believe. He made me want to believe all those wonderful, impossible things, and that he could somehow make them come true. He made me want all those things with him.
Sorcery is just will and power. So is believing.
Later that night, I tried to contact Jamal again. This time, when the same Flash intro came up, I kept pumping juice into the spell from the ley line below my building in an effort to stabilize the pattern. The squall from the speakers intensified until I was sure it was loud enough to raise the dead, or at least wake my neighbors. My computer slowed to a crawl and the screen flickered dangerously, but the system didn’t crash.
I poured more juice into the spell and the noise finally died down, to be replaced by sporadic bursts of white noise. In the intervals between the bursts, I heard voices. There were a lot of them and it was disturbing, like a party that had turned ugly. The cacophony of voices was punctuated by panicked shouts, terrified screams and despairing wails. It reminded me of live video footage I’d seen of a crowded Jerusalem restaurant in the aftermath of a suicide attack.
There was no foreground or background to the noise—all of the voices were just mixed in together. Occasionally, though, one of the voices was isolated enough that I could make out the words. Most of it made no sense to me—names I didn’t recognize, languages I didn’t understand, mundane phrases so removed from context they had no meaning. The voices were garbled, warped, but a few did make sense, and that was worse.
“I can’t find my leg,” a voice whispered.
“I’m dead now.”
“They took my mommy.” A little girl’s voice.
“I want to go, I want to go, I want to go, I want to…”
“I know who you are.” The voice sounded like an old woman. She sounded pissed.
“Help me, Domino. Please, D.”
“Jamal?”
“Help me, D…help me.”
I channeled more juice into the spell, straining until I thought my eyes would pop. I kept feeding the spell, but the juice kept backing up, into me, like blood in a junkie’s syringe. It was so cold it burned.
“Jamal, I’m trying. Talk to me. Just keep talking to me.”
“I can’t…I can’t get back, D. I can’t get back. It’s just dark…ain’t nothing here, Domino…ain’t nothing but the dark.”
“I know, Jamal. Keep trying. I’m here. Keep talking.”
“Domino? Are you there, D? Please don’t leave. Domino, please don’t leave me here.” He was crying, but his voice was growing fainter.
“Jamal, keep talking. I’m here.” I ground my teeth and reached for more juice, but I had so much of the backwash in me I couldn’t push it through and I felt like I was drowning. “Fuck!”
I tried again to force more juice into the spell, but now it was washing back into me faster than I could tap it from the line.
“Jamal! I’m still here. Come back.”
Silence, then a few short bursts of static. Then nothing. I’d lost him.
I shut down the computer and went to the kitchen for a beer. I was buzzing from all the juice I’d flowed. I was also shivering and choking on that grave-cold backwash I sucked down. I collapsed on the sofa and drained the beer.
Whatever was happening with Jamal wasn’t right. Contacting the dead was never a sure thing—if they didn’t want to talk to you, there wasn’t much you could do about it. Jamal obviously wanted to talk, but I couldn’t reach him. Why? The backwash I was eating when I tried to feed the spell—why?
The only explanation was that someone was fighting me. Pushing back at me. While I was flowing juice into the spell, someone was pumping it back into me. Someone stronger than I was.
Someone like Papa Danwe. It might have been Terrence Cole, I supposed, but I doubted the Haitian had a sidekick with enough juice to shut me down like that. It had to be Papa Danwe.
I felt pretty sure after this experience that FriendTrace wasn’t going to get it done. I maybe could have kept flowing juice into the spell a little longer, but I knew the backwash from the Beyond would have killed me before I was able to establish a stable connection with Jamal.
Still, the fact that Papa Danwe was blocking my efforts at communication made me even more determined to succeed. I needed to talk to Jamal. He obviously had something important to say, something the Haitian didn’t want me to find out.
Well, if you can’t bring Mohammed to the mountain, bring the mountain to Mohammed. That’s not a spell formula, just a saying that came to mind. If I couldn’t reach Jamal in the Beyond, maybe I could bring him to me.
It was a little after two in the morning, and I still had time. I went down to the garage and put my toolbox and several cans of spray paint in the trunk of my car. Then I drove to Crenshaw, back to Jamal’s apartment.
When I got to his door, I juiced the lock and let myself in. Anton had removed the corpse as ordered. The small apartment was empty and quiet. I set the toolbox on the floor beside the bondage rack and went to work.
The rack was really just two fitted timbers bolted together to form an X. I unbolted and separated them, laying them on the floor side by side. I closed up the toolbox and ran it down to the car, then returned for the first of the timbers. The beams were heavy, but I was able to get them down to the car, one at a time, using a little juice. With the top of the convertible down, they fit in the backseat, more or less. It was something to cling to the next time some prick in a Prius smirked at my vintage Motown gas-guzzler.
I went back to the apartment and stuffed some things from Jamal’s closet into a duffel bag. On the way out, I grabbed the stapler Anton had used with the magazine cover to protect Jamal’s modesty. I went down to my car and drove to the playground where I’d talked to his crew.
There was no one on the playground at that hour, even in Crenshaw. The security lights had likely been broken within hours of being installed, and the concrete was lit only by a feeble moon and the ambient orange glow of the sleeping city.
I hauled the timbers out to midcourt and reassembled the bondage rack. I’d packed some of Jamal’s clothes in the duffel bag, and I took them out and stapled them to the rack. There was a Lakers jersey, jeans and a pair of Nikes. Next, I went to work with the spray paint.
The tags Jamal had laid down all over the playground were designed to tap the juice of the place. There was a fair amount of it, and Jamal had done good work. I’d be able to get plenty of power, and best of all, in a way it would be Jamal’s juice I was flowing. I just needed to hook up his tags to the ritual I was building.
I used the spray paint to lay down a circle around the bondage rack. When the circle was complete, I grabbed a detailer out of the toolbox and began stenciling symbols into the painted line of the circle and the wood of the bondage rack. Ordinarily I’m not really into symbol work, but in this case I was just copying Jamal’s tags, in miniature. When I was finished, I scrounged up some broken boards and garbage and built a fire in front of the rack. Once the fire was blazing, I stripped off my clothes and started dancing naked around the circle.
It
