by K. A. Laity
What the hell was going on here? I looked over to Jim but he and Yun both were still staring at the scene below, brows furrowed, which I took to mean they were just as puzzled as I was. It was a nice feeling, but I didn’t have much time to savor it. The Lazarus folk finished dumping the bags on the back of the wagon, even though the two mules were shifting around trying to keep as far away from those rank corpses as they could. When all the work was done, the man tied the rope to the back of the wagon, hopped up on the seat and rattled off down the track back toward town, those shambling dead folk stumbling along as best they could behind him. I crossed my fingers right then that he wouldn’t see Beau and the paint in the stand of scrub and decide to investigate. Looked like it worked because we could see the plume of dust continue to rise as he headed into town.
“What the hell?” I said as soon as it felt safe.
Jim shushed me. “Might be more down there.”
“Well, hell, they’re probably dead folks, so I doubt it’ll matter much,” but I went back to whispering anyway. “You know that guy?” I asked Yun.
She nodded. “Mister Dauphine. He came a few months ago. A prospector, he say.”
“Prospecting, all right. Looks like he found himself some cheap labor, too.”
“We should go down there.”
I stared at Jim. “Down there? Where the dead folks are?”
“Were.”
“What if there’s more? That group he took, they can’t be all the bodies we ain’t accounted for.”
Yun glanced over her shoulder. “What if he comes back?”
Jim was impassive. He had that way of looking stubborn that never seemed mulish like it would have done on me. No, he always seemed right, not just obstinate The damn thing was that, most often, he was—right, that is. I had a notion this was one of those times.
“What are we going to do anyway?” I said as I made sure my guns were loaded.
“Put those people out of their misery.”
I never thought about it until just then, but he was right. I had only been considering how much I didn’t want to get bit by one of them. It was even worse to think about what it must be like to become one of them. Dead, but not laying down dead, and hungry, too. It made me feel like a cold wind was blowing across my neck even though the day was hot enough to melt cheese. “What do you suppose that thing around his neck was?”
“It had some power over them,” Yun said quickly. “He must have done this to them. Changed them that way.” I could see her hating him already, and I couldn’t really blame her. That Dauphine wasn’t high on my list of friendly folk.
“Let’s go,” Jim said, and with that we went down. Yun looked funny with that big shotgun slung in her arms—it was just about half her size—but I had no doubt that she could use it, that was for sure. We took a last gander around the entrance. There was a water barrel, some sticks of dynamite in a crate, and a couple of shovels and picks leaning against the hillside. Hearing nothing from below, we slipped inside the opening. Dauphine must be planning on heading back in the near future, because he had left torches burning throughout the dark. We sidled through the tunnel carefully, each of us a tad jumpy and ready for trouble, which didn’t make for too swift a passage through that darkened walkway It was a relief to finally have the path open up a bit wider, though it was just as gloomy as before.
Turning a corner, we stepped out into a kind of room, almost, with a higher ceiling, just before the path whipped around sharply to the right and went further down into the increasingly damp rock. There was a bit of a stink in here that wasn’t the musty smell of the stone walls, and I finally saw a chicken carcass lying on the floor of the cave. Those Lazarus folk must have been having themselves a little snack. But I bet it wasn’t them who had drunk the rum and smoked the cigars. He could have left some of that behind just to be friendly, although I didn’t think I would be fancying any chicken for a good while.
Jim wasn’t looking down at the chicken, though, but up higher on the walls. I squinted, too, but couldn’t quite make out what it was I saw. He got the bright idea of grabbing one of the torches and moving it closer to the wall, waving the flames back and forth.
“What the hell do you suppose that is?” I asked him since I certainly had no idea. It was a drawing, probably charcoal, and it looked like a kind of crazy cross on a kind of coffin or altar, and a couple more tiny coffins for good measure. There were all kinds of little curlicues and hatch marks to give it a bit of detail, but it didn’t look like any kind of portrait I ever seen. Down below, it looked like someone had smeared some of that chicken blood. Those Lazarus folk weren’t exactly the white tablecloth kind of folks.
Jim’s face looked kind of grim in the flickering lights, so I knew I was not looking forward to hearing his pronouncement when it finally came. “Strong magic.”
“Well, hell.” I really didn’t like hearing that.
“Blood magic—powerful stuff. Bringing people back from the borderlands is dangerous. Keeping them here, more so.”
“Borderlands?” What the hell did that mean? Oh; those borders.
“We have to break the bond.”
“Bond?” I was still struggling with the thought that people other than the good Lord might be able to zip people back and forth from far reaches of death whenever they damned well pleased, if they knew the right words to write or pictures to draw and had enough chicken blood to seal the deal. “You mean that rope he’s got them tied with? That shouldn’t be that hard to break.”
Jim didn’t have time to conceal his impatience. “The bond between the summoner and the dead.”
“Oh, the necklace thing,” I said finally, feeling a flush of satisfaction at having figured something out and not at all of embarrassment.
“He has gone to a great deal of trouble for some reason,” Jim said sounding almost sad. I could kind of see what he meant. There was a whole lot of power in what he did—pity it wasn’t directed toward something for the good of his fellow men. He obviously wasn’t raised by my mama and her good teachings.
“I think I know why he did it,” Yun said, suddenly appearing at my elbow and making me jump a little. “Look.” She held out her hand and in the middle of her tiny palm there was a little nugget.
It was gold.
There was no doubt in my mind, anyway. Of course, I had never seen any real gold except that it was already made into my pop’s pocket-watch or my mama’s wedding band, but it sure looked like gold to me. Jim lifted her palm toward the light and took a good long look as well, then turned even grimmer. He muttered something under his breath that probably reflected poorly on me and my lesser kin of the pale skins, but as was his habit, Jim quickly turned back to usefulness and purpose. “He will be back soon, we need to plan.”
“I say we kill him and put all those good people to rest,” I said, congratulating myself on a real good idea.
“They weren’t all good people,” Yun said kind of quiet like.
“Still, you don’t want to leave them walking around like that, it’s just not natural.”
Our bickering was interrupted by the sound of the mule wagon approaching. We all gaped at one another for a few ticks, then scattered like hens before a fox, taking up positions with as much cover as we could find. It wasn’t much. Yun leaned around the corner of the part of the passage where it made its downward turn. Jim lay flat against the wall where the tunnel first opened up into this room. I kind of hunkered down below those lines and squiggles and got a snoutful of dead chicken and old liquor. Then we waited. That was the hardest part, and it was making me antsy. “Think he’ll be in the front?” I whispered to Jim, “Or them Lazarus folk?”
Jim looked at me kind of funny and then I remembered that I hadn’t introduced him to my notion of what to call them. Being a heathen man, he didn’t know the Good Book so well, although from time to time he’d surprise you. But he understood anyway, he was smart like that. “If he is, we get the necklace. If not, aim for the
ir heads.”
“But he’ll run off!” Yun whispered a good bit louder. “We cannot let him get away.”
She had a good point. It was a pickle, I must admit.
“All right,” Jim said, a trifle short like. I couldn’t help but smile because it wasn’t me who ticked him off this time. “We let them all come in if he’s not first.”
Well, that was just damn peachy. All those hungry chomping creatures in a small dark cavern would find us like picnic lunch. Mama, why didn’t I listen to you and become a telegraph operator like you wanted?
We could hear the creaky wheels of the wagon, like the passageway somehow made the sound grow louder down here. We could hear old Dauphine cussing a blue streak of harsh words at the shambling folk who were likely doing the best they could without much of their cogitative abilities remaining. And then we heard the scuttling tramp of feet in the passage and we all three tensed, ready to fire.
It was not our lucky day.
We saw the glassy eyes of the Lazarus folk come shuffling through the opening, all looped together like before. Apparently Dauphine was heading up the rear, riding herd on them with his big old stick. If we had some shreds of luck left to us, it would be all he was armed with. I must admit, Jim has to be about the most courageous man I think a person could meet, heathen or Christian. He let those Lazarus folk stumble past him into the room without flinching, though he held up the torch in one hand and waved them away. My fingers were itching to fire, but I held on waiting like I was supposed to do. I threw a glance over to Yun and I could see her still crouched against the wall, looking tense as a buckboard spring.
Finally, there he was, big as life and twice as pleased with himself, although a bit scowling at present because it couldn’t have been much fun wrangling those hobbled corpses, though at least he had the walls to kind of keep them penned. “Stop right there,” Jim said with all the authority of a Texas Ranger.
That Dauphine, he was a cool customer. He snatched one of them folk right around the neck and dragged him between Jim and him. I don’t know if he figured out our plan or he was just in the habit of protecting himself, but it was the smartest move. There was about a minute where I think we all held our breath and it was like time was never going to pick up its heels and run ever again.
Then Yun let go with one barrel at the nearest of the Lazarus folk and his head exploded like a too ripe melon. I let go on the one nearest me and the craggy old woman on his right. The sound of the firing echoed so around that chamber that I thought my ears might well ring for the rest of my life. But I didn’t let it stop me, nor did Yun. She let go with the other barrel and then grabbed a couple more shells from where she had them tucked in the top of her dungarees—funny place to keep them, it struck me in the back of my mind then, but there was no time to cogitate about it. I put my next bullets to good use and we soon were thinning the herd quite nicely.
Meanwhile that Dauphine character was holding a conversation with Jim as he ducked for cover behind the dead guy, making Jim awful frustrated as he tried to aim for that necklace thing and keep the other chompers away with his torch. Heshot the Lazarus guy once, but the bullet didn’t seem to go through, must have hit bone. Dauphine gloated, “You can do nothing to me. I called on Baron Cimetière and he protects me still. You have no dominion over me.” There was a funny lilt to his voice that made the words seem almost musical. His pale face looked almost grey in the flickering torchlight but there was a madness in his eyes brighter than any fire. The god-damned gold lust! He had it bad. I don’t know who his important friend was, but unless he showed up pretty sharp like, he wasn’t going to be able to help him much. Yun and I were doing a good job of shooting down all the Lazarus folk. Having seen them in action we had plenty of encouragement not to let those teeth get any closer to us than we could help.
All at once the pale man tossed back his head, closed his eyes and began to chant words like a preacher almost, except I couldn’t understand a one of them. He might as well have been croaking like a frog. But the strangest thing happened.
It was like the air suddenly got hot and cold at the same time, and it became almost visible, swooping around us and shimmering like you see on a real hot day above the desert sands. I felt real odd, like something was pulling me from inside. I don’t really know how to explain it any better than that. We all seemed to stop in place, the quick and the dead alike, and hearken to these sounds that probably weren’t even words, at least not proper words a body could understand. Dauphine stretched his left arm out like a preacher casting away sin as his words grew mightier and louder. I could see Jim struggling to resist the pull of this spell or whatever it was he was putting on us, trying to bring his pistol back up to take advantage of the opening, but he was being affected by those strange words almost as much as I was.
Things were not looking good.
I remembered how my mama always scolded me—back at the kitchen table at our sheep farm, what seemed so very long ago just then—never to get in front of the hired men when breakfast was being served. If I got elbowed or sat on, it was my own hard luck, she said. Men who’re working a real day’s work needed some rib-sticking food and a little kid getting in their way wasn’t going to get a brotherly treatment. That Dauphine should have had a mother like mine—well, for all kinds of reasons, but especially right then to tell him something like that. Good thing for us he didn’t though, because I don’t know what we would have done if that Lazarus guy hadn’t whipped his head around and took a chunk out of Dauphine’s arm.
He screamed like a possum snatched by an eagle and the blood sprang out against his shirt. It was only natural to chuck that critter as far from him as he could, which of course left him open to Jim’s shot, the spell over us all kind of broken by his first cry. Jim aimed right at the big round part hanging from the necklace and hit it square center.
Lucky enough, I think his heart was conveniently located behind that. He spurted a whole lot of blood then from his chest and his mouth and started to slump down. Jim gave him a shove with his foot and the three or four Lazarus folk still moving made a bee-line for this fresh meat. Me and Yun made our own bee-line for the egress, waved through by Jim who looked careful like at the still body of Dauphine and then joined us high-tailing it out of there. The kiss of the sun felt like a mother’s welcome and we startled the mules with our relieved shouts of laughter. I ducked my head in the water barrel, much to Jim’s disgust—he was always as particular as a cat about his drinking water—but it felt so good to be out of the smelly cave I wanted to blow out my nostrils with clean smells.
“You suppose that’s the last of them?” I finally asked as I tried to smooth the water out of my sopping hair.
“Probably,” said Jim, always the careful one.
“Why don’t we use this dynamite,” Yun said suddenly, grabbing the sticks from the crate. Jim and I looked at one another and shrugged. It’s not like anyone was going to be wanting to go down there anytime soon. We led the mules some distance away from the cave and walked back. Yun insisted on lighting the fuses herself, whispering a few words over them before she tossed the sticks in the opening. The hill blowed up real good, rocks tumbling down and a whole lot of other rubble too. No one was going to be digging that out anytime soon. I asked Yun what she said over the sticks while we led the mules back to find Beau and the paint.
“A prayer for my father. He was killed by dynamite.”
Damn. Well, that was a fitting remembrance then, I guess.
“What are you two going to do now?” she asked Jim more than me, but we both kind of shrugged. We didn’t really have any set plan. If she wanted to tag along with a couple of no-accounts like us, well, I don’t think we were going to mind. Yun had proved herself to be a useful gal. Pretty, too, though I had a feeling that might prove to be trouble sometime. But we could work that out.
Besides, whatever we decided to do, there a whole lot of gold to help us do it.
ABOUT K.A. LAITY
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K.A. Laity is the award-winning author of Rook Chant, Owl Stretching, Pelzmantel and Unikirja, a collection of short stories and a play based on the Kalevala, Kanteletar, and other Finnish myths and legend, for which she won the 2005 Eureka Short Story Fellowship as well as a 2006 Finlandia Foundation grant. With cartoonist Elena Steier she created the occult detective comic Jane Quiet. Her bibliography is chock full of short stories, humor pieces, plays and essays, both scholarly and popular. She also writes romance as C. Margery Kempe and Kit Marlowe.
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Thank you for reading Unquiet Dreams.
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Author Copyright 2012 K.A. Laity (http://www.kalaity.com)
Covert Art: Amanda Stephanie (http://www.tirgearrdesign.com)
Editor: Kemberlee Shortland (http://www.tirgearrpublishing.com)