Unbury Carol(52)

Sliding along the wall, its chin drooped like candle wax to its chest.

“Do you hear that?” it said. “This is the sound of Rot’s approach, Carol. The rot that follows death. Deserved or not.”

A second face sprang from the blackness to Carol’s right. Its skin stretched back to from where it came, breath as foul as a mole’s den.

Once again, despite knowing she couldn’t, Carol tried to move.

The face beside her broke into clumps of dirt. The pieces fell to the storm room floor.

“That,” Rot said, still coming, sliding against the right wall now, advancing parallel to the length of her still body, “is something you’ll have to get used to. You will not be waking this time.”

Suddenly it was beside her, its face a finger-length from her own.

Its breathing was the hoarse music of Howltown.

“You’ve heard tales of babes left to starve in the brush, men strung up by their toes, hearts removed and hearts never found. But there are worse things on the Trail than outlaws…”

Carol closed her eyes. But the world, her world, went dark for only a breath, as, her eyes still closed, the dimensions of the cellar returned, lit anew by the same candle in its sconce coming to life. The man peered once again from across the storm room, wild eyes in the entrance, watching her on the slab.

But his voice continued beside her.

“Rot, Carol. Rot.”

She opened her eyes and saw he was still against the wall. Still coming. He wore a childish smile, his lips blurred, and Carol was afraid to close her eyes again, to open them, to close them, to—

“Sleep, Carol,” he said, fingering the wall. And his fingertips sounded like the pattering of rats. “You do not want to be awake for all that comes your way.”

Carol watched as he became the cracks in the stone walls, as the candlelight flickered but did not dissolve.

Then it was gone.

Carol heard her mother hammering. Heard James Moxie crying out that she was dead. Heard Dwight, too, whimpering in the shadows of this impossible cellar.

She closed her eyes and this time did find darkness. But when she opened them again, the room was still lit. As if her visitor wanted her to see all that was coming her way.

She heard, too, the cries of those in their graves who did not desire to dig up, but rather down, burrowing deeper, to where Carol lay, to where they could already smell the possibility of rot, reaching for a woman who would soon be buried alive, and whose rot was ordained, was assured, was coming.

Then the wind returned. And Carol didn’t know which way she fell.

But up or down, down or up, the light remained, and through the rippling storm room walls, through the flickering flame, she saw all the nightmares of her youth, life in Howltown, coming.

And yet there was hope. For Carol had learned that both monsters and madmen make mistakes. Dwight had overlooked her former lover, a man on the Trail who knew of her condition. And the thing that just left her, that had killed the electricity in her veins, leaving her in the cold empty country beyond anxiety and fear, that thing had made a mistake of his own.

For all he wanted to frighten her, and for all he had, he’d also changed her lot.

He’d rolled her over.

And Carol, never having been on her back before in the coma, discovered immediately, alone, that things were different now.

She moved.

It was slight. Hardly anything at all, but movement all the same.

Using every pound of inner strength she possessed, Carol lifted her chin toward her chest, then allowed her head to travel the quarter inch back down to the stone slab.

It was a start. An astonishing one. And it gave her the strength to try again. And again, until, as the sun rose outside Harrows, a sun that did not penetrate the storm room, Carol could conceive of actually sitting up, of actually rising, of actually taking action, in Howltown.





Moxie opened his eyes to see the mare walking, unhitched, about the ashes of the fire. He woke to the sound of wood crushed to dust beneath a hoof. Someone had unhitched her overnight. And yet she had not left him.

Moxie rose.

Probably it was the horror from Portsoothe, the face he’d seen through the fire, floating above the dirt.

But maybe not.

Moxie put his hat on and quickly hitched the mare. Then, pausing to think, he unhitched her again.

He brought his face close to hers.

“Thank you, old girl.”

Leaving her free, he rolled the bedding. He got water from the pouch and let the mare drink. She lapped it up readily and Moxie wondered if in some way the unnatural fire, the occurrences of the night before, had added to her thirst.

Had the mare taken off, curious or otherwise, Moxie would’ve had little chance of making it to Harrows. The telegram from Farrah Darrow told him that Carol’s funeral was set for tomorrow morning. Moxie had made it half the Trail in one day. If he could maintain this pace, he could get there in time. And yet…whoever hired the triggerman, the man Rinaldo spoke of, whoever wanted Moxie dead no doubt wanted Carol dead, too.

Perhaps that’s who unhitched the horse. Perhaps not.

And then there was the horror from Portsoothe. Rot.

Moxie understood clearly that, in the state Carol was in, it would only take a modicum of pressure on a pillow to kill her. Pinching her nostrils would do the trick.

Why hadn’t whoever hired the triggerman done so already? And who was to say he hadn’t?