Collapsing on the bed,
he lies there
gazing at the ceiling.
With the slow passing of time,
he at last feels able to attempt
another challenge.
"Margal, I will not do it!
Do you hear me, Margal?
I will not do it!"
Silence.
But only for a moment.
Then, becoming aware of a faint sound
in the room,
he turns his head
to gaze at the voodoo drum
beside the bureau.
It is a drum
he acquired weeks ago
at a service in Léogane
to which he was taken by the man
who later took him to Margal.
He bought it,
he paid for it,
but it is a genuine petro drum
used in genuine voodoo ceremonies.
Now it is filling the room with
a whispered throbbing
while on the bureau the two painted jars
acquired at the same ceremony
are faintly chanting
in a way
that fills him with terror.
It is happening.
He cannot be mistaken.
He leaps to his feet,
staring first at the drum,
then at the govis,
while the voice of Margal
takes possession of his mind.
"You may rest an hour, Dr. Bell.
Then you will do as you were instructed."
"Yes …"
"As Bastien told you but an hour ago,
I am not a patient man."
13
Standing alone in a clearing, the house was a small one of wattle and clay, roofed with banana-leaf thatch. Only moments before, Kay had wondered if Joseph really had a stopping place in mind or was merely hoping to chance upon one. Glad to have reached any kind of destination after so many hours of riding, she gratefully swung an aching leg over the saddle and dropped to the ground.
Stumbled.
Sat down hard on her bottom.
Then just sat there with her arms looped about her knees, laughing partly from sheer relief, partly from embarrassment at having made herself look foolish in the eyes of the man and woman who had just emerged from the house.
Lowering Tina to the ground, Joseph slid smoothly from his animal and ran to help her.
She wagged her head at him. "Let me enjoy this minute. It's the first soft thing I've sat on since we left." She flapped a hand in salute at the two old people hurrying anxiously toward her. "I'm all right," she assured them. "Just weary."
It was no lie. After the incident at the river, Joseph had set a wicked pace, either to get away from there as fast as possible or to get here to this caille before dark. Climbing steeply from the gorge, the trail had become a God-awful roller-coaster that made every mile a misery. Steady climbing was not so bad; you got used to leaning forward and more or less wrapping your arms around your mule's neck. Descending was all right, too, after you accustomed yourself to leaning back, clinging for dear life to the pommel, and hoping to God that the leather stirrups would not snap under the strain. But a constant shift from one to the other was pure hell, scaring the wits out of you while subjecting your poor tired body to torture. More than once she had envied little Tina, so confidently perched there in the crescent of Joseph's sturdy arms without a care in the world.
Without a care? Well … that weird business at the river had frightened the child, no question about it. People who said a black face couldn't pale were wrong. Tina's had certainly been ashen when Joseph and she reached the place where he had told the child to wait for him. Standing there by the mules, she had been staring back at the river as if in a trance, her soft, full lips pressed tight but trembling.
"Tina, are you all right?" Hunkering down to her, Kay had caught hold of her hands.
"I don't want to stay here, Miss Kay!"
"Well, we're not going to. But are you—"
"Please! I'm afraid of this place!"
The fear had faded as they had put the gorge behind them. Had there been a chance for them to stop and consider, they might have found an explanation for what had happened, but with nightfall threatening, they had pushed straight on.
Tina, thank heaven, seemed to have forgotten the whole thing now in her pleasure at reaching this place where they might eat and sleep. Joseph, too, though for a time he had certainly been shaken. As she sat on the ground now, looking up at the man and woman from the house, he said to her, "M'selle, I know these people. They will put us up for the night."
She struggled to her feet, though a number of muscles protested, and Joseph introduced the couple as Edita and Antoine, no last names. She shook their hands. They were in their late sixties, she guessed. Both were barefoot, both nearly toothless, both wore slight facial disfigurements indicating long-ago bouts with yaws. That curse was pretty well wiped out in Haiti now, thank God.
"Please go into the house," Antoine said. "I will attend to your animals."
There were two small rooms. The front one contained four homemade chairs and a table; the other, a homemade double bed. No connecting door. No kitchen. Cooking was done under a thatch-roofed shelter outside.
"You and the child will use the bed," Edita said in a manner that forbade any protest. "My man and I will sleep here in the front room, as will Joseph. Joseph is my sister's daughter's son."
"Thank you." It would not be the first time she had slept in a peasant caille. Nurses at the Schweitzer often did things their stateside sisters might think extraordinary. The bed could harbor bedbugs, of course. More, likely, the swept-earth floor was a breeding ground for the little beasties called chigres, which were worse. Those got under your toenails and laid eggs there.
"Tina should rest before supper," she said. "I'll help you with the cooking, Edita."
The woman seemed pleased.
The child fell asleep as soon as she climbed onto the bed, and Kay joined the woman in the kitchen. Supper was to be a chicken stew: First, kill the chicken. Edita attended to that with a machete, then cleaned the severed head and put it into the pot along with the rest of the bird. Kay prepared malangas, leeks, and carrots. While working, they talked.
"Where are you going, M'selle, if I may ask?"
"Bois Sauvage. Tina lives there."
"Oh?"
Kay explained, stressing the child's loss of memory.
"Strange things happen around Bois Sauvage," Edita said, implying that a loss of memory was not the strangest. "Do you know the place?"
"No. I don't know this part of Haiti at all."
"As I say, strange things occur there. So, I am not surprised at this story you tell me concerning the child."
"What do you mean by 'strange things'?"
"Well… unnatural things."
"Voodoo?" Any time a country person talked this way, the underlying theme was likely to be voodoo. Or associated mysteries.
"I think not voodoo, M'selle. Rather, sorcery or witchcraft."
Associated mysteries. Correct. Kay glanced at the fire where the stew was cooking in an iron pot that could well have been used in certain voodoo ceremonies. The kanzo service, for instance, at which those being elevated to kanzo were required to dip their hands into boiling oil. Remember the 'time we finally got to see that one, Sam, and couldn't believe it when the girl showed us her hand afterward and it wasn't even blistered?
Squatting by the fire and stirring the pot's aromatic contents, Edita looked up and said, "Do you know about a man named Margal in that district, M'selle?" More than yaws was responsible for the depth of her frown.
"Margal? No. Who is he?"
"A bocor. You know what a bocor is?"
"A witch doctor?" Admit you know something and you may learn more.
Edita nodded. "Margal is a big one, it is said. Perhaps the biggest of them all. Much to be fea
red."
"He lives in Bois Sauvage?" Kay was not happy at the thought of taking Tina to a village dominated by one of those.
"In Legrun, a few miles from there. And practically owns it, though he came there less than two years ago.
But his powers are not confined to there." The frown persisted. "Perhaps you will not encounter him. I hope not."
"I hope not, too."
Night fell while the stew was cooking. The woman used a bottle lamp in the outdoor kitchen but called on her man to bring a lantern when the food was ready to be carried to the house. Kay waked Tina and the four of them sat at the table in the front room where, with the door shut, there was a strong smell of kerosene from the lantern now hanging from a soot-blackened wall peg.
Edita bowed her head and murmured a grace, then served the food. After a few moments of eating in silence, she looked across the table at her man and said, "These people are going near to where the legless one is, Antoine." The frown of concern was back on her pocked face.
"So Joseph has been telling me."
The nurse in Kay was curious. "Legless, you say?"
They nodded.
"Born that way, you mean?" All kinds of abnormal children were brought to the hospital, usually by mothers who pitifully begged the doctors to "make them right."
Antoine's head wagged. "No, he was not born that way."
"Then how—"
"Different tales are told. One is that he lost his legs when a camion he was riding in overturned and crushed him. Such accidents do happen, of course. Another is that he became involved in politics and was beaten up, left for dead, by assassins from the capital, and saved himself with his bocor's powers but was not able to save his legs. Still another tale is that his mule fell from the cliff at Saut Diable."
"Hardly likely," Edita interjected, "because most people agree he was legless when he came here. Anyway, you will be seeing Saut Diable tomorrow and can judge for yourselves whether one could survive a fall there. At any rate, he is legless but very much alive."
"And to be feared," Antoine said.
"You are convinced of that? He really has extraordinary powers?" Kay asked.
They stared her to silence without answering her, as peasants were likely to do in such a situation.
Edita pulled an old, rope-bound suitcase from under the bed in the back room and took blankets out of it while Antoine and Joseph moved the table outdoors to make room for sleeping. It was time to turn in, Kay realized. In these remote mountain districts no one stayed up much after nightfall. For one thing, kerosene for illumination had to be transported long distances and was expensive.
She was a little disappointed. She had planned on discussing that puzzling occurrence at the river with Joseph, thinking they might come up with an explanation if they pooled their thoughts. But maybe this was safer. Though apparently over it now, Joseph had been frightened, she was certain. Stirring up his latent superstitions with more talk might not be wise.
"Well, good night, Edita, Antoine."
"Good night, M'selle," they responded, and the woman hesitantly added, "M'selle?"
"Yes?"
"What you are doing for the child is a loving thing. May Le Bon Dieu reward you."
"Thank you." She reached for Tina's hand. "Come on, baby. Let's get some sleep before we have to climb onto those mules again."
Falling asleep on that bed was not going to be easy, she soon discovered. At least, not with all her aches. The mattress was stuffed with some kind of coarse grass that had packed itself into humps and hollows. Each time she sought a more comfortable position, the stuff crackled as though it were on fire. Tina slept, and that was something, but in the end Kay could only abandon the struggle and lie there. At least, she was resting, not struggling to stay on the back of a mule.
The caille was far from quiet, too. One of the three sleepers in the front room—the old man, she guessed—snored from time to time, achieving some remarkable whistling effects through his not-quite-normal nose. In the thatch overhead, geckos croaked and clicked and made rustling sounds as they moved about. Outside the house, other lizards sounded like people with sore throats trying to cough, and tree frogs whistled like toy trains. But the outside noises were muffled; the room had no windows. At this altitude, the problem was to keep warm, not cool. Especially at night.
A roach-like fire beetle, the kind the peasants called a coucouyé, came winging in from the front room, pulsing with green light as it flew. It made a whirring sound until it crashed into a wall, then dropped to the floor —thunk!—and lay there, still pulsing. A few of those in a proper container, she thought idly, might serve these people better than their crude bottle lamps of kerosene with a rag for a wick. The light from just this one was eerily bright.
Tina was asleep now, and despite the lumpiness of the bed, Kay felt herself dozing off, too. Good.
Awake again, she floated back up to full consciousness and looked at the luminous dial of the watch on her wrist. Eleven-thirty. So she really had slept a while. The fire beetle, if it was the same one, had recovered from its fall to the floor and climbed part way up the wall and was pulsing there. Lizards still clicked in the thatch.
She dozed off again, awoke at two-twenty, and sleepily noticed that the beetle had moved up close to the roof. Trying to sleep in the same room with it was like trying to sleep with an advertising sign that kept winking on and off. Maybe one of the lizards up there would take care of it. They were fond of bugs. Again she felt herself dropping off to sleep.
Tina, beside her, began to tremble.
Dreaming?
If so, it was quite a dream. The youngster's movements became almost violent. She had been sleeping with her hands pressed palm to palm under one cheek, and now she turned convulsively on her back and began moaning.
Damn. I don't want to wake her but I'll have to if she doesn't stop. It must be a nightmare. Propping herself on one elbow, Kay peered at the child's face, glad now for the pulsing light of the beetle above them.
Something dropped with a dull plop from the thatch onto the foot of the bed. A gecko, of course, but she glanced down to make sure. The geckos were small and harmless. Kind of cute, in fact. The bigger lizards were supposed to be equally harmless but were not cute. Not in her book, at least.
The nightmare was causing Tina to thrash about in a frenzy that made the whole bed shake. Kay reached for her to wake her. There was a second small plop at the foot of the bed, and Kay turned her head again.
The fire beetle had fallen from the thatch. Still glowing, it struggled on its back with its legs frantically beating the air, six inches from the gecko.
The lizard's head swiveled in the bug's direction and its beady eyes contemplated the struggle. Its front feet, looking like tiny hands, gripped the blanket. Its slender brown body moved up and down as though it were doing pushups.
Mouth agape, it suddenly lunged.
Crunch!
With the light gone, the room was suddenly dark as a pit.
The child at Kay's side sat bolt upright and began screaming in a voice to wake the mountains.
The rest of what happened was simply not believable. It was so incredible that Kay felt a massive urge to scream along with the child.
At the foot of the bed, the beetle-devouring gecko had become larger. Was now, in fact, a great black shape half as big as the bed itself. Its feet spread out to grip the blanket, and its huge reptilian head turned toward Kay and the screaming child. Its enormous dragon-body began to do pushups again.
It was about to leap, to open its awful jaws and crunch again!
"Oh, my God!"
Tina's eyes were open at last. She was seeing the thing too. Her screaming seemed likely to tear the house apart.
Scarcely aware of what she was doing, Kay grabbed the child and rolled with her off the bed, onto the swept-earth floor near the doorless doorway. Not a second too soon. As she scrabbled for the doorway, pulling the shrieking youngster along with her, she he
ard the thing spring and land on the old bed, which groaned in protest. Heard the jaws snap together on something. A pillow, she thought. Both pillows? Then, still on hands and knees, still hauling the child with her, she reached the front room.
The screaming had aroused the sleepers there. They were all in motion. Slow motion, it seemed. Unless that was just another part of the nightmare.
Antoine was lighting the lantern. His woman caught hold of Tina and hugged her, telling her to stop screaming, she would be all right, just stop screaming and tell what had happened.
Joseph, helping Kay to her feet, peered strangely at her, then turned to look into the back room as Antoine stepped to the doorway and held the lantern high to put some light in there.
Tina stopped screaming.
Kay stepped to the doorway to look into the room she had just frantically crawled out of.
Nothing.
But I saw it. It was there. It was huge and it leaped at us!
She walked very slowly past the two men and into the room, terrified of what might happen when she approached the bed where the monstrous thing had materialized. But she had to know. Antoine followed with the lantern. Joseph trailed him.
Nothing.
After a while Antoine said, "M'selle, what frightened you?"
"I don't know."
There was nothing on the bed. Not even the small lizard that had eaten the fire beetle. And if the huge one's jaws had really closed on the pillows, they had done so without leaving a mark.
You imagined it, Gilbert. Just as you must have imagined the flash flood at the river.
But Tina had become frightened first. Tina, not she, had done the screaming.
She looked at her watch. In an hour or so it would be daylight. Backing away from the bed, she turned and walked into the front room where Edita was seated on a chair now with Tina on her lap. The child was whimpering softly.
"Are you all right, M'selle?"
"I guess so. But I know I can't sleep anymore. Just let me sit here and wait for morning."
The woman nodded.
"I can't explain what happened. Can't even try."
"M'selle, sometimes we can't."
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