Melted Cowboys

By Ion Fyr

ISBN: 978-1-7331291-4-5

This is a work of fiction. Any resemblance to real or imagined people or events is purely coincidental.

I wish to thank M, K and R for their support.

Published by Jon Rodebaugh

Ion.Fyr@gmail.com

Blue smoke from the ornately carved bowl of the pipe belonging to Vladislav Alexandrevich Morowitz traced lines in the air of the car, looking like Albarian script, cursive, curved and connected lines swirling in space, until, with hesitancy, mingling with the low-hanging cloud beneath the red-painted, tin-paneled ceiling. He was hypnotized for a moment or two, but his attention was drawn to the streaming evergreen beyond the window and the unending dactylic rhythm of the wheels on the rails.

The bowl of his pipe, with the sputtering embers of tobacco, portrayed a concise scene of a rampant dragon crushing an unrealistically designed tiger beneath its rear talons. It was carved from what purported to be elephant ivory, but was actually drawn from the tooth of some arctic, beach slumbering beast from Svalbard, or so he had surmised given the gentleman-sailor he won it from at cards four years ago.

Vladislav tucked the pipe stem between his yellowing teeth, maneuvering the bowl out of the way with the tip of his tongue. With his right index finger, he drove a lock of his dirty blond hair from his eyes, and with a fluid motion, pulled the all-important envelope from his jacket pocket. It was his reason for being on this train, numbing his buttocks for four days since departure from the Grand Central Station in Muskovia.

The envelope was a hard, yellow-brown manila, crude hemp fibers recycled from old ropes. It was not intended for the post, nor was it addressed for use in the postal system. It simply bore his initials “V.A.M.” and was sealed with a malformed signet-impressed wax blob. Fragments of the brownish-red wax fell off to the floor of the car every time Vladislav opened it.

Dropping more brittle fragments of wax to his feet, he flipped open the flap and withdrew the single page of the letter.

Gospodin Vladislav,

I have had come across my already afflicted desk the most bizarre tale yet in the form of a report of grotesquery in the Far East. This one, I’m afraid, needs to be investigated. There are too many elements that present as true, or at least in some way real, that the Office requires an explanation of these events, whether they be real or illusion.

Thus, I bid you go, at the request of the Office, and the greater Establishment of the Departments of the Khanate of Muskovy. Travel to Syopyr, and look into the events that I will describe below.

Four days ago a telegraph was received by the telegraph office in Muskovia, and forwarded to our Office, seeking an official investigation into some matters that defy natural, materialistic behavior.

It seems that (things being the way they are throughout the world) there are thieves amongst the cattle-herders and ranchers. This is also true of the area north of Baikal, where there are some few ranches in that region owing to the inhibition of the otherwise inhospitable terrain and lengthy winters.

It seems, according to the brief telegraph, sent by one Dasha Pomelova of Golovorezy, that some cowboys, those herders-of-cattle, were melted, as if they were candles in the heat of the flame. These details, she claims were revealed to her by a gentleman boarder, surnamed Kadurin, said to be an “explorer and adventurer”, regarding whom I have submitted a request for further information from the Central Registry.

This would be easily be written off as lunacy, or the drunken hallucinations of the forest people, who report these things all-too-frequently, were it not for the boarder hosted by the sender of the telegram being a personal acquaintance of mine, and a man of reputation and integrity, and who I know to be acquainted with strange and hidden mysteries.

Go, my friend, and investigate these melted cowboys. Keep me informed of any particulars or novel insights.

Respectfully,

Sogdan T. Kuril

Vladislav tugged on his pipe, but finding only ashy dust, he replaced the letter and returned it in the envelope to his breast pocket. He then looked into the bowl, and finding nothing of use, tapped it against the wall of the car, dumping a small heap of ashes and unspent tobacco powder onto the floor of the car, where it joined other small, discarded heaps, and proceeded to search his jacket for his tobacco tin. He wondered why the telegraphed message wasn’t included.

Two more days, he thought. Then he would be in Irkutsk, searching for travel up the lake, to the north from the southern tip. There was an extension of the railroad heading north from the regional capital, to what could only be called “the frontier”.

He refilled his pipe and struck a match against the wall of the car. He didn’t know what to think of “melted cowboys”. Acid? Disease? Otherworldly influence? Too soon to say.

His pistol was packed into his suitcase on the luggage rack above his head. Terrific design, he thought. He would prefer not to be killed by his case dropping on his head. There’s enough danger in this world. Why can’t they make space on the floor?

Two days and fifteen or sixteen stops later, Vladislav was feeling distinctly unclean. It was summer and, even here, there would be open water on the lake, if not that, then saunas or steam rooms, right? Considering that the lake often had ice until mid-June, he reassessed his desire for a swim.

He pulled his heavy, battered case down from the iron-runged rack over the seat where he had been sitting and sleeping for six days and trudged off the train.

The station was nothing like the the central station in Muskovia, lacking color and architecture. It was more a compilation of buildings, a mishmash of higgledy-piggledy paper cutouts thrown onto a map, all wood-grey and stone-grey and mud-brown, contrasting the rich green textures of the horizon and more distant white-capped peaks.

With some brief inquiries Vladislav was able to locate the town to which he had been directed by his betters (they weren’t; they just thought themselves so—Not so much Gospodin Kuril, but definitely the others.) A day north. Tomorrow. First light means halfway to noon in Siberian as far as the secondary rail line was concerned.

The steam and swim did wonders. The town was known for baths fed by hot springs. He didn’t so much swim as bob around. The sulfur-infused waters thawed his stiff limbs and was a pleasant alternative to the frigid waters of the very deep lake. He returned to his rented room, then went out on the town.

At neither of the local taverns he visited, could he find any information regarding strange events in the north. He inquired about cowboys, living or dead, and getting only the vaguest answers on the former and raised eyebrows on the latter, he Vladislav decided he would hold his questions until he was closer to the scene and in the company of Madam Pomelova of Golovorezy.

The next morning, Vladislav awoke, quite refreshed from a night’s sleep in a real bed. The ramshackle inn where he had spent the night provided inexpensive sweet poppyseed dumplings and hot tea for guests, and being famished he swallowed three dumplings and washed them down with two cups of steaming tea.

The morning was crisp with a slight breeze. He walked with his suitcase through the already bustling streets. At the rail station he learned that the northbound train was delayed due to a southbound cattle train. Take the ferry instead, he was told. Vladislav lit his pipe and walked the quarter kilometer to the dock, traversing the dilapidated neighborhood that lay between, avoiding the steaming and stinking waste and refuse pooling in the street.

With his pipe still wedged in his teeth, even after it had gone out, he looked out over the vast lake. The eastern edge was dozens of kilometers away. He wasn’t positive due to the craggy mountains surrounding the crystal clear waters. Vladislav had scanned a map of the region before he departed Muskovia, and knew the lake to be enormous.

Beneath the equally clear sky, bobbing in the wind-rippled water, were two ferries. The nearest one, the Tzarina Lyudmila was a monstrously ugly vessel. She was designed for the sole purpose of transporting locomotives and a handful of railroad cars up the lake during the months when it was ice free. She had little capacity for human passengers.

The other, Blagoslovennaya Vesna, was a two level passenger ferry, painted deep green with gold edging, and a pair of inline stacks, also glistening in slightly orange tint of gold. She was much more inviting and lacked the top-heavy appearance of the yet unladen railroad ferry.

Relighting his pipe, he went aboard and inquired about its schedule. He was happy to find dozens of other passengers waiting and was informed that it would depart shortly, “perhaps within the hour.” Surrounding his own head with trailing wisps of pipe smoke, he took the proffered ticket and joined the other passengers in the large common room on the main deck. He looked at his watch before sliding it back into his vest pocket.

His fellow travelers were mostly stout men, some looking desperate, some of them had mining gear, Golovorezy, the fourth and final stop on the northeastern shore of the lake was ringed with mines. The discovery of gold and deposits of pestryykamen’, called by some mottle-stone, drew in thousands hopeful miners and the accompanying criminals and profiteers that follow newfound wealth. Many of them had shovels and pickaxes. There were a group of painted working girls as well.

Dyra, Koroviy Gorod, Malin’kiy and then Golovorezy. There were other towns along the jagged shore, but they were skipped over.

The ship’s horn blared a warning to passengers and crew that they were about to get underway.

The air off the water was cold once Blagoslovennaya Vesna was away from the narrow harbor, tucked between rocky protuberances. The steam engine in the belly of the ship turned the single propeller and filled the sky in the wake of the ship with a dense, undulating cloud of smoke.

Vladislav pulled his case onto his lap, turned the numerical dials on each side to the correct sequence to release the pair of locks and opened it. With his back to the wall of the common room it was positioned so that no one could see the contents, except perhaps for the unlikely chance of someone peering through the porthole behind him.

Inside were his clothes, several changes and degrees of warmth—the weather in these parts of the Khanate was unpredictable, but always reputed to be quite frigid. He moved them aside. Tucked in the center of his case, protected from damage by the insulating wool fabric, was the device.

It was on loan to him, and his duty was to protect it from damage, for it was fragile. Ten centimeters on a side, and roughly a cube, it was constructed of brass and sheathed in a hard leather casing. One side revealed strings of numbers, much like the lock on his case, but longer. Each was twelve digits long. Enamel-painted metal cylinders rotating on their axes. Deep inside the obscure apparatus, complicated—far too complicated for Vladislav—magnetic mechanisms and timing devices, clicked out hidden logic and produced a precise latitude and longitude in near real time.

It was just one of the ingenious devices to come out of the University of Kyiv that his group had access to, and the only one entrusted to him on this investigation. In addition to latitude and longitude, it also could highlight shifts, ebbs and flows, in the murky, insubstantial ether, unseen to human eyes by means of a small gauge, itself lacking labels or units of measurement, only a clockwise dial with a red pointer spinning from the center at slim tick marks behind the glass. One was left to assume the device’s creator had some unit of measurement in mind, and that the clockwise-most endpoint was the maximum, but even this was uncertain. It was reset with a small brass button beneath the gauge.

Once Vladislav reached his penultimate destination, the residence of the woman who sent the telegram, one Dasha Pomelova, he would follow up and track down the source of the mystery, documenting the location and forces at work in this remote region.

He replaced the cube and found the butt of his holstered Semoyovski revolver. Vladislav drew the heavy grey pistol and verified that it was loaded and that the safety was on. His hand brushed the heavy box embedded near it, jingling with ammunition. He absently thought to himself that he should look into acquiring one of those new cartridge loading handguns. He returned it to it’s equally protected cocoon of clothing, shut and locked the case.

He disembarked in the diminutive town of Golovorezy, which stuck like a moldering, grey thumbnail from the hillside beside the harbor. The air was quite a bit cooler, here, two hundred kilometers north of Irkutsk, with the ice just having left the surface of the lake.

Enormous rafts of cut timber were being prepared to be tugged south down the lake to Irkutsk by smoking push-boats. These occupied much of the harbor, leaving only a narrow passage for the ferry.

Smoke filled the narrow valley above the harbor, the air lacking any sort of breeze, laying like a wooly blanket fifty meters above the sloping rooftops.

Vladislav set foot on the planks of the dock, taking several seconds for his land-legs to return after having spent a day and a half on the Blagoslovennaya Vesna. Still on the dock, he inquired a dockhand about the woman Dasha Pomelova who, he said, kept a house in the town. Surely in such a small place, every resident would know every other resident, at least by reputation.

His assumption was correct. The scraggly man did, in fact, know the woman Pomelova, referring to her as the madam of the town’s brothel. Vladislav raised his eyebrow slightly at hearing this, but quickly set the statement aside, as he realized he was in a frontier town frequented by randy, isolated men who spent much time alone with cattle, or felling wood in the vast forests of the region.

The house of Madam Pomelova was a large one and unlike many others, painted a pale blue with one rather gaudy, gold-hued onion dome-topped turret on the right side. It turned out that, while prostitution did occur on the premises, Madam Pomelova was not a madam in that sense; she was merely the proprietress and boarded two dozen people, some of whom took customers.

Inspector Vladislav Alexandrevich Morowitz introduced himself to Madam Pomelova in the gilded parlor of the house. She fanned herself, despite the chill of the house and the conspicuously dead stove in the corner.

Pock-marked and pasted with leaden makeup, she greeted him warmly, albeit nervously.

“Inspector Morowitz, I was not able to leave vacant the room Mr. Kadurin had maintained. The cost would have been too much for my expenses,” began Pomelova. “I did, however, collect his abandoned possessions to keep them safe, on the same day that I sent the telegram westward.”

The lady stood up from her seat on the faded yellow couch, displacing a small dog that Vladislav had somehow overlooked. She walked across the room with a limp betraying legs of uneven length. From a battered, red lacquered armoire, reflecting an Asiatic taste, although not so much in the construction, she withdrew a satchel, a notebook, and a small, myrtle green leather case.

“These were left in the room he let,” she said, handing him, first the case, then the notebook and 15 centimeter oblong compartment. “I took these from the room on the same day that I sent the telegram, as I said. They have been untouched by anyone save myself since then, locked in my cupboard.” She nodded at the armoire.

“This comes on the heels of stories, rumors, more likely, that men and animals have been killed under mysterious circumstances out in the forest.” She gestured northeast up the valley.

“He had come and gone over several days, chasing tales told by the cattle-herders, who came in to find food and liquor in the town; these he related to me on several occasions—Mr. Kadurin clearly had no one else to talk to. He told me many of the fantastic details of these stories: how they were found melted, corrupted in the body, though not in the way that results from typical death and decay.”

“On the day of his departure, he inexplicably left his notebook, which he had previously, over the 15 days of his residence, taken with him everywhere—never once setting it down—and perhaps too, the small case, there in your hand,” she said referring to the small green case. “He also left his riding machine, which is still out back next to the privy behind the house.” She revealed this to him in an ominous tone and with arched brows, as if to suggest Mr. Kadurin felt his end approaching.

Vladislav did not respond immediately, instead unclamping the small satchel. It contained a shirt, some undergarments and one stray bullet for a small caliber pistol. He thumbed through the small notebook some 15 centimeters by 25, finding a narrow pencil wedged between pages, separating the filled and the virgin sheets, damaging the cheaply made spine in the process. He would read through that later.

He then unclasped the small, green oval case. Upon doing so, Vladislav’s heart skipped a beat. His tongue shifted the stem of his unlit pipe between his teeth.

In Muskovy and throughout the whole of Europa, the mineral was rare. Chartreuse in color, transparent and possessed of unearthly properties, Everittite could be fashioned into lenses—windows, that with the proper calibrating could allow a kind of communication across thousands of kilometers with a sickening interference from similarly tuned windows, as well as other, poorly understood forces.

Here, however, the mysterious and rare crystal had been ground into a pair of barely concave lenses in the form of a pince-nez, connected with a thin brass wire surrounding the perimeter of each circular crystal and forming an arch with nasal padding on each side.

He looked up. Madam Pomelova was staring at him with a sedate, tipsy curiosity. The fan wafted musk around the room.

“How is it Mister Kadurin left…his possessions behind?” He asked, not caring to call out the inestimable value of the pince-nez.

Madam Pomelova blankly flashed her eyelids several times before responding, strangely exhibiting a different level of cognitive coherence than she had before. Finally, she answered. “He gave no word of his plan to depart, or announcement of his intentions. I let his room sit idle for two days, hoping for his return, as every day vacant is a cost against me. On the second day, I considered the mysterious nature of his investigations and knowing of the office you are affiliated with, telegraphed Muskovy.”

Madam Pomelova noted that she had still a vacant room, and that if he wished, she could accommodate him in the room formerly occupied by Kadurin, while shifting the room’s current occupant to the vacant one. Vladislav was expressionless, but ecstatic that she had made the offer without him having to ask.

“What was the state of mind, as far as you can determine, when Mr. Kadurin departed the last time? If I may ask.”

“He had become increasingly erratic in his actions and speech. At the end he was distraught, haunted even…as if chased.”

Vladislav agreed that it would be wise to take the same room, and waited 20 minutes for the madam’s servant boy to shift the current occupant to the different room, he then paid her 25% above the going rate.

Once ensconced in the room, still smelling of sex and some sort of unpleasant herbal extract perfume, Vladislav opened the notebook, sitting on the narrow still warm bed.

Ignoring and skipping forward past the boring and quite monotonous pages detailing his predecessor’s journey to the this current, desolate location, Vladislav read the journal’s cramped script.

Mr. Kadurin, Ari Magnikovich Kadurin to be exact, was a Muskovite by birth, the third child and second son of a merchant, but a young man of insight, if not, reason or factual learning. The Everittite pince-nez said everything one needed to know: he had both access to money and extremely rare minerals of a decidedly occult nature.

At first glance, beyond the droll transcript of his transit, Kadurin’s cause was obscure. Repeated mentions of the Hidden…beings that could not be remembered by human minds.

How could Kadurin track and document beings that betray memory? Vladislav wondered, noting to himself, that perhaps the man had had time to jot his encounters down before forgetting. Indeed, some of the pages were nearly in tatters, as if the owner had gone back and increasingly reread the later parts.

The journal, while difficult to read outright, was full of oblique references to things that Vladislav himself had never heard of (and he had been exposed to the occult bulk of Muskovy’s secrets.) In most cases, Kadurin was referring to other documents that he may have even had in front of him (though there didn’t appear to be any others present among his belongs).

Eventually, twenty something pages in, past that moronic narrative of the train passage, he finally came to something telling and useful, coming after paraphrased conversations with the woodsmen and cattlemen.

I finally came to the cleft in the rocks that the cowboys had spoken of, the place where they said the melted cows were. At first I couldn’t see anything, but then the offense against nature reached my unprotected nostrils.

Rot had set in. There’s no denying that. But, amongst the rocks, there lay 14 cattle…heifers…steer—it was hard to tell at this point. Most were scattered and laying in unnatural positions. Most were also missing large parts of their bodies.

Torsos were open to the sky, legs gone—not just torn off by predators and scavengers, but missing. Others lacked hooves, but retained all of their flesh. Another lost only a head.

Then, in my rugged climb over the rocky terrain, a landscape that cattle prefer not tot find themselves in, I came across the cowboys.

At first it looked as if someone had laid out dirty clothing, badly washed, to dry in the sun. But the rocks were covered in drying drips of…not so much blood…but goo (to use an imprecise child’s word).

The bodies of the cowboys were, like the rotting cattle, missing pieces, not consistent aberrations, but mostly random dismemberments. There was no sign of the missing limbs, heads or torsos, not for the human dead or their deceased bovine fellows.

Three of them were positioned as if they were attempting to cover themselves. Pistols had fallen from dead hands. One of the pistols had been cut in half. The grip, along with the hand and forearm that had held it were nowhere to be seen. The barrel and a portion of the cylinder, including sliced-off bullets in the grooves, lay on a rock where it had dropped, below the equally sliced-off forearm, with butcher shop clean cut bones and sinews, this hanging over a wind-dried gap in the stones.

Nearby, the other two lay.

One had sluiced into a different gap, providing a disquieting and disgusting view of a body that had spilled over and out like a candle whose walls were breached by the molten wax within, melting down over the edge of the table or plate upon which it had rested.

The other unfortunate soul lay on his back, over the edge of a large boulder, his missing head and shoulders, replaced by a thick mass of incoherent, mottled meat and bone, as if poured and frozen from a pitcher.

Shell casings from their pistols lay in the crevices and strewn around them. There had been an attempt at defense. Against what I could not begin to guess.

What could have caused this? I asked myself. The stench was overwhelming—I’ve been in the proximity of the dead before—the Battle of Satyripol was a fundamental experience for me—but here, the dead were affected, not by mere death and decay, but by something else.

Kadurin’s diary rolled around, flopping like a caught fish, scintillating like a penny-rag aimed at urban gossips. Who was Kadurin? Who is Kadurin? Is he actually dead or just missing?

Where did this happen?

Pages later, there was a brief description of Kadurin’s journey: first up the valley, along the cattle-road; then, up a meadow, one that was less popular because of the steepness of the pasture, and its relative barrenness, the likely outpost of cattle thieves.

Vladislav now had an idea—a very general idea—of where to search. He set the thin journal down, leaving the pencil in the place where he left of.

Downstairs again, he inquired with Madam’s servant, first regarding an evening meal, second about the route to the upland pastures, as detailed in the journal.

The shit-hole of Golovorezy possessed not one, not two, but three bustling pubs, or saloons or food-troths, however one wishes to describe them. Vladislav chose the nearest one.

A bowl of oat and beef slurry, washed down with two brimming glasses of much better beer, left him sated and satisfied, at least enough to continue his inquiry.

No, the cook, nor the two staff, likely her children, had not heard the stories of melted people and cows, and all thought it all disgusting and gross, as did the six cowpoke-looking fellow-diners that he approached, who then retreated from him as just as quickly.

Over an aperitif, still sitting in the tavern, Vladislav flipped forward through Kadurin’s diary until he came to blank pages. He paged back until he found ink. What were Kadurin’s last recorded thoughts?

…The things showed up on the plates again, using only the special lens…this time close to town. I can’t allow the townsfolk to be endangered by my presence here. I have four unused plates remaining.

Plates? Is there a camera somewhere? I must inquire of Madam Pomelova, though she made no mention of one among Kadurin’s abandoned possessions.

Vladislav was now even more curious. Perhaps the Hidden, as Kadurin referred to the phenomena, while immune to human perception, were still susceptible to capture by scientific and physical laws. I must find this camera. Perhaps it is still in the possession of Kadurin?

From the last rambling entry in Kadurin’s diary, it was obvious to Vladislav that his predecessor on this journey was at least a little deranged. The tone of his words in the earlier phases of the diary, was frantic and full of obscure and oblique references, but the later portion, consisting of his last week’s worth of entries expressed a tone of outright paranoia and obsession. Ideas and sentences ceased to flow logically in the course of description, but instead jumped track with every paragraph of increasingly scribbled words.

In one of the last coherent, legible thoughts and unfortunately one not attested elsewhere in what Vladislav had read, was a reference to a “shrine” or “pillar of the gods”, a place where his hidden folk had showed up in greater frequency (according to his notes and photographs.) He named these things not only as the hidden, but also described them as tall candle-like eerily glowing beings. Kadurin had added that it was strange that he could write about the hidden while looking at them or the developed plates (while he expressed frustration that he could not remember the appearance or even the experience after the fact). Deprived of both he bemoaned that he quickly forgot what he was even doing in Golovorezy and had to refresh himself daily by reading his own diary.

Closing the diary, Vladislav considered what he had read. He had no difficulty remembering what Kadurin had described. An effect of direct experience? he wondered. The description was too imprecise to wrap his mind around. Did he mean they shed light? Did they melt also?

I must find Kadurin’s camera and plates, if not the man himself. He looked up at the wall of the tavern covered in badly stuffed heads of boar and stag, imagining the mountains which lay beyond and the summer pastureland. There’s an old shrine up there somewhere which for some reason is frequented by these things, like haunting ghosts. Vladislav was positive that Kadurin and some few clues to the melting of cowboys lay up there as well.

Returning to the house of Madam Pomelova, he found her seated as before on the yellow couch reading a book of some obscure religious philosophy that he himself was not familiar with with a narrow crystal flute of what smelled like aquavit in her hand. Her asymmetric legs were curled under her shamelessly revealing her stockinged calves and shoeless feet.

“Madam Pomelova, you told me that these possessions belong to Kadurin—the diary, the vehicle and the pince-nez, along with his case of clothing—were all that Mr. Kadurin had left here upon his departure, but it has come to my knowledge that he was also in the possession of photographic equipment and photographic plates, and very likely chemicals used in the process.” Vladislav, took a breath. “Do you know anything of this? Their whereabouts? Did you see him with any other possessions, ones that did not remain after he departed?”

She looked up at him. Her cheeks were flushed from the aquavit. Pomelova looked back at the book, seemingly making a note of the page she was on, before shutting the book with snap. She set it down on the couch beside her small feet, and gazed once more at him.

“Mr. Morowitz, yes, I did give to you all of what Mr. Kadurin left behind. Now that you remind me, I do, in fact, remember Mr. Kadurin with a small amber bottle, stoppered and without label. In addition, I recall him locking into the small boot of his strange vehicle a wrapped object, 20 centimeters on a side, that had an expandable tripod placed next to it.” She squinted her eyes trying to remember the scene. “I didn’t mention it before, because I thought it just a part of the vehicle. I suppose it could have been a camera.”

After the effort of remembering brief events from weeks ago, she turned to a cut crystal decanter on the side table and poured herself another glass of aquavit.

Turning back, she raised the glass, as if to offer Vladislav one also. He nodded, yes.

The caraway infusion flowed over his tongue. He set the glass down and reached into his jacket for his pipe and the smaller “special” tin of pipe-leaf, pulling out a match with it. Digital habits and muscle memory.

After scooping a tiny bit of the resinous powder into his pipe, he lit it, striking the match on a rougher part of his boot.

Madam Pomelova looked on curiously until she smelled the telltale smell of the smoke.

Not wanting to be rude, he offered the pipe to her. She took the bowl in her hand and sucked at the stem, before handing it back to him.

They took turns for minutes or an eternity and spoke to each other no further that evening. Madam Pomelova returned to her book and Vladislav considered his approach to solving the mystery before returning home.

Later in his room, he smoked another bowl, skimming through the remaining pages Kadurin’s diary.

A mention of the route to the pasture, where the events took place. Another reference to an iron stele, a four-sided idol to the gods, four faces looking at the cardinal directions, each the face of one of the primary gods. Iron? That is highly unusual. Most “primitive” representations of the gods originated as thick logs, sometimes stone. Typically, such shrines would represent Percunos, Pikollos, Potrimpos and possibly Teljavel, but these varied a great deal by region and name, even finding representation in the Brethmanic Empire to the west. Who knows what the Slavs in the Brethmanic Empire thought of the incorporation of their ancestral gods into the twisted Attican Universal Church?

Vladislav’s thoughts meandered as much as Kadurin’s had at the end of his diary.

Vladislav was directed to Kadurin’s vehicle by a houseboy at the behest of Madam Pomelova. It was in the back, behind the expansive house, covered by a tattered tarp. The boy unveiled it as if it were a sculpture in an art exhibition.

It nearly was: comprised of steel and brass, it sat like a kneeling horse, though it looked nothing like a flesh and blood animal. In the city, back in Muskovia, tinkerers had invented, compiled from bicycle parts and combustion engines, two wheeled cars, going back a decade or more. This was not one of those.

It had legs, four legs to be exact. Its body formed a kind of crescent shape, upwardly concave, rising fore and aft, with a seat for the rider to straddle in the dip. Placed precariously on the forward end was the boiler and water tank and a cylinder of compressed and flammable blaugas, which extended at an angle under the leather saddle.

The aft end consisted of a gear work engine, driven by a drive shaft which travelled beneath the blaugas cylinder. This engine extended its power to each of the legs, which bending like a horse’s, or more precisely a mountain goat’s, giving movement to the machine.

Vladislav tapped a gauge which stuck up like an eyestalk from the front end, just in front of the saddle. The needle didn’t move, instead it showed the gas to be roughly less than half full. Another gauge showed the water to be three quarters capacity. There was another for boiler temperature.

Beneath and behind the saddle stretched two rising stacks, one for the steam, another for the exhaust of the furnace. These rose up above the rider’s head, like a cock’s tail, funnels of brass. Behind the saddle and in front of the tail, there was a storage compartment, though it looked as though, in a pinch, it could be used to transport a second rider.

The machine was driven and guided by three rods placed behind the eyestalk gauges, in a neat row. The device as a whole lacked labels, however Vladislav reasoned that the grooves notched in the metal panel surrounding the central rod indicated gear-ratios, which then suggested that the left and right rods controlled the directional movement.

He looked at the metal beast. How to light the gas? That pull cord perhaps. Those wheels must control the flow of gas and water…

Overall, it wasn’t a terribly complicated design.

Vladislav turned the wheels of the valves, allowing the flow of gas and water. He could hear the water filling the boiler, metallic trickling. He pulled the ripcord and heard the gas-flame light, deep within the metal heart of the beast.

It would take some time for the water to reach a boil. He returned to his room to get his location device, the pince-nez and his pistol. As an afterthought he grabbed another thick shirt, in case the mountainous air was cooler than the chill air in the vicinity of the lake. He had been carrying Kadurin’s diary all along, tucked in the pocket of his jacket.

Vladislav returned to the vehicle and opened the compartment behind the seat. There was no camera or tripod. Kadurin must have taken those with him when he fled on foot. There was, however, the aforementioned amber glass bottle. Placing the rest of his cargo in the compartment, Vladislav picked the bottle out of the recess and uncorked it. The acrid smell suggested a developing chemical, to turn the image projected onto the photographic plates into a static, permanent image; fixative they called it.

He recorked it and returned it to the compartment along with a paper-wrapped food bundle handed to him by the boy. He picked up his revolver instead and the small leather case containing the incredibly valuable pince-nez. These he put in the pockets of his jacket. Vladislav adjusted his hat on his brow. By now the boiler was growing hot.

As he left town for the mountain, Vladislav attracted curious glances from everyone, even those who had recently witnessed Kadurin’s comings and goings. Who was this new stranger, riding the mechanical horse, just as the other did? Vladislav didn’t pause to consider their opinions or notions.

The road into the mountains was muddy with the almost daily summer rains—it never rained for long, or very much, but the slopes of the Baikal mountains channeled the water down toward the poor excuse for a road, which followed the contours of the ridge, fifty meters above the lake’s glimmering surface. Deep and forbidding ruts showed the passage of recent wagons, drawn by donkeys or workhorses. By the lake, outcrops jutted out above the crystal clear waters.

The road was used by timber harvesters primarily who would harvest alder, larch and pine and tumble the lumber into the lake to be floated south to the mills of Golovorezy in great rafts bound together and towed by small and rickety steam tugs.

The road was also used by cattle herders, cowboys, to move their livestock from remote pastures to the towns to begin their journey to the cities of western Muskovy. It was to one of these pastures that Vladislav was heading.

He was impressed by the efficiency the mechanical mount possessed when crossing the muck and mire of the churned road. A wheeled vehicle would have bogged down, but the metal hooves pressed into the mud, pulling easily out with wet sucking sounds, but the strength of the engine made easy work of it.

He synched up his jacket against the increasing drizzle, blown into his face by the light breeze, and pulled his hat more firmly down on his forehead. The woolen coat was water resistant enough to keep his torso dry, but his legs were becoming increasingly damp, then wet. Not much further, I reckon, thought Vladislav, his opinion based upon Kadurin’s descriptions in the pages of his abandoned diary.

Vladislav, still was at a loss to explain both why Kadurin had left his diary and his vehicle, and why he presumably carried his camera equipment back to the mysterious site of carnage—camera equipment was by no means compact. It was almost as if he had become enfeebled or lost part of his judgement. Certainly, the latter pages of his diary were a jumble of barely coherent and haunted thoughts.

He was pulled from his internal reasoning by sudden recognition of a landmark mentioned in the pages of the diary.

To the left of the narrow track, standing in a cluster of white birch trunks, was a curiously arranged outcrop of lichen encrusted rock.

Kadurin had referred to it as my friend, the troll. Vladislav found this unusual, especially the endearment, but the explanation became somewhat apparent as he drove up and brought the mechanical horse to a pause on the nearest approach of the road to the stand of birch.

As if staring from within the stand, the rock outcrop took on an almost humanoid form, standing three meters tall, with hulking shoulders and protruding nose. He shuddered, assuring himself that it was only an outcrop of rock, rooted in the mountain beneath him, and not a living thing. Your friend, you say, my good Kadurin?

Vladislav dismounted the vehicle, and trudged into the stand of birch, his boots slipping on the wet rocks and fallen branches. Dead, fallen leaves disguised uneven ground beneath, threatening to trip him. There! On the north side of the grove! A deer path, widened by larger beasts.

He returned to the mechanical mount, which emitted a fizzing, sputtering sound from the drizzle hitting the hot boiler. The steam and smoke cloud from its exhaust was trailing southward along the path in the breeze.

With a grinding pull of the center gearshift, he lurched forward once more, and with the skill learned from four hours of driving the beast, he swung it elegantly—as much as possible for such a machine—onto the narrow deer track.

The feet of the machine did not sink as much into the less trodden path, although it did slip more, as there were more exposed rocks and branches and fallen trees to overcome. He was ascending the mountain now, and he was happy for the mount. Vladislav looked over his shoulder, nearly falling off his mount in the process; the troll was not following him.

III

Vladislav travelled higher and higher. Mist from low-hanging clouds surrounded him. They seemed darker now that he was within them than they had when he was beneath them. He opened the machine’s compartment and retrieved a paper wrapped chunk of bread and cheese, his only meal that he had brought with him—as he had merely set out today to get a lay of the land, so to speak.

The mountain side pasture was protected on three sides by sheer cliffs and looming rock faces. The enclosed space was sheltered and green in the midsummer warmth. The open face to the space faced the lake, looking southwest, and the opposite region, higher up and comprised of tumbled-down boulders—matching the description that Kadurin had left—looked out at the vast lake, which stretched for many kilometers south.

The steam horse, trudged up the slope without complaint, just a rhythmic tapping of the piston in its belly. He would have to refill its water at some point on the way back, but according to the gauge the blaugas was still holding.

Due to the enclosed nature of the pasture and the southerly updrafts, as well as the cessation of the drizzle which had plagued his morning, Vladislav unbuttoned his coat. He touched the textured wood grip of his pistol unconsciously. This was where Kadurin went to die…or at least to disappear.

He parked the mechanical beast. Then not finding an apparent shut-off, turned off the gas (which resulted in a loud bang) and then released the boiler pressure.

From the diary’s description he could tell that those boulders up the hill were the likely spot where the unfortunate cowboys met their end, and guessed that the slope above him was the boneyard of the cattle. Was that a nook, a cleft in the cliff face up there? It certainly seemed so.

Above him, up the nearly 45 degree incline, a quarter kilometer up, was a shadowed area, nestled in the highest portion of the enclosure.

Vladislav took with him the diary, his location marking device, which was ill-suited for transport in his pocket, being an awkward cube. He also had his pistol, the remains of his bread and the case with the pince-nez. His unbuttoned jacket hung unevenly on his shoulders from the distribution of the weight of the objects.

The rugged ascent took him longer than expected. His bread was soon finished and he wished he had had the foresight to bring water or beer. Spared the odor of putrefaction by the updraft through the pasture, with horror and surprise, he stumbled at last upon the killing ground described in detail by Kadurin. His predecessor’s description was true in every gory detail.

Not wanting to forget the more mundane tasks of his investigation, he tugged the inconvenient cube out of his jacket’s stretched out pocket. He primed the device and the dials reading the latitude and longitude spun of their own accord, until settling on some numbers that Vladislav took to be accurate for he had no way of knowing himself. He used Kadurin’s notebook to record the location. Then, he pressed the reset button of the device’s other gauge, and was immediately shocked that the dial swung all the way to the right, bouncing on the end of its reach, vibrating even. Something is here indeed, he thought, his hackles rising.

At the thought of Kadurin’s circumstances and predicament, almost as if by coincidence, Vladislav’s eyes caught a glint of metal higher up the slope. After returning the device to its case, he made for the glint, holding a kerchief over his nose at the rotting and melted cowboys and cattle now that he passed upwind of them.

He came over the ridge line using his hands (when he could) and feet to push upwards, kerchief still in his left hand, and now with the pistol in his right. The ground was comprised of heaps of fallen cliff-fragments, sharp-edged boulders and wind-blown grit, held together by the roots of alpine grasses and stubby flowers.

The glint was the fixture by which the box-camera—nominally Kadurin’s—was attached to the wooden, but extendable tripod. The camera had fallen, hopefully not hard enough to damage it’s lens or glass plate inside. It was resting on its side on top of a boulder. A bloody hand grasped one of the three legs, blue and swollen in death.

Vladislav, against the wisdom of his growling stomach, crawled forward.

Mr. Kadurin had been melted as well.

Vladislav, in a sudden inspiration, decided to add to the testimony of the diary. The pencil that had been wedge between the pages, the same that he had just used to record the location only moments ago had disappeared, probably lost in the climb. He looked at the remains of Kadurin.

First announcing himself, apologizing to the clearly dead man’s carcass, he braved a search of Kadurin’s right side. The man’s remaining clothing was tattered and soaked in bloody gore, but still possessed three pockets.

Nearly cutting his fingers, Vladislav discovered three triangles of a broken photographic plate in the inside breast pocket. These he moved to his own jacket’s pocket. The second pocket held a broken watch, the shattered face of which read 9:03. Then choking back vomit, he slipped his hand into the man’s trouser pocket. A stub of a pencil! He removed it as quickly as he could. He needed to step away for some air.

The pencil stub was 4 centimeters long and needed to be sharpened against a rock. Vladislav then described what he had found in Kadurin’s journal. Not knowing what to do with Kadurin’s body, or at least what remained of it, he left it for the carrion birds, as they of Pars do.

The camera, it turned out, was entirely intact. Both the focusing lens and the plate in use, onto which the projection would be projected, were unbroken, unscathed.

Kadurin’s satchel was lying untouched next to him. There were three additional plates within, tin and silver-plate, awaiting the fixative, forestalled by Kadurin’s death. The developing fluid was in the mechanical beast, way down the slope.

What is that!? The light was bad, shadowed by the mountains to the west—the sun was setting behind them. Hints of things, distortions, tall, like trees, but shaped like candles, dripping.Vladislav checked his own watch. It was later than he had thought.

The first plate appeared to be a photograph that the photographer took, upon seeing something with his eyes, that the lens was not yet prepared for. Hints of candles further back. Out of focus hints only.

Going with his new plan, Vladislav, hastily jotted down notes—very brief ones—in Kadurin’s remaining pages.

The second showed what looked like a lightning strike…, except the lightning emanated from one of the candle things. This too, he wrote down. He carefully restacked the plates in the bag.

The third plate was at an angle, the camera was falling. Gods they are huge!

Vladislav stood the camera back up on its tripod. A small, empty bottle, that again smelled like developing fluid rolled across the rocks, having fallen from somewhere under the camera.

Without developing the plate in the camera, Vladislav wouldn’t be able to witness the last event that poor Kadurin had.

He picked the bottle up. It was empty. Did Kadurin develop the plate under the cover of the box-camera’s hood? The shattered plate was in his pocket; he hadn’t had time to even look at it.

All of his ideas and speculations were written down, addenda to Kadurin’s own writing.

For a summer day, the day had moved rather quickly. Vladislav looked out at the lake down the mountain, summer sun, turning opposing peaks orange, before they turned purple and grey. The day was getting late.

There was nothing to make a fire from. Not at first. Then Vladislav remembered that desert nomads burned dung. In the declining twilight, he gathered an armful of the driest cattle-turds. Dried, they were light, fibrous and didn’t smell much—until they were burned. He used several of his dwindling supplies of matches to build a small fire, using at first dead and dried tufts of grass and flowers, then slowly adding increasing amounts of dung.

Having gotten a small, smoldering, guttering fire lit between rocks on a mountainside that reeked of dead and rot, Vladislav, embedding a lump of burning cattle dung on a dead steer’s femur, made his way up the remaining hill.

There was a clearing, plant growth trod thin by countless feet. Dark against the black of the silhouette cut into the rock, he saw it. Three times his height and by his touch he could tell that it was metal, probably iron, but possibly bronze.

He withdrew the Everittite pince-nez and placed it on the bridge of his nose. With his eyes lidded, he placed the case back into his pocket.

Vladislav opened his eyes. He stepped back, fumbling for his revolver, which had either fallen or been placed back into his pocket. It is there, he thought, feeling the weight of it in his jacket pocket. He thoughts had suddenly become muddled. The obelisk glowed brightly through the lenses. His intention to investigate it was ephemeral. He was not alone.

He turned, still with the Everittite pince-nez on the bridge of his nose. The thing loomed over him…indescribable, but candle-like, a blend of red and white, much taller than a man and reeking of carrion and sulphur and indescribable smells, indescribable sights. Radiant bands of light shown out from it, pulsing hypnotically.

Vladislav turned and ran.

Downhill and almost losing his eight-shot pistol in a crack, he nearly broke his leg.

He turned to look back up. There were three, glowing, four meter candle monstrosities, each with a single glowing eye above a single glowing maw.

Hundreds of meters downhill, somewhere to the north of the mechanical beast, Vladislav took out the journal of poor Kadurin and added his own testimony. He had lost his poor excuse for a fire and couldn’t even remember his makeshift torch, which had been dropped somewhere behind him as he fled. The Everittite glasses offered him a measure of light in a lightless landscape, the sun having since set.

Huddled between boulders, Vladislav used the glimmer-light of the pince-nez to scrawl out his own experiences. Each time he referred to the exotic, distinctly alien things, his scrawl glowed in a way that mundane descriptions did not.

He sat for a moment. The drizzle had started again. The sun had left the opposing mountains. What was it that had killed Kadurin and the cowboys?

Vladislav paged back a few pages in the journal, back to what Kadurin had written. Oh, shit…what he himself had written.

I forget it as it happens. So must have Kadurin. All we have are what the camera records and what we write down.

Vladislav took the next few breathes to write a short letter to his commander back in Muskovy.

Gospodin Kuril,

They deprive us of mental faculty and memory. Do not waste more officers on this. Kadurin may have been one of us, but now we are both dead.

Sincerely, Vladislav A. Morowitz

Looking up, Vladislav tucked the tattered diary into the rocks, folded into his hat. It would keep it sheltered until someday someone found it.

Vladislav lurched up, unsteady on his feet, given the dimensional-shifting of the Everittite glasses. The scene they revealed was representative, but somehow shifted from normal reality. Everything looked dead.

The demon, if it could be called that, was in front of him, candle-like, dripping in obscene ways. There were two others, but Vladislav was concerned only with the one in front of him.

Eight rounds…click click click click click

the end

Share this: