by S. A. Sidor
None of the three bothered to turn.
You, you… you you…you, you youyouyou…
It was as if he were a needle stuck on a record. He bowed slightly with each utterance.
I edged forward, feeling a sour gush of fear kick up inside me but not knowing why.
I tried the finger-painter. “What are you drawing?” No luck. I stepped back, irked. “What is this? A church meeting?” I asked in a raised voice. My head really hurt. I’d heard that question somewhere before. Maybe I was making a joke, but my lines didn’t even make sense to me. You, you… That sounded somehow familiar too but completely out of context.
The chanting petered off into gibberish.
“Yuyu! Va-BaDAAAHHH!” the chanter shouted in a finale that startled me.
The odd phrase echoed in my mind, bringing back thoughts of other voices, the ones Nina and I overheard through the wall in the observatory library. Somewhere else as well. Spain? Was that where I heard these alien sounds the first time?
Never mind, because they finished what they were doing. The finger-painting, chanting, and staying silent were over and done with. They stepped away from their work. The chanter, who was in the middle, was much taller than the other two. The finger-painter was quite short, like an older child, but you could tell by the way they moved they were no child. A petite woman? Their hoods were pulled low, hiding faces. The green light and my light joined on the landing. There were markings on the floor I hadn’t noticed before.
Lines. Angles. It reminded me of a geometry problem. Find the missing angle. I recalled the design chalked on the floor under Clark’s body.
“You ready to talk now? It’s rude not to answer when someone speaks to you,” I said.
The one whose job it had been to stay silent responded.
“It isn’t time for you yet. Go back.” A man. He spoke with a slight German accent.
“Back where?”
The one who had stayed silent pointed up the steps toward the cave opening. I was shocked! His hand and arm had no skin, just wet muscle and sinews, a network of throbbing blood vessels pumping. I should have been terrified, but I didn’t feel that way. I was numbed.
“I’m too tired for that now. After I sleep,” I said. “It’s a long way to daylight. Trust me.” I gestured with a sweep of my fortunately skin-covered arm.
“You’re injured,” the finger-painter said. No child’s voice. Feminine, speaking in a hoarse whisper, as if her voice box had been injured. “You have blood on you,” she rasped.
“You do too. See?” I shifted my lantern to show the finger-painter her bloodied hands.
The tall chanter in the middle came forward. The green light around the three came out of him. I say “him” because the shape had big shoulders, and it stood like a man with its legs spread far apart. The light spiked out of his head like a crown, and green spikes ran down his spine, reminding me of reptiles I’d seen poised on zoo rocks, with their flicking, forked tongues.
“Alden, you are important. Most important. We need you. Please, listen to us.” I can’t say it was a man’s voice. More like a god voice that went through me so that I vibrated. All their voices sounded odd and dreamy. The chanter touched my shoulders.
The pain in my head vanished. I was tingling.
“Are you helping me?”
“Yes,” the three said together in a single combined voice.
“You’re my friends?”
“Go back, Alden,” they said. “We will call you when it is time.”
Then I saw the landing was crowded with cloaked figures. There was hardly any room for me to move. Two of them were dancing and leaving sooty footprints on the stone. They lifted me up on their shoulders and carried me up the carved steps. I wasn’t frightened, though I should’ve been. But they felt strong and sure, marching me back to the cave entrance. My lantern was gone. I don’t remember where it went, but I didn’t need it. We had the eerie swampy green light, and they all knew the cave better than they knew their own homes. Why did I think that? I don’t know. But it felt true. I was so light in their hands. It was like I floated above them. Their humming – did I tell you they were humming or chanting or doing something that I could feel, buzzing around me like a swarm of bees, not to sting me, but to save me? – their noise, it relaxed me. Like machines more than bees. A kind of staticky noise that made me sleepy. I wasn’t asleep, and I wasn’t awake either. When the humming static, or whatever that sound was, when it stopped, it did it all at once. The silence afterward was total. I was lying on the cave floor, near the light from the sun outside, on the rim of the shadows that lived in the cave forever. Not on the hard rock but on the sandy soil, on my back.
My hands were folded across my chest.
“There you are,” they told me inside my head, comforting me.
There you are.
Chapter Twenty
“There you are!”
Boots stomped toward me where I lay, dazed. A leather toe prodded me in the side.
“You awake? Or faking it?”
“Man, he ain’t faking it. Look at all the blood. His skin’s as white as a fried egg.”
“I don’t know, Freddie. He tricked us before. Boss was mad he wasn’t in the truck.”
Freddie, who sounded like he was the farm kid that drove the truck, defended me from his partner’s accusations. “He probably fell out and crawled in here like a sick tomcat. He’s tricking exactly nobody.”
“Let’s get him up.”
Somebody took hold of my legs.
Freddie said in my ear, “C’mon, buddy, you need help for that busted head of yours.” Hands under my arms, he lifted me. The men carried me out of the cave, past the parked truck, and over to a table constructed of planks laid across a pair of sawhorses. A tarp corded between two pines tented the table.
I was groggy, nauseated. Freddie looked every bit the rangy teenager, sporting a tousled thatch of hair, the faint hint of a moustache, and a jacket two sizes too large. He ladled out a cup of hot chowder, setting it on a stump beside the table. Then he propped up my head, pressing a canteen to my cracked lips. “This here’s water. Drink some if you can. I got tasty soup waiting when you’re ready. Doc Unger is coming to inspect that knot on your pumpkin. Boy, that guard feller got you good. I wonder what you did to make him so angry. Doc will fix you up. He’s a real steady operator for a dope fiend.”
“Stop mothering him,” his partner said.
Freddie looked at my eyes, which were getting slowly better at focusing. “Winston’s ornery by nature, but he’s all bark, no bite. Pay him no mind.”
“I’ll chomp on both of you,” Winston said, snapping his raggedy, tea-colored teeth.
“No, he won’t,” Freddie assured me.
Winston stood under a corner of the tarp, smoking the shortest, fattest cigar I ever saw. I sipped from the canteen. The water’s cold made my teeth ache.
“You want to try sitting?” Freddie asked.
I nodded. He pushed me up. The snowy bootleggers’ camp tilted and rocked as if it were built on a platform at sea. But then the motion settled down to a tolerable balance.
“Where’re the monks?” I said, slurring my words. But I made myself understood.
“Why, he’s been to the pearly gates and back.” Winston laughed, slapping his thigh.
Freddie watched my face closely, looking for signs of ongoing impairment.
I didn’t feel chipper, but I knew I wasn’t brain damaged. I gave Winston a hard look.
“I think you might’ve had yourself a vision,” Freddie said.
I shook my head, which was a mistake.
“In there.” I pointed to the cave. “Way at the back. People in robes.”
Winston stopped his smiling and gaped at Freddie, then back at me. “You best stay out of there. And don’t tell nobody yo
u saw people in robes inside the cave. That’s off limits.” He chewed on his cigar. It had gone out. He took it from his lips, contemplated it, and put it back. Freddie went to the stump and held up the cup of steaming soup.
“No thanks,” I said. “You eat it. My stomach’s feeling queasy.”
“Suit yourself.” He drank half the cup, wiping his mouth with the back of his hand.
“Why am I here?”
“He’s a philosopher,” Winston quipped.
“The watchman from the docks? Remember him? He clocked you when you wasn’t looking,” Freddie said. “That’s what Calvin told us. Well, Cal, he didn’t like that. He fed that head-knocker some bare knuckles. Cal couldn’t hang around after that. He stuffed the guard in a trashcan and asked us to bring you here for Doc to patch up. Said he’d hitch a ride here as soon as he could.” I’d have preferred a trip to St Mary’s Hospital over this gutter medic they kept mentioning. But I understood Calvin’s instinct to keep things off the books.
“What about the woman with the dog?”
“We didn’t see no woman,” Freddie said.
Winston nodded in agreement. “No sir, no dolls or dogs on the docks today.”
Where had Nina gone? My anxiety was interrupted by a new source of unease.
“Here comes Doc now.” Freddie looked past me. “Make no mention of his wig.”
“What wig?” I asked.
“Shush,” Winston said, putting a finger to his lips and waving at me to pipe down.
“What have we here, gentlemen?” Doc Unger said, in lieu of a proper introduction.
I was glad they warned me not to mention the man’s hairpiece. Because if they hadn’t, it surely would’ve been the first item on my conversational list. As best as I could determine, Doc Unger wore a seventeenth-century French wig in the style of the Sun King, Louis XIV. It was a glossy mass of curls that fell to his shoulders and perched upon him like a slightly snarled, snoozing pet.
“Our boy here suffered a blow to the head from a wooden club,” Freddie said.
“Did he now?” The faux courtier set his leather bag on the ground. With firm but gentle pressure he turned my face away from him. His fingers delicately probed my injury.
“Is it fatal, Doc?” Winston asked, snickering. “Should we call a priest?”
“I think not.” The real exam began then. I yelped in pain. Doc rustled in his bag. He numbed me, cleaned my wound, stitched me. Then he bandaged my skull, wrapping my battered crown in a gauze turban. He handed me a small brown bottle of pills for pain, two of which I swallowed immediately. And he added that I should drink fluids, but not liquor, and to rest for a few days. “The human skull is a natural helmet, and yours, luckily, has not been breached. Not for lack of trying, you dear hooligan.”
After my treatment, I tried to pay him, using damp bills dredged up from my pockets.
He refused. “My work here is charity. For the good of society, I endeavor.”
With that he exited, dissolving into the snow like an extravagant ghost.
“I’ve never met a doctor like him before,” I said, astounded.
“Oh, Doc’s not a real doctor. He was a patient at the asylum before he escaped. He does quality work. Long as he gets his dope, he’s pleasant as can be. Keeps us fit as fiddles.”
I thought about my sewed-up head under the turban, the fat numbness sitting on me like a giant snoozing spider. This formerly institutionalized man had put his fingers inside a rip in my head. I surprised myself by feeling less worried than impressed. Though that might have been the pills already at work.
Freddie refilled his cup from the kettle. Steam rose, a scent of the sea too.
“Want a little soup now?” he asked.
“Sure, why not? What have I got to lose?” Lunatic surgery relaxes one’s standards.
“That’s the spirit.”
Even grumpy Winston appeared buoyed by the shift in attitude. “You really see monks in the cave?” he asked, earnestly.
“I did. They carried me back up the steps from down on the landing.”
The bootleggers exchanged quizzical stares.
“What?” I asked. “What did I say?”
“There ain’t no steps in the cave,” Freddie said. “It’s twisty back there, and it pitches down to the caverns that fill up when the tide’s in, but no steps. No landing neither.”
“But… but I was there,” I said, thinking about my memory; how unlikely it really was.
“Oh, you got conked and went to dreamland. It’s no big thing,” Winston said. He fished a flask out of his coat pocket and, after taking a swig, offered it to me.
“Doc said, ‘No liquor’.” Freddie reminded him. He kicked snow at his criminal cohort. “But give me a taste, Win.”
The two bootleggers drank, staring into the pines and falling snow.
“Strange life,” Freddie said, finally.
I didn’t disagree.
•••
Darkness crept into the woods around the Black Cave. Winston and Freddie pointed out a gap in the pines and told me the Miskatonic River was less than a hundred yards right that way. Through the trees, I thought I could make out distant church steeples. So, we weren’t all that far from the docks and the city. But I couldn’t walk it in my current shape.
“The hooch goes out to a boat after nightfall. We load it on the beach,” Freddie said.
“Does the booze always come in and go back out again?” My pain had reduced to a pounding, but tolerable, headache.
“That’s called distribution,” Winston chimed in.
“Rum-running boats ferry shipments down the river. A part stays here and goes to the O’Bannion joints. The rest leaves by truck, headed inland,” Freddie said.
“The Clover Club? That’s an O’Bannion place, right?” I felt recovered enough to join them for a smoke. “Naomi O’Bannion. She owns the place?”
The men nodded.
“That’s one thing her family runs,” Freddie said. “Quite a lady–”
“Don’t say no more. He’s a stranger,” Winston cautioned. “No offense, mister.”
“None taken.” My new bootlegger friends lit torches and staked them in the ground so their fellow brethren in the whiskey trade could see their work. The other members of the bootlegging crew were off nearer the road. We were on our own. “I know a lady like that.”
“The one you lost at the docks?” Winston asked.
“That’s her.”
“You called her Nina,” Winston remembered my ramblings from the ice truck.
“Did somebody say my name?”
Nina glided out of the trees.
Freddie and Winston jumped like a couple of spooked squirrels.
I nearly fell off the table. Nina approached, red-cheeked from her hike in the woods.
“What the hell? She’s a damned witch!” Winston pulled a pistol.
“Easy, fellas,” Nina said. “I’m no threat.” She raised her hands in the air.
“Where’d you come from?” Freddie said. Winston still had the pistol trained on her.
“Back there. Down by the river. After the watchman attacked Alden, I ran and hid in a toolshed. It was so abominably frigid, I thought I might emerge an icicle. When I worked up my courage enough to climb out, I saw Calvin in the alleyway looking for me.”
“Calvin? Where is he?” Winston’s finger hooked tight on the trigger.
“Point the gun down at the ground, please,” I said.
He seemed unsure. He switched the barrel back and forth between us. “I don’t know you. You sure as hell don’t know me. Don’t go telling me what to do.”
“Easy, Win. Don’t do nothing you can’t take back.” Freddie said.
I turned to Nina. “It’s awfully good to see you. Where’s Calvin?”
&nbs
p; “We found a boat. Calvin rowed up to a spot on the banks and dragged the boat ashore. I raced up here to see if I could find you. You looked so lifeless at the docks.”
I touched my turban of bandages. “Now I look like Rudy Valentino in The Young Rajah. It’s nice to hear you haven’t lost your skills as a boat thief. I do hope Calvin shows up soon.” Boots stepping in snow. Crunch, crunch. “Ah, here he comes now.”
Calvin pushed past a snow-heavy branch. A shower of ice crystals danced in the torchlight. A sweaty-faced Calvin smiled before his expression turned to surprise at the sight of Winston’s pistol. “What’s this? Winston, are you going to shoot me?”
Winston lowered the gun.
Freddie said, “Cal, you about gave us a heart attack.”
Sensing the danger had abated, Nina rushed into my arms.
We kissed.
“You two should leave,” Calvin said. “The current will carry the skiff into town.”
“I can steer,” Nina said. “My father had me sailing my own dinghy when I was ten.”
“Can you walk?” Calvin asked, helping me down from the table.
“If I go slowly.” I grabbed Calvin’s thick forearm. “Thank you for everything. They told me you took care of that bat-wielding maniac. I owe you.”
“After I took his club away, he wasn’t so tough.”
“We need to talk. Soon. I saw things in the Black Cave. Monks… well, they weren’t really monks. It’s difficult to explain.”
Calvin looked at Freddie and Winston. They shrugged.
“We’d better go,” Nina said.
I followed her through the pines to the black river, where Thorn, with his tail wagging, waited for us in the boat. Home to New Colony we went.
Chapter Twenty-One
Two weeks later I finished moving into Court’s old apartment. The property manager had cleaned the place out. He sanded the inside of the door and slapped on a new coat of varnish. If I peered from the side in the right light, I could still read the message and see the symbols the gargoyle had carved there. The three butchered names of Calvin, Nina, and me followed by the threatening ominous prediction.
