The Tangled Bridge (11 page)

Severin laughed. Musical, delicate, childlike. She glowed faintly in the darkness of the underpass. Her tiny hand stretched toward Shalmut and shed light on him, too. He and the river devils both shone in that sepia glow, washing to white with each strobe of lightning.

Madeleine tried to clamp onto Shalmut. Nothing. Slippery as Alice had been. No way to make him stop this. Madeleine was as helpless as the rest of them.

Another shot. One of the outreach volunteers went limp where he lay crouched on the ground.

People disappeared into the rain. Madeleine was on her feet again, trying desperately to get a fix on Shalmut, stumbling forward, but her pigeonry had no effect.

Shalmut turned back and looked her dead in the eye with the gun swinging in her direction. She saw now, saw through the illumination of Severin's briar light, that he was smiling.

Madeleine stopped. Shalmut wasn't smiling with his mouth, and not his cheeks. His smile was nothing more than a lift to the eyes.

Madeleine recognized that expression.

Other than the fallen, most everyone else had already disappeared into the rain or was cowering in the mud. Except Ethan.

Ethan lunged. He knocked Shalmut in the left side of the jaw, and Shalmut's head snapped sideways. The gun discharged again. The bullet landed in a wooden palette. Shalmut's head wobbled as he fell to the ground. Madeleine watched, and realized that she was still trying to clamp her pigeonry into him. Still trying to grab control. Clamping onto a spirit that was already loosening from its host.

Shalmut was sprawled in the dirt, a cloud of dust creeping from him like fog on a riverbank. He lay still.

 

thirteen

HAHNVILLE, 1927

WHEN PATRICE AND GILBERT
returned to Terrefleurs, they did not find that Trigger had collected Marie-Rose and brought her back home. They did not find Trigger at all. Not right away. The plantation workers were settled into their Sundays, shelling peas on their porches and recuperating from a long week in the fields.

Patrice and Gil found Rosie first. After checking all the outbuildings, they'd returned to the main house and looked through the basement. There, curled atop a burlap sack of red beans, lay little Rosie.

Gil said, “But I'd checked the basement. She wasn't in here.”

Rosie was wide awake, but in the briar and not responding to their prods. More disturbing were the sounds she was making. Guttural clucks. Odd little lashes of her tongue. And a queer sort of smile at her eyes. Patrice did not like that smile.

The thorns were curling their way into the cellar, beckoning Patrice into the other world. The scent of cool, rotted earth and rolling mist. She made herself calm. Refused to acknowledge the grinning river devil who watched from above in the beams crisscrossing the ceiling.

“We've got to find Trigger,” Patrice said.

Gil had walked to the other side of the basement and was staring at the space beyond the coal furnace. “Well, I found him and a little somethin extra.”

The look on Gilbert's face had Patrice on her feet and crossing to his side in half a heartbeat, leaving Marie-Rose alone on her bean sack. Trigger was there alright. He was standing opposite Gilbert with that same strange smile Marie-Rose was wearing.

On the floor lay a man Patrice did not know. Near death. A step stool was crushing his windpipe.

Patrice looked from him to Trigger and then back again. The stranger's mouth was open to a gray, blood-streaked tongue, and he was missing his front teeth. She thought to help him but at the same time, knew that he must be a bad man. That he had something to do with all this. A rumpled raw cotton sack lay near his knee.

In the man's hand was a knife, and it was streaked with blood.

She dared a glance at Trigger again. A black smudge across his cheek. A bloody gash down his forearm.

Trigger made a low, strangled grunt.

“Trigger?” Patrice tried, and then thinking he might answer to his given name instead: “Guy?”

But Trig was in the briar, just like Rosie. His look was so foreboding that Patrice had to remind herself that he was still her baby brother, gentle as a kitten. She reached for his hand but he stepped away, shying back without having looked directly at her. He stepped up, back onto that stool that rested over the fallen man's neck.

“Don't—” Patrice started to say.

An unearthly hollow sound emitted from somewhere in the stranger's throat.

A noise from behind made Patrice whirl. Marie-Rose was standing only three feet away and making a strange gasping cluck, her gaze leveled on Trigger, and he was looking at her, too. The expressions on their faces made Patrice back toward Gil and wrap her arms around herself.

“Their necks,” Gil said, and Patrice saw that both Marie-Rose and Trigger had blood at their back collars.

“What's happened here?” Patrice said.

Gil pointed to the man on the floor. “Who
is
he?”

But the question strongest on Patrice's mind was not who he was, but how he'd come about lying there on the fruit cellar floor. Had one of the younger ones attacked him?

Gil said, “I'm goin in.”

“No. Let me.”

Patrice knew she was the eldest and strongest of the four. And something was off about the way the younger siblings were mired in the bramble.

She said, “Keep an eye on them. Don't let them wander.”

“I will.”

“And keep an eye on … him.” She gestured to the man on the floor.

Gil nodded. “Careful, Treesey.”

*   *   *

IT TOOK NO TIME
at all for the thorns to come. No sooner had Patrice receded her mind that the fruit cellar seemed to worm to life. Potatoes in the bin sprouted eyes that gave to roots that became black, lengthening thorns. So did the tiny roots along the wall.

Patrice could see Trigger facing her just as he was in the material world. He was standing atop something that was not a step stool, but a sort of iron jaw, a trap, and beneath its teeth some kind of horrible bramble devil was writhing. A black, tarry thing that looked like a man whose arms and legs were far too long and thin. Trigger looked down at it and wobbled atop the trap, making the creature squeak.

“Trig—” she started to say, but he put his fingers to his lips in a hushing sound.

He smiled beyond Patrice's shoulder, and she turned to see Marie-Rose. She was grinning at some kind of colorful, winged flying fish. A briar sylph. It looked lighter than paper and it shimmered in a colorful display in stark contrast to the black briar. Weightless on a breeze. The sylph was making those sounds, the swallowed “g” sounds, and Marie-Rose was answering back.

And then Patrice realized that the sylph had led Rosie to one particular tree that stood out from all the others. A tall black pine that seemed to reach higher than heaven. At its base were carvings. Patrice recognized them at once.

Papa.

Carving used to calm him. A way for him to bring his physical body back together with its ghost. Trigger had recently started whittling, too.

Before he'd died, Papa had carved dozens of toys for the children. Patrice alone had fourteen dolls made of tupelo gum—one for each birthday. There would be no more.

So lovely was the sylph. And so absorbing the briar. Patrice had to work hard to form a thought: She had come here for a reason.

All four of the children's river devils were there, laughing, whispering, pointing. Patrice's devil was touching the iron jaw. It somehow made Patrice want to touch it, too. Even though part of her knew that in the other world, a real man lay trapped by it.

The colorful, hovering sylph receded toward the black woods and Marie-Rose stepped out as though to follow it further.

“No,” Patrice said aloud, and her two younger siblings shushed her.

Why?
she wondered.

But she didn't need words to communicate with them, especially not here. So Patrice compressed her thoughts into a single feeling. She let her body assume a sensation that reflected their mother—a feeling like tension and dread and always-fleeting hope or love.

Trigger and Rosie both reacted immediately. They went rigid, their gaze on Patrice. Impish smiles vanished.

Patrice beckoned to them, and they followed her without protest. She led them away from the oil slick. It required far more concentration than she'd ever had to muster before, and the journey back seemed longer than it should have taken, but finally, they were all out.

*   *   *

“WHO IS HE?” GIL
said, looking at the man on the floor.

Trigger almost seemed surprised. “I don't know. I found Rosie down here in the cellar. I went to get her down, and he came after me. Must have been hiding.”

Patrice said, “What do you mean,
get her down?
”

“I mean just that. She was up there.”

Trigger was pointing to the ceiling joists that stretched above the sack of red beans where Marie-Rose had been curled up. “If she hadn't a been makin those sounds I might not've seen her. But I looked up and there she was. Grinnin down at me like the Cheshire cat. Only she wudn't seein me. She was lookin at the sylphs.”

“That explains why I didn't see her,” Gil said. “Must've walked right under where she was hidin.”

Trigger said, “She wudn't hidin. She'd been stashed up there.”

“By him?” Patrice said, nodding toward the man on the floor.

“Looked that way. He hid Rosie up there. And then when I was trying to get Rosie, he came after me. Threw a sack over my head. But then I got out and he tried to stab me. Not sure what happened after that. Briar.”

The man opened his mouth and closed it again, sending a fresh course of blood over his lips. His throat made a choking sound.

“I think he's drowning in his own blood,” Gil said, and then looked to Patrice. “What should we do?”

She pulled the stool away from the man's neck. “Did my mother send you?”

The man's eyes met hers, but he gave no indication of an answer. He certainly couldn't speak. And yet it was enough: Patrice had felt what was in his heart and recognized her mother's presence in it. Her hands went cold. The intention inside this man had been to take the smallest child, and to kill another one. It's what Maman had sent him to do.

Patrice shook her head, unable to trust what she saw in him. It must be her nerves—she must be reading him wrong. As much as their mother hated them, Patrice couldn't believe she was capable of murdering one of her own children.

The stranger's mouth stretched wide and drooled red down his cheek.

Marie-Rose said, “Do something!”

Patrice shook her head. This man had come here with murder in his heart. Still, God would not abide their causing him to suffer, would He?

Gil said, “Maybe we oughtta sit him up.”

Patrice shook her head. “He'll still die. It'll just keep him suffering longer.”

“Didn't Mother once save that boy who couldn't breathe by cutting into his throat?”

“Yes. That was Ferrar. But I wouldn't know how to do that.”

She tried to imagine herself cutting into the stranger's windpipe and found the idea impossible. And he'd likely choke her if she tried it.

Trigger reached down and took the knife from the man's hand.

“Wait,” Patrice said.

But too late. Trigger thrust it into his heart.

Patrice gave a little cry, and Gil did, too, and they clutched one another. There came a horrible gurgling sound from where the man lay. Marie-Rose stood perfectly still, staring wide-eyed. Patrice grabbed her and pulled her into the huddle.

Trigger said, “There. Now he ain't sufferin no more.”

Marie-Rose finally opened her mouth and let loose a sob.

Patrice rubbed her back. “Shh. Shh.”

The stranger had already gone still.

Patrice took Rosie by the chin and checked her face. “It's over, now. Are you alright? Did he hurt you?”

“My neck,” Rosie said.

“We all have that. But I think we're fine. Whatever was in the scratch, it must not have worked properly or that man would have got us all by now.”

Gil was glaring at Trigger. “You just killed him outright!”

“Well if you'd really gone lookin for Rosie like you're supposed to!”

“I did come down here! I checked end-to-end!”

Trigger pointed at the dead man on the floor. “So why didn't he come after you the way he done me?”

Gil paused, his cheeks flaring despite the darkness in the cellar. “Maybe cuz I wasn't alone. Joseph was helping me look.”

“Joseph,” Trigger said, then nothing more.

The twins were staring at each other, and it seemed the slightest movement might cause them to lunge. Joseph was Gil's friend who lived in the field workers' cottages with his parents. After Mother had left Terrefleurs, Gil had started to pal around with Joseph instead of Trigger.

Patrice said, “Trigger, listen. Do you know if anyone saw you down here?”

Trigger kept glaring at his twin, nostrils flared.

Patrice touched his arm and gestured toward the man on the floor. “I mean do you think anyone saw
him?
Does anybody on the plantation know he's down here?”

Trigger shook his head. “Naw. I mean, when it happened, I sort of got pulled into the briar so I can't be sure. But I don't think no one from Terrefleurs saw.”

“Anyone.”

“What are we going to do?” Marie-Rose asked.

“First we'll have to bury him where no one will find out,” Patrice said.

“Mama'll find out,” Rosie said. “That's what the tar was.”

Trigger was nodding. “It's why we couldn't talk in the briar. She used that pool of oil to spy on us in some way. Not sure how. That thing came out of it.”

Patrice picked up the sack from the floor and covered the tiny window facing the back allée. “Well, if she knows she knows. Let's hope no one else does.”