Neil Gaiman & Caitlin R. Kiernan & Laird Barron (38 page)

The clearing was a quarter-mile depression in the jungle. Huts, mere shanties of withe-framed leaves rather than the beehives of a normal village, huddled against one edge of it. If all had gone well, Trouville’s askaris were deployed beyond the hut with Osterman’s group closing the third segment of the ring. All should be ready to charge at the signal. There would not even be a fence to delay the spearmen.

Nor were there crops of any kind. The floor of the clearing was smooth and hard, trampled into that consistency by thousands of ritual patterns like the one now being woven around the fire. In, out, and around—crop-limbed men and women who hobbled if they had but one foot; who staggered, hunched and twisted from the whippings that had left bones glaring out of knots of scar tissue; who followed by touch the motions of the dancers ahead of them if their own eye-sockets were blank holes.

There was no music, but the voices of those who had tongues drummed in a ceaseless chant: “Ahtu! Ahtu!”

“The scum of the earth,” whispered de Vriny. “Low foreheads, thick jaws; skin the color of a monkey’s under its hair. Your Mr. Darwin was right about Man’s descent from the apes, Dame Alice—if these brutes are, in fact, kin to Man.”

“Not my Mr. Darwin,” the Irishwoman replied.

The Krooman steward, in loincloth now instead of tailcoat, was behind the three whites with a hissing bull’s-eye lantern. Dame Alice feared to raise its shutter yet, though, and instead ran her fingers nervously along the margins of her open book. Three other blacks, armed only with knives, stood by de Vriny as couriers in case the whistle signals were not enough. The rest of the Captain’s force was invisible, spread to either side of him along the margin of the trees.

“Don’t like this,” Sparrow said, shifting his revolvers a millimeter in their holsters to make sure they were free in the leather. “Too many niggers around. Some of ’em are apt to be part of the mob down there, coming back late from a hunt or something. Any nigger comes running up in the dark and I’m gonna let’im hold one.”

“You’ll shoot no one without my order,” de Vriny snapped. “The Colonel may be sending orders, Osterman may need help—this business is going to be dangerous enough without some fool killing our own messengers. Do you hear me?”

“I hear you talking.” A stray glimmer of firelight caught the throbbing vein in Sparrow’s temple.

Rather than retort, the Belgian turned back to the clearing. After a moment he said, “I don’t see this god you’re looking for.”

Dame Alice’s mouth quirked. “You mean you don’t see a fetish,” she said. “You won’t. Ahtu isn’t a fetish.”

“Well, what kind of damned god is he then?” de Vriny asked in irritation.

The Irishwoman considered the question seriously, then said, “Maybe they aren’t gods at all, him and the others… it and the others Alhazred wrote of. Call them cancers, spewed down on Earth ages ago. Not life, surely, not even things—but able to shape, to misshape things into a semblance of life and to grow and to grow and to grow.”

“But grow into what, madame?” de Vriny pressed.

“Into what?” Dame Alice echoed sharply. Her eyes flashed with the sudden arrogance of her bandit ancestors, sure of themselves if of nothing else in the world. “Into this earth, this very planet, if unchecked. And we here will know tonight whether they can be checked yet again.”

“Then you seriously believe,” de Vriny began, sucking at his florid moustache to find a less offensive phrasing. “You believe that the Bakongos are worshipping a creature which would, will, begin to rule the world if you don’t stop it?”

Dame Alice looked at him. “Not ‘rule’ the world,” she corrected. “Rather become the world. This thing, this seed awakened in the jungle by the actions of men more depraved and foolish than I can easily believe… this existence, unchecked, would permeate our world like mold through a loaf of bread, until the very planet became a ball of viscid slime hurtling around the sun and stretching tentacles toward Mars. Yes, I believe that, Captain. Didn’t you see what was happening last night in the village?”

The Belgian only scowled in perplexity.

A silver note sang from across the broad clearing. De Vriny grunted, then put his long bosun’s pipe to his lips and sounded his reply even as Osterman’s signal joined it.

The dance broke apart as the once-solid earth began to dimple beneath men’s weight.

The Forest Guards burst out of the tree line with cries punctuated by the boom of Albini rifles. “Light!” ordered Dame Alice in a crackling alto, and the lantern threw its bright fan across the book she held. The scaffolding moved, seemed to sink straight into ground turned fluid as water. At the last instant the three figures on it linked hands and shouted, “Ahtu!” in triumph. Then they were gone.

In waves as complex as the sutures of a skull, motion began to extend through the soil of the clearing. A shrieking Baenga, spear raised to thrust into the nearest dancer, ran across one of the quivering lines. It rose across his body like the breaking surf and he shrieked again in a different tone. For a moment his black-headed spear bobbled on the surface. Then it, too, was engulfed with a faint plop that left behind only a slick of blood.

Dame Alice started chanting in a singsong, molding a tongue meant for liquid Irish to a language not meant for tongues at all. A tremor in the earth drove toward her and those about her. It had the hideous certainty of a torpedo track. Sparrow’s hands flexed. De Vriny stood stupefied, the whistle still at his lips and his pistol drawn but forgotten.

The three couriers looked at the oncoming movement, looked at each other… disappeared among the trees. Eyeballs white, the Krooman dropped his lantern and followed them. Quicker even than Sparrow, Dame Alice knelt and righted the lantern with her foot. She acted without missing a syllable of the formula stamped into her memory by long repetition.

Three meters away, a saw-blade of white fire ripped across the death advancing through the soil. The weaving trail blasted back toward the center of the clearing like an ant run blown by carbon disulphide.

De Vriny turned in amazement to the woman crouched so that the lantern glow would fall across the black-lettered pages of her book. “You did it!” he cried. “You stopped the thing!”

The middle of the clearing raised itself toward the night sky, raining down fragments of the bonfire that crowned it. Humans screamed—some at the touch of the fire, others as tendrils extruding from the towering center wrapped about them.

Dame Alice continued to chant.

The undergrowth whispered. “Behind you, Captain,” Sparrow said. His face had a thin smile. De Vriny turned, calling a challenge. The brush parted and a few feet in front of him were seven armed natives. The nearest walked on one foot and a stump. His left hand gripped the stock of a Winchester carbine; its barrel was supported by his right wrist since there was a knob of ancient scar tissue where the hand should have been attached.

De Vriny raised his Browning and slapped three shots into the native’s chest. Bloodspots sprang out against the dark skin like additional nipples. The black coughed and jerked the trigger of his own weapon. The carbine was so close to the Belgian’s chest that its muzzle flash ignited the linen of his shirt as it blew him backwards.

Sparrow giggled and shot the native through the bridge of his nose, snapping his head around as if a horse had kicked him in the face. The other blacks moved. Sparrow killed them all in a ripple of fire that would have done justice to a Gatling gun. The big revolvers slammed alternately, Sparrow using each orange muzzle flash to light a target for his other hand. He stopped shooting only when there was nothing left before his guns; nothing save a writhing tangle of bodies too freshly dead to be still. The air was thick with white smoke and the fecal stench of death. Behind the laughing gunman, Dame Alice Kilrea continued to chant.

Pulsing, rising, higher already than the giants of the forest ringing it, the fifty-foot-thick column of what had been earth dominated the night. A spear of false lightning jabbed and glanced off, freezing the chaos below for the eyes of any watchers. From the base of the main neck had sprouted a ring of tendrils, ruddy and golden and glittering over all with inclusions of quartz. They snaked among the combatants as flexible as silk; when they closed, they ground together like millstones and spattered blood a dozen yards up the sides of the central column. The tendrils made no distinction between Forest Guards and the others who had danced for Ahtu.

Dame Alice stopped. The column surged and bent against the sky, its peak questing like the muzzle of a hunting dinosaur. Sparrow hissed, “For the love of God, bitch!” and raised a revolver he knew would be useless.

Dame Alice spoke five more words and flung her book down. The ground exploded in gouts of cauterizing flame.

It was not a hasty thing. Sparks roared and blazed as if the clearing were a cauldron into which gods poured furnaces of molten steel. The black column that was Ahtu twisted hugely, a cobra pinned to a bonfire. There was no heat, but the light itself seared the eyes and made bare flesh crawl.

With the suddenness of a torn puffball, Ahtu sucked inward. The earth sagged as though in losing its ability to move it had also lost all rigidity. At first the clearing had been slightly depressed. Now the center of it gaped like a drained boil, a twisted cylinder fed by the collapsing veins it had earlier shot through the earth.

When the blast came it was the more stunning for having followed a relative silence. There was a rending crash as something deep in the ground gave way; then a thousand tons of rock and soil blew skyward with volcanic power behind them. Where the earth had trembled with counterfeit life, filaments jerked along after the main mass. In some places they ripped the surface as much as a mile into the forest. After a time, dust and gravel began to sprinkle down on the trees, the lighter particles marking the canopy with a long flume down wind while larger rocks pattered through layer after layer of the hindering leaves. But it was only dirt, no different than the soil for hundreds of miles around into which trees thrust their roots and drew life from what was lifeless.

“God damn if you didn’t kill it,” Sparrow whispered, gazing in wonderment at the new crater. There was no longer any light but that of the hooked moon to silver the carnage and the surprising number of Forest Guards straggling back from the jungle to which they had fled. Some were beginning to joke as they picked among the bodies of their comrades and the dancers.

“I didn’t kill anything,” Dame Alice said. Her voice was hoarse, muffled besides by the fact that she was cradling her head on her knees. “Surgeons don’t kill cancers. They cut out what they can find, knowing that there’s always a little left to grow and spread again….”

She raised her head. From across the clearing, Colonel Trouville was stepping toward them. He was as dapper and cool as always, skirting the gouge in the center, skirting also the group of Baengas with a two-year-old they must have found in one of the huts. One was holding the child by the ankles to drain all the blood through its slit throat while his companions gathered firewood.

“But without the ones who worshipped it,” Dame Alice went on, “without the ones who drew the kernel up to a growth that would have been… the end of Man, the end of Life here in any sense you or I—or those out there—would have recognized it.… It’ll be more than our lifetimes before Ahtu returns. I wonder why those ones gave themselves so wholly to an evil that would have destroyed them first?”

Sparrow giggled again. Dame Alice turned from the approaching Belgian to see if the source of the humor showed on the gunman’s face.

“It’s like this,” Sparrow said. “If they was evil, I guess that makes us good. I’d never thought of that before, is all.”

He continued to giggle. The laughter of the Baengas echoed him from the clearing as they thrust the child down on a rough spit. Their teeth had been filed to points which the moonlight turned to jewels.

∇

Jeroboam Henley’s Debt

Charles R. Saunders

T
he October moon limned the old house and its surrounding copse of trees in a wan white glare. A lowslung black sedan slowly approached the driveway, then turned in. The sound the car’s motor made before its driver switched off the ignition was reminiscent of the growl of an impatient beast.

The door on the driver’s side opened; when he emerged, it was as though a segment of the shadowy machine had detached itself and assumed the shape of a tall, muscular man. As the driver, whose name was Theotis Nedeau, started up the porch steps, an outside light flared on, illuminating his face. Even in the light, his complexion was of a singularly dusky hue.

With a sharp squeal of hinges, the screen door flew open and a short, rotund man bounded onto the porch to greet his visitor.

“Theotis!” he cried. “It’s been so long since you wired from Toronto. My God, I thought something had happened to you….”

About to catch his friend in an impulsive embrace, the smaller man, whose name was Jeremiah Henley, suddenly stepped back. For he recognized the grim set of the dark man’s mouth and the glint in his narrowed eyes.

Anticipating Henley’s next thought, Nedeau broke his silence.

“I was…delayed…at a gas station outside of Chatham.”

Suppressed fury crackled like static electricity in his voice.

“You’d better come in and have a drink, Theotis,” Henley suggested.

“Maybe I’d better.”

Together, the two men hauled Nedeau’s two suitcases out of the trunk of the new-model 1933 Auburn and carried them into the house. Though the suitcases were of similar weight, Henley had to labour with the one he’d chosen, while Nedeau bore his own burden easily. Once again, Henley recalled his friend’s phenomenal athletic prowess, how Nedeau had set football records that still stood and had once held his own sparring three rounds with Harry Wills, the black heavyweight even the great Jack Dempsey never dared to meet.

And he remembered a night more than a dozen years ago in Virginia, when he and Nedeau had been stopped by a policeman wanting to know exactly how a couple of “Nigras” had come by such a fine motorcar as the one they were in without having stolen it. Nedeau had flattened the policeman with one blow and they’d fled the state with a posse of cracker cops on their tail all the way up to the gates of the black college they’d been attending.