The River of Souls

The moon had risen. It was a lunatic’s laugh short of being full, and it shone ghostly white upon the unquiet waters of the River of Souls.

In their boat, Matthew sat at the bow and held the torch aloft as Magnus manned the oars. They had left the wharf at the Green Sea Plantation a half-hour ago, and now followed the river’s sinuous curves between the swampy wilderness on either side. They followed also what appeared to Matthew to be a floating carnival. Ahead of them were a dozen rowboats and canoes and more than a dozen other torches and lanterns lighting up the river. The boats held two, three, or four men, and some looked to Matthew’s eye to be about to tip their passengers into the drink.

And strong drink there seemed to be, as well, for from this throng occasionally arose rude shouts and field hollers and bawdy songs born from the jugs that passed along. Looking back, Matthew saw a score of other torch-lit boats following. In the sodden, steamy air there was a cruelly festive mood and perhaps a mood of desperation too, for Matthew reasoned that many of the men on this hunt were hungry to get their hands on as much Kincannon money as a dead slave would buy them. The boats wandered from one side of the river to the other, the torches seeking an empty boat that Abram, Mars and Tobey would have abandoned to start cross-country, but yet no such boat or signs of a craft being dragged out could be ascertained. So the carnival wound on with the river, and under the lunatic’s moon the brash singing of foolish men drifted out upon the thick green swamp. Swords caught firelight and threw it like a flurry of red sparks. A gunshot far ahead caused the merriment to go grim and silent, until the shouting passed back Nothin’ there, gents, nothin’ there, ol’ Foxworth is seein’ hain’ts in the dark.

“All right?” Matthew asked Muldoon, who labored steadily upon the oars and had not spoken since leaving the wharf.

Magnus gave a low grunt, which served as his yes. Then, to Matthew’s surprise, the black-bearded mountain paused in his rowing and shouted toward the boats ahead, “Royce and Gunn! You within my voice?”

In another moment someone called back, “Not up here!” Matthew heard a distant fiddle start scratching out a lively tune, one of the occupants of the boats having brought his cat-wailer. Magnus began rowing again. They were catching up to a group of three boats that seemed to be travelling together, the twelve men in them throwing jugs back and forth, laughing at rough jokes about the ‘skins’ and acting in general as if this were the grandest adventure to ever lift them off their porch chairs. There was a little too much waving about of muskets and pistols for Matthew’s taste. He thought the item of the Kincannons’ tragedy was much forgotten already, and this was turning into a night of rum-fuelled sport.

There came a commotion ahead, some of the men hollering and pointing at the water. One of them hit at something with an oar, and another slashed downward with his sword. The water thrashed and churned, and then Matthew saw the dark mass of an alligator pass by their boat, having survived the oar and blade. It began to submerge itself and with a haughty flick of its thick tail the creature left the world of men for its own domain.

Matthew thought of a warning Granny Pegg had given them before they’d left the wharf: If you fall into the water, get out quick. He understood why, for now torchlight revealed the red glare of alligator eyes watching the procession of boats, and the scaly black bodies of the reptiles gliding back and forth between the vessels as if taunting the passengers. Singing quietened and jocularity ceased, in the presence of these river monsters.

Magnus rowed on, undaunted. He kept a steady pace, his eyes fixed ahead, past Matthew and the torch. He was, as Matthew had been today, a man with a purpose, and Matthew thought that part of Muldoon’s quest was an effort to cleanse his soul of three killings under the sight of God.

“You want to watch the river,” Granny Pegg had said, as they waited at the wharf for Mrs. Kincannon to bring what they’d asked. “It’s wicked. It’ll steal from you in a short minute, if you don’t watch it.”

“It’s a river,” Matthew had answered. “No more and no less.”

“Oh, no, suh.” The old woman’s thin smile was nearly ghastly. “It’s been cursed, as all the swamp and woods around it has been cursed, once you get up past Rotbottom.”

“Rotbottom? What is that?” Matthew asked.

“The last town you’ll find. Hardly a town, not even so big as Jubilee. They live off the swamp. Take their ’gator hides into Charles Town to sell ’em. I’se seen their boats passin’ by, time to time.”

“You told Dr. Stevenson about the witch’s son being drowned, and the supposed curse,” Matthew reminded her. “I can appreciate such tales for a midnight’s telling, but there are no such things as witches and curses.”

“I’ve heard some of this,” Magnus said, as he leaned against a piling. The water lapped at the pier and frogs croaked by the dozen in the wet swampgrass. “Don’t believe none of it.”

“I didn’t conjure it,” Granny Pegg replied. “Heard it from an Indian woman elder than me, used to be the cook in the big house. She passed on last year. She come from Rotbottom, been married to a man up there a’fore a ’gator got him by the legs and dragged him down. She knew the tale, right well.”

“It’s nonsense,” said Matthew, watching a pair of torchlit canoes being rowed upriver from the direction of Jubilee. He was, as he knew Magnus to be, in a hurry to get started but there was no going anywhere without weapons.

“I will tell you,” the old woman said, standing before him under the sky full of stars and the slowly rising moon, “what I told my Mars, Abram and Tobey. How to stay alive up there, once you get to the cursed land. I told ’em, keep goin’ past Rotbottom. Stay quiet and don’t show no light. Indians up in there’ll come to the river if they hear a commotion. They’re dangerous, and you don’t want to call their attention. I say keep goin’ another few turns of the river. Find a place where you can pull the boat out and drag it into the brush. Then get movin’ fast and quiet, but keep your knives ready.”

“They have knives?” Magnus’ eyebrows went up. “Thought that was against the law.”

“Was and is. But Titus had one hid away, and so did Ash and Jacob. They give up their blades to their fellows. My boys took a leather bag full of whatever food was offered ’em, and I tell ’em to get to a boat and start rowin’, ’cause ain’t nobody gonna be listenin’ to Abram’s story when Miss Sarah is lyin’ dead and Cap’n Gunn swearin’ to his lies.”

“Did Abram have a chance to tell you what happened?” Matthew asked.

“He did. I knew it to be a regular thing, Miss Sarah leavin’ the barn first with her book and lantern. He was supposed to wait a few minutes. Then when he come out and around the barn, he said he near stepped on her. Knelt down beside her and called her name but she wasn’t movin’. Didn’t want to say this before Mizz Kincannon, but Abram tell me the knife was planted in her back. He pulled it out, said his heart was near to bust through his chest. Then all of a sudden he heard Cap’n Royce holler, ‘Killer!’, right close, and Abram looked up and saw him comin’, with a lantern in his hand. Abram dropped that knife and took to runnin’. Said he could hardly think, his head was so full of the sight of Miss Sarah lyin’ there all bloody and still as death.”

“So Gunn wasn’t even there, according to Abram?”

“Not there, as far as he knows. Couldn’t say that before, in front of Cap’n Gunn.”

“I’m guessing,” Matthew said, “that Royce did this deed in a fit of passion, or jealousy. Then he went to alert Gunn, and get him to concoct the tale. Probably he needed to clean blood off himself too. The bloody clothes might still be in his house, it would be worth a search. I would imagine he and Gunn have between them a score of incidents they would rather not come to light.”

“Find out when we catch ’em,” Magnus rumbled, his flinty eyes following another boat being rowed upriver.

“Things to ’member,” said Granny Pegg. “Keep your boat in the middle of the river. If you fall into the water, get out quick. Stay quiet goin’ up, quiet as you can be. If you needs go cross-country, watch where you step for suckholes and quicksand. Snakes aplenty up in there, and poisonous as Satan’s spit. And Old Cara told me this…if you hear a baby cryin’, keep goin’. Don’t try to find it…just keep goin’, ’cause that’s a spirit you don’t want to see.”

“Pah!” said Magnus. “Don’t believe in that, neither!”

“Just mind what I say,” the old woman insisted, and quite suddenly Matthew felt less of a champion for justice and more of a magistrate’s clerk who found himself about to get into water over his head.

Mrs. Kincannon and the young black girl who’d answered Muldoon’s knock on the door of the big house had arrived, the lady of the plantation grim-faced and beyond tears now, carrying a lighted torch and a leather bag that Matthew assumed contained food for a prolonged journey. The house servant carried a musket, a deerskin bag that likely held the tinderbox, powder and other arrangements for firing of the weapon, and a short-bladed cutlass. Magnus took the musket and both of the bags, while Matthew took charge of the torch and the cutlass. Within the boathouse, two rowboats were roped to the pier, and a pair of ropes trailed into the water where two other boats had been moored. One boat for the slaves, Matthew thought, and one boat for the hunters.

It was time to go. Matthew took his place at the bow of one of the remaining boats. Magnus untied it and climbed in, then fixed the oars in their locks. “Good luck to you,” said Mrs. Kincannon, “and I pray to Heaven you are able to do the right thing.”

“Watch the river, gen’l’men,” Granny Pegg offered as Magnus pushed the boat away from the pier with a large, black-booted foot. “God be with you.”

Matthew nodded his thanks. Magnus rowed them toward the middle of the river, and they were off upon its course. They rounded a bend where the grass waved in the water like the green hair of half-submerged nymphs. When Matthew looked back again he saw only star-strewn sky and dark river but for a few torches and lanterns gleaming in the distance.

Soon they had caught up to the floating carnival, and then the territory of reptiles. Matthew uneasily watched the passage of the creatures and saw their eyes glinting red in the rushes. One that glided by on the left side brought renewed agitation and hollering from the men just ahead, and when Matthew saw its scarred black body he thought it had to be as long as their boat. He caught sight of a hideous-looking snout and sunken eyes from a madman’s nightmare, and why he in that moment thought particularly of Lord Cornbury, Governor of the colony of New York and cousin to Queen Anne herself, he did not know.

He looked back over his shoulder and said to Magnus, “I don’t believe in curses. Or witches, either.”

Magnus said nothing, but kept steadily rowing. They were almost upon the three boats ahead.

“I once had reason to be involved with the case of a supposed witch,” Matthew went on. “It was the work of a human being…however evil, but human work.”

“Hm,” was Magnus’ reply.

“Civilized men don’t believe in such things.” Matthew realized he was beginning to sound a little edgy for reassurance in this statement. “Because…they don’t exist.”

He turned away from Magnus to focus on their progress, and that was when he saw one of the men in the boat ahead and to their left miss the toss of a liquor jug from one end of the craft to the other. It splashed into the water, and another of the men shouted, “Jackson, you fool! Don’t let that get away!”

The hapless Jackson, a wide-bodied man wearing a battered straw hat and trousers with patches on the knees, seemed already dazed by his drinking. He leaned over the stern and reached long for the jug, which was yet corked and floating. Jackson’s fingers closed around the handle. Just that quickly, the river struck.

A massive black snout dappled with knotty gray growths rose from the water. A pair of jaws clamped their teeth upon Jackson’s wrist. He gave a scream and, trying to pull free, reached to grasp the arm of the man nearest him, who a minute ago had been boisterous and heavy-voiced but now shrieked nearly in falsetto like a terrified woman. Then the alligator, a true leviathan, abruptly submerged with a twist of its body and slap of its tail. Jackson went over the stern and down under the water just a few feet away from Matthew, the straw hat spinning away. The second man pulled free but in so doing upset his own equilibrium and fell backward over the boat’s starboard side. The boat rocked violently as the two men left in it struggled to keep their balance and not be thrown out.

Matthew saw more of the reptiles gliding in. The shouting of the other men in the surrounding boats had become hoarse and panicked. Someone in another craft fired a pistol shot that plumed blue smoke and did not hit an alligator but instead chopped a chunk of wood off the port side of the boat that was now missing half its passengers. The water churned and frothed. Before Matthew surfaced a distorted and agonized face that tried to gulp for air in the turbulent foam but was dragged down again with its mouth full of Solstice River.

The second man had come up and was trying desperately to climb back into the boat, making it rock even more precariously. “Help me, Briggs!” he pleaded, as he tried to haul himself over. “Help me, Briggs!”

But Briggs was evidently too busy trying to keep himself from going into the wicked drink, for no hand or help was offered, and suddenly the pleading man’s voice was broken by a scream for he was being dragged down yet would not let go his grip. Alligators slid past on all sides and in between the boats like ships made of ugly iron. Magnus had ceased his rowing forward and was in fact rapidly backing them in an attempt to give distance between their craft and the boat in danger of capsizing. Perhaps Briggs was the one who did it, but Matthew witnessed one of the men there strike a blow for survival by slamming an oar across the top of his supposed friend’s skull, which caused the fingers to immediately loosen and the body to be jerked down into the River of Souls as quick as one might say ‘Dick Tuck.’

Though the water still thrashed with the activity of the reptiles, the second man did not rise from the depths again. The afflicted boat began to calm itself. Perhaps—or not—it was friend Briggs who gripped the oar, and who shouted into the descended silence, “I had to do it! He was already gone! I had to do it, or it would’a been the both of us too!” He looked around, his shoulders hunched as if for a whipstrike but his florid thin-nosed face crimped with anger. “You would’a done it! Every damned one of you!”

No one answered. Matthew had a reply in mind—it seems not all the reptiles here are in the water—but didn’t know how the Jubilee men with firearms would take such a comment from a stranger. His heart pounded and his throat was dry, though here was surely not the place to cup a drink.

“I didn’t kill him!” Briggs shouted to the world. “The ’gator took him, not me!”

A point to ponder, Matthew thought…but he had no time for that, for suddenly Jackson fought up from the river and grasped hold with his remaining hand upon the bow of Matthew’s boat.

The contorted face was smeared dark with ’gator slime. One eyebrow twitched. The eyes were bright with near-madness. “Pull me up!” he gasped. “God’s sake, pull me up!” The other arm rose up, and upon it the mangled stub of the crushed and bloody hand scrabbled to gain a grip. Matthew saw three or four alligators speeding toward the unfortunate victim. The reptiles struck one after another into the man’s submerged legs. Jackson grunted with each impact, his body shook violently and yet his anguished eyes still looked to Matthew for some hope of climbing out of his fate. Matthew reached down to grasp the man’s shirt. Before he could catch hold of it the free hand clamped onto his forearm and began to pull him over the side with frantic strength even as Matthew realized he was himself in danger and began to resist. Magnus threw aside the oars and reached for Matthew, but in the next instant…

…a bass-toned musket shot boomed. The top of Jackson’s gray-haired head exploded from the force of the ball. Blood and brains flew into the air and spattered Matthew’s shirt and face. Then Matthew pulled free, and the grimacing corpse slid back into the turbulence. The alligators hissed and snapped among each other as they sank their teeth into the flesh and rolled themselves over and over down into the murky depths.

It took Matthew a few seconds to comprehend what had just happened. He was standing in the bow holding his torch with Jackson’s brains and blood upon his face. He looked dazedly around and saw a rowboat with three men aboard coming up from behind and to the left. A pair of lanterns hung from hooks at the bow. Standing up in the bow and holding a smoking musket was Sir Raven’s Feather, the lean, rawboned man wearing the floppy-brimmed hat with the raven’s feather in the hatband whom Matthew had seen at the general store in Jubilee.

Matthew managed to get his tongue working. His face flamed under its anointment of gory matter. “Are you insane? I could’ve helped him!”

“No,” came the gravel-voiced reply, as hard as the heart of a stone. “Jackson was done. I saved your life, boy. Would’ve pulled you in with him.”

“I say I could’ve pulled him up!”

“Say what you please, but his widow’ll thank me for not sendin’ him home to her in a basket.” The man sat down in the boat and, placing the musket across his legs, began to reload the weapon from his alligator-skin ammunition bag. “Muldoon, you carryin’ a damn fool as a torchboy?”

Magnus made no comment. He took his seat and the oars and continued to row steadily forward.

It occurred to Matthew that not only had he witnessed a murder, but he’d been directly in the line of fire. “I nearly had him!” he protested, though his voice was getting weak.

“No. He nearly had you.”

“Sit down, Matthew,” Magnus said quietly. “Let it go.”

Magnus’ tone of voice was final. The boat carrying Sir Raven’s Feather slipped past, its rower a broad-shouldered man with a long brown beard and wearing a sweat-soaked gray shirt, his muscular arms working the oars like a machine. At the stern sat a third gent as straight-backed as a Sabbath preacher. He was also holding a musket. He wore a black tricorn hat and a black suit and he had a sharp-nosed, gaunt face as forbidding as three miles of bad road. The boat moved on past the area of troubled waters. Matthew sat down. His first instinct was to scoop up a handful of water to cleanse his face, but he noted that alligators were still gliding back and forth and so he decided to keep his hand out of the river.

“I could’ve pulled him up,” Matthew said in another moment. The smell of blood was drawing a swarm of insects around his face. “I could have.”

“Stamper put Jackson out of his misery and saved your hide too. So just let it go.”

“Jubilee isn’t a town that breeds a lot of brotherhood, I see,” Matthew said bitterly.

“It’s common sense,” said Magnus. “Man falls in the water and gets tore up by ’gators ain’t gonna be worth much no more, even if he survives it. So…the lesson is…don’t fall in the water with ’gators. And don’t put your hand in there like you’re wantin’ to, neither. You can clean up later.”

Matthew had no intention of moving himself from his present position. He swung the torch from side to side, inflaming the red eyes of a score of reptiles that still waited in the shallows of the River of Souls for more unfortunate victims. When Matthew had regained his senses and wits, he asked, “Who was that…the man with the raven’s feather…who?”

“The big man in Jubilee. Owns the general store. Name of Baltazar Stamper. Man rowin’ is Caleb Bovie, works for Stamper. Fella in black is Jubilee’s preacher, Seth Lott.”

So even the town’s holy man was out here after his share of blood money, Matthew thought. And it seemed to him, after witnessing Jackson’s head be blown open and friend Briggs send his companion to the alligators by way of an oar across the skull, that perhaps life had become cheap on the River of Souls, and that there were some out here—possibly many—who would gladly commit a ‘mercy killing’ if it meant removing the competition for the fortune of thirty pounds of gold.

He had to wonder if the muskets and swords might start finding other ways to cut down the competition, if this hunt went on for any length.

Perhaps Magnus Muldoon had the same thought at the same time, for he let the boat drift and hollered upriver with the full force of his mighty lungs, “Griffin Royce and Joel Gunn! You up there?”

This time no one amid the forward rowboats and canoes answered.

“Shall I row?” Matthew offered.

“I’ll get us where we’re goin’ faster,” said Magnus, as he took a moment to stretch his arms out, twist his head from side to side and then stretch his back. He took up the oars again and powered the boat onward.

Matthew had no idea of the time. The sky was still inky black, the moon still high. Huge willow trees met overhead and their branches hung over the river. The noise of men had quietened in the aftermath of violence. The chirrups and croaks and chitters of the swamp’s thousand-and-one creatures held sway. Matthew had the sense of a monstrous presence out there amid the wilderness, beyond the range of his torch. It was not one monster but many, waiting tensed in the dark to spring forth. It was the swamp itself, he thought. It was the alligators, the sinkholes, the quicksand, the snakes, and…what else?

It was Griffin Royce and Joel Gunn, somewhere far ahead, searching for the three runaways in order to silence the truth. It was men like Briggs, and Baltazar Stamper, Caleb Bovie and Seth Lott, hungry for money and ready—perhaps eager—to kill for it. It was a whole mob of desperate men from Jubilee, drunk on liquor and the thought of bringing back a pair of slave’s ears for a sum that might lift them up from the impoverished dust.

Matthew realized he had one hand upholding the torch and the other hand on the grip of his cutlass. The insects swarmed around his face, darting and biting. He knew that in spite of his best intentions he had nearly lost his balance and gone into the river with Jackson. So…it was true that a musket ball had saved his life this night, even though a murder—two of them, in fact—had been committed in front of his eyes. He wished for the comfort of his little dairyhouse, and with it the familiar town of New York with all its traffic and horse figs and complications and…yes…even the cold winds that swept his way from Berry Grigsby.

A disturbing thought came to him, though he had no use for tales of witches and curses.

I will not leave this river the same.

Well…who would? Already the deaths had begun. But Matthew had this feeling deep in his soul, and he could not shake it.

I will not leave this river the same.

He had a feeling of intense dread that surpassed even his experiences with Professor Fell. It lasted only briefly, but it was enough to give him a chill shiver on this steamy, sullen night. He gripped the cutlass harder. Little good that might do, but it was something.

And now onward…onward…following the quietened flotilla of torch-and-lamplit vessels, following the grim blood-hungry men with pistols and muskets and blades, following the twisting course of the Solstice River into the witch-cursed country, and Matthew Corbett with damp brains and blood upon his face, and carrying deep within himself a primal fear for the sanctity and survival of his soul.