The Awakening

by McBean, Brett

  As we crossed the plain, we kept close to clumps of trees, trying to make as little noise as possible as we shambled past single huts and larger habitations.

  I was relieved when we made it to a valley, and passing groups of sleeping huts, found a path leading up into the mountains.

  This mountain range wasn’t nearly as wild and rugged as the one Silva took me through to reach his plantation. It was still heavily wooded, but the slopes weren’t as high, so it was thankfully easy going without a mule or donkey to ride on.

  Jean-Philippe and I walked our stiff, broken walk through the mountains without talking and when it seemed like we were deep enough in, I said, “Do you want to stop here and rest? I think it will be dawn soon, and this looks like a good spot to hideout.”

  Jean-Philippe agreed, and so we left the narrow mountain path and headed into the forest. We trudged through scraggly bushes, past ferns and oaks, stopping when we reached the edge of a deep gully. We sat behind a large pine, so if a gendarme patrol came by on the path, they wouldn’t see us sitting in the woods.

  “So,” Jean-Philippe said after a spell. “What are we going to do? Here we are, two zombi savanes on the run. We can’t hide out in this mountain forever.”

  I sat contemplating our situation.

  “Do you have family?” Jean-Philippe asked.

  I didn’t answer for a long time, the pain I felt was too much. “Yes,” I finally answered. “I have a wife, a daughter and a granddaughter.”

  “I’m sorry.”

  I nodded.

  “Where are they?”

  “On a small plot near a town called Pignon, in the northern central plateau. I’m a farmer... was a farmer.”

  “Sounds nice. Me, I have no family. I never married, never had any kids. I ran a small hotel in St. Marc. It wasn’t doing too well when I... left, so I’m not exactly keen to get back there. Not, of course, that I could ever run it again.”

  “What did happen to you? If you don’t mind me asking?”

  “I was a gambler.”

  I almost chuckled. “Isn’t everybody in Haiti a gambler?”

  Jean-Philippe did chuckle. “I suppose. But I had it worse than most. Cockfighting was my game. I loved to bet on the cockfights.”

  “I’m a card man myself.” I caught myself, almost added was a card man, but decided not to. I’m sure I would be catching myself a lot in the time to come—it would do me no good to keep reminding myself of what a sad pathetic creature I had become.

  “Anyway, one day I bet on this strutting black cock,” Jean-Philippe continued. “I was sure it would win, it was up against some mangy looking red bird. Just before the fight I noticed the owner of the red cock smear something on its feathers. I had seen this done a number of times before. It was a hot, pepper-like liquid that didn’t harm the cock’s feathers, but would sting and blind a cock if it was to get into another cock’s eyes. Which was the idea. It was cheating, and being I had a lot of money on this fight, I spoke up, accused the owner of cheating. Well, there was an uproar, people demanded their money back, and the old man was bitterly embarrassed and angry at me. I later learnt that this man was friendly with some old bocor, and as payback for losing money and for the public humiliation, he paid the bocor to punish me.”

  “I see,” I said. “It’s always about payback.”

  “You have a similar story?”

  I told him about the three cacos, taking in Marcel, him raping my daughter, and me giving Marcel up to the police. Once I had finished telling Jean-Philippe my story, he laughed, saying how we both paid the price for standing up for our principles—only he said mine was much more virtuous than his.

  I also told him about my three girls, the strong beauty of Mangela, the frail beauty of Felicia and the innocent beauty of Rachel. Talking about them was hard, but I liked Jean-Philippe a lot, he was a good listener. I told him how much I missed them, and that I was concerned for their wellbeing. Afterwards he said, “They sound like three special people. In another time, I would’ve loved to have known them. And you. I’m sure we would’ve been good friends.”

  “I would say we are, now.”

  “Yes, we are, but not under the best of circumstances.”

  This I had to agree with.

  By this time dawn had arrived, and we heard the footsteps of mountain women walking along the nearby path, so we stopped our talking. Fearing being discovered by anyone, especially the Gendarmerie, we kept mostly quiet while the sun was in the sky. We talked sporadically, always softly, about our lives, growing up, the people we knew, and about life on the plantation. We didn’t have to work hard at keeping our voices down when speaking about that—we both naturally spoke in whispers about that awful topic. I learnt, that as far as Jean-Philippe could remember, he died around March nineteen-eighteen—which meant he had been on the plantation a full nine months before I arrived.

  I mentioned to him about what I had found in the forbidden room, told him what I had done, and he remarked, with a noticeable shift in tone, about how, while he was outside with Raoul, he felt a chill wash through him, a pained wail rang in his ears, and he had visions that both scared him and soothed him.

  The day passed slowly. A few times we heard gunshots in the distance. One time the gunshots sounded close, but it was hard to tell in the mountains. We heard the sound of hooves go by at around lunchtime, and judging by how many there were, we figured it was Gendarmerie, either doing a routine patrol, searching for cacos—if in fact the war was still being fought—or perhaps searching for stray zombis.

  At one point we even heard the toot of a ship’s horn.

  “Looks like you were right about us being near the ocean,” Jean-Philippe remarked.

  I nodded.

  Finally, dusk came, and then night, and the cover of darkness swept again over the land.

  I knew we had to move, but the inevitable question remained—where would we move to?

  Jean-Philippe was the one to bring up the subject.

  He was a dim shape beside me when he said, “So, what now? Where are you thinking you’ll head to?”

  There was only one destination I had in mind, one place I wanted to go, but I knew that was not possible now.

  I had been thinking about what to do, where to go, for the whole day—there was nothing else to do but think, sitting there under the pine tree—and it always came down to the same conclusion: wanting to see my girls.

  “I don’t know,” I said.

  “What about heading home? I know things have changed, but do you think...?”

  “No,” I answered. “No, I couldn’t.”

  “I understand,” Jean-Philippe said. “If I had a family, I don’t think I could face them either, no matter how much I wanted to.”

  “What about you? Will you try and head south?”

  “I don’t see why. Like I said, I have no family, and I could never go back to the hotel. No, I think it’s safe to say that I no longer have a home.”

  “Yes, I know what you mean.”

  The situation felt hopeless, overwhelming. I wondered what the other savanes were doing, what their plans were now they were free—or at least, free from the plantation.

  “I tell you one thing,” Jean-Philippe said. “I’m hungry. I could really go for some cassava bread, or a nice juicy mango.”

  “But no plantains.”

  “No, I never want to eat another plantain again for as long as I...”

  The rest of Jean-Philippe’s sentence hung in the deep mountain silence.

  “Come on, we should be able to find something to eat.”

  We got to our feet and walked back to the path. There didn’t seem to be anyone around, so we turned left and continued through the mountains.

  The wind had sprung up, the moon was curtained behind some clouds; it looked like it would rain soon.

  We trudged along the path, winding around bend after bend, walking up hills, down gullies and through streams. We didn’t pass any peasan
ts, which wasn’t unusual at this time of night, and thankfully we had yet to encounter any gendarme or marines. I knew that if we saw a patrol coming, we could hide in the woods by the side of the path; but if we got caught and they saw us before we saw them, I shuddered to think what we would tell them—they were bound to notice we were not quite human if they looked at us long enough.

  Soon we heard the deep beating of drums. A steady rhythm, it was neither a rada ceremony, petro, nor a Congo celebration.

  “A secret sect ceremony,” Jean-Philippe whispered, and I nodded.

  A secret sect was something to fear—all peasants knew the stories of child sacrifices, even cannibalism at these secret ceremonies. These sects had less to do with the religion of vodou and more to do with black magic. Everyone knew that anyone caught out at night who wasn’t part of the sect was stopped and, if deemed unworthy, shot—or worse.

  “That’s all we need,” Jean-Philippe said, “to run into a secret sect.”

  I tried not to think about it, but it was hard not to when there were drums pounding through the mountains, sounding like they were just around the next bend. They weren’t, but they sure sounded close.

  The drums were still pounding when we came upon a solitary hut by the side of the path. There was the faintest hint of light inside, but all was quiet. We would’ve passed right by and kept on going, if not for the mango tree beside it.

  “Finally, some luck,” Jean-Philippe said, and just as he spoke those words, the sky opened up. Rain poured down; hard, thick drops.

  Jean-Philippe shrugged and shuffled over to the mango tree. He plucked a mango, tore off its skin and bit into it. “Not quite ripe, but it’ll do,” he mumbled.

  I shambled through the rain, to the tree and grabbed myself a mango. I did feel bad about taking the mango without asking or paying, but I hoped the owner would understand.

  I roughly peeled back the skin and took a big bite of the green fruit. It tasted bitter, the flesh tough, but compared with the bland plantains I had been living off for the past few months or so, it tasted heavenly.

  I had finished the mango and was reaching up to pluck another, when the door to the hut opened and a voice, high-pitched and sounding as old as time itself, said, “Who’s out there?”

  Jean-Philippe and I both froze, rain splashing down on us, mango juice trickling down our chins.

  “Come on, I can hear you, even through this rain. Speak up, I won’t bite.”

  I looked at Jean-Philippe, he just shrugged, so I said, against my better judgment, “Just us, ma’am. Two old peasants.”

  “You don’t sound too old to me,” the voice croaked. “But you’d better come in before you drown.”

  I didn’t know what to say. The thought of getting out of the rain did sound inviting, but the moment this old crone took one look at us—me in particular—I knew she’d scream and tell us devils to get out. She may even go to the police.

  It seemed, too, that Jean-Philippe was stuck for words.

  “I won’t scold you for eating my mangoes. I got plenty of them. There’s a fire in here and proper hot food. Even rum and coffee. So come on in before I change my mind, or you get eaten by a Loup Garou—whichever happens first.”

  Jean-Philippe and I looked at each other and saw in each other’s eyes the uncertainty, the fear, but also the temptation of rum and proper hot food, so we turned and staggered over to the door and entered the hut.

  Out of the pelting rain, inside the small hut, light coming from a fire in which two pots were hanging over on wire racks, we could see the old woman, and she looked to be at least a hundred years old. She had lines on every inch of her face, which was like black leather, and her hair was as white as white can be. She had a slight stoop, but walked with purpose as she went over to the pots.

  “Come, sit,” she said, lighting an old tin cup fashioned into a lamp. The small hut grew a little brighter. “I’ve got some millet and chicken bubbling.”

  “Sounds good,” Jean-Philippe said.

  “Yes, sounds good.”

  “Rum? Coffee?”

  “Rum,” we both answered, and the old lady chuckled. “Brothers, are you?”

  “Ah, no,” I said, which made the old woman laugh even harder.

  “I wasn’t serious. By lord, you are strange ones.”

  We sat on two rickety chairs by a wobbly hand-crafted table, watching as the old woman poured us some clairin into two tin cups. She placed them down in front of us, shaking her head as she did so. “Damn secret sect,” she muttered, “annoying me with their drumming. Don’t they know I’m blind, not deaf?”

  Jean-Philippe and I looked at each other, amazed at our good fortune. This century-old woman was blind?

  It made sense, now that I thought about it. She hadn’t remarked on my bizarre features, or our glassy eyes.

  “So,” the old woman said as she started spooning the millet and chicken into two bowls. “What were you two young ‘uns doing out at this time of night?”

  I sipped my rum; it was good. “Well...” I began.

  “You see...” Jean-Philippe stumbled.

  The old woman laughed again. “Sorry, I shouldn’t have asked. I’ve put you two in an awkward position. Trying to explain why you’re out at night, when it’s obvious the reason.”

  “It is?” I said, gulping down the rum.

  “Yes, my hearing is perfectly fine. You’re both zombis, right? Savanes?”

  I blinked, suddenly dumbstruck.

  For a short while the only sounds were the rain pounding on the palm fronds and the booming of the drums.

  “You don’t have to worry. I won’t tell anyone. Why would I? You’re no threat to me.”

  “But how...?” Jean-Philippe stuttered.

  “Like I said, my hearing.” She brought over the two plates, setting them on the table with all the ease of someone with perfect vision. Up close, I could see her eyes—glassy, unfocused, like that of a zombi’s. She sat down opposite us. “Go on, eat.”

  We both ate, and it was delicious.

  “Firstly, it’s your voices,” she said. “Zombi savanes have nasally voices that are unnatural. You don’t hear it yourselves, and most other people can’t detect it, but I can hear it. And second, neither of you breathe. That should be fairly obvious to anyone—anyone listening, that is.”

  So there it was. This old woman, the first person we had encountered since leaving the plantation, had instantly recognized us for the monsters we were.

  “So you’ve met zombi savanes before?” Jean-Philippe asked.

  “Sure. You live as long as I do, in these mountains near that devil plantation, and you come into contact with lots of things. Zombis included. I take it that’s where you’ve come from?”

  “That’s right,” I said. “We escaped last night.”

  “The whole plantation has probably burnt to the ground by now,” Jean-Philippe said.

  “Good, I’m glad,” the old woman said.

  “So where are we exactly?” I asked. “I come from near Pignon, in the central plateau, and Jean-Philippe is from St. Marc.”

  “You’re in Morne Toussaint, in the north. The Bay of Acul is close by, as is Le Cap.”

  “We’re near Le Cap?”

  “Well, near enough. A couple of hours on foot, give or take an hour depending on your age, but that’s a lot nearer than either Pignon or St. Marc. If you keep on heading east, you’ll eventually come out of the mountains, onto the Plaine du Nord, which leads to Cap Haitien. You can’t miss it; it’s a big town.” She chuckled to herself.

  “We were sort of lost—still are, I guess,” I told her. “We don’t know where to go.”

  “Perfectly understandable,” the old woman said. “You both have family?”

  “Jacques does, I don’t.”

  “But...”

  “You can’t go back to them, the way you are?”

  “Well I can’t.”

  “Yes, it must be hard.”

  We
both gave her a brief rundown of how we came to be zombis. I told her of my three girls, and the old woman just sat there, listening, nodding her head every now and again.

  By the time I had finished telling her my story, the rain had stopped, and I realized so too had the drumming.

  “Just in case you were wondering,” the old woman said afterwards. “It’s now February 1919.”

  I did the calculations. Two months I had been away from my family; two months I had been a zombi.

  My insides turned cold. By the look on Jean-Philippe’s face, he, too, found this hard to stomach.

  “We’d better get going,” Jean-Philippe said. “While it’s still dark.”

  “Where will you go?”

  “Who knows,” I said as I got to my feet. “Thank you for the food and rum. And for the company.”

  “And the mangoes,” Jean-Philippe added.

  “You’re most welcome.” She got to her feet. “You know, you’re both more than welcome to stay here. For as long as you need. I could use the company, as well as help in the garden, and the gendarme don’t bother me at all, not that they come through here that often. This isn’t a big mountain range, not like those further east, where those nasty cacos are hiding.”

  “So the war is still going on?” I asked.

  “My, yes. It’s growing more and more bloody by the day. Another reason to stay. You don’t want to risk getting caught up in all that business.”

  The offer was tempting, and by the look on Jean-Philippe’s face, he, too, was contemplating the offer. But it wasn’t right. I couldn’t put this kind old woman in danger, and Jean-Philippe must’ve felt the same way, because he said, “Thanks, that’s awfully kind of you, but we couldn’t do that to you.”

  Besides, I had other ideas.

  “Well, the offer is there if you want it, but I understand your position.”

  We shuffled to the door, opened it and stepped back out into the darkness.

  “Goodbye young ‘uns,” she said. “And good luck.”

  We both said our goodbyes, and then started sloshing our way up the path.

  We were only a few miles down the mountain path when Jean-Philippe said, “You know, we never found out her name.”