by Ronald Kelly
Trevor chuckled softly, then continued. "Her clandestine affair with
young Jonathan went on for several months. I was aware of it, for I had come across them in the forest east of the sorghum mill. They lay in a bed of Spanish moss, rutting like wild animals, our saintly mother on top, taking all that he had to offer. She saw me standing there in the shadows, watching, but it did not alarm her. Rather, it seemed to heighten her excitement. Afterward, I promised to keep her secret, knowing how our father would react to such an unseemly liaison."
"But he did find out?"
"Yes, several weeks later." An expression akin to lunacy shone from Trevor's eyes as he spoke. "He found them, naked and writhing, drenched with the sweat of their passion, on the floor of the smokehouse. Father went mad with rage. He flung mother toward the house, then prying an axe from a stump near the woodpile, decapitated his wife's dark lover. He gathered up some of the other slaves, threatened them into secrecy, and had them carry the body off into the swamp to be disposed of. He took Jonathan's head, impaled it on a fence post, and set it aflame to serve as an example for any others who might have provided Rosealynda with her shameful pleasure.
"Afterward, everything fell apart for the Deveroux family. Jonathan's elderly mother grieved for days. You could hear her wailing along the dark banks of the swamp, searching for a trace of her son's remains, intending to bury him in a respectful manner. But she never found him. His headless body had been concealed well, undoubtedly weighted down with stones and dropped into the quicksand pit at the far side of the bayou. A week later, she appeared on the front lawn of our house and did her dirty deed in retaliation for the murder of her only son."
"The curse," said Quentin, lifting his face from his hands.
Trevor nodded. "She was known among the darkies as Mojo Mama. A swamp witch well-versed in the ways of voodoo and black magic. They were all afraid of her, as our father should have been. But he merely laughed and ridiculed her from the upstairs balcony as she opened a brightly-beaded bag and began to lay a number of objects in the dust at the foot of the front steps; a chicken foot, possum bones, a black candle, and a fine white powder that she spread about in a circle. Then she uttered a series of incantations that would dissolve the reserve of the most stout-hearted man. Our father was foolish. He cursed at her from the balcony and threatened to kill her the same as he had Jonathan. Mojo Mama jabbed a bony, black finger at him and cursed him and all who had lived and been sired beneath the roof of the Deveroux house to an agonizing Hell on earth. Then she went to the fence post, pried her son's blackened skull from its pinnacle, and disappeared into the swamp."
"What happened then?" Quentin asked, although he could only imagine the worse.
"For several days, nothing at all," said Trevor. "Father strutted about the house, making light of the witch's curse and even laughing about the beheading of our mother's Negro lover. Then it began to happen." His brother paused and stared at him. "You remember how our father was... strong and robust, beefy and as wide as the gate to mother's flower garden. Well, he began to waste away. Day after day, he lost pound upon pound of muscle, until he grew gangly and frail. He had Mammy prepare a bounty of food, but no matter how much he ate, he continued to dwindle down to nothing. Then his horror grew even more mortifying. His flesh decreased while his bones grew sharper and more pronounced. They began to break through his skin, exposed nakedly to the elements. One morning he did not come down for breakfast and we went up to find him lying in his bed, no more than a skeleton without flesh or innards. The only thing that remained were his eyes lying within the dry sockets of his skull, full of terror and remorse."
"Good Lord!" exclaimed Quentin. "Pray... continue."
Trevor did so, although with no pleasure. "After his death, about the time of the conflict at Gettysburg, our own individual curses came to be revealed. My putrescent state of decay, poor Isabella's monthly bleeding, and your own nasty condition. Our mother however, did not seem to suffer. She remained in her room upstairs, indulging in brandy and narcotics, with the door firmly barred and locked. And there she remained, until the curse of Mojo Mama finally came calling on her in the dead of night. But I have no need to speak further. You were here, in this very house, during that grisly discovery at the stroke of midnight."
Quentin shuddered at the thought. But he did not wish to dwell on his mother's death at that moment. Rather he was intent on finding a solution to the dire situation they now endured. "I shall go to Mojo Mama and reason with her. I will try to convince her that we, as children of the Deveroux name, had nothing to do with her son's murder. Shall I saddle a horse so that you may accompany me?"
Trevor laughed bitterly. "Are you mad? Me, leave the confines of this house? Why, the beasts of the swamp -- the boars and the buzzards, the gators and the gars-- would lay waste to my decaying carcass before I rode a quarter mile into the bayou. It would be certain death for me!"
Quentin knew that his brother was correct. To take him into the swamp would be like ringing the dinner bell for every hungry creature south of the canebrake. He stood and went to a side table. Opening an upper drawer, he took out a Colt Navy revolver that he had taken off the body of a dead Yankee following the Battle of Stones River. He checked the cylinder of the 36-caliber pistol. It was packed with powder and lead, and primed with percussion caps.
"Then I shall go alone and take my chances," he said boldly, gathering his nerve. "We must have relief from this ungodly curse!"
Trevor sighed. "The only relief we shall find, dear brother, is in Death's firm grasp. I grow weary and pray for it to come soon."
Quentin ignored his sibling's dark mood, shaking his head in resignation as Trevor turned back to the fire. If his brother was unwilling to reason with the old witch, then it was up to Quentin to go on his behalf. As he left the parlor, he turned to find that Trevor had stuck his head into the leaping wall of flames. He did not die, but screamed as the meat of his face and tongue blackened into living, breathing ash.
~ * ~
Daylight darkened into twilight as Quentin Deveroux rode along a narrow path through the heart of the swamp. His horse -- who had weathered calvary charges, cannon blasts, and the cries of dying soldiers -- was skittish amid the dense thicket and the water-logged columns of cypress shrouded with stringy, gray moss. The bayou was heavy with unfamiliar sounds, as well. The crying of loons, the rustling of unseen creatures in the brush, and the distant bellowing of bull gators in search of their mates... or an unwary meal.
As Quentin rode along the trail, he recalled the night of his mother's death. It had been a humid evening, so sweltering that nearly every window in the house had to be opened. Still, there was no breeze and nary a current of fetid air stirred. It was as though the wind waited, expectantly, for some horrible event to occur before daring to ruffle a shred of curtain or cool the heat-dampened skin of a single inhabitant.
Quentin had lain in his bed, bathed in sweat, unable to sleep. Trevor and Isabella had retired early, dealing with their own private portions of the Deveroux curse. Quentin could feel worms, beetles, and only God knew what else scampering through his intestines. They moved, en masse, through the moist, warm darkness of his bowels, searching for a single ray of light that might provide direction to the outside world. But there was no moon that night. It was pitch black and his internal tormentors had no such luck.
It was nearing the hour of midnight, when he heard sounds echoing from the west wing of the mansion... where his mother's bedroom was located. They were not the fitful thrashings of a nightmare or the tearful grief a widow might express at the loss of her husband. No, these were low moans and purring sighs; the kind that suggested a passionate coupling. At first he thought that Rosealynda was pleasuring herself. She indulged in the act and with great abandon, when she drank heavily. But, no, Quentin could also discern the creaking of the bed frame, as if tested by some vast weight. He turned over on his pillow, intending to drive the shameful sounds from his ears, wh
en they turned from pleasure to pain. His mother began to scream, crying for mercy, pleading for her attacker to stop. But the creaking of the bed continued. The ornately-carved headboard struck the wall behind it, again and again, rending delicate French wallpaper and battering plaster into dust.
Trevor and Isabella joined him in the hallway. By candlelight, they ran down the upstairs corridor, toward the western wing. A scream of immeasurable torment rang throughout the house, but grew silent as they reached the door of Rosealynda's bedroom. They found the door locked and barred from the inside. It took them several minutes to find something heavy and sturdy enough to batter the oaken door from its frame, but eventually they succeeded.
When they entered the room, candles held before them, they made a discovery that would haunt them the rest of their lives. Their beloved mother lay limply across the blood-soaked bed. She was naked; her once-beautiful face now a rictus of horror and agony. Her pale abdomen had burst from crotch to breastbone, as though she had been split open from the inside out.
They had rushed to the open window to see a huge form, dark and glistening with sweat, running across the lawn, toward the black expanse of the swamp. The three thought that the lack of nocturnal light was playing tricks on their eyes. The escaping attacker seemed to possess nothing above his broad, muscular shoulders.
Since that night, Quentin and his siblings had not had an easy moment and their individual shares of the Deveroux Curse seemed to grow stronger and more relentless. Now, heading into the swamp on a mission, Quentin hoped to end their distress once and for all.
The pathway gradually widened into a clearing and, suddenly, he found himself before the tin and tarpaper shack of Mojo Mama. The sagging porch of the structure bore fronds of dried herbs and swamp plants; obviously the ingredients to the various potions and poultices that she concocted. The tanned hides of rabbits, possums, and raccoons hung, stretched, across the outer walls of the old shack, along with the skins of critters that he could notidentify.
He reined his horse to a halt and swung down from the saddle. "Come out here, old woman!" he demanded. "I am here to have words with you!"
For a moment, he thought that she was not there. Then the door of weathered planks swung back on leather hinges and she appeared.
"I believe I smell the stench of Deveroux in the air."
Mojo Mama was far from the imposing figure he expected to find. She was small and frail, no more than five feet tall, dressed in ragged clothing and a dark blue bandana around the crown of her head. She was old -- at least in her eighties -- and as wrinkled and lined as the bark of an ancient tree. Only her eyes looked bright and youthful, twinkling with both malice and amusement as she regarded him.
"I've come to -- " Quentin began.
"Beg for my mercy?" she asked. "If that be so, you'd best get on back home to your suffering. The curse I've cast upon the house of Deveroux stands... and always shall stand."
The old woman's proclamation enraged Quentin. He started forward, his hands balled into angry fists. "Now, see here, witch! Can we not bargain for a resolution to this damnable grudge of yours?"
Mojo Mama laughed and smiled, revealing toothless gums as blue as a skink's tail. "Bargain? Did your hot-headed fool of a father give my poor Jonathan such a choice when he found him with your whore of a mother? Did he show compassion before he swung that broad-axe and cleaved my son's head from his shoulders?" She pointed toward the side of the yard with a gnarled finger. A wooden headstone stood in the weeds beneath a weeping willow tree. "All that he left for me to commend to earth lies there, severed and burnt, in the soil."
Quentin attempted to calm down and reason with her. "I promise, I will help you locate the rest of your son's remains, if only you will --"
Mojo Mama grinned and idly fingered a dried chicken foot that hung from a lanyard of gator teeth around her scrawny neck. "Oh, the remains of my beloved Jonathan are around here somewheres... lurking, hiding.... watching."
The young man's anger flared once again. "You'd best not play games with me, bitch, or I'll -- "
Eyes gleaming, Mojo Mama raised her left hand, her dark fingers curled toward the night sky. "Or you'll what, young Deveroux?"
Without warning, a horrible pain shot throughout Quentin. It was an agony unlike any he had ever felt before. Something long and sinuous began to travel up from the depths of his stomach, filling his throat and forcing itself into his mouth. Quentin fell to his knees and retched. In horror, he watched as the head of a snake pushed past his lips. It contorted within him as it struggled for escape. Soon, the last of it left him and dropped on the ground. It was a copperhead, perhaps two feet in length. It hissed at him with venomous fangs, then slithered off into the darkness of the swamp.
"Do you wish for me to conjure another?" she asked cruelly. "A rattler or a cottonmouth perhaps? You hold more than you could ever imagine."
Quentin staggered to his feet, his throat raw and bloody with the serpent's passage. "Why do you torment us so? We had nothing to do with our parents' sins. Why do you not leave us be?"
"Because you are Deveroux," she said firmly. "And, as long as I hold breath in my lungs, you shall know the horrors of Satan's lot within your own treacherous bodies."
"Then your lungs and yourself be damned!" declared Quentin. Angrily, he drew the Navy revolver from beneath his coat and thumbed back the hammer.
The witch simply stood there as he emptied the contents of the .36 pistol into her chest. She wavered on her feet for a long second, smiling at him as she belched blood and bullet-shredded tissue. Then she dropped to the boards of the porch, never to move again.
That should be it then, he told himself with satisfaction. With the witch dead, then the curse shall be no more.
Quentin Deveroux stepped into a stirrup of the gelding's saddle and swung astride. He looked at the crumpled form of Mojo Mama one last time, then with a scowl, headed back toward the bayou trail.
An hour passed. Two. Quentin began to realize that he had somehow taken a wrong turn. He was lost in the dangerous darkness of the swamp with no idea of where he was. The Deveroux plantation was to the north, but he could no longer discern which direction was which. The pale orb of a full moon hung overhead, visible through the Spanish moss and the gnarled limbs of the cypress trees, but somehow it seemed to shift at random, providing no aid to his bearings.
As he rode through a tall stand of wild canebrake, he suddenly heard the sound of something behind him. It was the noise of bare feet in the brush, moving stealthily like a cat. But he knew that it was no feline who pursued him. Its size was immense as it picked its way through the stand of bamboo. And that was not all that he heard. With the sound of footsteps came a peculiar whistling noise... like air forced through a narrow, wet opening.
Quentin urged his horse onward. The gelding grew skittish in the darkness, unable to see where it was going. The canebrake grew thicker, pressing in on the trail like opposing walls, making it difficult to navigate. The young man strained his ears for sound. He was thankful to find that he could no longer hear the sound of the footsteps... as well as the moist wheezing that accompanied them.
"Let's take leave of this damned place and get back home," he told his horse soothingly. His eyes peered into the darkness, trying to gauge his surroundings in the pale moonlight.
Abruptly, they were set upon. From out of the canebrake, two dark arms extended. Strong hands -- calloused from grueling work at the urging whip of the overseer -- grasped the throat of the gelding. With a powerful yank, the horse's neck was broken. Its eyes rolled into the back of its head and it dropped to its side, pinning Quentin Deveroux underneath.
Frightened, he struggled to pull himself free. He looked around frantically, but the arms of the demon in the canebrake had disappeared.
With some effort, Quentin managed to wiggle from beneath the weight of the dead animal. But something was wrong with his leg. He shrieked as he attempted to stand. Quentin looked down to see a jag
ged shard of bone protruding through his trousers, just below the knee.
He tried several times to walk, but fell each time. "Lord help me!" he cried out, teeth clenched against the agony that throbbed through his shattered shinbone. "Please... deliver me from this hellhole."
Slowly, he began to crawl on his hands and knees along the muddy pathway between the towering stalks of sugar cane. It was slow going... one torturous inch at a time. Once a swamp adder slithered across his path, scarcely a foot from his nose. He nearly screamed, but he knew he didn't dare. It would only alert his whereabouts to the wild creatures and gators who hunted in darkness, searching for a helpless morsel such as himself.
He had only traveled a few yards when he heard something come crashing out of the canebrake. He rolled over onto his back to find the thing that had killed his horse, standing on the pathway eight feet away.
It was the headless body of Jonathan; naked, his ebony skin glistening with sweat and wet sand. The ugly hole within the column of his neck -- severed just above the larynx -- sputtered and wheezed as his lungs inflated and deflated without benefit of those cerebral impulses necessary for such function.
"No!" screamed Quentin. "Lord Jesus, no... it is impossible!"
But he knew that Mojo Mama's voodoo had made it possible. Out of love and vengeance, she had conjured a spell and turned the sunken remains of her only son into a living, breathing zombie. Horrified, he watched as the headless corpse started toward him. Its huge, dark hands clenched and unclenched angrily, ready to latch upon the murderer of the woman who had once given birth to him.
Quentin wailed and tried to crawl away. He dismissed the revolver in his coat, for in his haste he had neglected to bring powder and ball with which to reload. The youngest of the Deveroux scrambled only a few feet, before hands roughly took hold of him. He wept, waiting to feel strong fingers close about his gullet, expecting the quick twist that might shatter his neckbone and send him spiraling into the dark void of death.