The Enterprise of Death

by Jesse Bullington

  XXXII

  The Convergence of Trails

  Manuel dropped the dead lantern and ran, telling himself he was going for more light, that he had to go for more light, but as he skidded around the side of the mound and heard Paracelsus’s scream joining his own, and then Monique’s joining their merry little choir, he knew he had no fucking intention whatsoever of going back. He was outside in the light, the abandoned lanterns propped on gravestones casting a soft amber haze on the screaming artist. Then he realized he was the only one still shrieking, the other two now silent as, well, the graveyard around him, and he shut up, too. As soon as he did he heard it, the panting, the shuffling of dirt, and try as he did to stare straight ahead and run for it his traitorous neck turned and looked back over his shoulder.

  At first Manuel saw nothing but the face of the barrow and the black forest behind it, but then a shadow moved along the top of the high mound and he would have screamed again, he would have prayed and wept and swore, but as soon as he saw the hyena atop the barrow it pounced. Spindly legs stabbed his back like spears, and he smelled his own death wafting out of the brown muzzle that clicked shut beside his cheek. Then Manuel was falling forward, the beast riding him to the ground, and he landed at the base of a tombstone, the weight of the monster grinding him into the earth.

  “Fuck fuck fuck,” Manuel chirped, a frigid wet nose snuffling his ear. Then its tongue was lapping him, the hot, sticky muscle plastering his hair up and out of the way of his neck. Manuel lay on his face with the hyena crouching on his back, several stiff lumps in its engorged belly rubbing the base of his spine as it breathed against his cheek, and his next fuck was washed out on a tide of vomit, the rotten-meat stench coming from the creature’s maw positively evil. Before he could even stop gagging it rose from his back and circled around, jutting its nose against his, and then it lapped up his spew, one yellow eye winking at him.

  Not like this, thought the artist, not here, not now. That was probably what everyone thought when they died, he knew, but he had been spared at least a dozen deaths before this one, deaths that would have been far better than being gobbled up by a devil or monster or whatever the fuck it was. He would really have to write a play where he died properly, one without all these witches and fiends, and Manuel giggled.

  The hyena stopped slurping up his vomit and giggled back, foul cords of the artist’s bile tethering its open mouth to the earth, and then tilted its head to the side and bit Manuel’s face. Not off, not yet, the jaws settling on either of the artist’s cheeks and pressing down, the rows of teeth reaching his ears. Manuel struggled then, struggled as he should have when it first pinned him instead of letting it take any pleasure from him, and he realized as the teeth pierced his skin and dug into the bone that it was still playing with him, that what he thought was pain was only a prelude, and then the hyena’s jaws tightened against his skull and Manuel screamed into its throat as it bore down like a nutcracker straining against an obstinate walnut.

  The lantern was right there above them and shone down the bright red, ribbed throat gaping in front of him, a tunnel so wide and slick Manuel wondered that it did not eat him whole, and then he felt his cheekbones begin to give, his sinuses bursting, and he heard a resounding crack. He realized his skull must have split from the pressure. It dropped him, and through the tears and drool coating his face he saw the tombstone towering above him, memento mori and all that, and wondered if he would be called up or pulled down. Then he heard the shrieks of the damned and closed his eyes, knowing himself a fallen man.

  “Up, lump!” Monique kicked his leg and Manuel opened his eyes, wiping the film from his face. The wailing hyena had not fled entirely but howled from the dark side of the barrow, and Monique snatched Manuel, hauling him upright. “Get your sword out, lump, an’ take this. Pop the fucker in the face when I hold’em still for ya.”

  “What!?” Manuel did not realize he was shouting as he took the proffered pistol. His ears were ringing but he was relieved to see that the second pistol she had set on the gravestone beside the lantern was smoking; a more likely culprit for the thunder in his head than a cracked skull.

  “Sword an’ pistol, lump, an’ if ya ain’t sure ta hit with mine then stick it with yours.” Monique was striding forward, leaving Manuel trembling with a gun in one hand and his hilt in the other. Looking down, he saw that, as if in a nightmare, the trigger and firing mechanism had somehow fallen off the gun and what he now held was a very long and heavy L-shaped piece of bronze with no means of firing. Before he could alert the gunner she began shouting into the darkness with a voice that could deafen a cannon. “Out, bitchdog, out! I took a paw for a paw, so let’s settle this fair an’ now!”

  Manuel forgot whatever he was going to say when he saw her draw a third pistol from a sheath at her waist and set it on a tombstone, and then take its mate with the same hand. She raised both arms and waved them in the air, and the artist saw that her right was mangled, the bitten hand soaking through whatever rag she had tied onto it and splashing the barrow as she dropped her arms and set her last gun down. She flexed the fingers of her left hand, peering around the edge of the light, and shouted, “Don’t need tools ta take down a fuckin bitchdog! You scared, bitchdog, you scared out there in the dark?! Come an’ ’ave a taste without your tricks an’ skulkin in the dark, bitchdog! Come an’ take a mouthful—”

  It did, shooting out of the night beside the barrow and latching its jaws onto her uninjured left forearm. Instead of toppling over, Monique spun around the monster, teeth dragging along bone as she fell onto its back and wrapped her bloody right arm around its throat. Manuel heard the splintering of her arm from where he stood but Monique did not relinquish her grip, instead settling all of her weight on its spine and clumsily kicking at its hind legs. She tackled it in a strange parody of how it had pinned Manuel, with the hyena flat on its stomach and Monique half atop it, one arm broken in its mouth and the other gripping it in a headlock. She screamed as it bit harder, blood and marrow bubbling around the viselike muzzle clamped onto her forearm, and the sound finally rattled Manuel out of his shocked stupor.

  Running to where she had placed the other two guns, Manuel cursed when he saw that these also lacked lock and trigger, the smooth metal pistols identical to the worthless one she had already given him. Before he could examine them more closely and see where the touchhole was located on the primitive firearms, before he could fetch the lantern to fire them once he had found the touchholes, the hyena began to thrash and roll like the crocodiles its kind would sometimes mate with. Manuel abandoned the pistols, comforting though it would have been to press a barrel to the creature’s canine temple and pull the trigger instead of stabbing at it with Monique so close, but by the time he had raised the sword they were a blur on the ground, Monique screaming ever louder, and Manuel moaned impotently, unable to tell one from the other for more than an instant as they rolled away from him.

  Then the hyena was up and before Manuel could close the distance between them it fled, limping. He saw that even though Monique had shot off its right forepaw while it was biting his head it was still hobbling quickly, dragging Monique after it by her mauled arm. She was screaming and screaming as Manuel chased them through the cemetery, the light failing as the monster passed through the gate, Monique bouncing after it, and as Manuel breathlessly reached the edge of the graveyard they vanished into the dark wood.

  “Fuck!” Manuel howled after them. “Fuck!”

  Going after them, he thought as he ran back to the lanterns, going after them, going to find her, going to save—she’s dead, he realized, Monique’s scream having trailed off, she’s as dead as Awa. It had met her, it must have, to replicate her voice, and it must have gobbled her up, must have gobbled her up and now it was gobbling up Monique, and if those two had not stood against it then what hope did he have? And Monique had let it take her, had put down her guns, the fucking idiot, or maybe it had broken them all somehow, it had—

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nbsp; “Ahhh!” Manuel yelped as a figure lurched out of the shadows toward him. “Paracelsus!”

  “The same.” The man looked like his own shade, pale and terrible as a body dragged from a river. “The same.”

  “Fuck me.”

  “Where is it?” Paracelsus looked around anxiously. “Where did it go?”

  “It’s got her,” said Manuel, handing the confused doctor one of Monique’s pistols and the fullest lantern. “Figure out what’s gone wrong here, and hold this.”

  The physician looked in bafflement at Manuel, as if the lantern and gun the artist had handed him were made of rock candy. Then Manuel tightened his grip on his hand-and-a-half and walked out the cemetery gate, Paracelsus following close at his heels. As soon as they passed the wall their visibility tightened to the paltry circle the lantern cast, but the creature had not tried to cover its trail and the wet smear Monique left guided them sure as a path deeper into the forest, Manuel praying they would be in time even though he knew she was already dead.

  The hyena dropped Monique after a half of a league, the woman having gone silent after it had dragged her into and over a few fallen trees. Looking down at its pulsing, oozing stump, it licked at the wound, watching the woman who had maimed it. She lay on her back, the right hand it had initially bit in the barrow folded behind her, the left arm it had dragged her by twisted and lame. It licked her face until she woke up, which it smelled even though she kept her eyes closed and her breathing even. It stanched its bleeding stump by pressing the wound into her armpit, and mimicked her voice.

  “Paw for a paw, bitch? Don’t need tools ta take down a fuckin bitch?” Then it chortled, obviously struggling to restrain itself from howling with laughter. Monique began to pull her arm out from under her back but its laugh turned to a growl and she lay still. She opened her eyes the tiniest sliver and realized with horror that either all the lanterns had gone out or she was far removed from the churchyard. It giggled. “You scared, bitch, you scared out ’ere in the dark?”

  “On my fuckin arm,” Monique groaned. “Lemme get it out, brute, you’re fuckin killin me.”

  It laughed again at that and she tugged harder, wondering if this was to be her last act, her final words. It did not kill her as she squirmed to get her arm free, the pinky, ring finger, and half a thumb she still had after its bite barely holding on to the slippery grip of the pistol she kept shoved down the back of her trousers. Her left arm, her shooting arm, was fucked beyond repair, the pain of it the only thing letting her ignore the fact that a real fucking demon was breathing its stink in her face.

  “Hunted often.” Each word borrowed from a different victim, the hyena addressed her in a dozen accents as she got her arm out from under herself. “Know guns. Smell gun dust. Took fingers, can’t use guns. You different. Wrong hand, wrong fingers. Ba-ba-bad doggie. Now better. No arms, no hands.”

  It cackled in her face, the fit so bad its eyes closed, though Monique could see nothing but a shape leering over her, a fiend even darker than the black night enveloping them. Then its laugh stopped abruptly and she heard it sniffing, a low growl building as it did. She raised her arm a little higher, the burning where her middle and index fingers used to be growing hotter as the open, leaking stubs hoisted the heavy bronze.

  Monique felt it relax and it chortled again in its broken staccato, “No fire, no fingers, no gun. Stupid bitch.”

  “No fire?” Monique breathed back in its face, and focused as intently as she could on the pistol balanced in her mangled hand. “Fire.”

  Manuel and Paracelsus heard the roar of a gunshot and quickened their pace. They were far away and moving slowly, and so by the time they reached Monique and the hyena she had extracted all the information she expected to gather from the creature. It was still alive when Paracelsus’s lantern fell on it, the ragged hole in its stomach pushing ripples across the pool of blood it wallowed in as it drew wheezy, ragged breaths. Both men had started back at finding the creature alive but now drew closer in wonder, like pilgrims beholding a miracle, and Manuel looked at Monique with equal measures of respect and horror.

  After rolling it off her Monique had stomped all four of the monster’s legs, the hyena crying and whimpering and snapping weakly despite the agony she knew the gutshot must be causing. The interrogation had not taken very long, it telling her all she needed to know, the distinct voices lent a more uniform cadence by the miserable whines accompanying each syllable. It hurt to talk, but it hurt worse to have bones broken, to be kicked in an open wound.

  Monique did not look much better. Her right hand was missing two fingers and half her thumb, and the awkward angle she had fired the gun from combined with the recoil had broken her wrist, the appendage dangling loose and dripping. Her entire left arm was black with blood, the bones cracked all along her forearm. She was smiling, though, and awake enough to berate Manuel as she slid down the tree she had leaned against.

  “Stupid fuckin bastard,” said Monique. “It’s fuckin killed me, thanks ta you.”

  “No,” Manuel moaned, going to her, but Paracelsus snatched his arm.

  “The lady is in dire need of assistance,” said Paracelsus, his eyes glancing to the hyena. “We must act quickly if we are to save her limbs. But I cannot work unfettered of anxiety with this, this beast at my back.”

  “Right,” said Manuel, but his sword hand felt as numb as his rattled brain. For an instant he considered going back for his charcoal and planks, but then the monster begged for help with the plaintive voice of a little girl and he advanced with his weapon.

  “What are you about, boy?!” said Paracelsus, though the pudgy doctor was obviously the better part of a decade younger than Manuel. “I didn’t say kill it, I said watch it!”

  The doctor had actually said neither of these things but Manuel did not debate this point. “You don’t mean to let it live?!”

  “No,” Paracelsus scoffed. “Do I look like a suicidal madman? No no no, by dawn that monstrosity will be dead as iron.”

  “Then what are you waiting—”

  “I have a patient to attend,” said Paracelsus. “Afterwards I will examine the monster, thoroughly, and inspecting it after it is dead will be worthless.”

  “What do you mean, worthless? It—”

  “If you wish to learn about life, you study the living!” Paracelsus turned his back on Manuel, clucking to himself as he saw Monique had passed out. “How else will you see how it all fits together? I’ve examined enough corpses to tell you that if you want to see how it all works you need a living, responsive subject.”

  Paracelsus kept on but Manuel stopped listening, walking around the creature’s head. From here it looked like an exceptionally large dog, one with a small stumpy tail and a very large, boxy head, but just a dog. Then one of its eyes focused on him, the voice of a child crying out in fear, and he stumbled back. It could not be real, it could not, and yet it was.

  “Oi!” Monique came to. “What’re ya doin?”

  “Saving your life, my lady,” said Paracelsus as he splashed water on her ruined right hand.

  “Alright then,” said Monique, shock helping her relax. “Ya know where she’s at?”

  “No,” said Paracelsus. “I was looking for her, have been ever since she left my employ. Manuel did not tell you I barely missed the both of you in Bern, what, six years past? Shortly after you, ah, quit my clinic.”

  “Didn’t mention it,” said Monique, resolving to have a little chat with her artist friend about being more forthcoming with information. “So what’s this? He said you was ’ostage of some chickenheads?”

  “Certainly, certainly. Our friend Sister Gloria—”

  “Who? Oh.”

  “Our friend Sister Gloria speaks in her sleep, habitually, at least when she stayed with me, and so I gathered she spent the bulk of her time in graveyards—”

  “Nah, not Awa, that don’t sound like’er,” said Monique.

  “Indeed she does, or at least did.
I have been … misled, I fear.” Paracelsus scowled over his shoulder at Manuel. “I was told that you and she had gone to Petersburg, or maybe Spain or Africa, they were not sure which, and so I scoured the sunbaked southern deserts, the once-great Granada, the icy steppes of the far north, all with predictably little success, realizing as I do now that you made no such sojourn. Or did you?”

  “What? Nah, Spain’s full of—fuck!” Monique swooned as he gently pressed on her shattered left arm.

  “So I took my time, making many, many advances of my own, but of course found no trace of her, and so I set to searching the countryside near the last place I knew she had been—Bern. And as I gathered from her unconscious mumblings it was her custom to speak to the stones in churchyards and ask them strange questions, I took to camping in cemeteries myself, in hope, vain though it proved, of finding a trace of the necromancer. Instead something found me …”

  “The devil there?” Monique felt hot and cold and sick.

  “The same. I did not know I was being followed, but followed I was. She had left a pair of old leggings at the clinic, and I kept them with me—”

  “Nasty fuckin man.” Monique shook her head.

  “What? I kept them so that if I caught her trail I could secure dogs to follow her—”

  “Dogs?! You was gonna hunt’er with dogs, lump?!”

  “If need be,” Paracelsus said defensively. “Unfortunately, something else picked up the trail. That monster. It thought I was she, from the scent in my bags, and it followed me here. I came into town a few days ago, inquired about the churchyard, and next thing I knew found myself held captive in a bandits’ den, a shack not far from here. They hardly fed me at all, and kept me gagged, and after thwarting my ingenious escape attempt they took me to the churchyard to give me to another band of brigands. I inferred they were operating as agents of some Inquisitor, which is hardly surprising—as a magus they don’t dare attempt to put me on trial, me, who would expose them as frauds, as corrupt, no no no, they tried to do it on the sly, knowing that as easy as it is to trick uneducated women into damning themselves the scholar will unmask them, will call attention to their—”