Andersonville (25 page)

Doctor John snored. Loudly.

Barclay found himself missing Clemis even more in that regard. But when midnight came, the Indian surgeon proved a light sleeper who was easily roused, and Barclay drifted off to sleep fairly comfortably, knowing the man would watch over him till morning.

In his dreams, he saw his sister, Euchariste, standing over him, holding his unborn nephew. She was dressed in robes of scarlet with flashing golden trim. There were deep scars on her cheeks. By this he knew it was not properly his sister but an amalgamative apparition of her soul and the goddess Erzulie of the Wrongs.

He was angry with Erzulie, of course. It was partly on her recommendation that Euchariste and Quit Day had pursued their love. For the last few years, even when he had done little to honor the
lwa
, for her he had held even less regard.

But here she stood, no longer in the gay wanton dress of courting and flirtation that marked her
Rada
aspect but leaking tears of blood for the unborn and heartbroken.

Perhaps she had chosen this form to propitiate his angry spirit.

“Did you come here to apologize?” he said boldly.

Fire flared behind her and in her eyes, and the still baby in her arms became a writhing green serpent curling around her arm.

“Do not mistake the intent of this visitation, child,” said the apparition. “Euchariste Lourdes and her boy child lived and died for love. What more can anyone ask for?”

“Family. Long life. Peace.”

“You ask for much and give no thanks for what you are given. People pray for love and passion, but as it comes, so too must it go. The worm forgives the plow. Once you understood this.”

Barclay sat up on his elbows.

“What do the
lwa
want of me now?”

“Our daughter, your sister, calls to your heart. She calls for the love of her husband.”

“He's dead.”

“No. He lives still, though in pain. She calls for her brother to preserve that life.”

“She asks me to save a man I want to kill?”

“There are many that need killing, Barclay Lourdes. But your white brother is not one of them. The souls of all men are balanced on the edge of a curio tipping from a wall. Behold. It is too heavy for you to catch alone.”

She gestured with her hand, and Barclay saw a huge French cabinet such as his mother once had kept in the house. It had a gilded metal frame and glass doors and a mirror on the back. The curio was tilted forward, and Day was struggling to hold it up. Inside the curio were hundreds of painted lead figurines. There were little soldiers in blue and gray and little men in suits and top hats, black and white, and women in ball gowns.

His dream self got up and went to Day's side to help. The figures were all sliding to the front of the case in a jumble. One in particular fell against the glass door as he put his cheek to it to catch it. It was right before his eye, a little blond girl in a plain white dress.

The fire flared, engulfing the goddess his sister. It grew white hot, and he closed his dream eyes against it.

When he opened them, the light was still there, but it was the day coming through the tent door as Doctor John rose. He looked back over his shoulder.

“Rough night?” he asked. “You been talkin' in your sleep.”

“What did I say?” Barclay asked, sitting up and yawning.

Doctor John shrugged.

“I don't speak Creole.”

They went out to line up for roll call and saw a great number of the prisoners gathered at the North Gate around the priest, Father Whelan, who was standing in the bed of a mule wagon, not the usual ration wagon, passing loaves of bread from a huge barrel to the prisoners. A multitude of men were reaching up, some of them crying openly and wailing their gratitude as he passed down the loaves.

As he and Doctor John shrugged past, Whelan caught Barclay's eye and waved him over.

“Barclay,” he said in greeting when he was close enough. “I'm leaving tomorrow, my son. The bishop has recalled me. I bought this bread fresh this morning in Macon. Here!”

Barclay was tempted, but he put up his hands. He wasn't going hungry like some.

“Give it to them,” he said, and waved one hand in a farewell gesture.

“Wait!” Whelan cried, and got down from the wagon.

He pushed through the men, who were reaching over one another to touch him now, as if he would ascend into heaven if they didn't keep hold.

Whelan extended his hand, and when Barclay took it, the old Irishman pulled him close and spoke in a low voice in his ear.

“You asked me to look for a one-eyed Confederate officer. I saw such a man this very morning. I went to visit Captain Wirz in his sickness, at his home where he is abed, to say my good-byes. Your man is in there, in the spare room.”

Barclay retrieved his hand from Whelan's and stared into his shining blue eyes. He nodded. Wirz had Day.

“Thank you, Father.”

“Thank
you
, my son. For showing an old priest the way back to the road. Go with God.”

“And you,” Barclay said, managing a smile.

All through the roll call the vision was all he could think about. Not just what he had been told but what he had been shown. The little blond-haired girl figure tipping in the cabinet. That had to be Charlie. Why had Erzulie shown her to him unless her fate was as important as Day's?

Afterward, he did not immediately head for the South Gate with the rest of the Negroes to gather the dead. He went straight to Charlie and Limber's tent.

He found a filthy man inside, a Tennessean named Gossett he knew only by name.

The man was unwrapping a bindle of personal belongings, and he stiffened and retreated to the corner, flourishing a makeshift knife, little more than a shard of rusty sharpened iron wrapped in string.

“I'm here!” he declared. “I seen it first!”

Barclay put up his hands.

“Where's Charlie and Limber Jim?” he asked.

“Gone!” said Gossett, running his white tongue across his rotten teeth. “Charlie got took to the hospital this morning. Limber and the other Regulator chiefs what participated in the execution petitioned Winder after Larkin got murdered by the ex-Raiders. They've all been paroled on jobs outside the stockade to protect 'em from reprisal.”

Barclay left and ran back to his tent.

Limber Jim and the other possessed men had been recalled by Wirz. They had taken Charlie with them, no doubt. He had been right. She was the key. The final sacrifice.

There was his mojo hand to collect, his conjure bag. Wirz was not dying soon enough. Maybe something in his demonically enhanced constitution was allowing him to resist the trick Barclay had laid on him.

He had to kill Wirz. Tonight.

General Winder stared out the window of his office and mopped the perspiration from his brow with a checkered handkerchief, worrying that whatever Wirz had caught from this abysmal place might be finding its way to him as well.

When the door to his office banged open, he spun angrily in his chair, ready to chastise the individual who had so coarsely interrupted his musings, but he paled at the sight of the two men who stormed in, or rather, at one of them.

The first was Captain Wirz, in himself a man to be feared surely but one whose pale, sickly dark-eyed look was ghastly to observe. He should not have been out of bed. The countenance of his singular companion, however, curdled Winder's marrow. It was mottled black and red, a horrifying visage of badly burned flesh from which two angry bloodshot eyes glared out of a molten, hairless brow on a misshapen head devoid of ears. The seared lips were turned up in a permanent sneer, the white teeth and blackened gums that were displayed lending the monstrous face a feral, predatory air.

The cut of the ruined tunic hanging in coal-black tatters from the figure's broad frame was barely recognizable as military, but the coiled whip at the man's side was unmistakable.

“My God,” Winder gasped, half rising from his chair.
“Turner?”

“We believe we have discovered the identity of Lieutenant Day's collaborator, General,” said Wirz.

The shock of Winder was almost nothing compared with the shock of the prisoners when the North Gate wicket swung open and Captain Wirz and the horribly burned man stalked inside at such a hasty pace that the retinue of Rebel guards had to labor to keep up with them.

The prisoners initially advanced on Wirz, begging for fresh water, but they uniformly shrank from the mutilated man as though from plague personified, gasping at the sight of him. Some whispered that Wirz's true nature had revealed itself at last and that the figure at his side was the Devil himself. The Catholics crossed themselves and spit as he passed, and the sickly wept, for they thought death had come for them. Before their approach, the wasted men scattered like startled crows.

But Wirz and Turner passed them all, heedless of their fearful reactions. They headed straight for the Negro ninety.

They stalked purposefully for the largest dugout tent in the neighborhood, the one that had belonged to the officer who had died.

Without giving any order to his subordinates, Wirz drew his gleaming saber with a rasp and a ring and slashed at the canvas structure while Turner leaped right in and pulled it down with his black hands. The confused privates shuffled around, seeing no inroad into aiding their masters' fury and so resigned to turn their bayonets against the equally bewildered crowd of breakfasting Negroes that hung back, witnessing the furious demolition of their beloved officer's onetime dwelling.

When they had swept the canvas and pole debris aside, they uncovered nothing.

Wirz turned and waved his saber around.

“Where is he?
Where is
Barclay
Lourdes?
”

One by one the silent black soldiers pointed, all in the same direction, toward the South Gate.

Turner led the way, with Wirz ramming his sword back into its scabbard and waving for the privates to follow.

At the South Gate they marched directly to the pile of corpses waiting for the wagon to take them to the graveyard.

Turner stooped over each body, duckwalking down the line. Finally he stopped at one. Wirz came to stand alongside him.

The body was the only black man among the pile and was staring half lidded in repose.

“Is it him?” Turner demanded.

“It's him,” Wirz confirmed, pursing his lips behind Turner's back in an annoyed expression.

Turner lashed out and kicked the corpse of Barclay Lourdes hard in the side.

The slack look of perennial repose did not alter. The empty eyes did not blink.

Turner straightened, hawked, and lobbed a gob of spit accurately in the dead man's right eye.

“Well,” he said, snorting. “I guess it wasn't him, after all.”

A violent, howling wind assailed the moonlit graveyard as if it had been sent to rouse the myriad dead to action, blowing their stolen breath back into them.

Among the row of corpses beneath the freshly turned earth of the newest grave trench, one answered the call.

The dirt stirred, and a shaky hand erupted like a shoot from the ground and clawed at the dark sky. The hand was dusted pale with lime, and so too were the arm and elbow that followed it.

The tendons along that arm strained for a moment, and slowly, Barclay's white-covered head broke through, mouth gaping and gasping, spitting dirt and lime.

The cool night wind buffeted him, a shock after the still, close heat of the grave. He blinked back the stinging lime powder from his watering eyes. He sat there a few minutes before he could see.

It took him another two minutes to extricate himself from the grave. He had taken the
kout poud
, a complex topical poison his mother had taught him how to make that her secret society had used as a punishment for condemned malefactors. The powder was dusted on a favored object or spread around a man's bed by night so that his bare feet would track through it undetected. It induced a death trance for a few hours. At the very least, the use of the
kout poud
resulted in a slow death by asphyxiation when the victim woke up trapped in his coffin. It also could be used to darker purposes Barclay didn't like to think about.

He had taken the
poud
only after instructing Doctor John to personally carry him to the South Gate after tucking his magic bag deep into the small of his back beneath his clothes, where it wouldn't be found.

It had been something of a gamble, but it had paid off.

His head was pounding and his limbs were sluggish from the effects of the
kout poud
, but he was free and so far undetected.

Far up the road from the graveyard, the yellow light of Wirz's house shone in the dark. Looking to the south, he saw a Confederate patrol, marked by a swinging lantern, turn up the forest road toward town. Good. It would be another hour before they returned.

He broke the string tied around his toes and staggered barefoot through the windy graveyard toward the road, successfully reaching the intersection before the chilling, unearthly howling began to the west.

It came from the kennels. The lazy catch hounds were slumbering, but the noses of the hellhounds could not be befuddled by a mere windstorm.

He didn't have the strength or command of his limbs to outrun them.

He had counted on that, though.

As the sleepy dog keeper was roused by the barking animals that took up their crafty infernal leaders' cries of warning, Barclay distinctly heard his voice angrily telling them to shut up.

He reached in his bag for the cornmeal he had saved from his rations, which he had mixed with wood ash. Taking it in his fist and shielding it against the wind with his body, he began to trace an intricate design in meal in the center of the crossroads. The complex, fanciful geometric pattern was like a stylized compass. It was a
veve,
a beacon designed to attract the attention of a specific
lwa
, in this case Kalfou, the master of the crossroads.

Next he took a pinch of gunpowder, all he had managed to get hold of from one of the guards in exchange for the remainder of his tunic buttons and greenbacks. Tucking it into his lower lip, he worked it like tobacco as he muttered an invocation in Creole.

The demon howling of the dogs grew more insistent, and there was a far-off crash followed by the handler's cursing.

They were coming now. Dark shapes moved rapidly closer.

He turned in a circle and took from his pocket the small empty holy water bottle he had pinched from Father Whelan. He had stained it blue with wild blueberries and carved a dog-headed wooden stopper for it that he now plucked out with his thumb.

He saw Old Spot, the chief of the Cubans, come bounding up the road with his three pack mates behind. The dogs were slavering, long, undulating ropes of silvery drool coursing from their maws as they came, their dark eyes flashing like smoked lenses, obscuring the secret hellish light he knew shone behind them. As he spit the gob of gunpowder into the center of the
veve
, he felt his body quiver as Met Kalfou descended upon him. Summoning an
lwa
in this manner, without drums, ritual, and a proper offering, and partially drugged to boot, was ill advised, but he had neither time nor the luxury of a congregation or
hounfor
. It was not like the summoning of one of Day's Christian demons. He did not command Kalfou but was willingly mounted by the raging spirit.

In that instant, he attained a modicum of the
lwa
's powers and looked on the racing dogs with a god's eyes. They once more assumed their true form, fleshless bodies propelling their great fanged heads like the prows of streaking locomotives, all baleful glowing eyes and belching fire.

He held the bottle aloft between his fingers as they leaped at him, snarling at the instant the full moon once more emerged from behind a passing cloud. It was no mere bottle but a spirit trap. The moonlight shining through the blue stained glass naturally attracted them like a favored scent or a bit of shine to a nesting crow. They yelped like whipped animals and twisted and bent like immaterial things of gossamer sucked into a whirling vortex, in this case the bottle, which he quickly stoppered with the cap.

The remainder of the catch hounds came bounding after but stopped dead at the sight of him looming pale in the center of the road. Their animal eyes saw not him but Kalfou, whose terrible true visage was thankfully unknown to his mind. The dogs lowered themselves to the ground and whined in fear, shaking, shitting even, then turned and tore off for their kennels again.

It took all his effort to buck and shake off the influence of Kalfou. He had not fulfilled the sacred role of the
cheval
in many years, and his phantom rider did not willingly depart, but when at last he did, it was with a haunting, dreadful laugh that came from Barclay's throat yet was not his own and that echoed in his soul even as it faded.

He fell to his knees for a moment, panting, and held up the dog-headed bottle, which now contained the trapped hellhounds. He had carved the ash wood plug into a flanged effigy of three snarling hound heads with the largest, representing Old Spot, in the center. It would hold them, but for how long, he couldn't say. He'd never trapped a hellhound before, let alone four of them. Maybe the psychic residue of the holy water would strengthen the prison. He could feel the bottle humming in his palm, though it looked empty. It was like a tincture of nitroglyercine, only a thin structure of stained glass between himself and the hellhounds' fury.

He wound a cord from his bag around the bottle and hung it from his neck, praying it would be safe tucked beneath his tunic. He turned back toward the light of Wirz's house, slipping off the road into the trees in case the dog handler decided to proceed without his animals to see what they'd been after.