Veiled Eyes

by C.L. Bevill

  Gaspard made a disapproving noise that bordered on horror. “It’s the same thing, Maman. And my own sister. May le bon Dieu watch over us. May He watch over her as well.”

  “Help me move the conveyer belts out of the way of the opening. We need to hurry.”

  The voices moved away from Anna, and she cracked open her eyes. Gaspard had a flashlight in his hands. Aurore put her lantern down on the hood of an old Chevy. They moved to the side of the huge hollow and began to move pieces of metal and equipment away from the walls. Grunting noise accompanied their work.

  Anna let the rose petals fall in her mind, wishing them to cover her furtive movements. Gaspard had knocked her unconscious with a single strike of his large fist. She didn’t want them to know she was moving before she had increased the distance between them.

  The walls suddenly vibrated with a tremendous shudder of movement. She froze in place, her eyes still cracked, and watched as Gaspard and Aurore halted their activities. “It’s nothing,” said Aurore. She reached for a larger piece of a conveyer belt. “Help me with this.”

  Gaspard was staring upward, remaining as still as night. “They say Goujon will cause another earthquake one day,” he said, his voice eerily echoing in the chamber. “He will come to protect his children from those who would do the family great harm.”

  “Superstitious rot,” growled Aurore. “Goujon is a myth made up by our grandfathers to keep us in line. Help me with this and be quick.”

  The walls of the mine shuddered again. It rippled down, and Anna felt the earth shift under her body. She felt a fine spray of moisture whip over her face and wondered if this room was about to fall into itself, filling with lake water that would rush in like Niagara Falls, forever washing away all sins from its path. Almost immediately she felt more water rushing around her hands and her bottom, as if sluice gates had suddenly been opened.

  Gaspard dropped the large piece of metal in his hands. “Non. Non. It’s him. He knows what we are doing.” His voice became increasingly agitated. “We don’t kill our own people. First Gautier, then the conja, and now Anna. He is angry with us.”

  Anna began to crawl backward, like a crab, trying not to splash the water as she crept. Aurore’s attention was rooted on her eldest son. “We should be speedy about this,” said Aurore calmly. “She’ll drown or suffocate quickly. She won’t suffer, and this place is no longer sound for man or beast. I had Sebastien put the explosives along the ceiling last week so that we could flood this place. It’s no longer safe here. There are things here that could expose us, expose the family to the wicked eyes of the outsiders. Better it is collapsed, covered with silt and lake water.”

  Anna bumped into something behind her, and the slight noise alerted Gaspard. His head swiveled down to look at her, gold eyes connecting with hers. Not startled or dismayed, he looked at her steadily, and then back at his mother, who was struggling with a larger chunk of engine. “I won’t help you, Maman.”

  Aurore straightened up. “What?”

  Folding her body into the deepest shadows, Anna took this as tacit permission to haul ass for the surface and the safety that waited there. The walls shook again, and she felt another splash of liquid run across her forearm. In a minute she knew she might be swimming for it.

  “I ain’t going to have any more to do with this, Maman. The family don’t know about this. The elders, they don’t know what you’ve done. They won’t condone murder. Not even the murder of outsiders. They won’t condone her murder. They know she’s special. You’ve lost your reason. You don’t have no common sense left.” Gaspard’s voice became pleading. “Think about what you’re doing. Even Goujon is questioning you. Listen to him.” The walls of the mine trembled again. The sound ricocheted along Anna’s backbone.

  She couldn’t see Gaspard anymore. She trusted her instinct and headed in the direction she thought she’d dropped her flashlight. She passed the shape of the Mazda Miata and knew she was headed in the right direction. The hidden opening to the sinkhole was just about opposite to the opening of the graveyard and the way out. She rose up on shaking legs and stumbled over something else.

  Aurore’s voice echoed through the chamber. “Then don’t. Leave, boy. I don’t need your help.” There was a brief pause. “Dieu, where is she?” Another pause and Anna hurried to her feet, her hands out, and feeling the way. “You let her go?”

  There was a rush of anger that Anna felt in her head. It was Aurore’s utter rage at being thwarted for the moment. It pulsated over her like the leading edge of a shock wave, making her reel momentarily.

  Gaspard cried out and was silent. There was a splash that revealed something had fallen down.

  Anna stopped at another obstacle and didn’t dare look back. The pain went deep into her chest, and she knew that she was feeling her half-brother die. Aurore had stabbed Gaspard with a knife. Gaspard’s thoughts shifted and slanted in her head, and she couldn’t move. Sorry, it came weakly. Mon Dieu, I am sorry for my sins with all my heart. In choosing to do wrong and failing to do good, I have sinned against—

  You, whom I should love above all things, Anna finished it for Gaspard because she knew that he couldn’t finish it, I firmly intend, with your help, to do penance, to sin no more, and to avoid whatever leads me to sin. Our Savior, Jesus Christ, suffered and died for us. In His name, my God, have mercy. Amen.

  “Amen,” said Aurore. “He will forgive me for doing what I had to do in order to protect the family. If that’s what one should have to do to protect the rest, to ensure our survival, then that is what shall be done.”

  Aurore was on the move, searching her out. Anna cut Gaspard from her mind. He was beyond her help now. She couldn’t feel Raoul in the room. Perhaps only the one son had been recruited; Raoul had seemed naïve to her when she had spoken with him.

  “True,” Aurore answered her thoughts. “It’s just you and I now. And look what I had to do because of you.”

  “You killed him all by yourself!” Anna yelled. Using her hands, she felt about and moved around the side of an unseen vehicle. On the far side of the room, the lantern was moving. Gaspard’s flashlight remained motionless where his dead hand had dropped it.

  She stopped as the walls around them shuddered again, twice as forcefully as before, as if some massive monster was slamming its fists upon the ground above their heads. Anna could almost see the great tail of a giant catfish pounding the silty bottom of the black lake, causing waves to roll into shore and the world to shift on its axis.

  Aurore’s lantern halted in place. Suddenly Anna could feel a twinge of fear coming from her. She fed upon it, absorbing it with glee, unexpectedly happy that she was scared as well. “You should be afraid, Aurore! I think this place will become your grave too! You’ll share it with all the people you murdered! With all the people your father and grandfather murdered!”

  “Be silent!” she screamed back. “It’s nothing! It’s just the mine!”

  Anna had resumed searching with her hands. It was with relief that she felt the cool metal of a flashlight under her fingers. It was right where she’d left it. The meager light from Aurore’s light refracting off the salt had allowed her to find it even in deep shadows. She looked over her shoulder, at where Aurore’s lantern showed her to be, and pushed the button of the flashlight. The light revealed the exit and Anna took it, happy to test her lungs, jovial that she would see how fast she could run again in this maze.

  She fled up the tunnel, her ankles sinking into water that was rapidly running downhill. At the first turn she realized that Aurore had outsmarted her. She had seen the marks Anna had left with the spray paint primer. She had taken some time to knock the marks from the walls. The end of a flashlight would have done the trick in a few minutes, knocking the painted salt off so that a few gray-spattered hunks of rock showed Anna that there was once a mark there, but certainly not the direction that would lead her outward.

  Aurore’s voice reverberated through the tunnel. “Silly An
na! Silly little outsider girl! No way out, chère! And I won’t chase after you. No, I’ll just set the explosives, little foolish girl! You’ll be trapped in here until you drown! And there’ll be nothing you can do! I’ll make sure you can’t call out to Gabriel until you die! You should have let me kill you, Anna! It would have been less painful!”

  Chapter 24

  Saturday, February 21st

  Among the lake people, water drawn from where the dead and the living traverse is powerful gris-gris against the goings-on of all devilish beasties and their dreadful evil deeds.

  Alby LaGraisse was drunker than a dozen Irish alcoholics on St. Patrick’s Day. He couldn’t find his prim daughter-in-law to drive him home nor could he find anyone to point him in the right direction. In fact, he couldn’t find his truck, even if he could have driven it anywhere. In his current state of inebriation his gifts had temporarily failed him, and he wasn’t exactly upset about it.

  Sometime later, Alby was still stumbling around looking for some purpose in his evening. “That’s a helluva outsider,” he slurred amicably to someone wearing a carnival mask. The large detailed mask resembled a wolf’s head with huge teeth protruding over an open voracious mouth. Normally it would have frightened someone as drunk as Alby, but he thought it resembled a rabid Benji and almost giggled at the thought.

  The wolf said, “Huh?”

  “Imagine that,” added Alby. “He could drink and eat crawdaddies. And he’s from New York.”

  “He’s drunk,” said the wolf to another mask. That one was Little Red Riding Hood. The rose red cloak allowed two blonde pigtails to hang loose. A little girl’s bright smile was permanently fixed on an elaborate mask.

  “Well duh,” said Little Red. It was a woman’s voice and plainly sarcastic.

  Alby lurched over to the edge of the lake to take a breath. It was patently true that he shouldn’t mix a dozen forms of alcohol on the same night, but it hadn’t bothered him at the time. However, it was coming back to haunt him now.

  “Should we do anything?” asked the wolf. Alby thought it was very solicitous of him considering he was supposed to be the Big Bad Wolf, although he wasn’t actively eating up Little Red Riding Hood like he was supposed to be doing.

  “Well,” said Little Red, “let’s get him to one of the aide tents so he doesn’t fall in and drown himself. I mean, jeez.”

  “Look at that,” said Alby wonderingly, staring at the blackness of the lake that he’d lived next to all his life.

  “What is it?” said Big Bad.

  “He’s drunk,” said Little Red. She put her arm around Alby’s shoulder and turned him away from the lake. Big Bad took Alby’s other side and added, “You’ll feel better when you’ve gotten some coffee in you, mister.”

  “Coffee?” Alby repeated, disgusted. “Coffee sucks. It tastes like moose piss, not that I’ve ever drank moose piss.” He chortled and paused. “But really, did you see that?”

  Little Red guided Alby into the tents looking for one of the aide stations she’d seen earlier. Some people didn’t know when to quit. “See what?” she asked, not bothering to keep the condescension out of her tone.

  “The lake’s beginning to recede. Saw it just now. Looks like it’s slowly draining away.”

  “Oh Christ,” said Big Bad. “Is he blotto or what?”

  “It was,” protested Alby indignantly. “It’s down a couple of inches. I’m not that drunk.”

  “Come on. This man needs an injection of caffeine and somewhere to lay down for about a hundred years,” said Little Red. “Once we give him to them, we can get back to the band.”

  * * *

  “Anna,” called Aurore soothingly. She had regained her composure and any remaining fear that was in her had slowly faded away as the thumping vibrations in the walls had come to a halt. “I ought to give you one last chance. I can understand why you’d run. After all, it isn’t easy to make the decisions I’ve had to make. Killing family members isn’t a cakewalk.”

  Anna had turned the flashlight off, so Aurore couldn’t track her in the darkness by following her light. She had a plan. The strategy was to find where Aurore had chipped away the gray paint on the walls by looking at the gray-splattered rocks of salt on the level part of the tunnel. She might not get the turns correct every time, but eventually she could eliminate the tunnels, and odds were that she wouldn’t have to do that every time. Ultimately, she would find that she hadn’t had time to trace her arrows all the way to the surface. She would find them in the upper echelons of the mine, still complete, and still pointing the way out for her.

  Let Aurore leave, she prayed to herself. Let her go to the elevator and leave. I can find my way.

  But Aurore heard Anna’s thoughts. Aurore’s voice vibrated down the tunnels, not allowing her to know exactly where the other woman was. “Sorry, chère! There are hundreds of miles of passages down here. Hundreds. This mine was worked for many, many years! There’s no way you’re gonna make it to the surface before I can flood the place out. And believe me, it’ll be quick. Water will fill up almost to the surface. It’s a physics thing, you know. The water will meet the level of the water outside. I’ve heard tell of another salt mine down south doing the same thing, excepting a drilling rig found a salt mine. They lost a whole drilling platform and two barges into it! Never recovered them. Now it’s one damn deep lake! No one is going to find anything when I’m done. And there’ll be two unfortunate deaths. Family members who done got caught up in the misfortune. I can hear it now. My son and Miss St. Thais were somewhere by the lake and must have been sucked down with the rest. I’ll put a marker next to your maman’s.”

  Anna held perfectly still in the darkness. She could hear Aurore, but no light was visible. Anna knew that the other woman was trying to trick her. Aurore knew the ways around this place. She’d probably grown up here, playing in these tunnels, trying out the part of understudy.

  Anna began to inch herself away from Aurore’s voice, trusting that she could find the exit if only she tried hard enough. The longer Aurore tried to convince her to give herself up, the longer Anna had to find the way out before she followed through with her threat.

  When she couldn’t hear Aurore anymore, Anna turned her flashlight on and discovered that she was well and truly lost in the labyrinth. She’d made so many turns that she had completely lost track of her marks back to the surface.

  Anna. Aurore’s thoughts came clearly to her, sad, accepting of her fate. I tried to warn you, Anna. Now it’s too late. The outsiders have truly spoiled you. Gautier and Meg’ll burn in hell for what they’ve done. You can let yourself die now. There’s no escape. You can’t get out. Not before I set off the explosions. N’est pas?

  There was a loud clanking noise that reverberated through the tunnels. Anna heard it and froze into place. She thought she knew what it was. Aurore had reached the elevators, and the lift had been geared up to bring her to the main level, where Anna had passed on her way to find Meg Theriot. Aurore had the key for the elevator. After all, it was the family’s mine.

  We can make one last deal, chère, thought Aurore. In her mind Anna could feel the elevator moving slowly upward, the gears and pulleys squealing with age and disuse. She shifted her weight so she wouldn’t lurch around on the platform. I can block you from Gabriel’s mind. But in your last moments of death, well, I can have little control there. Fear, after all, calls to all of us. But you’re strong, Anna. You can die without letting him know. And he is your beloved, isn’t he? I felt it. You have strong feelings for him.

  A surge of anger threatened to overwhelm Anna. She wanted to scream with frustration. Good guys were supposed to win. Bad guys were supposed to lose, and lose dramatically in a flaming ball of fire that clearly showed their pain-wracked deaths. And the bad guy was certainly not supposed to threaten the life of the man she loved after her own wretched death had occurred. It isn’t fair.

  Aurore’s amusement was evident. Fair? Mais non, nothing in li
fe is fair. Surely you’ve guessed that? But Gabriel doesn’t have to die.

  In exchange for what? Anna couldn’t prevent the thought. What is it that you want me to do?

  Die alone. Die with only your thoughts. And I swear I won’t touch a single, solitary black hair on his precious head. You have to die. He doesn’t. Aurore’s thought patterns became vicious. And I won’t be kind to him. But Sebastien’s with him right now. He’ll take care of him. You’ll be a faint memory that troubles him only in a blue moon. He’ll live a long life. La Famille is like stone. Like cement. We stick together. We last.

  Anna’s chin came up. That’s a tired metaphor, Aurore. It loses its strength upon repetition. You might want to remember that.

  You agree, Anna? It’s you and him. Or just you?

  Just me then. I’ll die alone. Anna gritted her teeth and willed herself not to be afraid. It would be quick. She would drown. All she had to do was to suck the water back into her lungs. She leaned back against the salt walls and slid to her bottom. The flashlight dropped to the ground and rolled away from her.

  Good girl. Aurore was approving. Her own personal protection came down before Anna could tell the other woman that she could be no more wrong than if she had tried.

  Hardly. But no one could hear her. And the fact that you’re a member of the family is purely incidental, you veiled-eyed bitch.

  * * *

  “You smelled earth?” repeated Camille.

  Gabriel and she sat in the coffee tent on the farthest side from the card players. Another bus driver had wandered in to sit in on the game, and they were all giggling about the hand one of them had gotten. “I mean,” said one designated driver, “could I get anything worse without having a baby straight? The gods of poker must hate me.”

  Gabriel nodded tiredly. His jaw had ceased to ache. For a brief time it had felt like someone had sucker-punched him with a 2X4 piece of wood. And the ache had transferred itself into the back of his head, as if someone had followed up with another 2X4 from behind. “It was like someone was turning the ground with a spade. Rich soil. Sandy and wet. All around me. All around her.”