I turned to Dana, who sat cross-legged on the floor out of the way, her skirt spread out around her. “Maybe I gave you the wrong impression,” I told her. “I said I wanted the real-world version.”

“Don’t bother them when they’re working, sugar.”

“Does it bother them if I talk to you? I want him disposed of, not raised from the dead.”

“We will dispose of him,” the black woman said behind me. “When we are done with him.”

“I’d think the whole world was as done with him as could be. He’s dead.” The veves were going remarkably fast, for drawings done in flour; there was one elaborate triangle at the corpse’s head already, and another taking shape at its feet.

“In an ideal world,” the woman said fiercely, “the dead are left in peace. Do you live in an ideal world, do you think?”

I wasn’t even tempted to answer that.

When the veves were done, Mr. Lyle stepped back, and the woman began to take things out of the leather case. An unmarked bottle of clear liquid. A shot glass. A little dark glass vial. A square of red silk, embroidered around the edges. She spread the silk over Mick Skinner’s chest, with points toward his head and feet. Then she poured some of the liquid into the shot glass — the smell of high-proof drinking alcohol reached me — and set the glass in the middle of the square of silk. After that, she began to light candles.

She was speaking, and so was Mr. Lyle — in unison, I realized only after a moment, because their voices were so different I had trouble listening to both at once. Hers was low and smooth; he might have had some damage in his throat, to judge by the whistling, broken, breathy sound of it. I didn’t recognize the words, or even the language, but the speech had a dance rhythm. I had to work to keep from swaying. Dana wasn’t bothering. Her eyes followed the woman in black, and her shoulders moved freely with the words.

It was taking a long time to light nine candles. The room was already warmer, and the points of light swam in halos before my aching eyes. By the time there were nine of them, bouncing in their golden auras, the speaking seemed to have a tune, and someone was patting a drumbeat on the floor. The woman produced the dark vial, unscrewed the cap, and held it over the corpse’s closed mouth.

“Eleggua,” she said, as if to someone in the room. “Find this man for me, and see if he has something to say. Exu Lanca, somebody fooled you when you closed the way behind this one. Let him through to speak to me, and I will see that the joker is punished in your name. Papa Ghede, this is your daughter asks you this, and it is right that you give it to me.”

I wanted to rub my eyes; they burned with tiredness, with the candlelight, with not blinking enough. But I didn’t want to move. It was important not to move. Someone might notice me. I wanted to see what Dana was doing, but that would have meant turning my head. The candles, the singing, the beat, were narrowing the world alarmingly. The woman let a drop fall from the vial onto the corpse’s lips.