A crow had been making the noise, its beak pecking on the door, and the big black bird stood in the dirt in front of the cabin looking up at him.
Its right wing was gone and that entire half of its body was featherless and bloody.
Marshall was suddenly wide-awake. The crow had been shot and should be dead, yet it stood there before him, patiently waiting to get inside his cabin. Behind it he heard other sounds, saw more movement, and he quickly closed the door, lit his lantern, then reopened the door. With the area in front of the cabin illuminated more fully, he spotted a bobcat and a fawn, several small squirrels and a javelina. All of them had been grievously maimed, and a few of the squirrels looked like they were rotting. The lantern created a semicircle of light directly before him, but it made the area beyond that semicircle even darker, and he stepped forward, swinging the lantern first one way then the other as he saw that there were other animals here as well, animals that had been dead but resurrected. They seemed to be guarding the entrance to a path that led into a section of woods that Marshall would have sworn had not been there when he’d left two months ago.
Guarding it or pointing him toward it?
He didn’t know, didn’t care. Walking back inside, he got his rifle and a handful of shells that he shoved into the pocket of a coat he put on. Carrying the lantern and the rifle, he strode past, through, over the resurrected animals and down the path. There were trees and bushes that should not have been growing here, that had no business being in California, and Marshall remembered some of the stories he’d heard.
Creatures more beast than man, more devil than beast, that had only to look at bushes to make them grow or touch eggs to make them hatch.
He knew it would be smarter to wake someone from the fort, have a party of men come with him, but he’d always been a man who listened to his gut rather than his head, and he walked boldly into the woods alone, rifle at the ready, prepared for anything.
Or so he thought.
For it was mere moments later when he came across the building. Nearly half as long as the fort itself, the structure seemed to rise out of the forest. Whether it had been constructed in an existing meadow or whether standing timber had been felled in order to provide the site, there was no free space, no ground left over. The large leafy trees grew right next to the front wall, against the sides, leaving no open area.
Marshall had not seen this building before and doubted that many others knew of its existence. It was new—it had to be—and it was built not of wood but adobe, like some of the Indians used. It reminded him of the hut he had encountered on the trip out to California—
bag of bones
—although it was much, much larger and actually had a door. No windows, though, and he wondered what was the reasoning behind that.
Marshall thought of knocking, decided against it, and alert for any sign that others were about, he carefully placed his lantern on the ground. Still clutching the rifle and ready to use it at a second’s notice if necessary, he tried the door. It was unlatched, and he pulled it open as quietly as possible.
From within, he heard a familiar mewling sound that made his blood run cold. No, not a sound.
Sounds.
There was more than one in there, and he shifted the rifle in his arm before picking up the lantern and peering inside.
Within was an antechamber from whose walls hung scythes and swords, knives and shears. The light from the lantern revealed dried blood everywhere. There was an open doorway at the other end of the small room, but the light did not penetrate that far and the space beyond the doorway was black.
It was from here that the sounds emerged.
Marshall was aware that whatever waited in that darkness could see him, but it was too late now for him to hide, and if he put out the flame he would not be able to see. He could turn around and leave, but that was not an option he even considered. Figuring that it would be better for him to move quickly, that it would make him less of a target, Marshall strode through the antechamber holding up his lantern and walked through the doorway into the gloom.
The room in which he found himself was so big that he could not see the end of it. A cloying odor of musk hit his nostrils the second he passed through the doorway, and it was all he could do not to gag and throw up. The light from his lantern seemed dimmer here and shone not very far, but that didn’t matter. Even with his limited range of vision, he could see the luxurious grasses growing on the floor . . . and the tall female monsters chained to thick pitch-covered posts. They blinked against the light, these terrible amalgams of bear and snake and pig and devil, their grimacing mouths filled with too many teeth, their spread legs ready and willing.
Sutter had had this building constructed as a prison.
Or a brothel.
On top of the mewling was another sound, a low rhythmic grunting. Marshall, sickened and disgusted, knew exactly what that sound was.
He held the lantern higher.
And it shone upon the bare back and buttocks of John Sutter.
Sweaty, muscles straining, Sutter was on his knees between the open thighs of one of the creatures, determinedly coupling with it. He turned briefly as the light touched upon him, and there was a crazed gleam in his eyes that reminded Marshall of the way he had looked when they’d captured the thing in the bear trap.
Let’s fuck it.
No wonder the fort was in such disarray. Sutter was out here, doing this, spending all of his time
consorting.
Even now, caught in the light, the captain was not embarrassed, did not stop. He turned back around and continued thrusting, making those awful, obscene grunts, eliciting from his monstrous lover that maddening mewling, a sound echoed by the chained captives all about them.
His instinct was to turn tail and run, but he needed to know what else was in here, so instead Marshall moved to the left and, holding the light aloft, stepped forward and peered into the darker recesses of the huge room. There were more females shackled to walls and posts, over a dozen altogether. He wondered where and how Sutter had captured them. The captain had to have had help, and with a sinking feeling in his stomach, Marshall thought about all of those new men at the fort. It suddenly occurred to him that maybe the old residents, the men he’d known, had not quit and left but had died trying to capture these monsters for Sutter.
He continued forward across the spongy grass, moving deeper into the building. The cloying, musky odor had given way to a far worse and infinitely more overpowering stench, a mixture of shit and piss and rot. He held his breath and stopped, gagging, unable to go farther. Ahead was a large jumbled pile comprised of bodies and bones. Dead open eyes glittered in the lantern light.
He thought he saw Jameson’s bruised and bloodied face.
And Big Reese’s.
On top of the pile was one of the monsters, male, its oversized penis partially severed and hanging down. Another lay on the right side of the mass of bodies, its ridged shiny skin in marked contrast to the dullness of surrounding work shirts.
But that was not the worst of it. For the pile appeared to be moving, and in the dim yellow light it took his mind a moment to realize that what he was seeing were smaller creatures, some the size of rats, some the size of cats, scuttling about over the dead bodies, crawling over heads, pulling themselves up over arms, sliding down sections of broken skeleton leg. They were slimy and scaly and hairy and spiky, and he knew exactly what they were: babies. The offspring of Sutter and his demonic concubines.
He also knew what they were doing with those dead bodies.
The infants were feeding.
He must have made some sort of shocked noise because, as one, the small creatures paused, stopped, looked at him, many with bloody mouths, one still chewing on the finger from a hand. They began whistling at him, a high-pitched sound that hurt his ears and turned all of the skin on his body to gooseflesh.
This time he did run. Trying to block out all sounds and smells, trying to look only at the ground so he would not trip, Marshall fled back through the building the way he’d come, over the grass, past the shackled females and Sutter, now crying out in ecstasy, through the door to the antechamber with its bloody tools on the walls.
He rushed outside, exhaling heavily, gulping in huge breaths of cool night air as he stumbled away from the building into the trees. The rifle felt heavy under his right arm and the swinging lantern in his left hand banged against its handle so hard as he ran that he thought it was going to break. But he dared not stop or even look back, and he raced through the woods toward the fort until he realized that he’d been running for far too long. He stopped, looked about, but nothing seemed familiar. He’d been running in the wrong direction, and now he was lost.
He saw movement out of the corner of his eye to the right, and he whirled in that direction, the lantern hitting his elbow and causing a flash of pain to shoot up his left arm.
It was one of them.
A male.
There were several trees between the monster and himself, but he could see it clearly in a shaft of moonlight, and it could obviously see him. With a wave of clawed hand, the creature created a miniature tree out of nothing, making it sprout up from a pile of dead leaves on the ground and then branch off until it was as high as Marshall’s stomach. Before his eyes, the small tree bloomed, then died, its leaves falling off, its branches and trunk withering to brown stumps that in the end resembled a burned man. The creature grinned at him, a sly, evil grin that he did not understand but that frightened him.
There were others, he saw. Large dark shapes too far away to be seen, which glinted in scraps of moonlight between the trees and could only be one thing.
He understood now why these woods had not seemed familiar to him. They had been changed, added to, made into something else. His mother had told him stories of Jack in the Green, a woodland sprite from the Old Country who shepherded through the winter months all things that grew and who was responsible for making plants flower in the spring. He had not believed those stories, but she had, and he wondered if that was what was happening here. Were these creatures responsible for the growth of plants in the new land? They seemed angered by the intrusion of men into their country, and though in his mother’s stories Jack in the Green had coexisted with people, these beings did not seem so benign.
The dark shapes passed between trees, bushes growing in their wake.
What were they doing now? What was their plan? Were they attempting to create a forest so thick that Sutter would get lost in it? Were they planning to rescue those of their kind imprisoned in the building? They were here for a reason, but he remembered their attempt on the fort and doubted that they would try such an attack again. Whatever they were, they weren’t dumb.
He had heard no noise, but the one that had been grinning at him from behind the burnt-man stump must have communicated to its brethren somehow, because in the seconds that had passed, those dark shapes had grown closer. Not close enough to be illuminated by his lantern but close enough for him to make out horns on heads, spines on backs, forked tails.
The air was suddenly shattered by the explosion of rifle fire, and one of the creatures fell to the ground with a whistling screech. There was the crack of another rifle, and Marshall hit the dirt, pushing the lantern away and lying flat as he stretched his own weapon out in front of him, ready to fire. ‘‘Who’s there?’’ he called.
‘‘Who’s
there
?’’ someone called back.
More rifles fired and two of the creatures fell screaming to the ground.
‘‘James Marshall!’’ he yelled.
‘‘Stay where you are!’’
The grinning creature stopped grinning as watery liquid gushed out from a hole that had suddenly appeared in its head. Within moments, the woods were silent save for the stomping of boots on leaves and the snickering conversation of rough men. The monsters that weren’t dead had fled, and though the forest still seemed strange to him, it no longer seemed threatening.
Marshall stood. ‘‘Don’t shoot!’’ he called. He saw a group of men heading toward him through the trees.
‘‘You really Mr. Marshall?’’ one of the men said. Marshall recognized him as one of the new fellows he’d seen at the fort.
‘‘Yes. Who are you?’’
‘‘Patrol,’’ he said, and explained that Sutter had commanded them to guard the section of woods around the periphery of what he called his ‘‘storehouse.’’ What he had in there acted as an enticement to those monsters, and it was their charge to not only protect the building but kill as many of the creatures as possible while doing so. The man grinned when he said the word ‘‘store-house,’’and Marshall could tell from his demeanor that the fellow knew exactly what was going on in there.
He could see in his mind the bare back and buttocks of John Sutter as he
consorted
with one of those things.
Was the captain going to share that with these men?
Let’s fuck it.
Maybe Sutter had finally found a way to make his fortune. Marshall himself had been tempted initially, and he recalled before the attack on the fort that most of those with him had seemed ready to jump on the shackled female without hesitation. Matthew had already done so and finished by the time they heard the screams of his wife from outside.
Marshall looked around at the motley collection of fighters before him, knowing that they would gladly pay for some time with one of the females.
But what of the offspring? What would be done with them? And what of those outside of Sutter’s purview, like the baby in the canyon? Who knew how many of
them
were out there, fathered by men or monsters out of mothers from both stripes?