The Hollow Ones(63)

Blackwood handed him back the flashlight. Solomon waved it over the clearing, over the graves where the spirits of dead slaves had arisen in a violet mist.

Again, he said, “What was that?”

Blackwood rolled the boy over onto his back, and Solomon remembered that it wasn’t a boy anymore. Its face was contorted and evil, now locked in an agonal expression of terror.

“What is it?” said Solomon.

Blackwood answered him only indirectly. “Possessed,” he said.

Solomon remembered his gun then. He wanted it in case this thing woke up again. He found it quickly with the flashlight, the muzzle still warm from the gunshot fired in error.

“It’s murder,” said Solomon. “You killed a boy.”

He turned back. Blackwood had produced a leather kit, unrolling it open upon the ground. Solomon saw that its interior pouches contained glass vials with powders and liquids, bits of plant matter, metal crosses. Blackwood returned the dagger to one pouch.

“He was no longer a boy,” said Blackwood. “He was well gone. I couldn’t save him. But I can release him now. I can grant him rest.”

Blackwood uncorked one of the vials of powder. He took care to lay the boy’s body out straight, arms by its sides, hands open, palms up. He closed its eyes.

Solomon said, “What the hell are you doing?”

It looked like some funeral rite. Blackwood poured the powder into his hand and arranged five generous pinches of the substance on the ground around the boy’s corpse, like points of a star. He pulled a vial of milky liquid from his kit and then stood at the boy’s feet. He spoke Latin, quietly but forcefully, an incantation. Solomon grew nervous and backed away. Using an eyedropper, Blackwood squeezed drips of the milky substance onto the powder, igniting five flames of pure white.

Blackwood extended his arm over the boy’s body, palm open and downturned, still chanting, the volume of his voice rising and falling. Blackwood’s hand trembled and his intonation became more insistent.

Solomon backed away farther, nearly tripping over the root of a tree.

Shadows moved over the boy’s face, his chest, his legs. Squirming, writhing. It looked like they were tugging at his flesh, a play of shadow…but how?

Something unexplainable was happening to the boy, outside and in.

Blackwood’s voice reached a crescendo, and at once he squeezed his open hand into a fist. The shadows raced away from the surface of the body to the five white flames, which surged and suddenly grew black—then were extinguished, leaving only a foul stench behind.

Blackwood dropped to one knee, momentarily sapped of strength, catching his breath. Solomon ventured forward a few steps, shining his flashlight on the boy’s face.

It was the visage of a young black-skinned boy again. Normal. Human. Innocent.



Solomon barely slept that night. He took two cleansing showers in the black-run motel on the edge of town, stopping the water multiple times to make sure the noises he heard—of someone moving around inside his motel room—were only in his head.

Toweling steam off the sink mirror revealed scratches over his throat, bruising around his eyes. Without these abrasions, he could have dismissed the whole thing as a terrible dream. When he closed his eyes and tried to sleep, he saw Vernon Jamus’s bright-silver irises, his jagged white teeth—but in Hugo Blackwood’s face. Solomon kept his handgun—the empty cylinder filled with a fresh round—on his nightstand, well within reach.

He was relieved when the sun hit his window, and he dressed and holstered up and left the motel early. He was fiddling with the keys to the borrowed FBI sedan, and didn’t see the British man in the dark suit standing by the car until he was almost at the driver’s door.

“Good morning, Agent Solomon.”

Solomon dropped the keys and reached for his gun. He drew it, staggering backward a few steps, putting space between him and Hugo Blackwood. “Get…get away from the car.”

Blackwood did not move. “Come now, Agent.”

“Hands where I can see them.”

“You had a difficult night, I see.”

“Stop talking—stop—and listen. You are under arrest.”

Blackwood’s mouth formed a tight smile, indicating a limited reservoir of patience. “Arrest?”

“For murder. The murder of Vernon Jamus.”

“You saw it yourself last night, the boy was already gone—”

“Stop talking.” The handcuffs were in the glove box inside the car. Dammit. “Get in the passenger seat.”

Blackwood said, “Do you want me away from the car or inside the car?”

“Just get inside the car and don’t make me shoot you, sir. Because I will. I have seen enough.”

“You’ve seen hardly anything. What are you going to tell them? ‘The whole truth and nothing but’?”

Solomon glowered at him. “I’m not only taking you in. I’m turning myself in, too.”

“For what?”

“That’s not up to me to decide. I was a witness, maybe an accessory after the fact.”

“The boy was attacking you. Do you know what he would have done had I not returned?”

“No, and I don’t want to know.”

“He would have ripped your throat out of your neck. Either by his hands or with his teeth. I’ve seen it before. It is entirely unpleasant.”