Unbury Carol(42)

The horse neighed and Moxie looked up into the darkness. Fires were good for the warmth but fires also created black worlds beyond the range of the flames. Moxie rubbed his hands together and saw the shape of Carol in the rising smoke, sleeping…not dead.

“We have another long ride tomorrow,” he said. The horse looked to him and then into the darkness of the woods again.

Moxie spread the corners of the blanket and lay down. He slept, briefly, and when he woke he saw a man seated on the other side of the fire.

It was very dark but the fire was still burning. Brighter, Moxie realized, than it had been when he’d fallen asleep. A foreign crackling sound, as though something not from the Trail was burning in there. He did not rise. He stared at the figure, seated, a pair of wide eyes focused on the fire and a face seen in pieces, as the flames would let him.

“I know that you are awake,” the man said. Moxie knew it was the voice from the barbershop. The voice from a tavern in Portsoothe many years ago.

He made to rise but the voice stopped him.

“You don’t want to see me. Not yet.”

It breathed, an audible wheeze, black wind across a gravel sky.

“Who are you?” Moxie asked.

The flames split for the duration of a heartbeat, a fraction of that, and Moxie saw the eyes again, large and unfocused, darting from the fire to the ground beside it.

“You must really want to know this. You ask every time…”

Then the eyes connected with Moxie’s own and the flames came together to block the view once more.

But Moxie had seen enough of the face. The rippling features. The exchange of faces, as if one had been painted upon another with grease.

“I want you to turn back,” the thing said.

Moxie was silent.

“There was a time, the right time, for you to be doing what you’re doing. But that time has passed.”

Moxie was silent.

“There’s no reason to let it propel you,” it said. “All men have regrets.”

“She’s not dead,” Moxie finally said.

Fingers of flame suddenly reached for him and Moxie hurried back in the dirt. He heard a hissing, water boiling, an egg under the sun.

“She’s dead.”

Moxie got up and the fire rose with him, blocking the face on the other side. The mare breathed heavy but did not wake.

“You don’t want to see this face. Not yet.”

Clouds obscured the moon and the fire crackled sharp. A wind came then, whirling the embers up in a circle around the fire and making the flames rise even higher. In them Moxie saw the eyes again, the form, seated, but suspended, perhaps, above the dirt.

“Have you considered that she does not want you to come?”

“No.” But he had.

“Have you considered that she is already rotting?”

“No.” But he had.

“Have you considered that the people in her life now will laugh at you when you arrive? That they will turn you back as I do now, sending you on your chivalrous way?”

“I’m not interested in her people.”

“No. You’re not.”

Moxie heard movement to his right and turned quick. A man emerged from the blackness. Moxie recognized him at once.

“I told you she was dead once already, James.”

Moxie remembered this man. His face, his voice, even the clothes he wore: the derby hat, the necktie, the rolled-up blue sleeves, the leather case in one hand. This man was a doctor once, lifetimes ago: the man he’d brought Carol to the first time he thought she’d died.

“She’s…not…” Moxie said.

“I told you she was dead once already.”

Deep breathing from across the fire. The doctor’s eyes swelled, grew, until they popped, and the flaked pieces of his eyeballs sizzled in the flames.

Moxie backed up fast.

“You were wrong, Doctor!”

“Was I?” The doctor, eyeless, gripped his bag. “Dead to you anyway, the way you left her.”

Moxie stared into the caverns above the doctor’s nose. Saw Carol on her back in the wrinkles of one. Himself walking away from her in the other.

“As I recall,” the doctor continued “you had little difficulty ignoring her once. Why the change of heart?”

Another flame reached for Moxie’s boot. He stepped aside.

“She’s not dead.”

“Yes,” the doctor said. “She is. It doesn’t take a medicine man to smell her now.”

The doctor’s mouth swung open; a tongue unraveled, fell hard to the dirt, and rolled toward Moxie.

Moxie steeled himself.

Then it was only the doctor again. The doctor as he’d looked some twenty years ago. His eyes were intact again, the same eyes that had looked into Moxie’s own, long ago, explaining Carol’s condition.

“Let me show you something,” he said now.

“I don’t want to see it.”

“Yes, you do.”

The shape on the other side of the fire continued to breathe, hoarse, steady, slow.

The doctor knelt in the dirt and opened his black bag. From it he removed something large, shapeless, dripping.

“This, James, is her stomach. I’ve removed it to determine her cause of death. And here…” He knelt again and came up with more of her. “These are her lungs. Now, James, you know a lady can’t breathe without her lungs, don’t you?”