Montressor

Chris Hill

Forty miles from Highpoint, past the Spine, up the edge of the Badlands. On a map, the old Goldrush Road looks nice, a little stripe of colour on the page. Not so nice in the real.

Flatland, but high up, meaning the sun can get good work on it. No creeks or rock tanks, no sir, not here. Huffing dust, so I’m glad of my beard. Gonna be a dry trek.

Lost sight of the rail tracks about half a mile back. No idea how I done it, but here I am, with nothing but cracked ground, scrub grass and cactuses. Might be a buzzard about, but I can’t see none.

Folks called me Clem, back in Highpoint. Clem Upstairs, that was me. Labourer, house builder, well digger, timber jack, roofer, all me. I go where the pay is. I go where the liquor’s sweet.

No place in Highpoint, no, not no more.

Clem Upstairs. S’not a bad name, but it’s not me now. Not sure who I’ll be next. Got time to think, though. Two days at least before I see my new home.

New Freiburg.

A place where a man can hide.

Old German settled there, back before the trouble started, then some mad lotta Dutch joined him, wanted a place away from the fighting. Back in Highpoint, I heard new settlers are heading that way. That means work.

Walk another hour. Hot air, thick in my throat. Canteen lighter with each sip. Water skin in my bag, but not yet, not ready to touch that. I’ve enough for three days. That’s all I should need.

Flies come to taste my sweat. I don’t bother swatting anymore.

My lucky day. The earth and scrub grass gets all pink with clay and chalk, and then opens up like a lady’s legs. The Long Crack. Me and my map thought I was too far west to hit it, but this, this is good. The Crack runs deep, a gully that ploughs into the heart of the Badlands, narrow at first, then wider in places.

Should be cooler, but it isn’t. That red clay and white chalk smear everything pink. The grasses and trees carve themselves little homes in small patches of black dirt. Snakes hunt rats in the holes in the walls, and thin rabbits burrow in scree.

Cold night that first night, no fire, just blankets and my pack to keep me.

Dawn makes the chalk and clay walls griddle-hot. Each step makes me dirtier, more of that dusty pink, so after my first hour of travel I’m covered, head to heel.

Didn’t expect it to be so long. Didn’t expect it to get so big. Could run from side to side if I had a mind to. Walls getting taller, or the floor getting lower.

Canteen getting empty.

I spy a buzzard sitting on the ruined branch of another Montressor tree. Had I the time I might cut that tree down—its trunk ain’t no thicker than my wrist—for an evening fire. But no. No time. Time is water here, time is sweat.

I keep on.

Walking down the Long Crack, my boots crushing chalk, the flies drinking down my sweat.

Midday.

Sun riding high.

Nothing moves in the heat. Not even the air.

Hot chalk on my sunburnt back, sucking up sweat. The price of shade.

Only a mouthful of water in the canteen. I refill it from the waterskin. Too much gone already. Must be slow with it.

Head hurts. Throat, dried by heat.

The walls here are high, sure can’t climb out.

I shake my head, trying to clear it.

Time to go, got to make up lost time. Time is water.

A stink. A stink, but where? Smells like, smells like, hell, I don’t know, something wrong, that’s for sure.

On my feet, I follow the path, and that smell gets worse as I go. Meat gone bad, that’s it. Meat spoiled, and fried by the sun.

Shouldn’t smell this bad? Shouldn’t, but does.

Round a rock corner, and now there’s a sound. No breeze, but I hear creaking. A shifting creak, like rope on wood, but it’s there and I can’t stop hearing it.

Then, so close as I could touch him, a man. He’s standing — no, he’s hanging — by the thinnest and most sickly-looking Montressor tree I’ve yet seen. Rope around his neck gone black. Sherriff’s manacles weigh down his hands. Bag over his face. Dark clothes. No boots. Feet all brittle and white, looking like bad cracked clay. I figure he’s my height, but the heat has shrunk him some. Death shrinks all men, somehow.

Wallace looked smaller afterward after he had made that one-way trip up the scaffold.

He’s a gentle pendulum on his rope, and I got no idea what pushed him, or how the skinny tree holds him up on so thin a branch.

He’s blocking me, hanging a foot over the path’s narrow point. The scree on the left is tall, and unstable as I’ve ever seen. The right is just pink rock, all to the top.

Cut him down?

Seems the Christian thing, take this nameless man and place him in the ground, say some words for his soul.

But…

I have time to keep, and time is water. Who will know he’s here, but me? Who can say that I didn’t do the right thing, if they ain’t here?

The smell covers my tongue, soaking in. I go around him one handed, the other clamped on my mouth, balance all the poorer for it. When I get past, I can breathe freer. One look back shows my passage has turned him, although I took all the efforts not to touch. Now he faces me again, expression hidden beneath the bag.

Not fear, but common sense, quicken my steps. Time is water, and I’ve got none for him.

Night camp under a rock. Blanket and beans. Little fire against the cold dark. No night sounds, but I ain’t listening for anything. When the fire speaks, I look outwards, away from its light, peering into the shadows.

My canteen is light. Lighter than it oughta’. Not drunk that much, surely?

No!

No!

How did this happen?

Canteen’s got a hole. A gash in its neck, opened by God-Knows-What, as surely as if an animal had worried at my throat.

Useless.

Ruined!

The water skin in my pack is still strong, though. Waxed leather and cloth, with a cork bug, three-quarters full. I’m safe, for now.

In the morning, I don’t piss right, and it stings when it finally comes out, like all I’ve got in me is vinegar.

Midmorning, and I’ve found a pair of short cactuses, each spined with cat-hair quills. Knife makes easy work of them, and the water within is mine. Bitter taste, and I swallow some quills.

The day goes on.

Sharp pain in my gut. Colour swirls where it don’t normally. Sweat rolls like bad oil from my back. I stop for a long, tormented, gravely piss.

The Crack bends. Hot walls corral me into a dip, the dark patches on the floor telling me it might’ve been wet here once. Had I the right tools then I could dig for water. Scrabbling in the dirt with my hands would waste time, and I got no time to waste. Time is water.

Sun is hot. So hot my bones creak.

Mouth dry, and some taste has come into it, a taste like something spoiled. I can taste it all throughout my mouth, as if my own spit rotted on my gums. The taste goes up my nose, giving the hot air a reek.

Something grey twists out of the earth just before my exhausted feet, and I stop, else I’m tripped.

A root.

I follow the shapes made by it in the dirt, eventually seeing the trunk rising high from the tree’s place on the Crack’s wall.

The reek is strong here.

Feet there, dangling above the ground, high up. Mottled black and white, dusty cracks, and misplaced bones. Desert dry.

The hanged man. The same irons drag his hands, the same bag, worn and old, the same dark clothes.

It can’t be. But it is.

I try to tell him, tell him I know I should've taken him down, said good Christian words for him, should’ve spared him from his fate atop the tree. But I got no words, and my feet carry me away, deeper into the heat.

I know he looks at me, I know he watches all the way down the trail, up high like that, he can see me run for miles. I don’t look back, but I know it. Under that bag, who’s really there? Whose face would I see?

My misplaced steps find a rock that my eyes don’t, and I tumble, roll across scree, bang my head against chalk walls. Something black and coiling strikes from the grasses, and as I arrest my fall, I see the arrowhead of a tiny black snake clinging to my shin. I rip it away, surge up and run for untold hours, ‘till I got no running left in me.

The night that falls is colder than all others.

I got no fire.

I barely got breath.

Up against the cooling chalk, bad angle, I curl up, sucking the poison from my leg, blood coming out in a salty rush. I can’t stop from drinking it. Too weak to care. Waterskin low, have to clean the wound, have to drink.

Waterskin half empty.

Sleep. Dreams of Highpoint. Wallace and his dog. Wallace on the gallows. Wallace turning to look at me, him roped on the scaffold, me on the ground, our places unlawfully switched. Wallace looking down at me, knowing what I done. Wallace, pointing his manacled hands, shouting through the canvas they placed on his head.

No!

The sunrise finds me shivering, mouth filled with cracks.

I look at my leg, at the unhealed wound on my calf. It bubbles like fat in a pan. I fancy something rolls in the wound, an unknown organ quivering in its labours.

Swallow water. Water is time.

Keep going.

Must find… must find the… place that I’m going.

Sun on my back.

Sun so hot, all the light seems to go dark. It can’t be. But it is.

Is he here, watching me? Is it Wallace under that bag?

I try licking up my own sweat, but it makes me wretch, and the flies make a sticky home on my tongue, stealing spit. The snake bite throbs red and purple and black. I can see it even when I close my eyes.

Walk.

Make it to… 

Make it out of here.

Dusk arrives, can’t say where from. Compass spins in its case, never fixed, never tranquil.

Have to drop my stuff. Weighs me down. The spinning, throbbing wheel on my leg, open like an eye, can’t take it.

Boots fill with dust. They go too.

Just me and my waterskin, getting smaller, shrinking.

More cactuses, their bitter water giving me life enough to manage a small, lumpy piss, but only just. Cry as I do it, the pain moving from my belly to member, sharp, and promising blood.

Shouldn’t rest. Get outta here. If I can’t…

Me next? Another body hanging on the tree? Is that how the hanged man came to be? Was he strung up by some evil ghost, some man he wronged, so as his skin could crisp and crack in the sun forever?

Evening don’t bring cool, and heat wraps me up, swallowing me. Breath crushed out, dry air in my lungs, unbearable heat. My feet bleed on the scorched chalk, and a red-black smear follows me everywhere.

Rope rubs on wood, and I smell him.

Wallace smelled a mite like that, that death smell, when they cut him down.

I look up, the night finding me with neither food nor fire, just shivering beneath a stone. There he is, the hanged man, on his tree. Black, silhouetted by stars, and I can feel all creation turn as I look up at the sway of the rope.

Sick, I stand, and faint, I move. Blunder down the Crack, running as only a man with an open eye in his leg can.

Fall down. The purple-black flesh of my leg stretches and becomes a mouth, red tongue moving over new lips. When I stand, I gotta, I look back to find the hanged man.

But he’s gone. The Montressor tree, alone, stands upon the ridge, cursed to watch, its rope ready for me.

Feet misplacing on the path. Are they mine? Or is that staggering coming from a foot baked brittle by the sun? Scrub grass hoists and jerks, kicked aside. By me? Run, run and don’t ask, just run!

My new mouth opens with wet laughter, giving him a sound to follow. Panting, hot, but dead, the sound of lungs being crushed by the weight of bricks. My chest… my chest… chest…

Rocks skitter, slide and collapse. The night spins, the stars spiral. The mouth on my leg opens up, becomes a stomach, fills itself full to bursting with black dirt, red clay and white chalk, then ruptures, spilling itself out.

Can’t do nothing but watch and feel myself fall down, over and over again.

Slam into hard ground.

Lay in the pain.

Lay in the pain for…I don’t know how long. I’m at the bottom of a scree spill. He’s coming for me, Wallace, the Hanged Man, he’s coming! Up, up, get up, you bastard!

The Crack’s walls are… they’re not there.

With strength only enough to quiver, my arms and back bring me to a sitting position. Chest tight, I stand, at last at the end of the Long Crack, amidst the stone river of a scree slope. Beyond are the lights of New Freiburg and the Dutch colony.

Above, the wind not carrying the rope’s creak, a man hangs from a Montressor tree. The light is poor. I do not see him raise his arms, heavy with irons, and point a finger at me. I don’t see it! I don’t!