And the Hills Opened Up (13 page)

“A demon?” Owen said, turning a shade paler than he already was.  “Like preachers go on about?”

“That’s right, little brother.  And he’s an ugly son-of-a-bitch, too.”

Elwood holstered his gun, climbed up onto the saloon’s porch, and turned to the folks in the street. “You want to live, get in here right now,” he hollered.  “You see somebody hurt, carry them along.”

Heads slowly turned his way, each lost in their own fog. 

“You tarry, you die.”

23

He’d tried.  He’d tried to warn everybody, to let them know what the town was dealing with.  He’d called a meeting and brought all the guns and asked Leg and Henry Jameson to guard the hotel’s front door and Butch Hastings and Larry Nolan to guard the back.  He’d spoken loudly and with purpose, like he’d been a lawman for twenty years instead of just two, and he hadn’t taken any bull about any of it.  He’d done everything within his worldly powers that he could.

But the Charred Man had still come calling.  Too fast and too strong and now they were all dying, dead, or about to die, and you couldn’t blame Milo Atkins for running for home.  No sir, nobody could blame him for that.  Not the groaning man he’d just passed, crawling in the dirt with his guts torn out, or the woman who was just standing there in the middle of the street, covered head-to-toe in blood and mumbling to herself as if speaking in tongues. 

At a time like this, a man needed to look after his family. 

He’d known they were in for it when the faces around him changed from confused and angry to surprised, plumb surprised, like all the steam in them had leaked out all of a sudden.  He’d known before he heard the screams at the back of the room, before the first bone snapped and the smell of burnt flesh reached his nose.  He’d known and he’d recalled the face of Hank Chambers, covered in grime and furious at the sheriff’s disbelief.

Luckily, belief was not a problem for Atkins anymore.  Soon as he realized the meeting was over, and more folks were about to die, a lot of folks, he’d ducked low and sprinted through the room, barreling his way through the crowd before any of them could think to do the same.  He’d been the first out the door, in fact, and had tripped over the bodies of Leg and Henry Jameson on the Copper Hotel’s front porch. 

Their eyes bulged from their sockets, almost popped all the way out, and black bruises circled both their necks.  Atkins imagined the Charred Man lifting them off the ground, one in each clawed hand, and squeezing the breath from them until their feet stopped kicking and their bowels loosened, Leg falling as mute as his son.

“I’m sorry, fellas,” Atkins said, scrambling to his feet.  “You did your duty as best you could.”

The screaming started in earnest inside the hotel.  The first couple of escapees burst out of the hotel and tripped over the Jamesons, as Atkins had done.  They fell hard, before they could brace themselves for the impact.  Atkins moved to help them up, but suddenly more folks sprinted out, knocking him into those he was trying to help, and then a third wave of escapees added to the heap, the whole tangle of folks roaring in terror.  Atkins cursed the pile at the top his lungs, picturing his wife and boy weeping over his grave.

At last, a few sensible heads prevailed and the heap began to untangle itself.  Atkins extracted himself from the crush and started pulling others out as well, grabbing any hand he found outstretched and pulling with his heels dug in. 

“Settle yourselves,” he shouted, recalling himself and his position in town.  “Everybody cool off and we’ll get you safe.” 

The shouting helped.  The pile was unpiled, each person freed staggering to his feet and running off into the dark. 

It wasn’t so simple in the hotel’s doorway, though.  Big Reggie Stills had somehow gotten himself wedged sideways against the doorframe, like he’d been running for the door, tripped, and fallen that way, only to have the surge of folks behind him press him into the frame before he could right himself.  Atkins couldn’t see Reggie’s shoulders or legs—only his round gut, protruding through the door as the crush of folks shoved into his spine, bowing it out.      

Big Reggie’s screams were something special, even compared to those coming from further inside the hotel.  Two men, still on their feet, were crammed right behind Reggie, their faces reddening from the forces working at their own backs.  Atkins took a breath, figuring the problem.  He picked up Leg Jameson’s shotgun, checked to see if it was still loaded, and fired both barrels into Reggie’s gut, aiming right where his body was bent the most. 

A scattering of insides flew into the air.  Big Reggie screamed double, his whole body shaking.  Atkins wiped the mess of pulp off his face, picked up the other shotgun, and emptied it into about the same spot.  This time Reggie split open, snapping like a branch bowed too far.  The two men behind him fell through the doorway, landed flat on their faces, and were trampled under by a dozen more folks scrambling for their freedom. 

Those at the back of this group were caught by the demon at their heels and yanked back into the hotel, howling murder.  Atkins removed his pistol from its holster, fired all six rounds into the hotel without taking particular aim, and took off at a sprint, relinquishing his role as the town sheriff right then and there.

He slowed to a walk, his side burning.  The north side of Red Earth seemed quiet and strange after what Atkins had seen downtown.  The cabins and shacks were dark.  No lamps burning, no squabbling, no cries of rough lovemaking.  Only a few whip-thin dogs, curled and sleeping against shut front doors as they waited for dinner scraps.

Atkins prayed his wife was home.  He looked up at the stars and begged them from the pit of his stomach.  He hadn’t seen Violet at the meeting but everything had happened so fast, so fast and then the Charred Man had appeared, tossing folks left and right.  His wife might have been at the meeting the whole time, holding Billy by the hand and waiting to speak to him.

Atkins broke into a run again as he reached the north end of town. 

“Vi?  You home, Vi?”

A light was burning in their cabin.  A shadow moved behind the window and Atkins felt his heart bump. 

“Hey!”

The door opened.  Two figures, one tall and one short, stepped out into the night.  The shorter one dove forward and tackled Atkins around the waist.

“Pa!”

Atkins grabbed the boy and lifted him into the air, sending his little feet swinging.  He hugged him to his chest and breathed in the fresh hay scent of his hair.

“What are they having downtown?” Violet asked.  “Some kind of miner’s ball?”

Atkins took another breath, savoring it, and looked at his wife.  Violet had her white apron on and her hair tied back with a ribbon.  “We heard the blasting earlier,” she said.  “They find a new seam of copper along with those killed miners?  Is that why they’re so riled up tonight?  Billy said there was gunfire in the saloon.”

Atkins set his son down and pushed him toward the cabin. 

“Go inside, Billy.”

“We ate supper without you, Pa.”

“That’s fine, Billy.  Go on in.”

Atkins took his wife in his arms.  He nuzzled her neck and kissed its softness.  He could feel her smiling, even with his eyes closed.  An owl hooted up in the hills and the wind rustled the pine trees. She tasted like salt with a faded bit of soap to it.  He wondered what his father was doing back in Wichita tonight, if the ornery old lawman would ever believe the stories that came back to him from this small company town.

“I love you, Violet,” Atkins told his wife, cupping her narrow shoulders with both his hands.  “I sure do.”

24

Father Lynch fought against waking, even as the noise next-door rose to a babbling clamor.  He’d only slept long enough to enter a deeper phase of sleep—the gin he’d drunk before retiring still warmed his blood, soothing, and the feather down in his pillow was soft and yielding beneath his skull.  He’d lived in Red Earth long enough to expect additional noise on a Saturday eve, the one night the miners would be allowed to sleep in the following day, and whatever was happening at the Copper Hotel reached him only as a natural attendant to the usual revelries.

Until the gunshots and the screams.  They roused him from bed as if he’d been fired from a cannon, sending him stumbling across his dark room in bewilderment.  For a moment he could not recall where he was, or what time it might be, and listened at stiff attention as more screams filled the night, wondering if he’d gone mad.

A new round of gunfire rang out—shotgun blasts, one followed shortly by another, and then six rapid shots from a revolver.  Lynch rubbed the sleep from his face and yawned. 

“Lord.  Another brawl?”

The priest searched the floor for his pants and shoes.  He slipped the pants on one leg at a time, struggling to keep his balance, and sat back on the cot to put on his shoes.  He took his time with the lacing, his vexation rising as he grew more alert.  Sixty-two was too old to be woken so abruptly to such noise.  Really, any age was too old to be woken so rudely.  If the sheriff couldn’t keep the miners reasonably in line perhaps it was time the camp found herself a new sheriff.  One less given to strutting and primping, somebody with a seasoned voice and the respect of hard men.

The floorboards creaked beneath his weight as Father Lynch opened the door to the sanctuary and strode down the aisle, still buttoning his shirt.  The gunshots and the screams had both died off, as if he’d been dreaming them all along.  Lynch opened the back door, winced at the chill, and stepped outside.  As he came round the church’s south side, he halted in his tracks—bodies lay piled around the Copper Hotel, both on its front porch and beneath its shattered front window.  The upper floor was totally dark and, as Father Lynch watched, the last light on the first floor was snuffed out as well.

Lynch crossed himself and turned his head.  Across the street, the Runoff Saloon was shuttered and dark and the street before it was littered with bodies lying face down or upon their sides.  In fact, a woman had fallen only a few yards from the church, her neck torn open and one arm outstretched toward the church as if in supplication. 

The priest searched his mind for some possible explanation for all this, something to do with the violence earlier that day, but could find none.  He wanted to call out, to step into the street and see to the fallen, but instinct held him back in the shadow of the church and told him to wait a moment.

He did not have to wait long.  A tall, spindly man stepped through the Copper Hotel’s doorway and tilted his head toward the night sky, listening.  The spindly man’s posture was strange, both stiff and slightly off-kilter, and he wore ill-fitting clothes as well—his white shirt sagged off his shoulders and his overlarge pants billowed around his legs.  Lynch shivered, glad the wind was blowing toward him, and then wondered at his gladness.

Perhaps it was the stranger’s hands.  The right was much larger than the left, the fingers elongated and almost claw-like, like the pinchers of a crab.  Was this because of a sickness of some kind?  A defect of birth? 

The stranger lowered his chin and scanned the street.  He had a large, scab-like patch on his cheek—the scab appeared to grow and recede in size steadily, as if it had a pulse of its own.

The priest’s breath caught in his chest. 

This man was the reason for the gunshots and the screams.  This stranger was the cause of the dead lying in the street.

Father Lynch forced his body to stillness while the tall stranger turned his gaze toward the church.  He did not wonder if the porch’s shadows shielded him from the stranger’s gaze or pray to the Lord to be passed over.  He stopped thinking altogether.  He was an emptiness…

    until…

          finally…

the stranger turned away again, heading south down the street, his stride awkward and unsure, as if he were still learning to use his spindly legs.

Father Lynch remained immobile until the stranger disappeared into the dark.  Then, and only then, did he allow himself to breath once more, to slip slowly back into the church and lock the door behind him.

25

None of the girls came back from the town meeting.  They’d all gone, all of them, hoping for excitement and gossip, and they’d wanted Ingrid to go along.  They’d gotten all fancied up in their best going-to-town clothes, like proper ladies, with their hair combed and ribboned and their mouths rinsed with salted water.  They’d all gone and begged her to come along, too.  “I do not believe anything can be accomplished by men, or by any meeting involving men,” she’d told them, still stung by Revis Cooke’s rejection.  “You ladies go on without me.”

Anita and Gertrude and Sarah and Ruth and Elizabeth and Agnes and Alexandra and Rachel and Daphne and Odette and Grace and even Madam Petrov, the old iron-skinned Russian herself, hadn’t made it back from the doings at the Copper Hotel.  Ingrid had a hard time imagining anything, man or bear or haunt, tougher than that woman—Madam Petrov drank nothing but hot black tea that tasted like tar, ate nothing but meat and potatoes, and could haul a keg of beer on her shoulder like it was a scrap of cloud.

Now it was only her and Caleb left to run things.  Well, her and Caleb and Elwood Hayes, who’d taken over while everybody else looked about the saloon stupefied and shocked.  He ordered the folks who were badly hurt to be taken to rooms on the first floor and everybody else to start stacking furniture against the saloon’s front and back doors.  He’d nailed the wood down as best he could, both into the walls and the floor.  He also had Caleb turn all the lanterns low and shutter the windows—Ingrid had never seen a man so unsettled and sure of himself at the same time.

When all the moving and hammering was over, she came up beside Elwood and touched his elbow.

“You think he’s going to leave us be if we keep the lights down low?”

“I don’t know.  Never dealt with a demon before.  Their reasoning is as strange to me as any woman’s.”

Ingrid smiled and met his eyes.  “We’re not that hard to figure, Mr. Hayes.  We just want fair treatment and a look now and then.”

“I’ll keep that in mind, Miss Blomvik.”

“Actually, I’m Mrs. Blomvik, Mr. Hayes.  I was married once, but he passed on a few years back.”

“Is that so?  I’m sorry to hear that.”

Ingrid looked across the room at the three miner wives, all of them newly minted widows, who were sitting in a circle, pale with shock and drinking coffee without a table between them.  Counting the widows and four prospectors who’d been lodging at the Copper, they numbered twelve healthy bodies on the saloon floor and five wounded in the rooms, including the National man Elwood had shot in the knee.  Everyone else in town had either scattered back to their cabins or had already been killed.

Ingrid crossed her arms, frowning at the furniture nailed to the walls.

“I’m going to be seeing my husband soon enough, I suppose.”

Elwood curled his arm around her shoulders and smiled. 

“Naw.  We’ll get this figured, sooner or later.”

“Like we figured robbing Mr. Cooke?”

Elwood laughed.

“Well, there’s no accounting for a company man.  Once they’ve swallowed the hook, you can’t get them off the line for anything.”

Ingrid leaned closer into Elwood.  She liked his strong arm around her shoulder, his warmth.

“How long—”

“They’re dead,” somebody shouted, making everybody in the room jump.  It was Owen Hayes, as pale and glassy-eyed as anybody she’d ever seen, even the girls she’d known who’d taken laudanum.

“The three folks wounded at the Copper are dead.  Their wounds turned black.”

Elwood took his arm back and crossed the room. 

“What about Stubbs?  Is Stubbs dead?”

“Hell no, I ain’t dead.”  Clem Stubbs stepped through the doorway to the hall, keeling to the side a bit and holding his wounded shoulder with his good hand.  “I’m soused as hell, though.”

Stubbs exhaled loudly, rumbling his lips together like a horse.  His hat had gotten lost somewhere and his red hair was a tangled and wild as his beard—he reminded Ingrid of an overgrown lilac bush. 

“You should be in bed, Stubbs,” Elwood said, fetching a chair and lowering the big man into it.  “That shoulder will howl at you for a week.”

“Let it howl.  Besides, how’s a man supposed to sleep with all that hammering?”  Stubbs nodded at the tables they’d thrown over the doors and windows.  “Looks like a poor attempt at the Alamo.”

“This is the Alamo,” Elwood allowed.  “Our own.”

Elwood told Clem Stubbs about what’d happened since they’d pried the bullet from his shoulder, occasionally looking to Owen or Roach Clayton to confirm what he was saying.  The whole room listened to Elwood talk, like they were hearing the story for the first time themselves, and when he finished it was so quiet you could hear the wind outside.  The story seemed just as wild to Ingrid as she heard it for a second time, like something out of a tall tales book you read to children before bed. 

“Jesus, that’s something,” Clem Stubbs said, scratching his bearded cheek.  “That reminds me of the skin-walkers the Navajos talk about.”   Elwood glanced around the room.

“Skin-walkers?”

“Yup, except they’re more like witches.  They can turn themselves into animals when they feel like it.  Bears and wolves and such.  That Charred Man doesn’t sound like any kind of animal I ever seen.”

“Maybe he was a skin-walker a long time back,” Owen said, “but the Indians in these parts found him out.”

“Or maybe he’s a pure demon,” one of the widows said, staring into her coffee cup.  “Sent by the Devil to take us all to Hell.”

The room was quiet another moment, till Stubbs laughed.

“Well, if that’s so, I’m not going easy.  How many guns have we got, El?”

“We tried shooting him already,” Roach said, his voice soft and far away.  “Elwood told you that part.”

“You must have missed him, that’s all.  Look at those sorry spectacles you’re wearing.”

Roach sighed and looked at the ceiling.  One of the widows shifted on her chair, making it creak.  They all looked her way.

“We just need to figure this out,” Elwood said.  “Anything can be figured if you chew on it long enough.”

The night passed slowly in the dim light of the turned-down lamps.  Four times they heard a scream outside, but none of them lasted long.  The men checked and rechecked their guns, making sure what little they had was loaded and ready.  Elwood, Clem, Roach, and Owen each had a revolver, Caleb the scatter gun he kept under the bar, and Ingrid the small one-shot pistol she’d found in Madam Petrov’s dresser.  Elwood had placed the armed men so that each faced a corner of the room, with their backs to the bar and a second man at their side to help keep them awake.  The widows had gathered up their own chairs and set them behind the bar counter, so that when they sat again only their heads showed above the bar.  Ingrid sat on the landing halfway up the stairs, with the one-shot in her lap and a good view of the saloon floor. 

Elwood Hayes didn’t sit, though.  He kept pacing the room and bothering the furniture they’d nailed across the windows and doors, testing it for weakness and muttering to himself.  He was like a dog chewing its tail, wondering at the pain but still willing to give it another try.  Everybody watched him cross back and fourth like he was a stage show, hoping that every pursing of his lips hinted at a breakthrough, at a thought nobody else had come up with yet.  Something good to save their lives.

Right at one A.M., the coach guard with the shot knee woke in his room, bellowed his pain and confusion, and passed out again.  “Jesus,” Clem Stubbs said, shuddering.  “I think I need to start drinking again.  I can handle my shoulder—it’s the waiting that’s special agony.”

“I’ll go check on him,” one of the widows said, rising from her chair.  She looked at her two friends in a meaningful way, wringing her hands.  They both sighed and agreed to go with her.

“Thank you,” Elwood said, going round the bar again.  “I appreciate that.”

Owen Hayes turned in his chair to look at his brother.  “What about upstairs, El?  What about the windows in those bedrooms?”

“I shuttered those, too,” Caleb said, yawning and stretching out his arms.  “Locked them tight.”

“But they’re not boarded, are they?”

“No,” Caleb admitted.  “I didn’t get to that.”

“I’ll do it,” Elwood said.  “You stay with Roach and Clem and see to it nothing gets through down here.”

“Yes, sir,” Owen said, straightening in his chair and snapping his hand in mock salute.  “Yes, sir, Mr. High and Mighty General, sir!”

Elwood ignored the sass and made up a pile of boards, setting a hammer on top of the pile and jamming a fistful of nails into his pocket.  He was relieved to have something to focus on, something that wasn’t pacing round the room and figuring.  He picked up the stack of boards and started for the stairway.

Ingrid rose on the landing and smoothed the front of her dress.  “I can help,” she said.  “I’ll hold the boards.”

The stairs creaked as Elwood climbed the first flight.

“Could use the help, now that you mention it.”

The outlaw set the boards at the top of the stairs and drew his gun.  “You hear anything funny, run back down and call the others.”

“What—”

“Wait here a moment.”

And like that he was headed down the hall and opening the door to the first room, gun at the ready.  He poked his head in, looked around, and stepped back.

“Still empty, shutters locked.”

“Well, I am glad to hear that—”

He was already gone again, poking his head into the second room.  He said the same thing when he came out of that room, too, and five rooms after that.  His mind seemed to work like a train, moving steadily, sure, but one track at a time.  After the last room, he picked up the hammer and some of the boards.

“He’s not up here.  Not yet, anyhow.”

Ingrid nodded.  Hayes took out a handful of nails from his pocket and hefted them in his hand.

“Well, let’s start down at that first room.”

“Sure.  You’re the carpenter, Mr. Hayes.”

They didn’t have much light to work with, only what came from downstairs.  The first room, like all the others in the Runoff Saloon, had only one window, neither large nor small, which a board could easily be fitted across. 

“This was Madam Petrov’s room.”

Elwood stuck a few nails in his teeth.  Ingrid held the board across the window and he hammered a nail into the board’s upper right corner, taking only two knocks to send it home. 

“Smells like powders and perfume in this room.”

“They all smell like that here,” Ingrid said, shifting her grip on the board.  “Except Caleb’s, I suppose.” 

Elwood hammered a second nail into the board’s upper left corner. 

“Madam Petrov was scared of smelling like an old woman,” Ingrid said, releasing the board and letting it hang on its own.  “And she only fifty.”

Elwood grunted, holding on to his thoughts.  Ingrid blew a puff of warm air into her bangs.

“You think we’re going to die tonight, Mr. Hayes?”

“Can’t say, but I hope not.  Haven’t raised near enough hell to suit me.  Figure I got a good ten more years in me yet.”

Ingrid smiled and got a second board ready.  When they’d boarded the window tight they moved on to the other rooms.  They took their time, doing the job well.  Ingrid went to the railing and checked on the saloon a few times, but nothing had changed down there except the widows had fallen asleep behind the bar, wrapped in blankets and huddled together.  When they finished boarding the last window, the one in her own bedroom, Ingrid came up and hugged Elwood Hayes from behind.  He stiffened at her touch, then exhaled and leaned into her grasp.  She hugged him tighter, squeezing her eyes shut.

“I don’t want Revis Cooke to be the last man I shared a bed with, Mr. Hayes.”

“That so?”

“Yes, sir.  It is.”

They stood like that for a long moment, with her arms around him, both wavering slightly on their feet, as if they could fall in about any direction.  He turned and she let him go, opening her eyes.  He was a dark outline against a darker room, a hammer swinging loose from his hand.

“You’re a lovely woman, Mrs. Blomvik.  A pure beauty.” 

She flushed at the compliment.  He leaned down and kissed her, his lips rough and cracked.  She reached up and laced her hands behind his neck, drawing him toward her, and returned his kiss with a longer, more open one.  A heat she barely recalled rose into her cheeks, something she had not thought she’d feel again.  Not after putting Erik in the ground like that, dressed in his black Sunday best, a bouquet of cattails and sunflowers clutched between his stiffened fingers.  The heat that drew you to a man like a pull you had no control over.

She closed the door and lifted her dress over her head, pulling the cotton over her breasts and head in one swift, fluid motion, leaving her standing in her slip alone.  Elwood reached behind his back, pulled out his gun, and set it carefully on the dresser.

“Should keep that handy.”