DTTF Contest - Jim Culver: Dark Was The Night, Cold Was The

DARK WAS THE NIGHT, COLD WAS THE GROUND

Jim Culver: Bad Voodoo in New Orleans and the Rougarou Blues

Late Friday evening down on the bayou, I was playing a solo requiem on my trumpet beside Ol’ Daddou's headstone, when I started to hear some strange muttering as if there was someone standin’ right there beside me. And lo’ and behond, who should appear but Ol’ Daddou hisself, all spectral and shimmering like a spiderweb in moonlight.

“Ol’ Daddou,” I said, “I expect you’d like one last song to help you pass.”

“If you’d oblige me,” he said.

“Why certainly.” I raised the trumpet, but paused just before placing the mouthpiece to my lips. “Say, Ol’ Daddou. How’d you get done in?”

The tale he told was long and convoluted, but basically came down to how he was smuggling hooch through the swamp from a half-dozen hidden distilleries when he was attacked by a monster—a wolf that walked like man. I’d heard the folktales about the mysterious wolf-man that prowled the swamps of New Orleans, but never took them for more than old wives’ tales. Seemed everybody knew somebody who had a distant cousin who had been supposedly killed by the thing.

As Ol’ Daddou described his last moments in the jaws of the beast, the hairs on my arms prickled right up.

Ol’ Daddou looked straight at me and said. "Now don't you get no ideas, y'hear?"

I shook my head. "No sir."

I played Blind Willie Johnson’s “Dark Was the Night, Cold Was the Ground” to help lay Ol’ Daddou to rest. When he was calmly reposed, I tucked my trumpet into its ragged case and turned to leave. As I marched away I could have sworn I heard Ol’ Daddou’s voice from behind me. "You watch yourself out there, son. You might find yourself back here as one of us."

I knew I had to go see my old friend of mine, a pretty little white woman by the name of Alyssa Graham. She and I had…what you could call mutual acquaintances. While this here horn could only summon the ghosts of the more recently-deceased, Miss Graham had the knack of reaching beyond the grave to talk to some real long-dead ancestors. I was thinking she might be able to contact a few others of the Long Departed and see what they knew of this strange wolf-man that prowled the swamps.

Miss Graham lived in a respectable house near Audubon Park. Lots of folks in the city knew she was the lady to come to, but there were no customers on this night, so she took me right in, which was right nice, me bein’ a black fella and all. I handed over what little change I had in my humble pockets and within minutes she was seated at her crystal ball, her eyes rolled back until only the whites could be seen. I got no idea who she spoke to, but it sounded like a whole mess of folks. None of them was Ol’ Daddou.

After she returned to normal and I could see her pupils again, she told me I should go talk to one Olive McBride, down along Broadmoor.

“Olive McBride?” I said. “You couldn’t tell me more?”

“I’m sorry, Mister Culver,” Miss Graham said. “All their memories were of death, and pain. But one of spirits gave me this name. She is connected, somehow.”

“Thank you, Miss Graham.” I tipped my hat and was about to take my leave when she stopped me.

“I’m going with you,” she said.

“Beggin’ your pardon ma’am,” I said, “but where I’m headed ain’t fit for a no lady, ‘Specially at night.”

She grabbed her hat and shawl and pushed past me. “There’s something out there, Mister Culver. You’ll need my help.”

I put my hands up. “Alright then. Have it your way.” I knew a lady who spoke to ghosts on a regular basis like Miss Graham had little to fear from the night, so what was it that had her so spooked?

There were no cabs at this hour so we had to hoof it clear over to Bourbon Street. The streets were eerily quiet—deserted like a dead tomb. The mist rolled up to our ankles and made us shiver with chill, even though the night was pleasantly warm.

We was sliding past some of the old mansions on the Rue de St. Charles in the Garden District when we passed one that didn’t look quite right.

“Here,” Alyssa said. “It’s here.”

I looked at her, then at the mansion, which looked overgrown and dilapidated. “Are you sure, Miss Graham?”

She paused as though listening to something, then nodded. “Yes, quite sure. Look.”

I looked to the spot on the ground where she pointed. There was a trail of blood leading into the topiary and around the mansion toward the gated garden at the back.

"I’ll be damned," I muttered. Then louder, “Miss Graham, I got a bad feeling about this.”

We followed the trail of blood back to the garden. The gate wasn’t locked…much. We shimmied our way inside and bloodhounded our way to a greenhouse. No matter what we did, we simply couldn’t find a way inside, short of breaking the glass. And with all the blood around, neither of us was too keen on that.

But that’s when we heard the sound.

It was like a snake rustling through the underbrush. ‘Cept this weren’t no snake. Miss Graham saw it first. Big around as a man, it was, with four toothed jaws that came together to form one mouth. Its entire body was covered in something wet and dripping that must have been pond scum. Miss Graham screamed. I screamed. The thing rose up in the air like a snake.

Miss Graham had a moment to look at me before shouting, “Run, Mister Culver. Run!”

I looked at her dumbly for a moment, but she was already running off into the maze of weeping willows and Spanish moss. The thing hissed and set off after her, its body sliding through the rosebushes with the sound of rustling paper.

“Miss Graham!” I shouted. “Miss Graham! Come back!” But she was already gone. I knew I couldn’t leave her, so I did the only thing I could and whipped out my trumpet. I started playing crazily, and for a moment the monster stopped. But then it kept moving and I launched into my Song of the Dead that had the special knack for bringing back the recently departed.

Miss Graham screamed. As I played I ran through the maze of trees and bushes and found her backed up against a willow, that leviathan poised to strike. I lifted my horn high and started in on the chorus. The ghosts of the recently departed swarmed around the monster. It writhed and flopped in agony as the ghosts drank its inner essence.

I had to play the entire song three times over, but in the end, the creature lay motionless on the ground, a foul slime oozing off its flesh. But by then, Miss Graham was dead too, so many terrible bites taken from of her flesh that it was a downright mercy she hadn’t lived.

There was strange noises in the night. I swore I heard more slithering, like there be more of them horrible serpents out there in the trees. Since I couldn’t do Miss Graham any more good by hanging around, I hightailed it out of there and was happy to run through what remained of the Garden District.

I found Olive McBride still awake in her second-story flat down on the seedier side of Broadmoor. I swear she know’d I was coming, for no sooner had I looked up at her window than she pulled the lacy curtains aside, and told me to hurry on in and to use the old wooden steps on the side of the building.

To any onlookers, if there was any at that late hour, it mighta looked like I was paying a late-night visit to one of the many prostitutes who frequented the area. But when I stepped inside, I beheld a vision out of one of those stories my Grandmammy used to tell me to scare me away from Lil’ Pap’s shed. I knew nuthin’ about this Olive McBride, ‘cept for this: she was a witch.

Miss McBride skipped the polite conversation and dove straight into business. She already knew that I was looking for the beast in the swamp—the The Rougarou, she called it.

“There is a powerful Bokor who lives deep within the swamp,” she told me. “She can tell you how to find the Rougarou.”

“And just how am I supposed to find this Bokor in all that swamp?”

“I’ll help you. Give me your hands.”

I joined my hands to hers. She spoke some strange incantation, then suddenly I was seeing into her eyes and she into mine, as though through a peephole. In her pupil I beheld the vision of an old run-down shack in the middle of some of the foulest-looking swamp I’d ever seen.

Then the connection was broken, just as suddenly as it had been made. And in my mind’s eye, I retained the image of the shack.

“Okay, this Bokor lives in a shack in the middle of some swamp,” I said. “How is that going to help us find him?”

“Her,” Miss McBride corrected me. “I know where she is.” She grinned at me. “I’ll take you to her.”

At this my eyebrows climbed high as a walnut tree. “You’re tellin’ me that you’re gonna to accompany a black man by yourself into a cursed swamp, at night, with a man-eating Rougarou prowling these here parts?”

She shrugged. “I’ll try anything once.”

We set out for the swamp, Prepared for the Worst. We made sure we each had a Flashlight, and I also brought a hooded Lantern I requisitioned from a local graveyard. I brought along my Grandmammy’s Holy Rosary, one of which I lent to Miss McBride. In return she gave me this little nail as a charm to wear around my neck, said the Church called it St. Hubert's Key, or the like. I said I already had a good luck charm, and showed her my lucky Rabbit's Foot that my Uncle Dox gave me when I was a boy.

“You will need all the luck you can get, James,” she said. “And more.”

I patted my hip flask as said, “Don’t you worry, Miss McBride. I brought Old Mister Liquid Courage to help us along.”

“It will not be enough,” she said. “Hold this.” She handed me a strange candle, like one you would see used at Mass. Then she started speaking in an eldritch tongue while drawing circles in the air around me with her arms.

“What was all that hoodoo?” I asked.

“Ward of Protection,” she said.

“And that’s s’posed to keep me from harm?”

She shrugged. “Let’s hope.”

Walking through a swamp at night was everything you’d expect, and creepy as hell. I was grateful for the lantern and our two backup flashlights. Losing our light out here would be worse than death, if you asked me, and I ain’t afraid of no ghosts.

When we thought we were close, Miss McBride made me join hands again in that strange seeking ritual, and before long we had the exact location of the Bokor’s shack in our mind’s eyes.

The shack would have been nearly impossible to find during the day, with all this mist about, but here at night we didn’t have a snowball’s chance in hell. ‘Cept Miss McBride was a witch, so we found our way just fine.

Despite being somewhere past midnight, there was a small candle lit in the window, like the Bokor had been expecting us. And maybe she had, for when we opened the door, she greeted us cordially as if she hadn’t been surprised at all to see us.

“You may call me Lady Esprit,” the Bokor said. “You are here about the Rougarou.” It wasn’t a question.

“Yes, Madame,” I said.

We sat down on some old rickety wooden chairs as she went on to explain: “The Rougarou was once a man. But he was cursed by an elder god named Shub-Niggurath to change with the turning of the moon. Now, he is neither man nor wolf, but both—an abomination. The only way you can lift the Curse of the Rougarou from the bayou...is to destroy it.”

A heavy silence lay between us all. I realized that this would be the only way—the only way to keep the Rougarou from killing others, like it did Ol’ Daddou.

I nodded. “Then that is what we must do,” I said.

She turned fully toward me, twining some string around her fingers in a cat’s cradle. Then she began to weave them together, moving a string here or there, until the form changed. “Would you know your fortune?” she asked.

“I’m game.”

Her deft fingers moved the strings faster than I could follow. Some had feathers dangling from them, others small bones, and maybe the skulls of rats or mice. She said nothing, only stared at me as her fingers worked. In the end, the result looked just as tangled and confused as what she had begun with.

“It will end in cold…and darkness,” she said.

I thought about the Blind Willie Johnson tune I had played for Ol’ Daddou. “That’s not very reassuring,” I said.

“It’s not meant to be,” she said. She cocked her head slightly, those dark eyes boring into mine. “So you wish to destroy the Rougarou?”

“Yes, Madame. I do.”

“And are you prepared to pay the price?”

I hesitated, swallowing hard. I glanced at Miss McBride, who nodded solemnly. “Yes, Madame.”

“Then give me your hand.”

I did so. She pulled out a wicked looking knife made of human bone and began to chant. I flinched as the knife bit into my palm and drew a wide stream of blood, which she caught in a bowl that had formerly been a human skull.

Truth to tell, I don’t remember a whole lot after that. I was nursing my playing hand with a bandage and not thinking about much else when I must have blacked out. When I came to, the Bokor was standing over me.

“The Pact is complete,” she said.

“The…Pact?”

“You have made a Blood Pact with the loa who inhabit this swamp. They will help you destroy the Rougarou.”

Well damn, I hadn’t set out to sign up for any Dark Pact with no spiritual forces, but I guess I was halfway down this road already, and there weren’t no turning back.

The Bokor said she would locate the Rougarou for us. She did something that looked a lot like that strange little seeking ritual Miss McBride did for me, ‘cept this one didn’t require a second person. I swear I could see the image in her mind’s eye reflected right there in her pupil.

“There is an old graveyard,” Lady Esprit said at last. “A place where the cairns of the first settlers to this place have sunken into the muck. The creature is there. Go now.”

We was about to walk out the door when the Bokor stopped us. “You will need this.” It was another one of those thick church candles Ritual Candles you’d light for Mass.

“What for?”

“Hold it. It will Light your way in the Darkness.”

“I mean no offense, Madame, but I have a lantern for that.”

I felt Miss McBride’s gentle touch on my arm and glanced at her. I knew then the Bokor meant a different kind of Light for a different kind of Darkness.

Before we left, Miss McBride did some more chanting and waving to cast another Ward of Protection on me.

“Another one? What’s wrong with the first one? And how do you know it’s going to work?” I asked.

“Just to be safe,” she said. “Did anything bad happen to you while we were wandering through the swamp in the middle of the night?”

“Well, no, but that don’t mean—”

“—It means it worked,” she said, cocking an eyebrow at me. I relented. Can’t argue with a woman.

We set off On the Hunt for the Rougarou. After an hour or so of picking through the bayou we finally came to a place that looked downright spooky. Cairnstones worn by the centuries poked out of the mist all over the place. I turned to say something to Miss McBride when a huge blur of brown swept past me, knocking me to the ground.

I heard snarling and tearing, and over all of it, the sound of Miss McBride’s agonized shrieks.

“Olive!” I screamed, scrambling up.

More shrieks of agony as the lanky wolf creature flayed the flesh from her body and literally tore her apart, shoving each dripping morsel into its mouth as if its hunger could not be sated.

I started to reach for my trumpet when a felt a strange tingling in my cut palm. Then I felt the power of the loa fill my arms and my legs, and suddenly I was a beast as well. With an inhuman howl of untethered rage, I leapt on top of the Rougarou in a Reckless Assault, beating and flailing at its head. I felt like I was a hundred-foot-tall heavyweight boxer pounding a much weaker opponent into the ground. Blood and fur flew from my fists as I pressed my fingers into the monster’s hide and tore out a hunk of flesh. The creature howled in agony.

Then I was flying through the air. I landed on something mercifully soft until a rolled a few times and my kidney fetched up against a cairnstone sticking out of the ground. When I clambered to my feet, clutching my side, the Rougarou was gone.

My first thought was for Miss McBride, but one cringing look told me all I needed to know. Like Miss Graham, it was a mercy she did not survive. Two dead white women in one night. I shook my head. Maybe Ol’ Daddou would be right. If the Rougarou didn’t get me first, either the local constable or some of the white folks was sure to.

I realized I was still clutching my Grandmammy’s rosary—or rather, what was left of it. When I loosened my hand, the beads slipped off the string and went bouncing into the misty undergrowth. Dammit. Miss McBride had the other one, and I didn’t have the heart to take it off her. At least I still had my lucky Rabbit's Foot. I told myself I was rubbing it for luck, but in truth I think was rubbing it because I was nervous as hell and found the feel of the smooth rabbit fur comforting.

Since there was nothing I could do for Miss McBride, I turned my focus toward finding the Rougarou. The thing had to be destroyed before anything like this could happen to anyone else.

I tried my hand at that nifty Rite of Seeking trick I saw the Bokor use to find the Rougarou, and within seconds, I had an image in my mind’s eye. I glanced down and found its tracks leading away.

“Gotcha.”

---

The Rougarou was near. I could smell it. I had tracked it out of the bayou and straight toward the Cursed Shores of New Orleans like a hellhound on its trail.

Overhead, black storm clouds rolled and roiled, their shapes twisting and churning in the night sky as though agitated or nervous, unable to sit still. They blotted out the stars like Armageddon itself. I remembered what the Bokor had told me, and took out the ritual candle and lit it. I trudged over the rough pebbles and dark sand until I found nice clean spot. I crouched and drew a circle like the kind I seen the Bokor and Miss McBride draw in the air, and placed the ritual candle in the center. I rose, scanning the dark shoreline.

Then I saw it. A black, lumbering shape loping over the sand, straight for me.

I felt that strange tingling in my playing hand again, except it was in my fingers, not my palm. That’s when I knew what I had to do.

It came to me, all at once. A new song. It was like the Song of the Dead I had played earlier, except different. Evolved.

Standing in the mystic circle, I took out my trumpet and started playing my new inspiration. As my fingers tingled, they moved, playing a new improvisation that sprung from my mind fully formed like Athena, in a tune I could only call the Rougarou Blues.

I don’t know where I found the Guts to stand there and play while the Rougarou came bounding down the shore straight toward me, but somewhere I found some Unexpected Courage and stood my ground, Defiant, as a Torrent of Power flowed through me and into my new Song of the Dead.

I played the song over and over again as first one, then two, then a dozen ghosts appeared from out of the mists to surround the Rougarou. It howled, clawing its way toward me through the sand, even as more souls of the Recently Departed covered it, consuming its essence.

But it wasn’t enough. The Rougarou dragged itself, snarling and roaring, right up to my magic circle and took a swipe at me with claws like a bear’s. The claws passed right through the barrier and raked my thigh.

I cried out, my song squawked momentarily, but I kept on playing. Then the creature realized its paw had hit the ritual candle, splattering hot wax on its fur, which promptly caught fire. It jerked back, roaring.

I poured everything I had into my song, my fingers tingling to the point of a numbing sting. The Rougarou rolled in the sand, devoured by flames and ghosts. And then was still.

I rocked from the Rougarou Blues straight into the Song for the Dead, guiding the ghosts back to the Beyond with the music from my trumpet bell. Until at last, there stood only two.

Two women.

Miss Graham and Miss McBride.

They stared at me as I collapsed onto the cold sand, in the center of my magic circle, as my lifeblood pumped out of the gash in my thigh.

“Blood for blood,” the ghost of Olive McBride said. “Soon the Pact will be fulfilled.”

“Won’t you play us a song, before you go?” Alyssa Graham said.

I nodded, my nose and hair dripping with sweat. I took a swig from my flask, which seemed to help some. I raised my trumpet to my trembling lips, then began to play a very special song.

“Dark Was The Night, Cold Was The Ground,” my trumpet sang in its plaintive wail, each note a little weaker than the last. This was my Final Rhapsody. The Bokor’s Prophecy came true after all.

First Miss Graham closed her eyes and faded, then Miss McBride. And then it was my turn.

I could only pray their souls found rest.

God knows, mine did not.

---

If you're interested in hearing the song "Dark Was The Night, Cold Was The Ground" check out these three links:

(1) Original Blind Willie Johnson: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BNj2BXW852g

(2) Gretch Honey Dipper Resonator cover: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lkSm2nQiQ64&list=RDlkSm2nQiQ64

(3) Justin Johnson cover (my personal favorite): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pKfsmI9qhI4