The Lower Deep (9 page)

"What are you talking about, friend? I have to get back to the hospital. I'm a doctor there."

The guard, sentry, whatever he was, only shook his head more vehemently. "It is not permitted to depart before the week of La Souvenance is over,
m'sié.
Everyone knows that!"

"What? You expect me to stay here the whole week?"

"You must."

It was no joke, Steve suddenly realized. In fact, it could be a very big problem. "Let me talk to someone in authority, please." He kept his voice level because it would be a shame to make anyone angry now, when surely a few words to someone higher up would bring about a relaxing of the rules. "Who is in charge of the comings and goings? Get him, will you? Or no—just take me to him."

"M'sié—"
A note of sadness had crept into the fellow's voice, as though ignorance in a learned man caused him great unhappiness.
"M'sié,
it is not we who make the rules here. It is the
loa."

"The
loa.
I
see."

"For you to leave would offend them."

It had gone on too long, Steve decided. Nadine would be arriving any minute now and he had to be outside in the road, not here in the compound behind a closed gate.
"Compère,
tell me. Are you saying you mean to stop me from opening that gate and walking out of here?"

"It will not be I,
m'sié.
It will be the
loa."

"
They will stop me?"

"Yes,
m'sié.
Or punish you."

"Well"—Steve exhaled an elaborate sigh—"it's a chance I'll have to take, then. Because I'm expected back at the Brightman, and that's where I'm going."

He stepped forward.

Though scarcely seeming to move, the gatekeeper was suddenly in front of him on widespread legs, blocking his way. Those big, long-fingered hands left the man's hips and reached forward to grasp Steve's shoulders.

No man did that to Steve Spence, at a voodoo ceremony or anywhere else. Especially after Steve had patiently made every effort to explain matters. Freeing himself with a twist of his hips, he made a fist of his right hand and drove it home just under the keeper's rib cage. Then as the fellow doubled over, the heel of Steve's left hand cracked down on the back of his neck and sent him sprawling. He was unconscious before he hit the ground.

There was no lock on the gate. It swung open when Steve pushed it. With a "Sorry,
compère,
but I had to do that," he walked out of the compound.

Almost.

Actually, he was through the gate but still in the strip of scrub growth between the gate and the road when the pain took him. The sentry could not have caused it, even if he had been conscious; Steve was well beyond his reach. What happened was like a lightning strike, or being belted under the heart with a sledgehammer.

The explosion of agony caused him to stumble and stagger while he grabbed at his groin with both hands in a struggle to keep going. He could not keep going, though—at least not on his feet. His knees buckled and he fell flat, facedown, and lay there hearing himself moan in torment as the pain coursed through him like a flame in his bloodstream. Then his mind screamed at him to get away from the fence, the compound behind it, the gate, and the man who had been guarding it,
because all of them together must somehow be responsible for what was happening to him.

Willing himself forward again, he began to crawl. He crawled through the last of the scrub
and reached the road and collapsed again. There, hearing the sound of a car engine, he feebly raised his head.

Down the road a pair of headlights approached through the deepening dusk. Was it Nadine? Just in time to help him? Dreading what he might see, he willed himself to look back at the gate. Its keeper still lay there on the ground, unmoving. No one else was there.

The headlights stopped, and he saw Nadine running toward him. It was the last thing he remembered until he came out of a coma five days later
at the hospital.

After dragging him to the Jeep and getting him away from La Souvenance, Nadine had stopped a little distance down the road and given him some kind of first aid, he heard later. Then she had completed the return trip to the Brightman at a speed that should have caused the death of them both. There Tom Driscoll had taken over.

With Tom's skill and Nadine's round-the-clock nursing, they had pulled him through.

No one, then or since, had ever explained what happened to him when he defied the rules and
walked out of that voodoo gate. Nor had anyone
ever explained why a voodoo
houngan,
so
grateful for having his life saved that he would invite an
outsider to attend such a service, had allowed such a thing to happen. Perhaps, as the gatekeeper had suggested, the
loa
themselves had been
offended, in which case maybe even a powerful
houngan
could not have intervened.

At least, he had learned one thing. Voodoo was not what the stick-a-pin-in-a-doll writers said it was. It was real and powerful and frightening.

You played games with it at your peril.

W
ith the memory of his nightmare experience at
La Souvenance still vivid in his mind, Steve looked at his watch. Half an hour had passed since Tom Driscoll's departure from his room. It was now 3:30 A.M.

Troubled by the older doctor's visit, he went to a window and stood there frowning out at the night.

Could there be some connection between La Souvenance and what was happening here at the Azagon? It seemed unlikely, yet this was the first time he and Tom Driscoll and Nadine Palmer had been together since then. And the village of Dame Marie
was
said to be a hotbed of voodoo, wasn't it?

In St. Joe, the impossible was merely improbable. And the improbable happened all the time.

Be careful, Spence. You still don't know what the hell happened while you were out of it back there at the Brightman. Be very, very careful here.

The night was dark, as his caller had mentioned. It was not altogether lightless, however. There seemed to be rather more stars in evidence than usual. He could still make out the sloping front lawn, the road, and the hotel beach beyond.

What the devil was Paul Henninger doing on his mysterious nighttime excursions? Was he up to something a bit shady, as Driscoll obviously suspected and perhaps young Mendoza did, too?

Was there maybe a house in town to which such a man might be drawn for the usual reason?

I'll have a talk with him tomorrow, Steve promised himself, then turned from his contemplation of the night sky to go to bed. But in mid-turn he stopped and swung back to the window, aware that he had seen something remarkable at the foot of the hotel driveway.

Paul Henninger had come back, stark naked and apparently ill.

Steve strode from the room with his dressing gown flapping behind him and his moccasins barely touching the floor. With one hand on the banister he descended the stairs like swift water flowing, then sped along the lower hall at the same no-nonsense gait. He was out the front door and striding briskly down the driveway before Henninger had managed to travel a third of the drive's length.

"All right, Paul. All right. Just hang on to me now, and we'll get you to your room."

The manager's only response was a shuddering moan as Steve got an arm around him. Though the night was warm, his naked body was cold and clammy despite its layers of fat, and he seemed unable to stop his violent shivering.

With Steve's help he did stop stumbling, however, and together they made it up the driveway, up the steps, and along the downstairs hall to Henninger's untidy room. There Steve eased him onto a chair, covered him with a sheet from the unmade bed, and stepped back to look at him.

"Do you want to tell me where you've been?" Steve had no trouble keeping his voice gentle.

"Oh, my God," Henninger moaned.

"Try to get hold of yourself, Paul. You haven't been drinking, have you?" The question was pointless. No one at the Azagon used alcohol. Some on the staff were rehabilitated alcoholics themselves.

"No, no, Doctor... I don't drink."

"Then let's try again, shall we?" Steve said. "When you left here about midnight, where were you going?"

"I don't know. I don't remember leaving."

"You were walking in your sleep, you mean?" Henninger lifted his head long enough to look
at his questioner for a few seconds, then let it fall.

"I don't—I don't remember going out, Doctor."

"You
were
sleepwalking, then?"

"I just don't know. All I know is that I ended up swimming naked in the sea, and everything around me was dark. I couldn't see the shore,
any lights on shore. I was all alone in the sea, naked and terrified."

Looking terrified even now, Henninger began to tremble violently but recovered and went on in a voice slightly more under control. "Oh, my God, Doctor, you can't know the feeling! I had been here in my room, safe in bed, reading. I almost always read at night. I don't remember putting the light out. Then all at once I found myself there in that dark sea with no shore, no lights, swimming as if I
had
to swim. Something was forcing me. And somehow I knew I was swimming
out,
away from land, to keep some kind of—of appointment."

"How did you get ashore?"

"Something—some fish, I suppose—struck at me. That broke the spell or whatever it was, and I stopped swimming. Then while I was treading water, confused, not knowing what to do, I heard drumming. You know—voodoo drums. That told me where land was, and I swam toward it like a
madman."

"Were you far out? I mean, did it take you long to reach shore?"

"Oh, my God," Henninger moaned again. "I was so far out, I thought I would never get back. When I stumbled up onto the beach at Anse Douce, I was absolutely exhausted and had to lie there until I recovered. Then I walked up and down searching for my pajamas. I must have been wearing them when I left this room, don't you see? But I couldn't find them. Evidently I took them off somewhere else. So I had to walk home naked."

"Where did this fish, or whatever it was, bite
you?" Steve wondered if his frown betrayed his suspicions. "What part of your body?"

Henninger stood up and put his left foot on the chair, brushing the sheet aside to bare his leg to the knee. "See for yourself, Doctor."

Something with teeth had certainly attacked the man, Steve had to admit as he examined the patch of lacerations, four or five inches in diameter, on Henninger's calf. It was nothing to be alarmed about now—simple first aid would take care of it—but to be swimming in deep water at night, far from land, and suddenly feel that sort of tearing at one's leg must have been truly frightening. "Let me bandage this for you, Paul."

"It's not bleeding now, is it, Doctor? But if you .
. . there's a first-aid kit in the bathroom cabinet."

Steve went for the kit and put on a bandage. "I'll run along," he said then. "After what you've been through, you need to sleep awhile, Paul."

"If I dare go to sleep," Henninger sighed while hobbling to the bed.

"Do you have anything to help you?"

"Pills, you mean? I'd be afraid to use them!"

"I see what you mean. Anyway, you'll hardly need any for the rest of tonight. You're exhausted. I'll look in on you first thing in the morning."

"Thank you." The fat man worked himself into a fetal position on the bed and pulled the sheet over him. "Thank you for helping me, Doctor. Believe me, I'm grateful."

On his way out of the room Steve again felt the rustling of the spilled salt, if it was salt, under the soft soles of his moccasins, and again found himself frowning down at the floor. But Paul Hennin
ger's untidiness had nothing to do with tonight's wild adventure, he was sure. There had to be, as Tom Driscoll kept insisting, something very sinister going on here at the Azagon.

What the hell was it? And who was behind it?

Deep in thought, he climbed the stairs to his room. Five minutes to four, his watch said now. He hung up his dressing gown and pajamas—somehow it seemed important to do that after the clutter of Henninger's quarters—and got dressed. Flashlight in hand, he departed.

His destination being the hotel beach, which seemed the likeliest place for the manager to have begun that weird nocturnal swim, he went out the front door and down the driveway.