The Cunning Man

by D. J. Butler

  “Pap! Pap!” Michael was invisible to him, obscured by the flies.

  “Hold on!” Hiram spat more flies out of his mouth. They were bigger than raisins and they wiggled on his tongue, causing him to gag and choke.

  He emptied the gasoline on the fire, jumping back to avoid getting burned again. Then he threw the gas can into the back of the truck and lurched to the window of the cab.

  “What the hell is with all these flies?” Michael asked. “And are you shouting something?”

  “Shouting at flies.” Hiram forced a hollow laugh. “It’s like we stumbled onto a bobcat’s lair, isn’t it? Only it’s a nest of flies. I think the fire is killing them. I’m going to get under the hood now, and I need you to keep hitting the starter until it takes.”

  “Got it, Pap.”

  Hiram lifted the hood. He couldn’t see the bottle, but he trusted that it would boil any second. If he hexed Gus Dollar, that might break his curse on Hiram’s truck. Now he needed the thing out in the darkness to stay away until the engine turned over.

  Hiram had never had occasion to curse anyone. But he understood that one element witches used to curse their victims was the recitation of scripture, backward.

  Especially the recitation of the Lord’s Prayer, in Matthew, chapter six.

  Hiram would counter the hex by reciting the prayer forward. “Our Father which art in heaven, Hallowed be thy name…” The familiar words tumbled from his mouth.

  The truck hadn’t yet started.

  Footsteps—the creature in the swarm was approaching again, and Hiram groped for any Bible verse dealing with fire. “And after the fire,” he shouted, “a still small voice!”

  The flames rose again, but the flies only got thicker.

  He whipped through the Lord’s Prayer a second time. He could hear Michael cursing inside the truck. The many hours he’d spent with Grandma Hettie, memorizing not only individual verses—what she used to sneer at as the “five-minute Sunday School technique”—but also whole chapters, and long sections of scripture, were paying off now, inside a swarm of flies and under attack by an unseen beast.

  But he was drawing a blank on his efforts to think of another useful passage about fire. There were the three children, but the account said furnace over and over.

  When would that witch bottle boil?

  He heard an enormous bellow directly behind him.

  If not fire, then light.

  “In the beginning was the Word!” Sweat poured down his face and dripped from his body. “In him was life; and the life was the light of men.”

  The fire vamped again. A sheet of dead flies struck the windshield of the Double-A like limp black hailstones, bouncing off and piling up on the engine block.

  He sang the Lord’s Prayer again, picking up speed and pitch, without missing a syllable. “Amen!” he shouted.

  The truck’s engine turned over.

  “Pap!” Michael shouted.

  Hiram slammed shut the hood of the truck, trapping ten thousand flies inside and sending another ten thousand bouncing into the dark night.

  Something grabbed him from behind. Hiram looked down and saw a hand clutching the hip of his overalls. It was gray and scabby and four times the size of a man’s hand, with three fingers and a long thumb. A nail like a tent stake sprouted from the end of each digit, yellow and jagged. A smell that mixed the dry scent of dust, the cloying iron reek of blood, and the sweet, fertile stink of rotting flesh swept over Hiram from behind.

  This was not Frank Johnson.

  Hiram placed both Harvesters against the side of the truck and kicked, flinging himself backward. He and the thing fell together into the flies and struck the sand together, and the creature felt as if it stretched, as if Hiram had fallen back onto modeling clay, or a water balloon.

  Hiram scrambled to his feet as quickly as he could, pulling the revolver from his bib pocket.

  “Pap?”

  A vast shape rose up from the swarm, too quickly for Hiram to see any detail, other than a face with too many mouths.

  He fired the revolver at the thing. It staggered back, and he fired a second time, and then a third.

  The sweet smell of crushed garlic filled his nostrils.

  Oh, no. Not now.

  He leaped onto the passenger-side running board of the Double-A, steadying himself with his left arm inside the vehicle.

  “What the hell is that, Pap?” Michael yelled.

  “Drive!” he yelled back.

  The thing loomed up again in the swarm of flies and Hiram fired at it as Michael punched the Double-A into gear. The truck had a high center, which let Michael take it off the road and around the bonfire as Hiram fired twice more. The next pull of the trigger clicked the hammer down on an empty chamber.

  Michael stomped on the accelerator and the truck burst out the far side of the cloud of flies, and into the cold February night.

  Chapter Twenty-Two

  “Pap, what was that?”

  “Watch the road!”

  Michael jerked his eyes back around to look at the road as Hiram switched out the empty cylinder for the loaded full moon.

  “You’re avoiding the question! What was that thing out there? And why were you shouting Bible verses?”

  Should he lie?

  Should he tell Michael, his skeptical and progressive son, that he was a cunning man?

  “I don’t know,” he said finally. “It was about the size of a bear, but I couldn’t see it clearly for all those flies.”

  Michael cursed long and hard. Hiram didn’t object.

  As the Double-A rattled around the winding desert road and back down toward Spring Canyon, his hands shook beyond control. He reloaded, carefully put the revolver into the glove box, pushed his shoulders back against the truck’s seat, and took deep breaths.

  Turning his face out the window so Michael wouldn’t hear, he chanted his charm against the falling sickness. He sucked in cold night air, and that seemed to help.

  “I don’t think I’m going to sleep tonight,” Michael told him. “Holy shit!”

  Hiram’s heart was pounding, and he was grateful for an opportunity to change the subject. “Look, this cussing thing,” he said. “Maybe, in this case, just say shit. Then you sound like a farmer.”

  “I sound like some other profession when I say holy shit?”

  “That makes you sound…Italian. You know, I don’t mind if you say words that are rude, but I don’t want you to say words that offend God.”

  “Which god, Pap?”

  “Come on, Michael.”

  “How about Ganesh, the elephant-headed Indian god?”

  “Fine, also don’t offend Ganesh.”

  Michael drove in silence for a moment. “How should I swear if I want to sound like a high-priced and extremely successful lawyer?”

  “I’m pretty sure they never curse.”

  “Somehow, that doesn’t feel right to me.”

  “Besides, you want to be a scientist.” Hiram smiled. “Take us back up to the mining camp, please.”

  “I guess we’ll try out the no-sleep thing for real, then.”

  Lawyer. Hiram could have kicked himself. Had Five-Cent Jimmy come with his writ and gotten Mary McGill out of jail? It was a long drive from Denver.

  Hiram had more pressing things he needed to do at the mine. Hiram couldn’t get the words of Teancum’s letter out of his mind. It might not turn out right because it’s so easy to get lost down there. Was the ghost of Teancum Kimball frightening miners, Teancum who had descended into the mine and not emerged?

  Or was there, after all, no ghost, but only a demon? A demon that was now possibly on the loose because Hiram had destroyed Gus Dollar’s binding charms. If the demon attacked them, it might attack others, and that would be Hiram’s fault.

  Hiram needed answers. He thought the mine would have them.

  The lights of Kimball came into view as the Double-A rounded a bend in the canyon.

  “Take us t
o Bill Sorenson’s house,” Hiram said.

  “What do you think it was? That thing up there?”

  Hiram didn’t answer for a while, his mind scrambling after a fitting response. “It could have been a bear. Or, I suppose, a bad man, though it seemed too big for that.”

  Michael fell quiet.

  What was the boy thinking?

  Michael parked the Double-A next to the foreman’s tidy home a few minutes later. Light shone inside, as it did in a few buildings elsewhere in the camp and in the big house at the north end of the canyon. “Are we staying?”

  “I think so. Come inside with me.”

  “Are we going down the mine? You know, it’s easy to get lost down there.”

  “I am,” Hiram said. “You…you need to try to sleep.”

  They got out of the truck, and Hiram knocked on the foreman’s door.

  Bill Sorenson answered it in a sleeveless white undershirt and cotton pants, blustering before the door was fully open and shaking the rolled-up newspaper. “Is dere a problem with de mine, dat you knock on my door so late?” Then he recognized Hiram and his face softened. “Ah, you dere. Come in.”

  “Thank you.” Hiram stepped inside. “I’m sorry to call at this hour.”

  “It’s nothing. You know, de men are proud and dey might not want to say anything to you, but you done a real good turn here. And if deir wives knew you were in my house, well, it ain’t dat dey’re less proud, but dey’re less stupid, and you’d get a lot of thank-you kisses.”

  “Aha,” Michael said. “Now I see why we came back.”

  “I’m glad to help them,” Hiram said. “And I’m hoping you’ll be willing to help me.”

  “You name it,” Sorenson rumbled.

  “I’m hoping you’ll take me down the mine tonight.”

  “Ja, ja, I can sure do dat. Don’t you want to wait until morning?”

  Hiram suddenly felt exhausted. He had barely slept the night before, and the effect of the last two days’ physical exertion, adrenaline, and fear abruptly piled on top of him like a mountain collapsing. Also, he was starting to get hungry again. “No, I want to do it now. Though if you have a slice of cheese or a crust of bread I could eat, I’d be grateful.”

  “Exciting,” Michael said. “Do I get to carry the gun?”

  Hiram meant to ask Sorenson if Michael could stay in his house, but the Dane beat him to it. “No way, young man. Dat mine is barely safe for grown men with deir wits about dem.”

  “Pap,” Michael objected.

  “Nope, I’m de foreman here, my decision is final.” Sorenson seized Michael by the wrist and slammed his rolled-up newspaper into the boy’s open hand. “I’ll give you dis, dough. It’s enough weapon for any man.”

  “Great, and I can read the news.” Michael unrolled the newspaper and looked at the headlines. “From 1932. The Helper Journal, our local informant. Hey, that guy Roosevelt won. Who knew? But what will poor Hoover do now?”

  “Just keep reminding yourself,” Sorenson said to Hiram. “Men with dumb kids wish dey had smart ones.”

  “I remind myself of that every day,” Hiram said.

  Mrs. Sorenson appeared in the kitchen door, wrapped in a nightgown and carrying a blanket. “The boy can relax here on the sofa, and hopefully get a little sleep. There’s milk in the icebox, and I baked a pan of sweet rolls.”

  “Like my mudder made,” the foreman said. “Only better.”

  “Don’t let her hear you say that!” Mrs. Sorenson wagged a finger.

  “If my sainted mudder is following me around in her afterlife, she’s got much bigger concerns dan de fact dat I think she made de second-best smorkager since de world began.”

  Mrs. Sorenson kissed her husband on the cheek as he shrugged into a long coat and shoes.

  “Mmm, smorkager,” Michael said. “It sure sounds delicious.”

  Bill Sorenson lumbered back into the kitchen and returned shortly after with two bottles of water and three sweet rolls piled on a plate. Was the mine that deep, that they needed to carry drinking water with them? Hiram wolfed down the rolls, and then he and Sorenson exited the house, shutting the door behind them.

  “Hold on just a moment.” Hiram climbed into the back of the Double-A, opened his tool chest, and took out two long pieces of chalk and an unpeeled witch hazel rod.

  “I’m going to do something that looks strange,” he warned Sorenson. “I ask that you not mention this to Michael.”

  “Look,” Sorenson said. “In my work, I’ve known men from every country under heaven, and I learned dis. Every man’s got his own weird bullshit. You don’t bodder me about my weird bullshit, I won’t bodder you about yours. And I won’t tell your son anything.”

  “I like your philosophy,” Hiram said. “It’s possible my bull is weirder than yours.”

  He carefully peeled all the bark off the rod with his fingers, revealing the soft white wood beneath. In an ideal world, he’d have soaked it in nightshade and dried it; in an ideal world, he’d also have something personal to Teancum Kimball to wrap around the rod.

  This was not an ideal world.

  He sang as he worked, and he held a prayer in his heart. Without specific words, his prayer was that he would find Teancum Kimball, or evidence that would tell him more about Teancum Kimball’s fate. His song was Psalm 130, to a melody Grandma Hettie had taught him.

  Out of the depths have I cried unto thee, O Lord.

  Lord, hear my voice: let thine ears be attentive to the voice of my supplications.

  If thou, Lord, shouldest mark iniquities, O Lord, who shall stand?

  There were other psalms that were appropriate to sing over a Mosaical Rod, but the one beginning out of the depths seemed appropriate in this situation. On the rod, he slowly carved three crosses, then the name teancum kimball, then three more crosses.

  Hiram stuck the chalk into a pocket. “I’m ready.”

  “Dat ain’t de weirdest bullshit I ever seen,” Bill Sorenson said as they climbed up the slope toward the mine opening. “Not by a long shot.”

  Hiram didn’t ask for details.

  Walking up the hill, Hiram saw his own breath in a white cloud and felt the skin of his face slowly freezing. He thought he saw the shadow of a man detach itself from the mine opening, slip to one side, and disappear again into the trees. But he might have imagined it.

  In a rectangular stone building just below the mine opening, they got helmets. “You ever work with a carbide lamp before?” Sorenson asked.

  “Show me how.”

  Hiram followed Sorenson step by step through the process of lighting the brass lamps. They opened a port in the top of the lamps by swinging a little gate horizontally, and filled the lamps’ upper reservoirs with water from their bottles. Then they screwed the lamps open through the middle, revealing lower reservoirs. Into these chambers, they scooped dusty gray pellets like gravel, screwing the lamps back together afterward. They pushed long levers on the top of each lamp from off to on.

  “Calcium carbide,” Sorenson said. “Makes a chemical reaction with de water. You feel de lamp getting warmer already, ja?”

  “I do,” Hiram agreed. “Will the light start automatically?”

  “No, de reaction just puts out a flammable gas. Now, you cup your hand over de dish here, and hit dis little guy, just like a cigarette lighter.”

  They both struck their igniters, and two fierce white flames sprang into being.

  The flames threw a long white light, but they stank infernally.

  “Aren’t there flammable gases down there?” Hiram nestled his lamp into place on the front of his helmet, then put on the helmet. He put his fedora on an empty peg.

  “Ja, dere are. Mining ain’t for chickens, son.”

  The Dane went to two big yellow rectangular boards nailed to the wall. Rows of hooks covered both; one was full of brass chits while the other was empty. Sorenson took a chit with a number on it and moved it from the “out” board to the “in” board. �
��If dey wonder where I am, dey will see dis and know I’m down below.” He transferred another chit with a “V” stamped on it. “Dat is for you, my do-gooder friend. If dere is a cave-in, dey know to look for two bodies.”

  They approached the mine entrance by a trough cut straight into the hillside, lined left and right with mortared stone that looked just like the stone of the mine buildings. Straight up the center of the trough ran railroad tracks. Beneath their feet and the tracks lay a rough scree of stone and dirt, studded with many chunks of coal. Where the hill rose steeply and the trough cut into it, becoming an actual tunnel, a concrete lintel lay over the opening. In large capital letters, cut an inch deep into the concrete, were the words kimball mining co. ☆ 1891.

  Down the slope from them, the long wooden tipple blocked their view of the highway and the eastern sections of the camp. The large building where rock was sorted out of the coal screened out a lot of light and made the mine entrance much darker than it would have been.

  Here at the gate, the air was warmer. The dirt immediately at the opening and to either side was free of snow and the soil was relatively dry.

  “Hold on one moment,” Hiram said.

  A correctly prepared Mosaical Rod should lead its user to find whatever it had been prepared to seek. Usually, that was water, though Hiram had heard of more than one prospector using such rods to try to find gold or silver. Hiram was looking for Teancum Kimball, either missing or dead.

  But a Mosaical Rod should also answer questions, and especially questions relating to the purpose of its creation.

  He gripped the rod loosely in both hands and let the pointing end rest a couple of feet above the ground. Sorenson watched, making no comment.

  Hiram started with a couple of test questions. “Is my name James?”

  Nothing happened.