Voodoo? You Do...

Picking up where we left off a couple of posts ago, I'd like to return, briefly, to this whole business of spirits, the occult and so on. Now, having ridiculed the idea that my increasingly scuzzy local pub might be full of ghosts, (although, if it turned out that it was built over the entrance to Hell, that would at least explain some of the weirdoes, scumbags and twats who seem to make up most of the customers these days), I'm now beginning to doubt the wisdom of having taken the piss out of the local Spiritualist church so thoroughly. Shortly after writing that post, I discovered a dead pigeon on my doorstep. Now, once again, I do tend toward the rational explanation that it died of a broken neck after being blown into the front of my house by some high winds we'd experienced the night before. However, I can't discount the possibility that it has been left there as some kind of occult warning. Don't Voodoo priests do something similar to mark out their next sacrificial victim? OK, I know that usually they only send a single feather dipped in blood, not the whole bloody bird, but maybe this is a very stern warning.

At this point, I should perhaps admit that my entire knowledge of Voodoo comes from two sources: the film version of Live and Let Die and 1966 paperback pulp horror novel entitled Dark Ways to Death. Actually, this latter publication, with its naughty Voodoo priests holding ceremonies in disused London underground tunnels, is a mine of information. Not only did I learn about that business with the feathers, but I also discovered that the Voodoo God Dambalaweda sometimes manifests himself as a feathered serpent and that during the 1960s the entire Afro-Caribbean staff of the London Underground were apparently attending human sacrifices in a tunnel just off the Piccadilly line. It also features a highly Freudian climax involving a bizarre collision of mythologies. All-in-all, it's a very entertaining read, incredibly fast-paced, full of incident in the best pulp fashion and, for a piece of 1960s British pulp fiction dealing with non-white immigrants, not that racist. Check it out , copies are fairly easy to pick up on AbeBooks and eBay.

Getting back to the point, should I expect to hear the beat of those Voodoo drums? Perhaps that is what they do in the Spiritualist church. I'll have to check with my friend (the one who reckons the Spiritualist church's minister looks like a sex offender), if she isn't too busy spying on perverts in the local park. Anyway, there is another explanation for the dead pigeon - it could an offering left by a local cat. They sometimes do that when they're trying to ingratiate themselves. Having said that, most domestic cats wouldn't tackle anything as big as a pigeon. Then again, maybe it was a Voodoo cat. Perhaps it brought the pigeon down by sticking needles into a pigeon effigy (significantly, the body did appear unmarked - cats usually chew them up a bit). Could it be that I'm being stalked by a Voodoo cat cult? Could the pigeon be a warning? They'll start making an effigy of me and sticking pins in it if I don't start leaving sacrificial offerings in the form of tins of tuna fish or saucers of milk outside my back door? Come to think of it, I have had that persistent twinge of pain my shoulder since last week...