Gods of Howl Mountain

by Taylor Brown

  “You aren’t gonna go telling him, are you?”

  Rory looked down at the double hammers of the shotgun, cocked like rabbit ears under a hawk.

  “Nuh-uh. That ain’t what I got to tell him.”

  * * *

  The moon was high and round, cradled in the dark claws of the trees. Its light spilled like shattered glass on the hood. Rory drove out of End-of-the-Road, toward town, his headlights painting the road white. He knew the Sheriff lived in one of the lakefront houses on the far side of the dam, built mainly for the big men from the mills. He looked at Ornias. The snake lay like a spring in the box, its tongue forking the air again, again.

  “We’ll go high up in the mountains after,” he said. “Just like Eustace done, living in caves and sleeping on leaves. It’s a whole kingdom up there, up in the wind and trees.”

  They circled the square, the headlights flashing the darkened storefronts, and turned for the dam. Rory reached out and touched the box, spreading his fingers against the screen. His palm glowed.

  “Don’t worry,” he told the snake. “I’m a-mind to set you free.”

  The Gumtree Dam loomed before them, a behemoth of stone. A line of white waterfalls ran down its face, the valley held flooded against its brink like a threat. The wheels hopped the joint and the sound changed, the tires whirring over concrete. On the far shore, the yellow-lit windows of waterfront houses danced through the trees, like the campfires of some powerful lake tribe. Rory thought of the little lords lodged heavy-bellied in their sitting rooms, smoking cigars, drinking bottled whiskey from across the ocean.

  He was more than halfway across the span when he saw the blockade, the cars parked nose-to-nose at the end of the dam. They were covered in camouflage netting. A lick of panic through his gut. He flicked the wheel slightly one way, then hard the other, downshifting and dumping the clutch. The rear tires broke loose, bawling beneath him, and the car reversed direction, scrawling black hooks of rubber in the road. He was already accelerating the opposite way, fleeing back toward town, when his headlights lit up the broadside of a bread truck. It had been pulled across the foot of the dam, boxing him in.

  “Shit.”

  He pulled another bootleg turn, stopping this time at the very midpoint of the dam. Smoke fumed from under the car. He was bookended, caught, and he could think only of the lights in the trees, the Sheriff so safe in the whiskey-glow of his room. Thumbing the brim of a fancy rabbit-felt hat. Drinking rock and rye for his throat. A tin-stamped star pinned to the lapel of his coat, allowing him to take, take, take.

  Rory revved the engine and dropped the clutch. The tires barked, the nose jumping skyward. He roared for the roadblock, the needles swinging erect, the wheel shuddering with power. The flash of a muzzle in the distance, like sparked flint, then another and another. Rory ducked, looking through the hoop of the steering wheel. Slugs rattled the chassis like hail. A white spider lurched across the windshield and burst, a cloud of blown glass that tore across his cheek. A round slammed the seat alongside him.

  Rory mashed the brakes.

  The car squalled and skidded, stopping slightly sidewise in the road, blue smoke uncoiling from the tires. He flashed the high-beams in surrender. Soon he could hear the boots of men, their hard heels clapping across the concrete. His head was down, his face burned. He put the car in neutral and clasped his hands behind his head, waiting. The machine clinked and rattled a chorus of broken glass, loose metal. A side-mirror fell off.

  Then they were on him, a flurry of arms ripping him from the seat. They had Winchester self-loading rifles instead of shotguns. They’d learned after the night on the mountain. One rammed the butt of his weapon into Rory’s temple, knocking him flat at their feet, pain ringing through his skull. His grandfather’s bowler hat, upended, spun a drunken circle in the road.

  “Take his leg,” said Kingman.

  Hands yanked and twisted, wrenching the leg from his stump. The straps and buckles tore his flesh as they went. Rory sat up, grabbing for his lost limb, only to watch the agent swing the calf into his face like a bat. He heard his nose break, a liquid crack, and the blood came scoring through his sinuses. His eyes flooded with tears. He tried to blink them away from the men watching him and couldn’t. The agent knelt over him. His face shone warped and leering through Rory’s tears, and he lifted the leg high like an ax. The blow glanced off Rory’s head and struck his collarbone, driving him to the ground. He curled into a ball. The blows struck his kidneys, his short-ribs and spine.

  Again, again.

  He could feel his cells bursting, his muscles torn. Blood booming against the blows, clouding his skin. He yelped at the crack of a rib. A sharp blow to the kidney, a vision of his urine shot red in the bowl. He would not ask them to stop. He would not.

  “Stop kicking yourself,” said the one wielding the leg. “Stop kicking yourself.”

  “Enough,” said Kingman.

  Rory opened his eyes. Kingman’s mustache frowned over him. There was no hate in the man’s eyes. No sympathy.

  “Give me the leg.”

  The agent handed it over. Kingman looked into the stump socket, examined the buckles and straps. He lifted the bootheel, eyed the pistol sunk in the inlay. He sighted down the calf like a pool cue, frowning, as if unsatisfied with its trueness, then turned and slung the leg from the dam. Rory watched that part of himself go spinning over the guardrail, the leather straps trailing like remnant sinew. He felt lighter somehow, watching it go. Stronger. Bloody here in the road, dismembered. So much lost, there was only one thing left. Everything was that.

  He looked at the Ford. Idling, the door open. The men looking love-eyed at Kingman, like they would a football captain or big-league slugger. Their rifles hung loose from their shoulders, their quarry already caught. Rory rose up to his knees and jumped to his foot, lurching for the car. It took him three hops to reach the door and every hop he thought he was dead. He reached for the shotgun still lying on the floor, pushing the barrels through the open window as he slammed home the door.

  The men froze. Even Kingman, with one hand over his heart, his fingers checked just short of the pistol under his arm.

  “Don’t,” said Rory.

  He looked from one of them to the next. He could cut them down where they stood, all four of them in two barrels of shot. He thought of them bright-wrecked in the road, ghastly in remainder. Unmade.

  So easy.

  He looked into Kingman’s face. The man looked almost amused at this turn of events. This one-legged hillbilly had bested him. He looked almost proud.

  Rory spat.

  “A pox on the hangman,” he said.

  He pulled the shotgun inside the car and rammed the stock down hard on the clutch, yanking the shifter into first. He raced the engine and let the pedal pop. The car bucked forward, squealing. It almost stalled but didn’t. It roared. The revenuers’ cars were parked nose-to-nose at the end of the dam. There was a gap between each and the guardrail, slightly too narrow for his car. Rory aimed for the trunk of the rightmost machine. The gas tank was under there. He thought of fire, his body burning like those chickens in the night.

  He banged into second gear, again using the shotgun against the clutch, then angled the barrels away from his face. He buckled his lap-belt at the last moment and braced, hitting the quarter panel of the government car at speed. Metal screamed, his chest slammed the wheel. He tasted blood in his mouth and couldn’t breathe, his lungs punched flat. He clung to the wheel like a man drowning.

  Maybelline pushed him gently back into the seat. She blew cold air through the shattered windshield, into his open mouth. She crossed the foot of the dam with a little jolt, then started up the road on the far side.

  * * *

  Rory squinted out over the mangled hood, the night skirling coldly about his face. Kingman and the others would think he’d fled for home. The mountain.

  Not yet.

  He turned onto the road that wound toward the lake, slow,
so they wouldn’t hear the motor through the trees. The cold felt good on his busted face, his broken nose, and there was warmth in his chest. Blood shunted toward a darkening, growing bruise, throbbing like a second heart.

  Soon he could see the lake through the trees, shining under the moon like hammered tin. He was watching the restless glimmer of the surface when he remembered the snake. His eyes went casting about for the box. There it was in the passenger footwell, upended. One of the hinges was busted, the door ajar. The serpent gone. Rory felt it before he saw it, looking down. The snake lay coiled on the floor at his foot. Fear shot through him, cold, as if he were seeing some part of his insides fallen ropy and slick from his gut, and he reached without thought.

  “Ornias,” he said.

  The snake struck fast from the floor, mindless and elongate, the pink mouth glistening like a woman’s sex. The fangs snapped into the web of his left hand. He screamed, swerving, drawing the hand to his chest like a wounded rabbit. The car lurched from the road, thundering over the shoulder, trees thudding past like giant ribs. He swerved back toward the blacktop, too hard, and the tires caught edgewise and the car rolled airborne, slamming down hard on the passenger side. A burst of glass and sparks, the scream of rent metal.

  Darkness.

  Rory opened his eyes. His head was heavy. He was hanging by his seatbelt, his world overturned. Out the window, he saw a blacktop sky, starry with broken glass. Maybelline lay on her roof in the road, ticking and hissing. There came a rattle, rising like the very sound of death, and Rory saw Ornias coiled in a bed of glass just inches from his hanging head. The viper’s rattle was poised, trembling like a tiny grenade. His body snarled and kinked, some letter in a language Rory didn’t know. Slowly the viper unwound himself. Rory watched the creature zig through the gleaming slivers of wreckage, a string of black diamonds passing between the broken teeth of the windshield and out into the splintery glass of the road. He watched the serpent skate off into the darkness, a whisper along the pavement.

  Gone.

  Rory realized that he was holding his arm out, as if to grasp the fugitive. Now he drew the arm back to himself, looking at his hand. Twin punctures in the belly of muscle between thumb and forefinger. Red bubbles the size of rabbit’s eyes stood atop the wounds. Rory unbuckled himself, crashing against the headliner. He took a shard of glass and cut an X into each fang wound and raised the bloody marks to his mouth, sucking in the red tang of himself and spitting it out. Again, again. He looked at the foamy blood, looking for the viper’s venom yellowing its fringes. Too dark to tell. Now he crawled through the shattered windshield, careful of the remnant glass.

  He knelt in the road, breathing hard. Before him lay Maybelline, riddled and smoking, her mazed undercarriage turned up to the sky. She was black-eyed, her headlights shot out. Her body dented, her black paint torn in silver streaks. She was bleeding oil in the road, steaming. This machine that had made him fast and strong, cutting across whole counties in under an hour, boring the dark with big glowing eyes. Rory crawled back to the car, searching for the shotgun among the scrap and glass.

  * * *

  The pain came hard and fast. A swarm of fire ants, entering through the twin tunnels of the wounds. They came marching up his arm, firing his veins, coursing against the hard dam of his throat. He gritted his teeth against a wail. He was lurching his way down the road, one-legged, using the butt of the shotgun for a cane. He was making for the lake. The Sheriff’s place.

  The flesh of his hand was ballooning, as if pumped full of air. Or ants. Blood bubbled from the X-cut wounds. He tried not to look. He didn’t want to see what might be squirming in the red fluid that drove him. He looked to the moon instead. It looked sick and yellow to him. A jaundiced bulb, warped on the vine. Pain shot through his gut, sharp and knifelike, like he’d eaten that shattered glass in the road.

  He clung to the first mailbox on the road and vomited, a yellowy heave. He wiped his mouth with the back of his hand. Thick ropes of saliva laced him hand to chin. His spit was chewy between his teeth, his gums dry and sore. His breath came ragged, sawing against his throat. The venom, the venom. Pain and plague and madness distilled into a liquid, injected like a curse. They said the bite of a diamondback could kill a man in under an hour.

  He had to hurry.

  He lifted his eyes to the house before him. It looked small from the front, the windows dark, like he imagined the valley cabin where they killed the boy that was his father. Where they stole his mother’s voice.

  Rory spat and started again down the road.

  Clouds shrouded the moon. He thought he wouldn’t be able to see, but he could. He could see the edges of things glowing faintly, gilded in trace threads of golden light. The trees, the houses. As if touched by the glow of a distant fire. Faint but there. He blinked and blinked again. Still there. He thought he might be beginning to die.

  He kept on.

  The Sheriff’s house. White with green trim. A low porch and metal roof, a small front yard with a curl of white pavers to the porch. The window blinds were drawn, slits of yellow light shining through the cracks. Rory leaned on the mailbox, no one around. The people here had dogs that lived in their houses, slept on their beds. Some ate food from the table. The nearest house was far through the trees, hardly visible.

  He steadied the shotgun on the mailbox and thumbed the breech. The barrels fell open. He checked the shells, seated snug in their chambers, and tried to blink away the weblike tendrils in his eyes. The corners of his vision were fracturing. Scaling. The night he saw was like those blinded windows, light leaking through the edges. He slid the shotgun from the top of the mailbox, jerked home the barrels, then bent and retched. Nothing but dry heaves now, long ropes of spit.

  He made the porch, slid to the nearest window and listened. Nothing. He pushed himself up, flattening himself against the wall beside the door. He held the shotgun in the crook of his arm and tried the knob. It turned, unlocked. If he walked through it, he could never walk out. The hinges didn’t wince. He ducked into the house, dropping to his knees as he leveled the shotgun.

  No one.

  A den with an overstuffed leather chair, wrinkled and creased like an old man’s face. Fishing photos on the walls. Big river cats in black and white, a younger Sheriff who smiled hefting his trophies. The smell of remnant cigars and bay rum. On a side table, the pearl butt of the man’s service weapon curled from the looped morass of his shoulder holster.

  Rory stuffed the gun in his belt.

  The floors were varnished pine. He worked his way room to room on the bony knobs of his knees, a carnival midget with an outsize gun. He pushed open doors with the heel of his snakebit hand, trying not to look at what it had become: a balloon of swollen flesh, the fingers fat as a giant’s. A dark storm brewing over the knuckles, blooming up his arm. His very death on march.

  He didn’t find the Sheriff in the kitchen or the bedrooms or the study. Not even in the bathroom, where Rory thought surely he would find him, sick, voiding into the porcelain by one end or the other. Not anywhere.

  Rory tried the back porch, the door grinding along its metal rail. Empty. A long dock stretched over the moonless void of the lake. Rory squinted. There was someone out there at the end. He descended the stairs, the shotgun cradled against his chest, and the steps seemed to be coiling beneath him, making him retch. He went crawling down the dock on knees and hand and elbow, his stump skidding for traction on the planks, the shotgun tucked under his snake-bit arm. He grimaced and bled, hardly getting his breath. He was reduced to this. Belly-crawler, dust-licker. A broken thing, bellying through the darkness.

  Rory found the Sheriff in a store-bought lounge chair, asleep. One hand lay over the armrest, the fingers dangling over a half-empty bottle of bonded Scotch. His rabbit-felt hat sat crooked over his eyes. His chest rose, fell, his breath whistling through an open mouth.

  “Sick, my ass.”

  He came around the front of the man and prodded his sh
oulder with the shotgun.

  “Up, you. Up!”

  The Sheriff stirred. He pointed up the brim of his hat, squinting one eye against the world, finding the twin bores of a shotgun in his face.

  “You got to be shitting me, Docherty.”

  “I know it was you.”

  The Sheriff straightened slightly, easing his hands toward his lap.

  “The hell you talking about, son?”

  Rory pushed the barrels closer to the man’s face.

  “I’m talking about the Gaston boy.” Rory paused. “I’m talking about my mother.”

  The Sheriff looked down at Rory’s swollen hand, up at his brighted eyes.

  “You snakebit, boy? You got that venom wilding in your brain?”

  “You needn’t worry about that. What you got to worry is how a load of this double-aught is gonna suit you.” He hooked one swollen finger through the trigger guard of the revolver in his belt. It would hardly fit. He hung the weapon upside down between them, his face twisting with pain. He had to be fast now.

  “I was planning just to shoot you. That was my original plan. But then I had a better idea. The two of us are gonna duel it out, right here on this dock. Ten paces or whatever the fancies used to do. Then, when I shoot you dead, I’ll know I given God the chance to stop me.”

  The Sheriff thumbed one of the rootlike veins that climbed his neck, his other hand sitting on his thigh. His eyes cut past Rory, watching for movement in the trees.

  “I never touched him, Rory. Neither him nor your mama.”

  “Don’t you worry now, Sheriff. I won’t use the buck. I brought along a deer-slug in case I had to take you from a distance. Ought to make it sporting.”

  The Sheriff watched him.

  “Who put you up to this? Eustace?”

  Rory said nothing. This was going on too long. He could feel himself growing weak. His leg was jellied, quivering. His hand the paw of an ogre or troll.

  “Course it was,” said the Sheriff. “I should of known.”

  “You should of known this day was coming.”

  The Sheriff’s chin rose slightly.