The longer she stares, the more evident the tiny cloud becomes. There must be lights beneath it. This place is the source of the mechanical heartbeat. This surgical hole in the jungle’s perfection. Humans. Environmental cancer.
She thinks to stop this sound, to inflict her powers of witchcraft upon anyone vulgar enough to imagine they can disturb a holy shrine such as the one upon which she stands. The hubris! How reprehensible are those who disturb and disrupt without awareness of those around them.
But the longer she stands atop the temple, her foul mood festering like an open sore, the more she feels a slight vibration rising through her bare feet, into her ankle bones, and up her shins. She kneels and places her open palms on the warm rock. Yes, the ground is shaking.
She zeroes in on the underbrush below and to the right, the earthen roof of the catacombs through which she has just wandered. The tunnels are part of the limestone cave systems that can be found in abundance throughout Central America. Here, the priests dictated a human fashioning, carving and connecting, blocking and redirecting, turning what nature offered into a labyrinthine puzzle that only they could navigate. If a commoner entered, he or she never came back. The priests’ abilities anointed them as superior and god-chosen. Untouchable.
But if Tia Dalma’s knees feel the tremor, so too do the limestone walls and ceilings of the catacombs.
Only now, as her unflinching eyes tear up, does she realize she has gone about this all wrong. Worse, she has condemned the people—the humans—responsible for the vexing sound. Instead of condemnation, she should have tried understanding. Instead of repulsion, she should have embraced, even praised their technology!
She sees so clearly where she has gone wrong. If the Beast remains alive in the suffocating chambers beneath her, there may yet be a way to free him.
THE WORKER’S SUN-BAKED SKIN is the color of tobacco, his unfocused eyes bloodshot. He stands, facing the jungle lit primarily by moonlight. Behind him, several electric lights reveal a tangled mass of machinery that connects to an assemblage of aluminum and steel rising like a church steeple. From here tolls the impertinent pounding of metal on metal that drew Tia Dalma. If the temple from which she has just walked represents a sacred place where humanity can connect to the gods, this place is quite the opposite.
In her hand, Tia Dalma holds a doll crudely fashioned from leaves and twigs, bound together with tendrils of green vine. It follows a human form: legs, arms, the stub of a neck upon which is lanced a chicozapote fruit to symbolize the head. Reminiscent of a child’s plaything, it is anything but. It serves no little girl’s purpose. It is not a soldier in a boy’s imaginary army. This doll serves a far more devious purpose. Her purpose.
Following her silent summons, the worker is drawn to the jungle’s edge.
Tia Dalma adjusts the doll’s left arm—and grins perversely as the worker’s left arm moves accordingly. Right arm. Echo. Swivel of the head left to right—perfection!
“The process must be compromised,” she says, speaking the man’s native Spanish so fluently, and with such a fine accent, that she might be this man’s mother. In his mind, the voice sounds like a fusion of his mother’s bidding and commandments from God. There is no denying it, no refuting its authority. To disobey would be tantamount to committing a sin.
“You will do what must be done, or suffer the consequences,” Tia Dalma whispers. With that, she stabs a twig into the doll’s belly. The man buckles over, groaning in agony. “Yes,” she says. “You must obey the Black Mamba.”
Tia Dalma works the doll. It is routine for her; she could do it in her sleep. Only the pesky Kingdom Keepers—five teenagers empowered by hologram technology who serve the good of Disney—are not fully susceptible to her black magic. The effects of her powers on the young people sent to defeat her are wholly unpredictable. Otherwise, she might have prevailed already, she and the other dark masters, the ones who have come together to overtake the parks—the entire Disney kingdom—for the good of bad, the dark of night, the sake of corruption and control. And don’t forget the three Ds: Danger, Desire, and Death.
The worker responds to Tia Dalma’s manipulations like a child’s remote-controlled robot, pivoting and walking stiff-legged in time with the relentless, rhythmic clanging toward the machinery, the dials and tanks, pumps and pipes that sit like an open sore amid a swill of mud. The muck oozes around the man’s bare feet as he reaches the metal tangle. He is not without consciousness: to a point, he can think for himself. Tia Dalma has taken control of him physically and impaired him mentally; they work as smoothly as dancing partners, like a well-oiled machine.