"Herbs with magical properties. Get in. It will be good for you."

      Joey walked across the redwood patio and stood beside the steaming hot tub. He wrinkled his nose. The water was a distressing yellow-green hue, and it gave off a reek like sulfurated tea.

      "Whenever somebody tells me something is good for me, you can bet it's really going to suck."

      "Get in," Baribeau said. "We don't have all day. You have to be purified in time for your initiation on Sunday, and there are many more things to be done."

      Joey stuck in a toe and pulled it out immediately. "Youch! Claude, it's scalding hot!"

      Baribeau shook his head. "You are such a crybaby sometimes, Spelvin. Get in there before I throw you in and hold you down."

      It was like immersing himself in boiling sewage, but Joey climbed into the tub. Seated, the water came up to his shoulders. His scalp began to sweat.

      "How long do I have to stay in here?"

      "Theoretically, until all the toxins have been leached out of your body. Since you would die of heat exhaustion before that happened, I'm only going to keep you in there fifteen minutes."

      "What a guy. Does this bath really have anything to do with vodoun, or is it just one of those Sonoma County seltzer-worshipping scams?"

      "People were doing this in Haiti centuries ago. Without the aid of a jacuzzi, of course."

      "Ummm."

      "While you're in there, you can practice the ritual song I taught you last night."

      "How does it go again? `Do do that voodoo that you do so well'?"

      Claude laughed, a rarity during the past five days. "All right, my friend. Just sit there in silence and meditate."

      Joey closed his eyes and tipped his head back. If you could ignore the smell, the hot tub was rather comfortable. One bubble jet pummeled his back, working on the tight muscles there. Joey felt his tension dissolving and his eyelids growing heavy.

      After his flip-out at SFO late Saturday night, Alison had brought him straight back to Berkeley, where Baribeau met them at his church. Leaving Alison behind, Joey rode with Baribeau and two members of his congregation to this farmhouse in Glen Ellen, a small town in Sonoma County, about an hour and a half away. When he asked whom the property belonged to, Baribeau said only that an old friend owned the place.

      Emotionally and physically exhausted, Joey spent most of the next two days sleeping upstairs in a down-quilted brass bed. He heard others come and go from the house, but he paid them little attention. He felt safe for the moment, and he was too tired to worry much about the future.

      He heard no drums, and there were no nightmares.

      On Tuesday, Baribeau roused Joey at six in the morning and began an arduous tutorial in the arts and mysteries of vodoun. There were songs to be learned, dance steps to be practiced, rituals to be carried out, interminable lists of deities to be memorized.

      Because he feared for his life and had no other options, Joey did as he was told, although not always without complaint. Baribeau conducted most of the lessons himself, but his assistants, Maurice and Claire, sometimes showed up to instruct him as well.

      The three of them had crammed Joey's skull full of bizarre facts. The week-long initiation, the kanzo, would begin on Sunday. Joey had damn well better be ready.

      Joey's head bobbed forward. He got a mouthful of bitter water and snapped fully awake, sputtering and choking.

      "Here. Sip this." Baribeau handed him a glass of ice water with a lemon slice floating in it.

      "I'm really dying for a Diet Coke."

      "I've told you before, no caffeine, no artificial sweeteners until after the kanzo. Nothing must blunt or excite your senses in the next few days."

      "I've not only got a new religion, but a new mom as well." He took the water and chugged it. "How much longer do I have to sit here?"

      "Ten more minutes."

      Joey spit the lemon slice into the Jacuzzi, watched it swirl and bob in the herbal soup.

      A car horn tooted at the front of the property. Baribeau said, "That must be Rhinehart."

      "Who's Rhinehart?"

      "Our host. Come inside when you're finished here."

      Baribeau left him again to stew in solitude.

      "You look beat."

      "I probably look better than I feel." Claude closed the front door behind Professor Eugene Rhinehart.

      A short, chubby, middle-aged man with a bushy red beard, Rhinehart clutched a brown paper bag under one arm. He wore a starched white shirt, gray worsted slacks, thin red suspenders and a matching bowtie. He absently patted a recalcitrant cowlick as he crossed the room and set the bag on a table.

      "Is your initiate running you ragged?"

      Baribeau snorted. "I may be creating a monster."

      Rhinehart chuckled and stopped when he saw Baribeau wasn't kidding. He opened the bag and removed two bottles of beer. "Perhaps we should avail ourselves of these and chat awhile."

      With mugs fetched from the kitchen, Rhinehart and Baribeau poured themselves tall, cool ones. They retired to the den and drank in friendly silence for a few minutes.

      His mustache rimmed with foam, Rhinehart finally said, "Isn't it a little unusual to try to complete a kanzo so quickly?"

      In Haiti, the initiation process was a long, expensive hardship, designed to discourage all but the most devout. Baribeau said, "Joey's a special case. The most important thing right now is to earn him some protection, as quickly as possible."

      "Have you figured out whya Concasseur is interested in him?"

      "Certainly not because he wants someone to carry on his work after he dies. My guess is that Concasseur has entered into a hot-point and that a human sacrifice is his best way out."

      One did not usually become a bokor of Concasseur's stature without making a hot-point, a blood pact with a powerful petro demon. And hot-point demons needed to be fed from time to time. Otherwise, they turned on the sorcerers they served.

      Rhinehart said, "So why didn't he just kidnap Joey and kill him? Why go to all the trouble of alternately seducing him and scaring him half to death?"

      "Concasseur's demon won't be appeased by just an simple offering," Baribeau said. "It has probably been waiting decades for its promised sacrifice. It wants something well-prepared and immensely satisfying."

      Claude knew that, had Papa Legba not intervened that night in the park, Concasseur would have forced Joey to join the Zobop and undergo an apprenticeship in black magic. But once Joey gained sufficient proficiency in the ways of vodoun, the old sorcerer would have offered him up to his hot-point demon.

      The stronger the `horse,' the more pleasure for the demon who breaks him.

      Rhinehart asked, "Aren't you afraid of doing Concasseur's work for him? Shouldn't Joey be kept away from anything that has to do with vodoun?"

      Baribeau shook his head. "I wish it were that easy. The rada loas definitely want him to be initiated, especially Ogu. They need him as a weapon against the petro loas. To flout their will would be disastrous. All we can do is hope that, with their aid, Joey and I can beat Concasseur at his own game."

      "Have you told Joey just how dangerous his kanzo could prove to be? That he may be putting himself in more danger by going through with it?"

      The hungan set down his glass, sighed heavily and rubbed his eyes. "No. I can't afford to frighten him any more than he already is. The kanzo must be done. There is no choice involved in the matter."

      Rhinehart gave him a penetrating look. "That doesn't seem exactly fair."

      "I never said it was."

      Joey got out of the tub, towelled off and went in search of Baribeau. He found him in the den, with someone he assumed to be Rhinehart. He got the feeling that they had been talking about him just seconds before he entered the room.

      "So here he is," Professor Rhinehart said, getting up from his seat. "Vodoun's Great White Hope."

      He shook Joey's hand vigorously while Baribeau made the introductions. "Joey Spelvin, meet Professor Eugene Rhinehart of the University of California's Anthropology Department."

      "Professor. Thanks for letting me hide out here."

      "It's my pleasure. Since my folks passed away, I don't get up to this old homestead as much as I'd like. You're welcome to use it as long as necessary."

      The professor grinned. "I must also admit that your case absolutely fascinates me. I couldn't wait any longer to meet you."

      Joey pulled up a chair and said to Rhinehart, "So, I'm an intriguing case, am I?"

      "If half of what Claude tells me about you is true."

      "Do you believe in vodoun?"

      Rhinehart glanced at Baribeau. "I believe in some, but not all, of its aspects. I'm more interested in its psychological and biological realities, rather than in its supposed magical properties."

      "You mean Claude hasn't ever strutted his supernatural stuff for you?"

      Baribeau took offense. "Joey!"

      Rhinehart laughed, a goofy, whooping sound. "I've seen Claude do many amazing things, some of which I can't explain, none of which I'm prepared to say were the result of other-worldly powers. Especially if I wish to keep my academic reputation unsullied. I'd love to capture evidence of true vodoun magic on film or videotape, but Claude doesn't perform on demand, and I'm not a member of his congregation."

      "Strong magic would destroy any camera that tried to record it," Baribeau said.

      Rhinehart waved away that objection. "At any rate, I'm a scientist by training and temperament, not a mystic. However, what interests me most, Joey, is that this Concasseur person seems to have a zombie under his control."

      Images of the Walkman and of Concasseur slitting Tiffany Wellington's wrists flashed across Joey's mind. "At least one."

      Baribeau said, "Gene was one of the first white scientists to analyze the zombie formula."

      "Zombie formula?"

      Rhinehart walked to his desk. With a key from his pocket, he unlocked the top drawer and brought out a wooden case. He opened the case and removed a tiny glass vial. The vial seemed to be filled with dry black dirt.

      "Tetrodotoxin," he said. "Poison from the puffer fish. Five hundred times more powerful than cyanide. I bought it from a bokor while on a field expedition to Haiti in 1983. It's been mixed with a bunch of other strange ingredients: powdered human bones, graveyard dirt, dried parts of lizards, sea worms and toads."

      He let Joey inspect the vial. Joey said, "What do you do with it?"

      "Blow it into the face of your intended victim, or coat the insides of his shoes with it. The neurotoxin acts fairly quickly. The victim feels nauseated, has trouble breathing. His blood pressure drops and, within six hours, he's completely paralyzed. What's truly astounding is that, although indistinguishable to the outside observer from a corpse, the victim remains conscious throughout the entire ordeal, in a state of suspended animation."

      "Wild. But are you trying to tell me that's what happened to Tiffany?"

      Rhinehart nodded. "If the zombie formula doesn't kill the victim, its effects eventually disappear. But the ravages of the drug, sometimes coupled with the horror of being buried alive and then dug up again, are often enough to induce amnesia, disorientation or psychosis."

      Shaking his head, Joey returned the toxin sample to the professor, who locked it away in his desk. "I don't buy it. When Concasseur slit Tiffany's wrist, yellow goop came out. Explain that with poisonous fish meat."

      "Sleight of hand. A hallucination. Who knows?"

      "Claude?"

      Baribeau took a few seconds before answering. "I think there are many kinds of zombies, Joey. There are those created by drugs. There are those created by magic. There are those that create themselves, that actively choose to be dead. They can be slow or fast, smart or stupid. They can be hideous monsters or look exactly like you and me."

      "That's all well and good," Joey said. "What I want to know is how to destroy one."

      Baribeau said, "If a zombie is truly a product of black magic, there are only a few means of stopping it." He ticked off the possibilities on his fingers. "Render its body unuseable by cutting it up or burning it completely. Kill the bokor whose power animates it. Or feed it salt."

      "Salt?"

      "If a zombie eats salt and then hears its own, true name, it will remember that it is dead. It can then be killed with a knife through the heart."

      They all drank in silence for a moment, each occupied by his own thoughts. Joey mustered the courage to ask the question that had been bothering him since he first met Baribeau. He said, "Claude, why are you doing this, going to all this trouble to help me?"

      Baribeau said, "I thought I had made that clear, Joey. My parishioners are in danger. If Concasseur and the petro loas he serves become much more powerful --"

      Joey cut him off. "Right, right. But there's more to this whole business than that. There's something personal between you and Concasseur. Isn't there, Claude?"

      At first, Joey wasn't sure the hungan would answer. Baribeau looked at Rhinehart and then away, his lips pursed. His fingers gripped tightly around the mug. He finally answered the question with a question. "Have you ever heard of Papa Doc, Francois Duvalier?"

      "Sure. He was the dictator of Haiti during the Sixties and Seventies, right?"

      "Yes. And do you know how he became the nation's president-for-life?"

      "Vodoun?"

      "Exactly. He was a physician by training but deeply interested in vodoun. During the election of 1957, he pledged to increase the influence of the poor black peasants who had been dominated by the mixed-race elite for over a century. But most important, he declared that vodoun, not Catholicism, was the legitimate religion of the Haitian people."

      Rhinehart nodded. "It was a brilliant maneuver. The descendants of African slaves made up ninety-five percent of the country's six million inhabitants. After years of political instability and religious oppression, they were more than ready for a man such as Papa Doc, one who would allow them to practice vodoun openly again."

      Baribeau said, "Once in power, however, Duvalier discovered that he was unable to trust his army. He created his own security force, the Ton Ton Macoute. The Ton Tons eventually became the most repressive secret police organization in the Caribbean. Its members were noted for their love of machine guns and mirrored sunglasses, as well as for their total lack of anything resembling human compassion.

      "No one has really explained how the Ton Ton Macoute became a national organization so quickly or why its power was so all-encompassing. Part of the answer may lie in the fact that many Ton Tons were recruited from the most powerful secret vodoun societies."

      "The Zobop," Joey supplied.

      "That's right. Duvalier openly courted the most influential hungans and bokors. He was widely rumored to be a sorcerer himself."

      Joey said, "I take it that Concasseur was involved with the Ton Tons?"

      "In Port-au-Prince, he led them. Not openly, of course. He pretended to be nothing more than a wealthy, elderly hotel proprietor. But the secret police in the city made no move without his approval."

      Rhinehart stood and walked to a bookcase, where he removed a pipe from a well-stocked rack. "I've never understood why a white man was given that much power within Duvalier's private security force." He took a pack of tobacco from his pocket and filled his pipebowl.

      "Only because he was such a powerful bokor," Baribeau said. "Duvalier's government guaranteed Concasseur a certain degree of security. In return, Concasseur instructed Papa Doc in some of the more arcane aspects of vodoun."

      Joey shivered at this reminder of just how high a roller Concasseur was. "I take it you had some sort of run-in with Concasseur while you were living in Port-au-Prince."

      "Not me. My Uncle Jacques. My father died a very young man, killed by a brain tumor. His brother took in my mother, my sister Camille and me, letting us live in his house and treating us as if we were his own flesh and blood."

      Rhinehart sat down again and lighted up. The scent of his smoke was sweet and mild. "Your uncle was a hungan, wasn't he?"

      "Yes. One who would not ally himself with Papa Doc. He was influential enough to be left alone for a time. Even the Ton Tons were frightened of him. But when Uncle Jacques began working to overthrow Duvalier through white magic, Henri Concasseur sent a loup-garou after him."

      Joey asked, "Isn't that a kind of werewolf?"

      "In Haiti," Baribeau said, "werewolves are nothing like those you know from American movies. First of all, they are usually women. Instead of tearing their victims apart like a rabid wolf, they prefer to drink their blood, as a vampire does. And the loup-garou usually preys on infants and small children, rather than on able-bodied adults."

      "Wasn't your uncle a little old to be bothered by werewolves, then?"

      "So he thought, and that was a fatal mistake. The loup-garou conjured by Concasseur was far stronger, more demonic, than any before."

      Joey could barely hear Baribeau's voice now, but he did not ask him to speak up. Baribeau stared at his hands, his mind obviously concentrating on times past and far away.

      "I was the last to see him alive. I came to his study to say goodnight before I went to bed. He was at his desk, poring over some old book. We chatted for a few minutes, and he reminded me to make sure the back door was locked tightly. Then I saw a single bead of blood trickling down to his eye from his scalp.

      "`Have you cut yourself?' I asked him. I wiped the drop away with my handkerchief, looked for a scratch on his head and saw nothing. He shrugged, sent me off to bed."

      Baribeau stopped, clearly trying not to let his emotions overwhelm him. Rhinehart touched him on the shoulder and said, "Claude, if you don't want to --"

      The hungan brushed the hand away and continued. "In the middle of the night, we were all awakened by screaming. I rushed to Uncle Jacques' room and, of course, it was locked. By the time we got the door opened, the screaming had stopped and the loup-garou had fled.

      "There was blood everywhere. On the floor, on the walls, on the ceiling. Uncle Jacques was covered in it, even though there was not a single mark on his body. He was completely exsanguinated, as if he had sweated out all his blood.

      "That wasn't the worst. The worst was the marks on the walls, where the werewolf had lapped up Uncle Jacques' spattered blood before departing."

      Joey looked at Rhinehart. The professor was pale, and he had let his pipe go out. Joey wondered how much of Baribeau's tale Rhinehart dared believe.

      His voice still subdued, Baribeau said, "My mother, sister and I left Haiti just a few days after the funeral, after I had performed the necessary rituals to lay Uncle Jacques to rest. I have never been back to the Caribbean since."

      Joey, still thinking about the tongue marks, said, "You think Concasseur has a loup-garou working for him here in America?"

      "There has been no evidence of it so far. Still, I've taken precautions. I won't be taken by surprise like my Uncle Jacques."

      Baribeau stood suddenly and wiped a tear from his cheek. He said, "Well, Gene, Joey and I had better get back to his catechism."

      Rhinehart got up and said, "Uh, of course. Yes. Let me fetch some books from upstairs, and I'll get out of your hair. I'll be in Berkeley the rest of the week, and I'll see you in time for the festivities on Sunday."

      After the professor left, Joey said to Baribeau, "Is Rhinehart attending my initiation?"

      "Strictly as an observer. Do you have a problem with that?"

      "It's his house, so I don't see why he shouldn't be here if he wants. But when I asked if Alison could come, you said the kanzo was for vodoun practitioners only."

      "Professor Rhinehart is well-versed in the ways of the religion, even if he is not a true believer. However, if something goes wrong, it will be too dangerous for Alison."

      "I want her here. It will make things easier for me."

      Baribeau shook his head in irritation. "Listen to yourself. I have told you that your initiation will be dangerous, that you and those around you will be at their most vulnerable during the ceremony. And still you want to jeopardize your best friend in order to `make things easier' for yourself?"

      Joey hung his head and said nothing.

      "Your kanzo will rid you of some of the bad energy afflicting your life and will protect you from many evil spells. With it will come responsibility, perhaps more than you have ever had to face," Baribeau said.

      "If you fail in that responsibility, Joey, then there will be little I can do to save you."