Another minute, another name – and the dancers forgot us and flung themselves at their neighbours, snatching, clawing, mouthing at each other, mounting. But though some of it turned to sex, it took a vicious, nauseating turn, and they shrieked with laughter at the blood that flowed. It was an orgy without passion, without a trace of real lust, even. It turned my stomach. And the moment the little man shrieked out the name Agwé! they forgot, fell apart, rolled and swept their limbs as if swimming over the filthy soil.
I was swimming, too, fighting to stay afloat. Struggling to keep thinking, to work out what Stryge could possibly expect of me – something I could still do and he, with his strange powers, couldn’t. But the drums pounded my thoughts to pulp, my head ached and my concentration shredded. The flickering of dance and flame became hypnotic. I couldn’t force my eyes away from twisted rituals acted out before me. Hours and minutes had no meaning; there was only an endless bloody blur of night, alive with the roar and reek of the seething, manic crowd, doing mad things at a madman’s command. I tried to prove Le Stryge was wrong; I tried to pray. But what could I say? And who to? So much else was out here I’d never believed in, maybe gods were, too – some, any, all, maybe. But what had I to say to any of them?
My mind wandered. Again and again I caught myself swaying in time to the fearful music of drums and voices. I sank my teeth into my lip in a frantic attempt to keep awake, to keep thinking – at least to resist, somehow. But it kept on happening, and I couldn’t find the energy. Sitting on the cold ground like this was numbing me, slowing my circulation. A low voice kept distracting me, mumbling words I half understood. I tried to yell at whoever it was – and only then realized it was me. I thought I was cracking up, at first; then I knew the truth, and that was worse.
I flailed in panic. It was happening already. The thing I dreaded – it was coming over me, softly, insidiously, even as I sat there. Trying to resist that? I hadn’t a dog’s chance.
Frantically I bit down on my disobedient tongue, chomped hard to restrain it. That gave me a better point of pain to concentrate on – and then I knew that the Stryge had been right. There was one thing I could still do. One way I could thwart this Don Pedro, one way of escaping the destiny the little bastard was planning for me. But I also knew why he hadn’t told me what it was.
I could bite through my tongue, choke on the blood, and die.
Easy to think about; not so easy to do. I’d heard of people managing it, prisoners under torture, madmen in straitjackets. And I told myself I ought to have at least as much of a motive as they did, surely. Not that dying would save my friends – but it might save a lot of others. And it would save me from something worse; from being a puppet and a prisoner in my own body, the hollow shell of some predatory horror I could hardly imagine. So I tried. Oh yes, I tried, all right, clamped my teeth down on the thick heart of the muscle till the pain was appalling and the veins stood out – and no further. I couldn’t; I was ready, I had the strength … and I just couldn’t.
Call it cowardice, call it subconscious resistance – but I could no more do it than fly out of the chains that held me. I kept on trying, I bit sharply, I shook my head about; but nothing I could think of would force my jaws to close.
So much for playing hero; and all this time I could feel my control slipping. I knew something was affecting me – the drums, the cold, the chanting, the foul air, the twisted little parade of cruelties at the altar. That was what I thought at first. Soon I knew better. They helped, yes; they trampled around in my thoughts and muddied them. But it was something else, something behind them, that was at work; something greater than their ghastly sum. With every new waft of presence it grew stronger, like hands tugging at me, light but implacable. They pressured my thoughts this way and that, like loosening a tooth in its socket.
It was no illusion; I was beginning to see things. Figures, many times manheight, that leaped and wheeled and capered behind the dancers, mimicking them like giant shadows cast upon the sky. Every minute I saw them more clearly, whirling over me, and what was around me grew hazier. Voices spoke in my brain, little tickling whispers, deep thunderous tones. I felt flashes of thoughts and memories that weren’t mine, that couldn’t be any man’s, that left only confusion in their wake, so far were they from any experience I could identify.
If I could have been any more terrified than I was, I should have been. It wasn’t like that at all. Every minute now I felt easier, more wondering. A distant door ajar, and coming from behind it warm light, the smell of wholesome cooking, the sound of familiar voices – that, to a child lost and hungry on an icy night, might be some shadow of what I felt. All the trappings of an absolute security, of a happiness I’d never known, of a richness I’d been longing for all my life yet never knew I lacked – the remotest taste of these things came to me, the promise that they lay ahead and were getting nearer. It didn’t bother me at all that my body seemed to be growing light, numb – until suddenly I felt my limbs twitch sharply, once, twice, without my having tried to move them. As if they were coming under the control of some other will –
I jolted awake, shivering and sweating. My head had nodded, my chin sunk down on my chest. It was like struggling to stay awake when I was working late. Except that in the warm blackness behind my eyelids Something was waiting …
I fought desperately to regain control. Somewhere, somewhere far away, there was a new clangour in the drumming, a sharp metallic dinging like the incarnation of a headache. And there were voices – Stryge’s, as harsh and desolate as ever I’d heard it. ‘– beating the ogan iron – can’t you hear? That’s it – that’s the end. The last – the greatest. If they can command Him –’
Something he’d said caught my attention – some memory. Some shreds of my will began to reassert themselves. I concentrated feverishly on whatever still bound me to earth – the pain in my tongue, the dull sting of the burns, the ache in my buttocks from the cold ground, and colder still the iron of the collar and chains. Ogan – that was the word I’d caught; now where had I heard something like that before? I smiled; Frederick, of course. It was good to think of him now. Old Frederick with his muttonchop whiskers, puffing with honest outrage, as belligerent as his picture of St James – ‘Think, man! What will you tell the Invisibles? You can’t argue with Ogoun!’
Courage came late to us both, he and I; well, better late than never. This had to stop here, now. Death, extinction – I had to hold onto something. Better them than fall for that sickly-sweet seduction, that happiness that wouldn’t let me be myself. Stryge had accused me of worshipping nothing; but he’d been wrong. Once before I’d thrown my happiness away – and that was because I worshipped success. Not its trappings – not what it could bring me. Just the satisfaction of achievement, the accomplishment, the abstract thing Itself. And by whatever god it represented, if I could sacrifice myself to it then, I should damn well be able to do the same now. Anything less –