by S. A. Sidor
“Backward, towards his tail.”
I pulled my knees under me. Moving into an unsteady crouch, I made myself less of a target. I tried to stand on the trampoline of semi-taut, soft flesh. But it was like standing on the skin of a chocolate pudding. I used my stick for balance. With my other hand, I hauled Wu up on his tiptoes. When I took my first step, the flesh beneath my boot yielded and swallowed my foot and ankle. I hesitated before taking another.
What if I sink into him, I thought. Like a nail driven into a tub of cold butter.
The decision to step or not step ultimately was not mine to make, for through the rock dust came a figure hurtling and landing on my back whereupon I sunk to my thighs in worm. But the clasping demon yanked me out again, and seizing me with vise-like arms and legs as tough as crab claws, likewise pinching me from neck to knees in an embrace I could not shake off, we both sledded along the spineless worm to the tail. I was the whole time dragging Wu by the wrist in a death-grip that would sooner have torn his arm off than let him go.
“Haw!” the figure yelled in my ear.
“Release me, fiend!”
“No can do, Doc.”
McTroy dug his spurs into El Gusano’s rump and plowed a pair of deep furrows which brought our three-man slide to a messy halt. “This bugger’s juicy!”
If worms can be said to scream, then El Gusano did just that.
The sound so shocked the ghouls they ceased firing.
El Gusano squirmed backward into the abyss with alarming speed. His mouth boomed at them. The great, grooved, heaving segments of the worm’s body made the barest of kissing contact with the walls as he descended taking us along for the plunge. Short of freefalling but not by much. Soon the dark enveloped us.
“Side cave,” McTroy shouted. He still had me wrapped up. I could hardly breathe.
“What–?” I gasped.
“Find the dang side cave where Evangeline is. Get in there ’fore he does.”
“Immobile… sssssshhh… crushing my…” McTroy rode upon my back, pinning me against the worm meat like a rodeo calf he was trying to tie down.
“You’re squeezing him too tight,” Wu said.
“Sorry,” he said. His bandy legs unlocked.
I had the capacity for taking air once more and began coughing. “That’s where the cave will be.” I shook a finger at shadows where even in the pitch black there was a hint of solid wall rushing past. “Starboard. Look for a light in the opening.” I cleared my throat. I did not see any light or the cave. What I felt was a sense of falling slower. Without light I lost my spatial sense. I do not know if it was the change of speed or the rubbery quality of the worm beneath me, but I found myself slipping again, not toward the tail end but starboard, in the direction where I had been staring so intently for a sign, a flicker of candles, or a lantern’s warm glow. This time I could not stop. I had my stick in one hand and Wu in the other. McTroy had only just unclasped himself from me. I searched for him with my stick hand as Wu and I rolled off the roundness of the worm into nothing but empty air.
Something like a breeze blew across my cheeks. I realized it was McTroy, sweeping his arms out and trying to catch me. Alas, I was too far over the edge. His fingers snagged my one intact sleeve but it was slathered in worm-slime, and the material snaked through his grip.
Bottomless, I thought. We will fall forever. I have failed the boy and Evangeline.
In anger and futility I struck out with my stick.
And the ferrule punctured the side of the worm.
I was hanging there like an Ourang-Outang on a branch with Wu like an infant version of myself clinging to my leg. This was stalling death and that was all. A pause. The stick was too slippery. My hands were sweating. The worm still moved with stout, barely contained fury and bashed his hugeness into the rocks. I could not climb up. Down was endless murk ad infinitum. McTroy remained undetectable to me. Perhaps he was dead already. Darkness hooded the entire ordeal. I looked down at Wu grappling my leg and I searched my brain for some consoling word. He was only a boy.
A boy I could see in silhouette.
How was that possible?
“A lantern, Dr Hardy! I see the entrance to the cave,” he cried out.
“Excellent. How far is it?”
“Right below me.”
My palm slipped along the frictionless ebony stick. “Do you think you might–?”
His weight was no longer attached to my leg. I looked down. Saw only my boot dripping worm-slime, and a faint, orangey glow that started somewhere under my heel.
“Yong Wu!”
El Gusano twitched at the pain of my stick-thorn in his side. He shivered like a horse. He contorted himself, flexing into the far wall, bending like a giant “U” with me deep in the letter’s well. I knew then that he was planning to bulge out and catch me like a gnat with the hard knuckle of his belly and smear my guts across the stone. When he tightened and I heard the explosion of stink leave his mouth as he exerted himself, then I withdrew my stick from his gooey hide and let his momentum throw me in the vicinity of the orange light. I spread my arms to fly – to fly! – and landed not unlike a clumsy duck on a frozen pond.
The pond was the floor of the side cave. Wu was there, waiting for me. He was holding a bull’s-eye lantern which he pointed at the back of the cave.
I scanned the well-lit space, no bigger than a wealthy family’s parlor.
Evangeline was not here. We were alone.
Wu was studying something: a tableau in need of interpretation.
A round table. Around the table three wooden stools. All the pieces scarred but functional. One of the stools was tipped over. On the table: a half-empty bottle. I picked it up. Pulled the cork. The clear liquid sloshing inside smelled smoky sweet, herbal, floral – I concluded this concoction was mescal (I had never tasted it before and wasn’t planning to try some now). Beside the bottle, a pair of overturned glasses. Remains of a third glass lay shattered in the corner. Papers were tacked to the wall. Railroad maps. Timetables. Coach schedules between cities and towns on both sides of the border. Also on the tabletop, the skins of oranges whose fruit was sucked dry and the pulp chewed. Touching the wood, I felt graininess on my fingertips and put them to my tongue – salt.
Wu’s mother had a good nose. She had been correct on all points.
“What happened? Where is Miss Evangeline?” Wu asked.
“I have the same questions,” I said.
The worm knocked against the edges of the cave’s entrance. His hot breath filled the cave. He grunted and pushed hard enough into the rock that fine dust rained down.
“Give me that lantern,” I said, “quickly.”
I turned the bull’s-eye glare on the chomping mouth of El Gusano. The hole of his maw was wide enough to swallow a barrel as if it were a pill. I saw boots in his mouth. I swung the lantern closer. “Those aren’t McTroy’s or Evangeline’s,” I told Wu. “He must have snatched one of the ghouls off the ledge and ate him to show his displeasure at being shot.”
“I do not want to be eaten,” Wu said.
“Nor do I, friend, nor do I.” I picked up one of the stools and tossed it in the worm’s trap. He cracked the legs and gulped the splintered wood. I fed him the other stools, one at a time.
“Wu, help me with the table. It will at least slow him down.”
We were about to heave-ho the table into his jaws when the distinct pop of a gunshot rang out, nearly deafening us. El Gusano’s chewing stopped. A stool leg poked from its lips like a toothpick. He sagged at the rim of the cave. A river of gray poured from his mouth, running all the way to the back of the cave where it pooled.
“Oh, it stinks.” Wu stuck out his tongue. “I never smelled anything so bad.”
Just before the last of the worm’s tensile strength failed, a hand appeared above his deflated-looking head. Then another hand and the top of a hat. Finally, McTroy hopped off the worm. He turned and kicked El Gusano under the chin, and the mighty b
andito, leader of the necrófagos, and fearsome, giant, shapeshifting annelid-man went over the threshold and silently began his fall to the bottom of the bottomless abyss.
“Last bullet,” McTroy said. “I figured brains are pretty near mouths. So I took a chance and plugged him.”
“You waited long enough,” I said.
“I had to take a measure,” he said, poking around the floor, uncorking the bottle, sniffing and upending it for what appeared to be the longest swallow in history. He blew out a long breath. He wiped the mouth of the bottle and offered it around. “Wanna slug?” When no one drank he took it upon himself to finish the final, smoky sweet drops.
35
Mysterious Third
McTroy’s boot pushed through shards twinkling in the lantern light. The pieces added up to one glass. Smashed to smithereens. The scintillating bits lay directly under a yellowed, finger-begrimed, oft-folded and unfolded map tacked askew on the wall. A railroad map. Desert, mountains, and mines. Not much else. Rails moved people and money in and out of the Arizona Territory. That’s why the necrófagos cared. Why El Gusano studied maps. Rails meant treasure. For filling the purse and the ghoulish belly. A stain showed where the glass exploded. Drips wept down the page, leaving a wiggy shadow face that covered Yuma, Opa, Pinal, Pima, and part of Cochise County.
McTroy pressed his nose to the map. He went cross-eyed as a Siamese cat. For an anxious second I feared he might actually lick the paper.
“Some people don’t like mescal,” he said, backing away. His voice sounded sad, baffled. He took the wasted dram of Mexican agave spirit as a personal affront.
“I dare conjecture it was our Evangeline,” I said.
McTroy frowned. “Seems like a woman of varied tastes to me. But you may be right, Doc.” He’d stuck his finger into the empty mescal bottle, carrying it that way as he searched the cave for further signs. All while tapping the bottle against his leg.
I continued. “She refused something they proposed to her. Vigorously refused.”
“They?”
“El Gusano and, as Mrs Wu told us, a mysterious third. A gentleman.”
“You think worm-o and this polished man were acting indecent?”
“That had not entered my mind,” I said (though briefly it had). “No. This is not a den of that particular shade of sin. The evil they discussed here was of an esoteric nature.” I knocked the ape head of my stick on the center of the table. “See this carving?”
McTroy cocked his head. “Looks like an eye.”
“An eye with sunbeams radiating out in every direction. I believe this to be the Eye of Horus. The All-Seeing Eye is a powerful occult symbol in many ancient cultures.”
“Deviltry?” He popped the bottle off his finger and tossed it to the abyss.
“Black magical business, to be sure.” I loomed over the round table. “What I see here is a meeting between three people. An attempt at cordiality is made. The two men are talking to her.” I pushed the table back exactly where it had been when Wu and I arrived, amid the now absent, worm-devoured stools. “They sat triangularly around the circle. The eye is within both the circle and their human pyramid. This is no coincidence. Extra-dimensional gods are being summoned. Evangeline would know more about this than I do. I am treading to the farthest limits of my knowledge.”
McTroy stood at my side, his hands on his hips. Imagining.
“What do these gents want?” he asked.
“I don’t know. But they can’t force the matter. There is an element of persuasion involved. Requiring, at least, a private chat. They ask for something only she can give.”
The bounty hunter rubbed his flinty chin whiskers. Maybe he hoped to spark an intelligent theory. “I never reckoned the maggot as a strong persuader of females. Too full of himself. Kind of fella who bulls a lady into a corner with his belly. Demands attention but doesn’t give any. Sloppy hands at the saloon, you know what I mean?”
I nodded, indicating I thought I did.
“He was amply lacking in social charms.” I concurred with the essence of what McTroy said even if I lacked any firsthand tavern experience. “So he is a bystander. Used, likely, as a silent threat. The stick rather than the carrot. It is the other gentleman who inveigles her. Or he tries to. He is the key to this parley. He calls the meeting.”
“And our little miss whips a glass at his head. Whew.” McTroy smirked and slapped his hands together. “Guess he didn’t know what he was steppin’ into.”
I reserved my judgment.
“Or he knew and made the effort nonetheless–”
“Excuse me, sirs,” Wu said. “But may we please get Miss Evangeline back now?”
“There’s an idea I can hitch my wagon to.” McTroy tipped his hat. The twinkle had returned to his gaze. I was certain the mescal in his blood was no small reason.
“Excellent request,” I said, nodding. “You keep us on the right track, young man, as always. First, calm yourself. We see no evidence the lady is dead. Everything speaks to the contrary.” I exaggerated for his sake. “Second, we have clues that she was kept alive for a reason.” I paced the hollow bandshell of El Gusano’s cave. Careful to step over the stream of gray-toned spew – those heavy juices the worm had disgorged in his final death throes. The smell was most vile even among the disgusting array of odors associated with the worm. I tucked my face into my elbow, preferring my own stink.
“Thur. Hah di he con and gaw fra heer innis numa four?”
“Say again, pard.” McTroy screwed up his face in bewilderment.
I lifted my mouth above the bend in my arm. “Third, how did he come and go from here in his human form? Surely, this was a cozy enough notch to snug into when he changed to the crawler state, wanting to put some distance between himself and the ghouls, steal a bit of quiet, reflective time alone, but he has his clothes to consider, the liquor, the furniture and maps… see, he idled here as a man too. How did he get in?”
The last question sprung from my lips as I made a quick re-crossing of the vomit trail. A small step. Smaller than before. The initial sludgy river of gray had reduced to a stream at my previous pass but now, here, underfoot, it was but a webby mucus trickle.
The great volume of liquid – where did it disappear to?
I followed the meandering spillage to the point where the wall and floor intersected. Rock to rock, tan on tan. A thin shadow was etched between them. There I crouched. I aimed the lantern. Squinting.
A separation. At the base of the wall.
Fairly uniform, approximately horizontal. Was it natural?
I jabbed my stick at it.
The gap ran as wide as a man’s shoulders. I placed my wetted fingers there and felt an air current– “A secret passage,” I said. I cannot recall ever using the phrase in daily life before this adventure, but it had become part of my regular lexicon. “Behind this portion of wall is a space that vents outside. The worm vomit seeps underneath and does not return. Gravity is showing us the way out. The question is: Where is the catch?”
“What catch, sir?” Wu had moved in to peer at the neat sliver of darkness.
“There is a release hidden somewhere in the room. It will be accessible but not obvious. When we find it, we find our escape… and Evangeline. It’s as simple as that.”
My comment sent Wu and McTroy into a flurry of wall slapping, floor tapping, and general pushing and pulling at every suspect cranny and square inch of the side cave. Funny, the cave was small for a giant worm, adequate for a man, but positively huge for hiding a secret button or lever that might unlock the door we needed to open.
Wu began taking down the maps and coach timetables. He stuffed them inside his shirt. Behind the last coach timetable – a protuberance of rock – a speleothem, common to caves – this example appeared to be calcite, root beer brown with a smudge of olive and a band of rhubarb crystals – earthy, but aren’t all rocks earthy?, and yet this peculiar specimen seemed quite out of place sticking straight from
the wall at ninety degrees, shaped like a pig’s nose, twitchy really, how inquisitive it was. Wu’s eyes lit up.
“Do you think this is the catch?”
“It is quite catchy looking, isn’t it?”
Wu’s hand hovered over the rock. “When I see it, I’m thinking I want to touch it. Maybe that’s why it is hidden behind the poster.”
McTroy stopped searching and joined us.
“Push it and find out,” he said.
Wu pushed the pig’s nose in.
The door made a click! and swung open.
A staircase.
I shined the lantern at the steps. Going up. I could smell fresh air pouring down like a waterfall. Should I tell you we ran like boys? (Well, Yong Wu was a boy), but we did. Wu went first, ducking under my arm, bumping the lantern, outrunning the beam.
“We don’t know what’s up there,” I said.
“She is up there.” Wu took the chiseled stairs two at a time. I was on his heels. McTroy over my shoulder, breathing mescaline breath. He has no bullets, I thought. The scarred wooden door at the top stood open. Outside. Night sky. Stars like pinholes in a black blanket. We were in a courtyard. Monastery walls surrounded us. Evangeline was in the middle of the courtyard. Standing still, under the moonlight. Wu ran. We all did.
36
Mysterious Third, Cont’d: the Bloody Scratches
Evangeline was waiting beside a fountain. Sand clogged the tiers of the fountain; dry stones filled its lower pool. Water had not bubbled here in years. I shined my light ahead as Wu ran to her. She did not react to the light or to us. The sand in the fountain sparkled like freshly fallen snow. As I stepped closer, I saw the stones in the pool were smooth, sun-bleached, and all about the same size. Their sides were oddly eaten away with small holes. Acidic waters? I wondered.
No.
Not holes, and not stones either.
Skulls.
Human skulls. The monks had built a monument to death at the center of their compound, making a mockery of life-giving water in the desert, and they had decorated the bottom of their font with the picked-clean heads of their victims. Ghastly bastards.
