“You mean like in voodoo,” Dan said, perking up a bit, “where ritual participants are ridden by the loa? ”
“Pretty much the same,” Xia said. “In fact many people here worship the very same loa. Sometimes they’re even taken over by Catholic saints, they say, although the saints are usually identified with specific orixás. ”
“People advertise the fact that they regularly get…possessed?” Annja asked. For all that she liked to think of herself as a tolerant person—and she’d spent enough time among enough people in strange and remote places to have what she thought pretty good credibility for the claim—the notion creeped her out considerably.
“They believe it’s an honor, to be chosen by the god or goddess,” Patrizinho said.
Xia checked an expensive-looking designer watch strapped to her thin wrist. “We’d better get on our way, Patrizinho,” she said, rising. “It’s been lovely meeting you, Annja, Dan. Perhaps we’ll get a chance to see each other again.”
Patrizinho stood, too. With a serious expression he said, “We should warn you to be wary of people who proclaim themselves horses for Ogum, or of Babalu. They are the gods of war and disease, respectively. They are dangerous, cranky spirits. Not to be trifled with, you understand.”
Dan smiled a tight smile that didn’t reach his eyes. “I’ve never been real afraid of gods and spirits.”
“Horses,” Xia said dryly, “tend to mirror their masters’ personalities. So perhaps you should keep an eye on them. ”
7
Annja opened her eyes to darkness—and the cold conviction she was not alone.
The night throbbed with a samba beat from the small hotel’s nightclub a couple of floors below, audible as a bass thrum beneath the white noise of the overburdened air conditioner in the window. For a moment she lay frozen, wondering if she was having a sleep-paralysis experience.
She smelled a waft of greens and warm, moist, dark earth—
She and Dan had spent a hot, tiring and unproductive day trolling the museums, the dark shops and bustling outdoor markets for clues to the fabled lost city of Promessa. As far as Annja was concerned it was anything but promising. For all the apparent conviction of Mafalda’s warning to them the day before, Annja was beginning to suspect they were on a wild-goose chase. And Annja knew enough about folk beliefs and culture to understand too well that Mafalda’s role in the community practically demanded she be a skilled actress.
But now—
With a sense of foreboding rising up her neck and tingling at the hinges of her jaw, Annja turned her head.
A figure stood at the foot of her bed. It was a shadow molded in the shape of a human. As she stared, the light of a streetlight and the half-moon glowed through inadequate curtains and enabled her wide eyes to resolve the form into what seemed to be an Amazonian man, short, wide shouldered, with a braided band holding long heavy hair away from what the shadows suggested was his darkly handsome face. His lean-muscled torso was bare; he appeared to be wearing only a loincloth of some sort.
As almost self-consciously quaint as this older part of Belém could be, the apparition had no more place in the climate-controlled room in a modern city than a pterodactyl or knight in armor. I don’t believe in ghosts, she thought.
“I am real,” the apparition said. Did he read my mind, she wondered, or did I speak aloud?
“You must stop asking the questions you are asking,” the man said. “Please. Otherwise untold harm will result.”
She struggled to sit up in bed, her heart racing.
“What about the harm you’re doing by withholding your secrets from the world?” She said it more to see if she got a response than from any belief that such harm was being done, or that such secrets even existed. “Isn’t that the ultimate selfishness?”
The man shook his head. “You speak of things you do not understand,” he said sadly. “There are many things you do not know, and cannot be permitted to know.”
“That’s ridiculous.” Anger at the violation of her privacy mixed with the adrenaline of fear surged within Annja.
“You have been warned,” the man said sorrowfully. “We are willing to die to protect our secret. Consider what we will do to you, if we must.” His apparent sadness only added mass to the soft menace of his words.
Annja whipped the sheet clear of her with a matador twirl and jumped from the bed. The sword came into her hand.
During the eyeblink that the sheet obscured her vision, her mysterious sad-voiced visitor had vanished. As if into thin air.
Scowling ferociously, she searched the room, sword almost quivering with eagerness to strike. Sometimes it seemed to have almost a life of its own.
She didn’t like to think such thoughts. They smacked of madness. She pushed them firmly from her mind.
M OMENTS LATER Annja found herself standing barefoot on the threadbare green-and-maroon flower-patterned carpet in the hallway, wrapped in a white bathrobe, aware that her hair and eyes were both wild. She did not carry the sword, since she felt a grim certainty she was much more likely to encounter alarmed innocent tourists or hotel staff than any crafty cat burglars.
What she did encounter was Dan Seddon, wearing a pair of weathered jeans and a look at once furious and bewildered. His own hair stood out in random directions. Annja thought he resembled Calvin from the Calvin and Hobbes cartoons she’d loved growing up. She fought a semihysterical impulse to giggle.
“So I wasn’t the only one who had a night visitor,” Dan said. “You look like an avenging angel on a bad-hair day.”
“You’re a great one to talk, Calvin,” she said.
He looked confused. “Never mind,” she said. “What did you see?”
“A woman,” he said. “Tall, thin, looked African. Had one of those headdresses on, the ones with the flared tops.” He had extensive experience in sub-Saharan Africa, Annja recalled. “She warned me not to keep seeking the quilombo of dreams.”
“And I suppose she vanished without a trace?”
“Absolutely. I rolled over to turn on the bedside lamp. When I rolled back I was all alone. Creepy.”
He made a sound deep in his throat that might have been a chuckle, or passed for one. “Something like this tempts a man to believe there might actually be something to the stories about these Promessans possessing mystic powers.”
It was Annja’s turn to produce an inarticulate noise, this a distinctly unladylike grunt of confirmed skepticism. “It’s some kind of trick. It’s got to be.”
“Was your window open? You find any sign the door had been jimmied?” Dan looked at her intently for a moment. “From your expression I’m taking that as a no on both counts.”
“Well…still. I’m not ready to buy into astral projection or anything,”
