A dozen utility carts were stationed around the warehouse and each one was festooned with lighted candles in glass jars that provided yellow, fluttering light in the smoky air. The carts were draped with beads and feathers. Human skulls were on every cart, with some painted red or black, and others unpainted. Bottles of chilli rum were everywhere: on the carts, in people’s hands, and on the floor.
The room was filled with black people dressed in everything from simple cotton whites to colorful clothes like those worn in the Caribbean. Some men wore no shirts, only khaki pants, and others dressed in loose shirts and sleeveless tee shirts. Some of the women writhing on the floor wore only cotton panties. People chanted in Creole as more of them euphorically sang and jumped and spun to the machinegun drumbeats.
Four men wearing replicas of the uniforms of the Tonton Macoutes stood near the carts. They wore the dark blue straw hats and sunglasses, even in the dim room, and each one had a long machete in a scabbard on their belt.
To Ariel they seemed to radiate evil. She turned her head toward the drums as they grew louder.
Each drummer had two drums; a set called batterie, with one drum larger than the other and both shaped like rough-hewn congas, but with more tapered bottoms. The players used sticks to beat on leather drumheads held in place with ropes.
Only the center portion of the floor was empty of people, and it had multiple designs drawn on it, with many of them representing the crossroads, the juncture of life and death. All drawings were done in white.
It was a Petro ceremony, and Ariel felt ice in her stomach. This was not to draw benevolent loa, oh no. She caught motion out of the corner of her eye as men drug a black goat and black pig into the open center of the floor. Several men in robes stepped to them, and one cut the pig’s throat with a hard, pulling slice of his butcher knife.
The pig squealed and fought, gurgling and pouring blood onto the concrete, its hooves sliding as if it was on ice. The people grew more excited, the drums beat faster as a woman dressed in flowing red moved to it and dipped her fingers in a small jar to paint white symbols on the pig’s back.
Drumbeats increased in speed and loudness when gourd rattles, called ason, joined in the cacophony as people shook them in frenzied delight while the chants grew louder. Several high-pitched wails mixed with the voices. People gyrated and danced as if possessed. Ariel watched as men pulled the terrified goat beside the dead pig and, as it’s yellow eyes rolled in fear and it fought the ropes, a third man doused it with a full quart of charcoal lighter fluid. They stepped back to allow the woman in red robes to toss a lit match.
The goat erupted in flames and foul gray smoke as the entire body combusted and its hair burned. The goat squalled and cried so loudly it pierced the ears, and it stamped and jerked and fought desperately to escape the fire and the ropes, but was unable to break free. The woman in red, along with many in the crowd laughed, enjoying the goat’s agony. Others swayed to the drums as if in trances. The woman in red poked the goat with a sharpened stick to make the pain worse for the animal, and continued to prod and torture it until the goat collapsed to the concrete and convulsed, then she jabbed it so hard that the point imbedded in the animal.
When it stopped moving, she cut the goat’s throat. People formed a line beside the woman as she dipped her index finger in the slashed throat, and then touched her wet finger to the tongues of those in line as they stepped forward. Each time someone new stood in front of her, the woman slid her finger into the slashed throat, drew it out and touched the wet end to the person’s tongue.
Ariel felt ill, but could not turn away. This was like living in a terrible, hallucinogen-induced nightmare. She had only been to ceremonies for benevolent loa before this, and those ceremonies were beautiful and were what most of Haiti practiced.
These ceremonies for evil were things she had heard of in whispers, but never seen. It frightened her to her core. She started to leave, but a motion at the back of the crowd across the room stopped her.
The crowd parted and a tall man whose dark face was painted white to look like a skull stepped into the center of the floor. He wore a loose-fitting red peasant suit with light blue sleeves, and wore a black, flat brimmed straw hat.
The second man wore a tall purple top hat whose shape reminded Ariel of the one Abraham Lincoln wore. His suit was purple, styled like something out of aristocratic England in the nineteenth century, with tails and a cravat. His pants were also purple, and he carried a black cane with a golden knob on the top. The upper half of his face was painted like a white skull. The two men walked to the center near the dead animals where the woman in red robes joined them as she motioned toward someone that Ariel couldn’t see.
Two men pushed out another cart. A young, nude, red-haired white woman was tied to the cart, face up, with her arms and legs pulled down on the sides toward the wheels. She’s been drugged, Ariel thought, and the woman lolled her head from side to side. The two men painted white markings on her body as the woman in red pricked her with a long, slender knife so her body jerked. A dozen lines of blood coursed down her sides before the men finished marking her, then the woman in red handed the knife to the man in the top hat. The other man pushed the woman’s upturned face down and back, exposing her throat and stretching the pale skin taut. The man in the top hat moved the knife to her throat.
That was enough for Ariel. She burst through the crowd, causing a loud commotion, and hurried to the door. She glanced back to see the man in the top hat staring at her. Banging the door open, Ariel raced to her car and slid behind the wheel. Before she drove away, The Tonton Macoutes and both skull-faced men stood outside the warehouse watching her. The man in the top hat raised his cane and pointed it at her like a long, accusing finger until she sped away and lost sight of them.
She didn’t go home that night, but instead drove all the way to Dania Beach, where she crawled under the pier into the darkest shadow and sat with her back to a piling. Ariel was so tired and exhausted, she let her eyes close. In moments her breathing slowed, and she fell asleep. The dreams that came to her were the same as the flashes she had seen when Marc Dessaline touched her arm and revealed his spirit to her. What he wasn’t aware of was how strong Ariel’s ability was. She saw the part of his life that he didn’t intend for anyone to witness.
Chapter 5
In the 1960’s, the legendary Haitian sòsyè, Malice Paisone, felt a need. She was the most powerful vodou witch in all Haiti, brilliant and beautiful, in her early twenties, and hungry for power. Malice was also an officer in the Tonton Macoute, promoted after saving Papa Doc Duvalier during an assassination attempt. Her close, continuing relationship with Duvalier afforded her a level of influence and protection almost unimaginable for the time. If she disliked someone, or took offense, that person, if they were smart, left immediately for another part of the country.
If they weren’t, well, within a short time, another rotting body would turn up in one of the untended fields where the Tonton Macoute tossed the dead when they finished with them.
Malice Paisone was known to have powerful magic, and used it to influence and manipulate, to heal, and to kill. Using the Tonton Macoute through Duvalier was simply more expeditious, but no more effective. She was not married, or had a man, although she had used them often over the years only to discard them when bored, or turn them to allies.
Her sexual expertise was legendary, though talked about among the people only in hushed tones. On her twenty-first birthday, Malice decided not to be alone any more. But she wanted someone extraordinarily special, a male she could train to be the way she wanted a man to be. And he needed to be someone with the ability and intelligence to become powerful in vodou, perhaps almost her equal. That was important in her plans.
She sent people in every direction to check out the young males. For eleven months, they found no one satisfactory. Then one day, Selvin Jarrè, her most trusted servant, came to her with excitement in his voice and told her of a child.
He travelled to the remote farming community of Bainet, on the far side of the mountains where it nestled in the fertile valley between the peaks and the sea, a place noted for the marabou people there, the beautiful ones with light colored eyes.
Selvin first saw the boy at sundown, standing in an unpaved, dusty street while a dozen stray dogs fought all around his feet, creating an eerie, sun-tinted dust cloud the color of the sunset. The boy barked one word at the canines as he clapped his hands twice, and they scattered as if stung by wasps. Bending down, the boy picked up a dusty ribbon of cooked goat meat the dogs had dropped. He slapped it against his leg, and then bit off a small piece. He chewed slowly and put the remainder in his front pocket.
Selvin walked closer, angling to the side so he could get a good look at the boy’s face. The boy raised his head, and Selvin almost stopped breathing. The boy was maybe eight or nine, and very tall, with eyes as gold as coins.
Selvin told Malice, “Looking at him was like looking into the eyes of a leopard.”
She said, “And he has no one?”