Being wanted. It was not a feeling I was at all familiar with. I knew in my marrow that I did not care to be wanted by Mr. Morningside, but Lee had been kind. He had believed me. Mary, too, had accepted me, as had the rest of the house. Just because they want me does not mean I must return the sentiment.
He waited patiently for an answer, which was good, because it took me quite a while to conjure one. When I escaped Pitney, my one and only friend there, Jenny, had been the one to create the diversion while I slipped out the window and fled into the night. She had faked a spasm, and I had convinced her to do it with a promise that I would find a way to rescue her, too.
There would be no rescue. Pitney was far behind me now. But Coldthistle . . .
“My friend . . . I think he might be in danger. He needs my help. It’s not the loneliness that irks me, shepherd, it is knowing I might have aided him somehow and instead did nothing.”
“Ah.” He sipped his ale and touched his cap again. “Faith without works is dead,” he then said. “Will you stay the night with us, dear?”
I put down my cup, feeling the weight of my worries crush down harder and then, unexpectedly, abate. “No, shepherd. Thank you for your hospitality, for saving me, but I believe I’m needed elsewhere.”
Chapter Twenty-Four
The Ferryman of Calabar
Few have had the extreme pleasure of watching an authentic Ferryman at work. Well, few are willing to pay the exorbitant price such practitioners charge for a glimpse of their craft. There are untold variations on the name, but “Ferryman” has always struck me as both the most descriptive and poetic of the bunch.
There is a natural ability necessary to do the work, of course, though the average charlatan or boastful shaman will claim they are capable of similar magicks. The Ferryman must work in darkness and secrecy, and only by the light of a blood moon. I was never given the woman’s name—I found her through discreet inquiry in the outer markets of Calabar, and then only through a young Nigerian adventurer I had met some years ago on a voyage to study the canis infernalis in distant Zanzibar. Olaseni scrounged up our Ferryman through a complicated system of symbols left on doors, then papers slipped to market runners and urchins, and then at last, after two weeks of idleness in Calabar, we received a message from the Ferryman herself. We were to find the water’s edge just before midnight and follow the calls of the red-necked nightjars.
It was a hot night, the shoreline thick with flies and swarms of bats diving for them. Tall ships swayed in the harbor, sails tied, their naked masts jutting out of the water like the skeletons of giant beasts. The sandy earth sank beneath our feet as we waited for each nightjar call, then went a little farther, then waited, then farther. . . . It was a rare and coveted blood moon, the light of which dyed the sands and the bay a deep, rusted vermillion. Olaseni was a slight young man and moved with amazing speed and silence. I struggled to keep pace, following the flash of a blue scarf tied around his waist. To our left, the water; to our right, the foreboding sprawl of so many tall and interlocked trees. We must have waited for a dozen ringing calls of ta-tweet ta-tweet ta-tweet before we stumbled upon a dirt path that cut into the expansive coastal forest.
Her name was Idaramfon. She complimented my Efik, and I complimented her English. She worked out in the open, sheltered by a few low-hanging fronds. A small fire had been stoked at the edge of the clearing and a child tended it, his back to us. Idaramfon wore a simple white tunic, clean and pure, a red-and-black sash twisted into a kind of rope she let hang loose around her neck. Her clean-shaven head glowed like a ruby under the blood moon.
The dead body of a young boy was laid out in front of her on a bed of grass. He was washed and naked, his expression one of peace. There were no visible marks upon the body, and I could surmise only that some unseen illness had taken his life.
“Not afraid of death or bats, I hope, stranger,” she said with a smile.
“I have seen my share of death, Ferryman. And as for bats? Fascinating creatures” came my reply. I checked my notes, which were shockingly easy to read in the bright moonlight. “They are not to be feared. Are they your chosen . . . vessel? Is that the word you prefer to use?”
She nodded, and as she did, a few of those very bats swooped down to join us. They landed on one of the low fronds, two dark brown creatures that were, quite frankly, grotesquely ugly. Their faces were wrinkled and their lower jaws pronounced, giving them a hungry, feral look. Still, I smiled to see them. They were part of the ritual, after all, and that was what I had come to witness. Perhaps the hideous things were a poetic choice, given that they would serve as waypoint between life and death for the soul, until someone or something chose to set them free.
A dense, cold miasma surrounded us, emanating from the young woman. Whispers chased around us, a soft tornado of voices that vanished the instant you tried to decipher the words. Chilled beads of sweat traced down my temples, the transition from hot to cold air so sudden it left me breathless and numb.
Her brown eyes glowed scarlet, then redder than that, hot coals that pulsed white in the moonlight. Next to me, Olaseni whimpered. I looked into Idaramfon’s burning eyes and a hundred lost souls stared back at me, challenging and provoking me to gaze on and on, to stay fixed in that spot and perish there so I might join them. Later, when we returned to his home, I asked Olaseni what he thought of the experience. He described it thus and with haunted eyes: it was like I could feel where my soul and body met, I could feel the seam, and then I felt that seam begin to give and tear.
In the clearing, her eyes red rimmed with silver, Idaramfon the Ferryman whispered, “When I tell you to close your mouth and eyes, strange one, do so. I intend to ferry away only one soul this night, and it should not be yours.”
Rare Myths and Legends: The Collected Findings of H. I. Morningside, page 233
Chijioke and Mary worked side by side on the lawn, both of them filling in holes as the orange glow of dusk grew all around us. A passel of crows had apparently survived the chase and now sat grouped on the manor’s roof, preening and fidgeting. By the time I left the shepherd’s hut, Joanna had cleared the dead birds from the stoop, though their feathers had gathered like black snow.
It was Chijioke who saw me first, jamming his shovel into the soft earth and leaning on it. He shielded his eyes and then waved, gesturing me over. I had taken the road back to Coldthistle, deeming it safer than the fields, where more of those ravens might be hovering. Two wagons waited in the circle drive outside the manse, and one was being loaded by Foster and George Bremerton, a long wooden slat with a draped figure balanced between them. Mrs. Eames. Somehow it made me slightly gratified to think she wouldn’t be buried right there on the grounds.