A Haunting of Horrors: A Twenty-Novel eBook Bundle of Horror and the Occult

by Chet Williamson

  "Only a few cobs now and then. But Luc—now there's a fellow who bets big and almost never loses. Everybody wonders how he does it. Why, the last time I was there, he—"

  "I don't approve of cockfights and wagering," Polinard said sternly. "But ask him about the little girl, please." And he switched the sander on to fill the shop with noise.

  The cockfights which Armand Cator attended were held near the coastal village of Petite Anse, just east of the city. Approaching the crowd, he searched its outer edge for his pal's familiar face but failed to find it.

  It was not good to fail when his employer asked him to do something. M'sieu Polinard, though strict, was a kind and decent man. Worried, Armand sought an opening in the crowd and worked his way into the pit to look at the circle of faces there.

  A fight was in progress. A white bird and a black and red one made the gray sand of the enclosure fly like rain as they tried to kill each other. Spectators leaned over the wall of knee-high bamboo stakes, yelling encouragement.

  The white was getting the worst of it. Even as Armand located his friend across the pit, the battle suddenly ended in a spurt of blood. There was a rush to collect bets.

  Armand worked his way around to his friend and was not surprised to find Luc Etienne clutching a fistful of gourde notes. Luc must have a sixth sense, he so seldom lost a wager. "Hi," Armand said, grinning. "You've done it again, hey?"

  The tall young man chuckled and stuffed the notes into a pocket of his shirt. It was an expensive multicolored shirt; not another in the place could be compared with it. He offered Armand a cigarette—another expensive item these days—and the two stood side by side just back from the bamboo barrier, smoking and talking.

  This was not a good time to ask about the little girl, Armand decided; as preparations got underway for the next fight, the crowd was too noisy. He would wait until Luc was leaving and then leave with him. They usually went back to the city together, anyway.

  "Look at Gri-Gri," Armand said.

  The man called Gri-Gri, a middle-aged fat fellow known to be the owner of some of the most courageous cocks in the district, had produced a bird which the crowd knew well. He was seated under a bayahonde bush with it, giving it a final grooming. Quite a following had gathered to watch.

  "That's the bird he refers to as his little terror," Armand. "I'll bet on it anytime. It's won six straight." Luc scowled at Gri-Gri in silence.

  "You agree?" Armand anxiously pressed. He almost never placed a wager unless Luc pronounced it a wise one.

  "No. That's not the cock you think it is."

  "What? Of course it is!"

  "Wait here," Luc said and walked over to join the crowd watching Gri-Gri rub the dun-colored bird with rum and half a sour orange. Some in the circle glanced at him and nodded, but he ignored them. After gazing at Gri-Gri intently for a while, he returned to Armand. "You're planning to bet on that bird?"

  "Well…" By the contemptuous look on his friend's usually good-humored face Armand could see something was wrong.

  "Don't. It's a ringer, supposed to lose. Gri-Gri's pals will bet against it for him and themselves, and go home rich."

  "Luc, you're crazy. I would know that cock anywhere. How many of that color do we see around here?"

  "I didn't look at the cock. I was studying him."

  "What?"

  "Behind that solemn look on his treacherous face, Gri-Gri is laughing his head off. If you want to bet, bet the other way on that one." Luc glanced toward a man who sat on the other side of the pit in a patch of shade cast by tall cactus, readying a small brown-red bird that looked no more ferocious than a common yard fowl. "As a matter of fact, here," he said, plucking the wad of gourde notes from his shirt pocket. "Bet this for me at the same time. If I do it, they'll suspect what's up. They know I usually win."

  Armand went through the crowd, calling out that he had money to wager on the favored dun's opponent. After finding takers he returned to Luc, and they watched the combat. The dun and the brown-red were placed in the pit and went at each other at once—say this for GriGri's ringer, he was willing enough—but the outcome was soon apparent. The dun knew what it ought to be doing but couldn't do it and was repeatedly bloodied, while the crowd groaned in anguish. All too soon, the fight was over.

  Armand went about collecting his money and was aware that people watched him as he returned to Luc Etienne. "We ought to leave, I think," he said. "If they see me handing all this over to you…”

  "I agree. Keep it for now and come on."

  They made a point of strolling about for a time, pretending to be interested in the next match, and then quietly departed. As they trudged out to the road, Armand handed over the other's winnings, and Luc, having won big, returned ten gourdes to him for his help. Soon after they had boarded a tap-tap to the city, Armand remembered to speak about the little girl. He consulted the paper on which he had written her name, to be sure he was remembering it right.

  "Did you know her when you lived in Bois Sauvage?" he asked. "Was there really a Tina Sam in your village?"

  The little bus clattered along the highway through shimmering waves that rose from the macadam in a swelter of midday heat, and Luc gazed at him with an expression of incredulity.

  "What's the matter?" Armand said. "All I asked was if you knew such a girl when—"

  "No, I didn't!"

  "Well, don't get sore with me. What's wrong with you, anyway? I only asked because my boss told me to."

  Luc Etienne got over whatever it was that had caused him to become so suddenly and strangely tense. "You say this girl is on her way to Bois Sauvage now?"

  "That's right. With a nurse from the hospital where her memory came back. If it really did come back. I guess it didn't if you never knew her."

  "When do they expect they'll get there?"

  "How would I know? They left here yesterday morning in a jeep. Can a jeep get to where they're going?"

  "No. From Trou they will have to use animals."

  "Well, all I want to know for M'sieu Polinard is, was there really a Tina Sam in your village or is she going there for nothing?"

  "She is going there for nothing," Luc said and then was silent. And since he was peculiar anyway at times, Armand contended himself with looking out the window as the tap-tap took them to town.

  Luc was the first to get off. "Be seeing you," he said, and jumped out the back. For a moment he stood there, hands in pockets, frowning after the tap-tap as it went on down the street. Then he turned and walked slowly up a cobbled lane to a gate and opened the gate and entered a yard. The yard was of hard-packed brown earth that bore the scratch marks of a twig broom. He crossed it to a small wooden house at the rear. This was where he had lived since coming to Cap Haitien about eight months ago.

  When he opened the door and walked in, the girl he lived with was on her knees, rubbing the wooden floor with the flat surface of half a coconut husk. She looked up in surprise. "Well, hi, you're home early, aren't you?" She was about sixteen. The dress she wore, made from flour bags with the printing still on them, was both old and too small. Luc had picked her up at a small backyard dance one night about a month ago and brought her here to live with him. Now there were times he wished he hadn't, for though she was willing enough in bed and looked after the house as well as could be expected, her being around all the time interfered with his freedom.

  He walked on into the bedroom without speaking to her. Kicking off his shoes, he first sat on the edge of the bed, then swung his legs up and lay on his back with his fingers twined under his head and his gaze fixed on the underside of the zinc-sheet roof above.

  Going back there, he thought. Tina Louise Sam going back there? That's bad.

  His girl appeared in the doorway. "Don't you intend to speak to me? What's the matter?"

  He ignored her.

  She came into the room. Standing beside the bed, she looked down at him in silence for a moment and then smiled. She was an attractive girl. Her long-
fingered hands, moving swiftly, unzipped the tight flour-bag dress and she shrugged herself out of it. It slithered down her thighs to the floor, leaving her naked. With the swift grace of a mongoose gliding through grass, she slid to a position on top of him.

  "Not now," Luc said. "I have to think about something."

  "You can think afterward."

  "No!"

  Laughing, she tried to put her mouth on his, but he jerked his head aside. Then she realized he was in earnest and, sliding off him, lay there at his side and frowned at him. It was the first time anything like this had happened.

  "You didn't go to the cockfights, did you? You've been with some other girl!"

  Gazing at the roof again, he shook his head.

  "Well then, what's wrong? You took my dress off me yesterday. Have I changed since then?"

  He stopped roof-gazing and turned himself to face her. His arm went around her and his hand clasped her small, firm bottom for a moment while he rubbed his nose against hers as though they were puppies at play.

  Then he said, "Go on now, clear out for a while. I have to do something."

  "What must you do?"

  "Stop acting as if you own me, damn it, and do as I say! Put your dress on and get out of here! Come back—" he hesitated, wondering how long it would take, if indeed he could do it all—"Come back in an hour."

  She looked at him in silence, waiting for him to say more. When he did not, she shrugged and got up. Putting the dress back on took longer than discarding it had—or was she deliberately taking her time! At last, with a final angry look at him, she left the room.

  He heard the outside door slam. Leaving the bed, he went and turned the key so she could not return before he wished her to, and so he would not be interrupted by unexpected callers. Back on the bed, he assumed a sitting position with his back against the headboard and his arms looped about his knees, then closed his eyes and fixed his thoughts on a face.

  Only twice before had he attempted this, and on both occasions he had only partially succeeded. The second time had been better than the first, though, so maybe he was learning, as Margal had predicted. Aware that he was sweating, he peeled off his expensive sport shirt and tossed it to the foot of the bed, then resumed the position and closed his eyes again. After a while the sweat ran down his chest in rivers.

  The face was beginning to come, and there was a difference.

  Before, the image had appeared only inside his head, in his mind. But not this time. No, man. This time it was out in front of him, in space, floating over the lower part of the bed just out of reach. It was more than just a face this time, too. Below it a pair of shoulders had appeared, and below the shoulders a chest was forming.

  Something really unexpected took shape then: legs. He was startled and confused. How could legs appear when Margal didn't have any? True, they didn't look solid like the rest of him. Only an outline of them was there, and that seemed to consist of a kind of glow, like the phosphorescence you sometimes saw in the sea at night. But how could there be any kind of legs on the image of a man who had been legless for two years?

  He concentrated on the face in an effort to give it more substance, while his own face felt as though someone were painting it with warm oil. But fixing his thoughts on one part of the image made the whole thing more real. It even summoned up the chair Margal was sitting on.

  Could he be imagining this? Dreaming it? Leaning forward, he stretched out a hand to try touching the thing that floated there over the bed and found he could not. But that didn't prove anything, did it? You didn't summon the man himself, only a vision of him, and the vision was now complete: Margal sitting there legless—but for some strange reason not so legless as he was in real life—in the chair he always used, and now even the room was partly visible. That many-hued room in which he, Luc Etienne, had so often assisted the bocor in his work.

  "Margal, you've come," Luc whispered.

  The eyes stared back at him. No one but Margal had eyes as terribly piercing as those.

  "Can you hear me, Margal?"

  The head slowly moved up and down. Or did he imagine that?

  "I have something to tell you," Luc whispered. "You remember that little girl, Tina Louise Sam?"

  This time the floating head did move up and down, he was certain.

  "Well, she is on her way back to Bois Sauvage right now. After she disappeared from Dijo Qualon's house she could not remember her name or where she came from, but now she has remembered, Margal. A nurse from the Schweitzer hospital is bringing her home."

  The eyes returned his stare with such force that he felt they would stop his breathing. Ah, those eyes! The face might be just an ordinary middle-aged peasant face if you didn't know how special it was, but no one else in all Haiti had such eyes, no. He heard a question and replied, "Yes, I am sure." Then another question and he said, wagging his head, "No, there is nothing I can do. It's too late. They left here yesterday morning."

  The floating image slowly faded and was gone. He waited for something more to happen, but nothing did. After a while, so drained of energy that he felt he must be as crippled as the man he had been communicating with, he sank down on the bed and lay there shivering in his own sweat until he fell asleep.

  8

  The tortured mountains

  of the Massif du Nord

  behind them at last,

  the bearded white man and Ti Pierre Bastien,

  now ride over flat, dusty

  cactus land.

  The sun's heat

  presses down on them,

  a smothering blanket.

  "Margal, I will not do it!

  I will not follow this man of yours

  a step farther!"

  Such a childish challenge,

  the mind of Margal

  will not even honor

  with an answer.

  The distance between master and servant increases.

  There comes a change.

  Subtle, yes,

  but a change.

  Feeling free for a moment,

  Dr. Bell reins in his mule

  and defiantly thinks—

  or even says aloud—

  "No, Margal, you cannot command me!"

  Then, the struggle

  of mind against mind,

  will against will.

  The white man's body writhes

  in agony

  and his face oozes sweat.

  Ti Pierre Bastien,

  his companion,

  watches and waits

  without expression:

  There can be but one outcome.

  In the beginning

  Dr. Bell's revolts are brief,

  but as time passes—

  the distance between master and servant increases—

  they endure longer.

  Until, one day, the man from Vermont

  is even able to free himself long enough

  to speak to his daughter Mildred,

  though afterward he cannot quite remember

  what he said to her.

  9

  "Tell me something, Milly," Sam Norman said. "Have you ever carried out any ESP experiments with your father?"

  Ever since the start of their journey at six that morning, his thoughts had been returning to the drum and govis in her father's room at the pension. Now, speeding along in the rented jeep on the north-coast road between flat fields of sisal, they were only a few miles from their destination.

  Mildred hesitated rather obviously, he thought, before shaking her head. "No. Not really."

  "What do you mean, not really?"

  "Well, Daddy has played around with things like telepathy and ESP for years, of course. But I don't call it 'experimenting'—to write something down and then say, 'Tell me what you're thinking about,' just to see if he's guessed right. Why do you ask?"

  "No particular reason. Just wondering." And Sam let the silence return.

  They had not talked much on the journey.
He had, of course, told her what he knew of the towns they passed through—St. Marc, Gonaives, Cap Haitien—and the names of the plants that she was not familiar with. But the ride had been hot and dusty until rain began to fall soon after their fording of the Limbé where the bridge was damaged. An alert entrepreneur no more than eight years old had shown him how to cross the river.

  The only bad moment for him had been when, soon after leaving the coastal town of St. Marc, they had passed the junction of the road that led to the Schweitzer. It was on that road one afternoon a long time ago—such a long time ago, it now seemed—that Operation Sandal had taken place.

  He had been driving Kay Gilbert home that day because she had ridden into town with one of the doctors instead of using her own car. He had the AID jeep in which he had driven to the city from his job in Jacmel. They hadn't known each other a long time then.

  You could drive that road to the Schweitzer without being too vigilant. Relatively speaking, of course. At any rate, it was reasonably flat and fairly wide, and along most of its length any oncoming traffic could be seen before it got too close. Taking advantage of that, he had elected to remove one hand from the wheel and put an arm around the girl at his side, pulling her over against him or at least applying enough pressure to convey a desire to do so.

  They had stopped for a swim before St. Marc—not at a proper beach but at a bit of shore where you could park just off the road and walk in through the sea-grapes. Magic water, crystal clear, with white pebbles lining the bottom … the place was little known but very special. Having planned on it, they had donned swimsuits under their clothes at the Calman.

  After swimming, they had walked the shore to dry off, and then put their clothes back on over the swim suits. No hanky-panky at that stage of their relationship. But, driving along the hospital road, Kay was still barefoot.

  "Hey, you're a nurse. Don't you know you're not supposed to go barefoot in this country? You could get hookworm."

  "In a jeep?" She wriggled as pretty a set of toes as he had ever seen, and definitely turned him on by doing so.