He prays, for the sake of his wife and child,
that something may have happened
to postpone the morrow.
Dr. Bell is entering a whirlpool
likely to suck him down.
Someone is telling him to halt,
to go back,
to cease his rebellion,
return to blind obedience,
or suffer the consequences.
With every step he takes,
the voice grows more threatening.
He races down Rue Magny
to the park where he spoke to his daughter.
He runs through the park,
along a path lined with shrubs and beds of bright
flowers.
The voice is stronger with every stride.
He struggles to reach the Pension Calman,
knowing that he is nearing also
the man with no legs.
Margal has indeed come from his place of iniquity
in the mountains.
He gasps for breath.
He looks wildly about him.
Which of the many houses
harbors the fiend?
The many different kinds of houses:
old and new ones,
large and small,
fragile coops of the very, poor.
Everywhere in this land
the peasant shack stands next to the mansion.
Where is Margal?
Close by, without a doubt.
His raging voice is almost too loud to be defied.
But Mildred is dying.
At the Calman.
Dr. Bell stumbles on the red-brick driveway.
Limp with weariness,
he staggers into the pension.
His daughter lies on a sofa in the big front room.
A strange man, on his knees beside her,
a stethoscope over her heart.
Sam Norman, a young woman Dr. Bell does not know
stand hand in hand, intently watching.
Tears flow down his cheeks.
Dr. Bell approaches the sofa.
He gazes down at his daughter.
The voice of Margal,
fearsomely close by,
thunders death, destruction in his head…
40
"Dr. Bell!"
The name burst from Sam Norman in a muffled explosion as he turned from the couch and saw Mildred's father lurching toward him. Bell's face told of his torment and the conflict raging within him.
Grabbing at Sam's arm, the older man stood there swaying. "Will she… Sam, will she die?"
The doctor answered that, rising from his knees and facing them. "I am sorry," he said in French. "There is nothing I can do."
Releasing Sam's arm, Bell sank to his knees to peer into his daughter's face. The face seemed strangely peaceful now, though only a few moments ago it had been a battleground of emotions.
Sam looked at Kay but said nothing.
Bell rose to his feet.
A change had come over him with the realization that his daughter was beyond rescue. A cold fury had replaced the conflict there. Sam stepped away, half expecting to be blamed and attacked for what had happened. But the fury was not directed at him. Without even a glance at him, the man from Vermont strode briskly across the room to the door.
Letting go Kay's hand, Sam said under his breath, "Wait here for me, baby. Okay?"
She nodded. "But be careful!"
He followed Bell out of the pension.
At the big open gate, Bell hesitated, but only for a few seconds while turning his head left and right as if to home in on a signal he was receiving. Turning to his right, he went quickly along the sidewalk, past the pension's ornate fence, with Sam twenty paces behind him. When he turned right again, it was to enter the unpaved driveway of one of the smaller, older houses fronting the Champ de Mars, almost directly opposite the Palais National.
Warily, Sam followed.
Dr. Bell walked quickly up the driveway and into a small rear yard fenced with rusty sheets of zinc. Under an aged soursop tree grazed a mule that he had seen at Margal's compound in Legrun: a big, dark-brown beast capable of bearing a heavy burden. Bell paused to frown at a strange device lying on the ground nearby amid saddle-mats of woven banana trash.
It was a chair of bamboo, obviously designed to be placed on a mule's back. Was it the chair in which the legless bocor had been conveyed here from his mountain retreat, with some of his servitors leading the animal over those difficult mountain trails and attending to his physical comfort during the journey?
I am right, Bell thought, clenching his hands in fury. He is here, this monster who caused my daughter's death.
At the back of the house, a flight of rickety wooden steps angled up to a second-floor veranda that looked as though it might collapse under the weight of any man who dared tread on it. Bell put a trembling hand on the railing and gingerly ascended. They would be in an upstairs room from which they could watch the palace, would they not? He thought so.
As he reached the top of the stairs, Sam Norman entered the yard below and looked up. Saw Bell go gingerly along the rotting veranda and halt before a closed door. The door was red, or had been once, and bore on its upper half a voodoo symbol containing three black circles in a row.
Bell cautiously opened it and stepped inside, out of Sam's line of vision.
Sam approached the stairs and climbed them slowly, testing each before trusting it with his weight. Reaching the veranda, he looked along it at the termite-eaten boards and winced with apprehension, reminding himself that Dr. Roger Bell of Vermont weighted considerably less than he did. Then he grasped the veranda rail and made his way carefully toward the red door, which was now open.
When he had left the veranda, Dr. Bell found himself in a narrow corridor that ran from the back of the house to the front. For this time of day it was surprisingly dark, perhaps because the four doors it contained, two on each side, were closed and there were no windows. A door at the front was half open, however, allowing a shaft of sunlight from some window in the room facing the Champ de Mars to slant into the hall. It was toward this that Bell slowly made his way, fully aware of his peril.
The voice in his head was a hiss now, and he well knew what that could mean. During his apprenticeship in Legrun, Margal had been hissingly angry with him a number of times. Twice he had been made to crawl back to his quarters, across the compound, on his hands and knees. On a third, more terrible occasion he had been forced to make the journey on his belly, like a salamander, pausing every few yards to scrape up donkey droppings in his path and eat them. "To teach you to obey me," the legless one had hissed. "For until you have learned to obey me, you cannot know how to make others obey you!"
There were voices in the room he was approaching, and he slowed his pace to a silent shuffle, barely moving his feet. Had he turned back when he neared the source of the voices, he would have seen Sam Norman at the red door behind him, but he did not turn.
Reaching the doorway in front, he flattened himself against the wall beside it and tried to hear what was being said. And heard, but it was in Creole and therefore incomprehensible to him. Had Margal always spoken to him in English? He did not know. Mostly, the cripple had talked to him through his mind, reaching him with thoughts alone. Perhaps thoughts needed no language.
I never should have begun this study. A man needs a stronger mind than mine, a mind able to resist the hellish forces it may encounter. From the very beginning—from those first innocent experiments with Mildred—I've been stupidly playing with demons.
The sounds in the room had ceased. He inched closer to the open doorway and dared to look in. The room held four persons.
Margal sat on a wooden lawn chair that had wide, flat arms and a mound of pillows to keep his crippled body comfortable.
The tall, wasp-waisted man lounging on an ordinary kitchen chair near the window was Ti Pierre Bastien, the Haitian who had taken Bell to Legru
n.
On the floor, beside Margal's chair, sat a second Haitian named Volny, equally strong but mindless, capable only of following the bocor's orders. A zombie? Perhaps. At the compound he had performed only menial tasks.
The fourth man was the blond Nazi who, after traveling all the way from Schleswig-Holstein to beg the bocor's help, had stupidly offended him and ended up with nothing. Less than nothing. Seeing him there, Bell vividly remembered the morning of the man's downfall: "What command am I directing into your mind, M'sieu Hauser?"
"You are telling me to kneel before you."
"But you are not kneeling."
"This is nonsense! I am receiving the command. Be satisfied with that. Only to my Führer would I kneel, and he is dead."
"M'sieu Hauser, I warn you—I am not a patient man."
"You speak to a future ruler of the world, Margal, not to some stupid Haitian peasant! I have already told you who I am! I warn you not to think I can be—"
What had happened then, in that room of many colors, was a thing that might happen again here in this house on the Champ de Mars, Bell knew, if he dared to step into Margal's presence and challenge the man. One moment, the German had been standing there before the sorcerer's chair, glaring in defiance. Next moment, he had been gasping for breath with his hands clutching his neck while his knees went limp, his body sagged, and slowly, writhing in agony, he had collapsed on the floor. In the two or three awful minutes before his struggles ceased, he uttered no sound louder than a gasp or moan, certainly nothing like a scream, although his blue eyes, hideously wide, had once looked at the legless creature on the chair and surely begged for mercy.
Fat Clarisse, Margal's woman, had come then, in response to the sorcerer's summons, and picked the Nazi up and carried him to another room. And when Bell saw him the following day, he had been as he was now, a man whose mind and will—both remarkably strong before—had apparently been taken from him, leaving only an empty shell to obey Margal's orders with never a murmur of protest.
If I face Margal now, I could end up like that, God help me. But he killed Mildred! He killed Mildred!
He looked down at his hands. They were all he had. The cripple had given him no weapon when sending him on this mission to the capital; had told him he would need none if he had learned his lessons well.
The hands curled now, aching to fasten on Margal's throat. Sucking in a deep breath to steady his thudding heart, Dr. Bell stepped from the corridor wall and strode into the room.
On the big wooden lawn chair, Margal stiffened at sight of him. The seemingly frail body became rigid, and the powerful hands gripped the chair arms like metal claws.
By the window, Ti Pierre Bastien stared at Bell in mild astonishment, letting his lower jaw drop so that his mouth resembled a frog's.
The two zombies seemed unaware that anything had happened.
Bell strode forward, arms extended, fingers twitching. His hands had never closed on any man's neck before, but they would do so now. Were they strong enough to squeeze the life from the creature facing him? He was not sure, but he could try.
Propelled by his fury, he covered half the distance. Then the sorcerer's gaze met his.
Margal seemed not to move—not even his lips. But his eyes were lasers and the voice in Bell's head was a shriek commanding him to halt.
He shuffled to a stop.
Now the legless body did move a little, leaning slightly toward him. One hand rose from the chair-arm, and a bony forefinger pointed. Though yards from Bell's chest, it felt like an arrow shot into him.
"Kneel, Dr. Bell!"
"No! I will not!"
"Kneel!"
The agony in Bell's chest climbed into his throat and cut off his breathing. His hands fluttered to his neck and squeezed, trying in vain to drive the pain out. Slowly, he sank to his knees.
A weapon… he should have brought a weapon, but where could he have obtained one? Never in his life had he used a firearm, anyway…
The room began to spin, and the figure on the chair, triumphantly holding him with his gaze, began to blur and fade in a turbulent fog of redness. No one else had moved; that was the astonishing thing. No one but Margal, and Margal, only slightly.
From the doorway Sam Norman saw it happen and brashly rushed into it.
Voicing a kind of kamikaze yell, surely an involuntary bellow, Sam reached the groveling figure of Dr. Bell and hurdled it. Not for him the hypnotic gaze of the figure on the chair; he had seen its effect on Bell and kept his eyes averted.
His headlong rush carried him to the chair itself. His groping hands found its big flat arms and heaved upward. The chair went over backward, and the legless man rolled out of it onto the floor, frothing at the mouth in his fury.
Sam dived over the chair and landed on top of him. Got him under the arms. Reared back and stood up, lifting him high. Hurled him into the wall.
Margal fell. A splash of scarlet marked the wall where some part of him had struck it. Hitting the floor on his stumps of legs, he drove his knuckles against the ancient boards to hold himself erect.
A hideous, shattered figure, he nevertheless still had a gaze that could drill into Sam's eyes and cause a bolt of lightning to explode in his head. The lightning was followed by a voice so terrible, it threatened to crack Sam's skull.
Will yourself dead, white man! Die!
Sam shook it off and strove to attack again. Managed two steps and felt himself no longer in this rotting house in the heart of Port-au-Prince but on a vast, empty plain, battling a hurricane of fiery wind. Floating in space before him, the face of Margal took on a leer of triumph while the wind turned into a rushing wall of flame that seemed certain to burn the clothes from his body and sear the flesh from his bones.
He knew what was happening. It had happened before, hadn't it?—not only to him but to the others. The sudden flash flood at the river. The monstrous lizard on the bed. Mildred's attempts to drown herself at Valliere. The terrifying illusions at Devil's Leap.
Damn you, Fenelon, you can't do this to me!
He took a step forward and the flames closed around him, blinding him with their crimson fury.
Will yourself dead, white man!
"To hell with you, Fenelon!"
In the midst of the flames, barring his way, loomed a figure he dimly recognized as the tall, thin-waisted man who had been sitting by the window. A horizontal forearm came at him like a fence rail, aimed to shatter his throat and stop his breathing.
Sam jerked himself aside and slammed a fist into the confident face above it. The fist jolted the face aside. The fence-rail arm wilted as the man fell. But against the wall Margal continued to scream.
"Die, white man, die! Do you not hear me?"
Floating in flames there; the face of the legless sorcerer was that of a devil in a fiery furnace. To reach him, Sam had to enter the furnace. With arms outflung, he went in, ignoring the reek of smoke in his nostrils and the feeling he was being burned alive.
It won't work this time, Fenelon. We're not at Saul Diable. This is just a room in a house on the Champ de Mars, and the house is not on fire. You're through anyway, damn you. Can't you feel your voice growing weaker?
True, the voice shrieking its monstrous commands inside his head was less shrill. Being slammed into the wall must have taken more from the bocor than the smear of blood left on the cracked plaster. But was the fire wholly an illusion? A searing pain in his left leg caused Sam to stop and look down. His pants were ablaze in a way the rest of the room was not. He dropped on one knee to slap at the flaming cloth, and the pain leaped to his hands.
Was it possible? Had Margal this time created an illusion so powerful it had bridged the gap and become reality? He looked up—straight into the sorcerer's crimson face, now only five or six feet away. It wore an unholy leer of triumph, and the voice in Sam's head, too, was obscene with triumph.
Burn, white man, burn! No one defies Margal!
Sam straightened again, snarl
ed "Damn you!" and attempted another step forward. Made it and was about to try another when a voice stopped him. It came from the hall doorway and was a real voice this time, not one in his tortured mind.
"Step aside, M'sieu!"
He lurched about. Into the room strode two men in Khaki army uniforms, each with an M-1 rifle at the hip. Sam dived out of their line of fire and the weapons jerked into action, filling the room with chatter.
Against the wall, the legless body of Margal danced weirdly for a few seconds on the rigid arms that held it erect and then, riddled, collapsed to the floor.
The rifles swept to other targets. To the broad-shouldered man, now on his feet again, whom Sam had felled with a fist to the face. To the blond, vacant-faced German and his fellow zombie. Then to the sprawled figure of Dr. Bell, but Sam's yell ripped through the room to stop that.
"No!" he bellowed in Creole. "That one's an American—not one of them!"
The guns were silent. Advancing, the two soldiers walked past Sam with scarcely a glance at him and frowned down at Margal. Into the room after them came a man Sam did not know: a handsome Haitian who hurried over to Dr. Bell, now struggling to rise, and with obvious compassion helped the older man to his feet.
The smoke in the room was thickening. Alive with crackling sounds and streaks of scarlet now, it rose from parts of the old wooden floor to swirl darkly to the ceiling. Sam's pant leg burst into flames again. He knelt to slap the flames out.
"This man is still alive, Dr. Molicoeur," one of the soldiers said, peering down at Margal.
Molicoeur left Dr. Bell and walked over to the sorcerer. Sam followed. The legless body lay in a spreading pool of blood, but the eyes were wide behind a thickening film, and the mouth was moving.
But the voice was not the one Sam had heard in the room of many colors at Legrun. Nor was it the one he had just been hearing in his head, screaming at him to die.
It was that of little Tina, saying defiantly in Creole, "I won't, I won't! I'll run away, you'll see. The very first time you send me for water or firewood I'll just run away because you're a wicked man."
The voice changed. Deepening, it became that of Dr. Bell, speaking English. On hearing it above the sputter and crackle of the flames from the blazing floor, Bell came limping over to stare, astonished, at the twisted lips from which it issued.
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