The Killings Read online

  “I workin’ the spirits,” Grandma Sable would say as she stroked his head after he poured out the day’s anguish to her. He’d rest his head in her lap while she sat in the battered wicker chair in the corner, reveling in the sounds and smells of the night outside her flimsy shack. “I workin’ them. They always protected me, and once I can appease them, they protect you too.”

  He didn’t know what loa Grandma Sable was working on bringing to this world to help them, but whatever it was, it never came, and Ronald Jeremiah continued with the constant beatings, his refusal to pay his servants, and even his mistreatment of the servants’ children.

  On the last night Mr. Jeremiah beat him, he hobbles to Grandma Sable’s shack, bleeding down the back of his legs, the pain and humiliation of his most recent abuse coming through strong. He pours his heart out to Grandma Sable, sobbing into her lap. “Mr. Jeremiah, he beats us, all o’ us. He beats the kids too,” he tells Grandma Sable.

  “He beat you tonight?”

  “Yes’m.” He is ashamed of this. He is even more ashamed of what he hasn’t told her, what he’s too ashamed to admit.

  The hand stops stroking his head. “What else he do?”

  He can’t tell her ... but he finds himself unable to stop, and it rushes out of him like water bursting from a ruptured dam. “He takes me! He beats me down and has me like he has my momma and all the other women!” And then he couldn’t help it; he bursts out sobbing, the pain and degradation of his assault that afternoon burning even hotter in his memory. Worst of all was the pain he felt from his shame, and the fear that Grandma Sable would turn him away, as if he was now poisoned by Mr. Jeremiah’s seed much like she’d already done with his mother.

  But she doesn’t do that. And as his sobs race their way out of his system, she begins stroking his head again, only the touch of her hand is different now. It is more sensitive, more calming, yet behind that gentle touch is something dark and sinister with a sense of purpose.

  When Grandma Sable speaks, her voice, old and brittle, has an undercurrent of terrific strength and power behind it. The threat of violence rumbles beneath her words like a coming storm. “He take you today?”

  He nods.

  “You try to fight him off you?”

  He nods, tears streaking down his face.

  He feels her fingers trace their way down his bruised and battered face. One fingernail brushes over the scab that has already formed over his left eyebrow. Another lightly traces over his upper lip, noting the puffiness, the blood still beading from a wound that brings waves of pain.

  “I’m gone give you something to drink,” Grandma Sable says. “And you gone drink it. Every last drop. You hear?”

  He nods and wipes the last of his tears from his eyes.

  “You gone sleep here. And when you wake up you’ll feel a lot better. All your pain will be gone. And you won’t need to be afraid of Mr. Jeremiah no more.”

  “What are you gonna do?” he asks, but she hushes him.

  She gently lifts his head from her lap and places it on a worn pillow near her wicker chair. Then she stands up and hobbles to the small kitchen. He hears her rummaging around in there with her jars and bottles - she has a lot of them, labeled in her shaky handwriting in a script he can’t understand. She pours water from the jug on the table and then drifts over to the fireplace where a small fire is burning. She is carrying a small tin cup, which she hangs over the fire for a moment. As the heat of the fire warms the liquid inside it, he hears her mutter words he does not understand. He knows it is the old language, the language of his people, but she also speaks another language, one that is alien-sounding and guttural. Hearing her speak the old language of their people makes him feel ashamed because he doesn’t know it but feels that he should.

  He watches Grandma Sable unhook the tin cup from over the fire and bring it to him, and he drinks from it at her urging. It has a strong, bitter taste, and it burns his throat as it goes down. But she insists he drink it down to the last drop. She sits down in the wicker chair and places his head back in her lap again. She talks to him gently, her voice soothing, and her fingers go back to caressing his head, his neck, his shoulders. Soon he is lulled to a sense of calm, peace, and then he is out ...

  ... and he dreams ...

  He dreams of Grandma Sable. How she stands in front of the fire with her jars of herbs, how she grabs a pinch in her gnarled fingers and throws them on the fire, her voice low and guttural, speaking to something he can’t see. A little later he sees her kneeling before the fire over the carcass of a black pig, the hog’s blood spilling over the floor as Grandma Sable recites the words to something she is calling Marinette. And then it feels like something awakens him as he hears a chicken cackle and squawk in pain and terror and he sees Grandma Sable clutch a black fowl in her hands. His stomach churns as she yanks the feathers out of it, plucking the fowl while it’s still alive. Despite the bird’s struggle, Grandma Sable’s clutch is strong. Her withered muscles bunch beneath her weathered, leathery skin and the heat of the fire, the aroma of sweat and blood and herbs and the scent of terror overpower him, sends him back into darkness …

  When he wakes it is morning. The sun is shining through the flimsy curtains of her shack. The smell of strong coffee wafts through his nostrils and he jerks awake, heart pounding, knowing that if he isn’t found in his bed by one of the plantation overseers, another beating will be in store. He sees Grandma Sable at the kitchen, pouring a cup of the black coffee.

  “What time is it?”

  “Six thirty,” she says, and he wonders how she knows this when she has no clocks on the wall or even a pocket watch.

  The events of last night are a fading memory as he scrambles to his feet and visually inspects himself, running his hands down his trousers and shirt. He feels okay. The pain in his ribcage from the bruises, his battered face, all gone. Even the burning pain in his rectum from Mr. Jeremiah’s violation is gone, and he feels whole and uncorrupted down there, as if it had never happened. Already he’s wondering if what happened yesterday was a dream. Or a nightmare.

  “Go on now,” Grandma Sable says, urging him to leave. “Go on, and stay clear of the main house tonight. You won’t want to be anywhere near Mr. Jeremiah tonight.”

  He leaves and does exactly what Grandma Sable says.

  That night he cowered in the servants’ quarters with his mother and the others, listening to the screams of Mr. Jeremiah’s family as he slaughtered them like hogs.

  He still remembers the sound of the blade hacking through flesh and bone.

  And now, as he sat in his room and thought about those times, the memories came back.

  He looked out the window at the street below. All was silent tonight. No women traveled alone. Those women that were out were always accompanied by a man. Other women traveled in groups of three or more. He watched them and felt the fury inside him feeding his lust, his appetite for blood. Only tonight, while the lust was very much present, it was subdued somewhat. If an opportunity presented itself he would no doubt be compelled to follow through, but none did, so the fury could only watch with him, its lust simmering on the backburner of his soul.

  But it could taste them. Oh, it could just sense their blood and flesh, their juicy morsels all packed and encased in their bellies. He knew that it would demand to be let out, it would try to overpower him, compel him to leave his room and venture out into the night with his blade to stalk the streets of a half-breed whore to violate and open up, letting her precious insides spill out onto the rough cobblestone, the thick aroma of her blood spreading as it gushed out of her ...

  He almost did it. Almost retrieved his blade, almost donned his jacket and shoes and hat and ventured outside to stalk the streets. But he didn’t. There were increased street patrols from the Atlanta Police and recruits from the ranks of the city’s Negro population, Uncle Toms who thought their cooperation with the police would earn them favor. He knew that would never happen. And he knew tha
t those Negroes currently patrolling the streets were not really police officers. They were snitches; spies. They were talking to other people in the community, listening to the rumor mill, and reporting everything to police headquarters. In a way, it was a genius of an idea. No White officer would be able to get the kind of information that could be secured from the Negro population. But another colored man? Especially one who wasn’t dressed like a police officer, wearing plainclothes? That was an entirely different matter. A man like that would blend right in to the community. You wouldn’t know who was a spy or who was just an average man on the street trying to make his way home in the dark after an honest day’s work.

  His lust for blood satiated for now, the killer took a deep breath and stood up. He approached his closet, selected a jacket, and put it on. He inspected himself in the vanity mirror tacked onto his closet door. He looked sharp. All he needed was his hat and he was good to go. He turned to his hat rack, selected a black felt hat, donned it, then checked his pocket for his wallet and keys. His eyes darted to the dresser near the window. His strap and blade were there, lying in plain sight. They could stay there. He wouldn’t need them tonight.

  He had other things to do this evening.

  The killer ventured out into the streets of Atlanta that evening and walked alone, and he walked far. And while he walked he observed and listened and made observations. And he took great delight in listening to people talk about him in fear. It brought a grin to his face.

  A sinister grin that he wore all night.

  TEN

  July 31, 2011, Duluth, Georgia

  Carmen Mendoza set her research materials aside and leaned back in her chair. She’d been at it for two hours, ever since returning home from work. She’d been doing a lot of research at her quiet apartment in Duluth every chance she got. She’d also spent a lot of time at the public library downtown, which was where she’d acquired the research material that was spread out before her now. She regarded the photocopies, her notes, with a sense of dread and puzzlement. The more she delved into this case the darker it was becoming.

  Most of what she found in the public record was of no help to her whatsoever. She’d visited Wayne Williams again on July 24 and learned the location of the old woman’s former residence. Wayne couldn’t remember the address but he remembered the street, what the house looked like, and its general location. Carmen had driven down to the area and found the house in question. It was a rundown place, sitting on a small lot with a weed-infested yard. The house looked like it had been there for more than a hundred years. The neighborhood was rundown, but it was vibrant and alive, with kids playing outside, older teenagers lounging around on front porches, young mothers talking to each other over backyard fences as they watched each other’s kids.

  Carmen took a few photos of the house and drove away, mindful of the attention she’d gotten from a few of the people in the neighborhood. They probably think I’m a cop, she thought as she drove away.

  On her next visit with Wayne on July 28, just two days ago, she showed him the pictures. “Is that the house?”

  He nodded. “Yeah, that’s it.” He looked at the photos hesitantly, as if he was reliving something that was better left in dark corners, tucked away, never to be seen. “Hasn’t changed much. Anybody live there now?”

  “I don’t know,” Carmen said, putting the photos back in her bag. And then she changed the subject and steered the conversation back to when Wayne first heard that Grandma Sable had passed on.

  She’d spent the last two days compiling the notes taken during her voluminous talks with Wayne Williams and had filled more than thirty pages in a Microsoft Word document on her laptop. Now, as she sat in the special collections department of the library with her Apple MacBook Pro open, she was ready to begin the next phase of her research.

  Court records hadn’t revealed much on the various deeds to the property. The records she’d found online through the county court system only went back to 1943. She focused on the years between 1950 and 1970. A man named Herman Wellington owned the home between September 1950 and June 1973. Wayne claimed the old woman had lived in the house in the late sixties. Carmen combed through the death records that were available online at the Atlanta hospitals and found no death certificate for a woman with the last name of Sable. Wayne wasn’t sure if Sable was even her last name. “That’s just what she was called,” he’d told her. “So I just assumed her last name was Sable.”

  Carmen’s research online and at the county hall of records searching through property deeds and death records proved frustrating. Carmen had been able to visually inspect hardcopy documents going all the way back to 1895, when the home on 765 Willow Street was initially built and deeded. Its first owner had been one Millhouse Rooker, and there was scant information on him. She went forward through the records, locating deeds of sale in 1904, 1925, 1945, and 1950. None of the buyers or rightful owners to the property was named Sable, and judging by the last names, all of the property owners had been White. In fact, no Black family had owned the house until 1985, when it was purchased by Mark Washington for the sum of $85,000 dollars.

  The death records were even more elusive. Carmen had been unable to find a death record for anybody with the last name Sable in the late 1960s. Going on the assumption the woman had lived to be one hundred and twenty, she’d gone back to city and state birth records and, once again, was disappointed to find no birth records for a female child with the last name Sable. Of course, African American births were hardly recorded back then, so Carmen wasn’t completely surprised by this. But she should’ve found a death record for the woman. If Wayne’s claim that she was born into slavery was true, she had to have been at least a hundred and ten, maybe a hundred and twenty when she died. Her death would have made news, but Carmen didn’t find any mention of a centenarian from the Atlanta, Georgia, area dying in the late 1960s who matched Grandma Sable’s description.

  Her research at the library until then had produced zero results. She’d pored through local history books published by local historical societies, concentrating her search on those volumes devoted to local African American history. None of the books she perused contained any mention of the rumored voodoo queen.

  It wasn’t until she decided to broaden her search into local folklore that she struck pay dirt.

  The volume she found was in the library’s special collections department, housed behind locked plate-glass doors. She’d already gone through every volume on local folklore in the library and casually asked if there were any other such volumes in the special collections department, figuring the answer would be no. Usually the only volumes kept in the special collections department were rare books of classic literature and collectible modern first editions. However, the librarian nodded once and said, “Actually, there is a pretty cool old book back there. It’s about voodoo and its practitioners in the general Atlanta area during and after the Civil War. Hold on, let me see what the restrictions are.” The librarian typed a command on the keyboard. He was a young man in his mid-twenties, long blond hair and a goatee, bespectacled, studious. “Yep, we still have it. Publication date on it is 1885 and it’s marked fragile. I can’t let you take it out of the special collections room, but you can look at it, as long as you wear gloves.”

  “Sure,” Carmen said, nodding. “Fine.” And that’s how Carmen Mendoza had been able to page through one of the rarest volumes of occult folklore and voodoo published in the United States.

  The book was called Yoruba Magic in Georgia, and there was no author listed. The publication location was listed as Atlanta, Georgia, but there was no publishing company listed. A vanity press effort, for sure. The binding looked like it had been done by hand. Probably no more than a hundred copies had been printed and bound, maybe fewer. And why it was considered rare and valuable was beyond Carmen’s comprehension. The weirdest things could be considered valuable. She supposed the volume was valuable because occult practitioners sought it out. Rega
rdless, Carmen paged through it in the special collections department. What she read fascinated her.

  According to the book’s anonymous author, Yoruba/Vodoun had been practiced in the United States by African slaves since the arrival of the first slave ships to the New World, in the late 1600s. The belief evolved into a robust philosophy. It held that all human beings possess what is known as Ayanmo - destiny and fate - and each human is expected to eventually become one in spirit with Oldumare, the divine creator and source of all energy. Yoruba originated with the Yoruba people of Nigeria and the adjoining areas of Benin and Togo. As many of the Yoruba people were sold into slavery between the sixteenth and nineteenth centuries by tribal enemies and European slave dealers, they were transported to various parts of the New World, where they transported their faith to their new homes. During this time the Yoruban people came in contact with other tribes, specifically the Gba speaking people from the same region Vodun originated from.

  Carmen carefully paged through the book. After the brief introduction of the history of Vodun, which was the proper spelling of the religion most commonly known as Voodoo, the unknown author set forth various anecdotes of the faith’s influence in the greater United States, most particularly the South. Carmen knew that slaves transported from Africa brought their religion to the New World, that Voodoo was a bastardized version of this old faith mixed in with other faiths from other African regions, as well as Catholicism. Several pages further in, the writer documented stories and folklore of various voodoo practitioners from the Greater Georgia area.

  The librarian stayed close by, observing as she looked through the volume with latex gloved hands.

  “Does the library have any record of how they received this volume?” Carmen asked.

  “I can check with the directors,” the librarian said. “Most of what we receive for the special collections department comes from donations. Occasionally the library buys books that later turn out to be valuable. That book over there” - he gestured to a glass case that housed modern first editions - “the Stephen King book The Dark Tower? They bought that brand new from the publisher thirty years ago when it first came out. It was never put out for lending but instead was placed back here. I think our head librarian at the time knew a good thing when he saw it. That book is worth more than a thousand dollars now.”