The Haunted

This close, the smell of the smoke was stronger, an odor heavy with the knowledge of mortality, with the weight of years and places long gone. He was afraid of the smoke, afraid of the smell, afraid of the colorless light within the dilapidated structure that could not have come from any lamp or fire. If he paused, he knew he would not have the fortitude to continue, so Kit marched directly up to the cabin, pushed the tattered cloth aside and stepped over the threshold.

Inside, it was dark, that eerie glow nowhere in evidence, the windowless interior so dim he would have sworn that it was night outside. There did not even seem to be any smoke, though the air was filled with whispers, soft words spoken by unseen presences that came from nowhere, came from everywhere, and made no sense to him at all.

Before him, the single room was meanly furnished—cot, table, chair—though he could make out little more than outlines in the gloom. The only aspect of the cabin that struck him as unusual, beyond the absence of any visible resident, was the odd sense that the interior of the ramshackle structure was older than the outside, and that the room in which he stood stretched far beyond the walls that enclosed it.

Near his ear, one of the whispers spoke his name.

“Hello!” he called. His voice seemed to echo, as though he were in a cave, and it took his brain a moment to realize that the whispers were repeating his cry, mocking him.

This was not what he had expected, and it was not something he could understand. Until this very second, the tactical value of this site in combat had been his sole focus, the idea that had led him here and that had lain in his mind since the first rumors of this village had reached him all those years ago. But his plans seemed foolish now, small. He suddenly realized that the power here could not be used, harnessed or contained. It was too big, too deep, too dangerous. He understood why the villagers kept away from this spot, and he wanted more than anything to get out of this cabin and as far away from here as possible.

A colorless fire sprang up in the center of the room, in a shallow hole he had not been able to see in the dark. It had no fuel, no kindling, but seemed to come from the earth itself, a blaze of indeterminate origin and pallid illumination that revealed words scrawled on the wall in what appeared to be blood, words he had never seen before and did not understand. On the cot, he saw now, was a low mound of whitish powder in the shape of a man’s body.

“Kit,” something whispered. And then his given name: “Christopher.”

Panic welled within him as he recognized that the thought on which his mind was focusing was not his own.

Using all of the strength and will he possessed, he stumbled back through the doorway, becoming tangled for one terrifying, heart-stopping moment in the tattered cloth before staggering up the footpath to where the Utes still stood.

It was dark now. He had been inside the cabin for a few minutes only, but in the open air it appeared as though more than an hour had passed. He was breathing heavily, and, grabbing the canteen from its strap around his neck and shoulder, he unscrewed the cap with trembling fingers and drank.

One of the Utes asked him what had gone on inside the cabin, why he had been in there for so long, but Kit shook his head, not wanting to answer. He stared before him at the buildings of the village, arranged around the cabin, the way hunters surrounded a bear or some other dangerous predator. Motioning for the Utes to follow him, he marched back down the empty street to the center of San Jardine.

In the windows of each adobe house, he saw as he drew close, were statues, figures carved from rock or molded from mud, sitting or standing behind small burning candles. He had not noticed them earlier, and they looked to him to have been placed there to guard the homes and protect the inhabitants within.

From him?

He felt a stirring of anger. As he knew from his wife, Mexicans proclaimed themselves Catholic, but this was even more pagan than that. It was bad enough worshiping all those graven images, all those “saints.” Hell, they’d even turned Jesus’ mother, Mary, into some kind of goddess that they prayed to. But what they had here had no connection to Christianity. It was primitive even beyond the religions practiced by Indians, and the figures in the windows looked like little monsters: creatures with oversize heads and spiky teeth, triangular bodies and multiple claws. From inside one of the homes, he heard the whimper of a woman, then a slap to shut her up, then silence.

The Utes were right. These Mexicans deserved to die.

He’d known it the moment he emerged from the cabin, but the feeling grew stronger as he looked at the various statues in the windows, those little blasphemies against God.