Chapter Ten

"Put your fucking pistol away, you triple-stupe old idiot. Now! Before I ram it up your skinny ass and pull both triggers. These are outlanders, interested in buying a totem or two."
"Sorry, angel heart."
Ryan's eye had adjusted quickly to the dim light inside the store, focusing on the old man who was sitting in a wheel-backed rocking chair, to one side of a cobwebbed window, holding a double-barreled flintlock pistol in both his bony hands. At first glance he looked like he might be around a hundred years old.
"Man could easy get himself shot, doing something foolish as that," Ryan snarled, conscious of how close he'd come to blowing the old man away. Part of his anger was directed inward for having walked so carelessly into the shack without taking some elementary security precautions.
"He don't mean no harm, mister." The arrogance and foul-mouthed hectoring vanished in a heartbeat. "Baptiste's my fourth husband. Kind man, most times. But he got caught badly by" She hesitated, carrying on along a different tack. "Never been the same since. Repeats hisself a lot. Lost his idea of what fuckin' time of day or night it is. Shadow of the man he was."
"Rare blaster," J.B. commented. "Mind if I take a look, Madame Maigris?"
"Baptiste, show the outlander your pistol."
"My precious blaster"
"Show him or I'll take the quirt to your chicken balls! Right now!"
The old man offered the pistol with trembling fingers. The Armorer took it and held it angled to the light that came through the open doorway, nibbing with his thumb at a dark, silvered maker's plate.
"Dated 1815," he said. "William Parker. Gun maker to His Majesty and the Honorable Board of Ordnance. Two thirty-three, High Holbom, London."
"Nice, "Ryan said.
J.B. sniffed. "Was once. Give me a week in a decently equipped workshop and I could make it good." He balanced it in his right hand. "Not charged with ball." He peered at it. "Flint and powder, but no bullet."
"Gimme my precious pistol," the old man moaned, grabbing it from the Armorer and pointing it at Ryan. "Bang, you're dead. Bang, you're undead. They're all undead and we're all dead. Forever and ever. Oh, man!"
Madame Maigris reached down and slapped him across the cheek, making his false teeth rattle. "Enough," she said, then smiled at Ryan and the others. "Shadow of the fucking man he was."
"What are the undead?" Mildred asked.
The woman turned and offered a broader smile, marred by the dreadful state of her teeth and the nervous tic in one corner of her mouth. "Tales of old women. The buried ones who walk again. Slaves to the voodoo masters."
"I seen them," Jak said. "When little. Worked for baron with power. Died in fire."
The woman looked toward the door, making a halfhearted attempt at crossing herself. "Don't listen to those old men's tales. Satan uses lazy tongues to spread his mischief. Look, since Baptiste gave you all such a nasty moment, least I can fucking do is make it up."
"No need," Ryan said. "Best we move on, anyway. We're with a friend whose wag"
But Madame Maigris wasn't paying much attention to him. "Place is in such a shitting filthy state. Still got some nice totems. Look around the place. Pick what you like. Free jack to you all."
While old Baptiste sat in the corner and mumbled, smiling at his fingertips, Ryan and the others looked around the cramped little shack.
It was hard to know what most of the stuff was. Everything was covered in a layer of dust that felt oddly sticky to the touch, making you want to wipe your palms on your pants after holding anything.
Jak moved to stand by Ryan. "Lot voodoo stuff," he whispered.
"Seen crucifixes."
"Sure. Some upside down. Chickens' claws. Rabbit feet. Vials dried blood. Glass eyes. Candy skulls. Corpse candles. All kinds stuff I remember."
"Good quality, ladies and men," the woman said, pushing her bulk between them, picking up beads and ribbons from trays, holding them out in her beefy hands.
"I don't really see anything I fancy," Krysty told her. "No offense."
"None taken. Wouldn't like to sell or trade your hair, would you, my dear?" She ran her fingers through it, making Krysty shrink from her. "Lovely, lovely color. Worth a fortune in some of the villes north and east. Or in the gaudies of Norleans. Do you a good deal on it."
"Thanks, but no thanks," Krysty said, moving away and wincing as Madame Maigris was reluctant to let her go and tugged at the fiery hair.
"Who runs the ville?" Ryan asked, edging toward the door of the fetid little hut.
"The Family," the old man said in a surprisingly clear, firm voice.
"What family?"
"Just called the Family," Madame Maigris replied. "Live in the big house to the north of the ville."
She turned to Jak. "Fact is, youngster, I wondered if you was a cousin or something similar to that. Some of them got that snow hair and white skin. But I see you fuckin' ain't."
"Did you say you'd give us a present?" Mildred asked. "Pretty little cross here."
"Take it an' welcome, dear lady. Solid gold and proof against any evil of day-stalking or night-creeping."
The crucifix was on a slender chain that Mildred suspected was closer to brass than gold. But it was nicely worked and held a tiny figure of Christ.
"Well, thanks, Madame Maigris. I'll take it."
"Much use as tits on a bull," Baptiste shouted, aiming the flintlock pistol again, waving it around dangerously close to J.B.'s face.
"Ignore him, please. Nothing else any of you would like as a memory of Madame Maigris?"
Krysty had a tiny crystal pendant on a silver chain, holding it to the door, watching the way that it seemed to glow with a yellow-green light.
"Fire opal," Madame Maigris said. "Supposed to have come from a land to the far south, beyond the edge of the known world. Whatever the fuck that means."
"I believe that it might mean Terra Incognita Australia, " Doc ventured. "Or Australia, as it was more commonly known. A small mining town called Coober Pedy was one of the centers of the opal trade."
"It's unusual."
"Take it. Go on. Don't want nothin' for it. Supposed to have power against witches and all."
"You do much trading here?" Ryan asked, helping Krysty to fasten the catch of the pendant around her neck. "Doesn't seem too lively."
"Some says we do and some says we don't. I calls it a matter of fucking opinion."
Baptiste cackled with laughter. "The rest of the world says we don't and she says we does. If you call such a matter of shitting opinion."
"Shut it," his wife said, but there was no venom in her voice and she seemed to have become suddenly tired and bored. "You got what you wanted, outlanders. Mebbe you should be hittin' the trail again."
"Be interested in meeting this Family you talked about," Ryan said, standing between Baptiste and the door.
The woman sniffed, wiping her nose on her sleeve. "You see the Family and they'll probably be real triple happy to see you. And your friends."
"Get many strangers?" Jak asked.
"No. Off the main highways."
"Guess it'd be like a lot of villes." Mildred was admiring her crucifix in a fly-specked mirror with a round pewter frame. "Some welcome new blood. Some don't."
There was a sudden stillness in the shack, as though the angel of death had swooped by, low overhead.
The woman stared at Mildred, her eyes wide, jaw gaping. She half lifted a hand to point, then let it drop. Her husband had half risen from his chair, waving the blaster around in an uncontrolled, spastic movement.
"Blood," she stammered.
"What'd I say?" Mildred looked quickly around at her friends, the rows of beads knotted into her hair whispered and clicking like the far-off sound of billiard balls.
"You been sent? That it? You all been sent by the Family?"
Baptiste nodded at his wife, a thread of spittle drooling from his parted lips. "You got it woman. They be spies for the Family. Sent here!"
"Nobody sent us." Ryan's hand had dropped to the butt of his SIG-Sauer P-226. Something had happened that he didn't understand, but the shotgun shack seemed brimming with a strange, hesitant, unspoken menace.
"So you fuckin' say!" The woman took a couple of steps toward the door, her head turning from side to side like an enraged walrus, peering out into the morning. "You brought other Family spies to take us into that dark house."
"We've never seen the Family," J.B. protested. "Never been here before."
"Let's go," Ryan said to the others. "Best we leave before there's blood spilled."
"More blood speech," the old man screamed in a hoarse, cawing voice.
Madame Maigris was skipping from foot to foot as if she were in a child's game. "You get out. Tell nobody nothing and nobody does nothing."
"We're going." Krysty reached out a hand. "Sorry if we've upset you."
But the fat woman drew back with a horrified expression on her face, as if Krysty had offered her a white-hot branding iron to embrace.
"Get the fuck away, fire bird!"
There was a sudden disturbance toward the back of the shop as Jak knocked over one of the trays of totems. As it fell, a corner ripped away a length of filthy curtain behind it, showing a crude wall painting.
A naked man had been nailed upside down to a cross, patches of red daubed on his hands and feet and over the genital area of his body. Hooded figures stood around him, one of them kneeling by the bottom of the crucifix, holding a copper bowl in one hand and a sharp silver knife in the other. Its edge touched the man's throat, opening up a torrent of crimson that was flooding into the bowl.
Everyone stopped moving and stared at the fresco, held by its animal power, by the atmosphere of brutish violence and terror that emanated from it.
"Sorry," Jak breathed, the single word hanging in the silence like a forgotten promise.
Madame Maigris stared at her own right hand, watching the fingers crabbing across the countertop toward the filthy scattergun.
"It's obscene," Mildred whispered. "Sort of a mix of senility and childishness."
"Shouldn't have seen it," Baptiste said, his face now seeming completely sane and wise.
"Leave the blaster," Ryan warned, his own automatic now clear of the holster.
But the fingers kept moving, while the woman looked down at them, face blank, as though she were observing someone else's hand.
"Let's get out of here, lover," Krysty said, touching Ryan on the arm. He noticed out of the corner of his good eye that she had drawn her Smith amp; Wesson 640. "Seriously bad feeling here, lover."
"Sure."


JOHANNES FORDE had become tired of waiting and had left Dean to watch the team. He moved silently up to the tumbledown shack, drawing both his Navy Colts, the sunlight glittering off the mother-of-pearl grips.
He jumped straight in through the doorway, landing with a jingle of spurs. "First man to reach for his shooting iron gets on the fast track to meet his Maker!"
The shout and the sudden appearance of the stranger gave the striking mechanism of total chaos the feather's-weight push it needed.
Madame Maigris snatched up the shotgun, pointing it toward Krysty.
Ryan squeezed the trigger once on the SIG-Sauer, but he was pushed off-balance by Baptiste and he knew instinctively that he'd missed the woman.
He swung a hasty punch at the cackling old dotard, glimpsing the double-barreled flintlock pistol very close to the side of his head.
There was a burst of dazzling light as Baptiste fired the blaster, the flash in the pan sending grains of fire into Ryan's right eye.
Into the good right eye.
Things got dark.