by Cave, Hugh
"I heard you speaking to me. I looked back and there you were, shining your light in my eyes. But, Sam, I still had to do what I... was being told to do. I still had to go to the edge there and walk off."
"Told by whom?" Sam demanded, feeling small things with many cold legs walking over his body.
She shook her head slowly again. "It was like some kind of dream. That's the only way I can describe it. Some kind of nightmare. I just had to do it. I couldn't help myself." Leaning forward on the cot, she unlaced and removed her sneakers. "I've got to go to bed, Sam. I'm sorry. I just can't talk anymore now. Please?"
He nodded and stood. Went to his own cot and stripped down to the underwear he would sleep in. When he looked across the room again, Mildred was in bed with a blanket pulled over her.
17
The section of the capital called Turgeau.
An impressive old residence in Rue Coirin.
Dr. Roger Bell pushes open the gate.
A bell tinkles and at once a tawny Great Dane
lopes down the wide driveway.
The front door opens at the same time.
A tall, slender Haitian,
light brown of complexion,
calls to the beast from the veranda,
then welcomes Dr. Bell.
Dr. Bell advances,
climbs the steps,
shakes the man's hand,
thanks him for consenting to see him.
They enter the house.
Dr. Bell is led into a handsome,
mahogany-paneled study.
On one of the book-lined walls
hangs framed proof
that Decatus Molicoeur
holds a degree of Doctor of Philosophy
from the University of the West Indies
in Jamaica.
There is nothing to indicate he is also
a close friend and confidant
of Haiti's president for life,
Jean Claude Duvalier.
But he is.
Dr. Molicoeur waves his caller
to a chair and smiles at him.
"Now, Dr. Bell,
what can I do for a distinguished
doctor of philosophy
from a state
I have never had the good fortune
to visit?"
His English is flawless,
his friendliness not to be questioned.
In another part of this lovely old house
he has a charming, beautiful wife,
an equally beautiful four-year-Old daughter
about whom Dr. Bell has been told
—warned—
by the legless bocor in Legrun.
Looking into the face of this man,
and thinking of the wife and daughter,
Dr. Bell now stiffens in his chair,
turns pale.
"Is something wrong, Dr. Bell?"
"No, no, it is nothing.
It will pass."
The voice of Margal
has re-established control.
Bell is once more
the obedient servant.
"You asked what you could do for me, Dr. Molicoeur.
"Yes."
"Begin, please, by looking at me."
That was how Margal had begun with him.
The eyes were the web
that held the victim.
18
"Miss Kay?"
"Yes, Tina?"
"Did you see that thing in our room last night?"
"I saw something, baby. What it was I'm not sure. What do you think it was?"
"I don't know."
They were naked, she and the child, having a bath in one of the prettiest mountain streams she had ever seen. A welcome bath, too, for the sweat of yesterday's ride and last night's tension was still on her, and they had ridden for another hour this morning since leaving the home of Edita and Antoine. At the house, there had been no water for bathing. At least, none she could have used without feeling guilty. Antoine and his woman would have had to walk far for it.
Soaped from head to foot, she lay back in the clear, shallow water and watched little Tina imitate her. Downstream, around a bend that hid him from sight, their guide Joseph was bathing, too. She could hear him splashing around and singing the folk song "Plotonnade" about the girl at the river who preferred making love to doing laundry: "You have water, soap, bluing, and starch. Why aren't you washing, girl?"
A minnow swam in between her legs and she said with mock indignation, "Hey, you, where do you think you're going?" Undeterred, it kept on coming until she put a hand down and splashed it away.
"Miss Kay?" Tina stood up and solemnly frowned at her. "It was a lizard, wasn't it?"
"I think so, baby."
"But such a big one!"
"Well, now, that's what I'm not sure of. You were asleep, and one of those lizards in the thatch dropped onto the bed. But it was only a little one, and I don't believe it really got big. I think we just imagined that part. And you were making noises in your sleep when it fell. I'll bet you were dreaming. Do you remember what you were dreaming about?"
Tina wagged her head, mechanically lifting water in her graceful hands and letting it run down over her slender body.
"You don't remember?"
"Uh uh."
Kay, too, stood up, feeling wonderfully clean and refreshed. "Anyway, we're okay this morning, aren't we? So I guess we'd better just forget it." Wading toward the bank, she paused to watch a crayfish scoot under a stone, then skirted a pool full of minnows to reach the overhanging rose-apple limbs on which Tina and she had draped their clothes after washing them. The clothes would have to be packed in the saddlebags wet, but no matter, they were clean. "Coming, baby?" she called, turning her head. Then she gasped.
The child was calmly sitting in shallow water, having herself a bowel movement.
Oh, brother, Kay thought, wincing. Even after all those talks at the hospital about clean water. . . Would this poor, miserable, wonderful country ever change?
Donning dry clothes, she called to the child again, and then went down the trail to the mules. Joseph was already there, looking scrubbed and cheerful. Tina appeared a few minutes later, and their journey continued.
Passing through the village of Vallière an hour later, she looked for the church and rectory Sam Norman had told her about two years ago, and for the bell tower he had described as "a kind of big white tombstone with a bell in the top of it." They were not hard to find, dominating the scene as they did.
So this is where he had had such a great time, she thought, and felt cheated. Why couldn't she have been with him when he came here, instead of that fellow from the U.N.?
In the village she had to wait several times while Joseph stopped to talk to people he knew. But not for long. Beyond Vallière, the trail continued its slow, twisting climb and the stillness returned.
The mountain stillness. No bird cry or leaf rustle could have much effect on a silence so profound, nor could the muffled thumping of the mules' hoofs over the layers of leaf mold. She felt as if she was riding through another world.
Why hadn't Sam written after returning to the States? Had she been that rotten to him their last night together?
In the stillness of the forest, her mind drifted back to that agonizing last weekend. Would things have ended differently if she had been able to get to Port-au-Prince on Saturday, as she had promised?
Sam had arrived there Saturday. She had not. Friday evening, a camion en route from Cap Haitien to the capital had gone off the road near St. Marc, landing upside down in a ditch; many of its passengers had been injured and brought to the hospital. What was she supposed to do? Say to the doctors, "Look, I can't help with these people, I have a date in Port"?
So she had arrived at the Pension Calman Sunday afternoon, a whole day late, and found that Sam was not there and everyone else, Victor Vieux included, was acting strangely.
"Victor, where is he?"
"I don't know, Kay. He stayed around all last evening waiting for you. Then this morning he took off."
"Didn't he say where he was going?"
"No. I'm sorry."
"Oh, God, Victor, I know I should have phoned him, but I couldn't. The damned telephone out there hasn't worked for days!"
"Kay, he knows that. He tried to phone you and they told him."
"Then why did he get angry?"
"Kay, be patient. Come, have a drink with me and wait for him. We both know he won't spend his last night in Haiti just driving around the city feeling sorry for himself."
It was a conspiracy of silence, of course. Something had happened, but Victor was not talking. The maids were in on it. Their unnatural reticence told her so.
Had Sam got drunk when she failed to appear? She didn't know his capacity, had never seen him truly drunk—unless he had been drunk that night in Jacmel when he tried to crash her room naked. Something was wrong, but what?
Then, at ten o'clock he had returned—
Stop it, she told herself. That was more than two years ago, and there have been other men since then, and Sam Norman is long gone and long forgotten.
Why, then, was she thinking about him now?
But she had been thinking about him almost constantly since leaving the hospital with Tina, hadn't she? And not just because of Tina's name, or even because Sam had traveled part of this wilderness trail before her.
He could have written, damn him. He could at least have said he was sorry for that last God-awful night.
They were climbing, she realized, and had been for a while. Without even thinking about it, she had leaned forward to grip her mule's neck as it clawed its way up an almost vertical stretch of rocky path. Now the trail was leveling off and she saw Joseph ten yards ahead, looking back and waiting for her. As usual, Tina sat snugly and smugly in front of him, fenced in by his arms.
She pulled up alongside, and he said, "For a little while it will be hard now, M'selle. Should we stop a while?"
"I'm not tired, Joseph."
"Well, all right. I was thinking you might be hungry, but maybe we should get this place behind us. Then we can stop thinking about it."
Remembering something the woman had said last night, Kay frowned. "Is this the place they call Saut Diable?" It meant, she knew, Devil's Leap.
He nodded.
She peered ahead. The sun was high and the track mottled with tree shadows, but after a short stretch where it leveled off, sloped down into a kind of trench. They had ridden through similar cuts already: places where the earth was soft and seasonal rains had scored it to a depth of eight or ten feet. Riding through such a place, you sometimes had to remove your feet from the stirrups and lift them high. Otherwise, if the mule lurched sideways, you could end up with a crushed leg.
"M'selle," Joseph said, "the defile ahead is narrow and very steep. You must make your animal descend slowly. You understand?"
She nodded, feeling apprehensive.
"But don't even start down it until I call to you from below."
"Until you call to me?"
"At the bottom, the trail turns sharply to the right, like this." Dramatically he drew a right angle in the air. "I will be waiting there to help you."
She was not sure she understood, but watched him ride on and noticed how carefully he put his mule to the trench. Riding forward herself, she reined in at the top and watched him go on down until he disappeared beyond a curve of the cut. It seemed a long time before she heard him calling her, from far below.
Scared, she clucked her own mule forward.
It was the worst stretch they had encountered, not only steep but slippery. The red-earth walls rising sheer on both sides smelled wet and musty and were only just far enough apart to permit passage. Her mule took short, mincing steps, stumbled at times. At one twist of the trail he went to his knees, all but pitching her over his head, then was barely able to struggle up again. Her feet had to be out of the stirrups, and she marveled that she was able to stay on the animal's back.
Luckily, her feet were back in place for the last few yards. The walls of red earth were a little farther apart. At the bottom, Joseph waited for her, standing on widespread legs against a patch of deep blue sky. He held in his hands a dead stick about as long as a baseball bat and, in fact, looked like a batter standing at the plate awaiting a pitch.
"Come slowly," he called to her. "And hang on!"
As she came within reach of him he swung the stick. Whap! It caught her mule across the left side of the neck and caused him to wheel abruptly to the right. As she clung to the pommel to keep from falling, she got the full picture and promptly wet herself.
Joseph had been standing on the edge of a sheer drop, to make sure her mule didn't take one step too many before turning. Had the animal done so, both she and it —and Joseph too, no doubt—would have gone hurtling down into a valley hundreds of feet below.
Her mule stopped. A little distance ahead, Joseph's animal was waiting, with Tina aboard and looking back. The trail was a ribbon of rock no more than six feet wide, winding along the cliff face for a hundred yards or more with awesome heights above and those terrifying depths below. Joseph, still clutching his stick, caught up with her and gave her mule a pat on the shoulder, as if to apologize for clubbing it.
"You are all right, M'selle?"
"I'll never be all right again."
He chuckled. "Actually, I was not worried. This gray beast of yours has been here before and is not stupid. I only wanted to be sure he would remember that place. Just give him his head now and let him follow my animal along here. Okay?"
"Okay," she said, hoping he would not notice her wet pants.
He walked on ahead and swung himself into the saddle, saying something to Tina that made the child look at him with adoring eyes. His mule started forward, and Kay's animal clop-clopped along behind it.
Then the trail began to go dark.
Kay looked up to see what had happened to the sun. It was there but fading, and the sky began to look like a thick sheet of overexposed photographic film becoming blacker every second.
She looked down. A dark mist rose from the valley which only a moment ago had been green. Was it a mist? Distinctly, she smelled smoke and saw flames. Then, like an exhalation from the earth itself, the darkness swirled up to engulf her.
Suddenly, she could see nothing in front of her, nothing above or below, nothing behind. All creation was black and boiling.
Her mule stopped. Why? Because in her sudden terror she had jerked the reins, or because he, too, was now blind? What was happening was unreal, she thought frantically. It was no more real than the flash flood at the fording yesterday and the harmless gecko that had become a ravenous dragon last night.
Margal, she thought. The man with no legs. We're getting close and he doesn't want us.
19
The sky, the valley, the trail snaking along the cliffside in front of her—all had disappeared. The darkness had engulfed them and was furiously alive, shot through with flames and reeking of smoke. The smoke made her cough and she could not stop coughing, had to cling to the saddle as she struggled to breathe.
And now the thunder. Peal upon peal of thunder, filling the fiery darkness in the valley and bouncing off the cliff in front of her and behind her. So, was this just a freak mountain storm after all?
Only it wasn't thunder she was hearing, was it? No. It was a booming of drums, ever so many drums, dozens, hundreds of drums. The sound assaulted her head and she wanted to scream but knew she must not. A scream might frighten the big gray mule. He wasn't easily frightened. He had proved that more than once. But he was still standing motionless, waiting for her to urge him forward again.
Should she do that? Had his world, too, gone mad? Or did he still see the trail in front of him, Joseph and Tina on the mule ahead, and the green valley below?
Can't stay here. Can't risk it. But there is no way to turn and go back!
Should she try to dismount and walk back? No, no! The world was so dark, she might as well be blind. If she tried to slide from the saddle on the cliff side, the mule might step away to make room for her. Might take a step too many and go plunging over the edge. And if she tried to dismount on that side without knowing where the edge was, she might drop straight into space.
She clucked to the gray as Joseph had taught her. Touched him, oh so gently, with her heels. “Go on, fella. But slow, go slow.”
He gave his head a shake and moved forward through the stinking smoke and the drum-thunder, while she prayed he could see the trail and would not walk off its edge. Or grind her into the wall.
If he does grind me into the wall, I’ll know he can’t see any better than I can. Then I can pull him up and at least wait. But if he goes wrong on the outside . . .
She began to cry. The smoke had got to her eyes and was burning them. And she was still coughing.
The mule plodded on through the unreal darkness. The drums thundered. Tongues of scarlet leaped high from the valley – high enough to curl in over the trail and stab at her feet, as if to force her to lift them from the stirrups and lose her balance. Fighting back the panic, she gripped the saddle with both hands and ground her knees into the mule’s sides for an added grip.
Saut Diable. The Devil’s Leap. Had the legless one lost his legs in a fall from here? She didn’t believe it. No one could survive such a fall.
Dear God, how much longer?
The gray could see. She was convinced of it. He trudged along as though this journey through the nightmare were all in the day’s work. Not once did he brush her leg against the cliff, and so she had to assume that not once did he venture too close to the drop on the other side. Was the darkness only in her mind, then? Was Margal responsible for it?
Never mind that now, Gilbert. Just hang on. Pray
It almost seemed that the one creating the illusion knew his grisly scheme was not working. Knew she had not panicked and spooked the gray mule into plunging over the trail’s edge with her. The thunder of the drums grew louder. She thought her skull would crack under the pounding. The darkness became a gigantic whirlpool that seemed certain to suck her into its vortex. She tried shutting her eyes. It didn’t help.
