Airship Hunters (16 page)

Cabot did not speak again for a minute or so. He stood there silently, staring at Valiantine until he turned to reflect upon the object of the man’s scrutiny, a glass-walled display case. In it sat a dark, lumpy stone. A small card lay next to the stone.

“We have a new report.” Though he did not speak loudly, his voice echoed a bit in the hall in which they stood.

“And we are on suspension, Cabot. Hasn’t that sunk in yet after three whole days?”

The younger man continued, undeterred. “Luray, Virginia. Near Massanutten Mountain, roughly sixty, seventy miles from here. They’ve been seeing lights there.”

The lieutenant digested that, his back still to Cabot. “And how is it we have this report, seeing as there is no longer a Department A-13?”

The Treasury man smiled slightly. “Someone, perhaps a junior agent, did not receive word of that, apparently. The report arrived upon my desk this morning. I didn’t question it.”

“And these lights?” Valiantine asked, turning toward Cabot.

“At night, up on the mountain. Townspeople say they don’t see them every night, but frequently, and when they do there are odd sounds that accompany them. One man reported he’d heard... a band playing.”

The lieutenant swung around fully, staring with great interest at his partner.

“Thought that would do it,” Cabot said simply.

“We’d be disobeying direct orders,” Valiantine said.

“Indeed. When do we begin?”

“Immediately, if we’re in complete agreement.”

“I believe there’s a line that will take us directly into Luray.”

“No,” Valiantine said, holding up a hand. “We’d be too exposed, too many ways to track us, once they realize we’re gone. Besides, I’m sick of trains.”

Cabot fingered his hat, letting out a breath. “A coach, then. But it will be more than a day before we’d reach the spot. Possibly closer to two.”

“That doesn’t worry me,” the lieutenant said, his eyes on something intangible in the distance. “Citizens of this country have died. Something is very wrong. We are being threatened from the outside. We must
continue to act, no matter the cost.”

Finally, he focused on Cabot again. “Can you make the arrangements? And quietly?”

The Treasury man turned on his heel, heading for the exit. “I know how to be circumspect,” he threw over his shoulder.

“Cabot? Perhaps we need to take the time to analyze this further?”

Cabot paused, but did not look back. “We have at least an entire day of a bumpy, dirty coach ride ahead of us to chitchat,” he said. “Don’t forget that.”

Valiantine smiled, nodding. He turned to take in the display case once more, his eyes memorizing every nook and cranny of the meteorite that lay within.

While they rode along on the journey, past the borders of Washington, D.C. and into the surrounding countryside, the lieutenant could not tear his gaze from the mountains ahead of them. He’d been all over the world and had seen many a range, but as they approached Massanutten and the Shenandoah line beyond it, he fought the urge to see them as ominous harbingers of what was to come.

As it turned out, they talked very little over the almost two full days it took them to reach the little town in Virginia, nestled between the hills and mountains of Appalachia. Thankfully, they had the coach to themselves, though its driver made more than one remark over the long hours as to why “two fine gentlemen would want to ride the roads when a perfectly good railroad was to be had.”

Upon their arrival, Valiantine paid the man above and beyond the proscribed fare and thanked him for his service and for his discretion. The driver smiled broadly as he accepted the money.

Things couldn’t get much stranger, could they?
the Army man asked himself, wondering if Cabot was also caught in the grip of dark, inner forces. Interestingly, the younger man seemed to brighten a bit from the trip, perhaps putting the incident in Kentucky behind him, or at least in reserve until such time as to examine it further.

They found the town of Luray to be as small and as quiet as they’d imagined. Arriving late in the day, Valiantine peered all around as they exited the coach, trying to ascertain Luray’s geography as night fell about them. In all, it appeared to be no different than thousands of other such towns that dotted the American landscape, save for its point of interest to their mission.

The dirt street they stood upon fell away to the north and south in slight tiers or steppes, the buildings around them simple wooden structures, worn but otherwise in good repair. To the east, mountains loomed in the distance, as well as to the west, which Valiantine knew to be the Massanutten. Few people walked the streets of Luray at that time of day, but he didn’t think it strange.

Cabot spotted an inn a few doors away from the telegraph office in front of which they paused, standing in the street with their bags in hand. They made their way to the establishment, checked in with a story of wanting to do a bit of climbing and bird-watching, and found the inn offered libations as well as meals. Shortly thereafter, the two agents leaned against a bar in one corner of the inn’s dining room and listened to a most amazing story related by the innkeeper himself, a man who introduced himself as Mr. Bamen.

“Go on,” Valiantine urged, taking another small sip of his beer. He disliked the stuff, normally, but found that by nursing a mug of it he won more confidences than mistrust.

“Well,” Bamen continued, his blonde slicked-back hair gleaming and long nose twitching, “these fairy lights come and go, come and go.”

Cabot had finished his own beer and ordered another; Valiantine approved of his tactics. “You say people also heard music? Surely that’s not unusual with other people around?”

Bamen chortled low in his throat. “It is if there ain’t no band about, sir, meanin’ no disrespect. We haven’t had a band in this town in decades, and we ain’t never had no orchestra. The constable himself heard the music, plain as day. I ain’t about to question his sanity. And he saw the lights, too.”

“Must be a lot of stories like that in this part of the country, eh?” Valiantine asked casually. “Legends, tales, that sort of thing.” He tried to sound indifferent about it.

“Sure,” Bamen said, “we have all of ’em, certainly. The black dogs and the wise babies and the frogs fallin’ out of the skies... even the big hairy men and the little wee ones, too. But I ain’t never heard much before about lights like giant eyes up on Massanutten accompanied by highfalutin’ music. No, sir, that’s downright strange.”

The lieutenant almost laughed at what the man considered “strange,” considering the laundry list of odd subjects he’d just rattled off. Instead, he looked Bamen straight in the eye and pointed a finger at him.

“What do you think of it all, Mr. Bamen? If you had to speculate; what would you say it all amounts to?”

The innkeeper paused in his wiping away at the bar top, obviously pondering the question. Finally, he spoke.

“I don’t like it, if I’m to be truthful about it. One queer thing, maybe that’s all it is. Two? Perhaps there’s a bit more to it. But when you have ghost lights on the mountain and phantom music and strangers passing through and the young man who got all bit up, well—”

Cabot’s hand shot out and clamped down on Bamen’s wrist. The man looked up at the Treasury agent, his eyes wide and his brow furrowed in confusion.

“Bit up? When? Where?”

“Three days ago,” the innkeeper said in a strangled voice. “Young feller from just outside of Luray. Bear got ’im. Mauled him something fierce. He lived, thank the Good Lord...”

Valiantine had set his mug down, unsure of whether or not to tell Cabot to release the man’s arm. “Where, Mr. Bamen?”

“Up on the mountain,” Bamen said, quietly, slowly, as if piecing something together. “But... it was a bear, I tell you!”

But he was addressing thin air. His two customers had moved to a table on the far side of the room and were deep in conversation.

“When?” Cabot asked, his face grim.

“Crack of dawn,” Valiantine replied. “But we may need some equipment. At the very least some better footwear. Heavier coats for both of us would also be nice; it will likely be cold up there, this time of year.”

His partner nodded. “He said ‘strangers passing through,’ also. Should we assume that there are two factions involved?”

“Dammit,” Valiantine said. “We’re making leaps in logic like March hares. But what else are we to do? We must assume that we’re in the middle of something and that we’re in danger of giving away our position at any given time. We’re alone in this now, Cabot; we have virtually no resources to fall back upon should things get dicey.”

“Did we ever?”

The lieutenant appraised the younger man’s question, nodding. “Unknown. So much is unknown. Let’s get a good night’s sleep and attack this full on in the morning.”

As it turned out, with constant thoughts about Mr. Bamen’s story, Valiantine didn’t sleep much at all.

The next morning the two agents sought out the general store in Luray and were pleased to find that it stocked proper boots and coats for climbing, as well as a few other provisions for their trek up Massanutten.

They also discovered the store’s proprietor had seen the lights on the mountain, too, and pointed them toward its northern section. Valiantine thanked the man with a friendly-yet-blasé tone and paused only briefly while exiting when the man urged Cabot and him to “mind the bears and rattlers.”

Scouting the base of Massanutten in the first rays of morning sun, they came upon what seemed to be an old trail, which began behind an ancient, immense tulip tree.

“Up the airy mountain, eh?” Valiantine said, looking at the mountainside.

“I’d rather the rushy glen,” Cabot replied, pulling his hat down tight.

Shortly into their ascent they decided their decision to forego actual mountain climbing gear such as spikes and ropes and the like was an accurate one; Massanutten was not steep, though it was not a walk in the park on a Sunday afternoon, either. Valiantine had scaled mountains as far off as Nicaragua, while Cabot’s experiences in more arduous forms of field work were not as extensive as his partner’s. Still, he did not complain and kept up with the army man.

The Treasury man offered a suggestion early in the climb: to give themselves time to observe their surroundings and catalog it for future reference. This he supported by another of his Yankee Bligh
bon mots
, one which Valiantine realized was sound and logical. They’d be away from civilization while on the mountain and, depending upon what they’d encounter there, likely to have to move about it in less than optimal conditions, meaning, in the dark, under fire, chased by wild animals, or any of a dozen or so other extreme situations.

They met with wild turkey, deer, and definite signs of bear. The trail they’d accessed was sparse at points, wholly disappearing into wildflowers and other flora at others. Valiantine had never fully grasped the intricacies of trailblazing and tracking, so he trusted his instincts and Cabot’s keen eyes to keep their feet on solid ground and moving ever upward.

By dusk, the two men had gained a height of almost two-thousand feet, more than two-thirds of Massanutten’s full elevation. They’d also seen the track of some large animal of which neither of them could wholly identify.

“Why music?” Cabot asked as they rested for a moment on a shelf of sandstone, near a grove of trees. Branches from a dead oak lay all about them.

Valiantine took his meaning immediately. “It does seem incongruous, doesn’t it? Hallucinations by the witnesses? Interpreting something else as music they recognize?”

Cabot chewed on that one for a few seconds. “Those vapors we discovered at Carnavon’s compound play some important role in all this. I feel fairly certain of it.”

“Absolutely,” Valiantine said, looking up at their destination again, the mountaintop, as it faded into the night. “I’m thinking along those same lines. What if—”

A bestial howl split the somber atmosphere of the mountainside. Both men’s hands flew to their coatpockets, fingering the revolvers within.

“Coyote?” Cabot asked.

“No, I don’t believe so.”

“I’m guessing that’s not a deer or a snake, then.”

“If it is,” Valiantine whispered, “then we are in for a bit of trouble.”

As it turned out, they were in for quite a bit of trouble.

Valiantine, pistol in hand, waved at Cabot. “Down, down; present as small a target as possible.” He himself lowered his center of gravity and extended one knee to the ground, looking all about him, urging his eyes to acclimate to the darkness.

A huge, black figure rose up not thirty feet from them, from behind a gigantic fallen tree they’d passed on the way up, and sprinted lightning-fast past them, passing within only five feet or so of their position.

Valiantine tracked the thing with his pistol, finger tensing on its trigger.

“No, wait!” Cabot said, grasping at his partner’s hand. “Don’t fire!”

A resounding, guttural growl filled their ears as the dark shape gained a spot on the other side of them, between two trees. It stopped there, and both men could see that it swung around to face them.