by S. A. Sidor
Ninety-nine, ninety-eight, ninety-seven.
Evangeline had recovered from her temporary panic. She splashed water onto her face. After dumping a hatful of well-water over her head, she wrung out her golden hair.
Ninety-one. Ninety.
Eighty-nine.
McTroy had an ear cocked upward.
Evangeline scooped water and drank.
I felt smooth gravelly rocks underfoot. I lay back. Floating with my legs out.
“Be quiet,” he said.
I sat up. We waited as the ripples in the water stilled.
“What is it?” I asked.
“I thought I heard Moonlight squeal.”
I listened and heard nothing. “What does that mean, if she squeals?”
“Means she’s fixing to kick and bite some dumb sonofabitch that gets too close.”
Evangeline snorted, and the sound was louder because of the stone walls.
“Sorry,” she said. Her big eyes flashed upward. In the semidarkness, they were twin moons. “I hear something too. Shush.”
I heard it. Rasping. Steady, rhythmic.
A knife cutting into something soft–
We all heard Moonlight’s high-pitched whinny then, something very close to a human scream. The other horses were squealing. One horse kicked at the posts. We saw the little planked roof shake over the well. Dust floated down. A dislodged slat dropped into the pool.
“Goddamn. I’m going back up there.” McTroy drew his weapon. He tugged the rope with his other hand. He started to climb.
He had gotten ten feet above us when the rope snapped and he fell.
McTroy crashed into me, and at least I broke his fall. His weight plunged me underwater until I touched bottom and rebounded to the surface, gasping. McTroy, hatless, trod water beside me. Evangeline watched the circle of light above. Getting lighter by the minute it was, for the locust cloud had passed, and the sandstorm blew northward. We heard nothing from the horses.
Even after McTroy called and whistled for Moonlight, we got no reply.
“If those asswipes hurt my horse I will skin them and roast them.”
I passed him his hat.
The frayed rope floated in the well water like a headless snake.
McTroy snatched it up and inspected it.
“It’s cut,” he said.
I offered another possibility. “Maybe it’s the end of the rope and the knot slipped. Maybe there’s no one up there.”
“Then why’d the horses get angry?”
“I don’t know. The locusts were bothering them? I’m sure they’re unused to that.”
McTroy shook his head. “Your half-burned goblin friend, Rojo, should’ve been dragged until he was nothing but a skull full of sand. But you let him wander off.”
“He’s a ghoul not a goblin,” I said.
McTroy shoved me across what little space we had. I hit the rounded wall.
I turned on him, and punched him squarely in the jaw.
He leaned back, and his hat was in the water again. I was glad to see blood on his lip. I realized he was smiling at me. It was not a friendly sort of smile.
“Doc has got some sand. I’ll be damned. Don’t think I’m not going to beat you, but damn, I didn’t think you had it in you.” He raised his fists.
“There’s no cause for your foolishness.” Evangeline looked at both of us with nothing short of total contempt. “We need to get out of here. Are you forgetting that Wu is possibly lost? He may even be injured in this storm. But he is most definitely terrified. Yet you two are the ones acting like children. It diminishes us all.”
Her scolding achieved the desired effect. We dropped our hands and stared at the water.
“I have a plan,” she added. “Care to hear it?”
“Yes, of course,” I said.
McTroy located his floating hat, wrung it out, and put it on.
“Tell us what you got,” he said.
A constellation of lights was still blinking before my eyes, the result of striking my head against the wall. Through this light show I did my best to show proper interest in Evangeline.
She continued, “All right then, gentlemen, these stones are laid tight and not good for climbing. But higher up, they are stacked less neatly and I believe I can manage enough of a toehold to pull myself to the rim. The question is how do I get that high?”
She waited.
We waited.
“The answer is: I stand on your shoulders.” She was smiling broadly.
“Whose shoulders now?” McTroy asked.
“Yours and his. I think you, McTroy, are an on-the-bottom sort of man. Sturdy in the legs. Stout through the middle.”
He considered this statement with much puzzlement evident.
“Hardy will stand on your shoulders. He seems more the balancing type, able to bridge the gap between me and you. I will stand on his shoulders. That will, if my estimate is correct, put my hands where I need them to be to grip that first ring of larger, looser-fitting stones. Then it’s up and out. I’ll take the rope.” She took the rope from McTroy. “I’ll drop it down to you when I reach the surface.”
I was skeptical… and dizzy. But at the time, I did not want to fight McTroy, or disappoint Evangeline again. Also, I did want to escape this soggy pit. I was willing to give her suggestion a try. McTroy was not as willing.
“You won’t be able to climb it,” he said.
“I am an accomplished climber of trees. I think trees and rocks are not so very unlike each other. Now you stand here, braced against the wall with your hands out.” She spun McTroy around, and she placed his hands on the stones as she wanted him. “Hardy, climb onto his shoulders. Here, I will boost you into place.”
I don’t know what was more surprising: the number of times we failed or that after each flubbing McTroy was willing to try again. I think it was the difficulty of the thing that drove him. He was a mulish man. Pig-headed – and every other beast that doesn’t let his betters get their way. It was instinctual, bred in the bone – McTroy’s desire to remain unconquered. He possessed other animalistic traits which over the years I came to see attracted women to his character and men too, for that matter. He wore his physicality easily and without pretense, a man of action, raw, uninhibited by civilization and its polite entrapments. He had little interest in self-examination but could be remarkably philosophical, especially if whisky was on hand. Alive in the world but almost unconsciously so – a wild man, an untamed one, or perhaps it is best to say: Rex McTroy was a man who did things his own way. He challenged those who sought to dissuade him from his private, in many cases dubious, ideas and prejudices, regardless of their merits. When challenged by others, if quarreling and boorish insults fizzled, he was prone to sulking. In the end, he was more than that, but what I mean to stress here is that he could be hard to be around. Exasperating. He tested the limits of one’s patience. Impulsivity, rudeness, arrogance – he had those in spades. However, if he had questioned things too much, I wonder, would he have quit on us?
By any measure Evangeline knew best how to handle him. She made sure to keep the conversation flowing while we attempted our circus act.
“Didn’t the cartouche mention plagues?” she asked me as her bare toes dug first into my hip, then into the meat of my shoulder, and made me realize I still had my boots (Staves’ boots) on and how they must’ve been cutting deeply into McTroy’s collarbones.
Evangeline’s nimble form surmounted the scaffolding of our braced, male bodies.
“No, but it was one of Kek’s titles. He Who Disturbs the Balance, Plague Bringer, Corruptor of the Land, Slayer from the South, Lord of Demons,” I said. My knees buckled a bit, but I steadied them. I held on to the wall. My fingertips pried at every available cranny for some purchase. McTroy felt like an oak stump beneath me – inert, no doubt gnarled, and perhaps supporting a colony of mosses between his trunk and roots.
Evangeline was breathing heavily from her upward exertions, but
that did not keep her from continuing our three-way chat. “There, you see? Just like the Plagues of Egypt, Mr McTroy. You know of them, the story of Moses in Exodus.”
“Moses was fighting for the other side in that one,” he said, as if he were leaning on a bar top and sipping a libation in casual idleness, and not anchoring a tower exceeding two hundred pounds of quivering (well, my legs were going wobbly) flesh.
“But magic is magic,” Evangeline said. “First wind, then sand, now locusts – Kek is controlling this. Make no mistake. We must be on guard. Magic surrounds us. I am almost there, gentlemen. Wait, what–?”
“What what?” I asked. “I didn’t… say… anything.”
As it often happens when one is unable to scratch one’s self, the skin along my untouchable cheek began to itch as if a colony of ants was exploring me. Evangeline shifted her weight. I grimaced and may have grunted softly as I embraced the wall and abraded my palms. Even the most petite woman seems less so when she is clenching you with feet like eagle talons.
“Can you push me a bit higher? I see strange markings on this stone here. Triangles. No, it’s a pentagram. How odd to find such a sign in a place like this.”
She moved again, stretching up to reach whatever it was she saw there – to get a better look. All her gravity transferred to a single, flexed leg. The ball of her foot stomped on an artery leading to my brain so that I felt suddenly hot on one side of my face; black waves were soon lapping at my vision. Inches from the tip of my nose, the stones began to ripple like draperies.
I clamped my boots to McTroy’s neck.
Evangeline rebalanced. Cranial blood flow returned, my nerves prickling angrily.
McTroy decided to take that moment to school me on how we were going to do things once we climbed out of the well. It seemed to cheer him up.
“I notice you aren’t armed, Hardy. But I’ll give you one of my Armys as long as you promise you won’t lose it. You’ll cover me on the way to the chapel. I’ll bar those bastards inside.”
“I’m not going to use a gun.”
“Sure, take it. Shoot whatever pops its head up, be it monk, mummy, or corpse-eater.”
“No.”
“Why the hell not?”
“I’ve never fired a gun before.”
“Are you shittin’ me? We ain’t got time to argue, Doc. Point it at middles and pull the trigger. Use two hands. Keep shooting till the bastards go down. I’ve got bullets.”
It was getting harder and harder for me to speak. My throat felt thin as a paper straw, with hardly any room for air, let alone words. How could I be expected to debate under these conditions? “Shooting them serves… no p- p- purpose,” I stuttered.
“Like hell it doesn’t.”
I pinched my eyes closed. “When the time comes I’ll find another way.”
Evangeline said, “You can give me the pistol. I’ve hunted birds and foxes with my father. I proved quite accurate with moving targets.”
“These are a mite bigger than pigeons. It’ll be easy for you. See, Doc, even a lady can do it.” My legs were trembling. I knew I could not keep upright for much longer.
“I can do it. I choose not to,” I said. “There’s a difference.”
McTroy shook his head, and I almost lost my footing.
“Stop moving!” I shouted.
“Keep steady, please, the both of you. This pentagram rock is quite loose. If I can pry it out, the gap will offer an excellent foothold.”
Bits of debris crumbled and dropped onto me. McTroy didn’t seem to notice.
“Your daddy never taught you how to shoot? What side was he on in the war?”
I disengaged one hand from the wall, shook out the numbness, and replaced it as quickly as possible. “My father was a Quaker. He worked in a Union hospital. He never owned a gun. I’ve rejected my father’s religious views but not all his ways. I don’t believe in God, or guns.”
“You’re a queer fish, Hardy. Don’t believe in guns? What’s this here in my hand?” McTroy yanked his right arm away from supporting our improvised acrobatic column to draw his Army and brandish it, wildly.
“I’m not talking about the thing itself. Surely you know the difference. Put your arm back!”
“Surely I do not. If I didn’t have my cannons, I’d be dead fifty times over. Maybe you never should’ve left the library. You can kill bookworms with your boot.”
“I don’t normally wear boots. These belonged to a dead Pinkerton agent.”
“Damn, son! I swear I will beef you on principle alone.”
Evangeline had partially removed the rock. The scraping of stone on stone was unmistakable. Her breathing was labored. I wondered if she could make the climb up and out.
“Those irons you so prize have tamed you about as well as they tamed this land,” I told McTroy. “This is to say, negligibly.”
“You should’ve seen it before men arrived with guns.”
“Forgive me. I thought we were hiding in a hole.”
“This is Mexico. It’s always been lawless.”
“I can’t tell what side of the border we’re on.”
“That’s because you’re an idjit.”
“Stop arguing!” Evangeline said. “You two are worse than my roommates at boarding school. And they were Scotch-Irish sisters!”
I looked down on McTroy as he looked up, grinning. “You mean they were a couple of nuns?” he asked.
“She means they were quarrelsome!” I could not suppress a smile.
“Be.” Evangeline jerked at the stone with as much force as she had. “Still. I have it, I think.” She did have it. The rock came away free from the wall, and a hidden doorway opened just above it. Evangeline gasped. I don’t know how we stayed standing up. With a final push of her daintily arched foot off the top of my head, she wriggled into the passageway. “I feel air. Circulating air. This gallery must lead to the monastery.”
She lowered the rope so we could join her.
It was then we heard the screams echoing from the tunnel.
27
A Baby’s Rattle
“My God, the sounds those people are making,” Evangeline said, her expression modulated from alarm to awe. She looked curiously up the passageway into the murk. It narrowed like a funnel, and the shape augmented distant sounds. “I’ve never heard anything like it before. Do you suppose the monks are killing them?”
“Probably wishing they were killed about now.” McTroy opened the cylinders of his pistols, blowing out the sand and water and wiping the bullets with his shirttail.
“You still sure you don’t want one of these?” he asked me.
“Yes, quite.”
“Miss E?”
Evangeline accepted one of his Army revolvers, enormously gray and lethal in her pale hand, though she seemed accustomed to it and more than ready to move ahead toward the source of the tortured screams. We were huddled in the aperture of the pentagram-marked secret door that opened into a likewise secret gallery. The rock covering the door had pulled completely loose and fallen with a thumping splash into the depths of the well. The funnel-like gallery squeezed down to a uniform rectangular tunnel which ran, as best we could guess, perpendicular to the well and in the direction of the monastery. Our choice was this: would we prefer to exchange a dark vertical shaft for an even darker horizontal one? I hesitate to call the air blowing out this new hole freshened; it smelled of candles and blood. I was the last to climb in and therefore stationed closest to the well, and here in a moment of pausing, I experienced a heavy dose of déjà vu. My mind traveled unbidden backward in time and across an ocean in mere seconds so I was once more crammed inside the horned skull rock, reliving my battle with the blind, pig-sized worm and the flood of gore that spilled forth in the aftermath. I choked for a good deep breath. To distract myself and bring my body into the present moment, I caressed the walls of the vestibule gallery, for they were strange and mesmerizing, though most of their wonders lay in obscurity. I am no ge
ologist. But the walls were not the same as the brickwork or dull desert stone I was used to seeing. All four sides of the passage were studded with geodes, and the ends of the geodes facing inward to the gallery had been lopped off cleanly, and polished to a glossy shine. I lit a match and passed the flame near the rocks. The colors were stripy, vibrant, and multi-layered. Variants of chalcedony I supposed, or what may more commonly be known as agates. These flat shorn knobs varied in size, the smallest being about the size of a man’s fist and the largest resembling an older child’s blankly staring face. Many of the geodes showed oblong and irregular borders – those appearing face-like depicted features akin to ancient petroglyphs or ghostly visages best known for lurching out at you in a dream. Pockets of crystals lay trapped inside these faces. Too often they resembled ice-encrusted eyes or wild mouths crowded with sharp, translucent teeth.
“Evangeline, what do you make of these agates? I’ve never seen anything like them.”
“They are protective. Put here to drive away fears. Whoever is in this gallery will find strength and courage, presumably to keep a cool head while secreted in the dark.”
Hogwash, I thought, or are my talismans not working properly?
“What of these little lovelies?” I tapped a rock resembling a frozen scream.
“Why, they are watching us of course.” She raised her eyebrows, giving a sly smile before she scrambled away from me, delving deeper into the hollow.
“You know the Egyptians, master builders that they are, installed plenty of creepy surprises in the skull rock. It’s too bad you didn’t come visit us. I will never forget what I saw.”