by Files, Gemma
Jenkins coughed up blood, then almost strangled on it going back down. “No,” he agreed, finally, once he’d retched his air-pipe clear again. “Not like you at all, from what I heard... Bartram Haugh.”
At this, Haugh really did shrug. Pointing out: “And yet, you might well notice—’tween the two’ve us, chivalrous Mister Reese and me, I’m the only one that’s still alive.”
“So you... do believe he’s the revenant I... painted him, at least.”
“Oh, stranger things’ve happened, I suppose. Hell, who would have ever thought I’d find some nonentity such as Fred Willicks’s ridiculous little life a fair enough fit to shape myself to? Then again, it was Phyllida who did the trick on that one, really, turning up on the next stage after like she did, all fresh and ready for love; had stars in her eyes the moment she heard his name come out my mouth, so who was I to disappoint?”
“U’huh,” Jenkins managed, unintentionally imitating verbally-truncated storekeep Mister Mahershah-whatsit. “‘N... then, there’s hers and your... son, too....”
“Simon, yes—he’s mine sure enough, poor mite, no matter his last name. May he never have need to discover his own in-born capacities, in future.”
Haugh put just enough resonant tone of emotion into this last that Jenkins could almost think he meant it, ‘til he remembered who he was talking to.
“Truth to tell, I thought you knew already,” he continued, conversationally. “That this quest of yours was some ruse, a protracted wild goose chase, calculated to get me out where you could pull a gun and collect the Union’s money. But it took a bare half-day’s ride with you for me to see how lamentably honest a fellow you really are, Sheriff, and that’s when I decided to let our trip here play itself to the full—further away you took me, after all, the less likely anybody’d be to prevent me covering your corpse over, once our business was done.”
“Always meant t’... kill me, then... is what you’re sayin’.”
“Well, yes. You’d’ve wrecked what I’ve built, otherwise, and I can’t have that.”
Jenkins coughed yet once more, and murmured something wetly in on top of it—
Haugh leant in, waiting for him to repeat it.
“I...pity you,” Jenkins said, finally, drawing a snort. He rolled his eyes far enough to glimpse something both sudden and surprising, though horribly familiar. And closer by far too boot than he would’ve ever expected, given the softness of its approach—
Haugh, however, noticed none of the above, being far too in love with the sound of his own voice, and continued to muse aloud: “Well, that’s your choice, little good as it’ll do you, or me... for you see, Sheriff, I’m no firm believe in God at all, let alone his mercy, or his judgment either. Christ knows what it was you thought you saw, back there in—Esther, was it?—but Sartain Reese had about as little to do with it as grace has with error: I shot him down, saw the front of his heart pop out from under his breast-bone in a spray, and I’ve killed more than enough men in my time to know the way they fall. Reese could tell you the same, if you was here.”
To this, and with gross effort, Jenkins could conjure only a dull creaking noise—something he himself was surprised to recognize, eventually, as laughter.
“Hysteria, eh? That’s one way to salve the sting. But we’ve chatted long enough, for my money, so... damn, what are you lookin’ at, anyhow?”
Said a voice from behind, preternaturally calm: “Always did please you to think me a fool, Bart, just as it pleased me to let you. But that’s over with, now.”
(Much like all else.)
These few words—or just the sound of ‘em, Jenkins didn’t wonder—were enough to turn outlaw Bart Haugh, a man with more sins on his soul than Judas and three thousand-odd dollars on his head, sheet-white. He turned towards their speaker, slow as river weed current-caught, perhaps unaware he was even doing so; blanched yet further when he saw who stood there, making all the tiny, charm-crinkled lines on his face stand out like scars.
For: it was the man himself, of course—though “man” might no longer be the most accurate term, Jenkins thought, given. “One-Shot” Reese, in whatever he used for flesh, corporeal enough to touch yet inhumanly mutable under pressure; Sartain Stannard Reese, his sandy locks slicked down with the same phantom blood still sticky-coating him from head to toe, skull topped in a buzzing black crown of flies. He cocked his head, regarding Haugh narrowly through almost yellow eyes, and watched that anything-but-gentleman go suddenly all a-tremble, shook juiceless, same as some storm-withered leaf.
“Been quite the spell, Bart,” Reese told him, unhurriedly, like they were chatting over supper. “Yes, I did have myself some rare difficulty, finding you. But then, you always did know how to make us both scarce, when it suited your plans best.”
Haugh gulped, straining for even the smallest measure of his usual sanguine humor. “Sartain—” he began, only to find himself cut off when Reese waved him silent.
“The Sheriff here has a fair idea how long I’ve been at it,” he continued, indicating Jenkins, “not to mention the cost of my quest, to me, and others. Oh, but I walked so far and found so very little, ‘sides from a grinding sameness! Delivering judgment on others, yet finding no respite of my own... it was enough, frankly, to drive me to despair. Until, just the other day, I received possible word of my imminent respite, and from the most unlikely of sources—that still, small voice above I catch just a whisper of, I only strain hard enough, letting slip how after all this time, you were finally comin’ to meet me.”
Haugh shook his head frantically, shoulders hiked like he wanted to back away but couldn’t gather the necessary steam. Instead he stayed fear-rooted while Reese stepped closer, stained boot-soles leaving reddish clumps of print on the street beneath; looked back Jenkins’s way as he did so, watching him spit up a pint or so more of his own blood to keep his airways open, and sighed at the sight.
“Should’ve kept to your own place, Sheriff, ‘specially after I worked so hard to clear it out for you—but I guess you know that, already. Who’d you leave in charge?”
“Good men,” Jenkins half-retched, in reply. “Not... too many left t’make... trouble for ‘em, after you was... done with us.”
“Well. S’pose you can take some consolation, then, knowing they won’t need to rely on your return.” To Haugh: “And what about you, sergeant? For I do hear you made a place for yourself on the other side of things, putting your skill at preying on your own kind to good use.”
“I was a marshal, or close as makes no never-mind. Took a wife, made a son. Got another coming.”
Reese nodded, with just a hint of sympathy. “It’s a hard world for those abandoned, and that’s the truth. But it’s hardly their fault the man they call father and husband can’t be trusted to recall how he made his true troth-pledge years back, to me.”
“That, between us—that was boys’ foolery, Sartain. Spartan fun, best kept for Army days.”
“Was that all? No, I don’t think so; much as I pity this gal you tricked into bed with you, least she’ll make your children a home and pray for you after, little as you deserve any such thing. You and I, though—we’re shield-brothers sworn, blooded together in battle, now and hereafter. Remember the song you taught me, riding away from Lincoln? That was prophecy, ‘friend’, disguised in tune. Don’t believe I’ve ever let it out of my mind since.”
And here he tipped his gory head back, conjuring a low and moaning refrain—some dour Appalachian holler slowed ‘til its verses stuck fast in the mid’s crevasses, harmfully catching, like lines from a Satan-inspired hymnal.
Oh the owl, the owl
Is a lonesome bird
It chills my heart
With dread and terror
That’s someone’s blood
There on its wing
That’s someone’s blood
There on its feather...
A pause, followed by this conclusion, with a mindful glance Haugh’s way—
>
But now I know
That time has come
When you and I
Shall be as one.
“Not now,” Bart Haugh denied it, in return, his voice like dust. “Oh God, no. Not now, not now....”
“As well now as any other time, don’t you think—for given all you’ve done, did you really believe there’d be no consequences to come?” Reese gave a cold sketch of a smile. “If so, consider yourself schooled, for here I stand, a walking object lesson; your destiny’s sketch, guilty on every charge, with only the barest fraction of my due payment yet rendered. And I did nothing at all, Bart, that you hadn’t done first, or told me to.”
“My job, it began as a jest, yes—but I was good at it. I’ve got a boy.” Hopeless: “Doesn’t that count, for anything?”
Reese shrugged. “Should it?”
Maybe not, Jenkins thought, too exhausted to stay even minimally upright. And fell face-down before he could hope to stop it, filling his bloody mouth with dust—dry dust turning pink, then red, becoming mud.
He choked himself to sleep, in fullest expectation of never waking again.
* * *
Much later, after he did revive, laid up convalescent in what had been Bart Haugh’s bed—or Fred Willicks’s, rather, a notion he never could bring himself to disabuse the Widow Willicks of, even once she’d finally agreed to swap her lost spouse’s name for Jenkins’s own—Jenkins made sure to tell her how “Willicks” had gone down fighting, bravely managing to transpose himself ‘tween Jenkins and their supernatural foe, and paying the price for his heroism. He slathered detail on detail, ‘till by the fourth repetition, the story ended with “Willicks” throwing his life away gladly by all but grabbing “One-Shot” Reese and dragging that troubled creature single-handed down to whatever cell awaited him in the Infernal realms, instead of... the opposite, basically.
T’was Phyllida he had to thank for his life, it turned out—said she’d had a dream, or been sent one, and used her God-lent strength to trace his and “Willicks”‘ trail at as high a speed as the ox-cart would support, with little Simon riding literal shotgun. They’d picked up a doctor in one of the towns Reese’s route had barely grazed and found Jenkins in dire straits, his wound miraculously glued shut by a fortuitous chemical coincidence of blood-mud trapped ‘neath Jenkins’s flopped trunk forming a loose poultice which unseasonably fierce overnight frost turned to ice, plugging things deep enough to prevent further infection; he’d suffered through fever and bronchitis before mending yet emerged hale, regaining his strength with surprising rapidity.
Miraculous, his eventual wife called it, and Jenkins didn’t disagree, since if there really was nobody up there looking out for him, it seemed bad form to throw that sort of happy synchrony back in the universe’s face.
Then again, might be it was less gratitude he felt than respect, reverence, or simple fear. Because, as Phyllida liked to point out, Reese had been an instrument of judgment, though a singularly rough and contrary one—which meant that the same force Jenkins credited with his recovery had probably set Reese in his path, in the first place. Why? To teach a lesson, prove a point?
Reese, who was indubitably gone—laid back down, if not to rest, with Haugh surely traveling alongside him in proverbial double-harness, wherever their eventual destination. Which was probably all the conclusion that dreadful figure’d ever really wanted, in Jenkins’s own estimation.
Impossible to discern which of the images he occasionally found himself summoning at odd moments, caught between dream and memory, were actually based in hard experience. Yet sometimes the former sheriff turned let’s-call-him-marshal heard voices and shivered to recognize their tones—one wildly pleading, the other coolly certain yet somewhat dead, too tired even for anger. Saying:
Moral deeds mean nothing, when the heart’s not in it. That’s a good man, right there, with your bullet through his chest—God only knows I’d do my best to save him, if I weren’t made for other work entirely. You and I, though... for all that’s passed, we’re just the same as we ever were.
All I’m asking for’s a little mercy, Sartain. Just that.
Oh, but this is a little mercy, Bart. You really don’t want to see what no mercy looks like.
What then? Jenkins sometimes wondered. Had Reese pulled Haugh into an embrace and begun to decay? Had the dirt sucked them both down like a sink-hole, then, while heavy rains and flash-floods—no longer sanguine yet hardly natural, given the way things had gone those last few months weather-wise—scoured it all clean overtop, leaving no trace at all to show they’d ever been there?
One way or t’other, if Reese’s misfortunes and Haugh’s comeuppance formed any sort of sermon, Jenkins might as well account himself converted. For though his job put him in constant contact with bad men (and some women) doing evil things, he fought hard to keep himself un-blooded, at least by the standards that’d cost Esther township’s previous Sheriff his life and—possibly—his salvation. In a world where invisible principalities and harsh recompense were no longer in doubt, in other words, Jenkins thought it better by far to keep his soul’s immortality intact, safe, at all costs that didn’t endanger the same in others... and let his body, in the main, take care of itself.
Haugh’s second child was born as summer turned to fall, a girl, blithe, kind and fair. They named her for Jenkins’s former home, and loved her as best life’s vicissitudes would allow for.
Copyright © 2013 Gemma Files
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Former film critic and teacher turned award-winning horror author Gemma Files is best-known for her Hexslinger novel series (A Book of Tongues, A Rope of Thorns, and A Tree of Bones). She has also published two collections of short fiction and two chapbooks of poetry, and she is currently hard at work on her fourth novel. The adventures of Jerusalem Parry and Solomon Rusk from “Two Captains,” her previous story in BCS, continue in “Trap-Weed” (Clockwork Phoenix 4) and “The Salt Wedding” (Kaleidotrope, early 2015).
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THE ADVENTURE OF THE PYRAMID OF BACCONYUS
by Caleb Wilson
The three cousins left the prairie, where their regiment had been massacred, for a landscape like crumpled cloth. Steep ravines made travel even more nightmarish than when the officers’ whips had slashed across the bark of their backs. At midday they paused in a glade to drink and rest. Those officers were all dead now. Hickshaw had decided to forgive and forget.
Fawcett rooted his muddy toes into the soil and pulled his wine flask from his pack. He tilted it to his mouth and a single drop came out. “What? Empty?” He turned to Hickshaw. “Your fault. You like us stupid, don’t you?”
Hickshaw smiled sadly. “I know, it’s not ideal. But would you have deserted otherwise? Or joined the regiment in the first place?”
“I didn’t like the regiment,” said Fawcett.
“Me neither,” said Chawkins.
“They gave us names,” said Hickshaw.
“It doesn’t matter. Names aren’t real. Why would we need names?” Fawcett tucked his empty flask away. Hickshaw scanned his cousin’s eyes—dull as raisins. Hickshaw’s would have been dull too, had he not broken into Chawkins’s pack last night, before they’d left their guard posts and the regiment had been destroyed, and drunk her flask dry. He also had one last mostly full flask stashed at the bottom of his own pack. Not to be imbibed until they were at the Pyramid. No point wasting wine on just walking.
Chawkins was tugging down the blade-like leaves that grew from the crown of her head and trimming them with a short, hooked knife. Hickshaw, admiring the cracking of the bark around her waist, plucked a flower from a vine and chewed it into a pulp. Sap and the last of Chawkins’s wine swirled in his brain. He was thinking of the man who had told him about Bacconyus.
A year ago it was, Hickshaw had come across the man, an “explorer,” after the man had explored too incautiously in the vicinity of Hicks
haw’s rope snares. He was hanging by his ankle from a limb. He must have smashed his nose when springing the trap, for blood dripped down his inverted features, off his hair, and spattered the leaves below. Hickshaw, dry and mean, had slapped the man around a bit to wake him up, and when he awoke, had slapped him around a little bit more. Eventually the man regained his voice.
“You, leaf-head, I’m an explorer, from—” and he produced some combination of syllables that Hickshaw’s desiccated brain couldn’t follow. “If you cut me down from here, I will make it very worth your while.”
“I was going to use your blood,” Hickshaw had said, “to make myself a pudding.”
“Very, very worth your while! If you cut me down from here, right now, I will tell you of treasures, yours to collect, which, if you find even one of them, will let you afford to buy a million puddings!”
Hickshaw had blinked several times, then taken up his flask and swigged a long swallow. “I am an uncomplicated being. Do I look like I need treasures?”
“What is it you want, then? I can offer it exactly. Mechanical maidens carved of geared gemstone? No? Rings to make you invisible, and not at the loss of your soul? No, you probably don’t have a soul. A magic shovel, a magic bird cape, the magic goblet of Bacconyus, which never empties of wine, to wash down your puddings?” This last had been offered in a spirit of desperation, however—
“Wine?” Hickshaw had said. “Tell me about that one.”
The explorer’s blood had made a mediocre batch of pudding. The man had had the stink of excessive travel, undertaken without enough ease. But each time Hickshaw sampled it, he remembered the man’s story, and by the time he finished the last helping, he had decided to find the Pyramid of Bacconyus and plunder it with the help of his cousins.
Wherever it was they were, they began to walk again, away from there. Sunset passed, and midnight, and dawn was approaching out of the frozen stars. At first light, the cousins stood on a bald peak, and Hickshaw scanned the horizons. His head felt filled with chaff, his eyes dry and sore, and yet he didn’t dare drink from the hidden flask while the others were watching. Besides...