Wild Cards IV

by George R. R. Martin

Chrysalis didn’t like it, even though Mambo Julia assured her airily that she would be perfectly safe, that the loa would watch over her. For further protection—unnecessary as it was, Mambo Julia said—the priestess gave her a small bundle wrapped in oilskin.

  “This is a paquets congo,” Mambo Julia told her. “I made it myself. It contains very strong magic that will protect you from evil. If you are threatened, open it and spread its contents all around you. But do not let any touch yourself! It is strong magic, very, very strong, and you can only use it in this simplest way.”

  With that, Mambo Julia sent her off with the chasseurs. There were ten or twelve of them, young to middle-aged. Baptiste, Mambo Julia’s man, was among them. They continually chattered and joked among themselves as if they were going on a picnic, and they treated Chrysalis with the utmost deference and respect, helping her over the rough spots on the trail. Two carried robes they had taken from the zobop column earlier that evening.

  The foot trail they followed led to a rough road where an ancient vehicle, a minibus or van of some kind, was parked. It hardly looked capable of moving, but the engine started right up after everyone had piled in. The trip was slow and bumpy, but they made better time when they eventually turned off onto a wider, graded road that led back to Port-au-Prince.

  The city was quiet, although they did occasionally pass other vehicles. It struck Chrysalis that they were traveling through familiar scenery, and she suddenly realized that they were in Bolosse, the slum section of Port-au-Prince where the hospital she’d visited that morning—it seemed like a thousand years ago—was located.

  The men sang songs, chattered, laughed, and told jokes. It was hard to believe that they were planning to assassinate the most powerful man in the Haitian government, a man who was reputedly an evil sorcerer as well. They were acting more as if they were going to a ball game. It was either a remarkable display of bravado, or the calming effect of her presence as Madame Brigitte. Whatever caused their attitude, Chrysalis didn’t share it. She was scared stiff.

  The driver suddenly pulled over and silence fell as he parked the minibus on a narrow street of dilapidated buildings, pointed, and said something in Creole. The chasseurs began to disembark, and one courteously offered Chrysalis a hand down. For a moment she thought of running, but saw that Baptiste was keeping a wary, if inconspicuous, eye on her. She sighed to herself and joined the line of men as they walked quietly up the street.

  It was a strenuous climb up a steep hill. After a moment Chrysalis realized that they were heading toward the ruins of a fort that she had first noticed when they’d passed through the area earlier in the day. Fort Mercredi, Mambo Julia had called it. It had looked picturesque in the morning. Now it was a dark, looming wreck with an aura of brooding menace about it. The column stopped in a small copse of trees clustered in front of the ruins, and two chasseurs, one of them Baptiste, changed into the zobop robes and masks. Baptiste courteously motioned Chrysalis forward, and she took a deep breath, willed her legs to stop trembling, and went on. Baptiste took her arm above her elbow, ostensibly to show that she was a prisoner, but she was grateful for the warmth of a human touch. The shaft of night had returned to her heart, but it had grown, had spread until it felt like a dark, icy curtain that had totally enveloped her chest.

  The fortress was encircled by a dry moat that had a dilapidated wooden bridge spanning it. They were challenged as they reached the bridge by a voice that shouted a question in Creole. Baptiste answered satisfactorily with a curt password—more information, Chrysalis guessed, wrenched from the unfortunate zobop who’d fallen into the hands of the Bizango—and they crossed the bridge.

  Two men wearing the semiofficial blue suit of the Tonton Macoutes were lounging on the other side, their dark glasses resting in their breast pockets. Baptiste told them some long, involved story and, looking impressed, they passed them on through the outer defenses of the citadel. They were challenged again in the courtyard beyond, and again passed on, this time led into the interior of the decrepit fort by one of the second pair of guards.

  Chrysalis found it maddening not to understand what was being said around her. The tension was growing higher, her heart colder, as fear wound her tighter than a compressed spring. There was nothing she could do, though, but endure it, and hope, however hopelessly, for the best.

  The interior of the fortress seemed to be in moderately good repair. It was lit, medievally enough, by infrequent torches in wall niches. The walls and flooring were stone, dry and cool to the touch. The corridor ended at a railless spiral staircase of crumbling stone. The Tonton Macoute led them downward.

  Images of a dank dungeon began to dance in Chrysalis’s mind. The air took on a damp feel and a mildewy smell. The staircase itself was slippery with unidentifiable ooze and difficult to negotiate in the sandals made from bits of old automobile tires that Mambo Julia had given her. Torches were infrequent, and the pools of light they threw didn’t overlap, so they often had to pass through patches of total darkness.

  The staircase ended in a large open space that had only a few uncomfortable-looking bits of wooden furniture in it. A series of chambers debouched off this area, and it was to one of these that they were led.

  The room was twenty feet on a side and lit better than the corridors through which they’d just passed, but the ceiling, corners, and some spots along the back wall were all in darkness. The dancing light thrown by the torches made it difficult to discern details, and after her first glance inside the room, Chrysalis knew that was probably for the best.

  It was a torture chamber, lined with antique devices that looked well cared for and recently used. An iron maiden lay half-open against one wall, the spikes in its interior coated by flakes of either rust or blood. A table loaded down with impedimenta such as pokers and cleavers and scalpels and thumb and foot screws stood next to what Chrysalis imagined was a rack. She didn’t know for certain because she’d never seen one, never thought she would see one, never, ever, wanted to see one.

  She looked away from the instruments of torture and focused on the group of half a dozen men clustered in the rear of the room: Two were Tonton Macoutes, enjoying the proceedings. The others were Digger Downs and Dorian Wilde, the bull-man who had led the zobop column, and Charlemagne Calixte. Downs was shackled in a wall niche next to a moldering skeleton. Wilde was the center of everyone’s attention.

  A stout, thick beam stuck out from the dungeon’s rear wall, close to the ceiling, parallel to the floor. A block and tackle hung from the beam and a rope descended from the sharp, wicked-looking metal hook at the bottom of the block and tackle set. Dorian Wilde was dangling from the rope by his arms. He was trying to haul himself up, but lacked the muscular strength to do so. He couldn’t even get a proper grip on the coarse hemp with the mass of tentacles that was his right hand. Sweating, wild-eyed, and straining, he swayed desperately while Calixte operated a ratcheted hand crank that lowered the rope until the bottoms of Wilde’s naked feet were hanging just above a bed of hot glowing coals burning in a low brazier that had been placed below the gibbet. Wilde would desperately swing his feet away from the searing heat, Calixte would crank him up and give him a brief respite, then lower him again. He stopped when the bull-man glanced toward the front of the room, noticed Chrysalis, and let out a bellow.

  Calixte looked at her and their eyes met. His expression was wildly exultant, and he was sweating profusely, though it was damply cool in the dungeon. He smiled and said something in Creole to the men in the background, who sprang forward and removed Wilde from the gibbet. He then spoke to Baptiste and the other chasseur. Baptiste must have answered him satisfactorily, for he nodded, then dismissed them with a curt word and a gesture of his head.

  They bowed and started to walk away. Chrysalis took a single instinctive step to follow them, and then the bull-man was before her, breathing heavily and eyeing her strangely. His erection, she noted sickly, was still rampant.

  “Well,” Calixte growle
d in English. “We are all together again.” He came to Chrysalis, put a hand on the bull’s shoulder, and pushed him away. “We were having a bit of amusement. The blanc offended me and I was teaching him some manners.” He nodded at Wilde, who was huddled on the damp flagstone paving, heaving great shuddering breaths. Calixte never took his eyes off Chrysalis. They were bright and fevered, burning with unspeakable excitement and pleasure. “You also have been difficult.” He plucked at the scar tissue that glinted glassily in the torchlight. He seemed deep in mad thought. “You need, I think, a lesson also.” He seemed to make up his mind. “He’ll have the others. I don’t think he’d mind if we used you up. Taureau.” He turned to the bull-man, spoke some words in Creole.

  Chrysalis scarcely understood him, even though he spoke English. His words were thick and blurry, even more so than usual. He was either very drunk, very stoned, or very mad. Perhaps, she realized, all three. She was frantic with terror. The chasseurs weren’t supposed to leave, she thought wildly. They were supposed to kill Calixte! Her heart beat faster than the drums she’d heard sounding through the Haitian night. The dark fear centered in her chest threatened to flow out and overwhelm her entire being. For a moment she teetered on the thin edge of irrationality, and then Taureau came forward, snorting and drooling, one massive hand unbuttoning the fly of his jeans, and Chrysalis knew what she had to do.

  She clutched the packet that Mambo Julia had given her and with frantic, shaking fingers pulled off the paper wrapping, exposing a small leather sack closed by a drawstring. She ripped open the mouth of the sack and with trembling hands threw it and its contents at Taureau.

  The sack hit him in the face and he walked right into a cloud of fine, grayish powder that billowed out from it. It coated his hands, arms, chest, and face. He stopped for a moment, snorted, shook his head, then kept right on coming.

  Chrysalis broke. She turned with a sob and started to run, thinking incoherently that she should have known better, that Mambo Julia was a conniving fraud, that what was about to happen was nothing compared to what she would experience in a lifetime of domination by Calixte, and then she heard a horrible, bellowing scream that froze every nerve, muscle, and sinew in her body.

  She turned. Taureau was standing still, but shivering from head to toe as every massive muscle in his body spasmed. His eyes nearly bulged from his head as he stared at Chrysalis and screamed again, a horrible, drawn-out wail that wasn’t even remotely human. His hands clenched and unclenched, and then he began to rake at his face, tearing long furrows of meat away from his cheeks with his thick, blunt fingernails, howling all the while like a damned soul burning.

  A memory flashed through Chrysalis’s mind, a terse recollection of a cool, dark bar, a delightful drink, and a short Tachyon speech on Haitian herbal medicine. Mambo Julia’s paquets congo contained no magic powder, no concoction compounded during a fearful ritual and consecrated to the dark voodoo loa. It was simply some herbal preparation, a fast acting, topically effective neurotoxin of some kind. At least that’s what she told herself, and almost believed.

  The awful tableau held for a moment, and then Calixte barked a word to the Tonton Macoutes who were watching Taureau with astonished eyes. One stepped forward, put a hand on the bull-man’s shoulder. Taureau turned with the speed of an adrenalized cat, grabbed the man by his wrist and shoulder, and ripped his arm from his body. The Tonton Macoute stared at Taureau for a moment with unbelieving eyes, and then, blood fountaining from his shoulder, he fell weeping to the floor, trying unsuccessfully to stanch the bleeding with his remaining hand.

  Taureau brandished the arm above his head like a gory club, shaking it at Chrysalis. Blood splattered across her face and she choked back the bile that rose in her throat.

  Calixte roared an order in Creole, whether at Taureau or his other man Chrysalis didn’t know, but the Tonton Macoute ran from the chamber as Taureau whirled in a mad circle, trying to watch everyone at once from crazed, fear-distended eyes.

  Calixte kept shouting at Taureau, who was shaking and trembling with terrible muscle spasms. His face was the face of a tortured lunatic, and his dark skin was turning darker. His lips were becoming distinctly blue. He shambled toward Calixte, screaming words that Chrysalis, even though she couldn’t understand the language they were spoken in, knew were gibberish.

  Calixte calmly drew his pistol. He pointed it at Taureau and spoke again. The joker continued to advance. Calixte squeezed off a shot that hit Taureau high in the left side of his chest, but he kept coming. Calixte shot three more times before the maddened bull covered the distance between them, and the last shot hit him right between the eyes.

  But Taureau kept coming. He dropped the arm he’d been brandishing, grabbed Calixte, and with a final spasm of incredible strength, threw him at the chamber’s rear wall. Calixte screamed. He reached out to grasp the rope hanging from the gibbet, but he missed. He missed the rope, but not the meathook from which it hung.

  The hook took him in the stomach, ripped up through his diaphragm, and skewered his right lung. He showered screams and blood as he kicked his legs and swung in counterpoint rhythm to the spasmodic jerking of his body.

  Taureau staggered, clutching his shattered forehead, and fell onto the brazier of burning coals. After a moment he stopped bellowing and there came the crisp sizzle and sweet smell of burning flesh.

  Chrysalis was violently sick. After she finished wiping her mouth with the back of her hand, she looked up to see Dorian Wilde standing before the limp, swaying form of Charlemagne Calixte. He smiled and recited:

  “It is sweet to dance to violins

  When Love and Life are fair:

  To dance to flutes, to dance to lutes

  Is delicate and rare:

  But it is not sweet with nimble feet

  To dance upon the air!”

  Digger Downs rattled his chains impotently. “Someone get me out of here,” he pleaded.

  Chrysalis heard the snap of small-arms fire in the upper reaches of the fortress, but the Bizango chasseurs were too late. The bokor, swaying from the meathook above the dungeon floor, was already dead.

  It was hushed up, of course.

  Senator Hartmann asked Chrysalis to be silent to help diffuse the fear of the wild card virus that was raging back home. He didn’t even want there to be a hint of American jokers and aces mixing in foreign politics. She agreed for two reasons: First, she wanted him in her debt, and second, she always avoided personal publicity anyway. Not even Digger filed a story. He was recalcitrant at first, until Senator Hartmann had a private talk with him, a talk from which Downs emerged happy, smiling, and oddly close-mouthed.

  The death of Charlemagne Calixte was ascribed to a sudden, unexpected illness. The other dozen bodies found in Fort Mercredi were never mentioned, and the two-score odd deaths and suicides among government officials over the next week or so were never even connected to Calixte’s death.

  Jean-Claude Duvalier, who suddenly found himself with a sullen, poverty-stricken country to run, was grateful for the lack of publicity, but there was something he discovered at the end of the affair, something puzzling and terrifying that he carefully kept secret.

  Among the bodies recovered from Fort Mercredi was that of an old, old man. When Jean-Claude saw the body he blanched nearly white and had it interred in the Cimetière Extérieur in haste, at night, without ceremony, before anyone else could recognize it and ask how it was that François Duvalier, supposedly dead for fifteen years, was, or had been until very recently, still alive.

  The only one who could answer that question was no longer in Haiti. He was on his way to America, where he anticipated a long, interesting, and productive search for new and exciting sensations.

  From The Journal of Xavier Desmond

  DECEMBER 8, 1986/MEXICO CITY:

  ANOTHER STATE DINNER THIS evening, but I’ve begged off with a plea of illness. A few hours to relax in my hotel room and write in the journal are most welcome. And my reg
rets were anything but fabricated—the tight schedule and pressures of the trip have begun to take their toll, I fear. I have not been keeping down all of my meals, although I’ve done my utmost to see that my distress remains unnoticed. If Tachyon suspected, he would insist on an examination, and once the truth was discovered, I might be sent home.

  I will not permit that. I wanted to see all the fabled, far-off lands that Mary and I had once dreamed of together, but already it is clear that what we are engaged in here is far more important than any pleasure trip. Cuba was no Miami Beach, not for anyone who cared to look outside Havana; there are more jokers dying in the cane fields than cavorting on cabaret stages. And Haiti and the Dominican Republic were infinitely worse, as I’ve already noted in these pages.

  A joker presence, a strong joker voice—we desperately need these things if we are to accomplish any good at all. I will not allow myself to be disqualified on medical grounds. Already our numbers are down by one—Dorian Wilde returned to New York rather than continue on to Mexico. I confess to mixed feelings about that. When we began, I had little respect for the “poet laureate of Jokertown,” whose title is as dubious as my own mayoralty, though his Pulitzer is not. He seems to get a perverse glee from waving those wet, slimy tendrils of his in people’s faces, flaunting his deformity in a deliberate attempt to draw a reaction. I suspect this aggressive nonchalance is in fact motivated by the same self-loathing that makes so many jokers take to masks, and a few sad cases actually attempt to amputate the deformed parts of their bodies. Also, he dresses almost as badly as Tachyon with his ridiculous Edwardian affectation, and his unstated preference for perfume over baths makes his company a trial to anyone with a sense of smell. Mine, alas, is quite acute.

  Were it not for the legitimacy conferred on him by the Pulitzer, I doubt that he would ever have been named for this tour, but there are very few jokers who have achieved that kind of worldly recognition. I find precious little to admire in his poetry either, and much that is repugnant in his endless mincing recitations.