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"Whaa," he said.
"Daddy, wake up. Where's Mommy?"
"Whaa." He closed his eyes and turned on his side. Frustrated but frantic about Mommy, I retreated from the bedroom and hurried down the stairway. I searched the rooms, all of which were dark, and then I peeked in the kitchen, hoping she had gone there to make herself some warm milk. But I found only the night-lights on and no one anywhere.
I thought for a moment and then hurried down to her studio. Even though it was dark, I could imagine her sitting there, so I flipped on the lights. My heart throbbed in triple time as I held my breath. She wasn't there, but her recent picture caught my attention. I drew closer to it and saw that she had added more detail.
It was a sketch of Jean's face on a ghostlike body floating out of the swamp, but vaguely suggested in the water below was the figure of a man, his eyes wide.
I studied the picture and then stepped back and gasped. This was the face I saw so often in my own nightmare; it was the face of Paul Tate, who was thought to have drowned himself out of grief when ,Mommy went to live with Daddy. It was a face that obviously haunted her as well.
I turned off the lights and hurried through the house to look in the garage, where my worst fear was confirmed. Mommy's car was gone; she had driven off to meet the voodoo mama in the cemetery in which Nina Jackson had been buried. Upstairs, Daddy was in a drunken stupor. What was I to do?
I dressed quickly and drove Daddy's car to the cemetery. In the glow of the moonlight the burial vaults took on a pale flaxen glow, and the shadows around them deepened, creating long corridors of darkness that wrapped themselves tightly around most of the ovens and permitted only the very tops of monuments to be seen. The darkness resembled a sea of ink.
I hesitated and then drove slowly around the cemetery. At first I saw nothing and hoped Mommy had gone someplace less ominous; but when I made a final turn, I saw her car near an entrance, and she wasn't in it.
My heart began to thump. I pulled up behind her car and reached into the glove compartment for the flashlight. Then I turned off the engine and the lights, allowing that sea of ink to rush in around me, too. A wave of anxiety washed over me and sent my throbbing heartbeat into my bones. My fingers trembled when I reached for the door handle and stepped out. For a moment it felt as if the ground beneath my feet had softened into quicksand. Every step toward the cemetery took great effort.
I turned on the flashlight and directed the beam down the corridor ahead of me, not daring to look back or to my left or right. With my attention glued to the ray of light, I walked on, listening, hoping to find Mommy quickly and get her out of here and home.
Suddenly the screech of a cat sent sharp shivers through my chest and made my stomach do flip-flops. Blood drained down into my feet. I stopped and waved my flashlight over the ovens, cutting across the stone figures, the engraved words, and the embossed faces of the dead. A second screech was followed by a snarl, and then all went silent.
"Mommy!" I cried into the night and waited for her response, but I heard nothing except the drumming of my own heart in my ears. "Mommy, where are you?"
A shrill laugh pierced the silence. It didn't sound like Mommy, so it sent me retreating a few steps. I spun around when I heard loud whispering on my right.
"Mommy, it's me! Where are you?"
The whispering stopped. I waited and then turned down another corridor. A few moments later the voodoo mama whom Daddy and I had seen leaving our house the other day crossed in front of me. She had a black cat in her arms. She didn't look my way. She walked into the darkness as if she had flashlights for eyes, and just as quickly as she had appeared, she disappeared. A moment later Mommy stepped out of the darkness, cupping a white candle in her palms, walking as slowly as a somnambulist, the glow of the candle turning her eyes into pools of gray light and making her cheeks glitter.
"Mommy!" I cried and ran to her.
"Pearl. It's all right," she said softly, but she didn't look directly at me and she didn't pause. Her eyes were fixed on what she remembered rather than what she saw, and she kept walking. It was as if she thought I too was an apparition. I seized her hand, and she turned to me, her eyes still full of the candlelight. "Nina has spoken to me," she said. "I know what I must do."
"Mommy, stop this. You're scaring me." I shook her hard, and the candle fell from her hands and was snuffed out as soon as it hit the ground.
"Oh, no!" she said, looking back into the darkness. "Quickly. We have to leave the cemetery. Quickly, Pearl." She grasped my hand desperately and pulled me forward. We ran down the dark corridors to the street. There she paused to catch her breath.
"Why did you do this, Mommy? Why did you come here by yourself?"
"I had to, Pearl. I had to. Let's go home now. It's all right. You didn't have to come looking for me."
"You told me you weren't going to do this. I fell asleep, and when I went to look for you, I saw you were gone and had taken your car. I tried to wake Daddy, but he's sound asleep," I said, eager to keep myself talking and hear the sound of my own voice. A thin wisp of a cloud had moved across the moon and weakened the little light there was around us. The silence in this dark cemetery was terrifying.
"It's all right," Mommy said. "It's going to be all right."
"Can you drive yourself home, Mommy?"
"Of course
. Let's go. And, Pearl, there's no need to tell Daddy where we were."
"Let's just get home, Mommy. Quickly."
She got into her car, and I got into mine. She drove slowly but carefully, and we pulled into the driveway together. We put the cars in the garage and then went into the house and upstairs.
"What did you do there with that woman, Mommy?" I asked her outside my bedroom.
