03 Graveyard Dust bj-3

by Barbara Hambly

  Big young Pedro, smiling shyly, My mama say, 'Mind your business." Among the pots he saw a carved wooden horse, with flying mane and flowers whittled into it. As he looked the horse got to its feet and began to dance.

  Olympe's voice: "I poisoned him. I poisoned him. But he isn't dead, I know it... "

  And another voice, "Up here! Please, up here!"

  Coughing.

  It was the coughing that made January turn. Fighting panic, fighting terror, still he knew that hallucinations didn't cough. On the table the little snakes vanished. The carved horse lay again on its side, edged with the ruby reflection of the stove's hellish glare.

  "Please!..."

  He dragged the table over to the hole in the ceiling, sprang up onto it. The smoke was worse in the loft, roiling from the stove's broken-off pipe. The young man up there had managed to squirm his way over to the hole, despite the ropes that bound his hands and his feet, so that January nearly tripped over him in the burning dark. "Gabriel," gasped the young man, as January groped for the ropes, for his knife. "He took Gabriel-threw the powders in the fire..."

  January dragged him to the hole-the young man's weight was slight as a girl's-and dropped through, holding up his arms to catch him. There was pain, but nothing like the agony of a month ago, and January silently blessed Augustus Mayerling and his miserable scale weights and beams.

  "He was here?"

  The young man's face was a skull, bare of flesh, save for a little black mustache... Then the vision vanished and revealed in the dim red smolder of the stove the emaciated features of someone who was unmistakably Antoine Jumon's brother.

  "Last night." Isaak coughed again, agonizingly, doubled over and pressed against the table. "Said his mother... Accused..."

  "Save it." January was already beside the stove, but through the rolling smoke he could see the lock that clamped it shut. Dizziness flooded his brain, and it seemed to him that things had begun to crawl from the opened pots on the table, chicken feet scratching across the planks toward him, and every little foul juju ball that had been tucked into the corner of the room. The skin of his belly, his arms, his thighs crept and twitched with the tiny lizards and snakes growing within: He knew if he remained here they would feed on the smoke, grow, and devour him.

  He returned to the shutters, dragging the table back to brace himself-and it seemed to him that the white thing from the swamp, the white thing from his nightmares, gripped it and tugged. You owe me, the thing hissed, looking at January with eyeless sockets, and grinned. You still owe me, for Pedro's death.

  "Let me out," bargained January, panting, "and help me, and I'll pay you what I can. You tell Mamzelle Marie what payment you want-I'll pay."

  But the creature only grinned.

  January turned from it, braced his body against the table, and drove his leg again at the shutters.

  Once, twice, then the wood cracked and he threw himself up against the door, slipped his arm through and shoved the broken bolt aside. Isaak was unconscious already; January dragged him out, and left him propped against the side of the house.

  "He'll head north across Bayou M?tairie," said Papa Legba, leaning against the corner of the house with his keys in his belt and his pipe in his hand. He jerked with the pipe to show the direction. "Woods are thicker on the other side, between the bayou and the lake."

  January remembered Cut-Arm's men, sheltering in the cipriere there.

  "There's gators in the bayou. Yellowjack'll make for the bridge most likely. You can get him there if you hurry."

  "Thank you," January gasped, and ran.

  The mists that had drifted all evening among the trees seemed to thicken and coalesce, although that, decided January, might only be the effect of the poisons in his brain. It was difficult to tell what was real and what was not, but he knew it would be madness to try to find the wangateur's tracks in the woods. He grabbed one of the lanterns that hung on the side of the house, kindled it, and followed the bayou itself, which he knew would lead him eventually to the cleared ground of the Roquigni and Allard plantations, that lay along the M?tairie Road. Even if Dr. Yellowjack didn't try for the bridge he might be more visible from that point, and Papa Legba was correct.

  There would be gators in the bayou. Snakes, too. The voodoo-man would be a fool, to try to cross.

  I'll never make it, thought January, striding as fast as he dared through the creepers and reeds. He has a start on me...

  You'll make it, rasped Legba's voice in his mind. January thought he glimpsed the old man in the mists again, though now he looked more like the battered old statue of St. Peter at the back of St.

  Anthony's Chapel, Heaven's keys dangling from his belt. His face was black rather than white.

  Might so be he's delayed in the woods. You hurry, though.

  January hurried. Sweat poured from him and the blood beat in his head, and around him the woods chittered with ghosts and loa and the twitching white leprous shape of the smallpox god.

  But the bayou lay always to his right. Sometimes there seemed to be something wrong and strange about the water; it glowed with blue light, or ran red like the Nile with blood. The cypress knees thrusting up through it stretched twisty gray hands to him. But he worked his way only a little inland to avoid being grabbed, and kept striding. And always the mist grew thicker, the silence pressing, and even the lantern's glow didn't help him much. I can't, he thought, gasping, his knees weak from the poison, and. Legba whispered, Not far.

  Strength came into him. Sometimes he thought someone else ran with his legs, someone who carried a sword and whose eyes burned with fire.

  A bayou ran in from the west that might have turned him aside. But from that point the lights near the second of the stone bridges was visible, guiding him forward. As he waded through the hip-deep waters under their blanket of fog he heard an alligator bellow, horrifyingly close, and the slip and whisper of water. He scrambled up the bank, stumbling, praying he wouldn't put his hand on a water moccasin, and ran forward again, toward the lights where the Bayou Road crossed the bridge. At the third bridge, where Bayou M?tairie ran into Bayou St. John and the M?tairie Road forked off, he stopped, gasping, leaning on the stone bridge's rail, the clammy fog thick in his lungs and, it seemed to him, the voices that had whispered all around him in the mists fading from his mind.

  He knelt, and scanned the threshold of the bridge. If someone had crossed who'd come through the marshy lands to the west, they'd done so without leaving wet footprints. Shutting the lantern slide, January stepped down from the bridge, panting, and crouched in a clump of pine. In the stillness, and the black thick fog, his mind felt clearer. Had Isaak Jumon, like Papa Legba, been a figment of whatever had been dumped into the stove?

  But the carved horse on the table... the child's toy that Isaak had carved. That told him those final few things he had not known.

  That was what Isaak had seen in Dr. Yellowjack's house on St. John's Eve. He would not even have had to see Lucinda or Abigail Coughlin, although the woman had almost certainly seen him.

  Of course, he'd be horrified to see his uncle's two delicately protected protegees there. Of course he'd risk his own freedom, to go back to town and tell his uncle that the woman and her daughter were there, and in danger...

  But in that case, why wasn't Isaak dead? If in fact he hadn't been a hallucination? Had he been a prisoner there, all those weeks? The idea was surely even more absurd than incarceration in the Jumon town house. January remembered the emaciated face, the way the young man had clutched at the table. Surely Dr. Yellowjack would have been better off to kill him immediately?

  If..?

  A voice screamed in the darkness, "Let me alone! " Hoarse panting breath, and the clash and rustle of young cane trampled. Water splashed. Dr. Yellowjack cried, "Get up and run you young bastard or I'll burn you! I swear I'll tear you to pieces with hot irons..."

  "I am," whispered Ben's nephew's voice, gasping in the last extremities of exhaustion and pai
n.

  "Please... don't..."

  The hissing rattle of cane, the slither of mucky earth. January forced himself to remain still. He knew that if he moved, if he went out into the wilderness of mist and darkness, Yellowjack would hear him, turn aside, and he'd be lost. Only if the wangateur thought the bridge was safe would he cross.

  Papa Legba, lord of bridges... Virgin Mary, help us...

  "Come on!"

  "Please..." A broken whimper that twisted January's soul to hear.

  I'll kill him. For hurting that boy, I'll feed the cat with his heart.

  "Come on!"

  "...coming..."

  He saw them in the mists. Yellowjack had a lantern, the glow of it bobbing, jerking in the choking vapors around them, glinting on the black heron-hackle in his hat. By its light January saw Gabriel, limping, staggering, falling, and trying to rise. His hands were tied behind him, and there was a rope around his neck, a rope that the voodoo-man jerked and dragged as a vicious child would drag at a puppy on a lead. Gabriel fell, sobbing, and braced himself, trying to keep from being strangled as Yellowjack dragged him along the shell path toward the bridge.

  "Get up! " The voodoo-man turned back. January could see he had a knife in his hand. Yellowjack tried to haul the boy to his feet again, but Gabriel was clearly at the end of his strength. The boy half-rose, then, with a cry, collapsed as his left leg buckled beneath him. "Please-my leg..."

  Yellowjack cursed him and stuck the knife in his belt, reached to grab his shoulders with both hands.

  Gabriel writhed like a snake and rammed his head into the man's groin. At the same instant January sprang forward, yelling, "Gabriel! Roll clear!" and flung himself on Yellowjack's back.

  His weight slammed the smaller man to the ground; the lantern bounced away.

  "He's got a poison sticker! " yelled Gabriel from the darkness, and January sprang back as he felt Yellowjack wriggle and lunge. Yellowjack twisted from beneath him and fled up onto the bridge, January ripping loose a pistol from his belt to follow. Yellowjack was yards ahead of him on the bridge, mists already closing around him, when he stopped, and threw up his hands.

  "No!"

  Just for an instant, January thought he saw clearly the silhouette in the darkness and the fog: thought he saw the outline of a top hat, the gleam of spectacles, the white glimmer of bones.

  What Yellowjack believed he saw-Baron Cemetery or something else-January never knew. But the wangateur veered from the end of the bridge where the dark form waited, and flung himself over the edge, into the water. The dark form vanished into the mist again, and January doubled back, sprinting to catch Yellowjack if he emerged from the water on this side of the bayou.

  Mist and water roiled, and he heard another cry. He saw something heave itself from the water on the far side and snatched up the lantern in time to see Yellowjack scramble, stumbling, out of the bayou on the far side, and limp across the marshy ground for the trees, half a mile away.

  He never made it. As January ran across the bridge he saw the man fall, and saw a dark shape stride from the mists toward him, a shape that resolved itself into a tall woman in a tignon with seven points. How either he or Yellowjack could have mistaken her for Baron Cemetery January didn't know-a final dream-shape born of poison and smoke-but when he reached Yellowjack's side, it was indeed Mamzelle Marie who knelt there.

  The wangateur was gasping, clutching at the wet weeds in terror and pain. A knife gleamed in Mamzelle Marie's hand as she looked up at January in the lamp light. "Snake," she said. "In the water." She took January's lantern from him and held it close, and slashed an X in Yellowjack's already swelling arm.

  "He thought you were Baron Cemetery," said January uncertainly. "He saw you in the fog on the bridge." Mamzelle Marie looked up with blood on her lips where she'd sucked clean the wound of its poison. Dried blood crusted her temple where Yellowjack had struck her from the gallery of the house. "I was never on the bridge," she said. "I came around over the bayou a ways back, and through the cipriere."

  January walked back the half-dozen paces required to shine a lucifer's dim quick flare on the bayou. He saw the sleek zigzagged backs, the arrowing ripples of wake as they swam away.

  Water moccasins, two of them, six feet long, the largest he had ever seen.

  Footsteps crunched on the shells of the bridge. The rope still dangled from Gabriel's neck and his hands were still bound but he wasn't limping. In fact he walked with his usual jaunty stride.

  "The Grand Zombi's her friend," said the boy, without a trace of the pitiful agony that had rent his voice only two minutes before. Without a trace of surprise, either. '"Course all the snakes in the bayou would go after Yellowjack, once she told them to. He was really stupid to try and swim."

  TWENTY-FOUR

  Judge Canonge was not best pleased, after a day in the courtroom hearing all those cases left behind by ill or absconding colleagues, to be summoned from his own packing yet again to the Cabildo. Nevertheless, half an hour after Constable LaBranche left the watch room where January, Mamzelle Marie, Gabriel, and Isaak waited, the deep golden voice could be heard through the open doors in the arcade.

  "Ridiculous? Of course it's ridiculous! If the man had had the sense God gave a goat he'd have seen there was something amiss in the confession... What have we here?" The Judge squinted around the grimy semidark of the watch room, then touched his hat brim. "Madame Paris."

  Mamzelle Marie nodded like a queen.

  "Your Honor." The young man got shakily to his feet, aided by the stick January had cut for him out by the bayou. "My name is Isaak Jumon. I understand you have convicted my wife, and this man's sister"-he gestured to January-"of my murder."

  The Judge's dark eyes flicked from Isaak's face to January's, and he remarked, "You again." He looked back at the young marble carver. "You look like you've been buried, anyway. Sit down, for God's sake. LaBranche, get ilris boy some brandy. I never liked that jiggery-pokery with your brother and his mysterious carriage rides in the middle of the night. And I understand some poor bastard has been buried under your name. Where have you been?"

  "In the care of a good couple named Weber." Jumon glanced self-consciously around him at the various guards in the room, then sipped from the glass he'd been handed. "Germans, who spoke no English. They feared moreover they would be sent back to Bavaria if they spoke of my presence in their house. They found me, soaked to the skin and dying, close by the gates of the Old Cemetery, and took me in, though they believed me to be stricken with the cholera."

  "Weber worked with me at Charity early in the month," January explained. He had not been asked to sit, and though his head had cleared considerably with the walk back to town he felt weak and a little shaky, and still half-expected to see snakes moving in the corners when he wasn't paying attention. "Members of the City Council were at pains to impress upon all of us there that there WAS no epidemic, and especially that no mention was to be made of cholera."

  "That idiot Bouille," said Canonge. "As if the pilots of the steamboat on the river don't carry the news. Though with that imbecile Blodgett giving cry in the newspapers I don't blame the Council for acting like a bunch of ninnies. They'd arrest the Samaritan on the road to Jericho for operating an unlicensed hack service, belike. I take it," he added, studying Isaak's drawn face and emaciated shoulders by the glare of the oil lamp in its socket above, "that cholera wasn't your problem."

  Jumon shook his head. "As it happened, I had nursed Monsieur Nogent's wife during the cholera the summer before last. I know the symptoms, and I knew that, similar as my own were, I had been poisoned, I think with arsenic. I was lucky to survive."

  "Do you know who administered the arsenic?"

  Jumon was silent for a time. "I think now that it has to have been Dr. Yellowjack. At the time-and I am ashamed to say it-I thought that it was through some agency of my mother's. I was-I was upset, and very frightened, and I thought all sorts of things about her that cannot have been true. I w
ent to Dr. Yellowjack's house, you understand, to ask his help against her..."

  "Thus putting yourself remarkably in accord with your good wife as to the proper way of dealing with the lady," remarked Canonge grimly. "Far be it from me to speak ill of a man's mother to his face, but Madame Jumon makes Lady Macbeth appear doting by comparison, and amateurish to boot."

  January stepped unobtrusively back to Abishag Shaw's desk, and leaned his weight on the corner of it, his knees abruptly weak. His body ached and although the mere thought of food was nauseating, he felt overwhelmed with a desperate craving for sweets. The air in the watch room felt stifling, like a dirty liquid in his lungs and throat, and he wondered if the hallucinations were returning. Everything seemed suddenly distant, like a Rembrandt painting-the judge's craggy face in lamplight and shadow, the straggling curls of Jumon's hair, the buttons on Gabriel's shirt. "I was naturally appalled-horrified-to see poor young Madame Coughlin in such a place," Jumon was saying. "And her daughter, too. She told me she had come there only to ask Dr. Yellowjack's help. I had not imagined she could be so superstitious as to believe that his potions and gris-gris would 'change her luck,' as she said. She swore that she was perfectly safe, but the more I thought of it, the more uneasy I became. I begged her to do nothing foolish, or without consulting my uncle..."

  Jumon's voice retreated from January's mind, distancing itself, like the disconnected images of lamplight and blackness. "... began to rain as I made my way toward my uncle's house... feared more than anything that that poor woman would be lured or forced into something which would cut her off utterly from the help of decent people... Innocent child..." Innocent indeed.

  "The symptoms struck me halfway there. I guessed at once what they were, from the metallic taste in my mouth, and from all I had heard of the voodoos. Had not Zoe been in the shop itself, sweeping up for my grandmother's new tenants, I doubt anyone within the courtyard would have heard me, for I did not have the strength to turn the gate key. I'm afraid I don't remember much, Your Honor, but I know that twice or three times she went out into the carriageway and listened, fearing that Grandmother would have heard something."