Medusa (16 page)

James Prescott shrugged. “Well, why not.”
 

The rest of the family gave a little cheer, and James Prescott turned into the parking lot of the House of Rising Fun. There were just a couple of other cars in the parking lot, he noticed. Good, he and his family would have the place almost all to themselves. They were off the books, he realized. No one from his company could track his movements up to now. He had paid for all of his transactions in cash. It was as good a way as any to ease into what was proving to be a truly laid-back vacation. Just what he’d been needing.
 

They all got out of the Suburban and walked into the place. Very weird. The place obviously used to be one of the big plantation houses like they had seen on their way in, but it had been painted several different colors, all bright and garish, imparting a sense of . . . madness?
Oh, stop it
, James Prescott chided himself.
You old stick in the mud; you never liked clowns and things like that, not even as a kid. Loosen up and have some fun.
He followed Angela and the kids, who were already disappearing into the front door.
 

Let’s see what this place is all about.
James Prescott followed his family inside, and stopped. He squinted, looking around for his family. He blinked his eyes repeatedly. It was awfully bright outside, and awfully dark in here. He had to stand still for a second until his eyes adjusted. When his vision came into focus, he started—a leering face was inches from his own.
 

He stepped back, and laughed nervously. Clowns. Everywhere in the room there were mannequins dressed as clowns. Looking around the room, James Prescott saw that there was a hallway, dimly lit by colored lights that led deeper into the funhouse. He took a breath and walked in that direction.
 

Got to catch up with the family
. He took five steps down that hall, and the floor fell out from under him. He found himself sliding down a chute of some kind, his mind racing,
 

This can’t be happening! Somebody could get killed—
 

He was deposited, none too softly, on the hard wooden floor of a room far darker than the room where the dummy clowns leered.
 

“Angela! Tina! Conrad! Can you hear me!”
 

James Prescott tried to stand, and winced with pain. He thought his left ankle might be broken, or at least twisted badly. When he found the person who ran this damned place—
 

“Angela! Tina! Answer me!”
 

And then he heard a sound that made his blood freeze in his veins—his daughter Tina screaming, screaming somewhere down here near him, on a level with him, Oh my god she has fallen down here too—but no, she was screaming for him!
 

“Daddy No! Make them go away! Go AWAYYYyyyyyyyy!”
 

Her cries turned into shrieks. They were hurting her! They were hurting his Tina, and now his wife was screaming too! “Help us James! There are men over here, I’m frightened!” And then he heard the rude guttural laughs of men and her cries mingled with those of her daughter’s, both crying out to him for help at once.
 

“I’m coming!” James Prescott screamed. He tried to run, but he ran face-first into a wall. He turned and tried to go in another direction, but he realized he was standing in a room that was only about five feet in any direction, standing in a wooden booth that the chute he had tripped had deposited him into, and then he realized that up there somewhere were different chutes, tripped by different weights, leading each person, each victim, down here to their own little room, from which there was no exit.
 

James Prescott stood in that darkness and listened . . . and went mad with pain and anger and grief while they raped and tortured and murdered his family, one after the other, and there was absolutely nothing he could do.

Chapter 20

Culver Ray stood in the room, waiting. An old woman sat in a chair, frail and trembling, but her eyes were filled with unearthly fire. Her glare could stop a burglar with a knife cold in his tracks. Her eyes were mad, determined, evil.
 

“Tell me what she’s done,” the old woman hissed at Culver Ray.
 

“She was talking to the foreigner. I think they’re planning something between themselves.”
 

The old woman’s lower lip squirmed like she was chewing something, a sure sign to Culver Ray that she was considering all the angles of what he had reported.
 

“Now, Culver Ray, what could that foreigner and my little Mafalda do to hurt us?”
 

Culver Ray grinned a wild yellow grin and his eyes widened. He had saved the best for last.
 

“That’s just it, Granny Patreaux. They weren’t alone. There were two other men there with them, and they weren’t drinking. They all had their heads together. These men looked like police, or worse. One of them was an older man, and he was carrying a pistol, I could tell. The other was a big, mean-looking black man. He had a scar on his face. One rough-looking customer.”
 

Behind her, in the shadows, someone was listening. Now he came forward, into the dim light, and stood behind the old woman’s chair, a huge man with a bald head.
 

“A black man? With a scar on his face?”
 

“That’s right. You look spooked. I ain’t never seen you spooked. Is he a friend of yours? I didn’t think you were from around these parts.” The question was asked in a leering, sarcastic voice. The bigger man was obviously irritated, but contained himself, and answered in a somewhat measured tone.
 

“I’m not. Neither is he. Somehow he’s on my scent again. I’ll be damned. She’s going to lead them right to us. Corsack must be insane, or he’s decided that our dear Mafalda means more to him than his poor wife, after all.”
 

The old woman took all of this in, silently. The two men waited for her pronouncement.
 

“Poor little Princess Mafalda,” the old woman said in a low voice—a voice similar to the sound the wind makes when it finds a hole in a wall. “She breaks her poor old Granny’s heart. Go to her, Culver Ray, and tell her she broke her Granny’s heart. Show her how bad her poor Granny feels.”
 

Culver Ray stood there, without moving. He opened his mouth but did not speak.
 

The old eyes rose, glowing, and fixed him with a fierce and fiendish stare.
 

The big man from the shadows spoke in a soft voice:
 

“She’s your granddaughter, Granny. Are you sure?”
 

The old woman spoke again to Culver Ray in lieu of an answer to the big man. “Get along, and do as you’re told.” The eyes lowered once more.
 

Culver Ray turned and went out the door.
 

“Same as her rotten mama, after all,” the old woman hissed after him.
 

Her mind drifted back five years, or so. She had sat on the porch of her old house, in her creaking rocker, under the brooding water oaks that hung heavy with Spanish moss, and had delivered her pronouncement. As always, Bertrand and Culver Ray had stood close at hand, ready to carry out her edicts.
 

Before her on the grass stood a yellow-haired woman, not of her blood, a woman most men would consider beautiful. She was out of place here. Fate’s hand had deposited her on that lawn, and now it had at last come back to wipe her from it.
 

The old woman fixed her glare on the yellow-haired woman, then finally spoke: “Well, I’ll just tell you what, little miss prim and proper. Mafalda here’s gonna earn me some money and help me, unlike you ever done. I am about tired of your bible thumpin’ bullshit, and these boys been wantin’ to get at your tight little holy ass for a long, long time. Today I’m a shore gonna make them happy.”
 

In the lamplight that ringed the aged and vined veranda, the young woman could see Bertrand and Culver Ray’s leering faces. Culver Ray drank from a bottle and licked his tongue out at her. Bertrand, the big simple one, giggled like a little boy. She felt her hands shaking, but tried with superhuman effort to hide the fear that consumed her.
 

Must stay calm and reason my way out of this. Sometimes she will listen to me if I am careful.
 

“Please, Mrs. Patreaux, I only want what is best for Mafalda.”
 

“You lily-white little bitch, you took my sweet Jacques from me. He hardly ever come back down here to visit his ole mammy once you took him away with you. If it wasn’t for you he’d still be alive. Now Mafalda’s old enough, I’m gonna put her to work here for me, and I’m gonna make sure she never leaves, and you ain’t gonna be around with your high words to get in my way.”
 

Bertrand and Culver Ray were closer, now. Culver Ray took a long drink from the bottle of whiskey and passed it to Bertrand, who giggled like a child and drank. Both men’s eyes were glazed and red in the lamplight.
 

“No,” the younger woman said—perhaps even meant to scream—but the word came out as less than a breath, not even a whisper.

Chapter 21

Corsack left Tiller and moved down through the woods toward the buildings that lay beyond a broad creek: the Patreaux Island funhouse, several smaller structures, and the old woman’s dwelling.
 

Corsack moved cautiously across a suspension bridge that hung over the swamp, and provided a way over to Patreaux Island proper. His mind went back over the series of events that had brought him to this pass, and as he had done a thousand times before, he cursed himself silently for his foolishness.
 

“Zahra, my darling, I am so very sorry,” he whispered to the darkness.
 

He had needed to get his wife into the country, but there was a problem. Corsack, whose real name was Laszlo Abramovich Solokov, was himself in the United States illegally. He had arrived six years before on a freighter smuggling various contraband electronics into the country.
 

His was a working passage. He had pledged to work until he arrived in the U.S., and then he had simply disembarked and faded into the populace. He had assumed the identity of a dead man, Dwayne LeMontaigne Corsack. He had bought the man’s identity—birth certificate, driver’s license, social security card—and simply assumed his name. He had found that in America, if you could offer three types of I.D., almost nobody cared enough to ask any further questions. You were who you said you were.
 

He had quickly discovered the only chink in the armor of his new identity was that he couldn’t convincingly pronounce either the first or middle names of the dead man.
 

“Corsack,” however, he liked. He wasn’t sure about the ethnic origins of the name, it was probably goyisher, but he liked the sound of it, a good strong name, a name that perhaps his wife would not dislike, either.
 

Zahra.
 

Her name tore him into pieces. His wife was near him now, very near. He had suffered long and hard to bring her so close, yet now she seemed farther away than she had when she was still in Chechnya.
 

He had arranged Zahra’s passage in the way that he had arranged his own. She had come over illicitly, on a freighter, with no passport. They had docked in the port of New Orleans. He and others like him had foreseen no trouble. It was only a matter of waiting until they were reunited with their loved ones. The Americans were too obsessed with their airports and the Mexican border to pay any attention to one insignificant railway container on one broken-down old freighter from a far-flung country most Americans had never even heard of, and probably couldn’t point out on a map. It was all arranged in advance, and a simple matter to wait for the crew of the freighter to go ashore, then disembark his wife and the others from the ship. It had all been done before, and everything should have gone forward without difficulty.
 

But other forces had intervened.

Chapter 22

Mafalda sat out by the pool, mulling over the last couple of days. She was thinking about a man named Roland Longville, about his calm, even voice, and his big, strong but gentle hands. And, oh yes, those soft brown eyes of his.
 

Careful, girl, you hardly know this guy.
 

And, yes, he was a cop, or something close to it. She was too sharp not to see it, even if he hadn’t made it obvious by asking all of those questions. Granny and her gang of misfits had probably done something they shouldn’t have—almost certainly had—out on Patreaux Island, and Roland and his friend had been hired to ask questions, she figured. They weren’t the first.
 

But how did Corsack fit into it all? He was a puzzle. He had appeared suddenly at the Blue Bayou a couple of weeks before, had chatted her up and brought her flowers. After a few days the questions had started. Did she have family in the area? Really? Please tell me. She thought he was odd but far too strange to be a policeman. Just another crush, she had thought. She had gently deflected his questions, some of the very same questions Roland had asked her tonight.