The Year's Best Dark Fantasy and Horror (33 page)

The hill slopes down from the house toward a stand of birch trees. It has taken him longer than he realized to find the things he needs; the golden light is deepening to dusk, purple gloaming creeping out from the trees and the shadow of the house.

He builds a fire halfway down the hill, working quickly but carefully. It takes him three tries to light it because his hands are shaking. He kneels by the fire, choosing a position where he can see the house without turning his back on the birch trees. His wife loved the birches, and he feels them watching.

He gives the scarf to the fire first, then the photograph. They burn quickly; he watches his own face blacken and disappear. Then, although he knows they will not melt, he throws her keys in the fire. And he asks again, desperately, “Why do you linger?”

He sees movement and looks at the house. She comes out the back door and walks down the hill toward him and the fire. In the dusk she glows faintly, like moonlight.

He stands up as she approaches, curbing his desire to run from her, and asks again, “Why do you linger?”

She says nothing, and her face does not change.

“Damn you,” he cries, “answer me!”

She stands and looks at him and does not speak.

He takes a step toward her before he remembers that she is dead and he cannot touch her. He says, “Please. You have to let me go.”

He sees the anger flare in her eyes, sees the snarl she wears when she comes to him at night. She opens her mouth and cries in a terrible, thin, inhuman voice, “You were all that I had!”

He flinches back from her, from her black, boiling, dead pain. “You were all that I had, so how can I let you go? All that I had,” she cries, “all that I had.”

But she is fading; all her power was in her silence. He can see her beginning to tatter, her substance drifting away upward like smoke. She stretches out her hands toward him, but they are already dissolving. “All that I had,” she cries, her voice faint and distant like the wind in the birch trees, and then she is gone. He can feel her absence like a throbbing pain in the bones of his skull and hands, and knows that he is free of her at last.

Numbly, methodically, he puts out the fire, using the garden hose to be sure the last lingering spark is extinguished. He gets the shovel and his work gloves from the shed and digs a hole; he puts his wife’s keys in the pillowcase and drops the pillowcase in the hole. He shovels the ashes and earth back over the pillowcase and tamps the whole thing down carefully.

He replaces the shovel, gloves, hose. Full dark is almost here. He walks back into the empty, dusty, silent house, and shuts the door behind him.

Why do you linger?

There was power in those stories, in seeing them slide up against one another like cards in a poker hand you know will win the pot.

Vampire Lake
Norman Partridge

Part One: Rumson’s Saloon

They heard the bounty killer an hour before they saw him. Out there in the desert night. Playing that harmonica of his, though the sounds that came out of it weren’t anything you’d call music. But he kept at it, and the racket carved the desert sands like Lucifer trenching a brimstone field with his pitchfork. A man who could raise that kind of hell with a harmonica was a man who could unsettle a room full of other men.

And that’s why the customers sitting in Rumson’s saloon did the things they did. Some slapped coin to the bar and made their exits. Others ordered up and drank more deeply, which pleased the barkeep. Still others unbuckled their gunbelts as the man with the harmonica drew nearer. They rolled leather studded with sheathed bullets around holstered Colts, and they stowed those weapons far from reluctant hands.

Outside, the harmonica had grown silent. The creak of saddle-leather put a crease in the night. Then footsteps sounded across plank boards, and the bounty killer came through the batwings of Rumson’s place.

He wore a patched coat the color of the desert, and he was dragging a man on a chain. One yank and the bounty killer bellied up to the bar. The gunman set his harmonica on the nicked pine surface. No one noticed the blood on the tarnished instrument, not with the poor skinny bastard trussed up in chains and padlocks crouching at the killer’s feet. As far as the occupants of Rumson’s saloon were concerned, that was the hunk of misery worth looking at, not a bloodstained Hohner that blew sour even on days that were sweet.

The bartender asked the bounty killer where he’d captured the man, and the gunman shook his head. Said the raw-boned Mex was a dynamite man who’d been locked up for years, and just tonight the bounty killer had broken him out of Yuma Territorial. “His name is Indio. If he put his mind to it, he could blow the gates off hell with a pissed-on fuse and a quarter-stick sweating nitro.”

“The hell you say,” Rumson said.

“The hell I do,” said the bounty killer.

The bartender shrugged. “What can I get you?”

“Salt. Tequila. A guide.”

“A guide? Where to?”

“Vampire Lake.”

The bartender raised an eyebrow. “Most folks say there ain’t no place like that in the world. It’s just a legend, like the cave that’s supposed to hold it. Of course, other folks say differently.”

“That’s what I hear. Same way I hear there’s a kid in this town who’s paid hell’s own tab for a visit to that brimstone pit. Same way I hear there’s a saloon-keeper who keeps that kid locked up in a cage and charges folks a double eagle to hear his story.”

“Sounds to me like you’re talking about a man who’s got a piece of property and a piece of business. And that business would be the kid talking, not getting on a horse and riding to hell and gone out of here. A piece of business like you’re talking about would be worth a good deal more than the freight you’d pay to hear an evening’s worth of words.”

“Let me talk to the boy about that.”

“Let me see the color of your money.”

“I think you’ve seen plenty enough money out of this deal already. My business is with the boy, not the half-shingled bastard who keeps him locked up like a circus chimp.”

At the sound of those words, the bartender jerked in his boots. The two men stared at each other across the bar, nothing between them but dim quiet. Both of them watching and waiting for the thing that would happen next.

It was the dynamite man who broke the silence. “Amigo. If you’re so soft on men in cages, what about me? I’ve been in a cage up in Yuma for three damn years. Why don’t you crank a key in these locks and let me go, and we can call it square?”

“Shut up,” the bounty killer said. “You’re doing time for armed robbery and murder. Three years ago, you blew out a bank wall in Tucumcari and killed four men. I caught up to you in a whorehouse, stuck a pistol in your face, and the Territory of Arizona locked you in the poke. But I’m the one who put you in there, so I figure that gives me the right to take you out if I have the need. Once I’m done with you, maybe I’ll take you back.”

“You can get started on that little trip right now,” Rumson said. “Get the hell out of my bar, and take that Mexican trash with you.”

“Uh-uh. I don’t move until you bring me that boy.”

“You’ll move. And directly—”

Rumson reached under the bar for a sawed-off shotgun. Before his hands could make the trip the barkeep lost the equipment to say anything. The stranger’s pistol saw to that. It came out of its holster rattler-quick and sprayed Rumson’s head across the barroom wall. In the brief moment after the bullet did its work, what was left of Rumson’s skull looked like a diseased egg dropped by one sick chicken. By the time that bloody hunk of gristle hit the floor, the bounty killer’s black rattler of a pistol was back in its holster.

Rumson’s corpse followed his head, thudding against the bar, toppling bottles on its way to the floor. After that, the only sound was the barkeep’s blood dripping off the wall and ceiling, making scarlet divots in a patch of sawdust behind the bar. Leastways, that was the only sound until the real commotion started. Chair legs scraped hardwood as men scrambled for the batwing doors, but it was the click of pistol hammers in the hands of fools with more guts than brains that brought the bounty killer’s gun out of its holster again. When that happened there was more terror and tumult in Rumson’s Saloon than there were shadows, and the gleam of that black Colt springing through the darkness sent a stampede scrambling for the doorway as the first shots were fired. As the crowd scrambled more men filled their hands with pistols of their own, but none of those pistols would put a man in mind of a snake.

The bounty killer’s black rattler did its work. And when it was empty he ducked behind the bar and came up with Rumson’s shotgun. And when that was empty, it was all over.

Or more properly: It had just begun.

Four men remained alive in the bar. The bounty killer. The dynamite man on a chain. A dark-eyed blacksmith roughly the size of a barn door. And a calculating preacher who kept a running ledger on the flyleaf pages of the prayer book tucked inside a pocket of his claw-hammer coat.

“Where’s the boy?” the gunman asked.

“Probably out back eating a live chicken, feathers and all,” the preacher said. “That child is crazy, mister. Apaches captured him in the desert. God knows what lies he told those red bastards, but it put them in a temper. A few days later some scalphunters found the boy tied to a wagon wheel, his head cooking over a Mescalaro fire along with a couple of scrawny prairie hens. The birds had gone to cinders, but the kid had it worse. Half his face was burned off, and his brain was boiling in his skull like a Christmas pudding. Just because that misery scorched some nightmares in his head don’t make them true.”

“You talk but you don’t tell me anything I need to know.” The killer reloaded his pistol, slapped the cylinder closed, and gave it a spin for emphasis. “I asked one question. That question was:
Where?
”

“You don’t need gun for answer.” The blacksmith’s voice was heavy with an accent born in a German forest he’d never see again. “Boy is out back—in cage in barn, behind horse stalls. No rivets in cage; all welds. Three locks on it. Hasps as strong as bars. Double-thick, like plates.”

“How do you know all that?”

The blacksmith blinked. Words jumped from one tongue to another in his head, then made the trip through his lips. “I forge bars. I build locks and hasps. I make cage.”

The bounty killer cocked his black rattler.

“Let’s take a look,” he said.

The barn doors swung open. Boots whispered over the dirty hay that covered the barn floor. A lantern swung on a creaky handle in the preacher’s hand. It was close to midnight now, and the place was so dark it seemed the night had heaved in a dozen extra buckets of shadow.

The darkness lay heaviest in a patch transfixed by iron bars near the back corner of the barn. “Give me that lantern,” the bounty killer said. Light played across the black bars as he took it from the preacher, and light painted the occupant along with the contents of the cage—a scuffed plate that didn’t get used much and a few tattered books that did:
Idylls of the King,
The Thousand and One Nights,
and a dime novel about Billy the Kid.

“Look at that damned animal,” the preacher said. “Face like a scorched biscuit. The brain of a kicked chicken. Stinks like an Arizona outhouse in August.”

Everyone squinted in the lantern’s glow. Only the blacksmith knew better than to look. He stared down at his mule-eared boots. But the dynamite man didn’t know better. He took a good long look. Then he turned his head and retched up his supper.

The bounty killer stared through the bars without saying a word. He fished the dead bartender’s key ring from his pocket. A moment later he went to work with three of the keys, slipping padlocks from hasps, opening the door.

Part Two: The Town

“Come out of there,” the bounty killer said.

“Yes, sir,” I said.

I picked up my chicken. Henrietta flapped some, shedding a few of the feathers I hadn’t plucked. I petted her and told her to hush, but she flapped her naked wings and squawked up a storm.

“Looks like we interrupted his supper,” the preacher said.

I glared at him and didn’t say a word, though there were plenty inside me I could have put to work. Instead I held Henrietta close, stretched myself in the lantern glow, and watched my shadow cast a path that led straight to the door.

We stood outside around an empty barrel, the lantern set on top of it. The bounty killer pulled a bank book from his pocket. “You get me to Vampire Lake, what’s in this book is yours. It amounts to twenty years of killing and twenty years of bounties. The four of you get back alive, you can split it four ways.” With that, he slapped the book on the barrelhead next to the lantern so we could get a look at it.

The blacksmith was confused. “This is book. Just paper.”

“These days money is just paper, too, amigo,” Indio said. “Banks are full of it, and one page from a book like this can bring many dollars. What our friend here collected for me and my gang alone would keep us in whores for a year.”

“But I am blacksmith. Not killer.”

“I take care of that job,” the bounty killer said. “But there are other jobs that need doing. The kid here, he’s our guide. He’ll take us through the desert, find that cave, lead us down to the underground lake where those dead things roost. And Indio will take care of any trouble we run into along the way that can be handled with dynamite.”

The big man said it again: “But I am blacksmith.”

“Yeah. That’s what you’ve got inside you, but it’s bundled up in one hell of a package. Where we’re going, I need a man who tops a couple hundred pounds and doesn’t mind the scorch of hot coals. You’re elected.”

“Those three I understand.” The preacher picked up the bank book and stared hard at the balance. “You need yourself a birddog, you’ve got a biscuit-faced geek uglier than Satan’s own bitch. You think you’re going to dynamite the gates of hell, you want the Mex along. The other one is a freight train on legs and too stupid to think for himself. But what about me? Why do you want a preacher along?”