"The Bolom" - Bahamas AI Art
©A. Derek Catalano
The Shadow of the Silk Cotton Tree
Part I: The Arrival of the Red Dust
The island of Andros does not welcome visitors; it merely tolerates them. It is a land of "blue holes"—bottomless limestone pits that breathe with the tides—and "coppice" forests so thick that a man can vanish ten feet from the road. To the locals, it is a place where the veil between the living and the spirit world is worn thin by the salt spray and the constant whispering of the casuarina trees.
Father Elias Cox arrived on the mail boat from Nassau during the hottest July in fifty years. He was a man of the cloth, but also a man of the soil, born in the Family Islands and educated in the cold cathedrals of England. He had returned to find his childhood home gripped by a sickness that the doctors in the capital couldn't name.
"It isn't a fever, Father," whispered Old Ma’ Tilda, the village midwife, as Elias sat in her small wooden shack in Staniard Creek. "It’s a draining. They wake up pale as the sand on the sandbanks, with a thirst that water can't quench, and eyes that see things in the corners of the room."
Elias looked at the girl lying on the cot—Tilda’s granddaughter, Seraphina. Her skin was a translucent grey. On her neck, hidden just beneath the jawline, were two small, puckered marks. They weren't clean punctures. They looked like they had been made by something with teeth designed for tearing, yet they were sealed with a strange, dark resin.
"Obeah," Elias muttered, the word tasting like copper in his mouth.
"Worse," Tilda replied, clutching her wooden cross. "They call them the Bolom. But these aren't just spirits. They walk. They have shadows. And they serve the man in the Silk Cotton Grove."
