I went crashing through the brush, certain that Ray was after me, possessed by some demon dredged up from his psyche…or by worse. I did not stop to untie the dory, but grabbed the machete from beneath the seat, hacked the rope in two, and pulled hard out into the water. Waves slopped over the bow, the dory bucked and plunged, and the noise from the reef was deafening. But even had a hurricane been raging, I would not have put back into the Burying Ground. I strained at the oars, gulping down breaths that were half salt spray, and I did not feel secure until I had passed beyond Punta Palmetto and was hidden from the view of whatever was now wandering that malarial shore.
After a night’s sleep, after dosing my fears with the comforts of home, all my rational structures were re-erected. I was ashamed at having run, at having left Ray to endure his solitary hell, and I assigned everything I had seen and felt to a case of nerves or—and I did not think this impossible—to poltergeistlike powers brought on by his madness. Something had to be done for him. As soon as I had finished breakfast, I drove over to Meachem’s Landing and asked the militia for their help. I explained the situation to one Sergeant Colmenares, who thanked me for my good citizenship but said he could do nothing unless the poor man had committed a crime. If I had been clearheaded, I would have invented a crime, anything to return Ray to civilization; instead, I railed at the sergeant, stumped out of the office, and drove back to Sandy Bay.
Elizabeth had asked me to buy some cooking oil, and so I stopped off at Sarah’s Store, a green-painted shanty the size of a horse stall not far from The Chicken Shack. Inside, there was room for three people to stand at the counter, and behind it Sarah was enthroned on her stool. An old woman, almost ninety, with a frizzy crown of white hair and coal-black skin that took on bluish highlights under the sun. It was impossible to do business with her and not hear the latest gossip, and during our conversation she mentioned that Ray had stopped in the night before.
“He after havin’ a strife wit dat Jimmy Mullins,” she said. “Now Jimmy he have followed dis tourist fella down from de Sea Breeze where dey been drinkin’, and he settin’ up to beg de mon fah somet’ing. You know how he gets wit his lies.” She did her Jimmy Mullins imitation, puffing out her chest and frowning. “‘I been in Vietnam,’ he say, and show de mon dat scar from when he shot himself in de leg. ‘I bleed fah Oncle Sam, and now Oncle Sam goin’ to take care of dis negro.’ Den in walk Ray Milliken. He did not look left or right but jus’ stare at de cans of fruit juice and ax how much dey was. Talkin’ wit dat duppy voice. Lord! De duppy force crawlin’ all over him. Now dis tourist fella have gone ’cause de sight of Ray wit his wild look and his scrapes have made de fella leery. But Jimmy jus’ stand dere, watchful. And when Ray pay fah de juice, Jimmy say, ‘Gimme dat money.’ Ray make no reply. He drink de juice down and den he amble out de door. Jimmy follow him and he screamin’. ‘You scorn me like dat!’ he say. ‘You scorn me like dat!’ It take no wisdom to know dere’s blood in de air, so I set a Superior on de counter and call out, ‘Jimmy, you come here ’fore yo’ beer lose de chill.’ And dat lure him back.”
I asked Sarah what she meant by “duppy voice,” but she would only say, “Dat’s what it were—de duppy voice.” I paid for my oil, and as I went out the door, she called, “God bless America!” She always said it as a farewell to her American customers; most thought she was putting them on, but knowing Sarah’s compassion for waifs and strays, her conviction that material wealth was the greatest curse one could have, I believe it was heartfelt.
Sarah’s story had convinced me of the need for action, and that afternoon I returned to the Burying Ground. I did not confront Ray; I stationed myself behind some bushes twenty feet to the right of the shelter. I planned to do as I should have done before—hit him and drag him back to Sandy Bay. I had with me Elizabeth’s ax handle and an ample supply of bug repellent.
Ray was not at the clearing when I arrived, and he did not put in an appearance until after five o’clock. This time he was carrying a guitar, probably gleaned from the debris. He sat beside the trench and began chording, singing in a sour, puny voice that sent a chill through me despite the heat; it seemed he was giving tongue to the stink of the rotting snakeskins, amplifying the whine of the insects. The sun reflected an orange fire on the panels of the guitar.
“Cas-si-o-pee-ee-ya,” he sang, country-western style, “I’ll be yours tonight.” He laughed—cracked, high-pitched laughter—and rocked back and forth on his haunches. “Cas-si-o-pee-ee-ya, why don’t you treat me right?”
Either he was bored or else that was the whole song. He set down the guitar and for the next hour he hardly moved, scratching, looking up to the sun as if checking its decline. Sunset faded, and the evening star climbed above Alps of purple cumulus. Finally, stretching and shaking out the kinks, he stood and walked to the pit and lowered himself into the water. It was at this point that I had intended to hit him, but my curiosity got the best of me and I decided to observe him instead; I told myself that I would be better able to debunk his fantasies if I had some personal experience of them. I would hit him after he had fallen asleep.
It was over an hour before he emerged from the water, and when he did I was very glad to be hidden. Icy stars outlined the massed clouds, and the moon had risen three-quarters full, transforming the clearing into a landscape of black and silvery-gray. Everything had a shadow, even the tattered fronds lying on the ground. There was just enough wind to make the shadows tremble, and the only noise apart from the wind was the pattering of lizards across the desiccated leaves. From my vantage I could not see if the water was bulging upward, but soon the snakes began their hissing, their pushing at the mesh, and I felt again that female presence.
Then Ray leaped from the pit.
It was the most fluid entrance I have ever seen—like a dancer mounting onto stage from a sunken level. He came straight up in a shower of silver droplets and landed with his legs straddling the pit, snapping his head from side to side. He stepped out of the shelter, pacing back and forth along the trench, and as the light struck him full, I stopped thinking of him as he.
Even now, at a remove from the events, I have difficulty thinking of Ray as a man; the impression of femininity was so powerful that it obliterated all my previous impressions of him. Though not in the least dainty or swishy, every one of his movements had a casual female sensuality, and his walk was potently feminine in the way of a lioness. His face was leaner, sleeker of line. Aside from these changes was the force of that presence pouring over me. I had the feeling that I was involved in a scene out of prehistory—the hominid warrior with his club spying on an unknown female, scenting her, knowing her sex along the circuits of his nerves. When he…when she had done pacing, she squatted beside the trench, removed one of the rocks, and lifted the edge of the screen. With incredible speed, she reached in and snatched out a wriggling yellowjaw. I heard a sickening mushy crack as she crushed its head between her thumb and forefinger. She skinned it with her teeth, worrying a rip, tearing loose long peels until the blood-rilled meat gleamed in the moonlight. All this in a matter of seconds. Watching her eat, I found I was gripping the ax handle so tightly that my hand ached. She tossed the remains of the snake into the bushes, then she stood—again, that marvelous fluidity—and turned toward the spot where I was hiding.
“Frank,” she said; she barely pronounced the a and trilled the r, so that the word came out as “Frrenn-kuh.”
It was like hearing one’s name spoken by an idol. The ax handle slipped from my hand. I stood, weak-kneed. If her speed afoot was equal to her speed of hand, I had no chance of escape.
“I won’t kill you,” she said, her accent slurring the words into the rhythm of a musical phrase. She went back under the shelter and sat beside the patch of smoothed dirt.
The phrasing of her assurance did nothing to ease my fears, yet I came forward. I told myself that this was Ray, that he had created this demoness from his sick needs and imaginings; but I could not believe it.
With each step I became more immersed in her, as if her soul were too large for the body and I was passing through its outer fringes. She motioned me to sit, and as I did, her strangeness lapped over me like heat from an open fire.
My throat was constricted, but I managed to say, “Cassiopeia?”
Her lips thinned and drew back from her teeth in a feral smile. “That’s what Ray calls me. He can’t pronounce my name. My home…” She glanced at the sky. “The clouds obscure it.”
I gawped at her; I had so many questions, I could not frame even one. Finally I said, “Meachem’s UFO. Was that your ship?”
“The ship was destroyed far from here. What Meachem saw was a ghost, or rather the opening and closing of a road traveled by one.” She gestured at the pit. “It lies there, beneath the water.”
I remembered the hard something I had poked with a stick; it had not felt in the least ectoplasmic, and I pointed this out.
“‘Ghost’ is a translation of the word for it in my language,” she said. “You touched the energy fields of a…a machine. It was equipped with a homing capacity, but its fields were disrupted by the accident that befell my ship. It can no longer open the roads between the worlds.”
“Roads?” I said.
“I don’t understand the roads, and if I could explain them it would translate as metaphysics. The islanders would probably accept the explanation, but I doubt you would.” She traced a line in the dirt with her forefinger. “To enter the superluminal universe the body must die and be reanimated at journey’s end. The other components of the life travel with the machine. All I know of the roads is that though journeys often last for years, they appear to be direct. When Meachem saw flame in the sky, it was because I came from flame, from the destruction of my ship.”
“The machine…” I began.
“It’s an engineered life form,” she said. “You see, any life consists of a system of energy fields unified in the flesh. The machine is a partial simulation of that system, a kind of phantom life that’s designed to sustain the most crucial of those fields—what you’d call the anima, the soul—until the body can be reanimated…or, if the body has been destroyed, until an artificial host has been supplied. Of course there was no such host here. So the machine attracted those whose souls were impaired, those with whom a temporary exchange could be made. Without embodiment I would have gone mad.” She scooped up a handful of shell-bits. “I suppose I’ve gone mad in spite of it. I’ve rubbed souls with too many madmen.”
She tossed out the shell-bits. A haphazard toss, I thought; but then I noticed that they had fallen into neat rows.
“The differences between us are too great for the exchange to be other than temporary,” she went on. “If I didn’t reenter the machine each morning, both I and my host—and the machine—would die.”
Despite the evidence of my senses, this talk of souls and energy fields—reminding me of the occult claptrap of the sixties—had renewed my doubts. “People have been digging up the Burying Ground for years,” I said. “Why hasn’t someone found this machine?”
“It’s a very clever machine,” she said, smiling again. “It hides from those who aren’t meant to find it.”
“Why would it choose only impaired hosts?”
“To choose an unimpaired one would run contrary to the machine’s morality. And to mine.”
“How does it attract them?”
“My understanding of the machine is limited, but I assume there’s a process of conditioning involved. Each time I wake in a new host, it’s always the same. A clearing, a shelter, the snakes.”
I started to ask another question, but she waved me off.
“You act as though I must prove something,” she said. “I have no wish to prove anything. Even if I did, I’m not sure I could. Most of my memories were stripped from me at the death of my body, and those that remain are those that have stained the soul. In a sense I’m as much Ray as I am myself. Each night I inherit his memories, his abilities. It’s like living in a closet filled with someone else’s belongings.”
I continued to ask questions, with part of my mind playing the psychiatrist, eliciting answers in order to catalog Ray’s insanity; yet my doubts were fading. She could not recall the purpose of her journey or even of her life, but she said that her original body had been similar to the human form—her people, too, had a myth of an ancient star-seeding race—though it had been larger, stronger, with superior organs of perception. Her world was a place of thick jungles, and her remote ancestors had been nocturnal predators. An old Caribe man had been her first host on the island; he had wandered onto the Burying Ground six months after her arrival, maddened by pain from a cancer that riddled his stomach. His wife had been convinced that a goddess had possessed him, and she had brought the tribal elders to bear witness.
“They were afraid of me,” she said. “And I was equally afraid of them. Little devil-men with ruddy skins and necklaces of jaguar teeth. They built fires around me, hemming me in, and they’d dance and screech and thrust their spears at me through the flames. It was nightmarish. I knew they might lose control of their fear at any second and try to kill me. I might have defended myself, but life was sacred to me then. They were whole, vital beings. To harm them would have been to mock what remained of me.”
She had cultivated them, and they had responded by providing her with new hosts, by arranging their fires to depict the constellation Cassiopeia, hoping to call down other gods to keep her company. It had been a fruitless hope, and there were other signals that would have been more recognizable to her people, but she had been touched by their concern and had not told them.
I will not pretend that I recall exactly everything she said, yet I believe what follows captures the gist of her tale. At first I was disconcerted by its fluency and humanity; but I soon realized that not only had she had two centuries in which to practice her humanity, not only was she taking advantage of Ray’s gift for storytelling, but also that she had told much of it before.
For twenty-two years [she said] I inhabited Caribe bodies, most of them terribly damaged. Cripples, people with degenerative diseases, and once a young girl with a huge dent in her skull, an injury gotten during a raid. Though my energies increased the efficiency of their muscles, I endured all their agonies. But as the Caribe retreated from the island in face of the English, even this tortured existence was denied to me. I spent four years within the machine, despairing of ever leaving it again. Then, in 1819, Ezekiel Brooks stumbled onto the Burying Ground. He was a retarded boy of seventeen and had become lost in the mangrove. When his father, William, came in search of him, he found me instead. He remembered the fiery object that had fallen from the sky and was delighted to have solved a puzzle that had baffled his captain for so many years. Thereafter he visited every week and dragged old Henry Meachem along.
Meachem was in his seventies then, fat, with a doughy, wrinkled face and long gray hair done up into ringlets; he affected foppish clothes and a lordly manner. He had the gout and had to be carried through the mangrove by his slaves. They brought with them a teakwood chair, its grips carved into lions’ heads, and there he’d sit, wheezing, bellowing at the slaves to keep busy with their fly whisks, plying me with questions. He did not believe my story, and on his second visit, a night much like this one, moonstruck and lightly winded, he was accompanied by a Spanish woman, a scrawny old hag enveloped in a black shawl and skirt, who he told me was a witch.
“Sit you down with Tía Claudia,” he said, prodding her forward with his cane, “and she’ll have the truth of you. She’ll unravel your thoughts like a ball of twine.”
The old woman sat cross-legged beside the pit, pulled a lump of clouded crystal from her skirt, and set it on the ground before her. Beneath the shawl her shadowed wrinkles had the look of a pattern in tree bark, and despite her apparent frailty I could feel her presence as a chill pressure on my skin. Uneasy, I sat down on the opposite side of the pit. Her eyelids drooped, her breath gre
w shallow and irregular, and the force of her life flooded me, intensifying in the exercise of her power. The fracture planes inside the crystal appeared to be gleaming with more than refracted moonlight, and as I stared at them, a drowsy sensation stole over me…but then I was distracted by a faint rushing noise from the pit.
Hatchings of fine lines were etching the surface of the water, sending up sprays of mist. The patterns they formed resembled the fracture planes of the crystal. I glanced up at Tía Claudia. She was trembling, a horror-stricken expression on her face, and the rushing noise was issuing from her parted lips as though she had been invaded by a ghostly wind. The ligature of her neck was cabled, her hands were clawed. I looked back to the pit. Beneath the surface, shrinking and expanding in a faltering rhythm, was a point of crimson light. Tía Claudia’s power, I realized, was somehow akin to that of the machine. She was healing it, restoring its homing capacity, and it was opening a road! Hope blazed in me. I eased into the pit, and the fields gripped me, stronger than ever. But as the old woman let out a shriek and slumped to the ground, they weakened; the point of light shrank to nothing, gone glimmering like my hope. It had only been a momentary restoration, a product of her mind joined to the machine’s.
Two of Meachem’s slaves helped Tía Claudia to her feet, but she shook them off and backed out of the shelter, her eyes fixed on the pit. She leaned against Meachem’s chair for support.
“Well?” he said.
“Kill him!” she said. “He’s too dangerous, too powerful.”
“Him?” Meachem laughed.
The Jaguar Hunter Page 38