Speaks the Nightbird mc-1

by Robert R. McCammon

  Of the 990 acres Bidwell had purchased, little more than two hundred were actually built upon, tilled, or used as pasture. A wall made of logs, their uptilted ends shaved and honed by axes into sharpened points, had been constructed around the entire settlement, orchards and all, as protection against Indians. The only way in or out—notwithstanding the seacoast, though a watchtower built in the forest there was occupied day and night by a musket-armed militiaman—was through the main gate that opened onto Harmony Street. A watchtower also stood beside the gate, allowing its militiaman a view of anyone approaching on the road.

  So far in the existence of Fount Royal, the Indian element had offered no trouble; in fact, they'd been invisible, and Bidwell might have questioned whether there were indeed redskins within a hundred miles, if Solomon Stiles hadn't discovered strange symbols painted on the trunk of a pinetree during a hunting expedition. Stiles, a trapper and hunter of some regard, had explained to Bidwell that the Indians were marking the wilderness beyond the tree as territory not to be trespassed upon. Bid-well had decided not to press the issue, though by the royal deed all that land belonged to him. No, best to let the redskins alone until it was time to smoke them out.

  Looking down upon the current decrepit condition of his dream hurt Bidwell's eyes. There were too many empty houses, too many gardens gone to weed, too many broken fences. Un-tended pigs lay about in the muck and dogs wandered, snapping and surly. In the past month five hard-built structures—all deserted at the time—had been reduced to piles of ash by midnight fires, and a burnt smell still tainted the air. Bidwell was aware of whom the residents blamed for these fires. If not her hand directly, then the hands—or claws, as the case might be—of the infernal beasts and imps she invoked. Fire was their language, and they were making their statements very clear.

  His dream was dying. She was killing it. Though the bars of her cell and the thick walls of the gaol confined her body, her spirit—her phantasm—escaped to dance and cavort with her unholy lover, to plot more wreckage and woe to Bidwell's dream. To banish such a hydra into the judgment of the wilderness was not enough; she had plainly said she would not go, that no power on earth could make her leave her home. If Bidwell hadn't been a lawful man, he might have had her hanged at the beginning and been done with it. Now it was a matter for the court, and God help the judge who must sit in attendance.

  No, he thought grimly. God help Fount Royal.

  "Edward," BidweU said, "what is our present population?"

  "The exact figure? Or an estimate?"

  "An estimate will do."

  "One hundred or thereabouts," Winston offered. "But that will change before the week is done. Dorcas Chester is ill onto death."

  "Yes, I know. This damp will fill up our cemetery ere long."

  "Speaking of the cemetery . . . Alice Barrow has taken to bed as well."

  "Alice Barrow?" Bidwell turned from the window to face the other man. "Is she ailing?"

  "I had cause to visit John Swaine this morning," Winston said. "According to Cass Swaine, Alice Barrow has told several persons that she's been suffering dreams of the Dark Man. The dreams have so terrified her that she will not leave her bed."

  Bidwell gave an exasperated snort. "And so she's spreading them about like rancid butter on scones, is that it?"

  "It seems to be. Madam Swaine tells me the dreams have to do with the cemetery. More than that, she was too fearful herself to say."

  "Good Christ!" Bidwell said, the color rising in his jowls. "Mason Barrow is a sensible man! Can't he control his wife's tongue?" He took two strides to the desk and slapped a hand down upon its surface. "This is the kind of stupidity that's destroying my town, Edward! Our town, I mean! But by God, it'll be ruins in six months if these tongues don't cease wagging!"

  "I didn't mean to upset you, sir," Winston said. "I'm only recounting what I thought you should know."

  "Look out there!" Bidwell waved toward the window, where the rain-swollen clouds were beginning to seal off the sunlight once again. "Empty houses and empty fields! Last May we had more than three hundred people! Three hundred! And now you say we're down to one hundred?"

  "Or thereabouts," Winston corrected.

  "Yes, and how many will Alice Barrow's tongue send running? Damn it, I cannot stand by waiting for a judge to arrive from Charles Town! What can I do about this, Edward?"

  Winston's face was damp with perspiration, due to the room's humid nature. He pushed his spectacles up on his nose. "You have no choice but to wait, sir. The legal system must be obeyed."

  "And what legal system does the Dark Man obey?" Bidwell planted both hands on the desk and leaned toward Winston, his own face sweating and florid. "What rules and regulations constrain his mistress? Damn my eyes, I can't watch my investment in this land be destroyed by some spectral bastard who shits doom in people's dreams! I did not build a shipping business by sitting on my bum quaking like a milksop maid." This last had been said through gritted teeth. "Come along or not as you please, Edward! I'm off to silence Alice Barrow's prattling!" He stalked toward the door without waiting for his town manager, who hurriedly closed his ledger and stood up to follow, like a pug after a barrel-chested bulldog.

  They descended what to the ordinary citizens of Fount Royal was a wonder to behold: a staircase. It was without a railing, however, as the master carpenter who had overseen the construction of the stairs had died of the bloody flux before its completion. The walls of Bidwell's mansion were decorated with English pastoral paintings and tapestries, which upon close inspection would reveal the treacheries of mildew. Water stains marred many of the whitewashed ceilings, and rat droppings lay in darkened niches. As Bidwell and Winston came down the stairs, their boots loudly clomping, they became the focus of Bidwell's housekeeper, who was always alert to her master's movements. Emma Nettles was a broad-shouldered, heavyset woman in her mid-thirties whose hatchet-nosed and square-chinned face might've scared a redskin warrior into the arms of Jesus. She stood at the foot of the stairs, her ample body clad in her customary black cassock, a stiff white cap enforcing the regimented lie of her oiled and severely combed brown hair.

  "May I he'p you, sir?" she asked, her voice carrying a distinct Scottish burr. In her formidable shadow stood one of the servant girls.

  "I'm away to business," Bidwell replied curtly, plucking from a rack on the wall a navy blue tricorn hat, one of several in a variety of colors to match his costumes. He pushed the hat down on his head, which was no simplicity due to the height of his wig. "I shall have toss 'em boys and jonakin for my supper," he told her. "Mind the house." He strode past her and the servant girl toward the front door, with Winston in pursuit.

  "As I always do, sir," the madam Nettles said quietly an instant after the door had closed behind the two men, her flesh-hooded eyes as dark as her demeanor.

  Bidwell paused only long enough to unlatch the ornate white-painted iron gate—six feet tall and shipped at great expense from Boston—that separated his mansion from the rest of Fount Royal, then continued along Peace Street at a pace that tested Winston's younger and slimmer legs. The two men passed the spring, where Cecilia Semmes was filling a bucket full of water; she started to offer a greeting to Bidwell, but she saw his expression of angry resolve and thought it best to keep her tongue sheltered.

  The last of the miserly sunlight was obscured by clouds even as Bidwell and Winston strode past the community's brass sundial, set atop a wooden pedestal at the conjunction of Peace, Harmony, Industry, and Truth streets. Tom Bridges, guiding his oxcart to his farmhouse and pasture on Industry, called a good afternoon to Bidwell, but the creator of Fount Royal did not break stride nor acknowledge the courtesy. "Afternoon to you, Tom!" Winston replied, after which he had to conserve his wind for keeping up with his employer as Bidwell took a turn onto the easterly path of Truth.

  Two pigs occupied a large mud puddle in the midst of the street, one of them snorting with glee as he rooted deeper into the mire while a mongrel
dog blotched with mange stood nearby barking his indignation. David Cutter, Hiram Abercrombie, and Arthur Dawson stood not far from the pigs and puddle, smoking their clay pipes and engrossed in what appeared to be stern conversation. "Good day, gentlemen!" Bidwell said as he passed them, and Cutter removed his pipe from his mouth and called out, "Bidwell! When's that judge gettin' here?"

  "In due time, sir, in due time!" Winston answered, still walking.

  "I'm talkin' to the string puller, not the puppet!" Cutter fired back. "We're gettin' tired a' waitin' for this thing to be resolved! You ask me, they ain't gonna never send us a judge!"

  "We have the assurances of their councilmen, sir!" Winston said; his cheeks were stinging from the insult.

  "Damn their assurances!" Dawson spoke up. He was a spindly red-haired man who served as Fount Royal's shoemaker. "They might assure us the rain will cease, too, but what of it?"

  "Keep walking, Edward," Bidwell urged sotto voce.

  "We've had a gutful of this dawdlin'!" Cutter said. "She needs to be hanged and done with it!"

  Abercrombie, a farmer who'd been one of the first settlers to respond to Bidwell's broadsheets advertising the creation of Fount Royal, threw in his two shillings: "The sooner she hangs, the safer we'll all sleep! God save us from bein' burnt up in our beds!"

  "Yes, yes," Bidwell muttered, lifting a hand into the air as a gesture of dismissal. His stride had quickened, sweat gleaming on his face and darkening the cloth at his armpits. Behind him, Winston was breathing hard; the air's sullen dampness had misted his spectacles. With his next step, his right foot sank into a pile of moldering horse apples that Bidwell had just deftly avoided.

  "If they send us anybody," Cutter shouted as a last riposte, "it'll be a lunatic they plucked from the asylum up there!"

  "That man speaks knowingly of asylums," Bidwell said, to no one in particular. They passed the schoolhouse and next to it Schoolmaster Johnstone's house. A pasture where a small herd of cattle grazed stood next to Lindstrom's farmhouse and barn, and then there was the meeting-house with a flagpole before it from which drooped the British colors. Just a little further on, and Bidwell's pace hastened even faster; there loomed the rough and windowless hardwood walls of the gaol, its single entrance door secured with a chain and iron lock. In front of the gaol was a pillory where miscreants who thieved, blasphemed, or otherwise incurred the wrath of the town council found themselves bound and sometimes pelted with the same substance that currently weighted Winston's right boot.

  Past the gaol, a number of houses with barns, gardens, and small fieldplots occupied the last portion of Truth Street. Some of the houses were empty, and one of them had dwindled to a charred shell. Weeds and thorns had overtaken the forlorn gardens, the fields now more frightful swamp than fruitful earth. Bidwell walked to the door of a house almost at the very end of the street and knocked solidly while Winston stood nearby, blotting the sweat from his face with a shirtsleeve.

  Presently the door was opened a crack and the grizzled, sunken-eyed face of a man who needed sleep peered out. "Good afternoon to you, Mason," Bidwell said. "I've come to see your wife."

  Mason Barrow knew full well why the master of Fount Royal was at his door; he drew it open and stepped back, his black-haired head slumped like that of a dog about to be whipped. Bid-well and Winston entered the house, which seemed the size of a wig box compared to the mansion they'd recently left. The two Barrow children—eight-year-old Melissa and six-year-old Preston—were also in the front room, the older watching from behind a table and the younger clinging to his father's trouser leg. Bidwell was not an ungracious man; he removed his hat, first thing. "She's to bed, I understand."

  "Yes sir. Sick to the soul, she is."

  "I shall have to speak to her."

  "Yes sir." Barrow nodded numbly. Bidwell noted that the two children also looked in need of sleep, as well as in need of a good hot meal. "As you please." Barrow motioned toward the room at the rear of the house.

  "Very well. Edward, come with me." Bidwell walked to the open door of the other room and looked in. Alice Barrow was lying in the bed there, a wrinkled sheet pulled up to her chin. Her eyes were open and staring at the ceiling, her sallow face gleaming with sweat. The room's single window was shuttered, but the light was strong because seven tallows were aflame, as well as a clay bowl full of pine knots. Bidwell knew it was a remarkable extravagance for a farmer such as Mason Barrow, whose children must be suffering due to this surplus of illumination. As Bidwell stepped across the threshold, a loose plank squeaked underfoot and the woman looked at him; her eyes widened, she sucked in her breath as if she'd been struck, and shrank away from him deeper into the confines of the bed.

  Bidwell immediately halted where he stood. "Good afternoon, madam," he said. "May I have a word with you?"

  "Where's my husband?" the woman cried out. "Mason! Where's he gone?"

  "I'm here!" Barrow replied, standing behind the other two men. "All's well, there's naught to fear."

  "Don't let me sleep, Mason! Promise me you won't!"

  "I promise," he said, with a quick glance at Bidwell.

  "What's all this nonsense?" Bidwell asked him. "The woman's feared to sleep?"

  "Yes, sir. She fears fallin' asleep and seein'—"

  "Don't speak it!" Alice Barrow's voice rose again, tremulous and pleading. "If you love me, don't speak it!"

  The little girl began to cry, the little boy still clinging to his father's leg. Barrow looked directly into Bidwell's face. "She's in a bad way, sir. She ain't slept for the past two nights. Cain't abide the dark, not even the day shadows."

  "This is how it begins," Winston said quietly.

  "Rein yourself!" Bidwell snapped at him. He produced a lace-rimmed handkerchief from a pocket of his jacket and wiped beads of sweat from his cheeks and forehead. "Be that as it may, Barrow, I must speak to her. Madam? May I enter?"

  "No!" she answered, the damp sheet drawn up to her terror-stricken eyes. "Go away!"

  "Thank you." Bidwell walked to her bedside and stood there, looking down at her with both hands gripping his hat. Winston followed behind him, but Mason Barrow remained in the other room to comfort the crying little girl. "Madam," Bidwell said, "you must desist in your spreading of tales about these dreams. I know you've told Cass Swaine. I would ask—"

  "I told Cass 'cause she's my friend!" the woman said behind her sheet. "I told others of my friends too! And why shouldn't I? They should know whatIknow, if they value their lives!"

  "And what is it that makes your knowledge so valuable, madam?"

  She pushed the sheet away and stared defiantly up at him, her eyes wet and scared but her chin thrust toward him like a weapon. "That whoever lives in this town is sure to die."

  "That, I fear, is only worth a shilling. All who live in any town are sure to die."

  "Not by his hand! Not by fire and the torments of Hell! Oh, he told me! He showed me! He walked me through the graveyard, and he showed me them names on the markers!" The veins in her neck strained, her brown hair lank and wet. She said in an agonized whisper, "He showed me Cass Swaine's marker! And John's too! And he showed me the names of my children!" Her voice cracked, the tears coursing down her cheeks. "My own children, laid dead in the ground! Oh, sweet Jesus!" She gave a terrible, wrenching moan and pulled the sheet up to her face again, her eyes squeezed shut.

  With all the candle flames, the pine knot smoke, and the humidity seeping in, the room was a hotbox. Bidwell felt as if drawing a breath was too much effort. He heard the rumble of distant thunder, another storm approaching. A response to Alice Barrow's phantasms was in order, but for the life of him Bidwell couldn't find one. There was no doubt a great Evil had seized upon the town, and had grown in both murky day and blackest night like poisonous mushrooms. This Evil had invaded the dreams of the citizens of Fount Royal and driven them to frenzies. Bidwell knew that Winston was correct: this indeed was how it began.

  "Courage," he offered, but it sound
ed so very weak.

  She opened her eyes; they had become swollen and near-scarlet. "Courage?" she repeated, incredulously. "Courage again' him? He showed me a graveyard full of markers! You couldn't take a step without fallin' over a grave! It was a silent town. Everybody gone ... or dead. He told me. Standin' right at my side, and I could hear him breathin' in my ear." She nodded, her eyes staring straight through Bidwell. "Those who stay here will perish and burn in Hell's fires. That's what he said, right in my ear. Burn in Hell's fires, forever and a day. It was a silent town. Silent. He said Shhhhhhhh, Alice. He said Shhhhhhhh, listen to my voice. Look upon this, he said, and know what I am." She blinked, some of the focus returning to her eyes, but she still appeared dazed and disjointed. "I did look," she said, "and I do know."

  "I understand," Bidwell told her, trying to sound as calm and rational as a man at the bitter end of his rope possibly could, "but we must be responsible, and not so eager to spread fear among our fellows."

  "I'm not wantin' to spread fear!" she answered sharply. "I'm wantin' to tell the truth of what was shown me! This place is cursed! You know it, I know it, every soul with sense knows it!" She stared directly at one of the candles. The little girl in the other room was still sobbing, and Alice Barrow said with small strength in her voice, "Hush, Melissa. Hush, now."

  Bidwell, again, was lost for words. He found himself gripping his tricorn with a force that made his fingers ache. The distant thunder echoed, nearer now, and sweat was crawling down the back of his neck. This hotbox room seemed to be closing in on him, stealing his breath. He had to get out. He abruptly turned, almost bowling Winston over, and took the two strides to the door.