Colin Cotterill - Disco for the Departed

Santiago was taken by surprise. He’d been busy maneuvering open the lid from the tea box without being noticed.

But he agreed to pass on the secrets of the ceremony. Siri was curious as to why he would give up such presumably classified information so readily. But he went into great detail and seemed inordinately proud to be passing on his knowledge. It appeared that for the rites to work, the hearts of the lovers had to be fresh. Santiago suggested that it would be best of all if they were still beating when they were removed, but conceded that this was often a little too gory for most people. The important thing was for the bodies to stay in perfect condition for as long as was possible after death.

“Hence the watery grave,” Siri concluded. “But why?”

Santiago told Dtui that the couple would appear together in eternity the way they looked when the fusing of their spirits had been completed. As even the undead have a sense of the aesthetic, they prefer their loved ones to be relatively free of rotting flesh.

For three nights before the ceremony, the priest would mix a special concoction, a paste. Only the very best priests knew the ingredients and the incantations used while mixing them. The Cuban began to boast to Dtui of his skill; he told her he was one of the greatest exponents of the dark arts.

Siri interrupted her translation. “Dtui, thank the doctor for his commercial. But perhaps he wouldn’t mind getting back to the night in question.”

Santiago laughed.

“What’s so funny?” Lit asked Dtui.

She squirmed in her seat before replying. “He said he can tell us everything we want to know, because…”

“Because what?”

“Because the three of us will remember nothing of this meeting. He says when the sun comes up tomorrow, we won’t even know who we are.” Dtui and Lit were intimidated by this announcement. Only Siri saw a funny side to it.

“I look forward to that,” he said impatiently. “But Civilai and I have done that trick no end of times with a bottle of rice whisky. It isn’t so hard. Now, the ceremony?”

Santiago told the doctor that he admired him for the bravado he managed to display when he was soon to meet a horrible end. He agreed to describe the rites in detail. The priest, he said, removes the hearts from the lovers. These he cuts into very small pieces on the altar and mixes them with the blessed paste in a pestle. Over and over he chants the incantation, over and over till he falls into a deep trance. He knows nothing beyond the actions he is to perform. On the altar, the same altar where he has minced the hearts, he models the paste into the shape of a bird. It is a bird in flight. There’s no need for the priest to be a great artist. Just the crude shape of a bird is enough. This figure must then be concealed. Nobody must see it or touch so that the bird can develop its own life and symbolically fly to eternity. Then the lovers will be together forever.

“And how long does this process take?” Siri asked.

Santiago thought for a second before replying. It was hard to say. Weeks? Months? Sometimes years. Sometimes not at all. It depended on the will of the lovers. Then, all of a sudden, Santiago sighed and removed his glasses as if he’d said enough. His demeanor changed. He removed the tea box from the drawer and placed it on the table in front of him. His voice became gruff and his eyes bloodshot as he growled at his guests.

A tremor entered Dtui’s voice. “He… he says he’s enjoyed talking with us but now it’s time for us to go.” She abandoned her role as translator. “Doc, I don’t like the look of this. I don’t think we should let him-”

Before she could complete her warning, Santiago had seized the box in his left hand and scythed it through the air in an arc. The powder it contained blew in a cloud around the three guests. They could smell the scent of long-dead beasts and the stink of putrid spices. They could hear the loud angry chant emerging from between the Cuban’s nicotine-stained teeth. Although their eyes stung from the dust, they could see Santiago back against the wall, extending his arms to an unseen God.

Dtui expected some manifestation-blisters, horns sprouting, a feeling of dread overwhelming her-but all she could manage was a sneeze. Lit also sneezed. Siri emerged from the cloud of powder with his hand over his mouth and nose and stared at the Cuban, now prone on the floor behind his desk.

“You can tell him to stop all this rot, Dtui. It didn’t work,” Siri said.

“But why didn’t it?” Lit asked, taking his gun from his belt and pointing it at the confused Cuban.

“Because it never does,” Siri told him. “Our Dr. Santiago here is a phony-a charlatan. He’s only the great high priest of Endoke in his own mind. He couldn’t conjure up a bubble in a bottle of Lao beer.”

“But that isn’t possible. You said he was thrown out of Cuba because…”

“Because he was a nuisance, not because he could actually perform any of the magic he professed to know. They thought he was a nutcase. His experiments got in the way of his medicine. Nobody was going to hire a surgeon, no matter how talented he might be, who believes the dark spirits are guiding his hand on the scalpel. Dtui, do you want to get him up off the floor before his joints freeze?”

Dtui helped the old doctor back into his seat, still mumbling an ancient curse, unable to believe that his intended victims were still conscious and coherent.

“I’m not saying he didn’t study the dark arts,” Siri continued. “I’m sure he did. I’m sure he’s a veritable authority on all the rites and rituals of Santeria and the Palo Mayombe. But the fact is, any old Josй can’t just declare himself to be a Grand Mage any more than I can announce to the world that I’m Mr. Universe. You have to have something special. You have to be touched by the spirits. Our Santiago here, despite his enthusiasm, just doesn’t have it.”

Deprived of the benefit of translation, the Cuban sat at his desk with a curious look on his face.

Lit stood, shaking his head. “But he did… he must have. What about this?” He held up his finger, which drooped sadly like a fractured stick insect. Siri walked to the towering refrigerator in the corner of the office and opened the door to reveal thousands of trays of neat petri dishes.

“Comrade Lit, if a man has no natural ability to perform miracles-and most men don’t-they resort to trickery, to conjuration. Once we established that our friend here was a fraud, it was just a question of going through the tricks he’d performed to explain them. Some he just made up. Others had more rational explanations. Take his supposed love potion, for example. We met the young nurse who had been charmed into his bed. But it wasn’t a spell that got her there. He’d caught her stealing medications to send back to her village. Her body was payment for him to keep his mouth shut. Simple blackmail.

“Many of his other spells can be explained scientifically. Among other things, he is a brilliant chemist. I’ve been trying to work out how he caused your finger to atrophy. As you were all billeted together in the same caves, I have to assume he infected you with some virus. He has a vast collection of cultures. It wouldn’t have been difficult for him to creep to your bunk at night and touch you with some contaminated sample.”

Comrade Lit was crestfallen. Could he really have been duped like a simple villager?

“Every odd event that happened here,” he said, “I marked down to Santiago and the supernatural. I was too afraid of my superiors’ reaction to report what was going on. I was too afraid of him. Do you suppose he might have had something to do with Colonel Ha’s death? His reaction to the ambush was inexplicable.”