custom, played endless games of cards at it well into each night. This evening would prove to be no exception.
Eli prepared a dinner from their day’s meager catch, supplemented with coleslaw and his special hushpuppies. Afterward, while he washed and dried the dinner dishes, the four men settled into their nightly poker session. Larrigan, who was accustomed to being the best at almost everything he undertook, was more than a little galled that Taggart generally won these games. This in spite of having one arm and a mind dulled by alcohol.
After the first couple of hands had gone Taggart’s way, Larrigan impatiently leaned across the table and said, “Alright, Taggart, let’s hear it. What’s the story on that old house?”
The guide looked up slowly and focused his bloodshot eyes on the journalist. For several moments he said nothing. Droplets of sweat rolled down his seamed and leathery face. His tiny, red-rimmed eyes held both fear and anger in their dark depths. They remained fixed on Larrigan in a steady gaze. Except for the creaking of the fan above, the room suddenly had become almost silent.
Eventually, Larrigan broke off the stare-down by glancing at old Eli. The man was staring at the journalist, frozen in the act of drying the last dish. His eyes seemed enormously wide, their whiteness a perfect match for the snowy tufts that fringed his ears. He stared at Larrigan in unabridged fear. But fear of what? Larrigan was compelled to know.
“Well, Eli,” he said. “What about you? What do you know about the legend of The Devil’s Creek?”
The old man moved at last. His ebony hands set the dish gently on the drain board. “Ah gots to be gwine home. Raht now!” He hurried to the door and disappeared into the night. A few moments later they heard the sound of his ancient outboard cough to life. Its steady puttering eventually vanished into the distance.
“Well, dammit, if no one is going to tell me, I suppose I’ll just have to go back up there and look around myself,” Larrigan said.
This provoked a response from Taggart. He sat back heavily in his chair and fumbled in his shirt pocket for another cigarette.
“No need to be doin’ that, Larrigan,” he said in weary resignation. “Ah’ll tell you what yore so all-fired anxious to know.”
A smug smile settled on Larrigan’s face. “Now we’re getting somewhere. Regale us with the ghost stories that frighten you superstitious yokels.”
Taggart fixed Larrigan with a sullen stare. “Look, friend, yore a guest here, and I want yore stay to be a good ’un; but you ain’t got to make fun of our local beliefs.”
“Sorry, Taggart. I’ll try to contain my skepticism,” Larrigan said dryly with the cynicism of too many years as an investigative reporter.
“I want y’all to unnerstand sumthin’,” Taggart said with a sweeping glance that included all three of the other men. “This here ain’t a good thing to be talkin’ ’bout. But ’cause this here fella won’t give it a rest,” he nodded at Larrigan, “and because y’all are payin’ customers, and good ’uns at that, I’ll tell ya’ what it is yore all damn fools enough to wanna hear.”
He took a deep drag on his cigarette and chased it with a pull directly from the bottle of whiskey. “That ol’ house” he said, “was built more than a hunnert years ago by some feller who come over here from Europe. He had been some kind’a count or earl or somethin’ fancy, and had him some money. He bought a coupla’ thousand acres for fitty cent apiece with the idea of drainin’ the swamp, harvestin’ the cypress trees, and farmin’ the land. A’fore he could get started, though, he come down with the Fever. He knowed he was passin’ on, so he called his twin sons to his bedside.
“Now the ol’ man, he loved both them boys. But according to their European ways, only one of ’em could inherit the property. Poor ol’ feller must have suffered a mite over that decision. Finally, though, he chose one of them boys over t’other.
“That other boy didn’t take kindly to that decision at all. He flew into a rage. While in that state, he kilt the ol’ man and his brother, and stole the inheritance. When he come to his senses again, and realized what it was he done, he suffered a torment as damnable as Hell itself.”
“My word! Ghastly tale, don’t you think, Larrigan?” Smythe-Thomas said, interrupting the guide.
Larrigan didn’t even bother to look at the Major. He was watching Taggart, who had begun to pale with apparent fear and was sweating even more profusely than previously. “Go on, Taggart, finish the story,” he said. His lifelong contempt for the occult had been stimulated, and he wanted more.
“Wahl,” the guide said in his heavy drawl, “at last the painful memory of what he done become too great for that thar’ young feller; and he resorted to black magic to find relief. In the library of that ol’ house there were lotsa’ ancient books, which his ol’ man done brung over with him from Europe. Some of ’em dated back to the Middle Ages and had been brung back from Asia by an ancestor who had been in the Crusades.
“The youngster pored through ’em ’til he become an expert in the black arts. Then, late one evenin’ when thar was a full moon ashinin’, he done performed the most evil ritual of ’em all… he conjured up Satan hisself.”
Smythe-Thomas, his face florid even in the dim light cast by the single, bare light bulb hanging over the table, sat bolt upright in his chair and loudly said, “What? Poppycock!” He was beginning to feel strangely uncomfortable. He was a man who didn’t like ghost stories.
Larrigan glanced at the aged Sir Edward. The old man was motionless, caught in the spell of Taggart’s story.
Sweat was flowing in rivulets down the guide’s face and neck, merging with the perspiration on his one good arm and running down to his wrist and hand, where it soaked the cigarette he was holding. He dropped it into the now-empty whiskey bottle. His hand shook visibly as he lit another one.
“Please continue the story, my friend. We are all quite fascinated by it,” Sir Edward said in a voice barely above a whisper. He edged closer to the table.
Taggart inhaled deeply from his cigarette, and coughed a grayish cloud of smoke toward the slow-moving fan. “Satan demanded to know why he’d been summoned up from Hell. The boy told him, ‘All I have…my estate, my soul, everythin’, is yore’s if you’ll let me have one deep gulp from the waters of Lethe.”
“Lethe?” Smythe-Thomas said.
“Yeah, Lethe,” Taggart said. “If y’all remember from yore schoolin’, in mythology it’s believed that four rivers flow through Hell. One of ‘em is Lethe, the River of Forgetfulness. It’s said that whoever drinks from Lethe forgets everything.
“In his torment, the young feller sought to drink from them waters so’s he could erase the painful memory of what he done. Satan agreed to the bargain, one drink from them strange, dark waters.” Taggart paused and took another deep drag on his cigarette then said, “But there was just one thing that boy didn’t know about.”
Leaning forward in his chair, Larrigan said, “And that was?”
“Turns out, he who drinks from Lethe not only forgets all, but is hisself forgot by all… as though he never was.
“Right after that, the boy done disappeared from these parts forever. It’s said that the Devil hisself done come and took his soul straight to Hell, as part of their bargain. That ol’ house ain’t known no mortals since that time. And it’s carefully avoided by all that’s got good sense.” He looked pointedly at Larrigan.
“I take it, then, that the place is supposed to be haunted?” the journalist said.
“Yeah, hell, it’s haunted,” Taggart said angrily. “The Devil hisself owns the place now. Any damn fool who enters it will be met by Satan and made to drink of Lethe’s waters, too. In forgettin’ all and bein’ forgotten by all, he then becomes the Devil’s property and his soul goes straight to Hell, too.”
He paused and looked around the table. “Maybe y’all find all this kinda’ hard to swallow, but us folks who were born and raised in these here parts have seen too many strange things to have any doubts.”
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nbsp; Taggart was visibly relieved to have finished the tale. He snuffed out his cigarette on the top of one of Larrigan’s empty beer cans, looked at Smythe-Thomas and said, “Next game! Yore deal, Major.”
“Count me out, gentlemen,” Larrigan said, rising from his seat at the table. “It’s hot in here. And, as we have a full moon tonight, I think I’ll go for a little cruise up the river.”
“You ain’t goin’ nowhere near that ol’ house, are ya’?” Taggart said fearfully.
“You think?” There was sarcasm in Larrigan’s voice and a smirk on his face.
“Please! Stay away from that place, man. It’s evil.”
“No can do,” Larrigan said. “Debunking myths is part of my job.”
“Ain’t no myth!” Taggart said, heatedly.
Larrigan favored the guide with a patronizing smile then turned to Sir Edward. “Isn’t that the way these things happen? Someone makes up ghost stories to entertain kids, and a generation or so later the rustics adopt it as gospel.”
“You know, Larrigan, perhaps our friend, Taggart, is right to a degree,” Sir Edward said. “I mean, it is nighttime and all. Don’t you think it would be more prudent to wait until morning?”
Larrigan snorted derisively and said, “Hell, if you’re going to meet Satan, what better time to do it than at midnight under a full moon.”
Taggart rose unsteadily to his feet and said, “Now,