Twenty feet from the bonfire stood a squat, square mausoleum. It was the only structure on the island and it was made from stone that shone an eerie irradiant white under the light of the moon. The fire-glow licked one side and turned it red.
Sitting around this charnel house were several knots of people. Four drummers in one group off to the right were thrashing the top of a single drum. Within a second huddle, lour women — each one wearing an ebony mask carved with the face of the Devil — sat on the ground facing the tomb, their hands busily stroking and working red cloth bags as if they were rosaries. Up on top of the white stone mausoleum, with her legs crossed and her eyes closed, with one wrinkled arm and pointing finger outstretched toward the man with the snake, sat the old woman in the faded housedress who Rick Scarlett had seen earlier through binoculars inside the drugstore.
John Lincoln Hardy, a bone in one hand, lurked behind this woman.
It was the sight of the snake, to Rick Scarlett's mind, that really set things off. First the drummers on the
The man with the snake — 'Damballah!' — approached the tomb — 'Damballah!' — and the old hag on top stood up.
'' Dam' —
Reaching down the old woman grabbed the hem of the housedress and pulled it up to her neck. Moonlight rippled across the wrinkles of her belly and her drooping pouches of fat.
The old woman spread her legs.
Her feet were planted firmly a yard apart on the top of the white stone tomb.
Her head was thrown back, swinging, her arms stretched up to grab the moon.
She thrust forward her crotch.
Black-gray hair, twisted and tangled, climbed halfway up the old woman's abdomen, spreading out like creeping vines from between her legs.
The masked women went wild.
'Dam-ba-llah! Dam-ba-llah!' they began to chant.
John Lincoln Hardy retrieved a skull from the ground and started to beat on its cranium with the large bone in his hand. The old woman leaned back like a limbo dancer and lowered herself to the tomb. She was now lying with her shoulders two inches off the stone, her skirt still raised, both feet doubled back under her to support the weight of her body, the snout of the snake firmly nestled up into her sex. She began to undulate her hips to the pounding of the drums. And as she rolled and heaved and humped spasmodically, the four masked women on the ground stood up and stripped off their clothes. Then they too began to rock to the rhythm of the drums, naked save for the masks which continued to cover their faces.
Spann closed her eyes when the man let the reptile go.
When she opened them once again, the snake had slithered up over the old woman's abdomen and between her withered breasts. Now Spann could see that the reptile was over six feet long, for its head was wrapped in a coil around the woman's neck while its slippery skin still slid across her groin. The old crone's voice was moaning out:
Then the man who had released the snake began to shake out of control. Though his steps were sedate to begin with, he abruptly gathered himself into a whirl, gyrating about on one foot, then breaking away with a stagger amid flailing arms.
This stagger was more a leap than it was anything else, a violent forward-reaching movement as though he were falling into space and could only avoid calamity by falling yet once more — so at the last moment he recovered himself and whirled about once again.
Then his face became a staring blank, every muscle collapsing. Suddenly he stopped moving. His body went rigid. And at that moment one of the masked women broke away from her group, dancing slowly toward him. She rolled up his trouser legs and bound a green handkerchief about his waist and draped a red cloth across his chest and up over his right shoulder. Then she placed a machete in his hand and he started to shake again.
Her body still thrashing wildly, the old woman up on top of the tomb cried out wildly in a strangled shriek of orgasm.
Then John Lincoln Hardy dropped the skull and reached out with the bone in his hand. For a split second Rick Scarlett detected a bright glint of light near one of the knobbed ends of the bone, but quickly it was gone. Hardy looped the piece of skeleton under the belly of the snake and removed the reptile from the stomach of the woman. He placed it in a bag.
Beside him. Rick Scarlett heard Katherine Spann breathe a low whispered sigh of relief.
Then from the ring of bonfire dancers a moan rose up through the night.
With a look of desperate bewilderment on her face, one woman broke away from the group. She began to whirl herself in a private fury toward the mausoleum. She flailed around and around, crying and choking, turning once, then twice, then a third and fourth time with ever increasing abandonment until her face was twisted in agony and her hand clutched at her head. As the white darkness of a voodoo seizure set in like a rush throughout her body, she slapped her forehead and the nape of her neck in an effort to ward off possession.
Behind her the ring of dancers hopped closer to the fire. One dangled a foot into the flames, while another waved a hand ecstatically among them.
From the group of drummers one man stood up and walked over to the possessed woman, still carrying his tom-tom. He began beating sound at her in a series of vicious slaps. The woman collapsed with a wild cry striking her head on the ground. In a snarl her lips pulled back from clenched white teeth. Her body began to convulse and the drummer went wild.
As he attacked her with his frenzied pounding, the man looked as though he would burst the drumskin in his effort.
The woman was now shaking her head from side to side, silently screaming,
John Lincoln Hardy, with the bone still in one hand and a bottle in the other, ran over to the woman. He took a swig of rum, spraying it over his face and rubbing it into his hair. He took another swig and spewed this mouthful over the woman. Then he struck her four times on the head.
The woman stopped convulsing.
The drummer ceased to beat.
The old woman on top of the tomb sat up and looked at Hardy.
Hardy hit the possessed one again and then pushed her softly toward the man who held the machete. He was standing near the mausoleum.
Both Spann and Scarlett tensed. Something was going to happen.
With one hand still to her head, her jaw now working under her hollow face, the woman-possessed slouched toward the man who held the knife. There was something untouchable about her, as though she really wasn't present. Enigmatically she mumbled to herself, her voice slurring the words until they were meaningless. At the tomb she stopped to bend over and kiss its stone. She groped in her hair and tied knots in it until the old hag who
