by Anne Rice
“Ron, this is—”
“In fact, I’m risking my life right now, calling you … this hour … someone’s been prowling … bedroom door all night, and … I think—”
“Ron, listen, hold on, this connection is going bad and I can barely—”
“My God!”
“Ronald?”
“My God, no!”
“Ron!”
“Please, no no, nononono!”
“Hey!”
“Oh … God!”
“Ron? … Ronald? … Sir Ronald … ?”
“Sally? Sally, this is—”
“Your Lordship?”
“Well, yes, how did you know?”
“I recognized your voice.”
“Always the clever lass you were, weren’t you, m’love. Now look, I’ve just had the strangest conversation with Sir Ronald. The connection wasn’t terribly good, so I wasn’t able to understand everything, but he seemed to think—”
“Oh, Your Lordship, I don’t know quite how to tell you this, but … Father’s dead.”
“No!”
“Not ten minutes ago.”
“My God.”
“He’s been murdered.”
“Good heavens.”
“It was … oh God, no!”
“Sally?”
“No, please, nononono!”
“Sal?”
“Oh … God!”
“Sally! … Sal? … Sally?”
“Matilda? This is—”
“Your Lordship?”
“Good God, you people are good. Yes, this is he in the electronic flesh, as it were. And I want to know what the bloody hell’s—”
“Oh, Your Lordship, she’s dead!”
“Sally?”
“No, this is Matilda. I’m as fine as anyone can be, under the circumstances. Sally’s dead, though. Not ten minutes ago. It was … horrible!”
“I don’t believe it. I was just talking to her. She told me something about Sir Ronald—”
“Oh, Your Lordship, he’s dead!”
“I know.”
“You do?”
“Sally told me.”
“She’s dead!”
“Yes, Matilda, I know. And if you’ll just calm down, take a deep breath, you can tell me—”
“Oh!”
“Matilda?”
“God preserve us!”
“Matilda?”
“Oh … God … no!”
“Matilda! … Matilda?… Ma—ah the hell with it.”
When he had failed to raise anyone else at the other end, Kent Montana knew he had no choice but to abandon his hope of a tranquil vacation and travel posthaste to the Garden State, if only to find out if he had somehow managed to invoke some sort of hideous telephone jinx. Not that he actually believed in jinxes, or superstitions, or hexes, or anything else of that unsettling supernatural-style nature; but he had learned in recent years that it never paid to actually deny the existence of such things out of hand. Doing so had tended to kill off a number of people he’d known, and had scared the hell out of most of the others.
This, however, sounded very much like simple out-and-out murder, which, while no less unpleasant, was much easier to understand. One person killed another—or, in this case, three others—and all you had to do was snoop around a little, bother the local police into taking more action than they already were, unearth some damning clues, finger the unrepentant killer, and when all was said and done, accept the gratitude of the victim’s stunningly beautiful daughter. Who, in this case, also happened to be dead.
He muttered in his sleep.
He rolled onto his side.
He rolled onto his other side.
In that half-awake state known as not quite sleeping, he grabbed his pillow and jammed it over his head.
For there was something else intruding into his unsettling dreams that steamy but cool tropical New Jersey night. Something ominous, something sinister, and it had nothing to do with the disturbing memory of the horrible calls he had received only two days ago.
It had everything to do with the drums.
He had first heard them the moment he had arrived at the extensive Kenilworth plantation long after midnight. Everyone but the manservant who had picked him up at the airport had already retired, for which he was grateful. His journey had been an arduous one, and sleep was what he wanted most.
He didn’t much get it.
Because of the drums.
Distant yet audible, lifting from the dark canopy of the horizon-wide fields of man-high corn in a steady frantic rhythm.
The drums.
In all voices from subliminal deep to nerve-rasping high, beating and throbbing and pounding and calling and insisting and tempting and luring and commanding.
The drums.
Their primitive music at home and at one with the primeval growth of what some also called maize, reaching into the souls of all those who heard, reaching into the nightmares of all those who dreamed, reaching into the dark recesses of the minds and the souls and the nightmares of those who lived on and around the isolated plantation, calling up the blackest, most evil, most horrid memories that those who heard them didn’t know they remembered.
The drums.
Kent tossed.
The drums.
Kent turned.
The goddamn drums.
He sat up and glared, rubbed his eyes, and realized that dawn had arrived over the formerly tranquil island of civility in the agricultural wilds of the centrally located county whose name he could never recall; it had arrived and had long since left, leaving late afternoon dying in its wake.
The drums had stopped.
He sighed his gratitude, flopped back wearily, and was about to doze off when someone knocked on his door. For a moment he was tempted to ignore the summons, but if he did, he knew he would be shirking his duty to his late friend, Ronald Kenilworth. So he groaned as best he could without anyone to hear him and express sympathy for his sleep-deprived condition, swung his legs over the side of the bed, and did his best to pound wakefulness into his face before he rose and opened the door.
A short, gray-haired black man in a white suit with wide gold piping smiled up at him with both his teeth. “Afternoon, sir, Your Lordship.”
Kent did not smile back. “Denbro, do you have any idea what time it is?”
Denbro grinned more broadly. “It be well nearly the dinner luncheon hour, Lordship, sir. I be coming to get you so you can meet the others, hear their stories, and save our home from the vengeance of Momma Holyhina.”
Kent looked at him.
Denbro saluted.
“Right,” Kent said grumpily. “I’ll be down as soon as I dress.”
“Do be hurrying, sir,” Denbro pleaded, his pudgy little face abruptly creased with concern. “We are—” He said no more, only scurried away, leaving Kent to wonder just what was going on. Surely, he thought as he put on his white tropical suit complete with white shoes and a red pocket handkerchief for that certain baronial dash and casual daring, the police have already launched their investigations; surely, he thought as he made his way through the rambling farmhouse toward the veranda in the back, suspects have already been rounded up and questioned, alibis established and suspicions aroused; surely, he thought as he stepped outside … and stopped thinking.
Not only was he making himself dizzy, all that thinking so relatively early in the day, but the setting sun had slammed him square in the eyes.
He winced, squinted, and noted the familiar surroundings with a silent sigh of regret.
The imported terra-cotta veranda was furnished with black, round, faux iron tables, tropical green wicker chairs, and several pots and vases packed with waxed semitropical flowers. At the largest table sat two men. One could have been uncharitably called a blimp—which Kent did, every chance he got—and the other a fence post. The fat guy was clearly older than the skinny guy, and a lot balder, but both were unmistakably members of the same gene po
ol, which obviously hadn’t been strained in quite some time. Each wore a black arm band on the right sleeve of his rumpled tropical suit jacket.
“Well, well,” sneered Roland Kenilworth, mopping his jowls and brow with a sweat-stained handkerchief. “About time you got up.”
“Good afternoon, sir,” greeted Robert Kenilworth nervously, reaching for a large pitcher of suspiciously dark lemonade and pouring himself a glass. “I trust you had a pleasant trip, a pleasant sleep?”
Kent stood by the table and looked at his late friend’s two sons, neither of whom had ever cared for their father, only the immense wealth the plantation had brought in. “The trip was awful, the damn drums kept me awake, and who the hell killed your father, sister, and the cook?”
Roland made a wet rumbling sound that might have been a laugh, unless he sneezed.
Robert paled, his bloodless lower lip quivering.
“Well, what about the police then? What do they know? Who do they suspect? Did you even bother to call them?”
Neither answered.
Something large and undoubtedly feral made a prowling noise in the cornfields that completely surrounded the lawn and the house.
Kent reckoned he was on a roll, and so: “Who is Momma Holyhina?”
“Jesus, man, who told you that?” Roland snapped. “Fairy tales, superstitious nonsense, a bunch of tommyrot and you’re not to listen to any of it, do you understand? Not a word!”
Kent frowned, suspecting not only a little overacting going on here, but also a remarkable overreaction to what he had thought was but a simple question. Was there something going on that he wasn’t aware of? And if he wasn’t aware of it, did he want to be aware of it?
Probably not.
At that moment a tall slender woman appeared out of the corn and made her way across the garden-strewn lawn toward them. She wore a loose, dirt-stained blouse, tan trousers, and high working boots; her lustrous dark hair was tied loosely behind her neck. In her right hand she carried a riding crop; on her left hip was a holstered revolver.
“Momma Holyhina is a witch doctor kind of thing,” Robert explained weakly, glancing fearfully at his older brother. “There are those who believe she is the one who ordered my father and sister and cook killed.”
“Balderdash,” Roland growled. “Ignorant savages who don’t know the first thing about anything.”
“We’re going to be next,” Robert whispered, and gulped at the lemonade. He hiccupped.
Roland glowered, but said nothing, only mopped his face and jowls again.
The woman reached the veranda.
Kent looked at the woman.
The woman looked at him.
“Well,” said Kent, grateful for a chance to smile at last. “It’s been a long time, Lucy.”
Lucy Dane used the back of her free hand to brush a strand of hair from her brow. “Hello, Kent.” She didn’t return the smile. “The boys are gone,” she told the brothers.
“Tommyrot,” Ronald snarled. “You just don’t know to handle them is all. They think this is all some kind of joke.”
“They know,” Robert whispered apprehensively as he took another healthy gulp of his lemonade. “They know.”
A crow called raucously from the depths of the corn.
Another answered from the peak of the roof.
“Know what?” Kent asked.
Lucy gave him a look that told him that he probably, all things considered, shouldn’t have asked. He knew that, he responded with a semi-apologetic lift of an eyebrow. He was always asking things he shouldn’t, and the answers were always things that he didn’t want to know because they tended, in rather more than an abstract sort of way, to lead him either into temptation or into trouble, and generally more the latter than the former, more’s the pity.
Then Lucy fished in her hip pocket for something, found it, and tossed it onto the table. “A joke, Roland? Explain this, then.”
Robert yelped, leaped to his feet whilst simultaneously crossing himself, knocked over the lemonade pitcher, toppled his chair to the ground, and raced into the house not quite but pretty damn close to screaming.
Ronald yelped, did his damnedest to leap to his feet whilst mopping his face and crossing himself, toppled his chair to the ground, staggered away a few paces, hit one of the posts that held up the veranda roof, rebounded with a grunt, staggered away into the garden, then changed his mind when he saw the corn, and lumbered around the corner of the house.
Denbro, who had come out of the house at the precise moment of leaping and lumbering to announce the imminent serving of dinner, took one look at what had caused all the commotion, yelped, danced back inside, and slammed the French doors.
Kent looked at the table.
On it was a dark lemonade-soaked thing which, upon closer examination without actually touching the disgusting thing, looked to his expert-in-several-arcane-matters eye undeniably like the soggy foot of a plucked virgin chicken laced around with blood-drenched feathers snatched at midnight from the five-foot wispy tail of a rare Delaware ground finch.
“It was nailed to my office door,” Lucy explained blandly.
“What does it mean?” he asked without thinking, then closed his eyes and waited for it; although maybe, he thought hopefully, it won’t happen this time. Maybe this time he’d get away from it.
“It means,” said the deep melodious voice of a diminutive black woman who had come around the side of the house at that exact moment, “that you will soon die if you do not leave this place at once.”
The sun set abruptly.
The drums began their infernal nightly pounding.
“It is,” the little woman added grimly, “the death sign of Lamolla.”
Kent strolled slowly to the middle of the yard, turned, and faced the house. Amazing, he thought, how we attempt to influence our environment so that home, wherever it may be, is never that far away. The plantation house, for example, although ostensibly a typical if damn huge American farm building, still echoed the Kenilworth family estate in Yorkshire; the garden islands around the lawn were pleasantly unruly in the country English manner; and even from where he stood he could smell, from the kitchen, someone boiling the hell out of a perfectly good piece of meat.
Yet here he was in central New Jersey, surrounded by thousands of acres of ready-to-be-harvested corn, trying to make sense of the wanton slaughter of a family he had known since his carefree university days, and the bizarre behavior of the survivors who seemed not at all distressed for those whose loss was so great.
He glanced up.
The night sky was liberally speckled with stars, and the large full moon seemed unnervingly cold.
A breeze drifted through the fields, sifting through the corn, causing it to whisper huskily, as if responding to the drums.
Some days, he thought glumly, I just cannot get a break.
He frowned.
He continued to frown as the tiny woman, dressed in cutoff jeans and T-shirt, with a calico bandanna wrapped about her head, hurried across the grass toward him. Lucy, he noted, remained on the veranda.
“Hello, Bitsy,” he said softly.
The woman, who barely came up to the middle of his chest, smiled brightly and kissed his chin. “How you been, Kent?”
He answered with a one-shoulder shrug. “I live, I’m still rich, what can I say? Now what’s all this then, love? Lamolla? I’m going to die?”
Her smile faltered. “It’s … it’s true.”
“Bitsy, for God’s sake, you went to Harvard. Law, for crying out loud. What’s gotten into you?” He grinned and slipped his hands into his pockets. “Next thing I know you’ll be mumbling stuff about voodoo and houngans and curses on the Kenilworths unto the fourth and fifth generation.”
She stared at him.
He stared back.
She stared at him.
The corn whispered and swayed.
The drums.
Kent didn’t like the prickling that began on
the back of his neck. Nor did he care for the way the night had fallen preternaturally still, except for the damn drums and the corn. But he especially didn’t like the question he was about to ask, because he already knew the answer, didn’t believe it for a minute, and knew that before this night was over he’d be proven wrong, as usual. Pretty sick of it he was, that he would have to do battle with forces that were generally beyond his ken, which is where, all in all, he preferred to keep them.
So he didn’t ask it.
Instead, he said, “Bitsy, who murdered Sir Ronald?”
Bitsy Freneau lowered her eyes. “You don’t want me to say.”
“How do you know?”
“You were just thinking about it. The not-wanting-to-know part.”
“My God, you can read my mind?”
She glanced at him without raising her head.
He cleared his throat and said, “All right, for my sins tell me anyway. Otherwise we’ll stand out here all night exchanging meaningful glances and driving poor Lucy crazy.”
Bitsy grinned. “Zombies.”
Kent grinned. “Bullshit.”
Bitsy grinned. “Lamolla is the god of vengeance Momma Holyhina called on to bring disaster and misfortune onto this place.”
Kent grinned more broadly. “Bollocks.”
Bitsy giggled. “Sir Ronald, he fire Momma Holyhina’s lover, Pierre Grumage, because Pierre want double overtime on Sundays, tried to get the other men to go on strike when he didn’t get it. Sir Ronald, he say there’ll be a big bonus when the crop is in but no double overtime. Pierre say he make sure Sir Ronald never bringing another crop as long as he live. Sir Ronald threw him off the plantation. Pierre go to Atlantic City, lose all his money, throw himself into the ocean. Momma Holyhina call Lamolla.” She spread her arms sadly. “Sir Ronald die.”
Kent wiped a hand over his face to smother the hysterical laughter he felt pressing at his lips. “Nuts.”
“Sally and Matilda, they be at the wrong place at the wrong time.” She stared at the ground. “Pierre kill them too.”