The Shadow Town (An Evan Ryder Weird Western)

by J. W. Bradley

  Nina was pulling Carlyle by the hand and they were already halfway up the balcony stairs.

  “Something’s got them riled up.” Hoot and I were running for the stairs and we reached them with about ten feet to spare. The investigator turned at the last second, pulling a little sack from his coat, he poured the contents out in his hand and flung what looked like little round balls out across the marble floor. The closest group of our pursuers ran across the objects and their feet shot out from under them.

  Hoot reached the landing where I was covering him with the rifle. “Old lead muzzleloader shot. As you can see, in this line of work that kind of gun’s reload time is just too long.”

  “Clearly.”

  We made it up through the musty attic and those on our heels were so close and so determined that I had to force myself not to look down lest I completely lose my nerve as the other men pulled me up through the roof hatch of the bank. Hoot slammed it closed and pulled the bolt across it.

  “That ain’t rabies!” With a shaky hand, Carlyle scratched at where I suspected his chin might reside, deep within the recesses of his formidable beard. “But those folks are like a mad pack of coyotes.”

  “No, not rabies.” I scrambled to my feet and went to the edge of the roof overlooking the main road. Thankfully Hoot’s horse and Anna remained at the hitching post. But now Anna looked a bit bored and I nearly found myself wishing a loud, healthy thunderstorm would come along, scaring the mustang into snapping her tether and running off.

  Nina came up to stand beside me and I took her hand in mine as we surveyed the town. “We can’t leave this place like it is. It’s too dangerous a thing.” Here and there people were still stumbling out of their homes shaking their heads, possibly as the last vestiges of humanity left them.

  “They’re getting worse.” She said.

  The thought of killing them all made me more than a little queasy, not to mention the fact that we’d more than likely be killed ourselves before we were finished. I looked to the eastern horizon and willed the sky to lighten just a bit, maybe in daylight the circumstances wouldn’t seem quite as horrific as they did now. But on second thought, at least the darkness hid a good portion of the blood we had been forced to spill. “Nina, I’ll speak plainly. Is there any way in hell I can convince you to stay here on the roof while I search for clues down in that well?”

  She looked down toward the circular stone structure, surrounded by work platforms, shovels and other equipment. She squinted those magnificent oversized eyes of hers to block out some of the moonlight then sighed heavily in resignation. “At least, make it make sense to me. Why should you go alone?”

  I could only shrug and shake my head.

  She seemed older than ever before. Why had her childlike innocence become so important to me? It flew directly in the face of how we lived our lives. Good Lord, was I a mess anymore. And I had lost my new bowler hat. Carter Maynes would be mighty pleased he had a habit of frowning upon my style of dress, often calling it ‘highfalutin’. And now I was-.

  “Ryder?”

  “Just thinking, Nina.” I turned around and found Franklin Hoot staring at me while sitting on the hatch lid, cross legged and smoking a pipe of carved ivory. The tobacco’s scent was agreeable and I afforded the other man a tired smile. “Have I thanked you yet for inviting us to this lovely party Mr. Hoot?”

  “I don’t believe you have Mr. Ryder. But I would be much obliged if you’d save your thanks until we have a handle on things.”

  “All right, in that case, you’ll be happy to know I’ve got things pretty much worked out by now.”

  Hoot perked up at this. “That is what I was waiting to hear.” He stood up and went to the large sack he had left on the roof earlier. Straining, he heaved a long metal object out follow by what looked like a camera stand and finally a small crate. “This is a Maxim Gun, military issue. Unlike Richard Gatlin’s version, this weapon requires no second operator to crank a reloading wheel. It uses the recoil motion to feed itself rounds. This version of course is smaller in size and was designed for our organization under contract. Lucas Henry had it stashed in the bank.” What had looked like a camera stand, was actually a tripod and he expertly mounted the gun on it and fed the end of a chain of ammunition into the gun. “I’ve used one before.”

  Carlyle let out a long, low whistle. “Now that there is a beauty. If we had a gun like that in the 112th Calvary regiment we’d have cleaned up those red-.” He froze up as if only now remembering who he was addressing. “No offense intended Mr. Hoot.”

  The W.E.r.d. investigator only smiled patiently and finished assembling the Maxim. “Never fear sir, what has past has past. He sighted the gun in and checked its field of fire up and down the town’s main road. “Now what’s this plan of yours Ryder?”

  “Well, while you create a diversion, I’ll climb down in the well.”

  “Simple as all that?” Hoot was lightly tapping out his pipe on the barrel of the gun.

  “I hope.”

  12

  It wasn’t easy, but I managed to work my way down two stories and now clung motionless to the big clock above the main doors of the bank. As my luck would have it, the sun was finally creepy over the horizon, filling the town with its warm, revealing light. I could hear those things stumbling around inside the bank just on the other side of the brick wall I clung to.

  In the waning hours of the night, I had instructed Hoot to use his roof hopping tactic again to draw as many of the town folk away as he could. Of course the trick was that the bank was the one building in town that was impossible to jump to the roof of. Meaning to get there you had to go up through the bank itself, unless you had a rope that is. I tied one end of our rope to Hoot’s waist and the spry little guy managed to leap to the adjacent building and tie it off to a roof beam as a means to get back up to our refuge or as a last ditch route of escape. He had left with an unlit lantern and half our match supply to start up a couple fires. As I waited, clinging to the bank like a spider, the smell of smoke hit me first, then in the early dawn light, flames appeared on a building at the end of the road. Seconds later, directly across the street from the first, new flames appeared, licking at the second building’s eaves.

  Somewhere above me there was a loud thump, signaling Franklin Hoot’s successful return to the bank’s roof. I was particularly thankful for this, because the thought of old John Carlyle manning the Maxim gun as I made my run for the well, wasn’t much more appealing than getting drug down in the dust by the maddened townsfolk.

  All at once the windows blew out of one of the burning buildings. Soon after, a flaming human figure came hurtling out the front door and collapsed in the street.

  I hadn’t noticed at first but thing’s had become deathly still in the bank. I put my ear to the wall and listened. What where they doing in there?

  There was a sudden motion below me. A cluster of townsfolk had left the bank porch and were heading toward the burning buildings. Still more appeared from down alleys and from different buildings, following the others. There were still a good number in the bank but no one, not a one, went to the well to fetch water for dousing the flames. I was more certain than ever that the well was the source of this town’s ungodly malady.

  I looked up and there was Nina, leaning over the edge of the roof, her long hair falling down around her head. When she nodded at me, I let go of the clock and dropped to the ground. I’m pleased to say it was a more graceful landing than in the alley the night before, but my legs were jarred when I hit, so I broke into a clumsy gallop of a run. It was a good fifty yards to the well, sitting right there in the middle of the road. I didn’t look left or right as I ran. Though I could pick up shapes at the edge of my vision, nothing seemed to be coming at me. Maybe it was still dark enough and the fires just distracting enough to get me safely to that hole in the ground.

  I was about twenty paces from the well, and an incredulous, triumphant grin was just breaking out on my fac
e when I heard the first pounding fire from the Maxim. In the next second I heard the crunching sounds of running boots on the gravel. And now I could sense shapes closing in around me. Still I stared straight ahead. The circumference of the community well was about twelve feet around and the wall about three feet high, without stopping I leaped up and over the wall. I reached out for a rickety construction ladder that was affixed to the side, and just as my hands gripped one of the rungs I was hit from behind by something big. It was a man who had come headlong after me over the well wall. He grabbed my waist and under our combined weight, the ladder collapsed beneath us like it was made out of toothpicks and glued together with spit.

  As my unwanted piggyback rider and I tumbled through the darkness, my pants caught on a nail and my fall was slowed only for the time it took the rusty thing to tear down the length of my leg, but it was enough to position the other man below me and then we hit the bottom seconds later, in a crunching mass of flesh and bone.

  I covered my head as the rest of the ladder came down in the darkness around me then jumped up painfully quick to my feet, anticipating an attack from the big man. After a couple of heartbeats, I determined my debris covered assailant was down for the count and as my eyes adjusted, I saw there was a lantern lying in the rubble at my feet. I lit the lantern and let my thoughts settle along with the dust around me. As I suspected, there was no water present. I had gambled that down here somewhere was not only the answer to what was wrong with Krotan’s Brook, but also a way to stop it. The shared mind theory had led me to believe there was something controlling the townsfolk, something I could deal with or even kill if need be. But that had been a gamble, the more I thought about it, the more worried I became. They all seemed to share a mind but it might have been more of a knowledge based sharing than a matter of controlling.

  Here I was, trapped in a well, with no escape if they all managed to swarm in after me. I could only hope that Franklin Hoot would be able to get Nina out of danger if I never made it back to daylight. But would anywhere be safe if this thing spread? With that thought driving me on, I held up the lantern and unexpectedly discovered that a downward angling side tunnel was cut in the earth to my right.

  My nose picked up a little of what Nina must have smelled, I couldn’t identify it, but like the ocean she had compared it to, the scent sure as hell didn’t belong out here in southern Colorado. I took to that side passage in a bent, shuffling fashion as the ceiling was low above my head and the floor was spongy enough to make my footing suspect.

  I went quite a ways, the whole time expecting to hear half the town tumble down the well in pursuit. The further I went, the more I wondered where the damn water was. And who in the hell digs a well into the earth at such an ungodly angle. The lantern revealed dry clay above and on the walls, but the ground was damp and earthier, a brown moldy substance coated it. Once I got on my hands and knees and took a good sniff, in hindsight not the best idea when dealing with an unknown cause of infection, but what choice did I have? At least my trepidation was unwarranted as the stuff turned out not to be the source of the ocean scent as I had expected, in fact, it smelled like plain old wet clay.

  I stood up, emboldened, ready to find some answers and my next step wasn’t a cautious one, so of course that’s when I slipped. My feet shot out from under me and I landed on my ass. I only slid down the tunnel about two feet but it was enough for me to hit an invisible drop off helplessly.

  For a moment I was in the air and I figured my landing might be a long time coming. But I crashed down on my tailbone for the second time and luckily I had only dropped about six feet. The lantern was still clutched in my left hand somehow.

  I was no longer in a roughly hewn tunnel but a smooth walled place. Ancient sandstone block walls disappeared in the darkness both in front and back of me. I stood up, not bothering to wipe at the grime now thoroughly incrusting my suit. Holding the lantern aloft revealed more of the same: a passageway of indeterminable length disappeared in each direction. Said passageway obviously not constructed by the populace of Krotan’s Brook.

  I set off forward, deciding to head first in one direction then quickly back the other if I did not find something of consequence. After several minutes I came to a rather formidable looking cave in and quickly turned back the other way. I passed the place where I had fallen into the tunnel and had gone about thirty feet when the previously strange ocean smell became downright fishy in complexity.

  The Iroquois found itself in my hand as a dark form on the ground grew in visibility at the edge of the lantern’s light. It was a long dark coat much like the one Franklin Hoot wore. I flipped it open with the toe of my boot and inside was sewn dozens of pockets of all sizes, containing the telltale working tools of a W.E.r.d. inspector’s coat. Lucas Henry’s I deduced. I ruffled through it a bit and found a pouch of the pungent crystals similar to the ones Hoot’s bunch had ambushed us with. I took that with me.

  There were footprints in the thin layer of dust on the floor. I followed them to where the integrity of the ceiling and walls began to show signs of failing. The earth around the tunnel was pushing its way in. The floor became more uneven and spots of where sand was slowly trickling in between the stones was evident everywhere. Finally I found signs of water, it lay in black stagnant puddles here and there. I reached a point where the floor sank away entirely and I walked into ankle deep liquid, my wake’s ripples cutting out through the darkness, heralding my imminent arrival. But arrival where?

  Ahead, the tunnel appeared smaller at first, but as the lantern’s wavering light revealed more. I stopped and tried to make sense of what I was seeing. The walls and ceiling were overgrown with a sickly grey fungus. Bulbous and slick with moisture, the mushroom things covered nearly every surface. They were like nothing I had ever seen. Monstrous and looming, they grew out of a film like that of curdled milk, all leading back to the pool of water I now stood in. Grimacing I raised the lantern and could just make out another cave-in beyond the unholy sprouts. The floor on the far side looked dry. Telling me an underwater spring might be the cause of the water at my feet. Also something about that second cave in tugged at me, but a faint popping sound made me hop in my boots a bit and lose my train of thought. I bent over and down close to the waterline, one of the more drooping of the mushrooms was deflating, spilling tiny particles into the water. I’m sure it was the hot, close air and the macabre circumstances coloring my perceptions but I thought I saw that the particles were squirming like so many tiny brine shrimp as they hit the surface.

  I stood up and stepped quickly backwards, out of the water. I had most likely found the source of the town’s strange infection but a solution to it was not immediately apparent. I could use the lantern to burn this grotesque garden to ash but what would that achieve? Take a sample back to the surface? We had not the time for a true scientific study.

  As I squinted in thought, the almost overwhelming sensation I was being watched swept over me. I looked once again toward the suspect cave in, then to one of the more rotund mushroom heads hanging down from the tunnel’s ceiling. Its membrane appeared thin and close to bursting. I darker line dissected the thing’s curving surface and as I watched it, the line split to reveal a terrible, alien and nightmarish eye!

  The thing blinked slowly and its crimson iris rolled toward me. I looked away, raising my gun at the same time.

  “Good God.” I muttered into my shoulder. But before I could pull the trigger, the sound of another gun firing somehow traveled to me from the surface. I recognized the deep booming of Hoot’s Remington Kittredge.

  Nina!

  I had to get back, nothing mattered now but getting her safely away. This otherworldly menace defied reason. No amount of the precious logic I trucked in would avail me here. The thought of whatever evil consciousness controlling that eye forcing its way into my mind was too much. I mean… I could probably overcome it but, well, there was Nina to think about. Okay that last part was sheer nervous bravado.


  I thought of the little pouch of ammonia crystals I had secreted in my jacket. Refusing to set down the lantern, I holstered my gun, reached into the pocket and pulled out the pouch. All this I did without once returning my gaze to that of the horrific eye. I shook some of the crystals into the water and flung the rest at the mushrooms where the pouch burst open. Only then did I brave a look and saw that some of the crystals had landed and stuck fast to that devilish leering orb. They sizzled there satisfactorily but now the eye seemed to be glaring at me in rage and pain.

  I turned and ran.

  13

  Nina watched as Franklin Hoot expertly traversed the Maxim gun back and forth across the street below, the gun’s bullets blowing arms, legs and heads off the evil townsfolk in a spectacularly bloody fashion as they ran in pursuit of Evan Ryder.

  One of the biggest ones slipped through the deadly hail of lead and hit Ryder just as he leapt into the darkness. Nina’s heart beat rapidly in fear for she had recognized the assailant’s curly red hair. “That was Michael Roy.” She whispered the words but Hoot had heard her.

  “Are you certain?” He asked, still sighting down the gun even though the street had cleared.

  “Yes.” She said in a growl before catching herself and continuing on in a fashion more befitting a frightened little girl. “I could make him out quite well.”

  “So it’s true, we have lost him.”

  John Carlyle had his ear against the trapdoor. “They’re getting loud down there.”

  Hoot ignored him, he was watching Nina. “Only Roy made it down after him. Mr. Ryder can handle himself.”