Paula Guran - The Mammoth Book of Cthulhu

“Gazing upon the accumulated trinkets, my bitten axes, the salted venison, the burlap and the barrels, storm chests and sealed urns, and the painting of your mother in her maidenhood, I am struck by how little there is to show for the generations of labor, for the missing thumb, the broken back, the lungs infested with devil’s club spore. My drunkard’s breath rasping, slower and slower.

“You are a good girl. Alas, I must tell you something nevertheless. My deathbed confession. Before you came along, I swore I’d be crisped in the fires of hell rather than sire offspring. You are dearer to my heart than any golden treasure. I should have kept my word.”

“Sired off spring?” she said. “I don’t take your meaning.”

“I fear it will come to you.”

When I was young, the Emperor’s Highway ended a few leagues south of the Black Forest. Not like today where the road cleaves right through the middle and is lined with hostels and cheery inns thanks to the many reforms of the Empress, Creator bless and keep her from harm. No, in the olden times all you got were deer paths and howling darkness once you set foot off the porch. Men hunted in groups with flintlocks and spears and packs of hounds. Boar, bear, wolf, and worse, lurked. Even a few of the trees and some of the mossy boulders couldn’t be trusted. Vile spirits were loose in the world. Hapless travelers vanished. Burly hunters, too. The children are what bothered everyone the most.

Ours has ever been a family of foresters — hunters, trappers, fellers, every one. My great-great-great grandfather Abernathy Ruark settled right here on the southern verge of the forest just after the shouting ended over the botched succession of King Theobald. Abernathy and his kin were a band of scofflaws and partisans who fled north when the revolt went sour, but half the kingdoms were in the same pickle and a couple generations later all was forgiven, if not forgotten. Most of the wood folk returned to the cities once the Interregnum ended. The Ruarks stood fast and continued to carve a living from the banded oak and red walnut that southern lords and fat-bellied merchants hold so dear. We hunted the razorback boars and skinned the bears-that-speakthe-tongue-of-men. We will continue until the last of us has shuffled into the Hinterlands.

James Dandy was a friend in my youth. Yes, yes, the very highwayman and brigand who got himself hanged in King’s Grove two winters gone. Last of his line. He grew up hard as nails. His parents were put to the ax and his brothers taken in chains to Sad Island. The Kouadoi would have bagged him, too, if he’d not squirreled away beneath a pile of dung until they tramped down to their ships and went back over the sea to their great ruined empire of caverns in Mount Thrall. That marked him, surely it did. Not a bad sort, but not a good one either, and now he’s worm food with all the rest but yours truly.

Our misadventures were mainly his doing, or that of his cousins Manfred Hurt and Ike Lutz, both of whom had fled Westhold under a dark cloud. Man whores, the pair. Hurt convinced me to leave home and travel the kingdom in search of adventure. For a year I followed him around like a puppy, growing leaner and meaner with each passing week. We survived by laboring when there was labor, stealing pies from windowsills, whoring ourselves to monied folk, and so forth. I learned much of Dandy and his cousins. Much indeed.

I’d resigned myself to another dose of boot-leather soup when Dandy waved a handbill he’d snagged from the gutter. He proposed that we four should join a troop of other stout lads to answer the King’s call for a march into the worst part of the Black Forest — The Fells. Aye, The Fells, The Fells where the Jumping Jack dwells . . . The Ministry of Coin wanted to scour the ruins of them old fallen holds that lie sunk into the muck and mire. There’d been a war, always a war, and it drained the treasury. Matters were so dire, palace servants had taken to melting royal dinnerware for the gold. Shameful.

Eadweard Mingy sat the throne in those days. King Mingy’s mother died birthing him and he was raised by a witch from the Far East. The bat gave him a taste for the black arts, maybe for the Dark itself. What a wretched court his must’ve been. Damned if that warlock Jon Foot didn’t curry his favor all the years Mingy reigned. Jon Foot’s folly is why I’ll never step north of the Hunt River so long as I draw breath. Creator blast him.

After a roaring drunk, my friends and I got fresh tattoos and signed up with the Royal Army. They were pleased to snatch our service since we were accomplished woodsmen, or close enough for their uses. I hoped to see home again. Foolish boy was I.

Away we went — a full company of soldiers, laborers, potboys, and whores. One of a dozen such companies sent to spelunk for gold and precious relics and jewelry in the abandoned strongholds of the dead lords. Whispers were that the leaders of the expeditions reported not to the chancellery, but to Foot himself. He sought something other than mere gold or trinkets among the ruins.

Woe to us who discovered it for him.

We marched. North and north through the tilled and green lands around Great Port. North and north over the Tumwater and though the Wolverine Mountains a day’s ride from the sea. North and north again until we passed through Sterling and entered the Black Forest in the region known as Cottonwood Vale for the cottonwood trees that line the River Fetch.

Our troop was led by Captain Vanger — well known throughout the army as a genuine hard ass. Vanger the Incorruptible, Vanger the Whip. Captain brooked no nonsense among the ranks, squaddie or civilian. Carried a blacksnake whip at his belt — as the men all do in Carlsbad, which is where he’d been brought bloody and screaming into this evil world. Loved that whip, Vanger did. Could snap a fly off a man’s cheek at seven paces. Nobody was safe from it, either. That’s how Manfred Hurt lost a chunk of his earlobe — old Incorruptible popped it like a cherry over some trifling infraction or because he didn’t care for the look on the lad’s face. No, it didn’t teach Hurt much except to use a bit more stealth when fucking about. Only a bit.

North and north. Five days along the Left Hand Path where the canopy closes like an iron trap and sunbeams are wan. That way cannot be found anymore; it has overgrown and some sprats argue it only exists in the addled minds of old men. Sprats with fewer teeth than before they say it to me, I aver.

Our scouts, a squad of Peloki warriors who wore topknots and red ochre war paint, had their chores cut out for them. You think our homely shack lies in the wilds, now, do you? Back then, the Left Hand was the only trail except what the animals made. Before the grand massacres that exterminated them once and for all, Malets and Hillmen skulked from the moors and hunted the forest. Not for game, mind you. Plenty of that in the highlands. The savages collected scalps from unwary southerners they caught with their breeches at half-mast.

None of us snot-noses had seen a genuine blue-belly, and despite the grim mutters among the veterans, we eagerly hoped to catch a glimpse. Some shit-eating fairy always lurks in the wings, waiting to grant an errant wish. Horses and donkeys went missing. Patrols spotted malevolent shadows flitting among the wagons and drove them away with torches and shouts. Finally, the Malets captured two lads on graveyard watch — snatched those unlucky boys smooth and quiet as weasels in the coop. Captain Vanger forbade any rescue mission into the deep undergrowth. He’d fought in the Battle of Thornwood and a dozen more on the Ynde subcontinent where tigers and their cults of worship roam the jungles. He knew the score. We marched onward and dusk came in a rich crimson blush through the foliage.