Evil Returns

by Cave, Hugh

  THE EVIL RETURNS

  Hugh B. Cave

  Digital Edition published by Crossroad Press

  © 2011 / The estate of Hugh B. Cave

  Copy-edited by: Trish Wilson

  Cover Design By: David Dodd

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  LICENSE NOTES

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  OTHER CROSSROAD PRESS BOOKS BY HUGH B. CAVE:

  NOVELS:

  Serpents in the Sun

  Conquering Kilmarni

  The Cross on the Drum

  Lucifer's Eye

  The Evil

  The Nebulon Horror

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  Chapter One

  Port-au-Prince, Haiti.

  A midweek morning, 10 A.M.

  The tree-lined streets of the elite Turgeau district are all but deserted.

  Cooks and maids from the poorer parts of this Caribbean capital have already arrived at their employers' homes and begun the day's toil.

  The flow of cars bearing businessmen and politicians to their downtown establishments has thinned to a trickle.

  All but one of the morning's marchandes have finished their rounds and departed.

  The sun is a blow torch, bubbling the asphalt and baking the cracked sidewalks. This is July. Haiti in July is hot.

  At No. 84 Rue Printemps, a second-floor bedroom window has been opened wide to catch what little breeze there is. There, peering down at the street, sits a strange figure in a bright orange dressing gown that conceals his legs. He appears to be a dwarf.

  Wasted away by some illness or accident that has scarred and shriveled him, he might be forty years old or sixty. His hair, touched with gray, is just beginning to grow back after being destroyed.

  The room is small. This old wooden house is not one of the more elegant homes on Rue Printemps, though it might have been in years past. A frayed gray carpet covers part of the plank floor. There is an old bed made of taverneau, a handsome wood now rare and expensive. An ancient chest of drawers stands beside it. Two small mahogany tables flank the chair on which the dwarf-man sits.

  This particular chair, old and big, is padded with remarkable pillows of sunrise red, passion-fruit yellow, the glowing purple of sea grapes. The dwarf-man has always reveled in bright colors and still seeks to immerse himself in them.

  The chair itself is an iridescent blue green, the shade of shallow sea water along Haitian beaches from which, these days, peasant-made boats overloaded with the country's poor so often precariously set sail for that land of promise, America, six hundred miles or so to the west northwest.

  For the past hour or so the man has been watching the passing parade of cars, maids, cooks, and peddler women, but except for a lone marchande on the opposite sidewalk, the show for today is now over.

  In lilting Creole, as she strolls along with swinging buttocks, the peasant wench sings out that she is a seller of lovely brooms and is now about to leave.

  "Mwen marchande bel balé! Mwen pr'allé kounyé a!"

  The man is not interested in brooms. He has a housekeeper-companion who looks after such mundane matters. Certainly he himself is not able to use a broom.

  He is, in fact, legless.

  Actually, most of the inhabitants of this poor Caribbean country, including the president he tried to destroy, believe this man is dead, and are happy in that belief. If not happy, at least relieved. They believe he perished in a fire that destroyed a building from which he was not able to escape.

  He did escape, however—able at the last minute to do so because his housekeeper, risking destruction, groped her way through the inferno to carry him out. But it was not she who healed him. While she helped by nursing him through the weeks when his life hung in the balance, he healed himself by calling upon the powers of his remarkable mind.

  His name is Margal. Margal the Bocor. Margal the Sorcerer. By a miracle of his own making, he is alive.

  With the disappearance of the broom peddler, Margal's eyelids drooped in boredom. But as the door of his room creaked open behind him, he indifferently turned his head.

  The woman who entered was in her way almost as unique as the man she served. Six and a half feet tall, she weighed at least two hundred fifty pounds.

  The dress she wore was striped with all the fiery colors of Margal's cushions. Her face was a full moon with sensuous lips and small, alert eyes.

  Her name was Clarisse.

  In one hand she carried a white enameled basin containing water and a sponge. Over one broad shoulder was draped a towel.

  "So you finally got here," the legless man grumbled.

  Without answering him, she placed the basin on a table beside his chair and stepped behind him. Her big hands were surprisingly gentle as they slipped his arms out of the sleeves of his orange dressing gown. Then, with her left arm lifting him, she removed the gown altogether, leaving him naked.

  "How are you feeling?" she asked. Her voice was that of a friendly bear.

  "I will recover."

  "You already have." Lifting a bar of pink soap from a pocket of her multicolored dress, Clarisse reached into the basin for the sponge, then soaped the sponge and, as usual, began the morning ritual by washing the stumps of his legs. His legs had been amputated just above the knees two years before his joust with death in the fire.

  "When are we going back to the mountains?" she asked while washing him.

  "We're not."

  Her hands hung suspended, dripping water onto him. "What are you saying? We can't stay here forever! Sooner or later they are bound to learn that the fire did not destroy you!"

  "We will not be staying here."

  "And not be returning to the mountains? Then where—"

  "Be quiet, will you?" He slapped at her in anger. "For more than two months, woman, I have been sitting in this prison, thinking about our future. Thinking, if you must know, what a fool I have been. I, Margal, the greatest sorcerer this land of sorcerers has ever known, have wasted months of my life in the stupid pursuit of revenge."

  "You had reason to seek revenge. They took your legs."

  "The loss of my legs was my own fault, Clarisse."

  Ceasing her ministrations again, Clarisse straightened, stepped back, and gazed at him, as though doubting his sanity. "Your fault?"

  "When those politicians demanded my services, why did I refuse? It was an act of idiocy. I could have given them what they wanted and won their confidence. Then I could have gained control over them. But no, I had to defy them and be beaten half to death in my sleep by their thugs, losing my legs in the process. A fool, yes, that's what I was, Clarisse. A complete fool!"

  Clarisse continued to gaze at him for a few seconds, and then went on with her work, shrugging in a way that caused her vast bosom to brush his face as she leaned over him. Coiling his arms around her, Margal pressed his face between her breasts.

  Normally she would have smiled when he did that. Not now. Now she said, still scowling, "If
we are not to return to the mountains and not to stay here, what are we to do, please? If you don't mind enlightening me."

  Burrowing more deeply, he merely grunted.

  She repeated the question.

  He leaned back, perhaps needing air at this point. From habit he glanced out the window beside him. On the far side of the street below, a white woman and a little white girl walked hand in hand along the cracked sidewalk, talking to each other. About thirty, the woman wore a sleeveless shift of pale blue that concealed her shape, but her movements left no doubt she was attractively slim and supple. The child wore a bright yellow sun dress.

  "There -they are again," the legless man said to his companion. "Have you called on your friend Edita yet?"

  She shook her head. "I can't think of what to say to her."

  Displeased, he slapped her hand away from his privates as she tried to sponge them. "Damn it, woman, I told you—"

  "Not everything you want can be accomplished the moment you demand it," she protested. "Especially when you want a thing so hard to explain." Applying the sponge again, she peered suspiciously at his face. "What are you up to, anyway? I haven't liked the look in your eyes lately. To be truthful, I wish I had never told you about those two."

  "But you did."

  She had, yes—weeks ago, when he first saw the woman and child walking as they were now. Amused when he had leaned forward on his chair, almost falling off it to peer out the window at them, she had said, "Do you know who that woman is, Margal? She has just moved into a house on this street. Her husband works at the American Embassy, and the ti-fi is their daughter."

  "What is their name?"

  "Dawson."

  "How do you know this?"

  "Don't worry. I'm not clairvoyant like you. I met their cook in the market, that's all. We've become friends and look for each other each morning, so we can walk home together."

  She referred, of course, to the huge Iron Market on Grand' Rue, where she went every day for fresh fruit, vegetables, and meat. A man of Margal's status could not be expected to rely on marchandes who trudged through the district with baskets on their heads. He craved cervelle, for instance, claiming the ingestion of an animal's brain was beneficial to a man whose own was the source of his power. Cervelle had to be fresh.

  "What does M'sieu Dawson do at his Embassy?"

  "My friend doesn't know, but thinks it must be something very important because his father is an assistant to the American president."

  "His father is what?"

  "An assistant to their president."

  "You joke!"

  "I do not. He even lives in their Palais National, which they call the White House."

  "Interesting," Margal had murmured. "Indeed, yes."

  On seeing the woman and child at other times, he had asked still more questions.

  "What is the woman's nom baptême?"

  "Sandra."

  "And his, her husband's?"

  "Brian."

  "And the little one?"

  "Hers is Marcia. They call her Merry."

  "How old is she?"

  "Six."

  "She is an only child?"

  "Yes, the only one."

  Then one Sunday morning the father had accompanied his wife and daughter on their stroll, and for the whole time they were in view Margal sat among his colored cushions like a spider in its web, watching them. She, Clarisse, could only stand there with a towel in her hands, waiting to dry him after his bath.

  For a change, it had been a cool morning. He shivered because he was wet. But he would not allow her to interrupt his concentration by touching him. "The man is young," he said in a low voice when the trio had passed from view. "I think about thirty." She began to dry his legless, fire-scarred body. "You agree? About thirty?"

  "Yes. But why should you be interested in how old he is? You can't expect to meet him."

  "There might be a way."

  "Don't be foolish. If I were to ask him to come here to visit you, how do you know he would be discreet about it? You are supposed to be dead, in case you've forgotten. One careless word and the whole Garde d'Haiti would be at our door!"

  He had seemed to ponder that for a time. Perhaps he was remembering his two weeks of hiding with a cousin of hers in the miserable slums of La Saline after she rescued him from the blazing house where he had been left to die. It had taken her that long to find a house she could rent. This one. This house they were hiding in now.

  Finally he had shrugged. "Very well. You are probably right."

  But now, as she finished the morning ritual again and turned to leave the room, he was saying something different. With his gaze fixed on the sidewalk where Madame Dawson and her small daughter had disappeared from sight, he was saying, "Wait. I want you to call on your friend this afternoon."

  She paused on her way to the door. "It is not a good day for me to do that."

  "Why isn't it?"

  "M'sieu is leaving for Miami tomorrow, to be gone for two weeks or more, she told me in the market this morning. She has to prepare a special dinner this evening. There will be guests coming to bid him good-bye."

  Margal's eyes always mirrored the machinations of his mind. Now a telltale glitter flashed in them. "He is going to Miami?"

  "Yes."

  "For two or more weeks?"

  "That's how long he usually stays, according to Clarisse."

  As Margal leaned toward her, his hands were the talons of a hawk about to seize a rabbit. "Now you must see your friend this afternoon!" he hissed. "There is something I want from that house!"

  "What are you talking about? What do you want?"

  He told her.

  She gazed at him as though he had asked for a piece of the sun. "Are you out of your mind? How in the world am I supposed to—?"

  "And in the morning you will go by camion to Léogane with a letter. Do you hear?"

  "I hear," she said, frightened now. "But I don't understand."

  "It is not necessary for you to understand! Just do as I tell you!"

  She knew that tone. When he used it, he would tolerate no argument, even from her. She knew, too, what he could do to those who offended him. Wondering why he so determinedly wanted something that belonged to the Dawsons' little girl, she turned and hurried from the room.

  Chapter Two

  Later that day, in another bedroom on Rue Printemps, Sandra Dawson packed a suitcase for her husband.

  This room had two beds. The suitcase lay on Brian's. His face a mask of boredom, Brian himself sat on a window seat and watched his wife. Thirty years old and six feet tall, he was considered by most women outrageously handsome.

  This afternoon he had just returned from a mile of jogging in the capital's cruel heat and still wore running shoes.

  "How many shirts will you need?" his wife asked. At the time of their marriage seven years before, her face had possessed a rare natural beauty. Now, though still attractive, she could have been mistaken for a zombie merely going through certain civilized motions.

  "How many what?"

  "Shirts."

  "Lord, I don't know."

  "I'll put in four. You can ask someone at the hotel to wash them out if you have to." Or your girlfriend, she thought.

  Tomorrow her husband would fly to Miami for talks with Immigration people. The latter were in trouble because so many Haitians were arriving in Florida illegally, most of them in makeshift sailing craft. The Haitian government could hardly be expected to do much about it. In political turmoil since the overthrow of the long-lived Duvalier regime, why should they weep because some of their desperate poor fled to affluent America?

  So all right. Brian again had a legitimate excuse for going to Miami, and it would be a relief to have him out of the way for a time. I should have married Ken, God help me, when I had the chance, she thought. Why was I so stupid?

  "Where's Merry?" her husband suddenly asked.

  "Out in the backyard, with Edita."

&nbs
p; "Doing what?"

  "The laundress didn't show up today, so I asked Edita to wash out a few things. Merry's helping."

  "For God's sake," he said, rising from the window seat.

  "What's the matter?"

  "Helping with the laundry?"

  "Little girls enjoy doing things like that. When you were her age, didn't you ever help mow the lawn or rake leaves?"

  The look he directed at her was an optic sneer. "I'm going downstairs for a drink. You want one?"

  "No, but run along. I can finish this."

  For some reason she felt instantly free of stress when he walked out of the room.

  Entering the yard just then, Clarisse wondered how she was going to persuade her friend Edita to give her what Margal wanted. All the way from her employer's house she had frowned over the problem.

  She found Edita at a backyard standpipe with little Merry Dawson, washing out some clothes.

  "Bon soir, ti-fi," she said to the child. Then, "Hello, Edita. You doing a washing?"

  "Hello yourself, Clarisse. As I told you this morning, m'sieu leaves for Miami tomorrow. Madame wanted some of his things washed, and the laundress is sick, so I said I would do them."

  "And you have no machine?"

  "It's broken. Being fixed."

  This was a piece of good fortune, Clarisse told herself. Yes, it was. Especially as she could see that not all the laundry being done was for the man of the house. In the basket were some items that certainly belonged to her friend's little helper.

  Edita and Merry sat on stools beside a big wash pan, and there was a yard chair nearby. Clarisse dragged it over and sat. "So this is the little girl you told me about." She smiled at the Dawson's six-year-old, but, of course, spoke in Creole. Though she had often seen the child walking with Madame Dawson, she had never before been face-to-face with her. What a lovely child Merry was, with her silky, golden hair and chocolate eyes!

  Edita placed an affectionate hand on the child's shoulder. "Yes, and isn't she a darling?" She herself was not yet twenty-five but already had four children of her own. Her mother looked after them while she was at work. Their father had fled to America months ago, and she had not heard from him. Perhaps he had never reached there. In those ramshackle boats it was always a gamble.