Tropic of Darkness

by Tony Richards

  “Jack, don’t worry. Wait a short while more. You’ll see.”

  He relaxed again, if only because he had no choice.

  When they went in, a young nurse recognized Luis. Warm greetings were exchanged. The student led her off into a corner, where they conversed in whispers. Finally she nodded, and then disappeared through a doorway to the back.

  “You’re certain this is going to help?”

  “It’s hard for you to understand, I know.” Luis nodded. “But be patient.”

  The nurse reappeared and ushered them inside. It was a modern surgery, where a middle-aged woman was sitting on a chair with a baby in her lap. A doctor in his fifties was examining the child. He finally nodded, the mother beaming with relief.

  “Bring her back again next week,” he told her. “Just to be completely safe.”

  The door clicked shut as she went out. The room got very quiet. The doctor returned to his desk and made some detailed notes on a pad. Only when he had finished did he look up at the two arrivals.

  He was a short man, around five foot five, his hair silver and closely cropped. He wore a neatly trimmed beard, and pale gray eyes peered out from behind his wire-rimmed spectacles.

  This didn’t look like any kind of witch doctor that Jack had ever seen.

  The man studied him unabashedly for almost a minute before shifting his attention to Luis.

  “Dorothy informs me that this Yanqui is being plagued by spirits. Are you here to translate for him?”

  “I speak Spanish,” Jack said. “But I think you’ve got it wrong. It’s dreams, not—”

  The man raised a hand to interrupt him. Luis smiled. “Jack Gilliard, this is Doctor Aldo Torres.”

  “I kind of guessed he was a doctor. But—?”

  “But how can I help you?” Torres finished for him. “Well, sir, medicine is but one of the methods that I use to assist this community. The others are a little more . . . unorthodox.”

  Jack began to notice a few things out of place. Like the piece of twisted tree branch by the window. And, in the corner nearest Torres’s desk, a small round table covered in a white cloth, with goblets of water standing on it. What exactly were they for?

  “So, what . . . you mean you’re a . . . santero?” he asked.

  “No. I am what you would call a Babaaláwo. A high priest, Mr. Gilliard.” The man got up, stretched both his arms, and took a few paces to emphasize the point. “I’ve been one for much longer than I’ve been a practitioner of science. The two are not opposed, in my opinion. Modern methods simply work better for some problems . . . and the older ones for others.”

  If this had been a few days back, Jack would have most probably laughed, mumbled something verging on sarcastic, and then walked out of the room. But after the last couple of nights he’d been through, after what he had seen and experienced . . .

  It was at least worth giving this a shot. When he spoke again, it was rather more slowly.

  “And in my case?”

  Torres smiled, but there was little humor in it.

  CHAPTER

  TWENTY-ONE

  Christ, had he been dozing? Pierre’s eyes came back open and he peered across the strand. It looked the same as it had done before he’d nodded off, except . . .

  He couldn’t quite put his finger on it, but something was off center. The brightness of the moonlight as it washed across the shore, perhaps. Had it been so strong before?

  Or maybe it was the vibration of the waves. They sounded rather more distant than they had been, and their foamy white caps seemed to be moving with an odd, unnatural sluggishness. As if the progress of time had slowed down a little.

  He took in the fact that he was shivering again, the breeze raising icy goose bumps on his flesh. And that simply should not be the case.

  Pierre stared up through the fronds above him, trying to see if the weather was changing. There was not a cloud in sight.

  The wind increased a little, and the leaves brushed against each other with a clattering sound. Pierre’s thighs and haunches ached. What had he been thinking of, sitting down here in the first place?

  The beach bag was still there, thank God, and he let out a sigh of relief. Why in heaven’s name had he wandered all the way out here?

  Get up. And get out of here immediately. That was the thing to do. But . . .

  He found he simply couldn’t. When he tried to lever himself up, his body wouldn’t cooperate.

  He tried not to panic, which was hard.

  A fresh sound came to him. It was so gentle that he couldn’t tell exactly what it was at first, and so he strained to listen harder.

  It was very soft laughter, getting nearer all the while.

  He peered in the direction it was coming from. The moonlight on the waves threw up a coldly burning glare, forcing him to squint to make out anything—and yet, a slim, dark object was definitely on the move. He could make out no more than a horizontal streak, at first. But as it drew nearer, it began taking on a human shape.

  It was coming to him, at its leisure. He could make out narrow legs, scissoring at an unbroken pace. And swaying hips.

  A woman.

  Somehow, he’d already known that it would be a woman.

  * * *

  Still little more than an outline, there was something about her height, her figure, and the way she moved.

  She walked along the tide line, foam curling around her toes. Then she stepped up from the water and began crossing the beach to him. The moon was behind her and still he couldn’t make out her face. But a sense of recognition grew in him.

  Her feet came to a halt in front of him. She rested her hands on her hips as she gazed down. All that Pierre could do was sit there. He couldn’t even speak, because his breath seemed to have clogged up in his throat.

  The woman reached up smoothly and undid her dress. It settled in a whispering bundle round her ankles, and the contours of her body—edged platinum by the moonlight—made his heart skip a beat.

  Was this—? No, it couldn’t be!

  The woman from last night?!

  She didn’t seem to notice his discomfort. She knelt down on the sand in front of him, her face still invisible. He offered no resistance when a hand reached out and pushed him back. Nor when the fingers of the other one started to undo his shirt.

  The act of love this time . . . it was like being mauled by a soft tigress; like being lifted by a warm tornado, whirled this way and that. So intense he could not think. So relentless that he couldn’t even catch his breath. Pierre was allowed to play no active part. Could only lie back, letting the full force of the woman’s passion sweep across him.

  But when the act had almost reached its limit, when the thing was nearly done . . .

  She stopped moving, on top of him. There might as well have been a statue straddling him now. And, like the dream last night, her skin felt suddenly rather cool.

  His eyes snapped open and he stared into her face. Her position had altered—the moonlight was striking her from a different angle by this time. He could make out her features with a chill, unflinching clarity.

  And her expression was as icy as her skin.

  * * *

  The green eyes continued staring down at Pierre. He forced a smile, then brushed his fingertips against one of the woman’s arms.

  “Hey, beautiful? What is it?”

  Her face could have been made of marble. She didn’t even indicate that she had heard him. He could feel the coldness of her skin increase. And it seemed to be working its way through to him a little.

  “Hey?” Pierre tried again. “What’s up?”

  And finally, her features loosened, a grin appearing on them. But there was something wrong with even that. Something almost predatory.

  Her head gave a shake, damp black ringlets dancing on h
er brow.

  “Nothing,” she whispered, the tips of her teeth showing. “Just . . . trying to bring about . . . something new into this world.”

  Was she high or something? What the hell was the bitch talking about?

  The skin of her features lost its even smoothness and began to shift and bulge.

  Pierre let out a high-pitched yell and tried to pull away. But the weight of the woman’s body pinned him down, holding him firmly in position.

  Her grin slewed crookedly to one side. Her brow distorted and the flesh around her cheeks started bubbling up, like plastic under intense heat. Pierre began struggling frantically. Despite his greater size and weight, though, he could not seem to break free of her.

  The skin at her cheeks split open abruptly. And Pierre, expecting blood, tensed up.

  None came. There was just decomposing flesh beneath. Something was squirming in its depths.

  He let out an anguished howl.

  The woman’s mouth came fully open. Her tongue stretched out in the direction of his eyebrows, a great deal longer than it should have been.

  Pierre shoved with all his might, but could no more seem to budge her than he could have overturned a truck.

  He could feel her flesh yielding to the pressure of his hands. And next moment, they were in agony, overcome by the most terrible freezing sensation. They had actually sunk into the woman. Were buried in her torso, right up to the wrist.

  The thing on top of him was barely recognizable as human anymore. He thought that he saw an enormous, bristling creature like a centipede come rushing out of her left ear. She shuddered slightly. Only her green eyes were unchanged, staring at him pitilessly. His hands had become so numb that he could not feel them any longer. And the chill had started spreading down his forearms.

  He could hear his own screams giving way to moaning. The woman’s head and shoulders seemed far lower than they had been. Her entire body appeared to be melting into his. His stomach and his hips, his upper thighs—the same icy chill took hold of them. And there was nothing he could do to stop it.

  The woman looked delighted. Her gaze was sparkling with triumph. More than half her form had melded into his.

  She continued sinking. Then suddenly, her descent slowed.

  And finally ground to a halt.

  The mass of flesh above him jolted a few times, trying to force itself the rest of the way.

  And then it vanished altogether.

  * * *

  There was another noise directly to Pierre’s left. A scraping on the sand. When he looked around, the woman was standing there, just as she had first been. Fully re-formed.

  Her face was set in a mask of rage, her eyes blazing with contempt. They stared down at him for what seemed like an eternity. And then, her lips curled back.

  “You’re no good!” she spat at him. “No, you won’t do at all!”

  Her figure turned to smokelike wisps, and disappeared.

  * * *

  Pierre could no longer feel the sand against his neck. He was back in the position where this thing had started, sitting propped against the palm trunk. He looked down in astonishment.

  His clothes were still on, every button in place. But his whole body was drenched with sweat, his lungs puffing like bellows.

  A nightmare? Had that been it? He felt even colder than he had before. Drew his knees up to his chest and wrapped his arms around them, shaking. Then he peered at the flat stretch of beach in front of him. And was brought to another halt.

  Very shallow, barely there, a twin row of impressions was visible in the sand, coming up to him from the water’s edge. They were like the faintest of exclamation marks. The lightest of footprints.

  But they shouldn’t have been there. If he’d simply had a nightmare, it meant no one had been present. Pierre felt terribly confused. It didn’t seem right that a dream and wakefulness should coincide like this.

  He continued to gaze at the prints. And when he finally stopped, it was because he’d practically stopped thinking altogether.

  The chill had spread up to his mind. Had actually slowed its workings down. His jaw went slack, his eyes turned dull, and he looked off at the sea like he’d forgotten it was there.

  Everything around him seemed to have taken on a hollow quality. And something told him that it ought to bother him, but he couldn’t even manage that.

  He got up, his movements slow and ponderous. Turned, and began making his way back.

  The beach bag with its money, his sole passport out of Cuba, was still lying where he’d left it, utterly forgotten.

  CHAPTER

  TWENTY-TWO

  Jack told Doctor Torres the whole story from last night, trying his best to leave nothing out. By the time he’d finished, he was painfully aware of how totally insane it sounded. He was prepared for mocking glances, when he finally looked up.

  But Luis had gone very still and thoughtful. As for Torres—those gray eyes were focused on him hard.

  The man raised the knuckles of his right hand to his chin. “The legend about the twins?” he asked. “It was Luis told it to you?”

  “In the graveyard yesterday—that’s right.”

  “Yet, you were having dreams like this even before you heard the story?”

  It struck him with a jolt, because he hadn’t considered that. “Ever since I arrived here, now I come to think of it.”

  “They are not simply dreams, you know,” the doctor told him firmly.

  “What, then?”

  “They are memories, Señor. And not yours. Other people’s.”

  That hit Jack with a dizzy sense of shock, his head reeling like he was in the grip of vertigo. The mafia guy, Mario Mantegna, whose eyes he had seen through in his sleep. Until that first dream, he’d had no idea what this town looked like back in 1958. And he realized that fully now.

  It was insane. Had nothing to do with his view of the normal world around him. Dreams could not be real. And yet it seemed they were becoming so.

  He waited for the doctor to go on.

  Torres opened a draw in his desk, and pulled something out of it. A narrow book, its covers leather bound, but faded in a mottled way and ratty at the edges, very old.

  “Do you know what this is?” he asked Jack.

  And Jack shook his head a little nervelessly.

  The doctor opened it to reveal pages of handwritten text, all of it in dense, tight, huddled script the ink of which had faded to dull purple. And there were illustrations too. Small women. Fires being lit. A bedroom.

  “It was passed to me by my father, who was a Babaaláwo too. And to him by his own father, down the line.”

  Jack nodded. “Yeah, I get it.”

  “It is the Chronicle of DeFlores. And in it is contained every bit of knowledge that the Babaaláwos of Havana have regarding the DeFlores twins. Their history. Their legend. The rumors regarding what they have been doing in the afterlife. We’ve been looking out for their return, constantly vigilant against it.”

  Against dead people coming back? That made no sense to Jack at all.

  “And this journal has been added to whenever the need arises,” Torres continued. He flipped some yellowed pages, pointing. “Can you see how the handwriting changes?”

  Jack felt his vision blurring when he tried to look, and had to rub his eyes. Okay, it was an interesting little book. What of it?

  “It means that I know most of what you’re going through,” the doctor said.

  Which made Jack jerk. Had this Aldo Torres just read his mind?

  He glanced across at Luis, only to see that the young Cuban had gone very quiet and motionless. He didn’t appear the least bit bothered, though. There was the gentlest of soft smiles playing on his features. A respectful smile, like they were in the company of someone very special.

 
“The twins, rightfully, should not be here,” Torres was going on, unbothered. “They no longer belong to this existence, but have chained themselves to it with the oath they spoke.” He stared at the book again and then put it aside. “They have bridged the gap between the two forms of existence. And so everyone they interfere with gets trapped on that bridge as well.”

  This was getting nuttier the longer it went on, and Jack grimaced, uncertain what the man was driving at.

  “When Isadora comes to you, you are drawn into a place where dream and waking are as one. There is no logic as we understand it. You see through the eyes of others and relive their memories simply because there is nothing preventing you from doing so.”

  Torres allowed Jack to take that in, which he only did with enormous difficulty.

  “You? Them? It is all the same. Then? Now? It makes no difference. What occurred forty years ago blends seamlessly with what happened an hour back. Everything is fused together. And you and the others in the past become, essentially, the same person.”

  And Jack still wasn’t sure of much, but was pretty certain that he didn’t even slightly like the sound of that.

  But say that it was real? Let’s say that the stuff the doctor was describing was the way things were. There’d been the dreams, the apparitions, none of it like anything he’d ever known before. He’d always thought himself a practical man but assuming—for a moment—he was being told the truth . . .

  “What’s it all in aid of?” he heard himself asking. “What’s the bottom line?”

  And now, it was the doctor’s turn to look uncomfortable. “I thought Luis explained.”

  “They want to come back. Sure, but . . . ?”

  “I would have thought that it was obvious. They no longer possess physical form. So they must find new bodies to occupy.”

  That made Jack straighten up a little, the night seeming to contract around him.

  “The way that you’ve described your dreams,” the doctor was continuing, “you’re far from the first they’ve tried. But they have still not found a suitable host.”

  “And when they failed?” Jack was thinking of Mantegna in his dream. And of the strange way Pierre Melville was acting. “What would have happened to those other men?”