Barbara Hambly - 03 Graveyard Dust

"I have snakes in my arms," he said.

He opened his eyes. The light in the room was gray. Mamzelle Marie sat on the edge of his bed, a damp sponge in her hand. Behind her stood Rose with a basin, and Hannibal, like a handful of fence pickets rolled in an undertaker's coat, slouched in the chair by the desk.

"I took them out," said Mamzelle Marie.

"Thank you." January drew in his breath, and let it out. His whole insides seemed to be raw and there was a curious quality to the room and to everything he saw. Mamzelle, Rose, Hannibal, the books piled on the desk. As if without warning they could mutate into other forms, or prophesy unknown events.

"Dr. Yellowjack kidnapped Gabriel," he said, as if he'd read it all in a book and needed only to relate it to these people for them to understand. "He got word to Olympe that unless she confessed the murder-and implicated Celie, I think-he'll kill him."

"If he hasn't done so already," said Rose. She still wore the neat dress of pink faille she'd had on in the courtroom, the sleeves rolled back over her arms and dark with wet.

"No," said Marie Laveau. "He wouldn't. Not unless he has to. Not until Olympe is hanged. She's a mother, and she has the Power. Olympe would know."

January sat up. The room darkened, then shivered with a kind of aerial fire, and it seemed for a moment that he saw two chicken feet gripping the end of his bed, as if an invisible chicken sat there. He rubbed his eyes, and they vanished.

"Where would they be?"

They looked at one another: Mamzelle, Hannibal, and Rose.

It was Mamzelle who replied. "The house by the bayou." She turned to Rose. "That policeman wasn't there yet?"

Rose shook her head. "He wasn't there two hours ago," she answered. "I'll go again."

"Two hours?" January blinked at the room around him. By the light it was only an hour or so after dawn. "It's close to six." Hannibal's voice was the whisper of scar tissue. And, when January's brows pulled together, trying to calculate sunrise and time, "Six in the evening. You've been off your head for most of the day."

"Moon won't rise till near midnight," said Mamzelle Marie. "There's a mist in the air. It'll be bad later, by the bayou. Best we go now while there's some light. Can you stand?"

"I think so."

Rose modestly turned away and stepped through the door onto the gallery while January got up;

Mamzelle merely handed him his shirt. As his mind cleared a little January realized it was indeed evening, but the equivocal light left him confused. He felt weak, and caught himself on the back of Hannibal's chair. On the narrow desk lay a newspaper, open to the second page. SENSATION IN THE COURT, announced the header at the top of the column. And, smaller, VOODOO

"What was it?" He made a mental note to buy serious gris-gris from Mamzelle, if she hadn't already put a fix on Burton Blodgett. "In the food, I mean?"

"The world's full of things it could have been." Marie Laveau set his boots down in front of him.

The room, he saw, had been cleared and cleaned. It smelled of burned herbs now, and soap.

"Maybe two or three together. Fricasee, they call it in Haiti, or akee. It was one of those they brought over from Africa. It takes time to act, so there'd be none to point and say, 'This man was poisoned.' They'd only say it was the cholera, and run away." She brought a cup over from the desk, and held it out to him. Sweetness and salt, soothing as it went down. Some of the strangeness seemed to go out of the room, as if a necessary ballast had been added to his brain.

"If I'd eaten as much of the stuff as you had, I'd probably have been dead when you got back," said Hannibal in his thread of a voice. "I still don't think I'll ever be able to look at beans and rice again, which is a pity, since some weeks that's all I live on. 'nocrcov Eyw xpEi,av ovx?xw', and I suppose Socrates ought to know. Are you sure our friend didn't put a hex on Bella's room as well as yours?"

"Rose," said Mamzelle, as January dug under the mattress for the pistols and the powder flasks he'd taken from the corpse of Killdevil Ned. While he was checking the loads he heard her go on,

"If you can't find this Shaw at the Cabildo, go to M'sieu Tremouille's house..." January's hands shook as he thrust pistols and flasks through his belt, slung the spares around his neck on their long piratical ribbons.

". a child been kidnapped, held at Dr. Yellowjack's house on the bayou. Tell him Yellowjack will kill the boy..."

A skinning-knife in his boot and another in his belt. He'd be hanged, he reflected bitterly, if he was seen with this much weaponry on him. He could hear Cut-Arm's laughter now.

"Tremouille's a smart man, and he's no coward." Looking around, January saw that Mamzelle Marie had kilted her bright skirt high, as she had the previous after noon to trek through the cipriere. "If this Shaw isn't there, Tremouille's the best we can do."

If Shaw wasn't there, thought January, the chances that any of the other Guardsmen would be bright enough-or have sufficient woodcraft-to rescue Gabriel before the wangateur killed him were slim.

The voodooienne turned back from the door as Rose's shoe heels clattered away down the steps.

Her long coppery fingers curled around the crucifix at her breast. "Virgin Mary, Mother of God," she said softly, "take us there safely." Then she snapped her fingers and made a sign with her hands, and spit into the corner. "Papa Legba, who has the keys to all doors, we need your help, too."

Mamzelle Marie took him by a different route into the cipriere this time. They passed through the Protestant cemetery where the smudge fires burned sullen in the dusk against the rising of the night miasma from the swamps, across the marshy verge of shacks and sheds and poverty-stricken immigrants, and straight into the trees. The failing light lent a weird cast to the gloom beneath the canopy of oaks and pines. Cypress trunks took on the appearance of men in that queer twilight, beards of moss the semblance of tree trunks or stands of laurel, water the look of solid land. The air felt close and thick in the lungs here, and mosquitoes swirled in stinging clouds.

"Judge Canonge spoke to your sister after the court was cleared, trying to get her to explain." Marie Laveau paused to get her bearings, then pressed through a stand of hackberry that hid a thread of game trail, pale in the dusk. "Even he smelled rotten fish. She said only she'd repented of her deed and of the lies she'd told."

January whispered, "Damn." He could see Olympe sitting there, with a face like a mechanical doll's, repeating over and over again, I poisoned him. I poisoned him. "There's ways of getting messages into the jail, even though none from the outside are allowed in. It wouldn't have been hard."

"It wouldn't have been hard, either, to poison Celie in the jail," said January. "She has-we have-her father to thank there, for keeping her so close. And of course if Olympe had died in jail-Olympe the voodoo, Olympe the idolater-there would have been less of an outcry at the trial. Celie might have gotten off, and if Isaak had passed word to her somehow, spoken of what she'd heard."

From the edge of the trees to the island in the bayou it was only a mile or so, and the night was a still one. Mamzelle Marie led the way cautiously, and January flinched at each sound. While it was true that Dr. Yellowjack would hang on to his hostage as long as he could, it was also true that in kidnapping the boy he had provided a clinching witness to the existence of Lucinda Coughlin's plot, and to his own part in helping her.

They came on the house over the rear of the island, following the low ground, the wet ground, where they could. Mosquitoes and gnats swarmed around their ears and nostrils, but once Mamzelle touched January's arm, and pointed out to him a cluster of tin pans and tubs, dangling together in a spiderweb of fishing line, halfhidden among the beards of Spanish moss. January followed her gesture down, and saw where the line was stretched among the root ridges of the higher ground, where the insects were less. Between the creeper and fern, and the gathering mists, it would have been impossible to avoid giving the alarm.