Onward, Drake! - eARC Page 12
Steven shook his head, seemingly still amazed after all these decades.
“That cottonmouth stopped right in his tracks. Didn’t move another muscle. I could hear it cursing up a storm, too. ‘Let me go, damn it all! Let me bite! Damned trespasser. This is my creek!’ That sort of stuff. Yep, it wanted to get at me, and it couldn’t because something was holding it. That something was Maude’s talent. She probably saved my life. I knew it then and I know it now.”
He nodded. “That was the day I realized she was more than a craft-talker. She was a major talent. She was a maker like none that have been born for many years. She could spread herself out into the world. She could cause animals to obey her, not merely listen. Trees and flowers, too. Maybe even the land itself.”
“Well, she must’ve lost it somewhere,” I replied. “After she got the dogs, she sure as hell couldn’t stop them from howling, shitting, and fighting all the time. It was all so . . . miserable.”
We went into the pen. I showed Uncle Steven the burnt salts underneath the dirt covering the floor. We both avoided looking at the body as best we could.
He was silent for a time, and I knew he was reaching out, feeling his surroundings with his talent.
“It’s like a bee’s nest around here,” he finally said. “I can barely follow the lines. It’s like trying to watch a particular teaspoon of water in a river. You’ll have to find the crack.”
“What crack?” For a moment I thought he might be talking about drugs. But he meant craft. Magic. I looked down at Mom’s body. She almost seemed to be smiling. Then a maggot squirmed out of the side of her eye. “Steven, what is this place?”
“No ‘uncle,’ huh? That’s the first time you ever used my name without it.” He knelt down next to my mother, his sister, and rolled her back over so that we couldn’t see her face. “Enough of that,” he said. “For now.” He stood back up. “Those old cunning men I was telling you about?”
“The ones who could move mountains, change the course of rivers, and make sure the Tide wins the SEC every other year? Yeah.”
“Not quite. I’m talking about the 1660s. The Barrons and Cooleys come over from Scotland. They get off the boat and disappear into the hills. And those hills were haunted back then. Manitous, devils, giants—things I can’t name because they haven’t been seen in five hundred years. Evil that had taken form and stalked the land. They faced those evil things down. Some they destroyed, but the more powerful they could only bind.”
“Are you telling me this barn is sitting on one of these bindings? Is that what the ley tangle is?”
“It’s holding something old,” said Uncle Steven. “Something’s under this ground that must not walk in our world again.”
“Did it get out?”
“Nah. We’d know if it got out,” Uncle Steven said. “But I think it managed to stick a tendril, a small finger, into the regular world trying to claw its way back.”
“And that’s what killed Mom?”
“Yes.”
“Did she even know she was sitting on one of these bindings?”
“How can you ask that, Phil?” Uncle Steven shook his head, evidently in amazement at my stupidity. “That’s why she built the goddamn barn here. Maude was a tender. A keeper of one of the major bindings.”
“And the craziness? Her sleeping like a bag lady on a cot in the loft? Her being a tender had something to do with that, too?
Uncle Steven nodded. “Tenders are always kind of nuts. You get that way when you walk between the worlds every moment of every day.”
“And the dogs?”
Uncle Steven considered. Blinked. “You know, I was a fool not to have seen it.”
“What?”
“You heard them. That howl when they all get going together.”
“Oh yeah.”
“That’s why they had to be wild or beaten up. Those kind of dogs know the scent of evil.”
“They’re . . . guard dogs?”
“We might as well come out and say it.” Uncle Steven again smiled one of those snowy smiles that was one lip quirk away from a grimace. “They guard the gate to hell.”
“And something is trying to get out. Something that got Mom?”
“That I’m not sure of. If it is, there will be a trail. A pathway, however small.”
A pathway, however small? Yes, I had located such, I thought. The tiniest crack?
“That’s what I’m good at,” I said. “That’s how I make a living. Finding what lies buried. But once I find it, what am I supposed to do?”
“Draw it out. You can’t kill the old one, but you can hurt it. Let it know it can’t come back into this world.”
“Hurt it? How?”
“The usual way.”
Even if you have the craft, unless you are a scribe, you can’t immediately locate ley lines, lines of magical power. You have to turn your inner eye toward them. Or, in my case, I use my trusty dowsing rod.
I went back to my car to get it, wading through the cats. My rod was in the trunk. It was a tube of copper welded into a “Y” shape. The main tube, the pointing end, was about two feet long. All three end-pieces were plugged, and the rod was filled with cave water that had never seen the light of day. I’d collected it on a spelunking expedition in Tennessee.
I took it back to the pen and stood with over Mom’s body.
“How do I do this?” I asked Uncle Steven.
He considered for a moment. “Start with her,” he finally said.
Once again I knelt beside Mom. So far, I hadn’t touched her except by clothes to roll her over. Now I had to do far worse.
I reached down and, after a moment’s hesitation, opened her mouth. My fingers touched soft rottenness inside.
I poked the end of the dowsing rod between her lips.
Then I grasped the handles of the rod with both hands, and let my mind flow.
The familiar sensation of travelling at immense speed. Travelling down, spreading into the liquid remains of her limbs, flowing through the places her body contacted the ground to enter the interstices of the earth.
Down. Spreading like water, forming a table of me, of awareness, that grew at a steady rate. Then my awareness bubbled up into the copper salt circle below the earth of the pen. I pushed harder. I explored the edges.
“It’s like a hoop of iron,” I heard myself muttering. “Keeps the power contained.”
“There has to be a crack,” said Uncle Steven. “Keep looking.”
And then I found it, sensed it. There was the smallest trickle outward, the smallest leak of power.
A pinprick opening. Most water-witches couldn’t have pushed their way through such a tiny gateway, but if there was one aspect of the craft that I’d practiced for years, it was dowsing—witching for water, organics, titanium, you name it. I was good at it. The line away from the circle was small, but very clear, unbroken, and solid. It led into a crazy knot of ley lines that met near the center of the barn. It took me a bit of unraveling, and I was able to find it, follow it—
Down, into the land, through the stone, flowing for a time with the water table. Then turning downward, plunging deeper still. Through the bedrock.
And then I was there. At the boundary of mantle and crust. Solid and liquid rock meeting, boiling with activity.
That’s where I found it. Felt it. Touched evil with my mind.
Uncle Steven was right. It was an old one, ancient; it had crossed the Bering Strait when the land-bridge formed. It had come following the first humans, slithering behind them through the ice-filled valleys of the New World, tracking its prey.
The souls of men.
Growing every year like a tree adds a ring. Lurking in shadow so long the darkness seeped into its being. Emerging to eat first the men who lived in the caves, then those who worshipped on the mounds of mud, then those who built longhouses, and finally the ones who drove the others away, seized their land. Settlers.
But one day it attacked the wrong
man. It even remembered the man’s name, which was my own.
Caleb Montgomery.
But instead of sucking this man’s soul, the old one found that it had fallen into a trap. The man, Montgomery, had been bait, drawing it into the midst of a net of ley lines.
Ley lines that were now pulled tight by the little men, the inconsequential nothings. How could this be? Yet it was.
It was encircled, bound by the power of the land itself, then cast into the bowels of the Earth.
The old one was not happy. It brooded for year upon year on one purpose.
Revenge.
Starting with those who bore the cursed name, Montgomery.
Like the tender. Oh, she believed she was clever, keeping her mind from me, always tightening the binding. But she dropped a stitch, left an opening. I could send fire.
I burned her, and feasted on her screams.
I knew it was talking to me. It had sensed me there. The fact that I was Phillip and not Caleb didn’t mean a damn thing. I was Montgomery. It could smell this in the very craft that I used. The craft that had bound it.
You have widened the pathway by seeking me out, little human.
I felt its tendril-hands reach for me.
It won’t do you any good, but you had better run!
Did I stand firm, find a way to dispel it, destroy it then and there?
I did not.
Instead, when it first reached for me, I broke like a bat out of hell for the surface.
I didn’t know until too late that I was being followed.
The “tendril,” the creature the old one sent after me, was only a tiny speck of its true being, a finger. Less than that. But very real. Very much composed of meat and bones—and teeth—held together by devil-craft.
It rose from the ground in the pen like a corpse breaking out of a grave, tossing my mother’s body aside. It was huge, the size of five men, at least, and its head was mostly mouth, with a gnarled, teeth-filled maw dripping with steaming, corrosive drool. Its deep-socketed eyes were square-pupilled, like a goat. It scanned the perimeter of the dog pen, seeking prey.
What it saw was my Uncle Steven.
“Get back!” I yelled to him.
Uncle Steven gazed up at the beast as if enraptured. “In Pleiku,” he said softly. Then he called out to the creature. “I’ve killed one of you.”
“Yesssssss.” Its voice sounded like a steam kettle that could articulate words. “But I will kiiiiill you now.”
Uncle Steven stumbled back through the pen’s gate. I was not far behind. The creature followed, taking its time, savoring our terror.
It opened its mouth.
And opened it.
And opened it.
When it was done, half its face was a lamprey-like circular maw. Big enough to fit around a man’s torso. And probably strong enough to bite it clean in half.
From that mouth a long, spike-pointed tongue lashed out, faster than the eye could follow. Maybe my uncle felt a vibration in the ley lines. Maybe it was gut instinct. But Uncle Steven dodged out of the way. If he had not, the tongue would have pierced his heart. As it was, it lashed across one of his arms, ripping through his flannel shirt and tearing a gash along his upper arm deep enough to expose the red striations of muscle.
He reeled, sank to his knees, holding the wound.
“Uncle Steven,” I shouted. “How? How did you kill it? The one in Vietnam?”
“C-four,” he said. “Bullets. You still carry that Colt? Use it!”
Could bullets really hurt this thing?
There was only one way to find out. I reached behind me and pulled my Colt 1903 from its waistband holster. It had come down to me from my grandfather on my father’s side.
The Colt fired .38 caliber bullets, and I had a full mag of eight hollow points.
The creature drew closer to Uncle Steven.
“You smell of night,” the creature said. Talons sprang from its outstretched fingers. It rose over Uncle Steven, moving in for the kill. “No matter. You will burn in my gullet like any other.”
Then, all around us, the dogs began a yowling session louder than any other I’d heard before.
The creature hesitated, looked around, perhaps trying to understand where so many dogs had come from. Their number was unbelievable, if not supernatural.
I fired a shot into its back.
For a moment it hung over Uncle Steven, talons at the ready. Then it slowly turned toward me. Its tongue shot out.
And knocked the Colt from my hand.
I’ll eat your soul, well-witcher.
The pain was intense. But I was too busy scrambling backward to worry about whether anything was broken.
Evidently not. My fingers closed around the two-by-four lying on the floor of the pit bulls’ pen, and I was able to grasp it.
The giant lamprey maw descended toward me even as I yanked the board up. The jaws clamped to rend, to kill—
But instead the two-by-four was jammed into its maw, keeping the mouth open. It recoiled back, shaking its head. The two-by-four refused to budge for a moment—thank God for pressure-treated wood—and the creature worried at its mouth with a talon, trying to extract it.
Behind the creature, Uncle Steven was on his feet. He was moving toward one of the dog pens.
The creature roared in frustration, but finally managed to wrap a talon behind the two by four and yank it out.
Then it turned its attention back to me, growing closer. A bit of its drool spattered onto my face and burned as if it were a fresh fire coal.
I had nothing. Nothing but words.
“At least tell me your name,” I said, popping out the first thing that came to mind.
This caused it to hesitate once again.
Uncle Steven opened a dog pen. He moved to the next.
My name? It is older than the race of man. To speak it would drive you mad.
“I want to hear it anyway,” I shouted. “Tell me your name.”
You are clever. I am bound to answer this question. But it will do you no good.
Devils were bound to say their name when asked? I did not know that.
But somewhere, maybe from inside me, I heard old Caleb Montgomery chuckling. “But I knew, laddy,” I thought I heard him say.
Very well. My name is—
That was when the first of the dogs hit the creature. They tore into the musculature of its legs with their teeth.
Meat! Meat! Meat! they shouted. Bring down the meat!
Uncle Steven opened another pen. And another.
Let us out! the ones still behind closed gates yelped. Let us eat, too!
Pit bulls, hounds, fiches, whippets, labs, mutts of all types—even a couple of fearless Pomeranians with pinprick teeth. The Pomeranians were sisters that my mother had stepped in front of an oncoming semi truck to rescue and pulled off a busy four-lane.
The creature reached down, grabbed a dog—one of the lab-mixes—in its talons, and flung the poor beast across the barn. It hit the far wall and splattered against it. The creature bent to grasp another one.
And I dove for the Colt. For a moment, I fumbled for it in the dust and dog shit, but then I had it.
The creature saw what I was doing, moved toward me, dragging along dogs attached by their teeth to its legs.
The biting dogs clamped onto the creature slowed it just enough. As the creature leaned toward me, I emptied the rest of the Colt’s magazine into its face.
On the seventh shot, its skull exploded.
I scrambled back and got out of the way as the creature fell in the center of the barn, throwing up a great cloud of disgusting dirt when it landed.
Across from me, Uncle Steven opened the last of the pens. Last but not least, he let the pit bull brothers in from the exercise yard.
The dogs chewed their way into the carcass with gusto. Large and small, they gulped down huge chunks of meat, and carried more away to continue gnawing in their doghouses, dens, and hidey holes.
Meat! So good! Meat and more meat!
Give thanks! Give thanks to the master!
As one, the dogs turned to me. Ears up. Tails wagging—or at least stumps for those who’d lost theirs. They began to bark, to howl, to yap and yammer.
The din reverberated throughout the barn.
He is his mother’s son!
Give thanks to the master!
He has taken down the meat!
Oh God, I thought. Shut up.
“I am not your master!” I shouted. But then I glanced at my uncle. He was holding his cut arm and obviously in some pain. But there on his face was that cunning man’s smile. He was shaking his head as if he didn’t believe my words. As if he’d scried the real truth.
He probably had.
“I am not my mother,” I said with a low growl. “I am not your master, you goddamn dogs.”
But, even then, I was starting to have my doubts.
* * *
Tony Daniel is an editor at Baen Books. He is also the author of ten science fiction novels, the latest of which is Guardian of Night, as well as an award-winning short story collection, The Robot’s Twilight Companion. Other Daniel novels include the ground-breaking Metaplanetary and Superluminal. He’s the coauthor of two books with David Drake in the long-running General series, The Heretic and The Savior. He is also the author of original series Star Trek novels Devil’s Bargain and Savage Trade. Daniel was a Hugo finalist for his short story “Life on the Moon,” which also won the Asimov’s Reader’s Choice Award. Daniel’s short stories have been much anthologized and have been collected in multiple year’s best compilations. In the 1990s, he founded and directed the Automatic Vaudeville dramatic group in New York City, with appearances doing audio drama on WBAI. He’s also co-written the screenplays for several horror movies that have appeared on the SyFy and Chiller channel, including the Larry Fesenden-directed Beneath. During the early 2000s, Daniel was the writer and sometimes director of numerous radio plays and audio dramas with actors such as Peter Gallagher, Oliver Platt, Stanley Tucci, Gina Gershon, Luke Perry, Tim Robbins, Tim Curry, and Kyra Sedgewick appearing in them for SCI-FI.COM’s Seeing Ear Theatre. He is currently writing and producing a series of adaptations of the works of Baen authors such as Eric Flint and Larry Correia for Baen Books Audio Drama. Daniel took his B.A. at Birmingham-Southern College, where he majored in philosophy. He has a Masters in English from Washington University in St. Louis. He attended the USC Film School graduate program for one year before dropping out to write. Born in Alabama, Daniel has lived in St. Louis, Los Angeles, Seattle, Prague, New York City, Dallas, and Raleigh, North Carolina, where he currently resides with his wife Rika, and children Cokie and Hans.