The Damnation Affair

Chapter 35

The moon’s cheese-rotten grimace rose through spilled clouds; its sullen light turned the flats into a treacherous chiaroscuro. The plainsong had burned its way through Jack’s throat, and he coughed and spat once, breaking the monotony of its rise and fall.

When he did, the shadows pressed close, and he hurriedly took up the thread again, despite the scraping to his voice and the vicious nips of pain all over his body as weary flesh told him just how thoroughly he had abused it. His head tipped forward, and when he glanced up he saw with no real surprise gleams of paired eyes in the ink-black shiftings, oddly colored like beasts’ eyes.

He was not merely being watched, for when the massive, ill-tempered white horse pranced restively, some of the shadows would dart in, nipping at the gelding and making him difficult to control. Only the song kept them back, and he heard the sliding sound of mud-beasts rising from the wet earth. By tomorrow, the flats would be a carpet of wildflowers, seeds that had lain dormant springing into brief, gloriously colored life.

His course had veered, but by the time the jessum trees shook their long tresses in the moonlight, he had an idea of what was waiting for him.

The darkness was more than physical, but when the horse stepped over the invisible boundary of consecration it lifted, and the white gelding discovered his usual ill-temper again. He had to work to convince the damn horse that Jack was the one in charge, and the disdainful laugh from the shadow-figure crouched atop the charterstone at the head of the grave nearly drove the beast out of its mind with fear.

Through it all, Gabe kept the song’s measured cadence. When, sweating and shaking, the horse stood with its ugly head hanging and lather dripping from its sides, he let the song die gratefully in his burning throat.

Silence. A faint brush of wind over the new life sprouting amid the ruin and mud.

“You’ve got a choice,” Robbie Browne said, finally.

Jack Gabriel dropped from the saddle with a purely internal sigh of relief. I just want to get some goddamn rest, kid. “So do you, Browne. Or is it Barrowe?”

“Both, actually.” The boy—or the thing wearing the boy’s likeness—shook his head, tossing the forelock with a curiously familiar motion. “Barrowe-Browne. Old names, sir. Not like yours.”

My name’s old enough. “Where is she?”

“My sister? Far beyond your reach, Sheriff. Which brings us to the choice.”

“You ain’t Robbie Browne. You’re it. The thing in the claim.”

“A lamentable misunderstanding. The thing in the claim lives in me, Jack Gabriel. A marriage of minds, you could call it. Except I’m not willing to give up my bachelor status.”

Gabe dressed the horse’s reins. If the animal bolted, good riddance. Plus, Joe would likely welcome its return without him. “So who am I talkin’ to?”

“Right now, on this ground, it’s Robert Browne. The consecration you so thoughtfully performed made its hold on me…uncertain.” A sigh, as Jack Gabriel’s gun cocked with a slight, definite click. “If you shoot at me, sir, you shall never see my sister again.”

The fear was claws in numb flesh. “I likely never will anyway.”

“I wouldn’t be so sure. She’s been bitten, and buried in ground you so thoughtfully made sacred. For better or worse, dear Cat’s just like me now. Little sister, always tagging along behind.” Another pause, and the scarecrow-figure shivered atop the charterstone, a quick, liquid, terribly wrong movement. “She shouldn’t have come.”

“Nope.” In that, at least, they were in complete agreement. Jack took a single step forward, wet pebbles and sand grinding underfoot. Another. “She ain’t fit for this.”

“Let me be frank, sir.”

“I wish you would be.” Another step.

“That’s close enough.” The light, laughing tone was a warning, and the white horse made a low unhappy sound, shivering. “Here is the bargain, Mr. Gabriel. I shall make you eternal, you shall leave me for daylight and the crows to feast on.” Robbie’s face was a white dish in the moonlight.

“Now why would you offer me a good deal like that, Browne? You ain’t the charitable type.”

“I am not. At least, I never was.” The boy hopped down from the charterstone, stepping over the freshly turned earth below. “Did you ever have a sister, sir?”

Something’s buried there. Buried nice and deep so sunlight won’t touch it. “Orphan.”

“Ah. Well. Then you don’t know.” A pause. “Sir, I wish…Catherine is all I have left. I wish for her to be proud of me. I would prefer her not to know I…am as you see me.”

“Funny way of showing it.”

“I didn’t know she would follow me. I had to alter my plans rather quickly once she appeared. As usual, you know, she always was rather a disturbance. Now, are you going to be reasonable?”

“There are good people in town dead because of you, Robbie Browne.”

“Would you like to add my sister to the list?” The boy’s laughter faded, and he reappeared to Jack’s left. Quick little bastard, slipping through pools of moonlight and shadow. And he was so damnably tired. “You’re Templis, aren’t you? The Order of the Redeemer. You know more about what she is than she ever will.”

Well, and there it was. His worst fears, confirmed. “The undead at the schoolhouse. They weren’t meant for her.”

“I knew there was something about you. The thing in the claim recognized you, but it’s…distracting, to have that much knowledge. It’s like a lumber room; thing wanted often buried—”

Jack moved. He hit the boy squarely, the knife sinking into the thin chest, and Robbie Browne laughed. Rolling, wet dirt flying and his exhausted body betraying him, the knife slapped out of his hand and the boy’s limbs closing around him like a vise. He struggled, and the prickles of grace burned unholy flesh. Robbie Browne hissed, his breath a sudden foulness…but even though Gabe’s spirit was willing, the flesh enclosing it had endured quite enough. Grace ebbed, and the struggle ended with a greenstick crack as bone in Jack Gabriel’s right arm gave way. He screamed, but the thing had its teeth in the juncture of his neck and shoulder. Tearing and ripping, a gout of hot blood down his shoulder, and his left hand was full of the gun he had loaded with charter-blessed ammunition.

Rolling again, the barrel jammed into the boy’s ribs. The thing inside Robbie’s flesh gapped and leered, and when the gun spoke, the white horse screamed to match Gabe’s cries and fled, trumpeting its fear as it tore through shadows and undead mud-substance alike. Another shot, and Gabe’s prayer rose like a charter-bell’s tolling, grace washing through him in a last hot flood of in extremis.

Catherine, he thought, deliriously, and Robbie Browne’s body sagged aside.

Jack curled himself into a ball, whisper-screaming as edges of broken humerus grated together. His lower arm had snapped in two places, too, and the pain ate him alive. Everything he had ever thought of eating rose in his throat, escaped in a series of retches.

Robbie’s body twitched. It hissed, a viper temporarily dazed. It wouldn’t be down for long.

I wish for her to be proud of me.

Me too, Gabe might have said, only he was busy trying to breathe. On his knees, left hand dropping the useless gun, and his fingers scrabbling through dirt for the knifehilt.

He found it, and the thing with Robbie Browne’s face glared up at him, its mouth working, black with Jack’s blood. “Do…it…” it hissed, and Jack didn’t hesitate. The broad blade bit deep, a tide of blackness gouting, and he hacked grimly at the thing’s neck until the head fell free, spurts of unholy ichor steaming in the chill night. The jessum trees rattled as they shook their fingers, just like slim graceful women letting their hair down, and the sound of the undead and the mud-creatures outside the consecrated ground falling to bits as the will that had impelled them decayed into dissolution was a whisper fit to haunt nightmares.

There was a brief starry period of blackness, and when Gabe regained consciousness he found himself lying under a cloudless sky, the stars a river and a graying of dawn in the east.

There was a wooden shape to one side, and two slumped corpses that were probably horses, drained to feed Robbie Barrowe’s unholy thirst. Jack didn’t care. He lay for a little while, until, blinking away dirt and crusted blood and nastier decaying fluid, he found the last gift Robert Barrowe-Browne would ever leave.

It was a second grave, dug just to the side of the freshly turned earth with the charterstone at its head. All Jack had to do was crawl, and pull some of the dirt over himself.

It should be enough. He prayed it would be enough.

His right arm hung useless, and the gun was left behind. He clutched the knife, its blade running with bubble-smoking black ichor, in his left fist as he crawled, scratching along the pan of the flats under Heaven’s uncaring vault. In the predawn hush, the scrape and rattle of his boots digging against damp earth were loud as trumpets. When he tumbled into the hole, the sides gave loosely, scattering over him.

It ain’t so hard, he told himself. All you have to do is put the knife in the right place.

He set the fine-honed edge against his own throat, and arranged his feet. His right arm throbbed and screamed, but he disregarded it. All it would take was a single lunge, jamming the hilt against the side of the grave, and he would bleed out.

But he had to do it before the sun rose.

Jack shut his eyes.

“Cath—” he whispered, and his legs spasmed, pushing him forward.