The Lower Deep

by Hugh B. Cave

  The room and the bed were empty.

  Closing the door, Steve retraced his steps to the staircase and, still in no great hurry to complete his mission and get back to the man awaiting him, went groping down the stairs. Paul Henninger's room was across from Driscoll's in a dead-end lower corridor. Again he knocked, waited a moment, then turned the knob.

  This room, too, was empty, but there the sameness ended. Where Mendoza's room had been reasonably tidy, this one looked as though an earthquake had rocked it. The bed was unmade. A sheet lay crumpled on the floor. A stack of books, apparently knocked off the bureau, had fallen onto a chair already cluttered with clothing.

  Something felt gritty under his moccasins as he turned to leave. He backed up and looked down. A powder of some sort had been spilled in the doorway—he must have stepped over it when he entered. Puzzled, he picked some up on a moistened fingertip and gingerly touched his tongue to it.

  Salt? It seemed so. Paul Henninger must really be something of a slob. Or was he ill?

  Shaking his head again, Steve went back upstairs.

  "Well?" Dr. Driscoll demanded.

  Steve shut the door and, with a shrug, walked to the bed and sat again. "They're both still out, Tom."

  "One of them on some clandestine journey," the older man declared with an I-told-you-so nod. "The other trying to find out what he's up to."

  About to ask, "Aren't you assuming a lot more than you ought to?" Steve was suddenly a little weary. "If you say so, Tom."

  "What's going on here, Steve?"

  "Sorry, I—what did you say?"

  "What's going on here? Something is! Look here, I'm a sick man. You know that; you've just done everything but take me apart and glue me back together again. I've been ill longer than you know, too—longer than I've admitted. But Paul Henninger was not sick when he came here. He was overweight, yes—disgustingly so for a man who once played World Cup soccer, if you know what that is—but he was otherwise entirely normal."

  Driscoll paused for breath, then in his cracked, husky voice hurried on again. "He was full of high spirits, Steve, eager to get this place running smoothly so he could find the time to do some painting again. A thoroughly likable fellow, for God's sake. And now look at him."

  Another pause. Steve waited for the older man to recharge his batteries.

  "And he isn't the only one here who has changed, Stephen. Three or four others have undergone some—some sort of—what's the right word for it?—metamorphosis? Tell me, do you think it possible this place may be an—an abode of evil?"

  "I'll pass on that for now, if you don't mind," Steve said. "Who are these others you're talking about?" His glance went to the file folders he had tossed onto the bed when Driscoll arrived.

  "Well, among the patients there's Morrison."

  Steve nodded. Robert Morrison was thirty-eight years old, from Boston, Massachusetts. A stockbroker. "What would you say is his trouble, Tom?"

  "He claims he has headaches, yet never suffered from anything of the sort before. I mean really fierce headaches that are just about driving him crazy."

  "Who else?"

  "Philip Wynn." Wynn was fifty-two, an executive in a southern department-store chain. "He has dreadful headaches, too. And nightmares. Hideous dreams from which he wakes up soaking wet, shaking all over, he says."

  Steve nodded. "Any others?"

  "Lawton Lindo." At forty-three, Lindo had been a highly successful attorney in Baltimore and perhaps would be again once he became convinced alcoholics could not drink—ever. "He has nightmares, too. He walks in his sleep." Driscoll wagged his head, letting his breath out in a noisy sigh. "Stephen, I don't think we need a recital of individual ailments."

  "No, I guess we don't. Anyway, I've spent hours with those three patients. I've examined them, discussed their attitudes with them, their goals, their state of mind, prescribed medication, diet Lord, I've even taken them to our library and encouraged them to read books that might help them."

  Steve reached for the file folders. "Look here. Morrison, Wynn, Lindo. When you came in, I was going over their case histories again, for the third time, still trying to pick up on something."

  "And you can't explain it," Driscoll said almost triumphantly. "Can you?"

  "Give me time, Tom. There has to be something between the lines here."

  For a moment the room was silent, as though its walls had absorbed the sounds left hanging in the air. Then Tom Driscoll said in a voice heavy with weariness, "Steve, something really is happening here, you know. Has been happening for weeks. Do you think it possible for a house to be the target of some evil force?"

  "No. "

  "But these men—we've examined them. Over and over again we've checked them out. And there is nothing wrong with them except, of course, the common illness that brought them here in the first place. Perhaps the Azagon itself is the answer? Evil does exist in the world, you know. What about the voodoo you and I encountered in Fond des Pintards? And your own ghastly experience at La Souvenance?"

  "Have you run into any voodoo here, actually?"

  "Not that I can be sure of. But as I wrote you when I begged you to come here, I've heard more than once that the area's voodoo people resent us."

  "Tell me something, Tom." Steve knew he was scowling now. "Why did you hang on to the name 'Azagon' when you took over this place? You know what the name stands for, don't you?"

  The older man let his mouth droop and blew a sigh out of it. "Death and cemeteries—yes, Steve, I know now. But in the beginning I didn't. Azagon isn't one of their better-known loa, like Damballa or Agoué, and when I found out about him, it was too late." Driscoll spread his hands up in a gesture of defeat. "I'd already advertised the place, listed it in the medical journals, written God knows how many letters on Azagon stationery. With all the other problems, I simply couldn't deal with that one, too."

  Steve studied his colleague for a moment, then shrugged. "All right. I'm sure there's a less sensational explanation for what's going on here. For starters, the meals are enough to give anyone a few ailments. Where in hell did you get that fellow who's in charge of the kitchen?"

  "Lazaire? We advertised and he came with good references from a hotel in the capital. Didn't I tell you?"

  "I guess someone did. Maybe Juan Mendoza, the night I got here. Anyway, I know I've met your chef before, and I've a feeling it was when we worked at the Brightman. He denied it when I asked him, but I still think—well, never mind. Was he there, do you suppose? As a patient, perhaps?"

  "Not to my knowledge."

  "All right. But anyway, his cooking—"

  "Stephen, I don't think our problems originate in the kitchen." Tom Driscoll seemed very tired again and spoke slowly, with pauses. "Really, now, I prefer to blame the voodoo people and—well, and the evil spirits we both know they can so easily invoke. Ah, well—"

  With a deep sigh, Driscoll pushed himself out of his chair, then stood there trying without success to refold the blanket Steve had wrapped around him. When Steve took the blanket from his unsteady hands and folded it for him, he sighed again.

  "It's hard for you to take me seriously, isn't it? I keep forgetting you've been here only a few days. When you've actually felt what I have—"

  "Felt what?" Steve knew he shouldn't.

  But the old man surprised him by not seizing the chance to elaborate. "You will before long, Stephen. Believe me." Then he reached out to touch Steve on the arm in a gesture of affection, and went shuffling from the room.

  La Souvenance, Steve thought, remembering. "Your ghastly experience at La Souvenance."

  He still had his own private nightmares about that.

  Before going to work at the hospital in Fond des Pintards, he had read everything he could get his hands on about voodoo, and decided not much of it was informative. Most writers who included a discussion of St. Joe's peasant religion in their travel books on the West Indies seemed merely to repeat the same few sensational stories. />
  Within a month of his arrival at the Brightman, he had come to realize that no one could accurately report on voodoo—or, for that matter, much of anything else in St. Joe—without first mastering the Creole tongue of the peasants. And how many so-called experts could have done that in the brief time they devoted to research here?

  The name "La Souvenance" had meant nothing to him when he arrived. He had never seen it in print. At the hospital, though, and on his explorations of the nearby countryside on his days off, he soon heard the whisperings.

  La Souvenance. The remembrance. The memory. The reminder. It was the name of a very special ceremony that took place only once a year, at Easter, in a foothills village some sixty kilometers from the hospital as the crow flew. Of course, St. Joe roads were never that straight, and the driving distance would be a lot more.

  The service was attended only by houngans and mambos—priests and priestesses—who could trace their origins back to a part of Africa called Dahomey. No one else.

  He had to see it.

  Luck had opened the door for him. To the hospital had come an aged patient known to be one of the leading houngans in that part of the island. He had acute appendicitis, and Steve operated. Rightly or wrongly, the old fellow was convinced that Dr. Stephen Spence was responsible for saving his life. When drawn by Steve into a discussion of voodoo one day, he freely admitted he was a practitioner.

  "A houngan, aren't you?"

  "Yes, m'sié, a houngan."

  "Tell me something, then. I've been hearing about an annual gathering of houngans and mambos at a place called La Souvenance—or perhaps that's the name of the ceremony itself; I'm not sure. It's said to take place a couple of weeks from now, and I would give a great deal to see it. Would that be possible, compère?"

  Silence, while the houngan gravely studied the face of the man he felt had saved his life. Then, "For you, Doctor, perhaps yes, if I ask it. Let me inquire. You know about La Souvenance, of course? The reason for it? The very strict rules?"

  A man's luck could reverse itself in an instant, Steve was to realize later. The words "No, I'm afraid I don't, compère; please tell me" were on his lips when a loudspeaker blared his name and he had to rush off to see another patient. There had been no further chance to talk to his houngan before the old fellow was discharged.

  Then, only two days before La Souvenance, the man returned.

  In the O.R., the Brightman's chief surgeon worked on a nine-year-old boy whose arm had been all but hacked off—with a machete—by his marijuana-crazed father. Steve was assisting. Patiently the houngan waited more than two hours on a chair beside the reception desk. Then when Steve at last appeared, he motioned toward the door, saying, "I prefer to speak to you in private, m'sié."

  On the steps outside the front door, where he could not be overheard, he said, "You may come, Dr. Spence. But only you. No one else. Is that acceptable?"

  "It is. Of course."

  "Then I will tell you how to get there." With great care and in great detail he did so. "You can safely leave your Jeep there in the road. No one will trouble it. The guard at the gate to the compound will admit you."

  Steve nodded.

  "A house will be placed at your disposal," the houngan went on. "There will be food and water to fulfill your needs. Do not bring a camera, please."

  "I won't, I promise you."

  "This service, m'sié, is held in memory of our African homeland. It is to remind us of our ancestors who were brought here as slaves. I know you have attended other services, but no outsider has ever witnessed this one. The fenced-in compound of small houses in which it takes place is guarded by a caretaker all year long, even though it is used only once a year. There are some rules you will have to abide by, as I mentioned before. I will be glad to go over them with you now, if you wish."

  Again Steve's luck was all bad. Already late for his rounds, he had to say, "Later, please. When I get there. But I do appreciate—"

  "I quite understand, Dr. Spence. After all, I was a patient of yours, too, remember. So we will be expecting you." And the houngan was gone—on foot, with dignity, and without a backward glance as he strode across the hospital compound.

  That evening Steve had a date with Nadine Palmer and took her to a pension in the nearby town of Espoir, where they could sit on high stools at a mahogany bar and have a few rum-sodas. Anything higher on the entertainment scale was too far from the hospital.

  Nadine and he had become good friends. She was lovely to look at and had been a nurse at the hospital long enough to be at home in St. Joe. They had even attended a few minor voodoo affairs together. She liked him, he felt, as much as he liked her.

  Well, maybe not quite. But she might in time.

  "Steve, you shouldn't drive yourself to that place," she warned. "Everyone knows the hospital Jeeps. If one of them were parked all night at such a village, there'd be talk."

  "Agreed. But I can't walk there. It's up near Perdu."

  "Let me go with you and drive the Jeep back." She touched his hand on the bar. "Then I'll come for you the next evening. That's what you're planning on, isn't it? A night and a day there?"

  Steve nodded. La Souvenance lasted a whole week, he had been told—and had told her. He should have asked the houngan about that part of it, and of course would have if there hadn't been so much else on his mind. But anyway, he hadn't a prayer of seeing all of the affair. The hospital would have his hide if he stayed longer than a few hours.

  As it happened, he was not able to leave the hospital until nearly dark. Some injured had been brought in from a bus accident. By the time Nadine and he departed, night had fallen and the moon was up.

  A full moon. Never would he forget that ride north along the coastal highway, with mountains looming like giant blobs of ink on their right and a haze of silver hanging over the sea on their left. Lamplight turned the small windows of peasant cailles into peering eyes. Chickens on the road took frantic flight when startled by the vehicle's approach. Roosters crowed in shadowy yards. St. Joe cocks practiced all night, it was said, in order to welcome the dawn with the proper enthusiasm.

  On passing a lantern-lit peasant yard packed with people, they heard drums and chanting and recognized the affair as a ceremony to Agoué, the voodoo god of the sea. Steve stopped the Jeep—at that point he was doing the driving, though Nadine had been at the wheel when they left the hospital—and for a while they sat to watch.

  After a moment he put an arm around the lovely woman at his side and drew her into his embrace and shaped his lips to hers, not quite knowing whether she would accept the intimacy or pull away from it.

  She accepted it. More than that, she returned it. At that moment, he almost ceased to care whether he became the "first outsider" to attend La Souvenance or not. Ahead, near the town of Perdu, they could turn off the road onto a stretch of beach hidden by sea-grape bushes. There would be an empty strip of sand fringing a moonlit sea—a very private place for very private happenings. But just when the desire to make love to Nadine was on the verge of overwhelming his curiosity about "The Remembrance" of voodoo's roots, Nadine herself broke the spell.

  "Hey, you," she said softly. "We'll never get there at this rate. Let's go."

  The approach to their destination was as the old houngan had described it. After a couple of miles of dark dirt road lined mostly with giant candelabra cactus, the Jeep's headlight beams flowed along a wall of vertical bamboo poles on their left. Then a gate appeared, and on the gate hung a lantern, the only light they had seen in a mile or more.

  Steve turned to clasp his companion's hands before getting out of the Jeep, then almost didn't get out. "Look—I'm not sure this is safe, hon. You shouldn't be driving back alone at this hour."

  Her lips brushed his face. "Don't worry. I'll be all right, sir."

  "But if this bucket of rusty bolts should give you trouble—"

  "It won't. And if it did, I'd still be all right. As soon as people found out I'm a nurse
from the Brightman, they'd push me home singing hymns."

  "You won't be nervous?"

  "Uh-uh." She wagged her head while squeezing his hands. "I know these people, Steve. Better than you do, even. Shall I tell you what would really happen if I broke down on the way home?"

  "Tell me."

  "I'd be invited into some caille and given food and coffee, and offered a bed. Probably the only bed in the place. And if the Jeep broke down too far for me to walk to a house, someone would go for a donkey. Run along, now. Go join your houngans and mambos."

  He took her in his arms again, this time without any hesitation. Kissed her again, thoroughly. Told her to be careful on the way back, and he would look for her to pick him up the following evening. "You know something?" he said when he was out of the vehicle and leaning in to kiss her good-bye after she slid over behind the wheel. "I think I'm falling in love with you, lady"

  "And do you know something?" she replied. "I think I'd like it if you did."

  She turned the Jeep around, and he stood in the middle of the dirt road, watched its solitary taillight dwindle to a drop of blood before disappearing. Then he walked to the gate.

  It had been opened by a man who was apparently the gatekeeper. Beside that one, a middle-aged fellow in a black shirt and black trousers stood waiting with outstretched hand. "You are Dr. Spence, m'sié?" he asked in Creole.

  "Yes, compère."

  "Come with me, please. I am to take you to a caille that has been made ready for you." At least, that was what Steve understood him to say. The Creole varied in different parts of the island, and the man was obviously from some part Steve had not been in. The fact that his mouth was all but empty of teeth made a translation even more difficult.

  As they walked across the compound together, the man continued talking, and Steve picked up snatches. "Will last a week" was one such fragment. "Not leave" was another. Later, Dr. Steve Spence was to remember that walk and blame himself bitterly for not taking the time to question the fellow. Haste makes waste, he would remind himself. In this case, the proverb should have been "Haste makes horror."