Master of the Crossroads

By D G Mattichak, Jr

Robert Tallant thought that he was being engaged to accompany the old Count Eisendorf on a scientific expedition to the West Indian Colonies but from the minute that they set foot in Kingston Town the whole journey began to take on the shape of a nightmare.
Guided by the evil Voodoo witchdoctor Blackjoe, the expedition first visits Queen Sabina and on advice that is given in a strange trance they set out to find the King of the Wangamen who lives hidden in the primitive jungles of the Unseeable People.
With death or worse hounding their steps the expedition makes its was through the cannibal filled forests past the evil Lwa spirits and an army of Zombies in search of the Count's ultimate prize- but what evil is he seeking? And when he finds it can Robert Tallant allow such pure evil to escape into the world?

• Language: English
• Publisher: D G Mattichak, Jr
• Release date: Dec 31, 2011
• ISBN: 9781466015739

D G Mattichak, Jr

D G Mattichak jr was born in 1963 in Syracuse New York and immigrated to Melbourne Australia with his family in 1972. He was educated in one of Melbourne's exclusive private schools before studying art at Preston Technical College.D G Mattichak jr has been a student of the occult arts since the early 1980s and has become well known in Australian magickal circles and, in recent years, around the world due to a string of essays on a variety of occult subjects http://www.scribd.com/dmattichak/shelf . He discovered the "key to the order & value of the English alphabet" from Aleister Crowley's Book of the Law in 1983 and has since used this English Qabalah to unlock the secrets of Thelemite magick. Success in these methods admitted him to the highest levels of attainment in various Hermetic disciplines and until recently he has been passing on his knowledge to private students, many of whom have gone on to become notable occultists in their own right.After almost three decades of study and development D G Mattichak jr has finally been able to distil his knowledge of magick and Thelema into a book- A Comment on the Verses of the Book of the Law, the first in a planned series of books on Hermeticism and Thelemite magick, revealing, for the first time in over a century, the secrets of magick that have been hidden in Crowley's magnum opus, the Book of the Law.D G Mattichak jr currently lives in Melbourne Australia with his artist wife Michelle and their two cats. He has had a long career as an al a carte chef in Melbourne's vibrant hospitality scene and now spends his time writing blogs on cooking, writing and, in the guise of Master Ankh af na Khonsu, about magick. He is also one of the founding members of the Mt Franklin Annual Pagan Gathering and regularly contributes to its official website http://mountfranklinannualpagangathering.blogspot.com/ as both an administrator and as an author. D G Mattichak jr's first book Loot was released in 2009. His books are available through amazon.com at http://www.amazon.com/s/ref=nb_sb_noss?url=search-alias%3Dstripbooks&field-keywords=D+G+Mattichak&x=13&y=20 .

Book preview

Master of the Crossroads

by D G Mattichak jr

The contents of this work including, but not limited to, the accuracy of events, people, and places depicted; opinions expressed; permission to use previously published materials included; and any advice given or actions advocated are solely the responsibility of the author, who assumes all liability for said work and indemnifies the publisher against any claims stemming from publication of the work.

All Rights Reserved

Smashwords Edition 2012

Copyright © 2012 by D. G. Mattichak, Jr.

Published by D. G. Mattichak, Jr. at Smashwords

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ISBN: 978-1-4660-1573-9

Contents

1 Through the Dark Jungle

2 At the Outset

3 Matilda’s Inn

4 Journey to Rio Bueno

5 Queen Sabina

6 Night Trek

7 Captain Heinrich’s New Crew

8 The Crew of Damned Souls

9 Landfall in Haiti

10 The Unseeable People

11 The Cannibals’ Dining Room

12 The Cemetary of Count Samedi

13 The Land of the Walking Dead

14 The Wangaman

15 Infernal Rites

16 Maitre Carrefour

17 A Deal With the Devil

18 The Road Out of Hell

19 Blackjoe’s Juju Bag

20 Murderous Resolve

21 The Count’s Tale

22 Delivery into an Evil Destiny

23 Stranded on the Beach

24 Carrefour’s Puppet

25 Unholy Funeral

26 Escape from the Devil’s Island

27 Sailing on Seas of Idyll

28 Carrefour’s Pet

29 New Crew

30 Dreams of Damnation

31 Return to Kingston Town

32 Captain Tobias

33 At the Crossroads of a Decision

34 The Book of Vodun Secrets

1 Through the Dark Jungle

A spark of sunlight glinted off of the razor edge of the machete as it came hacking down in a long powerful arc through the air and sliced a way for us through the impossibly dense jungle. I looked at the beads of sweat that were trickling down Tobias’s broad ebony back as he hacked again and again with a seemingly endless reserve of strength and energy to fight a way through the tangle of vines that strangled our path. The humid heat had become oppressive and I felt choked for air like I had been confined in a small space, the impression made all the more claustrophobic by the artificial darkness under the jungle canopy that allowed only a few slanting beams of sunlight to penetrate to us on the ground.

I had become somewhat inured to the screeches and calls of the birds and animals concealed by the dense foliage so that I had been able to push my unease down to a barely tangible level but still my eyes darted all around me, scanning the jungle for unexpected snakes or insects of horrible tropical proportions. I turned to look behind me, to check on the progress of the Count and our terrifying companion, the bocur called Blackjoe, who were following directly behind me. It seemed that the jungle had closed up behind them and I feared that we would never find our way back to Port Rio Bueno. Just at that moment Tobias grabbed at my shirt and looking into my eyes he split his ebony black face with a wide bright white, gap-toothed grin and said,

We’s nearly there Mistuh Robert, suh. before turning back to the track in front of him and delivering another hefty blow with his machete. Just a bit more to go now Mistuh Robert suh. he continued in his drawled English.

A few moments later we were through into a small clearing and as the Count and Blackjoe came out of the jungle it seemed to close up behind them so that I could not tell the way that we had come anymore at all. I threw myself down on the ground at the foot of a tall, leaning palm tree and worked my aching shoulders out of the heavy pack on my back with a satisfied sigh of relief. When I had had time to catch my breath I looked around the small clearing, marveling that anyone could apparently hold back the jungle’s inexorable advance. At the far end of the clearing was a small round wattle and daub hut with a peaked roof and a single door that faced us. A few chickens ran around in a small fenced yard next to the hut and a goat was tied to a tree nearby but otherwise the place was deserted.

The Count had dropped his own pack next to mine and gone over to examine the hut while the bocur stood impassive, as he always did, staring immutably into some indiscernible space that he alone inhabited or could perceive. The sight of the huge black bocur with his clouded eyes that yet could see, and his teeth that had been sharpened to points, had been enough to send tremors through my soul when I had first met him but in this place I found him to be terrifying, as if he were some spirit that had manifested itself out of the decaying layer of dead things that lay at the bottom of the jungle’s tangle of growth. To take my mind away from contemplating him I began to muse on how I had come to be in this place in the first instance.

2 At the Outset

It seemed like years had passed since I had answered Count Eisendorf’s advertisement for a personal assistant to accompany him on a journey to Jamaica for the purposes of research. When I had first met the Count I had found him to be a gentleman of the finest taste, well spoken, polite and fastidious in his dress. He was older than me by twenty years or so and his blonde hair was shot through with grey, whilst his face was lined with the experience of a full life. He used pince-nez glasses for reading and they hung by a chain from the breast pocket of his sharp grey morning coat while his cuff-links appeared to be two huge square cut sapphires and he wore a thick square onyx ring on the little finger of his left hand. He was the image of the cultured gentleman and I was drawn to him from our first handshake.

He told me that he wished to make a study of anthropology among the natives that remained on the island of Jamaica and that he would require someone to assist him with his notes and equipment. At the time I was desperate to get to the West Indies where I wished to search out my father’s youngest brother who, apart from myself and my mother, was my father’s last living relative on earth. My last information on him put him in Trinidad and as I was all but penniless I needed to work for my passage to the new world and the Count’s offer had seemed to perfectly fit the bill. I agreed to join him and we had set off only a few short days later aboard an old Indiaman called the Intrepid Queen that was carrying rum and salt pork for the army in Kingston Town.

During the journey the Count had done nothing to belie the madness that was to come when we reached the Caribbean, dining every night at the Captain’s table and filling his evenings on board with games of whist or entertaining us with piano recitals of Mozart and Bach. In some of the quieter moments aboard the Intrepid Queen he even spoke quite openly to me and I learned that he was a respected, albeit amateur, anthropologist who had been published in many scholarly journals on the subject of the primitive rituals of West African tribesmen. He had spent many years in the Congo but when his only child, a daughter, had died of a tropical fever it had broken his wife and she had wasted away with a broken heart until she too passed away. In spite of his own grief, or perhaps because of it, the Count had travelled to England where he had been much in demand as a speaker in the Universities and academic associations, relating his fantastic tales of life in the darkest reaches of unconquered Africa where the witchdoctor and the sorcerer ruled the hearts of the simple savages. He told me that he had travelled to England to study certain artifacts from Haiti and Guyana that were held in the British Museum and that our journey would be in the