by SA Sidor
Orcus trotted over to his master’s horse.
“Where’d you get that devil dog?” Billy asked. “Hades?”
Oscar dug into his saddle bag and tossed a treat to Orcus.
“Orcus is an Italian mastiff bred from Roman bloodlines. He hunts anything from wild boars to bears. Absolutely fearless. But today he will have to be satisfied with guarding Nightfall. I am not leaving Vivienne unprotected.”
The dog whimpered.
“I think he’d rather hunt the Beast,” Vivienne said, laughing.
Then Oscar’s wife made a low, gurgling sound as if she had something caught in her throat. She opened her mouth, but no sound came. Her face flushed as she tried to draw a breath. She pitched out of her wheelchair. Arms and legs flailed as she convulsed.
“Viv, my God!” Oscar said.
“Mother!” Claude and Cassi both shouted. They ran to her where she lay shaking uncontrollably, her leg braces chattering on the walk, her heels throwing gravel.
“She’s having a fit,” Pops said, climbing off his horse.
I dismounted and joined them.
Vivienne’s eyes rolled up in her head, showing only ivory. Her hair had come loose from its braiding. Nuggets of grit and dirty ice balls clung to her. She’d landed face down and now rolled over onto her back. Her nose and upper lip were bleeding.
“Give me more to eat,” she said. The voice was not her voice but that of a dead talker. “Give me more… give me, give me moremoremore…”
She writhed on the frozen ground.
“Viv, stop this. Grab her arms; someone help me.” Oscar tried to hold her kicking legs. She knocked him backward with a swift blow to the stomach that made him grunt in pain and struggle to draw another breath.
“Get something soft to put under her head,” Pops said.
I took off my coat, tucking it beneath her.
She turned and licked my hands.
Her eyes showed nothing but whiteness. The veins in her neck bulged.
“Taste you, Doctor. Taste you and eat you,” she said. She nipped at my fingers. I jerked my hands back. She laughed. “Eat you. Eat you. Eatyoueatyoueatyou–” Her teeth clacked together so mercilessly that I feared they might chip into pieces. This was not Vivienne Adderly. Something was using her body. She tore herself from Pop as he fumbled a needle from his bag, attempting to inject her. She raked black fingernails across his jaw. He swore. She rolled away. Then she went crawling on her belly. Claude and Cassi gaped in horror. Helplessly they watched her approach the horsemen. The horses retreated. She craned her neck, the muscles bulging. Her dress was shredding on the stones; her pale skin turned mottled. Despite her rolled-back eyes, she saw them. Giddy she was. Blood smeared half her face, staining her teeth crimson. It reminded me of the Beast glaring in the window last night.
“You are all going to die,” she said, swallowing her own blood.
Billy the Kid stayed the farthest back. He put the pine tree between himself and the possessed woman. Dirty Dan’s grizzly bear watched with dull beady brown eyes but did not come closer. Gavin Earl observed the scene coolly but made no move.
I tossed Vivienne’s fox blanket over her. She clawed at it as if it were alive.
“I am so hungry,” she said. She bit down on the fur, stuffing it into her mouth, straining in a futile attempt to consume it.
Smoke Eel stepped on the back of her leg. Feeling herself pinned, she twisted. He hit her with the butt of his shotgun. Vivienne’s head snapped back. She slumped, motionless.
While she remained unconscious, Pops jabbed his needle into the globe of muscle below her hip. Vivienne’s breathing fell into a deep, regular rhythm, her ribcage pumping like an exhausted animal that’s been chased through the woods. Her eyes shut. She might’ve been having nightmares. But this was real and not as easily dismissed as a dream.
“You hit my wife.” Oscar was sitting up in the pebbles. “You goddamned Indian bastard, I’ll see you hang. I’ll have you gutted and your entrails fed to my dog.”
Smoke Eel took his pencil and scribbled in his notebook. He turned it for me to read.
“Not your wife,” I read aloud for everyone to hear.
“Of course she’s my wife. I’ve known her twenty years, you heathen idiot,” Oscar said.
Smoke Eel wrote another note.
“Your wife on the outside. Not your wife on the inside,” I said.
“A possession,” Evangeline said. “Like her dead talks, only Viv did not control this. It invaded her. As a medium she is sensitive to such entities. To powerful malignant forces too.”
Smoke Eel scribbled furiously.
“This lady speaks the truth. The spirit in your wife is evil. We must not listen,” I read the written words, and then added a few of my own. “It is like a sickness that comes on suddenly.”
“A sickness? She’s been infected by an entity that wants to scare us?” Oscar said.
“That’s possible,” I said.
Cassi bundled up the bruised and unconscious Vivienne. Claude lifted his mother.
“Claude, put her in bed.” Oscar turned to his daughter. “Someone from the family has to stay behind. Do you understand me, Cassi? You will have to miss the hunt today, I’m afraid. Stay with her. Your mother needs you.”
Cassi appeared torn between the responsibility of acting as the dutiful daughter and feeling crestfallen for being left out of the day’s events.
“I will make certain she remains safe,” she said, nodding.
“Good girl.”
She began to shuffle away.
“We can postpone the hunt until tomorrow,” I suggested. “Vivienne is obviously feeling unwell. She needs rest and the town doctor. The Beast isn’t going anywhere.”
“No.” Oscar regained his footing and dusted himself off. “Viv will recover. The best thing we can do is continue with our plans. The entity wishes us to slow down because it is threatened. We will go forward. Get back on your horses. My wife is my business. The Beast is yours. Find it. Let’s go! Go!”
Oscar looked like a man who had lost his fortune and been run down by a stagecoach in the same day. He left for the Gold Trail with Smoke Eel leading him along the road. On Claude’s horse, Oscar placed one of Smoke Eel’s pages with a note telling Claude to follow. It was late morning by the time we filed out of Nightfall Lodge. The sun was climbing, offering light but little warmth. I was the last in line. I heard the doors open behind me and turned in my saddle.
When Claude came outside he had blood on him. The sun found the red stripe.
He did not seem to care. His face was a mask, his eyes without pity.
Claude rode in another direction, driving his horse up through the high rocks.
There is more the hint of a killer in him, I thought. He’ll get bloodier. He wants this.
I was right.
And I was wrong.
12
Good Draw
The copper-painted signpost stuck up from the rockpile like a fat lightning rod. There was a big black bird on it, maybe a crow; but the bird flew off before I could identify it, but not before leaving behind a streak of lumpy white deposit in its place.
“Wu, is it the Chinese who believe bird droppings are an omen?” I asked.
“Yes, we most surely do,” he said.
“And what do they predict?”
“Birds.”
I nodded with a false solemnity. It was good to see Yong Wu joking. He had endured much sorrow in his young life, and his resiliency inspired me. I tended to explore my wounds, never letting them heal, as if they were an unmapped country and I their devoted cartographer.
“Here is our trail,” Evangeline said. “Do you think we got a good draw?”
McTroy had the map spread across his pommel. His mouth was shut tight and his eyes were slits. He was pondering. He looked up at her. “I don’t see how it matters. The railroad lies to the northeast, but we won’t g
o that far. There’s a creek runs through our zone. That’s good. But the Beast might be anywhere out there. Standing behind one of them ponderosa pines or huddled in its hidey hole waiting for after dark. I asked around town. None of the Beast attacks came before the sun moved into the west. I’d say daylight’s about as safe as it’s gonna get. And make no mistake, the Beast will find us ’fore we find it. But that don’t mean we can’t look.”
Wu was visibly relieved at this information. He had been swiveling around in his saddle all morning, trying to catch sight of a monster. Any monster. Judging by his sudden jolts, he’d seen a few suspicious blurs creeping among the tree shadows and gnarly, snow-mottled rocks.
“What do you think it is?” he asked McTroy.
“I don’t have an opinion. Not yet. I haven’t seen it. Or even dreamed about it, right, Doc?”
I ignored his provocation about my night wandering and what I saw standing on the ledge in the lodge window.
“Yet you believe it is nocturnal?” I asked.
“Night privileges the ambusher. Predators take every advantage afforded to them. That’s true for the Beast. And it’ll be true for our rivals when they come too.”
“Earl might sabotage us?” I said. “I hadn’t considered him a threat.”
“Start considering. He’ll do what it takes to grab the gold.”
“It’s quite a specimen, that bull. I’ll admit I was stunned to discover it here,” I said.
“So, you think the idol’s the real McCoy?” The bounty man remained dubious.
“Possibly,” I said. “Oscar picked a good story. It’s difficult to prove true or false. He’s drawn to beautiful and unusual things. Like Vivienne. I could see him paying top dollar for such an object. It would hold a strange attraction for him. Parting with the biblical idol would be a genuine sacrifice. To him it would be a prize worth risking one’s life to win.”
“I want it,” Evangeline said. “I don’t care if it’s biblical, mythological, or what-have-you. I’m not very biblical in case you haven’t noticed. We write our own stories. Nothing is true but that power makes it so. Give me my dreams over your realities. The past is a rotting corpse. It falls apart when examined and stinks to high heaven.”
I was flabbergasted. “How can you say that nothing is true? I am by practice no churchgoer, no godly man in the eyes of any creed, nor do I claim myself to be a believer. Yet the study of Egyptology builds upon authenticity. History must be vigilant against lies. It records the truth. However faulty the results, the goal is noble. Lies corrupt knowledge! We must have facts!”
“But, Hardy, you mistake me for a fellow Egyptologist. I am an occultist. What others call fancy drives me more than universal truths taught to you by dusty old men in dustier old classrooms. I reject them and their chalky dullness. Facts are not all there is under the sun.”
“You are comfortable living with lies?” I said.
“If they are better lies, then I will take them gladly.”
“And give them,” McTroy said, smiling. He slipped a whiskey bottle from his saddlebag and pulled the cork with his teeth. He offered the bottle around, but no one took any. He swallowed several times as he tipped it back. “I like you, Miss E. Sure you won’t enjoy a drink with me this glorious morning?”
“I’ll drink when we have something to celebrate,” Evangeline said. She pulled off her glove and crossed her heart with her gloveless finger. “I promise.”
She put the glove on again.
“I celebrate the morning.” McTroy opened his arms and filled his lungs deeply with fresh mountain air. He plugged the bottle back between his lips and suckled it like a baby. The glass flashed blue in the sun. Then he wiped his mouth with the back of his hand. He corked the whiskey and returned it to his bag. Cardinals flitted through the pine boughs. A snowy valley dived sharply away to our right. The sunny brightness hitting the snow brought stinging tears to my eyes. I tugged my bowler lower and tried to look for tracks on either side of the trail. But all the pocks in the snow appeared equally indecipherable to me. I was like an illiterate leafing his way through the Sunday New York Times. Study though I might, any clear meaning evaded me.
I tried to concentrate on riding.
“McTroy, what do you know of Gavin Earl’s team?” Evangeline asked.
“Murderers and scum.”
“Care to elaborate?” she said.
“Pops ran brothels in lumberjack camps up north. Kept his soiled doves tame by making them slaves to opium. Rides a medicine wagon these days with the Kid. The Kid does some trick shooting. They con the local rubes and move on. Dirty Dan the Mountain Man butchered two families in their cabins. I’ll not speculate on what he did before he killed them.”
“How do you know so much about these men?” Evangeline asked.
McTroy reached into his coat and pulled out folded papers. He handed them to Evangeline, who read them and then passed them on to me and Wu.
“I got bills on them,” he continued. “They’re wanted men. These are famous fellas. Even if we don’t find the Beast, I plan on collecting some bounties.”
“You have no bill for Gavin Earl,” she said.
“He’s too smart.”
“Does Earl deserve a rope and a tree too?” she inquired.
“What Gavin Earl deserves is a-coming for him,” McTroy said.
“What about the one who calls himself Billy the Kid?” I said. “There is no wanted poster for him either. Perhaps that’s because Pat Garrett killed the young gun years ago.”
“He looks like Billy to me,” McTroy said, matter-of-factly.
“You’ve met Billy the Kid?” I asked.
“Once at Hargrove’s Saloon, the night he shot Joe Grant. I didn’t witness the fracas. But I saw Billy there. Played cards with him. That’s what he looked like.”
“And our Billy resembles the real Billy?” I said.
“Yep. He hasn’t aged a day since.”
“Why didn’t you collect at Hargrove’s if he was a wanted man?” Evangeline asked.
“He was wanted in New Mexico Territory. I worked mainly in Arizona and Texas. He never robbed trains or coaches. Billy’s a cattle rustler. I had no cause to tangle with him.”
“But we can agree Billy is dead. Everybody knows that,” I said.
“What everybody knows don’t mean a thing to me, Doc. Hard enough to know what I know and not get confused by it. Billy looks pretty good for a dead man.”
I considered Billy’s recuperative powers.
“Billy was shot at the Starry Eyes yesterday. A flesh wound to the ear. Pops sewed him up and injected him with a solution from a little green bottle. I think it was not the first time Pops repaired him,” I said. “He seems fit this morning.”
“Maybe Pops sewed him up after Garrett plugged him too. He’s juicing him with an elixir that keeps the Kid sleeping outside the pine box hotel.” McTroy rubbed his rough chin and smiled. “I hope I look as lively when I’m a goner.”
“As an Egyptologist I appreciate your desire to leave behind a handsome corpse.”
“I’m just not leaving it today, Doc.”
Wu cleared his throat.
“Miss Evangeline, what happened to Mrs Adderley? Was she under a witchcraft spell?” Wu’s voice might have deepened in the last year, and he had certainly sprouted, but he was still a boy inside after all, and he sought certain assurances that might provide comfort.
“Vivienne is a medium who opens herself to the spirit world. That makes her vulnerable to spiritual assaults. And she confided in me that she sometimes suffers spells – not of a witching nature but neurotic fits caused by the fall that crippled her legs,” Evangeline said.
“Where did she fall?” Wu asked, wide-eyed.
“It was here. In these mountains. She ended up in a gorge. It was lucky she did not die, from what she told me. Oscar rescued her from the ledge. He climbed down a rockslide at great personal risk to bri
ng her to safety. It’s one of the reasons she puts up with him. He is her savior.”
“Those things she told us were pretty awful. ‘You are all going to die,’” Wu said.
“Perhaps she means eventually. You’re all eventually going to die. That sounds less ominous.” I did what I could to mitigate his dread. But I failed to put a dent in my own unease.
“Whoa, Moonlight.”
McTroy stopped his horse.
Where Jingle was a mostly white horse flecked with gray imperfections that made me like him for his irregularities – those dots and foggy freckles were quite mesmerizing if you tried to trace a pattern, a bit like looking for figures in the stars – McTroy’s Moonlight was a pure white mustang. Smallish and incredibly strong for her size, she had legendary endurance and an intelligence that bettered many men. She was a good-luck talisman for McTroy. He placed her high among his most valued friends.
McTroy swung out of his saddle, taking his Marlin repeater from its scabbard. He levered the gun and scanned the landscape carefully, keeping his rifle stock against his cheek. When nothing emerged, he crouched and inspected the snow at the trail’s edge.
I hopped down from Jingle and joined him.
“What do you see?” I said. “Is it evidence of our elusive Beast?”
McTroy pointed to a line of tracks angling into a patch of thicker woods. The prints were large: four oval toe impressions and a rear paw pad. Taken together they were wider across than my hand, which I spread on the icy ground for comparison. I brushed snow from my palm.
“Mountain lion,” McTroy said. “Walking, not running.” He gazed over his left shoulder. “We’re not half a mile from the lodge.”
“Interesting, if not relevant to our chase. The Beast walks on two legs, McTroy, not four. Why are we wasting time looking for cats?”
“Because I don’t want to be hunted by two beasts.”
“Fair enough.” I started following the tracks. “But it does strike me as unlikely.”
“Hold off,” McTroy said.
I had my head down staring intently at the impressions. I glanced up and saw them continuing for several yards, heading between a half-dead spruce and pile of pink boulders.
