The Ashanti Dagger

Lit by red flickering torchlight, the worshippers assembled in the clearing and then upon their goatskin drums, drummers began playing wild syncopated rhythms while the worshippers in some kind of ecstatic trance started a frenzied kind of dancing.

“I see her”, said the priest, standing behind an altar, his eyes closed,“The sacrifice. She thinks she is safe. She doesn’t know the spirits are watching her every move”.

“That’s it”, thought Dr Redmond, a rather persistent, young female forensic pathologist working late for the London metropolitan police, looking at the photographic image on the internet web page  and then back down at the strange ivory and silver handled long bladed knife on the table in front of her, “A perfect match in fact”.

 

She scrolled down and read what was written underneath the image.

 

“The Ashanti dagger; legendary sacrificial weapon said to have been used by Haitian and west African voodoo practitioners. According to folk legend, any person killed with the dagger would later return to life as a zombie and use the dagger to murder others”.

 

It made perfect sense, she thought.

 

The police had dragged the naked body with the dagger between its shoulder blades out of the Thames. Around its neck had been a small purse containing charred remains of plants and insects like the ingredients of a charm. No doubt it had been some kind of ritualistic murder performed by some imigrant voodoo priest and intended to create a zombie.

 

She looked over at the dead, badly decaying body of the young, black African looking male on the examination table, its skin purplish blue, its eyes staring motionless at the ceiling.

 

“Well. It certainly hasn’t worked so far”, she joked with a smirk.

 

She heard a noise from behind her, like a door opening and slamming and then the clicking and rotating of a lock.

 

“The sacrifice is trapped. The spirits have been clever, my children. There is nowhere she can go now”, said the priest, smiling blissfully, “Soon her blood will flow”.

 

“Hello?”, she said, getting to her feet and turning round.

 

There was nobody there but she had definitely heard the door open and close, she thought.

 

She went over to the door and tried its handle but the door wouldn’t open.

 

Bloody hell, it’s locked, she thought, some idiots locked it from the outside, locked me in.

 

She rifled through the pockets of her white lab coat for the key to unlock the door and she could feel lots of other things, like the card key for getting into the main building but the key for the room

wasn’t there.

 

And then, looking through a small vertical window in the door, she saw the key with her green key ring upon it lying on the floor just outside the door.

 

“It’s my key”, she said,“But how did it get out there?”

 

“The spirits are rising, awakening the child of the dead”, said the priest.

 

She heard another noise from behind her; a louder noise this time, a noise like the creaking of an examination table and like heavy limbs moving, as if a dead person that had come back to life were getting up off of it then putting his feet upon the floor.

 

“No, it can’t be”, she said to herself, “It must be something else that fell. Just turn around and you’ll see. It can’t be”.

 

But she dreaded turning round for then she might see with her eyes what she was imagining in her terrified mind, that a half decaying corpse was standing behind her looking at her with angry piercing eyes; that he was walking closer.

 

Then she heard lumbering footsteps scrape against linoleum and all her scepticism drained away.

 

“Oh god”, she said as she then heard a clattering and scraping sound like a dead hand seizing and picking up a large heavy knife from a table.

 

“ It has found the killing knife, the spirits have her now”, said the priest raising his dagger over the white wax effigy of a woman with closed eyes.

 

And then, confirming all that she feared, reflected in the window in front of her she saw the dagger, held up by a rotting and discoloured hand and then the face of the zombie moving closer towards her.

 

The drumming stopped.

 

 

Dr Redmond opened her eyes and looked round about her, at the lifeless corpse lying on the examination table and the door that was unlocked and partially ajar.  Had it all been just a terrible nightmare, she wondered, perhaps brought on by working so late.

 

“Fall asleep did you”, said DCI Jim Blake, Helen Redmonds boyfriend coming into the examination room and seeing her open her eyes, “I don’t blame you. You’ve been working all night. Any luck identifying our mystery knife?”.

 

“Yes”, said Dr Redmond, sitting behind her laptop, smiling; glad to see him, “It’s a voodoo dagger used for making ritual sacrifice”.

 

“Oh well, well done”, he said, “Now I think the best thing for you is to get some sleep. You look dead tired”.

 

“Oh no, I’m not ; I don’t feel tired at all, quite the opposite infact”, she said, getting up and walking over to him, putting her arms around him, “But I’m really glad that you’re here, Jim”.

 

Smiling, Jim put his arms around her but then his smile faded as he felt something, it felt like the handle of a knife, sticking out of her back.