Yet walk they did, all the same, as cautiously as us, shuffling down with backs to the walls, pistols at the ready, never sure what the next step would bring, or whether it would be there at all. The air was still, but the lantern-flame cowered and trembled as if a slow breath played upon it; I somehow felt that if anyone but Mall carried it, it wouldn’t have stayed alight. Not that it was much help; but it made more difference than you could imagine. The atmosphere of the place was like a physical weight pressing down on our shoulders, and even when the light caught the edge of a tall vaulted stone arch and we felt the stairwell open out into a wider ambience, the claustrophobia didn’t let up. The storm was no more than a distant rumble. It was quiet as the grave – most graves, anyway; but no way were we alone.
Then, just at the edge of the lamplight there came a sudden flurry and rush of motion. Jyp’s pistol and mine went off together. There was a dazzling flash, and a single high-pitched scream that chilled my heart. That was no Wolf’s cry – who had my panicky shot hit? Then, as my sight cleared, I sagged with relief. On the steps below lay the gory remains of two fat black rats, one cut completely in two, the other, a foreleg blown away, kicking into death. Jyp and I exchanged shamefaced grins.
‘Nice shootin’, pal!’ he said.
‘Some shooting! There must have been a hundred there!’
‘That few?’
Mall held up the lantern, and as they caught the light her long curls flared golden and seemed to redouble it; her pale eyes flashed. Overhead a roughly vaulted ceiling appeared, and to left and right dim outlined alcoves, and the sense of oppression eased a little.
‘Where they stored their wines, maybe!’ whispered Jyp, when it became clear nothing was going to leap out at us just immediately. ‘Sure looks like –’
Something crunched softly under his foot, and he looked down. ‘Maize flour? Well, vittles too, maybe –’
Then the light touched the back of an alcoye. ‘Uh,’ he remarked. ‘Not a wine cellar, then.’
‘Not unless they kept a cask of amontillado,’ I whispered back, looking at the row of dangling chains and fetters, and he smiled wryly.
Mall tossed her curls angrily, and the flames leaped as the lantern swung. Along the wall the row of alcoves stood out, and the rusting remains of iron cages swinging from the roof, that a man might crouch in, but neither sit nor stand. In the centre of the floor opened a brick-built hearth, like a blacksmith’s; but the long-handled irons still standing in its ashen charcoal I knew were not for working metal.
Mall spat like a cat. ‘Those damned dog-Dagoes! May the Devil fry ’em in’s warming-pan! A dungeon! A dungeon for helpless slaves! And a place of torment! Stir you, hell, and swallow it whole to set its bitch-gotten masters in!’
She wasn’t whispering. Her curse shivered the air with its force, and the steel of her voice set pins and needles in my skin. The shadows leaped in panic as she brandished the lantern, and the light flared high and clear. Even the rusty cages creaked and swung, and I shuddered as I saw dangling from one the yellowed bones of a handless arm. Rats had gnawed them, by the look of it. They seemed almost to be pointing, down at the floor. And the new light did indeed show up something there, tracks and swirls and spirals traced out in mounds of yellowish dust. Shapes that reminded me of something, something definitely unpleasant; but all I could think of was how odd it was that they hadn’t gone mouldy, that the rats hadn’t eaten them …
Jyp snapped his fingers. ‘Vevers! In maize flour, of course!’
I remembered then. ‘Jyp, what – these – these are the shapes they smeared all over my office!’
I’ll just bet they are! Crests, signs of the loa! There’ve been rites held here, and not by the Spaniards neither! Sort of heraldry – you make the sign, you invoke ’em – see there, like a ship with a sail, that’s the sea-god Agwé! And just in front of us here, like the compass-rose, that –’ His voice faltered a moment. ‘That’s a friend of yours, that’s Papa Legba – and there, that heart with the swirls around it? They’re swords piercing it –’
‘For is not seven such the sign of her!’ I repeated, astonished.
‘What?’
‘What the look-out said – I’d forgotten it – the dark woman with the leathery face – I thought she was just –’
‘May Henry,’ said Mall thoughtfully. ‘An old Bermoothes pirate, sailed these waters so long she’s crusted with their superstitions like barnacles. She’s strange in mind, aye, but not wandered. A shame she’d not come with us. What’d she say it of?’
‘Of me – after you and I – and the wind, she said the Undertaker’s wind –’
‘That bears off the dying, aye! And evil sendings! And by all that’s clean and holy, she was right! Erzulie, the pierced heart is her sign, the power of love! But this one, this vever, did you not see the shape of it, Jyp?’
‘It’s rough, sure. Sort of slanted; distorted, almost … Oh-oh. You mean this is Erzulie Ge-Rouge?’
‘Aye – Erzulie of the left-hand path, the love of pain and anger! The love that breeds destruction! Erzulie in the thrall of Petro! Don Petro, the loa who warps all the rest, who wrenches them to his own fell purpose! Who twists the good in them to savagery!’ Mall glared at me, panting. ‘Just as it twisted you, Stephen, and I – to set us against one another! A sending rode that wind, a sending of love twisted, love made into a snare and a tripwire …’ She paused, sweat trickling down between her heaving breasts. ‘I was meant to strike you down! Or at least quarrel, aid you no more! To leave you and yours at sorest need! I – I! See, see, they’re all twisted, all turned – all captive – all save his, that heads the rest!’ She stepped forward and swung the lantern high over the largest shape of all, stretching from wall to wall, a great scolloped circle around a cruelly-barbed cross. In sudden fury she kicked at it, savagely, and a choking flurry of dust exploded up into the light. Then, as it fell in thin plumes around her, she froze, and her sword levelled.
‘What was that?’
Out of the obscurity, clear but faint, it came, a haunting echo of a sound that must practically be graven into the very stones about us – a sudden clink of chain, and a short cry, half stifled sob, half scream.
After the shadow-dance, it was almost too much. The hands backed away hastily towards the stair, halfway to panic – and me? I was right there with them. I’d have felt more ashamed of that if Jyp hadn’t reacted the same way, sidestepping hastily over the vevers as he backed off. Only Mall stood her ground, straight and shining in the gloom, and cried aloud ‘Who speaks?’
The curtain of dust swirled before her with impossible energies, but no answer came. But the very ring of that voice, mellow and fearless, drove back the tide of fear that threatened to wash over our minds. And to me above all it brought a sudden realization of what that sound might be. ‘Clare!’ I yelled. ‘Clare! Is it you?’
And this time the answer came – just one word, but it sent me bounding back past Mall, snatching the lantern, and straight through the swirling dust. It was my name.