Nancy K. Duplechain - Dark Trilogy 01 - Dark Bayou

by Nancy K. Duplechain

  We passed up a small road on the left. I looked back at the map but couldn’t find the road anywhere on it. “Wait! Go back.” He stopped the truck and turned around. “Go slow.” He dropped down to twenty, and I peered out the window, looking for the narrow opening. “There it is!” He stopped the truck.

  “You took that road? You sure?”

  “Yes. But it’s not on the map.”

  He took the map from me and looked it up and down. “Why in the hell would you take that road north, instead of continuing east like you were?”

  “Because, smartass, I didn’t know I was going east!”

  “Okay, okay. Calm down.” He handed me the map and turned right onto the single lane road and, soon, we came to a crossroads.

  “Okay, stop,” I said. “I took a left here.” Lucas slowly shook his head. “Stop it! I told you I didn’t have a map on me at the time.”

  “I’m sorry.” He looked over at me, and I did my best to show him how hurt and angry I was. “Really. I’m sorry. If this turns out to be what we’re looking for, well maybe it was a good thing you got lost out here.”

  I crossed my arms and pouted some more as he turned left onto the potholed road, which eventually became a gravel road, which turned into a dirt road, filled with trenches. Here, he dropped down to seven miles-per-hour. I was starting to get a little car sick from all the bumps, but I didn’t complain.

  “You were right. I don’t see any address here, not even a mailbox. And there’s nothing on the map at all,” he said, as we pulled up to the clearing where the house was. As soon as the house came into view, with the old rotted barn behind it and the dove coops, my stomach sank, and I wanted nothing more than to get away from it all. He drove closer to the house and parked there. He got out, but I hesitated. “You coming?” I nodded and got out, all the while watching the shadows on the side of the barn for any sudden movements.

  Lucas walked up to the house, examined the dilapidated exterior, then walked up to the door and knocked. There was no answer, but I could have told him that. He knocked again. Still nothing. “Hello!” he called out. “Police! Anyone home? I just have a few questions.” He peered into the window of the one-story structure.

  “No one lives here,” I said. “Look at it! Everything’s gone to waste. The most you’ll get are squatters and crack dealers, but even they wouldn’t set up shop here. Nobody’s that crazy or desperate.” He ignored me and tried the door. It was unlocked. He looked at me and motioned for me to stay back. I was more than happy to oblige.

  He pulled out his gun, did his cop thing and cautiously entered the dwelling. I leaned against the truck with my arms folded, chilly despite the early evening humidity. I turned my gaze to the barn, again seeing the rusted equipment in its dark womb. I turned away, looking at the dove coops, which didn’t seem all that scary, compared to the rest of the place. I went over to them, keeping one eye on the entrance to the barn at all times.

  There were individual cages stacked up in rows and columns. It was no wonder I confused them for rabbit cages from far away. But, seeing the white feathers still left behind in between the wire links, I was sure it was doves. Could have been pigeons, I told myself. But deep down, I knew what it really was.

  “Leigh!” Lucas called from the door frame of the house. He didn’t sound alarmed.

  I jerked my head up and saw him waving me over. “What?” I asked as I approached him.

  “Come help me go through some of this stuff.” I hesitated. “I promise,” he assured me, “nothing that scary in here.” He gently took my hand and led me into the house.

  The first thing I noticed was the smell of dust. The second thing I noticed was the clutter. There was junk everywhere. “Watch your step,” he warned. There were boxes and crates, old cracked furniture, piles of newspapers and magazines. I glanced at one newspaper on the top of one stack. The date was November 2, 1989. Besides the date, it was clear to see no one had lived here for a very long time. We made our way to the kitchen. The floor was pretty clear here, but the table was just as messy as the living room. On top of the mess was a drawer. Lucas let go of my hand and made a clearing on the table. Then he dumped out the contents of the drawer onto the table top. “Help me go through this stuff.”

  “What is it?”

  “Looks like pictures and personal documents. I’m looking for a name. I want to know who owns this place. Or who did own it.”

  I started going through the pile with him, sorting pictures and receipts and discarding old batteries and ink pens and paperclips. The pictures were old, most of them black and white. One showed a man and woman with a boy of about six, posing, but not smiling. Another showed the boy, older, possibly eleven, with a deer he had killed. The way he grinned over the dead animal made me uneasy. It was the look in his eyes, like he had found his calling. I flipped the picture over, but there was nothing written there. Nor was there anything on the back of the other picture. I picked up another one, this one of the boy as a young man entering the Army, posing with some fellow soldiers. He looked very serious, but his friends all smiled. Nothing written there, either. “There are no names on any of these.”

  “These either,” said Lucas. He put down a small pile of photos on a short stack of newspapers. I scooped them up and started flipping through them.

  “Isn’t it strange that no one is smiling in any of these? The only one I saw smiling was the boy after he killed a deer. But all the rest—hey, look at this.” I picked up the newspaper that was under the pictures.

  “What?”

  “It’s that boy, the one who killed the deer.” It was a small picture at the bottom of the page. In it, the boy was standing next to some dove coops with doves in them. The caption read: Walter Savoy, 13, of Sulphur, with his prize-winning doves. Annual 4-H show, 1943. “It’s him. It has to be!”

  “Hang onto that paper.” He pulled out his phone and dialed. “Hey, it’s Lucas,” he told the person on the other end. “Can you look up a name for me? Walter Savoy … Okay.” He cupped the phone with one hand. “Roger’s looking it up now,” he whispered to me.

  While we waited, I went through some more photos. It seemed to be a steady progression of the boy’s life into adulthood until the pictures stopped when he looked to be in his thirties. “I don’t understand. Where are the pics of him as the old man I’ve been seeing?”

  Lucas politely shushed me and went back to the phone. “Yeah. Whatcha got?” I saw him nodding and concentrating. While he and Roger conversed, I searched through the junk from the drawer and came across another picture. This one was of him, as the old man, standing in a barn. He was grinning the same way he had as a boy when he killed the deer. Beside him, hanging on a nail over a wooden workbench, was a locket with an intricate rose detail inlayed in gold. I threw down the picture and sprinted towards the barn. “Leigh! Wait!” was the last thing I heard before I made my way out of the cluttered living room and out the front door.

  I ran into the dark, rotted barn and had to give my eyes a second to adjust. Once they did, I scanned the four walls, but it was still difficult to see. I stepped further in, walking slowly towards the back wall. The barn was bigger than I thought. I passed under the loft, and the smell of rotted hay was sickening. I rounded a corner and there, against the back wall, with scant light reflecting off of it, was my mother’s locket.

  I slowly approached it, fear taking over my every move. My heart beat faster, and I fought to take any more than shallow breaths. It was too quiet in there, and anything could hear me breathing. I made it to the wall and carefully, gently, brushed away a cobweb blocking the workbench and retrieved the locket. With shaking hands, I opened it and saw the tiny pictures of my parents, young and full of life, inside.

  I closed it and held it to my chest, my eyes watering, and took a step back. I turned around, and what I saw made me want to scream, but no sound came out of my throat. On the right, written on the adjacent wall, were the words, and the sorcerers and all liars
shall have their part in the lake which burneth with fire and brimstone. I recognized the words instantly as the same ones Dr. Deville quoted from the Book of Revelation. They looked like they were written in blood at one time. It wasn’t the words that made me want to scream in terror, but the two bodies that hung from the beams of the loft in front of me, the flesh almost completely gone from their bodies. They had been there a very, very long time. One was a man, the other a woman, and it was hard to tell, but they appeared to have been elderly at the time of their deaths. They had wasted away to practically nothing and their clothing had mostly slipped off their bodies. Their shoes were on the ground beneath them, long ago fallen from their shriveled feet. I recognized the woman’s dress. It was the same one the boy’s mother wore in one of the pictures.

  “Oh, my God.” Lucas’s voice made me jump, and I turned to him, tears in my eyes. He hugged me and pulled out his phone again.

  ***

  “Those were his parents in the barn,” I said after awhile. Lucas was driving us back to Lafayette. By the time the Calcasieu Parish Sheriff’s office had shown up and taken our information, the last sliver of twilight had disappeared from the summer sky. We drove through the darkness with his headlights and a crescent moon to guide us down I-10 East.

  “How do you know?”

  “Her dress. It was same one she wore in one of the pictures.” I was silent for a moment, my mother’s locket now around my neck as I clutched it close to my chest. “He killed his own parents,” I said, surprised at the indifference in my voice. Lucas noticed and looked at me uneasily.

  “It’s going to be okay, Leigh.”

  I whispered a chuckle, “How are we supposed to stop a monster like that?”

  He didn’t answer me, but I could tell he thought long and hard about how to answer the question. He was just as lost as I was. “Roger said he found an obit on a Walter Savoy of Sulphur who died in 1997,” he said, softly. I hadn’t told Lucas what Clothilde told me about the night my mother died. About how the Dark Man, who I now knew as Walter Savoy, was killed that night, too, by the descendants of Charlemagne’s knights, which included my mother. And now it looked like he wanted revenge, to make sure all of us “sorcerers burneth in a lake of fire and brimstone.” How could I tell him this? He seemed eager to believe in ghost stories, but tales of paladins and ancient bloodlines? Despite the fact that I was supposed to have this great ability bestowed upon me through my lineage, I still felt so powerless to save a little girl from a dead man.

  We got back to Clothilde’s just before nine o’clock. Her car wasn’t in the driveway. Alarmed, I ran to the house, unlocked the door and called out, “Maw-maw? Lyla?” I heard no reply, but saw a note by the answering machine.

  Going see Miss Ya. She’s sick again.

  Took Lyla with me. Food in the icebox.

  -Maw-maw

  The message light on the answering machine flashed, and I hit play. The first three messages were mine, asking her to pick up and call me back. The fourth was Cee Cee, saying that she would be stopping by in the morning to bring something over. The last one was Clothilde, saying that she tried my cell phone, but it wouldn’t go through, and that she and Lyla would be spending the night with Miss Ya because she was sicker than she thought. She took special care to add that Lyla was safe with her.

  “Everything okay?” Lucas had followed me in the house.

  “Yeah. Maw-maw’s staying with Miss Ya tonight. She has Lyla with her. She said she tried calling my cell, but it wouldn’t go through.”

  “We probably lost service in some areas out there.” When he said “there,” dread washed over me as I recalled the events of the afternoon and evening. He noticed the look on my face and hugged me tightly. “It’s okay. I won’t let anything happen to you or Lyla. I promise.” I didn’t argue. I let him believe that. Truth is I wanted to believe it, too. He released the hug. “You going to be all right here tonight?” I nodded. “Okay. I’ll call Miss Celia and tell her I’m back.”

  He excused himself to make the call. I wandered over to the fridge, or the “icebox,” as Clothilde still insisted on calling it. Inside was a casserole dish with a roast in it. It looked great, but I wasn’t hungry. I shut the door and heard Lucas telling Miss Celia, “I guess you’re right. You sure?” A pause. “Okay. Thank you. I appreciate it. Night.” He followed me to the kitchen as he put his phone back in his pocket. “She said Jon’s already sleeping, and she wouldn’t mind if he spent the night.”

  “Was she angry?”

  “Not at all. Her granddaughter was visiting again, and she said the two of them wore themselves out playing. They both crashed around seven.”

  I smiled, but it quickly turned to a grimace. I let my frustrations out, pounding my fist on the table. “I don’t know what to believe anymore!” He went to hug me, but I shrugged him off. “It feels like I’m losing everyone I love and Lyla is going to be next. Clothilde’s getting older every day, and I can see how exhausted she gets. Everyone keeps leaving me.” I couldn’t stop a few tears from silently rolling down my cheeks.

  “Lyla’s still here. So is Clothilde. And Carrie.” He gently took my hand in his. “And so am I.” I let him hug me this time, and he held me tightly against him. I wrapped my arms around him just as tightly. We stayed like that for a few moments before he pulled back, wiped the tears from my eyes, and kissed me very softly. And it felt right. It felt like everything that happened that day had aligned itself to make this moment happen. I kissed him back a little harder. And then we walked upstairs together and into my room.

  ***

  I was afraid to open my eyes. I was afraid it would be like my dream, where, after we made love, I’d awaken to that horrid scene my mind conjured up the night before. But this was different. We hadn’t made love. We simply slept in each other’s arms. I felt more like a lady than I had in a very long time.

  With my eyes still closed, I ran my hand along his strong arm that was wrapped around my waist. It felt good, and I felt safe. Behind my eyelids, I could tell the sun was out and it was morning. I felt his body pressed against mine, his breathing slow and steady behind me. I made myself open my eyes.

  There was no L.A. skyline outside the window across from my bed. Instead, there was the top of a persimmon tree with a couple of sparrows in it. They chirped at each other, fighting over a spot on a branch. I smiled and shifted my weight a little.

  “Morning,” he said, softly. I turned to face him. “Hi.” He smiled at me but then gave me a weird look and asked, “Everything okay?”

  “Yeah. Why?”

  “You were looking at me funny.”

  I laughed a little. “I was just relieved to see you there.”

  “Who else were you expecting?”

  “Never mind.” We were quiet for a bit, and he never took his eyes off of me, not even when he delicately kissed my shoulder or ran his fingers through my hair. I delighted in the way his own hair was a little shaggy compared to how groomed he usually looked. When he was little, it was almost platinum-colored, but it was a nice dirty blonde now. When I thought about all the times we spent growing up together, the times he and David used to pick on me, it felt weird to be with him in this moment. But it was the first time I felt really at peace since I’d been back in Louisiana.

  “Do you feel a little better?” he asked.

  I groaned, remembering last night’s events. “I was.”

  “Sorry.”

  I nestled in closer to him. “It’s okay. There’s a lot I have to do, and I just don’t know where to start.”

  “You won’t have to do it alone.”

  I looked into his sincere eyes and couldn’t imagine myself anywhere else in the world. I kissed him softly and rested my head against his shoulder. “Remember when you asked me if I believe in an afterlife?”

  “Yeah. Do you now?”

  “I suppose. It’s the only explanation that makes any kind of sense after everything I’ve seen.”

  “
Always looking to explain things.” He shook his head, disapproving. “Never had much faith, did you?”