Tropic of Darkness

by Tony Richards

  He ran a hand through his short hair, the memory taking hold of him.

  “Armando. ‘Fat Armando,’ we called him, too fond of food. He ran toward the graves. He jumped. But he was far too heavy, and his foot landed on the edge of the second plot. Two days later, Armando was dead.”

  Jack could scarcely believe the young man was serious about this. But he asked, “You’re kidding? How?”

  “He died in his sleep. Nobody could find a cause for it.”

  “And you think it’s because he touched that grave?”

  “I know that sounds crazy. But it’s what we’re brought up to believe, man.”

  Jack had come across some attitudes like this before during his travels through the Latin world. Superstition took on new dimension, extra depth, in countries such as these. Unless you’d been raised with it since infancy, you could never quite believe in certain things the way these people did.

  So he asked, more quietly, “Whose graves are these exactly?”

  “Perhaps we ought to move away,” came the reply. “Again, I’m sorry. I’d just feel a bit more comfortable.”

  Jack hesitated, still rather bewildered, and then followed him back behind the line of trees.

  * * *

  “In the eighteenth century, when this was a Spanish colony and slaves worked the plantations, one of the richest men in Cuba was Santiago DeFlores. Yes, the man in the first grave.”

  “Under that cruddy little headstone? But didn’t the rich folk around here usually have grander stuff, like mausoleums?”

  Luis insisted if Jack listened, it would become clear.

  And as the boy kept talking, Jack detected something in his tone. A measured rhythm and a cadence, like this had been told by others many times before, and there was memory involved. Luis was not merely explaining the story. He was reciting it, like a catechism he had learned.

  “DeFlores lived on his plantation for most of the year, and it was a big plantation. Half the land between Camagüey and Las Tunas was his. But he also kept a mansion on the far side of Havana Bay, for him to stay at when he visited the capital. He did that several times each year. Oh yes, he lived an opulent life. For all his riches, though, he never had much luck in love.”

  His first wife, apparently, had been a great beauty who was never faithful to him. She was banished from society, left Cuba and was never seen of or heard from again.

  And his second wife drowned while swimming—although it turned out that there were some people, even to this day, who maintained it was no accident.

  “DeFlores was in mourning for a long while after that. He stopped visiting Havana and became a very lonely man.”

  And when the man’s gaze finally did start turning toward women again, it alighted on a tall, striking girl called Camille Gado.

  She was not exactly what you’d call an ideal choice: European of origin, but from peasant stock, so low on the social scale that she’d spent most of her life among DeFlores’s slaves. She had been brought up alongside them and played with their children when she had been young.

  And she had learned their ways and customs, too.

  “Very quickly, DeFlores fell in love with Camille. He could not hide it, did not even try. He moved her from her quarters into the plantation house. Even brought her to Havana, where they stepped out together like a man and wife. Polite society was scandalized. People couldn’t understand why so wealthy and respected a man should behave in such a way. It was incomprehensible to them . . . but not to those of African descent.”

  Apparently, Camille’s mother had little time to care for her when she’d been young. And so the slaves had looked after her most of the time. And passed on their knowledge of the occult to her, from a very early age. Camille, once she’d reached her teenage years, had ended up becoming a Santera, a priestess of the cult. She’d taken on great power. And she loathed living in poverty.

  “And so she cast a spell on the old man, making him love her?” Jack asked, a little humorously.

  But his companion didn’t even pick up on that.

  “Uh-huh. Perhaps,” Luis suggested, still entirely serious, “she even brought about the drowning of his second wife.”

  Some versions of the tale—and there seemed to be plenty of them—insisted that she really did marry him, but not in any Christian fashion. In a secret ritual in the woods.

  Whatever the truth, nine months after they first met, she bore him children. Twins. Two girls, Isadora and Lucia. It was said that you could tell them apart only by the color of their eyes. They both grew up to be extremely beautiful themselves. And learned their mother’s secrets, becoming Santeras in their own right.

  Camille must have loved them too much, blind to all their faults. Since, having been raised in luxury and comfort, her daughters were greedy, selfish women.

  “Santería is mostly a benign religion, but all things have their darker side. Brujería, it is called. The worship of bad orishas. Some even say the pair of them became Awo—witches—and learned the unholy art of Palo Mayombe.”

  Either way, by the time that they had turned eighteen, they’d become powerful enough to break their mother’s spell on Santiago DeFlores and replace it with their own.

  “Oh my God. You mean . . . they made their father . . .”—Jack faltered—“love them? As in, that way?”

  Luis nodded uneasily.

  “They slept with him, yes. And it increased the dark side of their powers in a way that nothing else could.”

  For his own part, DeFlores must have been wracked with guilt, and terrified of what might happen if Camille or anyone else ever found out. The one solution he could think of was to leave her on her own to manage the plantation, while he brought his daughters to the capital.

  “But of course, Camille finally learned the truth. One day, late in the summer of that year, she took a horse and rode the whole way to the mansion. And she stole inside while everyone was out. She scattered through the master bedchamber a colorless, odorless potion known only to her kind. Then, she hid in the gardens and waited.”

  DeFlores and the twins must have sat through dinner that evening and then retired to bed. And once she saw the light was on, Camille employed a very unique spell.

  “Her orisha was Changó, you see. The god of lightning and fire. The potion she had scattered was special to him. And the room burst into violent flame, trapping her husband and daughters inside. The twins joined hands, and it is said that in their dying agonies, they made a vow. That they would come back to this world one day, stronger than ever before.”

  It all sounded pretty insane to Jack, but he still asked, “How?”

  “By something called egungun, ‘possession’ in English,” Luis told him. “The tradition of Santería is full of it. We do not touch their graves because we fear the souls of the two sisters will possess us. And we soak the soil above them with the blood of animals to keep them trapped below the ground.”

  Jack tried not to smile at this old wives’ tale. But he regarded the boy cautiously, seeing how convinced he was about this. “Let’s hope it works, then,” he murmured quietly, for want of anything better to say.

  “Yes. Let’s hope.”

  They started making their way back to the cemetery gates, Jack’s head still spinning from the heavily detailed but rather farfetched story.

  “And how about Camille?” he asked. “Whatever happened to her?”

  “She died a few years later, so it’s told. A sudden fever. But some stories tell how she gave birth to a third daughter, not too long before that happened.”

  “She was a busy lady.”

  But his sarcasm, once again, was lost on young Luis.

  “Some even say that girl had children of her own, and their descendants are still with us to this very day. Some even claim the very last of that particular line remains alive here in H
avana.”

  They went outside, Jack squinting in the golden sunlight. And he ducked his head against it, placing his hands calmly on his hips.

  “People claim a lot of things. You’ll learn that someday, Luis.”

  CHAPTER

  TEN

  As that day’s light began to fail, Dolores Vasquo—still trapped in the dark heart of the big old mansion by the bay—carried out the dreary tasks she was obliged to perform every evening, following the instructions that the sisters had given her.

  Every stick of furniture had to be in the correct position. Every rug smooth on the floor, and every picture straight. Everything like it was sealed in an enormous bead of amber, safe from passing time. They both insisted it was kept this way.

  The gods only knew why, in a crumbling wreck like this. Whenever it rained, water poured down through the ceilings like a colander, drenching everything beneath them. Strong winds shook the structure to its foundations. Vagrant shafts of sunlight, through holes in the roof, had left bleached streaks everywhere they touched. And the furniture itself was in foul condition, faded till the colors were a muddy blur, and rotted and infested too.

  Still, this was the way that they required it. And it was her duty to provide for all their needs, as her mother had done. And her grandmother before her, back across the ages.

  She was born to it, doing those things they could not physically do. Which included lighting candles and enacting all the necessary rituals.

  Her own daughter, unconceived as yet, would be carrying out these selfsame duties in the years to come. And that troubled her worse than any other matter.

  She would be thirty in a couple of days. The time to bear a successor was practically at hand. And the knowledge of it—the guilt of it—had become like some enormous pressure, bearing down on her.

  To pass this life of pain and shadows on to yet another human being. To bring into this world a living child who would have no real life at all.

  The blackest of despairs closed over her. Dolores stood there, her eyes closed and her teeth gritted, shuddering as though she was trying to hold in a scream.

  Damn you, Camille!

  The words shrieked through her head abruptly.

  Damn you to the lowest depths of the oru buruku!

  Hell.

  * * *

  Isadora DeFlores materialized into dim being in a room on the second story of the house, and smiled ironically. She’d spent the whole day, as usual, in her coffin at the cemetery. Had heard every word that had passed between Jack Gilliard and his guide.

  “Let’s hope it works, then.”

  “Yes. Let’s hope.”

  The man seemed ready for her. She’d been studying him since he’d arrived. And she’d never come across a fellow quite like this before, tough, resilient, and self-contained. Except there was a gap beneath that toughened shell. Moving around the way he did from place to place, and rarely getting close to anyone, there was an emptiness that needed filling.

  How she loathed the sunlit hours of her existence. The sacrifices covering her grave worked to that extent, at least. From dawn until dusk, she was held a prisoner beneath the dull, parched earth, a disembodied soul, just like her sister. Listening to the scratching noises that were insects burrowing. Listening to the soft, incredibly slow breathing of Great Mother Earth herself.

  It was only when night fell that she was able to emerge. The night lent her a power nothing created by mortal men could hope to overcome.

  She seemed to have brought a little of the grave scent with her. It hung about her nostrils, embedded in her clothes. And since, in truth, she possessed neither, it could only be her own imagination, taunting her.

  Every evening though, the moment she materialized, she thought she could detect it.

  Merging. That was the one, the only thing that would set her completely free. It would happen one day, she was certain of it. But when? She had tried numerous times throughout the decades, first with local men. And then, when that hadn’t worked, with foreign visitors. And still she hadn’t found any suitable vessel.

  It had to be a man. The means by which she tried to merge demanded that, an absolute fusing of bodies. But it had turned out that not just anyone would do. She was not quite sure what the important factor was. An inner strength perhaps, or an emotional affinity. Or maybe whoever she’d finally take over needed to have something missing from his own depleted soul. In any event, she’d not found him yet, and neither had Lucia. The gods knew, it wasn’t for lack of trying.

  Isadora pondered on it bitterly as she went down the stairs. She found this entire business so distasteful. She could hear Dolores shuffling around somewhere down there, but paid it no attention.

  Did anybody think that she wanted to harm all those men? Far from it. Lucia might be cruel and vicious, but not her. She cared. She had a special place in her heart for each and every one of them. Poor Lucas. Poor Alfredo, Francis, Mario. She knew every last one of their names. That proved how much she cared, didn’t it?

  You are such a very kind-hearted person, she told herself. So sweet, so very tender. Far too kind, in fact. Almost a saint.

  She wound up in the big, bare pantry. Her sadness, she’d decided, was a pious thing, almost sacred in its depth and its solemnity.

  A martyrdom. Yes, that was it. She was indeed a martyr.

  She remembered when she’d first begun to understand how special she was. It was when she had been a little girl, merely six years old. There had been a game she’d liked to play. Like so.

  Standing with her back against a wall, she put her feet together. Stretched her arms out sideways, palms cupped, her knuckles against the plaster. Tipped her head to one side, letting her eyes slip shut.

  Look! She was a female Jesus, nailed onto a cross!

  She’d done it often as a child. And Mama, catching her at it, had always gotten mad and started shouting. “Isadora, what d’you think you’re doing?! Are you crazy, girl?!”

  But of course, she wasn’t that. Just special, that was all.

  What a poor, mistreated little girl she had once been.

  Bad Mama!

  * * *

  Everything was as it should be, in its proper place. The dead preferred things this way, their surroundings frozen so they resembled the past.

  Every last room had been checked, except for one—the blackened, charred remains of the old master bedroom, where Dolores never went. She had only ever looked in at the ruins once in her whole life, and that had been from just outside the door. It was the scene of the twins’ violent deaths, and so forbidden.

  She stopped in front of a large, faded mirror with a beautiful jade frame, hanging in the second story hallway a few yards down from the house’s central room. Somehow, it had moved. Things seemed to do that by themselves occasionally.

  She reached out to adjust it, and then paused. And gazed at her reflection in the smudged, streaked glass.

  It was like trying to see through fog, the quicksilver had faded so badly. But she could get a vague impression of her face. Enough to shift her mood toward resentful weariness.

  She might have grown up beautiful had she been born elsewhere. She had seen the paintings of her ancestor, Camille, and the genes were certainly there. But as it stood, the ebon of her skin had faded to a rough, lusterless gray from its long absence from sunlight. Her spine was rounded and her shoulders stooped.

  Her face, at twenty-nine years old, was like some crone’s, porous and sallow and criss-crossed with deep lines, the corners of her mouth turned permanently down.

  But the worst thing was the expression in her eyes. She could never bring herself to look into them for too long.

  She drew back and touched the mirror’s rim lightly, tilting it back to true. Why should it matter to the sisters, anyway? Why should the angle of a mirror bother them? They we
re eggun, after all. Long dead.

  It was as though they insisted on this entire business simply to deny that fact. Like, if the house remained the same, then time would not have passed.

  They were liars—that was the plain fact of it.

  To their mother.

  To their hapless lovers.

  Even to themselves.

  * * *

  The sisters ought to be awakening and on their way. Or perhaps they were already here? She could almost feel it sometimes, like a droplet of ice water on her spine.

  She went over to a door and opened it.

  The large, square room her candlelight revealed was at the direct center of the house. There were no windows, this being the only way in or out. And unlike the other rooms, the furniture in here had been removed. High-ceilinged and bare-floored, it was cavernous and hollow.

  Except that someone—possibly the first in her line—had set up ranks of brick-and-board shelving the whole length of one wall. And on the shelves were neat rows of clay pots.

  There were hundreds of them. Crude, unglazed, each roughly the size of a coconut. And most of them were sealed at the top with a swatch of cloth tied down to the rim with cord. A pair of glossy black cockerel feathers dangled from each fastened knot.

  The last couple of dozen jars were uncovered as yet. Were waiting to be filled. There were thick black candles placed between the jars at regular intervals.

  Dolores took a deep breath and then stepped inside. The air was several degrees cooler in here, but she was used to that.

  She produced a taper from a pocket at her hip, touched it against the flame of the candle she was carrying. Then she held it to the wick of the first black one, muttering some words in Yoruba as she did so. And repeated the process the whole way along the line. This was a part of her duties too. Lighting the sacred candles, caring for the jars, acquiring brand-new ones when they were needed. The sisters could do none of that. They needed a human servant.

  This close to the covered pots, her hand began to shiver. Because, this close, she could hear faint noises coming from beneath the cloth.