Curious, Janet approached the car and looked inside. A small notebook lay on the front seat, obviously placed there by the driver. On the passenger seat lay an empty soda can, and a half-full pack of cigarettes. The keys to the patrol car were still in the ignition.
She stepped back and looked around. It wasn’t normal for a law enforcement officer to go off and leave a patrol sitting in the middle of the road, especially with the door standing open and the keys in the ignition. She didn’t know who was driving the car, but such things were not done. Even she knew that.
But maybe there was a reason for the officer’s actions. Perhaps he had to exit the vehicle quickly, and there wasn’t time to take the keys or close the door. He might be chasing a bad guy, or he might have seen someone he was looking for.
Krissy.
Janet looked around, suddenly hoping that her daughter had been found and this was the reason for the officer’s careless actions. Maybe he had seen her, or the person who had taken her. Perhaps he saw them both, alongside the road, and had stopped the car to give chase.
She studied the forest on the opposite side of the road. There was no sign of her little girl, the officer, or the big bad man who might have taken her. If the deputy had seen someone, then he had given case into the forest. He had apparently not called for backup, as proper procedures dictated; instead, he had decided to do the pursuit by himself.
“If there was a pursuit,” she said, aloud. “For all I know he’s behind a bush taking a whiz.”
That might also be true. The officer might only be standing somewhere in the shadows, relieving himself. If that was the case, then it was stupid to leave the patrol car in the middle of the road. Country roads were notorious speedways, and even the flashing lights of a patrol car might not be enough to keep it from getting hit by a fast driving redneck.
Wondering if the deputy was somewhere nearby, Janet looked around and called out, “Hello? Is anyone here? Officer?”
There was no answer. Surely, if a deputy had been standing behind a bush, relieving himself, he would have heard her calling. That meant something else was going on. Perhaps the deputy was following someone. If that was the case, he might need help. At the very least someone ought to call the sheriff’s office to tell them about the empty patrol car and the missing officer.
There was a phone in her cabin, but Janet didn’t feel like walking all the way back across the camp to use it. There was also a phone in the Blackwater Lounge. She didn’t know what time the lounge closed, but if it was still open she could use the phone there. If the lounge was still open, then that’s where she would probably find her husband. She could ask him if he had also heard a scream.
Leaving the roadway, she cut across the campgrounds to the lounge. The lounge might already be closed, but she knew some of the locals always stayed later than closing time. Finding the front door unlocked, she opened the door and entered the lounge.
The lounge was dark, real dark, and at first she didn’t think anyone was still inside. Everyone must have already gone home, but if that was true then they had forgotten to lock the front door.
“Hello?”
No one answered.
“Hello? Mr. Sanders, are you still here? I wanted to use your phone.”
The interior of the Blackwater Lounge was quite dark, even the beer signs above the bar had been turned off. The emergency exit sign above the door was still lit, its red letters casting a pale crimson glow over the area directly in front of the door. It wasn’t much light, but it was enough to see the bodies.
“Oh, my God.”
Three people lay on the floor just inside the doorway, two men and a woman. She recognized two of the people as Ross and Mary Sanders. They lay in separate pools of blood, not far from each other. An older man lay on the floor farther back from the door. She didn’t recognize the third person, but suspected he was probably a customer. Or he had been a customer. Like Ross and Mary, the older man was also dead.
“Oh, my God,” she said again, her lips barely forming the words. Something terrible had just happened inside the tiny lounge. Someone had just murdered the owners of the Blackwater Fish Camp and one of their customers. From the looks of things, they had either been stabbed repeatedly with a knife or shot with a large-caliber gun.
Janet remembered the gunshot that had awakened her, and the scream she had heard, and a chill came over her as she realized those sounds were associated with the murder of people she knew. While she had slept peacefully, someone had been killing three innocent people no more than two hundred yards from her cabin.
A sudden fear came over her. She looked quickly around the lounge, fearful that she might also find the body of her husband. But there were only three people lying on the bloody floor.
She also remembered the empty patrol car sitting on the road and wondered if the officer had responded to a call for help. Surely not, for a call about a shooting, or a stabbing, would have summoned more than just one car. Perhaps the officer, just driving by, had seen the murderer running from the lounge, and had given chase. If so, he was up against a dangerous psychopath and would need backup.
She thought about hurrying across the room to use the phone behind the bar, but stopped herself for fear of disturbing a crime scene. She was also afraid to enter the lounge, fearing the killer might be hiding in the darkness.
Hiding in the darkness.
Her mouth went dry. She had been standing there, a witness to a bloody crime scene, and she had not considered the possibility that the killer might still be around. If he was, then she too could end up as a victim.
Get out of here. Now!
She turned on her heals and fled back out the door, running for her cabin. She had just rounded the corner of the building when she almost collided with someone coming from the other way.
Janet screamed, startled by the sudden appearance of another person. She thought it was the murderer, but the person she nearly collided with was much too small to be a killer.
She stopped and jumped back, her hands automatically going to her face for protection. But the other person made no move to attack, just stood there, looking at her. A tense moment passed, and then Janet recognized the person standing before her.
“Krissy?”
The little girl was covered with filth and mud, and her long blonde hair was so dirty it was almost black. She would have been unrecognizable, had it not been for the familiar shape of her body and face. Even her eyes looked different in the darkness, appearing to glow with a strange bluish-green light.
“Krissy? Oh, my God, it is you. Oh, my God.” She took a step toward her daughter, then stopped. Krissy didn’t seem to recognize her. She just stood there looking at her, looking right through her.
“Krissy, it’s okay baby. It’s Mommy. You’re safe now. No one is going to hurt you.” Janet wanted to rush forward and scoop her daughter up in her arms, but she held back. Krissy might be in shock, and any sudden movements might terrify her. There was no telling what she had gone through during the past couple of days, what someone might have done to her. She might have severe psychological damage. It might take years of therapy for her to recover.
“Krissy, it’s okay. You’re safe now,” Janet repeated, trying to keep her voice from quivering with emotion. It wasn’t easy, because she was fighting hard to hold back the tears. She wanted nothing more than to rush forward and smother her little girl with hugs and kisses.
The girl gave no indication that she recognized her mother. She just stood there, looking at her, standing still as a statue, with both hands behind her back.
“Would you like some hot cocoa, honey? How does that sound? We have some cocoa back at the cabin. I’ll have Daddy make you some, with little marshmallows.” Janet looked around, hoping that Robert would miraculously appear now that she needed him most, but her husband was nowhere to be seen.
She turned back to Krissy, surprised to find that her daughter had moved a few feet closer while she had b
een looking away. As she watched, the little girl moved her left hand out from behind her back. In her left hand she held a plastic bag that contained something, though it was much too dark to see what was in the bag. A dark liquid leaked from one corner of the bag. It looked like blood.
“What’s that you have there, sweetheart? Is it something for me? A present?”
The little girl looked at her for a moment longer, then smiled, finally recognizing her mother.
“Yes, Mom-m-y. A present for you.”
Janet was startled by her daughter’s voice, because it didn’t sound normal. She was probably parched with thirst. Or she might have a sore throat from exposure to the elements. It didn’t matter what her voice sounded like. Krissy now recognized her, and that was the important thing.
Still holding the plastic bag in front of her, Krissy started walking toward her mother. Janet opened her arms wide to embrace her baby. Krissy’s smile widened. Janet smiled back. It was the happiest moment of her life.
Chapter Twenty-six
The pain in Robert’s ankle had diminished considerably. The herbal concoction Jimmy Cypress had used on it had obviously done some good. Chalk up one for traditional Indian cures. The swelling in the ankle had gone down, and it only hurt a little when he placed his full weight upon it. Now all he had to worry about was getting an infection in the scratches, and, according to Jimmy, that was now not likely to happen.
With his ankle wrapped with moist leaves and an Ace bandage, and with his courage fortified by half a glass of whiskey, they had left the cabin of Jimmy Cypress and headed back toward the lagoon. Jimmy thought that Krissy might return to the lagoon, guided by the spirit of the voodoo sorcerer that now possessed her, but the little girl was nowhere to be seen. Knowing that time was running out for them, they decided to make their way toward the fish camp in hope that someone else might have seen the child.
They followed the boardwalk through the forest, Jimmy’s black cowboy boots making a hollow clomp-clomp sound as he hurried along the wooden path. Robert’s ankle was better, but it wasn’t perfect, and he still had to remind the Seminole man to slow down so he could keep up.
Arriving at the Wekiva River, they crossed the wooden footbridge to the backside of Blackwater Fish Camp. Robert remembered how he had previously seen an owl sitting on the sign marking the beginning of the nature trail, and how he had thought at the time that it might be some kind of evil omen. Little did he know that the owl’s appearance would indeed mark the beginning of what seemed to be a never-ending nightmare.
Entering the camp, they made their way toward the Blackwater Lounge. They both knew that Ross Sanders kept late hours at the lounge, and they were hoping they could find a few people to help them search for Krissy. Of course, they couldn’t tell the others what they knew. No one would believe them. How could you convince someone that a ten-year-old girl was inhabited by the evil spirit of a voodoo sorcerer?
Robert wasn’t even sure if he believed it. His daughter had acted strange, that was a given. She had even attacked him. Still, everything he had been taught in life made him doubt that such things as possessions were possible. The story had sounded convincing enough when being told by Jimmy Cypress in his tiny cabin, especially after a few shots of bourbon whiskey. But now, out in the fresh air, with the whiskey starting to wear off, he was starting to have his doubts about what had been said to him. His little girl couldn’t really be possessed. Could she?
What about the way she acted?
She was probably in shock. Maybe Krissy had not recognized him. Maybe she thought he was her abductor, and had attacked him out of fear.
But she called me Daddy.
That she had. Which meant his daughter had recognized him, and had not thought that he was her abductor coming back to hurt her some more. Maybe she had only recognized him for a moment, long enough to call him Daddy, before her mind slipped back into a delusional world caused by pain, fear, and a traumatic experience. That was possible. Or maybe someone had given her drugs, and she was in the midst of a hallucination.
What about her voice? She didn’t sound like Krissy.
The gravely voice was easy to explain. She had been missing for days and exposed to the elements. She could have been thirsty, her throat dry and parched. She might even had been tied up, a rope wound tightly around her neck. Such things could easily effect her voice. Hell, there might even be permanent damage to her vocal cords, especially if she had been choked by someone. Drugs too could also alter her voice. If Krissy was under the influence of some powerful hallucinogen, or narcotic, that would explain why she was talking funny.
Okay, smart guy. What about her eyes? How do you explain how her eyes had looked?
Again drugs. That was how police could tell if a person was stoned, by their eyes. Marijuana made a person’s eyes look shiny, while LSD and amphetamines made the pupils dilate. Drugs could have made her eyes look big and shiny, appearing to glow in the light of a full moon.
Bullshit. You know better. You’ve been there, done that.
Robert had come of age during the seventies, a decade when drugs were very easy to obtain and used by just about everyone. During his college years, he and his roommates had smoked, snorted, and swallowed just about every kind of illegal substance they could get their hands on. He knew what it was like to be stoned, and he knew what a person looked like when they were tripping on the hard stuff. Krissy did not have the eyes of a drug user. And there wasn’t a drug made that would change the color of a person’s eyes, other than make them red. Krissy had brown eyes, but when he had seen her at the lagoon her eyes had glowed a strange bluish-green.
Her eyes had glowed.
Krissy had the eyes of an animal, there was no other way to describe them. Her eyes had shone with the strange reflective glow of a nocturnal predator, like the eyes of a wolf caught in the bright beam of a car’s headlights. No drug he knew would make a person’s eyes look like that.
He didn’t want to think about how his daughter’s eyes had looked, for it made him go all rubbery in the legs. It also made him want another drink real bad, made him want several drinks--hell, he wanted the whole damn bottle. He wanted a bottle of the strong stuff and a place to hide, allowing himself to get so drunk that all the hurt and pain of the past couple of days would go away. Maybe when he woke up things would be back to normal, with Krissy sleeping safely in her bed.
Robert frowned. Getting drunk was not the answer. It was up to him to find his daughter. Up to him and a Seminole Indian named Jimmy Cypress. A Seminole with a box of leaves and a magic staff.
The camp was quiet when they arrived. No lights burned in any of the guest cabins. They had just passed the bait and tackle shop when Robert spotted Janet in the shadows near the lounge. She was kneeling, her arms outstretched before her as if to give someone a hug. He took a few steps toward his wife, and saw that she was about to hug Krissy.
“Janet, no!” Robert yelled a warning, running toward his wife. “No. Stay back. That’s not Krissy!”
Janet turned to look at him, obviously confused by his sudden outburst. Krissy also turned to look at him, her facial expression becoming almost animal as she spotted the two men running toward her.
“Robert, what...?” Janet was still looking his way, so she did not see the knife that suddenly appeared in Krissy’s right hand. The little girl had been hiding the knife behind her back, but now held it in front of her.
“Look out!”
Janet turned and saw the knife in her daughter’s bloody hand. Her mouth dropped open in shocked surprise. Hissing in anger, Krissy lunged at her mother but missed. The deadly blade sliced only air. And then Krissy was past her mother, running away toward the front of the camp.
“Krissy, no!” Robert yelled, but the little girl did not slow down. She raced away into the night, disappearing from view.
Robert reached Janet’s side. “Are you okay?”
Janet nodded. “Yes. I think so.”
�
��Are you sure?”
She looked down, checking to make sure she had not been hurt. “Yes.”
“Thank God.”
She got to her feet. Her eyes were wide with a mixture of shock and horror. “Krissy tried to stab me.”
Robert nodded. “I know. I saw it.”
Tears formed in her eyes. “But why? Why did she want to hurt me? I’m her mother.”
“Krissy’s different now.”
“Different? How? What do you mean?”
Jimmy Cypress arrived next to them. He had started to chase after the fleeing child, but had stopped and turned back. “Your daughter’s actions are not her own. She has been possessed by an evil spirit.”
She turned to look at the Indian man, apparently not comprehending what he had just said. “Possessed?”
The Seminole nodded. “Your little girl is no longer your little girl. She is a thing of evil, possessed by the spirit of Mansa Du Paul. He is inside her, controlling her.”
Janet shook her head and turned to Robert. “I don’t understand. Isn’t Mansa the name of Krissy’s make-believe friend?”
Robert put his hands of his wife’s arms. “Mansa Du Paul was a voodoo sorcerer who used to live in this area. He was an evil man that performed black magic ceremonies. He also ate children. The Indians living in this area killed him. They cut his body up into little pieces and threw them in the river, but they couldn’t kill his spirit.”
She stared into her husband’s eyes, trying desperately to understand what he was saying. Turning her attention back to Jimmy Cypress, she asked, “And you think the spirit of this sorcerer is now inside Krissy?”
Jimmy nodded.
“Do you believe it too?” she asked Robert.
“I’m not sure what to believe. All I know is that our daughter is no longer the same little girl we know and love.”
“Maybe she’s in shock. Maybe she has been hurt, or molested.”
Evil Whispers Page 24