Andersonville (26 page)

There were no sentries posted outside the two-story house, so he was able to creep right up to the corner and slink unseen along the outside wall till he came to one of the glowing windows and peered in, being careful to remain just outside the square of light.

He was afforded a view of the dining room, where Wirz, looking sickly in the extreme and swaddled in a blanket like an infirm child, sat at the head. At the other end was an elderly officer with a shock of uncombed white hair he recognized as Winder.

A young blond girl about sixteen years of age, pretty but plain in a white cotton dress, sat at the table next to Wirz, and an older woman Barclay presumed was Wirz's wife, with iron-streaked blond hair in a tight bun, sat with her back to the window.

The diners all rose at once. Wirz's wife went swiftly to Wirz and said something to him in a low voice, apparently urging him to sit back down and not tax himself.

She turned and said something inaudible above the wind to Winder, who replied in his loud, bassy voice: “Regretfully, no, Elizabeth. In the morning I shall be reporting to Florence in South Carolina to assume the command of the Confederate Bureau of Prison Camps. I trust you and Cora will care for your husband until I return on inspection.”

Mrs. Wirz nodded pleasantly, as did the girl, Cora, who curtsied, apparently saying their good evenings. The women gathered the plates and flatware as Winder smiled broadly and bowed at the waist. Wirz appeared detached as the women kissed each of his pallid cheeks and departed.

Barclay saw lights in the upper windows of the house.

A new grimness settled over the two officers left alone in the dining room. Wirz rose from his chair, clutching the flannel blanket like a shawl, and said something low to Winder, who nodded and came around the table.

They passed out of the room, but Barclay, creeping carefully along the side of the house, was able to track their progression to a corner bedroom, where his already labored heart clenched to see Limber leaning against a wall, clean and in the garb of a Confederate private, looking down at a man in the bed.

It was Day, apparently asleep.

He nearly forgot himself and pressed his face to the half-open pane, when the door to the room rattled and he ducked back into the darkness as Wirz and Winder entered. He bumped into something solid, nearly tripped over it, and had to throw out his hands to catch himself. It was a stump with a hatchet sunk in the center.

“Still no change?” Wirz asked Limber.

Limber shook his head.

“He's recovered fully from his wounds,” Winder grumbled. “Why doesn't he wake?”

“Because he knows it is safer for him if he doesn't,” Wirz said, going to the bedside and prying open Day's good eye. “This is no ordinary sleep. He's in a mystic trance.”

“What can we do?” Winder very nearly whined behind Wirz's back.

“There is nothing we can do. But there is nothing he can do in this state either.”

“What about his associate?” Winder asked. “If it wasn't the nigger Lourdes…”

“If it wasn't Lourdes, then it must have been the priest. My sickness began shortly before his departure. It cannot be a coincidence.”

“Then why did you let him leave?”

“The prisoners adore him as a saint. If I moved against him, we would've had a riot on our hands.”

“We could've taken him in secret.”

“General, by now you should appreciate how difficult it is to keep a secret in Andersonville. Between the gossiping of our own men and the infiltrators it's a wonder the Pope and Ulysses Grant haven't showed up themselves at this point.”

“But isn't it likely that he is on his way to get assistance?” Winder said.

“He won't get there. I've dispatched Turner and Bush with five men. They'll overtake him on the road to Americus before he ever gets back to Savannah.”

Barclay swallowed, blinking back delirium. Whelan would take the knife intended for him before the night was over. He wanted to leave, to steal a horse and ride after them. But he couldn't.

“You said the ritual would be completed tonight,” Winder said. “The woman in the cellar, you said she was the last sacrifice you needed.”

“She would've been,” Wirz said, sneering and straightening from Day. The thick Swiss accent was dropping in and out now, worse than it had that day in Wirz's office. It was as if Mastemah and Wirz were becoming one. “If this infernal satyr hadn't infected her with a soulless child and rendered her useless as a sacrifice.”

The last was directed at Limber, who blinked rapidly.

At the window, Barclay started again. Charlie was in the cellar, then. He looked around for a pair of outside doors but saw none on this side of the house.

“I only wanted to make sure I had a fresh body to possess in case this whole thing doesn't pan out,” Limber said.

Winder frowned and looked from him to Wirz, who turned on Limber.

“Your lack of confidence in our endeavor is disappointing,” Wirz said.

Limber shook his head.

“I just don't wanna go back to the pit,” he said. He looked at Winder imploringly. “You don't know what it's like. It's so dark. I can't go back to that, not after feeling and smelling and tasting—”

Wirz let his blanket drop and swung his bad arm at Limber with surprising dexterity. The blow he landed felled the taller man like a club.

“You low-born mutt,” Wirz muttered. “I should send you back to the freezing fires myself. Go and fetch those rags you were wearing earlier.”

Limber got slowly to his feet and limped over to the chifforobe in the corner.

“Without her, can we still complete the ritual tonight?” Winder asked with a definite twinge of anxiety.

“There's yet a way,” Wirz said, turning back to look at Day. “If we take young Cora to the stockade, brand her, and sacrifice her. Then it will be accomplished.”

Winder bit his lower lip.

“Sometimes I don't know if it's you or the other one speaking,” he said.

“What other?” Wirz asked.

“That little girl,” Winder said, glancing up at the ceiling and lowering his voice. “Are you certain it's got to be her?” Then, before Wirz could answer, he cleared his throat and set his shoulders as if he had an audience and said, “Because if it is absolutely necessary to win the war, I'll condone it. For the good of Dixie.”

Wirz chuckled. It was a high, strange sound, bordering on mania. It broke into a fit of deep phlegmy coughs that nearly doubled him over before they at last subsided.

“Dixie,” he said, unbuttoning his shirt as Limber came over with his own filthy Union uniform in his hands. “Attend me,” he said to Limber, and turned to face Winder, holding out both arms as though he had never been infirm. His wounded arm was blocked from view but apparently had recovered completely.

Limber stripped off his linen shirt like a body servant and set the ragged Union tunic on his shoulders as he stepped out of his pants. He strapped his LeMat pistol on underneath the tunic.

“General Winder, it is precisely because of men like you that I harbor no qualms about ending humanity once and for all.”

“What did you say?” Winder asked, flustered. Wirz pulled up Limber's faded Union trousers and slipped on the worn braces.

“Oh, come now. I thought you were a clever villain, Winder,” Wirz said as Limber buttoned his tunic. “Even our bumbling infiltrators probably know that I fully intend to sic the ha-Mashchit not just on the North but on all of mankind. It doesn't recognize political boundaries, after all, and with the bloodless sacrifices of the Raiders and Cora, there will be nothing to bind it this time. No sacred blood to suspend it in. This time, I have ensured that the ha-Mashchit will rage unchecked across creation.”

“But the war,” Winder stammered. “You said you'd win it for us.”

“I said I would end it for you. And it will end. With the death of every pestilential man, breeding woman, and nit child. And when the last cursed human breath is drawn, there will be no more need for a tempter to fire your wretched souls for the Father. My long, long duty will be fulfilled, and I will return to the kingdom to bask once more in the warmth of the Presence.” He closed his eyes and smiled slightly. When he opened them again, tears were spilling down his cheeks. “I will go home at last.”

He looked over at Winder, whose lips were moving soundlessly.

“But yes, it will mean the end of your war, as I promised you. As I promised Henry Wirz.”

“But I thought there'd be peace,” Winder said.

“Oblivion is the only lasting peace mankind can ever attain.”

He broke into another fit of coughing then, and Winder inched toward the door. When next Wirz—or rather Mastemah—spoke, his teeth and lips were stained red with blood.

“But now, because of some paltry backwoods magic, Wirz's body is infirm. Only my own presence has kept him from succumbing. Perhaps a new form is in order. What do you say, General? Ready to give your last full measure for your precious Dixie?”

Winder's answer was to break for the door.

Wirz raised his supposedly useless arm and stopped him short.

Barclay winced at the sight of that twisted appendage. The pustules he had only glimpsed before were bubbling and bursting now before his eyes, incessantly leaking pus and ichor, re-forming, bursting again, as if the flesh were some boiling concoction superheated by a fire deep within. The arm had swollen to twice its normal girth, bulging and contracting like a thing alive.

Winder wailed and stumbled back into the corner.

Wirz smiled.

“I've been concentrating a great deal on this arm. Regenerating it for Wirz was part of our contract. He was quite upset that he was no longer able to embrace his dear Elizabeth. Do you think she will welcome his embrace now, General?”

He turned the overlarge arm over admiringly, and the sores raced up and down its length in strange patterns.

Winder fell to his knees and thrust the heels of his hands into his eyes.

“God! God!” he wailed.

“Silence, you!” Mastemah barked, and the huge arm swept across Winder's face, knocking him to the floor as it had Limber. “What do you know of God? You aren't even fit to use that paltry appellation, you miserable little pismire. If you were to stand for a moment in the Almighty Presence, your unworthy flesh and matchstick bones would blow away like a stack of dry leaves and your covetous little mind would burn to ash. Your naked soul is the last gasp of a trout on the deck of a trawler compared to the undying fire of the Spirit.
God
. You don't even know His name.”

Winder cowered on the floor, his jaw apparently broken, blood streaming from his lips.

“But I know it, General,” said Wirz, raising the arm over Day's bed. As he did so, the nails elongated to gnarled talons and clicked like a Mandarin doing figures as they moved toward the sleeping man's throat. “You will hear it tonight. You will hear it, and you and your kind will be no more. But not Lieutenant Day here. His death will be a mercy.”

Barclay didn't know what possessed him in that instant. It was a foolish thing to do, but he did it almost on instinct. He pulled the hatchet free from the stump, backpedaled a few feet, then ran at the house and took a flying leap that sent him smashing through the bedroom window.

He landed on the far side of Day in a scatter of broken glass. The room wheeled and rushed, the poison still affecting him. He shook his head free of the blurriness and sprang at Wirz, chopping at his head with the hatchet, but he felt like he was moving underwater.

Wirz spun and whipped his thick arm across his midsection. Barclay was lucky to get the monstrous knuckles and not the sharp claws, but he still pinwheeled to the floor hard.

He thought he heard a crack. With abject terror, he felt for the small bottle that had been hanging around his neck.

Thankfully the phial trapping the hellhounds hadn't broken. But something in his skeleton had. Probably a rib, not more than one, he hoped.

He lay there wheezing for only a few seconds before Limber stooped and dragged him to his feet.

“Well, I'll be,” Limber said.

“Mr. Barclay Lourdes,” said Wirz. “It seems Sergeant Turner was right about you. My compliments on your death spell, sir. However did you manage to enact it?”

“Trade secret,” Barclay muttered, feeling his ribs and thankfully finding them intact, though the brief sharp pain when he prodded his right side told him Wirz probably had dealt him a fracture.

“Oh, come, come. It's hardly fair to keep secrets when so many of my own are laid bare to you,” Wirz said, pressing the first two of his surprisingly strong, long-nailed fingers against Barclay's throat.

“I don't know your secrets. Are you Wirz, or are you Mastemah?”

“You continue to impress me,” Wirz said, smiling. “Captain Wirz pegged you for an ordinary slave. His time as veterinarian of chattel dulled his perception considerably. You have been a blind spot for him. Always when you seemed a bit important, he would thrust you from his mind. But in answer to your question, we have been together for some time now, so there is little difference between us at this point. Spirits need strong human emotions to break their bonds, Mr. Lourdes, to tow them into this world. Never before had I felt a man so angry and disgusted with war and his own kind than when Henry Wirz passed over my watery prison, raging in pain madness in his bunk on a leaky ship bound for England. His loathing drew me up from the cold depths into which I had been cast so long ago. He was my liberator. When I told him I would end not only this war but all wars for all time, he accepted me freely. He was so overburdened with horror toward his own kind that he made the ultimate sacrifice for peace. He gave himself. His own will. To me. The things he saw at Seven Pines, Lourdes. I don't know if you have seen much battle. I myself fought in the first war there ever was. I saw the slaughter of angels, Lourdes.
Angels
. How much more fragile you bloody little men are. And how like ignorant children at play to ape the lesser inventions of your betters. Wirz,” he said, tapping his own temple with one clawed finger, “understands this, if nothing else.”

There were heavy footsteps, and Big Pete came into the room, garbed in civilian clothes. He had a shotgun in one hand and two glowing-hot iron brands in the other. Barclay didn't need to see the pattern of the twisted metal to know what they were.

“Horses are ready, master,” said Big Pete. He lifted the branding irons. “Irons are hot.”

“Why now?” Barclay pressed. “You've had months to complete this ritual. Why did you wait so long?”

“The ha-Mashchit is empowered by human suffering. Its ferocity is commensurate to the sin it has fed upon. That is why the destruction of Sodom and Gomorrah was so total, whereas only the firstborn of Egypt died. The people of Sodom did more evil in their brief time than in generations of Hebrew slavery.”

“So Andersonville, everything that's happened here—”

“Has been to strengthen the ha-Mashchit,” Wirz finished. “In addition, I had to ensure a total cross section of sacrifices, representative of all of humanity, so that none may escape in the end. I've soaked the grounds of Andersonville with the blood of men and boys of every age and color. Only one specimen remains unrepresented.”

“A female,” Barclay said.

“Yes. Limber, go upstairs and fetch the girl,” Wirz said. “The opiate in her dinner should make it a simple task even for you. Bring her outside.”

Limber flung Barclay into the corner beside the huddled General Winder.

“You're too smart for your own damn good, Barclay,” Limber said in parting.

Beside Barclay, Winder stared at him wild-eyed. His jaw was swelling up nicely, definitely broken. He held a red-stained checkered handkerchief up to his bleeding mouth.

“How about these two?” Big Pete asked, indicating them with the barrel of his shotgun.

Wirz put the Union kepi on his head and took one of the glowing branding irons from Big Pete.

“Keep the general quiet,” Wirz said. “Kill the other one. And him,” he said, pointing to Day. “The woman in the cellar, too. Good-bye, Mr. Lourdes. It's been truly rewarding to finally apprehend you.”

“You never apprehended me,” Barclay said.

Wirz moved to the door, and Big Pete touched his arm.

“Master?” he said.

“What is it?”

“Will it really be tonight?”

Wirz smiled broadly and touched Big Pete's hand.

“Tonight you shall be with me in paradise.”

Big Pete watched Wirz depart, then turned his attention back to Barclay and Winder.

Barclay wet his lips. His throat felt parched, but he had to summon up his voice. He was physically no match for Big Pete, he knew. If he could slap his wits into wakefulness, maybe he could get the best of him another way.

“You really think there'll be a place for you in what's to come?” Barclay asked.

“Shut up,” Big Pete snapped.

Barclay didn't know if he was speaking to Big Pete or to the demon inside him now, but he trusted the thing was listening.

“I mean, you're not an angel. You're a kastiri. Born in fire. When there are no human souls anymore, there will be no reason for hell, right? Even less for a tormentor demon.” He smiled, thinking of what Day had said to him that night outside the stockade. “What do you think's going to happen when it's all over? You think the angels are just going to welcome you up there with open arms?”

“Shut up, nigger,” Big Pete insisted.

Barclay heard footsteps upstairs. He heard them descend. He heard a door slam. Somewhere a horse snorted. He was running out of time.

“No paradise for the likes of you. You'll get the same thing the rest of us will get. Oblivion. Yet you're helping Mastemah's cause. And calling him master, too. Seems that makes you the nigger, not me.”

“You don't know what you're talkin' about,” Big Pete said. He propped the shotgun against the chifforobe. “You're right about hell, though. Won't be no need for it anymore. Let me show you what you're gonna miss out on, boy.” He brandished the white-hot iron and jabbed it at Barclay.

Barclay rolled, and Winder howled behind his clenched teeth as the metal connected with his upthrust hand, searing his palm with a hiss.

Barclay sprang up on the bed and pulled Day down on the opposite side. He grabbed the unconscious man's head in both hands and screamed in his face.

“Quit!”

The entire bed flipped up and crashed against the far wall. Big Pete advanced toward them through the empty space.

Barclay seized the oil lamp on the nightstand and flung it. It missed Big Pete's head and smashed against the chifforobe, spreading fire up its doors and dousing the rest of the room in flickering darkness.

Barclay picked up the nightstand itself then and swung it like a club. It shattered over Big Pete's shoulders, and Pete reached in and grabbed him by the wrist, pulling him toward the brand with irresistible strength.

Barclay twisted his body out of the way of the hot iron and popped his wrist free of Big Pete's fingers. He swung himself up the man's statue-hard arm and onto his shoulders, hugging the back of his head and wrapping his legs viselike around his neck. He couldn't budge the man, but he effectively blinded him.

Big Pete flailed with the glowing iron, swiping the upended bed and setting the sheets ablaze.

Barclay hung on as if to a bucking horse but could see no way out of his predicament until, in the corner, Day rose up groggily to his feet, steadying himself against the wall.

Big Pete flung himself back and battered Barclay against the flaming chifforobe. The shotgun, which had been leaning against it, fell to the floor.

Day staggered unsteadily toward it.

Big Pete wrenched around again and put his back to the burning bed.

Day picked up the shotgun.

Barclay let go and dropped from Big Pete's shoulders.

Day stalked up and touched both barrels to Big Pete's chest before he pulled the triggers. It couldn't hurt him, but the force of the double load shoved him back against the burning bed.

Barclay scrambled to his feet and pulled the burning sheets down over Big Pete's shoulders.

Big Pete screamed and tripped, tumbling forward.

Day yelled for Barclay to help him, and together they tipped the heavy, burning chifforobe from the wall. It smashed down on top of Big Pete with such a crash that it drove him through the floor into the cellar below, a wreckage of burning wood and blankets and thrashing flesh.

Big Pete had dropped the branding iron.

Barclay snatched it up and leaped down into the hole.

He landed hard on top of the shifting pile of debris, from which Big Pete was already straining to rise. Barclay's shaky knees nearly gave out on him.

His head was pounding, but taking up the iron in both hands, he drove it down again and again into the back, neck, and skull of Big Pete, smelling the sizzling flesh and hearing the bones breaking with each blow. He must have done it a dozen times before the giant ceased to move and lay there, his exposed brains smoldering.

Barclay stood over the pyre and looked up.

Day appeared at the edge of the hole in the ceiling, looking down on him grimly.

“Good thing you woke up!” he called.

“I was far gone. I needed a familiar voice to pull me back. Thank you,” Day said.

He held up the blood-soaked handkerchief Winder had been holding and let it flutter down into the hole.

“The general's gone.”

Barclay caught the checkered handkerchief.

“Charlie!” Barclay yelled into the dark cellar. “You down here?”

From somewhere in the shadows there was a muffled reply.

“Get down here, Quit, and help me,” Barclay called, stuffing the handkerchief into his pocket.

“All right, just a minute,” Day said. He disappeared momentarily and returned wearing Wirz's linen coat and hat and clutching the shotgun. He swung his legs over the edge. “Better bring me up to date, too.”

As they crept blindly through the cellar, Barclay told Day everything that had happened since he'd gotten his letter from Callixtus.

They found Charlie bound hand and foot in a preserves closet in the cellar, and Barclay stooped to free her.

“So Mastemah is on his way to the stockade to enact the final sacrifice and speak the word of power,” Day said.

“What word of power?” Barclay asked.

“Sorry, that letter…I was rushed. He needs to recite a certain name of God to call up the ha-Mashchit.”

The last thing Barclay removed from Charlie was her gag.

“What the hell's going on, Barclay?” she gasped.

Charlie. She was still bearing the baby of a kastiri in her womb. A soulless monster that any malevolent entity could come across and inhabit at its birth. He wanted to tell her to run, to get clear of Andersonville. But he couldn't let her do that. Not till he figured out what to do about her condition.

“Charlie,” he said, “Limber and Wirz are headed to the stockade. They're going to murder a little girl.”

“What? Why?”

“Does it matter? We're going back in to stop them.”

“You're going
back?”
she exclaimed, rubbing her sore limbs.

“For the girl. We could use your help.”

Charlie hesitated.

“You mean you ain't gonna tell me to save myself, that this is men's work?”

“You're more man than a lot I've met here.”

She grinned slightly.

“Thanks, I guess. Give me that shotgun.”

Day handed it over.

She broke it open and looked at them expectantly.

“Come on, let's get you some ammunition,” Barclay said.

As they led her back to the corpse of Big Pete, Day whispered to Barclay, “That's a
woman
?”