Of Grave Concern (17 page)

31

In the morning, we pulled on our cold and wet clothes and rode along the creek in the direction of
Ciudad Perdida.
The water snaked through a series of rolling hills, and gradually the bluffs got steeper, and soon we were riding right down the middle of the shallow creek.

In an hour, we came upon the broken body of Pollux Adams tangled up in the branches of a willow tree. His neck was bent at an angle that was painful to look at.

“Wonder what it felt like,” I mused.

“Which part?” Calder asked. “The flying or the dying?”

“The flying.”

“Why don't you ask him?”

“Ghosts can't answer a direct question,” I said. “Besides, I don't hear anything. His spirit isn't here. Back at the cabin, maybe.”

We urged our horses on.

The banks along the river became steeper, and there began to appear square and rectangular holes here and there—windows and doorways leading to rooms filled with dirt and debris. At the back of my mind, I could hear murmuring voices, but I couldn't make out what they were saying.

“We're getting close,” Calder said.

“Do you have a plan?”

“Nope,” he said. “I was hoping you'd have one. After all, you're the one who talks to the dead.”

I shrugged. “I can hear voices, but they're very old voices,” I said. “I don't know what they're saying. They just sound sad, mostly.”

We went another quarter of a mile, and the bluff dwellings became thicker along the north side of the creek. In some places, the walls had collapsed, revealing steps going down and rooms that were so big they hadn't been all filled in with dirt yet.

“How many people could have lived here?” I asked.

In my head, the voices had become a chorus of loss.

“Thousands,” Calder said. “You've got fresh water here, you're protected from the worst of the winter wind, and there had to be plenty of buffalo and other game. It must not have been a bad life. You could raise a family here.”

He was staring at the silver trunk of a cottonwood when he said it, and I knew he was thinking about when he had his own family, not so long ago in Presidio County.

“Come back, Jack.”

“I'm here,” he said, standing in the saddle and peering down the creek. “There's smoke there, through the trees. I think we are upon the whiskey trader's hideout.”

“I see it. And it smells like they're roasting some kind of meat.”

“Okay, here's the plan,” Calder said decisively. “I am going to ride on in by myself and kill the sonuvabitch, and you're going to wait here. If I don't come back in an hour, you turn that Arabian around and head back toward the trail.”

“That's the dumbest plan I ever heard, Jack. First off, we want to bring the whiskey trader back for trial. Second off, if you get in trouble, I'm no good to come in and get you out of it. So it's obvious that I'm the one who has to go in by myself, and you wait here. And if I don't come back soon, then you shoot your way in.”

“I don't like it,” Calder said. “Maybe we should try to smoke them out first.”

“If we were after ordinary criminals, that might work,” I said. “But Vanderslice is something there's not even a word for yet, and Malleus isn't even human. I don't think smoke is going to bother them.”

“But if you walk in there first, they have you as a hostage.”

“I'm only good as a hostage as long as I'm not willing to die,” I said. “Jack, you know that I'm not expecting to come out of this alive. Unless I get my aura back, there's no point in my coming out alive. I'll just turn into something more and more ugly. You have to promise that if they threaten to kill me to get you to throw down your guns, that you won't do it. Shoot me if you have to, to prove the point.”

“I won't shoot you.”

“That's sweet, but not helpful.”

Calder smiled.

“Jack,” I said. “There's something I need to tell you.”

“Well,” he said, “me too. But you first.”

“There's a thousand-dollar reward out for my capture, dead or alive, in Ohio. I conned a pork baron there out of a few thousand dollars and he squealed pretty loud. So I'm not Kate Bender, but there is a pretty price on my head. If I'm dead when this is over, you ought to ship my body back to Cincinnati and ask for the reward.”

He looked a bit odd.

“Now, why the hell would you tell me that?” he asked.

“I'd rather you get the money than County Attorney Sutton,” I said. “Now, what is it you want to tell me?”

“It was nothing,” he said.

“Nothing?”

“Just that when we get out of this, you should stop cussing in French. It disturbs people. That's all.”

Calder dismounted and tied the reins of the horse to a bush. Then he checked his revolver and pulled the rifle from the saddle scabbard and cradled it in one arm. Finally he pulled a cigar from his vest pocket and stuck it in the corner of his mouth.

“All right,” he said, “I'm ready. Let's kill us a demon.”

I dismounted and handed Fatima's reins over to Calder. Then I closed my eyes, said a silent prayer to whomever or whatever good might listen, and began walking toward the smoke. I was nervous, but I walked deliberately. My head was high, and the breeze trailed the black ribbon behind my hat. They had to hear me coming, because my ankle-high shoes made an awful racket scraping against the gravel and sloshing in the water.

When I rounded a bend in the creek, I saw the hideout, a big complex of ancient rooms tucked into the bluff. The rooms and the stairs going down to them had been cleared of mud, and I could see shadows moving inside.

Outside, on the broad sandbar in front of the complex, stood Vanderslice surrounded by at least a dozen of the wild whackers I had seen before. Some of the whackers were dressed in rags, and others had no clothes at all. They were clustered around a hunk of browned meat being turned on a spit over a fire, and Vanderslice had the bone-handled skinning knife in his hand. He was carving off slices of meat and throwing them to the whackers, who snapped and snarled at one another.

“Down, boys,” Vanderslice said. “There's plenty for everyone.”

Also on the sandbar was a farm wagon, a buckboard, unhitched but with barrels of whiskey in the back. More barrels were on the sandbar, not far from the stairs leading down into the ancient rooms. Around the barrels were bottles of all shapes and sizes, ready to be filled and corked. An Indian woman and a boy of about twelve were working to fill the bottles, ladling whiskey from the barrels and pouring it into metal funnels in the necks of the bottles, and then stopping the bottles with a cork.

The woman wore a stained buckskin skirt, fringed at the bottom, a blue blouse, and a bead-and-shell necklace around her neck. I could not tell her age. She might have been thirty or fifty. Although her body seemed strong, her face was deeply lined, and her eyes were dark with sorrow. The boy wore dark wool pants, moccasins, and a red print shirt. His bright eyes warily watched Vanderslice as he worked on the meat.

As I drew closer, I could see that what was being turned on the spit was the torso of a man.

“Knew you'd come,” Vanderslice said to me, throwing another strip of meat to the whackers. “Women are just dying to meet me.”

“I come because of the Russian girl.”

His hand went to the pocket with the missing button.

“So . . . what they say about you is true,” Vanderslice said. “You do talk to the dead. What did pretty, stupid, dead little Anna have to say?”

“That you betrayed and then killed her.”

“But of course,” Vanderslice said. “I sold my soul to Malleus.”

“I hope it was worth it.”

“He'll give me you,” he said. “He'll kill you, in the end. But before he does, he'll turn you over to me. And you'll be sorry that you were so rude to me on the street in Dodge City.”

“I think not.”

“I'm guessing you're not here alone,” Vanderslice said, his eyes darting over the creek. “But I reckon we'll find out who and how many soon enough.”

“Is that Castor Adams?” I asked.

“The same,” he said. “One of the boys did wrong in killing him, but it seemed a shame to let the meat go to waste.”

He carved another slice, but instead of throwing it to the whackers, he took a bite. He chewed, then offered it to me.

“Hungry?”

“Not now,” I said.

“Oh, it ain't half bad,” he said. “I don't see what all the fuss was, with the Donner Party and old Alfie Packer. Meat is meat. We're all animals, right? Seems to me, a good many human animals would be of more use as vittles anyhow.”

He threw the rest of the slice to the whackers. One of them jumped and caught it in his mouth.

“Is Malleus here?”

“In the temple,” Vanderslice said, jerking his head back to the ruins.

“Call him out,” I said. “I want my soul's shadow back.”

Vanderslice laughed. “That ain't going to happen,” he said. “Old Malleus is very particular about those shiny bits of stuff that he keeps in a bag on his belt. It's where his power comes from. He reaches up through the solar plexus and snatches them from people. He keeps the bigger and brighter ones, like yours. The others, the dull ones, he uses to turn wolves into whackers.”

“So they're not werewolves.”

“Just the opposite,” Vanderslice said. “Weremen.”

“That's why they go back to wolves when you kill them,” I said.

“My, you do catch on.”

“But what about Shadrach?”

“Oh, he was a real man, all right,” Vanderslice answered. “Not much of a man, I'll grant you. Old Malleus had quite enough of his stupidity after he busted another wheel, so he shot him with somebody else's aura. When that happens, it's like two bottles of nitroglycerin being smashed together—
kaboom!
—it blows your whole chest apart.”

“That's what Malleus uses that antique pistol on his belt for.”

“It's good that you're still dressed for a funeral,” Vanderslice said, and smirked. “Because the next one's going to be your own.”

Then something stirred deep in the ruins Vanderslice called the temple, and I could see a shadow walking up the stairs. I was expecting Malleus, but what emerged, instead, into the daylight was a woman wearing a black silk robe, open to the waist, with nothing beneath. She was about my age—and was nearly my image in every other respect.

Her face was smeared with red ochre, and abalone baubles dangled from her earlobes. She moved with an animal grace, like a lazy housecat walking across a porch warmed by the sun. The whackers seemed both excited and repelled by her; and even though they scrambled back out of her way, their hungry eyes locked on her body.

“Whiskey trader, you talk too much,” the woman said.

“I was only—”

“Shut up,” the woman said. Her voice had the same odd accent that I had detected in Malleus's voice.

“I should have let Malleus cut out your tongue long ago. How much have you told her? Oh, never mind. I'm going to assume everything.”

The woman walked over to me and smiled. She reached out with a cold hand and lifted my chin.

“Now we see through a glass, darkly.”

It was Katie Bender.

32

The woman took my left hand in hers and pulled me toward the stone steps leading down into the shadows, but I resisted.

“Come along,” she said. “You came here to see Malleus, didn't you?”

“Yes,” I said, and stumbled after her. I looked over my shoulder, hoping to catch a glimpse of Calder striding across the gravel bar, but there was nothing but woods and water.

“I've been feeling you for a long while,” the woman said. “Years, in fact. Always at the edge of my consciousness, like a half-remembered dream when daylight comes. But here you are in the flesh, at last.”

“What should I call you?”

“Ah, there's a problem,” she said, stopping. She leaned close and cupped a hand around my ear, brushing away the hair. “Don't call me ‘Katie,' because that is a weak and diminutive form of my name. But your modern tongue would break itself in attempting to pronounce ‘Aikaterini.'”

“What language is that?”

“Ancient Macedonian.”

She kissed me. Her lips were as cold as steel.

“Where are the others?” I asked, pulling away.

“There are no others.”

“Ma and Pa Bender? Your brother, John?”

“Ah,” she said. “Them. The old ones were merely slaves, and the stupid young one only a consort. They are dead. I killed them all, soon after we left that wretched cabin. As mortals they thirsted after land, and now they have their wish—they sleep beneath the prairie for eternity.”

“Did you slit their throats?”

“There was no time for pleasure, darling,” she said. “I shot them all, with a marvelous invention—the Colt 1873 revolving pistol, a forty-five-caliber, also called ‘the Peacemaker.' Oh, how I love you Americans and your sense of humor!” She laughed wickedly. “Oh, would that Alexander had a thousand such weapons. Macedonians would rule the world still, instead of yet and again.”

“You knew Alexander the Great?”

“A casual relationship,” she said. “He loved boys more.”

“That had to sting.”

“Enough talk!” she said. “Malleus awaits.”

At the bottom of the steps was a room with a fire pit in the center and all manner of objects piled against the walls: expensive clothes flung carelessly about, caskets overflowing with jewelry, books, marble busts of Greek and Roman statesmen, dusty wine bottles. Also piled about were human skulls the color of parchment. The ghosts here were old—very old. Their voices were the murmur of a shallow river in a deep cave unseen by any man.

Malleus was sitting—or rather squatting—on a throne that looked like it would have been at home in the court of Nero. He was wearing a dressing gown over his enormous body, and from a wide leather belt dangled the antique pistol and the leather bag. His hands were the color of dead fish and were resting on the silver handle of a walking stick.

“Take off your hat,” she said.

When I refused, she knocked it to the floor.

Then Katie dropped to one knee and attempted to pull me down with her, but I refused.

“Malleus, my lord,” she said. “I have brought the other.”

“Welcome to hell,” Malleus said, opening his arms. Then he smiled, revealing those teeth the color of old tusk, and I could not help but shudder.

“It could use some cleaning,” I said, “but it is hardly my idea of hell.”

“Pahghh!”
Malleus spat. “You mean your Christian idea. How bored am I of this theology for simpletons. One god to rule all—how uninspired! Give me that old-time religion, when there was a god for every temper. And hell is merely the netherworld, the place of the dead.”

Malleus motioned for Katie to come to him, and she scooted across the floor and put her back against the throne. She loosened the silk gown and he caressed her bare shoulders as he spoke.

“Why have you come here?”

“My aura,” I said. “Give it back.”

“You had your chance,” he said. “I dropped it from surprise when I took it—it was made of better stuff than I expected. It lay there in the mud, and you could have snatched it up, but you did not. I placed it in my collection then. When I have enough of the shiny ones, I will transform into something more pleasing. . . .”

“Are you Macedonian, too?”

He waved dismissively. “I speak more dead languages than any Oxford don,” he said. “No man has heard my native tongue in five thousand years, and none know its name. Call it ‘Enigma.'”

“Obviously, you aren't human,” I said.

“Brilliant,” he said. “Any more revelations for us?”

“What are you?”

He smiled. “If I told you,” he said, “I might be lying. Or I might not.”

I had my answer.

“What are you doing here?”

“Anything I want,” he said. “And what I want at the moment—meaning the next hundred years or so—is to set loose a new kind of evil upon humanity. Murder as a kind of sickness. I don't know what to call it yet, exactly. I might just wait and see what kind of bad name you can give it. You get so many things wrong! Oh, some of my favorites—spontaneous generation, the miasma theory of disease, pinochle, maternal imprinting, phrenology, Lamarckism.”

“We get a few things right.”

“Given enough time, perhaps,” he said. “Problem is, your race doesn't have time, does it? What can you accomplish in your biblical three score and ten? The best of you make some music for others to hum, scribble some dreams or nightmares for others to share, or work a lifetime to discover and perfect some new knowledge. But the rest of you—driven by the pursuit of pleasure and profit, turning a blind eye on the pain of others, and always beating ploughshares into swords. Yours is a murderous race. Why, look at what you have done here on the plains in the space of a single generation. You have driven the aborigines from their lands, destroyed a multitude of cultures, and slaughtered the bison to near extinction.”

He made a motion with his hand, and Katie somehow knew what he wanted. She brought him one of the skulls from a pile near the wall.

“Look upon the legacy of an empire,” he said, holding up the skull as if he were in a play. “You have no name for them, but they ruled this land for a thousand years and did but a fraction of the harm you have done in a handful. Their empire collapsed, in time. Now, even their name is known only to the wind.”

He squeezed the skull, and his fingers crushed the ancient bone as if it were thin plaster; teeth and dust falling to the floor.

“That is man,” he said. “That is your fate, and soon. But I offer something . . . better.”

“What?” I asked. “You want to turn me into one of those whackers?”

“Why would I do that when I have a surplus of dull auras and an unlimited supply of prairie wolves?” he asked. “No, I want you to serve me as your ageless sister, Aikaterini, serves me. In return, I offer eternal youth, power second only to my own, and a seat at the table of darkness.”

“And if I don't?”

“I'll kill you, of course,” he said. “Your soul will wither and die without its shadow.”

“Doesn't sound like much of a choice.”

“Oh, but it is,” Malleus hissed. “I can kill you, but I can't make you serve me. You must do that of your own free will. Choose now.”

“Thanks, but I'm tired of playing this game,” I said. “Just give me my aura, and I'll be on my way.”

“You're choosing death,” he said. “You'll become food for the whackers.”

“Well, I always liked dogs.”

Where the hell is Calder?
I thought.

Malleus struck the cane on the floor, producing a rap that echoed from the walls.

“Enough!” he said. “There is one last thing you should see.”

He nodded to Katie, and she stood, picked up a clay jar by the throne, and removed the wooden plug. She shook some handfuls of blue powder into her hand and threw them into the fire pit.

The fire erupted like she had thrown kerosene on it.

It continued to blaze fiercely, with a weird blue tinge, and Malleus began chanting in the Enigma language. Presently a form appeared in the flames. It was a nude man, a young man with blond hair.

It was Jonathan.

Suddenly I couldn't breathe. I felt like the floor would sink from beneath me. I staggered back a step or two.

“This is a trick,” I muttered. “Something you've ordered from Sylvestre and Company. It's not real.”

The nude Jonathan stepped out of the fire and into the room. Katie padded over and looped an arm around his neck and nuzzled his cheek.

“Oh, he seems real enough to me,” she said hungrily.

“Get away from him!”

I shoved her aside.

“Jonathan,” I said. “Is it you?”

He smiled, just as I remembered. He was still the age he was when he died. And when once I had been so much younger than he, now I was
older.
Nearly twice as old.Would he still want me now?

“Jonathan, are you real?”

No response. He seemed confused.

“Ask him,” Malleus said. “Ask him for the secret sign, the message that you had agreed that he would send from the other side as a sign that love survives death.”

I took his hand and squeezed it against my cheek.

“Do you remember?”

He blinked.

“Do you remember me?”

“Ophelia,” he said.

“My love,” I said. “What was the message?”

It was the message: “I await my wife.”

I sank to the floor beside him, sobbing, still holding his precious hand against my cheek.

“Oh God,” I said.

Katie put a hand on his shoulder and urged him down with me. I cupped his face in my hands and kissed him, a kiss that thrilled me to my shadowless soul. Then I rested my head against his chest.

And frowned.

“This isn't right,” I said.

“What could not be right?” Katie asked. “It is your love, returned from the grave. This is your heart's desire. All of your prayers have been answered in an instant, and you can stay here and rule with us—and live with him—forever.”

I got to my feet. My head was spinning, and I had to think hard to get out the words.

“This is a trick,” I said. “It's not Jonathan.”

“But the message,” Malleus said. “What of the message?”

“I—I don't know,” I said. “You read my mind, somehow. Maybe you even read my heart. But it's not him. I know it's not him. It can't be.”

“Why not?”

“He doesn't
smell
right.”

At that, the Jonathan-like apparition vanished in a flash of light and thunder and blue smoke. I fell backward from the concussion, landing heavily on the stone floor, my head throbbing.

Malleus stepped down from the throne and walked around the fire pit to where I lay on the floor. He looked down at me like I was a pile of trash, something annoying that needed to be cleaned up.

“Tell the whiskey peddler to feed her to the whackers,” Malleus said.

“Shame,” Katie said, walking over to me on swiveling hips. “We would have found her amusing . . . for a time.”

Then she reached down and grabbed hold of my earlobe and pulled me to my feet. I knocked her hand away with a forearm.

“That hurts, you bitch.”

She laughed.

“You dare defy me?” she asked. “Your suffering will be great.”

I reached up and grabbed one of the alabaster earrings.

“You first.”

I jerked the thing out of her ear and threw it to the ground. She shrieked and clasped her hand to her ear. Blood ran down the side of her neck. Then she looked at me with a hatred that made my heart skip a beat.

I made a dash for the steps.

She scrambled after me, and I was nearly at the top when she caught my ankle and pulled me down. I fell, but kicked out hard with my free leg. The heel of my shoe landed squarely in Katie Bender's face, and she fell backward down the stairs.

I emerged from the steps into the sunshine.

“Stop her!” Katie Bender called.

Vanderslice was standing with his arms crossed, the bone-handled skinning knife in his right hand, and he was smiling. He was about ten yards away, between me and the creek.

Katie Bender made it to the top of the steps. Blood was gushing from her nose and the corner of her mouth. She wiped her mouth with the palm of her hand, smearing the blood across her cheek.

“Didn't know immortals bled,” I said.

“You fool,” she said. “This isn't
my
blood. I'll just replace it with my next victim. And I'm going to start with you. Toss me the knife, whiskey trader.”

Vanderslice tossed the skinning knife over my head, a perfect pitch, and Katie Bender caught the bone handle in her left hand. Then she approached, the knife at the ready.

I stumbled backward, into Vanderslice.

He pinned my arms to my side.

“I'm going to slit your throat from ear to ear,” she said.

“Get back!”

“Then I'm going to skin you and throw your hide in with the others, and you're going to end up becoming a belt for some kind of machine back East, turning out spools for thread or toothpicks or maybe hammer handles.”

“Don't touch me!”

“Are you going to beg?” she asked. “There would be some pleasure in that.”

Vanderslice grabbed my hair and jerked my head back, exposing my throat.