Green Eyes

by Lucius Shepard

  The ballroom darkened, and the world of the gros bon ange came into view. It was laughable to see these black, jeweled phantoms flailing their arms, shaking their hips, flaunting their clumsy eroticism to the accompaniment of Downey’s song. He scanned the crowd, searching for the complex pattern that would single out Dularde; then Otille could loose her hounds, and he and Jocundra could rest. He wondered what Dularde’s punishment would be. Banishment? Gruel and water? Perhaps Otille would have him beaten. That would be well within the capacity for cruelty of the spoiled brat who had batted her lashes at him moments before. He swung his gaze up to the makeshift balconies, and there, at the far end of the room, were two figures holding hands and kicking out their legs in unison on the edge of a silver-trimmed platform. Glittering prisms twined in columns around the legs of the taller figure, delineated the musculature of his chest, and fitted a mask to his face.

  ‘There,’ said Donnell, adding with all the nastiness he could muster, ‘is that your goddamn stray?’

  He pointed.

  As he did, his elbow locked sharply into place, and his arm snapped forward with more force than he had intended. The lights inside Dularde’s body scattered outward and glowed around him so that he presented the silhouette of a man occulting a rainbow. He wavered, staggered to one side, a misstep, lost his grip on his partner, fought for balance, and then, just as Donnell normalized his sight and drew back his arm, Dularde fell.

  Hardly anyone noticed. If there were cries of alarm, they could not be heard. But Otille was screaming, ‘Turn off the music! Turn it off!’ Papa and Simpkins and Downey echoed her, and several of the dancers, seeing it was Otille who shouted, joined in. The outcry swelled, most people not knowing why they were yelling, but yelling in the spirit of fun, urging others to add their voices, until it became a chant. ‘Turn off the music! Turn off the music!’ At last it was switched off, and someone could be heard above the hubbub calling for a doctor.

  Otille flashed a perplexed look at Donnell, then pressed into the crowd, Papa Salvatino clearing a path before her. Downey craned his neck, gawking at the spot where Dularde had fallen. Simpkins folded his arms.

  ‘My, my,’ he said. ‘We’re purely havin’ a rash of coincidences. Ain’t we, Brother Downey?’

  Their bedroom was on the second floor, as were those of all the pets, and though the furnishings were ordinary, Jocundra had spent a sleepless night because of the walls. They were paneled with ebony, and from the paneling emerged realistically carved, life-sized arms and legs and faces, also ebony, as if ghosts had been trapped passing through the tarry substance of the boards. Everywhere she rested her eyes a clawed hand reached for her or an angelic face stared back, seeming interested in her predicament. The faces were thickest on the walls of the alcove leading into the hall, and these, unlike the others, were agonized, with bulging eyes and contorted mouths.

  Donnell, too, had spent a sleepless night, partly because of her tossing and turning, but also due to his concern over the man who had fallen. She didn’t fully understand his concern; he had taken worse violences in stride. She tried, however, to be reassuring, telling him that people commonly survived far greater falls. But Dularde, said Otille, when she came to visit early in the afternoon, had suffered spinal injuries, and it was touch and go. She did not appear at all upset herself and insisted on showing them the grounds, which were fantastic in their ruin.

  It had rained during the night, the sky was leaden, and peals of distant thunder rolled from the south. They walked along the avenue of pines where long ago Valcours Rigaud’s daughter had wed beneath a canopy of gold and silver spiderwebs. Now the webs spanned even between the trunks, creating filmy veils dotted with the husks of wasps and flies. Otille slashed them down with her umbrella. The entire landscape was so overgrown that Jocundra could only see a few feet in any direction before her eye met with a plaited wall of vines, an impenetrable thicket of oleander, or the hollow shell of a once mighty oak, itself enwrapped by a strangler fig whose sinuous branchings had spread to other trees, weaving its own web around a series of gigantic victims. The world of Maravillosa was a dripping, parasitical garden. Yet underlying this decay was the remnant of artful design. Scattered about the grounds were conical hills fifteen and twenty feet in height, matted with morning glory and ivy, saplings growing from their sides, like the jungle-shrouded tops of Burmese temples. Paths entered the hills, curving between mossy walls, and at the center they would find broken benches, fragments of marble fountains and sundials, and once, a statue covered in moss and vines, its hand outheld in a warding gesture, as if a magician had been struck leafy and inanimate while casting a counterspell.

  ‘Valcours,’ said Otille bemusedly, rubbing away the moss and clearing a circular patch of marble.

  From atop one of the hills, between walls of bamboo and vines, they had a view of the house. Black; bristling with gables; speckled with silver magical symbols; a ramshackle wing leading off behind; it had the look of a strange seed spat from the heart of the night and about to burst into a constellation. Beyond the hills lay an oval pool bordered in cracked marble and sheeted with scum, enclosed by bushes whose contours were thrust up into odd shapes. Valcours, Otille explained, had been fascinated with the human form, and the bushes overgrew a group of mechanical devices he had commissioned for his entertainment. She hacked at a bush with her umbrella and uncovered a faceless wooden figure, its head a wormtrailed lump and its torso exhibiting traces of white paint, as well as a red heart on its chest. A rusted epee was attached to its hand.

  ‘It still worked when I was a child,’ she said. ‘Ants lived inside it, in channels packed with sand, and when their population grew too large, traps were sprung and reservoirs of mercury were opened, flooding the nests. The reservoirs were designed to empty at specific intervals and rates of flow, shifting the weight of the figure, sending it thrusting and lurching about in a parody of swordsmanship. The only ants to survive were those that fled into an iron compartment here’ - she tapped the heart - ‘and then, after it had been cleaned, they were released to start all over.’ She cocked an eyebrow, as if expecting a reaction.

  ‘What was it for?’ asked Jocundra. The apparent uselessness of the thing, its death-powered spurts of life, horrified her.

  ‘Who knows what Valcours had in mind,’ said Otille, stabbing the dummy with her umbrella. ‘Some plot, some game, But I hated the thing! Once, I was about eight, it scared me badly, and after it had stopped moving, I took out the iron compartment and dropped it in the bayou.’ She sauntered off along the rim of the pool, scuffing algae off the marble. ‘I’ve ordered the copper,’ she said over her shoulder. ‘You can stay if you like.’

  ‘How long will it take?’ asked Donnell.

  ‘A week to get here, then a few weeks for construction.’ She started walking toward the house. ‘You can think about it a few more days if you wish, but if you do stay, I hope you understand that it’s a job. You’ll have to keep yourself available to me five days a week from noon until eight. For my experiments. Otherwise, you’re on your own.’ She turned and gave Donnell a canny look. ‘Are you sure you’ve told me everything about the veve, why you’re building it?’

  ‘I hardly know myself,’ he said.

  ‘I wonder how it relates to Les Invisibles,’ she said.

  ‘Les Invisibles?’

  ‘The voodoo gods,’ said Jocundra. ‘They’re sometimes called Les Invisibles or the loas.’

  ‘Oh,’ he said derisively. ‘Voodoo.’

  ‘Don’t be so quick to mock it,’ said Otille. ‘You’re about to build the veve of Ogoun Badagris out of three tons of copper. That sounds like voodoo to me.’

  ‘It’s quite possible,’ said Jocundra, angry at Otille’s know-it-all manner, ‘that the veve is an analogue to some mechanism in the brain and can therefore be used by mediums as a concentrative device, one which Donnell -because of his abilities - can use in a more material way.’

  ‘Well,’ Otille began, but J
ocundra talked through her.

  ‘If you’re a devotee of voodoo, then you certainly know that it’s a very social religion. People bring their day to day problems to the temple, their financial difficulties, lovers’ quarrels. It’s only reasonable to assume they’re receiving some benefit, something more than a placebo of hope, that there are valid psychological and even physiological principles embedded in the rituals.’

  ‘Oh, my,’ said Otille, rolling her eyes. ‘I’d forgotten we were keeping company with an academic. Let me tell you a story, dear. There was a man in Warner’s Parish, a black man, who was on the parish council and who believed in voodoo, and his colleagues put pressure on him to disavow his beliefs publicly. It was an embarrassment to them, and they weren’t too happy about having a black on the council in any case. They threatened to block his re-election. Well, the man thought it was important to have a black on the council, and he made the disavowal. But that same night hundreds of men and women came into town all possessed by Papa Legba, who was the man’s patron loa. They were all dressed up as Legba, with moss for gray hair, canes, tattered coats and pipes, and they went to the man’s house and demanded he give them money. It was a mob of stiff-legged, entranced people, all calling out for money, and finally he gave it to them and they left. He said he’d done it to make them go away, which is true no matter how you interpret the story. The people of the parish put it off to a bunch of crazy backwoods niggers getting excited about nothing, but as a result the man kept his post and satisfied his god. And of course it hasn’t happened since. Why should it? The necessary had been accomplished. That’s the way Les Invisibles work. Singular, unquantifiable events. Impossible to treat statistically, define with theory.’

  Otille smiled at Jocundra, and Jocundra thought of it as the smile of a poisoner, someone who has seen her victim sip.

  ‘Hardly anyone notices,’ said Otille.

  Behind the house was a group of eight shotgun cabins, each having three rooms laid end to end, and here, said Otille, lived her ‘friends.’ Slatternly women peered out the windows and ducked away; slovenly men stood on the porches, scratched their bellies and spat. To the west of the cabins was a graveyard centered by a whitewashed crypt decorated with rada paintings - black figures holding bloody hearts, sailing in boats over seas of wavy blue lines - this being home to Valcours’ seven coffins. And at the rear of the graveyard, through a thicket of myrtle, was the bayou, a grassy bank littered with beer cans and bottles, a creosote-tarred dock, and moored to it, a black stern wheeler: an enormous, grim birthday cake of a boat with gingerbread railings and a smokestack for a candle. It had originally belonged to Clothilde, Otille’s grandmother.

  ‘It was to have been her funeral barge,’ said Otille. ‘She had planned to have it sailed down the Gulf carrying her body and a party of friends. My father used to let us play on it, but then he found out that she had booby-trapped it in some way, a surprise for her friends. We never could find out how.’

  Jocuridra was beginning to think of Maravillosa as an evil theme park. First, the Black Castle studded all over with silvery arcana; then the Bacchanal of Lost Souls with a special appearance by the Grim Reaper; the Garden of Unholy Delights; the cabins, an evil Frontier-land where back porch demons drooled into their rum bottles and groped their slant-eyed floozies, leaving smoldering handprints on their haunches; and now this stygian riverboat which had the lumbering reality of a Mardi Gras float. Somewhere on the grounds, no doubt, they would find Uncle Death in a skeleton suit passing out tainted candy, black goat rides for the kiddies, robot beheadings. Perhaps, she thought, there had once been a real evil connected with the place, a real moment of brimstone and blood, but all she could currently discern were the workings of a pathetic irrationality: Otille’s. Yet, though Maravillosa reeked of an impotent dissolution rather than evil, Otille the actress could bring the past to life. Leaning against the pilot house, her black hair the same shade as the boards, making it seem she was an exotic bloom drooping from them, she told them another story.

  ‘Have you heard of Bayou Vert?’ she asked.

  Donnell perked up.

  ‘They say it runs nearby. It’s extraordinary that a place like this coujd create a myth of Heaven, even such a miserable one as the Swamp King’s palace. Gray-haired swamp girls don’t sound very attractive to me.’ She let her eyes contact Jocundra’s, her lips twitching upward. ‘Clothilde wrote me a letter about Bayou Vert, or partially about it. Of course she died long before I was born, but she addressed it to her grandchild. The lawyer brought it to me when I was sixteen. She said she hoped I would be a girl because girls are so much more adept at pleasure than boys. They have, in her phrase, “more surfaces with which to touch the world.” She instructed me in the use of… my surfaces, and confessed page after page of her misdeeds. Mutilations, murders, perversions.’ Otille crossed to the railing and gazed out over the water. ‘She said that she had fertilized the myth of Bayou Vert - it had been old even in Valcours’ day - by spreading rumors of sightings, new tales of its wonders, tales about the Swamp King’s black sternwheeler that conveyed the lucky souls to his palace. Then she poured barrels of green dye into the water, sending swirls of color down into the marshes, and waited. Almost every time, she said, some fool, a trapper, a fortune hunter, would come paddling up to the boat, and there he’d find Clothilde, naked, gray wig in place, the handmaiden of Paradise.’ Otille ran her hand over the top of a piling and inspected the flecks of creosote adhering to her palm. ‘They must have had a moment of glory on seeing her because they could never say anything. They just looked disbelieving. Happy. She’d make love with them until they slept, and they slept deeply, very, very deeply, because she gave them drugged liquor. And after they woke, too groggy yet to feel anything, she said they always had the most puzzled frowns when they looked down and saw what she had done with her knife.’

  The clouds were breaking up, the sun appearing intermittently, and the beer cans on the bank winked bright and dulled, as if their batteries were running low.

  ‘Come on,’ said Otille sadly. ‘There’s lots more to see.’

  Chapter 15

  July 29 - August 14, 1987

  Those first weeks at Maravillosa, Jocundra had time on her hands. She wandered the corridors, poking into the cartons and crates that were stacked everywhere, exploring the various rooms. The motif of ebony faces and limbs emerging from the walls was carried out all through the house, but in the downstairs rooms most of the faces had been painted over or disfigured, and it was common to see nylons fitted over a wooden leg, coffee cups hooked to fingers, a black palm holding a soiled condom. The furniture was wreckage. Footless sofas, stained mattrsses, cushionless chairs, everything embedded in a litter of beer cans and wine bottles. And here Otille’s ‘friends’ could be found at any hour of the day or night. Drinking, making love, arguing. Many of the arguments she overheard involved the virtues of religious cults and gurus; they were uninformed, usually degenerating into shoving matches, and their most frequent resolution was the use of sentences beginning with, ‘Otille said…’ It soon became clear that this interest in religion only mirrored Otille’s interest, and that the ‘friends’ hoped by arguing to gain some tidbit of knowledge with which to intrigue her.

  To pass the time further, Jocundra decided to put together an ethnography of the estate and went about securing an informant. Danni (‘It’s really Danielle, but there’s so many Danielles who’s actresses already, so I dropped the endin’, you know, just said “to ‘elle with it,” kept the i and accented it. I think it sounds kinda perky, don’t you?’) was typical of the women. Pretty, though ill-kempt; blond and busty; accustomed to wearing designer T-shirts and jogging shorts; an aspiring actress in her mid-twenties. She had come to Maravillosa in hopes that Otille would ‘do something’ for her career. ‘You see what she’s done for Downey, don’t you? I mean he’s almost a star!’ She identified the other ‘friends’ as gamblers in need of a stake, poets looking for a patroness
, coke dealers with a plan, actors, singers, dancers, musicians and con artists. All young and good-looking, all experts on Otille’s past and personality, all hopeful of having something done.

  ‘But what do you do for her?’ asked Jocundra one day. ‘I understand you provide her with companionship, an audience, and she gives you room and board…’

  ‘And actin’ classes,’ Danni interrupted. ‘I wouldn’t be here if it wasn’t for the classes.’

  ‘Yes, but knowing Otille, it seems she’d expect more for her money.’

  ‘Sometimes she entertains,’ said Danni, uncomfortable, ‘and we help out.’ When Jocundra pressed her, Danni became angry but finally said, ‘We sleep with the bigwigs she brings out from New Orleans! Okay?’ Ashamed, she refused to meet Jocundra’s eyes. ‘Look,’ she said after a petulant silence. ‘Otille’s a terrific actress. Bein’ taught by her, it’s… well, I’d sleep with the Devil himself for the chance. You learn so much just watchin’ her! Here.’ She affected a pose Jocundra recognized as a poor caricature of Otille. ‘Baron!’ she snapped. ‘Bring Downey to me at once. If he’s not here in ten minutes, I’m not going to be responsible!’ She relaxed from the pose and grinned perkily. ‘See?’

  The hierarchy of the pets was, according to Danni, the main subject of study among the ‘friends’; they spent most of their energy trying to associate themselves with whomever they believed was in the ascendancy. Going to bed with Otille’s favorite was the next best thing to going to bed with Otille herself: a rare coup for a ‘friend,’ so rare it had been elevated to the status of a myth. Clea was currently much in demand, and Papa, because of the reliability of his gift, was always ranked first or second. Simpkins was scarcely more than a ‘friend’ himself, and Downey, due to his star quality, could have his pick regardless of hisstatus in Otille’s eyes. Even Clea had a crush on him. And as for the Baron, he was apparently neither ‘friend’ nor pet and Danni was of the opinion that he had some sort of hold over Otille.