Eliot Pattison - Bone Rattler

Five minutes later Duncan circled the barn until out of sight of the main house, quickly locating a smoke-stained stone structure beyond the milking shed. The furnace was cold, the bellows idle. Beyond the anvil was a sooty structure of heavy vertical slats spaced a few inches apart, filled waist-high with charcoal, its door kept shut with a length of chain connected with a padlock.

“Mr. Lister,” Duncan said, pressing his face close to the planks. “Are you in pain? Can I get you something?” A scrap of cloth extended through a gap in the planks. It was stained with dried blood.

“Just before dawn comes a great chorus of birds.” The voice that came from the shadows was dry as sticks. “You’ve never heard such singing. A little taste of heaven.”

“I beg you not to be contemplating heaven just yet.”

“I’ve heard only gulls these past thirty years. ’Tis a sweet choir to awaken to.”

On the ground Duncan noticed a piece of birch bark shaped into a cone, fastened with a splinter of wood. He filled it with water from the smith’s bucket and passed it through a gap in the slats.

“The day you crossed the river,” Duncan said after Lister had drained the cup and passed it back, “a man was killed. Did you see anything?”

Lister scooped away charcoal, making a hollow where he could sit close enough that Duncan could see the dim glow of his face. “Don’t know about a killing. But there was a phantom lurking about. He weren’t meeting the Company, he was just studying it, following close as a shadow, cool as a fox. We were an hour past that Dutch inn. Young Frasier had tended my wounds and left me with a crock of water. Most of the men were out of the wagons, walking, herded on by the keepers and those guards. I was inconvenienced in the wagon, nothing to do but enjoy the day. A bird sang then, too. I thought nothing of it at first, but it persisted, a short, questioning song that seemed to want an answer, but none ever came. The bird followed, then I saw a dark shape close by, a stone’s throw away. At first I thought it a stump, but then it moved, and the bird song moved. The shadow would disappear, then appear a quarter mile up the road as we passed. It went on for two or three miles, the song and the shadow, the song getting more and more lonely.”

“And then?”

“A rider galloped up behind us. A man all in leather with a face like a shard of flint. Had words with some of the keepers. Frasier and Cameron. Showed them a piece of paper in his pocket. Took a drink from the water barrel tied to the back of my wagon, still on his horse, studying me with eyes like two black pebbles. Then he heard the bird, too, and he froze and turned toward the woods, his hand on his big skinning knife. He grinned, chewed off a cheekful of tobacco, and galloped on.”

“The shadow in the woods?”

“Never saw it again. Never heard the bird again.”

“Nothing else happened?”

“The road was full of bends, and crossed through many boulder fields that made it difficult to see the last wagon and those walking behind. I did not see Cameron, nor Frasier, for nigh an hour. But after another hour came the thing in the tree.”

Duncan filled the cup and Lister drained it once more. When he started again his voice was low and wary. “At first I thought it was a child in a blanket, and I was going to be sick. But it was a bear, a baby bear, recently hung from a tree on a noose over the road, blood dripping from its mouth. Its little paws were caught on the rope like it had struggled to escape before dying. I didn’t like it. No one liked it. Spooked the horses, even the guards. We made a ring of big fires that night and kept them burning ’til dawn. After that first night we drove straight through, sleeping in the wagons, driving in the moonlight.”

“What have they told you?” Duncan asked. “About what will happen here.”

“There’s to be a trial. There’s to be a hanging.”

Duncan fought to keep his voice steady. “Do you need something? A blanket?”

“At night I burrow down into the coal. Cameron jokes about it, says get used to it since where I am going all there is is burning coals.”

“Food?”

“Mostly what I need is a bath,” Lister said with a hoarse croak, his effort at a laugh. “Get me a bath and a bottle and they can do their worst.”

“I know you did not kill Evering.” Duncan declared.

Lister took a long time to answer. “If I told ye I did, we would both be shamed and y’er new American clan will be for naught. If I say nay, ye’ll try something foolish.”

“The history of my days,” Duncan said in a slow voice, “can be traced from one foolish act to another.”

“And the most foolish would be to throw away y’er new life for a dried-up sack of bones.”

“I seem to recall a day on a mast,” Duncan replied, “I seem to remember gripping hands. A pledge was made. It works both ways, you know. You brought me back to life. We must both endure the consequences of that bargain.”

In the silence that followed, Duncan could hear the wheeze of Lister’s leathery lungs. A lamb bleated. A milk cow bellowed. “The Ramsey lass arrived a few hours after we did,” Lister said at last. “I can see the side of the house from here. She stands at an upstairs window and just stares at the forest. She weeps for hours, she’s so scared. Frasier works in the kitchen sometimes, helping with the meals for the men.”

“That man in leather,” Duncan asked. “Was he here when you arrived?”

“Aye. Hawkins be his name, I ken. Five more looking just like him walked out of the woods a few hours later, carrying muskets. Axes and heavy knives in their belts. Empty eyes. Hawkins got a keg of rum from the great house. Got drunk in the barn, carousing all night, must have slept on hay in the empty stalls. Cameron announced that Hawkins is now a keeper. Six of the Company left with him this morning, new weapons in their belts. McGregor, plus McPhee. McSween. Ross.”

As Lister related the other three names something cold seemed to scrape across Duncan’s spine. The body snatchers. Hawkins had taken all the body snatchers. “Did Lord Ramsey speak with them?”

Lister sighed but did not answer the question. “Surely ye ken why we Scots have survived so many centuries against the English?” he asked. “We know when to retreat. We be masters at knowing when to retreat.”

“If you always retreat, eventually there is no ground left behind you.”

Lister muttered a low curse and grew silent again. A soot-covered finger appeared through a gap in the planks, pointing across the river. “Do you understand where we be?” he asked.

“The frontier.”

“Do ye ken the old maps that warned how boats fell off the edge of the world if they sailed too far? They had the right of it, they just mixed up land and sea. On the other side of that river ye fall off the world.”

“Some men go inside and return.”

“Then they be different men when they return, emptied out by the blackness. Makes me feel like a cowering boy just to watch it. The darkness there is like nothing I’ve ever seen. Worse than the blackest sea in the blackest storm. Ye can read the sea, but ye can’t read that. There is no bottom to it, there is just black behind the black.” There was an unsettling edge of fear in the old sailor’s voice. “It stretches without roads for hundreds of miles. Thousands. There is no soul alive who’s been from one side to the other, who knows where the far side lies. Go into it,” the old sailor warned in a voice that began to frighten Duncan, “and the clan dies.”

“Why would you say such a thing?” Duncan asked. “Why would you think I would be so foolish as to cross the river?”

Lister responded by extending a long, bony finger toward a wooded island in the river. “Find Frasier. Go meet Professor Evering. Even the dead are not safe over there.”