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The English hanged JosephAKA Matzulas Kebahalain the main square of Coxen Hole and threw Mary into jail as a prostitute. She died there of pneumonia three months later. The villagers spirited the boy off to the jungles on the mainland, where he had been apprenticed to the local Hungan. |
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The Dark Man watched the clock over the check-in desk as if it were his worst enemy. In a way it was. Each tiny movement of the second hand was like someone tearing a small slice out of his gut with a pair of ice tongs. His eyes wandered to the glass wall that looked out at the waiting plane. |
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Quickly averting his eyes, the Dark Man glanced at his apprentice to see if he had noticed themthe drooling ghosts with their contorted faces pressed against the window. |
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The goateed man was surreptitiously picking his nose and staring at a passing stewardess. |
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Naturally, the sorcerer recognized the disembodied spiritshe had personally sent each soul on its one-way trip to hell. There was Kempahis was the red spirit with the gaping holes for eyes. He had been the headman of the Dark Man's adopted village on the mainland. Then there was Hemat, the schoolteacher who had tried to turn the villagers against him. His was the ghost dripping ectoplasmic gore from the stump of a headless neck. And then of course there was Begalla, the Dark Man's old mentorthe Hungan who had first set the Dark Man's feet on the thorny road to Baron Samedi and the Guédé. His giggling ghost had a raw hole where its heart used to beat. |
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And there were others. So many others that their ghosts were buzzing around the window like flies around an outhouse. Their psychic howls of glee echoed inside his head like the screams of demented inmates in the bowels of the deepest, darkest asylum. They knew their time was near, and without the Butcher's Broom to protect him, there was little the Dark Man could do to stop them. |
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''It will be a good time?" the man with the goatee asked. |
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