by Rhodi Hawk
The water was surging at her ankles. It had reared up from banks and was sweeping over the campsites. Fickle river devils abandoned their goading, chiding and danced in the chaos of the water. They called for panic among their hosts.
The raft was turning in a wide circle. Trigger was on it, now, his hands on Francois’ shoulder.
Patrice felt her physical body go slack, and she knew that the water had knocked her off her feet. She let it pull her toward the center. Toward the raft, which had tilted toward the sky and then disappeared.
forty-two
LOUISIANA, NOW
IN A STRANGE KIND of way, Madeleine’s urinary tract infection made itself useful. The frequent need for the latrine forced her to rise up from her cot and walk outside. She also made herself drink water every hour to keep her system flushing. Movement was good, she thought. It made her breathe deeply, caused the blood to circulate. The breath, the blood, the water; all in constant, cleansing flow.
The early evening rain subsided to a fresh drizzle. Daylight diffused through the clouds and lit the inside of the shanty in soft tones of gray.
She felt the raft rock beneath her, and she sat up. The strange boy was standing there, dripping wet, in the doorway.
She said, “Go away!”
He blinked at her. He looked like he was about to say something. But then he turned and slipped back into the water and was gone. Like a ghost.
Madeleine was striving to stay alert now. The lack of food had left her weak and sluggish, and her injuries kept her in a constant state of pain. She listened for signs of the boy returning but heard nothing but the usual evening dissonance. The sun gave her a scarlet sunset as it sank over the bayou, underlighting the remaining clouds with deep vermillion and sending a fan of crepuscular rays heavenward. She watched it all. The sun finally disappeared and the daylight trailed off behind it, leaving complete darkness. No moonrise yet. The clouds blocked the stars.
She realized she was kneeling beside her cot. No recollection as to when or why she’d positioned herself there, or for how long. Her knees were so stiff she realized hours must have somehow fled by. Her hands were raw behind her back, and the mosquitoes fed relentlessly. The sounds that carried across from the shore—the chirruping of frogs and crickets, and the night birds’ calls—they all converged together into a single rhythm. Pulses of unified sound with silence in between. She listened, fascinated. Her mouth had gone slack. The shanty itself seemed to twitch with that sound. She realized she was not alone.
“Who’s here?” she asked aloud.
No reply. Just the pulsing dissonance. Madeleine’s breathing grew shallow, because she knew what had come. Not the boy. The coldness. The void that had filled her in the briar, a disembodied thing that had become embodied in her, until Bo had wrapped his arms around her and pushed it out again.
She felt something move over her jeans where she knelt. A slow, dragging motion. She crawled backward to the wall and pushed herself against it. She couldn’t hear it move. It found her again. It wound its way up to her waist, light flicks of a serpentine tongue at the skin of her arms.
A voice, neither male nor female, said, “Almost.”
She cried out, terrified, as it moved up over her shoulder. The thing was not the void but it had traveled in on its coldness. She felt it bite the back of her neck and she screamed. She drew in her breath and screamed again, quaking, letting her fear travel with that long, drawn scream over the bayou, ending in a sob.
But the thing had made its bite, and its body was now unraveling from her.
A sense of déjà vu. Had this happened on previous nights?
“What do you want?” she shrieked.
A silence, and she gulped back tears.
Then, the voice came again. “You are given a chance. You may live if you choose.”
Madeleine felt her throat go numb in dread, but the familiar sleep was stealing over her.
The thing said, “Tell us where to find the infant.”
Madeleine cried, “What infant?”
The chirps of the bayou creatures continued their pulsing, louder now.
This time, another voice came in reply: “Your brother’s child. Tell us, or you die here, alone.”
“Oh God, Chloe? Are you doing this? I’m your blood!”
But she knew it wasn’t Chloe she was talking to. And it wasn’t a bayou serpent, or the cold void. She was talking to all of these. They had somehow come together the way a great fungus can permeate beneath the soil and taint several fields of crops at once.
She heard, “If you choose to live, you will see all and know all, and you will be elevated above all men.”
“If I find out where the baby is for you, what will you do to him?”
She listened for the answer. The spiders were at their wrapping again. No further reply came. Only the distant pulse of the night creatures, still unnaturally aligned. The silence between each call was the most dreadful thing Madeleine had ever known.
* * *
THE NEXT SUNRISE, SHE awoke on the floor again. The pains of her body were such that she was retching before she’d opened her eyes. A relief, at least, to be able to see if only in the gray shimmer of dawn. She looked at it rolling beyond the doorway and saw turtles sitting at the end of the raft. They slipped over the side and into the bayou even as she watched.
And then the immediate need for the latrine had her lurching forward, fighting her way to the door, determined not to wet her jeans. For some reason it seemed a matter of life and death that she preserve that single dignity.
The breeze outside was fresh on her face. In the diffused light of morning fog, she could see a crusted brown line that ran forward from the back of her neck around to her chest. She managed to get out of her jeans and over the bucket, and then it was done. She braced herself for the painful squeeze that came after.
The fog was so heavy this morning that there was no visible shoreline. It felt cool, though, and smelled light.
She pulled her jeans back up using her thumbs as a combined hook where her hands were tied, and then began the labor of wrestling the water jug from the trap line. Ignoring the pains. Forcing her stiffened body to move.
But then something stopped inside her. And she couldn’t. Just couldn’t.
The trap line slipped through her fingers and the jug floated backward on some unseen current below. She was shaking. Her body wouldn’t stop. She couldn’t make it stop.
“Help me!” she called out over the bayou. “Please! Boy! Please come back!”
She lay down on the raft. She wasn’t going to pull that jug out of the water again. Because she couldn’t. Her breaths were coming in shudders. She had so little strength.
The coldness that stole in on her last night, it was madness. And it—they—wanted her brother’s baby. Little Cooper, the last child of the briar after herself and Zenon. She realized, then, why she’d been kept in such a state. Starved, sickened, injured. She was probably much more compliant now than she might have been when it all began.
She knew she had to leave.
She was going into that damn bayou. She had to chance it. See how far she could swim while holding her breath. She should have done it on the first day, the very first sunrise. She would have had more strength then than she had now.
She positioned herself at the edge. Took a long breath. And then she tilted forward.
* * *
THE WATER ACCEPTED HER with a whisper. Her legs were kicking sideways like a frog’s but with her hands still tied she had so little control, and it took all her strength just to keep upright as she went down, down. Not forward. Not forward at all. Her body sank at an astonishing speed.
She looked up and saw the surface disappearing, the light above shrinking so that it resembled the opening to a rabbit hole, and all around was speckled green and gold and brown. Bubbles rose in lazy drifts.
This wouldn’t do. She had to move forward, not down. Even with her ability to hold a very
long breath she would eventually run out of air. But the more she kicked and tried to propel herself, the faster her reserves drained away.
She steeled herself, making herself quit the frog-flails, and she kicked in rhythmic propulsion. Her body was dropping fast but she was at least falling at an angle now, not straight down.
Only, she’d lost track of which way was shore.
Ridiculous! What was she going to do, walk the entire aimless distance along the bayou floor?
Her head thrown back, she was tempted to scream, that hole of light above seemed so very far away.
She didn’t even see him coming. The boy. His face flickering in bends of light. He seized her bicep and she let out the scream that had been locked inside. It flew muted in a volley of bubbles. That knife was between his teeth, his hair and beard waving on end toward the surface.
The scream had forced the air from her lungs and she now began to convulse, feeling the bayou wash into her air passages. He had the knife out of his mouth and was cutting the twine that bound her wrists. Her body lurched upward. He had her by the armpit. She kicked her legs and together they surged toward the surface, her hands clawing for the sky.
They broke free to fresh air. She gagged and spat and he watched her as though she were some kind wild animal.
She wanted to say thank you to him, but all she could do was gasp each single breath one at a time. She pulled her arms forward, her arms that had been forced behind her back for days on end, and she put her hands over her eyes, weeping.
But even as she labored through the ragged breaths she realized something odd about it. Each shudder came at a specific cadence. She stopped. Forced herself to be quiet, listening. Because she’d been breathing along with the sounds of the bayou. The night creatures. It wasn’t morning at all. It was still dead of night. And this fog had come from the briar.
forty-three
LOUISIANA, NOW
ON THE DISTANT SHORE, Madeleine could hear Severin singing, though she couldn’t hear precisely what she was singing. Only that her voice came in pulses with the night creatures.
The boy took Madeleine’s arms and pulled them over his shoulders, and he swam with her across the fog-spun surface. The duckweed had encroached, which might have seemed a natural part of the bayou but for their telltale swirls of red among the green. The briar’s duckweed. She was seeing the river devil world layered over the material world, which often made things confusing. She didn’t know how Zenon could stand it.
Madeleine could not feel her arms nor make a fist and she wasn’t entirely sure how she was hanging on to this boy, but she was. And he bore her load. He brought her to a sandy bank where they rested, silent, looking across the distance to where the shanty winked in and out of sight through the fog. Severin’s voice sounded closer now. Still pulsing with the frogs and crickets, singing:
One
Pigeon
Two
Crow
Three
Rot
Four
Slow
The boy turned to Madeleine and said, “You can walk?”
It surprised her to hear him speak. She wasn’t sure what she might have expected but his voice sounded like that of any other teenage boy, except his words lacked enunciation.
“Yes, I can walk. Let’s go.” But the second she rose to her feet she was down again.
He grabbed her by the arm. “Well, ma’am, I can see you’re a big fat liar.”
She looked at him and saw satisfaction on his face. He positioned himself at the side of her cut ankle and slung her arm over his shoulder, lifting her at the armpit so that he could help bear her weight as she walked.
She eyed his skinny frame. “You can’t just drag me along like this. We’ll never make it very far.”
“Well, you talkin true that time at least. But we ain’t got far to go, don’t have far.”
It took her a moment to process the peculiar way he spoke. “We don’t?”
“No ma’am. We here.”
“Here?”
But there was nothing here. Only massive cypress trees— not giants like in the true briar, but these were very tall and wide. No cabin, no shanty. And no ground for that matter. The bank where they’d been resting made a thin arm that wound into the woods, but the boy was leading her away from that and towards a flooded expanse of swamp. The water meandered between each tree with the roots rising up in knees like moons orbiting a planet.
“I must not be seeing right,” she mumbled, thinking the briar was hiding the material world.
“You seein just fine. Dead of night and ain’t no moon, moon isn’t out, but you can see. We in a cyprière. This here’s my tree.” He patted the huge gray cypress behind him.
“You can see out here, too?”
“How much seein you need to do to swim across a lake and climb an old tree?”
She shook her head, looking out toward the shanty where it floated in the lake. “It’s not going to work. We’re too close to that shanty out there. Chloe’ll—I mean, they will be able to find me.”
He released her arm and leaned her against the tree like she was a bicycle. “You worried that old witch Chloe gonna find you if you stay here?”
She nodded. “She can and she will.”
“So where you gonna hide that she can’t find you?”
Madeleine stared at him.
He said, “Even if you walked seven leagues and buried yourself in a cold empty grave she gonna find you.”
Madeleine turned and looked back at the floating shanty. The fog kept shifting around it. Now only the roof was visible, now it disappeared completely.
She said, “You know Chloe.”
He gave a huff. “Much to my detriment. Alright, little lady, now I can’t carry you up there. You just gonna have to figure out how to climb it on your own.”
She was already leaning on the tree but as she turned, she paused.
He said, “What now?”
“Nothing, just … I’m Madeleine.”
“Enchanted. I’m Gaston.” He took her hand in both of his and gave a half bow, a near-ludicrous gesture given his age and their mutual state of dishevelment. “Now kindly get moving, Miss Madeleine.”
She turned back to the tree and lifted her foot onto the lowest protrusion. The roots and limbs made it easy to manage. She used her hands to brace herself but she might as well have been leaning on baguettes, her arms felt so useless. They also felt like they were crawling with ants right down to the bone marrow.
She stumbled, and Gaston helped, and then they were up the tree. Actually, it wasn’t so much a matter of climbing it as circling it. The tree was hollow at the bottom. There was a wide triangular groove at water level, and just above that was a more deliberately hollowed-out space with a level floor. She climbed up into that and Gaston followed.
She said, “What now?”
He shrugged. “Sleep if you like. I’ll get you somethin to eat.”
She looked around. The hollow was almost as big as the shanty. The other trees were fairly close, probably hopping distance for Gaston, and they were draped in Spanish moss.
She looked, and saw movement. A figure in the trees. She nudged Gaston.
He looked in the direction she was staring. “You just now catching sight of him?”
But as Madeleine stared, the figure seemed to blend into the Spanish moss.
Gaston said, “Can’t say he relishes your being here. He ain’t gonna bother you too much, though, he won’t bother you. That one’s attached to me.”
And then he gestured down below where Madeleine now saw Severin scooping duckweed and swimming toward the shaded cyprière. “Besides, looks like you got your own.”
She regarded him. “You can see the river devils?”
“I can see mine. Yours I can only partly see if I don’t look at it directly. Unless I’m in a state. I’ll be back with some food.”
And then he was moving down the tree like a daddy longlegs, and he wa
s gone.
* * *
SHE HAD FALLEN ASLEEP again by the time he returned. The smell of food woke her. Outside was full daylight. He brought corn mash and duck soup, and she got the impression that the duck had just been shot or trapped or wrastled, or whatever it was a half-naked hermit boy did when he wanted to procure a duck.
The insects were incessant with their hovering but Madeleine had grown used to that over the past several days, and she was so relieved to have actual food that nothing else mattered.
“Go easy,” Gaston said.
She knew he was right. The rich duck was golden on the palate but lead in the belly.
Her hands had been tied behind her back so long that she all but couldn’t use them, and she had to hug the bowl with her arms in order to drink from it.
She looked at Gaston and for the first time, truly examined his face. It struck her that this boy was about the same age as the huffers who had been harassing Bo. Oyster had that posturing, self-conscious teenage way about him, although there was still quite a lot of awkwardness in his expression and in the way he carried his not-yet-full-grown body. In Gaston, there was nothing awkward. And certainly no self-consciousness. She pondered a thousand questions about him, questions she would not ask because she couldn’t bring herself to slow down on the soup and corn mash. She knew the moment she set down the polished tupelo bowl she would fall right back to sleep.
And Severin, after not being around for a week or so, why was she not demanding attention?
Gaston pointed at a great willow tree beyond the opening. “There’s your privy, OK Miss Madeleine? You just walk along that branch and there’s a place to sit. Far sight better than the old one, which was just a goat-smellin stump.”
She stared at it, and then nodded. Her bowl was empty.
“You fallin asleep again.”
She opened her eyes, surprised to find that they’d closed.
He said, “That ole witch put the scratch poisons on ya. Nothin to do but sleep it off. Gonna have enough to face up to when you wake up.”