“I got plans for you, honey,” he grunted. “I’m going to have something out of you before we finish, you can bet your sweet life.”
A woman’s harsh shrilling cut between them. “Keep your hands off’n that poison dirt whore! Don’t touch them big ugly tits—she’s nothing but a whore, Lonnie, that’s all she is.” There was the sound of splashing water as someone waded to shore after them. “Roy, get him to quit!”
“You shut your mouth,” another man said harshly. “Noise carries over the damned water.” Then, to the man holding Rachel, he added, “Leave her alone, Lonnie, or I’ll kick your butt.”
But the brutal hands continued to roam over Rachel’s breasts. They managed to rip open the front of her shirt before the bigger man took her in his arms, then roughly shifted her to his shoulder. Her head banged against his back as he stepped into the wall of marsh grass around them.
“I’m going with you,” the woman panted. “You’re not going to do nothing to her. Not while I’m around!”
“Pull in the boat.” When the other man staggered around them the man who carried Rachel pursed under his breath. “Gawd, not like that, you’ll lose us the anchor.”
In that position, her arms tied behind her back, and straining upside down as she was being carried, Rachel lost track of what was happening. Marsh grass whipped around them, rivulets of the tide running underfoot. Her heart was pounding in her body as though it would explode through her ribs. They were all so drunk and dirty that the stench of their bodies made her gag. And it was dark—breathlessly, solidly dark inside the high, reedlike grass.
They were going to kill her, she was sure. Her mind reeled with the knowledge. Perhaps they would rape her first. That was what the woman was shouting about. But why? The tape sealed her mouth. She couldn’t scream. She couldn’t beg for her life. Nothing.
The man carrying Rachel stopped and let her slide from his shoulder. When she staggered he held her upright. The dark was close about them. The woman came rushing up and was on her like a wildcat, clawing at her face and hair.
“Whore! Whore!” The screams beat on her ears. “I know what he’s been doing to you! I seen him sneaking into your house, you bitch! I been driving by, I know what he’s been doing in your whore’s bed!”
Oh God! She knew that voice now. It was Darla Jean’s.
The bigger man shoved the woman back. She careened into the man in the windbreaker, who stumbled drunkenly and sat down in the reeds.
The big man bent over Rachel. “Just stand still. You don’t want to get hurt, and I can hurt you bad.”
It was impossible to stand still; she was shaking so wildly her knees were threatening to collapse under her. When he untied her wrists they were so numb that Rachel could not even lift them. He unsteadily unfastened the remaining buttons of her shirt and pulled it off. He handed it to the woman, who circled them restlessly, her feet slipping in the mud.
“We’re going to show you what we do to poison dirt whores,” Darla Jean was yelling. “We know what you been doing with my lover!”
The big man reached around Rachel’s body, unfastened her brassiere and pulled it off. The damp night air was cold against her breasts. Her flesh turned cold deep inside her, colder than the damp sea air. Underneath the tape she whimpered.
The bigger man stood staring at her, peering at the creamy shine of her breasts in the dark. “My gawd, Lonnie’s right. We oughta do something with all that.”
“Keep your hands off’n her,” the woman screeched. “You’re so drunk you can’t do nothing noways. Get her clothes off!”
Rachel sagged, but hands pulled her back upright. She felt a chilly dimness seep through her mind, fear dulling her senses as the men unfastened her jeans and pulled down the zipper. She wasn’t going to faint, she tried to tell herself. The big man dropped to a crouch to work the jeans and the nylon underwear panties down her legs. Darla Jean grabbed Rachel’s arms to keep her from falling, nails deliberately biting into her flesh as the ropes around her ankles were loosened and taken off.
“I ought to let them have you,” she rasped into Rachel’s ear. “I ought to let them beat you black and blue, you ugly redheaded whore!” The voice cracked madly. “You’re dead meat—dead meat! When we get through with you, ain’t nobody going to touch you no more.”
The other woman’s face was right in hers. Her sharp features were contorted, the mouth turned down to form a mask of demented hate. “I want her dead!” Darla Jean howled.
When she lunged at Rachel the bigger man pushed her away. “Dammit, you two ain’t got no sense. Shut up, Darla Jean! We don’t want no marks, they can tell if she’s been hurt. I ain’t going to spend no time, not for this. You said get rid of her, that’s all you said.”
“You ought to let me fix her up little,” the man in the windbreaker said thickly.
“Christ,” the other growled. “When the tide’s turned she’ll go out in the sound, the rip will get her. Even if she swims, t’won’t do no good.”
They were going to murder her.
The man holding her said, “You don’t know it yet, sissy, but you done drowned while you was playing around nekkid in your swimming hole.”
Rachel moaned. The thought of them watching her there in the tidal pool, planning this, was horrifying. Darla Jean was circling them, crashing in the marsh grass, working herself up into a frenzy.
“He ain’t going to miss you,” she was howling. “Oh, I know that big devil better’n you, whore! ‘I need someone to belong to me,’“ she mimicked. “That’s what he told you—I know everything he does. You ain’t seen him nekkid in the light, have you? You don’t get no more than what I got, you cold-assed bitch. Well you’re dead, you’re going to drown! He won’t think about you no more!”
She threw herself at Rachel, but the bigger man caught her around the waist and held her. “Kill her now!” Darla Jean screamed.
Rachel went down on her knees in despair. In the darkness, in miles of dark tidal flats, they were leaving her to drown. Even when they left, even when she pulled the tape from her mouth, there would be no one around to hear her screams for help.
Please, she begged them with her eyes.
The bigger shadow was saying, “C’mon, dammit. We’re going to be up to our asses in water if we don’t get out of here.”
Darla Jean was moaning crazily as the bigger man dragged her away. She heard the man in the windbreaker still protesting drunkenly that they ought to give him a few minutes alone with her. Rachel was left kneeling, naked, in the soft sandy mud. Then it was almost silent except for the whine of mosquitoes and the lap of water.
She sank back against her heels and for the first time raised her hands, and as slowly as a sleepwalker began to rub her wrists.
Darla Jean had done this because of Beau Tillson.
Her still-dazed mind, exhausted, turned slowly. Darla Jean and the two men with her had planned it. They were leaving her to drown.
Slowly, each movement an agony, Rachel worked at the tape with her nails. Even peeling the strip back slowly a fraction of an inch each time, the skin of her lips came off with it. She felt the touch of something cold and looked down. It was dark in the wall of grass, but she knew the chill clasp of water. The tide was rising. What they had said was that they’d leave her naked in the marshes so when her body was found it would look as though she’d drowned, caught swimming in her tidal pool, and the river had carried her out.
In a little while, perhaps an hour, two hours, the thousands of jigsaw pieces of mud bars at the mouths of the Ashepoo River would be flooded with the salt flow of the sea. The current would seep through the shoulder-high grass in black water that filled the channels scoured by ebb and flood, too strong to swim, even if one knew which way to swim in the vast blackness.
The rivers of the Carolina coast, wide, brown slow-moving torrents with names like the Combahee, the Santee, the Wando, the Pee Dee, the Ashepoo, sank into great plains of marsh that were a wilderness f
or water birds and fish and alligators. Unless a person could see the shoreline it was a labyrinth.
Rachel rubbed her hands against her sandy bare knees and painfully got to her feet, knowing that the ground under her was slowly turning to water. A dull need to survive, even stronger than the blind panic she’d felt when she’d been dragged from the boat, filled her mind. After taking a few steps she realized that she still had a shoe and a sock on her left foot. She pulled them off. Her next step carried her into soft, sucking mud and sand to her knees. Floundering for a few heart-stopping moments, she finally fell into a dry clump of marsh grass.
On her hands and knees she parted the grass and saw water—the channel.
A small crescent moon was coming up, a late-rising moon above a black horizon that could have been the unlighted mainland or only the salt-marsh prairie. Nothing was more than a few inches above sea level in this landscape. The little moon gave a silvery sheen to what looked like one of the bigger tidal mouths of the Ashepoo, or the edge of St. Helena Sound.
She could swim; she had been a competitive swimmer from college days. Should she launch out into the water or remain where she was? The rising tide was now around her ankles.
While she crouched there on her knees she felt the first whining sting of a mosquito settling on her bare back.
More time passed. If this was terror, it was a cold, unrelenting clutch on Rachel’s consciousness that no longer allowed her to think. She was naked and chilled to the bone from the damp sea wind soughing in the marsh grass. If she went into the black, forbidding water, she would be even colder. But she had to do something.
With a last thought that she might not get out of this alive after all, she eased herself into the icy water and a soft mud bottom that made her feet shrink back instinctively. The water wasn’t deep, but the mud gave way and she plunged in. Over her head. Under the surface. She gulped a mouthful and came up spluttering. Her feet churned for the muddy bottom and couldn’t find it. And then right before her face the moonlit shadows that had lain so still in the mud at the black water’s edge came alive, log-shaped presence that slithered like snakes or other cold-blooded things in the sudden pale light of the moon and then noiselessly, sleekly, down into the cold black water that covered them again.
Alligators.
Rachel’s mouth opened and strained to scream, but nothing came out. She threw herself at the mud bank and the marsh grass and clung there, hauled up on her hands and knees, gasping. What had been a riverbank full of small, silent reptiles had disappeared, no doubt as frightened as she with her sudden blundering among them. She held armfuls of marsh grass clasped to her naked body and couldn’t let go. The rasping, retching sounds of terror at last came from deep inside her.
After a while, after a long while when she could breathe again, she lay where she had landed, facedown, her legs drawn up under her, feeling the mosquitoes feeding on her exposed flesh.
The moon rose higher and rode among a few misty stars. A heavy dew was falling, and she was miserably cold. Aware at last of the surges of frigid water lapping at the backs of her legs, her arms and naked breasts. She began to crawl.
She crawled very carefully, looking for things lurking in the marsh grass, until she came to another expanse of water, the moon full on it in a silver sheath. She heard the lone, repeating sounds of a night bird, an insistent chuck-will’s-widow, somewhere on shore. There was no longer a dry place; the water surged a full current around her now. It licked hungrily at her to reach above her knees, and it tugged at her cold, submerged feet.
Rachel opened her mouth but could only make a loud, wordless croak. It could have been anything. It could have been Help. She was ashamed that she couldn’t do any better than that. She wasn’t making any noise, any proper effort to stay alive. There had to be something out there. Bird. Or man. Or beast.
Help! she screamed, but wasn’t sure she made any noise at all. It was as though her throat were locked, still imprisoned in the cold, crystal bubble that kept her alive. Then she heard the water moving around her loudly, calling her name, sucking at her eagerly, trying to draw her back into its cold black depths.
This time she screamed powerfully. No words, just a mindless, desperate shriek. And the water gurgled, wanting her, growling for her. Calling her name.
Rachel could see that it brought something out of the deep to claim her before rescuers might come. The sea wanted her, was longing for her. What came out of the hungry depths was a sea monster all speckled with brown and green splotches where it was not covered with black. And the water eddied around it powerfully. It was strangely beautiful, with a black and green face shining in the moonlight.
The sea really wanted her, Rachel knew, to send such a green and black monster for her. It was a sea dragon, and Death, and the Lord of the Alligators, all in one.
“Rachel,” it said.
Chapter Fifteen
“Rachel,” the Lord of the Alligators said, “stop yelling and tell me, are Lonnie and Roy Murrell still around?”
“Don’t touch me!” She was screaming like a madwoman. She fought off the monster’s hands when he tried to grab her. Her feet went out from under her and she fell into waist-deep water again. She had almost no strength left to struggle when he picked her up and held her at arm’s length, glittering eyes in the moonlight carefully assessing her condition.
“Rachel,” he said again, “shut up.”
Even through her quivering shrieks she could tell that the sea monster had a man’s voice. The black-and-green-painted face was stern as hands examined her cold, naked body, pressing her legs and arms and breasts, hesitating over the shadowed delta at the joining of her legs before his hands passed on to cup her face and turn it up to him.
“Listen to me,” he told her curtly. “We’ve got a long way to go to get you out of here, and the tide’s just about at full flood; that means the water’s deep. Are you listening? When the tide starts over these mud bars there’s a hell of a current, and I’ve got to get you to the boat.” His voice rose over her cries. “Dammit, I almost missed you—I’ve been back and forth six or seven times right in this spot, and I wouldn’t have found you if you hadn’t started yelling.” The hands on her muddy bare shoulders gave her a hard shake. “Rachel, it’s me. If you don’t cut it out I’m going to have to slap you.”
“No,” she moaned at last.
She knew the Lord of the Alligators. She knew well this beautiful, hard-faced apparition that had materialized out of the sea so magically to capture her. But she didn’t want to go with him. She didn’t want to die.
“That’s better,” the husky voice told her. He lifted her swollen hands to the light and examined the raw places the ropes had left around her wrists. She heard him curse softly under his breath. “Rachel honey, I can’t carry you, the weight of both of us will make us sink in the mud and we’ll get stuck here. You’re going to have to come out on your own two feet. You’re going to have to help me.”
“Leave me alone,” she sobbed. She knew how cruel he was.
“Sweetheart, you’re all right.” The hands stroked the wet, muddy tangle of her hair and pushed it away from her face. The moving, murmuring water swirled waist high around them. “I’m not going to let anything more happen to you. I know every inch of this marsh, and I’m going to get you out of here. Do you understand what I’m saying?”
Oh, yes, she knew his magic well enough; she had seen it before, when his mesmerizing husky voice had flowed over her, making her do what he wanted.
“Who are you?” she whispered.
He scowled. “You know who I am, Rachel. Snap out of it or you’re going to drown us both, because I’m not going to leave you. I’m not going to leave you,” he repeated, “do you understand that?”
“Yes,” she said, not sounding very sane.
“That’s my angel.” He could smile, the Lord of the Alligators, with the grim line of his painted mouth. He took time, even with the water rising around them, to
touch her chin, his hard thumb stroking the corner of her mouth gently. “Tell me you can walk, honey. That you can do that much.”
“I can walk.” But she staggered when he let her go.
He took her hand, pulled her right arm over his wet shoulders and supported her weight, so much so that she was half lifted on that side, her foot barely touching marshy ground. But it worked.
“I can see where we’re going,” he murmured, “even if you can’t—my night vision is still pretty good. Just concentrate on what you’re doing and keep up with me. We’re going to wade through a lot of water and marsh grass. If it gets deep, I’ll swim and bring you along behind me.”
He half dragged, half lifted her through the rush of water, and she felt the mud slip out from under her feet several times. When she gasped he kept talking softly. “That’s it, move with me, keep a sort of rhythm. I want you to tell me where are Darla Jean’s brothers, Lonnie and Roy, the men who were with you. Did they go off in a boat? Did they say they were coming back? I have to know if they’re still somewhere around.”
She thought about that as best she could. “I don’t know,” she said finally.
The moonlight was bright around them, molten silver on an endless expanse of a nightmare flood plain. She thought it would never end. Then the moon went behind a cloud and she heard herself sobbing wearily.
“How did you get out here?” his voice prodded her, keeping her alert. “Were you in Roy’s boat?”
She tried to think about that. Finally she told him in a weary voice that they’d put a sack over her head in her backyard, tied her hands and feet, then carried her away. It seemed like a dream. She told him about being in the bed of the truck, covered with a foul-smelling rug. Then she told him in broken words about the boat, what she could remember of it, and the one called Lonnie who kept saying he was going to rape her.
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