Wraiths of the Broken Land

by S. Craig Zahler

  Dolores faced forward. In the adjacent room stood the black scarecrow silhouette of Long Clay, who had one revolver extended and the tip of its sibling lodged within Ubaldo’s nasal cavity. (The Mexican’s good and broken arms were bound by a cord.)

  “Wait in the hall.” The gunfighter shifted his rubber head so that he could see the Plugfords through his left goggle. “They’re fetching the dandy.”

  Brent carried Dolores to the edge of the passage, and there she surveyed the vast subterranean parlor, which was illuminated by hundreds of nook-embedded candles. Upon the nonagonal clay tiles laid eleven corpses, a morass of charcoal faces, iridescent entrails, cracked white ribcages, exposed lungs and severed limbs. The redheaded woman recognized that the deceased men were Catacumbas guards, most of whom had visited her chamber.

  “We brung grenades,” said Brent.

  “Good.” The invasive smells of blood, gunpowder, iron and scorched fat filled Dolores’s nostrils. “They deserve it.” Two baby turtles crawled across a broiled liver.

  Dolores raised her gaze from the carnage and looked toward the dais, which was thirty yards distant. Facedown upon the stone floor laid twenty-nine formally-dressed gentlemen and forty whores who wore variegated silk kimonos. Pointing the barrel of a pump-action shotgun at the exposed backs of the prostrated individuals was Stevie, clad in a rubber mask, tattered clothes and an iron tabard. He nodded his orange head at his sister, and she waved in return.

  John Lawrence Plugford reached the twins and paused. Beneath her blanket, Yvette quietly prayed.

  On the far side of the parlor and next to the stairwell stood the third corner of the sentry triangle, a small pudgy fellow who held a repeater rifle and wore an iron tabard, a maroon suit, a rubber mask and white gloves. He waved a hand at Dolores and summarily gripped his weapon.

  The redheaded woman suddenly realized at whom she was looking. “Lord,” she muttered to her brother, “that’s…”

  “Yeah,” said Brent. “That’s him.”

  Dolores waved her hand at Patch Up. “I can’t believe he’d get involved in this ugliness.”

  “He’s family,” stated John Lawrence Plugford.

  Stevie called out from the dais, “You girls see any men you want me to execute?”

  Yvette prayed louder.

  Dolores could not see most of the prone captives, but a rotund man who had squeezed his bulk through her chamber door on several occasions was very visible. “Let me see that one in the second row—the fat one in the purple suit.”

  Stevie walked over to the indicated man and kicked his head sideways. “Stand up.”

  The fat fellow from Portugal rose to his knees, wiped dust from his iridescent cuffs and stood upright. His back was to Dolores.

  Stevie prodded the captive with his shotgun barrel. “Walk to the front of the stage so she can see you good.”

  The fat man wended his prostrated peers and strode to the edge of the dais, where he paused, buttoned his double-breasted lavender jacket and aligned his hair, as if he were preparing for an opera recital.

  Anger coursed through Dolores’s breast. This was the odious creature who had stuffed dirty socks into her mouth and sodomized her.

  “There are many important men in this establishment,” the Portuguese gentleman proclaimed, “and there will be retribution for what—”

  The gunstock impacted his right cheek.

  “Don’t share your stupid wisdom,” advised Stevie.

  John Lawrence Plugford leaned close to Dolores. “Did he touch you?”

  “Yes.”

  John Lawrence Plugford stopped breathing.

  Brent’s hands tightened upon Dolores’s shoulders and legs.

  Stevie swung his gunstock into the fat man’s jaw, and the bone snapped. The rapist from Portugal cried out, exactly as he did whenever he sprayed semen, and he clasped his asymmetrical chin. Near him, the prone captives shuddered, but did not say anything.

  “Apologize to her!” boomed John Lawrence Plugford.

  “Do it!” yelled Stevie. “Apologize!”

  Blood trickled from the fat man’s lopsided mouth, down his bulbous neck and onto his white shirt. He looked at Dolores and said, “I am so—”

  “Get on your goddamn knees and put your fat hands together!” shouted Stevie. “That’s how you apologize!”

  The fat man from Portugal dropped to his knees.

  “Why you done it!?!” yelled Stevie. “Why you do that to her!?! She’s a good woman.” His voice warbled unevenly, and Dolores knew that he was crying beneath his rubber mask. “Goddamn you!” The gunstock crushed the man’s nose.

  “Let him apologize,” John Lawrence Plugford said to his youngest child.

  The fat man looked at Dolores and opened his mouth. Blood flowed from the carmine hole and down his chin.

  “Hands together!” admonished Stevie.

  The fat man pressed the palms of his hands together and said with a slurred voice, “I am s-s-sorry that I mis-s-s-streated you.”

  “Say it true! What you did!” Stevie pressed the tip of his shotgun to the fat man’s hands. “Say it true!”

  “I am sorry that I raped you.”

  Barrels thundered. The fat man’s hands were obliterated by buckshot, and his face was seared by a brilliant flash of gunpowder.

  Dolores felt immediate gratification, as if one of the many painful cysts in her guts had been removed.

  The fat man wobbled upon his knees and fell sideways. Blood poured from his truncated arms.

  Stevie raised a boot over the charred rapist’s face.

  “No!” boomed John Lawrence Plugford. “He dies slow.”

  Beneath her blanket, Yvette wept.

  The fat man from Portugal tried to scream, but was unable to pull his seared lips apart.

  Chapter XIV

  In Adjacent Rooms

  London was a large, gray and spectral city filled with ancient mysteries that tantalized Nathaniel Stromler’s burgeoning mind. Although he was only thirteen years old, he was capable, mature and tall enough to pass for a man of nineteen (the age that was the intersection of flip adolescence and ambitious adulthood), and naturally he wanted to explore the enigmatic environs unaccompanied. Unfortunately, for him the Itinerary was filled and allowed the youth no time for solitary rambles.

  Out of necessity, the thirteen-year-old-fabricated.

  On the eleventh morning of the family sojourn, a Thursday, the youngest Stromler announced that he felt ill and would be unable to endeavor the campaign that was described in the Itinerary. The delivered news was reinforced by a quartet of sneezes, which were coerced by pepper that he had ground the previous evening and installed inside his handkerchief. Although his older sister Isabella harbored suspicions regarding the veracity of his illness, the declarations and physical proofs he proffered wrought looks of consternation from his parents.

  “Perhaps I should remain with you,” Mother said, “should your condition worsen.”

  “The housekeeper is a dependable person,” the boy responded from his bed, “and shall be summoned should my mild illness become notable.” Nathaniel applied pepper grinds to his nostrils with the handkerchief. “I am quite confident—” He sneezed. “I am quite confident that a one day abstention from the Itinerary is all that I shall require.” The youth improvised a lusty cough.

  Nathaniel’s parents squabbled over whether or not they could leave their innocent son alone in an English hotel apartment, and after each combatant had twice attacked and defended each position, they gave their assent.

  “Do not leave the room under any circumstances.”

  “Disregard your mother’s statement should there be a fire.”

  “Naturally,” the woman replied, “Nathaniel would not remain in the room should i
t become enveloped by flames.”

  “I only sought to clarify your advice.”

  “It is a mother’s duty to offer her son guidance, especially when his father is only too happy to abandon him in favor of sculptures and paintings and sherry and glances (which he believes are surreptitious) at buxom English ladies.”

  The squabble continued for five more minutes. Isabella complained that she was hungry, and presently, the trio departed.

  Nathaniel walked toward the window, cloaked himself in striped curtains and looked through the glass. Father hailed an open carriage, Mother summoned its replacement and Isabella pointed out an omnibus toward which they all hastened.

  The young man began his toilet and envisioned his private ramble throughout the great gray metropolis of fog. Upon his solitary walk, he would observe English architecture and the people who lived within it, and he would purchase some written works and perhaps a pastry. If he encountered the housekeeper before he departed, he would pay her some farthings to corroborate his whereabouts, but his intention was to stealthily escape the hotel and trust that his absence would not ever be discovered.

  After he had completed his toilet, Nathaniel dressed himself in a brown three-piece suit and exited the apartment.

  The lank youth entered the hallway and strode upon the pine green carpet that covered the major part of the floor. At the end of the hall, he heard a strange noise and paused. From behind a closed door emanated a loud crackling that he at first believed to be the theoretical fire predicted by his parents.

  Concerned for the safety of any tenants therein, Nathaniel approached the portal.

  A loud piano note rang and was succeeded by two different pitches. The young man recognized the crackling emanation as that of a wax cylinder amplified in the flower of a phonograph.

  Suddenly, the music stopped.

  “This is the penultimate piece I’m to sing at the recital,” said an Englishwoman located within the room.

  “I very much look forward to hearing it,” replied a man who possessed a strange accent.

  The crackling union of metal needle and spinning wax resumed, and the composition began anew. Nathaniel heard the familiar melody, and when the recorded pianist augmented the single note phrase with thick bass chords, the Englishwoman began to sing.

  It was immediately apparent to the young eavesdropper that the lady within the apartment was a professional performer—she rang the pitches clearly and precisely. Although she strained for several high notes, her voice had a plaintive quality that turned this limitation into a virtue, a humble acknowledge of human fallibility. The song modulated to a lower register, and the singer’s voice blossomed like a lush lily garden causing the youth’s heart to pound within his chest. For the first time in his life, he yearned.

  The notes climbed, and the woman followed desperately.

  In the third floor hallway of The Hotel Gregory of London, Nathaniel Stromler savored a transformative invisible beauty.

  The voice vanished, and the recorded pianist reached his concluding cadence. The phonograph crackled rhythmically for five heartbeats and was gone.

  “You have a remarkable gift,” said the man with the strange accent. “Herrlich.”

  “Danke, mein herr. I think of you whenever I perform this particular aria.” Buried within the Englishwoman’s speaking voice were the myriad hues that her singing had revealed.

  For the duration of several heartbeats, Nathaniel heard nothing beyond the door.

  “I would like for us to make love,” announced the Englishwoman.

  The instinct to flee did not overpower Nathaniel’s curiosity.

  “Ja.”

  Footsteps resounded within the room, and a shadow darkened the narrow space between the carpet and the bottom of the burnished door.

  “A boy is outside,” said the German man.

  Nathaniel departed from the portal and pressed his back to the hallway wall. Adjacent to the doorframe, the youth lurked.

  “Please help me remove my dress,” requested the singer.

  Tumblers whined, and the lock clicked. Nathaniel’s fear of being apprehended abated. The shadow beneath the door changed into the sound of footsteps.

  With his back flush against the wall, the lank youth listened. Silken fabrics rustled, buttons clicked, clothing crumpled and fell, fingers slid across skin, the man said, “Alyssa,” bedclothes crinkled, wood whined, the woman groaned, the man moaned, the woman said, “There,” wood whined, bedclothes rustled, the woman said, “Kurt, Kurt,” the man said “I love you,” a soft pulse grew louder and louder and louder, the wall throbbed, the man groaned, the woman cried out and together they said, “I love you.”

  A burning harpoon lanced Nathaniel Stromler’s stomach and roused him from his dream.

  The twenty-six-year-old gentleman from Michigan opened his eyes. Two scorpions that were covered with black oil scrambled around their wooden prison. In the adjacent bowl, fifty gray arachnids crackled like a spinning phonograph cylinder that had run out of music.

  Gris, sitting at the far end of the dining room table, informed his progeny that he would remit the foreigner.

  Diego clenched his gloved left hand and said, “Padre. Por favor. Nosotros—”

  “Silencio.” Gris turned his eye upon the captive. “Your associates have killed many men, taken seventy hostages and demanded your immediate release.”

  Nathaniel was fairly certain that this was a dream or a ruse (or perhaps the latter embedded within the earlier) and did not proffer any reply.

  “Salvation does not seem to lift your spirits,” remarked the white-haired Spaniard.

  “I am not entirely convinced that—” A new sharp agony seized Nathaniel, and he vomited a small amount of blood and black oil. The inhabitant within him—the third arachnid that had been presented to his digestive tract—harried his stomach lining with pincers that felt disproportionately huge.

  “My sons would like to use you as a hostage,” Gris remarked, “but my opinion is that you are not very valuable.”

  “You are correct,” replied Nathaniel.

  Gris looked sternly at his sons. “We shall deliver the gringo to his associates.” In Spanish, he added that he did not want one more innocent person killed because of two foreign whores. “We shall conclude this business immediately.”

  Diego and his silver-haired sibling nodded.

  The white-haired Spaniard looked at whomever stood behind the captive. “Xzavier.”

  Bright metal slid across the ropes that held Nathaniel’s left and right wrists to the arms of the stone chair, and the bindings sloughed. Unbound, the gringo raised a tremulous hand to his mouth and wiped away blood, bile and black oil. Although he still doubted his purported release, a small hope glimmered.

  The flashing knife sliced through the fetters that bound his ankles, and dammed arterial blood surged toward his numb feet. For the first time since the painful dinner had begun, Nathaniel saw the person who had braced his head and inserted the wooden ruler. Xzavier was a muscular Mexican with curly black hair, a nose like wet clay and a large ‘X’ branded upon his neck.

  Diego covered the wooden bowls, removed his canvas glove, rose to his feet and announced that he would escort the foreigner to the parlor.

  Gris told his son to comply with the intruders.

  “Si.”

  Diego and Xzavier placed their hands beneath Nathaniel’s armpits and hoisted him from the stone chair. Hard things that felt like hot coals, needles and broken glass shifted within his belly.

  From their seats at far end of the oaken dining table, Gris and his silver-haired son appraised the risen captive. Presently, they returned their attentions to quivering flan.

  “Walk,” ordered Diego.

  Xzavier slapped a palm in-between
Nathaniel’s shoulder blades, and the gringo stumbled forward, holding his stomach.

  The trio strode past tapestries of Spanish galleons, underneath two elaborate candelabra and to the double door on the far side of the room. Diego twisted the silver doorknob, pushed and motioned for the captive to precede him through the open portal. Compelled by Xzavier’s hand, Nathaniel walked into a torch-illumined hallway.

  Diego exited and shut the door. “Continue.”

  The three men traversed a long hallway of grayish-ochre stone; Nathaniel’s stomach alternately burned and grew cold, and his bruised right eye throbbed.

  Presently, they entered a broader passageway, upon the far side of which waited a petite Mexican woman, clothed in a modest brown and green dress. She held an unborn child in her swollen stomach and a small revolver in her right hand. Nathaniel wondered if he was about to be executed by a pregnant woman.

  “Halt,” Diego ordered.

  The men stopped. Xzavier grabbed Nathaniel’s collar and screwed his fist clockwise; the fabric tightened around the gringo’s throat, and he wheezed.

  “Vengo, Rosalinda.” Diego walked to the petite woman and from her received the small firearm. He kissed her upon the mouth, and they embraced.

  Nathaniel saw that the couple wore matching gold bands upon their ring fingers.

  “Gracias, mi amor,” said Diego. “Gracias.”

  Rosalinda said that Gris never should have kidnapped the white women.

  Diego stated that his father had fairly acquired the gringas.

  The pregnant woman told her husband to be careful.

  “Si.” Diego kissed the palm of his hand, pressed it to Rosalinda’s swollen stomach and said that he would be very cautious.

  The woman asked her husband what he intended to do with the pistol.

  Gris’s son said that he would not employ the firearm unless the intruders fired upon him.

  “Si.” Nodding, the woman wiped fearful tears from her eyes. “Cuidado.”