“ Then let me finish what I have to say. Your life may depend on it.”
She kept a firm hold on his hands and nodded her head.
“ Legend has it that the soucouyant is the old woman that lives at the end of the road,” he went on, “and that she lives the day away in her house, shut up against the sun. But when night falls, and bats replace the birds in the trees, she sheds her old shriveled up skin and hides it away. Then she rises through the roof in a ball of flame to seek out a young victim.” He saw the look in her eyes and stopped the telling. He met her gaze head on, till she was forced to look away. She took her hands back and folded them in her lap.
“ Go on,” she finally said.
“ You sure you want me to?”
“ I’m sure.”
“ Okay.” Then he continued. “After the soucouyant finds a victim, usually a young woman, it flames down to earth, arriving as a carnivorous animal, where it hunts the girl until she’s crazy with terror, because the soucouyant needs the terror as much as the young blood.”
“ It sucks out the blood?” Sarah interrupted.
“ Yes.”
“ Like a vampire?”
“ Yes.”
“ And you want me to believe this?”
“ Yes.”
“ Because that’s what the wolf and the bear were, your soucouyant?”
“ Yes.”
“ Why couldn’t they be just what they appeared to be?”
“ You saw the ball of fire?”
“ I saw something. We were going so fast. I closed my eyes.”
“ Do you want me to finish?” he asked.
His smile was forced and Sarah thought he was treating her like a kid with a simple math problem. The answer appears obvious, but the kid can’t seem to grasp it, so you keep explaining away, attacking the problem from different angles, until you see the light in the child’s eyes. Well, if John Coffee wanted to see that light in her eyes, he was going to have to do a heck of a lot of explaining.
“ After the soucouyant has fed, it returns to the ball of fire, seeks out its skin and becomes a simple old woman again.”
“ There are no males?” Sarah asked.
“ I don’t know, maybe, but this one’s definitely female. And she’s one tough old bird. My personal theory is that soucouyants have been around for a very long time, coexisting with man. I think they could be the source of all of the shape changing legends. Vampires. Werewolves. They’ve always been with us, we’ve just never understood them.”
“ So how do you kill them? Silver bullets?”
“ You know, I could slap myself, that one seems so obvious. I’ve got a silver bladed knife that sent it flaming away the other day, but I’ve never considered silver bullets.”
“ I was kidding,” Sarah said.
“ I know you were, but silver does weaken it. The old folks in Trinidad use a silver cross to protect themselves against it. But if you want to kill a soucouyant, you have to find the skin.”
“ Then what do you do?” Sarah found herself getting interested, despite herself. He was a powerful storyteller and she was hanging on his words.
“ You fill the skin with rock salt and hot pepper.”
“ And?”
“ When she returns to her house and slips into the skin, she starts to itch and burn and she literally scratches herself to death.
“ And of course there’s the locket and the necklace. The Soucouyant wears an old locket dangling from an old necklace that’s been dipped in a magic potion. When she’s wearing it, she can’t age. Take it away and they grow old, like us. They grow old and they can die.”
“ Why don’t you carry around a jar of salt water and just throw it on the animal when it comes?”
“ We’re talking a lot of salt water. She’d have to be immersed. However I do carry a jar of cayenne pepper and it saved me the other day. A good slap in the face with that stuff will cause the old woman to start scratching and flame away.”
“ How did you get involved with this thing?” she asked, still playing along, because now she was sure he was suffering from some kind of paranoia.
“ Remember the movie, To Have and Have Not, staring Humphrey Bogart and Lauren Bacal?”
“ Vaguely.”
“ There’s a part in it where the Lauren character tells the Vichy police that she just arrived from Port of Spain, Trinidad. Just the way she said it made me want to go there.”
“ So you did?”
“ So I did,” he said, then he continued. “I stayed in a guesthouse overlooking Port of Spain on the left and the ocean on the right. It had no pool, no cooking facilities, a television that got only one channel and a part time air conditioner. It was summer and it was hot.
“ I was bored and casting around for something to do. I could read when the air conditioner was working, but I had to get out of that house when it wasn’t. And since there was nothing to do in Trinidad, I decided I might as well work.
“ And I’m a thief.”
“ You went to a foreign country to steal? I don’t believe it. What if you would have been caught? Do you have any idea what jail is like in a third world country?” Sarah said.
“ I didn’t go to steal, I went for a vacation. Things just didn’t work out the way I’d planned.”
“ So you stole that thing you told me about the other night?” she said.
“ The necklace.”
“ And you gave it to Carolina?”
“ You’re getting ahead of the story.”
“ Sorry.”
“ So one night when the air conditioning wasn’t working and it was about ninety degrees at ten o’clock at night, I decided to go for a walk. There was this house at the end of the block. Sitting off by itself. Fenced in. Two stories. Very upscale for the neighborhood. I wondered what was behind that tall fence.
“ Breaking into a house is the easiest thing in the world to do. The fence was about six feet high with pieces of broken bottles cemented to the top of it to discourage anyone from climbing over. I picked the lock on the gate, then picked the lock on the back door.
“ Once inside, I found a veritable burglar’s feast. The house was furnished with expensive antiques, and the hardwood floor had the kind of finish you’d expect to find on an expensive yacht. The walls were covered with paintings and you didn’t have to be an art expert to know their value. I didn’t have to look very far to know that I’d hit the mother lode.
“ Inside the bureau drawers in the dining room, I found stacks of bills, dollars, pounds, Swiss francs. Bundles of hundred dollar bills, a hundred to a packet. Other drawers had gold coins, Double Eagles, Canadian, and here’s the kicker, Doubloons, Spanish Doubloons.
“ I won’t even go in to the jewelry, except to say there were more diamonds there than any jewelry store in Manhattan ever dreamed of having at any one time.
“ All that cash and treasure and no alarm. Why? My first impulse was to load up as much as I could carry and get on out of there, but then I thought about it. I was in way over my head. I’d never been anything but small time. I would have been crazy to take that stuff, at least anything that would be missed. Whoever lived in that house had to be one powerful individual to amass that kind of wealth and just leave it lying around unprotected like that.”
“ So what did you do?” Sarah asked, finding herself being drawn into his story, despite her doubts about his sanity.
“ I took one of the Doubloons, just to have one, and one of those bundles of hundreds. Ten thousand dollars.
