Killdozer! (16 page)

I dragged myself to my feet and limped toward the cabin. I had to pass the tree, and as I did the little canoe caught my eye. I tucked it under my arm and crept back to the cabin. I tripped on the top step of the porch and fell sprawling, and I hadn’t strength to rise. My leg was an agony, and my head spun and spun.

Then I was inside and Anjy was sponging off my head, and she laughed half hysterically when I opened my eyes. “Jon, Jon, beloved, what have you done? Who did this to you?”

“Who … heh!” I said weakly. “A damn fool, sweetheart. Me!” I got up and stood rockily. “How’s Pat?”

“Sleeping,” said Anjy. “Jon, what on earth is happening?”

“I don’t know,” I said slowly, and looked out through the window
at the fallen tree. “Anjy, the kid took that hair she swiped and probably some of her own and poked it all into that tree I just cut down. It—seems important for me to get it back. Dunno why. It … anyway, I got out there as soon as we had Pat quieted, but the hair had disappeared in the meantime. All I found was this.” I handed her the canoe.

She took it absently. “Pat told me her story. Of course it’s just silly, but she says that for the past three days that tree has been talking to her. She says it sang to her and played with her. She’s convinced it’s a magic tree. She says it promised her a lovely present if she would poke three kinds of hair into a hole at the roots, but if she told anyone the magic wouldn’t work.” Anjy looked down at the little canoe and her forehead puckered. “Apparently it worked,” she whispered.

I couldn’t comment without saying something about Séleen, and I didn’t want that on Anjy’s mind, so I turned my back on her and stood looking out into the thick wet heat of the swamp.

Behind me I heard Patty stir, shriek with delight as she saw the canoe. “My present … my pretty present! It was a
real
magic!” And Anjy gave it to her.

I pushed down an impulse to stop her. As long as Séleen had the hair the harm was done.

Funny, how suddenly I stopped being a skeptic.

The silence of the swamp was shattered by a great cloud of birds—birds of every imaginable hue and size, screaming and cawing and chuckling and whirring frantically. They startled me and I watched them for many minutes before it dawned on me that they were all flying one way. The air grew heavier after they had gone. Anjy came and stood beside me.

And then it started to rain.

I have never seen such rain, never dreamed of it. It thundered on the shingles, buckshotted the leaves of the trees, lashed the mirrored bayou and the ground alike, so that the swamp was but one vast brown stream of puckered mud.

Anjy clutched my arm. “Jon, I’m frightened!” I looked at her and knew that it wasn’t the rain that had whitened her lips, lit the fires
of terror in her great eyes. “Something out there
—hates
us,” she said simply.

I shook her off, threw a poncho over me. “Jon—you’re not—”

“I got to,” I gritted. I went to the door, hesitated, turned back and pressed the revolver into her hand. “I’ll be all right,” I said, and flung out into the storm. Anjy didn’t try to stop me.

I knew I’d find the hag Séleen. I knew I’d find her unharmed by the storm, for was it not a thing of her own devising? And I knew I must reach her—quickly, before she used that bundle of hair. Why, and how did I know? Ask away. I’m still asking myself, and I have yet to find an answer.

I stumbled and floundered, keeping to the high ground, guided, I think, by my hate. After a screaming eternity I reached a freakish rocky knoll that thrust itself out of the swamp. It was cloven and cracked, full of passages and potholes; and from an opening high on one side I saw the guttering glare of firelight. I crept up the rough slope and peered within.

She crouched over the flames, holding something to her withered breast and crooning to it. The rock walls gathered her lovely, hateful voice and threw it to me clear and strong—to me and to the turgid bayou that seethed past the cleft’s lower edge.

She froze as my eyes fell upon her, sensing my presence; but like many another animal she hadn’t wit enough to look upward. In a moment she visibly shrugged off the idea, and she turned and slid and shambled down toward the bayou. Above her, concealed by the split rock, I followed her until we were both at the water’s edge with only a four-foot stone rampart between us. I could have reached her easily then, but I didn’t dare attack until I knew where she had hidden that bundle of hair.

The wind moaned, rose an octave. The rain came in knives instead of sheets. I flattened myself against the rock while Séleen shrank back into the shelter of the crevice. I will never know how long we were there, Séleen and I, separated by a few boulders, hate a tangible thing between us. I remember only a shrieking hell of wind and rubble, and then the impact of something wet and writhing and whimpering against me. It had come rolling and tumbling down the rocky
slope and it lodged against me. I was filled with horror until I realized that it sheltered me a little against the blast. I found the strength to turn and look at it finally. It was Patty.

I got her a little under me and stuck it out till the wind had done its work and was gone, and with it all the deafening noise—all but the rush of the bayou and Séleen’s low chuckle.

“Daddy—” She was cut and battered. “I brought my little boat!” She held it up weakly.

“Yes, butch. Sure. That’s dandy. Patty—what happened to mother?”

“She’s back there,” whimpered Patty. “The cabin sagged, like, an’ began m-movin’, an’ then it just fell apart an’ the bits all flew away. I couldn’ find her so I came after you.”

I lay still, not breathing. I think even my heart stopped for a little while.

Patty’s whisper sounded almost happy. “Daddy—I—hurt—all—over—”

Anjy was gone then. I took my hatred instead, embraced it and let it warm me and give me life and hope and strength the way she used to. I crawled up the rock and looked over. I could barely see the hag, but she was there. Something out in the bayou was following the rhythmic movement of her arms. Something evil, tentacled, black. Her twisted claws clutched a tiny canoe like the one she had left in the tree for Patty. And she sang:

And Séleen bent and set the canoe on the foaming brown water. Our hair was tied inside it.

Everything happened fast then. I dived from my hiding place behind and above her, and as I did so I sensed that Patty had crept up beside me, and that she had seen and heard it all. And some strange sense warned Séleen, for she looked over her crooked shoulder, saw me in midair, and leaped into the bayou. I had the terrified, malevolent gleam of her single eye full in my face, but I struck only hard rock, and for me even that baleful glow went out.

Patty sat cross-legged with my poor old head in her lap. It was such a gray morning that the wounds on her face and head looked black to me. I wasn’t comfortable, because the dear child was rolling my head back and forth frantically in an effort to rouse me. The bones in my neck creaked as she did it and I knew they could hear it in Scranton, Pennsylvania. I transmitted a cautionary syllable but what she received was a regular houn’-dawg howl.

“Owoo! Pat—”

“Daddy! Oh, you’re awake!” She mercifully stopped gyrating the world about my tattered ears.

“What happened?” I moaned, half sitting up. She was so delighted to see my head move that she scrambled out from under so that when the ache inside it pounded it back down, it landed stunningly on the rock.

“Daddy darling, I’m sorry. But you got to stop layin’ around like that. It’s time to get up!”

“Uh. How you know?”

“I’m hungry, that’s how, so there.”

I managed to sit up this time. I began to remember things and they hurt so much that the physical pain didn’t matter any more. “Patty! We’ve got to get back to the cabin!”

She puckered up. I tried to grin at her and she tried to grin back, and there is no more tragedy left in the world for me after having seen that. I did a sort of upward totter and got what was left of my feet and legs under me. Both of us were a mess, but we could navigate.

We threaded our way back over a new, wrecked landscape. It was
mostly climbing and crawling and once when Patty slipped and I reached for her I knocked the little canoe out of her hand. She actually broke and ran to pick it up. “Daddy! You got to be careful of this!”

I groaned. It was the last thing in the world I ever wanted to see. But then—Anjy had said that she should have it. And when she next dropped it I picked it up and handed it back to her. And then snatched it again.

“Patty! What’s this?” I pointed to the little craft’s cargo: a tiny bundle of hair.

“That’s the little bag from the tree, silly.”

“But how … where … I thought—”

“I made a magic,” she said with finality. “Now please, daddy, don’t stand here and talk. We have to get back to … y-you know.”

If you don’t mind, I won’t go into detail about how we dragged trees and rubbish away to find what was left of our cabin, and how we came upon the pathetic little heap of shingles and screening and furniture and how, wedged in the firm angle of two mortised two-by-fours, we found Anjy. What I felt when I when I lifted her limp body away from the rubble, when I kissed her pale lips—that is mine to remember. And what I felt when those lips returned my kiss—oh, so faintly and so tenderly—that, too, is mine.

We rested, the three of us, for five days. I found part of our store of canned goods and a fishing line, though I’m sorry now that we ate any of the fish, after what happened. And when the delirium was over, I got Patty’s part of the story. I got it piecemeal, out of sequence, and only after the most profound cross-questioning. But the general drift was this:

She had indeed seen that strange performance in the rocky cleft by the bayou; but what is more, by her childish mysticism, she understood it. At least, her explanation is better than anything I could give. Patty was sure that the River Spider that had attacked us that time in the bayou was sent by Séleen, to whom she always referred as the Witch of Endor. “She did it before, daddy, I jus’ betcha. But she didn’t have anythin’ strong enough for to put on the canoe.” I have no idea what she did use—flies, perhaps, or frogs or crayfish.
“She hadda have some part of us to make the magic, an’ she made me get it for her. She was goin’ to put that li’l ol’ hair ball in a canoe, an’ if a River Spider caught it then the Spider would get us, too.”

When I made that crazed leap for the old woman she had nowhere to go but into the bayou. Pat watched neither of us. She watched the canoe. She always claimed that she hooked it to shore with a stick, but I have a hunch that the little idiot plunged in after it. “They was one o’ those big black sawyer things right there,” she said, “an’ it almos’ catched the canoe. I had a lot of trouble.” I’ll bet she did.

“You know,” she said pensively, “I was mad at that ol’ Witch of Endor. That was a mean thing she tried to do to us. So I did the same thing to her. I catched the ugliest thing I could find—all crawly and nasty an’ bad like the Witch of Endor. I found a nice horrid one, too, you betcha. An’ I tied him into my canoe with your shoelaces, daddy. You di’n’ say not to. An’ I singed to it:

She showed me later what sort of creature she had caught for her little voodoo boat. Some call it a mud puppy and some call it a hellbender, but it is without doubt the homeliest thing ever created. It is a sort of aquatic salamander, anywhere from three inches to a foot and a half in length. It has a porous, tubercular skin with two lateral streamers of skin on each side; and these are always ragged and torn. The creature always looks as if it is badly hurt. It has almost infinitesimal fingered legs, and its black shoe-button eyes are smaller than the head of a hatpin. For the hag Séleen there could be no better substitute.

“Then,” said Patty complacently, “I singed that song the way the Witch of Endor did:

“The rest of the verse was silly,” said Pat, “but I had to think real fast for a rhyme for ‘Witch of Endor’ an’ I used the first thing that I could think of quicklike. It was somepin I read on your letters, daddy, an’ it was silly.”

And that’s all she would say for the time being. But I do remember the time she called me quietly down to the bayou and pointed out a sawyer to me, because it was the day before Carson came in a power launch from Minette to see if we had survived the hurricane; and Carson came six days after the big blow. Patty made absolutely sure that her mother was out of hearing, and then drew me by the hand down to the water’s edge. “Daddy,” she said, “we got to keep this from mother on account of it would upset her,” and she pointed.

Three or four black twisted branches showed on the water, and as I watched they began to rise. A huge sawyer, the biggest I’d ever seen, reared up and up—and tangled in its coils was a … a
something
.

Séleen had not fared well, tangled in the whips of the River Spider under water for five days, in the company of all those little minnows and crawfish.

Patty regarded it critically while my stomach looped itself around violently and finally lodged between my spine and the skin of my back. “She ain’t pretty a
-tall!”
said my darling daughter. “She’s even homelier’n a mud puppy, I betcha.”

As we walked back toward the lean-to we had built, she prattled on in this fashion: “Y’know, daddy, that was a real magic. I thought my verse was a silly one but I guess it worked out right after all. Will you laugh if I tell you what it was?”