Michael Bishop - Ancient of Days

I AM: By repostulating me as the Alpha and Omega, the supreme primal-and-ultimate holistic concept, you may believe in me again by rediscovering in me the ground of your own existence.

LOYD ( struggling in Yagaza’s powerful hands ): What the hell for?

I AM: To realize once again that you were spawned by a multidimensional, paratemporal Benevolence and that even your most pointless-appearing torments mean, Mister Paul. They resonate forever in the all-encompassing Mind of God.

LOYD ( weeping bitterly ): Hooray for our resonating torments. Hooray, hooray. What a comfort, what a comfort….

The possessed man slumped from Yagaza’s immaterial embrace. Meanwhile, Agarou, god of ancestors, climbed out of the psychic grotto into which he had earlier withdrawn. He climbed out of it to remount the body of Paul Loyd. He meant to ride his human horse back into the rainy compass of Prix-des-Yeux and its houngfor . Regaining control was not hard. Because Loyd had so little fight left in him, Agarou routed the man’s defenses, occupied his overloaded mind, and looked out through his eyes. He found that Loyd was sitting at the feet of the agonized statue of Homo habilis primus . One of Loyd’s hands clutched the statue’s stone phallus, apparently to keep him from toppling over.

Let go of me, Loyd told Agarou. I’m sick of the selfish double dealings of gods.

The one who must release you comes now, Agarou said. Patience. Loyd peered through the loa ’s eyes— his eyes, if only he could get them back—at the flashlight beams crisscrossing in the entrance shaft to the upland cave system. A small party of people was approaching, limned in nappy silhouette behind, or off to the sides of, the bobbing flashlight beams: figures of blood and substance, not habiline ghosts. The closer they came, the more palpable grew the light accompanying them. The darkness in the catacombs began to relinquish its ultraviolet character to the dim grittiness of the visible spectrum, for Agarou’s hold on him was weakening.

Caroline knelt beside him. Adam knelt beside him. Their clothes were drenched, their faces beaded with rain. Behind them, looking down on him, stood two sinister-looking men whom Loyd could not place and whose postures bespoke a belligerent impatience. They carried weapons: rifles or submachine guns. Even the loa possessing him recoiled from these figures, and Loyd struggled to focus on Caroline and her habiline protector. Caroline looked like a drowned angel; Adam, a refugee from the bombed-out set of a 1930s Hollywood musical starring Fred Astaire. (It was the top hat and tails that did it.)

“Come forth, Mister Paul,” urged Adam in his hoarsest whisper. “Come forth from your possession by Agarou, god of ancestors.”

I sat up straighter. Embarrassed, I let go of the lustrous prick of the statue behind me. I blinked against the flashlight beams of the armed men regarding me with equal measures of curiosity and contempt.

“What the hell’s going on?”

Caroline kissed me and nodded at one of the beret-wearing men. “You remember Lieutenant Bacalou, Paul? We met him on the boat coming over from Cap-Haïtien.”

“Hello again.” Lieutenant Bacalou gave me a curt nod and a superior smile.

Groggy, I tried to stand. With Caroline and Adam’s support, I succeeded, but briefly teetered like a bounce-back toy trying to regain its equilibrium. Five minutes ago, I had been talking to God—scoring points against him in an emotional metaphysical debate that had utterly wrung me out. To find this grim pair of Tontons Macoutes in his place, holding my wife and my friend at gun point, seemed a bleak variation of a nightmare that had already taken place in Beulah Fork. E. L. Teavers and the Klan, Lieutenant Bacalou and another of Baby Doc’s rifle-toting bogeymen: they were mirror images. Or maybe this cave was the darkroom in which the negatives of the unsmiling macoutes would turn out to be pernicious double exposures. No matter where we went, we could not escape the merciless pursuit of zealots.

“All right,” I managed. “Tell me something about this.”

Caroline explained that Lieutenant Bacalou and his men had burst into the houngfor shortly after I, as Agarou’s human mount, had left it. The rain and my sudden leavetaking had forced their hand—they’d had to show themselves before assessing the entire situation to the lieutenant’s satisfaction. By accident, then, the macoutes had disrupted the vaudun ceremony at just the right moment to foil the efforts of the rain god Damballa and his bride Aïda Ovedo to possess Brian and Caroline. (I was glad to hear this. The idea of Caroline’s being the anthropologist’s consort, even in the twilight world of loa possession, revolted me.) The men under Bacalou’s command had entered the peristyle so unexpectedly that RuthClaire had screamed and the habilines had panicked. Toussaint was dead. He had attacked the first man into the tonnelle —not Bacalou, but an agent from the Pointe d’Inagua security post—and the agent had riddled his body with his submachine gun. In the resultant confusion, Alberoi and Dégrasse had broken through the wall behind the drum platform and escaped into the night.

“Erzulie? Hector?”

“They’re okay,” Caroline said. “They’re under guard in a dry corner. Brian and RuthClaire are with them down there, likewise under guard.”

I looked at Bacalou. “Did you bring a whole army up here with you?”

“Not even a platoon,” he said with easy irony. “At first, Monsieur Loyd, it was only Philomé and I who followed the two women and the Austin-Antilles man up here from Rutherford’s Port.” He swung his flashlight in an arc that illuminated his stocky partner’s face. “Monsieur Loyd, Philomé Bobo.”

“Enchanté,” said Bobo. But, frankly, he did not sound charmed.

“On the edge of the cigouave encampment,” Bacalou continued, “I sent Philomé back down the mountain to Pointe d’Inagua for reinforcements. Who could say looking at their hovels how many demons might dwell there? Soon, Philomé returned with Charlemagne and Jean-Gérard—almost in time to see you leaving the houngfor , a loa on your back. It was needed, monsieur, to summon enough help to be fully prepared.”

“You’d make a good Boy Scout,” I said.

Bacalou ignored the compliment. “We still have no idea how many cigouaves live up here. There could be dozens, couldn’t there? This caverne —it’s very big.”

“Not counting myself, only five of my people remained in the world,” Adam said. “You murdered Toussaint. Now there are only four.”

“Peut-être,” the lieutenant replied. “Maybe.” He nodded at his partner.

“And what Philomé did was not murder, Monsieur Montaraz, but a very quick-thoughtful defense of the self.”

Further talk revealed that while holding the remaining occupants of the houngfor at gun point, Lieutenant Bacalou and his men had decided to retrieve me for questioning. Adam and Caroline had volunteered to lead the macoutes to me, Adam because he knew where I was and Caroline because she feared for my safety in my possessed state. Negotiating the uplands had not been easy in the dark and the rain, nor had their journey through the palisade of dripping sablier trees, but at last they’d reached the cave entrance and here they were. Their torn and sodden clothes testified to the pains they’d taken. Now, Caroline said, we could all be under arrest together.

“Why are we under arrest?” I asked “What have we done?”

Lieutenant Bacalou considered. “You have aided and abetted the cigouaves , who, during the previous regime, did many treasons against the government of Papa Doc. The order to rid the island of them has never been officially put away. We could kill those two old ones down there, and you their cunning accomplices, and any other demons we might find in this impressive hole, and do it, you understand, with the blessings of Baby Doc and also, maybe, the present U.S. administration.”