Neil Gaiman & Caitlin R. Kiernan & Laird Barron (84 page)

“Well, what did the Russkie find?” Calhoun said.

“Don’t recall, ’xactly.” Bane leaned the axe against his knee and sighed. “Ruins, mebbe. Mebbe he lied, ’cause ain’t nobody backed his claims. He was a snake oil salesman, I reckon. They run him outta the country.”

“I think,” Miller said, “that’s an amazing coincidence, your ending up on this hunt. Could be you’re pulling our legs.”

“Mebbe. But I ain’t. God’s truth.”

“
Arri, arri
.” Ma scowled and stabbed at the ground. His voice was thick as cold mush.

“Sounds like Ma thinks that redskin mumbo-jumbo rubbed off on you,” Stevens said. “Why’n blue blazes did you volunteer to come along if this place is lousy with bad medicine?”

“Hell, son. McGrath done volunteered me.”

“Have at it, then.” Calhoun raised his hat with one finger. “What’s so spooky about Mystery Mountain?”

“Besides the burial mounds and the cave crypts, and them disappeared explorers,” Stevens said with a smirk.

“Oh, they’s a passel o’ ghosts an’ evil spirits, an’ sich,” Bane said, again glancing into the night. “Demons live in holes in the ground. Live in the rocks and sleep inside big trees in the deep forest where the sun don’t never shine. Ravenfoot says the spirits sneak up in the dark an’ drag poor sleepin’ sods to Hell.”

“Hear that, Thad?” Stevens nodded at Horn. “Best sleep with one eye open.”

“I hearda one,” Ruark said, and his companions became so quiet the loudest noise was the pop and sizzle of burning sap. He spat on his whetstone and continued sharpening the knife. “Y’all remember the child’s tale Rumpelstiltskin? The king ordered the miller’s daughter to spin straw to gold or die, an’ a little man, a dwarf, came to her an’ said he’d do the job if’n she promised him her firstborn child? Done deal an’ she didn’t get her head chopped off.”

“They got themselves hitched and made a bunch of papooses,” Stevens said. “Everybody heard that story.”

“How’n hell that dwarf spin straw to gold?” Horn said. He took a swig of hooch and belched.

“Magic, you jackass,” Calhoun said.

“Lil’ fucker was the spawn o’ Satan, that’s how,” Bane said.

“The king made her his queen an’ everthin’ was hunkum-bunkum for a while,” Ruark said. “Then, o’ course, along comes baby an’ who shows up to collect his due? She convinces him to give her until the dark o’ the moon to guess his name an’ call off the deal. So bein’ a cantankerous cuss, the feller agrees. He knows his name is so odd she hasn’t a snowball’s chance in hell o’ sussing it out.” He paused and finally looked up from his work and slowly met the wondering gaze of each man riveted to his words. “But that ol’ girl
did
cotton to the jig. She sent messengers to the four corners o’ the land, their only mission to gather a list o’ names. One o’ them men reported a queer sight he’d spied in a deep, dark mountain valley. The scout saw a mighty fire below and who danced ’round that blaze but a pack o’ demons led by the little gold-spinner hisself. The dwarf cackled an’ capered, boasting that his name was Rumpelstiltskin. He was mad as a wet hen when the queen turned the tables later on. He stomped a hole in the palace floor an’ fell into the earth. That was the end o’ him.”

“That’s a pretty happy ending, you ask me,” Miller said as he pondered the incongruity of camping in the remote mountains with a company of dog-faced loggers and listening to one of them butcher the Rumpelstiltskin fairytale.

“Well, that part about the demons jumpin’ ’round the fire an’ calling up the forces o’ darkness, some say they seen similar happenins in these hills. They say if’n you creep along the right valley in the dead o’ night ’round the dark o’ the moon you’ll hear ’em singin’ an’ chantin’.”

“Hear who?” Calhoun said.

Ruark kind of smiled and shook his head and said no more.

“I’m turnin’ in,” Horn said and jumped to his feet. “Ain’t listenin’ to a bit more o’ this nonsense. No siree Bob.” He stomped a few feet away and rolled out his blanket and climbed under it so only the crown of his cap and the barrel of his rifle were showing.

“Too bad your mama ain’t here to tuck you in and sing a lullaby,” Stevens called.

“Told you to shuddup ’bout my mama,” Horn said.

Calhoun chucked a stick of wood, bounced it off the kid’s head. That broke the mood and everybody guffawed, and soon the company crawled into their blankets to catch some shuteye.

∇

Miller roused with an urge to piss. A moment later he lay frozen, listening to the faint and unearthly strains of music. Initially, he thought it the continuation of dream he’d had of sitting in the balcony of a fancy court while the queen in her dress and crown entertained a misshapen dwarf who wore a curious suit and a plumed hat, while in the background Ruark narrated in a thick accent, but no, this music was real enough, although it quavered at the very edge of perception. An orchestra of woodwinds and strings buoyed a choir singing in a foreign tongue. This choir’s harmony rose and fell with the swirls of wind, the creaking of the sea of branches in the dark above him. He couldn’t tell how far off the singers might be. Sound traveled strangely in the wild, was all the more tricky in the mountains.

“Ya hear that?” Calhoun said. Miller could barely make out the gleam of his eyes in the light of the coals. The young man’s whisper was harsh with fear. “The hell is that?”

“The wind, maybe,” Miller said after a few moments passed and the music faded and didn’t resume. The sky slowly lightened to pearl with tinges of red. He rose and ventured into the brush, did his business and wiped his hands with dead leaves and fir needles. Ruark was moving around by the time Miller returned. The old logger kindled the fire and put on coffee and biscuits. That drew the others, grumbling and muttering, from their bedrolls.

No one mentioned anything about voices or music, not even Calhoun, so Miller decided to keep his own counsel lest they think him addled. This was desolate country and uninhabited but for the occasional trapper. He’d heard the wind and nothing else. Soon, he pushed the mystery aside and turned his thoughts toward the day’s hunt.

Breakfast was perfunctory and passed without conversation. The party struck camp and headed northwest, gradually climbing deeper into the folds of Mystery Mountain. Sunlight reached fingers of gold through the canopy and cast a tiger stripe pattern over the shrubbery and giant ferns and the sweating boles of the trees. The pattern rippled as leaves rippled and shifted in a way that might hypnotize a man if he stared at it too hard. Miller blinked away the stupor and trudged along until they crested a bluff and found the wide, irregular bog Bane had spoken of the previous evening. The fellow had been correct—there was deer sign everywhere. The party fanned out in pairs and settled behind screens of brush to wait.

Miller dropped one as it entered the field at the edge of his weapon’s effective range, while Stevens, Bane, and Ruark each bagged one in the middle ground. Unfortunately, Horn’s lone shot merely injured his prey and it darted into the woods, forcing him, Ma, and Calhoun to pursue.

By noon three bucks were skinned and quartered. The men loaded the mules and strapped smaller cuts to their own packs and prepared to set off for Slango. Ma, Horn, and Calhoun remained in the forest pursuing the wounded buck.

“Damnation,” Bane said, shading his eyes against the sun. “We gonna be travelin’ in the dark as it is. Those green-hands dilly-dally much longer an’ it’s another biv-oo-ack tonight.”

“Hell with that. We don’t hoof it back by sundown McGrath will have our hides, sure as the Lord made little green apples.” Stevens unplugged the moonshine and had a swig. His face shone with sweat from the skinning and toting. “Here’s what I propose. Miller, you and Ruark take the mules and skedaddle back to Slango. Me and Bane will go round up our wayward friends and catch you two down the trail. Let’s get a move on, eh?”

Miller swatted at the clouds of swarming gnats and flies. A rifle boomed in the middle distance. Again after a long interval, and a third time. A universal signal of distress. That changed everything. Stevens, Bane, and Ruark frantically shucked the meat and hot-footed in the direction of the gunshots. Miller spent several minutes dumping the saddlebags from the mules and tethering them near a waterhole before setting after his comrades. He moved swiftly, bent over to follow their tracks and broken branches they’d left in their wake. He drew the Enfield from its scabbard and cradled the rifle to his breast.

Into the forest. And gods, the trees were larger than ever there along a shrouded ridge that dropped into a deep gulf of shadows and mist. He was channeled along a trail that proved increasingly treacherous. Water streamed from upslope, digging notches through moss and dirt into the underlying rock. In sections the dirt and vegetation were utterly stripped to exposed plates of slick stone, veined red with alkali and the bloody clay of the earth. The trees were so huge, their lattice of branches so tight, it became dim as a shuttered vault, and chilly enough to see faint vapors of one’s breath.

The game trail cut sharply into the hillside and eventually passed through a thick screen of saplings and devil’s club and leveled into a marshy clearing. A handful of boulders lay sunken into the moss and muck around the trunks of three squat cottonwood trees. Surprisingly enough, there were odds and ends of human habitation carelessly scattered—rusted stovetops and empty cans, rotted wooden barrels and planed timber, bits of old shattered glass and bent nails. Either the site of a ruined house, long swallowed by the earth, or a dumping ground. The rest of the men gathered at the rim of the hollow nearest a precipitous drop into the valley. Fast moving water rumbled from somewhere below.

Horn lay on his back, his boots propped on the body of the fallen buck. Ma and Calhoun were nowhere in evidence. Miller took it all in for a few moments. He finally shouldered his rifle and had a sip of water from his canteen. “He hurt?” He jerked his thumb at Horn. The boy’s coonskin cap had flown off and his long, greasy hair was a bird nest of leaves and twigs. A black and blue lump swelled above his eye.

“Nah, he ain’t hurt,” Stevens said. “Are ya, kid? He’s okay. Got the wind knocked outta him is all. Tripped over a damn root and busted his skull. He’ll be right as rain in a minute. Won’t ya, kid?”

Horn groaned and covered his eyes with his arm.

“He’s affrighted,” Bane said, and spat. The grizzled logger clutched his rifle in one hand and a tomahawk in the opposite. His knuckles were white. He kept moving his eyes.

“Afraid of what?” Miller said, surveying the area. He didn’t like the feel of the place, its dankness, the malformed cottonwoods, the garbage. He also disliked the fact Calhoun and Ma weren’t around.

Stevens and Bane glanced at each other and shrugged. Stevens squatted by Horn and patted his arm almost tenderly. “Wanna slug of this fine awerdenty, kid? Where’d those other boys get to, eh?” He helped Horn get seated upright, then held the jug for him while the kid had pull.

Ruark scowled and ambled to the drop and stared down into the valley. The water thumped and so did Miller’s heart. He tilted his head and stared through the opening above the clearing, regarded the brilliant blue-gold sky. Cloudless, immaculate. Already the sun was low against the peaks. Dark came early in the mountains. The sun seemed peculiar—it blurred and flames radiated from its core and its rim blackened like a coal.

Horn coughed and wiped his mouth on his wool sleeve. “Yeh, tripped an’ smacked muh noggin’. Weren’t no stob, though. No sir. They’s a snare yonder. Prolly more where that come from.” He pointed and Bane went and examined the spot.

Bane whistled and said, “He ain’t blowin’ smoke. Step light, boys. We ain’t alone.”

“Bushwhackers,” Ruark said, turning with predatory swiftness to regard his comrade.

“Ain’t no bushwhackers.” Stevens rose and swiped at the gathering flies with his hat. “We maybe got us a trapper tucked into that park down there. That’s what we got.”

“Shit.” Bane lifted a piece of thin rope, its long end snaking off through the underbrush. He coiled in the slack and gave it a yank. A bell clanged nearby and Bane threw the rope and jumped back as if scalded. “Shit!”

“Yeh, shit!” Ruark said and stepped away from the ridgeline. He had his Sharps in hand now.

Miller said, “Thad, where’s Cal and Ma?”

Horn still appeared confused from the blow to his head, but the grave faces of his companions sobered him a bit. “Din’t see on account I was woozy for a spell. Heard ’em jawin’ with somebody that come up on us. Cal said to hang on, they’d be right back.”

“You act a mite nervous. Something else happen?”

The boy hesitated. “Din’t much care for the sound of whoever they was that jawed with Cal an’ Ma. Not ’tall. Sounded right wicked.”

“The hell does that mean?” Stevens said.

Horn shrugged and pulled on his cap.

“Shitfire!” Bane said, and spat.

“How long ago?” Miller said. He thought of hiding in the trenches during the war, scanning the gloom for signs of the enemy creeping forward. He’d learned, as did most men of violence, to recognize the scent of imminent peril. At that moment the scent was very strong indeed.

“I reckon half an’ hour ago. I blacked out for a while. Them shots snapped me outta it.”

Before the boy had finished speaking, Bane and Ruark slipped away to the edge of the clearing, cutting for sign. Ruark whistled and everyone but Horn hustled over. Just beyond a deadfall he’d found a well-beaten footpath. Their missing comrades had passed this way, and so had at least two others. Bane swore and cut a plug of chaw and jammed it in his mouth. He swore again, and spat. The four held a brief discussion and decided there might be trouble ahead so caution was advised. Miller would help Horn back to camp while the rest went on to find Calhoun and Ma. Horn got to his feet and joined them, visibly shaking off his unsteadiness. “Like hell. Ma is my boy. I’m goin’.”

“Fine,” Stevens said. “Moses, you lead the way.” And the men proceeded along the path single file. The going was much easier than before as the path lay a few feet from the ridgeline and the hills, while steep, were much gentler than before.