A metallic squeaking made him turn toward the hut, and the spectacle advancing toward him across the clearing—it was the bocor, straining to push a wheelbarrow in which were tumbled two unconscious dark-skinned bodies—awoke both horror and hope in him. Fleetingly he wished it didn't have to be human blood, that sheep's blood would serve, as it had in Odysseus' day—but he set his jaw and helped the bocor lever the bodies out onto the dirt so that their heads were conveniently close to the trench.
The bocor had a little paring knife, and held it toward the one-armed man. "You want to?" Hurwood shook his head. "It's," he said hoarsely, "all yours." He looked away and stared hard at the torch flame while the black man crouched over the bodies, and when, a few moments later, he heard the spatter and gush against the oilskin in the trench, he closed his eyes.
"The words now," said the bocor. He began chanting words in a dialect that combined the tongues of France, the Mondongo district of Africa, and the Carib Indians, while the white man, his eyes still closed, began chanting in archaic Hebrew.
The randomly counterpoint chanting grew gradually louder, as if in an attempt to drown out the new noises from the jungle: sounds like whispered giggling and weeping, and cautious rustling in the high branches, and a chitinous scraping like cast-off snakeskins being rubbed together. Abruptly the two chanted litanies became identical, and the two men were speaking in perfect unison, syllable for syllable—though the white man was still speaking ancient Hebrew and the black man was still speaking his peculiar mix of tongues. Astonished by it even as he participated, Hurwood felt the first tremors of real awe at this impossibly prolonged coincidence. Over the sharp fumes of the spilled rum and the rusty reek of the blood there was suddenly a new smell, the hot-metal smell of magic, though far stronger now than he'd ever encountered it before …
And then all at once they were no longer alone—in fact, the clearing was crowded now with human-shaped forms that were nearly transparent to the torchlight, though the light was dimmed if a number of them overlapped in front of it, and all of these insubstantial things were crowding in toward the blood pit and crying out imploringly in tiny, chittering, birdlike voices. The two men let the chanting stop.
Other things, too, had appeared, though they didn't cross the ash lines the bocor had laid around the perimeter of the clearing, but simply peered from between the palm trunks or crouched on branches; Hurwood saw a calf with flaming eye sockets, a head hanging in midair with a ghastly pendulum of naked entrails dangling from its neck, and, in the trees, several little creatures who seemed to be more insect than human; and while the ghosts inside the verver lines kept up a ceaseless shrill chatter, the watchers outside were all silent.
The bocor was keeping the ghosts away from the trench with wide sweeps of his little knife. "Hurry!" he panted. "Find the one you want!"
Hurwood stepped up to the edge of the trench and scrutinized the filmy creatures. Under his gaze a few of them became slightly more visible, like webs of egg white in heating water.
"Benjamin!" called one of these, its scratchy frail voice rising over the background babble.
"Benjamin, it's me, it's Peter! I was groomsman at your wedding, remember? Make him let me sup!" The bocor looked questioningly at the other man.
Hurwood shook his head, and the bocor's knife flashed out and neatly razored the supplicating ghost in half; with a faint cry the thing dissolved like smoke.
"Ben!" screeched up another. "Bless you, son, you've brought refreshments for your father! I knew—"
"No," said Hurwood. His mouth was a straight line as the knife flashed out again and another lost wail flitted away on the breeze.
"Can't hold 'em back forever," panted the bocor.
"A little longer," Hurwood snapped. "Margaret!"
There was a curdling agitation off to one side, and then a cobwebby form drifted to the front.
"Benjamin, how have you come here?"
"Margaret!" His cry was more one of pain than triumph. "Her," he snarled at the bocor. "Let her come up."
The bocor quit the sweeping motion and began jabbing back all the shadows except the one Hurwood had indicated. The ghost approached the trench, then blurred and shrank and became clearly visible again in a kneeling posture. She reached out toward the blood, then halted and simply touched the fiour-and-rum paste on the rim. For a moment she was opaque in the torchlight, and her hand became substantial enough to roll one of the candy balls a few inches. "We shouldn't be here, Benjamin," she said, her voice a bit more resonant now.
"The blood, take the blood—" the one-armed man shouted, falling to his knees on the other side of the trench.
With no sound at all the ghost's form relaxed into smoke and blew away, though the cold blade hadn't come near her.
"Margaret!" the man roared, and dove over the trench into the massed ghosts; they gave way before him like spider webs strung between trees, and his jaw clacked shut against the hard-packed dirt. The ringing in his ears almost prevented him from hearing the chorus of dismayed ghost-voices fading away to silence.
After a few moments Hurwood sat up and squinted around. The torchlight was brighter, now that there were no ghost-forms to filter it.
The bocor was staring at him. "I hope it was worth it." Hurwood didn't answer, just got slowly, wearily to his feet, rubbing his scraped chin and pushing the damp white hair back out of his face. The monsters still stood and crouched and hung just outside the ash lines; evidently none of them had moved, or even blinked, probably, during the whole business.
"Entertained, were you?" shouted Hurwood in English, shaking his lone fist at them. "Dive over the trench again, shall I, just so you won't feel cheated?" His voice was getting tight and shrill, and he was blinking rapidly as he took a step toward the edge of the clearing, pointing at one of the watchers, a huge pig with a cluster of rooster heads sprouting from its neck. "Ah, you there, sir," Hurwood went on in a travesty of hearty friendliness, "do favor us with your frankest opinions. Would I have been better advised to do a spot of juggling instead? Or, perhaps, with face paint and a false nose—"
The bocor caught his elbow from behind and turned him around and stared at him with wonder and something that was almost pity. "Stop," he said softly. "Most of them can't hear, and I don't think any of them understand English. At sunrise they'll go away and we'll leave." Hurwood pulled free of the other man's grasp, walked back to the center of the clearing and sat down, not far from the trench and the two drained corpses. The hot-metal smell of magic was gone, but the breeze wasn't dispelling the blood-reek very much.