All the Devil's Creatures (40 page)

The walls continued to shimmer and then to melt and Geoff could feel a rumbling in the floor beneath him. He watched Joey’s gaze shift to meet the Doctor’s black hole eyes. They stood there—the four of them like wooden pieces on a chess board. And Geoff thought and hoped he saw fear spread across the Nazi’s face. Then the flames erupted.

•

“Hellfire, is that you Miss Solis?”

Marisol splashed in the opaque water and felt something cold and reptilian slither between her legs. Seastrunk stood on the pier with his gun trained on the Prince, the brim of his Stetson shadowing his face, his khaki uniform starched and creased and almost gleaming in the bright May sun.

“It’s me, Sheriff,” she said.

“Well then climb on out of there so you can tell me what the hell’s going on.” To the Prince, he said, “And you. Get out nice and slow and keep your hands visible.”

Marisol eschewed the ladder from the bayou onto the pier, leaving it to the Prince. She swam to the boat instead. Grabbing hold of its sides, she lifted herself up and on board, spreading her weight to minimize the rocking.

“Sheriff, Bobby Henderson’s hurt. We need to get him to a hospital.”

Seastrunk glanced her way. “God damn it.” The sheriff’s aim never left the Prince as the dripping man climbed onto the pier.

Ordering the Prince to sit with his back against a tall light pole near the end of the pier, the sheriff took his handcuffs from his belt and secured the man there. The Prince grimaced with his arms stretched behind his back and around the pole.

Then Seastrunk trotted over to the boat where Marisol sat inspecting his deputy. “What happened?”

“Insect attack. I don’t know what they were—kind of like those weird dragonflies you have around here. But different. He might be poisoned.”

They roused Bobby enough to work him out of the boat and down the pier, his arms draped over their shoulders. The Prince called out to be set free, but they ignored him.

“Thank God you came when you did,” Marisol said. “How did you know?”

The sheriff seemed to almost stumble, then firmed himself up. “I don’t rightly know. Best not to ask.”

Pausing from securing the semi-conscious deputy into the passenger seat of his Crown Victoria, Seastrunk said, “Dunlap. Is he—”

“Tied up and knocked out inside the store. Let’s go.”

As they walked to the shack, Marisol’s soaked denim weighed her down. She steamed in the sun, and it smelled of swamp. Then she felt a rumbling beneath them, and the water all around rippled with the vibration.

“What was that?”

The sheriff did not slacken his pace. “Lord if I know.”

Inside the store, the elderly proprietor had just regained consciousness. He spoke with a nasal twang. “You get the son-of-a-bitch?”

“Yessir, we got him.”

The sheriff squatted to untie and inspect Dunlap. He looked into his eyes and examined the nasty bump above his temple where the Prince had cold cocked him. “I reckon you got a pretty bad concussion, fella. Better drive you to town, let them look you over at the hospital.”

“Ain’t necessary.” He sat up on the floor and massaged his forehead.

“Heading that way anyhow.”

Seastrunk stood and faced Marisol. “I’ll take the injured to the hospital and the prisoner to jail. I’ll have a full load. Can you make it back to town all right?”

She shook her head. “I need to get back to the island, to Geoff Waltz. I’ve got a feeling something’s not right.”

The sheriff nodded and did not protest and then they heard the sound of vehicles driving into the gravel lot outside and grinding to a stop. They rushed out and saw six armed men in black suits emerging from three black Town Cars. As the men jogged to the pier flashing badges she had no time to make out, Marisol saw that the cars had U.S. Government plates. The men went to the Prince still secured to the light pole and cut off his restraints with shears, not bothering to ask for a key. Then they frog marched the wet and foul trickster back down the pier to their vehicles, hardly pausing to inform the sheriff and Marisol that the man was under arrest under the authority of the National Security Act.

As the government men shoved him into the back of a Town Car, the Prince announced that he would say nothing without a lawyer. Then the cars and the men left as quickly as they had arrived.

Seastrunk watched the scene with his hands on his hips and his hat tipped back on his head. “Well I’ll be God damned.”

Then another subterranean rumbling, many times greater than before, shook the earth and almost threw them to the ground. As if some vast beast were writhing and dying or collapsing beneath them.

“Shit and hellfire. This whole dang swamp feels like it’s fixing to open up. Maybe you ought to come back to town.”

But Marisol had already loped halfway down the pier, toward the boat. She felt a burning and panicked need to get back to China Island.

•

Joey looked into the dead eyes of his father. He looked into an abyss and saw only madness. And an abiding malice.

He did not understand his own abilities, his difference. One day in kindergarten, he skinned his knee and watched it heal before his eyes. He knew that other children bled, had scabs and bruises. He knew that Paw-paw knew that he did not bleed, scab, or bruise. They never spoke of it; they kept it a secret between them and away from his mother.

His other abilities, his mental powers, grew stronger as he grew older. But he also sensed that they had begun to peak as he approached adolescence.

He began to see things, to dream things. He dreamed of himself as an old man. But he now knew those dreams were of his father. He came to understand that he must someday go to his father, that his father would make him a man. Now he had found his father, and the void within that man terrified him.

One day in second grade, he moved a pencil with his mind. Later, he honed that skill onto an entire cup of pencils that sat on his teacher’s desk, spilling them like pickup sticks. This made him happy. But then one afternoon he grew enraged at a blue jay that dive bombed his cat in the broad lawn behind his house. He focused his mind and felt some preternatural energy course through him and capture that bird, and it flew straight into a tree and died. This filled him with abject fear. And a sick dread.

Now his mind’s energy held his Pap-paw and Mr. Waltz in place across the room. He could almost see the field that poured through his eyes and captured the two men. Like something blue and stretchy, cartoon rubber. He looked into his grandfather’s eyes—into his mind, his soul—and he saw pain and fear. But also love. And he looked into the lawyer’s soul and he saw sadness. But also hope. And a bright passion blooming.

The lawyer called out to him.

He pictured his mother’s eyes; he saw the love.

He pictured the woman nailed to a tree; he saw the hate.

The gruesome scene, the mutilation of that beautiful woman, had haunted his dreams. The evil had risen off the bayou that day like a toxic fog. He saw a woeful symbol marring sacred flesh.

That same symbol, the terrible inverted cross, flanked him now.

A sick aura of hate. As on the bayou where the woman died, he sensed it now from the twisted soulless man before him, his putative father. If such were his life’s destiny, he would choose death.

And so he released the two flawed, good men from his mind’s grip and turned to his father. Only he would no longer think of this awful husk, this empty former-man, as his father. He had no father. He felt ready to be reborn.

He saw fear in the Doctor’s eyes as he focused his energy like never before. Something electric flowed through his veins and out. He saw only white heat. And then darkness.

•

The Doctor burst into flames and the air in that small space reeked of ozone and burning flesh and hot metal. Joey fell to the floor in a crumpled heap.

Issuing a weary moan, Willie fell to his knees. Geoff felt the field’s grip leave him and he rushed to the stricken boy. The intense flames from the Doctor’s body threatened to engulf him. Geoff pulled him to safety and checked his pulse—regular—and listened to his deep and steady breathing. But Joey would not awaken.

He threw the child over his shoulder and held out a hand to the old man, helping him to his feet. The walls around them were melting and disintegrating into rusty dirt.

“We’ve got to get out of here.”

Geoff pushed the Doctor’s desk against the wall, beneath an air vent, and lifted a chair on top. Laying Joey upon the wide desk beside the chair, Geoff doffed his pack and pulled out a screwdriver for the vent and a length of nylon rope for the boy, silently praising Marisol for her preparation. He saw the towel-wrapped canister containing the grotesque fetus—it seemed so minor now, after all he had seen in this place. But he still wanted to get it to the outside, to expose at least some of the crimes that had occurred here.

Handing the pack to Willie, Geoff climbed his makeshift steps and unscrewed the vent. Then he pulled his client up.

“You first. Carry the bag, I’ll get your boy. You have to lead us out of here. Can you do that?”

“Yes. Yes I can.” The old man’s forceful voice and stubborn eyes had returned, recalling to Geoff the client meeting weeks before, when Willie had turned the crowd against Texronco’s settlement offer. As if the wicked spell that this place cast had at last released its grip.

For this place would soon exist no more. The walls melted and collapsed into piles of dirt—like the gun Geoff had held. The unearthly material atomized, or dissolved into its elemental form. And behind those walls lay the saturated loam of that swampy country. Soon it would all cave in, suffocating them, burying them alive.

Willie pulled himself up into the ventilation duct and Geoff followed, Joey passed out and lashed to his back. It seemed that the dissolution of the facility began at the bottom and worked its way up—things appeared a bit more stable up here. A lucky break. And with Willie leading them on their Byzantine trek, they came at last to the bottom of the well shaft. Here, the entropy had only just begun. But they didn’t have much time. They had one hundred feet to climb on narrow rungs with a heavy pack and an unconscious boy.

Geoff paused just long enough to remove the walkie-talkie from the bag now on Willie’s back. He prayed Marisol would be within range, feared that she could not have had time to make it all the way to the hospital with Bobby and back. But when he called out over the radio, he heard her voice crackling back through thick static. He could hardly understand her, but she was there.

He said, “We’re coming up but we’re going to need a rope. Take the rope from the boat and tie it to a tree or the well or something that’ll support us. Drop it down the shaft.”

Releasing the speak button, he heard her voice come back but could not make out the words. He could not know whether she had understood his instructions, had no time to ponder it.

He gestured for Willie to mount the rungs rising up the shaft. But the old man said, “No. You first, with Joey. If nothing else, let’s get Joey out.”

Geoff climbed, Willie right behind. The shaft’s metal sides wavered and shimmered and grew soft. When they had risen half way, Geoff could see bare earth leaking through. Each rung seemed less solid than the one before. What felt like dirt began to coat the palms of his hands. His back screamed with the weight of the boy.

The next rung threatened to dissolve in his hands.
We’re goners
, he thought. But then he saw Marisol’s silhouette in the circle of light thirty feet above. A heavy length of rope dropped down the shaft at his side. Jumping onto it, he almost lost his grip and slid down. But he got hold and glanced down just long enough to see that Willie had done the same.

As the space caved in all around, adrenaline propelled him—the only possible explanation for the unnatural strength he found to pull himself and Joey out of that hole. He used his legs on the metal sides dissolving into dirt and his hands on the rope to climb until he rose near enough to the surface for Marisol to grab his arms and help lift them out. And then he and Joey lay there by the opening—the boy still in a deep slumber, Geoff panting like a shaggy dog in August.

“Willie,” he said between gasps.

He rolled over and looked down the shrinking shaft and Marisol looked down and their heads touched and she smelled like sweat and the bayou but also like sweet life.

Willie’s voice emerged from the abyss. “I can’t climb no more. I’m too old.”

Marisol took the rope and started pulling. With his last ounce of strength, Geoff did the same. They worked together and pulled Willie up by inches as the hole collapsed. But even that gnomish figure was too heavy to lift fast enough.

Then Geoff called into the hole. “Drop the pack. You’re too heavy—drop the pack.”

And the old man must have done so because the load grew lighter then, enough so that when Geoff and Marisol threw their weight back, Willie came up from the soft ground coughing and covered in metallic dirt, just as the last trace of the well shaft disappeared.

G
eoff put the finishing touches on a thirty-page brief and filed it through the federal court’s electronic system. A major project done, and only 5:30.
And it’s Friday—I can knock off early and go have a beer
.

Stepping out into a perfect October afternoon, he waved to the contractors constructing his new garage out back, just finishing up for the day. He left on foot, inspecting the grounds. The old house did not look too shabby—he had spent the summer on everything from having the foundation leveled to washing the windows. He glanced up; the countless clusters of young green orbs on the pecan trees presaged a bumper crop this year.

As he walked into the neighborhood dive, he saw Tony Abruzzo sitting perched on his usual stool. He scanned the room for Marisol and felt a twinge of disappointment at her absence. Then he took a seat by Tony, the two men greeted each other, and Geoff ordered a pint.

“How’s the house work coming along, Geoffy-boy?”