Liar, liar, pants on fire . . .
Her uncle Rusty had always said liars went to hell. He’d obviously missed a scripture passage somewhere—because now she knew that liars sometimes brought hell with them as well.
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
Sarah closed her eyes for a moment, trying to remember the feel of the kitten’s fur when she’d petted it, the sound of its gentle purring and how that sound had sent soothing vibrations all the way through her body.
“Maybe he won’t come back.” The sound of Nicky’s voice startled her. It sounded foreign in this place, like the pound of a hammer in an empty church hall.
“Maybe,” she said, opening her eyes and not feeling an ounce of hope that that would happen. She just didn’t want to crush whatever hope he might be holding onto.
“I…I’ve been trying to get us out of here. Figure out a way for us to get out, you know? But every time I pull my knees up, they get sucked back down. The stuff he dumped in here is like quick sand or something.”
Sarah nodded, then considered that he may not be able to see her head move. “I know. I tried, too, and it did the same thing to me.”
When the man in the purple hat had forced them into the holes, he immediately began hauling buckets of sludge from the edge of the island and dumped it over their legs. They hadn’t screamed then, not like earlier when he’d tied them up and they thought he’d meant to kill them right away. She’d been too afraid he’d dump mud in her mouth if she screamed again, and although Nicky never said one way or the other, she was sure he’d kept quiet for the same reason.
After a bunch of trips to the edge of the island for sludge, the man finally stopped dumping it on them when the mud reached their waist. He’d gotten back into his boat then, leaving them there. When he returned a couple hours later, he had a bottle of water with him and forced both of them to drink from it. After that, he dropped another bucket of mud into each hole, then left again. That became his routine.
The last time he’d come, Sarah had gathered up enough courage to ask for food. The man never responded to her question, just mumbled something about stars and the moon. She might have been young and didn’t have a lot of experience with much, but Sarah knew crazy when she saw it. Living with Rusty Woodard had at least given her that advantage. It was something in the eyes, the way they talked and moved their bodies, like something else was controlling them instead of their own brains. According to her uncle, God was the one who controlled him, but she had no idea what might have been controlling the mud man. He seemed even farther removed from reality than her uncle when he was in the throes of a serman, or filled with the spirit like he always claimed.
Why did the mud man want to harm them? What had they done? She didn’t even know him, or didn’t think she did. It was hard to tell with half of his face hidden beneath that ball cap. Once they’d reached the island, he’d made sure they didn’t get a good look at him by covering the lower half of his face with a camouflage bandanna, like in the old cowboy and Indian movies her uncle watched on television. The bad guys always wore bandannas over their mouths in those movies. His clothes, though, were ordinary. An over-sized jacket that covered a camouflage shirt and jeans, the same clothes worn by nearly every man in Bayou Crow. He could have been anyone—or no one—or as Uncle Rusty would have said about anyone prone to lying…”He’s got the devil in him for sure.”
“I’m hungry,” Nicky said. He had streaks of dried mud across his forehead and a long dollop of it along the side of his nose. Sarah wondered if it made his nose itch. How horrible to have an itch you couldn’t scratch. “You?”
“Yeah,” she answered.
“I wanna cheeseburger . . . no, two of them. Fries, too. Super-size—and a chocolate shake, biggest they got. Maybe an order of chicken nuggets, too. Twelve of ‘em, with those little packets of barbeque sauce they stick in the bag, you know?”
Sarah held in a groan. Talking about food made her stomach hurt. It felt like it was gnawing in on itself, desperate for anything to eat. She wanted to tell him to shut up, but didn’t have the heart to. Her dream had come while she’d been sleeping. Nicky’s came while he was awake. She couldn’t fault him for that.
A long silence grew between them, and it seemed to turn up the volume in the swamp. Even from an ant’s eye view, she saw nothing ahead but water and cypress trees, all brown and beige. They looked like naked old men, or what she imagined naked old men might look like since she’d never actually seen one—all twisted and lumpy, parts of them poking out at odd angles. Birds seemed to be everywhere, all shapes and colors, all of them cawing, squawking, screeching. And bugs, millions of bugs; and frogs that whined and croaked and barrumphed, until the sounds got all mixed together, and she couldn’t tell one from the other. At night, the sounds were so loud, it made her ears hurt.
She couldn’t see the horizon well from where they were, too many trees were in the way. But she saw broad streaks of orange and red and purple, signs of the sun setting on a spring day. Night was on its way again. Sarah hated the night.
“I wonder what my mama’s cooking right now,” Nicky said, his words soft and sad. “Jambalaya maybe, with baked sweet potatoes. She cooks that so good. The jambalaya I mean. You know, with big chunks of meat all mixed in with the rice.”
“Sounds great,” Sarah said, trying to muster more than a half half-hearted response. She didn’t have to wonder about her uncle’s supper menu. If she was calculating right, today was Friday, which meant greasy meatloaf, supplied by that pinched-faced old hag, Widow Costello. She had a huge, brown mole under her right eye and lived down the road from the church. Her meatloaf smelled and tasted like sweaty gym shorts, and it had red things she called pimentos all stuck up in the meat. On Fridays, Sarah usually settled for a peanut butter and jelly sandwich and a glass of milk, leaving her uncle and Widow Costello to the nasty meatloaf and a burbling session of, “Oh, Pastor Woodard, I don’t know what this town would ever do without you!” The woman’s words were so syrupy, they made Sarah want to puke.
“Sarah?” Nicky’s voice sounded smaller this time, like he’d suddenly gone backwards in age.
“Huh?”
A long pause—the rise and fall of chittering bug songs. “Are…are you afraid?”
Sarah thought about her answer for a moment, considering what might be best for him to hear—then figured it was useless to lie. “Yeah.” Once the word was out of her mouth, she could almost hear her uncle shouting, “And the truth shall set you free!”
“Me, too.” He let out a long, shaky sigh, then added quietly. “I want to see my mom again. I don’t wanna die.”
She nodded slowly, not caring this time whether Nicky saw her or not. She didn’t want to talk about dying. It would make the possibility too real, turn the nightmare into a hardcore reality—one she wasn’t ready to face.
“You know…since your uncle is a preacher and everything, you’ve gotta know some prayers and stuff, right? Maybe…um…maybe we could say some, ask God to help us or something.”
Sarah leaned her head against the dirt ledge behind her and closed her eyes. She didn’t want to talk about God either. Not about someone who’d left her without a mother or father, who’d allowed her to be raised by a weird uncle who made her wear funny clothes and treated her as if she was a contagious wart that needed to be cut off and thrown away before someone died from its disease. Who forced a little girl to desert her childhood and any hope of friends. Who demanded so much attention a person couldn’t even enjoy other parts of life.
“Sarah?”
She kept her eyes closed, willing his voice away, willing herself back to sleep, back to the dream about the field and her mother and the magic shoes that would change her life forever.
“Sarah…”
Her eyes opened at the change in Nicky’s voice. It had gone from soft and wishful, to whispered and urgent. She lifted her head, turned to him. “What?”
“Shhhh, not so loud. Don’t move
. . . don’t . . .don’t even blink.” Nicky was looking to the right, his head straining to one side. All she could see was his hair, the streaks of mud in it. She heard him grunt and knew he was trying to pull himself out of the sludge again. Suddenly, he whipped his head back in her direction. “It’s coming . . .it’s coming!” His eyes were still red, but no longer wet, only wide and wild.
His words seem to thrust shock-wires into her heart, tripping it into a beat so fast it felt like it was going to jump out of her chest. In that moment, the water the mud man had made them drink needed to come out and come out now. Her bladder felt stretched to capacity, ready to burst out of her body, just like her heart, thumping, hammering, determined to leave her.
Nicky bowed his head, and she heard him mumble, “God, please . . . God, please make it go away. Make it go away . . .” His head looked like one small hill rising from a dark brown plain, and beyond it, right at the water’s edge, Sarah saw the wide, thick-scaled snout of a full-grown alligator. Its mouth was partially open, its teeth a million miles long. It seemed frozen in place, watching them, sizing them up, measuring the supper that lay ahead. Then it moved forward, gripping mud and swamp grass with pointy claws and webbed toes.
Sarah felt her mouth drop open and her bladder immediately release. Oh, God, what a field day her uncle would have now with her peeing in a hole, a boy right beside her. Peeing on the pastel blue shift so stained with grime. So many smudges. Too many. Had she not been paralyzed by the sight of the alligator, she’d have probably laughed. Laughed at the absurdity of the thought, the uselessness of it. Instead, for the first time in her young life, Sarah Woodard uttered a prayer and meant it with all of her heart. “Jesus, if you’re really up there, please, don’t let us die.”
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
The pain had been worth it. Olm just wished his ancestors would have given him some kind of warning. It had all come so unexpectedly. The dark form in his truck, the way it had moved over him slowly, almost seductively, before it bit into his chest. The pain had been fierce, like two rows of sharp thick sewing needles clamping down on him at the same time. He’d gone blind with agony for a moment, nearly driving his vehicle off into the bayou that ran alongside the road. It had taken mind over matter to keep that from happening. Mind over matter—his mind over what mattered.
Once they released him, the form disappeared, leaving him stunned, bruised, and questioning whether he was going mad. It soon became clear to him, though. He wasn’t going insane. He was evolving, and Olm was stunned that he hadn’t caught on to that fact sooner. Logically, it was simple really. If a person invoked every ancestor from the Great Spirit World that had come before him, surely some significant, physical manifestation had to come with that invocation, right? Of course. And how better to get a person’s attention than to back them into a corner and cause pain?
Thinking through it now, Olm realized that the attack hadn’t been an attack at all. It had been an initiation of sorts, which meant that the dark form had to have been one of his ancestors. Possibly his great-grandfather or his great-great-grandfather, the latter a man he envisioned to be one of the most powerful leaders in the Skidi tribe, in the entire Pawnee nation. It had to have been him, for it was only after that attack—that initiation—that Olm’s mind blossomed, opening up to a new idea that would enhance his ceremonial sacrifice to Tirawa. He would have never come up with a plan like that on his own. Just as he’d suspected from the very beginning, the collective knowledge of his forefathers, every leader, warrior, medicine man, and ceremonial priest, was slowly but surely becoming his own.
The first idea had come to him the moment he spotted the old woman with the pinched face and the mole beneath her right eye. Olm knew when he saw her that she was to be part of the ceremony. Not as a sacrifice, for she was far too old and ugly for that. But her blood poured around the fire that would consume the children’s hearts would cause a savory scent to arise up to the heavens, like exotic incense strategically placed on an alter. How could Tirawa not be impressed with that?
Luring the woman to him had taken very little effort. Olm knew her to be lonely and always eager to serve, to please. As soon as he had her alone, he wasted no time. He took an electrical cord from a nearby lamp, wrapped it around her neck and cut off her air supply. The woman’s struggles had been feeble, her death relatively quick. Once her body quit twitching, he carried her to the bathroom, leaned her body over the edge of the bathtub at the waist, then waited twenty minutes to make sure her heart and brain were as lifeless as her limbs. Only then did he puncture the right side of her neck with a screwdriver, boring into her carotid artery. Her blood flowed thick and easy, like rich red wine into the plastic gallon jug he’d brought along to capture it. Once the jug was filled, he left the woman hanging over the tub, allowing the remaining blood in her body to gurgle down the drain.
Although Olm had made sure to be meticulous in the clean up, the tricky part came when he had to load the woman into his vehicle, then into his boat. His plans were to dump her somewhere near Gro-beck Point, which was a stretch of marsh thick with buttonwood trees and water lillies, and it was en route to the children. No one would ever find the old woman there, and even if they did, there wouldn’t be enough of her left to identify. Once her body was exposed to the elements, the raccoons, birds, alligators, and other swamp scavengers, they’d be lucky to find matching bone fragments.
The entire time Olm worked to move her out of the house, into his vehicle, into the boat, he felt sure he was being watched and kept glancing over his shoulder every few seconds. He’d felt someone hiding behind a tree, the corner of a house, behind a car door, waiting to catch him in the act. The paranoia did nothing to stop him, though. He’d doggedly pressed on. If anyone got too nosy, he’d just have to make sure they met up with the same demise as the old woman.
Twisting the throttle, Olm set the skiff’s motor into high gear. He was anxious to see the brats’ faces, the horror in their eyes when they saw him. Night was a challenge since he had to depend on the aide of a flashlight, which was fine, but it didn’t provide him near the satisfaction of seeing those young, terror-stricken faces in the white light of day.
Olm lowered his head to cut the wind from his eyes and pushed the point of the skiff even faster down the lower Grand River. He veered right through Flat’s Cut, taking note of the giant willows, cypress trees, and tupelos, each dressed in new spring greenery and most accessorized in gray Spanish moss.
The whine of his motor echoed through the darkening passages. Beavers and nutrias scrambled up nearby banks while egrets with three-foot wing spans skated over the surface of the water. Blue herons flew a few feet ahead of him, and a barred owl swooped overhead, then roosted on a nearby treetop. There were alligators, some ten-fifteen feet long, poised like felled logs, watching as he zipped by. No wonder his ancestors took to this place so easily. The Atchafalaya—the name alone carried the strength of the Native American, with its thousands of acres of swamps, lakes, and water prairies, each rich with wildlife, both in land and water; its very soil capable of nurturing any seed.
Olm pulled back on the throttle, slowing, and took a left into Rooster Shoot, a narrow waterway that led directly to Gro-beck Point. When he reached the mouth of the point, he hooked a hard right into an inlet stuffed with water lilies, puttered through the bramble about a hundred feet, then tossed the old woman out of the boat. Very few people set crawfish traps or ran trout lines in this area because it was so clogged with vegetation. He felt confident no one would happen upon her body here.
After making sure the boat was free of evidence, Olm turned on a small headlight that was perched on the bow and steered his way out of the inlet. He veered back into Gro-beck Point, where he quickly circled into an offset bayou that brought him to a straight-away that led to Fausse Point. Along the way, he heard bullfrogs croaking, locusts and mosquitoes whining, and he soon joined their chorus, humming to himself, content with his progress and the bright future
that lay ahead of him. Night was falling and the great moon lay ahead. That huge white orb had the power to stretch its light to the four corners of the earth. He felt its illumination fill him, and it made him want to dance, stomp, whoop in victory.
Suddenly, a flash of mustard-yellow light, caught out of the corner of his eye, stole Olm’s attention. It was the size and shape of a basketball, had a tail like a comet, and hovered over the water a few hundred feet to his right.. He blinked, and in the fraction of a second it took his eyelids to flutter, the ball of light was beside him. It circled his boat, rushed out a couple hundred feet ahead, then stopped and hung in mid-air—pulsing—pulsing.
Olm had been so shocked by its abrupt appearance that he’d let go of the throttle, which killed the engine. While gawking, it suddenly dawned on Olm that he was looking at a feux fo lais, something he’d heard about since childhood but had never seen before. Fishermen and trappers spoke of them often, eerie, illusive swamp lights that taunted and mesmerized boaters to follow it, then leading them into the deepest parts of the swamps, where it kept them until daybreak…if they survived the night . . .if they didn’t wind up lost forever.As legend had it, the only way to outsmart a feux fo lais was to stick the blade of a knife in the ground or in the heart of a tree at the time it was spotted. Supposedly this would send the light dancing around the blade instead of around its intended victim.
And there was little question in Olm’s mind that he was indeed this thing’s ultimate target.
CHAPTER SIXTEEN
Watching the yellow sphere, Olm felt himself being drawn into its dance—the swirling, whirling, so beautiful, so brilliant—its tail wavered and flickered like a silk scarf in a breeze. Although it emitted no sound, he could have sworn on anything and everything holy that it spoke to him. Called to him seductively—“Follow me . . .follow meee.”
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