“Five?” I said, a little faintly. Not just a habit, it seemed; a positive addiction.
“A verra unhealthy atmosphere for Englishmen it is in the tropics,” she said, and smiled slyly at me. “Fevers, ulcers, festering stomachs; any little thing will carry them off.” She had evidently been mindful of her oral hygiene; her teeth were still very good.
She reached out and lightly caressed a small bottle that stood on the lowest shelf. It wasn’t labeled, but I had seen crude white arsenic before. On the whole, I was glad I hadn’t taken any food.
“Oh, you’ll be interested in this,” she said, spying a jar on an upper shelf. Grunting slightly as she stood on tiptoe, she reached it down and handed it to me.
It contained a very coarse powder, evidently a mixture of several substances, brown, yellow, and black, flecked with shreds of a semitranslucent material.
“What’s this?”
“Zombie poison,” she said, and laughed. “I thought ye’d like to see.”
“Oh?” I said coldly. “I thought you told me there was no such thing.”
“No,” she corrected, still smiling. “I told ye Hercule wasn’t dead; and he’s not.” She took the jar from me and replaced it on the shelf. “But there’s no denying that he’s a good bit more manageable if he’s had a dose of this stuff once a week, mixed with his grain.”
“What the hell is it?”
She shrugged, offhanded. “A bit of this and a bit of that. The main thing seems to be a kind of fish—a little square thing wi’ spots; verra funny-looking. Ye take the skin and dry it, and the liver as well. But there are a few other things ye put in with it—I wish I kent what,” she added.
“You don’t know what’s in it?” I stared at her. “Didn’t you make it?”
“No. I had a cook,” Geilie said, “or at least they sold him to me as a cook, but damned if I’d feel safe eating a thing he turned out of the kitchen, the sly black devil. He was a houngan, though.”
“A what?”
“Houngan is what the blacks call one of their medicine-priests; though to be quite right about it, I believe Ishmael said his sort of black called him an oniseegun, or somesuch.”
“Ishmael, hm?” I licked my dry lips. “Did he come with that name?”
“Oh, no. He had some heathen name wi’ six syllables, and the man who sold him called him ‘Jimmy’—the auctioneers call all the bucks Jimmy. I named him Ishmael, because of the story the seller told me about him.”
Ishmael had been taken from a barracoon on the Gold Coast of Africa, one of a shipment of six hundred slaves from the villages of Nigeria and Ghana, stowed between decks of the slave ship Persephone, bound for Antigua. Coming through the Caicos Passage, the Persephone had run into a sudden squall, and been run aground on Hogsty Reef, off the island of Great Inagua. The ship had broken up, with barely time for the crew to escape in the ship’s boats.
The slaves, chained and helpless betweendecks, had all drowned. All but one man who had earlier been taken from the hold to assist as a galley mate, both messboys having died of the pox en route from Africa. This man, left behind by the ship’s crew, had nonetheless survived the wreck by clinging to a cask of spirits, which floated ashore on Great Inagua two days later.
The fishermen who discovered the castaway were more interested in his means of salvation than in the slave himself. Breaking open the cask, however, they were shocked and appalled to find inside the body of a man, somewhat imperfectly preserved by the spirits in which he had been soaking.
“I wonder if they drank the crème de menthe anyway,” I murmured, having observed for myself that Mr. Overholt’s assessment of the alcoholic affinities of sailors was largely correct.
“I daresay,” said Geilie, mildly annoyed at having her story interrupted. “In any case, when I heard of it, I named him Ishmael straight off. Because of the floating coffin, aye?”
“Very clever,” I congratulated her. “Er…did they find out who the man in the cask was?”
“I don’t think so.” She shrugged carelessly. “They gave him to the Governor of Jamaica, who had him put in a glass case, wi’ fresh spirits, as a curiosity.”
“What?” I said incredulously.
“Well, not so much the man himself, but some odd fungi that were growing on him,” Geilie explained. “The Governor’s got a passion for such things. The old Governor, I mean; I hear there’s a new one, now.”
“Quite,” I said, feeling a bit queasy. I thought the ex-governor was more likely to qualify as a curiosity than the dead man, on the whole.
Her back was turned, as she pulled out drawers and rummaged through them. I took a deep breath, hoping to keep my voice casual.
“This Ishmael sounds an interesting sort; do you still have him?”
“No,” she said indifferently. “The black bastard ran off. He’s the one who made the zombie poison for me, though. Wouldn’t tell me how, no matter what I did to him,” she added, with a short, humorless laugh, and I had a sudden vivid memory of the weals across Ishmael’s back. “He said it wasn’t proper for women to make medicine, only men could do it. Or the verra auld women, once they’d quit bleeding. Hmph!”
She snorted, and reached into her pocket, pulling out a handful of stones.
“Anyway, that’s not what I brought ye up to show ye.”
Carefully, she laid five of the stones in a rough circle on the countertop. Then she took down from a shelf a thick book, bound in worn leather.
“Can ye read German?” she asked, opening it carefully.
“Not much, no,” I said. I moved closer, to look over her shoulder. Hexenhammer, it said, in a fine, handwritten script.
“Witches’ Hammer?” I asked. I raised one eyebrow. “Spells? Magic?”
The skepticism in my voice must have been obvious, for she glared at me over one shoulder.
“Look, fool,” she said. “Who are ye? Or what, rather?”
“What am I?” I said, startled.
“That’s right.” She turned and leaned against the counter, studying me through narrowed eyes. “What are ye? Or me, come to that? What are we?”
I opened my mouth to reply, then closed it again.
“That’s right,” she said softly, watching. “It’s not everyone can go through the stones, is it? Why us?”
“I don’t know,” I said. “And neither do you, I’ll be bound. It doesn’t mean we’re witches, surely!”
“Doesn’t it?” She lifted one brow, and turned several pages of the book.
“Some people can leave their bodies and travel miles away,” she said, staring meditatively at the page. “Other people see them out wandering, and recognize them, and ye can bloody prove they were really tucked up safe in bed at the time. I’ve seen the records, all the eyewitness testimony. Some people have stigmata ye can see and touch—I’ve seen one. But not everybody. Only certain people.”
She turned another page. “If everyone can do it, it’s science. If only a few can, then it’s witchcraft, or superstition, or whatever you like to call it,” she said. “But it’s real.” She looked up at me, green eyes bright as a snake’s over the crumbling book. “We’re real, Claire—you and me. And special. Have ye never asked yourself why?”