Eliot Pattison - Bone Rattler

“You said before, many of them feel the old gods are leaving them. If they were trying to adapt the old ways,” Duncan pressed, “who would be the giver?”

Woolford swallowed hard. When he spoke his voice had gone hollow. “A god.”

Each man in turn opened his jaw as if to speak, but no words came out. They watched, mute, as Jonathan brought back another handful of pebbles and returned to his foraging on the bank.

Duncan extracted the notched council stick and dangled it in front of the ranger. Woolford’s eyes lit with sudden interest, but as he tried to grab the stick, Duncan closed his fingers around it. “Are the men who raided us from Tashgua?”

“Likely so,” Woolford replied in a simmering voice. “I must see that stick.”

“Are there Scots with Tashgua?”

“There were, months ago. The ones who survived are probably safe in Carolina by now.” Cold anger was building in the ranger’s eyes.

“Did you find my brother’s body at Stony Run?”

“No.” Woolford eyed Duncan’s hand as if he were about to pounce on it.

“Was Tashgua at Ticonderoga?”

“I would not swear it,” Woolford said in something like a hiss, “but I would guess it to be so, watching from the hillside.”

“Where my brother disappeared.” Duncan dropped the stick into the ranger’s hand. “Where would the Onondaga hold a council?”

“Not all the Onondaga, but the prophet of the Onondaga, the great seer of the Iroquois people.” Woolford bent over the little stick as he spoke, counting the notches. “And this,” he said, lifting the stick in his open palm, “guarantees that every senior chief, every medicine man from every one of the tribes who believes that the old ways must be preserved will be there.”

“Fitch had seen another message on a wampum belt,” Duncan recalled, his breath catching. “It told where the council will be, didn’t it?”

Woolford did not reply, only rose and trotted toward the barn, where he had left his pack and rifle. The message Fitch had seen hours before his murder. The council was being called at Stony Run, on the day the world was going to end.

After a moment, a shadow fell over Duncan. He turned and rose, facing Crispin. The big man, his face gaunt with melancholy, seemed to have shrunk. He said nothing, but gestured Duncan toward the barn.

“Lord Ramsey has a plan,” Crispin announced in a worried voice as Duncan arrived at his side by the entrance. “He’s called a meeting of all the town in an hour.” The butler and a handful of Company men were staring at a row of smudges six feet from the loft ladder. They were the prints of hands covered with soot, rising straight up the wall, without accompanying footprints, spaced as if some great pawed spider had scaled the high wall. Duncan pushed though the men and climbed the ladder.

The hay had been pushed back from the center of the north wall of the massive loft, forming a ten-foot-wide semicircle of bare wood, above which a hideous red face hung from a beam, its crooked black mouth upturned at one end in a haunting smile, curled down at the other in a sinister frown. It was the mask from the island, the mask that had been on the prophet Evering, with the professor’s black waistcoat suspended below it, but hung around its neck now were a dozen huge claws.

“It wasn’t there yesterday,” Crispin announced from behind him.

“But no one saw an Indian in the town during the raid. There were men watching everywhere, some with muskets.”

“No one saw them in the house,” Crispin reminded him in a bleak tone, “except the boy. Those who worship such a thing, they are creatures of the night.”

“It’s just a piece of wood, Crispin.”

“They’re bringing guns,” Crispin said over his shoulder. “They’re going to shoot it.”

A new figure appeared, from a second ladder. Woolford stared in silence at the mask, then warily approached it, pacing in front of it, never taking his eyes from it. Then he paused, reached up, and ran his hand along its cheek, as if greeting an old acquaintance.

“Pull the damned thing down!” an angry voice boomed. Duncan turned to see Cameron, a sickle raised in his hand.

“You may pull it down if you wish, Mr. Cameron,” the ranger calmly rejoined. “You can burn him. You can chop him. You can shatter him with bullets. But what happens when he reappears tomorrow morning? With another row of prints where he scaled the wall?” Woolford asked in a solemn tone. The men grew very still. “The Indians consider these masks alive, with a spirit inside. And this is a very powerful one. When it isn’t in use, offerings of food need to be given it to keep it content.”

The big keeper spat a curse but backed away to a rope at the far end of the loft, never taking his eyes from the demon. One of the Company men, watching in silence, reached into his pocket, hesitantly approached the wooden creature, and tossed a piece of sausage to the floor below it.

“Why here?” Crispin asked the ranger. “Why the barn?” Duncan recalled he had heard the same question twice before, when Sarah had chanted there and when Frasier had hidden a saw in the building.

Woolford’s brow knitted, then he shook his head again. He had no answer. “Mr. Fitch always liked to camp near running water,” the ranger said after a moment. “If you’d bury him near the river I’d be obliged.”

Crispin nodded soberly.

“His Christian name was Ezekiel. He was born in ’oh-seven. In his pack you’ll find a scrap of silk that belonged to his wife, who died of cholera years ago. Put it near his heart.”

“Where are you going?” Duncan asked.

Woolford’s gaze was filled with foreboding. “The crooked man comes from a crooked tree,” he said, then turned and climbed down the ladder.

Ramsey was in no mood for one of his long speeches when the Company was finally assembled. His message was short, and the icy determination in his eyes seemed to unnerve many of those who watched. “I want six men, no more,” he announced from his perch on a wooden crate in the barnyard. “It is an old game they play. For thousands of years, enemies have sought to steal princesses to use against a king. The way such villains are beaten is through wit and stealth.” Cameron appeared at his side, bearing one of the big muskets.

“I am not empowered to change the duration of your servitude, for that is by order of the courts in England. But those who come back with my daughter,” Ramsey continued, “and the parchment they stole from my office, shall have an extra hundred acres of bottomland at the end of their term.”

Cameron pushed past Ramsey and stood in front of the crate. The assembly withdrew a step, eyeing the big keeper uneasily.

“As the first members of the Edentown militia, you will each be equipped with a musket, knife, and tomahawk,” Ramsey added. “And all the ammunition and other supplies you can carry.”

Two men pushed through the line, the red-bearded McGregor and another of the rough men who had accosted Duncan in the bilges of the Anna Rose.

“You will be led by my strong right hand, whom I have appointed major of our glorious new troop.”

Duncan leaned forward, confused, and was shocked as Reverend Arnold emerged from behind Ramsey. Arnold was attired in the white shirt he usually wore, but over it he had donned a pocketed hunter’s frock, opened to reveal one of the old metal breastplates Duncan had seen in the library. He carried Ramsey’s engraved fowling piece. On his head he wore a new tricorn hat; on his feet, high-topped riding boots.

“We shall smite the heathen with the power of God in our hearts and in our weapons,” Arnold declared in a loud but unsteady voice. He could not conceal the fear in his eyes. Had Ramsey forced the vicar to venture into the forest?