Writ on Water (4 page)

So, there was something alive in the cemetery for the large spiders to eat after all. That should reassure her quaking nerves, which were telling her to run away from this assignment before it was too late.

Reluctant, yet having no choice but to go on, she again laid a hand on the heavy gate and pulled it shut behind her. The heavily brambled track was the only way to get to the mausoleum, but if she stayed to the center of it, surely she would be safe
from the thorns and spiders. She walked slowly, feeling the path before her with cautious feet. The trail was long and curving, forcing her to review the Patrick dead as she made the hike—or at least their occasional tombstones. There was no wind, but the occasional stray vine reached out onto the walk and tore at her skirt as she forced her way into the maze.

As she drew closer to the mausoleum, she could see that the family building was covered in cobwebs so dense with dust they looked like grimy cheesecloth. A particularly large curtain of filthy silk hung over the open door. It swayed in and out with the earth's respirations coming at intervals from the passage beyond. She knew it for what it was—the stone grave's mouth and esophagus, which took in the bodies that were offered up it. No one had come for a long time, and its belly felt empty with just the naked bones of the long dead rattling around inside.

Her ligaments were tight with tension, ungainly and slow. As though she were a puppet, controlled by some unseen hand, Chloe walked the serpentine way toward the shrouded monument; left foot, right foot, one reluctant jerking step after another, a puppet pulled along by its master. It seemed to her that there was rustling under the ground, as if her clumsy passage stirred up things that were unhappy with their homes in the earth, things that wanted to rise up and follow her back out to the world where they had once
lived. She didn't want to wake the Patrick dead, but her feet were awkward and heavy as she staggered deeper and deeper into the maze, and she knew that her footsteps called the ghosts like a knock upon the mausoleum door.

Suddenly she could hear the choking gurgle of water. Little liquid tendrils began creeping over the earth, weaving their way toward her. They were an ugly rusty red, like the ground was bleeding; the low ground near this rising river would soon grow too soggy to walk upon. Chloe looked about quickly, dreading the water's approach. Conveniently, a mat of cypress roots and carnivorous green creepers grew along the surface of the soil, stopping right at her feet. She stepped up onto the thorny mat. If she stayed on top of the vines, stepping from hummock to hummock so that she didn't touch the naked, sucking ground with her feet or tattered skirt, she would be fine. She could go on.

Reluctantly, Chloe resumed her walk. Soon she arrived at the dead heart of the cemetery—-the mausoleum—and she circled the monument slowly, ready to take the much-needed pictures with her new digital camera. This house of the elite dead was withdrawn from its stone neighbors, facing away from them either in shame or disdain. The way was open, and she was able to wander to the back where she was supposed to see
the statue
, the funerary monument she had been sent to photograph.

The thing hiding under the cobwebs was huge—more than life-sized. It had the mass of a nightmare monster. Still reluctant to get too close, Chloe forced herself to look up at the beast squatting on the corbelled roof whose peak was just above her head. Through the grimy curtain she could see that it had wings on its back, but with its filthy veil of floral detritus it seemed closer kin to a gargoyle than a guardian angel. Surely no thief would ever want such a nightmarish creature. Yet this was her job, her quest. She had to complete her work.

It was dismaying, but she would have to clear the dirty webs if she were to take a clear photograph. She looked about, but there was nothing she could use as a broom or dust rag. She would have to get closer . . . would have to touch the sticky silk with her bare hands.

Shuddering, she stepped forward onto the iron fence, careful of the sharp spikes. She swept the cobwebs away, wiping her clammy fingers on the long white dress she had been given to wear on this special trip to the Patrick boneyard. The beast was at last revealed. It had a lion's mane—though thick and ropey like a nest of snakes—and a baboon's face filled with vicious viper's fangs. Its paws were a grotesque evolution of articulate human fingers and raptor claws. Its unnaturally long tail curved around the jagged eaves of the roof like a striking serpent, and reminded Chloe of a bloody Mayan god. Hurriedly she stepped
back, tearing her dress on the fence's iron spikes.

Chloe looked down and saw that she had brought her old thirty-five millimeter camera. That was wrong, but she couldn't go back now. She raised the device with trembling hands and tried to focus. Through the lens, she could see the yellow lichen that had grown over the beast's eyes in a thick cataract. Her fingers depressed the shutter, but as the aperture snapped open, the petrified eyes seemed to contract and then twitch under their parasitic bandage.

No!
She rejected that notion firmly. It was just the shadows moving around her, old tree leaves passing between the statue and the summer sun; that was what had caused the beast to go from light to dark and back again. It was not blinking. Its waxy skin did not move. It did not breathe. It was
not
animate.

Yet, as she watched, the stone talons seemed to flex themselves and the broad chest stirred.

She dropped her camera from nerveless fingers and stared with dilating pupils. The beast's eyes blinked again, shearing the lichen from their stony surface. The lips curled back from the horrible teeth and a narrow, whip-like tongue slithered from its mouth to reach for her. It flicked over her face, stinging like a cold lash everywhere it touched.

Chloe tried to run, but she had stepped off her hummock and the wet ground had sucked up her feet; the subterranean cypress roots had knotted
at her ankles, holding her in place. The cold, tentacle noose of the beast's tongue curved around her neck. She began to scream, but it was too late. The monster choked off her breath as it drew her into its stony maw and down to its empty belly. . . .

“Geez!” Chloe wheezed in the darkness. It was a dream! Just a dream from the stress, she reminded her scrambling heart, panicking at her efforts to recall what she'd seen. She had been having a lot of dreams lately. This one was bad—the worst yet—but she was awake now and it would stop scaring her. Because it wasn't real.

“I've gotta quit watching those old DVDs—I don't care how sexy vampires are,” she said. But that was just rationalization. Her nightmares weren't from the movies. They were most likely from her grandmother. And her great-grandmother. And all the other great-greats back to the seventh generation. The sins of the mothers were being visited upon the children, except that Chloe's mother hadn't lived long enough to say if she had also had “the Sight.”

After a moment, Chloe snapped on her bedside lamp and reached for a book with a hand that still trembled. She hesitated a moment and then skipped over the murder mystery, reaching instead for a romance.

Reading at one a.m. was not the wisest choice of activities when she wanted to get an early start in
the morning, but she needed to relax for a bit and she found solace in the written word. Chloe promised herself that she would stop reading after the first love scene, but that was a lie. Once she started a book, she would read straight through to the end. Especially if the alternative was facing another of the nightmares that lurked in her subconscious.

Maybe, she thought, it would have been wiser to have taken the job in Florida, alligators, heat, leeches and all. The assignment to photograph large reptiles couldn't have upset her any more than this trip to Virginia—to Gran's infernal territory.

For the sword outwears its sheath,
and the soul outwears the breast.
—Lord Byron

Jarvis Perth was in his accustomed place on Old Mill Road, which was to say that he was dead center of both lanes and trundling along at a solid seven miles per hour—the greatest speed his aging tractor could manage on the slightly uphill stretch of pavement. Or on a downhill stretch, unless it was tumbling end over end, which from the collection of branches and mud in the roll cage above the driver's seat, it would seem to have done quite recently.

Chloe knew that it was Jarvis Perth who was slowing the parade of muddy pickups through town because a woman dressed in a loudly patterned housecoat and filthy pink mules had bellowed out a greeting to him in a voice shrill enough to frighten off every crow in the southern states. The lady was the only one who was hollering
though, so Chloe assumed that Jarvis was a beloved local character whose foibles were tolerated because of his immense charm and goodness. Anyway, the folks in Riverview, Virginia, didn't seem to be real rigid about things like traffic lanes and speed limits. Since she had entered the county, no one in the snail parade seemed to take the 55 MPH signs posted along the tree-lined roadway as anything other than roadside decorations. Perhaps it was because they all seemed very busy eating pork rinds and rearranging their gun racks as they drove.

Chloe mentally smacked herself for that last thought. Just because her granny was a backwoods horror show, that didn't mean everyone around here was backwards.

Normally, the tortoise-like pace along a smelly tar road being slowly torn up by tractor treads that punched deep grooves in the melting macadam and left the surface with an unattractive rash would cause frustration sweats and hyperventilation, but since she was in no particular hurry to arrive at the Riverview Plantation, and had missed her morning infusion of double-strength caffeine, Chloe was able to meander along with her humor unimpaired, occasionally waving and smiling at total strangers who cheerfully smiled and waved back. The superficial contact helped her resist the heat-induced somnambulism that had been threatening to overpower her for the last hour and more.

“ ‘Woke up this morning,' ” she began to croon, doing her best Stevie Ray Vaughan voice. Except, she hadn't woken up this morning. She'd never actually gone back to sleep after that damned dream. And she probably shouldn't be singing the blues about this. That quiz had said that sleep deprivation in middle-class white females didn't count unless it was on account of being in jail, or being stabbed in a back alley by a woman whose man you had stolen. The blues weren't about psychic grandmothers, job stress and not having air conditioning.

Also, she wasn't sure people from downtown Atlanta could have the blues. True, it was a city in the South, but it was also fairly high-tech. The blues didn't go well with ultra-modern lighting and computers. You could get the blues in some parts of Texas, anywhere in Alabama or Mississippi, and of course in the older sections of Chicago or Detroit—and certainly anywhere in New Orleans—but not in California or Hawaii. It might be some rule about proximity to beaches, or perhaps the need to live in a flood plain or where they had deep snow in winters that lasted for six months. That wouldn't rule out Duluth or Aspen, though, and you never heard of great blues classics coming from there. . . .

Chloe shook her head. Maybe that quiz had been right about her after all.

Geography aside, the blues could be about running away. And that was sort of what she was doing,
though not chased by an angry lover with a shotgun or a switchblade, or the law.

“ ‘O, I ran away this morning—but my troubles are chasin' me. Yeah, I ran away this mornin'—' ” Running away sounded childish, though, when your life wasn't in danger. And it might not help her escape her personal baggage, which had been piling up of late. Especially given the direction she was running, because the travel-trunk of emotional baggage lived in Virginia. But she wouldn't know until she gave running a try. And surely anything was better than huddling in her bed, doing her best to avoid both the phone and sleep in the long hours that belonged to the street sweeper, and the stray cats who prowled the Dumpsters in the parking lot.

Forget the blues. She needed a paradigm shift. She wasn't running away. Instead, independent Chloe Smith was headed for a new—and possibly diplomatically challenging—job at Riverview Plantation. Which was why she wasn't in any hurry to arrive. There was no need to rush at her fate now that the meeting was scheduled. Didn't everyone keep saying that life was a journey and not a destination?

Of course, most people—as her father would say—were so full of it their eyes were brown. And that went double for the advice they gave.

Chloe consulted her map again, though there was no need. The road was straight and had no forks.

Her new client was a good buddy of her boss and mentor, Roland Lachaise. She had been thoroughly briefed—and reassured—about the delicate but benign nature of her assignment, but she was still feeling bemused and uneasy. And having super-sized anxiety dreams at night.

Her granny, a fey old witch who'd loved terrorizing her grandchild with tales of the weird anytime Chloe's parents were absent, had assured Chloe of the child's inheritance of the matrilineal curse of second Sight. Up until the week just past, Chloe had never believed it. Her traditional Methodist father had always called his mother-inlaw's vision rituals “bullshit necrophilia” and would have nothing to do with Gran after his wife died. The taxidermy and dining on roadkill thing hadn't helped. Dad was a complete urbanite, and his world was not accommodating to certain rural ideas.

Gran wasn't a necrophiliac—not in the strictest technical sense of the word. Was there such a thing as a necrophile? That sounded closer, but Chloe had always thought the old woman was morbid and probably delusional. However, now she was beginning to wonder if Granny Claire had been right in her malicious prognostication. Could Chloe be seeing visions, perhaps—please, God, only metaphorical ones warning of future danger?