Nightwitch (30 page)

“
Then what are you saying?” She looked into his sweet eyes and tried to see beyond his words. He was a troubled man, but his eyes said that he was telling the truth, or at least the truth as he believed it.

“
I’m saying that this thing, this soucouyant, is real. It did this.” He pulled his fingers away from the front of his shirt and ran them along his scabbed check and bruised neck. “I know that even after everything you’ve seen, everything that’s happened, you still don’t believe. But I’m telling you it’s real. I’m not making this stuff up.” His hands went back to his lap, clenching each other tight enough to turn his knuckles white.

“
Silver Kryptonite, wooden stakes, come on, John, you have to know how this sounds?” She reached out and took his tense hands in hers, pulled them apart and met his liquid stare with concern.

“
I’ve kept this bottled up for a long time, because I know how it sounds. Do I look crazy to you?”

“
No,” she said, but he did kind of look crazy, with his disheveled hair, wringing hands, pleading little boy stare, and the way he was sitting, almost in a lotus position, looking like a firecracker about to explode.

“
Then let me finish what I have to say. Your life may depend on it.”

She kept a firm hold on his hands and nodded her head.

“
Legend has it that the soucouyant is the old woman that lives at the end of the road,” he went on, “and that she lives the day away in her house, shut up against the sun. But when night falls, and bats replace the birds in the trees, she sheds her old shriveled up skin and hides it away. Then she rises through the roof in a ball of flame to seek out a young victim.” He saw the look in her eyes and stopped the telling. He met her gaze head on, till she was forced to look away. She took her hands back and folded them in her lap.

“
Go on,” she finally said.

“
You sure you want me to?”

“
I’m sure.”

“
Okay.” Then he continued. “After the soucouyant finds a victim, usually a young woman, it flames down to earth, arriving as a carnivorous animal, where it hunts the girl until she’s crazy with terror, because the soucouyant needs the terror as much as the young blood.”

“
It sucks out the blood?” Sarah interrupted.

“
Yes.”

“
Like a vampire?”

“
Yes.”

“
And you want me to believe this?”

“
Yes.”

“
Because that’s what the wolf and the bear were, your soucouyant?”

“
Yes.”

“
Why couldn’t they be just what they appeared to be?”

“
You saw the ball of fire?”

“
I saw something. We were going so fast. I closed my eyes.”

“
Do you want me to finish?” he asked.

His smile was forced and Sarah thought he was treating her like a kid with a simple math problem. The answer appears obvious, but the kid can’t seem to grasp it, so you keep explaining away, attacking the problem from different angles, until you see the light in the child’s eyes. Well, if John Coffee wanted to see that light in her eyes, he was going to have to do a heck of a lot of explaining.

“
After the soucouyant has fed, it returns to the ball of fire, seeks out its skin and becomes a simple old woman again.”

“
There are no males?” Sarah asked.

“
I don’t know, maybe, but this one’s definitely female. And she’s one tough old bird. My personal theory is that soucouyants have been around for a very long time, coexisting with man. I think they could be the source of all of the shape changing legends. Vampires. Werewolves. They’ve always been with us, we’ve just never understood them.”

“
So how do you kill them? Silver bullets?”

“
You know, I could slap myself, that one seems so obvious. I’ve got a silver bladed knife that sent it flaming away the other day, but I’ve never considered silver bullets.”

“
I was kidding,” Sarah said.

“
I know you were, but silver does weaken it. The old folks in Trinidad use a silver cross to protect themselves against it. But if you want to kill a soucouyant, you have to find the skin.”

“
Then what do you do?” Sarah found herself getting interested, despite herself. He was a powerful storyteller and she was hanging on his words.

“
You fill the skin with rock salt and hot pepper.”

“
And?”

“
When she returns to her house and slips into the skin, she starts to itch and burn and she literally scratches herself to death.

“
And of course there’s the locket and the necklace. The Soucouyant wears an old locket dangling from an old necklace that’s been dipped in a magic potion. When she’s wearing it, she can’t age. Take it away and they grow old, like us. They grow old and they can die.”

“
Why don’t you carry around a jar of salt water and just throw it on the animal when it comes?”

“
We’re talking a lot of salt water. She’d have to be immersed. However I do carry a jar of cayenne pepper and it saved me the other day. A good slap in the face with that stuff will cause the old woman to start scratching and flame away.”

“
How did you get involved with this thing?” she asked, still playing along, because now she was sure he was suffering from some kind of paranoia.

“
Remember the movie, To Have and Have Not, staring Humphrey Bogart and Lauren Bacal?”

“
Vaguely.”

“
There’s a part in it where the Lauren character tells the Vichy police that she just arrived from Port of Spain, Trinidad. Just the way she said it made me want to go there.”

“
So you did?”

“
So I did,” he said, then he continued. “I stayed in a guesthouse overlooking Port of Spain on the left and the ocean on the right. It had no pool, no cooking facilities, a television that got only one channel and a part time air conditioner. It was summer and it was hot.

“
I was bored and casting around for something to do. I could read when the air conditioner was working, but I had to get out of that house when it wasn’t. And since there was nothing to do in Trinidad, I decided I might as well work.

“
And I’m a thief.”

“
You went to a foreign country to steal? I don’t believe it. What if you would have been caught? Do you have any idea what jail is like in a third world country?” Sarah said.

“
I didn’t go to steal, I went for a vacation. Things just didn’t work out the way I’d planned.”

“
So you stole that thing you told me about the other night?” she said.

“
The necklace.”

“
And you gave it to Carolina?”

“
You’re getting ahead of the story.”

“
Sorry.”

“
So one night when the air conditioning wasn’t working and it was about ninety degrees at ten o’clock at night, I decided to go for a walk. There was this house at the end of the block. Sitting off by itself. Fenced in. Two stories. Very upscale for the neighborhood. I wondered what was behind that tall fence.

“
Breaking into a house is the easiest thing in the world to do. The fence was about six feet high with pieces of broken bottles cemented to the top of it to discourage anyone from climbing over. I picked the lock on the gate, then picked the lock on the back door.

“
Once inside, I found a veritable burglar’s feast. The house was furnished with expensive antiques, and the hardwood floor had the kind of finish you’d expect to find on an expensive yacht. The walls were covered with paintings and you didn’t have to be an art expert to know their value. I didn’t have to look very far to know that I’d hit the mother lode.

“
Inside the bureau drawers in the dining room, I found stacks of bills, dollars, pounds, Swiss francs. Bundles of hundred dollar bills, a hundred to a packet. Other drawers had gold coins, Double Eagles, Canadian, and here’s the kicker, Doubloons, Spanish Doubloons.

“
I won’t even go in to the jewelry, except to say there were more diamonds there than any jewelry store in Manhattan ever dreamed of having at any one time.

“
All that cash and treasure and no alarm. Why? My first impulse was to load up as much as I could carry and get on out of there, but then I thought about it. I was in way over my head. I’d never been anything but small time. I would have been crazy to take that stuff, at least anything that would be missed. Whoever lived in that house had to be one powerful individual to amass that kind of wealth and just leave it lying around unprotected like that.”

“
So what did you do?” Sarah asked, finding herself being drawn into his story, despite her doubts about his sanity.

“
I took one of the Doubloons, just to have one, and one of those bundles of hundreds. Ten thousand dollars. I figured they would never be missed. Then I committed the worst mistake of my life.

“
I opened the back door to leave, and as I turned to close it, the moonlight reflected off an object in a trash basket, by the washing machine. Curious, I went back in. It was a child’s locket on an old gold linked chain. So old that it was frozen shut. I supposed that’s why it had been tossed in the trash. I thought it would make a great gift for Carolina, so I took it.”

“
Let me guess,” Sarah said. “It was the magic locket.”

“
And she wants it back,” John Coffee said.

* * *

Sarah thought about what he’d said and decided that when he got back with the clothes, she was going to get them on and get out of Dodge. He was a nice enough man, and a wonderful lover.

He made her wonder what she had ever seen in Miles. True, Miles was successful. He was well read in a day when most men were stuck in front of the television. He dressed well, talked well, lived well. He cooked her gourmet meals, took her out on weekends, showered her with presents, and he wrote poetry to her. On the surface he was every woman’s dream.

But he was stick-in-the-mud boring when it came to talking about anything he wasn’t interested in, and he was a coward.

John Coffee on the other hand was a man of few words, with powerfully attracting eyes. He wouldn’t write you a poem, or send you flowers, or spend all day in front of a stove for you.

But he would die for you. And that had to count for something.

Still, he belonged in an institution somewhere. He needed help and she didn’t have it in her. The last few days had used her up. All she wanted was some clothes, so she could go to the bank and get enough money to travel to Europe or South America. Someplace where she could sleep till noon and eat all the junk food she wanted. It was what she needed. A vacation from life.

She slid out of the sleeping bag and peeked out of the tent. She looked at the sky and wondered what time it was. She should have asked John before he went into town. She knew it must be late, because the sun was hanging low in the sky. Probably around four or five. Still a couple of hours of daylight left.

She pulled her head back in the tent and put on her socks and hiking shoes. She had a hard night, followed by pleasant sex, and she wanted a bath, needed a bath. She stuck her head out of the tent again and roamed her eyes around the clearing.

Deserted.

Should she, she asked herself? She had always been a shy person, and until now, had never even slept without a nightgown. She had always disliked being naked outside of her bedroom or bathroom, but last night she’d been all over northern California without a stitch on, and now she was thinking about going to the river and splashing some of the cool water on her bare, naked skin.

She climbed out of the tent, and stood in front of it, feeling deliciously wicked and giddy. She was exploring uncharted regions of herself and finding that she liked what she found. The slight breeze, whipping around parts of her body that had never seen the sun, sent a pleasing chill through her. Maybe she was a closet nudist, she thought.

She laughed as she walked through the clearing. Every nerve was alive. She felt like the forest had a thousand eyes, each one on her. Every tree an admirer, every branch waving homage, every leaf and pine needle rustling in the breeze, making sweet forest music for her. She had never felt so free. She wrapped her arms around her breasts, grabbing her shoulders with her hands and hugged herself. Then she did a full spin and laughed again. She was having fun.

But she was cold, too, so she hustled back to the tent and started rummaging through his duffel bag. She found a tee shirt, way too big for her, but scads better than nothing at all. She pulled it over her head, then pulled off the shoes and wiggled into a pair of his well worn Levi’s, surprised to find that they fit round her waist pretty well. John Coffee had broad shoulders, but a thin waist. She remembered last night and she remembered that she liked that.

She would splash that cool water on her bare, naked skin another day, when it wasn’t so cold, she thought, as she cuffed the Levi’s. She was lacing up her shoes when she heard the laughter.

She recognized it immediately, Brad Peters, her perennial problem child. She tucked the shirt in, ran her hands through her hair. Counted to ten, and stepped out of the tent.

“
Over here,” Brad said, to Ray Harpine, then he turned and saw Sarah standing in front of the tent.