Barbara Hambly - 03 Graveyard Dust

"He has spells, too, that keep the snakes angry hereabouts," murmured Mamzelle Marie. "He says they'll call out to him, and tell him who's coming. But they won't speak of me. Or of you, if you're with me. Still it's best we be careful."

January wondered if the voodoo-man claimed the allegiance of the local alligator population as well. The light was going, and he probed each pool and reed tuft with his stick, poison-dreams still whispering and buzzing in his head. He felt at any moment that the white eyeless thing of his dreams would come sloshing up out of the depths. Red eyes seemed to watch from the shadows, eyes that were gone when he turned his head. Once he thought he saw a huge water moccasin curled on a log, and when he met the serpent's copper eyes it flicked its tongue at him and slipped down and into the cattails, hastening away toward the house. Maybe it did have a message to deliver.

In any case the house was dark-shuttered-when January and Mamzelle Marie finally saw its pale bulk shimmer amid the trees. Woodsmoke lay thick on the clammy air. Gone indoors? wondered January. Driven to stifling in the house by the mosquitoes? They circled the house once, straining their eyes through the cinder-dark dusk to see if anyone watched from the gallery. It seemed to be true that snakes in the thickets behind the house were angrier, for a small one sank its fangs into January's boot, and a few minutes later a larger one struck at him from a hole under a log. "You stop that," ordered Marie Laveau, her hand darting out and catching the serpent behind the head as it tried to retreat once more. The reptile lashed and struck at her wrist, scratching the copper skin, though January guessed it had spent its poison on his boot-leather. It was only a young one, too, barely the length of a biblical cubit.

Marie Laveau held it up, and stared into its yellow eyes. "You got no respect," she said softly, as the serpent's coils circled her arm. "You tell your friends Mamzelle Marie is here, Mamzelle Marie who walks on glass and golden spikes. You tell your friends Damballah-Wedo is my husband, and I have coffee with John the Revellator two afternoons a week, who drove off snakes out of his coffee cup when King Herod tried to poison him. You tell them, leave me and my friends alone."

She set the snake on the ground, and watched it as it slipped away. "It'll be a while," she said, "before they all get the word."

Carefully, they moved in toward the house. A boat was tied at the bayou, where the dancing had been. Heart hammering, January crept through the water and the reeds-this was the kind of place where alligators loved to lie-cut the line, and let it drift away. On the ground where the last light fell he could see the verves scratched into the dirt, sprinkled with rum and fresh blood. As soon as there was an inch of cover he crawled from the water and crept along the thickets to where Mamzelle Marie waited, probing always ahead of him with his stick. A turtle studied him from a log. He wondered if he should hand it a calling card to take in. "I see no track around the house going away," she said in a breath. "He's in there." January pulled on his shirt again, and looped the ribbons of the pistols once more over his neck. "Then let's have a closer look." He spotted where the carry beams went, that bore the weight of the gallery's planking, gritted his teeth hard, then lifted Mamzelle Marie over the rail and onto one. She was a tall woman and built strong, but still her weight was a good sixty pounds less than his, less likely to make the boards creak. From the woodpile he handed her up thick shakes and bars cut from timbers, and these she used to bar the shutters from the outside. They were latched from within, but at the house's rear was a window where the shutters did not fit. Even from ground beyond the edge of the gallery, January could see the crack was big enough to get Killdevil's skinning-knife through and flip the catch. He waited until Mamzelle Marie came slipping back, then vaulted silently over the rail. He crossed the gallery in a stride, flipped the catch, hurled the shutters back, and stepped through, pistol in hand.

There was only the single room, and that room Helldark and choking. Smoke grabbed his throat, shoved hot coals up his nostrils, acrid, sweet, stinking. By the dim glow from the vents in an American iron stove he got an impression of chairs, and a table scattered with pots and jars, open as if in haste. A hole in the ceiling showed where a loft was, but there was no ladder beneath it. He stepped in, called out, "Yellowjack!" and behind him he heard Mamzelle Marie scream his name.

The shutters banged shut behind him and he heard the crash of a bar. The next moment a pistol bellowed, inches from the other side of the wall, and something fell on the gallery, and he knew he'd been trapped. They'd been trapped.

Footsteps fled across the gallery, creak-creak-creak, and were gone. He shouted "Mamzelle!" but there was no sound, and dizziness broke over him, choking, swooning. The smoke, he thought.

Poison.

He flung himself against the shutters, but the wood was stout. Images swirled in his mind, and he thought he heard laughter: thought he saw Death dancing a jig in the corner of the room, with his black cloak and his fiddle; thought the shutters rattled, where the white thing pawed and picked to get in. For a panicky moment he started to move the table, to block it out, then thought, Don't be a fool, and braced himself against the table, brought up his right leg and kicked with all the strength of his back and hips at where the bar would be.

He felt it jerk and give.

Voices whispered in his mind. Ayasha's laughter: Eh, malik, you think you're stronger than oak beams and steel? And the soft polite tones of Delphine Lalaurie, the most terrible woman he had ever known: I'm afraid you haven't learned your lesson very well M'sieu Janvier, clear as if she stood with her whip in hand in the dark behind him still. Things crawled and crept and rustled among the pots on the table-he thought he saw a thousand tiny snakes wriggling toward him, each with a paper bearing his name in its mouth.

Big young Pedro, smiling shyly, My mama say, 'Mind your business." Among the pots he saw a carved wooden horse, with flying mane and flowers whittled into it. As he looked the horse got to its feet and began to dance.

Olympe's voice: "I poisoned him. I poisoned him. But he isn't dead, I know it... "

And another voice, "Up here! Please, up here!"

Coughing.

It was the coughing that made January turn. Fighting panic, fighting terror, still he knew that hallucinations didn't cough. On the table the little snakes vanished. The carved horse lay again on its side, edged with the ruby reflection of the stove's hellish glare.

"Please!..."

He dragged the table over to the hole in the ceiling, sprang up onto it. The smoke was worse in the loft, roiling from the stove's broken-off pipe. The young man up there had managed to squirm his way over to the hole, despite the ropes that bound his hands and his feet, so that January nearly tripped over him in the burning dark. "Gabriel," gasped the young man, as January groped for the ropes, for his knife. "He took Gabriel-threw the powders in the fire..."

January dragged him to the hole-the young man's weight was slight as a girl's-and dropped through, holding up his arms to catch him. There was pain, but nothing like the agony of a month ago, and January silently blessed Augustus Mayerling and his miserable scale weights and beams.

"He was here?"

The young man's face was a skull, bare of flesh, save for a little black mustache... Then the vision vanished and revealed in the dim red smolder of the stove the emaciated features of someone who was unmistakably Antoine Jumon's brother.

"Last night." Isaak coughed again, agonizingly, doubled over and pressed against the table. "Said his mother... Accused..."