Free Bluebolt One by Philip McCutchan

round there and give yourself a drink if I’m not in.” He grinned down at her, took her chin in his hands, loving the light dusting of golden freckles on the tawny cheekbones. “That’s if you haven’t lost the latch-key....”
    She grinned back. “Darling, it’s my dearest possession, I wear it next to my heart. . . look, who was it who said just now to get along to Chelsea as soon as I can?”

    They left Albany Street together and split up at Great Portland Street station.
    Shaw made his way to the reference library in Kensington High Street. Here he was handy for Gliddon Road and could nip home quickly to stand by for Debbie. He spent the morning studying large volumes dealing with the peoples of Africa—and Nogolia in particular. And as he read, absorbedly, the quiet room seemed to grow quieter, dark with the secrets of the hidden, forbidding continent; the atmosphere thickened with the blood that had been spilt in ten thousand years of voodoo, a doctrine and a way of life as old as time itself, stretching back into pre-history. Africa, land of the Dark and Angry Gods, the men of hate and fury, the spine-chilling spirits whose gross appetites could be appeased only by human sacrifice and terror... those old gods still stalked the land and filled men’s minds to-day, made the lush green jungle creep with fear, and, except on the surface, twentieth-century progress came to a dead stop. Behind the factories of so-called Modem Africa, behind the copper- and diamond-and tin-mines, the gold-mines and the progressive industrial front, there still lurked the ancient paganism walking hand-in-hand with the ju-ju man who had a vested interest in its survival. . . Sango the Thunder God, the Snake God, Erinle, Otin, Esamba, all these gods and others were the stock-in-trade of ju-ju . . . cruelty and barbarism and revolting practices, blood and lust disguised as propitiation ceremonies for the spirits who came to plague and purge the jungle-heart of Africa. Latymer had been right.
    These people, steeped from birth and pre-birth in the implicit beliefs and understandings of their ancestors, could not easily or quickly be weaned from a way of life which held life itself as cheap as dirt, could not have their thought-stream dammed and diverted in the short span of one or two generations. Behind the police façades of the Negro colonies here in London even, behind the faces of the bus-conductors and the street-sweepers and the lawyers and the businessmen, behind the too-smart suits and the decorative shoes and the colourful shirts, there lurked still those deep impulses, impulses which, in blind and sheerly instinctive obedience to the powerful, compelling voice of Africa as personified by the man who called himself Edo, could break right through as soon as the moment of action came. Even the hard-headed Jiddle had been half inclined to believe in these things; and Shaw realized, as he read on, that you didn’t even need to believe in order to see the stark fact that most of Africa’s millions had no possible doubt in their minds that voodoo and the ju-ju man and the Dark Gods were there yet, and always would be, that they were immortal and timeless, while the white man’s meaner substitutes of mission and hospital were only drearily temporary and could be swept away. Indeed, Shaw’s newspapers lately had told him that in some ways Africa was ‘advancing’ backward, that in many areas, as the white men withdrew, the old practices were coming back.
    And yet Patrick MacNamara had intended being a doctor.
    Surely the doctors, at least, among the Africans had given up the old nonsenses? A man who intended to study the white man’s medicine must surely have gone halfway towards rejection—or could he be rediverted? Probably he could.
    It was still a puzzle, and Shaw couldn’t fit the pieces together until he’d found MacNamara.
    He got back to the flat shortly after twelve-thirty and found it empty. Because he’d expected