“Like the morning after a long drunk,” I said. “Then why don’t we go on back up?”
Alkali laughed.
“Think you’re gonna go faster up that hike than you did down it?” He shook his head. “There’s no way we’d ever make it.”
We sat quiet around the fire. I thought about what Cole had said about blind frogs.
“It’s like they ain’t human no more,” Cole said.
“In the state we saw them, they were not.”
“You ever seen anything like this before?”
Van Helsing seemed to smile.
“Not precisely, but...something very much like this, yes.”
“How? When?”
Van Helsing stared across the fire at Cole.
“With Quincey.”
In spite of my pains and fright, I perked up.
Cole shared a look with the old Dutchman, and shrugged.
“Alright, Professor,” he said. “Since I might not get another chance, tell me. What happened to Quincey?”
But Van Helsing shook his head.
“No. Such a story should not be told now. Besides, it will give us all another reason to live.” He turned and grinned at me. “All of us. Eh, Alvin?”
I wanted to spit at him.
Maybe there’s something to the Dutchman’s talk. Maybe they won’t even come until daybreak. I still wish we could sneak up out of the cabin, but Alkali’s right. It’d take too long, and anyhow they’re probably laid up somewhere up there, watching to see we don’t try it.
I found that the brown glass whiskey pint I’d bought at the Sunup had proven itself sturdier than Alkali’s old leg. It had survived its fall, and I cracked it open and wouldn’t share. Nobody asked me to.
Cole drifted off to sleep while as I mentioned, Alkali lined up our pistols and began cleaning them and checking to see they were all in working order. Van Helsing got a hold of my shoulder, and dolled it up in a dirty bandage torn from his shirt sleeves, talking to the Injun as he worked. Now he’s shuffling papers, as though he’s on a field trip and has brought along his student’s work to grade. The Injun took to humming, and then singing lowly.
Realistically there is little hope for us. We’re outnumbered and short on cartridges and whole men. No one has asked me to confirm the message I telegraphed to Marshal Ruddles in Bastrop for help, but I’m sure fretting over it now. I was so damned hurried, out of fright and necessity. Was the message clear? Will Ruddles come in time?
I don’t know when Skoll and his wolf-men will get to us. I hope I am passed out, though I guess a pint of whiskey won’t be enough to get me there. At least I won’t feel it when it comes...the way Ranny must have. I keep thinking about what Plenty Skins said about how they’d eaten Picker down at that burnt place in the canyon. The firelight moves like a shallow orange tide pool across our rock ceiling. I wonder how far away we are from that burnt place.
CHAPTER 17
From the Journal of Abraham Van Helsing
August 29th?
Buckner’s diary confirms that the dead man on Coleman’s property was indeed one of Skoll’s wolf-men. Picker and Buckner surprised and killed him, and Picker, fearing he had murdered a white man, took the fur mantle and cowl and went to his uncle.
I told Plenty Skins as much, after I had read it, and asked him to describe what had happened when Picker had come to him. He had been humming and rocking where he sat, looking into the fire. He fixed me with his eyes, and it seemed that something from the fire had made a home there and remained still.
“I knew the white man Picker had killed was no ordinary man,” he said. “By then I had already had my dream.”
Talk of dreams again.
“I told him the dream, and he got scared. I warned him to stay with me where I could protect him, but he run off. They musta been hunting him the whole time. He shoulda stayed with me. I coulda protected him.”
Buckner’s writings also mention some sort of goings on in the canyon. Drums, noises, a great fire. We have already seen the result of that night, but I cannot help wondering what it entailed (beyond the death of Picker). If Callisto was there — the poor girl! Will she be in need of psychological counsel when this is all over, if we do see things to a successful end and bring her from the dark influence of her husband?
I think of Mina Harker, and how, despite her ordeal, she came through the flames stronger even than I. I wonder how Callisto will be. A Mina, or a Van Helsing? My resolve is solid. God will deliver us somehow from this, if only for that woman’s sake.
I turn my attention back to the matter of the ritual. It has been of some significance to them surely. Could it have been their wedding ceremony? Thinking of Callisto bound in her wedding dress among that pagan, wolf-clad horde fills me with outrage. I try to think back to my study of ancient Norse rites, and I endeavor to tie into those memories the facts of the ritual killing, the hearts, the bowl of blood, and the cannibalization of Picker, but without my library at hand it is quite useless. I can call up thousands of pertinent facts when I am prepared, but I didn’t come to Texas expecting to encounter a single Norwegian let alone a cult of Odin worshipers. In my mind, every bit of vampire lore I amassed in my crusade against Dracula is rendered trivial. There are no hard facts to deal with here, only speculation.
I sense there is some pattern that I am overlooking. Nothing that will help us now particularly, but it does occupy my mind.
I asked Plenty Skins why he thought the wolf-man had been skulking around on the Morris ranch, for surely it was for the same unknown purpose the Skoll cowboys had been infringing upon the Q&M range land since the beginning.
“For the same reason Picker and Buckner were there,” Plenty Skins answered almost immediately. “Hunting ground.”
Picker and Buckner were warned off of Mr. Morris’ place, but they went anyway to try and poison that mountain lion. So if the yellow haired wolves were warned off and kept coming, why do you think they did? The game was good. The cattle.”
But, I pointed out, they had their own cattle, and the largest grazing land in the county in the property they bought.
“That ain’t so,” Alvin said. “Most of the cattle got auctioned off separate. Besides a few milk cows they just got the land itself.”
Then it made sense. If one thinks of Skoll and his men as a pack of wolves (as indeed they believe themselves to be), then they would need a reliable food source. The cattle. The Q&M cowboys had suspected them of rustling. But in reality, they’d been hunting. And after being driven off the hunting grounds by Cole’s men, they’d decided to take the land.
“Damn,” said Coleman, from under the brim of his hat, where I’d assumed he was asleep. “Is that all they wanted? Cattle? I woulda sold ‘em cattle and they coulda ridden the damn things naked on their own property for all I care. Hell, it’s a free county.”
“But they are not wolves. They are men, too. White men. They would not be content with what they could buy,” said Plenty Skins.
I understand something of which he spoke. Skoll and his men are not fully wolves. They do not seek sustenance alone, but to glut themselves on ill-gotten bounty as their Viking forebears did of old. For them, danger seasons the meat.
Plenty Skins rose then, and took his ever present satchel from his shoulder. Even in the confusion of flight he had kept it with him. He opened it now, and took out the odd wolf hide apparel we had found him in. I watched him put it on, humming the same tune as earlier. He took out the turtle shell rattle and sat back down, facing the fire. He resumed his staring, and beat the rattle against his palm in rhythmic intercessions that were in time with his murmured song.
I asked him what he was doing, but he would not answer.
“Let him be, Professor,” Alkali said, staring down the disembodied barrel of one of his guns. “You won’t get another word out of him.”
I asked Alkali if he understood something of what Plenty Skins was doing.
“Not a wit,” Alkali admi
tted. “But I guess I know a death song when I hear one.”
I didn’t need to ask what that was.
Yet I am still not convinced we shall die here.
* * *
From the Pen of Alvin Crooker
August 30th
Skoll and his men came just before dawn.
The sky was as dark as a blanket of uncut denim, and the whole lot of us were finally starting to doze when a great screaming went up somewhere down the canyon, like the one we’d heard last night.
At first we all just sat and listened to it, like it was a weird siren song that kept us nailed put. But as soon as it ended, dropping off in the night, Cole was on his feet and shouting for us to get ready.
We all had our pistols nearby or in hand, except for the Injun. He’d quit his singing about an hour before and gone and sat at the back of the cave. Alkali laid a pistol down in front of him, but he just stared off into space like a man out of his head.
We took up places behind the big rocks across the cave mouth and got set to meet their rush. Van Helsing ran back to Plenty Skins and urged him to join us, but the red man sat the same as before, as if the Dutchman wasn’t there shaking him.
Van Helsing gave up and ran for the rocks. As an afterthought, I scuttled over to where Plenty Skins was sitting and picked up the pistol that lay in front of him. I fixed him with what I intended to be a guilt-inducing glare, but instead found myself unnerved by his look of complete emptiness. It was as though he had so resigned himself to die that he was already on the brink. His eyes were large and unfocused, like they were seeing angels or the Indian equivalent. I got back to my spot near Alkali.
The racket they made seemed to come from all around us in that canyon. I kept looking over my shoulder thinking they were somehow creeping up on us. I only saw Plenty Skins, staring at nothing.
Then we saw a few of them, loping over the rocks. We directed a withering fire at them, and that was when the real body of them attacked from above.
They had crept onto the roof of our cave sometime in the night, and dropped down on our position in the cave mouth, engaging us hand to hand.
I heard shots all around me, but I was busy trying to catch my wind and keep it. My attacker landed full on my shoulders from a good height and I was breathless. I fought like hell to keep my arm and push him away.
Their shapes twisted crazily in the dying firelight and the hint of rising dawn. I felt his breath on me, hard and heavy, heard him growling. Then his artificial claws were in me, and I had my hands up under his chin, trying to keep his clicking dentures from my throat, even as his nails burrowed into my torso. I couldn’t tell the sound of the ripping fabric of my shirt from the tearing of my skin. I tasted copper in my mouth and was convinced this bastard was going to be the end of me.
Somewhere a wild man raised his yell above the others and Alkali hollered back. A pistol fired, lonely in the loud rush of men’s voices and the falling blows.
Cole screamed, “Goddamn you!”
That dark, fanged and bearded face I was squeezing between my white hands got closer. His jaw wrenched about, trying to nip at my fingers. My arms ached, the busted one crooning like a lovesick nighthawk. I couldn’t feel the pain in my chest, but I knew by the flying fabric and the blood that he was doing his damndest to dig a hole right through me.
A howl sounded, different from all the rest. It was a real wolf’s howl, long and keening, rising high in pitch and sliding through every man’s ear and dancing a jig down each of his vertebrae. It even penetrated the scrambled brains of the blood-mad crazy that was killing me, for he went rigid in my hands and twisted his head away to look.
Then he was gone.
Something tremendous barreled into him and took his weight from me. I lay for a minute, staring at the ceiling with my arms still in the air, clutching at the empty space where he’d been.
I tried to sit up, but the pain was too much. I felt like I had a crocodile biting my belly. But something was strange. It was the noise. The hollering and the growling had stopped. I looked, and could see everyone plain, standing still and staring. Even the eyes of the wild-men were wide in their wolf-skin masks. I recognized Vulmere among them, his red beard blazing in the firelight, lips parted and drawn back around jagged teeth. His claws were dipped in blood, and he stood hunched like an animal about to break for the woods. All the men were aping him. Even Van Helsing. He was leaning against a big rock with his hair wild and blood across his face, his revolver in his hand and one sleeve torn and ragged. I saw Cole too. He was kneeling on the ground, and one of the Scandinavians had his arms around him, but they had both stopped wrestling, like a couple of little ones caught fighting in back of the schoolhouse.
Where less than a minute before the cave mouth had been filled with strife and chaos, now there was only a curious popping noise to my left.
Straddling the body of the Norgie that had been mauling me was a wolf. A tremendous, iron gray wolf, big as a young steer. Its legs were thick as a mountain lion’s, thicker. They ended in huge black socks, each larger around than a big man’s fist. I only saw it from the back. Its heavily muscled neck was inclined downward, and its muzzle thrust into the dead man’s throat. Then, as I looked, it raised its head and saw me, a long thin strand of gore stretching from its black lips. Its eyes shone with fire, black as all evil. It had a huge head, with great ears that swiveled about constantly. One long tooth protruded from its lips like a red soldier’s saber.
I got the strangest idea, and looked back towards the cave.
The Indian was sitting there still. Only his eyes were shut tight.
One of the wolf men yelled, and I looked back and saw it was Vulmere. His fists beneath his claws were bunched into hammerheads, and the veins were standing out alongside his red-rimmed eyes. His ugly teeth foamed and he shook like a man wrestling with the St. Vitus.
The huge wolf looked at him, lowered its head and flattened its ears. Its dark eyes narrowed and the lips split back to reveal rows of sharp red and yellow teeth.
Man and wolf-man rushed at each other. The wolf’s huge claws scrabbled over the stones and Vulmere jumped gamely at him.
He caught around that wolf’s head and hitched up his legs, digging his bare heels into the back of its neck and hanging on like a man trying to wrestle down a mustang the hard way. But the wolf’s jaws clamped down on his shoulder. I heard the bones there shiver and split like timber. Vulmere gave a very un-beast like scream.
The wolf shook him like a puppy with a dishrag. His limbs flopped about like breeched fishes. One of his claw-gloves slipped off and stuck in the dirt in front of me, quivering. There was another crack, and the wolf flung Vulmere down. He lay in a tangle of sodden fur and right angles, twitching and gasping his last.
The wolf pawed at him with one great forefoot, then arched its back and let loose a terrible nose-to-the-moon howl.
Everyone in the cave mouth stood still in awe, frozen by the display and respectfully silent for its duration.
But when the monster lowered its head and licked its chops, the wolf-men surrounding it stirred. Cole and Van Helsing, Alkali and I were entirely forgotten. They growled, and, as if they were all of one notion, closed their circle and pounced on the huge animal.
Each of them attacked from a different angle. I counted five of them. They clung to its hide by their fists or by their teeth, and they alternately bit and kicked and stabbed. The monster wolf wheeled about like a bull, thrashing its head and kicking out, but the beast men held on like flies.
I saw Van Helsing take aim with his pistol and Cole rise up from the ground and grab him.
“You’ll hit it!” he warned, and watched helplessly with the rest of us as our strange savior was overpowered.
Alkali was beside me, and his look was probably as worrisome as mine on him. His clothes were in ruins, and his exposed skin was slashed with crisscrossing red furrows.
“You alive, Alvin?” he asked.
I told him
I thought I was. My eyes kept going to the big wolf. I was anxious for it.
Then there was another howl. But this wasn’t the big gray’s. It was higher, sadder, and it whirled ghost-like through the whole canyon.
All at once the wolf-men released the huge animal and backed away warily. The howl was still sounding. They stared wide-eyed at the huge wolf. It glared at them, breathing heavy and growling, bleeding from a half a dozen wounds that lent a scarlet shine here and there to its ashen pelt.
Cole and Alkali pointed their guns. This time it was Van Helsing that stopped them.
“Don’t!”
The wolf-men retreated into the lessening dark, tearing off down the canyon. Cole shrugged off Van Helsing and fired after them. Alkali joined in, and their bullets ricocheted on the stones while the Norgies scampered off untouched. It seemed that as the howling dwindled, they were gone.
When I looked back, the big wolf that had saved me was gone too.
Then we all saw a dark shape perched up behind us on the cave roof, peering down with huge yellow eyes. It was a second monster wolf, though this one was obviously not as big as the gray. As the orange light filled the canyon and touched its face, it colored the animal water-at-midnight black. It whined once, then withdrew, quick and quiet as a ghost.
We said nothing to each other. Just stared, entirely confused and too ragged, I think, to move.
A voice echoed down to us from somewhere on the rim. It was Skoll.
“You live another day! But you had better leave! Today we are at our strongest!”
“Leave, nothin’,” Cole muttered.
“Fiend!” Van Helsing bellowed up the rock walls, raging, turning around where he stood to address Skoll wherever he was. The red in his face matched the blood that was smeared across it. He looked like he’d just brought down an antelope with his teeth. “Villain! We’re coming for her! Damn you!”
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