Pigeons from Hell | Page 8

his clammy flesh. The gray fog
wrapped wispy tentacles about their feet as they carried their grisly
burden across the lawn.

The Snake's Brother

Again the shadows were lengthening over the pinelands, and again two
men came bumping along the old road in a car with a New England
license plate.
Buckner was driving. Griswell's nerves were too shattered for him to
trust himself at the wheel. He looked gaunt and haggard, and his face
was still pallid. The strain of the day spent at the county-seat was added
to the horror that still rode his soul like the shadow of a black-winged
vulture. He had not slept, had not tasted what he had eaten.
"I told you I'd tell you about the Blassenvilles," said Buckner. "They
were proud folks, haughty, and pretty damn ruthless when they wanted
their way. They didn't treat their slaves as well as the other planters did
- got their ideas in the West Indies, I reckon. There was a streak of
cruelty in them - especially Miss Celia, the last one of the family to
come to these parts. That was long after the slaves had been freed, but
she used to whip her mulatto maid just like she was a slave, the old
folks say. . . . The Negroes said when a Blassenville died, the devil was
always waitin' for him out in the black pines.
"Well, after the Civil War they died off pretty fast, livin' in poverty on
the plantation which was allowed to go to ruin. Finally only four girls
were left, sisters, livin' in the old house and ekin' out a bare livin', with
a few blacks livin' in the old slave huts and workin' the fields on the
share. They kept to themselves, bein' proud, and ashamed of their
poverty. Folks wouldn't see them for months at a time. When they
needed supplies they sent a Negro to town after them.
"But folks knew about it when Miss Celia came to live with them. She
came from somewhere in the West Indies, where the whole family
originally had its roots - a fine, handsome woman, they say, in the early
thirties. But she didn't mix with folks any more than the girls did. She
brought a mulatto maid with her, and the Blassenville cruelty cropped
out in her treatment of this maid. I knew an old man years ago, who
swore he saw Miss Celia tie this girl up to a tree, stark naked, and whip
her with a horsewhip. Nobody was surprised when she disappeared.
Everybody figured she'd run away, of course.

"Well, one day in the spring of 1890 Miss Elizabeth, the youngest girl,
came in to town for the first time in maybe a year. She came after
supplies. Said the blacks had all left the place. Talked a little more, too,
a bit wild. Said Miss Celia had gone, without leaving any word. Said
her sisters thought she'd gone back to the West Indies, but she believed
her aunt was still in the house. She didn't say what she meant. Just got
her supplies and pulled out for the Manor.
"A month went past, and a black came into town and said that Miss
Elizabeth was livin' at the Manor alone. Said her three sisters weren't
there any more, that they'd left one by one without givin' any word or
explanation. She didn't know where they'd gone, and was afraid to stay
there alone, but didn't know where else to go. She'd never known
anything but the Manor, and had neither relatives nor friends. But she
was in mortal terror of something. The black said she locked herself in
her room at night and kept candles burnin' all night. . . .
"It was a stormy spring night when Miss Elizabeth came tearin' into
town on the one horse she owned, nearly dead from fright. She fell
from her horse in the square; when she could talk she said she'd found a
secret room in the Manor that had been forgotten for a hundred years.
And she said that there she found her three sisters, dead, and hangin' by
their necks from the ceilin'. She said something chased her and nearly
brained her with an ax as she ran out the front door, but somehow she
got to the horse and got away. She was nearly crazy with fear, and
didn't know what it was that chased her - said it looked like a woman
with a yellow face.
"About a hundred men rode out there, right away. They searched the
house from top to bottom, but they didn't find any secret room, or the
remains of the sisters. But they did find a hatchet stickin' in the
doorjamb downstairs, with some of Miss