The Cthuliad: – The Indian Fighter

                                                     ”Oh! woman, woman, woman,
                                                      What have you been and done?
                                                      You have killed the finest butcher
                                                      That ever the sun shone on!”

                                                                - The Three Butchers, Lesley Nelson-Burns


- November 29th, 1864

My tongue probes the sores in my mouth that are beginning to taint the taste of my food. There's blood and something worse crusting on the back of my gums and I think I have another tooth breaking loose. The rainbow-filmed salt meat doesn't help, nor the cheap bourbon mouthwash.

Then there's that sound again.

My eyes crack open, eyelashes gummed together. I try looking at the ceiling of the ragged wall-tent that’s been my home these last six days, trying to get my eyes to focus. Through the sliding grey wisps that cloud my morning vision I can just about make out the bug that woke me with its creaks and clicks, it’s as big as my thumb. I watch as it picks its way through the silk-wrapped corpses of an absentee spider’s pantry. I think about my bitch of a wife. I let the bug live.

I don’t worry none now that she’s gone. When someone’s taken something as what’s yours, or it's been put out of reach, it’s just one thing less to worry about somebody stealing. Indian smarts.

The stale stench of Perique and acrid sweat fills my fly-blown den, but there’s something else too, something I know I should be able to place. The taste in my mouth makes me gag. I try to sit up, but a pain shoots across my back and into my skull like someone’s just towed a worm through my spine. Fuck, how long have I been asleep?

Something brushes by the flap of the tent, rattling the mess tins and horse traces hanging there. I whip upright so fast white flashes pierce my hazy vision and my legs make to fold beneath me. The Le Mat, in my hand all along, reaches out; my gun arm palsied, twitching like the leg on a dying horse, still manages to pull me up and onto my frozen feet.

As I throw back the tent flap I’m already yelling, no words, just the killing yell that accompanies the slash of cavalry sabres and the rise and fall of rifle butts and bayonets, the cries of women and babies.

There’s no-one there, nothing. Just that damn mist from the lake, rolling, drifting across the silent camp, thick as damp wood-smoke, crawling taller than a dog-tent.

A shrill, hysterical voice cries out.

“Where are you!”

As the ragged echoes of the question rebound in the fog I realise it was my own voice.

I look down and see fresh blood on my one un-booted foot, another broken whiskey-jug no doubt. Rainwater and boot-churned filth press into the wound, it’ll be green and stinking in three days.

Back in the tent I stand in front of the broken piece of copper- polished glass that I used as a mirror when I last shaved; and I see what this fucking place, this… this thing, has done to me.  Snow coloured hair where there was black; black shadows where there was none. I’m thirty years old give or take a year, I look like my father’s corpse.

Almost involuntarily the French revolver lifts, dragging my hand with it until they are both level with my aching head. The barrel of the pistol presses into my temple, sliding slightly on the sweat-damp skin until it finds a familiar groove, a place where it has lodged before and raised a mark. The face in the mirror smiles a nervous smile. I feel my eyelid flicker. The gun then pulls itself down and across my jaw, scraping against the stubble. The rough edged metal leaving a red welt where it drags across the pallid flesh. Then sliding over my lip, it breaks through a scab and strikes against my teeth as it enters my mouth. I stare at the reflection, there’s tears rolling down the distorted face trapped between the glass’s jagged edges, but by then I’m beginning to laugh; the barrel rattling against my loosening yellow teeth.

Then the mirror is gone, smashed into even smaller pieces.

Looking down I see the shattered reflections and more cuts on my uncovered foot. One razor-like shard has lodged in something soft hidden behind an upturned table. My head feels light and… and then I recall what the other smell is.

She must have been there for three days. She survived the lynching of her brothers and their friends. She’d probably wished she hadn’t. I’d held her head still, forced her eyes open to watch the bodies jangling on the ropes. Ropes thrown over trees at the waters edge, nine bodies hanging over the water, their kerosene-soaked flesh burning, the eerie light reflected in the mirror-flat surface of the lake reminding me of a picture the company cook had shown me of lanterns in some Chinese village. He’d laughed when he told me how he’s killed the girl he stole it from. I’d bought him a drink and laughed with him.

………

We’d split from our troop. Eleven volunteers including a trapper-guide and his evil looking dogs, all skirmish-hardened fighters, all plunder hungry; our task to follow a mixed pack of Sioux, Cheyenne and Arapaho, into trail-shy territory.

A shopkeeper’s woman in the town went out of her way to point out that there was a couple of negroes with them too.

“Anything to help,” she’d said, her grin full of half-grey teeth and half-hidden malice.

They might not have known it, but the thieves were all dead as soon as they entered the Merl’s Gallo mission church.

A young minister was jostled through an eager, hard-faced crowd of local god-fearing folk and with a voice that wavered in the breeze and our cigar smoke he told us that the misson had been broken in to sometime after dark, three nights before.

His accent shouted that he's been schooled in a wealthy part of New England, his eyes screamed that he wished he hadn't left. Under the gaze of the town's womenfolk he began to stammer as he told us the little more that he knew. The harpies and harridans that had gathered, somehow seeming much larger than their downcast-eyed male counterparts, confirmed the eastener's account with their vigourous nodding and an occasional grunt of assent or a shout of "Heathen animals!" as punctuation.

Once inside it seems the gang had left the church’s silver-plate trinkets and other fancy do-dads on the altar untouched, uninterested, heading straight down to the cellar instead. There they’d had a party to themselves, ransacking the place, eventually making off with a chest holding a number of objects belonging to the old dead priest, father Blake.

“Injun Hokey” one of the older women had told us, “A stone statue”, taken from a local tribe now long gone to their happy hunting ground, killed in some local reprisal, a petty land war, or maybe just plain bloody-minded Christian killing.

“He took it off of them to stop their damned filthy practices in Williamson’s Wood,” another had added.

Filthy practices. The whores that worked the small saloon across from the empty mission leered and flashed us the tools of their trade as we rode out.

Blake should’ve broken that damn statue up with a pick when he had the chance instead of keeping it, but that’s human folly for you, we’re too curious, too precious by half.

So there we where, our orders to chase these poor fuckers to ground, cut them down and then rejoin the main trail heading south into the Colorado Territory; there to join that do-gooder two-gun parson, Chivington and his hired dogs. We were to bring the chest with us and to take what we thought fitting from the fugitives.

It was the 20th of November by the time we caught up with the church-breakers. At least the ones they’d wanted us to catch; an old man, three Arapaho women, two children no more than eleven years old, and the mad Negro.

Even watching my boys make free and bloody with his daughters and grandchildren couldn’t loosen the old man’s tongue. He was a hard bastard that one, the look in his eyes told me he’d seen some murderous shit in his time; but despite what he thought he’d seen, he hadn’t met a fucker like me.

I set to work on him good, and I made him make a hundred different sounds he didn’t think he’d ever make, but he still didn’t tell me where the chest had gone. He died with out me noticing, still working on his bones and tattered flesh.

He was a proud one that old man. Probably thought he’d saved the others. What he didn’t know was that I already knew where the chest was going, the babbling black loon had told me. I’d just wanted a bit of fun of my own.

………

So we’d chased the others here. They hadn’t even bothered hiding the stolen chest. I guess they thought they were home free.

The lake itself wasn’t on any map that I’d been given on leaving Ridgley. I used the “D” guard “Bowie” I’d handmade from an old heavy sabre to prize a rib out of the negro that had made it to the lake; not all the way out, just far enough to hold without breaking it. He told me the lake’s name, but I guess I won’t be adding it to no map.

The night after the lynching was the first night we heard the sounds over the water. A low sound of drums and occasional raised voices, like the crazy moonshine fuelled war-dance chants the drunken braves put on for the tourists in the towns. We stood on the bank of the lake, horse blankets wrapped around ourselves for warmth. Flesher-Marsh, our Norwegian trapper, pointed to a shadow in the mist out across the water. A clump of reeds maybe? An island we’d missed as we rode in? We let it slide. When the fog cleared in the morning we’d find a ford for the horses and burn the island that the mist was hiding blacker than a priest’s cassock.

Yet the next day the mist wouldn’t budge, in fact it snowed. We set out to reconnoitre the lake but after an hour we had to turn back. Coming back in the blizzard we nearly missed the camp altogether. Nat Peaslee didn’t make it back at all. He and his horse went over the edge of a ravine not more than two hundred yards from where we’d made camp. Something else we missed on the way in.

It was that night we heard the other sounds. Like someone pouring empty mussel shells onto a stone floor. I’d heard something similar as a kid. My pa had owned a little strip of dirt in Missouri, and one year out of the blue they’d hit the fields of every farm for fifty miles. Locusts, gods green vengeance, straight outta the Old Testament. “And they shall cover the surface of the land, so that no one shall be able to see the land.” People just hid in their houses. When we eventually got it in our heads to step outside again it was as if some one had taken shears to every field as far as you could see. My ma had laughed at the comical look of the flensed land, but we had a mean winter that year.

And here was that sound again, just louder, the clicks clearer, like something with way too many legs running over the freezing ground beyond the tent canvas.

When we got outside we couldn’t see a damn thing. Within a couple of steps I could feel the mist forming frost on my face and hair, my boots unsteady on the icy ground. I don’t know who screamed first. Suddenly something huge moved off to my right, I lifted the pistol and fired using the larger of the Le Mat’s two barrels, the blast echoed off the mist making it sound like we where stuck in a mountain gorge. Other shots rang out. There was a whine and a clang as the cooking pot two feet to my left was hit. I threw myself to the ground and stayed low while the shots kept coming. Somebody shouted to stop. They’d been hit. They couldn’t see. The gunfire stopped, the last echoes taking with it the fading sound of the eldritch clicking feet.

Crawling through the white fog, melting snow and hoof-raked filth some of us managed to find each other, all of us shaking and spooked, content just to huddle in the lee of a fallen tent.

Todd Thayer was dead, he’d been the one to shout that he’d been hit, and he had been, just not by a bullet.

The early grey light gave us the courage to walk back to find him, it looked like someone had pulled a plough across his belly. It took us less than an hour but longer than it should’ve to realise who else and what else was missing altogether; five men gone, plus all of the horses. Flesher’s hounds were steaming in the feeble morning sun, butchered, unrecognisable. Young Kenny Whateley went mad there and then. Two hours later, after writing a fevered letter to his girl, he cut his own throat in his tent.

The next five nights were the same.

We’d agreed no guns, just edged steel, get close enough to the bastards to see who or what it was we were killing; but the results were the same.

Last night, out of the corner of my eye, I’d seen the shape of something that shouldn’t be walking the land. I swung around, lashing out with the wide bladed “Bowie” I knew as soon as it bit into flesh that I’d made a mistake.

Lanigan died in my arms crying like a babe, praying like a penitent nun, his guts open to the grey sky.

……

That just leaves me and the chest.

The sky is crazy shade of purple, like a bruised cheekbone; the light will hold for another hour at best.

The snow is starting to fall again, gently now, trying to cover a scene that looks like the killing floor of a Chicago abattoir slowly spilling into a kids picture of Christmas.

It’s been nine days since I killed the old man, sixteen hours since I gutted Lanigan, and I’m wondering if it wouldn’t have been better if I’d have just carried on straight to Colorado.

……


WIP

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