The Drought (23 page)

“
Kote li ou fe mal
?” Where does it hurt? And then the darkman’s hands were on him, moving across Jar’s small chest and applying pressure in different places. Jar felt himself being moved and then he felt the warmth of the fire against his skin. He knew it was a dream, or a hallucination, and deep down the cold reality of where he was settled in. He would die down here, his body decaying right alongside Luke’s.

A deep warmth settled across his chest. It felt like fire was burrowing into his bones. It spread across the broken ribs and whispered through his collapsed lung, first joining the pain, then prodding it forward, as if ushering an unwanted guest to the nearest exit.

Struggling against the pressure from the hands on his body he rolled his head away and whispered hoarsely, “No, I don’t want anything from you.”

Jar’s mouth fell open. His ribs expanded. His deflated lungs filled with cool air and suddenly he was plunged into a darker level of consciousness, not a dream inside a dream but a nightmare inside a nightmare. Images flickered inside his head. They weren’t perfect but they were clearer than the Jerry Springer episode he’d been watching the day Barry came to his house carrying the Carlton Fisk ball.

*

He saw soldiers moving stealthily through bushes. They came to a cluster of houses and entered carrying machetes. Terrified screams erupted. Women were dragged outside by their hair and crying children were shoved into a dirt courtyard. They knelt in the dirt crying, trying to comfort each other and begging for mercy. The men who survived the initial attack were bound and brought to watch.

One of the soldiers snatched a four-year-old child away from his screaming mother. The soldier cocked his head and extinguished his cigarette in the boy’s eye. The boy’s piercing scream triggered a visceral response and several of the men lunged forward, straining against the ropes that bound them. A machete descended and one of the men’s heads rolled toward the huddled group of women, a snarl of rage forever frozen on his face.

A deep lilting voice whispered,
“My name is Jean-Claude Brunache. Mwen Mouri. I died.
The dream bled into another, scenes of carnage replaced by a long curving road lined with trees. Jar was riding shotgun in an old Mercury and a giant tumble weed rolled down the road in front of the car. A man, he didn’t recognize, gripped the steering wheel in the twelve O’clock position. The radio was tuned to a blues station—and a voice sounding tinny and faraway crooned, “Something’s Gotta Hold on Me.” Periodically the man would rub his free hand against the seat like his hand was on fire with an itch he couldn’t reach.

They exited a canopy of gnarled oak trees draped with moss and turned onto a gravel side road. After awhile the dense foliage split, the trees opened up and the Mercury pulled into a clearing. Another car, foreign and expensive, waited. At the sight of the sleek car, Jar straightened in apprehension and peered through the windshield. He recognized the car. He had seen it before.

The man next to Jar sat behind the wheel of the Mercury chewing his bottom lip. He reached for the cigarette behind his ear but it was gone. He’d smoked his last one on the road. It was obvious he was in no hurry to exit the vehicle. Finally he reached past Jar, opened the glove compartment and took out a pistol and a flashlight. He shoved the pistol in the back of his pants, exited the car and went around the back to retrieve something from the trunk. He came back carrying an old crate.

The man in the expensive car opened his door and stood. Jar craned to see the man, a queasy niggle in the pit of his stomach telling him he already knew the man’s identity. The man entered the clearing carrying a duffle bag by a strap. He had a gun in his other hand. Jar’s apprehension turned to fear as moonlight slid across the familiar features of Griffin Tanner.

For a brief heart stopping moment Griffin Tanner stared at the Mercury and Jar was certain he’d been spotted and that any minute his best friend’s father would cross the distance and snatch him from the car. Griffin turned back toward the guy with the crate and tossed the duffle bag at his feet. The other guy placed the crate in the grass and tentatively snagged the duffle bag and pulled it toward him.

Griffin knelt in the grass and opened the crate. For a brief tantalizing moment he was vulnerable and Jar found himself urging the other man to kill him, kill him quickly before it was too late—before he brought that box to Junction.

Jar knew he was dreaming, knew he was only a spectral figure in the scene in the woods because when he opened the door no one looked over, and when he grabbed the rock out of the grass it was cool to the touch like it hadn’t been baking in the sun for nearly a year. He crossed the distance ready to end it all before it ever started. He lifted the rock high. Over Griffin’s shoulder he caught a glimpse of an object in the crate. It was a simple clay box with a symbol carved in the lid. Jar didn’t wait to see what else might be in the box. He swung and brought the rock down against the back of Griffin Tanner’s head.

Jar blinked. He was back in the cavern. There was no fire, and he was cold. He had the Carlton Fisk ball clutched in both hands, the same way he’d been holding the rock, and his back was curled against Luke Casteel’s rotting corpse. He let out a stifled scream and rolled away. The earlier pain was subdued but not gone. Holding onto the Carlton Fisk ball he scrambled further away from Luke’s body before stopping to examine his ribs. They were sore but not broken. He took a deep breath expecting pain but his lungs inflated and deflated without restriction.

He remembered the sensation of heat pushing the pain from his body. Trembling he rose up from the cold dirt expecting the looming presence of the darkman to emerge from the surrounding shadows but no one came. He saw the glow of his pen light next to Luke’s body and reluctantly went back to retrieve it. His dad’s pocket knife was there too. It was open. He closed it and slipped the knife into his pocket. He pointed the light up, trying to find the cut rope. The rope was gone.

He scanned the cavern with the meager light. On two sides he saw walls of rock cut from limestone. Carrying the Carlton Fisk ball and pen light in his left hand, he touched the cool surface with his right and began to follow the wall.

Within a few minutes he came to a dead end. Quelling rising panic, he switched the pen light and ball to his right hand and slid his left along the cool limestone wall. He walked back the way he’d come, passed Luke’s body and kept going certain he’d hit another dead end and have to face the fact he was trapped with Luke for eternity. The wall kept going, darkness stretched out in front of him. A pang of hunger rumbled in his stomach. He ignored it and kept walking.

Reserve, Louisiana

While a golden cloud of sand, both beautiful and deadly descended over the town of Junction, a different pallor hung over the town of Reserve. Fear—nearly tangible—spread across the town with the ringing of the telephone. Mothers hustled their children inside, while fathers loaded shotguns and flashlights preparing for another long day in the marshlands. Angelina Dupier had been missing for nearly forty-eight hours.

Narried stood sentinel at a window overlooking deserted streets. She stood in an empty restaurant watching an empty town. There had only been one other time in the past twenty years her restaurant had been empty and that was the day her husband Simon had died. She had closed it, not for the sake of grieving, but to honor the man with whom she had shared her life. She would have given anything for Simon’s strength in what was still to come.

News of the missing girl had drifted into the diner much like an errant breeze. Only, the effect of the news was more in line with a hurricane. Her older customers, the ones that had been around fifty years ago and remembered the first heat wave, crossed themselves and muttered the words, “Tonton Macoute.”

Loosely translated the words meant Uncle Knapsack. Haitian immigrants brought the term to Louisiana. In Haiti, children who were good were visited by Tonton Noel, or Uncle Christmas and if they were bad they were snatched by Uncle Knapsack.

Uncle Knapsack might have been a piece of Haitian folklore, but Narried knew better than to dismiss the stories as conjecture, the truth flowed beneath like a raging river of blood. There had been a man in Haiti, a real flesh and blood man who craved young flesh. His name was Jean-Claude Brunache. He had been killed, his body burned and still his soul craved the blood of children.

Fifty years ago, the town of Reserve had born witness to that craving. It had lost seven children. Jean-Claude Brunache had arrived in town in the form of a beautiful gypsy girl. It was a clever choice. If she hadn’t been caught gnawing on the intestines of Harriet Trudeu, there wouldn’t have been a single person in town convinced of her guilt.

Narried let out a wavering breath of air. She had not only been a witness but a participant in what followed. She could still see light shimmering off the machete, still hear the filth spewing from the woman’s sweet lips, still smell the metallic scent of blood. They had done what was necessary, what was required but it had not been enough.

What was happening now was not the will of the Loa. Someone earthbound was calling Brunache home, offering blood sacrifices like a beacon. She suspected the Dupiers. If she were right, then Angelina Dupier’s disappearance was only a ruse intended to stir up old fears. She could not fathom Elise’s motive in all of this, but she suspected Roger Dupier had not kept his vow of silence.

The one question she couldn’t answer was why? What did she hope to gain? Was she one of the fools who thought the gateway to immortality could be breached by possessing Brunache’s ti-bon-ange? God help her if this was the case.
No,
she silently corrected herself
. God help them all.
The spirit of Jean-Claude Brunache could not be tamed, or manipulated. If he were released, if he found a willing vessel there was little doubt he would make his way back to the town responsible for banishing his soul—little doubt when he arrived he would seek his revenge in blood.

Junction, Texas

The sandstorm Maple McManus predicted was gaining momentum. The wind kicked up, the sand flowed freely across dry fields and empty roads, and the air filled with a golden haze, hindering both breath and sight.

Jar stumbled toward home, his arm lifted against the grit stinging his face and eyes. The events in the tunnel were a vague dream. He’d wandered through the dark for hours. When the pen light went out, he’d cried just like a little girl and nearly curled up against the wall in defeat. Something in him kept him moving. Exhausted and hungry he put one foot in front of the other until he saw hazy light in the distance. The tunnel narrowed until he had to crawl on all fours—he came through an opening just a little bigger than the drainage pipe.

Once he was outside, jubilation buckled his knees and he sank down and cried again. Not sure where he was, he got himself together and began to walk. It took him a good half hour to realize he was in the state park. Instead of relief he felt a queasy sensation bubbling right beneath his bellybutton—he still had a five mile walk home.

Head down, he shuffled through small sand drifts, trying to make sense of what happened to him in the tunnel. He would have sworn he’d seen the dark man and that he’d cut the rope but waking up next to Luke and finding his dad’s knife open made him doubt any of it. He ran his fingers across his bruised ribs and felt phantom weight moving across them. Was it all a dream? All the details were fading together. He’d already forgotten part of the name, was it
John-Claude
or
Gene-Claude
?

He remembered Griffin Tanner clear as a bell. He had his arms around that crate. That part made the most sense and for some reason scared Jar more than anything else. What did he have in there? Something for his collection? Somehow it all made sense he just couldn’t put his finger on it. His legs trembled with exhaustion as he walked down 15th street but he felt the pull of home and his mother and the safety those two things represented and picked up his pace.

The first thing he saw as he approached the trailer house, was the rusted out remains of his father’s pickup truck. It was never going to run again, but his mother had insisted it was her property and she wanted the damn thing towed out to her place as soon as the Sheriff’s office was through with their investigation, which she added shouldn’t take too long seeing as “the entire Sheriff’s department shared a single brain and that brain was of questionable origin.”

He walked past the rusted beast and made his way wearily up the three steps and into his house. What greeted him inside was complete chaos. The couch and the chairs had been moved away from the walls and now sat haphazardly in the middle of the room. Jar’s mother, close to hysteria, kneeled near the wall, pulling long strips of electrical tape off a nearly depleted roll. She wore only a pair of cotton underwear and a thin T-shirt. Her pale skin, damp with perspiration looked like it had been dusted with a fine layer of gold glitter.