The River of Souls (17 page)

“I think all men have been tranced, by some woman or another,” Matthew replied. “And women the same. We men don’t hold the only key to that particular vault.” 

“Reckon not,” Magnus agreed. “You have a woman?” 

“Good question. I’m not quite sure.” 

“If you don’t know for sure…then you must not. You livin’ in that big town…maybe you wanted to come see me and give me some advice you oughta be takin’ yourself.” 

“Oh?” Matthew’s eyebrows went up. “What would that be?” 

“Climbin’ out of the hole you dug for yourself. I know I dug a deep one, ’cause I didn’t have use for people I thought was laughin’ at me and my folks. What hole are you in, and why’d you dig it so deep?” 

Matthew had to ponder that one for a moment. “Someone else is digging it for me,” he replied, thinking of the image of the masked Professor Fell working tirelessly in a windblown cemetery, shovelling out a grave meant for a young man from New York. “I don’t intend to be pushed into it before my time,” he said. “Neither do I wish anyone I care for to find themselves in it, and dirt thrown into her face.” 

“
Her
face?” asked Magnus. 

“Hey, Sipsey!” shouted one of the men in the boat just ahead. “Play us a tune!” 

The voice had been ragged and slurred. Up further along the river, the man with the fiddle obliged by beginning what at first was a slow, sad and gray song that suddenly with a scrape of the bow blazed itself up into a conflagration of notes. The man with the jug and the sword was standing in his boat, twisting his upper torso to the music and slashing at the air; he let go a wild holler that seemed to reverberate across the wilderness and for a moment silence all the night-things that chattered and chittered for a space of their own. 

In another boat, someone who was obviously also not only a music-lover but a lover of the jug fired a pistol into the air, and Magnus muttered, “Damn fools.” 

Matthew caught sight of something, but he wasn’t quite sure what it was. 

It was something sliding into the water from the righthand thicket. 

He thought at first it was another alligator, but it moved so fast and so smoothly he was unable to tell for sure. He caught other quick movements from that direction, maybe three or four dark shapes submerging themselves. Something was definitely in the river that had not been there a moment before. Matthew felt the flesh prickle on his arms and at the back of his neck. 

The man with the sword and jug was still cavorting to the fiddle player’s tune. Matthew said, “Magnus?” 

Before Magnus could answer or Matthew could determine what he was going to say next, there came a high thrumming sound nearly masked by the fiddle music. 

The swordsman suddenly dropped his jug to clutch at his throat, which had just been pierced by an arrow. He fell backwards into the river, his sword now ineffectual and the liquor in his blood not strong enough to overcome a sharpened flint through the windpipe. 

In the next instant, the boat from which the swordsman had fallen was overturned by a pair of mud-dark figures that burst up from beneath, spilling the craft’s other two passengers into the water. The same also with a boat to the left of that one, even as a musketball shrieked off into the sky, and two more unfortunates tumbled into the Solstice. A torch hissed as the water drank its flame. Arrows came flying from the thicket on the right, one lodging itself into the shaft of Magnus’ oar on that side and another passing by Matthew’s face so close it nearly shaved his cheek of the day’s whiskers. Up ahead, three more boats were overturned, including the one that carried Sipsey, the fiddler. Pistols flared and swords struck down at the river from those boats still upright, and in answer to those insults more arrows flew from the wilderness to strike wood and flesh alike. 

Matthew felt a
thump
beneath their boat, and then another. His heart hammered in his chest. An arrow passed through the flame of his torch and threw a firestorm of sparks. Suddenly they were going over, and as Matthew fell across the side of their boat he felt an arrow strike him in the meat of his left shoulder. The pain stole his breath, and in the following second he was in the river holding his cutlass and a dead torch. He was underwater one instant and the next could stand on a muddy bottom, the river up to his collarbone. The attackers had chosen a shallow place in which to devise this assault, using the river’s foundation to propel themselves upward against the hulls. This fact did not linger long in his brain, because the mud-smeared figures were everywhere around him and so were flailing white men who found themselves, like Matthew, very suddenly much too far from home.

Eleven

Matthew was painstricken and dazed, but he knew he must get out. In the moonstruck darkness he had no idea where Magnus was, or if the figure to the left or to the right was an Indian or a citizen of Jubilee, as water thrashed and foamed and men cried out in either their own pain or their own terror. Matthew made for the swamp on the lefthand side, away from the attackers. He had gotten only two strides through the turbulence when an arm like iron grasped him around the throat and began to pull him toward the opposite shore. A flint blade was put to the side of his face, daring defiance. He heard flesh being struck nearby and thought that Magnus must be fighting for his life with either an oar or his fists. Then Matthew was hauled out of the water into a dense thicket where thorns grabbed at his trousers and shirt, and he stumbled and fell and yet the arm tightened about his throat and the blade began to dig at his cheek. 

He still had hold of the deceased torch and the cutlass. With no desire to be strangled or sliced, he did what he had to do; he brought the cutlass’ business edge up sharply between his legs and into the crotch of the Indian who’d seized him. There was no cry of pain, just a muffled grunt of it as if between gritted teeth, and the blade scrawled blood from Matthew’s cheek but suddenly the arm was gone from around his throat. Without thinking of direction or what he might do to help Magnus or anyone else he tore through the nightblack woods before the warrior could recover, and fighting through thorns and vines he was aware of other figures running around him, but whether they were Indians on the hunt or white men being hunted he did not know. 

He just ran, with the mud of the River of Souls clotted on his boots and the dank smell of the river up his nostrils. 

There was no light. Here the roof of trees was thick enough to obscure the moon. Vines caught at his legs and nearly toppled him. “Oh my God! Oh my God!” he heard someone half-shouting, half-sobbing to his right, but he could see no face to go along with the pleading. He ran on, fighting through the brush, and suddenly he tripped over a fallen limb or tree root and fell to the ground, losing his grip on the doused torch and twisting his body to one side to avoid driving the arrow in any deeper. The impact with the sodden earth knocked the breath from his lungs. He lay on his right side, his lungs heaving and his teeth clenched with pain. He still had hold of the cutlass, and no power in this haunted swamp would make him let it go. 

He heard distant screams and, nearer, the noise of men tearing their own paths through the wilderness. When he was able he forced himself up on his knees, and he sat there thinking that he should get back to the river and cross it to the other side, which seemed the safer. But what about Magnus? Shouldn’t he try to find Muldoon and give whatever aid he could? That was laughable, Matthew thought. He could find no one in this wild darkness, much less give aid with an arrow sunken in his shoulder and blood running down his face. But he still had the cutlass, and thank God for that blessing. 

He was aware of stripes of moonlight streaming through the trees to illuminate in deep blue the woods before him, and he was aware also of figures moving through that light. 

Except they were not human figures. They were skeletons in motion, skulls and bones that glowed with faint green luminosity. There were six or seven of them, hunched down and creeping slowly through the foliage, and in that moment Matthew doubted the strength of his own sanity. 

A man came running past Matthew from the direction of the river. He evidently saw the green-glowing skeletons—too late!—and with a hoarse cry of terror tried to turn away from them. One of the nightmare figures leaped forward with an eerie howl. A scythe-shaped weapon at the end of a long shaft swung out. In another instant the runner’s head was nearly removed from the neck. With a gush of black blood the man’s body danced a macabre jig as the head flopped back and forth, and when the body collapsed two of the skeletons leapt upon it with drawn flint knives and finished the job of hacking head from bloody neck. 

In that moment, Matthew Corbett of New York did perhaps take a jolt to his mind, for he fell unto his right side and curled up, knees to chin, and he thought that if he did not move from this place until daylight he would be safe, for surely the sun would frighten away these evil spirits of the night. Looking up he saw two more of the skeletons run forward in pursuit of a man who burst from the brush and fled like a terrified rabbit. This unfortunate’s head was likewise nearly cleaved off by the scythe. One of the skeletons picked up the head by the hair and, swinging it round and round with malignant glee, ran off with it held high into the woods as if offering the swamp its greatest trophy. 

Screams and cries echoed through the night. Matthew realized he was in the middle of a battleground…or, more correctly, a slaughterground, for the skeletons were taking the heads left and right of men who had escaped from the Indians at the river. He let go the cutlass for a moment to grasp the shaft of the arrow lodged in his shoulder, but the slightest pressure on it was enough to make the pain shoot down his arm and freeze his left hand. He gave that up as a bad job and once more found the cutlass, which was at present his best and only friend. Sweat had beaded on his face and his heart was racing. One of the skeleton men came very near to where he was lying, but then pulled back just short of stepping on him in the thicket. 

If he thought he was safe in this little patch, Matthew suddenly found himself gravely mistaken. A body landed on his back, his hand was hammered to release the sword, his head was yanked back by the hair and a leather cord was wrapped around his throat. The weight slid off him and he was hauled to his feet by rough hands. A knife was placed against his neck and he suffered a slap to the face that must be, to the Indians, a supreme insult. He found he would much rather be insulted than dead, for no weapon swung at him to remove his head. At least, not yet. His vision was blurred by the force of the blow and by the pain in his shoulder, but he saw several of the skeletons ringing him. Through the abject terror that thrummed through him, a cooler part of himself realized that these were only men painted with some kind of black pigment and then the images of skull and bones applied with a phosphorescent agent…likely an elixir made from a swamp plant. But Matthew realized that though they were only men, they were most certainly Indians from the village the strange young woman in Rotbottom had foretold, and thus the lopping off of heads might be only the beginning of this deadly ordeal. 

The skeleton men hopped and leaped about Matthew, gibbering in what might have been their own language or the language of the mad. He was pulled along by the leather cord, and though he tried to address them in both English and French his voice was half-choked by the binding and no good came of it. 

By the moonlight he saw a few other white men, dripping wet from the River of Souls, similarly neck-bound and being dragged along through the swamp. “God’s mercy! God’s mercy!” one of them croaked, but no mercy was shown and Matthew thought God kept His distance from this accursed place. Was there any purpose in fighting the cord? In dropping to his knees and trying to scrabble away into the thicket? He decided no, if he wished to keep his head…and in so keeping his head, he might yet have time to think himself a way out of this. 

Someone sobbed brokenly, like a woman, to Matthew’s right. Matthew’s mind was inflamed with both terror and the need to plot some kind of escape, but as he was being pulled roughly along he wondered how many boats and canoes from Jubilee had gotten past this village of the damned before the torchlight had alerted the Indians and brought them, as Quinn Tate had said, to the river like flies on dead meat. Most likely Abram, Mars and Tobey had gotten past, and the first group of boats as well. Would that have included Royce and Gunn? Probably the Indians hadn’t been waiting too long before they attacked, which meant that many of the boats further ahead had gotten through. 

He didn’t have much longer to ponder such questions, for suddenly he and the others were pulled from the wilderness into a clearing where multiple torches burned and a bonfire illuminated dwellings that obviously had been constructed by members of different tribes: some made of stones, some of logs, some of woven grass and treebranches, and some of stretched animal hides. The commonality among these dwellings, Matthew noted, was that they were all decorated with alligator skulls and bones, as if these elements from the River of Souls bound the outcasts—the criminal, the insane, and possibly both, if Quinn Tate was correct in the questionable lucidity of her own mind—together as one tribe.