The Beautiful Thing That Awaits Us All (39 page)

    Huddled around the lamp, the loggers resembled characters from some gothic fable; resurrection men leaning on spades at midnight in a swampy graveyard. By that primitive oil lamplight, the company was a horrific, blood-soaked mess. They piled their packs and sundries in the middle of the floor and counted ammunition and rations. Wounds were appraised: Bane's hacked shoulder would be the death of him without medicine. Ruark had gotten hit in the belly; the hole was about the size of a bean and welled purple and it bubbled when he took a breath. The black powder ball was still inside, although the old logger shrugged and spat and said he felt fine as frog's hair. Stevens revealed nasty punctures in his thigh and ribs, a vicious slash across his breast. Only Miller had survived the melee unscathed.

    "What? None of that blood you're covered in is yours? Not even a scratch, you lucky bastard!" Stevens threw back his head and laughed as Ruark helped wind strips of cloth around his torso to staunch the bleeding.

    Miller didn't say anything. He'd never taken more than a few bumps and bruises, the occasional cut from flying shrapnel, during the war, had literally walked through the apocalypse at Belleau Wood untouched.

    Stevens made a firepot by slathering bear grease in a tin cup and lighting a strip of cloth for a wick. He and Ruark proposed to scout the tunnel and make certain nobody was sneaking along their back-trail. That left with Miller with the kid, who was unconscious and raving, and Bane, who appeared to also have one foot in the grave.

    The wait proved short, however. Stevens and Bane reappeared, wide-eyed as horses who'd been spooked by fire. Ruark tossed loose timber and small rocks in the tunnel opening. Stevens reported that the caves stretched on and on, and branched every few paces. In his estimation, anybody damn fool enough to venture into that labyrinth would be wandering for eternity.

    After a long, whispered conference, it was decided the men would wait until daylight and then make a run for Slango. There was no telling when or if McGrath might deign to send a search party, so it was safest to assume they were on their own. Watches were set with Ruark taking the first as he allowed he couldn't sleep anyhow. He snuffed the lamp and the firepot and they settled in to wait.

    Stevens said, "Ever wonder what Rumpelstiltskin wanted with a kid?"

    Miller pulled his hat down and tried to relax. An eldritch white radiance illuminated the cave and it was just him and Horn; everyone else melted and vanished. Mist flowed from the passage and curled over the pile of packs, swirled over Horn's chest and around Miller's knees. Horn stared. His face was gray, suspended in the mist. He said, "C'mon, tell me true. What'd y'all see in that tree? What was hidin' up in there?"

    "Worms," Miller said. He wasn't certain if this was accurate. The memory slipped and slithered and changed when he tried to examine it closely. A fibrous network of slimy roots, or worms, or a mass of tendrils squirming in the moist dark of the mighty cedar bole. "They had faces."
Demons sleep in holes in the ground. Live in the rocks, sleep inside a big ol' trees in the deep forest where the sun don't never shine.

    "Oh." Horn nodded. "I dunno what the little man in the story wanted with the child, but I kin tell ya the villagers give their babies to their friends inside the trees… inside this mountain. The sons an' daughters of Ol' Leech. An' I kin tell ya what the people of Ol' Leech do with 'em."

    "I'd rather you didn't."

    "Jist shut yer eyes an' look inside. We so close, ya kin see their god. He's sleepy like a bear in winter. Dreamin' of his people. Dreamin' of us here in the daylight, too. But he's wakin' up. Be creepin' out a his den pretty soon, I reckon."

    "Save it, kid."

    "He loves his people. Loves us too, in a different way." Horn's smile was shrewd and cruel. He opened his mouth and inhaled the peculiar light and Miller's dreams became confused. He dreamt of falling through the mountain, through the entire Earth, and into the sky, accelerating like a bullet until the light of the sun dwindled to a pinprick. He crashed through the icy, blood-black surface of a strange moon and drifted weightless in its hollow core. The cavern was rank and humid and dark as pitch. He floated over crags and canyons and forests of clabbered flesh and fungus, his body carried upon the updrafts of a warm, gelatinous sea. At the center of this sea a mountain range shuddered and stirred. The colossus writhed and uncoiled with satanic majesty, aroused by the whine of flea wings. It whispered to him.

***

    Miller awoke to Calhoun begging for help.

    Calhoun cried from the direction of the tower. He called them by name in a tone of anguish and his voice carried. He began screaming the screams of a man partially buried alive or hung in barbed wire or swollen with mustard gas. Miller lay in the shadows, watching the dying light of the fires shiver across the wall of the cave. Calhoun kept screaming and they all pretended not to hear him.

***

    Still later and after night settled in as tight as a blindfold, Stevens shook Miller. "Somethin's wrong."

    "Oh, jumpin' Jaysus," Ruark said and moments later lighted the firepot. Miller would've cursed the old man for revealing their position, except he saw the cause of alarm-Horn was gone, spirited away from under their noses. Drips and drabs of blood smeared into the tunnel, into the blackness. "Them sonsabitches snatched Thad!"

    As if in response to the light, a faint, ghostly moan echoed up the passage from great subterranean depths.
Help me, boys. Help me.
At least that's what it sounded like to Miller. The distance and acoustics could've made wind whistling through chimneys of rock resemble almost anything.

    "Lordy, Lordy," Bane said. He was a frightful sight; gore limed his beard and jacket. He might've been a talking corpse. "That's the boy."

    "Ain't him," Stevens said.

    "The kid is done for," Miller said. His eyes watered and he struggled to keep his voice even. "Whoever's hooting down that tunnel is no friend of ours."

    "They's right, Moses," Ruark said. "This an ol' Injun trick. Make a noise of a wounded friend an draw ya in." He ran his thumb across his throat with an exaggerated flourish. "Ya should know it, hoss. That boy is daid."

    "Lookit all the blood," Stevens said.

    Bane shoved a plug of tobacco into his mouth and chewed with his eyes closed. His flesh was papery and his eyelids fluttered the way a man's do when he's caught in a terrible dream. He resembled the photographs of dead outlaws in open coffins displayed on frontier boardwalks. He spat. "Yeh, an' lookit me. Still kickin'."

    
Help me. Help me.
The four of them froze like woodland animals, heads inclined toward the dim cries, the cold, cold draft.

    "Ain't him," Stevens repeated, but mostly to himself.

    Bane stood. He leaned against the wall, the barrel of his Rigby nosing the sand. He nodded to Ruark. "You comin'?"

    Ruark spat. He lifted the firepot and led the way.

    Bane said, "Alrightee, boys. Take care." He tapped his hat and limped after his comrade. Their shadows swayed and jostled, and their light grew smaller and seeped into the mountain and was gone.

    The others sat in the dark for a long time, listening. Miller heard faint laughter, a snatch of Bane singing "John Brown's Body," and then only the fluting of the wind in the rocks.

    "Oh, hell," Stevens said when the silence between them had gone on for an age. "You was in the war."

    "You weren't?"

    "Uh-uh. My father worked for the post office. He fixed my card so's I wouldn't get conscripted."

    "Wish I'd thought of that," Miller said.

    "You seen the worst of it. Any chance we kin get out a this with our skins?"

    "Nope."

    There was another long pause. Stevens said, "Want a smoke?" He lighted two Old Mills and passed one to Miller. They smoked and listened, but there was nothing to hear except for the wind, the rustle of branches outside. Stevens said, "He weren't dragged. The kid crawled away."

    "How do you figure? He was pretty much dead."

    "
Pretty much
ain't the same thing, now is it? I heard 'em talkin' to him, whisperin' from the dark. Only heard bits. Didn't need more… they told him to come ahead. An' he did."

    "Must've been persuasive," Miller said. "And you didn't raise the alarm."

    "Hard to explain. Snake-bit, frozen stiff. It was like my body fell asleep yet I could hear what was goin' on. I was piss-scared."

    Miller smoked his cigarette. "I don't blame you," he said.

    "I got my senses back after a piece. Kid was long gone by then. Whoever they are, he went with 'em."

    "And now Moses and Ruark are with them too."

    "I didn't tell the whole truth about what we saw in the tunnel."

    "Is that so."

    "Didn't seem much point carryin' on. Not far along the trail it opens into a cavern. Dunno how big; our light couldn't touch but the edges of the walls and the ceilin'. There were drops into plain ol' nothin' an' more passages twistin' every which way. But we stopped only a few steps into the cavern. A pillar rose high as the light could reach. Broad at the base like a pyramid and made of rocks all slippery an' shiny from drippin' water. Except, the rocks weren't just rocks. There were skeletons cemented in between. Prolly hundreds an' hundreds. Small things. There was a hole at eye level. Smooth as the bore of my gun and about the size of my fist. Pure black, solid, glistenin' black that threw the light from our torch back at us. We didn't peep too close on account of the skeletons before we turned tail and ran. Saw one thing as we turned to haul our asses…That hole had widened enough I could a jumped in and stood tall. It made a sound that traveled from somewhere farther and deeper than I want a think about. Not the kind a sound you hear, but the kind you feel in your bones. Felt kinda bad and good at once. I could tell Ruark liked it. Oh, he was afraid, but compelled, I guess you'd say."

    "Well," Miller said after consideration, "I can see why you might've kept that to yourself."

    "Yeh. I wish them ol' coons had stayed back. Maybe we could a blasted our way out with their guns and ours."

    Miller didn't think so. "Maybe. Catch some shut eye. Sunup in a couple hours."

    Stevens rolled over and set his hat over his face and didn't move again. Miller watched the stars fade.

***

    They left the cave at dawn and descended the hill into the ruins of the village. Ashes turned in the breeze. The tower stood, although scorched and blackened. Its double doors were sprung, wood smoldering, hinges melted. Smoke curled from the gap. Many of the surrounding houses had burned to their foundations. Gray dust lay over everything. Corpses were stacked near the longhouse and covered with a canvas tarp to keep the birds away. Judging from height and width of the collection, at least fifteen bodies were piled beneath the tarp awaiting burial. Twenty-five to thirty men and women combed the charred wreckage. Their hands and faces were filthy with the gray dust. Some stared hatefully at the pair, but none spoke, none raised a hand.

    Miller and Stevens trudged through the village and onward, following the river south as it wended through the valley. With every step, Miller's shoulders tightened as he awaited the inevitable musket ball to shear his spine. Early in the afternoon, they climbed a bluff and rested for the first time.

    After Stevens caught his breath, he said, "I don't understand. Why they'd let us live?" He removed his hat and peered through the trees, searching for signs of pursuit.

    "Did they?" Miller said. He didn't look the way they'd come, instead studying the forest depths before them, tasting the damp and the rot and the cold. He thought of his dream of flying into the depths of space, of the terrible darkness between the stars and what ruled there. "We've got nowhere to hide. I had to guess, I'd guess they're saving us for something very special."

    So, they continued on and arrived at the outskirts of Slango as the peaks darkened to purple. Nothing remained of the encampment except for abandoned logs and mucky, flattened areas, and a muddle of footprints and drag marks. Every man, woman, and mule was gone. Every piece of equipment likewise vanished. The railroad tracks had been torn up. In a few months forest would reclaim all but the shorn slopes, erasing any evidence Slango Camp ever stood there.

    "Shit," Stevens said without much emotion. He hung his hat on a branch and wiped his face with a bandanna.

    "Hello, lads," A man said, stepping from behind a tree. He was wide and portly and wore a stovepipe hat and an immaculate silk suit. His handlebar mustache was luxuriously waxed and he carried a blackthorn cane in his left hand. A dying ray of sun glowed upon the white, white skin of his face and neck. "I am Dr. Boris Kalamov. You have caused me a tremendous amount of trouble." He gestured at the surroundings. "This is not our way. We prefer peaceful coexistence, to remain unseen and unheard, suckling like a hagfish, our hosts none the wiser, albeit dimly cognizant through the persistent legends and campfire tales which please us and nourish us as much as blood and bone. To act with such dramatic flourish goes against our code, our very nature. Alas, certain of my brethren were taken by a vengeful mood what with you torching the village of our servants." He
tisked
and wagged a finger that seemed to possess too many joints.

    Miller didn't even bother to lift his rifle. He was focused upon the nightmare taking shape in his mind. "How now, Doctor?"

    Stevens was more optimistic, or just doggedly belligerent. He jacked a round into the chamber of his Winchester and sighted the man's chest.

    Dr. Kalamov smiled and his mouth dripped black. "You arrived at a poor time, friends. The black of the sun, the villagers' holiest of holy days when they venerate the Great Dark and we who call it home. Their quaint and superstitious ceremony at the dolmen cut short because of your trespass. Such an interruption merits pain and suffering. O' Men from Porlock, it shan't end well for you."