“Wish someone would have told me that a long time ago,” I muttered.
“It doesn’t protect your dreams,” he said, gravely.
“Okay. Thank you.”
“God bless. Good luck, Leigh.” He hung up.
I swallowed hard in my dry throat as the footsteps stopped. I quickly ran out of the bathroom and into the living room, carrying the toilet paper with me. I couldn’t tell Carrie what was going on, and I certainly didn’t want to scare Lyla. I tried to put on a smile. “Care, you have a candle?”
She furrowed her brows when she saw the scroll of toilet paper in my hand. “Uh, yeah?”
“How ‘bout a white one?”
“Why?”
“Can you get it? Please?”
She shrugged, got up and walked to an end table in the corner of the room. It had a cabinet built into it, and she reached in and pulled out a big white candle. “Will this do?”
“Got a light?” She reached into the cabinet again and pulled out a box of matches. I grabbed them from her and sat down in the middle of the room and lit the candle. “I just thought that we could all say a prayer together. You know, to kind of bless the night.” They looked at me funny, like I knew they would. “C’mon,” I said, patting the floor on either side of me. “It can’t hurt.” They looked at each other and then looked back at me. They shrugged and sat next to me.
“Leigh, does this have something to do with us teasing you? Because—”
“No! Not at all. Now let’s join hands.” I held out my hands on either side of me. They hesitated, but each took a hand and then linked their own hands together. I closed my eyes, mentally conjuring up the words I wrote on the toilet paper. Dirty Dancing was still on, and I suddenly felt very stupid reciting a prayer to ward off darkness while “I’ve Had the Time of My Life” played in the background and the scent of—what is that?
“What’s that smell?” I asked.
“Lemon Meringue Pie,” said Carrie.
“Huh?”
“The candle.”
“Oh.” I closed my eyes and tried to shake off the stupid feeling creeping up again, but I heard the footsteps once more. I wasn’t the only one.
“What’s that?” asked Lyla.
“Okay,” I said, trying to bring their attention back to the circle. “Y’all concentrate.” I started Father Ben’s prayer. “I ask for the White Light of the Holy Spirit—”
The electricity went out at that second, silencing the movie and, from what I remember, it was the part where Baby finally does “the lift,” with Patrick Swayze lifting Jennifer Grey over his head in a moment of triumph.
Lyla gasped and started to instinctively pull her hand away, but I held it tightly in mine. I started the prayer over. “I ask for the White Light of the Holy Spirit to surround us now, shielding us from all darkness—”
We heard the footsteps on the roof again, running quickly back and forth over the living room. “What’s going on?” Carrie asked, panicked. I held her hand tightly, too, and continued with the rest of the prayer.
“I ask for the angels and saints to stand as sentinels, guarding us from darkness. I ask this in the name of the Father—”
The footsteps stopped.
“The Son—”
The tree nearest the patio door scratched its branches up and down, sounding like the nails of someone trying to scrape their way in. Lyla started to cry, trying to pull her hand away, but I squeezed tighter.
“And the Holy Spirit—”
I heard a pair of wings flapping outside. Then another pair, and another, and another. The wings flapped violently in the night, soon droning like the hum of a loud machine surrounding us from all sides.
“What’s going on?!” asked Carrie, trying to pull away from me, but I held her hand as tightly as I could.
“And in the name of the Holy Virgin Mary. Amen,” I finished.
The wings stopped. The void of noise shocked us. We were afraid to exhale because the sound coming from our lungs would have been too loud for this moment. The lights suddenly came back on and, with it, the TV and the blaring of Dirty Dancing. We screamed in surprise. I let go of their hands. They stared at me, both shaking a little. Lyla was sniffling, her tears drying, too scared to cry now.
“What the hell was that?” accused Carrie.
“Care …” I started, not knowing what I could tell her to even begin to explain what had just happened.
“It’s him! It’s the old man!” cried Lyla. She was shaking a little and kept looking over her shoulder.
“What man?” asked Carrie.
“The old man with the white hair! He’s going to get me! Jonathan told me he was coming for me!” She crawled to me and hugged me, burying her face in my chest. I wrapped my arms around her and tried to soothe her.
“It’s okay, Lyla. He can’t get in here tonight. Don’t worry. I took care of it. That prayer we said was to protect us. He’s not coming in here.”
“What man? What’s going on, Leigh?” I looked at Carrie with a hopeless expression. “Leigh!”
“I can’t tell you. I’m sorry.”
“You can’t tell me? I think I should know who the hell was just walking on my roof and playing with the lights!”
“A prank, maybe?”
She glared at me. “A prank? C’mon, Leigh. The truth. Who’s the old man Lyla’s talking about?”
I felt Lyla shudder in my arms. “You wouldn’t believe me.”
She sighed. “I promise I’ll believe you.”
I couldn’t tell her about Charlemagne and his holy knights or their blood line. I certainly couldn’t tell her that I was one of them and Clothilde and Lyla, too. Lyla didn’t even know she was one yet. I had to protect the identity of the paladins, so I settled on the simplest explanation. “It was a ghost,” I told her. And that wasn’t entirely untrue. I was told that Les Foncés had the ability to be ghosts and the Dark Man was certainly ghost-like at times, even though he did have a physical form.
“A ghost?”
I nodded.
She shook her head in disappointment. “Leigh.”
“You said you’d believe me.”
“Okay. I know you well enough to know you’re holding something back from me. But I also know you well enough to know it’s for a good reason. If you say a ghost, I’ll believe you. And if you say I have nothing to worry about, I’ll believe that, too.” She gave me a weary smile.
I mouthed the words, Thank you.
Later that night, after Carrie begrudgingly helped me turn around every single mirror in her house, the three of us slept in the living room. Carrie took the couch, and Lyla clung to me on the sofa bed. Father Ben was right. The Dark Man did not bother us for the rest of the night. Before I drifted off to sleep, my cell beeped once with an incoming message. It was from Lucas. Sweet dreams, he wrote.
I hoped he was right.
10
Tracking the Dark Man
It was a sweet dream.
At first, anyway.
Lucas and I were in my bedroom back in Los Angeles, but it wasn’t my old apartment. This was a chic penthouse that looked out onto the L.A. skyline, lit up against the black night. My lamp was on, casting a soft glow on our entwined bodies. His lips were all over me, my legs locked with his. With each kiss, every worried thought I had left my mind. Later, we fell asleep in each other’s arms.
I’m not sure how much time passed in the dream, but I woke up and it was still dark, save for that beautiful skyline. I walked to the window to stare out at the view. I felt so happy and safe with Lucas only a few from feet from me. I was again eighteen-hundred miles away from Acadiana, and I felt like I could breathe again.
I smiled at my faint reflection in the window, impressed with how content I looked. But my smile was suddenly not my own. The teeth became yellowed and brittle, and my eyes changed, too. They became very luminous, and my red hair turned white. My reflection had become the image of the man from Bancker; the Dark Man. I s
tepped back in horror and he grinned wider. A white dove flew up to the window and started violently pecking at it.
I turned around to reach out to Lucas for help. But the elegant bedroom was no more. The walls were a sickly gray color. The bed had rotted sheets caked in mud and wild grass grew around it. Lucas’s body was stretched out on the bed—at least I thought it was him. The body was a heap of decrepit flesh falling off of bone. I gaped in horror and turned to run, but found that I was moving more slowly than I should. I looked down and realized that I was no longer standing on the soft carpet of the once-chic bedroom. Instead, I was knee-high in murky green water. I started to panic, unable to trudge through it.
I turned back to the window, desperate for anything, even to jump out to my death if that’s what it took. When I turned, it was no longer night time. It was late afternoon and, instead of the L. A. skyline, I saw a lake before me.
In the instant that I saw the moss-draped Cypress and Tupelos, the entire room I was in disappeared, and I found myself inside a very small room with old, warped floor boards and a dirty window over a rusted sink. There was a small wood-burning stove in the corner. Adjacent to that was a tiny table, only big enough to seat two people, though there was only one antique wooden chair pushed under it. On the floor was a large maroon stain. My mind flashed to the picture of my mother sprawled out on a floor like this with a knife deep in her abdomen. It was here. I was sure of it. This was the cabin where she was killed, the one in the Atchafalaya Basin where she and the other paladins chased Les Foncés.
I slowly walked over to the door, cautiously opened it and stepped out into the late, hazy afternoon. There was an old rocking chair on the porch here. I remembered that from my previous dream, but there was no hooded figure rocking in it now.
Before me, the soft soil sloped downward a few yards and turned to silt as it reached the swamp. In that other dream, my mother had told me to keep Lyla away from here. But I wasn’t exactly sure where here was. If it was indeed the Basin, that was a huge area to avoid. I-10 ran right through it. If it was Lake Martin, how come I didn’t see this cabin when Lucas and I were there? Of course, we only covered part of the lake that day.
As soon as I started to analyze the dream, my conscious mind decided to come forth to tell me I was dreaming. That was the end of it. I woke up, alone on the sofa bed. It was bright outside and there was no one in Carrie’s living room.
I got up and went to the kitchen. No one there, either, but there were dishes in the sink and the smell of toast and grits and oatmeal still hung in the air. I looked outside the patio doors and saw Carrie and Lyla each holding a plastic garbage bag. I shouldn’t have been surprised, but I was when I saw a big pile of black feathers. They were bagging them, a rake on the ground nearby.
I slid open the door and Carrie turned to look at me while Lyla continued shoving feathers in her bag. Carrie didn’t say anything, but the look on her face was enough. It was a look of anger, fear and confusion. Her face could certainly say a lot with a few well-placed lines. I didn’t say anything. I went out, helped them bag the remaining feathers, and Carrie and I hauled the bags to the curb while Lyla did the dishes.
“So, do I have to worry about anything tonight?” she asked as we set the bags against her trash can. There was an edge of agitation to her voice.
“I don’t think so. You should be fine tonight.” She nodded. “Care … I’m sorry. I really am. I didn’t want you to get dragged into this.”
“And you can’t tell me what ‘this’ is.”
I shook my head. “Sorry,” I whispered.
She sighed. “Do you need help? Or does Lyla need—”
“She’s why I’m back. I’m here to help her. I just don’t know how yet. I’m going to put a stop to this as soon as I can.”
“Okay. But you promise me that if you do need me, you won’t hesitate to call, right?”
I smiled. “I promise.” I took a deep breath. “I think Lyla and I need to go back to Clothilde’s now.”
She smiled and hugged me. “Keep me updated, okay?”
“I will. Thanks for everything.”
“No prob, Leigh-Leigh.”
* * *
We didn’t talk on the ride home, but she looked scared. I wanted to tell her everything would be fine, but I didn’t know if that was true. I was utterly lost. I had no clue how to find the Dark Man and what to do with him when I found him. If I had this healing ability, how was I supposed to get it and use it? And how would that even protect Lyla? All I could do, it seemed, was fix her after she got hurt. As it stood now, Lyla had more of an ability than I did. I didn’t think I could heal an ant if I tried.
The sky was a little overcast by the time we got back to Clothilde’s, just before 11:00 AM. Anything to block the horrid June sun was a blessing to me. Summer was not exactly my favorite season in Louisiana. Lyla went upstairs to unpack her things. I dropped my overnight bag by the foot of the stairs and looked around for Clothilde. I didn’t see her, and the house seemed quiet. I went outside and found her in her shed, brewing up some mysterious concoction with her spoon in hand. I was afraid to ask what it was this time. Before I could even say hello, she was already down to business.
“Lucas called for you,” she said.
“Here? Why didn’t he just call my cell?”
“He said he tried, but kept getting an e-mail.”
“You mean voice mail?”
She banged the wooden spoon against the pot of mysterious goo and reached for the lid. “Mais, whatever it’s called with those portable telephones!” She put the lid on the pot and set the fire to simmer. I reached into my pocket and pulled out my phone. I forgot I had turned it off after Lucas sent me that last text before I went to bed. I turned it on and slipped it back into my pocket.
“You okay?” I asked, wondering why she sounded so angry.
“Go call Lucas. He said he really needed to talk to you.”
“Bad news?”
She looked like she was at her last straw. “I don’t know if it’s bad or not. I have other things to worry about.”
“What’s the—”
“I’ll tell you later. But first I have to talk to Father Ben again. He’s coming back this evening.” She went to the other side of the shed and started pulling out little glass bottles that looked like the ones in her kitchen cabinet, except these were empty.
“You need help with those?”
“No, but thank you,” she said, softening. She grabbed an armload and brought them to the small table in the middle of the room. She started to align them in some kind of order that wasn’t clear to me. It didn’t look like size, volume or color, but it was clear she could see an order in her mind.
“Father Ben really helped us out last night,” I said.
She nodded, still concentrating on the bottles.
“The Dark Man can’t hurt Carrie, can he?”
“He can, but he won’t. He doesn’t want her. He wants Lyla, for now.” She reached under the table and pulled out a box filled with small plastic bags that contained an array of herbs and powders and leaves.
“For now?”
She grabbed a handful of plastic bags and laid them out on the table in front of the bottles. “I think this particular entity started off like other Foncés. It just randomly caused chaos and destruction, like they all do. But this one is now attacking our side of the blood line, trying to cut it off. It knew David had the gift before David knew it. Michelle was just in the wrong place at the wrong time. It would have gotten Lyla, but she figured out a while back that she had a gift. And, she’s able to do something that most traiteurs can’t.”
Nancy K. Duplechain - Dark Trilogy 01 - Dark Bayou Page 14