David Drake: Balefires

The men stared at each other. "I'll stay," Kernes said. Alice banged through the gate and into the milking parlor without a look behind her."I'd have stayed anyway, Alice!" the smaller man shouted.

"Call Doc Jepson," Deehalter repeated wearily. "We can tell him it was dogs or something-" the tooth marks were too high and broad for that to be other than a transparent lie-"and hope we can scotch this thing before worse happens."

Numbly, Kernes made the call. As the little man hung up, they heard the rasping starter of the old station wagon. A moment later, gravel spattered as Alice rocketed down the drive. Almost as fast as he himself had driven the night before, Deehalter thought.

"It's because of what we took out of that mound," Kernes said in a small voice.

Deehalter shook his head in irritation. "This thing didn't come from a skull or a little bit of iron," he snapped. "It's big, big enough to kill a Holstein."

"It was there just the same," Kernes replied. "We've got to close that grave up with everything in it again. Then maybe we'll be okay."

"You're nuts," Deehalter said. But he remembered the thing's eyes and the gape of its jaws; and he knew that sometime that day he would help Kernes bury the objects again.

Deehalter walked to the mound and the parked jeep without speaking. In the field behind him, the crows settled noisily on the carrion again.

Kernes had lifted out a pair of shovels and the gunny sack holding the objects. "Well?" he asked.

"Yeah," said Deehalter with a shrug, "it was Wiener."

Kernes began to undo the knot which closed the sack's throat. Without looking up, he said, "I think it's the moon. That's why it didn't come out when we opened the mound. It needed the full moon to bring it out."

"Bullshit," said Deehalter."Isaw the thing and it's not moonlight, it's as solid as you or me. Damn sight solider than old Wiener there," he added with a grim twist of his head. "Moonlight's just light, anyway."

"Fluorescent light's just light too," Kernes retorted, "but it makes plants grow like they don't with a regular light bulb. Christ, Dee, don't youfeel the moon on you at night?"

Deehalter did, but he wasn't about to admit that weakness even in the noon sun. Kernes had paused after opening the bag, unwilling either to dump the contents back into the hole without ceremony or to touch them again barehanded. The big man hesitated also. Then he glanced at the guns in easy reach, between the front seats of the jeep, and lifted out the skull.

The bone felt warm. Because Deehalter had not really taken a look at it before, he did so now at this last opportunity. The teeth were damaged in a way that at first he could not explain. Then the farmer cursed, set the skull down on the ground, and stretched out in the open trench. The angle was too flat for Deehalter to have been able to see anything even if he had brought a flashlight this trip, but his fingertips found the shallow grooves he expected in the under-surface of the slab.

"Christ," he muttered, standing up again. "That poor sucker was alive when they covered him up in there. He didn't have a damned thing to dig with, so he tried to scrape through the stone with his teeth."

Kernes stared at the skull and looked a little sicker than he had before. His finger traced but did not touch the front teeth. All four of the incisors were worn across the flats as if by a file. They had been ground down well into the nerve canals. One of the front pair had cracked about halfway from the root. "Yeah, I'd seen that but I didn't think…" he said. "Jesus, what a way to go. He surely must've known he couldn't chew his way through a foot of rock."

"Maybe he didn't know there was a foot of it," Deehalter said. "Besides, he didn't have a lot of choice."

Carefully, the big man set the skull as far back into the mound as his arm would reach. The litter of bone and rock chips within scrunched under his shirtsleeve.

The rippled, iron teardrop was still closed. Deehalter looked at it for a moment, then twisted it to split the halves because they had been separate when he found them. The metal divided with a soft gasp like a cold jar being opened. Deehalter set the halves under the slab as carefully as he had the discolored skull.

Almost before he rolled out of the way, his brother-in-law was tossing a shovelful of earth into the hole. Kernes worked feverishly at the soil pile he and his son had thrown up in digging the pit. By the time Deehalter had brushed himself off and picked up a shovel, the blast-crumbled edge of the slab had been buried again.

They finished their work before noon, leaving on the mound's side a black scar that sealed off the greater blackness within.

The barn windows were green fiberglass which the western moonlight outlined sharply against the walls. The diffused illumination was weak and without distinct shadows, It made the loft floor an overlay of grays on grays which wobbled softly as Deehalter paced along it. The cattle penned below murmured, occasionally blatting loudly at their unfamiliar restraint. At each outburst, Deehalter would pause and lean over the loft rail with his rifle forward; but the bellowing was never for any reason that had to do with why two armed men were watching the barn tonight.

At the north end of the loft, Deehalter stopped and looked out the open loading door. The cow yard below was scraped and hosed off daily, but animal waste had stained the concrete an indelible brown which became purple in the mercury light.

To the left, within the fence of the cow yard and in the corner it formed with the barn, hunched Kernes with a shotgun loaded with deer slugs. From Deehalter's angle, the smaller man was foreshortened into a stump growing from the concrete. Nothing moved in the night, though the automatic feeder in the hog pens flapped several times. As Deehalter watched silently, Kernes looked up at the moon. Despite the coolness of the night and the breeze from the west, Kernes pulled out a handkerchief and wiped his forehead.

Deehalter turned and began pacing back to the south end of the barn. He had finished his thermos of coffee hours ago, and it was only by staying in motion that he was able to keep awake. He couldn't understand how Kernes could huddle in the same corner since ten o'clock and still be alert; but then, Kernes wasn't a person Deehalterwanted to understand.

Deehalter peered out the south door. Nothing, nothing, of course nothing. A fox barked in the invisible distance and the big man's grip tightened on his rifle stock. He caught himself before he threw a bullet out into the night in frustration; then he began to pace back.

But each time the creature had come, it was in the near dawn. As if it were striding to the farm from far away, or because it got a late start. The notch he and Kernes had blasted in the Indian mound faced southwest. Moonlight would not have entered it until nearly morning. But there was no living thing in that narrow rock basin, only a litter of bones and what was probably a meteorite.

Why had that Indian been sealed up alive?

Nothing but bones and iron in the mound. Briefly, Deehalter's mind turned over a memory of awakening to seize his rifle in the pattern of moonlight etched across his room by the Venetian blinds. Now he held the weapon close and bent forward to look at his brother-in-law.

Kernes had moved slightly, out along the electric fence. The yard light colored his shirt blue but could not throw a shadow forward into the glare of the full moon. Kernes was staring west at that mottled orb. His shotgun barrel traced nervous arcs, rising and slipping back to a high port. It was almost as if the smaller man were wishing he could fire at the moon, but catching himself a moment before he did anything that… crazy.