The River of Souls

by Robert McCammon

“A part I want to keep,” Matthew answered, “was almost in the game.”

  “Lost a lot of blood, looks like. Took a knife?”

  “Arrow.”

  “Broke off the shaft?”

  “No,” Matthew said. “I pulled the arrowhead out.”

  There was a moment of respectful silence, even from the drunken gigglers. Then Stamper called out, “Halleck, pass that jug over here! Let’s give this boy a drink. I think he needs one more than you do.”

  The jug was passed. Matthew had a swallow, which burned hot going down and brought tears to his eyes but he welcomed the sensation. Then Quinn took the jug, said to him, “Draw a breath,” and when he did—knowing what she was about to do—she splashed some of the liquor onto his shoulder wound.

  Comets and fireballs whirled through his head. The pain almost broke his teeth. He thought for a second his tormented flesh in that area had burst into flame. Then he was aware of being helped to the ground by Magnus, because his legs had collapsed. He sat in the firelight with his hand clasped to his shoulder and the beads of sweat glistening on his face.

  “Thank you,” said Quinn, giving the jug back to Stamper, who began its passage back to Halleck and the other drunkards.

  “Heard three shots,” Magnus said. “Killed three snakes?”

  “Snakes were killed by the sword,” Stamper answered as he chewed on the blackened meat. “Whetters, Carr and Morgan fired those shots.” He motioned toward three men on the other side of the flames. “Tell the man why you’re wastin’ gunpowder, Morgan.”

  “Wasn’t no waste!” said the wild-looking red-haired man with a hooked nose and maybe four or five black teeth in his head. “Somethin’ was stalkin’ us! We all heared it!”

  “Scared it off, whatever it was!” said one of the others, thin and balding and red-eyed from either his experiences of the night or sips from the jug. “Somethin’ big…followin’ us through that thicket. Didn’t make a lot a’noise, but it cracked a twig or two. Gettin’ closer and closer. Thought it might’ve been one of the skins, slippin’ up to cut our throats!”

  “Those skins are a long way from here, I’m bettin’,” said Stamper, with a nostril-flare of disgust for either the runaways or the three shooters. “And no one of ’em is gonna try to cut anybody’s throat. They want to run, not fight.”

  “Just tellin’ you what we heard,” Morgan insisted. “Out there lookin’ to scare up a rabbit or such…then we all heard it prowlin’ through that brush. Couldn’t see it, not even with the torch. Keepin’ well-hid.” He turned his attention from Stamper to Magnus. “So we took our shots and to Hell with whatever damn devil it was.”

  “Indian, maybe?” Magnus asked. “The Dead in Life?”

  “Maybe, but I don’t believe they’d roam this far from their village,” Stamper said. “Whatever it was, you boys are damned poor shots. Wasn’t a drop of blood in that thicket.” He reached over and gave his musket a loving pat. “We’ll find out before dawn whether you hit an Indian or not.”

  Matthew looked up at the sky. Had it ever been so dark before dawn in his life? Quinn settled herself beside him and pushed the sweat-damp hair back from his forehead.

  Magnus reached down. He took for himself a stick of burnt snake meat from the hand of a long-nosed man who seemed to think just for an instant of defying Fate, but then regained his senses and sat with his knees pulled up to his chin. Magnus chewed on the meat and surveyed the group of men. He was a formidable beast, with his hair and beard matted and filthy and his face darkened by Solstice River mud. “Why’d you pull off the river here?”

  “I don’t know who got here first and started a fire,” Stamper said, “but it’s a good place to camp. High off the mud. Eat some food and wait ’til daylight. Get started again in a couple of hours.”

  Magnus nodded. “I’m lookin’ for Griffin Royce and Joel Gunn. Anybody seen ’em?”

  “I seen ’em,” said a man leaning against a tree on the other side of the fire. He cradled a musket, was thick-bodied, had a neck like a bull and a square-jawed face that looked like he could crush stones between his teeth. Even so, his blind left eye was stark white. “About an hour ago. They was rowin’ ahead of me, Ellis and Doyle. Movin’ fast. Rounded a bend, and they was gone.”

  “Hm,” said Magnus, still chewing on the reptile.

  “Why you lookin’ for them, Muldoon?” Caleb Bovie had snake meat in his teeth and a voice that sounded as if his throat had been scraped with a razor. “You’re out after the skins just like the rest of us, ain’t you?”

  Magnus was suddenly at a loss for words. He looked to Matthew, who took up the banner even though he was still nearly insensible. “We wondered…if those two might’ve found the runaways yet. They started off…before everyone else. So…”

  “And what the hell are you doin’ here and who are you?” Stamper asked, his eyes narrowed. “I saw you in Jubilee. Wearin’ fancy clothes with fancy manners. You’re from Charles Town, am I right? What are you doin’ out here on a slave hunt, boy?”

  Magnus got his jaw unlocked. He had realized, as Matthew knew, that telling these men what Granny Pegg had said would carry no weight, and might work against their aim. “Matthew’s a friend of mine. Was at my house when the bell started ringin’.” He offered a crooked, muddy-faced grin. “Don’t hold it against him that he’s from Charles Town. Wantin’ to help me start a business. Ain’t that right, Matthew?”

  “Yes, that’s right.”

  “Business?” Stamper snorted and a few of the others dared to laugh, but quietly. “Muldoon, only business you can do is spreadin’ a stink wherever you walk.” His hand touched the musket, just in case. “And it’s news to me that you have a friend. Boy,” he said to Matthew, “you must be as poor a soul as he is.”

  Quinn leaned toward the man. Her face was tight, her eyes dark, and she said in a voice of fire and ice, “Don’t you talk to him that way, mister. I won’t have it. You hear?”

  “Is that so?” Stamper replied, with a quick glance at the other men, for Matthew saw he enjoyed not only being the center of attention, but also being a hornet in a chamberpot. “Why? What’s he to a sad-eyed young wench from Rotbottom?”

  “He’s my husband,” Quinn said calmly, “and he’s come back to me from the dead.”

  Thirteen

  There followed a long, frozen silence.

  It was broken when Baltazar Stamper said, “That explains it, then. Fitzy, cut me off some more snake and put it on here!” He held up his sharpened stick toward a thin young man who obediently knelt down and started slicing the meat from a dead brown snake that lay across a rock next to two already well-carved carcasses. Stamper’s deep-set eyes glittered as he appraised Matthew and Quinn. “Mr. Matthew,” he said, “you got yourself one there, it seems.”

  Seth Lott wore a grin like an ugly gash. “My services are yours, sir, for a Christian wedding. Or might I say…a renewed marriage.”

  “Then you can do the deed to her,” said Caleb Bovie, peeling some skin from his chunk of snake. “Do her good and proper. Right here by the fire, kinda…” He struggled to find the word, his mouth working but no sound being produced.

  “Romantic,” said Stamper, who received his portion of reptile from Fitzy and put it over the fire to burn.

  “Thank you for your interest and comments,” Matthew replied, taking them in one after another with a hard-edged glare. “Perhaps in Jubilee you have little respect for women…particularly one who might be…confused…but I’d ask you to restrain your jocularity.”

  “Big words,” said Bovie, with a frown. “What do they mean?”

  “They mean…shut your damned mouths,” Magnus answered, and he rested the rusted pistol against the bulk of a shoulder. “Stamper, I hear you put two wives in the grave. Lott, you got a fifteen-year-old girl with child a couple of years ago and she’s still wanderin’ the alleys of Charles Town, lookin’ for Jesus. And Bovie…you wouldn’t know the backside of a woman from a horse’s
ass, would you?”

  Bovie flushed red and started to stand up, but Stamper gave a harsh laugh and held out his stick of smoking snake meat to prevent Bovie’s rise. “Let him talk, Caleb. Entertainin’ to hear a fool prattle on. Oh, you men ought to hear what’s said about our friend Muldoon in Charles Town. Speakin’ of a certain society lady, who goes to balls and fancy dances with young handsome men. And then Magnus shows up, like a little boy with a broken heart. Beggin’ himself on her. Oh yes, I’ve heard it told in more than one tavern. How they laugh at him in that town! Our hermit Magnus Muldoon, tryin’ to…” He paused, and took a slow bite of snake. “Be somebody,” he went on. “When ever’body knows, and he knows it too…that he won’t ever in his life amount to any more than the pile of walkin’ shit he already is.” Stamper smiled faintly, with a bit of meat in the corner of his mouth. “But let Magnus reach high, I say. Let him reach up as far as he can. He ain’t goin’ nowhere, and he ain’t gonna catch no star, if that’s what he’s after. Let him reach up, and try and try to get away from what he is by grabbin’ the skirts of a—”

  “That’s enough.”

  It had been Matthew’s voice. Delivered as strongly as a pistol shot, but with better aim and elegance.

  Bovie stared holes through him. “Just ’cause you been arrowshot, boy, and lived to tell the tale don’t mean nothin’ to me. You better watch that smart mouth.”

  “Oh, let’s be friends,” said Stamper, with a shrug. “Comrades, out here on the River of Souls lookin’ to do the right thing. Get us some black ears to take back with us. Avenge Miss Sarah’s murder. That’s what it’s about, ain’t it?”

  Magnus had said nothing during all this. His face may have tightened and his glowering become more fearsome, but Matthew thought he was admirable in his solidity. The jugs began being passed around the fire once more, the other men began talking back and forth, and after a moment Magnus lowered his pistol and sat down with one side toward the party of avengers and the other toward the river.

  “Your husband,” said Seth Lott to Quinn. “As a man of God, I am interested in your story. Of life and death, rebirth and resurrection. What happened to him, dear child?”

  Many of the men were listening, though some had started a game of cards to go along with their taste from the jug. Quinn shifted uneasily, perhaps taking note—as Matthew did—of the rapacious eyes upon her.

  “My Daniel died last summer,” she said, speaking to the reverend. “It was a hot summer. Dry, like this one. Thunder and lightning, but no rain. You know how it can happen here, all of a sudden. The lightning strikes, and a tree catches fire. Then another one, and one after that, and then the whole woods starts burnin’. It can happen so fast, if the wind is dry and the thicket’s parched. So it was last summer.”

  “Wildfires,” said Lott. “Yes, they do start quick. They move fast, until they burn themselves out. It’s God’s will.”

  Quinn nodded. “Maybe it is. But it’s a hard will, I think. God must be a long ways from this place. Must be thinkin’ of other things, and helpin’ other people.”

  “God helps those who help themselves,” said the preacher. “That’s His mysterious way.”

  Matthew wondered if—taking into consideration that Magnus had been more truthful than spiteful—Lott had dismissed his young pregnant mistress with those exact words.

  “Could be,” said Quinn, her expression impassive. “When that fire takes hold and starts movin’, nothin’ can hardly stop it. Animals run from it and get caught when the wind jumps the fire from place to place. Happens to men, too. Last summer fire was ragin’ toward Rotbottom. We ain’t much, but we’re somewhere. Got lives and houses and families just like in any place. My Daniel and some men went out to chop down trees and dig firebreaks, stop it from gettin’ any closer to town.”

  “I saw the smoke,” said Stamper. “Looked a long way off, though. Happens just about every year.”

  “You got the swamp and the river to keep Jubilee from burnin’,” Quinn went on. “We got our picks and shovels and wantin’ to keep what’s ours. Maybe twenty men went out there, to fight the fire that was comin’. Lightin’ up the sky at night like the Devil’s grin, and throwin’ sparks onto anything that would burn. And the wind pickin’ up, and moanin’, and rushin’ those flames on. Gettin’ closer all the time, gettin’ stronger, and startin’ to catch even the swamp trees alight. My Daniel went out there, to help save our town…and he was one of three who didn’t come back, when it was all said and done.”

  “Burned up, was he?” asked Stamper, indelicately.

  “Not burned,” the girl replied. “Taken.”

  “Taken?” Matthew frowned. “How do you mean?”

  “By the beast,” said Quinn. “It came out of the smoke. Nearest man saw its shadow…couldn’t tell much of it…but it fell on my Daniel, and he was gone.” She reached out and put her hand on Matthew’s. “You said before you left me…you had a feelin’…a fear that day. But you looked in my face, and you told me how much you loved me, and you said, ‘Quinn…don’t you worry, ’cause I’ll be back.’ Said the child I was carryin’ was too important for distance to come between us…not the distance between our town and that fire, or the distance between life and death. Don’t you remember that?”

  Matthew was silent, but he felt an arrow pierce his heart as two tears ran from Quinn’s eyes in her terribly-composed and solemn face. It was a mask, he thought, that hid tremendous suffering, more than a young girl could stand without creating a desperate fiction.

  “You’re Daniel, returned to me,” she said. “I know it. I feel his spirit in you. And maybe you don’t remember everything of us…how things were…but as he gets stronger, he’ll tell you. And someday, maybe soon, you’ll remember all about Daniel Tate, and you’ll let Matthew Corbett go…because he’s just a suit of skin over the heart of my husband.” Her hand squeezed his, and she managed the saddest of smiles that drove Matthew’s arrow deeper. “I can’t ever let you go again…and we can have another child, Daniel. I’m so sorry…so sorry…I was so tore up I lost our baby. I just cried our baby’s life away, and for that I am so sorry.” She leaned toward him, her eyes glistening. “It was a boy. They told me, before they wrapped him in white linen and buried him. You remember that white linen, Daniel? For our weddin’? And how much you paid for it at the store in Jubilee?”

  “White linen is expensive,” was Stamper’s comment. “Pity to bury somethin’ as expensive as that.”

  Someone across the fire laughed, and Matthew saw Quinn wince as if struck by a slap across the face, and he took hold of his short-bladed sword that had likely belonged to a man now beheaded and lost to the world, and with every ounce of strength he possessed he struggled to his feet and stood in the leaping firelight with the young madwoman at his feet.

  “One more word of disrespect to her,” said Matthew to Baltazar Stamper, “and I’ll run you through or die trying.”

  “Let’s test that out, boy,” answered Caleb Bovie, who reached beside himself to grasp a wicked-looking sword that had probably twice the blade of Matthew’s weapon. He stood up, grinning and wild-eyed. His chest swelled out as he inhaled the swamp air, bugs and all. “Muldoon,” he said, “I’ll be on you ’fore you cock that pistol, so if I were you I’d just stand real still.”

  “Don’t need to cock it.” Magnus held it up to use as a club. He took a single step toward Bovie. “Come on, let’s see if you’ve got any brains in that damn ugly head.”

  Before anyone else could move, something moved in the thicket beyond.

  A torchlight could be seen approaching. “Hold your tempers and everyone keep their brains in their heads,” said Stamper, as he got to his feet. Most of the other men stood up as well, and brandished firearms or swords toward the advancing unknown.

  “Who comes forth?” Stamper called. A faint tremor in the man’s heavy-lunged voice told Matthew that the tales of this haunted swamp must not be fully lost on even the hardest of these men.


  There was a few seconds’ pause, in which the crackling of the fire and the humming of insects were the only sounds.

  Then a voice came: “Stamper?”

  “I know myself, but who are you?”

  More movement sounded in the thicket. The torchlight spread wider. A few of the men cocked their muskets. “Stay your triggers!” Stamper hissed. “I think I recognize that voice.” He spoke to the distance again: “We have some nervous men with guns in here, gentlemen! Kindly tell us who you are!”

  “Oh, for the sake of Christ!” replied the man, much nearer now and still coming. “It’s Griff Royce and Joel Gunn! Hold your fire!”

  Matthew and Magnus exchanged glances. Bovie’s attention, a short-lived beast, had turned from the approach of violence to the approach of the two Green Sea ‘captains.’ Quinn stood up, but grasped onto Matthew’s arm as if fearful the spirit of Daniel would again fly away from the body it supposedly inhabited.

  In another moment the two men appeared through the tangle of vines and brush, both of them looking hollow-eyed and weary under the torchlight. Gunn was carrying the torch. Both men were armed with muskets and had knives in sheaths tucked into their trousers at the waists. They came into the circle of the fire, as the other men visibly relaxed and lowered their weapons.

  “No ears yet?” Stamper asked.

  “Not yet, but we’ll get ’em,” Royce answered. He and Gunn scanned the assembly, and both of them stopped at Matthew, Quinn and Magnus. “Well,” said Royce, in a voice that held a knife’s edge of tension. “What do we have here?” The pock-marked face with its square chin and high cheekbones showed the hint of a cruel—perhaps cunning—smile. The green eyes seemed full of flames. “The young man from Charles Town…Matthew Corbett, isn’t it? Magnus Muldoon the love-struck hermit and…who is this?” If his eyes indeed were full of flames, the fires reached toward Quinn. “A beauty in rags?” he asked. “Or a ragged beauty? From Rotbottom, I’m thinkin’?”

  Gunn had no interest in Royce’s focus of attention; he was fixed on the sight of Matthew Corbett. “You!” he said, with a curl of contempt on his fleshy lips. “Not enough that you came in where you weren’t wanted, you had to come here?” He saw the bloody shirt. “Looks like you paid a price for it, too! I could’ve told you not to come on this hunt!”