Dead Man’s Hand (34 page)

“Galahad!” cried Catherine. “Oh, no! That thing is hurting him!” She dashed toward
the door, but I reached out and caught her as gently as I could.

“Don’t go out there,” I said. “Not until I’ve—”

“I’ll save your dog, Miss Catherine!” shouted Billinger, who was beyond my reach.
Before I could do anything, he unholstered his pistol and ran out the front door,
which he left open behind him. I heard the young man shouting, then I heard him fire
his gun—I prayed he was shooting into the air. But even as I headed for the door,
his cries turned from anger into alarm, then into shouts of pain.

As I rounded the edge of the house, I could see Billinger and the flying creature
engaged in the most fantastic battle the world had perhaps ever seen, although it
was nothing compared to what was to come later that day. The monster had apparently
tried to seize the dog like a hawk takes a hare, and had partially succeeded, snapping
the animal’s tether, but either Galahad was too heavy or young Billinger’s arrival
had prevented it from escaping with its prey. The creature had one of its talons caught
in the dog’s collar, but Billinger was holding the collar too. As the shrieking reptile-bird
struggled to rise, wings flapping with a noise like someone beating wet clothes on
a flat rock, the poor dog dangled by its neck, whining piteously.

“My gun!” Billinger shouted when he saw me. “I dropped it! Over there!”

I had a gun of my own, but didn’t intend to use that either if I could avoid it, in
part because of the danger to the young man and the innocent hound. Instead, I swung
a broom which I had grabbed on my way out and hit the creature hard enough to startle
it, but it didn’t let go of the dog’s collar, so I waded in, shoving and swatting
with the broom to keep the thing distracted. When I got close enough, I dropped the
broom and pulled my buck knife to cut the dog’s collar. Poor Galahad fell to the ground,
then ran back toward the house with his tail firmly clenched between his legs and
crawled back under the porch. The reptile-bird, free now, flapped up to the edge of
the Denslows’ roof and crouched there, squawking at us like a giant crow. Billinger
retrieved his gun and began firing, though I shouted for him to stop. A moment later,
the hideous, beaked corpse lay half off the roof, drizzling blood.

I meant to retrieve the creature’s body, but was distracted by Catherine running out
the door. When she found out her dog was under the house, apparently whole and safe,
the girl threw her arms around both of us in gratitude. “Oh, you are true heroes!
But what was that horrible thing?”

“A creature from another age,” I said. “One of Mr. Owen’s ‘dinosaurs,’ I believe,
if you read the popular newspapers. I think our flying monster is something from Earth’s
distant past.”

“Then how has it survived so long?” said Catherine, eyes wide.

“It’s not the dinosaur that’s out of its time, Miss,” I said. “I’m afraid it’s the
rest of us.” I looked to her grandmother. “Doesn’t she know?”

The old woman shook her head. “Like everyone in the town, she knows that strange things
happen at Midsummer—but that’s all.”

“Here now, what is all this?” said Billinger. “Stop talking in riddles, will you?”

“Tell them,” said Mrs. Denslow. “They need to know.”

“It’s Medicine Dance,” I said. “It’s the town itself. Thanks to Mrs. Denslow’s grandfather,
Noah Lyman—your great-great-grandfather, Miss—and the experiment I already mentioned,
once a year on Midsummer’s Day the entire town becomes unstuck from one dawn to the
next and wanders in time. How it feels to us is that the town stays the same, but
the surroundings change, a little or a lot depending on how far it moves through time.
That’s how it was explained to me, anyway.

“Most years Medicine Dance doesn’t wander far at Midsummer—sometimes I’m sure the
change is scarcely noticed. But every thirty-nine years, the movement is more… violent.
Last time, as Mrs. Denslow can tell you, the townsfolk here woke up to find themselves
in an icy age full of strange creatures, some of them quite dangerous—”

“Do you mean the June Blizzard?” Billinger was staring at me intently. “I know of
that. It was a freak storm that happened when my parents were courting…”

“It was no storm. It was the town itself that slipped through time to an era many
thousands of years ago, when ice and snow covered all this territory.”

“That seems a long claim,” said the young man.

“Then tell me what you just fought in the front of the house?” I asked. “A parrot,
do you think? Ask Mrs. Denslow what she once saw out there, where today an entire
inland sea lies in front of you…? What did you see in the snow that day thirty-nine
years ago, Marie?”

It shocked the old woman a bit, me using her first name in front of the others. “An…
an elephant,” she said at last. “It was covered in long, shaggy hair. It was huge!
I saw it right there, plain as the nose on your face.”

Young Catherine looked quite overwhelmed, but Billinger was frowning. “I don’t like
to call any lady a liar, Mrs. Denslow—” he began.

“Then you’d better stop right there, Edward Billinger,” she said, but before she could
make clear exactly what the penalty would be if he didn’t, we heard more noise from
the front yard. This time it was shouting.

“That sounds like young Tim Winkens,” said Catherine. “What’s he doing?”

“Running,” said young Billinger as he looked out the window. “Looks pretty het up,
too.”

I headed for the door. On a thirty-ninth Midsummer, nobody was likely to be running
around just for exercise.

“Help!” the boy shouted as he scrambled over a gate he could have unlatched in a second
or two. He was perhaps twelve years old, all elbows and knees. “Come help! The Dahlers’
house is on fire! Some big animal knocked it over! Hurry!”

“Oh! You’re not really going… out there, are you?” Catherine said, frightened. “Not
out with those dreadful creatures?”

“We must,” I told her. “At least
I
must. It’s why I’m here. But perhaps Mr. Billinger could remain to watch over the
house…”

The young man drew himself up straight. “Do you mean to insult me, sir?” he asked.
“My neighbors need my help—how can I remain here?” I decided I liked him pretty well,
although I would have preferred that he stay with the women.

We left the ladies locked in, armed with two of my smaller pistols and a cavalry saber
of Noah Lyman’s that had hung on the parlor wall. I took two more pistols for myself
out of my chest, and also the big Springfield Trapdoor rifle. At Mrs. Denslow’s suggestion,
we grabbed buckets and shovels as well. When we opened the front door, the dog Galahad
quickly emerged from beneath the porch and traded his hiding-hole there for one inside
the house.

Tim Winkens had only stopped to catch his breath and was already trotting toward a
cloud of black smoke rising over the northern end of town, but he had run a long way
already and we quickly caught up with him.

“You said something about a big animal,” I said.

“Huge! Bigger than any circus elephant! Karl Dahler told me it was Leviathan, right
out of the Holy Bible!”

I couldn’t help wondering if maybe I should have brought the dynamite, too, but decided
that it might not be the best thing to carry to a fire.

We reached the Dahler property in just a few short minutes, along with several other
people from the town. The house, which had once sat beside Angel’s Creek, now stood
at the edge of a marshy estuary bordering the new ocean. We could see many strange
creatures in the trees and in the water, but no sign of Karl Dahler’s Leviathan. There
was, however, a track that had been made by feet and a dragging tail. The footprints
were each more than a yard across, and the creature had also left a pile of dung as
big as a wheelbarrow, now being swarmed by beetles as big as dinner plates. It was
easy to see how the Leviathan’s massive tail might have knocked down the side of the
barn, almost crushing the farmer in the process as he sat on his milking stool, and
tipping over the lamp to cause the fire, which had already caught one wall and the
barn roof.

The air, while still summer hot, was so much thicker and damper than normal that I
could see some of the men were having trouble with it, coughing and spitting as if
they had contracted a chill. Despite the moisture, though, the flames seemed to burn
even hotter than usual; there wasn’t much we could do to save the barn, but we did
what we could to keep the fire from spreading. While some formed a bucket brigade
to bring water from the swamp, Billinger and I helped others to dig a firebreak, then
knocked out the walls that still stood so as to collapse the ruined barn and make
it easier to fight the flames. When we had saved the other buildings, Karl Dahler
went from group to group, thanking everyone and trying to describe the thing he’d
seen, which he said had been straight out of scripture.

“He had a neck like a giant snake!” Dahler said, then pointed at the wide, muddy track
the creature had left behind. “Look, just like it says in Job—‘His undersides are
jagged potsherds, leaving a trail in the mud like a threshing-sledge.’ And it’s true!”

* * *

As Midsummer’s Day wore on, we were called onward from the Dahlers’ place to one emergency
after another. Smaller reptiles no bigger than cats, creatures that went on their
hind legs, got into barns and cellars all over town, causing havoc, but the upset
they caused was as nothing to the terror inspired by the winged sky-creatures and
the (fortunately peaceful) long-necked giants. There was talk of fiercer creatures
attacking livestock.

Noon came and went without food or rest as Ned Billinger and I went where we were
needed.

Late in the afternoon, as we tramped back through the heart of town for what must
have been the fifth or sixth time, the church bells on Spring Road began chiming over
and over, as though some ill-behaved child was swinging on the bell rope. Half the
people in town seemed to have gathered in front of the clapboard church. The ringing
stopped as the preacher climbed down from the little belfry and walked out to stand
on the front porch like a politician addressing his constituents. I didn’t know the
man, and didn’t know what exactly he was going to say, but I felt pretty sure it wouldn’t
be much different than what I’d heard thirty-nine years ago from another minister.
That had been mostly outraged fulminations against the ungodliness of Medicine Dance
and the bizarre weather God had punished the town with, but this time the central
feature was the unholy ocean which had seen fit to suddenly spread itself along the
town’s flank without so much as a by-your-leave from the preacher, the mayor, or the
town council. The preacher felt this was clear evidence of some kind of punishment
on the town for sinfulness.

I quickly grew impatient. God might very well have caused all this—I wasn’t equipped
to say one way or the other—but even if He had, it didn’t help solve it. Also, I was
beginning to worry about what might be going on back at the Denslow place, even though
it was on the opposite side of town from most of the strange creatures we had encountered.
I told Billinger I thought it was time to get back to Catherine and her grandmother.

We left the rest of the citizens arguing about why exactly the Devil had brought the
sea to Medicine Dance and made our way back along the shore on the edge of town, reptile-birds
wheeling and croaking high above us.

We paused for a moment to watch a bunch of boys—Clay Hopyard’s sons, Billinger told
me—who had made themselves a raft out of stripped saplings and were wading it out
into the water. The young sailors were being watched by a half dozen men taking some
rest, who said they’d been chasing the springy little lizards out of nearby houses
for the last hour, but I was concerned. I shouted to the boys to come in, but we were
still too far away for them to hear. As they listened to me, the men watching seemed
to realize that this new ocean might contain things bigger than the fish they were
used to pulling from the local streams, but before they could do more than look thoughtful,
a long neck suddenly came coiling up out of the water near the children, silver in
color and as long as a horseshoe pitch. The boys screamed when they saw it, and all
of them ran to one end of their raft, which promptly capsized.

This time I did take out my guns, pulling both pistols and firing them in the air
as I ran down toward the edge of the water. Those of the other men who had guns did
the same. We must have seemed like a low-lying thunderhead full of lightning as we
hurried down the slope toward the splashing and screeching.

It was a stroke of luck that the raft had capsized in relatively shallow water, so
that after only a few strokes most of the boys could get their feet beneath them again.
A couple of them were already dashing up the bank toward us, screaming that a monster
snake was attacking their friends. I could see the creature’s huge body just beneath
the surface, an expanse of hide as long and wide as a whale’s carcass, but I didn’t
bother to tell them this beast was no mere serpent. Instead, I began firing in a more
concentrated way as the creature tried to get at the last two boys where they cowered
in the water behind the overturned raft. The raft was not going to stay afloat much
longer—already the thing was beginning to come apart under the hammering of the creature’s
fierce, fanged head.

It was not my intention to kill when I didn’t need to—the old man had taught me that
these creatures were no more at fault than the people were—but neither was I going
to stand idly by and watch two children eaten, one of them no more than six or seven
years old. I had left my rifle lying back on the shore, but I needed to make an accurate
shot, so when I had waded out into the water past my thighs, still a good twenty yards
away from the splintering raft, I holstered one of my pistols and aimed the other
one as carefully as I could, resting my gun-hand on my other wrist. I waited until
the water-monster lifted its head high above the boys, poised to strike, then I pulled
the trigger.