Authors: Nicholas Wolff
“Fix bayonets!” I called out. The Marines have come through here many times since ’15, so the Haitians knew what would happen if they charged. They spat at us, some of them, and I had to restrain Private Post and Private Ford, for we needed no more bloodshed.
The screaming from the house, though, I have to admit, was horrible even for us. I have no qualms about dealing harshly with the
cacos,
but this was a woman. No words were spoken, but the looks from the men were troubled. Except for Private Dyer and one or two others, who seemed to enjoy it.
As second in command, I never considered accompanying the captain into the house. My duty lay in guarding it. I know now that Markham is depraved and lacking in the most basic human virtues. But he is still our fellow Marine, as well as our leader, and the thought of stopping him never entered our minds. The Haitians are unruly and obstinate, and the
cacos
kill us when they can. Many soldiers in Haiti have done the same, some perhaps worse.
But we sensed something different about that “interview,” as Markham would later call it. Perhaps it was the dark atmosphere of the ceremony that preceded it. But I suspect it was that woman’s agonized, bone-chilling screams.
I had the sense she was calling to someone.
October 1st: Something occurred last night that has shaken us all.
What little we can glean about the whereabouts of Bule place him last in Gonaïves, on the western coast, so we adjusted our route accordingly. Last night, we were sleeping outside a small city called Dessalines. We had pitched our tents and cooked our meals over open fires before retiring at eight. Sentries were posted, of course, although this is not known to be rebel territory. The night was still, the air barely moving, which is the particular curse of this country that seems not to be in the Caribbean but suspended over some Mesopotamian desert. At about 9:15, I heard a cry. It was Private John Prescott, who was second man on the watch. This exclamation was then followed by a shot. I was up in an instant and found my revolver already in my hand as I pulled back the tent flap. There I saw Prescott backing up, his gun pointed out at the trees, the bayonet blade catching the last glimmers of the fire.
“What is it?” I asked. I could see other heads poking out of the three other tents.
Prescott was deprived of speech. He backed up until I caught his shoulder roughly with my hand and stopped him.
“Marine, what is your report?” I demanded.
“It . . . it was him,” Prescott said. His voice was quivering and low. I felt terror in his body; if I had not held him up, I believe he would have fainted.
Markham came out of his tent, his hair wild.
“Who?” he demanded.
“The man in the red shirt,” Prescott said. “The man we killed.”
“That’s nonsense,” I said. “These Haitians look—”
“It was him, as sure as I’m standing here.”
“Where’s Monk?” Markham said, referring to Private Monk, the first man on the watch. He hadn’t appeared, despite the commotion.
Prescott gave Markham a haunted look.
“That’s just it, Captain. That’s why I fired my gun. The man in the red shirt was dragging him off. Monk’s throat was . . .”
I was watching Markham’s face, and the range of emotions that came across it is still present with me. First confusion, then a dawning horror—what we were all feeling, I believe, at that fateful moment—and then something I can no more describe than I can understand. I will call it fascination. I got the sense that he wanted to believe that the man in the red shirt was with us again. But the campfire was throwing flickering shadows across all of our faces, and I believe this last impression was a trick of the light. I forgot it almost immediately.
Since Markham stood rooted to the spot, I called for search parties to be assembled. Someone piled fresh timber on the fire, which roared to life, and we began to inspect the tree line. The first party took torches and set out, while a second one, which I directed to head west, wasn’t twenty paces away when they called out.
“Here!” The man’s voice—was it Dyer’s?—was filled with a screeching terror. I felt it myself. The woods were as dark as ink, and the image of the man in the red shirt, arisen, was with us.
I ran up. There was something lying on the ground. I called for a torch and brought the flame down close to the earth and saw a pool of red, viscous matter. I knew immediately that it was blood. But gouts of it, sprayed in a radius of five or six feet. The men stared at it in a kind of trance.
“This is where he took Monk,” Prescott said.
We followed the blood trail with torches as we ran forward into the forest. But it gave out after forty yards. I didn’t say anything, but I knew that the human body has only so much blood and that it was more a case of Monk’s veins being emptied than any attempt at misdirection by the killer. He didn’t seek to hide his tracks. The opposite, in fact, was true. In chasing after him, trying to avoid the red gouts on the dirt, I had the distinct impression that the murderer would have been well pleased had we caught up with him, as he made no attempt to take the smaller animal paths that branched left and right off the main path he was on.
When we returned, Prescott described the murderer in detail. He’d caught sight of him as he passed by the flaming torch that the sentries always gathered around. The man had the same red shirt, the same brown half-pants, the same round face smeared with pale dirt as the figure from the ceremony. When I say that, after what we had seen, having been so long from civilization and the company of other white men, we believed Prescott from the beginning, perhaps you will not credit it.
But we did. Especially Markham. He revealed to us that the woman in the village had told him, after much “persuasion,” that Bule was not only a political enemy of the current administration and of the Americans, but also a sorcerer “of the highest reputation.” When Markham sliced open the woman’s cheeks and choked her with a sash—he confessed these details blithely—she was muttering incantations, calling Bule to help her. Joseph, the interpreter, had fled in terror, but he’d translated a few of the maledictions. They were calls for our deaths.
When Markham told us this, I watched him closely. I have begun to suspect something is amiss. Markham has sent no messengers back to our HQ updating them on the search for Bule, as has been our standard practice when on these small squadron missions. (We are without any Morse equipment in the field.) He hasn’t asked for reinforcements—as the attack on Monk certainly warrants, under our orders—or volunteered any information at all to the commanders back in Port-au-Prince. We seem to be going deeper and deeper into the Haitian firmament, losing our connection to the battalion. And Markham seems not to mind it one whit.
“Sir, I think we need to send for reinforcements,” I said to Markham once we were back in camp and he and I were conferring. “If Bule has followers who are willing to attack us, he’s clearly more dangerous than we imagined.”
Markham sat on his camp chair, his lank hair falling over his forehead as he stared at the campfire.
“Do you believe this was the man we killed?” he asked.
“It could have been a man dressed like him. For all we know, it’s a ritual here to dress in the dead man’s clothes and avenge him. Who knows what these people get themselves up to? But I know that—”
“
I
believe,” he said, looking at me with his piercing blue eyes, “that it was.”
“Even more reason to get more men here. We can send ahead to Colonel Fine in Cap-Haïtien for reinforcements.”
Markham’s scorn was palpable. “If you lack the resolve to finish the mission, Godwin, please tell me at once.”
I could have struck him then. It was beneath my dignity to respond.
“What about Monk?” I said finally. “Will you leave him to the savages?”
“What I will do is track Bule and kill him.”
“If we are at the beginning of some kind of insurrection, we have to at least let command know. And someone must search for Monk. If you insist on going ahead, then send word—”
“So they can steal Bule away from me?” Markham said loudly. There was something in his eyes I do not pleasantly recall.
“Sir, if we pursue Monk’s killer and another unit takes Bule, what is the loss to the Corps?”
Markham said to me, “I will have him. No one else.”
I continued my arguments for a few moments more, but Markham was not to be moved. We marched out of camp early this morning, with Monk still unaccounted for.
October 2nd: Squalls of rain today, surprisingly cold. We are still heading toward Gonaïves, a notorious haunt for rebels. I estimate the city is eight days’ march away. The men are looking forward to fresh provisions, sleeping in camp beds, and a temporary respite from this cursed mission.
No sign of Monk or his killer. The men, I feel, will revenge themselves on any Haitian if they are not given the real culprit.
October 4th: More strange occurrences. I can now attest to them myself. Last night was one of the oddest of my life, and I do not wish to experience the same again.
We had spent the day cleaning our equipment, mending our clothes, and resting. These things can only be neglected for so long: the brass on our Springfields needed polishing, the barrels needed the brush, and all of us needed to clean the dust off our uniforms. It was an industrious and tiring day, and by late dusk I was ready for my bedroll. I made sure the sentries were posted, both of them on four-hour shifts, and I crept into my tent, grateful for the eight hours of sleep ahead of me.
I nodded off almost immediately. But soon my dreams began to perturb me. I haven’t had such insistent and bewildering visions since college, when I was an inveterate drinker. I tossed on my bedroll and the heat of the tent seemed suffocating, although in fact it was a cool night with a fair breeze. I remember a strange taste in my mouth—a strong copper taste that seemed to coat my teeth and tongue. I have not tasted such a thing before.
I do not know how long I lay there. Without a glance at the night sky, I couldn’t tell if it was midnight or four a.m. Most of the visions fled from my mind, and all I can remember is a series of nightmarish faces, black faces, enormously large, the red veins in their eyes looming up at me.
But what I do remember is hearing a voice.
It came to me clearly, and its words were clear.
“Depart this place,” it said. “Go and do not come back.”
The voice seemed to be right outside my tent. I woke, wiping the sweat from my forehead, only to find myself blind in the dark.
The dream didn’t dissipate. I felt a thing—a presence close to me is the only way I can describe it.
“Who are you?” I asked.
And then a sigh. It came from just outside my tent.
“Leave, Sergeant. Leave before . . .”
The voice sank away, as if the speaker had caught something in his throat, but I believe the rest of what he said was “I come for you.”
I knew the voice. I had heard it daily for many months. It was indisputably that of Private Patrick Monk.
I was paralyzed with fear. The blackness of the tent seemed to choke me. I knew Monk was dead; I had seen his blood and no man could survive that. What spoke to me had to be a ghost, but then what was the thing that brushed against the side of my tent, rustling as it got up to leave?
October 7th: We have felt for the past few days that we are being tracked. We were aware in the past that our movements are often reported ahead—you cannot travel discreetly through Haiti, as the island is too small and too heavily populated—and that we rarely surprise anyone. But this is different. Our lead soldiers on patrol report that they hear movement in the trees off to the right and left as we move, mimicking our progress. Several attempts to locate this contingent of
cacos,
for that’s what we assume it is, have been unsuccessful.
Captain Markham seems uninterested in pursuing any enemy shadowers. His time is used up with “interviewing” the local inhabitants as to the whereabouts of Bule. He has taken to talking to these natives alone in their huts. He is, I have to say, remarkably gifted with languages and has picked up enough of the patois to make even the services of our translator unnecessary. Sometimes screams and begging moans proceed from the huts when he is at his “interviews,” other times not. Twice we have found a corpse when the questioning was terminated. One of their faces was bashed in; the other had his nose slit up either side and an eyeball removed, as well as a fatal stab wound.