03 Graveyard Dust

TWENTY-THREE

Mamzelle Marie took him by a different route into the cipriere this time. They passed through the Protestant cemetery where the smudge fires burned sullen in the dusk against the rising of the night miasma from the swamps, across the marshy verge of shacks and sheds and poverty-stricken immigrants, and straight into the trees. The failing light lent a weird cast to the gloom beneath the canopy of oaks and pines. Cypress trunks took on the appearance of men in that queer twilight, beards of moss the semblance of tree trunks or stands of laurel, water the look of solid land. The air felt close and thick in the lungs here, and mosquitoes swirled in stinging clouds.

"Judge Canonge spoke to your sister after the court was cleared, trying to get her to explain." Marie Laveau paused to get her bearings, then pressed through a stand of hackberry that hid a thread of game trail, pale in the dusk. "Even he smelled rotten fish. She said only she'd repented of her deed and of the lies she'd told."

January whispered, "Damn." He could see Olympe sitting there, with a face like a mechanical doll's, repeating over and over again, I poisoned him. I poisoned him. "There's ways of getting messages into the jail, even though none from the outside are allowed in. It wouldn't have been hard."

"It wouldn't have been hard, either, to poison Celie in the jail," said January. "She has-we have-her father to thank there, for keeping her so close. And of course if Olympe had died in jail-Olympe the voodoo, Olympe the idolater-there would have been less of an outcry at the trial. Celie might have gotten off, and if Isaak had passed word to her somehow, spoken of what she'd heard."

From the edge of the trees to the island in the bayou it was only a mile or so, and the night was a still one. Mamzelle Marie led the way cautiously, and January flinched at each sound. While it was true that Dr. Yellowjack would hang on to his hostage as long as he could, it was also true that in kidnapping the boy he had provided a clinching witness to the existence of Lucinda Coughlin's plot, and to his own part in helping her.

They came on the house over the rear of the island, following the low ground, the wet ground, where they could. Mosquitoes and gnats swarmed around their ears and nostrils, but once Mamzelle touched January's arm, and pointed out to him a cluster of tin pans and tubs, dangling together in a spiderweb of fishing line, halfhidden among the beards of Spanish moss. January followed her gesture down, and saw where the line was stretched among the root ridges of the higher ground, where the insects were less. Between the creeper and fern, and the gathering mists, it would have been impossible to avoid giving the alarm.

"He has spells, too, that keep the snakes angry hereabouts," murmured Mamzelle Marie. "He says they'll call out to him, and tell him who's coming. But they won't speak of me. Or of you, if you're with me. Still it's best we be careful."

January wondered if the voodoo-man claimed the allegiance of the local alligator population as well. The light was going, and he probed each pool and reed tuft with his stick, poison-dreams still whispering and buzzing in his head. He felt at any moment that the white eyeless thing of his dreams would come sloshing up out of the depths. Red eyes seemed to watch from the shadows, eyes that were gone when he turned his head. Once he thought he saw a huge water moccasin curled on a log, and when he met the serpent's copper eyes it flicked its tongue at him and slipped down and into the cattails, hastening away toward the house. Maybe it did have a message to deliver.

In any case the house was dark-shuttered-when January and Mamzelle Marie finally saw its pale bulk shimmer amid the trees. Woodsmoke lay thick on the clammy air. Gone indoors? wondered January. Driven to stifling in the house by the mosquitoes? They circled the house once, straining their eyes through the cinder-dark dusk to see if anyone watched from the gallery. It seemed to be true that snakes in the thickets behind the house were angrier, for a small one sank its fangs into January's boot, and a few minutes later a larger one struck at him from a hole under a log. "You stop that," ordered Marie Laveau, her hand darting out and catching the serpent behind the head as it tried to retreat once more. The reptile lashed and struck at her wrist, scratching the copper skin, though January guessed it had spent its poison on his boot-leather. It was only a young one, too, barely the length of a biblical cubit.

Marie Laveau held it up, and stared into its yellow eyes. "You got no respect," she said softly, as the serpent's coils circled her arm. "You tell your friends Mamzelle Marie is here, Mamzelle Marie who walks on glass and golden spikes. You tell your friends Damballah-Wedo is my husband, and I have coffee with John the Revellator two afternoons a week, who drove off snakes out of his coffee cup when King Herod tried to poison him. You tell them, leave me and my friends alone."

She set the snake on the ground, and watched it as it slipped away. "It'll be a while," she said, "before they all get the word."

Carefully, they moved in toward the house. A boat was tied at the bayou, where the dancing had been. Heart hammering, January crept through the water and the reeds-this was the kind of place where alligators loved to lie-cut the line, and let it drift away. On the ground where the last light fell he could see the verves scratched into the dirt, sprinkled with rum and fresh blood. As soon as there was an inch of cover he crawled from the water and crept along the thickets to where Mamzelle Marie waited, probing always ahead of him with his stick. A turtle studied him from a log. He wondered if he should hand it a calling card to take in. "I see no track around the house going away," she said in a breath. "He's in there." January pulled on his shirt again, and looped the ribbons of the pistols once more over his neck. "Then let's have a closer look." He spotted where the carry beams went, that bore the weight of the gallery's planking, gritted his teeth hard, then lifted Mamzelle Marie over the rail and onto one. She was a tall woman and built strong, but still her weight was a good sixty pounds less than his, less likely to make the boards creak. From the woodpile he handed her up thick shakes and bars cut from timbers, and these she used to bar the shutters from the outside. They were latched from within, but at the house's rear was a window where the shutters did not fit. Even from ground beyond the edge of the gallery, January could see the crack was big enough to get Killdevil's skinning-knife through and flip the catch. He waited until Mamzelle Marie came slipping back, then vaulted silently over the rail. He crossed the gallery in a stride, flipped the catch, hurled the shutters back, and stepped through, pistol in hand.

There was only the single room, and that room Helldark and choking. Smoke grabbed his throat, shoved hot coals up his nostrils, acrid, sweet, stinking. By the dim glow from the vents in an American iron stove he got an impression of chairs, and a table scattered with pots and jars, open as if in haste. A hole in the ceiling showed where a loft was, but there was no ladder beneath it. He stepped in, called out, "Yellowjack!" and behind him he heard Mamzelle Marie scream his name.

The shutters banged shut behind him and he heard the crash of a bar. The next moment a pistol bellowed, inches from the other side of the wall, and something fell on the gallery, and he knew he'd been trapped. They'd been trapped.

Footsteps fled across the gallery, creak-creak-creak, and were gone. He shouted "Mamzelle!" but there was no sound, and dizziness broke over him, choking, swooning. The smoke, he thought.

Poison.

He flung himself against the shutters, but the wood was stout. Images swirled in his mind, and he thought he heard laughter: thought he saw Death dancing a jig in the corner of the room, with his black cloak and his fiddle; thought the shutters rattled, where the white thing pawed and picked to get in. For a panicky moment he started to move the table, to block it out, then thought, Don't be a fool, and braced himself against the table, brought up his right leg and kicked with all the strength of his back and hips at where the bar would be.

He felt it jerk and give.

Voices whispered in his mind. Ayasha's laughter: Eh, malik, you think you're stronger than oak beams and steel? And the soft polite tones of Delphine Lalaurie, the most terrible woman he had ever known: I'm afraid you haven't learned your lesson very well M'sieu Janvier, clear as if she stood with her whip in hand in the dark behind him still. Things crawled and crept and rustled among the pots on the table-he thought he saw a thousand tiny snakes wriggling toward him, each with a paper bearing his name in its mouth.

Big young Pedro, smiling shyly, My mama say, 'Mind your business." Among the pots he saw a carved wooden horse, with flying mane and flowers whittled into it. As he looked the horse got to its feet and began to dance.

Olympe's voice: "I poisoned him. I poisoned him. But he isn't dead, I know it... "

And another voice, "Up here! Please, up here!"

Coughing.

It was the coughing that made January turn. Fighting panic, fighting terror, still he knew that hallucinations didn't cough. On the table the little snakes vanished. The carved horse lay again on its side, edged with the ruby reflection of the stove's hellish glare.

"Please!..."

He dragged the table over to the hole in the ceiling, sprang up onto it. The smoke was worse in the loft, roiling from the stove's broken-off pipe. The young man up there had managed to squirm his way over to the hole, despite the ropes that bound his hands and his feet, so that January nearly tripped over him in the burning dark. "Gabriel," gasped the young man, as January groped for the ropes, for his knife. "He took Gabriel-threw the powders in the fire..."

January dragged him to the hole-the young man's weight was slight as a girl's-and dropped through, holding up his arms to catch him. There was pain, but nothing like the agony of a month ago, and January silently blessed Augustus Mayerling and his miserable scale weights and beams.

"He was here?"

The young man's face was a skull, bare of flesh, save for a little black mustache... Then the vision vanished and revealed in the dim red smolder of the stove the emaciated features of someone who was unmistakably Antoine Jumon's brother.

"Last night." Isaak coughed again, agonizingly, doubled over and pressed against the table. "Said his mother... Accused..."

"Save it." January was already beside the stove, but through the rolling smoke he could see the lock that clamped it shut. Dizziness flooded his brain, and it seemed to him that things had begun to crawl from the opened pots on the table, chicken feet scratching across the planks toward him, and every little foul juju ball that had been tucked into the corner of the room. The skin of his belly, his arms, his thighs crept and twitched with the tiny lizards and snakes growing within: He knew if he remained here they would feed on the smoke, grow, and devour him.

He returned to the shutters, dragging the table back to brace himself-and it seemed to him that the white thing from the swamp, the white thing from his nightmares, gripped it and tugged. You owe me, the thing hissed, looking at January with eyeless sockets, and grinned. You still owe me, for Pedro's death.

"Let me out," bargained January, panting, "and help me, and I'll pay you what I can. You tell Mamzelle Marie what payment you want-I'll pay."

But the creature only grinned.

January turned from it, braced his body against the table, and drove his leg again at the shutters.

Once, twice, then the wood cracked and he threw himself up against the door, slipped his arm through and shoved the broken bolt aside. Isaak was unconscious already; January dragged him out, and left him propped against the side of the house.

"He'll head north across Bayou M?tairie," said Papa Legba, leaning against the corner of the house with his keys in his belt and his pipe in his hand. He jerked with the pipe to show the direction. "Woods are thicker on the other side, between the bayou and the lake."

January remembered Cut-Arm's men, sheltering in the cipriere there.

"There's gators in the bayou. Yellowjack'll make for the bridge most likely. You can get him there if you hurry."

"Thank you," January gasped, and ran.

The mists that had drifted all evening among the trees seemed to thicken and coalesce, although that, decided January, might only be the effect of the poisons in his brain. It was difficult to tell what was real and what was not, but he knew it would be madness to try to find the wangateur's tracks in the woods. He grabbed one of the lanterns that hung on the side of the house, kindled it, and followed the bayou itself, which he knew would lead him eventually to the cleared ground of the Roquigni and Allard plantations, that lay along the M?tairie Road. Even if Dr. Yellowjack didn't try for the bridge he might be more visible from that point, and Papa Legba was correct.

There would be gators in the bayou. Snakes, too. The voodoo-man would be a fool, to try to cross.

I'll never make it, thought January, striding as fast as he dared through the creepers and reeds. He has a start on me...

You'll make it, rasped Legba's voice in his mind. January thought he glimpsed the old man in the mists again, though now he looked more like the battered old statue of St. Peter at the back of St.

Anthony's Chapel, Heaven's keys dangling from his belt. His face was black rather than white.

Might so be he's delayed in the woods. You hurry, though.

January hurried. Sweat poured from him and the blood beat in his head, and around him the woods chittered with ghosts and loa and the twitching white leprous shape of the smallpox god.

But the bayou lay always to his right. Sometimes there seemed to be something wrong and strange about the water; it glowed with blue light, or ran red like the Nile with blood. The cypress knees thrusting up through it stretched twisty gray hands to him. But he worked his way only a little inland to avoid being grabbed, and kept striding. And always the mist grew thicker, the silence pressing, and even the lantern's glow didn't help him much. I can't, he thought, gasping, his knees weak from the poison, and. Legba whispered, Not far.

Strength came into him. Sometimes he thought someone else ran with his legs, someone who carried a sword and whose eyes burned with fire.

A bayou ran in from the west that might have turned him aside. But from that point the lights near the second of the stone bridges was visible, guiding him forward. As he waded through the hip-deep waters under their blanket of fog he heard an alligator bellow, horrifyingly close, and the slip and whisper of water. He scrambled up the bank, stumbling, praying he wouldn't put his hand on a water moccasin, and ran forward again, toward the lights where the Bayou Road crossed the bridge. At the third bridge, where Bayou M?tairie ran into Bayou St. John and the M?tairie Road forked off, he stopped, gasping, leaning on the stone bridge's rail, the clammy fog thick in his lungs and, it seemed to him, the voices that had whispered all around him in the mists fading from his mind.

He knelt, and scanned the threshold of the bridge. If someone had crossed who'd come through the marshy lands to the west, they'd done so without leaving wet footprints. Shutting the lantern slide, January stepped down from the bridge, panting, and crouched in a clump of pine. In the stillness, and the black thick fog, his mind felt clearer. Had Isaak Jumon, like Papa Legba, been a figment of whatever had been dumped into the stove?

But the carved horse on the table... the child's toy that Isaak had carved. That told him those final few things he had not known.

That was what Isaak had seen in Dr. Yellowjack's house on St. John's Eve. He would not even have had to see Lucinda or Abigail Coughlin, although the woman had almost certainly seen him.

Of course, he'd be horrified to see his uncle's two delicately protected protegees there. Of course he'd risk his own freedom, to go back to town and tell his uncle that the woman and her daughter were there, and in danger...

But in that case, why wasn't Isaak dead? If in fact he hadn't been a hallucination? Had he been a prisoner there, all those weeks? The idea was surely even more absurd than incarceration in the Jumon town house. January remembered the emaciated face, the way the young man had clutched at the table. Surely Dr. Yellowjack would have been better off to kill him immediately?

If..?

A voice screamed in the darkness, "Let me alone! " Hoarse panting breath, and the clash and rustle of young cane trampled. Water splashed. Dr. Yellowjack cried, "Get up and run you young bastard or I'll burn you! I swear I'll tear you to pieces with hot irons..."

"I am," whispered Ben's nephew's voice, gasping in the last extremities of exhaustion and pain.

"Please... don't..."

The hissing rattle of cane, the slither of mucky earth. January forced himself to remain still. He knew that if he moved, if he went out into the wilderness of mist and darkness, Yellowjack would hear him, turn aside, and he'd be lost. Only if the wangateur thought the bridge was safe would he cross.

Papa Legba, lord of bridges... Virgin Mary, help us...

"Come on!"

"Please..." A broken whimper that twisted January's soul to hear.

I'll kill him. For hurting that boy, I'll feed the cat with his heart.

"Come on!"

"...coming..."

He saw them in the mists. Yellowjack had a lantern, the glow of it bobbing, jerking in the choking vapors around them, glinting on the black heron-hackle in his hat. By its light January saw Gabriel, limping, staggering, falling, and trying to rise. His hands were tied behind him, and there was a rope around his neck, a rope that the voodoo-man jerked and dragged as a vicious child would drag at a puppy on a lead. Gabriel fell, sobbing, and braced himself, trying to keep from being strangled as Yellowjack dragged him along the shell path toward the bridge.

"Get up! " The voodoo-man turned back. January could see he had a knife in his hand. Yellowjack tried to haul the boy to his feet again, but Gabriel was clearly at the end of his strength. The boy half-rose, then, with a cry, collapsed as his left leg buckled beneath him. "Please-my leg..."

Yellowjack cursed him and stuck the knife in his belt, reached to grab his shoulders with both hands.

Gabriel writhed like a snake and rammed his head into the man's groin. At the same instant January sprang forward, yelling, "Gabriel! Roll clear!" and flung himself on Yellowjack's back.

His weight slammed the smaller man to the ground; the lantern bounced away.

"He's got a poison sticker! " yelled Gabriel from the darkness, and January sprang back as he felt Yellowjack wriggle and lunge. Yellowjack twisted from beneath him and fled up onto the bridge, January ripping loose a pistol from his belt to follow. Yellowjack was yards ahead of him on the bridge, mists already closing around him, when he stopped, and threw up his hands.

"No!"

Just for an instant, January thought he saw clearly the silhouette in the darkness and the fog: thought he saw the outline of a top hat, the gleam of spectacles, the white glimmer of bones.

What Yellowjack believed he saw-Baron Cemetery or something else-January never knew. But the wangateur veered from the end of the bridge where the dark form waited, and flung himself over the edge, into the water. The dark form vanished into the mist again, and January doubled back, sprinting to catch Yellowjack if he emerged from the water on this side of the bayou.

Mist and water roiled, and he heard another cry. He saw something heave itself from the water on the far side and snatched up the lantern in time to see Yellowjack scramble, stumbling, out of the bayou on the far side, and limp across the marshy ground for the trees, half a mile away.

He never made it. As January ran across the bridge he saw the man fall, and saw a dark shape stride from the mists toward him, a shape that resolved itself into a tall woman in a tignon with seven points. How either he or Yellowjack could have mistaken her for Baron Cemetery January didn't know-a final dream-shape born of poison and smoke-but when he reached Yellowjack's side, it was indeed Mamzelle Marie who knelt there.

The wangateur was gasping, clutching at the wet weeds in terror and pain. A knife gleamed in Mamzelle Marie's hand as she looked up at January in the lamp light. "Snake," she said. "In the water." She took January's lantern from him and held it close, and slashed an X in Yellowjack's already swelling arm.

"He thought you were Baron Cemetery," said January uncertainly. "He saw you in the fog on the bridge." Mamzelle Marie looked up with blood on her lips where she'd sucked clean the wound of its poison. Dried blood crusted her temple where Yellowjack had struck her from the gallery of the house. "I was never on the bridge," she said. "I came around over the bayou a ways back, and through the cipriere."

January walked back the half-dozen paces required to shine a lucifer's dim quick flare on the bayou. He saw the sleek zigzagged backs, the arrowing ripples of wake as they swam away.

Water moccasins, two of them, six feet long, the largest he had ever seen.

Footsteps crunched on the shells of the bridge. The rope still dangled from Gabriel's neck and his hands were still bound but he wasn't limping. In fact he walked with his usual jaunty stride.

"The Grand Zombi's her friend," said the boy, without a trace of the pitiful agony that had rent his voice only two minutes before. Without a trace of surprise, either. '"Course all the snakes in the bayou would go after Yellowjack, once she told them to. He was really stupid to try and swim."