Andersonville (22 page)

Barclay had a hell of a time making the two Pennsylvania Dutchmen and the Spaniard understand why they were accelerating their progress, and by the time Skinny and Bill returned with the other Pennsylvanians and the two Irishmen, they had lost thirty minutes arguing.

As soon as Skinny appeared and explained the situation, though, everyone fell into his role. They all trusted his judgment.

While Skinny dug, the German and the Pennsylvanian relayed buckets of uncovered clay back down the tunnel, and the Puerto Rican manned the bellows. Bill, Barclay, and two of the Pennsylvanians, Roberts and Enderlein, began a fairly regular relay of ascending and descending, disposing of the clay and earth. They kept it up throughout the night, with the two Irishmen keeping watch.

Somewhere around two in the morning he and Bill were walking along the banks of the creek shedding dirt when he noticed that the scaffold had been completed and stood in a circle of dim, dying torchlight like the skeleton of some elder beast uncovered at last. The six nooses hung in the still air.

He knew then that in case he was delayed in his errand, he had to do something to prolong the sacrifice.

“Lend me your knife,” he said to Bill.

Bill handed it over.

“Go on back. I'll be there directly.”

“This is your show, Barclay,” the Indian said. “You're the one wanted us to double-time it.”

“Don't worry, I'll be there,” he said, and slipped away without further argument.

The camp was mostly still. The carpenters' torches were spluttering, casting the simple plank deadfall scaffold in sinister hues. This was no mere execution machine but a sacrificial altar standing on cursed ground.

He would be exposed atop it even in the low light, so he went quickly down to the creek and dunked his cap in the water, then returned. He went around one by one to each of the four torches, using his soaking-wet kepi as a bell extinguisher, dousing the lights one at a time until the skeletal platform with its six ropes was nothing more than a dark silhouette.

He took off his shoes then, tucking them under his arm, and mounted the short stair. When one of the planks creaked beneath his feet, he crouched there for a full minute before moving on.

When he finally reached the top, he dared to stand and, reaching up, gripped one of the nooses and sawed at the braids with Bill's knife. He knew the rope had to appear sound, so he only scored it before moving to the next one.

He had barely put the blade edge to the rope when he heard a sneeze and dropped onto his belly.

He lay there for what seemed like forever until, straining his eyes to the point of watering in the dark, he saw a thin figure approach the base of the stair.

He held the knife ready, knowing he would have to kill if he was discovered.

The figure stepped onto the stair.

Barclay rolled noiselessly onto his side. Was it one of the Regulators? If it was Romeo or Limber or one of the other possessed men, he probably could see him clearly in the darkness. It couldn't be one of them. If it was, Bill's knife wouldn't do anything, anyway.

The figure got halfway up the stair, then crouched and immediately straightened.

Barclay heard the scrape of something heavy.

The man turned and descended again, then departed. Just a carpenter who had forgotten or perhaps stowed his contraband hammer and had come to retrieve it.

Barclay took a breath. He wanted to score the other nooses, but he knew he couldn't afford to wait any longer.

He slipped off the platform and made his way back to Skinny's.

Skinny was irate.

“Where the hell have you been, Lourdes? We've only got two hours till the show's off.”

“So let's get it done, then,” Barclay said.

The exhausted tunnelers were rotated out to disposal and lookout duty. Enderlein went first into the passage with the shovel, then Bill, then Barclay, taking over the relay duty. It was two hours of painful crawling back and forth in the cramped tunnel, moving the buckets in and out of the passage. One of the Irishmen, O'Bannon, manned the bellows, and though it did provide a gush of fresh air whenever Barclay neared it to pass the bucket up, he couldn't imagine the meager air Bill and Enderlein were getting farther down the tunnel, if any.

The work was exhausting, and the thought of the tons of shifting sand waiting to come down through the crumbling clay ceiling of the passage caused Barclay's heart to hammer in his chest. He kept his breaths shallow and quick, but the blood pounded in his ears. They worked mainly in darkness, it being too close and the air too precious to burn away with candlelight. The only sign that they were not in the grave itself was the pinprick of light from the flickering candle O'Bannon kept on the shelf in the vertical shaft.

They did not speak as they worked, but the huffing of their breath let each man know the others still lived.

Then, when Barclay felt he couldn't stand the dark closeness any longer, Bill whispered to him: “Enderlein figures another couple feet and he's past the outer wall.”

Barclay inched laboriously back to O'Bannon and watched the Irishman smile between his feet when he passed him the word.

Then there was a strange sound from up ahead, and Enderlein shrieked once. It was the sound of rushing water.

God, thought Barclay. Had they misjudged their direction and doubled back to the creek? Had they struck some underground spring they hadn't anticipated?

O'Bannon reacted quickly and, gripping Barclay by the ankles, yanked him out of the tunnel into the shaft.

They had three ropes made from braided cloth tied around the leg of each man in the tunnel proper.

O'Bannon grabbed one and began to pull furiously.

Barclay sat up and pulled the other.

High above, Skinny's face appeared over the hole.

“What's the matter?” he called down in as loud a whisper as he could manage.

“I don't know! Trouble! Underground spring, maybe, or—”

At that moment the water gushed from the tunnel and spread across the floor of the shaft.

Except it wasn't water.

It was blood.

Not some dark mud as Limber had suggested the night he'd pulled the red-tipped root from the ground. As before, he could smell the copper taint, feel the consistency as it swiftly rose to his ankles. It was blood, and it was filling the tunnel.

“My God!” O'Bannon exclaimed, pausing in his work at the sight of the stuff pooling around his ankles.

“Keep pulling, goddammit!” Barclay yelled over the rushing blood, which was now threatening their calves.

Barclay pulled for all he was worth, and in a few moments he was rewarded as Bill Mixinisaw came kicking and splashing out of the tunnel, entirely painted red.

So O'Bannon had a hold of Enderlein.

“What happened?” Barclay asked, pulling the sputtering Indian up out of the stuff.

“I don't know, I don't know,” Bill said. “He was digging, and he stopped and stuck the spade in the ground. It all just started rushing in…There's something in there.”

“What?”

“I felt something claw at me.”

“Here he comes!” O'Bannon bellowed triumphantly.

The left foot of Enderlein broke the surface of the well of blood as O'Bannon dragged it from the tunnel with effort.

Enderlein's leg was not attached.

Instead, a terrifying face breached the surface of the frothing blood. It was thin and skull-like, devoid of hair yet not entirely fleshless, for it had flabby overlarge ears and a batlike nose that flared and inflated twin bubbles of blood at the first taste of air. Its jaw was clamped down on the ragged end of Enderlein's disembodied foot, at the ankle, where the torn flesh exposed a piece of crushed bone to which it had affixed its double rows of triangular serrated bloodstained teeth. The brow was downturned in the extreme, the red-painted flesh of the forehead wrinkled in astounding, almost mesmerizing patterns amid a blanket of ugly tumorous growths so large that they flapped independently with every movement of the grotesque head.

Then, from that scarlet mask, the vertical lids covering its two bulbous eyes slid open.

The shaft was filled with blinding yellow light, as if from a theater spot.

Then Barclay knew it was a kastiri. The same blazing light he had seen diffused in Turner's eyes in his vision now shined unhooded from this horror paddling into the shaft.

“Don't look in its eyes!” he warned, throwing his back to the well and shielding himself from the glare with his hand.

The blood was up to his thighs now.

The kastiri screeched shrilly, dropping Enderlein's foot, and leaped from the tunnel, spreading out impossibly long, thin arms that ended in long, dramatically curved red talons like the claws of a digging mole.

It bore down on O'Bannon and dragged him down beneath the surface of the ever-rising pool of blood.

Bill screamed and started to climb the shaft, throwing his feet against one wall and his back against the opposite one, hopping nimbly up.

The blood covering him now drizzled in a red rain down on Barclay, who groped in the pool for O'Bannon, trying to snag his thrashing arms and legs. He gripped a limb and pulled but found he had gotten hold of the kastiri's arm. Its hard flesh was scorching to the touch and burned his fingers red before he let go with a yelp.

He straightened and looked up. Bill was halfway up the shaft. Suddenly the sandy wall against which his back was braced collapsed inward. Two sharp clawed red hands burst out and wrapped themselves around his torso, pulling the Indian in.

The blood was up to Barclay's waist, and O'Bannon had stopped fighting.

Now the thing surfaced and stood in the shaft, popping its jaws, rending some unidentifiable hunk of O'Bannon to stringy sinew in its jaws.

Behind it, the tunnel opening, nearly submerged, expelled a third blood-covered kastiri into the pit with him.

The bellows floated by, and he snatched it, the only weapon handy, as the demon that had killed O'Bannon lunged at him.

He swung the bellows against its head twice, driving it back, then jammed the nozzle into one of its blazing eyes.

Something fell across his shoulders. It was one of the corded cloth ropes. He gripped it with both hands and leaped as above him Skinny and the German hoisted for all they were worth. The other kastiri sprang past its afflicted counterpart and latched on to his leg. It pulled itself up, tearing open his tunic, and bit deep into his side. He howled in agony. The thing's touch was already like a hot stove. Its bite felt like burning coals punching through his flesh.

The withering pain nearly made him let go of the rope. He frantically searched for a weapon. Looking down at the thing as it wrenched its maw around in his side, he remembered the long fang on the rawhide cord around his neck that Boston Corbett had given him. The tooth of one of Turner's hellhounds.

He grabbed it, broke it from his neck, and drove it into the ear of the kastiri like a dagger. Instantly its bite slackened, and it released him. It tumbled down the shaft, but instead of crashing onto its fellow below, it disincorporated with a splash of blood and was gone.

As he haltingly ascended in intermittent darkness, the sand walls began to crumble all around him, and a myriad of sharp-nailed hands reached out to claim him as they had Bill Mixinisaw. They ripped and tore at him, but he swung the tooth all around, and wherever it struck, the groping claws recoiled.

He nearly stabbed blindly at Jorge and Skinny as they pulled him free of the hole and into the tent but recognized them in the last instant and allowed himself to be extricated.

He fell on his back, clutching at his bleeding side.

Skinny loomed over him.

“What the hell happened down there?” he hissed.

Barclay tried to gasp a warning, but it was too late.

Over Skinny's shoulder, Jorge and the German were both looking into the hole when the glaring yellow light burst forth, blinding them, lighting up the whole tent like the sun.

They were pulled inside with little more than a grunt of protest.

The Irishman and the two Pennsylvanians entered the tent, alarmed and querulous at how swiftly the plan had failed.

Then the ground at the Irishman's feet crumbled. Two long bloody arms shot up; the claws plunged into his belly, hooked over his pelvis, and yanked him down through the sand. He moaned as he went.

One of the Pennsylvanians also was pulled down. His comrade grabbed his arms and, bracing himself, tried to free his friend, but the man let out a bone-shaking scream and his upper half broke away, falling atop his would-be rescuer, the jagged, broken, bloody spine protruding where his torso prematurely terminated.

Then two pairs of crimson arms shot out of the ground around the Pennsylvanian, who was now on his back with the dead upper half of his friend on top, and pulled them together through the floor of the tent.

The coppery smell of blood was thick and choking.

The ground near Barclay's face crumbled, and spindly red arms broke through, pushing a bony, blood-soaked upper body and an unwieldy tumorous head free. The fell eyes opened, freezing him like a toad beneath a hunter's light.

Skinny took up his ball and chain and swung it in an overhead arc like a morning star, bringing it down so hard on the kastiri's skull that its head drove down into its upper torso so that only its upper eyelids and forehead showed over its broken collarbone. But the deceptively frail-looking creature backhanded its attacker so hard that Skinny's head turned completely around with a horrifying crack.

Skinny, his head now facing the wrong direction, stumbled backward, fell, got up again, and staggered toward the door of the tent, affording Barclay a grotesque view of his slack face, blood spurting from his lips, eyes blinking in surprise over his shoulders before he stepped into the open shaft and tumbled mercifully from sight.