Devil's Call

by J Danielle Dorn

  I do not know what Henry Ness thought he was chasing. But when I awoke the next morning, he was gone, as was the compass.

  18

  NESS HAD LEFT me supplies and horses. I imagined in his way he was trying to keep me safe. Absent the compass, I had no means to track Dalton. And you were coming soon. I stuck between the forest and the river, scanning for any sign of Ness, or Dalton, or my mother. If Ness did not find me, I figured, Dalton would sooner or later.

  On the third day, I started finding body parts scattered along the path. Late in the morning I found a foot, still in its boot, along the side of the path I was following. An hour or so later, I found an ear. It was resting atop a snowdrift, as if set in the most visible place possible, and dread began to overtake my hunger. They were like mile markers from a Christian’s notion of hell, and the higher the sun rose the less at ease I felt, and from time to time I heard the cawing of crows. Each time, I inspected the discarded appendage closely, fearing it belonged to either Ness or my mother. By the time the sun had swung around the meridian and was heading towards the horizon, I had found a hand, blue and dappled with ice crystals. It wore no jewelry, and its size suggested it had belonged to a man.

  Eventually I had to stop and make camp. On a normal night I would have extinguished the fire before turning in, not wanting to risk its burning out of control or giving away my location, but the horses were as uneasy as I was, and besides, in ten hours of riding we had seen no sign of the head belonging to the rest of the pieces. I had trouble sleeping knowing it was still out there somewhere, and as soon as the sky was gray enough to see by the next morning, I broke camp and got back on the road.

  On the fourth day, when I was now well north of anything that could pass for signs of civilization, my eyes had just about gone to sleep from the sameness of the landscape when a neglected signpost flashed red at me. The horses slowed without my clucking to them, and the source of the red tightened my jaws.

  The body had neither skin nor scalp. By the slimness in the hips and the broadness of the chest, I could tell it was a man’s. It had not been there long enough to freeze solid, but he had been dead long enough for scavengers to have had at him. In the center of its chest, a metal badge had been stabbed through the bone. It did not pull away from the body as the gory mess turned over to reveal its decoration to me.

  I consider myself a woman of strong constitution and character, but I had to steady myself on the side of the cart and vomit.

  If the body, or what was left of the body, belonged to Henry Ness, I did not want to know. I had my suspicions, and I still have my doubts. That body could have belonged to anyone, as could the badge. Coincidences abound in the wild, yet I cannot lie and tell you that I would have felt anything if the body had turned out to be the sheriff’s. I was beyond grief, then. All I had room for was anger.

  After I had been on the desolate road for a week and a half, I began to fear I would not see another settlement before my food stores began to run out. All around me were trees and snow, but a body cannot subsist off bark and water. My body was not my own. My belly grew bigger, yet my stomach growled from the time I rose in the morning until the time night fell not even eight hours later.

  On the tenth day, the horses and I found ourselves walking into a relentless wind, with gusts that brought tears to my eyes and forced me to tie my scarf in such a fashion that I could breathe but not see. I had to trust the horses and my own sense of direction.

  In time the wind began to bring with it a scent I thought certain to be a product of my imagination. Were it not for the fact that the horses reacted to it before I did, that they made high distressed noises and balked when I flicked their reins, I might have considered ignoring it. Might have, but for the fact that I was not smelling rabbit or duck or even a larger game animal, boar or bear or elk.

  I allowed the horses to stay where they were while I climbed down from the cart. Putting my back to the wind took away some of its sting, and I unwrapped my face that I would have full use of my senses, if only for a moment. It was then I heard the crackling of the fire, and was able to follow it farther off the path. Another crackle, this time beneath my boot. I had stepped not on a downed branch, but a rib picked clean of meat. I found another a few feet away. In another few feet, I reached a small clearing.

  Someone had left a thick hunk of meat, flayed and skewered by the bone, roasting over a fire. My stomach growled and cramped at once, my hunger at war with the horror I felt, the uncertainty.

  Perhaps it was not human flesh, after all. If it was, it may well have been your gran’s. At least, this is what I reminded myself as I considered what I had stumbled upon. That I had stumbled upon it meant someone had left it there for me. Mocking me.

  I stood in the clearing a while longer, daring the demon whose presence I could not feel to show himself, and when he did not, I spat to clear my mouth of water and returned to the cart.

  On the eleventh day, I stopped for a meager lunch scraped together from what was left of my stores, and in doing so I realized I had run clean out of the tea Eva had blessed to keep you where you were. I rummaged through all of the bags and sacks in the cart, but I had no luck in finding any pouches or stray dry leaves that I could use to barter another day or two of travel without worrying about your coming early. I had loved you since the moment of your quickening, but this was not the place where I wanted to bring you into the world, nor was it the time.

  I rode the horses another ten miles or so after that, stopping when I realized I needed to hunt for meat in addition to setting up camp for the night. That time of year is miserable for hunting, and so close to the end of my pregnancy as I was, I could hardly sneak through the woods with its dead leaves and frozen underbrush and pursue what creatures were still foraging for food without giving myself away, but I found myself lucky. As dusk fell I came upon a doe limping through the forest with a miscarried foal, still in its sac, trailing frozen behind her. She was weak and unsteady on her feet, and I would like to think shooting her was a kindness nature would not have afforded her had I not come along. Her pelt was mangy and her meat stringy, but I made use of what I could and left the rest for the scavengers.

  That night, the wind howled, and though the horses nestled together under their thick blankets I knew they were cold and restless. I hardly slept myself. My ears confused the howls of the wind with the screaming of the victims I imagined the demon George Dalton to be skinning in the darkness. On more than one occasion, I awakened thinking I had heard my mother’s voice.

  It was to be the last night of true rest, and I let nightmares pick away at it until I rose in the morning raw-boned and frozen, my back aching something fierce. The way the sun rose, its color or its fierceness or maybe just my own imagination, told me today was the day I was going to find the demon. Whatever it was, it was right.

  Later that morning I surmised the demon George Dalton had come upon a group of prospectors out in the woods the night before, and this group of prospectors had taken a shine to him.

  I could imagine him sitting around the fire with them, brewing coffee and telling jokes, his eyes just as dead and cold as the land around them, looking at all of them like they were nothing while they thought to themselves that they had had themselves a spell of good luck running into another pair of hands and a man willing to work for his supper, prospecting being miserable business this time of year but profitable if you could survive the cold. And I did imagine him. As I did not encounter him at this campsite, I could do nothing more than imagine him.

  And as I rode, I found imagining him gave me something to focus on other than the discomfort in my back and belly. I refused to believe it was you getting ready to come into the world. I wanted to believe you would stay put until I had strung the demon up, or at least secured him to the horse and started dragging him on back to Fort Pierre, where I would tell the prospectors what they really had in their midst. I would say, Look, look at this snake. You all let him just slide on
through here after he killed five people between here and the southern territory, after he killed my husband and the father of my child. I could not even tell them how many were dead in Louisiana because of him. A lawman’s pieces lie scattered between here and the Missouri River, with no accounting for his head. Your lord only knows how many more dead lie so in his shadow. Look.

  And I imagined the night your father died, because I wanted to have that fire hot in my breast when I finally caught up with Dalton. I imagined that feeling of holding my breath, warning Hawk to be careful, just before the ground fell out from under me, before George Dalton shot your father and shot Hawk and took my mother.

  As the horse and I rode along the coastline, we began to find bodies again. Unlike the bodies on the road, these bodies were bobbing in the slushy surf in the lake, the waves rolling in white capped and angry, the first of the bodies full clothed and facedown, and I thought it must have been an accident. But then as we kept riding and we got closer to the next campsite, I started feeling like I felt that night George Dalton shot your father, this faint feeling like someone was grabbing me by the back of the neck and holding me over open air, and we rode past another body. And another. And another. And I began to imagine, because it was imprinted in the landscape of the place and I was attuned to it, I knew more then than I had known before, that the demon George Dalton had suspected they were beginning to learn too much, or they were getting too friendly, or he had felt my presence in the settlement, and he had compelled the men one at a time to stand up from their morning necessaries and walk into the lake far enough that when they drowned the only thing that would get them back to shore was the surf catching their dead weight and carrying it the rest of the way.

  Eight bodies we passed, all told. Not even the birds chirped. Nothing but the sound of the water lapping at the stones and the sand, but the horse’s hooves stamping through the snow. That dead silence kept after us for miles as I urged the old girl on faster. I was more weight than she was used to carrying on her back, and she had not had a night’s rest since Hawk died. In spite of her lather and her buckling knees, I urged her on.

  It came as no surprise to me that the horse could run only so fast for so far, and yet I allowed myself to feel frustration and anger as she gave a final wheezing whinny and collapsed into the snow, unable to get up again. I climbed out of the saddle, and she fell over onto her side, dead.

  The galloping had been hard on my hips, but it was not the hours of riding so hard that had taken away my breath. It was not long before I realized what was happening. You were coming whether I wanted you to or not. I continued on foot, fast as I could with the band of pain tightening and releasing faster than it had before.

  The sky was dark and the full moon bright overhead when I reached the apex of a final hilltop and the salt-rimmed lake-shore revealed itself, and the figures before it.

  One of the figures was bound to a stake planted in the lake’s shallow shores. Steam rose from the lake’s surface like spectral witnesses to the coming atrocity. The figure was my mother. Your grandmother, Catriona MacPherson.

  Ministering to the stake was the other figure, the tall black-clad hunter known as George Dalton. He had his back to me, though I had no doubt in my mind he was aware of my presence, and I could not hear what he said as he grabbed hold of the top of the stake and tugged, easy as unearthing a blade of grass. The stake fell into the icy sludge that winter had made of the water, and it swallowed my mother up.

  I had started running before the stake had even tipped—at least, as fast as I was able to run with a full-grown baby ready to leave my belly—while screaming for my mother.

  Dalton stood aside, making no effort to stop me from plunging into the water after your gran. The cold grabbed hold of my knees and nearly pulled me down, all the muscles responsible for keeping me upright flaring with a sensation I mistook for heat, so unlike any cold I had ever felt before as it was. In the wake of the pain from the freezing water came another band of pain, this one so intense I nearly went down on my hands and knees in the lake. Had I, we all would have drowned out there. I braced myself on my knees, cursing myself for my weakness in that moment, and when it passed, I gathered up my strength and grabbed hold of the stake, my gloved hands shaking with a fierceness I could not control.

  Once we were back on the rocky shore, I crouched and began to work at the ropes binding my mother’s body to the stake. My fingers were stiff and numb, refusing to do as I pushed them to do, and I was shivering so hard I could not get a good grip on the waterlogged rope. I was beginning to consider using a knife to cut her free when that band tightened in my belly again.

  It was then I felt a pain so hot and bloody that I screamed for the first time since the pains had started, sending me to my hands and knees with nothing but Hawking’s rifle slung across my back for either protection or companionship.

  When I first felt you quickening in the springtime, I thought I would give birth to you in front of the fireplace at home. I had watched my aunts give birth to my younger cousins, and I had helped deliver more than a few of De Soto’s new babies. Helping deliver a baby is a different matter than giving birth yourself.

  The fire spreading to the center of my body told me there would be no more willing you to stay where you were. I could only get my trousers down around my knees, but that was far enough to do what I needed to do. Still on my hands and knees, I pushed. Then I fell onto my back in the snow. The blood and the fluid from the sac soaked the earth underneath me, and I had only enough time to catch my breath before I had to push again. So I pushed and I could not help but scream that time.

  My sweet, longed-for child, there you were at last, and the only thought I had as the blackness closed in around me was to let you lie in my trousers because they were warm and dry and I was not thinking straight at all by then.

  I was bleeding more than I had ever seen a woman bleed before. It seemed even my eyes were covered in blood as everything went very dark. The last thing I remember is reaching for you as I heard footsteps crunching in the snow, coming towards us.

  19

  BEFORE I TELL YOU what he told me, I want to give you the story of your kinswoman who burned at the stake for what she did in Scotland.

  Your gran’s mother, my Nana Sorcha, her great-grandmother was named Eimhir. Eimhir, like many of the women of the MacPherson clan, loved a man who had to answer for his love, and rather than staying in town to risk their neighbors turning them in, they built their own home in the woods, and according to the story passed down through the generations, Eimhir bore her man two children. The firstborn, Sorcha, survived, while the son perished, as many children perished in those days. Though their hearts ached, Eimhir and her man held out hope for the day she would bear a third, for the number three carries much luck and good fortune in the Work of women with Celtic blood. Though Eimhir Worked all the fertility spells she could think of, though her family blessed a circle around her and she and her man loved each other very much, they had no success in conceiving a third child before Eimhir’s man was run down in the street, either by highwaymen or townspeople who believed him to be enthralled by a witch.

  If Eimhir had gone mad, this would make the tale easier to understand. Grief causes all manner of turmoil in the hearts and minds of those left behind, and though Eimhir had her sisters to support her, and though her kin Worked all of the magick in their books to turn the tides in her favor again, Eimhir did not trust that the goodness of their magick was enough to overcome the greed of Death, and so she stole away into the woods sometime after her man’s burial. She toppled the caern placed over his grave, and she dug through the dirt with her own nails, and she dragged him back to the house they had built for their children and there she enacted magick so dark it has been recorded, sure, but those who recorded it would never speak of it.

  Death is a natural part of living, but it is the end of life as well. Just as healing is a natural process, so is dying. All that you can do for a
dying person is help them in their passage to the other side, ease their suffering that they may let go and leave behind an empty shell, rather than allow themselves to be fettered to objects or places or, worst of all, people who cause them to become tash. Ghosts.

  There is nothing to be done for one who has ceased to live and has since become a body. Not unless you are willing to give up your own soul and become a shell that you might barter with the spirits on the other side. This is the darkness of the magick I considered after your father died, but my wits returned to me, and I convinced myself that your father deserved peace.

  Necromancy is a forbidden practice, and for good reason. Your ancestor Eimhir bargained with spirits she did not understand, and she invited one into her dead man’s body, and when he rose again he did so with a thirst for blood. Somehow, the story goes, Eimhir did become pregnant by what had made a home out of her dead man’s body. When the witch hunters came to town and sent her man back to the earth to which he belonged and strung her up to burn for the sin she had committed, even her kin had no interest in trying to save her. That story marked the MacPherson women’s slow escape from Scotland. We all know it, and now you do as well.

  Prior to reading the page I pulled from Aunt Griselda’s mouth, I did not know the history the witch hunters had with our family. What I know now has tainted the story as I knew it. As I knew it, Eimhir’s was a cautionary tale, a warning meant to steer my cousins and me away from blacker magick. I do not believe Eimhir caused the grief of which George Dalton convicted her, but neither do I believe he killed her for committing necromancy. Your gran can tell you the story as she knows it, knowing as she will what became of the fiend who burned her great-great-grandmother.