Poe's children: the new horror : an anthology - By Peter Straub Page 0,256

beast nearby as if in hiding. The beast came across the field on all four paws, like this, and Jama-Santi moves forward in a crouch to show the men, and then it slashed at the woman, rising up on its two legs until it was taller than a man, and then it knocked the woman to the ground and ran off with her infant.

crocodile man, monkey man, alligator man.

There is a bristling on the backs of the black necks; it goes unnoticed for the moment by the Dutch. There are the words that are repeated in the shanties, by the black slaves speaking in their Neger-Englen.

alligator man, mystery man, crocodile man.

But what more is to be said about the wedding party, about the feasting and the dance, the endless rounds of the cotillions? Or for that matter what more is to be said about the wedding couple? The chaste bride. The expectant groom. Shall we call attention to them now and to the coming of the night with its sweet outpouring like the liquid from the sugar cane? The stalk is slit deep, and the syrup of the sugar is dripping.

Maria Sibylla has gone out behind the main house of the Castillo Plantation and has been followed by Mathew van der Lee. “Mr. van der Lee,” she says when she sees him. “Here, come.” Her black hair is piled high upon her head, and her shoulders are bare, and she is thin in her garden silk. “Madame Sibylla,” says Mathew van der Lee as he approaches her.

They will be returning soon to Surimombo.

It is early evening, just before the nightfall. The day of work is over on the sugar farms. The slaves talk about the beast, they say its eyes are malignant, flashing. And the land moves out from the sea down into the jungle.

It is her desire that is driving her. To seek beyond the limits that would otherwise constrain her. In the morning she goes out alone into the fields, behind the house, into the small forest, alone into the jungle.

From a distance she thinks they are large birds, but as she approaches she sees they are monkeys. There is a brood of them on the ground in the clearing. The monkeys are curious, especially the youngest ones, they approach without fear to smell her out. A baby grabs at the bottom of her overall. But when she steps forward, the baby lets go and runs back to the rest. The adults approach menacing, their shrieks deafening, then all at once they pull themselves into the trees.

When the monkeys clear, Maria Sibylla sees the old black woman, Mama Cato. She has brought cowrie shells and beetles to trade for fabric and a sheet of vellum. Mama Cato is running back and forth in front of Maria Sibylla, shouting something that the Dutch woman does not understand. Then Mama Cato stops her shouting and her running and throws her head back and makes a call like a bird. Her call brings toucans. The toucans are flying all around her, the toucans in flight, flapping their wings above Mama Cato.

When the trading is finished, the old woman moves back into the jungle and the toucans disappear above the trees.

But something else is moving now, a hint of something moving among the trees.

Or is it only the way the land moves out from the sea into the jungles. And the swaying of the branches in the trees.

Are there footsteps? Footfall? When Mama Cato has left her alone in the forest? The sound of thrashing against the jungle growth.

Is it the beast? The white beast stalking? On its diurnal ritual? The heaving and sighing of the beast.

And in the distance the cracking of the whips, the whips cracking back on the sugar farms.

That evening at supper the five of them gather. How familiar now the sight of them gathered. The plates are passed from left to right, the way they have always been passed since the first evening of her arrival. And the lodgers are seated where they have always been seated since the moment they first sat down. The talk tonight is of the beast, of the incident at Providentia Plantation. Since the attack on the female slave there has been talk of little else at Surimombo. And Esther Gabay, for all her fears of its effect to stir unrest among the slaves, is unable to control the conversation, to stop the steady stream of discourse on the beast.

“What is called