by S. A. Sidor
Whatever his crimes, the punishment did appear extreme. Yet, he was surely not an innocent man. And perhaps he deserved all he got and more. I simply didn’t know.
“Look, I am sorry if you suffered–”
“Silence! They wished me to be destroyed. But I am not destroyed!”
He shuffled one foot, then the other. He stretched out an impossibly long arm. His hand covered my whole face. The bandages smelled of wood smoke from the fire.
“Dog, do you know what the underworld smells like? It smells like shit. And do you know what wandering in the void of space smells like? Dead embers. For millennia Amun Odji-Kek, the greatest to ever live, greater than any pharaoh, was so deprived!”
He closed his grip over my skull. He shook with rage, and worms dropped from the folds of his windings into my lap. I could not move! He ground his palm hard into my eyes until they burned as if he had rubbed them with salt.
He took his hand away.
I gulped in fresh air.
“I am returned,” he said, his words coming out almost in whispers.
He is not talking to me so much as to himself, I thought. But he did not react to my thinking words this time. He seemed not to see me any more. He wandered around the fire circle. When he reached Yong Wu, he stopped again.
“Like you, this boy is awake.”
Kek altered his position so I could see Yong Wu’s face; his eyes were open and locked on the sky. But I knew that he was as aware of what was happening as I was. The poor boy! As he did with me, Kek took Wu’s head in his hand – his two hands, using both this time. “Shall I crush his head? Shall I squeeze out his brains like so much pulp?”
“No,” I cried in my mind, and I heard Wu’s voice join me.
“Do either of you know what it is like to smother in a box?”
“I do. I nearly suffocated in a trunk my grandmother kept for storage. It was the most terrible experience I ever had. I fear tight spaces. Let the boy alone!”
“So, you do know. But can you imagine that no one will ever come to rescue you? That your servants are screaming without air in boxes around you? That when you die you will enter an even more hostile underworld? Would you survive to return as I have?”
Above Kek the air grew dense, flickering with forms – with bats.
He ignored them at first. He was concentrating on smothering Wu with his hands. Bats dove at him. And their numbers multiplied until they enrobed his body in quivering black. He swatted at them with one arm, keeping his other hand tight over Wu’s nose and mouth. The night fliers did not relent. They hissed and nipped at his wrappings until he released the boy. Kek roared, grabbing bats from the air, flinging them to the ground and into the fire, stomping on them if they did not recover quickly, crunching them into the sand.
Once Wu was in no eminent danger of being killed, the bats flew off.
I saw Kek’s ivory bones exposed through the tatters of his shroud. His flesh was dried, wrinkled, and stiff like salted fish. Beetles skittered in his ribcage. Kek’s eyes shined with strange light. As he had grown bored with me, he now ignored Yong Wu. For his lack of interest, I was grateful. He wandered back to the fire. His pupils shrank to snaky vertical slits.
“Soon I will be able to feel this heat. I will live.”
“Where are you now?”
“I don’t know. I am waiting for my servants. I need sacrifice. Magic and blood sacrifice.”
He did not deceive me. I was too insignificant to lie to.
He crouched over the campfire. He poked at the embers until his fingers lit. He held them out like a candelabra, tipping his head, studying the jittery flames. Eventually he snuffed them, one by one, in his mouth.
“How can I find you?”
“You will serve me,” Kek said. His voice was weak. Fighting off the bats had tired him.
“I may have discovered your tomb, but I will never serve you.”
“You serve me already,” he said.
I lifted my chin to argue, realizing in an instant – I could move and Kek was gone.
Immediately I went to Wu. His eyes were closed, but he was breathing normally. I could not decipher if he had fallen into a deep sleep or if he was only feigning because of his fright. I said his name several times and jostled him, yet nothing changed. I went then to Evangeline and McTroy and found them both to be so completely at rest that their condition bordered on stupor. My conclusion was that Kek’s conjuring had done something to enchant them, though they seemed unharmed, even blissful in their states.
This discovery did not soothe me.
24
El Camino Del Diablo
McTroy rose first and already had coffee boiling by the time I crawled from my blankets. The morning was windless and the sky still dark. From his saddlebag, our guide retrieved a knotted cheesecloth sack filled with Black Shirley’s butter-and-guava jelly-filled biscuits. He bit into one as big as his fist and handed me the sack. Skewers of bacon spat over the fire. He inspected and moved them around. He looked eager to meet the day.
My stomach growled.
“Bacon’s about done. I like mine burnt. You might not,” McTroy said.
He drank his coffee, the steam rising past his hat.
I rubbed my cold hands together. McTroy wore buckskin gloves with lambs’ wool sticking out at the cuffs. He had turned up his collar and slipped a gray falsa poncho over his head. I draped my bedroll over my shoulders and grabbed for a can of coffee.
He pushed me back with his boot.
“Cans are hot.” He shucked one glove and tossed it to me.
The glove bounced off my chest.
“Bad dreams keep you up last night, Doc?”
“I slept roughly, that is to say – not at all.”
With my gloved hand, I retrieved a coffee can and then a bacon stick.
“We’ll get you back to your featherbed soon as we can. I, myself, slumbered like a drunkard in the arms of an angel.”
I was sitting on the ground, and McTroy had procured a smooth curved rock for his seat. From this vantage point, I noticed a black stippling on the left side of his face, etched below the hairline. Previously I had taken it to be a smudge of dirt on a man who toiled and slept outdoors. The disfigurement was not at all new; it had the appearance of trying to heal and failing to do so. I wondered if it was the reason why he wore his hat so low, to cover the dark stain on his skin, a trace of vanity in this hunter of villains.
“If you don’t mind my asking, how did you get that mark on your forehead?”
He touched the spot with his naked thumb.
“Feller by the name of Apache Zeb did that. You ever hear of him?”
I indicated I had not.
“Half-breed horse thief. Arsonist. Murderer, mostly of women. He was the first desperado I went after for the reward. I was a kid. Apache Zeb got the drop on me. Took my pop’s Colt Walker and told me he’d see me in hell. Pulled the trigger before I could say anything back. Misfire. I socked him in the throat and ran. The powder burned me.”
“That must’ve been a harrowing experience.”
“Can’t say I ever forgot it.”
“Did you catch him?”
McTroy shook his head sourly then gave a light tug to his hat brim.
“He’s still out there being a menace. Last I heard he went to Oklahoma.”
A sniffing noise made me turn.
Moonlight: saddled and ready to ride. Her wet eyes stared.
“Say, Doc, you a sleepwalker?”
“Not to the best of my knowledge,” I said.
“The best of your knowledge might need improvement. How else do we explain these draggy tracks all around our fire? You got big feet, son. I might’ve shot you.”
“Thank you once again for not shooting me.”
“Don’t mention it.”
“If, indeed, I was the somnambulist. You must sleep heavy for a hunter.”
“Not hardly.”
The fact he hadn’t awakened both
ered him. As it should have.
“Hey, Wu, these ain’t your hoofprints dancing in the night like a warrior, are they?”
“No, sir,” the boy said to McTroy.
His muffled answer came from deep under a pile of blankets.
“We got dead bats too. Some in the fire, others ground up in the dirt. Mighty odd business. I might be inclined to call it a bad omen. These your bats, Emperor Wu?”
This time Wu was slower to respond.
“I don’t think so,” he said.
“Ha. They’re squashed pretty good. Whatever it was did the job, and then some.”
I ate my bacon and biscuit. Drank my coffee.
Wu emerged. His pigtails were crooked, fraying. Despite my being unable to wake him from his trance in the night, he looked like he hadn’t slept. I searched for some recognition in his eyes of our mutual firelight encounter with the mummy, a sign that he remembered what had happened. I got little more for my questioning gaze than yawns. He came over, and we three sat, facing east. Wu dropped twigs in the fire.
The sky stitched a pink ruffle across the black silk of the retreating night. Even as we watched, stripes of peaches and cream spilled out under the pink.
“Gorgeous morning,” Evangeline said.
She’d come up quietly from a rock pile at some distance to the rear of us. Well, three stunned males looked back at her and then to her blankets which were bunched just so to lend the impression she was lying there. Maybe she’d been the first one awake.
“What were you doing?” McTroy asked, angry.
“Washing up,” she said.
“How long you been back there?”
“Long enough to wash up. Is privacy forbidden on the trail?”
“No, but… you should say something before you go off.”
“Next time I will wake you, McTroy. You have my word.”
Nutmeg freckles sprinkled her clean, high-boned face. Our ride in the sun must have brought them out. She approached us slowly, taking languid, long-legged strides, both arms raised above her head, tying her hair back until a single torch of pale flames swung behind her. Those upturned agate eyes sparked in me both chills and fieriness at the dawn. I had never seen a woman look so beautiful in my life.
I gulped my coffee and scalded my throat.
“Ahhhhh.”
“Are you all right, Hardy?” she asked, touching my convulsing back.
I nodded.
“Worried,” I said, gasping. And I choked some more.
“I am surrounded by such concerned gentlemen!” Her dramatic statement teetered on the verge of laughter. She found McTroy and me ridiculous in differing ways.
“Breakfast is ready. Get some before it’s gone.” McTroy threw the dregs of his coffee on the fire and the smoke kicked up. “Saddle your horses. We’re losing time with all this talking.” He walked off and pissed on a cactus in plain sight.
I handed Evangeline the cheesecloth bag.
“The biscuits are good. But we have a problem. Kek was here.”
“Here? When?” Inadvertently – and I could not fault her – she scanned the immediate grounds for signs of the sorcerer. If I had said there was a wolf in camp her reaction would have been the same.
“Last night. Wu and I saw him. Or we saw an image of him.”
“An image? I don’t understand.”
“We saw him walk into our fire ring. He talked to us. He tried to smother Wu.”
“You saw the mummy alive? What did he say?”
“He bragged about coming back from the dead. Only he’s not all the way into this world yet. He fades out. He needs… his exact words were ‘magic and blood sacrifice.’”
Evangeline weighed this news. Her expression changed several times before she spoke again. I gathered she had so many questions she didn’t know which to ask first.
“Odji-Kek tried to smother Wu. Was he trying to speed up his materialization?”
I tightened the cinches on our horses.
“Unlikely. He’s very angry. Resurrection makes him moody, perhaps. I do know he wants to damage things, to hurt them, if that makes any sense.”
“But he couldn’t do it?”
“The bats stopped him. Biting. Thrashing. These nocturnals care a lot about our Chinese train boy. Kek killed a batch over by the fire. If I hadn’t been paralyzed and in danger of having my own head crushed, it would have been remarkable to observe.”
Evangeline watched Wu folding his blankets.
She said, “It makes sense that Odji-Kek can’t sacrifice to himself. He’d need someone else to do that. A disciple to cut the offering’s throat and worship him.”
“The necrófagos? Might they bring His Awfulness back?”
“Perhaps they could do it. But… they don’t have any blood inside them. Blood isn’t the easiest thing to come by in the desert.”
“Says who?” McTroy, astride Moonlight, broke between us. “This desert is soaked with blood. You’re not hunting then you’re hunted. Let’s nail ’em ’fore they get too far.”
He rode ahead.
We mounted our horses. I leaned over to give Wu a hand up.
“On the train, you told me the mummies couldn’t hurt me,” Wu said. “Was that true?”
One look told me he remembered last night and what Kek had done to him.
I’m sorry I failed to protect you.
I thought this but could not say the words aloud.
“I thought it was true at the time. I’m afraid I was wrong,” I said.
“What if they try to hurt me again? What will you do?”
“We’re not going to let that happen,” Evangeline said. “Not ever.”
At noon, we found the first coffin.
A little after noon we saw the sarcophagus. First, I thought it was another stone. Uncrated, sunken into the sand, the lid sliding off to one side and broken in half. There was no question the wood coffin we had passed earlier belonged to my mummies, to one of Kek’s minions. I recognized the aged wood. To see it kicked apart (and empty)… I felt a loss. Here I had traveled and searched and dug it up and secured it overseas, only to have a thing I thought was precious stolen and thrown away like trash. But finding Kek’s sarcophagus was even worse. It was damaged beyond repair. There was no wooden coffin inside. I didn’t even know if Kek had an inner mummy case. He was not buried like other men had been buried. Nothing about him was typical. I had spent two years locating this sarcophagus, and many sacrifices had been made to bring it to America. Yet, here it was, treated no differently than a common shipping crate.
There was no one around. This stretch of land spread out flat, bleached of color, devoid of movement. Sweat soaked my hatband and dripped down my cheeks, cutting the layer of dust that covered me like a mask. I would’ve paid a Half Eagle for a cool breeze. The mountains humped to the west, too far away to conceal any attempt at an ambush. Broiling heat. I could almost feel the temperature rising, daring anything to live in this wasteland. There were only rocks and scrub and cacti and Kek’s burial box where it sat, plump as a Sonoran Desert toad.
I wanted to scream in frustration.
Oh, I would have screamed, if it weren’t for the guitar music.
Sweet, melodious – the tune sounded Mexican. Like a love song.
“Where’s it coming from?” Evangeline asked.
“It sounds close,” Wu said as he hugged me tighter.
“Inside the damned casket is where it’s coming from.” McTroy drew a pistol and rode up alongside Kek’s tomb. He looked in, pulled his head back, and then looked in again.
He started swearing to himself.
The music stopped.
“Who is it?” Evangeline asked.
“How the hell should I know? Get over here and you tell me.”
McTroy leaned over the sarcophagus and said something then spit on the ground.
Evangeline and I (and Wu) peered inside the sarcophagus.
Tucked in the southernmost corner, like a spi
der, was a necrófago, or half a necrófago. And a guitar. His gaunt body ended under the ribcage. Below that he was crumbly black. He had some whitish tailbone left. It was sooty too. He was looking up at us with black eyes. He had no weapon. His skin-from-a-corpse mask was gone. He held on to the guitar. It was a nice guitar. The index finger on his right hand was missing. I recognized him, or what remained of him. He was the red-handled axe-wielding train robber. The one whose finger Kittle shot off. The ghoul who killed Thomas the porter.
“You speak English?” Evangeline asked him.
“Sí, some I do.”
“What happened to you?”
“Nothing good.”
McTroy shot him in the chest. Twice.
“Why did you do that?” Evangeline asked, incredulous.
“It was unnatural,” McTroy said.
“That was stupid of you,” I said.
McTroy still had his gun in hand. It was not the smartest comment I ever made.
“What’s done is done. That thing was an abomination. My mama read me the bible and I know an abomination when I see one.”
“It was stupid because you didn’t kill it,” I said.
“What?” He glanced down at what he knew to be the freshest of corpses.
“Tell him,” I said to the ghoul.
“It’s true, señor. You no kill me.”
The necrófago waved lazily at him in the hot sun.
“Why you goddamned sonofa–” McTroy pointed his gun.
“It won’t do any good,” I said.
“He’s impervious to your bullets,” Evangeline said.
McTroy shot him four more times. Each bullet made the half body jerk.
“Do you see?” I said. “You’re wasting ammunition.”
The necrófago began to play the song from before. A sad song, full of longing.
“We should talk to him,” Evangeline said. “He may know something that can help us.”
McTroy tugged at Moonlight’s reins. He rode off a short distance, talking to himself, and finally he called back over his shoulder, “What’s going on here? Who are you people?”
It would not have surprised me to see him ride away forever.
Evangeline answered him in a raised voice, “It’s complicated. We’ll explain it to you. Soon, I promise. But now we need to talk to this unsightly creature. Nothing has changed as far as my offer. You will be paid. Now come back here. We have work to do.”
