by Derry Sandy
A large blue butterfly landed in her lap then flew off and landed on the ground a few steps away. Kat watched it. It repeated its actions, this time landing on her hand instead of in her lap before again fluttering off a few feet. Kat took the hint and rose to follow it.
She trailed the butterfly for the rest of the afternoon, over hills, through clear cold streams, over fallen moss-covered trunks until the sun was low. The rainforest foliage hastened the twilight and soon Kat was walking through a grey gloom. She had better vision in the dark than in the day and she could still easily follow the big blue butterfly. Then she heard voices. Kat continued walking until she entered a clearing and saw that Kariega was regaling a woman and a younger girl with some tale. They sat around a small fire, at the foot of a massive silk cotton tree that looked exactly like the one under which she had awoken this morning. Have I walked in a circle for hours? Kat thought.
“Is this the same tree?” Kat asked as she entered the clearing.
The three faces around the fire turned to look at her. Kariega smiled warmly and replied with lifting one eyebrow quizzically. “We have been waiting for you here all day so I’m not sure what tree you are talking about.”
“Please excuse my manners,” Kat said walking forward and smiling. “I am Katharine.”
“Hello, my name is Ghita. We are glad you decided to come.” The petite and lovely Indian girl rose and inclined her head slightly and gracefully. She remained standing and Katharine walked over and extended a hand. The girl’s hand was warm and slender with a grip that was surprisingly strong. She adjusted her red sari with a shift of her shoulders and sat back down.
The other woman made no move to rise. “My name is Jenna Lockhart,” she said curtly, fishing a gold lighter from between her conspicuous cleavage and lighting a hand-rolled cigarette. Kat wondered why she simply didn’t use the embers from the fire to light her cigarette. When she exhaled Kat noticed that most of the smoke exited through a thin slash that split her throat horizontally almost ear to ear. Despite the unnerving mortal wound, Jenna was attractive in a womanly way. Kat thought that the word that best described her was ripe. She exuded smoldering lustiness from her husky voice to her shapely limbs. Kat felt inadequately slender in her thin white shift.
“A pleasure to meet you Jenna,” Kat said, mentally acknowledging that both these strangers had died tragically and there was little pleasure in the circumstances of this meeting at all.
“So, have you all eaten?” Kat asked rhetorically.
Ghita responded graciously. “The goat you made was perfect, Katharine. Thank you.”
“You are welcome,” Kat replied, itching to ask Kariega how they became separated after the dance.
Kat took a seat around the fire, completing the circle of dead people. It was fully dark now and the orange flame illuminated their faces and banished the shadows to the periphery. How to start the inevitable conversation Kat wondered. Kariega also sat in silence. It seemed that Kat’s arrival had added a somber note to the proceedings, perhaps reminding the women of the circumstances that brought them to this meeting.
“So why was I asked to come here?” Kat asked breaking the silence.
Ghita and Jenna made and held eye contact for a charged second. Then Jenna spoke, conceding the responsibility after their silent negotiation.
“We could not risk meeting you in the Absolute. Here we are hidden from Lucien’s eyes and ears to a degree. We called you because you have an intimate relationship with death. Even when you were mortally wounded you’ve always bartered your way back from death’s clutches.”
Jenna paused and took a long drag on her cigarette while pressing the free palm across the slash on her throat so all the smoke escaped through her nostrils. “How would you feel if there was someone who was altering the rules of your familiar acquaintance death? What if the next time you slept, you could not find your way back to the Absolute? You know the ones who bury you are bound to the graveside by the ritual, unable to leave until you return. What of them?”
Kat stared into the flames recalling the only other time she had slept. That time, she had become lost in the experiences of Limbo and had forgotten that it was not her actual life. It had seemed like she had been there for mere days. Kariega too had been bespelled by their reunion. She ended up spending almost a year of real time in Limbo, a year that to her went by in the blink of an eye. As the one bound in the ceremony, Tarik was compelled to sit vigil by the grave. He had been incapable of straying more than a few feet from the mound of dirt marking the place of Kat’s interment.
She had not known this would happen prior to performing the ritual. In fact they had not known very much about the procedure before that first attempt, but she had needed to speak to Kariega about the problems presented by his first son, Onyeka and matters regarding the Order.
Tarik’s soucouyant physiology and his sheer will to survive prevented him from dying of mere starvation and thirst. But his body had turned on itself, cannibalizing him down to bones and skin. When she finally returned the earth around the grave had been pockmarked with thousands of holes indicating where he had dug for worms and bugs to eat.
She had found dried blood and feathers caked around his mouth, the remnants of some hapless bird that had flown by or landed within reach. It had been months before he finally regained his full strength, and even then he was never able to recall details of the last three months of her absence. The experience had been frightening and cautionary. They now knew that the soucouyant sleep required a support staff, someone to feed the watchers while they were bound to the grave. They had also learned that in limbo there was no reliable way of keeping time. Rohan will not let Kamara and Tarik starve, she thought, and if something happened to Rohan there was still Voss, Imelda, and Jonah. They had also devised a method of pulling her back if she spent too long. She could not afford to be gone for a year this time.
“Jenna, you seem to know a lot about me.” Kat replied. “But you sent your message through Rohan, an Orderman. Why not have this conversation with him. The Order deals with rogue obeah men.”
“There is no unity among the houses,” Jenna replied.
“The Order has been compromised, we do not know who is a traitor and who is not.”
Kat had considered this possibility, but she chose not to lead Jenna with her own opinions. “Tell me what you know about this obeah man,” she asked.
“He is a like a soucouyant, but instead of blood he has found a way to feed on souls and ghosts. He is a strong necromancer, surpassing even Papa Niser and his control over the dead is growing stronger. He proffers philosophical arguments for opening the Grey but I think that his main reason is his thirst for new souls from people slain by greyborn. For some reason he can trap these souls easier and they give him more power. If he manages to open the Grey the resulting human deaths will give him a multitude of spirits to devour and incidentally an army of animated corpses with which he can terrify the remaining living. He will become a god.”
“You two were captured by him?”
“We were both killed by greyborn. He has kept us around for many years. Me, he ignores. Ghita, he uses.”
Chapter 24
The most elusive goal of necromancy is self-resurrection. Only Nagash and the Christian God have supposedly achieved it. Bringing even a small animal back from the dead requires absolute control over the magiks, and such control is obviously impossible once one’s own bodily functions have ended as a result of one’s own demise. Death thus makes self-resurrection a circular impossibility. But if one could teach the spirit to remember the flesh once they have been separated, then perhaps...
-Undated excerpt from one of the last surviving pages of Onyeka’s five manuals on Necromancy
Kamara had never been bespelled before and the compulsion that prevented her from leaving the graveside was particularly strong. She tested its limits during the first hour that she and Tarik sat vigil. She got up and walked toward the house. S
he made it about twelve feet then found herself seated next to Tarik again, right where she started. She could not remember returning or sitting down. It happened in the blink of an eye.
She repeated the attempt, this time consciously willing herself toward Stone. The result was unchanged. There was no pain or any voice commanding her to return. It was like the setting that returned computers to their factory configuration. She remembered standing and walking toward Stone, but the moment she crossed some invisible boundary she was returned to the starting point, and the memory of her return was erased.
Kamara did not like it. Out of sheer curiosity she tried one more time at a dead run and again blinked and found herself sitting next to Tarik. The only difference this time was that she felt slightly nauseous. Compulsion whiplash, she thought.
“You can’t beat it, Kamara,” Tarik said with a look of amusement as he paused from flipping through the pages of a worn copy of Jack London’s Call of the Wild. “I tried the last time and I can run much faster than you.”
“What happens when I cross the boundary, I can’t remember the return? Am I teleported back here?”
“No, nothing that dramatic, you simply turn around, walk back here, and sit down,” Tarik replied.
Kamara resigned herself to catching up on her reading for her law classes. Reading which had been sorely neglected considering recent developments.
It was Monday afternoon and Kat had been ‘dead’ for two days. Rohan and Voss worked six-hour shifts guarding the grave site. It was now Voss’ shift and he dozed in a hammock, cradling a long black automatic rifle. He was shirtless in the evening warmth, but an extra rifle clip was stuck in the waistband of his black shorts. Two of Cassan’s hounds lay close by, massive and menacing even in repose. The third hound was with Jonah and Imelda and Agrippa remained with Rohan as he slept or exercised before it was his shift.
Voss’ hammock hung outside the zone of compulsion, but close enough to allow him to respond immediately to any threat. So far it had been boring. Kamara and Tarik ate by the grave, slept next to the grave, read books in the shade of the teak trees that surrounded the grave. Tarik produced a deck of playing cards for their umpteenth game of three-hand-knock. The hours crawled by slowly and the only issue that had arisen so far was when she needed to use the toilet or take her sponge baths.
Rohan had erected a bathroom tent for them, at the outermost boundary of the circle of compulsion, where she was able to perform her ablutions. He dutifully emptied the bedpan three times a day without a complaint. This created a whole new level of intimacy between them. Tarik did not ever need to use the chamber pot. He explained that his physiology was extremely efficient at breaking down food and little was ever left undigested, and that he had last gone to the toilet about twenty years before.
Chapter 25
Kat, Jenna, Ghita, and Kariega all sat around the fire. Shepherd dozed a little way off, lying on his side, each exhale kicking up little puffs of dust. As it turned out, both Ghita and Jenna knew Lucien intimately. Kat had asked Jenna how she came to know Lucien and the woman began the story.
“When I met Lucien he went by another name and wore another face. Back then he called himself Lazarus. He discards names when he grows bored with them or when he changes bodies, but of course, I did not know that at first. The first time I saw him I was living in a tenement in East Port-of-Spain, I forget the exact year but it was some time in the late 1880’s, perhaps 87 or maybe 88. At the time I was sharing the barrack-yard apartment with two other women, who, like me were unmarried and on their own. As you can imagine we made a living anyway we could. We would travel to the city and look for housekeeping, laundry, seamstress or cleaning work. If things were tight we were not above entertaining the occasional gentleman caller.”
Jenna paused and pulled deeply on the cigarette that never seemed to grow any shorter. When she spoke again her syllables were punctuated with serpentine coils of smoke that rose to festoon her face with a silky white obscurity.
“It was very hot the night I met him, so I was sitting on the front stoop when Lazarus first came by astride a tall gray mare. I was not an expert in horseflesh but that was the most handsome animal I had ever seen. A black man riding a horse was something of a rarity in those times and unheard of in the tenement yard but there he was, looking as if he belonged on that horse.
He wore a cloak and a black felt top-hat even in the heat, but he did not sweat. He was accompanied by a man-servant, a short ugly man who walked ahead of him carrying a torch. There was something special about Lazarus, beyond the fact that he was a black man on a horse travelling through what was at the time, one of the poorest and most violent communities in Trinidad. His uniqueness was a combination of little things, his unhurried movements, his aura of confidence, the way he spoke. He also rode as if he was born on the back of a galloping stallion. When he brought the horse to a stop the animal stood stock still, no pawing the ground, no nervous sidestepping, it did not even lower its head to crop the grass.
“Lazarus was a dark handsome man with narrow features. When he removed his hat I saw that his head was shaven and there was a small tattoo on the side of his scalp of a very lifelike eye. At first I thought he was looking for a whore, but then it occurred to me that a man who could afford a horse, a cloak, and a manservant could probably afford to go whoring in a better part of the country. He introduced himself as Lazarus and said he was looking for a live-in maid. I was skeptical. I told him that I had other friends who might be interested, but he replied that he came here for me specifically, that I had been recommended highly by someone for whom I had done some cleaning work.
“You might think that this would be a dream come true for a woman in my situation, eking out a life in the barrack-yard. To have a handsome man ride up asking for her by name to offer a steady job and maybe more.
“But no one ever remembers the name of a travelling cleaning lady. Besides none of the people I had ever worked for had cared to ask where I lived, nor would they advise another member of their circle to visit the barrack-yard at any time day, or worse yet, night. Lazarus was lying through his perfect white teeth. There was an air about him and his servant, something underneath the smile and the polished mannerisms. I struggled to put a finger on what it was about him that nagged me and then I realized that they put a feeling in my stomach. It was a feeling like how I felt about the large snakes that sunned themselves by the river while I did my washing, not an immediate fear but…perhaps an atavistic, instinctual dread.”
Jenna’s immortal cigarette had finally succumbed to her incessant puffing and she paused her story to roll a new one from a tin of tobacco she produced from somewhere on her person.
“Why don’t you use a pipe?” Kat asked as the woman lit the end.
“When I was alive pipes were for rich men. And I have never been rich, neither in life nor in death.” Jenna exhaled a billowing cloud and continued her tale.
“When I refused his offer, his eyes narrowed, but then he smiled and said he would be back in a couple days and that I should reconsider. His servant walked over to me and presented me with a heavy silver coin that was unlike any currency I had ever seen in Trinidad. Then they turned and left.
“The next night our apartment caught fire and burned to the ground. I managed to escape through a window but none of my friends were so lucky. The only item I could salvage, apart from the clothes on my back, was Lazarus’ piece of silver. I had nowhere to go, no money, not even a change of small-clothes. The morning after the fire a horse-drawn buggy showed up driven by Lazarus’ ugly servant. He said nothing as he came to a stop in front of the sooty stoop where I sat pondering my bleak future. What was I to do but get in?” Jenna looked into the distance as she said those last words perhaps pondering what would have happened had she made a different choice.
“I cried quietly the all the way to San Fernando. I had never been this far from Port-of-Spain. Cane fields everywhere as far as the eye could see, and the
San Fernando Hill sticking out like a white ghost from the green forest. The man-servant took me to a large house within sight of the wharf. The grounds were immaculate, as was the interior. I asked the man-servant where Lazarus was. He did not respond then nor has he ever responded to any question I have posed. In fact I have never heard him speak. He just walked ahead and I followed him.
He opened the door to a room on the upper floor and closed the door after me when I entered leaving me alone with my worries. As it turned out Lazarus needed no maids. I never saw him at all. If he lived in the house he did an excellent job of staying out of sight. There was never any laundry to do, no ironing, dust never settled anywhere. In the beginning, the first few days I cooked and served three meals a day and left a man-sized portion at the head of the dining table. The food was never touched and so I gave up that practice. I saw the man-servant from time to time, rarely before sunrise, but after dark he roamed the halls, silent as a greased adder. I received my weekly salary, though for what, I did not know.
“I was not a prisoner. One day I left without telling anyone and spent three days in Port-of-Spain visiting some old acquaintances. I got somewhat drunk and was walking down Duke Street when three men grabbed me. They hauled me into an alley, punched me in the face and began tearing off my clothes. They smelled like shit and piss, mangy vagrants they were and I remember thinking they were going to have their way with me then cut my throat.”