The Beautiful Thing That Awaits Us All - By Laird Barron Page 0,115
court while the queen in her dress and crown entertained a misshapen dwarf who wore a curious suit and a plumed hat, while in the background Ruark narrated in a thick accent, but no, this music was real enough, although it quavered at the very edge of perception. An orchestra of woodwinds and strings buoyed a choir singing in a foreign tongue. This choir’s harmony rose and fell with the swirls of wind, the creaking of the sea of branches in the dark above him. He couldn’t tell how far off the singers might be. Sound traveled strangely in the wild, was all the more tricky in the mountains.
“Ya hear that?” Calhoun said. Miller could barely make out the gleam of his eyes in the light of the coals. The young man’s whisper was harsh with fear. “The hell is that?”
“The wind, maybe,” Miller said after a few moments passed and the music faded and didn’t resume. The sky slowly lightened to pearl with tinges of red. He rose and ventured into the brush, did his business and wiped his hands with dead leaves and fir needles. Ruark was moving around by the time Miller returned. The old logger kindled the fire and put on coffee and biscuits. That drew the others, grumbling and muttering, from their bedrolls.
No one mentioned anything about voices or music, not even Calhoun, so Miller decided to keep his own counsel lest they think him addled. This was desolate country and uninhabited but for the occasional trapper. He’d heard the wind and nothing else. Soon, he pushed the mystery aside and turned his thoughts toward the day’s hunt.
Breakfast was perfunctory and passed without conversation. The party struck camp and headed northwest, gradually climbing deeper into the folds of Mystery Mountain. Sunlight reached fingers of gold through the canopy and cast a tiger stripe pattern over the shrubbery and giant ferns and the sweating boles of the trees. The pattern rippled as leaves rippled and shifted in a way that might hypnotize a man if he stared at it too hard. Miller blinked away the stupor and trudged along until they crested a bluff and found the wide, irregular bog Bane had spoken of the previous evening. The fellow had been correct—there was deer sign everywhere. The party fanned out in pairs and settled behind screens of brush to wait.
Miller dropped one as it entered the field at the edge of his weapon’s effective range, while Stevens, Bane, and Ruark each bagged one in the middle ground. Unfortunately, Horn’s lone shot merely injured his prey and it darted into the woods, forcing him, Ma, and Calhoun to pursue.
By noon three bucks were skinned and quartered. The men loaded the mules and strapped smaller cuts to their own packs and prepared to set off for Slango. Ma, Horn, and Calhoun remained in the forest pursuing the wounded buck.
“Damnation,” Bane said, shading his eyes against the sun. “We gonna be travelin’ in the dark as it is. Those green-hands dilly-dally much longer an’ it’s another biv-oo-ack tonight.”
“Hell with that. We don’t hoof it back by sundown McGrath will have our hides, sure as the Lord made little green apples.” Stevens unplugged the moonshine and had a swig. His face shone with sweat from the skinning and toting. “Here’s what I propose. Miller, you and Ruark take the mules and skedaddle back to Slango. Me and Bane will go round up our wayward friends and catch you two down the trail. Let’s get a move on, eh?”
Miller swatted at the clouds of swarming gnats and flies. A rifle boomed in the middle distance. Again after a long interval, and a third time. A universal signal of distress. That changed everything. Stevens, Bane, and Ruark frantically shucked the meat and hot-footed in the direction of the gunshots. Miller spent several minutes dumping the saddlebags from the mules and tethering them near a waterhole before setting after his comrades. He moved swiftly, bent over to follow their tracks and broken branches they’d left in their wake. He drew the Enfield from its scabbard and cradled the rifle to his breast.
Into the forest. And gods, the trees were larger than ever there along a shrouded ridge that dropped into a deep gulf of shadows and mist. He was channeled along a trail that proved increasingly treacherous. Water streamed from upslope, digging notches through moss and dirt into the underlying rock. In sections the dirt and vegetation were utterly stripped to exposed plates