PART IX INTO THE DARKNESS
PART IX
INTO THE DARKNESS
The whipping post. The lynching tree. The wagon wheel. They were the stories of slavery, an inheritance of fear and dread . . .
Texas and Louisiana
Friday, 17 October
Waiting for a day and two nights helped us in another very important way.
It gave me time to do a whole bunch of preparations.
I went about them in my usual way, methodically and precisely, even though my face was all swollen and busted up and my two broken fingers ached in their splints.
I checked in on my foster parents. They were safe and in hiding.
I also called Heidi. She was safe, too, but also pissed as hell and she said so in very colourful language. She demanded to help, so I got her to handle one element of my preparations.
Then Friday came and once again Audrey and I drove from Texas into Louisiana.
At first, we drove in separate cars—Audrey in the Kombi, me in a white GMC Savana van that I’d borrowed from the Houston Four Seasons Hotel.
After making a couple of stops, I left the nice Savana at a boat ramp on the Texas side of the Sabine River near Orange and got into Audrey’s much older van.
From there we drove together across the high concrete bridge that spanned the river and entered Louisiana.
Since we couldn’t go to Dead Man’s Creek via Victorville—not an option—we went through Hackberry, way to the southeast. It meant crossing the vast bayou to the south of the Kingman property, but it was the only way to get back to Dead Man’s Creek without being seen.
In Hackberry, dressed as tourists, we rented a houseboat that came with a little swamp-runner.
A few hours later, as the sun set on the horizon, we were in the swamp-runner, both dressed in black and speeding through the bogs and alleys of the swamp at forty miles an hour, approaching the southern outlet of the Acheron River.
Night had fallen by the time I guided the swamp-runner up the river.
In the sixteen days since LaToya Martyn’s baby had been found, the water level had subsided considerably.
The beached house now lay fully exposed on a muddy bank, tilted on its side. The formerly fast-flowing waters of the river no longer passed through it. Now the river flowed gently around the side-turned house on its way to the bayou.
Across the river from the house we saw Dead Man’s Creek.
It opened before us, dark and stinking, even more menacing at night than it had been in daylight.
The Kingmans’ rehearsal wedding dinner at their estate would be starting. Their attention would be elsewhere.
A full moon was rising and it gave off just enough light for us to see by.
This was good. I didn’t want us using flashlights that might betray our presence.
In the moonlight, the drooping branches of the trees that framed the creek looked like the claws of giant creatures hiding its secrets.
Its muddy banks were steep. The water channel running out of it was now a trickle.
‘We go on foot from here,’ I said.
And so for the second time, we ventured up Dead Man’s Creek.
Passing a few alligators, we came to Crazy Eli Gage’s encampment, with its filthy barge and Confederate flag . . .
. . . only this time we passed it and kept going.
The creek twisted and turned, bending upward, climbing toward the wall of low forested hills that guarded the Kingman estate.
The mud made slurping suction noises with our every step.
The creek bed narrowed as we climbed—a deep scar in the landscape—until it was barely eight feet wide, its high dirt walls crowding us on both sides.
Thick stands of pine trees now rose above the muddy rim, blocking out the moonlight, making it difficult to see.
Then about half a mile beyond Crazy Eli’s camp, well inside the forest, we turned a final bend and stopped.
We could go no further.
A high modern fence cut across our path, disappearing into the forest on either side of the creek bed.
To account for the creek, a circular metal grille had been built into the fence.
Water trickled out through its vertical and horizontal bars.
The gaps between the bars, I saw, were not wide enough for a person to fit through.
But a doll would fit.
‘This must be the edge of the Kingman property,’ Audrey said.
‘Well, we didn’t come this far just to come this far,’ I said, pulling my compact blowtorch from my backpack.
Its blue flame sizzled to life.
I aimed it at the bars and began cutting.
After ten minutes, I’d opened a gap wide enough for us to wriggle through.
We squeezed through and ventured further up the winding creek.
Fifty yards later, we came to a second inner barrier: a nine-foot-high chain-link fence.
A broad bog ran like a moat on our side of it and it was inhabited by a few mid-sized alligators, ten-footers.
Peering beyond the bog, I spotted a segment of the fence down near the ground where the uniformity of its links was broken.
The chain-links there, I saw, had recently been welded back into place.
Repaired by someone.
Fixed.
And suddenly an image of LaToya Martyn sprang into my mind.
The hurricane rages.
LaToya carries her dead baby encased in the doll affixed to the wooden cross.
The doll on which she has scrawled the image of the -trident-shaped Tree of Fear.
I recall LaToya was dyslexic in high school. Maybe she drew the tree on the doll because, in her haste, scribbling words on it was too difficult.
The doll will act as armour for her dead child’s body, to protect it from being eaten by gators or swamp critters. The cross will keep it afloat.
LaToya crawls through a gap she has made low in the chain-link fence. Is it a gap she’s been slowly widening over weeks or months?
In the howling wind and rain of the hurricane, the bog is a mess of waves and swaying tree branches. The gators huddle beneath the trees.
LaToya sloshes past them.
Comes to the raging stream pouring through the grille that leads to Dead Man’s Creek.
She can’t get through this grille.
Its thick metal bars cannot be bent or twisted like the wires of the chain-link fence.
But her baby in the doll can fit through.
The raging torrent presses LaToya against the grille.
She slides the doll with her dead child in it through a gap between the bars and watches it float away on its cross, down the fast-flowing waters of Dead Man’s Creek toward the Acheron River.
And suddenly I am overwhelmed by LaToya Martyn’s courage.
She waded through an alligator-infested bog and raging floodwaters to set her daughter’s body free.
To let someone know about her existence.
Someone.
Anyone.
Me.
I wonder if LaToya was crying as she did this, heartbroken at the loss of her child, despairing at her status as the property of another human being, wondering how her life had come to this.
I’m generally not prone to anger, but this made me angry.
‘We have to press on,’ I said to Audrey.
After wading past the wary alligators in the bog, I cut through the repaired section of the chain-link fence and we crawled through it, going in where LaToya had come out.
More trees, moonlight through the branches.
At length we came to a concrete storm culvert that cut through the dense jungle.
A broad grey-walled trench about eight feet deep, I guessed it had been built sometime in the last twenty or thirty years. The concrete was sturdy and thick, and water trickled down the drain’s narrow central groove, flowing away into the darkness toward Dead Man’s Creek.
Climbing out of this new culvert, we skirted an older one.
A much older one.
This storm trench’s walls were made of rotting, crumbling -timber, old railway sleepers by the look of them.
It was about ten feet deep and covered by a dense canopy of vines and tree branches, turning it into a long cave of sorts, with narrow openings at each end.
Its wooden walls were caked in years of accumulated mud, and over the decades they’d been gradually pushed apart and twisted by encroaching roots. No wonder the Kingmans had built the new storm drain.
The base of the old trench was filled with foul-smelling standing water and from it I heard a deep guttural grunting.
I risked turning on my flashlight to see what had—
An enormous alligator looked up at me from the pool.
Christ, it was huge.
Eighteen feet, easy.
Cyrus Barbin’s voice echoed in my head.
‘Saw the bad ones thrown to Goliath in the old storm drain.’
I gulped.
The old storm drain.
Could this gator be ‘Goliath’? Big gators could live to forty or fifty years of age and this one was huge. Did Cyrus, in his youth, see disobedient slaves thrown into this trench to be devoured by the monstrous creature?
I flicked off my flashlight, moved on.
Climbing further up the wooded slope, the ground became firmer beneath our feet and the trees began to clear.
I saw open space beyond the treeline up ahead and quickened my pace.
‘Sam,’ Audrey whispered, struggling to keep up. ‘Wait. Slow down.’
I came to the edge of the tree line and looked out.
‘Fuck me,’ I breathed. ‘Fucking hell.’
THE KINGMAN COMPOUND
I beheld a grove, a glen of some kind.
It was a wide space—a lawn and a lake—open to the sky but bordered by thick forest on two sides, the east and the south.
The silver light of the moon reflected off the lake.
In any other setting, it would have been magical.
On the far northern side were farm structures: barns, lofts, shacks, a water tower and a livestock truck.
I recalled Bill Brewster’s story.
I saw a cattle transport leave Victorville—I mean, this was a big truck normally used to move a dozen bulls and cows—but I could just make out through the slats that it had people inside it.
On the fourth side of the glen, the western side, a high rocky hill bounded the space.
It was tall, dark, jagged and cruel.
An absolutely enormous arch-shaped doorway was cut into the base of this hill and from that doorway stretched a long stone stage that extended out into the lake, just above its surface.
The doorway must have been fifty feet tall. It looked -ornamental, gothic, like the entry to a medieval church.