Candle in the Attic Window(72)
“What?” My own eyes were blurry, as much from confusion as from the details of the story I had never before heard in its entirety. “Why can’t you leave?”
“I can,” he corrected himself, his voice harder, sharper, “but I won’t. Not until I see what happens to that monster who took my daughter.”
“But how could you know he’d come back? And so soon?”
“Soon? I died over a year ago, Malis.” He smiled at my guilty frown. “And I knew he’d be back because he’s a coward and, no matter what faith they might profess, all cowards fear death. I knew he’d do everything to stave off his end and that would mean coming home. He knows how powerful Theary is; everyone who lives here does.”
This last seemed to have the air of reproach in it, but I felt far too unnerved to defend my beliefs. Perhaps sensing this reluctance on my part to acknowledge the witch’s prowess, he adopted a different strategy. As he spoke, he again took my hand and we began threading our way between the hazy trees towards our destination.
“You know I’m not some traditionalist stooge,” Grandfather said. “I’ve always respected your decision to practice the new medicine. But don’t you have a responsibility to respect the wishes of your patient?”
“Of course,” I allowed. “But if they don’t know what’s best for them, sometimes a doctor must make a decision for them.”
“The coward’s dying,” Grandfather said, almost happily. “Like most of his compatriots – like those two lackeys who came here with him – he’s been taken into the fold of the new government. No arrest, no tribunal. Don’t you think a man in such a position, if he desired it, could receive better western treatment than a young doctor without her tools in the middle of the jungle?”
“I suppose ....”
“Those folk at the clinic helped me enough that I know the good your stuff can do. But the Rouge spit on your learning. Many less might have died had they not outlawed any but Theary’s way, for hers is a special sort of medicine and requires more skill than you might think. So this patient, if you must call him such, this dying, murdering coward, he has come all the way out here to receive treatment far different from any you might provide. And yet, you insist you must interfere?”
I stayed quiet, the only sound my sneakers pulling in the mud and slipping on roots. I wanted to tell him how badly I had wished for such an excuse not to even look at this man, to stay inside my warm childhood home and bore my grandmother, and have her bore me, until we both passed out from exhaustion. But I was prouder then and, even believing as I must have that I either dreamt or hallucinated the ghost leading me deeper into the jungle, I did not give him the satisfaction of an answer. We both knew, though, and as the lights of her hut appeared like the eyes of a smoke-wreathed demon, we approached the side window instead of the front door.
A stool waited for us in the mud beneath the window. From within came the chanting of the witch. I slipped out of my filthy sneakers and socks, rather than risk slipping from my perch, and stepped onto the stool. Grandfather floated higher off the ground to watch beside me. I felt a strange giddiness, as though I were a child peeking in on a secret adult activity.
The heat, the stink, and the light pouring out of the room blinded me, but when my eyes adjusted, I almost laughed at the ridiculous sight before me. Prostrate and still on a bed, in the centre of the one-room hut, lay a man swaddled in damp bandages from head to toe. Three other figures danced around him in pursuit of a trotting black cat. They followed it around the room, but my attention shifted to the patient, who was not breathing. The witch and the two men from my car-ride goaded the cat towards the patient, but the cat seemed intent on avoiding the man and made for our window. Before I could duck out of sight, Grandfather leaned forward and the cat jumped backwards, preferring the chase to confronting a ghost in the window. The witch saw us, even though the men did not, and she smiled.
Then one of the men startled the cat from the other direction, and it deftly leapt onto a chair, only to have the other man direct it back towards the bed. At this, the cat dived over what I now took to be a corpse and the two men cheered, their faces bright and sweaty. Glancing with confusion at Grandfather, I saw him grinning. After another few minutes, the cat again found itself on a chair and again pounced over the corpse, and at this, Grandfather floated behind me and gripped my shoulders tightly.
The two men exchanged wary looks and cautiously approached the corpse, and the witch put herself between them and the door. I leaned closer, as did Grandfather, as did the two men. Then the corpse sat upright on the bed and I jumped, falling backwards off the stool. Grandfather smiled even wider and beckoned me back up, whispering, “You’ll miss it; look quick!”
Inside the house, the men were shouting and I quickly righted the stool, my legs trembling and my brow drenched at the knowledge that all my childhood fears of the witch were justified. I clambered back up, soaked in mud and puddle-water, and saw one of the men on the floor, the risen corpse squatting over him. The other man had a machete and wrestled with the witch in the doorway. I realized he must have cut her when blood began soaking the neck of her dress. I was so transfixed by the sight that it took the corpse bellowing a wordless, terrible cry to startle me into action.
Even if my grandfather’s presence beside me had left any doubts that the dead can return, the scream of that bandaged corpse now straddling his fellow would have dispelled them. I had put in several eighteen-hour shifts in the emergency room, and heard every manner of sound the human body can produce, and that shriek dwarfed them all in its fury and pain. The sound made me sick to my stomach. Then the man underneath the crouched corpse gave a very human scream of his own. Before I could move to help, the corpse brought its mouth down on the pinned man’s throat and ended the wail by biting through every major artery in his neck. Blood jetted over them both, Grandfather cackling with glee beside me.