Chapter 8 – No Brother Left Behind...
Once again, all seven Turner brothers gathered in their cabin's great room. Both the living and the dead assembled to wait upon their father's will. The corpses of Harry, Bart, Thomas and Samuel lay upon the long tables their surviving siblings had placed below the upside-down, somber carvings of death masks that lined the Turner great room.
The living brothers – Robert, Grant and Glen – again orbited their brothers' corpses. Maggie again slumped upon the floor outside the door to her father's inner and dark sanctum. Light from the fires set by the Harlington posse now infiltrated between the boards nailed across their cabin's windows. Shut within their cabin, the Turners heard the shouted curses from Harlington's men, who anxiously waited behind their fires for their revenge upon the Turner family. Occasionally, the crack of gunshots reverberated through the great room, attempts to tempt the surviving Turners out from their home to face the bullets the posse carried to the occasion. The flames constricted upon the Turner cabin, and the time was at hand for Thaddeus Turner to command his gathered children.
Maggie heard her father shuffle in his sanctum's darkness and jumped to her feet.
“Stand back from the door, Maggie.” Thaddeus whispered through his sanctum's thick door. “Have you extinguished all of the lights?”
Maggie retreated from the door. “Only light from the outside fires seeps into the cabin. Most of that is blocked by the blankets draped across the windows.”
“Good enough, Maggie,” Thaddeus rasped. “My lamp will suffocate whatever light else seeps into the great room. Do all your brothers wait for me?”
Maggie shuddered. Her blistered hands ached from working the shovel. She had dug through much of the night alongside her brothers, fearful that the approaching fires would too soon expose them to Harlington's men they heard riding upon the outskirts of their ranch, fearful that the noise of their efforts would betray them to the rifles that gathered to kill them. Harlington's men had not fallen upon them, however, and all the lost Turners had been exhumed from the earth. Robert, Grant and Glen had each carried a brother back home upon their shoulder, forcing Maggie to once more take hold of Samuel's ankles to drag that brother's body to the family great room. Father Thaddeus had vowed to leave no brother behind, neither of the living nor of the dead.
Maggie shuddered upon recalling the terrible wrath death and decay had delivered to her brothers' remains. Harry and Bart's bodies cracked as Maggie and her brothers attempted to stretch them out upon the great room's tables. Those two dead brothers were little else but skeletons wrapped within stiff and thin paper. Thomas's corpse was not so light or fragile, yet the white worms still burrowed through the stiff muscles that had once made Thomas's back so dependable and strong. Samuel's state wrenched Maggie's heart and soul. The earth had not yet swallowed Samuel's decaying stench. His body was swollen. Mucus ebbed from his eyes and nose. The flesh had torn away from the bone where Maggie had clutched at the ankles to drag the body home. Though her brother no longer lived, Maggie felt she had inflicted a shameful hurt upon those ankles in her rough dragging. Maggie refused to look at Samuel's open eyes, which appeared to have lost their color while the maggots feasted on their soft tissue, looking away from poor Samuel's torn face as she softly brushed away the dirt and mud from dead Samuel's shirt and arms.
Maggie shuddered. For she feared she had placed herself on a path filled with corpses more terrible following the sketches she had traced in the Harlington dust. She had begun a bone-shaker's journey, and such a trip was not filled with diamonds and pearls.
Maggie took a step further down that path when following her father's last wish for the preparation of their dead. She placed in each of her brothers' dead palms one of the golden dollar coins she had accepted from Emma Harlington. She was a new bone-shaker, but Maggie realized what power those coins would gather for the deceased. Those golden coins would focus the dead. The golden coins would guide the dead's steps. The dead would seek those cursed to feel the gold's touch. Maggie trembled. She had not known that the curse she growled in Dry Acre when cradling dead Samuel's head would be manifested. She had only voiced such a curse to stoke fear. She too had accepted the Harlington coin.
The door of Thaddeus's inner sanctum hissed as it inwardly slid open. Thick coils of shadow twirled out from the sanctum, soon flooding the great room and shrouding the chamber in deep darkness. Tendrils of black stretched from the thickening shadows, as if fingers sent by the dark to test, touch and taste the surroundings.
“You have done your hard work well my children.”
Thaddeus's voice tumbled out from where the shadows gathered the thickest and darkest. Clouds of black shrouded the great Turner bone-shaker as he entered into the great room with the sound of knuckles scraping across the cabin's wooden flooring. The specter blue flame of Thaddeus's lamp jostled in the blackest heart of the shadows that swirled around the bone-shaker. The lamp's small flame cast no illumination, a cold torch that strangely intensified the dark rather than cast the slightest glow. The bone-shaker's children held their breath as that flame neared the center of the great room. They knew their father held that light. They knew their father shuffled closer to those corpses spread upon the tables. But they could not see their father for how the shadows so completely cloaked the bone-shaker.
Maggie's mind swooned. Powerful magic accompanied her father and those shadows. She struggled to keep her feet as that magic pulsed, and Maggie knew that the power her father summoned as he shuffled to the great room's center dwarfed what she had called in the shapes her fingers had traced in the dust of a Harlington horse stall.
The darkest plumes of shadow leaned over the brothers assembled upon the tables as the lamp's blue flame jostled over the dead faces hidden in the dark.
“Much has been taken from us in this place,” Thaddeus's voice rasped through the shadows. “Our brothers have been murdered so that our kin would not consider this place a home. It is thought we are killed for our land. It is said that those who hunt us would be appeased if we only accepted their coin in exchange for our acres. But we know that coin is not the real spring of their hatred. We are unlike them. We do not share their nature, and so they will never make room for us in this place.
“We would have left on our own accord given a little patience. We would have fled silently in the night had they offered us a kindness.” The darkness amplified Thaddeus's voice as his lamp's blue flame jostled in the black. “We would have needed no coin in exchange for this dusty ranch. Instead, they have stolen from us. They have murdered us. They have fractured our family because our household is not like their own.”
Darkness swirled in the great room's center, caressing the upside-down, carved death masks. The black whirled, and Maggie's thin hair waved in the shadow wind. Tendrils of black extended, globules of dark that morphed into long, crooked fingers that found the corpses assembled upon the tables. Those hands hesitated for a second before rushing into the bodies, inflating what remained of collapsed lung tissue, pounding upon still hearts until an unnatural rhythm pulsated within the cold chest. The dead stirred as shadow filled their remains.
“May our living rest a little easier in knowing that the dead will have their revenge.”
Maggie watched as the great room's shadows rushed into the bodies of her brothers. Strands of dark uncoiled from around Thaddeus Turner as the shadows that shrouded the bone-shaker abandoned him for the magic that pulled the black wisps into the corpses set upon the tables. The dead betrayed small signs of stirring - twitching fingers, shifting jawbones, curling fists. All of the great room's shadows filled the dead Turner brothers. No shadow denied the magic's pull. Even the darkness that should have naturally lingered around corners rushed into those brothers, and the light which seeped through the boarded windows from the fires that approached the cabin threw strange illumination into that great room as the dead claimed all darkness.
Thaddeus Turner curled upon the flo
or. Shadow no longer concealed his deformity. Darkness no longer disguised the perversity his face had become. The last of his living sons looked away, and overcome by what they so recently witnessed, silently revolved around their brother's bodies in a slumping, counterclockwise orbit.
Maggie did not turn away from her father. She had never been afforded the opportunity to look away from deformity.
“Bring me a blanket, Maggie,” whispered Thaddeus as his eyes considered his daughter's face in the strange light flickering in a room drained of shadow. He could not deny hers was an ugly face, but the bone-shaker was glad to gaze into Maggie's pink, albino eyes. Each blemish of Thaddeus's deformity represented a choice, a sacrifice, made for his pursuit of power. Maggie had chosen none of her aspects others considered terrible. Maggie's deformity was her birthright. Her deformity promised so much power. “Bring my something to cover my face. The firelight pains my sight.”
“The fires are right outside our door,” Maggie spoke as she wrapped a heavy curtain around her father. Smoke drifted through the boarded windows. “We will have to face them soon.”
Thaddues nodded. “Less time than you know. We must not be in this room when your brothers rise. Gather my lamp, Maggie. Its flame will shroud us from the dead we have summoned. Come my sons. Do not so fear your father's face. Carry me into my sanctum. We will wait there as your brothers rise, protected by my door's thick bolt and my lantern's flame.”
The Turners felt the heat of the outside fires. They heard the voices of the Harlington men who circled outside their cabin. They heard the braying of horses and the cracking of flame.
Robert, Grant and Glen lifted their father from the floor and carried him towards his sanctum. Upon the great room's tables, the heads of the dead fought to lift themselves as the shadows that called them again to life coursed through their remains.
Maggie paused and looked back. Tears glistened in her pink eyes “Can I say farewell to my brothers? I was not given the chance to say a proper goodbye before they were murdered.”
Thaddeus reached out to Maggie with one of his unnaturally long arms. Maggie did not flinch nor shudder as her father's swollen hand, with its fingers of bulbous knuckles, rested upon her shoulder. “We cannot Maggie. They would not understand what you would say, just as we would not understand them. The language of the dead is lost to us. The dead will anger when you fail to understand what they have to tell you. They will rage when you cannot understand the secrets of the other side they will try to communicate. They will shriek as the words you will try to give them turn alien in their ears. Now you know why I have devoted so much to bridge that chasm that separates the language of the living from the language of the dead.”
Thaddeus sighed. “They would kill us in their anger, Maggie. They are no longer the brothers you once knew. Ours is the cruelest kind of magic.”
Maggie nodded and wiped the tears from her eyes as she followed her father into his sanctum. Every magic cast demanded an awful sacrifice. Maggie did not doubt her father's warning as she watched her brothers lower the bolt and set their father's desk against the door.
She knew the dead would have their revenge.
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