"Don't you worry, little man. I'm something of an old hand when it comes to putting down evil things."
***
Hank had told the old man everything he could remember. How his family was crossing the mountains to start a new life in California, now that they were free. How his mother had taken ill and passed away, slowing up their trek into the mountains. How the winter had come early this year, making travel deadly and slow.
The cold had almost killed them more than once, but turning back would have been just as dangerous as trudging forward at that point. Then one night, after waiting out a blizzard in a cave, the boy and his father had eyed the white, controlled smoke of a fireplace or a stove. They reckoned it must be a house, or at least a camp of some sort. Although the father had been unsure what kind of hospitality they might receive at its source, it had to be better than dying of exposure. It turned out he was wrong.
What they found was a finely crafted cabin, oddly out of place this deep in the mountains. Its log form was mostly of a typical construction, aside from how it seemed to merge right into the rock of an adjacent cliff face. Smoke had still been pouring out of the chimney when they arrived, and Hank remembered how he could almost feel the warmth inside.
Hank's father had knocked on the door, and was more than a little surprised by how warmly he was greeted by this stranger. The cabin's owner had invited them in and offered each a plate of hot, bitter stew made from roots and some manner of vegetable paste. There had been something else in the stew too—something that made sleep come upon them with the same gentle quickness as the heat that warmed their bones and their bellies.
In hindsight, Hank told the old man, he could see there was something wrong with situation. Their host was strangely elated upon seeing two weary travelers show up at his doorstep. And after he served dinner, the mountain man had said grace and thanked god for his bounty, not their bounty, just his. And he hadn't even been eating alongside them.
Hank went on to tell how he hadn't even made it through his meal before he passed out. When he came to, he was locked in what he called a stone coffin, with iron bars set by his head. His forced slumber had saved him from seeing his father's actual death. But when he awoke, he heard the sounds of the mountain man's cleaver butchering the man who had raised him. Hank, being a child, had found the room to maneuver himself so that he could look back through the bars. What he saw was the severed head of his pa. A lifeless, grown version of his own face, discarded to the dirt floor like so much offal. Hank had been strong up until this point, but now he began to sob once more. With a trembling voice he recounted how he had been unable to close his eyes or turn away as the hillbilly unceremoniously cut his father apart as easily as one might dress a buck.
Hank broke down into quiet sobbing as he relived the terrible moments. The old man had planned on giving him a few minutes before pushing him more. Hank started talking first, though, and his words confirmed what the old man already suspected.
"And you ain't gonna believe me 'bout what happened next, but it's the truth," Hank said with a quiver in his voice.
"I've grown a pretty high tolerance for the unbelievable, Hank."
"He took the bowl that he used to catch my dad's blood, and walked to the door over there. He climbed up on a stump of wood so he could reach the crucifix hung up over the doorway, and poured my dad's blood over the cross."
Hank's words were distant as he told this part, as if the events were too surreal for his mind to fathom.
"He said some kind of prayer as he poured it over the cross. Something about blood for blood and flesh for flesh. I was already so afraid, but then ..."
"Then what?" the old man asked, barely above a whisper.
"Jesus talked back to him. Not just in voice, neither. I could see his mouth moving from across the room. His wooden body squirming on the cross, like he was a living thing. He told him a stranger was coming. I'm guessing that's you. Said you were an animal sick with grief and that killing you would be a mercy."
The old man smiled in his cramped, prison of stone, earth and iron. A faint laugh even escaped his lips.
"Are you ... laughing?" Hank asked with amazement and a bit of fear.
"He's getting scared," the old man said, more to himself than in reply to Hank. "Means I'm getting close."
Hank wondered what the old man was talking about, but there was something in his brief laughter that was unsettling. Neither of them spoke for the rest of the night, and the old man settled into a restful sleep, trapped in the den of the cannibal witch.
CHAPTER EIGHT
Golden sunlight poured down from the powder blue sky, reflecting off of the sepia earth and casting a healthy glow across the green leaves of the endless orange trees. The intensity of the day's brightness assaulted Emmett's eyes and head, causing the young man an ache that dominated his frontal lobe.
"I ain't paying you to nurse no hangover, redskin," Harvey Mackum said in a nasal admonishment.
Emmett shook off the pain in his head and tossed a large sack of oranges into Mackum's cart. It was the fifth sack of oranges he'd picked that afternoon, which brought him up to twenty-five cents for the day so far.
"That's the problem with you Injun-blooded bastards. One or two shots of rye and you’re aching for a week," Mackum said, believing himself helpful. "Gotta build some tolerance if you're gonna make it in the white man's world."
"Wasn't drinking," Emmett replied with little interest or emotion as he grabbed an empty sack that was hanging from a nail on the back of the cart.
Under normal circumstances, Emmett had little patience for Harvey Mackum's breed of instructional bigotry. Today his mind was far too preoccupied with where the last week had disappeared to take offense or to note Mackum's words.
This morning Emmett had awoken in his own bed. The sunlight stabbed between the shutters of his bedroom window, prodding him awake like golden daggers. How he had gotten home, he had no clue. Nor could he think quite clearly about any subject, to be truthful. His head and eyes ached with sharp, throbbing malignancy. Every muscle in his body felt as if it had been marinated in pain.
According to his mother and Mary Coughlin, no one had heard him come home. They had simply found him in his bed yesterday morning, burning up with fever. Six days had passed between when he had entered the Cavern of The First Breath and today. Aside from incredibly vivid and disturbing fever dreams, Emmett could account for none of this time.
To throw more coal onto the fire, his extended disappearance had set his mother into such worry that her condition had now worsened. Her cough was no more violent, but the fits came with increasing frequency. Her nearly nonexistent appetite had shriveled into nothingness. Her sunken face and frail body looked already dead, rather than dying.
In short, time was running out, and Emmett had burned up a good bit of it.
Mary Coughlin had been good enough to stay with his mother for the extra days. She was a fine and kind old lady if there had ever been one. She was in no position to work for free though, and Emmett had to spend almost all of his remaining funds to compensate her for her time. As such, he had to head out this day, with his pounding head and confused state of mind, to rustle up some quick cash. This is how he ended up five miles away on Mackum's fourteen-acre orange grove. It was time for harvest, and he knew the man always paid, even if he was something of a prick.
Mackum stepped up next to Emmett and grabbed a burlap sack for himself. The man was small in stature and abrasive in personality, and had all the good looks of a stillborn weasel, but he was hardworking and honest. There were plenty of charismatic, lazy men who would smoke cigars while others sweated for them. Mackum wasn't one of those. He worked alongside his men and set the pace, all the while paying a mite fairer wage than those other types of employers. These traits made the Irish-blooded farmer respectable, if not likable.
"Word around town was you up and vanished for more'n a week. I figured you followed your pa into that damn-fool wa
r."
Mackum's voice sounded muffled and distant, the mocking voice of a murderer to a man being drowned.
Emmett grabbed an orange the size of a grapefruit. His eyes were transfixed on the spot where two branches met upon the trunk of the orange tree. Above the knot where the two branches became one was a hollow that held an uncanny resemblance to the living throne of wood where death had been seated in his dream. For the better part of a minute Emmett stared at this image that had escaped his mind and shifted into the real world. It was different, of course, smaller and vacant. Instead of being half-buried in darkness and obscured by sheets of snow, this hollow was canopied by leaves that offered only a soft shadow of concealment. Still, Emmett felt with all his heart that he was looking at the seat of Hell's queen.
"Emmett? You deaf, boy?" Mackum yelled, stirring Emmett from his reverie.
Emmett turned and looked at him blankly, trying to cope with the idea that death had followed him.
"If you ain't here up there," Mackum said while reaching up and poking the much taller teenager in the forehead, "then I don't need you here at all".
Emmett realized now that Mackum had been talking to him the whole time, no doubt in some demeaning manner. The man was angry now. He didn't take well to being ignored on his own land by folks he was paying.
"Sorry. I'm just kind of ..." Emmett began, trying to banish the images from his dream, which were now returning with titanic force. "My ma's getting worse. It's hard to focus on anything else."
"Well, you got my condolences, kid. If you ain't fit to work though, you need to get to stepping. If you ain't making me money, then you ain't making money, neither. Can't have some big, moping oaf slowing down my pace."
Emmett wanted to hate the farmer for his callousness, but he couldn't. There was something in his honesty that appealed to Emmett. It reminded him of his father in a way. While Emmett's pa might show more tact, he was never one to beat around the bush or distort the truth.
There were other things about Mackum that reminded Emmett of his father. He was hardworking and full of life. The farmer might not have been a handsome, broad-chested giant like his pa, but he had that same limitless energy and iron will.
"Sorry, Mr. Mackum. I'll speed it up. We need the money"
And Emmett did pick up the pace. He picked oranges just as fast as Mackum, but stayed at trees longer, as his height allowed him to grab more fruit. The farmer, always a tree or two ahead, kept yapping in his ugly, nasal voice. He voiced his dislike for the Confederate troublemakers, as well as the nigger-loving Yankees for bringing war to the continent. He bragged about his fruit and his trees, challenging Emmett to name one farm he'd ever seen with finer oranges. He bitched about the how the Jew lawman in town had failed to track down the bastards who kept stealing his alpacas in the night.
All of this was just background noise to Emmett. Consumed by his own thoughts—thoughts of spiteful grandfathers, and hidden caves, and dying mothers—Emmett only turned his full attention toward Mackum when he ended a sentence with the words "blood for blood".
"What was that?" Emmett asked, shooting a glance of such urgency and fear in Mackum's direction that the farmer actually stumbled backward.
"Blood for blood," Mackum replied, eyeing Emmett nervously. "Saying if that Christ-killer, Silver, was worth the copper in his badge, then I'd see some justice. And not some New York City, dandy justice. I mean blood for blood."
Two thoughts occurred to Emmett just after Mackum stopped speaking. The first was that his words were a sign. The queen of death would take Mackum in trade. Mackum, with his wiry muscles and strong hands. Mackum, whose limitless energy nurtured life across fourteen acres. Mackum, who treated him like so much redskin garbage. Yes, death would trade his mother for the man before him.
His second thought, which flashed into his mind almost simultaneously, was how foolish and mad his father would think him right now. To even consider sacrificing a living, breathing man, on the word of a nightmare and some stone-age mysticism, was paramount to insanity. Such deadly madness, his father had said more than once, was where all superstition eventually led. Abraham slaying his son, Aztecs killing so that the sun may rise, Arabs and Christians murdering one another for the claim of desert ruins— faith, wherever it may be placed, always led to doom.
This act, if he chose to go through with it, would not be murder for some allegorical deity or a lifeless idol. Slaying Mackum, here in this field of green and orange, would not be a sacrifice to the titanic goddess of death. It would be a sacrifice to the living goddess of his birth so that she might live, and a sacrifice to his father, so that he might come home to the woman he loved. This would not be an act of superstition. It would be a business transaction, between Emmett and some force that lay just beyond the grip of understanding.
Blood for blood—Mackum's words were but one sign that day. Another spoke in a stronger, if more subtle voice. This was the fact that no one else had shown up at the farm looking for work this morning. On a beautiful day, where a man pays a fair wage, such lack of interest was downright unnatural. There was Elijah Hewitt, of course, Mackum's full-time hand, but he was working acres away. More importantly, Emmett's late rising had brought him to the farm hours after sunrise. Elijah had already been hard at work by then, leaving no one but Mackum to know that Emmett had even been here.
As many as thirty oranges were in Emmett's sack right then. He flexed his arm up and down, taking measure of the weight in the bag. It was heavy, but Emmett was strong. The young man felt confident he could swing the sack with enough force to knock Mackum off of his feet. Mackum was a tough little bastard. A hit like that wouldn't knock him out, but it'd stun him. Emmett reckoned that would be enough.
Using his thumbnail, which had grown a bit too long and far too dirty since his trek to the Paiute reservation, Emmett cut into the skin of an orange that had yet to make it into his sack. With a quick motion he peeled off a big hunk of the rind, and then another, exposing a good portion of the sweet, wet fruit within. Mackum was still yapping up ahead, with his back turned to Emmett. He hadn't noticed a thing. If he had, he'd be screaming his head off at Emmett for stealing his produce.
Emmett closed in on Mackum. The sack of oranges was slung over his shoulder and he held it one hand. The half-peeled fruit was in the other. With a pivot of his hips Emmett swung the bag out to the side, with all the force of an overturned trebuchet. The sack caught Mackum in the left shoulder and the side of the head. The unsuspecting farmer spun for a quarter rotation before hitting the dirt hard. His mouth and nose collided with the knotted roots of a nearby orange tree, and both burst open with blood.
Mackum rolled over, stunned but furious, just in time to see the massive sixteen-year-old fall down upon him. Emmett’s knees landed on Mackum's shoulders with all the grace and care of a drunken buffalo. The boy bore down on the farmer's chest, pushing the air from his lungs.
"Mother fucker!" Mackum began to scream, spraying spit and blood from his mouth. He only managed the "Mother fu—" before Emmett's right hand smashed the half-peeled orange into his mouth, like a comically large gag.
Emmett could feel Mackum twisting and writhing against his weight. He could hear the mumbled, muffled screams against the sweet, pulpy gag. None of this would do the man any good. Emmett had him now, and he had gone too far to turn back. Mackum would be delivered to the dual-toned death goddess of his dream. A trade for his mother's life.
Tipping the sack upside down, Emmett let the thirty or so oranges tumble into the rich California dirt. With the sack empty, Emmett pulled it over the farmer’s head, hiding his panicked, hateful gaze. Once the burlap was pulled over Mackum's face, Emmett wrapped his big, meaty hands, hands far too big for a kid his age, around the farmer's throat. He thanked whatever gods may be for the sack. Somehow he doubted that he could have looked Mackum in the eye while he killed him. The sickening sensation of a trachea collapsing beneath his fingers was bad enough (for some reason Emmett thou
ght that crushing a sparrow in his fist would feel much the same). To look into a familiar face, or any face for that matter, while committing such a gruesome and despicable act would have been too much for Emmett to bear, even in his mother's name.
But the burlap sack was there, just as the other workers were not. Through the coarse material, Emmett could see no terror, pain, or yearning. There was only the rough-hewn, brown landscape of the sack, approximately the same shape as a man's face. Someone or something was watching out for him, Emmett thought, supplying him the tools to save his ma. Giving him the means to be a hero.
CHAPTER NINE
The unmistakable sound of a gunshot stirred the old man awake. Another shot followed, and the old man could tell that the blast hadn't come from a hunting rifle. It was the crack of a .44 caliber cartridge revolver—the war cry of his own pistol.
Pain earned from a slumber spent in the tiny confines of a cell that he barely fit into wracked the old man's muscles. Small rocks embedded within the hard-packed soil on which he lay dug into his back. His tongue and throat felt as dry as desert sand, as the fire burning within the cabin's stove had banished the humidity from the air. Between his teeth he could feel the bits of the human flesh that he was fed the night before, and the thought brought a wave of nausea over him. Still, there was a cautious optimism in his heart.
That optimism was his greatest weapon against the Devourers and their servants. The beasts from beyond the stars, as well as the witches who served them, fed off of base emotions like fear and despair.
The old man would not sustain his enemy, nor could he. Long ago he had bled out the last of such feelings. The old man was calm and cool on the outside, but no cold emotions or hollowness lay in his heart. Below his patient exterior, reflected in his steel-gray eyes, there was a furnace of white-hot love and hate. These twin forces consumed his entirety, leaving no room for Thurs and his lot to lay their hooks into him.
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