03 Graveyard Dust bj-3

by Barbara Hambly

  He mixed water with egg whites-throwing the yolks and shells on the floor in his fumbling haste, his vision starting to play tricks on him in the wavering candle light-and gulped them down, heroic quantities. He gagged, then induced vomiting and purging, as he had done for Hannibal.

  The fiddler lay stretched now on a blanket on the floor, like a drowned elf dredged from a gutter, wet with sweat and spilled water and slime. In the jittering dimness January thought for a moment that he saw, not the bones staring through the skin, but the man's skeleton itself, a nest of snakes creeping in the cage of the ribs...

  He blinked, and jerked his head, and found himself lying on the floor with spilled saline solution and nastiness everywhere about him. Doggedly he prepared an other draught for himself, fighting the pains in his belly, his thighs, his arms where they'd been twisted nearly from their sockets last spring... Had old Mambo Jeanne at Bellefleur been right, all those years ago, about certain poisons making snakes and lizards grow under your skin? He looked down at his arms and found that the old woman had indeed spoken true: His skin was moving with them, bulging out or twisting in long tracks. He forgot the draught, stared fascinated, horrified... And then he was in Paris. It was late, past two, the dead slack leaden hour of exhaustion, and stars burned, opium-crazed diamonds in a sky black with the velvet abysses of infinity. Summer heat like boiling glue, and the stenches of Paris in the summer; and every light was quenched, in mansion, flat, attic, and hovel. Where he was coming from he didn't know-the Marais Quarter across the river, he thought. Someone's Christmas Ball. And he saw Death, skipping and dancing down the street. Death looking just like He should, with his black cloak draped over a raggedy mess of stained wool shroud, and bony feet clattering a little on the slippery cobbles. Death messier than engravings portrayed, Death the way January was familiar with him from years at the Hotel-Dieu, shreddy flesh dribbling gobbets of black fluid and maggots.

  Death with his attendant skeletons-revolting in their stained shroudless nakedness. They knocked on doors, climbed through windows where no one would open, came out of alleyways, dragging men and women by the wrists or arms or hair. Fat butchers and slender milkmaids, a nightshirted child clutching a carved wooden horse, stockbrokers digging through their pockets looking for coin to pay off those grinning Guede... The coins fell through the bony fingers and clattered ringing on the stones. Some people came dancing, skipping. Ayasha tossing her scented hair. A woman leaned out a garret window and called her son's name, frantic with weeping. The boy didn't hear.

  Carts rolled behind them, heaped with bones. Baron Cemetery was driving one of them, tipped his hat to January, and winked behind his spectacles. "Care to come?" His voice was creaky, shrill and hoarse. "Free ride. Good to see an old friend from home."

  "I can't." January's words came out harsh and whispery as the skeleton god's. "I have to find Olympe." The boy who was dancing beside the cart turned, waved to January, and held out his hand. January saw it was Gabriel.

  "Gabriel, come back!" He stepped off the curbstone, something he knew he should have known better than to do. His feet sank ankle-deep in the black mud of Paris. "Gabriel, don't go! " Gabriel only waved again, with one hand. The other gripped the hand of a young man, dancing, too, a slim light-skinned youth with a black trace of mustache, whom January knew was Isaak Jumon. January tried to follow but the ooze held him fast. "Gabriel..." "He'll be all right," said Mamzelle Marie. January shook his head. "The Baron," he tried to explain. He climbed the stairs in the Paris house, put his hand on the doorknob... "Who?" asked Hannibal's voice.

  "The Baron," explained Mamzelle Marie. January opened the door, and saw Ayasha sitting on the bed, sharing a glass of wine with the Baron Cemetery, who had one bony arm around her waist. "Don't look at me," said the Baron. "I haven't got him in my pocket." And he dug in his pocket with one hand to prove it, coming up only with some shards of broken crockery, such as the slaves at Bellefleur had stuck around graves. Then he laughed and dragged Ayasha down onto the bed, lying on top of her while she giggled and squirmed, pulling up her skirts, her long hair trailing onto the floor.

  "Baron Cemetery," explained Marie Laveau, unnecessarily, January thought. "The lord of the spirits of the dead." (You don't have to tell me that!) She touched January's hand.

  He was lying in his own bed, he thought, and felt as if he were coming off a ten-month drunk.

  Cholera?

  The image returned to him, of a rat dying by candlelight on a table.

  "I have snakes in my arms," he said.

  He opened his eyes. The light in the room was gray. Mamzelle Marie sat on the edge of his bed, a damp sponge in her hand. Behind her stood Rose with a basin, and Hannibal, like a handful of fence pickets rolled in an undertaker's coat, slouched in the chair by the desk.

  "I took them out," said Mamzelle Marie.

  "Thank you." January drew in his breath, and let it out. His whole insides seemed to be raw and there was a curious quality to the room and to everything he saw. Mamzelle, Rose, Hannibal, the books piled on the desk. As if without warning they could mutate into other forms, or prophesy unknown events.

  "Dr. Yellowjack kidnapped Gabriel," he said, as if he'd read it all in a book and needed only to relate it to these people for them to understand. "He got word to Olympe that unless she confessed the murder-and implicated Celie, I think-he'll kill him."

  "If he hasn't done so already," said Rose. She still wore the neat dress of pink faille she'd had on in the courtroom, the sleeves rolled back over her arms and dark with wet.

  "No," said Marie Laveau. "He wouldn't. Not unless he has to. Not until Olympe is hanged. She's a mother, and she has the Power. Olympe would know."

  January sat up. The room darkened, then shivered with a kind of aerial fire, and it seemed for a moment that he saw two chicken feet gripping the end of his bed, as if an invisible chicken sat there. He rubbed his eyes, and they vanished.

  "Where would they be?"

  They looked at one another: Mamzelle, Hannibal, and Rose.

  It was Mamzelle who replied. "The house by the bayou." She turned to Rose. "That policeman wasn't there yet?"

  Rose shook her head. "He wasn't there two hours ago," she answered. "I'll go again."

  "Two hours?" January blinked at the room around him. By the light it was only an hour or so after dawn. "It's close to six." Hannibal's voice was the whisper of scar tissue. And, when January's brows pulled together, trying to calculate sunrise and time, "Six in the evening. You've been off your head for most of the day."

  "Moon won't rise till near midnight," said Mamzelle Marie. "There's a mist in the air. It'll be bad later, by the bayou. Best we go now while there's some light. Can you stand?"

  "I think so."

  Rose modestly turned away and stepped through the door onto the gallery while January got up;

  Mamzelle merely handed him his shirt. As his mind cleared a little January realized it was indeed evening, but the equivocal light left him confused. He felt weak, and caught himself on the back of Hannibal's chair. On the narrow desk lay a newspaper, open to the second page. SENSATION IN THE COURT, announced the header at the top of the column. And, smaller, VOODOO

  CONFESSES HEINOUS CRIME.

  "What was it?" He made a mental note to buy serious gris-gris from Mamzelle, if she hadn't already put a fix on Burton Blodgett. "In the food, I mean?"

  "The world's full of things it could have been." Marie Laveau set his boots down in front of him.

  The room, he saw, had been cleared and cleaned. It smelled of burned herbs now, and soap.

  "Maybe two or three together. Fricasee, they call it in Haiti, or akee. It was one of those they brought over from Africa. It takes time to act, so there'd be none to point and say, 'This man was poisoned.' They'd only say it was the cholera, and run away." She brought a cup over from the desk, and held it out to him. Sweetness and salt, soothing as it went down. Some of the strangeness seemed to go out of the room, as if a necessary ba
llast had been added to his brain.

  "If I'd eaten as much of the stuff as you had, I'd probably have been dead when you got back," said Hannibal in his thread of a voice. "I still don't think I'll ever be able to look at beans and rice again, which is a pity, since some weeks that's all I live on. 'nocrcov Eyw xpEi,av ovx?xw', and I suppose Socrates ought to know. Are you sure our friend didn't put a hex on Bella's room as well as yours?"

  "Rose," said Mamzelle, as January dug under the mattress for the pistols and the powder flasks he'd taken from the corpse of Killdevil Ned. While he was checking the loads he heard her go on,

  "If you can't find this Shaw at the Cabildo, go to M'sieu Tremouille's house..." January's hands shook as he thrust pistols and flasks through his belt, slung the spares around his neck on their long piratical ribbons.

  ". a child been kidnapped, held at Dr. Yellowjack's house on the bayou. Tell him Yellowjack will kill the boy..."

  A skinning-knife in his boot and another in his belt. He'd be hanged, he reflected bitterly, if he was seen with this much weaponry on him. He could hear Cut-Arm's laughter now.

  "Tremouille's a smart man, and he's no coward." Looking around, January saw that Mamzelle Marie had kilted her bright skirt high, as she had the previous after noon to trek through the cipriere. "If this Shaw isn't there, Tremouille's the best we can do."

  If Shaw wasn't there, thought January, the chances that any of the other Guardsmen would be bright enough-or have sufficient woodcraft-to rescue Gabriel before the wangateur killed him were slim.

  The voodooienne turned back from the door as Rose's shoe heels clattered away down the steps.

  Her long coppery fingers curled around the crucifix at her breast. "Virgin Mary, Mother of God," she said softly, "take us there safely." Then she snapped her fingers and made a sign with her hands, and spit into the corner. "Papa Legba, who has the keys to all doors, we need your help, too."

  TWENTY-THREE

  Mamzelle Marie took him by a different route into the cipriere this time. They passed through the Protestant cemetery where the smudge fires burned sullen in the dusk against the rising of the night miasma from the swamps, across the marshy verge of shacks and sheds and poverty-stricken immigrants, and straight into the trees. The failing light lent a weird cast to the gloom beneath the canopy of oaks and pines. Cypress trunks took on the appearance of men in that queer twilight, beards of moss the semblance of tree trunks or stands of laurel, water the look of solid land. The air felt close and thick in the lungs here, and mosquitoes swirled in stinging clouds.

  "Judge Canonge spoke to your sister after the court was cleared, trying to get her to explain." Marie Laveau paused to get her bearings, then pressed through a stand of hackberry that hid a thread of game trail, pale in the dusk. "Even he smelled rotten fish. She said only she'd repented of her deed and of the lies she'd told."

  January whispered, "Damn." He could see Olympe sitting there, with a face like a mechanical doll's, repeating over and over again, I poisoned him. I poisoned him. "There's ways of getting messages into the jail, even though none from the outside are allowed in. It wouldn't have been hard."

  "It wouldn't have been hard, either, to poison Celie in the jail," said January. "She has-we have-her father to thank there, for keeping her so close. And of course if Olympe had died in jail-Olympe the voodoo, Olympe the idolater-there would have been less of an outcry at the trial. Celie might have gotten off, and if Isaak had passed word to her somehow, spoken of what she'd heard."

  From the edge of the trees to the island in the bayou it was only a mile or so, and the night was a still one. Mamzelle Marie led the way cautiously, and January flinched at each sound. While it was true that Dr. Yellowjack would hang on to his hostage as long as he could, it was also true that in kidnapping the boy he had provided a clinching witness to the existence of Lucinda Coughlin's plot, and to his own part in helping her.

  They came on the house over the rear of the island, following the low ground, the wet ground, where they could. Mosquitoes and gnats swarmed around their ears and nostrils, but once Mamzelle touched January's arm, and pointed out to him a cluster of tin pans and tubs, dangling together in a spiderweb of fishing line, halfhidden among the beards of Spanish moss. January followed her gesture down, and saw where the line was stretched among the root ridges of the higher ground, where the insects were less. Between the creeper and fern, and the gathering mists, it would have been impossible to avoid giving the alarm.

  "He has spells, too, that keep the snakes angry hereabouts," murmured Mamzelle Marie. "He says they'll call out to him, and tell him who's coming. But they won't speak of me. Or of you, if you're with me. Still it's best we be careful."

  January wondered if the voodoo-man claimed the allegiance of the local alligator population as well. The light was going, and he probed each pool and reed tuft with his stick, poison-dreams still whispering and buzzing in his head. He felt at any moment that the white eyeless thing of his dreams would come sloshing up out of the depths. Red eyes seemed to watch from the shadows, eyes that were gone when he turned his head. Once he thought he saw a huge water moccasin curled on a log, and when he met the serpent's copper eyes it flicked its tongue at him and slipped down and into the cattails, hastening away toward the house. Maybe it did have a message to deliver.

  In any case the house was dark-shuttered-when January and Mamzelle Marie finally saw its pale bulk shimmer amid the trees. Woodsmoke lay thick on the clammy air. Gone indoors? wondered January. Driven to stifling in the house by the mosquitoes? They circled the house once, straining their eyes through the cinder-dark dusk to see if anyone watched from the gallery. It seemed to be true that snakes in the thickets behind the house were angrier, for a small one sank its fangs into January's boot, and a few minutes later a larger one struck at him from a hole under a log. "You stop that," ordered Marie Laveau, her hand darting out and catching the serpent behind the head as it tried to retreat once more. The reptile lashed and struck at her wrist, scratching the copper skin, though January guessed it had spent its poison on his boot-leather. It was only a young one, too, barely the length of a biblical cubit.

  Marie Laveau held it up, and stared into its yellow eyes. "You got no respect," she said softly, as the serpent's coils circled her arm. "You tell your friends Mamzelle Marie is here, Mamzelle Marie who walks on glass and golden spikes. You tell your friends Damballah-Wedo is my husband, and I have coffee with John the Revellator two afternoons a week, who drove off snakes out of his coffee cup when King Herod tried to poison him. You tell them, leave me and my friends alone."

  She set the snake on the ground, and watched it as it slipped away. "It'll be a while," she said, "before they all get the word."

  Carefully, they moved in toward the house. A boat was tied at the bayou, where the dancing had been. Heart hammering, January crept through the water and the reeds-this was the kind of place where alligators loved to lie-cut the line, and let it drift away. On the ground where the last light fell he could see the verves scratched into the dirt, sprinkled with rum and fresh blood. As soon as there was an inch of cover he crawled from the water and crept along the thickets to where Mamzelle Marie waited, probing always ahead of him with his stick. A turtle studied him from a log. He wondered if he should hand it a calling card to take in. "I see no track around the house going away," she said in a breath. "He's in there." January pulled on his shirt again, and looped the ribbons of the pistols once more over his neck. "Then let's have a closer look." He spotted where the carry beams went, that bore the weight of the gallery's planking, gritted his teeth hard, then lifted Mamzelle Marie over the rail and onto one. She was a tall woman and built strong, but still her weight was a good sixty pounds less than his, less likely to make the boards creak. From the woodpile he handed her up thick shakes and bars cut from timbers, and these she used to bar the shutters from the outside. They were latched from within, but at the house's rear was a window where the shutters did not fit. Even from g
round beyond the edge of the gallery, January could see the crack was big enough to get Killdevil's skinning-knife through and flip the catch. He waited until Mamzelle Marie came slipping back, then vaulted silently over the rail. He crossed the gallery in a stride, flipped the catch, hurled the shutters back, and stepped through, pistol in hand.

  There was only the single room, and that room Helldark and choking. Smoke grabbed his throat, shoved hot coals up his nostrils, acrid, sweet, stinking. By the dim glow from the vents in an American iron stove he got an impression of chairs, and a table scattered with pots and jars, open as if in haste. A hole in the ceiling showed where a loft was, but there was no ladder beneath it. He stepped in, called out, "Yellowjack!" and behind him he heard Mamzelle Marie scream his name.

  The shutters banged shut behind him and he heard the crash of a bar. The next moment a pistol bellowed, inches from the other side of the wall, and something fell on the gallery, and he knew he'd been trapped. They'd been trapped.

  Footsteps fled across the gallery, creak-creak-creak, and were gone. He shouted "Mamzelle!" but there was no sound, and dizziness broke over him, choking, swooning. The smoke, he thought.

  Poison.

  He flung himself against the shutters, but the wood was stout. Images swirled in his mind, and he thought he heard laughter: thought he saw Death dancing a jig in the corner of the room, with his black cloak and his fiddle; thought the shutters rattled, where the white thing pawed and picked to get in. For a panicky moment he started to move the table, to block it out, then thought, Don't be a fool, and braced himself against the table, brought up his right leg and kicked with all the strength of his back and hips at where the bar would be.

  He felt it jerk and give.

  Voices whispered in his mind. Ayasha's laughter: Eh, malik, you think you're stronger than oak beams and steel? And the soft polite tones of Delphine Lalaurie, the most terrible woman he had ever known: I'm afraid you haven't learned your lesson very well M'sieu Janvier, clear as if she stood with her whip in hand in the dark behind him still. Things crawled and crept and rustled among the pots on the table-he thought he saw a thousand tiny snakes wriggling toward him, each with a paper bearing his name in its mouth.