Killdozer! (14 page)

“—come to a hovel like this on a wild goose chase just because a fool of a sheriff can’t get any information. I’m going to find out how much of my taxes goes to keep that fellow in office, and get an exemption. I’m the public, dammit, and I ought to be able to deal with a public servant. Hello, Farrel. What’s all this nonsense, now?”

Farrel’s voice cut through Kelley’s because it was so deep and so very quiet. “That little man behind you is the guy I was tellin’ you about. He’s seen the man in Eu … Mrs. Kelley’s car.”

“Oh. Well? Well? Speak up, man. Who was it? If he’s in business, I’ll break him. If he’s on relief, I’ll have him taken off. If he’s the kind of worthless tramp Eula would probably take up with, I’ll hire some muscles I know to take care of him. Well? Well?”

“You can see him for yourself,
Mr
. Kelley,” said Donzey evenly.

“I don’t want to see him!” stormed Kelley. “Is he here?” He peered around.

Donzey had a flash of him grunting and wallowing in mud. “Not exactly. Sit down over there, and I’ll show you a sort of moving picture.”

Kelley opened his mouth to protest but found himself lifted off the floor, swung around and dropped into a chair. He squealed indignantly, saw Farrel’s great horse face hovering close to his, turned a pinkish shade of gray and shut his mouth.

“Easy, Farrel,” said Donzey gently, and put the earphones on Bill Kelley. Rummaging through his new filing cabinet, he clipped a specimen onto the machine and turned on the switch. Kelley’s eyes closed.

They stood looking at their prisoner.

“Farrel—” said Donzey smoothly. The sheriff looked up. “What I was saying before he came … I’ve been wondering if it isn’t the sight of Death that actually takes the … the soul out of a man.”

Farrel grunted and turned back to Kelley. He was following the man’s mind through that tragic maze of Eula’s life. His jaw muscles kept knotting and slackening, beating like a heart.

Kelley suddenly stiffened. His eyes opened wide—so wide that the lids seemed about to fold back on themselves. The man’s horrified gaze was directed at them, but they both sensed that he saw neither of them. For a full minute no one in the room moved.

“He’s seen the show,” muttered Farrel. “What’s he doing—stalling?” Then he realized that Kelley’s staring eyes weren’t looking at anything any more.

Donzey nodded. “Yup,” he said, “it’s seeing Him does it.”

“What’s the matter with him?”

“Why,” said Donzey, “I reckon he climbed into that car with Eula. You see, I didn’t set the time switch.”

“Oh,” said Farrel. He went and lifted up Kelley’s wrist. “
Tsk, tsk
. Whaddye know. This here guy’s up an’ died on us. Heh! In a automobile accident that happened more’n a week ago!”

I
T WAS WHILE
we were fishing one afternoon, Patty and I, that we first met our friend the River Spider. Patty was my daughter and Anjy’s. Tacitly, that is. Figuratively she had originated in some hot corner of hell and had left there with such incredible violence that she had taken half of heaven with her along her trajectory and brought it with her.

I was sprawled in the canoe with the nape of my neck on the conveniently curved cedar stern piece of the canoe, with a book of short stories in my hands and my fish pole tucked under my armpit. The only muscular energy required to fish that way is in moving the eyes from the page to the float and back again, and I’d have been magnificently annoyed if I’d had a bite. Patty was far more honest about it; she was fast asleep in the bilges. The gentlest of currents kept my mooring line just less than taut between the canoe and a half-sunken snag in the middle of the bayou. Louisiana heat and swampland mosquitoes tried casually to annoy me, and casually I ignored them both.

There was a sudden thump on the canoe and I sat upright just as a slimy black something rose out of the muddy depths. It came swiftly until the bow of the canoe rested on it, and then more slowly. My end of the slender craft sank and a small cascade of blood-warm water rushed on, and down, my neck. Patty raised her head with a whimper; if she moved suddenly I knew the canoe would roll over and dump us into the bayou. “Don’t move!” I gasped.

She turned puzzled young eyes on me, astonished to find herself looking downward. “Why, daddy?” she asked, and sat up. So the canoe did roll over and it did dump us into the bayou.

I came up strangling, hysterical revulsion numbing my feet and legs where they had plunged into the soft ooze at the bottom. “Patty!” I screamed hoarsely.

She popped up beside me, trod water while she knuckled her eyes. “I thought we wasn’t allowed to swim in the bayou, daddy,” she said.

I cast about me. Both banks presented gnarled roots buried in rich green swamp growth, and I knew that the mud there was deep and sticky and soft. I knew that that kind of mud clutches and smothers. I knew that wherever we could find a handhold we could also find cottonmouth moccasins. So I knew that we had to get into our canoe again, but fast!

Turning, I saw it, one end sunken, the other high in the air, one thwart fouled in the black tentacles of the thing that had risen under us. It was black and knotted and it dripped slime down on us, and for one freezing second I thought it was alive. It bobbed ever so slowly, sluggishly, in the disturbed water. It was like breathing. But it made no further passes at us. I told Patty to stay where she was and swam over to what I could reach of the canoe and tugged. The spur that held it came away rottenly and the canoe splashed down, gunwale first, and slowly righted itself half full of water. I heard a shriek of insane laughter from somewhere in the swamp but paid no attention. I could attend to that later.

We clung to the gunwales while I tried to think of a way out. Patty kept looking up and down the bayou as if she thought she hadn’t enough eyes. “What are you looking for, Patty?”

“Alligators,” she said.

Yeah, I mused, that’s a thought. We’ve got to get out of here! I felt as if I were being watched and looked quickly over my shoulder. Before my eyes could focus on it, something ducked behind a bush on the bank. The bush waved its fronds at me in the still air. I looked back at Patty—

“Patty! Look out!”

The twisted black thing that had upset us was coming down, moving faster as it came, and as I shrieked my warning its tangled mass came down on the child. She yelped and went under, fighting the slippery fingers.

I lunged toward her. “Patty!” I screamed. “Pat—”

The bayou bubbled where she had been. I dived, wrenching at
the filthy thing that had caught her. Later—it seemed like minutes later, but it couldn’t have been more than five seconds—my frantic hand closed on her arm. I thrust the imprisoning filth back, hauled her free, and we broke surface. Patty, thank Heaven, remained perfectly still with her arms as far around me as they would go. Lord knows what might have happened if she had struggled.

We heard the roar of a bull alligator and that was about all we needed. We struck out for the bank, clawed at it. Fortunately Patty’s hands fell on a root, and she scuttled up it like a little wet ape. I wasn’t so lucky—it was fetid black mud that I floundered through. We lay gasping, at last on solid ground.

“Mother’s gonna be mad,” said Patty after a time.

“Mother’s going to gnash her teeth and froth at the mouth,” I said with a good deal more accuracy. We looked at each other and one of the child’s eyes closed in an eloquent wink. “Oh, yeah,” I said, “and how did we lose the canoe?”

Patty thought hard. “We were paddling along an’ a big fella scared you with a gun and stoled our canoe.”

“How you talk! I wouldn’t be scared!”

“Oh,
yes
you would,” she said with conviction.

I repressed an unpaternal impulse to throw her back into the bayou. “That won’t do. Mother would be afraid to have a man with a gun stompin’ around the bayou. Here it is. We saw some flowers and got out to pick them for mother. When we came back we found the canoe had drifted out into the bayou, and we knew she wouldn’t want us to swim after it, so we walked home.”

She entered into it with a will. “Silly of us, wasn’t it?” she asked.

“Sure was,” I said. “Now get those dungarees off so’s I can wash the mud out of ’em.”

A sun suit for Patty and bathing trunks for me were our household garb; when we went out for the afternoon we pulled on blue denim shirts and slacks over them to ward off the venomous mosquitoes. We stripped off the dungarees and I searched the bank and found a root broad enough for me to squat on while I rinsed off the worst of the filth we had picked up in our scramble up the bank. Patty made herself comfortable on a bed of dry Spanish moss that
she tore out of the trees. As I worked, a movement in midstream caught my eye. A black tentacle poked up out of the water, and, steadily then, the slimy branches of the thing that had foundered us came sloshing into the mottled sunlight. It was a horrible sight, the horror of which was completely dispelled by the sight of the sleek green flank of the canoe which bobbed up beside it.

I ran back up my root, tossed the wet clothes on a convenient branch, broke a long stick off a dead tree and reached out over the water. I could just reach one end of the canoe. Slowly I maneuvered it away from its black captor and pulled it to me. I went into mud up to my knees in the process but managed to reach it; and then it was but the work of a moment to beach it, empty out the water and set it safely with its stern on the bank. Then I pegged out our clothes in a patch of hot sunlight and went back to Patty.

She was lying on her back with her hands on her eyes, shielding them from the light. Apparently she had not seen me rescue the canoe. I glanced at it and just then saw the slimy mass in mid-bayou start sinking again.

“Daddy,” she said drowsily, “what was that awful thing that sinked us?”

“What they call a sawyer,” I said. “It’s the waterlogged butt of a cypress tree. The bottom is heavy and the top is light, and when the roots catch in something on the bottom the current pushes the top under. Then one of the branches rots and falls off, and the top end gets light again and floats up. Then the current will push it down again. It’ll keep that up for weeks.”

“Oh,” she said. After a long, thoughtful pause she said, “Daddy—”

“What?”

“Cover me up.” I grinned and tore down masses of moss with which I buried her. Her sleepy sigh sounded from under the pile. I lay down in the shade close by, switching lazily at mosquitoes.

I must have dozed for a while. I woke with a start, fumbling through my mind for the thing that had disturbed me. My first glance was at the pile of moss; all seemed well there. I turned my head. About eight inches from my face was a pair of feet.

I stared at them. They were bare and horny and incredibly scarred. Flat, too—splayed. The third toe of each foot was ever so much longer than any of the others. They were filthy. Attached to the feet was a scrawny pair of ankles; the rest was out of my range of vision. I debated sleepily whether or not I had seen enough, suddenly realized that there was something not quite right about this, and bounced to my feet.

I found myself staring into the blazing eye of the most disgusting old hag that ever surpassed imagination. She looked like a Cartier illustration. Her one good eye was jaundiced and mad; long, slanted—feline. It wasn’t until long afterward that I realized that her pupil was not round but slitted—but not vertically like a cat’s eyes, but horizontally. Her other eye looked like—well, I’d rather not say. It couldn’t possibly have been of any use to her. Her nose would have been hooked if the tip were still on it. She was snaggle-toothed, and her fangs were orange. One shoulder was higher than the other, and the jagged lump on it spoke of a permanent dislocation. She had enough skin to adequately cover a sideshow fat lady, but she couldn’t have weighed more than eighty pounds or so. I never saw great swinging wattles on a person’s upper arms before. She was clad in a feathered jigsaw of bird and small animal skins. She was diseased and filthy and—and evil.

And she spoke to me in the most beautiful contralto voice I have ever heard.

“How you get away from River Spider?” she demanded.

“River Spider?”

She pointed, and I saw the sawyer rising slowly from the bayou. “Oh—that.” I found that if I avoided that baleful eye I got my speech back. I controlled an impulse to yell at her, chase her away. If Patty woke up and saw that face—

“What’s it to you?” I asked quietly, just managing to keep my voice steady.

“I send River Spider for you,” she said in her Cajun accent.

“Why?” If I could mollify her—she was manifestly furious at something, and it seemed to be me—perhaps she’d go her way without waking the child.

“Because you mus’ go!” she said. “This my countree. This swamp belong Séleen. Séleen belong this swamp. Wan man make
p’tit cabane
in bayou, Séleen
l’enchante
. Man die far away, smash.”

“You mean you haunted the man who had my cabin built and he died?” I grinned. “Don’t be silly.”

“Man is dead, no?”

I nodded. “That don’t cut ice with me, old lady. Now look—we aren’t hurting your old swamp. We’ll get out of it, sure; but we’ll go when we’re good and ready. You leave us alone and we’ll sure as hell”—I shuddered, looking at her—“leave you alone.”

“You weel go
now—ce jour!”
She screamed the last words, and the pile of moss behind me rustled suddenly.

“I won’t go today or tomorrow or next week,” I snapped. I stepped toward her threateningly. “Now beat it!”

She crouched like an animal, her long crooked hands half raised. From behind me the moss moved briskly, and Patty’s voice said, “Daddy, what … oh.
Ohh!”

That does it, I said to myself, and lunged at the old woman with some crazy idea of shoving her out of the clearing. She leaped aside like a jackrabbit and I tripped and fell on my two fists, which dug into my solar plexus agonizingly. I lay there mooing “uh! uh! u-u-uh!” trying to get some wind into my lungs, and finally managed to get an elbow down and heave myself over on my side. I looked, and saw Séleen crouched beside Patty. The kid sat there, white as a corpse, rigid with terror, while the old nightmare crooned to her in her lovely voice.