by Cave, Hugh
It was some trick, of course. Some trick that the Everols or Gordon—or maybe those voodoo creeps from Haiti—had cooked up to scare him. But, by God, he'd show them he didn't scare so easy. There were other ways of getting out to the main road. Not with the truck, no. He'd have to come back for that later. But he still had two feet, and sitting there with that damned black cat staring at him had sobered him up enough to use them.
With the driveway blocked, the shortest way to the highway was over the knoll where the cave entrance was. The entrance where he'd seen the Mason woman go in and locked her up to keep her from telling the world what he had in there. Though how Ethel Everol could have known about that, he'd be damned if he could figure out. She must be one of those weirdos who could read a person's mind.
Blast the cave, anyway. He wished he'd never been called on to recover the Shelby girl's body. Wished he'd never discovered the entrance down there in the sinkhole. The stinking cave had been nothing but trouble. The Everols had been smart to keep it a family secret, even if they'd only done it so strangers wouldn't come around to explore it.
The hell with them. To hell with them all. Especially that Gordon guy, whoever he was. Gordon was just shit lucky to have had the stick with him that time at the cave mouth, and even luckier to have escaped when the net was dropped on him. Some people were born lucky.
Too bad he didn't have the time right now to set the Goddamn house on fire, with all of them inside it. They deserved it, siccing that damned black cat on him the way they had.
With one last glance at the shadow shapes blocking the driveway—their eyes like hot coals floating in the rainy dark—Earl took off through brush and trees, en route to the knoll.
A tree came to life in his path and lunged at him. No, not a tree. It was a huge snake of some kind, with beady eyes and a flicking tongue, so high off the ground it seemed to be walking on its tail. With a strangled cry he leaped to one side and fell on his hands and knees in a thicket of prickly wild fern but managed to scramble to his feet again just in time. The snake lunged again but missed him.
Sobbing for breath he ran on, and as he ran, he thought of the time he'd fixed the brakes on Verna Clark's red car so it would roll down the slope into the quicksand pond with her inside it. He hadn't been certain she was a real danger to him then, only figured she might be, and he'd be stupid to take any chances.
Sending for that college catalog to check on her had been a real smart idea, too, one that paid off. Whatever she was—a friend of the Mason dame he'd murdered, a snoop for the broad's insurance company, even a lady cop—he'd found out she wasn't a professor at the college like she'd claimed to be.
The knoll. And no more shadows with fiery eyes. Whatever they were, those shadows, maybe they'd take care of things for him back there at the house. That wolf—Jeez. But the people back there had crazy Ethel and the black cat, didn't they? Crazy Ethel who'd been just another old woman when she went away, and now was some kind of. . . kind of... some kind of what?
Climbing the knoll in the dark, he lost his footing a few times where the going was steep and had to wobble along sideways before he could regain his balance. As he passed the boulder at the cave entrance he turned his head and cursed it. Then he thought about how he'd found that Mason after shutting her up in there.
After staying away for days to be sure she'd be dead when he went back, he'd found her just inside the entrance, cold and stiff, with her fingernails gone and her hands rubbed to the bone from trying to claw the rock aside. She never could have clawed it aside. Nobody could. Not after he'd wedged a couple of others against it on the outside.
But had she been there all the time, right there at the boulder? He'd wondered. After finding herself trapped, wouldn't she have looked for some other way out? Her flashlight had been dead when he found her, but it must have been okay for a while. Anyway, there wasn't any way for her to escape except through the sinkhole with scuba gear. Finding that out was all she would have got for her trouble.
Cursing the rain and the darkness, he stumbled past the cave entrance, then went sliding and lurching down the other side of the knoll toward the pond road that would lead him out to the highway. But twenty feet from the road he stopped in his tracks, suddenly wanting a drink so badly he would have given an arm or a leg for one.
Blocking his way were a human shape and a crouching cat, both of them glowing in the dark like they were made of glass or clear plastic with lights inside. The cat was no little one like the one at the house either. It was bigger than his pickup truck and glowed like it was a kind of dirty yellow with dark stripes. Its wide-open mouth looked like a room in the cave, filled with white teeth. Two teeth in its upper jaw were so long and sharp, they could probably bite right through a man.
Standing there, trying to summon enough strength to turn and run, Earl saw the cat's rump and hind legs twitching. Saw its long tail whipping from side to side with such force that he could hear brush being scythed down by it on both sides of the road. The creature's huge front paws dug holes in the ground as it got ready to spring. From its cavern of a mouth came a warning growl that turned his whole body ice cold and made his hair stand up.
"Run!" he silently screamed at himself "For Christ's sake, run!"
He couldn't.
The human shape at the cat's side was not so clear but in a different way was even more scary. A woman, glowing the same way but made of mist or fog. The same woman he had shut up in the cave. The one whose cold, stiff body he had first wrapped in canvas and carried to a niche just short of the crawl, then later dragged through the crawl to a safer hiding place where it was supposed to be now.
It wasn't there now. Holy Mother, no! And it wasn't a dead body anymore, either. Alive again, even though made of mist or whatever, the woman was here between him and the road to the highway, standing alongside the cat, with a hand on the cat's head. Like they were pals. Buddies. And she was staring at him like she hated him. Her eyes were twin lasers burning holes in his brain.
Earl's mouth opened and he screamed, but no sound came out. His mind told him again to turn and run before it was too late. The cat was ready to leap. The woman's eyes would turn him to ash. From somewhere he at last found the strength, the will, to lurch around and run for the pond.
The pond, yes. Even in the dark he knew where the pond was, and it was his only chance. No way could he get past those two and go down the road, and with the knoll behind him he couldn't retreat. With his legs shaking the way they were, he couldn't even climb the damned knoll. But if he could reach the pond and dive into that black water, maybe they wouldn't follow. And he was a good swimmer. Once under water, out of sight, he could maybe change direction and come up where they wouldn't expect him to....
Racing down the slope into the water, he flung his arms over his head for the dive, then realized his mistake and tried to stumble back out but was too late. He had run into the pond at a place where the bottom was soft—the very place he had hoped the red car would end up, with its owner inside it. When he tried to scramble back out for a try at a different spot, his feet were trapped in soft ooze that was already over his ankles. Wildly he waved his arms about, trying to pull himself free.
No good. Nor was there anything he could grab on to. No tree limb was close enough even if he could see, though he all but turned himself into a corkscrew trying to reach for shadows.
Full circle. His luck had come full circle. The Clark girl had escaped being drowned here and he, Earl Watson, was about to take her place.
He began to cry.
The ooze was up to his knees now, and the more he struggled, the deeper he sank into it. He stopped struggling and still went on sinking. At the edge of the pond the huge, glowing cat crouched just back from the water's edge, watching him, and the woman stood beside it, still with one hand on its head. The woman who was really back there in the cave, stiff and cold, wrapped in canvas, in the niche beyond the crawl.
Was she the cat's mistress? If she let go and gave the
word, would it spring at him? It could reach him in one bound, he was sure, a tiger cat that huge. Even if the quicksand trapped it, those god-awful jaws would close on him first.
In his terror he was moaning now. The ooze, sand, mud, whatever it was, had reached his ribs. Below the ribs everything was so numb it seemed not to be there anymore. He flung his arms about. He began screaming for help. His past, or parts of his past, took over his mind, as if to add to his punishment.
That day back in February when the cops had come to ask if he would try to recover the body of the Shelby girl, and he had taken his scuba gear to the sinkhole and found her on the bottom. And noticed what looked like a cave opening there.
A cave. He would keep it a secret, at least until he had a chance to find out how big it was and what could be done with it. You never knew. A man would be stupid to blab about a thing like that, and maybe pass up a chance to make some big money. That was the way he'd always worked, grabbing at opportunities that came along from out of nowhere. A chance to peddle crack one time, though he was too smart to use the stuff himself. A chance to make a couple of grand by helping a guy get out of the state when the cops wanted him for rape. A little here, a little there; you took what came along and made the most of it. To live any other way was just plain dumb.
So he'd kept quiet about the cave but gone back to explore it every now and then. Easy enough after he'd found the entrance on the knoll. Then the Mason dame; he'd have been stupid to risk losing everything because of her. And even more stupid to pass up the chance to get some dough out of Everett after getting rid of her.
And Everett, believing one of the Everol women had done it. Yeah. But what the hell, why wouldn't he? Before Mason disappeared she'd been around town for quite a while, staying at the inn and snooping around the Everol place. Everybody knew that. And everybody knew the Everols were death to people who trespassed on their property. One time they'd even tried to have the sinkhole fenced in so people wouldn't go there, and they didn't even own it. And here was this woman shut up in their cave to die, and who else would have done such a thing except one of them, to put an end to her prowling around?
One of the Everols. So you got on the phone and you called the old man and you said, "Hey, I got somethin' to show you, Mr. Everol. Somethin' mighty important." And after a lot of talk you took the old buzzard into the cave and showed him the body and, yeah, convinced him he'd better cooperate. It wasn't hard to convince him one of his women had done it.
"So, Mr. Everol, you pay me and I'll keep quiet about this. We leave the body right here in the cave—I'll hide it where no one will ever find it—and you pay me to keep my mouth shut. What, Mr. Everol? If you take any big sum of money out of your account, the folks at the bank might wonder what's up? Well, all right, here's what we'll do. You take out a smaller amount every week, see, and drop a hint you're fixin' up that old house of yours. Nobody's gonna question that."
It all came back. Not slowly but in a rush, like a sudden gust of wind when you were out on the Gulf in a boat sometimes. Whoosh, and all that part of his past raced through his mind and was gone, and he was still right there in the pond, up to his armpits now in the ooze, and the woman of mist was still standing there at the pond's edge watching him, with one hand on the head of that huge, crouching cat.
And he, Earl Watson, was now pleading for help in a voice that had become little more than a whine. "Oh, God, get me out of here! Help me, somebody! Jesus, I'll drown in this stuff. I'll drown!"
The ooze reached his shoulders. He felt it slide in and slither around his neck. Only his head and arms were still out of it, the arms waving feebly now and his voice reduced to a whimper.
"Lady. . . you on the shore. . . I know I shouldn'a done it to you. I was wrong. Jeez, lady, please . . . don't let me die like this...
She answered him by lifting her hand from the head of the cat.
In one swift, fluid glide, with its awesome jaws agape, the monstrous feline leaped out over the black water toward the parts of Earl Watson that were still visible. A loud crunching sound cut off Earl's blubbering as the jaws snapped shut. Then with an enormous splash, the prehistoric monster disappeared into open water beyond what was left of its victim.
The parts of Watson it left behind were the bloody stumps of his upthrust arms and a third stump, spouting blood like a fountain, where his head had been. In another moment these, too, disappeared into the now crimson water. Then the misty figure on the shore slowly dissolved, leaving nothing there but rain-filled darkness.
And silence. An eerie silence that flowed in to swallow the echoes of Earl Watson's last whimpering pleas for mercy.
Chapter Thirty-Two
Rising from its crouch, the black kitten turned from the now empty doorway in which the wolf had appeared. Ethel Everol went to it and picked it up. Holding it in front of her face, she said to it softly, "Thank you, Blackie. You were wonderful." Then she put the cat on her shoulder and, with a frown, went to the center of the room and lifted the cocomacaque out of the earthenware jar that held it upright. "Now help me with this, Blackie," she said while frowning at it.
The cat rubbed its face against hers.
After studying the voodoo stick for a moment, Ethel turned to Jeff Gordon. "You say you handled this, Jeffrey?"
He nodded.
"How, exactly? If I may ask."
"To hold off a creature in the cave, a saber-toothed cat of some sort, when it was about to attack me. And to defend myself against Earl Watson."
"Did you injure Mr. Watson with it? Enough to draw blood?"
"I'm sure I did. When Verna and I saw him a little later, he was wearing a bandage with blood on it."
"Ah! Then this stain on the stick could be his blood!" Ethel turned her head toward the cat on her shoulder. "Do you see it, Blackie?" She held the cocomacaque close to the cat's eyes and touched a dark spot on it. "Right here. See? And don't you agree with me that the blood of such an evil man might be the cause of Lelio's problem?"
Blackie put his nose against the stain. His ears flattened. His tail bushed out. His "Mrreow!" was louder than the animal sounds outside the windows.
Lelio stepped forward. "I should have washed it, m'selle. Let me wash it now."
"No." Ethel shook her head. "Such pollution can't just be washed off, I'm sure. Throw the stick away, Lelio."
"But we must have a poteau-mitan, m'selle! Without one, we cannot have a service!"
"I will be your poteau-mitan," Ethel said.
"You?"
"Yes. Get rid of the stick."
Lelio tossed the stick into the dining room. Jeff Gordon saw it land on a rectangle of carpet, slightly less faded than the rest, where the big dining table had stood. Ethel kicked off her shoes, leaving herself barefoot, and took a step forward. The movement placed her with one foot on each side of the govi, which by careful measurement was already in the exact center of the room.
With the kitten still on her shoulder, Ethel folded her arms. "Proceed with the service, Lelio. Let your loa come through me."
"From—the beginning, m'selle?"
"I think so, yes. From the beginning."
For the third time that evening the two from Haiti went through the ritual of a service summoning Erzulie and Legba while the others sat on the chairs against the walls and silently watched. But the room itself was not silent. Accompanying the small sounds made by Lelio and his wife were the louder ones voiced by the creatures outside. Not a moment passed when at least one of the room's windows did not frame some shadow shape darker than the night itself, with eyes like blazing coals. Would-be intruders, determined to get in but held at bay by the pentagrams.
But for how long, Jeff Gordon asked himself, would those circled stars on the windows be effective? They blazed now with a life of their own. Could they continue to blaze that way without burning themselves out?
Lelio sprinkled drops of water about the room again. When the moment came for him to kiss the poteau-mitan, he dropped
to his knees and pressed his lips to the bare feet of the woman who had taken its place.
He retraced the vèvés and sprinkled water again. He shook his asson over them, filling the room with its rhythmic maraca music. Now for good measure he repeated the invocation to the guardian of the gate.
"Papa Legba, ouvri bayé. Papa Legba, Attibon Legba, ouvri bayé pou nou passé...."
But the prayer was intoned in a different voice this time. One heavy with despair. One that said he had lost faith in his ability and was merely going through the motions.
Leaning toward Jeff, Verna Clark whispered, "What will happen if he is successful?"
"Someone will be possessed. Perhaps more than one."
"Possessed?"
"Mounted, they call it. By the spirits of the loa he is calling up."
"How will we know?"
"By what they say. How they act. But when it's over they won't remember."
Suddenly the person on the other side of Verna, the little bird woman, Susan, began to tremble. Her eyes closed and she stood up. Her arms, dangling at her sides, shook so violently it seemed they would break off at the shoulders.
Lelio, still chanting the prayer to Legba, became aware of what was happening and was silent. He turned slowly to face her. His eyes doubled in size and he sucked in a breath. In a voice totally different from the one he had been using, he began a new chant.
Jeff Gordon had learned enough Creole in Haiti, and enough about voodoo, to know the words were an improvisation.
"Erzulie, you have answered! You are here at last. Thank you; oh, thank you! But now you must protect this house of sorrow from the evil old ones I called up by mistake! You must send them back! You must intercede for us with Papa Legba and ask him to close the gate on them!"
Trying to watch the bird woman and the houngan at the same time, Jeff felt himself becoming dizzy. More than dizzy—confused. He rose from his chair and fell back again, aware that Verna Clark was staring at him in alarm. He lifted a hand and slapped the side of his head, hard, hoping to clear his mind and his vision.