Where Darkness Dwells (21 page)

Her mother's trembling fingers brushed her cheek.

Warm, so warm…

"Don't… don't try to speak, honey. It's, it's going to be okay. I'll fetch Dr. Thompson. He's right… he's right here."

Her mom croaked as if struck. Through her failing consciousness, Betty heard more flesh ripping. Smooth cuts parting the living from the dying. A distressing, protracted sigh--either her own or her mother's--she could no longer tell. A weight hit the ground nearby and didn't stir.

Mom…

Betty's eyes dimmed. In the last of her vision she saw her murderer's pale skin, his arms veined with what looked like wriggling worms. His forearm flexed, twitching the knife at his side. A blood bead seeped from its tip to the grassy path. Her murderer turned toward her house and sleeping brother. Betty's vision shrank to a mere pinprick then winked out for good.

11.

Scully thought he was going to have to kill Dr. Thompson, but the old man just meekly curled up in the grass and cried. That was a good thing. His boss went up to the house to finish off the family, leaving Scully to keep an eye on things at the graveyard. He was weakening. Badly. He wasn't sure he could take down anyone, even an old man like Thompson.

Gonna fill that hole up good,
he thought.
Three bodies, no make that four, counting the boy up at the house.

Just when he was about to say a prayer of thanks for Thompson's tears, Magee took out a flask from his pocket. The old barber winced as he tipped it back and drained it, answering any doubts Scully had about Magee.

Good. No hassles from nobody.

"Why don'tcha get your sorry asses outta here?" Scully tried to sound threatening, but only succeeded in shredding something in his esophagus. It hurt like hell--the ripping and rotting and falling apart--but it couldn't be helped. Not until he returned to the Underground. That wouldn't happen until he and Ethan had this big old mess cleaned up. "Another loose end severed," his boss would say.

After long years of dormancy, Ethan was taking more risks lately. His boss would repeatedly implore that it was all for good reason--the consolidation of his power and the security of the Underground, above all things, the security of the Underground. While Scully thought those were valid reasons, he thought something else was spurring Ethan's risk taking. Thea Calder. Ethan wanted her to be with him, wanted to possess her like a golden trinket hanging about his neck. He would do anything to insure that no one would learn about their hidden lair. No, no one could learn the secret. No one could dare threaten his immortality, his eternal happiness.

Magee grabbed the doctor's elbow and helped him to stand. Neither one took their eyes off Scully.

"You have no right doing what you do!" Thompson yelled, spittle and tears flying off him. Waving his index finger at Scully, he stepped toward him.

"That hole's deep enough for another body, another two, you keep yapping." Scully hoped his tone didn't reveal how weak he felt. He picked up his shovel, then with effort, held it high like a brandished weapon. He hoped the men couldn't see the clean white of his arm bone gleaming through his rotten flesh.

Not much holdin' me together.
He tried to laugh. His chance at humor couldn't hide the fact he was getting scared. He couldn't remember it ever getting this far.

Why'd Ethan have to go after the boy anyhow?

"Come on, Doc. Let's get home."

"It can't go on. Not like this," Thompson said, but his expression held defeat, not resolve. His shoulders slumped. He wasn't going to fight, and he wasn't going to say anything to cause any more bloodshed. Scully could see it in his eyes.

"Don't speak like that. Now, you know this is how it is. Let's just git while we still can."

"Magee, you have another bottle of the clear stuff?"

"Do fishes blow bubbles?"

Magee and Thompson staggered up the path, careful not to step in the bloody mess that used to be the Harris women.

Scully waited until they were gone, then fell to the ground. He wanted to simply sit and rest while waiting for Ethan, but was starting to lose control of his motor functions.

It was getting harder to breathe. He thought how funny it was to notice such a thing. He no longer needed to breathe, not up here aboveground, but his body continued to listen to instinct. His lungs sucked in air, acting out the motion of respiration. Something beat in his chest cavity, something that pushed and pulled a viscous fluid, something very unbloodlike.

Holding his eyelids closed, Scully focused on controlling the delicate muscles holding them in place. He didn't want the rotten membranes to tear. He hated that feeling; it was worse than paper cuts dipped in vinegar.

His mind flitted back five minutes, seeing that girl's insides emptied out like a tossed bucket of piss. Dead before she hit the ground.

The image sent him further back, to when he first saw Ethan laid up in a hospice bed tucked inside a crumbling Spanish mission on the edge of the Everglades, on the edge of the civilized world. Bandages bound his entire torso. Without them his insides would have spilled like that Harris girl's. He remembered the room stinking of spoiled meat, and searching for it until he realized the stench was coming from his friend. The Seminoles routed Ethan's company, cutting three dozen soldiers to ribbons, gutted stem to stern. Their ambush lived up to the Seminoles' savage reputation; added to it even. And there were niggers amongst them. Mixing nigger blood with savage. The thought had made him nauseous. Still did.

The mission's physician had sent a letter to an address he found in a stack of letters in Ethan's rucksack: his widowed mother in Pekin, Illinois. In no condition to travel the Mississippi to collect her incapacitated son or his putrefying remains, she asked Arthur Scully, Ethan's childhood friend, to go in her stead. He agreed, knowing she wouldn't want to see her son in either condition.

Entering the makeshift hospice, Scully saw mosquito netting shrouding Ethan's sick bed. Netting meant his friend wasn't dead. They wouldn't need to protect a corpse from mosquitoes. They clouded the outside material, while flies buzzed inside the shroud, having hatched from his wounds.

Ethan had been unconscious and feverish. Blisters rimmed his mouth, seeping, crusting. But he was alive.

Scully stepped through the netting and sat in a chair at Ethan's side, swatting the flies away. Taking in the severity and extent of his friend's wounds, and afraid to do anything more, he held his hand, waiting for his eyes to open.

A week later, Ethan woke from a frightful delirium in which he had raved about setting fires to scorch crops and flesh in equal measure, and the necessity to skin the conniving red skin, skin the treacherous black skin. Rid the earth of them. The last words of his delirium haunted Scully, and from that day on, he would often wake from his own nightmares with Ethan's words conjuring up the worst possible imagery.

A distant voice niggled his brain, shaking it free from memory's pull: "Scully. Scully, come on, Arthur, wake up."

Someone slapped his face, hard. Ethan. Ethan had returned from the house. A dull thud hit the ground nearby. The Harris boy. The job was done.

"We need to get you back. In a hurry." His friend lifted him, grunting with the effort as he threw him over his shoulder. "I didn't realize it was so bad. Digging the grave must've made it go faster. I told you it needn't be so deep."

Scully tried to speak but couldn't.

"Don't worry. Here we go. We're going home."

Arthur Scully's body was falling apart. Ethan's hands kept slipping through the muck that was all that remained of his flesh. "Just close your eyes, rest up." Scully didn't know his eyes had opened of their own accord. He could no longer feel his skin, could no longer see.

"I'll get you back safe, then come back to fill that hole you dug." Something from inside his skull was pressing down with the gravity of being carried upside down. The pressure built at his brow line, then found release as something gushed through his eye sockets and into his matted hair.

"We're going home," Ethan told Scully a few weeks after waking from his delirium.

"We didn't think you'd make it."

"But I did." Ethan grimaced as he stood from the hospice bed. His wound's dressing still needed frequent changing, and he wasn't up to full strength yet, but Ethan had an urge about him; he had to leave this place behind and move on. He no longer wanted to sleep in the bed where he had been expected to die.

They bought two seats in a cramped, rickety wagon from a group of trappers and merchants traveling from the Everglades to New Orleans. Sharing the wagon bed with curing skins pulled taut over wooden frames, the oppressive air smelled worse than Ethan's recovery room. Ethan was still too weak for them to travel on their own, and Scully didn't know the lay of the land, so despite the stench, the arrangement worked for the best. Once in New Orleans, they booked a cabin on a steamer heading back to Illinois, and they were soon on their way home.

Scully remembered the moment specifically. The first mention from Ethan about a venture that would change the course of their lives. Haze rose in indolent wisps from the Mississippi. They both leaned against the railing circling the deck of the steamer, watching the sunrise over the wooded Tennessee side of the river. Ethan leaned closer and in a conspirator's whisper said one word: "Expedition."

"Expedition?"

Ethan glanced around the deck, but it was early and few people strolled by.

"Private Abrahms, he died in the final Seminole raid, he used to go on about how he was going to trap once the fighting was done. He was going to trap live gators and bring them up north, sell them to carnivals and zoos. Once up North, he'd make his return trip home with rich old coots to do some of the trapping themselves. He'd set up cabins along the 'glade's shore, make them real fancy. The best liquor, the best whores, the best hunting and trapping. He'd go on and on like it'd be a damn resort."

"We don't know nothing about gators, Ethan. Don't they bite?"

"Not gators, nitwit. That's just where the seed of my idea came from. A jumping off point."

"You lost me."

"Ain't gators we're going for."

"What then?"

"Niggers. What else? We'll set up an outfitting company for rich southern folk. Some will hire us on to catch their runaways, and we'll track them and collect the bounties. Some will want to come along to bag a prize to bring home."

"Niggers… you know that sounds, well, is that legal?"

"If the right people get a take, anything's legal."

"Sounds like poaching to me."

"Exactly! That's the point. We bring in the Borland brothers for muscle, and with you and me on the business side, we'll be rich in no time."

That's how it all started. A conversation Ethan had with a entrepreneurial private now buried in an unmarked grave somewhere south of nowhere. Over ninety years ago. Now Scully's chest still fought to glean oxygen from his inhaled breath. His muscles fought the onslaught of rapid decay.

As Ethan carried his friend down the steps to the Harris's cellar, and while he dragged him through the damp, unlit tunnel carved by the Borland brothers in the guise of The Collectors, Arthur Scully's body continued to deteriorate. His mind had receded to the farthest reaches of his memory, to his earliest recollection--stumbling and falling as he learned to walk--when his flesh felt the Underground's delicate caress.

Ethan had saved him, saved his immortality. The Underground worked its wondered, knitting new flesh over putrefied, replacing the dead with something not quite. Scully gasped for air and held it deep in his rotting chest, then let out a laugh that sent oily, putrid tissue sputtering from between his healing lips.

"Let me down, old hos'. I got it from here."

"That was close. I didn't think you'd make it."

"Well, you were wrong."

They returned to the Underground, returned to immortality, with another loose end severed and Ethan one step closer to realizing his goal.

At the outset, they weren't expecting to kill the entire family. Just bury the old man. Give him peace, even though he'd turned down their offer of salvation. They were, after all, a respectable people. The wife would've held silent over the evening's events; but then the daughter came out, and judging her reaction, she wouldn't have kept silent on her own. So Ethan helped her along with that. Then the mother and son had to follow, falling like dominos.