Authors: Robert R McCammon
On the road to St. Benadicta, astride his muscular chestnut horse Phoenix, Lawson listened to the sounds of the night and warily scanned the forest beneath the brim of his black Stetson.
He wore a black suit, a white shirt and a crimson waistcoat. At his waist was the ebony holster with the two backward-facing Colt .44s. The Colt on the right had a rosewood grip and the Colt on the left had a grip formed of yellowed bone. Each pistol held six slugs. The gun on the right side held regular lead bullets, while the one on the left did not.
The moon was a white scythe above the treetops. Phoenix moved at a brisk walk. Lawson figured another couple of hours to St. Benadicta. If his estimation of speed and distance was correct, he would be beating daybreak by about an hour. There would be the problem of shelter; there always was that problem, but Lawson had solved it many times before. In his saddlebags were two folded-up black curtains, thick enough to wrap himself up in and have a comfortable outdoor sleep if he could find a suitable slice of shadow that didn’t move too much. Usually there was a room available, for enough money. And he never slept like the dead anyway; if anyone burst the lock and got into his room with evil intent, even in midday, they wouldn’t be leaving the same way they’d entered .
He listened to the churrings and clicks and rustlings of the nighttime forest, as Phoenix continued along the trail leading southwest into the bayou country. Lawson was alert but relaxed; he was confident in his ability to survive, yet he knew not to push his luck.
He had what he needed. Father Deale had been resourceful. Now it was up to Lawson to see things through. Tonight, before he’d left New Orleans, he’d had a further insight into the priest’s desire to help him. A letter had come to the Hotel Sanctuaire with the requested package.
Lawson
, the letter had begun in smoothly flowing blue handwriting.
I expect you’ll find good use for these
.
I hope you’ll return in one piece, along with the young woman. God protect her soul, I pray she’s survived. I wanted to tell you that I consider it an act of God that you came to me in confession that night. I’ve told you about my time in Blancmortain, when I was married and a teacher in the school there. I’ve told you about the people who were found dead in that summer of 1838, drained of blood with the fang bites at their throats. What I’ve not told you, and what I choose to tell you now, is that in addition to the ten who were murdered in that fashion, four others disappeared. Among them was my wife, Emily. She came home one night at the end of that summer, Lawson. She came to my window, and she begged to come in because she was so cold. I almost let her in…almost. She was a wretched sight, half-naked, dirty and blighted and her face dark with dried blood. By that time they were feasting on other towns. By that time I knew what she was…what she’d been turned to. When I refused to let her in, Emily cursed me. No demon could voice the curses she threw at me. No horror could be more horrible than that, because Emily had been pregnant with our child and now she was a thin, ragged nightmare. It went on and on, until the sun came up. I packed and left that day. I am a different man now, because some of the man I used to be stayed in Blancmortain, holding hard to a crucifix he took off the wall. He is suffering there still, in that little house where no one dares live.
I know what used to be my Emily is still out upon the world. She may be with the others in Nocturne, or she may be in another town far from there, living like an animal and a monster. But I have hope for you, Lawson, and if I have hope for you I also can find some hope for Emily. That she can come back to me, as she was before? Hardly. She will always be twenty years old. Isn’t that the most terrible joke, Lawson? That if survives on blood, she will always be young? My hope for you is that you can find your way back to humanity. My hope for her is that she can be released from that existence, and die in the grace of God. I want you to release her if you find her, Lawson. If you can. I want you to do this for me, and for her. You do the mercy, and I will take care of the grace. For all three of us, suffering as we are.
God be with you, Lawson. I know you travel by night. He does too.
And the missive was signed,
Your friend, John
.
Phoenix went on. The moon moved across the sky. The forest pulsed with life unseen, though Lawson caught the occasional shape of an animal out in the dark. The ground was still firm, not yet swampy. Above his head the canopy of trees blotted out the stars. Lawson had the small oil-painted portrait of Eva Kingsley—painted two years ago, when she was seventeen—in his head; he would know her when he saw her, if she was not much changed.
Forward
…
He was drowsing a bit, letting Phoenix lead the way. He could smell the damp of morning in the sultry air.
Forward, Nineteenth Alabama…!
And just that fast, it was upon him.
It had been a confused meeting of weary soldiers, on that early evening of April 6
th
, 1862, with the sun sinking down over the bloody forest and fields of Shiloh and the red-tinged Owl Creek swamp. “Forward, Nineteenth Alabama!” had been the cry sent up by a young Confederate captain who’d been a lawyer not so long before, but who had enlisted to do his duty for the Southland, been trained and stationed at Mobile for three months. He and his men had first seen the “elephant” this morning, as the grays attacked the blues to push them back into the swamp’s embrace. The day’s fighting had been long and brutal. Captain Lawson had already received the graze of a rifle ball across the meat of his right shoulder and a hole in his hat. The balls sounded like hornets as they passed, a deadly hum and whine that ended with the cries of many young men falling to their knees with their brains spilling out or the blood pooling where they lay. Waves of gunsmoke floated through the trees. In some places soldiers were nearly face-to-face in the deepening gloom before they recognized the colors of the enemy and pulled their triggers or swung their swords. Forward went the men of the Nineteenth Alabama, and forward to meet them in the darkening thickets came the men in Union blue.
Shots erupted along the ragged line. Fire and sparks flew into the tormented air. Lawson squeezed off a shot from his Navy Colt and was answered by a rifle slug that nearly kissed the right side of his face. Cannonfire boomed in the distance, cavalry horses shrieked and fell, and with his next step Lawson found himself boot-deep in a young soldier’s entrails as the Union soldier sat on his knees and tried dazedly to push the red coils back in where they belonged.
“On the left! Riders on the left!” someone shouted. Lawson saw the enemy cavalry coming from that direction between the trees, sabers carving the air. He got off a shot and saw a man in an officer’s uniform grasp at his throat and topple. The rebel soldier three feet to Lawson’s left lost the top of his head to a gleaming saber, and Lawson fired into the rider’s face but the horse was quickly past him and gone.
“Forward! Forward!” Lawson shouted, but what they were going forward to he did not know. Those were the orders.
Forward, ever forward, and not a step back until the Yanks are neck-deep in the Owl Creek swamp
. This day and now into the dusk he had seen carnage beyond his imagining. He had thrown up his guts, but at least they were still in his body.
Over the riflefire and shouting and the sound of horses and men being killed he heard the cannons speak in their deadly tongues of flame, and suddenly the blasts began on all sides. Plumes of dirt and broken rocks shot into the air. “Forward!” Lawson hollered, but he knew no one could hear. He staggered onward, with maybe a dozen of his men around him, and with a few paces taken they broke through the burning underbrush and into a hail of Union lead.
Soldiers fell to Lawson’s left and right. One man grabbed at his arm as he went down, shot through the lung and bubbling blood. Lawson fired into the haze of smoke, the Colt kicking in his grip. A fierce pain stabbed his right thigh above the knee and stole his breath. A second slug hit him squarely in the left shoulder and knocked him back. He fell into the thicket of vines and thorns, and there he lay as the battle raged around him, his lungs hitching and his vision fading in and out. He told himself to get up, to rejoin the fight, and as he tried a body fell across him and pinned him down. Horses without riders thundered past. The cannons spoke again from a distance, and once more the earth exploded.
In this maelstrom of death and destruction Trevor Lawson sank down into what felt like a hole lined with velvet black. His eyes closed, and his body shivered as he slept.
He awakened in the dark, with the sounds of pain around him. He smelled blood and sulphur. The murmurs of wounded and dying men rose up from the forest like whispered hymns. Occasionally someone cried out or sobbed. Lawson could no longer hear the noises of battle. The cannons were silent. Frogs croaked from bloodied ponds and crickets chirped in the gore-smeared weeds. Lawson felt the throbbing pain of his bullet wounds. He thought his left shoulder might be broken, for he couldn’t move that arm. He was aware that he yet gripped hard to the Colt. Was it still loaded? He didn’t know. The body that lay across him twitched. Lawson could smell whiskey on the man’s mouth. Confederate or Yank, he knew not, but the man was still breathing. Also the wounded soldier had a beard like the pride of a hog’s bristle-brush. Lawson needed to push the man off, to roll him over, anything to get free. With one working arm it was going to be difficult. The man muttered something that sounded like
Lemons, Rolly
in his delirium, and Lawson wanted to say
Get off
me, you damned fool
.
He was aware, then, that there was movement among the fallen soldiers.
There was no light. No candle-lit lanterns searching for those who might survive the night, to be loaded onto wagons and taken to the field hospital. There was no light, but there was movement.
Lawson turned his head to the left as much as he could. He could barely breathe with this bearded ox lying across him. He narrowed his eyes, scanning the dark. Yes…someone was moving among the bodies. More than one, it appeared. The figures were nearly blurred, moving like ghosts yet they were not spirits of the dead, for Lawson saw them crouch down and they became solid enough in their stillness. He counted five, and possibly there were more he could not see. He thought they might be camp followers looking for their lovers, for indeed three were women in long and dirtied gowns. He started to call out for help, to proclaim
I am alive
, but before he could summon the breath to speak…
…someone reached down and wrenched the bearded ox’s head backward. Lawson saw long clawlike fingernails caked with dirt. The bearded man’s throat was exposed; his eyelids fluttered, as if he were awakening from his wounded slumber. Then suddenly there were two figures crouching down on either side, a man and a woman both thin and wild-haired. The man wore a mud-stained dark suit, the woman a dirty light-colored gown with what appeared to be fabric roses at the bosom.
Lawson saw the woman open her mouth wide, and wider still. Something unhinged in the jaw and the lower teeth thrust forward. Two curved fangs descended from the upper teeth, and in a blurred rush of desperation of need or hunger she bit into the bearded man’s throat on one side while the man’s descended fangs plunged into the other side. Their eyes burned red at the centers, as if embers glowed there from the hearth of Hell.
Their bodies shuddered. The bearded man’s eyes opened and rolled backward in his head to show the whites. His face contorted in silent agony. The two creatures continued to feed from his throat, making slurping and sucking noises. Tendrils of blood ran. The male creature’s hand drifted out and stroked the woman’s tangled hair, as if this moment was the essence of the greatest love between them.
Lawson made a noise. Maybe it was a gasp of shock or a whine of horror, he didn’t know. But in the next instant the red-centered eyes of the two things were upon him, and as they pulled away from the offered throat blood drooled from their fangs. They sat on their haunches, observing him as one might observe a nice piece of juicy steak, the next object of their banquet.
With the cold sweat of fear on his face Lawson lifted his right arm, cocked the Colt and fired a bullet into the male creature’s forehead.
The noise was deafening and caused some of the other creatures to shriek, an unholy sound of keening banshees. The thing that had just been shot sat staring at Lawson, his red eyes unblinking, his forehead slightly caved in and a hole smoking where the bullet had passed. Then he grinned, as if this were just the best of entertainments.
At the edge of madness Lawson shot the woman in the face. Her nose splintered into pieces like a china cup breaking and her head rocked back with a force that might have snapped a human’s neck, but then she righted herself and her hand with its broken and filthy nails came up to touch the ragged hole. An expression of dismay flickered across the noseless and bloody-lipped visage, and she said to her companion in a voice like the whisper of dry wind through dead reeds: “Oh, Ezekiel, he has made me
ugly
.”
Lawson shoved his right shoulder against the body that lay across him. He squirmed out from under the weight, as the wound at his thigh sought to drag him again down into a dark pool of pain. He was having none of it. Though gunshot in two places, Trevor Lawson realized that if he stayed in this place he would be consumed by these demons, and whether this was real or a fiction of his fevered brain made no matter. He wanted to, and intended to, live. Once free of the man’s weight Lawson scrabbled like a broken crab across the ground, across bodies living and dead and pieces of bodies. He heard the high, ringing laughter of the things behind him, and he dared not look. With an effort that made the breath of agony whoosh from his lungs and fresh sweat jump from his pores he got up on his feet and, crashing through the bullet-riddled underbrush, he fled for his life.