“It will tell me if any manifestation of Changó is here. Just watch and wait.”
Decker hunkered down beside her. She pulled the stopper out of the bottle of blood and sprayed it across the stones like a priest spraying holy water. “Kabio, kabio, sile,” she repeated. “Kabio, kabio, sile.”
They waited for over a minute. The thunder rumbled again, and this time it echoed through the cellar as if it had come from somewhere below the ground, rather than the sky.
“I guess he’s not here after all,” Decker said.
“Wait. This always takes a little time.”
Another minute passed, but then Decker heard a faint sizzling sound. He sniffed, and he could not only smell damp, and dried-out herbs, but a burned smell, like meat stock burning on the side of a cooking pot. He shone his flashlight on the thunderstones and saw that the rooster blood was drying up and bubbling, and giving off smoke. The thunderstones themselves had turned gray, and one or two of them were beginning to glow red-hot.
“Changó is here,” Queen Aché said, emphatically.
“You’re sure about that?”
“Look for yourself. Look at the stones.”
One by one, the stones turned to scarlet, and Decker could feel the heat they were giving off, the same dry heat as a sauna. “Changó’s power is attracted to this ebbó. He is showing us that he is close by.”
“Yes, but where?”
“You won’t be able to see him, but I will. I will call on Yemayá to help me against my enemies, and to give me strength.”
With that, she reached into her satchel again and brought out a plastic bag, neatly folded and tied with blue tape. She untied the tape and opened the bag, revealing a small silvery-scaled fish. She took out yet another bottle and poured a thin, sticky liquid over the fish. “Sugarcane syrup,” she explained. Then she dropped seven shiny pennies onto it.
“Yenya orisha obinrin dudukueke re maye avaya mi re oyu …” she sang, closing her eyes and swaying her head from side to side.
Hicks looked at Decker uneasily. “I hope we’re not getting ourselves into something we can’t get out of.”
“Like I said, sport, we don’t have any choice.”
Hicks’s cell phone rang again, but when he took it out to answer it, Decker said, “Leave it. It’s only Cab getting close to boiling point.”
“… lojun oyina ni reta gbogbo okin nibe iwo ni re elewo nitosi re omo teiba modupue iya mi.”
Queen Aché stopped swaying and opened her eyes. She arched her head back and stared at the ceiling for a moment. Then she said, flatly, “Yemayá is with me.”
Decker looked at her, and then took off his glasses and looked at her even more closely, because there was no question at all that something had possessed her. It was difficult to pin down exactly what it was. But she seemed to radiate an extraordinary energy, and when he took a step closer to her he could feel the hairs on the back of his neck rising up, as if he were standing close to an electrical transformer. She turned to look at him, and although she was still Queen Aché, with that high forehead and those erotically drooping eyelids and those full, slightly parted lips, there was another face within her face, a face that was calm and stony-eyed and infinitely old.
Decker realized that, at secondhand, he was looking at the face of an orisha, a goddess from the earliest days of African civilization, a creator of dynasties and magic. He had been frightened before. His nightmares about the Battle of the Wilderness had frightened him. But nothing had ever frightened him like this: the realization that there was a world in which the dead could live forever, and that men could walk through walls, and that none of the laws of possibility meant anything at all.
He was suddenly reminded of Eduard Munch’s painting of The Scream—the utter terror of finding out that life has no boundaries whatever.
“What now?” he asked Queen Aché.
“We find out where your So-Scary Man is concealing himself.”
She picked up the apples one by one and placed them on the hot thunderstones. They sizzled and blistered, and gave off a thick, caramel-smelling smoke.
“Lead me now to Changó,” Queen Aché said. “Lead me through the paths of Changó Ogodo, Alufina Crueco, Alafia, Larde, Obakoso, Ochongo, and Ogomo Oni. Lead me through all his various disguises: Saint Barbara and Saint Marcos de Leon and Saint Expeditus.”
Up until now, the smoke had been billowing upward, but as Queen Aché continued her chanting it began to drift toward the opposite side of the cellars. It coiled its way past the stalagmite dwarfs, and then it seemed to disappear into the darkness, as if somebody were pulling a long gray chiffon scarf through a keyhole.
“He’s there. Changó can’t resist the smell of apples.”
Decker unholstered his gun, but Queen Aché laid her hand on top of his. “You must understand that you cannot kill Changó. You can only kill Major Shroud.”
“He’ll do, for starters.”
“But you cannot kill Major Shroud while Changó still possesses him.”
“So how can we stop him?”
“In Santería, we believe that everybody has an eleda. It means their head, or their mind, but it also means their guardian angel. In Major Shroud’s case, his guardian angel is Changó. While Changó is alert, he will protect Major Shroud against any attack. But eledas can grow hungry, and need feeding and entertainment. If you invoke Changó, and give him a plaza, an offering of fruit and candy, and light some candles for him, he should be distracted long enough for you to kill Major Shroud.”
She dug farther into her satchel and pulled out another cotton bag, tied with red and white string. “I brought apples, and bananas, and herbs, too. Rompe zaraguey and bledo punzó.”
“And candles?”
“Of course.” She produced three church candles, tied together with red ribbon.
Decker took the bag and the candles and pushed them into his pockets. “You’re not really doing this because I threatened to shoot you, are you?”
Queen Aché gave him a strange smile, and he was sure that he could see Yemayá smiling, too, behind the mask of Queen Aché’s face.
“When there is no man who can stand up against you, Lieutenant, what is left? You have to test your strength against the gods.”
“Haven’t you ever—”
“Relied on anyone? Yes. Once. But one morning we both woke up and knew that I had grown stronger than him, and so he packed his bag and left without saying a single word.”
“Do you know how much I hate you for what you did?”
“No, Lieutenant, I don’t. I never loved anybody as much as that.”
Hicks was shining his flashlight in the far corner of the cellars, where the smoke was hurrying away. “There’s an opening here, Lieutenant. Part of the wall’s collapsed.”
Decker came over to join him. Just past the dwarfish stalagmites was a narrow alcove, and most of the brickwork at the back of it had fallen inward. It looked like the wall in which the drunken Fortunato had been bricked up alive, in Edgar Allan Poe’s story The Cask of Amontillado. “For God’s sake, Montresor!”
When he probed his flashlight into the back of the alcove, Decker could see that it led to a cavity between the station walls. The cavity was only a little more than two feet wide, but in between the walls the rubble had fallen to form a kind of staircase, leading down. The smoke was steadily sliding in the same direction.
“Well … the smoke seems to think that he’s hiding down here.”
Hicks grimaced, as if this was all too much for him. “The smoke thinks he’s down here? For Pete’s sake.”
Decker took an awkward step over the broken bricks and eased himself sideways through the opening. The smell of herbs was even stronger here, but there was another smell, too, and it was sickening. The smell of seawater and raw sewage, and bad fish, and half-decayed crabs.
He maneuvered himself around and offered his hand to Queen Aché, but she managed to climb through the opening unaided. The “
staircase” was only a steep slope of crumbled masonry, slippery with damp, and Decker had to keep one hand pressed against the right-hand wall to steady himself as he descended. Halfway down he lost his footing and landed on his backside, sliding down six or seven feet before he managed to catch hold of a protruding beam of rotten timber and stop himself.
At the bottom of the slope was the opening to a low, pitch-black crawl space. They shone their flashlights into the darkness, crisscrossing like light sabers. The floor of the crawl space was thick with streaky black mud, and the ceiling was buttressed with dripping brick. Decker reckoned that it ran more than two hundred feet, from one side of the station building to the other.
Hicks said, “If you get caught in here, Lieutenant, you won’t stand a hope in hell.”
“Has to be done, sport.”
“But if you can’t even see him—”
“I can,” Queen Aché reassured him.
“Okay …” Hicks said, reluctantly, “so what’s the plan?”
“I guess we’ll just have to search the place on our hands and knees. Do it systematically, in squares.”
“No, Lieutenant,” Queen Aché said. “You won’t have to do that. Look.”
Decker turned around. The smoke from the burning apples was drifting steadily down the staircase and into the crawl space. When Decker shone his flashlight on it, he saw that it was hurrying toward the right-hand side, about three-quarters of the way under the station, where it abruptly disappeared downward This was where the ceiling had collapsed from the floor above.
“Looks like we’ve found him,” Decker said.
“So what do we do now?” Hicks asked.
“We propitiate his eleda.”
“I thought we were just going to blow his head off.”
“Same thing, differently put.”
CHAPTER THIRTY-THREE
Decker took the bundle of candles out of his pocket. Queen Aché untied the ribbon around them and lit them, handing one to Decker and one to Hicks.
“You will have to think respectful thoughts about Changó. Make him your offering of fruit and beg his forgiveness for the sins of your forefathers.”
“And you really think that will work? Think what he did to Moses Adebolu.”
“Changó saw Moses Adebolu as a traitor to his faith. You are only his blood enemy.”
“Is that all? That’s reassuring. But, well, we all have to die someday, don’t we? Let’s go do it.”
He crouched down and entered the crawl space, the brick ceiling scraping against his back. The sewagey reek of river water was even more overpowering down here, and the greenish black mud squashed thickly into his brand-new Belvedere loafers.
As he approached the hole where Queen Aché’s apple smoke was disappearing, he could see more clearly what had happened. A large section of the ceiling had collapsed, not enough to cause any structural damage to the station, but enough to cause the floor beneath it to collapse, too. He shone his flashlight on the bricks and rubble and saw, that there was a gaping cavity beneath the foundations, black as a prehistoric cave. He could also see rotting wooden uprights, and part of an old brick wall, which he took to be remnants of the old fishing dock at Shockoe Creek.
Inside the cavity he saw greasy wet planks, blackened with age, which could have been a section of a ship’s deck, although most of them had given way, and there was another cavity below them, where the ship’s hold must have been.
Queen Aché and Hicks came crouching up to join him. Hicks knocked his head on the ceiling and said, “God damn it.”
“You see that?” Decker said. “I’ll bet you that was the ship that was carrying Major Shroud’s casket—the Nathan Cooper, wasn’t it? When they started renovating the station last year, all the drilling must have brought the ceiling down, and opened up the old Shockoe dock.”
“You mean to say they built the station right over the ship, without even bothering to move it?”
“Maybe it wasn’t practical to move it. Maybe the builders were too scared to move it. It looks like they filled in the creek and buried the ship, too.”
Decker tried to penetrate the ship’s hold with his flashlight, but the darkness seemed to swallow the beam of light completely, and absolutely nothing was reflected back. His jaw was trembling, not only because of the chilly damp down here in the crawl space, but because he could sense that something deeply malevolent was very close. It was the same feeling that he had experienced in his nightmares—the feeling that somebody was rushing toward him, somebody who wanted to do him terrible harm.
He paused for a moment and took a steadying breath, and then another, even though the air down here was so fetid. He had never suffered from claustrophobia before, but now he was conscious of the tons and tons of brick and masonry that were weighing down on him, and the fact that he would have to crouch like Quasimodo to escape anything that came after him.
“Lieutenant?” Hicks asked. “You okay, Lieutenant?”
“What? Never felt better.”
“You really think there’s something down here?”
“I’m sure of it. Let’s get down there and check it out.”
“That deck don’t look none too safe.”
“Well, we’ll just have to tread easy, then, won’t we?”
Queen Aché knelt down in the mud. Her candle flame was dancing in the draft, so her expression seemed to change from one second to the next—amused, indifferent, scornful, disturbed. “Changó is here, no question about it. Yemayá can sense his Changó’s presence, very strong.”
“In that case, we’d better go get him.”
Queen Aché gripped his sleeve. “Don’t forget. You must acknowledge Changó’s greatness. You must beg him to forgive you for all of your misdeeds. Whatever Major Shroud looks like, however he talks to you, it is Changó to whom you are paying your respects, not him. When Changó is distracted—then and only then can you deal with Major Shroud.”
“How will I know when that is?”
“Because I will tell you. You cannot see Changó, but Yemayá can.”
“Okay, then. Hicks, you ready?”
“I guess so.”
Decker turned around and cautiously climbed backward down the heaps of rubble. His shoes immediately dislodged broken bricks and crumbling mortar, creating a miniature landslide that rattled onto the planking of the ship below. As he climbed down lower, he saw that a rusted iron girder had fallen across the ship, preventing the rubble from dropping any farther, so that there was a gap of at least three feet between the rubble and the deck. Grunting with effort, he edged himself around so that he could jump down. More bricks suddenly slipped beneath his feet and before he could jump he fell awkwardly sideways and landed on his side, bruising his shoulder and his hip. He said, “Fuck!” His candle rolled away from him, into a pool of stagnant water, where it instantly fizzled out.
“Are you okay, sir?” Hicks called.
“Terrific, damn it.”
“Your candle!” Queen Aché warned him. “You must light your candle!”
Decker climbed to his feet and retrieved his candle. He dried it on his sleeve and then lit it again with his cigarette lighter. “Queen Aché? You coming down next?”
Queen Aché slid down the debris and landed on the deck with a stumble that was almost graceful. Hicks came next, slithering and cursing, although he managed to jump over the gap and land on his feet.
Queen Aché brushed herself down. “Try to show no fear when Major Shroud appears. He is one of the walking dead, but like all zombis he doesn’t know it. He believes that he is still the same man that he was when he was sealed in his coffin, so you must talk to him as if he is a normal person. While you are doing that, I will present your plaza to Changó and see if I can draw his attention away from protecting Major Shroud’s head.”
“Sounds like a plan to me.”
“One thing, though … whatever you do, make no attempt to kill Major Shroud until I tell you that Changó has lef
t him unprotected. Otherwise, you will be directly attacking Changó and Changó’s anger will be terrible.”
“You got it.”
They walked along the deck to the fathomless hole where the planks had rotted away. Decker leaned forward and swept his flashlight from side to side. He could make out some of the timbers of the lower decks, and some coils of rope, and a bulging bundle of gray slime that must have been a bale of cotton, but no sign of a casket. “I guess I’ll have to go down there and look for it.”
“For Christ’s sake, Lieutenant, be careful.”
“Hicks, old man, this is part of the job.”
Although most of the interior of the ship had been gutted by wood rot and boring beetle, there was still the skeleton of a corroded iron companionway clinging to the right-hand side. Decker inched his way toward it and managed to reach out and get a grip on the uppermost railing. The deck planking splintered wetly beneath his weight, but he paused and took a sharp breath, and then he managed to swing himself around and perch both feet on one of the steps.
“You stay there,” he told Queen Aché and Hicks. “I’ll shout out if I find anything.”
He descended the companionway a step at a time, testing each step to make sure that it wouldn’t give way. It was at least twenty feet down to the remains of the next deck, and it looked so rotten that—if he fell—he would probably fall right through it, and down to the next deck, and the keel, if the Nathan Cooper still had a keel.
It took him nearly five minutes to climb down to the bottom of the companionway. He looked around, trying to orient himself, and trying to work out which way the ship had been docked. The likelihood was that it had been sailed into Shockoe Creek prow-first, and since the sides of the ship tapered off to his right, the hold was probably amidships, to his left.
Holding up his candle in his left hand and his flashlight in his right, he crossed the deck toward a darkened, dripping passageway. The floor was heaped with dead crabs in various stages of decay, like the chopped-off hands of hundreds of massacred children, and the stench was so strong that he couldn’t stop himself from letting out a loud, cackling retch. He carefully stepped his way aft, his shoes slipping and sliding, and the flickering flame from his candle made it look as if the crabs were still alive, and crawling on top of each other.
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