By the time they left for Haiti, Henley's face was darkened with scales. The ears, cheeks, forehead, and scalp were still clear, but he had the mouth of an iguana, and his eyes were ringed with black circles.
There were some febrile explanations at the airport about how sickly he was, but no one made a big fuss.
On the island, Autway brought him far out to North End to a trench hut on the mountainous outskirts of the slums. There the chants continued, only now there were many more people, kettle drums, torch parades, and the ceremony of zilet en bas de l'eau, the worship of an undersea island.
At the peak of the ceremony, elderly devotees gouged themselves to death with sharp stones.
Henley watched on in horror as his body danced its insane, impossible movements. His fingers were gradually becoming webbed, and his joints rearranged so that he could move his body as could no other human.
During the days, he walked about restlessly. With the anorak pulled up over his head, his body swayed through the shantytowns. He seemed to hover over the ground, shifting his weight like so much smoke.
The breeze wherever he went was full of patterns, and there were always shadows flitting around him without any apparent source. Seeing him coming, workers stopped in the fields and blew high lonely notes on whistles made from the wing bones of seabirds.
Once, as he drifted down the back road of a slum, a very tall woman with yellow eyes and wild crowfeather hair came out of a shack carrying a child. She laid the infant in the white dust, stood before Henley, and lifted her skirts. Her eyes were charged with sorrow like a dying horse, and Henley understood that the baby was dead. With long fingers, she touched her breast, then slowly, slowly, her sullen eyes staring, she glided the tips of her fingers down over her belly to the cloud of hair below. That moment, a swirl of shadows like a shifting pattern of clouds played around the small corpse, and it stirred.
There was a muffled outcry from the onlookers who had stayed hidden in their huts. The woman fell to the side of her child, her face slippery with tears of joy. But Henley could see there would be a horrible price to pay. The baby was looking up at him not with the wonder-bright gaze of an infant but with a fully alert, seductive stare that promised violent knowledge deeper than innocence or guilt.
Another time, on a side street in North End, two blacks wearing cutoff denims and bulky pyjamastriped jackets over clean white T-shirts confronted him.
They looked malicious. One was missing half of an ear. The other had on a large hat and dark glasses.
The one with the glasses had grabbed his arm, but when he felt the spongy consistency of it, he let it go like a hot wire and jumped back. The abruptness of his action spun Henley around to face them and dropped back the hood of his anorak. The two men gaped stackfaced, unable to move for a long moment.
Then the one with half an ear drew a gun out of his jacket. Henley's stomach muscles tightened in a spasm, and the gunman was blown backward, tumbling to the ground. Henley drew his hood up, walked down the street, and turned a corner. In the secluded alley, his stomach knuckled again, and he was hoisted into the air, lightstepping over tin roofs until he settled into a garden patch several houses away.
Henley was no longer awed by such feats. The terror of being dislocated from his will had numbed him to all surprise. The memories of his previous life were remote, and he watched the events shaping themselves around him as if in a dream. Even when Autway led him up into the mountains to see the star pools, he was unmoved.
Beyond the spectral shapes of moss and fern and tall cypresses that spired above enchanted swamps, far up in the smoky hills, they came to a series of large ponds devoid of all vegetation. The sides were banked with hewn logs and packed gravel, the work of many generations. On their shores at irregular intervals were monoliths of black rock, the inscriptions carved into them exhausted by time.
Standing there, beneath a quail's-breast sky, with the wind blowing in off the pools and swirling around their heels like a discarded garment, Autway let out a low moan and began chanting. The red light of dusk was moving as if it were a breeze on the water.
They stood facing east until darkness had settled around them. Henley's body was becoming very excited.
He felt a ringing in his collar bones at the sound of the old man's droning voice, and the thick muscles massed in his legs were stirring. Barely able to remain still, his shuffling feet sounding like breath, his breath like a forgotten language, he watched the stone star, the moon, rise over the black water.
By moonlight, he could see something stirring under the water. There were many shapes, massed as one shadow. They were moving closer beneath the surface, and the expectation of their arrival nailed his breath. A splash sounded far to the left followed by a loud scuttling noise on the rocks.
Something was approaching.
Henley's body unsealed its breath and breathed deeply. Slow as a planet, it turned to face the darkness.
Laboured wingbeats sounded from a distance. A hulk loomed on the dark edge of the pool. Outlined in moonlight, Henley couldn't make sense of it. It was writhing gouts of flesh, a tangle of limbs, and then, abruptly, it narrowed and slipped back beneath the glass-grained water.
A torpid langour overcame Henley's body. It felt heavy, tired. Autway took him by the elbow, which was gelatinous and limp, and steered him away from the shining water. He felt wrong. His body had never felt so weary before. By the time they got back to trenchtown, he was stiff, almost rigid with exhaustion. The next day, Autway led him out to a remote channel where the shore was thickly covered with limestone dust that fluffed in from the quarries. Three white huts squatted on the shore, and, beyond them, an albino horse was corralled. Henley's curiosity about the previous night dissolved in a fright of recognition. To his left, drifting in the lazy current, was a white catboat with one man standing up in it.
Autway rattled his calabash, and the boatman steered towards the shore. With great trepidation, Henley watched him moor his boat and remove a black jug.
'De lurkers will naw come until we purge you,' Autway said.
Purge me! Henley thought with terror, watching the white horse's pink eyes staring at him while it champed. He wanted to face Autway, but his body wouldn't move.
'Yas. We must make room for de Host. We gone take you out. Too bad we can't kill you, but dat dere is bad for de Host. You naw get with your bruthers, les morts. Nyarlathotep cotch you and now let go. De l'eau noir, de black waters cotch you. You gone dere. You gone to go.'
The boatman was approaching with the jug in his hands. His face was cretinous, blank and washed as the sky.
Autway stepped closer, whispered in his ear. 'If even de earth itself knew. But dere is naw way to know. Speak to de dead and what do dey say? "I can be anyone you need." Give up de terrible arrogance of de past, give up de root of de present, and all dat de future can tell you is where it is you was never goin'.'
Henley's bones filled with a cold mist as the idiot offered Autway the jug. The gangan took it reverently and turned to face Henley. His face was a crust of harsh planes, and the shard of mirror was clouded. He spoke, and there was steel in his voice. 'Silence be your shepherd. What is beneath you be triumphant.'
Autway tilted the jug so that its mouth gaped before Henley's eyes. Its darkness mawed and he felt himself leaning out of his body toward it. He looked down, and there were lights, tiny and dim, moving there. They swung closer, and he saw that they were swirls of stars, galaxies, misty ballerinas flying apart through a dread night. He was falling, baffled, booming with fear. The midnight black gulfed him, and there would have been a scream, a yowl, but for the soundlessness of those blind depths.