by Cave, Hugh
The two black dogs prowled the yard and seemed to know precisely what they were out there for. She herself had let them out at Margal's command. Even watching them through the window sent shivers of dread through her.
Never before had she heard them growl so much or seen them prowl that way, as if they actually expected a victim to come blundering within reach of their fangs. Heaven help anyone careless enough to do that!
"Well?" she said fearfully, placing a hand on Margal's privates in an effort to mellow his mood.
"Well what, woman?"
"I'd like to know."
"You'd like to know what?"
"What will you do when you're close enough to command him?" She used the hand in a way that always pleased him. "You can't prevent him from returning to Washington, you know. The whole country would at once be aware that something was wrong."
"Why should I want to?"
"What are you saying? That we must go to Washington?" Dear God, it was bad enough to be here in Florida! If she had to live in a monstrous place like this nation's capital, she would surely die!
Margal reached up to fondle her bosom, though she was not naked as he was. "You'll like it there. I'm told it's a beautiful city."
"I want to go home to my mountains!" she wailed.
"Not just yet."
"But Washington! God in heaven! Jumel says there is so much traffic there, a person can't even cross the street safely. And the weather turns so cold at times, you have to wear an overcoat! Has someone drained all the good Haitian blood out of you?"
"I need to be close to him. You know how it weakens me to manipulate someone from far away." He fondled her thighs now, with his hand under her dress.
Clarisse reacted to his touch with a little sigh of surrender. She had not lived with this man before he lost his legs and with them his manhood—or, at least, his desire to demonstrate it. Every now and then she worked up enough courage to complain to le bon Dieu about that.
Now, as she went on with her probing, her voice was almost a caress in itself. "Margal, talk to me, please. What will you do when you own that man? Are we to be rich?"
He laughed. It was the laugh of a child just handed a fascinating new construction toy with which he could build anything he might imagine. "Clarisse, I have more ideas than there are grains on a stalk of piti-mi. More than there are dogs on the streets of Port-au-prince at night. Or fleas on the dogs."
"Ideas such as what?"
"Well, we can be rich, as you suggest. And will be; you can take that for granted. In a very short time we'll be far wealthier than we ever could have become in Haiti, even if I chose to return there and take control of that poor country. And, of course, I will control Haiti and make things most unpleasant for those who opposed me. Take that for granted, too."
Done with caressing her, he withdrew his hand. "But those steps will be only a beginning, believe me. Only the sip of rum before the grand feast. The possibilities are so enormous, they keep me awake nights trying to sort them out. To put it very simply, I may change the world. If only to amuse myself."
Reaching down, he moved her hand away from his body. "Go away now, eh? Let me rest."
"Just another little minute, please," Clarisse insisted. "Is it tomorrow we go to this place—this Cape Canaveral—where you will be close to him?"
"Yes, tomorrow."
"At what time?"
"Well, Jumel said it normally takes about two hours to get there from here, but I wish to be there early, to prepare myself." He paused in thought. "The event is scheduled for three-fifteen. We should be there about eleven, I think."
"And the child's father will be driving us?"
"In his handsome silver car, yes."
"Where is Jumel?"
"At a cabin a few miles from here, attending to the child's mother and her pilot friend. Because I have no energy to spare for them at this time."
"And what about the child herself? Is she to go with us?"
He shook his head. "She stays here."
"What if someone should come and find her here?"
"That is why the dogs are outside." His voice had acquired a note of impatience. "Jumel assured me that they are quite capable of preventing anyone from entering this house. Now run along, woman. I must prepare my mind for tomorrow."
He patted her on the bottom as she turned away. Then his voice trailed her to the door.
"After all, my pet . . . tomorrow will be the most unforgettable day of our lives. Be sure of it."
Chapter Forty-two
"What time is it, Jumel?"
Even if his watch had been running, Ken could not have looked at it with his hands bound behind him. All he knew was that the seemingly endless night was over at last, the east window of the cabin was again yellow with early sunlight, and the man slouched on the chair by the door had his eyes open.
Jumel lifted his left wrist and peered at it. "Ten minutes past eight."
Glancing across the room, Ken saw that Sandy was still asleep on the cot. Good. In an unsuccessful struggle to get comfortable, she had kept the flimsy bed creaking through most of the night. Now she must need all the rest she could get.
He looked at Jumel again. The Haitian's bleary eyes and drawn face seemed to indicate sleep had eluded him, too. To the best of Ken's knowledge, he had left his post only twice during the night to prowl like a demon spirit about the lamp lit room. Now he must be almost as full of aches and weariness as though he, too, had spent the night bound to his chair.
Had the time come at last to put their lives on the line?
"Is there any more food, Jumel?"
"Some."
"I'm starved. But take me outside first, eh? Before I flood your little country home here."
The Haitian showed his displeasure with a Creole oath. "You need to go again?"
"God, man, it's been twelve hours or more. I'm not a stone statue!"
"All right, all right." Jumel shuffled across the floor and knelt to release Ken's ankles, then rose again, muttering. He did not enjoy being deprived of his sleep, it seemed, even when serving his admired master. "Come on, then," he grumbled.
With his wrists thrust through the chair back and its legs protruding behind him, Ken followed awkwardly. "Watch out for snakes now, Jumel. I've said it before and I'll say it again: This is exactly the kind of place they love!"
"M'sieu." The tone was one of strained patience. "I have not forgotten your foolish fear."
"I tell you, it isn't foolish! It—"
"Please. If you wish to relieve yourself—" Shaking his head, the Haitian stepped outside, halted by the nearest tree, and turned. Almost indifferently he drew the automatic from his belt.
In the cabin doorway Ken stiffened, feeling as though he had just been led blindfolded to a wall. Did I wait too long? Is he going to kill me? He has to eventually, and it would save him a lot of trouble to do it now . . . .
Half expecting a bullet to cut him down, he slowly shuffled toward the man. The gun remained silent. In a cold sweat he positioned himself, facing the sun. It was a low sun at this hour. Like a huge orange eye it glared at him through the lower branches of a live oak draped with yard-long beards of Spanish Moss.
Filtered through the moss, the sun's bright light almost blinded him as he waited. Worse, it robbed the moment of reality, causing him to feel he was imprisoned in a dream. Would Jumel squat to unzip his fly and extract his penis from his pants, or blast a hole in his heart instead?
For God's sake—which?
For a moment the Haitian seemed unsure of what he ought to do. With the gun in his right hand only inches from its target, he almost seemed to be awaiting instructions. Perhaps he had mentally asked a question and was expecting an answer.
At last, with a shrug, he shifted the automatic to his left hand, dropped to one knee, and reached for Ken's fly. But apparently at that moment he sensed something amiss. His fingers froze and he jerked his head up.
"What are you doing?" His voic
e was sharp with suspicion.
"Looking, for Christ's sake!"
"At what?"
"Not at. For. I've told you a dozen times this is the kind of place—"
"Oh. Your snakes." As his fingers fumbled for the zipper again, Jumel's lips flattened in a sneer.
Suddenly Ken's whole body began to shake. His mouth trembled open. His lips struggled to babble out words.
"T-there's one by the t-tree, c-coming at you, Jumel! Kill it! K-kill it, for God's s-sake! Kill it!"
You primed the pump and the water came. Jumel might not have believed, but he jerked his head around.
When he did that, two things happened. First, the sudden twisting of his neck pulled him off balance, and he had to jab his gun hand at the ground to steady himself. Second, that blazing orange sun behind the veil of Spanish Moss must have distorted his vision at least enough to make him think there could be a snake at the base of the tree.
Before he could recover from either, Ken's right knee took him like a battering ram just under his left ear and sent him crashing into the tree hunk.
The top of his head hit it first, with a noise like that of a watermelon dropped on concrete.
Ken shuffled forward. With the chair still riding him like Sinbad's old man of the sea, he stood there peering down at the crumpled body. It would be a long time before the Haitian moved again. It might be never.
There was a smaller tree some twelve feet away. Ken went to it, turned his back to it, and with a twist of his body slammed the legs of the chair against it. Two of them splintered off and fell to the ground. A second assault shattered the others and broke the chair's back. Though still bound to each other, his wrists were now free of the chair.
He returned to Jumel, not to look at the man again but to locate the weapon that had sailed from the Haitian's hand when he was kneed. It lay in the grass a yard from its owner. Easing himself to the ground, Ken fumbled for it with his bound hands—with care, because it might go off if picked up recklessly. With the weapon safely in his possession and out of the Haitian's reach if by some miracle Jumel should come to, he returned to the cabin.
It was a relief, being able to walk without a burden on his back.
Inside, Sandy sat half awake on her cot. "Hi," she said listlessly. "I need to go, too, I guess." Her eyes opened wide. "Hey, you're—" She sat up straighter. "Where is he?"
"Outside. Out cold." Ken started for the table but stopped to look at her. "Are you all right, hon?"
"Yes. But what—"
"Later." Completing his journey, he peered into the cardboard carton. "That knife he sliced the corned beef with—he didn't take it out of his pocket. It has to be in here."
Turning his back so that his bound hands made contact, he tipped the box over. Its contents spilled out on the table. His fingers found the knife. After a number of failures he discovered how to grip it so the sharp edge of its blade could be brought to bear against his bonds.
In a couple of minutes he was free.
He cut the ropes from Sandy, then, and took her into his arms. Let her cry, he told himself when she began to do just that. Let her get rid of it. Even if it hadn't dawned on her that Jumel would have to kill them to protect himself and his bocor master, she must have been terribly frightened all this time. And even more fearful for her daughter.
But he could not let her cry for long. Time was even more important now than it had been. Stepping back, he said sharply, "We've got to get out of here, hon. Come on."
Outside, Elie Jumel still lay unconscious at the base of the moss-draped oak, like a gnome peacefully asleep in some fairy-tale forest. Except that his pillow was a pool of blood.
"Wait." Ken knelt to touch the man's neck. There was a pulse.
"Just a minute, Sandy." Hurrying back to the cabin, he returned with some of the rope Jumel had used on Sandy and himself. It took only a moment to make sure the gnome would not leave his magic forest if he awoke. "Soon as we can, we'll tell the police where to find him," he said as they went down the path to the pier. "He probably wasn't all bad. Just had to do what Margal told him to."
But on the pier he halted, swung around, scowled back up the path. "Hon, wait. If that creep comes to and tells Margal we escaped, the way he called on Margal for help when I first tried to jump him . . . I'd better go back and make sure he can't."
Sandy pawed at him. "No, Ken! No!"
"But if we're to get Merry out of that house and stop Margal from—"
"Please! If you killed him, I couldn't live with it."
The eruption of fear in him subsided, and he expelled the ashes with a gust of breath. "All right. He may not come to for a while. Let's go." Untying the painter of Jumel's boat, he held the craft while she stepped into it, then dropped into the stern and shoved off.
The motor, thank God, started at the second pull. They were away. All they had to do now was get back to the car and—
And what? Go to the police with what any sane cop would reject as a tale dreamed up by someone who belonged in an asylum? Or dare once more to confront the devil's number-one disciple the hard way, without help?
Chapter Forty-three
He should have paid more attention to the river when Jumel brought them up it. Of course, he had been preoccupied then with his suspicions of the man. And Sandy had been oblivious of everything but the prospect of being reunited with her daughter.
Neither of them now could tell the main channel from the false ones and blind alleys. Not by the banks, which everywhere resembled those of a jungle stream. Not by the water's flow, either. There was so little current that fallen leaves, instead of drifting downstream, appeared to be decorations pasted on a mirror.
And as the sun climbed higher in a brassy sky, the heat became a torment.
With a hand on the tiller, Ken struggled with the decisions he was forced to make. This wooded island coming up—should he try passing it to left or right? This thing on the left that seemed to be a widening of the main channel—should he try it or risk the narrower band of water that went straight ahead? If he took the widening and it turned out to be only a bay or a pond, the mistake would cost them precious time. Perhaps a lot of precious time.
The damned stream was unreal. How for God's sake could he ever have thought it beautiful?
Hearing the mutter of a small plane overhead, he welcomed it as a sound from a world of sanity and, glancing up, wished he were in that world instead of this one, with its heat and problems. And, yes, its peril. For the longer they took to get out of here, the greater the chance that Jumel would recover and call on Margal to stop them.
Think about flying that plane, Forrest. It worked before for a while. It could work again. You hear? This isn't a boat on a jungle stream. It's a Cessna in a clean blue sky. Go, man, go!
Faced with yet another choice of channels, he gambled on the wider one and sent the boat coughing on into a world of tall trees that all but hid the sky. A fantasy world of shadows and silence in which a lone white bird planed on ahead as though to guide them. But the bird was a false leader. Rounding a bend and finding himself confronted by a wall of Spanish moss, Ken knew he had erred.
In the bow Sandy turned her head. "Ken, I don't think—"
"I know. We have to go back." He swung the tiller.
Black as ink here with the sky blocked out, the water looked bottomless and sinister.
Sinister it was, bottomless no. Something scraped along the boat's bottom, caught hold of the prop, and whipped the tiller out of his grip as it brought the craft to a shuddering stop.
With a warning to Sandy to hang on, he stood up and tried to rock the craft free. The effort produced only more rubbing sounds, more vibrations from solid but unseen things tearing at what he stood on. Sandy gazed at him in silence with an expression of surrender on her tired face.
"Got to go over the side, hon. See if I can free it."
"Ken—" Her voice seemed loud in so much silence. "What about snakes?"
"What
about them?"
"You said—"
It was a relief to have something to laugh at. "Hell, that was for his benefit." Sitting to take off his shoes, he remembered to take Jumel's pistol from his waist and place it in the boat. Then he wriggled over the side and felt for the bottom with his feet.
As he'd suspected, the obstruction was a submerged tree. One with a maze of twisted limbs. But when he worked his legs down through the maze, the stream bed was of soft mud that would not support his weight.
There was no way he could brace himself in the mud to tug or push the boat loose. Maybe if he could get a foothold on the tree itself.
But that particular tree must have dropped into the stream long ago. When he tried to stand on its slimy limbs and exert pressure on the boat, his feet slithered out from under him and he fell into the water. Again and again the same frustration. Close to exhaustion, he at last gave up.
Half in the boat again, he glanced from Sandy's frightened face to the bank he knew their car was on, somewhere downstream. "Hon, we'll have to swim ashore and walk it."
He knew she could swim. Back in that other life that now seemed only a dream, they had gone to the beach together often. But could she bring herself to try swimming in water as dark and sinister as this?
She did seem to hesitate, but only briefly. "All right."
"It might even save us some time. If we did get the boat out of here and kept taking wrong turns—"
"That's right."
He watched her slide over the side and ease herself down until her feet found some part of the tree. Then he reached for Jumel's gun and followed her.
How to keep the gun dry was going to be a problem. He would have to swim a one-hand sidestroke, keeping the other upthrust like a periscope. "Ready, Sandy?"
"Yes."
"Stay close to me. There's nothing here to hurt us." Except maybe one of the gators Jumel had talked about. Or a water moccasin—for even though he had raved about those only to lay the groundwork for an escape attempt, there should be some in a swampy stream such as this.
