Enigmatic Pilot (43 page)

Finally, they found themselves far enough away from Independence to consign the remains of the Clutters to earth and to heaven—if such in-between beings were allowed into heaven. There was a grove of trees off the track, which was becoming less a road and more tall grass with a seam running through. As far into the grove as they dared to venture, and as close in as they could get with the wagon and the now exhausted horses, they set about the strenuous task of digging a grave deep enough to hide the coffin.

All three Sitturds pitched in. The heavy rain that had softened the earth made the back-aching work somewhat easier, but not much. It was a good hour of team excavation before an acceptable depth was achieved. At some point, they each recalled poor old Tip back in Ohio—and the Time Ark. Rapture’s heart wandered further back in time to the stillborn body of Lodema, while Lloyd thought of his cove of wind charms and the slave cemetery across the river from St. Louis, where Schelling had taken him to meet Mother Tongue. Hephaestus remembered vague flashes of his drunken sprees in the shantylands, and how he had once passed out in a graveyard, and very well might have remained if not for the grace of chance and the love of his family. It struck them all that every camp is made amid graves. It is just unknown who lies buried.

It was with this welter of woe and anxiety that they at last completed their morbid mission. The horses were refreshed
from the respite—slightly. To be able to push on past sunrise seemed hard. That would leave them still too close to Independence for comfort. Not being able to talk above a whisper and share concerns made the anxiety grow. A damp mist was beginning to rise, which was unsettling to see and unpleasant to feel, and the shambling gait of the horses seemed to herald some imminent breakdown, when around a stand of broken trees and heavy bracken they heard a sound that brought their hearts up into their mouths. It was not an animal sound, like a wild pig or a coyote. It was not a human sound, but it made the duck gun they were carrying seem as useful as a feather duster.

“E’ Gawd love!” Rapture exclaimed, too loud for the male Sitturds’ liking, for out of the patchy mist the beast noise rose as if in response. It was followed by the yelp of a dog—the mutt that had tagged along with them must have slunk out ahead of them, as dogs liked to do, Lloyd reasoned. Now the poor wayfarer had flushed some savage creature out of the underbrush and was about to become a meal. Or was something lying in wait for them?

All their mutual fears forced them to freeze. The moon swam out from behind what was left of the clouds, and the sky above the low road fog sharpened into cold clarity—the intensification of the light revealing the silhouette of something like a man, and something a little too much like a bear for their liking. The thing seemed to recognize its greater visibility and made a gesture that demonstrated a fierce desire both for confrontation and for greater camouflage.

Both inclinations were thwarted in a strangely comic fashion when the creature rushed forward, to be dragged back and to fall with a thump, as if it had run to the end of a length of chain. The next thing, which to Lloyd’s and Rapture’s minds at least, was the most unexpected of all was that a familiar voice rose out of the darkness. “Hey there, Senator,” it said. “Don’t fret now. I knew they were comin’ for the last half hour.”

It was Fast Fanny Ockleman, the gunwoman they had met
on the main street earlier in town. The unmistakable ramrod shadow strode up out of the gloom about ten paces away from where the creature had appeared, and which now had returned to an upright but crouched position, making a low, threatening sound that was somewhere between an ursine growl and some kind of protective chant.

In the moonlight, Lloyd could see that she had one of her newfangled guns drawn, but she approached with no hint of alarm and seemed to step through the thigh-high mist to meet them with the grace of an Indian, just as casually as she had greeted the outnumbered situation with Joshua Breed and his hooligans. I wonder if anything scares her, Lloyd thought, before turning his mind to what she was doing out in the wild, awake and alert, at such a time of night.

“You folks’ll have to be right quieter if you expect to get where you’re goin’, and travelin’ at this hour is for those who have to or know how. I take it you have to.”

“Who … is that?” Hephaestus gasped, almost dropping the reins.

The weary horses had snapped awake at the first hint of the creature’s presence. Perhaps if there had been a breeze they would have known about the brute long before. In any case, they were nervous and distraught now.

“Tid be now a long tale tru,” Rapture muttered, not wanting even to think about the incident back in town.

“I am the best shadow you’ll meet in these parts tonight,” Fast Fanny replied. Nearby, Lloyd thought that he could make out a group of shelters tucked away, hidden by both branch and mist.

“We weren’t wanting to meet any shadows a’tall,” the elder Sitturd replied.

“Best not to venture by moonshine then,” the woman answered.

“What’s that … animal?” Lloyd called, unable to help himself.

“Hush there, boy,” Fanny returned. “Other folks are trying to sleep, and you don’t want to be stirring up Senator again. I’ll be to sunup getting him peaceful and he’ll be a sack of possums all day on the trail. Now follow me, with a lid on your questions. I can give you a place to bunk for a bit, and come a brighter hour you can make a better plan than the one you got.”

“You know this woman?” Hephaestus demanded.

“Aye that,” Rapture assented, not wanting to say more.

“And you trust … her?”

“Yes,” Lloyd answered decisively, still curious about the tethered creature, which was quite obviously of the same mind regarding them.

Hephaestus took stock. They had just fled civilization, well before their preparations were complete, to embark on the most difficult leg of their entire journey, having witnessed some kind of nightmare magic that had beset their hosts, then buried the evidence of the atrocity in an unmarked grave on the edge of what was to them real wilderness, with the possible charge of murder hanging over their heads, and maybe even more serious trouble awaiting them if anything like what his son had hinted about was true. In this mix of moonlight and mist, the idea of following a total stranger—a woman who looked like a man and who wielded a kind of gun that he had never seen before, and had some kind of monster animal, no less—seemed if not reasonable to him, then at least possible and maybe even advisable.

Fanny led them around the stand of trees to two wagons, one of them large and of odd design, and several improvised structures, which Lloyd recognized as Indian-style tepees made of animal hides supported by wooden frames. The rest of the camp, whoever they were, seemed to be asleep, except for a short, stocky man who had been leaning against a wagon wheel with a large cudgel on his knees. He got to his feet when Fanny gave a tight whistle.

“Who’s this now?” he whispered.

“At first light,” Fanny replied, as if to say no more would be said until then.

She ushered the Ohioans into a squat tepee pitched in the lee of the larger wagon and ducked her head in when the family had straggled through the slit.

“I’ll unhitch your horses and give them some feed. We don’t have much for our own, let alone yourn. But they’ll get some rest. We rise early and we’ll be on the trudge earlier than usual. I reckon you should do the same. But take a load off now. Whatever called you out on the move at such an hour won’t have an easy time making worry for you for a few hours at least. Now, no questions till birdsong. Get as much shut-eye as you can.”

Suddenly, the hardened woman was gone, and the Sitturds were left in deeper bewonderment than ever, but more than a little grateful not to have been attacked by the beast or waylaid by dark men with even darker designs. All three were bone-fagged and brain-sore, and still coming to terms with the crazed events of the day. Lloyd felt particularly bleary, since he had not slept more than an hour the previous night owing to his encounter with the Quists and the Bushrod Rangers.

Something in the performance with the Eye had drained him, he felt, and perhaps had also energized him in some new way, which he considered might account for the spell that had overcome him when caning Josh Breed. He had no explanation for the women in white. Then the shock of finding the Clutters, and all the questions their grisly situation called forth! It was all such a jumble, and yet he sensed that just to the edge of his mind’s sight was an explanation that brought it all together. The hint of it toyed with him for a while, as he lay clutching his bag of precious items on the hard bedroll in the skin-smelling tepee that kept the night damp at bay.

For a few moments he listened to his parents’ emphatic whispering, trying to clear his head—trying to feel the protective presence of Lodema and to imagine where his beloved Hattie
was, hoping she was out of danger and knowing that almost certainly she was not. It was in this anxious, exhausted, wondering state that a dream began to enfold him.

He had the idea that he was hunting for Hattie, trapped inside a giant music box. The inside of the box was like an empty theater he had peered into in St. Louis. Hattie was hidden somewhere within, but he could not find her; she was being held prisoner by a man like Junius Rutherford with mechanical crab-claw hands. Then into the darkness of the empty seats there came a weird wind that brought with it a cloud of what looked like fireflies, luminous tiny insects that were so beautiful to behold that he wanted to reach out and touch them. But when he did they burned his hand like cinders. He swatted at them, trying to escape, and when he readjusted his eyes he saw that on every empty chair there now burned a sleek candle with even flames rising from them like the voting hands of some dire and unanimous congress. A door opened, and he saw a figure he took to be Hattie dragged from the theater and out into the light. He raced after them, feeling the scorching flecks of the insects against his face, hearing the hissing of the candles, like a religious chant.

He knew that he was still inside the music box, but it was much larger than he had first thought. The door of the theater opened into the street of a town, a ghost town lit by unknown means, like the lights he had seen in Mother Tongue’s grotto. Dead people were walking about as if in a trance. Skeletons and mechanical men and women, like a vast fair of haunted machines. There were folk dressed in historic costumes and all manner of fantastic creatures from out of fairy tales, while women in hoopskirts with the same porcelain mask for faces paraded past in silence.

In the dark of the windows he ran by, he glimpsed things like torture chambers—people getting their limbs removed, human bodies with the heads of other animals, pits full of reptiles with
the faces of children. On and on he ran, trying to catch the man who had Hattie—or was it his sister?

Gradually, the light began to change, and he saw that the music box that he thought was a theater and then a town was like another kind of theater yet again. There were living people watching, pointing, ogling the sights—as if the entire maze he was lost in was but one huge medicine show. The people were in costumes of a type he had never seen before. Bright artificial colors, ridiculous shoes. Many of the women were baring obscene amounts of flesh, and everyone seemed obese. The more frantically he explored, the more disgusted he became, for he came to see and smell the overpowering aromas and quantities of the nauseous, tempting food they were devouring. Gorging like maniacs.

In the labyrinth of the automata ghost town, there were islands and lagoons where machine men dressed as pirates fought with swords and fired cannons. Somnolent blank princesses sang to birds and squirrels, whose mouths opened on hinges in perfect time. He saw riverboats like the kind he had ridden on, filled with talking dolls. All the living people were laughing at these distractions, stuffing food into their mouths as if they had never eaten before. The horror of it almost made him forget why he was there, what he was chasing—for in some unspoken way he understood that it was the mechanical creatures and the fantasies unfolding all around that were driving the living people mad with gluttony. Everywhere he turned, there were more frightening visions.

The giant music-box theater, which had turned out to be inside a town, which was really a bigger theater, revealed itself to be a city, swirling and swarming with bloated people in insane colors with masks like clock faces. Hunkered in doorways, like beggars, were rodent forms and filthy derelicts with the tails of lizards. There were trains that whisked by as if they ran on light, and carriages without horses or oxen that looked like eggs
or beetles. In the sky overhead were flying machines like those he had envisaged, but inside them were just more people eating and drinking. The women wore next to nothing, and yet street-corner preachers set fire to random passersby. Bodies and baubles hung from the street lanterns—a murder and a sale of some kind were transacted on every corner. And, all the time, Lloyd told himself, “The oddest thing of all is that I know I am still inside the music box.”

Still, knowing this did not help him find Hattie. Then he peered out beyond the festering false-face emporia and saw something that held his eye. It was, in fact, something like the Eye. Only in the shape of an enormous building, like a cathedral. Limestone and metallic green, it towered in the distance. Until he saw that it was not a citadel of some kind, nor was it human-made. It trembled rhythmically, like some deep music. It was laced with lightning and rainbows as dark as the skin of the fish he remembered catching in the Licking River back in his other life. Hovering on the horizon like an omen and a promise, he saw in its inverted pyramid shape the complexity of the Ambassadors’ master symbol. It was a tornado—heaped and spiraling chaos that somehow retained its form. And at the base, in the gorgeous crisis that anchored it to the earth, was a door—and in the doorway was a girl.
Then the shadow of a jeweled claw reached out to him
. He turned to run and headed for one of the riverboats, for they were most familiar to him. He chose the one that seemed most authentic—and to his astonishment he found himself confronted by his old comrade, St. Ives. The gambler appeared lost in reverie, smoking a cigar and staring down at the water.