“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.
***
The phantom woman leaned down again to say something more, and Meshack cringed away. She raised a hand as if to strike him, and stopped. She looked to me again and crooked her neck to indicate a hole beside me, and behind me.
I turned to see it, and against the raw, damp skin of my cheek there was air—I was almost certain of it. It was moving air that didn’t stink so wholly of shit and decay.
“Meshack!” I said. “This way, it might be…it must be…” I floundered in my excitement.
***
Meshack was alone again. Nicodemus was at the edge of the pit, shaking and retching where he stood. It was odd to watch a man vomit that way, without crunching over or aiming his mouth at the ground.
“Get him,” Meshack said. “And let’s go.” My poor nephew, he was shaking so hard, and dribbling blood down his forearms and chest. It was pooling against his belt, soaking his shirt. He’d be no help in lifting the other man out.
I tried to climb d
own gingerly, but I tripped and went face-first into the bone pit, bruising myself in ways too horrible to contemplate. I staggered, and thigh-deep in the terrible wreckage of humanity I seized Nicodemus by the arm and dragged him—vomit and all—up over the edge and onto firmer turf.
“I thought you were going to leave him,” I said to Meshack as I hauled the other man up. It was almost like towing a drowned man.
“We’re going to need him.”
“We are?”
“Yes, unless you want to stay here and live in the valley. And you don’t want that anymore than I do. So it’s got to be him.” Meshack was staring down at the outermost paper, holding his candle past it and over it.
I’d forgotten he could read.
XVI
The Instructions
Neither Heaster Wharton Senior nor Junior could read. The message must’ve been dictated.
First man out alive, Mander or Coy, whoever’s got these papers gets the whole of my property on two conditions: One, he blows up the entrance to that cave our folks call the Witch’s Pit and he leaves it closed forever. Two, he stays in the valley and sees to it that the cave stays shut.
My pappy and Mr. Boone, they should’ve killed that thing off when it was just the one. Maybe they didn’t mean to let it live and breed. Maybe they didn’t know it was full with a litter of little things, down there in the cave. Maybe they didn’t know they’d only crippled it and made it madder, and meaner—and they’d let it birth some company.
Or maybe they were just scared and didn’t know what else to do. I don’t know. I weren’t there. My pappy told me about it, though, and he told me he didn’t think it was finished.
Well I know it wasn’t finished. And if my kin can’t cut it off, then they’ll have to live here with it. I know everyone wants me to divvy up the land all fair, so that’s just as fair as I can make it.
And if no one gets out, and no one ever reads this, it just goes to show that none of them deserved it anyway.
Table of Contents
Copyright
Table of Contents
No gypsy slut nor doxy,
Acknowledgements
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Cherie Priest, Those Who Went Remain There Still
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