by Cave, Hugh
"Mr. Gordon—" It was Blanche taking over now, with her head atilt and her arms folded. "Just why did you come here, anyway? The truth, I mean. To write about us and our problem?"
"No, Mrs. Everol. Not at all."
"That magazine you sent us said you'd written about other people with such problems and would put it all into a book someday."
"That isn't why I came. As I told you when asking your permission, I hoped to be able to help you."
"Well, you've helped," Everett said. More than ever his wasted face resembled a skull. "At any rate, you put those things on the windows here. But that's about all you can think of to do, it seems, so we think you'd better leave now."
Jeff looked at the others. The silence lasted long enough to become embarrassing before he stood up and said quietly, "Of course, if that's what you want. I'll just go upstairs for my things." He would stay at the motel, of course. If by chance there was no unit available, he would have a bed there anyhow.
"He doesn't mean now!" Little Susan's voice was shrill with protest. "Do you, Everett?"
"Yes, he does," Blanche snapped.
"No!" Jumping to her feet, the bird woman angrily faced her brother-in-law. "You can't expect him to start driving back to Connecticut this late in the day, Everett! That would be cruel!"
The silence took over again while Everett looked at the others. He finally lifted his bony shoulders in an exaggerated shrug. "All right, all right. You can stay the night, mister. But I'd be obliged if you cleared out first thing in the morning."
"I can leave right now, Mr. Everol."
"No, no!" Susan cried. "You mustn't, Jeffrey."
Jeff glanced at her. She was violently shaking her head at him while her eyes and the forward thrust of her tiny body tried to tell him something. Remembering his earlier talks with her—her confession that she was afraid of her sister's husband—Jeff nodded.
"All right. I'll say good night and go upstairs now, though, if you folks don't mind."
Susan's "Good night" was more like a sob. No one else spoke as he turned and walked out of the room.
In his room he shut the door and threw himself on the bed, lying on his side with his gaze on the marked window where the wolf had appeared. So they had heard his car this morning, in spite of the precautions he had taken, and now they wanted him out of here. Why? Had they somehow found out that he had become friendly with Verna, whom they regarded as a most unwelcome intruder?
Well, so much for his efforts to help them. And they were right, of course, in saying he hadn't done much. At least Amanda was up and around again, even if she only sat there like a ghost and stared at him, saying nothing. He had saved her, hadn't he, by bursting into her room in time?
Why had little Susan been so determined that he should stay the night? What did she want of him?
He had the answer to that question a little more than an hour later. Sitting there in his room, still dressed after gathering his few possessions together to be carried down to his car in the morning, he heard footsteps as first several persons together, then one alone, climbed the stairs and walked past his door on the way to their rooms. Those together, he guessed, were Everett, his wife, and his sister Amanda; the one by herself was Susan.
Silence took over. But before half an hour had passed, someone tapped softly at his door and a whispery voice said, "Jeffrey?"
Rising, he went to the door and opened it, instinctively making no more noise himself than he had to. And Susan slipped in under his arm, rather like a kitten darting into a room after scratching to be admitted.
He shut the door and turned to find her standing by the bed, facing him. Downstairs she had worn a frilly blouse and a long, dark skirt. Now she had on a nightgown trimmed with lace.
"Jeffrey, we have to talk," she whispered. "Right now, because we won't have a chance to in the morning, before you leave here."
With a movement of his hand he indicated she should sit on the bed. She obeyed, staring at him. He sat beside her. 'Talk about what, Susan?"
"About you, and why they want you out of here. Do you know what I think?"
"No, Susan," he said gently. "What do you think?"
"You remember me telling you about that woman who disappeared last month? Early last month? I did tell you, didn't I? The woman who was looking for fossils on this property? How she vanished, and the police came and talked to us every day for days?"
"The college woman. Yes, I remember."
She leaned toward him and poked his arm with her forefinger. "Jeffrey, I think one of them is responsible for doing away with her."
"Why? I mean, why would they want to?"
"Because she was nosing around the property here and they don't like people doing that. They never have."
"And what do you think they did to her?"
"Well, of course I don't know. I mean, how could I know, for heaven's sake? But it wouldn't be hard to make someone disappear around here. There's the pond, with its quicksand. And the sinkhole, where that little girl drowned. And other such nasty places."
"And?"
"What do you mean, and?"
He had expected her to say, "And the cave." But perhaps she didn't know about the cave. "Tell me something, Susan," he said. "How long have you been living here with your sister and the Everols?"
With her head atilt and her eyes half shut, she did some mental arithmetic. "Four and a half years."
So, yes, perhaps they hadn't told her about the cave.
"And I'm still an outsider, as you can see," she said. "I mean, I'm only Everett's wife's sister, not a real Everol."
"Which one of them do you think is responsible for Ki—for the woman's disappearance?"
With an accusing frown she leaned away from him. "You were going to say Kimberly, weren't you? I never told you the woman's name was Kimberly Mason. I'm sure I didn't. Jeffrey Gordon, have you known about this all along?"
"After you talked to me the last time, I asked a few questions in town," Jeff lied. "Thinking, of course, that there might be some connection between her disappearance and the happenings I'm here to investigate."
"Oh." She let out her breath. "Well, all right. But as for which one of them might be responsible, I don't pretend to know. What I do think is that the others know and are protecting the guilty one. And they want you to leave before you stumble on the truth."
"If you're right," Jeff said, "I'm surprised they let me come here at all."
"Well, I am, too. I mean, why did they? But they don't want you here now, and I just felt I ought to tell you why, so you'll be on your guard."
"On my guard." Jeff reached out to touch her hand. “I will be, Susan. Thanks for the warning. And listen: If you need to get in touch with me about anything, I'll be at the Four Pines Motel. Do you know where that is?"
She nodded. "Yes, I know. And now you listen: I've told you all this, Jeffrey Gordon, because I like you. No matter what the others say, I like you." Suddenly she leaned forward and touched her pale, thin lips to his cheek. Then, just as suddenly, she slid off the bed and ran to the door.
Inching it partway open, she first put her head out to be sure the hall was clear, then stepped out and silently shut the door behind her, thrusting a tiny hand back in to wave good-bye as she did so.
Chapter Twenty-One
Earl Watson had set his alarm for three A.M. before turning in for the night. When it went off, he reached out and shut it off before it could wake his wife. From the early days of their marriage, anyone reckless enough to ask him about his wife's sleeping habits had been informed with a sneer that the best thing Marj did was sleep.
She slept now while Earl got up, put on clothes and boots, and went downstairs, where from a cupboard under the kitchen sink he snatched an almost full bottle of bourbon and tipped it to his mouth.
His need for what he would have called a good stiff drink satisfied, he hurried out to the yard. Moments later his aged pickup growled down the road with Earl hunched over its wheel and the bottle be
side him on the seat.
Carrying only the bourbon and a battery lantern, he left his truck on the pond road at the edge of the Everol property and climbed the knoll. There he rolled aside the boulder at the cave entrance, tipped the bottle to his mouth yet again, and went groping into the cave.
The bourbon was already more than half gone..
On his way to where he was going, Earl passed the second of the two voodoo rooms Jeff Gordon had discovered—the one Lelio Savain and Lucille had set up when their first was defiled—but in his haste he passed it without even a glance. On he went for another half mile or more, past the mouths of smaller side tunnels, until he reached a place where the ceiling dipped so low that he would have to get down on his hands and knees if he hoped to continue. On his right now was a man-high niche, a yard or so deep, on the floor of which lay what appeared to be a roll of canvas tied at both ends with rope.
Here Earl drank again from the bottle and tossed it away, thinking he had finished the bourbon but actually leaving an eighth of an inch. On his hands and knees, with no small output of effort, he dragged the roll of canvas toward him and checked the ropes wrapped around it. Then, grumbling, he entered the low-roofed stretch of tunnel backward, still on his hands and knees, dragging the roll after him.
The crawl-stretch was a long one, a hundred yards at least, and by the time he reached the end of it he was cursing the canvas with what little breath he had left. He was also all but drowning in his own sweat, though the cave was cool. For a while he simply sat there with his back against a wall and his head on his chest. Then he went on again, still on his hands and knees because he was too drunk and too tired now to lift the roll of canvas to his shoulder and walk with it.
Some ten yards in from where the ceiling had risen he came to a niche that at first glance appeared to be similar to the one from which he had taken the roll. The tunnel continued on into the darkness, but this was his destination. With no little difficulty he removed rocks and rubble from the opening, then stepped inside. But this was not a simple crack in the wall like the other. A part of it that could not be seen from the main tunnel angled to the left for another three yards. It, too, was strewn with rocks, some of them good-sized boulders.
He moved enough of these to clear a passage, and then with much muttering dragged the roll of canvas into this hidden part of the niche. Having pushed it against the back wall, he used the rubble and rocks to create a barrier that would hide it from anyone who might decide to look in. At the main entrance to the niche he created a second such wall to further discourage any intrusion. He knew this cave well, and the wall, when finished, looked as though it had always been there. But by then he had labored for more than an hour and had to rest again before returning the way he had come, through the crawl-stretch to where he had tossed away the bottle.
When drunk, Earl Watson was not a man of good humor. As his wife often pointed out, alcohol inevitably made him first moody, then sullen, then angry, and finally violent. He was in the next-to-last stage when he again reached the Haitians' second voodoo room and stopped to rest.
This time, catching a glimpse of what was in the room when he slouched against the wall at the entrance, he straightened again and played his light around inside. What he saw caused his red-flecked eyes to become slits and turned his heavy breathing into a snarl.
He lurched into the chamber and went storming around it, to rub out the cornmeal vèvés so meticulously drawn by Lelio Savain as part of the latter's invocation to the loa. He snatched up the earthenware urn in which Lelio had placed the cocomacaque stick taken by Jeff Gordon. He hurled the urn against a wall, where it exploded into fragments. Then he staggered drunkenly to the altar, swept it clean of other urns and the asson on which Lelio had labored with such patience and devotion, and threw the white cloth halfway across the room before reducing the altar to chunks of splintered wood by slamming it again and again against the floor.
Only when his rage began to subside did the animal sounds Earl had been making break down into words and become comprehensible. "Keep the Goddamn hell out of my cave!" he was shouting in his fury. "I found it and it's mine! You hear, Goddamn it? It's mine!" A number of variations on this theme followed, some much more colorful and violent, before he finally lurched about and left the wrecked hounfor.
His cave? Yes, by God, it was! A few others might know about the entrance on the knoll now, but he was damned sure that he alone had explored this whole underworld, challenging every possible crawl, sump, sink, and boulder choke to reach the actual ends of tunnels that less experienced cavers would have thought ended sooner. He alone knew how many old bones it contained—fossils that had to be worth a pile of money or there wouldn't be so much about them on TV and in the papers. He had explored other Florida caves in his day and knew what he was doing here. Using compass and measurements, for instance, he had decided that one passageway ran somewhere near the Clandon cemetery. Another went close to the Everols' house, maybe even under the house.
Someday, by God, he would figure out how to make real money out of all this knowledge. Not just the miserable few bucks he was making now. Damned right he would. To hell with painting houses for a living.
He was still spewing out his anger, though only in mutterings, when he made his exit from the cave and rolled the boulder back into place. Was still muttering as he went reeling down the side of the knoll to his pickup. On the way back to town he barely had control of the truck, letting it swerve all over the road, but luckily he met only one car, and it gave him a wide berth.
At home he found his wife, Marj, still asleep.
As he carefully eased himself back into bed beside her, the alarm clock that had woken him at 3:00 A.M. now said 4:20.
Just east of the Clandon cemetery the car Earl Watson had passed suddenly lost its purr and began to cough. With a muttered, "Oh God, not again!" Fiona Deering pulled it to the side of the road and shut off the ignition. Her eight-year-old daughter, Corinne, turned to her with a frown and said, "What's wrong this time, Mommy?"
Mother and daughter had left their motel early because the car had twice before given them trouble on their journey from Mobile, Alabama, and Fiona was determined to reach Walt Disney World before dark. The trip was a birthday present for her daughter, and today was Corinne's birthday, and, by God, she intended to be there even if the damned car did keep misbehaving.
"We'll just let it cool down awhile and see what happens, honey," she said. If Schuyler were here, he would have done something under the hood by now and everything would be okay again. But she and Corinne's father had been divorced for more than a year—he was already married to the other woman—and what lay under the hood of a car was pretty much a mystery to her. She worked in a bank, not a garage.
Taking a map from the glove compartment, she peered at it in the light from the dash. “That town we passed through a little while back, honey—it's called Clandon. Do you suppose they'd have an all-night service station there?"
"It looked awful small, Mommy."
"Well, you never know. And if the car won't start, we'll have to do something. We can't just sit here."
"We could wait for daylight," the child said.
"That's a long way off. Maybe they'll have an all-night fast-food place, at least. We'll feel better if we have a bite to eat, don't you think?"
"Well—all right."
"I'll just try the car, and if it doesn't start…”
She turned the key. The starter made an unnatural humming sound and nothing else happened. She tried again and then stopped, afraid that if she continued she would only add to the problem by running down the battery. With a shake of her head she took the key from the ignition and dropped it into her handbag. "Well, honey?"
"All right," her daughter said without enthusiasm.
"Let's go, then." Getting out, Fiona waited for her daughter to follow suit, then locked the car and took the child's hand. "Watch out for cars, now." There hadn't been one in the past hou
r, but you never knew.
There was a moon, or part of one, in the night sky, but clouds kept sliding under it and allowing the warm, sticky darkness to take over. Next time she would remember to put a flashlight in the car, she promised herself. And from now on, before undertaking any trip as long as this one, she would have the car checked, too. She'd been unforgivably careless this time. But as they walked along the road's edge Corinne began to sing, and she had to laugh as she joined in. The song was "Hi Ho, Hi Ho," from Walt Disney's Snow White, which they had on a video tape at home.
A swift-moving cloud let the moonlight through again, and she saw they were approaching a roadside cemetery. They had passed it in the car, she remembered; probably it belonged to the town of Clandon.
Back where it ended in a wall of woods, something was in motion. A long black shadow of some kind.
She stopped in her tracks, jerking Corinne to a halt with her.
"What's the matter?" the child asked.
Fiona lifted her free hand to point. "Look." Then, in a shrill wail, "Oh, my God! What is that thing?"
Never before had she seen anything like the creature that was rushing toward them. It looked like a lizard, but the moonlight must be playing tricks on her because there were no lizards that big. Its enormous feet either smashed the gravestones in its path or, like pile drivers, pounded them deep into the earth.
"Run!" Fiona screamed. "Run!"
She looked back as they did so. Common sense told her to save every ounce of energy for running, but terror made her turn her head. And, yes, the creature was a lizard. Born in the south and having majored in biology, she knew all about that suborder of reptiles, even the names of the various kinds.
But this one was far more hideous and much, much bigger than any she was familiar with. Bigger than the largest alligator, it had a horny head and great, gaping jaws, and a monstrous, flicking tongue. Old; that was the word. Ancient. Like something you saw in one of those museum displays of giant birds and saber-toothed cats and Tyrannosaurus Rex, the carnivorous dinosaur whose head was four feet long.
