Angler In Darkness

by Edward M. Erdelac

  “Well, maybe it snapped off on Jimpsey’s buckle.”

  “He wasn’t wearin’ one,” Doc said gravely.

  Ben handed the bit of steel back.

  “Look Doc, we gotta keep up with them two. Can you do that?”

  “I live up here, kid,” Doc said, slipping the metal into his pocket. “Can you keep up with me?”

  * * * *

  It was colder than a witch’s third tit during the ascent, maybe colder than before because of the rip Fisher had put in Ben’s shirt that let the wind right in to raise bumps on his flesh. They tried to keep Buck and Fisher both in sight, but the two ranged far ahead. Nearly an hour into the climb they split up to circle the mountain and make sure Waterback didn’t try to double back again and slip away.

  Doc was true to his word and did not lag behind. They came to a point just ten minutes or so below where he’d first caught Waterback and only then stopped to catch their breath.

  “How come you never came up to see me, Redbone?” Doc asked abruptly. He never had taken the long way around things.

  Ben took off his hat and felt the cool wind through his hair.

  “I dunno,” he said. “I been busy.”

  “Bullshit. Bustin’ up stills and lockin’ up drunks ain’t no full time occupation, even in Tahlequah. Be straight with me.”

  “Maybe....it was because bein’ up here reminded me of my pa so much.”

  “That ain’t so either. You been around lawyers too damn much. Didja think after your pa left I wouldn’t wanna see you? Didja think I thought less of you because he lit out?”

  He’d never truly thought about it that way, but it might be so. Everybody had loved his pa around Tahlequah. When English John left, some had whispered it was typical of a white man to leave his Indian family and that had made him feel ashamed as a son. A lot of times he and his pa had walked this mountain with Doc. Doc would point out the birds and the varmints and name them all, and tell him which plants were good for what ailments, which to steer clear of. He had learned a good deal more from Doc than he ever had from his pa.

  Ben scratched his head and put his hat back on.

  “Your pa always had itchy feet,” said Doc, “but I don’t think he was a bad man. He was just the sort of man kept a tally of other folk’s blessings, never his own. I ‘spect he told himself when he went off that he’d be back some day with money enough to move you all into a big house. Hell, maybe he will. That’s a white man’s truth. But that ain’t got nothin’ to do with you or who you are.”

  Doc slapped Ben’s shoulder hard, then moved on.

  “After you take this feller to the calaboose, you come back here an’ see me now and then, huh?”

  Ben smiled to himself, but he wondered if it would be Waterback or Buck and Fisher he wound up taking back.

  Then they heard the singing wheeling down the mountainside. It was a high voice, melodious like a woman’s, but strange. Sometimes when a lion yowled in the night, people mistook it for a woman’s scream. This was something like that. The voice sounded like a wildcat pretending a human voice.

  It sang;

  Uwe'la na'tsïkû'. Su' sä' sai'.

  Uwe'la na'tsïkû'. Su' sä' sai'.

  Ben fought down his rising hackles with a forced smirk. The words didn’t make sense. He looked over at Doc. The old man was leaning heavily against an oak tree. Ben couldn’t see his expression.

  “What...?”

  Doc shushed him and turned his head slowly, listening, but the voice was carried away on the blowing wind.

  “What the hell was that?” Ben repeated.

  Doc looked back. His face was drawn and grave.

  “Sound to you like it come from up there?”

  He motioned towards the little clearing up the mountain where Waterback had built his fire.

  Ben nodded.

  “Come on,” said Doc. He doubled his pace so that Ben kept up only with effort.

  They reached the spot. The small patch of smoldering black earth from Waterback’s fire was still there. Ben crouched down and sifted through the ash. He found a scrap of burnt cloth. There was a small unblackened corner of red paisley, like a hanky. He saw something else he hadn’t noticed before. A blackened pocketknife, opened. Why drop all this in the fire? Jimpsey wasn’t stupid enough to think a little fire could destroy a knife was he? But he hadn’t used a knife on Peggie anyhow, so it wasn’t like this was evidence. Maybe he had dropped it accidentally. There was blood on the ground too. Six drops of it. Had he nicked himself and dropped it? He hadn’t been bleeding when Ben had clapped the shackles on him.

  There was a movement in the bushes. Both he and Doc snapped aright, rifles at the ready.

  Fisher stepped into the clearing from the opposite side and came over.

  Ben relaxed.

  “Did you hear that singing a little while ago? Like a woman’s voice?” Ben said.

  Fisher shrugged.

  “Blowin’ hard up here. I didn’t hear no such thing.”

  He passed out of the shadow of the pines. They saw that his clothes, hands, and face were smeared with blood. His spectacles were gone too.

  “Goddammit! What’d you do, Fisher?” Ben mumbled, shaking his head.

  “Found Waterback. Left him back there,” Fisher said dully, indicating the brushes behind him.

  The wind was stirring the fallen leaves in the clearing, causing the trees to sweep the dark sky. Ben stalked across the clearing and jerked aside the bushes.

  Waterback was face down in the rotting leaves. His blood was black and gummy in the silver light, like crude oil. It looked like Fisher had butchered him. A big flap of his face was torn back. Waterback’s teeth and naked eyeball showed.

  “Dammit,” Ben whispered.

  Doc came up behind him and stood over the body. He got down to look closer.

  Ben went back into the clearing. He covered Fisher with his Winchester. Fisher made no move for the pistol belted around his waist.

  “I told you, Fisher, goddammit. Now I got to arrest you.”

  “I know,” Fisher said. “I’ll go with you, Ben.”

  Ben stepped forward, then thought of something. The chains. The chains hadn’t been on Waterback’s wrists. How the hell had he gotten them off?

  “Hey Ben?” Doc called from the trees.

  Ben looked back.

  “We better start back now, Ben,” Fisher said. “It’s late.”

  There was something odd in his tone, a shift in the way he was carrying himself. He’d been a mad bull before. Now he seemed like a dog, eager to please. Neither resigned to his lot nor proud of doing what he’d set out to do.

  “Where’s Buck?” Ben asked.

  “Hey! Ben!” Doc called again, more forcefully this time.

  Fisher took a step toward him.

  “He’ll be along.”

  Ben looked back. Doc was standing on the edge of the clearing, but in a different spot from where he’d gone into the brush. He was aiming his rifle right at him.

  “Get down!” the old man yelled.

  Ben dropped to the ground.

  Doc’s rifle boomed. Ben felt the shock of the big bullet passing overhead. It struck Fisher dead center, with enough force to pierce a bull’s forehead.

  Ben rolled and stared at Fisher.

  He hadn’t fallen. Fisher turned and was ran, crashing through the brush, giggling as he went.

  Doc fired again, but Fisher was gone, cackling in a high, throaty pitch like an old woman.

  “Jesus!” Ben exclaimed and looked back at Doc. “What’d you do that for?”

  “That wasn’t Fisher,” Doc said.

  “What?”

  “Fisher’s layin’ back here. Come and look.”

  Ben approached the crazed old man warily, his rifle on him, but Doc lowered his Sharps and made no move against him, just gestured to the break in the trees from which he’d emerged.

  True enough, the black man was laying there dead, naked on his b
ack amid the shrubs. There was a big tear in the flesh just below the breastbone. His top two ribs and been snapped and yanked half out of his body. There was a dark, empty cavity with shreds of connective tissue hanging loose.

  “I seen Waterback’s wounds weren’t too fresh,” Doc said, as Ben knelt to examine the corpse. “His chains ain’t there neither.”

  “I saw that too.”

  Ben passed his hand over Fisher’s face to close his wide, staring eyes. How could he be laying here? Who had that been in the clearing? Buck? It had sure looked like Fisher.

  “I looked around a little, and that’s when I found him.”

  “It’s Fisher alright. What the hell happened to him? Looks like a bear ripped him open.”

  “His liver’s missin.’ Look at the back of his neck.”

  Ben got down lower and pushed Fisher’s cooling body on its side. He squinted. There was a tiny mark about the size of a dime on the back of his neck.

  “That’s how she gets ‘em,” Doc muttered.

  “What? Who?”

  “Sometimes she’s called Nûñ'yunu'ïv.”

  “Stone Dress?” Ben repeated, standing up. His knees shook a little, and he stamped his foot. Just the cold.

  “But we always called her U`tlûñ'tä,” said Doc. “Spearfinger.”

  “What are you talkin’ about?”

  “In the old days, back in the Carolinas, she used to come down from the blue ridge of Whiteside mountain. She’d come as an old woman. She’d go after the children mostly. Set ‘em in her lap to brush their hair, then prick them in the back of the neck like that. You heard her singin’ earlier.”

  Ben thought back to the nonsense singing they’d heard on the wind.

  ‘Uwe'la na'tsïkû'. Su' sä' sai'.

  Liver, I eat it. Su' sä' sai'.

  “She’d come down when the people burnt the leaves off the mountains. She knew the smoke meant dinner. She ripped the livers outta folks, just like this.”

  Ben stared at the old man in the dark. He had known him too long to take him for a liar. Doc wouldn’t waste time telling stories given the situation. Besides, he’d seen and spoken to two dead men tonight himself. This thing, this Spearfinger, must have killed Waterback before he’d even found him. It’d let him chain it. It had wanted to go back to Tahlequah. Even as Fisher it had tried. If he were a little more English, maybe he would’ve held onto doubt a little longer. But the fact was, he was Cherokee too.

  “Where’d it come from? I mean, how could a thing like that exist?”

  “Nobody knows. Could be it sprung from the earth. Maybe it come outta the underworld, or maybe a witch’s heart got buried in the ground and Spearfinger grew around it.”

  “You seen this thing yourself?”

  “I don’t know,” he said.

  “What do you mean?”

  “Back before the whites came and burned out Chillhowee -that’s where she was supposed to have been killed. Chillhowee hunters baited her, got her in a pit and did her in. But...”

  “What?”

  “On the Trail, this is forty years ago,” Doc said. “Lots of us died. Lots of...children,” he said. He swallowed hard, like he was trying to get down something bitter. “You heard how that was. When the soldiers come and took us.”

  “Yeah, I heard.” Ben’s mother had been on the Trail as well, freezing on foot or in an uncovered wagon from New Echota to Fort Gibson. Four thousand Indians had dropped dead along those roads, one of them his infant aunt who his mother had lost crossing an icy river. Ben had heard, but never from Doc, not even when he’d once got up the gumption to ask.

  “The cold killed a lot of us, and some starved, but I believed then and I believe now, that there was somethin’ else too. Somethin’ that come along with us. We set out from Rattlesnake Springs, and right off we started findin’ some of the children like that,” he said, nodding to Fisher’s body. “I think she pretended to be one of us, and she got caught up in the march. I think she took the young ones, the weak ones, the way a wolf will trail a herd and cut out the dying.”

  “But you said she died at Chillhowee?”

  “Maybe she didn’t. Or maybe this is one of her kin. Once I thought I heard that singin’ when I was huntin’ down in Pumpkin Hollow. Before that, ‘last time I heard it was on the Trail. Maybe she ranges all over. Sometimes I heard about folks disappearin,’ or windin’ up dead in the hills. Once I heard about a man who come home to his family and found another man looked just like him standin’ on his own porch. Dog wouldn’t let him in the door.”

  “I heard that story too. I took it for shine talk.”

  Then they heard, from somewhere up on the ridge, woven in the rushing wind and the rasping bushes;

  ‘Uwe'la na'tsïkû'. Su' sä' sai'.

  How could it have got above them so fast?

  “I’m scared, Redbone,” Doc said, smiling faintly. “All the years I lived, more’n I got any right to, maybe. But I’m scared of what’s out there.”

  “How’d they her in the story?”

  “Spears and arrows busted off of her. She had power over stones. You seen how my rifle didn’t do nothing. But in the story...her heart. Yeah, I recollect her heart could be pierced.”

  “You cut it dead center with your Sharpes and it didn’t...”

  There was a shot then, clear and echoing. Two more. Buck Tate’s rifle.

  “Ben?” came Buck’s voice from high up on the mountain. “Doc?”

  “Buck!” Ben called.

  “It could be her,” Doc warned.

  “She knows where we’re at. We ain’t moved.”

  Then, to Buck;

  “Where are you Buck?”

  “I dunno! Up above you, I guess. Ben, I seen somethin’ a little while ago! I don’t know...I thought it was Fisher!”

  “We know about it! Don’t go near it! It ain’t Fisher! Fisher’s dead!” Ben yelled. “Didja hit it?”

  “I thought I did...but it went off into the trees!”

  “Don’t go near it, and keep where you can see it coming! We’re comin’ up! Keep talkin’ so’s we can find you! An’ shoot your gun once in awhile so we know it’s you!”

  Buck did keep it up. They followed his voice and rifle, scrabbling up the inclines of shifting stone, forging through the wind lashed brush, the river just a ribbon now, a thousand feet and more below. Finally Doc did give out.

  “I can’t get no higher,” he panted, leaning against a big tree.

  ‘Uwe'la na'tsïkû'. Su' sä' sai'.

  They heard it clearer now, and closer.

  “She’s right up there, I believe,” Doc said.

  “Ben, did you hear that?” Buck called down.

  “Yeah! I’m comin!” Ben looked once more at Doc. “You be alright here?”

  Doc nodded, panting so hard he couldn’t answer. He waved him on.

  The wind got to blowing so hard he felt the need to cling to the ground and the trees, lest it knock him right off the mountain. At last he clambered to a stony area near the summit where the sycamores sprouted between broken boulders and the wind was very strong.

  Buck was there, hugging his rifle, crouched in a small space between three jutting stones. His hat was gone, and his curly hair was blowing everywhere. He looked wildly at Ben, but then smiled and waved to him.

  Ben waved back and started creeping along the rocky ground towards Buck, angling his rifle everywhere he looked.

  Then there was a grinding clamor of shifting rock and sliding gravel. Buck cried out.

  Ben broke into a run. When he reached Buck, he found him half-pinned between the three big rocks. They had closed on him like stone fingers trapping a fly, and before Ben’s astonished eyes, they continued to turn inward as if to pinch him to death.

  Buck shrieked in agony as the big stones pressed into his hips and back. He had dropped his rifle, and wriggled in his stony trap, reaching for Ben desperately.

  Ben rushed to the rocks and put his shoulder to one, tr
ying to shove it off, but it was too heavy. Whatever power had animated it was irresistible. He could hear Buck’s bones snapping beneath his hoarse screams.

  Ben jammed the stock of his rifle underneath the base of the smallest boulder and heaved, trying to lever it out.

  Buck wailed and pulled at the gravelly earth, trying to pry himself loose.

  Ben stuck both feet on the boulder and put all his weight on the rifle. There was crack as the wood stock splintered and snapped off, but for a moment the stone gave. Buck slithered out, dragging his crushed legs behind him like something scuttling out of the sea for the first time.

  He lay there on his belly coughing up blood.

  Ben leapt away as the big stone he had been wrestling with suddenly rolled towards him, crushing his rifle.

  He turned, scooping up Buck’s gun in one hand and Buck in the other arm. Pulling the man to his feet elicited another scream that Ben seemed to feel travel the whole length of Buck’s sweating body.

  “Come on!” he hollered above the wind. He began to limp with him away from the rocks back toward the edge.

  Then there was another crackling sound from behind. Ben dared to look back and saw an immense shape perched like a giant buzzard on one of the stones. She was a gray old woman with mud covered skin and whipping white hair, her ratty brown blanket flapping like a cape about her. Her limbs were absurdly long and thin, like the legs of a crane, her body and head disproportionately large. She leered at him in the moonlight. Her teeth were jagged and black as coal, black as her two cannon bore eyes, wide and buggy in her emaciated skull. A thick oily mud leaked from the corner of her blood splashed mouth and hung like melted cheese from her narrow chin. She held her spindly arm out, beckoning with the curved talon on the end of her long finger. As though in answer, the big stone lying on its side began to shiver and crack.

  Then it blew apart.

  Ben looked away as the jagged bits of stone flew at them like a torrent of focused hail. They struck his arm around Buck’s waist and smashed the elbow, ripping Buck from his grasp.

  Ben fell to his knees clutching his gravel-riddled arm. Buck lay flat on his face beside him, his body shredded and leaking dark blood as if he’d been blasted with a load of grapeshot.

  Ben swung around with Buck’s rifle and fired. He could scarcely lever the Winchester with his bleeding, broken arm.