And so the captain's orders continued, detailing some of the men as pickets to remain on the ridge-top, at least until given orders to come down, others, including Corporal Latham, to precede the main body into the village, but spreading out into its open places, guarding the dirt paths between its houses, its church and its churchyard. Latham, in point of fact, to take his group and scour the churchyard for any townspeople who might be hiding there, bringing any he found to the square where Captain Pindar would set the main camp up.
And the wind, meanwhile, slackened further, while other sounds now came, sounds of murmuring within the houses as the first troops passed slowly between them, the men with bayonets fixed on their muskets, alert for hostility. Then even these were then drowned out by the sounds of drums, as, the scouts passing through to the square without incident, the doors and the windows remaining shut tight, the main troop descended in battle order, carefully, warily, until they, too, reached the village's center.
"You of the village," the captain then shouted. "You see we are here and that we will not harm you. We ask you to come out--to send someone out to us. We wish to buy provisions from you. To use your well to fill our canteens with. To camp here peaceably only for one night and then be on our way."
And this time several of the doors opened. Latham watched from the churchyard where he and his small group had been inspecting what seemed the signs of a recent funeral, one interrupted before it was finished, as men from the houses came out to the square, but never straying too far from their own front doors. Some of them shouted, short, bent men, as if Aboriginals or else of mixed blood, but not in English. Part French, a few of them. Others in some tongue that seemed like that of the Oneida tribespeople, yet not entirely that, while Latham listened, hearing a snatch now and then that he recognized.
"Gardez!" a few shouted--that in a broken French Latham could understand. "Gardez-vous de la fin du vent! Gardez son extrémité!"
And Latham, at least, realized what they were saying. The wind that presages death--beware its ending!
But Captain Pindar shouted over them: "Damme, is there no one here who speaks English!"
Then there was silence as the villagers retreated softly back into their houses, closing the doors quietly behind them. The wind sank down to a sigh and then to a whisper.
And then--next to Latham, practically in his ear, a quiet voice murmured. "I speak English."
Latham jumped back, nearly tripping over a shovel--another sign of the ceremony that had, for some reason, been abandoned. Before him a man stood, robed as a village priest.
"I-I'm Corporal Latham," he stammered. Then, regaining his wits, he bowed hurriedly. "Begging your pardon, sir, but I was startled. I did not hear you come out."
"My pardon, then, Caporal," the priest answered, leading him to the square where the captain waited. "I am Charles Devinette, curé of the church where I came out a side door. Here in our village we have become used to moving with little sound, staying inside when our work does not call us out. 'Out of sight, out of mind,' as say you English, yes?"
"Uh, yes," Latham answered. "This is our commander, Captain Pindar, who, as you may have heard, wishes to let your villagers know that we only wish to camp here for the night. To rest and reprovision ourselves."
The priest nodded, then shook hands with the captain. "My children," he said, "the flock of my village, wish you no harm either. With your permission, I will call them out again, but only for the briefest moment. I will explain to them that you must be sheltered, even as they are sheltered themselves, that they must each take one or two of you with them into their houses. To let you wait with them. . ."
The captain shook his head. "Damme!" he said. "You mean what you wish is to separate us -- to get us in small groups where you can kill us. Your language is French, at least what I can make of it. Some of you Indian, by the look of you. Likely most of you, even if you live in white men's houses." The captain smiled then, a bitter, tight-lipped smile. "Probably massacred, those that built 'em, eh?"
"Capitaine, non!" the priest protested. "We massacre no one. We are on neither side. As for our bodies, our language, our ways, we are, all of us, only what life makes us to be, yes? Here in these mountains there are êtres--things--much older than French or English. Or even the Iroquois. Things that are even more silent than we are. That strike when the wind dies!"
And the wind was silent as the priest suddenly turned and bolted back into the churchyard, Latham following on his heels at the captain's orders. He ran as quickly as he could, but the priest was faster, dodging gravestones, dodging the long, narrow, wicker basket used to carry the newly deceased--when even funerals were interrupted when the wind showed signs of stopping its constant hum--dodging the shovel that Latham had almost tripped over before, and then disappeared through a stout oaken door in the church's stone side, locking it with a firm click! behind him.
And Latham stood, transfixed, as the air became completely calm. As the leaves of the trees outside the town ceased their constant rustling, as every iota of motion was stilled. As even the murmurs inside were halted--until, a sudden scream!
A scream of horses, beyond, in the meadow where they had been taken. The shouts of the men who had been posted with them, followed by the captain's barked orders, to form up in ranks. A defensive square. Riflemen inside, bayonets outside.
Latham turned and ran to join them, seeing, as he did, over the church roof, the fog on the mountain beyond the village streaming downward, tendrils already having reached the plateaued grass where the horses had been tied. He twisted, broken-field dashing through the cluttered churchyard when, with a sharp jolt, he felt the earth drop away beneath him.
He landed in darkness--the newly dug grave, the corpse already in it, but left unfilled when the gravediggers had hastily dropped their shovels to flee the impending calm. He tried to climb out of it, scrambling up its crumbling side, but his foot was caught in the winding cloth of the corpse's shroud, becoming all the more entangled the more he attempted to extricate it.
And overhead the air became heavy, hot with moisture, darkening as the fog rolled in behind him. As--
He tried to scream! To give some warning even if he could not join the others, faced outward in their defensive formation to stave off whatever it was that ignored those inside the houses--out of sight, out of mind, as the curé had said--but oozed on steadily up the pathways between the houses. Converging on the square. While, in the square itself, behind the men--he tried to scream, but the words would not come out.
He tried a second time to shout a warning that, in the square's center, out of the well where they had been planning just minutes before to refill their canteens another something was rising, haze-like, slowly forming in misted tendrils into some dim shape. Into some massing thing long-forgotten, hinting of scales and half-rotted tentacles, of bone and horn-like beak, as if of some race of ancient sea creatures long trapped beneath the ground. Fearing the wind only, the slightest breeze that would tear its damp form apart, scattering its substance into atoms, but, when even that which it feared had become still. . .
When all that moved were things filled with blood's wetness. . .
The scream would not come! Blood and an excruciating bolt of pain filled his mouth but his frenzied brain didn't acknowledge this as, struggling, he trapped himself within the shroud-cloth's vise-like windings, falling now on the corpse, rolling now under it as, in new darkness, he felt in his ears the echoes of other screams.
Then only silence.
And then, again, wind and the murmur of voices as villagers dug him out. Wind that portended death for some, as the French trappers used to say, when it stopped blowing. For others, just graves.
But now, for Philip Latham, neither. Now the villagers took him in, an unwitting orphan, and saw to his wounds, and fed him and clothed him. They made him one of them, working side by side with him in the fields, finding a wife for him, helping him to establish a family. And always, now, h
e fled indoors with them when the wind began to slack in its blowing, until a time came, scarcely twenty years after, when another war spread to the mountains.
This war, however, was not with the British, regular army and raw colonials fighting side by side, but rather was a struggle against them. Except in the village, sides still did not matter.
The priest was long dead by then, when a detachment of New Hampshire volunteers, under Captain Nathaniel Flambard, arrived at a time when the wind once again was beginning to die down. As for the villagers, even their French had become unintelligible to anyone but themselves. And so, this time, they could give no warning, not even when this new captain screamed as he stood in the village square, the well behind him, his troops arrayed with him in loose formation, for someone, anyone, who could speak English.
"We wish not to harm you," he shouted. "We wish only for provisions. To fill our canteens here. To rest for the night and then be on our way."
Some who remembered brought Latham out to the square, to stand a moment remembering himself when he, too, was a soldier. He tried to speak, to explain, what was going to happen, but his useless mouth couldn't form the words. When he saw the uncomprehending light in the eyes of the soldiers, he retreated inside with the rest of the townspeople.
And then, just before the wind stopped completely, one of the other officers turned to this new captain. "What do you make of it, Nate?" he asked.
The captain shrugged. "Whole village is mad, for all I can gather. And that man most of all. Harmless enough now, but something must have happened years back that gave him quite the fright. Did you see the inside of his mouth when he tried to talk?"
The other nodded. "That blackened stump? Aye, sir. I wonder if we'll ever know what it was--what could have frightened a man so much--that he'd bite his own tongue off?"
CASA DE LOS CADÁVERES
Gerard Houarner
What can I say about Gerard? He's a solid pro with three decades in the field with novels like Road From Hell and The Beast That Was Max and works as Fiction Editor over at Space and Time Magazine. This story--the title translates to "House of Dead Bodies"--is a refreshingly modern take on Lovecraftian themes. The genius of Lovecraft and the authors he inspired is to couch horror into solid reality. That's what makes it all the more horrible. Casa de los Cadáveres is that type of tale.
Ponch led the way through the night, his shock of white hair like a torch of pale flames under the street lamps, shoulders rolling, hips swaying like a jaguar casually passing through jungle sniffing out the borders of his territory. He left a trail in the air that smelled of alcohol.
Cynthia and Mike followed, side by side, studying and passing lists to one another as Mike kept up a hushed, mostly one-sided argument. Mike was a swaying sapling, tall but fragile, the whining of his voice like a breeze whistling through bare branches. Cynthia was short and thick, with straight black hair and pale skin, like she’d been hiding under a rock most of her life.
Luis brought up the parade’s end. He couldn’t think much beyond Cynthia’s curves contained by a tight red top and blue jeans that a backpack over the shoulder did nothing to hide. Ponch had been there, already, but Luis didn’t mind. There were expectations as well as responsibilities, running with Ponch. That’s why Luis brought up the rear.
At that time of the night, on the right summer night, a touch of tidal salt mingling with the East River sharpened the residual oil and torch smoke smell of neighborhood repair shops, small factories and warehouses holding on against rising towers of encroaching gentrification.
Without restaurants or markets to feed on, rats were few, even with the river near. The streets were clear of vehicles, leaving the single traffic signal they’d passed, after parking the cars, futilely clicking between red and green.
"We approach like hunters," Ponch had said, with a smile. "Quietly, and on foot."
Like the rest of the family, Luis had never cracked the code to Tio’s craziness. It hadn’t mattered, especially after the divorce and they’d stopped seeing him, until money became a problem. Mom had warned Luis, but like she said, times were hard.
"Time he knew about the old family business," Ponch said, when Luis and his mother asked for help.
The faint whisper of traffic from the Triboro Bridge peeking out from between the buildings struggled to penetrate the neighborhood’s spell of stillness. Manhattan’s life and lights across the water seemed a country away. Ponch appeared to be in his element in the empty streets lined with shuttered fronts. Luis wondered if he’d ever find someplace in which he belonged.
Ponch stopped at a rolling steel gate to an unmarked building. Mike and Cynthia stumbled into one another as they fell out of their private world. Luis stayed on the curb, watching their back. Ponch tapped, gently, twice.
"Are you kidding me?" Mike said. He brushed past Ponch and banged on the steel door three times, hard. "What are you afraid of?"
Luis flinched, Cynthia giggled.
Ponch laughed and said, "You can’t wake the dead. You can only call them."
The boy stood taller, braced for a storm.
A grey security door opened. A woman’s voice drew Ponch, and he held a hand up, pointed to Mike, spoke in a language that seemed to mix Spanish with others in a kind of Creole tongue Luis had never heard. After a few second, Ponch signed to the rest and entered.
Luis was last to come in, expecting a hijacked truck or container, a makeshift casino or sex club, a chop shop, perhaps pit with roosters or dogs, even a cage with men. Ponch’s reputation was large, and far more complicated than Luis’ basic ‘smart kid, good hands, no ambition’ tag which own mother liked to push on others.
"Disappointed?" Ponch asked, taking him by the elbow as soon as he came in.
The steel door closed, and an old, frail woman in widow’s black took Luis’ hand. "Excuse me," she said, with a coquettish smile. Her grip was strong and boney. The gloom smoothed over the wrinkles of her small face, whose delicate features reminded him of old paintings of Spanish nobility. There was an odd smell to her, like an astringent spice on a sour, over-ripe fruit. They never talked about the stink of people in the paintings in college art class.
Mike and Cynthia were already the flight of stairs to the left that led to the office, peering through dimly lit batches of used appliances and commercial kitchen equipment, bales and piles of construction supplies, and overcrowded racks of open boxes and trays.
"You have your father’s look," the old woman said, gently, caressing Luis’ cheek with her other hand.
Luis stiffened. Ponch’s grip slipped, but the old woman’s stayed strong. "I’m nothing like him," he said.
"That’s true," the old woman said. "You’re still here."
"Our business is there," Ponch said, pointing up to the office.
The pair steered Luis up the steps and inside, leaving Mike and Cynthia behind. Luis looked to them as they rummaged in the aisles, Mike calling out for more light. They’d become a sideshow to whatever else was going on that now included him. He looked to the steel security door, then relaxed, let himself be led. Ponch’s reputation as a hustler didn’t include violence.
The thick, wooden, windowed office door opened to a long room, the wall on the left and two rows of shelving lined with used books under hand-printed headings. The old woman led the way along the right hand wall, its concrete blocks caved and pitted. Cheaply framed art prints from the Met and MOMA had been hung along its length.
Ponch and the old woman flirted in Spanish as they headed to the sunken couches and wooden chairs around a steel desk at the back. She looked back and said something to him, frowned when he didn’t respond and went back to Ponch. Luis understood enough to feel the weight of time between them, something deep and powerful underneath their supple sexuality.
By the time they reached the back, a black-haired, round-faced man sat behind the desk. Hands folded over a Buddha-belly, he smiled and nodded his head as Ponch slid across the front of his d
esk and collapsed on to one of the couches.
"This is my brother’s son," Ponch said, waving a hand at Luis as he backed up a couple of steps to sit in the chair furthest from the desk, against the pitted wall, where the line of sight to the door was clear. He belonged at the back of the parade, quietly earning his piece of the night’s action.
"Hector," the fat man introduced himself. "Idoya," he continued, nodding his head to the old woman who had stopped to stand beside him.
Ponch waited a few seconds, and said finally, "Luis. He’s thinking of joining the family business."
"I knew your father," Idoya said. "Very well."
"College didn’t go well?" Hector asked.
Idoya giggled. "Do you hear your grandfather calling?"
Luis grunted. His mother would have reminded him, ‘I told you.’ "My father said grandfather came to this country to escape the family business."
"The call is in our blood," Hector said.
"There are other things on my mind," Luis said. "A real job. Helping my Mom."
"At least you could have learned Spanish," Idoya chided. She turned to a small corner table and began pouring coffee into Styrofoam cups.
Ponch watched her as he said, "She’s not worth the effort."
Luis stared at door, not sure if Ponch meant his mother, Cynthia, Idoya. "Maybe I don’t want as much out of life as you."
"He’s young," Ponch said to Hector. "I was like that when I was his age."
"You still are," Idoya said, and the three laughed.
"True--but these days I feast at a larger table."
Torn Realities Page 17
