Merrick - Anne Rice [58]
The pillar was brightly painted red to the midpoint and green to the top, and it rose from a huge altar stone quite appropriately heavily stained. Beyond in the darkness stood the inevitable altar, with saints even more numerous and magnificent than those in Great Nananne’s bedroom.
There were banks upon banks of lighted candles.
It was, I knew from my studies, a common Voodoo configuration—the central pillar and the stone. One could find it all over the island of Haiti. And this weedy flagstone spot was what a Haitian Voodoo doctor might have called his peristyle.
Cast to the side, among the close and straggling yew trees, I saw two iron tables, small and rectangular in shape, and a large pot or cauldron, as I suppose it is properly called, resting upon a brazier with tripod legs. The cauldron and the deep brazier disturbed me somewhat, possibly more than anything else. The cauldron seemed an evil thing.
A humming sound distracted me somewhat, because I was afraid that it came from bees. I have a very great fear of bees, and like many members of the Talamasca, I fear some secret regarding bees which has to do with our origins, but there is not room enough to explain here.
Allow me to continue by saying only that I quickly realized that the sound came from hummingbirds in this vast overgrown place, and when I stood quite still beside Merrick, I fancied I saw them hovering as they do, near the fiercely sprawling flower-covered vines of the shed roof.
“Oncle Vervain loved them,” said Merrick to me in a hushed voice. “He put out the feeders for them. He knew them by their colors and he called them beautiful names.”
“I love them, too, child,” I said. “In Brazil they had a beautiful name in Portuguese, ‘the kisser of flowers,’ ” I said.
“Yes, Oncle Vervain knew those things,” she told me. “Oncle Vervain had been all over South America. Oncle Vervain could see the ghosts in the middle air all around him all the time.”
She left off with these words. But I had the distinct feeling that it was going to be very difficult for her to say farewell to this, her home. As for her use of the phrase “ghosts in the middle air,” I was suitably impressed, as I had been by so much else. Of course we would keep this house for her, of that I’d make certain. We’d have the place entirely restored if she so wished.
She looked about herself, her eyes lingering on the iron pot on its tripod.
“Oncle Vervain could boil the cauldron,” she said softly. “He put coals under it. I can still remember the smell of the smoke. Great Nananne would sit on the back steps to watch him. Everybody else was afraid.”
She went forward now and into the shed, and stood before the saints, staring at the many offerings and glittering candles. She made the Sign of the Cross quickly and laid her right two fingers on the naked foot of the tall and beautiful Virgin.
What were we to do?
Aaron and I stood a little behind her, and at her shoulders, like two rather confused guardian angels. There was fresh food in the dishes on the altar. I smelled sweet perfume and rum. Obviously some of those people crowded about in the shrubbery had brought these mysterious offerings. But I shrank back when I realized that one of the curious objects heaped there in seeming disarray was in fact a human hand.
It was cut right before the wrist bone, and it had dried into a dreadful clench of sorts, but that was not the full horror. It was overrun with ants, who had made a little massacre of the entire feast.
When I realized that the loathsome insects were everywhere, I felt a peculiar horror that only ants can bring.
Merrick, much to my amazement, picked up this hand rather daintily in her thumb and forefinger, and shook off the hoodlum ants with several small fierce gestures.
I heard nothing from the audience in the crowd beyond, but it seemed to me that they pressed closer. The humming of the birds was becoming