Barbara Hambly - 03 Graveyard Dust

"Save it." January was already beside the stove, but through the rolling smoke he could see the lock that clamped it shut. Dizziness flooded his brain, and it seemed to him that things had begun to crawl from the opened pots on the table, chicken feet scratching across the planks toward him, and every little foul juju ball that had been tucked into the corner of the room. The skin of his belly, his arms, his thighs crept and twitched with the tiny lizards and snakes growing within: He knew if he remained here they would feed on the smoke, grow, and devour him.

He returned to the shutters, dragging the table back to brace himself-and it seemed to him that the white thing from the swamp, the white thing from his nightmares, gripped it and tugged. You owe me, the thing hissed, looking at January with eyeless sockets, and grinned. You still owe me, for Pedro's death.

"Let me out," bargained January, panting, "and help me, and I'll pay you what I can. You tell Mamzelle Marie what payment you want-I'll pay."

But the creature only grinned.

January turned from it, braced his body against the table, and drove his leg again at the shutters.

Once, twice, then the wood cracked and he threw himself up against the door, slipped his arm through and shoved the broken bolt aside. Isaak was unconscious already; January dragged him out, and left him propped against the side of the house.

"He'll head north across Bayou M?tairie," said Papa Legba, leaning against the corner of the house with his keys in his belt and his pipe in his hand. He jerked with the pipe to show the direction. "Woods are thicker on the other side, between the bayou and the lake."

January remembered Cut-Arm's men, sheltering in the cipriere there.

"There's gators in the bayou. Yellowjack'll make for the bridge most likely. You can get him there if you hurry."

"Thank you," January gasped, and ran.

The mists that had drifted all evening among the trees seemed to thicken and coalesce, although that, decided January, might only be the effect of the poisons in his brain. It was difficult to tell what was real and what was not, but he knew it would be madness to try to find the wangateur's tracks in the woods. He grabbed one of the lanterns that hung on the side of the house, kindled it, and followed the bayou itself, which he knew would lead him eventually to the cleared ground of the Roquigni and Allard plantations, that lay along the M?tairie Road. Even if Dr. Yellowjack didn't try for the bridge he might be more visible from that point, and Papa Legba was correct.

There would be gators in the bayou. Snakes, too. The voodoo-man would be a fool, to try to cross.

I'll never make it, thought January, striding as fast as he dared through the creepers and reeds. He has a start on me...

You'll make it, rasped Legba's voice in his mind. January thought he glimpsed the old man in the mists again, though now he looked more like the battered old statue of St. Peter at the back of St.

Anthony's Chapel, Heaven's keys dangling from his belt. His face was black rather than white.

Might so be he's delayed in the woods. You hurry, though.

January hurried. Sweat poured from him and the blood beat in his head, and around him the woods chittered with ghosts and loa and the twitching white leprous shape of the smallpox god.

But the bayou lay always to his right. Sometimes there seemed to be something wrong and strange about the water; it glowed with blue light, or ran red like the Nile with blood. The cypress knees thrusting up through it stretched twisty gray hands to him. But he worked his way only a little inland to avoid being grabbed, and kept striding. And always the mist grew thicker, the silence pressing, and even the lantern's glow didn't help him much. I can't, he thought, gasping, his knees weak from the poison, and. Legba whispered, Not far.

Strength came into him. Sometimes he thought someone else ran with his legs, someone who carried a sword and whose eyes burned with fire.

A bayou ran in from the west that might have turned him aside. But from that point the lights near the second of the stone bridges was visible, guiding him forward. As he waded through the hip-deep waters under their blanket of fog he heard an alligator bellow, horrifyingly close, and the slip and whisper of water. He scrambled up the bank, stumbling, praying he wouldn't put his hand on a water moccasin, and ran forward again, toward the lights where the Bayou Road crossed the bridge. At the third bridge, where Bayou M?tairie ran into Bayou St. John and the M?tairie Road forked off, he stopped, gasping, leaning on the stone bridge's rail, the clammy fog thick in his lungs and, it seemed to him, the voices that had whispered all around him in the mists fading from his mind.

He knelt, and scanned the threshold of the bridge. If someone had crossed who'd come through the marshy lands to the west, they'd done so without leaving wet footprints. Shutting the lantern slide, January stepped down from the bridge, panting, and crouched in a clump of pine. In the stillness, and the black thick fog, his mind felt clearer. Had Isaak Jumon, like Papa Legba, been a figment of whatever had been dumped into the stove?

But the carved horse on the table... the child's toy that Isaak had carved. That told him those final few things he had not known.

That was what Isaak had seen in Dr. Yellowjack's house on St. John's Eve. He would not even have had to see Lucinda or Abigail Coughlin, although the woman had almost certainly seen him.

Of course, he'd be horrified to see his uncle's two delicately protected protegees there. Of course he'd risk his own freedom, to go back to town and tell his uncle that the woman and her daughter were there, and in danger...

But in that case, why wasn't Isaak dead? If in fact he hadn't been a hallucination? Had he been a prisoner there, all those weeks? The idea was surely even more absurd than incarceration in the Jumon town house. January remembered the emaciated face, the way the young man had clutched at the table. Surely Dr. Yellowjack would have been better off to kill him immediately?

If..?

A voice screamed in the darkness, "Let me alone! " Hoarse panting breath, and the clash and rustle of young cane trampled. Water splashed. Dr. Yellowjack cried, "Get up and run you young bastard or I'll burn you! I swear I'll tear you to pieces with hot irons..."

"I am," whispered Ben's nephew's voice, gasping in the last extremities of exhaustion and pain.

"Please... don't..."

The hissing rattle of cane, the slither of mucky earth. January forced himself to remain still. He knew that if he moved, if he went out into the wilderness of mist and darkness, Yellowjack would hear him, turn aside, and he'd be lost. Only if the wangateur thought the bridge was safe would he cross.

Papa Legba, lord of bridges... Virgin Mary, help us...

"Come on!"

"Please..." A broken whimper that twisted January's soul to hear.

I'll kill him. For hurting that boy, I'll feed the cat with his heart.

"Come on!"

"...coming..."

He saw them in the mists. Yellowjack had a lantern, the glow of it bobbing, jerking in the choking vapors around them, glinting on the black heron-hackle in his hat. By its light January saw Gabriel, limping, staggering, falling, and trying to rise. His hands were tied behind him, and there was a rope around his neck, a rope that the voodoo-man jerked and dragged as a vicious child would drag at a puppy on a lead. Gabriel fell, sobbing, and braced himself, trying to keep from being strangled as Yellowjack dragged him along the shell path toward the bridge.

"Get up! " The voodoo-man turned back. January could see he had a knife in his hand. Yellowjack tried to haul the boy to his feet again, but Gabriel was clearly at the end of his strength. The boy half-rose, then, with a cry, collapsed as his left leg buckled beneath him. "Please-my leg..."