The Amulet

  And when she returned to the kitchen a few moments later, Audrey no longer bore the slight burden of the year-old Ralph Taylor.

  Chapter 54

  Mrs. Taylor pulled up into the driveway of her home, a little flurried; she had promised Audrey that she could leave by five-forty-five, and it was well past that time now. Audrey was a good girl, and Mrs. Taylor trusted her with the children, so she liked to treat Audrey as well as possible. It wasn’t the girl’s fault, after all, that her fa­ther was a killer (even though Graham had got him off for lack of evidence), and so long as the man didn’t come around along with his daughter, everything was all right.

  There were four great bags of groceries in the backseat of the car; she ought not to have gone to the store right at five-thirty, for that was when all the women from the munitions plant went as well, and there were great lines at the check-out counters. Mrs. Taylor got out of the car, and called toward the kitchen window, “Audrey! You come on out here! I need some help!”

  Mrs. Taylor opened the back door of the car, and lifted one of the heavier bags into her arms, and turned toward the house. Audrey had not come out so Mrs. Taylor called again. “Audrey!” she cried, and walked to the back door. She supposed that the girl was in the far part of the house, perhaps with the baby in his room. She tried to pull open the latticed door, but found to her surprise that it was latched on the inside.

  “Audrey!” she called again. “Come unhook the door! This bag is heavy, girl!” She shifted the weight in her arms and waited a moment; it was then that she heard clearly, for the first time, the terrible racket that the wash­ing machine was making, rocking from side to side as if with a greatly unbalanced load of heavy clothing, or rugs, even.

  Mrs. Taylor stamped her foot with impatience. What had become of that girl? She had hooked the back door, she was letting the washing machine get away from her—and Mrs. Taylor had specifically warned her about the machine—and for all she knew, Audrey might even have left the dishes from dinner! She feared for a moment that Audrey might have gone off just at five-forty-five, locking the two children inside, but reassured herself that Audrey, young though she was, was much more responsible than that, and would never leave the two children alone for a minute.

  Again Mrs. Taylor shifted her weight, and listened with some little alarm to the violent rumblings from the washing machine on the porch inside. She glanced down toward the kitchen window, to see if she could catch sight of Audrey inside; but what she saw frightened her severely. She screamed loudly, and threw down the bag of groceries, so that cartons of milk and eggs broke open, and spilled out onto the back steps. The washing machine had overflowed and water was pouring underneath the latticework and onto the plants that bordered the house; but the suds from the machine were red—red like blood.

  Mrs. Taylor flew down the steps, slipping in the spilled liquid and kicking cans out of her way, and ran over to the side of the house. She cupped her hands beneath the liquid. It was blood, blood mixed with soap. Again she screamed, and frantically attempted to wipe it away on her dress.

  Inside the house, Audrey was humming soft and low in the kitchen. Mrs. Taylor’s calls were plainly to be heard, and the child Graham looked up at Audrey inquisitively, wondering why she did not respond.

  Audrey took up a large butcher knife from the rack of drying dishes by the sink, and walked with it out onto the back porch. There the washing machine was rocking vio­lently from side to side, almost shaking off its concrete-block foundation; the crimson suds flowed in lugubrious pulses from underneath the lid. There was a great slippery pool of dyed water in the middle of the porch, through which Audrey had to go to get to the back door.

  But the thin film of soap on top of the pool caused the young black girl to slip as she was reaching for the latch on the back door, and she fell backward against a shelf on the wall. The radio dropped to the floor and smashed open.

  Audrey lay full-length in the pool of blood and soapy water. Her slick shoe heels would not catch against the painted floor, and she could not immediately get up. She rolled over on her stomach and was raising herself on all fours, when she inadvertently placed her hand swiftly down on the blade of the butcher knife. Her wrist was sliced open, and the blood began to flow prodigiously from the wound. Audrey scurried to raise herself, and unthinkingly grabbed hold of the electrical cord of the radio to pull herself up with, but this had been pulled from the appliance, and was live with electricity. She was stunned into unconsciousness, and in only a couple of minutes had bled herself beyond the hope of recovery.

  Mrs. Taylor went again to the back steps and began to pound on the door. Now more blood—thicker, darker, less diluted with water—began to flow out over the edges of the porch. Again Mrs. Taylor set up a round of screams, and ran around the other side of the house. She was on her way to the front door, but stopped at the kitchen window and peered inside. There, she could see her three-year-old son little Graham playing with a great bloody butcher knife, trying to carve up one of his wooden blocks.

  Hysterically, his mother screamed at him, “Graham, you put that thing down ’fore you cut yourself! You hear me! You put it down!!”

  Chapter 55

  Sarah did fix Jo her dinner that night, but the two women, sitting across from one another at the tiny break­fast table in the kitchen, spoke hardly a word. And those few words that did pass between them had nothing to do with the amulet or the air conditioner. Sarah cleared the table, and said, “I’m going over to Becca’s now. We’re gone look through some old catalogues, I think.”

  Jo sat very still and said nothing, but she glowered a monstrous frown, and her eyes disappeared into their sockets.

  Sarah shrugged and walked out the door without an­other word. Why mollify a woman who had, in effect, murdered a dozen people?

  Sarah and Becca went through seven years’ of Mont­gomery Ward’s and Sears’ catalogues, but found no item that resembled the amulet. Becca was not on the mailing list of the wholesale jewelry houses in Mobile, and had none of those books.

  Sarah sighed when she closed the cover of the last and oldest catalogue, “I didn’t think we’d find it anyway. The first time Jo talked about it, she said her cousin gave it to her just years and years ago, and I think she made it all up about the Montgomery Ward catalogue, trying to confuse me.”

  “Well,” said Sarah, “what do we do now?”

  Becca shrugged and looked away. Sarah could tell that her friend was thinking of something, but she did not prod.

  “I tell you what,” said Becca after a few moments, in a low, cautious voice, “I think we’re gone try the wee-gee board.” Sarah started to protest; she knew how much Becca feared the thing. But Becca held up her hand, and shook her head. “It’s not gone be as bad as all that. Be­sides, this whole town has had bad luck, and we ought to do what we can to stop it. We’re just gone be real careful, that’s all . . .”

  “How do we do that?” asked Sarah curiously.

  Becca didn’t know, and therefore didn’t answer; but she went to the closet and brought down the set. They placed the board between them on the kitchen table, and Becca took the suddenly inspired precaution of sprinkling the planchette with holy water taken from a bottle in the pan­try placed next to the vanilla extract.

  “Shouldn’t we turn down the lights? Or maybe we should do it in the living room or something,” suggested Sarah, who thought that Becca’s brightly lighted—even garish—kitchen provided insufficient atmosphere.

  Becca shook her head. “Don’t need it, don’t want it. Spirits come crowding down thick enough as it is. Don’t want to draw ’em in here with setting the place up spooky and all. And I wouldn’t do this if Margaret was here, but she isn’t. She’s too young to fool around with this kind of thing. I wouldn’t want nothing to happen to Margaret ’cause of a wee-gee board.”

  “How do we do it?” asked Sarah, a little impatiently. She didn’t believe it would work, but then, she didn’t be­lieve in the a
mulet either.

  Becca instructed Sarah to place two fingers of one hand on the planchette, while she did the same. “Now we ask it a question, just a little everyday something, something we don’t care about. Then we just sit, and this thing starts moving around, pointing at letters and numbers and so on, and that’s the answer to the question. Sort of. Sometimes. You write down what the thing points to, to keep a rec­ord, ’cause spirits don’t spell remarkable. You got to ask things you don’t care about first, so that it’s got time to know what you’re like, and to gather the spirits ’round the board, I guess. ’Cause they’re out there, just waiting for a chance to say something to us. Sometimes they don’t answer the questions that you’re asking, and they just start talking to you, and that’s when you got to stop it, right then and there, ’cause if you don’t, you gone find out things you don’t want to know.”

  Sarah nodded, and Becca continued, for in dealing with so dangerous a device as the Ouija board, too much in­struction was barely enough to protect against the evil spirits that were able to speak through the little pointed wooden tongue that moved about on the brightly painted board. “You not supposed to laugh, but I don’t hardly need to say that, ’cause after the first five minutes, don’t nobody laugh no more. Sometimes it works, sometimes it don’t. When it don’t, you cain’t make it work. And you don’t need to try to push the thing, ’cause it just goes by itself. When I was first doing it, I used to try to push it—just a little—to send it where I wanted it to go, and I couldn’t do it. I’d send it off to the H and it would head right for the M, and it spelled out M-I-K-E, even though I didn’t want it to. And then I went and married the man, and that was the worst luck that I ever did have in the whole of my life! So you don’t have to push it.”

  Sarah shuddered. She had never done this before, and she couldn’t conceive that the strange little board before her, with the two crescents of alphabetic letters, the row of numbers, the Yes and the No, and the small wooden triangle were anything but a gift for a child born on Hal­loween. It certainly wasn’t as dangerous- or evil-looking as the Pine Cone rifles that passed before her on the assem­bly line every day.

  “I’m ready then,” said Sarah. “What do we ask it first?”

  “Well,” replied Becca, “like I said, something that don’t matter. Like, ‘What day of the week will my next date be on?’”

  Sarah laughed, but Becca held up a warning finger. “Don’t giggle now. This is serious, or we not gone find out anything, and we gone get the bad luck to boot. Now you look here, this board’s special, ’cause it’s got the days of the week on it, up there at the top, and most of ’em don’t. I still wish you hadn’t given me this thing. Now, Sarah, we got to be serious.”

  Becca dropped her hands into her lap, and closed her eyes briefly; when she opened them again, her face was blank and solemn. She looked like a snapshot of herself taken at a bad moment. This made Sarah even more jittery but she closed her eyes and in a few moments, when she had calmed a little, she opened them again.

  Becca stared vacantly at the buttons on the front of Sarah’s blouse, and she said, “When will I have my next date?”

  The two women raised their hands out of their laps, and placed two fingers each on the planchette. It stood still a moment, and then moved irresolutely among the letters of the alphabet. In a few seconds, it had rested on the circle which denoted Yes.

  Sarah thought that this made no sense, for the planchette ought to have headed for one of the days of the week. Becca was unperturbed. “What night of the week will I have my next date?”

  Their fingers, which had been lifted from the planchette when it came to rest, they dropped down again, and the wooden piece struggled, this time stopping above the number 4.

  “That’s next Saturday,” said Becca when she lifted her fingers. “Saturday’s the fourth.”

  “Have you got a date then?”

  “Don’t know yet for sure. Jimmy Mack Jones was talking to me yesterday about something next Saturday night, but he didn’t made no commitment, really, so I don’t really know yet for sure. Wrestling in Opp or some­thing like that. I’ll see him tomorrow, and then I’ll find out.”

  Sarah was impressed, but she did not comment for fear of breaking the spell. Three more questions were asked, of an equally innocuous nature, and the Ouija board an­swered in either an ambiguous or senseless manner. Becca wasn’t sure that they were getting through.

  “We gone try one more time, and if it don’t work, this thing goes back up in the closet for a good long while. All right then, here’s the question: ‘What’s Margaret doing right now?’ ”

  The two women placed their fingers on the planchette, and slowly it moved from one corner of the board di­rectly toward the letters on the far side. It stopped dead on the letter M and then moved suddenly again to the letter L next to it.

  Sarah was very much surprised, for before the planchette had seemed to waver all the while, to be unsure of itself, but now there was no question but that M and L were the letters intended. It was as if they had only been playing around before, but now that the board had been threatened with its removal, the planchette moved in earnest.

  “M-L,” said Becca, after a moment. “That’s Mary-Louise, and that’s where Margaret is tonight.”

  The planchette moved suddenly to the other end of the board, pulling their fingers across so suddenly the muscles knotted in Sarah’s upper arm with the strain of maintain­ing so light a touch on the wood. N, then across to E, then to L—and Sarah suddenly removed her fingers.

  Becca glanced at her reproachfully. “It was gone write out Nelson.”

  “I know,” whispered Sarah, and trembled. She had not wanted to see the board spell it out with such hideous ease. She knew that none of the movement in the planchette was of her volition, and she was frightened.

  “Do you know about the amulet?” Becca asked sharply, and in so matter-of-fact a tone of voice that Sarah thought the question was intended for her. Their fingers were on the planchette, which trembled slightly and then moved first to the figure 1 and then to 6, and then stopped. Sarah pushed, but it would not move.

  “Sixteen,” said Becca. “I think it means twelve, twelve people killed so far. Is that what you mean?” said Becca, again in the matter-of-fact voice. Once again the plan­chette moved; Sarah tried to push it toward the letters, away from the Yes, but it moved only one figure over, to the 7, paused, then 2, danced a little circle and returned to the 2, then over to 1, and then—though Sarah was desperate to remove her fingers altogether—the plan­chette dived straight again to the 2, moved away, and then returned resolutely to the same figure. Sarah trem­bled as she recorded the figures on the back of an en­velope: 7 2 2 1 2 2.

  “They add up to sixteen,” said Becca, and Sarah nodded reluctantly.

  “The seven is the Coppages,” said Sarah.

  Becca nodded thoughtfully. “And the first two is the Shirleys and then the Simses and then poor ol’ Miz Weaver. But they was two more two’s, and there’s not nobody else dead.”

  Sarah shivered violently. “Nobody we know of. Becca, you think this means there’s four people dead we don’t even know about yet?”

  Becca shook her head. “We would have heard, don’t you think? Pine Cone’s not that big, you cain’t just go and cover up four people being dead, even when they been dying like they have this week. As it is, there’s bodies just right in the streets, seems like.”

  “Can we ask it anything else?”

  “Sure. That’s why we’re here. If there’s gone be bad luck, we already brought it down, so we might as well find out what we can.”

  “Ask ’em if that was right. There’re really sixteen peo­ple dead because of the amulet.”

  Becca did so, and immediately the planchette began the sequence again, but in reverse: 2 2 1 2 2 7. Sarah lifted her fingers so quickly that the planchette skidded across the board.

  “That answers the question,” said Becca with a li
ttle irritation. “You ought not be so jumpy, Sarah. Don’t want ’em to start lying to us.”

  “They lie?” She was almost hopeful.

  Becca shrugged. “Who knows what they do? I don’t like this, but we’re doing it, and we might as well do it right.”

  Sarah was surprised and troubled by Becca’s hardness in all of this.

  “Ask ’em,” said Sarah, and paused, “ask ’em where it came from.”

  The planchette didn’t wait for Becca to put the ques­tion: it moved quickly, but with a certain lurch it had not had before, and spelled out D E N I J O Z A F A N A N A N A N, and looked to be stuck between the A and the N just below it, until the two women, puzzled and trou­bled, raised their fingers.

  “I tell you what it looks like,” said Becca. “It looks like Dean and Josephine and somebody getting stran­gled.”

  Sarah sighed heavily, not that there wasn’t more spe­cific information, but that all that she had feared was being confirmed. And now she had begun to fear this board as well.