CHERRY WILDER Saturday

Jack Dixon knew that he had gone mad. The final strand had snapped and he was completely sans marbles. He had nowhere to look: he did not trust the Pennsylvania hills any more; the rearview mirror reflected the angry faces of his hosts. He glanced sideways at the driver. Corey was a young black man, very tall and thin, acquired by the family in the West Indies. He was a trusted servant; he often made a fourth at bridge or danced the limbo at parties. Now Corey stared at him and asked in an undertone:

‘What did you see, Mr Tenn?’

‘Dixon.’

Corey curvetted with the great car on the dirt road; down in the dark valleys, where night had already fallen, Jack could see the glint of lake water.

‘I’m sorry, Corey,’ he said. ‘My name is John Dixon. Mr King is joking when he introduces me as Jack Tenn. Old college joke…’

The glass panel was wide open but communication between the spacious interior of the custom-built limousine and the driver’s seat was patchy. Now he heard Elizabeth King say in a drunken harridan’s voice:

‘You’re a jinx! Your stars are vile! You stink of bad luck!’

Jack glanced fearfully out of the window and saw an old man with a scythe. Avery King snarled at his wife:

‘If that dog vomits I’ll shoot it!’

Corey pressed a button and the glass panel closed. Jack could see the Kings still at it, and now he could see Chung, the chow-chow dog, paws up, peering at Corey and himself.

‘What you see, back there, Mr Dixon?’ persisted Corey.

Something awful. He had seen something awful, something that convinced him about losing his wits. (No one, amateur or professional, ever believed what he foresaw, at this moment. Namely that he would be describing what he had seen to them, at some future time…)

‘Big black car parked by the roadside,’ he said smoothly. ‘You catch a glimpse of it too?’

A hearse, glittering with glass and gold, its doors flung open obscenely, spilling out wreaths of flowers. Against the near side were a man and a woman dressed as bride and groom: they were grotesquely patched with blood as if they had been machine-gunned. The man still lolled half upright against the hearse, but the woman had slid down, leaving her long veil pasted to the carosserie with blood.

‘… going to Les Hiboux,’ said Corey. ‘Nothing else around here. A few summer places on Lake Grant.’

‘Long way out,’ said Jack, pulling himself together. ‘Can anyone really make a go of a restaurant out here?’

‘More of a hobby now,’ said Corey. ‘For Pierre and his mama. They had a smart place, Le Coq Vert, near Stony Brook. Mr King bought them out when his partners put up the new fitness centre.’

In the back seat Avery wrestled the dog to the ground then took a firm grip of Elizabeth’s long rope of pearls. She sat back until he released her then seized his hand and tried to bite it. Jack looked out of the window and saw a flock of birds clustered around the branch of a leafless tree. They flew away and left the ragged corpse of a naked black man swinging from the branch.

He sat back and shut his eyes.

‘I’m not feeling awfully well, Corey. Is it far?’

‘We’ll stop up ahead at the lookout, Mr Dixon.’

Jack had a strong feeling of déjà-vu. He was back at college in America, driving like this, in the evening, and someone said ‘stop at the lookout’. Could almost fill in the details, they were in the Edsel, Avery was driving, two of their best girls were along. Ace King and Jack Tenn and a couple of homecoming queens.

He was overwhelmed with a rush of pure reason, thinking of this harmless scene. A college reunion was a rite of passage; old Ace and old Jack had been dealt a few good hands. Each had succeeded in his own way, as Jack knew they would. Jack could describe himself as a dramaturge, quietly stalking his Chair of Drama at an English provincial university, and Ace had succeeded to the family millions.

The holiday had begun very well. This was some new thing, some kind of nightmare. There had been something in the drinks back there at the Kings’ family seat; they were all being gassed here in the limousine. He was going suddenly insane, assailed with frightful images, and with an embarrassment that amounted to hatred. Avery and Elizabeth had never been anywhere near as bad as this before, they were out of their minds.

When the car drew up he sprang out at once but not more quickly than Avery himself, the dog Chung, and Corey, who opened the door for Elizabeth. They were at a crossroads on the shorn summit of a hill and the moon was rising. A resonant bird-cry came from the direction of the lake and farther off a dog howled. Chung, the good-tempered tawny creature that Elizabeth had saved from the cooking pot in Hong Kong, when he was a puppy, gave vent to an extraordinary snuffling moan and began to run in circles, black tongue lolling.

Avery came striding up to Jack and looked him over with concern. He put his head back, stuck his hands in his trouser pockets and rocked on his heels, staring at his friend.

‘Are you all right?’ he asked. ‘Saw you looking very squeezed out… grimacing away in the front seat.’

‘Right as rain!’ said Jack, stiffening his upper lip.

Avery was neatly built and fair, a natural sportsman. There was something essentially simple and lovable, for Jack, in a man who could bounce into a room wearing flannels and really say: ‘Anyone for tennis?’

‘I have a wager going with Corey,’ said Ace seriously. ‘Here, you must hold the pot.’

Jack took the envelope with a stiff little bow, like a second at a duel, and buttoned it into the breast pocket of his denim jacket. Sporting chances of all kinds were an important part of life in the King household; there was an unhealthy preoccupation with luck, good and bad, and the picking of winners. Jack tried to recall Ace’s gambling addiction in college; had his old pal always been so heavily into bloody mumbo-jumbo? The trouble seemed to have carried over into the next generation: when Ace Junior could not be found he was usually in Las Vegas.

The two men strolled along the edge of the dirt road and stared to the northwest, over the boundless tree-girt reaches of mountain and valley. Jack turned his head, looking for Elizabeth, and his blood turned to ice in his veins. He could see her white naked sinewy legs, the folds of her long sequined chiffon skirt, the thrust of Corey’s half-covered buttocks: they were up against the car on the other side.

A string of possible reactions flashed before his eyes, but he could do nothing. He looked at the hills and was overwhelmed by a mortal terror that Ace would turn his head. He felt a cold sweat break out on his brow.

‘Did you see that?’ whispered Ace suddenly.

‘What? No! What was it?’ babbled Jack.

Ace ran along the shoulder of the road and peered down the narrow crossroad, hardly more than a track in places. Jack stumbled after him and saw a tall figure in a grubby pale-coloured coat, a duster, and a battered black hat. In two long, bouncing steps the man was lost from view behind a tree.

‘Did you see it?’ demanded Ace.

‘I saw a man,’ said Jack. ‘A tramp or something.’

‘Bad luck!’ said Ace. ‘You missed the possum.’

He turned to call his wife: ‘Elizabeth!’

Jack’s head snapped around at the same moment. The hilltop was spacious and very light still; Corey, in his modish tan leisure suit, was posed nonchalantly a hundred yards away. Elizabeth stood looking back the way they had come, with Chung at her heels; her long blue-grey chiffon skirt blew backwards, she held a cashmere shawl wrapped tightly about her shoulders.

Now she came swimming through the air of evening, put her powdered cheek next to Jack’s for a moment, then said to Ace: ‘Let’s get on, shall we?’

Jack was convinced by Elizabeth, she was one of the most convincing persons he knew. His perception must be disastrously at fault; she had not been coupling with Corey, she had not even been stridently drunk, taunting Ace with his bad stars.

‘Ace,’ he said, ‘did you see that chap, just now?’

‘No,’ said Ace easily, ‘can’t say I did. But then, I was looking up a tree.’

They were all walking towards the very centre of the crossroads, Elizabeth was leading them, walking faster now. It was dark; the darkness had gathered all around them as they walked, and now there was only a small circle of remaining daylight on the pale earth where the four ways met. A white hen and a black cockerel lay intertwined, dabbled with blood, their throats cut.

Jack felt a light touch on his shoulder; Corey said gently: ‘You can see the place from here..’

Down the hill the scrubby undergrowth and the spruce plantation gave way to cleared land, fields with fences of split rails. On the right was a low stone building with warm light in its windows. He looked back quickly at the dead chickens to see if they were still there; the hen twitched at his feet.

* * *

‘Corey,’ he demanded, ‘what the hell is all this? I saw some character in the bushes just now…’

‘The lake,’ said Corey, acting tongue-tied. ‘There’s some kind of freaks camping down by the shore.’

There was a sudden drumming on the dusty earth. Elizabeth screamed and overbalanced as Chung butted his way past her legs. He went through the midst of them, his pads drumming, seized the black cockerel and raced on down the hill into the darkness.

‘Chung! Baby!’

Elizabeth got up, taking an arm each from Jack and her husband.

‘He’ll go to the restaurant, Mrs King,’ soothed Corey. ‘He’ll go find Madame Belle.’

‘Beast!’ said Elizabeth.

She looped her pearls around her neck another time and headed for the car.

‘I lay you ten,’ said Ace, as they hurried after her, ‘that there are at least four people in the place besides us.’

‘You mean four other people having dinner?’ said Jack warily.

‘That’s right. Are you on?’

‘Yes,’ said Jack firmly. ‘I say there will be fewer than four. In fact we’ll probably be the only people in the place. Timing it from the moment we walk in, of course.’

He hated getting back into the car and was relieved when Elizabeth flung herself into the front seat. He and Ace settled in the nether reaches; Corey had opened the glass panel. Jack did not want to look out of the window, though it occurred to him that perhaps theother side of the car was jinxed. He felt an aversion to the back of Elizabeth’s head with its perfectly recreated pageboy bob. It was her normal colour, grey-blonde, but he began to think it was a wig; he was troubled by the notion of an ugly seam that ran all the way down the back of the head, like a scar.

He turned his head, looked back at the crossroads, and was able to reach out and tap Ace on the knee. They both looked through the wide rear window. Jack saw the man in the duster standing in the very centre of the crossroads, where the white hen was still lying. He raised a rifle to his shoulder, aimed at the big car, point-blank. Jack gave a cry and ducked his head; there was a light jolt, Corey swung the wheel.

‘Sorry, Mrs King!’ he said. ‘That was some pothole.’

‘Something back there?’ enquired Ace.

‘Did you see anything?’ countered Jack.

‘I saw the water lapping on the crags…’ quoted Ace dreamily. ‘What was I supposed to see?’

Bearing in mind that he was one of the few people ever to spoof Avery Philpott King III, Jack said in a low voice: ‘The girl, of course!’

Ace looked back again with mild interest.

‘Girl? Where?’

‘Gone now…’

He hadn’t been able to draw Ace. To prevaricate when one was actually having hallucinations seemed to him the height of madness. Perhaps everyone did it when they began seeing things. Jack called to mind certain scenes in Hamlet and The Tempest where visions were taking place.

The car drew up before Les Hiboux and he followed Avery and Elizabeth up the wide steps between two stone owls with glowing eyes. They passed through two sets of glass doors and Jack could not see the interior very clearly. The room was irregular in shape, with cosy alcoves and a general soft amber light. The decor was new and old, quite nicely done, nothing garish or tatty, the merest hint of French provincial.

Jack saw that he had lost his bet: at least three of the alcoves were occupied. He had the impression of a table full of older people in evening dress, including a woman with some kind of green ornament in her hair. On the other hand there was a couple beside the palm, middle-aged, who had not dressed up. He wore a tweed jacket, rather like Ace, and she wore a twinset, probably cashmere.

‘Oh drat!’ said Ace. ‘You win!’

Before he could query this decision — there were at least ten people in the restaurant, weren’t there? How many did Ace think there were? Which ones could he see? — the proprietor, Pierre, came up with open arms. He was a tall, good looking, magnolia-skinned individual, running to fat a little. With his tweed jacket he wore a single Creole earring and a large pendant of a skull with emerald eyes.

‘That’ll be fine,’ said Elizabeth, choosing between two tables. ‘How’s Mama?’

‘Feelin’ the cold per usual,’ said Pierre, who never stopped smiling but always had a whine in his voice. ‘Keeps gettin’ the death cards in her patience. Says we need a new run of luck.’

‘You’ve got one!’ said Ace.

He explained the joke about the names: Ace King, Jack Tenn, and Pierre said softly, ‘And this lovely lady is your Queen! Oh, we’ll have to try and cut ourselves in on some of that luck of yours, Mr King!’

Jack had guessed, correctly, that the place was more table d’hôte than àla carte. Pierre left them a bill of fare handwritten in copperplate on green note-paper; it was headed for the day of the week: Samedi. A single drum began to play so softly that he wondered if it was in the jungle reaches of his mind. The lighting had altered now so that he could hardly see the neighbouring tables: that convincing couple beside the palm had faded into the haze. He could not even be sure that the tree was a palm.

Corey stepped into their circle of light carrying a tray with three glasses in silver holders and a glass jug, twined with flowers. He was in shirtsleeves, showing his fancy vest, like a riverboat gambler.

‘Madame B’s special punch,’ he said, pouring.

‘After this,’ said Avery, ‘we will feel no pain.’

‘How right you are, Mr King!’ Corey smiled, showing too much gum, spoiling the effect of his capped teeth.

‘How many helpers does she need back there?’ demanded Elizabeth. ‘Corey, make sure you find Chung.’

‘He’s out back, Mrs King,’ said Corey, watching as Elizabeth drained her glass. ‘Madame will take care of him till you’re done.’

Jack took one gulp of the punch and was flooded with memory. That same stinging dry taste had spoiled his daiquiri, back at the house… like a pinch of some chemical. He must be sensitive to some damned additive, something that went into drinks. The thing was simply not to touch another drop and to control his paranoia as best he could. He could not see whether Ace had finished his glass or not; Pierre was serving the bisque from a silver tureen.

The rich salmon-coloured soup was delicious; the drumming had grown louder; in the jungle birds were screaming. With an effort Jack pushed back his chair a little, out of the narrowing circle of light, and tried to see where he was. Les Hiboux was empty; wherever he looked in his part of the room he could see bare tables, some with the chairs stacked.

A very young girl, brown-skinned, wearing a dusty pink mini-dress, sashayed between the tables collecting the cruets. Her movements struck at Jack like lightning; he forced himself to look away. Elizabeth was making passes with her hands in front of her face as if brushing away spiderweb.

‘Not bad at all,’ said Ace. ‘Bit light on the langouste, d’ye think?’

‘Mmm,’ said Elizabeth. ‘Are we going to have some music?’

The tall black man in the duster stood on the little bandstand beside an old upright piano and a set of vibes. He had two little round drums in the crook of his left arm: as the tempo increased Jack felt a rising panic. He looked about for the pink girl and found her sidling out from the kitchen; she went to stand below the platform, in the shadows. Her hips moved rhythmically, she lifted one hand and pulled a clasp from her hair so that it fell down over her shoulders. Jack was shivering now with a painful mixture of fear and excitement.

‘Why don’t you try it?’ said Avery.

He became aware that Pierre had served the entree: terrine of duck, with white truffles, prettily arranged with watercress.

‘No!’ said Elizabeth. ‘Far too bland. What’s the point of the watercress anyway?’

Jack gobbled the pale sliver on his plate and it tasted warm and salty, like blood. The black man was singing in a high, subliminal voice; he stripped off his duster expertly, hardly pausing in his drum beat. He waved his naked brown arms above his head but the drums kept playing, the girl in pink danced in the shadows, flashing her thighs. Now the Master of Ceremonies gesticulated with his left hand and suddenly in his right hand he held a knife. No, worse than a knife, a machete…

‘Mama!’ screamed Elizabeth.

The old woman advanced out of the shadows near the kitchen door with the same dancing step, keeping the rhythm of the drums. She was small and slight with a very upright carriage; she wore a dark red apron over a long slinky black dress decorated with twinkling bead fringes. Ace and Elizabeth both broke into a chorus of greeting: Jack was introduced to Madame Belle. The light reflected on her steel-rimmed spectacles so that she had no eyes. She still moved back and forth, coming a little nearer to the table each time.

‘… been far too long,’ said Ace.

‘… everyone looking so well!’ said Elizabeth.

The old woman, who had not spoken a word, danced right in, drawing her hands out from under her apron. She laid her right palm in the middle of Elizabeth’s back, on the grey-blue chiffon of her high-necked dinner gown. She snapped the fingers of her left hand and Corey, who had come from nowhere with a trolley, whisked the plates away.

‘Oh, you folks are really getting it all, tonight!’ said Madame Belle.

The Kings laughed aloud; Corey and the old woman lifted the casserole on to its warming stand and began to serve the Chicken Christophe. Jack saw that Madame Belle’s right hand was wet and discoloured; she wiped it on her apron.

‘Just a minute there, Mr Jack!’ said Corey, setting down his plate. ‘You got a feather!’

He felt a movement at his back, between his shoulder blades. He thought ‘They marked two of us, how will they mark Ace?’ The old woman danced easily around the table and poised behind Ace’s chair, on the way to the bandstand. She danced side by side with the pink girl, below the man with the drum. He wore a black tailcoat now, with red satin lapels, and he played a riff or two on the vibes.

Madame Belle stripped off her apron and flung it to the ground near a pile of other props: the duster coat, the battered top hat, the machete. Her slinky dress had thin rhinestone shoulder straps and showed the paler flesh of her small, slack breasts. The girl’s dress had parted at the waist to show her taut, forward-thrusting brown midriff.

‘Now this really is good!’ said Ace. ‘She got it right with the marinade and the extra onions.’

‘Yes,’ said Elizabeth, ‘I must admit. ’

She wriggled her shoulders, put down her fork and reached far up behind her own back, a movement nearly impossible for a man to make.

‘Mama Belle had wet hands or something!’

Corey at once walked behind her chair and dabbed with a napkin.

‘Soon dry out, Mrs King, with that light chiffon..’

It was the turning point. Jack caught Corey’s eye and knew that an error had been made. The young man swallowed hard, tossed his head, and danced away towards the kitchen. Jack said: ‘Ace, do you remember our chicken song?’

‘What’s the matter, sport?’ said Ace. ‘Don’t you care for the Christophe? It’s really only a variant of Chicken Marengo.’

‘No,’ said Jack, still pretending to eat. ‘I mean our own particular chicken ditty.’

He hummed a few bars of ‘The Skye Boat-Song’. It had got them out of trouble and out of bars several times in the past.

‘Good God!’ said Ace. ‘As bad as that? You really are feeling seedy, aren’t you?’

‘We’re in danger,’ said Jack.

The drumming had grown very faint: the tall man and the old woman were poised beside the bandstand like wax figures: the girl lay on the floor, balanced on shoulders, buttocks, bare heels. Now all three began to move in unison; the drumbeat was slowly coming up; the bird-cries sounded. The machete appeared again in the right hand of the tall man.

‘Some kind of ceremony!’ said Jack. ‘They’re out to get us!’

‘You’re out of your mind!’ said Ace. ‘We know these people. Corey… you’re not suggesting that Corey…’

‘Elizabeth,’ said Jack, ‘could you just manage to turn around without attracting too much attention? We want to see the back of your dress.’

It was hard to tell whether Elizabeth had been following very closely but now she did as she was asked. She bent forward first in one direction, then another, and helped herself to more casserole. Her dress bore the mark of Madame Belle’s bloody hand.

‘It’s blood, isn’t it,’ said Elizabeth quietly.

She sat back in her chair trembling and pale, as if she were made of grey-blue chiffon.

‘They killed my poor baby,’ she said. ‘If this is one of your gags, Avery, it has gone too far!’

Lips drawn back from her clenched teeth, she seized the heavy serving fork, withdrew a long lump of flesh from the casserole, dumped it on the white tablecloth and doused it with the remains of the punch to wash off the sauce. Jack remembered that Elizabeth was a registered nurse.

‘Yes,’ she said in a mad, whispery voice. ‘Yes, I thought so. It isn’t cooked, you understand. Just put into the dish.’

She leaped to her feet and shouted: ‘Bloody murderers!’

On the tablecloth lay a medium-sized black tongue with gobbets of adhering tissue: a dog’s tongue. Jack felt his gorge rise; the lights went out, flickered back, and the drums filled the world. He saw Ace stand up and put his arms around his wife, restraining and protecting. The pair of them staggered and fell; Jack was dragged down, engulfed by the falling table; he experienced a series of lightning flashes.

He was transported into the ambience of the pink girl, he felt the heat of her body. He saw the jungle clearing, felt the warm moist air, after rain, and smelled the tang of fresh blood. The tall man opened the top of the piano, dragged out a black cockerel and halved it in the air with the machete.

The back of Jack’s head hit the floor and everything went into slow motion. (There was evidence that the back of his head had hit some flat surface; he carried the report from the county hospital about with him, from shrink to shrink, throughout the Anglo-Saxon lands.) Ace and Elizabeth rose up out of the folds of the tablecloth, legs rubbery, arms extended as if they were trying to fly. The drumbeat was a huge hollow sound. The tall man, naked under his tailcoat, with a necklace of small skulls, leaped high in the air and floated down into the circle of light.

When he moved his arms Ace and Elizabeth began to dance, horribly, like marionettes. Voices swelled in affirmation, calling his name, as their high priest: ‘Samedi! Sa-me-di!’ He drew near with the gleaming machete, not touching his victim, and a red line opened from Ace’s chin down to his groin, through layers of cotton, silk, cashmere, worsted, epidermis, fat and muscle. Jack heard his own long slow groan of protest as Ace twisted to the floor.

Baron Samedi whisked off Elizabeth’s ash-blonde wig and sketched a splitting blow down the back of her skull. She folded down into a soft pile of grey-blue chiffon. Jack saw the girl, he saw Corey, saw Pierre amongst the worshippers. They danced half-clad, in the darkness, stretching their hands, palm upwards, into the circle of light; Baron Samedi, Lord of the Crossroads, flicked at them with his magic blade until a red line marked each one…

* * *

He was shivering with cold and trying to get more of the fur rug, which whimpered beside him. When he moved the skin of his face hurt terribly, runners of pain spread through all his limbs… He slid backwards along the ground on his bottom, like a baby, in total darkness, smelling blood, grass, petrol, wet dog. He hugged Chung’s neck and ungummed his eyelids painfully but still saw very little. They were free of the car now and he was beginning to see its position.

‘Yes, yes, old chap,’ he croaked to the distraught dog.

He was pleased, for some reason, to find Chung licking his face. He turned his head very slowly and saw a tree on the shoulder of the road. Up above was the starry heaven. There was a dreadful silence; no one else groaned or sighed. Run off the road at the Lookout. Jack tried to shout but all that came out was a feeble, hoarse sound hardly above a whisper.

He kept on trying as he inched painfully towards the tree. He clung to its trunk and dragged himself upright. Chung moaned and howled, butting his knees. The car had rolled over and come to rest against a larger tree. On the way back to town. Avery. Elizabeth. Corey. Jack made a very great effort: ‘Help!’

The old man strolled towards him with an awful lack of urgency. He made his own light. Jack could see sparks of blue fire at his lapels, on his bony wrists, on the brim of his battered top hat.

‘Help’s coming.’

The voice was half in, half out of his head.

‘In the car…’ gasped Jack. ‘Mr and Mrs King…’

‘Corey,’ added the old man. ‘He’s there too.’

‘Are they…? Can’t you see to them?’

‘No, Jack,’ said the old man, smiling sadly. ‘I only seen to you.’

He did something with his eyes so that they turned white; the bones of his skull shone through the taut, black skin of his face. Jack heard the raunchy rhythm of the drum, the roar of the jungle; he smelled the reek of blood.

‘Help them, damn you!’ he shouted.

‘You’re a wonder,’ smiled the Baron. ‘You are a natural. Just a leetle pinch of the obi medicine and you see all that there is to see and then some. It will all come back to you.’

Jack heard the wail of a siren, somewhere along the dark road through the hills. Help coming. He tried to make out the restaurant, down the hill, but all its lights were out.

‘What was the plan?’ he demanded. ‘Why would those people want to gang up on some rich customers with a… a voodoo ceremony?’

‘How ‘bout vengeance?’ asked the Baron. ‘Or a sacrifice to bring gambling luck?’

He was suddenly holding up five diamonds: ace, king, queen, jack, ten. He folded them away into his skeletal black hand and blood oozed between the fingers.

‘Conjuring tricks!’ said Jack through set teeth.

‘That’s the very word!’

‘Chung wasn’t hurt. ’

The old man chuckled and buried his fingers in Chung’s thick fur. ‘We take pity on dogs,’ he observed, ‘even when we might have to find some poor dog already dead. Colour up his tongue a little…’

‘That’s enough!’ said Jack.

He tried to stand alone, without clasping the tree, and began to weep for pain and weakness.

‘It ain’t no use to go down there,’ said the old man.

But Jack was stumbling, crawling, back down to the wrecked car. Chung came with him a little way then would go no further. His eyes had grown accustomed to the darkness: he was able to make out the body of his old friend, Avery Philpott King III, skewered and gutted, in the ruins of the back seat. Elizabeth was worked into a very small space beside him. When Jack touched her hand, pulled gently at her cold wrist, the whole wreck seemed to shake.

He scrambled backwards, lurched against the car again and cried out in alarm as it rocked crazily. He found that if he bent sideways he could see Corey, head and shoulders bulging the windshield.

‘They take Corey out first,’ whispered the old man, in his head. ‘Then the wreck will fall down and burn..’

‘Murderers!’ said Jack.

He remembered Elizabeth leaping up from her chair.

‘The magic became too strong,’ said the old man.

He reached down a solid, skinny, old man’s hand and helped Jack back up the slope. The ambulance and a police car, with sirens blaring and flashing lights, swept on to the dark hilltop.

‘Sometimes it happens that way,’ he went on. ‘The magic becomes too strong and Baron Samedi swoops down to do some death-dealing…’

He propped Jack up against the tree, like a zombie, with Chung at his feet. He left him with a final word: ‘Remember, you got an Ace in the hole, boy!’

Jack saw him walking away over the crossroads, through the crowd of helpers all converging on his tree. He could not tell if any of them were aware of the old man or not. Jack was wrapped in a blanket and given treatment for shock. He saw the body of Corey, still with a spark of life left in it, being carried past on a stretcher. Corey’s left arm hung down; the palm of the hand was marked with a thin red line, like a cat-scratch.

(The psychiatrists he consulted in the United States and in Britain showed interest in various aspects of his story. The American woman was interested in the possible misuse of hallucinogenic drugs. The Scotsman was distressed by the racist element. The English woman was impressed by his sexual reaction. Everyone was relieved to hear that Chung made a complete recovery. None of them trusted Jack; he could not decide whether they found him too mad or not mad enough.)

There was a shout from over the edge of the road as the wrecked car crashed down and burst into flames. One of the policemen — would he be a deputy sheriff? — was struck by a piece of burning debris. He ran blazing across the summit of the dark hill and the ambulance attendants rushed out with more blankets to smother the flames.

In the light of the burning man Jack caught a glimpse of Pierre, Madame Belle, a girl that could have been the pink girl, huddled together. There was a bunch of youngsters, campers, the freaks from down by the lake. Next morning, in the county hospital, wherever that was, he remembered the ‘pot’ that Ace had given him to hold for ‘a wager with Corey’.

The envelope in his jacket pocket bore his own name, John Dixon, in Ace’s handwriting. Inside, folded in sheets of green tissue paper, he found a cross made of dark stained wood, carved with a skull and a phallus. Yes, of course Ace had been in on the thing somehow. But had the cross been passed to Jack with malice or for his protection? He wondered if Elizabeth had received any kind of a fetish.

Corey had died during the night so Jack had no chance to talk to him again, except in the way that he talked to all of them again: in his dreams. He wrapped up the fetish and kept the horrid thing by him for years, showing it only to a few close friends.

In fact he was never able to scrape up more than a very few close friends, but his luck was phenomenally good from that time forward. It was said that J.D. had the golden touch; that his taste in women was exotic; that he was addicted to psychotherapy. In the end he gave the voodoo cross to the young actress who played First Witch in his famous Macbeth with the Haitian setting.

Cherry Wilder recently returned to her native New Zealand after living in West Germany with her late husband and two daughters since the mid-1970s. She published poetry, short stories and criticism before making a commitment to genre writing — science fiction, fantasy and horror — and her short fiction has appeared in many magazines and anthologies, including Interzone, Asimov’s Ghosts, Best SF 16, New Terrors, Dark Voices, Skin of the Soul and Best New Horror. Her novels include the ‘Torin’ trilogy (The Luck of Brin’s Five, The Nearest Fire and The Tapestty Warriors), the ‘Rulers of Hylor’ trilogy (A Princess of the Chamein, Yorath the Wolf and The Summer’s King), the ‘Rhomary’ series(Second Nature and Signs of Life), and the horror novel Cruel Designs. Her collection Dealers in Light and Darkness was published by Edgewood Press, and she is currently working on the first volume of a new ‘Hylor’ trilogy for Tor Books. As she explains, ‘ “Saturday” recalls a visit to a real restaurant in the Pennsylvania Hills in 1983. The district is called Twin Lakes and at the time this suggested the atmosphere of the occult work, Twin Peaks.’

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