Like a spry gnome, Erzulie danced, her bare feet slapping the floor near the center post. The python kept flowing down its own post behind the drum platform, its bronze and garnet body shimmering in the candlelight. A chicken began to cluck: two chickens. Erzulie’s hand came into my view, swinging a chicken by its bound legs. Adam, who appeared above us near the poteau mitan, took this flapping fowl from her and bit off its head. He spat the head out, along with a mouthful of feathers, and gouts leapt from the decapitated bird’s neck, fountaining in a gaudy, queasy-making rain. Our white cambric gowns were spattered, and the stench of hot blood filled our nostrils, as did the fainter scent of flowing serpent.
“O great loa,” Adam chanted, “your horses await your mounting. They invite you to ride.” He dropped the headless chicken, which beat the ground with impotent, reflexive wing flaps. “O loa, come!”
The second chicken, which Erzulie thrust aloft, cackled hysterically. It, too, smelt blood, sensing that a like fate lay in store for it. And Erzulie beheaded it as quickly and surely as Adam had executed the other. Blood parachuted away from her like streamers from a crimson Roman candle. I shut my eyes and covered my mouth and nose with my palm. Caroline leaned against me as tense as a vibrating metal pole. When I pushed my groin against her again—to reassure us both—my cock was now a shriveled nub. What, exactly, was mystical about this ceremony? So far, it was an abomination and a horror, and I wanted out.
Drumbeats, chanting, dancing.
Opening my eyes and peering down the length of Caroline’s body, I saw that the couleuvre had reached the ground. Only an arm’s length from Caroline’s feet, it lay loosely coiled at the base of the wall. Having unhinged its lower jaw, it was methodically swallowing—with terrible, wavelike gulps—a headless chicken that, a moment past, had lain next to the center post. That damn serpent, I thought, is gagging down its dinner feathers and all. I shut my eyes again.
Drumbeats, chanting, dancing. Adam danced barefoot with the barefoot Erzulie. The drummers on the platform—or, at least, Dégrasse and Alberoi—undulated behind their instruments like revelers in a stalled conga line. Even Hector had got to his feet. He bounced up and down behind us, stutter-stepping between the vevés that Alberoi had designed. I could feel him moving, just as I did everyone. The drumbeats, the chanting, and the dancing pulsed in my temples like angry blood. Brian groaned, and Caroline’s head popped back so quickly that she split my bottom lip.
“O Legba,” Adam cried, no longer dancing, “let the loa descend into this temple and mount their horses. We call for Agarou, god of ancestors, and Aïda Ovedo, virgin wife of Damballa, and for Damballa himself, whose serpent we have propitiated. Let them descend and ride their horses. Let their horses run with them like thoroughbreds!”
Someone yanked my head back. Erzulie, I think. Over my split lip, she poured orgeat, a syrupy drink with a tang of almonds. This, Adam said, was another offering to Damballa and his wife, consumed by us prostrate horses so that the loa could enjoy it once they’d mounted us and brought us to our feet. If nothing else, the taste of the orgeat routed the sickening odors of couleuvre and slaughtered chicken. Then I could smell rum. A habiline drummer splashed it about, renewing the baptism of the already baptized ceremonial drums, being prodigal with the native clairin simply because Les Gens had it to be prodigal with.
“Come, Agarou! Mount your horse!”
The center post shook. Brian reached out to steady it. The electricity coursing through the poteau mitan galvanized him, and Caroline, and battered me like a thousand tiny tidal waves working to erode my identity. One moment, I was Paul Loyd; the next, I was obedient meat for the loa possessing me. In short, I was a horse.
Agarou, the vaudun god of ancestors, leapt down the lightning rod of the poteau mitan to convulse the robed body of the human being gripping its base. From this person, the god passed into Caroline Hanna, who kicked out, and on through her into the terrified consciousness of her husband. Agarou mounted Loyd. Racked by the god’s spiritual horsemanship, Loyd thrashed, as a mustang ridden by a determined cowboy will buck for its pride’s sake, foreknowing itself tamed. In just that way, Loyd thrashed. He threw himself far from Caroline. He writhed so violently on the hard-packed floor that his gown erased or smeared portions of the vevés drawn there.
Where stars had earlier shone, storm clouds massed in bands above the mountain. Still putting up a token fight for his body, Loyd heard thunder cannonading across the sky as if from the ramparts of the Citadelle Laferrière, south of Cap-Haïtien on Haiti itself. And with each new roll of thunder, the mounted man convulsed. Even as they continued to drum or dance, the habilines watched Loyd. Hector, the blind one, had moved into a corner to escape being knocked down by the flailings of his arms and legs. Erzulie, however, had taken his predicament as a challenge to her skill as a dancer. Above him, she leapt from foot to foot, guessing well where to place her feet without stepping on him. Adam, meanwhile, had renewed his plea for Aïda Ovedo and her husband Damballa to come down the center post into the temple.
The thunder above the mountain boomed louder, and the hidden kernel of Paul Loyd’s consciousness realized that the storm noise would completely drown that of the vaudun service—no more hope for rescue by sympathetic islanders. Agarou had him.
“Up, Agarou!” Adam urged the loa. “Ride your horse to revelation! Show your horse the god who showed himself to our ancestors!”
Loyd felt himself giving in to the inevitable. His movements became less violent. He bridged his loa-possessed body so that his heels and the back of his head held him off the ground. He searched the trinket-hung pavilion for sympathy. Where was RuthClaire? At last, he saw her—in the corner opposite Hector’s, regarding him with a grimace of appalled compassion. How must he look to her? He could scarcely hold his eyeballs still enough to focus her image. Maybe she’d never seen a possession like this one. She was frightened as well as appalled.
“Adam!” she cried, to be heard over the drumming and the thunder. “Adam, stop it! I think it’s killing him!”
Killing me, thought Loyd dispassionately. This is killing me.
The habiline in top hat and tails turned to his wife. “Oh, no, it is bringing him to life, to a knowledge that he could not otherwise so vividly acquire.”
Loyd placed his forearms on the floor parallel to his arched body. Pushing with them, he sprang off the ground like a limbo dancer who has just crept beneath the lowest level of the bar. Upright, his body swayed in the temple’s candlelit geometries. Caroline and the anthropologist lay beside the center post, entranced but not yet possessed, their blood-spattered gowns making them resemble murder victims: an interesting, but not too disturbing sight, for they weren’t dead, and once Aïda Ovedo and Damballa mounted them, he would have company in his spiritual slavery.
“Aaaawwgh,” he said. Spit ran down his lip and chin.
In his Baron Samedi costume, Adam made an ironic bow. “Welcome, Agarou. Welcome, Agarou. Welcome, Agarou.”
Agarou did a scissoring dance step.