The Mammoth Book of Best New Horror. Volume 23

GREGORY NICOLL But None Shall Sing for Me

WARM CARIBBEAN SEAWATER splashed gently over his bare brown ankles, clawing at the soft crystalline sand under his feet as it glided back into the foamy surf, beckoning him toward the ocean depths, urging him to join its turbulent blue-green mysteries.

He stood firm, unmoving, resolutely upright and solidly ashore, ignoring the siren calls of the waves. Many decades before, his long-ago mothers and long-ago fathers had crossed that great ocean in the belly of the slave ship Brillante, each of them rationed just one pint of unsalted water per day, their dry and piteous cries answered only by the sting of the slaver’s cat o’ nine tails.

His people still spoke of the cruelty of Captain Homans who, on one infamous voyage, rather than allow his illegal human cargo to be captured by the policing British frigates, had dragged every dark-skinned man, woman, and child from the hold of his ship and cast them into those waters, with the iron shackles still fastened tightly about their legs. It was whispered that the echoes of their voices could still be heard, crying out from those depths, their horror at this fate mixed with joy that their suffering was finally at its end.

Tonight, for a moment, he thought he could hear them.

Though his eyes were huge and white, bulging on his face like two eggs taken from the nest of a goose, his unblinking grey pupils revealed little to him beyond indistinct variations of light and shadows. Instead, whenever and wherever he walked, his steps were guided by the more potent signals of sound and smell. Unable to distinguish morning from twilight, he determined the hour of the day by feeling the ocean’s tides. Now, as the white waves crashed against the high, jagged black horns of rock on St Sebastian’s coastline, he knew that evening had finally come.

In the distance, from across the sugar cane fields, came the forlorn call of a huge horn made from the great curled shell of a conch, a voice from the sea displaced far inland. It was the signal for which he had been waiting, the summons for the faithful to gather at the hounfour, where tonight they would conduct a ceremony with a blood sacrifice.

He had a duty to perform there. A potentially deadly duty. Yet he had no fear of death.

He had been dead himself for years.

He was called Carrefour, named for the moonlit crossroads where he stood guard.

Nearly seven feet high, he was a human statue with skin darker and drier than the husks of over-ripening cane that grew around him on every side. The strong, warm tropical winds blew and shook those rain-starved stalks violently, but Carrefour did not move. Nor was there the slightest flutter among the close, tight curls of woolly hair which clung to his scalp. His great muscular brown chest was bare. Carrefour’s only clothing was his loose pair of blackened sackcloth trousers, so old and so stiff that even the wind could not bestir them.

As if frustrated by its inability to ruffle Carrefour, the night breeze swirled toward a large ceramic jar which hung some distance away, suspended by hemp ropes from a crude scaffold made of driftwood. The jar had been carefully pierced with irregular holes in several places, like a whistle, so that the air would howl when passing through. Its tone was low and mournful.

From the place of worship, just a short distance away through the cane fields, came the steadily pounding rhythm of the tamboulas and the frantic rattling of instruments made from bones and gourds. The dancers had begun to move and chant, singing and crying out, raising small offerings as they asked the serpent-spirit Dumballah Wedo to bring rain to these thirsty fields.

Carrefour smelled blood.

The rich, fragrant red liquid dripped thickly and steadily from the carcasses of a white she-goat and a black he-goat as they dangled from the branches of a nearby tree. The animals’ life essence had been drained to satisfy the thirst of the loa whose presence was expected at tonight’s ceremony. Their bodies now swayed in the wind, grisly fruit that no living man would pick.

The musk of the dead animals was strong, almost overpowering, yet Carrefour’s widened nostrils picked up another scent behind it in the wind tonight. It was faint at first, a vague hint of something less natural to these fields than the carcasses and the cane. It was a faraway aroma of silks and soaps. The strange scent hovered ghostlike in the distance, but slowly drew nearer.

Woman, he thought. The healer.

The scents reminded him of an encounter he had observed earlier, during the daytime, in the village where he concealed himself from the burning afternoon sun. There were two strangers in the market, a man and a woman, both white and both smelling of alcohol. The man stank of the rum distilled from this island’s own cane. He spoke loudly, his words distorted by the strong drink. The woman smelled sweetly of a very different alcohol, the kind Carrefour knew was used in the medicine rooms of the island’s Great White Mother.

He had seen the rum-soaked man before, out in the cane fields. Carrefour recognised him as the brother of the planter who owned these fields. Those two men lived together near the coast, in the old Fort Holland, a sombre stone mansion whose central courtyard was infamously decorated with a massive wooden figurehead salvaged from the wreckage of the slave ship Estrella.

The woman who had accompanied him, however, was completely unknown to Carrefour.

These two white strangers had sat together in the café across the market. Their faces were a mere blur to Carrefour’s unblinking eyes, but from their different scents and their differing words, he detected a tension between them. The rum-soaked man was in great need of healing. The medicine-woman was a healer. Yet Carrefour sensed that the rum-soaked man’s need was simply too great. He was broken. He was already lost. The medicine-woman’s words were soft and caring, but they came too late.

The man had done something evil and selfish, something so foul to the eyes of God that its infamy had inspired their village’s calypso troubadour to compose a ballad about it. Carrefour had heard the song, but had never seen its subject until that moment. As he had tried to remember the words of the ballad, the troubadour had appeared there in the street, as if lured by Carrefour’s thoughts, and had begun to sing the song from the next corner. That round little fellow with his sad guitar had strummed the song quite mournfully, singing of the sorrow and shame brought to the rum-soaked man’s family.

The drunken man’s crime was familiar to Carrefour. Once, long ago, he too had lusted after his own brother’s wife.

A strange light gleamed through the cane stalks.

It is she who walks toward me, Carrefour observed, the healer-woman.

The small spot of light moved along the ground, blazing from a silver cylinder clasped in the healing-woman’s hand, its beam guiding her across the uneven terrain. As her gentle footsteps tentatively approached the wind-swept crossroads where he stood guard, Carrefour’s senses were at full alert. He saw her now through his murky eyes, the same female stranger from the village, drawing cautiously closer in the moonlight. The faint perfume of the medicine-alcohol still lingered about her. She wore a white gown, over which she had pulled tightly a dark wool shawl. She moved in the direction of the ceremony, following the sound of the drums.

Carrefour knew she could not go there.

I must not let her pass.

Accompanying the medicine-woman was another white female. This one moved more slowly, but with a strangely regular rhythm. Though Carrefour could not discern the features of her face, he noticed the strong line of her eyebrows, arching gracefully like the countenance of a white owl. There was something curiously regal in how she bore herself, as if she were the exalted lady of a great estate. No sooner had the thought formed in his mind than Carrefour knew she was the one, the wife of the plantation owner, and the object of the damning passions of that planter’s brother.

This woman was dressed only in ivory-hued silks, as if she had just risen from her bed. She smelled strongly of oils and powders, along with something else.

And then he knew.

She is one like me.

The second woman was, like himself, a zombie.

There was no stink of the grave about her. Unlike Carrefour, this one had never lain immobile with her heart stopped by the strange paralysis of the island magic, nor had she felt the first shovel full of earth tossed onto her chest, followed by another and another, until it seemed the weight of the whole island was atop her.

Neither had she known, some nights later, the sudden horrid jolt of awakening to an unholy and maddening afterlife, bringing with it the strength to claw oneself up from beneath the thick carpet of dark, wormy earth, through thick yellow roots and heavy veils of rough, tooth-like rocks and, finally, to walk once again in the moonlight.

This one’s fate had clearly been much different. Doubtless her passage had taken place in a big house, on a soft bed, with palm fans and silken curtains. But she was just as dead. And, sadly, just as alive.

Is it I alone who see this?

Carrefour stepped forward. The healer’s light beam illuminated his face, causing her to stop short. She gasped and covered her mouth in horror at the sight of him, stifling a scream; but her silent white companion remained expressionless and unmoved.

Since the night of his resurrection, Carrefour had been assigned many tasks by the houngan priest and even by the Great White Mother, but all these chores had involved only the use of his massive size and matching strength. None had required thought and reasoning. Tonight’s task was simple, to guard the crossroads and let only the faithful pass by. These two were not of the faith, and by the command with which he had been charged, he should drive them away. Yet there was a purpose driving them here, a purpose which was not his to deny.

The planter’s wife wore a small patch pinned to her gown, indicating she had been approved to attend the hounfour tonight, but the healer did not.

Carrefour hesitated only briefly before stepping aside.

The healer will see, at the hounfour, and tonight she will learn of our ways.

They moved past him, the healer giving one nervous glance back, her expression a strange mix of fear and gratitude, before pressing on toward the sound of the ritual drums.

Carrefour stood for a moment, alone in the crossroads, listening to the wind howl through the holes in the dangling ceramic jar.

Then, slowly, he turned and followed them.

Flickering torchlight reflected off the long, gleaming steel blade as the sabreur danced to the hammering of drums within the sacred circle. The air was hot and musky despite the wind, for the hounfour was hidden down in the low ground, its edges ringed by tall benu trees whose branches were heavy with fruit. The faithful watched the sabreur’s sacred dance, enraptured, from the periphery of the circle. The whiteness of their fine linen suits and cotton gowns contrasted starkly against their dark faces, black skin sparkling with perspiration.

The two white women emerged from the darkness and stood at the edge of the circle. The healer nervously beheld the scene, but her companion was expressionless and unmoved. Carrefour stopped a short distance behind them, concealing himself back in the shadows.

Many of the worshippers clutched offerings of live hens and wicker baskets of eggs which they brought as offerings to the serpent-spirit Dumballah Wedo. Others had already placed their gifts around the central post, beside the tall black top hat and the cigarettes that had been laid out for the exclusive use of Papa Ghede, brother to the Patron Spirit of the Farmers, should he care to make his appearance tonight. Nearby stood a tall clear glass bottle filled with first-distillation rum, into which a dozen large red-orange Cuban peppers had been inserted, crushed, and mixed. One sip from this vessel would sear a mortal man’s throat and force his eyes to close shut in choking agony.

It was Ghede’s favourite drink.

The sabreur slung his huge sword left and right, and then stopped and held it proudly aloft as the faithful cried out joyfully. The drummers increased the speed of their rhythmic pounding on the tamboulas, and a row of dancers strutted into the circle. They were half a dozen young women of the island, chosen for their beauty and the magnificence of their swelling bosoms, which they bared proudly as they danced. Smiling, they leapt in unison left and right, necklaces of bead and bone swinging to and fro between their naked breasts while, down below, their white skirts twirled to the rise and fall of the drummers’ beat.

From a group of faithful seated near the two strangers, a small dark-skinned boy suddenly leapt into the circle. His arms flailed as if he were a marionette shaken on its strings, and it was immediately evident to Carrefour that the little one’s mind was not his own. Less than ten years in age, this child was now the helpless puppet of a loa, come to join the festivities.

The boy lurched to a stop at the central post. Quickly donning Papa Ghede’s black silk hat, which would have slipped down and covered his head completely if not for his wide ears blocking its descent, the child poked several cigarettes between his lips and lit them all almost simultaneously with the flame from a dripping crimson wax candle. Puffing pungent white smoke, he hoisted the rum bottle and flicked the cork from its aperture before darting into the line of dancers.

The drummers quickened the pace of their rhythm yet again, excited to have such a prominent loa here in their midst, even if the human body he had chosen to inhabit was hardly much larger than a monkey. The worshippers applauded and swayed eagerly with the music, confident that if Papa Ghede had joined their ceremony, the spirits of Zaka and Dumballah must be nearby as well. This would bode well for their harvest.

Hopping about and then undulating as if engaged in intense copulation, the small boy passed down along the row of dancers. He briskly pinched each one on her buttocks as her skirt rose with the beat. After leaving his mark in this manner upon the whole company, he stopped at the far end of the circle and, taking the cigarettes from his mouth, threw his head back and opened his jaw wide.

How the oversized top hat remained atop his head through this was impossible to determine, but even more astonishing was what followed. The possessed child tilted the bottle of fiery pepper-infused rum and poured nearly a quarter of it straight into his mouth, gulping it down eagerly and without pause. Even from the far side of the circle, the stinging aroma of that fiery spiced rum burned at Carrefour’s nostrils.

Carrefour noticed the healer-woman react to this event, reflexively turning to the planter’s wife in alarm. Seeing that her silent companion was still unmoved, the healer moved forward as if to intercede between the boy and the bottle. Carrefour extended one arm and held her back, restraining her from entering the circle.

Her shawl was soft under the coarse husk of his hand, her body warm and yielding beneath it. Briefly, a dim vision of his own long-ago woman flickered somewhere in the fading grey pools of memory inside Carrefour’s mind.

He released the healer. She turned and looked up at him with an expression he was unable to interpret as either terror or relief.

The drums continued their relentless pounding. At the edge of the circle, the possessed boy laughed shrilly and began to dance in place, again joyfully following the beat. His high-kicking steps never faltered as he alternated each long drag on his smouldering cigarettes with a deep gulp from his incendiary bottle. When all the rum was drained from it, he cast it aside and jumped to the centre of the circle, throwing his arms upward with a swift, violent move which brought the entire dance to halt.

After one final savage flourish, the drums fell silent.

The sabreur stepped forward, raising his sword. He then lowered it slowly, extending its hilt to the child. The boy seized the huge blade, its edge nearly as long as his own entire body, and turned toward the two white visitors. He pointed the tip of the sword at the planter’s wife.

The circle was completely silent. The only sound was the howl of the wind through the cane and dangling whistles.

Back behind the sabreur, on the wicker and cane-husk wall of the hounfour, a small door swung inward, its crude wooden frame creaking weakly. The possessed boy passed the sword back to its bearer, marched forward, and stepped through this portal. The door creaked shut behind him.

Silently, a small procession of the faithful advanced and began forming a line outside the door, awaiting their own opportunities to speak with the wise houngan within, to ask him to interpret the ways of the spirits for them and to advise them on their prayers. The healer-woman stepped forward to join them, glancing back briefly at Carrefour as if to ask his permission.

He made no move to stop her.

The healer stepped aside briefly to pick up the discarded rum bottle. She raised it toward her nostrils as if to sample its scent, but dropped it before it reached her face. Her lips curled and she grimaced in open disgust at the potent smell wafting from its uncorked end.

In a moment, the door of the hounfour swung open again and the boy emerged. He no longer wore the black hat of Papa Ghede. He walked normally, as if nothing out of the ordinary had happened. When the faithful reached down to rub his shoulders or to pat him on the head as he passed down the waiting queue, he looked up with genuine surprise, baffled by their excessive attentions.

The healer woman knelt before him and, in a soft voice which Carrefour could not clearly hear, asked him some questions. The child shook his head and smiled. She leaned forward more closely and whiffed the boy’s breath. Her forehead creased with confusion. Clearly she was puzzled, for the boy did not reek in even the slightest way of the cigarettes or of the fiery rum which the whole circle had watched him consume.

A native woman now stepped to the door of the hounfour and whispered a question for the priest inside it. He answered her in a deep voice which reached Carrefour’s ears as a low rumble, like great wooden wheels rolling over cobblestones. The woman nodded, accepting the holy man’s answer, and stepped away. Another worshipper, who had waited in the queue behind her, beckoned for the healer to take her place. The white visitor accepted gratefully, but when the healer reached the door, it opened. She was ushered briskly inside and the door creaked shut behind her.

A low murmur grew steadily among the faithful waiting for the houngan. They gestured at where Carrefour stood. For a moment he imagined that they were staring and pointing at him, but he soon realised that their attentions were focused on the planter’s wife. She remained near the edge of the circle, unmoving and unmoved, where she had stood throughout the entire ceremony. The sabreur walked slowly up to her, extending the tip of his sword. He pressed it against the bare flesh of her left arm and drew its edge down purposefully, finishing the stroke with a quick and forceful turn which spun her slightly on her heels, so that Carrefour could now see her face. A longitudinal wound, nearly four inches across, opened in the white woman’s arm. The skin on either side parted like a pair of thin, pale lips opening to speak.

But no blood flowed forth.

The murmuring of the crowd rose to a tumult.

“Ghost,” one voice hoarsely whispered.

“Living dead,” another gasped.

“Zombie!” someone shouted.

The door of the hounfour creaked open again and the healer-woman dashed out. Close behind her followed the island’s Great White Mother, and then the houngan himself. The healer looked in horror at the bloodless wound and, grasping the planter’s wife by the arm, led her quickly from the circle. The houngan and the Great White Mother spoke to the worshippers, calming them and asking that they resume the service.

Carrefour watched the scene carefully through his dull, milky eyes. He saw the Great White Mother turn and steal a curious, lingering glance after the two departing women. Her face seemed to reflect more than mere interest. She seemed to smile with pride. Even through the blur of his dead eyes, there was no mistaking it.

It was then that he knew.

He recalled the strange song of the village troubadour, who had sung of sorrow and shame descending on the planter’s family.

The words of that song are true, thought Carrefour, but the blame for those two brothers’ pain lies with the woman who bore them. It was she.

He sensed strongly that the fault for their sorrow lay only partly with the planter’s rum-soaked brother, whose misplaced passions had threatened to shatter their familial bonds. The greater blame belonged to their own mother, a white woman well-schooled in Northern medicine, but who also dabbled adroitly in island voodoo.

The planter’s wife who walks as a ghost. walks because of her.

Ceremonial drums pounded vibrantly as Carrefour held the planter’s wife in his hand, closing his dry brown fingers around the soft, cool smooth silk of her gown. She was so small that only the tips of her feet and the top of her head protruded from the grasp of his surrounding fingers.

The sabreur smiled, pleased by Carrefour’s interest. He reached up and tugged the tiny white doll from Carrefour’s hand. He waved and gestured at it, holding the symbol aloft. Slowly Carrefour extended his arm and took the little effigy back from him. Once more the sabreur removed it from his grasp.

The drummers quickened their pace.

Carrefour turned and began to walk away. He had been assigned his mission.

Burdened with great purpose, he moved toward the faraway lights of Fort Holland.

There was a strong hint of ocean salt in the warm night breeze, and it slowed Carrefour’s pace, causing him to step awkwardly on the unpaved trails, with his footfalls dragging as if walking under seawater. At this delayed pace, he reached the planter’s home when the moon was more than halfway through its nightly arc. Bullfrogs croaked from the high grass of the surrounding marshes.

The unguarded iron gate of Fort Holland swung open silently at his touch.

Carrefour shuffled into the central courtyard, making better progress now that this flat stone surface was under his feet. Other than the scrape of his soles on the smooth stone, the only sound in here was the constant trickle of water from the fort’s fountain, over which an immense wooden figurehead loomed.

Carrefour paused briefly to stare up at the huge carving, his dull and unblinking eyes struggling to take in the sight.

He had heard tales of it, but until this moment he had never seen it. Rescued from the wreckage of the slave ship Estrella, the figurehead was a giant effigy of Sebastian, the Christian saint from whom this island took its name. It depicted the saint during his martyrdom, with a dozen of his tormentors’ arrows protruding from chest and arms. In real life, Sebastian had somehow survived this horror. So too had much of the Estrella’s terrified, dusky-hued cargo endured the misadventure of their shipwreck. They had lived to walk the sands of this island, if only to toil in the cane fields under the unrelenting lash of their white masters.

Carrefour continued onward past the splashing fountain, shuffling up onto the covered porch at the far side of the courtyard. He knew this was where he would find the Holland family’s sleeping rooms. He could smell her now, the planter’s wife, the fair white zombie wrapped in her cool silken robes. His nostrils flared, picking up the scents of the oils and perfumes with which the healer-woman had washed her, and beneath these the reek of those stinging Northern medicines which so vainly attempted to mask the woman’s undeniable condition.

For she is dead, he thought. As dead as I.

He heard something stir behind billowing curtains. Someone must have heard him.

Is it.?

A high-pitched scream tore through the night breeze.

It was the cry of the healer-woman, roused by Carrefour’s approach. She screamed again, and soon there were more sounds, doors and windows opening, frantic footsteps. A large man ran up behind him, the boards of the porch creaking under his mass.

“Stop!” he barked. His voice was deep and masculine. “Why have you come?”

Carrefour turned and found himself face to face with the planter himself, the lord of Fort Holland. He was a powerfully built and imposing white man who was wrapped in an ornate golden night-robe.

“Why have you come?” the planter asked again, his tone angry and forceful.

The sound stirred Carrefour’s rage.

Something deep within him boiled to the surface, faint memories of his own life, his life before his resurrection, when he and his brother competed for the hand of the same woman. The white man’s fearsome tone echoed the outrage and betrayal in Carrefour’s brother’s voice on that night when he had surprised them together.

And yet there was another, even deeper memory awakening beneath that one, faint and ghostly grey impressions of lying on the bare wooden hull of a creaking ship as it pitched upon heaving waves, men and women wallowing for days and nights in their own filth, hearing the chanting and screaming of the entire tightly packed living brown cargo, and the vicious crack of a cat o’ nine tails.

His lips curled back in a savage snarl.

He reached out, his long brown arms grasping eagerly for planter’s neck. He could crack the man’s windpipe as easily as he would crush a stalk of cane. He stepped forward, making a crude lunge for his victim.

“Carrefour!”

The unexpected sound of his own name caused him to stop instantly, his fingers mere inches from the planter’s bare white neck.

“Carrefour!” came the call again.

It was the voice of the Great White Mother. She turned away from him and whispered something to one of the household servants. Carrefour could not make out all the words, but he heard her say, “Salt. quickly. brick of salt. only. return them to their graves.”

He saw her now, roused from her sleep, wrapped in a long woollen shawl and with her grey hair hanging loosely. She stood in a doorway which opened onto the porch. The expression on her face was difficult to discern in the deep shadows here, but her commanding tone was unmistakable as she addressed him.

“You must go,” she insisted.

The Great White Mother was not to be denied. Her Northern medicine was strong. He had known hundreds of fellow islanders who had finally overcome maladies such as cholera, dysentery, and malaria only by means of her cures. But her voodoo was just as powerful. She had become a mambo, the female counterpart of their own houngan priest, equally skilled in the ways of island magic. It was she who had solved the dilemma of her two quarrelling sons, the rum-soaked brother and the planter, by destroying the object of their tension. It was she who made the planter’s wife walk as a zombie.

A female servant scurried to the Great White Mother’s side, bearing a brick of salt from the kitchen. The Mother held up her hand, gesturing for her servant to step back. “No need for that now, Marianne,” she whispered. “He will go peacefully.”

Carrefour turned and shuffled off through the courtyard, past the trickling fountain, past the watchful gaze of the giant martyred saint, past the great iron gates and, finally, onto the sandy trail beyond. Warm ocean breezes embraced him as he stepped outside the walls of Fort Holland.

He headed toward the hounfour.

The sound of the ceremonial drums began again softly, coming from that direction.

The tamboulas hammered with renewed purpose, their rhythm quickening. Flickering torchlight danced over the sabreur, casting bizarre distortions of his shadow on the cane-husk walls. He prepared the small effigy of the planter’s wife by binding its waist with one end of a long, slender thread. As the faithful chanted, he raised the white doll and asked the spirits of the field to bless the long steel ouanga needle he had selected.

Carrefour watched from the edge of the circle as the doll was placed at one side and the sabreur crouched in position at the other. Once again the beating of the drums hastened. In time with this faster rhythm, the sabreur began motioning with his arms, beckoning the effigy of the planter’s wife to move toward him.

As one of the worshippers gently pulled the almost invisible thread, it did.

Carrefour saw her near the beach, on the sandy trail beneath which the waves broke most loudly against the horns of jagged black rock, where they sprayed the air the widest and highest with fine mists of salty water. Even in the darkness, even through the blur of his dead eyes, he knew it was her.

The wife of the planter.

The woman walked the irregular trail at an unvarying pace, with her golden hair hanging limp on her shoulders and the white fabric of her gown dragging along the ground behind her.

She heeds the call of the sabreur, but how will his needle take her?

As if in answer, a second figure appeared on the trail, moving at an awkward pace but clearly driven by an intense passion. It was the planter’s brother.

The rum-soaked man.

He blundered along the sand much faster than the woman, quickly overtaking her.

Carrefour noticed that there was something in the man’s hand, a long and slender cylindrical object which resembled a wand or a small whip. It was only as the two white figures connected at the crest of the trail, in the brief moment before they vanished behind a shield of jagged black rocks, that Carrefour recognised the instrument which the man clutched so purposefully.

An arrow from Sebastian’s chest. .

So this was the dark magic the sabreur had wrought. His holy ouanga needle, when pressed into the doll’s chest, would bring about an event that ended the dead woman’s empty, ceaseless walking. Carrefour had hoped for a bolt of lightning or a column of fire, even one which would set alight the dry, rain-starved cane fields and bring ruin to the region, but not an arrow pulled from the wooden figurehead over Fort Holland’s fountain.

Saint Sebastian survived his martyrdom. So too will the planter’s wife rise again.

Unless.

He shuffled as quickly as he could toward those jagged black rocks, his immense brown feet scraping the sand like shovels. As the salty air stung his nostrils, he realised at last why he had always felt at peace near the shore, why he had always been able to hear the echoes of his ancestors who had perished in the ocean.

The salt.

He understood now, at last making sense of those words he had overheard the Great White Mother say to her servant, wise counsel about using a brick of salt as voodoo magic, to subdue a zombie.

The salt will end the suffering.

He was too late.

As he reached the crest of the trail, he looked down on a chamber of rock and saw the rum-soaked man standing over the woman, who lay motionless in a soft bed of sand. Saint Sebastian’s arrow protruded from her heart.

Weeping softly, the man withdrew the arrow and cast it aside.

Does he truly think she is finished? Can the man believe that this is truly her end?

Carrefour descended the trail and advanced toward them.

Even above the pounding of the surf, the white man somehow heard his approach and turned to face him. Seized by panic, the man began shouting and gesturing for Carrefour to get away, but Carrefour reached out with both of his hands, extending them toward him.

The man turned back and gathered up the woman in his arms. She hung limply in his grasp, but Carrefour could already see her leg beginning to kick as her inevitable re-animation began. It would not be long.

Unless.

“Get away from us!” the man shouted. “Away, I say!” With the woman sprawled across his arms, he began to back up into the surf. The waves broke around his ankles, then around his knees, and then around his waist. The woman’s head, dangling into the seawater, was soon submerged.

Carrefour continued his advance. It was this event for which he hoped.

The salt. she will taste the salt.

It was the village fisherman who found them.

Long before dawn, when the tide was at its highest, the dark-skinned men walked barefoot in the warm coastal waters, guided in their quest by the fluttering flames of small torches. They carried spears and tridents, quickly thrusting these sharp-edged tools at the darting fins of their elusive aquatic quarry. Less than an hour had passed and already their catch had exceeded that of the past three days, until one of the younger men spied something floundering in the water, something which was not a fish.

As the sombre column moved up the trail from the beach, two fishermen bore torches in advance of the others. A group of four of the men carried the lifeless body of the planter’s rum-soaked brother. Carrefour alone transported the corpse of the planter’s wife, draped over his extended arms, for none of the villagers had dared to touch her.

She no longer moved.

At last, thought Carrefour, she has found peace.

The sky was still dark when the grim procession reached Fort Holland. The great iron gate opened for them at the hands of servants whose heads hung in woe, though Carrefour sensed their relief in the hushed whispers they exchanged as he passed. The planter stood sadly on the porch above them, with his arms around the healer-woman. Though the healer’s wrenching sobs were genuine, he sensed that the planter’s grief was as false as that of his servants.

The healer then wiped away her own tears with a small chequered handkerchief and began to watch the fishermen closely, with fascination, almost as if she intended later to paint a portrait of the scene. Her stare faltered only from time to time when she daubed the corners of her eyes with the moist cloth.

The healer, he thought, she is strong. She will go North and tell this story, so that others will come to believe.

The group of fishermen laid the planter’s brother gently onto the cool flat stones of the courtyard. Carrefour did the same with the limp form of the planter’s wife, her robes spilling out beside her. The villagers then turned and, after respectfully placing one of their torches upright near the two limp bodies, they made their way back out through the gate.

Carrefour shuffled slowly over to the courtyard’s fountain, whose water trickled like bitter tears. From the waist of his rough sackcloth trousers, he drew the single arrow which the rum-soaked man had taken from here. Carrefour placed its tip back into the small hole in the centre of the big wooden saint’s chest. He pushed forcefully. The arrow sank deeply into the aperture, protruding upright.

It would stay.

As Carrefour passed through the gate, lightning flickered in the distance. It was followed by a low, faraway roll of thunder.

The rain comes, he thought.

The loa are pleased.

The cane crop will be saved.

From the distance he heard the call of the ocean, the foamy waves breaking rhythmically on the shore.

I shall join them now.

The beach glistened like fine jewels as moonlight reflected off the wave-washed sand. Salty spray burst from the rocky outcroppings, lingering ghost-like in the air after each mighty crash of the surf against the beach.

Carrefour shuffled purposefully into the wet sand. His huge brown feet sank down into the soft smooth grains, each step leaving massive divots in the beach which filled up quickly with warm saltwater and were erased by the next pass of the waves. The ocean crashed around his knees and then, as it drew itself back from the shore, began to pull him along with it, beckoning him toward its depths.

He continued to walk.

The water wrapped itself around his waist like the arms of his long-ago lover, tugging him forward, deeper. Ocean salt teased his nostrils, re-awakening long dormant memories of his life before, returning him to the long-ago time when he was alive, when he was human, when he had foolishly believed that his own death, however it might come, would be final and would bring an end to his time on Earth.

And now, he thought, at last it shall be.

Men in far lands will hear of what happened here, of this island and its mysteries. They will speak of the white healer from the North, of how she travelled to join us and learn of our ways.

The warm seawater reached Carrefour’s chin, wave caps surrounding and embracing his neck. He continued to walk forward, his mouth filling with its intensely salty sting, the salt seeming to explode like gunpowder, sending images flashing through his mind in time with the flashes of lightning from the great tropical storm brewing overhead.

Men will tell her story many times, he thought. They will whisper it by firelight, and they will write it in their books. They will draw and paint its strange scenes as they grasp hopelessly to understand them. They will retell tales of the white healer in their poems and their songs. their troubadours will sing of how she walked these shores accompanied by one of our own living dead.

Yes, so shall they sing. but none shall sing for me.

The water covered Carrefour’s unblinking eyes, salt burning them until they could see no more. The ocean closed over his head and roughly plunged him down even deeper, forcing him undersea by the roots of his woolly scalp.

In the distance he heard the shouts and cries of his ancestors, the wails of his long-ago mothers and long-ago fathers when the iron shackles of the Brillante dragged them under the sea, joined by the howls of terror-stuck slaves aboard the Estrella as its wooden hull shattered against the knife-like ridges of a hidden reef.

Their wailing slowly eased into softer calls, faraway echoes of contentment and peace, of tribal drums around crackling fires, of the hooves of zebra and wildebeest thundering in the distance across hard-packed yellow earth, of the laughter of small brown children watching, of happy group-chanting as the orange sun descended slowly on the warmth of the African plains, and of the gentle whispers of love from the lips of his brother’s wife.

For the first time in as long as he could effectively remember, something resembling a smile curled at the edges of Carrefour’s dead black lips.

Until, finally, it all went dark.