by Derry Sandy
“Would you abandon me Kariega? Would you abandon your seed that grows within me?” With that Katharine tore the crucifix from about her neck and hurled it at Kariega. Her body now a ball of flame, she leapt off the bed and flew out the window. The flames extinguished completely upon her exit.
Kariega was at once shocked and mortified. Katharine was pregnant? And now she had flown off without her ward. Her coven would become instantly aware of her presence in the world they would also know that she had been hidden from them, that she had abandoned them. Such was the nature of the bond between soucouyant of the same coven. They would come for her, to punish and perhaps worse.
Kariega fled the house in pursuit of the woman he loved. On his way out he grabbed a cutlass and looped the lanyard cross-ways over his shoulder so that the scabbard fell at his side. He dashed headlong to the stable and leapt upon his horse without taking the time to saddle Shepherd, his tall black stallion. Into the night he plunged. Kariega knew where she would go, an old haunt, one of the places where she used to hide her skin when she had been a soucouyant. He hoped to convince her to don the ward before the coven found her.
The horse galloped through the night with Kariega crouched low over its withers, fistfuls of mane in his sweat slicked palms. Branches stung his chest, tall grasses whipped against his calves and bare ankles. The horse began to lather beneath him, but he did not ease the pace. When he got to the derelict great house, he leapt from Shepherd’s back before the horse had come to a complete stop.
Drawing his machete, he sprinted across the overgrown yard and up the steps. The doors were boarded shut with planks of sun-bleached wood which he swiftly split with the blade. Shouldering the door, he entered.
Inside, the house was dark and silent as a tomb. The floorboards groaned beneath his bare feet and with every step he left footprints in a previously undisturbed layer of ancient dust. He strained his ears for sounds but heard nothing. Perhaps she had not come here, he thought.
Slowly Kariega made his way down the long dark hallway. The hallway eventually opened to a large, high ceilinged circular room. At the base of the double staircase foyer, he found Katharine. Bound tightly atop a large table, she was unconscious and bleeding from bite marks all over her body. The tatters of her burned nightgown were bloody. Kariega approached cautiously; scanning the ceiling and the upper floors and began slicing through the ropes. When she was freed he tied the crucifix around her throat and threw her over his shoulder.
Turning around to make his way back down the hall and out of the house he found his way blocked by three women. They stood silent, gaunt, and pale in the moonlight that entered through holes in the high ceiling. It was obvious who they were, Katharine’s coven. Their lower jaws were smeared with her blood.
“Let me pass. You have drunk her nearly dead. She has been sufficiently punished,” Kariega said.
“Magician, do you dare instruct us on how to administer the matters of our coven?” said the woman on the right. “We will be the final arbiters of the sufficiency of her correction. Now set her down and we may allow you to crawl out of this place.”
Kariega set Katharine down gently and stood before the women, who now floated a foot above the rotted floorboards, the flames of their soucouyant birthright a dim mesmerizing halo around their bodies. They began circling Kariega and Katharine, taunting him.
“The child in her belly is an insult to us. We will see that it is scraped out of her,” one of the women shrieked.
Kariega cringed. He marshaled his power and whispered, “Shepherd, my guardian, come.”
None of the three women saw the massive lion enter the room behind them. The creature that used to be Kariega’s horse sprang onto the back of the nearest woman and bit into her skull with a crunch. Kariega used the moment of surprise to cut into the face of the second woman with his machete.
Shepherd sprang at the third soucouyant. The woman moved like lightning. She tore a section of rotted stair rail and hurled it at the airborne cat. The make-shift spear entered the creature’s chest with a wet sound and the immense cat bellowed in agony. The wound was mortal but the lion fought still, falling on and pinning the woman to the ground with its bulk. Kariega was engaged in a pitched battle with the soucouyant he had cut. He was already bleeding in several places where her sharp talons had slashed him. Shallow cuts crisscrossed his arms and chest.
It required the full extent of his skill and strength to fend her off. Kariega heard a noise from behind and half turned just in time to see the other living soucouyant yank the section of railing out of the dying lion and hurl it toward him. There was nothing he could do, she was too fast. Pain like fire bloomed in his body as the banister pierced his back and erupted through his chest.
Kariega crumpled to the floor and knew he was about to die. But perhaps there was a chance that he could secure the life of his love and the offspring she carried. He crawled towards the unconscious Katharine. The two remaining soucouyant mocked him as he inched toward her, leaving a trail of blood as he went.
He grabbed hold of Katharine’s foot and hauled himself forward so that he could press his lips to the limb, it was cold and clammy, but he needed to be in contact with her bare skin for this to work. Kariega could feel his strength bleeding out of him through the hole in his chest. He whispered against the pale skin of the sole of Katharine’s foot.
“A final gift, to you from me,
The Strength to bind,
The Eye to see
To you a gift do I bestow,
A spear to pierce…
…Our foes below
I gift the strength, which once was mine
My power wielded
Is now thine.”
Kariega’s eyes closed slowly. Katharine’s eyes shot open and with her awakening came knowing. She understood Kariega intimately, his fears, his joys, his love for her. It was an extreme sort of empathy, as if the man had lived his entire life inside her head.
She inherited his memories, his knowledge of the arcane, and his strength in witchcraft. She knew what he had done and she knew he was dead. She knew everything. Sorrow welled up in her chest. She knew it was her temper that had led to the death of her only friend and lover, the father of her unborn offspring.
The two remaining soucouyant stood above her, oblivious to the conference of power that had occurred. Katharine envisioned them bursting into flames and they obliged by exploding into twin pillars of white fire which, unlike their own soucouyant fires, burned their flesh.
They screamed and begged for mercy. Katharine gave them none. Though the fires burned fiercely it took more than an hour for the women to go silent. Katharine watched, sitting on the floor, with her hand on Kariega’s chest. When the women had been burned to ash she broke up floorboards with her bare hands and erected a pyre for Kariega right in the center of the room. She then climbed up to the roof and opened large hole in the ceiling above the pyre so that the heavens might bear witness to the passage of a great man.
When the preparations were done she laid Kariega and his lion next to each other on the pyre and called forth fire. Flames rose from the center of the pyre and quickly consumed the entire thing. Katharine stood watch, soot stained tears rolling down her face. She stayed until the fire burned out and the embers cooled. It was hard to leave the place, but eventually she had to go. She left the body of the soucouyant Shepherd had killed to rot where it fell, but she took the stake that had pierced Kariega’s body.
Four months later Katharine was in the African bush searching for Kariega’s mentor and teacher. It took her another six months to track the man down and when she finally found him, she stayed an additional year with the ancient little witchdoctor, learning from him and sharing her own knowledge. While there she slowed her gestation as soucouyant can, protecting her child in her belly until she returned from her journey
When she returned to Trinidad, she brought with her Kariega’s thirteen-year-old son, Onyeka, a son Kariega had father
ed a mere month before his exile and whom he had not known had existed. The boy had been harshly treated. As a result of his father’s exile and the subsequent death of the entire royal family, Onyeka and his mother had been forced to dwell on the fringes of village society, eking out a living. Eventually his mother had died, broken under the weight of cumulative hardships.
Katharine’s return was celebrated by the entire plantation and Kariega’s first son was introduced to the Order The four original Ordermen disdained interacting with Katherine, but they recognized that the boy, unlike Kariega, could be groomed in their image as the Order’s first initiate. Two years later Katharine gave birth to a boy. The child was born with a birthmark that looked like a ring of ravens in flight around his left wrist. Katharine named the child Tarik and from the very beginning the boy was special, the son of a reformed soucouyant and a dead obeah man.
Chapter 9
‘78 was the year of the woman…
they give the whole of 79’ to the children
but brother man Black Stalin say beware
‘81 in Trinidad is Vampire year
— "Vampire Year" by Stalin
Kamara lay semi-upright in a hammock clad only in her bra and her skirt. Her torn and bloody blouse was beyond salvage and had been discarded.
Kat had tended to her wounds with the deftness of a surgeon, cleaning the bites then pouring on a thick white liquid that smelled like camphor and burned like molten gold. After that she had soaked a clean cloth in a red scentless liquid and commanded Kamara to hold the cloth to the wound. The pain of the first treatment subsided as soon as the cloth touched her shoulder. Within moments Kamara felt vastly better. She peeked under the cloth and saw that the ragged bite marks were already half their original size.
Kamara followed Kat around the room with her eyes. When the soucouyant had seen to all the wounded she went to the section of the hut’s wall dedicated to insects and selected a jar filled with squirming larvae. One of the dead jumbies lay with the upper half of its body across the threshold of the doorway, its desiccated eyes frozen in a surly, sightless glare. Kat walked up to the body, turned it on to its back, and poured some of the larvae from the bottle into the mouth of the cadaver.
Everyone in the hut gasped when the corpse deflated like a balloon as the voracious larvae went to work. The creatures ate their way from the inside out, devouring everything. Within ten minutes all that was left were twenty fat pupae cocooned in hard brown casings lying on the porch. Kat scooped these up into a separate jar which she then set on her insect wall.
“What the hell are those things?” Voss said breaking the silence and gesturing to the jar full of larvae.
“Larvae from scarab beetles found in the Grey,” Kat replied. Voss nodded as if he understood completely. Kat then called to Tarik, handed him the jar of larvae, and told him to see to the rest of the corpses in the yard and collect the pupae when they were done feeding.
Kamara observed the boy as he left the house with Agrippa at his heels. The child was fearless, observant, and never hesitated to obey Kat’s instructions. Kamara mused that his life must be quite odd for him to maintain such gravitas under the current circumstances.
Rohan approached her and laid a hand on the nape of her neck. “Are you all right?” he asked in a low voice, concern creasing his forehead.
“I liked that blouse, now it’s covered with mendo spit,” Kamara replied, imitating Rohan’s customary flippancy and grinning. Rohan however would not rise to the bait.
“You can’t continue coming along on these excursions” he replied gravely.
“Firstly, you were the one who insisted that we all come rather than splitting up, and secondly, why would I want to miss all this excitement? Besides no one twisted your arm and made you tell me all the company secrets, Rohan.” She smiled and he smiled back.
Company secrets. Kamara thought back to when she had met Rohan two years earlier. At the time she was a first-year law student at the University of the West Indies Hugh Wooding School. After a late night of studying she was heading toward the car park when a large shape erupted from the shadows around the paved walkway, tackled her, and pinned her to the ground.
Her first thought was that it was a large dog but even in the darkness she could tell that it wore clothes. She struggled hard, screaming for help, but its grip was like a metal vise. Its maw descended toward her face as she strained backward to delay the inevitable. Then, just when all seemed lost, someone pulled the creature off her. Both the beast and her rescuer tumbled into a dense Crown of Thorns hedge. She could not see the scuffle, but from what she could hear it was intense and violent. Then there was quiet and a dreadlocked young man picked his way out of the thorny shrubbery.
He wore a wry smile when he said, “Those stray dogs are really becoming a problem on campus.”
A lawyer in training, Kamara prided herself on her ability to spot a lie. “That was not a dog,” she replied.
“It was a dog.” The stranger responded dismissively, but Kamara would not be put off.
“It held me down as if it had hands. I would believe that it was an ape of some sort before I believe it was a dog. Tell me what it was.”
“Fine, it was an escaped baboon. Why do you think I know any better than you do? It is very dark in that hedge. Besides whatever it was it’s gone now. I can walk you to your car to make sure no more baboons or dogs attack you.”
On the walk back to the car Kamara saw that the man’s arms were covered in scratches from the thorny bush. Then she noticed that he was dripping a trail of blood from a gash along his ribs.
“The baboon-dog bit you and it looks bad, let me see it.” Kamara said with genuine concern. The stranger glanced at the tear in his shirt and flesh as if he had not felt the wound before.
“I’ll be fine, I have been bitten by many dogs. Once I see you to your car I’ll take care of myself.”
Kamara intuitively knew something was different about the man, and curiosity about the truth of the encounter ate at her, but she decided not to press him further. When they got to the car, she asked for his name, he hesitated a moment before responding. “Rohan Le Clerc,” he said.
Then she ventured hers without waiting for him to ask. As they were about to part ways, she invited him to lunch as a way of saying thanks and he declined politely. She insisted and he accepted her invitation after the fifth repetition. She got into her car, drove around the block, parked, got out, and took another route on foot back to the scene of the attack. From a bush she watched as Rohan and four other men dismembered and buried the corpse of a man-sized wolfish creature clad in the ragged remains of trousers and a shirt that looked like no animal she had ever seen. Kamara’s heart pounded. When she met Rohan at lunch few days later, she cut to the chase.
“Your baboon-dog was wearing trousers?”
Rohan grinned. “You’re not very good at sneaking, Kamara. We knew you were hiding in the bushes.”
“You’re not afraid that I will tell someone what I saw?”
“Tell someone what exactly? Do you know what you saw?”
“I think it was a lagahoo,” she replied matter-of-factly using the name of a creature from stories her grandmother used to tell her. She studied his face for a reaction. Rohan had schooled his expression quickly, but the brief and slight widening of his eyes told her all she needed to know. He laughed off her suggestion.
“A law student should know better. Lagahoo are old wives’ tale. It was nothing but a stray dog, dressed up maybe, as a prank.”
“You took great pains to cut it up and bury it, Rohan. Just tell me the truth.” Kamara had been raised single handedly by her mother, a stern, hard-working woman who had taught her to take no bullshit, particularly from men.
Rohan looked into her eyes for a moment, “Truth is a cold, dark, lonely mountaintop. The valley of lies is comforting, verdant, and warm.”
“Where is that quote from?” she asked.
“My grandfather
,” he replied.
Kamara felt like she was on the edge of a precipice. The reality she believed in would not survive a leap off the edge. The pit of her stomach felt empty and queasy. She could turn back now and return to the warm comforting valley, or she could press onward, the reward for which might be knowledge of a frightening and alien world fundamentally and dangerously different from the one she knew. “I want to know the truth,” she replied.
Rohan studied her for a moment and then he told her everything. He told her about the Grey the Absolute and the Ether, about lagahoo and soucouyant and the Watchers Guild and the three houses. He told her about blood magic and about astral travel, his words quickening and his enthusiasm rising as if the telling was a catharsis. When he was done, he asked her if she believed. Strangely enough she found that she did believe what he had told her.
“I have never told a valley dweller the truth, and I’m not quite sure why I shared these ancient secrets with you. By any rate you will probably be placed on psychiatric evaluation if you ever told anyone else, and now you’ll probably jump at every other shadow.” She knew he was right.
“Not all of the creatures are out to get you. They are like men, some are good, some are bad. The main difference is, instead of guns and knives the bad ones use fangs, claws, and magic. The majority walk around among us passing for human to all but the best-trained eyes. A couple of your girlfriends might be soucouyant.” He grinned and she shuddered.
They began to see each other on a regular basis. Eventually she brought him home to meet her mother and he brought her to Stone House to meet Isa, Kimani, and Dorian. Now two years later, he was standing there with a concerned look on his face, probably regretting inviting her up to the summit of Mount Truth.
***
By now all the wounded had been tended to and attentions gradually refocused on the obeah woman who still lay unconscious on the floor. Kat selected a small figurine from her wall of shelves, a carving of an elephant seated on its haunches. The carving was fashioned from a creamy brown material that could only be very old ivory. It was small, and would easily fit atop the cap of a soda bottle. The features of the carving were worn smooth as if it had been handled for generations.
