Andersonville (12 page)

“I don't need him for the box, you damned insolent cur!” Day snapped.

“Well, what do you need him for, Lieutenant?” Turner asked coyly, and a few of the sentries within earshot snickered.

“The officers' woodpile's low, and I need a man to fetch kindling. Right about now you ought to thank the Lord I don't make you come down here and do it.”

“Maybe it'd be all right if I come down and escort you, sir,” Turner said.

“Jesus Christ Almighty, is this what passes for discipline in Georgia? Sergeant Turner, you are testing me to the breaking point,” Day roared. “I think if I can manage a soldier as dumb as you, I can handle one nigger, by God; now open up that wicket and don't say another word. You'll talk yourself right into the guardhouse.”

A few of the boy sentries giggled.

Turner whipped his head around until they quieted, then nodded to Day.

“Yes, sir,” he hissed through his teeth.

“Here,” Day said, tossing a big iron key and an empty sack down to Barclay. “Open that up, fill it, and pass it back.”

Barclay opened the bottom of the postbox and stuffed a handful of correspondence inside, then held it and the key up to Day, who jammed the key back into his coat pocket and threw the sack over his saddle.

“Now walk ahead of me.”

Barclay walked slowly through the wicket out onto the torchlit path.

Turner hawked a gob of spit down on him when he passed underneath.

“Turner!” Day hollered. “I'll have you on report for that!”

“For spittin' on a nigger?” Turner asked incredulously. “There ain't no regulation against that!”

“Forget it,” Barclay whispered.

Day glanced at Barclay, then pointed up at Turner.

“You and I are going to tangle, Sergeant!” he warned. “Count on it!”

Turner, silhouetted now in his roost, made no other move but to shrug.

“Just give a holler when you're finished with him,
sir
.”

Day urged his horse on, and Barclay walked ahead of him up the trail.

Dr. Wayman Day sat in his cavernous study at his satinwood desk, unconsciously stroking one of his considerable gray sideburns as he pored over a ponderous Latin edition of Athanasius Kircher's
Cabala Hebraeorum
. A shadow fell across his work. He leaned back in his creaking chair to rub for a moment at his watering eyes, thinking a cloud had passed across the noonday sun. When next he opened them, his gaze wandered naturally to the tall picture window and its commanding view of the hemp fields of Day's End.

A frown descended on his drawn face, causing the sharp ends of his silver mustache to sink past his chin. Though it had been a bright, blazing Louisiana afternoon only moments before, the sky was now ink black with unnatural clouds, and as he watched, bolts of scarlet lightning projected upward from the ground, playing across the ponderous clouds in brilliant red flashes. A deep, fearful thunder shook the pane and rocked an Oriental porcelain vase that had belonged to his late wife off the shelf, smashing it.

Wayman Day placed a silk ribbon in Athanasius Kircher and closed the book with a thump.

He heard a sound like stumbling, rapid footsteps outside his chamber door, followed immediately by a persistent rapping.

Before he could bid the visitor enter, the door swung open and a black boy of eleven years dressed in a dark green broadcloth tailcoat and a fine brocaded vest of silk satin and clean white twill trousers entered, breathless.

“Dr. Day, sir. Me and Quit…we need your help with something.”

The boy looked nervously over his shoulder.

“Quit and I,” Wayman corrected.

Wayman frowned and looked over at his locked bookcase, where he kept secure his most dangerous grimoires. There was a conspicuous empty space on the shelf.

He stood up, the chair groaning back.

“What in God's name have you two scalliwags gone and done now?”

In a few moments the black child was leading him through his own manor house, babbling inane snatches of a prerehearsed excuse, something about “being powerful curious about the locked up books on his shelf” and “settling an argument about whether or not a
lwa
and an angel was the same thing.” By the sound of things, the wager would remain uncollected as they had not procured an example of either.

They passed through the kitchen, where the house servants huddled together in a corner of the pantry praying loudly, and finally came to the heavy cellar door, behind which a series of beastly, disconcerting animalistic howls were sounding.

Dr. Day pushed his nervous boy guide aside and gripped the handle of the door, yanking it open.

At the bottom of the stair, his own son, also eleven, lay contorting horribly on the dirt floor in the middle of an inexpertly drawn pentacle and a circle of black candles in various positions of disarray. The boy's blond curls stood almost on end from his scalp, and yellow-green froth was bubbling out between his gnashing teeth. Every limb and digit was bent at a peculiar angle, the entity within him being unused to piloting a human form. The younger Day's eyes rolled up, and a series of weird bleats and barks erupted from his throat.

Dr. Day closed the cellar door and fixed the boy at his side with a withering glare of disapproval.

“Ain't you gonna get rid of it, sir?” the boy asked him after his gaze proved unavoidable.

“I should say not! Not here, anyway. I'll go to my oratory. Safe within a properly drawn and charged circle, I'll exorcise it from there. You'd better come along with me, Barclay. And keep your eyes open. You might learn something.”

The doctor turned from the door and strode past the terrified servants.

“What about Quit?” young Barclay Lourdes asked, catching up with him.

“We'll just let him keep that thing busy awhile.” He put a hand on the boy's shoulder. “Don't worry; it's nothing honest faith can't handle. You do know I'm going to have to tell your daddy about this.”

“Yessir,” Barclay sighed.

When they were out of sight of the stockade wall, Quitman Day leaned down from his saddle.

“That Turner's on to us,” he said, glancing over his shoulder.

“Might be,” Barclay said, shrugging. “It could be my fault, too. I told him you were a catamite earlier today.”

“What?”
Day exclaimed, stopping his horse. Barclay felt like he could see his expression fall even in the dark.

“We don't have much time,” Barclay said, walking on.

Day rode alongside him.

“When Turner beat me,” Barclay said, reaching off the path now and again to break off dry wood from the shrubs and bushes, “he took me to the edge of death. I'm sure I had a vision of this place as it really is. I saw things that have no business being out of hell. I think Turner is possessed by one of them.”

Day nodded, striking a match and lighting one of his cigars.

“I've seen them too. Kastirin,” he said. “Tormentor demons. You don't normally catch them outside of hell or a summoning circle, but most any demon can break free on their own if they're invited into a pact with a human soul, one that's filled with negative emotion for them to suckle on. Turner definitely shares his body with one. That makes him dangerous.”

“Dangerous how?”

“You've seen how the
lwa
grant their horses special powers when they take possession. Handling hot coals in the mouth, that kind of thing. The kastiri grants him abilities beyond a normal man. He'll be stronger, quicker, more resilient. Normal bullets, knives, they won't do much good.”

“Any way around that?”

“Beyond a lengthy exorcism? I find salt can sometimes drive out a demon, in copious amounts. They hate the stuff.”

Barclay took note of that, though salt was a luxury inside the stockade.

“How about fire?”

Fire was the primal element. Most supernatural creatures had an aversion to it, but would a demon born in a cradle of the stuff be affected?

“Yes, I think so. Certain enchanted implements do the trick, too. Mystic iron, silver, or something blessed. And of course if the head is removed from the shoulders. Eventually, though, the demon's personality begins to take over the man's,” Day said. “The human soul is replaced in the end, and only the kastiri remains.”

“Then there's the dogs,” Barclay said. “Not all of them but the ones Turner favors. The big spotted Cubans that lead the others. They reek of brimstone. I do believe they're hellhounds.”

“Hellhounds?” Day exclaimed. “I understood those creatures' sole purpose was to drag back souls contracted to hell. What are they doing here?”

“Well,” said Barclay, “if Turner did invite congress with a kastiri, maybe one of them is waiting around for his soul.”

“So if there's five of them…”

“That's right. That means five men who have merged with kastirin. Turner and who else?” Barclay asked.

“I don't think any of the boy sentries are. Every one of them is a local volunteer who doesn't know his ass from a hole in the ground. Maybe a couple of Turner's bunch. Sergeant Duncan's a good candidate, or the dog handlers. There's Wirz. Did you get a look at him when you had the sight?”

Barclay shook his head. “He rode out through the wicket before I could.”

“He talks to himself in his office all day. Even argues sometimes. But I don't know,” said Day, taking off his cap and running his hand through his hair. “I don't think he's sharing his body with a mere kastiri. They're rather easy to scry when you know what you're looking for. Wirz is…something else entirely.”

“What?”

“I don't know. I don't even know how the other kastirin can be floating around. By rights, without mortal bodies to inhabit, they shouldn't be able to exist on this plane. What are they even doing here?”

“A lot of the prisoners dream of them. One of the Indians told me something, too.” He told Day about Bill Mixinisaw's vision of a prior civilization dedicated to human sacrifice to something that lived beneath the ground and about the bloody root he'd pulled one night.

“That bears looking into,” Day said. “I'll talk to the locals, see if I can learn anything about the history of the area.”

“I'm not sure,” Barclay said, “but I think the disturbance centers in that filthy creek or beneath it. It's like this place is a torment ground; every petty work detail and punishment, the disorganized methods of cataloging and distributing rations, it's like the men here are being deliberately tortured and harassed to create an environment these kastirin things can abide in. I can feel this place like a heavy wet blanket on my soul.”

“I'm sorry I called you here,” Day said.

Not yet, Barclay thought. But he said: “Why
did
you ask for me?”

“Because I'm at a loss. I don't understand it, but whatever's happening here, the Lord and His angels are sitting it out. My powers aren't worth what a pig could spit in here, and being assigned as the prison censor, I don't get much time in the actual stockade. I need a man inside, but I also need another angle.”

So Western magic was failing. Time for hoodoo and vodoun. Time for the old ways.

“Anything else you can tell me so far?” Day asked.

“Those boy sentries you mentioned,” Barclay began, “they're crack shots for being nothing but volunteers off the local farms. Or at least we're meant to think they are.”

“What do you mean? I expect you get to be a pretty good shot pickin' squirrels out of trees all day.”

“Except they don't ever fire. I've seen a couple men killed crossing that deadline, but I've never been able to pinpoint one of those sentries as the shooter. Never found a ball in the dirt either.”

“Interesting.”

“The cornmeal ration we're being fed, it has a lot of ingredients that don't belong. I can smell a spell a mile off, Quit. Some of the men told me they've found lead powder in it.”

Day rubbed his face.

“Lead.”

“Yes, and the first man I saw killed died of a belly wound. The second had a mouthful of raw cornmeal, and his lower jaw was blown off when he strayed over the line.”

“Then the prisoners are being fed some kind of reagent,” Day said after a moment's rumination. “Something being brewed up in the bake house? Or at least introduced there.”

“That was my thought,” Barclay said. “The iron filaments coalesce and explode whenever someone crosses that line, giving the appearance of a bullet hit. It's a passive mystic barrier. Deters escape on a mass scale by reputation alone.”

“Ingenious,” Day said, smiling slightly in his excitement. “Nice work, Barclay.”

Barclay almost grinned back. He felt like they were kids again, figuring out cantrips in Dr. Day's oratory chamber.

“It's just a theory,” he said. “And there's something else. This morning, hauling corpses out of the dead house, I noticed they've all been branded.”

“The men?”

“Their corpses, yes. I carried a man out yesterday. Today, when I carried him out of the dead house, I found a mark on his collarbone that I'm sure wasn't there before. I checked two others. They were all branded with the same symbol.”

“What symbol?” Day asked excitedly.

Barclay shifted his bundle of kindling, stopped in the road near one of the torches, and took one of the sticks in his hand. He drew the mark from memory in the dirt.

Day stared at it in the firelight for a moment.

“I don't recognize it.”

Barclay sighed.

“But it proves we've got a magus mixed up in this affair,” Day said. “Who is it, I wonder?”

“Tell me about Captain Wirz,” Barclay said, straightening with a bundle of sticks under his arm.

“It's hard to find anything on him prior to enlistment. He was born in Zurich and came over here in '49. He claimed to be a surgeon, but the only work experience as a physician I can find for him is as slave doctor on the Marshall sugar plantation in Milliken's Bend in 1860. He joined the Delta Rifles in December of that year.”

“The Delta Rifles?” Barclay exclaimed.

Jesus, they might have passed each other in the street in New Orleans. The Delta Rifles had been a company of planters' sons and their associates from the surrounding area. They had seized the federal arsenal at Baton Rouge as soon as secession had been declared, and almost all the original company had become officers during the reorganization into regular units.

“Yeah. I'm surprised I never met the man,” said Day. “He was in the 4th Louisiana Infantry a year later and caught a bullet in that arm of his at Seven Pines in '62. Lost the use of it. After that, it gets a bit sketchy.”

“How so?”

“He was promoted to captain and assigned by General John Winder to command the military prison in Richmond.”

“Winder,” said Barclay.

“You know about him?”

“He was the assistant inspector general of camps of instruction in Richmond. I saw him once at Castle Thunder.”

Day stopped his horse.

“You were at Castle Thunder?”

“I've been a lot of places,” Barclay said dismissively. “Winder's a bully and a martinet.”

“Well, he's in command of every prison in Georgia now, including this one. He seems like a good candidate as being behind all of this.”

“Winder's no magician,” Barclay said doubtfully. “He's an old soldier turned politician. A money-grubbing crook.”

“People can change. He was involved in the early planning and initial surveying of the land. I heard him brag that he's killing more Yankees than they are on the front.”

Barclay shrugged.

“Maybe. Back to Wirz.”

“Well, as I said, details are a bit sparse. Wirz was dispatched to Europe, ostensibly on recuperative leave to seek treatment for his arm. My sources in intelligence say he was actually a special emissary to Paris and Berlin for President Davis. He came back this past February and was sent straightaway here a month later.”