“What you want?” he said. “I mean, what you really, really want?”

Richard cleared his throat again.

“We want to get –“

The man raised one long, thin finger, its nail curving like the claw of an animal, and Richard fell silent. Vicki turned her head towards him and saw his face had changed; it had sagged into a dumb, mannequin blankness. She felt a moment’s alarm but before she could say anything, the man spoke to her again.

“What do you want, lady?” he said, softly. “You wanting something bad. I can tell. You tell me.”

Vicki looked into his eyes. They weren’t black anymore, but a shifting sea-blue. As she opened her mouth to speak, they went the colour of the sugar cane leaves.

She felt the words rushing up inside her, coming up from nowhere, as if there were someone else inside her controlling her voice.

“I want a baby,” she said.

The man lowered his pointing finger and she felt her ears pop, as if sound had come rushing back to fill a vacuum. She’d been mistaken about his eyes – they were as black as the tar found in sticky little lumps on the beach.

Richard looked at her incredulously. She felt heat come rushing into her face but she said it again.

“We want a baby.”

The man looked at her with his coal-nugget eyes and nodded.

“Obeah Man will help you.”

The chattel house was filled with thick, intense heat, and it was dark, the open window frames covered with cloth, the door shut tight. They sat on the dirt floor, facing the Obeah Man. Vicki flicked her eyes sideways, taking in the sagging sofa at the back of the room, the heap of old rags in the corner. There was a cage against the wall where a pair of white roosters rustled and flapped. Another movement caught her eye and she saw, shockingly, a monkey hunched in a dank corner. She caught the glint of dim daylight from a metal chain around its ankle that its long, prehensile fingers picked at. It saw her looking and drew its lips back from its teeth, chattering at her.

Vicki felt oddly dreamlike, her vision wavering. She’d walked into the house in a daze, unable to believe what she’d said, what was happening. I must have heat stroke, she thought, to say something like that, to be here in this house – but still she sat on the hard dirt floor and stared through the darkness at the black eyes of the Obeah Man. Richard sat next to her and she could feel his disbelief and anger radiating outwards, buffeting her arm. He must really love me to do this, she thought.

The man sat down opposite them. His legs folded up under his chin like the legs of a grasshopper. He held out a small, white cylinder to Richard.

“Smoke.”

Richard blustered, holding up one hand.

“No, thanks. I don’t –“

“Go on,” hissed Vicki.

He threw her an annoyed glance. Then, she could see it happening, the shrug of his shoulders, the mental oh fuck it that brought down a blankness to his face. He reached out for the joint, brought it to his lips and sucked down the curling, pungent smoke.

He offered it to Vicki but the Obeah Man shook his head.

“She don’t want that,” he said, and Vicki tensed for Richard’s explosion as this man’s presumption, but he said nothing. After a while, his head fell forward and she saw his shoulders sag. She turned her head towards him.

“Richard?” she said, tentatively. His head lolled and she thought his eyes were closed. He didn’t answer her. Smoke rose in a curling grey tendril from the joint still smouldering in his hand.

There was a squawk from the corner and the Obeah Man brought out one of the roosters. It struggled against his hands, white feathers drifting towards the floor. He brought it before Vicki and gripped it between his knees. Before she could say anything, there was a dim glint of light from the knife that had suddenly appeared in his hand and in one swift movement, he’d removed the rooster’s head.

She was too startled to gasp. The blood pattered into a carved wooden bowl on the floor while the rooster’s wings flapped frantically for a few moments, the movement gradually slowing as the flow of blood lessened. She could feel her own heart beating with quick, painful thuds.

The Obeah Man gave the body of the bird a final, business like shake, and then threw the limp bundle of feathers into a corner. He passed his hand over the top of the bowl. Vicki saw the steam rising from the quivering pool of blood inside it and felt a bubble of nausea rise in her chest.

He held the bowl to her lips.

“No,” she said. “I can’t.”

“If you want what you really want,” said the Obeah Man,  “you drink this. You understand? You got to really want it. You don’t want it, you wait for your husband to wake up and you get out of here. Can’t do anything to you that you don’t want. You got that?”

Vicki nodded. She found it suddenly hard to get her breath – she pressed a hand to her diaphragm.

“Can’t get anything unless you really want it,” said the Obeah Man. “So, question is, how much you want it? How much?”

Vicki took a deep breath.

“This much,” she said and, gripping the bowl with her teeth, swallowed its contents in one quick movement.

The coppery taste of the blood in her mouth made her gag but she fought it, swallowing it all down. She could feel it hit her stomach. She took a deep shaky breath and wiped her mouth with the back of her hand.

“That’s good,” said the Obeah Man.

Vicki tried to breath deeply. The smoke in the room began to waver and writhe and she was sure the room was becoming smaller. She felt a jab of panic. Patterns began to reel and spin before her eyes and, it was true, the walls were closing in on her… She cried out and the walls rushed towards her and she gasped and sank backwards, falling downwards. She was falling through the floor, sinking into the dirt that felt as soft as a pillow. It parted beneath her back, welcoming her into darkness. There was a slow steady throbbing, a beat that echoed the thud of her heart. She lost all sense of herself; all sense of herself as Vicki. She was just existing, an entity hanging in the blackness of the void. She looked down and saw the dim shine of her skin, a pallid white glow in the darkness. Where had her clothes gone? She wondered briefly and then forgot about it.

There was something pulling at her, tugging at her hair. She brushed at it, brushed against fur and a long fingered hand that was pulling at her, pulling, tweaking…

It was the monkey. Its prehensile fingers were tangled in her hair, pinching her face.

“You have to get out,” it said. It had a high, clear voice; a voice like a young child’s.

Vicki looked into its brown eyes and saw the truth.

“Get out and keep running,” said the monkey.

She got to the door quickly and stumbled from the veranda. Five steps and she was in amongst the sugar cane; the rank, sweet smell all around her, the thin green leaves slashing at her unprotected white skin. She ran, gasping; falling once to go to her knees in the damp black soil, running fast, her breasts hurting, her breath coming short and fast. The sugar cane stretched on in endless green rows. Above her she could hear the faint whistle of a giant set of wings, the whomp, whomp, whomp of gargantuan feathers scything through the hot air. She ran on, endlessly, as the air darkened around her and a gigantic shadow fell upon the fields, tracking her. As she ran, her breath sobbing in and out of her lungs, she could see herself as if from above, a tiny bobbing white doll. She heard the cease of the wing beats and the terrifying sound, the gradual whistling, as whatever was in the sky folded its wings and dropped, slicing through the air, zeroing in on her. She screamed as she ran but it was too late, too late; she felt a immense jolt to her body and a piercing pain as talons gripped her shoulders from behind and a sharp beak plunged forward, impaling her from the top of her spine downwards, pain and heat radiating outwards from the moment of impact, the agony and the ecstasy too much for her to do much more than scream, even as she fell forward into the earth…