Restless Dead

by Cave, Hugh

  But this monster was alive! Horribly alive! It was overtaking them with the speed of an express train. In only another few seconds it would reach the road.

  She stumbled, dragging her more nimble daughter down with her because she would not let go of the child's hand. Scrambling up again, she felt the road shudder under her feet as the creature thundered from the cemetery grass onto the blacktop. The night was full of her screams.

  Suddenly a cloud slid under the moon again and total darkness returned, as though a giant hand above had poured black ink on the earth.

  And the ink filled with sounds—grinding, crunching, crackling sounds—before silence returned. When the moon reappeared moments later, the road was empty.

  Chapter Twenty-Two

  No alarm clock waked Ethel Everol that morning. What did was the clatter of a truck dumping sand at the unfinished house in which she had sought shelter for the night. Rubbing her eyes, she sat up and looked around in bewilderment, then remembered where she was and struggled stiffly to her feet. Dust motes danced in a shaft of sunlight from a window.

  When she appeared in the doorway a few seconds later, the man at the truck's wheel was lighting a cigarette and a second, younger man in the yard was zipping up his fly as he turned to climb back into the cab. Both men looked at Ethel in astonishment.

  They saw a thin, sharp-eyed woman who looked at least eighty years old, wearing black shoes, a wrinkled brown dress, and a dark gray sweater. As she returned their stares, she mechanically brushed cement dust and wood shavings from her clothes, then lifted her hands and ran her fingers through her hair in a hopeless attempt to make that more tidy, too.

  The man on the ground finished zipping his fly and took a step toward her. "Lady, is there somethin' you want here?"

  "No, thank you." Ethel shook her head.

  "Then what are you doin' here?"

  "I needed a place to sleep. Really, I haven't touched anything, and I'm going now." She stepped from the doorway and began the long, muddy walk out to the road, smiling as she passed them.

  Neither man spoke until she reached the highway. Then the one on the ground looked up at the one in the cab and said while scratching his reddish hair, "Holy cow, Wayne, what you think of that, huh? A broad that old on the road. And sleepin' here without no bed or nothin'."

  "You got to give her credit, Lennie. I hope I'm as tough when I'm that old."

  "Yeah. Me, too."

  "We got no time to worry about old ladies, though. Come on, we're runnin' late."

  The truck growled out of the yard. When it passed Ethel a moment later as she strode determinedly along the road's edge, both men waved. She waved back without breaking her stride.

  An hour later, at a small gas station restaurant, she again bought bread and cheese for her breakfast. Soon after she had finished eating it—while continuing her pilgrimage, of course—a young man in a pickup offered her a lift. He worked on a dairy farm twelve miles ahead, he told her, and let her off when he turned in there. By that time the sun was bright and hot. Her clothes no longer felt clammy, and she had stopped shivering.

  As she trudged along a deserted stretch of highway a little later, a small black kitten came trotting out of some woods just ahead and paused to eye her. Welcoming the excuse to rest for a moment, Ethel broke her stride.

  The kitten came to her feet and looked up at her with yellow eyes.

  "Hello, little one," she said, extending a hand to it. "I don't see any house around here. Where are you from?"

  The kitten rubbed itself against her ankle.

  "You're pretty," Ethel said with a smile. "About six months old, aren't you? What's your name?"

  The kitten looked up at her again and meowed.

  "Blackie?" Ethel said. "I bet some little girl or boy named you that. Well, come on, Blackie. I haven't passed a house in quite a while, so you must live somewhere ahead and we can walk there together."

  They had gone about a quarter mile, the kitten trotting along beside her and looking up every few seconds, when the pine woods ended in a field fenced with wire. The fence posts leaned every which way and looked rotten. The wire was rusty.

  An old white house at the end of the field seemed sadly neglected, too—in fact, about ready to fall down. In the tall grass between it and the road was an abandoned car many years old, a discarded bathtub, an old wood-burning stove, and other rusting junk.

  As they approached the house Ethel looked down at her companion and said, “Oh, dear, I hope you don't live here, Blackie, a nice, clean little kitty like you. You don't, do you?"

  Apparently sensing some danger that Ethel did not, the kitten all but glued itself to her leg and voiced a series of faint cries. Suddenly Ethel saw why.

  There were three of them—three large, tawny dogs as muscular and mean-looking as any she had ever seen. From somewhere behind the old house they came at a full run, their jaws already dripping saliva in anticipation of the kill.

  She knew what pit bulls were. In country parts of Florida they were common. She knew, too, that many were bred solely for illegal dog-fighting. The more vicious they were, the more their owners prized them.

  Pit bulls bred to fight would attack anything that moved. Once their powerful jaws clamped shut on a victim, nothing short of death could make them let go. Children had been victims more than once. Even grown-ups. Small animals were easy prey.

  These three had obviously seen the kitten.

  Suddenly Ethel felt something like hot needles piercing her leg and looked down to see what was happening. It was the kitten, whining in terror as it clawed its way up under her dress.

  "Well, you poor little thing," Ethel said calmly.

  Reaching down, she held the tiny creature with one hand while easing its claws out of her leg with the other, then lifted it in front of her face and smiled at it before pressing it to her breast. Her gaze fastened on the onrushing dogs again.

  "Don't be afraid, baby," she said. "I won't let them hurt you."

  She wouldn't, either. Something she had learned when she was in that other world would protect both of them. She knew it as surely as she knew her name was Ethel Everol. All she had to do was keep the kitten from squirming—so it would not hurt itself, poor thing—and aim an unblinking stare at the oncoming brutes while silently commanding them to halt.

  Without even a thought of running away, she spread her feet and put her mind to work.

  Not ten feet from their target, the three pit bulls braced their legs and skidded to a stop as if suddenly aware that they were in danger. One of them tumbled rump over head before finding its feet again. Then all three crouched there in the road, looking at Ethel as though she were the killer and they the ones threatened.

  "Go away," Ethel said without raising her voice. They continued to stare. All three had stopped slavering and were trembling now. Their eyes were cloudy, like marbles made of milk glass. Cringing, whining, they retreated with their bellies rubbing the road, then turned and raced back the way they had come.

  "There," said Ethel, holding the kitten in front of her face again. "We've nothing to be afraid of, have we? In fact, I believe we make a good team, you and I. If we don't find out where you live, you can stay with me."

  As she trudged along the highway, Blackie once more trotted beside her, looking up every little while.

  A boy on a bicycle overtook them. Ethel asked him if he knew the kitten and where it lived. He didn't.

  She stopped at a house and rang the bell, asking the same question of the woman who came to the door. The woman did not know, either.

  After that there was no point in even thinking about it, she decided, because they were too far from where she and Blackie had first become friends. So from now on it would be the two of them.

  Ethel and Blackie. Blackie and Ethel.

  We two against the world, she thought.

  Chapter Twenty-Three

  With the cocomacaque that had saved him before, Jeff Gordon tapped the bould
er he had just rolled away from the cave mouth on the knoll. "Remember," he said, "we don't have a clue as to what may be in here, so be careful."

  Verna Clark touched his hand and nodded.

  Jeff followed the beam of his flashlight into the tunnel. With a light of her own, Verna followed. Though it was daylight, the sun was not yet up, and behind them the knoll was gray with mist.

  As he groped his way along the passage, Jeff realized he was tired. He had spent most of the night staring at the ceiling, catching only catnaps while the hours crawled by. Knowing it would be his last night at the Everols' had made him even more apprehensive than before, in that room where Jacob had been so brutally slain.

  There had been no real good-byes when he left the house at daybreak. All but Everett were still asleep when he descended the stairs with his few possessions. The snow-haired patriarch of the clan, appearing from out of nowhere, had simply stood there in pajamas and a robe, disdaining to reply to a civil, "Well, good-bye, Mr. Everol. I'm sorry I couldn't be of more help to you."

  Did old skull-face in fact know more about what was going on than he was admitting, as the little bird woman, Susan, had suggested?

  So. . . no good-byes. Not even from Susan. And after exploring the cave, he would be following Verna back to the Four Pines Motel to find out whether the owner, Gwen Towson, had a vacant cottage he could rent. But first there was this possibly dangerous job that Verna and he had decided to tackle this morning to deal with.

  He waited for Verna to catch up to him. "Is everything all right, love?"

  "Yes. How big did you say this cave was?"

  "Who knows? That's one of the things we'll be trying to find out, I guess."

  He went on again, and presently came to the chamber from which he had taken the cocomacaque that was now comfortingly clutched in his left hand—the voodoo stick that had saved him first from the saber-tooth and then from Earl Watson. When his light revealed the ruined vèvés and the wrecked altar, he stopped in his tracks.

  "There's something here I think we should look into, Verna."

  She followed him in. "This is the room you told me about? The hounfor?"

  "Yes. And evidently someone doesn't want the Haitians using it. As I told you, on my way from the sinkhole I found another one that seemed to have been violated."

  "Earl?" she suggested.

  "He knows about the cave, at least. We're sure of that." Again Jeff played his light around the chamber. "Has he ever been to Haiti, do you know?"

  "He never said so."

  "He'd have mentioned it if he had. A visit to the land of voodoo isn't something you keep quiet about. And he isn't a reader. So maybe this is just a show of ignorance. I mean with his kind, when you don't understand something and it scares you, you fight back by trashing it."

  "I don't like this," Verna said uneasily. "Can we go on, Jeff?"

  On his belt Jeff carried the reel of cord he had used before, with more than half of the line still on it. Saying, "We'd better start using this now, so we don't get lost in here," he tied one end to an outcrop of rock beyond the voodoo chamber. Then, for the next ten minutes, the only sound was that of their footsteps, stirring up ghostly echoes.

  Confronted by a familiar scene, Jeff stopped again. The stretch of tunnel ahead was the one in which he had picked up the bone fragment he had handed to Verna at the Drowning Pit after tangling with Earl Watson on the knoll.

  Apparently nothing had been touched here. Parts of animal skeletons still littered the floor and were imbedded in the tunnel's walls. He motioned Verna forward.

  She examined those on the floor first, going slowly from one group of bones to another. "This was a huge snake of some kind, Jeff. I think this must have been a bird, a big one like the vulture I told you about." Turning to the walls, she added, "It's a fantastic find. When I tell my prof about it, he'll want to bring a team here."

  "There's something else," Jeff said. "Come on."

  A little farther on he stopped again, this time at the wolf's head imbedded in the wall. Shining his light on it, he waited for Verna's reaction. It was, after all, a complete head, so real it seemed about to leap out of the wall and attack them. And the creature it belonged to had surely been bigger than any member of the wolf family now living on Planet Earth.

  Verna's first response was a sharp intake of breath as she stepped forward. In silence she studied the thing. Then, still staring at it, she said in a voice of awe, "Jeff, this is incredible! A prehistoric wolf, almost perfectly preserved? If I weren't looking at it, I wouldn't believe it."

  "And I saw one alive at my window," he reminded her. "Just as Amanda did."

  "And before that you saw a huge snake."

  "There were other such things, too—shadowy things some of us saw but couldn't identify. And whatever it was that made those enormous tracks near the pond, the time you picked up the marijuana cigarette. What are we dealing with, Verna? Have you any idea?"

  She shook her head.

  "Well, maybe the answer is somewhere in this cave. Let's go."

  "I wish we'd brought a camera," she said. "Some other time. Come on. Please."

  With the cord unwinding behind them to guide them back out of the cave, they spent the next hour exploring side tunnels, retrieving the line after each dead end to make it last. Several such tunnels were difficult, with water or low ceilings finally blocking them. When the roof dipped sharply at what appeared to be the end of the last one, Jeff dropped to his hands and knees and ventured in a few yards, aiming his light ahead of him. Crawling back out, he shook his head in defeat.

  "This seems to be it, love. A wasted morning."

  Verna turned aside to pick up an empty bottle. "Look at this, Jeff. We're not the first to come this far."

  They examined the bottle together. Holding his light behind it, Jeff said with a frown, "There's still some liquor left in it. If alcohol evaporates as fast as I think it does, that ought to mean—" He shook his head. "No, not necessarily. It might have had more than a little in it when it was left here."

  "I doubt that," Verna said. "Is this a common brand?"

  "I've never heard of it."

  "Well, it's what Earl drinks. There was always a bottle of this on the kitchen counter."

  Reduced to silence by his disappointment, Jeff led the way back out, winding up the cord as he went. The second voodoo room seemed a logical place to stop and rest. While Verna sat on the floor with her back against the wall, he stepped into the chamber for another look around.

  "Verna, come here, will you?"

  She pushed herself up and went to him.

  "Look." He played his light over the rubbed-out vèvés on the floor, the wreckage of the altar. "Someone's been in here since we checked it. The altar cloth is gone. The asson."

  "Was it Earl again, do you suppose?" There was apprehension in her voice. "If it was, he found the boulder moved away at the entrance and knew we were in here. Knew someone was, anyway."

  "It wasn't Earl."

  "How do you know?"

  "It had to be the Haitians, or one of them." He pointed with his light. "See what's missing? Only things that could be patched up and used again—the altar cloth, the asson, some of the urns." Jeff turned to look back at the passage. "They must have known someone else was in here, too. Yet they came in."

  "Maybe they didn't know their hounfor had been wrecked," Verna suggested.

  "Maybe. Then, on finding it like this, they salvaged what they could to set up a new one."

  "But probably not in the cave again, Jeff. That would be foolish."

  "Right, probably not in the cave. Why is it so important, anyway, to have another hounfor right away? In Haiti ordinary ceremonies can be held at home without all the trappings." Jeff looked at her. "Should we pay Lelio and his wife a little friendly visit, do you think?"

  Verna ignored the question, as though her thoughts were on something she considered more pressing. "Jeff," she said with a frown, "are you going to tel
l the Everols about this cave?"

  "Not until I find out whether they already know about it," he replied without hesitation. "Because if they do, why didn't they tell me?"

  Chapter Twenty-Four

  Rock and roll with news breaks. And commercials, of course. It was the station Nick and he had always listened to while tooling around in the old clunker looking for easy marks. Now Nick was gone and Dan Crawley was stretched out on the bed in his room, listening alone through headphones.

  It was nine-thirty A.M., the DJ said. Nine-thirty in the fucking morning and Ma and her latest dude were already out boozing somewhere, probably at the same bar at which she'd picked him up in the first place, a week ago.

  The news came on.

  He shut his ears to it and reached for the burning joint on the table beside the bed. But before he could take a drag, the voice got through to him and he lay there listening, the joint suspended in space above his open mouth.

  "...and, according to the police, some of the more clearly defined footprints seem to indicate that the creature was a giant alligator or lizard. Along the route it traveled, stones in the Clandon cemetery were either shattered or trampled into the ground, as if by something as heavy and powerful as a tank. On the highway nearby were found pools of fresh blood and a woman's shoe with the severed foot still in it. The foot appeared to have been chewed off, not cut with an instrument. Also on the highway, police found a locked, abandoned car that has been traced to a Mrs. Schuyler Deering of Mobile, Alabama. The investigation continues. We will have further bulletins for you as soon as they are released."

  Dan Crawley gazed wide-eyed at the joint in the air above his face, then mechanically reached out to put it back in the ashtray on his bedside table. Behaving more like a robot than a living seventeen-year-old, he dragged the headphones from his head, extended his hand again, opened his fingers, and let the headphones fall to the floor. Then, with his face dead white and his mouth still open, he sat up and forced himself to think.