The Book of Koli (Rampart Trilogy #1) - M. R. Carey Page 0,102

facing me for a few moments before he padded away into all that wild green and was lost to my sight. It seemed like there wasn’t no wight nor beast in Ludden that wanted to stay and hold parley with me.

I tucked my knife into my belt and walked on into the village, like as I was in a dream. I never seen nobody, alive nor dead. Just the ruin and the stillness, and the forest that had come in slow but sure to lay down its claim on this place and make it good.

The numbness of surprise wore off of me then, and panic fear took a hold of me. I would of turned and walked back out onto the road, only there was trees all around that would scoop me up and squeeze me dry as soon as I put my nose out of the gate. I was stuck here until the clouds set in again.

I run in and out of some of the houses, hoping I might find someone, anyone, that was left alive and could tell me what had happened. But there wasn’t nobody to be seen, and nothing to say where they’d gone. Them doors that was broken in, it was only a great push of weeds that broke them, not a violent hand. Inside, chairs and tables was where they was meant to be, with plates laid out on some of them and pots on the range. There hadn’t been no reaving that I could see, nor no great struggle. Whatever took Ludden had took it whole, like as it was in a single bite.

I did find one dead body at last. In a room in one of the bigger houses, there was a bed – and, in among the mouldered sheets, the bones of someone that had slept there. He died looking up at the ceiling, it seemed like, and with one hand under the bolster like he was making himself a mite more comfortable. I say he, on account of he wore a man’s shirt with no drawstring at the neck. There was a pisspot on the floor next to the bed, with black mould all up the sides of it. Flies was coming in and out of the open window, but they wasn’t lighting on the bones, or on the bed. Whatever rotting this dead man had to do, he had done it a while before, so the flies didn’t take no interest.

I cried for him, though it didn’t make much sense to do so. I never knowed him, and I never knowed what killed him. I just felt the weight in my heart of him dying here, and most likely being alone when he went, for if he had kin that stayed with him to the end they would surely of stayed an hour longer to bury him.

I thought maybe I should bury him my own self, but I didn’t have no shovel to dig with and I would have had to carry all the bones down to the street a few at a time and make a pile of them. In the end, I decided it was better to leave him where he was, but I sit with him a while and told him a little of my story in case his ghost was still there to hear it.

Outside the window, the sky was getting darker. I thought I had better stay in Ludden this night, and move on in the morning if there was cloud cover enough, but I was not minded to sleep in the room the dead man’s bones was in.

I picked myself up and went out of the house, back into the street. I looked all around, wondering which out of all these houses I should choose to lay myself down in.

The next thing I knowed, something pitched into me from behind. I went down heavy on my stomach, with all the wind knocked out of me.

I got my hand to my knife quick, but before I could draw it out of my belt someone put their knee into my back and their hand on my neck.

“You just can’t give up lying, can you?” says a voice in my ear, panting hot and heavy. “Crying out that you’re Koli Woodsmith. You ain’t that no more, you thieving bastard. You’re Koli Faceless, and that’s more than you deserve to be.”

I couldn’t see who was up on my back, but I thought I knowed that voice. Then