I’m going to build the veve of a voodoo god out of copper. Three tons of copper.’ He laughed. ‘I don’t suppose you know about veves, though.’
Indeed, I assured him, I did know, having done quite a bit of reading on the subject of vaudou, this at the urging of Ms Verret.
‘Oh?’ He scratched the back of his neck. ‘Tell me about Ogoun Badagris.’
‘One of the aspects of Ogoun,’ I said, ‘who is essentially the warrior hero of the pantheon. I believe that Ogoun Badagris is associated with wizardry. A rada aspect.’
‘Rada?’
‘Yes. Rada and petro are more or less equivalent to white and black magic. Good and evil.’
‘And which is rada?’
‘Good,’ I said.
‘Well,’ he said softly, more to himself than to me, ‘I guess I should be thankful for that.’
He went on to tell me of a plan he had, hardly a plan, more a vague compulsion to act in some direction, and though the action was as yet unclear, as the days passed the parameters of the deed were defining themselves. Something decisive, he said, something dangerous. It was evident to me that he was evolving past the human, and I was in mortal terror of the vibrant devil he was coming to be. I lay half hypnotized, helpless before him, the tongues of his words tasting me, licking me prior to taking a bite. Finally Verret and the old man returned; he was carrying a brandy bottle and she a coil of rope. Without further ado they gagged me and lashed me to the bed, and afterwards Harrison asked me to break free if I could. Ordinarily I would have pretended to struggle, but at his behest I shook the bed in earnest.
And then they were gone, gone to Maravillosa, swallowed up and gone beyond the reach of the CIA, the project, and for all I know beyond the hand of God Himself. We had no word of them until news came of Harrison’s actions on Bayou Rigaud.
I may well have met Otille Rigaud; however, from all reports, it is unlikely I would have forgotten the occasion. She was a woman who traveled freely through the various strata of society, and the mention of her name was sufficient to cause highly respected citizens to cough, make their excuses, and leave the room. I wish that I had met her. Though many have tried to explain the events which occurred upon Bayou Rigaud, she alone might have illuminated them. Stacked on my writing table at this moment is page after page of dubious yet accurate explanation. Data sheets, medical records, government documents. For example, here we have the results of an autopsy performed on an unidentified body, citing one hundred and seventy separate fractures caused by the instantaneous degeneration of bone tissue, blood clots, cell damage, crushed spinal ganglia, and so forth. Appended is a telephone-book-sized study exploring the victim’s agony, which must have been substantial, and speculating on the nature of the forces that came into play. I will quote from the summary section.
…Movements of the Ezawa bacteria within the brains of Subjects One and Two created electrical currents which interacted with the electrical functions of the neurons, thereby enabling them to intuit the direction of the geomagnetic field. The copper device, aside from its function of conductivity, seems to have acted as a topological junction, its design such that all possible formulae of energy manipulation - the vibrational and rotational states of electrons, spin states of magnetic nuclei - were reduced to the choreographed movements of an electrical field (either Subject One or Two) within the geomagnetic field. Together with the device, the subjects became dynamos. They provided the current fed through the device, which in turn fed a magnetic field back through their bodies. Dependent on the exact choreography, the field could attain a potential strength of at least several hundred thousand times that of the geomagnetic field.
‘The energies redirected through the bodies of both subjects must have been of sufficient strength to disrupt in coherent fashion their atomic structures. Bulman hypothesizes there may have been a particular reaction involved with the hemoglobin. Electrons were raised to higher energy states, unipolar fields were created at the fingertips of the subjects, and photons transmitted along the lines of the fields. The emission of light visible in the tapes resulted from energy loss when the electrons dropped back to lower energy states. Essentially, the physical damage sustained by Subject One occurred when his nuclei absorbed enough radiation to flip their orientation and align with Subject Two’s field, this being a structural irony his component particles could not maintain…
