Chapter 10
THEY HEADED EAST OUT of town, past Bayou Sauvage and over the Twin Span Bridge, making for the Mississippi line. Chambers concentrated on driving while Pendergast silently read the clipping. Finally, he stirred.
“The body was found in a storage facility,” he said in his lazy drawl. “About three o’clock yesterday morning. The place employed a watchman during the overnight hours, and during his patrols he noticed one of the steel doors wasn’t closed properly—and seemed to be emitting an unpleasant odor.”
“I’ve seen people rent those places for everything from practicing their drums to balling the neighbor’s wife. Keep going.”
“A man was found dead and mutilated within that storage room—possibly vivisected.”
“You mean, cut up while still alive?”
“Perimortem—at the time of death, either right before or after. One arm was amputated.”
“Nice.” Chambers focused once again on his driving. Had this been a day earlier, he’d have been tempted to drive the car over the embankment and into the Mississippi. But driving to a crime scene like this, he was beginning to feel like a human being again instead of a walking corpse.
“That is an impressive swamp, even for Mississippi,” Pendergast said.
They’d just crossed the river, and below them spread an apparently endless swamp filled with water lettuce and alligator weed, punctuated by enormous, ancient cypress and mangrove trees.
Spanish moss hanging from the spreading canopy formed a kind of eternal twilight beneath the massive trunks.
“You never heard of the Grand-Morte Swamp?”
“Ah. The famous Ghost Swamp,” Pendergast said, using its local name.
“So you do know it.”
“I know of it. My family didn’t spend much time east of the Pontchartrain… as a rule.”
East of the Pontchartrain. Sounded like typical old-money family, to go with his upper-class accent.
“Then you at least know it’s the most haunted swamp in the state—and that’s saying something.
Used to be a little town down there called Frenier.
Nothing special, just a bunch of pirogue-paddling, crawfish-eating huckleberries…
and a Creole priestess by the name of Julie Brown.
She cursed the town back in 1921, in the midst of a hurricane.
She went down with the rest of the place, cursing and chanting voodoo songs.
And her body glowed as yellow as the moon, people say, before she sank beneath the wind and waves. ”
“Fascinating. Or perhaps she simply chose to end her own life, rather than let nature’s violence do it for her.”
“What are you talking about?”
“Ingesting match heads laden with phosphorus was a common form of suicide in the 1920s. It tended to give the victim’s intestines a rather ghostly glow—along with ‘smoking-stool syndrome,’ which—”
“I get the picture, thanks.”
A pause. “Have you ever been in there?”
“Me? Hell, no.”
“But you believe in the curse.”
“I didn’t say that.”
“No—you didn’t. So perhaps you’re more like Edith Wharton.”
“Who?”
“A novelist known for her depictions of America’s gilded age. She once said: I don’t believe in ghosts… but I’m afraid of them.” And, settling back in his seat, Pendergast took his gaze away from the window.