Angler In Darkness Read online

  Auguste’s whole body snapped, like one retreating from the edge of slumber. He panicked to find he was restricted.

  As he lay on the grass, listening to the old man’s story, lost in the strange, vivid vision, half a dozen snaky things had wriggled silently out of the ground all around him and crept slowly, gently over his legs. Now, as he struggled to kick them free, they drew tight, binding him to the ground.

  He snatched his skinning knife from his belt and chopped at one of the slick gray tendrils over his knee. He cut the gritty earthworm surface of the thing. A black oily substance bubbled from the wound, exactly like the bad Asi the old man had given him, but without the smell of the yaupon holly.

  Its blood. The old man had made him drink its blood!

  The tentacle slurped back into the grass and he managed to bend his knee. Then his legs erupted all over in a series of searing hot needle pains as he felt dozens of canine teeth puncture his shins, his thighs, his testicles.

  He fell flat on his back and moaned, the knife forgotten. He felt a terrible draining sensation come in pulses. The gray things, the snakes, the tentacles, they were sucking all the blood from his legs slowly, almost luxuriantly, as if savoring the taste of him. In a moment he couldn’t even feel them anymore.

  The old man stood over him, looking down, smoking his pipe again. His cape had fallen open, and the intricate tattoo on his chest stood out in the firelight. The pattern was of some monstrous, one-eyed thing, with hundreds of multi-mouthed serpents extending from a strange, grimacing face in the center, curling over his nipples and arms in fantastic patterns.

  “What....?” Auguste managed.

  “You killed my brother,” said the old man, “but the fire woke the Mishibijiw. She had grown very large over four hundred years. The whole City was her blanket. Roused, she broke from the mounds. She knew the people were fleeing. She took as many as she could to sustain her. The City was destroyed, and all the people who survived fled, never to return. The Cahokia, the Kavvchias, Michiagamias, they taught their children to stay away from this place.”

  “Me? I....you’re...,” Auguste murmured, feeling drowsy and slow now. A penetrating coldness was spreading up his legs to his belly.

  “Red Horn, yes. I remained with her all these years. I grew old, with no blood to keep me young. I repaired the holes in the mounds by night, to keep the sun from her. I slept in the earth at her bosom. As you will, for a time.”

  “Me?”

  “It’s your blood she wants. Like the roots of a mighty tree she reaches far and wide beneath the earth now. She hears things. She felt your blood. The blood of the one who burned the roof. The one who killed Wild Boy.”

  “I’m...not....”

  “His blood is yours, through your mother. He lives in you. I am just an old Indian. Not enough to spread her influence across this new white world. But your French blood makes you valuable. It will be your punishment, you see. For killing Wild Boy. You will bring others to her now. White people. She will feed again, and grow strong.”

  “Won’t,” Auguste whispered, his eyes rolling in his head. His chest was cold. His heart. It was beating hard, a lonely bellows fire trying to hold back the encroaching dark.

  “You will. After a few years beneath the earth, at her breast, you will.”

  The old man put away his pipe and smiled, his long, sharp teeth yellow as the gold in the chunkey stone in the moonlight, the stars wheeling behind his head, the poles disappearing, fading at the edges of his vision.

  “We will have The City again,” he said.

  His eyes looked wholly black.

  “Killer Of The Dead” is my “Spear And Fang” - the first story I ever had published, by editor Terry Martin in a nice, but short-lived UK magazine called Murky Depths, which interspersed prose stories with comics, both serialized and short form. It was accompanied by a perfectly lurid two page spread illustration by Tom Moran depicting some really savage looking vampires rampaging through a village of Indian women in various states of dress. It reminded me in a way of the work of Tim Truman and in that stark black and white across those lovely glossy pages, of something out the old EC Comics or Creepy featuring Bernie Wrightson. After years of writing and never having a thing accepted, to the point where I began to suspect nothing I sent was even being read, it was like a defibrillator jolt to the chest for this fan of classic pulp fiction and horror comics to get my first story put out in such a perfect way. It was as if the universe had finally thrown me a bone and said, offhandedly, “Oh yeah. Is this what you’ve been looking for?”

  I think I had just seen the behind the scenes stuff for my favorite vampire movie, Near Dark, and the backstories Lance Henricksen and Bill Paxton came up with for their characters intrigued me. It seemed like cowboys versus zombies and vampires had been done, but I couldn’t remember seeing a story like that from the Native perspective. Indians seemed naturally well equipped to handle vampires, so I ran with it. My personal favorite thing that came out of this was the idea of vampires sleeping under buffalo robes during the day with their horse reins looped around their arms or legs. I had read in Forrest Carter about guerilla cavalrymen learning that trick from the Indians, so they could wake and ride in an instant if they had to. That stampede sequence was definitely inspired by the motel shootout in Near Dark.

  Killer Of The Dead

  The boy puts his back to the tipis with their warm, glowing bellies, and he feels the smooth, cold stones beneath the trickling surface of the creek with his toes. The water is black but for the fat hunter’s moon reflected lazing amid the wavering stars. He is not afraid to be alone. He thinks the night shadows hide nothing that is not there in the day.

  “You should come inside and eat,” says his mother behind him. Always trying to fatten him, but he grows ever leaner as he grows taller.

  “Not hungry,” he mutters.

  “They won’t be back tonight.”

  “I should be with them!” he blurts out. “Even Grandfather’s with them. And here I am with the old men and women like some baby!”

  It is an old argument, but that doesn’t matter to him.

  “You’ll be a man soon enough,” she coos. “Then you’ll wish you were a boy again.”

  It is prophecy, though he doesn’t know it. He only scowls and turns from her.

  “Don’t stay out in the dark too long,” she says, and he hears her draw back the hide flap, hears the giggle of little children and the wet lung chuckle of old Marten telling a story, and then he hears the horses.

  He thinks it is the men. He splashes across the creek and scrambles up the hill to meet them, wondering if his uncle has brought him a mustang to ebb his disappointment at having been left behind, knowing all along he will, and feeling guilty at having played up his anger to ensure it.

  On top of the hill are four horses, but on the horses are four white men. He has never been so close to white men before. They look sick, their skin is so pale. They regard him, and in the light of the moon their eyes shine strangely, like the glassy yellow stares of a branch full of night owls.

  “Looky here,” says one of them. This one has long, greasy yellow hair.

  “He’s just a kid, Telemachus,” says another who lowers his head and will not look at the boy.

  “Nothin’ but kids down below,” says a third, “...and women.”

  “My favorite kind,” says Telemachus, and he draws a pistol from his belt.

  The fourth white man is taller than the rest and wears no hat. The light on his hairless head is stunning to the boy, who has never seen a bald man either. The tall bald man rides down the hill and the boy follows him with his eyes, so he doesn’t see the heavy barrel of Telemachus’ revolver as it collides with the top of his head, bouncing his brain in his skull.

  He wakes up at the bottom of the slope, revived by the cold creek water into which his face has slid. He hears screaming and the whining of the camp dogs as they are shot.

  He tries to push up from hi
s belly, but his head contains a sweat stone, heavy and burning red. He cannot call his knees to help him, and blood runs in his eyes.

  Through the blood he sees the lodges pulled down and children scurrying everywhere. He sees old Marten trampled beneath the horse of the greasy haired man, Telemachus.

  Then he sees his mother.

  Telemachus rides after her, and reaches down to grab her, but when she turns, the boy’s father’s war hatchet is in her hand, and in the next moment it is sticking in the white man’s face.

  He falls from his horse screaming and the boy thinks, good.

  But the greasy haired man gets back up.

  His mother falls on her hands and tries to crawl away, but he catches her ankle and pulls her back, cussing her with the hatchet still in his face.

  The tall man rides up like some storied hero, and he says words to the ugly one the boy cannot hear.

  “She’s mine, Maldonado! Look what she did!” He argues, and he plucks the hatchet from his face. There is a brief spurt of blood but still he does not die.

  Maldonado slides off the back of his horse and stands between them.

  “Hot blood like her’s would burn your belly, pendejo,” he says, and he reaches down and pulls the boy’s mother against him by her black hair, and he is not a hero at all, but a monster.

  He opens his mouth and beneath his sweeping black mustache he has teeth like a wolf’s. He closes his animal jaws around the boy’s mother’s long neck and she screams, and he sees Maldonado’s gaunt cheeks drawing in and out as he sucks from the wound and she slowly slackens in his arms. The boy tries again to find his feet but slips, and the fall douses his mind in black water.

  When the boy opens his eyes again daylight is twisting like a blazing knife behind his eyes.

  The boy can stand now, and he stumbles back across the creek.

  “Here is my grandson!” says the voice of his Grandfather, and he sees the warriors from the horse raid picking through the torn lodge skins and hanging their heads over the bodies scattered and curled up like leaves across the sunny grass.

  His uncle is there, his rifle naked in his hand, and he is whirling about with tears in his eyes and a thin trail of blood running down the corner of his mouth.

  The boy stares at the blood, thinking hard while his uncle shakes him by the shoulders shouting Who? Who? and he says,

  “White men.”

  His uncle stands, and he is a tornado of fringe and wild black hair and bulging eyes, and the sun glints on the patterned brass in the wood of his Henry rifle as he holds it toward the sky.

  “We’ll find them and kill them!” he screams, and the other men join him.

  Only Grandfather kneels beside him and touches his pulsing head with something cool.

  “Wait!” he says, when he has heard enough. “Look at the bodies of our dead. They’re white as winter, and they’ve been bit, but not eaten. My grandson has more to tell, I think.”

  He tells them everything, and he shows them his father’s bloodied hatchet, sticking out of the ground near his mother, who he does not look at.

  “What kind of medicine do they have that they can do these things?” says Digging Bear, staring at the reddened edge of the hatchet when Grandfather pulls it loose.

  “Medicine of the left hand,” says Grandfather, handing the hatchet to the boy. “They must be wicked things if they draw their power from the blood of women and children.”

  “They are not like us,” says Quaking Otter.

  “No,” says Grandfather thoughtfully. “They are like the sta-au spirits that haunt the campfires, but made flesh.”

  “Their trail’s still fresh,” says Bloody Lance.

  “There is blood on my brother’s hatchet. We go after them and we kill them,” says his uncle. “Mourn later.”

  They gather up their horses, and his uncle brings him the mustang without a word while Grandfather helps him onto its back. The boy stares at the nape of the horse’s neck, with its tangled mane, and he feels guilty. He wants to bury the hatchet in the back of the mustang’s skull, hoping the feeling will die with it. But this is foolish.

  “But what the boy said about the hatchets...,” Quaking Otter says in that tone he has.

  “He has never lied,” says Grandfather, after blessing the four directions and murmuring a swift prayer for the dead.

  “We won’t use hatchets,” his uncle says, levering his rifle and passing his American pistol to the boy. In that moment the boy loves even over the memory of his own father. He puts aside his feelings toward the horse and his own childishness, and as he tucks the pistol into his belt beside the hatchet, he swears in his heart he will be a man from now on.

  * * * *

  Red Lance is the greatest tracker of all the Blood People, and before sunset they are upon the killers.

  They find them at the bottom of a deep box canyon wedged into the forest. The four of them lay sleeping on the stones, entirely hidden beneath thick, shaggy buffalo robes in what the boy’s uncle says is the way of gray soldiers, with the reins of their horses looped around the crooks of their elbows. Their horses stand over them, heads bowed.

  “Why do they sleep beneath those robes?” the boy says, because it has turned out to be a hot day.

  Grandfather too is puzzled, but Red Lance says eagerly,

  “Let’s shoot them to pieces.” He puts his rifle to his cheek.

  The boy’s uncle pushes aside Red Lance’s rifle and shakes his head.

  “There’s a better way.”

  In the raid on the Pierced Nose People they have taken a dozen ponies. The boy has ridden the whole way at the back, tending them. Now they drive the horses before them, down the steep slope, down into the canyon with a rumble like thunder crashing, down upon the white men, sleeping beneath their buffalo robes.

  The white men’s horses are exhausted, or they are dull animals. Only one of them pricks up its ears and sees the wave of horseflesh galloping down upon them in a cloud of dust and stone. This horse, a piebald, bolts for the far end of the fissure, dragging its surprised rider out from under his blanket.

  As that one is pulled out into the open air, he screams shrill as his horse, and all over his body open flame sprouts. The horse, driven to greater effort now by fire as well as fear of the stampede, clatters off through the trees, leaving a smoking trail. The man’s screams are lost to their ears.

  The boy turns on his mustang’s back and sees that the others have seen this too.

  They enter the canyon in the wake of the stampede, and when it has finished passing over the camp, the murderers lie broken beneath their robes, two of their ponies dead.

  Quaking Otter rides up to take a scalp for the fat wife he has lost, but a pair of twisted, mangled hands reach up as he dismounts, and he is dragged beneath the shaggy robe.

  The boy and his uncle and Red Lance and Digging Bear shoot at the twisting mound of buffalo and men. As they do, the other two rise shakily, the big blue steel barrels of revolvers poking out from under their robes. They shoot back, and Digging Bear is struck in the head and falls dead.

  Red Lance and the boy and his uncle shoot at all three of the killers, and two stumble into a cave, shedding blood on the stones. The third lies dead along with Quaking Otter, dead and burning.

  They stare at the body of the killer, immolated as though it has died in torture fires. They move the thing away from Quaking Otter with their lances, and watch it smolder.

  “The sun is like fire to them,” the boy observes. The gun is hot in his hands, and empty. He is embarrassed to ask for more cartridges.

  “Yes,” says Grandfather, looking to the western hills, towards which the reddening sun dives like a fisher seeking trout. “But the sun won’t last.”

  “They’ve crawled into that hole to die,” Red Lance says. “Let’s take their scalps, so their ghosts don’t follow our lost ones into the next world.”

  Grandfather gets down on his haunches, close to the burned man and
rubs his chin.

  “They didn’t go in there to die. They’re in there waiting for you.”

  “We emptied our rifles into them!” the boy’s uncle says. The boy is relieved, thinking that now he will be able to ask for more bullets for the pistol.

  “Remember what my grandson said? We should think about this...” He reaches into his medicine bundle for sweetgrass and tinder. “Wait awhile. I’ll talk to the spirits.”

  “You stay here and talk to the fire, old man,” his uncle says. “I’ll kill them myself.”

  He walks off across the stones, toward the dark mouth of the cave, and Red Lance follows. They load their rifles from their bandoliers as they go.

  The old man starts a fire and settles.

  “I’m going with them,” the boy says.

  “You’ll die,” says Grandfather. “Then I’ll have to fight them alone. And I’m too old to build scaffolds for you all.”

  The boy watches his uncle and Red Lance disappear into the cave. His heart is with them, but he thinks of his Grandfather here alone, and of how he turned from his mother the last time they spoke. He feels cold inside, and he comes over to the fire, just to warm himself before he goes.

  “Get the bows from the horses,” says Grandfather.

  They sit for a long time, Grandfather singing low. Nothing breaks his melody. Not even the screams of the boy’s uncle and Red Lance echoing from the cave, though this makes the boy jump. The fire dances, on the kindling and in the eyes of Grandfather till the boy can’t tell which burns brighter. He beats a turtle shell rattle from his medicine bundle against one aged hand, and the sound is timed to the boy’s own heart. Grandfather touches the black horn amulet handing from his neck, and he closes his eyes.

  “Take out all the arrows and break off the heads,” he says after a bit.

  The boy does as he is told, though he doesn’t understand. His Grandfather doesn’t wait for him to ask.

  “These things are unnatural. They’re beaten together from man and strange powers, like the metal of the white man. The true purity of Nah-too-si, the sun, kills them, so our weapons too must be pure. Sharpen the arrow shafts with my knife. Hurry. We’ve got to go after them before night comes.”