Wounds by Nathan Ballingrud

Author:Nathan Ballingrud
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Gallery / Saga Press

The Butcher’s Table

1. Devils by Firelight

The Englishman stood on the beach, just beyond the reach of the surf, and stared out over the flat, dark plain of the Caribbean. A briny stink filled his nostrils. Palm trees heaved in the night wind. Overhead, a heavy layer of stars, like a crust of salt on Heaven’s hull. At his back, the small port town of Cordova gabbled excitedly to itself: fiddles and croaking voices raised in raucous song, like a chorus of crows; the calling and the crying of women and men; laughter and screams and the rumble of traded stories. It sounded like life, he supposed. No wonder it made him sick.

Martin Dunwood was very far from home.

Approaching from behind came a heavy expenditure of breath, feet shuffling in sand; he turned to see a shape lurching from town: a small man, fat and stumbling, a rag-wrapped something clutched in his left hand. The smell of rum blew from him like a wind.

“Mr. Dunwood,” said Fat Gully. “What’re you doing. . . .” His words trailed off as he caught his breath.

“I’m taking some air,” said Martin. “Please go away.”

“No you don’t,” Gully said, his words sliding together and colliding. “No you fucking don’t.”

Martin controlled his voice. “No I don’t what.”

Fat Gully meant to muscle up to him with his broad chest, but he miscalculated his footing and toppled back onto his posterior, air exploding from his lungs like a cannonball. His dignity, however, remained undamaged. He gestured with whatever item he held in his left hand, which Martin noticed was caked in dark blood. “No you don’t take on no highborn airs with me, you fancy bastard. I’ll peel you standing, fat purse or fucking not.”

Martin wore his rapier, but he had seen Gully and his wicked little knife in action as recently as this afternoon, when they had been surrounded by four shipless sailors, attracted by Martin’s moneyed appearance and anxious to settle the question of his worth. Fat Gully had acted suddenly, with a grace utterly at odds to his toadlike aspect; before a breath could be drawn, two of the men were attempting to keep their innards from sliding through their fingers and onto the filthy street. Martin was not eager to test him, even in his drunken state. Instead he turned his gaze to the gory rag in Gully’s hand, leaking a thin black drizzle onto the sand. “What in God’s name do you have there?”

Gully smiled and climbed slowly to his feet. The lights of the town cast him in shadow as he extended his arm and opened his hand. He looked like an emissary from an infernal province, bearing a gift.

Martin inclined his head forward to see, raising an eyebrow. It took him a moment to make sense of it: a tongue, freshly pulled from its root, saliva still glistening in the moonlight.

“The Society told me what you’re here for,” Gully said, a dull smile moving across his face. “I brought a snack for your new friends.

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