"You met 'em?"
"Beeson was very rude and arrogant. He called me a 'hocus-pocus bitch' and walked out as soon as he saw what we were doing. Medd was more polite. He thanked me for my time before he left."
"They never came back?"
"No."
Meaning they didn't believe in this shit either, thought Max. Which either made him more open-minded or a born-again fool.
"Shall we begin now, Max?"
The table was a huge Ouija board. A notebook, a pencil, and a solid, clear-glass, oval pointer were placed at Mercedes's side.
They were about to have a séance.
* * *
They sat around the table, Max in front of Mercedes, Chantale opposite Philippe, heads bowed, holding hands in a circle, as though they were saying grace. Everyone apart from Max had their eyes closed. He wasn't going to take it seriously. He didn't believe in it.
"Eddie? Eddie Faustin? Ou lŕ?" Mercedes called out loudly, filling the room with her voice.
If she was faking, Max thought, she was putting her heart and soul into it. Her face, under the strain of concentration, was even more bizarre than it had been when relaxed. She'd screwed it up so much that her features disappeared almost entirely in whorls and bunches of pinched-together, scrunched-up flesh. She was squeezing Chantale and Philippe's hands so hard her fists were shaking with the effort. They were both wincing in pain.
The room had gone a shade darker. Max thought he saw something move by the shelves and looked over. The exhibits seemed a fraction brighter and alive, vivid and empty like lit-up clothes-store mannequins on an empty, dark street. He swore he could detect movement in some of thema pulse beat in the hand, the toes moving at the end of the foot, the snake darting out its tongue, cracks forming in the eggshell. Yet when he focused on them individually, they were utterly lifeless.
Philippe and Chantale tightened their respective grips on Max's hand, their lips moving soundlessly.
The atmosphere in the room had changed. He did not feel oppressed in there, despite all the black-magic paraphernalia, the knowledge that his predecessors had passed through here on their way to mutilation and, quite possibly, death. But now he felt a tightness creeping into his chest and back, a feeling of someone heavy standing on it.
When he first heard the sound, he didn't register it as anything special. He mistook it for the fan.
When he heard it again it was closer and louder, coming from right under his nose: a single light tap, followed by the sound of something small scraping over a smooth surface, a sound not unlike that of a zipper being done up, top to bottom, low notes ending on high.
He looked down at the board. Things had changed. The pointer had movedor been movedfrom Mercedes's side up to the letters. It was indicating the letter "E."
Chantale and Philippe let go of his hands.
"Qui lŕ?" asked Mercedes.
He saw the pointer turn, independently, to point at "D."
Max wanted to ask Mercedes how she was doing it, but his mouth was too dry and his balls ice.
Chantale's face was impassive.
Mercedes had written the first two letters down.
The pointer turned to the right and moved across the board slightly to stop at "I," its motions jerky yet steady, as if really guided by an unseen hand. It looked impressiveeven if it was fake, which he kept telling himself it was, so he wouldn't freak out.
He thought of looking under the table to see if there was a machine underneath, controlling the spook show, but he wanted to see where it was all going.
Both Mercedes's hands were on the table.
The pointer moved back to "E" and stayed put. It looked like a big, congealed teardrop.
"He's here," Mercedes said. "Ask what you want to know."
"What?"
"Askhimyourquestion," Mercedes said slowly.
Max felt suddenly stupid, like he was being taken in and massively conned, all the while being loudly laughed at by an invisible audience.
"All right," he said, deciding to play along for the time being. "Who kidnapped Charlie?"
The pointer didn't move.
They waited.
"Ask him again."
"Sure he understands English?" Max quipped.
Mercedes gave him an angry look.
Max was about to say something about the batteries dying when the pointer jerked into motion and zipped around the two arches of letters, stopping there just long enough for Mercedes to write down what they were before moving on to the next.
When the pointer stopped moving, she held up her pad: H-O-U-N-F-O-R.
"It means temple," she said.
"As in voodoo temple?" Max asked.
"That's right."
"Which one? Where? Here?"
Mercedes asked but the pointer didn't move.
And it never moved again for them. They repeated the ceremony. Max even tried to empty his mind of all doubting thoughts and cynicism and pretend he really believed in what they were doing, but even so, the pointer didn't budge.
"Eddie has left," Mercedes concluded, when she'd tried for the final time. "He usually says good-bye. Something must have scared him. Maybe you did, Mr. Mingus."
* * *
"Was that for real?" Max asked Chantale as they walked back toward the orange grove.
"Did you see any trickery?" Chantale said.
"No, but that doesn't mean it wasn't going on," Max said.
"You need to believe in the impossible once in a while," Chantale retorted.
"I do," Max grunted. "I'm here aren't I?"
He was sure there was a perfectly rational, humdrum explanation for everything they'd witnessed at the Leballec house. Accepting what he'd just seen at face value was just too much of a mind-fuck.
Max believed in life and death. He didn't believe life crossed over into death, although he did believe that some people could be dead inside and appear to be living on the outside. Most lifers and long-timers he'd seen in prison were like that. He was pretty much that way too, a corpse wrapped in living tissue, fooling everyone but himself.
Chapter 38
WHEN THEY RETURNED to Clarinette, they asked anyone who looked old enough to remember, or give them a sensible answer, who had been in charge of the construction site they'd crossed over on their way to the stream.
The replies were the same from person to person:
"Monsieur Paul," they all said. "Good man. Very generous. Built us our town and hounfor."
Not Vincent Paul, Chantale explained, but his late father, Perry.