Tropic of Darkness

by Tony Richards

  Nothing, probably. Any way he looked at it, he was just chasing phantoms. But those damned photographs . . . he was always like this when he came across something that he didn’t fully understand. Like a dog with a bone.

  Carlos crossed to the chrome rails that overlooked the tables and then scanned the crowd. There were a couple of faces he immediately recognized. One was a black marketeer, Juan Sando. Another, Jose Hector Perinos, was a notorious high-class pimp. It annoyed him that creeps like these could live it up so well while honest people struggled for everything they had.

  Mostly, though, the crowd was made up of turistas, enjoying what they doubtless believed was a “typical” Cuban night out.

  His gaze touched on a familiar face a few tables away—a Frenchman by the name of Pierre Melville, working in Cuba as a volunteer. Carlos already knew about this fellow all right, from his informants among the working girls. And now, he could almost feel his nose start twitching.

  How was it that an Internationalista could afford places like this, and drinks like the ones sitting in front of him? There was another gringo next to him whom Carlos did not recognize. But they both seemed to be doing very nicely.

  He decided on instinct, then and there, to keep a very close eye on this pair.

  As the showgirls began trooping out, Carlos let his gaze sweep out across the auditorium, trying to spot anything else in the slightest out of place.

  * * *

  The stage filled up with dancers, trooping out from either wing, dressed in gold bikinis and with tall white plumes of feathers in their hair. And an amused smile crept over Jack’s features. This was nothing but a good old-fashioned cabaret. He doubted that the repertoire had changed too much in the club’s history. Exactly the kind of show . . .

  The smile dropped from his lips, his gaze becoming troubled once again.

  The same kind of show that people might have watched here decades back. Back in the fifties.

  The dream again. This was precisely like the dream.

  But just where had he seen this club depicted? And why could he remember that particular dream so vividly when, normally, he barely remembered his worst nightmares for more than a handful of seconds? Hell.

  The chorus girls all started singing as they kicked and turned.

  “Welcome to you all! Welcome to the Karibe! Welcome, everybody, to the land of dreams!”

  Brilliantly colored lights kept flashing across Jack. The music rose. The audience was rippling, heads bobbing, necks craning, palms slapping on tabletops.

  But Jack felt himself almost . . .

  Sinking.

  Like he was drowning in a sea of noise and vibration, motion and colored light. Being pulled below the surface, where the sounds were duller, the hues more muted. And he tipped his head back and could see the moon again. It seemed like the only real thing at this moment.

  There was a sudden pressure on his shoulder, and he rushed back to full consciousness.

  Pierre had reached across and gripped him, and was peering at him strangely.

  “Jackie? What in the hell is wrong with you?”

  Jack shook his head, trying to clear it. Returned his attention to the stage.

  When the dancers finished their number and left the stage, they were replaced by a singing duo. Then a fire-eater. Then the chorus girls returned. They’d changed costumes. There were still plumes in their hair, but they were red this time. The bikinis were of black leather, even skimpier than the gold ones. Each dancer wore a necklace made of seashells.

  Deep drums—in the orchestra pit—set up a throbbing beat.

  It was no Vegas-y number this time. They moved sinuously, like cats. Their heads swung languidly from side to side. Their eyes darted across the audience as if they were hunting.

  Jack felt his throat tighten as he watched.

  His girl for the evening snuggled up to him. Her perfume filled his nostrils, and he could feel her warm breath on his neck. But he did not so much as glance at her.

  The lights began to dim. The dancers’ bodies grew shadowy. Jack’s eyes narrowed. He would’ve sworn that there was somebody else moving in the gray dimness at the rear of the stage. Except he couldn’t make out who.

  The pounding of the drums was so loud that he found it hard to think straight. The entire world around him seemed to be caught up in their rhythm. Even his own breathing was. Even his heartbeat.

  Something glinted back behind the dancers for a second. Jack craned forward, trying to see what it was.

  Another spotlight came on, high up. It was stronger than the rest, a searing white, and sent a brilliant, tight beam lancing down to the stage floor. But it was empty. It remained abandoned, nobody moving in its direction. Jack was starting to wonder what on earth it was for when . . .

  Something passed through it.

  So quickly that he thought at first it had to be a huge moth or a bat.

  It was only when it came through for a second time, from the opposite direction, that he could see it was a hand. Female. Very slender and pale olive.

  The spotlight began moving around, trying to find the rest of the body. All it caught were fleeting glimpses. A flash of shoulder. Or a forearm, trapped for a split instant before vanishing from view.

  These were like the outer edges of a jigsaw, giving him no real idea what the whole picture was. Who was this woman?

  And it seemed to be happening independently of the main act. The other girls were still performing their cat number, seemingly oblivious.

  The beat of the drums abruptly stopped.

  The dancers froze into position.

  Something else had stopped too, Jack could see.

  The spotlight had halted.

  And captured in its harsh glow was the woman that it had been chasing this entire time.

  Like the others, she was motionless, her body held erect. Her arms were raised above her head, the wrists crossed, and her head was tilted back. Her eyes seemed to be closed, but . . .

  More than ever, Jack felt certain he’d seen this before.

  The audience around him was reduced to silhouettes.

  The woman finally began to move again. Very slowly, smoothly, she lowered her arms until they rested at her sides. Then, her chin came down. And the eyes were still closed, so Jack couldn’t be quite sure. But wasn’t she . . . ? Wasn’t she . . . ?

  He had seen that face before. He was certain of it. In the dream.

  The woman’s lashes gave a quiver that was noticeable even at this distance. Then her eyes started to open. And Jack found himself praying for them to be blue or brown. Because if they were a soft, delicate hazel . . .

  They blinked at him.

  And as Jack jumped up from his seat, yelling out loud, the woman’s lips formed themselves into a hungry and delighted smile.

  He was vaguely aware of everybody in the audience staring at him, Pierre gawking at him like he’d gone insane. But that was only on the edges of his consciousness. He couldn’t shift his focus from the woman on the stage.

  She remained there a moment longer, as still as a statue now.

  And then, without moving in any way, she disappeared.

  * * *

  One thing started puzzling Carlos when he stared across a second time at Pierre Melville’s table. Exactly which part of the show was the Frenchman’s gaunt companion looking at? His blond head kept on bobbing around quite independently of the dancers, as if he was watching something else entirely.

  He was still wondering about it when the companion leapt up to his feet and cried out like a maniac. The girl who was with him ended up dumped on the floor. And everybody else was craning round, trying to make out what the commotion was.

  The gringo seemed oblivious to the attention he was getting. He gawked at the stage for a few seconds more.

  Then he
gave a massive, nerveless jerk. Seemed to lose his balance and staggered. Had to grab hold of the table to stay upright, pulling the cloth loose and sending glasses crashing everywhere.

  Carlos followed every movement, his suspicions deepening, as Pierre rose and took hold of his friend’s elbow, trying to calm him down.

  The man was probably a junkie. He certainly looked thin enough. Maybe he’d been sniffing the cocaína too much and was having delusions. And that made his mind up. Yes, he would keep a very careful eye indeed on these two jokers in the days to come.

  CHAPTER

  FOURTEEN

  Jack had pulled himself free of Pierre and was stumbling back through the lobby. There were no gaming tables these days, like there had been in the fifties. At least that was different.

  He staggered through a door into a washroom. Which was empty at the moment. And thank God for that.

  Giddiness took hold of him again, and he clung onto a basin for support, still breathing heavily, his eyes screwed shut.

  A dream. And a slender woman on a nightclub stage in front of him, illusion and waking reality merging. It frightened him, and that didn’t happen too often. But it still did not make any sense.

  One moment she’d been there, in plain view. And the next, she was gone, exactly the way it had been in his fantasy last night.

  There was still blackness around him and the world seemed to be rocking. Open your damned eyes, he told himself.

  Jack managed it, but only very slowly. His lashes tried to stick together and his vision blurred. But finally, his own reflection drifted into focus in the mirror on the wall in front of him.

  There was still nobody else in here.

  He’d actually suspected that the woman might be there behind him, when he dared to look.

  * * *

  Sleep was a tenuous thing for Dolores. Always had been, ever since she could recall. She remembered once, in her teenage years, dipping into a book in the house’s library and coming across some phrase about a person “falling deep into a peaceful slumber.”

  And she’d been filled with envy. How might it feel, to lie unconscious in her bed for long, uninterrupted hours, instead of drifting in and out of sleep and waking at the slightest noise, the way she always did?

  There was something else about the process too. Something her own Mama had told her, a few months before she’d died.

  “Our kind have always believed that sleep is a brief foretaste of death. Beware of dreams especially, Dolores. Be ever conscious of their power. For when you dream, you leave our world and open a door to quite another. And it is their world, the twins’, where they are at their very strongest.”

  That had always stayed with her. But tonight, sitting at the table in the dining room, her head tilted and Dolores nodded off.

  A dream began immediately, the images wrapping around her like some great, enfolding blanket. She could smell and touch as well as see and hear.

  It was no longer the present day but over two hundred years earlier. And she was still of the same bloodline, but was no longer Dolores.

  She’d become the one who had begun all this. Her many-times-great grandmother. Camille herself.

  * * *

  The Batá, big leather drums, summoned her, despite the fact that they were beating several miles away, too distant to be physically heard. She could make out their insistent rhythm in her head, the same way she heard many things a normal human couldn’t. It was a vibration like a second pulse.

  Her silk petticoats rustling, Camille went to a window of the great DeFlores estate, staring out across the green expanses of the sugarcane plantation. It was so vast, an ocean of stems tinged red by the disappearing sun. You could look from here to the farthest horizon and still not see it all.

  Smoke was rising from the refinery chimneys more than a mile distant, lending its own shadings to the coming dusk. But its furnaces would be dying down, untended by this hour. The refinery, the stables, and the fields themselves would be deserted this particular late afternoon. Traveling by horse and cart, or hurrying on foot, the plantation’s slaves would be gathering in the woods at the eastern border of the property. None of the overseers would dare to try and stop them.

  This night was a great tambor, the festival of her personal orisha, mighty Changó. And not even the cruelest and most brutal of the whites dared stand against their slaves on such occasions.

  The big house around her was unnaturally quiet. Even the maids and cooks were gone.

  A creak of floorboards directly above her broke Camille’s train of thought. That would be her husband, pacing around nervously in the study upstairs. He’d been pensive the entire day, knowing what was coming and the part that she would play in it.

  This whole business unsettled him badly; he was still a Christian man at heart. But like the overseers, he had far better sense than to attempt to intervene.

  She smiled and began humming to herself, anticipating the pleasures of the night ahead. The dancing, and the singing, and the sacrifices, and . . .

  And . . . Santiago was a decent man, treated her very well. But it would feel so good to have a younger buck pressing against her tonight. Have fingers run across her skin that were not stiff with age. Have the smell of hot, fresh sweat in her nostrils, instead of the faint odor of decay.

  It would be the doing of wonderful Changó, the orisha of passion, among other things. Of the many tambors, this was certainly the best.

  She went out of the room and down the stairs. The evening’s heat enfolded her as she emerged onto the porch, the whine of mosquitoes starting up around her head.

  A couple of the yard dogs roused themselves and followed her as she went toward the stables. And once she’d mounted up, they continued after her for a while longer before tiring and falling back.

  She spurred her roan mare in the direction of the woods.

  The light was already three-quarters gone when she got there. Everything had taken on a smoky look, and the chime of cicadas was a solid presence.

  The sound of drums echoed out between the dense trunks like a giant’s heartbeat, and she stared at the spot it was coming from.

  If shadows had a place of birth, then this had to be it. If they were living things, then this was where they slept during the day.

  It had been no accident that the original Yoruba slaves had chosen this place to practice the most secret of their arts. There were certain places in the world that were entirely perfect for such rituals. Concealed places, always. Caverns. Plateaus. Hidden coves.

  And clearings within woods such as this one.

  As for Camille, her spirit had been bound to this place, long before her birth. And anybody else who came here did so at her sufferance.

  Even her own daughters. They’d have both arrived. She thought of them with a tremendous pride. How very beautiful they had become. And they were both as good students as any santera could hope for, their thirst for the secret knowledge seemingly unquenchable.

  Camille went in through the trees. Despite the fact that there was practically no light to see by, she walked easily and quietly. Other noises reached her before much longer. She could make out chanting and the stamp of countless feet upon the ground.

  She kicked off her shoes, began to unfasten her heavy dress. She was leaving it behind like a snake shedding its skin. Her stockings and her undergarments went the same way.

  She reached the edge of the clearing and could make out the two things in it that made this spot so very sacred. There was a tall palm tree—special to Changó—and a Ceiba tree, holiest of them all.

  The ground around the latter was covered with the bones of animals that had been sacrificed.

  Camille stopped, just out of sight behind the tree line. Watched.

  There had to be around six hundred worshippers present. They ranged from elderly folk to todd
lers. And everywhere that she looked, there was motion.

  Arms were raised and heads tipped back. Three drummers were squatting at the far end of the clearing, keeping up a rhythmic discourse, singing to the beat.

  A heavy rustle in the undergrowth behind her brought her head jerking around.

  Peering at her through the gloom were two pretty young girls, Nora and Jasmina. They normally worked in the scullery of the great house. On nights such as these, however, they had special duties to perform.

  They had brought along a flask of pure spring water, and they washed Camille down. And then, they helped her get dressed. A long red coat came first. Then a red and white headdress. Her wrists and neck were adorned with strings of beads.

  By the time that it was done, the sky above had turned completely black. The stars were bright as jewels. Bats whirred across them.

  Jasmina placed the axe of Changó in Camille’s right hand. Nora put a rattle in her left.

  And, as if upon a signal, the drumming abruptly stopped.

  Camille stepped out through the trees and a path cleared for her through the suddenly hushed crowd, all the way to the spot where the batea of Changó sat. It was a bowl that contained Changó’s sacred thunderstones.

  Jasmina brought Camille a struggling rooster and a ceremonial knife. Blood spattered down. Then both the girls were needed to present and hold a small ram, which kept on trying to pull away until Camille cut its throat.

  The drums started up again, faster and angrier than before. The dancing became more chaotic.

  Camille waved the axe, shook the rattle. Waited for the blessed orisha to possess a man. This was not a normal practice of the Santería cult. Many a believer would be shocked. But she was no ordinary priestess, and the rules did not apply to her. This was a demonstration of the greatness of her power.

  Except she waited, longer and longer.

  And nothing happened.

  There was a sudden peal of thunder from the cloudless sky, a certain sign that Changó was nearby. The crowd, as one, yelled “Kabiesi!”