Those Who Went Remain There Still (13 page)

“What the hell is that?” Carlson asked, but he had the good sense to drop his voice to barely more than a baby’s sigh.

Shhh
, Meshack insisted again, and Titus chimed in with a simi-
lar noise.

After ten or fifteen seconds of turning all our ears to the sound, Titus held his lantern up towards his face and mouthed,
Something heavy
.

Meshack agreed.
Coming closer
, he mouthed back.

I could barely see them trying to talk without making a sound, but every word they conveyed was a sharp pick in my stomach. Something heavy. Coming closer. If we held ourselves still and paid the utmost attention, we could hear it and yes, coming closer.

I didn’t want to close my eyes; I didn’t
dare
close them, despite the frightened and childish impulse that seized me.

Instead I concentrated and tried to imagine the shape and size of the thing that made the noise. The scrapes that accompanied the dragging noise had a rhythmic quality to them. It could’ve been footsteps, but they were too irregular—unless the creature walking was partly lame.

A glance around at the party told me the others were doing the same, trying to sort out what might make such an odd, intimidat-
ing noise.

“It might be nothing,” Jacob said. His whisper was a shout in the watercolor blackness of the cave.

I wished to heaven that I could see the cave’s entrance again, merely to know it was there and be reassured that there was an exit from this suffocating place with its seamless walls. But we were well past that, and no matter how hard I strained to see behind us, I saw nothing of the gray-white portal.

“What kind of nothing?” Nicodemus asked, and all the letters shook like they were being rattled in a box.

Someone was breathing hard and loud. The gasps took on a sharper, wheezing edge. I held my lantern up and towards the face
of Carlson, who was squeezing his free hand along his ribcage.
Carlson?” I asked.

He waved as if to respond, but he couldn’t answer.

By pure stubbornness he pulled himself together, despite the rising clamor of the heavy, dragging, closely approaching visitor—and make no mistake, we all believed that it was alive.

The thing that came our way was doing so with purpose. It was stalking forward, coming up from some distant hole or chamber; and with it, the stink came too, advancing ahead of it and warning, or promising, something terrible.

“We can’t just sit here,” Meshack said. He was shaking and tense. His arms were tight around the lantern he held, and I only then realized he’d retrieved one of those rock-picking axes. It perched firmly in his fist, held slightly aloft.

Titus was mirroring Meshack’s stance, except that he had his revolver up instead of an axe. “Where do we go?”

“This is crazy!” Carlson finally squeaked. “It’s just a noise. It’s just a damn noise, and it can’t hurt us or nothing. Whatever it is,” he was barreling forward with his thoughts as if should he stop, he would not be able to begin again. “It’s more afraid of us than we are of it, right? Isn’t that what we tell the young’uns when—”

“Then why’s it coming for us, if it’s so scared?” Nicodemus snapped.

Carlson ignored Nicodemus and said to Titus, “Put down your goddamned gun, Mander.”

“I’m not aiming it at you.”

“I don’t want to see it out no-how.”

And with a ferocious click that had all the bang of a barking dog, Carlson had his own piece cocked.

“Not again!” I said in my full voice, and though I’m usually described as soft-spoken, I might have been screaming. I held out my arms and spoke above the one-two, one-two, slippery slide of the thing coming up close. “Not now, not here!”

Meshack tried to shove me aside, but I held my ground. “No,”
I swore. “Any one of you fires in this space, we’ll all get killed,
on’t you understand? The bullets will bounce, they’ll bounce and hit—”

***

I was interrupted by a call.

***

I’m at a loss to describe this call, except to say that it came at such a volume that I was reminded of standing on a riverboat a bit too close to the whistle. Although we felt no gust of wind to accompany it, the belching, grumbling croak breezed through our hair and rattled our clothes.

We were startled into perfect immobility, each one of us from youngest to oldest.

Carlson particularly looked pale, and his hand was over his heart—squeezing at the ribs and meat there.

And then, very quickly—so quickly that I must say it happened all at once—a slick orange shadow blinked behind Titus, and his
lantern was extinguished in a swift, thunderous lurch.

Carlson screamed, and Nicodemus fired off one mad bullet that ricocheted with a series of stone-shearing pings and scrapes. Jacob was screaming too, but I couldn’t tell why; and no one could see Titus. No one knew what had become of him.

He was there, and then a shadow that moved fast and thickly had covered him like a quilt, and then he was gone.

It had happened in less than a moment.

My body moved of its own accord, and I had no control over it at all. I flung myself backward, seeking some solid place of refuge or at least a spot from which I could defend myself from our unknown attacker. But it was not stone that I found, not at first. My backbone collided with something softer—though equally sturdy.

For a panic-stricken second I imagined a boulder covered with an eiderdown quilt.

The lantern in my hand burst backwards and I heard a tinkling crack as some part of it shattered against the cave wall.

Oil splashed, and a stray spark cast the overflow into a furious blast of spilling flame.

The whole room lit up into a collage of yellow, and copper, and black. Choppy silhouettes of frantic shapes cut across the light and although we had illumination to spare, it was impossible to see. It was impossible to think. It was impossible to do anything except grit my teeth and try to cover my head, because another piercing cry blasted out right in our midst, and the sound was purely astounding.

I turned my head and tried to examine the source but I saw nothing except a shapeless, lurching, wretched beast in a feather cloak—or that was the impression that reached my brain, at least. I couldn’t imagine what else it could be; it was as if my memory was flipping through images in a picture book, desperate and grasping for something logical.

An Indian chief in an eagle headdress, turning and dancing around a fire.

A phoenix, engorged and rising.

It was on fire, and I wasn’t sure why until I remembered the oil in my lantern. My hand was on fire too, and I hadn’t noticed until the searing pain cut through my terror and confusion. I screamed and the flaming bird-beast screamed back.

A pair of wings, each the size of a carriage door, extended with such power that they might have been propelled by pistons or springs—and the nameless thing launched itself forward.

“Run!” I think it was Meshack’s voice. “Run!” he said again, and then there was another round of gunfire but I do not know who began it and by then my ears were ringing so soundly that all I could hear was a whispering chime.

Bullets zipped around my head; one chinked against the stone wall beside me and tore at my sleeve, rending a perfect slice that—had it come any closer—would have drawn a fair amount of blood.

I was stunned. I was too stunned to move, though the men were moving around me. Someone was shouting for Titus, but I didn’t see him. Someone was shouting for Pa, so that must’ve been Nicodemus; and someone shouted back, so that would have been Jacob.

Meshack grabbed my arm, and it stung because the bullet had clipped me close.

He propelled me forward, and he pushed me, shoved me, then pulled me onward—deeper into the cave—and I couldn’t understand why. I even asked him, “Why?” and it came out like a pathetic shout. I hated the sound of my own voice, but I couldn’t make it any stronger and I was increasingly certain that I had soiled myself with fright.

A hysterical thought of comfort alighted in my head.

At least no one will smell it.

Meshack wasn’t answering me. He let my question linger in the air and as he drew me deeper into the darkness, I knew why. Behind us—behind me, for I was the last to follow—the awful flaming beast was blocking our only retreat to the open air.

XIII

More than She Could Chew: Reflections from the Road, Daniel Boone, 1775

She knew where I was hiding, and we both knew it.

Little Heaster was gone, and his light was gone with him—so I was pretty sure she had the advantage over me. I could see it in her eyes when the moonlight caught them. They lit up, reflecting back at me in a pair of green-gold circles. Animals with eyes like that, they see real good when the light’s low, because that’s how God made them.

Unfortunate for me, I was not made in any such a fashion.

I couldn’t see a thing, hardly, and what I
could
see I couldn’t see with any real distinction. The whole world was one black shadow at the bottom of a bucket, at the bottom of a well.

I was breathing hard, but trying to slow it. I had to get hold of myself. I had to think.

I wanted to believe that my thinking could give me an advantage—a man can outthink a beast, and a man can make himself hold a branch on fire, even when he don’t want to. But my fire was out, and I knew enough about the thing before me to know that she could think, too. She could trick. She could lie.

And she could see better than I could. Maybe she could hear better too.

But I listened for all I was worth.

I closed my eyes, since they weren’t doing me any good anyway, and I opened my ears as best I could. At the edge of what I could hear, Heaster was getting away. Much closer, the creature was holding real still.

Only the hard crack of a splitting twig or the barest rustle of a too-close patch of leaves betrayed her.

At least I knew she hadn’t followed him. At least she’d decided to stay and try to get a bite out of me. I was glad for that, even as I was shaking in my boots. Between me and Little Heaster, she’d have a harder time taking
me
.

I pressed my back against the tree and opened my eyes—and in those few seconds they’d adjusted, just a little. I still couldn’t see much of anything, but there were shapes in the shadows now. The tall lines were trees. The quiet and shifty lump in the clearing was the beast that hunted me.

It was a terrible spot I was in.

I
knew
she knew where I was. But she wasn’t coming for me. Not yet. She was keeping herself all silent; I couldn’t even hear her feathers rustling, or her body twitching. The most that reached my ears was a loud dripping that sounded like soup being ladled slowly onto the ground from a very great height.

I could only pray that it was blood.

A clutch of leaves crunched under one huge foot. A second crunch came up closer to the tree I used to hide myself.

My thoughts were speeding in circles and I could not calm them. She was coming for me, and I had nowhere to hide. I shifted my grip on the axe, because that was all I was holding anymore. Everything else had been taken, or had fallen, or was simply lost. So I clung to that axe with both my hands and I prayed for guidance. I prayed for strength. I prayed for Little Heaster to make it back to camp unharmed.

Her feet were crashing against the earth, like she was lifting them up one at a time and testing them. She was stomping in place, but then she decided she’d had enough of that and she leaped—in just a couple of quick steps she’d be at my tree—and I had barely half a second to think about what to do.

When she was quiet, she was invisible.

When she was running, she was a terror of noise and sharp edges; and I did not need to see her lit up to know where she was coming from.

I turned and ran, and I ran myself smack into another tree within three steps. It hurt like crazy, but it was mostly just my shoulder and it could’ve been worse—it could’ve got me harder in the head, and it could’ve knocked me down. I didn’t go down, but I staggered off to the side and she was right behind me.

She didn’t expect me to cut so hard to the left, but then again, neither did I. Hitting the tree might’ve saved me from her, for just a few moments, so I kept staggering on around. I went behind her, back the way she’d come tearing at me. Her wing cast up a huge gust, a big wind that wasn’t hard enough to blow me down, though it was hard enough to scare me silly. It felt like she was breathing right up against me, whispering into my ears. And all I could do was run, and run blind.

So I tried to think.

Was she hurt so bad that I could climb out of her reach? Ordinarily you don’t think to climb a tree to escape something that flies, but I knew she was hurt. She was really hurt, even if she wasn’t hurt as bad as she’d pretended.

I might try it, as a last resort.

Only
as a last resort.

I ducked my head down, partly because it hurt so bad I had to, and partly because I was trying to shield it from the lower branches. And if I were to fall, I’d need to cover it anyway.

Of course, if I were to fall, that’d be pretty much the end of me.

She was moving lop-sided, having to turn herself to follow me between the closer trees. That gave me an idea.

I couldn’t hardly see a thing, but if I could go farther back away from the Road, where the trees were smaller and closer together, I could feel my way along better—and she’d be even more hard-pressed to follow me. It was hard to remember which way to run, while I was trying to remember and trying not to kill myself against another tree trunk at the same time—and all the while, she was back behind me, huffing and puffing and trudging along so close, so fast, that I couldn’t escape the smell of her.

Her beak snapped and I felt a tug and a jab at my back, to the right of my backbone. Hot pain scored down my ribs, right through the buckskin coat.

I didn’t cry out. I didn’t want her to think she’d hurt me.

She slowed me, though. She was biting down because she’d got a mouthful, and she was tugging, trying to pull me back by my coat. She was slashing at me, trying to snag the cut with her pointed face.