How Good is Your Voodoo? (excerpt)

10:00 PMCoughing and inhaling gulps of dusty air, Mei stirred on a half-an-inch-thick, dusty stone floor. She was unsure of where she was, but she was very sure of the pain she felt in her abdomen. It felt like sore muscles after an intense workout, only the pain was magnified in one area. It hurt to move it.Mei opened her mouth to let out a groan of pain, but quickly clamped her hands over her mouth as she heard shuffling somewhere in the room along the floor. She reached for her camera, then patted her chest several times, and her eyes went wide: It wasn’t around her neck.She frantically looked around the floor; there was a thick coat of dust lining it, and there were a number of waist-high barrels standing in a row. They smelled faintly of wine and also…sugar? Mei couldn’t tell. Carefully peering over them, she scanned the dark wine cellar, lit only by a few low-burning lanterns. Two lanterns lit the way upstairs, while another set of lanterns illuminated a door. Through the window of it, she could see a lone lantern lighting up two objects on two separate hooks: a small key, and her camera.She gasped with glee.Then she stifled a shriek as she heard and saw a loud knife banging on one of the barrels in the room. From the darkness, she heard a slow shuffle, the same that she heard before, followed by a wet, guttural growl. One fore the figure’s forearms was chewed raw, while the other—the one holding the knife—was still intact. The entire arm itself was fairly muscular.“Flesh …” Droned an almost inhuman, deep, wet voice.***

Blood dripped onto Kun’s green vest. His eyes fluttered open. He could barely move his mouth without a sharp-shooting pain in his jaw at the spot where the earlier punch landed. He tried moving his arms, but felt something restraining them. His eyes fluttering open, he focused them onto his wrists and noticed they were bound by rope. He looked down and noticed that his legs were also bound. Changing his eyes to light blue, he tried to break his bonds, but stopped short of doing so when he heard a record scratch.

An old gramophone rested on an end table in front of tall, curtained windows. Next to it was an old, empty-looking easy chair. Remembering what had happened before, his light blue eyes changed to dark blue and he was treated to a vision of a ghostly figure putting the needle back on the record.

And this was the second thing he saw.