The Mammoth Book of Best New Horror 23 (Mammoth Books)

by Jones, Stephen

  Her shawl was soft under the coarse husk of his hand, her body warm and yielding beneath it. Briefly, a dim vision of his own long-ago woman flickered somewhere in the fading grey pools of memory inside Carrefour’s mind.

  He released the healer. She turned and looked up at him with an expression he was unable to interpret as either terror or relief.

  The drums continued their relentless pounding. At the edge of the circle, the possessed boy laughed shrilly and began to dance in place, again joyfully following the beat. His high-kicking steps never faltered as he alternated each long drag on his smouldering cigarettes with a deep gulp from his incendiary bottle. When all the rum was drained from it, he cast it aside and jumped to the centre of the circle, throwing his arms upward with a swift, violent move which brought the entire dance to halt.

  After one final savage flourish, the drums fell silent.

  The sabreur stepped forward, raising his sword. He then lowered it slowly, extending its hilt to the child. The boy seized the huge blade, its edge nearly as long as his own entire body, and turned toward the two white visitors. He pointed the tip of the sword at the planter’s wife.

  The circle was completely silent. The only sound was the howl of the wind through the cane and dangling whistles.

  Back behind the sabreur, on the wicker and cane-husk wall of the hounfour, a small door swung inward, its crude wooden frame creaking weakly. The possessed boy passed the sword back to its bearer, marched forward, and stepped through this portal. The door creaked shut behind him.

  Silently, a small procession of the faithful advanced and began forming a line outside the door, awaiting their own opportunities to speak with the wise houngan within, to ask him to interpret the ways of the spirits for them and to advise them on their prayers. The healer-woman stepped forward to join them, glancing back briefly at Carrefour as if to ask his permission.

  He made no move to stop her.

  The healer stepped aside briefly to pick up the discarded rum bottle. She raised it toward her nostrils as if to sample its scent, but dropped it before it reached her face. Her lips curled and she grimaced in open disgust at the potent smell wafting from its uncorked end.

  In a moment, the door of the hounfour swung open again and the boy emerged. He no longer wore the black hat of Papa Ghede. He walked normally, as if nothing out of the ordinary had happened. When the faithful reached down to rub his shoulders or to pat him on the head as he passed down the waiting queue, he looked up with genuine surprise, baffled by their excessive attentions.

  The healer woman knelt before him and, in a soft voice which Carrefour could not clearly hear, asked him some questions. The child shook his head and smiled. She leaned forward more closely and whiffed the boy’s breath. Her forehead creased with confusion. Clearly she was puzzled, for the boy did not reek in even the slightest way of the cigarettes or of the fiery rum which the whole circle had watched him consume.

  A native woman now stepped to the door of the hounfour and whispered a question for the priest inside it. He answered her in a deep voice which reached Carrefour’s ears as a low rumble, like great wooden wheels rolling over cobblestones. The woman nodded, accepting the holy man’s answer, and stepped away. Another worshipper, who had waited in the queue behind her, beckoned for the healer to take her place. The white visitor accepted gratefully, but when the healer reached the door, it opened. She was ushered briskly inside and the door creaked shut behind her.

  A low murmur grew steadily among the faithful waiting for the houngan. They gestured at where Carrefour stood. For a moment he imagined that they were staring and pointing at him, but he soon realised that their attentions were focused on the planter’s wife. She remained near the edge of the circle, unmoving and unmoved, where she had stood throughout the entire ceremony. The sabreur walked slowly up to her, extending the tip of his sword. He pressed it against the bare flesh of her left arm and drew its edge down purposefully, finishing the stroke with a quick and forceful turn which spun her slightly on her heels, so that Carrefour could now see her face. A longitudinal wound, nearly four inches across, opened in the white woman’s arm. The skin on either side parted like a pair of thin, pale lips opening to speak.

  But no blood flowed forth.

  The murmuring of the crowd rose to a tumult.

  “Ghost,” one voice hoarsely whispered.

  “Living dead,” another gasped.

  “Zombie!” someone shouted.

  The door of the hounfour creaked open again and the healer-woman dashed out. Close behind her followed the island’s Great White Mother, and then the houngan himself. The healer looked in horror at the bloodless wound and, grasping the planter’s wife by the arm, led her quickly from the circle. The houngan and the Great White Mother spoke to the worshippers, calming them and asking that they resume the service.

  Carrefour watched the scene carefully through his dull, milky eyes. He saw the Great White Mother turn and steal a curious, lingering glance after the two departing women. Her face seemed to reflect more than mere interest. She seemed to smile with pride. Even through the blur of his dead eyes, there was no mistaking it.

  It was then that he knew . . .

  He recalled the strange song of the village troubadour, who had sung of sorrow and shame descending on the planter’s family.

  The words of that song are true, thought Carrefour, but the blame for those two brothers’ pain lies with the woman who bore them. It was she . . .

  He sensed strongly that the fault for their sorrow lay only partly with the planter’s rum-soaked brother, whose misplaced passions had threatened to shatter their familial bonds. The greater blame belonged to their own mother, a white woman well-schooled in Northern medicine, but who also dabbled adroitly in island voodoo.

  The planter’s wife who walks as a ghost . . . walks because of her . . .

  Ceremonial drums pounded vibrantly as Carrefour held the planter’s wife in his hand, closing his dry brown fingers around the soft, cool smooth silk of her gown. She was so small that only the tips of her feet and the top of her head protruded from the grasp of his surrounding fingers.

  The sabreur smiled, pleased by Carrefour’s interest. He reached up and tugged the tiny white doll from Carrefour’s hand. He waved and gestured at it, holding the symbol aloft. Slowly Carrefour extended his arm and took the little effigy back from him. Once more the sabreur removed it from his grasp.

  The drummers quickened their pace.

  Carrefour turned and began to walk away. He had been assigned his mission.

  Burdened with great purpose, he moved toward the faraway lights of Fort Holland.

  There was a strong hint of ocean salt in the warm night breeze, and it slowed Carrefour’s pace, causing him to step awkwardly on the unpaved trails, with his footfalls dragging as if walking under seawater. At this delayed pace, he reached the planter’s home when the moon was more than halfway through its nightly arc. Bullfrogs croaked from the high grass of the surrounding marshes.

  The unguarded iron gate of Fort Holland swung open silently at his touch.

  Carrefour shuffled into the central courtyard, making better progress now that this flat stone surface was under his feet. Other than the scrape of his soles on the smooth stone, the only sound in here was the constant trickle of water from the fort’s fountain, over which an immense wooden figurehead loomed.

  Carrefour paused briefly to stare up at the huge carving, his dull and unblinking eyes struggling to take in the sight.

  He had heard tales of it, but until this moment he had never seen it. Rescued from the wreckage of the slave ship Estrella, the figurehead was a giant effigy of Sebastian, the Christian saint from whom this island took its name. It depicted the saint during his martyrdom, with a dozen of his tormentors’ arrows protruding from chest and arms. In real life, Sebastian had somehow survived this horror. So too had much of the Estrella’s terrified, dusky-hued cargo endured the misadventure of their shipwreck. They had lived
to walk the sands of this island, if only to toil in the cane fields under the unrelenting lash of their white masters.

  Carrefour continued onward past the splashing fountain, shuffling up onto the covered porch at the far side of the courtyard. He knew this was where he would find the Holland family’s sleeping rooms. He could smell her now, the planter’s wife, the fair white zombie wrapped in her cool silken robes. His nostrils flared, picking up the scents of the oils and perfumes with which the healer-woman had washed her, and beneath these the reek of those stinging Northern medicines which so vainly attempted to mask the woman’s undeniable condition.

  For she is dead, he thought. As dead as I . . .

  He heard something stir behind billowing curtains. Someone must have heard him.

  Is it . . .?

  A high-pitched scream tore through the night breeze.

  It was the cry of the healer-woman, roused by Carrefour’s approach. She screamed again, and soon there were more sounds, doors and windows opening, frantic footsteps. A large man ran up behind him, the boards of the porch creaking under his mass.

  “Stop!” he barked. His voice was deep and masculine. “Why have you come?”

  Carrefour turned and found himself face to face with the planter himself, the lord of Fort Holland. He was a powerfully built and imposing white man who was wrapped in an ornate golden night-robe.

  “Why have you come?” the planter asked again, his tone angry and forceful.

  The sound stirred Carrefour’s rage.

  Something deep within him boiled to the surface, faint memories of his own life, his life before his resurrection, when he and his brother competed for the hand of the same woman. The white man’s fearsome tone echoed the outrage and betrayal in Carrefour’s brother’s voice on that night when he had surprised them together . . .

  And yet there was another, even deeper memory awakening beneath that one, faint and ghostly grey impressions of lying on the bare wooden hull of a creaking ship as it pitched upon heaving waves, men and women wallowing for days and nights in their own filth, hearing the chanting and screaming of the entire tightly packed living brown cargo, and the vicious crack of a cat o’ nine tails . . .

  His lips curled back in a savage snarl.

  He reached out, his long brown arms grasping eagerly for planter’s neck. He could crack the man’s windpipe as easily as he would crush a stalk of cane. He stepped forward, making a crude lunge for his victim.

  “Carrefour!”

  The unexpected sound of his own name caused him to stop instantly, his fingers mere inches from the planter’s bare white neck.

  “Carrefour!” came the call again.

  It was the voice of the Great White Mother. She turned away from him and whispered something to one of the household servants. Carrefour could not make out all the words, but he heard her say, “Salt . . . quickly . . . brick of salt . . . only . . . return them to their graves.”

  He saw her now, roused from her sleep, wrapped in a long woollen shawl and with her grey hair hanging loosely. She stood in a doorway which opened onto the porch. The expression on her face was difficult to discern in the deep shadows here, but her commanding tone was unmistakable as she addressed him.

  “You must go,” she insisted.

  The Great White Mother was not to be denied. Her Northern medicine was strong. He had known hundreds of fellow islanders who had finally overcome maladies such as cholera, dysentery, and malaria only by means of her cures. But her voodoo was just as powerful. She had become a mambo, the female counterpart of their own houngan priest, equally skilled in the ways of island magic. It was she who had solved the dilemma of her two quarrelling sons, the rum-soaked brother and the planter, by destroying the object of their tension. It was she who made the planter’s wife walk as a zombie.

  A female servant scurried to the Great White Mother’s side, bearing a brick of salt from the kitchen. The Mother held up her hand, gesturing for her servant to step back. “No need for that now, Marianne,” she whispered. “He will go peacefully.”

  Carrefour turned and shuffled off through the courtyard, past the trickling fountain, past the watchful gaze of the giant martyred saint, past the great iron gates and, finally, onto the sandy trail beyond. Warm ocean breezes embraced him as he stepped outside the walls of Fort Holland.

  He headed toward the hounfour.

  The sound of the ceremonial drums began again softly, coming from that direction.

  The tamboulas hammered with renewed purpose, their rhythm quickening. Flickering torchlight danced over the sabreur, casting bizarre distortions of his shadow on the cane-husk walls. He prepared the small effigy of the planter’s wife by binding its waist with one end of a long, slender thread. As the faithful chanted, he raised the white doll and asked the spirits of the field to bless the long steel ouanga needle he had selected.

  Carrefour watched from the edge of the circle as the doll was placed at one side and the sabreur crouched in position at the other. Once again the beating of the drums hastened. In time with this faster rhythm, the sabreur began motioning with his arms, beckoning the effigy of the planter’s wife to move toward him.

  As one of the worshippers gently pulled the almost invisible thread, it did.

  Carrefour saw her near the beach, on the sandy trail beneath which the waves broke most loudly against the horns of jagged black rock, where they sprayed the air the widest and highest with fine mists of salty water. Even in the darkness, even through the blur of his dead eyes, he knew it was her.

  The wife of the planter . . .

  The woman walked the irregular trail at an unvarying pace, with her golden hair hanging limp on her shoulders and the white fabric of her gown dragging along the ground behind her.

  She heeds the call of the sabreur, but how will his needle take her?

  As if in answer, a second figure appeared on the trail, moving at an awkward pace but clearly driven by an intense passion. It was the planter’s brother.

  The rum-soaked man . . .

  He blundered along the sand much faster than the woman, quickly overtaking her.

  Carrefour noticed that there was something in the man’s hand, a long and slender cylindrical object which resembled a wand or a small whip. It was only as the two white figures connected at the crest of the trail, in the brief moment before they vanished behind a shield of jagged black rocks, that Carrefour recognised the instrument which the man clutched so purposefully.

  An arrow from Sebastian’s chest . . .

  So this was the dark magic the sabreur had wrought. His holy ouanga needle, when pressed into the doll’s chest, would bring about an event that ended the dead woman’s empty, ceaseless walking. Carrefour had hoped for a bolt of lightning or a column of fire, even one which would set alight the dry, rain-starved cane fields and bring ruin to the region, but not an arrow pulled from the wooden figurehead over Fort Holland’s fountain.

  Saint Sebastian survived his martyrdom. So too will the planter’s wife rise again.

  Unless . . .

  He shuffled as quickly as he could toward those jagged black rocks, his immense brown feet scraping the sand like shovels. As the salty air stung his nostrils, he realised at last why he had always felt at peace near the shore, why he had always been able to hear the echoes of his ancestors who had perished in the ocean.

  The salt . . .

  He understood now, at last making sense of those words he had overheard the Great White Mother say to her servant, wise counsel about using a brick of salt as voodoo magic, to subdue a zombie.

  The salt will end the suffering . . .

  He was too late.

  As he reached the crest of the trail, he looked down on a chamber of rock and saw the rum-soaked man standing over the woman, who lay motionless in a soft bed of sand. Saint Sebastian’s arrow protruded from her heart.

  Weeping softly, the man withdrew the arrow and cast it aside.

  Does he truly think she is finished? Can the m
an believe that this is truly her end?

  Carrefour descended the trail and advanced toward them.

  Even above the pounding of the surf, the white man somehow heard his approach and turned to face him. Seized by panic, the man began shouting and gesturing for Carrefour to get away, but Carrefour reached out with both of his hands, extending them toward him.

  The man turned back and gathered up the woman in his arms. She hung limply in his grasp, but Carrefour could already see her leg beginning to kick as her inevitable re-animation began. It would not be long.

  Unless . . .

  “Get away from us!” the man shouted. “Away, I say!” With the woman sprawled across his arms, he began to back up into the surf. The waves broke around his ankles, then around his knees, and then around his waist. The woman’s head, dangling into the seawater, was soon submerged.

  Carrefour continued his advance. It was this event for which he hoped.

  The salt . . . she will taste the salt . . .

  It was the village fisherman who found them.

  Long before dawn, when the tide was at its highest, the dark-skinned men walked barefoot in the warm coastal waters, guided in their quest by the fluttering flames of small torches. They carried spears and tridents, quickly thrusting these sharp-edged tools at the darting fins of their elusive aquatic quarry. Less than an hour had passed and already their catch had exceeded that of the past three days, until one of the younger men spied something floundering in the water, something which was not a fish.

  As the sombre column moved up the trail from the beach, two fishermen bore torches in advance of the others. A group of four of the men carried the lifeless body of the planter’s rum-soaked brother. Carrefour alone transported the corpse of the planter’s wife, draped over his extended arms, for none of the villagers had dared to touch her.

  She no longer moved.

  At last, thought Carrefour, she has found peace.