by Cave, Hugh
Had she, too, used some kind of oil or lotion? She hadn't when touching his face—he was sure of that—but perhaps before easing herself onto her knees before him . . .
No, no. The magic was in her bare hands, not from any tube or bottle. Nor could she have used leaves or roots, as certain practitioners of obeah were said to do at times. And his hands, his face, his arms, all were as good as new again.
"Better?" She looked up at him.
"Thank you, yes. Much better."
"Please come and see Gerald, then." Rising, she turned to the brown woman with the far-apart eyes. "He fell asleep again just after you left, Bronzie. Perhaps when we wake him this time, he will be himself."
Peter followed them into the bedroom. On the bed, wearing the same pajama bottoms, Bronzie's son lay on his back with his eyes closed, the lamplight yellowing his face and chest. Relaxed and breathing gently, he seemed to be at peace now. Mother Jarrett leaned over him and touched him on the forehead.
His eyes opened—large, dark brown eyes that seemed to have trouble focusing on the face above him. His lips parted and he licked them. "Please," he said in a pleading voice. "Oh, do, sir, let me go!"
"Gerald," the tall woman said quietly, "where are you?"
"It dark but green down here. It cold. . ."
"Where are you?" Mother Jarrett asked again.
"Me don't know. It under the ground and them won't let me out. It cold and wet, like Riversink . . ."
The tall woman looked at Bronzie. "Riversink?"
"He must mean Riversink Cave near Waldon, where my sister lives," Bronzie said. "The boys went into it once when we were visiting her. They were young then, and it frightened them."
"You're in a cave, Gerald?"
Sobbing now, the boy only repeated, "It cold, and them won't let me out."
"Who won't let you out?"
"Me don't know who them is. Them come in the green dark and talk. Them want me must do something."
"Why don't you do it, then, and get out of there?"
"No, no!" His voice was almost a scream. "Me can't do it! It not right!" His arms came up, flailing, and he seemed to be trying to drive something or someone away from him. "Leff me alone!" he shouted. "Leff me alone! Me won't do it!"
Peter stepped forward to Mother Jarrett's side. Was the boy still asleep, he wondered, even though his eyes were wide open? Was he talking in his sleep, not knowing what he was saying? If so, the dream must be terrifyingly real. There were tears in his eyes now and his whole body was violently jerking.
With a questioning glance at the two women, Peter laid a hand on the lad's bare chest. It was cold and damp, though the room was hot. The taut skin was rough with goose pimples.
Experimentally, Peter said sharply, "Gerald! Do you know who I am?"
The eyes focused on him. "Mr. Peter?"
"Now look around this room. Tell me where you are."
Gerald struggled to a sitting position and gave the room a thorough scrutiny. "It—my own room, suh?"
"It is. So what's all this about your being in a place that's cold and wet, like Riversink Cave?"
"Huh?"
"Don't you remember what you said to us just now?"
The boy's face had gone blank. He looked at his mother, at the tall woman in the white robe and head-cloth, then back at Peter. He shook his head. "Did me say something wrong, suh?"
Peter stepped back. "Bronzie, do you suppose he actually is hungry? Could that explain some of it?"
"No, squire. He ate a whole dish of stew peas less than an hour ago. He can't be hungry after that."
"Gerald, are you hungry? Do you want some food?"
"No, suh. Me don't want nothing."
"Wherever he was," Mother Jarrett said quietly, "he is not there now, it seems. This is the way it has been, Mr. Sheldon, all through last night and today."
"The hallucinations come and go?"
She nodded. "And I think I will ask you a favor, if I may."
Impressed again by the forcefulness of her black-opal eyes, Peter returned her gaze and waited.
"I think he should not remain in this room where these fantasies can steal in upon him, Mr. Sheldon. Do you suppose you could let him return to work tomorrow? And put him with others, so he will have someone to talk to?"
Peter thought about it while the three of them watched him. Not trying to hide his uncertainty about the wisdom of it, he said at last, "Well, there are some men weeding Field One, by the gate. I suppose if anything went wrong there, they could get word to me fairly fast."
"Thank you, squire!" Bronzie Dakin said with feeling.
But if anything does go wrong, Peter thought, I may lose some of my best workers. Those are the men who refused to go with the soldiers.
He was committed now, though. Turning to the boy on the bed, he said, "You hear, Gerald? You can join the others in Field One at the usual time tomorrow." That would be eight o'clock.
"Yes, Mr. Peter."
"See that you behave yourself, now. I don't want any trouble."
"Yes, suh."
"Above all, don't discuss with the others what you've been telling us here. You understand?"
The boy nodded, his far-apart eyes unblinking as his gaze remained fixed on Peter's face. Peter turned away, and the two women followed him into the front room. There he said to Bronzie, "I'll try to keep an eye on him," and to the tall one in white, "How long will you be staying here, Mother?"
"As long as I am needed, Mr. Sheldon."
"Praise the Lord," murmured Bronzie.
Peter solemnly shook hands with them and departed. But on the steep uphill walk back to the Great House, through a warm darkness rich with the smells of earth and growing things, he wondered again whether he had been wise in agreeing to let the twin of missing Georgie Dakin return to work in the morning.
12
I WONDER IF CORALINE COULD HAVE PUT SOMETHING in those sandwiches."
Peter said this to Edith Craig on the Great House veranda after his return from Bronzie Dakin's. The power plant filled the night with its usual low humming, but the windows of Alton Preble's room were dark now.
"Yes," he continued, "I can't help wondering if Coraline . . . I don't mean intentionally, of course. But food is sometimes a problem here, with the nearest real stores eighteen miles away in Wilton Bay. It's just possible the ham in those sandwiches had been around too long."
"Are you serious, Peter?"
No, not really, he thought. But he had to suggest some sort of explanation for what had happened at the John Crow's Nest, or she might be frightened into leaving. Turning on his chair, he looked at her. "Why shouldn't I be serious? I've been thinking about this since it happened, as I'm sure you have. There must be some logical answer, Edith."
"Why didn't you say this at dinner, when we were trying to tell Alton what happened?"
"Because at that time I couldn't think of anything a lawyer might accept as reasonable. Anyway, he didn't seem too concerned."
"He was, though. When we were walking in the gardens, it was all he talked about."
"At dinner he was more interested in what he'd discovered in the books."
That, at least, was true. The one thing on Preble's mind at dinner had been, apparently, the fact that Armadale was earning no money. "You have all this coffee planted, but the returns don't begin to pay expenses," he'd said. "I find this disturbing."
"We began to plant coffee here only five years ago." "Meaning?"
"At this altitude, over three thousand feet, a coffee tree can take four years or more to come into bearing in our kind of soil. The only trees that have produced any cherries so far are those we planted the first year. Naturally the return hasn't been enough to offset the cost of caring for the whole place."
Alton Preble did not like to be told to think again, it seemed. His long face registered displeasure before, with a shrug, he said, "Are you saying Armadale won't show a profit until everything you've planted comes into bearing?"
<
br /> "Not that. By the time the second year's trees are producing—with next year's crop, that is—we should be in the black."
" 'Should be'?"
"Nothing in farming is certain. Especially in the tropics."
With a shake of his head Preble had looked across the table at Edith. "For the life of me, Edith, I can't understand why your father thought this a wise investment."
"I don't believe he thought of it as an investment at all," Peter said.
"How in the world did he think of it, then?"
"He was a man with a streak of adventure who had spent most of his life in the humdrum business of banking. When he was given a chance to buy Armadale and restore it, his imagination took over."
To Edith the barrister said dourly; "Do you agree with that, my dear?"
"Yes, Alton, I think I do."
"I must say I never knew that side of your father. If there was such a side."
"Did you ever look at the books in his study, Alton?"
"Books?"
"Conrad, Stevenson, Maugham. . . He was fond of fantasy, too. Long before Tolkien won wide recognition, Daddy was telling people about The Lord of the Rings. No,I'm not at all surprised that he bought this property. I'm only sorry he didn't live to see what might be done with it."
"By you?" Preble's long face drooped with displeasure.
She shrugged. "By someone, I'm sure. After the start Peter has made here, it would be criminal not to carry on, don't you think?"
"So long as I'm not the one to do it," the barrister grumbled. "I've a law practice to look after."
That had been the end of the conversation about Armadale. The end of dinner also. The talk had not returned to the strange happenings at the John Crow's Nest, and soon afterward Peter had departed for Bronzie Dakin's house in Look Up.
He said now, "Should we have a go at the kitchen, do you think? See if there's any of that ham left in the fridge?"
Edith nodded, and they went inside together. Flipping on light switches as they proceeded through the house—because Coraline had turned them off when she departed, despite his telling her he would let the power plant run all night with Edith and Preble here—he led the way downstairs to the kitchen. There, a switched-on light revealed a room some twenty feet square with stone walls, a stone floor, and long wooden counters as scrubbed as the deck of an old-time sailing ship.
Stepping past the stove, which functioned on propane gas that had to be trucked up from the Bay, Peter halted before an English fridge that also ran on gas. He opened its door and stooped to peer in.
There were eggs from a man in Cedar Ridge who raised chickens. There were some unrecognizable cuts of pork from an open-air market in Darleyville where goats, pigs, and even cows were dissected with machetes on the weekly market day. The butter came from New Zealand by way of a Chinese-owned supermarket in the Bay. Mustard greens, Swiss chard, turnips, and Chinese cabbage were from Armadale's own vegetable plots. Among these and other items was part of an island-cured ham, wrapped in plastic, on a plate.
He carried the ham to one of the scrubbed counters and unwrapped it.After sniffing it, he silently held it under the nose of his companion. She tested its aroma, too, and shook her head.
"It seems all right to me, Peter."
"To me, too. Still . . ." Sliding open a drawer, he took out a kitchen knife. But when he would have used it, Edith thrust out a hand to stop him.
"Should you?"
"I don't know any other way to find out."
"But—"
"Just enough to taste. Not the amount we ate in the sandwiches. If I try to do anything irrational, you'll be here to stop me."
She watched anxiously as he cut a thin sliver and lifted it to his mouth. He was nervous, himself, as he chewed and swallowed it.
"Does it taste all right?"
"Seems to. I'm suspicious enough at this point not to be certain."
After washing the knife under a tap, he dried it on a dish towel and returned it to the drawer. Then after rewrapping the ham and replacing it in the fridge, he turned to Edith and shrugged.
"I don't feel anything. How about going back upstairs and having a nightcap?"
She nodded. "And then I should go to bed."
Taking some ice from the fridge, he filled two glasses and handed her one. "The liquor's upstairs in the pantry. An awkward arrangement I ought to change but never seem to get around to. Fact is, when you live alone, you don't feel inclined to drink much. At least I don't."
In the pantry he added Scotch to her glass—that was her drink, she said—and St. Alban rum to his own. Scotch, he remembered, was her fiancé's drink, too. On the veranda they sat in the dark with the glasses on the broad, flat arms of their chairs, and looked at the stars, waiting to find out whether the ham he had eaten would have any effect on him.
By the time the drinks were finished he was sure it was not going to.
Edith stood up. "Well, it's been quite a day, hasn't it?"
"I hope it hasn't turned you off. About Armadale, I mean."
"No, I don't believe it has done that. It leaves a lot of questions, though." She could still smile, thank God. "Well, Peter, I'll say good night. Will you show me more of the plantation tomorrow?"
"Of course."
"The river you've talked about? The waterfalls, close up?"
"I'll be glad to."
"Good night, then. And I do hope the ham—"
"I'm fine," he assured her. "Don't give it a thought." And after watching her go along the veranda to the outside door of her bedroom, he headed for bed himself.
13
HIS ROOM WAS AT THE REAR OF THE HOUSE, NOT THE front. Nor was it one of the larger ones. Philip Craig, when living and working in the capital, had frequently come out for weekends, and the best room—the one now occupied by his daughter—had of course been reserved for him. Others, including the one now used by Alton Preble, had been set aside for friends he might bring with him. Still, Peter's room was adequate.
As he undressed in it now he felt comfortably at home, as always. On the walls were framed photographs of his father and mother, and of the Highlands County cattle ranch in Florida where he had grown up. The frames had held faded prints from a Scottish calendar when he arrived at Armadale. His parents had sent the photographs later, at his request.
Another thing that made him feel at home here was a stack of letters, many of them read over and over, in the top drawer of an old cedar chest of drawers. Some were from home, some from college friends both male and female, and some were from a girl named Jennifer who might now be Mrs. Peter Sheldon had he not fallen in love with Armadale. A week's visit had persuaded Jennifer she did not care to live even for a short time at the end of a dirt road in St. Alban's Morgan Mountains. Not even in a handsome old Great House.
Ah, well, his folks approved of what he was doing. Especially his father.
His father. It was odd, but when troubled, he could almost always conjure up a vivid picture of Dad—tall, lean, supple, with his ruggedly handsome face shaded by a cattleman's hat that concealed a shock of reddish hair. The man in the mental picture was usually on the back of a horse, as he was in the photo on the wall.
Mother was somehow less vivid, perhaps from having lived so long in the big man's shadow. But her letters were always full of warmth.
So, too, were the letters from his only sister, Laura. Opening a drawer now, he took out her latest, carrying it to the bed so he could reread it before going to sleep.
"Dear Petey," he read, and laughed at her still calling him that. And then stopped reading, aware that something strange was happening at the windows.
Up to now, the only alien things in his room had been the faint chugging of the power plant and an oversweet smell of night-blooming jasmine from the garden. Now the room was being invaded by tendrils of mist or fog, though there was no breeze to propel them.
He sat up as the mist shut out his view of the walls and closed in on him. What was happen
ing here? A repeat of what had occurred up at the John Crow's Nest? Had the ham been tainted, after all?
Or poisoned?
He could not believe it. His visit to the kitchen with Edith, his dramatically tasting the ham, had been no more than a charade to persuade her to believe that the events of the afternoon had a logical explanation: if not the ham, then something else. Not for a moment had he believed the sandwiches were really the cause of it. But now. . .
The room was full of this swirling, pale green mist, and he was remembering there was something he had to do. Still clutching his sister's letter, he swung his feet to the floor and reached under the bed for his slippers.
Through the whirlpool of fog he groped to the door, which opened onto a central corridor. Still groping, because the fog flowed out with him when the door swung wide, he turned left and made his way to the top of the stairs leading down to the kitchen. His right hand clung to the old wooden railing as he made his way down to that room with the stone floor and scrubbed counters.
Though most of the house lights were still on, he had turned off the one in the kitchen when Edith and he left. After all, neither she nor her fiancé would be going down there at night. Now, feeling as though the walls were crowding in on him, he fumbled for the switch and the sudden brightness caused the walls to recede and let him breathe again. The mist still swirled about him, though, filling the room and half concealing its contents.
What had he come here for? Ah, yes—the fridge. Groping toward it with his hands outstretched, he touched it and found it cold. Should it be this cold on the outside, when the night had been so warm until a few minutes ago? But he himself was so cold he was shivering. Not quite sure what he was doing, but knowing he must do it, he felt his way around to the back of the box.
