But then a wheezy voice, the expression of a dulled, ancient sensibility, said, “I found dat gold cross in a cave up on Hermit’s Ridge ...”
Prince panicked, sprang for the door, forgetting there was none, scrabbled at the stony surface, fell, and crawled along, probing for an exit. Byrum’s voice harrowed him.
“And I come to him and say, ‘Mr. Prince, I got dis terrible pain in de chest. Can’t you give me money? I know dat your money come from meltin down de gold cross.’ And he say, ‘Byrum, I don’t care diddley about your chest!’ And den he show me de door!”
Prince collapsed in a corner, eyes fixed on the starry record player from which the old man’s voice came. No one argued against By rum. When he had finished there was a silence.
“He’s been sleeping with my wife,” said a twangy American voice.
“Jerry!” Prince yelled. “Where are you?”
A constellate bottle of rum was the source of the voice. “Right here, you son . . .”
“Dere’s to be no talkin with de mon before judgment!”
“Dass right! De spirits make dat clear!”
“These damn things aren’t spirits ...”
“If dey ain’t den why Byrum Waters in de Dream tonight?”
“De mon can’t hear de voices of de spirits cause he not of de island hisself!”
“Byrum’s not here! I’ve told you people so many times I’m sick of it! These things induce telepathy in humans. That means you can hear each other’s minds, that your thoughts resonate and amplify each other’s, maybe even tap into some kind of collective unconscious. That’s how ...”
“I believe somebody done pelt a rock at de mon’s head! He crazy!”
The matter of the purple fires was tabled, and the voices discussed Prince’s affair with Rita Steedly (“Dere’s no proof de mon been messin with your wife!”), reaching a majority opinion of guilty on what seemed to Prince shaky evidence indeed. The chill in the room had begun to affect him, and though he noticed that unfamiliar voices had joined the dialog—British voices whose speech was laden with archaisms, guttural Carib voices—he did not wonder at them. He was far more concerned by the trembling of his muscles and the slow, flabby rhythm of his heart; he hugged his knees and buried his head in them for warmth. And so he hardly registered the verdict announced in Byrum Waters’s cracked whisper (“De island never cast you out, Mr. Prince”) nor did he even hear the resultant argument (“Dat all you goin to tell him?” “De mon have a right to hear his fate!”) except as a stupid hypnotic round which dazed him further and increased the chill, then turned into ghostly laughter. And he did not notice for quite a while that the chill had lessened, that the light filtering through his lids was yellow, and that the laughter was not voiced by spectral fires but by ragged drunks packed closely around him, sweating, howling, and slopping their drinks on his feet. Their gap-toothed mouths opened wider and wider in his dimming sight, as if he were falling into the jaws of ancient animals who had waited in their jungle centuries for such as he. Fat moths danced around them in the yellow air.
Prince pushed feebly at the floor, trying to stand. They laughed louder, and he felt his own lips twitch in a smile, an involuntary reaction to all the good humor in the room.
“Oh, damn!” Maud slammed the flat of her hand down on the counter, starting up the bar flies and hiccuping Freddie Fender’s wail. Her smile was fierce and malefic. “How you like dat, Mr. Prince? You one of us now!”
He must’ve passed out. They must’ve dumped him in the street like a sack of manure! His head swam as he pulled himself up by the window ledge; his hip pocket clinked on the stucco wall . . . rum bottle. He fumbled it out, swallowed, gagged, but felt it strengthen him. The town was dead, lightless, and winded. He reeled against the doorway of the Dream and saw the moldering shanties swing down beneath running banks of moonlit cloud. Peaked and eerie, witches’ hats, the sharp jut of folded black wings. He couldn’t think.
Dizzy, he staggered between the shanties and fell on all fours in the shallows, then soaked his head in the wavelets lapping the shingle. There were slippery things under his hands. No telling what . . . hog guts, kelp. He sat on a piling and let the wind shiver him and straighten him out. Home. Better than fighting off the rabid dog at the Hotel Captain Henry, better than passing out again right here. Two and a half miles across island, no more than an hour even in his condition. But watch out for the purple fires! He laughed. The silence gulped it up. If this were just the drug doing tricks . . . God! You could make a fortune selling it in the States.
“You scrapes off de color and dass what you smokes,” he sang, calypso style. “De black coral takes, boom-boom, just one toke.”
He giggled. But what the hellwere those purple fires?
Duppies? Aliens? How bout the purple souls of the niggers? The niggers’ stinging purple souls!
He took another drink. “Better ration it, pilgrim,” he said to the dark road in his best John Wayne. “Or you’ll never reach the fort alive!”
And like John Wayne, he’d be back, he’d chew out the bullet with his teeth and brand himself clean with a red-hot knife and blow holes in the bad guys.
Oh, yeah!
But suppose they were spirits? Aliens? Not hallucinations?
So what!
“I one of dem, now!” he shouted.
He breezed the first two miles. The road wound through the brush-covered hills at an easy grade. Stars shone in the west, but the moon had gone behind the clouds and the darkness was as thick as mud. He wished he’d brought his flashlight . . . That had been the first thing which had attracted him to the island: how the people carried flashlights to show their paths in the hills, along the beaches, in the towns after the generators had been shut down. And when an ignorant, flashlightless stranger came by, they’d shine a path from your feet to theirs and ask, “How de night?”
“Beautiful,” he’d replied; or, “Fine, just fine.” And it had been. He’d loved everything about the island—the stories, the musical cadences of island speech, the sea grape trees with their funny, round, leathery leaves, and the glowing, many-colored sea. He’d seen that the island operated along an ingenious and flexible principle, one capable of accommodating any contrary and eventually absorbing it through a process of calm acceptance. He’d envied the islanders their peaceful, unhurried lives. But that had been before Viet Nam. During the war something inside him had gone irreversibly stone-cold sober, screwed up his natural high, and when he returned their idyllic lives had seemed despicable, listless, a bacterial culture shifting on its slide.
Every now and then he saw the peak of a thatched roof in silhouette against the stars, strands of barbed wire hemming in a few acres of scrub and bananas. He stayed dead center in the road, away from the deepest shadow, sang old Stones and Dylan, and fueled himself with hits of rum. It had been a good decision to head back, because a norther was definitely brewing. The wind rushed cold in his face, spitting rain. Storms blew up quickly at this time of year, but he could make it home and secure his house before the worst of the rains.
Something crashed in the brush. Prince jumped away from the sound, looking wildly about for the danger. The tufted hillock on his right suddenly sprouted horns against the starlight and charged at him, bellowing, passing so raw and close that he could hear the breath articulated in the huge red throat. Christ! It had sounded more like a demon’s bellow than a cow’s, which it was. Prince lost his balance and sprawled in the dirt, shaking. The damned thing lowed again, crunching off through a thicket. He started to get up. But the rum, the adrenaline, all the poisons of his day-long exertions roiled around in him, and his stomach emptied, spewing out liquor and lobster salad and coconut bread. Afterward he felt better—weaker, yet not on the verge of as great a weakness as before. He tore off his fouled shirt and slung it into a bush.
The bush was a blaze of purple fires.
They hung on twig ends and leaf tips and marked the twisting course of branches, outlinin
g them as they had done at Maud’s. But at the center of this tracery the fires clustered together in a globe—a wicked, violet-white sun extruding spidery filaments and generating forked, leafy electricities.
Prince backed away. The fires flickered in the bush, unmoving. Maybe the drug had finished its run, maybe now that he’d burned most of it out the fires could no longer affect him as they had previously. But then a cold, cold prickle shifted along his spine and he knew—oh, God!—he knew for a certainty there were fires on his back, playing hide-and-seek where he could never find them. He beat at his shoulderblades, like a man putting out flames, and the cold stuck to his fingertips. He held them up before his eyes. They flickered, pulsing from indigo to violet-white. He shook them so hard that his joints cracked, but the fires spread over his hands, encasing his forearms in a lurid glare.
In blind panic Prince staggered off the road, fell, scrambled up, and ran, holding his glowing arms stiff out in front of him. He tumbled down an embankment and came to his feet, running. He saw that the fires had spread above his elbows and felt the chill margin inching upward. His arms lit the brush around him, as if they were the wavering beams of tinted flashlights. Vines whipped out of the dark, the lengths of a black serpent coiled everywhere, lashed into a frenzy by the purple light. Dead fronds clawed his face with sharp papery fingers. He was so afraid, so empty of everything but fear, that when a palm trunk loomed ahead he ran straight into it, embracing it with his shining arms.
* * * *
There were hard fragments in his mouth, blood, more blood flowing into his eyes. He spat and probed his mouth, wincing as he touched the torn gums. Three teeth missing, maybe four. He hugged the palm trunk and hauled himself up. This was the grove near his house! He could see the lights of St. Mark’s Key between the trunks, white seas driving in over the reef. Leaning on the palms as he went, he made his way to the water’s edge. The wind-driven rain slashed at his split forehead. Christ! It was swollen big as an onion! The wet sand sucked off one of his tennis shoes, but he left it.
He washed his mouth and his forehead in the stinging salt water, then slogged toward the house, fumbling for his key. Damn! It had been in his shirt. But it was all right. He’d built the house Hawaiian style, with wooden slats on every side to admit the breeze; it would be easy to break in. He could barely see the roof peak against the toiling darkness of the palms and the hills behind, and he banged his shins on the porch. Distant lightning Hashed, and he found the stair and spotted the conch shell lying on the top step. He wrapped his hand inside it, punched a head-sized hole in the door slats, and leaned on the door, exhausted by the effort. He was just about to reach in for the latch when the darkness within—visible against the lesser darkness of night as a coil of dead, unshining emptiness— squeezed from the hole like black toothpaste and tried to encircle him.
Prince tottered backward off the porch and landed on his side; he dragged himself away a few feet, stopped, and looked up at the house. The blackness was growing out into the night, encysting him in a thicket of coral branches so dense that he could see between them only glints of the lightning bolts striking down beyond the reef. “Please,” he said, lifting his hand in supplication. And something broke in him, some grimly held thing whose residue was tears. The wind’s howl and the booming reef came as a single ominous vowel, roaring, rising in pitch.
The house seemed to inhale the blackness, to suck it slithering back inside, and for a moment Prince thought it was over. But then violet beams lanced from the open slats, as if the fuming heart of a reactor had been uncovered within. The beach bloomed in livid daylight—a no-man’s-land littered with dead fish, half-buried conchs, rusted cans, and driftwood logs like the broken, corroded limbs of iron statues. Inky palms thrashed and shivered. Rotting coconuts cast shadows on the sand. And then the light swarmed up from the house, scattering into a myriad fiery splinters and settling on palm tops, on the prows of dinghies, on the reef, on tin roofs set among the palms, and on sea grape and cashew trees, where they burned. The ghosts of candles illuminating a sacred shore, haunting the dark interior of a church whose anthem was wind, whose litany was thunder, and upon whose walls feathered shadows leapt and lightnings crawled.
Prince got to his knees, watching, waiting, not really afraid any longer, but gone into fear. Like a sparrow in a serpent’s gaze, he saw everything of his devourer, knew with great clarity that these were the island people, all of them who had ever lived, and that they were possessed of some otherworldly vitality—though whether spirit or alien or both, he could not determine—and that they had taken their accustomed places, their ritual stands. Byrum Waters hovering in the cashew tree he had planted as a boy; John Anderson McCrae flitting above the reef where he and his father had swung lanterns to lure ships in onto the rocks; Maud Price ghosting over the grave of her infant child hidden in the weeds behind a shanty. But then he doubted his knowledge and wondered if they were not telling him this, advising him of the island’s consensus, for he heard the mutter of a vast conversation becoming distinct, outvoicing the wind.
He stood, searching for an avenue of escape, not in the least hopeful of finding one, but choosing to exercise a final option. Everywhere he turned the world pitched and tossed as if troubled by his sight, and only the flickering purple fires held constant. “Oh, my God!” he screamed, almost singing it in an ecstasy of fear, realizing that the precise moment for which they’d gathered had arrived.
As one, from every corner of the shore, they darted into his eyes.
Before the cold overcame him, Prince heard island voices in his head. They ranted (“Lessee how you rank with de spirit, now! Boog man!”). They instructed (“Best you not struggle against de spirit. Be more merciful dat way”). They insulted, rambled, and construed illogics. For a few seconds he tried to follow the thread of their discourse, thinking if he could understand and comply, then they might stop. But when he could not understand he clawed his face in frustration. The voices rose to a chorus, to a mob howling separately for his attention, then swelled into a roar greater than the wind’s but equally single-minded and bent on his annihilation. He dropped onto his hands and knees, sensing the beginning of a terrifying dissolution, as if he were being poured out into a shimmering violet-red bowl. And he saw the film of fire coating his chest and arms, saw his own horrid glare reflected on the broken seashells and mucky sand, shifting from violet-red into violet-white and brightening, growing whiter and whiter until it became a white darkness in which he lost all track of being.
* * * *
The bearded old man wandered into Meachem’s Landing early Sunday morning after the storm. He stopped for a while beside the stone bench in the public square where the sentry, a man even older than himself, was leaning on his deer rifle, asleep. When the voices bubbled up in his thoughts—he pictured his thoughts as a soup with bubbles boiling up and popping, and the voices coming from the pops—and yammered at him (“No, no! Dat ain’t de mon!” “Keep walkin, old fool!”). It was a chorus, a clamor which caused his head to throb; he continued on. The street was littered with palm husks and fronds and broken bottles buried in the mud that showed only their glittering edges. The voices warned him these were sharp and would cut him (“Make it hurtful like dem gashes on your face”), and he stepped around them. He wanted to do what they told him because ... It just seemed the way of things.
The glint of a rain-filled pothole caught his eye, and he knelt by it, looking at his reflection. Bits of seaweed clung to his crispy gray hair, and he picked them out, laying them carefully in the mud. The pattern in which they lay seemed familiar. He drew a rectangle around them with his finger and it seemed even more familiar, but the voices told him to forget about it and keep going. One voice advised him to wash his cuts in the pothole. The water smelled bad, however, and other voices warned him away. They grew in number and volume, driving him along the street until he followed their instructions and sat down on the steps of a shanty painted all the colors of the rainbow
. Footsteps sounded inside the shanty, and a black bald-headed man wearing shorts came out and stretched himself on the landing.
“Damn!” he said. “lust look what come home to us this mornin. Hey, Lizabeth!”
A pretty woman joined him, yawning, and stopped mid yawn when she saw the old man.
“Oh, Lord! Dat poor creature!”
She went back inside and reappeared shortly carrying a towel and a basin, squatted beside him, and began dabbing at his wounds. It seemed such a kind, human thing to be so treated, and the old man kissed her soapy fingers.
“De mon a caution!” Lizabeth gave him a playful smack. “I know dass why he in such a state. See de way de skin’s all tore on his forehead dere? Must be he been fighting with de conchs over some other mon’s woman.”
“Could be,” said the bald man. “How bout that? You a fool for the ladies?”
The old man nodded. He heard a chorus of affirming voices. (“Oh, dass it!” “De mon messin and messin until he half crazy, den he mess with de wrong woman!” “Must have been grazed with de conch and left for dead.”)
Universe 14 - [Anthology] Page 23
