The Ring

Jul 12, 2009 Features / Columnists, The Creative Corner

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Part Seven: Haitian Magic

By Michael Jordan

He felt like a schoolboy waiting on his first date, wondering whether she would show; but Dr. Delon’s red Honda Fit was parked outside his apartment at the stroke of eight-thirty.
He had imagined that she would be dressed in some white ceremonial gown, like an elder in a spiritual church. Instead, somewhat disappointingly, she was wearing a jersey, faded denim jeans, and low-heeled sandals.
She nodded at him. She glanced quickly around the house; at Wayne asleep in his crib, which they had placed outside, and at Sandra, sitting nearby.
She smiled. Goodnight, Sandra.”
“Night.” The hostility in her voice startled Maxwell. He stole a glance at Sandra. She was hunched forward in the chair. She was looking—glaring actually—at Dr Delon, who was unstrapping her sandals.
He stifled a sigh. She had been restless all day, despite the valium he had given her on the doctor’s instructions. He had hoped that Dr. Delon’s arrival would have calmed her. Instead, it seemed to have had the opposite effect.
He moved over to Sandra. He put an arm around her shoulder. Abruptly, she said: “I think we should call it off.”
“But Sandra…”
She shrugged off his arm. “I said—” Suddenly she rose. She ran towards the toilet, and even before she had reached he could hear her retching.
She was leaning over the toilet when he reached the washroom, but now she turned to him.
“What y’all trying to do to me, Max?”

He shook his head, puzzled. “Sandra, we trying to help you—“
“Yuh ain’t do enough, Max?” she asked tearfully, and he felt the guilt wash over him. “You—”
“Sandra,” said Dr. Delon, just behind him; her voice gentle but firm. Sandra’s gaze shifted to the Haitian. There was a difference in her…something in her lips and eyes, and for a second the thought hit him: this is not my wife.
“Sandra.” Again, that firm but gentle tone. “I am here to help you. I know that you want us to help.”
Abruptly, the hostility left Sandra. Her shoulders sagged; the appealing helplessness returning. “Yes, doctor, I want you to help me.”
Maxwell led her to the sink and later, under Dr. Delon’s coaxing, she took a cup of hot milk, sipping it as they sat in the living room.
“When—we going to start?” He sensed that she was still tense. She kept glancing towards Dr. Delon’s handbag on the floor.
“When you are sleeping, everything will happen. Remember…fight, even in your dreams.”
“I think I vomit out the valium.”
The Haitian smiled. “Don’t worry. I think it is still in your system. I just want you to sit here and relax…”
They sat in the living room, hardly speaking as the minutes ticked away. Outside, it had begun to rain heavily. He was glad. If anything happened tonight, the rain would muffle the sounds of their mad ritual from the neighbours.

Suddenly he realized that Sandra was slumping on his shoulder. She sat up quickly as he shifted. “Max…I think I ready to go to bed.”
They followed her to the room. She gave a tremulous half-smile as she lay on the bed. A wave of sadness—for her, for himself—overcame Maxwell, and he was bending to kiss her, to reassure her that everything would be —
“No Max!” She pushed him away suddenly, with a cry of warning and fear. Behind him, a sharp intake of breath from Dr. Delon.
Sandra was gripping the sheet. Her lips were clenched as if she was in pain. For the second time that night, he was struck by the feeling that she had somehow changed.
“Sandra?”

“Just…stay away…till I sleep…”
And with a rush he recalled how Sandra had kissed him on the night Karen’s baby fell ill. Kissed him…and just like that, he had fallen into sweet, deep slumber…put to sleep with a kiss…
She lay there, breathing heavily for a few moments more. Then, like a mask dissolving, the harshness in her features vanished. Her eyelids drooped…closed; her chest rose with the regular breathing of someone asleep.
Maxwell sighed. “What…now?”
The Haitian went outside, returning with the shoulder-bag, which she unzipped. She rummaged inside, withdrew a few strips of cloth. She stared at him regretfully. “We have to tie her. You saw what happened just now.”

He nodded miserably.
“Now we wait,” she said, after binding Sandra’s limbs to the bed.
They stood, watching her sleep. Outside, the rain increased in frenzy.
He was just thinking that nothing would happen tonight, when he noticed that Sandra’s breathing had again changed.
Her fists clenched. She frowned in her sleep.
“No…no…” she whimpered. “No…”
Dear Father, he thought. It’s happening. He wanted to go to her, but restrained himself. A sudden gust of wind—it seemed to come from inside the room—rattled the bedroom window. In it, he seemed to hear a burst of harsh laughter. Simultaneously, a dog in the neighbourhood erupted in hysterical barking.
Dr. Delon touched his arm. “We begin.”
She bent to the bed again, removing two blue bed sheets. Quickly, she wrapped Sandra in one of the sheets, while, on her instructions, she used the other to wrap Wayne, still fast asleep in his crib in the living room.
Delving again in the bag, she removed a new manicole broom, a pack of incense sticks, and two sticks of chalk. He helped her shift the bed to the centre of the room, then watched as she used the chalk to draw a circle around the bed. She dipped into the handbag again, this time removing a tiny plastic bag tied with string.

A foul, pungent odour assailed him as she undid the bag and thrust a finger inside. The smell evoked a long-buried, childhood memory of his grandmother rubbing something in his scalp one night when he had awakened from a bad dream about something under his bed…
“Asafetida”, the Haitian said.
She parted Sandra’s hair, and carefully rubbed the ointment into the centre of Sandra’s scalp.
She did the same to Wayne, even as Maxwell found himself wondering what his God-fearing, dear departed parents would have thought of all this.
On the bed, Sandra moaned softly. Her hands balled into fists. He watched as Dr. Delon unclenched Sandra’s right hand and placed a plain black ring on one of her fingers. It dawned on him that it was the same finger that had carried the dead woman’s ring.
As if sensing his puzzlement, the doctor said: “It is a Haitian talisman that I got from my grandmother. You wife’s soul and the entity she calls Isobella are wandering now. Sandra’s soul will return, but we will try to keep Isobella out.”

He recalled reading somewhere, long ago, that the spirit, linked to the body by some invisible cord, roamed about at night, and that these night-wanderings produced dreams. But there was something in Dr. Delon’s plan that aroused a dread in him…it was something that his long-dead grandmother had once told him…
But the thought slipped away as Sandra began to writhe on the bed like the woman in his dreams.
And will some poor young mother, he wondered, wake up tomorrow, screaming and clutching a half-dead child? What is she dreaming?
She is floating on a cloudy night; her fingers linked with Isobella’s. She is laughing like a schoolgirl bent on some adolescent prank, but there is apprehension in her gut, because the prank will go awry. There’s a heavy drizzle, but the rain does not touch her. She feels a heady thrill at her own power. She’s flying! And now they circle a village on the East Coast—La Bonne Intention, Isobella says— and the thrill is mixed with sadness, because she knows that what they’re about to do is so terribly wrong, oh no, she cannot do it, but then Isobella tells her what lies so soft and so warm and ohhhhh so sweet in one of those houses, and that blots out everything but her awful, all-consuming thirst…

Next week: Facing Isobella—the conclusion of The Ring

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