Speaks the Nightbird mc-1

by Robert R. McCammon

  Again Jack One Eye was almost upon him. Again Matthew lunged to the left—but this time he had misjudged both the geometry and the flexibility of his knees. The angle was too sharp and his feet skidded out from beneath him. He went down on his right side in the grass. He was only vaguely aware of Rachel's screams through the thunder in his head. The gray wall of Jack One Eye rose before him. He staggered up, fighting for balance.

  Something hit him.

  He had the impression of the world turned upside down. A searing pain filled his left shoulder. He knew he was tumbling head over heels, but could do nothing about it. Then he landed hard on his back, the breath bursting from his lungs. He tried to scramble away, as again that gray wall came upon him. Something was wrong with his left arm.

  Matthew was struck in the ribs on the left side by a red-hot cannonball that picked him up and flung him like a grainsack. Something grazed by his forehead while he was tumbling—a musket ball, he thought it must be, here on this field of battle— and a red film descended over his eyes. Blood, he thought. Blood. He hit the ground, was dragged and tossed again. His teeth snapped together. I'm going to die, he thought. Right here. This sunny, clear day. I am going to die.

  His left arm was already dead. His lungs hitched and gurgled. The mangy gray wall was there in his face again, there with an arrow shaft stuck in it.

  He decided, almost calmly, that he would do his own sticking.

  "Hey!" he hollered, in a voice that surprised him with its desperate power. "Hey!" He brought the knife up and stabbed and twisted and wrenched and stabbed and twisted and wrenched, and the beast grunted roared roared breath hot as Hades smelling of decayed meat and rotten teeth stabbed and twisted and wrenched blood red on the gray streaming down a glorious sight die you bastard you bastard you!

  Jack One Eye might be huge, but it had not grown to such a ripe old age by being stupid. The stickings had an effect, and the bear backed away from the mosquito.

  Matthew was on his knees. In his right hand, the blade was covered with blood. He heard a dripping, pattering sound, and he looked down at the gore falling into the red-stained grass from the twitching fingers of his left hand. He seemed to be burning up from within, yet the fiery pain of shoulder and ribs and forehead was not what made him sob. He had peed in his breeches, and he had brought no other pair.

  Jack One Eye circled him to the left. Matthew turned with the beast, dark waves beginning to fill his head. He heard, as if from another world, the sound of a woman—Rachel was her name, Rachel yes Rachel—screaming his name and crying. He saw blood bubbling around the bear's nostrils, and crimson matted the gray fur at its throat. Matthew was near fainting, and he knew when that happened he was dead.

  The bear suddenly stood up on its hind legs, to a height of eight feet or more. It opened its broken-toothed mouth. What emerged was a hoarse, thunderous, and soul-shaking roar that brimmed with agony and perhaps the realization of its own mortality. Two snapped arrow shafts were buried in festered flesh at the beast's belly, near a bloody-edged claw wound that must have been delivered by one of its own breed. Matthew also saw that a sizeable bite had been ripped from Jack One Eye's right shoulder, and this ugly wound was green with infection.

  It occurred to him, in his haze of pain and the knowledge of his impending departure from this earth, that Jack One Eye was dying too.

  The bear fell back down onto its haunches. Ami now Matthew pulled himself up, staggered and fell, pulled himself up again, and shouted, "Haaaaaaaaaaa!" in the maw of the beast.

  After which he fell to the ground once more, into his own blood. Jack One Eye, its nostrils dripping gore, shambled toward him with its jaws open.

  Matthew wasn't ready to die yet. Come all this way, to die in a clearing under the sun and God's blue sky? No, not yet.

  He came up with the sheer power of desperation and drove the blade under the bear's jaw, giving the knife a violent ripping twist. Jack One Eye gave a single grunt, snorted blood into Matthew's face, and pulled back, taking the imbedded blade with it. Matthew fell on his belly, the pain in his ribs making him curl up like a stomped worm.

  Again the bear circled him to the left, shaking its head back and forth in an effort to rid itself of the stinger that had pierced its throat. Banners of blood flew in the air from its nostrils. Even on his belly, Matthew crawled to keep the beast from getting behind him. Suddenly Jack One Eye came in again, and Matthew pulled himself up, throwing his right arm up over his face to protect what was left of his skull.

  The movement made the bear turn aside. Jack One Eye backed away, its single orb blinking and glazed. The bear lost its equilibrium for a second and staggered on the edge of falling. It caught itself, then stood less than fifteen feet from Matthew, staring at him with its head lowered and its arrow-stubbled sides heaving. Its gray tongue emerged, licking at the bleeding nostrils.

  Matthew pulled himself up to his knees, his right hand clutching his ribs on the left side. It seemed the most important thing in the world to him, to keep his hand pressed there so that his entrails would not stream out.

  The world, red-tainted and savage, had dwindled to the single space of distance between man and animal. They stared at each other, measuring pain, blood, life, and death each by their own calculations.

  Jack One Eye made no sound. But the ancient, wounded warrior had reached a decision.

  It abruptly turned away from Matthew. It began half-loping, half-staggering across the clearing the way it had come, shaking its head back and forth in a vain effort to dislodge the blade. In another moment the beast entered its wilderness again.

  And Jack One Eye was gone.

  Matthew fell forward onto the bloody battleground, his eyes closed. In his realm of drifting, he thought he heard a high-pitched and piercing cry: Hiyiiiiiiii! Hiyiiiiiiii! Hiyiiiiiiii! The vulture's voice, he thought. The vulture, swooping down upon him.

  Tired. So... very... very... tired. Rachel. What... is to... become... of...

  The vulture, swooping down.

  Screaming Hiyiiiiiiii! Hiyiiiiiiii! Hiyeeeeee!

  Matthew felt himself fall away from the earth, toward that distant territory so many explorers had gone to journey through, and from which return was impossible.

  thirty-nine

  MATTHEW'S FIRST REALIZATION of his descent to Hell was the odor.

  It was as strong as demon's sweat and twice as nasty. It entered his nostrils like burning irons, penetrated to the back of his throat, and he was suddenly aware that he was being wracked by a fit of coughing though he had not heard it begin.

  When the smell went away and his coughing ended, he tried to open his eyes. The lids were heavy, as if weighted by the coins due Charon for his ferry trip across the Styx. He couldn't open them. He heard now a rising and falling voice that must surely be the first of untold many souls lamenting their scorched fate. The language sounded near Latin, but Latin was God's language. This must be Greek, which was more suitably earthy.

  A few more breaths, and Matthew became knowledgeable of the torment of Hell as well as its odor. A fierce, stabbing, white-hot pain had begun to throb at his left shoulder and down the arm. The ribs on that side also began an agonizing complaint. There was a pain at his forehead too, but that was mild compared to the others. Again he tried to open his eyes and again he failed.

  Neither could he move, in this state of eternal damnation. He thought he was attempting to move, but he couldn't be sure.

  There was so much pain, growing worse by the second, that he decided it was more reasonable to give up and conserve his energy, as surely he would need it when he walked through the brimstone valley. He heard the crackling of a fire—of course, a fire!—and felt an oppressive, terrible heat as if he were being roasted over an inferno.

  But now a new feeling began to come over him: anger. It threatened to burst into full-flamed rage, which would put him right at home here.

  He had considered himself a Christian and had tried his very best to follow
the Godly path. To find himself cast into Hell like this, with no court to hear his case, was a damned and unreasonable sin. He wondered in his increasing fury what it was he'd done that had doomed him. Run with the orphans and young thugs on the Manhattan harbor? Flung a horse-apple at the back of a merchant's head, and stolen a few coins from the dirty pocket of a capsized drunk? Or had it been more recent wrongdoing, such as creeping into Seth Hazelton's barn and later cutting the man's face with a tin lantern. Yes, that might be it. Well, he would be here to greet that lover of mares when Hazelton arrived, and by that time Matthew hoped to have built up some seniority in this den of lawyers.

  The pain was now excruciating, and Matthew clenched his teeth but he felt the cry rising up from his parched throat. He couldn't restrain it. He was going to have to scream, and what would the company of diaboliques then think of bis fortitude?

  His mouth opened, and he let loose not a scream but a dry, rattling whisper. Even so, it was enough to further drain him. He was aware that the murmuring had ceased.

  A hand—so rough-fleshed it might have been covered with treebark—touched his face, the fingers starting at his chin and sliding up his right cheek. The singsong murmuring began once more, still in that undecipherable language. What felt like a thumb and finger went to his right eye, and endeavored to push the lid up.

  Matthew had had enough of this blindness. He gave a soft gasp at the effort it involved, but he forced his eyes open of his own accord.

  Immediately he wished he had not. In the red, leaping light and drifting smoke of Hades, the visage of a true demon greeted him.

  This creature had a narrow, long-chinned brown face with small black eyes, its flesh wrinkled and weathered like ancient wood. Blue whorls decorated the gaunt cheeks, and a third eye— daubed bright yellow as the sun—was painted in the center of the forehead. The earlobes were pierced with hooks from which dangled acorns and snail shells. The head was bald save for a topknot of long gray hair that grew from the back of the scalp and was adorned with green leaves and the bones of small animals.

  To make Matthew's induction to Hell even worse, the demon opened its mouth and displayed a set of teeth that might have served as a sawblade. "Ayo pokapa, " the creature said, nodding. Or at least that was the sound Matthew heard. "Ayo pokapa, " the demon spoke again, and lifted to its lips half of a broken clay dish in which something was densely smoking. With a quick inhalation, the creature pulled smoke into its mouth and then blew the noxious fumes-—that nasty demon's-sweat odor—into Matthew's nostrils.

  Matthew attempted to turn his head aside, and that was when he realized his skull was bound in some way to whatever hard pallet he lay upon. Avoiding the smoke was impossible.

  "Yante te napha te, " the creature began to murmur. "Saba yante napha te." It slowly rocked back and forth, eyes half-closed. The light from one or more hellfires glowed red through the dense pall of smoke that drifted above Matthew. What sounded like a pineknot burst, and then there came a hissing noise like a roomful of rattlesnakes from beyond the murmuring, rocking di-abolist. The acrid woodsmoke seemed to thicken, and Matthew feared that the little breath he could grasp would soon be poisoned. "Yante te napha te, saba yante napha te, " went the repeated, rising and falling voice. Again the ritual with the broken dish and the inhalation was repeated, and again the smoke— damn Hell, if there was such a powerful stink to be smelled for eternity!—was blown up Matthew's nostrils.

  He couldn't move, and assumed that not only his head was bound down but also both wrists and ankles. He wished to be a man about this, but tears sprang to his eyes.

  "Ai!" the demon said, and patted his cheek. "Mouk takani soba se ha ha." Then it was back to the steady murmuring and rocking, and another blast of smoke up the nose.

  After a half-dozen draughts, Matthew was feeling no pain. The cogwheels that usually regulated the order of his mind had lost their timing, and one rocking motion by the demon stretched to the speed of the snails whose shells hung from the earlobe hooks, while the next was gone past in an eyeblink. Matthew felt as if he were floating in a red-flamed, smoky void, though he could of course sense the hard pallet at his back.

  And then Matthew knew he must be truly insane, for he suddenly realized something very strange about the piece of broken dish from which the murmuring, smoke-blowing creature was inhaling.

  It was white. And on it was a decoration of small red hearts.

  Yes, he was insane now. Absolutely insane, and ready for Hell's Bedlam. For that was the same dish Lucretia Vaughan had thrown into the fount, only then it had been whole and contained a sweet yam pie.

  "Yante te napha te, " the demon crooned, "saba yante napha te."

  Matthew was fading again. Losing himself to the swelling dark. Reality—such as it was in the Land of Chaos—disappeared in bits and pieces, as if the darkness were a living thing that hungered first for sound, then light, and then smell.

  If it was possible to die a death in the country of the dead, then that was Matthew's accomplishment.

  But he found that such a death was fleeting, and there was very little peace in it. The pain grew again, and again ebbed. He opened his eyes, saw moving, blurred figures or shadows, and closed them for fear of what had arrived to visit him. He thought he slept, or died, or suffered nightmares of Jack One Eye running him down in a bloody clearing while the ratcatcher rode the bear's back and thrust at him with the five-bladed sticker. He awakened sweating summer floods, and fell to sleep again dry as a winter leaf.

  The smoke-breathing demon returned, to continue its tortures. Matthew once more saw that the broken dish was white, with small red hearts. He dared to speak to the creature, in a feeble and fearful voice, "Who are you?" The murmured chant went on.

  "What are you?" Matthew asked. But no answer was given.

  He slept and waked, slept and waked. Time had no meaning. He was tended to by two more demons, these more in the female shape with long black hair similarly adorned by leaves and bones. They lifted the mat of woven grasses, moss, feathers, and such that covered his nakedness, cleaned him when he needed to be cleaned, fed him a gray paste-like food that tasted strongly of fish, and put a wooden ladle of water to his lips.

  Fire and smoke. Shifting shadows in the gloom. That murmured, singsong chanting. Yes, this was surely Hell, Matthew thought.

  And then came the moment when he opened his eyes and found Rachel standing beside him in this realm of flames and fumes. "Rachel!" he whispered. "You too? Oh... my God... the bear..."

  She said nothing, but pressed a finger to her lips. Though dead, her eyes were as bright as gold coins. Her hair cascaded in ebony waves about her shoulders, and Matthew would have been lying if he'd said the infernal light didn't make her heart-achingly beautiful. She was wearing a dark green shift decorated around the neck with intricate blue beadwork. He stared at the pulse that beat in the hollow of her throat, and saw moisture glisten on her cheeks and forehead.

  It must be said, these demons did excellent work at the illusion of life.

  He tried to angle his face toward her, but still his head was confined as were his arms and legs. "Rachel... I'm sorry, " he whispered. "You shouldn't be here. Your time in Hell... was already served on earth."

  Her finger went to his lips, to bid him be silent.

  "Can you ever... ever forgive me?" he asked. "For bringing you to... such a bad end?" Smoke drifted between them, and somewhere beyond Rachel the fires crackled and seethed.

  She gave him an eloquent answer. Leaning down, she pressed her lips to his own. The kiss lingered, and became needful.

  His body—the illusion of a body, after all—reacted to this kiss as it would have done in the earthly sphere. Which didn't surprise Matthew, for it was a well-known fact Heaven would be full of angelic lutes and Hell full of flesh flutes. In that particular regard, perhaps it was not such a disagreeable place.

  Rachel pulled back. Her face remained within his field of vision, her lips damp. Her eyes were shining, a
nd the fire shadows licked her cheek.

  She reached back and undid something. Suddenly the blue-beaded garment slipped off her and fell to the ground.

  Her hands returned, lifting the woven mat from Matthew's body. Then she stepped up onto what must be a platform of some kind and slowly, gently eased her naked body down against his own, after which she pulled the grass mat over them again and kissed his mouth with longing.

  He wanted to ask her if she knew what she was doing. He wanted to ask her if this was love, or passion, or if she looked at him and saw Daniel's face.

  But he didn't. Instead, he surrendered to the moment; to be more accurate, the moment demanded him. He returned her kiss with a soul-deep longing of his own, and her body pressed against his with undeniable urgency.

  As they kissed, Rachel's hand found the scrivener's readied instrument. Her fingers closed about him. With a slow shifting of her thighs, she eased him into her, into the moist and heated opening that relaxed to allow entry and then more firmly grasped once he was sheathed deep.

  Matthew was unable to move, but Rachel was unrestricted. Her hips began a leisurely, circular motion punctuated by stronger thrusts. A groan left Matthew's mouth at the incredible, otherworldly sensation, and Rachel echoed it with her own. They kissed as if eager to merge one into the other. As the woodsmoke swirled about them and the fires burned, as their lips sought and held and Rachel's hips moved up and then down to push him still deeper, Matthew cried out with a pleasure that was verging on pain. Even this central act, he thought in his state of sweating rapture, was a cooperation of God and Devil.

  Then he just stopped thinking and allowed nature to rule.

  Rachel's movements were steadily strengthening. Her mouth was against his ear, her pine-scented hair in his face. She was breathing quickly and harshly. His heartbeat slammed, and hers pounded against his damp chest. She gave two more thrusts and her back arched, her head coming up and her eyes squeezed tightly shut. She shivered and her mouth opened to release a long, soft moan. An instant later, the feeling of pleasure did translate into a white flashing pain for Matthew, a fierce jolt that rippled from the top of his head down his spine. In the midst of this riot of sensations, he was aware of his burst into Rachel's clinging humidity, an explosion that brought a grimace to his face and a cry from his lips. Rachel kissed him again, so ardently as if she wished to capture that cry and keep it forever like a golden locket in the secret center of her soul.