David Wilson - Hallowed Ground

The wagon came to a halt, the flatbed creaking heavily on its rear axle. Mariah, for the first time, sat up front beside Balthazar. She scanned the moonlit plain that rolled out around them. There were no signs of life, save for an odd glow in the distance. No insects, no animals, no birds. The only sounds she heard were made by the wind shivering through scrub brush. Just when she thought they were truly and utterly alone the mournful cry of an owl broke the silence. She felt rather than saw Balthazar flinch.

"What?"

"It’s nothing," he said, brushing her off with grunt. "Damn bird startled me."

It wasn’t a bird that plucked at his nerves. They both knew that. On any other night the old man was so precise, so particular. Misnaming the owl caused something – some sense – inside her to prickle. She turned to look at him properly, struggling to believe something could startle him. He had witnessed tentacles reaching up out of the dirt to drag a man down; he had taken her back to her own coffin. There was no way a simple barn owl could affect the man, not like that.

"I see lights," she said, pointing. It was a poor attempt to shift his attention. Still, he answered her:

"They’ll be brighter soon, I expect. There’s something of a shindig in progress."

Mariah waited for him to explain. She didn’t ask questions. She had learned to be patient. If he intended to tell her, he would tell her, but in his own time. She could ask all the questions she wanted, he might just as well answer with a riddle, a question of his own, or spin some other story that meant nothing to her and left her all the more confused, and with more questions. Then again he might say nothing and let silence fester between them. There was no way of knowing how he would respond. So she waited the silence out.

"I have been expecting this particular party for a long, long time," Balthazar said. "You might say it’s the final move in an elaborate game of checkers. Have you ever played?"

He turned to her, and she shook her head.

"It’s a simple but fascinating game," he said, leaning across conspiratorially. "I’ve never lost."

Mariah turned and stared out over the plains. The lights had brightened, and if she concentrated, she thought she could hear voices. There weren’t any coherent words. The harder she tried to pick out actual shapes and sounds the more sure she was that there were none to hear, only tones, rising and falling in an eerie cadence.

There was something wrong with the lights, she realized.

A campfire’s light would have flickered, throwing both light and shadow across the sky. It wouldn’t be so bright, and you’d see it dance. She knew that. A town was different. The light came from a number of sources and coalesced into a single canopy overhead. This wasn’t like that either. The closer they came, the more it resembled a ray of light – a cylinder shooting straight up from the desert floor all the way into the high banks of cloud.

Balthazar inclined his head slowly, like a dog listening to the cry of a distant animal. As Mariah watched, he licked his dry lips and seemed to mouth several words. He saw her looking at him and smiled.

"It sounds as though things are going well," he told her. "Perhaps one might venture so far as to say very well. With a little luck, and I am always lucky, my dear, our work may prove a little easier than I originally expected."

He slapped the reins to the horses’ backs, and the wagon lurched forward again. Mariah stared at the light intently as it grew brighter and more intense. She didn’t say a word. It wasn’t that she was listening to Balthazar, or even the curious ululating tones that weren’t quite voices, she was simply lost to the light. Every now and then she thought she saw something more defined, a shadowed shape whirling within that luminous ray. And occasionally, as those shadows writhed and twisted, they looked almost human.

She couldn’t tell if they were trying to get out, or if they were scrabbling desperately to find their way in.

Chapter Thirty-One

Creed crouched in the small clearing, keeping himself just out of sight of the Deacon’s camp. Tension had his skin crawling. He cracked his fingers. He chewed at his lip. It wasn’t just that something was wrong – everything was wrong. He felt it like a frisson in the air itself. He hid there for as long as he could bear, then pushed to his feet and started to prowl, circling like a wildcat. He was almost sure there wouldn’t be a weakness in the barrier, but he’d been wrong before. Supposing there was a flaw; he wouldn’t find it by sitting back on his haunches and waiting. He reached out occasionally, to test its resistance. As the darkness deepened he thought he saw an actual wall shimmer between his fingertips and the tents. Again and again he tested it, causing the charge to flicker in and out of focus beneath his touch. If he strayed too near, the locket grew icy, freezing into his chest, and the pain drove him back.

He moved slowly and carefully around the perimeter of the camp, always looking and listening. He didn’t know who or what else he might be out there, but one thing struck him as pretty much sure, no barrier – whatever it might be – had ever been erected just to keep the likes of Provender Creed out of a camp. So, thinking through it, Creed was fairly damned certain something else was out there in the darkness with him.

He paced the perimeter.

A little more than a quarter of the way around the circuit, he saw something. A flickering light. It was a fire, and not a small campfire. This one was big enough to be a pyre. It had been lit back a ways from the weird icy wall, in among the scrub of trees. The blaze sent shadows dancing over the skeletal limbs, in turn sending more shadows dancing across the dirt. Creed crouched and slipped closer, moving as quietly as possible.

The fire was blazing hot. Whoever had set it wasn’t too concerned with it being seen, that was certain. The flames crackled. The sound masked Creed’s approach. He felt like his heart would drive itself out of his chest if it got beating any faster.

"Damn," he whispered. "Just what in the hell have I gotten myself into?"

Three tall shadows surrounded the fire. Two had their backs to him, and the third stood directly across the fire. They each had long poles in their hands. It seemed as though they were intent on stirring the coals and keeping the fire burning hotter, but as Creed eased back a low hanging branch to get a better look, it was all he could do to bite back a scream.

The fire pit was maybe three feet across. It was deep, and even from where he stood, twenty or thirty feet back, the heat was stifling. It was like a bowl carved into the earth, filled with glowing coals. To one side they’d stacked a pile of dead branches to feed in when the heat died down, but it didn’t look like that was going to happen anytime soon.

None of that mattered. What mattered was the man – thing? – trying to claw its way free of the inferno. Creed recognized the three immediately. They were the strangers who’d invaded his room. He reached instinctively for the reassuring handle of his six-shooter but stopped no more than an inch from the grip when he realized how useless the weapon was. At least one of them ought to have been dead; he’d been pumped full of enough lead put down a horse.

Long arms covered in blackened, searing flesh groped for the sides of the pit. There was a mewling, mindless sound that might have been a voice, once, but whenever it rose, one of the three slammed the end of their pole into the side of the thing’s head, or its shoulder, pressing it back and silencing it with the force and shock of each new blow.

Something beyond the obvious was wrong. It took Creed a moment to sort it, and then he frowned. Fire. Meat. Wood. Charcoal. But there was no smell. Any one of those things ought to have been giving off some sort of smell. The meat, a sickly sweet stench – he’d burned bodies before – during a bout of plague further west – but all he smelled here was the maddening, cloying sweetness of the fog of incense.