by Derry Sandy
***
Hold the porthole, Kat had commanded before vanishing into thin air with Ghita. The soucouyant obviously had a good deal of misplaced confidence in them. They were battered, bruised, and thoroughly exhausted. Their superior flesh was healing with almost mortal sloth. They needed rest. Clarence and D’mara looked gaunt as their bodies self-cannibalized to heal the fresh wounds they sustained beating the lagahoo back through the hole. Voss knew he looked similarly frail.
The porthole was open to a clearing in a forest of gigantic trees. The sun kissed the horizon and in the gloom cast by the unfamiliar woods, dark silhouettes congregated, their eyes aglow. The people who had shot the arrows had either been killed or had retreated to the village. Voss, Clarence and D’mara were alone to face whatever was coming.
A cool breeze came through from the Grey, smelling and tasting like no breeze that had blown on earth for millennia. Something about the wind called to Voss. It tugged at the fibers of his being. He felt a desire to cross the threshold, not as an aggressor but as a brother. He wanted to join the shared consciousness of the greyborn.
“Do you feel that?” Clarence asked.
“Yes. The Grey is calling to us. We have more in common with them than with man.”
More dark shapes appeared, eye shine glittering in the twilight murk. Suddenly Voss realized what was going on, they were being given a chance to join the greyborn or die defending the hole. A voice called to them, speaking directly into their minds asking; Why do you stand in their defense?
Voss pondered that question. Why should he stand with humanity, die for them in this bespelled room? So many human beings were liars and cheats and worse. But he remembered that long ago, a poor rice farmer and his wife had adopted him as their seventh child and raised him as one of their own. That spirit of kindness was worth defending.
When the trio made no move to cross the threshold the psychic voice spoke again. You have made your choice to die.
Creatures began stepping out of the gloomy forest and across the threshold, lagahoo, soucouyant, Duen, trolls, blue devils, faeries and other creatures that Voss did not even recognize. They were the strongest of the greyborn and thus the first able to cross. Soon the lesser greyborn would follow, the leviathan, the thunderbird, the coursing grey-dogs of the fields and forests. Mankind would be overwhelmed.
Voss roared at the oncoming masses, knowing that there was no way they could stem this tide. He felt a liquid rush around his ankles. Glancing down and back he saw that from beneath the door white liquid seeped into the room. The liquid coalesced into a pale twisted humanoid form that Voss knew only too well. Dozens of maboya rose all around them. Voss moved to strike the closest one, but a woman’s voice shouted, “Stop! They are under my control.”
Kamara entered the room accompanied by Ghita who held the door open. Maboya poured in. Voss, Clarence, and D’mara fell back and allowed the milk-white denizens to meet the onrushing tide of greyborn.
***
The big double door opened slowly moved by an unseen hand. A cold, dry wind escaped as if from a subterranean crypt that had been sealed for a century. Light from the hallway halted at the threshold in a sharp umbral line. The restless little spirits stirred. Their frail voices spoke at her ear, cold breaths whispered down the nape of her neck saying Come. Go. Stay. Flee…
Though Kat could not see into the room, she felt the power. In the unseen depths of the room someone was weaving a rotted tapestry of magik. It was not just the magic necessary to keep the porthole expanding but other things, black things, grave magic, necromancy, the sorcery of the Loa. It a dangerous cocktail of witchcraft and obeah much of which should never be done at all, let alone simultaneously.
Kat allowed the soucouyant fire to well up from within her. It sprang to life shrouding her in molten blue halo like a low gas flame. White flames like candle light burned in her eyes giving her a second sight that penetrated the ossified gloom.
The room was thick with familiar spirits. They crawled the walls, they hovered in the air, they thrashed violently between the ceiling and the floor. Now that she could see them she could also hear them. They wailed, they cried, they laughed, they cackled. The room was like some low outpost of hell, forgotten by gods and devils alike, a repository for all the worthless souls undeserving of paradise yet insufficiently significant to warrant proper punishment.
The ghosts were so numerous that their dark essence absorbed the light from the hallway, leaving the entrance to the room a solid wall of black to those without the third eye. To Kat the interior of the room was a restless maelstrom of tormented beings. Kat had never seen anything like it in her centuries of existence. She had never felt power like that which was being woven in the room. It was not just the quantity of power but its malevolence. This type of power could raise a thousand dead and make them dance.
It had been many decades since Kat had prayed. She had become so self-sufficient that she believed that any prayer she uttered would only clutter the celestial airwaves with its non-essential nature. But now prayer seemed appropriate and she felt no shame in it. She prayed to the ancestors, to the Christian god, to the good spirits of the Loa, to Krishna and Allah and a hundred other deities long forgotten. Then she drew power from her son. He would expect that. She drew power and stoked her fire. When she had drawn her fill, she stepped into the room cautious but without fear, bolstered by her hatred for Onyeka and her resolve to kill him.
The sensation of entering the room was like being lowered into a cold bath of congealed blood. The air was thick, cloying and foul. Phantoms brushed across her skin like smoke from a mosquito coil. It was hard to breathe, and the fog of ghosts limited her visibility to a few feet. She peered into the obscurity looking for Onyeka. Obeah swelled in the room. The walls creaked as the black magic tested their strength.
“You came for me again, Katharine, just like when I was a boy.” The voice came from everywhere, the spirits spoke in Onyeka’s voice. It was powerful display of the reach of his necromancy. The delivery was disjointed, sometimes spoken by one ghost, sometimes spoken by several.
“Yes, I came for you, but this time I’m not here to do you a kindness, Onyeka.”
“Brave words from a tigress that has blundered into a trap.” The word ‘trap’ echoed and faded.
“How did you escape death when your guild executed you?” Kat said, hoping to buy time before the attack that she knew would come.
“Wouldn’t you like to know?”
“Yes, I would.”
A multitude of unclean spirits chuckled.
“You are not as smart as you think you are, Kat. Maybe I was unaware you would burn through the drug or maybe I knew and predicted you would play along to find me. Maybe I wanted you right here right now. After all I also fooled you into thinking that I was in the body of Lucien Sardis as opposed to simply enslaving his soul and forcing him to do my bidding. Perhaps I’m not even in this room.”
“You are here, Onyeka. This is too much power to control remotely.”
“You want to know how I escaped dying. I took possession of one of my executioners. Just before my body died I jumped out of my unfortunate corpse and into his. It took everything I had to accomplish that and afterward I was weak for a long time. He did not even know I was there. I was a fly on the wall as he went around accepting sexual favors from women and men in exchange for silly potions. I was there when he manipulated some small village’s council members and while he performed sham ceremonies for money. His behavior is part of the reason for obeah’s decline. The practitioners lost respect for the craft. When I regained my strength I forced him out of his own body and bottled his soul. He’s flying around here somewhere in the room, along with Lucien, Lazarus and a thousand other souls I have captured and enslaved.”
“Crayfish told me it was a frog you possessed not a man,” Kat sneered.
“There is little difference between the two, so the story was not entirely inaccurate.”
&n
bsp; “Do you even know what you are doing? There is too much power here. What do you hope to achieve?”
“Why did you come for me in Africa? You, a small light-skinned woman, fair enough to pass for white, out in the bush, searching for the son of an exiled witch-doctor? That was dangerous, even for one with your gifts. Was it out of a sense of duty to my father?”
“I have told you the story many times, Onyeka, it has not changed. I love your father fiercely, and I caused his death. So yes, once I found out he had a son, I felt honor-bound to find you, to bring you back, protect you and teach you his craft. To raise you as if you were my own son.”
“My father. Kariega was possibly the most powerful sorcerer in Africa, yet he was sold into slavery. You Katharine are easily ten times stronger than any human being, you grow neither old nor ill, yet you abide by their laws, you even protect them. They should bow to our kind.”
“Your father respected the law and was aware of his limits. Out of his exile and enslavement came the Order. I know that after Kariega was exiled your life was not ideal, I know the people of your village treated you with scorn, but you bring shame to your father.”
“Scorn? Scorn would have been an improvement Katharine. My mother and I were treated like living latrines, spat upon and abused until she died from the shame. All the while Kariega was playing at being a slave master with his foreigner lover. My father made the choice that led to his death. In the new world only the fittest shall rule.”
“You are a fool. The Grey will swallow the Absolute. Most human beings will die and the rest will be turned to greyborn. There will be nothing left to lord over. No one will remain to witness obeah’s renaissance. Can you visualize Sally saleswoman or Andy the accountant facing down the spiny-bear or the thunderbird? By the time the human armies mobilize it will already be too late.”
“Not if they come to me in time.”
“They don’t know who you are, Onyeka. Will presidents look you up in the yellow pages. Are you listed under ‘lagahoo exterminators’? Besides, you will need an army of your own greyborn to defeat the onslaught.”
“I have an army at my disposal.”
Kat continued to move through the poltergeist soup. She wondered what he meant when he said he had an army. Then it began to dawn on her, an explanation of why he was using so much grave-magic.
“You’re going to raise the dead to fight?”
“Now you are starting to think. And you’re close but not completely correct. Packs of lagahoo would roll through animated dead like a buzz saw through canvas. Maboya would be great, they are strong and savage but difficult to control in large numbers. The problem of how to beat back the greyborn once the porthole was open troubled me for years. I discovered the solution purely by accident. When Gershon accidentally killed Ghita, her soul didn’t cross to the Ether instead it retained some of its life and tried to go to the Grey. I caught her before she could do so. She was something different, not quite alive but not quite dead. Even ordinary humans can sometimes see her. She can touch things when she wishes. She is literally on the cusp of being alive. Moreover, I discovered that while in the Absolute she is stronger than any greyborn. When the greyborn begin to kill I intend to capture the souls as they try to cross to the Grey and press them to service by turning them onto the very creatures that so shortly slayed them.”
“You cannot juggle all those balls simultaneously Onyeka. Too many moving parts. Some part of this plan will fail.”
“If it fails it fails. We have been chatting too long, now you must join my friends Lucien and Lazarus.”
A massive form broke through the fog of ghosts and charged toward her. It was a large hairy beast with a white scar along the side of its head. She recognized the yellow eyes. It was Onyeka’s servant, Gershon. Apart from his eyes nothing else was recognizable as human. The beast was broad-chested and thickly-muscled with a snout filled with tusks and fangs. Kat hurled fire at it. She expected the fire to cling to it like liquid and burn until she willed it to stop, but the balls of fire hit the beast and extinguished almost immediately. She dodged the shape-sifter as it charged and leapt upon its back like a lioness upon a buffalo. The animal immediately sprang upward slamming her between its back and the ceiling. Kat held on. She bit into the beast’s throat until she broke a major vessel. She hadn’t needed to drink blood ever since Kariega had freed her. But blood drinking was still her birthright, and shapeshifter blood, filled with power, was like a peppered steak of some exotic meat.
The beast clawed at her trying to yank her off its back, but a soucouyant’s bite severely and immediately weakens the victim. She drank and the beast’s form shrank to that of a man, a small ugly man. When she had drunk the corpse dry, she yanked at its head violently snapping the man’s neck then dropping him to the floor.”
“Katharine. Gershon was the closest thing to a friend that I ever had.”
Kat turned around and there was Onyeka like a younger more severe version of his father. He hovered above the ground, a specter.
“Well, like I always say, don’t leave your best friends lying in the driveway if you don’t want them to get run over when dad backs the car out.” Kat wiped blood from her chin with the back of her hand and licked it off in one long stroke, she knew she was being cruel, she did not care. “I tried to be your friend, Onyeka. But you could not overcome your childish anger, you never even tried. So here we are centuries later and you are still the same petulant, arrogant child I smuggled out of Africa and tried to raise as my own.”
“I have always liked your body, Katharine, so strong, so powerful. Maybe I will use it for a couple centuries while I torture your soul.”
“Try me, boy. You are not half the man your father was and he gifted me all his power when he died.”
Onyeka flew at her so fast she could not move out of the way in time. He speared into her body. He was inside her, under her skin like some massive wriggling invertebrate. He was trying to possess her, to force her out of her own body. He was strong. He had done this to a thousand other men and women, all of whom were now hovering in the room in a maelstrom of ectoplasm. She felt him expanding inside her, filling her, she was losing control.
She knew what needed to be done. There was no one to perform the proper ceremonies, no grave, no one to keep watch. But she was full of powerful blood and she was connected to her son so perhaps that connection would bring her back. She embraced Onyeka’s spirit as tightly as possible, weaving her own essence around him. Then she fumbled in her pockets for the leviathan tooth blade Kariega had given her. Before Onyeka realized what was happening she plunged the knife into her own heart and slammed it home with the heel of her palm. Too late he realized what was happening. He tried to escape her flesh, but her essence clung to his and they were both dragged down into the soucouyant sleep, into Limbo.
***
The maboya were all but impossible to control, each one rebelled against her, attempting to break free of her influence. Kamara felt like a small child trying to wield a knight’s broadsword to herd a bunch of rabid cats. The maboya could be pointed and unleashed but that was about it. She stood on the outskirts of the fight. Voss, Clarence, and D’mara formed a ring around her and she concentrated on maintaining some modicum of control over the pale monsters.
Lisa and a young man lay at her feet unconscious. Rohan sat near her, whispering encouragement even though he was himself in dire need of medical attention. The fight was brutal and it was impossible to tell who was winning, but the relatively narrow width of the opening to the Grey helped them staunch the tide of greyborn. Then the porthole winked out of existence with a blinding flash and a sound like a thunderclap. Many maboya were trapped in the Grey when the hole closed and many greybeasts were trapped on their side of hole. The sudden closing of the porthole broke Kamara’s concentration and she lost control over the maboya.
“We have to go. I don’t have them anymore,” she said as one of the creatures turned on Voss. He snatched it
by the throat and broke its spine, but it began healing even as he tossed it to the floor.
Most of the maboya were still engaged in the fight against the creatures from the Grey, but Kamara knew that sooner or later they would all become more interested in human flesh.
Voss and Clarence punched a hole through the press of bodies as they rushed towards the door. D’mara grabbed Lisa and the unconscious man by their shirt collars and dragged them after the vanguard. Kamara brought up the rear supporting a limping Rohan and holding her sword.
They made it through the double doors and shut it behind them.
“I cannot believe we escaped that,” Clarence said doubled over, hands on his knees, breathing hard.
“Yes, let them kill each other in there. We can clear out the survivors when it’s over,” Voss said.
Ghita materialized from thin air wearing a concerned look. “All of you come with me. The soucouyant has done something very reckless.”
“Are we going to do something with the door so that the maboya don’t slip out?” Clarence asked.
“Clarence and D’mara, stay here and guard the door.” Ghita said. “But do not risk your lives needlessly. Nothing can leave this place unless shown the way out.”
Lisa bolted upright screaming as if in the grip of a night terror. Kamara knelt next to her holding her and trying to calm her. The other man remained unconscious.
Ghita led those who could follow, to another part of the house.
***
This time there was no peaceful awakening. Katharine’s arrival in limbo was abrupt and painful. She bolted upright on the beach sands in the midst of a violent hurricane. The waters of the glassy sea churned and heaved in massive green swells capped with white. Desperately angry winds drove sand and sea blast to sting her naked skin and from above, rain fell in blinding sheets that forced a chorus from the leaves of the jungle canopy.
Onyeka was not with her. Had she really managed to entwine his spirit with her own as she fell into limbo? Had he broken free? Spirit travel was by no means an exact science, and she had transgressed every rule regarding the sleep. Could a strong spirit like Onyeka be dragged into limbo at all?
