The Lower Deep (30 page)

"You'll see."

George realized he was taking off his pajamas in front of her, a thing he had not done in a long time. It was all right, however. She was silently telling him what to do; he no longer had a will of his own. Naked, he carefully hung up the pajamas and made the bed. Had he been directing his own movements he never would have made the bed, he realized. Then, not bothering with underwear, he put on slacks, a shirt, and sneakers. Nothing else.

His headache was less severe now. That was a thing to be thankful for, at least, no matter what else was happening. His sneaker laces tied, he waited for Alice to tell him what to do next.

"Follow me," she ordered.

The moon was quite bright, George noticed as he trailed her out of the house and down the steps to Dame Marie's main street. Not so bright, though, as the night Dannie André and he had gone swimming at Anse Douce and he had been forced to put forth his best effort to catch Dannie when she set out for some unknown destination. Odd, his remembering that now when his mind no longer belonged to him.

He looked at Alice as they walked along together. Was she causing him to remember that night? Did she want him to, for some reason?

Half past four. Nearly five now. And this was a country town on the north coast of the island of St. Joseph, in the West Indies. He could hear drums throbbing. There was a voodoo service in
progress somewhere, probably in that section of the town known as The Hounfor. Some of his fish
ermen insisted you could tell what kind of service it was by the drumming. A small family ceremony called for one kind of beat;
kanzo,
with its seven pots of boiling oil for initiation, was more complex;
prise du mort,
the calling of dead spirits from a graveyard, involved still other rhythms. There were dozens of different services. Maybe hundreds.

And even without such a backdrop of sound, this was still St. Joseph. You sweated because of the
heat and humidity. You recognized the gutter smells and the garbage smells and the stink of donkey shit. You heard the rats scurrying and—
always a shock—heard roosters crowing at the top of their rooster lungs even though the dawn was still a long way off.

Why did St. Joe roosters crow all through the night, anyway? Civilized fowl didn't, did they? And
why did all St. Joe dogs, even in the capital, feel
they had to answer when a single stupid mutt somewhere awakened from sleep or got bored
with prowling and voiced a yelp of complaint? Jesus. Let one single dog in this country sound off at night, and for half an hour no one within a mile could get any sleep.

"George." Alice smiled again as she had in his bedroom. "Do you still believe I went to visit a boyfriend the times I left you at night?"

"Or boyfriends. Plural."

"I didn't, you know. I don't have a boyfriend. Not even one. Not the kind you've imagined anyway."

"What kind do you have?"

She laughed softly, and when George turned to look at her, he noticed the greenish glow in her eyes again. It scared him now. A cold chill caused him to start trembling, and he couldn't stop.

"Are you aware that I've been coming into your room at night, George?" his wife said.

George was more aware of what was happening now, and did not think it wise to answer her. They were walking down toward the fishing village at Pointe Pierre, and she had him by the hand, and they were in the middle of the street. On both sides were shops, all of them dark and shuttered for the night, some with wooden doors that swung shut and others with drop-down iron fronts that looked like drawbridges in movies of old England. It was a weird way to live, he thought, and the truth was, these shopkeepers had less to fear from nighttime invaders than their counterparts in, say, New York or Chicago. Crazy.

But there it was, and as Alice and he walked on down the middle of the street to the shore, he felt he was in a kind of wood-and-steel tunnel from which there was no escape. He had to go where she was taking him. His apprehension swiftly increased.

"Are you, George? Are you aware that I've been coming into your room at night?" Alice said.

He had better answer her, after all. There was no telling what she might do to him if she became angry. "Yeah, sure," he mumbled. "Of course."

"And do you know what for?"

"I think so. You came to hypnotize me." Suddenly his fear changed to anger and he refused to give her that much satisfaction. "I mean," he snarled, "you have some crazy idea you can hypnotize me. Some delusion. I caught you trying to do it one night."

"Delusion?" Her voice again laughed at him. "You don't believe you're doing what I want you to right now, George? You think you're just out for a walk through town in the moonlight, maybe to find some relief from one of your headaches?"

She was right, George knew. Tonight she had at last succeeded in hypnotizing him, if that was the word for the full control she had achieved. At any rate, she was now fully in command. He could no longer fight back.

"You gave me the headaches?" he asked as they walked past some of the town's better homes now. Jesus God, how he wished he were in one of those homes instead of being led like a lamb to the slaughter down this deserted moon-weird street to the sea! He knew some of the people in those houses, too, and they liked him for what he was doing here. Just let him get away from Alice for a minute and he could knock on almost any door, even at this ungodly hour, and say he was tired, drunk, sick or whatever, and would they help him? They would probably give him some strong St. Joseph coffee, which next to Jamaica's Blue Mountain was the best in the Caribbean and maybe the world, then walk him into a bedroom with a fancy double bed of mahogany or even more expensive taverneau—though layered with coats of varnish that would hide all the natural beauty of the wood—and then they . . . oh, hell, oh, hell . . .

"The headaches were not inflicted on you delib
erately, George," his wife was saying. "They were merely a by-product. A side effect, if you like."

"But you did cause them."

"Oh, yes. Certainly. I caused them."

"Are you responsible for what's been happening to others here as well? And at the Azagon? Are you?"

"Some of it, George."

"For what's happened to Ginny Jourdan? Did you make that happen, too?"

"George, be patient. You'll know everything soon. No, I'm not responsible for everything that's happened to Ginny. I did take her to where she went when she disappeared for eight days, just as I'm taking you now."

Once more George's anger erupted through his terror. "Damn you, Alice! You—" Shock waves of pain stopped him in midshout and with both hands pressed to his temples he stood swaying in the middle of the street. For a moment he thought the pain would destroy him, then it gradually subsided. Lowering his hands, he looked at Alice and saw her eyes fade from a brilliant sea-green to their former pale green glow.

"Don't become violent, George," his wife said. "Unless you want me to show you what I can really do now. I don't think you'd like that."

Feeling as though he had been slowly lowered into a tank of ice water, George could not make his body stop shivering.

"Come." She took hold of his right arm. "We still have a way to go. And in case you're wondering why we didn't use the Jeep tonight, it's because I'm not sure when we may come back."

"Back from where?" George asked meekly. "Why can't you tell me, for God's sake?"

"I'd rather let you wonder. You've been very difficult, you know. I've had to work on you much longer and harder than I expected. I think it must be because you dislike me so much. Or because you're so fond of Danielle André."

Oh, God, George thought. She knows about Dannie. But Dannie was safe at home, where he had left her, not part of this nightmare he was caught up in. If she were part of it, he would lose his mind entirely. Even the slight control he still retained over it.

With Alice at his side he trudged on, letting her lead him because he could not help himself. And again, for some reason that eluded him, he became acutely aware of the sound of drumming in that part of Dame Marie where the voodoo people held their ceremonies.

Was the one now taking place a part of what was happening to him? Had Alice visited The Hounfor on some of those occasions when he thought she was with a boyfriend? That would explain some of this, wouldn't it? Or would it?

Now a new smell took the place of the gutter odors he had been faintly aware of. His senses picked up the ever-present bouquet of Pointe Pierre, where the local fishermen cleaned their catch on the dock and the warm tropical water lapping at the pilings always smelled of fish. Suddenly George's mind sharpened enough to tell him where he was being taken.

He stopped in his tracks. "We're going to Anse Douce?"

Alice laughed, obviously pleased with herself. "You know something, George? Would you believe I just put that thought into your mind, to see how you would react to it? I did, really. But I didn't tell you to stop walking. Come!" The last word was a sharp command with a threat in it.

George obeyed because he had to, with terror a pale specter trudging at his side. "Is that—is that where you took Ginny?"

"When?"

"When she disappeared for those eight days? You said—"

"Oh, that time." Everything seemed to amuse Alice tonight. "Yes, of course. But at other times she went there by herself."

"But you were responsible."

"You could say so, George. Yes."

"And Paul Henninger? Are you responsible for what he's been doing?"

"You want to know too much too fast, George."

"The time he woke up from a nightmare like the ones I've been having and found himself trying to swim to—" George turned his head to stare at her. "Where was he trying to swim to, Alice? Tell me!"

"I don't have to tell you anything," she retorted. "And keep your voice down, please. The people in these shacks"—she meant the fishermen's homes they were passing as they put the pier behind them—"are all sound asleep and haven't any idea what's going on. They'd be frightened if they did, I can tell you. Almost as frightened as you are.
You
are
frightened, aren't you, George?"

"Alice, for the love of God, what—"

"Because you ought to be. Oh, yes. Very much so . . ."

Knowing he risked further punishment and would be powerless to stop it, George nevertheless halted again. "I ought to be frightened of what, Alice? For Christ's sake, what are you mixed up in?"

"You'll see when I want you to, George. Come!" Again he had to obey.

They continued on in silence for a time, George's mind numb with terror now, and presently he realized she had told him the truth about their destination, at least. Pointe Pierre was well behind them. Side by side, she firmly holding his arm, they walked along the shore through an eerie haze of moonlight toward the seemingly peaceful cove called Anse Douce.

In the moonlight everything seemed exaggerated. The waves lapping the sand were liquid silver. The, tangled sea-grape bushes were fantasy creatures, alive, with upflung arms that terminated in multiple hands with undulating fingers. A crab prowling for food cast an inky shadow-twin more real than itself.

And the sounds! The waves whimpered. The breeze in the sea grapes sighed and rustled and hissed. The beach sand protested their intrusion with faint squeakings, as though an army of invisible mice accompanied them.

Then the cove. Here at the water's edge, broken bars of white marked where the waves fell apart with soft crashing sounds. Like a surrealistic painting, George thought, or a dream picture with a sound track. But the fragment of his mind that
still belonged to him warned it was no dream this time. Their purpose served at last, the nightmares were finished.
Fini net,
a Creole-speaking St. Joe peasant would say.

Tonight if he walked into the sea here and swam down through coral canyons as he had done with Dannie in his imagination, it would be real. Hideously real. Nothing he would wake up from with only a bitten tongue.

His laboring mind fastened on the finding of a shark-ravaged body here. "Did you bring Lawton Lindo here, too?" he heard himself asking. "The alcoholic fellow who drowned out there the time my boat went down?"

"Poor Lawton." Alice shook her head. "No, I didn't bring him. The truth is, nobody did."

"What?"

"He brought himself, George. He thought he was ready but he wasn't, that's all. And it was just bad luck that the people on your boat chanced to see him that day. If they hadn't, nothing would have happened to them. Nothing at all. But they saw him swimming and tried to pick him up, and of course that couldn't be permitted. Poor Lawton would have had to explain what he was doing out there all alone, and he wasn't mentally ready for such an interrogation any more than he was physically prepared for the journey. You still don't understand, do you?"