On reaching the door, she lifted a hand to the brown leather bag to make sure it was still in place. Throughout the journey it had been a nuisance; now it was a comfort. She knocked. In a moment the door swung open. A boy about twelve years old, wearing only ragged khaki pants, stood gazing up at her.
She went through the usual peasant formalities. "Honneur, ti-moun."
"Respect, M'selle."
"I would like to speak with M'sieu Margal, if you please. I have come a long way to see him."
Motioning her to enter, the boy silently stepped back from the doorway.
The room in which she found herself surprised her, and not only for its large size. Its floor was of tavernon, the close-grained cabinet wood that was now even rarer and more expensive than Haitian mahogany. Tables and chairs, one of the latter strangely shaped, were of the same wood. Did it grow here? Probably, but Margal must have paid a small fortune to have the trees felled and cut up. The walls of the room were of clay, but each was a different colour - aquamarine, rose, black, green - and intricately decorated. The effect was startling.
"Please be seated," the boy said. "I will ask my master if he wishes to see you. Not there!" he added quickly when Kay, out of curiosity, moved toward the oddly shaped chair. "That is my master's!"
"Sorry." She veered away, but not before noticing what a really remarkable chair it was. Its back was vertical, its extra-wide seat littered with varicolored cushions. It had wide, flat, slotted arms. Fit a board across those arms, using the slots to anchor it, and the chair could be a desk, a work table, even a dining table.
She remained standing. The boy disappeared into a connecting room, leaving the door open.
In a moment the youth reappeared pushing a kind of wheeled platform on which was seated a man. Wearing a bright red nightshirt - if that was the word for it - the man weighed perhaps a hundred and fifty pounds, and would have been about five foot six had he been able to stand erect.
Apparently he could not do that. His legs, crossed in front of him, looked to Kay as though they had been broken and allowed to heal without benefit of medical attention.
The boy pushed the wheeled platform to the odd-shaped chair. Reaching behind him, the man placed both hands on the chair's arms, hoisted himself up, and worked his crippled body backward into position. After squirming to make himself as comfortable as possible, he lifted his head. It was awrithe with a thick, stringy mass that resembled the dreadlocks of Jamaican Rastafarians.
His stare was totally innocent. "I bid you welcome, M'selle. My name is Margal. Please tell me who you are and why you have come here."
It was the moment of truth. Kay took in a breath to steady herself.
"M'sieu Margal, my name is Kay Gilbert, and I am a nurse. A hospital nurse. I came here - as I think you already know - to return a lost child to her home in Bois Sauvage. A child whom you, M'sieu, turned into a zombie but whom we at the hospital were able to restore to health. And I have a proposition for you."
The man who could not walk only stared at her with unblinking eyes, saying nothing.
"I know what you are," Kay continued, using words she had silently rehearsed on the way to this place. "I also know you cannot walk. So I have come to make you an offer."
Those eyes! She could not even decide what colour they were, they were so frightening. And they were doing things to her mind. She was losing her power of concentration.
"As I say - M'sieu Margal - I am from the hospital. That hospital - in the Artibonite - which everyone in Haiti, including you, I am sure - knows about and respects. And I promise you this - that if you - if you will stop doing to people what you - what you did to Tina Anglade - if you will give me your word of honour never to -never to do such a thing again - we at the hospital will do our best to - to repair your legs so that you will be able to - to walk again."
She paused, struggling desperately to maintain control. Dear God, those eyes were making it so hard for her to think straight! Then when he did not answer her, except for a downward, ugly twist of his mouth, she added weakly, "I - I am not fluent in your - your language, M'sieu. Do you understand what - what - I -just - said?"
Something like a laugh issued from that ugly mouth, and the stare intensified. Suddenly Kay was back in the caille where the harmless gecko had become a giant dragon intent on devouring her and the child. And then she was sitting on a grey mule, clutching its saddle, while an unreal darkness full of smoke and flames swirled up from a far-below valley to engulf her. And she knew what Margal was doing.
Her offer of help meant nothing to him. He was bent on controlling her, perhaps destroying her. Perhaps the prospect of creating a white female zombie intrigued him. With only one move left to her, she grabbed at the brown leather bag dangling from her shoulder.
Tearing it open, she thrust her hand in and snatched out the one thing it contained - the shiny black automatic her boyfriend, a doctor at the hospital, had insisted she keep with her for safety's sake on this mad mission to the realm of Margal.
But before she could even level the weapon, that room with its multicoloured walls became something else. No longer was she standing there in a house, struggling to point a deadly weapon at another human being. All at once she was in an outdoor place of idyllic beauty where any thought of killing seemed a kind of blasphemy.
There were no weirdly painted walls here. No man with twisted legs sat on a chair in front of her, gazing at her with hypnotic eyes that merely mirrored the awful powers of his incredible mind.
What she saw was a broad valley shimmering in sunlight - a lovely, dreamlike valley carpeted with green grass and colourful wild flowers. And where Margal's chair had been was a young tulip tree with a soft, wide-eyed dove perched on one of its branches, gazing at her with pretty head atilt.
But this isn't Eden and that isn't a dove, Gilbert! You know it isn't! For God's sake, don't let him do this to you!
She still had the gun in her hand. With every ounce of will power she possessed, she forced the hand to lift it, made her eyes and mind take aim, and commanded her finger to squeeze the trigger.
In that idyllic setting there was but one living thing to aim at. The dove.
The sound of the shot shattered the illusion and jolted her out of the hypnotic spell the man on the chair had not quite finished weaving about her. She came out of it just in time to see the bullet pierce his forehead and slam his head against the back of the chair. Still in a partial daze, she pushed herself erect and stumbled forward to look at him.
He was dead. Not even Margal the Sorcerer could still be alive with such a hole in his head and most of his brains splattered over the back of the chair. Never again would be do what he had done to little Tina Anglade - and probably more than a few others.
Probably it had been a foolish notion, anyway, to think he might change his ways if given the ability to walk again.
Her trembling had subsided. In full control of herself again, she looked for the boy, who perhaps, like Luc Etienne, had hoped by serving the master to absorb some of Margal's evil knowledge. When she called to him, there was no answer. Apparently he had fled.
With a last glance at the dead man on the chair, she put the gun back into the brown leather bag and walked out of the house. At the waterfall, the father of little Tina Anglade was waiting for her, as promised. He stepped forward, frowning.
"I heard a noise like a gunshot," he said, his frown asking the unspoken question.
She shrugged. "That man made a noise to frighten me, the way he made the thunder at Saut Diable that I told you about." With his help, she climbed onto the grey mule. "I'm finished," she added. "I've done what I was sent here for. Now we can go home."
20 - Michael Marshall Smith - Later
I remember standing in the bedroom before we went out, fiddling with my tie and fretting mildly about the time. As yet we had plenty, but that was nothing to be complacent about. The minutes had a way of disappearing when Rachel was getting ready, early starts
culminating in a breathless search for a taxi.
It was a party we were going to, so it didn't really matter what time we left, but I tend to be a little dull about time. I used to, anyway.
When I had the tie as close to a tidy knot as I was going to be able to get it, I turned away from the mirror, and opened my mouth to call out to Rachel. But then I caught sight of what was on the bed, and closed it again. For a moment I just stood and looked, and then walked over towards the bed.
It wasn't anything very spectacular, just a dress made of sheeny white material. A few years ago, when we started going out together, Rachel used to make a lot of her clothes. She didn't do it because she had to, but because she enjoyed it. She used to trail me endlessly round dress-making shops, browsing patterns and asking my opinion on a million different fabrics, while I half-heartedly protested and moaned.
On impulse I leant down and felt the material, and found I could remember touching it for the first time in the shop on Mill Road, could remember surfacing up through contented boredom to say that yes, I liked this one. On that recommendation she'd bought it, and made this dress, and as a reward for traipsing around after her she'd bought me dinner too. We were poorer then, so the meal was cheap, but there was lots and it was good.
The strange thing was, I didn't even really mind the dress shops. You know how sometimes, when you're just walking around, living your life, you'll see someone on the street and fall hopelessly in love with them? How something in the way they look, the way they are, makes you stop dead in your tracks and stare? How for that instant you're convinced that if you could just meet them, you'd be able to love them forever?
Wild schemes and unlikely meetings pass through your head, and yet as they stand on the other side of the street or the room, talking to someone else, they haven't the faintest idea of what's going through your mind. Something has clicked, but only inside your head. You know you'll never speak to them, that they'll never know what you're feeling, and that they'll never want to. But something about them forces you to keep looking, until you wish they'd leave so you could be free.
The first time I saw Rachel was like that, and now she was in my bath. I didn't call out to hurry her along. I decided it didn't really matter.
A few minutes later a protracted squawking noise announced the letting out of the bath water, and Rachel wafted into the bedroom swaddled in thick towels and glowing high spirits. Suddenly I lost all interest in going to the party, punctually or otherwise. She marched up to me, set her head at a silly angle to kiss me on the lips and jerked my tie vigorously in about three different directions. When I looked in the mirror I saw that somehow, as always, she'd turned it into a perfect knot.
Half an hour later we left the flat, still in plenty of time. If anything, I'd held her up.
"Later," she said, smiling in the way that showed she meant it, "Later, and for a long time, my man."
I remember turning from locking the door to see her standing on the pavement outside the house, looking perfect in her white dress, looking happy and looking at me. As I walked smiling down the steps towards her she skipped backwards into the road, laughing for no reason, laughing because she was with me.
"Come on," she said, holding out her hand like a dancer, and a yellow van came round the corner and smashed into her. She spun backwards as if tugged on a rope, rebounded off a parked car and toppled into the road. As I stood cold on the bottom step she half sat up and looked at me, an expression of wordless surprise on her face, and then she fell back again.
When I reached her blood was already pulsing up into the white of her dress and welling out of her mouth. It ran out over her makeup and I saw she'd been right: she hadn't quite blended the colours above her eyes. I'd told her it didn't matter, that she still looked beautiful. She had.
She tried to move her head again and there was a sticky sound as it almost left the tarmac and then slumped back. Her hair fell back from around her face, but not as it usually did. There was a faint flicker in her eyelids, and then she died.
I knelt there in the road beside her, holding her hand as the blood dried a little. It was as if everything had come to a halt, and hadn't started up again. I heard every word the small crowd muttered, but I didn't know what they were muttering about. All I could think was that there wasn't going to be a later, not to kiss her some more, not for anything. Later was gone.
When I got back from the hospital I phoned her mother. I did it as soon as I got back, though I didn't want to. I didn't want to tell anyone, didn't want to make it official. It was a bad phone call, very, very bad. Then I sat in the flat, looking at the drawers she'd left open, at the towels on the floor, at the party invitation on the dressing table, feeling my stomach crawl. I was back at the flat, as if we'd come back home from the party. I should have been making coffee while Rachel had yet another bath, coffee we'd drink on the sofa in front of the fire. But the fire was off and the bath was empty. So what was I supposed to do?
I sat for an hour, feeling as if somehow I'd slipped too far forward in time and left Rachel behind, as if I could turn and see her desperately running to try to catch me up. When it felt as if my throat was going to burst I called my parents and they came and took me home. My mother gently made me change my clothes, but she didn't wash them. Not until I was asleep, anyway. When I came down and saw them clean I hated her, but I knew she was right and the hate went away. There wouldn't have been much point in just keeping them in a drawer.
The funeral was short. I guess they all are, really, but there's no point in them being any longer. Nothing more would be said. I was a little better by then, and not crying so much, though I did before we went to the church because I couldn't get my tie to sit right.
Rachel was buried near her grandparents, which she would have liked. Her parents gave me her dress afterwards, because I'd asked for it. It had been thoroughly cleaned and large patches had lost their sheen and died, looking as much unlike Rachel's dress as the cloth had on the roll. I'd almost have preferred the bloodstains still to have been there: at least that way I could had believed that the cloth still sparkled beneath them. But they were right in their way, as my mother was. Some people seem to have pragmatic, accepting souls, an ability to deal with death. I don't, I'm afraid. I don't understand it at all.
Afterwards I stood at the graveside for a while, but not for long because I knew that my parents were waiting at the car. As I stood by the mound of earth that lay on top of her I tried to concentrate, to send some final thought to her, some final love, but the world kept pressing in on me through the sound of cars on the road and some bird that was cawing in a tree. I couldn't shut it out. I couldn't believe that I was noticing how cold it was, that somewhere lives were being led and televisions being watched, that the inside of my parents' car would smell the same as it always had. I wanted to feel something, wanted to sense her presence, but I couldn't. All I could feel was the world round me, the same old world. But it wasn't a world that had been there a week ago, and I couldn't understand how it could look so much the same.
It was the same because nothing had changed, and I turned and walked to the car. The wake was worse than the funeral, much worse, and I stood with a sandwich feeling something very cold building up inside. Rachel's oldest friend Lisa held court with her old school friends, swiftly running the range of emotions from stoic resilience to trembling incoherence.
"I've just realized," she sobbed to me, "Rachel's not going to be at my wedding."
"Yes, well she's not going to be at mine either," I said numbly, and immediately hated myself for it. I went and stood by the window, out of harm's way. I couldn't react properly. I knew why everyone was standing here, that in some ways it was like a wedding. Instead of gathering together to bear witness to a bond, they were here to prove she was dead. In the weeks to come they'd know they'd stood together in a room, and would be able to accept she was gone. I couldn't.
I said goodbye to Rachel's parents before I left. We looke
d at each other oddly, and shook hands, as if we were just strangers again. Then I went back to the flat and changed into some old clothes. My "Someday" clothes, Rachel used to call them, as in "someday you must throw them away". Then I made a cup of tea and stared out of the window for a while. I knew damn well what I was going to do, and it was a relief to give in to it.
That night I went back to the cemetery and I dug her up. What can I say? It was hard work, and it took a lot longer than I expected, but in another way it was surprisingly easy. I mean yes, it was creepy, and yes, I felt like a lunatic, but after the shovel had gone in once the second time seemed less strange. It was like waking up in the mornings after the accident. The first time I clutched at myself and couldn't understand, but after that I knew what to expect. There were no cracks of thunder, there was no web of lightening and I actually felt very calm. There was just me and, beneath the earth, my friend. I just wanted to find her.
When I did I laid her down by the side of the grave and then filled it back up again, being careful to make it look undisturbed. Then I carried her to the car in my arms and brought her home.
The flat seemed very quiet as I sat her on the sofa, and the cushion rustled and creaked as it took her weight again. When she was settled I knelt and looked up at her face. It looked much the same as it always had, though the colour of the skin was different, didn't have the glow she always had. That's where life is, you know, not in the heart but in the little things, like the way hair falls around a face. Her nose looked the same and her forehead was smooth. It was the same face, exactly the same.
I knew the dress she was wearing was hiding a lot of things I would rather not see, but I took it off anyway. It was her going away dress, bought by her family specially for the occasion, and it didn't mean anything to me or to her. I knew what the damage would be and what it meant. As it turned out the patchers and menders had done a good job, not glossing because it wouldn't be seen. It wasn't so bad.
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