Water Witch (12 page)

Why did the mud man want to harm them? What
had they done? She didn’t even know him, or didn’t think she did.
It was hard to tell with half of his face hidden beneath that ball
cap. Once they’d reached the island, he’d made sure they didn’t get
a good look at him by covering the lower half of his face with a
camouflage bandanna, like in the old cowboy and Indian movies her
uncle watched on television. The bad guys always wore bandannas
over their mouths in those movies. His clothes, though, were
ordinary. An over-sized jacket that covered a camouflage shirt and
jeans, the same clothes worn by nearly every man in Bayou Crow. He
could have been anyone—or no one—or as Uncle Rusty would have said
about anyone prone to lying…”He’s got the devil in him for
sure.”

“I’m hungry,” Nicky said. He had streaks of
dried mud across his forehead and a long dollop of it along the
side of his nose. Sarah wondered if it made his nose itch. How
horrible to have an itch you couldn’t scratch. “You?”

“Yeah,” she answered.

“I wanna cheeseburger . . . no, two of them.
Fries, too. Super-size—and a chocolate shake, biggest they got.
Maybe an order of chicken nuggets, too. Twelve of ‘em, with those
little packets of barbeque sauce they stick in the bag, you
know?”

Sarah held in a groan. Talking about food
made her stomach hurt. It felt like it was gnawing in on itself,
desperate for anything to eat. She wanted to tell him to shut up,
but didn’t have the heart to. Her dream had come while she’d been
sleeping. Nicky’s came while he was awake. She couldn’t fault him
for that.

A long silence grew between them, and it
seemed to turn up the volume in the swamp. Even from an ant’s eye
view, she saw nothing ahead but water and cypress trees, all brown
and beige. They looked like naked old men, or what she imagined
naked old men might look like since she’d never actually seen
one—all twisted and lumpy, parts of them poking out at odd angles.
Birds seemed to be everywhere, all shapes and colors, all of them
cawing, squawking, screeching. And bugs, millions of bugs; and
frogs that whined and croaked and
barrumphed
, until the
sounds got all mixed together, and she couldn’t tell one from the
other. At night, the sounds were so loud, it made her ears
hurt.

She couldn’t see the horizon well from where
they were, too many trees were in the way. But she saw broad
streaks of orange and red and purple, signs of the sun setting on a
spring day. Night was on its way again. Sarah hated the night.

“I wonder what my mama’s cooking right now,”
Nicky said, his words soft and sad. “Jambalaya maybe, with baked
sweet potatoes. She cooks that so good. The jambalaya I mean. You
know, with big chunks of meat all mixed in with the rice.”

“Sounds great,” Sarah said, trying to muster
more than a half half-hearted response. She didn’t have to wonder
about her uncle’s supper menu. If she was calculating right, today
was Friday, which meant greasy meatloaf, supplied by that
pinched-faced old hag, Widow Costello. She had a huge, brown mole
under her right eye and lived down the road from the church. Her
meatloaf smelled and tasted like sweaty gym shorts, and it had red
things she called pimentos all stuck up in the meat. On Fridays,
Sarah usually settled for a peanut butter and jelly sandwich and a
glass of milk, leaving her uncle and Widow Costello to the nasty
meatloaf and a burbling session of, “Oh, Pastor Woodard, I don’t
know what this town would ever do without you!” The woman’s words
were so syrupy, they made Sarah want to puke.

“Sarah?” Nicky’s voice sounded smaller this
time, like he’d suddenly gone backwards in age.
“Huh?”
A long pause—the rise and fall of chittering bug songs. “Are…are
you afraid?”

Sarah thought about her answer for a moment,
considering what might be best for him to hear—then figured it was
useless to lie. “Yeah.” Once the word was out of her mouth, she
could almost hear her uncle shouting, “
And the truth shall set
you free!”

“Me, too.” He let out a long, shaky sigh,
then added quietly. “I want to see my mom again. I don’t wanna
die.”

She nodded slowly, not caring this time
whether Nicky saw her or not. She didn’t want to talk about dying.
It would make the possibility too real, turn the nightmare into a
hardcore reality—one she wasn’t ready to face.

“You know…since your uncle is a preacher and
everything, you’ve gotta know some prayers and stuff, right?
Maybe…um…maybe we could say some, ask God to help us or
something.”

Sarah leaned her head against the dirt ledge
behind her and closed her eyes. She didn’t want to talk about God
either. Not about someone who’d left her without a mother or
father, who’d allowed her to be raised by a weird uncle who made
her wear funny clothes and treated her as if she was a contagious
wart that needed to be cut off and thrown away before someone died
from its disease. Who forced a little girl to desert her childhood
and any hope of friends. Who demanded so much attention a person
couldn’t even enjoy other parts of life.

“Sarah?”

She kept her eyes closed, willing his voice
away, willing herself back to sleep, back to the dream about the
field and her mother and the magic shoes that would change her life
forever.

“
Sarah
…”

Her eyes opened at the change in Nicky’s
voice. It had gone from soft and wishful, to whispered and urgent.
She lifted her head, turned to him. “What?”

“Shhhh, not so loud. Don’t move . . . don’t .
. .don’t even blink.” Nicky was looking to the right, his head
straining to one side. All she could see was his hair, the streaks
of mud in it. She heard him grunt and knew he was trying to pull
himself out of the sludge again. Suddenly, he whipped his head back
in her direction. “It’s coming . . .it’s coming!” His eyes were
still red, but no longer wet, only wide and wild.

His words seem to thrust shock-wires into her
heart, tripping it into a beat so fast it felt like it was going to
jump out of her chest. In that moment, the water the mud man had
made them drink needed to come out and come out
now
. Her
bladder felt stretched to capacity, ready to burst out of her body,
just like her heart, thumping, hammering, determined to leave
her.

Nicky bowed his head, and she heard him
mumble, “God, please . . . God, please make it go away. Make it go
away . . .” His head looked like one small hill rising from a dark
brown plain, and beyond it, right at the water’s edge, Sarah saw
the wide, thick-scaled snout of a full-grown alligator. Its mouth
was partially open, its teeth a million miles long. It seemed
frozen in place, watching them, sizing them up, measuring the
supper that lay ahead. Then it moved forward, gripping mud and
swamp grass with pointy claws and webbed toes.

Sarah felt her mouth drop open and her
bladder immediately release. Oh, God, what a field day her uncle
would have now with her peeing in a hole, a boy right beside her.
Peeing on the pastel blue shift so stained with grime. So many
smudges. Too many. Had she not been paralyzed by the sight of the
alligator, she’d have probably laughed. Laughed at the absurdity of
the thought, the uselessness of it. Instead, for the first time in
her young life, Sarah Woodard uttered a prayer and meant it with
all of her heart. “Jesus, if you’re really up there, please, don’t
let us die.”

CHAPTER FIFTEEN

The pain had been worth it. Olm just wished
his ancestors would have given him some kind of warning. It had all
come so unexpectedly. The dark form in his truck, the way it had
moved over him slowly, almost seductively, before it bit into his
chest. The pain had been fierce, like two rows of sharp thick
sewing needles clamping down on him at the same time. He’d gone
blind with agony for a moment, nearly driving his vehicle off into
the bayou that ran alongside the road. It had taken mind over
matter to keep that from happening. Mind over matter—his mind over
what mattered.

Once
they
released him, the form
disappeared, leaving him stunned, bruised, and questioning whether
he was going mad. It soon became clear to him, though. He wasn’t
going insane. He was evolving, and Olm was stunned that he hadn’t
caught on to that fact sooner. Logically, it was simple really. If
a person invoked every ancestor from the Great Spirit World that
had come before him, surely some significant, physical
manifestation had to come with that invocation, right? Of course.
And how better to get a person’s attention than to back them into a
corner and cause pain?

Thinking through it now, Olm realized that
the attack hadn’t been an attack at all. It had been an initiation
of sorts, which meant that the dark form had to have been one of
his ancestors. Possibly his great-grandfather or his
great-great-grandfather, the latter a man he envisioned to be one
of the most powerful leaders in the Skidi tribe, in the entire
Pawnee nation. It had to have been him, for it was only after that
attack—that initiation—that Olm’s mind blossomed, opening up to a
new idea that would enhance his ceremonial sacrifice to Tirawa. He
would have never come up with a plan like that on his own. Just as
he’d suspected from the very beginning, the collective knowledge of
his forefathers, every leader, warrior, medicine man, and
ceremonial priest, was slowly but surely becoming his own.

The first idea had come to him the moment he
spotted the old woman with the pinched face and the mole beneath
her right eye. Olm knew when he saw her that she was to be part of
the ceremony. Not as a sacrifice, for she was far too old and ugly
for that. But her blood poured around the fire that would consume
the children’s hearts would cause a savory scent to arise up to the
heavens, like exotic incense strategically placed on an alter. How
could Tirawa not be impressed with that?

Luring the woman to him had taken very little
effort. Olm knew her to be lonely and always eager to serve, to
please. As soon as he had her alone, he wasted no time. He took an
electrical cord from a nearby lamp, wrapped it around her neck and
cut off her air supply. The woman’s struggles had been feeble, her
death relatively quick. Once her body quit twitching, he carried
her to the bathroom, leaned her body over the edge of the bathtub
at the waist, then waited twenty minutes to make sure her heart and
brain were as lifeless as her limbs. Only then did he puncture the
right side of her neck with a screwdriver, boring into her carotid
artery. Her blood flowed thick and easy, like rich red wine into
the plastic gallon jug he’d brought along to capture it. Once the
jug was filled, he left the woman hanging over the tub, allowing
the remaining blood in her body to gurgle down the drain.

Although Olm had made sure to be meticulous
in the clean up, the tricky part came when he had to load the woman
into his vehicle, then into his boat. His plans were to dump her
somewhere near Gro-beck Point, which was a stretch of marsh thick
with buttonwood trees and water lillies, and it was en route to the
children. No one would ever find the old woman there, and even if
they did, there wouldn’t be enough of her left to identify. Once
her body was exposed to the elements, the raccoons, birds,
alligators, and other swamp scavengers, they’d be lucky to find
matching bone fragments.

The entire time Olm worked to move her out of
the house, into his vehicle, into the boat, he felt sure he was
being watched and kept glancing over his shoulder every few
seconds. He’d felt someone hiding behind a tree, the corner of a
house, behind a car door, waiting to catch him in the act. The
paranoia did nothing to stop him, though. He’d doggedly pressed on.
If anyone got too nosy, he’d just have to make sure they met up
with the same demise as the old woman.

Twisting the throttle, Olm set the skiff’s
motor into high gear. He was anxious to see the brats’ faces, the
horror in their eyes when they saw him. Night was a challenge since
he had to depend on the aide of a flashlight, which was fine, but
it didn’t provide him near the satisfaction of seeing those young,
terror-stricken faces in the white light of day.

Olm lowered his head to cut the wind from his
eyes and pushed the point of the skiff even faster down the lower
Grand River. He veered right through Flat’s Cut, taking note of the
giant willows, cypress trees, and tupelos, each dressed in new
spring greenery and most accessorized in gray Spanish moss.

The whine of his motor echoed through the
darkening passages. Beavers and nutrias scrambled up nearby banks
while egrets with three-foot wing spans skated over the surface of
the water. Blue herons flew a few feet ahead of him, and a barred
owl swooped overhead, then roosted on a nearby treetop. There were
alligators, some ten-fifteen feet long, poised like felled logs,
watching as he zipped by. No wonder his ancestors took to this
place so easily. The Atchafalaya—the name alone carried the
strength of the Native American, with its thousands of acres of
swamps, lakes, and water prairies, each rich with wildlife, both in
land and water; its very soil capable of nurturing any seed.

Olm pulled back on the throttle, slowing, and
took a left into Rooster Shoot, a narrow waterway that led directly
to Gro-beck Point. When he reached the mouth of the point, he
hooked a hard right into an inlet stuffed with water lilies,
puttered through the bramble about a hundred feet, then tossed the
old woman out of the boat. Very few people set crawfish traps or
ran trout lines in this area because it was so clogged with
vegetation. He felt confident no one would happen upon her body
here.

After making sure the boat was free of
evidence, Olm turned on a small headlight that was perched on the
bow and steered his way out of the inlet. He veered back into
Gro-beck Point, where he quickly circled into an offset bayou that
brought him to a straight-away that led to Fausse Point. Along the
way, he heard bullfrogs croaking, locusts and mosquitoes whining,
and he soon joined their chorus, humming to himself, content with
his progress and the bright future that lay ahead of him. Night was
falling and the great moon lay ahead. That huge white orb had the
power to stretch its light to the four corners of the earth. He
felt its illumination fill him, and it made him want to dance,
stomp, whoop in victory.