The Summoner: (11 page)

He scanned the throng of worshippers, trying to block out the pitiful sounds of the animal. What he saw provided no relief. The crowd had disintegrated into a frenzied mass of depravity. Earthen jugs made their way around the crowd, burgundy liquid pouring into screaming mouths. Some danced as if possessed, bodies jerking and eyes rolling until the whites showed. As Taps had warned, some began coupling on the ground at the feet of the other worshippers.

A man approached Nya with wild eyes and extended arms, mouth agape in bestial delight. Grey pulled her aside and shoved the man in the back. He sprawled into another group of people, who drew him in. Nya shuddered and drew closer to Grey.

He turned back to the clearing. The goat had been stripped of skin on its back and sides, and was now a red mass of exposed flesh. The
N’anga
performed yet another cut, and the goat’s eyes rolled. Before it swooned, the
N’anga
shoved something in his other hand under the animal’s nose. The goat’s eyes popped and it jerked into consciousness.

Grey’s eyes blurred with anger. He averted his gaze again, until Nya tugged on his arm and whispered at him to look.

The
N’anga
now stood beside the animal, head bowed, as if praying. He raised his head skyward, and then his arms. He lowered his arms and held the back of the goat’s head. He drew the back of the neck close to his hip, exposing the throat.

With another expert motion, a vicious slash, the goat’s head lolled. The
N’anga
dropped it and faced the crowd. Except for a few isolated shrieks, an eerie silence descended. Even the drums had quieted.

The
N’anga
began to pace in a slow circle around the altar, waving his hands in slow and methodical movements. The drums picked up again, and a low murmur built from the crowd, a throaty hint of sound that grew first into a hum, and then a rising chant, and finally into a steady, muscular roar that dominated even the drums.

Nya turned to Grey with startled eyes. He cocked his head one time, letting her know he was equally confused as to the meaning of the two-syllabled word the worshippers were chanting.

E-su,
they shouted again and again, throwing the word into the air as if it were alive.

E-su!

Another narrow path opened, lined on either side by the frenzied horde of worshippers. Grey waited with dulled senses, pushing what was happening to the same place he put the violence.

What he saw next snapped him into a desperate focus. His adrenaline spiked and his eyes fixed on the approaching procession in disbelief. On what two more men in white linen were leading down the corridor towards the
N’anga
.

Not what, rather, but who.

They were leading a human being. A man.

15

“N
o,” Nya moaned.

E-su,
the crowd shrieked.

E-su!

The two new men wore masks, lesser versions of the one worn by the
N’anga
. The captive, a middle-aged Shona man, appeared to be walking forward of his own accord, in between the two men.

The noise from the crowd made it hard to hear. Grey leaned close to Nya’s ear. “Why isn’t he tied down? Maybe he’s here for some other purpose.”

A spark of hope lit her eyes. Grey took solace in his own rationalization; the alternative was unthinkable. Grey took the back of her arm and started picking through the crowd. They got within ten feet of the center before the crowd became too thick to move.

Grey and Nya arrived just as the bodyguards led the captive past. He was clothed in tattered workpants and a dirt-stained tank top, like he’d just been plucked from working in his vegetable plot.

The man’s face was a blank slate, a picture of calm amidst a sea of madness. His eyes were placid and serene, glossy, as if he were in a trance.

Grey grabbed Nya’s arm. “That man—did you see his face? He reminds me of the boy in Fangwa’s house.”

“If the
N’anga
… God, if he’s going to—we’ll have to do something.”

“I know.”

He and Nya were near the front, surrounded by worshippers. He knew the
N’anga
had spotted them, and that he wasn’t worried. Grey now knew why these ceremonies were held in the middle of nowhere.

He could think of only one thing that might give them a chance, an improbable plan he almost discarded as soon as he conceived it. Too many worshippers surrounded them, too many men stood between him and the
N’anga
.

But he couldn’t stand there and watch
that
happen.

“Nya, did you bring a gun?”

She nodded without looking away from the scene unfolding within the circle. The two assistant priests had led the man to the
N’anga
. The
N’anga
traced his hands in the air above and around the man’s head.

“I need you to give it to me,” Grey said.

“You know the rules of the investigation.”

“Do you want to watch that man die?”

Her head snapped around, as if awakening from a trance of her own.

“We don’t know he’s going to kill him.”

“I think we can safely bet on it. And unless you think you can do something about it, I want you to give me your gun.”

“What do you plan to do? Kill the
N’anga
? We’ll be ripped to shreds by these people, and so will that man.”

“I’m not planning on killing him. I’m planning on holding him hostage and taking him out of here.”

Her eyes roamed the crowd. “You’ll never make it past the bodyguards.

“You should start moving to the back of the crowd. If this goes down, get out of here and get help.”

She drew her handgun and handed it to Grey. “You mustn’t do this unless you have to.”

E-su!

E-su!

The unfamiliar word rang in their ears, the crescendo of the drums rose higher, the frenzy of the crowd escalated to an impossible din.

One of the assistants brought the
N’anga
a stone jar, and the
N’anga
left the captive standing alone next to the altar. The man didn’t move, his body rigid as if held erect by an unseen force.

The
N’anga
tipped the jar and poured a viscous red liquid onto the ground. Grey knew it was the same liquid that had flowed freely for the past hour. The
N’anga
walked in a wide circumference, using the man and the altar as the center, circumscribing another, smaller circle within the clearing. He then walked around the circle of blood, this time staying outside of it, making continuous hand motions as he moved.

When the
N’anga
reached his starting point he stopped and faced the man. He brought his hands up, palms inches apart and facing each other, then brought them together in a swift clap.

The movement had an immediate effect on the man. The rigidity in his body lessened so abruptly that he almost fell, as if he’d just awakened from a deep sleep and had to regain his footing.

The man took in his surroundings, and all traces of calm vanished. His mouth gaped, and he bellowed and ran in the opposite direction from the
N’anga
, directly towards Grey and Nya.

The man reached the outside of the inner circle and lunged to step across the thick swath of blood spattered on the soil. Instead of reaching the other side, his body stopped in midair and bounced backward as if he’d run into a wall.

The man slowly rose. He ran forward and was again repelled, just before the line of blood, by what appeared to Grey to be thin air. Grey watched with a slack jaw, a tingling coursing through him.

The man’s expression turned from confusion to terror. The
N’anga
watched impassively as the man approached the edge of the circle and probed the air, his hands stopping, palms out, each time they reached the empty space above the edge of the inner circle. He looked like a mime inscribing in mid-air. Were it not for his initial attempts, when he’d tried to run out of the circle and was thrown back, and the look of horror on his face as he clawed at the invisible barrier, Grey might have written it off as pretense.

But this man was not acting. He screamed, he beat the empty air with his fists, he made furtive glances around the circle as if expecting something to surprise him from behind.

The drums grew louder, and the crowd surged in excitement, feeding off the man’s attempts to escape.

E-su!

E-su!

The
N’anga
waved his hands, and a thin mist rose out of the ground inside the circle. Grey’s eyebrows rose, and he saw Nya staring open-mouthed at the scene, her face mired in fear and disbelief.

The fog rose to the man’s waist, and Grey gripped the gun. The
N’anga
ceased his hand movements. The man wheeled around the circle, searching for escape, making pleading motions towards the
N’anga
and the crowd.

Just as the fog rose high enough to obfuscate the captive from view, the
N’anga
sprang to life again. He made an exaggerated sweeping motion with his arms, and the crowd hushed. Screaming from inside the circle pierced the night sky, accompanied only by the throb of the drums. Nya dug her nails into Grey’s arm.

Grey wondered how much longer he could bear the intimate stab of the man’s screams, although what was there to do about it? As far as he could tell, the man was alone in the circle.

The
N’anga
thrust his arms skyward once again and roared at the top of his voice, above the drums and the screams, drawing out the word into two thunderous syllables.

Eee-suuuuuu!

The screaming inside the circle stopped. The drums died as well, and after a few moments of silence, Grey’s pulse spiked.

Why had the screaming stopped? He tried in vain to see through the fog, but it was too dense.

The
N’anga
spread his arms like wings, and the fog began to dissipate as quickly as it had arrived. It grew thinner and thinner as Grey strained to see into it. When it was gone the
N’anga
dropped his arms.

Except for the bloody remains of the goat on top of the altar, the circle was empty.

The crowd erupted, more brazen than ever. The drums thundered back to life. Grey stared at the circle. He turned to Nya, saw the shock in her eyes, and they turned together towards the clearing.

The worshippers next to them began to writhe. Grey grabbed Nya and she tore her eyes away from the circle. They pivoted to claw back through the crowd, and found themselves inches away from the zealous eyes and scattered hair of two women. Before Grey and Nya could react, the women spewed liquid into their faces.

Grey jerked back. He rubbed the liquid out of his eyes and coughed it out of his mouth. He wiped his face with his shirt and opened his eyes. He looked at Nya, then blinked and took a step back.

Nya’s face was melting.

He closed his eyes and held them shut, then opened them again. The horns on the
N’anga’s
mask extended many feet higher than Grey knew them to be, and the colors and shapes of the crowd had taken on a surreal cast, as if he’d stepped into a Dali painting. The world tilted and blurred, merging with the drums, the chanting, and the smell of sweat and blood to stage a concerted assault on Grey’s senses.

Nya groaned. “What did they do to us?”

Grey kept his hands ready in front of him, but he was growing weaker. He tried to use Nya’s blurred shape as a focal point, he grasped onto her and fought to keep his grip on sanity, fought to control the enervating effect of whatever drug threatened to overwhelm him.

He dropped to a knee. Nya sagged in his arms, and Grey let her sink to the ground. He couldn’t hold her. He looked at the threatening crowd and then down at Nya.

He crumpled to the ground beside her, and remembered no more.

16

T
he empty emerald bottle slipped from Viktor’s hands. He knew dawn had come and gone only from the weak light filtering through the drapes.

He also knew that, sometime during the strange and reality-warping loneliness that arrives with deepest night, the darkness of remembered past had interred him once again.

Viktor had studied religion all his life. He had come of age under the secular aegis of Communist Czechoslovakia, and he’d performed his studies secure in his agnostic fortress, comfortably removed from the provincial behavior of the subjects of his textbooks and lectures. He’d abhorred the repressive government, but embraced his country’s disdain of organized religion. He thought his scholarship would help end the blight of dogma once and for all.

A phone call from London, twenty years ago, led to the investigation that rattled his worldview.

Viktor had recently completed a series of lectures at Cambridge on West African religion. A few weeks later, an Inspector from Scotland Yard contacted him and asked if he’d be willing to assist in an investigation involving a ritual murder. Viktor had agreed, pleased to put his esoteric knowledge to good use.

He arrived at Paddington Station, met with forensics, and the insanity began. What he thought he knew of religion became husks of prosaic drivel delivered in the drone of tired scholars. As he stood over the waterlogged, headless body of the Nigerian boy in the London morgue, he realized his real education had just begun.

It was his first case, and one of the few that still gave him nightmares. The boy had been mutilated, skin flayed, digits missing, organs removed. The sight of the body had scarred him. But what brought the nightmares was what he’d learned about the practitioners of Juju during the course of the investigation. That the men who’d done this thing did it not because they were evil, but because they believed in its power.

They sacrificed out of religious conviction rather than cruelty
, he had once lectured. Until the investigation, until those lengthy interrogations in grimy police rooms, he had never really understood the terrifying import of those words. But there had not been a shred of remorse in the eyes of the suspects. There had only been belief.