of the World Fantasy Award, his short fiction has been gathered into six collections. Some of his nonfiction was compiled for the International Horror Guild Award-winning Wild Hairs. In addition to The Kill Riff, he has authored five other novels, the most recent of which is Internecine (2010). Film-writing credits include The Crow, The Texas Chainsaw Massacre: The Beginning, and The Hills Run Red.
Voodoo Child
Graham Masterton
I saw Jimi ducking into S.H. Patel’s, the news agent on the corner of Clarendon Road, and his face was ashy gray. I said to Dulcie, “Jesus, that’s Jimi,” and followed him inside, shop doorbell clanging. Mr. Patel was marking up stacks of Evening Standards and said, “New Musical Express not in yet, Charlie,” but all I could do was to shake my head.
I walked cautiously along the shelves of magazines and children’s sweets and humorous birthday cards. I could hear Mrs. Patel’s television playing the theme tune from Neighbours somewhere in the back of the shop. There was a musty smell of manila envelopes and candy shrimps and fenugreek.
I came around the corner of the shelves and Jimi was standing by the freezer cabinet, looking at me wide-eyed; not sly and funny the way he always used to, but wounded almost, defensive. His hair was just the same, frizzy, and he was wearing the same sleeveless Afghan jacket and purple velvet flares—even the same Cherokee necklace. But his skin looked all white and dusty, and he really scared me.
“Jimi?” I whispered.
At first, he didn’t say anything, but there was a chilliness around him and it wasn’t just the freezer cabinet with its Bird’s Eye peas and Findus mixed carrots and original beef burgers.
“Jimi . . . I thought you were dead, man,” I told him. I hadn’t called anybody “man” for more than fifteen years. “I was really, totally convinced you were dead.”
He snuffed, and cleared his throat, his eyes still wounded-looking. “Hallo, Charlie,” he said. He sounded hoarse and remote and blocked-up, the same way he’d sounded that last night I saw him, September 17, 1970.
I was so scared I could scarcely speak, but at the same time Jimi was so much the same that I felt weirdly reassured—like it was still 1970 and the past twenty years just hadn’t happened. I could have believed that John Lennon was still alive and that Harold Wilson was still prime minister and that it was peace and love forever.
“I’ve been trying to get back to the flat, man,” Jimi told me.
“What? What flat?”
“Monika’s flat, man, in Lansdowne Crescent. I’ve been trying to get back.”
“What the hell do you want to go back there for? Monika doesn’t live there anymore. Well, not so far as I know.”
Jimi rubbed his face, and ash seemed to fall between his fingers. He looked distracted, frightened, as if he couldn’t think straight. But then I’d often seen him stoned out of his skull, talking weird gibberish, all about some planet or other where things were ideal, the godlike planet of Supreme Wisdom.
“Where the hell have you been?” I asked him. “Listen, Dulcie’s outside. You remember Dulcie? Let’s go and have a drink.”
“I’ve got to get into that flat, man,” Jimi insisted.
“What for?”
He stared at me as if I were crazy. “What for? Shit! What for, for fuck’s sake.”
I didn’t know what to do. Here was Jimi, three feet in front of me, real, talking, even though Jimi had been dead for twenty years. I never saw the actual corpse, and I never actually went to his funeral because I couldn’t afford the fare, but why would the press and his family have said that he was dead if he wasn’t?
Monika had found him lying on the bed, cold, his lips purple from suffocation. The doctors at St. Mary Abbot’s Hospital had confirmed that he was dead on arrival. He had suffocated from breathing vomit. He had to be dead. Yet here he was, just like the old psychedelic days, “Purple Haze” and “Voodoo Chile” and “Are You Experienced?”
The shop doorbell rang. It was Dulcie, looking for me. “Charlie?” she called. “Come on, Charlie, I’m dying for a drink.”
“Why don’t you come and have a drink with us?” I asked Jimi. “Maybe we can work out a way of getting you back in the flat. Maybe we can find out who the estate agent is, and talk to him. Courtney probably knows. Courtney knows everybody.”
“I can’t come with you, man, no way,” Jimi said evasively.