by Cave, Hugh
Jeff stepped back.
Standing there with no display of hostility, her hands limp at her sides and a faint smile on her lips, the woman from the institution said, "Mr. Watson, look at me, please."
Watson did so, then looked away again.
"No. Keep looking. I believe you have something to tell us, and I want you to look at my eyes while you do. Let me tell you something, Mr. Watson. Just a little while ago I was attacked by pitbulls who were far more ferocious than you, yet there isn't a mark on me. Think about that while you look at me."
Watson's gaze returned to her face. Evidently it had to. His hands gripped his knees and his mouth trembled.
"It wasn't Lelio and Lucille who shut that poor girl up in the cave was it, Mr. Watson?" Ethel said.
Except for his trembling he was like a statue, sitting there looking up at her.
"Was it?" she repeated.
"I-I don't have to—"
"Oh, but you do. Doesn't he, Blackie?" She turned her head to smile at the kitten on her shoulder.
Blackie voiced a shrill, "Mrreow!"
"It was you who shut Miss Mason up in the cave, wasn't it Mr. Watson?" Ethel continued.
"No! You're crazy!"
"Don't stop looking at me. And I'm not crazy, Mr. Watson. I was never crazy. I only went away to learn." Again Ethel glanced at the small black animal on her shoulder. "I've even taught Blackie some of what I learned. Haven't I, Blackie?"
"Mrreow!" This time the kitten bared its teeth.
They looked a little like the teeth of the saber-tooth in the cave, Jeff Gordon thought. Smaller, of course, but just as threatening. Perhaps just as dangerous.
"Tell us, Mr. Watson," Ethel said. "Tell us how you saw Miss Mason go into the cave one day and decided you didn't want her to discover the fossils there and tell the world about them. Because, at the right time, you planned to 'discover' them yourself and become rich in some way. And so you rolled the boulder over the entrance while she was inside, and everything you have said about finding her body in there has been a lie. Come, Mr. Watson. Tell us."
Mouth open, he stared up at her with eyes that appeared to be made of glass.
"All we need from you is a simple 'That's right,'" Ethel murmured. "Come now."
The rain pounded the windows. Watson licked his lips.
"Mr. Watson, we haven't all evening." Ethel's voice was a shade less casual, a little more biting. "For your information, we have other things to do here this evening."
He remained silent.
"Very well." Lowering herself to one knee, she looked again at the kitten on her shoulder. It meowed once more and jumped to the carpet only a yard or so from Earl Watson's feet. With its teeth bared, it crouched there with its gaze fixed on his face.
Watson suddenly lurched erect, flailing the air in front of himself with both hands. "No!" he cried hoarsely. "Keep it away from me!"
"You must be aware, Mr. Watson, that one snap of those terrible jaws could take your head off." Ethel's voice mocked him. "All I need to do is give a command."
"My God, all right, I did it! I locked the Mason woman up in there!"
"Say it again, Mr. Watson."
"I did it! I admit it!"
Ethel turned, letting her gaze touch the faces of the others in the room. "You heard that, all of you? Everett? Blanche? Amanda? Susan? You, Jeffrey? You, Miss Mason?"
Some nodded; others only stared. Jeff Gordon's gaze was fixed on the kitten, and he wondered what Earl Watson was seeing there. Was it only a kitten or had it become to Earl something more like the tawny saber-toothed cat of the cave?
"So, then, we have witnesses," Ethel said. "You have confessed to a murder, Mr. Watson. A murder for which you have blackmailed my brother Everett. We know all we need to know, except where you have hidden the poor woman's body. Tell us that, please."
"It—you go into the crawl, if you know where that is."
"I know where it is," Jeff Gordon said.
"You go through the crawl on your hands and knees. Just beyond it, on the right, is a niche choked with boulders."
Jeff nodded. "I know about that, too."
"She's in there, wrapped in canvas."
Jeff looked at Verna Clark, beside him, and reached for her hand. But there were no tears now. As she gazed at the man who had killed her sister, her face revealed only loathing.
Ethel said, "All right, Mr. Watson. Now, because we have other things to do at the moment, you will continue to sit here quietly, please, until we are finished and have the time to deal with you." She leaned forward to stroke the crouching kitten. "Guard him, Blackie. If he tries to get out of his chair, you will know what to do."
The kitten's "Mrreow!" was too savage a sound, too threatening, to have come out of that small mouth, Jeff Gordon decided. There was something going on here that only Ethel and Watson—and the cat?—seemed to understand.
Apparently Ethel was finished. Turning to the Haitians, she said quietly, "Lelio, I believe the time has come for you to try again. We need the presence of your loa to close the book on all this. If you think I can be of any help, please call on me."
Chapter Thirty
"Papa Legba, ouvri bayé! Papa Legba, Attibon Legba, ouvri bayé pou nou passé!"
Over and over Lelio intoned the words.
The three white candles burned on the altar. In the center of the room the cocomacaque stood upright in the govi. The vèvés to the keeper of the gate and the protector of homes still lay undisturbed on the carpet. The sound of rain at the windows was much like the sound of whisper drumming that normally would accompany this stage of the ceremony. So much so, in fact, that when Jeff Gordon closed his eyes he could easily convince himself he was in Haiti, not Florida.
But, of course, this was not Haiti and what Lelio was attempting to do had already failed once.
Something was not correct. Was the old houngan himself at fault?
Not likely, Jeff decided, watching the man as he walked slowly about the room with his glass of water, sprinkling the floor as a salute to the loa. He had been in voodoo all his life and had probably been taught by a father who had learned from his father, all the way back to Africa. That was how it went.
It must be something else, then. The altar, perhaps—Lelio had suggested a service to consecrate the old table, but there had not been time. The govis? Lucille and he had had a supply on hand, made, of course, by themselves, but were they made of the proper kind of clay? And should they, too, have been blessed after Lelio added the symbols of the loa he was so desperately trying to contact?
The cocomacaque. Such a stick had certain powers, granted. And this one had worked at first when Lelio called upon the old gods for vengeance and unleashed horrors he had never dreamed of. Then it had worked a second time when he realized his mistake and called on Legba to close the bayé on the horrors so innocently let loose. But, as the old fellow himself had suggested, the cocomacaque had been handled by a certain Jeff Gordon since then. And the poteau-mitan, for which it was being used here as a substitute, was perhaps the most important part of any voodoo ceremony. It was the bayé.
On his knees now, Lelio was kissing the cocomacaque. Except for the drumming of raindrops at the windows marked with circles and stars, the room was still as a tomb. Every eye was on the houngan. Even Earl Watson stared at him in silence now, instead of at the black cat crouching before him with its gaze fixed on his face.
Lelio staggered up from his knees. His voice was only a hoarse whisper as he spoke the ancient langage, the meaning of which even he could not know. Again Lucille brought him a dish of cornmeal from the altar. Again, stiff-kneed, he bent from the waist and drew the vèvés—easier for him this time because he had only to dribble the cornmeal over the same designs he had so carefully created before.
Again he sprinkled the completed symbols with water and shook his asson over them.
Again, with Lucille, he chanted in Creole the Catholic prayers and the voodoo invocations.
>
Again, after an anxious wait that seemed to last forever, he intoned words of despair.
"They—are not coming."
Silence.
Earl Watson, with a sneer on his face, leaned back in his chair and said with a snort, "Who ain't comin'? What the hell's this crap all about, anyhow? What you think you're doin'?"
Lelio seemed to feel he must answer. With his head lowered and his gaze on the floor, he said wearily, "I have asked Legba and Erzulie to come and help us. They have not heard me."
But little Susan, the bird woman, suddenly leaned forward in her chair to stab a finger at one of the windows. "Look!" she cried shrilly. "Oh, my God, all of you! Look at what is coming! Look!"
Shapes. Shapes out there in the darkness pressed forward to peer in through the glass, with only the pentagrams between them and those in the room. What revealed them was not the flickering light of the candles on the altar; that was too faint. It was the glow of their own eyes, red as burning coals and bright enough to identify some of them.
One window framed the face of a huge vulture. Another that of the monstrous snake, or one like it, that had appeared to Jeff Gordon the first night of his stay here, when he had not even known who he was. At a third appeared a wolf's head with gaping jaws and a mouth like a passage in the cave, with stalactites and stalagmites for fangs.
Jeff recovered first from the paralysis that seized them all. In a voice so steady it surprised him, he said, "All right now. Let's not panic. The pentagrams have worked before." He stood up. "I'll check around, see what's going on in the rest of the house."
Before he reached the hall, Verna Clark was at his side. No need for her to say, "Where you go, I go." It was in her eyes. In the touch of her hand.
They hurried together through the rest of the downstairs and found shapes, shadows, at almost every window. Not all had eyes. Some were only swirling lumps of black mist apparently seeking a way in. But no longer was the pounding of the rain the only sound. At every window the besiegers had voices now. Some snarled, some growled, some hissed. Some that looked like giant lizards even screamed like birds.
As Verna and Jeff stood before a window that framed one of those—behind, of course, the pentagram that made it safe at the moment for them to be there—Verna spoke as if unaware of what she was saying. "Jeff... a professor of mine once said that all the birds we know today are descended from dinosaurs. Dinosaur means terrible lizard, Jeff. Maybe the vulture that killed Jacob in this house wasn't a bird at all. . .
Jeff took her hand. "Come on, love. We have to get ourselves and the others out of this trap. Let's see what's upstairs."
They hurried there together, first to the room Jeff had occupied—the one in which Jacob's face had been mangled by the beak of a huge vulture—then to the one in which Ethel had been driven to her "learning place." Then they went to Amanda's, and Susan's, and the room shared by Everett and his wife.
In all of them it was the same. Shapes, shadows, globs of swirling mist at the windows. Some with glowing red eyes, some with eyes of other colors or no color at all, merely bright round holes like tunnels. Again the rain drumming was overpowered by snarlings, spittings, and ear-splitting bird cries from the throats of things that looked like lizards.
"No way out here," Jeff said. "No way out anywhere, it looks like. Let's go back to Lelio."
As they hurried back down the stairs, he asked himself a question: If the house were under siege, as it seemed to be, how long would the siege last? More important, would the traditional power of the pentagrams, many of them now blazing as brightly as the fiery eyes they held at bay, continue to be effective that long?
He and Verna had more to protect them than the magic symbols on the windows. They wore the stars on their bodies, as well. Back at the motel, after his last adventure in the cave, Verna had stood naked before the mirror in the bathroom and painted one on herself with the Mercurochrome, as he had. How could he forget it when, feeling she might not be doing it correctly, she had asked him to come and help her?
Would he ever again take her in his arms the way he had then? Would they ever get out of this hell house alive, to even think about such things?
In the living room the others had not moved. Not even Watson, whose gaze was fixed again on the cat. Still seated, staring at the windows like a group of people turned to stone by some kind of curse, they did manage to turn their heads and look at him as he and Verna entered. But no one spoke. The only sounds were those made by the specters in the night outside.
Quietly Jeff said, "There's no way out. Lelio, try to think what you may have done wrong and begin again. But first"—he turned to Susan—"have you some iodine or Mercurochrome here? Something you can paint pentagrams on your bodies with, for extra protection?"
Susan said calmly, "We have already done that, Jeffrey."
"You what?"
"Blanche and Everett said I was being foolish, but I pointed out that those on the windows had already proved their worth, and we would have nothing to lose in going a step farther." She nodded briskly. "I helped you with the windows, if you remember. This time I used some blue paint that was left over from painting a bedroom. There is some of the paint left if—" She looked at the two Haitians. "In the kitchen closet we have some white, too. Shall I get it, Lelio?"
"Thank you, m'selle. Lucille and I will use it, yes."
Jeff turned to the man who had murdered Verna's sister. "Watson?"
"What the hell you talkin' about?" Watson snarled.
"We're talking about the symbols you see on the windows here. They seem to be keeping those creatures out there from breaking in and destroying us. For now, at least."
"And you want to paint one of those dumb things on me?"
"I don't want to paint one on you, Watson. I wouldn't touch you with plastic gloves and a brush with a ten-foot handle. But if you want to apply one to yourself, Susan will bring you what you need."
"You got to be crazy. All of you, you got to be crazy!"
"Have it your way." Jeff shrugged and turned away.
Susan hurried to the kitchen. Returning with a pint can of white paint already opened, she handed it and a small brush to Lelio, who stepped into the dining room. Lucille followed. They had not asked how to draw a pentagram, Jeff noticed. Had not even glanced at a window. Apparently they knew about such things. Among the many truths his summer in Haiti had taught him was that there was much, much more to voodoo than chanting and drumming. And very little of it took place in most voodoo movies.
In a few moments Lelio and his wife returned. Because the sounds outside the house had become louder, Lelio had to speak loudly to be heard. "I am ready to try again, m'sieu. But without knowing what is wrong, I have little hope." Shaking his head in anticipation of failure, he stepped to the altar. Lucille followed to assist him. Jeff, who had been standing, turned to go to an empty chair.
A low, throaty growl stopped him. He spun about to face the dining room doorway. There, filling the whole doorway, was the monstrous wolf he had faced before, or one just like it. Even as he threw up his arms and took a backward step, the slavering jaws opened wide to reveal a forest of fangs.
Blanche and Amanda screamed. Little Susan wailed "Oh, my God!" Everett tried to yell but could produce nothing more than a strangled moan of fear.
The two Haitians merely stared.
Ethel, calmly rising from her chair, voiced only one word. "Blackie!"
Before the wolf could launch itself in a leap that must have brought it hurtling into the room with the door frame draped around its neck, the black cat obeyed Ethel's command. Leaving its place in front of Earl Watson, Blackie sprang to confront the intruder. The kitten's "Mrreow!" was a challenging scream that made the windows rattle. Jeff Gordon thought his eardrums had ruptured. The thing in the doorway froze.
Something strange happened then. At least, Jeff thought it did. One moment what he saw was a small black kitten in a crouch, facing a prehistoric monster whose head alone
filled the whole doorway. Then, its tail horizontal and swishing from side to side, the kitten began to grow larger.
No, not the kitten itself. Ethel's tiny companion was as small as before. But something like a shadow of the same shape began to flow out from it: an opaque shadow that even while retaining the kitten's form expanded until it was as big as the wolf. From where Jeff stood, the prehistoric thing in the doorway was hidden by it.
The voice of the spectral cat made the windows shake again. That of the wolf this time was only a whimper.
Then Jeff found himself rubbing his eyes and asking himself if he had imagined it. The wolf was gone. What he saw was an empty doorway—nothing there at all—and little Blackie turning to look up at his mistress as if for a word of approval.
The whole thing had taken no more than a minute or so, Jeff was certain. Long enough, though, for something else to happen. Long enough, while all eyes were on the drama in the doorway, for Earl Watson to have seized his chance to get away.
His chair was empty. A gust of wind from the hall had to be coming from the front door he had left open behind him in his flight.
But was that important? More so, surely, was the revelation that some part of the cave did, indeed, run underneath this house, as Jeff had suspected. And if that was so, the pentagrams on the windows might offer no protection against some of the creatures from the cave.
But why had the wolf appeared inside the house when the other horrors were still trying to get in from outside? Was it because Lelio had moved his hounfor into the house this time, and because the wrong loa were answering his summons again?
Chapter Thirty-One
Stumbling down the veranda steps in rain and darkness, Earl Watson made for his pickup truck in the driveway. Then he saw he could not escape that way.
Beyond the truck, the usual route to the main highway was alive with the same kinds of things that had been snarling and hissing at the windows of the house. They themselves were almost invisible in the dark, but their eyes were not.