by John Farris
She came back before he put his shirt on and embraced him fiercely, standing eye to eye.
"We haven't said ten words to each other in three hours."
With a pang he noted that her voice wasn't right, a hoarseness from the throttling she'd received, and she was developing the nervous habit of constantly trying to clear her throat
"Not very civilized," he agreed, kissing her. And again.
The truth was they'd consciously, and gratefully, avoided the matters that oppressed them. But their unwillingness to talk seriously now seemed forced, to both of them. The undeniably guilty feeling of time stolen for pleasure, the subtly felt influence of the coming storm, all worked against the mood they were trying to sustain.
Nhora turned away first, looking numb around the mouth, smile barely visible, eyes lonely. She began to dress, standing a little apart from and with her back to him, as if she were shy about the act of covering her nakedness in the bleak, nearly empty space of the long dormitory. Jackson buttoned his own shirt and put on his jacket.
"I'm free, you know," she said, just whispering. "Free to go where I want and with whom I want."
"I hope so."
Thunder; he was feeling light-headed and blamed the sudden drop in air pressure as the storm took shape. He pulled up a wooden chair and sat astride it. "Nhora, about Champ—"
She turned on him with a face he'd seen only once before, when a maid had startled her. "I told you, told you, told you something awful would happen, that he just wasn't right! Now this—" She swiftly shielded her throat with an open hand, stood rigidly staring at Jackson with her teeth bared in an unpleasant way. Then the hand dropped hopelessly and a crushing despair changed her face, pulling all the muscles downward in a mask of heroic lament. "I've had nightmares," she said. "And they've all come true. I saw Nancy lying dead in that motel room long before I heard about it."
"Nhora, did Nancy get in touch with you from Kezar County?"
"No. I didn't hear from her at all this time."
"Could she have called, and could you have driven to Kezar County and found her dead, and then driven back to Dasharoons the same night in such a state that by the next morning you didn't remember having made the trip at all?"
Nhora was very still for an improbably long time. The sun that entered the room was no longer geometrically defined; it flooded now like a rising sea, struck highlights in places he hadn't looked before. The head of a razorback hog was mounted on one wall. Bodiless, the tusker seemed not to have surrendered even in death, and something of his transcendental rage and wildness was repeated in Nhora's brilliantly touched eyes.
A small bird, lost in the light, dived against the unshuttered window, startling them. The bird flubbed briefly at the glass, then got its bearings and flew away. Nhora snatched up her stovepipe boots and stormed away to the door, heedless of splinters this time.
"Have you gone crazy?" she yelled back at Jackson, and went out to the porch.
He caught up to her as she was sitting on the steps pulling the boots on.
"Nhora, I'm sorry."
"What made you bring that up?" she said, still furious, eyes shut as she stomped her left heel securely into the boot.
"I had breakfast with Everett Wilkes this morning. He claims there are members of the Bradwin family who saw you in Kezar County two nights ago."
"Well, he despises me, and he might say almost anything." The right boot went on; Nhora jumped away from Jackson's hand on her shoulder. The impulse to run from him took her well into the clearing before she stopped. She swayed then as if she might faint, cupping her hands to her face.
"God, how can I tell anybody what I'm suffering?"
The heavy noon shade in the clearing had been translated into gloom; the space around them was no longer secluded and inviting, it seemed cavernous and threatened to be uninhabitable. Leaves whipped through the air. The sky was solid brass overhead, purple-dark between the trees. Jackson closed and hooked the shutters, lugged saddle and blanket to the horse and cinched the saddle in place.
When he turned around to call Nhora she was already there, sad taut face again. "Thank you; it's getting bad, I have to get back."
"Nhora, we can tie the horse behind the car, drive slowly."
"I'll make better time across country." She swung up into the saddle, and he handed her the reins. "Are you going to the house?"
"No, I'm out of barbiturates and I need a supply of other pharmaceuticals. I'll take what I want from the clinic and arrange payment later."
"Come as soon as you can!" she urged. She wheeled her horse around and looked up at the sky. "If I get caught in this I'll lay over at the railroad spur, so don't worry." She urged the big horse into a canter, then changed her mind and came back, riding in a big circle around him, horse becoming difficult to hold, side-stepping fractiously with his head thrown back. She leaned over in the saddle, staring at Jackson, face pale with intensity.
"How can I be two people at once?"
"Who's the other one?" he said fascinated, but feeling dizzy again as if the deepening gloom beneath the trees had invaded his mind. He had to turn to keep Nhora in view.
"A horror! A witch. I can't describe her to you, I don't want to try. But I know she doesn't want me to be free."
The stallion suddenly took control, bolting with her, and Jackson fell back, still within an inch of being knocked down and trampled. Nhora hauled on the reins and looked back, frightened: saw that he was all right. Then she let the horse run, they soon flickered out of sight behind a mass of dogwood trees.
Thunder; the rain coming in huge spaced drops, shattering like silent glassware against the stone barbecue pits.
He walked hurriedly to the car, shuddering, then tingling from the charged air, and something else: an overlay of feeling, the kinesthetically explicit memory of lovemaking, the slow exquisite ways she'd turned in his arms, combing out every nerve until he was half-drunk with sexual longing. He experienced a painful sense of loss, of being somehow physically weaker now that Nhora was no longer there. Recalling the fleet, bitter look on her face as she gave her horse full rein, his pain intensified. Not running from him, but as if she'd deliberately doomed herself to a fated course. How can I be two people at once? Did she still feel love for the dead old man, was that what she meant by not being free?
Jackson regretted having let Nhora go until he knew what was on her mind. They could have sheltered the horse inside the lodge, where the accommodations were at stable level anyway. Waited out the storm break there. But he felt it wasn't too late to catch her, persuade her to turn around.
The rain, instead of quickening, had stopped; the air, despite fulminating clouds, was almost windless as the storm mysteriously withheld its power. He reached the car, but a snake was in his way.
Jackson looked absently at it, his mind at a distance. It was a greenish-colored, almost iridescent snake, rather pretty, about two feet long and not poisonous. He sensed that something about the oncoming storm or a recently ingested meal had made it sluggish, unable to head for its nesting place deep beneath the roots of a nearby tree.
Just as he visualized the snake hole and the sinuous passage into dark earth he reached down in a kinds of dreaming daze and picked the reptile up, grasping it firmly with the fingers of his right hand just behind the head. The snake yawned wide but didn't hiss at him as it was lifted. Jackson ran his other hand the length of the sleek body.
Deep in the hindbrain there was a residual warning, a dim shriek: This is terror I'm holding, this is death. But the old, freezing fear no longer seemed believable. What was the harm in holding it? In fact the snake felt good in his hands, compliant: He let it slip through his fingers and twine around his wrist, feeling the smooth contractions, the running wave of energy, his penis throbbing in response, his breathing husky. The head of the snake arrested in air, eyes absorbing him. He felt pleased with them both, his heart at rest, skin just a little chilly because the temperature had continued to fall
. A few, random drops of rain splashed down.
Why had he ever been afraid? He walked across the road in the direction which he knew the revived snake had wanted to go; it glided from his downstretched arm, wriggled a few feet and disappeared into its hole.
Nhora.
Jackson smiled.
He drove back the way he had come, and caught just a glimpse of her, half a mile away in pasture and riding hard, before a wall of gray rain slammed downs cutting off his view.
He intended to intercept her at the railroad spur, where the private car was sitting. In the heavy rain he took wrong turns. After an anxious ten minutes on slick clay he was glad to find the hard road, and a gas station, where he received directions to town.
The worst of the rain had held off until the end of the funeral for Old Lamb, his wife and his granddaughter; the hundred or so mourners were scrambling along the road between the cemetery and the church when Jackson drove by.
He spotted Tyrone walking under an umbrella held by one of the deacons and rolled down his window as he drove abreast of them.
"Tyrone, could I talk to you?"
Tyrone nodded and pointed to the church, a white frame building with a squat bell tower. Jackson parked and ran up the steps. Tyrone joined him half a minute later. They shook hands in the vestibule, rain streaming down Tyrone's face and forming puddles on the worn-out linoleum. Rain was frying loudly on the metal roof.
"Come on to my office, doctor."
Jackson followed him to a narrow book-cluttered room at the back of the church. There was a chamber-pot light fixture, a cracked green shade half drawn over the single end window, a rolltop desk, a wood-burning stove and a scuttle filled with cordwood. A wall clock ticked; it was ten minutes to five.
Tyrone disappeared into a tiny lavatory, emerged shirtless with towels for each of them. He sat down and pulled off his soaked shoes and socks, hung his dark suit coat up to dry. Jackson had a mild case of the shivers and wondered if he was coming down with a summer cold. Tyrone noticed and selected two pieces of wood for the stove. He started a fire. There was a big chipped porcelain coffee pot on top of the black iron stove. Tyrone gave it a shake and set it back down again.
"Just made fresh day before yesterday," he said with a slight smile.
Lightning jerked through the sky as the rain beat against the frail side of the building. The roof had begun to leak. Tyrone put a pan under the steady drip. He gave Jackson his cushioned swivel chair and sat on the window seat.
"Don't know which of us looks worse beat up today," he commented. "Guess you didn't get much sleep last night." He finished toweling off, flicked the towel into a corner, put on a T-shirt and socks drawn from a cubbyhole of the desk.
"It was a very bad night."
Tyrone nodded. "For all of us. I was close to that old man, he taught me near as much as Boss did." Tyrone paused introspectively, dwelling on his personal loss.
"The funeral happened quickly."
"It's according to our religion, doctor. We're Burning Bushers. The dead got to be buried within twenty-four hours, lest their bodies be defiled by unclean spirits." He paused again. "Understand it's that way with certain of the Jews."
"And some African tribes I know of."
"Well—there are those of us not all that far removed from Africa."
"I was reminded of that again early this morning."
The window glass behind Tyrone's head was misting over. In the stove the wood began to crackle. "How so?"
"There seems to be a full-fledged voodoo cult in the neighborhood."
Tyrone gave him a wide-awake stare. "Voodoo?"
"It's the root religion of the Negro. Long before Christianity was introduced by the—"
"I know, I know all that," Tyrone said impatiently. "I just never heard of it goin' on around here before."
"Nhora and I happened on The oum'phor—the temple—quite by accident. There's an old stove-up steamboat down on the river—"
"I know the one you mean."
"Difficult and also dangerous to get to. A natural sanctuary for those desiring to be anonymous."
"You and Nhora saw this?"
"A peristyle with all the ritual paraphernalia—drums, rattles, symbolic serpents."
"You appear to know a little about the subject."
Jackson spent several minutes briefing Tyrone on his background.
"A missionary station? You are full of surprises."
"Perhaps you know that Nhora also lived in Equatorial Africa, as a child. Only a hundred miles from where I grew up."
"She mentioned about Africa to me. Maybe that's why we always got along so good. Doctor, I know just about everything that goes on in this community. But I can't tell you a thing about voodoo."
"There's an aspect of this particular cult that has me uneasy, and that's what I wanted to discuss with you."
Tyrone shrugged. "'Bout all I can do is listen, but go ahead."
"The cult seems to have involved Nhora in their rites."
"If I didn't see you sittin' there cold sober—"
"She's not an initiate. I'd find that bizarre, yes, but not beyond my understanding. She's merely represented, by an effigy. A locket of her mother's, containing a portrait of Nhora, was stolen some time ago. This locket has now turned up as the centerpiece of the effigy. The ritual worship quite obviously is centered on Nhora."
"I don't know enough about it. You mean in voodoo they worship actual living human beings?"
"No," Jackson said, "they don't. They worship a full pantheon of gods and goddesses—the superhuman, the fantastic, the dead. But no living beings."
Tyrone jumped off the window seat. "Doctor, you're sweating real bad. Too hot in here for you?"
It was more of a cold sweat. Jackson swallowed. "I'm—all right. Lack of sleep, the rain, a chill, I suppose."
"Let me pour you a cup of this strong coffee. Bet you didn't eat today."
"As a matter of fact, no. But I'm not hungry."
Tyrone hunted up two mugs and poured coffee, which had just begun to boil. Jackson found it surpassingly vile, but he relished the heat of the mug between his hands. A rainy night in August couldn't be this cold, especially after the temperature had hovered around a hundred hours earlier. Freak weather, he thought. But no doubt in his mind anymore, he was coming down with something. He yearned for Nhora, her firm hand on his brow.
"Go on," Tyrone said, resettling himself on the window seat. "You were sayin' about Nhora—"
"I don't know just what it is I mean to say," Jackson confessed, and momentarily he felt confused. "Except that—I'm worried. It's an untypical thing for voodoo."
Tyrone said, watching him closely, "Unnatural, sounds like."
"Yes. She could be in some kind of danger."
"Ummhmm. See what you mean." Tyrone smiled. "You know, doctor, I'm real glad you dropped by to see me this afternoon."
Confusion again; exactly what was he doing here? But he was grateful to have Tyrone's company. He was feeling lonely, curiously isolated. From himself, from the legions of humanity, from the one who meant everything to him.
"We know," Jackson started, and stopped, and made a slow circle in his head to recover his train of thought. "We know that unnatural, freakish things have happened in the Bradwin family. Their lives are circumscribed by nightmare. But why? My own life—for years—the same kind of nightmare—" He shook his head hopelessly.
Tyrone was hanging on his every word. "Just what kind of power would you say voodoo has over people?"
"For the initiate, the true believer, the power is immense. Every aspect of his life is ruled by voodoo; the promise of reward, the threat of a terrible vengeance."
"For ordinary people, like you and me?"
"No power at all, I would say." But having spoken, he felt a chill of disapproval in the region of his spine, followed by bewilderment, not knowing just who he had sinned against.
Tyrone leaned forward, making a serious point.
&nbs
p; "And Nhora? If she don't believe, then how can it hurt her?"
"I don't know." Jackson found it difficult to draw a steady breath. His extremities were cold, his lips and tongue felt numb. But it wasn't all that unpleasant, more of a sated feeling. He could sleep now, he really could, just close his eyes and drift away. But he didn't want to offend his host. The clock ticked. He stared across at Tyrone, unable to think of anything more to say.
Tyrone rose slowly, not taking his eyes off Jackson. He walked toward him.
"What's the matter, doctor? Are you sick?"
"I don't know—if that's it at all."
"Dyin', maybe," Tyrone said dispassionately.
Jackson felt a small shock. "Why do you say that?"
"It crossed my mind. But you're probably not that close to dyin'. Not yet."
"What do you mean?"
"Can you get up out of the chair, please?" Tyrone said with a frown.
Jackson tried. He couldn't budge. He sweated. Time ticked away. Tyrone shook his head, momentarily stymied by their mutual dilemma.
"Well, now. I just never figured on somebody like you comin' along. Takin' a shine to her." His smile grew ruthless. "Did you get yourself a little today, doctor? That what the matter with you? Did she sure 'nuf fuck the breath of life out of your body? You are some kind of born victim, I'd say." He looked down at Jackson, shaking his head in sorrow.
Jackson opened his mouth to speak. But he was just too tired, too worn. Bloodless. The infernal ticking clock had stolen a thousand years from him while he sat there trying to be friendly with Tyrone, unburdening himself. All his fears about the woman he loved.
Tyrone pried the coffee mug from Jackson's hands and set it aside.
"I better attend to a few changes," he mused.
He turned and slapped Jackson hard across the face. But Jackson scarcely felt it, his jaw might have been anesthetized.
"Can you tell me where Beau Bradwin is? Pay attention here to me. Don't go noddin' off now." He smote Jackson again, opening the cut on his chin. Tyrone stepped back with a grimace of displeasure, not liking blood. Jackson's mouth hung open.
