Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine. Vol. 105, Nos. 3 & 4. Whole Nos. 640 & 641, March 1995

The Watchers by Jo Bannister

Jo Bannister is as clever as they come with the twist-in-the-tail short story. For those interested in trying her longer, fiction, St. Martin’s Press has a new novel due out in May entitled A Taste for Burning, and her previous Book, Charisma, published by St. Martin’s last autumn, is available in bookstores...

It didn’t look much like a witch’s cottage. For one thing, it wasn’t in the middle of a deep dark wood at the end of a winding path overhung with cockle, spurge, dead nettles, and Old Man’s Beard. A witch living in Colliers Row would have to take two buses to anywhere you could pick ingredients for even a very modest spell, to cure boils on a cat, for instance. A love potion for a tax inspector would involve a longer journey than that.

For another thing, the curtains at the parlour window were yellow gingham and the sill was decorated with a collection of china pigs. All right, so maybe modern witches prefer not to advertise their presence with plum velvet and wax effigies; still, there was something distinctly nonoccult about yellow gingham and china pigs.

Denzil Boswell and Geordie Baker passed Colliers Row going to and from work each day — Denzil at a hardware store, Geordie as an apprentice butcher — so the cottage was part of their local scenery. You might think they would long ago have stopped noticing it; but no. Hardly a day went past without one of them cracking some joke about it or crossing his fingers to ward off the evil eye. This they did with great hilarity and hoots of mirth, without realising that such obsessive derision was only another way of paying respect to the myth. Two young men who really thought it was nonsense would have talked about something else.

“Did you ever see her?” Denzil asked once. “My mum says she’s all shrivelled and wrinkled, and ninety if she’s a day.”

“Your mum thinks everybody’s shrivelled and wrinkled unless they go through turnstiles sideways.” It was true. Mrs. Boswell came from Jamaica, where anybody worth a row of beans is expected to have at least two chins.

“My mum says she was a famous witch in Haiti but she had to leave. Something to do with an army officer’s son and a goat.”

Geordie stared. “What — she turned him into one?”

“Turned him into one, married him to one — something like that.” Denzil affected a nonchalance he didn’t altogether feel. The West Indian blood in his veins was significantly diluted by the Tyneside steelrigger who had been his father, but the spirit of the islands sends out long fingers, and at times like these he could feel them stirring in his hair.

Denzil’s mother was a devout Christian and knew voodoo for the work of the Devil. If asked, she would say she’d told her children about mambos and houngans as an awful warning. But the truth was that Mrs. Boswell was a natural storyteller, that she sometimes missed the vibrant colours and fevered passions of home, and that the violent erotic activities of the voodoo pantheon — of Damballah the snake god and Erzulie the temptress and Baron Samedi the lord of the underwprld — sent a delectable shiver up the spine if related with sufficient enthusiasm over a well-made fire on a cold northern night.

So though Denzil Boswell considered himself a modem urban Englishman, rational and pragmatic, there was something about the idea of a voodoo witch living two streets away that teased and intrigued him.

“Our Joyce” — Geordie’s sister worked in the supermarket — “says she wears gold jewellery all the time, big earrings and bangles and things, and pulls out wads of notes to buy a tin of dog food.”

“What’s she called?” All Denzil could remember was that it was something long, complicated, and foreign.

Geordie didn’t know either. He shrugged. “Something Froggy.”

Her name was Clarice Erzulie Tituba Vincour, and she was somewhere in her ninth decade. Even she wasn’t quite sure where: public records in Haiti at the beginning of the century fell somewhat short of Somerset House standards. She had lived in England for more than forty years and if she, like Mrs. Boswell, missed the warmth and spontaneity of the West Indies, she didn’t miss the way people in authority could make your life a misery if they took against you. And it was such a little goat, and any fair-minded person would have said it was hers and not the army officer’s son’s to start with. Well, probably.

So she fled Port au Prince and came to England as housekeeper to a cousin’s brother-in-law, a widowed shopkeeper. Clarice looked after him until he died, when, having no children, he left her the little house in Colliers Row and enough money to see her through her own old age.

Though this closing phase of her life was lasting longer than either of them had expected. Fortunately Clarice had ways to boost her savings over and above the rate of inflation. There were advantages in being seen as a practitioner of the old arts.

She didn’t practice much now: partly because of her age, more because of the age they lived in. People today, you threaten to put a hex on them, they laugh in your face. You threaten to take their duppy, they think you’re talking about something you buy in a pet shop.

Still, there were worse places in the world for a woman to grow old without family, without friends, with just a hit of money to keep the wolf from her door.

Until the night she was snoozing in the old bentwood rocking chair by the embers of the parlour fire and woke with a start to hear someone opening the kitchen door.

The thought of the old witch, shrivelled and wrinkled and shunning the world except for rare occasions when she went shopping with a wad of notes, filled Denzil Boswell’s thoughts more and more. He thought about her while stacking galvanised buckets, while weighing out nails, while decanting white spirit, and when he went home at night he dreamed of her. What else did she keep in that little house, behind the gingham curtains? Were there effigies and lambs’ hearts stuck with thorns? Was there a black cat that suckled from a nipple in her armpit?

And the money: How much was there? She was a very old woman, she was probably deaf, you could probably hammer her down with a twelve-pound maul and not wake her. He would dearly love to see the effigies, and if he were to find her hoard of witch’s gold she probably wouldn’t miss a little of it. She probably didn’t know how much she had.

Denzil thought he could get into her house easily enough. The back door gave onto a small yard reached from an alley running behind the row, just like his mother’s house; and just like his mother, she probably forgot to lock it half the time. He could be in and out without her even knowing, with a handful of gold and one of those effigies to show Geordie the next day. Geordie was a bit law-abiding at times, but stealing from a witch wasn’t like stealing, it was more like proving yourself. A rite of passage.

In the end he’d thought about it so long, in such detail, that it became inevitable. If doing it proved him a man, what did failing to do it prove? So late one night, when his mother was asleep, he crept out by their own back door — unlocked, naturally; one day they’d have burglars — and slipped along the alleys to Colliers Row.

It was a strange frame of mind in which he found himself: at once elated and afraid, eager to get there and aching to get home, proud of himself and also ashamed. But this wasn’t about how he felt, it was about what he did. And he was going to take some witch’s gold, just to show that he could.

It was an ominously dark night: low clouds, no stars. He’d come by the back alleys to avoid being seen — his mum would kick up a stink if she ever heard what he’d been up to — but it was an unnecessary precaution. In dark clothes, with his middling-dark colouring, he was as hard to spot as a prowling cat.

The house with the yellow curtains was the last in Colliers Row, so it didn’t take much counting on his fingers to work out which was the right yard. The yard gate was latched but not bolted: Denzil let himself in with only a little creak from an unoiled hinge. It was enough to stop his heart for a beat or two but nobody else could have heard it.

The back door was indeed unlocked. His blood raced. If he’d been wrong about that, if the witch had put her cat out and locked up last thing like sensible people, he’d have had to go home. Now he had to go on. He let himself into the kitchen and groped his way around the familiar layout to the parlour door. All these little houses were built the same, but he was taken aback by the smell, which was strange, musky and spicy. The smell of the islands, he supposed, though he’d never been there. His mother’s cooking inclined more to meat and two veg.

The parlour smelled odd too: a dry, dusty, powdery smell he could almost but not quite identify. Also there was the smell of clinker from the embers of a fire. A couple of glowing coals and the glimmer through the gingham curtains of a distant streetlamp — all the nearer ones having been broken — was the only light in the room. It wasn’t enough to see the hand in front of his face. He stood just inside the door, breathing unsteadily, getting his bearings.

Close at hand a voice — a strange voice, ancient and creaking as the hinge outside, a voice with an accent like the singing in his mother’s church — said, “Stay where you are, child. The baron is watching you.”

Denzil’s heart pounded as if it would come out through his ears. But he did as she said. That was what that strange powdery smell was: the smell of old ladies. She was here in the dark room with him: the witch who never slept. Who turned army officers’ sons into goats.

He stammered, “The baron?”

“Baron Samedi,” she croaked in the terrible darkness, and then he understood. Those dreadful tales of his mother’s that brought the incense of Caribbean nights and passions to the backstreets of Tyneside came back to him, years after he had last thought of them. Baron Samedi, chief of the evil Petro gods; also known as Baron Cimetièrre and Baron Crois. Not a nice chap. Not a nice chap at all.

And, of course, entirely mythical. Denzil drew a deep breath, forced his shoulders back, straightened to his full height. Did this mad old woman really think she could scare him with a Haitian bogeyman? Even if he’d felt inclined to believe in gods and demons, which he did not, surely there was a question of jurisdiction? Gods are like wines: not all of them travel well.

“A witch?” he snorted, with perhaps a shade more bravado than he felt. “There’s no such thing!”

“I never said there was,” she retorted calmly. “I just said you should keep still while the baron has his eyes on you. You don’t want to upset the baron; oh no indeed.”

Denzil’s fingers were groping along the wall for a light switch; then he realised that, even if he wanted to see her, he didn’t want her to see him. His hand dropped to his side. “There’s nobody here, old woman. Just you and me, and in a minute there’ll just be you.”

“Stay where you are,” she said again, her musical voice hardening. “The baron’s gettin’ upset now. You gotta be nice to Clarice. Respectful.”

“Who?” He was thinking. She’s old and alone, and if she has a cane to defend herself with that’s the most she’ll have. I can walk out of here any time I want. Hell, I can bundle her under the stairs and take a proper look round, and she can do damn-all to stop me. He wondered why he was even bothering to talk to her.

“Me,” she snapped irritably. “Clarice Erzulie Tituba Vincour. Miss.”

Denzil laughed out loud. “Clarice Erzulie Tituba Vincour? Lady, that’s a hell of a name for a crazy old Haitian woman!”

“What you know, child?” she demanded, her rusty voice soaring angrily. “What you know about Haiti? What you know about me? You know nothin’. Nothin’!”

He felt oddly piqued by her disdain. “I know about your crazy gods — about Baron Samedi. The lord of Saturday. Also known as the lord of the cemetery and the lord of the cross. The chief of the Petro gods in the voodoo pantheon.” He’d impressed himself; it remained to be seen if he’d impressed her.

Perhaps he had, because when she spoke again her voice was softer. “You know all that? Somebody given you a good education once. Pity to waste it robbing old ladies.”

“Old ladies who produce wads of money at supermarkets deserve to be robbed. Tell me where it is. I won’t take it all.”

“You won’t take any of it,” Miss Vincour corrected him robustly. “Not while I got Baron Samedi to guard it.”

Denzil was getting cross. He hadn’t come here to hurt anyone, didn’t see himself as a mugger of pensioners, but she was getting on his nerves with all her mumbo jumbo. He started to say, “Clarice, you say that one more time—”

Then in the darkness he felt a gust of hot air move across the back of his hand and heard a soft, inhuman, panting, chuckling sound. It froze him to the marrow of his bones.

Clarice chuckled too, an old dry chuckle like breaking sticks. “I guess you’re going to tell me now that Baron Samedi’s a hell of a name for a Rottweiler.”

In the darkness, close by Denzil’s leg, the panting turned to a growl.