Mister Slaughter

by Robert R. McCammon

  God help me survive the next test, Matthew thought.

  “Can I sit here with you? Just for a minute?”

  He was aware that Lark had joined him. He sat up, glad to have some company. “Yes,” he said. “Please do.” He reached over to brush some sticks and rocks away from where she was going to sit. “I apologize for the furnishings,” he told her, “but at least the place has a nice view.”

  He doubted if his attempt at humor had made her smile, as he couldn’t see her face in the dark. Behind her, the small fire was dying. Under her cloak, Faith appeared to have at last drifted to sleep, which in itself was a blessed event. Lark sat down and offered him the flask of water. He took it, drank some and returned it.

  Neither of them spoke. Overhead the night had revealed an awesome river of stars, and within that gigantic river were swirls of light like celestial currents. Some stars appeared to burn red, or blue. Some seemed to pulse with unknown energy. Far off above the horizon, a spark of fire leapt, gold against black, turned orange and winked out just as suddenly. It was the way of all things, Matthew thought. Beginnings and endings, even for stars.

  “Matthew,” Lark said. “I wanted to tell you…I don’t blame you for anything.”

  He didn’t respond, but he was listening very carefully.

  “You shouldn’t blame yourself,” she went on, and whether she was looking at him as she spoke or not, he couldn’t tell. “You had your own reasons for what you did, and I’m sure…you thought they were important. They must have been important. But if you weren’t…if you weren’t a good man, Matthew, you wouldn’t be out here right now. You wouldn’t care what happened to us. And you wouldn’t be trying to make things right.”

  “I don’t think I can ever—”

  He stopped speaking, because Lark had placed a finger against his lips.

  “You can,” she said. “By taking him where he needs to be. By not giving up. Everything that’s happened is in the past now. It’s done. Do you hear?”

  He nodded. Her finger moved away.

  “Let yesterday go,” Lark said, “so it will not betray tomorrow.”

  Did he feel something leave him? A heaviness? A sadness that had leeched deep? A sense of guilt, like a self-built gallows? He wasn’t sure. If he did, it was not dramatic; it did not have the power and majesty of a river of stars, or a celestial current. But he thought that by the grace of this young girl—older and wiser than her years would suggest—there was the lighting of a small spark of hope within him, there in his darkness, and by it he might find his way home from this wilderness his soul wandered.

  “Would you hold me?” she asked, in barely a whisper.

  He did. She put her head against his shoulder, and pressing her face in tightly she began to cry with muffled sobs, so her mother—her child—might not hear and awaken. He stroked her hair, and rubbed warmth into her neck, and still she clung to him and wept like any heartbroken girl of sixteen years might, on a night when the stars burned with fierce beauty high above the ugly realm of rattlesnake country.

  Matthew didn’t know how long he held her, or how long she cried. Time had indeed stopped for the Englishman. But at last her sobbing quietened, her crying ceased, and she lifted her face from his damp shoulder.

  “Thank you,” she told him, and she got up and returned to her mother’s side.

  Matthew lay back down, the pistol under his fingers. His legs were hurting and his back ached, but for the first time in a long while—maybe since he’d decided to break open the red octopus—his mind knew a calming touch of peace.

  His eyes closed.

  He slept soundly, and at least for a short while he feared not.

  Twenty-Three

  WHEN Matthew awakened, it was as any animal of the forest might: instantly alert, his senses questing, and with the memory of what Walker had just quietly spoken to him.

  “He’s coming.”

  There was no light but starshine and the poor candle of a quarter-moon. Everything was made up of shades of dark blue deepening to black, and Matthew could just see Walker kneeling at his side.

  “One minute,” Matthew answered, in an equally quiet, composed voice. He opened his shooter’s bag and brought out his powderhorn. In his firearms training, Matthew had been required by Greathouse to several times load a pistol blindfolded. Matthew then thought it had been ridiculous, but now he grasped the wisdom of the exercise. He wished, indeed, that he’d practiced it more, instead of getting out the door and to the coffeehouse as soon as possible. But he would have to do the best he could, and if he made a mistake the gunpowder goblin—he who sometimes flashed bright and hot and sometimes fizzled and sputtered in the hands of greenhorns—would soon correct him most harshly.

  He shook powder into the pistol’s flashpan, after which he closed the pan’s lid and thumbed the striker to half-cock. Now, he thought as he shouldered his shooter’s bag and stood up to follow Walker, they were in it for blood.

  Walker unsheathed his bow, took an arrow from his quiver and nocked it. “Slowly and silently,” he whispered. “Stay on my right side, shoulder-to-shoulder. He’s coming in from the left, about sixty yards out.”

  “How do you know?”

  “I got near enough to hear him. And to smell him. Are you ready?”

  “Yes.” He had told bigger lies, but not many.

  They left the sleeping girl and her mother, crossed the clearing and entered the forest on the far side. Matthew strained to see anything, and thought himself lucky not to immediately trip over a root or stumble into a thicket and fall face-first, alerting everything with ears between here and the City of Brotherly Love. But the moccasins helped his feet read the earth and he moved slowly, at Walker’s pace. One step, and stop. One step, and stop. His heart was beating hard; in this silence, surely Slaughter could hear the drumming.

  When Matthew took a pace forward and dead leaves crackled, the noise seemed as loud as the raucous laughter of ruffians in the Cock’a’tail tavern. Walker stood motionless, and so did Matthew. They stayed that way for what Matthew thought must have been at least a minute. Walker knelt down, making no noise, and leaned his head further toward the ground. Then, at last, he stood up again and eased onward, correcting their course a few more degrees to the left.

  Blue upon black and gray upon black were the colors of the night woods. Matthew’s eyes were becoming more accustomed to the dark; here the black stripes of tree branches were faintly seen across dark blue underbrush, and there a gray boulder rose up like an island in a sea of ink. The two stalkers, seeking to intercept the third, continued steathily into the forest. When thorns clutched at Matthew’s buckskin jacket and scratched his face, he barely paused in his advance. His eyes sought movement among the massive trunks of trees and among the black patterns of vegetation. He kept the pistol low at his side, his thumb ready to pull the striker to full-cock. Though the air was chill, sweat rose at his temples and dampened his armpits. He was no hero born with iron nerves; every step he took, he thought he might pee in his breeches.

  “Crouch down,” Walker whispered, close to his ear.

  He obeyed. Walker got on his knees, tilted his head and leaned forward, almost placing his ear upon the ground. The Indian stayed in that posture as if frozen, while Matthew scanned back and forth across the dark.

  It was very quiet at first. Just a hint of sound, before it became a sound.

  Dead leaves being crunched underfoot, almost directly ahead.

  The sound ceased, so quickly Matthew wasn’t sure he’d heard it or not.

  Walker remained still.

  The back of Matthew’s neck crawled. If that was indeed Slaughter out there, and not just any noctural animal, he was moving as cautiously as they were. It called to Matthew’s mind the unsettling supposition that Slaughter might have known they would be here, and he was listening for them as well.

  The noise did not repeat itself. Walker waited a moment more, and then he silently and smoothly rose to his f
eet.

  He took one step forward and stopped. Then one step, again, and stopped. His head went from side to side, the arrow ready for a target. Matthew eased up next to him, wincing as a small stick broke under his right heel.

  Walker once more remained motionless, and Matthew with him. They listened, in the silence.

  Matthew could only hear his heartbeat and the roaring of blood in his veins. If any of that got any louder, he would be deafened.

  And now…now…ahead again, but nearer…was that the noise of a boot scraping across a stone? Or had it been a pistol’s striker being drawn to full-cock?

  Walker’s elbow was planted firmly in the center of Matthew’s chest. The message was clear: Wait.

  Moving his head in small increments, Matthew looked back and forth across the woods. Nothing moved. Nothing made a sound.

  Then, frighteningly and horribly, there came from the direction of camp a woman’s cry. It was sharp and sudden, and became the noise of Faith calling for her mother. Matthew realized she had awakened in the dark, with all the terror it unlocked in her fragmented mind. In a few seconds the sound of her voice faded, as Faith had either drifted off again or Lark had been able to comfort her.

  Walker’s elbow moved from Matthew’s chest. Slowly, carefully, Walker took a single step.

  Something abruptly burst from the brush beneath the Indian’s foot. Matthew, who thought his hair had just turned white, had the sense of a small dark shape scurrying off. Its clatter through the leaves sounded like a herd of deer, though the creature had probably been a rabbit or a woodchuck. Walker stood as solid as a rock, but Matthew was left trembling and instinctively felt at his crotch for any leakage there. Fortunately, he was still wearing dry breeches.

  But was there a shape ahead of them, through the slanting blue and black bones of the night, that Matthew saw moving? Just a glimpse, and then gone…if it had ever been there?

  “Something moved,” Matthew whispered, his voice raw. He started to point and thought better of it. “Ahead…to the left.”

  Walker aimed his arrow toward that point, and when the Indian took his next step Matthew felt his guts twinge until it was evident there would be no more bursts from the brush. Matthew stayed alongside him, as they advanced among huge trees. In another moment Matthew was aware of a faint and hazy lumination on all sides: the green glow from dozens of mushrooms on the forest floor, or of fungus attached to rotting wood.

  Matthew kept alert for any further movement. Walker stopped again and seemed to be sniffing the air. There was a long pause, during which Matthew thought his teeth might break, he was clenching them so hard. Walker whispered, with a hint of urgency, “He’s close.” A shape suddenly rose from a crouch through the thicket in front of them, but even as Walker let his arrow fly the shape flattened out once more and merged with the dark. There came the thunk of the arrowhead hitting a tree. Walker reached back, took a second arrow from his quiver and nocked it.

  Matthew saw, to the left again, another fleeting motion. Whether it was part of a shoulder, or a back, or a head, he couldn’t tell. It was just there one instant and the next not. The bowstring sang and the second arrow sped away. No cry of pain followed. There was only the silence and the stillness. Walker readied a third arrow. The Indian moved forward, the bow drawn and the arrow seeking a target. Matthew lifted his pistol and cocked the striker; it made a jarringly loud click. He followed Walker, staying just off his right shoulder.

  With two more paces, the world blew up.

  Sparks flew from low down on the ground, about ten feet in front of Walker. In the blinding flash of the powder igniting, Matthew saw Walker fire his third arrow into the light, and then the sound of the gunshot cracked his ears. As Walker staggered back, Matthew pulled his pistol’s trigger and fired into the billowing smoke, his eyes dazzled by first Slaughter’s shot and then his own. Another voluminous gout of smoke whirled up, rank with the potent smell of gunpowder, and he felt Walker collide with his shoulder and nearly knock him sprawling.

  Matthew went down on his knees. Walker had fallen to the ground somewhere behind him. And now, as Matthew’s head reeled and his eyes seemed to pulse with white-hot cores of flame, he realized he had to get his gun loaded again, for there was no way to know if Slaughter had been hit or not. Over the high-pitched ringing in his ears he heard Lark shouting from the camp: “Matthew! Matthew!”

  He got the shooter’s bag off his shoulder and shut his eyes, for they were useless. His fingers would have to see for him. They found the powderhorn, a lead ball and a cloth patch.

  “Matthew!” Lark screamed.

  He poured the powder, pulled the ramrod from its socket and rammed down the patch and ball. Opened the flashpan. Shook powder into the pan. Closed it. What was he forgetting? Something vital. The ramrod. Still in the barrel. If he lost it, the pistol would be reduced to a club. He removed the ramrod from the barrel and—

  A shot fired from his right. The ball hissed past his ear. Slaughter might be wounded, but he was still able enough to quick-load a pistol in the dark.

  Matthew opened his blind eyes, which saw nothing but flowing curtains of light, and fired at the sound of Slaughter’s shot. He heard the ball smack into a treetrunk; he thought, crazily, that Greathouse would have kicked his tail for firing too hastily and too high. Then Matthew’s next thought was that even though Slaughter was also shooting blind he had to move, lest Slaughter pinpoint his own position from the sound. Grabbing the shooter’s bag and holding the pistol like God’s own gift, he got on his belly and crawled to the right over dead leaves, roots and luminous mushrooms.

  He got his back against a tree and, eyes closed, started the loading process again. Halfway done, he was shaken by the crack of another shot from somewhere in front of him, but where the ball went he didn’t know. All he cared was that he wasn’t hit. Flashpan primed? Ramrod out? Yes. He aimed into the night, pulled the trigger, and the little bastard bullpup gun failed to fire.

  He thumbed the striker back, his hand trembling. Could be any damned thing gone wrong. Flint misaligned. Touch-hole blocked. Maybe not enough powder in the pan. He opened the pan, feeling his way, and shook more powder into it from the horn.

  “Matthew! Matthew, answer me!” Lark was pleading, near panic. Beyond her voice, he could hear the sound of Faith wailing like a child about to be whipped.

  He opened his eyes. Through the mist and dazzle he saw a shower of red sparks fly up from the underbrush maybe twenty feet away. He heard the report an instant before the ball knocked splinters from the treetrunk a foot above his head; then it was his turn, and when he pulled the trigger this time the Dovehart Special fired into Slaughter’s hiding-place with a spectacular display of flaming comets and smoke that might have choked London.

  In the aftermath of the shot, Matthew set to work reloading. His industry was sped by sheer terror, for Slaughter’s last try had been much too close. Was Slaughter wounded? Dead? There was no telling. He got the pistol ready, cocked the striker, and waited for Slaughter’s next move, if the man could move at all.

  He heard a crashing through the woods. In what direction, it was hard to tell. The smoke was still thick and his eyesight still feeble. Was Slaughter repositioning himself for another attack? Getting around behind him? He almost called out to the man, but for what purpose? To tell him to give himself up? He thought that Slaughter might be arrow-pierced and pistol-shot, but as long as the monster had breath, teeth and claws he was not going to surrender. He waited, his heart pounding, the gun aimed into the night, and he would not let himself think about what had happened to Walker. “Matthew!” Lark called again, but he was too afraid to answer.

  A period of time went by—two minutes? three?—during which Matthew thought he might either vomit or pass out. He did neither, but he was hard-pressed to want to move a muscle from where he sat, with the protection of the treetrunk at his back. “Stand up,” someone said at last, from the dark. It was Walker’s voice, calm and steady. Matt
hew didn’t move; he thought he must have been made delirious by the gunpowder fumes, or his ears weren’t quite back to normal. “Up,” Walker’s voice repeated. “He’s gone.” Matthew was too dazed to respond to the specter; he could see nothing, though thankfully the bright whorls of gunfire had faded away. A hand grasped his left arm. It was solid enough. “Stand up. He’s gone. Toward the camp.” The last three words knocked sense into him. He shouldered his shooter’s bag and tried to stand, but everything seemed to be gone from the knees down. “I thought you were shot,” Matthew said.

  “Listen,” Walker insisted. “Do you hear the women anymore?”

  Matthew did not. This time his effort at getting to his feet was successful. “Lark!” he shouted. There was no answer. Then, again, and louder: “Lark!”

  Slaughter, he thought. Slaughter had crept up to them in the dark, while he was sitting against the tree protecting his back, and cut their throats with razor or knife. “Lark!” he cried out, and his voice broke.