by Cave, Hugh
At Ima's request he had seated himself on a straight-backed chair in the center of the living room. On the sofa to his right sat the woman he loved, and on the veranda in front of him, watching the lake, stood his best friend, Sam Norman. Both had flatly refused to leave when he questioned their need to expose themselves to danger just to be with him.
To his left, in an easy chair and still clutching his stomach, sat the homicide investigator Karl Jurzak. In pain, palpably, but alert and curious.
Will had wanted to hold the affair in his own apartment upstairs, but Ima had vetoed the request. It was here, she pointed out, that she had talked to the gods and blessed the cocomacaque, the candles, and the ring. The service, therefore, should take place here.
The room was beginning to darken now as she walked about relighting candles which had been set upright earlier in gobs of their own wax on saucers from Lynne's china closet. There were thirteen of them, arranged around him in a circle. Ima had explained why the candles had to be white. "Bocors and obeah persons always use black ones."
As the Haitian woman completed her preparations, Will sat there in the ring of small flames, watching her. She wore the opal ring now. Jurzak had given it to him when they arrived, and he had handed it to Ima. She wore it on her left hand, with the gem turned inward.
Now she stepped to the wall and took up the cocomacaque leaning there. On it she had tied inch-wide strips of colored cloth—green, pink, lavender—and bits of braided white string. He recalled a visit he had once made to a sacred voodoo waterfall in the mountains of Haiti—Saut d'Eau it was called—where similar bits of cloth and string had adorned a number of dead trees leaning into the mist that filled the grotto.
The cocomacaque was now a gros arrêt, he suspected, meant to protect him and perhaps to protect her as well. She must have brought the bits of cloth and string with her from Jamaica.
Holding the monkey palm, she turned to look toward the veranda, where Sam was on sentry duty watching the lake. Sam shook his head at her. The sliding glass door being only partly open, she went to it and opened it wide, at which a light breeze entered that caused the candle flames to flicker. Will looked at the flames and supposed he ought to feel slightly foolish in such a position, a grown man sitting in a circle of candles in the living room of a Florida condominium. Yet he did not feel the least bit foolish; this was deadly serious.
"Are you afraid, Mr. Will?" Ima asked quietly, turning to look at him.
"Yes." Why lie? A prickling sensation had taken hold of his whole body, especially his hands and feet, and he could feel the blood pounding in his ears. Why shouldn't he be afraid? He was the bait in a God-awful trap, knowing the thing in the lake would come for him, and not knowing whether this quiet Haitian woman with her knowledge of the occult would be able to protect him.
His fear must have been visible to them all, for Lynne Kimball suddenly rose from the sofa and stepped through the ring of candles to his side. Sinking to one knee beside his chair, she looked into his face. "Will, I'm frightened," she whispered. "Do you have to go through with this? Can't we just run?"
"Hon, there's just nowhere to run to."
Her eyes closed. Almost inaudibly she whispered, "Dear God, if this man and I are really something special to you, as we've dared to think, please help us now."
Reaching out, he took her hand and squeezed it.
The room darkened. Ima had said she did not want the lights on, only the candles. Beyond the veranda the lake had become dark, too. Most of last night an almost full moon had been dimmed by clouds. Tonight it was hidden completely.
The light from the ring of candles would be clearly visible to anyone or anything on the lake. Or in it.
Karl Jurzak said unexpectedly, "Is it always this noisy here, Mr. Platt?"
Noisy? When you lived here you scarcely noticed it, but yes, it was noisy. Some of the lake's inhabitants seemed to find a special voice at this hour. At the moment, the loudest were two frogs talking to each other tirelessly in xylophone tones, one slightly higher on the scale than the other. To a man whose stomach was keeping his face contorted with pain, it must be annoying.
"It will quiet down, Karl," Will said.
But Jurzak wanted to talk. Perhaps it helped him to combat the pain. "Brief me again, will you? What's going to happen here?"
"I wish I knew."
"Well, then, how will the opal affect what happens? You must think it will play a major role or you wouldn't have chased me for it."
Will hesitated. It was the first time he had been asked to be specific. "What we think, Karl, is that when the obeah woman wore this ring it absorbed from her some power that my wife was able to use when she took the ring back."
"Do you believe in life after death, Mr. Platt?"
"I think so. Do you?"
"I must. It is what I have left—all I have left—to know I'll be with my wife again. And it may be we can achieve a life after death by believing in it. That would not surprise me, Mr. Platt. Not at all."
Will was silent.
"And, of course," Jurzak said, "you believe, too. Because what you are saying is that your wife is able to use this obeah power of hers even in death."
"Am I saying that?"
"It is your wife you expect tonight, isn't it?"
"Of course."
"And she is dead?"
"I believe so."
"You really know so, don't you, Mr. Platt? She didn't drown herself. If she was so afraid of the lake that she never swam in it, she would not have killed herself that way, as you yourself pointed out to me when I first brought up the possibility of suicide."
The fat man shifted his hands on his stomach, now pressing a few inches higher up. A grimace of pain accompanied the change. "Ah, no, Mr. Platt. Never would such a person have swum out into those slithery weeds and deliberately filled her lungs with water she considered so unwholesome. Fastidious women like your wife don't destroy themselves in ways they consider ugly. They look for the nice ways."
Pausing again, Jurzak looked down at his hands as though surprised to find them exerting such pressure on his body. "You killed her, I think, Mr. Platt. Of course, I don't suppose I'll ever be able to prove it, nor will anyone else. If she was a true pupil of the obeah woman you've told me about, perhaps I don't want to."
Will continued to stare at him.
"Is that why you killed her, Mr. Platt? Because she had become a creature of evil?"
Will glanced down at a thing Ima Williams had hung about his neck when she led him to his chair. It was fashioned of fragments of colored cloth sewn together to form a small drawstring bag. The colors were the same as those on the cocomacaque.
What was in the bag he did not know, but it reminded him of similar pouches, containing lumps of camphor, that his mother had made him wear around his neck when he was very young. Those had been to ward off colds, she had insisted. But she had been a deeply religious woman. In her nightly recitation of the Lord's Prayer she had always borne down heavily on the words "Deliver us from evil."
He had, in fact, always suspected that the camphor bags were meant to protect him more from evil than from anything as ordinary as colds.
If I live through this night, he thought, frowning now at Jurzak but still maintaining silence, maybe I'll show him the letter I wrote to Lynne and Sam. He just might understand.
Suddenly from the veranda Sam Norman called, "I see it! It's coming!"
37
"I Hope He Finds Her"
Ima Williams at once came out of a seeming trance inspired by Jurzak's questioning of Will. Holding the cocomacaque stick horizontally in front of her at arm's length, she began a slow walk around the circle of candles.
Her shoulders dipped and swayed. Her bare feet performed a shuffling yanvalou step on the carpet—or what would have been a yanvalou had her hands been free to rest on her knees.
From her mouth came the chant Will had heard from the bedroom earlier.
"Papa Legba, ouvri
bayé! Papa Legba, ouvri bayé pou mwé! Abobo!"
The song ceased. But her lips still moved, and Will guessed she was praying to certain of her gods, calling on them to help her in this moment of terrible need.
Were they hearing her? Was there anyone out there to hear her, really? He thought there was. He had seen too much at voodoo services to retain many of his original doubts. So many improbable acts were performed in voodoo. It was stupid to deny them because they could not be explained.
Sam Norman said from the veranda, "It's rising from the marsh out there. A misty kind of thing, white. No particular shape to it." His voice droned on; leave it to Sam to be more curious than alarmed, even at such a moment. "Now it's floating above the water toward the beach. It's drifting over the lawn. It's rising."
Ima Williams continued her ritual slow dance around the candles. On the sofa Lynne Kimball leaned forward, staring at the veranda as she waited for the appearance of the thing Sam was describing.
Glued to his chair within the circle, Will felt his hands clench at his sides and his body begin to tremble as it turned cold again.
Karl Jurzak, clutching his belly, slowly got out of his chair and onto his feet. Swaying from side to side as though about to crash to the floor, he too gazed fixedly at the veranda.
Silent now, Sam Norman walked backward through the open veranda doorway into the room. As Lynne Kimball rose trembling from the sofa, her face ashen, he reached her side and took hold of her hand. Then as the thing from the lake rose into view outside the veranda screen, he said in a low voice to Will, "This is it, man. Be careful."
"Damn it, get out of here!" Will ordered loudly. "Both of you!"
They did not reply. Did not move.
"Get out!" he shouted again. "Go up to my place and wait there!" Reaching into his pocket for a key, he tossed it to Sam. "Please," he begged them. "Can't you see I've got trouble enough?"—without having to worry about the two persons I care most for in this whole crazy world, he silently finished. "Lynne, Sam—please. There's nothing you can do to help me here.
They looked at each other and could find no reason to deny his plea. Sam touched him on the shoulder in departing. Lynne's lips brushed his face. The door closed behind them, and suddenly Will felt enormously relieved.
Ima Williams stepped into the circle of candles and took up a position almost in front of him, facing the veranda but leaving him room enough to see the thing float through the screen and assume human shape.
Vicky, his wife. Made of mist, fog, teleplasm, ectoplasm—whatever it was—but still as tall as Vicky, as slender as Vicky, as attractive as Vicky. And the shape walked toward him the way it must have walked through this apartment and the one above when it left the footprints.
Fascinated, he watched the carpet turn wet behind her now as she created more of the footprints. And the odor, the same dreaded swamp smell—or was it really some kind of death smell?—clogged his nose and throat, threatening to choke him.
At the ring of candles she halted to look down at the flames and studied them for a moment, motionless. Then she looked up again, straight at him, as though mocking him the way she so often had in life.
As she stepped through the ring and continued her advance toward him, he would not have been surprised to hear her sneering at him in his helplessness. The candle flames flickered as though touched by a sudden brief gust of wind.
Aware that something like death was about to happen to him, Will froze on his chair, incapable of movement.
But the hounsi kanzo from Haiti was not so stricken. Holding the cocomacaque like a lance, she lunged forward and plunged it into the midst of the thing. From her lips burst a cry of "Abobo!" that rang like a bell through the apartment. Then she thrust her left hand, with the opal ring on it, palm forward into the creature's ill-defined face.
The thing that was Vicky stopped in the midst of its relentless advance as though impaled on the monkey-stick. Its hands, if they were hands, groped in vain at the stick, then weakly writhed up to its misty face and struggled there in a convulsive effort to push the ring away also. It swayed like a column of white smoke bent by a strong wind and then, still swaying, began to change both shape and color.
The tall, slender thing of white turned gray. Turned darker gray. Turned almost black. It began to shrink in size. While writing on the cocomacaque that had pierced it, it slowly lost its proportions and changed into a dwarf.
A new face took the place of the one that had almost been Vicky's. But this one was familiar, too, in a horrible kind of way. Will had seen it first when he went with Sam to that hell house in the Cockpit. Had seen it later when he went there with Vicky and found Sister Merle dying in a pool of blood on the bed.
"My God!" he whispered while struggling in vain to overcome his paralysis.
The obeah woman was alive again now. At least, she was alive in what Karl Jurzak had called a life after death. The transfiguration complete and Vicky done away with, she stood before him. The creature writhing on the cocomacaque, slapping furiously at the opal ring, was not Will's wife but the woman who, in Jamaica, had jabbed a finger into his face and shrieked a curse at him just before she died.
And she was much stronger than Vicky. Much more powerful in every way!
She slapped the monkey-palm stick aside with such force that it was torn from Ima's grasp and hurled halfway across the room, to clatter to the floor in front of Karl Jurzak. She must have nearly broken the Haitian woman's wrist in driving an upthrust arm against Ima's ring hand to slam it away from her face.
Ima staggered back and sank to her knees, moaning.
The specter from Jamaica pursued her with incredible swiftness, seizing her by an arm before she could rise. One misty hand locked itself around Ima's wrist and savagely twisted, wringing a cry of agony from the hounsi's lips. The other tore the opal ring free and held it aloft in triumph.
In the lesser glow of the candles, the opal pulsed now with an incredible kind of fire, its colors seeming to mate in some unholy union of evils. Then, thrusting the ring onto the third finger of her misty left hand, the obeah woman turned and hurled her dark, twisted shape at Will as he at last came to his senses and struggled to his feet.
Her attack slammed him back onto his chair. Like a cloud of poison gas she enveloped him.
While he struggled to fight her off, his mind strained to comprehend what was happening. Was it really Merle, not Vicky, who had tried to plunge the knife into him in the apartment that night? Was it Merle he had disposed of in the lake?
He could not make himself believe it. At worst there might have been a merging of their psyches at that time because of the sessions at the obeah woman's house and their sharing the black opal's powers. But it was both of them he had been forced to deal with, not Merle alone.
Why, then, was Merle destroying him now?
As he struggled without hope to save himself, he recalled what Ima had told him just before his departure from Jamaica.
"Mr. Will, who knows what death is? Be on your guard. She will seek revenge!"
Ima was right. From the moment of Merle's dying, when through the ring she had poured herself into the living body of her pupil, she must have wanted only that: revenge. He remembered again her death-bed curse.
Be on his guard? God help him, he had tried to be. And now she was about to have her way with him, because Ima could not save him, after all. The chants, the prayers, the candles and the cocomacaque, the arréts to protect him from evil . . . all of them together were not strong enough.
This was the end.
He wondered whether the earlier victims had felt the way he did now. It was not pain, exactly. He almost wished he could cease struggling and let it happen and get it over with. Some primal instinct for self-preservation made him continue, but the struggle was barely physical. It was more a thing of the mind, a refusal to admit the power, even the existence, of anything so unreal.
He was in quicksand, slowly sinking to his death but will
ing himself not to. He was naked in a pool of dark water filled with leeches that had attached themselves to all parts of his body and were slowly draining him. He was weakly pushing with both hands at a smothering mist through which he could see in spite of its blackness.
He saw Ima Williams, on her knees, apparently stunned but trying to crawl to the cocomacaque which had been knocked from her grasp.
Just behind her, Karl Jurzak swaying crazily from side to side as he stumbled forward to try to help her.
Whatever was destroying Will slackened its grip for a moment. An arm of darkness reached out with almost insolent lack of haste to confront Ima as she crawled toward the monkey-palm. A shadowy hand with the hellfire opal glittering on its third finger fastened on the hounsi's shoulder.
Jerking Ima back on her knees, the hand transferred its grip to her throat as she cried out in Creole, imploring her voodoo gods to help her.
When the hand with its blazing opal was withdrawn, the Haitian woman collapsed on the carpet, to lie there twitching and moaning.
The stunted shadow of Sister Merle turned back to Will then, but again he won a reprieve through no action of his own. Karl Jurzak had reached for the cocomacaque and was bending to pick it up.
She whirled toward the investigator like a small, dark funnel cloud, and he tried desperately to bend more quickly. Perhaps, having seen what had happened when Ima plunged the voodoo stick into Vicky's astral form, he hoped to repeat the attack. But his groping hand was still inches above its objective, violently unsteady, when his face suddenly filled with agony.
It was an agony that had nothing to do with Sister Merle or leeches or quicksand. It was inside him, at the very core of his being, affecting his life source.
Will saw him suck in a great, chest-filling torrent of air. Saw him grab at his balloon of a belly with both hands as though to keep it from exploding.
His knees buckled. Almost at the obeah woman's feet he crashed to the floor like a felled tree.
Merle looked down at his still form. The monkey-palm was under his huge, inert body, only an inch or two of it still visible. Anyone trying to pick it up would have to roll him over first.