by Cave, Hugh
Wayne Lawry had mentioned the bar. This was Gifford.
The address Ken had was 21 Petrea Road. Where in Gifford that might be he hadn't a clue. Maybe he could find out in the bar.
He swung into the almost empty parking area and got out. "Hon, I won't be long."
"Ken, I'm frightened!" Sandy said.
"I'll be as quick as I can. Or you could come in with me."
"No, no! Just—if he should start working on my mind again and I'm alone—"
Ken hesitated, and then saw that he might not have to go into the bar after all. Near its door stood a young black woman in a white blouse and bright red slacks.
Reaching into the car, he touched Sandy on the shoulder. "Just sit tight."
"You lookin' for someone?" The girl in the red slacks had her hands on her hips and a knowing look on her face as he approached her.
"A friend who lives on Petrea Road. But I don't know how to get there."
"You have a friend on Petrea Road?"
"Why not?"
"You the wrong color, mister."
The best response to that had to be a laugh, he decided. To his surprise she laughed back at him. "All right, Brother Whitey." She stepped closer to peer into his face. "Just go up that road over there and take your first left and . . ."
Knowing she probably wouldn't repeat them, Ken listened carefully to her directions. It was well that he did, for had he been less than attentive, her next remark might have wiped them from his mind. Extending a long forefinger with a gilded nail, she tapped his belt buckle and said with a scarlet-lipped smile, "After you through callin' on your friend, brother, if you decide to ditch that lady in the car and come lookin' for me, you not goin' be sorry. Y’hear?"
"Suppose you're not here?"
She shrugged. "Looks like I will be. It's real quiet tonight. So you think about it, hey?"
"I'll do that."
Returning to the car, he slid in behind the wheel. "It's all right, Sandy. I found out how to get there." When she didn't answer, he turned to look at her and saw that her eyes were closed. "Hey!"
Her eyes grudgingly opened. In spite of her fear of being left alone in the car, she must have fallen asleep. Drugged, he thought again. But what had the bastard given her? What effect would it have on her if, when they neared the house they were seeking, Margal took over her mind again?
"Did you—?" Gazing at him, she shook her head, as though to clear it. "Did you find out how to get there?"
"Yes. Relax now, hon. Sleep if you want to. I'll wake you."
She came back a little more from where she had been. "Ken—what do you plan on doing when we get there?"
He had been thinking about that. "First we make sure Merry is there. Margal may have moved her, knowing we're closing in on him in spite of all he's done to stop us."
"But—"
"When we're sure we'll be sending the police to the right place, we'll go to them." Sensing she was about to argue, he shook his head at her. "Look at us, Sandy. You've been drugged. I could be a drifter. The police won't want to believe what we tell them, and if we aren't sure of ourselves. . .
And suppose Merry had been moved from Jumel's house, he thought. By themselves they would not be able to find her and would have to go to the police anyway—even if their chance of being listened to was close to zero.
It could be the end of the line.
With Sandy now silent he drove on, following the black girl's directions. Each turn seemed to produce a darker, less traveled road than the one they had left. The night itself was black, with few stars visible. For some reason even the car's lights seemed less bright than they should have been.
They were bright enough, though, to pick out the road sign he was seeking. Then a mailbox loomed up on the left with the name JUMEL on it, in front of a shabby house with glowing windows.
He drove past without even slowing. "Mustn't let them think we're anything but a passing car," he said when Sandy protested. A bend in the road took them beyond sight of the house and he sought a place to pull off. "I'd better hide the car, hon." Sandy would be less nervous then on being left in it while he reconnoitered.
He found a grass-grown pair of ruts that angled off behind a screen of twisted melaleuca trees. Driving in, he switched off the lights. "Now you wait here for me, Sandy. I won't be—"
"No!" As he opened his door, her fingers fastened on his arm. "You're not leaving me here!"
"But—"
"Not after what that man has already done to me, Ken! I'm going with you!"
She was right, of course. Margal was working on her mind now, as well as his. To leave her here could be risky. He might return to find she had driven off again without him.
"Well, all right. But remember, all we want is to make sure Merry is there. No confrontation if we find out she is."
They were both out of the car now. Reaching for her hand, he began to walk her along the ruts. "I understand, Ken," she said almost inaudibly. "I won't do anything foolish."
Together, in silence, they returned to the road. But something had happened to it. It was not the same road.
In fact, it was not a road at all.
Ken halted, releasing her hand and drawing her close to him with a protective arm around her shoulders. "What the hell . . . ?"
He frowned down at his feet. The ground on which he stood was not the blacktop they had driven over in the car. Was it the floor of a cave?
No, not a cave. It was of stone, but this stone was in rough-cut rectangular blocks. In the cracks between them grew weeds and moss.
He turned to look for the trees on either side. They had vanished. In their place were walls of the same material as the roadway, turning the road into a tunnel.
He looked up. The tunnel had a stone ceiling. And he had been here before.
"Sandy . . ."
"Where are we?" she whispered.
He thought he knew but was not prepared to say so until he was certain. "Come on." Taking her hand, he drew her along the tunnel. If he were right, there would be apertures—gun ports, actually—along one wall. Through them he would be able to see . . .
They came to one and he halted. Yes, it was like those he remembered. But he had been here only in daylight and couldn't see what lay out there now, at night. Yet somehow he was sure the walls of a nearly two-hundred-year-old fortress rose high above the corridor in which he stood, and its massive entrance door lay frighteningly far below. And beyond the small strip of flat land leading to that door, an almost vertical mountain slope fell steeply into one of the many deep valleys of Haiti's Massif du Nord.
"Oh, my God," Sandy said. "Ken, where are we?"
"What do you see?" Surely not what he was seeing, unless the illusionist was now able to manipulate both of them at once.
"A corridor with stone walls, a stone floor, a stone ceiling. It's like—like—"
"The Citadelle, in Haiti?"
"Yes!"
The Citadelle Laferriére. That never-completed but still incredible mountaintop fortress near the north-coast city of Cap Haitien, built so many years ago by King Christophe. Both of them had been there, he more than once. Was that why Margal was able to take them back?
Take them back for what?
To mind came some of the grisly stories connected with the place, most of them no doubt true. How some twenty to thirty thousand peasant workmen had perished while building it, either from exhaustion while dragging the monstrous blocks of stone four and a half miles up from the valley, or by falling to their deaths while slaving to erect the walls. How once, to show an aghast English diplomat how magnificently loyal his troops were to him, Christophe had drilled a company of them on the windswept highest level and given a command that sent them marching off its edge.
Christophe himself, dead by his own hand after a paralytic stroke, was entombed here in the central courtyard.
And now, thanks to the wizardry of a Haitian sorcerer born in these same northern mountains, Sandy Daws
on and Ken Forrest were here again.
At night, this time. Alone. In a world of ghosts. For what?
"Come on!" Ken grasped his companion's hand. "Let's get out of here!"
They stumbled on down the corridor, its inky blackness unbroken except for patches of faint starlight shining through the gun ports. Black cannon shapes loomed in front of some ports, with pyramids of equally black cannonballs beside them. A right-angle turn led to another tunnel, and they were trapped in a nightmare.
A nightmare of walking. No, not really walking; it was impossible to do that in such darkness, over rough stone floors that kept causing them to stumble into unseen walls. All they could do was cling to each other and grope along with their free hands outstretched to warn of hidden dangers ahead. On and on from one corridor to another, with only the gritty whisper of their footsteps to keep them company. Unless, Ken thought, one ought to count the ghosts of the many Haitians who, while toiling here, had given their lives to create this fantastic monument to their mad monarch.
Suddenly the dark was behind them. Stumbling from its clammy embrace, they found themselves confronted by a rising flight of stone steps misty with starlight and began to climb.
A small but persistent voice whispered a warning in Ken's mind: Don't do this. Don't! But he could not respond. Instead, he said eagerly to the woman behind him, "Come on, hon! I know where we are now!"
Yes, he knew. These narrow steps, whose only handrail was space, led to the Citadelle's topmost level, a vast stone platform as windy as the flight deck of an aircraft carrier. Always uncomfortable in exposed high places, he had broken out in a cold sweat while walking that upper level.
Unable to help himself, he toiled on up, turning at the top to extend a hand to Sandy as she struggled up behind him. They stood on the flight deck together, with a mountain breeze drying their sweat and pressing their clothes against them.
"Why—have we come up here?" Sandy asked fearfully.
Yes, why? He turned to look around, as though the surrounding peaks of the massif might hold an answer even though they were scarcely visible. To be standing here in the dark was awesome. The sky must be full of clouds. He couldn't see them, but they had to be there because so few stars were aglow in a tropical sky that normally would be ablaze with them. Staring, he slowly walked away from his companion.
Forgot about her.
Felt he was alone.
Moments must have passed, for when the sudden clatter of a kicked stone caused him to turn, Sandy was not at the top of the steps where he had left her. She too was in motion.
Seemingly unaware of what she was doing, she was walking straight toward the edge of the lofty drill area where Christophe had marched his troops to destruction!
"Sandy!" Her name burst wildly from his lips as he raced after her. "Sandy! For God's sake, stop!"
Chapter Thirty-four
Dear God, she was too far away. He would not be able to reach her in time.
"Stop, Sandy! Don't do it!"
She wasn't hearing him. Not paying the slightest attention. She was just plodding on as though mesmerized, with the edge of space only a few yards in front of her.
Like Christophe's sacrificial soldiers, she would walk blindly off the highest point of the fortress, to be shattered on the rocky mountainside far below.
He was hurtling toward her like a sprinter now, with head thrust forward, feet pounding the stone, the mountain wind lashing his face. No breath left to cry out her name again. She hadn't heard him anyway.
To reach her in time he would have to throw out his arms and leave his feet in a diving tackle. It might hurl her over the edge, she was so close to it. The momentum of his dive might carry him over with her.
He had no choice. It was the only way.
His hands curled in mid-dive as he reached for her ankles. That was the first thing he felt—her ankles in his grasp. Then his knees and chest hit the rough stone with a lightning-flash stab of pain, as though he had attempted a swan dive into a waterless pool.
There followed an instant of blackout in which he had no idea whether his hands still circled Sandy's ankles or had fatally lost their grip.
When the blackout passed, Sandy was in front of him with her head and shoulders over the brink, staring down wide-eyed in a silent paroxysm of terror. But his hands had not failed her. Drawing her to safety, he helped her to her feet and led her back to the top of the stone stairway.
They had climbed the stairs without incident, but he could take no chances now. "Let me start down first," he instructed. "Then you turn around and come down backward, as you would on a ladder. Can you do that?"
"I'll—try, Ken."
He went down backward himself, having to feel for each step with his feet before bracing himself to reach up and guide hers into place. The mountain wind strengthened and began to moan through rooms and corridors below. Something white materialized in the darkness and, after giving him a moment of near panic while floating toward them, turned out to be a huge white owl.
Haiti's mountain folk had a superstition about white owls. If one circled a house at night, someone inside would die before daybreak.
Nonsense, of course. But in this brooding land of witchcraft, Christophe's monstrous Citadelle seemed to whisper fierce warnings against complacency.
They reached the bottom and he found himself able to breathe normally again as he reached for Sandy's hand. "Come on now. It's time we got out of here."
Again the corridors were black as caves except for starlight shining through the gun ports. Again the ghostly cannon, never used to repel the expected assault by French troops seeking to recapture Napoleon's lost colony, were hazardous as unseen obstacles to be blundered into in the dark.
Leading the way, Ken paused every few yards to be sure Sandy was still close behind him. Some chambers were roofless now as they neared the central courtyard. Here the cannon were half hidden by weeds that had established roots between the stones. And as corridors changed levels for no apparent reason, unexpected flights of steps increased the hazards.
And always there were footsteps.
Those were of their own making, of course. Had to be! Even if the Armée d'Haiti still quartered a few prisoners here to police the ruins, they would not be awake at this hour. Certainly not prowling in the dark through a place they believed to be haunted.
Yet the never silent echoes sounded like pursuers' footfalls, at times safely behind but at other times so close, Ken could not resist lurching about to see who might be there.
It was a relief to emerge at last into the huge central courtyard with its pervading mist of starlight. A blessing to leave behind the walls and stirred-up dust, and feel the clean mountain breeze again. Then, as he sought a half-remembered route to the lowest level and its door to the world outside, a sudden shaft of moonlight pierced the clouds and, like a spotlight in a theater, illuminated something white in their path.
A white block of stone, coffin-shaped, in the center of walkways outlined with equally white rocks. Ken stopped. "Christophe."
To this spot in 1820 the corpse had been carried secretly up the mountain from the palace of San Souci, in the dead of night, and lowered into a pit of lime to save it from desecration by a mob of the king's disillusioned followers.
Sandy clung to Ken's arm. "What did you say?"
"The grave. His. Wonder how he likes being buried up here where so many died because of him."
Together they gazed at the tomb, Ken no longer fearful they would have to spend the night here. It was not the first time he had stood in this spot. "I know the way out now."
Out to where, though? A mountainside in Haiti or a country road in Florida? A terrifying world of illusion or back to a reality equally perilous? Anyway . . .
Taking Sandy's hand again, he said, "Come on, hon. We're okay now."
But it was not to be so simple. His "way out" led only to more tunnels, more stairs, more darkness and pursuing footfalls. Soon, despite the ch
ill caused by the damp stone of their prison walls, he began to sweat as he realized his memory was failing him.
But, damn it, all they had to do was descend, wasn't it? The way out of this hellish pile was at the bottom . . . wasn't it?
Doggedly he trudged on, aware that he was nearing the end of his stamina. How long had they been wandering in this nightmare? Perhaps not always, as he was beginning to feel in his desperation, but certainly for most of a long, eerie night. And if he was running out of endurance, what about Sandy?
Halting, he leaned against a wall and waited for her to catch up to him. Heard her stumble not once but twice as she covered only a few yards of darkness. Could tell by the sound of her breathing that she was even more exhausted than he.
She stumbled once more, this time into his waiting aims. For a moment she seemed unable to get her breath at all. Then she moaned softly, "Oh, God, Ken, I'm so tired. Can't we rest?"
Easing her to the floor of the passageway, he sat beside her and took her in his arms again. Would they ever find a way out, or were they doomed to wander here forever?
She slept. After a while, so did he.
When he opened his eyes, there was a sky above instead of a stone ceiling. Its grayness seemed to herald the start of a new day.
Or was that the color of a day just dying?
At any rate, he lay not on cold stone but on his back in deep grass.
Was he still in Haiti? He had gone to sleep there with Sandy in his arms, and she was still asleep beside him. Yet the feel of being in Haiti had fled, and this bed of tall grass was certainly not in the Citadelle.
Over him stood a man with a black face, silently peering down at them. The face appeared to be Haitian.
But many residents of Gifford, Florida, were black, too . . . weren't they?
Chapter Thirty-five
At Elie Jumel's house in Gifford, in the bedroom where he spent most of his time, the man without legs gazed at the woman who had just come in with his supper. The grimy windows were beginning to darken.
"Clarisse."
"Yes, Margal."
