Those Who Went Remain There Still (17 page)

I seized the gun and I aimed it at the creature. It turned to look me in the face. It saw a skinny old man with a dwindling lantern in one hand and a firearm held awkwardly in the other.

Meshack had pulled himself upright and was pushing his feet against the uneven wall, reaching up and back for the ledge. “John,” he wheezed. “
Don’t
.”

He must’ve thought the same thing I did. Too close to shoot. Too many rounded walls, boxing us all close and together. The seared scrape on my arm stung and reminded me of the way a bullet might bounce, and I was afraid, but I was also afraid of the smashed-moon face that glared with tufted eyebrows.

I dashed for the ledge and leaped up it, nearly throwing my lantern and extinguishing it in the process, but Meshack caught the light by its wire handle and caught me by the arm. He helped lift me up and pull me through.

He grabbed the gun out of my hand and pulled the hammer back—which I had not thought to do, for I knew so little about the way these things operate.

Then, with both of us up and the creature’s face biting into the opening where we’d squeezed ourselves, he pulled the trigger. Twice he hit the thing in the face, once in the mouth, I think. It blew back away from us, now sporting a splintered hole in its beak and a badly burned patch on the side of its eye.

Meshack pulled the trigger again but either the gun failed or I did not hear it because I couldn’t hear anything, anymore. The sound of the shot was too much for my already too-much abused ears; something was broken inside them, or inside the left one at any rate.

A stabbing pain shrieked through my skull but there was nothing to do but run, run, climb, and run. It was almost easier when I couldn’t hear, and I couldn’t know the maddening distraction of the furious pursuit at our heels.

Meshack didn’t have to pull me anymore. I labored along beside him, scuffling through the wet and slippery stink of the corridor that was, in some places, almost too narrow to accommodate either one of us.

We pushed our way through, and up, and past.

In the tangling rush of our escape, I passed my nephew in the corridor. That’s how we accomplished our retreat, leapfrogging one another at the side, trying to push on up and past, and knowing (although I could not detect it) that the cacophony of evil bird voices echoed down below.

***

We were walking with our hands as much as our feet, and my hand was a furnace of pain and remarkable, blessed numbness in spots that made me think perhaps I’d damaged something irreparably. For one berzerk moment, I thought perhaps I’d lost the hand altogether, and there was so much disaster chasing from every corner that I’d simply failed to notice.

But then I dropped my knuckles to steady myself, and I did not find the textured stone beneath it.

I felt leather.

I stopped abruptly. Meshack ran into me from behind. I was holding the light; we’d traded for whoever was in front. He didn’t see me, I shouldn’t think—though how I hadn’t seen the dead man is a question I cannot answer.

But there he was, or rather, there was part of him.

There were legs, both of which had been gnawed down to bone at the thigh. There were ribs, too, scattered someplace. All of it was gruesomely fresh, and it must’ve occurred within seconds! What kind of creature—or, I shuddered to think, what appalling number of them—could strip a man down to loose parts in such a brief span of moments?

“Who is it?” Meshack asked. He crawled over to be next to me and repeated himself loudly into my ear, for I hadn’t heard him the first time. A whole choir of bells was banging behind my eyes, rattling my senses even worse than they were already shaken.

“I can’t tell,” I confessed.

“Me neither,” he said, and something in his voice cracked.

Could this be Titus? Or one of the other Manders? Or someone altogether different, whose presence in the cave had gone unknown to us?

I cocked my head to listen to him with my right ear, which caught the words a little more strongly.

He said, “Well, it’s got to be one of them, I guess.”

Meshack was breathing hard, and so was I. We were both bleeding, too, and the scratch on his chest looked bad, but it was caking and clotting, and I hoped it was a good sign. I was still smearing blood every place I laid my hand, and the dull, dismal ache of the pain there felt as if it would eat my whole arm if it were left to rage unchecked.

He said, “I didn’t even hear any screaming.”

“Neither did I.” But of course, I wouldn’t have. I had to watch his mouth to catch all his words. “But you know what this means—it means they aren’t just behind us. They’re ahead of us, too.”

“Ahead of us. Beside us. Behind us.” He grimly ticked off the
possibilities.

“Don’t do that,” I begged. “Don’t. We’ll find a way out. You said it yourself, out—or into a defensive position.”

“And you said ‘up.’ Up isn’t getting us very far. It didn’t get
him
anywhere.”

“It’s getting us
up
,” I argued.

Ahead there was noise of a scuffle and then sounds like whimpering—but we didn’t hear any snapping beaks or cawing whistles except behind us, so we kept on going. How much farther could it be, anyway? How much farther could we go before we ran out of room to retreat?

Before long the way opened, and there was a pit down before us.

The pit wasn’t deep, but it was wide, and it was full. And down in the thick of it, stood Nicodemus—thrashing and throwing things around. My lantern-light waned, and I set it down carefully before it went out all together.

“Meshack, give me your candles if you have them.”

He reached into his satchel and pulled out a pair of fat, home-dipped tapers. I fought to light them from the last bits of the lantern’s failing spark. While I cursed at the reluctant wicks, I tried to ignore Nicodemus and his sputtering, ranting mumble.

“Where is he? The rest of him, it’s in here somewhere. The rest of lots of them, look at them, how long these have been here. Well, he’s new. He’ll be wet. They couldn’t have just swallowed it, all of him, not in that nick of time when they took him and he was gone.”

“Your pa’s dead, Nick,” Meshack said. There wasn’t any unkindness in his words, but he said them firmly. “You left him down in the tunnel.”

“He was right behind me!” our cousin hollered so that even I could hear him without struggling to understand. “And I went back! I went back when I noticed he weren’t breathing and crawling behind me! You know what I found?”

Meshack told him, “I know what you found. We found it too.”

“Why don’t you look at what
I
found?” He asked it like an invitation. He asked it with a little bit of pride, and a little bit of madness. It wasn’t a question. It was a declaration of insanity.

Just then, the candle wicks caught and our light promptly doubled, then tripled as I urged the second wick into flame. “Nicodemus,” I said, “Your lantern’s failing. Give me your pack, I’ll light your candles…”

I don’t think I managed to chew the whole word out.

As I was speaking, our light lifted up the shadows and I saw what Nicodemus was doing. I saw what he was throwing, and what he was digging his arms down into, lifting up pieces of detritus from the pit and throwing them left and right, over his head, behind himself.

“Jesus
Christ
,” Meshack said.

I almost repeated the sentiment, not from blasphemous faith—but from pure astonishment.

***

The pit was filled with bones, and it was bigger than I’d thought.

There was no way to know how deep it went. There was no way to guess how many sets of mortal remains had been abandoned there. From a spontaneous accounting of the rounder domes, the skulls, I thought perhaps hundreds. I saw longer skulls too, more jagged shapes to the bones, and knew that the pit held more than men, but deer too—and dogs, and bears, and the spirits only knew what else.

“Get him out of there,” I said, too horrified by the sight to move.

“
You
get him out,” Meshack flapped his arm in his cousin’s general direction. “I’m not going to make him do
shit
.”

He leaned forward and rested that way, with his hands braced on his thighs.

“Nicodemus, get out of there,” I ordered. I was so tired there wasn’t much force behind it, and I didn’t think he’d obey me, anyway. But I tried it again, and I handed Meshack a candle.

I walked over to the edge closest to my Mander cousin and held out my less-injured hand. “Take it,” I told him. “Take it, and we’ll get out of here.”

“How?” He shrieked it at me, so loud I heard it with both ears—and it felt like a knife in my teeth.

I lifted my candle above my head in order to cast every bit of light it could. The chamber was honeycombed with passages that emptied into this very place. The ceiling was so tall that my light wouldn’t reach it; I didn’t know where the shadows ended and the cave began again.

“Boone?” I pleaded under my breath.

“Is that what you’re doing?” Meshack asked without lifting his head. “Praying to the ghost of Daniel Boone? Don’t tell me you’re as crazy as everybody said. Please, uncle. Don’t make me think that, not now.”

“I’m not praying. I’m
asking
. It’s not the same thing. And anyway, I saw him,” I admitted, swinging my gaze from side to side, once again seeking help or shelter. “I saw him, and he’s been trying to help us.”

“Why?” And now there was the edge of mania in Meshack’s voice too, and maybe it was in my own as well, but I could hardly hear my own words. “If he really wanted to help us, he would’ve told us to never come inside!”

“And would that have worked?” I was shouting now, too, because what was the point in keeping quiet? “Would we have stayed out—would
you
have stayed out if I’d told you, ‘A ghost said we should leave it be?’ You wouldn’t have done it.
They
wouldn’t have done it,” I gestured at Nicodemus, who was dragging himself up and out of the bone pit, wading towards my outstretched hand.

And then Nicodemus asked a most startling question. In a casual voice, as if nothing odd or terrible were transpiring all around him, and as if he were not standing in a pile of bones as if it were a rain puddle, he said, “Who’s that woman?”

Meshack didn’t even look up to see. “There ain’t no woman, Nick.”

The Mander nodded hard. “Yeah there is. She talking to you.” He pointed up and out, and his eyes were wide with astonishment, freshly big with a new kind of fear.

It amazed me, how the Mander had seen her first. It made no sense at all; he knew nothing of the spirits. But once she’d been duly indicated, I don’t know how I could’ve missed her.

***

Meshack froze, and it looked to me as if he were waiting to be beheaded. He leaned forward, the candle clenched in his one hand and Nicodemus’s gun in the other. He fixed his eyes on the slippery floor between his boots.

She crouched beside him and whispered at his ear. She placed her hand on his knee, beside his own hand, and she was chattering words, quickly, lightly.

 I couldn’t hear them.

Something about the way the light hit her told me that she wasn’t there in any mortal sense. It was the way the flame licked through her; it was the too-smooth skin that had no pores, no eyebrows, and no fine lashes.

She looked like a large, coiled infant from some other species, wet and freshly hatched from an egg.

“Meshack?” I whimpered it like a child, because the phantom terrified me.

She wasn’t like the flickering ghost of Boone, who came and went and looked mostly like an echo of a man. She was something else, or something worse—something weirder. She had no hair and she wore a gray dress that ended ragged at her knees, and her toes curled to catch the bumpy skin of the cave floor. She was barefoot, and bare faced, and bare headed.

Meshack wagged his head slowly back and forth, and he mouthed a response I couldn’t catch. He still hadn’t raised his eyes to look at her.

Whatever he said, she argued with it, and the fluttering consonants of their strained conversation told me nothing. When he shook his head, I think he said, “No, baby.” And then he said something else, and I heard enough of its edges to infer the rest. “Not me alone. He comes too, or I can’t go.”

She scowled, and the shape of her face was so thoroughly insane that it may as well have been evil.

Won’t.

And he said, “Then I won’t go. Not without him.”

***

She glowered at me and it was a hateful look that sucked all the breath out of my chest. I honestly feared that she would approach me, then; and the thought of it was enough to make my eyes water. I tried to retreat, though there was nowhere to go except into the pit with Nicodemus, and what kind of improvement would that be? So I held my ground and prayed to all the spirits who had ever shown me any kindness that please, please,
please
. Don’t let that terrible phantom touch me.

She watched my terror with disinterest and disdain, wasting time and saying nothing until she came to some conclusion that I’d never understand. Again she pushed her face down close to Meshack’s.

I believe she said,
Now or never, leave and stay gone
.

“What about you?” he asked, either tears or sweat moistening the whole of his face. “Whatever came of you? And why would you stay?”

She ignored the first question, but to the second she replied with a sing-song lilt,
This fray, it well becomes me.

The phantom produced something in her hand; I don’t know where she’d kept it hidden, or if I simply hadn’t spotted it before. It was a flap of papers, and it was folded and laced shut. She passed the papers to Meshack and he finally tried to see her there, in that parting moment. But he winced and turned away.

***

Nicodemus stayed mired in the bone pit. He was afraid of the strange woman in that vague, dream-state way that didn’t bother to process the reasons for his fright; but he was afraid of the bird things in a concrete, miserable way that inspired him to true terror.

And they were coming, creeping up fast and loud. By then my ears had recovered enough that I could hear it like a hum. My hearing was returning, but slowly. I faintly prayed, in case I had not yet exhausted my spiritual favors, that it might not be altogether destroyed after all.