The Jumbies

by Tracey Baptiste

  Corinne held up her palm to get a better look. She frowned at the little plant that had suddenly appeared. Then she snorted in disgust. The witch’s magic was strong enough to make this broken seed grow, but she had still refused to help Corinne fight Severine and the other jumbies. Corinne tossed the plant into the surf. A wave brought it back to her.

  “Papa was right. The sea doesn’t keep anything.”

  With the sound of her voice, the plant grew a little more. Before Corinne could take a closer look, another wave pulled the tiny plant back out to sea.

  31

  The Boys’ Plan

  Malik stumbled behind Bouki in his douen costume. Bouki parted the bushes and helped his brother through so no one would see them before they had a chance to create their distraction. The scent of freshly baked loaves was strong as they passed the bakery. Malik paused, but Bouki shuffled him along. He led Malik past the nearly empty market and edged the road toward a small patch of trees near the dry well, across from the mahogany forest. They needed to get close enough to the fishing village so everyone would hear them scream, but far enough to get them all away and give Corinne her chance.

  Someone small appeared on the bend and walked toward them. When Bouki stepped out to greet her, Dru jumped back with surprise.

  “What are you doing here?” he asked.

  “I was looking for you.”

  “No, you’re looking for Corinne,” Bouki corrected. “She isn’t with us. She’s going to climb the cliff to get her mother’s necklace.”

  “You let her go?” Dru asked. “No one can climb that cliff.” Her hair had been rebraided, and now she unbraided and rebraided the ends of it again.

  Bouki shrugged. “Who could stop her? We’re her distraction so the fishermen won’t get in her way.” He waved to Malik, who stepped out from behind the tree.

  Dru gasped. “How did you do this?”

  “My ingenuity,” Bouki said proudly.

  Malik kicked him.

  “Ow! Well, okay, it was a joint effort.” He rubbed his shin. “We’re going to pretend that I captured my brother back from the douens. Everyone from the village will come running. That will give her some time to push out to sea.”

  “But there are jumbies in the forest,” Dru said. “What about them? If she makes it to the top of the cliff, won’t they come out of the forest to get her?” She bit her lip.

  “What else can we do? There are only two of us.”

  “I’ll do it. I’ll make sure nothing will be looking toward the cliff. No one will see her.”

  “Alone? How?”

  “I’ll think of something. She needs my help,” Dru said.

  “Even though she’s part jumbie?” Bouki asked. “What would your mother say?”

  Dru said nothing. She only unbraided and rebraided her hair.

  “She’ll be killed climbing the cliff,” said Bouki, “and you’ll be killed going into the forest alone, and we’ll be kidnapped by the douens and never seen again. This is an excellent plan.”

  “At least we would have tried,” Dru said.

  Bouki smiled with approval and looked at Dru as if he was just seeing her for the first time, and liked what he saw. “Well, we better get to it, then. The sun is nearly gone. The half-jumbie will need her distraction soon,” Bouki said.

  Malik sighed. The smell of warm bread drifted to them on the wind. Bouki was sorry that he would never steal from the baker again. And he shuddered to think of what douens ate for dinner.

  32

  Leaving

  As soon as Dru came back home, her mother ushered her to the bedroom for safety. Dru stood alone in the middle of the sleep mats and blankets as her family moved in the front room, boarding up the windows and doors. It would be dark soon, and the jumbies would return. The hair on Dru’s arms stood out. Her fingers felt cold and numb. But she knew she wasn’t just going to stand there while everyone—even her friends—fought.

  While the rest of her family secured the front room, Dru changed into one of her brother’s shirts and pants. She grabbed some matches and quietly dislodged the two wide floorboards near her mat that she often used to stash things she did not want her siblings to tease her about. She dropped beneath the house, where there was just enough space to lie flat. She crawled out to the side and into the open air. Her heart beat fast. She didn’t want to think about what her mother’s face would look like when she discovered that her youngest child had disappeared.

  33

  Stepping In

  The brothers faced the forest. “Well, brother,” Bouki said. He turned to Malik.

  Malik extended his hand and Bouki shook it solemnly. They took one last look at each other and stepped into the trees.

  34

  Firewood

  Dru clenched a handful of matches in her fist. Her brother’s shirt hung to her calves and her braid had snagged on a nail beneath the house and come loose again. She made her way through the sugarcane fields to the edge of the forest. There she picked up small dry twigs and branches and gathered them up in the hem of the shirt. She looked for an opening in the trees and closed her eyes for a moment to steady her nerves before she entered. Dru navigated through the dark forest with the tips of her toes and fingers. Even though her blood pumped loud in her ears, she kept going. She needed to get as far in as she dared so the small fire she planned to set would cause just enough commotion to surprise the jumbies and the villagers. Her legs trembled as she went on.

  35

  Nothing

  The brothers didn’t need to go far into the forest. They stopped at the first line of trees, far enough in that it would look like they had been taken, but close enough to the road to get out fast. As soon as they found a spot to stop, they noticed something strange about the forest. There was no sound or movement around them. It was as if every single creature had disappeared. The sound of nothing at all filled their ears like dry cotton. The brothers strained to hear even the wind in the leaves. Bouki sensed that the jumbies were waiting for them to make their move. He looked at his little brother. Malik puffed his chest out to show he was brave and nodded once. Bouki held his fist out and counted one, two, and three on his fingers. On the third finger, they both screamed into the night.

  The forest awakened.

  36

  Pushing Off

  Corinne’s heart beat out the moments till the brothers’ signal would arrive. She watched the fishermen pull their boats in and set their nets to dry. Her muscles tensed. She strained her ears. With the boats moored, the fishermen moved toward their houses. If the boys didn’t create their distraction soon, it would be too late. It had to be now, while the men were still outside. Corinne was just about to quit waiting when she heard Bouki and Malik scream.

  The fishermen ran toward the sound. Corinne waited for their footsteps to die off in the distance, and then she dashed in the opposite direction to her father’s boat.

  The tide was going out again, pulling everything back into the sea. Corinne pushed as the tide pulled and got her father’s boat into the first small waves.

  “If you’re in the sea, Grand-père, I could use your help tonight,” she whispered. The only answer was the sound of a gentle splash from the waves. Corinne pushed harder, and the boat pulled free of the sand and began to bob in the waves. Corinne jumped inside and pulled one of the oars out to paddle. But as she got away from land, the wind began to work against her. It pushed her toward a shallow spit that threatened to snag the boat. She rowed as fast and as hard as she could, but the shore was not getting any farther away.

  “Please!” Corinne called out.

  Suddenly the wind changed direction and began pushing the boat out to sea. Corinne turned parallel to the shore and sliced through the waves. High on the cliff, the stone from her mama’s necklace reflected the last shards of sun and kept her on a direct path.

  37

  Striking the Match

  Dru thought she heard Bouki and Malik scream. The sound w
as tiny and distant, but the night was so quiet that it was possible their cry might have carried for miles. She dropped her bundle of twigs in a pile. Then she worked quickly to clear out a path around it. She had seen her father clear the land around the cane fields every year before he set them on fire at the end of the season. It kept the fire where he could control it. Satisfied with the small circle she made around her twigs, Dru crouched on the ground and tried to strike a match. But every match was damp from the sweat in her hand. As she worked, she heard something moving among the trees. Finally, one of the matches lit, and in its tiny flame she saw a figure coming closer. Then she heard the rattle of chains.

  Dru whimpered and dropped the match. It lay smoking on the forest floor. She crawled backward into a thick bush and cowered. There was nowhere to go, and the space she had cleared meant there was nothing between her and the creature moving toward her but the few twigs she had found. She pressed back as far as she could go before she realized that she was caught in the branches of a stinging nettle. The branches of the bush hooked her shirt and hair and the leaves stung at her hands. The more she struggled, the more she was caught. Above her, the moon rose and shone on a fly caught in a spider’s web between bright red balisier flowers. It also struggled to break free, but neither fly nor girl was successful.

  38

  The Cliff

  The sounds in the villages were now too far away to reach Corinne on her boat. She was close to the cliff, where the water roared and beat the rocks at its base. The closer she got, the choppier the waves became. Beneath the little yellow boat and the silver-black water, currents bashed against hundreds of sharp rocks that jutted up just beneath the surface of the sea. Corinne stopped rowing and allowed the boat to be pushed by the turbulent surf. She used one oar to push away from any jagged rocks that might split the boat. The closer the boat got to it, the more impossibly large the cliff grew. The light was almost gone, and Corinne began to shiver.

  It wasn’t much farther now.

  39

  The Douens Fight

  Even though the brothers couldn’t see much of anything, they could hear things closing in on them from all sides. They turned and ran toward the road, toward the sound of people coming to see what had happened to the screaming children.

  “Did you hear them? Where are they?” the booming voice of Hugo asked above the crowd that had gathered at the edge of the forest.

  “They’re in there!” said Victor.

  “They got him!” Bouki shouted as he got near the road. “They made my brother into one of them!”

  Bouki and Malik burst through the trees. Malik did the best he could to show off his douen feet and to hold on to the hat on his head. The people came to the road quickly and held up their weapons, ready to attack Malik.

  Bouki hadn’t thought of this.

  “We’ve lost enough children to these jumbies!” Laurent’s mother shouted. “No more!” She stomped toward the boys.

  “That one is their last!” Victor said as he came up beside her.

  More people came out of their houses, each one carrying some kind of weapon: a garden rake, a large piece of driftwood, stones the size of fists. They all made their way toward the brothers.

  Bouki stood in front of Malik and screamed, “Don’t hurt my brother!” He knocked Malik to the ground to show them that Bouki’s feet were not real, but the adults pressed in closer.

  Malik threw himself over his brother and covered both their eyes with his hands. But after a few moments, he peeked through his fingers and saw what the adults were really after—a band of douens standing behind them on the edge of the forest with weapons of their own.

  The brothers scrambled out of the way of the fighting and crawled through legs to escape.

  Just as they reached the edge of the crowd, Bouki turned back to his brother with a satisfied grin to help him up. But a little jumbie man was right behind Malik. Bouki grabbed Malik’s arm quickly, but the douen caught Malik’s other arm and Bouki’s leg in a vicious grip. It dragged the brothers back between the trees. The fighting adults never noticed. In seconds, all that was left of the brothers was one fake coconut husk foot and the small straw hat.

  40

  Rough Water

  Waves crisscrossed and slapped against each other and the sides of Corinne’s boat. The choppy water sprayed salty foam high above her. Corinne grew tired from pushing the boat away from rocks. She couldn’t avoid them all. The boat scraped along sharp edges and cracks appeared everywhere in the wood. The waves grew stronger. The boat was pushed in every direction. Corinne sat on her knees, working the oar to avoid destruction while the sea crashed over her and stung her eyes.

  She shivered, soaked to the skin, and her arms ached. The base of the cliff was still too far away. Now the boat was heading straight for a large, jagged rock. Corinne moved to the front to try to push away from it, but the boat was moving too fast. She screamed.

  In the moonlight, Corinne thought she saw the silver flash of a huge fish tail hit the side of the boat, shoving it out of the way of the rock at the last moment. She wiped saltwater from her eyes to see better, but the creature was gone. Was it real or her imagination? She felt the boat being pushed by some unseen force, and soon she came to a still channel that led to the base of the cliff. “Thank you, Grand-père!” she said to the waves.

  Then Corinne looked at the slippery, foam-flecked rocks that rose to the sky above her.

  She longed for a moment to catch her breath, but the moon was already high in the sky. It was time to climb.

  She searched the black rock for a foothold or a notch for her hand, but she saw only wet rock and crevices filled with sharp barnacles and pieces of shell. A great wave broke against her and the little boat. She braced herself with the oar and heard it crack and split in two. Water ran down the rocks, revealing crumbled barnacles in a nook. It made just enough space for her hand. She used the jagged edge of the fractured oar to scrape away the bits of barnacle that remained and reached up. As another wave gathered its strength to crash into the boat, Corinne pulled herself up by one hand. The fingers of her other hand found a tiny hold, and she curled her toes to grab on to the slippery rock. Just as she left the boat, the wave crashed down, smashing it. The boat’s yellow planks were sucked into an eddy. The boat that let her know her papa was always near had disappeared forever.

  Corinne bit her lip and moved upward. The farther she went, the drier the rocks were and the easier to hold. She made sure she had a firm grip in one place before she moved to another. As she neared the top, a smooth, flat rock hovered over her. It jutted out with no place for her hands, the final obstacle to reaching the necklace. Corinne had no choice. She was going to have to jump away from the cliff and grab the edge of it with both hands. If she missed, there was only the briny water and sharp rocks to welcome her below.

  She clutched the cliffside, nearly frozen with cold and fear. The wind whipped through her wet hair and clothes. She squeezed her eyes shut and thought about her father, how his eyes had glassed over, unseeing, like the murky surface of a swamp. He needed her. She thought about Bouki and Malik taking on the douens. They needed her. She thought about Dru in her noisy house. She needed her too. But who did Corinne need? Who did she have to turn to now?

  Above Corinne, her mama’s necklace twisted in the wind and its stone’s shiny surface blinked back moonlight. Corinne could just make out its light. Her mama was there. She was almost close enough to touch.

  Corinne gathered all her strength, crouched, and jumped. The fingers of one hand caught the top of the rock, but the other slipped and her leg smacked against the cliff. A flood of warmth spread up through her leg, the same leg she’d cut open just a few days ago. She scrambled and found another grip for her left hand. Then she pulled herself up. Her leg left a long streak of blood shimmering against the face of the rock. She found a place for her foot and pushed herself over the top of the cliff. She lay on the edge for a while as her heart pounded
and her thigh bled.

  The sound of fighting in the village echoed on the rocks. The jumbies were busy. Corinne knew that there wasn’t much time to figure out her mama’s magic. She pushed herself up to stand and limped over to where the necklace dangled. She untangled it from the dead branch Severine had tied it to and turned the smooth stone in her hand. What was it about this stone that had hurt Severine? And why didn’t it hurt Corinne? She was a jumbie too. In the moonlight, Corinne saw a few nicks and scratches on the face of the small stone, but there was nothing remarkable looking about it. She squinted, hoping to detect something useful, some writing or an image she had not noticed before that would tell her what she needed to do. But there was nothing.

  As Corinne examined the necklace, an old woman stepped out of the forest and onto the cliff. When Corinne looked up, the woman smiled, then shed her skin and burst into yellow flames. Corinne backed up to the cliff’s edge. She was trapped.

  41

  The Lagahoo

  Dru tried to stay still in the bush to avoid brushing against the stinging leaves. The lagahoo drew itself up to its full height, with chains clinking around its neck and waist. It turned to the full moon and bared its teeth. Dru held her breath. Even the fly in the spider’s web stopped struggling.

  Dru covered her eyes, waiting for the lagahoo’s teeth to pierce her skin. In the space between her fingers, she glimpsed a small orange glow. Fire. The match she’d dropped had landed on some dry leaves among her twigs. The flame was gathering strength. It caught onto the hairy leg of the lagahoo. The smell of burning fur filled the air. The lagahoo rushed forward and fell against the bush that had entangled Dru. The force of the crash freed Dru. Only torn bits of her shirt and a few strands of hair were left behind. The fire spread from the lagahoo to the branches of the bush, well outside the clearing Dru had created. Her blood ran cold with horror.