Them Bones Read online

  Then I heard a low chanting coming from inside.

  I rearranged Took on my shoulders and walked in through the west gate.

  The smell hit me then. Death.

  A small group of people danced in the center of the plaza. The rest of the huts seemed empty, or places filled with the dead.

  I went to the dancers.

  They were Buzzard Cult people, and Moe was in there with them. They continued to dance in the bright sunlight as I walked up to them, still in the woodpecker skins.

  Moe left the group and came to me.

  ‘Where are the others?’ I asked. ‘Did the Huastecas attack again?’

  ‘Those that are left are across the River,’ said Moe. ‘They have abandoned the village. They carried their gods with them,’ he said, pointing to the temple. The woodpecker effigies were gone.

  ‘It wasn’t Huastecas,’ Moe continued. ‘Hamboon Bokulla was right. Look around you,’ he said, sweeping his arm over the still village. ‘Death came, a disease, while we were gone. We found the last of them. They sneezed and coughed up blood. Their skins burned to the touch and had turned purple with spots. They raved and they died yelling for water. It was not nice. You can look if you want. We only found the last few, and one old man who lived through it. The others are all east of the Mes-A-Sepa, starting over.’

  ‘Are there any canoes left?’

  ‘Take mine,’ said Moe. ‘I won’t need it any more.’

  ‘What are you going to do?’

  ‘We? We will dance up and down the River, bringing news of the coming of Lord Death to all who will listen. Eventually there will be many more of us, even on your side of the River. Death is here, Death like we have never seen. Perhaps it will take the Huastecas too, and they will join us in our dances. Perhaps we shall all die soon. It is the End Time. Will you join us in our dances?’

  I thought of what the Woodpecker God had said, and looked at the dead village. I felt Took’s weight on my back.

  ‘No,’ I said. ‘Perhaps we will meet again. I have to give Took back to his people.’

  ‘A happy death to you, then,’ said Moe. He started to walk away, then turned. ‘Thank you for saving me from the slab so I could see the triumph of Lord Death.’ Then he rejoined the shuffling dancers – two steps left, half step, two steps right, his crying skull tattoos shining in the morning sun.

  I found Moe’s canoe at the landing, put Took-His-Time in the bow and paddled across the water, every muscle aching, fatigue hallucinations jumping at the corners of my eyesight. The River was a bright sheet of mud. More and more buzzards were circling in the skies, west of the River. Perhaps the dancing of Moe’s people was keeping them out of the deserted village, maybe something else.

  The people were easy to find. A few skin huts stood on a small bluff half a kilometer down and across the waters.

  I put in to the landing where other canoes lay. Somebody blew a conch horn. I carried Took up the bluff across my arms. A small crowd gathered.

  I saw familiar faces. Coming toward me in Sun Man’s robes was his nephew on his sister’s side. I looked past him to the far corner of the huts where a clearing had been made. In the center was a small mound covered with charcoal. Past it the three woodpecker effigies stood blank and silent.

  I heard crying, and Sunflower came up to me, touching Took’s body with her hands. I carried him toward the charcoaled mound, still warm from Sun Man’s funeral. Sunflower helped me straighten the body. Others went to the hut and brought back a handful of Took’s unfinished pipes.

  We arranged them around his head and on his chest. Someone brought a torch. We put a few dried limbs and chips on him, and dragged some brush over to the mound.

  Then I pulled off the woodpecker outfit, beak upward, and placed it on top of Took-His-Time, and was handed the torch.

  ‘He told me to tell you,’ I said, and lit the costume which burst into flames, ‘that He is gone.’ I pushed brush onto the fire, then went to the woodpecker effigies. I pulled and pushed one and lay it across the flames. Then another and the other, straining and sweating under their weight.

  Then we stood and watched the smoke and flames rise into the buzzard-dotted sky. Sunflower cried beside me. Sometime before the flames died down, six days and nights of fatigue crashed over me, and I slid down into bright blue dreams.

  THE BOX XVII

  Smith’s Diary

  *

  April 17, 2003

  This will be it.

  The diary goes in the box with the official stuff and the beacon. I hope someone finds it.

  It is quiet out there, and a starry night.

  They are out there, more of them than we ever thought there could be. They seem to have been coming for days, from all directions, and now they are ready.

  They mean to kill us all, or make slaves of us – whatever it is they do.

  I can’t blame them, but I don’t want to die either, so far away from everything. We will kill each other tomorrow.

  Hennesey is ready. God have mercy on us, and them too. We can’t help being what we are. Neither can they.

  We tried.

  DA FORM 12003

  18 April am

  Pres dty

  34

  KIA

  76

  KLdy

  8

  MIA

  13B. F. Jones/M. Smith

  MLDyAst Sta Chief /CWO1 RA

  2CIA/act Comm.

  AWOLCivilian contgt/US Army Gp.

  1

  Bessie XIV

  The Box lay on the table in the humidity-controlled room in the University museum.

  The team slowly opened it around the cracked place, removing the chipped shellac and pitch until they could get to the seams and pry them.

  The wood came off in slips thin and pliable as paper.

  It took hours to get it open.

  Inside was rot and maché. There were hard flat disks that could not be moved. They had become part of the box walls.

  There was a book, its covers ghosts, its pages spiderwebs, but they could see words. There was a ream of paper solid as a butcher block. There was a small black box gone to sludge, with metal inside showing dimly through.

  ‘It’ll take months to dry the pages and separate them,’ said the curator.

  ‘We’ve got nothing but time,’ said Bessie.

  THE BOX XVIII

  On the side of the box, beneath the coat of pitch hardened to an amberlike material, and the cracked layer that had once been shellac, was a message in smeared grease pencil:

  KILROY WAS HERE

  and underneath, another hand had written

  BUT NOT FOR MUCH LONGER

  Bessie XV

  Light cold rain pattered against the top of the bluff. The wind was from the north. Cold gusts whipped Bessie’s rubberized raincoat against her legs. The weather had changed. There would be sleet before nightfall, possibly snow by tomorrow night. The weather was as crazy as the rest of the year had been.

  She looked down at the dark waters of the bayou. The top of the mounds was already under four feet of water – all the work of the summer obliterated as if it were a slate wiped clean. There was nothing left of the site but the specimens in the museum, her and Kincaid’s notes, the Box. All the trenching and leveling, the work, the coffer dam against the rising flood was down there, known to catfish and gar.

  There must have been a last stand and a final massacre. Just over there had been where the Box was buried. Right down there were the mounds where the old chief had had their bodies piled and the heads taken home. It was also where they brought him back when he died and buried him some years later, on top of the dead in their mounds, next to their horses.

  Two cultures must have clashed here, neither able to understand the other, or help the other. A small drama in the scheme of things. Now traces of both were gone, relics of two doomed groups. One wiped out by their ancestors, the ancestors themselves then swept aside by the roll of time.

&
nbsp; Bessie shivered for the future, for all futures. She leaned against Captain Thompson, who was lost in his own thoughts.

  ‘None of it was fair,’ she said.

  ‘Of course not.’ He watched the sleeted waters of the bayou.

  ‘They should have let us find out more. They should have closed down the whole state. They should have let Baton Rouge drown. They . . .’

  ‘You know all of it, don’t you?’ he asked.

  ‘No! I want to find out why it happened. I want to understand!’

  ‘They killed each other. They couldn’t get along.’

  ‘No. The ones from the future, up there. Why couldn’t they have been wiser, kinder? Something? They came from a time when . . .’

  ‘I don’t know. Why do people do anything?’ Thompson threw his cigarette out in a spinning arc off the bluff. The twisting red dot winked out in the waters.

  ‘A copy of the report’s back at my hotel room. You can read it tomorrow,’ he said to her. ‘I wrote down just what happened, and what you found. I sent photostats of all the things we could copy. Kincaid will send a copy of your final papers. That’s all I can do.’

  ‘Will it make any difference?’

  ‘I don’t think so,’ he said. ‘It’ll be strange reading for some archivist. Somebody might want to do something with it, but what can they do? They can’t change the past.’

  ‘But the future! That can be changed.’

  ‘I hope so. But we don’t even know the terminology, half of it. People at the War Department will start asking about what some of the things are, and I’ll try to tell them what I think they are. Then they’ll ask you about all the Buck Rogers stuff. I’m sure Amazing Stories or Weird Tales will be interested, but that’s about it. That’s the kind of reaction I’ll be getting.’

  ‘But proof. We’ve got it.’

  ‘Look,’ he said. He put his hands on her shoulders. ‘It’s all very fine, what you have, for a museum, for what the average bloke thinks. But when you start waving it around in public, that’s when you get in trouble. You know that. Look at that . . . what, the . . . elephant thing. . . .’

  ‘Cincinnati tablet.’

  ‘That. That’s been nothing but trouble, and still nobody’s convinced. All you can do is try to prove this to your colleagues.’

  ‘And you?’

  ‘I’m going to quietly insist to my superiors. That’s all I can do. Any more, and they’ll quit listening.’

  ‘Kincaid’s going to deliver his paper when he finishes it.’

  ‘I wish him luck. There’ll be cries of hoax before he’s halfway through.’

  ‘I know.’

  They were silent. The sleet began to fall harder.

  ‘We’d better go,’ said Thompson. ‘These roads are bad enough without this freak ice storm.’

  Bessie climbed into the Army truck beside him. He cranked it up and turned on the headlights. The truck faced the bayou. Through the sleet and rain she saw the waters of the bayou flat and black before them. This time next summer they would be another six feet higher. The whole landscape would be changed for hundreds of square miles around.

  Thompson turned on the wipers. ‘There’s a bottle of coffee back there; find it, will you please?’ He turned the truck around. ‘I’m chilled through.’

  She rummaged behind the seat and found the warm jug. She looked out the rear window, saw the waters being lost in the darkness.

  ‘They didn’t understand,’ she said.

  ‘No, I expect they didn’t,’ said Captain Thompson.

  He put the truck in low gear and bounced past a mudhole.

  Leake XVIII

  ‘them bones, them bones gone walk aroun’ them bones, them bones gone walk aroun’ them bones, them bones gone walk aroun’ nunc audite verbum dei’

  Things aren’t normal, and they never will be again.

  Everyday Sunflower and I and a few others go and pile some more dirt on Took’s mound.

  Everyday I work a little at the pipes Took-His-Time left in rough form, and finish them up a little more.

  Everyday brings new horrors to which we have grown numb.

  Stories come from upriver on both sides: villages deserted, given over to the woods.

  The Buzzard Cult people danced by one day last week, still across the River. We all watched. Their hands are joined, they do their shuffling steps for kilometers at a time. We hear they dance into dead villages, through their plazas, out the gates again.

  When they danced back by again, earlier this week, there were fewer of them. Our hunters who go back across the Mes-A-Sepa keep away from the towns and solitary huts, any place that had been settled by man.

  The only good news to come across is that the Huastecas seem to be dying faster than we ever will, from some other disease, or the same one with a whole new set of symptoms. Theirs sounds like mumps to me. They got it way down on the Gulf where their merchants had set up permanent trade with the Traders during last winter.

  The Traders and Northmen are being hunted and killed wherever they are found. I hope some of them get away. The diseases are here; it’s too late to stop them. Killing the messengers is futile. It probably makes the people feel better.

  On this side, the Buzzard Cult is growing, too, but slowly, quietly. They get together and dance, then they go home. Without the Woodpecker, there’s not much else. The tattoo man is busier than ever. Weeping eyes are the next big craze, also hands and eyes, and rattlesnakes.

  There is death and resignation all around.

  Sunflower tries to keep busy and to keep me happy. I have to go out with the other guys now and hunt. It’s late spring, and we’re not sure if the crop we planted over here will make it. We’re killing and drying meat as fast as we can. Maybe that mammoth will come back this winter, and if the pipe magic works, we’ll all eat good.

  I was carving on the pipe, trying to get the tusks just right, when they started yelling my name outside.

  ‘Yaz! Yaz!’ called the new Sun Man.

  I came out with my spear.

  The new Sun Man was already deeply tanned. He was carrying a small deer over his shoulder, something the old Sun Man would never have been seen doing. Everybody was out hunting and grubbing for roots.

  Three guys who’d been across the River with him were there.

  ‘Yaz,’ said one, pointing back over the water. ‘The place you came from. Remember? Something funny’s going on there.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘The air is weird. It moves. Next to the tree where you tied the white cloth, and laid the orange thing on the ground. We ran a rabbit through there, and it went away, right in front of us. We watched the air move for half an hour. Then the air started making hooting noises. We left in a hurry.’

  ‘Thanks,’ I said. ‘I’ll take care of it.’

  I went back inside our skin hut.

  ‘What’s up?’ asked Sunflower. She looked over her shoulder at me.

  ‘Oh, guy-stuff.’ I rummaged around. ‘Sun Man wants me to take care of some business for him.’

  ‘Will you be gone long?’ she asked.

  ‘I don’t know.’

  ‘Is it across the River?’

  ‘Just a little way.’

  She looked at me darkly. ‘Do you need some food?’

  ‘A little.’ I got some Army stuff I might need out of the bundle.

  Sunflower gave me some food, leaned up and kissed me on the head. ‘Hurry back,’ she said.

  I walked to the flap.

  ‘Tell me if you’re going forever,’ she said, very quietly.

  ‘I don’t think so,’ I said.

  I kissed her. She looked away.

  I went down to the River and picked out a canoe. There were lots not being used these days.

  *

  I had almost forgotten how the place looked, the bluff, the faraway bayou. It was noon the next day when I got there. I heard the hooting a long way off – a rising and falling klaxon sound, cycling about once e
very two minutes. It should keep the animals away, and bring in curious people.

  Only there weren’t any curious people within twenty kilometers anymore. I doubt the Buzzard Cult people this side of the River would pay much attention. They’d probably think it just one more manifestation of Lord Death. Maybe they would take notice, and build a shrine to it when they found it.

  The air was shimmering. Somebody was still alive, Up There. They must have found a way to reconnect me. Good old Dr. Heidegger. Maybe his sons or grandsons or daughters. Or someone ten thousand years from now, who’d read his notes and duplicated his experiments as a curiosity.

  I picked up a one kilo rock, took out my map-marking grease pen, wrote who are you? on it, stepped out where the front of the gate should be, and tossed it gently in.

  Then I dived flat to the ground.

  Nothing happened. The air kept shimmering, the sound rose and fell.

  For an hour. Then the sound stopped. Chills ran up and down my spine.

  A little more than an hour later, by my watch that still ran, the rock came back out. It rolled to within a meter of me. Beneath my message was the hastily scribbled HEIDEGGER. leake?

  I wrote one hour delay – rock coming through. what happened? and then threw it back in and waited.

  The rock didn’t come back next time. Something light slapped into the grass. It was a lab notebook, with an extension cord wrapped around it for weight.

  we lost the others. perfected machine. two way travel now possible. not much time left here but rest of group not in target years. where are you?

  I wrote back: some world we never made, doc. no christianity. indians, arabs, vikings! i live in a mud hut, make pipes, fight aztecs, pile up dirt. everybody dying of plague brought by steamboats. alexander’s library never burned. over to you.

  It was dark when the answer flew back. come back through. we need your help, leake. background level too high, all dying. help us find others, send them to right time as planned. wear cimp suit. we need your help.

  I wrote WAIT on the lab book and sent it back.