by Derry Sandy
On the corner posin’
Bet yuh life is something they sellin’
And if yuh ketch dem broken
You can get it all for nuttin’
– "Jean and Dinah" by The Mighty Sparrow
Clarence ‘Caramel’ Jeremy stood on the corner of Abercrombie and Knox streets which formed the northwest apex of Woodford Square. It was after sundown, all the honest men had left, and the square was now the domain of transients, vagrants, pickpockets and whores.
Clarence’s face was heavily powdered. His long red wig and his tight yellow dress were at odds with his day-glo pink nail polish and lipstick but matched his platform club shoes perfectly. He was tall and thin, a thinness exacerbated by the terminal disease that was not so slowly killing him. A diet of cigarettes, soda, and cocaine did little to improve his gauntness.
Clarence did not feel so well that night, but the show had to go on. At fifteen he had been banished from his family home, when his father finally conceded that his romantic interest in other boys and his penchant for women’s clothing was not just a passing folly. Since then he had made a living the best manner he knew how, whoring.
A long black car pulled parallel to the curb in front of Clarence in a hush of displaced air. The rear window rolled down and Clarence sashayed over to the car. The passenger lounging in the back seat was partially caught in a triangle of sulfur colored light cast by the street lamps. His face remained obscured in the shadows, but Clarence could tell that the man was tall. The chauffeur was clearly illuminated and proved to be a small black man of indeterminate age. The driver held the steering wheel precisely at the prescribed ten and two o’clock positions and studied the distance beyond the windscreen as if he did not wish to partake in the sins of his benefactor.
“How are you doing?” The passenger spoke to Clarence in an unaccented and cultured voice.
“Me? I’m pretty good. Are you looking for a good time?” Clarence had seamlessly donned his street persona Caramel, who was flirtatious and fun and whose speech was a collection of the clichéd phrases of whoredom.
In response to his question the rear door of the car opened soundlessly. Ever since the time he was picked up by one man and taken to a house where five other men were waiting, Clarence had become very wary of getting in to strange cars. That ordeal had almost killed him, but he had learned a very important lesson. Now he usually arranged to meet his clients at a run-down guest house near Queen’s Park Savannah and he would have been there tonight, but the expenses of his addictions were driving him to work longer hours in less familiar places.
Clarence was about to arrange to have the stranger accompany him back to his room when a familiar voice spoke to him from the cavernous maw of the back seat. “Clarry, my son, won’t you come sit next to your dad…I’m sorry for the way things are between us.” His father’s voice choked back a sob. “I’m so sorry, son. So very sorry.”
On some level Clarence was certain beyond a doubt that his dead father was not speaking to him from the shadow-drenched backseat of the chauffeured car. But his mind was suddenly clouded. He heard his own voice respond as if a ventriloquist’s hand was up his behind puppeteering his lips. “Dad, all I ever wanted was for you to love me, accept me for who I am, that’s all.”
“I realize that now, Clarence. Please, come in. Let’s talk. Everything will be better. We will fix everything.”
His father’s voice spoke words that Clarence had not realized he had been yearning to hear. Clarence had no recollection of getting into the car, but he came to himself when the door closed with a hydraulic susurration followed by a thump that rattled his bones like the first clods of soil on his coffin.
The enchantment cleared and was replaced by unmitigated, naked terror. He frantically searched for a door handle, but the interior of the car was seamless. The stranger and his driver said nothing while Clarence searched for an escape. As the car pulled away from the curb, a mewling, plaintive noise escaped Clarence’s throat. Clarence slammed his hands against the glass, but greasy scuff marks were the only impact he made. Realizing the futility of attempting to escape, Clarence reached into his clutch for the icepick he kept there.
Holding the weapon in front of his face, Clarence put as much room between himself and the stranger as the car would allow.
“Clarence, my friend.” The man’s warm voice filled the backseat. The overhead streetlights created an alternating succession of light and dark but the speaker’s face somehow remained cloaked in shadows regardless of how bright the back of the car got. “Clarence, I’ve been watching you. You are the lowest of the low, a reject amongst rejects. If a mangy dog could scrape together your fare you would allow it to have you.”
“Please just let me out.” Clarence barely recognized the voice that came from his mouth, so thick was it with fear. “Let me out and I will forget this happened. I won’t go to the police.” Clarence spoke and hoped that the stranger was unaware that the local police did not give half a broken fuck about what happened to a male prostitute like him.
“Let you out, Caramel?” The man’s voice continued to carry a warm friendly tone, at complete odds with the desperation Clarence felt. “Let you out for what? So you can continue clinging to your leprous existence?”
Clarence had heard enough. He knew he could not negotiate his way out of this situation. He stabbed at the stranger. The man caught Clarence’s hand at the wrist and twisted it, snapping the bones as easily as if they were rotted kindling. Clarence started to cry out, but a fist slammed into his face, and again and again. The stranger maintained an iron grip around his broken wrist while beating Clarence mercilessly. Teetering on the edge of consciousness Clarence slumped down into the narrow floor-space between the back seat and the front. The stranger angled his body and kicked and stomped him. Clarence’s mouth filled with blood and he began to choke and gag at the taste.
“Don’t die now, Clarence. You have been called to a higher purpose. You will be given the chance to atone for the last twenty-four years of your life.” With that the man leaned over and punched Clarence viciously in the temple. A warm darkness closed around him like a familiar and welcome blanket.
The black car sped through the streets of Port-of-Spain. The Trinidadian night continued and didn’t miss Caramel the whore.
***
Clarence came to in the dark, suspended from the ceiling by his wrists, one of which was broken. It was difficult to breathe through the ruin of his nose and his lips were swollen, crushed, and encrusted with a film of dried blood, snot, and spit.
His pain was distant and incorporeal, a dull, omnipresent, holistic throb on the outskirts of his perception. He had lost one of his high heeled pumps and the front of his dress was damp with urine. The memory of what had happened came to him in fragments as he hung suspended in silence.
A soft groan made him aware that he was not alone. It took him three attempts before he could get words past his broken lips.
“Is someone there?” His voice was brittle with fear and thirst. There was silence. Clarence spoke again. “If someone is there, please talk to me.” Again the only reply was silence and Clarence wondered if he had imagined the sound.
Then a woman’s voice responded. “Please, please let me go, I didn’t see your face, I swear I won’t tell anyone, just please, please let me go.”
Clarence felt immense relief that he was not alone. “I’m sorry lady, but I’m in the same situation. How did you get here?”
“A car pulled up and a man spoke to me. Last thing I remember is the car door closing. Then I woke up here.”
“How long have you been here?”
“I don’t know. Hours? Days? I don’t know.” The woman’s voice broke with despair.
A shaft of light pierced the room as a door opened behind the suspended pair. The light was followed by an even deeper darkness when the door shut again. The newcomer lit a candle and set it on a table also behind them. On the far wall Clarence watched th
e shadow cast by the newcomer approach the shadow of the woman suspended next to him. Without warning, the quiet in the room was pierced with screams. Clarence longed to block his ears as the newcomer inflicted some horrible torture on the woman.
Wet sounds from the horror the stranger was inflicting punctuated the brief pauses between her screams when she gathered enough air to scream again. Hers was an unending serenade to agony. Clarence’s bladder voided itself in a hot, pungent stream down his legs and he began to cry. When the woman finally fell silent, the smell of blood, piss, and excrement filled the void left by her quieted cries. The still unseen stranger exited, extinguishing the candle on the way out leaving Clarence alone in the dark with the dead woman.
Clarence did not know how long he hung there in the blackness, but eventually a voice spoke from the same position that the woman’s voice had come previously. This however, was a rough and sibilant voice devoid of humanity or fear. “Clarence when he comes back he will make you into one like us and then we shall be set loose to feed.”
The final shreds of Clarence’s frayed and tested sanity fell to bits like a moth-eaten sail in a typhoon. The room was now filled with laughter, a high-pitched feverish laughter from Clarence and the gravelly and coarse laughter of whatever the woman had become.
Chapter 4
The morning after the funeral found Rohan on an eight-mile run which covered a loop of forested trail in the acres surrounding Stone House.
His wounds were healing well. A mayalman attached to the Order had visited and had given him vile things to swallow to speed his rehabilitation. The speed of his current recovery was nothing compared to the swiftness with which he had healed in the forest but between his innate healing powers and the mayalman’s magic, the wounds he had sustained in the forest were well on their way to being painful memories. He wondered if the mayalman had something that would heal the pain in his heart caused by the deaths of his family members.
He was on his fifth mile and someone had been tailing him since mile two. The person was skilled at staying out of sight and, had Rohan not possessed heightened senses bestowed by his Order marks, he may never have noticed he was being followed. As it was, Rohan heard the footfalls and breathing of the mystery individual more than half mile behind him as they struggled follow while remaining unseen.
A massive tree stump marked mile six, where the trail swung into a blind turn which initiated the loop back toward Stone House. The left side of the turn bordered an embankment and the right side of the trail fell off into a steep but shallow drop down to a small stream, a perfect spot for an ambush. Rohan sprinted up the track to the spot where he would lay in wait.
He wore his usual running gear; black shorts and sneakers with no shirt. But considering recent incidents he also carried a small loaded gun and a knife. He still felt woefully under armed and unprepared.
Hidden by the blind corner and the embankment, he flattened himself in the leaf litter and waited for his pursuer to catch up. The individual shadowing him would round the bend and would not see him until the trap was sprung. A few minutes elapsed then he heard footfalls. A male voice muttered something unintelligible. Rohan waited until the man had passed him on the path then rose silently, took two soundless steps and placed his gun against the back of the man’s head.
“Why are you following me?” Rohan said in a voice that was calmer than he felt.
The man replied in a deep drone, “Is that how Stone House greets strangers?”
With that the man spun around with the speed of a Lycan, knocking the pistol from Rohan’s grip and sending it sailing into the bush. Rohan realized that the person in front of him was not an ordinary human being. He had a second to wonder why he had not sensed the man’s inhuman nature but recovered when the man reached under his jacket. Rohan leapt back simultaneously reaching for and throwing the knife at his ankle. The man dodged to his left and the flaying knife cut a neat slash in the upper sleeve of the well-tailored suit jacket.
Rohan landed in a fighting crouch facing the man-creature. The individual lay on his side in the leaf litter where he had fallen when he dodged the knife. He propped his head up on his hand as if he were relaxing. He looked up at Rohan with a quizzically angry look.
“Calm down Le Clerc. I’m not an assassin.” Then he saw the hole in the jacket sleeve. “For Christ’s sake, this suit is practically brand new.” He spoke in a deep monotone that had a European luster. He continued muttering, “I told them I did not want to do this shit, but the Watchers always feel they know best.”
The man was of Indo-Caribbean heritage. Good looking in a rough-hewn way, he looked to be in his late twenties. He was tall, had deep brown skin, straight black hair pulled into a man-bun. His arms tested the seams of a well-cut lightweight gray suit, a suit ruined by sweat stains. His nose was hawk-like and slightly off-center as if it had once been broken. A strong jaw and thin lips completed the face that stared up at Rohan. Rohan decided the well-dressed stranger lying in the leaf litter was unlikely to be an assassin and walked forward to offer him a hand back to his feet.
“Is there a reason you are following me?” Rohan repeated. “This trail does not lead to a men’s fine clothing store.”
The man seemed amused. “My name is Voss Prakash, the Watchers sent me to serve as your bodyguard until further notice.” Voss reached into his jacket pocket again causing Rohan to tense. Voss either didn’t notice or pretended that he was unaware of Rohan’s disquietude. From the pocket he withdrew a long, envelope, made of thick cream-colored paper that had somehow survived Voss’ fall without crumpling. He tossed it to Rohan and continued talking. “This is proof of my assignment.”
Rohan turned over the envelope, which was sealed in wax and embossed with the sigil of the Watchers’ Guild. The deep gold sealing wax was impressed with the relief of a great silk cotton tree and under the tree sat a gnarled old man seated cross legged with a short, knotty walking staff across his lap.
“You know,” Rohan said, “I don’t think that any Orderman has ever been assigned a bodyguard. We are regularly dispatching greyborn. Don’t you think that, at the very least, qualifies us to protect ourselves?”
“With your House elder and your chaptermen dead or missing, Stone House has dwindled to a membership of one. The Watchers will raise new initiates for Stone but you know selection and training takes time. In the interest of maintaining Stone’s continuity, the Watchers want to ensure that you stay alive.” As Voss spoke, he attempted to rub the grass stains from his knees.
Rohan regarded the letter. He was about to use his thumbnail to break the wax seal. Who the hell still used seals? he thought, when the little wax man embossed on the seal stood slowly and shook his short wax walking staff. The leaves on the silk cotton tree trembled as if moved by some invisible breeze, and the golden seal transformed into a huge yellow butterfly which rose off the envelope and flew into the tree tops. Rohan’s breath caught in his throat. The Watchers’ had enchanted the letter with a protection spell to ensure that he alone opened the letter. No doubt had someone else touched the wax seal with the intent of opening the letter, the seal would have morphed into something much less pleasant than a big golden butterfly. Shuddering slightly Rohan unfolded the letter. Typical of the Guild, the letter was curt and to the point.
Greetings,
The Council at the Watchers Guild requires a meeting to confirm the deaths of Isa Le Clerc and Dorian Le Clerc of Stone House Chapter of the Order, and to discuss the whereabouts of Kimani Le Clerc also of Stone House chapter. Evil stirs ever, but the House of Three has had the foresight of a greater evil. Make haste to appear before the Council. Voss Prakash, bearer of this letter, is to stay at your side until the meeting. We await your appearance. The future of Stone hangs in the balance.
The Council at the Watchers Guild.
Always so formal, Rohan thought as he refolded the letter. The future of Stone hangs in the balance? He almost laughed.
The Council at
the Watcher’s Guild assisted the Order in dealing with the various miscreants that occasionally leapt out of folklore. However, they never got their hands bloody. They were psychics and seers, responsible for intelligence gathering of the supernatural sort.
Their functions also included media suppression. They worked tirelessly to ensure that the wider public kept on believing that monsters were the stuff of myth. The Watchers planted false stories, bribed witnesses, and were not above the employment of magic, hypnosis or intimidation to keep stories from making mainstream news. One more important function Watchers performed was confirming the deaths of members of the Order. Something in the letter struck Rohan…discuss the whereabouts of Kimani Le Clerc. Kimani’s body was in the forest, rotting. There was nothing to ‘discuss.’
Rohan turned to Voss, “How soon do I have to be there?”
“You know the Guild, they expect you to be there today. Now,” he replied.
Rohan turned around on the path and started to run back to Stone House, leaving Voss to keep up.
Chapter 5
The grey sedan meandered through the upscale Woodbrook neighborhood with Voss at the wheel and Rohan and Kamara, who they had picked up at the house, seated in the back. They drove in somber silence, each preoccupied by their own musings. The windows were rolled up and the sounds of the outside world were muted.
The car was a cocoon of melancholy. Rohan’s grief over Isa inevitably led to thoughts about his parents. His mother, Isa’s daughter Renate had been committed to leading a normal life. When Rohan was six, both Renate and Martin, his father, fell sick. The doctors said it was a severe bacterial infection, but Isa believed it was obeah, the fulfillment of a vendetta against him by one of the many enemies he had made as elder of the Order. Neither of his parents recovered. Isa had seen to it that Rohan had been tested and marked and had raised him as his son. Isa and the Order had become the family he knew. When he lost his parents at six, Rohan knew something tragic had happened, but he was young enough to recover quickly. He was no longer six, however, and the grief he felt at Isa’s loss would not fade easily. It waxed and lingered and threatened to consume him.