A Natural History of Hell: Stories (22 page)

“I was at the inn tonight when the red man came,” she said.

“Ahh,” said Toler. “I saw you gather up the remains of the hunters he, what would you call it, killed?”

“Yes.”

“How did you find me in the storm? How did you know I was out there?”

“Do you know who I am?” she said.

Toler began to sweat. He shook his head and gripped his sword. “Are you my mother
’s servant?
”

The young woman laughed. “Perish the thought. I
’
m the crone of Aer.”

“The crone of Aer?” said Toler, knowing he
’
d heard the title before. “Where
’
s Aer?”

“At the end of the valley of the known world,” she said.

“You don
’
t look like a crone,” he told her.

“To each her crone,” she said.

“
And so I’
m to assume you sent this hellish swordsman after me? Made him of coral so as to cancel the magic of my weapon?”

“That monstrosity isn
’
t mine,” she said. “I want to help you defeat it.”

“There
’
s not going to be a battle,” said Toler. “I
’
m fleeing for my life. I
’
m not prepared to meet such an opponent.”

“Because he has an advantage like the one your sword, in any other duel, would give to you?”

“Precisely,” he said.

“You will fight him,” she said.

“I can
’
t.”

“I
’
ve made you something that will help.” She walked past him and the glow of the fireplace into the shadows of the cottage.

Toler sweated profusely; the so recently welcomed warmth was now oppressive. He didn
’
t trust anything. A sword that turns opponents to coral, a red coral man with a crystal sword that turns opponents to salt, and a witch in a cottage in the middle of a blizzard. “Wake up,” he whispered to himself, and then the crone of Aer returned, holding a large goose egg out toward him. He took a step back from this new strangeness.

“This egg holds your salvation in a duel with Thybault. Do you remember the salt I gathered at the inn?”

“Yes.”

“I mixed it with green vitriol and derived the spirits of salt. They
’
re here in the egg. Merely crack this in the face of Thybault and you will have gained back the advantage.”

“What will happen?”

“The spirits will be released.”

“I
’
m going back into the storm,” he told her. “
I don’
t trust you. I remember the story my mother told me about you.”

“Your mother, who was sent to assassinate me? That demon we saw at the inn tonight, that wasn
’t my doing.
”

Toler moved toward the door. His hand touched the knob and he felt a sudden sting at the back of his neck. He tottered for a spell and then fell into the heat of the cottage. The crone spoke directly into his ear. “It
’
s your mother
’s servant.
” He woke in the street, the Coral Heart drawn and in his hand, a crowd surrounding him. He heard the church bells and in a second realized he was back in Thyse. He pulled himself up off the frozen mud, and the crowd retreated a few steps. Freezing to the point of shivering and totally confused, he turned to look for an escape from the people, and saw Thybault charging, the crystal blade above his head. He wore no shirt or shoes; the cold meant nothing to him.

Toler crouched and brought his weapon up to block the downward chop of the crystal blade. The crystal clanged off the metal of his weapon, hard as blade steel. He absorbed the blow and rolled away, two somersaults backward and then into a standing position. As he lifted the Coral Heart in defense, he felt the beat of the pulse in his palm. His heart regulated it and regulated the sword. The training he
’
d done was paying off. Thybault came after him, swinging wildly, massively, as if to cut Toler in half. The red man
’
s blade caught a bystander on the earlobe and made her a cloud of salt. The sight of it distracted the Coral Heart and it was everything he could do to gather in his wonder and counter a thrust of the crystal death.

The duel became fierce, a crazy clash of swords amid the thronging crowd. The pair moved around the street, attacking and defending. At one point, Toler could have sworn that he
’
d been cut by Thybault. In fact he stopped to look along his side where his shirt was ripped. “Don
’
t you get it,” said the red man. “You
’
ll know when I cut you because you
’
ll be a pile of salt.” With this, Toler
’
s opponent punched him in the mouth, those polished coral knuckles like a hammer, and sent him stumbling backward into the crowd. Afraid to be caught by an errant blade from the red man, the crowd retreated and let their defender fall on his back in the street.

Again, Thybault advanced, this time more deliberately, as if confident he could finish the duel at will. Someone behind Toler helped him to his feet. As he regained his stance, he felt something smooth slip into his free hand. It could have been a stone by its size, but it lacked the weight. He cantered to the left and began circling Thybault. The red man swung, every time just a second behind the moving target. When Toler stopped abruptly, Thybault kept turning and swinging, and this gave the Coral Heart a chance to look down at the object he held; the crone
’
s goose egg.

He got in two good slashes to the red man
’
s neck, but his blade had little effect upon the coral. Tiny slivers chipped away, leaving barely visible creases. One thing he was sure of was that the longer he could stay alive the better his chances were.

The red man, carrying and swinging the crushing weight of red coral arms, was growing winded. He redoubled his efforts to finish off Toler and came with a barrage of lunges and half fades that pressed the youth back nearly to the wall of the inn. Thybault then executed an empty fade and instead of retreating lunged with his foot drawn up. He caught Toler in the chest with a kick and slammed him against the wall, knocking the air out of him. He slid down to a sitting position. The Coral Heart had sprung free from Toler
’
s grasp, and the crystal sword advanced, slashing the air.

Thybault stood now above his prey, leering down. The crowd cheered, shifting allegiance upon seeing that Toler was doomed and fearing reprisals from the apparent victor for having initially cheered against him. The red man lifted the gleaming blade into the air for the final blow, and it was here that Toler threw the egg that was still in his hand. It hit his opponent in the face and cracked. Something wet inside spilled across the coral man
’s visage. He laughed at Toler’
s desperate attempt at defense, and the crowd joined him.

Then Thybault’s face began to smoke and fizz, and a chunk of his chin slid off. The coral man’s laughter turned to screams, and the crowd, not knowing how to react, screamed as well. Toler gathered his wits and rolled to where the Coral Heart lay. As he sprang up with his weapon in his grip, Thybault dropped the crystal sword and clawed at his face, more slivers and chunks bubbling pink and fizzing away, coming loose. The Coral Heart didn’t rely on the magical properties of his sword but just its strong steel blade, and with a mighty arcing swing, the air singing against the blood groove, he took off his opponents already rotted head. It fell on the ground smoking. A moment later the massive weight of the coral body tipped over and smashed to pieces in the frozen street. The crowd cheered for Toler.

Toler stared at the smoldering face and, in awe, noticed the lips moving. He got down on his knees and put his ear to them. To his astonishment, the sound that came forth was his mother
’
s, -I-’s, voice. “You have now ascended to the third level,” she said. “I thought I was to renounce the sword,” whispered Toler. “Don
’
t be a fool,” were her last words. Then the crowd swarmed him and took him on their shoulders into the inn to celebrate his victory.

Late that night, when he returned to the barn to prepare his things for a journey back to Camiar in the morning, the crone of Aer was waiting for him. She stepped out of the shadows, and her sudden presence made him draw the Coral Heart.

“I noticed Thybault
’
s crystal sword disappeared soon after the duel,” he said to her.

“I took it and hid it away. No one will find it. You now have no equal.”

“
I don’
t understand my mother
’
s creation.”

“She was testing you. She may live in a cave in the mountains, but in her heart she
’
ll always be an assassin.”

“But didn
’
t you put a spell on her and change her?”

“That was all just a dream she had, twice deluding herself. You can create incredible, deadly thought-form servants and raise a child while surviving in the mountains, but you can
’
t change what
’
s in your heart.”

“So you helped me because she once intended to kill you?”

“From what I saw today,” said the crone, “it looks like she intended to kill you as well.”

“You said no one else knows where the crystal sword is?” asked Toler.

It was only hours after he
’
d left the village, riding on a main trail through the Forest of Sans, that the owner of the barn Toler had stayed in found the red coral statue of a young woman with long hair. The man was surprised and perplexed by it for a few years until news of the hard red slaughter reached even Thyse. Upon learning of the Coral Heart, he told his daughter how the ancients once believed that the planet Mars was made of red coral.

The Thyme Fiend

In July of 1915, in Hardin County, Ohio, the normally reliable breeze of the plains that through eons could be counted on for at least a modicum of relief during the most dire of summer days—a wave in the wheat, a whisper in the cornfield—without warning up and died. The relentless blue skies and humidity were merciless; the dream-white clouds, palatial and unmoving. Over ninety degrees every day, often over a hundred, no hint of rain. Fear of crop failure turned like a worm in the heart. Farm folk sweated and burned at their labor, and at night took to either the Bible or the bottle or both. Some children were sent to the evaporating creek to try to catch memories of coolness; some to the distant windbreaks, those thickets of trees, like oases in the vastness of cornfields, to play Desert Island and loll in the shade until the sun went down. More than one mother fainted from the heat of a stove. Nights were better for being dark but offered no relief from the sodden stillness that made sleep so hard to achieve.

On the hottest of the days in that long spell, sometime just before noon, when the sun was at its cruelest, fourteen-year-old Emmett Wallace mounted his bike and, leaving the barnyard, headed out on the dirt road that ran all the way to Threadwell or Mount Victory, depending on which direction you chose. He pedaled slowly west, toward the former, passing between fields of drooping wheat. Turkey vultures circled, casting their shadows on him, and the long straight path he traveled dissolved at a distance into a rippling mirage.

The bike wasn’t new, but it was new to him, his first, and the joy of powering himself along, the speed of it, hadn’t yet become old hat. It had been a birthday gift from his father not but five days earlier. Bought used, it was a Hercules; a rash of rust across its fading red paint, splintered wooden rims, an unpadded shoehorn of a seat with a saddlebag behind it. There was a small oil lantern with a glass door attached to the handlebars, but the burner was missing.

Nothing was said, but the boy knew the bike had come to him as reparation for an incident that happened in spring. It was after a day of ploughing, dusk coming on, and father and son stood in the barnyard, unhitching the horses. They’d worked for days, from one end of their land to the other. Emmett sensed that he was, for the first time, more an asset in the fields than a distraction and felt a closeness to his father that had been missing in recent months. In that instant it came to him to try to explain just why he needed his cup of tea before bed. The old man had deemed the practice a vain pretension and ordered his wife not to continue it.

Emmett’s mother disagreed. “You’re not the one who has to get up in the middle of the night and calm the boy down,” she said. His father grumbled but knew his place, and she kept on brewing the herbal drink, filling the steel tea ball with thyme from the kitchen garden. It was a remedy for nightmares brought over from the old country.

“I get the terrors otherwise,” Emmett explained.

His father stopped and turned to stare at him.

“My skull gets jammed to cracking with demons. Fire. Blood. People crying.” He shook his head as he spoke, hoping to better convey his dread.

With a sudden lunge, his father clipped him across the side of the face with the back of his hand. Emmett went down into the dirt, dizzy, his lip bleeding.

“No more of that crazy talk. It’s time you grow up,” said his father, leading the horses away toward the barn.

The bike was the boy’s sign that even though his father had been silent as a gravestone on the subject, he was sorry for what he’d done. That was enough for Emmett, that and the bike, which was finally a means of getting out into the world, beyond the limits of walking. The last book he’d borrowed from the little library Mr. Peasi, the barber, kept in the corner of his shop in Threadwell was Washington Irving’s
Tales of the Alhambra.
In daylight Emmett was also a wanderer in both mind and body, a naturalist of the creek bed, a decoder of clouds. While the sun shone, he longed for the world to reveal its mysteries, but at night, without the tea, he’d wake screaming in the clutches of those mysteries within.

The night terrors started the year Emmett was five. For years following, his parents often wondered what had ignited them. They couldn’t remember a single remarkable event from that time, traumatic or otherwise. The demons bloomed in a scream one night in the middle of January. It was brutally cold even with both the stove and fireplace roaring. Emmett lay between his parents on a makeshift bed of comforters close to the fire. His sudden bellow, a croaking cry from somewhere deep within, made the blizzard outside seem something out of summer. The boy was never able to give any substantial details about what dreams had plagued him.

Happy to be free of school for the summer and free of his chores for the day, he rode along at a good clip, barely noticing the heat. Pastor Holst’s wife passed in her white Studebaker, smiled at the boy in his overalls, no shirt or shoes, and hit the horn, but Emmett was so preoccupied he barely thought to wave until she disappeared ahead in a cloud of dust. He’d been picturing the Addison place, abandoned since five summers earlier—a farmhouse and outbuildings left just as they were, beds made, belongings still in the dressers and closets. The family had fallen on hard times and had left to live with Mrs. Addison’s folks in Indiana. Mr. Addison was supposed to return for some of their things, but once they were gone, they never came back. Emmett’s father would say, “I understand Mr. Addison liked his whiskey.”

A mile from home, he came to the drive of the abandoned farm, stopped pedaling, and turned to look around. There wasn’t a soul in sight. The air, of course, was still, and the sunburned weedy jumble that was the front lawn of the place was alive with the buzz of insects overheating. Other than that, the day was silent, not even a dog barking in the distance. He rode down the drive and into the open barn, where he dismounted and leaned the bike against the low wall of an empty horse stall.

Last he’d been to the Addisons’ two weeks earlier, the mysteries of the main house were plumbed—a broken mirror, which made him wonder if it had been the beginning of their bad luck, women’s undergarments in a dresser drawer turned to lace by the swarm of white moths that flew out when he opened it. The place had smelled of mildew and mice, and he decided not to disturb it again, but to investigate the outer buildings, the various sheds, the silo, the icehouse. In his daydream, he opened the door to the last, and there, still unmelted, were shimmering blocks of frozen freshwater cut from Ziegler’s pond, east of Mount Victory, back during the winter he was nine. “Eternal ice,” he said to himself as he walked across the burned brown field.

He headed for the icehouse, which sat beneath a giant white oak. On the way, he noticed a well that lay right on the border of the barnyard and the growing fields—a turret of limestone blocks, a wooden support each at north and south to hold the windlass, but the windlass and rope and bucket were missing.

Emmett leaned over the turret’s opening and peered down into the cylinder of shadow. He called hello to hear the echo and tossed a stone in to listen for a splash. No splash sounded but he could hear the stone hitting rock at the bottom, and from the sound, the bottom didn’t seem all that deep. He backed away from the edge a little and moved a few degrees to the side. The sun directly overhead shone down into the dark, revealing something that made Emmett squint. He stared for a long while and then pushed off the edge of the limestone and ran back to his bike.

He raced down the dirt road, a wake of dust trailing, feeling sick with both excitement and fear. When he was back in the yard of his own home, he jumped off the bike and let it fall in the dirt. “Pa,” he yelled. His father called to him, “In the barn.” The old man, his shirt drenched, his hat in hand, was sitting on a milking stool, back against the workbench.

Emmett stopped before him and leaned over to catch his breath.

“Well?” said his father.

“Pa, there’s a dead person in the well at the Addisons’ place.” In the instant he’d spoken, he suddenly realized how much trouble he’d be in for having been over there.

His father sat forward and put the hat on. “What were you doing at the Addisons’?”

The boy was silent. Finally he said, “Exploring.”

The man shook his head in disappointment. “A dead person?”

“At the bottom of the well.”

“You sure the well is dry and you weren’t seeing your reflection?” he said and stood up.

“I threw a rock in, there was no splash, and I saw a skull looking up at me.”

Dusk gathered in the barnyard of the Addison place and had filled the well to the brim with shadow. Emmett’s father said to him, “There better be something down there.” Fritz Dibble, a Threadwell Fire Department volunteer, lowered a glowing lantern on a rope into the murky depths. Chief of Police Benton, smoking a roll-up cigarette, hat cocked back, followed the path of light in its descent. He wiped his arm across his forehead and said, “Whew. It’s hotter than the widow Alston out here.” Dibble smiled, but Emmett’s father didn’t. Emmett said, “I’m pretty sure I saw a skull,” and the chief said, “We’ll see about that.”

Just as the boy had predicted, the skull was slowly revealed. The attached skeleton still wore tattered clothing. Emmett felt his father’s hand lightly touch him on the top of the head. “The lantern?” asked Dibble. The chief said, “Leave it down there,” and then called over his shoulder to his young officer, “Johnson, let’s get you ready.” A new rope was used for Johnson, tied around the tops of his legs and then crisscrossed behind him so that he would sit upright in his descent. When he and the chief thought his rigging was secure, he crawled up onto the edge of the well. Emmett’s father sent the boy to the buckboard to fetch their horse, Shadrak. A harness was placed on the animal. “We could use the Model T, but I think the horse’ll be gentler,” said Benton.

“Just make sure that limestone edge don’t cut my rope,” said Johnson, who took off his hat and handed it to Dibble. Once his rope was attached to the metal rings of the horse’s harness, he lowered his legs over the side and sat on the edge of the well. Emmett’s father took the horse by the reins and moved Shadrak forward till the rope connecting Johnson to the animal was taut. “Okay, here we go,” said the chief. Johnson leaned forward and inched off the edge of the well. Emmett looked over the side as the horse stepped backward and the officer sank one jerky increment at a time into the orange lantern glow.

“Smells like death,” Johnson called up, and the voice echoed.

“Send him down the hook,” said the chief, and Dibble set another line over the side tied to the end of a rusty hand scythe he’d found in the Addison barn. “Coming down to your right,” Dibble called to Johnson. By then the officer was nearing the bottom of the well. He picked up the lantern by its rope and held it nearer the skeleton. “About a half ton of mouse shit down here,” came the echo. Then they heard him gagging. “I think I know who this is,” Johnson yelled.

“Who?” asked the chief.

“Jimmy Tooth.”

Benton nodded, and after a vacant moment, said, “That actually makes sense,” in a voice too low for Johnson to hear. He yelled, “You got him hooked?”

“Yeah.”

“Okay, Mr. Wallace,” said the chief. “Bring him up.”

Emmett’s father took the horse by the reins and started forward, again one labored step at a time.

“Jimmy Tooth,” said Dibble. “If that’s him, he’s been down there for about three years.”

“That’s about right,” said Benton.

“Do you think he was drunk and fell in?”

Emmett looked away from the well opening and realized it was twilight. He saw the moon coming up out across the fallow field and had a memory of Jimmy Tooth—a handsome young man with dark eyes, a wave of dark hair, and always a vague grin. He’d heard his mother describe Jimmy as “simple.” Tooth worked as an assistant to Avery Cross, the blacksmith, and lived in the back of the shop. Whenever Emmett had been there with his father, he’d never noticed Jimmy say a word that wasn’t a repetition of what Cross had just told him. Once every few months, he would spend his pay on a bottle of Old Overholt and rampage through the town, openly leering at women and screaming nonsense.

“Why you say it’s Jimmy?” asked the chief.

“The skeleton’s wearing the same religious medallion Jimmy used to wear,” said Johnson. “Every time we arrested him, and I’d have to remove his belt and belongings, I’d have to take it from around his neck. I remember what it looks like. Saint Benedict.”

“Jimmy was a good kid, but a bad drunk,” added Dibble.

Emmett’s father joined the men at the well and said, “Cross told me Jimmy said that one day he’d take off to Kenton and become a conductor on the railroad to Chicago. When he vanished, that’s where we thought he’d gone.”

“Threadwell didn’t exactly miss him,” said the chief.

Night fell, and the empty sockets of the skull peered above the rim of the well.

“Whew, what a stink,” said Dibble.

The three men on the rope gave it a long pull to get the corpse to clear the opening, and though it did, falling in a clatter on the ground next to the well, the left leg hit the limestone turret the wrong way and kicked up into the air. It came down right on its heel, and the bony foot cracked off and fell back into the pit.

“Chief,” said Johnson, “I ain’t going back in after that foot. You want it, you’re going to have to go down there.”

Benton laughed. “In that case it stays where it is.”

Emmett’s father retrieved the lantern from the well and held it up high. The chief stood over the corpse. “Looks like someone knocked Jimmy Tooth’s teeth out,” he said, pointing with the toe of his boot at the one incisor that remained on the upper jaw. “That’s irony.”

“He could have lost them in the fall,” said Johnson. “Or maybe they came out while he lay there rotting. The mice could have took them.”

“Did you notice the crack in the back of the skull?” asked Benton.

“Head could have got bashed in the fall,” said Johnson.

“I heard you can see the stars during the day from the bottom of a well,” said Dibble.

Chief Benton took the feet and Johnson took the shoulders, and they hoisted the remains into the air. Blue flannel shreds, once a shirt, hung down, and the medallion clattered within the rib cage. The jeans, but for small holes, were still intact, the belt fastened around the hip and pelvic bones. Emmett followed them to Dibble’s truck, wondering what had happened to the shoes and socks.