The Year's Best Dark Fantasy and Horror (35 page)

“One yank of that strap and I dropped from the wagon bed. Another and I skidded across the sand. The dead man dragging me had no more trouble than if he was pulling a canteen behind him. He was just a shadow, but he was strong, with hands and arms like vined midnight. He turned that face built of smoke in my direction and smiled a butcher-shop smile. I screamed my head off, but there was no one to help me—every one of us who was still sucking wind was in the same fix. But those shadows didn’t care. They just dragged us along, through the dirt and the patches of blood spilled by our kinfolks. And we set up a chorus of screams that sounded sure enough like a parade of souls headed straight for Satan’s pit.”

The wind rose just then, and the fire kicked up a crackle. The Mex crossed himself, and so did the blacksmith. Their eyes were trained on the campfire and the white smoke that rose from it, which swirled and twisted like it was trying to knot the darkness.

“Jesus, Mary, and Joseph,” the blacksmith said.

Indio nodded.
“Madre de dios.”

“What a load of horseshit,” the preacher said.

“I told you once to shut up,” the bounty killer warned. And to me: “Go on.”

“They dragged us into that coffin hole one by one, then through a burrow no wider than one a wolf would dig. That burrow widened into a tunnel, and then a cave. It was nothing but dark in there. Still, I heard things and nailed them up in my memory. The scrape of a key in a lock. A creaking iron door. Wind through a wall of bars. Then that door swinging shut on rusty hinges, and a key finding its notch. One turn and that door locked. The vampires put us on our feet on the other side of the gate and cut our bonds. Then they marched us down black tunnels, deep into the earth. A mole would have been lost in that darkness. Miles and miles we went, lower and deeper, with no sound but our footsteps, and folks crying, and walls that talked. Those walls told us, ‘Welcome to hell, pilgrims,’ laughing at us as we passed by. And if you reached out a hand in the darkness to steady yourself, you’d bring it back bit and bloody, because those walls were hungry for a taste of what the vampires had gorged on that night.

“The deeper we went, the lighter it got. Not any kind of light you’d find in the sky above you, but a kind that was just bright enough so you could keep your bearings. Mushrooms grew in patches on the wall, glowing the way fireflies do. So did smears of fungus that lay like a carpet at our feet. Air blew up the tunnel like it couldn’t wait to escape through that grave hole up above in the piecrust earth, and the bite of that wind was as sharp as the bite of those things that lived in the walls behind us.

“And with that wind came the smell of Vampire Lake. It was waiting below. One whiff and I knew the water would be black. Suddenly I could see the shore in my mind’s eye, the sand as white as bones. I knew there’d be dead men sitting there on coffin boxes. Waiting, just waiting, for us.”

“I think you ate yourself a bellyful of those mushrooms down there in that hole,” the preacher said. “And a couple bushels of loco weed, too.”

I ignored him. “They kept me locked up down there for weeks. Months, maybe. I was never sure how much time had passed. We were corralled in a barred cave near a bridge that stretched out across the black water. The bridge was narrow, made of old planks that had nearly rotted through with time. It led to a small island in the middle of the lake. One of the guards told us that was where the vampire queen roosted, as solitary as a black widow spider. At least once a day the guards would come and get a prisoner. More often two. They’d march those folks across that bridge, and it was like watching someone mount the steps to a gallows. The shadow-faced guards marched them forward, and those old planks creaked under their tread, and that black water churned beneath them with every step. Something was down there, beneath the surface, waiting. Something just as hungry as those dead men and that wicked queen—”

“Save that part for later,” the bounty killer said. “Tell us about that queen. What was her story?”

“I never saw her. Leastways, not face to face. That guard, he said she’d been down there since the days of the conquistadors. Made a trip into that cave with a captain and his men looking for Indian gold, found a lake that bubbled up out of hell. Of course, they didn’t know that then. They camped down there in the dark while they searched for treasure. Drank from that lake. Swam in its waters. And one day those soldiers weren’t men any more, and that señorita wasn’t a woman. After that, they say she drank down a thousand men, and still she was always thirsty. Skinny as a rake she was, out there alone on that island with only a Navajo slave girl for company. She used that girl for a footstool. Made her sit still for hours, her cold bony feet on that girl’s back, toenails digging in like tiny shovels. She’d sit there on a throne of bones with her feet up on that Navajo girl, her eyes so black they looked like giant ticks burrowed into her sockets. Staring across that dark water, never blinking, always watching. Waiting for a full belly she could never have no matter how many souls she drank down.”

“And what made you so special?” the preacher asked, staring at the coals. “Why didn’t that queen bee suck on you? You weren’t as ugly then as you are now.”

“She might have done the job . . . had I waited around. One night I managed to sneak out of there. The guards dragged off a couple of the younger girls. There was a big shivaree around the coffin boxes near the shore as the dead men took them down, and while that was going on I worked some rocks loose and made a gap near the end bar along the edge of the cave mouth. Soon enough, I wriggled my way out. I found a tunnel and followed those glowing mushrooms, and when the mushrooms started to thin out and the light began to dim I smeared myself all over with that fungus from the floor, made the rest of the trip glowing like a funeral candle with a short wick. I could hardly see at all, but I saw enough, and the things I saw set me running. I don’t even remember what I did when I came to the gate at the end of the tunnel, but I figure I was so skinny and greased with sweat that I must have squeezed my way between the bars. I crawled out of that grave hole into another pocket of darkness. It was night, and the air was so fresh it seemed like ice poured straight into my lungs. I saw the stars above and they set me running again. I ran for miles, stumbling into the middle of an Apache camp. They grabbed me, and—”

“And you was out of the frying pan and into the fire.” The preacher laughed heartily. “Then those red bastards took one look at you, thought you was some kind of devil, and cinched you to a wagon wheel. Cooked you up just like these here hens.”

“I’m not going to tell you a third time,” the bounty killer said.

“Yeah,” said Indio. “Let the kid be.”

The preacher cussed a blue streak. “You men are as weepy as a church choir. Let’s all take up a collection plate for poor little biscuit-face, why don’t we?” He turned to me, grinning. “Boy, I’ve got to say that bartender taught you one hell of a story to feed the rubes. Did he give you a live chicken to chew on when you finally learned to tell it right? I mean, I know telling whoppers is the only way a geek like you could make a living, but it’s hell’s own price for us to have to stare at the leavings of your face while you do the work.”

With the sound of those words, Indio and the bounty killer started to move. The blacksmith was faster. He snatched the preacher by the scruff of the neck, lifted him off his feet like he was a sack of sugar. Then he spilled him across one knee as he crouched, and held his face just short of the fire.

“You like to talk. Maybe we fix your face now, and then you tell us story.”

“Jesus!” the preacher shouted. “Get this bastard off me!”

Disgusted, the blacksmith chucked him backwards. The preacher flew a few feet, landing on his ass. A puff of desert playa rose up around him, and he scrambled around on all fours like a spider popping on a hot griddle before he gained his feet.

“I’ll get even with you, you goddamn square-headed Heinie bastard,” the preacher said. “And then you’ll be a quarter-mile past
sorry.
”

The blacksmith thought about that for a long moment.

“No,” he said finally. “You can put bullet in me. You can put knife in me. You can open Bible and bring Jehovah down on white horse and have him twist me to a leper. You can do what you want. But I won’t be sorry.”

It was quiet after that. I stared at the fire. At the spit. I watched as the blacksmith turned his little homemade crank, and I watched the chickens go ’round and ’round. One was bigger than the other. The skin on that one started to crack and drip juice, while the little one’s skin crisped up like a shell. Watching that, I started to sweat a little bit, and the scars on my face began to itch.

Finally, the bounty killer said, “Tell the rest of it, boy.”

“No. I’ve said enough. Right now, you either believe me or you don’t. Tomorrow, you can see for yourselves.”

No one said anything for a while. The bounty killer tore a loaf of brown bread into four sections and gave one to everybody but the preacher. Soon, the first chicken was ready. Indio took a knife and carved up the scrawny bird. He passed hunks around on tin plates. He didn’t give one to the preacher. By the time the Mexican was done with that knife, all that was left was the gizzard, and one black wing, and a knotted little lump of a head. The preacher helped himself to all that, swearing a little bit, and moved off from the fire to a spot behind the blacksmith.

Soon the other bird was done, but by then the men had eaten their fill . . . except the blacksmith, of course. The big German ate a couple of legs and half a breast, then left the rest of the chicken on his plate. I could tell that the preacher was eyeing the meal, but he didn’t come into the blacksmith’s range. Despite his hard tongue, he didn’t dare.

But a little while later, the man in black passed me by. He bent low at my ear and shook that blackened chicken head like it was some big medicine.

Inside, the bird’s dry brain rattled around like a pea in a whistle, and the preacher laughed. “That’s all most folks have inside their skulls. You and me know that, don’t we, boy?”

The other men rolled up in their blankets. All but the preacher and me. He sat ten feet distant, just short of the fire’s glow, toting numbers in the back of his Bible. I stared into the fire’s dying flames while Henrietta skirted the withering coals, her naked wings flapping against her fat little body. ’Round and ’round the fire she went, but in a different way than those birds we’d cooked. And all the while she pecked at the piecrust playa, her little beak burying itself in the white dirt time and time again. There was nothing much to eat there, but she kept at it. That’s the way she was.

I guess I was, too. My brain kept pecking at the story churning in my head. The old and familiar parts had slipped over my tongue just an hour before, but it was the new parts that were on the boil and wouldn’t let go of me. They tumbled around in my head along with the heartbeat of the day—the desert heat that had put all of us on edge, those pole-ax blows the preacher had landed with his tongue and not his fists, the greasy chicken I could barely choke down. I thought long and hard about all that, and the tale I’d told, and the way my heart had thundered when the blacksmith held the preacher’s face to the fire.

And I remembered the way the men’s eyes had flashed while they heard the different parts my story, the way some of them had looked away and some of them had tried to look deep inside me as the tale hit its peaks and valleys. But most of all I remember the one question the bounty killer had asked—that question about the vampire queen.

The bounty killer’s voice was there in my head, and so was his question, and so was the sound of his bloodstained harmonica. Suddenly my gaze seemed to burrow into that dying fire circled with chicken tracks, and down through those glowing coals, and I found myself standing at the edge of Vampire Lake. The sandy shoreline gleamed like powdered bone, and the waves beyond were a dark whisper. Dead men sat on their coffin boxes, their faces bloody from a whipping they’d never expected. Funeral clothes hung in tatters from their cleaved skin. Others were history, dead straight through this time, their black blood spilled by blades and bullets coated with silver.

Beyond the carnage, that narrow bridge stretched across black water. In my vision I traveled across it like a bat on the wing, following an empty mile of hanging planks. I plunged headlong through a burrow of shadow, dropping to roost before the vampire queen.

She waited on a throne of bones, her tick eyes unblinking. She did not seem to notice me. Her black lace dress was tightly gathered around her narrow waist and the layered architecture of her collar bones and ribs. Her naked white feet rested hard on the bent back of the Navajo slave girl who served as her footstool. Now and then, the queen curled her toes and her sharp nails sliced into the girl’s back, deep enough to raise a tiny scream. And even so the vampire did not smile. For she was waiting, staring across the water with no expression on her face, waiting with a cigarillo between her cold lips. Tobacco smoke traveled from her dead lungs through tight nostrils, whispering into the air on lifeless breaths.

And I turned away and saw why the vampire queen stared and didn’t blink. I saw why she waited. The bounty killer was walking across the bridge, coming toward her. Black water gleamed through gaps in the rotten boards, churning beneath his every step. Albino alligators snapped against the water. Their great armored tails thrashed, casting guillotine ripples in waves that couldn’t hold a shadow. Tired of a diet of dead carcasses discarded by the queen and her minions, the reptiles gnashed their teeth for a taste of something vital and alive. The bounty killer’s scent drove them wild; it was as if they scented the dead men’s shadows that dragged at his heels and thundered in his heart.

And that was something I felt in my gut as much as my head, for nothing in the bounty killer’s expression conjured so much as a single word. He was a stone, and the expression he wore made the one on the face of the vampire queen seem as expressive as a Mexican carnival mask.