Bane shook his head and spat. He broke apart his Rigby and checked the load and clacked the breech into place again.
“Well, this ain’t good,” Stevens said.
Horn said, “What we aimin’ to do?” He moved to shuck his pack and Ruark frowned and told him to leave it be.
“Gonna find Cal and Ma. That’s what. And leave your goddamned pack on. We have to make tracks in a hurry you wanna be all the way up shit crick with no paddle?” Stevens clapped his hat on. “Stick our noses in every last house. Kick in the doors if we have to. Let’s make it quick. Daylight is burnin’.”
Miller and Bane teamed to search the cottages on the south side; Stevens, Horn, and Ruark took the north. It went fast. Miller took the lead, busting through the doors and making a brief sweep of the interiors. The women inside calmly waited, speaking not a word to the trespassers—and indeed, many were pregnant. Each house was small and dim, but there weren’t many places to hide. Most were neat and well-ordered, not untoward in any obvious way. Simple furnishings, albeit archaic. Oil lamps and candles, fireplaces that doubled as ovens. A paltry selection of books on rude shelves. This last detail struck him as truly odd.
He said to Bane, “Not one Bible. You ever see this many houses without a copy or two of the good book lying around?” Bane shrugged and allowed as he hadn’t witnessed that particular phenomenon either.
Both parties finished within a few minutes and regrouped in the square. Everyone was sweating from running up the hill to check the half dozen houses perched there. Miller mentioned the lack of holy literature. Stevens said, “Yeh, mighty peculiar. Where are the kids? You seen any?”
“Gudamn!” Horn said. “Brats should be crawlin’ underfoot, chasin’ the chickens, screamin’ bloody murder. Somethin’ shore as hell ain’t right.”
“Mebbe they inside the big house,” Ruark said. “Or that tower.”
“Well, we gotta check that house,” Miller said although the idea made him unhappy. The thought of searching the tower was even worse—it curved out of joint, angles distorted, and the sight made his head queer, his stomach ill. Not the tower if there were any other way.
Horn appeared stricken. “Hold on there, fellas. Them women ain’t gonna hold Cal or Ma. No sir. We barge in there an’ git shot, some might say we had it comin’.”
“Yeh, I reckon,” Stevens said. “You can stay out here and keep watch if you’re afraid of the ladies. Them husbands gonna be walkin’ in on us any minute. Who knows how many of them old boys’ll show.”
“Plenty, you kin wager,” Bane said.
Miller kicked the door. “Solid as a stump,” he said. Ruark spat and unlimbered his axe, as did Bane a moment later. The pair stood shoulder to shoulder chopping at the door and it crashed inward after a few blows. The men piled into the house, blinking against the smoky dimness. The sole light came from what seeped through window notches and a guttering fire in the hearth. The murk made hazy blobs of the long table, the counter and barrels stacked in threes here and there. The peak roof vaulted to a height of fifteen or so feet, supported by a massive center beam and a series of angled joists that met the wall at about chin level. Meat hooks, pots and pans, coils of rope, cured ham, and strings of sausage swayed and rustled with each gentle exhalation from the hearth.
Of the women there was no sign, but Ma was present.
Miller almost cried out when he beheld what had been done to the Welshman, and Stevens hollered loud enough to bust an eardrum. Miller didn’t blame him. Ma sat Indian style, naked in the middle of the floor, blood thick as pudding around his legs, in his lap. His belly was sliced wide and a quivering rope of purple innards was strung several feet above him and looped through a large eyebolt suspended from a chain. The intestines traveled down again like a pulley cable and wrapped around a wooden turnstile. The turnstile had been cranked repeatedly and its gory yarn oozed and leaked. Most of the rest of Ma’s guts were slopped across his thighs, or floating in the grue. His slack jaw drooled. He gave his comrades a glassy eyed nod not much different than his usual.
“Oh, god, Ma!” Stevens said. “What’d they do to you, hoss?”
Horn stuck his head in to see what the commotion was all about and shrieked to beat the band, so Ruark swatted him with his hat and drove him outside. Right then the matron ghosted from the gloom in the corner and hacked Bane’s shoulder with a cleaver. He yelled and smacked her in the jaw with the butt of his Rigby and she sprawled.
Blood trickled from the matron’s lips. The injury did not diminish her, rather imbued her with an aura of savagery and mania that caused the men to flinch as one might from a wounded beast. Her eyes were so very large and dark and they gleamed with tears of rage and exultation. She whispered with the intimacy of a lover, “Did ye see what’s waiting for ye in the trees?”
“Where’s our other man?” Miller strode over to the matron and leveled his rifle at her. “I’ll blow a damned hole in your kneecap, Missus. See if I won’t.”
“No need for that. The handsome lad is in the tower. They gave us the fat one for sport. It amuses them to watch us practice cruelty.”
Miller walked around Ma and the coagulating lake of blood. He grasped the ring of a trapdoor and pulled. Several of the women were huddled like goats in a root cellar. They gasped and held each other.
“See him?” Stevens said.
Miller slammed the trapdoor and shook his head.
Bane cussed as Ruark pulled the cleaver free of his shoulder with a gristly crunch. Miller fashioned a tourniquet. The entire left side of Bane’s buckskin jacket was soaked through and dripping. Horn shouted. Everyone ran to the windows. Twilight lay upon the world and a disjointed chain of lamps bobbed in the purple dark, descending the switchback trail on the other side of the valley. Miller said, “Either we fort up, or we run for it.”
Stevens said, “Trapped like rats in here. Roof is made of wood. They could burn us alive.”
“Not with they women in here,” Bane said through gritted teeth.
“You want to spend the night in here with them?” Miller said.
“Yeh, never mind.”
“We could take this one as a hostage,” Stevens said halfheartedly.
“Piss on that,” Miller said. “Who knows what she’ll chop off next time.”
“Ye should flee into the hills,” the matron said. “The horrors ye will soon meet…flee, good hunters. Or make an end of each other with your guns and knives. T’will be a merciful death in comparison.”
“Shut up before I kill you,” Miller said. The matron stopped talking at once.
“What about Ma?” Stevens said.
“He’s gone,” Bane said. “Worst way a man kin go. Gutted like a pig.”
“We cain’t leave him.”
“Naw, we cain’t.” Ruark drew his flintlock pistol. He walked over and laid the barrel against the back of Ma’s head and squeezed the trigger. For Miller, in that moment the past five years of his life were erased and he side slipped through time and space into a muddy trench in France, shells and bodies exploding. He had never left, never escaped.
Stevens aimed his rifle at the matron. He lowered it. “Don’t have the sand to shoot no woman. Let’s git, boys.”
Ruark said, “Won’t make it far in these woods in the dark.”
Stevens said, “We head for the tower and fetch Cal. See what happens.”
The Matron said, “Yes! Yes! Go into the house of the Master! He’ll greet ye with a glad smile and open arms!”
“Quiet yerself, hag,” Stevens said, menacing her with his rifle butt. “C’mon, boys. Let’s find poor Cal before the villains make stew of him.” There was grudging acquiescence to this plan and the men withdrew from the longhouse and its horrors.