“After such an entrance,” Adam said, “you must have great hunger.” He swept a headless chicken up, dug the nails of his hands into its breast, and broke it open with a wicked popping motion. From this bloody rent, he pulled entrails such as Loyd had never used in his cooking at the West Bank. Adam handed these items to Agarou, who, to Loyd’s consternation, began to eat them. Warm and slippery, they were hard to chew, but Agarou got them down almost as fast as the couleuvre had engorged the entire unplucked body of the other chicken.
RuthClaire (Loyd noticed, stealing a look through the vaudun god’s eyes) had left the houngfor. Why? Once, not so long ago, she had tolerated the barbaric eating habits of her habiline husband. Rain sheeted down, rattling the palm-frond thatching of the tonnelle. It blew in through the open tops of the peristyle’s walls. It dripped from the eaves and from seams in the roof’s underside. No longer inhibited by the need to play softly, the drummers beat their instruments with abandon. The noise inside the swaying building crescendoed and crescendoed again. So did the noise outside. In Loyd’s benumbed body, Agarou turned his face up and opened his bloodied mouth to the life-giving waters of which his fellow loa Damballa was the presiding deity. He had led his horse to water, and had made him drink.
Loyd drowned not only in this deluge, but also in the ancient personality of the loa astride him. Rain veiled his eyes. It penetrated the tonnelle’s roof and extinguished the candles in their plastic pots. The pots hissed their dismay. Or maybe it was the python hissing, swimming toward him in the downpour like a great ruby and golden eel. Of all the former inhabitants of the structure dissolving in the rain, the serpent was the only one that Loyd could see. He knelt—Agarou made him kneel—to embrace the creature, which lifted its head and kissed him on the lips with a double flicker of its tongue. Then the rain ceased, and the dripping echoes of its cessation thrummed, and Agarou found himself alone on the flank of his Caribbean Olympus.
“Giddyup, horse,” the loa said.
Loyd began to walk uphill, as did Agarou. He felt himself two consciousnesses at once, and had the further conviction, as he strode away from Prix-des-Yeux (which had dissolved in the rain along with the vaudun temple), that he was climbing not one but two mountains. First was the mountain on the tip of Pointe d’Inagua here in Manzanillo Bay, but superimposed spiritually on that landscape were the lineaments of Mount Tharaka in the African nation of Zarakal. Each time Loyd stopped to look back down the mountain, he saw—by lightning flashes—first the ebony ripples of the Atlantic and then the vast antelope-dotted expanse of the Zarakali plains. They alternated, these features, and with them Loyd’s present and East Africa’s Pleistocene past likewise alternated—so that, ridden by Agarou, he was two different minds at two different places at two different times. How could such a thing occur? Well, the vaudun service had done its work: the drumming, the chanting, the dancing. And then the python had kissed him, both to acknowledge Agarou’s power over him and to link his fitful self-awareness to distant places and earlier times.
Loyd-loa continued his hike uphill. The fragrance of coffee blossoms hovered over everything, wonderfully fresh after the rain. Where was Agarou going? If the loa riding him tried to take him very far, he—his body—would collapse. (You can’t ride a dead horse.) He had worn himself out crawling through the habiline caves, and a forced diet of chicken innards was not likely to counteract his body’s fatigue. Then Loyd heard himself laugh. Or was Agarou laughing through him, having found his ignorance of the mechanism of possession amusing? His body would do whatever Agarou demanded for as long as Agarou spurred and controlled it. (You can ride a dead horse—at least until its last vestiges of mind have decayed into insentient randomness.) Loyd resigned himself to a long hike, and an even longer captivity.
At last the horse came to a palisade of mastodon skulls, sabre-tooth tiger tusks, and chalicothere skeletons twenty or thirty feet high. These bones were locked together like pieces of an enormous ivory puzzle, grim and dazzling in the lightning-riven night. Loyd-loa approached them, intent on finding a solution. He gripped a pair of weather-polished tusks and swung between them into the labyrinthine heart of the puzzle. Inside the barrier, he ducked and climbed and twisted to find passage through the bones. A spur on a set of wildebeest horns stabbed him in the side, and he cried aloud, Let me out of here! His plea was for escape from both Agarou and this treacherous ivory maze. I’m in the picket of sablier trees, not a pile of interlocking tusks and antlers, Loyd thought, more coherently. And he was. The image of a bone-surrounded Mount Tharaka had disguised the reality of the Haitian mountain. It was Agarou who preferred the surrealism of the ancient African past, and because of Agarou’s ascendancy, Loyd had not seen the sablier hedge. Well, they were through it now, scrambling uphill in the open toward the shrub-lined cut where the entrance to the caves was hidden. Agarou-on-Loyd halted in a three-point stance and in a gust of ozone-heavy wind looked downhill at Inagua Bay. Sea and savannah did their dizzying switch, a sail boat metamorphosing into an albino elephant and a flight of bats into a flock of prehistoric flamingos.
Then reality came back.
How will I see down there? Loyd wondered. His hand raised a flashlight to face level (an instrument he could not recall the god picking up), but when he thumbed its button, no beam shot forth. This won’t do, Loyd told the god of ancestors.
Agarou replied, Do gods need eyes to see in your material darkness? We possess the second sight of divinity.
But—
Shut up, nag. Nag me no more. And Agarou laughed at the timidity and lack of faith of his human horse, and yanked him into the bush through which Hector habitually entered the caves, and pushed him down a body-worn slide into total darkness and the breathy cool of the buried past.
I can’t see! Loyd cried to his vaudun rider.
Open your eyes, mon! Open your eyes!
Not realizing that they’d been closed, Loyd opened his eyes. He could see. What he saw, though, came as if by ultraviolet illumination. The cave walls glinted silver and purple-red, as if each rock fracture disclosed a sweating seam of liquid mercury or grape jelly. Also, in order to make out the size and shape of surrounding objects, Loyd had to look at them peripherally. A direct gaze dissolved into mist whatever he sought to view. So, to unlock the gloom’s ultraviolet secrets, he did many quick or slow double takes, lifting or lowering his eyes, ducking and feinting. He felt like a soul in hell.
Yagaza, Agarou corrected him: Africa. The afterlife.
Finally, he realized that Agarou had permitted his own consciousness to resume control of his body. He was still possessed—the loa had not dismounted, had instead just dropped the reins—but now his own peculiar Loyd-ness was free to direct his steps here or there in these weird caves. Agarou had retreated to a spectator’s place behind his eyes. (Undoubtedly, it was Agarou who allowed him to see.) Thus it was now Loyd’s will rather than the loa’s that counted. My will be done, Loyd thought. My kingdom’s come, and it’s hell rather than heaven….
Shadows in the ultraviolet told him that he was not alone. Habiline wraiths encircled him, a hunting party of naked Early Pleistocene males. He walked in their midst in his glowing cambric baptismal gown, a sunlit saint in a pit of resurrected time. He told himself to stop, to turn back and climb out of the gloom just as he’d entered it—but the habilines about him carried him forward against his will. My will, he thought. I can’t do my will. I do theirs. And although he marched with them in apparent freedom, a head and a half taller than the tallest of the ghostly hominids, he had no real choice but to follow their lead and to wish he were less gaudily dressed and a good deal smaller. And when the habilines began to run, they pulled him along: He tottered over them like an effigy on a shoulder-borne float in a religious procession.