Part One: The Oblong Box
1
Utah Territory, 1882
The moon came up.
It slid from a satiny, wind-blown grave.
It came up over the mountains like some huge, luminous eye
staring down from the misty sky above. Its pallid light sought and
touched serrated horns of exposed rock, winked off drifts of snow,
and imbued spruce and pine with a ghostly ambience. The wind
blew and the trees bent, shadows dripping from them in writhing
loops, finding craggy ground and slithering across the landscape
like greasy black worms, filling hollows and glens and dark, secret
places with night.
And high above, that bloated moon kept watch.
Not daring to blink.
If this was an omen, then it was a bad one.
2
The wagon came pounding down the hard-packed, frozen road
that cut through the silver mining camps of the San Francisco
Mountains. Like a jagged knife blade, it slit open the underbelly of
night, probing, slicing. It bounced over deep-cut ruts laid down by
ore wagons and was drawn by a team of black geldings blowing
steam from their nostrils. Their iron-shod hoofs rang out like
gunshots. A whip cracked and the team vaulted forward and the
wagon thumped and bumped and careened.
“Christ almighty,” Tom Hyden said, clutching the plank seat for
dear life. “You’re gonna get us killed, old man. You’re gonna pitch
us straight down into one of them ravines. See if you don’t.”
Jack Goode grinned, a cigar stub protruding from his weathered
lips. “Man pays me to do a job, sonny, and that job I do,” he said,
cracking the whip again, his long white beard blowing up over his
face like a loose neckerchief. “I do what he asks and I do it quick as
I can on account I got better ways to spend my time.”
Hyden felt the wagon thrashing beneath him, wood groaning
and iron creaking. His ass bones were getting jarred right up into
his throat. He clung to the seat with one hand and his shotgun
with the other. The box in the back rattled in its berth like dice in a
cup.
“Dammit,” he cried, “all we got in the back is a body. A dead one
at that. It don’t care if we’re early or late.”
Goode just laughed.
The road dipped, climbed, then cut through a shadowy cedar
brake and leveled out as it meandered across a rocky plain. The
moon washed everything down with ethereal, uneven light.
“There,” Goode said. “Whisper Lake ain’t but a cunt-hair down
through that gorge. We can slow up some. Here, kid. Take these
ribbons.” He passed the reins to Hyden and struck a stick match
off his boot, cupping it in his hands, firing up his cigar again. He
blew smoke and coughed. “We’re making good time. Luck holds, I’
ll be in town just in time for a swallow and a tickle.”
Hyden could see sweat glistening on the horses’ flanks like dew.
And maybe some of it was blood. Way the old bastard was working
that bullwhip, he’d probably laid their flanks clear open. Hyden
sighed, kept his eye on the countryside, kept imagining he saw
dark shapes flitting about—shapes like little men. But he was tired,
his eyes caked with sleep. If he didn’t put his head down and
pretty goddamn soon, he was going to fall right out of the wagon.
Squinting his eyes, he thought he saw something running across
the twisting road ahead…something that ran upright.
“You see that?” he said to Goode.
Smoke barreled from Goode’s nostrils like fumes from a foundry
stack. “Nope. Didn’t see a thing,” he said. “And I didn’t, because I
ain’t looking. If there something out there, mayhap I don’t wanna
see it.”
“It looked like…” Hyden sighed. “Nothing, I guess.”
“Sure, it was nothing. These goddamn mountains are full of
nothing. That’s why I rode us so hard back there—if there was
something back there, I didn’t want to see it. Particularly if it
looked like little men that weren’t men.”
“You seen ‘em, then?”
“Nope. Ain’t seen nothing I wasn’t supposed to see.” Goode
stretched, his back popping. “Listen to me, boy. Just keep yer eyes
on Whisper Lake. We’ll be there in an hour or so. Just think of the
women and the strong drink and the sins of the father.”
Hyden just shook his head. Sometimes he just couldn’t figure
Goode out. Sumbitch had a way of talking about something while
he was talking about something else entirely. Hyden watched and
saw no more shapes. Imagination, that’s what. Fatigue. He didn’t
believe in the tales of little men. It was some kind of Shoshone
legend. Hyden’s grandpappy Joe, when he wasn’t pulling off a
bottle of rye and reminiscing about all the gold strikes he’d been
on, talked about ‘em. Said they were real. Said he’d seen ‘em in the
mountains. Said he knew a trapper up in the Needle Range had
shot one and stuffed it, sold the mummy to some sideshow fellow
from Illinois for a case of Kentucky bourbon and a Sharps rifle.
But grandpappy Joe, he did go on.
Hyden had a packet of home-rolled cigarettes and lit one up.
They’d been on the trail since the afternoon before. Were bringing
a pine box and its occupant from the Goshute tribal lands of Skull
Valley down to Whisper Lake in Beaver County. Fifty a piece some
injun was paying ‘em. Just to bring a body home.
Shit, but it was a living.
“Hey, boy, how old you now?” Goode asked.
“Twenty-three come spring.”
“Twenty-three.” Goode laughed. “When I was twenty-goddamn-
three I had me a Sioux wife and three young-uns up in Dakota
Territory. Had me a strike of the yellow stuff worth near hundred
thousand.”
“Then what the hell you doing hauling stiffs for a hundred bucks
in this godforsaken land?”
“I spent it.” Goode went silent, thought about it. “Twenty-three,
twenty-three. You ever get yer lily pressed, boy? By a white
woman, I’m saying. Why, I know this one down Flagstaff way—
runs herself a crib of meat-eating felines with more curves than a
loose rope. This one, though, Madame Lorraine, she dunks you in
a hot bath, rubs you down with oil and Louisiana perfume, then
sucks yer Uncle Henry so goddamn hard, yer eyes get pulled back
into yer head—“
“Quiet,” Hyden said. “I heard something.”
“Just my bowels blowing off steam, son.”
“No, damn you, not that.”
Goode listened. Couldn’t hear a thing but the wind skirting the
trees and whipping through empty spaces. The sound of the horses
hoofs. Not a damn thing else.
“Boy,” he said, “you quit worrying about them little folk. Got
yerself spooked. You might be better looking than a bluetick, but
you ain’t much smarter.”
“It ain’t that. It’s something else.” Hyden looked back in the
hold, at that narrow pine box. Could see moonlight reflecting off
the brass bands and square nail heads. “Something moved
in there.”
“Stop with that. Dead ‘uns don’t move, take my word for it.”
Hyden just sat there, the countryside too dark and shadow-riven
for his liking. He tried to think about Whisper Lake. A soft bed.
Some hot food. But then he heard it again…a thumping sound. He
was sure it came from inside that casket.
Goode would not look back there. He took the reins back and
piloted them through the frosty night. A few snowflakes lit in the
air like flies. With any luck, it wouldn’t build into anything before
they reached Whisper Lake.
“What’s worrying you, son?” he finally said.
“What’s in that box, I guess.”
“It’s just a dead body.”
“I know it’s a dead body,” he said. “But I thought…”
“You better quit thinking, then,” Goode said. “We’re a long way
from nowhere to be thinking such things. Dead ‘uns are dead ‘uns.
They can’t hurt you no more than a rocking chair can. Keep that in
mind.”
Hyden chewed his lip, clutched his shotgun tightly. “I guess I’m
wondering what’s in there, what’s in that box. I don’t like it.”
“Dammit, boy, I don’t like what’s in yer head, but you don’t hear
me complaining.”
They rode on and the moon slid behind a cloud and the night
grew darker, went black to its roots, seemed to gather around
them in clutching, sinister shadows.
“Boy, light that lantern.”
Hyden reached over the seat…froze-up tight when he thought
he heard a shifting sound from inside the box…then quickly
grabbed the oil lamp and lit it up with a cupped match. The
shadows retreated, but the night seemed bunched around them
like a fist anxious to grasp something. It hung to either side of the
wagon in sheets and blankets of murk. The hold was creeping with
stygian forms.
Goode said, “Yer hearing things back there and that ain’t so
strange. Not really. This road is bad and that body is knocking
around same as us. Don’t pay it no attention, son.”
But Hyden kept hearing those sounds and something was
stirring his guts with a willow twig. “I just been thinking is all,” he
said, his breath frosting from his lips. “Been thinking on Skull
Valley where we got the box from. Kind of creepy up there. Kind
of lonesome and desolate…it puts your mind to things.”
“What sort of things?”
“Skull Valley…that’s Spirit Moon’s grounds.”
The old man licked his lips slowly, deliberately. “I hear tell
Spirit Moon’s dead.”
“Some say he don’t die same as others.”
Goode laughed. “Bullshit. Besides, Spirit Moon is from the
Snake Nation, boy. Skull Valley is Goshute land. What would Spirit
Moon be doing there?”
“The Snake is just Shoshone, anyhow. Goshutes are tight with
‘em. I heard his tribe is up there in the hills, doing what they do.”
“Maybe, son, but what you heard about Spirit Moon…those is
just witch-tales, is all. Injuns think he’s some big bad medicine
doctor, but a white man should know better. Just some Snake
witch doctor. A damn injun and he don’t scare me none.”
But Hyden didn’t believe that. Goode even pronounced Spirit
Moon’s name kind of low in a whisper…like he was afraid the old
injun would hear him from his grave. And maybe he would at that.
“You ever hear of Walking Mist, boy?”
Hyden said he had. Another Snake medicine man, but from
years back.
“Well, let me tell you about him. Walking Mist was a Snake
hoodoo man, too, like Spirit Moon. In fact, he was his ancestral
granddaddy. Well, back in the ‘30’s, so I was told, up in the
Wasatch, Walking Mist got on the wrong side of a couple beaver
trappers from Fort Crokett. The three of ‘em were boozed-up and
looking for a fight and happened upon Walking Mist who, it was
claimed, refused their offers of marriage to his sisters. They shot
Walking Mist down, chopped off his head and buried it in a box.
They buried his body somewheres else.” Goode’s face was set and
stern in the lamplight. “Well, now old Walking Mist he had himself
a high yeller girl for a wife, some nigger out of a Baton Rouge
plantation. She was said to be one of them conjure-folk. Said she
used to make up love potions and cures for the sick. Made little
dolls out of clay and burlap, sprinkled the hair and fingernails
from someone she didn’t like in ‘em and put the hex on ‘em. Folks
used to pay her to do so…horses, skins, rifles, what not.
“Well, this high yeller girl goes into one of her voo-doo trances
and, sure enough, she locates old Walking Mist’s head with a rod
cut from an ash tree. She opens that box and old Walking Mist’s
head, powerful crazy medicine man that he was, is still alive. Eyes
open. He tells her where his body is buried. Not long after,
Walking Mist is seen ambling around, head stitched back on, a
funny light in his eyes.”
“And what about them trappers?”
Goode grinned like a bear skull. “They found ‘em one day. They
had twenty-foot stakes shoved right up their asses. Up their asses
and right into their throats. Just bobbing in the wind up atop them
stakes that were driven into the ground. Thing was, nobody never
did find their heads.” Goode spit his cigar butt into the night. “I
heard that from an old Ute I used to do some drinking with.”
“I thought you didn’t like Indians?”
“This ‘un was different.”
Hyden was nodding his head up and down. “That story, I believe
it. My grandpappy Joe said that Spirit Moon was part demon and
part human, could do anything he set his mind to. Grandpappy
said a copper miner lost his hand in a cave-in and Spirit Moon
rubbed something on it and called names into the sky and a month
later, that hand grew back. Grandpappy Joe said it was true. Said
Spirit Moon had eyes like coals. When them eyes looked at you,
you were never the same again.”
“Country’s ripe with bullshit, son.”
“Some of it’s true.”
“Maybe.”
“There was a Paiute from the Cedar Band that had two heads,”
Hyden said. “I saw him once. It was true enough.”
Goode laughed. “Next you’ll be telling me you can rope a bronc
with yer pecker and still have enough left to make a dance hall gal
whistle Dixie in the dark.”
Hyden felt his ears burn like they’d been branded. “If you don’t
believe in nothing, then why you tell me that story of Walking
Mist?”
“To pass the time, boy, strictly to pass the time and to see how
gullible you are. And dammit, yer gullible. That Ute believed what
he told me, but I expected better from you being a white man. If I’
d known you were afraid of spooks, I woulda got me another boy
to ride shotgun.”
“My grandpappy Joe—“
“Yer grandpappy Joe was full of more shit that a privy pit,”
Goode said. “And don’t take that the wrong way, son. But he liked
to talk is all. Now, enough with this fool yarning, I say.”
And it was enough.
Hyden was thinking about Skull Valley. The day before, they’d
pulled into a little Goshute camp situated at the base of a rise
punched through with caves. Some young buck in an army shirt
and bowler hat was waiting for them with the pine box at the side
of the dirt trail. A couple old men in trade blankets were standing
in a loose circle muttering some nonsense. The buck—didn’t look
like no medicine man—paid Goode without so much as a word,
seemed relieved almost. The body was that of some white man had
kin in Whisper Lake. They never learned what the Goshute were
doing with it and they didn’t ask. But now, thinking on it, Hyden
was wondering what those old men were up to and if that young
buck was some kind of shirt-tail relation to Spirit Moon.
Hard to say.
Hyden didn’t know if they were Goshute or Snake. He’d only
seen Spirit Moon once. Over at the store in Ophir, Toole County.
Spirit Moon had been there with his sons, who were loading his
wagon. The old man was wrapped up in a buffalo robe and there
were beads and feathers braided into his hair. His face was a maze
of tiny scars that seemed to move like writhing maggots. Hyden
had turned away then, before the old man looked upon him.
Before—
There was a shifting in the box and both of them heard it this
time.
They looked at each other in the eerie, flickering lantern light,
something like fear cut into their faces. They quickly looked away.
Hyden licked his lips, but he didn’t have any saliva left.
Something was happening.
He could pretend otherwise, but something was building around
them like heat lightening and they could both feel it. But they were
men. Grown men with a job to do and it had to be done.
From the box there was a thump, then a rustling.
“Boy,” Goode said, his breath not coming real easy, “take a look
back there for the love of Christ…what the hell am I hearing?”
Hyden felt a white-hot terror in his belly, felt it feeding up into
his chest. He leaned over the seat, shotgun in one hand, lantern in
the other. His skin was crawling in undulating waves. He was cold
to the bone…but it was not from the clammy April night. He
looked at the box, the lantern casting tongues of light over its lid.
The brass hasps were still fitted into place. All them nails—Jesus,
had to be a hundred of them—still pounded into the lid.
Only…only, didn’t it almost look like five or six of them were
sticking up now? Like maybe something inside was pushing them
through? Hyden felt a grim weight settle over him, crushing him
down like a granite graveyard slab. He felt weak, paralyzed even.
The atmosphere around him was blanched, soured, thick with
something that just ripped the heart straight out of his chest.
As he watched, two of the nails slid out of the lid with a groaning
sound. They popped free and clattered into the hold.
“What in the Christ?” Goode said, his voice sounding choked
and dry. The moon came back out and his face was discolored and
sickly. “Mind me, boy! What was that?”
“Nails…” Hyden tried to say, but there was no air in his lungs.
Just something blowing and drifting like desert sand. “Them
nails…they’re starting to pop free…”
“Yer imagining shit!” Goode said. “Or…or maybe that body’s
bloating. Known ‘em to burst a box right open…happens
sometimes.”
But Hyden just shook his head. Things like that didn’t happen in
cold weather.
Then they both heard it. A noise from inside that box—a
scraping, scratching sound like fingernails on wood. There was
horror in both men’s eyes. A huge, relentless horror that spilled
out like tears and into the night, surrounding them, enclosing
them, wrapping them tight in a shroud. The darkness slithered
and whispered.
Then: thump, thump, thump. Pounding fists.
Goode drew in a sharp breath: “Get up! Get up!” he cried to the
horses, his whip cracking like thunder. “Get-up you sonsofbitches!
Get-up!”
Hyden just kept watching the box, wondering maybe if his
scattergun would be of any use against what tried to climb out of
it. Whatever was happening in there, it wasn’t good. Wasn’t
natural. There were arcane mysteries fermenting in there, dark
alchemies brewing, spectral truths rattling their teeth. In the black,
noisome darkness, something was breathing and aware. And that
something was worse than anything Hyden could imagine.
The wagon was really rolling then, down a bend that cut through
the hills and over a creaking wooden bridge that spanned a
rushing, icy creek.
“Only a few miles now!” Goode cried out, the wagon thundering
towards its destination, the horses pounding forward like the devil
himself was chasing them…and maybe he was. Goode kept looking
over at Hyden apprehensively, then back at the box. “Just hang
tight! I can…yeah, I can see the lights below!”
Hyden took his word for it.
He did not turn and look.
He could not turn and look.
His eyes were wide and staring, that frosty wind buffeting him
mercilessly. But he did not feel it. Did not feel his numb fingers on
that wooden stock. Did not feel that icy mortuary chill that crept
through his bones and locked them tight and hard as iron in a
deep freeze. All he knew was the box. It was the center of his
universe. It was a dark star and he was a speck of dust caught in its
malefic orbit. All he could do was watch those nails twist up and
pop free, one after the other.
And in the box, a flurry of scratching and pawing and thudding.
Something in Hyden suddenly snapped. A wild, shrieking terror
ripped through him and he began to shout: “I’m getting out of
here! I’m jumping out of here! This is crazy—“
But Goode forced him back down and told him to shut up, shut
up, goddamn it, it was all in his head, all in his head. But the idea
of being alone in that wagon with that box in the back and what it
contained…Goode knew he couldn’t do it by himself. Just
couldn't.
And Whisper Lake was right before him now. To either side
were the derricks and mainframes and hunched shacks of the
outlying mining camps.
Something back there made a loud, snapping sound and Goode
didn’t need to turn to see that one of the brass bands had broken
open and the other wouldn’t be far behind and then…and then…
Hyden’s breath was coming in sharp, hurtful gasps. He was
shaking so badly he could not hold the shotgun. It clattered
uselessly to his feet.
And then they were in town and whatever was in the box
seemed to sense that, for it settled back down into its cold berth
and waited things out. Goode and Hyden let a out a collective sigh,
but did not relax until they found the undertaker’s and got rid of
the damnable thing.
Copyright 2004, 2009 by Tim Curran