Restless Dead

by Cave, Hugh

  "Joe only just remembered your place," Pimples said. "I been tellin' him for the past hour there wasn't no such lake as this one on the map, but he kept sayin' I was crazy, and—"

  "All right!" the tall man said impatiently. "Well, Mr. Darby?"

  "Of course. Take number two and stay as long as you like. No one is here right now."

  "Are the bass bitin'?"

  "The same as always, Mr. Janarek." The white-haired man started to walk away, then stopped and looked back. "I'm sorry I don't have more than one boat this evening.. The others are being painted and won't be returned until tomorrow. One will be enough for you, though, won't it?"

  "Yeah, yeah, sure."

  "If I were you, I would try to get out there right now. This is the best time of the day."

  Joe drove the car through the clearing to the second cottage and flipped the lever that opened its trunk. They carried in their luggage, fishing gear, and food. It was a pretty nice cabin, Pimples remarked. "Old, but you can see he looks after it real good. The old guy, I mean. I take back what I said about you bein' crazy, Joe."

  "Thanks."

  "I still don't understand why you never brought me here before, though. We been to a lot o' worse places."

  "Let's go look at the lake," Joe said.

  They walked the fifty yards down to the lake-shore, and Pimples was again impressed. "Hey, a real beauty," he said. "A mile and a half long, did you say? It looks longer'n that to me. Deep, too. And look at all them cypresses and live oaks, would you? I'd have swore there was nothin' like this in here."

  "Well, now you know."

  "Awright, I'm dumb. So let's wet a line, huh?"

  Returning to the cottage, they changed into the fishing clothes they had brought and readied their spinning rods for the evening's action. "No need for live bait here," Joe said with authority. "Darby probably charges all outdoors for it, so to hell with him. Just tie on a plastic worm."

  "Any special color, you think?"

  "I bet it don't make the slightest bit of difference. You could use a hunk o' shoelace."

  First to finish his preparations, Pimples gleefully pranced around the room, even leaping onto a bed and jumping from that to the other one. "Jeez, Joe, this is great! A lake like this all to ourselves, a swell cabin; oh boy, oh boy." Still standing on the second bed, he suddenly became thoughtful. "There's just one thing."

  "What?"

  "That feller Darby. I never been here before, Joe, but I swear I know him from someplace."

  "There's a million old guys like him, for Pete's sake. Come on, let's catch us some bass."

  According to Joe's watch—the one he had bought to replace the fancy French one snatched from his wrist that time by the old Haitian—there was an hour of daylight left when they pushed the rowboat into the water. Pimples took up the oars. Joe sat in the stern and gazed with pleasure at the massed oaks and sweet bays on one shore, the swamp maples and colorful ground cover on the other. He prided himself on having an eye for beauty.

  Selecting what appeared to be a likely spot some eighty yards from shore, alongside an expanse of lily pads, they began to fish. After only a few minutes Pimples, with a yelp of triumph, set his hook and hauled in a bass. A big one.

  Joe caught one. Pimples caught another. As the sport continued, they filled the evening with whoops and loud talk, and the white-haired man came down from his cottage to stand at the lake's edge and watch them for a while. This time he was not alone. There was a woman with him.

  Joe waved to them and the old fellow waved back before he and the woman returned to the cottage.

  There were more than a dozen big bass in the boat when the sport began to pall. Time had passed unnoticed; the lake was turning black and the tall trees framing it began to lose their identifying shapes against a darkening sky.

  Pimples put down his rod and lit a cigarette. "Have you noticed a funny thing about this place, Joe?" he said. "There's no birds."

  Joe thrust a cigarette between his lips and leaned forward to take a light from his companion. "So what?"

  "There ought to be, with all these trees and water. Lots of birds."

  "We're scarin' 'em off."

  “You don't even hear any birds. If we was scarin' 'em off, they'd still be around, singin'. Birds almost always sing this time o' the evenin'."

  "You can think of more damned things to complain about," Joe said, shaking his head from side to side in mock amazement.

  "I'm serious, Joe. This is a spooky place." Pimples reached for his rod but stopped in mid-motion. "Hey, look. The old guy's watchin' us again."

  Joe turned to look and saw the man and woman on shore again. He shrugged. "What of it?"

  "I still say I know him from someplace." Pimples took up his rod. "Hey, this boat's leakin'."

  "It's been leakin' since we got into it," Joe said.

  "I mean bad. Look here, for God's sake! He must've had it patched with somethin' and the stuff is washin' out." Pimples moved a leg so the tall man in the stern could see the waterspout under his thwart. At the rate the water was spurting in, the small craft would be unmanageable in only a few minutes. "Jeez," he said. "We better get out o' here!"

  "It's time we quit, anyway," Joe said.

  Reaching for the oars, Pimples dipped the blades into the dark water and pulled with a strength born of uneasiness. The right-hand oar broke just above the blade and he tumbled backward off the seat, letting go of both handles. The oar that had not broken jumped from its lock and was out of reach in the lake before either man could grab for it.

  "You clumsy fool!" Joe yelled. "Now look what you done!"

  Pimples pulled himself back onto the seat and looked helplessly at the lost oar. Then he saw something beyond the oar and said in a whisper, "Jeez, Joe—look! And see the size of it!"

  Joe looked and was silent with dread. Ten feet from the boat, a foot from the floating oar, a snake all of four feet long swam toward the boat with its broad, flat head creating a wake. It was a dark olive brown with darker bars and blotches along its heavy, slithering body. In a place like this, so far from help, a bite from a cottonmouth moccasin that big would leave a man no chance.

  "Make for shore!" Joe cried hoarsely. "Use your hands!" Twisting sideways, he leaned over and plunged his own cupped hands into the water.

  But Pimples was incapable of movement. "Joe," he whispered, staring now beyond the snake. "There's more of them. There's dozens more. And look what's happenin' to the lake."

  Joe snatched his hands from the water as though it had suddenly become boiling hot. His eyes bulged. All about the crippled craft now, as it filled from a swiftly increasing number of leaks, the dark surface of the lake was in motion. Everywhere he looked, those broad, flat heads moved toward him trailing long, slithering shadows.

  The silence complained of by Pimples no longer existed. An eerie hissing had taken its place.

  Wrenching himself out of his trance, Joe stumbled to his knees and tore loose the rotten board on which he had been sitting. Clutching it with both hands, he thrust one end into the water and used it as a paddle.

  The boat lurched ahead for a few yards, then slowed to a crawl. Slowed because the water he sought to drive it through was no longer open but choked with reeds, lily pads, and cattails. Lake Revanche had shrunk in size. The surrounding forest of tall trees had vanished. The boat struggled like a trapped and frightened animal in a shallow, snake-infested slough less than a hundred yards in diameter.

  Exhausted, Joe at last stopped trying to paddle.

  Shaking with fear, Pimples put his hands to his face and moaned through his fingers. "Joe, Joe, we're sinkin'. This ain't no real lake at all, and it's full o' snakes! And look, Joe—they're back again, the old guy and the woman, watchin' us!" Despite his near delirium, he managed to remove one hand from his face and point to the shore.

  Joe looked up and saw the two people standing there. Just standing, watching, not making any move to help them. If, indeed, there was an
y way the pair could have helped.

  "Joe, look at him," Pimples whimpered. The boat had filled with water and was settling among the swamp growth, still sixty feet or more from the standing figures. "You know who he is, Joe? It's the old Haitian who grabbed your watch that night!"

  Joe could no longer use the ripped-up board; the boat was resting on the bottom with only an inch or two of its sides above water. "You're crazy!" he bellowed in a rage of frustration. "He's white. Those Haitians were black!"

  "I don't care what color he is, Joe. He could be makin' us think he's white, couldn't he? You talked to him about bass fishin', so he knew you was big on it. And he could've made you think you remembered this lake that ain't no lake, and made both of us believe anything he wanted us to believe when he got us here, couldn't he? Maybe these aren't even real fish we got in the boat, Joe. Jesus, Joe. He said he was a voodoo priest, didn't he? They got powers!"

  "You're crazy."

  "No I ain't, Joe. They get ahold of somethin' that belongs to you; they can do all kinds of things to you!"

  "What's he got that belongs to us, for Christ's sake?"

  "Joe, he took your watch."

  Joe stood up. "To hell with him," he snarled. "We can walk ashore from here."

  "No, Joe! Jeez! The snakes!"

  "How do you know he isn't makin' us see the snakes, too?" Joe yelled. "You want to stay here, that's your business. I'm gettin' out."

  Stepping from the boat into the slough's dark water, he stumbled but regained his balance and began his struggle to reach the shore.

  From the boat Pimples watched him, softly whimpering.

  On shore the old man and the woman had disappeared into darkness.

  At the junction of the dirt road and the narrow blacktop, a boy of eleven stood by the old arrow-shaped sign. His bicycle had been leaning against the signpost for nearly an hour.

  Hearing a car coming along the blacktop, he stepped forward. When he waved the driver down, the car stopped. It was a police car with a young uniformed officer at the wheel.

  "Hi, Duane," the policeman said. "What you want?"

  "There's somethin' you ought to look into down at Mr. Darby's old place," the boy said.

  The officer glanced involuntarily at the sign above the lad's bike. An old, weathered thing that had been there for years, it said simply ORVILLE DARBY, FROG LEGS. "What you mean, something I ought to look into, Duane?"

  "Well, there's an almost new Cadillac there and nobody around but two dead men. I been waitin' here to tell you."

  "Two dead men? Get in!"

  "What about my bike? I don't want it stole." The officer got out, opened the car's trunk, and put the bike into it. He held the car door open for the boy to squirm onto the seat. On the way down the road he said, "When did you discover this, Duane?"

  "On my way to town for Ma. The car was there and I called out to the two black people that's been livin' there, like I been doin' since they got here. When they didn't answer, I took to wonderin' if they was all right and went on in."

  They arrived at what Joe and Pimples had believed to be a fishing camp on a lake. There was no lake—only a round glimmer of dark, shallow water filled with swamp growth, about a hundred yards across. On the edge of it stood three all but falling down shacks of cypress, in a yard overgrown with weeds and tall grass. The Cadillac stood in front of the second shack.

  The boy led his policeman friend past the buildings and the car to the edge of the slough, where a tall man lay half on the bank with one leg in the water. He had ripped his pants to expose the other leg, and both of his hands still gripped it, with fingers and thumbs imbedded in purple flesh, as if struggling to hold back the pain. The leg was swollen to more than twice its normal size and the man's face was a gargoyle of agony and terror, with the mouth and eyes wide open.

  "He's been snake-bit," the officer said. "Cottonmouth, looks like. They hang out here, I've heard."

  "They sure do," the boy said. "It was a cottonmouth killed Mr. Darby when he was after frogs one night. And the old black guy told me they come out every evenin', a whole slew of them. He even had one come into his cabin. But you know what he said, Terry?"

  "What did he say?"

  "He said he wasn't scairt of no snakes. That's right. Honest. He said, 'The snakes will not harm me, little boy. I serve them. I serve Dam—Damballa—and all the snakes do his bidding.'" Perhaps unconsciously the lad had imitated the old man's deep, slow voice. In his own he added, "Who's Damballa, Terry?"

  The officer's last name was LeClerc and he was from Louisiana, where voodoo is not unknown. He said quietly, "Damballa is a voodoo god, Duane. One of the big ones. His symbol is a snake. If your old guy said he served Damballa, I'd guess he was a houngan, a priest."

  "Anyway," the boy said, "I expect more'n likely it's on account of all the snakes that nobody never tried to take over here when Mr. Darby died." He tugged at the man's arm. "Look out there at the boat, Terry."

  The morning sun was bright, and Terry had to shade his eyes to see the rowboat in the slough and the second body in it. "I just don't believe this," he said. "Why, that old tub's been laying here since Orville Darby died. It couldn't have even floated unless somebody patched it up. Even the oars were too rotten to steal. Duane, what do you suppose happened here?"

  "You'll notice there's two fishin' rods in the boat," the boy said with a show of pride at his ability to observe such things. "See 'em stickin' up there behind him? What I think, these two men was out there fishin'—though Lord knows what for—and the boat sank and this one tried to walk ashore but got snake-bit, whilst the other was too scared to try it and got bit where he sat. You see how swole his arm is, hangin' down in the water?"

  "I see," Terry said. "And I think you're probably right. Anyhow, I'm not wading out there after him and I'm not touching this one either. I'll call in for help. Let's have a look inside those shacks first.

  They went together into the shack that had been assigned to Joe and Pimples and found the suitcases and food on a wreck of a table in there. The two beds in the shack were only rusty springs laid on rustier iron frames—no mattresses, no bedding of any kind. The rundown condition of the place led the officer to say wonderingly, "Now how did those two men figure to stay in a place like this? Can you answer me that, Duane?"

  "No, sir, I can't."

  They looked at the third cabin and found it in even worse condition but empty. Then with the officer in the lead they walked into the first cabin.

  "This must be where the old black fellow and his woman were living," Terry said.

  The boy nodded. "They were here about a week, all told."

  "Doing what? Trying to make a living hunting frogs, like Orville Darby did?"

  "Uh-uh. The old guy said they were on their way home and just staying here awhile to rest up. First time I talked to him, he asked me real polite was it okay for them to use the place, seein' as how nobody was here, and I said why not but stay out o' the slough because there was so many snakes in there." The boy interrupted himself. "Hey, looka this. I never seen any o' this stuff before."

  He had walked around the shack's one bed, on which its occupants had constructed a mattress of grass that still bore the imprints of their bodies, and halted before a table. Except for the bed and a single wobbly straight-backed chair, the table was all the shack contained.

  On it stood an assortment of curious objects—curious to the boy and his policeman friend, at least. One was a miniature hand-carved signpost. Shaped like the one where the boy had been waiting with his bike, it said DARBY'S FISHING CAMP. LAKE REVANCHE.

  "I never heard Mr. Darby call this place a fishin' camp," the boy said. "Never heard of any Lake Revanche around here, neither. Did you, Terry?"

  "Never."

  "What's it mean, that word?"

  "It's French. Means revenge."

  A second object was even more curious. It was a postcard picture of a mid-Florida lake surrounded by tall trees. A place of unusual
beauty.

  And in front of that, laid out on an oblong of green palm fronds like a jewel on a bed of velvet, was a wristwatch. Its expansion band was broken and it had the words LOUVAN, PARIS on its dial.

  The room's single chair was placed at the table in a position from which anyone seated on it could have concentrated, without distraction, on the carefully laid-out objects.

  Perhaps for hours on end.