The Vanishing

by Bentley Little

  She was not alone, he saw as he drew closer. There were others just like her, walking around naked, and it was only the fact that many of them were male that made him slow his pace.

  Come, she danced. Come.

  Now he was looking at the scene before him more objectively, his critical faculties breaking through the haze in which they’d been shrouded since his encounter with the hole in the hut. What he saw was impossible, though he accepted it unquestioningly. He had stumbled upon—or been led to—a community of these creatures. They were of a kind but not identical, and he saw fur and scales, horns and tails. Their homes had bones visibly embedded in the adobe, and rotting carcasses lay on the ground between them.

  He understood that these were the type of beings that had assaulted Robin and her friends all those years ago, and he wondered if that had been the reason for his attraction to her in the first place, if on some subliminal level he had sensed that taint—and wanted her for it.

  He told himself that was crazy thinking, but as outrageous as it sounded on the face of it, he could not dismiss such an idea out of hand. Particularly when he considered his own reaction to the revelation of her attack. Rather than cutting the vacation short the way she wanted and being concerned with the feelings this was dredging up for her, he had insisted that they remain and had even contemplated staying longer.

  Not only that, but his desire for her had intensified.

  He felt guilty, but the guilt turned to disgust as he saw a large male—nine feet tall if it was an inch—hold a small skull in its hand and bite into the cranium as though it were a cracker.

  The woman—

  creature

  monster

  —of his dreams continued to dance for him, trying to seduce him. She had only one breast but it was perfectly formed and centered pleasingly in the center of her chest, jiggling slightly as she swayed sensuously from left to right. She thrust her hips forward, moving in and out of the moonlight and shadows, exposing the exaggerated attributes of her vulva, her shiny tail slithering seductively between her legs.

  He wanted to jump on her, wanted to rip off his clothes and taste her, touch her, take her. But he resisted, and as the minutes passed, the come-hither expression on her face was replaced with something that more resembled puzzlement. It was clear that she was not used to rejection, and his ability to withstand the temptation even though every fiber of his being longed to be intimately joined with her, made him feel powerful, gave him strength.

  He could not see as well as he had only a few seconds previously. The moonlight seemed dimmer. Shadows appeared darker, and there were more of them. From within one of those shadows came a man who made his way past the milling creatures, around the dancing seductress and up the grass-carpeted path, a human being like himself wearing only dirty, raggedy clothes. He seemed uncomfortable and ill at ease, and he stood in front of Andrew for several long moments as if unsure of what to do.

  Or as though he was waiting for instructions.

  That was more like it, and even as Andrew’s brain articulated the thought, the filthy man attempted a smile and held out his hand to be shaken, like a parody of a bad salesman. Andrew did not shake it, and the hand slowly dropped back to the man’s side.

  ‘‘Who are you?’’ Andrew asked. ‘‘What are you doing here?’’

  ‘‘I . . . am . . . here . . . for . . . her.’’ He spoke slowly, and his speech was thick and awkward, as though he hadn’t spoken English in a long, long time. At the word ‘‘her,’’ he absently reached down to touch his penis, and Andrew saw that while it was hard, it was also bruised and scraped, red and bloodied.

  This man, too, he understood, was in the thrall of one of the females.

  In love?

  Andrew was not sure he’d put it that way, but it was clear that the desire had become obsessive, so much so that the man had turned his back on human beings and civilization and had come out here to the wilderness to live with these . . . whatever they were.

  Wasn’t that what he was doing, too?

  No, Andrew realized, and for the first time since arriving in California he knew for certain that he did not belong here, this was not for him. He might have been called, but he did not have to answer.

  More than anything else in the world, he wanted to see Robin and the kids right now, wanted to be with them, wanted to be traveling east on that highway home.

  ‘‘We . . . can . . . help . . . them,’’ the man said in that maddeningly slow, dumb voice.

  ‘‘Help them do what?’’

  The man’s mouth hung open and his eyes moved up as his brain searched for the word. Frustrated, he shook his head.

  ‘‘I’m not helping anyone do anything,’’ Andrew said. ‘‘I’m going—’’ Home, he’d planned to say, but just at that second soft hands reached around from behind him, one snaking around his neck, one cupping his crotch. The fingers, white and slimy as they were, knew what they were doing and even through the thick material of his jeans manipulated him expertly. He tried to pull away, but she was stronger than he was—and part of him did not want to pull away.

  ‘‘You . . . help . . . or . . .’’ The man made a high-pitched whistling noise that sounded like something made by a ceramic flute, and the sound was echoed by the beings all around them.

  He could guess what that meant, and to his mind the chuckling that followed confirmed it.

  If he were a religious man, he would have prayed.

  But he was not.

  So instead he cried.

  Twenty-six

  1850

  John Sutter was not the man he had been.

  Neither, Marshall supposed, was he.

  The two of them had not had a falling out—not exactly—but the friendship was strained between them. If it could even be called a friendship anymore. ‘‘Business partner’’ was probably the most accurate description of their relationship, but even that implied more contact than they had with each other these days. For the most part, Sutter attended to affairs in Coloma and around the fort, while he saw to things farther afield, and the less they had to see of each other the better.

  He’d been gone for two months this time, although one of the reasons was a freak spring snowstorm that had kept the high-line trail impassable for nearly a week. He’d even made it to San Francisco, and he’d found it relaxing to be in a real city, to be away from the wilderness and among the monuments of men. On the way back, he found himself thinking that there was probably a lot of carpentry work to be found in such a growing city, and he decided that the next time he was out that way, he would try to look for a job and leave the diggings behind permanently.

  He didn’t have the stomach anymore for a life in the wild.

  His party arrived at the fort, and he sensed the difference immediately. It was nothing concrete, nothing he could point to with any specificity, but no one came out to greet them, and the few people they saw were surly and preoccupied. The buildings themselves seemed shabby and untended, and while there weren’t weeds actually growing in the gravel of the courtyard, they would not have been out of place. Life at the fort had changed, and Marshall wondered if that was merely because he’d been absent for a while or if Sutter’s previously iron grip had faltered.

  There were quite a few unfamiliar faces at the various posts. He knew the men who’d returned with him and recognized a few people here and there, but for the most part Sutter seemed to have replaced most of his dependable old hands with newer workers whom Marshall couldn’t identify and who did not look particularly trustworthy.

  The captain was not in his office, but Marshall and Claude Lake, his second in command on the trip, gave an abbreviated report and a stack of invoices and paperwork to the rather belligerent young man who was manning the office, telling him to make sure that Sutter knew they were back. Claude went for a drink with the others, but Marshall was tired and said that he just wanted to go back to his place and catch up on some much-needed sleep. On the way, he
walked by the storage room where he had shot the female creature—

  Let’s fuck it

  —but he passed by without even trying to open the door and look inside, his muscles tense and knotted.

  His own cabin had remained untouched, but there was another cabin being built nearby, in view of his side window, and he realized that although this was his home, it did not feel like home to him anymore. He had some money saved up, not a lot but enough, and he decided that rather than wait until his next journey to San Francisco, he would collect his pay from Sutter and start looking for a new situation immediately.

  He was through with this.

  Marshall found an old whiskey bottle, downed its contents, then slept soundly through the rest of the day and well into the night, undisturbed by dreams.

  It was the tapping on his door that woke him up. ‘‘Hold on!’’ he called, groggily getting out of bed and stumbling toward the door to unlatch it.

  He wasn’t sure how long the tapping had been going on, but it was low, not loud, and he sensed that it must have been sounding for quite some time in order for its percussive rhythm to capture his attention in his sleep. And it was tapping, not knocking, a light, continuous rapping on the wood that he should have realized instantly was far too even and far too consistent to have been made by any person. But he was still sleepy, was at the door already, and he unlatched and opened it.

  A crow had been making the noise, its beak pecking on the door, and the big black bird stood in the dirt in front of the cabin looking up at him.

  Its right wing was gone and that entire half of its body was featherless and bloody.

  Marshall was suddenly wide-awake. The crow had been shot and should be dead, yet it stood there before him, patiently waiting to get inside his cabin. Behind it he heard other sounds, saw more movement, and he quickly closed the door, lit his lantern, then reopened the door. With the area in front of the cabin illuminated more fully, he spotted a bobcat and a fawn, several small squirrels and a javelina. All of them had been grievously maimed, and a few of the squirrels looked like they were rotting. The lantern created a semicircle of light directly before him, but it made the area beyond that semicircle even darker, and he stepped forward, swinging the lantern first one way then the other as he saw that there were other animals here as well, animals that had been dead but resurrected. They seemed to be guarding the entrance to a path that led into a section of woods that Marshall would have sworn had not been there when he’d left two months ago.

  Guarding it or pointing him toward it?

  He didn’t know, didn’t care. Walking back inside, he got his rifle and a handful of shells that he shoved into the pocket of a coat he put on. Carrying the lantern and the rifle, he strode past, through, over the resurrected animals and down the path. There were trees and bushes that should not have been growing here, that had no business being in California, and Marshall remembered some of the stories he’d heard.

  Creatures more beast than man, more devil than beast, that had only to look at bushes to make them grow or touch eggs to make them hatch.

  He knew it would be smarter to wake someone from the fort, have a party of men come with him, but he’d always been a man who listened to his gut rather than his head, and he walked boldly into the woods alone, rifle at the ready, prepared for anything.

  Or so he thought.

  For it was mere moments later when he came across the building. Nearly half as long as the fort itself, the structure seemed to rise out of the forest. Whether it had been constructed in an existing meadow or whether standing timber had been felled in order to provide the site, there was no free space, no ground left over. The large leafy trees grew right next to the front wall, against the sides, leaving no open area.

  Marshall had not seen this building before and doubted that many others knew of its existence. It was new—it had to be—and it was built not of wood but adobe, like some of the Indians used. It reminded him of the hut he had encountered on the trip out to California—

  bag of bones

  —although it was much, much larger and actually had a door. No windows, though, and he wondered what was the reasoning behind that.

  Marshall thought of knocking, decided against it, and alert for any sign that others were about, he carefully placed his lantern on the ground. Still clutching the rifle and ready to use it at a second’s notice if necessary, he tried the door. It was unlatched, and he pulled it open as quietly as possible.

  From within, he heard a familiar mewling sound that made his blood run cold. No, not a sound. Sounds. There was more than one in there, and he shifted the rifle in his arm before picking up the lantern and peering inside.

  Within was an antechamber from whose walls hung scythes and swords, knives and shears. The light from the lantern revealed dried blood everywhere. There was an open doorway at the other end of the small room, but the light did not penetrate that far and the space beyond the doorway was black.

  It was from here that the sounds emerged.

  Marshall was aware that whatever waited in that darkness could see him, but it was too late now for him to hide, and if he put out the flame he would not be able to see. He could turn around and leave, but that was not an option he even considered. Figuring that it would be better for him to move quickly, that it would make him less of a target, Marshall strode through the antechamber holding up his lantern and walked through the doorway into the gloom.

  The room in which he found himself was so big that he could not see the end of it. A cloying odor of musk hit his nostrils the second he passed through the doorway, and it was all he could do not to gag and throw up. The light from his lantern seemed dimmer here and shone not very far, but that didn’t matter. Even with his limited range of vision, he could see the luxurious grasses growing on the floor . . . and the tall female monsters chained to thick pitch-covered posts. They blinked against the light, these terrible amalgams of bear and snake and pig and devil, their grimacing mouths filled with too many teeth, their spread legs ready and willing.

  Sutter had had this building constructed as a prison.

  Or a brothel.

  On top of the mewling was another sound, a low rhythmic grunting. Marshall, sickened and disgusted, knew exactly what that sound was.

  He held the lantern higher.

  And it shone upon the bare back and buttocks of John Sutter.

  Sweaty, muscles straining, Sutter was on his knees between the open thighs of one of the creatures, determinedly coupling with it. He turned briefly as the light touched upon him, and there was a crazed gleam in his eyes that reminded Marshall of the way he had looked when they’d captured the thing in the bear trap.

  Let’s fuck it.

  No wonder the fort was in such disarray. Sutter was out here, doing this, spending all of his time consorting. Even now, caught in the light, the captain was not embarrassed, did not stop. He turned back around and continued thrusting, making those awful, obscene grunts, eliciting from his monstrous lover that maddening mewling, a sound echoed by the chained captives all about them.

  His instinct was to turn tail and run, but he needed to know what else was in here, so instead Marshall moved to the left and, holding the light aloft, stepped forward and peered into the darker recesses of the huge room. There were more females shackled to walls and posts, over a dozen altogether. He wondered where and how Sutter had captured them. The captain had to have had help, and with a sinking feeling in his stomach, Marshall thought about all of those new men at the fort. It suddenly occurred to him that maybe the old residents, the men he’d known, had not quit and left but had died trying to capture these monsters for Sutter.

  He continued forward across the spongy grass, moving deeper into the building. The cloying, musky odor had given way to a far worse and infinitely more overpowering stench, a mixture of shit and piss and rot. He held his breath and stopped, gagging, unable to go farther. Ahead was a large jumbled pile comprised of bodies and bones. Dead
open eyes glittered in the lantern light.

  He thought he saw Jameson’s bruised and bloodied face.

  And Big Reese’s.

  On top of the pile was one of the monsters, male, its oversized penis partially severed and hanging down. Another lay on the right side of the mass of bodies, its ridged shiny skin in marked contrast to the dullness of surrounding work shirts.

  But that was not the worst of it. For the pile appeared to be moving, and in the dim yellow light it took his mind a moment to realize that what he was seeing were smaller creatures, some the size of rats, some the size of cats, scuttling about over the dead bodies, crawling over heads, pulling themselves up over arms, sliding down sections of broken skeleton leg. They were slimy and scaly and hairy and spiky, and he knew exactly what they were: babies. The offspring of Sutter and his demonic concubines.

  He also knew what they were doing with those dead bodies.

  The infants were feeding.

  He must have made some sort of shocked noise because, as one, the small creatures paused, stopped, looked at him, many with bloody mouths, one still chewing on the finger from a hand. They began whistling at him, a high-pitched sound that hurt his ears and turned all of the skin on his body to gooseflesh.

  This time he did run. Trying to block out all sounds and smells, trying to look only at the ground so he would not trip, Marshall fled back through the building the way he’d come, over the grass, past the shackled females and Sutter, now crying out in ecstasy, through the door to the antechamber with its bloody tools on the walls.

  He rushed outside, exhaling heavily, gulping in huge breaths of cool night air as he stumbled away from the building into the trees. The rifle felt heavy under his right arm and the swinging lantern in his left hand banged against its handle so hard as he ran that he thought it was going to break. But he dared not stop or even look back, and he raced through the woods toward the fort until he realized that he’d been running for far too long. He stopped, looked about, but nothing seemed familiar. He’d been running in the wrong direction, and now he was lost.