“Dere’s big vultures up dere, Jubert, flyin cross de moon and screamin your name.”
Prince was a little afraid of the drug, but less afraid of the islanders—nowhere near as afraid as Jubert was of him right now. Prince had been much more afraid, had cried and soiled himself; but he’d always emptied his gun into the shadows and stayed stoned and alert for eleven months. Fear, he’d learned, had its own continuum of right actions. He could handle it.
Jubert made a gurgling noise.
“Got a question, Jube?” Prince leaned over, solicitous.
A sudden gust of wind sent a dead frond crashing down, and the sound scared Jubert. He tried to lift his head and passed out from the pain.
Somebody shouted, “Listen to dat boy sing! Oh, he slick, mon!” and turned up the jukebox. The tinny music broke Prince’s mood. Everything looked scattered. The moonlight showed the grime and slovenliness of the place, the sprinkles of chicken droppings and the empty crab shells. He’d lost most of his enthusiasm for hunting down Rudy and George, and he decided to head for Maud Price’s place, the Golden Dream. Sooner or later someone stopped in at the Dream. It was the island’s gambling center, and because it was an anomaly among the shanties, with their two stucco rooms lit by naked light bulbs, drinking there conferred a certain prestige.
He thought about telling them in the bar about Jubert, but decided no and left him for someone else to rob.
Rudy and George hadn’t been in, said Maud, smacking down a bottle on the counter. Bar flies buzzed up from the spills and orbited her like haywire electrons. Then she went back to chopping fish heads, scaling and filleting them. Monstrously fat and jet black, bloody smears on her white dress. The record player at her elbow ground out warped Freddie Fender tunes.
Prince spotted Jerry Steedly (who didn’t seem glad to see Prince) sitting at a table along the wall, joined him, and told him about the black coral.
“Everybody sees the same things,” said Steedly, uninterested. “The reef, the fires …”
“What about flashbacks? Is that typical?”
“It happens. I wouldn’t worry about it.” Steedly checked his watch. He was in his forties, fifteen years older than Rita, a gangly Arkansas hick whose brush-cut red hair was going gray.
“I’m not worried,” said Prince. “It was fine except for the fires or whatever they were. I thought they were copepods at first, but I guess they were just part of the trip.”
“The islanders think they’re spirits.” Steedly glanced toward the door, nervous, then looked at Prince, dead serious, as if he were considering a deep question. He kicked back in his chair and leaned against the wall, decided, half smiling. “Know what I think they are? Aliens.”
Prince made a show of staring goggle-eyed, gave a dumb laugh, and drank.
“No shit, Neal. Parasites. Actually, copepods might not be so far off. They’re not intelligent. They’re reef dwellers from the next continuum over. The coral opens the perceptual gates or lets them see the gates that are already there, and … Wham! They latch right on. They induce a low-grade telepathy in human hosts. Among other things.”
Steedly scraped back his chair and pointed at the adjoining room where people thronged, waving cards and money, shouting, losers threatening winners. “I gotta go lose some money, Neal. You take it easy.”
“Are you trying to mess me around?” Prince asked with mild incredulity.
“Nope. It’s just a theory of mine. They exhibit colonial behavior like a lot of small crustaceans. But they may be spirits. Maybe spirits aren’t anything more than vague animal things slopping over from another world and setting their hooks in your soul, infecting you, dwelling in you. Who knows? I wouldn’t worry about it, though.”
He walked away.
“Say hi to Rita for me,” Prince called.
Steedly turned, struggling with himself, but he smiled.
“Hey, Neal,” he said. “It’s not over.”
Prince nursed his rum, cocked an eye toward the door whenever anyone entered (the place was rapidly filling), and watched Maud gutting fish. A light-bulb sun dangled inches over her head, and he imagined her with a necklace of skeletons, reaching down into a bucketful of little silver-scaled men. The thunk of her knife punctuated the babble around him. He drowsed. Idly, he began listening to the conversation of three men at the next table, resting his head against the wall. If he nodded out, Maud would wake him.
“De mon ain’t got good sense, always spittin and fumin!”
“He harsh, mon! Dere’s no denyin.”
“Harsh? De mon worse den dat. Now de way Arlie tell it …” Arlie? He wondered if they meant Arlie Brooks, who tended bar at the Sea Breeze.
“ … dat Mary Ebanks bled to death …”
“Dey say dat de stain where she bled still shine at night on de floor of de Sea Breeze!”
Maybe it was Arlie.
“Dat be fool duppy talk, mon!”
“Well, never mind dat! He never shot her. Dat was Eusebio Conejo from over at Sandy Bay. But de mon might have saved her with his knowledge of wounds if he had not run off at de gunshot!”
“Ain’t he de one dat stole dat gold cross from old Byrum Waters?”
“Correct! Told him dat gold have gone bad and dass why it so black. And Byrum, not mindful of de ways of gold, didn’t know dat was only tarnish!”
“Dat was de treasure lost by old Meachem? Am I right?”
“Correct! De Carib watched him bury it and when he gone dey move it into de hills. And den when Byrum found it he told his American friend. Hah! And dat friend become a wealthy mon and old Byrum go to de ground wrapped in a blanket!”
That was his cross! That was him they were talking about! Outraged, Prince came up out of his stupor and opened his eyes.
Then he sat very still.
The music, the shouts from the back room, the conversations had died, been sheared away without the least whisper or cough remaining, and the room had gone black … except the ceiling. And it brimmed, seethed with purple fire: swirls of indigo and royal purple and violet-white, a pattern similar to the enclosed waters of the reef, as if it, too, signaled varying depths and bottoms; incandescent-looking, though, a rectangle of violent, shifting light, like a corpse’s first glimpse of sky when his coffin is opened up in Hell … and cold.
Prince ducked, expecting they would swoop at him, pin him against the freezing darkness. But they did not. One by one the fires separated from the blazing ceiling and flowed down over the walls, settling on the creases and edges of things, outlining them in points of flickering radiance. Their procession seemed almost ordered, stately, and Prince thought of a congregation filing into their allotted pews preparatory to some great function. They illuminated the rumples in ragged shirts (and the ragged ends, as well) and the wrinkles in faces. They traced the shapes of glasses, bottles, tables, spiderwebs, the electric fan, light bulbs and their cords. They glowed nebular in the liquor, they became the smoldering ends of cigarettes, they mapped the spills on the counter and turned them into miniature phosphorescent seas. And when they had all taken their places, their design complete, Prince sat dumbstruck in the midst of an incredibly detailed constellation, one composed of ghostly purple stars against an ebony sky—the constellation of a tropic barroom, of Maud Price’s Golden Dream.
He laughed, a venturing laugh; it sounded forced even to his own ears. There was no door, he noticed, no window outlined in purple fire. He touched the wall behind him for reassurance and jerked his hand away: it was freezing. Nothing moved other than the flickering, no sound. The blackness held him fast to his chair as though it were a swamp sucking him under.
“I hurt bad, mon! It hurt inside my head!” A bleary and distressed voice. Jubert’s voice!
“Mon, I hurt you bad myself and you slip me de black coral!”
“Dass de truth!”
“De mon had de right to take action!”
Other voices tumbled forth in argument, most of them drunken, sodden, and seeming to issu
e from starry brooms and chairs and glassware. Many of them took his side in the matter of Jubert’s beating—that, he realized, was the topic under discussion. And he was winning! But still other voices blurted out, accusing him.
“He took dat fat Yankee tourist down to print old Mrs. Ebanks with her camera, and Mrs. Ebanks shamed by it!”
“No, mon! I not dat shamed! Let not dat be against him!”
“He pay me for de three barracuda and take de five!”
“He knock me down when I tell him how he favor dat cousin of mine dat live in Ceiba!”
“He beat me …”
“He cheat me …”
“He curse me …”
The voices argued points of accuracy, mitigating circumstances, and accused each other of exaggeration. Their logic was faulty and stupidly conceived. It had the feel of malicious, drunken gossip, as if a group of islanders were loitering on some dusty street and disputing the truth of a tall tale. But in this case it was his tale they disputed; for though Prince did not recognize all the voices, he did recognize his crimes, his prideful excesses, his slurs and petty slights. Had it not been so cold, he might have been amused, because the general consensus appeared to be that he was no worse or better than any of his accusers and therefore merited no outrageous judgment.
But then a wheezy voice, the expression of a dulled, ancient sensibility, said, “I found dat gold cross in a cave up on Hermit’s Ridge …”
Prince panicked, sprang for the door, forgetting there was none, scrabbled at the stony surface, fell, and crawled along, probing for an exit. Byrum’s voice harrowed him.
“And I come to him and say, ‘Mr. Prince, I got dis terrible pain in de chest. Can’t you give me money? I know dat your money come from meltin down de gold cross.’ And he say, ‘Byrum, I don’t care jack-shit about your chest!’ And den he show me de door!”
Prince collapsed in a corner, eyes fixed on the starry record player from which the old man’s voice came. No one argued against Byrum. When he had finished there was a silence.
“The bastard’s been sleeping with my wife,” said a twangy American voice.
“Jerry!” Prince yelled. “Where are you?”
A constellate bottle of rum was the source of the voice. “Right here, you son …”
“Dere’s to be no talkin with de mon before judgment!”
“Dass right! De spirits make dat clear!”
“These damn things aren’t spirits …”
“If dey ain’t den why Byrum Waters in de Dream tonight?”
“De mon can’t hear de voices of de spirits cause he not of de island hisself!”
“Byrum’s not here! I’ve told you people so many times I’m sick of it! These things induce telepathy in humans. That means you can hear each others’ minds, that your thoughts resonate and amplify each others’, maybe even tap into some kind of collective unconscious. That’s how …”
“I believe somebody done pelt a rock at de mon’s head! He crazy!”
The matter of the purple fires was tabled, and the voices discussed Prince’s affair with Rita Steedly (“Dere’s no proof de mon been messin with your wife!”), reaching a majority opinion of guilty on what seemed to Prince shaky evidence indeed. The chill in the room had begun to affect him, and though he noticed that unfamiliar voices had joined the dialog—British voices whose speech was laden with archaisms, guttural Carib voices—he did not wonder at them. He was far more concerned by the trembling of his muscles and the slow, flabby rhythm of his heart; he hugged his knees and buried his head in them for warmth. And so he hardly registered the verdict announced in Byrum Waters’s cracked whisper (“De island never cast you out, Mr. Prince”) nor did he even hear the resultant argument (“Dat all you goin to tell him?” “De mon have a right to hear his fate!”) except as a stupid hypnotic round which dazed him further and increased the chill, then turned into ghostly laughter. And he did not notice for quite a while that the chill had lessened, that the light filtering through his lids was yellow, and that the laughter was not voiced by spectral fires but by ragged drunks packed closely around him, sweating, howling, and slopping their drinks on his feet. Their gap-toothed mouths opened wider and wider in his dimming sight, as if he were falling into the jaws of ancient animals who had waited in their jungle centuries for such as he. Fat moths danced around them in the yellow air.
Prince pushed feebly at the floor, trying to stand. They laughed louder, and he felt his own lips twitch in a smile, an involuntary reaction to all the good humor in the room.
“Oh, damn!” Maud slammed the flat of her hand down on the counter, starting up the bar flies and hiccuping Freddie Fender’s wail. Her smile was fierce and malefic. “How you like dat, Mr. Prince? You one of us now!”
He must’ve passed out. They must’ve dumped him in the street like a sack of manure! His head swam as he pulled himself up by the window ledge; his hip pocket clinked on the stucco wall … rum bottle. He fumbled it out, swallowed, gagged, but felt it strengthen him. The town was dead, lightless, and winded. He reeled against the doorway of the Dream and saw the moldering shanties swing down beneath running banks of moonlit cloud. Peaked and eerie, witches’ hats, the sharp jut of folded black wings. He couldn’t think.
Dizzy, he staggered between the shanties and fell on all fours in the shallows, then soaked his head in the wavelets lapping the shingle. There were slippery things under his hands. No telling what … hog guts, kelp. He sat on a piling and let the wind shiver him and straighten him out. Home. Better than fighting off the rabid dog at the Hotel Captain Henry, better than passing out again right here. Two and a half miles across island, no more than an hour even in his condition. But watch out for the purple fires! He laughed. The silence gulped it up. If this were just the drug doing tricks … God! You could make a fortune selling it in the States.
“You scrapes off de color and dass what you smokes,” he sang, calypso style. “De black coral takes, boom-boom, just one toke.”
He giggled. But what the hell were those purple fires?
Duppies? Aliens? How bout the purple souls of the niggers? The niggers’ stinging purple souls!
He took another drink. “Better ration it, pilgrim,” he said to the dark road in his best John Wayne. “Or you’ll never reach the fort alive!”
And like John Wayne, he’d be back, he’d chew out the bullet with his teeth and brand himself clean with a red-hot knife and blow holes in the bad guys.
Oh, yeah!
But suppose they were spirits? Aliens? Not hallucinations?
So what!
“I one of dem, now!” he shouted.
He breezed the first two miles. The road wound through the brush-covered hills at an easy grade. Stars shone in the west, but the moon had gone behind the clouds and the darkness was as thick as mud. He wished he’d brought his flashlight … That had been the first thing which had attracted him to the island: how the people carried flashlights to show their paths in the hills, along the beaches, in the towns after the generators had been shut down. And when a ignorant, flashlightless stranger came by, they’d shine a path from your feet to theirs and ask, “How de night?”
“Beautiful,” he replied; or, “Fine, just fine.” And it had been. He’d loved everything about the island—the stories, the musical cadences of island speech, the sea grape trees with their funny, round, leathery leaves, and the glowing, many-colored sea. He’d seen that the island operated along an ingenious and flexible principle, one capable of accommodating any contrary and eventually absorbing it through a process of calm acceptance. He’d envied the islanders their peaceful, unhurried lives. But that had been before Viet Nam. During the war something inside him had gone irreversibly stone-cold sober, screwed up his natural high, and when he returned their idyllic lives had seemed despicable, listless, a bacterial culture shifting on its slide.
Every now and then he saw the peak of a thatched roof in silhouette against the stars, strands of barbed wire hemming in a few
acres of scrub and bananas. He stayed dead center in the road, away from the deepest shadow, sang old Stones and Dylan, and fueled himself with hits of rum. It had been a good decision to head back, because a norther was definitely brewing. The wind rushed cold in his face, spitting rain. Storms blew up quickly at this time of year, but he could make it home and secure his house before the worst of the rains.
Something crashed in the brush. Prince jumped away from the sound, looking wildly about for the danger. The tufted hillock on his right suddenly sprouted horns against the starlight and charged at him, bellowing, passing so raw and close that he could hear the breath articulated in the huge red throat. Christ! It had sounded more like a demon’s bellow than a cow’s, which it was. Prince lost his balance and sprawled in the dirt, shaking. The damned thing lowed again, crunching off through a thicket. He started to get up. But the rum, the adrenaline, all the poisons of his day-long exertions roiled around in him, and his stomach emptied, spewing out liquor and lobster salad and coconut bread. Afterward he felt better—weaker, yet not on the verge of as great a weakness as before. He tore off his fouled shirt and slung it into a bush.
The bush was a blaze of purple fires.
They hung on twig ends and leaf tips and marked the twisting course of branches, outlining them as they had done at Maud’s. But at the center of this tracery the fires clustered together in a globe—a wicked, violet-white sun extruding spidery filaments and generating forked, leafy electricities.
Prince backed away. The fires flickered in the bush, unmoving. Maybe the drug had finished its run, maybe now that he’d burned most of it out the fires could no longer affect him as they had previously. But then a cold, cold prickle shifted along his spine and he knew—oh, God!—he knew for a certainty there were fires on his back, playing hide-and-seek where he could never find them. He beat at his shoulderblades, like a man putting out flames, and the cold stuck to his fingertips. He held them up before his eyes. They flickered, pulsing from indigo to violet-white. He shook them so hard that his joints cracked, but the fires spread over his hands, encasing his forearms in a lurid glare.
Year's Best Science Fiction 02 # 1985 Page 59
