A Vision of Fire (11 page)

“This is very interesting,” the madame murmured to Caitlin. “Damballa is active in your life.”

Caitlin did not know who or what “Damballa” meant and did not feel disposed to speak. She remained absolutely still.

“He protects the weakened,” the madame continued. “This is why I brought him.”

Caitlin noticed that she did not say “the weak” but “the weakened.” It was an interesting distinction. The woman placed her bag on Gaelle's desk and reached into it. Slowly and with both hands, she
brought out a clean white bag that looked like a hotel pillowcase. Its end was twisted, curled over, and secured with white ribbons.

“Enock,” the madame said.

Her son stood quickly, looked around, and seized the bottle of water Aaron had been drinking from. He took the saucer from Gaelle's cold cup of tea and poured a few tablespoons of water into it. Then he placed the saucer near the madame and went back to his seat.

As Madame Langlois unfastened the white ribbons, Caitlin felt cold fear grab her throat and heart.

“Fear is respect,” the madame said, as if from a distance.

She opened the pillowcase and slowly, almost lovingly, pulled out a tightly coiled snake.

Caitlin was barely breathing.

“The serpent is in pain,” the madame told Caitlin. Then she leaned toward the reptile and murmured, “Damballa is grateful for your sacrifice.”

Caitlin could not pull her eyes from the snake. It was not very big, and its scales were a chalky gray with copper spots shaped like a leopard's. She remembered from one of Jacob's projects that a snake only coiled tightly when it was very afraid. She saw the faintest of trembles across the snake's skin. Had that been what she felt through the bag? But the bag was too thick . . . The madame held the snake near the water but it made no move toward it, no flick of the tongue to sense its surroundings.

“Why is it acting like this?” Caitlin asked. “Are you torturing it?”

“These tiny hands cannot harm her,” the madame said. “She is doing Damballa's work.”

Madame Langlois slowly, stealthily stepped to Gaelle. The girl was crying silently and she craned backward as the snake neared her. Suddenly red liquid oozed from the snake's eyes, nostrils, and mouth, dripping onto the floor. Caitlin felt bile rise in her throat. Some snakes, she remembered, could bleed from their orifices at will, in the presence of a predator. This snake was terrified . . . specifically of Gaelle.

Jack London flashed through Caitlin's mind.

The madame stepped away from the girl but the snake continued to bleed. She pointed at Caitlin's left hand. “Place your fingertips on her.”

“Me?” Caitlin said, mortified.

“Yes, you who knows so much.”

Caitlin tentatively lifted her hand and saw that her palm was literally dripping sweat. She thought about holding off, posing some of the myriad questions that flashed through her mind, but warily and somehow irresistibly she rested her fingertips on the snake's outermost coil—

Suddenly Caitlin slammed backward on her heels and the world turned red. She was choking, suffocating on clouds, thick, billowing sulfur. She struggled for breath, tried to scream. She felt every major and minor muscle in her body tense and twist, as if she were the snake holding itself tight. And then she felt
presences
. That was the only way her brain could describe it. Shades, wraiths, something ephemeral but
there
.

People? Robes filled with wind? Red flashes of fire and lightning, illuminating sharp spires of pale rock.

Everything turned then, twisting in circles, hoops within hoops. And in the center was a terrible face with huge eyes. Its massive mouth gaped at her in a horrific smile. She flung up her right arm against it and all in a second the robes and the wind, the fire and rock, all of it seemed to ram through her arm and out of her hand—

Across the room, Gaelle fell hard against the wall.
Was she thrown?
Suddenly Caitlin could see again. She could see Gaelle against the wall, her whole body spasming. Her arms flailed sideways as she shouted unintelligible words. And then she started screaming and screaming.

Marie-Jeanne shouted and dove for her daughter, attempting to cradle her in her arms. Aaron followed, trying to support her head. He was shouting at the madame, “Stop it!” Outside fifty voices rose,
some in angry shouts, some in desperate songs. Some pounded on the front door. Caitlin looked behind her at the faces pressed against the window, shouting. Then she noticed the madame. The old woman was choking.

Almost unconsciously, Caitlin stood and hurried to the madame's side. She placed a hand on her back at the base of her neck. The woman was freezing, goose bumps rising from nape to shoulders. Incredibly, the madame was still holding the snake in her right hand. Forcing her fingers into the woman's mouth, Caitlin worked it open, feeling for an obstruction—but there was none. Then suddenly the madame inhaled deeply, filling her lungs, then coughed, clearing her throat. As if this was an everyday occurrence, she nodded in thanks. She rose to her knees and bowed over Gaelle. Gripping the serpent tightly in her right hand, she placed her left hand on the girl's ankle. A tremor passed through the older woman's body like an earthquake but her right hand held the snake steady.

Then, abruptly, it was over.

Gaelle, curling away from all the hands around her, compressed into a fetal position against the wall and cried. Someone shoved the front door open and rushed into the room. It was the priest. He did not touch Gaelle, and he did not pray over her, only spoke quietly to her. He was serving as a buffer against the eyes and mouths that hovered just outside the office.

A half hour later, a calm settled over the Anglade Charter Fishing office. It had been hard-won. There had been an epic shouting match between the crowd and two policemen, and another among the Catholic priest, Marie-Jeanne, Enock, and Aaron, all of whom disagreed about what Gaelle required next. Even the madame had raised her voice in outrage at one point, but in this she was with Caitlin: the two women had conspired by joined will and physical interference to move Gaelle out of the office into the back room. Caitlin settled the young woman onto a makeshift bed of waterproof boat cushions.

As Gaelle was shifting from tears to exhaustion, the madame en
tered the room to place the snake back in its pillowcase and set it on a shelf where Gaelle would not see it. Caitlin smoothed the girl's hair and forehead and wiped her cheeks until she fell asleep.

“She will protect,” said the madame, indicating the snake, then Gaelle.

Caitlin nodded. She did not understand what had happened, what role the snake had played, but there was no denying that there were powerful forces at work. She had endured nightmares after the encounter with Maanik and they were of a piece with the visions she had experienced here. Whatever the agent, it was strong enough to leap from one subconscious mind to another.

Right now, more than anything else, Caitlin wanted to curl up and sleep too. She knew the urge came not only from exhaustion but from fear. She just wanted to pretend none of this had happened. But she knew sleep would not be possible, not logistically or practically. Even now, when she closed her eyes, the memory of that manic face she had seen jerked her awake.

“You are okay,” Madame Langlois said to Caitlin.

Caitlin wasn't sure whether the woman meant she was healthy or acceptable. Either way, she thanked her. Then she looked her in the eye and said, “I feel bad for the snake.”

Madame Langlois nodded. “Me too. There are alternatives.”

“Are they dangerous? To either Gaelle or the snake?”

“No. I will make a
wanga
, what you call a fetish. It will do the job of the snake. I will do that today.”

Caitlin slowly nodded. Whether it was household gods in ancient Egypt, totems in Native American lore, or Catholic icons, she had always understood that people thought inanimate objects had great power. Like the placebo effect, their beliefs could change their minds and actions, thus changing their situations. But maybe there was more to it. She had felt the power through the snake, and she had seen the madame wrestle with that power and manage it. If the madame also wrestled power into an object . . .

But you don't believe any of this
, her rational side was telling her.
Snakes don't intercept energy any more than frogs cause warts or pulverized eye of newt can make someone fall in love
.
That woman was squeezing the poor creature, choking it, putting on a show that caused Gaelle to react
.
And that caused
you
to react. The power of suggestion, that's all this was. You brought back your nightmare because you were in a receptive, weakened state.

Maybe so
, Caitlin told her brain.
But maybe not.

Tentatively she asked, “Can an inanimate object handle that much . . . whatever it was? Energy? Pain?”

“It will take some doing,” the madame admitted, then unexpectedly smiled in a very tired way. “I will stay here with her. And if it must be, I will take some.” She shrugged. “That is the responsibility. That is the job.”

Caitlin smiled, closed her eyes, and rested the back of her head on the wall. From outside she heard people, tourists most likely, asking questions in a hodgepodge of languages. They reflected the confusion she felt. There was only one thing she knew for certain: like the universe itself, the scope of this mystery continued to confound, deepen, and expand.

“Doctor,” Madame Langlois said.

Caitlin opened her eyes to see the madame tearing a sheet of paper from a small notepad. She held out the page—it was Gaelle's drawing of crescent triangles. “Take it,” the madame ordered. “This is not of Vodou.”

CHAPTER 16

C
aitlin gasped herself awake on the plane.

The hum of the engines just outside the window had a soothing effect as she eased herself back . . .

From what?

The nightmare face from her vision in Haiti had violated her mind with startling ferocity . . . and contempt. She'd been dreaming of domestic familiarity: feeding Jacob's fish while he was away on a sleepover. Then the awful
thing
appeared, leering with its hideous grin and lifeless gaze, burning like a brand into her brain.

The late evening flight from Haiti to New York was nearly empty and she had full privacy in the dark. As much as she flew, Caitlin didn't really like it; she wished there were some way to ride outside the plane, with real air instead of this canned stuff, and a big, unobscured view. She turned to the side and brought her feet up on the seat next to her, curling into herself as Gaelle had curled against the wall.

Caitlin's breathing was shallow and quick, panicked, and she was shaking; she felt as though she were wearing a heavy winter coat zipped tight to the throat. She tried tapping the sides of her eye sockets with her fingertips and running a slightly cupped hand down her
breastbone, slowly, to focus on clearing her airway. Neither worked and she felt like she might start to cry. Caitlin had participated in too many street-corner arguments with dates, colleagues, a stalker, and decades of cab drivers; and Jacob, when he was little, had not been shy about calling attention to himself in restaurants when he felt frustrated. Over the last ten years Caitlin had become much more self-conscious about public displays.

Still shaking, she gently rested her head in her palms. No tears came. The magnitude of what she had experienced overcame her:
How do I help these girls? Are their experiences related—and if so, by what conceivable mechanism? What am I missing?

And then there was Vodou.

An eccentric woman and a fussy, arrogant son. A charmed snake, or was it a possessed snake or drugged snake? The entire thing could have been smoke and mirrors, the madame or her son working some kind of trickery while Caitlin was distracted by Gaelle. Even the vision, that face, may have been induced by a combination of suggestion and a burned or powdered drug that Caitlin had smelled or ingested. She had not applied any kind of scientific methodology to the experience. The data was useless.

This is too much for me
, she thought.
I'll give it to someone else, I'll refer Maanik to some other kind of expert.
Maybe what she needed, what they both needed, was exactly what the madame had provided: a figure of faith, not reason.

Yet another part of her was trying to get through with a message.

You have a choice.

It was the same choice that she had elucidated for every one of her clients at some stage of their therapy, because it was a fundamental part of being human and alive: you had to choose between being afraid and being angry.

Fear was a natural reaction, but if she chose to dwell in it, it would cripple her. She had to stop it before she spiraled downward. However, she was not naïve. For all kinds of evolutionary and biochemical
reasons, positive thinking and “Go, Caitlin!” pep talks alone were not going to do the trick here. They didn't have enough force to generate the necessary escape velocity.

So she chose anger. Not a knee-jerk, arrogant fury that could backfire and tie her in knots, but a clear, decisive, protective instinct. Whatever the cause of these episodes for Maanik and Gaelle, whatever she had felt herself, it was resulting in a certain torture, and that was unacceptable.

She sat up straight and turned on her seat light. Lowering the tray table in front of her, she pulled a pen and a few printouts from her bag. Flipping the printouts over, she prepared to write on their blank backs. What did Maanik and Gaelle's episodes have in common? What did they possess that she
was
familiar with, that she
did
have practice in treating?

Start with what
you
experienced
, she thought.

Freud believed that dreams were comprised of manifest and latent content. The manifest content was immediately recalled on waking and was thought to mask the true meaning of the dream: the forbidden, subconscious elements.

She found herself not writing but drawing. Before she knew it, she had accurately re-created the huge face and terrifying smile that had manifested in Haiti and woken her just moments ago. Now it was in front of her. Her mind had been throwing all kinds of words around to describe it—“otherworldly,” “evil,” “alien.” But the salient point was that the visual was real. Here it was, right before her.

What are you?
she demanded.

Suddenly the hair rose on the back of her neck and she felt cold all over. The fear was back—the same flavor of fear she had tasted outside her office building when she was certain she was being watched. Her skin tingled, prickled all over. She adjusted herself in her seat and peered slowly around the dark cabin. The hum of the engines was the only thing that felt safe and sane. The dark was the exact opposite. One of her professors once remarked, “Young people and animals are
instinctively afraid of the dark. What right have we to say they're wrong?”

They were not wrong. The stillness and blackness about her felt like just a few shallow breaths from death. Her reading light gave scope to the darkness everywhere else; specks of starlight revealed the vastness of the night outside. The hints of light were like a map to Caitlin: the breadth of what she knew measured against the expanse of what she did not know. That in itself was terrifying.

Maybe someone
was
watching. Maybe it was the flight attendant. Maybe it was this face from the Vodou-induced trance.

Caitlin at this moment rallied her anger and chose not to care. They, whoever they were, could watch all they wanted as long as they didn't interfere. She had work to do. She studied her drawing again and pulled out Gaelle's sketch to compare them. The triangle of crescents looked almost Celtic, not at all similar to this. She put away the sketch and stared at the nightmare face again for several minutes. She could not shake the feeling that there was something familiar about it. She closed her eyes and combed through all the cultures she had experienced through travel and research. It didn't seem like a mask, nothing like the horned, fanged Hannya figure of Noh theater. Intuitively she felt it was something carved. The Easter Island statues? No, that wasn't it. The mouth wasn't the same. This mouth had lips indicated by a line curving around eight or nine thick, oval teeth. Somewhere in Hawaii? In New Zealand, something from the Maori?

Tiki figures
, she recalled with a jolt. They had large mouths and eyes very similar to this. She whipped out her phone; took a photo of her drawing, wincing from the bright flash; and texted it to Ben with a message:
I saw this in connection with Gaelle. Long story. Polynesian influence?

Then Caitlin did what she had previously avoided. She walked herself through the trip from the time she got off the plane, making detailed notes on everything that she could remember, without gloss,
without explanation, and with only momentary hesitation when she reached her experience of the force that had thrown Gaelle against the wall. What could she even call it—energy? The Vodou push? She wondered if an electrical force could possibly account for it. It was worth researching later. She wrote until her hand cramped, until she was done. Folding the pages carefully, she numbered them in case they fell, then tucked them away before once again attempting sleep. Her mind would gather strength; it would not feed her dream demon, not if she could help it. She turned off the light.

Her last thought was of something she'd seen through the window of the Land Rover heading back to Port-au-Prince—a patch of new trees planted on one of the mountainsides. The government had recently announced it was going to replant Haiti's decimated forests. Caitlin hoped that the madame and her son would see it on their way back to the city and trust that fumbling, faulty human beings did sometimes create solutions.

• • •

Caitlin arrived home at two in the morning but her father was awake to open the door, allowing her to walk into a bright kitchen and a hug. She dropped her bag on the kitchen table and sat down.

“How is he?” she asked.

“Fine, fine,” Joe said. “A little quiet, maybe.”

“When?”

“Earlier tonight,” he said. “He just kind of stared out the window for, oh, two minutes or so. I left him. He snapped out of it.”

Caitlin felt a shiver. Two minutes. That's about how long she was in her bizarre trance.

Her father chuckled. “I'll tell you, though. He crowed like Peter Pan when he got me to eat kale.”

Caitlin returned to the moment. “Eat it and like it?”

Joe grinned. “It was better than I expected. Don't tell your mother.”

Caitlin chuckled. She opened her bag and sorted through it, separating items she would leave in the bag and items to put away.

“Cai, why don't you unpack in the morning? You look like you need as much sleep as you can get.”

She shook her head and kept sorting.

“How did things go down there?” he asked.

She stopped, looked at him sideways. “Dad, what's the weirdest thing that's ever happened to you? Something that didn't have an explanation.”

“Hunh.” He sat back and thought, staring around the room much like Caitlin did when she needed to think. He was a tall, broad-­shouldered man with close-set Irish blue eyes and a sort of permanent youthfulness. “Well,” he said, “to be honest, it was you.”

Caitlin stared at him in surprise.

“You had your own personality from the day you were born,” he went on. “Well, maybe the day after you were born. You were always such a watcher, big eyes studying everything, and with very little to say.”

“Mom said I was always quiet.”

“Quiet but not—what—not drowsy or dull. You were always alert. I could see something in your eyes. To your point, the question you asked, I don't know where souls come from but I know they exist. I saw yours.”

Caitlin felt tears in her eyes, the tears that had refused to come before.

Her father placed a hand on her shoulder. “What's on your mind? Did Haiti get to you?”

Caitlin shook her head. He stepped back. He knew not to pry, and she was relieved when he changed the subject.

“I remember you loved ghost stories when you were a kid,” he said. “You read every one you could get your hands on. I always wondered whether you'd seen one.”

Caitlin laughed. “Really? I remember the mythology books, Edith
Hamilton. Oh, and Nancy Drew and the haunted lighthouse or farmhouse or something like that.”

“Oh sure. We stopped letting you read them when you had nightmares.”

She turned back toward him. “I had nightmares?”

“Normal kid stuff,” he said. “That's what the doctor told us. We ended up giving all the books away and they stopped.”

It was Caitlin's turn to say, “Hunh.” She placed her papers on the “to put away” stack. Her drawing of the face was on top and Joe picked it up to look at it. He laughed.

“Where in the hell did you see this?” he asked.

“Do you recognize it? I think it's some kind of Polynesian tiki figure.”

He grinned. “It's not often that I get to tell you you're wrong.”

“What do you mean?”

He patted her hand and held up the drawing. “This is from your ancient past, kiddo.”