by Cave, Hugh
It rocked sideways, then ponderously rolled just far enough to reveal a vertical slit in a wall of rock behind it. With a nod to Lucille, Lelio stepped aside.
Wriggling into the opening, Lucille disappeared in darkness. But in a moment a light from inside played over the entrance to guide the old man as he followed her.
A little way in he found her waiting for him, holding a flashlight, and she reached into a niche for a second one that she handed to him. Then, with Lucille in the lead, they continued.
The niche had become a passage, gently sloping downward. For a hundred yards or so it was no more than that: a tunnel about a yard wide, leading into a world of stone beneath the knoll. They went along it with care, the old man acknowledging his age by reaching out with his free hand at times to steady himself. They passed dark holes in the walls that could have been side passages.
Ten minutes later, one of these side tunnels led them into a more or less circular chamber about twenty feet across. Here their flashlights revealed the voodoo pé or altar that Lelio had built months earlier, though not in this chamber, after stumbling on the entrance to the cave one day when the boulder had been rolled away from it. Only since the theft of his first asson, the day before the coming of the man called Jeffrey Gordon to the Everols', had Lucille and he moved the altar to this room.
Its legs were tree limbs that Lelio had obtained on the property. The boards that made up its top, covered now with a white sheet, had been salvaged from the remains of a chicken coop behind the caretaker's cottage. On the cloth now were earthenware jars—govis—made and painted with ritual designs by Lelio as he had patiently labored to create something like the altar over which he had presided in Les Irois.
A small village, Les Irois. He had not lied to their caller about that. No four-wheeled vehicle could reach it, and the journey on foot or by mule from the nearest real road was long indeed. Yet people had come there from all over Haiti to attend the services of Lelio Savain, or to seek his counsel.
Why, oh why, had he let himself believe the United States would have more to offer him?
Lucille had finished lighting candles on the altar and in niches about the room. Now Lelio stepped to the altar and took up two of the objects lying there. One was a govi adorned with the cross of Legba and filled with small stones. When summoned, the spirit of Legba could be expected to enter it. The second object was the cocomacaque he had brought from his homeland—the stick whose power had helped him to survive when he and the others were put off the boat to drown.
Carrying these objects to the center of the chamber, he placed the jar on the floor and carefully thrust the stick into it. The stones held the stick upright. In that position it became, like the handle of the asson, a symbol of the poteau-mitan or central post by which the gods would come from their home in Ifé when he called them.
Now, returning to the altar, he took up a white soup plate full of yellow cornmeal and carried it to the poteau-mitan.
Bending from the waist with his knees stiff and his legs wide, he held the plate with his left hand, took some of the meal in his right, and proceeded to draw designs on the floor around Legba's govi by letting the yellow powder dribble between his thumb and forefinger. Slowly, with infinite care, he drew the vèvé of Legba with its elaborate cross—the same symbol that was done in paint on the jar—and the vèvé of Erzulie with its dominant heart. Legba and Erzulie, the sun and the moon, were the ones most likely to help him in this hour of need. But the vèvés must be correct, the cocomacaque must do its job again, and the new asson must meet with the loas' approval.
The drawings finished, he straightened and returned the plate of cornmeal to the altar. Then he took up the asson. Again bending from the waist, and chanting in a barely audible monotone as he did so, he lightly struck each of the vèvés several times with the gourd rattle.
"Papa Legba," he sang in a moaning monotone, "I beg you to close the gate. Beloved Erzulie, help us, help us, I implore you." Still chanting, he fell to his knees and bent forward to touch his lips to the vèvés while Lucille watched him in silence.
On her face was a look of profound melancholy.
Chapter Thirteen
What, Jeff Gordon asked himself, should he do about his date with Verna Clark? Now that he had a car again, should he ask Everett's permission to use the phone and call her to say she would not have to pick him up as planned? Everett and Blanche had returned from their weekly shopping trip an hour earlier.
No, he decided. With more than one phone in the house, someone might eavesdrop, and for now at least he did not want the Everols to know that he and Verna were seeing each other.
At five minutes to seven, saying he was going to town on an errand and would have dinner at the inn before returning—and that Susan had lent him a key in case he got back late—he drove out to the gate and found Verna waiting there in her borrowed car.
"Are you in a hurry for dinner?" he asked her.
"Uh-uh." She shook her head and smiled at him. For that kind of smile from this kind of woman he would have risked far more than the Everols' disapproval, he knew.
"I want a look at that sinkhole before it's too dark for us to see anything," he explained. "Why don't you drive back to the Watsons' alone and let me follow you? We can leave your car there and use mine. I don't want you having to drive me back here again when the evening's over."
She nodded. "Shall we take both cars to the Drowning Pit or leave one here?"
"Both, I think. The Everols might come snooping."
"You don't want them to know we're friends?"
"Not just yet. They've a thing about you."
She made a face. "And I was hoping you'd be able to convince them I'm harmless. Well. . . do you remember how to get to the sinkhole from here? The ruts that lead in to the pond, I mean?"
"I'll follow you."
She turned her car and drove up the highway in the direction he had been coming from when he first picked her up. When she swung in along the road to the pond, he was close behind her. This time she stopped well short of the water.
Getting out, she walked back to him and opened his door. "Let's go it on foot from here, shall we?" she said. "I don't want another car tampered with."
"Check. Is the garage fellow going to be able to put yours right, by the way?"
"He said yes, but it will take a few days. He's had to send for some parts."
Jeff looked back along the ruts. His car could be seen from the highway, he realized, and he had encountered trouble along that route before. "We'd better play safe and lock these."
"Jeff"—her voice revealed anxiety—"just why are you doing this? You're not thinking of diving, are you?"
"No, no. I don't have any diving gear yet. Just want a good look at the place so I can be thinking about how to tackle it."
"Oh." She let out her breath. "Well, all right, then. You had me scared for a minute." Reaching for his hand, she voiced a nervous little laugh.
Hand in hand, they walked to the pond and climbed the knoll.
The top of the knoll was an eerie sort of place in the evening light. With so many huge boulders, it reminded Jeff a little of England's Stonehenge, which he had visited in pursuing his interest in the occult. Not that the stones here were laid out in a Stonehenge circle. But they did seem to speak to some part of his mind or consciousness, the way that ancient, mysterious ring of rocks had.
There was no time now to explore the knoll, though. With Verna following, he made his way down the slope on the far side and advanced to the rim of the sinkhole.
The Drowning Pit. It was like an almost circular swimming pool some thirty feet in diameter, carved out of limestone and so full of water that it seemed about to overflow. At this hour the water was almost as black as tar. Standing there at the edge, he looked down and wondered how deep it was.
"Hey, Danny! That was a car in there!"
The speaker was Nick Indrotti, the younger of the two youths who had run Jeff Gordon
off the road. Dan Crawley was driving this time. Nick sat beside him with a joint between his lips.
The souped-up clunker had just passed the rutted side road where Jeff and Verna had left their cars.
"Pull up, I tell you, Danny! Maybe we found us an easy one!"
The clunker coughed to a stop. "You didn't see no one around?"
"No!"
"Okay." Dan shoved the shiftstick into reverse and sent the machine weaving backward. At the entrance to the pond road he braked it again. Both youths peered up the road in silence, straining to see what was in there where tall trees cut down the light.
"I think there's two cars," Nick said.
"Yeah. Me too."
"Let's go."
Shoving the doors open, the pair leaped to the blacktop and went racing down the ruts into the woodland gloom. With live oaks and other big old trees all but crowding the road out of existence, there was little daylight left here. Probably only eyes that knew what they were looking for would have spotted Jeff's car in the first place.
On reaching the car, seventeen-year-old Dan Crawley said with a frown, "Hey, didn't we hit this one before? Take a look at it. The one you ran off the road."
Nick looked and said, "Yeah. Whaddaya know?"
"There wasn't nothin' in it. We got some cash off of him, but nothin' in the car except a suitcase, and only crap in that. Let's try the other one, huh?"
"The other one. Yeah."
They went to the car in front, and Nick tried the driver's door. "Locked," he said. "Shit."
"So we bust it. Nobody's around to hear nothin'."
"Gotta find a rock." Letting go of the door handle, Nick looked up and down the almost dark road but saw nothing big enough. Try a dumb thing like busting a car window with a rock too small, you could ruin your hand. He turned and peered into the roadside trees, then took the joint that was still dangling from his lips and let it fall to the ground. "Wait up," he said, and walked into the off-road gloom with his gaze on the ground.
Slouched against the car, Dan Crawley sent uneasy glances up and down the road while waiting.
After a few minutes he called out in a hoarse whisper, "Union, c'mon, will you? We don't need a rock as big as a fuckin' gravestone, for Chrissakes!"
"Keep your shirt on," Nick called back. "I got one."
He was some thirty feet from the car, in a little clearing surrounded by trees tall enough to turn dusk into dark. At the edge of a hogplum thicket in front of him lay a whitish stone the size of his fist. He bent down and reached for it.
But before his grimy fingers with their black-tipped nails could make contact, a loud hissing sound beyond the hogplum caused him to suck in a breath and jerk up his head.
He found himself gazing into an open mouth.
A wide-open mouth. Huge. With a multitude of cone-shaped teeth that resembled pickets in an eight-foot-high, once-white fence that had turned dirty yellow with age.
For perhaps ten seconds the mouth yawned there without coming any closer, like a cave entrance waiting to be explored. Nick leaned forward with his head upthrust, staring at it in abject terror while his breathing became an irregular flutter and his eyes swelled to the size of table-tennis balls.
The monstrous throat he stared into, between two huge, gaping jaws, had to be ten feet deep.
The gray, black-spotted horror that loomed behind it was a jumbo-jet body with scales, on short legs as big around as old oak trees.
Nick Indrotti finally got his lungs full of air and let out a scream that all but tore his head off. He screamed again.
He screamed a third time.
That was all.
The awesome jaws had opened wider. The monstrous, scaly body behind them rose on its tree-stump legs and began to sway from side to side. Some part of Nick's half-paralyzed brain told him it was a 'gator. A 'gator too big to be real. Get out of here! his mind shrieked. Run!
He somehow succeeded in making his feet obey the command and, stumbling around, began to run.
But he was too late. And, despite his terror, much too slow.
With incredible swiftness the huge creature hurled itself after him. The wide-open jaws shot forward and snapped shut with a cannon clap that shook trees and made the earth tremble. Half of Nick's body was inside them when the conical teeth began grinding.
The teeth of a 'gator, any 'gator, are designed not so much to chew the creature's food as to tear it into big, bloody chunks for swallowing.
Leaning against the car, waiting for Nick to come with the rock to smash a window, Dan Crawley heard the screaming and snapped out of his slouch.
"Hey, what the hell—"
As the screaming ceased, he stepped away from the car and saw something dark moving like a big black stain among the trees. Something much too big to be his buddy. Puzzled, scared enough to be shaking, he went toward it slowly, ready to turn and race out of there if he had to. To hell with being a hero.
When he saw what it was, he stopped as though he had walked face first into a wall.
Born in a part of Florida where 'gators were common, he had seen his share of them. Never one as big as this, though. Jesus, it must be fifty feet long! But was it a 'gator? Alligators had broad snouts, and this one's was long and tapered. A croc, maybe. He'd read about those. Were there crocodiles in Florida? Christ, who cared? Who could care about anything except what was hanging from this thing's jaws!
His buddy's legs. The rest of Nick was inside, out of sight. And even as Dan began to choke on his own vomit, the huge head swung almost vertical, the jaws opened, and the rest of Nick Indrotti disappeared into the monster's maw.
The jaws snapped shut again.
Dan spun himself around on one foot and raced back to the road. Without even a glance at the two cars parked there, he sped past them and down the road to the clunker on the blacktop. Sobbing out his terror, he threw himself into it and fumbled frantically with the ignition key until he got it started. Then he sent the car weaving down the highway toward Clandon in such a way that anyone seeing it would have thought its driver was on the point of passing out drunk.
Jeff Gordon turned from the dark, still waters of the Drowning Pit to frown at his companion. "Did you hear something, Verna? Someone yelling?"
Verna nodded. "Yes, I think I did."
"It seemed to come from where we left the cars. Let's go. We're through here anyway."
They climbed the knoll and made their way through the fantasy world of boulders on its crest. They hurried down the other side and along the pond road to the cars.
"Over there." Jeff pointed into the woods. "What could—" Puzzled, he ventured in a few yards, then stopped. "Good God, it looks as though a tank went through here!"
Something at least as big as a tank must have made that track through the trees and undergrowth. From the way the brush was packed down and small trees bent over or broken near the base, something low to the ground and huge must have passed through here while Verna and he were at the sinkhole.
With a glance back at Verna, he went forward a few feet more, alert and ready to run at the slightest sound. This time when he stopped it was to stare down at a footprint. Not a very distinct one, but still a print.
The foot of a huge bird, perhaps? A giant lizard? An equally oversized alligator? He thought of the wolf he had seen at his window. Of the vulture that was supposed to have killed Jacob Everol and driven Jacob's twin sister mad.
There were other prints. The enormous weight of the creature had compacted brush, stones, and leaves in impressions more than a foot deep. Judging by their direction, the creature had come from the pond and gone back there.
Shaking his head, Jeff returned to the cars. "What did you find?" Verna Clark asked.
"The tracks of a big 'gator, I think. But 'gators don't yell."
"No." Her hand was out, holding something for him to look at. "People who smoke these things might, though."
He took it from her and lifted it to his nose. "Marijuana?"
/>
"I found it here on the ground." She frowned at him. "Come to think of it, wasn't there another noise after we heard the yell? Didn't I hear a car—?"
"Start up and take off at high speed? I think so. Yes. But out on the highway, not in here."
"Well, someone's been here. I'm sure this joint wasn't here before." Unlocking her car, she leaned in. "Nothing of mine's been touched, though. What about your car?"
He went to his and found it still locked. But suddenly he wanted out of there in a hurry, and the feeling was so strong, it almost made him shout a warning.
"You ready?" he called to Verna.
"Yes, Jeff."
"Then I'll see you at the Watsons'. Let's go." Backing his car out to the highway, he waited for her. Then, to be close if anything unexpected happened, he let her drive ahead of him toward town.
They dined at the inn again, this time on what the menu called "our famous Southern Fried Chicken." They asked each other what could have made the tracks back there near the pond. Failing to come up with any likely answer, they turned to the subject of the Everols.
Jeff told Verna what he had done to protect the Everol house. "If, of course, protect is the right word. If something comes tonight in spite of the pentagrams, there are some other things I can try."
"But you believe the pentagrams may work?"
"When you're fooling around with psychic phenomena, love, you never know what will happen. I went to Haiti, for instance, convinced that the powers of voodoo existed mostly in the imaginations of certain writers. Then in two months I saw enough—not just heard about it, mind you, but saw it—to make a believer of me."
"Such as?"
He told her about some of the voodoo services he had attended.
"How were you able to get into such affairs?"
"I was staying with the family of a wealthy young Haitian I had in class—a fellow you'll be hearing a lot about someday because he wants to be a writer and is going to be a good one. He took me around, taught me some Creole, translated for me when I needed help." Jeff flapped a hand in the air between them. "Whoa, fair lady. Let's talk about us."