Long Chills

by Ronald Kelly

  It was nearing the hour of midnight, when he heard sounds echoing from the west wing of the mansion… where his mother’s bedroom was located. They were not the fitful thrashings of a nightmare or the tearful grief a widow might express at the loss of her husband. No, these were low moans and purring sighs – the kind that suggested a passionate coupling. At first he thought that Rosalinda was pleasuring herself. She indulged in the act and with great abandon, when she drank heavily. But, no, Quentin could also discern the creaking of the bed frame, as if tested by some vast weight. He turned over on his pillow, intending to drive the shameful sounds from his ears, when they turned from pleasure to pain. His mother began to scream, crying for mercy, pleading for her attacker to stop. But the creaking of the bed continued. The ornately-carved headboard struck the wall behind it, again and again, rending delicate French wallpaper and battering plaster into dust.

  Trevor and Isabella joined him in the hallway. By candlelight, they ran down the upstairs corridor, toward the western wing. A scream of immeasurable torment rang throughout the house, but grew silent as they reached the door of Rosalinda’s bedroom. They found the door locked and barred from the inside. It took them several minutes to find something heavy and sturdy enough to batter the oaken door from its frame, but eventually they succeeded.

  When they entered the room, candles held before them, they made a discovery that would haunt them the rest of their lives. Their beloved mother lay limply across the blood-soaked bed. She was naked, her once-beautiful face now a rictus of horror and agony. Her pale abdomen had burst from crotch to breastbone, as though she had been split open from the inside out.

  They had rushed to the open window to see a huge form, dark and glistening with sweat, running across the lawn, toward the black expanse of the swamp. The three thought that the lack of nocturnal light was playing tricks on their eyes. The escaping attacker seemed to possess nothing above his broad, muscular shoulders.

  Since that night, Quentin and his siblings had not had an easy moment and their individual shares of the Deveroux Curse seemed to grow stronger and more relentless. Now, heading into the swamp on a mission, Quentin hoped to end their distress once and for all.

  The pathway gradually widened into a clearing and, suddenly, he found himself before the tin and tarpaper shack of Mojo Mama. The sagging porch of the structure bore fronds of dried herbs and swamp plants, obviously the ingredients to the various potions and poultices that she concocted. The tanned hides of rabbits, possums, and raccoons hung, stretched, across the outer walls of the old shack, along with the skins of critters that he could not identify.

  He reined his horse to a halt and swung down from the saddle. “Come out here, old woman!” he demanded. “I am here to have words with you!”

  For a moment, he thought that she was not there. Then the door of weathered planks swung back on leather hinges and she appeared.

  “I believe I smell the stench of Deveroux in the air.”

  Mojo Mama was far from the imposing figure he expected to find. She was small and frail, no more than five feet tall, dressed in ragged clothing and a dark blue bandana around the crown of her head. She was old – at least in her eighties – and as wrinkled and lined as the bark of an ancient tree. Only her eyes looked bright and youthful, twinkling with both malice and amusement as she regarded him.

  “I’ve come to – ” Quentin began.

  “Beg for my mercy?” she asked. “If that be so, you’d best get on back home to your suffering. The curse I’ve cast upon the house of Deveroux stands… and always shall stand.”

  The old woman’s proclamation enraged Quentin. He started forward, his hands balled into angry fists. “Now, see here, witch! Can we not bargain for a resolution to this damnable grudge of yours?”

  Mojo Mama laughed and smiled, revealing toothless gums as blue as a skink’s tail. “Bargain? Did your hot-headed fool of a father give my poor Jonathan such a choice when he found him with your whore of a mother? Did he show compassion before he swung that broad-axe and cleaved my son’s head from his shoulders?” She pointed toward the side of the yard with a gnarled finger. A wooden headstone stood in the weeds beneath a weeping willow tree. “All that he left for me to commend to earth lies there, severed and burnt, in the soil.”

  Quentin attempted to calm down and reason with her. “I promise, I will help you locate the rest of your son’s remains, if only you will – ”

  Mojo Mama grinned and idly fingered a dried chicken foot that hung from a lanyard of gator teeth around her scrawny neck. “Oh, the remains of my beloved Jonathan are around here somewheres… lurking, hiding…. watching.”

  The young man’s anger flared once again. “You’d best not play games with me, bitch, or I’ll – ”

  Eyes gleaming, Mojo Mama raised her left hand, her dark fingers curled toward the night sky. “Or you’ll what, young Deveroux?”

  Without warning, a horrible pain shot throughout Quentin. It was an agony unlike any he had ever felt before. Something long and sinuous began to travel up from the depths of his stomach, filling his throat and forcing itself into his mouth. Quentin fell to his knees and retched. In horror, he watched as the head of a snake pushed past his lips. It contorted within him as it struggled for escape. Soon, the last of it left him and dropped on the ground. It was a copperhead, perhaps two feet in length. It hissed at him with venomous fangs, then slithered off into the darkness of the swamp.

  “Do you wish for me to conjure another?” she asked cruelly. “A rattler or a cottonmouth perhaps? You hold more than you could ever imagine.”

  Quentin staggered to his feet, his throat raw and bloody with the serpent’s passage. “Why do you torment us so? We had nothing to do with our parents’ sins. Why do you not leave us be?”

  “Because you are Deveroux,” she said firmly. “And, as long as I hold breath in my lungs, you shall know the horrors of Satan’s lot within your own treacherous bodies.”

  “Then your lungs and yourself be damned!” declared Quentin. Angrily, he drew the Navy revolver from beneath his coat and thumbed back the hammer.

  The witch simply stood there as he emptied the contents of the .36 pistol into her chest. She wavered on her feet for a long second, smiling at him as she belched blood and bullet-shredded tissue. Then she dropped to the boards of the porch, never to move again.

  That should be it then, he told himself with satisfaction. With the witch dead, then the curse shall be no more.

  Quentin Deveroux stepped into a stirrup of the gelding’s saddle and swung astride. He looked at the crumpled form of Mojo Mama one last time, then with a scowl, headed back toward the bayou trail.

  An hour passed. Two. Quentin began to realize that he had somehow taken a wrong turn. He was lost in the dangerous darkness of the swamp with no idea of where he was. The Deveroux plantation was to the north, but he could no longer discern which direction was which. The pale orb of a full moon hung overhead, visible through the Spanish moss and the gnarled limbs of the cypress trees, but somehow it seemed to shift at random, providing no aid to his bearings.

  As he rode through a tall stand of wild canebrake, he suddenly heard the sound of something behind him. It was the noise of bare feet in the brush, moving stealthily like a cat. But he knew that it was no feline who pursued him. Its size was immense as it picked its way through the stand of bamboo. And that was not all that he heard. With the sound of footsteps came a peculiar whistling noise… like air forced through a narrow, wet opening.

  Quentin urged his horse onward. The gelding grew skittish in the darkness, unable to see where it was going. The canebrake grew thicker, pressing in on the trail like opposing walls, making it difficult to navigate. The young man strained his ears for sound. He was thankful to find that he could no longer hear the sound of the footsteps… as well as the moist wheezing that accompanied them.

  “Let’s take leave of this damned place and get back home,” he told his horse soothingly. His eyes peered int
o the darkness, trying to gauge his surroundings in the pale moonlight.

  Abruptly, they were set upon. From out of the canebrake, two dark arms extended. Strong hands – calloused from grueling work at the urging whip of the overseer – grasped the throat of the gelding. With a powerful yank, the horse’s neck was broken. Its eyes rolled into the back of its head and it dropped to its side, pinning Quentin Deveroux underneath.

  Frightened, he struggled to pull himself free. He looked around frantically, but the arms of the demon in the canebrake had disappeared.

  With some effort, Quentin managed to wiggle from beneath the weight of the dead animal. But something was wrong with his leg. He shrieked as he attempted to stand. Quentin looked down to see a jagged shard of bone protruding through his trousers, just below the knee.

  He tried several times to walk, but fell each time. “Lord help me!” he cried out, teeth clenched against the agony that throbbed through his shattered shinbone. “Please… deliver me from this hellhole.”

  Slowly, he began to crawl on his hands and knees along the muddy pathway between the towering stalks of sugar cane. It was slow going… one torturous inch at a time. Once a swamp adder slithered across his path, scarcely a foot from his nose. He nearly screamed, but he knew he didn’t dare. It would only alert his whereabouts to the wild creatures and gators who hunted in darkness, searching for a helpless morsel such as himself.

  He had only traveled a few yards when he heard something come crashing out of the canebrake. He rolled over onto his back to find the thing that had killed his horse, standing on the pathway eight feet away.

  It was the headless body of Jonathan – naked, his ebony skin glistening with sweat and wet sand. The ugly hole within the column of his neck – severed just above the larynx – sputtered and wheezed as his lungs inflated and deflated without benefit of those cerebral impulses necessary for such function.

  “No!” screamed Quentin. “Lord Jesus, no… it is impossible!”

  But he knew that Mojo Mama’s voodoo had made it possible. Out of love and vengeance, she had conjured a spell and turned the sunken remains of her only son into a living, breathing zombie. Horrified, he watched as the headless corpse started toward him. Its huge, dark hands clenched and unclenched angrily, ready to latch upon the murderer of the woman who had once given birth to him.

  Quentin wailed and tried to crawl away. He dismissed the revolver in his coat, for in his haste he had neglected to bring powder and ball with which to reload. The youngest of the Deveroux scrambled only a few feet, before hands roughly took hold of him. He wept, waiting to feel strong fingers close about his gullet, expecting the quick twist that might shatter his neckbone and send him spiraling into the dark void of death.

  But it did not come. No, something much more horrifying took place. He felt the thing’s brawny arms encircle him, lifting him from the pathway. Quentin shut his eyes in revulsion as it pressed him closely to its broad chest, almost tenderly so. He struggled to break free, but there was no chance of doing so.

  Quentin pleaded as Jonathan headed through the canebrake with him in tow. Onward into the bayou it took him, until they reached a broad clearing amid a crescent of ancient swamp oaks. There the zombie took a few steps forward… and sank…returning to the mire of the quicksand pit it had been confined to following its untimely death.

  Quentin screamed until the quicksand slowly sucked them both downward. But as they went under, he realized that he was not suffocating as he should. The Curse of the Deveroux had not ended with the shooting of Mojo Mama. It continued, even more terrifying than before.

  Sinking toward the pool’s murky bottom, Quentin Deveroux knew that he would spend eternity in a heightened state of torment and mortification, unable to die, trapped in the unyielding arms of the victim of his father’s unbridled jealously and rage.

  As he hung there, suspended between life and death, he felt the creatures within him panic and surge into battle. Snake against toad, scorpion against spider, a nest of hornets against an invading army of angry red ants. All converged within him, biting, stinging, bringing agony and boundless fear… but, alas, no promise of finality.

  Potter’s Field

  It was a muggy Sunday afternoon in the summer of 1943 when the black sedan appeared at the far end of Old Newsome Road. From where they sat on the front porch, they could see it heading their way, leaving a billowing cloud of red clay dust in its wake.

  “Think they’re lost?” Clayburn Biggs asked his wife, Maudie. His eyes studied the approaching automobile while he absently constructed one of his one-handed cigarettes.

  “I don’t know,” the woman said with a shrug. She fanned herself with a funeral home fan with a painting of Jesus holding a lamb printed on one side of the cardboard. “We rarely see a nice car like that way out here.”

  “They’re not lost,” said the girl who sat, reading, on the hanging swing at the far end of the porch. “It’s us they’re coming to see.”

  Clay and Maudie looked at one another. If their daughter said that it was so, there was no point in denying the matter.

  Soon, the car pulled to the side of the road in front of the Biggs’ farmhouse. The engine idled for a long moment and then grew silent. Two men climbed out and stretched in the blazing August sun. One was tall and lanky with sandy blond hair, while the other was big and burly and dark-haired, almost bear-like. They wore dark suit pants, long-sleeved starched white shirts, and thin black ties, while their jackets had been discarded and left in the sedan. At first Maudie thought they might be Jehovah’s Witnesses, but their clothing was not Sunday-go-to-preaching attire, but apparently what they wore on the job every day of the week.

  Leisurely, the two started across the front yard toward the porch. “Hello,” the tall one called out with a boyish smile. He held a stack of manila folders in his right hand.

  “Howdy,” replied Clay with a nod. “What can we do for you, fellas?”

  “We’re hoping that we’ve finally found the Biggs residence. We’ve gotten lost several times, driving up and down these back roads looking for it.”

  “Well, you found it.” Clay eyed them both with suspicion. “The question is, why would you want to?”

  The big fellow took a black wallet from his pants pocket and flipped it open, displaying a badge and a card with an official stamp across its face. “We’re federal agents, Mr. Biggs.”

  Sammy Biggs sat up straight from where he had previously lain slumped in a chair next to his mother. The ten-year-old’s eyes widened with sudden interest. “The FBI? Honest to goodness?”

  The tall agent chuckled and mopped at the nape of his neck with a handkerchief. “That’s right, son. Believe it or not, we are. I’m agent Robert Upchurch and this is my partner, Nathan Moore.”

  The big fellow nodded curtly. He didn’t seem nearly as friendly as the other man was.

  “You boys look hot enough to fry eggs on the toes of those shiny black shoes of yours,” Maudie told them. She got up out of her rocking chair and started for the front door. “Ya’ll get on up here in the shade and I’ll fetch you some cold iced tea.”

  “Thank you, ma’am,” said Upchurch gratefully. “That would sure hit the spot.”

  After Maudie had gone inside and the men had sat down in a couple of straight-backed chairs on the porch, Sammy hopped up and studied the two men without a hint of shyness. “So you really are G-men? Sent down here to Coleman by Mr. Hoover himself? Do you have handcuffs and guns and all that?”

  “Stop pestering the fire out of these gentlemen, Sammy,” Clay said, giving his son a warning look. After the boy had returned to his seat, the former tobacco farmer studied the two government men cautiously. “What I wanna know is why boys like you would have cause to come all the way down here to see me.”

  The two men glanced at one another and then looked toward the far end of the porch. “Uh, we didn’t come to see you, Mr. Biggs,” Agent Upchurch replied. “To tell the truth, we came to see her.�
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  Clay lit his homemade cigarette with a sulfur match and took a long drag. “Who? Cindy Ann?”

  Before they could answer, the girl on the swing looked up from the copy of Little Women she had been reading. “They want me to help them, Pappy.”

  Clayburn Biggs turned and regarded his daughter. It was hard to believe that the tall, willowy sixteen-year-old with the long red hair and lightly freckled complexion was the same little girl who had once played with paper dollies while he did mechanic work amid the shade of the persimmon grove. She possessed none of the painful shyness and flighty behavior she had back then. Now she was quiet and patiently calm, possessing a maturity beyond that of a normal teenager. Clay figured – considering all the trouble she had been involved in seven years ago – Cindy had been forced to grow up a bit faster than was customary.

  “What in tarnation do you need her to help you with?” Clay asked them point-blank.

  Agent Upchurch took a folder off the top of the stack he had brought with him. “According to our file on Miss Cynthia Ann…”

  Maudie reappeared with two tall glasses of sweet tea in her pudgy hands. “The Federal Bureau of Investigation actually has a file on our Cindy Ann? Pardon me for saying so, Mr. Upchurch, but that’s downright disturbing!”

  The tall man smiled gently. “No need to be alarmed, ma’am. Mr. Hoover keeps open files on all manner of U.S. citizens… some who might be threats to our nation’s security and some who might be beneficial to the Bureau and its various investigations. Miss Cynthia Ann is one of the latter.”

  Agent Moore took a long swig of the iced tea and regarded the barefoot girl in the swing with an undisguised smirk on his broad, clean-shaven face. “According to our sources, your daughter allegedly possesses the power of second sight.”

  Clay cracked an amused smile. “I take it you don’t cotton to such things, Agent Moore.”

  “No,” the man told him truthfully. “I can’t say that I do. It just seems like a bunch of hoo-doo and fancy parlor tricks to me.” A sly expression gleamed in his small eyes that could have been mistaken for pure meanness. He took the pile of folders from his partner and shucked one from off the bottom.