by S. A. Sidor
“Forgive me, Wu, but am I to understand you’re saying your parents are vampires?” I tried to sound gentle but shuddered at my own words.
“People call them that,” Wu said. “The Chinese workers call them Jiangshi.”
“Where do your parents stay?” Evangeline asked.
I noticed her scanning the horizon again.
“In caves, mostly. Sometimes they would ride the train with me.”
“How on earth…?” I began. Evangeline halted me with her hand.
“They would hide under the coal in the coal-car, all the way at the bottom,” Wu said. “At night, I would call them out of the tender when no one was around. They like to sit on top of the train when it is moving. To feel the air blowing. Smelling the desert smells. I’d sit too.”
“Oh, I see,” she said. Her expression had turned immeasurably sad. She pressed a finger to the corner of her eye. She did not want the boy to see her tears.
“Where’d they get their blood, son?” McTroy asked. His words had gone soft as spring rain, like they did when he talked to Moonlight.
“They never bit any passengers on the train. I forbid them to. I would bring them blood from the kitchen, from sides of beef and, when I could, slaughtered chickens. If they grew very hungry, they would fly into the desert. I don’t know what they did out there. But they always came back to the train to be close to me. That is why they follow us now.”
“I don’t believe him,” Rojo said. “I never met a vampire. They are only legends.”
“They are not!” Wu threw the ghoul’s guitar at him. Rojo caught it.
“I was out in the desert watching the trains and I never saw any vamp–”
McTroy jerked the rope and Rojo quieted.
“Wu, if you say your parents are following us, then I believe you.” McTroy stretched his arm out to the boy. Wu hesitated. But the gunman held his hand out steady and he waited with a steady eye on the boy too. Something wordless passed between them. McTroy was a hard man, and he’d witnessed more than his share of tragedy and sorrow. I now know much of it was personal. I think that’s what Wu sensed in him, knowing McTroy had suffered – he’d been alone and had to fix what couldn’t be fixed all the way through to make things whole again. He’d survived. I guess they recognized each other’s wounds and decided if they had pain in common, why not add trust?
Wu switched horses, climbing behind McTroy in the saddle.
“Me and Wu are going to ride out there a ways and see if we can stir up his folks so he can parley with them.” McTroy uncoiled Rojo’s rope and flipped it to me. “Keep an eye on the grave-robber.”
I took the leash but not without cringing in repulsion.
Moonlight stepped gingerly over Rojo’s half-body as he coughed and tried to crawl from under the horse’s diving hooves.
It is an uneasy feeling – being watched by watchers you cannot see. The bell tower lay to the south with its scheming reclusive monks, and now to the north we had vampires, though they might be, if not exactly our friends, our allies. In the desert dwell mysteries and visions you will find nowhere else on the globe. To this I can verily attest.
“Here, ghoul,” I said. “Here.” I clucked my tongue. I gave the leash little tugs.
I remounted my Penny.
“Is no reason to treat me like un perro,” Rojo said.
“I wish you were a dog. You’d smell better.”
“To each one goes his favorite smells. I will not judge you, doctor.”
“Speaking of judging, how do you live with yourself?”
“What is this question? I live with me because I am Rojo.”
“A ghoul’s life is nothing but murder and eating the dead,” I said.
“True,” Rojo said. “But tell me if you never eat.”
“All men eat,” I said.
“You eat dead things? Qué asco! But that is muy repugnante.” I think then he sneered.
“You’re making fun of me.”
“At least no one with a butcher cuchillo kills los animales for you to eat them…”
I grew frustrated with the ghoul’s jibes and tugged his rope.
“I am no grave-robber,” I said. “Let’s leave it at that.”
“Sorry, señor, but how did los mummies get to Mexico if you not dig them?”
I tugged the rope.
“Dig, dig, dig.” He pantomimed shoveling as he said this. “Es divertido, no?”
A south wind began whipping sand clouds into the air. Soon Moonlight and her two riders disappeared from our sight. It was a hot, dry wind that scraped at my throat.
Evangeline tied a kerchief over her face and tugged her hat low.
“We need to find some shelter or we’ll be skinned raw as your little pet,” she said.
“Agreed,” I said. “But we can’t wander far, and our options are limited.”
“Señor, there is a well not too close to the very bad church. She has a little roof over the top. It’s not much but is something.” I stared down into those sand-filled midnight eyes and wondered how much I could trust them. Not much at all, I decided.
“Hardy, what do we have to lose if we listen to him? The monks don’t venture out of their fort and we can’t remain here in the open.”
Penny and Neptune were shaking their heads. The airborne grit pelted us without cease. It had a sound to it, this wind, an insectile buzz that added to the horses’ anxiety and my own.
“Rojo, how far is the well?”
He shouted above the grinding whirring wind. “Is half way between here and the church, in the southeast corner, around the back. That’s why you no see it.”
I couldn’t have seen it now if it stood ten feet ahead of me.
The sand blinded us, thick as a blizzard. “All right, then. Up with you.” I yanked the malodorous creature onto Penny, in front of me. The guitar on his back kept a breathable space between us. “Tell me where to go.”
“Is straight ahead, boss.”
We walked our horses through the sandstorm in search of the hidden well.
26
Plague Bringer
“Where did you see this kind of fever before?”
“I’m sorry, Hardy, what? This cursed wind is driving me crazy. I can’t hear you.”
I mopped my brow and wiped the dust from my eyelids. The well was exactly where Rojo said it would be. It had a few thin slats built over it, hardly what I’d call a roof, and a beam with a rope and pulley, none of which did anything to stop the sideways wind attack, but the rim of the well was good blockage. I looped the horses’ ropes over the biggest stone on the rim. Evangeline and I squatted inelegantly on the lee side of the well, our backs against the warm mosaic of stones. We had picked our way through an atmosphere increasingly composed more of earth than air. One cannot open one’s eyes fully in a sandstorm. It is a hazy endeavor made of squinted glimpses revealing a hellishly dull and altogether obscure world. The lack of horizon in this smoky fog of sand exacerbated my vertigo, and despite the fact I could not see the church in the storm, I knew we were much closer to it.
“I said, ‘Where did you see this kind of fever before?’ Concerning my ill turn back there, you commented this was not your first experience along these peculiar lines.”
“Oh, did I say that? I don’t recall…” Evangeline had pulled her hat down to her nose, and her kerchief was tied just below. I could see her eyelashes twitching.
“You did without a doubt,” I said. “Here, put this around you.” I draped my blanket over Evangeline so we were like a pair of Esquimaux huddled in a squall.
“What an odd thing for me to say. Your condition flustered me quite a bit.” She grabbed my knee and gave it a reassuring pat. However pleasant it was for me to receive this comforting touch, I wondered why I felt a signal to change the course of the conversation. I ignored the signal. I placed my hand on hers.
“Not so odd if it’s based on personal history. When and where did you get yours?”
; “My what?” she asked, as innocently as was possible for her.
“Your history with fevers and sorcery,” I pressed.
“I can’t imagine…” She waved off my question.
“Let’s see – your father was struck almost fatally with a fever. Was that when he suffered his corporal stress reaction? His fever dream revealed the location of Kek’s tomb. Being a dutiful daughter, you must’ve tended to your sick father. You even wrote the letter telling me how he projected his spirit to my tent in Egypt accompanied by a phantasm. Were Kek and the phantasm one and the same? I dare to assert they were.”
Evangeline had emerged snail-like from under her chapeau. She untied her kerchief and attempted to remove the dust from her face, but a few dirty smears were all she got for her efforts. They did nothing of course to hide her striking appearance. In fact, the smudging accentuated her good looks! Perhaps my near proximity to her affected my judgment. I was still feeling kindly towards her for administering to my symptoms, this despite her deception and reluctance to admit to it.
“Well,” I said. “Do you have an answer?”
“You seem full of answers already. I wouldn’t want to overburden you,” she said.
“Did Kek cause Monty Waterston’s fever and mine? Was it Kek who led us to his tomb? Did you know Kek was pulling strings like a puppeteer from beyond the grave?”
“Yes! Yes! And yes!” She stared at me, furious. “Tell me, Hardy, does that change one thing? Does it?”
I fumbled for a clever reply, settling finally for a simple one.
“No.”
She closed her eyes. Trying to calm herself, she straightened her spine and turned her head slightly away from me. Her chest rose and fell, rose and fell with deep breaths. I watched and waited. When she opened her eyes again, I could not deduce if she had succeeded in tamping down her anger, but she could stand the sight of me again. I even noticed the beginnings of a smile at the corner of her mouth; although it might have been of the variety a cat shows to a mouse before swallowing him whole. She said, “There you have it then. My father is old, Hardy. Although he has kept himself in excellent condition for a man of his years, his health has declined precipitously in the last year. That brain fever very nearly killed him. But he knew Kek was reaching out to him across time, space, and dimensions unknown. He told me so. Despite the risks, he welcomed it. Can you imagine making contact as my father had done? After decades of studying Egyptian occultism, he succeeded where others had failed miserably. If Kek wanted to show us the location of his tomb and his sarcophagus, why wouldn’t we act on it? You read about the dream in my letter. And you followed the phantasm’s map just as surely as we did.”
“But I expected to find only artifacts.”
“There is that difference,” she admitted with a nod. “But artifacts do lead to other things.”
I was about to argue about the value of field research versus the hazard of following evil spirit guides when we spotted something approaching the well through the sandstorm.
Tall and dark, moving slowly, deliberately – straight for us.
“If that is Amun Odji-Kek, what will we say to him?” I asked.
Evangeline peered ahead.
“We will remind him that if not for us he would be entombed.”
“He doesn’t care. We serve him. That’s what he’ll say.”
“I serve no one.”
“Maybe if you mentioned how he and your father go back years together…”
The figure stopped. It seemed to be orienting itself, fixing upon our location. The head was long and large, the chest wide, and it began moving again.
“Where is Rojo?” Evangeline asked.
The sand swept by us like curtains of rain in a downpour.
“Crawled off somewhere, never to die… What’s wrong with the legs?” I asked, pointing at the figure. “They’re all funny, a jumble.”
“What’s wrong with the legs is there are four of them,” Evangeline said with great relief. “McTroy! Here we are! McTroy! Moonlight, come this way, girl, come on!”
The amber veil parted. Moonlight emerged, following the sound of Evangeline’s voice. McTroy rode low on the animal, leaning forward, and I could not see his eyes, only a slot like one in a suit of armor, between his poncho and his hat brim. He flung himself off the horse’s back, and Moonlight joined Neptune and Penny beside the well structure, their noble, oblong faces turned away from the worst of the wind. McTroy hitched Moonlight to one of the splintery wood posts supporting the beam, pulley, and bucket. He made sure our horses were securely tethered there too. Then he joined us.
“Where’s Wu?” Evangeline asked.
“Gone.”
He picked up a handful of pebbles and let them slip through his fingers.
“Gone how?” Disbelief, fear, anger – these three emotions mixed in her brief query. I feared she might strike our guide if he gave an answer that she found lacking.
“I lost him,” he said.
The last pebble dropped. He tugged the frayed collar of his poncho down past his chin and looked dartingly at us, then away again. I saw a man who would’ve welcomed a slap in the face because he hated his failure. Hated having to tell us he’d lost the boy.
Instead, Evangeline only showed him her shock. “What do you mean you ‘lost him’?”
“We were on foot searching for his parents when this storm kicked up. One minute he was behind me, the next he wasn’t. I called for him but got no reply. I was lucky to find you.”
A steady stream of sand trickled off his hat as he spoke.
“You left him out there alone? That is unacceptable, Mr McTroy,” Evangeline said.
The bounty man knew she was right.
“Perhaps, he found his parents,” I said, grasping for any reason not to despair.
“I didn’t see nobody.” He gulped like a man with a sore throat. His face was red from the whipping sand. He had been out there, searching in the whirlwind. “Hell, there were some rocks, a big pile of them right where he went missing. Maybe he got himself in there for shelter. If he stays put, he’ll be fine. I can spot those rocks again after this blows over. If he wanders, then he’s in trouble. We may never find him.”
“Don’t you say that!” Evangeline slugged McTroy in the shoulder. I could tell that she surprised him.
“How close are we to the damned church?” he asked.
“It’s right in front of us,” I said, “a stone’s throw, maybe a little farther, but not much. Rojo told us where to go. We needed protection from the storm.”
“That’s just dandy.” McTroy peered over his shoulder down into the well. “I don’t suppose you know where your friend is, do you?”
“I was telling Evangeline that he very likely just crawled away…”
“Just crawled away… huh? What do you think about that, Miss E?”
“It worries me some,” she said, biting at her lip.
“As it should,” he said. “’Cause if he’s squirmed over to the castle and is talking to his devil-lovin’ buddies, how’s that gonna sort out for us? I don’t like it, is how.”
“He was a bit harder to keep track of than Yong Wu,” I said, sharply.
“What are you saying? Spit it out, Doc.” His right hand balled into a fist.
“I’m saying we each lost someone in this chaos, and I don’t like to be blamed.”
“Funny thing about blame is there’s always – what in the Hell…?”
McTroy paused in his dissertation on blame at that moment as he had been struck lightly in the chest with something that stuck to his poncho. He plucked it from his chest and held it out for further study. It was long as my little finger, and just as plump, the color a bright, acid green. While he inspected it, another hit him. And another. Evangeline shrieked as a half dozen of the same creatures landed on her person. They pelted me as well. Did I mention they had wings? Fluttery transparent ones, two pair, the longer, thinner, and spotted set of blades being located n
earer the head and the fatter hindwings resembled sails. Quite amazing. Their buzzing noise was louder than the sandstorm, which had died down substantially, not that our view of the world got any clearer. For the sand was replaced without interruption by these flying invaders.
“Crickets!” McTroy shouted.
“Grasshoppers, actually,” I said. “These are desert locust. Right now, they’re swarming as their kind is wont to do. Millions, even billions of them. They fly with the wind. You can eat them, did you know? Some cultures consider them a delicacy.”
“Eat a cricket like hell.” McTroy pinched one by its wings and flung it away. Before hitting the ground, the locust righted itself and joined its brethren in flight.
Evangeline was slapping the insects from her face, not quite quickly enough to keep them from landing, here and there, upon cheek and brow, ears and chin.
“They don’t bite or sting or anything,” I said, hoping to make her feel better.
“I cannot… take… much… more of… this…” she said, until an especially menacing-looking specimen fanned his merry way between her fine lips. Her eyes bulged and she spit the grasshopper out, looking as if she might shriek, but the prospect of allowing an entry for more bugs into her mouth made her hold back until the pressure grew and grew to such proportions that she was forced to act with her whole body at once, and decisively so. She stood, turned, grabbed the rope and bucket hanging above the well, and leapt over the wall.
I hesitated.
“Follow her, Doc. I think she’s got the best idea.”
McTroy took one last doleful look at the horses. But there was obviously no bringing them down into the well with us.
I know my phobia of tight spaces is as tiresome to others as it is cumbersome to me. But the thought of being down a dark well was not at all preferable to swarms of grasshoppers according to my sensibilities. Yet I am not one to hold up the group for selfishness. I took the rope, testing it for strength, and lowered myself into the water hole.
McTroy shimmied down the rope after me, and soon we three were out of the sand and insects and into water up to our ribs, or in Evangeline’s case, slightly higher. The atmosphere of the well’s bottom was not exactly cool, the water not particularly sweet. But I am not ashamed to say I sunk down to my neck bones and drank, and I did feel better for doing so. I felt almost clean too. It was dim down there, but we could see each other. Our voices were magnified so there was no need to shout as we had to in the storm. A quiet and sloshy place, the wetted stones were stained a displeasing brown. The grasshoppers grew thick topside, flying and buzzing, and the little well’s roof added to my feeling of being forever closed in. I shut my eyes and dipped my face in the water and blew bubbles. Counting silently back from one hundred…
