In every Santa Fe saloon, the regulars said Abaddon Island was haunted by devils. That didn’t deter the tracker, a man who called himself Thibault Boxley, from setting his sights on the island. He joked that Old Scratch already got his right arm, from the elbow down, when a Confederate cannon blasted it off at Shiloh. He and the devil were square, he said. The Santa Fe barflies never laughed at that one, though.
Boxley told anyone willing to listen that he was on the trail of his missing brother, H. H. Boxley, the noted geologist. Then one morning he set off for the caldera lake, Abaddon, and the knuckle of land rising up from its deep middle. After a week camping in the island’s scrubland, outcrops, and ponderosa stands, Thibault was in low spirits. All he had to show for his efforts were a black eye and an empty belly.
When a woman showed up on Abaddon, Boxley was in no mood to entertain. He greeted her with a skeptic’s squint. And the raised end of his lever-action Winchester.
“Are you Thibault Boxley?” called the young woman. She wore pants and short-cropped hair, and carried enough effects for a small prospecting company. But she was alone. She had hiked over the caldera ridge alone, paddled across the lake to the island alone, and now stood alone on the open scrub below the irate tracker.
“Maybe,” replied Boxley. “Who’s asking?”
“I’m Ida McKay, Mister,” the woman called, “and I’m a great admirer of H. H. Boxley—of his work, I mean. I’m something of a geologist myself.”
“So what are you doing on Abaddon Island?” Asked Boxley, his gun still leveled on McKay.
“Looking for him. And my goodness, I could spot you as his brother anywhere—a bit skinnier, and the arm of course—but you’re a Boxley!”
The tracker found her acute perceptiveness irritating, and considered the morality of shooting her on the spot.
“Mister,” continued McKay, “if you are, as I reckon, the brother of H. H. Boxley, we are here for the same reason.” She dropped her bags to outstretch her arms, a grandiose gesture undone by the clattering of her tin cookpots. She had been using a thin length of iron pipe as a walking stick, and now raised it. “I propose a partnership!” she bellowed.
“You’re an odd bird, you know that?” said Boxley. He lowered the rifle. His eye was throbbing. The sun was about to set. But he hadn’t eaten a decent meal in a fortnight. Hunger and bone-tiredness and old-fashioned curiosity overruled his caution.
Soon they were heating hash and coffee over a small fire. Boxley kept his rifle in his lap, and listened to McKay prattle on about stratigraphy and the Laramide Orogeny. The Abaddon Caldera, she told him, was sitting on a rift valley, which accounted for its geothermal vents and rare mineral deposits. Those vents perhaps accounted for the stories of devils, she added with a twisted grin. The island was a lava dome. With a twinkle in her eye, she said the underlying magma was due to erupt “soon”—in a mere 80,000 years. It was no surprise, she told Thibault, that his brother’s trail led them both here, to this geologist’s wonderland.
“Yeah,” said the one-armed tracker into his coffee cup. He analyzed her freckled face, which looked naive enough, and then the .45 in her gunbelt, which didn’t. “Henry Harrison was my brother. And yeah, I’m here looking for him. But you ought to know: this island is a hell of a place.”
“A hell of a place? But to your brother, this place is heaven! He had a theory about inosilicates—oh, but you’re not a scientist. Those are minerals built like interlocking chains. And the caldera we’re sitting on holds the answers to his theory!”
“So, what—you’re here to prove his theory? Well, I’m here to ensure his Christian burial.”
“Oh. You reckon he’s dead?”
The two stared at each other. Then McKay reached for Boxley’s hand—a gesture of sympathy and common purpose.
“Let’s help each other,” she said.
But he pumped the lever of his Winchester. Something was creeping through the ponderosas just up the hill.
“Like I said, this island ain’t heaven,” he grumbled. “Get behind me.”
McKay unholstered her revolver, and crouched behind Boxley. Whatever was trampling the pine needle duff was only ten or twelve yards away.
“Every couple hours,” whispered Boxley, “something infernal crawls out of this hill.”
“Infernal?”
“That’s right. The stories are true. Devils? I don’t know. But I’ve watched ’em spring up—clawing up from the ground. And one snuck up on me. Gave me this,” said Boxley, touching his black eye.
The rustling stopped. Then, an elk emerged from behind a juniper bush, and regarded the two humans with surprise.
“That’s an elk,” said McKay.
“I know what an elk is,” said Boxley.
He lowered his Winchester. The elk snorted.
Then a monstrous figure erupted from the trees. It leapt on the elk’s back. McKay gasped and stood. The demon worried the elk’s shoulder with what might have been teeth. Boxley squeezed off a shot before he could aim. The percussion disoriented everyone, and the elk threw the demon and dashed away.
The ill-shaped devil frantically scrambled in a tight circle. It grabbed at the scruffy grass. Boxley wondered if his bullet struck home—but the apelike form wasn’t writhing. You’d swear it had dropped its spectacles. Then, it looked up at the tracker and the scientist, and began to crumble like a wet sandcastle.
“Aw, there it goes,” said Boxley. He huffed up the hillside, and McKay followed.
He probed the lifeless pile of clay with his boot. “They always go to bits,” he explained, “before I can plug ’em.”
McKay crouched over the remains, eyes wide in the failing light. Boxley told her how he’d fought off the creatures for a week now. Each one was a little bigger and hungrier than the last. The first were aberrations of nature—a yard-long mudpuppy, a misshapen fox, a mooncalf. The last few were vaguely simian, and this one—Boxley frowned.
McKay produced a tin spoon and began poking at the residue.
“Look!” she said, and held up the spoon so Boxley could see. But he didn’t see much.
“Some clay,” he said, squinting.
“To the fire,” said McKay. She carried the spoonful of demon down the hillside, almost tripping with excitement. The tracker could see McKay wasn’t going to be scared off by the creatures.
Working by the low light of the campfire, she assembled a box with spyglasses poking out either end. Boxley found himself pressed into service, blowing through her iron pipe, heating the firebrands. McKay, meanwhile, sifted the demonic remains through a screen, and pulverized some crystals with a tiny hammer.
“Keep those coals white hot,” she instructed. She positioned her boxy apparatus so that one spyglass, with a slit opening, faced the coals.
“This here’s a new device from Germany. A spectroscope.”
She paused to search Boxley’s face, and decided to explain further. “I’ll toss the dust onto the coals,” she said, “and the flame will cast light through here, make a pattern I can read through here.”
Boxley shrugged. McKay smiled politely, lay sideways, and pressed her face to the eyepiece.
She dropped the dust, producing a spectacular flare: blue, then white, then pink.
“Well?” said Boxley.
The young scientist sat up, and stared thoughtfully into the fire. The dusk had given way to darkness.
“Plain old silicates,” she said. She was breathing hard, and rocking on her heels.
Boxley knew she wasn’t telling the whole story.
“What were you expecting?” he asked.
“Mr. Boxley, the creatures you’ve been taking pot-shots at are what I was expecting. My—your brother’s theory has to do with abiogenesis. Life arising—”
“Out of the miry clay,” Boxley said, quoting the psalm. “Hot Damn,” he added, unbiblically.
McKay looked him in the eye with sudden fierceness of purpose.
“You’ve been to the place where they spawn?”
“Yeah,” he said. Boxley didn’t like to think what was likely to happen if he took McKay to the source. But he also knew that the fuse had been lit, so to speak, the moment McKay had set foot on Abaddon. There was no avoiding what had to happen now.
“I’ll take you there,” he said.
***
Soon, Boxley and McKay were perched on a weathered outcrop. Just below, a bed of muddy clay was bubbling, warmed by a sulfurous spring.
It was a dark night despite the Milky Way throbbing like a migraine over them. McKay had a small candle lantern with a cracked lens, and continually repositioned it in the hopes of casting some light on the pit. Boxley figured it did as much good as the lit end of his cigarette.
“What do you aim to do?” asked Boxley.
“I aim to finish your brother’s work,” McKay said. Then she added, “one way or another.”
“Look,” said Boxley. He chucked his butt. Picked up his rifle.
A disturbance in the clay pit made its surface swell up. Then, McKay could just make out an elbow, followed by a shoulder. The new creature pulled itself up with unnatural spasms. Now it stood tottering on the ground, a measure more human than the thing that bit the elk. Boxley took aim with his rifle. But he hesitated.
The creature looked up at him. In the dim light, he saw the thing press an amorphous finger to the bridge of its malformed nose. Boxley knew this gesture well. H. H. Would often adjust his spectacles when he proved a point.
Then the hunger pangs hit the creature. It lunged.
A shot rang out. A bullet blasted a fist-sized hole where the clay man’s heart should be. The heat of the impact hardened the strange clay into a ring, even as the rest of the golem’s body sloughed to the ground.
Boxley checked his rifle, but it hadn’t fired. Then he looked at McKay. He saw in the dim lantern light that McKay held her revolver in both hands. She was breathing hard.
“Thanks,” he said. He whistled, and wiped the sweat from his brow with the stump of his right arm. “I been trying to nail one of them for a week.”
McKay turned her gun on Boxley.
“Yeah,” he said. “My brother told me you were a rival of his, Ida McKay. Proud, smart, unscrupulous. But a killer?”
“We’ll find out,” she said.
“Why?”
“The mix of inosilicates I identified with my spectroscope? Those aren’t naturally occurring—I synthesized them in my laboratory. I call them polysilicatides.”
“Talk plain!”
“H. H. stole my samples. He didn’t think I knew about this place. Figured he could beat me to the proof—abiogenesis.”
Boxley licked his lips, held onto his Winchester. He wondered how well McKay knew H. H. Did she recognize his mannerisms—like the gesture the creature had made? Boxley aimed to keep her talking. He’d wait for an opening.
“You sound pretty sure he came here,” he ventured. “So where is he?”
“Ha,” said McKay. “Maybe he fell in. Each polysilicatide construct—or ‘devil’ if you like—is repeating the same process. In my laboratory, I’ve seen the clay self-replicate on the pattern of organic matter, but it’s never exact. I reckon these poor creatures are all degraded copies of H. H. Boxley.”
“If that’s true,” said the tracker, “this can end amicably. We both can have what we came for.”
“Oh?”
“Sure. You say he fell in—I’ll put up a cross right here. And you can take a bucket of your demon-clay back to your laboratory. Take all the credit for your theory.”
Boxley saw her hesitate. He shifted his footing. She brandished her revolver. Put pressure on the trigger.
“The barflies in Santa Fe said you lost your arm at Shiloh,” she said. “But you and I both know you never fought at Shiloh, Henry Harrison Boxley. Thibault did. Far as I can figure, he’s in an unmarked grave in Pittsburg Landing.”
Boxley was silent.
“I knew you were stone-cold crazy,” McKay continued. “Desperate to outdo me. Fake your disappearance, change your name, shave your beard, sure. But to amputate your arm—even I never imagined you’d go that far.”
Boxley swung his Winchester up. McKay was quick to squeeze her trigger.
The tracker took a .45 bullet in the chest. But he kept his grip on the rifle and let a shot fly, straight into McKay’s gut. She staggered backwards, and fell into the wet clay.
***
The following spring, the US Geological Survey came to Jicarilla Apache territory to hir scout. Everyone recommended Hernando Fletcharota for his eagle eyes. The USGS sent him to search for Ida McKay, promising a handsome reward. Following rumor and hearsay, Fletcharota made his way to Abaddon Caldera. He had seen the smoke from the campfire as soon as he crested the ridge.
Now he paddled a raft across the lake to the island. And for the first time in his life, he doubted his eyes.
Two figures were working by the campfire, some fifty paces up the scrubby hillside. A man and a woman, Fletcharota thought. One worked a blowpipe, the other was tapping a box. Perhaps they were prospectors, smelting samples of ore. That might explain why they looked so muddy, Fletcharota reasoned. Maybe they had been prospecting in a silty stream bed. But no; something about their movements was wrong.
Fletcharota called out to them. The figures dropped their tools and looked up. The scout saw clearly that the man and woman had no eyes.
Then, like castaways spying a rescue ship, they sprang into a run. But they didn’t make it far down the slope. With the jolt of each step, a foot, a leg, a hip cracked and crumbled. The man’s torso rolled as his arms flailed, and his head split from his shoulders. The woman grabbed her head, as if to hold herself together. But it was no use. Her elbow hit a rock and she disintegrated. The two figures were now two far-flung piles of crumbs.
Fletcharota watched the whole scene silently. Then he scanned the scrubby slopes, and saw it was dotted with similar piles of dissolved clay.
He spent a long time drifting on his raft. Then he decided no reward offered by the USGS was worth setting foot on this island. He turned around.
by 
Peter T. Donahue
Latest posts by Peter T. Donahue (see all)
- The Phantom Limb - June 27, 2021
Great work with this story, Peter. Loved it.
Excellent story.