Arceneaux breathed the name of his god, his loa, Damballa Wedo, the serpent. Garrigue whispered, “Women. Always the women, always the belly. Duplessis.”
“He carry her here.” Arceneaux was calming himself, as well as Garrigue. “Killed her somewhere back there, maybe in the city, carry her here, leave her like a business card. You right, Rene. Can’t be, but you right.”
“Business card.” Garrigue’s voice was still tranquil, almost dreamy. “He know this place, Jean-Marc. If he know this place, he know everything. Everything.”
“Hush you, man, hush now, mind me.” Arceneaux might have been talking to a child wakened out of a nightmare. “Shovel out back, under the crabapple, saw it last time. We got to take her off and bury her, first thing. You go get me that shovel, Rene.”
Garrigue stared at him. Arceneaux said it again, more gently. “Go on, Rene. Find me that shovel, compe’.”
Alone, he felt every hair on his own body standing up; his big dark hands were trembling so that he could not even cover the woman’s face or close her eyes. Alexandre Duplessis, c’est vraiment li, vraiment, vraiment; but the knowledge frightened the old man far less than the terrible lure of the crumpled thing at his feet, torn open and emptied out, gutted and drained and abandoned, the reek of her terror dominating the hot, musky scent of the beast that had hunted her down in the hours before dawn. The fear, Damballa, the fear—you once get that smell in you head, you throat, you gut, you never get it out. Better than the meat, the blood even, you smell the fear. He was shaking badly now, and he knew that he needed to get out of there with Garrigue before he hurled himself upon the pitiful remains, to roll and wallow in them like the beast he was. Hold me, Damballa. Hide me, hold me.
Garrigue returned with the rusty shovel and together they carried the dead woman deeper into the woods. Then he stood by, rubbing his mouth compulsively as he watched Arceneaux hack at the hard earth. In the same small voice as before, he said, “I scare, me, Ti-Jean,” calling Arceneaux by his childhood nickname. “What we do to him.”
“What he did to us.” Arceneaux’s own voice was cold and steady. “What he did to ma Sophie.”
As he had known it would, the mention of Arceneaux’s sister immediately brought Garrigue back from wherever terror and guilt together had taken him. “I ain’t forgot Sophie.” His gray eyes had closed down like the steel shutters whose color they matched. “I ain’t forget nothing.”
“I know, man,” Arceneaux said gently. He finished his work, patted the new grave as flat as he could make it—one good rain, two, grass cover it all—and said, “We come back before next moon, clean up a little. Right now, we going home.” Garrigue nodded eagerly.
In the car, approaching the freeway, Garrigue could not keep from talking about Sophie Arceneaux as he had not done in a very long while. “So pretty, that girl, that sister of yours. So pretty, so kind, who wouldn’t want to marry such a fine woman like her?” Then he hurriedly added, “Of course, my Elizabeth, Elizabeth was a fine woman too, I don’t say a word against Elizabeth. But Sophie … la Sophie …” He fell silent for a time, and then said in a different voice, “I ain’t blame Duplessis for wanting her. Can’t do that, Jean-Marc.”
“She didn’t want him,” Arceneaux said. There was no expression at all in his voice now. “Didn’t want nothing to do with him, no mind what he gave her, where he took her, never mind what he promised. So he killed her.” After a pause, he went on, “You know how he killed her.”
Garrigue folded his hands in his lap and looked at them.
So low he could barely be heard, he answered, “In the wolf … in the wolf shape. Hadn’t seen it, I wouldn’t have believed.”
“Ripped her throat out,” Arceneaux said. “Ma colombe, ma pauv’ p’ti, she never had no chance—no more than him with her.” He looked off down the freeway, seeing, not a thousand cars nor a distant city skyline, but his entire Louisiana family, wolves all, demanding that as oldest male he take immediate vengeance on Duplessis. For once—and it was a rare enough occurrence—he found himself in complete agreement with his blood kin and their ancient notions of honor and retribution. In company with Garrigue, one of Sophie’s more tongue-tied admirers, he had set off on the track of his sister’s murderer.
“Duplessis kill ma Sophie, she never done nothing but good for anyone. Well, I done what I done, and I ain’t sorry for it.” His voice rose as he grew angry all over again, more than he usually allowed himself these days. He said, “Ain’t a bit sorry.”
Garrigue shivered, remembering the hunt. Even with an entire werewolf clan sworn to avenge Sophie Arceneaux, Duplessis had made no attempt to hide himself, or to flee the region, so great was his city man’s contempt for thick-witted backwoods bumpkins. Arceneaux had run him to earth in a single day, and it had been almost too easy for Garrigue to lure him into a moonshiner’s riverside shebeen: empty for the occasion and abandoned forever after, haunted by the stories of what was done there to Alexandre Duplessis.
It had taken them all night, and Garrigue was a different man in the morning.
After the first scream, Garrigue had never heard the others; he could not have done otherwise and held on to his sanity. Sometimes it seemed to him that he had indeed gone mad that night, and that all the rest of his life—the flight north, the jobs, the marriage, the beloved children and grandchildren, the home—had never been anything but a lunatic’s hopeless dream of forgetfulness. More than forty years later he still shuddered and moaned in his sleep, and at times still whimpered himself awake. All the blood, all the shit … the … the … sound when Ti-Jean took that old cleaver thing … and that man wouldn’t die, wouldn’t die … wasn’t nothing left of him but open mouth, awful open mouth, and he wouldn’t die …
“Don’t make no sense,” Arceneaux said beside him. “Days burying … four, five county lines—”
“Five,” Garrigue whispered. “Evangeline. Joyelle. St. Landry. Acadia. Rapides. Too close together, I told you …”
Arceneaux shook his head. “Conjure. Conjure in it somewhere, got to be. Guillory, maybe, he evil enough … old Fontenot, over in St. Landry. Got to be conjure.”
They drove the rest of the way in near-silence, Arceneaux biting down hard on his own lower lip, Garrigue taking refuge in memories of his wife Elizabeth, and of Arceneaux’s long-gone Pauline. Both women, non-Creoles, raised and encountered in the city, believed neither in werewolves nor in conjure men; neither one had ever known the truth about their husbands. Loups-garoux run in families: Arceneaux and Garrigue, marrying out of their clans, out of their deep back-country world, had both produced children who would go through their lives completely unaware of that part of their ancestry. The choice had been a deliberate one, and Garrigue, for his part, had never regretted it. He doubted very much that Arceneaux had either, but it was always hard to tell with Arceneaux.
Pulling to the curb in front of the frame house where Garrigue lived with Claude and his family, Arceneaux cut the engine, and they sat looking at each other. Garrigue said finally, “Forgot to fish. Grandbabies always wanting to know did we catch anything.”
“Tell them fish wasn’t biting today. We done that before.”
Garrigue smiled for the first time. “Claude, he think we don’t do no fishing, we goes up there to drink, get away from family, get a little wild. Say he might just come with us one time.” Arceneaux grunted without replying. Garrigue said, “I keeps ducking and dodging, you know? Ducking and dodging.” His voice was growing shaky again, but he never took his eyes from Arceneaux’s eyes. He said, “What we going to do, Ti-Jean?”
“Get you some sleep,” Arceneaux said. “Get you a good breakfast, tell Claude you likely be late. We go find Duplessis tomorrow, you and me.”
Garrigue looked, for a moment, more puzzled than frightened. “Why we bothering that? He know right where we live, where the chirrens lives—”
Arceneaux cut him off harshly. “We find him fast, maybe we throw him just that little bit
off-balance, could help sometime.” He patted Garrigue’s shoulder lightly. “We use what we got, Rene, and all we got is us. You go on now—my knee biting on me a little bit.”
In fact—as Garrigue understood from the fact that Arceneaux mentioned it at all—the bad knee was hurting him a good deal; he could only pray that it wouldn’t have locked up on him by morning. He brought the car back to Noelle, who took one look at his gait and insisted on driving him home, lecturing him all the way about his need for immediate surgery. She was his oldest child, his companion from her birth, and the only one who would ever have challenged him, as she did now.
“Dadda, whatever you and Compe’ Rene are up to, I will find it out—you know I always do. Simpler tell me now, oui?”
“Ain’t up to one thing,” Arceneaux grumbled. “Ain’t up to nothing, you turning such a suspicious woman. You mamere, she just exactly the same way.”
“Because you’re such a bad liar,” his daughter replied tenderly. She caressed the back of his neck with a warm, work-hardened hand. “Ma’dear and me, we used to laugh so, nights you’d be slipping out to drink, play cards with Compe’ Rene and your old zydeco friends. Make some crazy little-boy story—whoo, out the door, gone till morning, come home looking like someone dragged you through a keyhole backwards. Lord, didn’t we laugh!”
There had been a few moments through the years when pure loneliness had made him seriously consider turning around on her and telling her to sit herself down and listen to a story. This moment was one of them; but he only muttered something he forgot as soon as he’d said it, and nothing more until she dropped him off at his apartment building. Then she kissed his cheek and told him, “Come by for dinner tomorrow. Antoine will be home early, for a change, and Patrice just got to show his gam’pair something he drew in school.”
“Day after,” Arceneaux said. “Busy tomorrow.” He could feel her eyes following him as he limped through the lobby doors.
The knee was still painful the next morning, but it remained functionally flexible. He could manage. He caught the crosstown bus to meet Garrigue in front of Claude’s house, and they set forth together to search for a single man in a large city. Their only advantage lay in possessing, even in human form, a wolf’s sense of smell; that, and a bleak awareness that their quarry shared the very same gift, and undoubtedly already knew where they lived, and—far more frightening—whom they loved. We ain’t suppose to care, Damballa. Bon Dieu made the loup-garou, he ain’t mean us to care about nothing. The kill only. The blood only … the fear only. Maybe Bon Dieu mad at us, me and Rene, disobeying him like we done. Too late now.
Garrigue had always been the better tracker, since their childhood, so Arceneaux simply stayed just behind his left shoulder and went where he led. Picking up the werewolf scent at the start was a grimly easy matter: knowing Duplessis as they did, neither was surprised to cross his trail not far from the house where Garrigue’s younger son Fernand lived with his own wife and children. Garrigue caught his breath audibly then, but said no word. He plunged along, drawn by the strange, unmistakable aroma as it circled, doubled back on itself, veered off in this direction or that, then inevitably returned to patrolling the streets most dear to two weary old men. Frightened and enraged, stubborn and haunted and lame, they followed. Arceneaux never took his eyes from Garrigue, which was good, because Garrigue was not using his eyes at all, and would have walked into traffic a dozen times over if not for Arceneaux. People yelled at him.
They found Duplessis in the park, the great park that essentially divided the two worlds of the city. He wore a long red-leather coat over a gray suit of the Edwardian cut he always favored—just like the one we tear off him that night, Damballa, just like that suit—and he was standing under a young willow tree, leaning on a dainty, foppish walking stick, smiling slightly as he watched children playing in a sandbox. When Arceneaux and Garrigue came up with him, one on each side, he did not speak to them immediately, but stood looking calmly from one face to the other, as his smile broadened. He was as handsome as ever, velvet-dark and whip-lean, unscarred in any way that they could see; and he appeared no older than he had on the night they had spent whittling him down to screaming blood, screaming shit, Damballa …
Duplessis said softly, “My friends.”
Arceneaux did not answer him. Garrigue said inanely, “You looking well, Compe’ Alexandre.”
“Ah, I have my friends to thank for that.” Duplessis spoke, not in Creole, but in the Parisian French he had always affected. “There’s this to say for hell and death—they do keep a person in trim.” He patted Garrigue’s arm, an old remembered habit of his. “Yes, I am quite well, Compe’ Rene. There were some bad times, as you know, but these days I feel as young and vigorous as … oh, say, as any of your grandchildren.” And he named them then, clearly tasting them, as though to eat the name was to have eaten the child. “Sandrine … Honore … your adorable little Manette …” He named them all, grinning at Garrigue around the names.
Arceneaux said, “Sophie.”
Duplessis did not turn his head, but stopped speaking.
Arceneaux said it again. “Sophie, you son of a bitch—pere de personne, fils de cent mille. Sophie.”
When Duplessis did turn, he was not smiling, nor was there any bombast or mockery in his voice. He said, “I think you will agree with me, Jean-Marc, that being slashed slowly to pieces alive pays for all. Like it or not, I own your poor dear Sophie just as much as you do now. I’d call that fair and square, wouldn’t you?”
Arceneaux hit him then. He hadn’t been expecting the blow, and he went over on his back, shattering the fragile walking stick beneath him. The children in the sandbox looked up with some interest, but the passersby only walked faster.
Duplessis got up slowly, running his tongue-tip over a bloody upper lip. He said, “Well, I guess I don’t learn much, do I? That’s exactly how one of you—or was it both?—knocked me unconscious in that filthy little place by the river. And when I came to …” He shrugged lightly, and actually winked at Arceneaux. He said softly, “But you haven’t got any rope with you this time, have you Jean-Marc? And none of your little—ah—sculptor’s tools?” He tasted his bloody mouth again. “A grandfather should be more careful, I’d think.”
The contemptuous lilt in the last words momentarily cost Garrigue his sanity. Only Arceneaux’s swift reaction and strong clutch kept him from knocking Duplessis down a second time. His voice half-muffled against Arceneaux’s chest, Garrigue heard himself raging, “You touch my chirren, you—you touch the doorknob on my grandbabies’ house—I cut you up all over again, cut you like Friday morning’s bacon, you hear me?” And he heard Duplessis laughing.
Then the laughter stopped, almost with a machine’s mechanical click, and Duplessis said, “No. You hear me now.” Garrigue shook himself free of Arceneaux’s preventive embrace, nodded a silent promise, and turned to see Duplessis facing them both, his mouth still bleeding, and his eyes as freezingly distant as his voice. He said, “I am Alexandre Duplessis. You sent me to hell, you tortured me as no devils could have done—no devils would have conceived of what you did. But in so doing, you have set me free, you have lost all power over me. I will do what I choose to you and yours, and there will be nothing you can do about it, nothing you can threaten me with. Would you like to hear what I choose to do?”
He told them.
He went into detail.
“It will take me some little while, obviously. That suits me—I want it to take a while. I want to watch you go mad as I strip away everything you love and cannot protect, just as you stripped away my fingers, my face, my organs, piece by piece by piece.” The voice never grew any louder, but remained slow and thoughtful, even genial. The soulful eyes—still a curious reddish-brown—seemed to have withdrawn deep under the telltale single brow and contracted to the size of cranberries. Arceneaux could feel their heat on his skin.
“This is where I live at present,” Duplessis said, and tol
d them his address. He said, “I would be delighted if you should follow me there, and anywhere else—it would make things much more amusing. I would even invite you to hunt with me, but you were always too cowardly for that, and by the looks of you, I can see you’ve not changed. Wolves—God’s own wolves—caging themselves come the moon, not even surviving on dogs and cats, mice and squirrels and rabbits, as you did in Joyelle Parish. Lamisere a deux … Misere et Compagnie—no wonder you have both grown so old, it’s almost pitiful. Now I”—a light inward flick of his two hands invited the comparison—“I dine only on the diet that le Bon Dieu meant for me, and it will keep me hunting when you two are long-buried with the humans you love so much.” He clucked his tongue, mimicking a distressed old woman, and repeated, “Pitiful. Truly pitiful. A tres—tres—tot … my friends.”
He bowed gracefully to them then, and turned to stroll away through the trees. Arceneaux said, “Conjure.” Duplessis turned slowly again at the word, waiting. Arceneaux said, “You ain’t come back all by yourself, we took care. You got brought back—take a conjure man to do that. Which one—Guillory? I got to figure Guillory.”
Duplessis smiled, a little smugly, and shook his head. “I’d never trust Guillory out of my sight—let alone after my death. No, Fontenot was the only sensible choice. Entirely mad, but that’s always a plus in a conjure man, isn’t it? And he hated you with all his wicked old heart, Jean-Marc, as I’m sure you know. What on earth did you do to that man—rape his black pig? Only thing in the world he loved, that pig.”
“Stopped him feeding a lil boy to it,” Arceneaux grunted. “What he do for you, and what it cost you? Fontenot, he come high.”
“They all come high. But you can bargain with Fontenot. Remember, Jean-Marc?” Duplessis held out his hands, palms down. The two little fingers were missing, and Arceneaux shivered with sudden memory of that moment when he’d wondered who had already taken them, and why, even as he had prepared to cut into the bound man’s flesh …
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