Chapter 76

It was just past midnight and the monolithic prison slumbered beneath a bright full moon. Not everyone was asleep however…

Mel cowered on the floor in the far corner of her cell. Her eyes were wide open. A low keening moan of fear issued from the back of her throat.

Nighttime was when duppies liked to come out. That was when she had to be most vigilant. Sometimes her cellmate would wake up and tell her to be quiet. But her cellmate didn’t understand. Mel envied her ignorance as she lay there snoring lightly.

She looked around the cell, peering up at the window, squinting once again into the shadows by the door, alert for any possible intrusion, her paranoia sharpened and amplified by all the dope she had smoked the previous day.

The prison might have big thick walls and locks and bars, but these were no obstacle for a duppy. Duppies could walk straight through walls and locked doors. Or sometimes they liked to transform themselves into animals, like a fly or a rat, and get into a place through some unprotected crack.

That was the thing with duppies. They could be anything. They could be anywhere. You never knew for sure. That’s why she was so scared.

When she was a child, her grandmother had told her plenty of stories about the duppies which haunted the hills and jungles of rural Jamaica. Rollin’ Calf, Whooping Boy, Bubby Susan, Ol’ Higue…

There was a whole host of them to be scared of, all of them grotesque-looking and frightening, and each with their own horrible method of killing you. If you were foolish or unlucky enough to be walking around at night when one of them was around, then they would hunt you down and kill you for sure.

‘Who are they? What are they?’ she would ask her grandmother.

‘Dem be de duppies of a people dere long ’fore our people.’

The evil souls of the ancient dead wandering the earth…

But her grandmother had warned her that it was your run-of-the-mill duppy that you had to be most careful of, because those were the ones that looked human. These were most often the angry souls of wronged people seeking vengeance or the malevolent souls of particularly bad people who couldn’t bear to give up their twisted ways.

More worryingly though, her grandmother had told her that duppies weren’t just limited to the realm of the dead. In fact, you could even be a duppy yourself and not know it. Her grandmother had explained that when you fell asleep your soul wandered off and did things. You woke up and remembered those things as dreams. But maybe, in some cases, you actually did them for real…

Either way, all Mel knew was that duppies existed and they were something to be very, very afraid of. The only real way to get rid of a duppy was to get an obeah man – a witch doctor – to carry out a special ritual. But there were no obeah men in here to do that. That was the problem.