FEVER DREAMS: A Bracken and Bledsoe Paranormal Mystery

by April Campbell Jones

  Katie shook her head at the bobbing bow of Stubby McKenzie’s little skiff. “That’s why you’ll never make a truly great psychic investigator, Bledsoe!”

  “Why, because I don’t strike while the iron’s hot?”

  She pulled strands of hair from her face, on her a very sexy gesture. “Because half the time you can’t even find the iron!”

  She held the big Maglite in her free hand, playing the beam through the roil of marsh mist ahead and guiding me around logs and hummocks. And not a few reflective red eyes.

  It seemed only minutes before she was waving her hand frantically at me to slow down and, a moment later, to cut the engine.

  The oil-stinking roar ceased.

  Five seconds of pure silence.

  Then a chorus of frogs grew thrumming, broken only a distant reptilian bellow or the soul-searching cry of an egret.

  I reached for the starboard oar but Katie immediately took it from my hands and shipped it again. She pressed a finger to pursed lips, gently picked up the oar beside her and dipped it gently into inky depths so black the oar tip looked cut away. She leaned gracefully to one side and rowed ahead with nary a ripple.

  When she caught my surprised expression she leaned into me, whispered. “C Stroke! Junior high summer camp!”

  Like a witch’s swampy hovel in a Grimm fairy tale, the old woman’s rickety necklace of smiling dock emerged from the low lying fog, pale and sharp as incisors.

  Katie found a piling without use of the light, tied us up and stepped with acrobatic precision to the rotted plank, round butt swishing invitingly. I wanted to jump her right there on the loose boards and crickets. That’s why my heart was beating so fast. Yeah. Sure. That isn’t why it was hammering away at all. It was hammering with expectation and maybe even with a vague hope. And maybe with a not-so-vague fear.

  Nothing, absolutely nothing about this, felt right.

  All I could see was the canted black hulk of the shack ahead of us, but it fairly screamed a silent warning: Go back! Herein lies Death!

  Katie didn’t seem to sense it. Not at all.

  She made her way gamely (and with the uncanny stillness of a…well, cat) to the steeply leaning side of one dark, boarded wall, ignoring the door altogether.

  I could just make her out trying to peer between what we both knew were board cracks that revealed only more blackness. Even over the undulant stridulating of the frogs and bugs you could feel the silence seeping out of the hut’s interior.

  “Must have missed her!” I leaned hissing toward Katie, “nobody home!”

  Katie pulled her cheek from the dark plank, stood looking at it a long moment. “Yes, there is.”

  I frowned, pressed by forehead to one of the larger cracks, squinted. Black. Black as a panther eating licorice in a coal bin at midnight, I could hear Uncle Willis in my head.

  I turned to my vividly imaginative partner. “Katie, there’s no one here! Let’s go! Come back in the daylight!”

  Katie ignored me. “She’s in there.”

  She stood silently, a lovely, ghostly vision in striped by moonlit mangrove shadows like a sleek, lithe tiger. My eyes kept roaming to those tight, white shorts, curved and cleft like ripe fruit.

  They held my eyes as Katie swiveled along the side of the shack, fingers lightly brushing the wood as if searching. Did she think the old woman was asleep in there?

  She reached the end of the dock on that side of the hut. Paused, head cocked, lovely hair bannering lightly. Listening….

  When she turned to face me again, her breath caught. “What the hell, Elliot!”

  I stepped back innocently. “What—“

  She nodded down at me, frowning. “You have a hard-on?”

  I slumped sideways, flushing. “No!”

  “The hell you don’t!”

  “It was your round little bottom, when you were bouncing up on the dock.”

  She studied me a moment, face pale, shook her head. “That’s not it. You’re excited…” She lifted her head, sniffed the air. “So am I. Look…”

  She bowed he back, tenting her T-shirt. Her nipples were hard, even the aureole a faint outline. She looked down fearfully. “This is bad, Elliot.”

  “Speak for yourself.”

  “I’m not kidding around.” She kept looking around, sniffing. “Sexual tension can sometimes be a harbinger of evil intent, dark forces testing our will! Does that sound crazy to you?”

  “It sounds like my Aunt Ethel. Katie, let’s get out of here!”

  Katie listened, sniffed, held up a flat palm to the air. “Can’t you feel it? Like a warm, cushion pressing close…only not the kind that makes you sleepy, the kind that makes you drunk, aroused.”

  She turned to me again, face flushed even in near-darkness. “It’s coming from the house!”

  My throat felt thick, chest tight, like the air was suddenly too heavy. “What’s it want?” and she must have heard the terror in my voice.

  She touched the rough wood of the shack, caressed it. “To distract us, maybe. Pull us together.”

  “Why?”

  “Those in the throes of sensuality dull their senses to outward things, furtive things. They also make noise—act as a warning signal to them, maybe, like an alarm.”

  “’Them’?”

  Her eyes were wide with luminesce. “Whoever’s in the house.”

  Every fiber of my being, with the possible exception of that part that wanted to disrobe and ravage Katie, wanted to run. Far away. And not look back.

  “What do we do?”

  I don’t think she heard me. “Elliot…come here…”

  She bent in moonlight and stretched upon the crooked dock.

  “Katie—“

  “Just shut up and come over here to me.”

  I couldn’t seem to get my legs to work without actually instructing them.

  I crept up beside her. She was a vision of loveliness. I felt a crawling sensation in my groin.

  “Lie down beside me, Elliot.”

  “Katie, we really need to get out of here---“

  “Just keep it in your pants, cowboy, and come down here a second.”

  I joined her on the dock, stretched out on my stomach beside her. She lay on her own stomach, palms cupped to her temples, peering down between the boards. “Do you see that?”

  “Yes.”

  “And--?”

  “It’s beautiful. A work of art.”

  “Not my ass. Look way down, between the slats. What do you see?”

  I pressed my face to the damp wood. “Water?”

  “What else?”

  I pressed until the planks pinched my forehead, squinted. “A lily pad?”

  “Good for you. May be hope for you yet.”

  “Then why am I so scared?”

  “It’s pitch black out, Elliot.”

  “No shit.”

  “Can you see in the dark like Garbanzo?”

  “No.”

  “Then I guess there must be a light down there.”

  * * *

  The front door opened easily under Katie’s hand.

  I stood outside a moment—feeling like a coward inside. Then followed gingerly behind her.

  “I don’t understand what we’re doing inside the house!” I whispered.

  Katie tripped on something in the blackness. “Ow!”

  “Are you all right? What was that?” I switched on my flashlight.

  “It’s nothing! An armadillo. Turn off that light!”

  “A what!”

  “It was stuffed. I think.”

  “I can’t see shit!”

  “Then don’t step in any.”

  I stepped on something. It squeaked and ran away.

  “Was that you that squeaked?”

  “No, that was my sphincter! Katie--?”

  “What?”

  “Remember the Robichou house--?”

  She sighed in darkness. “I don’t think Mama Grace has a watch alligator in here. Th
ere isn’t room. Let’s just give our eyes a moment to adjust…I don’t think we’ll need the flashlight.”

  “And why is that?”

  She was still a moment; I imagined her somewhere ahead of me on the creaking floor boards, head cocked like that again, listening. “There’s light in here, Elliot…”

  I saw nothing.

  “Can you sense it?”

  “There’s only one thing I sense…”

  “I know. The cold. The chill. Like it’s thirty degrees colder inside the hut.”

  I nodded at nobody. “How can that be?”

  “Well, it’s not the thermostat. Cold spots often precede the arrival of poltergeists, outré spirits. Even demons. Do you smell that?”

  “Is it a demon?”

  “That incense again. Mixed with something else…”

  I sniffed at the dark. “Yeah, bat shit.”

  “Sh! Listen!”

  I heard nothing.

  “What am I listening for?”

  “What? What did you say--?”

  “I said, what am I—“

  “Elliot, shut-up! Listen! She’s here!”

  Heart back in throat. Knees knocked together. Ice in my veins. Bladder bursting. It was so pleasant here in Louisiana…

  I still heard nothing.

  “Elliot! Take my hand! Give me your hand!” voice sibilant with terror.

  I floundered out in blackness, couldn’t find Katie.

  Then I froze.

  Now I could hear it. A little girl’s voice.

  “Leave this house!”

  My throat coagulated. My back molars were rattling like dry bones. I couldn’t seem to get my voice to work. I jumped as Katie’s fingers closed over my waving hand; they were like ice.

  But her breath was warm against my ear. “Do you hear it?”

  All I could do was nod hard.

  “Leave this house now! Go back where you came from!”

  I could hear Katie laboring bravely to speak beside me. “Amy--?”

  “There is nothing for you here…only death…”

  Katie’s fingers were crushing my own. “Amy? Sweetie, is that you? We’ve come to help you! To free you! Release your spirit from this terrible place!”

  Silence.

  “Katie…my hand…”

  “Sorry,” her fingers relaxed. “Amy? Darling, are you there?”

  Silence.

  Something felt very not right.

  The soft cushion of warm lust had morphed into a pressure of all-consuming fear; the kind of fear that has no remorse, gives no quarter. A fear from diseased, mocking, insane realms.

  I became abruptly aware Katie no longer held my hand.

  “Katie?”

  I swiped out at darkness.

  “Katie--?”

  Silence.

  Oh, Christ. “Katie!”

  Then I saw the soft glow from the other end of the hut…

  * * *

  It took all my will not to turn on the flashlight as I descended the hard mud stairs.

  On the other hand, I’d managed to find the hidden door from the green glow seeping under it and somewhere in my harried mind Katie kept warning me not to announce my presence with a bobbing beam of light.

  The lower I descended the narrow mud walls, the richer the odor of earthen musk, the deeper the chill both outside and in my vitals. And another smell too, even stronger than the dank humus and nasty licorice-scented incense from above: the odor eons old…of a generation old dwelling, of death and life that was nearly dead. And swelling all about me like an echo from the beyond, the little girl’s voice.

  “Turn back…turn back…turn back…”

  The little room at the bottom of the dirt-carved stairs was as small as the shack above it and beyond black, I’m certain, without the ringing green glow of candles, both in earthen wall sconces and lining the pentagram on the dried mud floor. From every corner a blacker line of swamp water like dark tears of blood—the source of that impending pressure, I now realized. At any moment I expected the clay walls to rupture inward, the greedy brown waters of the marsh to rush in and crush us. Both of us.

  Me and the old woman kneeling at the center of the circle of candles, bowing with raised, skeletal arms and yellow claws before the grim alter in front of her.

  “…turn thee back O child of Satan…return thee again to that place of eternal night…”

  Not Amy…not the little girl at all, but the high-pitched child-like voice of Mama Grace.

  “…turn away from us and trouble us no more with your wrath of vengeance…your restless sense of childish justice…”

  Silence again…and the overpowering sensation I wasn’t really there, this wasn’t really happening…rather, it was happening to my corporal self but that my mind had gone somewhere else…perhaps to the refuge of insanity.

  “She’s restless tonight.”

  It was a moment before I realized the old crone, back still to my shaken face, was speaking to me.

  “Been restless these many days now ‘pon yer arrival, but ‘specially tonight. She knows ye see! Oh, she knows more than you and your harlot friend can possibly imagine! She knows and she holds a terrible strength of both mind and spirit! A strength to make a black fever of our brains were we not to keep her at bay!”

  I felt like I was watching it all from somewhere above, could even see myself there in the little mud room. Though my voice came from the bottom of a deep well. “Who killed her?”

  The bent back trembled, at first I thought in palsy, then realized it was a chuckle. “Jest had to know the truth of thet, didn’t ye? Had to come here to this peaceful place and bring thet uppity whore and her infernal familiar!”

  “’Familiar’?”

  “The cat, ya damned fool! Ain’t a coven ner humfort on Earth can contain two familiars!”

  I swam lazily above, watched my face blink incomprehension beneath me. “I don’t understand. Katie, you mean? Where is she?”

  Again the palsy shake, accompanied now with a gargled cackle. “Not Katie, ya danged idjet! Amy! My familiar! And a damned good one! Too good, as it turned out. Too smart, too eager to learn the ways of the gris-gris, the teachings of the dark land!”

  “Dark land?”

  She waved an impatient claw. “Yer too dense to get it! Too closed down to let it in. Not like her, not like yer hussy friend with her modern methods and DNA’ n that other TV crap!”

  “’Dark land...Africa, you mean. The home of Vooddoo.”

  A cackled grunt. “Ye wouldn’t know Voodoo from hoodoo ner the difference b’twain! But that bossy whore of yers…she gots some potential. Had I knowed her as a youngin’…maybe…”

  “What have you done with her?”

  The ancient shock of gray shook. “Aint what I done, but what yer ta do!”

  And she dug her crooked cane in the dirt and pushed to her shaky feet with a gut-deep groan, sweeping aside her black dress as she turned. Katie lay supine before her. Naked. Both corners of her mouth trailing black blood.

  The hatchet handle jutting awkwardly from her breast.

  THIRTY-EIGHT

  “Oh sweet Jesus…”

  Which only brought further cackles.

  “He can’t help ya none! Not around here kin!”

  My mind swept back to my body on a current of burning heat. I felt my lips skin back in a rictus of hate and dread. “What have you done to her?”

  “Whaz it look like, moron! Killed the meddlin’ bitch! Only thing ya can do when they gets outta line!”

  “Oh Katie,” I burbled, “oh sweet Jesus!”

  “Hah! Like you ever set foot in a church the last thirty years er more!”

  The gray head bent to the pale perfection at her feet, cocked and studied it a moment like an old hen. “Yeah, I can see the waste of it, I ain’t stupid. She had her share of potential like I said, same as young Amy. Not on her level, mind ya! No, sir. Amy was the best familiar I evah had, smart as a whip and jest radiatin
g a talent fer the dark arts! Cept…”

  “Except what?”

  The aged croak became almost wistful for a moment. “Cept she had the darkness in her. Oh, yes, had it deep, even before I first saw her, took her under my arm, commenced to teach her. An unnatural dark that don’t come from apprenticin. And with it, that…alien kinda wisdom. Nevah I saw a pupil learn so fast, grow so all powerful quick!”

  She looked up at me earnestly now. “Thas it, don ya see? She was born doin’ evil!”

  “No one’s born evil.”

  “She was! And a doin’ evil for evil’s sake. Like a wildfire wiffout no bounds! Oh, I know--face like an angel, sweet as autumn syrup--but Amy Robichous warnt what she appeared! And I knew, sure as gator’s mate in spring and witches dance in moonlight, I knew it wouldn’t be long ‘fore she became more powerful than Mama Grace…and would someday use agin me, to make a fool of me, challenge me and…”

  The old woman paused; choking up? Maybe ? A little?

  “…finally put me down. Destroy me. Seen it in her eyes early on—the cunning, the thirst for knowledge of all things forbidden--the envy. Ate her up like a cancer. So, what was I to do, what choice did I have? What choice?”

  I took the ensuing moment of quiet to come to Katie, terror still dogging me every step of the way. “Why? Why did you need to do this?”

  It was like I wasn’t there anymore.

  Mama Grace stared absently at one of the flickering tallows, yellow eyes hypnotized by the flame. “Warn’t no big problem talkin them boys into helpin’. Cormac—he was ever the go-getter, lookin’ to advance hisself, cravin’ money to do it and willin’ to do anything to get it, even pledge to the Voodoo. And Roger? He’d do anything for another fix. Specially the kind I cud provide. Least-wise till he got with that trash Diane. Oh, I had ‘em! I had both them boys hopped up on my brew all durin’ thet kidnappin.”

  I knelt beside Katie’s dead eyes, closed them with thumb and forefinger, kissed her pale forehead.

  “Lil too hopped up, mebe. Muffed that last part real good. Didn’t count of the girl’s strength even after my repeated warnings. Anyways, she gave em the slip…ran into the woods, into the swamp. Swim like a fish, thet youngin.’ But she was tired, feverish, not thinkin’ straight. I seen her try for the lake, them party lights on the other side. Met her halfway there in the skiff…”