“I know that sound,” Barret said, stopping in his tracks.
They were on the outskirts of town, just about to step beyond its limits, when the familiar sound touched his ears. From somewhere very near the shrill song of a small carrion flute resonated in the air around them; it played an unknown tune, or barely a tune at all for that matter, but its sound was distinct.
To their left the fence line continued into the distance for quite some way before it turned back into town. Five posts along that fence was a young girl, she was sitting on the grass, her back against the post, and her legs were straight out in front of her with ankles crossed. She was a petite thing, maybe a little shorter than Billy in height, she had long blonde hair brushed behind small rounded ears, and she wore a grey tunic with a white shirt underneath. Her feet were bare and dirty, and a little larger than you’d think; her eyes were closed and against her pursed lips she brushed a fine bone carrion flute.
“She is pretty,” Cetra said.
“Though she can’t hold a tune,” Billy added.
The girl stopped playing and turned to look at them. On the left side of her face, that side which had previously been turned away from them, a large raspberry coloured blotch trailed down her cheek, from the eye to the corner of her mouth, it was oddly in the shape of the letter G.
“Hello little girl,” Cetra said first, “What is your name?”
“Gabriella,” she said timidly.
“Gabriella. That is a beautiful name. My name is Cetra.”
“Most call me Gabby,” the girl said, appearing to be suddenly comforted by Cetra’s presence, “Only my parents call me Gabriella.”
“Gabby is nice too,” Cetra affirmed, “It does match the birthmark on your cheek, G for Gabby.”
“Oh?” Gabby sounded quizzically, “That’s not a birthmark, it’s a brand.”
“A brand?” Billy gaped.
Gabby looked at Billy suspiciously and then turned her attention to Cetra again.
“I have a lot of brothers and sisters....”
“So do I,” Cetra said.
“.... and my parents kept forgetting our names, so they branded our first initial onto our faces so they could remember who was who.”
“That’s just awful,” Billy said quietly, “How many brothers and sisters do you have?”
Again Gabby looked upon Billy with suspicion, but Cetra nodded her head and winked, indicating to the girl that he was ok.
“I don’t know,” Gabby said, “I see them around town.... with their brands. Some of them I’ve never even met, mostly the younger ones that is. I don’t go home much.”
“That is very sad,” Cetra said.
“It’s ok. I get by.”
“Hmmm,” Cetra hummed as she paused to think.
This gave Barret a window of opportunity to get in his own line of questioning. He approached the girl slowly and crouched down a short distance away.
“Where did you get the flute from?” he asked pleasantly.
Gabby pointed to the horizon directly in front of them. “The next town,” she said.
They all looked and saw the smudge of another town in the distance. They had missed that up until now.
“Who sold it to you?” he continued.
“A tall man,” she said, “looked a bit like you only much skinnier.”
“When did you see him?”
“Just yesterday,” she answered.
“Hmmm,” Barret hummed as it was now his turn to pause and think. He stood up again and went back to stand with Billy.
They talked softly about the chances of Barry still being in the next town, about the place with the pillars being potentially within their grasp, about what Billy looked forward to most when he eventually got home; and about the weather.
At the same time, in a whole separate conversation, Cetra asked Gabby a question.
“Do you want to come with us?”
Where “Yes!” was Gabby’s immediate response.
So now, when the boys turned their attention back to the girls, Cetra and her new friend Gabby were holding hands and ready to go.
“I did ask Gabby to come with us,” Cetra told them.
Billy smiled at the girl and as usual Barret huffed. Then they all agreed to head out.
In the mean time, Rod, who had had little or nothing to say for the past 180 or so hands, continued to lie on his stomach and soak up the warm sun.
“I like your mouse,” Gabby said when she finally noticed the lump on Cetra’s shoulder, “He’s cute.”
Rod stirred and sat up. “Thank you young lady,” he said in response to the compliment, “But you must forgive me, my mind had wandered back to home. I am Rod, and I am very pleased to meet you.”
“Gabby is travelling with us now,” Cetra said.
“Oh, how delightful,” Rod said, clasping his hands together, “Welcome aboard my dear.”
Although the next town was only on the horizon, it was still going to be a long walk.
“You miss home do you?” Gabby asked.
“My home is among the rocks and the sand,” Rod said with a sigh, “Perhaps it’s not so much that I miss the desert, but more so that I miss that past life.”
“Oh?”
“You see, I have now lived to find my adventure, so that old life is history. We desert mice live long lives to get to where I am now; I just hope it doesn’t end too soon.”
“What happens if it ends?” the young girl questioned.
“I may die.”
This comment made Cetra’s ears prick.
“Why would you die?” she asked gravely.
Rod looked into her eyes. “We live to stumble upon our adventure in life, when that adventure comes to an end what more do we have to live for?”
“Then we must keep this adventure going,” Cetra said firmly.
“But Billy may well be nearly home,” Rod added.
“Maybe he might, but I have been wandering around for a lot of days and I am always finding something new to do or somewhere new to go. So you, sir Rod, you will stay with me.”
Her words were forceful, and Rod was honoured. “Tally-ho then,” he called.
Hands passed.
The sun climbed higher into the sky.
Gabby whistled another tuneless tune when their conversation was exhausted.
A lone bird squawked as it flew overhead.
A single fl blew up on the breeze and landed on Barret’s upper lip. He flipped it away with the back of his hand and it blew off somewhere else.
Billy waved his hand over the satchel which had been supplied by Brand earlier that day. He elbowed Barret in the side and said, “Watch this.” Again he waved his hand over the satchel and from it produced a delicious rapple.
Indifferent, Barret said, “Watch what?”
“Magic,” Billy commanded.
He passed the rapple to Barret and repeated the action, waving his hand over the satchel and suddenly.... magically.... produced another rapple.
Barret rolled his eyes and returned his attention back to the path before them.
“Desperate for entertainment, are you?” he said.
“A little,” Billy admitted.
He handed a rapple to each of his companions and they cracked on.
Although for a while now, Billy had felt an odd sense that they were being followed.
“I feel like we’re being followed,” he said.
Not the only one, Cetra also admitted to a similar feeling of something out of the ordinary, but the sensation she felt was of something ahead of them, and it was something very familiar.
“It is here,” she shrieked excitedly, “I can feel it.”
Thus after a momentary pause to consider what Cetra was actually implying, they too became excited, drawing in even Gabby who really had no idea what she was getting excited over but thought it would be fun to just go with the flow.
“Are you serious?” Barret yelled, outshining any reaction Billy may have tried to exhibi
t.
Cetra jumped on the spot and smiled that exaggerated smile she smiled so well. There was no matching her joy, it was spontaneous and contagious, and it drew everybody in.
“There!” she cried and pointed a long finger along the path they were already headed.
About half way between them and the next town, nestled amongst a bunch of bushes and shrubs and a little way off the road itself, there were several wooden sheds. They stood isolated, appearing abandoned; but Gabby told them of a more sinister story.
Beneath those pitched and somewhat cracked rooves, bubbling and fermenting just under the surface of the earth, ingested and thus excreted by large, ravenous Bloody worms, lay the composted remains of every dead thing to have come out of that town just a little further down the track. From the insignificant yellow flowering plant held so dear by the young and frivolous Emma Piebeard, who one day forgot to water it and thus found it the next day huddled into a ball and crying its last breath of oxygen; to the one recently deceased town elder, Bart Bigbod, who undesirably put forward a bill to have those very sheds dismantled and in their place proposed the establishment of a town cemetery proper. Inexplicably, Bart was soon thereafter found decapitated atop a steaming pile of burros’ excrement by a band of local farmers, who perchance, just happened to be the very same farmers who chose to fertilise their crops with the rich compost produced from the darkness of those same sheds in question.
“That’s nasty,” were the only words Billy could muster.
Barret, on the other hand, was morbidly intrigued.
They continued along the path at a steady pace, eager to get to the place with the pillars, at least three of them not too keen though on the implications surrounding their destination, one curious to know what a worm bloated corpse might look like, and Gabby.... Gabby was indifferent, she’d walked this path a million times.
“I’ve walked this path a million times,” Gabby reassured them, “It doesn’t smell bad or anything.”
“Well I for one agree with the farmers,” Rod boasted, “The breaking down of dead bodies is a very natural thing, and essentially it is not simply a rotting corpse in this instance, but the manure produced by the Blood worms all mixed in with soil and plant matter. Readymade compost. That’s beautiful.”
“Yuck,” Billy gagged and poked out his tongue, “You may as well be irrigating your crops with raw sewage.”
“On the contrary, young man,” Rod retorted, “Sewage is bodily waste, full of toxins. This is rich body compost itself, no different from cow or chicken manure.”
“And cows and chickens don’t eat meat. You don’t fertilise your veg with the poo from a meat eater. You don’t rake up the dogs’ poo and throw it in the garden; you throw it over the back fence where you won’t tread in it.”
Billy’s knowledge of gardening was limited to his father’s influence, which was limited to a little book called A Vegetable Patch for Beginners, written by Marmalade Anneg. They had laughed about the author’s name for days, but their vegetable patch had thrived.
“This certainly is very interesting,” Cetra butted in sweetly, “But we are here now.”
Indeed they were there now, and it didn’t at all smell bad, just as Gabby had said. In fact, it smelt strangely sweet and oddly pleasant. Who’d have ever thought that worm poo could smell good enough to eat...?
Ugh!
There were eight sheds in all, none were locked but two had red flags tacked to their doors. A final one was falling apart and visibly in disuse.
Barret fingered one of the red flags and found the smell to be concentrated more around those two sheds.
“What are the flags for?” he asked Gabby.
“The flags stay there for five days,” she said, “That’s how long it takes for the worms to finish their job and then settle back down after their eating frenzy.”
“Eating frenzy?” Billy gulped.
“So these two are fresh ones?” Barret said, “What would happen if I opened the door and fell in?”
Gabby giggled. “They would eat you alive.”
“Nice,” Barret said, nodding his approval.
Curiosity is a strong driving force, and Barret was no exception to that; it drove him to do something that nobody really expected, or even hoped he might do for that matter – open the door.
Now everyone knows the significance behind a red flag.... it is a warning, it means stop. Gabby knew it, Billy even knew it, Cetra figured it out once she knew there were man eating worms involved, and Rod.... well, he seemed to know everything. So why was Barret so uninformed?
Curiosity!
Curiosity gives license to stupidity.
Thus when Barret stuck his head through the doorway and peered into the gloom of the shed he screamed, “Oh my...!” and forcefully grabbed onto the sides of the wooden framework to steady himself.
The others, apart from Gabby, cried their concern and quickly ran to their comrade’s aid, grabbing him by the clothes and pulling him back. They stumbled but never fell; and Barret laughed.... and kept laughing until both Billy and Cetra slapped him across the head in disgust.
Curiously though, seeing as how the door was now already open, they all craned their necks to have a look inside, and it turned out to be just dirt, sweet smelling, richly fertilised dirt.
Distractions entertained, and the curtain brought down on Barret’s fun, Cetra now concentrated on the giddiness she was feeling produced from the close proximity of the place with the pillars; her place of worship.
“It is that one,” she beamed and pointed at the shed that was structurally unsound and almost near collapsing.
Behind her back everyone smiled and shrugged their shoulders before following. Obviously it was only a very short walk, but for Cetra it was a walk filled with excitement and anticipation. Her God’s presence was there, and she could feel it already, with arms outstretched and welcoming.
To their surprise the old rusty hinged door opened easily and without even a single creak. Cetra looked back at everybody and smiled before stepping over the threshold. They each followed, Barret then Gabby, but Billy hesitated for a moment to glance around one last time at the plain they called Bradley. He still had that feeling of being followed, and was certain he may have heard footsteps lurking around the sheds. Finally though, he stepped through the hole and closed the door behind him.
CHAPTER THIRTY EIGHT