The room was tiny, and pitch dark except for the single red bulb that glowed overhead. As Raymond’s eyes adjusted, he saw there was very little in the room: one large table, a hatchet and an array of knives fixed to the wall. The wall itself was painted with symbols he didn’t understand. In the middle of the table was a large iron pot. From this, a quiver of long sticks protruded, so straight they might have been arrows.
There was a chicken tied to a bolt in the table, black eyes glistening with fear.
Victor gestured toward the iron pot. “The source of my power. It doesn’t look like much, does it?”
Raymond sensed that no answer was required. Victor reached for him to lift him up, and Raymond shrank back.
Victor leaned down and spoke gently.
“You have nothing to fear, my child. Nothing. I am in control here. You will learn to ignore these feelings of fear. Eventually you will feel nothing and, believe me, to feel nothing is a great advantage in this world. For now, know that I will protect you. I will let nothing harm you. Nothing.”
“I want to go home, Uncle.”
“It is too late, Raymond. Stay by my side and nothing bad will happen to you.”
He hoisted Raymond up and stood him on an apple crate so the boy could see into the pot. There was a foul, congealed liquid with solids of indistinct shape adrift in it.
“Nganga,” Victor said. “This is called the nganga. In here we place the things we give to the gods. If we want a favour from Oggun, the god of iron, for example, we might put in a railway spike, or some large nails. If we want a favour from Ochosi, god of hunters, we might put in an arrowhead.”
“But there’s only one God, isn’t there?”
The brown face waggled at him.
“That is a different religion altogether. I’m teaching you a much older, much more powerful religion. In the Christian religions, yes, there is only one God. In Palo Mayombe, there are many. Into this nganga we also put the things we need in order to control the spirits. Spirit beings, you see, have no power over human beings unless it is given to them. They are vessels, drifting this way and that, until we give them power. We—that is to say, the wizards—give them life. We give them breath and we give them the power to see, the power to hear, to go places, to grasp things.” Victor flexed a claw open and shut before Raymond’s eyes.
“Where do spirits come from?”
“From living creatures. Animals. Sometimes from human beings. We take them from this world in such a way that we control them in the next. Then they do our bidding. They work for us, you see. Only wizards have this right, this power. Now be silent. Clear your mind of all fear, and just watch what I do. We will do something nice for your mother. We will ask Oggun to bring her something nice.”
Victor turned to the nganga and spread his hands like a Catholic priest over the altar. He began to speak in a language Raymond did not recognize. He knew it was not Spanish or English or French.
“Bahalo! Semtekne bakuneray pentol!” Victor turned to Raymond and spoke in an aside. “Always you must speak firmly to them. We do not beg on bended knee like the Christians and the Muslims. We tell them. We command.”
Victor raised his arms over the cauldron once more.
“Bahalo! Seeno temtem bakuneray pentol!”
Victor took the hatchet from the wall, grabbed the chicken and removed its head with a single stroke. He tossed the head into the pot. The headless chicken strained at its leash, running this way and that, unaware that it was dead.
Raymond started to cry. He tried to stop himself, but he couldn’t; his entire body shook with sobs.
Victor took hold of the chicken by the feet and unclipped the leash. He held the still-struggling bird upside down over the nganga so that the hot blood squirted into the pot. He started to say more words, then turned on Raymond, gripping his shoulders: “Stop crying now, Raymond. You hear me? Stop crying.” The bony hands shook him. “If you show fear, you allow the spirits to control you. This must never happen. Stop crying now. Take a deep breath and show them you are in command.”
Raymond tried to do it, but he was hopeless that first day.
Later that week, when he came home from school, Gloria was entertaining a customer. Raymond went straight to his bedroom and tried not to hear the noises the man made, his mother’s elaborate cries of ecstasy. When the man was gone, Gloria came to her son’s room.
“Come with me,” she said. “I have a surprise for you.”
They rode the battered elevator down to the lobby. Gloria took Raymond out to the parking lot and sat him in a brand new Honda Prelude. It had a leather interior and a wonderful radio and it smelled powerfully of new car. Sunlight glittered off every surface. “How do you like Mommy’s Honda?”
Raymond touched the steering wheel.
“Isn’t it fantastic?” she said. “Uncle Victor got it for me from a friend of his.”
“Who?” Raymond asked.
“A friend. I don’t know who. It doesn’t matter who.”
She started it up and pulled onto Gerrard Street. Five minutes later they were cruising along the Gardiner Expressway. Lake Ontario flashed brilliant blue and silver in the sun. The few clouds were absurdly white. Gloria opened all the windows and the sunroof, and their hair whipped about their ears. Raymond didn’t have to ask who had given her the car. It had been Oggun. Oggun had given them this car, just as Victor had told him to.
As time went by, Raymond got braver and braver in his uncle’s temple. Over the following months and years, Victor instructed him in the art of controlling the spirits. He taught him that when you took a soul, you had to do so with the utmost pain. Really, the sacrifice had to be screaming as it died, otherwise you could not command its soul. And if you showed the slightest fear, then the spirit would end up controlling you.
He showed Raymond how you remove the claws or feet, toe by toe, so the spirit would be able to grasp, how you cut off the feet and throw them into the nganga so the spirit would be able to move about and, finally, how you look into the sacrifice’s eyes in its final agony and tell it you would come for it in hell. Then you took the brain and transferred it to the nganga, so the spirit would be able to understand your commands, would be able to think.
Raymond threw up the first few times. But eventually it was just as Uncle Victor had said; he got used to it. The fear diminished, and by the time he was fourteen he felt no fear whatsoever. Chickens, goats, dogs, cats—in the end, it made no difference. Raymond learned to master the screaming animals and to stare into their eyes as they died.
Then his uncle taught him how to summon the spirit of the creature you had sacrificed, how to make him work for you.
Time, the twenty-one-year-old Raymond learned, took on a whole new meaning when you were on the receiving end of the blade. The hot blood turned sticky on his back, and his head ached monstrously from gritting his teeth against the pain.
His uncle removed the blindfold, and Raymond had to close his eyes against the candles that blazed in rows and rows. Then Victor released the leather cuffs and sat Raymond down.
“Don’t worry,” Uncle Victor said. “The wounds will soon heal.”
Cool water splashed over his back. His uncle dabbed at him gently. “You have nothing to fear, you know. From the moment I first noticed you—that time in the hall—I looked into your eyes and I said to Gloria, ‘Your son is going to be a priest. A very powerful priest.’”
Raymond remembered, but the old man often repeated the story.