to be the only thing nearby when the storm somehow opened a random portal that some bug just happened to accidentally poke its way through?
The inspector quietly checked Galvez’s progress. The man was barely halfway through the notebook. Looking about, Legrasse then took note of a section of the dead man’s leg, where the pants were up far enough to reveal flesh above the sock line. Round red welts like sucker wounds appeared to circle the victim’s leg.
Legrasse wondered at it all, at what the searchers could have been after. What was the point, he mused, of coming night after night, but never taking anything, never actually doing anything—anything. Why?
Absently smacking his hand with the butt-end of the cane, the inspector took a closer note of the carvings etched into its length. There was nothing remarkable about them, although he did notice they seemed somewhat fresh. Still, they seemed of no great importance. Indeed, his mind left them instantly as he noticed Galvez coming to the end of the notebook. Tossing the cane back to the Spaniard, Legrasse turned in his small clear space in the traps, studying. Wondering.
“Hey, John,” called Galvez, “anything you want me to do while you stare off into space at the tax-payers’ expense?”
“It’s your investigation,” replied Legrasse absently. “Be creative.”
The lieutenant nodded, looking for a direction in which to head. Legrasse looked down at the traps, wondering about them again.
He had been puzzled about them since he had arrived. So far all he had learned had only added to his puzzlement. He still could not believe Claro had set out all the traps. Their placement was so finely meshed, so intricate. And the patterns he had noticed, swirls and star-shapes, intersecting each other over and over throughout the main room—
Why, wondered Legrasse. Why would he do it?
The traps had not been working, the inspector remembered. Yet Claro had gotten more and more of them, ultimately painting himself into the corner, so to speak, with them.
Across the room, Galvez picked the next spot where he would knock a new hole in the traps so that he could move toward the back rooms. Sealed off as they were, none of them had been investigated yet. To the lieutenant’s way of thinking, it was high time they were opened.
Ignoring Galvez’s actions, Legrasse concentrated on the traps. There was something he was not seeing, something that was passing him by. He stared down at the floor again, trying to look at everything once more from the beginning, struggling to gain a new perspective.
The traps were everywhere. In tight, sophisticated patterns. Why? How could Claro have managed it, with only two hands? It did not seem possible. And, even if it were, why had he done so?
Galvez spotted the point where he could place his next footfall without disturbing too many of the traps.
Of course, he thought, the traps aren’t so tight everywhere. Fairly sparse back by the door when you first came in. And where the patterns ran up against one another. Indeed, that was where Galvez had been making his strikes, in the freer areas between the patterns.
Convenient, whispered a voice from the back of Legrasse’s mind. He caught the tone, realizing instantly his subconscious was trying to tell him something.
The footfalls had been conveniently made, slivers of space left between each of the patterns, just right for a human of average height, spaced just so, placed directly where the average human eye would see them, would pride itself on being able to take advantage of them.
Galvez’s arm stretched out, positioning the cane for its next strike. And, as it did so, the inspector’s memory superimposed another image on the scene. He thought back to voodoo rituals he had witnessed, to the foul priest he and his men had stopped only months earlier, all of them, scratching patterns in the sand or the mud, making their magic gestures with their totem sticks—
“I’m going to take a look in the back rooms.”
The lieutenant pulled his hand back, even as Legrasse’s mind raced. What if Claro had not set the traps, or even if he had, if after his death, something else had moved them? Changed their positions, moved them into patterns…
Galvez’s hand began to descend—
Into the same patterns it carved into Claro’s cane, the cane left at the front door, where the traps were not so thickly spread, so that one could enter, and pick up the cane!
“No!”
Legrasse screamed at Galvez, even as he threw himself at the lieutenant. The lieutenant shouted as well, raising his free hand in response, trying to bring up the one wielding the cane, but it was too late. Both men went down painfully, rolling over and over in the flesh-tearing maze.
* * * *
Most of their pains had long subsided, but Galvez was still not certain of Legrasse’s reasons. Yes, he understood about the traps being laid out in the same patterns as those on the cane. He understood about the interconnected manner of most magics, and how, yes, perhaps he had been maneuvered into striking each of the patterns in turn with what could very well be thought of as a wand. And, yes again, considering the detail in which Claro had written in his journal, the fact he did not mention patterning the traps was an odd omission. Still…
“You could have just told me not to hit the traps again,” he muttered, his dignity still as sore as his flesh.
Legrasse sighed. His hands and legs and arms and face had been snapped and gouged in just as many places as had Galvez. He had lost as much blood, had pulled one of the crushing things off his nose and one off an ear. He did not answer the lieutenant, however. There was no point.
As they stood on the edge of the swamp, watching the old house burn, he did not see where it mattered. When the conflagration was finished, the officers waiting nearby would dynamite the spring Claro had written of, the one they had found with so many sinister gouges roping up through the mud surrounding it. Afterward, the entire area would be salted, then forgotten.
Holding the cane for a moment longer, Legrasse wondered if what he had seen in his mind were even possible. Could the blind lengths have carved the patterns, planted the wand, arranged the room to be discovered just so, waiting for some unsuspecting wretches to trigger the ritual?
And to what end?
“Just to take advantage of the fact that a storm somehow opened a random portal that some bug just happened to accidentally poke its way through?”
At that point, Legrasse did not care if he were right or not. Better sore ribs and a swollen ear than some foul horror flopping about loose. One poor dead bastard was enough.
But, maybe Claro was not the only one that had gotten too near the edge. The inspector wondered if, perhaps, he too might not have seen more than he could bear at this point. Maybe he was growing overly paranoid over the unspeakables he had encountered. Perhaps he was weakening, assigning them too much credit, too much ability. But then, how could one ascribe such beings with too much ability?
He might’ve been wrong, he snorted, but that didn’t mean it wasn’t possible.
Muttering a curse in Hector Claro’s honor, Legrasse threw the cane as hard as he could into the blazing cremation before him. Then he turned and walked back toward the police wagon parked well back from the swamp and the burning house.
