Shape-Shifter (2 page)

Shakespeare was too stunned to object. He went to the window and peered through one of the slats. His heart gave a flip. Parked on the other side of the street, opposite his house, was an unmarked car. Lolling up against it were three bulky Afro-Guyanese men, all wearing dark glasses. At the same time, he saw his friend, Denzil Bennet, bounding up the wooden steps to his front door:

‘Why you sittin’ in the dark?’ enquired Denzil, helping himself to a glass of rum. Paranoia prevented Shakespeare telling Denzil what had happened:

‘I got a headache … The light hurtin’ me eyes.’ Denzil flopped onto the sofa and ran his hands through his manic bush of frizzy, greying hair:

‘You hear the latest story about Hogg?’ he asked.

Shakespeare eyed him suspiciously:

‘What story?’ Had Denzil heard something, already? He came and sat on the sofa.

‘Remember how we laugh at the Cuffy statue?’ Denzil continued.

Shakespeare did indeed remember how they had laughed when the statue of the great slave leader had been unveiled. The statue was grasping a scroll in his hand, held at the hip, pointing upwards, but at such an angle that when the covering flag was pulled off, it appeared to a section of the crowd that Cuffy was holding himself with an enormous erection. Shakespeare recalled how he and Denzil had joined in the rippling titter that swept through the onlookers. Just now, however, he was unwilling to admit ever having laughed at anything organised by the government.

‘Well,’ Denzil went on, ‘the story go so. One night Hogg’s personal aide was contemplating the statue when the statue start to speak: “Get me a horse,” says Cuffy. “You can’t speak – you’re a statue!” says the aide. “Get me a horse. In Berbice in 1763, I used to ride a horse.” Well, the aide is so frighten, he run all the way to Hogg private residence. “Cuffy speakin’,” he says. “The statue speakin’. Come look.” Now, as you know, Hogg is an extremely superstitious man. He consult an obeah woman and all that foolishness. Apparently, she give him a special ring whose stone change colour when ‘e life in danger. So now Hogg think ‘e bein’ given a special sign an’ ‘e pull on his pants an’ come back with the aide to the statue. “Fool,” says Cuffy to the aide. “I said I wanted a horse, not a jackass.”’

Denzil let out a screech of laughter. Shakespeare remained silent. He felt sure that Denzil had been sent to trap him. Laughter in the present circumstances could be interpreted as a form of high treason.

‘You don’ think that funny?’ Denzil stared at Shakespeare in disbelief. ‘What’s the matter with you, man? That headache eat out you brain or what?’

‘I goin’ to my bed,’ announced Shakespeare, abruptly. ‘My head is hurtin’ me.’ Denzil shrugged and swallowed the last of his rum.

‘Tell me what you see in the street,’ demanded Shakespeare as Denzil opened the door.

‘There ain’ nothin’ in the street. Street empty. Go to bed, man. You sick.’

The door banged shut behind him, leaving Shakespeare in the gloom.

That night, Shakespeare tossed and turned under his single sheet like a cat in a sack. He suffered the most horrible nightmare. He dreamed he was standing on the sea wall. All around him he smelled the detritus of crab and shellfish left there by fishermen. As he gazed out over the waters of the Atlantic, a black shape began to emerge from the sea. It grew larger and larger, laughing in a sinister manner as it became gigantic. Then it sank back down in the sea and he saw the letters
H O G G
written in the sky. Shakespeare woke sweating from the dream. Too frightened to go back to sleep, he spent the rest of the night hugging up his knees with his arms, fretting over what to do.

The next morning, Shakespeare miserably cleared out his office, scooping his tapes and books into a large canvas bag. Horace Tinling watched him with an expression somewhere between mock sympathy and outright superciliousness. Replacing him in the recording studio was a smartly dressed, young black woman, leaning towards the microphone as she gave out a recipe for Yam Foo-Foo. On his way home, he called at his grandmother’s house in Albuoystown. Nibbling at breadfruit cooked in coconut milk, he told her the whole sequence of events, including the dream of the night before. She was a woman of few words:

‘Leave the country,’ she said.

News travels fast in a country without the benefits of advanced communications technology. The whole of that Saturday and the following day, nobody came to call on Shakespeare. None of his friends appeared. The telephone remained mute. It was as if, overnight, he had become a leper. Taking advantage of the unaccustomed solitude, Shakespeare pored over his dilemma. He went over every detail of what had happened to him. He recalled Denzil’s scorn of Hogg’s superstitious cast of mind. He recalled Hogg’s appointment at the radio station. Late on Sunday evening, the first faint inkling of an idea came to him, an idea for his deliverance so wild and fantastical that he put his hand over his mouth and shook his head. ‘No, I couldn’t,’ he thought. ‘Yes, I could. No, it’s outrageous … Yes, I will.’

As the Monday morning vendors laid out their pyramids of scarlet wiri-wiri peppers and green water melons for the day’s sale, Shakespeare was already knocking at the door of his grandmother’s house.

‘You wan’ coffee-tea, cocoa-tea or tea-tea? I ain’ got milk.’ She shuffled round the tiny kitchen.

‘Tea-tea,’ said Shakespeare. It was his next request that she balked at. She jutted out her jaw and looked at him askance:

‘Why you want to borrow me clothes?’ she asked, suspiciously.

Shakespeare avoided an explanation. He cajoled and begged his grandmother until finally she gave in and let him depart with one longish skirt, an old blouse with puffed sleeves, a headwrap and a pair of high-heeled shoes her daughter had abandoned there the year before.

On his way home, Shakespeare bought an old coconut. Once inside the house, he allowed the jalousies to remain shut and moved around in semi-darkness. Every now and then he checked through a slat to see if the unmarked car with its ominous occupants had reappeared. No sign of them. He emptied the tapes and books from his bag onto the sofa and replaced them with the clothes his grandmother had lent him; Then he chopped the coconut in half and cut out the white flesh with a small knife. After that, he spent some time banging the two halves of the shells together until they produced a sound that satisfied him. Then he placed those too inside the bag. He fetched an axe and that also went in the bag. ‘Now comes the difficult bit,’ he said to himself, and went over to the telephone. Several times he lifted the receiver and replaced it on the hook. Each time he put it back, he would walk round the room rehearsing a slightly different version of what he planned to say. Finally, he picked up the phone and dialled the number of Vice-President Hogg’s office. The secretary answered.

‘Good morning.’ The tone of Shakespeare’s voice was fawning. ‘This is Comrade Shakespeare McNab speakin’. I am so sorry to trouble you – I would not dream of troublin’ you if it was not a matter of extreme urgency. I have had a warning dream concerning the Vice-President. My dead mother appeared to me in a dream last night warning me that he is in imminent danger and I felt it my duty to pass the message on.’

There was a moment’s hesitation on the other end of the line, then came the snappy reply:

‘I do not take messages from dead people.’

Shakepeare’s brain raced. His entire plan would totter if the message did not get through:

‘No. The message is from
ME
,’ he said, hastily. And to ensure that the Vice-President did, indeed, receive the information, he added, ‘I shall, of course, be writing to confirm what has happened, but I thought I should pass it on as quickly as possible, lest anything should occur before the letter reaches him. I should not like to be the one responsible for withholding that sort of information.’ That should fix her, thought Shakespeare, who discovered to his surprise that he was on his knees in front of the telephone.

‘All right.’ The voice was reluctant. ‘I shall inform the Comrade Vice-President if you think it is really necessary.’

‘Thank you,’ said Shakespeare. ‘I think it is.’ His scalp was tingling all over as he hung up.

More than once, during the rest of the afternoon, Shakespeare decided to abandon his plan altogether. It was too risky. Too much was at stake. It would be wiser to do what his grandmother suggested and flee the country. Nobody would offer him a decent job if he could not get his old one back, and if this scheme failed, he could say goodbye to the broadcasting world forever. All the same, perhaps it was worth one last attempt.

As dusk fell, a shortish man could be observed sizing up and examining the trees that bordered a narrow stretch of road some distance from the city. To his right, the road led to the entrance gates of Vice-President Hogg’s private residence. The house itself remained out of sight at the end of a long drive. To his left, the road extended for a hundred yards or so until it met the main highway. Nothing but a tangle of trees and shrubs stood on either side of it. Overhead, a host of bats sewed up the great opal and silver clouds with their flitting, looping trajectories. Half way between the gates and the end of the road, Shakespeare spotted the tree that he wanted. It was a young, slender casuarina tree. He took the axe from the bag and began to chop at-the base of the trunk. With the sound of each chop, his heart leapt with fear and he glanced up and down the road. No one came. When the trunk was half severed, Shakespeare looked at his watch and decided to wait. He hid out of sight, in the bushes. The tree stayed upright. At about the time he had estimated, a chauffeur-driven limousine turned off the main road and made its stately way up the rutted earth track towards the entrance to Hogg’s estate. The driver stopped to unlock the gates and then the car disappeared up the drive. It was nearly dark.

‘Quick. Quick. Is now or never,’ whispered Shakespeare to himself, his face set in a wild grimace. With all his might, he pushed at the trunk of the casuarina tree until it fell in a graceful faint, blocking the road. Shakespeare dissolved back into the bushes, then remembered he had left his bag by the tree, ran to retrieve it and slipped on some wild tamarind pods. He cursed, but the pods gave him an idea. He picked one up and shook it. It rattled. He slipped it under his arm and melted once more into the trees. The sky had turned from silver to grey to black.

Vice-President Hogg gazed moodily from the open back window of his limousine as the driver came to a halt, the branches of the toppled casuarina tree waving in his headlights:

‘I have to get some help to move this obstruction,’ apologised the driver after inspecting the offending tree. Hogg grunted his assent and waited while the chauffeur sped off towards the main road.

It was then that Hogg began to hear things. First of all he heard the sound of soft, ploppy bangs on the roof of the car which he dismissed as something falling from the trees. Then, what appeared to be the piercing whistle of a bird assailed his ears, a whistle that ended in an unearthly rattle. Two minutes later, from his right, he heard a loud munching sound from the bushes. Almost immediately, from his left he heard a high-pitched voice calling:

‘Hello, daalin’.’

Silence followed. Hogg’s small eyes shifted from side to side. Nothing happened. Hogg permitted himself to relax a fraction when the silence was broken by the clip-clop of hooves along the dried earth road. Hogg thrust his head out of the car window. What he saw appalled him. Beyond the section of road, illuminated by the car headlights, he could just make out the figure of a woman. She wore some kind of headwrap and a whitish dress with puffed sleeves. She was approaching slowly with a lolloping, uneven gait. Worst of all, she was beckoning him with the crook of her first finger, beckoning him to follow her into the bushes. Hogg gave a little moan and fell on his knees in the back of the car. No sooner had he assumed this position than all hell seemed to break loose in the trees at the side of the car. He could hear shouts, the crashing of branches and the snapping of twigs, as if some enormous creature was threshing about. Then Hogg heard a familiar voice yelling:

‘Go way! Leave him alone, I tell you.’ More silence.

Fearfully, Hogg raised his face to the window where it confronted the equally tense face of Shakespeare McNab.

‘Praise the Lord. You safe.’ Shakespeare panted. ‘Did you get my message? I came to warn you in case the message din reach.’

Hogg wiped a film of sweat from his face with a handkerchief. The breast of his khaki jacket rose and fell as he stared, mesmerised, at Shakespeare, his jaw slack.

‘Might I get in the car? I think it would be safer for both of us.’ Shakespeare tried to control his breathing rate. Hogg shifted to the far side of the back seat and Shakespeare slipped in beside him:

‘Lord a mercy. All these years I bin tellin’ stories about these things an’ I never really believe them. Now I know it all true. Lucky I was here. I fought her off. You know who that was?’

Hogg’s eyes swivelled towards Shakespeare. They seemed to contain some sort of warning, but Shakespeare could not stop:

‘La Diablesse.’

‘Who?’ asked Hogg, confused.

‘La Diablesse.’ Shakespeare lowered his voice to a whisper. ‘That must have been the warning my mother was trying to give you in the dream. Did you get the message I left?’

Hogg nodded.

‘La Diablesse. You know. She got one straight foot and one cloven hoof. She lure people to their death in the forest.’

A rumbling laugh emerged from Hogg’s nether regions. Shakespeare quailed. The plan was not working. Hogg didn’t appreciate the seriousness of an encounter with La Diablesse. Shakepeare’s own heroism would go for naught. He shot a worried glance at Hogg’s enormous, shaking bulk.

‘Jesus God,’ said Hogg. ‘I thought it was my wife.’

The strength oozed out of Shakespeare’s limbs. Never had it occured to him that Hogg would mistake the apparition for the ghost of his wife. He attempted to put the matter right:

‘If you will forgive me for contradicting you, Comrade Vice-President, I am sure that what I saw was La Diablesse. When I shouted and shake the branches, she jus’ fade back into the trees.’