The River of Souls

by Robert McCammon

  Matthew saw more of the reptiles gliding in. The shouting of the other men in the surrounding boats had become hoarse and panicked. Someone in another craft fired a pistol shot that plumed blue smoke and did not hit an alligator but instead chopped a chunk of wood off the port side of the boat that was now missing half its passengers. The water churned and frothed. Before Matthew surfaced a distorted and agonized face that tried to gulp for air in the turbulent foam but was dragged down again with its mouth full of Solstice River.

  The second man had come up and was trying desperately to climb back into the boat, making it rock even more precariously. “Help me, Briggs!” he pleaded, as he tried to haul himself over. “Help me, Briggs!”

  But Briggs was evidently too busy trying to keep himself from going into the wicked drink, for no hand or help was offered, and suddenly the pleading man’s voice was broken by a scream for he was being dragged down yet would not let go his grip. Alligators slid past on all sides and in between the boats like ships made of ugly iron. Magnus had ceased his rowing forward and was in fact rapidly backing them in an attempt to give distance between their craft and the boat in danger of capsizing. Perhaps Briggs was the one who did it, but Matthew witnessed one of the men there strike a blow for survival by slamming an oar across the top of his supposed friend’s skull, which caused the fingers to immediately loosen and the body to be jerked down into the River of Souls as quick as one might say ‘Dick Tuck.’

  Though the water still thrashed with the activity of the reptiles, the second man did not rise from the depths again. The afflicted boat began to calm itself. Perhaps—or not—it was friend Briggs who gripped the oar, and who shouted into the descended silence, “I had to do it! He was already gone! I had to do it, or it would’a been the both of us too!” He looked around, his shoulders hunched as if for a whipstrike but his florid thin-nosed face crimped with anger. “You would’a done it! Every damned one of you!”

  No one answered. Matthew had a reply in mind—it seems not all the reptiles here are in the water—but didn’t know how the Jubilee men with firearms would take such a comment from a stranger. His heart pounded and his throat was dry, though here was surely not the place to cup a drink.

  “I didn’t kill him!” Briggs shouted to the world. “The ’gator took him, not me!”

  A point to ponder, Matthew thought…but he had no time for that, for suddenly Jackson fought up from the river and grasped hold with his remaining hand upon the bow of Matthew’s boat.

  The contorted face was smeared dark with ’gator slime. One eyebrow twitched. The eyes were bright with near-madness. “Pull me up!” he gasped. “God’s sake, pull me up!” The other arm rose up, and upon it the mangled stub of the crushed and bloody hand scrabbled to gain a grip. Matthew saw three or four alligators speeding toward the unfortunate victim. The reptiles struck one after another into the man’s submerged legs. Jackson grunted with each impact, his body shook violently and yet his anguished eyes still looked to Matthew for some hope of climbing out of his fate. Matthew reached down to grasp the man’s shirt. Before he could catch hold of it the free hand clamped onto his forearm and began to pull him over the side with frantic strength even as Matthew realized he was himself in danger and began to resist. Magnus threw aside the oars and reached for Matthew, but in the next instant…

  …a bass-toned musket shot boomed. The top of Jackson’s gray-haired head exploded from the force of the ball. Blood and brains flew into the air and spattered Matthew’s shirt and face. Then Matthew pulled free, and the grimacing corpse slid back into the turbulence. The alligators hissed and snapped among each other as they sank their teeth into the flesh and rolled themselves over and over down into the murky depths.

  It took Matthew a few seconds to comprehend what had just happened. He was standing in the bow holding his torch with Jackson’s brains and blood upon his face. He looked dazedly around and saw a rowboat with three men aboard coming up from behind and to the left. A pair of lanterns hung from hooks at the bow. Standing up in the bow and holding a smoking musket was Sir Raven’s Feather, the lean, rawboned man wearing the floppy-brimmed hat with the raven’s feather in the hatband whom Matthew had seen at the general store in Jubilee.

  Matthew managed to get his tongue working. His face flamed under its anointment of gory matter. “Are you insane? I could’ve helped him!”

  “No,” came the gravel-voiced reply, as hard as the heart of a stone. “Jackson was done. I saved your life, boy. Would’ve pulled you in with him.”

  “I say I could’ve pulled him up!”

  “Say what you please, but his widow’ll thank me for not sendin’ him home to her in a basket.” The man sat down in the boat and, placing the musket across his legs, began to reload the weapon from his alligator-skin ammunition bag. “Muldoon, you carryin’ a damn fool as a torchboy?”

  Magnus made no comment. He took his seat and the oars and continued to row steadily forward.

  It occurred to Matthew that not only had he witnessed a murder, but he’d been directly in the line of fire. “I nearly had him!” he protested, though his voice was getting weak.

  “No. He nearly had you.”

  “Sit down, Matthew,” Magnus said quietly. “Let it go.”

  Magnus’ tone of voice was final. The boat carrying Sir Raven’s Feather slipped past, its rower a broad-shouldered man with a long brown beard and wearing a sweat-soaked gray shirt, his muscular arms working the oars like a machine. At the stern sat a third gent as straight-backed as a Sabbath preacher. He was also holding a musket. He wore a black tricorn hat and a black suit and he had a sharp-nosed, gaunt face as forbidding as three miles of bad road. The boat moved on past the area of troubled waters. Matthew sat down. His first instinct was to scoop up a handful of water to cleanse his face, but he noted that alligators were still gliding back and forth and so he decided to keep his hand out of the river.

  “I could’ve pulled him up,” Matthew said in another moment. The smell of blood was drawing a swarm of insects around his face. “I could have.”

  “Stamper put Jackson out of his misery and saved your hide too. So just let it go.”

  “Jubilee isn’t a town that breeds a lot of brotherhood, I see,” Matthew said bitterly.

  “It’s common sense,” said Magnus. “Man falls in the water and gets tore up by ’gators ain’t gonna be worth much no more, even if he survives it. So…the lesson is…don’t fall in the water with ’gators. And don’t put your hand in there like you’re wantin’ to, neither. You can clean up later.”

  Matthew had no intention of moving himself from his present position. He swung the torch from side to side, inflaming the red eyes of a score of reptiles that still waited in the shallows of the River of Souls for more unfortunate victims. When Matthew had regained his senses and wits, he asked, “Who was that…the man with the raven’s feather…who?”

  “The big man in Jubilee. Owns the general store. Name of Baltazar Stamper. Man rowin’ is Caleb Bovie, works for Stamper. Fella in black is Jubilee’s preacher, Seth Lott.”

  So even the town’s holy man was out here after his share of blood money, Matthew thought. And it seemed to him, after witnessing Jackson’s head be blown open and friend Briggs send his companion to the alligators by way of an oar across the skull, that perhaps life had become cheap on the River of Souls, and that there were some out here—possibly many—who would gladly commit a ‘mercy killing’ if it meant removing the competition for the fortune of thirty pounds of gold.

  He had to wonder if the muskets and swords might start finding other ways to cut down the competition, if this hunt went on for any length.

  Perhaps Magnus Muldoon had the same thought at the same time, for he let the boat drift and hollered upriver with the full force of his mighty lungs, “Griffin Royce and Joel Gunn! You up there?”

  This time no one amid the forward rowboats and canoes answered.

  “Shall I row?” Matthew offered.

  �
��I’ll get us where we’re goin’ faster,” said Magnus, as he took a moment to stretch his arms out, twist his head from side to side and then stretch his back. He took up the oars again and powered the boat onward.

  Matthew had no idea of the time. The sky was still inky black, the moon still high. Huge willow trees met overhead and their branches hung over the river. The noise of men had quietened in the aftermath of violence. The chirrups and croaks and chitters of the swamp’s thousand-and-one creatures held sway. Matthew had the sense of a monstrous presence out there amid the wilderness, beyond the range of his torch. It was not one monster but many, waiting tensed in the dark to spring forth. It was the swamp itself, he thought. It was the alligators, the sinkholes, the quicksand, the snakes, and…what else?

  It was Griffin Royce and Joel Gunn, somewhere far ahead, searching for the three runaways in order to silence the truth. It was men like Briggs, and Baltazar Stamper, Caleb Bovie and Seth Lott, hungry for money and ready—perhaps eager—to kill for it. It was a whole mob of desperate men from Jubilee, drunk on liquor and the thought of bringing back a pair of slave’s ears for a sum that might lift them up from the impoverished dust.

  Matthew realized he had one hand upholding the torch and the other hand on the grip of his cutlass. The insects swarmed around his face, darting and biting. He knew that in spite of his best intentions he had nearly lost his balance and gone into the river with Jackson. So…it was true that a musket ball had saved his life this night, even though a murder—two of them, in fact—had been committed in front of his eyes. He wished for the comfort of his little dairyhouse, and with it the familiar town of New York with all its traffic and horse figs and complications and…yes…even the cold winds that swept his way from Berry Grigsby.

  A disturbing thought came to him, though he had no use for tales of witches and curses.

  I will not leave this river the same.

  Well…who would? Already the deaths had begun. But Matthew had this feeling deep in his soul, and he could not shake it.

  I will not leave this river the same.

  He had a feeling of intense dread that surpassed even his experiences with Professor Fell. It lasted only briefly, but it was enough to give him a chill shiver on this steamy, sullen night. He gripped the cutlass harder. Little good that might do, but it was something.

  And now onward…onward…following the quietened flotilla of torch-and-lamplit vessels, following the grim blood-hungry men with pistols and muskets and blades, following the twisting course of the Solstice River into the witch-cursed country, and Matthew Corbett with damp brains and blood upon his face, and carrying deep within himself a primal fear for the sanctity and survival of his soul.

  Ten

  "I have to clean myself,” said Matthew when the smell of the dried gore on his face became stronger and the swarm of insects more maddening. Still, he resisted putting his hand over the side or even cupping water in his half-crushed tricorn, for his torchlight revealed here and there the slowly-gliding shapes of the alligators yet seeking another bite of the human breed. “Will you guide us to shore for a minute?” he asked Magnus, who after a pause to deliberate this request nodded and aimed their boat toward the northern bank. As soon as he’d asked the favor, Matthew recalled Granny Pegg saying Keep your boat in the middle of the river. But surely a minute’s pause on the shore for him to wash his face in shallow water would not bring a curse down upon his head, he thought, and anyway it had to be done. There were lights of boats both ahead of them and behind; Matthew figured he and Magnus were probably somewhere near the center of the floating carnival, and so far there’d been no shouts of anyone finding an abandoned boat, no gunshots, and no answer when Magnus called for Griffin Royce and Joel Gunn.

  The rowboat’s prow slid onto mud amid a tangled thicket. The water here was only a few inches deep, and the torch showed no red-eyed reptile waiting in the high weeds. Matthew leaned over the bow…

  “Careful,” Magnus cautioned. And explained to Matthew’s jittery start: “Don’t fall in.”

  “Thank you,” Matthew answered, as he wet his face and wiped the bloody matter off his cheeks, forehead and chin with his shirt. He made out what appeared to be the meager light of candles through the woods ahead. Light through windows? he wondered. Ah, yes…the town of Rotbottom, according to Granny Pegg the last stand of civilization on the River of Souls. The thrum of frogs was like a constant drumbeat, the noise of crickets and night-insects a rising and falling cacophony. It seemed that a hundred nasty little humming and buzzing flying things were circling his head and trying to drink the liquid from his eyeballs. He waved them away with his torch and kept scrubbing his face in an attempt to get every bit of human debris off himself. He had had time to think, between the attack of the alligators and his request to head for shore, that it was certainly not a sure thing that the trio of runaways could be found—or could be saved from being killed by any of the other men. In fact, it was a high chance that they could not be saved, if they were indeed found, and all of this would be for naught. Still…what would he be, if he did not try?

  “Have to pick up our pace,” Magnus said. “Try to get to the front of the pack. Way back here, we can’t do anything.”

  “I know,” Matthew replied.

  “How we gonna stop those skins bein’ murdered?” Magnus asked, as if in the past few minutes this question had suddenly dawned on him. “How are we gonna prove Royce killed Sarah? Seems like all you’ve got is some clay under Sarah’s fingernails, and Granny Pegg’s story. That won’t send a man swingin’. Anyhow, Gunn’ll stand up for him. Hell, they’ll kill those slaves and cut their ears off before we ever see ’em…then what’re you gonna prove?”

  “That…I don’t know,” Matthew admitted. “The first thing we have to do—if we can—is to stop any murdering of Abram and the others. Royce and Gunn want to silence them, but they don’t trust the river or the swamp to do it for them. So if we can find the slaves first, so much the better.” And good luck with that effort, he thought. He swung the torch again at the multitude of swarming insects. “Damn these things!” he fumed. “They’re everywhere!”

  Magnus scratched his own cheek where a biter had landed and left a swelling. “Before he settled in Jubilee,” said Magnus, “Baltazar Stamper made his livin’ trackin’ down runaway slaves. He and Bovie both. If anybody can find ’em, it’s those two. And that preacher’s half-crazy and hot on the trigger. I wouldn’t turn my back on any of those three.”

  “It seems we have excellent company on this jaunt.” Matthew had finished cleaning his face to his satisfaction, and now he waved the torch again to ward off the hungry congregation. He started to slide back into the boat.

  “Mud,” someone said.

  The voice made Matthew freeze, though it was spoken so softly it might nearly have been only the sultry breeze searching through the rushes. It had been a feminine voice with a low, smoky quality. Matthew knew someone was standing there amid the underbrush, but his torchlight could not find her among the shadows of shadows.

  “What?” he asked, as if proposing his question to the swamp itself.

  “Mud,” came the repeated reply, and then she moved forward from the wildness of vines and thorns and lifted her own punched-tin lantern. The torchlight fell upon her. “Mud keeps them away,” she said. She came toward him without being invited, and she looked into his eyes as if trying to spy the essence of his soul. He felt himself being probed in every hidden place, which caused him to want to draw back and away from the young woman…but he did not. Then, also without being asked, she leaned down, scooped up a handful of dark river mud, and held it out for his approval. He smelled in it the strong odor of the swamp, a heady and earthy aroma that might have been repellent for its many layers of decay and rebirth, and yet Matthew caught within it a strangely medicinal whiff as well, as pungent as camphor. He wondered how many thousands of dead trees and riverweeds and passage of years were in that handful of mud. It was if the y
oung woman was offering him a salve formed from the River of Souls itself.

  Matthew understood, and he took some of the mud on his fingers and streaked it across his chin, cheeks, forehead and across the bridge of his nose like warpaint in his battle against the bugs.

  “More than that,” she urged, and he obeyed her.

  “Thank you,” he said, when the job was done and the insects began to whirl away from their interrupted feast.

  She stood before him, staring at him with dark blue eyes that seemed luminous in the light, and sparkling like the star-strewn sky. “Pleased,” she answered at last, in her quiet, smoky voice.

  Of course she was a citizen of Rotbottom, Matthew thought. But she was not what he might have expected to find out here in this country, this last gasp of so-called civilization before the true wilderness began. For one thing, she was very lovely. Matthew might even have considered her beautiful, and far more so than Pandora Prisskitt for she was natural and unadorned in her loveliness. She was perhaps seventeen or eighteen, small-boned and slim, wearing a dress sewn from some kind of coarse gray cloth but adorned at the neck with a ruffle of indigo-dyed lace. Her hair was black and lustrous, not pinned up or prepared in any way popular in Charles Town, but allowed to fall casually about her shoulders in thick waves and in bangs on her forehead. She had beestung lips and a thin-bridged nose that turned up slightly at the tip, like the slightest disdain for her own state of ragamuffinry. She had a firm jaw and high cheekbones and in no way appeared weak or impoverishered in spirit; in fact, she faced the two journeyers with what Matthew thought was a stately air of what might have been great confidence, as if to say this was her world and these two men were strangers upon it.