“Dat’s da spirit,” Jeroboam laughed and chewed the end of the pipe. “Kill her widt my blessing.”
Cassi stood. “I need to go talk to my friend. Which way does she come, when she comes at night?”
“She tie her boat outdere to da pier. Dat’s why I say for you to go by da big tree. Magdalena cannot see your boat. Da cabin block da view.”
She wasn’t sure if she should thank the old man or what. Killing this monster meant killing him, but he said he wanted to die. The whole thing was crazy. The thought crossed her mind this might be some kind of trap, that Max wasn’t anywhere near here, and she’d been lured out here by this sick man for some foul purpose yet to be revealed. But his story was too elaborate, the circumstances too aligned with what she and Max had seen and heard.
She could only hope it would work.
Jeroboam opened the door and led her out into the sunlight. “I wait in da house like I always do. Magdalena will take Max to dat altar, will tie him up, an will cut out his heart. Den she will throw it into da swamp waters and da dark one will wash her in skin an she will be human.”
“Like hell she will,” Cassi nodded curtly to Jeroboam and made her way to the boat to share this load of lovely information with her suspicious mailman who would be just full of “I told you so.”
12.
Night fell like black velvet over the shanty, over the tobacco-spit brown waters of the swamp, and over the little fishing boat hidden on the far side of Jeroboam’s cabin. Troy lay prone in the boat waiting. Cassandra was hidden away on the muddy banks of the bayou, heart pounding, blood beating her eardrums louder than any Voodoo drum. Jeroboam said that his mud mother – the false Magdalena – would come tonight by boat, and that she’d have Max with her.
Now that the moment had arrived, she wasn’t at all sure she was ready.
Cassi clutched the old wood grip of the now sharpened and cleaned knife. It looked a lot different than how she had found it within the walls of the summer kitchen. If Jeroboam’s story was to be believed, Troy couldn’t kill this monster: only she could do that. Magdalena had given her this power when she fornicated with her husband. Jeroboam had imparted the secrets to her and now, it was up to her to end this – before Magdalena ended Max’s life and became a mortal woman of flesh and blood.
Amidst the croaking bullfrogs she could hear the creaking of Jeroboam’s rocking chair rhythmically rocking on the wood floorboards. An owl hooted somewhere in the dense vegetation pressing in on her, surrounding the rickety cabin jutting over the bayou waters. The faint sound of a boat motor tickled her ears. She inhaled sharply.
The motor’s noise grew louder, closer.
Someone was coming.
Cassi could no longer hear Jeroboam rocking. She could no longer hear the chorus of nature. All she could hear was that boat motor cutting through the water drawing nearer with each passing second.
The motor shut off. She heard the clunking of boat against pier. Cassi pushed back the mossy tendrils before her and peered into the night toward the boat. A dot of light from a lantern danced in the ebon gloom. A shadowy figure, twisted and lurching, heaved something from the bottom of the boat and slung it over its shoulder. Struggling, the dark shape – which Cassi assumed to be Magdalena – half crawled and half stepped from the depth of the boat up onto the wobbling pier. The light from Jeroboam’s windows illuminated the area around the cabin so Cassi had a clear view of the scene.
A hideously deformed, leathery-looking woman walked laboriously under the weight of her burden – a hogtied Max – toward the stone altar behind the cabin. Max writhed and rocked in an attempt to knock Magdalena off balance, but she appeared possessed of some supernatural strength to remain so unaffected by his struggle. She continued to her destination. There, she dumped him unceremoniously onto the stone table.
Max, gagged, protested loudly and unintelligibly. He lay groaning on the hard surface.
The naked woman danced around the altar, her creamy skin glowing brighter in the light of the lanterns and moon. She used the lantern to ignite several braziers positioned around the area and the site instantly radiated with light. Cassi could see Max clearly now, his bathrobe torn and caked with mud, his face battered and bruised. The gag had cut into the sides of his mouth and blood, both fresh and dried, smeared his face.
“Oh Seigneur sombre du marais! Je vous donne coeur de cette man et sa force de vie! m'entendre! m'entendre!” Magdalena undulated, and the sounds of Voodoo drums began to resonate from out of the bayou.
Cassi felt the hairs on her arms stand and the feeling of evil washed over her. Something was out there in the swamp – something sinister and unnatural. She shuddered.
Magdalena gripped a big hunting knife in one fist, danced, writhing in the dirt, wallowing on her naked belly, her flat, dried teats flopping as she rolled to her back, pushed her buttocks from the mud and gyrated her hips in the air sexually.
“Me prendre un sombre! Me rendre votre femme! Me donner chair et me donner du sang!” Magdalena shouted, smearing mud over her face, and through her matted hair. She rose from the dirt, her body changing shape. No longer was she the form of a woman, but her twisted skeleton began to contort and elongate, stretch and spasm until her arms grew long, her legs grew awkwardly bent and talons sprang from her fingertips. Her hair moved around her monstrous skull as if alive. Magdalena began to jump and scream in some sort of native-like ritual around the altar. Max lay frozen, his face rigid with terror.
The waters around the cabin began to churn and bubble. Jeroboam ran from inside, out onto the pier and then quickly onto land. The little shanty pitched to one side dramatically and Cassi wasn’t sure if the ancient hovel would remain standing or if it would sink to the bottom of the swamp, engulfed in a huge bubble of swamp sludge.
The invisible, supernatural drums beat louder. Magdalena danced wildly, in a frenzy, white froth foaming from her mouth from between jagged, black teeth. She leapt onto the stone altar like an animal. Taking Max’s bathrobe in hand, she hacked at the fabric with the knife and tore it in shreds from his body, leaving him shivering and naked on the cold stone. Frantically the mud mother grabbed clumps of Max’s hair and chopped it from his head with the glistening blade. Max fought to get away but only succeeded in pounding his own head onto the stone, temporarily dazing himself with pain.
Magdalena tossed the handfuls of hair into the air. Standing over Max, she crouched like a wild woman, gibbering madly. She turned toward the waters, shrieking, “Come to me, dark one! Make me your woman! I give you dis man’s heart an’ you give me flesh and blood! I give da masta to da masta!” She brandished the knife above Max’s chest.
Troy chose that moment to start up the motor.
The whirl and sputter seemed deafening to Cassi. Magdalena screeched and sprang from the altar to the muddy ground, assuming a defensive crouch, knife ready to strike. Still holding Max’s hair in her hand, she tossed it into the nearest brazier – the smell of burning hair tinged the air.
Cassi moved closer, careful to stay behind dense blankets of Spanish moss and low hanging branches. As Magdalena ranted, Cassi crept closer, until she was behind the little outhouse directly behind the doppelganger.
Magdalena faced the stirring brown waters of the swamp, her curved, hunched back to Cassi. As Magdalena raised her arms skyward, Cassi sprang from her position and ran toward the mud woman – knife held outstretched like a spear.
The mud woman whirled around, and as she did so, she unknowingly plunged herself onto the end of the familiar knife. A look of horror crossed her face. She dropped the knife she had in her own hand and clutched the simple wood handle of the one thrust into the spot where a heart should beat, but didn’t. “My knife!”
“Not yours, harlot! The real Magdalena’s knife!” Cassi shouted at the creature.
Magdalena dropped to her knees and fell backward into the mud. She began to writhe.
Cassi backed away, puffed up her cheeks and blew out a forceful breath, bendin
g over to grip her knees and just breathe. She felt faint from exhaustion and from the swamp gases rising up from the troubled waters and drifting over the densely vegetated shore.
Jeroboam walked over to the stone altar and smiled a peaceful smile.
“I want--” he started, but a primal shriek rent the night and the doppelganger jumped to its feet, and onto the altar. The mud mother yanked the knife from her own chest, raised her arm to plunge the knife into Max’s chest, and then watched as her own arm crumbled before her like dried mud, and cracked away in a crust sprinkling all over Max’s naked body.
“No!” Magdalena shouted as her body began to disintegrate and fall, no longer held together in a solid mass of false flesh by the Voodoo magicks that had kept her in such a human form for so long.
Max rolled from beneath her, falling off the far side of the altar, landing with a loud thunk on the ground. He moaned loudly.
Magdalena’s dusty remains began to bubble and hiss, oozing into a puddle of putrid swamp sludge.
Jeroboam retrieved the knife from the pile of dirt that once comprised his former mud mother and cut the binds from Max’s wrists and ankles. Then he sat on the ground, leaning against the altar.
Jeroboam smiled at Cassi. “You did it, girl. You set me free. Merci. Merci.” Jeroboam leaned his head back, took one last shuddering breath, and then -- before Cassi could make any comment or express any of the strange sadness she felt for him -- his head dropped forward onto his chest, the life draining out of him at last.
Cassi looked down on Jeroboam’s peaceful remains for a moment, then blinked at the night around her. Steadying herself, she allowed herself to believe that the doppelganger was indeed dead, and that this crazy, fucked up ordeal was over. At least for her. She looked toward Max, lying shivering on the ground. He whispered to himself rapidly, not making any sense. His fingers twitched as he clutched and unclutched his hands. Max stared at her, but didn’t seem to see her. He didn’t make any attempt to move, sit up or stand. He simply lay, naked in the dirt, hissing unintelligibly.
The waters calmed, the frogs and toads resumed croaking, and Troy brought the boat up to the pier beside Magdalena’s vessel.
“Come on, baby. It’s okay now. It’s all okay.” Cassi slid an arm around Max, pulled him from the mud, and helped him toward the boat.
Troy peeled off his camo shirt, leaving himself in a white, sweat-soaked undershirt, and helped the whispering Max into the sleeves. They helped him onto the bottom of the boat. Max sat there, hugging his arms to his chest, shivering, muttering quietly and incessantly to himself as Cassi and Troy looked worriedly on. Cassi exchanged a concerned look with Troy.
The little boat moved away from the cabin, abruptly lifted on a massive wave as an unexplained force pushed the waters toward the shore, engulfing the ancient shanty, and pulling it down into the murky waters. Jeroboam’s little shack slid beneath the wave in a violent burst of water, spewing broken furniture, shattered wood planks and assorted relics from a long-lived life into the air, over the muddy banks and littering the sludgy water.
The boat moved farther away into the darkness of the swamp, lanterns and the single headlight shining over the path before them. Cassi looked back toward the cabin site: the fires of the remaining braziers glowing like dancing orange orbs against the blackness of the night.
“Let’s go home, Troy,” she said. “Home to Sorrow Creek.”
The End
About the Author
Christopher Fulbright is a former reporter turned technical writer whose stories have received honorable mentions in The Year's Best Fantasy & Horror and Best Horror of the Year.
Angeline Hawkes is a Bram Stoker-award nominated author with a B.A. in Composite English Language Arts. Individually and collaboratively they have been published by Delirium Books, Dark Regions Press, Bad Moon Books, Chaosium, DarkFuse, and many others.
For more information, visit their website at http://www.fulbrightandhawkes.com/. Sign up for their newsletter for the latest news and special offers.
Other eBooks by these Authors
Novels
Scavengers
Novellas
Then Comes the Child
Blood Coven
Black Mercy Falls
Sorrow Creek
The Devil Behind Me
Elderwood Manor
Links to buy these ebooks in all available formats can be found at http://fulbrightandhawkes.com/?page_id=2
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