The Traiteur's Ring (31 page)

She tipped his head up by his chin and wiped a tear from his cheek.

“I gotta go now, honey-boy,” she said, and he felt her hands on him grow light and cold. Her touch became more like a memory. “You gotta go, too. Find dat Indian be waitin’ for you, Bennie. More to tell ya.” She had nearly disappeared, her touch now gone though he could still see a faint shadow of her hands on his arms.

“What Indian? Where will I find him?”

“You know where, Bennie,” she said. “I love you, boy,”

“I love you, too, Gammy,” he said, but she had disappeared.

Behind her, behind where she had been, he saw the dark hole in the woods, the hole in his reality. The rabbit hole stared back at him, and he smelled the wet and rotting stench of it. A cold air belched out at him, like opening a freezer in your face in summer time, only with a terrible putrid smell behind it.

Go on, nah, boy. Git in dat dey hole, now. Tings waitin’ ya.

Ben realized he had come a long way to this place. He had traveled years, and continents and untold dreams – many forgotten, perhaps – to get here. There was no choice left for him. Maybe there never had been.

Ben hunched down and passed through the green threshold and into the dark, wet hole in the woods.

*   *   *

He felt the warm wetness of the earth as it squished beneath his feet, and his brain tried to trick him, to let his fear convince his mind that the ground moved a little. He felt as if the tunnel-like hole in the woods might be alive – like he slid down the throat of some living thing.

More like up its ass. When the bayou takes a shit it dumps wherever this path takes me.

The thought that he headed for the place where the magical waste of the haunted woods ended up gave him a tight-lipped grin, but in no way reassured him. But Gammy would never have let him continue on if he was in real danger, right?

The heat felt nothing like Africa or Iraq. Humid didn’t even touch it – wet seemed more the word he needed. The air felt thick and heavy, and he found it difficult to suck it in and out of his lungs. The foul smell, like something rotted in the tunnel with him, didn’t help his breathing any either. Between his legs, on the tissue-like ground was a thin stream – only a trickle at first – of nearly black water coursing down with him. As he continued downward, the little stream widened slowly until he had to spread his feet apart a bit to keep from stepping in it. He thought perhaps the black water might be the source of the horrible sulfur smell that gagged him and the thought of it soaking through his Keen climbing shoes revolted him.

His impression that the hole dove down a short distance from the entrance had been right on and almost immediately he had to lean backwards to keep from pitching forward face-first down the ever-steepening shaft. He held his arms at shoulder height, ready to grab something if needed, but he greatly preferred not to touch the twisted, grey briar patch looking branches that formed the tunnel in the woods. The branches looked hard and somehow sharp and seemed almost woven together like someone had knitted the hole out of dead scrub. Now and again, a puff of ice-cold air brushed his face and dried, for a moment, the sweat running down his temples and neck.

After only a few minutes Ben felt the pitch shallow out, and the tunnel began to widen rapidly. Just in time, since the little trickle of foul, black water had by now become a full-fledged stream. As the tunnel widened, Ben found he could step to one side of the running water and walk along the edge, so long as he hunched over a bit more to avoid rubbing against the walls and ceiling. He could hear ahead of him a gentle roar he believed could be the tumbling water of a true river, though how the puny little stream could grow to that size so quickly seemed unbelievable.

Yeah – okay. ‘Cause the day has been completely fucking believable until now. The black river from nowhere is the only part you can’t swallow?

He doubted the foul stench had lessened any, but at least he had acclimated to it and no longer gagged at the smell. As he continued on, the tunnel widened more and shortly he could stand upright which pulled out much of the achy stiffness accumulating in his back and shoulders. He started thinking about what in the hell he was doing, now that he didn’t have to focus all of his attention on not stepping in the black shit water or touching the evil looking vines of this damned place.

That Gammy thought he should come here seemed enough. The old Cajun, the Village Elder, even his own sense of calling from the dreams – they all were suspect in his mind. But Gammy – Gammy was different. She had cared for him his whole short childhood and had always protected him, even from her own frightening world. He doubted if he could have gone down this hole if not for Gammy.

So, thanks for that.

He no longer felt like he walked in a tunnel. The walls and ceiling had stretched out to the point where he felt more like he had entered some other world whose low sky had been woven from the dead and sharp-looking brush. The walls now stretched out at angles away from him, ever widening as they disappeared in the distance. Far away, maybe a half mile or more, he saw the black river seemed to flow towards a low, flat rise in the brown and grey horizon – like a squatty building of some sort. Ben picked up his speed to double time, and his right hand unconsciously sought his M-4 rifle in a combat sling on his chest, but of course it wasn’t there. He looked at his watch again, Christy ever present in his thoughts. The large face of his Pathfinder flashed the time, but each beat the seconds flashed, the number stayed the same instead of moving forward. He stopped a moment and stared at the watch, then idiotically smacked it with the palm of his hand – the watch version of kicking a generator that didn’t fire right away. The watch ignored him and continued to flash:

11:43:05

Each time the seconds flashed, they just repeated.  It was still five seconds past Eleven-Forty-Three.  Something about this place either made his watch stop working or had actually stopped time. For some reason that made it more real and less dream-like, crazy as that seemed.

Ben continued on.

Guess I don’t need to hurry. Seems like I’ve got all the time in eternity now.

The thought gave him a terrible chill, and he shivered.

A building took shape as he approached and now looked more like ruins of some ancient Incan altar than a real structure. Its surface was half-covered with a sort of moss, only black like the water. A wide opening, about the size of a double garage door, oval instead of square, he thought, opened in its middle and allowed the thick, pasty liquid to flow through undisturbed. At the edges, where the black water should have flowed with subtle eddies of turbulence as it touched the walls it instead moved glass-like and unbroken, as if somehow it flowed through without quite touching the ruins. It looked creepy once he noticed it.

Ben walked slowly up to his side, the right side, of the ruins as he walked along the edge of the black river. As he got closer, the Incan temple feeling of the place increased. The sides of the structure facing him looked now to be more like stairs, partially covered with the black, damp-looking vegetation. The walls angled only slightly, making the steps quite steep, and they rose maybe two hundred feet to the flat top of the square pyramid, and at the top, Ben saw him.

The Indian.

The Eater of the Dead.

He sat cross-legged in the very center, atop the bridge the pyramid-ruins formed over the black river. He watched Ben as he approached but made no gesture, no acknowledgement. His face remained stone. From the distance, Ben couldn’t tell if he was young or old, but his body, scantily clad in pants of animal skin and a simple band of cloth around his left bicep, looked young and fit. Ben stared at him a moment and waited for a gesture that he should climb up and join him or that perhaps the Indian would come to him – or meet him half way. The man simply stared, so still as to almost be a statue. Ben hesitated another moment and then shrugged and began to climb.

Came this far – let’s see what this guy has to tell me.

The steps were narrow, not even as wide as the length of his feet, and slick as they were covered in perspiring swamp grass. Ben had to be careful not to slip. The last thing he wanted to do was lean forward and touch the steps with their slimy coating of dead whatever, so he climbed with his arms up, his shoulders raised and uncomfortable, and his hand held out like a dainty old woman tip-toeing through a field of dog shit.

With the steep pitch of the stairs that didn’t last long, and he felt his legs begin to burn and his shoulders ached. Sweat now poured from his face and body and stung his eyes which he wiped periodically with the back of his equally sweaty arm. As he rose higher above the now cave-like floor of the strange tunnel-world, he felt himself sway a bit.

“Fuck it.”

Ben leaned forward began to climb with his arms, as well. His hands now and again grabbed a thick clump of black grass which felt hot and rubbery more than wet. Each time he grabbed a clump, a horrible stench filled his mouth and nose like he had squeezed some primordial fart out of the ooze on the step-like wall of the ruins. He looked up – nearly halfway there – and refused to look down. The arches of his feet now burned from the way he unconsciously grabbed at the steps with his toes, trying to compensate for how narrow they were.

He looked up again and saw the Attakapa still stared down at him, his face impassive and unmoved by Ben’s struggle. He doubled his effort and felt his pace pick up a tiny bit, driven forward by sheer will and resolve.

The only easy day was yesterday,
another SEAL mantra reminded him, this one from his memory and in the voice of one of his instructors from SEAL training. He could almost see him – Senior Chief Perez, hands on hips and blue instructor T-shirt dry and neat – as he and his classmates struggled, filthy and disheveled, through some impossible task.

Ben’s arms now burned as much as his legs, but he pushed forward, palms achy from finger-grasping the slick and narrow steps.

I’m not ringing the fuckin’ bell.

He was close enough now to see the Indian clearly, but it didn’t help him estimate his age. The face was like chiseled stone, and he could have been twenty-eight or Sixty-eight for all Ben could guess. He sat cross-legged and stared at him, hands in his lap.

One more burst of pure spirit and a few minutes later, Ben stepped onto the flat top of the ruins. He immediately bent over, hands on knees, and his chest heaved as he sucked in huge gulps of the thick, wet air. He could feel the Indian’s eyes on him only a few feet away, but could not yet straighten up to look at him and instead raised a hand, index finger up in the universal “hang on one fuckin’ minute” sign. The Indian made no sound, and Ben sensed no motion.

Slowly his breathing became easier and less painful, and he shook his head to clear the rivers of sweat off of his face. Then, he straightened up with a loud “Whew!” and turned to face the reason for his journey.

From only a few feet away he could narrow the age estimate on the man who sat cross-legged at his feet to perhaps the thirty to fifty range. His dark eyes stared impassively back at him from beneath cropped black bangs of hair. His dark skin seemed barely able to contain the tight, cut muscles beneath it. In another world he could have been a SEAL, Ben thought. They could have been warrior brothers. The grey arm band around his left bicep again struck Ben as remarkably similar to his villagers in Africa. The man stared at him but said nothing. His face told him even less.

“Well,” Ben said and his voice sounded to him as far away and kind of dream-like and tinny. The sound echoed off the woven walls and ceiling of the cave like world. “I’m here. I understand you have something you’d like to share with me?”

For some reason that sounded almost hilarious to him, and he barely contained a chuckle. He failed to dissuade the smile that accompanied it. It disappeared when the Attakapa vanished suddenly and then, in a flash, reappeared in front of him, hands on hips and face only inches from his own. Ben startled back a half step and instinctively reached for his M-4 Rifle, which of course did not, in fact, hang in a combat sling across his chest – maybe couldn’t even exist in this other world.

“Holy shit,” he breathed.

Attakapa is in our blood and spirit, but can be friend or enemy both.

Ben held his Gammy’s warning close, but held his ground and the dark-eyed gaze of the Attakapa. He was still a SEAL, Goddammit.

The Indian’s face stayed stone, and his mouth remained tight-lipped and locked, but his words floated in the dank air between them just the same.

“I am the protector of the Living World,” the low voice said, and the words echoed off the twisted and grey brush sky of their other world. “I am Attakapa and Rougarou. We are from the same circle, you and I, and share both the same Ashe and the same heart. My time passed long ago, but the dark one is here, and so your time is now.”

The dark eyes never wavered or blinked, but the lips moved now as the Indian grasped him by the arm just above the elbow in a peculiar embrace.

“We are brothers now. Kin of the same circle of Rougarou.”

Ben grasped the Indian’s bulging bicep back. The man’s dark eyes flashed upwards for a moment, and Ben saw something familiar in the vast recesses. Something he had seen in the spirits of his fellow fighters just before a big operation where enemy fire and bloodshed were fairly certain. The eyes came back to his and seemed to barely conceal a storm behind them.

“We have little time, and I have much to tell you. We will sit.”

Chapter 28

They sat atop the ruins, cross-legged, facing each other, and Ben felt selfish that his only real goal was to get past all of this and back to Christy and his life with her – a life with babies and dinners on the deck, of long walks and holding hands on the couch. He yearned for that soft life, but the call he felt here seemed familiar and reminded him of the call he answered when he had first joined the SEALs. It had been a call to a hard life of risk and pain, but also one of service and pride – a life of sacrifice with the incredible reward of knowing others were safe and happy because his team was out there on the pointed edge of the spear.