The car drew up before Les Hiboux and he followed Avery and Elizabeth up the wide steps between two stone owls with glowing eyes. They passed through two sets of glass doors and Jack could not see the interior very clearly. The room was irregular in shape, with cosy alcoves and a general soft amber light. The decor was new and old, quite nicely done, nothing garish or tatty, the merest hint of French provincial.
Jack saw that he had lost his bet: at least three of the alcoves were occupied. He had the impression of a table full of older people in evening dress, including a woman with some kind of green ornament in her hair. On the other hand there was a couple beside the palm, middle-aged, who had not dressed up. He wore a tweed jacket, rather like Ace, and she wore a twinset, probably cashmere.
‘Oh drat!’ said Ace. ‘You win!’
Before he could query this decision - there were at least ten people in the restaurant, weren’t there? How many did Ace think there were? Which ones could he see? - the proprietor, Pierre, came up with open arms. He was a tall, good looking, magnolia-skinned individual, running to fat a little. With his tweed jacket he wore a single Creole earring and a large pendant of a skull with emerald eyes.
‘That’ll be fine,’ said Elizabeth, choosing between two tables. ‘How’s Mama?’
‘Feelin’ the cold per usual,’ said Pierre, who never stopped smiling but always had a whine in his voice. ‘Keeps gettin’ the death cards in her patience. Says we need a new run of luck.’
‘You’ve got one!’ said Ace.
He explained the joke about the names: Ace King, Jack Tenn, and Pierre said softly, ‘And this lovely lady is your Queen! Oh, we’ll have to try and cut ourselves in on some of that luck of yours, Mr King!’
Jack had guessed, correctly, that the place was more table d’hôte than àla carte. Pierre left them a bill of fare handwritten in copperplate on green note-paper; it was headed for the day of the week: Samedi. A single drum began to play so softly that he wondered if it was in the jungle reaches of his mind. The lighting had altered now so that he could hardly see the neighbouring tables: that convincing couple beside the palm had faded into the haze. He could not even be sure that the tree was a palm.
Corey stepped into their circle of light carrying a tray with three glasses in silver holders and a glass jug, twined with flowers. He was in shirtsleeves, showing his fancy vest, like a riverboat gambler.
‘Madame B’s special punch,’ he said, pouring.
‘After this,’ said Avery, ‘we will feel no pain.’
‘How right you are, Mr King!’ Corey smiled, showing too much gum, spoiling the effect of his capped teeth.
‘How many helpers does she need back there?’ demanded Elizabeth. ‘Corey, make sure you find Chung.’
‘He’s out back, Mrs King,’ said Corey, watching as Elizabeth drained her glass. ‘Madame will take care of him till you’re done.’
Jack took one gulp of the punch and was flooded with memory. That same stinging dry taste had spoiled his daiquiri, back at the house...like a pinch of some chemical. He must be sensitive to some damned additive, something that went into drinks. The thing was simply not to touch another drop and to control his paranoia as best he could. He could not see whether Ace had finished his glass or not; Pierre was serving the bisque from a silver tureen.
The rich salmon-coloured soup was delicious; the drumming had grown louder; in the jungle birds were screaming. With an effort Jack pushed back his chair a little, out of the narrowing circle of light, and tried to see where he was. Les Hiboux was empty; wherever he looked in his part of the room he could see bare tables, some with the chairs stacked.
A very young girl, brown-skinned, wearing a dusty pink mini-dress, sashayed between the tables collecting the cruets. Her movements struck at Jack like lightning; he forced himself to look away. Elizabeth was making passes with her hands in front of her face as if brushing away spiderweb.
‘Not bad at all,’ said Ace. ‘Bit light on the langouste, d’ye think?’
‘Mmm,’ said Elizabeth. ‘Are we going to have some music?’
The tall black man in the duster stood on the little bandstand beside an old upright piano and a set of vibes. He had two little round drums in the crook of his left arm: as the tempo increased Jack felt a rising panic. He looked about for the pink girl and found her sidling out from the kitchen; she went to stand below the platform, in the shadows. Her hips moved rhythmically, she lifted one hand and pulled a clasp from her hair so that it fell down over her shoulders. Jack was shivering now with a painful mixture of fear and excitement.
‘Why don’t you try it?’ said Avery.
He became aware that Pierre had served the entree: terrine of duck, with white truffles, prettily arranged with watercress.
‘No!’ said Elizabeth. ‘Far too bland. What’s the point of the watercress anyway?’
Jack gobbled the pale sliver on his plate and it tasted warm and salty, like blood. The black man was singing in a high, subliminal voice; he stripped off his duster expertly, hardly pausing in his drum beat. He waved his naked brown arms above his head but the drums kept playing, the girl in pink danced in the shadows, flashing her thighs. Now the Master of Ceremonies gesticulated with his left hand and suddenly in his right hand he held a knife. No, worse than a knife, a machete...
‘Mama!’ screamed Elizabeth.
The old woman advanced out of the shadows near the kitchen door with the same dancing step, keeping the rhythm of the drums. She was small and slight with a very upright carriage; she wore a dark red apron over a long slinky black dress decorated with twinkling bead fringes. Ace and Elizabeth both broke into a chorus of greeting: Jack was introduced to Madame Belle. The light reflected on her steel-rimmed spectacles so that she had no eyes. She still moved back and forth, coming a little nearer to the table each time.
‘...been far too long,’ said Ace.
‘...everyone looking so well!’ said Elizabeth.
The old woman, who had not spoken a word, danced right in, drawing her hands out from under her apron. She laid her right palm in the middle of Elizabeth’s back, on the grey-blue chiffon of her high-necked dinner gown. She snapped the fingers of her left hand and Corey, who had come from nowhere with a trolley, whisked the plates away.
‘Oh, you folks are really getting it all, tonight!’ said Madame Belle.
The Kings laughed aloud; Corey and the old woman lifted the casserole on to its warming stand and began to serve the Chicken Christophe. Jack saw that Madame Belle’s right hand was wet and discoloured; she wiped it on her apron.
‘Just a minute there, Mr Jack!’ said Corey, setting down his plate. ‘You got a feather!’
He felt a movement at his back, between his shoulder blades. He thought ‘They marked two of us, how will they mark Ace?’ The old woman danced easily around the table and poised behind Ace’s chair, on the way to the bandstand. She danced side by side with the pink girl, below the man with the drum. He wore a black tailcoat now, with red satin lapels, and he played a riff or two on the vibes.
Madame Belle stripped off her apron and flung it to the ground near a pile of other props: the duster coat, the battered top hat, the machete. Her slinky dress had thin rhinestone shoulder straps and showed the paler flesh of her small, slack breasts. The girl’s dress had parted at the waist to show her taut, forward-thrusting brown midriff.
‘Now this really is good!’ said Ace. ‘She got it right with the marinade and the extra onions.’
‘Yes,’ said Elizabeth, ‘I must admit. . .’
She wriggled her shoulders, put down her fork and reached far up behind her own back, a movement nearly impossible for a man to make.
‘Mama Belle had wet hands or something!’
Corey at once walked behind her chair and dabbed with a napkin.
‘Soon dry out, Mrs King, with that light chiffon . ..’
It was the turning point. Jack caught Corey’s eye and knew that an error had been made. The young man swa
llowed hard, tossed his head, and danced away towards the kitchen. Jack said: ‘Ace, do you remember our chicken song?’
‘What’s the matter, sport?’ said Ace. ‘Don’t you care for the Christophe? It’s really only a variant of Chicken Marengo.’
‘No,’ said Jack, still pretending to eat. ‘I mean our own particular chicken ditty.’
He hummed a few bars of ‘The Skye Boat-Song’. It had got them out of trouble and out of bars several times in the past.
‘Good God!’ said Ace. ‘As bad as that? You really are feeling seedy, aren’t you?’
‘We’re in danger,’ said Jack.
The drumming had grown very faint: the tall man and the old woman were poised beside the bandstand like wax figures: the girl lay on the floor, balanced on shoulders, buttocks, bare heels. Now all three began to move in unison; the drumbeat was slowly coming up; the bird-cries sounded. The machete appeared again in the right hand of the tall man.
‘Some kind of ceremony!’ said Jack. ‘They’re out to get us!’
‘You’re out of your mind!’ said Ace. ‘We know these people. Corey...you’re not suggesting that Corey...’
‘Elizabeth,’ said Jack, ‘could you just manage to turn around without attracting too much attention? We want to see the back of your dress.’
It was hard to tell whether Elizabeth had been following very closely but now she did as she was asked. She bent forward first in one direction, then another, and helped herself to more casserole. Her dress bore the mark of Madame Belle’s bloody hand.
‘It’s blood, isn’t it,’ said Elizabeth quietly.
She sat back in her chair trembling and pale, as if she were made of grey-blue chiffon.
‘They killed my poor baby,’ she said. ‘If this is one of your gags, Avery, it has gone too far!’
Lips drawn back from her clenched teeth, she seized the heavy serving fork, withdrew a long lump of flesh from the casserole, dumped it on the white tablecloth and doused it with the remains of the punch to wash off the sauce. Jack remembered that Elizabeth was a registered nurse.
‘Yes,’ she said in a mad, whispery voice. ‘Yes, I thought so. It isn’t cooked, you understand. Just put into the dish.’
She leaped to her feet and shouted: ‘Bloody murderers!’
On the tablecloth lay a medium-sized black tongue with gobbets of adhering tissue: a dog’s tongue. Jack felt his gorge rise; the lights went out, flickered back, and the drums filled the world. He saw Ace stand up and put his arms around his wife, restraining and protecting. The pair of them staggered and fell; Jack was dragged down, engulfed by the falling table; he experienced a series of lightning flashes.
He was transported into the ambience of the pink girl, he felt the heat of her body. He saw the jungle clearing, felt the warm moist air, after rain, and smelled the tang of fresh blood. The tall man opened the top of the piano, dragged out a black cockerel and halved it in the air with the machete.
The back of Jack’s head hit the floor and everything went into slow motion. (There was evidence that the back of his head had hit some flat surface; he carried the report from the county hospital about with him, from shrink to shrink, throughout the Anglo-Saxon lands.) Ace and Elizabeth rose up out of the folds of the tablecloth, legs rubbery, arms extended as if they were trying to fly. The drumbeat was a huge hollow sound. The tall man, naked under his tailcoat, with a necklace of small skulls, leaped high in the air and floated down into the circle of light.
When he moved his arms Ace and Elizabeth began to dance, horribly, like marionettes. Voices swelled in affirmation, calling his name, as their high priest: ‘Samedi! Sa-me-di!’ He drew near with the gleaming machete, not touching his victim, and a red line opened from Ace’s chin down to his groin, through layers of cotton, silk, cashmere, worsted, epidermis, fat and muscle. Jack heard his own long slow groan of protest as Ace twisted to the floor.
Baron Samedi whisked off Elizabeth’s ash-blonde wig and sketched a splitting blow down the back of her skull. She folded down into a soft pile of grey-blue chiffon. Jack saw the girl, he saw Corey, saw Pierre amongst the worshippers. They danced half-clad, in the darkness, stretching their hands, palm upwards, into the circle of light; Baron Samedi, Lord of the Crossroads, flicked at them with his magic blade until a red line marked each one...
* * * *
He was shivering with cold and trying to get more of the fur rug, which whimpered beside him. When he moved the skin of his face hurt terribly, runners of pain spread through all his limbs...He slid backwards along the ground on his bottom, like a baby, in total darkness, smelling blood, grass, petrol, wet dog. He hugged Chung’s neck and ungummed his eyelids painfully but still saw very little. They were free of the car now and he was beginning to see its position.
‘Yes, yes, old chap,’ he croaked to the distraught dog.
He was pleased, for some reason, to find Chung licking his face. He turned his head very slowly and saw a tree on the shoulder of the road. Up above was the starry heaven. There was a dreadful silence; no one else groaned or sighed. Run off the road at the Lookout. Jack tried to shout but all that came out was a feeble, hoarse sound hardly above a whisper.
He kept on trying as he inched painfully towards the tree. He clung to its trunk and dragged himself upright. Chung moaned and howled, butting his knees. The car had rolled over and come to rest against a larger tree. On the way back to town. Avery. Elizabeth. Corey. Jack made a very great effort: ‘Help!’
The old man strolled towards him with an awful lack of urgency. He made his own light. Jack could see sparks of blue fire at his lapels, on his bony wrists, on the brim of his battered top hat.
‘Help’s coming.’
The voice was half in, half out of his head.
‘In the car...’ gasped Jack. ‘Mr and Mrs King...’
‘Corey,’ added the old man. ‘He’s there too.’
‘Are they...? Can’t you see to them?’
‘No, Jack,’ said the old man, smiling sadly. ‘I only seen to you.’
He did something with his eyes so that they turned white; the bones of his skull shone through the taut, black skin of his face. Jack heard the raunchy rhythm of the drum, the roar of the jungle; he smelled the reek of blood.
‘Help them, damn you!’ he shouted.
‘You’re a wonder,’ smiled the Baron. ‘You are a natural. Just a leetle pinch of the obi medicine and you see all that there is to see and then some. It will all come back to you.’
Jack heard the wail of a siren, somewhere along the dark road through the hills. Help coming. He tried to make out the restaurant, down the hill, but all its lights were out.
‘What was the plan?’ he demanded. ‘Why would those people want to gang up on some rich customers with a ... a voodoo ceremony?’
‘How ‘bout vengeance?’ asked the Baron. ‘Or a sacrifice to bring gambling luck?’
He was suddenly holding up five diamonds: ace, king, queen, jack, ten. He folded them away into his skeletal black hand and blood oozed between the fingers.
‘Conjuring tricks!’ said Jack through set teeth.
‘That’s the very word!’
‘Chung wasn’t hurt. . .’
The old man chuckled and buried his fingers in Chung’s thick fur. ‘We take pity on dogs,’ he observed, ‘even when we might have to find some poor dog already dead. Colour up his tongue a little...’
‘That’s enough!’ said Jack.
He tried to stand alone, without clasping the tree, and began to weep for pain and weakness.
‘It ain’t no use to go down there,’ said the old man.
But Jack was stumbling, crawling, back down to the wrecked car. Chung came with him a little way then would go no further. His eyes had grown accustomed to the darkness: he was able to make out the body of his old friend, Avery Philpott King III, skewered and gutted, in the ruins of the back seat. Elizabeth was worked into a very small space beside him. When Jack touched her hand, pulled gently at
her cold wrist, the whole wreck seemed to shake.
He scrambled backwards, lurched against the car again and cried out in alarm as it rocked crazily. He found that if he bent sideways he could see Corey, head and shoulders bulging the windshield.
‘They take Corey out first,’ whispered the old man, in his head. ‘Then the wreck will fall down and burn . ..’
‘Murderers!’ said Jack.
He remembered Elizabeth leaping up from her chair.
‘The magic became too strong,’ said the old man.
He reached down a solid, skinny, old man’s hand and helped Jack back up the slope. The ambulance and a police car, with sirens blaring and flashing lights, swept on to the dark hilltop.
Dark Terrors 5 - The Gollancz Book of Horror - [Anthology] Page 29
