Until Death Do Us Part

Click here to read the author’s note for this story

As the smoke cleared and the dust settled, I saw him beside a one-mule cart.  He wore farm clothes instead of the uniform in his ten-year-old photograph, and his curly hair and beard were graying.  Despite the years, the weathering, and the worry-lines joining the laugh-wrinkles, I knew it was him.  I’d sent him no return photograph, but his undimmed eyes scanned the handful of passengers disembarking at the end of the line.

I marched up to him.  “Hambel Smithson?”

His eyes took a moment to settle upon me, and they kept twitching towards the western horizon.  “Yes.”

“Amby Vrawczyk.”  I stuck out my hand, and he took it like another man’s.  “Pleased to meet you in person.”

“Yes.”  Even by letter, Hambel wasn’t loquacious, but he seemed preoccupied.   “I’ll get your trunks and we’ll be away.”

I tossed my carpetbag into the cart.  “I don’t have anything else.”  Why would I drag the detritus of my old life to the new frontier?  Affluence meant nothing out here.  My acquaintances in the city called it madness, but I didn’t respect them, anyway.

This, at least, garnered a raised eyebrow, but Hambel didn’t comment; he just glanced at the station clock.  “Let’s get moving.  Best to be at the farm before sundown.”

He handed me up to the cart and climbed up beside me.  Despite his urgency, he paused, looking at me, before taking the reins and getting the mule moving with a final glance at the clock.  I adjusted my bonnet over my ruddy hair and wondered what he was thinking.

Hambel’s pace raised a dust cloud over the trail behind us as we rode west from Platform Eleven, but the sun was only brushing the infinite prairie horizon when we reached the farm.  No one was awaiting us.  I put a hand on his arm as he stopped the cart by the barn, and a hard muscle quivered beneath his shirtsleeve.  He looked at me, unspeaking, before he shook himself with a suspicious glance at that glorious sunset and helped me down from the cart.

I stepped through the doorway, and Hambel froze behind me.  “Ain’t much of a place,” he mumbled.  “Needs a woman to it.”  He hesitated.  “Amby…”  But he didn’t finish the thought.

I thought it was perfect.  It had a dirt floor, a sod roof, a stone hearth, and in the dim light through a greasy window I fell in love with it.  Maybe it was how different it was from everything I knew, but I thought it was the most honest any place could be.  When I stepped across the threshold, I already thought it was home.

Hambel made supper, and I wondered if he didn’t think a city woman could cook, but then I realized this was normal for him.  Only when he put the tin dishes down on the trestle table did he speak again.

“I’ll sleep on the floor,” he said.  “Consider it your house, too.  Just don’t touch the fence, and don’t go outside after dark.”

I’d half-expected a preacher to be waiting for us at the farm, and I was almost disappointed there wasn’t, although I appreciated Hambel’s consideration.  As for his exhortation about the fence and the dark, I thought little of it until nature called in the middle of the night.

There was no chamber pot, so I climbed from bed, wrapped myself in a blanket, and padded out the door to the outhouse.  I don’t know that the prairie night was colder or darker than any other, but it was vaster.  Tall grasses rustled, though I felt no breeze, and I hurried to the outhouse as hairs prickled on the back of my neck.  I told myself it was my imagination.  My business finished, I rewrapped the blanket and stepped from the outhouse.

A force slammed me back into the door so hard the wood cracked.  I heard a screeching like blades of grass rasping together, a chittering like locusts, and I felt a whisper of breath like dirty feathers on my cheek.  Tangled in the blanket, I flailed against my unseen assailant; it was like no beast I’d ever heard described – my feeble blows didn’t seem even to land.  A gunshot cracked the night, and I glimpsed Hambel emerging from the doorway, a rifle crooked in one elbow and the brightest torch I’d ever seen erupting in his other hand.

Whatever monster attacked me – I still couldn’t see it clearly, which I blamed on being blinded by that torch – seemed barely distracted by the gunshot, but it recoiled from the torch’s white-hot light as Hambel approached.  I untangled the blanket enough to scramble to my feet and sprint for the house.  The monster pursued, but Hambel met me halfway and thrust the torch at it; it made no sound, but its presence lessened, somehow, and then we were through the door and Hambel slammed it shut.

When we caught our breath, I peeked through the window, but there was nothing to see, just the ordinary night.  “You just live with those things?” I demanded.

Hambel shrugged.  “Don’t go outside at night,” he repeated.  He sounded tense and worried; his tone’s intensity disoriented me, and I lapsed into old habits.

“It was probably your cooking’s fault, anyway,” I retorted.

He paused, and I thought I’d ruined it.  “Ha!” he barked once, and I went weak with relief.

We both laughed, then, and I might have sounded hysterical.  How anyone could live with those monsters outside I couldn’t imagine, and I thought I wouldn’t sleep the rest of the night, but exhaustion overcame terror.  In the morning, we went to see the preacher.

Preacher Rasper ran a simple church on a hilltop for a dozen local farmers, but Hambel and I weren’t there for a service.  The two men argued, but Rasper relented first, and he led us to a closet behind the altar, where a trapdoor descended to a basement.  A skull sat on a pedestal inside the basement.

It was shrunken down to bones and leathery bits of skin and sinew holding the pieces together.  A strip of deep black linen wrapped around the base of the neck, and it stared up the ladder as the trio of mortals descended.  I shivered a bit looking at it, and I wondered what it was doing in a church.

“Τώρα τι θέλετε?” the skull asked, and I about leapt from the basement.

Rasper crossed himself before replying in the same language.  With a hand over my heart, I looked between them as they spoke and tried to lean into Hambel’s solid presence behind me.

“This is, or was, Archimedes,” Rasper explained, turning back to us mortals.  “He’s lucid now, but he’ll lapse soon – 2000 years as a mummified skull drove him mad, if he was ever sane, but when he’s aware he’s still a genius.”

“That’d drive anyone insane.”  My voice squeaked despite my efforts at equanimity.

“Βρήκατε ακόμα τον Αμόζ?” Archimedes demanded.

Rasper ignored him.  “It was important that you see this, or else you would not believe everything else, but let us speak somewhere more comfortable.”

“Μην τολμήσεις να με αφήσεις εδώ, ηλίθιε! Είμαι ο Μίδης…” Archimedes shouted as we left the basement, the trapdoor muting his burgeoning incoherent episode.

Upstairs, I needed to sit, and Rasper appeared pale behind his spectacles.  “Some black magic preserved him since his decapitation in 212 BC.  As near as he can figure, the monsters appeared in 30 BC, just after Rome conquered Egypt.  The torch Hambel used last night was his design.”

Rasper was correct; I would not have believed a word of this had I not seen the skull and heard it speaking ancient Greek.  It still strained credulity.  “You mentioned nothing of this in your letters?”

Hambel looked down at his hands, but it was Rasper who answered.  “Would you have believed him?”

“I did warn you there are dangers out here,” Hambel murmured.

I looked between the two and decided that Rasper was again correct.  Even now, I wasn’t certain I believed.  “What are they?”

“Shadows.  Fragments of fear given form,” Hambel said.

“We don’t know,” Rasper admitted.  “Not even Archimedes.  He’s awaiting his partner’s return, someone called Amoz, who went to the ‘land of the dead’ to find answers.  I believe Amoz is long dead, but Archimedes remains fixated on that line of inquiry.  Even so, his devices are the difference between surviving and living out here.  It is why I cannot give him rest, no matter the devilry involved or how often he pleads for it.”

I took a deep breath.  “And you’re crusaders bent on fighting back the dark monsters on the edge of the frontier?”

Hambel shook his head.  “We’re just what we appear, Amby.”

“As long as you stay inside at night, the frontier has only the ordinary dangers,” Rasper explained.  “They’re afraid of, or harmed by, full-spectrum light.  That’s what Archimedes’ torches produce, and it’s why they aren’t a danger during the day.”

“But you live with them as if it’s normal?”  Neither man responded, but their silence was an answer.

The ride back to the farm was long, and we remained silent for most of it.  Hambel glanced at me a few times, but mostly he concentrated on driving, and I was preoccupied.  Should I turn back?  Anyone I knew in the city would already be in town with a ticket on the next eastbound train.  I wondered why I should care what people from the city would do; I left it for a reason.

Still, I hesitated at the threshold.  Only the cracked outhouse door gave evidence of the night’s struggle.  Hambel’s burly frame filled the doorway as I paused, and I felt a warm band of metal in his palm as he took my hands in his.

The eyes that looked into mine were recessed in creased and weathered skin, but they were as bright and earnest as the youth’s in the photograph.  “Could you still love me, Amby?  Is there a chance you might decide to stay?  I know it’s not much of a life.”

Against all logic but my own, I slipped the gold band from his palm onto my finger.  I resolved two things when I did.  The first I kept to myself: I would end the threat these monsters posed, even if it cost the whole fortune I abandoned in the city.  They were just part of the environment to Hambel and the others, but I could tell they were wrong.  The second, more important resolution I said aloud.  “It is if I can be your wife.”

We had the wedding the next morning, with Preacher Rasper and a handful of Hambel’s neighbors.  It was in the morning, so that everyone had time to return to their farms before sunset.  That evening, my husband and I sat watching the sunset light the prairie gold and tried not to think about the shadows crawling after that retreating amber flame.  If this was madness, then I was glad to be insane.

Thank you for reading Lloyd Earickson’s short story, Until Death Do Us Part, an IGC Publishing original story. If you enjoyed the story, please consider leaving a comment or review in the discussion below the story. Be sure to follow IGCPublishing.com for updates, more information, and other freely available stories.

If you want to know more about the writing process for this story and how it came to be, please read the author’s note and release post.

Copyright 2024, IGC Publishing