“No!” A shriek from Jane. “You can’t do that! You can’t! It isn’t … debentchouaje … it will break the net!”
Now came a violent change, as if all the air and color had been sucked from the room and replaced with an alien gas, an alien spectrum. A presence entered, something heavy, awful, and vast, something far larger than the room, larger than the world. Paz found he could hardly breathe, and also that he didn’t have to. Something had gone wrong with time. He felt turned to stone; he couldn’t move his head, but he saw it out of the corner of his eye.
Until this moment Paz had thought that the carved depictions of African deities he had seen in museums were imaginary abstractions?the gigantic heads, the slitted eyes, the razor-sharp planes of the features; but now he found that they were actually very good likenesses. The room was full of people now, or rather flickering images, like a thousand films being shown at once, no, not that either … He could not take it in, but neither could he close his eyes. He understood, without knowing how he understood, that this was Ifa himself, not riding on a person, but the actual orisha, the lord of fate.
Around him time ripped away from its welding to space and matter. He saw Jane, as she was now, and as a baby, and a little girl, and as a pregnant woman with a swelling middle, and as a crone, and dead, all together, as the gods see us, and Jane, his Jane, was bowing to the being with her hands covering her face. He heard screams. Geometries that the human brain was not designed to record occupied the room. Paz shut his eyes.
Now blackness and … it came to him then, a dream, or a memory. His room, above the restaurant on Flagler, he must have been four or five, waking at night to the sound of drums, going out of the little room he shared with his mother, to the living room, and there was his mami, in a white dress, and other women and men with drums and a strange smell in the air, smoke and rum, and they were playing drums, and he went up to his mami, frightened, and she turned around and there was someone else living in his mami. He screamed and someone picked him up, a thin man, and he said, Forget this, little boy, go to sleep.
His mother was shaking him. He was late for school. He tried to pull the covers over his head, but they weren’t there. She was grabbing at his arm, his hand, putting something into it, something heavy. He opened his eyes.
His mother said, “Outside. They’re coming to help him.”
Questions formed but froze on his tongue. He looked at what was in his hand and saw that it was Jane’s Mauser pistol. He got up and walked slowly around the periphery of the room, fingers trailing the walls, the furniture, eyes on the ground. There was still stuff going on that he didn’t want to know about. He found the doorknob and went out onto the landing.
One of them was already on the stairs, a squat brown man in an undershirt and shorts. He looked ordinary except for all the blood on him. Paz shot him in the chest. The thing kept on coming. He remembered you weren’t supposed to let them touch you. Paz shot him again and the man collapsed and rolled down the stairs. Others appeared at intervals. The last one was Eightball Swett, identifiable only by his clothes and the smell, because his face had mostly fallen off. Paz used the last of the bullets on him. He looked at the big pistol, its action popped back, the breech empty.
What a peculiar dream, he thought, I really want to remember this when I get up. He walked back through the open door into Jane’s apartment.
The weirdness had quite gone, replaced by what looked like a candlelit domestic scene except that Dawn Slotsky was lying naked on the kitchen table. Jane seemed to be talking to Moore in an ordinary voice, while on her hip perched the little girl, still in the yellow bird costume.
“I was the goat,” Jane said. “God knows how long Ulune has been planning this, probably before either of us was born. He set a trap for the leopard in a village far away. And you fell into it. You tried to unmake time before you’d done the fourth sacrifice. Maybe if you’d waited, you might have been able to whip Ifa, I don’t know. But he came, just like in Ife in the old days, not mounted, but as himself. And he took it all back, all the power, like they did in the Ilidoni.”
She set the child down. Paz saw his mother motioning to him. He walked over to her and she threw her arms around him, hugging him like she used to when he was small. He started to ask her what was going on, but she held her fingers over his mouth. They both looked at Jane and her husband.
“You can’t do sorcery anymore, can you? The rat bit the baby, so they burned down the house.” Her voice became softer, and she reached out her hand to him, tentatively. “Is there any of you left in there, Witt? Anything?”
Paz couldn’t see the man’s face, but he saw the glittering black knife flying at the little girl and heard the hoarse cry, words in a tongue he didn’t know, issue from the man’s throat. He pulled away from his mother and leaped toward them, although he knew it was going to be too late. But Jane stepped aside and crouched, with the little girl still on her hip, and somehow the man went stumbling across the room. He caromed off the refrigerator. The glass knife flew from his hand, spun through the air, hit the stove top, and shattered.
Now a high-pitched shrieking, like a siren. Dawn Slotsky was back among the conscious. Paz started to move toward Moore, but Slotsky was off the table and on him, screaming and battering Paz with her fists. She sank her nails into his face. He grabbed at her hands, and over her shoulder was able to see Witt Moore get to his feet and take an eight-inch chef’s knife from the magnetic rack over the sink. Paz looked around wildly for Jane but she was gone. In an instant so was Moore. Paz yelled for his mother.
It took them a few minutes to get Dawn Slotsky down to where she was just weeping hysterically. Mrs. Paz took her into the little bedroom and laid her into the hammock, crooning gently. Paz left them to it and got his Glock out of the cupboard. He knew where they’d gone. He could hear the footsteps above him.
The ladder led into darkness. He stopped with his head just above the loft’s floor and waited for his eyes to adjust. Faint moonlight came in through a high, round window. Green light glowed from some kind of cartoon character nightlight plugged into a wall socket. He could hear bodies moving in the dark and he could hear Jane Doe’s voice.
“You can still get away,” she said. “You could go back to Africa, you could see Ulune. He’d help you. You could try to …”
There was the sound of a more violent movement. Paz could now make out what was happening. Moore was stalking his wife. She was backing away from him; he was trying to corner her. Every so often, he would leap and lunge and strike with his knife, and she would simply not be where he expected her to be, or where Paz expected her to be, for that matter. Things were vague in the darkness, but it looked to Paz a lot like magic.
And all the time she was talking. “You could try,” she said, “to unravel the evil, to make some good come out of it. You could have a life.”
This was too much for Paz. He walked the few steps up to the floor of the loft.
“Drop the knife, Moore,” he shouted. They both froze and looked at him.
Jane cried, “Oh, no, please …”
Moore broke into a clumsy run, directly at Paz, with the knife held out rigidly before him, like a spear. Paz saw the shine of his face, the sweat flying, he saw the gleam of his bared teeth and the eyes, white, empty. Almost without willing it, Paz fired twice. Moore kept moving for a few feet until the hydrostatic shock turned his muscles to jelly and he dropped to his knees. The rigid knife arm sagged, and he fell over slowly onto his right side. Paz kicked the knife away.
Then Jane Doe was kneeling by the side of the fallen man, touching his face; she was making high-pitched, awful, keening noises. Moore’s mouth was open, and he seemed about to speak. Paz saw that there was a look of profound surprise on the face. Jane held his face in her hands, and Moore now seemed to see her for the first time. He said, “What? What?” and then he started choking, and blood that looked black in the moonlight shot from his mouth and covered Jane Doe’s hands.