Sunday, November 7th, 12:07 a.m.
Crouched low and then down on their stomachs, Spann and Scarlett closed the gap. First they skirted the uninhabited huts, crawling out of the water and sticking to patches of shadow as they followed the voodoo drumming into the trees. Each time the beating stopped they picked up on a monotonous soul-chilling chant that droned through the muggy air. Several harrowing screams erupted, raising the hackles on each cop's neck. They left the shelter of the trees and came upon a natural glade within the swamp where a grassy island, almost clear of vegetation and washed in splinters of moonlight, humped out of the bayou. At once they could see that the island was a graveyard-perhaps an ancient cemetery for runaway Southern slaves — for from one end to the other crooked tombstones stuck up from the ground like rotting lower teeth.
For the next twenty minutes neither Spann nor Scarlett would speak a word. They lay submerged in mud on the fringe of the fetid waterway that circled the island and watched.
Near the center of this graveyard, seven naked figures — one of them white — were bellowing and braying and writhing around a raging ring-shaped bonfire. An occasional rift in the high curtain of flame revealed a gnarled cypress tree that stood at the heart of the blaze. Surrounding both the dancers and the fire like a circle of Stonehenge rocks was another concentric ring of several wooden scaffolds. These gibbets were similar to those in front of the uninhabited huts but from each of these hung the still-twitching corpse of a freshly-slaughtered goat. One of the goats was still alive for the air was rife with its screams, while beneath each scaffold the ground was littered with hundreds of skulls. The dancers were moving counterclockwise in between the ring of gibbets and the fire.
The goat stopped screaming and died.
Then suddenly someone with an almost disembodied voice cried out the word "damballah!" and the chorus of dancers in return chanted" Largent, ce sang!"
A man with a snake curled around his neck burst through
the ring of flame.
Thump… thump… thump… the drums began again.
Scarlett tapped Spann on her mud-covered shoulder and nodded off to the left.
Twenty feet from the bonfire stood a squat, square mausoleum. It was the only structure on the island and it was made from stone that shone an eerie irradiant white under the light of the moon. The fire-glow licked one side and turned it red.
Sitting around this charnel house were several knots of people. Four drummers in one group off to the right were thrashing the top of a single drum. Within a second huddle, lour women — each one wearing an ebony mask carved with the face of the Devil — sat on the ground facing the tomb, their hands busily stroking and working red cloth bags as if they were rosaries. Up on top of the white stone mausoleum, with her legs crossed and her eyes closed, with one wrinkled arm and pointing finger outstretched toward the man with the snake, sat the old woman in the faded housedress who Rick Scarlett had seen earlier through binoculars inside the drugstore.
John Lincoln Hardy, a bone in one hand, lurked behind this woman.
Thump… thump, thump, the drumming picked up in pace.
It was the sight of the snake, to Rick Scarlett's mind, that really set things off. First the drummers on the assotor frantically began setting up a shifting structure of counterpoint beats. But as soon as the writhing figures began to adopt the beat, each drummer abruptly abandoned the assotor and reached for a separate drum. Three started thrashing tom-toms, the fourth an iron ogan. Fragmented now, the musicians slapped out monologues while the dancers around the fire followed them into frenzy.
thump, thump… thump, thump… thump, thump… slap…
The man with the snake — "Damballah!" — approached the tomb — "Damballah!" — and the old hag on top stood up.
'' Dam" — thump — '' Ba'' — thump — '' Llah!"
Thump, thump…
Reaching down the old woman grabbed the hem of the housedress and pulled it up to her neck. Moonlight rippled across the wrinkles of her belly and her drooping pouches of fat.
The old woman spread her legs.
Thump, thump…
Her feet were planted firmly a yard apart on the top of the white stone tomb.
Thump, thump…
Her head was thrown back, swinging, her arms stretched up to grab the moon.
Thump…
She thrust forward her crotch.
Black-gray hair, twisted and tangled, climbed halfway up the old woman's abdomen, spreading out like creeping vines from between her legs.
Jesus!Rick Scarlett thought as the man with the snake eased the head of the reptile up toward the old hag standing on the tomb.
The masked women went wild.
"Dam-ba-llah! Dam-ba-llah!" they began to chant.
John Lincoln Hardy retrieved a skull from the ground and started to beat on its cranium with the large bone in his hand. The old woman leaned back like a limbo dancer and lowered herself to the tomb. She was now lying with her shoulders two inches off the stone, her skirt still raised, both feet doubled back under her to support the weight of her body, the snout of the snake firmly nestled up into her sex. She began to undulate her hips to the pounding of the drums. And as she rolled and heaved and humped spasmodically, the four masked women on the ground stood up and stripped off their clothes. Then they too began to rock to the rhythm of the drums, naked save for the masks which continued to cover their faces.
Spann closed her eyes when the man let the reptile go.
When she opened them once again, the snake had slithered up over the old woman's abdomen and between her withered breasts. Now Spann could see that the reptile was over six feet long, for its head was wrapped in a coil around the woman's neck while its slippery skin still slid across her groin. The old crone's voice was moaning out: " Bande, Damballah, bande!"
Then the man who had released the snake began to shake out of control. Though his steps were sedate to begin with, he abruptly gathered himself into a whirl, gyrating about on one foot, then breaking away with a stagger amid flailing arms.
This stagger was more a leap than it was anything else, a violent forward-reaching movement as though he were falling into space and could only avoid calamity by falling yet once more — so at the last moment he recovered himself and whirled about once again.
Then his face became a staring blank, every muscle collapsing. Suddenly he stopped moving. His body went rigid. And at that moment one of the masked women broke away from her group, dancing slowly toward him. She rolled up his trouser legs and bound a green handkerchief about his waist and draped a red cloth across his chest and up over his right shoulder. Then she placed a machete in his hand and he started to shake again.
Thump, thump… thump, thump… thump… thump… thump…
Her body still thrashing wildly, the old woman up on top of the tomb cried out wildly in a strangled shriek of orgasm.
Then John Lincoln Hardy dropped the skull and reached out with the bone in his hand. For a split second Rick Scarlett detected a bright glint of light near one of the knobbed ends of the bone, but quickly it was gone. Hardy looped the piece of skeleton under the belly of the snake and removed the reptile from the stomach of the woman. He placed it in a bag.
Beside him. Rick Scarlett heard Katherine Spann breathe a low whispered sigh of relief.
Afraid of snakes? the male cop thought. Believe me, woman, one day soon have I got a snake for you.