‘Oh Christ,’ I said, wishing I’d never asked. ‘That slime she spouts …’
‘A polluted river,’ spat Jyp, with an irritated glance at Mall. ‘Like the one runs down to those docks of yours, maybe. C’mon, let’s move!’
He drove us on uphill. The trees grew taller on this side of the valley, but on the slope they gave less shade. Many of them were towering trompettes, whose broad fronds like giant fig-leaves spread only from the summit. They let the sun through as it climbed towards the zenith, and it hammered down upon our sweating backs. Incessant metallic chimes rasped across the valley like its maddening voice, but they were only the calls of bellbirds. My mouth was parched, my head aching, but I knew to the last drop how little there was left in my canteen, and cursed the flies that had driven us from the river. The thick ferny mould tore down underfoot, baring the red soil like a raw wound. That was moist enough, and you could hear other streams along the hill, no doubt leading to the falls. But they were too far off our trail. It was early afternoon before we crested the false summit, more or less sliding down into the dip beyond, and sank down gratefully by the muddy little streamlet at its foot.
Something more than tiredness weighed me down; a sick inner emptiness, a chill all that heat could not disperse. Jyp had been right. I wished I’d never asked about Stryge’s creatures. The idea had a special kind of horror that gripped me and shook me and wouldn’t let me go – of possession, of something lurking within a body like a shell, of some other, alien, mind peering out from behind eyes that didn’t belong to it, like painted shutters on an empty, crumbling house. A haunted house. A ghost in a machine; but the wrong ghost, the wrong hands on the controls …
‘Aye,’ said Mall, when I let slip something of what I felt. She splashed the brownish streamlet water on her glowing cheeks. ‘That’s so. Possession’s a thing most potent in any magic, for good or ill. Be it in spellsong of Finnmark or Bermoothes obeah or plain homebred warlockry, a spirit in a body doesn’t belong to it, that’s a terrible thing, an unnatural mingling that unleashes great powers. And if some malign spell fix it there, why then, ‘tis free to walk abroad among men unhindered and turn those powers to all manner of ill. Those creatures, the Stryge hardly dares let them from his sight. Yet they are most imperfect, one an animal, the other a living corpse; neither could go undetected for long among men. And once detected, the remedy’s swift and sure. So fear them, aye, but don’t dwell on them; they’re no harm to you.’
How could I explain it wasn’t them I was afraid of, at all? It was the bare idea – the way some people are scared of spiders or cats or knives scraping plates, sheer abstract terrors. It frightened me whether it had anything to do with me or not, a horrible sense of total vulnerability. And the idea that it might – or with Clare … Almost more than I could stand. Did phobias take living shape, too, outside the Core? I couldn’t ask. I couldn’t explain. I just thanked her; and when Jyp gave the word I went on.
Up here above the falls the trees were changing, growing taller still and thicker; scrubby pines of some kind at first, aromatic eucalyptus, and then tall ormes – Haiitian elms – and fragrant cedars. In their shade the going was easier, but the gloom made me apprehensive.
Jyp seemed to feel it, too. ‘Can’t be far to the castle now,’ he muttered, avoiding my eye.
‘Right! And they’ll be there by now, won’t they? And what’ll they be doing with –’
‘Hell, Steve, I don’t know. Look, whatever they do, these ceremonies of theirs, they’re always at night, right? And we’ll get there before then.’
Just. He didn’t say it; but the word hung in the air, like the dustmotes in the sunbeams that slanted between the trunks. They were slanting low now, though, and dark clouds were rolling in from the west. We hadn’t much time, and I couldn’t even see the bloody castle yet.
That’s what I thought, anyhow. It turned out I’d been looking at it for a while. On this steep slope the mansion itself was hidden by the outermost terrace wall, so thoroughly overgrown that, seen from below, it blended into the tossing greenery behind. So we pushed through a really nasty thicket of spiky-leaved sisal, and it pounced. There were the terrace walls, there was the towering façade of the castle right in front of us, louring over us so suddenly we stopped dead and collided with each other like guilty children. The hands pressed close in a babble of half-voiced oaths. A cool breeze trailed across our faces. The silence that fell was devastating. If ever a place lay in ambush, that one did.
We could see it clearly now, high and stark under the dark clouds rolling swiftly in. That wasn’t the least bit reassuring; it looked as if it could see us. There was an eyeless, gaping quality about those tall windows with their upswept architraves like devilish eyebrows, as if the darkness behind them wasn’t just emptiness but in constant oily motion. But it didn’t look any the less deserted. The tropics aren’t kind to the works of men. Its stucco was stained and crumbling, its stonework root-cracked and rain-worn, the sinister crenellations decaying and the cruel cheveaux-de-frise on the inner walls half toothless with rust. Wrought-iron balconies sagged like withered tendrils; fragments of shutters drooped from half-torn hinges, and the roof gaped tileless in a dozen places. There wasn’t a sign or sound of life.
Until, that is, something rattled. A slow, tormented creak split the air, and faded into a swift, juddering tattoo. In that place, beneath the black clouds rolling in, it was a ghastly sound. It made me think of some ghostly galleon, riding at anchor over the rippling treetops; or of dry bones dancing on a wind-whipped gibbet.
Mall, coming up from the rear, broke the spell. ‘Fools! Asses! What is’t but cane?’ And so it was, a great green and yellow canebrake waving stiffly in the wind at the top of the wall, its stems colliding musically. But the nervous laughter died in our throats, for beyond the brake, at the apex of the terrace, stood a sinister vision. One I, at least, had seen before – the same scarecrow shape from the Vieux Carre graveyard, but far taller, black and stark as a withered tree against the onrushing storm. Its high-collared greatcoat trailed from crossed-stick shoulders the height of my head, its tattered hat tilted forward as if sunk in thought, brooding amidst the dry clattering cane.
‘The Baron’s watching his boneyard!’ said Jyp acidly. But as he spoke the wind seemed to take the hat, for it turned, rolled on the shoulder and lifted as if to look out seaward. As one man we ducked down and crept by like mice beneath a watchful owl. Call us crazy if you like.
At the wall’s foot we found a gateway, flanked by massive pillars; the gates that once blocked it were gone, the hinge pins rusted to stumps. The lintel, ornately carved with a religious subject – St Peter, it looked like, before cockcrow – lay shattered and half buried to one side. Beyond it a long narrow stair climbed to the terrace; its balustrade was ruinous and overgrown, its steps cracked and tilting, but it seemed to be the only way up. Quickly, keeping low, we scurried through and climbed, looking up nervously; we could hardly be more vulnerable here. At the top Jyp beckoned me forward, and together we peered cautiously over the edge. The cracked terrace flagstones stretched out before us to the inner wall, empty except for clumps of bushes and rattling cane; the largest of them hid the sinister stick figure from us – or was it the other way round? Beyond an imposing inner gate, one of whose doors still hung rotting from the hinge, stood another figure like it, but no longer clothed; minus its hat and coat the outstretched scarecrow arms looked more pathetic than sinister.