Black Fly Season (21 page)

‘Yes, Uncle.’ Victor had told him to call him uncle and by now it came naturally. ‘Uncle, why does it smell so bad?’

‘When you understand magic, you will know that that is a good smell, not bad at all. But now will you listen to what I am telling you?’

‘Yes.’

‘Because it is the most important thing you will ever hear me say. I repeat: what I am about to show you is a great secret. So secret, that if you ever tell anyone what you see in here, or what I do in here, or what you do in here, I will kill you. Do you understand me? I will kill you, Raymond.’

Uncle Victor’s face, seamed and brown as a walnut, drew closer. His black eyes looked into Raymond’s and Raymond knew he could see his fear.

‘I won’t tell, Uncle.’

‘I love you my child, but if you tell, I will kill you with no more hesitation than a butcher kills a pig. You will die, you will be buried, and your mother will weep endless tears for you and she

will never be happy again in her life. You don’t want that, do you?’

‘No, Uncle.’

‘So, if someone says to you, “Hey, that Victor is a strange old bird. What does he get up to in that gardening shed of his?” what do you say to this person?’

‘I don’t say anything.’

‘They may force you to say something. What will you tell them if they twist your arm and hurt you to make you talk?’

‘I tell them I don’t know what you do in here?’

‘No, you tell them this: “Uncle Victor keeps his gardening tools in there.” That’s all. Not a word more. It is the truth, after all. No one can call you a liar. So what do you say?’

‘Uncle Victor keeps his gardening tools in here.’

The bony fingers gripped his shoulder; it was like being squeezed by a hawk. ‘Good, Raymond. You are a good boy. You are worthy to learn about magic. Now I will show you my temple.’

Victor slipped his foot under a rack of manure bags and pressed a pedal. Something clicked, and the back wall shifted on a pivot. The smell was ten times worse, and Raymond gagged.

‘It’s all right,’ Victor said. ‘You will get used to the smell. In time, you will come to love the smell. It is the smell of power.’

The room was tiny, and pitch dark except for the single red bulb that glowed overhead. As Raymond’s eyes adjusted, he saw there was very

little in the room: one large table, a hatchet, and an array of knives fixed to the wall. The wall itself was painted with symbols he didn’t understand. In the middle of the table was a large iron pot. From this a quiver of long sticks protruded, so straight they might have been arrows.

There was a chicken tied to a bolt in the table, black eyes glistening with fear.

Victor gestured at the iron pot.

‘The source of my power,‘Victor said. ‘It doesn’t look like much, does it?’

Raymond sensed that no answer was required. His uncle reached for him to lift him up. Raymond shrank back.

Victor leaned down and spoke gently.

‘You have nothing to fear, my child. Nothing. I am in control here. You will learn to ignore these feelings of fear. Eventually you will feel nothing and, believe me, to feel nothing is a great advantage in this world. For now, know that I will protect you. I will let nothing harm you. Nothing.’

‘I want to go home, Uncle.’

‘It is too late, Raymond. Stay by my side and nothing bad will happen to you.’

He hoisted Raymond up and stood him on an apple crate so the boy could see into the pot. There was a foul congealed liquid with solids of indistinct shape adrift in it.

‘Nganga, Victor said. ‘This is called the nganga. In here we place the things we give to the gods.

If we want a favour from Oggun, the god of iron, for example, we might put in a railway spike, or some large nails. If we want a favour from Ochosi, god of hunters, we might put in an arrowhead.’

‘But there’s only one god, isn’t there?’

The brown face waggled at him.

‘That is a different religion altogether. I’m teaching you a much older, much more powerful religion. In the Christian religions, yes, there is only one God. In Palo Mayombe there are many. Into this nganga we also put the things we need in order to control the spirits. Spirit beings, you see, have no power over human beings unless it is given to them. They are vessels, drifting this way and that, until we give them power. We - that is to say the wizards - give them life. We give them breath and we give them the power to see, the power to hear, to go places, to grasp things.‘Victor flexed his sinewy claw open and shut before Raymond’s eyes.

‘Where do spirits come from?’

‘From living creatures. Animals. Sometimes human beings. We take them from this world in such a way that we control them in the next. Then they do our bidding. They work for us, you see. Only wizards have this right, this power. Now be silent. Clear your mind of all fear, and just watch what I do. We will do something nice for your mother. We will ask Oggun to bring her something nice.’

Victor turned to the nganga and spread his hands

like a Catholic priest over the altar. He began to speak in a language Raymond did not recognize. He knew it was not Spanish or English or French.

‘Bahalof Semtekne bakuneray pentoll’ Victor turned to Raymond and spoke in an aside. ‘Always you must speak firmly to them. We do not beg on bended knee like the Christians and the Moslems. We tell them. We command.”

Victor raised his arms once more over the cauldron.

‘Bahalo. Seeno temtem bakuneray pentol!’

Victor took the hatchet from the wall, grabbed the chicken and removed its head with a single stroke. He tossed the head into the pot. The headless chicken strained at its leash running this way and that, unaware that it was dead.

Raymond started to cry. He tried to stop himself but he couldn’t; his entire body shook with sobs.

Victor took hold of the chicken by the feet and unclipped the leash. He held the still struggling bird upside down over the nganga so that the hot blood squirted into the pot. He started to say more words then turned on Raymond, gripping both his shoulders: ‘Stop crying now, Raymond. You hear me? Stop crying.’ The bony hands shook him. ‘If you show fear you allow the spirits to control you. This must never happen. Stop crying now. Take a deep breath and show them you are in command.’

Raymond tried to do it, but he was hopeless that first day.

Later that week, when he came home from

school, Gloria was entertaining a customer. Raymond went straight to his bedroom and tried not to hear the noises the man made, his mother’s elaborate cries of ecstasy. When the man was gone, Gloria came to her son’s room.

‘Come with me,’ she said. ‘I have a surprise for you.’

They rode the reeking elevator down to the lobby. Gloria took him out to the parking lot and sat him in a brand new Honda Prelude. It had a leather interior and a wonderful radio and it smelled powerfully of new car. Sunlight glittered off every surface. ‘How do you like Mommy’s Honda?’

Raymond touched the steering wheel.

‘Isn’t it fantastic?’ she said. ‘Uncle Victor got it for me from a friend of his.’

‘Who?’ Raymond asked.

‘A friend. I don’t know who. It doesn’t matter who.’

She started it up and pulled out on to Gerrard Street. Five minutes later they were cruising along the Gardiner Expressway. Lake Ontario flashed brilliant blue and silver in the sun. The few clouds were absurdly white. Gloria opened all the windows and the sun roof, and their hair whipped about their ears. Raymond didn’t have to ask who had given her the car. It was Oggun. Oggun had given them this car, just as Victor had told him to.

As time went by, Raymond got braver and braver

in his uncle’s temple. Over the following months and years, Victor instructed him in the art of controlling the spirits. He taught him how when you took a soul you had to take it with the utmost pain. Really, the sacrifice had to be screaming as it died, otherwise you could not command its soul. And if you showed the slightest fear, then the spirit would end up controlling you.

He showed him how you removed the claws or feet, toe by toe, so the spirit would be able to grasp, how you cut off the feet and threw them into the nganga so that the spirit would be able to move about, and finally how you looked into the sacrifice’s eyes in its final agony and told it you would come for it in hell. Then you took the brain and transferred it to the nganga, so the spirit would be able to understand your commands, would be able to think.

Raymond threw up the first few times. But eventually it was just as Uncle Victor said; he got used to it. The fear diminished, and by the time he was fourteen he felt no fear whatsoever. Chickens, goats, dogs, cats, in the end it made no difference. Raymond learned to master the screaming animals and to stare into their eyes as they died.

Then his uncle taught him how to summon the spirit of the creature you had sacrificed, how to make him work for you.

Time, the twenty-one-year-old Raymond learned, took on a whole new meaning when you were on

the receiving end of the blade. The hot blood had turned sticky on his back, and his head ached monstrously from gritting his teeth against the pain.

His uncle removed the blindfold, and Raymond had to close his eyes against the candles that blazed in rows and rows. Then Victor released the leather cuffs and sat Raymond down.

‘Don’t worry,’ Uncle Victor said. ‘The wounds will soon heal.’

Cool water splashed over his back. His uncle dabbed at him gently. ‘You have nothing to fear, you know. From the moment I first noticed you - that time in the hall - I looked into your eyes and I said to Gloria, “Your son is going to be a priest. A very powerful priest.”’

Raymond remembered, but the old man often repeated the story.

Uncle Victor rubbed ointment on the long lines he had cut into Raymond’s back. The pain began to attenuate, to become bearable.

‘You will have nothing to fear, Raymond. Believe me. You are going to be the most powerful priest walking the earth. A true collector of souls.’ And then Victor did an amazing thing. He knelt down and bowed his head.

Stephen P. Russell had come prepared floppy straw sun hat, bright white bug shirt, Off Deep Woods insect repellent - he was ready for anything. As Algonquin Bay’s best-selling watercolourist, Stephen P. Russell prided himself on being an all-weather, all-terrain sort of man. His ancient Volvo wagon was crammed with boots, umbrella, slicker, sandals, sunblock, coffee thermos, as well as the painterly paraphernalia of the amateur artist: easel, brushes, colours and a none too steady folding stool.

Stands of birches were his bread and butter, preferably birches adorned with clumps of snow or dripping with rain. He sold two or three of these works every weekend at the farmers’ market. You couldn’t live on the money it brought in, but it was a nice supplement to a pension from the Nipissing Separate School Board. He prided himself particularly on his ability to render the platinum sheen on the leaves of the silver birch, the very effect he was creating at this moment.

A steady breeze was riffling the leaves and blowing them back like the fur on a cat. A languid

chorus line of scotch pines swayed beside the birches, but the painter ignored them. These he would do with a green wash later, blurry as you please. That was the great thing about watercolours, it was easy to blur everything you didn’t want the viewer to see. Pines were not Stephen P. Russell’s strong point.

The brushwork on the birch leaves took a lot of doing, a lot of concentration. And for some time now, the painter had noticed that his concentration was flickering. Normally he could work for hours, thinking of nothing but his subject and his technique, but today he had finished his thermos of coffee early, and now nature had to take its course.

He turned from his easel and looked behind him toward the nasty construction site. No, he would have to head the other way. He got up with difficulty from his little stool - oh, the aches and agues of the so-called golden years! - and tottered stiffly toward the bushes.

At first he didn’t realize what it was. The thing was only in his peripheral vision and he was seeing it through anti-bug mesh. It made him jump because he thought somebody had caught him relieving himself outdoors. It was only when he had zipped up, face burning with embarrassment, that he turned and realized that this person had not seen anything at all.

There was already a small crowd of cops at the scene by the time Cardinal arrived. A pale, reedy man separated himself from the knot of people and began filling out a form that kept curling from his clipboard in the breeze. Once again Cardinal was in luck; this time the coroner was Dr Miles Kennan. He tore off the flimsy top sheet of the form and handed it to Cardinal.

‘We’ve got an obvious victim of foul play here, Detective.’ Kennan had a gentle, breathy voice. ‘I do hope you’ll give my regards to the Forensics Centre.’

‘“Cause of death,” Cardinal read from the form, “gunshot and/or blunt trauma”?’

‘You’ll see what I mean when you take a look,’ Kennan breathed. ‘Either would have killed him eventually, but you’ll need a pathologist to tell which one actually did him in.’ The doctor swatted at his neck. ‘God, I hate black flies.’

‘Time of death?’

‘You’ll have to ask the Centre that one. I’d

guess he’s been dead between twelve and twentyfour hours. But even that’s a very rough guess.’

‘All right. Thanks, Doctor.’

Cardinal stepped under the crime-scene tape. Arsenault and Collingwood were down on hands and knees, evidence bags in hand. Delorme was on her cell phone, apparently on hold.

‘Forensic?’ Cardinal asked.

She nodded.

‘Who called us?’

‘Local artist. He doesn’t know anything.’

Delorme spoke into the phone. ‘All right, Len. Thanks.’ She hung up. ‘I asked Weisman if someone from ballistics could stay late.’

‘It’s already late.’

‘Yeah, that’s what Weisman said.’ Delorme shrugged. ‘I charmed him to death.’