The Clearing

by Dan Newman

  The boys shuffled forward through the drying nutmeg, and the community at their feet grumbled at the intrusion, rattling out their displeasure as they jostled with their neighbors to find a new space. At the far corner of the room there was a clearing just below a window, and as Nate looked through it, he could see it was the window he had noticed from outside the morning they arrived, the one that was cocked open and felt like someone, something, was watching him through it. The thought of it made him shiver, and he reflexively looked back into the expanse of the attic. Tristan had put the flashlight down and was fussing with the chicken in the bowl, and so no light was cast into the center of the loft. The darkness was so complete it seemed to draw the very breath from Nate’s chest, and as his eyes struggled to find something to focus on, he became quickly alarmed that there might be something out there, in the black expanse, watching them and waiting its turn.

  “I can’t see anything over there, Tristan,” he said, and his voice gave away his concern. “I think there’s something there. Shine the light. Shine the light over there.”

  Tristan lit the room and the shadows retreated. There was nothing there, and the return of light to the darkness felt like a thick and suffocating blanket ripped from about his head at just the last minute. “All right, the chicken’s all set,” said Tristan. “Let’s get out of here.”

  “I’m good with that,” whispered Nate, shuffling his feet forward and giving life to the nutmeg chorus once more.

  21

  Nate blinked again and tried to focus on the object. It sat in the penumbra of the blue moonlight, veiled in navy tones that wouldn’t give up its shape. He hadn’t left anything there when he went to sleep, had he? No. His clothes and shoes were on the chair at the foot of the bed. Nate leaned in and caught what looked like something shiny, perhaps a reflection. And as he came closer he saw that it was indeed a reflection, a chance moonbeam bouncing off the surface of a small glass vile—a small glass vile pressed into the hollowed-out abdomen of a bloodied bird.

  Nate recoiled like a hand from a hot stove, and then, gaining his wits, lunged for the bedside table light. In the stark light of the lamp the shades of blue in the room retreated, and the thing on the floor called out in reds, while the open window became a maw in flat black. Nate’s eyes flicked back and forth between the open window and the dead bird. Both registered as threats, both urging him to react. But somehow their opposing forces paralyzed him into inactivity and only served to get his heart racing wildly. Finally Nate’s mind committed. He lunged again, this time for the window to slam it shut. He could see nothing out there. The window resisted closing, and the more he struggled with the latch the more defiant the glass pane became. Shit! he exclaimed, and the sound of his own voice in the stillness of the night made his fear real, and his heart raced again. At last the latch came free and he swung the window closed. Then, as an afterthought, he drew the curtains tightly against whatever—whoever—might be watching outside.

  Nate then turned to the thing on his floor.

  It looked to be much the same as the one from Rodney Bay: black feathers matted with crimson, limp-necked and bulging at the gut with a protruding glassy vile. The small bottle was wrapped, much like the last one, with leaves and something stringy and vine-like, and inside there was a dark red liquid that clung to the inside and coated the glass with a red hue.

  Jesus Christ, muttered Nate squatting in front of it. What should I do? he thought. What do you do when a dead bird—some kind of black magic, voodoo, dead bird—shows up on your floor in the middle of the night? What’s the protocol? He’d have to tell someone. Yes, he’d go wake the manager, or the owner, or whatever the title was of the woman who had rented him this room. He’d go find her and tell her, and she’d call the police. No. The police could not be trusted—he’d learned that lesson already. And whoever was out there—was that what they wanted him to do? Unlock the door and come out into the 4:00 am darkness where they could lash out at him from the shadows, truss him up like a pig for the slaughter and drag him off to God knows where?

  In the stall before a decision could be made, he realized he needed a weapon. He needed something in his hands that was hard and had a bit of heft to it. What could he use? There wasn’t much, nothing in fact, nothing except the old wooden chair at the foot of his bed where his clothes lay. It was old and heavy, and the two uprights that formed the rear legs and extended up to make the chair-back supports were thick as truncheons.

  Without so much as a thought to the owner, Nate seized the chair, hoisted it above his head and brought it crashing down onto the floor. It held together, but he felt it flex. The second blow did it, and a few kicks saw the structure collapse entirely, yielding two solid pieces of heavy mahogany that made a menacing pair of clubs. Nate hefted them both, felt their weight, then put one aside in favor of a single weapon.

  Moving quickly, he checked the door to his room, made sure it was locked, and then darted over to the window to look out. As he swept back the curtain his heart lurched; he was confronted by a man with a club staring back at him, and Nate instinctively yelped and leapt backwards into the room.

  With the light on, it was impossible to see out through the window, and at the same time anyone outside would have a perfect view of Nate. He scrambled for the bedside lamp. With a click, the room was plunged into darkness, and Nate froze by the bed, waiting, watching for anything to move. After a few moments his hand began to cramp. He loosened his grip on the makeshift club, changed hands and moved stealthily over to the edge of the window. This time he moved the curtain slowly, from the side, and with darkness cloaked around him, he had a clear view of the scene outside.

  The small courtyard was quiet. It was finished in flagstone with seams of white concrete. To the right was the back of the restaurant, and the area to the left and straight ahead was bound by a small track, and then gave way to bush. A lone and stark security light burned above the back door of the restaurant, pointing away from the structure and down the two ruts of the track. And above it all a bright and waxing gibbous moon drenched the scene in blue.

  Nate scanned the area. Everything seemed quiet, but his mind ran wildly around trying to figure out what to do next. No one would be awake right now, he rationalized. The smartest thing to do would be to just sit tight and wait it out. Wait until the sun was up and the threatening darkness was pushed well back. He would make better decisions then, he thought. Nate wiped his forehead. It was warm in the room, so warm. And now with the window closed there was no breeze. Was it just heat, or was it a fever?

  Using pieces from the broken chair, Nate picked up the carcass of the chicken and put it in the small trash can by the door. It was lined with a white plastic bag, so Nate tied it up securely, and put the bag and the small bin in the furthest corner of the room. It would have to do for now. Nate then checked the door one more time to make sure it was locked, propped the pillows up and crawled onto the bed. He would wait it out in the warm little room. He would sweat some, but he would be safe. He sat silently with his knees up, the club lying across his thighs, and tried to listen for the sound of someone approaching.

  • • •

  It occurred to Nate that perhaps it was all staged, an elaborate trick to scare the crap out of him and Pip. He thought about it hard: the dead chicken in the attic where all the nutmeg was drying, the dead goat, the stories Richard and the old woman in the hut had told them. Maybe it was all just quality theatre. But the goat thing bothered him. Goats were currency this far off the beaten track, and killing one was an expensive prop to impress a thirteen-year-old.

  “Keep watching,” said Tristan, and Nate was snapped back to the present. “You’ll see the whole upper part start to glow.”

  The two boys were standing in the bedroom at the bay windows that sat up over the track. They had shuffled down to the right end, where the windows angled in and afforded a view back toward the workers’ huts. Halfway down the track sat the small square form of the cop
ra oven, and Nate could make out a series of flashlights bobbing around and occasionally lighting up the three figures out there—Vincent, Pip, and Richard. Nate felt good about standing in the relative safety of the bedroom. After his adventure into the attic with Tristan, he was happy to be a bystander for now, watching as others floundered about in the darkness.

  “It’s cool when you throw the spark in—it all lights up at once, and you get these wild flames from the burning husks,” said Tristan excitedly, and as he said it the small square building suddenly surged with an orange glow, with most of the light emanating from the six-inch gap between the top of the walls and the raised tin roof.

  “There it goes!” squealed Tristan, patting the windowsill in excitement. “I love that!”

  Nate saw that he was smiling, but as Richard came hopping excitedly around the structure with his uncle’s arm about his shoulders, Tristan’s smile quickly vanished.

  “We’ll all be going to sleep now,” Tristan said, turning away from the window and flopping down on the bed at the center of the room.

  Nate watched as the two boys and Vincent stood basking in the glow of the copra oven. He could see that the flames were settling, and that the orange glow was calming to a modest blush. He turned and looked at Tristan. “That bowl we left upstairs. You believe in that stuff? I mean, for real?” He tried to sound tough, dismissive, but it came out with an edge of concern.

  “What do you think?” asked Tristan derisively. “You think I like going up there? Of course it’s real.”

  “But you’ve never seen it, right? The Bolom. You’ve never actually seen it yourself.” It was a statement.

  Tristan propped himself up on his elbows and looked at Nate with something akin to pity. “You vwayajes are all the same, tourists with no understanding of this place. No appreciation. No consideration for anything outside your narrow North American experience.”

  The lecture struck Nate as hollow. It was a recycled invective, probably something his father was fond of saying. It rang entirely false in Tristan’s delivery, but Nate stood quietly and let him go on. “Of course I haven’t seen it—yet. But I’ve felt it. I’ve felt it close to me, I’ve heard it and I’ve seen the things it does. It’s real, Nate.”

  Nate turned back to the window and stared down at the group of three figures watching the coconut husks settle into their glow for the night. It was smoking much more now, billowing up through the gap at the top of the structure, muting the glow to snatches of orange brightness peeking through the haze. Vincent motioned to the boys and they began to move away from the structure. They moved slowly, backwards, hanging on to the moment and lingering as much as they could. Finally Vincent clapped his hands and the boys fell in behind him.

  It took another hour to settle the boys, but by the time Vincent pulled on the blue nylon string in the floor and silenced the generator—and the single light in the room—they were all ready to sleep. Vincent lay in the only bed, pushed up against the wall near the bedroom door. The boys lay in their sleeping bags on one-inch thick foam rectangles by the bay window. They giggled and swatted each other for a while, but stopped when Vincent mumbled at them from a state of near sleep: Boys, come now, time for bed.

  Soon the old room was silent, and all five slipped speedily into a deep sleep. The house settled into its rhythm for the night. The winds crept through the open windows, blew through the empty, lightless corridors, and chased stray leaves along their way. The bats, filled from a night of gorging on fruit from plantations all across the island, fluttered back in and found their roosts, squeaking lightly and wrapping their wings about them like shrouds in the blackness. Spiders set to work on new webs, mice patrolled the dark corners and edges for new scraps, and ants trouped through the kitchen, unseen and in single file, liberating spilled sugar they found on the floor.

  And, in the black hours before dawn, Nate woke in the darkness to the sound of something else—something much larger than spiders and bats—and the sound of it sat him up on his mattress. It came through the open front doorway of the plantation house at Ti Fenwe, hesitantly at first, stepping cautiously, and then, after a moment of silence that threatened to coil Nate’s ears, it thundered up the stairs and into the blackness of the attic.

  22

  Nate was sweating hard in the little room in Dennery. He had fallen asleep much easier than he might have imagined, perhaps in part because of the heat, or because of his exhaustion after the unsettling business with the dead bird. He had settled back into the pillows on the bed, and the sweat coming off him as he slept had pooled in the notch at the base of his neck. It ran down his chest as he sat bolt upright, torn from sleep by the thunderous sound at his door.

  Nate lurched from the bed, wide-eyed and confused by the rough awakening, and was startled again as the club he had set across his legs tumbled to the floor and clattered around his feet.

  “Nate!” came the cry at the door, followed by more banging. “Nate, man, you in dere?” Nate steadied himself and tried to focus. His head hurt, and the flesh behind his eyes felt thick and spongy.

  “Nate! It me, man. Smiley!” The voice was more insistent now.

  “Just a sec,” he replied. And he was surprised again, this time by the meekness in his own voice. As he crossed the room to the door, Nate realized he felt awful. He twisted the deadbolt and Smiley came through like a stocky brown bull, arms spread wide and at the ready, eyes flitting quickly about the room. “Nate, are you okay? Is everytin’ okay?” He finally looked at Nate and recoiled physically at the sight. “Bondie! My God!” He called out. “What has happened to you?”

  Nate’s mind struggled through a sticky bog. “What do you mean what’s happened to me?” Something in Nate slipped and he found himself getting angry.

  “Are you not well, my friend? You seem ill.”

  “Yes, yes,” said Nate scaling an unreasonably steep ridge of irritation. “I feel like shit. I don’t know what’s wrong.”

  “Sometin’ happen?” asked Smiley, and then, awkwardly, “you sick in de night?”

  “No, no, I wasn’t. But there was this thing…” Nate’s mind was clearing quickly. His head still hurt and pounded like a marching band drum, but he was putting things together more cleanly now. The complete disconnect of Smiley’s presence dawned on him. “Smiley, how the fuck did you know I was here?”

  Smiley was sweating, too, Nate could see, and a little crop of sweat beads had risen like dew drops on his nose. He ran his thumbs around the radius of his belt and administered a three-point hike to his navy trousers. “Nate, man. Dis room will cook you to death. Come, le’ we get outside and out of dis heat. It terrible in here.” He reached a hand out to Nate and flicked his chin at the closed window. “You should have propped dat open. Get yourself a nice evenin’ sea breeze.”

  “It was open, until that showed up,” said Nate, pointing at the garbage can in the corner.

  Smiley wiped the sweat away from his nose and forehead with a handkerchief produced from his pocket. “What’s in there?” he asked cautiously, edging up to the container like man approaching a spitting cobra.

  “Some voodoo shit. A dead bird with a bottle stuffed in it. A chicken I think.” Nate’s voice was calm, almost detached. “It’s my second one in as many days.” The sense of urgency and panic that had gripped him so tightly the night before had been all but burned away with the daylight.

  Smiley looked into the garbage can from as far away as he could, but all he was able to see was a dense shape wrapped in white plastic. “Dis bird. Dis chicken. It black?”

  “Yeah, black.”

  “And it have glass inside? Glass with sometin’ red?”

  “Blood I’m guessing.”

  “Mm hmm. Blood for sure. Come,” he said again. “Le’ we get you outside.”

  He helped Nate from the bed and the two men walked into the brilliance of another idyllic tropical day. Outside in the courtyard behind the restaurant sat an old blue Gallant Sigma, a ref
ugee from the mid ’70s, rusting some but still fighting the good fight. Nate looked at its boxy sheet metal and chrome, and he couldn’t help but be drawn into the nostalgia of the thing. He remembered them being a staple in his youth, and anyone pulling up to the Yacht Club in a new Gallant was guaranteed nods of approval from the veranda, and perhaps even a decent semicircle of beer-swilling auto enthusiasts. Smiley gently ushered him over to the back door of the restaurant.

  Inside, they sat at one of four little tables on rattan chairs woven from local palms. The restaurant was really a bar, and Nate got the feeling it rarely saw people during the day. No one came to serve them, and Smiley walked through the open doorway into another part of the structure and came back with a tall glass bottle of water and a pair of plastic cups. Nate realized he was thirsty on a scale he couldn’t remember ever feeling before. His whole mouth was dry to the point of being tacky, and any two parts that touched were momentarily fused together.

  He snatched at the cup and found himself trembling as he raised it to his mouth, and much of the water spilled as he shakily tipped it to his lips. He swallowed deeply, and Smiley was ready with the refill. “Go slowly, Nate,” he said in an oddly paternal way. “You t’row all dat back up if don’t slow down.”

  And on cue, Nate turned quickly and stumbled for the door. He retched twice, steadied himself, then returned and sat heavily at the table. “Jesus, what’s happened to me?” he asked, cupping his face in his hands. “I feel like shit.”

  Smiley exhaled slowly. “I’m surprised it has taken dis long,” he said.

  “What—you’re surprised what’s taken this long?”

  Smiley pursed his lips. He leaned forward and became solemn, like a man delivering news of the death of a loved one. “The Obeah, Nate. You have been touched. You have been set upon by some fearful darkness, my friend.”