“Peters? You here?” Not seeing him right away worried me. I’d had enough guys turn up dead.
“Here.” From the far end.
It was dark in there. I moved warily, even assuming Peters wasn’t one of the villains.
I found him at the nether end, all right, hard at it with a pitchfork. He grumbled, “That damned Snake must have been playing with his paint set all the time. He hadn’t cleaned out in months. Look at this mess.”
I looked. I wrinkled my nose. Peters was tossing manure and soiled straw into a spreader wagon. “I’m no expert but isn’t this the wrong time of year to spread manure?”
“You got me. All I know is, it’s got to be cleaned out and this’s the wagon you haul it in.” He mumbled some rakledly rikkenfratzes and colorful commentary on Snake Bradon’s ancestors, then added, “I have enough to do without this. What’s up, Garrett? And why don’t you grab a fork and help while you’re resting?”
I grabbed a fork but I wasn’t much help. I was always lucky, even in the Marines, and never had to learn the practical side of keeping horses. “What’s up is, I’ve found the fence who bought the stolen stuff. One of my associates will bring him out this afternoon.”
He stopped pitching. He stared long enough to start me wondering if maybe he wasn’t less than thrilled. He said, “So you are doing something after all. I was starting to think you were a drone. That the only effort you were putting out was trying to get Jennifer to put out.”
“Nope. Not interested. Not my type.” I guess there was an edge to my voice. He dropped it.
“You just wanted to give me the news?”
“No. I need your help. My associate is bringing a doctor, too.”
“And you want me to distract the old man while this croaker gets a look at him?”
“I want you to go down the road and meet them, explain to the doc so he don’t get himself booted before he gets a look. Not that I have any hopes he can tell much without laying hands on.”
Peters grunted and started throwing horse hockey, “When are they coming?”
I tried guessing an optimum turnaround time. With Saucerhead there wouldn’t be many delays. He’d just grab them by the collar and drag them. “I’d think two more hours. If we can, I’d like to get the fence in without anybody seeing him. So we can spring him on whoever.”
He grunted again. “You’re slacking.” We tossed. He said, “I’ll manage. I’ll have to see the old man first. Always something around here.”
I told him, “I have hopes for this.”
“Yeah?”
“Maybe it’ll start things unravelling. If it goes right, we could get it tied up by tonight.”
“You always were too optimistic.”
“You don’t think so?”
“I don’t. You’re not dealing with your average idiots. These guys aren’t going to rattle. They aren’t going to panic. Watch your back.”
“I intend to.”
He put his fork down. “You go ahead. I’m going to go clean up.”
I watched him walk toward the open doorway, grinned. Those ears stuck out like the handles of jugs.
I tossed about three more forksful and quit. Mama Garrett didn’t raise her boy to be a stable hand.
I’d gone a dozen steps toward the house when I had a thought. I turned back and invited myself into Snake Bradon’s den. I fiddled around for five minutes getting a lamp going. Snake wasn’t there anymore. I wondered what they’d done with him. Nobody had done any digging in the cemetery.
Damn! I’d meant to ask Peters about Tyler and the draug!
I missed the Dead Man’s nagging. I just wasn’t alert enough. Getting too turned inward or something. Not paying close enough attention. I didn’t do that when I had the Dead Man to tell me what to do. I went down the list, by the numbers.
All right. I would. I’d failed to meet Snake in time. That didn’t mean Bradon couldn’t still tell me something, as the Dead Man would remind me. They could all tell me things, want to or not, if I concentrated. So let’s start here, now, Garrett.
I did the things I’d done when we’d found Snake. I didn’t learn anything this time, either. But I did pay attention to the paint-splashed worktable. I hadn’t before. I hadn’t considered that side of Snake at all.
Cook said he’d had tremendous artistic talent. Someone else said he might have painted the sorceress Invisible Black. Here, there, there’d been remarks to the effect that he remained an active artist. That side of the man didn’t fit the rest of the Bradon image, to my mind. Artists sponge off the lords of the Hill. However good they are, they can’t make a living doing what they do. I hadn’t considered Bradon an artist because he hadn’t fallen into the groove.
That table was evidence he’d worked plenty. But where were the results? The table wasn’t his product.
I started a thorough search, working outward from the center of Snake Bradon’s life. I found nothing interesting in his room except squirreled stuff for making paints. I recalled that he’d been messy when we were checking what had happened to Hawkes. He’d been working on something recently.
There was a fifteen-by-twenty tack room next to Snake’s hole. The place had been torn apart.
I just stood there, surprised. Somebody was worried about Snake after he was gone? My, my. And Garrett hadn’t been smart enough to get to it first.
If the searcher found something, he did a fine job of getting rid of it. There was nothing there now but a scatter of brushes, some broken underfoot. I wondered if Bradon’s hobby had been a secret. One of those kind everybody knows but nobody mentions. Painting pictures wasn’t a manly, Marine sort of thing to do. He might not have shared with the others.
I was having a little trouble making sense of these people. Again. Still.
I paused to wonder where I’d have hidden something if I’d been Snake. As the searcher probably had, knowing him better.
Brilliant thinker that I am, I came up with a big nothing.
Nothing for it, then. A general search. Every nook and cranny. Whoever had gone before me wouldn’t have had a lot of time. He’d have to be seen places when he was supposed to be. Hell. Maybe he’d done his hunting before Morley and I came along last night. Or maybe while he was supposed to be loading manure?
Whatever, there was a chance he hadn’t found anything.
If anything existed.
I did a quick tour of the ground level. Nothing caught my eye. I felt the imminence of the confrontation with the thief and kept getting more hurried, somehow hoping to have an extra dart when the showdown came.
I climbed into the hayloft, perched on a bale and muttered, “What the hell am I looking for, anyway?” Paintings? He’d painted, obviously. And the product wasn’t in evidence. But what could paintings tell me if I found them?
I shrugged, got up, looked around. Snake had gotten a damned good hay supply in, considering. All neatly bailed, too. From what I recalled the country boys saying back when, that wasn’t common. Ordinary folks filled their lofts with loose hay.
“Ha!” A story recalled. A guy in the outfit, Tulsa something, hell of an archer, did our sniping. Farm kid. Poor background. Died on that island. But he used to laugh about games he’d played with the daughters of the lord of a nearby manor. They’d done it in a secret room they’d built in the hayloft of the lord’s main barn.
I raised my lamp high and stared at all that hay, too much for the state of the place. Might that pile be hollow? I muttered, “That has to be it.”
I poked around the outside, trying to guess how Bradon would have gotten inside. Elimination left me three good spots to find entrances. I set the lamp on a beam and went to work.
I moved maybe ten bales before I decided I’d tried the wrong place first. I went to the next spot, moved another ten bales and felt foolish. Looked like I’d outfoxed myself again.
My activities drew the attention of the natives. Three ugly cats joined me, including an evil old calico. Me moving th
e bales got the mice stirring. The cats were snacking. They worked as a team, not something cats usually do, as far as I know. When I’d turn a bale, one would jump into the vacated spot to scare mice toward the others. At one point the calico had one mouse under each forepaw and another in her mouth.
“See?” I told them. “I’m not all bad.”
One more try.
Third time was the charm, as they say. I tipped a few bales. Cats flew around. And, behold! A three-foot-high, eighteen-inch-wide hollow, black as a priest’s heart, ran back into the pile. I got the lamp. I asked the cats, “One of you want to run in there and let me know what’s up? No? I didn’t think so.”
I got down on hands and knees and crawled.
26
It smelled in there. Not too bad a smell, but a strong one of moldy hay. It didn’t do my cold any good. My nose ran like a fountain.
There was a room inside the hay, larger than I’d expected. Snake had spanned it with planks to support the bales on top. It was maybe six feet wide and ten feet long. His paintings were there, along with other treasures, mostly what we’d consider trivial or trash. Junk from the war, mostly. And medals. Snake had accumulated him a potful of medals, proudly displayed on a tattered Karentine banner against the narrow end wall.
I couldn’t help feeling for the guy. A hero had come to this. A life for his country, for this.
And our rulers wonder why Glory Mooncalled is a folk hero.
Both side walls were lined with paintings, none of them framed, all just leaning there, stacked three and four deep. They were every bit as good as Cook said they could be. Better, maybe. I’m no expert but they looked like the product of a driven genius.
They weren’t cheerful paintings. They were the spawn of darkness, visions of hell. One caught my eye immediately and hit me like a blow in the gut. It was a swamp. Maybe not the swamp that became my home away from home during my stint, but a place just as horrible. And that painting was no simple, brooding landscape faintly touched with the dark side. Swamp things swarmed there the way they seemed after they’d driven you mad for months. Mosquitos the size of hornets, eyes that watched from the dark, stagnant water. Human bones.
In the foreground was a hanged man. The scavengers had been at him. A dark bird perched on his shoulder, pecked his face. Something about the way he hung left you certain he’d hanged himself rather than go on.
A couple of guys in the company had killed themselves when they couldn’t take it anymore.
Gods. I felt like I could fall into that painting and tumble right back through time.
I turned it around. It got to me that much.
Shaking, I went down the row on that side, then up the other. No other piece had the personal impact that one did but the same genius drove them. They’d have as much power for the right viewer.
“He was crazy,” I murmured.
I couldn’t hear anything well but it seemed the horses below were restless.
I went around again, checking the paintings behind the ones displayed.
Most seemed less maniacal, more illustrative, yet there was no doubt they portrayed places beheld by the same eye that had interpreted the war in the others. One I recognized as a view of Full Harbor contorted into a hellish dreamscape, more proof that Snake had put his memories or haunts onto his canvases.
Snake hadn’t been just a painter of places. The first portrait I encountered was of Jennifer, I’d guess, at the time the General had come home. She was indefinably younger and maybe more beautiful—yet interpreted by mad eyes.
I studied it hard but couldn’t figure it out. Yet Snake had done something with Jennifer that gave me the creeps.
There were portraits of the others, too. Kaid looked old and tired and worn out and you got the feeling that death was watching over his shoulder. The General had some of the creepiness that illuminated Jennifer and something of the fox about him. Chain looked plain mean. Wayne looked like a greedy burgher. I got it! Part of it. Part of the interpretation was how Bradon had clothed them. That was the crude statement. But there were the faces, too, painted like the man had been able to read the bones and souls beneath.
There was a later portrait of Jennifer, crueler than the first but with the lady more beautiful. Then a couple of guys I hadn’t met, presumably among the missing. Then one of Dellwood that reminded me of a basset hound. I guess Snake saying he was a faithful old dog without a soul or mind of his own. Then one of Peters, either a failure for the artist or observer. I couldn’t read anything into it. Then one of Cook that must have been romantic excess because she came off like a saint, like a mother to the world. Then still another of Jennifer, almost repulsive in its portrayal of the dualities, beauty and horror.
Once I got over being startled, I examined it more closely. Part of the effect came at a subconscious level, almost. I don’t know how he did it but he’d painted two faces, one over the other, the outer one of blinding beauty and the other the skull face of death. You didn’t see that one without staring long and hard.
The horses were excited downstairs. I wondered why but was preoccupied with the magic—yeah, the sorcery—of Snake Bradon’s artistry.
If it was a sin that Jennifer’s beauty should be hidden, it was the crime of the century that Bradon’s paintings should go unseen, certain to fall victim to mold and moisture.
Before I left Jennifer, I vowed I’d find some way to bring the paintings out. Snake Bradon wouldn’t go unremembered.
Had he been in love with Jennifer? She was the only subject he’d painted more than once, excepting a scene that looked like a before and after of a nonhuman holy place that had had the misfortune to stumble into the middle of a human battle. The later painting reeked of defilement by the corpses and ravens and bones. It felt like a parable of the world.
I blew my nose, hit the motherlode. Before it watered up again, I caught a whiff of a new odor. What? I shrugged and went on.
“Damn! Ah, damn my eyes!” That was no curse, friends. That was a squeal of triumph.
Snake had painted my lady in white. He had caught her as the incarnation of beauty—yet she, too, had some of the creepiness he’d put into his portraits of Jennifer.
She was in a wind, running, frightened. A darkness lay behind her. You knew it was in pursuit, yet you could not define what it was. The harder you looked the harder it was to tell it was there. The woman looked right into your eyes. The artist’s eyes. Her right hand was just starting the motion of reaching out for help. Her eyes said she knew the person she was looking at knew what was behind her.
It transfixed me. It had the impact of the swamp painting. And this time I couldn’t figure out why, because this one couldn’t be explained in terms of my own past.
I blew my nose again. I got another whiff of that odor. This time I recognized it.
Smoke!
The damned stable was on fire! No wonder the horses were excited!
I scrambled out of there, to the edge of the loft.
Flames roared at the end where Peters had been working. The animals had gotten out and run. I heard shouting outside. The heat was savage.
I wasn’t trapped—yet. If I moved fast I could get clear.
I knew the mileage Morley would get out of the gesture as I dove into the hole leading to Snake’s cache. He’d be on me for a year, risking my life over some daubs on canvas.
I slapped a dozen of those daub-hickeys into a pile as big as I could manage and dragged them out. The fire was spreading fast. Flames were almost to me when I burst out. The heat beat at me. I felt my eyebrows curl, my eyes dry out. I staggered away. The flames came after me.
“Damned fool,” I muttered to myself. The heat seared the back of my neck. Now my eyes watered, nearly blinding me. My chances were slim enough without the damned paintings.
I couldn’t let them go. They were that important. They were worth risking a life. Part of me already mourned those I’d had to leave behind.
The fire had spread
below faster than it had up top. It was ahead of me now, at the end where Snake had lived. I wasn’t going to get out that way.
I could see daylight through cracks between the vertical boards that formed the outside wail, rough-cut timber that had shrunk with the years till some of the gaps were half an inch wide. It was like looking through the bars at the gates of hell. From the inside. That close. And so far.
As panic closed in, I threw myself that way.
The stable was old and damned near falling down, and, if it was half as rotten as it looked, I might be able to bust out. I hit the wall with my shoulder, low. Both creaked. Neither broke but I figured the wall had the edge. I got down on my back and shot my feet out. One board gave an inch. That gave me hope and maybe some manic strength. I let fly again. An eight-inch-wide board tilted outward, then fell away under its own weight. Mad as I was, I flipped Bradon’s paintings out before trying to make the hole wide enough for me.
The smoke almost overcame me first, but I made it. I jumped.
I lay around panting a while, vaguely aware that I was out there alone, away from the hollering on the other side of the barn. I climbed a fencepost and got myself upright, looked around, counted limbs to make sure I hadn’t left any behind. I was still alone. I gathered my priceless salvage.
If there are gods, they agreed with me about those paintings. They hadn’t been damaged. I got them together, limped over to the cow barn, hid them in the hayloft. My fuddled sense of humor told me that was appropriate. Then I stumbled back around the far side of the stable.
The whole gang was running around like chickens, doing the hopeless, bringing buckets of water from the wellhouse. Only the General and Peters were absent.
“Garrett!” Jennifer squealed. “What happened?”
I’m such a handsome devil, they just go to pieces when they see me. “I was taking a nap in there,” I lied.
She got a little pale.
I gave her my heroic grin. “Not to worry. I just busted through a wall and here I am.” A coughing jag hit me. Great timing. Damned smoke. “Can’t stop the true of heart.”