The Book of Cthulhu

The Men from Porlock

Laird Barron

September, 1923

Darkness lay stone heavy as men roused, drawn from inner night by the tidal pull of blood, the weight of bones sagging outward through their flesh. Floorboards groaned beneath the men who shuffled and stamped like dray horses in the gloom of the bunkhouse. Star glow came through chinks in slat siding. Someone had lighted the stove and smoke drifted among the bunks, up to the rafters. It had rained during the night and the air was ghastly damp. Expelled breath gathered on the beams and dripped steadily; condensation oozing as from stalactites of a limestone cave. The hall reeked with the stench of a bunker: creosote and sweat, flatulence and rotten teeth and the bitter tang of ashes and singed tobacco.

Miller hunched nearly double at the long, rough-hewn pine table and ate lumpy dick and molasses for breakfast. He scooped it with a tin spoon from a tin pan blackened and scarred from a thousand fires and the abuses of a thousand spoons. When he’d done, he wiped his mustache on the sleeve of his long johns and drank black coffee from a tin cup, the last element of his rural dining set.

His hands were dirty and horned with calluses from Swede saw and felling axe. He’d broken them a few times over the years and his knuckles were swollen as walnuts. He couldn’t make a tight fist with the left hand; most mornings his fingers froze into a crab claw barely fit to manage his Willie, much less hook an axe handle. At least he was young—most of the old timers were missing fingers, or had been busted up in a hundred brutal ways—from accidents to fistfights to year after year of the slow, deadly attrition from each swing of mattock or axe. Olsen the Swede (first among the many Swedes west of the Rockies) got his leg shattered by a chain as a kid and hopped around the camp with his broadhead axe for a crutch. His archrival Sven the Norwegian (first among innumerable logger Norwegians south of Norway) lost his teeth and an ear while setting chokers back in the Old World—setting chokers was dog’s work no matter what country. Even Manfred the German, known and admired for his quick reflexes, had once been tagged by an errant branch; his skull was soft in places and hairless as if he’d survived a fire, and one eye drooped much lower than the other. Lately Manny had climbed the ladder to donkey puncher. A man wasn’t likely to be injured while running a donkey; if anything went wrong he’d be mangled, mutilated and killed with a minimum of suffering.

One of the Poles, a rangy, affable fellow named Kasper, frequently asked Miller if he planned to get out before he got his head lopped off, or his legs snapped, or was cut in half by a whip-cracking choker cable, or ended up with a knife stuck in his ribs during a saloon brawl. Perhaps Miller was as pigheaded as most men his age and addicted to the security of quick money in a trade few wanted and fewer escaped?

As for himself, Kasper claimed to be cursed rather than stubborn—madness ran through his blood and yoked him to cruel labor, the wages of sin committed by an overweening ancestor in the dim prehistory of Eastern Europe. The Pole wrote poems and stories by lamplight, although his English translations were so poor it would’ve been difficult to know exactly how to rate his poetry. Miller wasn’t keen for the art of letters, although he possessed a grudging admiration for those who were clever with words. His own grandmother had studied overseas as a girl. After she shipped back to the U.S., she kept her diaries in Latin to confound nosy relatives. She showed them to Miller when he visited her home in Illinois—grandma filled up seventy-five of the slim, clothbound tomes, a minor library.

Today, Kasper sat on the long form far from Miller, another bleary shade among jostling elbows and grinding jaws. Miller was fine with that arrangement—all day yesterday the Pole worked with him on an eight-foot saw, a misery whip, to take down an old monster cedar. He knew, as did everyone else, Miller was among the loose contingent of veterans inhabiting Slango Camp.

The Pole confided: My oldest brother was shot by a sniper along the Rheine. He was killed with one of those fucking German “mousers”—the big rifles they shoot with. Our family lives in Warszawa and only found out what happened because one of my brother’s comrades was with him when it happened and relayed the bad news and mailed home his personal effects. The Legiony sent my brother home in a simple box. I guess there was some confusion at the train depot because so many plain wooden boxes filled up the freight cars and the boxes had serial numbers instead of names. The people in charge of these things mixed up the manifest lists, so my family and the other families had to pry apart the boxes to figure out who was inside each one. They didn’t send an official death notice until several weeks after the funeral, which I could not attend. I could not afford to travel home for a funeral. My little sister and cousin died last year. Cholera. It is very bad back home, the cholera. I couldn’t go to her funeral, either. They buried her in our village. My brother was buried in another village because that is where my father’s people come from. All the men in our family are buried there. Probably not me, that would be too expensive, but my other brothers, certainly. None of them are interested in coming to America. They are happy in Polska.

This monologue had come at Miller over the course of many hours and became intelligible to his ear only after the third or fourth cycle. He grunted nominal responses where necessary. Finally, after they toppled the tree and prepared to call it a day, he effectively ended the conversation by unplugging his canteen and dumping its contents over his head until steam lifted from him. He’d looked the Pole in the eye and said, At least they found enough of him to pack in a box. That’s a pretty good deal if you think about it.

Slango was small as camps went—two bunkhouses, the filing house, courtesy car, company store, a couple of storage sheds; no electricity, no indoor plumbing, nothing fancy. Bullhead & Co. played fast and loose, a shoestring operation one or two notches above a gyppo outfit. The owner and his partners ran the offices from distant Seattle and Olympia and rumor had it they’d eventually be swallowed up by Weyerhaeuser or another giant.

According to some, Bullhead himself visited once the prior year and stayed for several days in the Superintendent’s car on the company engine, John Henry. This surprised Miller; Slango Camp lay entrenched in the rugged foothills of Mystery Mountain, a heavily forested region of the Olympic Range. The camp was a good sixteen miles from the main rail line, and from there another eighteen miles from the landing at Bridgewater Junction. The spur to Slango Camp plunged through a temperate jungle of junk hemlock, poplar and skinny evergreens, peckerwood, so-called, and nearly impassable underbrush—seas of devil’s club, blackberry brambles, and alder. The loggers spanned the many gullies and ravines with hastily chopped junk trees to support rickety track. It seemed improbable anybody, much less a suit, would visit such a Godforsaken place unless they had no other choice.

Miller stowed his kit and dressed in his boots and suspenders and heavy jacket. The initial sullen mutters of exhausted men coalesced and solidified around him and evolved into crude, jocular banter fueled by food and coffee and the fierce comradery of doomed souls. He’d seen it in the trenches in France between thudding barrages of artillery, the intermittent assaults by German infantry who stormed in with their stick grenades and “mousers” as Kasper said, and finally, hand to hand, belly to belly in the sanguine mud of shoulder-width tunnel walls, their bayonets and knives. He seldom made sense of those days—the mortar roars, the fumaroles from incendiary starbursts boiling across the divide, eating the world; the frantic bleats of terrorized animals, and boys in their muddy uniforms, their blackened helmets like butcher’s pots upended to keep the brains in until the red, shearing moment came to let them out.

He went into the cold and wet. Light filtered through the trees. Mist seeped from the black earth and coiled in screens of brush and branches and hung in tatters like remnant vapors of dry ice. Men drifted, their chambray coats and wool sock hats dark blobs in the gathering white. Even as he shivered off that first clammy embrace of morning fog, mauls began to smash spikes and staples into the planed logs laid alongside the edges of the camp. Axes clanged from the depths of the forest, ringing from metal-tough bark. The bull gang paid cables from the iron bulk of the donkey engine. The boys shackled the cable to the harnesses of a six oxen team and drove them, yipping and hollering, into the mist that swallowed the skidder trail—a passage of corduroy spearing straight through the peckerwood and underbrush, steadily ascending the mountain flank where the big timber lay ripe for the slaughter.

“Miller!” McGrath the straw boss gestured to him from the lee of the company store. McGrath was one of the old boys who haunted logging camps everywhere—sinewy and grizzled and generally humorless; sharp-eyed as a blackbird and possessed of the false merriment of one as well. He was Superintendent Barrett’s foreman, the voice and the fist of his authority. Plug tobacco stained the corners of his mouth. Veins made ridges and valleys in his forehead and neck and the backs of his leathery hands. A lot of the men regarded him with antipathy, if not naked hatred. But that was the compact between peasants and overseers since the raising of the Pyramids.

Miller acknowledged the dynamic and accepted the state of things with equanimity. He actually felt a bit sorry for the boss, saw in the scarred and taciturn and blustering foreman the green youth who’d been ragged raw and harrowed by the elders of his day, exactly the same as every other wet-behind-the-ears kid, discerned that those scars had burrowed in deeper than most would ever know.

“Miller, boy!”

“Yes, sir.”

“Been here, what—two weeks?”

“I guess that’s right, sir.” Really it was closer to six weeks since he’d signed on in Bridgewater and road the train to Slango with a half dozen other new hands.

“Huh. Two whole weeks and we ain’t had us a jaw. I guess we jawin’ now. You a good shot, boy?”

“I dunno about that, sir.”

McGrath grinned to spit chaw and rubbed his mouth. “You was a rifleman in the Army, wasn’t you? A sniper? That’s what I hear. You a real keener.”

“Yes sir.” Miller looked at his feet. One of the men, probably Rex or Hagen, had talked. A group of them went hunting white tails a couple of Sundays back. They’d been skunked all day and taken to passing around one of the bottles of rotgut hooch Gordy Thompson kept stashed in his footlocker, and swapping lies about the battles they’d fought and the women they’d fucked and who was the lowest of the lowdown mutts in Slango, which boiled down to McGrath or Superintendent Barret, of course, and who wouldn’t like to toe the line if it meant a shot at one of those bastards.

The party was heading toward camp to beat darkness when Rex, the barrel-chested brute from Wenatchee, proffered a drunken wager nobody could peg a stump he marked by a pinning it with an empty cigarette pack some two hundred yards from their position. Like an idiot, Miller casually opined he could nail a stump from at least twice that distance. Everybody was three sheets to the wind; rowdy wagers were laid. Dosed on whiskey or not, Miller’s hands remained steady. He fired five rounds from the British Enfield he’d carried home from the Front, rapidly jacking the bolt action to eject each shell and chamber the next bullet—eight of ten rounds in a pattern that obliterated the illustration of a horse and carriage. Floyd Hagen covered the wreckage with a silver dollar as the men murmured and whistled amongst themselves.

“Where you from?”

“Utah.”

“You live in the hills, then? You a Mormon?”

“No sir, I’m not a Mormon. My people are Catholic.”

“Yeah? I figure everybody in Utah for a Mormon. They run the regular folks out on rails is what I hear.”

“Well, I don’t know what they do in Salt Lake, sir. We were raised Catholic. The Mormons left us alone.”

“But your people lived in the hills, din’t they?”

“That’s so.”

“What I thought. You a hillbilly, I seen it straight away. Me too. North Carolina, Blue Ridges. We know all about squirrel stew, an’ opossum pie, ain’t that right? You got opossum in Utah, don’t you, boy?”

Behind Miller’s left eye the world cracked and vomited blood—red sky limning a benighted prairie of scrub and slick pebbles like the scales on the spine of the Ouroboros. In the seam of the horizon a jackrabbit flew from rock to rock.

“That Po-lack said you shot a bunch of Huns in the war. That right, boy? You pick off some Huns?” McGrath grinned and spat again, sent a withering stream of acid against the plank skirting of the shack. “Nah, don’t worry about that. My grandpappy was in Antietam and he didn’t talk about it none either. They’s a photographer comin’ in on the John Henry. Be here this weekend. Cookie wants a couple nice bucks for supper. I’m thinkin’ you, Horn, Ruark, Bane, and Stevens can take the day off, go git us some meat. Oh, and Calhoun. He smashed his thumb the other day. Cain’t hold an axe, but maybe he kin skin with his good hand, huh? Useless as teats onna boar ’round here.”

“A photographer.” That meant a distraction of the highest order, surpassed only by visits from upper management. This outside scrutiny also meant the bosses would be bigger pricks than usual.

“Some greenhorn named Chet Goul-ee-ay. Goddamned Frenchies. The Supe says we gotta squire him around, wipe his ass an’ sich. Put on the dog an’ pony show.”

“I’m in the cedar stand with Ma today.” Miller raised his head to follow a jay as it skimmed the roof and landed on a moss-bearded shake. A camp robber. The bird fluffed its gray feathers and watched him and the straw boss.

“I ain’t sendin’ Ma with you. He cain’t shoot worth shit. That I know.”

“Somebody’s got to pack the meat downhill.”

“Okay. Take him too. Seven, that’s a good number, anyhow. Maybe you boys’ill get lucky.”

∇

Miller went to the bunkhouse and fetched his frame pack and rifle and slipped a knife into his belt. He stuck some shells into his jacket pockets and helped himself to biscuits and beans from the cook shack. There were four cooks. Two stout, no-nonsense types, and two doughty women renowned for their severity and parsimony with seasonings. The dour quartet bossed around a squad of bottle washers and scullery maids. The chief cook, Angus Clemson grudgingly handed over the vittles, grumping that he hadn’t been given prior notice of this raid upon his stores. Leftovers were the best he could do—and Miller had best be damned grateful for the courtesy.

The impromptu expedition took some time to organize and it was nearly midday before the other men had gathered the necessary supplies and were ready to venture forth.

Calhoun, Horn, and Ma met him in the yard. Calhoun was a tall lad; hard-bitten and deadly serious. His left thumb was wrapped in a bandage. Despite his youth and hard bark, he’d proved meticulously groomed and well-spoken. Ma was shorter, and wide as a mattock handle across the shoulders. His hair hung long and oily over a prodigious brow and his eyes shone dull yellow. He spoke seldom and when he did, his Welsh slur rendered him largely unintelligible. His raw strength was the stuff of legend. He could walk off with three hundred pounds of cable looped over his shoulders as if it were nothing. He’d once grabbed a planed log that took three men to move and hoisted it overhead with a grunt and a groan before heaving it onto a pile; on another legendary occasion he singlehandedly dragged a cast iron camp stove of at least a quarter ton out of the mud before other men could finish harnessing the mules. Ma wasn’t challenged to many arm wrestling or Indian wrestling matches.

Thaddeus Horn, a rawboned youngster raised in the finest Kentucky backwater tradition, wore a coonskin cap slick with grease and dirt, declared it had been in his family for three generations. Flattened and hideously bleached and hopping with bugs as the cap appeared to be, Miller scarcely doubted the assertion. The youth packed a massive Springfield rifle that could’ve been a relic from the days of the Texas Revolution, or a buffalo gun Sam Houston might’ve fired over the ramparts of the Alamo—although Cullen Ruark swore by his Big Fifty and Moses Bane scoffed good-naturedly and bragged his antique Rigby could knock down a small tree if he cut loose both barrels at once.

Miller asked Horn if he’d seen Stevens or the others. The kid waved toward the hills, said he figured the trio decided to hightail it before the straw boss changed his mind and sent them all back to hacking at trees.

They hiked up out of camp, slogging through the wastes and ruins of a vast swath of clear-cut land. The near slopes were littered with shorn stumps and orange sheaves of bark. The sundered loam oozed sap and water like a great open wound. Bombs might’ve caused such devastation, or perhaps Proteus himself rose from the depths to rip loose the skin of the ancient mountain, peeled it away to bare the granite bones.

Bane, Ruark, and Stevens awaited them at the boundary where deep forest began. Three pack-mules were tethered nearby, munching on weeds. Ruark was a wiry galoot. His snow-white beard touched the middle button of his leather vest. Nobody knew much about Ruark—he didn’t say two words on any given day, but he swung an axe like a fiend from Hell. Moses Bane was another old-timer, hair just as snowy, yet even shaggier. He was also much fleshier than Ruark and scarred around the eyes and nose and almost as bullishly powerful as Ma. A lot of the younger hands called him Grampa Moses. He was a bit more talkative than his pal Ruark, especially after he’d gotten a snootful. It was said the duo served in the Spanish-American War as scouts. Neither spoke of it, however.

Both men were loaded like Sherpas—, bedrolls, ropes, and hooch jugs; rifles, single shot pistols, axes, skinning knives, and God knew what all. Miller felt weary from simply looking at the old boys.

Stevens lounged on the butt of a deadfall and smoked an Old Mill from a bashed pack he stuffed in his front pocket. He rested a lever action Winchester across his knees. A few years older than Miller and almost handsome after a rough fashion. His hair was dark and shaggy and fell near the collar of his canvas vest. Some said Stevens was the best topper at Slango; he certainly clambered up trees with the speed and agility of a raccoon.

Miller privately disdained this popular assessment—if the man was that good McGrath wouldn’t have turned him loose to poach deer, visiting photographer or not. Bullhead & Co. ran entirely too close to the margin—Superintendent Barret had announced a few days beforehand that the home office expected to see the Slango region logged and its timber on rail flats by Valentine’s Day. This produced a few sniggers and wisecrack asides about Paul and Babe signing on to right the ship. Neither Barret nor McGrath laughed and it was plain to see Slango would be upping stakes or folding its tents by midwinter.

“Boys,” Stevens said.

“Whatch ya got there?” Horn eyed a glass jug in the weeds by Stevens’ boot.

“Hooch,” Stevens said.

“Well, guddamn, I seen that,” Horn said. “Ma got some, too. Regular heathen firewater. Right, Ma?”

Ma ignored them, his attention fixed on a mosquito growing fat with blood on his misshapen thumb knuckle. The stupid intensity of the Welshman’s fascination made Miller slightly sick to his stomach.

“Yeh,” Stevens said. “May not bag us a deer, but we gonna get shit-drunk tryin’.” He picked up the jug and put it in a burlap bag. He tied the bag to his pack and slipped the pack over his shoulders and began trudging into the woods.

“Okay!” Horn followed him, the Springfield slung loosely over his shoulder. Ma went close behind them and Miller hung slightly back to avoid being slashed across the face by sprung branches. The sun had burned through the overcast, but its rays fell weak and diffuse here in the cool, somber vault of the forest. The air lay thick and damp as if they’d shuffled into the belly of a crypt.

None of them was familiar with the environs beyond Slango. However, Stevens had borrowed a topographical map from the Superintendent’s car and they decided to follow the ridges above Fordham Creek. The surveyors who’d originally explored the area had noted a sizable deer population in the hinterlands upstream. Eschewing a group council, Bane and Ruark silently moved ahead of the group to cut for sign.

The old growth trees were enormous. These were the elders, rivals to the Redwood Valley sequoias that predated Christ, the Romans, everything but the wandering tribes of China and Persia. Crescents of white fungus bit into slimy folds of bark and laddered toward the canopy. Leaves had begun to drop and the ground was slimy with their brown and yellow husks. Vast mushroom beds, fleshy and splendorous, lay in shallow grottos of root and rock. Horn tromped across one in childish glee. Hooting and cackling, he grabbed Ma by the arm and the pair jigged in the pall of green smoke. Horn had been drinking heavily, or so Miller hoped. He dreaded to think the boy was so simple and maniacal as a matter of inbreeding.

Birds and squirrels chattered from secret perches and Horn abruptly blasted his rifle at a roosting ptarmigan as the group negotiated a steep defile of a dry stream bed. Leaves and wood exploded and it was impossible to determine whether the bird flew away or was blown to bits. The unexpected boom caused Stevens and Miller to drop to their knees. Horn staggered from the recoil and lost his footing on the slippery rocks. He slid ass over teakettle down the slope and crashed into some brambles. The mules skittered free and bolted into the brush and it required a good half hour to recapture them.

Steven scowled at the boy. He gained his feet and hesitated as if contemplating violence. Then he laughed and unlimbered his jug and had a pull. Afterward, he handed the jug to Miller. Miller took a snort of the sweet, dark whiskey and lost his breath for a few seconds. Stars shot through his vision. “Careful, sonny boy. That’ll curl your toes—my Daddy makes it himself. Finest Californee awerdenty you’re likely to sample in this lifetime.”

Miller would’ve agreed if his voice hadn’t been burned to ash in his throat.

Bane and Ruark emerged from the undergrowth and reported they’d located a large hollow not far below the chaparral and possibly that supply of deer meat the boss so badly desired. Spoor was plentiful at least. There were several high vantages and effecting a killing field shouldn’t prove difficult. If all went well, the party would bag their prizes and return safely to Slango by tomorrow night.

The expedition made camp within a tiny clearing in the lee of a slab of rock jutting from the hillside. The outcropping loomed, thick with tufts of moss and lichen. They gathered wood and built a bonfire and sawed rounds from a log to seat themselves in the glare of the flames. The men stuck their hands near the fire. It was bitter cold. Each evening the snowline crept lower, dragging its veil of white dust.

Darkness blotted out the landscape. Embers streamed through notches in the canopy and swirled among the stars. Stoic, brooding Ma unpacked his fiddle and sawed a lively jig for the boys, who clogged in time while tending the mules and cooking supper. The Welshman’s expression remained remote and dull as ever. His hands moved like mechanisms that operated independently of his brutish mind, or as though plucked and maneuvered by the strings of a muse. Idiocy and genius were too often part and parcel of a man. Miller grinned and tapped his toe to the rhythm, however, the ever watchful segment of his brain that took no joy in anything wondered how far the light and music penetrated into the black forest, how far their shouts and hoots echoed along gullies and draws. And his smile faded.

Supper was roasted venison, Indian bread, and coffee, a couple of fingers of moonshine in the dregs for dessert. Conversation and fiddle-accompaniment ebbed and for a while everyone fell into reverie, heads cocked toward the whispering wind as it brushed the treetops. Night birds warbled and small creatures rustled in the leaves.

“They’s stories ’bout these parts,” Bane said with an abruptness that caught Miller off guard. Bane and Ruark had laid out an array of knives, tomahawks, and sundry accessories for oiling and sharpening. Ruark hefted an Arkansas Toothpick, turning it this way and that so it gleamed in the firelight. Bane painstakingly stroked a whetstone across the edge of his felling axe. A lump of chaw bulged his cheek. “Legends, guess ya might say.” It was no secret how much ‘Grandpa Moses’ loved to spin a yarn. His companions immediately paid heed, leaning closer toward where he sat, white hair and beard wild and snarled, little orange sparks shooting as he rasped his axe.

Horn became agitated. “Aww, dontcha go on, old man. No call for that kinda talk while we’re hunkered here in the woods at night. No sir, no sir.”

Stevens guffawed. “What’s a matter, kid? Your mama put the fright in you back in Kentucky?”

“Hush yer mouth ’bout my mama.”

“Easy, kid. Don’t get your bristles up.”

Miller didn’t speak, yet misgiving nagged him. He’d dwelt among the Christian devout as well as the adherents of mystical traditions. There were those who believed to speak of a thing was to summon it into the world, to lend it form and substance, to imbue it with power. He wasn’t sure how to feel about such theories. However, something within him, perhaps the resident animal, empathized with the kid’s fear. Mountain darkness was a physical weight pressing down and it seemed to listen.

Bane paused to gaze into the darkness that encroached upon the circle of the cheery blaze. Then he looked Stevens dead in the eye. “I knew this Injun name o’ Ravenfoot back to Seattle who come from over Storm King Mountain way. Klallam Injun. His people have hunted this neck o’ the woods afore round eyes ever hollowed canoes. He told me an’ I believe the red man knows his stuff.”

“Who’d believe an Injun about anything?” Stevens said. “Superstitious bastards.”

“Yeah. An’ what tickled yer fancy to speak up now?” Horn said, his tone still sour and fearful. Ma squatted near him, head lowered, digging into the dirt with a knife. Miller could tell the brute was all ears, though.

“That map of your’n,” Bane said to Stevens.

“What the hell are you chinnin’’ about? The map? Now that don’t make any kind of sense.” Stevens took the map from his pocket, unrolled it and squinted.

“Where’d you get that?” Miller said, noting the paper’s ragged border. “Tear it from a book?”

“I dunno. McGrath gave it to me. Prolly he got it from the Supe.”

Now Bane’s eyes widened. “My grand pappy was a right reverend and a perfessor. Had lots o’ books lyin’ ’round the house when I was a sprat.”

“You can read, Moses?” Calhoun spoke from where he reclined with the wide brim of his hat pulled low. The men chuckled, albeit nervously.

“Oh, surely,” Bane said. “I kin read, an’ also write real pretty when I take a notion.”

“Recites some nice poetry, too,” Ruark said without glancing up from whetting his knife. “I’m partial to the Shakespeare.” These were the first and only words he’d uttered all day.

“But Grand pappy was a dyed in the wool educated feller. He took the Gospel Word to them heathens in Eastern Europe an’ the jungles of Africa, an’ some them islands way, way down in the Pacific. Brought back tales turn yer hair white.”

“Aha, that’s what happened to your hair!” Stevens said. “Here I thought you was just old.”

Bane laughed, then spat. “Yeh, so I am, laddio. This is a haunted place. Explorers wandered ’round Mystery Mountain in the 1840s. Richies in the city, newspapermen mostly, financed ’em. Found mighty peculiar things, they say. Burial mounds ’an cliffside caves with bodies in ’em like the Chinee do. A few o’ them explorers fell on hard luck an’ got kilt, or lost. Some tried to pioneer and disappeared, but onea ’em, a Russian, came back an’ wrote hisself a book. An pieces o’ that book wound up in another one, a kind o’ field guide. Looks like a Farmer’s Almanac, ’cept black with a broken circle on the cover. I seen that page afore. Ain’t too many copies o’ that guide not what got burned. My mama was a child o’ God and hated it on account o’ its pagan blasphemy, documentin’ heathen rites an’ sich. Grand pappy showed me in secret. He weren’t a particularly devout feller after he finished spreadin’ the Lord’s Word. Had a crisis o’ faith, he said.”

“Well, what did the Russkie find?” Calhoun said.

“Don’t recall, ’xactly.” Bane leaned the axe against his knee and sighed. “Ruins, mebbe. Mebbe he lied, ’cause ain’t nobody backed his claims. He was a snake oil salesman, I reckon. They run him outta the country.”

“I think,” Miller said, “that’s an amazing coincidence, your ending up on this hunt. Could be you’re pulling our legs.”

“Mebbe. But I ain’t. God’s truth.”

“ Arri, arri.” Ma scowled and stabbed at the ground. His voice was thick as cold mush.

“Sounds like Ma thinks that redskin mumbo-jumbo rubbed off on you,” Stevens said. “Why’n blue blazes did you volunteer to come along if this place is lousy with bad medicine?”

“Hell, son. McGrath done volunteered me.”

“Have at it, then.” Calhoun raised his hat with one finger. “What’s so spooky about Mystery Mountain?”

“Besides the burial mounds and the cave crypts, and them disappeared explorers,” Stevens said with a smirk.

“Oh, they’s a passel o’ ghosts an’ evil spirits, an’ sich,” Bane said, again glancing into the night. “Demons live in holes in the ground. Live in the rocks and sleep inside big trees in the deep forest where the sun don’t never shine. Ravenfoot says the spirits sneak up in the dark an’ drag poor sleepin’ sods to Hell.”

“Hear that, Thad?” Stevens nodded at Horn. “Best sleep with one eye open.”

“I hearda one,” Ruark said, and his companions became so quiet the loudest noise was the pop and sizzle of burning sap. He spat on his whetstone and continued sharpening the knife. “Y’all remember the child’s tale Rumpelstiltskin? The king ordered the miller’s daughter to spin straw to gold or die, an’ a little man, a dwarf, came to her an’ said he’d do the job if’n she promised him her firstborn child? Done deal an’ she didn’t get her head chopped off.”

“They got themselves hitched and made a bunch of papooses,” Stevens said. “Everybody heard that story.”

“How’n hell that dwarf spin straw to gold?” Horn said. He took a swig of hooch and belched.

“Magic, you jackass,” Calhoun said.

“Lil’ fucker was the spawn o’ Satan, that’s how,” Bane said.

“The king made her his queen an’ everthin’ was hunkum-bunkum for a while,” Ruark said. “Then, o’ course, along comes baby an’ who shows up to collect his due? She convinces him to give her until the dark o’ the moon to guess his name an’ call off the deal. So bein’ a cantankerous cuss, the feller agrees. He knows his name is so odd she hasn’t a snowball’s chance in hell o’ sussing it out.” He paused and finally looked up from his work and slowly met the wondering gaze of each man riveted to his words. “But that ol’ girl did cotton to the jig. She sent messengers to the four corners o’ the land, their only mission to gather a list o’ names. One o’ them men reported a queer sight he’d spied in a deep, dark mountain valley. The scout saw a mighty fire below and who danced ’round that blaze but a pack o’ demons led by the little gold-spinner hisself. The dwarf cackled an’ capered, boasting that his name was Rumpelstiltskin. He was mad as a wet hen when the queen turned the tables later on. He stomped a hole in the palace floor an’ fell into the earth. That was the end o’ him.”

“That’s a pretty happy ending, you ask me,” Miller said as he pondered the incongruity of camping in the remote mountains with a company of dog-faced loggers and listening to one of them butcher the Rumpelstiltskin fairytale.

“Well, that part about the demons jumpin’ ’round the fire an’ calling up the forces o’ darkness, some say they seen similar happenins in these hills. They say if’n you creep along the right valley in the dead o’ night ’round the dark o’ the moon you’ll hear ’em singin’ an’ chantin’.”

“Hear who?” Calhoun said.

Ruark kind of smiled and shook his head and said no more.

“I’m turnin’ in,” Horn said and jumped to his feet. “Ain’t listenin’ to a bit more o’ this nonsense. No siree Bob.” He stomped a few feet away and rolled out his blanket and climbed under it so only the crown of his cap and the barrel of his rifle were showing.

“Too bad your mama ain’t here to tuck you in and sing a lullaby,” Stevens called.

“Told you to shuddup ’bout my mama,” Horn said.

Calhoun chucked a stick of wood, bounced it off the kid’s head. That broke the mood and everybody guffawed, and soon the company crawled into their blankets to catch some shuteye.

∇

Miller roused with an urge to piss. A moment later he lay frozen, listening to the faint and unearthly strains of music. Initially, he thought it the continuation of dream he’d had of sitting in the balcony of a fancy court while the queen in her dress and crown entertained a misshapen dwarf who wore a curious suit and a plumed hat, while in the background Ruark narrated in a thick accent, but no, this music was real enough, although it quavered at the very edge of perception. An orchestra of woodwinds and strings buoyed a choir singing in a foreign tongue. This choir’s harmony rose and fell with the swirls of wind, the creaking of the sea of branches in the dark above him. He couldn’t tell how far off the singers might be. Sound traveled strangely in the wild, was all the more tricky in the mountains.

“Ya hear that?” Calhoun said. Miller could barely make out the gleam of his eyes in the light of the coals. The young man’s whisper was harsh with fear. “The hell is that?”

“The wind, maybe,” Miller said after a few moments passed and the music faded and didn’t resume. The sky slowly lightened to pearl with tinges of red. He rose and ventured into the brush, did his business and wiped his hands with dead leaves and fir needles. Ruark was moving around by the time Miller returned. The old logger kindled the fire and put on coffee and biscuits. That drew the others, grumbling and muttering, from their bedrolls.

No one mentioned anything about voices or music, not even Calhoun, so Miller decided to keep his own counsel lest they think him addled. This was desolate country and uninhabited but for the occasional trapper. He’d heard the wind and nothing else. Soon, he pushed the mystery aside and turned his thoughts toward the day’s hunt.

Breakfast was perfunctory and passed without conversation. The party struck camp and headed northwest, gradually climbing deeper into the folds of Mystery Mountain. Sunlight reached fingers of gold through the canopy and cast a tiger stripe pattern over the shrubbery and giant ferns and the sweating boles of the trees. The pattern rippled as leaves rippled and shifted in a way that might hypnotize a man if he stared at it too hard. Miller blinked away the stupor and trudged along until they crested a bluff and found the wide, irregular bog Bane had spoken of the previous evening. The fellow had been correct—there was deer sign everywhere. The party fanned out in pairs and settled behind screens of brush to wait.

Miller dropped one as it entered the field at the edge of his weapon’s effective range, while Stevens, Bane, and Ruark each bagged one in the middle ground. Unfortunately, Horn’s lone shot merely injured his prey and it darted into the woods, forcing him, Ma, and Calhoun to pursue.

By noon three bucks were skinned and quartered. The men loaded the mules and strapped smaller cuts to their own packs and prepared to set off for Slango. Ma, Horn, and Calhoun remained in the forest pursuing the wounded buck.

“Damnation,” Bane said, shading his eyes against the sun. “We gonna be travelin’ in the dark as it is. Those green-hands dilly-dally much longer an’ it’s another biv-oo-ack tonight.”

“Hell with that. We don’t hoof it back by sundown McGrath will have our hides, sure as the Lord made little green apples.” Stevens unplugged the moonshine and had a swig. His face shone with sweat from the skinning and toting. “Here’s what I propose. Miller, you and Ruark take the mules and skedaddle back to Slango. Me and Bane will go round up our wayward friends and catch you two down the trail. Let’s get a move on, eh?”

Miller swatted at the clouds of swarming gnats and flies. A rifle boomed in the middle distance. Again after a long interval, and a third time. A universal signal of distress. That changed everything. Stevens, Bane, and Ruark frantically shucked the meat and hot-footed in the direction of the gunshots. Miller spent several minutes dumping the saddlebags from the mules and tethering them near a waterhole before setting after his comrades. He moved swiftly, bent over to follow their tracks and broken branches they’d left in their wake. He drew the Enfield from its scabbard and cradled the rifle to his breast.

Into the forest. And gods, the trees were larger than ever there along a shrouded ridge that dropped into a deep gulf of shadows and mist. He was channeled along a trail that proved increasingly treacherous. Water streamed from upslope, digging notches through moss and dirt into the underlying rock. In sections the dirt and vegetation were utterly stripped to exposed plates of slick stone, veined red with alkali and the bloody clay of the earth. The trees were so huge, their lattice of branches so tight, it became dim as a shuttered vault, and chilly enough to see faint vapors of one’s breath.

The game trail cut sharply into the hillside and eventually passed through a thick screen of saplings and devil’s club and leveled into a marshy clearing. A handful of boulders lay sunken into the moss and muck around the trunks of three squat cottonwood trees. Surprisingly enough, there were odds and ends of human habitation carelessly scattered—rusted stovetops and empty cans, rotted wooden barrels and planed timber, bits of old shattered glass and bent nails. Either the site of a ruined house, long swallowed by the earth, or a dumping ground. The rest of the men gathered at the rim of the hollow nearest a precipitous drop into the valley. Fast moving water rumbled from somewhere below.

Horn lay on his back, his boots propped on the body of the fallen buck. Ma and Calhoun were nowhere in evidence. Miller took it all in for a few moments. He finally shouldered his rifle and had a sip of water from his canteen. “He hurt?” He jerked his thumb at Horn. The boy’s coonskin cap had flown off and his long, greasy hair was a bird nest of leaves and twigs. A black and blue lump swelled above his eye.

“Nah, he ain’t hurt,” Stevens said. “Are ya, kid? He’s okay. Got the wind knocked outta him is all. Tripped over a damn root and busted his skull. He’ll be right as rain in a minute. Won’t ya, kid?”

Horn groaned and covered his eyes with his arm.

“He’s affrighted,” Bane said, and spat. The grizzled logger clutched his rifle in one hand and a tomahawk in the opposite. His knuckles were white. He kept moving his eyes.

“Afraid of what?” Miller said, surveying the area. He didn’t like the feel of the place, its dankness, the malformed cottonwoods, the garbage. He also disliked the fact Calhoun and Ma weren’t around.

Stevens and Bane glanced at each other and shrugged. Stevens squatted by Horn and patted his arm almost tenderly. “Wanna slug of this fine awerdenty, kid? Where’d those other boys get to, eh?” He helped Horn get seated upright, then held the jug for him while the kid had pull.

Ruark scowled and ambled to the drop and stared down into the valley. The water thumped and so did Miller’s heart. He tilted his head and stared through the opening above the clearing, regarded the brilliant blue-gold sky. Cloudless, immaculate. Already the sun was low against the peaks. Dark came early in the mountains. The sun seemed peculiar—it blurred and flames radiated from its core and its rim blackened like a coal.

Horn coughed and wiped his mouth on his wool sleeve. “Yeh, tripped an’ smacked muh noggin’. Weren’t no stob, though. No sir. They’s a snare yonder. Prolly more where that come from.” He pointed and Bane went and examined the spot.

Bane whistled and said, “He ain’t blowin’ smoke. Step light, boys. We ain’t alone.”

“Bushwhackers,” Ruark said, turning with predatory swiftness to regard his comrade.

“Ain’t no bushwhackers.” Stevens rose and swiped at the gathering flies with his hat. “We maybe got us a trapper tucked into that park down there. That’s what we got.”

“Shit.” Bane lifted a piece of thin rope, its long end snaking off through the underbrush. He coiled in the slack and gave it a yank. A bell clanged nearby and Bane threw the rope and jumped back as if scalded. “Shit!”

“Yeh, shit!” Ruark said and stepped away from the ridgeline. He had his Sharps in hand now.

Miller said, “Thad, where’s Cal and Ma?”

Horn still appeared confused from the blow to his head, but the grave faces of his companions sobered him a bit. “Din’t see on account I was woozy for a spell. Heard ’em jawin’ with somebody that come up on us. Cal said to hang on, they’d be right back.”

“You act a mite nervous. Something else happen?”

The boy hesitated. “Din’t much care for the sound of whoever they was that jawed with Cal an’ Ma. Not ’tall. Sounded right wicked.”

“The hell does that mean?” Stevens said.

Horn shrugged and pulled on his cap.

“Shitfire!” Bane said, and spat.

“How long ago?” Miller said. He thought of hiding in the trenches during the war, scanning the gloom for signs of the enemy creeping forward. He’d learned, as did most men of violence, to recognize the scent of imminent peril. At that moment the scent was very strong indeed.

“I reckon half an’ hour ago. I blacked out for a while. Them shots snapped me outta it.”

Before the boy had finished speaking, Bane and Ruark slipped away to the edge of the clearing, cutting for sign. Ruark whistled and everyone but Horn hustled over. Just beyond a deadfall he’d found a well-beaten footpath. Their missing comrades had passed this way, and so had at least two others. Bane swore and cut a plug of chaw and jammed it in his mouth. He swore again, and spat. The four held a brief discussion and decided there might be trouble ahead so caution was advised. Miller would help Horn back to camp while the rest went on to find Calhoun and Ma. Horn got to his feet and joined them, visibly shaking off his unsteadiness. “Like hell. Ma is my boy. I’m goin’.”

“Fine,” Stevens said. “Moses, you lead the way.” And the men proceeded along the path single file. The going was much easier than before as the path lay a few feet from the ridgeline and the hills, while steep, were much gentler than before.

Ten minutes later they came to a fork at the base of a dead red cedar. The bole of the cedar would’ve required four or five men to link hands to span its girth. It had sheared off at about the eighty foot mark. One fork of the trail continued along the ridge; the other descended into the valley, which was still mostly hidden by forest. Boot-prints went both directions, but Bane and Ruark were confident there friends had travelled in the valley. Bane sniffed the air, then gestured downward. “Wood smoke.”

“Sure enough,” Miller said just then winding the tang of smoke. They’d proceeded only a few paces when he happened to look back and stopped with a hiss of warning to his companions.

“What is it?” Stevens said.

“That tree,” Miller said, indicating a blaze mark on the downhill face of the big dead cedar—a stylized ring, broken on the sinister side. The symbol was roughly four feet across and gouged in a good three inches. Someone had daubed it in a thick reddish paint, now bled and mostly absorbed by the wood. It appeared petrified with age. Some inherent quality of the ring caused Miller’s flesh to crawl. The light seemed to dim, the forest to close in.

Nobody said anything. Stevens produced a small spy glass and swept the area. He muttered and tossed the glass to Bane. Bane looked around. He passed it to Ruark. Finally he swore and handed the glass back. Stevens in turn let Miller have a go. Stevens said, “I make out three more—there, there, and there.” He was correct. Miller spotted the other trees scattered along the hillside. Each was huge and dead, and each bore the weird glyph.

“I seen that mark afore,” Bane said in a reverential whisper.

“That book,” Miller said and Bane grunted. Miller asked for Stevens’ jug, hooked the handle with his pinky, mountain man fashion, and took a long, stout pull of the whiskey until black stars shot across his vision. Then he gasped for air and helped himself to another, healthier swig.

“Jaysus,” Stevens said when he finally retrieved his hooch. He shook the jug with a sad, amazed expression as if not quite comprehending how this could’ve happened to his stock.

“I don’t cotton to this ’tall,” Horn said. He rubbed the goose egg on his forehead. He was flour-pale.

“I’m with the pup,” Bane said. He spat. Ruark grunted agreement. He too spat a gob of Virginia Pride into the shrubbery.

Stevens crept up to the cedar and studied it intently, ran his fingers over the rough bark. He said, “Damn it all! Boys, lookee here.” As everyone clustered around he showed them how a great chunk of bark was separate from the tree. The slab of bark was as tall as three men, narrowing to a sharp peak. The outline, as of a door, was clear once they discerned it against the pattern. The bark door was hinged with sinew on one side.

“Whata ya reckon it is?” Horn said, backing away.

Watching Stevens trace the panel in search of a catch caused Miller’s anxiety to sharpen. The light was fading and far too early in the afternoon. The sun’s edge was being rapidly eaten by a black wave, creating a broken ring of fire and shadow. This phenomenon juxtaposed with the broken ring carved in the tree. Miller said, “Don’t boys! Just leave it!”

Stevens muttered his satisfaction at locating the catch. Bane and Stevens pulled the wooden panel three quarters of the way open and then stopped, bodies rigid as stone. From his vantage Miller couldn’t make out much of the hollow, gloomy interior, but the other two men stood with their necks craned and Bane moaned, low and aggrieved as a fellow who’d been stabbed in the gut. “Sweet Lord in heaven!” Stevens said.

Miller took several broad steps to join them at the portal. He gazed within and saw—

—Something squirmed and uncoiled, a darker piece of darkness, and resolved into—

—His vision clouded violently and he staggered, was steadied by Ruark while Bane and Stevens sealed the panel, ramming it closed with their shoulders. They spun, faces white, wearing expressions of fear that were terrible to behold in men of such stern mettle.

“Good gawd, lookit the sky,” Horn said. The moon occulted the sun and the world became a shadowy realm where every surface glowed and bloomed with a queer bluish-white light. Every living thing in the forest held its breath.

“Jaysus Mother Mary!” Ruark said, breaking the spell. “Jaysus Mother Mary Christ Almighty!”

And the men scrambled, tripped and staggered, grasping at branches to keep their footing. The eclipse lasted four minutes at most. The group reached the bottom as the moon and the sun slid apart and the world brightened by degrees. The valley was narrow and ran crookedly north and south. There were falls to the north and a small, shallow river wound its way through sandbars and intermittent stands of cottonwood and fallen spars and uprooted trunks.

A rustic village lay one hundred seventy or so yards distant upon the opposite side of the valley behind a low palisade of vertical logs—a collection of antique cottages and bungalows that extended as far as the middle heights of the terraced hillside. Several figures moved among the buildings, tending to chickens, hanging clothes. Stevens passed the scope around and it was confirmed that a handful of women were the only visible inhabitants.

Miller had marched similar villages in the European countryside where the foundations might be centuries old, perhaps dated from Medieval times. To encounter such a place here in the wilds of North America was incomprehensible. This town was wrong, utterly wrong, and the valley one of the hidden places of the world. He’d never heard a whisper of the community and only God knew why people would dwell in secret. Perhaps they belonged to a religious sect that had fled persecution and wished to follow their faith in peace. He thought of the dreadful music from the previous night, the ominous drums, the blackening sun, and was not reassured.

Away from the central portion of the community loomed a stone tower with a crenellated parapet surmounted by a turret of shiny clay shingles that narrowed to a spike. The tower rose to a height of four stories, dominating the village and was constructed of bone-white stone notched at intervals by keyhole windows. The broken ring symbol had been painted in black ochre to the left of every window and upon the great ironbound oak doors at the tower’s base. As with the symbol of the ring carved into the tree on the hillside, some combination of elements imbued the tower with menace that struck a chord deep inside Miller. His heart quickened and he looked over his shoulder at the way they’d come.

“Be dark soon,” Stevens said. He also cast a furtive backward glance. Long shadows spread over the rushes and the open ground before them. The bloody sun hung a finger’s breadth above the peaks and the sky was turning to rust. “These folks may be dangerous. Keep your guns ready.”

Horn snatched at Bane’s sleeve. “What’d y’all see back there?”

“Shut it, boy. Ain’t gonna leave this valley goin’ that direction. Nothin’ more to tell.”

“Yeah, shut it,” Ruark said and gave the kid a shove to get him moving.

∇

The company forded the river where it rushed shin deep, and moved to the village and passed through the open gate of the palisade after Stevens hailed the occupants. A dozen women of various ages paused in their chores and silently regarded the visitors. The women wore long, simple dresses of a distinctly Quaker style and dour bonnets and kerchiefs. They appeared well-fed and clean. Their teeth were white. Several of them immediately repaired to the central structure, a kind of longhouse. Most of the others went into the smaller houses. One of the younger girls smiled furtively at Miller. Obviously she was simple. Her dress was cut low and revealed her buxom curves, her belly swollen with child and Miller blushed and turned his head away. Chickens pecked in the weeds. A couple of goats wandered around, and a small pack of mutts approached, yipping and snaffling at the men’s legs.

A brawny matron with gray hair stepped forward to greet the company, and she too offered a friendly smile. “Hello, strangers. Welcome.” Her accent and mannerisms seemed off-kilter, indefinably foreign.

“Beggin’ your pardon, Ma’am.” Stevens doffed his hat, clutched it nervously. “Our apologies to intrude and all, but we’re on the trail of a couple old boys who belong to our group. We’re hopin’ you might’ve seen ’em.” His voice shook and he and Bane continued to cast worried glances over their shoulders. For his part, Miller had spent the past few minutes convincing himself he’d seen a coon or porcupine in the dead tree. Maybe a drowsing black bear.

To further distract and calm his galloping imagination, he studied the lay of the land. The houses were made of smoothed rocks and mortared stone and the windows were tiny and mostly without glass, protected from the elements by means of thick drapes and shutters. The dirt paths were grooved and hardened to iron with age. The hillside climbed steeply through trees and undergrowth, although its face was mostly rock. A cave mouth opened beneath an overhang. He’d thought perhaps some eccentric industrialist had possibly created a replica of a medieval town and transplanted its citizens, but the closer he inspected it, the more its atmosphere seeped into him, and he understood this was something far stranger.

The matron apparently observed the tension among the loggers. She said, “Dear gentlemen, ye have nothing to fear. Be at peace.”

“We’re not afraid, Missus,” Miller said. He used a gruff tone because the woman unnerved and unsettled him with her odd accent, her antiquated primness, the manner in which she cocked her head like a living doll. How the whites of her eyes were overcome by black. “But we are in a powerful hurry.”

“The men will soon return from the gathering and ye shall treat with them. Until then, please rest.” The matron waved them toward some benches near the statue of a figure in robes, two children of equally indeterminate sex crouched at its feet. The statue was defaced by weather and green mold. One grotesquely elongated hand stretched forth as if to part a curtain to reveal some dark mystery. The children’s necks were cruelly bent, tongues distended, spines humped and exposed as if flayed by a butcher’s knife. The larger figure’s dangling hand caressed their bowed heads. “Girls, see to fetching our guests pie and lemonade.” The two younger women disappeared into the longhouse, as did the one who’d smiled at Miller. They moved with the ponderous grace of soon-to-be mothers.

Miller wondered if all of the girls were with child and wished he’d paid more attention. It seemed important. He said to the matron, “How did you come to build this village? It’s not on any maps.”

“Isn’t it?” the woman said and for an instant her smile became sly as a predator of the wood. “Our hamlet is very old and was carried across the sea by our founders when Sir Raleigh still served the Queen’s pleasure. This is a place of worship, of communion and far, far from wicked civilizations of men. The nights are long in this valley. The days are gloomy. It is perfect.”

Stevens wrung his hat and fidgeted. “If you don’t mind, Ma’am, we need to locate our friends and be on our way before the sun goes down. Could you kindly point the way? Tracks show they come through here.”

“You saw them, of course,” Miller said. He decided what it was about the woman’s speech that bothered him: Her voice was hoarse, the cadences unbalanced, her intonation stilted because she wasn’t accustomed to speaking and hadn’t been for a long time.

“Aye, she seen ’em alright,” Bane said, mouth set in a grim line. “Prolly one o’ you wenches that lured em’ here.”

The matron kept smiling. Her hands trembled. “Our husbands will be home anon. Mayhap they have seen your companions.” She turned and walked into the longhouse. The door closed and then came the unmistakable clunk of a bar dropping.

Bane shook his head and spat. He broke apart his Rigby and checked the load and clacked the breech into place again.

“Well, this ain’t good,” Stevens said.

Horn said, “What we aimin’ to do?” He moved to shuck his pack and Ruark frowned and told him to leave it be.

“Gonna find Cal and Ma. That’s what. And leave your goddamned pack on. We have to make tracks in a hurry you wanna be all the way up shit crick with no paddle?” Stevens clapped his hat on. “Stick our noses in every last house. Kick in the doors if we have to. Let’s make it quick. Daylight is burnin’.”

Miller and Bane teamed to search the cottages on the south side; Stevens, Horn, and Ruark took the north. It went fast. Miller took the lead, busting through the doors and making a brief sweep of the interiors. The women inside calmly waited, speaking not a word to the trespassers—and indeed, many were pregnant. Each house was small and dim, but there weren’t many places to hide. Most were neat and well-ordered, not untoward in any obvious way. Simple furnishings, albeit archaic. Oil lamps and candles, fireplaces that doubled as ovens. A paltry selection of books on rude shelves. This last detail struck him as truly odd.

He said to Bane, “Not one Bible. You ever see this many houses without a copy or two of the good book lying around?” Bane shrugged and allowed as he hadn’t witnessed that particular phenomenon either.

Both parties finished within a few minutes and regrouped in the square. Everyone was sweating from running up the hill to check the half dozen houses perched there. Miller mentioned the lack of holy literature. Stevens said, “Yeh, mighty peculiar. Where are the kids? You seen any?”

“Gudamn!” Horn said. “Brats should be crawlin’ underfoot, chasin’ the chickens, screamin’ bloody murder. Somethin’ shore as hell ain’t right.”

“Mebbe they inside the big house,” Ruark said. “Or that tower.”

“Well, we gotta check that house,” Miller said although the idea made him unhappy. The thought of searching the tower was even worse—it curved out of joint, angles distorted, and the sight made his head queer, his stomach ill. Not the tower if there were any other way.

Horn appeared stricken. “Hold on there, fellas. Them women ain’t gonna hold Cal or Ma. No sir. We barge in there an’ git shot, some might say we had it comin’.”

“Yeh, I reckon,” Stevens said. “You can stay out here and keep watch if you’re afraid of the ladies. Them husbands gonna be walkin’ in on us any minute. Who knows how many of them old boys’ll show.”

“Plenty, you kin wager,” Bane said.

Miller kicked the door. “Solid as a stump,” he said. Ruark spat and unlimbered his axe, as did Bane a moment later. The pair stood shoulder to shoulder chopping at the door and it crashed inward after a few blows. The men piled into the house, blinking against the smoky dimness. The sole light came from what seeped through window notches and a guttering fire in the hearth. The murk made hazy blobs of the long table, the counter and barrels stacked in threes here and there. The peak roof vaulted to a height of fifteen or so feet, supported by a massive center beam and a series of angled joists that met the wall at about chin level. Meat hooks, pots and pans, coils of rope, cured ham, and strings of sausage swayed and rustled with each gentle exhalation from the hearth.

Of the women there was no sign, but Ma was present.

Miller almost cried out when he beheld what had been done to the Welshman, and Stevens hollered loud enough to bust an eardrum. Miller didn’t blame him. Ma sat Indian style, naked in the middle of the floor, blood thick as pudding around his legs, in his lap. His belly was sliced wide and a quivering rope of purple innards was strung several feet above him and looped through a large eyebolt suspended from a chain. The intestines traveled down again like a pulley cable and wrapped around a wooden turnstile. The turnstile had been cranked repeatedly and its gory yarn oozed and leaked. Most of the rest of Ma’s guts were slopped across his thighs, or floating in the grue. His slack jaw drooled. He gave his comrades a glassy eyed nod not much different than his usual.

“Oh, god, Ma!” Stevens said. “What’d they do to you, hoss?”

Horn stuck his head in to see what the commotion was all about and shrieked to beat the band, so Ruark swatted him with his hat and drove him outside. Right then the matron ghosted from the gloom in the corner and hacked Bane’s shoulder with a cleaver. He yelled and smacked her in the jaw with the butt of his Rigby and she sprawled.

Blood trickled from the matron’s lips. The injury did not diminish her, rather imbued her with an aura of savagery and mania that caused the men to flinch as one might from a wounded beast. Her eyes were so very large and dark and they gleamed with tears of rage and exultation. She whispered with the intimacy of a lover, “Did ye see what’s waiting for ye in the trees?”

“Where’s our other man?” Miller strode over to the matron and leveled his rifle at her. “I’ll blow a damned hole in your kneecap, Missus. See if I won’t.”

“No need for that. The handsome lad is in the tower. They gave us the fat one for sport. It amuses them to watch us practice cruelty.”

Miller walked around Ma and the coagulating lake of blood. He grasped the ring of a trapdoor and pulled. Several of the women were huddled like goats in a root cellar. They gasped and held each other.

“See him?” Stevens said.

Miller slammed the trapdoor and shook his head.

Bane cussed as Ruark pulled the cleaver free of his shoulder with a gristly crunch. Miller fashioned a tourniquet. The entire left side of Bane’s buckskin jacket was soaked through and dripping. Horn shouted. Everyone ran to the windows. Twilight lay upon the world and a disjointed chain of lamps bobbed in the purple dark, descending the switchback trail on the other side of the valley. Miller said, “Either we fort up, or we run for it.”

Stevens said, “Trapped like rats in here. Roof is made of wood. They could burn us alive.”

“Not with they women in here,” Bane said through gritted teeth.

“You want to spend the night in here with them?” Miller said.

“Yeh, never mind.”

“We could take this one as a hostage,” Stevens said halfheartedly.

“Piss on that,” Miller said. “Who knows what she’ll chop off next time.”

“Ye should flee into the hills,” the matron said. “The horrors ye will soon meet…flee, good hunters. Or make an end of each other with your guns and knives. T’will be a merciful death in comparison.”

“Shut up before I kill you,” Miller said. The matron stopped talking at once.

“What about Ma?” Stevens said.

“He’s gone,” Bane said. “Worst way a man kin go. Gutted like a pig.”

“We cain’t leave him.”

“Naw, we cain’t.” Ruark drew his flintlock pistol. He walked over and laid the barrel against the back of Ma’s head and squeezed the trigger. For Miller, in that moment the past five years of his life were erased and he side slipped through time and space into a muddy trench in France, shells and bodies exploding. He had never left, never escaped.

Stevens aimed his rifle at the matron. He lowered it. “Don’t have the sand to shoot no woman. Let’s git, boys.”

Ruark said, “Won’t make it far in these woods in the dark.”

Stevens said, “We head for the tower and fetch Cal. See what happens.”

The Matron said, “Yes! Yes! Go into the house of the Master! He’ll greet ye with a glad smile and open arms!”

“Quiet yerself, hag,” Stevens said, menacing her with his rifle butt. “C’mon, boys. Let’s find poor Cal before the villains make stew of him.” There was grudging acquiescence to this plan and the men withdrew from the longhouse and its horrors.

Miller went to the palisade gate and shouldered the Enfield, aimed at the string of lights and blasted several rounds in rapid succession. One of the approaching lamps burst, the rest were doused momentarily. A howl of pain rose from the field. Miller reloaded in a hurry. He ran for the tower where his companions were gathered near its double doors. Something fluttered to his left—a coat tail disappearing behind a pile of neatly stacked firewood. He knew they’d been had. While the villagers waving lanterns on the flats played decoy, others had crept along in a flanking action. He dropped to a knee and swung his rifle around.

“Ambush!” Bane hollered as a dozen or more men in coats and top hats sprang from behind sheds, cottages, hay bales, seemingly everywhere. Pitchforks, hatchets, and knives, edges gleaming and glinting; a couple carried blunderbusses, bulkier and older than even Ruark’s. Those guns cracked and spat fire. Puffs of sulfurous white smoke boiled and seethed.

Ten feet away Bane let loose both barrels of the Rigby with a clap of thunder that sounded as if Archangel Michael himself had descended from Heaven to smite the good Lord’s enemies. The muzzle flash lit up the tower courtyard like a rocket explosion. A villager was cut in half and a section of the cottage wall behind him caved in, stomped by an elephant. The other loggers loosed a fusillade in a murderous fireworks display.

Night vision spoiled by the alternating glare and shadow, Miller struggled to find targets. He didn’t have the opportunity to draw a bead, but simply emptied the Enfield as fast as he could work the bolt. Most of his bullets clattered off stone or ripped furrows into the earth. However, he shot one bearded brute between the eyes as the man charged with an upraised hatchet, and drilled another in the back as the fellow stood motionless as if uncertain how to join the fray.

The cottage that Bane had perforated with his gun caught fire. Flames leaped into the sky. Glass tinkled as it fractured. The fire spread to another house, then another, and in less than thirty seconds, the combatants were struggling by the red blaze of a circle in hell. Ruark swung his axe and lopped a villager’s head. The head floated past Miller and into the blaze. Bane screamed and laughed, his beard splattered with blood. He pressed a man’s face against a flaming timber and held it there until flesh popped and sizzled. Horn dropped his rifle and turned to run. An older gent in a stovepipe hat knocked him down and skewered him with a pitchfork. The pitchfork went in with a meaty thunk and a clink as the tines bit through into the dirt. Horn grabbed the handle and wrestled for dear life and the man grunted, planted his boot against Horn’s groin, and pried loose the pitchfork and raised it to stick him again. Then Ruark’s axe whapped the back of the villager’s skull and turned it to jelly and the man collapsed facedown, legs twitching. Stevens’ rifle boomed once, twice, and he cursed and drew a knife and sidled in tight with his companions. Miller was empty. He picked up a severed hand and forearm and threw it in a man’s face then shoulder-blocked him to the ground and methodically clubbed him to death with his rifle butt. Sweat and grease and flying drops of blood soaked him. Miller’s arms were weak and he could scarcely raise them at the end. A blast of heat from the burning houses seared his cheeks and ignited the tips of his hair. The smell of roasting flesh was strong.

The remaining villagers routed, fleeing through the flames and the rolling black smoke. Bane, still braying mad laughter, chucked a tomahawk. It sank into a man’s backside. The man yelped and stumbled. Bane whooped and said, “Run, ya fuckin’ dogs!” And he barked.

“There’s reinforcements yonder!” Stevens and Ruark grasped Horn under the arms and dragged him to his feet. The lad gasped and fainted.

Rifles thundered near the front gate. A musket ball kicked dirt near Miller’s foot.“ “Follow me, boys!” He led the charge up the hill and into the cave along a twisting path illuminated by the hellish conflagration. Storming the tower was out of the question—he suspected it would burn to the ground soon enough. Regardless, anyone trapped inside would be smoked out or broiled alive.

The cave mouth opened into a low-ceilinged area with a sandy floor and natural outcroppings that served as adequate cover. The men quickly repurposed empty barrels and busted timbers to fashion a makeshift barricade at the entrance. After they’d finished effecting hasty fortifications, Stevens passed around the remnants of his bottle. He said, “We’re in it deep. Killed us a few, but I count twenty, maybe more. Prolly mad as hornets over what we done.”

“Learn us somethin’ we don’t know, boy,” Bane said. Between blood loss and one too many belts of rotgut to kill the pain, he slurred, listing precariously until Ruark helped him sit against the wall.

Below, several houses were utterly consumed in the inferno and the fire made a sound like rushing wind. Sparks ignited the lower branches of nearby trees. The smoke had become so thick it proved difficult to discern the movements of the villagers. Men darted about with buckets, presumably hurling dirt and water on the flames. Miller went flat and laid the Enfield across his rolled jacket. He waited, inhaled, partially exhaled, and squeezed the trigger. A lucky shot—a villager’s arms flew from his sides and he toppled and lay in the dirt, one hand extended into a burning pile of wood, and soon his clothes smoked and flames licked over them. The rest of the villagers made themselves scarce. The fire spread swiftly after that.

Horn moaned and twisted on the ground. He prayed for Jesus, Mary, and God. Miller helped Ruark peel aside the boy’s shirt and slid his hand under his body and felt around. The tines had indeed gone clean through and Horn leaked like a sieve. It wouldn’t be long. He caught Ruark’s glance and shook his head slightly. Ruark spat. “Boy didn’t even fire that peashooter o’ his. Bastards.”

Horn cried for his mama.

“Hush,” Stevens said, striking a match and lighting a lamp he’d found on a peg. He hung the lamp from a support timber in the back of the cave where it constricted to a narrow passage that descended into absolute darkness. Miller couldn’t determine the purpose of the cave; although moderately carved and shored, it wasn’t a mine. Occult symbols had been chalked upon the walls. Stick figures bowed and scraped, dwarfed by what appeared to be a huge bundle of twigs. Not twigs—worms, or something squiggly like worms.

Huddled around the lamp, the loggers resembled characters from some gothic fable; resurrection men leaning on spades at midnight in a swampy graveyard. By that primitive oil lamplight, the company was a horrific, blood-soaked mess. They piled their packs and sundries in the middle of the floor and counted ammunition and rations. Wounds were appraised: Bane’s hacked shoulder would be the death of him without medicine. Ruark had gotten hit in the belly; the hole was about the size of a bean and welled purple and it bubbled when he took a breath. The black powder ball was still inside, although the old logger shrugged and spat and said he felt fine as frog’s hair. Stevens revealed nasty punctures in his thigh and ribs, a vicious slash across his breast. Only Miller had survived the melee unscathed.

“What? None of that blood you’re covered in is yours? Not even a scratch, you lucky bastard!” Stevens threw back his head and laughed as Ruark helped wind strips of cloth around his torso to staunch the bleeding.

Miller didn’t say anything. He’d never taken more than a few bumps and bruises, the occasional cut from flying shrapnel, during the war, had literally walked through the apocalypse at Belleau Wood untouched.

Stevens made a firepot by slathering bear grease in a tin cup and lighting a strip of cloth for a wick. He and Ruark proposed to scout the tunnel and make certain nobody was sneaking along their back-trail. That left with Miller with the kid, who was unconscious and raving, and Bane, who appeared to also have one foot in the grave.

The wait proved short, however. Stevens and Bane reappeared, wide-eyed as horses who’d been spooked by fire. Ruark tossed loose timber and small rocks in the tunnel opening. Stevens reported that the caves stretched on and on, and branched every few paces. In his estimation, anybody damn fool enough to venture into that labyrinth would be wandering for eternity.

After a long, whispered conference, it was decided the men would wait until daylight and then make a run for Slango. There was no telling when or if McGrath might deign to send a search party, so it was safest to assume they were on their own. Watches were set with Ruark taking the first as he allowed he couldn’t sleep anyhow. He snuffed the lamp and the firepot and they settled in to wait.

Stevens said, “Ever wonder what Rumpelstiltskin wanted with a kid?”

Miller pulled his hat down and tried to relax. An eldritch white radiance illuminated the cave and it was just him and Horn; everyone else melted and vanished. Mist flowed from the passage and curled over the pile of packs, swirled over Horn’s chest and around Miller’s knees. Horn stared. His face was gray, suspended in the mist. He said, “C’mon, tell me true. What’d y’all see in that tree? What was hidin’ up in there?”

“Worms,” Miller said. He wasn’t certain if this was accurate. The memory slipped and slithered and changed when he tried to examine it closely. A fibrous network of slimy roots, or worms, or a mass of tendrils squirming in the moist dark of the mighty cedar bole. “They had faces.” Demons sleep in holes in the ground. Live in the rocks, sleep inside a big ol’ trees in the deep forest where the sun don’t never shine.

“Oh.” Horn nodded. “I dunno what the little man in the story wanted with the child, but I kin tell ya the villagers give their babies to their friends inside the trees… inside this mountain. The sons an’ daughters of Ol’ Leech. An’ I kin tell ya what the people of Ol’ Leech do with ’em.”

“I’d rather you didn’t.”

“Jist shut yer eyes an’ look inside. We so close, ya kin see their god. He’s sleepy like a bear in winter. Dreamin’ of his people. Dreamin’ of us here in the daylight, too. But he’s wakin’ up. Be creepin’ out a his den pretty soon, I reckon.”

“Save it, kid.”

“He loves his people. Loves us too, in a different way.” Horn’s smile was shrewd and cruel. He opened his mouth and inhaled the peculiar light and Miller’s dreams became confused. He dreamt of falling through the mountain, through the entire Earth, and into the sky, accelerating like a bullet until the light of the sun dwindled to a pinprick. He crashed through the icy, blood-black surface of a strange moon and drifted weightless in its hollow core. The cavern was rank and humid and dark as pitch. He floated over crags and canyons and forests of clabbered flesh and fungus, his body carried upon the updrafts of a warm, gelatinous sea. At the center of this sea a mountain range shuddered and stirred. The colossus writhed and uncoiled with satanic majesty, aroused by the whine of flea wings. It whispered to him.

∇

Miller awoke to Calhoun begging for help.

Calhoun cried from the direction of the tower. He called them by name in a tone of anguish and his voice carried. He began screaming the screams of a man partially buried alive or hung in barbed wire or swollen with mustard gas. Miller lay in the shadows, watching the dying light of the fires shiver across the wall of the cave. Calhoun kept screaming and they all pretended not to hear him.

∇

Still later and after night settled in as tight as a blindfold, Stevens shook Miller. “Somethin’s wrong.”

“Oh, jumpin’ Jaysus,” Ruark said and moments later lighted the firepot. Miller would’ve cursed the old man for revealing their position, except he saw the cause of alarm—Horn was gone, spirited away from under their noses. Drips and drabs of blood smeared into the tunnel, into the blackness. “Them sonsabitches snatched Thad!”

As if in response to the light, a faint, ghostly moan echoed up the passage from great subterranean depths. Help me, boys. Help me. At least that’s what it sounded like to Miller. The distance and acoustics could’ve made wind whistling through chimneys of rock resemble almost anything.

“Lordy, Lordy,” Bane said. He was a frightful sight; gore limed his beard and jacket. He might’ve been a talking corpse. “That’s the boy.”

“Ain’t him,” Stevens said.

“The kid is done for,” Miller said. His eyes watered and he struggled to keep his voice even. “Whoever’s hooting down that tunnel is no friend of ours.”

“They’s right, Moses,” Ruark said. “This an ol’ Injun trick. Make a noise of a wounded friend an draw ya in.” He ran his thumb across his throat with an exaggerated flourish. “Ya should know it, hoss. That boy is daid.”

“Lookit all the blood,” Stevens said.

Bane shoved a plug of tobacco into his mouth and chewed with his eyes closed. His flesh was papery and his eyelids fluttered the way a man’s do when he’s caught in a terrible dream. He resembled the photographs of dead outlaws in open coffins displayed on frontier boardwalks. He spat. “Yeh, an’ lookit me. Still kickin’.”

Help me. Help me. The four of them froze like woodland animals, heads inclined toward the dim cries, the cold, cold draft.

“Ain’t him,” Stevens repeated, but mostly to himself.

Bane stood. He leaned against the wall, the barrel of his Rigby nosing the sand. He nodded to Ruark. “You comin’?”

Ruark spat. He lifted the firepot and led the way.

Bane said, “Alrightee, boys. Take care.” He tapped his hat and limped after his comrade. Their shadows swayed and jostled, and their light grew smaller and seeped into the mountain and was gone.

The others sat in the dark for a long time, listening. Miller heard faint laughter, a snatch of Bane singing “John Brown’s Body,” and then only the fluting of the wind in the rocks.

“Oh, hell,” Stevens said when the silence between them had gone on for an age. “You was in the war.”

“You weren’t?”

“Uh-uh. My father worked for the post office. He fixed my card so’s I wouldn’t get conscripted.”

“Wish I’d thought of that,” Miller said.

“You seen the worst of it. Any chance we kin get out a this with our skins?”

“Nope.”

There was another long pause. Stevens said, “Want a smoke?” He lighted two Old Mills and passed one to Miller. They smoked and listened, but there was nothing to hear except for the wind, the rustle of branches outside. Stevens said, “He weren’t dragged. The kid crawled away.”

“How do you figure? He was pretty much dead.”

“Pretty much ain’t the same thing, now is it? I heard ’em talkin’ to him, whisperin’ from the dark. Only heard bits. Didn’t need more…they told him to come ahead. An’ he did.”

“Must’ve been persuasive,” Miller said. “And you didn’t raise the alarm.”

“Hard to explain. Snake-bit, frozen stiff. It was like my body fell asleep yet I could hear what was goin’ on. I was piss-scared.”

Miller smoked his cigarette. “I don’t blame you,” he said.

“I got my senses back after a piece. Kid was long gone by then. Whoever they are, he went with ’em.”

“And now Moses and Ruark are with them too.”

“I didn’t tell the whole truth about what we saw in the tunnel.”

“Is that so.”

“Didn’t seem much point carryin’ on. Not far along the trail it opens into a cavern. Dunno how big; our light couldn’t touch but the edges of the walls and the ceilin’. There were drops into plain ol’ nothin’ an’ more passages twistin’ every which way. But we stopped only a few steps into the cavern. A pillar rose high as the light could reach. Broad at the base like a pyramid and made of rocks all slippery an’ shiny from drippin’ water. Except, the rocks weren’t just rocks. There were skeletons cemented in between. Prolly hundreds an’ hundreds. Small things. There was a hole at eye level. Smooth as the bore of my gun and about the size of my fist. Pure black, solid, glistenin’ black that threw the light from our torch back at us. We didn’t peep too close on account of the skeletons before we turned tail and ran. Saw one thing as we turned to haul our asses…That hole had widened enough I could a jumped in and stood tall. It made a sound that traveled from somewhere farther and deeper than I want a think about. Not the kind a sound you hear, but the kind you feel in your bones. Felt kinda bad and good at once. I could tell Ruark liked it. Oh, he was afraid, but compelled, I guess you’d say.”

“Well,” Miller said after consideration, “I can see why you might’ve kept that to yourself.”

“Yeh. I wish them ol’ coons had stayed back. Maybe we could a blasted our way out with their guns and ours.”

Miller didn’t think so. “Maybe. Catch some shut eye. Sunup in a couple hours.”

Stevens rolled over and set his hat over his face and didn’t move again. Miller watched the stars fade.

∇

They left the cave at dawn and descended the hill into the ruins of the village. Ashes turned in the breeze. The tower stood, although scorched and blackened. Its double doors were sprung, wood smoldering, hinges melted. Smoke curled from the gap. Many of the surrounding houses had burned to their foundations. Gray dust lay over everything. Corpses were stacked near the longhouse and covered with a canvas tarp to keep the birds away. Judging from height and width of the collection, at least fifteen bodies were piled beneath the tarp awaiting burial. Twenty-five to thirty men and women combed the charred wreckage. Their hands and faces were filthy with the gray dust. Some stared hatefully at the pair, but none spoke, none raised a hand.

Miller and Stevens trudged through the village and onward, following the river south as it wended through the valley. With every step, Miller’s shoulders tightened as he awaited the inevitable musket ball to shear his spine. Early in the afternoon, they climbed a bluff and rested for the first time.

After Stevens caught his breath, he said, “I don’t understand. Why they’d let us live?” He removed his hat and peered through the trees, searching for signs of pursuit.

“Did they?” Miller said. He didn’t look the way they’d come, instead studying the forest depths before them, tasting the damp and the rot and the cold. He thought of his dream of flying into the depths of space, of the terrible darkness between the stars and what ruled there. “We’ve got nowhere to hide. I had to guess, I’d guess they’re saving us for something very special.”

So, they continued on and arrived at the outskirts of Slango as the peaks darkened to purple. Nothing remained of the encampment except for abandoned logs and mucky, flattened areas, and a muddle of footprints and drag marks. Every man, woman, and mule was gone. Every piece of equipment likewise vanished. The railroad tracks had been torn up. In a few months forest would reclaim all but the shorn slopes, erasing any evidence Slango Camp ever stood there.

“Shit,” Stevens said without much emotion. He hung his hat on a branch and wiped his face with a bandanna.

“Hello, lads,” A man said, stepping from behind a tree. He was wide and portly and wore a stovepipe hat and an immaculate silk suit. His handlebar mustache was luxuriously waxed and he carried a blackthorn cane in his left hand. A dying ray of sun glowed upon the white, white skin of his face and neck. “I am Dr. Boris Kalamov. You have caused me a tremendous amount of trouble.” He gestured at the surroundings. “This is not our way. We prefer peaceful coexistence, to remain unseen and unheard, suckling like a hagfish, our hosts none the wiser, albeit dimly cognizant through the persistent legends and campfire tales which please us and nourish us as much as blood and bone. To act with such dramatic flourish goes against our code, our very nature. Alas, certain of my brethren were taken by a vengeful mood what with you torching the village of our servants.” He tisked and wagged a finger that seemed to possess too many joints.

Miller didn’t even bother to lift his rifle. He was focused upon the nightmare taking shape in his mind. “How now, Doctor?”

Stevens was more optimistic, or just doggedly belligerent. He jacked a round into the chamber of his Winchester and sighted the man’s chest.

Dr. Kalamov smiled and his mouth dripped black. “You arrived at a poor time, friends. The black of the sun, the villagers’ holiest of holy days when they venerate the Great Dark and we who call it home. Their quaint and superstitious ceremony at the dolmen cut short because of your trespass. Such an interruption merits pain and suffering. O’ Men from Porlock, it shan’t end well for you.”

Stevens glanced around, peering into the shadows of the trees. “I figured you didn’t come for tea, fancy pants. What I want a know is what happens next.”

“You will dwell among my people, of course.”

“Where? You mean in the village?”

“No, oh, no, no, not the village with your kind, the cattle who breed our delicacies and delights. No, you shall dwell in the Dark with us. Where the rest of your friends from this lovely community were taken last night while you two cowered in the cave. You’re a wily and resourceful fellow, Mr. Stevens, as are most of your doughty woodsmen kin. We can make use of you. Wonderful, wonderful use.”

“Goodbye, you sonofabitch,” Stevens said, cocking the hammer.

“Not quite,” Dr. Kalamov said. “If we can’t have you, we’ll simply make do with your relatives. Your father still works for the post office in Seattle, does he not? And your sweet mother knits and has supper ready when he gets home to that cozy farmhouse you grew up in near Green Lake. Your little brother Buddy working on the railroad in Nevada. Your nephews Curtis and Kevin are riding the range in Wyoming. So many miles of fence to mend, so little time. Very dark on the prairie at night. Perhaps you would rather we visit them instead.”

Stevens lowered his rifle, then dropped it in the mud. He walked to the doctor and stood beside him, slumped and defeated. Dr. Kalamov patted his head. The doctor’s hand was large enough to have encompassed it if he’d wished, and his nails were as long as darning needles. He flicked Stevens’ ear and it peeled loose and plopped wetly in the bushes. Stevens clapped his hand over the hole and screamed and fell to his knees, blood streaming between his fingers. Dr. Kalamov smiled an avuncular smile and tousled the man’s hair. He pushed a nail through the top of Stevens’ skull and wiggled. Stevens fell silent, his face slack and dumb as Ma’s had ever been.

“Reckon I’ll decline your offer,” Miller said. He drew his pistol and weighed it in his hand. “Go ahead and terrorize my distant relations. Meanwhile, I think I’ll blow my brains out and be shut of this whole mess.”

“Don’t be hasty, young man,” Dr. Kalamov said. “I’ve taken a shine to you. You’re free to leave this mountain. There’s a lockbox in the roots of that tree. The company payroll. Take it, take a new name. And when you’re old, be certain to tell of the horrors that you’ve seen…horrors that will infest your dreams from today until the day you die. We’ll always be near you, Mr. Miller.” He doffed his hat and bowed. Then he grasped Stevens by the collar and bundled him under one arm and into the gathering gloom.

The lockbox was where the man had promised and it contained a princely sum. Miller stuffed the money in a sack as the sun went down and darkness fell. When he’d finished packing the money he buried his head in his arms and groaned.

“By the way, there are two minor conditions,” Dr. Kalamov said, leering from behind a stump. The flesh of his face hung loose as if it were a badly slipping mask. His eyes were misaligned, his mouth a bleeding black slash that extended to his ears. He had no teeth. “You’re a virile lad. Be certain to spawn oodles and oodles of babies—I must insist on that point. We’ll be observing, so do your best, my boy. There is also the matter of your firstborn…”

Miller had nearly pissed himself at Dr. Kalamov’s reappearance. He forced his throat to work. “You’re asking for my child.”

Dr. Kalamov chuckled and drummed his claws on the wood. “No, Mr. Miller. I jest. Although, those wicked old fairytales are jolly good fun, speaking such primordial truths as they do. Be well, be fruitful.” He scuttled backward and then lifted vertically into the shadows, a spider ascending its thread, and was gone.

∇

Years later, Miller married a girl from California and settled in a small farming town. He worked as a gunsmith. His wife gave birth to a boy. After the baby arrived he’d often lie awake at night and listen to the house settle and the mice scratch in the cupboards. When the baby cried, Miller’s wife would go into the nursery and soothe him with a lullaby. Miller strained to hear the words, for it was the deep silences that unnerved him and caused his heart to race.

There was a willow tree in the yard. It cast a shadow through the window. As his wife crooned to the baby in the nursery, Miller watched the shadow branches ripple upon the dull white oval of wall. On the bad nights, the branches twitched and narrowed and writhed like tendrils worming their way through fissures in the plaster toward the bed and his sweating, paralyzed form.

One morning he went to the shed and fetched an axe and chopped the tree down. The first tree he’d felled since his youth. The willow was very old and very large and the job lasted until lunchtime.

The center was semi-rotten and hollow, and when the tree crashed to earth the bole partially split and gushed pulp. Something heavy and multi-segmented shifted and retracted inside the trunk. Water gurgled from the wound with a wheeze that almost sounded like someone muttering his name. He dumped kerosene over everything and struck a match. The neighbors gathered and watched the blaze, and though they gossiped amongst themselves, no one said a word to him. There’d been rumors.

His wife came to the door with the baby in her arms. Her expression was that of a person who’d witnessed a dark miracle and knew not how to reconcile the fear and wonder of the revelation.

Miller stood in the billowing smoke, leaning on his axe, eyes reflecting the lights of hell.

∇