The eerie blackness operated on their time-sense, too, leaving them unable to guess how long they sat. Finally, a light flared about fifteen or twenty feet in front of them, then another. Two more lighted up, and Sue Robin saw four huge candles, as large as her arm, at four corners of a smooth arena that resembled a small dance-floor. Aunt Clarinda appeared in the center of the arena, no longer wearing the white sheet, but now in a bright blouse and a wrap-around sarong that came to her ankles. Her feet were bare, the color of the earth floor.
With that turban she sure looks like a voodoo queen, Sue Robin thought languidly. The liquor and whatever else Aunt Clarinda had put in it was working like a pleasant sedative, but her senses seemed sharper than ever. She was more acutely aware of the incense now, and she believed she could hear the breathing of the three of four other watchers, though they sat at least five yards away.
Out of the darkness a white-robed attendant brought forward two wicker baskets. Aunt Clarinda took the lid off one and lifted out a white rooster with its legs bound. She laid it on its side in front of her and opened the other basket, taking out a black rooster, similarly bound. As the attendant took away the baskets, the soft muffled throb of invisible drums began, one deep-voiced and two others higher pitched. At first they were felt rather than heard, so softly did they beat out their steady persistent rhythm.
A strange chant broke from the old woman's lips as she knelt with the tied roosters on the ground in front of her, and her arms raised upward as though in prayer. The words were alien, incomprehensible to the two women seated in the darkness, but one sound was repeated until it became clear: "Legba!"
"She's praying to an African God," Sue Robin whispered, her lips right against Mary Beth's ear. "I remember some stories from childhood."
Legba, the trickster God! By word of mouth from mother to daughter, as the super sensitivity of a voodoo priestess became evident in an adolescent girl, the ancient chants and rituals were kept alive. Legba, changer of destiny!
The drums sounded louder.
Aunt Clarinda finished her invocation, but the chant continued, carried on by the unseen drummers. Now the old lady lifted the roosters one after the other high above her head, and her lips continued to move soundlessly. Placing them on the ground again, she changed them about, alternating their position, black on the right, white on the left, then white on the right and black on the left.
Sue Robin wondered if the birds had been drugged, so submissively did they accept this checker-playing with their feathered bodies. Beside her, Mary Beth sucked in her breath loudly and her eyes widened at the developing action in the arena.
The voodoo priestess drew a long knife from behind her back. Like summer lightning the blade flashed twice, and both roosters flopped headless on the ground, their necks gushing crimson fountains. The drums thudded louder, more urgently, and Aunt Clarinda sprang to her feet. Snatching up a white sheet, she folded herself in it and began a twisting dance about the rectangle, passing closer and closer to the tall candles on each pass. The fluttering ends of the sheet brushed the candle flames, dimming them momentarily as the old woman continued to whirl at a speed incredible for one of her years.
For a moment the figure seemed to blur in the midst of the eerie, flickering light, and Sue Robin shook her head slightly to clear her vision. That likker, she thought. It sure has got me.
The chanting welled up and the rhythm of the drums changed drastically, building to a crescendo.
"Mawu! Mawu! Mawu!" called the hidden chanters. Then the drums stopped abruptly in the midst of a rumble.
Sue Robin stared in disbelief.
The robed figure halted in the middle of the arena, and as the candles flared up again, the enveloping sheet was thrown off and the slim, naked figure of a young woman sprang forth, her creamy chocolate skin gleaming in the golden light.
CHAPTER SIX
"My God!" breathed Mary Beth, and her hand fell on Sue Robin's thigh and held.
Slowly, the drums resumed a soft rhythm, but this time it was a more erotic beat. The moon Goddess had appeared, transformed from the old priestess by the trickster God, and now she glided gracefully into a dance as old as man and the memory of man. The earth Goddesses, Sue Robin mused. All of them were fertility Goddesses. And this beautiful creature was Mawu, the moon Goddess. She could also be Aphrodite and Ishtar and all the other Goddesses of beauty and sex.
The dance was slow at first and openly a sensual and suggestive. As the splendid figure swung to face directly toward Mary Beth and Sue Robin, the brunettes hand clenched suddenly on Sue Robin's thigh. She had just noticed that the dancer's cunt was as smooth as a baby's, shaven clean and rubbed with a glistening oil or some other body ointment. Like ripe pears, her pointed breasts thrust out between her sinuously weaving arms, and her prominent African buttocks arched high behind, a perfect symbol of sexuality. Her black hair was close-cropped in a modified Afro style, accenting the huge golden earring swinging from her ears.
The earrings were all she had on.
The drums throbbed a bit louder and the rhythm became even more exciting. The girl turned her back toward the white-robed watchers and faced into the darkness behind her. Her feet were spread far apart and her arms moved in restless liquid motions over her head while her hips jerked forward as if thrusting her shaven cunt at someone or something in the pitch darkness.
"She's calling somebody," Mary Beth whispered in Sue Robin's ear. Her hand on the tall blonde's thigh was no longer clutching but was now caressing slowly and lightly through the thin sheet covering it.
Something moved forward into the candlelight of the arena and Sue Robin's breath stopped. The something was a powerfully muscled young black, and he was as naked as the dancer. His dark face impassive, he took a stand on one side of the arena and folded his arms, his magnificent body easily erect.
The increasingly intimate touch of Mary Beth's hand on her thigh told Sue Robin that her sister-in-law was overwhelmed by the sight of the thick cock dangling far down between the man's parted legs. They were close enough to see clearly the head flaring like a huge pink mushroom. Sue Robin's eyes roved up and down the figure, from the close-cropped curly hair, down the sloping shoulders thick with muscles, the small taut waist, and the sinewy thighs. But always her rapt gaze returned to the massive cock between his legs. What would it be like erect? she wondered.
She looked back at the dancer, now dancing at the man, flaunting every part of her body at him with lewdly suggestive movements full of promise and mind-blowing ecstasy. Why, it's Sybil! she realized suddenly. Sybil, her childhood playmate, Aunt Clarinda's granddaughter, and an anthropology major at the university. Of course! Who would be a more likely incumbent priestess than this granddaughter of a priestess, filled with occult lore from childhood, and now studying it in the classroom as well.
Only this lithe creature teasing and tantalizing with her supple body was not a student be a Goddess of sex, alluring and confident. The pear-shaped tits jiggled and shuddered as she writhed and contorted her body, and her hips swayed and rolled and quivered in the oldest rhythm of woman. She danced nearer to the motionless man, smiling up into his face, then turning away and wriggling her protuberant buttocks at him.
It was too much for him. He still held his stance, arms folded and body motionless, but his face was coming alive with lust as he stared at the maddening female. Not only that. Mary Beth's hand on Sue Robin's thigh sought to slide under the enveloping sheet while both women gazed wide-eyed at the awesome cock as it, too, responded to the irresistible magic and began to rise like a sorcerer's wand preparing to summon still more demons to the meeting.