Cross Current - Kling Christine - Страница 63

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You don’t have to know the language to know when men are talking about sex. It’s in their eyes, in the way they laugh. I remembered the Capitaine’s little game with my zipper on the ship. I began to understand why Solange was acting as though she feared she would never see me again, and I imagined that anyone looking at the side of my neck would see my pulse pounding in the veins there.

Malheur seated himself with a flourish on a big wooden spool next to the altar. The spool’s wood was weathered to a silvery gray. Probably, it had once been used to run wire around the island, but now it served as a throne for the leader of what seemed to be shaping up to be a Voodoo party.

Solange and I were still standing against the wall about ten feet from the door. I squeezed her hand, and she looked up at me. Inclining my head in the direction of the door, I raised my eyebrows slightly to ask her if she understood. She nodded. Very slowly, we began inching our way toward the exit.

Malheur lined up several bottles and clay pots and produced a mortar and pestle from beneath the table. He began adding ingredients from the pots—dried leaves and dark, foul-smelling liquids—and grinding them together. After pouring some of the rum into the stone bowl, he lit the mixture with a wooden match. He waved his arms in the air over the blue flames and spoke aloud, but his voice was blotted out by the drums that had just started. I had thought the drums at Mambo Racine’s were loud, but these were brutal. It felt as though the drummers were beating directly on my body.

I pressed my hand against my chest and felt for the pouch that Racine had given me. The drums, candles, lanterns, potions, real human bones—these produced some kind of irrational fear. Potions couldn’t hurt me. To be afraid of a six-foot-four-inch murderer was perfectly logical, but it was the blank stare of that skull that made me want to clutch the pouch and start talking to La Sirene.

Malheur had his back to us, but because he was sitting at an anlle, I could see part of his face. We had halved the distance to the door when he called out my name.

“Seychelle Sullivan,” he said, his voice loud enough to be heard over the drums.

Gil appeared at my side. He grasped my arm and put an end to the progress we had made toward the exit. He shoved me in front of Malheur. I never let go of Solange’s hand.

Malheur’s eyes looked really out of it—drunk or high. The look was not the same I’d seen on the faces of the people at Racine’s who claimed to have been possessed by the lwa.

“The bokor is gone. I am Bwon Samedi.”

He grabbed at the front of my shirt and pulled me down to him. I tried to twist out of his grip, to turn my head aside, but he just held me there, my face not two inches from his. I could feel and smell his breath on my cheek. He didn’t try to kiss me or bite my nose off—he didn’t do anything. The longer we stayed like that, the more frightened I grew. What was he doing? Then he leaned in until his nose almost touched my cheek and his nostrils flared. He was sniffing me. I squirmed when his nose actually ground into my ear, and he made grunting noises like a foraging pig. Then he leaned back, though he still held the front of my shirt. I felt a second of relief before he smacked me open-handed across the face.

I was dazed, couldn’t see a thing out of my left eye, and probably couldn’t have told you my own name. I stumbled back, the room spinning, but I was determined to stay upright. Too late, I realized I had let go of that little hand.

I heard her call out over the noise of the pounding drums and saw the blur of her yellow tank top and bright red shorts as the Haitian crewman disappeared with her into the other room.

“Solange!” I cried as I started toward the spot where the blur of color had disappeared.

The second slap rocked me even harder, and I tasted the blood where my teeth had pierced the inside of my cheek. The pain must have shown on my face because Malheur threw back his head and laughed again. He was standing now, and he motioned to Gil, who stepped in and grabbed my arm again in his viselike grip. I shook my head to try to clear my blurry vision. There seemed to be only one other room in the house, and though I called out her name, I could barely hear my own voice inside my head. Malheur lifted the bowl that contained the mixture he had cooked up earlier, then shouted something to the drummers, and the rhythm grew even faster. Gil dragged me out the front door and onto the landing. Malheur followed, bringing one of the kerosene lanterns to light up the clearing. Whatever he intended to do to me, he wanted an audience to appreciate it.

The drumming stopped and the silence was nearly as painful as the noise had been. My head had taken too many blows; it felt as though my brain had been jarred loose. The hiss of the pressure lantern was the only sound in the night air when Gil pressed me against the railing at the edge of the landing. Though my vision was blurred, I could still make out the countless white eyes looking up from the dark ground. Malheur held the stone bowl over his head, and he began talking to them in Creole. In the flickering lantern light, it grew clear to me that this man, this bokor, thought himself some kind of charismatic leader. Power. And fear. These were what he fed on. The machete on his belt, the potion in his hands, the death images on his hat and glasses—these were the instruments of fear he used to gain power over these people, just as he had done years ago in Haiti under the Duvalier regime.

As my eyes grew more accustomed to the dark, I realized that, from the balcony, we were able to see across the tops of the mangroves to the ocean beyond. We’d entered on the west side of the island, and now I could see open water ahead through the mangroves. I knew South Bimini wasn’t very big, but I didn’t realize that we had nearly traversed the width of the island on our canal passage. As Malheur continued his speech in Creole, I scanned the water off to our right and understood that I was looking at the Great Bahama Bank that stretched out eastward toward Andros. And there, traveling not more than a quarter mile offshore, I spotted the dim light of a small boat. I wondered if it was Rusty.

“Don’t look this way,” a voice whispered right next to my ear.

I gave a barely perceptible nod of my head.

“Don’t swallow,” Gil whispered, so quietly that I could barely hear him over Malheur’s rantings.

“What?”

Malheur abruptly stopped speaking and motioned to Gil to bring me closer to him. Gil grabbed my ponytail and yanked my head back, while Malheur’s huge ring-covered hand pulled on my chin to open my mouth. The move took only seconds and surprised me. I couldn’t clamp my jaw shut in time. Malheur splashed his mixture on my face, getting equal parts down my throat and all over my shirt and hair. The taste was foul, and as I gagged and choked, some of it went down my windpipe. When Gil finally let go of my hair, I bent forward from the waist, coughing and trying to spit it all out on the ground. But I knew, as I gagged and tried to make myself vomit, that I had swallowed some as well.

Malheur spun around and went into the house, calling out instructions to Gil.

Gil let go of my arm for a few seconds, walked to the door, and checked to make certain it was closed. Malheur had taken the lantern with him. It was now pitch-black outside. My coughing had just started to subside when Gil emerged from the dark, grabbed me, pried my jaws apart, and stuck his fingers down my throat. I heaved what tasted like pure stomach acid, and Gil jumped back while I puked over the railing.

“Geez, Gil,” I said. My throat burned. Then I had another, milder coughing fit.

“He uses drugs. He wants the people to think he’s a hot shit Voodoo priest, that he’s making people into zombies. He makes it look like a potion, then he just mixes in some drugs—roofies. Makes people kinda paralyzed. He does shit to ’em then. Plays with ’em.”

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