Back to Wando Passo, David Payne [little red riding hood ebook .TXT] 📗

place so old and deep he’d never been admitted there at all, and when Cell looked up at her and smiled, it was no longer Cell, and the woman who smiled back, whose hair shone blond in the deceiving portrait lights, was no longer Ransom’s wife.

TWENTY-TWO

Addie runs and stumbles, stumbles, runs. Her hem is drenched. Her hair is all about her face. What has Harlan done? She speaks the thought aloud. “What has Harlan done to me?” She’s sobbing now; her hands are at her mouth. She shakes her head, and then her eyes are dry, and he’s as absent from her thoughts as he was three months ago before she even knew his name. It’s a long time before she thinks about the path. By the time she looks, it’s lost. The path is lost, and so is Addie, irretrievably, and dark is falling fast.

She comes into a clearing, into different air. It’s warmer here—there’s a little rise of ground—but suddenly she feels cold. There’s gooseflesh on her arms. Rubbing up and down, she has a sudden flash of Percival—“That means they are close, niña”—but quickly shoves it down. A faint, wet quashing accompanies Addie as she goes, a sound she takes for her wet shoes. There’s a blackened circle from some old fire and the fallen carcass of a tree—is it a cypress?—so large that four people holding hands might encompass it, but only just. Insects and rot have mined a cavity in the trunk, and as the slant rays of the setting sun fall into the black cave, something glitters on the floor, winking amber, green, and blue. Peering cautiously in—her hand is on her breast now, her finger at the button—she sees bits of broken bottle glass, unfamiliar coins, and what look like horehound candies, the little ones in paper twists her aunt throws by the handful every Christmas morning to the eager children in the yard. On the floor of the cave is a design in chalk and streaks and smears of some orange substance like the fat that rises in a pot of cooling soup. There are candles and brimming goblets, as there were on Percival’s bóveda, but there are other things as well, things she did not see there—a rusty knife, a cigar, half smoked, a bottle of dark rum—and Paloma’s plate, the good bone-china one she held when Addie first caught sight of her in urgent conference with Clarisse. The leeches are still there—still, there—arranged in the pattern of an X. Each has been penetrated, one by a nail, another by an animal’s curved, sharpened bone, a third by a needle and thread; they loom like soft islands in the lake of Percival’s black blood, which leaks its smell into the air, a smell like rotting meat and copper, along with something thick and sickly sweet like roses. On the margin of this lake, a single blowsy fly sits, rubbing its hands. The feeling here is not like Percival’s bóveda in the least.

And now her eye is drawn to the deep interior, to something hulking near the rear wall of the cave. It looks, briefly, almost like a human form, but as her eyes adjust, she realizes she’s staring at a cloth, a black cloth draped on something underneath. From its upper edge, a branch protrudes, a mottled green and white, like sycamore. On it is a single twig, and on that twig a single, shriveled leaf. Lower, she sees the ribbed tip of an ivory horn, and at the level of the floor, a metal foot, animal in shape—like some large jungle cat, a jaguar or a leopard—and the round black belly of what appears to be an iron pot…one might say a cauldron.

Fear is raging like a wildfire through her senses, but Addie tells herself it’s just some Negro thing, something put here by the slaves, some superstition, like the broom at weddings…. But then she gazes into a depression in the wood as deep as her cupped hands and sees her own face staring back—not a reflection. Harlan’s is there, too. It’s the miniature she commissioned of the two of them, in tempera on ivory, and gave as an engagement gift. It’s been submerged in water, and the rusty knife has been stabbed into the hinge, cleaving them apart. Clarisse, she thinks, Clarisse did this, and she feels something stealing over her like madness. In some part of herself, she half wonders if this is a dream but knows it’s not. And it’s only now that Addie notices that the sound she heard before is coming from within the cave, behind the cloth, and the curious thing is, she isn’t moving now. Addie’s standing still, dead still, listening with every fiber, and the sound seems less like footsteps on a muddy path than something eating, like Sultan, Harlan’s bloodhound, off in the corner of the pen, gnawing his wet bone. And as the hound, sensing an intruder, might stop and look up from its paws, so this thing now, inside the pot, senses her and stops. She can feel its alien awareness fixed on her, and it is dour, old, and strong, unspeakably. A taste she can’t identify, a bad taste, fills her mouth, and suddenly she’s sweating, not perspiring, sweating rivers. The whole forest has grown still. No wind blows. No bird sings. There’s only the drowsy buzzing of the fly on the plate rim. As she looks down at her arm, a mosquito lights, and Addie, thinking she should swat it, merely watches as it does its business and flies off into the gloom with a thin whine. Standing here, she has the sudden visceral conviction that the life around her, all the green life of the swamp and of the world itself, including hers, is like a thin skim floating on a deep black pond, and the pond is death. And death is old and fathomlessly deep and