The Black Witch of Mexico (15 page)

Adam took a step back. It was like a scene from the Middle Ages. This time he let Luis lead him away.

“What’s going on?” Adam said once they were outside.

“It’s nothing,” he said. “come away now, it’s all right.”

They went back to the clinic and Adam sat down on the steps, listened to the chilling sounds still coming from the house. Luis sat there with him in the dark until it finally stopped. Neither of them spoke.

* * *

It was quiet. Bernard made his way back up the hill, using a flashlight to find his way along the uneven dirt lane.

“Was that what I thought it was?”

He stopped when he heard Adam’s voice. He swung the torch toward him. “I don’t know what you saw, Doctor Prescott. I hoped you wouldn’t see anything.”

“How could anyone sleep through that?”

Bernard came over, sat on the step next to Adam. “Luis can you make me a coffee please? Put a little whiskey in it, if you will.”

Luis went inside.

“You just performed an exorcism?”

“The family asked me to do it.”

“You really think that girl is possessed by the devil?”

“It’s not important what I think. It’s what they think.”

“I know that girl. Her mother brought her to see me a couple of days ago.”

“What did you think was wrong with her?”

“She has depression. I gave her some Zoloft.”

“Well they did no damned good, did they? If I didn’t do anything they’d go and see the Crow, and I don’t want him tampering with these poor people anymore than he does already.” Bernard put down the Bible and the stole and hung his head. “I don’t believe in demonic possession any more than you do. I believe the devil is inside us, and it’s a devil called belief. They believe she’s possessed and she believes she’s possessed and the only way to cure her is to make her believe something else. I needed to impress her subconscious, if you will. They all think I just threw out a devil so in the morning I believe she will be better. Satisfied?”

“It was just a charade, then?”

“You can call it that but what I did has a sound basis in western medicine.”

“Well they didn’t teach us that when I was an intern.”

“Didn’t they? You know what a placebo is?”

“It’s a sugar pill we give someone as a control in a patient study.”

“Don’t doctors also sometimes use them to deceive someone into making themselves better?”

“So what you did tonight, that was a placebo?”

“These people believe only
white prayer can unearth what has been buried by black prayer. If someone casts a spell on you, you cannot be cured any other way.”

“So that was your white magic?”

“They call it
el poder blanco
. If an impressionable teenage girl thinks the
brujo
has put a devil in her, she will make herself sick because of it. So it’s going to take something truly spectacular to stop her believing it, and then she’ll make herself better again.”

“Well, that was certainly spectacular.”

Luis brought Bernard his coffee. He drank it in silence then wandered back to his own house behind the church. Adam watched his flashlight weave between the houses and then disappear.

He sat there for a long time, staring at the shivering moon, but even when he finally took himself to bed, he could not sleep. He didn’t care if anyone else found comfort in it;
whatever gets you through the night
, as the saying went.

He turned on the flashlight and pointed it at the plain wooden crucifix on the wall above his bed. He sat up. He opened the drawers in the mildewed bedside stand; they were all empty except for a small Bible. He picked it up and opened it to a random page:

He replied, "Because you have so little faith. I tell you the truth, if you have faith as small as a mustard seed, you can say to this mountain, “Move from here to there' and it will move. Nothing will be impossible for you. "

He tossed it back in the drawer. If you have faith as small as a mustard seed? He supposed that was what Bernard meant--if Adam could make them believe him they would stop believing something else and it would solve the problem. He had to impress them more than the Crow and his little tricks.

“Well, we’ll see,” he murmured and turned off the flashlight and lay down again.

Everything he had ever believed was being challenged here.

He was still awake when the rooster started crowing and scrabbling in the dirt under his window. Perhaps he would go and visit one of the
curanderos
about his insomnia and have him wring its neck. He knew that at least would be a certain cure.

* * *

Two days later the girl was back, sitting on the bench in the waiting room next to her mother. When it was their turn he called them into the examining room and shut the door.

He remembered how he had last seen her, in her dimly lit bedroom, frothing at the mouth, screaming at the crucifix that Bernard held to her face.

She looked up and gave him an angelic smile.

“What can I do for you?” he said. “c
omo ayudate
?”

The mother held out the girl’s hand, took off the filthy rag she had tied around it. “She burned it on the pot,” she said.

“I’ll dress it,” he said.

Afterwards he asked her if there was anything else wrong. She said ‘no, everything was fine now.” He asked her about the depression. She said ‘oh no, Padre Bernardo took away the devil that was causing it. I am well now.”

They left.

He saw Father Bernard speaking to them outside, saw him pat the girl on the head and smile at her. He looked around and saw Adam watching him. Their eyes met for a moment. Bernard shrugged. He looked every bit as baffled as Adam did.

Chapter 34

As the weeks went by, there were more and more villagers coming to the clinic with strange maladies that they attributed to the effects of the
maldad negra
. If they had no money they would come to him looking for
el poder blanco
. More often he suspected they went up to the bluff, to visit the Crow and have the curse removed.

Adam decided it was time he went to take a look at the Crow for himself.

* * *

There was a full waiting room in the clinic that morning, as there was most days. Around midday a little boy was brought in with an anaphylaxis, he guessed from an insect bite. He was blue and wheezing. He gave him an adrenalin shot and within half an hour he was resting quietly with an intravenous line in place. His parents fell on their knees and prayed to God for the miracle.

He wanted to say to them: never mind God, what about the white witch of Boston?

The first moment he had alone was later that afternoon. Bernard had driven in to San Cristobal for supplies and Luis had slipped away for a siesta. He walked to the edge of the village and looked up the track that led to the Crow’s adobe house on the bluff.

He started up the path. It was narrow and rocky, followed the lip of the deep gully and the creek bed far below. Halfway up he stopped in his tracks, staring at the skull placed beside the path, a fat cigar jammed between its teeth. Another fifty paces further on there was an altar with the skin and skull of a snake and a cloth effigy with pins stuck in it.

The Crow’s house stood on its own. There was a dusty pick-up parked outside. A dog lay on its side on the veranda but as he came closer it picked up his scent. It jumped up and started howling. It was chained to one of the veranda posts or it would have attacked him.

He supposed that was as close as he was going to get unseen. The Crow came out and grabbed the dog by the scruff of the neck and dragged it back onto the veranda. Adam turned and started back down the hill. He turned back once to look over his shoulder and he saw the Crow watching him.

He swore he saw him smile.

Chapter 35

He pulled out the photograph that he kept in his wallet and stared at it, as he had done every day he had been in Santa Marta. It was creased and dog-eared. He didn’t really need it, he could conjure her smile, the look in her eyes, even her scent just by closing his eyes.

“come back to me,” he whispered.

* * *

He and Bernard hiked up to the Olmec ruins at the top of the valley. It was a two-hour climb along narrow goat tracks through thorn bush and cactus, and by the time they got there they were both bathed in sweat and their legs were covered in long, deep scratches.

But it was worth it
, Adam thought. A stone pyramid rose from the plateau, grey, silent and unexpected. Bernard laughed at his look of surprise. “Hurry up before the tourists get here,” he said, a private joke.

They sipped from their water bottles and got their breath back. Tumbleweed scattered in the face of a searing wind. A turkey vulture glided overhead, searching for animal remains in the gully.

“How old is this?”

“It was probably here at the time of the Crucifixion.” Bernard said, ‘and probably a long time before. It’s something, isn’t it?”

The stones had been worn smooth by wind and rain but he could make out the face of an ancient serpent god snarling at him.

“Do you want to go up?” Bernard said.

Adam nodded.

It was steep, and by the time they reached the pinnacle they were both labouring for breath and Adam could feel his heart banging inside his chest. Bernard was wiry and hard for his age, accustomed to hard climbs, but even he slumped to his haunches when they got there.

The very top of the pyramid was flat and about the size of a racquetball court. From it they had a view all the way down the valley towards Santa Marta and the mountains of Guatemala to the south.

They sat there in silence for a long time.

“They sacrificed people up here,” Bernard said. “They weren’t as bloodthirsty as the Aztecs but they practised human sacrifice, the same as they did. The blood of young men and women flowed down those stone gutters once, so that the gods would send rain and make the crops grow.” He stood up and spread his arms. “They would have had a shrine to one of their diabolical gods right about where you’re sitting. They gods each held a stone bowl and that was where they placed the hearts of their freshly killed sacrifices as offerings. They invited great evil into this place. That is how it happens, I believe. You invite it in and it comes.”

“I thought you didn’t believe in the Devil?”

“If you love the light, then you have to believe in the darknessalso.”

“You mean the Crow?”

“I do not think the Devil interferes in the world, and neither does our Creator. I think all evil is done through the power of persuasion.”

“Persuasion?”

“We all hear two voices calling us either to the light or the dark, Doctor Prescott. There’s a story in the gospels, perhaps you know it? It tells how Jesus went up the mountain to do battle with the devil. Lucifer showed him the whole world below and said, ‘look you have all this power, why not take anything you want?” But Jesus resisted him, he said it’s God’s will that matters, not mine. But most of us do not have the power to resist, and that is how the devil breaks us. He shows us the things that are not ours to have, the things we think we want but that will ultimately destroy us.”

The sun was fast sinking in the sky. The wind whistled through the ancient stones.

“come on, Doctor Prescott, it’s time we left. It will be getting dark very soon. This is one place I do not wish to be without the light.”

Chapter 36

Bernard drove them into San Cristobal. Adam felt like a yokel dumped in the middle of Times Square; there were tourists, women selling coloured straps, belts and dolls, there was traffic and tourist buses and crowds. While Bernard went to get supplies Adam wandered off to look for an internet cafe. His chest felt tight as he opened his email, hoping to see her name in his inbox. Two weeks ago, when they had last come into town, he had sent her pictures of the village and a chatty email telling her what he was doing. He had been hoping for some sort of response.

But there was mostly junk mail, pages of it. “You pathetic bastard,” he muttered to himself and closed down the page. He passed some coins to the girl at the desk and walked out into the bright sunshine.

He was like a junkie craving a fix. She’s not coming back, he told himself. Why can’t you leave this alone?