Fury From the Tomb Page 16

  After a bit of reflection, and copious swearing and recrimination of the present company and of himself – McTroy rejoined us.

  “I will be paid the bounty?” McTroy said, to confirm what he’d heard from Evangeline’s well-formed lips. He rubbed his chin with the back of his pistol-waving hand.

  “Yes, paid in full. When we achieve our goal.”

  She addressed the undead. “Now, ghoulish one. Do you have a name?”

  “Nombre?”

  “What do your dirty compadres call you?” McTroy said loudly. He spat again.

  “Rojo,” the necrófago said.

  “How did this happen to you, Rojo?” Evangeline asked. “Did it have to do with the mummies you stole from the train?”

  “Los mummies.” He nodded. “Sí, sí, los mummies did this to me. I hate them.”

  “What did they do?” She avoided examining his vivid condition too directly.

  “They burn me. El Gusano crawls up from his hole. We meet him. Aquí. El fantasmo del mummy gigante says to break out his amigos de las cajas. So we do. He then grabs me and burns me so he goes into his body muchisísimo más. I do nothing to him. I hate him.”

  “The big mummy is still a ghost?” I asked.

  “He is like…” Rojo flopped around the sarcophagus bottom. “All of them the same… los mummies.” He flopped awkwardly, rather fishlike. “They kill some conejos, but…?” He shrugged.

  “Conejos?”

  “He means jackrabbits,” McTroy said. “The damned mummies were eating rabbits.”

  “They did not eat them. They sacrificed the rabbits to animate the other mummies,” Evangeline said, nodding to herself. “Kek is powerful enough to force himself back into this world. He uses the animal blood to rejuvenate his servants. If what Rojo says is true, Kek is in his own body now.”

  Rojo picked up the guitar and began to strum it.

  “Why did they leave you?” she asked.

  “I can no ride. El mummy gigante – he took my horse. They’re coming back.”

  “Ain’t nobody coming back for you,” McTroy said. He had said this to other desperate men. I knew by how quickly the words came. Maybe he’d heard them himself.

  The necrófago played. Slowly, then faster. The hot tomb could have baked bread. But the music rang out as beautifully as notes floating from the window of a concert hall.

  “Where is El Gusano taking the mummies?” McTroy asked.

  “I don’t know. I am stuck in the box. I don’t even see which way they ride.”

  “Good luck when the lobos come to pick your bones.” He pointed at the exposed portions of the ghoul. “What’s left of them.”

  “I think I no taste too good. They don’t eat me.”

  “Something will. Eventually. Leave him.” He acted as if he were finished with the truncated graverobber. “We’ll keep following those horse tracks.”

  “You don’t know where they go, do you?” Rojo said.

  “You don’t either.” McTroy made his tone sound dull, like a man tired of trading.

  “Maybe I do. If I think very hard, something maybe shakes loose.”

  “Look at yourself, Rojo. I think you know shit. And if the critters don’t want you, you’ll dry up like a lizard turd.”

  “It’s not so bad. I am in shade part of the day. I have my music.”

  “Keep telling yourself that.”

  McTroy tilted his head, letting us know we should ride farther away. He took a coin from his pocket and flipped it into the shadeless coffin. It pinged on the quartzite.

  The music stopped. I couldn’t see him, but I pictured the ghoul stroking the coin.

  “Say, where’d you learn to play guitar anyway?” McTroy backed Moonlight up, leaving Rojo with nothing but the white sun in his sight.

  “I found one in a grave. Long time ago. But I lost it. Then I found this one on the train. It’s better than my old one.”

  He plucked a few notes. A sharper sound. He was using the coin.

  Moonlight walked to where we waited.

  The sun burned my hands. I touched Penny’s mane, combing through the hairs. Evangeline uncorked her canteen. McTroy put his finger against his lips. Shush.

  “Hey, hey you still there?” Rojo asked. “I didn’t hear you ride off so you must be here.”

  McTroy shook his head.

  There came a quick rustling sound from inside the sarcophagus. The ghoul appeared to be trying to lift himself to the edge to peek out. But, being as he was, that is to say, half of his former self, he could not maintain his balance. He fell and landed on the guitar by the discordant sound of it. “I know where they’re going! Lady! Tell the caballeros to come back here!”

  “Where they headed?” McTroy shouted.

  “You take me with you and I show you.”

  “Not good enough.”

  “They’re going to a church. With monks.”

  “A monastery?” Evangeline whispered. “Do you know this place?”

  “No,” McTroy said, under his breath. “Could be a lot of places.”

  “Listen! Hey! They’re not going to the church,” Rojo said.

  “Which is it?” I said. “Are they going to church or not?”

  “They’re going to the temple underneath the church. That’s where they’re going. You never gonna find it without me. That’s where the necrófagos hide. Take me. C’mon.”

  That is how Rojo came to ride with us into Mexico.

  Well, not exactly ride.

  McTroy threw the end of the rope into the sarcophagus. “Tie it under your arms.”

  “You gonna drag me?”

  “You smell, Rojo. Moonlight won’t have it.”

  “What about the lady? Lady, you let me ride with you?”

  Evangeline, Wu, and I declined to help Thomas’ murderer.

  “It’s drag or dry up, devil. If you ain’t tying, give me my rope.” McTroy pulled and the rope pulled back. McTroy smiled. With McTroy’s assistance Rojo hoisted himself to the rim of the vault. He had tied a solid knot against his bullet-riddled chest. He boosted himself up, using the guitar like a crutch. The ghoul looked my way.

  “Señor, you do something for me?”

  I had no desire to aid this loathsome thing. “What is it?”

  “My body no feels pain. If I get to a graveyard I can feast and grow new legs. You know? But this is the best guitar I ever have. You take it for me? Please?”

  I paused at first but then relented and took the instrument from him and gave it to Wu.

  Wu reluctantly slung the guitar across his back.

  25

  Death Castle in the Gila

  The monastery was the ugliest building I’d ever seen. My first glimpse of it rising out of the desert gave me vertigo. It triggered a bilious wave in my gut. I burped, lurched in the saddle, and hung my head askew in case I lost my biscuits. Swampy gas-green acids bubbled up inside me. Awhirl, I felt slick and cold as a frosty window; my shirt suckered to my skin despite attempts to peel it away. Next the shivers commenced, my teeth chattering, my head vised so I was nearly struck blind with pain. I stopped Penny, climbed down, and knelt in the dirt before I keeled over.

  “What’s the matter?” McTroy said.

  “Sick,” I said. “Suddenly. Maybe the bacon was bad.”

  “Mine wasn’t. We all ate it.”

  “Are you feeling dizzy?” Evangeline asked.

  “Very.”

  “It might not be the cured pork.”

  At the words “cured pork” I heaved dryly. Evangeline dismounted and put her hand to my brow. She retrieved her purse from Neptune’s saddlebag.

  “You’re feverish. I’ve seen this before. Your connection with Odji-Kek is strong. I suspect he’s close by and his power has grown vastly. This is a corporal stress reaction.”

  I said, “He’s in the church… the sanctuary of that monastery. I sense him – enthroned.”

  McTroy screwed up his face. He looked down at me then at the chur
ch walls.

  “That place is laid out like a fortress. If he don’t want to come out, it’ll be hell forcing him. Them friars might not be friendly if they’re hiding undead scum.”

  McTroy reeled in his rope, wrapping it around his saddle horn. In the dust, Rojo bumped along, looking and smelling like a sack of dead mackerel. My sight returned – piecemeal, splotchy, and shifting in hue to nauseating effect. But I did not have to look for long at our fellow traveler to register that the day’s ride had come at a high price – naked Rojo freshly skinned and leaking a panoply of gray liquids.

  Two inky eyes squinted at us.

  If I entertained any thoughts that the ghoul had somehow expired, they soon were dispelled. He blinked. He licked his scabby lips with a shriveled tongue. McTroy jerked the rope and Rojo popped into a sitting position. The necrófago braced up on his broomstick arms.

  “How you doing back there, you ol’ corpse chewer?” McTroy asked.

  “I been better,” the ghoul said.

  “That’s good to hear. Well, your directions were true. I’ll give you credit. These monks at Our Lady of the Dirthole – what are they, slaves to Satan, something like that?”

  Rojo nodded as if the slow action were pumping out the last of his juices.

  “Sí, something like that,” he said, grinning.

  His teeth were in fine shape. He had too many of them, pointed like needles, curved like a snake’s. Sand gathered in a moustache above his wide cannibal smile.

  “How many are inside?”

  Rojo closed his eyes while counting the evil monks in his head.

  “Veinte… twenty?” he said. “Maybe less if El Mummy said to kill some for him.”

  “They’re human then?” Evangeline asked.

  I couldn’t believe that I had arrived at a point in my life where this was a good question to start with. But it was. I had been thinking of asking the same thing.

  “Human, but bad, bad men… they stop with the Jesus long time ago. Now they pray to other gods. If a traveler in the Gila has bad luck and he comes to them for food or a place to sleep… they get their necks cut in their beds. The brothers give us the bodies after they finish. The brothers never leave here, so we necrófagos tell them news about, you know, the world that we see on our rides. We send people to them too.”

  “Isn’t that lovely?” Evangeline had been rummaging around in her purse. She found what she was searching for. A packet of what looked like hard candies. She gave one to me. “Suck on this. It might help you. Later I will make you tea if you’re not better.”

  I popped the lozenge in my mouth.

  “What is it?”

  “Peppermint oil and some ginger.”

  It tasted not bad. Quite good, actually. I felt a little bit less horrible already. I sipped water from my canteen and sucked some more.

  “Lay flat on your back. Here. Loosen your collar,” she said.

  I did as I was told.

  Evangeline fanned me with her slouch hat.

  Her thighs were wonderful pillows. If it weren’t for the sickness I was experiencing, and the grave-robbing corpse defiler sitting a few feet away, and the fortress filled with devil-worshipping throat-slashing monks, and the other necrófagos, of course, and the mummies, and Odji-Kek himself whose mental link with me caused my acute distress – it would’ve been a most pleasant way to spend time in the desert.

  “Are you feeling any relief?” she asked.

  “A bit, starting just now. The very beginnings of not being unwell…”

  “Give it a few minutes.”

  “I will.”

  McTroy said, “There must be a secret way in and out of that death castle. Don’t tell me they swing the gates open every time you come home from gobbling in the graveyard. Where’s the passage?” McTroy twitched the rope, and Rojo coughed.

  “You squeeze me I can’t tell you.”

  McTroy gave him some slack.

  Rojo lost his balance then righted himself.

  “There is no secret passage,” he said.

  The bounty hunter took up the slack he had given, and if there were a tree around, I’m certain he would have thrown the rope over a branch and let the ghoul dangle.

  Rojo saw his irritation and added quickly, “But they always have one monk in the bell tower. Day and night he watches. Whenever we return from a raid, he climbs down and lets us inside. There’s one up there now, I promise. He is watching, seeing what you are going to do.”

  We all looked at the bell tower.

  It was too far away to make out details, too far to detect any cloaked figure spying out from the adobe arches surrounding the bell. But since Rojo had said what he said, I couldn’t imagine the tower being unoccupied. It was like staring at a hole where you knew something nasty and crawly lived; itchy feelings raced over me. I narrowed my eyes, could perceive no change, no sign of habitation, yet in my mind a tower spy emerged: a hooded face, patient as a gargoyle, tracking us – an evil sentinel – that is who, or what, I felt ensconced up there.

  I stood and dusted off my clothes. Vertigo subsiding.

  “What are we going to do?”

  “We ride past. After dark we backtrack,” McTroy said. “Surprise them.”

  “How do we get the guard in the watchtower to open the gate?” Evangeline said. She had her spyglass out and braced along Neptune’s rump. “I see someone standing there. Rojo isn’t lying. What will he do to sound the alarm? Ring the bell, I suppose?”

  Rojo nodded. “The monks have el masa negro at night. Rituals, you know? They sleep in the day when it is hot. Except for the watcher. You come back under the moon and they will all be awake. Busy, busy. Necrófagos too. I don’t know if mummies sleep.”

  “Black mass? Where? In their chapel?” Evangeline collapsed her spyglass.

  “Sí, they go to church at midnight.”

  “Then that’s where we hit them. Block the doors and burn it,” McTroy said.

  “First, we need to get in,” I said. “That’s the tricky part. If they ring the bell, we’ll be caught like ducks on a pond. And we can’t even fly. They’ll pick us off one by one.”

  “I can help with this.”

  It was Wu.

  I had almost forgotten about him. He sat there on Penny’s back. This was the first time I really recognized his talent for stillness and quiet. But it wouldn’t be the last. Wu could be close to invisible when he wanted to be. And passing unnoticed is an asset in many circumstances.

  He had more to contribute. He told us so.

  “I could ask my parents to unlock the gate to the monastery,” he said.

  “Has the heat got to you, China?” McTroy asked. “You feelin’ squirrelly like doc?”

  Wu touched his face to check. “No. I feel like who I am. Like a boy.”

  “You say your parents will let us into that unholy fortress?”

  “Yes, they will. I only need to ask them tonight.”

  “Are they with the devils inside there now?” McTroy’s voice dropped to a whisper as he contemplated the disturbing idea that Wu’s parents were within the monastic walls for reasons unknown. “Do they live there?”

  “Absolutely not. Why would they go to a place like that?”

  McTroy threw his hands up. “Where the hell are your parents?”

  Yong Wu pointed north, in the opposite direction from the monastery.

  “They have been following us,” he said.

  The horizon was empty. Nothing. Not even the floating speck of a bird.

  McTroy sat tall on Moonlight and shook his head.

  “I’ve got a pretty keen sense if and when I’m being followed. I haven’t seen hide or hair of anybody on our trail. I think you’re telling tall tales.”

  “Mr Hardy saw them. He saw them last night by the fire. They attacked the mummy when he stopped me from breathing…” Here Wu paused. My concurrence on the event seemed expected. All heads turned to me, even Rojo’s.

  “The bats?” I said.
“Wu, you told me that your parents died.”

  “They did.”

  “Then how do you explain…?”

  “Because they came back, Mr Hardy.” Wu drew in a deep breath and spoke words that appeared to have been trapped inside him for a long time. “My father was the first to be bitten. Late one night in his tent the creature came to him. Some who saw it said it glowed green in the dark and it flew between the tent flaps. Others said it was a rotting man with wild hair smelling of mold. It picked him up and hopped off with him.”

  My shock at hearing of the supernatural was wearing off. There were happenings going on in the shadows of the ordinary world. They were real too. Once having seen them, I could not un-see them. In fact, I saw more, and more.

  “Didn’t anyone try to stop it?” I asked.

  “No. They were too afraid. They pretended it was a bad dream they were all having. In the morning, his body was found outside the camp, near the railroad tracks where the men had been working. My father was dead. There were rocks nearby, and a small cave where a wolf had been seen the evening before. But no one would look for my father’s killer. The men decided not to tell my mother about the cave. They buried my father there under the rocks, and told her he died from a terrible accident. Her job was to cook for the men. That night they said she did not have to cook. She stayed in her tent and cried. A week later my father came looking for her. My mother was screaming. The men recognized him, but he was not alive. He took my mother back to the rocks with him.”

  I was aghast. “Good Lord, Wu, how terrible. Where were you during this nightmare?”

  “I was with my mother. I was in the tent when he came for her. My mother pushed me down under a blanket to hide me. I saw my father. He did not see us. I think he was blind, but he could smell things. He sniffed the air. That was how he found my mother. He knew her smell.”

  “You’ve seen your mother… afterward?” Evangeline asked.

  “Yes, she is dead and then alive again too. They helped me to rescue you and Mr Hardy when you were staked to the ground. They will not hurt me. All they want to do is go home, but instead they are out here in the desert. They are lost together.” Here his voice quivered.