Restless Coffins, page 21
I bolted back out into the rain-soaked street and coursed towards the end of the road, my percussive heartbeat crashing in my ears, my nerves screaming. In the darkness, I heard a tram car bell clang out. I ran out into the centre of the street and sprinted along the wet tarmac. An overwhelming sensation of blind panic was driving me towards the nocturnal resting place of a thousand lost souls, an unwelcome destination that I only ever strayed towards in my nightmares.
*
The rain swirled out of the blackened night and danced off the red brickwork road and drummed down onto my body. A dim glow from an amber street light hung over the open gate of the St Louis Number One Cemetery on Basin Street. Above my head, the graveyard’s name hung in large scrolled ironwork lettering. Carved stone angels stood either side of the black-painted entrance. Inside, low-wattage lamps suspended from thick wires criss-crossed the interconnecting paths and lit up the interior of the burial ground with a phosphorous incandescence. I took the Beretta from my trouser waistband, pulled back the receiver, slid a round into the chamber, then stepped across the unwelcoming threshold. I looked cautiously around me then walked quickly past the first decrepit tombstones and glanced back down at the map, my pulse racing in my neck. I followed the path along the edge of the cemetery and made my way past a series of sunken brick crypts, the white plaster cracked, the open-air graves sunk down into the earth and wrapped in vines that had rooted into the mortar. Glass jars and rusted tin cans filled with withered flowers littered the ground. At the end of the footpath, lit up by one of the over-hanging lamps, I saw, tied at waist height from the central stem of a crumbling iron railing, a length of thick red cord. I took a deep breath and ran the tips of my fingers nervously along the taut rope, then followed its route deeper into the graveyard. Around me more tilted stone angels brooded over lost souls amid a grove of marble crosses.
Old vaults stacked like alabaster filing cabinets lined the inner walls, their brass plaques identifying the remains of those housed within. The red cord led towards the open doors of a tiny red-brick burial chamber. I raised the Beretta out in front of me. The pistol suddenly felt heavy and warm in my hand. My arm stretched out into the night, dead leaves clicked under my feet as I followed the red rope and edged closer towards the catacomb. I swung the pistol in all directions as I closed in on the tomb. At the entrance, protected from the rain by an overhanging stone canopy, were a row of fifteen or so large candles that had been lit and placed in jam jars. Written in white chalk on the lintel above the door of the mausoleum were the words Tick-tock. I walked inside and pointed the Beretta down towards the shaded opening at my feet. A set of stone steps corkscrewed into the darkness, each lit by a single candle. Dreading the descent, I followed the red cord down the stairwell into the unknown, one step at a time. The stairs wound out into a long, candle-lit whitewashed crypt that had to have been twenty feet underground. The crimson rope had been threaded along the centre of the stone floor and was then pinned to the wall at the end of the short crypt-lined passageway. I could feel my heart tom-tomming underneath my ribs as I made my way slowly along the damp corridor, the backs of my legs quivering, flashes of colour popping like lesions behind my eyes, the Beretta cautiously sweeping from side to side in my jittery grip. Each step I took felt as if I was being drawn back down towards the fiery Hades that I visited, reluctantly, in my sleep. A grey blanket had been hung over the entrance of the last vault. Pinned to it was a large piece of white paper which had the words The blame layeth at the feet of Victor Ellington printed on it in black ink. I held my breath as I let the tip of the Beretta’s barrel graze the blanket. My hand shook as I reached out and grabbed hold of the damp fabric with my fingers and snatched it back from the wall.
A small lantern that hung from the low ceiling of the crypt blazed back at me with iridescent humidity. The inside of the dank tomb reeked of damp, warm fetid urine and the unmistakable musk of death. My eyes forced themselves shut for a moment, then snapped open as my squinting vision struggled to focus on the horror inside. My unsteady grip immediately loosened on the blanket, but my brain did not register it falling to my feet. I started to retch, my body staggering backwards, my knees buckling with shock. Tears welled in the lids of my eyes and a sudden, violent wave of nausea propelled itself up from the pit of my gut. I became light-headed and, at the same time, strangely disconnected from the inhuman carnage in front of me, as though what I was seeing belonged somehow inside the world of another wretched being’s unwanted nocturnal hallucinations.
I stared inside the oppressive tomb at Evangeline’s lifeless body, which was still bathed in sweat. Beads of perspiration ran slowly from her forehead and dripped from the tip of her chin and jawline. Her bottom lip was swollen and crusted in freshly drying blood. Her wrists and ankles had been bound tightly together with the same red cord that had led me to her. She’d been pushed back inside the crypt, her body pinned up against the back of the damp clay wall. Her head had been tilted backwards, her hair matted with dirt and small leaves. Two small brass coins had been rested carefully on the lids of her closed eyes. I reached inside and touched her tear-stained cheek with my fingers, gently caressing the side of her face with the back of my hand before pulling out the saliva-soaked rag that had been stuffed cruelly into her mouth. The damp cloth was pitted with specks of blood. I reached down and stuffed the rag into my trouser pocket then pulled out my Puma pocketknife and cut the ropes that bound her.
I staggered forward like a sleepwalker not quite believing what I was seeing. My stomach lurched again as I brushed my palm across her curly hair and then put my hand around her fingers and squeezed them. I hooked my arms underneath Evangeline’s still warm, but quickly stiffening, legs. Her clammy skin brought on renewed waves of nausea as I pulled her body close to my chest and drew her out of the crypt. I held her tight against me and closed my eyes, the tears streaming down my face. The ground seemed to move underneath my feet as I sobbed uncontrollably. Then the shaking started, like rough bone and sinew ripping apart inside me. I pressed my face against Evangeline’s cheek, muffling my weeping, then slowly slid my body down the wall and sat with her in my arms. The brass coins had fallen from her closed eyes. Her beautiful face looked like a flower cut unexpectedly from its stem. I held her chin and kissed each lid, before resting her head against my chest. A silent scream coursed from deep inside me; my wailing stifled as I sank my face against the side of Evangeline’s broken neck.
*
I don’t know how long I stayed there. A numbness took over my body and kept me tucked against the fusty sarcophagus wall, along with my grief-stricken reverie. The passing of time was eradicated by an all-consuming sorrow which had rendered me powerless to move. I don’t remember what brought me back to the living world, or finally getting to my knees and carrying Evangeline back along the candle-lit passageway, up the spiral stone stairs and out of the underground tomb. The crypt behind me felt palpable in its silence and reluctant to allow us to leave its subterranean world. All I could hear as I reached the final step was the sound of my own pitiful sobs echoing back at me.
Outside the mausoleum, the rain had stopped and the wind was blowing a dense mist across the graveyard. The cemetery lights glimmered hypnotically above my head, the weak beams from the overhanging lamps cutting through the approaching fog and picking out the wisps of the air vines and flickering cobwebs that were strung from the cypress moss and live oaks along the length of the path in front of me. I took a few unsteady steps forward towards the footpath then felt a heavy pressure pushing down hard against my chest. I couldn’t draw enough air into my lungs and my head began to reel, my heartbeat pounding in my ears. My knees suddenly gave way from underneath me and I sank to the ground, my weakening arms still clinging to Evangeline’s limp body. I lifted my head and drew Evangeline towards me.
Shadows danced out of the fog. I thought I saw two faceless figures walking towards me. I closed and opened my eyes in quick succession and tried to focus on the approaching shapes that moved in between the headstones and sunken, marble sepulchres around me. I saw one of the apparitions pick up speed and cut across my line of sight as if he was making his way around the back of the crypt. I pulled Evangeline’s body closer towards me and, as I did so, saw a cloaked man striding towards me out of the mist, the hem of a priest’s robe raised into the air, buffeted by the quickening breeze. Then, to my left, out of the corner of my eye, I saw a pair of legs of rush across the grass and immediately felt something hard rake off the back of my head. A white light went off inside my skull and a feeling of total paralysis encased me like concrete. My mouth hung open, my eyes could not focus and my ears roared with a high-pitched sound. As I began to fall forward into a cloudy abyss, I saw a black hand reach out to try and catch me. Evangeline slipped from my weakening grasp as an all-encompassing blackness wrapped itself around me and drew me towards a far off resting place I knew I had no name for.
26
I awoke in darkness, stretched out across a damp camp bed. My head was pounding, the sweat pouring down my face. The air was hot and breathless, like steam caught under a glass bell, and dense with humidity. Whilst I’d slept, I’d been haunted by nightmares, most of them thankfully lost as soon as I’d opened my eyes. I tried to raise my head off the pillow, but was suddenly hit with a sharp wave of pain that pulsed from the back of my skull to the front of my forehead. I winced, sank back and put my forearm across my face, my breathing shuddering in my throat as I slowly came to. I rolled off my side and lay on my back with no idea where I was. I was weak, my arms and legs hot and heavy, as if they’d been set in lead. I closed my watering eyes and felt myself keep fading towards sleep, then coming awake again. In that strange dream state, I suddenly remembered the St Louis cemetery and finding Evangeline’s body. I saw myself being lifted from the ground by men with no faces who pitched me through a door into a wet, stone-paved alley that reverberated with the clatter of dustbins. I recalled a sharp stabbing pain in my arm, the back doors of a truck being flung open and being thrown inside. As the vehicle sped away, I thought I saw a partial moon shining down on me. The night sky was lit up with violent bolts of white lightning as I submitted to an insentient dominion.
“Joseph.” I heard my name being called and recognised the man’s voice immediately. I lifted my head from the pillow and saw Vic sitting in a rocking chair at the foot of the bed. His lips didn’t move when he called out my name again. I watched as he smiled back at me, then felt a shiver of pleasure and fear at seeing him again. The chair and the floor creaked as he moved slowly back and forth. I tried to raise my arm off the bed and reach out to him. Vic stared at me and smiled, then shook his head when I tried to pull myself up onto my elbows. A hand touched my shoulder, then pushed me back down onto the mattress as I struggled to rise. I heard my cousin’s voice call out to me as I slipped backwards, and closed my eyes, his words echoing all around me, “Rest now, JT, every’ting gonna be al’right, brutha.”
The only image remaining in my head, as I fell back into a dark realm of unconsciousness, was of Evangeline calling out to me, her face contorted in fear, her trembling fingers reaching out towards me; the scarlet cord that held her wrists dripping with blood.
*
A thin beam of multicoloured sunlight crept in between a crack in a pair of barely parted drapes. I was sitting on the edge of the camp bed, my mouth as dry as sandpaper, staring at the empty rocking chair. I squeezed my temples between my fingers and tried to shake away the images that were still springing up inside my mind, each one more disturbing than any of those from my sleep. The panorama of my hallucinatory journey called out to me to return. I wanted to close my eyes again, drift back off to sleep and rejoin the pain-riddled memories I’d been existing with until just a short while ago. Across the room I heard a door handle being turned. I looked away from the chair to see an elderly mulatto man coming through the door in a burst of hot sunshine. The man walked across the squawky wooden floorboards towards me, carrying a suitcase, and let the door slam hard behind him, drawing the room back into semi-darkness. My fingers balled together to make a weak fist and tried to raise myself up from the camp bed, but felt the room begin to whirl as I attempted to stand. I looked into the shaded light. My vision was still playing tricks on me. I could see the man, but the room around him was still blurred, without specific detail or special form. I heard the case being dropped on the floor and the swish of the curtains being drawn back. My eyes snapped shut as the room was suddenly filled with a rainbow of bright light. When I finally reopened them, I saw the room I was in properly for the first time. I was in some kind of small church or chapel. Old timber walls reached up around me towards a high-beamed plaster ceiling. A large brass crucifix was nailed in the centre of one of the walls and a fading portrait of the Virgin Mary hung over the head of the bed. In front of me, the sun shone down through a large and ornate stained-glass window, creating a multicoloured light display that stretched across the bleach-scrubbed floorboards towards me. I sat still for a moment and let the last of the phantoms which had been plaguing my mind ease away, then picked up on the sour smell coming from underneath my arms. The old man was dressed in a black priest’s cassock, which was fastened up to his thick, muscled neck. He picked up the suitcase, which I now recognised as mine, and walked over to me, dropping it at my feet.
“Dis fo’ yuh.” The accent was backwater Bajan and reminded me instantly of my deceased father’s. “I had to club yuh pretty good wid dat sap last night . . . Yuh mem’ba any’ting?”
The question almost brought me to tears. I concentrated on what had happened to Evangeline the night before with such ferocity that I began to tremble. I nodded my head. “Yeah, I remember.” My voice was hoarse and congested, cracking hard enough that I thought my windpipe was about to split open. When I spoke again, my vocal cords felt like they were about to snap. The old man standing in front of me was no more a member of the clergy than I was. I stared up at him and felt a bubble of hot anger well up inside my chest.
“Who the hell are you?”
The man pointed to himself and smiled. “Me? . . . Am a friend’a da family.”
The elderly Bajan was perhaps in his late sixties and no more than five and a half feet tall. His thick-set body looked in good condition for a man of his advanced years, his muscular shoulders and arms straining inside his ill-fitting clerical attire. The fella’s eyes were watery and red along the rims, his face unshaven and shiny with sweat. His teeth were yellow-coloured and thin at the ends, almost as though they had been filed. A light grey afro was cut short on his head and looked like a wig on top of a black mannequin. He looked down at me, then reached into his trouser pocket and screwed a cigarette in to his mouth, lit it with a Zippo then crumpled the empty packet and threw it on the chapel floor. I watched as he sucked on the cigarette, then blew a plume of thick grey smoke into the air. He scrunched up his nose as he sniffed the air then turned and walked back across the room and out the door. When he returned a few moments later, he was carrying a blue and white wash jug and bowl and had a towel hooked over his arm. He sat the pitcher and basin on a white-painted table in the corner of the room then rubbed his sleeve across the face of a dusty oval mirror that was attached to the back of the washstand and made his way back over to where I still sat.
“Yuh looks like you could use dis, Mistah Ellington.” The mulatto man pointed back at the jug and bowl. “Dey is plenty hot water fo’ yuh ta tek a wash an’ shave. Den we git yuh sum’ting ta eat.”
“Who’s we?”
“Yuh’ll soon see, once yuh sweetened up a bit.” The old Bajan chuckled to himself and backed away from me to leave. I raised my arm up and felt a twinge in the muscle close to the top of my shoulder. I held out the palm of my hand to stop him from leaving. I looked at the washstand then back up to the old man.
“What do I call you?”
The Bajan’s shrewd, bloodshot eyes stared down at me. They held onto mine suspiciously for a second or two whilst he sized me up. He took another drag on his cigarette then began to walk back across the room, finally calling out to me when he was just about heading through the door. “Ma name’s Worrell . . . Everton Worrell, but most folk dey jus’ call me Bussa. Yuh can call me Bussa . . . like yuh papa did.”
27
I stood underneath a wisteria-covered iron trellis on the back porch at the rear of the chapel that overlooked the lush green everglade. I stretched my arms out either side of me and felt the bones in my neck crack as I rolled my head and yawned. The dilapidated old church sat at the furthest edge of the bayou, the brown current of its slow-moving waters drifting close by. On the far side of the water was a heavy border of willow trees, and, beyond them, a vast expanse of marsh filled with moss-strung dead cypress, whose tops were as pink as newly opened roses, as the sun broke through the low mist that rolled in between the overhanging branches. The sky above the wetlands was clear and blue, the day warm and windless. Earlier, I’d been standing over the bowl Bussa had brought me as if I’d been drugged. I washed and shaved myself slowly, then changed into a fresh, white, short-sleeved cotton shirt and a pair of navy trousers. Everything in my suitcase was just as I’d left it back at the Dejeans’. My money was untouched. How the case had found its way to be with me was anyone’s guess. Evangeline’s trusty Beretta had been wiped down, oiled and left on the seat of the rocking chair. Next to it was my penknife and trilby, which had been carefully dried and brushed clean. I reached around to the back of my scalp and felt at the bump on my head. I smarted as I ran my hand carefully across the bruised skin underneath my hair. My body suddenly lurched forward and I became dizzy again. I sat myself down at a wooden bench by the back door of the chapel and, after regaining my balance, looked down gingerly at my wristwatch. I patted my fingers gently on the glass and read the hands; it was just after 8.30am.
