The Mammoth Book of Best New Horror. Volume 23

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.