Rogues

by George R. R. Martin

  Down the corridor on the way to his room, he ran into Bethany—who was barefoot and holding an ice bucket. “Hi there!” she chirped, and he said “hello” in return, adjusting the backpack he toted as luggage. Then she added, “I don’t know why I’m surprised to see you here. Can’t imagine where else you’d crash.”

  “This is close and clean. It’ll be fine for the night.”

  “Is that how long you’re staying? Just overnight?”

  “Depends. We’ll see what happens.”

  She shuddered and clutched her ice bucket. “You sure you’ll be okay?”

  “I always am.”

  She laughed nervously, and he wondered if she ever laughed any other way. “I guess nobody bothers you, not very often.”

  “No, ma’am, they do not.”

  They said their good-nights and he went alone to his room. He flipped on the light to reveal nothing at all outstanding but nothing offensive, either: a bed with an ugly comforter, a tiny stack of sample-sized toiletries, and a sink with a chipped faucet head.

  He wondered what Bethany would’ve thought if he’d blurted out the things he kept close to his chest—if he’d said that no, nobody bothered him too often but when they did, they did it for keeps. Anyone who’s ever watched a prison movie knows you take down the biggest man first; and the monsters knew it too. So far he’d escaped those greetings with only a few scars to show for it, but they were ugly scars, and they reminded him daily of those who hadn’t been so lucky.

  The nothings out there … they were worse than the nobodies.

  Sometimes the nothings bit and fought, screamed and spewed poison or fire. Nothings could change their shapes and shift their bones, and sometimes, only a Bible and brute force could put them down.

  Kilgore’s Bible was a small red leather-bound thing, thumbed into softness with onionskin pages that flapped, fluttered, and stuck together. He didn’t read it much anymore. Didn’t need to. Knew it forward and backward, just like the devil. But he kept it on his person because once it’d deflected a swipe of claws that would’ve otherwise opened his chest instead of leaving him looking like he’d passed out facedown on a barbecue grill.

  And that made it lucky.

  In absence of mortal assistance, he’d take what luck he could get. He’d rather have Pastor Martin by his side, but that ship had sailed, hadn’t it?

  So when night came, he tucked the Good Book into his pocket, smashed up against his battered notebook—a worn thing filled with thoughts and research on the case, scribblings and small, carefully drawn images that might or might not mean anything to him later on. An hour or two of potting around on the Internet had given him a name, or at least a direction. It was only a starting point, but it was better than nothing.

  Back into his car he climbed. He tossed his pack onto the passenger’s seat, and in doing so, he winged the silver cross that hung from the rearview mirror. It swung back and forth, smacking the glass with a loud crack. He grabbed the holy trinket and steadied it. He held it an extra moment or two, then said, “Fuck it,” pulled it off the mirror and slung it around his neck. He didn’t have a church, but he had his faith. And he had the trusty old Jolly Roger, which started on the first try.

  Out past what few streetlights and corner stores Ducktown boasted, the car’s headlights cut a bold path through the pitch-black, middle-of-nowhere murk.

  He wasn’t more than a couple of miles from the mine, but there were few signs to guide the way and little in the way of civilized lighting; the stars were so damn bright overhead, and the trees loomed so tall, so close together on every side of the service road that would take him down to the crater lake.

  He watched those trees as he drove, hunting for something that might live there and hide behind them. Some hint of the old balance. Some kind of resurrection.

  When he hit a low-slung bar across the road, the headlights shone bright on a big-ass NO TRESPASSING sign. The high beams glinted off the rest of the message, which stopped just short of promising that anyone who drove any farther would be shot on sight and fed to the bears for fun. Probably because there weren’t any bears.

  He left the car to inspect the situation in person. The hip-high gate across the road wore the sign like a badge, but Kilgore couldn’t find a shit to give, and nothing but a rusted padlock on an old chain held the whole thing together. A pair of swift kicks with his steel-toed work boots made short work of the matter, and one more kick sent the gate swinging back into the trees, where it dragged itself to a halt and leaned off-kilter against a raggedy evergreen.

  It almost wasn’t worth the effort to clear the way. The dirt road ran out another hundred yards down the line, petering into a wide patch that gave a vehicle enough room to turn around, but that was about it.

  With some creative steering, he maneuvered the car into an about-face so he could hit the ground running if conditions called for it later. Then he parked, pulled the brake, and left the door open so the dome light would stay on while he checked his supplies.

  A plastic ketchup squirt bottle full of holy water. A well-worn gris-gris he’d had made in New Orleans, the year before The Storm. Flashlight and extra batteries, and a head-mounted lamp he’d borrowed from a buddy who was a mechanic. An old silver cake knife because sometimes silver meant something, but it was expensive—so he took it where he found it.

  A loaded nine-millimeter because you never know.

  He patted his chest and felt the reassuring bulk of the notebook and the Bible. Tucked the gun into his waistband, up front where it’d be easier to reach even though the cold metal on his belly gave him a full-body shiver. He donned the headband with the LED light on it, and felt ridiculous but his hands were free, and that was more important than dignity in the dark.

  Everything else he stashed in his trench-coat pockets.

  He closed the car door and the light went out. He flipped the switch on his headlamp, and it came on, illuminating the woods without quite the vigorous panache of the Eldorado’s beams; but outside what passed for town, a little light went a long way.

  For a moment he stood still and listened. He didn’t hear much. It almost bothered him, but then he remembered Ammaw Pete grousing about how all the critters were only just coming back, and then he supposed it wasn’t quite so unsettling. There weren’t any crickets to fiddle their legs in the grass. No mice to rustle in the leaves, or squirrels to build nests high above. Nothing and no one, except whatever waited in the crater.

  Kilgore had a pretty good sense of direction—almost an uncanny one, or so his mother used to tell people. He could feel it in his head, the tug of the crater’s location. The smell of its water wafted up through the trees, an unpleasant stink of bottom-pocket pennies and stagnation.

  The service road had gotten him close.

  He sniffed, wiped his nose on his forearm’s sleeve, and started marching.

  The grade grew steeper as he proceeded; with every step, the ground dropped away more sharply beneath him. He slipped and skidded, catching himself on the vegetation or—on one particularly unpleasant stumble—his own hands.

  And then he reached the clearing that surrounded the water—a ring of red dirt that held back the trees, or maybe the trees just didn’t want to dip their roots into that questionable pond. It was a creepy little beach, angled and naked, with all the grimy allure of a bathtub ring.

  Unmoving except for the pivot of his neck, the big man surveyed the scene and still, he heard nothing. But he felt something, and he didn’t like it: the prickling, unhappy sense that he was being watched.

  He fished out his notebook. The brightness of his headlamp washed out the pages and made it tough to read, but he squinted and forced his own words to appear.

  “You took two boys.” He said it quietly. Like the light, a little sound went a long way. “They were here to help the basin, and you killed them.”

  A ripple scattered the calm surface of the night-blackened pool. He heard it, the soft rush of water in m
otion, the ripple of a solitary wind chime playing its only note.

  “Ammaw Pete said something that got me thinking: She said a good talking-to wouldn’t stop you, not if it came from me. So I wondered if there was anyone you might obey. Everything’s afraid of something, but you’ve been living the high life up in here, haven’t you?”

  The water moved again. From the edge of his vision, Kilgore saw it, the shifting lines of something traveling below the surface but not yet rising.

  “She called you a little ol’ Nick, and that’s not just an expression. She meant you’re a little ol’ devil, but I doubt you qualify for the title. A devil could leave the water and wreak more … interesting havoc someplace else. And you can’t, can you?”

  He lifted his gaze without lifting his head. The offset glare of the light showed him a shape that was round and bald, a head not unlike his own. Eyes rising just far enough to break the waterline and see what motherfucker was doing all this taunting.

  Kilgore fought back a shudder and returned his eyes to the notebook, to the word he’d written down. “Not sure how to pronounce this,” he admitted. “And it might be the wrong name anyhow, but it’s a pretty coincidence all the same, so I’m going to call you Kupfernickel.”

  The eyes in the water were blacker than the sky above or the water below. They were so black that the darkness spilled out in an ambient glow of evil.

  Kilgore met the thing’s glare. “That word … does it mean anything to you?”

  A low, burbling sneer blew bubbles in the lake. And then, so softly that it could scarcely be understood, the creature replied.

  Silly sprites.

  “Silly sprites,” Kilgore repeated, too surprised to say anything else until he’d checked the notebook again. Often these things couldn’t speak—or if they could, they found it hard to make themselves understood. This one’s voice was clear though it sounded like it came from miles and miles underground. “But they’re dangerous, aren’t they? And tied to metal … like the metal here at the Burra Burra Mine, sort of.”

  German miners of old complained about copper that was bedeviled and could not be smelted. They didn’t know that the metal wasn’t copper at all, but nickel arsenide; they couldn’t get copper out of it because there wasn’t any copper in it.

  “You’re not so different from that, kupfernickel. One thing pretending to be another. You’re no elemental—no creature of life, that’s for damn sure.”

  Your word means nothing. You mean nothing. There is no life here.

  “You ought to be a small thing, a cold spot. A patch where grass won’t grow. But the pollution from the mine let you outgrow your britches.”

  I am stronger than you know, it hissed, and it lifted itself, crawling toward the bank, and toward Kilgore with a deliberate slowness that showed off its fearsome, knock-kneed and razor-sharp shape.

  “No,” he insisted, and he did not back away, calling its bluff. “If you had any strength of your own, you wouldn’t be wearing the skin of a dead man. You haven’t got enough substance. Not enough life.” He looked up quickly, scanning the woods with the white-bright beam that shot from his forehead. The tree line appeared impenetrable and unbroken, a row of trunks divided with stripes of darkness. It felt like a cage.

  The creature fussed some moist complaint, but it stopped its progression from the water and remained thighs deep in the glassy lake. It scanned the tree line too, seeking whatever Kilgore might be hunting; but seeing nothing, it sneered afresh.

  You know little and understand less than that.

  “Then come up out of that water. Get out here and teach me a lesson, eh, Nick?”

  The creature hesitated, then lunged—and retreated, as if it’d changed its mind.

  But Kilgore knew a fake-out when he saw one. “You can’t, can you?”

  Can, it insisted.

  “Show me.”

  But the thing watched the trees again, seeking some response that Kilgore couldn’t see. It cowered in the water, stuck in a pose between menace and retreat. The thing wore loose-fitting clothes—the homespun and overalls of a miner a hundred years ago, in boots and gloves, and the smudge of candle soot around its empty eyes. Sopping and stark, its clothing clung wetly to its skin-and-bones form, showing off the crooks and bends of something made of little more than gristle and myth.

  “Come on out and take a swing at me if you think you’re so tough. I’ve smacked the shit out of bigger things, and I’ll smack it out of you.”

  The coal-black eyes squinted, and tendrils of pitch-colored smoke oozed from the sockets. You fear the water.

  “You fear the land,” he countered.

  I fear nothing.

  “Then why do you watch the trees?”

  It scowled and dipped, its joints creaking and bowing, as it adjusted itself in the water. The smoke that poured from its blank, deep eyes likewise spilled from the corners of its mouth when it spoke. I fear no trees.

  “And I ain’t afraid of the dark, but I know what’s in it.”

  Kilgore checked his distance from the water’s edge: a good thirty feet. Far enough that even with a lunge, the creature probably couldn’t grab him. Even so, to be on the safe side … he sidled back another yard or two, never taking his eyes off the two smoking craters in the creature’s shriveled-apple face.

  His notebook slipped, but he caught it. He held it up to the light of his headlamp and began to read.

  “By the standing stone and twisted tree, thee we invoke—where gather thy own.” He cleared his throat, and ignored the splash and hiss from the creature that still stood in the water. “Mighty Lord of the woods and animals, hunter and hunted, I call to you.”

  None shall answer! There is no life here!

  “Hear me, and come once more to this, your sacred home. Keeper of the mighty gates of winter, watcher of the living land,” he breathed, and it might’ve been his imagination that something flickered in the trees beyond the edge of his headlamp’s glare.

  None remain to hear you!

  “You’d best fucking pray that’s the case,” Kilgore growled. “In the name of Jesus, of the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit …”

  Hear yourself, you coward, the creature spit. Singing to the crucified king and calling the old gods, with the same breath.

  He shook his head. He’d heard it before, from holier things and people by far. “God of Creation, send Your angels. Send them in a shape this motherfucker will know, and lend them Your Almighty power.”

  Your God has no angels for the likes of me. No swords. No choirs.

  There, back toward the Eldorado, he saw it this time for certain: moving between the gnarled greenery like a stream flowing past rocks, one moment slow—one moment lightning-fast, shifting in some strange spot between the worlds. “And He shall give His angels charge over thee,” he repeated his favorite bit from the red-bound book. “To keep thee in all thy ways.”

  Nowhere did it specify what those angels would look like or how they’d do any of the promised keeping.

  You cannot have it both ways. Old ways and new gods.

  “One God,” he corrected. “Just the one—old, new, and always. But He’s got a very diverse work force.”

  And one thing was certain, sometimes things took the names they were called by. They assumed the shapes that were best believed. He didn’t know how it worked, or why. He didn’t understand the mechanisms of the Law, but he suspected that no one on earth ever had—or ever could. All he knew was that God was on his side. He believed it harder than he believed his own name.

  Your Christ has no power here!

  “You’re wrong about that, and everything else,” he said—and he might’ve said more but a vivid white light sparked, quivered, and blasted out from the tree line. It all but blinded Kilgore, who still had the good sense to keep one watering eye on the creature though he backed away farther. One arm up, shielding himself from the sudden illumination.

  The supernova cast shadows of trunks sharper tha
n prison bars, flinging the shapes across the crater lake and around the hole where a mine once worked, and up the ridge around it—past the miners’ cage that split the light into lace, and all along the determined sprouts that clung to the piss-poor dirt, red as the face of Mars.

  “There is life here yet!” he gasped, his breath sucked out of him by that divine, demanding illumination.

  Between his fingers, around the edges of the fierce brilliance that was colder than November, he saw a four-legged shape, each limb as narrow as a sapling; there stood a barrel-chested trunk and a proud head capped with a crown as wide as Kilgore’s outstretched arms. Or not a crown at all—antlers, then, if that’s what they were.

  This thing had names as well as antlers, though Kilgore could not bring himself to call any of the common ones. Not for prayer or entreaty, for it was too close to blasphemy. Even if he knew what his own God called this thing, it wouldn’t be a word for lips like his to pronounce.

  He inhaled, exhaled. Forced himself to breathe through the rapture of this piercing light that cut through the copper basin and everything in it.

  “Tubal-cain,” was the best he could muster in salutation. A name for the horned guardian from the mighty red book. He gagged on a small laugh, remembering a tidbit of lore he’d almost forgotten. “You were a metalsmith, praise Jesus! I see Your patterns, Lord. I see You turn the wheel …”

  The great stag shifted. Its shape wavered between wafer-thin projection and flesh and blood, but it held and it glared down at the creature in the lake—which cringed against the light.

  The creature struggled in place, a fly in molasses. It fumed and reared, lunging backward and going nowhere … no, going forward, toward the shining thing in the trees. Dragged up, kicking and fighting from the water until it was free and suspended, angry and dripping and swearing in a tongue no living man has ever understood. Shrinking, and withering like the grass once withered and the trees once wilted where they stood.

  “Take him away!” he gasped, not quite laughing anymore, too winded to do anything but wheeze. And as the miner-shaped creature rose up, wriggling and dying, sailing reluctantly toward the woods, Kilgore felt a pressure in his chest like a hand squeezing. The pressure crushed hard, and he wiped at his eyes but saw only the searing afterburn of the light from the trees … and then he saw stars.