Fear Weaver (12 page)

Peter, Erleen and Aunt Aggie were still at the table. Astonishment had rendered them mute, but not for long. Erleen threw herself out of her chair, crying in dismay, “Where did that heathen come from?”

Nate carefully laid the warrior on the floor. Each breath the man took threatened to be his last. “Question?” Nate asked in sign language. “Enemy wound you?”

The warrior tried to reply, but couldn’t make his fingers work. He tried to speak, but all that came out of his mouth was a trickle of fresh blood.

“Someone get a glass of water for him,” Nate said.

The warrior’s red eye swept the room and stopped on Fitch and Harper. Mewing, he thrust his hand at them, then looked at Nate, trying to convey some meaning.

Nate didn’t understand, and said so in sign language.

Whatever the warrior was struggling to get across died with him; he arched his body, convulsed, and exhaled his final breath.

Peter, Erleen and Aggie had come over, and Peter asked, “Is he dead?”

“Where did you find that savage?” was Erleen’s question.

Aunt Aggie had one, too. “What was he trying to tell you?”

Nate wished to God he knew.

The search commenced an hour after sunrise.

Nate was the first one up. He quietly slipped out to bury the Blackfoot and covered the mound of earth with rocks to discourage scavengers.

Erleen insisted on a big breakfast. Her daughters and Agatha helped cook and bake. They made flap-jacks and oatmeal and toast and corn cakes. Peter remarked that it was too bad they didn’t have eggs and bacon, his usual morning fare back home.

Nate wasn’t going to eat, but the smells were too tantalizing to resist. Especially when he learned they had maple syrup to put on the flapjacks. Once he started eating, he found he was hungrier than he thought. Four flapjacks, a bowl of oatmeal, and two corn cakes later he was full.

It was decided that Aunt Aggie would stay at the cabin with the girls and Philberta.

“Erleen and I will work as a pair,” Peter announced. “Fitch and Harper will hunt together, too. That leaves you, Mr. King, to search by yourself, if you are agreeable.”

Nate was more than willing. He could cover more ground alone.

Fitch and Harper brought the horses from the
corral. Nate saddled his bay while they threw saddle blankets and saddles on theirs. Everyone had a rifle except Erleen, who was armed with two pistols. It was decided that she and Peter would search on the right side of the stream, Fitch and Harper would take the other side. That left Nate free to roam as he pleased.

The day started off promising enough. A clear sky and the bright sun dispelled some of the gloom that perpetually shrouded the valley floor.

Nate was the last to leave. “Keep the door closed and barred at all times,” he cautioned Agatha.

“Don’t fret. I won’t let anything happen to the girls or Philberta.”

“If you need me, fire a shot out the window and I’ll come at a gallop. But whatever you do, don’t step foot out of the cabin.”

“We’ll be fine,” Aunt Aggie insisted.

Tyne smiled and waved as Nate rode off and he returned the gesture. He stuck to the trail until it brought him to the cow elk with its belly torn open. Bent low, he rode in ever widening circles. He was thirty feet out when he spied a few indistinct prints. Dismounting, he gave them a closer scrutiny. They weren’t mountain lion tracks or wolf tracks. They might be bear tracks, though no claws were evident. Or they might have been made by something else.

Nate rode in the direction the prints pointed. For half an hour he threaded through some of the thickest forest he had ever seen. He was constantly ducking to avoid low limbs and skirting logs. Many were covered with moss. It reminded him of the forests along the Pacific coast, which he visited once years ago.

As Nate neared the high cliffs, the shadows deepened. It wasn’t even noon, yet he would swear it was
twilight. The green of the trees and the grass became a ghostly gray. It lent the illusion he was in a spectral realm. It didn’t help that the woods were so still. Wildlife was completely absent.

At last the trees thinned. Ahead reared the rock ramparts. Nate could see the top by craning his head back. He shuddered to think of his fate should the cliff unexpectedly collapse. Tons of rock and dirt would smash down on top of him, crushing him to a pulp.

The vegetation ended short of the cliff, leaving an open space between the trees and the rock face. Nate debated which way to go and reined up the valley toward the junction of the cliffs beyond the cabin.

Nate was acting on a hunch. He didn’t have all the particulars worked out in his head yet, but he had enough confidence in his judgment to put his hunch to the test. He hadn’t gone twenty yards when a spot of pink and white caused him to draw rein. Curious, he hung by an elbow and one leg, Comanche fashion, and nearly lost his grip and his breakfast when shock hit him like a physical blow. He was used to violence. He had witnessed more than a few atrocities. But
this
was unthinkable.

The pink and white was a human finger, or what was left of it. Chewed pink flesh from the nail to the knuckle and gnawed white bone below. Judging by the fresh condition of the flesh, it hadn’t been there long. Since early that morning, Nate surmised. He left it there. Showing it to the others would only sicken them. And they would still insist on continuing the search. They had proven blind to the danger they were in.

The
chink
of the bay’s hooves was unnaturally loud. The wind was stronger here at the base of the
cliffs, and every now and again a gust would stir the trees and brush.

Nate looked for tracks, but the ground was too hard. Smudges and a few vague prints were all he found. Anything might have made them. But the finger practically confirmed his hunch. The bite marks weren’t those of the sharp shearing teeth of a bear or mountain lion or any other meat-eater. They were made by something with strong but blunt teeth, the same as the bite marks on the cow elk, and on the Blackfoot.

Nate didn’t have all the pieces of the puzzle worked out yet. The
what
, he thought he knew. The
why
, he had an idea. And if he was right, the horror of it all was beyond imagining. He must get the proof he needed to convince the others quickly, before anyone else fell prey to the creatures responsible.

Creatures
was the right word. They were no longer what they had been. They were like beasts, and yet worse than beasts, in that where wild animals killed to fill their bellies, these things killed for the sheer cruel joy of killing. The cow elk proved that. They only ate part of her. A mountain lion or wolves would have eaten her down to the bone.

Ahead, a shadowy spot on the wall brought an end to Nate’s pondering. He leveled the Hawken. But it was only a shallow cavity where some of the rock had broken from the cliff. As he rode on he saw more of them.

By Nate’s reckoning he was well past the cabin when he came on the first remains. What was once a squirrel was now bones and skins. Farther on was all that was left of a dead rabbit. After that, a fawn and a doe. Both had only been partially devoured.

The rancid stink of decay filled the air. A harbinger
of what awaited past a finger of forest that hid the next stretch of cliff. Nate rounded it and drew rein in stunned disbelief.

A virtual carpet of dead things filled the space between the cliff and the woods. Some of the remains were dry and withered, others more recent, a few with flesh almost as pink as the finger. Nate counted parts of four elk and what had to be a dozen deer. It was if the valley had been picked clean of living things and all the bodies brought here.

The reek was abominable. The bay shied, but Nate goaded it on. He tried to avoid the bay stepping on any of the remains, but several times bones crunched under its hooves and once a hoof came down on the skull bone of a doe.

Nate drew rein a second time. Bile rose in his throat as he stared down at the gnawed but still recognizable features of Black Elk. The warrior’s glazed eyes were wide in the shock he must have felt at the moment of his death.

Nate could think of only one reason for the Black-feet to have somehow gotten to the valley ahead of them. Black Elk hadn’t been content with a lock of Tyne’s golden hair; he’d wanted Tyne. He reckoned the Blackfeet had aimed to spring an ambush. Only the ambushers had been ambushed themselves.

Nate didn’t care to share their fate. Constantly scanning the gloom-shrouded vegetation, he neared the end of the valley. Tall pines hid the junction of the sandstone cliffs. He had no idea what he would find, but he certainly didn’t expect to come on a cave.

The opening was as big as the Woodrows’ cabin. Sunlight barely penetrated. There was enough, though, to reveal the bones and animal forms that littered the cave floor.

Dismounting, Nate edged closer, placing each moccasin with care. He heard nothing to indicate the cave was occupied. They might be crouched in the shadows, waiting to rush out and overwhelm him before he could get off a shot. But nothing came out of the cave except the most awful reek. A stench so foul, Nate covered his mouth and nose. He held his breath for as long as he could and breathed shallow when he had to.

Stopping near the cave entrance, Nate listened. The silence of the tomb prevailed. Acting on the assumption they were in there, he sought to lure them out into his gun sights.

“I’ve found your lair! Show yourselves!”

Nothing stirred within.

“What’s the matter? You killed those Blackfeet. Now try me, and we’ll end this.”

Continued silence. Nate might as well have addressed the cliff. Poking his head into the opening, he tried to tell how far back in the cave went. An odd buzzing caught his ear, and something small and dark alighted on his cheek. He swatted at it, and a fly took wing. A fly that was just one of hundreds—if not thousands—swarming over the grisliest of feasts. Nate had noticed a few others on the remains he passed, but nothing like this. The newest kills were covered with them. And those not covered with flies were crawling with maggots.

Nate’s breakfast tried to climb up out of his stomach.

Ordinary bloodletting seldom bothered him. But this was different; this was slaughter on a scale that shook the soul. He started to pull back, and saw a foot. It jutted out of the black recess, a moccasin, half-on and half-off. He assumed it belonged
to another Blackfoot until he realized how white the skin was. “Ryker?” he blurted, and felt foolish for doing so.

Nate had to make certain. Taking a deep breath, he darted into the cave. Maggots crunched under-foot. Flies rose in thick clouds, clinging to his hair and neck and buckskins. One got up his nose. An involuntary sneeze expelled it, and then he was next to the foot. Bending, he gripped the ankle, and pulled to drag the body into the light. The skin had a parchmentlike quality that told him the body couldn’t possibly be Ryker. This was an old kill. He kept on pulling anyway.

The dead man, or what was left of him, matched the description Nate had been given of Sullivan Woodrow. Sully’s nose was gone and the cheeks had been chewed on, and empty sockets gaped where the eyes should be, but there could be no mistake.

Placing his arm over the lower half of his face to ward off the stink and the flies, Nate backed out. He couldn’t take the abomination any longer. Hurrying to the bay, he mounted and headed back the way he came. He was doubled over, wrestling with his stomach, when a rock sailed out of the woods and struck him on the shoulder.

Instantly he brought up the Hawken, but no one was there.

“Not me you don’t,” Nate said, reining sharply into the trees. He plunged through brush and circled thickets. He looked behind trees. He looked up in trees. But he found no one.

Frustrated, Nate headed for the cabin. He hadn’t liked leaving Aggie and the girls alone. The things that slew the four warriors would have no trouble slaying a woman and two girls.

Glimpses of the chimney spurred him on. He came up on the cabin from the rear and slowed as he drew near the corral. The horses still in the corral heard him and had their ears pricked, but when they saw it was him they didn’t whinny or stamp.

A low murmur brought Nate to a stop, someone speaking softly in a singsong voice, as if reciting poetry. It took him several seconds to recognize the voice. Puzzled, he quietly alighted and crept into the trees.

Philberta was on her knees next to a small mound of earth. Her back was to him, her head bowed.

Nate stopped. The mound must be the grave of the baby she lost. He was intruding on her private grief. Then he caught the words she was saying.

“Hush little baby, don’t say a word. Mama’s going to pluck you a mocking bird. And if that mocking bird won’t do, mama’s going to get a worm for you. And if that worm is covered with dirt, mama will wipe it with her skirt. And if that worm still won’t go down, mama will buy a goat from town. And if that goat you don’t like, mama will kill it with a spike.”

Nate was rooted in place.

“Hey, diddle, dinkety poppety pet. How I bet you wish we never met.” Bending, Philberta patted the mound. “It’s not my fault, my dear. Stomachs are stomachs, Sully always said. But now my Sully is dead, dead, dead.”

Nate wished he could see her face. He couldn’t tell if she was truly expressing sorrow—or something else.

“I have always liked them, you know. Lullabys and nursery rhymes. When I was a girl they were my very favorite things. I always made my mother
sing Tome before I went to sleep, or else had her read a rhyme. I would have loved to do the same for you.”

Feeling foolish, Nate started to back away.

“I would have read to you. Or skinned a kitten and made mittens of the skin. Or stuck a needle in its eye so it would die, and chopped up the meat for kitten pie,” Philberta tittered. “Aren’t I just the silliest goose? I was never so tight but that I was loose.”

Nate froze.

“Birds of a feather flock together, and so will pigs and swine. Rats and mice will have their choice, and so will I have mine.”