by Cave, Hugh
It had never been easy for him to think. With fear causing his whole body to shake, it was even more difficult now. But after a while he made a decision.
Still shaking, he got off the bed and reached under it to drag out a suitcase. It was the one he had taken from the car that Nick had run off the road beyond the cemetery. The same cemetery the guy on the radio had just been talking about. The stuff he'd lifted from the driver's pockets was now in the suitcase. All but the money from his billfold, of course. They had spent that even before Nick was swallowed by the 'gator as they'd tried to loot the two cars at the pond.
Before picking up the suitcase and leaving the room, he took time to snuff out the joint. Not that his mother would say anything if she found it; she smoked more of the stuff than he did. But even if the house was a dump, it was all the house they had, and he'd catch hell if he set it on fire.
In the yard he tossed the suitcase onto the back seat of the clunker and got in behind the wheel. Ten minutes later, on Clandon's main street, he stopped in front of the town's police station.
A big, muscular man in a brown uniform, bent over something he was reading at the front desk, looked up when Dan stumbled in with the suitcase. Turning to a younger man who was hunched over a typewriter at the only other desk, he said, "Clay," and Clay stopped typing. Both silently stared at their caller.
Both knew him. He was the kid who bummed around with Nick Indrotti, who'd been reported missing. The two of them were almost always in some kind of trouble.
Dan Crawley set the suitcase down and returned their stares. "There's somethin' I gotta tell you," he said. "About what I just heard on the radio. What happened at the cemetery."
Giving them their full attention, the two men waited for more.
"Awhile back," Dan said, "Nick Indrotti and me seen a car that had went off the road out there past the cemetery. We stopped, and it was a car from out of state and the guy in it looked dead. So we—" Forgetting the rest of what he had rehearsed on his way here, he stopped in fear and confusion.
"So you what?" the man at the front desk said.
"We—that is, Nick—well, we emptied the guy's pockets and took this suitcase out of the car's trunk. Everything's in here now." Dan looked down at the bag and began shaking again, the way he had in his bedroom. "I'm bringin' it in, that's all." Having trouble this time because his mouth had gone dry, he sucked at his lips. "No, that ain't all. I have to tell you about Nick."
The man named Clay said in a sneering voice, "He has to tell us about Nick, Marvin. Okay, what about Nick?"
Dan Crawley tried to stop shaking but couldn't. "That—" He swallowed. "That thing at the cemetery got him. Or one just like it."
"How do you know about the thing at the cemetery?" the big man at the front desk challenged.
"The radio just now. And I seen what got Nick."
"You saw what?"
"I seen the 'gator that got Nick. Or maybe it was a crocodile, if we got such things around here. Anyway, it was big and fast. Jeez, was it fast! It caught Nick like he was standin' still, and I seen part of him hangin' out of its mouth, and then it swallowed him."
Marvin turned to look at the younger policeman, who frowned back at him. Clay said, "Where did this happen?"
"That road by the pond."
"What pond?"
"Out near the Everol place. The one with the quicksand."
Marvin said sarcastically, "And what were the two of you doin' out there? Checkin' out some other car you maybe could strip?"
Dan Crawley had stopped shaking but had to wet his lips again. "We just happened to stop and walk in there, that's all." When the men only continued to stare at him, he swallowed again and said in a hoarse whisper, "All right. There was a couple of cars in there and nobody around."
"Did you strip them?" Marvin asked.
"No! They was locked. It was when Nick was lookin' for a rock to—" Jeez, Dan thought, don't say that.
"A rock to smash the windows with?" Clay said. "Well ...
"Let's see the suitcase. Hand it up here," Marvin said.
Relieved that the inquisition seemed to be over, Dan swung the suitcase onto the desk. "It ain't locked," he said. "The key's inside of it, on the ring with his car keys."
Opening the bag, Marvin half rose from his chair to see what it contained. Pushing aside clothing and shoes, he took out a notebook and a billfold.
"The guy's name is Jeffrey Gordon," Dan volunteered. "We never used the credit cards."
"I'll bet," said Clay, leaving his typewriter to come over and have a look.
"No, we never did. Honest."
"You have any idea where this Jeffrey Gordon is now?" Marvin asked. "If he was dead like you thought he was, or like you claim to've thought, we'd know about it."
Dan shook his head.
But Clay had taken the notebook and opened it, and said now, "Most of this seems to be about Haiti, Mary, but there's something here about the Everols, too. Listen to this, Mary. 'Ethel Everol, age sixty-eight, was visited in December by psypsychi—psychiatrist R. J. Walther at the institution where she is a patient. Claimed she actually saw the creature that killed her brother and tried to kill her. Dr. Walther says he is inclined to believe her.'" Clay's gaze traveled on down the page. "There's more about the Everols. Looks like he was headed for there, Mary. Should I phone them?"
"Take a run out there. They're not the kind to tell you much over the phone. Here, take the bag in case the Gordon guy is there." Marvin returned the notebook and wallet to the suitcase and closed it. "While you're at it, better ask him if he wants to press charges against this kid. You," he said to Dan Crawley, "sit down on the bench over there and tell me again what happened to your buddy. And take it slow this time, so I can write it down."
At the Everol house, Clay left the suitcase in the police car when he went to the door. Everett Everol answered his ring.
"Mornin', Mr. Everol," Clay said. "We're lookin' for a feller named Jeffrey Gordon. He here by any chance?"
In the doorway Everett looked more like a scarecrow or a dressed-up skeleton than a living human being. "He was here till this morning, Clay. He's gone now." Behind him, Clay saw Blanche and her sister Susan step from the living room into the hall, apparently to find out who had rung the bell and what was wanted. They kept their distance, though.
"Would you know where he is, Mr. Everol?"
"Uh-uh." The old man shook his head. "He came here from Connecticut, promisin' to give us the benefit of his fancy knowledge about the kind of thing's been troublin' us, if you know what I mean, as I'm sure you do. Never did much and left at daybreak this mornin', I suppose to drive back there."
"Tell me some more about him, if you will," Clay said. The wife's sister, he noticed, was no longer in the hall listening. Apparently wasn't interested.
"Tell you what?"
"Well, we have a suitcase belongs to him, along with his billfold and a notebook he done a lot of writing in. I'd like to let him know we have them if I can. Seems he had an accident on his way here and both him and his car were stripped by a couple of town kids who do that kind of thing."
"That's right," Everett said. "When he showed up here he was in pretty bad shape. You want to come in, Clay?"
"For a minute. Thanks."
Everett stepped aside. Going past him, Clay saw Blanche quickly retreat into the living room. When he himself walked into the living room he found her sitting in an easy chair with a magazine. She looked up as if surprised.
"Why, hello, Clay," she said. "What brings the police here? Or is this a social call?"
"Just tryin' to find out about your Mr. Gordon, ma'am."
"Oh. Well, you'd better—" She smiled as her husband followed Clay in from the hall. "I was just going to say you'd better talk to Everett."
For a while Clay did that, but he learned little more than he had already been told. It seemed the Gordon fellow had asked if he might come and try to find an answer to the Everol mystery, as the t
own folks called it. Then he'd shown up after his accident with his mind affected and his memory gone and, being stripped of his billfold and everything, hadn't known who he was until the Everols told him. That, at least, was the Gospel According To Everett, and Blanche backed the old man up by nodding every few seconds.
Anyway, Gordon had now gone back to Connecticut, where he was a professor at some university.
Clay thanked the old man and went back out to his car and was halfway out to the road when Susan stepped out of some bushes and flagged him down. He slammed his foot on the brake pedal.
There'd been Everols in Clandon since before there was a Clandon on the map, and nobody liked them much, but Susan was different. After all, she wasn't really an Everol, only the sister of a woman who'd married into the clan.
She leaned into the car window, which was open because the air-conditioning had gone bad and the department hadn't gotten around to getting it fixed yet. "Clay," she said, kind of breathless because that was the way she was, "do you really want to find Jeffrey?"
"Huh?"
"Jeffrey Gordon, Clay! You were asking Everett about him."
"Why, yes. Sure I do. You know where he is?"
"At the Four Pines," she said. "That's where he is, Clay, at the Four Pines Motel. And Clay"—she stepped back, with a sort of lost expression on her face—"you'll tell him it was me that told you, won't you? Please?"
Chapter Twenty-Five
Jeff Gordon, too, heard a report of the cemetery tragedy, though not from a rock and roll radio station.
After exploring the cave with Verna, he had followed her back to the Four Pines Motel and obtained a cottage two doors down from hers. They had gone to a small nearby restaurant for dinner, then spent the evening in her cottage trying to put the pieces of the puzzle together.
Just before eleven, Jeff had returned to his own place and switched on the TV while getting ready for bed. Then, after hearing essentially what Dan Crawley later heard over the radio, and seeing some graphic video coverage of the destruction at the cemetery, he had slept badly, waking every little while to find his mind still searching for answers.
Up at daybreak, he was in the shower when one of the missing bits of the puzzle fell suddenly into place. The bottle, he thought. Why would Earl Watson have gone to the end of a dead-end passage to empty a whiskey bottle and throw it away?
The crawl there must lead to something.
Lead to what?
While poking through the wreckage in the voodoo chamber yesterday he had scratched a finger and caused it to bleed. Reluctant to take chances, he had stopped for a bottle of Mercurochrome on his way to the motel. The little bottle of red stuff was still in the motel bathroom. After drying himself, he stood before the washbasin mirror with it and carefully painted a pentagram on his chest. Then, on his way to the door, he picked up the cocomacaque.
Always play the percentages. More than once that philosophy had paid off for him.
Should he wake Verna and tell her where he was going? No, he decided. He would not be taking her anyway—only the presence of the fossils in the cave had persuaded him to let her share the risk before—and if she knew where he was going, she would insist on accompanying him. He had better leave a note of some sort, though.
The Four Pines was not the kind of motel that supplied stationery for its guests. He had bought some notebooks, however—planning to write a book someday about his activities, he always kept notes—and now tore a page out of one and wrote on it, "Gone to check on something. Back soon." Before going to his car he slid the paper under Verna's door.
At the quicksand pond, before climbing the knoll, he took the reel of cord he had used before from the trunk of his car, but not until he reached the place where they had found the bottle did he feel a need to use it. With one end of the cord made fast to a rock, he dropped to his hands and knees and began to crawl.
When the ceiling slanted upward after a hundred yards or so and he was able to stand again, he was not surprised. His light revealed a continuing tunnel as wide and high as the one behind him, its floor strewn with rocks and rubble.
He should have a compass, he thought then. And a tape or pedometer. Well, he had always been blessed with a good sense of direction and distance. Unless the passage had too many bends, he would come close to determining where it went. One thing he was sure of even now: It was headed in the general direction of the Everols' house.
A niche on his right was choked with the rocks and rubble that seemed to be everywhere. He stopped to peer into it. His light disclosed nothing but more boulders, however, and he went on.
Soon he began to find fossils and bone fragments.
It was like the stretch of passage in which Verna had become so excited. One cluster appeared to be another huge bird. A second, with four legs and a skull, might have been a wolf, or perhaps a saber-tooth like the one that had threatened him. Some bones were even imbedded in the tunnel's walls.
There was quicksand at the pond. Had this whole area been something like a sea of quicksand in the old days? That might explain the presence of so many dead things here.
He would have to bring Verna here after all, to record these new discoveries. She would never forgive him if he didn't. But that must wait until later, when the Everol mystery and that of her sister's disappearance had been solved.
A piece of the Everol puzzle seemed to be falling into place right now, as he continued along the tunnel. He had come about half a mile, he estimated. There had been no significant change of direction. Unless he encountered such a change, he would very soon be under the Everols' yard. Or—who could say?—even under the house.
Think, he told himself. This tunnel is part of an underworld full of fossils from an age when Florida was a stamping ground for all kinds of nightmare creatures. Above it is a house where some of those creatures are preying on the inhabitants. What the hell is bringing those long-dead monsters to life?
He stopped. In front of him the passage ended in a solid wall of rock. And, yes, if he wasn't under the Everols' house, he was certainly close to it. Time to go back.
Back along the tunnel.
Back on his hands and knees through the crawl, and to wind up the cord for the next visit.
Now back past the trashed voodoo room to the entrance on the knoll, and then to Verna for a discussion of what he had learned.
But as he neared the voodoo room, he heard something in the darkness ahead and froze in his tracks.
What stopped him was a deep-throated growl or snarl that seemed to make even the walls of the passage tremble. Nothing even remotely human could have made it. He knew what had.
He had been trudging along with the light in his right hand, the cocomacaque in his left. Now he switched them and aimed the light at the entrance to the hounfor, where he had been confronted by a saber-tooth before.
One was there again, in the same menacing crouch, with jaws open and long, and sharp teeth agleam. When he saw the tawny haunches quivering he knew he had only a split second to react before the monster would come hurtling at him like a battering ram. Knew, too, that if it did spring, he would be slammed to the tunnel floor like something made of cardboard and killed by a single snap of those awesome jaws.
He sank to his knees. Dropping the light, he thrust the cocomacaque in front of him with both hands, as he had done before when facing this beast or one like it. But this time the great cat did not retreat. For some reason the voodoo stick had lost its power. He dropped it and tore at his shirtfront, ripping the fabric apart to bare the red pentagram on his chest.
The light had fallen to the floor in such a way that the hounfor and the crouching cat in its entrance were left in darkness. He could see nothing now but a pair of fiery eyes as he held his breath in an agony of suspense. His heart was an air hammer, his hands and face clammy with sweat.
Then the growling subsided. There were receding sounds of huge paws slapping the stone floor. And silence.
Reaching
for the light and the cocomacaque, Jeff struggled to his feet, the light's beam wobbling over walls and ceiling before he could steady it. The tunnel ahead was empty, thank God. Shaken, he peered into the hounfor as he passed it. It, too, was empty.
On he hurried to the entrance, praying the huge cat would not suddenly reappear. With the boulder rolled back into place, he ran down to his car and, still shaking, drove back to the motel.
Standing in the doorway of her cottage when he pulled in, Verna waved, then ran to him and was at the car door when he opened it. "I was just beginning to get scared," she said. "Your note didn't say what time you left, so I couldn't know how long you'd been gone. Where did you go?"
"To the cave again, and let me tell you what I found." Taking her by the hand, he led her to his unit. There, while she sat on a chair and he on the bed, he told her of the tunnel that ended somewhere under the Everols' yard or house. "Did you watch the TV news last night after I left you?"
"Yes," she said. "The cemetery."
"I'm betting some part of the cave runs under there, too."
She nodded.
"Verna, listen to me. When I was in Haiti last summer I attended a very unusual voodoo service. It wasn't something tourists get to see. I told you before that I'd become friendly with certain voodoo people through a Haitian student of mine, didn't I? Well, I was invited by one of them to go to this affair in a place called Petit-Goave, out on the southern peninsula."
He paused. "Actually, I suppose the fellow just wanted a ride out there to save him a bruising trip on a tap-tap or camion, and he knew I had a rented car. But never mind. I got there and saw what happened.
"What happened," Jeff went on, "was that the old houngan in charge of the service called upon one of the old, old voodoo gods—gods most houngans don't even know about and wouldn't dare call up if they did—for help in obtaining revenge for his own son. The son had been a shopkeeper there in Petit-Goave. His best friend had somehow taken the shop away from him, stolen his wife as well, and left him with nothing. The son was there at the ceremony, along with some friends of his who sympathized. No one else, except my friend and I, the usual servitors, and a large black dog that belonged to the officiating houngan. This was forbidden stuff, you understand. All of us could have been jailed for it."