The Triangle and The Mountain: A Bermuda Triangle Adventure (27 page)

“Of the mist? How would getting into a longboat help them?”

“He thinks that a sailor went up a mast and made a
discovery.”

“Which was?”

“That there was a mist that enveloped the boat, just like
ours, but that it was not a general mist. It only clung the boat itself. The
top of the main mast or of all the masts were sticking out of it and he
realised that when he climbed up there.”

“I see where you are going with this. You want me to climb
up the mast for nothing. I’m not going to.  I really don’t think anything is
amiss. We just need to replace some computer equipment, that’s all.”

“I’m more than a little worried here, Grant. Aren’t you?
Just climb up there and have a look. At least then we will know.”

“It might not tell us anything,” said Grant. “Sometimes the
mist is low but sometimes it can be a hundred metres high.” He took a deep
breath and continued with finality. “You know what, we need to get this rudder
hung as well. We’ve been sitting here a long time now. How about I climb up
after we’ve finished with the rudder. It will only take another two hours or
so. You need to give me a hand.” He fished the file from a pocket of his
shorts.

“What if something happens before we are done?” asked
Madeleine, not moving. “Something had happened to people after they had
witnessed these very same things. We know that.”

Grant studied his crew for a moment. “You mean
you
do. On the other hand … I’m not going to fight with you over this,” he said.
“The most important thing on a boat is not the equipment anyway. It is the quality
of the spirit between the crew. I know how important this is to you. Let’s go.”
He found his climbing harness and strapped it on.

He hopped onto the main boom and then caught a halyard above
his head in the jumar clamps. “And I thought I was done with this,” he said as
he moved his feet into the straps and pushed up with his legs. He took his first
break only ten metres up. Two days before he could do fifteen. Once again he
regretted letting himself go while he partook of the finer pleasures of St
Martin. Sailing can be terribly demanding on the body and you needed to be fit.
He sat back in the canvas harness and held on to the mast. The mist was so
thick that he could only barely make out Madeleine where she stood on deck. He
waved an arm through the soup around him. He had seen fog of a more brilliant
white. This one was more mayonnaise-like. He took a deep breath to get the
smell of it but it was odourless. Then he pumped upwards once more. He was
certainly not scared. This was just something to get behind him so that he
could continue with the assembly of the new rudder. His whole perspective
changed, however, just before he reached the top of the mast.

“Hey, Madeleine!” he called.

“I can’t see you but I can hear you,” she answered from
below.

“I’m out of the mist, but it is very strange. It’s as if the
boat is wrapped in a ball of cotton wool. I can clearly see the ocean all
around us.”

“Isn’t that what I told you?” said the voice from below.
“It’s what I suspected.”

He rappelled down inside seconds, going from bright sunshine
into a world where everything was a consistent dirty grey, all the way down to
the deck.

“You know I don’t believe in this stuff, so you have to be
careful with me now, but what, according to your stories, happens next?”

“Either the mist leaves us or it doesn’t.”

“What if it doesn’t?”

“Then I suppose we die.”

“How does that happen? I don’t feel anything.”

“From the stories that I remember it all happens in a flash,
in mid-sentence. It’s been witnessed by others who were in radio contact with
people who were in the mist when they disappeared.”

“This mist ends only a few metres beyond the stern,” he
said. “I could see our safety buoy bobbing in the sunshine behind us. That
could be the safest place to be.”

“The Marie Celeste again. How do we get there?”

“That’s the problem, isn’t it? We don’t have a dinghy or a
life raft left. We are basically stuck on the boat.”

“Which may disappear any second.”

 “Let me get this straight. Right now this grey mist is
sucking the energy out of everything on this yacht, including us, up to the
point where we will simply implode, disappear into a black hole?”

“That’s what they say.”

Grant looked at his hands. There was nothing wrong – yet.

“I won’t give up like this,” he said. “There must be a way
out. You’d better tell me every story that you know.”

“I told you the stories just a few days ago. What more do
you want to know?”

“Anything that could help us get out of this cocoon. Tell me
about the people who were in this situation but who escaped.”

“There was the ship pulling the barge, of which I told you. They
escaped by simply going full steam ahead. Eventually the mist, or electronic
fog as Mr Hall called it, simply disappeared.”

“We are stuck,” said Grant. “We cannot use our engine
because the diesel has been contaminated. Not even the sails will work, because
there is no wind.”

“Perhaps you could call for help with the radio.”

“And say what? I’m not even sure that I believe this
myself.”

“Help might come too late anyway,” said Madeleine. “And it
might attack whoever comes as well.”

“Who else escaped?”

“Some aeroplanes flew out of it. I told you those stories as
well. There is a guy who flew out of it twice.”

“We are not a plane. What other stories do you have? Your
uncle disappeared when?”

“Fifteen years ago.”

“Who else was fairly recent?”

“There was the case of two men who took their yacht out one
evening just before Christmas to look at the lights of Miami. They radioed that
something had bumped them from below that jammed their rudder so that they
would need a tow. That was the last that anybody had heard of them. They did
not respond to radio calls after that. The Coast Guard was at their location
twenty minutes later but there was no sign of them or the boat. Not then, not
ever. As with the other boats and planes, not even debris was found. Why it
interested me was that this yacht also had built-in buoyancy, just like my
uncle’s ski-boat. It could not sink. The Coast Guard searched right through the
night and six more days on that location and downstream along the current. They
did not find as much as a life jacket.”

“OK, what else?”

“I don’t know, Grant. Two submarines also disappeared but
what does it help you?”

“Well, maybe it is useful to know that it operates under the
surface, on the surface and in the air. There is just no escape, unless you
move sideways fast. I remember you saying that this is a vortex thing, caused
by extreme meteorological conditions.”

“That is one theory.”

“It makes perfect sense. You have to actually live through a
hurricane to understand the incredible violence in it. Some limit somewhere is
bound to be crossed. When you say that this is only one theory, what else is
there?”

“Only one more that I know of, which goes like this. There
are reports of ships that came through here that had engine trouble and became
becalmed like us now. In the silence the sailors heard singing.”

“Singing?”

“Yes, singing by mournful African voices. Some people could
hear it very clearly. It gave rise to this alternative theory.”

“Which is?”

 “In the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries many slave
ships passed through these waters. Since it was not long before the ships would
disembark their slaves, the captains would seek out the old and the sick and
throw them overboard. They would then claim from insurance and make a tidy sum
of money. The story is that there were some African sorcerers amongst these
slaves that were thrown overboard. While they and their companions were being
ripped to pieces by the sharks they, or he or she, pronounced a curse on all
shipping that passed through here. The grey mist and its effects are all the
result of that curse.”

“You cannot expect me to believe in sorcerers. It’s the stuff
you find in that Harry Potter movie you mentioned the other day.”

“I’m only telling you how the people of the Caribbean see
it. Did you know that almost all Caribbean people are of African descent?”

“Yes, that’s common knowledge. What is the point?”

“An important one. The major belief system on the islands is
Vodun, which comes from Africa.”

“You mean Voodoo.”

“The Voodoo that you see in the movies is only a very small
part of it. Vodun is the ancient African belief in a Creator and subordinate
spirits or sons, which is not unlike Christianity and which is why the Vodun
faith was to an extent easily absorbed by the Catholic faith. People of the
Caribbean pray to the Saints but some of their Saints are actually Vodun
personae.”

“What has this got to do with the electronic fog?”

“I’m trying to explain to you how I as a Catholic understand
the way people believe on the islands.”

“How they believe in sorcerers?”

“Yes, because we know them in our own society. It works like
this. Every person, according to Vodun, has an external spirit attached to him
or her. Most spirits are good spirits, but some, only a small number, are bad.
These are the spirits who make people do bad things, like the voodoo you see in
the movies. Actually, the movies pale to the reality of these people and their
spirits and what they do. The Vodouisants call them
bakor
. We are
familiar with the power of these people, which is why many believe the story of
the curse.”

“Where do they get their power from?”

“The institution of the
bakor
came from Africa with
the ancestors. The evil spirits move from one generation to the next. How do they
get their power? They are known to kill people, especially children. They then
control the immense power of these souls by manipulating portions of their
bodies for their own purposes.”

“Are you saying that they can cause the electronic fog and manufacture
an actual black hole? That is attacking the very foundations of the universe! How
and why would they do that?”

“We are talking about things so evil that they oppose the
universe itself.”

“Incredible. How do you break this
bakor
power?”

“The priests of Vodun, called
houngans
and
manbos
have rituals to oppose the power of the
bakor
. Also, there are people in
the Catholic Church who practice exorcism. By working together, and by
apologizing to the souls of the slaves who worked with the
bakor
we
broke the power of the curse. That is why these incidents have been all but
gone for quite a number of years.”

“You said ‘we’ now for the second time. Don’t tell me you
are part of this. You are getting just a little weird.”

“I was taught by somebody very special. My grandmother was
the most beautiful woman of her generation in the Caribbean. She was a mixture
of Spanish, French and African. So she was creole. She was also a
manbo
,
a priestess, just like the one you saw on St Martin. When I was small, I learnt
a lot from her. I was her assistant, a
houngan
.”

“And I thought you were all English.”

“Like most people on the islands, I am a mix. My tan does
not go away. Bermudans don’t like to think of themselves as part of the
Caribbean but it is not exactly true. Over the centuries there has been a lot
of mixing. And in case you’ve wondered, I am a good Catholic. I have not had
any contact with Vodun since my grandmother died and that was many years ago.”

“So you are not a priestess?”

“No.”

“Pity.” Grant jumped up, grabbed a spinnaker pole and ran
around the boat, stabbing the water with it.

“Get away!” he shouted.

“What are you doing?” Madeleine asked after his second round
of the boat.

“I just put two and two together. Maybe these slaves are
pulling us down.”

“I’ve never heard of that method before and it does not seem
to work because the mist is still there.”

“Then what do we do?” asked Grant. He brandished the pole
and poked into the mist with it. “Don’t you remember a ritual or something?”

“I think we need so start with
you
,” said Madeleine.
“The
manbo
said that you have brought the curse back to the Triangle.”

“That’s what she said but what does it mean? I thought we
had covered that angle during the storm.”

“Since then things have been milling around in my
subconscious. I have put all these things out of my head for so long, but now I
am beginning to think in that way again. How old did you say these two farmers
were?”

“A hundred and ten and a hundred and five.”

“That is extraordinary. Also, you have a very special gift,
isn’t that so?”

“I don’t call it a gift. I’m just lucky.”

“You have not always been lucky. Didn’t you say the old lady
introduced you to the idea of the stock market?”

“She did, yes.”

“Were you lucky before then? Winning at the casinos all the
time?”

“Not that I know of. What are you steering at?”

“Has it ever occurred to you that we have a coincidence here
of some very extraordinary lucky people? The old people and yourself?”

“Not really.”

“Has she ever asked you for anything in return for you being
so lucky and for the farm they gave you.”

“No, only small favours.”

“Like what?”

“Well, they are understandably very hurt by the fact that
their family had deserted them but they still wanted some contact. They just
wanted small things from them, little personal things.”

“Like what?”

“Stupid things. You know these are old people and the
thinking is not so clear. She said she wanted anything that they would not
miss, like a sock or a handkerchief, things you expect to lose.”