The Whirlwind in the Thorn Tree (35 page)

Halfway through another attempt at “Ring of Fire” (I’d lost count), I spied a dark blob on the eastern edge of the world, a scrim of non-color slightly less dark than the sky.

I thought about a hundred different things. I thought about stupid things. Accumulated years of stupid things that I discovered didn’t mean shit. Pop culture. Man, to hell with pop culture. It took being stranded in the desert alone with my gray matter to make me acknowledge just how full of bullshit my head was.

I hated it. I zeroed in on the hate, to give me something to think about that wouldn’t break me or make me crazy.

I broke off pieces of brush as I shuffled by them until I eventually had a bundle of brittle twigs, which I stuck in the pocket of my new vest. I took them out and snapped them into tiny methodical pieces, a half-inch at a time, until I ran out of sticks. I gathered more sticks and broke those into little pieces too.

When I got close to the town, I decided to follow the track right to the train station, because I had an irrational fear that if I strayed from the track, I’d never find my way back. There were no lights, but I could see by the luminescent moon the cluster of clapboard buildings jostled together like dead teeth in the loose gums of the sand.

A half-kilometer out, I perceived a broad swath of movement in the corner of my left eye. I didn’t pay it any attention at first because I was so tired, but then the sheer size of it meant that I couldn’t ignore it any longer.

It was a column of sand, rolling out of the newborn dawn, as tall as a four-story building.

I did not have the strength to run. My knees, hips, and feet were in agony, and every step felt like I was walking on the severed stumps of my ankles. I tugged the scarf over my face.

The sandstorm steam-rollered me with a soft, unchallenging grandiosity that evolved as the wind blew until it was throwing handful after howling handful of grit into my eyes and piling it in my left ear. The world became a dim, amorphous netherworld of blurry outlines. I didn’t see the train station platform until I almost ran into it.

I put out a hand and followed the edge like a blind man until I encountered a flight of stairs that creaked as I climbed them onto the loading stage. The train station was a simple affair, clapboard like the rest of what I now understood to be a ghost town, some habitation that had withered up and died years ago.

I wrestled the door open, slid inside, and jerked on the door, scraping it across the floorboards, until it was shut again.

I was awash in shadows, the only visible part of the world around me being the dim gray rectangles that looked out onto the sandstorm. The sound of the sand striking the glass panes reminded me of the soft ticking of falling snow.

I felt my way deeper into the train station, barked my shin on a bench, stepped around it, found a wall, and followed that until I found a ticket window.

I had the crazy suspicion that if I accidentally put my hand into the semi-circle hole at the bottom, some gnobbly gray twig of a hand would close itself over mine and drag me screaming into the ticket office. My imagination painted a grim vision of mummified corpses, stacked against the walls like the postal trunks in the train’s mail car.

My friends. Not my friends. My brain, mired in exhaustion, fought to bifurcate reality, to distinguish between what I knew and what I feared.

I managed to not choke up as I stood there in front of the window in the dark. I shuddered at the thought of the mummies again. I pictured them dragging their rigored bodies across the floor with their cool, dry scarecrow’s stick-hands, reaching for my legs, yawning, unbreathing, long teeth and black gums.

The fear was keeping me sane.

I shuffled on down the wall, exploring with my hands until I found not the door I expected but a ladder. I started climbing it, tugged the rungs to test my weight, and ascended them into a spacious attic.

There, I swept aside dry leaves and laid down on the boards to listen to the building clatter and complain.

_______

I awoke some time later to the loud flapping-banging of the wind ripping at the roof. The sunlight was still brown and grainy against the attic window, a cinnamon-swirl of sand. When I opened my eyes and sat up, I had a bad shock.

One entire end of the attic was occupied by a hulking insect nest, a blob of layered gray paper as big as an automobile, a hole in the side I could fit my head into. All around me were the carcasses of at least a hundred piss-yellow hornets, each one the size of my fist. They lay on their backs, their legs bowed up in knots of death, clouds in eyes the size of thumbnails.

I recoiled, trembling, and scrambled down the ladder in terror.

My stomach growled as I stepped out of the depot and surveyed the time-scoured ghost town around me. The day had come in full, coloring the world a burnt rust-orange with the sandstorm. A sign by the front door of the station building told me that the once-town’s name was “Synecdoche”, but someone had painted over it: “WELCOME TO THE STICKS”.

I pulled my scarf up over my mouth and nose, and walked down the front steps into the dirt cul-de-sac.

My boots clanked on the loose planks of the boardwalk flanking the main street. Tired death-rattles toyed with the shutters, aspirating dust through broken windows. A sign in Ainean dangled sideways from a single chain in front of a large cabin with a wraparound porch.

I could have been on any abandoned western movie set, if not for the looping, flowing script painted on boards and murals that reminded me so much of Persian calligraphy.

I sat on the stoop of a shop and stared at the awkward sign as it twisted and flapped, trying to will the words to make sense. Dark, gaping glassless windows gazed back at me from across the street. I sat there long enough that the sandstorm finally started to peter out and the sun slipped through a crack in the air.

The building the sign was attached to turned out to be a saloon. The wind had coated everything in a layer of dust. There was no furniture inside, not counting the busted debris littering the floor, which included the shattered remnants of the chandelier, a wrought-iron ribcage in the middle of the room. Dry, broken bottles lingered behind the bar shimmering in the dull honey light.

The door behind the bar led to a pantry stocked with ancient mouse turds. Something skittered away from my foot into the shadows and I jerked backwards, my heel colliding with a solid object on the floor.

I toppled against the wall, righted myself, and saw that I’d tripped over a padlock.

It was slipped into a hasp, which was bolted into a trapdoor in the floor. A stone was sufficient to break the lock. I opened the hatch, wary about what might be inside, but nothing leapt up the ladder at me. It was too dark to see, though, so I went back to the bar and found a candle rolling around in a drawer underneath the countertop, half-melted, the wick black.

There were no matches. I took off my satchel and looked through it, none there either.

The spectacles inside were clean and polished. I took them outside and tried to use the sun to make the wicks ignite, but it was useless.

I had saved the broken-up brush twigs. I took them out and piled them on the saloon’s porch, using the lens to light them. That didn’t work either, so I used a stone to grind some of them into fiber and then focused the solar laser on it.

Soon I was fanning sweet-smelling smoke, and then the chaff caught and I held the tip of one of the twig pieces in it, used that to light the candle. I stood the candle in the neck of a broken beer bottle so that it resembled an Olympic torch, and carried it into the cellar of the saloon.

It was a cramped space, surrounded on all sides by shelves. A few cans gleamed dully at the edge of my light. I gathered as many as I could hold and took them topside.

There was no can opener in the saloon, but the chandelier had daggerlike prongs curling up from the main post of it, wrought-iron filigree leaves with sharp points. It took a couple of swings to pierce the can. I used it to work the end open, slopping some of the contents all over the floorboards. It held some sort of stew, a conglomerate sludge of potatoes, green vegetables... perhaps some sort of roast.

I spooned it out with the mangled lid, wolfing down the tasteless slop in gratitude.

A spout behind the blacksmith’s stable provided me with water to wash it down with. I didn’t even mind that it was dirty. I pumped a bucketful and let the sediment settle, and gulped in all the warm water I could hold.

When I finished, I went upstairs to the saloon’s inn rooms to see if there was anywhere to sleep later. The mattresses were ripped to shreds, but someone had left blankets in a dresser. I would need to rest for a day or so before continuing, providing the mysterious presence that had chased me here didn’t show up first.

When I thought about him, I could feel him, like a cold aurora from the west that flickered at the outermost edge of my mind, a subthought St. Elmo’s Fire.

He had lost me in the sandstorm, but he would find me soon enough.

Bad Juju

I
HAD TAKEN OFF MY SHIRT
and vest to let the sweat dry, and I was lying on the saloon’s front porch in the afternoon sun daydreaming about the Tekyr escort from Maplenesse when the first quiver hit. I sat up and immediately regretted it as a wave of dizziness and nausea overtook me, and salty saliva filled my mouth.

I walked down to the end of the block and vomited several times into the weeds, a torrent of bilious slush. I swore, struggling to breathe, my balls and guts aching. I walked back to the smithy with tears in my eyes, drank a handful of the pump’s water and sat by the forge, sweating bullets and shaking.

The sandstorm was just a memory. The sun had become an unrelenting hammer from a hard cobalt sky. I leaned back on my elbows, spat again, and let my head tip back.

When I looked up again, I noticed movement on the dark scar of the horizon.

Three figures were following the train track. They were riding some sort of animal, but I couldn’t understand the look of it at this distance.

Rising slowly, so as not to draw attention to myself, I got up and slid behind the far corner of the abandoned smithy shop. From there I made my way across the backsides of the clapboard structures lining the main avenue, jogged across the street, and entered the saloon at a run.

I snatched up the leather satchel with the Kingsman crest and ran outside, where I wriggled underneath the porch.

A few minutes later, I could hear voices. The three men came sauntering around the corner at the far end of Synecdoche (WELCOME TO THE STICKS!) and up the main drag, talking and laughing, generally cutting up. They were riding on the white beasts with heavy bodies and slender faces, with their great curving scimitar-horns that arced backwards over the riders’ legs.

The man in the middle seemed to be the brains, the mediator. Once, one of them shoved the other and they started arguing. Brains separated them and warned them to stop.

I could see the pistols at their hips, and one of them was carrying a rifle.

They clunked across the porch into the saloon and explored the building, lamenting the absence of alcohol. I heard a crunch as one of them stepped on the spectacles.

“Cannit believe there’s nothin tall in here, no liquor what,” said the red-headed one. He was sinewy and lanky, and walked like a bicycle with square wheels. The other guy, shorter and darker, in a green doublet and bowler hat, I could hear him creaking down the ladder into the cellar pantry.

“There’s some tins of food down here, but I figure it’s gone off, aye.”

“Someone’s been into em,” said Brains. “Look here. Tat’s a mess.”

Red chuckled. “Say he cut the tin open with the iron spike here, he did. Not been goon long.”

“Where d’you think he went?” asked Bowler.

“Prolly still here, I expect,” said Brains. “If he’s got any smarts, he won’t be in here, where he could be run into. He’ll be larkin’ in one of t’ese periffery parts of town, might even have a roll tossed out on a roof to keep off the street. Migh even have a rifle. If you go back outside, keep an eye on the roofline.”

“Think it’s a Kingsman?”

“I hope not.”

The fact that no one called him out on his cowardice struck me as relevant.