All Heads Turn When the Hunt Goes By (38 page)

"How well do you know him?" Nhora asked, still astounded.

"I mistrust the public personality. I've never had reason to fear him. He's not a hoodlum and I doubt he's murdered anyone. He hews to a personal code chivalric in its complexity, which a logical mind couldn't hope to fathom. I think, now that I know who Early Boy really is, that I'd welcome a chance to talk to him."

Nhora shuddered. "But not here."

"I'm certain we're quite alone. I'll just have a quick look aboard."

Nhora stayed behind, near the center of the peristyle.
 
Jackson found the deck planks still reasonably sound—and tracked with muddy bootprints. An area in front of a louvered stateroom door had been swept clean recently. The door was warped, sticking to the frame. He put his shoulder to it and the door scraped open. A shaft of sun lit up the dry, musty room inside. The odor of perfume drifted out. Jackson hesitated, then entered and, was immediately blinded.

The room, apparently, was the holy of holies, dedicated to the worship of a particular god. Jackson shielded his eyes against the reflected glare of a broken mirror, part of a bulky old bedroom dresser that stood near the middle of the small room. The walls had been draped in faded, water-stained red velvet. The dresser served as an altar. Ritual designs, called
vèvès
, decorated the bow front. There were amulets, bells and candles on the dresser top, along with an
asson
, a calabash rattle containing small stones and the vertebrae of snakes. It symbolized both the power of the priest and the voices of the ancients, the
loas
.

Nothing unusual in all this. Jackson yawned and turned, glimpsed something hanging on the back of the door. It startled him until he realized it was little more than a scarecrow on a wrought-iron cross, mounted so that it could be carried during ceremonies. But it seemed worth a closer look, because the scarecrow obviously was meant to be a woman.

There was a glossy wig on top of the cross, blatant red curls hanging down the front of an old-fashioned, petticoat-stuffed dress, an heirloom from another century. The dress was of lace and silk, with belied sleeves and a high neck. The silk had been a rich brown, but it was now sun-spotted, and the serpentlike effect was disquieting. So were the snakeskins that had been wrapped around the cross-piece; shreds of skin dangled from the ends of the bar like wispy fingers.

The only other object of interest was a gold locket on a chain, half-hidden by the sprawl of wiggish curls. He picked the locket up, found the catch with tracing fingers, opened it, stared at the oval portrait inside. He was swept by nausea. His hand tightened on the locket; he snapped the chain and bolted from the room.

"Nhora!"

She was waiting for him in the peristyle, eyes glazed from shock or rapture, lonely as a saint at a stake. But this stake, more terrifying than the flames of hell, was slowly twining itself around her.

Dun-colored, and of the earth. But the gaze of the giant was remote, far-reaching as starlight. It looked at him with towering arrogance, freezing the will. King of the gods. His mind shrieked, but no sound issued from his throat. Nhora's hands slid glibly along the snake's body, urging it upward, head-high. Jackson tried to push himself away from a pillar of the steamboat, but his legs were unworkable, he was forced to cling. Thinking:
I know what it must mean
. But intuition was fouled by darkness that crossed the mind like a swift-running cloud shadow.

Nhora began to turn away, her body seeming to undulate, to move metachronally with the winding-around horror in her hands. They stood eye to eye, open-throated. Jackson heard the faint gush and rattle of a calabash. Shock bolted through him and the rotten pillar snapped in his embrace. He fell, fell a long way, striking the deck with his chin almost as a painless afterthought. There was an instant of awful, artificial clarity, a sensation of release from life—discontent, elation, self-pity—before he was tumbled under in a rocketing flood.

C
hamp awoke alone, in a cool skin, breathing passively, focused without sorrow on a wall of new sunlight, his mind like brand-new. He was half-alert to the danger he believed himself to be in, wondering coolly about it though he didn't have an inkling of what had warned him, or what to expect; he had no dream or premonition to go by. He lay there, on the steamer chair in the playroom, covered with a thin yellow blanket, light streaming healthily through his mind. His body felt neutral. He didn't have to go to the bathroom, he wasn't hungry, there was no pain. He felt as lightly strutted as the model airplanes overhead, his body ready to be used, with reasonable caution.

Each physical act—sitting up, placing one bare foot on the floor, then the other—called for introspection. Demands to be weighed, and met. Sense of blood tilting deep, wobbling in the belly, a heaviness, like mercury finding a level. Standing was moderately suspenseful. He grasped the back of the chair. He heard a tractor in a field, morning moves of the house coming alive. He felt, then, curiously pressed for time, although still there was nothing definite, just an awareness of being the last in command. Boss watching him from a wall, shadow of his pith helmet eclipsing all but the jaunty grin and grizzle of safari beard, '32 or '33, the tall, barrel-chested man beside him none other than Ernest Hemingway.

Champ moved flat-footed along the picture wall, nudging his shadow before him. Visions of a family half-destroyed. Duty to fulfill. Weight of reckoning to bear. He was in command. His heartbeat rang in his ears He had to stop and lean against the wall, head floating precariously. Then he went around the room again.
 
Heavy in the lungs. No breath. Like trying to squeeze air from stones.

He stopped again and, without knowing why, took down one of a pair of Civil War sabers crossed beside the mantel. He unsheathed it.

Hadn't been cleaned in years. The edge nicked and dull. He and Clipper, inflamed by the movies, by Douglas Fairbanks, having at each other mindlessly in duels. Could've been seriously hurt, despite their lack of power and technique, even with these heavy dull blades. Boss never put a stop to it. He preferred wounds to timidity.

Tears sprang to Champ's eyes. He made a conscious effort to hold the saber high and steady, but his arms trembled. He snuffled from weakness, and let the blade drop, the point narrowly missing bare toes as it struck the hearthstone.

In command, but not ready. And so he would be killed like the others. Knowledge that had awakened him so early on this cheerful morning. Death was coming, he would fall.

He replaced the saber in its tarnished scabbard and laid it on the mantel. It was no good to him anyway; too damaged to repair.

But there was another, useful saber. Not far away.

His old bedroom was next door. Nothing had been changed during his years away from Dasharoons. His metal locker from Blue Ridge Military Institute was at the foot of the bed. Champ opened it. He took out neatly packed cadet uniforms. Mothballs rolled along the floor. Near the bottom of the locker, blade protected by a soft and elegant jewelers' cloth, was the dress saber he had received from the company on graduation day. The hilt was gold, the blade unflawed Swedish steel.

With his weapon in his hands he felt nerveless again, satisfied that, whatever his fund of strength, he need not die disgraced.

He took a whetstone from the locker and, sifting on the edge of the bed, placidly concentrating, seeing nothing but his own quick reflection in the mirror surface, he began to work.

"J
ackson!"

He heard her faintly, as if she were years away, separated from him by time rather than distance; it might have been his mother's voice. He was conscious then of the radiance of the sun, his eyelids glowing and warm. Something moved, he felt a shifting weight against his ribs, the sun was blocked. He heard himself groan. Drops of ditch water pattered on his face, collected in the hollows of his eyes. He trembled in irritation and raised a hand to skim away the lingering drops.

Nhora caught his hand and held it tightly.

"Be careful, you're still bleeding."

Pressure against his chin, he couldn't open his mouth to answer. He grunted something.

"Here, let me help you sit up."

As he was lifted, supported by an arm across his back, pain arrowed from a cut and throbbing chin; he felt a chipped tooth with his tongue. His neck was stiff and painful too. Nhora's face, when he opened his eyes, was very close, somewhat blurred. He blinked to clear his vision. Didn't work. There were bits of leaf mold in her hair, a smear of blood—his?
—
on one cheekbone. A fly buzzed them both, then vanished.

She took her other hand away from his chin and he glanced down at the bloody handkerchief she was holding, darker blots in the crimson.

"How deep a cut?" he asked, moodily calculating stitches, not yet concerned about what might have befallen him. His memory was as bad as his eyesight. But there was a lump of foreboding in the region of his heart.

"I don't know. It's almost stopped bleeding now. For a few minutes you were like a—a gored ox, I was scared." She turned her head to drop the wadded handkerchief into a rust-flecked coffee can filled with water. The sun jumped at him again. He traveled back an instant, to the flash in a bureau mirror, the stateroom aboard the tottering old
Stephen Mulrooney
. A room draped in shabby red velvet and oddly claustrophobic, like a chamber in a dead heart. The room had contained some kind of threat, and now he felt alarmed. What was it?—Just an old dress, a wig, some snakeskin. A childishly executed version of a voodoo goddess, but which one? That was crucial.

Another flash-jump, to a little piece of time slick as ice: His mind slipped and slithered as he tried to grasp the significance of the locket and the portrait which he had—

The next thing he knew he was pushing Nhora roughly away from him. She sat down hard, heels in the air, almost going over backward. Jackson scrambled to his feet and swayed like a drunk. Nhora was very close to tears.

"Jackson, what's got into you? You'll start pouring blood again."

He leaned against the car and looked at the river; the sun was much higher than it had been back in the thicket.

Now he was shuddering. His shirt was sticking to the hairs on his chest. He looked down. Bloodstains everywhere,
drip drip drip
to the cuffs of his trousers. He stared at his clenched empty hands, dimly aware that he was missing something. But the blood baffled him.

He looked at Nhora. She was standing but hadn't made a move toward him. She swam into sharper focus.

"What happened?" he asked her.

"Jackson, I don't know! You came running out of that stateroom and hit a post or something, then you fell facedown on the deck." She was trembling, from relief or fear. "Just good luck you didn't knock yourself out. I don't know what I would have done then. I stopped the blood as best I could, and led you back to the car—now what's the matter? Are you going to faint?"

"You had," he said carefully, trying not to shy away from the new horror occupying his mind, "a snake in your hands."

"Oh, God, is that all?" Nhora said with a look of irritation. She lowered her head and picked at bits of dried mud on her dress. "I don't know where it came from. I was waiting for you, I looked down, there it was right at my feet. I knew I had to get rid of it before you came out, or else—" She shrugged, raised her eyes. "Jackson, I told you, from the time I was a little girl I could handle snakes, even poisonous ones like the cottonmouth. I suppose I learned not to be afraid when I was with the Ajimba, they always had hundreds of snakes and lizards around. They prayed to them. Snakes were their gods."

"This one was a monster—tall as you."

"I think you're exaggerating, it's just your phobia." She spread her hands, indicating a length of three feet. "I don't give a snake any more thought than a june bug, now can we change the subject? And I
hate
the way you're looking at me. I'm not unclean, or some kind of freak, just because I picked up a snake. Why don't you tell me what you saw in that room that upset you so badly."

"Nhora, I had a locket. What happened to it?"

Nhora reached into a pocket of her dress and came up with the locket. It spun on the chain, spraying the light of the sun at him. "I gave it to my mother when I was seventeen, a year before she died. There's a picture of me inside. I haven't seen the locket for a couple of years, I thought it was lost. Where did you find it?"

"In the stateroom. Hanging from the neck of a filthy ritual effigy."

"How did it get there?"

"Don't you know?"

"Of course not!" she exploded. "Somebody found the locket, or else it was stolen—oh, I don't know." She opened the locket and studied the tiny portrait of herself. Then, dismayed, she snapped the locket shut and put it away. She turned with a look of bewilderment and walked a short distance from Jackson, head down again, brooding.

Jackson waggled his sore jaw with care, but there was no grit and grind of a broken bone despite swelling on the right side behind the chin. He was no longer dizzy and in danger of losing his balance, and his vision was coming around nicely. He took off his jacket, stripped the ruined shirt, used a clean portion of it and water from the coffee can to scrub his chest, put his jacket back on. He made a pad for the cut and taped it securely in place, swallowed two aspirin and decided he would live.