by S. A. Sidor
She and her helpmate moved along the edge of the chasm in a manner most inhuman. Their noses twitched. The mouths slightly opened, like a cat’s.
When they had finished tasting the air, they conferred with their son.
“Miss Evangeline is down there,” Wu said, indicating the abysmal crack. “In a side cave.”
“And her condition is…”
“Alive.”
“Thank goodness,” I said, filling with relief.
“I am afraid they smell the worm too. He is with her.”
“What is he doing? Can vampires deduce that from the… smell?”
“I will ask.”
This next conversation took longer than I anticipated. I listened to many exchanges back and forth. When I inclined my head for clarifications, I received none. Patience frayed. I had time to wish more than once that I had studied Chinese dialects instead of ancient Egyptian. Wu appeared determined to get his information straight before relaying any content to me. The effort I appreciated, the suspense – not nearly so much.
“The two are drinking piña juice with oranges and salted chili peppers.”
“Good.” I sighed. I had thought her dead. “Very good news, I’d say!”
Confusion on my part – seeded, rooted, flowered in seconds. The burring of alarms began in my head, or in my chest. Oranges and salted chili peppers?
“Wait… what is piña?”
“I don’t know, sir. My parents tell me it’s something the traqueros drink.”
“McTroy, help me. Do you know of this concoction?”
“Traqueros are Mex railroaders. Piña? That’s maguey mash. Shee-it. The worm is drinking the mescal! I wish I had some. It’ll warm you all the way down to the holes in your socks.” McTroy pantomimed taking healthy swigs from an invisible bottle.
I am no prude. My puzzlement may have obscured this fact.
“Why would they be drinking spirits?”
“He’s wooing her, pard. Probably got a piano stashed in that den of his. Fancy lace curtains hanging every which way. The gal’s smart, though. She’ll hold off the ol’ wiggler long as she can. Don’t you worry, Doc. He was sinful ugly. Or his tail was.”
El Gusano had brought her to a grotto and changed himself into human form.
I was not pleased. But I preferred the idea of a wormly courting to other more forceful, even digestive alternatives.
“She is safe for the moment. We have no time to lose, then.” I strode to where I had pulled the Ka door loose from the wall. I ran the flickering torch over the surface. I knocked the ape’s head of my walking stick – once, twice, thrice – against the cold stone. “Wu, here is where I ask your parents to do us a second favor.”
Wu approached. His palms spread to touch the smooth hardness. He was shaken. Without moving his head, his eyes rolled sideways to regard me with something more than skepticism and less than the pity commonly offered to town fools. “My father and mother have strength beyond humans. But they cannot bite through rock.”
“Of course they can’t.” I laughed. “I don’t want them to eat the rock, merely to pass through it to the other side.”
Now I knew how town fools felt. Wu turned to McTroy for assurance.
McTroy did his best to endorse me. “He sounds loco. But you’re hearing him right. I’ve seen things in these burrows that I wouldn’t have believed in the daylight. This here’s mummy rules. Let Doc tell it.”
I nodded my thanks for his… support.
I continued, “Amun-Kek has opened the Ka door and passed over its threshold to the Duat with his procession of monks and mummies. They dwell in the underworld at this very moment. A living being without occult charms cannot follow them. Forgive me, Wu, for saying this so bluntly – but your parents are not strictly alive, are they?”
Wu watched me so intently I feared he might cry. He did not. But he steeled himself.
“They are between,” he said.
Brave boy. I was counting on him.
“Between is often not a good place to be. However, it is just what we require. I am asking you to ask your parents to use the Ka door. I cannot tell you what will happen to them if they should go through. What I know comes from the Book of the Dead. For reasons that are obvious I have no firsthand knowledge of whom or what they will encounter once they have crossed over. The gods control it. Yet, make no mistake, the Duat is highly dangerous. Kek and the monks are there. My hope is that your parents might drive them back to this side.”
“Flush ’em out,” McTroy added. He made a motion that was intended to convey pursued creatures bursting forth from cover. Birds perhaps? Foxes? I could not discern which. He had a way with theatrical flourishes though, and the boy was thusly engaged.
“To act like hunting dogs?” Wu asked. His expression verged on sourness.
I was ready to object to the comparison.
McTroy interceded, taking a different tack.
“That’s right,” he said. “Like good ol’ scent hounds they’ll chase them monks and mummies back here. I’m gonna kill the monks, and we’ll grab the mummies for Doc.”
Wu was quiet for a moment. He drew nearer his parents who stood slackly like two automatons who had run their mechanisms down. Skeletal bodies, flesh like puddled wax. They did not stir, or breathe, or blink, or acknowledge in any demonstrative way that their only son, still a young child, paused before them filled with emotions far greater than his age could possibly accommodate without suffering great pain and inner turmoil. He touched their denim sleeves, caressing the rough, dirty material, for even that was preferable to their corpselike skins. The cobwebbed silver nimbuses of their hair trembled as he sighed.
“Father and mother have done awful things. They do not mean to, but they do.” His voice thickened with grief. “If they help people, maybe they will find peace with our ancestors. Maybe they will leave hell. Maybe they will stop being hungry ghosts.”
Evangeline would have known the best words to say to the boy. McTroy remained silent.
I tried to imagine what she might say.
“I’m certain they love you, and they know you love them too.”
“I miss the way they used to be.” Wu wiped tears from his cheeks.
He spoke gently to his parents in their dialect. They woke slowly as one does to the morning songs of birds outside a familiar window.
They went through the door together, Mr and Mrs Wu, in one hop. The wall became like a thick mist. I might have imagined the smells, but I think not. It was frosty at first, a whiff of iron rust lingering about like the old farm equipment in the corner of my father’s barn, a trace of burnt matchsticks too, not one but a whole pile collected together, heaping, sulfurous. Out from under it all – as Kek himself had told me it was in the Void of the Underworld – arose a scent of shit that forced me to stop my breathing, and then it disappeared again with abruptness like the banging of an outhouse door on a black, winter morning. My parents dead and gone these many years… why did I think of them? I knew why. Book of the Dead. Duat. The Land of the Dead. Were they there?
I covered my nose and kept staring. Vapors swirled. Nebulous. No colors.
The vapors of time, I thought, reveal nothing to us.
Wherever the vampire couple landed, it was in silence. The vapors slickened.
I tapped my stick and heard a rocky report. The Ka door was closed again.
Wu had turned from the scene before his parents jumped. He waited at the rope bridge with his back to me. McTroy and he were talking. I raised the torch. I was too far away to make sense of their words. Wu straightened his shoulders and nodded. Sleek as a crow, McTroy perched on the rim of my light, one hand on his Army pistol, the other steering Wu away from the chasm’s edge. The dead would be here soon.
Are we ready?
33
Gunfight at the Temple Underneath
This then was our task: to wait for the vampires to drive the mad monks, mummies, and ghouls from the Duat through the Ka d
oor and back to our “side” of things so that we might sort them out, dispatching the monkish and ghoulish accordingly, capturing the resurrected Egyptian sorcerer and his acolytes, helping, or at least not harming, the Nosferatu-infected parents of our youngest companion, all without rousing the ire of the worm who in his side-cave lair plied with his liquor and charms the young though quite resourceful and canny Miss Waterston before presumably, ultimately, he would swallow her body, perhaps whole, perhaps piece by piece. I reviewed this plan with my partners.
“That’s about the size of it,” McTroy said.
Wu nodded in accord with the bounty man.
“It seems a size, or two, too large to me,” I admitted. “For just us three, I mean.”
“We’ll do it. Maybe not as neatly as you said but done just as well.”
For the sake of clarity I must mention that we were not sitting idly by the by, like three schoolboys fishing from a bridge in the sun on an endless summer afternoon. I squatted, holding what remained of a still excellent torch. Wu knelt on the bridge, his nose pressed to the slats. McTroy hung underneath us like a ship’s monkey, sawing at ropes with his stag knife. This positioning did not affect our ability to converse, though I could not see McTroy’s face and was prevented from reading any trace of irony thereupon. Hand over hand he pulled himself back to relative safety beside the boy.
“That ought to work,” he said. “I might’ve cut too deep on the left cable.”
The left was where I squatted. I shifted toward the middle. “Will it hold?”
“I’d like it to hold some, but not too sturdy. We’ll find out.” McTroy raised his knee high and stomped his boot. The ropes creaked. A brief interval of quiet followed, and then my ears detected a noise like the breaking of banjo strings.
“Get your asses off the bridge, boys!” McTroy shouted.
Wu and I were quick to comply.
A laughing McTroy stayed behind. The bridge swayed under him, cockeyed, as he straightened up to his full height, ignoring the threat of death that yawned below. The gold tooth shined in the corner of his grin. He looks like a pirate on the deck of his schooner, I thought. A mad pirate. He freed his Army irons from their leathers and let his arms hang down. “My bullets are low. I’ve loaded the last from my belt. Got twelve left for the job at hand.”
“There are more devils than that,” Wu said. He had opportunities to count as he shadowed us through the Temple labyrinth.
“I know it.” McTroy winced as if in pain. “I need to think.”
He aimed his right-hand barrel at the Ka door.
“Speed your thinking, McTroy,” I warned. “They may flood through that portal at any second.”
Wu and I stationed ourselves judiciously away from the edge of the crevasse, on the opposite side from the Ka door. McTroy turned in a slow circle at the center of the bridge, looking it up and down. He had the habit of disparaging higher learning, schoolroom education of every kind, books in general (except for the holy bible), and scholarly works in particular. I knew him to be more intelligent than he pretended. His “thinking” had much to do with angles and what we bookish, chalk-covered types might label geometry. Probabilities entered into his calculations as well. He was studying how best to deliver his twelve remaining shots. His balletic pacing on the span halted. He’d formulated a strategy. Those glittering gray eyes made me glad I was not a hell monk.
“I’m sticking to this side,” he said. “I’ll tuck up in that notch.” Here he gestured to the shadows where I spied no indentation a man might use for cover, but I suppose that was what made it a good place to hide. “Them friars are gonna be running. We need them bunched on the bridge. But we can’t let ’em cross over.”
I guffawed. “How do you propose to do that?”
“You have to stop them.”
“Me? By what means?”
McTroy shrugged, paying little attention to my degree of shock. He walked off to his hiding place adjacent to the door, crabbing his way along a narrow, brittle-looking ledge hardly suitable for pigeons, eventually slipping into a patch of total stygian gloom. Like a phantom he was gone. Also like a phantom, he had a leftover thought he wished to express.
“Use your walking stick, Doc. Swing it. Dent a few heads.”
“I cannot hold back a horde!”
The Phantom McTroy made no further comment.
Wu said, “Twenty-five is not a horde, I think. With the ghouls and mummies added in it is still less than fifty. Fifty might be a horde. But you want to capture the mummies, yes?” He tugged at my surviving sleeve when I did not answer. “You want to bring them back to Los Angeles?” he asked. “The Egyptian corpses go to California?”
“Yes, to Mr Waterston, Evangeline’s father. He funded my expedition…”
“Then you had better not let the mummies fall into the chasm.”
“I had better not… I agree.” Keep the monks back with a stick? Was the man a lunatic? I was more likely to be trampled. Or speared. I didn’t want a gun. But I was no willing human sacrifice either. The ghouls did have guns. Deadly arms were their métier. If I blocked their way, what was to say they wouldn’t simply shoot me tout de suite? Was I expected to block bullets with my stick as well? I could not conceive of a more ludicrous, outlandish, and absolutely reckless assignment–
“Dr Hardy?”
I went on mumbling to myself. “McTroy would have me killed outright so he might save Evangeline. The noble gray knight, oh how charming. The lady, seeing him, is overcome with gratitude. Won’t that be dandy? If only I were around to witness it–”
“Dr Hardy! Dr Hardy! Dr Hardy, sir…?”
“Damnation! What?”
“The chanting has stopped. Does that mean something?”
I listened until my ears rang with the silence. I heard my own blood coursing.
No drumbeats, nary a voice.
I had thought the chants were maddening, but this negative switch was far worse.
We had wanted them to stop. They had stopped. But what were the chanters doing? Were vampires killing them, or were the chanters in this moment too busy piking our vampires through the chest? Lopping off moldy bat heads with glinting blades? Would pikes and blades be our destiny?
“Get behind me. Here, Wu, take this torch. Hold it high. The monks are going to run toward the light. I will dispatch them as they arrive. If they pass me, you must halt their progress. Burn them. Kick them. Punch them. Do not allow them off the bridge. Understood?”
He was only a boy. It was too much to ask of him. But he would be a dead boy if he failed. Boys have gone into battle for millennia. They do not know better, or as in this case, they have no choice. Survival does not question your age. Neither does death.
“It is like a game,” Wu said. Squaring his shoulders, he brandished the torch.
“A game we cannot afford to lose, Master Wu. I’m glad we’re on the same team.”
“I am also happy that McTroy and Miss Evangeline are with us.”
I nodded solemnly. “We will get her back, Wu. You have to believe that.”
He swatted invisible monks with his firebrand. He jumped onto the bridge and back again. The idea of a game was preferable to trepidation. The boy was adaptive.
“Be careful now. Stay off the bridge.” I hauled him in by his collar. He weighed little more than a cat, or that was how he felt – all bouncy, twisty, and acting frolicsome.
Wu glanced at the chasm, drawing fiery circles in the air. “My parents said they smelled a man in the cave with Evangeline and the worm. But I think they’re wrong.”
I startled upon hearing this new information.
“A man? What sort of man?”
“A gentleman. Probably they smelled you or McTroy, or maybe someone the worm ate but had not fully digested. When El Gusano turns himself into a man-shape, mustn’t he wear clothes from a man he killed? I guessed so. The scent of this man’s old suit is what they smelled. But it was confusing. Mother insisted it was a gentl
eman–”
“What exactly did she say?”
“Let me think… Mother said, ‘In the cave are a woman, a worm, and a gentleman drinking piña juice, oranges, and salted chili peppers.’ But she meant only two people in the cave, not three.”
Did she?
A third in the cave with Evangeline and El Gusano? A mystery mescal sipper?
Wu parried with his imaginary monsters. Too soon they would be real.
I leaned into the crevasse.
I saw nothing but emptiness. The dark worked its trickery on my vision. Then I found something real in all that barren blackness – a glowing – subtle, maybe a mile or so down, that is how far off it seemed, too distant at any measure. Unreachable, but steady.
I marked it. Looked away.
Marked it again upon a second viewing.
Like Venus afloat in the night sky, only the sky was under me instead of above me and more than half of it was rock. That hazy dot of straw-colored light – Evangeline would be there… with the worm… and was there an obscure, imbibing gentleman in their company? The thought unsettled me. My, oh my, but how the unknown is always worse even if the known is adequately dreadful. I stuck my face into the dark. Chills ran over me as I half-expected faces other than my own to pop out and mock me. None did. If I extended myself into the abyss too hastily, too eagerly, I’d lose my balance. Gravity would snatch me to my death. I’d fall right past Evangeline, my body tumbling, my arms wheeling uselessly in the air, until I burst like a bone-and-blood-filled balloon at the bottom of this bottomless pit.
I struck my fist against the bridge.
Cool yourself, Hardy. Wait for an advantage. Be ready.
I pulled back, coiled up, resolved and watchful. She would live through this. Worm or no worm, I would make certain of it. I could not bear to think otherwise.
“The door, Dr Hardy… Look at the door…”
The Ka door began to fluoresce with a greenish alien color. Very like foxfire one finds deep in the woods. Eerie to observe, even more troubling when the observer knows what lay on the other side – and that this lambency before us was no patch of mushrooms growing along a damp log, but an emerald-shaded hell filled with demons.