by Jack Dann
“The dogs are tired and it’s late,” Scobie said. “I’ve marked the trail, so we can find it easy tomorrow.”
“Bloody hell!” Lord Bullard said. “We’ve light yet. I’ve paid my wage to nab this beastie, so I say lead on!”
“Easy, now,” Mr. Welloc said. “Night’s on us soon and these woods get very, very dark. Crashing about is foolhardy, and if Master Scobie says the dogs need rest, then best to heed his word.”
Lord Bullard rolled his eyes. “What do you suggest, then?”
Scobie said, “Camp is set around the corner. We’ve got hunting shacks scattered along these trails. I’ll kennel the hounds at one and meet you for another go at daybreak.”
“A sensible plan,” Mr. McEvoy said. As the shadows deepened and men and horses became smoky ghosts in the dying light, he’d begun to cast apprehensive glances over his shoulder.
Luke Honey had to admit there was a certain eeriness to the surroundings, a sense of inimical awareness that emanated from the depths of the forest. He noted how the horses flared their nostrils and shifted skittishly. There were boars and bears in this preserve, although he doubted any lurked within a mile after all the gunfire and barking. He’d experienced a similar sense of menace in Africa near the hidden den of a terrible lion, a dreaded man-eater. He rubbed his horse’s neck and kept a close watch on the bushes.
Mr. Landscomb clasped Scobie’s elbow. “Once you’ve seen to the animals, do leave them to the lads. I’d enjoy your presence after supper.”
Scobie looked unhappy. He nodded curtly and left with the boy.
Camp was a fire pit centered between two boulders the size of carriages. A dilapidated lean-to provided a dry area to spread sleeping bags and hang clothes. Stable boys materialized to unsaddle the horses and tether them behind the shed. Lodge workers had ignited a bonfire and laid out a hot meal sent from the chef. This meal included the roasted heart and liver from the buck Lord Bullard brought down earlier.
“Not sure I’d tuck into those vittles,” Mr. Williams said, waving his fork at Lord Bullard and Mr. Wesley. “Should let that meat cool a day or two, else you’ll get the screamin’ trots.”
Mr. McEvoy stopped shoveling beans into his mouth to laugh. “That’s right. Scarf enough of that liver and you’ll think you caught dysentery.”
Lord Bullard spooned a jellified chunk of liver into his mouth. “Bollocks. Thirty years afield in the muck and the mud with boot leather and ditch water for breakfast. My intestines are made of iron. Aye, Wes?”
“You’ve got the right of it,” Mr. Wesley said, although sans his typical enthusiasm. He’d set aside his plate but half finished and now nursed a bottle of Laphroaig.
Luke Honey shucked his soaked jacket and breeches and warmed his toes by the fire with a plate of steak, potatoes, and black coffee. He cut the meat into tiny pieces because chewing was difficult. It pleased him to see Mr. Wesley favoring his own ribs whenever he laughed. The Englishman, doughty as he was, seemed rather sickly after a day’s exertion. Luke Honey faintly hoped he had one foot in the grave.
A dank mist crept through the trees, and the men instinctively clutched blankets around themselves and huddled closer to the blaze, and Luke Honey saw that everyone kept a rifle or pistol close to hand. A wolf howled not too far off, and all eyes turned toward the darkness that pressed against the edges of firelight. The horses nickered softly.
Dr. Landscomb said, “Hark, my cue. The wood we now occupy is called Wolfvale, and it stretches some fifty miles north to south. If we traveled another twelve miles due east, we’d be in the foothills of the mountains. Wolfvale is, some say, a cursed forest. Of course, that reputation does much to draw visitors.” Dr. Landscomb lighted a cigarette. “What do you think, Master Scobie?”
“The settlers considered this an evil place,” Scobie said, emerging from the bushes much to the consternation of Mr. Briggs, who yelped and half drew his revolver. “No one logs this forest. No one hunts here except for the lords and foolish, desperate townies. People know not to come here because of the dangerous animals that roam. These days, it’s the wild beasts, but in the early days, it was mostly Bill.”
“Was Bill some rustic lunatic?” Mr. Briggs said.
“We Texans know the type,” Mr. Williams said with a grin.
“Oh, no, sirs. Black Bill, Splayfoot Bill, he’s the devil. He’s Satan, and those who carved the town from the hills, and before them the trappers and fishermen, they believed he ruled these dark woods.”
“The Indians believed it too,” Mr. Welloc said. “I’ve talked with several of the elders, as did my grandfather with the tribal wise men of his era. The legend of Bill, whom they referred to as the Horned Man, is most ancient. I confess, some of my ancestors were a rather scandalous lot, given to dabbling in the occult and all matters mystical. The town library’s archives are stuffed with treatises composed by the more adventurous founders, and myriad accounts by landholders and commoners alike regarding the weird phenomena prevalent in Ransom Hollow.”
Scobie said, “Aye. Many a village child vanished, an’ grown men an’ women, too. When I was wee, my father brought us in by dusk an’ barred the door tight until morning. Everyone did. Some still do.”
Luke Honey said, “A peculiar arrangement for such a healthy community.”
“Aye, Olde Towne seems robust,” Lord Bullard said.
Dr. Landscomb said, “Those Who Work are tied to the land. A volcano won’t drive them away when there’s fish and fur, crops and timber to be had.”
“Yeah, and you can toss sacrificial wretches into the volcano, too,” Mr. McEvoy said.
“This hunt of ours goes back many years, long before the lodge itself was established. Without exception, someone is gravely injured, killed, or lost on these expeditions.”
“Lost? What does ‘lost’ mean, precisely?” Mr. Wesley said.
“There are swamps and cliffs, and so forth,” Dr. Landscomb said. “On occasion, men have wandered into the wilds and run afoul of such dangers. But to the point. Ephraim Blackwood settled in Olde Towne at the time of its founding. A widower with two grown sons, he was a furrier by trade. The Blackwoods ran an extensive trapline throughout Ransom Hollow, and within ten years of their arrival, they’d become the premier fur trading company in the entire valley. People whispered. Christianity has never gained an overwhelming mandate here, but the Blackwoods’ irreligiousness went a step beyond the pale in the eyes of the locals. Inevitably, loose talk led to muttered accusations of witchcraft. Some alleged the family consorted with Splayfoot Bill, that they’d made a pact. Material wealth for their immortal souls.”
“What else?” Mr. Williams said to uneasy chuckles.
“Yes, what else indeed?” Dr. Landscomb’s smile faded. “It is said that Splayfoot Bill, the Old Man of the Wood, required most unholy indulgences in return for his favors.”
“Do tell,” Lord Bullard said with an expression of sickly fascination.
“The devil takes many forms, and it is said he is a being devoted to pain and pleasure. A Catholic priest visiting from the city gave an impromptu sermon in the town square, accusing the elder Blackwood of lying with the Old Man of the Wood, who assumed the form of a doe, one night by the pallor of a sickle moon, and the issue was a monstrous stag. Some hayseed wit soon dubbed this mythical beast ‘Blackwood’s Git.’ Other, less savory colloquialisms sprang forth, but most eventually faded into obscurity. Nowadays, those who speak of this legend call the stag ‘Blackwood’s Baby.’ Inevitably, the brute we shall pursue in the morn is reputed to be the selfsame animal.”
“Sounds like that Blackwood fella came from Oklahoma,” Mr. Williams said.
“Devil spawn!” Luke Honey said, and laughed sarcastically.
“Bloody preposterous,” Lord Bullard said without conviction.
“Hogwash,” Mr. Briggs said. “You’re scarin’ the women and children, hoss.”
“My apologies, good sir,” Dr. Landscomb said. He didn’t look sorry
to Luke Honey.
“Oh, dear.” Lord Bullard lurched to his feet and made for the woods, hands to his belly.
The Texans guffawed and hooted, although the mood sobered when the wolf howled again and was answered by two more of its pack.
Mr. Williams scowled, cocked his big revolver, and fired into the air. The report was queerly muffled, and its echo died immediately.
“That’ll learn ’em,” Mr. Briggs said, exaggerating his drawl.
“Time for shut-eye, boys,” Mr. Williams said. Shortly after, the men began to yawn and turned in, grumbling and joshing as they spread their blankets on the floor of the lean-to.
Luke Honey made a pillow of the horse blanket. He jacked the bolt action and chambered a round in his Mauser Gewehr 98, a rifle he’d won from an Austrian diplomat in Nairobi. The gun was powerful enough to stop most things that went on four legs, and it gave him comfort. He slept.
The mist swirled heavy as soup and the fire had dwindled to coals when he woke. Branches crackled, and a black shape, the girth of a bison or a full-grown rhino, moved between shadows. It stopped and twisted an incomprehensibly configured head to survey the camp. The beast huffed and continued into the brush. Luke Honey remained motionless, breath caught in his throat. The huff had sounded like a chuckle. And for an instant, the lush, shrill wheedle of panpipes drifted through the wood. Far out amid the folds of the savanna, a lion coughed. A hyena barked its lunatic bark, and much closer.
Luke Honey started and his eyes popped open, and he couldn’t tell the world from the dream.
LORD BULLARD SPENT much of the predawn hours hunkered in the bushes, but by daybreak he’d pulled himself together, albeit white-faced and shaken. Mr. Wesley’s condition, on the other hand, appeared to have worsened. He didn’t speak during breakfast and sat like a lump, chin on his chest.
“Poor bastard looks like hell warmed over,” Mr. Williams said. He was dressed in long johns and a gun belt. He sipped coffee from a tin cup. A cigarette fumed in his left hand. “You might’ve done him in.”
Luke Honey rolled a cigarette and lighted it. He nodded. “I saw a fight in a hostel in Cape Town between a Scottish dragoon and a big Spaniard. The dragoon carried a rifle and gave the Spaniard a butt stroke to the midsection. The Spaniard laughed, drew his gun, and shot the Scot right through his head. The Spaniard died four days later. Bust a rib and it punctures the insides. Starts a bleed.”
“He probably should call it a day.”
“Landscomb’s a sawbones. He isn’t blind. Guess I’ll leave it to him.”
“Been hankerin’ to ask you, friend—how did you end up on the list? This is a mighty exclusive event. My pappy knew the Lubbock Wellocs before I was born. Took me sixteen years to get an invite here. And a bribe or two.”
“Lubbock Wellocs?”
“Yep. Wellocs are everywhere. More of them than you can shake a stick at—Nevada, Indiana, Massachusetts. Buncha foreign states too. Their granddads threw a wide loop, as my pappy used to say.”
“My parents lived east of here. Over the mountains. Dad had some cousins in Ransom Hollow. They visited occasionally. I was a kid and I only heard bits and pieces . . . the men all got liquored up and told tall tales. I heard about the stag, decided I’d drill it when I got older.”
“Here you are, sure enough. Why? I know you don’t give a whit about the rifle. Or the money.”
“How do you figure?”
“The look in your eyes, boy. You’re afraid. A man like you is afraid, I take stock.”
“I’ve known some fearless men. Hunted lions with them. A few of those gents forgot that Mother Nature is more of a killer than we humans will ever be and wound up getting chomped. She wants our blood, our bones, our goddamned guts. Fear is healthy.”
“Sure as hell is. Except, there’s something in you besides fear. Ain’t that right? I swear you got the weird look some guys get who play with fire. I knew this vaquero who loved to ride his pony along the canyon edge. By close, I mean rocks crumbling under its hooves and falling into nothingness. I ask myself, what’s here in these woods for you? Maybe I don’t want any part of it.”
“I reckon we all heard the same story about Mr. Blackwood. Same one my daddy and his cousins chewed over the fire.”
“Sweet Jesus, boy. You don’t believe that cartload of manure Welloc and his crony been shovelin’? Okay then. I’ve got a whopper for you. These paths form a miles-wide pattern if you see ’em from a plane. World’s biggest pentagram carved out of the countryside. Hear that one?”
Luke Honey smiled dryly and crushed the butt of his cigarette underfoot.
Mr. Williams poured out the dregs of his coffee. He hooked his thumbs in his belt. “My uncle Greg came here for the hunt in ’16. They sent him home in a fancy box. The Black Ram Lodge is first class all the way.”
“Stag get him?”
The rancher threw back his head and laughed. He grabbed Luke Honey’s arm. There were tears in his eyes. “Oh, you are a card, kid. You really do buy into that mumbo-jumbo horse pucky. Greg spotted a huge buck moving through the woods and tried to plug it from the saddle. His horse threw him and he split his head on a rock. Damned fool.”
“In other words, the stag got him.”
Mr. Williams squeezed Luke Honey’s shoulder. Then he slackened his grip and laughed again. “Yeah, maybe you’re onto something. My pappy liked to say this family is cursed. We sure had our share of untimely deaths.”
The party split again, Dr. Landscomb and the British following Scobie and the dogs; Mr. Welloc, Luke Honey, and the Texans proceeding along a parallel trail. Nobody was interested in the lesser game; all were intent upon tracking down Blackwood’s Baby.
They entered the deepest, darkest part of the forest. The trees were huge and ribboned with moss and creepers and fungi. Scant light penetrated the canopy, yet brambles hemmed the path. The fog persisted.
Luke Honey had been an avid reader since childhood. Robert Louis Stevenson, M. R. James, and Ambrose Bierce had gotten him through many a miserable night in the tarpaper shack his father built. He thought of the fairy-tale books at his aunt’s house. Musty books with wooden covers and woodblock illustrations that raised the hair on his head. The evil stepmother made to dance in red-hot iron shoes at Snow White’s garden wedding while the dwarves hunched like fiends. Hansel and Gretel lost in a vast, endless wood, the eyes of a thousand demons glittering in the shadows. The forest in the book was not so different from the one he found himself riding through.
At noon, they stopped to take a cold lunch from their own saddlebags, as this was beyond the range of the lodge staff. Arlen trotted from the forest, dodgy and feral as a fox, to report Scobie had picked up the trail and was hoping to soon drive the stag itself from hiding. Dr. Landscomb and the British were in hot pursuit.
“Damn,” Mr. Williams said.
“Aw, now that limey’s going to do the honors,” Mr. Briggs said. “I wanted that rifle.”
“Everybody wants that rifle,” Mr. McEvoy said.
Mr. Williams clapped his hands together. “Let’s mount up, hombres. Maybe we’ll get lucky and our friends will miss their opening.”
“The quarry is elusive,” Mr. Liam Welloc said. “Anything is possible.”
The men kicked their ponies to a brisk trot and gave chase.
AN HOUR LATER, all hell broke loose.
The path crossed a plank bridge and continued upstream along the cut bank of a fast-moving stream. Dogs barked and howled, and the shouts of men echoed from the trees. A heavy rifle boomed twice. No sooner had Luke Honey and his companions entered a large clearing with a lagoon fed by a waterfall did he spy Lord Bullard and Mr. Wesley afoot, rifles aimed at the trees. Dr. Landscomb stood to one side, hands tight on the bridle of his pony. Dead and dying dogs were strewn everywhere. A pair of surviving mastiffs yapped and snarled, muzzles slathered in foam, as Scobie wrenched mightily at their leashes.
The Brits’ rifles thundered in unison. Luke Honey caught a
glimpse of what at first he took to be a stag. Yet something was amiss about the shape as it bolted through the trees and disappeared. It was far too massive, and it moved in a strange, top-heavy manner. Lord Bullard’s horse whinnied and galloped blindly through the midst of the gawking Americans. It missed Luke Honey and Mr. Williams, collided with Mr. McEvoy and knocked his horse to the ground. The banker cursed and vaulted from the saddle, landing awkwardly. His horse staggered upright while Mr. Wesley’s mount charged away into the mist in the opposite direction. Mr. Briggs yelled and pulled at the reins of his mount as it crow-hopped all over the clearing.
“What the hell was that?” Williams said, expertly controlling his horse as it half reared, eyes rolling to the whites. “Welloc?”
Mr. Liam Welloc had wisely halted at the entrance and was supremely unaffected by the debacle. “I warned you, gentlemen. Blackwood’s Baby is no tender doe.”
Mr. McEvoy had twisted an ankle. He sat on a rock while Dr. Landscomb tended him. Scobie calmed his mastiffs and handed their leashes to Mr. Liam Welloc. He took a pistol from his coat and walked among the dogs that lay scattered and broken along the bank of the lagoon and in the bushes. He fired the pistol three times.
No one spoke. They rubbed their horses’ necks and stared at the blood smeared across the rocks and at the savaged corpses of the dogs. Scobie began dragging them into a pile. A couple of flasks of whiskey were passed around, and everyone drank in morbid silence.
Finally, Mr. Williams said, “Bullard, what happened here?” He repeated the question until the Englishman shuddered and looked up, blank-faced, from the carnage.
“It speared them on its horns. In all my years . . . it scooped two dogs and pranced about while they screamed and writhed on its antlers.”
“Anybody get a clear shot?”
“I did,” Mr. Wesley said. He leaned on his rifle like an old man. “Thought I nicked the bugger. Surely I did.” He coughed and his shoulders convulsed. Dr. Landscomb left Mr. McEvoy and came over to examine him.
Mr. Liam Welloc took stock. “Two horses gone. Five dogs killed. Mr. McEvoy’s ankle is swelling nicely, I see. Doctor, what of Mr. Wesley?”