The Year's Best Dark Fantasy and Horror (38 page)

He scratched a Lucifer alive and put those sticks to work.

The bridge exploded in a million toothpicks.

The queen and her men did just about the same.

Blood was everywhere, but the gators didn’t mind.

They were hungry.

They ate.

Part Six: Rumson’s Saloon

We came up out of that empty grave hole in the desert. Indio and I did, plus the Navajo girl. Double-quick, we grabbed that crate of dynamite out of the wagon and took it into the cave. Indio set a couple charges near the twisted iron gate, set another couple further down the tunnel, then ran fuses through the burrow that led to the surface. He put a match to them and we slapped leather for safety, Indio on horseback and me with the Navajo girl in the wagon.

Henrietta was with us, too. In the ruckus I almost forgot to untie the rawhide cord that held her to the wagon wheel, but I remembered at the last moment. We were less than a mile away when thunder exploded in the earth’s belly. A huge cloud coughed out of the ground like the wave of blood that had risen from the lake. Only this wave caught us, then overtook us, then set us riding even faster with bandanas wrapped around our faces. Me in the wagon slapping the ribbons while Henrietta squawked from her hatbox nest beneath the seat, and the Navajo girl holding on for dear life at my side, and Indio in front of us giving his horse plenty of spur.

In other words, we didn’t look back. What was behind us had been blown to hell and gone, and we knew it. The deal was finished, and in more ways than one. Without the bounty killer’s bank book there was nothing between Indio and me at all anymore. That book was in some dead gator’s belly down there in hell, and we’d never touch it in this lifetime. So there was nothing to fight over, and nothing to celebrate. We parted ways without much more than a handshake, and Indio headed south for Mexico.

The Navajo girl and I camped in the desert that night. When I awoke the next morning, she was gone. So I came back to town. There really wasn’t anywhere else to go. After a few weeks I discovered Rumson had written a will, leaving his saloon to the whores. They decided to go into another business—or the same business, but minus the beds upstairs—and they hired me. So here I am, standing behind the bar where Rumson used to stand.

Still minus half a face, of course.

But plus another story.

Besides the whiskey, that’s what we sell around here. I tend this bar night after night and tell it, and then I sleep the wee hours through and get up in the morning and do it all over again.

And some nights, even as the words spill out of my mouth, I think about the bounty killer. A man like that, you want to imagine there was something else in him. Something that could excuse the killing, and his hard ways, and the things that brought him to the point where he’d ride into a town and do the horrible things he did, then go down in a hole in the ground and do worse. And maybe there was something, and maybe there wasn’t. Maybe there was only a kind of desire. The kind you can’t really know until death starts to push the door closed behind you. The kind that pushes at you when you put the spurs to a horse and ride it hard toward a place you’ve never been.

Some nights I think it was one way, and some nights I think it might have been another. And maybe that’s what keeps me here, night after night, telling the story. The wondering, I mean. Maybe that’s why I do what I do. I don’t rightly know. I can’t rightly say.

But that’s my story, stranger. You can believe it or not. If you want to know more, come back tomorrow morning. We’ve got a little museum out back. You can see the bounty killer’s black rattler of a pistol. You can look at Rumson’s sawed-off shotgun, too. There’s a glass case with Indio’s shackles, and a letter from the warden up at Yuma which testifies to the fact that they’re real. In one corner there’s the hatbox I took from the general store on the night Rumson died, and most afternoons you’ll find Henrietta sleeping in it. She’s old now, doesn’t get around much. You can even buy a book I wrote where I set down the story straight. It’s illustrated by a fellow from Philadelphia who does drawings for all the Eastern magazines. I’ll even sign it for you if you want.

But the story you heard tonight, that one’s cash on the barrelhead.

Now pay up and hit the trail, amigo.

We’re closed for the night.

Whatever lived in the teapot, it was not more difficult to believe in than the blighted landscape above their trenches. Something bright and shining ought not be more impossible than that . . .

Lord Dunsany’s Teapot
Naomi Novik

The accidental harmony of the trenches during the war produced, sometimes, odd acquaintances. It was impossible not to feel a certain kinship with a man having lain huddled and nameless in the dirt beside him for hours, sharing the dubious comfort of a woolen scarf pressed over the mouth and nose while eyes streamed, stinging, and gunpowder bursts from time to time illuminated the crawling smoke in colors: did it have a greenish cast? And between the moments of fireworks, whispering to one another too low and too hoarsely to hear even unconsciously the accents of the barn or the gutter or the halls of the public school.

What became remarkable about Russell, in the trenches, was his smile: or rather that he smiled, with death walking overhead like the tread of heavy boots on a wooden floor above a cellar. Not a wild or wandering smile, reckless and ready to meet the end, or a trembling rictus; an ordinary smile to go with the whispered, “Another one coming, I think,” as if speaking of a cricket ball instead of an incendiary; only friendly, with nothing to remark upon.

The trench had scarcely been dug. Dirt shook loose down upon them, until they might have been part of the earth, and when the all-clear sounded at last out of a long silence, they stood up still equals under a coat of mud, until Russell bent down and picked up the shovel, discarded, and they were again officer and man.

But this came too late: Edward trudged back with him, side by side, to the more populated regions of the labyrinth, still talking, and when they had reached Russell’s bivouac he looked at Edward and said, “Would you have a cup of tea?”

The taste of the smoke was still thick on Edward’s tongue, in his throat, and the night had curled up like a tiger and gone to sleep around them. They sat on Russell’s cot while the kettle boiled, and he poured the hot water into a fat old teapot made of iron, knobby, over the cheap and bitter tea leaves from the ration. Then he set it on the little campstool and watched it steep, a thin thread of steam climbing out of the spout and dancing around itself in the cold air.

The rest of his company were sleeping, but Edward noticed their cots were placed away, as much as they could be in such a confined space; Russell had a little room around his. He looked at Russell: under the smudges and dirt, weathering; not a young face. The nose was a little crooked and so was the mouth, and the hair brushed over the forehead was sandy-brown and wispy in a vicarish way, with several years of thinning gone.

“A kindness to the old-timer, I suppose,” Russell said. “Been here—five years now, or near enough. So they don’t ask me to shift around.”

“They haven’t made you lance-jack,” Edward said, the words coming out before he could consider all the reasons a man might not have received promotion, of which he would not care to speak.

“I couldn’t,” Russell said, apologetic. “Who am I, to be sending off other fellows, and treating them sharp if they don’t?”

“Their corporal, or their sergeant,” Edward said, a little impatient with the objection, “going in with them, not hanging back.”

“O, well,” Russell said, still looking at the teapot. “It’s not the same for me to go.”

He poured out the tea, and offered some shavings off a small brown block of sugar. Edward drank: strong and bittersweet, somehow better than the usual. The teapot was homely and common. Russell laid a hand on its side as if it were precious, and said it had come to him from an old sailor, coming home at last to rest from traveling.

“Do you ever wonder, are there wars under the sea?” Russell said. His eyes were gone distant. “If all those serpents and the kraken down there, or some other things we haven’t names for, go to battle over the ships that have sunk, and all their treasure?”

“And mer-men dive down among them, to be counted brave,” Edward said, softly, not to disturb the image that had built clear in his mind: the great writhing beasts, tangled masses striving against one another in the endless cold dark depths, over broken ships and golden hoards, spilled upon the sand, trying to catch the faintest gleam of light. “To snatch some jewel to carry back, for a courting-gift or an heirloom of their house.”

Russell nodded, as if to a commonplace remark. “I suppose it’s how they choose their lords,” he said, “the ones that go down and come back: and their king came up from the dark once with a crown—beautiful thing, rubies and pearls like eggs, in gold.”

The tea grew cold before they finished building the undersea court, turn and turn about, in low voices barely above the nasal breathing of the men around them.

It skirted the lines of fraternization, certainly; but it could not have been called deliberate. There was always some duty or excuse which brought them into one another’s company to begin with, and at no regular interval. Of course, even granting this, there was no denying it would have been more appropriate for Edward to refuse the invitation, or for Russell not to have made it in the first place. Yet somehow each time tea was offered, and accepted.

The hour was always late, and if Russell’s fellows had doubts about his company, they never raised their heads from their cots to express it either by word or look. Russell made the tea, and began the storytelling, and Edward cobbled together castles with him shaped of steam and fancy, drifting upwards and away from the trenches.

He would walk back to his own cot afterwards still warm through and lightened. He had come to do his duty, and he would do it, but there was something so much
vaster
and more dreadful than he had expected in the wanton waste upon the fields, in the smothered silence of the trenches: all of them already in the grave and merely awaiting a final confirmation. But Russell was still alive, so Edward might be as well. It was worth a little skirting of regulations.

He only half-heard Russell’s battalion mentioned in the staff meeting, with one corner of his preoccupied mind; afterwards he looked at the assignment: a push to try and open a new trench, advancing the line.

It was no more than might be and would be asked of any man, eventually; it was no excuse to go by the bivouac that night with a tin of his own tea, all the more precious because Beatrice somehow managed to arrange for it to win through to him, through some perhaps questionable back channel. Russell said nothing of the assignment, though Edward could read the knowledge of it around them: for once not all the other men were sleeping, a few curled protectively around their scratching hands, writing letters in their cots.

“Well, that’s a proper cup,” Russell said softly, as the smell climbed out of the teapot, fragrant and fragile. The brew when he poured it was clear amber-gold, and made Edward think of peaches hanging in a garden of shining fruit-heavy trees, a great sighing breath of wind stirring all the branches to a shake.

For once Russell did not speak as they drank the tea. One after another the men around them put down their pens and went to sleep. The peaches swung from the branches, very clear and golden in Edward’s mind. He kept his hands close around his cup.

“That’s stirred him a bit, it has,” Russell said, peering under the lid of the teapot; he poured in some more water. For a moment, Edward thought he saw mountains, too, beyond the orchard-garden: green-furred peaks with clouds clinging to their sides like loose eiderdown. A great wave of homesickness struck him very nearly like a blow, though he had never seen such mountains. He looked at Russell, wondering.

“It’ll be all right, you know,” Russell said.

“Of course,” Edward said: the only thing that could be said, prosaic and untruthful; the words tasted sour in his mouth after the clean taste of the tea.

“No, what I mean is, it’ll be all right,” Russell said. He rubbed a hand over the teapot. “I don’t like to say, because the fellows don’t understand, but you see him too; or at least as much of him as I do.”

“Him,” Edward repeated.

“I don’t know his name,” Russell said thoughtfully. “I’ve never managed to find out; I don’t know that he hears us at all, or thinks of us. I suppose if he ever woke up, he might be right annoyed with us, sitting here drinking up his dreams. But he never has.”

It was not their usual storytelling, but something with the uncomfortable savor of truth. Edward felt as though he had caught a glimpse from the corner of his eye of something too vast to be looked at directly or all at once: a tail shining silver-green sliding through the trees, a great green eye like oceans peering back with drowsy curiosity. “But he’s not
in
there,” he said involuntarily.

Russell shrugged expressively. He lifted off the lid and showed Edward: a lump fixed to the bottom of the pot, smooth white glimmering like pearl, irregular yet beautiful even with the swollen tea-leaves like kelp strewn over and around it.

He put the lid back on, and poured out the rest of the pot. “So it’s all right,” he said. “I’ll be all right, while I have him. But you see why I couldn’t send other fellows out. Not while I’m safe from all this, and they aren’t.”

An old and battered teapot made talisman of safety, inhabited by some mystical guardian: it ought to have provoked the same awkward sensation as speaking to an earnest Spiritualist, or an excessively devoted missionary; it called for polite agreement and withdrawal. “Thank you,” Edward said instead; he was comforted, and glad to be so.

Whatever virtue lived there in the pitted iron, it was not more difficult to believe in than the blighted landscape above their trenches, the coils of hungry barbed black wire snaking upon the ground, and the creeping poisonous smoke that covered the endless bodies of the dead. Something bright and shining ought not be more impossible than that; and even if it was not strong enough to stand against all devastation, there was pleasure in thinking one life might be spared by its power.