“They’re gone for now,” Corinne said. “We have until tonight to think of what to do.”
“What can we do?” Bouki said. “They are stronger than us. They can make giant killer weeds grow up out of the ground in seconds. They have claws and razor-sharp teeth and fur.”
“Everything has a weakness,” Corinne said. “Remember, Dru said they can’t come out during the day.”
“Severine can,” Dru said.
“Dru!” Corinne rushed to hug her. “You’re okay!”
Dru didn’t hug her back. Her hair was unbraided and waved in the wind, and there was a strange look in her eyes.
“What happened?” Corinne asked.
“They were everywhere,” Dru said. “I made it all the way home, and I peeped out of a hole in the wall near my bed. I saw them come out of the forest and start banging down doors and fighting with my neighbors. Then a little band of douens started to pitch marbles in the street. My neighbor Allan . . .” she paused and looked at Corinne. “He came out to play with them. I wanted to scream at him not to go, but I didn’t want them to know where I was. So I just watched. As soon as he picked up a marble to pitch, they started saying ‘Oh, oh, oh’ and next thing, Allan was saying it too.”
Corinne gasped. “What happened?”
“His mother came out and tried to call him back. So then the jumbies knew his name. They called him, and he followed them into the forest. His mother called him again, but he couldn’t go to her.”
“Why not?” Bouki asked.
“When he turned back toward his mother, his legs didn’t turn with him. They were still walking toward the forest while the rest of him was facing his mother. I stopped looking then. I could still hear all the fighting, but I couldn’t watch anymore.”
Corinne tried to shake off the cold feeling that was crawling up her spine. Then she whispered, “I’m sorry.”
Dru cast an accusing eye at Corinne, but said nothing.
Malik hung his left arm at his side and hobbled for a few steps.
“That’s no use. We tried to talk to the witch before,” Corinne said. “She didn’t want to help.”
Malik waved his hand at the destruction all around them.
“You’re right, brother,” Bouki said. “Things are different now.”
“The white witch doesn’t care,” Corinne said.
“Maybe it’s you she doesn’t want to help,” Dru said. “You were the one who went running into the mahogany forest, where everyone knows there are jumbies. You were the one who had that jumbie in your house. Maybe the witch just didn’t want to help you.” She bit down hard on her trembling lip.
“It’s not my fault that Miss Severine followed me out of the forest. And if you’re looking for somebody to blame for sending me in there . . .” She pointed a finger at Bouki.
“Me? How was I supposed to know that stupid ’gouti would go that way?”
Malik stamped his foot so hard that the curls on his head shook. He pointed toward the forest and then back at the village. Then he put his hands on his hips.
“Okay, you’re right, Malik,” Corinne said. “They could come back again. So how do we find the witch?”
27
The Swamp
No human had ever seen the witch’s house. But everyone knew that it was hidden in a swamp of stinking water, surrounded by mangrove trees so thick that some said they were enchanted to make sure no one got through. No one had ever attempted the trek to see the witch in her lair—until now.
Corinne, Dru, Bouki, and Malik journeyed north around the coast of the island toward the mouth of the largest river. About midafternoon, they finally heard the sound of churning water where the river mingled with the sea. They turned and followed it deeper into the island. The farther they went, the more they got crowded in by mangrove trees. The children waded in the water, swatting away thick swarms of flies, because the big, gray roots were too dense on either bank for even their small feet. The water was not much better. Mangrove roots arched down like giant, aged fingers and tripped them as they walked. Then, as the trees began to come in even closer, growing directly out of the river, the water became still and turned to swamp.
The murky, greenish water of the swamp seemed to stretch on forever around them.
Corinne stopped and looked around at the still water and the ancient trees with their tangled roots. She held her nose and breathed through her mouth to avoid the stink. Besides the horrible stench, there was no way to tell how deep the water would get, or behind what grove of trees the witch’s hut stood, or even what creatures watched, hidden in the trees or under the water. It took her several heartbeats before she could take another step forward. The others waited for her. They moved only when she did.
Bits of thick, brown, oily muck clung to their clothes as they went. Behind them, they left a trail of muck-free, greenish water.
“Something’s on me, it’s on me!” Dru screamed. “Get it off!”
“Stop it. You’re splashing the slime on me, Dru!” Bouki said.
“Get it off!” Dru screamed.
“There’s nothing on you,” Corinne said to Dru. “You’re imagining things.”
“You got nasty swamp water in my mouth!” Bouki complained. “Stop with all that splashing!”
Corinne put both her hands on Dru’s shoulders as much to steady her own quaking body as to calm Dru down. “We’ll be out soon. It’s not so bad. Look. It’s clearing up ahead.”
Malik tapped his brother’s shoulder and pointed out a snake curled on a branch overhead. Corinne saw it too. It was barely noticeable, only a slightly paler shade of green than the leaves around it. Then it unfurled and stretched itself toward the water.
“Looks like we’re going to be in that clearing sooner than you think,” Bouki said. He cut through the swamp as fast as he could go, splashing up vile-smelling water.
Malik followed close behind. Corinne trailed a little, pulling Dru along. The long, green snake touched down in the water. It began to slither toward them in a curving line over the surface of the swamp. It was fast.
All four of them screamed and beat a rapid path away from the snake.
“Come on! Come on!” Bouki shouted from up ahead.
When they were finally away from the trees, the ground beneath them dropped suddenly and they were forced to swim. Bouki struck out for the middle of the swamp with Malik close behind. Corinne pushed Dru ahead of her and followed, paddling hard. They cleared the mangrove and the muck, but they all continued to swim frantically until Bouki called, “It’s okay. It’s gone.”
They were all covered in nasty-smelling slime, and wet, cold, and panting from exhaustion. The witch’s house was still nowhere in sight. “We’re wasting time,” Corinne said. “We should go back.”
Malik reached his hand out and pointed behind her. There, in the middle of the clearing, was a tiny island. It was not much more than a muddy mound rising out of the center of the swamp with a small shack on top.
Corinne smiled. “Good eye, Malik!”
Corinne led the way toward the little island. Near its shore a mossy row of rocks rose out of the water and made a path toward the witch’s hut.
It was hard for them to pull themselves up onto the slippery rocks. Several times they lost their footing and wound up back in the water. Only Malik seemed to make progress, as if he had grips on the soles of his feet.
“How does the old witch do it?” Bouki asked after he fell in yet again.
“She’s a witch. She uses magic,” Dru said.
“Maybe the rocks are only slippery for us. Maybe when she is walking on them, it’s a regular road,” Bouki said a moment before he fell back into the water up to his neck.
As Corinne slipped into the water again, Malik moved past her on nimble feet. “How are you doing that?” she asked. But Malik only snickered.
Bouki got back up on the rocks. “She does this with a tray of potions balanced on her head?”
“Like I s
aid, it’s magic,” Dru said.
“I could use some magic,” Bouki complained.
At last they all made it to the witch’s door. Corinne knocked three times, hard. They dripped swamp water on the witch’s front step and waited.
The crooked door wobbled open and the witch peered through it. She studied the slime-covered children carefully. “You again?” she asked. Her voice grated like a boat scraping along gravel. She turned back inside the shack and left the door open.
Corinne watched the bright colors of her housedress darken in the shadows of the hut. She hesitated at the door.
“I won’t eat you,” the witch said from inside. She began to laugh, but ended up coughing instead.
Corinne went in first, and the others followed her. The house was only one room. On shelves along the crooked walls, there were glass, clay, and wooden containers of various shapes and sizes. The floor was bare wood rubbed smooth from countless years of the old woman’s shuffling feet.
The witch gestured to a rough-hewn table and bench in the middle of the room. “Sit.” She moved to the opposite side and returned to filling and sorting the ingredients in her potions.
“Why wouldn’t you help us when we came to you in the market yesterday?” Corinne demanded.
“I didn’t know then what she wanted,” the witch replied. Her shoulders drooped toward the floor. Her deep-brown skin, which already had lines and grooves like the bark of a tree, seemed to crease even more deeply.
“I tried to warn you,” Corinne said. “I knew she was going to do something to hurt us all.”
Dru put her hands on her hips. “You knew?”
“Well, my friends knew,” Corinne corrected herself. “But I came to you and you did nothing.”
The witch shuffled over to a shelf. As she went, her long yellow toenails clicked on the wooden floor. She scratched at the shiny brown bald spots between her white braids. At her side, her left arm hung withered and limp. She didn’t seem like someone powerful, someone who could help.
With some difficulty, the witch rolled a piece of paper into a funnel with her good arm and poured red seeds into small bottles. She stuck a cork in each one and put them on a tray. Malik reached out a finger toward a slip of paper that held a tiny hill of black pods.
“Do you like your fingers the way they are?” the witch snapped.
Malik froze. The witch shook her head at him and he pulled his hand back into his lap. In that moment, she looked like her previous self: powerful, self-assured, and able.
“So what do you want me to do now?” she asked without looking at any of them.
“I need to get past the jumbies,” Corinne said.
“Ha!” the witch replied with contempt. “How do you plan on doing that?”
“Can’t you help me? You get past them all the time.”
“The jumbies don’t have anything to fear from me, and there’s nothing I have that they want,” the witch said. “I also don’t go around fighting them and trying to set fire to their homes, so they trust me. If you can say the same thing, then you can also get past them.”
“Isn’t there some trick?” Corinne asked.
The witch shook her head and her white braids tossed around.
“Then can’t you just get rid of the jumbies?” Corinne asked.
“Me? You people have too much faith in what I can do.”
“You could if you wanted to,” Corinne said. “What are all these for?” She gestured to the bottles, seeds, and leaves on the table.
“Some people need these things.”
“Right now, people need to get rid of all those jumbies. What do you have here for that?”
“Nothing,” said the white witch.
“Severine has put some kind of magic on my papa. He doesn’t even know what’s happening around him. And now there’s a poisonous vine wrapped around my house. What do you have for that?”
“You have any jumbie weed killer on this table?” Bouki asked with a grin. He nudged his brother and Dru. But no one laughed. The witch shot him a nasty look and he pretended to smooth out a knot on the wood table.
“I told you that was a bad one. And now she has completely taken over your house?” The witch shook her head and clucked her tongue. “Women and men live together all the time,” she said finally. “You should try to get along with your new mother.”
“She’s not my mother!” Corinne shouted. She clenched her fists to stop them from shaking. “Do you understand? She’s taking my papa. She’s changing him. You’re the only person who can help. Don’t tell me you’re just going to stand there and do nothing! I can’t stand around and watch him become a . . .” Corinne hesitated.
“A jumbie,” Dru finished, with a firm nod.
Corinne shot her an angry look. “He isn’t a jumbie. He doesn’t know who he is. I could probably make him better if I could only get into my house when she isn’t there.”
“Past her poison weed?” the witch asked.
Corinne folded her arms around herself. “You must have something here I can use. She’s stronger than me. And she’s turned on everyone else. Didn’t you hear them all last night? This is our island and their kind are trying to take over.”
“Their kind?” the witch asked. “What kind is that?” She looked at Corinne beneath one cocked, white eyebrow.
“The kind of things that came out of the forest last night,” Corinne said slowly.
“Their kind, your kind, is there a difference?”
“They are trying to kill us!” Dru said.
“They belong to this island, child. You cannot get rid of them. They are part of it. You don’t like it when someone moves into your house for an afternoon,” the witch said to Corinne. “How would you like it if someone moved in, shoved you and your family into the deepest pockets of the island, and refused to leave for a couple hundred years? And what if those new people forgot that you were even there, and when they found you again, they feared you and tried to kill you off? How would you like that?”
Corinne looked down at her hands in her lap. Severine had told her the same thing. With a small voice, she said, “They’re not like regular people.” But she understood about losing her home, and she was willing to fight for it, the same as Severine.
“I’m not like regular people, either,” the witch said. “Will you be trying to get rid of me next?”
Corinne searched the witch’s face. “How are you different?”
“I’m as different as you are,” she said, eyeing Corinne.
Corinne stiffened. Her eyes darted to her friends to see if they understood what the witch meant.
“They’re taking children,” Dru pleaded. “They’re probably going to get these two boys next. They don’t even have parents to look after them.”
“Hey!” Bouki said.
“It’s true. You don’t,” Dru said. But she didn’t want to scare Malik too much, so she smiled at him and patted his hand a little.
“Look,” Corinne said. “We know Severine wanted something from one of your little bottles here. Whatever magic she used on my papa probably came from right here.”
“You made this mess.” Bouki banged his fist on the wood table. Some of the bottles wobbled and clinked together. “So you help us fix it.”
He tried to hold the witch’s gaze. But when her eyes burned into his, he looked down at the table again and put his hands in his lap.
“You think I had something to do with that? You’re wrong,” the witch said. “She didn’t need any help turning your father. Men are turned by pretty faces every minute of every day.”
Bouki nodded. “I told her that, didn’t I, brother?” he asked Malik softly.
Malik didn’t even blink in response to his brother.
“Then what did she come to you for?” Corinne asked.
“She came to me for a way to stay on the outside. Her kind can’t live too long away from their own element.”
Corinne and Dru exchanged a look. “How
could you help her but not help us?” Corinne asked. “Now she’s taken over my house. My mama’s house. She’s killing my papa!” The words burned her throat.
The witch sighed deeply. “It is my vow. I cannot take sides. If I help one side, I have to help the other. So it’s better to stay out of it entirely. I have helped your side plenty. I’ve done all I can do.”
“What happens to you if you take sides?” Corinne asked.
“You see how my arm has shriveled up,” the witch said. “Useless.”
Bouki sucked his teeth, chups. “That happened to you when you went swimming in the river that day, when you nearly drowned yourself.”
“You’re not too smart, are you, boy?” the witch sneered. “Do you imagine I could have lived surrounded by water for over a hundred years and never have learned how to swim?” She turned her attention to Malik. “It must be very frustrating living with a dunce like this one.”
Malik’s face broke into a brief smile that disappeared when he saw his brother’s hurt face.
“Can’t you fix your arm?” Corinne asked.
“I don’t have a remedy for her magic,” the witch said. “It’s an old magic, far beyond what I know.”
“What about my papa?”
The witch shook her head.
“And what would happen to me? What if I tried?” Corinne asked in a low voice.
“Ah, I see. So you already know what you are, then.” The witch saw the confused looks on the faces of the other children. “But you have not told your friends yet?”
Corinne looked down at the table. “I don’t believe it,” she said softly.
The Jumbies Page 10