Stephen Jones - The Mammoth Book of Best New Horror. Volume 23

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.