Wolfsbane (14 page)

Pat shifted his gaze to meet the eyes of Sheriff Edan Vallot. The tan of the man's face had paled. “Neat trick,” Pat said. “Wonder what she does for an encore?”

“I don't know what you're talking about,” Edan replied. He turned to Janette. “Take your grandmother back to the house,” he ordered. “I'll be in to talk with you both in a few minutes.”

“Don't order me about on my own property, young man!l” Madame Bauterre snapped at Edan. She walked into the fence-enclosed area of the
garçonnière
and looked inside at sprawled, pale death. She did not flinch at the sight. “Who is he?”

“Harold Callier,” Edan said. “Are you familiar with the name, Madame?”

The old woman smiled. “Oh, yes, young man. I am very familiar with the name Callier. Trash, just like his father, and his father's father. When do you intend to remove this garbage from the floor of my
garçonnière?”

Edan, Deputy Andrus, and Don Lormand stood in shock at her callousness. Only Pat wore a faint smile on his lips.

“Soon,” Edan replied.

“The sooner the better,” Madame Bauterre said, then put a heavily veined hand on Pat's muscular arm. “How is your appetite, Strange?”

“Good. I'm hungry.”

The others, including Janette, looked at him in open astonishment.

Madame Bauterre smiled. “The cook has prepared
poulet en Cocotte
—it's one of her specialties. Would you please escort me to the dining room?”

“My pleasure, ma'am.”

“Come along, Janette. It's a sin to allow good food to waste.” She looked at Sheriff Vallot. “I know nothing about this trash in the
garçonnière,
Sheriff. I have seen nothing, so I have nothing to discuss with you. Good evening.”

 

Janette took one quick look at the elegantly prepared meal and fled the table, a hand over her mouth. Victoria Bauterre ate heartily, as did Pat.

“Well, Strange,” the old lady smiled at him. “Much excitement on your first night in Louisiana, eh? Sure you want to stay?”

“That was a good trick with the dog, lady,” Pat said, hedging the question. “How'd you do it?”

Her dark eyes hardened, losing their twinkle. Dark obsidian set in her face. “I want you to take Janette, Strange. Leave here. Go away for a time.”

“She hired me to stay. But if she wants us to leave, I'll go.”

“Convince her to leave. I'll make it worth your while.”

“There may not be much to me, ma'am—” Pat laid his fork aside—“but if I contract to do a job, I'll stick with it, to the end.” He met her gaze. “And you can believe that.”

“Very admirable of you, Strange. I'm sure you were a good soldier—a fine warrior, but this is family business.” She looked closely at him. “You really don't know why you came here, do you?”

“I was paid to come here.” Pat wore a slightly confused look.

“Going to be quite a shock when the truth comes to you,” she muttered.

“What?”

“Nothing. No matter. You won't win.”

Pat was more confused than before.

“Let's just say,” the old woman said, “this is family business. It does not concern you.”

“She concerns me.” Pat jerked a thumb toward the upstairs where Janette had fled.

Victoria studied him for a few seconds, her dark eyes hooded, concealing the evil that lay behind them. Then she smiled. “Why, Strange—I do believe you're a bit in love with my granddaughter.”

Pat said nothing, his eyes never leaving hers.

She rose from her place at the table to walk to the chair beside his. She sat down and placed an old hand on his. “All right, Strange, here it is: I love my grandchild very much, and I will be most unhappy if anything should harm her. But she was warned not to come here. I tried to send her away, but she refused.

“I have a . . . mission here, Strange. I'm dying. I won't last much longer . . . in this form. Take what you don't know, Strange, and take my granddaughter, and leave.”

“I don't understand,” Pat said. “I really don't.”

A voice rose in her head: He is not going to tell the warrior. His warrior will have to make his own choice without His guidance. So you are wasting your time. And mine. And His.

“All right,” Victoria said.

“All right what?” Pat asked.

“The conversation does not concern you.”

“I don't see anybody else in the room, for Christ's sake!” Pat said.

“Why did you say that?” Victoria asked.

“Why did I say what?”

“For Christ's sake.”

“Hell, lady . . . it's an expression, that's all.”

“I see.”

“I wish to hell I did!”

“Very well,” Victoria said, feeling Pat's hand move under her own. “I have to convince you in my own manner. Try to remove your hand, Strange . . .
le mercenaire.
”

“Are you joking?”

“Try.”

Pat tried, but he could not. Pat was, certainly, not the man he was at age twenty-five, but he was no ninety-eight-pound weakling, either. He gave it all he had, until beads of sweat broke from his forehead to drip down his face. But he could not budge her hand, and she appeared to be exerting no effort.

“Relax, now, Strange,” she told him. “I'm going to release your hand. I wouldn't want your hand to fly up and hit you in the face. You're a powerful man, but you're attempting to combat something you do not understand.”

She removed her hand and Pat flexed the fingers of his right hand. “All right,” he said. “But are not one of those . . . things in the pictures she took. You're . . . something else.”

“Don't be too sure,” Victoria smiled. “You puzzle me, Strange. Even though you don't know at all why you're here—yet—perhaps you never really will, you're not afraid of me. I
know
you are mortal, but you're not afraid of me.”

“Are you saying you're not mortal?”

She lifted her shoulders in an elegant, ladylike reply.

“I've never seen a creature, human or animal, that couldn't be stopped.”

“You're what, Strange: forty-two? Yes. I'm ninety-dying, yet you couldn't raise your hand a moment ago.”

“Hypnosis, perhaps.”

She laughed. “You really believe that?”

Pat shrugged. “Lady, I don't know what to believe.”

“Then believe this: Janette may—and I repeat: may—be harmed in the days to come. If so, it will be accidental, for she is a Bauterre. But you are an outsider, so I cannot guarantee your safety—if you remain.”

“I . . . think I'll stay.”

“Then you are a fool, Strange!”

“When does the action go down?”

“I beg your pardon?”

“The action. When does your operation start all out?”

She rose from the table and stared down at him. “When the wolfsbane grows on the bloody bayou path.”

“What?”

She turned and walked away.

Pat sat for a moment, reviewing all that she had told him, and had done to him this evening. He could understand none of it. He resumed eating, chewing each bite slowly. What she did had to have been a trick of some sort, he concluded. Just a trick.

 

With Janette lying naked in his arms, Pat told her everything her grandmother had said and done. Including the amazing feat of besting his strength.

“You don't know why you're here?” Janette asked, her breath hot and sweet on his face, “What did she mean by that?”

“I don't know. What spooked me was the private conversation she had with somebody.”

“When the wolfsbane grows on the bloody bayou path,” Janette repeated. “I don't know what that means. And I don't understand who she was talking with.”

“Maybe it was the devil?” Pat laughed in the darkness of the room.

Beside him, Janette said nothing, for that was what she had been thinking only moments before. But not in jest.

“Janette?”

“Umm.” She snuggled against him.

“Tomorrow, I think we better go to the sheriff and lay our cards on the table.”

She stiffened against him and said nothing.

“Also tomorrow, we'll start visiting the old graveyards in the county . . . Parish. Your grandmother's name was . . . what?”

“Strahan.”

“Funny how that name sure rings a bell with me. I must have soldiered with some guy by that name.”

 

So now you know, the voice rang hollow in Victoria Bauterre's head. And you must play the game accordingly.

“Bah!” The old woman spat the word. “When are you going to find the courage to stand up to Him?”

“I did—once. The results were only slightly less than catastrophic. No, my dear, this game is played by the rules, or not at all.

“Whatever you say,” she reluctantly agreed.

Always what I say!

 

“No.” The words pushed past the pale, bloodless lips of Ray Campbell. “No more. Please. For the love of God! Please let me live.”

But he was too weak to fight the clawed hands that pinned him to the damp ground. He could scarcely struggle. He cut his eyes as a small black dog appeared next to him. His eyes widened as the dog began changing into a human form. The form of an old woman, dressed all in black.

The woman lifted her veil and her face was death, with burning eyes and fanged teeth. She opened her dress, exposing the grossness of her nakedness: the ancient sagging tits, the wrinkled body, the hairy cunt. She straddled him, pushing her cunt to his lips, her hands behind his head, holding his mouth against her, forcing his tongue to wet her leathery labia. She opened herself to him, and the foulness of death filled his head. She gripped his slack penis, but he was too far gone, too close to death to respond. She cursed him with profanity learned through thousands of years of the darkness of evil, at the feet of her master. The true evil.

She slipped from him to take his penis in her mouth, her teeth biting him, ripping his ball sac from him, drinking the flow of blood that gushed from him. He whimpered as she pulled life from him, and his world dimmed. His heart went into spasms as the flow of blood and oxygen diminished. His head fell back and his tongue protruded from his mouth, dark in death.

She ordered the creatures to carry him deep into the bayou, to a clearing. They ran on paths they had trod for years, until they came to the spot where Claude Bauterre was shot to pieces years before. There, they danced under the yellow spray of moonlight, howling and grunting as they jerked their hairy bodies to a rhythm they alone could hear. They stamped their feet on the damp earth in a macabre strut, celebrating the return of the Evil One. They howled at the moon. One creature was small, almost child-size.

They danced until a small black dog appeared in the clearing. Then the grotesque creatures ceased their obscene parading and strutting, watching in silence as the dog began changing forms, transforming itself into something not quite human, yet more than animal.

The newly arrived form talked with them, talked with them at length, occasionally putting its arms around the smaller beast, petting it, almost in a loving gesture. The creatures listened to their instructions. They occasionally snarled, drool dripping from fanged jaws.

“We've picked up a tail,” Pat said, watching through the side mirror, passenger side. “Looks like Sheriff Vallot.”

“No crime in going to a graveyard,” she replied.

“Babe? Suppose we do discover ten or twenty or fifty Bauterre males buried in this parish. Then what?”

“There are fifteen that we will find.”

“How do you know that?”

She shook her head. “I don't know. The number just popped into my head. I was probably told that as a child and it's been there all along.”

Pat mumbled something highly uncomplimentary about the entire Bauterre family—under his breath—and resumed his watching of the sheriffs car behind them. “I suppose you are going to tell me you know where all the graveyards are located?”

“Yes, as a matter of act, I do.”

“How do you know that? No! Never mind. I don't want to hear about it.”

She smiled. “Regrets about coming with me, Pat?”

“This is worse that trying to convince certain African soldiers that evil spirits don't lurk in the branches of a baobab tree.”

“Maybe they know something you don't? Ever thought of that?”

Pat closed his mouth and kept it shut.

Janette turned off the state highway and onto a Parish road. She drove for a few miles, then pulled off and drove down a dirt road and up to what was left of an old church. “Right here,” she said.

A sluggish bayou lay to the north, dark swamps just beyond that.

Edan Vallot pulled in behind them and walked up to where they stood. “Sightseeing?” he asked.

“You might say that,” Janette replied, her eyes and tone of voice cool.

“Thought you'd both like to know: we found Ray Campbell this morning. Or what was left of him. He was hung up on a cypress root.”

“I could have done very well without that knowledge,” Janette said.

“And?” Pat asked. “Drop the other shoe, Sheriff.”

Edan hesitated for only a second. “There wasn't a drop of blood left in him.”

“Puncture wounds in the neck?” Pat asked.

“Yeah,” Edan answered, removing his hat and wiping his forehead with the back of his hand. “Among other places. Mrs. Simmons, would you please tell me what you-all are doing way out here in the country?”