Shades of Evil

by Cave, Hugh

  SHADES OF EVIL

  Hugh B. Cave

  Digital Edition published by Crossroad Press

  © 2011 The Hugh B. Cave Estate

  Copy-edited by: Patricia Lee Macomber

  Cover Design By: David Dodd

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  LICENSE NOTES

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  OTHER CROSSROAD PRESS BOOKS BY HUGH B. CAVE:

  NOVELS:

  Serpents in the Sun

  Conquering Kilmarni

  The Evil

  The Evil Returns

  The Nebulon Horror

  The Cross on the Drum

  Lucifer's Eye

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  BOOK ONE

  The Haunting

  1

  A Thing from the Lake

  The window beside her bed overlooked the lake, and the sound she was hearing was a water sound. A splashing.

  Not the single explosive splash of a feeding bass, although the large-mouths in the lake did voraciously feed at night sometimes. This must be the sound of wild ducks or wading birds, frightened by a marauder. Or perhaps by the alligator the mystery man in the next apartment, Haydn Clay, claimed to have seen.

  Yes, it was a sound of panicky ducks in a frantic race through the reeds and lily pads. They couldn't easily fly out of all that vegetation, so they usually made for open water before taking off. Most of the time they headed toward the strip of white sand the condominium proudly called its beach, then soared with a sharp bank to the left or right to avoid braining themselves against the six-story building itself.

  She was hearing the flapping of their wings now. They were airborne. Wondering what they were fleeing from at three A.M., she slipped out of bed and went to a window. The moonlight streamed through her summer-weight nightgown to reveal a remarkably slim and shapely figure for a woman of her age.

  Had she awakened her husband? Concerned, because yesterday he had returned from his daily round of golf complaining of chest pains, she turned to peer at his bed. Earlier, on waking and needing a bathroom, she had gone all the way through the apartment to the guest bathroom instead of using the one off their bedroom, to be sure she would not disturb him.

  He was asleep on his back, gently snoring. But of course. Had the slight stir of her going to the window aroused him, he would be reaching for her by now, with the moonlight leaving her practically naked like that.

  She smiled. "Treasure the good things when you're aging," someone very wise had once said or written. One of the best of all the good things now was Jerry's loving, maybe a little less vigorous than before, but still wonderful. I'm sixty-four and he's sixty-seven, for heaven's sake, and we still respond to each other's slightest touch.

  But what in the world had caused the ducks to panic at this hour?

  She stood there frowning at the beach, which of course wasn't a beach at all, really, but a developer's come-on—a real-estate gimmick common in this part of central Florida where lakes abounded. SWIM AT YOUR OWN RISK the signs said. Where you swam, of course, was in the condo pool, down on the common beyond the shuffleboard courts. This lakeside beach was just white sand trucked in to imitate the ocean fronts of Fort Lauderdale or Boca Raton.

  Sure, you could get into a swim suit and loll around soaking up the sun while folks up north shoveled their cars out of snowdrifts. But you couldn't swim here because ten yards out from the trucked-in sand were weeds that felt like a tangle of live snakes and at times did harbor a snake or two. Cottonmouth moccasins, to name just one variety. Not to mention frogs that sometimes gurrumped all night, and—if true—Haydn Clay's alligator

  And, right now, something else. But what was it?

  She pressed her nose against the screen and tried to identify what she was seeing. A vapor of some sort rising from the water. Swamp smoke? A mist?

  If the ducks had been fleeing from it, it must have come in from the area of reeds and pond lilies where they had been, a half acre patch of semi-swamp just off the shore here. Or from beyond, of course, where the water was much deeper. But the thing was rising out of the lake just off the strip of white sand now, and was forming itself into something the way a cloud in the sky sometimes takes on a shape you could put a name to.

  Human? As it emerged from the water it seemed to become so. Less amorphous now, it assumed the shape of a person wading up onto the beach, though the water remained still. About the legs of a real person the water would have swirled, no? And the agitation would have been plainly visible in the moonlight.

  The thing was leaving footprints in the smooth sand of the beach, though. A whole trail of them. But were they real footprints? There seemed to be no depth to them. They had no shadowed edges, as they ought to have in the moonlight. Yet they were wet—you could tell—and appeared to glow with the strange phosphorescence that sometimes could be seen in the marsh.

  What in heaven's name was it? And why did she have the distinct feeling it was malevolent, that just by looking at it she might be placing herself in terrible peril?

  "Jerry," she said in a whisper. Then, louder: "Jerry, wake up!"

  "Uh?" Opening his eyes, he saw her at the window and sat up in bed, frowning at her.

  Wrenching her gaze from the thing on the lawn, she turned toward him and cried again, "Jerry!"—annoyed now because he had not recognized her fear and responded to it. A chill of terror raced through her as her gaze twitched back to the unnatural thing below.

  "What's up?"' Swinging his feet to the floor, Jerry pushed his stiff, stout body erect and stumbled toward her.

  "Look down there! What is that thing?"

  At her side he lifted an arm behind her and let his hand rest on her buttocks. Pure habit; he had even, without thinking, done it at the condo cocktail party last week. Neither sex nor affection was on his mind, though, as he leaned toward the window and gazed incredulously at the misty figure walking, or floating, over the grass.

  "I'll be damned."

  "Is it real?" Ruby asked him.

  He did not reply. Just stared.

  "It came out of the lake," she said. "It scared the ducks. They made such a racket getting away from it, they woke me up. Jerry, what is it?"

  "Somebody's playing tricks," her husband said, remembering a thing he and some other kids in his high school science class had cooked up one memorable Halloween, years ago, to scare the school's principal. You took some gauze or cheesecloth, a mixture of luminous paint, benzene and varnish . . . "A trick," he said again. "Some joker in the building."

  "Jerry," she said, "it came out of the lake."

  "Couldn't have. If you get the stuff wet, it won't work."

  "It came out of the lake, I'm telling you!"

  "Look," he said, and took his hand away from her to press a pointing finger against the glass. "Now what the hell is it up to?"

  The Halloween memory had reached a corner of the building and wavered to a halt. There it stood, a vaguely human shape in a surrealistic
painting that included the three-mile long lake with its acres of marsh, the strip of beach gleaming in the moonlight, and the expanse of lawn leading up to the white concrete condominium which in the light of the moon resembled an oversized mausoleum. Here and there a palm tree cast a grotesque shadow on the grass, like a slender woman with a Medusa hairdo. Clusters of flowering shrubs suddenly came to life as small birds awoke and noisily flew out of them.

  The thing from the lake just stood there, seeming to peer at the building. As though wondering what the structure was. Or who lived in it.

  "I'm wrong," Jerry Ellstrom admitted in a low, uncertain voice. "We kids didn't come up with anything like that."

  "Jerry, is it a woman? I mean the ghost, or whatever, of a woman?"

  "You've been reading too many of Will Platt's books."

  "Look! It's moving again!"

  Its study of the building finished, the misty figure was again in motion, walking or floating past the screened veranda of the first-floor apartment on the east corner. Watching it from their third-floor window in 302, the Ellstroms saw it disappear as the building blocked their view. In continued silence for another minute or so they stood there.

  "I'll bet I know," Jerry Ellstrom said then with a snort of disgust.

  "What?"

  "That bastard Helpin, under us. He worked in Hollywood. Some kind of special effects man."

  "But why—?"

  "Because he hates Ed Lawson, that's why. There isn't anything he wouldn't do to make trouble for Ed."

  "Who, with Haydn Clay, saw the alligator," Ruby contributed, frowning.

  "Saw something, anyway."

  "Jerry, we both saw this. It was real!"

  "All right, we saw it, but what the hell was it?" There was a fierceness in his voice that startled and puzzled her. Had he, too, sensed that the lake thing was a creature of evil?

  Afraid again, but for him this time, she drew him away from the window. His report yesterday of the pain in his chest had frightened her. Without telling him, she had called their doctor and been advised not to let him exert himself or become excited.

  "Come on back to bed, hon," she begged, trying to keep out of her voice the other fear—the unreasonable sense of terror—that she felt now about the nameless thing from the lake. "Come, Jerry. Please. You need your sleep tonight."

  He turned for one last look at the now empty condo lawn below and, with a reluctant "Well, all right, if you say so," let her lead him back to the bed. At any other time he almost certainly would have lovingly placed his open hand over her small, soft bottom and pressed his face against hers as they walked toward that bed together. This time, no.

  She glanced at the scowl on his face and decided he was worried. Or, like her, was caught up in a cold chill of fear that didn't really make any sense.

  2

  The Gathering

  At 4:20 P.M. the following day, in apartment 604, Willard Platt pulled a page of rough-draft copy from his typewriter and glanced at his watch.

  He had begun work at eight after downing a boiled egg and a cup of instant coffee for his breakfast. Had quit at 12:30 to lunch on a tall glass of club soda laced with bourbon, but had become restless and carried the glass back to the small third bedroom he called his study. He still wore the lightweight blue bathrobe he had thrown on over his pajamas when he got out of bed.

  He didn't usually work this hard on a book, he thought, scowling, on his way to the bathroom to take a shower. Something about this one was driving him. Was it because he was alone now? No Vicky filling the apartment with sounds as she moved about trying to amuse herself?

  In the bathroom he stripped and looked at his image in the mirror-wall over the washbasin. Forty-seven the day after tomorrow, he thought. You don't exactly look it. A bit fat just now, maybe. That's from all those meals of stew peas and such in Jamaica, bless Ima Williams and her idea of a white man's appetite. Most of it is still muscle, though. Nothing to be ashamed of. As for the face—well, hell, it was never anything special, but it'll serve.

  He turned on the shower, stepped in, and soaped himself. His soapy hands lingered on his body until he got hard and came, a thing he had learned to do of necessity soon after his marriage twenty-seven years ago. What would the dear ladies of Lakeside Manor think if told that Will Platt's beautiful, sexy-seeming wife was frigid? Or would they believe it?

  Probably not. And they most certainly would not believe, even if he himself told them, that in Jamaica she had become a devoted student of obeah and a dangerously evil woman. For that matter, most of the condo ladies would have to go to a dictionary to learn the meaning of the word "obeah"—that it was a particularly powerful and ugly form of West Indian sorcery born long ago in Africa. The idea that their bridge-playing Vicky had studied to become a sorceress . . . well, hell, they just wouldn't buy it.

  Anyway, her friends would be at the weekly cocktail party this afternoon and he had better be there to answer questions about her disappearance, or they'd be calling him to find out if he'd heard anything. Condominiums, even small ones like this with its mere twenty-four apartments, were not private places.

  Almost every woman here knew, for instance—straight from darling Vicky—what he liked to eat, drink and wear, how many hours a day he usually spent at the typewriter, that he was too impatient to play a decent game of golf, and that he got bored half to death sitting in a boat waiting for a Florida bass to come along and swallow a hapless minnow with a hook through its body.

  (He did cast a dry-fly occasionally. But there were precious few fish in this lake smart enough to rise to flies.)

  Vicky hadn't told the ladies what happened in the bedroom, of course. Or, rather, what didn't happen. Most of them probably thought she was exactly the right mate for a man who wrote all those torrid love scenes into his novels.

  Finished with his shower, he dried himself and walked into his bedroom, where he stood at a window for a moment. In Lakeside Manor all the bedroom windows facing the water were extra wide. He never tired of looking out at this lake, which, thank God, was a wildlife sanctuary and thus had been left pretty much in its natural state. A few of the houses around its edge had wooden piers, but there were no concrete embankments to make the thing resemble a vast swimming pool. More than half the shore, in fact, was marshland, unsuited for development.

  I'd better wear something decent. Every dame in the building will be asking me if I've heard anything.

  He donned pale green slacks, a dark green shirt, white shoes. Then he went into the kitchen, took a bottle of bourbon and a glass from a closet there, and put them into a brown paper bag.

  Okay, Buster, here we go. Brace yourself.

  There was the usual cute sign in the elevator, stuck up a few days before by the condo's social director. "April First is now safely behind us, so let's quit fooling around and come out in force for the weekly 'do' at 5 P.M. Wednesday. Bring the usual bottle of something wet and a snack or two to munch on, and we'll be seeing you."

  Descending to the ground floor, he stepped out with his paper bag and turned right along the green carpet, at the end of which he emerged into the open where the residents' cars were parked facing one another in neat rows, as if about to kiss. Off to his left, across half an acre of lawn, the pavilion was already crowded.

  A woman's deep voice behind him said, "Will, did you hear about the dogs?" Like himself, Estelle Quigley had lived in the building since its construction three years before.

  He paused, half turned, and waited for her to catch up to him. She was one of the few women in the building he could honestly say he liked: a short, dumpy widow with a mind he constantly envied. Retired now, she had for years owned and run a topflight restaurant in Massachusetts.

  "Dogs, Estelle?"

  "The two from that house by the golf course, that have been fouling up the common. No one's told you? They were found dead in the road this morning."

  "Good God." The animals in question were Great Danes, inseparable. He
had always admired them, even while complaining with everyone else at the way their owner encouraged them to use the common for a john. "You mean someone killed them?"

  She fell in beside him on his left and they walked together toward the group at the pavilion. "Ed Lawson said there wasn't a mark on them."

  "No! Don't tell me someone was ugly enough to poison those beautiful beasts."

  "It would seem so, wouldn't it? Unless the vet discovers something else." She shook her head in sadness. "We have some peculiar people around here, Will."

  "I didn't think we had any that peculiar. When did this happen? I've been working all day."

  "Ed found them just after daylight, on his way over to play golf." Big Ed Lawson loved his golf and played well, but as resident manager had to get in his licks before his working day began.

  "Dead in the road, you say?"

  "Over there." She pointed to the blacktop that curled in from the main highway to the parking area.

  Will was still slowly shaking his head when they reached the pavilion. The Quigley woman left him to join friends, and he stepped to the table where he poured bourbon into his glass and leaned over to fill it at the tap. The pavilion was a roofed circular counter some twenty feet in diameter with a grill in the middle for cookouts.

  "You hear about the dogs, Platt?"

  Will looked at the speaker and was tempted to be rude and turn away. Carl Helpin, 202. A man who spoke in snarls and said "Platt" when he knew your name as well as anyone else did, and they all called you "Will." A short man with flickery, pale blue eyes. To hell with him. "Yes, I heard."

  "Damned queer. The vet says they weren't poisoned."

  "Then what killed them?"

  "He doesn't know. Like I say, it's damned queer."