Ellen watched Thea and Louisa. The shadows in the living room, where they had brought the child, were alive with menace. The little girl squirmed on the big rattan sofa, hands rigidly at her sides. She would slither up and down the pillows until they had to put her back for fear she'd fall, and soon she would be doing it again.

Hoagie was standing at the window, searching for a break in the weather. Occasionally he would glance at Louisa and Ellen. Louisa was soaked with rain. She had brought her cards and a gourd—mon asson, she called it. The candles at the head and foot of the couch gave the scene a funereal air.

Louisa touched the child's forehead tenderly, chanting:

My house feels the spray, Oh Toutou Bilango!

Macaya, I feel the spray.

Three leaves, three points.

Oh, house, Oh, house, Oh...

My house feels the spray.

Toutou Bilango...

She looked up. To Ellen she murmured, "We tie down now the baka, the loa, I think it is a snake...."

She had torn a stick from the brush outside, wet and soggy with rain. She ripped a piece from her red cotton skirt with fingers that were strong and sure. She wrapped it around the stick.

She had found fishing line on Neptune's Folly. Now, incredibly, she jerked it in two with the strength of a powerful man. Her face was impassive, her goldflecked eyes a million miles away. When she moved around the room, she floated like a ghost. In the distance, Ellen thought, there was music—ethereal, discordant. She heard the sound of a choir singing, although there was no choir within a hundred miles.

Louisa's beauty dissolved from view, and she saw dark waters flecked with fire. Somewhere down there lurked a menace, circling, but as long as Louisa's voice went on, it would not hazard near.

"We wrap the loa... we make a cross..."

Slowly Ellen returned. Louisa beckoned to Hoagie, who moved over as if drugged. She thrust the fishing line into his hands. Slowly, dazedly, he stretched it out at arm's length.

The other piece she gave to Ellen. As if Louisa had told her to, Ellen found herself stretching it, too, into a vertical position. Without a word Hoagie and she mated the strings in the center.

In the middle of the cross of string, Louisa held the stick. Neither Ellen nor Hoagie seemed to need instructions. They found themselves wrapping up the loa—the stick with the line, until the red cloth was gone and there was only string.

Thea muttered, "The baka... the baka is in me." But now, she stayed motionless, bound in space and time. "The baka... the baka..."

Swiftly Louisa rose. Carrying the tied, wrapped stick, she floated to the door. And then she was running through the rain exultantly, the stick held high. Ellen found herself with Hoagie, watching from the porch.