The Cunning Man

by D. J. Butler

  “WHAT THEN, ZOLLER?” The voice rippling out of Eliza was titanic. Hiram turned his light to face her in time to see flies erupt from her mouth with each syllable. The skin of her face and arms bulged and rippled as she moved, as if she had too many muscles underneath. Or as if there were a swarm of flies inside her, trying to escape. “I GAVE YOU THIRTY YEARS OF PROSPERITY, AS PROMISED. WERE THEY NOT ENOUGH? WILL YOU BIND ME NOW FOR ETERNITY?”

  Hiram heard muttering in Greek and German both.

  In English, Mary whispered, “Holy shit.”

  “You allowed Teancum Kimball to run me off my land!” Gus yelled.

  “YOU HAD HAD YOUR PROSPERITY AND YOUR TIME WAS UP! YOU CANNOT BIND ME!”

  “I already have,” Gus said. Hiram turned his light to Gus Dollar’s face and saw the shopkeeper shift posture. He pulled a sword up in front of him, the ritual blade Hiram had seen earlier in the shop. “I have summoned you to this place, and now I will slay your vessel of flesh, and transfer the power of your spirit to me.”

  “FOOL.” The Beast-Eliza waved an arm at Ammon and Samuel, slumped against the stone. “I SUMMONED YOU. I BROUGHT YOU ALL HERE TO FEED UPON! TEANCUM KIMBALL DELIVERED HIS OTHER SPAWN IN PERSON. I WILL TAKE THESE LAST THREE AS HIS FINAL OFFERING.”

  Gus’s voice jumped in pitch. “I command you in the name of Elay Adonay to submit!”

  Hiram shuddered. Invocation of any of the Divine Names was dangerous. An unworthy man who attempted it would fail, and if he was unworthy enough, might be destroyed.

  Eliza laughed. She turned toward Hiram, who got a split second’s view of Eliza’s face. Flies swarmed her eyes, nostrils, ears, and open, leering mouth. “THANK YOU FOR DELIVERING MY STONE TO THE WOMAN.”

  Eliza punched Hiram. That single blow tossed him and Michael both across the chamber. He narrowly avoided the altar, with its gruesome little deposit, and fell to the stone beside Teancum Kimball.

  His helmet rattled away, across the stone. He dropped the whip.

  Climbing onto all fours, Hiram looked into the crook of Teancum Kimball’s arm and realized that the man wasn’t carrying the skeleton of a lamb—the skeleton belonged to a very tiny human baby.

  Michael yelped.

  Hiram gagged, tried to vomit, and failed. Of course the Beast had found a child to kill during its rampage. It had developed a taste for it devouring Teancum Kimball’s babies.

  “You killed my daughter!” Medea howled.

  Violence erupted into the cave, but Hiram saw it only through the crazed and shifting window afforded to him by the crossing beams of the various carbide lamps. Medea leaped forward with her scimitar swinging, and at the same time, Walter lunged and swung the pickaxe.

  Eliza attacked with fists that swelled to the size of milk bottles, black masses of flies flowing like tar. Her first blow struck Walter in the face. His neck exploded, the goiter throwing a dark wave of blood across the chimney. Her second caught Medea in the stomach, and the miner dropped her blade into the water and fell to all fours.

  Gus shouted in Latin, or maybe Greek.

  Scrambling, Hiram found his helmet and got it back onto his head.

  Eliza stepped into the water, flies bursting from the orifices of her face at the chill touch, and she towered over Medea. The miner coughed and retched into the water, helpless.

  Hiram threw himself into Eliza’s path. “No!”

  Eliza swung a punch at him, and only a wild, last-second duck brought him beneath a blow that might easily have brained him. He fished in the water, feeling several slimy things with his fingers and the back of his hand before he found the sword’s hilt.

  He raised the weapon in front of him.

  “You will serve me!” Gus shouted.

  Hiram meant to swing the sword at Eliza, but hesitated. For all that flies now swarmed her, she had a woman’s form, and not the form of an enemy.

  Eliza struck him, knocking him into the water. He dropped the sword and floundered, feeling he had too many limbs until he realized he was tangled up in Walter’s corpse.

  Gus was still chanting.

  Eliza stepped forward. She swelled to twice her normal size. She raised enormous talons over her head for a killing blow. Was she aiming at Hiram or at Medea?

  Fire sprang up behind Eliza and the Beast howled in surprise.

  Gus’s spell? But no, there was Michael, with the gas can. He’d lit the back of Eliza’s dress on fire. The flies swarmed angrily as they escaped her body.

  But as the flies exited, the sound became less and less the bellow of a wounded ogre, and more and more the shriek of a terrified woman whose body is on fire.

  The flies swarmed densely, cohering into a dense, humanoid shape between Hiram and Eliza. He couldn’t save her unless he moved the monster.

  Standing on wobbly legs, Hiram raised his right arm to the square, elbow bent, hand up, like a carpenter’s square, an ancient sign of true alignment, blessing, and oaths. And he shouted the secret name of God.

  Not Jehovah, the silly sub-Latin English spelling of the King James Bible. Nor yet Yahweh, the more fashionable pronunciation that Mahonri had learned from reading those books of Biblical scholarship, and that he used when he wanted to put on intellectual airs.

  Hiram used the secret pronunciation of the Tetragrammaton that Grandma Hettie had taught him. It was the only one of the Divine Names that he knew. She had whispered it to him in a closet and made him whisper it back to her until he got it right. And she had told him only to pronounce it in dire need, or else in a wind so strong it would whip the word right out of anyone’s hearing, or else when passing the vital pronunciation on to an apprentice of his own.

  Hiram shouted the name of God and the fallen angel Samuel, Mahoun, Master Mahan, the Beast of many names—flinched.

  Five times, Grandma Hettie had told him. No demon can stand in the presence of the Tetragrammaton spoken five times with authority, by a person with a chaste and sober mind.

  Was Hiram worthy? He risked failure and his own destruction.

  He didn’t see any other choice.

  He stepped forward, keeping his right arm square, and shouted it a second time, and now the Beast darted to one side. It roared, taking shape in the cloud of flies, and tore at the sides of its head with its own talons.

  Hiram wanted to keep shouting the Name, to drive the Beast out of the world for good.

  But Eliza was on fire.

  With the Beast to one side, he leaped forward. He tackled Teancum Kimball’s only surviving daughter, pain from the fire searing his arms.

  The fire splashed left and right, some of it spreading across the surface of the water and some of it still clinging to Eliza Kimball as Hiram dragged her from the pool and threw her to the stone shelf. His helmet gone again, he would have been blind but for the light of the fire, on Eliza and on the stone shelf.

  He ripped his coat off and slapped it down on Eliza, patting out the flames. Remembering the lamens, he grabbed the lead one from the coat pocket. He saw the whip lying beside Eliza, and picked it up, as well.

  Medea joined Hiram and together they dragged Eliza to her feet.

  “Mary?” Hiram asked.

  Michael pointed; the labor organizer had cut the bonds on the Kimballs’ wrists and was grunting, trying to pull them to their feet. Of the six of them, she was the only one still wearing a helmet with a lamp. The beam of her lamp bounced around the cave as she moved, both giving light and baffling Hiram’s vision. Shadows and flies swarmed.

  The Beast lunged at Hiram, and he snapped the whip at it.

  It was an awkward attack, and the Beast grabbed the bullwhip, a hand clearly visible within the swarm of flies. Then the misshapen, multimouthed face appeared, and it yanked the whip from Hiram’s hand. Hiram backed away and the demon laughed.

  Then it stuffed the leather into one of its open maws.

  And laughed.

  “Run!” Hiram yelled.

  But the Beast turned around and advanced on Gus.


  The shopkeeper screamed in Latin and held the ceremonial sword up in front of him, but the demon didn’t slow down. Something had gone wrong with Gus’s charm.

  But what?

  “Run!” Hiram pushed Michael into the water first, with Eliza’s elbow in the boy’s grip. The Kimball heiress muttered dazed gibberish. “Help her get through!”

  Mary and Medea followed, each dragging one of the Kimball brothers. The men stumbled, limbs probably cramped or asleep from having been tied up.

  Hiram grabbed the gas can and checked that its cap was screwed on tight. He followed last, backing along the submerged tunnel by feel and watching Gus Dollar and the Beast. He was the only witness when Gus shrieked in rage and flung his blade to the ground.

  The whip, Hiram realized. The whip with Gus’s blood on it. The demon had eaten Gus’s blood, and Gus’s hex had failed.

  Exploding into a swarm of flies, the Beast fell on Gus.

  Chapter Thirty-Six

  Backing through the tunnel, Hiram slipped. He plunged into the icy water and lost his grip on the sword. For unreal moments he floated at the bottom of the pool, the icy tendrils creeping into his blood.

  His dream dictionary had warned him of an early death.

  But a beam of light from behind him crossed the stone, illuminating white creatures like scorpions and glinting off the fallen blade.

  Hiram grabbed the sword, pushed himself to the surface—and smacked his head against the tunnel ceiling.

  For long seconds he could see nothing, and he didn’t know whether he had blinded himself with the blow to the head, or whether the last carbide light had gone out.

  “Pap!” A gentler beam crossed Hiram’s path.

  A flashlight, held in Michael’s hands. Mary, Medea, and the Kimballs huddled behind him. Medea stood in front of them with her sword in hand, rage in her eyes; the others looked terrified.

  Hiram staggered onto the rocky shelf below the boulder-strewn crack leading up to the mine. Three other tunnels branched off from the chamber, and his enemy could come out of any of them. If only he could close every passageway, including the one out.

  “The lead lamen,” he said. “Joshua brought down the walls of Jericho. Gus came down here to fight the demon with a sword, but his original plan was to bury it under rock.”

  “Pap?”

  “The lore is beyond me, but he was going to kill the monster and…absorb it. Eat its soul. It’s the other lamen!” Hiram pulled the lead plate from his pocket. “Give me some light.”

  Michael stepped close and shone his beam on the lead plate. “Pap, you hit your head.”

  Hiram chuckled. “True. But I think I know what Gus was trying to do. He wanted the Beast’s power, so he planned to trap its spirit in his Book of the Spirits, but destroy the body.”

  “And that…bit of plate there?”

  “It’s image lore.” Hiram looked into his son’s shadowed eyes and made a noise that was half-laugh and half-sob. “I’m sorry, I know this is all too much.”

  “Pap, we should run.”

  “We will.” Hiram jabbed a finger at the writing on the plate that he couldn’t read. “What does that say?”

  “In nominee patris et filii et spiritus sancti,” Michael said. “Is that Latin?”

  Mary McGill shouldered her way between them. “In nomine, not in nominee.”

  “It’s Latin?” Hiram said. “Nuns?”

  “Nuns,” Mary agreed.

  “Teach us the pronunciation,” Hiram said.

  She said it twice, Hiram repeating it the first time, and Hiram and Michael both following along the second.

  Medea stared at the passage back into the altar chamber.

  Michael pulled them back on task. “Pap?”

  Hiram held up the plate. “The English quote is from Joshua six, about Jericho.”

  “Joshua fit the battle.” Michael grinned. “I can play that one on guitar.”

  “Shout,” Hiram said, “for the Lord hath given you the city. And what shall we shout?”

  “The Latin prayer,” Mary said.

  “And that will bring down the cave behind us, and trap the thing inside.”

  “It…will?” Michael furrowed his brow.

  “It should.” Willpower should not be a part of any charm. The magician didn’t impose his will on the universe, the magician acted in accordance with known laws, or else the magician asked God.

  In either case, faith was essential.

  “It will,” Hiram said.

  “The cave will collapse,” Michael emphasized. “It has to.”

  Hiram tousled his son’s hair. “Back to the mine.” He gestured to boulder-stuffed chasm that led upward. “As fast as you can and say the Latin words as much as you can. Shout them!”

  “Anything else?” Michael asked.

  “If you get to the mine, and you can find it in your heart…pray.”

  Michael hesitated, nodded, and scampered up the crack. He dragged Eliza with him. The black-clad teacher from the east was now scorched black of complexion and her hair was burnt short. The stink of fire hung about her, and she moved as if half-asleep.

  “In nomine patris,” Mary McGill said, “et filii, et spiritus sancti.”

  “Louder,” Hiram said. “Shout!”

  “Mr. Woolley.”

  Hiram turned to find Ammon and Samuel Kimball. Both men were pale and shivering. How much had they seen? And what had their fragile minds allowed them to remember?

  Samuel looked more rational than he ever had. “I’m sorry,” he said simply.

  “I’m sorry,” Ammon echoed his brother.

  “Up the rocks with Miss McGill,” Hiram said. “She’s going to be chanting Latin. Whatever she tells you to shout, shout it with her.”

  “I stay with you,” Medea told Hiram, her voice flat.

  The two brothers clambered up the rocks, awkwardly echoing Mary’s clipped and precise Latin syllables.

  A hideous roar rang out. It seemed to come from low along the icy pool, but also from two of the tunnels that opened onto the shelf. The Beast had fed, but it was coming for them.

  Hiram and Medea retreated up onto the lowest of the rocks and Hiram splashed some gas down to create a thin barrier. As he lit the gas with his Zippo, he looked up and saw flies swarming from all three tunnels opening onto the shelf, and from the submerged tunnel as well. A wall of flame rose between him and the flies, but he knew it wouldn’t last.

  He shouted. “In nomine patris et filii et spiritus sancti!”

  Kneeling, he wedged the lead lamen down among the boulders at the base of the crack. This was not a charm he was master of, but he thought that images written to bring down walls and cities—and mines—had to be buried inside the walls to be effective. In his dream, too, something had been buried beneath the demon king’s throne.

  Had he dreamed of the lamen, then?

  The Beast lumbered toward Hiram, and for a moment he feared he would be flattened.

  But the Beast reached the line of fire and stopped. It opened all three mouths of its eyeless face and leaned back, gaping skyward. With a sound like a horrific belch wrapped around a high-pitched whistle, three columns of flies exploded out of the Beast’s maws. Hiram smelled rotten meat. As the swarms grew in size, the Beast’s body dwindled, until it had disappeared entirely, and there was only the swarm.

  But the swarm stayed below the flame.

  Hiram raised his arm to the square and shouted the Name.

  “Up!” Hiram shouted at Medea.

  “Look!” She pointed below the swarm.

  A pile of blood and torn flesh, and splintered bones like a demented game of pick up sticks, lay beneath the swarming flies. For a moment, Hiram wondered what it was, but then he saw the glint of a glass eye nestled in with the gore and the shattered remains.

  His stomach turned. He was lucky it was empty.

  “Go!” he cried.

  “You go!” Medea pulled Hiram past her and sent him scampering up
the rocks. He climbed breathlessly, swooning from lack of air and from effort, and had to stop to catch his balance and avoid dropping the gas can. “Lay down more fire!”

  Looking down, he saw the beast re-form and lunge at Medea.

  The miner was not a trained swordfighter, but the Beast had killed her daughter. She hurled herself at the Beast with such ferocity, slashing and howling, that the Beast stepped back.

  Then she turned and raced toward Hiram up the chasm.

  He lay down a second line of gasoline across the boulders, a little thicker than the previous one. He thought he had enough for one more wall.

  The Beast bounded up on Medea’s heels. She leaped from one giant stone, over the gasoline barrier, to another just as Hiram touched flame to the gas.

  Whooosh! Fire leaped up, blinding Hiram.

  The Beast roared but fell back.

  Hiram shouted the Name at it again. It hissed and roared but didn’t fall back.

  “In nomine patris et filii et spiritus sancti!” Hiram yelled, resuming his dogged upward climb with Medea at his side. He was careful not to get his hands or feet wedged between rocks. “In nomine patris et filii et spiritus sancti!”

  Near the top of the chasm, maybe fifty feet from the mine entrance, he saw Michael, Mary, and the others. They were shouting too, but Hiram didn’t sense the slightest evidence that the cave was about to collapse.

  Was Gus’s hex a failure?

  Had Hiram misunderstood the lamen? Was it the will of God that he fail? Was his faith too weak?

  Or was he not pure enough? All charms, but especially the spells of the high court magicians, were said to depend on the magician’s personal purity. A chaste and sober mind. It was one of the reasons why Hiram fasted, and tried to keep his heart free of enmity toward any.

  And if he wasn’t pure enough to make the lamen work, would the use of the Divine Name also fail him?

  He paused his ascent and glanced up again. Medea stopped with him. Did the others have insufficient faith, or purity?

  And specifically, they should all be as pure as possible with respect to the operation at hand. He remembered abruptly his divination by sieve and shears, with Gus Dollar and his grandchildren. Hiram had asked whose heart must change.