400 Boys and 50 More

by Marc Laidlaw

  He had just stepped back to raise his pick when the German let out a warning cry. With a grinding sound, the sides of the tomb began to shift and tilt, caving in on themselves like the walls of the Dagonite temple. The German’s digging had undermined the whole support, though it scarcely seemed possible that four thick walls could be so easily toppled. The heavy slab atop the four drove them sideways to the earth, where they collapsed almost gently, unbroken. The coffin must have been buried beneath the earth, and not imprisoned in the stones as Charlie had feared. There was nothing but hollow space in there.

  Parkes and the captain came running from the woods.

  “What happened here?” the captain said.

  The German stared at him as if he were an idiot.

  “Our first oven!” Parkes cried. “I can almost smell that bread. Please, captain, let me run for a cook. We’ll eat fresh loaves tonight.”

  “While the rest of the army dines on stale?” said the captain, but something in this must have pleased him, for he nodded, smiling, and told Parkes, “Run back, then. But be discreet. One cook, and bring only enough supplies for our own needs. We’ll give the oven a trial to break it in; let heat scour the grave-grubs from the stone.”

  “What about the boy?” Parkes asked. “The prisoner?”

  “We can’t send him back just yet or he’ll no doubt tell them what we’re up to. He bears us no love, you can be certain.”

  Parkes rubbed his hands together, barely restraining his delight, and hurried away faster than Charlie would have thought was in his power. The dark was oppressive now, no less so the heat, which seemed to have increased with nightfall. Heat lightning flickered far off, followed seconds later by thunder.

  “Bloody provincial weather,” the captain griped. “Heat and damp. It’s like living in an armpit.”

  Charlie bent over the fallen stones and said softly, “And like a louse, you infest it.”

  He heard a soft chuckle. Wolfgang was grinning as he slid his hands under a slab.

  “You don’t speak, but you understand, don’t you?” Charlie whispered.

  The German nodded. Together, they lifted the carved slab between them. Lightning flashed again, nearer than before, catching in the ornate stonework and filling with woods with light.

  Between them, first digging a firepit and then erecting the stones upon it, they finished the oven before Parkes returned. He came leading a horse laden with several sacks, followed by a sullen, silent little man who supervised the firing of the oven and then sat down to mix up and knead several loaves by its fitful light. Rain fell, first lightly and then in torrents; as the oven heated, steam rose from the stones and mixed with the general humidity. Charlie was given the task of stoking the flames. The heat was disagreeable and the rain was too persistent to ever allow the flames to dry him. Finally the cook pushed him aside and shoved half a dozen loaves into the granite maw, and the slab that served as a door was wrestled into place. As soon as the first faint smell of cooking bread pervaded the night, the captain told the cook to return to camp before he was missed. The man stalked angrily away, obviously wishing he’d been invited to join the meal. The horse went with him.

  There was no other focus for their evening now but the oven and the loaves within it. The four stood around the radiant crypt, Charlie feeling mildly proud of the accomplishment, thinking it a neat trick that might be repeated for the benefit of the Patriot Army, if he ever happened to rejoin his regiment, and if circumstances were ever dire enough to require it.

  “You can stop slavering,” the captain admonished him. “None of those loaves will be wasted on a prisoner of war. We’ve retained some crusts for that purpose.”

  Parkes chuckled.

  “I wouldn’t want it anyway,” Charlie forced himself to say, although he was sorely disappointed by this inevitable news. “That’s dead man’s bread. It’s probably cursed.”

  “Superstitious lout,” the captain said. “Well, suit yourself, as necessity would have it.” He drew a few crusts out of his coat pocket. “Here, these have served me well during the campaign. They were probably baked the day before your cowardly Washington fled across the river.”

  At that, Charlie could restrain himself no longer. He had no rationality to hold him in check, and little enough reason to live in any case. He struck the crumbs from the captain’s palm and, in continuance of the same gesture, threw his hands around the officer’s neck. As Charlie throttled him, a feeling of satisfaction filled him. Even as the captain choked and sputtered, Charlie knew that Parkes was creeping up behind him.

  He heard the click of a musket lock, but he didn’t care. The barrel poked him in the kidney.

  “Release him!” Parkes hissed.

  Thunder and lightning crashed and blazed in the same instant. The captain’s eyes looked like wet marble, bulging but not yet sightless; there was still a strong fire of triumph in them.

  “Go ahead, Parkes,” Charlie said over his shoulder. “Kill me.”

  “Parkes!” the captain croaked.

  The hammer hit the pan with a dull sound. Nothing. Rain must have soaked the powder. Charlie laughed miserably and thrust the captain away from him. He was outnumbered by an army.

  The captain stood rubbing his throat, glaring at Charlie in the orange glow. His hand trembled on the hilt of his sword. Parkes cursed the useless musket, then threw it aside and strode to the oven.

  “Bread must be ready,” he said. “Can’t let it burn, can we?” The captain glared at Charlie a moment longer, then let go of his sword and gestured at the oven. “Get it out then,” he said.

  “After we eat, this prisoner goes to the camp. I’ve been treating him too carelessly. He may have military secrets that would be some use to us. I’ll see if we can’t arrange for Indians to draw them out of it.” He smiled at Charlie. “They’re excellent torturers, you know.”

  Parkes urged Wolfgang to open the oven. The German wrapped his hands in his thick blue coat, then shoved the heavy door aside. It fell sizzling on the grass. A blaze of heat rushed out at them, seeming to glitter for a moment like the starry flecks that Charlie had seen in the inscriptions. The loaves were golden, perfect. He swallowed his saliva and sank back, turning away from the torment of sight and smell.

  “Watch him, Parkes,” the captain said.

  “Aye, sir. No foolish moves, boy, or we’ll have an entire army down on you.”

  Wolfgang stooped into the oven and batted out one loaf, two, catching them in the folds of his coat. These were delivered to Parkes, who seemed unable to wait for them to cool. The rain had abated, so he swept the top of one of the untouched granite crypts and set the loaves down. Soon the oven was empty. Charlie refused to look at the bread; instead his eyes were drawn to the melting air inside the kiln. The lower slab was the one with inscriptions on it. The heat seemed to gather where the darkness had been before, glowing out of the lines and letters, sketching them on his eyes. Even when he looked away, into the dark woods, he could see them burning there. In fact, they seemed to continue to grow, looping out in bright extensions of the carved vines, threading through the shadowy trees, tangling everything in fire.

  Parkes sighed. “The smell is heavenly. I can’t wait any longer, Captain.”

  “It’s your own tongue you’ll burn. Go ahead.”

  Parkes lifted a loaf to his mouth and tore off a bite that should have suffocated him. He chewed it happily, and when he opened his mouth, steam escaped, even in the warm air.

  “Delicious, captain,” he gasped. “I commend it to your appetite.”

  “Ah.” The captain took up a second loaf and ripped off a handful, chewed slowly and thoughtfully, glancing sidelong at Charlie. “Like a piece, boy?” he said through his food. “I bet you would. It’s good bread. The best I’ve eaten. A growing boy needs good fare like this. But a rebel like you deserves only to waste away. You might as well watch me eat, boy. It’s the closest you’ll get to a meal tonight.”

  “What abou
t you, Wolfgang?” Parkes said. “You worked hard, you must be hungry. Go ahead.”

  The German was crouching by the stove. Now he rose and retrieved two loaves.

  “Ah,” said Parkes, “I knew you must be ravenous. A big fellow like you.”

  But with a swift double-gesture, Wolfgang tossed one loaf to Charlie and raised his carbine with the now-free hand, aiming it at the captain.

  “Damn you!” the captain cried, struggling to his feet. “I knew you were trouble from the first. You’re a criminal, aren’t you? Faced with imprisonment or military service, eh? Well, you’ll be rotting in a cell before this war is over—that, or rotting in the earth.”

  “If so, I wouldn’t be the first criminal turned soldier. . .captain.”

  These words from the German were utterly shocking to Charlie, who sat with the hot loaf of bread clenched in both hands, not yet daring to eat. Shocking because they were delivered with a clear English accent.

  Charlie was not the only one surprised by the German’s speech. The captain sputtered and turned to look one way, then the other. At last he faced Wolfgang again. “What do you mean by that?”

  “I mean that you’re a murderer.”

  “If you call killing in battle murder, then I suppose I am.”

  Wolfgang smirked. “What would you call killing a defenseless girl? Valor?”

  “Who are you?” the captain said.

  “I am justice, your nemesis, sealer of your fate. I entered that room after you’d left it. I found my sister dead. No one would have believed me had I accused an officer of such a crime, and you were sailing the next day. I thought that if I followed you, I might someday have a chance to avenge her far from the English courts, which would only protect someone of your class. I sailed as a mate on a ship of the line, and once here it was easy enough to steal a blue coat. Even easier to get you to take me on. You’re so eager for slaves, you’d accept any story.”

  “He’s mad, Parkes,” the captain said.

  “If so, the rape and murder of my sister drove me mad.”

  “That’s right, you’re mad,” Parkes chattered. “You think you have the upper hand, but that gun is useless, as you should know, in all this damp.”

  Wolfgang shook his head. “The Indians have a way of keeping the powder dry. I learned it.”

  “He’s bluffing,” said the captain.

  “You’re welcome to see for yourself.”

  No one moved. Wolfgang settled down, carbine fixed on the captain, propped on his knee. He nodded at Charlie.

  “Eat,” he said. “I’ll do nothing else until you’ve eaten.”

  Charlie looked down at the cooling loaf in his hands. It was flaky, baked hard on the outside, but soft within. He turned it over, and saw something that gave him pause.

  On the underside of the loaf, strange designs had been baked into the bread in bas relief. He saw part of a five-pointed star, a few curls of twisting vine, a stylized eye. They’d been imprinted on the bread by the oven floor.

  He pushed the loaf away from him. To eat it would have been like supping on the dead.

  “I can’t,” he said. “It’s wrong.”

  Wolfgang’s eyes narrowed. “What is?”

  In that instant, the captain threw himself at Wolfgang. The carbine fired. Parkes screamed, leapt up, staggered backward into a tree with his hand clapped over his eye and blood leaking through his fingers; he slumped and made no further sound. The gun fell spent and useless to the ground.

  Charlie jumped to his feet and rushed toward the two struggling men. He tried to lift the stone door of the oven, thinking he could crush the man’s skull, but it seared the skin from his fingers, as though only that moment removed from the flames. He whirled to see that the captain, besides his sword, was armed with a dagger. Its tip lay at Wolfgang’s neck, just about to dig in.

  “Please!” Charlie screamed. He didn’t know who he was begging.

  But a transformation came over the captain, at first indistinguishable from rage. His eyes widened, his mouth gaped, the dagger dropped from his fingers. Releasing Wolfgang, he dropped back into the grass, probing at his flesh with trembling hands.

  While Charlie and Wolfgang stared, tiny lines of blackness snaked out of the captain’s mouth, like bloodworms or swift growing vines; they swiftly veiled his face. Deep incisions appeared in his flesh, as though hot, invisible brands were pressing into him. The symbols were all too familiar to Charlie: stars and eyes and triangles, and everywhere those gripping tendrils. They glowed with a fire-flecked blackness. The captain screamed, once with all his voice, then a second time, when his throat was choked. A black growth filled it. He writhed as though caught in a net, but the net was inside him and nowhere else.

  He staggered to his feet, turning blindly to run. His fatal plunge carried him straight into the mouth of the oven.

  Charlie gasped and moved away from the sudden smell of burning flesh. Wolfgang bent to the granite slab that served as an oven door. Scarcely seeming to feel the heat that had fused Charlie’s fingertips mere seconds before, he forced the door into place, sealing the savories to bake in the oven. Then he too moved away, toward the trees. At the last moment before vanishing into the dark, he turned back toward Charlie.

  “I know where to find a boat,” he said. “I’ll bring you along, if you’ll show me how to find General Washington. I wish to join the American army, if they’ll take me.”

  “Oh, they’ll take you,” Charlie said. “We need more men like you.”

  In the oven, fat sizzled and spat.

  * * *

  “Loaves From Hell” copyright 2011 by Marc Laidlaw. First appeared in The Weird Fiction Review, Vol. 1 (2011), edited by S.T. Joshi (though written many years earlier).

  HIS POWDER’D WIG, HIS CROWN OF THORNES

  Grant Innes first saw the icon in the Indian ghettos of London but thought nothing of it. There were so many gewgaws of native “art” being thrust in his face by faddishly war-painted Cherokees that this was just another nuisance to avoid, like the huge radios blaring obnoxious “Choctawk” percussions and the high-pitched warbling of Tommy Hawkes and the effeminate Turquoise Boys; like the young Mohawk ruddies practicing skateboard stunts for sluttish cockney girls whose kohled black eyes and slack blue lips betrayed more interest in the dregs of the bottles those boys carried than in the boys themselves. Of course, it was not pleasure or curiosity that brought him into the squalid district, among the baggy green canvas street-teepees and graffitoed storefronts. Business alone could bring him here. He had paid a fair sum for the name and number of a Mr. Cloud, dealer in Navaho jewelry, whose samples had proved of excellent quality and would fetch the highest prices, not only in Europe but in the Colonies as well. Astute dealers knew that the rage for turquoise had nearly run its course, thank God; following the popularity of the lurid blue stone, the simplicity of black-patterned silver would be a welcome relief indeed. Grant had hardly been able to tolerate the sight of so much garish rock as he'd been forced to stock in order to suit his customers; he was looking forward to this next trend. He’d already laid the ground for several showcase presentations in Paris; five major glossies were bidding for rights to photograph his collector's pieces, antique sand-cast najas and squash-blossom necklaces, for a special fashion portfolio.

  Here in the slums, dodging extruded plastic kachina dolls and machine-woven blankets, his fine-tuned eye was offended by virtually everything he saw. It was trash for tourists. Oh, it had its spurts of cheap popularity, like the warbonnets, which all the cyclists had worn last summer, but such moments were fleeting as pop hits, thank God. Only true quality could ever transcend the dizzying gyres of public favor. Fine art, precious stones, pure metal—these were investments that would never lose their value.

  So much garbage ultimately had the effect of blinding him to his environment; avoidance became a mental as well as a physical trick. He was dreaming of silver crescents gleaming against ivory skin when he realized that he must h
ave passed the street he sought. He stopped in his tracks, suddenly aware of the hawkers’ cries, the pulse of hide drums and synthesizers. He spun about searching for a number on any of the shops.

  “Lost, guv?” said a tall brave with gold teeth, his bare chest ritually scarified. He carried a tall pole strung with a dozen gruesome rubber scalps, along with several barrister’s wigs. They gave the brave the appearance of a costume merchant, except for one morbid detail: Each of the white wigs was spattered with blood . . . red dye, rather, liberally dripped among the coarse white strands.

  “You look lost.”

  “Looking for a shop,” Grant muttered, fumbling Mr. Cloud’s card from his pocket.

  “No. I mean really lost. Out of balance. Koyaanisqatsi, guv. Like the whole world.”

  “I'm looking for a shop,” Grant repeated firmly.

  “That all then? A shop? What about the things you really lost? Things we’ve all lost, I'm talking about. Here.”

  He patted his bony hip, which was wrapped in a black leather loincloth. Something dangled from his belt, a doll-like object on a string, a charm of some sort. Grant looked over the brave’s head and saw the number he sought, just above a doorway. The damn ruddy was in his way. As he tried to slip past, avoiding contact with the rubbery scalps and bloodied wigs, the brave unclipped the charm from his belt and thrust it into Grant’s face.