Stone That the Builder Refused - Madison Smartt Bell [352]
Moustique had turned away from the dance and was walking off into dim starlight. The doctor followed him, trailing the rum gourd from his knuckles, into the mouth of a green brushy tunnel. As the drums grew more distant, the vertigo against which he’d warned Guizot also receded.
The doctor emerged with Moustique into a circle open to the sky. In the shrubbery walls of the enclosure were numerous little niches lit by candles. Moustique went to one of these and began to spoon water over several squat clay jars. In his movement was a preternatural calm.
“What do they hold?” the doctor asked.
“Spirits of the ancestors.”
“Have you got the Père Bonne-chance in there?” The doctor’s voice missed the jocular note he’d tried for. Indeed it seemed he could scarcely croak. “Your father?”
“No,” Moustique said. “His spirit wants to be with the saints of Jesus in the sky. These are Fontelle’s people, out of Dahomey.”
As he spoke, the doctor felt himself grow sick with fear. He knew that Moustique’s chapel was built on the site of some old horror and that something connected that emplacement to this one. He was also quite sure that Nanon had been here, very near to where he now stood, and not very long ago, though he did not know the source of any of these certainties. But the fear drained out of him, lanced like a boil. He could still feel a hollow where the fear had been, there in the soft spot on the bottom of his brain.
He stood before another leafy niche, where a candle illuminated an image of the Mater Dolorosa, long bright sword piercing into her heart. Below it hung a loop of pearlescent, pale blue beads, and framed by the beads was a fragment of mirror. When the doctor looked into it, he saw nothing. Where his reflected visage should have been was empty air.
The thrum in the back of his head intensified. The doctor turned toward it, but of course it was always behind him. Riau had entered the peristyle and stood, relaxed but motionless, in the same pose he’d had with the girl.
Something changed in the tone of the distant singing. The drums had opened a deeper throat.
Jé mwen . . .
mwen pè gade
Jé mwen . . .
Mwen pè gade sa-a . . .
The doctor became aware that Riau was centered on a filament that ran through the top of his head through his coccyx, through the bottom of his heel. It coursed from the bottom of the ocean to the starlit crown of the sky with Riau’s whole being suspended on it weightless as a thread.
My eyes . . .
I fear to see
My eyes
I’m afraid to look at that . . .
The doctor’s own body began to turn on the same axis as Riau’s. The drum beat in the back of his head was lost in its own overtones, the hum of bees, urgent stroking of thousands of butterfly wings, and the song dropped into a heart-wrenching minor key.
Mwen vini lwen . . .
Kouman yo yé
Kouman yo yé
Mwen pralé lwen
Kouman yo yé
Kouman yo yé a . . .
He was aware that his body was falling, the gourd released from his numb arm to offer an oblation of spilled rum in a neat circle on the ground. He was no more with his body, but surging upward on that invisible filament with a flowering rush of speed his body, the whole circle of Moustique’s peristyle shrinking away in the bright disappearing lens of a spyglass reversed. In the center of the vanishing orb Cléo and Isidor appeared to dance like marionettes, like insects—a whistling emptiness replaced them. The stars churned into a whirlpool of silver and from the vortex stepped Nanon, unfastening her bodice, her face calm, compassionate, certain. She opened her heart, reached in with both hands, and presented to the doctor, of all strange things, his glasses.
“You fainted,” Maillart said.
“What?” The doctor was somewhere beside the source of his own voice.
“You fainted,” Maillart said patiently. “Christ, what a night.”
“I was watching the dancing,” the doctor said. There had been something more but he couldn’t remember it.
“You are not yet restored enough from the siege,” Maillart suggested. “Or maybe it’s a relapse of your fever.”
The starry vortex whirled again before the