With sticky fingers I pulled some matches out of my pocket and lit the candle. I was standing knee deep in the mushrooms but they were more brownish in color than grey now and they looked to be shrinking down around me, withering. There was a tunnel angling down like I was in before and I followed it, heedless of the hot wax running over my hand.
The dying fungus gave way to a cleaner passage. The familiar sandstone walls were here and so were some more bodies. These hadn’t died by gunshot. They were dispatched by means of twisted necks, disembowelments and an odd throat ripped out. If these were the ones who had taken Nina, they had paid for it dearly it appeared. Even as that thought came to me, the trail of dead ended and I found Nina.
She lay by a deep pool of water, possibly the remains of Krotan’s Brook I had fruitlessly looked for on my way into town, ancient beyond anything I had imagined, tainted by something older still. Behind the pool was the false cave in, my estimation of its location had been right. A tin pitcher lay beside Nina its watery contents spilled out. I knelt, lying the candle to the side and then took her in my arms. There was blood on her hands and mouth and she had thrown up some on her chest.
She whimpered, sensing my presence and cracked her eyes open. “They…they made me drink the water.” I nodded, a sad hopeless smile on my face. She continued. “I heard voices in my mind. ‘Let me in,’ they said. But I wouldn’t at first. Then those people started shaking me and I got mad.” She tried to look past me, at the carnage she had wrought, I held her tighter so she couldn’t see. “But I forgot to keep the voices out and they got in, and were making me think like them, weird thoughts. I pictured a place that looked nothing like here, black rocks and dead upside down trees and too many stars in the sky. I said goodbye to you in my head, because I was slipping away.”
“It’s okay Nina I’m here.”
“Then the voices started screaming, like they were hurting. Like they were the scared ones and were trying to get out of me. I screamed at them in my head and finally it was quiet. Then I heard the gun. I knew you’d come Ryder.”
Tears welled in her eyes, big ones and they rolled down each side of her little twitching nose. She began to sob. I brushed her hair back and smoothed out that wild silver streak.
“Daddy. Daddy!” She cried, weakly trying to wipe the blood from her hands on the remains of my shirt.
I held here tighter still. “It’s okay, Nina it’s over now.”
17
Carter Maynes came to Ryder Ranch a month later. His hat in hand as he approached across the library, I had to smother a grin.
I put aside my teacup and the copy of Jules Verne’s Mysterious Island I had been reading. I rose to meet him and gave him a brotherly hug. “Hello Carter, I’m happy to see you, but it’s unexpected.” I could have tortured him further, made him squirm while he was forced to ask for my assistance in some desperate endeavor, but in truth I was ready for a new challenge. “I must assume the Pinkerton Agency has sent you to once again retain my services?” I asked in as pompous a manner I could muster.
He looked at the floor, his large frame beginning to shake slightly.
“My dear fellow! Have a seat.” What the devil? I had never seen the man so distraught.
He began to absently smooth out his illustrious, ever billowing muttonchops with a shaking hand. Finally he looked up at me and began to guffaw like a mad man. “I fooled you! Oh hell Ryder I finally did it! Your vaunted powers of observation have failed you!” He did indeed sit down at last, flopping back in my chair, nearly spent by his own mirth. “I’m not here on business. The circus is coming to town and I know how Nina has been waiting with breathless anticipation!” He took a sip of my tea, now looking quite smug. “Special passes no less, came down from the old man Pinkerton himself.”
I smiled with a bit of unease. “Sounds…wonderful.” In truth, the circus always seemed quite an inhospitable place, lots of animal dung, bad food….bearded ladies.
Later in the afternoon, Carter and I walked to the big picture window while sipping the last of our after dinner bourbon. Nina was outside, feeding the horses Anna and Dante through the corral fence, hanging at her side was a gift Carter had brought from Franklin Hoot, the inspector’s obsidian tomahawk. Behind her, we could just make out my parent’s carriage growing larger on the horizon, on its way back home.
At this point Carter’s extra jovial mood was wearing a bit thin, and I grimaced as he laughed into his drink. “You’re quite the gentleman here in your familiar and comfortable environment.” He gestured around with a sweep of his arm. “Well, old Hoot filled me in on a thing or two from your time together. Of course it was nothing I didn’t already suspect. Why, he made you out to be a veritable barbarian.”
I nodded grimly. “Maybe that’s true. I trust Krotan’s Brook has been properly…taken care of.”
“Yes, yes top men working on it and all that. But it appears you were correct, it was really Nina that ended the thing. Something about her killed the, invader, as you called it in your report, when it tried to take her in its power. Unfortunately the W.E.r.d. people are even more interested in her special qualities than ever before.” Carter looked ready to retire to one of the leather easy chairs. He was half sat down when:
“Now you have done it!” I hurled my brandy glass into the fireplace. It shattered and a great ball of flame billowed out dramatically.
Carter screamed like a school girl with a mouse up her britches and jumped straight in the air. “Ryder!”
I smiled. “Now, that display was for your tomfoolery at my expense earlier, and for making me go to a circus.”
Evan Ryder returns in The Shadow Hunt and related books are as follows,
The Weirdverse Time Line
Modern Day:
Dark Zenith
Dark Garden
Dark Heart
Turn of the Century:
The Shadow Trail
The Shadow Town
The Shadow Hunt
The Shadow Kin (forthcoming)
The Crusades:
The Savage Green
The Blood Red Horizon
The Cold Cerulean Sea (forthcoming)
Table of Contents
THE SHADOW TOWN
2
3
4
5
7
8
10
11
12
13
14
15
16
17
The Weirdverse Time Line
The Shadow Town (An Evan Ryder Weird Western) Page 7