by S. A. Sidor
Evangeline remained motionless.
Did this charnel house bone pile transfix the lady and freeze her in place?
It did not appear so. Her head was turned away, toward the gate.
I shifted the bull’s-eye lantern.
A coach. Painted black. It seemed to absorb my light, to suck it inward, leaving little detail for me to descry but merely contours of the wood and a team of six black stallions, impossibly huge and muscular and snorting what I can only describe as blue flames. They stomped their skillet hooves. Manes like black, black smoke. Their eyes glowed hot cherry-red, and on the nighttime desert floor I felt the heat pouring off them, tightening the skin on my cheeks, as if they were a living, breathing, fiery furnace.
I swung my beam higher and cried out in surprise.
In the driver’s box a coachman rose up. Whip in one hand, reins gathered in the other. My light flooded over him. Unlike the coach itself, he appeared of this world. In fact, I knew him. It was Hakim, my old friend and the foreman of my Egyptian dig in the Valley of the Kings. A man whose death I had mourned. Yet here he was, in Mexico. I was stunned. There was no mistaking him. I had presumed him to be executed, a meal left for the jackals in the shadow of the skull rock. Obviously, he had not only survived that day at the tomb, but he played some part in this macabre Mexican affair as well.
“Hakim!”
He did not answer me. He settled back into his seat and whipped the horses. The coach jerked, and the team of six pulled it swiftly through the gate. On the ground where the coach had been lay a coil of dirty linen bandages. It reminded me of the skin a snake sheds; only this skin was man-sized. The evidence left no doubt that the mummies were riding inside the coach. Kek finally had attained his freedom from any ancient curses imposed upon him as punishment for his sorcery. He had broken the shackles of death.
Before the coach disappeared, a fish-white face emerged from behind one of the coach’s leather curtains. The skin was stretched over high, noble cheeks. Big eye sockets full of milky wrinkles and a pair of weed green eyes. Lips slanted: opening wordlessly, closing. A hand of thin bones appeared. Was it waving? It held a bloodied handkerchief to its cheek. Whose face? Not Kek’s. More like something hooked from the ocean floor. It stared. Not at me, but at Evangeline.
Then the face was gone. The coach sped off.
A dust cloud enwrapped us like fog.
Wu had stopped short of Evangeline. As the dust settled I understood the reason for his hesitancy. Evangeline was not our old Evangeline. She was she. But altered. I noticed less trauma evidenced in her countenance than anger. Her chin pushed forward, her neck held stiffly at an odd position, almost formal, as if she were being forced to endure an unpleasant conversation; a strong pulse drummed in a vein above the notch of her collarbone. She breathed through her nose. Her eyes fixed wide and wet and unfocused. Something black stained four fingertips of her right hand as if she had dipped them in a shallow bowl. I turned the bull’s-eye on her and they changed to red: blood. She looked at us without any sign of recognition. The light bothered her. Wincing, she raised her bloodied hand. I redirected the beam at the ground. Her braid had come unraveled, flared into a white nimbus around her face, witchy-colored by the moonlight.
“Miss Evangeline?” It was Wu speaking. I was glad he went first.
“You’re not dead?” Her voice was hoarse like a person unaccustomed to conversation.
Was she a madwoman? Had the encounter below driven her insane?
Perhaps she sounded worse than she was.
A simple case of rawness in the throat…?
I was suddenly aware of my own thirst. Don’t judge her too quickly, I told myself. We’ve been through an ordeal here – massive, bizarre, and freakishly violent – except for the death of one maggot and a score of devil monks, it remained wholly unresolved. I knew the gist of my night underground. I was missing a large part of Evangeline’s. What had passed between her and the worm? Who was the Mysterious Third? What did he say to her over mescal and broken glass?
She studied each of us in turn clinically. Never have I felt more like a preserved frog pinned belly-up on a table. She kept her emotions checked.
“You seem alive and well,” she said, and said it rather neutrally, I thought.
“For the most part we are.” I slapped the dust from my shirt.
Her eyes narrowed. “But how can you be? Answer me that.”
Wu spoke in a rush. “Mr McTroy killed the worm. He shot it right in the brain. Dr Hardy and I jumped from the worm’s back into the cave and… and then we looked for the hidden catch. I found it behind a map! When I pressed the catch it released the secret door and we discovered the steps and we climbed straight up here and we saw you.” Wu gestured to the passage. He bowed and smiled. But he did not go nearer to her. Even he was taken aback by her strangeness. Absent was her usual warmth. She felt dangerous to be around, like a cool but fierce beast that might eat any one of us at any time.
“We tried to save you,” I said. “When we got to the cave you were gone.”
“I am lucky to have so many men wanting to save me.”
What did that mean? We had not in fact saved her, true. But was she angry with us? No, no, it was not just anger I detected now but a whirlwind of attitudes and strong emotions that frankly left me uneasy. I was more in the dark than when I fell into the abyss. I did not know what to say to Evangeline, but I had absolute confidence that whatever words I might choose, and however artfully I might arrange them, they would still be wrong.
Therefore, I chose silence.
McTroy was more direct. “What the hell happened to you?”
The dust cloud settled, but another form of obscurity replaced it. My eyes stung and I wiped them, but it did no good. A reluctance to breathe gripped my chest. Smoke drifted over the courtyard. Thickening. I interrupted my silence to cough into my fist.
“The monastery burns,” Evangeline said, with no more care than if she had been mentioning a passing cloud at a summer picnic.
Fire danced on the roof. It kicked and stretched. Red legs and orange arms. A lot of them, poking through, reaching up and touching new places. It grew and grew.
She said, “The ghouls torched the chapel. Soon this will be an inferno. The wood has been baking in the desert for who knows how many years… no one can stop it. A ruin. That’s what’s left when everything is over. The world ends in fire.”
McTroy grabbed her elbow. “Have you seen our horses?”
Evangeline shook her head.
I tied a bandana around my nose and mouth. I told Wu to do the same. “The smoke is what kills you. Stay low. Crawl if you need to.”
Evangeline covered her face with the hem of her skirt. She took my hand.
“We have to get outside the gate,” McTroy said.
The fire snapped. It growled. Savage, crazed, hungry. Devour, it said. Devour.
“The stone well. Back where we started. It’s far enough away that we should be safe for a while,” I said. “Let’s go there.”
“We’ll need water,” McTroy said. “A walk without it, we’re good as dead.”
He led us through the smoke. Embers fell like crimson snowflakes. Sparks, like floating matchheads. Fire raced along the charred brick walls in zigzag patterns, and the wooden gate lit up bright – a wavy, raging curtain hanging before us and threatening a fatal delay to our escape. I smelled lamp oil. Spilled – here, on the sand, a shattered jug – I kicked it. The ghouls had set a fire trap to snuff us out. Evangeline was right. The monastery would be a smoldering ruin by morning. But we wouldn’t be inside. I bent half over and took a firm hold of McTroy’s gun belt at the small of his back. I was good as blind. Gasping for air. Smoke wrapped like a poisonous hot towel around my head. Evangeline squeezed my hand. Wu had hers, and she encouraged him to stay calm and keep going. We cleared the gate just as a dragon’s roar erupted behind us. The chapel exploded. Chunks of splintered wood and adobe and yes, more human bones ra
ined down. Debris covered the desert like a battlefield. A blazing crucifix ten feet tall dropped from the heavens and stabbed, inverted, into the sand. It was a scene from Dante: the Circle of the Heretics – an infernal sepulchral plain outside Satan’s city – a hell on earth forged by men with nothing better to do than to add chaos to Creation.
“They must’ve had a storehouse of gunpowder,” McTroy said.
“There’s the well.” Evangeline let go of my hand, and pointed. “The horses!”
Moonlight, Neptune, and Penny were tied to the post where McTroy had left them. The conflagration terrified the animals, but they were glad to see us. McTroy got a rope from his saddle and skilfully fished the bucket from the well. Wu and I hoisted water for the horses and for us. We drank. We filled the canteens and sheepskins. We cleaned our sooty faces. All while the monastery pumped smoke into a predawn sky, but the wind was blowing in our favor and it carried the foul pollution away from us, to the south.
The air was cool. Wetness from the splashed well water brought a chill to Evangeline. Her body shivered. I placed my hand on her shoulder. She was small, really. Her constant motion, her energy, augmented her. But that fact was easy to forget.
“We are out of it,” I said. I meant, of course, the inferno.
She made a snorting sound, a mirthless laugh. “Hardy, we are in deeper than ever.” She scrubbed the blood from her fingers, rinsing them again, and again.
A shiver ran through me.
McTroy checked his rifle, slid it back into its scabbard on Moonlight’s saddle. He unbuckled his saddlebag and was about to turn up the flap when a voice spoke from the other side of a nearby cholla thicket.
“I don’t think you want to do that,” the voice said. “If you want to live…”
McTroy had his Marlin repeater out of the scabbard and levered before I could lower the canteen from my lips.
“Who is it?” he said. Then to me, “Shine the light, Doc.”
I shined it.
“It’s your old amigo, señor,” the voice said. “How soon we forget.”
“Show yourself or die.”
“I don’t think so, but I will come out and talk.”
From behind the cholla came a dragging sound, then a dragging figure, low to the ground, in the dirt, pulling itself along by its arms, balanced on the palms of its hands. It had a guitar strapped to its back.
“Corpse muncher!” McTroy shouted. “What’er you doin’ hiding in the bushes?”
The necrófago did his best to shrug. “Nada. I am enjoying la hoguera – the bonfire.” Rojo smiled a needle-toothy smile. “You make it out of the Temple Underneath alive, huh? I think you leave something cooking in the oven. Maybe monk meat? I never see that before.”
McTroy waved. “Weren’t nothing. Like eating pie. We hardly broke a sweat.” He screwed up one eye and said, “Is it me, or ain’t you looking better since last we parted?”
Indeed it was true. The ghoul looked – this is a relative term I employ given the circumstances – healthier. Certainly, he’d grown more robust from the waist up. His face was in one piece. He was blessedly clothed in what seemed a ragged brown animal pelt. He appeared to be sprouting two fresh legs, though at the moment the limbs were little more than a forked, greenish-gray, almost tentacular nub of flesh; the nubby protrusion jutted from under the fur sash he wore and followed after him like a budding iguana tail. Ghouls, who are neither alive nor deceased, regenerate by eating dead things. I wasn’t sure if I wanted to see behind the cholla. Rojo must’ve sensed doubt in the twist of my brow.
“I ate a coyote, doctor,” he said. “An old one – he had a bullet in his neck. He died in that bush. Dying alone is sad, you know?” He shook his head. “I think maybe he was sick because he tasted funny. I make a poncho of him.” Rojo squared his shoulders.
“Ro, you complaining about the menu?” McTroy asked.
“I no complain. Everything is on a necrófago’s menu.”
McTroy chuckled. I think he was actually beginning to like the ghoul. “Rotten coyote sounds like a meal made for ghoul kings.”
“A little stringy. Not bad, if you have teeth.” He snapped his. The horses stirred.
“Probably had rabies,” I whispered to Evangeline and Wu.
Wu wrinkled his nose.
“Did you see the mummy coach pass by?” Evangeline asked Rojo.
“Oh, yes. She was rápido, señorita. Never have I seen one like her before.”
“Where did it go?”
“El Norte.” Rojo pointed with his chin. “She’ll be over the border before too long.”
“What makes you think she’s heading to the US?” I asked.
“Where else she gonna go?”
I had no retort.
“Hey, Crazy Red, I need to reload. Why’d you keep me from my bullets?” Despite the friendly conversation, McTroy had not let down his rifle. Out of politeness he aimed the barrel to the left of Rojo, slightly.
“Señor McTroy, I am sorry to inform you that your saddlebag is full of snakes.”
“Bullcrap, if you’ll pardon me. Moonlight wouldn’t let a snake get close to her.”
“The mummy hypnotized your horse. She no moved. She no made a sound.”
“No bandaged bastard can hypno-whatever my mare.” McTroy reached for the unbuckled flap and turned it up. “See!”
“Don’t–” Evangeline tried to warn him but it was too late.
The asp lunged from the saddlebag. If McTroy did not possess a gunfighter’s reflexes I dare say he would’ve been bitten on the nose. As it were, he batted the viper with the stock of his Marlin rifle, knocked it to the sand and shot it twice. A second asp slithered from the bag, and as McTroy had his back turned in the execution of the first reptile, I carefully removed this inquisitive serpent with my walking stick.
“Where should I put this?”
“Christ Almighty! Fling it toward the ghoulie!”
I jettisoned the Egyptian cobra. McTroy dispatched it with a single shot to the head. He used the muzzle of his rifle to close the saddlebag flap. The bag bulged and subsided; a heavy squirming was also noticeable inside the opposite leather pouch.
“I don’t recognize those snakes. Big ole heads, flat as the bottom of my boot.”
“They’re asps from Egypt. Hooded vipers. The story goes that Queen Cleopatra killed herself with an asp,” I said. “The rearing cobra is a symbol of royalty and divinity.”
“Asps! What son of a bitch puts asps in a man’s saddlebag?”
Rojo scurried over to the dead snake and stripped off its skin with his teeth. He sucked down the small bones and flesh. “I saw Odji-Kek do it,” he said, around a mouthful of asp.
“I know who it was, dammit. And, Doc, I don’t need any symbolical lecture.”
Rojo was confused. “Then why did you ask what son of a–?”
“It’s an expression, Ro.” McTroy loosened the saddlebags from Moonlight and gingerly carried the parcel of certain death over to a rock pile as I lighted his way.
“If I dump these fellers out, they gonna bite me?”
“I venture they will slip away seeking greener pastures.”
“Good luck finding any, you belly-crawling sons of Satan.” He emptied both bags into an inky wedge betwixt two boulders, mindful not to drop his ammunition boxes into the crack with the cobras. “I’d shoot ’em all, but I’m short on bullets as it is.”
“They are only following their nature,” I said.
“So am I.”
We rode through what was left of the night, past the dawn, straight into a fine morning. The sky turned hard enamel blue. The heat was tolerable. Our horses were hungry and McTroy led us to a wash where they munched saltgrass and desert marigolds. Sensing their first decent food in days, the horses fussed nervously; their hooves stirred up moths sipping at the salty mud in the wash. I pressed my lips together to keep the paper-winged creatures from flying into my mouth. No one talked. Evangeline and Wu shared Neptune’s s
addle. Rojo accompanied me. We had decided he acquitted himself nicely concerning the asps and should no longer be presumed an enemy. Though I can’t say he smelled any better.
“Riding is better than the dragging,” he said.
“I would think so.”
“But sitting with nothing to do is the best.”
“You display unforeseen depths, Rojo.”
“It is not on purpose I do this.”
I put Rojo down on a rock so he could play his guitar. Despite being a brigand and a disgusting graveyard scavenger, he strummed a pleasant tune. We all dismounted. McTroy borrowed Evangeline’s telescope, climbing to higher ground to take a survey. Wu finally started to feel the disappearance of his parents into the Duat. He had a long, hiccupping cry and fell asleep afterward. Evangeline and I were alone.
“Before we go any farther, there is matter we need to discuss,” I said.
“Speak plainly, Hardy.”
“I know of no other way.”
She smiled and turned to study a moth that had alighted on her wrist.
“Who was the third individual with you in the cave?”
She continued to examine the lepidopteran. “I did not know him.”
“Was it your father?”
That greenish-gold flash – her stare locked onto me. I felt like a rabbit that has spotted the lioness and realized his chances for escape are few. Thumping heart. A cold block in the belly, melting away. Events slowed yet rushed by far too quickly for the mind to sort them out properly. It would only start to fit together later. In retrospect.
“Do you think I don’t know my own father?” she said.
“My father was a farmer and we barely spoke–”
“Well, my father is more than a farmer. In our home we converse daily, deeply.”
I carried my stick in case we might run across a rattler or two. I was crushing the ape’s head. My knuckles whitened under the pressure of my grip.
“Insulting my family is out of order,” I said.
“An order you fail to follow.”
“I have reasons. But let’s forget the question of ‘who’ for the moment. What did this mysterious third person want from you?”