Lockhart's Legacy (Vespari Lockhart Book 1) (5 page)

All of this sufficiently proved that a vishler had indeed attacked the mortician. And there was enough left behind for him to create the bait he needed. Ignoring the bodies for a moment, Lockhart checked the mortician’s remaining shelves. He needed something to put the components in. His eyes eventually settled on a sealed mason jar with a few sticks of rock candy stored inside. Apparently, Mr. Brown had something of a sweet tooth. Lockhart grabbed the jar, twisted the tin lid off and prepared to dump the candy out.

“I’ll take those,” Knox said with a sudden jolt. Smiling, she added, “No sense letting ‘em go to waste.”

He shrugged his shoulders, grabbed the sticks of the rock candy and handed them to her. While she held onto them, Lockhart walked over to one of the bigger piles of the mortician’s remains. Much of what the vishler discarded, it left shredded pretty well. The body itself really was in pieces, and most of the bones were missing, but there was still enough for him to work with. He needed something that stank. Horribly if possible. Pulling his knife from his boot, Lockhart located bits of Mr. Brown’s intestines, and using the blade to lift it, took a whiff. Behind him, Knox winced at this, but he needed to make sure the stink would be enough to draw the vishler.

Satisfied with the smell factor of the organ, Lockhart sliced off a bit of the intestines and coiled it inside the mason jar. He then sealed it back up and wiped off the remaining gore on his knife using a towel among the mortician’s things. He returned to the mayor with what he needed and set the jar down on a table next to her.

“P-p-payment,” he said.

Knox nodded. “Right. Well, we can only afford to give you three silver rounds.” She shrugged. “We don’t have a whole lot in the coffers.”

Rounds, not coins. Not surprising given coins’ rarity in the west. Silver rounds were the unofficial currency of the area, after all. It would do, all the same. Lockhart held up his hand, showing all five fingers.

The mayor shook her head. “Four.”

His hand held steady at five.

“Four and, I think we have a couple slivers.”

Slivers. Was she serious? Slivers, chunks of silver not yet minted into any currency, official or not, had little intrinsic value. Few merchants accepted them even in the desert. He might find some use for them though. He’d made bombs before with silver shrapnel, but the uses for that wasn’t common. Regardless, he kept his hand at five fingers.

“Four, a couple slivers, and…” Knox removed one of the rock candy from her other hand and held it out to him with a smile. “And one rock candy.”

He paused a moment. He needed more. He needed to leave that town and follow the trail the beldams had left. This was all a waste of his time if he wasn’t going to get anything out of it. He couldn’t just abandon them though. The vishler would be back eventually. It had to die, and that meant he had to kill it. Lockhart finally nodded and reached his hand out. Knox moved the individual candy back to her other hand and shook to confirm the deal.

“Good,” she said. “So, how long will this take?”

“Sh-sh-should be done to-to-tonight,” he told her.

“You want a down payment?” she asked, smiling again and holding out the rock candy.

Lockhart sighed but took the candy anyway. He plopped the rock candy in his mouth, releasing his grip on the stick and picked up the mason jar of Mr. Brown’s intestines. From there, Knox led him back out to the street and turned to face him.

“I guess I should get back to the funeral unless there’s anything else.”

Lockhart reached into an interior pocket in his duster and fished out his canteen, showing it to her.

“Oh,” she said. Pointing to a well down the street, Knox told him, “You can fill up there. Take what you need.”

He nodded to her and turned in that direction.

“I’ll see you tomorrow, yeah?” she called after him.

Lockhart raised a hand in acknowledgement and kept moving. Behind him, he heard the mayor bite down on one of the rock candies and turn to go back to the funeral. He preferred to savor the flavor of his, as he didn’t have anything else to eat on him. He might get lucky and stumble on something in the wilderness, but he wasn’t holding out hope. Water, though, he couldn’t go without, so he continued to the well.

Setting the mason jar of guts and his canteen on the stone masonry of the well, Lockhart reached out and grabbed the rope. Using it, he pulled up the bucket at the bottom and set it on the stones as well. He dipped his canteen down into the water, letting it fill to the brim. When he was finished, he screwed the lid on again before stowing it back in his duster pocket. Dropping the bucket down into the well, Lockhart picked up the mason jar and set to tracking the vishler.

Ever since he’d determined what had attacked Mr. Brown, he’d been keeping a watchful eye on the ground for tracks. He found that they wouldn’t be hard to follow, as the vishler had left a bloody trail from the mortician’s. No better time than the present, Lockhart found that trail and started to follow it out of Abilene. The blood eventually ceased, and all the vespari had to go on were the tracks that the creature left behind. These were scarce and became harder and harder to track the further he went.

Though he attempted to savor the rock candy for as long as he could, he finished it well before he found any sign of the vishler’s lair. In fact, after a while, he lost the trail altogether. This wasn’t unexpected, as vishlers were notoriously hard to track. That was where the bait came in. He would make it come to him using the scent of death and the promise of more bones.

Picking a place to make camp under the shadow of a tall cliff wall, Lockhart unsealed the lid of the mason jar and poured out the intestines on the ground. He next removed his knife and pricked his finger. The vespari dripped the blood along the length of the organ to further entice the vishler to join him. With the bait set, Lockhart set to gathering enough wood to start a campfire. Dead trees were plentiful enough in the area to accommodate this, but he waited until the sun dipped down toward the horizon before lighting it. Then, he reloaded his revolver, counting how much ammunition he had remaining. Six shots in the revolver. Seven more in his pouch. Knowing the vishler would show up sometime that night, Lockhart sat with his back to the cliff and waited.

***

As Lockhart sat there, waiting for the vishler to show up, he took out his notebook. Within it, he had catalogued, described, and otherwise noted the various monsters that he had encountered throughout his lifetime as a vespari. One of the ways he did this was through sketches he drew. Withdrawing from social situations as a child because of his stutter, Lockhart learned how to draw with a remarkable accuracy. Some of that had to do with his near perfect memory and being able to draw on it when sketching these creatures.

While he waited for the vishler, Lockhart updated his notebook with depictions of the beldam coven with accompanying information about them. He’d noted each of their names, even the wraith that he dispatched. Additionally, the vespari wrote a few details about how the coven interacted with one another.

First up, he drew the wraith, Gunnilda, and what he remembered of her. In the cave, he’d only caught a glimpse of her, but before that, when she slashed open his gut, he’d got a better look. It was through this memory that Lockhart transferred her image to paper. Her pale, semi translucent skin. Her black, soulless eye sockets. Her agape mouth in perpetual scream, and even her hair standing on end. Lockhart captured it all. At the bottom of the page, Lockhart wrote down her name, what she was, where he’d found her, and the date on which he dispatched her. Then, he dragged the pencil through her name to mark that he’d destroyed her.

He took up the task of detailing Estrild next. Her stature and relative youth had been the features that most made her stand out from the other beldams, but that was harder to capture without a comparison. Instead, he focused on her unkempt appearance. All of the beldams had been ugly and monstrous, but she had given the least thought to her appearance. Her tangled hair partially covering her face, the disgusting stains on her teeth, and even her ripped, wrinkled clothes all stood out to him, and so he made sure to transfer them onto the page. As he hadn’t yet killed Estrild, he couldn’t cross her or the others out, but he did indicate the other pertinent details about her at the bottom of the page.

Mabilia went on the next page. The beldam had been more muscular than any other he’d ever seen. This meant her skin didn’t hang off her bones nearly as much as it did the others, but she still looked old and decrepit. Though it disgusted him to remember it, Lockhart also drew Mabilia’s big bulging eye as well as the empty eye socket with yellow pus seeping out. Again, he denoted her name and any other information at the bottom of her page. For her, he finally remarked that Mabilia was injured, describing how he had cut into her wrist with his knife.

Flipping to the next page, Lockhart decided to work on Alviva. The oldest of the beldams, she’d taken up the position of leader, though the vespari had his doubts about who truly controlled things in the coven. Alviva was also the fattest in the group with fat rolls and sagging skin in equal proportion. He wished she’d worn more to conceal her horrid body, as moles, each with their own hairs spanned the parts that her clothes hadn’t covered up. He remembered how he likened them to quills on a porcupine as he drew them into his notebook and jotted down her name.

Last in the coven but certainly not least was Petronila. Though she did not claim leadership in the beldam coven, Lockhart had a feeling that Petronila was adept at controlling the others. Somehow akin to a snake, this beldam had a tall but hunched over body. He remembered how she had such elongated arms that they nearly scraped the floor if she didn’t hold them up. Otherwise, disease had deformed her body. Beldams commonly had blemishes and warts, but Petronila had more on her face alone than on any individual beldam he’d ever seen. Then there were the boils, cysts, and other disfiguring malformations. More so than the others, Lockhart found himself concerned by Petronila. She was cunning, and it had been her idea to place the Caustic Brand on him to siphon his power. He would have to be wary of her when he finally tracked the coven down again.

Upon finishing his update to his notebook, Lockhart decided to peer back through and check on the other vishlers he’d encountered. It was while he was perusing his history of kills that he realized that the vishler had taken the bait. The night was too quiet. Something malevolent was approaching. Closing the notebook, Lockhart stood up and shoved it into an interior pocket of the duster. He exchanged it for the silver and pearl revolver, drawing it in preparation for what was coming. Finally, he kicked dirt onto the campfire. The light would only blind him from seeing in the dark, so it had to go.

As Lockhart’s eyes adjusted to the starry-lit night, he got his first glimpse of his quarry. The vishler walked toward him, standing upright on two feet. The creature towered over him at more than ten feet tall. It had taken a longhorn’s skull as its own. Tip to tip, the horns were at least as wide as Lockhart was tall. Below that, he had a harder time distinguishing which animal the bones came from, especially in the dark. The vishler was lanky - its arms nearly scraping the ground, and the vines and weeds that strapped its bones together appeared weak, loose, and sloppy. Because of this, Lockhart guessed that this was a child, no more than a decade old.

Skulls, humans included, hung around its waist like a belt, but the vishler hadn’t collected many. Only five humans in total. Most of this vishler’s bones had to have come from animals that died in the wastes. Its fingers all ended in bird skulls, the beaks forming the fingertips. The vishler’s chest was comprised of a series of rib cages harnessed together as one whole. Standing on hooves strapped to the three feet tall femurs of an animal he couldn’t identify, the vishler screeched at Lockhart, extending its arms outward and kneeling down to him to show off its collection of bones.

The vespari wasn’t impressed, and he certainly wasn’t afraid. There had been bigger and more ancient vishlers in his past. This one wouldn’t even make the notebook. Lockhart aimed his revolver at the creature and fired before it finished its roar. The runed bullet collided with the vishler’s longhorn skull, cracking it and silencing the monster instantly. It froze there in the moment and then fell forward with a thud.

The kill had been easy. He worried that it was
too
easy. He wasn’t going to make the mistake of overconfidence. Lockhart waited a couple minutes to ensure the vishler really was dead before he made another move.

No stirring from the creature.

He stepped forward a couple paces and kneeled to examine its skeleton body a little closer but still keeping it at a distance. Still, the vishler remained motionless. At this closer proximity, Lockhart could see the bullet hole in the skull and the cracks that extended from it. He saw no sign of life behind the vacant eyeholes. Standing, Lockhart walked the rest of the way to the vishler’s body. There, he kicked the longhorn’s skull. The skull separated from the rest of the bones, as all the weeds and vines had come loose. The rest of its body held firm together though.

Backing up, he knew it wasn’t over. The vishler abandoned its skull, and must’ve had another to use. Maybe it wasn’t so young and foolish after all. The creature, sensing that its facade hadn’t worked, revitalized itself. The vishler stood upright again, leaving the abandoned longhorn skull on the ground. It’s head was now the skull of a deer with multiple tined antlers. This time, it didn’t waste its breath with a roar; it simply leapt at Lockhart with its beak-lined claws.