The Lower Deep (7 page)

"No. But where in the world would they go?"

"I'll soon be back. Just make yourself comfortable, Tom." With a feeling of relief at being able to escape for a time, Steve strode out of the room. The house slept; he was sure of that before he had traveled the length of the upstairs hall. It was a spooky sort of place at night, with its doors closed and long corridors seeming to stretch away into an infinity of darkness.

Why didn't the manager leave more lights on?

The generator had to run anyway, didn't it? Or would more lights consume more diesel fuel, which had to be hauled over that god-awful road from Cap Matelot?

He ought to ask some questions. Of course, he had already asked a few hundred, along with giv
ing lectures, prescribing medication, conducting classes and seminars and all the rest of it, but there were too many aspects of the Azagon he hadn't dug into yet. There should be forty-eight hours in a St. Joseph day, damn it.

Accompanied by the scuff of his moccasins, he went to the far end of the hall, listened at Mendoza's door, and finally rapped it lightly with his knuckles. When his knock brought no response,
he knocked again, more forcefully. Then he dropped his hand to the knob, found the door unlocked, and opened it.

The room and the bed were empty.

Closing the door, Steve retraced his steps to the staircase and, still in no great hurry to complete his mission and get back to the man awaiting him, went groping down the stairs. Paul Henninger's room was across from Driscoll's in a dead-end lower corridor. Again he knocked, waited a moment, then turned the knob.

This room, too, was empty, but there the sameness ended. Where Mendoza's room had been rea
sonably tidy, this one looked as though an earthquake had rocked it. The bed was unmade. A sheet lay crumpled on the floor. A stack of books, apparently knocked off the bureau, had fallen onto a chair already cluttered with clothing.

Something felt gritty under his moccasins as he turned to leave. He backed up and looked down. A powder of some sort had been spilled in the doorway—he must have stepped over it when he entered. Puzzled, he picked some up on a moistened fingertip and gingerly touched his tongue to it.

Salt? It seemed so. Paul Henninger must really be something of a slob. Or was he ill?

Shaking his head again, Steve went back upstairs.

"Well?" Dr. Driscoll demanded.

Steve shut the door and, with a shrug, walked to the bed and sat again. "They're both still out, Tom."

"One of them on some clandestine journey," the older man declared with an I-told-you-so nod. "The other trying to find out what he's up to."

About to ask, "Aren't you assuming a lot more than you ought to?" Steve was suddenly a little weary. "If you say so, Tom."

"What's going on here, Steve?"

"Sorry, I—what did you say?"

"What's going on here? Something is! Look here, I'm a sick man. You know that; you've just done everything but take me apart and glue me back together again. I've been ill longer than you know, too—longer than I've admitted. But Paul Henninger was not sick when he came here. He was overweight, yes—disgustingly so for a man who once played World Cup soccer, if you know what that is—but he was otherwise entirely normal."

Driscoll paused for breath, then in his cracked, husky voice hurried on again. "He was full of high spirits, Steve, eager to get this place running smoothly so he could find the time to do some painting again. A thoroughly likable fellow, for God's sake. And now look at him."

Another pause. Steve waited for the older man to recharge his batteries.

"And he isn't the only one here who has changed, Stephen. Three or four others have undergone some—some sort of—what's the right word for it?—metamorphosis? Tell me, do you think it possible this place may be an—an abode of evil?"

"I'll pass on that for now, if you don't mind," Steve said. "Who are these others you're talking about?" His glance went to the file folders he had tossed onto the bed when Driscoll arrived.

"Well, among the patients there's Morrison."

Steve nodded. Robert Morrison was thirty-eight years old, from Boston, Massachusetts. A stockbroker. "What would you say is his trouble, Tom?"

"He claims he has headaches, yet never suffered from anything of the sort before. I mean really fierce headaches that are just about driving him crazy."

"Who else?"

"Philip Wynn." Wynn was fifty-two, an executive in a southern department-store chain. "He has dreadful headaches, too. And nightmares. Hideous dreams from which he wakes up soaking wet, shaking all over, he says."

Steve nodded. "Any others?"

"Lawton Lindo." At forty-three, Lindo had been a highly successful attorney in Baltimore and perhaps would be again once he became convinced alcoholics could not drink—ever. "He has nightmares, too. He walks in his sleep." Driscoll wagged his head, letting his breath out in a noisy sigh. "Stephen, I don't think we need a recital of individual ailments."

"No, I guess we don't. Anyway, I've spent hours with those three patients. I've examined them, discussed their attitudes with them, their goals, their state of mind, prescribed medication, diet Lord, I've even taken them to our library and encouraged them to read books that might help them."

Steve reached for the file folders. "Look here. Morrison, Wynn, Lindo. When you came in, I was going over their case histories again, for the third time, still trying to pick up on something."

"And you can't explain it," Driscoll said almost triumphantly. "Can you?"

"Give me time, Tom. There has to be something between the lines here."

For a moment the room was silent, as though its walls had absorbed the sounds left hanging in the air. Then Tom Driscoll said in a voice heavy with weariness, "Steve, something really is happening here, you know. Has been happening for weeks. Do you think it possible for a house to be the target of some evil force?"

"No. "

"But these men—we've examined them. Over and over again we've checked them out. And there is nothing wrong with them except, of course, the common illness that brought them here in the first place. Perhaps the Azagon itself is the answer? Evil does exist in the world, you know. What about the voodoo you and I encountered in Fond des Pintards? And your own ghastly experience at La Souvenance?"

"Have you run into any voodoo here, actually?"

"Not that I can be sure of. But as I wrote you when I begged you to come here, I've heard more than once that the area's voodoo people resent us."

"Tell me something, Tom." Steve knew he was scowling now. "Why did you hang on to the name 'Azagon' when you took over this place? You know what the name stands for, don't you?"

The older man let his mouth droop and blew a sigh out of it. "Death and cemeteries—yes, Steve, I know now. But in the beginning I didn't. Azagon isn't one of their better-known
loa,
like Damballa or Agoué, and when I found out about him, it was too late." Driscoll spread his hands up in a gesture of defeat. "I'd already advertised the place, listed it in the medical journals, written God knows how many letters on Azagon stationery. With all the other problems, I simply couldn't deal with that one, too."

Steve studied his colleague for a moment, then shrugged. "All right. I'm sure there's a less sensational explanation for what's going on here. For starters, the meals are enough to give anyone a few ailments. Where in hell did you get that fellow who's in charge of the kitchen?"

"Lazaire? We advertised and he came with good references from a hotel in the capital. Didn't I tell you?"

"I guess someone did. Maybe Juan Mendoza, the night I got here. Anyway, I know I've met your chef before, and I've a feeling it was when we worked at the Brightman. He denied it when I asked him, but I still think—well, never mind. Was he there, do you suppose? As a patient, perhaps?"

"Not to my knowledge."

"All right. But anyway, his cooking—"

"Stephen, I don't think our problems originate in the kitchen." Tom Driscoll seemed very tired again and spoke slowly, with pauses. "Really, now, I prefer to blame the voodoo people and—well, and the evil spirits we both know they can so easily invoke. Ah, well—"

With a deep sigh, Driscoll pushed himself out of his chair, then stood there trying without success to refold the blanket Steve had wrapped around him. When Steve took the blanket from his unsteady hands and folded it for him, he sighed again.

"It's hard for you to take me seriously, isn't it? I keep forgetting you've been here only a few days. When you've actually felt what I have—"

"Felt what?" Steve knew he shouldn't.

But the old man surprised him by not seizing the chance to elaborate. "You will before long, Stephen. Believe me." Then he reached out to touch Steve on the arm in a gesture of affection, and went shuffling from the room.

La Souvenance, Steve thought, remembering. "Your ghastly experience at La Souvenance."

He still had his own private nightmares about that.

Before going to work at the hospital in Fond des Pintards, he had read everything he could get his
hands on about voodoo, and decided not much of it was informative. Most writers who included a discussion of St. Joe's peasant religion in their travel books on the West Indies seemed merely to repeat the same few sensational stories.

Within a month of his arrival at the Brightman, he had come to realize that no one could accurately report on voodoo—or, for that matter, much of anything else in St. Joe—without first mastering the Creole tongue of the peasants. And how many so-called experts could have done that in the brief time they devoted to research here?

The name "La Souvenance" had meant nothing to him when he arrived. He had never seen it in print. At the hospital, though, and on his explorations of the nearby countryside on his days off, he soon heard the whisperings.

La Souvenance. The remembrance. The memory. The reminder. It was the name of a very special ceremony that took place only once a year, at Easter, in a foothills village some sixty kilometers from the hospital as the crow flew. Of course, St. Joe roads were never that straight, and the driving distance would be a lot more.

The service was attended only by
houngans
and
mambos
—priests and priestesses—who could trace their origins back to a part of Africa called Dahomey. No one else.

He had to see it.

Luck had opened the door for him. To the hospital had come an aged patient known to be one of the leading
houngans
in that part of the island. He had acute appendicitis, and Steve operated. Rightly or wrongly, the old fellow was convinced
that Dr. Stephen Spence was responsible for saving his life. When drawn by Steve into a discussion of voodoo one day, he freely admitted he was a practitioner.

"A
houngan,
aren't you?"

"Yes, m'sié, a houngan."

"Tell me something, then. I've been hearing about an annual gathering of
houngans
and
mambos
at a place called La Souvenance—or perhaps that's the name of the ceremony itself; I'm not sure. It's said to take place a couple of weeks from now, and I would give a great deal to see it. Would that be possible,
compère?"

Silence, while the
houngan
gravely studied the face of the man he felt had saved his life. Then, "For you, Doctor, perhaps yes, if I ask it. Let me inquire. You know about La Souvenance, of course? The reason for it? The very strict rules?"

A man's luck could reverse itself in an instant, Steve was to realize later. The words "No, I'm afraid I don't,
compère;
please tell me" were on his lips when a loudspeaker blared his name and he had to rush off to see another patient. There had been no further chance to talk to his
houngan
before the old fellow was discharged.

Then, only two days before La Souvenance, the man returned.

In the O.R., the Brightman's chief surgeon worked on a nine-year-old boy whose arm had been all but hacked off—with a machete—by his marijuana-crazed father. Steve was assisting. Patiently the
houngan
waited more than two hours on a chair beside the reception desk. Then when Steve at last
appeared, he motioned toward the door, saying, "I prefer to speak to you in private,
m'sié."

On the steps outside the front door, where he could not be overheard, he said, "You may come, Dr. Spence. But only you. No one else. Is that acceptable?"

"It is. Of course."

"Then I will tell you how to get there." With great care and in great detail he did so. "You can safely leave your Jeep there in the road. No one will trouble it. The guard at the gate to the compound will admit you."