Greyborn Rising

by Derry Sandy

  “Kat…are you? Who…what are you?”

  “Rohan Le Clerc, your great-great grandfather Kariega would say that you are as blind as an intestinal worm in the ass of an ox. You didn’t think I was an ordinary old woman did you?”

  Rohan recovered from his shock. “No of course not, but I also didn’t think they offered such excellent anti-aging solutions in the mangrove swamps.”

  “I’m a soucouyant, Kariega knew that you would need my help someday and that day has come, so here I am, helping.” She shifted the weight of the woman on her shoulder.

  “Umm so you can just change your appearance.”

  “A little obeah goes a long way. After Kariega died, I had to wait for you at this specific location. I had no idea when you would come, only that you would come eventually and that it would be at sunset, so I had to be here every day, at least at sunset. At first I lived somewhere else…somewhere nicer and I came here every day at sunset. But then it was easier to simply buy the land and assume an identity. When you are ageless time doesn’t really mean that much anymore and I couldn’t very well sit here for the last hundred plus years looking like a young woman. People get suspicious and jealous when their neighbors do not age. Even in a slum like this.”

  “Wait for us? Didn’t you send the boy to bring us here?”

  “The boy has been following you off and on for five years, Rohan, ever since I pieced together what Kariega’s visions meant. I had to wait until I could get all of you here at the same time even the damned dog.”

  “You could have just let me know in advance to come when I had assembled the appropriate team.”

  “Kariega’s instructions were clear, neither me nor my agents could speak to you unless you initiated contact. I disobeyed him once. The results were… undesirable.”

  “But didn’t Tarik initiate contact?” Rohan knew he was being difficult but he needed to make sense of at least some of the madness that had overtaken his life, and Kat seemed to be the one with answers.

  “The boy grabbed your girlfriend’s necklace and you initiated contact by chasing him.”

  “Seems like a really technical argument to me,” Rohan replied dryly.

  “Is she alive?” Kamara asked pointing with her chin to the woman slung over Kat’s shoulder.

  “Yes, she’s alive, unconscious but alive. Rendering her unconscious severs the tie to the mendo. This one was using borrowed power. No practitioner of necromancy has been able to steer more than five jumbies simultaneously since Papa Niser and five was a stretch even for him. We need to know who her benefactor is.” Kat patted the unconscious woman’s broad rump. “But first we must attend to the wounded.”

  Rohan picked Kamara up like a child and held her against his chest. Kat led the way back to the hut, toting the large unconscious woman as easily as if she were a sack of down. Lisa was at the door her arms wrapped around Voss’s right arm as if he was the trunk of a tree she had climbed to escape a pack of wolves below. She was shuddering but her lips were set in a hard line of resolve. In the small yard Tarik played fetch with Agrippa. The ‘stick’ was a jumbie’s forearm.

  Chapter 8

  (1810)

  Canst thou draw out leviathan with a hook? Or his tongue with a cord which thou lettest down? Canst thou put a hook into his nose? Or bore his jaw through with a thorn? Will he make many supplications unto thee? Will he speak soft words unto thee? Will he make a covenant with thee? Wilt thou take him for a servant forever? Canst thou fill his skin with barbed irons? Or his head with fish spears? Out of his nostrils goeth smoke, as out of a seething pot or cauldron. His breath kindleth coals, and a flame goeth out of his mouth. Lay thine hand upon him, remember the battle, do no more.

  – Excerpt from Job 41, King James Version.

  Kariega Le Clerc awoke, ejected from sleep by the same nightmare that had driven him awake many nights before. Now that he was awake the countless small sensations of being alive slowly coalesced and reintroduced him to reality; the sheets beneath him, the whine of a mosquito close to his ear, his own rapid breathing, all mundane and reassuring.

  He peered into the darkness next to him. Katharine’s eyes stared back at him, unblinking and glowing faintly blue in the black of the room. She never stayed asleep through his nightmares. Kariega suspected that perhaps she never actually slept at all, at least not in the human sense. He was all but positive that she simply lay in his bed with her eyes shut, more to set him at ease than anything else.

  It had been five years since the night they met. At first their relationship had been limited to her teaching him and the other members of the Order about soucouyant and everything she knew about creatures from the Grey. She shared a treasure trove of information, and, an avid student, Kariega documented it all in writing. When the Order hunted rogue greyborn this extra knowledge was worth its weight in unspilt blood.

  Kariega was not quite sure how their relationship had evolved from what it started as to what it now was. Katharine represented everything that a man of his circumstances and cultural background eschewed in a companion. She was disquietingly opinionated, incorrigibly headstrong, blasphemously irreverent, and disobedient. She was also frettingly slender. Her skin color and speech pattern marked her as planter class and above it all, she was a soucouyant and not even a made soucouyant, she had been born this way and had never been human. From day one Katharine however, had proven her worth beyond that of a mere teacher.

  A plantation without a master could not be kept secret. If it could, Kariega would simply have continued running the place as he had been doing for so many years while Maloney had perpetually vacillated between dysfunctionally inebriated and regretfully hung-over.

  Maloney’s death upon Katharine’s fangs could only be concealed for so long. The plantation’s few white employees, the drivers, and the journeymen who visited for seasonal repairs, could never be co-opted into a cover-up.

  Kariega and the other founding members of the Order flirted with the idea of slaughtering every white man who came to the plantation but creating a pattern of vanishing Caucasians would be the surest way to squander this fortuitous turn of events. It was a boon that Maloney had been killed on a Saturday. The drivers would not return to work until Monday morning, giving Kariega and Katharine a full day to prepare an explanation that corroborated with the circumstances.

  The slave drivers were a punctual bunch. On Monday morning the six of them arrived at the plantation well before sunrise, the last arriving within ten minutes of the first. They were surprised when Katharine met them at the outer gate dressed in the black of mourning. She introduced herself as William Maloney’s estranged daughter who had sailed from France to visit her father only to find that he had died over the weekend. That the man had died in a fall down the stairs was plausible enough, drunkards often fell and occasionally such falls were fatal. However, the knitted brows of the six drivers conveyed that they were suspicious of the fact that Maloney had never mentioned having a bastard daughter in France and that Katharine’s arrival coincided so closely with the planter’s death. Nonetheless it was precisely this coincidence that allayed their apprehensions. No daughter who planned to murder a father would do so on the very weekend of her arrival.

  Katharine assumed the administrative duties of the plantation and had announced that, in respect of the dead, there would be no work that day. The drivers returned to their homes and the slaves to the slave row.

  Maloney’s death still had to be reported to the local authorities, and they always investigated the deaths of planters whether they appeared to be accidental or not. Around noon a lone, bony, gnarled white man dressed in wrinkled, sweat stained khakis arrived. The white man’s tough hide was so tanned that he almost appeared black. He dismounted his mule, adjusted his wide leather belt, and unholstered a long gun from its place in the saddle. Shouldering it he advanced toward the great house in a bow-legged saunter.

  Katharine met the scowling sheriff with Kariega a silent presence a
t her elbow. She invited the man into the drawing room where Kariega served tea and Katharine served the story of a grieving daughter. The man listened then demanded to see the body. Katharine obliged and led him out to a shed where William Maloney was packed in salt and rapidly melting ice. It was a small blessing that Katharine had not killed the man in a more physically ruinous manner. Katharine had been able to cover the bite marks on his neck with makeup and the body’s state of decomposition served to further conceal the small puncture wounds. They had however, to resort to snapping the man’s neck so that it supported the story of a fatal fall.

  The sheriff conducted a perfunctory evaluation of the body, all the while covering his nose with a handkerchief and muttering under his breath about pampered planters and their lethal drunkenness. He then asked if the man had left a will.

  “His documents are all in a safety deposit box in London,” she informed the official with an air of scorn that gave no doubt of what she thought of the idea that such an important document would be secure on the plantation. “I will present the documents in a month or two once they are delivered.”

  When the man left after commanding them to see to the burial rights immediately, Kariega and Katharine both breathed a sigh of relief. Within a few weeks they had very convincing forgeries of the ownership documents fabricated and presented to the local constabulary. Per the forgeries, ownership of the plantation fell to Maloney’s daughter Katharine and Kariega was to share management of the plantation as a freed-man. Maloney’s family had preceded him in death so there was no one to challenge the legitimacy of Katharine’s inheritance.

  In the beginning their relationship had been courteous and amicable. When they spoke, it was with politeness borne out of mutual need. Katharine was free from her bond to the Loa and Kariega needed Katharine to back up the tale of Maloney’s death and to function as the European face of the plantation. Slowly however they realized that they were alone in the world save for each other. Kariega was a witch doctor, sold into servitude by order of his king. Even the other men with whom he had formed the Order never really understood him and eventually the other men chose to leave the plantation. Despite the advantages Katharine had provided, their discomfort over her true nature led them to follow the mandates of the Order in the way they saw fit.

  Katharine was a reformed vampire who could never actually join the world of human beings but to whom the world of her own coven was closed. They were both caught in social limbo. Each evening discussion became successively more personal. Everyday each shared more about themselves. Many times, they conversed through the night, their discussions running the gamut from philosophical topics, to the technical aspects of plantation management, to the downright silly.

  A deep, but unspoken bond developed and one evening Kariega was surprised to realize that he had become attracted to her, that perhaps she was not as unflatteringly slim and pale as he once thought and that her obstinate, irreverent qualities made for better conversation.

  A hurricane was raging the first night she came to his quarters. The winds howled in a ferocious attempt to enter the great house through any crevice. Rain assaulted the slate roof with a sound like muffled drums. In the fields the tall stalks of sugarcane whipped the low night sky, their frenzied lashings occasionally silhouetted against the undulating horizon by violent flashes of lightning.

  Kariega had been asleep when her presence woke him. Even in the pitch darkness and with his back to the door he knew it was Katharine. Maybe it was the faint smell unique to her or maybe his subconscious mind recognized the sound of her breathing. He turned over and all he could see was the dim blue glow her eyes emitted, visible only in pitch darkness.

  She stood at the door waiting, for what he did not know. He wondered how long she had been there. He asked her what she wanted, she responded with silence. He got out of bed and went to her. He stood in front of her and still she said nothing.

  “Are you afraid of the storm?” he had asked simply to break the silence. He knew the woman to be fearless.

  “Two hundred-year-old soucouyant are afraid of nothing,” she responded.

  They stood facing each other in the darkness, each reluctant to be the first to cross a boundary that could not be uncrossed. Kariega took her by the hand, and she stepped forward, pressing herself against him. She was naked, which was not out of the ordinary. Kariega had seen her unclothed many times before. For the first time however, his body reacted to her nakedness.

  He took hold of her slender waist in both hands and kissed her. Her body was warm. She returned his kisses hungrily. They never made it back to the bed. The storm barely drowned out the sounds of their passion.

  In the morning she was not beside him having left before he awoke. They did not speak of what had happened, and went about their daily routines, running the plantation. That night however, she returned and every night after that but always she left before he awoke.

  After about a month of this pattern, Kariega confronted her.

  “Why is it that you never stay the night? Do I snore?”

  She thought for a moment then responded. “You snore like a sawmill, but that is not why I do not stay. Before this,” She said, fingering the crucifix. “I always returned to the coven’s lair after a night drinking blood. I think leaving is just instinct.”

  He replied, “Well, you do not drink blood anymore. I am your coven and this room is your lair.”

  Now when his nightmares woke him to a world silent but for the sound of crickets chirping, she was there.

  That night he felt her get out of bed. She stoked an oil lamp, left the room and returned with a warm pot of chamomile tea. She poured two cups and sweetened them with honey.

  “Same dream?” she asked tying a white silk robe about her body in a rare concession to sartorial proprieties.

  “Yes,” he responded. Kariega’s smooth muscular torso gleamed in the lamp light with a thin sheen of sweat. “The black weight bearing down on us—you me, this house—impossibly massive impossibly heavy, malevolent and omnipresent.”

  “What do you make of it?”

  “I don’t know. A warning, perhaps? A foretelling of evils to come?”

  “Do you fear it?”

  “It does not inspire fear so much as despair. In the dream we are powerless before it.”

  “Is there any hope?”

  “If there is any hope it lies in a man who has suffered a great loss, a woman who is his companion, a child and you. Sometimes there are others, an animal, some sort of wolf or dog maybe. Another woman and another man are sometimes in the dreams. But the first four are the vital components. Without them all is lost.”

  “When will the darkness come?”

  “I do not know, could be a day, it could be many years from now.”

  This exchange had been repeated many times before. The nightmare would wake Kariega abruptly. Once awake he would find that Katharine was already awake and the conversation that followed was always the same. The repetition was their way of controlling something that was otherwise mystical and outside their control.

  “Maybe it is just an ordinary nightmare,” she said, attempting to assuage his discomforts, and to this Kariega smiled. Katharine extinguished the oil lamp and they both lay awake in bed, Katharine’s head on Kariega’s chest, his arms around her shoulders.

  “Kariega,” Katharine began. “There is something I must tell you.”

  “There is something I must tell you too,” Kariega said. There was a pause as each waited for the other to speak first. Kariega broke the silence. “I have to travel back to Africa to consult someone who may understand the dreams.”

  Katharine said nothing, but Kariega felt her body grow warm then hot. Then her flesh became so hot that it was too painful to allow her to continue lying against him. He pushed her away.

  “What’s the matter, Katharine?”

  “What is the matter? What is the matter? Do you really have to ask Kariega Le Clerc?” She spoke in
an angry hush, and a white flame, a vestige of her heritage leapt alive in her eyes. “You are going to travel back to your village, back to the place from whence you were banished? You would abandon everything we have built here? And for what, a dream that may or may not come to fruition for decades, centuries even? You yourself said so.” Katharine paused briefly before relaunching her tirade. “And how do you propose to travel to Africa? In the hold of a slave ship? Have you forgotten that you are African? Can you even find your damned village?” She allowed her voice to often. “We are happy here. Whatever evil the dream portents we can face the threat together.”

  Kariega felt waves of heat radiating from her. His own sweat began dampening the sheets below him.

  “Katharine be still, the dream is of dire importance, I know that much. I need a better understanding of its meaning and the only person who will know is my teacher in the village. I will be back eventually.”

  His latest words only enraged her further. “Kariega, the sail to Africa is, in the best of times, three months long and fraught with danger. Your tribe was nomadic, it may take months or even years to track down your teacher and that is assuming he is even still alive. Your magic saved me but it also made me alone, one of a kind, a soucouyant without a coven, unknown to any of her kind. Then you befriended me, accepted me for what I am. I will not lose my only friend to some flight of folly.”

  “Katharine, this is something I have to do. The fate of man may rest with understanding the threat that is coming.”

  The bed suddenly erupted into flames and the curtains followed. Kariega rolled off the bed frantically beating at his now-ignited trouser legs. Katharine sat in the center of the bed, her silk robe burning but her flesh remaining untouched.