Beneath Ceaseless Skies #215 Read online

  Issue #215 • Dec. 22, 2016

  “Where She Went,” by Linden A. Lewis

  “The True and Otherworldly Origins of the Name ‘Calamity Jane’,” by Jordan Kurella

  For more stories and Audio Fiction Podcasts, visit

  http://beneath-ceaseless-skies.com/

  WHERE SHE WENT

  by Linden A. Lewis

  The morning Ama wasn’t in her bed, Rhee strapped on his gun belt and set out along the witch river. The sky hung dark with magic-summoned clouds, promising rain from the direction of the witch’s cottage nestled in the heart of the obelisk forest. And for the first time in his long life, Rhee walked towards the towering obelisks, a hundred feet tall and thick as two men, spurs singing in the desert sand, his wide-brimmed hat pulled low over his brow and one hand poised above his revolver.

  It wasn’t like Ama not to come home for the night. Sure, she was as headstrong as Rhee’s wife—God rest her soul—and she could take care of herself. But she was thoughtful enough not to make Rhee worry and had a kindness that had also bloomed in her momma, a foreign flower in the harsh soil of the desert. Rhee hadn’t been surprised when Ama’s mother, his only daughter, had taken off swearing she was going to more beautiful places than Twopenny Falls, but he had been surprised when she left her baby behind. So Rhee had done the only decent thing and taken in his granddaughter Ama, who was far more like Rhee than she had any right to be.

  Like Rhee, Ama was just another cactus in the sand. She belonged.

  He could close his eyes and picture her in the lazy afternoons, running off into the desert with her arms flung wide. She’d watch the sand blow over the plains or the rain clouds roll in from the obelisk forest. She’d scream with the lightning, her voice echoing like thunder in its wake. She’d take her journal and sketch the delicate petals of the fairy dusters and the hard, shiny shells of scorpions with an artistic eye she sure hadn’t inherited from Rhee. She could see things he missed in the play of dark and light, in the way the obelisk forest cast claws of shadows over anyone who dared venture close enough.

  But at the end of her daily wanderings, Ama always came home and curled up in her bunk beneath her granny’s quilt. It wasn’t like her to stay out when the howls of the coyotes haunted the sands. It wasn’t like her to make Rhee hunt her down.

  Rhee swallowed some cold water from the witch river to put out the fire of worry in his gut. Walking was thirsty work for a man in the desert, and he didn’t have a horse anymore. His workhorse had died a couple weeks before, and he had yet to scrape the money together to buy another. Ama had built a cairn of stones on the horse’s grave in what she called her garden, but that was little more than sage bushes clumped together. Rhee loved her too much to tell her the garden was mostly weeds.

  Rhee’s knees and lower back were burning like the midday sands by the time he finished the five mile walk to Tanner’s land—a task that took all of the morning. Tanner, the only man who had ever seen the witch with his own two eyes, lived on the edge of the obelisk forest like a fool, his ranch squat against the looming stones. But Rhee kept his eyes off the forest of monsters and on his revolver.

  He only had three bullets.

  He counted himself lucky to have those three. Most shooters had moved to the newfangled energy pistols with automatic sights and lasers after Mad Tom had found them in what he called a broken metal caravan. Now there was pitiful little ammunition to be bought other than the energy blocks, and a farming man like Rhee didn’t have the coin for a new gun. And he sure didn’t trust them either. Old Johnny Whitetail had blown his damn hand off with one of those things, and Rhee wasn’t about to pinch pennies to buy himself one when he had better things to buy and a good gun of his own.

  If he was going to shoot a man, he’d do it full well with his own eyes and his own lead.

  The fire trickled from his veins to his back and knees as he walked, his body pinching and wrenching in ways it never had even a couple years ago. But leisure was a daydream. He had no time to rest his weary bones.

  Every moment he was away from Ama was a moment she grew closer to the witch.

  Tanner’s house, a ramshackle flat fallen into disrepair, looked abandoned when Rhee first approached. But he wasn’t fool enough to go in half-cocked; he kept his finger on the trigger, his hands as gnarled as tumbleweeds still steady after all these years. Back when everybody was still using revolvers in Twopenny Falls, Rhee shot bottles and targets at the saloon for bet money. It was his cunning eye and steady grip that had first won over the missus.

  He widened his stance in front of the battered wooden door. He cupped his hand around his mouth and shouted, “Tanner!” His voice echoed into the obelisks, catching and distorting until he sounded like a dozen different men all demanding the same thing. “Tanner, you come out here right now or I’ll blow your damn door down!”

  Nothing responded but the familiar whistle of the wind. He pointed the gun towards the door. “I’ll count to three, Tanner!” It was more warning than the man deserved. His rage eclipsed his fear; he let it fuel him.

  “One!” he started. “Two!”

  The door flew open, and Tanner, dirt-streaked face and tattered clothes, stumbled out with his hands up.

  The tightness in Rhee’s chest loosened, and he spat at Tanner’s feet. “Where’s Ama?”

  One of Tanner’s hands went to his bald head, rubbing like it was a genie’s lamp he could use to wish for more hair. “Now Rhee—”

  “You know me, Tanner.” He leveled the gun at Tanner’s chest. “So don’t test me. Where’s Ama?”

  “Keep a cool head about you, Rhee—”

  “Tanner—”

  “I’ll tell you where she is—just give me a moment.” Tanner stood rubbing, rubbing, rubbing his head. Rhee fought the urge to shoot his hand.

  “She in the house?” Rhee kept the gun leveled but took four wide steps until he had crossed the distance between them.

  Tanner finally stopped his rubbing and threw his arms out wide. “No, not there...”

  Rhee’s heart beat a frantic staccato in his chest. “You’re not filling me with any good feelings towards you, Tanner.”

  “You know the rules!”

  “I don’t care about the damn rules.”

  “But the witch needs her!”

  “Damn the witch!”

  Tanner flinched, raising his arms as if they’d protect him from a bullet. Spit flecked his lips when he spoke again, his eyes shiny with fear. “I’m sorry, Rhee... Ama was chosen. She’s Lamia’s replacement.”

  Rhee’s throat constricted, a lump forming that made it hard to talk. “And like a good little boy, you did what the witch said.”

  “I know, I know. But I had to. If we want the rain to come, if we want the river to fill with water, I had to take her.” Tanner’s voice was as soft as the wind, and Rhee knew the truth when he heard it. It didn’t make it any easier to hear. “After your wife and girl, I tried to talk Lamia out of it, but—”

  Rhee smashed the butt of the gun against Tanner’s cheek. Tanner dropped into the sand as Rhee let loose a storm of curses that would have set his daughter to blushing.

  “You already took her? She’s already there?”

  Tanner rolled in agony, sobbing into his hand, fingers speckled red.

  “I’m sorry, I’m sorry, I’m sorry—” Over and over Tanner muttered apologies, dirt sticking to the blood on his cheek.

  He was sorry. A sorry sack of shit. Rhee cursed again before holstering the gun.

  He only had three bullets. And if he was going into the obelisk forest after Ama, he would need every one.

  Even if Tanner deserved one
in the head.

  “Are you gonna go after her? In there?” Tanner’s face was swollen, his eye turning black with a bruise. “Lamia doesn’t allow anyone but me to enter—”

  Rhee clenched his steady, withered hands into fists and steeled his voice so it wouldn’t shake.

  “Yeah,” he said. “Yeah. I’m gonna get Ama back even if I have to kill the witch and damn the rains.”

  * * *

  The numbness started in his toes. He was well into the afternoon when he realized what it meant—that he couldn’t feel the pain anymore. Dead nerves. Or something worse. Some sort of permanent damage that didn’t heal in a place like Twopenny Falls.

  But he didn’t care. He didn’t stop walking. What would his legs matter if he lost Ama?

  Nothing.

  So he kept his hand on his gun and his eyes peeled for movement.

  There was only the sound of the river rushing and his spurs striking stone filled the air. Not a bird singing, not a rabbit rustling, not a coyote hunting.

  The witch river widened and dipped, but Rhee stuck close to its bank. Enough tall tales had come about the witch that lived upriver where she summoned the water that helped their town survive.

  The witch had taken the last little girl twelve years ago. Ama hadn’t been born yet, and his daughter was too old to be of interest to the witch. His soft flower of a girl had wept when she heard the news, while the missus had pressed her hands on her meaty hips and demanded Rhee go and fetch her back from the witch.

  “It’s not our business,” he had said.

  What a young fool.

  If he had done as his wife asked then, would he be traipsing through the woods over a decade later on aching legs and back?

  A hint of music hit him in the dead air, the first human sound he’d caught in this place other than his own breathing. The first sound that proved something existed out here with him.

  He licked his lips and stepped closer to the witch river. His hearing had been fading lately, but he knew he wasn’t mistaken in this.

  There—again—a voice in song.

  He opened his mouth to cry out, chose to swallow it instead. A fish’s tail flicked out of the river and then disappeared into the dark depths, leaving a shadow as big as he was.

  The faint singing started again, louder this time, and while Rhee couldn’t make out the words, he felt compelled towards them. Pulled, like the arm of a compass toward true North.

  A shadow swam closer, tail flicking above the water before the head rose with it. Slender arms braced against a rock, bare breasts heaved, and long, wet hair trailed after. At its waist, skin turned to shimmering scales and fins. Its dark eyes snapped to Rhee—and then he knew the legends were true.

  Siren.

  She opened her mouth—a wet, pink void filled with rows of needle-thin teeth—but before she could sing, he leveled the gun and fired. It took her in the chest with a hollow thud, and she slipped below the water as the other sirens farther down the river stiffened and turned his direction.

  Four left. Four sirens alive, and only two bullets. He clapped his hands over his ears and howled a sound, not quite a word, as the four darted for him, mouths open in snarls, voices stretching in song. Without moving his hands, he started to sing as well—far louder than even the roar of the river.

  “She shot for the sun,” Rhee sang, belting out the first song that came to his mind, a lullaby the missus had sung to his daughter when she was little, and then to Ama after his daughter was gone.

  Of all the songs, of all the tunes he knew, it was this one that he hated the most.

  All the sirens slipped beneath the water, but Rhee didn’t think them gone for a moment. “And the moons. Constellations beyond,” he sang.

  He forced his stiff legs to move, forced his eyes away from the sirens. His hands shook over his ears as he sang. “Even in her flight, the stars fell at her feet.”

  The sirens swam ahead of him, their mouths open with song. Competing with him for his attention. For control of his body.

  Over and over, Rhee sang the lullaby. For an hour? Two? He stumbled along the riverbank, aches echoing from his knees to his pelvis. He did not even stop to take a drink of water, though his lips cracked and voice shook, and he did not turn from the river, afraid to be lost in the forest of indistinct obelisks. The sirens took turns above the surface, waiting for him to falter. Waiting for his voice to go out. For his hands to drop from his ears.

  Waiting to cast their spell on him and devour him with their rows of sharp teeth.

  He gasped for air like a drowning man when all four of the sirens sank like stones. Still singing, still clasping, he turned as they fled back downriver, black shadows growing fainter with the roll of the river.

  A trick? A trap? But the river flowed spotless, not a siren to be seen.

  Rhee pulled his hands from his ears—and found nothing but the stillness.

  He collapsed to his knees and dropped his arms to his sides, muscles burning and trembling and twitching. He crawled to the edge of the river and drank deeply, shoving his face, gray beard and all, into the water’s edge. Cooling him, refreshing him, the water ran over his aching face and burning hands.

  That song—that silly, childhood song that he had never wanted to hear again—had saved him. He could still picture his wife singing to Ama, putting her to bed beneath the homespun quilt. He and his wife had clung to Ama. She was all they had left after their daughter. Ama was their light—until his hard old wife had crawled into bed beside him and whispered goodbye.

  “Don’t you mean goodnight?” he had asked.

  And she had just smiled and gone to sleep.

  Ama had raged and cried at her granny’s funeral even more than when her momma left. The night after, she said she’d never sleep again unless Rhee sang her the song.

  “Then I guess you won’t be sleeping,” Rhee had said.

  If he could go back... if he could do it all again...

  Ama. He’d find her and apologize to her. Ama, I’m so sorry.

  He’d save her.

  “Tell me, boy, what you’re doing in our forest.”

  Rhee stiffened at the voice, the rasp of a blade on leather. He had not been called a boy in a long time, and had not been so afraid in longer than that.

  But the voice did not take control of him, did not force him to turn. Not a siren then, but something no less dangerous if it lived in this forest. Something drawn to him from the noise of his gun, the strength of his singing. Something bad enough to scare the sirens away...

  “Face us,” another voice said, similar but still distinct from the first.

  He had heard the tales, but they were nothing... nothing when staring them down...

  God, what creatures have you wrought?

  It was a woman, yet not. Clawed feet gripped into the side of the obelisk, puncturing stone. Feathered arms curled to her drooping breasts protectively, each finger tipped with a talon. Her hair was black feathers, and her face ended with the point of a beak.

  But her eyes—God—her eyes were startlingly human.

  The harpy dropped to the ground like a feather on the wind. Another perched above her, and a third clung to another obelisk. When he did not stand, the first stepped towards him, powerful thighs rippling with coiled muscle.

  Had Ama seen such beasts? Had she been afraid?

  Had the witch created them?

  And a thought worse than all the rest—had they been human once?

  He swallowed bile.

  Her beak couldn’t smile, but her eyes could. “What are you, who comes here to our forest?”

  They watched him with curiosity, not malice. “I am Rhee, and I am here to find my granddaughter.”

  The three creatures chirped in something approximate to laughter. “There is only one man allowed to come and go in our forest—and he is not you. But you sand fleas, you desert worms, you do not come in and survive.”

  Even on his knees, he met the creature’s e
yes. “Then I will be the first.”

  The laughter again. The first hunched her back and bent her feathered knees to meet his gaze. “You do not know then, the purpose of my sisters?”

  Rhee moved his head, a muscle in his jaw twitching. “No.”

  “We protect Lamia. We eat men who think they will be the first to do what no one else has done.” She leaned towards him. The carrion smell of her breath raked over his cheek. “What do you think of that?”

  His stomach dropped. His chest clenched.

  They would not let him go after Ama. They would not let him live. He would survive the sirens only to be killed here, closer to the witch’s cabin where Tanner had taken his granddaughter. Ama would go on forever believing he had not come for her, that he had not tried to save her—

  No. Damn that.

  He still had his gun.

  Two bullets. Three harpies.

  Ama, his heart beat. For Ama.

  His forefinger found the trigger and his thumb cocked the hammer in the fluid movement of his drawing. His eyes never left the harpy’s—brown, deep brown like Ama’s—as he centered the gun between them.

  In the moment before he squeezed, the harpy’s eyes widened with an altogether human emotion.

  Fear.

  The gun went off with a blast. Rhee’s heart jumped as it did every time he shot, even after all these years. The harpy whirled away, blood splattering in an arc, her face a hole that erased every human aspect. He was standing before her body settled, cocked the gun again as an inhuman cry went up from the other two.

  One bullet left.

  Hissing and screeching. Feathers fluttered as they rushed him. The obelisks cast one into shadow, one into light.

  He shot again.

  It took one harpy in the fleshy arm, her wing bending as she swerved off-course.

  The other hit true, knocking him back in a tangle of claws and feathers. Sharp blades slipped into his shoulder, his chest, his knees—

  The river swallowed them.

  The claws found the flesh of his inner thigh and clung. He screamed beneath the water tinted pink with his blood, the harpy’s face distorted through the bubbles of his breath. He slammed his fist against her beak, but she did not break away.