Green Eyes

Chapter 14

The oak tree sheltering Caitlett’s Store looked as if it had undergone a terrifying transformation: a hollow below its crotch approximating an aghast mouth, swirled patterns in the bark for eyes, thin arms flung up into greenery. Mr Brisbeau parked the truck beside it, keeping the motor running, while Jocundra and Donnell slid out. Someone cracked the screen door of the store and peeked at them, then let it bang shut, rattling a rusted tin sign advertising night-crawlers. Nothing moved in the entire landscape. The marshlands shone yellow-green under the late afternoon sun, threaded by glittering meanders of water and pierced by the state highway, which ran straight to the horizon.

‘Are you going back to the cabin?’ Jocundra asked Mr Brisbeau.

‘The damn gov’ment ain’t puttin’ me on their trut’ machine,’ he said. ‘Me, I’m headin’ for the swamp.’

‘Goodbye,’ said Donnell, sticking out his hand. ‘Thank you.’

Mr Brisbeau frowned. ‘You give me back my eyes, boy, and I ain’t lettin’ you off wit “goodbye” and “thank you.”’ He handed Donnell a folded square of paper. ‘That there’s my luck, boy. I fin’ it in the sand on Gran Calliou.’

The paper contained a small gold coin, the raised face upon it worn featureless.

‘Pirate gold,’ said Mr Brisbeau; he harumphed, embarrassed. ‘Now, me, I ain’t been the luckiest soul, but wit all my drinkin’ I figure I cancel it out some.’

‘Thank you,’ said Donnell again, turning the coin over in his fingers.

‘Jus’ give it back nex’ time you see me.’ Mr Brisbeau put his hands on the wheel. ‘I ain’t so old I don’t need my luck.’ He glanced sideways at Jocundra. ‘You wait twelve more years to come around, girl, and you have to whisper to my tombstone.’

‘I won’t.’ She rested her hand on the window, and he gave it a pat; His fingers were trembling.

‘Ain’t sayin’ goodbye,’ he said, his face collapsing into a sad frown; he let out the clutch and roared off.

Jocundra watched him out of sight, feeling forlorn, deserted, but Donnell gazed anxiously in the other direction.

‘I knew the son of a bitch would be late,’ he said.

The interior of the store was dark and cluttered. Shelf after shelf pf canned goods and sundries, bins of fish hooks and sinkers, racks of rods and reels. The fading light was thronged with particles of dust, and their vibration seemed to register the half-life of some force that radiated from a tin washtub of dried bait shrimp set beneath the window.

‘Cain’t wait here ‘less you buy somethin’,’ said the woman back of the counter, so they bought sandwiches and went outside to eat on the steps.

‘Funny thing happened last night,’ he said, breaking a long bout of chewing. ‘I was talking to Edman while you were searching the house, and I felt you behind me. I could’ve sworn you’d come back in the room, but then I realized I was feeling you walk through the house. It’s happened before, I think, but not so strongly.’

‘It’s probably just sexual,’ she said.

He laughed and hugged her.

‘You folks cain’t wait here much longer,’ said the woman from inside the door. ‘I’m gonna close real soon, and I don’t want you hangin’ round after dark.’

‘There must be some kind of feedback system in operation,’ said Jocundra after the woman had clomped back to the counter. ‘I mean considering the way your abilities have increased since you began healing. I’d expect more of an increase while you’re on the veve. Even though you’ll be trimming back the colony, you’ll be routing them through the systems that control your abilities.’

‘Hmm.’ He rubbed her hip, disinterested. ‘It was really weird last night,’ he said. ‘Sort of like the way you could tell the Gulf was beyond the pines at Robichaux’s. Something about the air, the light. A thousand micro-changes. I knew where you were every second.’

The sun was reddening, ragged strings of birds crossed the horizon, and there were splashes from the marsh. A Paleozoic stillness. The scene touched off a sunset-colored dream in Jocundra’s head. How they sailed down one of the channels to the sea, followed the coast to a country of spiral towers and dingy portside bars, where an old man with a talking lizard on a leash and a map tattooed on his chest offered them sage advice. She went with the dream, preferring it to thinking about their actual destination.

‘That’s him,’ said Donnell.

A long maroon car was slowing; it pulled over on the shoulder and honked. They walked toward it without speaking. There were bouquet vases in the back windows, a white monogrammed R on the door. Jocundra reached out to open the rear door, but Papa Salvatino, his puffy face warped by a scowl, punched down the lock.

‘Get in front!’ he snapped. ‘I ain’t your damn chauffeur!’

‘You’re late,’ said Donnell as he slid in. Jocundra scrunched close to him, away from Papa.

‘Listen, brother. Don’t you be tellin’ me I’m late!’ Papa engaged the gears; the car shot forward. ‘Right now, right this second, you already at Otille’s.’ He shifted again, and they were pressed together by the acceleration. ‘We got us a peckin’ order at Maravillosa,’ Papa shouted over the wind. ‘And it’s somethin’ you better keep in mind, brother, ‘cause you the littlest chicken!’

He lit a cigarette, and the wind showered sparks over the front seat. Jocundra coughed as a plume of smoke enveloped her.

‘I just can’t sit behind the wheel ‘less I got a smoke,’ said Papa. ‘Sorry.’ He winked at Jocundra, then gave her an appraising stare. ‘My goodness, sister. I been so busy scoutin’ out Brother Harrison, I never noticed what a fine, fine-lookin’ woman you are. You get tired of shar-penin’ his pencil, give ‘ol Papa a shout.’

Jocundra edged farther away; Papa laughed and lead-footed the gas. The light crumbled, the grasses marshaled into ranks of shadows against the leaden dusk. They drove on in silence.

The house was painted black.

On first sight, a brief glimpse through a wild tangle of vines and trees, Donnell hadn’t been certain. By the time they arrived at the estate, clouds had swept across the moon and he could not even make out the roofline against the sky. A number of lighted windows hovered unsupported in the night, testifying to the great size of the place, and as they passed along the drive, the headlights revealed a hallucinatory vegetable decay: oleanders with nodding white blooms, shattered trunks enwebbed by vines, violet orchids drooling off a crooked branch, bright spears of bamboo, shrubs towering as high as trees, all crammed and woven together. Peeping between the leaves at the end of the drive was the pale androgynous face of a statue. Things crunched underfoot on the flagstone path, and nearing the porch Donnell saw that the boards were a dull black except for four silver-painted symbols which seemed to have fallen at random upon the house, adjusting their shapes to its contours like strange unmelting snowflakes: an Egyptian cross floating sideways on the wall, a swastika overlapping the lower half of the door and the floorboards, a crescent moon, a star. He assumed there were others hidden by the darkness.

Papa led them down a foul-smelling, unlit corridor reverberating with loud rock and roll. Several people ran past them, giggling. At the end of the corridor was a small room furnished as an office: metal desk, easy chairs, typewriter, file cabinets. The walls were of unadorned black wood.

‘Wait here,’ he said, switching on the desk lamp. ‘Don’t you go pokin’ around ‘til Otille gives you the say-so.’

The instant he left, Jocundra slumped into a chair. ‘God,’ she said; she opened her mouth to say something else, but let it pass.

Shrieks of laughter from the corridor, the tangy smell of cat shit and marijuana. Oppressed by the atmosphere himself, Donnell had no consolation to offer.

‘The ends of the earth,’ she said, and laughed despondently. ‘My high school yearbook said I’d travel to the ends of the earth to find adventure. This must be it.’

‘The ends of the earth are but the beginning of another world,’ someone intoned behind them.

The gray-haired usher from Papa Salvatino’s revival stood in the door; neither his beatific smile nor his shabby suit had changed. At his side was a crewcut, hawk-faced young man holding a guitar, and lounging beside him was a teenage girl, whose costume of a curly red wig and beige negligee did not disguise her mousiness.

‘This here’s Downey and Clea,’ said the usher. ‘I’m Simpkins. Delighted to have you back in the congregation.’

Downey laughed, whispered in Clea’s ear, and she grinned.

Jocundra was speechless, and Donnell, struck by a suspicion, shifted his visual field. Three black figures bloomed in the silver-limned door; the prismatic fires within them columned their legs, delineated the patterns of their musculature and nerves, and glowed at their fingertips. Simpkins and one of the other two, then, along with Papa, must have been the three figures Donnell had seen in Salt Harvest, and he thought he knew what their complex patterns indicated. He shifted back to normal sight and studied their faces. Clea and Downey were toadies and boot-lickers, but each with a secret, a trick, an ounce of distinction. Simpkins was hard to read.

‘So you’re Otille’s little band of mutants,’ said Donnell, walking over to stand behind Jocundra.

‘How’d you know that?’ asked Clea, her voice a nasal twang. ‘I bet Papa told you.’

‘Lucky guess,’ said Donnell. ‘Where’s the other one? There’s one more besides Papa, isn’t there?’

Simpkins maintained his God-conscious smile. ‘Right on all counts, brother,’ he said. ‘But if half what we been hearin’s true, we can’t hold a candle to you. Now Downey here’ - he gave Downey’s head a friendly rub - ‘he can move things around with his mind. Not big things. Ping-pong balls, feathers. And then only when he ain’t stoned, which ain’t too often. And Sister Clea…’

‘I sing,’ said Clea defiantly.

Downey snickered.

‘And when I do,’ she said, and stuck out her tongue at Downey, ‘strange things happen.’

‘Sometimes,’ said Downey. ‘Most times you just clear the room. Sounds like someone squeezin’ a rat.’

‘It’s true,’ said Simpkins. ‘Sister Clea’s talent is erratic, but wondrous things do happen when she lifts her voice in song. A gentle breeze will blow where none has blown before, insects will drop dead in midnight…’

‘She oughta hire out to Orkin,’ said Downey.

‘And,’ Simpkins continued, ‘only last week a canary fell from its perch, never more to charm the morning air.’

‘That was just a coincidence,’ said Downey sullenly.

‘You’re just jealous ‘cause Otille kicked you outta bed,’ said Clea.

‘Coincidence or not,’ said Simpkins, ‘Sister Clea’s stock has risen sharply since the death of poor Pavarotti.’

‘And what’s your speciality, Simpkins?’ asked Donnell.

‘I suppose you’d classify me as a telepath.’ Simpkins folded his arms, thoughtful. ‘Though it never seemed I was pickin’ up real thoughts, more like dreams behind thoughts…’

‘Simpkins once had a rather exotic vision which he said derived from my thoughts,’ said a musical voice. A diminutive, black-haired woman swept into the room, Papa and a heavy-set black man at her heels. ‘It was a pretty vision,’ she said. ‘I incorporated it into my decorating scheme. But his talent failed him shortly thereafter, and we never did learn what it meant.’ She walked over to Donnell; she was wearing a cocktail dress of a silky red material that seemed to touch every part of her body when she moved. ‘I’m Otille Rigaud.’ She gave her name the full French treatment, as if it were a rare vintage. ‘I see you’ve been getting to know my pets.’ Then she frowned. ‘Baron!’ she snapped. ‘Where’s Dularde?’

‘Beats me,’ said the black man.

‘Find him,’ she said, shooing them off with flicks of her fingers. ‘All of you. Go on!’

She gestured for Donnell to sit beside Jocundra, and after he had taken a chair, she perched on the desk in front of him. Her dress slid up over her knees, and he found that if he did not meet her stare or turn his head at a drastic angle, he would be looking directly at the shadowy division between her thighs. She was a remarkably beautiful woman, and though according to Papa’s story she must be nearly forty, Donnell would have guessed her age at a decade less. Her hair fell to her shoulders in serpentine curls; her upper lip was shorter and fuller than the lower, giving her a permanently dissatisfied expression; her skin was pale, translucent, a tracery of blue veins showing at the throat. Delicate bones, black eyes aswim with lights that did not appear to be reflections. A cameo face, one which bespoke subtle understandings and passions. But her overall delicacy, not any single feature of it, was Otille’s most striking aspect. Against the backdrop of her pets, she had seemed fashioned by a more skillful hand, and when she had entered the office, Donnell had felt that an invisible finger had nudged her from the ranks of pawns into an attacking position: the tiny ivory queen of a priceless chess set.

‘You have a wonderful presence, Donnell,’ she said after a long silence.’Wonderful.’

‘Compared to what?’ he said, annoyed at being judged. ‘The rest of your remaindered freaks?’

‘Oh, no. You’re quite incomparable. Don’t you think so, Ms Verret? Jocundra.’ She smiled chummily at Jocundra. ‘What an awful name to saddle a child with! So large and cumbersome. But you have grown into it.’

Jocundra registered surprise on being addressed, but she was not caught without a reply. ‘I’m really not interested in trading insults,’ she said. She opened her purse and pulled out a manila folder. ‘These are our cost estimates. Shouldn’t we get down to business?’

Otille laughed, but took the folder. She carried it back to the desk, sat, and began to examine it.

A tap on the door, and Papa leaned in. ‘Otille? They spotted Dularde in the ballroom, but there’s so damn many people, we can’t catch up with him.’

‘All right. Don’t do anything. I’ll be down in a minute.’ She waved him away. ‘These don’t seem out of line,’ she said, closing the folder. ‘And I’m quite impressed with you, Donnell. But I think we should both sleep on it and see how we feel in the morning. Then we can talk. Agreed?’

‘Fine by me,’ he said. ‘Jocundra?’

She nodded.

‘I apologize for getting off on the wrong foot,’ said Otille, scraping back her chair and standing. ‘I have to deal with so much falsity, I end up being false myself. And I suppose my theatrical background has affected me badly.’ She tipped her head to one side, considering an idea. ‘Would you like to hear something from my play? Danse Calinda?’

Donnell shrugged; Jocundra said nothing.

Otille adopted a distracted pose behind her chair. ‘I’ll do a brief passage,’ she said, ‘and then we’ll find Dularde.’ As she spoke the lines, she darted about the room, her hands fidgeting with her dress, papers on the desk, straightening furniture, and all her movements had the electrified inconsistency of someone prone to flashes of otherworldly vision.

’”… And then coming back from Brooklyn Heights, the cabbie was talking, looking at me in the rear view mirror, winking. He was very friendly, you know how they are when they think you’re from out of town. But anyway as he was talking, the skin started dissolving around his eye, melting, rotting away, until there was just this huge globe surrounded by shreds of green flesh staring at me in the mirror. And I was afraid! Anyone in their right mind would have been, but all down Broadway I was mostly afraid that if he didn’t keep his eye on the road we were going to crash. Isn’t that peculiar? I’m terribly hot. Are you hot?’” She walked over to the wall and pretended to open a window. ‘“There. That’s better.’” She fanned herself. ‘“I know you must think I’m foolish running on like this, but I talk to so few people and I have… I was going to say I have so many thoughts to express, so many tragic thoughts. So many tragic things have happened. But my thoughts aren’t really tragic, or maybe they are, they’re just not nobly tragic. The only thing noble I ever saw was a golden anvil shining up in the clouds over Bayou Goula, and that was the day before I came down with chicken pox. No, my thoughts are like the radio playing in the background, pumping out jingles and hit tunes and commercials and the news bulletins. Flash. A tragic thing occurred today, ten thousand people lost their lives, then nervous music, typewriters clicking, and moving right along, on the last leg of her European tour the First Lady presided over a combined luncheon and fashion show for the wives of the foreign press. Ten thousand people! Corpses, agony, death. All that breath and energy flying out of the world. You’d think there’d be a change in the air or something, a sign, maybe a special dark cloud passing overhead. You’d think you would feel something…”’

Donnell had been absorbed by the performance, and when Otille relaxed from the manic intensity she had conjured up, he felt cut off from a source of energy. ‘That was pretty good,’ he said grudgingly.

‘Pretty good!’ Otille scoffed. ‘It was a hell of a play, but the trouble was I tended to lose myself in the part.’

Otille’s pets and the black man she had called Baron were waiting by the doors of the ballroom. Though the doors were shut, the music was deafening and she had to raise her voice to be heard. ‘I really hate to interrupt things on account of Dularde,’ she said, looking aggrieved.

Downey and Clea and Papa put on expressions of concern, displaying their sympathetic understanding of Otille’s position, but Simpkins’ smile never wavered, apparently feeling no need to cozy up. The black man stared at Jocundra, who hung back from the group, ducking her eyes, lines of strain bracketing her mouth.

‘Is this important?’ asked Donnell. ‘We’re tired. We can meet him in the morning.’

‘I won’t be awake in the morning,’ said Otille angrily; she turned to the others. ‘Please try to find him once more. I’ll wait here.’ She gestured to the Baron, and he flung open the doors.

Music, smoky air and flashing nights gusted out, and Donnell’s immediate impression was that they had pierced the hollow of a black carcass and stumbled onto an infestation of beetles halfway through a transformation into the human. Hundreds of people were dancing, shoving and mauling each other, and they were dressed in what appeared to be the overflow of a flea market: feathered boas, ripped dinner jackets, sequined gowns, high school band uniforms. Orange spotlights swept across them, coils of smoke writhing in the beams. As his eyes adjusted to the alternating brilliance and dimness, he saw that the ceiling had been knocked out and ragged peninsulas of planking left jutting from the walls at the height of about twenty feet; these served as makeshift balconies, each holding half a dozen or more people, and as mounts for the spotlights and speakers, which were angled down beneath them. Ropes trailed off their sides, and at the far end of the room someone was swinging back and forth over the heads of the crowd.

‘… party!’ shouted Otille, as her pets infiltrated the dancers, pushing their way through.

‘What?’ Donnell leaned close.

‘It’s Downey’s party! He just released…’ Otille pointed to her ear and drew him along the hall to where the din was more bearable. Jocundra followed behind.

‘He’s just released his first record,’ said Otille. ‘We have our own label. That’s him playing.’

Donnell cocked an ear to listen. Beneath the distortion, the music was slick and heavily synthesized, and Downey’s lyrics were surprisingly romantic, his voice strong and melodic.

‘It’s one of the benefits of living here,’ said Otille. ‘I enjoy sponsoring creative enterprise.’ She strolled back down to the doorway, beckoning them to follow.

The shining blades of the spotlights skewed wildly across the bobbing heads, stopping to illuminate an island of ecstatic faces, then slicing away. Some of the dancers -both men and women - were naked to the waist, and others wore rags, yet they gave evidence of being well-to-do. Expensive haircuts, jewelry, and many of the rags were of good material, suggesting they had been ripped just for the occasion. Five minutes passed, ten. Jocundra stood with her hand to her mouth, pale, and when he asked her what was wrong, she replied, ‘The smoke,’ and leaned against the wall. Finally Downey and Papa returned, Simpkins behind them.

‘I think I saw him,’ said Downey. ‘But I couldn’t get close. It’s like the goddamn stockyards out there.’

‘Somebody said he was headed this way,’ said Papa; he was huffing and puffing, and it was clear to Donnell that he was exaggerating his winded condition, making sure Otille noticed how diligently he had exerted himself on her behalf.

‘I guess we’ll have to stop the dancing,’ said Otille. ‘I’m sorry, Downey.’

Downey waved it off as inconsequential.

‘Now, hold up,’ said Papa, earnestly addressing the problem. ‘I bet if all of us, maybe Brother Harrison here as well, if we all got out there and kinda formed a chain, you know, about five or six feet apart, and went from one end to the other, well, I bet we could flush him that way.’

Otille glanced shyly up at Donnell. ‘Would you mind?’

What he read from Otille’s face angered Donnell and convinced him that this was to be his induction into petdom, the first move in a petty power play which, if he were nice, would bring him treats, and if he weren’t, would earn him abusive treatment. When he had met Otille, her face had held a depth of understanding, intimations of a vivid character, but now it had changed into a porcelain dish beset with candied lips and painted eyes, the face of a precious little girlwho would hold her breath forever if thwarted. And as for the rest, they would go on happily all night trying to tree their kennelmate, delighting in this crummy game of hide-and-seek, woofing, wagging their tails, licking her hand. Except for Simpkins; his smile in place, Simpkins was unreadable.

‘Christ!’ said Donnell, not hiding his disgust. ‘Let me try.’

The ballroom darkened, and the world of the gros bon ange came into view. It was laughable to see these black, jeweled phantoms flailing their arms, shaking their hips, flaunting their clumsy eroticism to the accompaniment of Downey’s song. He scanned the crowd, searching for the complex pattern that would single out Dularde; then Otille could loose her hounds, and he and Jocundra could rest. He wondered what Dularde’s punishment would be. Banishment? Gruel and water? Perhaps Otille would have him beaten. That would be well within the capacity for cruelty of the spoiled brat who had batted her lashes at him moments before. He swung his gaze up to the makeshift balconies, and there, at the far end of the room, were two figures holding hands and kicking out their legs in unison on the edge of a silver-trimmed platform. Glittering prisms twined in columns around the legs of the taller figure, delineated the musculature of his chest, and fitted a mask to his face.

‘There,’ said Donnell, adding with all the nastiness he could muster, ‘is that your goddamn stray?’

He pointed.

As he did, his elbow locked sharply into place, and his arm snapped forward with more force than he had intended. The lights inside Dularde’s body scattered outward and glowed around him so that he presented the silhouette of a man occulting a rainbow. He wavered, staggered to one side, a misstep, lost his grip on his partner, fought for balance, and then, just as Donnell normalized his sight and drew back his arm, Dularde fell.

Hardly anyone noticed. If there were cries of alarm, they could not be heard. But Otille was screaming, ‘Turn off the music! Turn it off!’ Papa and Simpkins and Downey echoed her, and several of the dancers, seeing it was Otille who shouted, joined in. The outcry swelled, most people not knowing why they were yelling, but yelling in the spirit of fun, urging others to add their voices, until it became a chant. ‘Turn off the music! Turn off the music!’ At last it was switched off, and someone could be heard above the hubbub calling for a doctor.

Otille flashed a perplexed look at Donnell, then pressed into the crowd, Papa Salvatino clearing a path before her. Downey craned his neck, gawking at the spot where Dularde had fallen. Simpkins folded his arms.

‘My, my,’ he said. ‘We’re purely havin’ a rash of coincidences. Ain’t we, Brother Downey?’

Their bedroom was on the second floor, as were those of all the pets, and though the furnishings were ordinary, Jocundra had spent a sleepless night because of the walls. They were paneled with ebony, and from the paneling emerged realistically carved, life-sized arms and legs and faces, also ebony, as if ghosts had been trapped passing through the tarry substance of the boards. Everywhere she rested her eyes a clawed hand reached for her or an angelic face stared back, seeming interested in her predicament. The faces were thickest on the walls of the alcove leading into the hall, and these, unlike the others, were agonized, with bulging eyes and contorted mouths.

Donnell, too, had spent a sleepless night, partly because of her tossing and turning, but also due to his concern over the man who had fallen. She didn’t fully understand his concern; he had taken worse violences in stride. She tried, however, to be reassuring, telling him that people commonly survived far greater falls. But Dularde, said Otille, when she came to visit early in the afternoon, had suffered spinal injuries, and it was touch and go. She did not appear at all upset herself and insisted on showing them the grounds, which were fantastic in their ruin.

It had rained during the night, the sky was leaden, and peals of distant thunder rolled from the south. They walked along the avenue of pines where long ago Valcours Rigaud’s daughter had wed beneath a canopy of gold and silver spiderwebs. Now the webs spanned even between the trunks, creating filmy veils dotted with the husks of wasps and flies. Otille slashed them down with her umbrella. The entire landscape was so overgrown that Jocundra could only see a few feet in any direction before her eye met with a plaited wall of vines, an impenetrable thicket of oleander, or the hollow shell of a once mighty oak, itself enwrapped by a strangler fig whose sinuous branchings had spread to other trees, weaving its own web around a series of gigantic victims. The world of Maravillosa was a dripping, parasitical garden. Yet underlying this decay was the remnant of artful design. Scattered about the grounds were conical hills fifteen and twenty feet in height, matted with morning glory and ivy, saplings growing from their sides, like the jungle-shrouded tops of Burmese temples. Paths entered the hills, curving between mossy walls, and at the center they would find broken benches, fragments of marble fountains and sundials, and once, a statue covered in moss and vines, its hand outheld in a warding gesture, as if a magician had been struck leafy and inanimate while casting a counterspell.

‘Valcours,’ said Otille bemusedly, rubbing away the moss and clearing a circular patch of marble.

From atop one of the hills, between walls of bamboo and vines, they had a view of the house. Black; bristling with gables; speckled with silver magical symbols; a ramshackle wing leading off behind; it had the look of a strange seed spat from the heart of the night and about to burst into a constellation. Beyond the hills lay an oval pool bordered in cracked marble and sheeted with scum, enclosed by bushes whose contours were thrust up into odd shapes. Valcours, Otille explained, had been fascinated with the human form, and the bushes overgrew a group of mechanical devices he had commissioned for his entertainment. She hacked at a bush with her umbrella and uncovered a faceless wooden figure, its head a wormtrailed lump and its torso exhibiting traces of white paint, as well as a red heart on its chest. A rusted epee was attached to its hand.

‘It still worked when I was a child,’ she said. ‘Ants lived inside it, in channels packed with sand, and when their population grew too large, traps were sprung and reservoirs of mercury were opened, flooding the nests. The reservoirs were designed to empty at specific intervals and rates of flow, shifting the weight of the figure, sending it thrusting and lurching about in a parody of swordsmanship. The only ants to survive were those that fled into an iron compartment here’ - she tapped the heart - ‘and then, after it had been cleaned, they were released to start all over.’ She cocked an eyebrow, as if expecting a reaction.

‘What was it for?’ asked Jocundra. The apparent uselessness of the thing, its death-powered spurts of life, horrified her.

‘Who knows what Valcours had in mind,’ said Otille, stabbing the dummy with her umbrella. ‘Some plot, some game, But I hated the thing! Once, I was about eight, it scared me badly, and after it had stopped moving, I took out the iron compartment and dropped it in the bayou.’ She sauntered off along the rim of the pool, scuffing algae off the marble. ‘I’ve ordered the copper,’ she said over her shoulder. ‘You can stay if you like.’

‘How long will it take?’ asked Donnell.

‘A week to get here, then a few weeks for construction.’ She started walking toward the house. ‘You can think about it a few more days if you wish, but if you do stay, I hope you understand that it’s a job. You’ll have to keep yourself available to me five days a week from noon until eight. For my experiments. Otherwise, you’re on your own.’ She turned and gave Donnell a canny look. ‘Are you sure you’ve told me everything about the veve, why you’re building it?’

‘I hardly know myself,’ he said.

‘I wonder how it relates to Les Invisibles,’ she said.

‘Les Invisibles?’

‘The voodoo gods,’ said Jocundra. ‘They’re sometimes called Les Invisibles or the loas.’

‘Oh,’ he said derisively. ‘Voodoo.’

‘Don’t be so quick to mock it,’ said Otille. ‘You’re about to build the veve of Ogoun Badagris out of three tons of copper. That sounds like voodoo to me.’

‘It’s quite possible,’ said Jocundra, angry at Otille’s know-it-all manner, ‘that the veve is an analogue to some mechanism in the brain and can therefore be used by mediums as a concentrative device, one which Donnell -because of his abilities - can use in a more material way.’

‘Well,’ Otille began, but Jocundra talked through her.

‘If you’re a devotee of voodoo, then you certainly know that it’s a very social religion. People bring their day to day problems to the temple, their financial difficulties, lovers’ quarrels. It’s only reasonable to assume they’re receiving some benefit, something more than a placebo of hope, that there are valid psychological and even physiological principles embedded in the rituals.’

‘Oh, my,’ said Otille, rolling her eyes. ‘I’d forgotten we were keeping company with an academic. Let me tell you a story, dear. There was a man in Warner’s Parish, a black man, who was on the parish council and who believed in voodoo, and his colleagues put pressure on him to disavow his beliefs publicly. It was an embarrassment to them, and they weren’t too happy about having a black on the council in any case. They threatened to block his re-election. Well, the man thought it was important to have a black on the council, and he made the disavowal. But that same night hundreds of men and women came into town all possessed by Papa Legba, who was the man’s patron loa. They were all dressed up as Legba, with moss for gray hair, canes, tattered coats and pipes, and they went to the man’s house and demanded he give them money. It was a mob of stiff-legged, entranced people, all calling out for money, and finally he gave it to them and they left. He said he’d done it to make them go away, which is true no matter how you interpret the story. The people of the parish put it off to a bunch of crazy backwoods niggers getting excited about nothing, but as a result the man kept his post and satisfied his god. And of course it hasn’t happened since. Why should it? The necessary had been accomplished. That’s the way Les Invisibles work. Singular, unquantifiable events. Impossible to treat statistically, define with theory.’

Otille smiled at Jocundra, and Jocundra thought of it as the smile of a poisoner, someone who has seen her victim sip.

‘Hardly anyone notices,’ said Otille.

Behind the house was a group of eight shotgun cabins, each having three rooms laid end to end, and here, said Otille, lived her ‘friends.’ Slatternly women peered out the windows and ducked away; slovenly men stood on the porches, scratched their bellies and spat. To the west of the cabins was a graveyard centered by a whitewashed crypt decorated with rada paintings - black figures holding bloody hearts, sailing in boats over seas of wavy blue lines - this being home to Valcours’ seven coffins. And at the rear of the graveyard, through a thicket of myrtle, was the bayou, a grassy bank littered with beer cans and bottles, a creosote-tarred dock, and moored to it, a black stern wheeler: an enormous, grim birthday cake of a boat with gingerbread railings and a smokestack for a candle. It had originally belonged to Clothilde, Otille’s grandmother.

‘It was to have been her funeral barge,’ said Otille. ‘She had planned to have it sailed down the Gulf carrying her body and a party of friends. My father used to let us play on it, but then he found out that she had booby-trapped it in some way, a surprise for her friends. We never could find out how.’

Jocuridra was beginning to think of Maravillosa as an evil theme park. First, the Black Castle studded all over with silvery arcana; then the Bacchanal of Lost Souls with a special appearance by the Grim Reaper; the Garden of Unholy Delights; the cabins, an evil Frontier-land where back porch demons drooled into their rum bottles and groped their slant-eyed floozies, leaving smoldering handprints on their haunches; and now this stygian riverboat which had the lumbering reality of a Mardi Gras float. Somewhere on the grounds, no doubt, they would find Uncle Death in a skeleton suit passing out tainted candy, black goat rides for the kiddies, robot beheadings. Perhaps, she thought, there had once been a real evil connected with the place, a real moment of brimstone and blood, but all she could currently discern were the workings of a pathetic irrationality: Otille’s. Yet, though Maravillosa reeked of an impotent dissolution rather than evil, Otille the actress could bring the past to life. Leaning against the pilot house, her black hair the same shade as the boards, making it seem she was an exotic bloom drooping from them, she told them another story.

‘Have you heard of Bayou Vert?’ she asked.

Donnell perked up.

‘They say it runs nearby. It’s extraordinary that a place like this coujd create a myth of Heaven, even such a miserable one as the Swamp King’s palace. Gray-haired swamp girls don’t sound very attractive to me.’ She let her eyes contact Jocundra’s, her lips twitching upward. ‘Clothilde wrote me a letter about Bayou Vert, or partially about it. Of course she died long before I was born, but she addressed it to her grandchild. The lawyer brought it to me when I was sixteen. She said she hoped I would be a girl because girls are so much more adept at pleasure than boys. They have, in her phrase, “more surfaces with which to touch the world.” She instructed me in the use of… my surfaces, and confessed page after page of her misdeeds. Mutilations, murders, perversions.’ Otille crossed to the railing and gazed out over the water. ‘She said that she had fertilized the myth of Bayou Vert - it had been old even in Valcours’ day - by spreading rumors of sightings, new tales of its wonders, tales about the Swamp King’s black sternwheeler that conveyed the lucky souls to his palace. Then she poured barrels of green dye into the water, sending swirls of color down into the marshes, and waited. Almost every time, she said, some fool, a trapper, a fortune hunter, would come paddling up to the boat, and there he’d find Clothilde, naked, gray wig in place, the handmaiden of Paradise.’ Otille ran her hand over the top of a piling and inspected the flecks of creosote adhering to her palm. ‘They must have had a moment of glory on seeing her because they could never say anything. They just looked disbelieving. Happy. She’d make love with them until they slept, and they slept deeply, very, very deeply, because she gave them drugged liquor. And after they woke, too groggy yet to feel anything, she said they always had the most puzzled frowns when they looked down and saw what she had done with her knife.’

The clouds were breaking up, the sun appearing intermittently, and the beer cans on the bank winked bright and dulled, as if their batteries were running low.

‘Come on,’ said Otille sadly. ‘There’s lots more to see.’