All Souls' Rising Read Online Free PDF Page B

into that same deep-throated barking as before.
    No, it was not fever, the doctor thought with a slight inward smile. Merely an agitation of the nerves. He got up and found his trousers on the peg and put them on. Barefoot and bare-chested, he went out to the gallery. A breeze was shivering the cane mats that closed either end of the long porch. In the exhilaration of his escape from the nightmare, the doctor felt preternaturally sensitive; he could have counted the hairs on his chest when the breeze lifted them, or numbered the splinters on the post when he placed his palm against it. He was not leaning for support, but only caressing the wood.
    Behind the house the dog stopped barking and he heard the scratching of its claws against the dirt as it began to run and then the muted smash of its body against the heavy door. There was something else. He went down the two steps from the gallery and started across the compound, toward the ragged line of trees that scattered away from the denser hedging of the entrance allée . His feet were tender; he could feel the powdered dust caking up between his toes, and whenever he stepped on a pebble, he winced a little. By the time he had reached the trees his eyes had adjusted to the starlight. Beyond them the land dipped gently down and rose farther on and he could see one field after another checkered by the tight shrubbery of citrus trees that divided them, and he saw the starlight shining on the narrow channels that brought the water in. Where the cultivation ended the land rose sharply up and up and was a mountain, and he could not have measured the height of it if not for the stippled patterns of stars that began to appear at its limit. That was where the drumming came from, one pattern so low he could not really hear it, only feel a dim vibration of the small bones in his ears, and another drum sounding higher, beaten intermittently, like a voice calling to someone and waiting for answer and calling again. Surely it would have awakened any dreamer. The doctor’s hands were curled over the prickly twigs of the two trees he had stopped between. His heart and lungs were working powerfully and there was a potent sense of health and vigor that seemed to rise through the soles of his bare feet and work through every vital part of him. He stood still there for quite a time and then began to circle around the edges of the compound.
    The pole still lay where it had been, but every part of the body had been removed and the nails also had been pulled out. Doctor Hébert stepped over it and walked back toward the grand’case . Arnaud was sitting on the gallery, dandling his cane, balancing it and letting it drop from the vertical and catching the ornate pommel just before it tilted out of his reach. The reddened point of his cheroot glowed and faded and swept down to his knee. The doctor wondered, as he came up, if he might have failed to notice his host there when he first left the house.
    “You are wandering,” Arnaud said. He rested the cane against his outstretched leg.
    The doctor walked up the steps and stood beside him. “Something woke me,” he said. “A silence. The dog stopped barking.”
    “That’s how it is,” Arnaud said. He held a bottle up to the doctor, who swallowed from it, tasting a grapy thickness of sticks and stems and then the brilliant heat of eau-de-vie .
    “The dog,” the doctor said. “That is an animal you have there. Do you always keep him penned?”
    “It’s necessary,” Arnaud said. “I trained him for the maréchaussée . He only understands killing, this dog. There is a band of maroons in the area, very troublesome.”
    “There?” Doctor Hébert said, swinging his shoulders toward where the pitch-black of the mountain interrupted the spangled blue-black of the sky. The movement of the deeper drum still trembled at the limit of his hearing. He noticed the shape of the mountain’s dark to be vaguely reminiscent of a hog’s head.
    Arnaud