by Harvey Click
Mary got the revolver from the bow and watched the lake for worm-men. The dragon looked fully formed now, and it leaned down so close to the water that she could see a row of bony plates sticking out of its back like armored shields. It looked older than the lake or the earth beneath it, older than dinosaurs or whatever might have roamed the planet or burrowed through the dirt before them. Its face wasn’t human or animal or like anything she’d ever seen, but it had a grotesque beauty. There was a terrible intelligence in its reptilian eyes, and Mary could hear their gaze moving like a cold wind across the waves.
“Over here!” someone yelled.
It was Grimes, swimming toward them through the fog. Dexter pulled him aboard, and he fell naked and panting into the stern.
“Broke my arm,” he gasped. He kept it covered with his other arm and shivered. “So cold,” he said. “I’m getting too damned old to swim with one arm.”
“How’d you get away?” Dexter asked. “I saw that thing swallow you.”
“Luckily it swallowed my dagger too,” Grimes said. “Had to cut my way out. I have stories to tell, but they can wait.”
His words were slurred, maybe because he was cold. He looked younger without his glasses, and his naked body looked soft and smooth like a boy’s. He grinned, and Mary tried to figure out what was wrong with his mouth.
His silver front tooth was no longer silver. It was pearly white.
She cocked the revolver. “Show me that broken arm,” she said.
The Grimes-thing slithered to its feet and leaped past Dexter from stern to bow. Its left arm was a kind of flipper like something on a deformed fetus, but its good humanoid right hand grabbed Mary’s ankle and dragged her out of the boat. Her gun wasted a bullet on the sky, but she managed to hold onto it while the snaky fingers wrapped around her ankle pulled her down below the surface.
“I know you, Bitter Ember, and you know me,” she heard something say.
She aimed the gun beneath her feet, cocked the hammer, and fired. The explosion pounded her ears, but the dark water kept talking while her lungs screamed for air.
“Come live with me and live forever,” it said. “We’ll burrow through tunnels of mysteries and treasures you can’t imagine. I’ll show you worlds hidden beneath the earth where dreams and even lies are true. I’ll take you to the cool deep cave where your father lives and your mother waits for you.”
Mary fell through fascinating depths. So many attractions here, places she’d never been and things she’d never seen. The voice pointed out the sights like a tour guide. She saw her father adding another link to her death-chain and chanting a death song that begged her to join him.
“I show you the future,” the voice said, and the future was made of flame and dirt and blood, and she realized that these were the three ingredients of gold, and she saw endless piles of it glittering in countless caverns.
Fool’s gold, she thought.
She pulled up her foot with the snaky fingers wrapped around it until she felt the muzzle of her revolver touch its soft skull. The gun fell out of her hand when she fired, but the thing let go. Its voice moaned painfully out of her head like a rotten nerve yanked out of her brain.
She kicked her way to the surface and coughed water and yelled, clinging to a shrinking scrap of consciousness like a raft. It seemed a long time before Dexter found her and pulled her into the boat.
“You okay?” he asked.
“I’ve had better days.”
“Hang on, we’ll get there,” Dexter said. He went back to his oars and pulled.
Mary vomited into the bilge slushing in the bottom of the boat. She thought of Garrick scooping up his puke and rubbing it on his face. She thought of Letha floating in the cistern. Probably pieces of her brain were drifting around in the lake right now like flotsam, thinking their isolated thoughts. When her lungs felt better, she sat up and watched the tower.
“It’s gonna keep making these creatures like men,” she said. “Pretty soon they’ll pass for human.”
“How do you know that?” Dexter asked.
“It told me so. It showed me a world with all the real people killed. That doesn’t sound so bad right now.” She tried to see shore through the fog but couldn’t. “I don’t think we’re getting any closer,” she said.
“That lifeboat’s slowing us down,” he said.
Mary took his dagger and was about to saw the rope when she noticed Ryver lying inside the rubber boat. He seemed to be asleep, face covered with blood and eyes shut, fingers clamped around his truncated wrist to stop the flow.
“We’ve got company,” she said.
Dexter handed her the rifle. She jacked the lever, aimed, and squeezed the trigger about halfway. She had worked all her life for this moment, but now nothing felt right. She was sick and scared and tired, and it didn’t seem fair for him to die peacefully in his sleep.
“Wake up, Ryver,” she said. “Rise and shine.”
He stirred a little. “That you, Pocahontas?”
“Yep, it’s me all right. Open your eyes, asshole. I want you to look at me when you die.”
Ryver tried to sit up. He opened his eyes, but the dead one was the only eye left. There was a bloody socket where the other one used to be.
“Do me a favor,” he said. “Cut me loose and give me a few minutes to make my peace.”
“I got your peace right here,” she said. “Maybe you can’t see it, but it’s your trusty old John Wayne cowboy rifle. Just want you to know it’s your own gun that’s gonna do the job.”
“Christsake, I’m dying anyway,” Ryver said. “Can’t you see I’m finished? Maybe this stump might heal, but I ain’t gonna grow a new eyeball, not with my treatment all worn out. How long you think a man in my line a work’s gonna live without his eyes?”
“I’d say about ten more seconds. Try to enjoy them.”
“Quit talking and shoot him,” Dexter said.
“Listen to me, Pocahontas. I got a little box filled with money in the front of the boat, go take a look. It’s a whole lot a treasure, it’s everything you want. It’s all yours if you just give me a few minutes here to make my peace.”
He seemed to be babbling. Why would there be money in the front of the boat? And even if there was, she could take it anyway. Ryver wasn’t stupid enough to think she was that stupid, unless there wasn’t much blood left in his brain. But something in his voice told her he wasn’t babbling.
“You’re talking shit,” she said. “Can’t you think up some better last words?”
“Listen to me, Pocahontas, and listen close. I can’t say much ‘cause this lake has good ears even if you don’t. I’m telling you I’m finished but my workday ain’t done, so just cut me loose and let me float. But first help me strap this life jacket on. Don’t let a dead man drown when he wants to go fishing.”
Something he’d said earlier flashed through her mind: “See what it’s like working for the Man? If he gives you a day off to go fishing, you end up being the bait.”
The life jacket was too heavy to save anyone from drowning.
Ryver’s dead eye stared straight at her as if it could see. It shut and opened again. He had winked at her.
“Shit,” Mary said. She laid down the rifle and started reeling in the rubber boat.
“What are you doing?” Dexter asked.
She started to explain and then remembered that the lake had ears. “He needs a few minutes to make his peace,” she said. “Just help me strap that life jacket on him.”
“What, are you crazy? If you won’t kill him, I will.” Dexter’s voice was sharp with anger. He let go of the oars and grabbed the rifle.
Mary gave him a look harder than steel. “Shut up and give me a hand,” she said.
They stared at each other. Dexter put down the rifle and pulled in the rubber boat. He held it steady while Mary strapped the heavy orange jacket around Ryver. He felt cold and limp and almost dead, and she didn’t think that thing out there liked de
ad meat. She tied off his stump with a scrap of rope and hoped that would keep him alive.
“What’s this all about?” Dexter asked.
“Never mind, just row,” she said.
Dexter went back to his oars. Mary stared down at the bloody face, wondering if Ryver was dead or alive. His body shifted, or maybe it was the waves.
Then something happened to his face. The lips stretched up. It wasn’t a pretty smile, but he seemed to be trying.
She cut the rope, and the rubber boat drifted away, bobbing and spinning toward the tower. Dexter rowed, and fog soon hid Ryver, but Mary could still see the smile frozen on his bloody face. She held it in her mind like a photograph in her album of horrors, along with the picture of her butchered father and the story of her mother dying outside the burning cabin.
“There it goes,” Dexter said.
A sharp ripple whipped through the tower, and its tail swept out of the water. It glared at them with crimson eyes and disappeared beneath the surface. A swollen wave lifted the rowboat and spun it around.
“Where the hell did it go?” Mary yelled.
She aimed the rifle like a slingshot against Goliath at every swell, but the whole lake was boiling like a cauldron; it could be anywhere. Dexter pulled hard against a current trying to tug them back to the vortex where the monster had been.
“There it is,” he said.
Mary saw the huge head rising slowly from the water, majestic and hideous, its ancient eyes burning like kilns. Dexter rowed furiously, and the slow billow caused by its rising helped wash them the rest of the way to land.
He scrambled out of the boat and yelled at Mary. “Come on, what the hell are you doing?”
She was looking through ropes and rags in the bow. “Ryver said there’s a box up here filled with money,” she said.
“Are you nuts? Come on.”
“I’m sure it’s here somewhere,” she said.
But there was no box in the bow. Maybe it had slid back. She kept looking, wondering why she trusted her worst enemy.
“Come on!” Dexter yelled. “Look, it’s coming this way!”
Ryver hadn’t lied: the little metal box was buried under a pile of rope beneath the rower’s seat. She opened it and found what she’d hoped to find. She scrambled out of the boat with her treasure.
The fog was lifting, as if trying to get away from the monstrosity snorting flame and smoke as it slid swiftly toward them through the water. Then it stopped and peered back and sniffed the air. A little rubber boat bobbed out of the mist, and the creature sped toward it. Jaws opened wide, and a long tongue darted out and licked up the boat like a juicy bug. The thing reared up its head and swallowed.
Mary shut her eyes. “Beloved Father,” she said, “Mother that I never knew, Naomi and Miss Barkley and all the others—this song’s for you.”
She pressed the bright red button on the detonator.
***
It seemed like an endless tunnel. Slimy walls kneaded Ryver down farther and farther, and he thought I must be in hell by now.
But it wasn’t hell yet because hell couldn’t stink this bad.
Come on, Pocahontas, he thought. Christsake, get it over with. Can’t you find the fucking detonator?
He had always imagined that at the end of his life things would make some kind of sense, but they didn’t. Hell of a paycheck after all those Goddamn years of work, dying like this in the belly of a stinking snake.
Words of an old Mexican witch came back to him: “Beware the inferno kindled by a bitter ember.”
He started to laugh, and then he felt the inferno crushing him in a fiery fist.
Chapter Thirty-Three
One second after Mary pressed the red button, the monster reared up and bellowed like an orchestra blaring every note at once. It roiled the lake with its frenzied thrashing until the squalling waves rose around it and sucked it down.
The water swirled in a maelstrom, and the thing burst up again and shook the air with the thunder of its roaring. It stared at the wound in its underbelly with an expression almost human and tried to stuff its dangling innards back into the gaping hole. Then it lay down in the billowing waves and whimpered. White pus oozed out between its scales, and the creature melted into the lake like a huge slug caked with salt.
Mary and Dexter didn’t speak. There seemed to be nothing to say. Soft breeze stirred the fog, and a septic stench rolled in from the lake.
Ryver’s truck was parked fifty yards away near the shoreline. They couldn’t see anyone inside it, but an army could be hiding in the waist-high weeds around it.
“Better take a look,” Mary said.
Dexter shouldered Ryver’s rifle and they hunkered through the weeds to the truck. It was empty.
“Maybe he left his keys,” Dexter said. He reached for the door latch, but Mary stopped him.
“Don’t mess with Ryver’s truck,” she said. “It’s probably wired to blow. We better walk.”
It was slow going, crouching through wet weeds and stopping every few feet to listen. The sky was beginning to brighten, but there was still plenty of darkness to flesh out every noise. They came to the open chain-link gate, and the gravel lane beyond it didn’t offer much cover. It wended its way up through the narrow valley to a field. They hid behind a pile of rocks and watched.
Letha had claimed that more than four hundred people lived in Pallas, and maybe she wasn’t exaggerating. There seemed to be that many in the field. They sat on blankets or bare grass, and some of them stood. Mothers held babies and a father slapped a crying toddler.
“Looks like they’re waiting for a rock concert,” Mary whispered.
“Let’s not be the main act,” Dexter said. “Maybe we can sneak through those trees.”
They worked their way from tree to tree around the edge of the field, peering past trunks and through bushes to watch the people. The sky was bluing into dawn when Mary saw the back of the gas station and a few cars parked behind it. She grabbed Dexter’s arm and pointed.
“That old Chevy oughta be pretty easy to hot-wire,” she whispered.
“You know how to do that?” he asked.
“Sure. My daddy taught me.”
They watched. Nothing moved. Everyone seemed to be back there waiting for the show to begin.
“Let’s do it,” she whispered.
They stepped out of the bushes, too tired to run, and a ghost of white light flapped in front of them like a sheet on a clothesline.
“Go back to your houses,” it said. “Athena orders you back to your homes.”
It wasn’t a very good illusion. It looked more like swirling stage smoke than a woman with a white robe and veil.
“Ach! I know you,” it said. Stage smoke flapped and folded into the fat shape of Professor Krickbaum pushing up his glasses. “Bitter September and Dr. Ratliff! Here I am, hiding in this big vehicle.”
The rear door of a utility van opened, and Krickbaum waved desperately. “Over here!” he said. “Hurry! So glad I am to see you. I cannot drive, so vhat vas I to do? Is Mr. Grimes not vith you?”
“He’s dead,” Mary said. She glanced into the back of the van at a chair and a little table holding a blinking gadget.
“Such a pity,” Krickbaum said. “But no time to grief. The villagers haff stopped obeying my Athena projection. Ve must leave in great haste.”
Dexter drove. He had to dodge some bodies as he pulled around to the front of the gas station.
“Looks like there’s been some shooting here,” he said.
“A most terrible fight,” Krickbaum said. He scooted his chair up to the back of Mary’s seat and peered out the windshield. “Some of the villagers did not belief my projection, and there they fought vith Mr. Ryver’s men. Vhat awful danger they put us in you can see for yourselfs.”
He kept talking while Dexter turned onto the road. “So happy I am to leaf this awful place,” he said. “I tell the Philosopher I dislike field vork, but here he sent me in the te
rrible thick of battle. Very good thing for all of us my life jacket vorked so nice in the end. I stuffed it myself vith explosif mixed vith cabiric alloy shrapnel and dried lavender leafs so Zyx cannot smell the shrapnel. The lavender leafs vas my idea. Even the so-smart Philosopher did not think of it.”
Mary turned up the heater full blast, shivering in her wet dress. She tried to watch for trouble, but she could barely keep her eyes open. A fragment of an old song played in her head, something about living forever.
“I think we’re supposed to turn up here,” she said.
“I don’t think so,” Dexter said. “Is there a GPS or a road map or something?”
She looked in the glove compartment, but there was nothing. “Don’t think you’ll find these backwater roads on a map anyhow,” she said. “Just so you get us real fucking far away, that’s all I care.”
The sun was rising over the hazy hills and sucking steam out of the woods. Krickbaum was leaning forward with his face right beside Mary’s, babbling about herbs and metals and lavender leaves, and she turned away from his foul breath. She laid her head against the window, shut her eyes and drifted. She thought about her father and mother living in a nice cool cave beneath the earth. She could live there with them forever.
She woke up when Krickbaum said, “Let me out here, please.”
“What?” Dexter asked.
“Let me out here, please. In the garden of vater and stone, I hear the luffly mermaids sing.”
“There’s nothing here,” Dexter said. “No water, no garden, nothing but a lot of damned hills.”
“Let me out, I say. I vant to go back to the garden. In the garden beneath the lake, such luffly songs the sweet mermaids sing.”
“Get a hold of yourself,” Dexter said. “I hear something too, but we’re not going back there for a better listen.”
“I am a fat man vith bad eyes and the spastic colon!” Krickbaum shouted. “All my life I vait and vait for this very moment, and now you tell me I cannot go hear my pretty mermaids, but I tell you such beautiful things they are and so sweet they sing to me!”
Mary realized what he was doing too late to stop him. He opened the back door of the van and dove headfirst onto the speeding pavement. Dexter hit the brakes, and they jumped out and ran to him.