Tropic of Darkness

by Tony Richards

  They forgot about him completely. Focused, instead, on a point beyond his shoulder. Why?

  The only possible answer was that there was someone else behind him.

  * * *

  His skin crawled. His shoulders tightened. Who was back there?

  But Jack didn’t seem to have the nerve to turn around. All of his courage had left him in an instant. He was completely paralyzed.

  There was the brushing of a bare foot on the polished floorboards to his rear. A soft rustle that sounded like silk. And then a laugh, so low and breathy it was almost like a sigh.

  A deep and purring female voice came oozing around him, making the hairs on the back of his neck prickle.

  “Ah, Señor Gilliard. I believe that you are rather lost.”

  Still, he couldn’t turn. He watched the twins instead, trying to gauge what was happening by their reactions. And they looked almost as afraid as he was.

  “You’re wondering where you are. And yes, you’re still in the DeFlores house. Not the one of your world, though.”

  Jack’s gaze darted to the window again, trying to confirm that. There was still no movement. And the sea continued with its rushing, hissing noises, but he couldn’t see it.

  “Here, there is no change or decay. Nothing ever goes away. This house was standing here at the first hour of the universe, and shall still be here when the last trumpet sounds.”

  The skin between his shoulder blades had drawn so taut it almost burned. There was a trembling beneath his skin, but it could not get out.

  “You’re wondering who I am. Is that not the case?”

  Her footsteps moved across to him, until the owner of that satin voice finally came in sight.

  It was the same tall woman who had appeared through the ripples, the one who had interrupted the proceedings back in that dark room. She smirked at him before glancing over at the twins.

  “Lucia? Isadora? Dears? Please introduce me.”

  Her complexion was darker than the others and, although her face was quite unmarked by time, she had the air of being older than them. There was something to her manner and her bearing that was quite magnetic. Jack thought that he’d seen feline grace before, but never like this.

  He managed to pull his eyes away from her and dart a glance at the sisters himself. And both of them were dumbstruck.

  It began to dawn on him exactly who this was.

  Her gaze became knowing.

  “Oh, you’re a bright fellow,” she remarked, sounding quite impressed. “Perceptive. Intuitive. Qualities I much admire. My daughters chose you well.”

  Lucia unfroze. Took a sudden, jerky step in her direction, raising both her fists.

  “You? What are you doing?”

  Camille DeFlores stared back at the younger woman coolly.

  “Is that any way to greet your mother? Why ask such foolish questions anyway? I came because the Babaaláwo summoned me.”

  Isadora moved up too, the pair of them shoulder to shoulder. If they’d been rivals before, it was forgotten in this woman’s presence.

  “Trapped under the ground because of you!” she shrieked. “Two hundred years of misery, because of you!”

  Camille just frowned, looking bored.

  Isadora’s features twisted up with fury when she saw that. She leapt forward, grabbing with her nails.

  But her mother was too fast. Camille raised her right palm, describing a circle in the air. A ring of sparks was left behind, and Isadora’s hands went through it.

  And the thing abruptly shrank, tightening about her wrists, then slicing into them. A glittering sheen momentarily spread up both her arms, which had become slightly translucent.

  The younger woman leapt back with a howl, deep confusion in her eyes.

  Camille thrust her lower lip out.

  “We could keep on doing this forever. We all have that kind of power. It’s hardly the point.”

  Jack could see, from both of their expressions, they had not the faintest idea what she was talking about. An eyebrow lifted on Camille’s smooth forehead.

  “He is in our world now. He has been getting nearer to it for quite some time. And yet neither of you have possessed him. There is something in him that is far too strong for that. So it is time for him to choose which of us he wants inside him.”

  Jack felt himself stepping back.

  Heard himself muttering, “God, no. I choose no one.”

  “Really?”

  When her face swung round to him, her dark brown eyes were gleaming.

  “You want to return to what you had? Living inside your own shell for the rest of your days? What kind of life is that?”

  He remembered the desires he’d had since coming to Havana. All the longings and sad yearnings since the dreams had first begun. To settle in one place at last, with someone special. It still tugged hard at a secret place inside of him.

  But what these creatures were offering? They would occupy his body, and he’d cease to be.

  Camille was shaking her head. She could read his thoughts.

  “You’ll still be there, Jack. Except one of us will be there too, existing in you. You will be complete.”

  He tried to take another backward step, and only half managed it. Jack was trying to remember what Torres had told him, what would happen if these spirits merged with anyone. But he couldn’t, since his mind was blurring.

  “I want to go back,” he said.

  Camille’s expression had taken on a dull and rather mournful quality.

  “No human being has ever come this far into our world and then returned. So, you have a very real choice. You can either stop here . . .”

  It remained entirely still outside the house, as unnerving as anything he’d seen, and Jack began to shake.

  “. . . or you can return to life with one of us inside you. It is solely your decision. Choose.”

  CHAPTER

  THIRTY-FOUR

  After an age of groping around blindly, Aldo Torres managed to find one of his candles and light it. Its glow did not penetrate very far into the surrounding murk, but it at least gave him the chance to find one of his flashlights.

  His arm was trembling as he played the beam about the room. And that lent everything a jerky, unreal quality all over again. His heart seemed to have climbed into his throat. He still couldn’t find Jack.

  “Somebody?” he yelled, as much to shatter the silence as anything else.

  Noises came from one side of him. And the shivering light touched faces, none of them the Yanqui’s.

  Leland Hague was hunched where he had first been, and was looking badly dazed. As for Manuel Cruz, he’d managed to pull the knife out of his shoulder. And was still sitting against the wall, clutching at his blood-drenched shoulder.

  The light found Dolores’s bedraggled corpse, but no one else.

  Torres pulled himself together and attended to Manuel’s wounds, using strips of the man’s shirt for bandages.

  “Where’s the Yanqui?” Manuel croaked. “Where is he?”

  Maybe he had fled the same way as Luis. Torres started calling out as loudly as he could. And Hague added his own voice.

  The only answers they got were their own echoes. Torres scowled with exasperation. Jack could possibly be hiding, or even lying unconscious somewhere. He would have to search the entire place.

  He turned . . . to find Dolores staring at him.

  No, it was just a misty image of her. Her corpse was still lying on the floor. This was her ghost.

  Her face was no happier than it had been when she’d been alive. She frowned, studying him. Her mouth moved, but there was not the slightest sound. He got the sense of what she was trying to tell him, however.

  Come with me.

  And he’d already been through so much this evening th
at she didn’t even particularly frighten him. He’d met with spirits before, and this one seemed to mean no harm. So he followed her out along the corridor, to a door at the far end. The room beyond was filled with junk, and dust lay thickly over everything.

  Torres rummaged around until he dug out something covered with a very old layer of cloth. There was a painting underneath. An old and faded portrait, in cracked oils. But unmistakable.

  The same woman who’d risen from the floor when he had summoned something from the other side.

  “The mistress of this house?” he asked, the question almost sticking in his throat.

  Dolores nodded.

  “And the Yanqui?”

  She simply shrugged, then disappeared from view.

  * * *

  A while later, the remaining three men made their way out through the front door, Manuel clutched between the others, and Doctor Hague moving like a crippled insect on his single crutch. Without a word passing between them, they made their way through the tangled undergrowth, over to the waterside, where they sat down on the jutting rocks. They stared across the bay at Old Havana.

  The moon had dropped almost the whole way to the far horizon. The wave tops glistened brightly in its thin remaining light. And the Old Town looked very beautiful, its high roofs edged with an almost celestial silver.

  Torres lowered his head.

  “I never even considered this.”

  He took two short stubs of cigar from the front pocket of his shirt, offered one to Manuel and then lit the other.

  “It’s not your fault,” Manuel told him. “You did what you had to. There was no alternative. We’d all have died, and the result would be the same.”

  “What you’re saying,” Hague broke in, “is that the mother might have Gilliard?”

  “Any of them might now. There is no way of telling.”

  They were silent for another while, Hague chewing over his next question. “Can it really be as bad as you make out?”

  Torres let his gaze drop farther, the beauty of the bay becoming unbearable to him. There was a saltwater pool in the rocks below his feet. A self-contained world filled with little crabs and fishes. And he could wreck it in an instant, if he so desired. Simply destroy it with one swift stamp of his heel. Had the world that they inhabited become like that?

  “If the dream world and the real one start to coincide . . . if the gap between them becomes bridged . . .”

  He drew on his cigar.

  “Then who knows what might happen? There is no way to predict it. The old rules will be replaced by new ones. Or perhaps there will be no rules in the slightest. Is not that a frightening thought?”

  There were still things that needed to be done. They all knew that, and got to it. The cigar stubs were tossed aside. The three men got up painfully to their feet and headed back into the house again. They wrapped Luis’s corpse in an old rug and by slow degrees dragged it outside.

  The mottled disc of the moon had faded partially from view by the time they emerged. A glimmer of pale yellow toward the east spoke of the approach of dawn. And—as was traditional amongst high priests of the Santería cult—Torres stretched his arms out to the new day’s sun in a ritual known as nangare.

  The words he spoke were a petition to the sun. That the world would be a fine place to live in, this coming day. That the gods and their servants should keep everybody safe and well. No evil should befall them. They should walk into the following evening happy and at peace.

  He spoke the words with special feeling, this particular morning.

  Hague waited until he had finished before asking, “We can only hope, then?”

  All that the high priest could do was pull a face. And then he went back into the DeFlores house one final time.

  He returned to the same room where the battle had taken place. Except it didn’t look quite so important any longer. It looked more like a crowd of fractious kids had gotten loose in here, powder scattered everywhere, shards of pottery strewn across the floor.

  He was reaching out, now, with his finely tuned senses. Looking with his inner eye. And could no longer sense the presence of Dolores’s spirit. She’d gone somewhere else, taking her unborn child along with her. The souls of the men trapped in the jars had gone away as well. In fact, this entire ruined mansion . . . it was empty as the husk of some abandoned shell.

  Nothing. There was nothing here at all. To that effect, they’d succeeded. For the first time in centuries, the DeFlores house was no longer a danger.

  Except they’d simply moved the problem on. And where else in the world might it start showing its grim face?

  Torres rubbed his brow and sighed. He retrieved his staff, and then began to search extensively through the whole place.

  He hunted through every room. Through every corner, nook, and cranny he could find.

  But however hard he tried, he could not find the slightest sign of what had happened to Jack Gilliard.

  EPILOGUE

  CLOUDS ON

  WATER

  THE PRESENT DAY

  She had been noticing the tall man in the pale cream suit for several days. She’d only ever seen him at a distance, but he stood out in this place where almost everyone dressed casually. He seemed rather gaunt, and she was not sure she liked that. But he had gripped Carolyn Mitchell’s attention. Some quality about him fascinated her.

  She thought she saw him now, in the corner of her eye, over by a row of tentlike structures at the far end of the beach. He was wearing dark glasses and a hat of the same color as his suit, as usual. But when she turned her head in his direction, he was gone.

  Carolyn sighed and tried to relax.

  The Varadero beach sprawled out in front of her, a light golden color like the palest Demerara sugar. The hotel, only two years old, reared into the humid air behind her like some modernistic obelisk. She was at a round glass table on the edge of the terrace, by the swimming pool. A couple of feet ahead of her, the concrete slabs gave way to sand.

  She’d come here, from London, on one of those “singles” packages that were so popular these days. And she wasn’t looking for new friends. Carolyn worked in entertainment, the publicity side of the business, and already had more of those than she knew what to do with. No, she had her mind on something else. But the men who had arrived with her on the same tour were so completely unacceptable that, by the end of the first week, she’d wound up taking one of the waiters from the cocktail bar back to her room. And that had been fine, but not really what she was after.

  And now, this. This sudden change in weather. It was still stiflingly hot, but dense clouds churned above her, swaths of them. They were reflected in the Caribbean waves, so that it was hard to tell where the ocean left off and the sky started.

  It had all started happening about the same time that the man in the pale suit had first shown up.

  Belts of cloud kept moving in, then swirling off again. A bolt of lightning would come flashing down occasionally and scorch the surface of the water. Thunder would erupt without the slightest warning, making everybody jump. And the heavens kept taking on peculiar colors, sickly mauves and even stranger greens.

  It made her slightly nervous. Was it tornado season round these parts? She wasn’t sure.

  She was still in her bikini, but took off her sunglasses, since she couldn’t see the point of wearing them. The pool was empty. People didn’t like using it when there was the threat of lightning.

  The beach in front of her was only thinly populated. A fierce wind was starting to blow up, throwing spray in from the sea. But there was one couple out there who were oblivious to everything around them. Sitting on a beach towel, they were kissing. And she knew they’d only met two days ago. Somebody, at least, had found romance.

  She looked around for the tall man again, but he was not in view.

 
Maybe she ought to go back to her room. But she’d be even more alone there than she was out here. Carolyn chewed at her lip, then decided—to hell with it—and slumped back in her seat.

  The noise of wind and waves melded together in her ears. The lack of sunlight made her drowsy, as if evening were approaching. She felt her head tip back.

  And before she really knew it, she had fallen fast asleep.

  * * *

  The dream was of a kind she’d never had before.

  She was in some kind of nightclub, an enormous one. There was no roof to the place—it was open to the darkened sky. The swollen moon and stars peered down. There were dozens of tables, and they were jam-packed with guests. Everyone was very finely dressed, but in a somewhat old-fashioned way.

  She was alone at her table, and still wearing her bikini. Which made her feel awkward and embarrassed, until she figured out that nobody was looking at her. Every eye was glued to the wide stage up front.

  The same tall man was on it, standing in a spotlight. And why was she surprised by that? His suit was pure white now, as was his hat, as were his shoes. He wore white gloves. And he still had his dark glasses on.

  He had a trumpet pressed to his lips. No, she corrected herself. She’d been around musicians long enough to know that this was a cornet.

  He wasn’t using any microphone. But his playing was so loud and avid it reverberated around the club.

  She recognized the tune, an old classic. It was “I’ve Got You Under My Skin.”

  And when he finished, there was wild applause.

  He didn’t bow. Didn’t retreat to the wings. He simply climbed down from the stage and began to walk in her direction, the instrument swinging from his grasp. Carolyn felt aware anew that she was half naked. Her body hunched in on itself.

  But this didn’t seem to bother him. He didn’t seem to notice . . . or at least, he acknowledged it no more than the applause he’d gotten. He pulled out the chair opposite her and settled into it, the black discs of his sunglasses aimed directly at her face.

  He was rather thin but handsome, very masculine.