The Summoner: (39 page)

Nya looked straight at Grey. Her eyes met his, her warm beautiful eyes. “Shoot him,” she said.

The
N’anga
took a step, and Grey stepped with him. Grey couldn’t let him go far; there was too much risk of another trick. This had to end now. He would have to try for a thigh shot, and hope the shock of the bullet would cause the
N’anga
to drop the knife. Grey pointed the gun, numb, his hand steady and his mind elsewhere.

What happened next was a blur.

A large hand wrapped around the
N’anga’s
neck, and another hand grasped onto the wrist that held the knife against Nya’s throat, slowly pulling the knife away. The
N’anga
struggled to regain control of the knife, but he couldn’t budge the hand that had appeared as if disembodied.

It took Grey a moment to process what had happened, because the
N’anga’s
large frame covered most of the form hanging behind him, and Grey had been concentrating on the
N’anga
and Nya.

Grey’s eyes followed the arm around the
N’anga’s
neck up to a huge shoulder, and then to Viktor’s face shadowed behind the
N’anga
, straining with all his might to hold the wrist that threatened to end Nya’s life.

The
N’anga
had backed too close to Viktor, and Viktor was far from unconscious.

Grey still had no shot. He ran straight at the
N’anga
, ready to grab the knife out of his hand and thrust it back into him.

He arrived too late. As he approached, the
N’anga’s
eyes bulged in pain and disbelief. Grey’s eyes moved downward. One of Nya’s hands was holding the scalpel, and the scalpel was sticking halfway out of the
N’anga’s
abdomen.

Nya made a vicious sideways movement, jerking the scalpel across the
N’anga’s
midsection. The
N’anga
sagged and clutched at his stomach as his insides spilled out.

Viktor held the
N’anga
aloft with the arm around his neck, and rammed the
N’anga’s
own knife into his back. The
N’anga
slumped, and Viktor let him fall. He collapsed at Grey’s feet, crimson robes stained an even darker red.

Grey pointed the gun at the
N’anga’s
head.

“Not yet,” Nya said.

Grey held his shot and toed the
N’anga
with his boot. He didn’t speak or cry out. Grey kept a wary eye on the still form, and reached out to touch Nya lightly on the shoulder. She stiffened.

“It’s your call,” he said.

Her eyes remained fixated on the crumpled form. “How long does he have?” she said, her voice flat.

“An hour at most, probably less. He’ll die a terrible death.”

“Is there any chance he’ll survive?”

Grey eyed the wounds, took in the exposed organs and dark hues of the lifeblood pumping onto the cavern floor. “Absolutely none.”

“Then leave him to die alone.” She pointed at the pit. “In there.”

62

T
hey gathered two weeks later, at Viktor’s request. It was the first time Grey had seen Viktor since the night they left the
N’anga
to die. Nya sat on the loveseat in Viktor’s study, wrapped inside a modest-hued sari to conceal her bandages, her second day out of the hospital. She gave distracted replies when engaged, but for the most part stared straight ahead, her mind, perhaps her heart and soul, in another place. Grey’s interaction with her since that night—his constant visits and calls to the hospital—had been stilted, cold.

What she’d been through, a horror which she had yet to discuss, clung to her like a shroud. Occasionally she would murmur something about her father and Nigeria, but Grey hadn’t pressed her. He had a brittle hope that, with time, they might pick up where they’d left off before the
N’anga
had taken her.

Muse in hand, Viktor sat in his customary chair by the window. He was staring at two leather-bound tomes, aged the color of yellowed tobacco leaf, resting ominously on the coffee table in front of him. The
Awon
Iwe
.

Grey sat across from him in a hardback chair, remembering.

After they’d taken Nya and the captive village girl to the hospital in Masvingo, Viktor and Grey returned to the cave. They stood above the pit and gazed upon the
N’anga’s
corpse with their own eyes. Grey had approached the pit with hesitation. Part of him expected for the proverbial tomb to be empty, for the man who had nearly managed to transcend mortality to have overcome death and risen to walk the earth once more, a lich among men, cursed and soulless and terrible.

But he was there. He lay on his back, mask strewn at his feet like a forgotten relic. His face was tilted upwards, as if straining to escape the pit, his mouth fixed in an expression of pure terror Grey would never forget.

What had terrified this man before his death—this man who had tortured and killed others, who had made this dank hole his own, who had stalked the corridors of evil each and every day? At the last he had looked upon death and trembled, but why? Had he seen inward at the final hour and shuddered? Had a vision of his eternal future presented itself, a last insidious whisper of where he was going and who or what he might meet when he arrived?

Or had the source of his terror been external—had he called something into that pit, something that remained to see him off?

They’d seen him, and that was enough. The
N’anga
would never leave that cave, at least not in a mortal capacity.

Ten minutes down the tunnel leading back to Great Zimbabwe, they found a short side tunnel that opened onto an antechamber. A skinny pallet lay in the corner of the room. On the pallet were a few personal items, the sort of mundane things one doesn’t expect someone such as the
N’anga
to own: a passport, a small pouch stuffed with American dollars, a South African driver’s license.

Next to the pallet was a table surrounded by a small army of candles. In the middle of the table lay the
Awon
Iwe
. Viktor knew them instantly by the markings and their position as the centerpiece of the shrine.

The
Awon Iwe
: the lost books of the babalawo, containing the true names of the babalawo’s flock, including, remarkably, the current prime minister of Nigeria. The reason the
N’anga
had come to Zimbabwe, the reason William Addison and Nya’s father and many others had died. Viktor had picked them up reverently. He would of course return them, he’d said, to the Nigerian government.

Grey chuckled. After Viktor knew what was inside.

Grey returned to the present, and asked Viktor a question he’d been too overcome by emotion to ask that night. “What happened at the end? The
N’anga
didn’t seem the type to make a mistake like that.”

“I don’t believe he expected me to wake up for quite some time.”

“Then how did you?”

“Earlier in the evening I took a counteragent that stimulates certain receptors within the body. I’m uncertain what he used to drug me, but I have to believe it was mitigated by the counteragent. I was still rendered unconscious, but I woke up not long before you arrived. Of course I pretended otherwise.”

“So you didn’t know for sure it would work?”

“No.”

They simmered in an uncomfortable silence until Nya set her tea down, put a hand to her side and leaned towards Viktor, her face taut from the strain of the movement. “Do you know? Do you know how he took me? If you do, I want to know. I need to know.”

Viktor hesitated before answering, and when he spoke, his voice was careful. “When I attended the ceremony, I brought a pair of thermo-imagery goggles with me.”

“Smart,” Grey said. “To see through the fog.”

“Everything happened as before. But this time, when the fog concealed the captive, I saw what occurred within the circle.”

“And?” Grey asked, his mouth set. Nya’s head was cocked to the side, and she was looking away from Viktor.

“The girl backed around the circle as if frightened. Just after the
N’anga
shouted Esu’s name—he only did it once, and only after he’d quieted the crowd—she calmed and walked to the altar. She opened it and crawled inside. And then she shut it behind her.”

“She did
what
?”

“She didn’t wake until the crowd had died down and the
N’anga
clapped. Then she came to life, and was trapped inside the circle. There wasn’t another change until the
N’anga
roared Esu’s name, and then she crawled into the box.”

“I don’t understand.”

Viktor turned to Nya. “Grey mentioned that you saw him during confession. Is this true?”

“I thought he knew my father. I needed someone to…” She trailed off.

“Did you receive any substances from him, any food or drink?”

“I took communion,” she said, her eyes widening. “Numerous times.”

“I’m quite sure the
N’anga
used a combination of drugs and mental enthrallment to seduce and control his victims. He must have used mind-weakening narcotics—I suspect something akin to datura weed, perhaps a Yoruba variant—to get you through the ceremony and into his
igbo-awo
. He introduced the drugs into your system gradually, through communion. In the last session, he likely increased the dosage and kept you under until you entered the circle. Just enough to bend you to his will. His other victims were probably easier to enthrall, more susceptible to his power.”

“But I… I never felt like I was being drugged, or controlled. I just woke up at the ceremony.”

“He was very skilled.”

Grey gestured towards the
Awon Iwe
. “Was there anything helpful in there?”

“It’s mostly incomprehensible dialect and native pharmacology. I did see a ritual related to enthrallment. What I understood of it wasn’t helpful. It spoke of channeling the Orisas, ritualistic phrases and movements, sometimes combined with creating effigies of the victim.”

“You mean spells,” Grey said.

“I prefer to think of them as unnecessary cultural affectations. I believe the babalawos are, in effect, practicing an advanced form of mind control, aided by narcotics, the belief of the victims, and strong-willed priests skilled in mental manipulation.”

Nya wrapped herself in her arms. “So you think in confession he somehow… his voice, it was so calming, and that grandfather clock…
Jesus, Mary and Joseph
.”

“As I once said, Juju is a much older, much more effective version of its New World offshoots. I believe some of the enthrallment, the mind control, was lost in the transition to the Americas. It was replaced by an over-reliance on narcotics, creating the mindless zombies of Vodou. What he did to you, and the other victims, was much more subtle—and much more effective in the eyes of his worshippers. It’s more disturbing to see someone like his ceremonial victims, someone like Doctor Fangwa’s servant boy, alive yet not alive, bound by fear to the will of the babalawo.”

Grey thought of the girl he’d found lying on that slab of stone, eyes open, nothing stopping her from walking out of that cave. Grey found himself gripping his chair. The man was dead, he reminded himself. Dead and rotting.

Nya rubbed herself as if there were a chill. “But how did he get us to wake up when he wanted?”

“I believe he instilled pre-conditioned signals in his victims, similar to what’s used in hypnosis. Militaries have experimented with this, and found significant success. Remember—the West has been studying the power of the mind for a few hundred years, on an amateur level. Certain cultures, in this case the Yoruba babalawos, have been studying, practicing and perfecting the powers of the mind for
thousands
of years. I’m afraid some of what they’re able to do, we cannot yet understand.”

“It’s amazing,” Grey said, “that it works on such a grand scale. A whole culture that…” he broke off and stared at his hands.

“It’s difficult to say where the cycle of belief starts. Once boils spontaneously appear on a victim, do you think anyone that’s seen that will ever doubt that it’s real? The babalawo will never have a shortage of victims.”

Nya stood, her face unreadable. She put a hand on the couch to steady herself. Grey rose to help her. “I must beg off,” she said. “I know I’ve said it before, but thank you both again. For my life. And Professor, thank you for your explanation.” Her mouth drew tighter. “I apologize. My weakness endangered everyone’s life.”

“Don’t, Nya,” Grey said. “He was your priest, for God’s sake. He drugged you. I fell under his spell in the caves also.”

“This man was extraordinary,” Viktor said. “What he did to you could have happened to anyone.”

Nya pushed away from the couch.

Grey took her arm. “I’ll walk you out.”

“Grey,” Viktor said. “A word before you leave?”

“Sure,” he said, and helped Nya to the lobby.

He embraced her before she left the hotel. She let him hold her for a long time, but when he moved to kiss her, she turned her head.

“I’m sorry,” she whispered, and took his hand. “I can’t yet.”

“I understand.”

“What will you do?”

“I’m not sure.”

“Will you stay in Harare for a while?”

“Yes.”

“I’d like that.”

They fell into each other’s silence, until her tear interrupted them. Grey ran a gentle finger across her cheek. She cringed but let him. He said, “Are you going back to work?”

“Not yet.”

“Then I guess we both have some time on our hands.”

She smiled, wanly. “Would you care to have tea tomorrow?”

“I’d love to.”

Grey walked her to the taxi. He’d wanted to drive her, but she wouldn’t let him, and her pride and courage broke his heart. He watched as the traffic swallowed her. In spite of her distance, she still felt closer than anyone ever had.

• • •

Viktor clasped his hands in front of him. “You’ll remember I told you Interpol and other law-enforcement organizations occasionally solicit my assistance? Over the last few years the requests have increased in frequency. In fact I’ve had to turn down quite a number.”