Voodoo

A short story

Image by Tracy Lundgren from Pixabay

Janet Aomori hated her boss for 107 reasons, all of which she listed in her Leuchtturm1917 hardcover notebook using a Pelikan fountain pen with Diamine Oxblood, a blood-red ink. 

1. Whenever there’s some shit work to do that nobody else wants, I get assigned that work.

2. He never promotes me.

3. He glares at me.

4. I teach new staff the ropes, and then they get promoted above me.

5. He asks for my input only when he’s already decided something.

6….

Janet was a copywriter at Applebaum Advertising. Her boss was Stuart Rice, the senior vice president for corporate concerns. He was forty-two years old; she was forty-three. He glowed bronze with a tennis tan all year; Janet remained pale from overexposure to fluorescent lights. Rice had perfect blond hair; a perpetual windstorm buffeted Janet’s shoulder-length black hair.

Her list of reasons for hating her boss continued to expand yearly by a couple of dozen. Sometimes, he surprised her with reasons to hate him that she never imagined, such as when he asked her to run to the groomer to check on his poodle, Miffy. 

Janet was an optimistic, cup-half-full woman who tried to be mindful of others’ feelings and always assumed that the person she was talking with might be having a bad day. Except for Stuart Rice, whose main goal was to make Janet’s days bad.

But what could she do about this? Janet considered quitting, but copywriting jobs were hard to find, especially ones that paid as well as Applebaum Advertising. Given their ages, though, her hell would last decades. She considered anxiety medication but knew she’d resent being a Xanax pill popper because of him. 

Maybe he’ll get hit by a bus. Wouldn’t that be wonderful?

Oh! An evil idea percolated in Janet’s mind. I can push him in front of a bus. Just a little nudge, and then it’s all over. Nobody will know. 

I’ll know.

Acid churned in her stomach. She shook for many minutes.

The thought of killing somebody so unnerved Janet that she scheduled an appointment with her doctor for a Xanax prescription. She didn’t tell her doctor that murderous intent precipitated the visit—instead, she described the general contours of her relationship with her boss—and the doctor happily okayed a ninety-day supply of the feel-better drug. 

Which barely nudged her anxiety. 

Or maybe it helps because without the Xanax, I’d be worse. What do I do now?

Janet then stumbled across the dark web, where she could order poisons by mail or hire a hitman. 

As she was researching how to end Rice’s life, she added numbers 108 and 109 to her list of reasons she hates her boss:

108. He stole my yogurt from the fridge.

109. He told me to attend a 9 p.m. Zoom meeting for which I had canceled my real-world plans but didn’t tell me that the meeting had been canceled. 

She explored the dark web more, but convinced herself she was only researching how to murder someone as a way to calm her nerves, nothing more. 

Tomorrow, I’ll take a long walk from my apartment to the Village for shopping therapy, which might help me more than the Xanax and might rid me of the urge to murder.

It better.

The heat dome over the United States East Coast singed her skin the instant she exited her apartment. The sweat that dripped from her forehead evaporated into nothingness before it hit the concrete sidewalk.

Yet she was determined to walk miles to her favorite Greenwich Village shopping street. 

For the sake of my mental well-being.

Three water bottles later, she arrived at a vintage clothing shop on Greenwich Avenue and 10th Street. As she was about to enter, an object in the window of a bric-a-brac shop next door caught Janet’s eye: a coffee-brown voodoo doll with eyes made from black buttons held in place with an X-pattern red thread. A long yellow thread with short perpendicular stitches like a half-completed railroad track formed its mouth and painted bits that looked like natural fingernails protruded from the tips of its fingers. Janet stared at the doll. 

She didn’t notice that the store’s owner had opened the door and stuck his head out until a blast of air-conditioned air struck her. “Wouldn’t you like to come inside where it’s cool and hold the doll?”

Janet nodded weakly. She was too hot to talk. 

The shop owner was a man in his late fifties with gray hair dotted with patches of fading black. He wore beige chinos and an off-white button long-sleeve shirt. Janet thought his face was remarkably smooth for somebody his age, probably because he spends most of his time indoors like I do. 

“Go ahead, hold it,” he said, extending his arm to the doll. 

“Okay.” The air conditioning made Janet smile. 

The doll stung her hands as if it had emitted a static electric discharge, and she almost dropped it. 

“You’re the second person interested in my voodoo dolls today.”

“I am?” Janet turned the doll around.

“A man about your age bought one not even an hour ago.”

“He did?” A sudden chill made goosebumps pop up over her body. Her legs wobbled. “What did he look like?”

“He was tall, wore a Yankees baseball cap—”

Reason #27: Rice worships the Yankees and I’m a Mets fan, and wears a Yankees cap to the office just to annoy me.

“—handsome man with the grayest eyes I’ve ever seen. I have different dolls in different colors and I recommend buying the doll that’s closest to your eye color for maximum effectiveness because it creates a connection between the owner and doll, and then you can create the link between doll and victim by saying the victim’s name twice. A friend of yours, I presume.”

“He’s the opposite of my friend.”

“I see. In that case, you may have a problem.” 

“Ouch! Ow, ow, ow!” Janet grabbed her left arm with her right hand as a piercing pain struck.

Rice stuck a needle in me! Bastard. 

“Fuck that hurts.” Janet spun to the store’s owner. “I’ll take it. How much?”

“Fifty dollars.”

On any other day, Janet would have balked at spending fifty dollars for a tattered, worthless superstition, but it wasn’t worthless and certainly wasn’t a superstition.

It’s a weapon of war. 

Janet grabbed onto the store’s counter for support when a stabbing sensation weakened her left leg. 

“Here, take it.” She passed him three twenties. “Keep the change.” She was on her way  out of the store when she stopped, her sneakers squeaking against the linoleum. “Do you have any needles? I need needles. Hurry!”

Janet’s phone buzzed. She grabbed it from her bag. 

What now?

She read Rice’s text: I hate you. Your laugh sounds like cackling hyenas and your ad copy reads like an eighth grader wrote it ten minutes before class, and those are just two of a dozen reasons.

Only a dozen reasons, Janet thought. I have one hundred and nine, and my list is still growing. 

Janet screamed as a massive headache, like an exploding grenade, nearly dropped her to the floor. 

My doll is Stuart Rice, my doll is Stuart Rice. 

She summoned all her remaining strength and stabbed her voodoo doll deep in the chest, twisting it to the left, then the right. 

Janet staggered to a pale blue Toyota Camry on the corner and leaned against it, setting off the alarm. Pain nearly spun her into unconsciousness. 

Nothing happened for the next thirty seconds. Then her phone buzzed again. Rice texted, “I’m not that easy to kill. But maybe you are. This isn’t over—there’s more than voodoo.”

A flock—Janet thought the dozens of cackling witches on broomsticks flying overhead was a flock because what else do you call them?—darkened the Manhattan sky. The witches flew in a V-formation; a dozen bats circled each witch like orbiting moons. When directly above Janet, the lead witch spilled a caldron of bubbling liquid. 

Is that lead? Boiling pig fat? 

Janet didn’t wait to find out. She looked uptown, then downtown, for the best escape route and saw it: Mikey’s Spell Shop. 

That’s where Rice must have gone. But what if he’s there now? It doesn’t matter. I must fight fire with fire and need a more powerful spell than Rice commands. 

As she was about to enter Mikey’s Spell Shop, a light reflecting off the glass door beamed toward Janet’s eyes. She blinked: Hall’s Hollywood Souvenirs. 

She had a plan.

Janet limped to the Hollywood souvenir shop and, despite her dwindling energy reserves, pulled the door open and stepped inside. Her Apple Watch heart rate monitor flashed EMERGENCY while furiously vibrating and beeping. She grabbed a green and purple crystal model of Zenkaa, a winged half-dragonfly, half-dragon creature with the head of a gargoyle from the 1966 classic The End of Earth, and deposited it on the counter. 

“That’s one-thousand-seven-hundred-and-fifty dollars,” the freckled clerk who looked fourteen years old said.

“Yeah, okay. Hurry.”

“Do you want a box or bag? A box is five dollars more but also more protective.” 

“Just hurry!”

The sale completed, Janet ran as best she could with Zenkaa tucked under her arm to Mikey’s Spell Shop. “Make it alive,” she instructed the shopkeeper.

“And do battle with the witches?” the woman behind the counter asked. Her name tag read, “Mikey.” Mikey put on the owl-shaped, turquoise-framed reading glasses dangling from a chain around her neck and pressed her nose to the Zenkaa reproduction. “Nice monster. What do you want from it?”

“To do battle with Stuart Rice.”

“Is Rice that nice gentleman who was just in here?”

“He’s not nice!” Janet shouted as she stomped the hardwood floor, shaking the bottles of herbs and oils that lined the store’s shelves. “He's awful. The worst boss ever.”

“Are you Janet?” She pressed her nose to Janet’s nose, removed her reading glasses, and squinted. “He said you’re the worst employee ever. He told me about the time you misspelled the company president’s name and about when—”

“Just do it!”

Two hideous creatures with flesh dripping off their skeletons banged their bony fists against the door. The glass held, but Janet didn’t think it could withstand many more blows.

“What are those?”

Mikey shrugged. “Zombies, probably. They’re not from me. Your friend—”

“He’s not my friend!”

“—probably visited Jamie’s Scariest Nightmare Comics, a block and a half south of here.”

“I need something else, too. Zenkaa alone isn’t going to defeat Rice.”

“You’re probably right, but I can only cast a spell on what I have in front of me. Speaking of which, that will be one-hundred-and-twenty-five dollars. Cash only.”

Janet dropped seven twenties on the counter. She ran to the exit, pushed the door hard, and sent the two zombies flying into the street, where a cement truck crashed into them. After a few seconds, the zombies stood up and growled. Zenkaa took flight, growing in size and soaring above the buildings, firing flames from its mouth. It incinerated half of the witch flock. Zenkaa dove downward toward a figure dashing around the corner toward Perry Street. 

Rice! 

“Get him, Zenkaa,” Janet shouted. “Burn him!”

Janet ran toward Rice, but stampeding zombies blocked her way.

With the zombies in pursuit, Janet dashed into the nearest place, a ramen noodle restaurant. The chef and restaurant owner, a bespeckled Japanese woman in her fifties with short hair that had a blue streak running along the left side, narrowed her eyes. She glanced outside at the remaining witches that were orbiting the neighborhood, noted the zombies and flying dragonfly-lizard thing, and then turned back to Janet. 

The six customers sitting at the counter continued to slurp their ramen. 

“You’re at war, aren’t you?” she asked, her tone more of a statement than a question.

“How do you know?”

“I’ve seen it before, a long time ago before your parents were born and before your grandparents existed. Bosses and staff don’t always get along. Sometimes you win, sometimes they do; it all depends on who has the most powerful monsters. You need Jorōgumo.”

“Who?”

One of the customers handed the chef his finished bowl of ramen. She added rice to the broth and passed it back to the diner. “Jorōgumo is the spider lady. She’s beautiful, but her web entraps people whom she then kills.”

“Jorōgumo sounds exactly what I need.”

The restaurant shook like it was in the epicenter of an earthquake. Outside, a seven-foot-tall man with one eye that was closed and just one leg shambled down the street. 

Walks somehow on one leg. Navigates somehow with a single shut eye. 

The giant wore a velvet red cloak, and gold crown embedded with emeralds and rubies sat on its head. 

“What is that thing?”

“Ah, your friend summoned—”

“He. Is. Not. My. Friend.”

“—the Celtic demon king, Balor, the conveyor of death. Stay out of its sight because if it opens its eye, a glance will kill you.”

“What defense is there for that kind of monster?”

“No defense. It is immortal and, once summoned, will wreak death for eternity. It lived neither in hell nor heaven until your friend—

“No, my boss is not my friend!”

“—summoned it from the fiery depths beneath Mount Slemish, an extinct volcano that last erupted one hundred million years ago, to where it had been banished.”

One hundred million years ago. That was when—

Janet had an idea. “Can I summon dinosaurs?”

“Even dinosaurs may not be powerful enough to defeat Balor,” the chef said. She removed her glasses and wiped the lenses with her apron. 

“I don’t care about Balor. I want to kill Rice. Can you make a spell to bring dinosaurs back, maybe a herd of T-Rex or Allosaurus?” Janet asked, her voice raspy. Janet didn’t know if the ramen chef was also a spell-maker or some other sorcerer, but magic-makers were all over this part of Greenwich Village today.

“I need to make a call. I don’t have that ability, but a friend who operates an illegal sorcery shop out of his apartment on Eighth Street may be able to.”

An illegal sorcery shop. Are there legal ones? Why are they illegal? Never mind, Janet thought. Focus on Rice’s demise.

“Okay, do it.”

“Do you have a credit card? He’s old school and doesn’t accept PayPal. I can run it through my card reader for him.”

Janet passed the ramen chef her Delta Airlines Visa card, wondering how many points she’d receive but wondering even more if she’d be alive to use them. Ten minutes later, New York City rumbled and shook under the massive weight of dozens of flesh-eating reptiles. The sky darkened as myriad pterosaurs with their thirty-six-foot wingspan separated Manhattan Island from the sun.

The shrieks of Manhattanites as dinosaurs devoured them barely registered with Janet. Neither did the crunch-crunch of human bones sway her from her single-minded goal: Rice’s demise. 

Janet was sure one of these creatures would find and consume Rice. I wish I had thought of dinosaurs from the get-go and hadn’t wasted time with voodoo. 

She wished she could hear Rice’s final scream, but would settle for the satisfaction that he was no longer alive. 

The gleeful feeling of final revenge lasted less than fifteen minutes. A creature with a crocodile’s head, a lion’s front limbs, and a hippopotamus’ back legs rammed the restaurant’s door. 

Ammit, Janet remembered from a middle school history class, an ancient Egyptian creature that eats people. I’m going to need an even more powerful monster, she thought. 

She shuddered. But what will Rice counter with?

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If you enjoyed Voodoo, I think you’ll like my story, The Window Person.