“The little man who turns on the light in the refrigerator when you open the door,” I said. “Let’s go find out what’s for dinner.”
“I … I—” She puckered all up the way she used to do when she slept in a bassinet—what I used to call “baby’s slow burn.” And then she wailed the same way. “I don’ want dinno-o-o!”
I thumped her on the back, picked her up and dropped her on top of her dungarees. “Put them pants on,” I said, “and be a man.” She did, but she cried quietly until I shook her and said gently, “Stop it now. I didn’t carry on like that when I was a little girl.” I got into my clothes and dumped her into the bow of the canoe and shoved off.
All the way back to the cabin I forced her to play one of our pet games. I would say something—anything—and she would try to say something that rhymed with it. Then it would be her turn. She had an extraordinary rhythmic sense, and an excellent ear.
I started off with “We’ll go home and eat our dinners.”
“An’ Lord have mercy on us sinners,” she cried. Then, “Let’s see you find a rhyme for ‘month’!”
“I bet I’ll do it … jutht thith onthe,” I replied. “I guess I did it then, by cracky.”
“Course you did, but then you’re wacky. Top that, mister funny-lookin’!”
I pretended I couldn’t, mainly because I couldn’t, and she soundly kicked my shin as a penance. By the time we reached the cabin she was her usual self, and I found myself envying the resilience of youth. And she earned my undying respect by saying nothing to Anjy about the afternoon’s events, even when Anjy looked us over and said, “Just look at you two filthy kids! What have you been doing—swimming in the bayou?”
“Daddy splashed me,” said Patty promptly.
“And you had to splash him back. Why did he splash you?”
“ ’Cause I spit mud through my teeth at him to make him mad,” said my outrageous child.
“Patty!”
“Mea culpa,” I said, hanging my head. “ ’Twas I who spit the mud.”
Anjy threw up her hands. “Heaven knows what sort of a woman Patty’s going to grow up to be,” she said, half angrily.
“A broad-minded and forgiving one like her lovely mother,” I said quickly.
“Nice work, bud,” said Patty.
Anjy laughed. “Outnumbered again. Come in and feed the face.”
On my next trip into Minette I bought a sweet little S. & W. ̣ 38 and told Anjy it was for alligators. She was relieved.
I might have forgotten about the hag Séleen if it were not for the peculiar chain of incidents which had led to our being here. We had started with some vague idea of spending a couple of months in Natchez or New Orleans, but a gas station attendant had mentioned that there was a cabin in the swamps for rent very cheap down here. On investigation we found it not only unbelievably cheap, but deep in real taboo country. Not one of the natives, hardened swamp runners all, would go within a mile of it. It had been built on order for a very wealthy Northern gentleman who had never had a chance to use it, due to a swift argument he and his car had had one day when he turned out to pass a bridge. A drunken rice farmer told me that it was all the doing of the Witch of Minette, a semimythological local character who claimed possession of that corner of the country. I had my doubts, being a writer of voodoo stories and knowing therefore that witches and sech are nonsense.
After my encounter with Séleen I no longer doubted her authenticity as a horrid old nightmare responsible for the taboo. But she could rant, chant, and ha’nt from now till a week come Michaelmas—when is Michaelmas, anyway?—and never pry me loose from that cabin until I was ready to go. She’d have to fall back on enchantment to do it, too—of that I was quite, quite sure. I remembered her blazing eye as it had looked when I struck her, and I knew that she would never dare to come within my reach again. If she as much as came within my sight with her magics I had a little hocus-pocus of my own that I was sure was more powerful than anything she could dream up. I carried it strapped to my waist, in a holster, and while it couldn’t call up any ghosts, it was pretty good at manufacturing ’em.
As for Patty, she bounced resiliently away from the episode. Séleen she dubbed the Witch of Endor, and used her in her long and involved games as an archvillain in place of Frankenstein’s monster, Adolf Hitler, or Miss McCauley, her schoolteacher. Many an afternoon I watched her from the hammock on the porch, cooking up dark plots in the witch’s behalf and then foiling them in her own coldbloodedly childish way. Once or twice I had to put a stop to it, like the time I caught her hanging the Witch of Endor in effigy, the effigy being a rag doll, its poor throat cut with benefit of much red paint. Aside from these games she never mentioned Séleen, and I respected her for it. I saw to it that she didn’t stray alone into the swamp and relaxed placidly into my role of watchful skeptic. It’s nice to feel oneself superior to a credulous child.
Foolish, too. I didn’t suspect a thing when Patty crept up behind me and hacked off a lock of my hair with my hunting knife. She startled me and I tumbled out of the hammock onto my ear as she scuttled off. I muttered imprecations at the little demon as I got back into the hammock, and then comforted myself by the reflection that I was lucky to have an ear to fall on—that knife was sharp.
A few minutes later Anjy came out to the porch. Anjy got herself that name because she likes to wear dresses with masses of tiny pleats and things high on her throat, and great big picture hats. So ingenue just naturally became Anjy. She is a beautiful woman with infinite faith and infinite patience, the proof of which being that: a—she married me, and b—she stayed married to me.
“Jon, what sort of crazy game is your child playing?” She always said “your child” when she was referring to something about Patty she didn’t like.
“S’matter?”
“Why, she just whipped out that hog-sticker of yours and made off with a hank of my hair.”
“No! Son of a gun! What’s she doing—taking up barbering? She just did the same thing to me. Thought she was trying to scalp me and miscalculated, but I must have been wrong—she wouldn’t miss twice in a row.”
“Well, I want you to take that knife away from her,” said Anjy. “It’s dangerous.”
I got out of the hammock and stretched. “Got to catch her first. Which way’d she go?”
After a protracted hunt I found Patty engaged in some childish ritual of her own devising. She pushed something into a cleft at the foot of a tree, backed off a few feet, and spoke earnestly. Neither of us could hear a word she said. Then she backed still farther away and squatted down on her haunches, watching the hole at the foot of the tree carefully.
Anjy clasped her hands together nervously, opened her mouth. I put my hands over it. “Let me take care of it,” I whispered, and went out.
“Whatcha doin’, bud?” I called to Patty as I came up. She started violently and raised one finger to her lips. “Catchin’ rabbits?” I asked as loudly as I could without shouting. She gestured me furiously away. I went and sat beside her.
“Please, daddy,” she said. “I’m making a magic. It won’t work if you stay here. Just this once—please!”
“Nuts,” I said bluntly. “I chased all the magic away when I moved here.”
She tried to be patient. “Will you please go away? Oh, daddy. Daddy, PLEASE!”
It was rough but I felt I had to do it. I lunged for her, swept her up, and carried her kicking and squalling back to the cabin. “Sorry, kiddo, but I don’t like the sort of game you’re playing. You ought to trust your dad.”
I meant to leave her with Anjy while I went out to confiscate that bundle of hair. Not that I believe in such nonsense. But I’m the kind of unsuperstitious apple that won’t walk under a ladder just in case there’s something in the silly idea. But Patty really began to throw a whingding, and there was nothing for me to do but to stand by until it had run its course. Patty was such a good-natured child, and only good-natured children can work the
mselves up into that kind of froth. She screamed and she bit, and she accused us of spoiling everything and we didn’t love her and she wished she was dead and why couldn’t we leave her alone—“Let me alone,” she shrieked, diving under the double bed and far beyond our reach. “Take your hands off me!” she sobbed when she was ten feet away from us and moving fast. And then her screams became wordless and agonized when we cornered her in the kitchen. We had to be rough to hold her, and her hysteria was agony to us. It took more than an hour for her fury to run its course and leave her weeping weak apologies and protestations of love into her mother’s arms. Me, I was bruised outside and in, but inside it hurt the worst. I felt like a heel.
I went out then to the tree. I reached in the cleft for the hair but it was gone. My hand closed on something far larger, and I drew it out and stood up to look at it.
It was a toy canoe, perhaps nine inches long. It was an exquisite piece of work. It had apparently been carved painstakingly from a solid piece of cedar, so carefully that nowhere was the wood any more than an eighth of an inch thick. It was symmetrical and beautifully finished in brilliant colors. They looked to me like vegetable stains—dyes from the swamp plants that grew so riotously all around us. From stem to stern the gunwales were pierced, and three strips of brilliant bark had been laced and woven into the close-set holes. Inside the canoe were four wooden spurs projecting from the hull, the end of each having a hole drilled through it, apparently for the purpose of lashing something inside.
I puzzled over it for some minutes, turning it over and over in my hands, feeling its velvet smoothness, amazed by its metrical delicacy. Then I laid it carefully on the ground and regarded the mysterious tree.
Leafless branches told me it was dead. I got down on my knees and rummaged deep into the hole between the roots. I couldn’t begin to touch the inside wall. I got up again, circled the tree. A low branch projected, growing sharply upward close to the trunk before it turned and spread outward. And around it were tiny scuff marks in the bark. I pulled myself up onto the branch, cast about for a handhold to go higher. There was none. Puzzled, I looked down—and there, completely hidden from the ground, was a gaping hole leading into the hollow trunk!
I thrust my head into it and then clutched the limb with both arms to keep from tottering out of the tree. For that hole reeked with the most sickly, noisome smell I had encountered since … since Patty and I—
Séleen!
I dropped to the ground and backed away from the tree. The whole world seemed in tune with my revulsion. What little breeze there had been had stopped, and the swampland was an impossible painting in which only I moved.
Never taking my eyes off the tree, I went back step by step, feeling behind me until my hand touched the wall of the cabin. My gaze still riveted to the dead bole of the tree, I felt along the wall until I came to the kitchen door. Reaching inside, I found my ax and raced back. The blade was keen and heavy, and the haft of it felt good to me. The wood was rotten, honeycombed, and the clean blade bit almost noiselessly into it. Thunk! How dare she, I thought. What does she mean by coming so near us! Thunk! I prayed that the frightful old hag would try to fight, to flee, so that I could cut her down with many strokes. It was my first experience with the killer instinct and I found it good.
The sunlight faded out of the still air and left it hotter.
At the uppermost range of my vision I could see the trunk trembling with each stroke of the ax. Soon, now—soon! I grinned and my lips cracked; every other inch of my body was soaking wet. She who would fill Patty’s clean young heart with her filthy doings! Four more strokes would do it; and then I remembered that skinny hand reaching out, touching Patty’s flesh; and I went cold all over. I raised the ax and heard it hiss through the thick air; and my four strokes were one. Almost without resistance that mighty stroke swished into and through the shattered trunk. The hurtling ax head swung me around as the severed tree settled onto its stump. It fell, crushing its weight into the moist earth, levering itself over on its projecting root; and the thick bole slid toward me, turned from it as I was, off balance. It caught me on the thigh, kicking out at me like a sentient, vicious thing. I turned over and over in the air and landed squashily at the edge of the bayou. But I landed with my eyes on the tree, ready to crawl, if need be, after whatever left it.
Nothing left it. Nothing. There had been nothing there, then, but the stink of her foul body. I lay there weakly, weeping with pain and reaction. And when I looked up again I saw Séleen again—or perhaps it was a crazed vision. She stood on a knoll far up the bayou, and as I watched she doubled up with silent laughter. Then she straightened and lifted her arm; and, dangling from her fingers, I saw the tiny bundle of hair. She laughed again though I heard not a sound. I knew then that she had seen every bit of it—had stood there grinning at my frantic destruction of her accursed tree. I lunged toward her, but she was far away, and across the water; and at my movement she vanished into the swamp.
I dragged myself to my feet and limped toward the cabin. I had to pass the tree, and as I did the little canoe caught my eye. I tucked it under my arm and crept back to the cabin. I tripped on the top step of the porch and fell sprawling, and I hadn’t strength to rise. My leg was an agony, and my head spun and spun.
Then I was inside and Anjy was sponging off my head, and she laughed half hysterically when I opened my eyes. “Jon, Jon, beloved, what have you done? Who did this to you?”
“Who … heh!” I said weakly. “A damn fool, sweetheart. Me!” I got up and stood rockily. “How’s Pat?”
“Sleeping,” said Anjy. “Jon, what on earth is happening?”
“I don’t know,” I said slowly, and looked out through the window at the fallen tree. “Anjy, the kid took that hair she swiped and probably some of her own and poked it all into that tree I just cut down. It—seems important for me to get it back. Dunno why. It … anyway, I got out there as soon as we had Pat quieted, but the hair had disappeared in the meantime. All I found was this.” I handed her the canoe.
She took it absently. “Pat told me her story. Of course it’s just silly, but she says that for the past three days that tree has been talking to her. She says it sang to her and played with her. She’s convinced it’s a magic tree. She says it promised her a lovely present if she would poke three kinds of hair into a hole at the roots, but if she told anyone the magic wouldn’t work.” Anjy looked down at the little canoe and her forehead puckered. “Apparently it worked,” she whispered.
I couldn’t comment without saying something about Séleen, and I didn’t want that on Anjy’s mind, so I turned my back on her and stood looking out into the thick wet heat of the swamp.
Behind me I heard Patty stir, shriek with delight as she saw the canoe. “My present … my pretty present! It was a real magic!” And Anjy gave it to her.
I pushed down an impulse to stop her. As long as Séleen had the hair the harm was done.
Funny, how suddenly I stopped being a skeptic.
The silence of the swamp was shattered by a great cloud of birds—birds of every imaginable hue and size, screaming and cawing and chuckling and whirring frantically. They startled me and I watched them for many minutes before it dawned on me that they were all flying one way. The air grew heavier after they had gone. Anjy came and stood beside me.
And then it started to rain.
I have never seen such rain, never dreamed of it. It thundered on the shingles, buckshotted the leaves of the trees, lashed the mirrored bayou and the ground alike, so that the swamp was but one vast brown stream of puckered mud.
Anjy clutched my arm. “Jon, I’m frightened!” I looked at her and knew that it wasn’t the rain that had whitened her lips, lit the fires of terror in her great eyes. “Something out there—hates us,” she said simply.
I shook her off, threw a poncho over me. “Jon—you’re not—”
“I got to,” I gritted. I went to the door, hesitated, turned back and pressed the revolver into
her hand. “I’ll be all right,” I said, and flung out into the storm. Anjy didn’t try to stop me.
I knew I’d find the hag Séleen. I knew I’d find her unharmed by the storm, for was it not a thing of her own devising? And I knew I must reach her—quickly, before she used that bundle of hair. Why, and how did I know? Ask away. I’m still asking myself, and I have yet to find an answer.
I stumbled and floundered, keeping to the high ground, guided, I think, by my hate. After a screaming eternity I reached a freakish rocky knoll that thrust itself out of the swamp. It was cloven and cracked, full of passages and potholes; and from an opening high on one side I saw the guttering glare of firelight. I crept up the rough slope and peered within.
She crouched over the flames, holding something to her withered breast and crooning to it. The rock walls gathered her lovely, hateful voice and threw it to me clear and strong—to me and to the turgid bayou that seethed past the cleft’s lower edge.
She froze as my eyes fell upon her, sensing my presence; but like many another animal she hadn’t wit enough to look upward. In a moment she visibly shrugged off the idea, and she turned and slid and shambled down toward the bayou. Above her, concealed by the split rock, I followed her until we were both at the water’s edge with only a four-foot stone rampart between us. I could have reached her easily then, but I didn’t dare attack until I knew where she had hidden that bundle of hair.
The wind moaned, rose an octave. The rain came in knives instead of sheets. I flattened myself against the rock while Séleen shrank back into the shelter of the crevice. I will never know how long we were there, Séleen and I, separated by a few boulders, hate a tangible thing between us. I remember only a shrieking hell of wind and rubble, and then the impact of something wet and writhing and whimpering against me. It had come rolling and tumbling down the rocky slope and it lodged against me. I was filled with horror until I realized that it sheltered me a little against the blast. I found the strength to turn and look at it finally. It was Patty.
Killdozer! Page 12
