The Beautiful Thing That Awaits Us All - By Laird Barron Page 0,124
the ground. Live in the rocks, sleep inside a big ol’ trees in the deep forest where the sun don’t never shine.
“Oh.” Horn nodded. “I dunno what the little man in the story wanted with the child, but I kin tell ya the villagers give their babies to their friends inside the trees… inside this mountain. The sons an’ daughters of Ol’ Leech. An’ I kin tell ya what the people of Ol’ Leech do with ’em.”
“I’d rather you didn’t.”
“Jist shut yer eyes an’ look inside. We so close, ya kin see their god. He’s sleepy like a bear in winter. Dreamin’ of his people. Dreamin’ of us here in the daylight, too. But he’s wakin’ up. Be creepin’ out a his den pretty soon, I reckon.”
“Save it, kid.”
“He loves his people. Loves us too, in a different way.” Horn’s smile was shrewd and cruel. He opened his mouth and inhaled the peculiar light and Miller’s dreams became confused. He dreamt of falling through the mountain, through the entire Earth, and into the sky, accelerating like a bullet until the light of the sun dwindled to a pinprick. He crashed through the icy, blood-black surface of a strange moon and drifted weightless in its hollow core. The cavern was rank and humid and dark as pitch. He floated over crags and canyons and forests of clabbered flesh and fungus, his body carried upon the updrafts of a warm, gelatinous sea. At the center of this sea a mountain range shuddered and stirred. The colossus writhed and uncoiled with satanic majesty, aroused by the whine of flea wings. It whispered to him.
* * *
Miller awoke to Calhoun begging for help.
Calhoun cried from the direction of the tower. He called them by name in a tone of anguish and his voice carried. He began screaming the screams of a man partially buried alive or hung in barbed wire or swollen with mustard gas. Miller lay in the shadows, watching the dying light of the fires shiver across the wall of the cave. Calhoun kept screaming and they all pretended not to hear him.
* * *
Still later and after night settled in as tight as a blindfold, Stevens shook Miller. “Somethin’s wrong.”
“Oh, jumpin’ Jaysus,” Ruark said and moments later lighted the firepot. Miller would’ve cursed the old man for revealing their position, except he saw the cause of alarm—Horn was gone, spirited away from under their noses. Drips and drabs of blood smeared into the tunnel, into the blackness. “Them sonsabitches snatched Thad!”
As if in response to the light, a faint, ghostly moan echoed up the passage from great subterranean depths. Help me, boys. Help me. At least that’s what it sounded like to Miller. The distance and acoustics could’ve made wind whistling through chimneys of rock resemble almost anything.
“Lordy, Lordy,” Bane said. He was a frightful sight; gore limed his beard and jacket. He might’ve been a talking corpse. “That’s the boy.”
“Ain’t him,” Stevens said.
“The kid is done for,” Miller said. His eyes watered and he struggled to keep his voice even. “Whoever’s hooting down that tunnel is no friend of ours.”
“They’s right, Moses,” Ruark said. “This an ol’ Injun trick. Make a noise of a wounded friend an draw ya in.” He ran his thumb across his throat with an exaggerated flourish. “Ya should know it, hoss. That boy is daid.”
“Lookit all the blood,” Stevens said.
Bane shoved a plug of tobacco into his mouth and chewed with his eyes closed. His flesh was papery and his eyelids fluttered the way a man’s do when he’s caught in a terrible dream. He resembled the photographs of dead outlaws in open coffins displayed on frontier boardwalks. He spat. “Yeh, an’ lookit me. Still kickin’.”
Help me. Help me. The four of them froze like woodland animals, heads inclined toward the dim cries, the cold, cold draft.
“Ain’t him,” Stevens repeated, but mostly to himself.
Bane stood. He leaned against the wall, the barrel of his Rigby nosing the sand. He nodded to Ruark. “You comin’?”
Ruark spat. He lifted the firepot and led the way.
Bane said, “Alrightee, boys. Take care.” He tapped his hat and limped after his comrade. Their shadows swayed and jostled, and their light grew smaller and seeped into the mountain and was gone.
The others sat in the dark for a long time, listening. Miller heard faint laughter, a snatch of Bane singing “John Brown’s Body,” and then only the fluting of the wind in the rocks.