Black Static Horror Magazine #1

by TTA Press Authors

  I hired a radio-taxi at Santos-Dumont—fixed fare: this wasn't the day to be on the meter. The driver was an ancient mulatto, a gnarled root of a man who drove with just the tip of one finger resting on the steering wheel, while, with his other hand, he worked the radio dial, chasing the traffic news.

  We inched along the Catete Road. Sweat poured out of me. Rain drummed against the roof of the car. The old man had a picture of the Virgin of Guadalupe taped to his rear-view mirror and a little straw figure splashed with wax resting on a bed of lace on the dashboard.

  "Brother,” I said, “what's with this weather?"

  He turned around and looked at me, as if seeing me for the first time, as if I had only that second appeared in his cab. “Paulista?"

  "Yes,” I lied. He didn't need to hear my life story.

  "My wife is from Indianópolis,” he said, naming a suburb of São Paulo, then: “Brother, this—” he jerked his thumb towards the rain-darkened windows “—this is Mama Axé. This is the saints. They've summoned up the storm, called down the rain, to wash the Europeans away."

  Mama Axé: Macumba mistress of Rio de Janeiro, healer, shaman, high priestess of the orixá-saints of true Brazil. Dr Marin would have to wait. “Change of plan,” I said. “Take me to Babylon."

  Babylon was a favela—a shantytown—built on one of the rocky prominences that separate Rio's Botafogo Bay from the district of Leme. Babylon: a grand name, but the favela was nothing but a dismal scattering of tin-and-breezeblock shacks and abandoned cars lining the road that led up the mountainside, terminating behind an old Catholic shrine.

  The old man stopped the taxi by the burnt-out ruin of a MacDonald's stand, ten metres short of the shrine. I cracked open the door and stepped out into the driving rain. The old man started to turn the car around. I headed up the road.

  I had my umbrella with me, but I hadn't gone three metres before my trousers were plastered to my legs. There wasn't a soul to be seen. Though there was no mains electricity on the mountain, the favelados did have battery-powered lighting, the odd generator. But I could see no lights through the windows, under the doors, of the shacks that I passed.

  Washed off the mountain by the rain, the favelados, the people of the shantytown, were ... elsewhere.

  I headed in the direction of the shrine, a white smudge on the rain-blackened near-horizon. At the head of the road, just short of the shrine, there was a building two, three times larger than the rest. Long and narrow with whitewashed walls, it could have been a chapel, a missionary church. But no, it was the High House terreiro: the church, the clinic, the council chamber of Mama Axé, Macumba mistress of Rio de Janeiro, uncrowned queen of Babylon.

  A fitful light, leaking in like rainwater through the space between the walls and the raised roof, lit the interior of the High House. The air was dank and filled with the sound of the rain beating against the corrugated-iron roof sheets.

  I propped my umbrella against the wall by the door and took in my surroundings. I was standing at the back of the main hall, the hearth and heart of the terreiro, the place where all the ceremonies, the celebrations, were held. It was a wreck. The white cotton wall hangings lay, crumpled and torn, in sinuous heaps on the rough concrete floor. The path between the crumpled drapes was strewn with debris—with broken candles, shards of pottery, piles of food, with chicken feathers and gore.

  With chicken feathers and gore.

  I started forward, picking my way through the debris, my heartbeat quickening.

  On the floor by the front wall a length of white lace foamed out from under an overturned trestle table. Dozens of pieces of garishly coloured plaster were embedded in the lace: the shattered remains of the terreiro's plaster saints. Macumba, called Candomblé by some, Babassuê by others, was a mélange of African and Catholic beliefs—Holy Spiritualism. There was a movement in Macumba, coming out of Bahia State, to discard the Catholic trappings, to bring the African gods out from behind the old disguises, out from beneath the robes of the Catholic saints. But Mama was orthodox, rooted in tradition, loyal to the saints.

  I knelt down to gather up the plaster fragments. At that same moment, I heard something scrape against the floor to my left. Startled, I straightened and turned towards the sound. There was a door in that corner of the room: the door to Mama's private office; I had forgotten that it was there. The door stood slightly ajar. A shadow flitted across the gap.

  Waves of heat washed over me.

  "Who's there?” I said, my voice thick with fear. “Come out.” I stood stock still, but cast about with my eyes looking for some kind of weapon; I hadn't come prepared for a fight. A figure stepped out from behind the door. It was a boy, a tattered child, dressed in nothing but a ragged pair of jeans. “Keep coming,” I said, as the tension started to drain from my body.

  The boy took another step forward, fully into the room, out of the shadows. The fitful light from the windows washed over him.

  My breath caught in my throat. He had a row of blanched and jagged scars splashed across his chest: five great bullet wounds stitched across his heart.

  "Looking for Mama Axé?” he said. “Me too.” He started towards me, threading a path through the debris. He had the angular features and rich, black hair of an Indian; an unlikely type to find in a house of Macumba—if it wasn't for those scars. He stopped, just out of arm's reach, and returned my stare. “You're not from around here,” he said.

  I ignored the remark and asked him his name.

  He thought about that for a little while then laid his hand on his chest with his fingers splayed out to cover the scars. “They call me Sortudo,” he said. Lucky.

  I couldn't help myself: giddy with released tension, I burst out laughing.

  "What do they call you?” Sortudo challenged, speaking over my laughter.

  "João Watanabe,” I answered him.

  "Wata...?” His eyes lit up and he dipped his head: it made sense to him now. “You're from São Paulo.” São Paulo was home to the largest Japanese community in Brazil—the largest in the world outside of Japan. I could have played along, but I needed to know what had happened here—what had happened to Mama Axé and her helpers, her priestesses, her seers. For that, I needed to make a connection with the boy.

  "No, I'm from the Green Coast; my family are fishing people. But I spent most of my childhood—up until I was about your age—living right here with my mother."

  "Right here in Rio?"

  "No, right here—in Babylon. In the High House."

  "The terreiro?” Sortudo's eyes widened with surprise. “You're Mama Axé's son? The one that went away?"

  "Yes."

  Sortudo dipped his head in an exaggerated gesture of respect. Then he swept his arm around the room. “In that case, welcome home."

  "What happened here?” I said. “Who did this? Where is everybody?"

  Sortudo held up his hands in a gesture of surrender: he didn't know. “I was trying to find out when you got here."

  "Find out how?"

  Sortudo smiled. He seemed endlessly amused. “Come on.” He turned and gestured for me to follow as he headed back towards Mama's private office.

  His back was a mess of pale, palm-sized splashes of scar tissue that pulsed and rippled as he moved.

  The office was in as bad a state as the hall. Mama's old high-backed chair, the finest, oldest, heaviest piece of furniture in Babylon, had been shattered. Her white cotton ceremonial robes had been torn apart. The contents of her ancient filing cabinet—the only store of official documents in the favela—were scattered about the floor. The room reeked of wine and beer. But I could see no signs of blood.

  Sortudo had placed a small table that had lost its legs on top of the filing cabinet and covered it in a white cloth. There was a little pile of cowrie shells resting on the cloth.

  I knew then what he had in mind.

  "Do you know what you're doing?” I asked.

  Sortudo trailed his fingers across his scars once more. �
��No one closer to the saints than me, Mama said.” His brush with death would have given him special status in Mama's eyes.

  "Who shot you?” I asked.

  "The police. The Army. Drug dealers. Gunrunners. Bandits.” He shrugged: all of them, any one of them. “The police raided the City of God ... two years ago now. It turned into a war.” The City of God was one of Rio's roughest districts. The poor souls who lived there seemed to revel in the cruel irony of the name.

  "And now you're an initiate of the terreiro?"

  That sparked another smile. “Mama asked me to become an initiate. I asked her how much it paid.” He shrugged. That was the end of that. He scooped up the shells and pressed them to his chest, over his heart, over his scars. “You ready?” I nodded. “We need to know what happened here,” he said, his head tipped back, looking to the roof. “That's the question we need answering.” He threw the shells down on the tablecloth then looked up at me. “Tell me, what do you see?"

  I leaned forward and studied the fall of the shells.

  I saw a dark force coming cloaked in illusion, hidden from us, coming to kill. I saw a man who wasn't there.

  "What do you see?” Sortudo said.

  "Someone came here to find Mama,” I said. “And when they couldn't find her, they tore the place apart. Then they left to go look somewhere else."

  "The Europeans,” Sortudo said. The men that Mama had summoned the saints to wash away.

  This much of the story I already knew. Swiss, they were, engineers, working on top of Pavão, one of the mountains that separate Copacabana from Ipanema and the lake. There were fifteen or twenty of them, a construction crew, working for a French company, partnered with a Belgian firm that had a piece of Brazil's booming wireless communications industry. They had come to put up aerial antennas, masts for mobile phones.

  They weren't evil men; they had not come to do harm. They were just engineers, just doing a job. They built their masts. But they also dug ditches to stop their site from being washed away. Four weeks after their arrival, one day in late November, it rained for a half-hour—just an ordinary summer downpour. The Swiss site was untouched: their drainage system worked, channelling tonnes of water away, off Pavão. But in the shadow of Pavão, clinging to the leeward slope of its sleeping sister-peak, Cantagalo, there was another of Rio's many favelas. The water channelled away from the Swiss site swept through the favela like a river in flood. Twenty-three people died in as many minutes, washed away with their homes.

  The city government lamented their deaths, but did nothing. The Swiss had permits; the favelados were squatters.

  It was around this time that Mama entered the story. She was asked to mediate between the Swiss and the favelados—the survivors who wanted compensation. Favelados, people without a voice, often asked Mama to speak for them. She met with the Swiss before Christmas. Those talks had to adjourn for the holidays. Sometime after that, something changed.

  "How did it come to this?” I asked Sortudo, gesturing towards the storm-battered roof of the terreiro.

  Sortudo shrugged. “People were protesting outside the site on Pavão: it was holding up the work. So, a week ago now, the Europeans moved down onto Cantagalo and bulldozed what was left of the favela to make way for a security fence to keep the protesters away. Mama saw that the Europeans were only playing at listening to her. She decided to make them pay for their contempt."

  "She called down the storm?"

  Sortudo's eyes lit up. He shook his head. “She called down Xangô, holy saint of thunder and righteous retribution. She went to Central Station and beat the rails; she plied the saint with blood and beer. And he called down the storm.” He made no attempt to hide the thrill he felt, his childish joy at this display of Mama's power, the saint's violent rage.

  "Madness,” I said.

  Sortudo's face contorted into a look of confused surprise.

  I gestured at the wreckage of Mama's chair. “It's what Mama did that led to this; that brought...” I shook my head: it was pointless trying to explain further. “Sortudo,” I said, “we have to find Mama. Where would she go from here?"

  "Don't you know?"

  I smiled ruefully. “I haven't been here in fifteen years."

  Sortudo tipped his head to one side and squinted at me: I was a puzzle to him. “Okay, I know someone we can try."

  I took him outside, to the waiting taxi. It cost me 10 reais to get the old man to let him inside.

  * * * *

  It was two a.m. before we found her, Sortudo, the old man and me; nine hours after we left Babylon. Sortudo directed us to a house in nearby Gloria; a phone call from there sent us to a fortune-teller in Tijuca. The fortune-teller sent us to a store in the City of God.

  The City of God: we crept across a road junction; Sortudo, his face pressed to the window, muttered, “There, right there, that's where I fell."

  The store sold raw materials to half the priests, half the fortune-tellers, in the city. The owner, a thick-bodied black woman with the dull, dead hair of a former platinum blonde, recognised Sortudo. When Sortudo introduced me, she gasped and reached out and took my hand—an act of reverence that left me flushed with anger and embarrassment; it reminded me too much of when I was a child, in the High House; the favoured son. But I didn't pull away. I asked her if she knew where Mama was.

  "She sent for my grandson this afternoon, wanted him to bring her chickens and salt. He took all we had."

  "Bring them where?"

  "Central Station."

  Mama had returned to the railway tracks.

  * * * *

  Three a.m. The streets of Central Rio were axle-deep in water, but almost clear of traffic. We crawled up Vargas Avenue—the taxi, Sortudo, the old man and me. The tower of the railway station loomed large.

  "Where will Mama be?” I asked Sortudo.

  "Where she called down Xangô,” the boy replied with certainty.

  "Where was that?"

  "In the marshalling yard,” the old man said. “We'll have to take the works’ road.” I looked at him with some surprise. “There were hundreds of people there for the ceremony,” he said, as if stating the obvious. “They had to stop running the trains. My wife and me watched it all on World TV."

  * * * *

  "Sortudo,” a voice called, “where have you been?"

  A tall, thin black woman, dressed in a turban and a voluminous dress of white calico stepped out of the shadows and nodded to the boy. Her clothes were wet through. She was carrying a cloth-wrapped bundle of candles.

  We were in one of the train sheds, on our way to the marshalling yard. I had paid off the old man, sent him and his taxi home with nearly 150 reais—all the money that I had on me.

  "Iyálorixá Souret,” Sortudo said. “I've been looking for Mama. She wasn't where she was supposed to be."

  The woman, Souret, tipped her head to one side, accepting Sortudo's reply. But her eyes were on me.

  Seeing this, Sortudo made the introductions. “Iyálorixá Souret of Ilé Itàn Ifá—” the words were African, not Portuguese; the Iyálorixá was a priestess of one of the Bahian nations—a Candomblist “—this is João Watanabe."

  The Iyálorixá's face grew pale. “Yes. I knew tonight was a fateful night, all the signs were there.” She crossed her arms over her chest and bowed to me. “Welcome home, Axélinho."

  "Don't call me that!” I snapped. I had been under the storm for over twelve hours; my nerves were frayed. And a new tension was building inside me: a heightened sense of the encounter to come. “Where is my mother?"

  The Iyálorixá nodded wearily: she wasn't there to fight with me. “Mama came here to draw strength from the orixá. But it won't be enough; all the signs are there."

  "Just take us to her, please."

  The Iyálorixá bowed to me a second time. Then she turned and walked away, piercing the veil of water streaming down across the mouth of the train shed. Sortudo and I went after her.

  The Iyálorixá follow
ed the tracks out of the shed. Spotlights cast their light down onto the yard, a gaze so intense that it pierced even the gloom of the storm. Fifteen metres ahead of us the tracks crossed those from the other train sheds arranged around the marshalling yard. A canopy, an open-sided tent, had been thrown up over the point of convergence. The heavy fabric rippled and snapped in the wind, flashing bright beneath the arclights. A ghostly-white crowd of people were gathered beneath it. They rocked and swayed, as if buffeted by the same wind that drove the canopy. But I could hear the drums; through the hiss, the static, of the falling rain, I could hear the bass beat of the drums, driving, driving the people on.

  Xangô, holy saint of thunder and righteous retribution, had a love of iron; he was drawn to it like lightning. The wronged, the vengeful, those who would seek Xangô's aid, sought out railway tracks, banged on the rails to get Xangô's attention, covered them in blood and beer to draw him near.

  Lightning flared, thunder rolled; sparks played about the light towers. The drums drove the people on.

  We reached the canopy. The Iyálorixá began to moan. Sortudo swore then broke into nervous laughter. We began to push our way through the crowd. The heat and the humidity were incredible. I began to tear at my clothes. The sound of the drums beat at my ears. The electricity coursing through the air locked my jaw. I growled through gritted teeth. I pushed forward, through the swaying crowd.

  Lightning flared. I saw my mother; I saw Mama Axé, Macumba mistress of Rio de Janeiro, queen of Babylon, at the centre of it all, at the point where the tracks met, alone in a circle of burning candles, surrounded by a feast of rice and fish and manioc, and bowls of chicken blood and beer.

  And bowls of chicken blood and beer.

  I tried to call out, but my jaw was locked; I could not speak. I growled, I moaned, I pushed my way to the edge of the crowd. I broke through, into free space; I stumbled over a rail, stepped on a plate of rice, shattering it, kicked over a dish of manioc. Mama's eyes were closed, her face upturned, her expression serene. She had her hands held out, palms raised to the sky. I took another step towards her. I reached out.

  Something, somewhere, snapped; a flash of light darted across the underside of the canopy. Mama stepped out of the circle. She died. Mama died.