by Cave, Hugh
There was a disdainful air of triumph in the sway of the obeah woman's ghostly figure as it turned back to Will.
From some unsuspected reservoir inside him, Will summoned the strength to stagger up from his chair and face her. As she reached for him, to draw him into her deadly embrace, he concentrated with all his mind on the opal ring that blazed on her finger.
With both hands he clawed for it. She had not expected that, it seemed. She was unprepared. One of his clutching hands reached its objective and the ring slid free into his palm. But before he could even think what to do with it, the woman became a swirling cloud of blackness and swamp-smell—the same awful swamp stench that had accompanied the maker of the wet footprints—and he felt himself in quicksand again.
No, not in quicksand this time. In something beneath it, some lower deep from which he could emerge only in a form like hers. His hand opened limply and the opal ring dropped to the floor.
But, behind Sister Merle, something was happening to Karl Jurzak.
The man himself had not moved. His body still lay where it had fallen, with the cocomacaque under it. But tendrils of white smoke were rising from it now as though it had begun to smolder.
Will was still conscious enough to wonder what in God's name was happening. Was it because in dying—if, indeed, the man was dead—he had clung to the cocomacaque and absorbed something of its power? Because, after all, voodoo gods summoned by Ima Williams had blessed the monkey-palm, had they not? And its awesome force had already been demonstrated in the hounsi's attack on Vicky.
The tendrils detached themselves from Jurzak's unmoving body and curled upward. They writhed and twisted above him until they began to assume a shape. A human shape. Big. Broad-shouldered. Obese. Like Jurzak himself.
It flowed over the carpet. Unaware of it, Sister Merle concentrated on finishing what she had begun with Will. Her spectral form embraced him like a fly-eating flower, absorbing and draining him.
The hands of Karl Jurzak took her from behind and slowly tore her from her intended victim.
Will felt himself released. Felt himself falling. He crashed back onto his chair and the chair tipped and he was on the floor, looking up at two straining shapes.
Good versus evil, he thought. Love against hate.
He began to crawl away from the struggle, aware that Ima Williams, on her hands and knees, was doing the same thing. Reaching the sofa, he turned to see how the conflict would end.
Both figures were fainter now, but he could still identify them. The astral form that had risen from Karl Jursak's body stood by the overturned chair in which he Will Platt, had been sitting in anticipation of a horrible death. Its arms were extended. Its hands were locked about the throat of the other figure, which was kneeling. In the flickering light of the candle ring the struggle seemed unreal, like a scene in a motion picture viewed through a curtain of gauze.
The kneeling figure slowly became transparent as it struggled to break Jurzak's grip. Through it now Will could see some of the candle flames and, brighter that those, the glowing opal that had fallen from his own hand but a few moments before.
Sister Merle seemed to make a last desperate effort to lean from Jurzak's grip and reach out for the opal, but in vain. Even as Will stared at her, her struggles diminished. Under her a dark, wet stain began to spread over the carpet.
Before Will's eyes the woman from Jamaica's Cockpit Country disappeared, leaving only the image of Jurzak. That, too, was all but invisible now.
Will saw it look down at the wetness and turn away. Saw it walk slowly over to the body of Karl Jurzak and look down at that and turn away from that also. He recalled certain passages in books he had read about life after death: statements from people who, though believed to be dead and in some instances actually declared dead, had recovered.
There had been a startling similarity in their accounts of how in spirit form they had departed from their dying bodies and looked back at them, even floated above them in hospital operating rooms and watched the medical teams still at work.
As the fading form of Karl Jurzak turned from Karl's body and walked out of the circle of candles, it was almost nothing. A wraith. A shade. A thing of the imagination.
Suddenly it was no longer there.
Gone to look for his wife, Will thought. I hope he finds her.
Ima came to him, looking older and on the verge of exhaustion. Anxiously she peered at his face. "Are you all right, Mr. Will?"
"I think so. What about you?"
"We will both be all right now, I believe."
Taking her by the hand, he walked her through the ring of candles to the chair where he had been the bait in the trap. The opal was there where he had dropped it and, frowning, he bent to pick it up. After peering at it or a moment, he handed it to Ima and said simply, Look."
No one would ever again say of this opal that it filled the hearts of the gods with delight. It was dark and lifeless now.
"Its fire has gone out," Ima said wonderingly, and turned to gaze at the wet stain on the floor. "Mr. Will, I don't understand"
"We may never understand what happened here tonight," Will said. "But thank you, Ima. Thank you for everything." Lifting her hand, he touched it to his lips. "Now let's put these candles out and go tell Lynne and Sam what happened. If we can find words for it."
38
Epilogue
Jamaica
The Villa Bella guest house, on a hill outside Christiana, is a pleasant place in which to wake up in the morning. Behind it runs a mountain valley that often fills with pockets of morning mist resembling small lakes.
Waking at daybreak, Will turned to the woman beside him and drew her into his arms, to find she was awake too, and waiting—wanting—to be loved. Afterward he said, "How about a walk in the garden before breakfast?'
"I'd like that."
They had arrived on the island the day before, with Ima. Had been met at the airport by Ken Daniels in his battered taxi. After dinner that evening at the guest house, Lynne and Will had gone along for the ride when Ken drove Ima to the home in Mandeville where she was employed.
There had been an exchange of money, of course. More important, an exchange of embraces between Ima and Lynne and a promise that the Haitian woman would come again to the States one day to stay with them longer. "Everything in its time," Ima had said, smiling.
In the guest-house garden now, Will put an arm around the waist of the woman beside him and they gazed together at the lakes of mist in the valley. Able to see the house he had lived in on coming to Christiana to help Sam Norman, he pointed it out to her. Sam was back in Massachusetts now. Then he said, "What would you like to do while we're here? A week is a fairly long time, you know. We can't spend it all here at the guest house."
"Let's take turns," she said.
"Turns?"
"Telling Ken Daniels where we want to go each day, and what we want to see."
"You like him, don't you?"
"I like all your friends, Will Platt."
That was something new for him after so many years of marriage to a woman who had tried her utmost to alienate every friend he had. "Thank you," he said, kissing her. "And with Ken helping us, we'll do the island. A honeymoon."
They were not married. They might never be, with nothing and no one to prove—really prove—his wife was dead.
"What are we to do with our nights?" Will asked. "There's nothing much after dark here, you know."
"I'll think of something," Lynne told him, solemn as any of the little country churches they could see on the surrounding hills. "Trust me, darling."
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