The birds had ceased their singing.
A movement to the left caught his eye. Three crows burst from the foliage, cawing loudly as they shot across the clearing.
Beside the lake, Rachel lay on her back, drowsing. The voices of the crows came to her, and she opened her eyes in time to watch the birds pass overhead.
Matthew stood motionless, staring at the impenetrable area from which the crows had come.
Another movement seized his attention. Far up in the sky, a single vulture was slowly wheeling around and around.
All the saliva had left his mouth and become cold sweat on his face. The sensation of danger stabbed him like a knife in the neck.
He felt certain something in the woods was watching him.
Moving with careful deliberation though his nerves shrieked to turn and run, Matthew pushed the cork back into the bottle. His right fist tightened around the knife’s handle. He began to retreat from the honey-flowing tree, one step at the time, his eyes darting back and forth across the treacherous woods.
“Rachel?” he called. His voice cracked. He tried again. “Rachel?!” This time he looked over his shoulder to see if she’d heard.
A heavy form suddenly exploded from its place of concealment at the forest’s edge. Rachel was the first to see it, by only a second, and she let go a scream that savaged her throat.
Then Matthew faced it too. His feet seemed rooted to the earth, his eyes wide and his mouth open in a soundless cry of terror.
The monstrous bear that was racing toward him was an old warrior and fully gray. Patches of ashy malignant mange infected its shoulders and legs. Its jaws were stretched to receive human flesh, streams of drool flying back past its head. Matthew had just an instant to register that the bear’s left eye socket was puckered and empty, and he knew.
He was about to be embraced by Jack One Eye.
Maude…at Shawcombe’s tavern…Jack One Eye hain’t jus’ a burr. Ever’thin’ dark ’bout this land…ever’thin’ cruel, and wicked.
“Rachel!” he screamed, twisting toward her and running for his life. “Get in the water!”
There was nothing she could do to help him except pray to God he made the lake. She ran toward the water and leaped into it, swimming in her bridal dress toward deep water.
Matthew dared not look behind. His legs were pumping furiously, his face distorted by fear, his heart on the verge of bursting. He heard the thunderous impact of paws behind him, gaining ground, and he knew with awful certainty that he would never reach the lake.
He clenched his teeth and threw himself to the left—the bear’s blind side—at the same time letting out a shriek that he hoped might startle the beast enough to give him extra time. Jack One Eye hurtled past him, its rear claws digging up furrows of earth. A front claw swung and made the air between them shimmer.
Then Matthew was running for the lake again, dodging and swerving with every step. Again the earth trembled at his heels. The bear was bigger than the biggest horse he’d ever seen, and it could crush every bone in his body just with its forward progress alone.
Matthew leaped to the left in a maneuver that nearly snapped his knees. He almost lost his balance as the bear went past, its massive mange-riddled head thrusting in search of him. The jaws came together with a noise like a musket shot. He smelled the reeking bestial stink of the thing, and was close enough to see the broken shafts of four arrows in its side. Then he was running again, and he prayed that God grant him the speed of a crow.
Again Jack One Eye was almost upon him. Again Matthew lunged to the left—but this time he had misjudged both the geometry and the flexibility of his knees. The angle was too sharp and his feet skidded out from beneath him. He went down on his right side in the grass. He was only vaguely aware of Rachel’s screams through the thunder in his head. The gray wall of Jack One Eye rose before him. He staggered up, fighting for balance.
Something hit him.
He had the impression of the world turned upside down. A searing pain filled his left shoulder. He knew he was tumbling head over heels, but could do nothing about it. Then he landed hard on his back, the breath bursting from his lungs. He tried to scramble away, as again that gray wall came upon him. Something was wrong with his left arm.
Matthew was struck in the ribs on the left side by a red-hot cannonball that picked him up and flung him like a grainsack. Something grazed by his forehead while he was tumbling—a musket ball, he thought it must be, here on this field of battle—and a red film descended over his eyes. Blood, he thought. Blood. He hit the ground, was dragged and tossed again. His teeth snapped together. I’m going to die, he thought. Right here. This sunny, clear day. I am going to die.
His left arm was already dead. His lungs hitched and gurgled. The mangy gray wall was there in his face again, there with an arrow shaft stuck in it.
He decided, almost calmly, that he would do his own sticking.
“Hey!” he hollered, in a voice that surprised him with its desperate power. “Hey!” He brought the knife up and stabbed and twisted and wrenched and stabbed and twisted and wrenched, and the beast grunted roared roared breath hot as Hades smelling of decayed meat and rotten teeth stabbed and twisted and wrenched blood red on the gray streaming down a glorious sight die you bastard you bastard you!
Jack One Eye might be huge, but it had not grown to such a ripe old age by being stupid. The stickings had an effect, and the bear backed away from the mosquito.
Matthew was on his knees. In his right hand, the blade was covered with blood. He heard a dripping, pattering sound, and he looked down at the gore falling into the red-stained grass from the twitching fingers of his left hand. He seemed to be burning up from within, yet the fiery pain of shoulder and ribs and forehead was not what made him sob. He had peed in his breeches, and he had brought no other pair.
Jack One Eye circled him to the left. Matthew turned with the beast, dark waves beginning to fill his head. He heard, as if from another world, the sound of a woman—Rachel was her name, Rachel yes Rachel—screaming his name and crying. He saw blood bubbling around the bear’s nostrils, and crimson matted the gray fur at its throat. Matthew was near fainting, and he knew when that happened he was dead.
The bear suddenly stood up on its hind legs, to a height of eight feet or more. It opened its broken-toothed mouth. What emerged was a hoarse, thunderous, and soul-shaking roar that brimmed with agony and perhaps the realization of its own mortality. Two snapped arrow shafts were buried in festered flesh at the beast’s belly, near a bloody-edged claw wound that must have been delivered by one of its own breed. Matthew also saw that a sizeable bite had been ripped from Jack One Eye’s right shoulder, and this ugly wound was green with infection.
It occurred to him, in his haze of pain and the knowledge of his impending departure from this earth, that Jack One Eye was dying too.
The bear fell back down onto its haunches. And now Matthew pulled himself up, staggered and fell, pulled himself up again, and shouted, “Haaaaaaaaaaa!” in the maw of the beast.
After which he fell to the ground once more, into his own blood. Jack One Eye, its nostrils dripping gore, shambled toward him with its jaws open.
Matthew wasn’t ready to die yet. Come all this way, to die in a clearing under the sun and God’s blue sky? No, not yet.
He came up with the sheer power of desperation and drove the blade under the bear’s jaw, giving the knife a violent ripping twist. Jack One Eye gave a single grunt, snorted blood into Matthew’s face, and pulled back, taking the imbedded blade with it. Matthew fell on his belly, the pain in his ribs making him curl up like a stomped worm.
Again the bear circled him to the left, shaking its head back and forth in an effort to rid itself of the stinger that had pierced its throat. Banners of blood flew in the air from its nostrils. Even on his belly, Matthew crawled to keep the beast from getting behind him. Suddenly Jack One Eye came in again, and Matthew pulled himself up, throwing his right arm up ove
r his face to protect what was left of his skull.
The movement made the bear turn aside. Jack One Eye backed away, its single orb blinking and glazed. The bear lost its equilibrium for a second and staggered on the edge of falling. It caught itself, then stood less than fifteen feet from Matthew, staring at him with its head lowered and its arrow-stubbled sides heaving. Its gray tongue emerged, licking at the bleeding nostrils.
Matthew pulled himself up to his knees, his right hand clutching his ribs on the left side. It seemed the most important thing in the world to him, to keep his hand pressed there so that his entrails would not stream out.
The world, red-tainted and savage, had dwindled to the single space of distance between man and animal. They stared at each other, measuring pain, blood, life, and death each by their own calculations.
Jack One Eye made no sound. But the ancient, wounded warrior had reached a decision.
It abruptly turned away from Matthew. It began half-loping, half-staggering across the clearing the way it had come, shaking its head back and forth in a vain effort to dislodge the blade. In another moment the beast entered its wilderness again.
And Jack One Eye was gone.
Matthew fell forward onto the bloody battleground, his eyes closed. In his realm of drifting, he thought he heard a high-pitched and piercing cry: Hiyiiiiiiii! Hiyiiiiiiii! Hiyiiiiiiii! The vulture’s voice, he thought. The vulture, swooping down upon him.
Tired. So…very…very…tired. Rachel. What…is to…become…of…
The vulture, swooping down.
Screaming Hiyiiiiiiii! Hiyiiiiiiii! Hiyeeeeee!
Matthew felt himself fall away from the earth, toward that distant territory so many explorers had gone to journey through, and from which return was impossible.
thirty-nine
MATTHEW’S FIRST REALIZATION of his descent to Hell was the odor.
It was as strong as demon’s sweat and twice as nasty. It entered his nostrils like burning irons, penetrated to the back of his throat, and he was suddenly aware that he was being wracked by a fit of coughing though he had not heard it begin.
When the smell went away and his coughing ended, he tried to open his eyes. The lids were heavy, as if weighted by the coins due Charon for his ferry trip across the Styx. He couldn’t open them. He heard now a rising and falling voice that must surely be the first of untold many souls lamenting their scorched fate. The language sounded near Latin, but Latin was God’s language. This must be Greek, which was more suitably earthy.
A few more breaths, and Matthew became knowledgeable of the torment of Hell as well as its odor. A fierce, stabbing, white-hot pain had begun to throb at his left shoulder and down the arm. The ribs on that side also began an agonizing complaint. There was a pain at his forehead too, but that was mild compared to the others. Again he tried to open his eyes and again he failed.
Neither could he move, in this state of eternal damnation. He thought he was attempting to move, but he couldn’t be sure. There was so much pain, growing worse by the second, that he decided it was more reasonable to give up and conserve his energy, as surely he would need it when he walked through the brimstone valley. He heard the crackling of a fire—of course, a fire!—and felt an oppressive, terrible heat as if he were being roasted over an inferno.
But now a new feeling began to come over him: anger. It threatened to burst into full-flamed rage, which would put him right at home here.
He had considered himself a Christian and had tried his very best to follow the Godly path. To find himself cast into Hell like this, with no court to hear his case, was a damned and unreasonable sin. He wondered in his increasing fury what it was he’d done that had doomed him. Run with the orphans and young thugs on the Manhattan harbor? Flung a horse-apple at the back of a merchant’s head, and stolen a few coins from the dirty pocket of a capsized drunk? Or had it been more recent wrongdoing, such as creeping into Seth Hazelton’s barn and later cutting the man’s face with a tin lantern. Yes, that might be it. Well, he would be here to greet that lover of mares when Hazelton arrived, and by that time Matthew hoped to have built up some seniority in this den of lawyers.
The pain was now excruciating, and Matthew clenched his teeth but he felt the cry rising up from his parched throat. He couldn’t restrain it. He was going to have to scream, and what would the company of diaboliques then think of his fortitude?
His mouth opened, and he let loose not a scream but a dry, rattling whisper. Even so, it was enough to further drain him. He was aware that the murmuring had ceased.
A hand—so rough-fleshed it might have been covered with treebark—touched his face, the fingers starting at his chin and sliding up his right cheek. The singsong murmuring began once more, still in that undecipherable language. What felt like a thumb and finger went to his right eye, and endeavored to push the lid up.
Matthew had had enough of this blindness. He gave a soft gasp at the effort it involved, but he forced his eyes open of his own accord.
Immediately he wished he had not. In the red, leaping light and drifting smoke of Hades, the visage of a true demon greeted him.
This creature had a narrow, long-chinned brown face with small black eyes, its flesh wrinkled and weathered like ancient wood. Blue whorls decorated the gaunt cheeks, and a third eye—daubed bright yellow as the sun—was painted in the center of the forehead. The earlobes were pierced with hooks from which dangled acorns and snail shells. The head was bald save for a topknot of long gray hair that grew from the back of the scalp and was adorned with green leaves and the bones of small animals.
To make Matthew’s induction to Hell even worse, the demon opened its mouth and displayed a set of teeth that might have served as a sawblade. “Ayo pokapa,” the creature said, nodding. Or at least that was the sound Matthew heard. “Ayo pokapa,” the demon spoke again, and lifted to its lips half of a broken clay dish in which something was densely smoking. With a quick inhalation, the creature pulled smoke into its mouth and then blew the noxious fumes—that nasty demon’s-sweat odor—into Matthew’s nostrils.
Matthew attempted to turn his head aside, and that was when he realized his skull was bound in some way to whatever hard pallet he lay upon. Avoiding the smoke was impossible.
“Yante te napha te,” the creature began to murmur. “Saba yante napha te.” It slowly rocked back and forth, eyes half-closed. The light from one or more hellfires glowed red through the dense pall of smoke that drifted above Matthew. What sounded like a pineknot burst, and then there came a hissing noise like a roomful of rattlesnakes from beyond the murmuring, rocking diabolist. The acrid woodsmoke seemed to thicken, and Matthew feared that the little breath he could grasp would soon be poisoned. “Yante te napha te, saba yante napha te,” went the repeated, rising and falling voice. Again the ritual with the broken dish and the inhalation was repeated, and again the smoke—damn Hell, if there was such a powerful stink to be smelled for eternity!—was blown up Matthew’s nostrils.
He couldn’t move, and assumed that not only his head was bound down but also both wrists and ankles. He wished to be a man about this, but tears sprang to his eyes.
“Ai!” the demon said, and patted his cheek. “Mouk takani soba se ha ha.” Then it was back to the steady murmuring and rocking, and another blast of smoke up the nose.
After a half-dozen draughts, Matthew was feeling no pain. The cogwheels that usually regulated the order of his mind had lost their timing, and one rocking motion by the demon stretched to the speed of the snails whose shells hung from the earlobe hooks, while the next was gone past in an eyeblink. Matthew felt as if he were floating in a red-flamed, smoky void, though he could of course sense the hard pallet at his back.
And then Matthew knew he must be truly insane, for he suddenly realized something very strange about the piece of broken dish from which the murmuring, smoke-blowing creature was inhaling.
It was white. And on it was a decoration of small red hearts.
Yes, he was
insane now. Absolutely insane, and ready for Hell’s Bedlam. For that was the same dish Lucretia Vaughan had thrown into the fount, only then it had been whole and contained a sweet yam pie.
“Yante te napha te,” the demon crooned, “saba yante napha te.”
Matthew was fading again. Losing himself to the swelling dark. Reality—such as it was in the Land of Chaos—disappeared in bits and pieces, as if the darkness were a living thing that hungered first for sound, then light, and then smell.
If it was possible to die a death in the country of the dead, then that was Matthew’s accomplishment.
But he found that such a death was fleeting, and there was very little peace in it. The pain grew again, and again ebbed. He opened his eyes, saw moving, blurred figures or shadows, and closed them for fear of what had arrived to visit him. He thought he slept, or died, or suffered nightmares of Jack One Eye running him down in a bloody clearing while the ratcatcher rode the bear’s back and thrust at him with the five-bladed sticker. He awakened sweating summer floods, and fell to sleep again dry as a winter leaf.
The smoke-breathing demon returned, to continue its tortures. Matthew once more saw that the broken dish was white, with small red hearts. He dared to speak to the creature, in a feeble and fearful voice, “Who are you?” The murmured chant went on.
“What are you?” Matthew asked. But no answer was given.
He slept and waked, slept and waked. Time had no meaning. He was tended to by two more demons, these more in the female shape with long black hair similarly adorned by leaves and bones. They lifted the mat of woven grasses, moss, feathers, and such that covered his nakedness, cleaned him when he needed to be cleaned, fed him a gray paste-like food that tasted strongly of fish, and put a wooden ladle of water to his lips.
Fire and smoke. Shifting shadows in the gloom. That murmured, singsong chanting. Yes, this was surely Hell, Matthew thought.
And then came the moment when he opened his eyes and found Rachel standing beside him in this realm of flames and fumes. “Rachel!” he whispered. “You too? Oh…my God…the bear…”