Voodoo Heart by John Everson

Author:John Everson
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Suspense, supernatural, thriller, horror; gothic fantasy, dark fantasy, creepy stories
Publisher: Flame Tree Publishing
Published: 2020-09-21T17:40:30+00:00

Chapter Twenty

Wednesday, August 7

First Moon

“What do you make of this?” Aubrey asked me. I’d just walked into the back of a shop near Decatur. The kind that sells T-shirts and gris-gris bags indeterminately. One of the cashiers had instantly ushered me to a doorway in the back. Inside, there was a long narrow dark room. Brick wall on one side, wood on the other. Old stained-wood floor. Odds and ends stacked all around.

But in the center of it all….

A man’s body. Or pieces of it anyway.

I’d gotten the call during lunch; it was the kind of call that you wish you had let go to voicemail.

“Who is it?” I asked.

“They called him Flip Frenzie,” Aubrey answered. He shrugged and nodded at Tarrington, who was leaning over something in the back of the small room. “He got the call.”

I walked over to the other detective and looked over his shoulder. He was gently prodding a human leg with a ballpoint pen. The leg moved. Just a little. Unfortunately, not because it was alive.

“What’s the story?” I asked.

Tarrington looked up at me. I couldn’t tell if he was a little green, or if that was just the bad lighting in this creepy little back room. Either way, he didn’t speak fast.

“Call came in when they opened up this morning,” he said. “The staff found the owner back here when they needed some Scotch tape and came looking for a roll. You just don’t expect to trip over your boss’s left arm when you want a piece of tape.”

I got his point. The bloody shoulder stump of Frenzie’s arm lay just in front of a small desk that hugged the long wall of the room.

“I would guess the arm was the least of their concerns,” I said.

Tarrington nodded. “Yeah, when they saw the guy’s eyes were open and staring at them, they bolted out of this room. One of them left the premises completely and won’t come back. Can’t say that I blame her.”

I shook my head. “No. Can’t say that I do either.”

I crossed the room and knelt down in front of Flip Frenzie’s wide-eyed gaze. Someone had mounted the man’s head on a steel spike. It was part of a small palisade made up of a half dozen spikes. It probably had served as a demonstration piece at some point. But now it served as the place where the owner’s head was impaled.

The man’s mouth hung open. Something dark glinted from within. I reached out with my thumb and forefinger and gently extracted what someone had pushed into his mouth.

It looked like nothing more than a smooth black rock.

“What do you think of this?” I asked, holding the stone up for Tarrington.

The other man looked up from the disembodied leg and shook his head. “They get weirder every damn time,” he said.

“Find anything to suggest what the hell this is about?” I asked.

Aubrey piped up then.

“Just this,” he said. “It was in the middle of the floor, but I don’t think it belonged to the store.

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