“Lyla! Run!” I screamed, running through the garden, almost tripping over the watermelon patch.
The crow folded its wings around Lyla, totally engulfing her. It disappeared in a puff of black shadow. It looked like a magic trick: Now you see her, now you don’t. It was the kind of trick Lyla would have delighted at. We were too late. I made it to the persimmon trees just as the last of the shadow wafted up into the darkening sky. “No!” I cried, dropping to the ground, out of breath and in despair. I rolled over on my back, gasping for air and choking back tears. Lucas slid in next to me, holding me.
“Oh, God, Leigh!” he said, holding me.
I could hear Clothilde saying something similar in the background, near the garden. I heard Jonathan crying. I heard my heart beating, threatening to burst through my chest, but not from lack of oxygen, from despair, from losing the most important person in my life, the one I was entrusted to protect. I looked out at Clothilde, Cee Cee and Jonathan. Cee Cee was holding him, trying to console him. Clothilde looked like she would drop from anguish at any second. Ben was perfectly still, his eyes closed in concentration. I was vaguely aware of Lucas saying how sorry he was. My opened eyes were instantly stung by the drizzle that fell into them.
I got up and marched over to Ben. Now everyone followed my gaze and they, too, noticed him. Jonathan was still crying. “Hush, my baby,” soothed Cee Cee, patting his back and rocking him. His sobs quieted down to sniffles. Ben opened his eyes.
“What do you see?” I asked him, my voice hoarse.
“Lyla. She’s there. With him in a cabin with a porch and—”
“A rocking chair,” I said.
He looked at me in disbelief. “Yes.”
“Where’s the cabin?” asked Lucas.
“Lake Martin. West bank.”
I glared at Clothilde. “You told me mom died in the Basin. That was a lie, too. It was Lake Martin.”
“I’m …” she started, trying to say she was sorry, but knew it was useless. “We couldn’t tell you everything just yet. We—”
“Save it! I don’t care right now. I just want to get Lyla back.”
Lucas sprinted towards his truck. I ran after him. “Stay here! It’s too dangerous,” he said to me.
“No way! That’s my niece over there. I’ll be damned if I’m just going to sit here and wait.” I got into his truck just as the others caught up to us.
“We’ll follow y’all,” said Clothilde.
“Absolutely not!” said Lucas. The three of you stay here. Watch Jonathan for me.”
“Daddy!” cried Jonathan from Cee Cee’s arms.
Lucas ran to him, picked him up and kissed him. “I’ll be back. I promise. Okay, sport? Miss Clothilde’s gonna take good care of you till I get back. But I will come back. Okay?” Jonathan nodded, still sniffling. Lucas set him down, and Clothilde put her arms around him.
“There’s no way the two of you can do this alone,” said Ben.
“Too dangerous for y’all,” said Lucas.
“It’s more dangerous for you than it is for us,” said Cee Cee.
“We need to perform the ritual just as we did for Simon,” said Ben. “We have to be there.”
Lucas thought it over for a second. He pointed at Cee Cee and Ben. “You two follow us. Miss Clothilde, stay here and watch Jon.” He jumped into the truck with me, put on his silent siren and peeled out of the driveway. As we hit the road, I glanced in the rearview mirror and saw Cee Cee’s car a few yards behind us.
We got to Lake Martin about twenty minutes later. Cee Cee did a good job of keeping up with us because they pulled into the lot only a minute or two after we did. When they got down, I noticed Cee Cee now had her Elvis purse slung across her chest, resting at her hip.
“Either of you know how to steer a boat?” Lucas asked them.
“Son, I was raised on the bayou,” replied Ben.
“All right. Y’all follow us, but stay far behind. Try to stay hidden by the trees if you can.” Ben nodded, and we broke up into teams, each taking a small motorboat from Lucas’ rental collection at the dock.
Lucas steered us through the middle of the lake, headed for the west bank. It was easier said than done because, while the middle of Lake Martin was wide open, we had to pass through dense flora and trees with roots that scraped along the bottom of the boat as we headed west.
We moved slowly here, twice having to back up to go around some sizeable roots. One mother alligator snapped at us as we got too close to her nest of eggs. A small flock of egrets flew overhead, looking like a band of phantom birds in the nearing twilight. The Spanish moss swayed eerily in the breeze that brought with it fat rain drops that plopped onto the water, rippling the reflection of the darkening sky.
Ben and Cee Cee followed us closely through most of it, but hung back when we made it through to another clearing. That was when we saw the cabin, far off in a dark corner on the west bank. It was engulfed by shadows, and we could only make out the outline of the dwelling. There was a small light coming from that direction. Lucas signaled for them to stop. Ben killed the motor of his boat. Lucas shut off our motor, and he and I used the paddles to bring us a few yards closer.
It was as I had seen it in my dreams—rustic, long-forgotten by the world, save for whatever occupied its malevolent little frame. And whatever it was was nothing more than a black silhouette in a creaking rocking chair on the tiny porch. As I stared at the phantom rocker, it suddenly stopped in mid rock, picked up its head and turned to me, and it, Walter Savoy, grinned at me and started rocking away, never taking his yellow eyes off of me. And there, in the humid twilight of the swamp, a bitter chill washed over me, and my spine felt like ice.
“You sure that thing isn’t human, right?” Lucas asked me.
“Are you seeing what I’m seeing?”
He looked at Savoy, the Dark Man, once more. He nodded, taking his gun from his holster. “Right.” He checked the barrel and cocked it, putting the safety back on. He put his gun back in the holster and Savoy got up from his rocking chair and entered the cabin.
“You ready?” he asked me.
I nodded. “You?” I asked, never taking my eyes off the front door.
He took a deep breath. “Yeah. But I’m not sure what I’m ready for exactly.” He picked up his paddle, and I picked up mine. We rowed the rest of the way to the bank as the last pink on the horizon turned to violet, and the rain slowly picked up.
***
Lucas helped me out of the boat and, together, we pulled it halfway up the bank. He turned once to make sure Cee Cee and Ben were far enough behind. I glanced back and saw that they were well hidden among a thicket of bushes where the bank curved outward.
Lucas pulled out his gun. “Stay behind me,” he said. I nodded. We crept up to the cabin, coming in on the side. From this angle, I noticed that it only had two rooms. There was another building in back, a small one with a little chimney with smoke billowing out.
“What’s that?” I whispered, looking at the building with the chimney.
“Looks like a smokehouse,” he said as he slowly stepped up on the porch of the cabin and peeked into the one window that looked into the kitchen area. I stepped up and glared inside. The light we saw was coming from a lantern on the small table. There was no one in the room. No one we could see, anyway. He walked up a little further and tried the doorknob. It was unlocked and, when he turned it, it opened easily with only a slight creak. He motioned for me to stay back, and he slowly entered the room, gun pointed. He checked behind the door. No one there. He nodded for me to follow.
“Leave it open,” he whispered. I left the door open and followed him in. We stepped forward toward the next room. The kitchen door swung closed behind us with a loud bang, making us both jump. I reached for the door to open it again, but I was stopped by a muffled scream.
“Lyla!” I called, running toward the next room.
“Leigh! Wait!” Lucas ordered, but I went ahead anyway.
/> The next room was very dark, but with the light coming in from the kitchen, I was able to make out a bedroom that had a splintered wooden bed frame and a stained mattress stuffed with moss. There, in the corner, was a decayed body, little more than a pile of bones, under a black hat and old blue jeans. The skull rested on a bed of long, white hair.
“We need to burn those!” I said. “Hurry!” I pulled a ratty old blanket off the mattress.
“Lyla!” I called out again. We were quiet. I held my breath, straining to hear. There was no answer. I kneeled down near the body, and Lucas did the same. Together, we put the remains onto the blanket and bundled it up. Lucas carried the blanket and its contents into the kitchen and placed it on the floor. We heard the scream again.
“It’s coming from outside,” I said as I went to turn the knob on the door that led to the porch, but it wouldn’t budge. “It’s locked!”
“Let me try.” He twisted and turned the knob every which way, but it didn’t give. “Back up,” he said, pointing his gun at the lock beneath the knob.
I turned around and gasped. My mother, wraithlike and ethereal, stood before me. “Help Lyla,” she said, her voice little more than a soft breeze through the moss on the Tupelos.
“What is it?” Lucas asked, alarmed.
“My mother.”
“Where?”
“Right in front of us. Don’t you see her?” The door opened before he could answer. I turned to see Ben and Cee Cee on the porch, worried. I turned back to my mother, but she was gone.
“She’s in the smokehouse!” said Cee Cee. “Y’all hurry!”
Lucas carried out the blanket with the body in it and set it down on the porch. The four of us ran out to the back of the cabin and up to the smokehouse. The door was open, waiting for us. I heard a scream again, louder this time. I ran in first, and the door was shut behind me before the others could follow me in. I turned to open the door, but it was locked. I heard Lucas banging on the other side.
“Leigh, get away from the door! I’m going to shoot the lock!” I backed up. He shot at the door. I heard him try to open it, but he couldn’t.
“Aunt Leigh!” I whirled around to see shriveled old meat hanging from panels of rotted wood. There was a table in the center of the room. On it were rusted knives and hooks. Near them was Lyla, strapped down to the table. I ran to her and tried to undo her straps.
“Where is he?” I asked her.
“I don’t know,” she whimpered.
The straps weren’t coming lose. I picked up the nearest sharp object, a rusted knife, to cut them. As soon as I touched it, I had a mental flash of my mother, lying on the floor of the cabin’s kitchen with this very knife in her abdomen. I dropped it as if it were a hot iron branding my palm.
“Aunt Leigh!”
I gathered my composure, picked up the knife and cut her out of the straps. I threw the knife down and helped her off the table. We ran to the door where I could hear Lucas and someone else, possibly Ben, trying to break down the door.
“Get us out of here!” I called to them.
I heard Cee Cee’s muffled voice on the other side. “Wait. Y’all stand back,” she said to them. Then she said something in French, but it was a dialect I didn’t recognize. Certainly not Cajun or Creole or even Parisian. Then the knob slowly turned and the door opened by itself. Lucas’ astonished face matched mine. “What did you do?” I asked Cee Cee as Lyla and I stepped out into the rain.
“I said an ancient French spell to open the door. Like an ‘open sesame.’ Now y’all get out of here! Let me and Ben take care of this.”
We all started running for the porch to get out of the rain. As we rounded the corner, we saw Clothilde and Jonathan under the shelter of the porch. “What are you doing here?” demanded Lucas, furiously, as we joined them on the porch.
“I didn’t come last time, and I lost my daughter. I’m not going to lose Leigh and Lyla, too! I came to help.”
“You had no right brining my son here!”
Jonathan ran up to Lucas and clung to his leg. “Daddy! Miss Clo said everyone’s going to stop the Dark Man!”
“I want to go home!” wailed Lyla.
“One of you, please take Lyla and Jon and get them out of here. I have to stop that thing in there!” I said to them.
“You can’t do it alone,” said Ben. “We all have to work together! Now let’s hurry and start the fire.”
“It’s raining,” said Lucas. “You’ll never get it to light up.”
“We’ll do it here on the porch,” said Cee Cee. She reached into her purse and pulled out some lighter fluid and a box of matches. She doused one side of the porch and then the blanket. As soon as she lit the match, the front door flung itself open and a pair of giant, monstrous hands reached out and pulled me, Lucas, Jonathan and Lyla into the cabin, and the door slammed shut.
The last thing I heard was the four of us screaming. Now I heard nothing. I was sprawled out on a hard surface and the room was pitch black. It felt like I was the only thing occupying space here. I felt no other presence with me. All I heard was my own breathing. I was afraid to speak, afraid that if I made a sound, something I didn’t want to find me would.
“Lyla? Lucas? Jon?” I asked, cautiously. There was no answer. I didn’t even hear the rain on the roof. Am I dead? I wondered. No. I’m not dead. “Lyla? Jonathan? Luke?” My voice was flat, had no echo.
I shakily stood up, reached out for anything to hold onto and had to force my legs to balance; my equilibrium was off from not being able to see or hear. I had never been so terrified in all my life. The nothingness surrounded me, engulfed me in a continual state of the unknown. I could have been in outer space or in a coffin and wouldn’t have known the difference.
I heard a loud bang, and I looked behind me to see that a planet had exploded into a million stars. I’m in outer space, after all. I quickly sat back down on the hard surface beneath me. Why does outer space have a floor? Suddenly the floor gave out from under me. I’m falling. Oh, God, I’m falling! Something’s spinning me around, and I’m falling. I’ll fall forever, through space and time. As I fell, I thought I could hear Lyla and Jon crying from some other realm, a far off place that had no direction or destination. It’s raining in outer space, I thought stupidly. I could faintly hear the light rain outside and—oh, God, what’s touching me? What’s touching my face? Get off of me!
“Leigh?!” I heard Lucas’ voice. I didn’t know why he was yelling at me or why my head hurt or why—
My eyes fluttered open. My head was reeling. I was so dizzy I felt like I could have thrown up. Through the dim light in the kitchen, I saw Lucas kneeling over me, touching my cheek. He looked so worried about me.
“You okay? You passed out for a second.”
Lyla and Jon were still crying. Jon was pressed up against Lucas. I sat up to comfort Lyla, but it was too fast. I felt that feeling like I was falling again and Lucas steadied me in his arms. “You hit your head against the stove. Not a lot of blood, though.”
“Lyla,” I called to her. She crawled over to me and hugged me tightly. She was shaking, and I squeezed her to me as hard as I could. The dizzy feeling was starting to wear off. “Can you open the door?” I asked Lucas.
“No. I tried to shoot the lock, but it won’t budge.” I motioned to him that I wanted to get up and he helped me, never taking his arms from me. Lyla rose with me and Jon with Lucas. Lyla stayed glued to my side, her arms around my hips.
The lantern flickered just then, and the shadows in the room flickered with it. I saw the shadows change suddenly, and they seemed to elongate, to swirl and move, looking like rivulets of black ink. “I’m seeing things. I think I need to lie down again,” I said.
Nancy K. Duplechain - Dark Trilogy 01 - Dark Bayou Page 22
