Down These Strange Streets

“There are different ways to go about it, aye? One way is to give the afile powder to the person, wait until they drop, and then bury them atop a recent corpse. Ye just spread the earth lightly over them,” she explained, catching his look. “And make sure to put leaves and sticks over the face afore sprinkling the earth, so as the person can still breathe. When the poison dissipates enough for them to move again, and sense things, they see they’re buried, they smell the reek, and so they ken they must be dead.” She spoke as matter-of- factly as though she had been telling him her private receipt for apple pandowdy or treacle cake. Weirdly enough, that steadied him, and he was able to speak past his revulsion, calmly.

“Poison. That would be the afile powder? What sort of poison is it, do you know?”

Seeing the spark in her eye, he thanked the impulse that had led him to add, “Do you know?” to that question—for if not for pride, he thought she might not have told him. As it was, she shrugged and answered offhand.

“Oh . . . herbs. Ground bones—bits o’ other things. But the main thing, the one thing ye must have, is the liver of a fugu fish.”

He shook his head, not recognizing the name. “Describe it, if you please.” She did; from her description, he thought it must be one of the odd puffer fish that blew themselves up like bladders if disturbed. He made a silent resolve never to eat one. In the course of the conversation, though, something was becoming apparent to him.

“But what you are telling me—your pardon, madam—is that in fact a zombie is not a dead person at all? That they are merely drugged?”

Her lips curved; they were still plump and red, he saw, younger than her face would suggest.

“What good would a dead person be to anyone?”

“But plainly the widespread belief is that zombies are dead.”

“Aye, of course. The zombies think they’re dead, and so does everyone else. It’s not true, but it’s effective. Scares folk rigid. As for ‘merely drugged,’ though”—she shook her head—“they don’t come back from it, ye ken. The poison damages their brains, and their nervous systems. They can follow simple instructions, but they’ve no real capacity for thought anymore—and they mostly move stiff and slow.”

“Do they?” he murmured. The creature—well, the man, he was now sure of that—who had attacked him had not been stiff and slow, by any means. Ergo . . .

“I’m told, madam, that most of your slaves are Ashanti. Would any of them know more about this process?”

“No,” she said abruptly, sitting up a little. “I learnt what I ken from a houngan— that would be a sort of . . . practitioner, I suppose ye’d say. He wasna one of my slaves, though.”

“A practitioner of what, exactly?”

Her tongue passed slowly over the tips of her sharp teeth, yellowed, but still sound.

“Of magic,” she said, and laughed softly, as though to herself. “Aye, magic. African magic. Slave magic.”

“You believe in magic?” He asked it as much from curiosity as anything else.

“Don’t you?” Her brows rose, but he shook his head.

“I do not. And in fact, from what you have just told me yourself, the process of creating—if that’s the word —a zombie is not in fact magic, but merely the administration of poison over a period of time, added to the power of suggestion.” Another thought struck him. “Can a person recover from such poisoning? You say it does not kill them.”

She shook her head.

“The poison doesn’t, no. But they always die. They starve, for one thing. They lose all notion of will, and canna do anything save what the houngan tells them to do. Gradually, they waste away to nothing, and . . .” Her fingers snapped silently.

“Even were they to survive,” she went on practically, “the people would kill them. Once a person’s been made a zombie, there’s nay way back.”

Throughout the conversation, Grey had been becoming aware that Mrs. Abernathy spoke from what seemed a much closer acquaintance with the notion than one might acquire from an idle interest in natural philosophy. He wanted to get away from her but obliged himself to sit still and ask one more question.

“Do you know of any particular significance attributed to snakes, madam? In African magic, I mean.”

She blinked, somewhat taken aback by that.

“Snakes,” she repeated slowly. “Aye. Well . . . snakes ha’ wisdom, they say. And some o’ the loas are snakes.”

“Loas?”

She rubbed absently at her forehead, and he saw, with a small prickle of revulsion, the faint stippling of a rash. He’d seen that before; the sign of advanced syphilitic infection.

“I suppose ye’d call them spirits,” she said, and eyed him appraisingly. “D’ye see snakes in your dreams, Colonel?”

“Do I—no. I don’t.” He didn’t, but the suggestion was unspeakably disturbing. She smiled.

“A loa rides a person, aye? Speaks through them. And I see a great huge snake, lyin’ on your shoulders, Colonel.” She heaved herself abruptly to her feet.

“I’d be careful what ye eat, Colonel Grey.”

* * *

THEY RETURNED TO SPANISH TOWN TWO DAYS LATER. THE RIDE BACK GAVE Grey time for thought, from which he drew certain conclusions. Among these conclusions was the conviction that maroons had not, in fact, attacked Rose Hall. He had spoken to Mrs. Abernathy’s overseer, who seemed reluctant and shifty, very vague on the details of the presumed attack. And later . . .

After his conversations with the overseer and several slaves, he had gone back to the house to take formal leave of Mrs. Abernathy. No one had answered his knock, and he had walked round the house in search of a servant. What he had found instead was a path leading downward from the house, with a glimpse of water at the bottom.

Out of curiosity, he had followed this path, and found the infamous spring in which Mrs. Abernathy had presumably sought refuge from the murdering intruders. Mrs. Abernathy was in the spring, naked, swimming with slow composure from one side to the other, white-streaked fair hair streaming out behind her.

The water was crystalline; he could see the fleshy pumping of her buttocks, moving like a bellows that propelled her movements—and glimpse the purplish hollow of her sex, exposed by the flexion. There were no banks of concealing reeds or other vegetation; no one could have failed to see the woman if she’d been in the spring—and plainly, the temperature of the water was no dissuasion to her.

So she’d lied about the maroons. He had a cold certainty that Mrs. Abernathy had murdered her husband, or arranged it—but there was little he was equipped to do with that conclusion. Arrest her? There were no witnesses—or none who could legally testify against her, even if they wanted to. And he rather thought that none of her slaves would want to; those he had spoken with had displayed extreme reticence with regard to their mistress. Whether that was the result of loyalty or fear, the effect would be the same.

What the conclusion did mean to him was that the maroons were in fact likely not guilty of murder, and that was important. So far, all reports of mischief involved only property damage—and that, only to fields and equipment. No houses had been burnt, and while several plantation owners had claimed that their slaves had been taken, there was no proof of this; the slaves in question might simply have taken advantage of the chaos of an attack to run.

This spoke to him of a certain amount of care on the part of whoever led the maroons. Who did? he wondered. What sort of man? The impression he was gaining was not that of a rebellion—there had been no declaration, and he would have expected that—but of the boiling over of a long-simmering frustration. He had to speak with Captain Cresswell. And he hoped that bloody secretary had managed to find the superintendent by the time he reached King’s House.

* * *

IN THE EVENT, HE REACHED KING’S HOUSE LONG AFTER DARK, AND WAS informed by the governor’s butler—appearing like a black ghost in his nightshirt—that the household was asleep.

“All right,” he said wearily. “Call my valet, if you will. And tell the governor’s servant in the morning that I will require to speak to His Excellency after breakfast, no matter what his state of health may be.”