He had barely managed to wipe himself down and replace his clothes when the old priest swept the door open, exposing him to the laughing, eager faces of as many of the cultists as could get a view inside. The old man beckoned him to come out, while a couple of older women rushed past him to see to the woman, who was beginning to rouse from her trance. He was still reeling with ecstasy and exhaustion, but there was evidently to be no break. Eager hands ushered him into a smaller hut, this one with smoke ebbing from the door corners. He dimly observed that it was no doubt a sweat lodge, part of the universal pattern of the rites of passage. You could find them in preliterate cultures the world over: Amerindians, Siberians, Melanesians, Amazonian rain forest dwellers. All of them did it. In Peter’s preconscious mind rested the knowledge that the smoke hut symbolized the womb of the second birth, birth unto a higher plane. It would be an ordeal, designed, through oxygen starvation and sensory deprivation, to produce visions, usually visions mirroring the traditional totem-masks of the tribe. What would he see, if anything?
Half-stumbling, partly due to the shoving of his escort, partly to his residual light-headedness, Peter fell to the ground inside the fire-lit hut. The ground was plain but not hard. The light flickered with its source. He felt a great urge to surrender to sleep. When had he slept so much? He could not remember. He drifted, drifted. He supposed he was asleep again, because now there appeared to be a row of figures stooping and sitting before him, too long a line for the small space to accommodate. He thought that he ought to know them. There was surely something familiar about them. And then he remembered he had marked their faces the previous night, at that ceremony he had largely forgotten. Maybe he would remember more of it now that they were here again, the bocors, the houngans, the tattooed and branded sorcerers of the cult. The firelight did strange things to their outlines, that was for sure, but it seemed to Peter that it was their shadows that were strangest of all. They did not seem remotely to correspond with the bodies casting them. The man in the middle, with the hoop ear rings and the worst scars along his neck: the shadow that loomed above him reminded Peter vaguely of the outlines of Great Tulu, the pincers attached to rolling necks and appendages. The others were all different but equally ill-fitting. Yes, the Old Ones… He was beginning to remember…
The spokesman for the group opened his eyes, and Peter saw no iris or pupil, only an empty expanse of glowing green, as when a ray of sunlight penetrates the sea water above a diver. The figure started to speak. It seemed as if he had been speaking for some time, as if someone had turned on a radio in the middle of a speech. But the content was definitely directed to him. “We know it is knowledge that you seek. The true seekers come to us sooner or later, as you have come. Here they learn the higher path, the path to the past. Which can come again. But you are special, Young Sir. The Old Ones have sent you to us for a purpose. You can help us to bring back the past of the Old Ones.”
Peter felt he should be sitting in a posture of respect or veneration to these old saints, these elders of the community. But he was utterly empty, barely able to grasp what was being said. He lay there like a limp doll, hoping they would take no offense.
“We know you want to learn our secrets so you may gain fame by betraying them to the outside world. That you cannot do. But you will gain your fame. You will write your book. We will tell you what you may say. Others will even be able to verify what you say. And when you have your fame, we will have it. And then we will send one to you with something else you may tell your world. It is a world that loves the drugs. Substances.” A ripple of laughter followed this.
“In that day, maybe two, three years down the road, when you are the so-famous professor, you will tell them you have discovered something great among us. You will tell them the old island witch doctors are not so stupid. That they have chemical secrets from the rain forests. Powders that can lift the spirit, than can extend the manhood, that will shrink the fat from the white man’s ass. And it will. And it will do other things their tests will not show. And in this way, you, my son, will open their hearts to love the past of the Old Ones. And in that day you white men will sing as we sing: That is not dead which can eternal lie. And with strange eons, even death may die!”
He didn’t see them leave. Maybe he had blacked out, lost consciousness even within the dream. But at length he roused again, sure by this time that he had been secretly drugged, even before being brought here to the sweat lodge. Now the fumes were making him cough. That’s it—he had coughed himself awake. There was something in the smoke that was playing hell with his sinuses, that kept him confused, too. But that, of course, was part of the regimen. It didn’t worry him unduly. But it entered his head to wonder about Metellus. Was he elsewhere in the camp, undergoing something similar?
And then: there he was! Peter flinched with shock, as welcome as the sight of him was.
“Peter! I made a big mistake bringing you here!” The image of his friend hovered nearby. The man must be kneeling to look into Peter’s sodden face. Peter smiled and reached out to touch the other’s shoulder in reassurance, but he could not reach him somehow.
“No, no, Met. It’s all going well! Better than I could have… Say, that’s quite a scar you’ve got there… How’d you…?”
The black visage, curiously dim and gray in the smoky interior of the hut, waited for Peter to compose himself, to get his thoughts straight.
“Hear you passed your initiation rite, or test, or.. Give me a minute…”
“Yes, mon ami, I took the Third Oath of Damballah, all right. With the Third Oath one renders oneself entirely to the Old Ones.”
“Well, I can tell you, buddy, the Second Oath’s not s’bad! I never had such a…”
“What about the First Oath, my friend? Did you taste the drink? The salty cup?”
“Yes, it was blood, I know. I knew it would be. Very common in these things. Probably one of their goats.”
“I think it was a goat named Metellus,” the black man said, closing the mouth in this face and opening the new lips of his throat into a horrible grin. “It is no mere scar. You now have my blood in you. That is why I may come to you in this manner, while your mind has been opened to the influences. I have little time left. You have little time left.”
Peter was shaking himself awake, shruggingly gathering himself into a sitting position. His wide eyes looked on the face of his dead friend, and the greater his sobered clarity became, the dimmer the features of Metellus became. “No, Metellus, I…”
The words came as a sourceless whisper: “You dare not leave and disobey the Old Ones now. They will not permit it. Do not openly defy them. But do not serve them. I will…” And there was no more. But Peter was now very definitely awake. His head pounded without benefit of drums. The smoke was about dispersed, which, he figured, was probably what allowed his head to clear. He lay down for a second, found that this only made his head hurt worse. So he rolled over to kneel and stand, but as he rolled, he encountered a supine form and recoiled. At first, his memories mixed up, he imagined it was the woman from a few hours before. But it wasn’t.
He sprang backwards away from the machete-butchered carcass of Metellus. It hadn’t been just his throat. That must have been only the beginning. He hadn’t looked like this in the dream Peter had just awakened from. But he could no longer begin to guess, in this place, what was a dream and what was waking reality, or even what the difference was supposed to be. Anything was equally real, it seemed.