His Ragged Company

by Rance Denton

  I clicked down a double six-pip. “You’re a pretty good shot. You want a job?”

  He tapped a domino against his lips. “You want me to be a mercenary?”

  “I want you to be my deputy,” I clarified.

  “That’s sweet of you, Marshal Asshole. All your job offers this unceremonious?”

  “Take it or leave it,” I said.

  Grady Cicero quirked a bushy brow underneath his spectacles. He watched me for a few minutes, now and then his temple twitching or his mustache flicking like it was trying to whip a fly. A hard sell.

  He clicked a tile down. A six-and-two.

  “So,” I said, clearing my throat, “when you want to start?”

  “By the way I showed you up with your own rifle, I think I already have, Marshal Faust.”

  We finished our game. I figured in the future I might be needing help. Maybe not, though. Maybe the Gregdons would stay in their hole. Maybe they’d forget I existed. Maybe they’d go back to their normal ways: simple thieving, simple bullying, easy to kill.

  I doubted it, but I hoped.

  Suppertime came and Cicero went for beef. I lingered behind with whiskey. I rolled back in my chair when he was gone and considered my desk drawer. After enough thinking and not enough doing, I pulled it open.

  Rattling around inside one of the knuckle-holes of Cicero’s brass knuckles, Joshua’s perfect silver sphere winked in the dull light of my desk’s oil-lamp. I saw my face distorted and reflected back at me in the silver ball.

  On my desk, Billy Gregdon’s half-burnt piece of paper began to darken. New ink bled into it. I see you, it read. In a flash, it burned to nothing.

  I slammed the desk shut.

  Now

  Being’s a funny thing. You take it for granted. That’s natural, really. Look too far into the crevices of what we don’t know and can’t fathom – like what you are when you aren’t – and it starts getting too bright for us to handle. What’s unknown isn’t a dark room. It’s a blinding ball of fire. But turn your head to acknowledge it, it shines light on all those bleak parts that make up who you are: your doubts, your weaknesses, your inadequacies, all your mistakes.

  So most of us don’t think about being. We just are. No questions, no answers. Easy. Breezy.

  But with that legion of worms writhing inside of me, I wasn’t.

  At this moment, I am not.

  Fear rattles me. Inside me. Shakes me like cornhusk doll.

  They’re eating the time out of my bones. They feast on fibers under my skin. What could have been but one minute stretches out into an endless bootlace of time. Now and then I become vaguely aware of the agony of the thorns in my wrists, but swarmed by these burrowing beasts, I imagine pieces of myself falling away: slivers of skin, and with it, tidbits of memories and sensation and weight…

  “Hold on,” I growl to myself through my—

  (Do I still have teeth…did I ever have teeth?)

  “Tell me this doesn’t unravel you that much, Elias Faust. You’re made of more resilient stuff, or so I was led to believe.” His voice thrums with quiet pleasure. He’s enjoying this; he’s loving it.

  The worms, they’re in my brain. Gnawing at the meat in my skull. Driving themselves like nails underneath my muscle and curling around my organs. When they suck at me, parts of me start pulling away from the here and now, like a blanket pulled apart thread by thread…

  “Why are you—”

  (Think…words. Find them. God, are they…are they eating those, too?)

  I glance down. The slithering little parasites feast under my fingernails. My nails are like cloudy glass. They thrash underneath. “Why is this so important to you,” I manage to ask.

  “Because it is imperative that we know every detail exactly as you experienced them.”

  “Why the worms,” I say. “The bugs? Is it really…” (What’s the word?) I find it eventually. I might as well have needed to wrestle it out of a worm’s slimy mouth. “Is it really necessary?”

  “Necessary? No. Amusing? Highly. Testing your resolve, though, is part of the process.”

  “Well, your process is a real pain in my ass.”

  Just then, in front of the sickly gaslights over my questioner’s shoulders, I watch him lift a hand into the air and clench it into a violent fist. An invisible hook snares me by the stomach and yanks me forward. Inside me the worms chatter in a heinous symphony of noise, squealing and screaming and screeching in discomfort, burrowing deeper into my conscience to get away from whatever danger they sense, like rats fleeing fire.

  I’m face-to-face with him. There’s blood and rot on his breath.

  Every one of his eyes – all thirteen of them – stare through me. His face is a whole array of them, bulging and large, beady and small. They gleam on the cheeks like pustules and wink and blink across the misshapen brow. They don’t open and close in unison. When he speaks, the cavernous mouth gapes and there is a lone eyeball resting on the back of his tongue, as if it might roll out at me any second. The worms are screaming. I feel it. They’re terrified.

  My whole body goes numb.

  The fisted hand tightens. I lurch closer. I’m inches away. “Even under this kind of duress, Faust, your cooperation is essential. There’s still quite a lot of ground to cover, and letting yourself be misguided by small distractions will only extend our inquiry. The choice is yours: you can wallow in your pain, or you can agree to tell us what you know. That means everything. That means—”

  The worms peel the image out of my brain. They unstitch it out of my memories, and I see it flash like a quick burst of lightning in front of me: a face of stark white and black, like bone formed on flesh. She’s small, she’s powerful, and I…

  (They’re going to eat what remains of her right out of your mind…)

  “You want me to tell you about her?” I ask.

  Thirteen. His name’s Thirteen. I remember it now.

  “Absolutely everything,” he says.

  Part IV

  The Girl Made of Gold

  17

  I was having a really good night until, twelve-and-a-half minutes before all the bloodshed, Miss Lachrimé Garland stormed into the Crooked Cocoon Saloon, gasping like a well-pump and looking about ready to bust a few whale-bones out the side of her corset.

  “I think you need to come see this,” Lachrimé told me, and they were the most sobering damn words a body can hear.

  I was halfway through a very good beer. It was Saturday night. I was enjoying myself, mostly. “It can wait,” I said.

  Next to me, Cicero pinched his bowler. “Maybe we should burn that into the office door. The age-old motto: It can wait.”

  “Well, this absolutely can’t, with a big motherfucking emphasis on the absolutely can’t.” She never raised her voice, just thrust her chin forward and glared holes through me. “You do get paid to do something.”

  “A lofty presumption,” Cicero said.

  “This is something,” I said, raising my beer.

  Which she snapped out of my hand and chugged to solve the problem, leaving a mountain of foam under her nose. Then, her hand as hot as a furnace, she grabbed my lapel and yanked me to my feet. “I swear to Christ,” she said and wrenched me for the door.

  People parted in front of us, but were altogether too busy to care much about anything except their games of cards, their warm drinks, or the tinkling mutter of the off-key harpsichord trilling away in the corner. Cicero sat back at our table and raised my shotgun from where it’d been leaning against another chair. I shrugged as loudly as I could.

  Sure, you lazy bastard, I thought. Keep enjoying yourself.

  When Lachrimé tugged me out the front door, I immediately felt the cool air of the Blackpeak night against my face, knocking my head free of smoke and commotion. She pushed me into the street and started walking in front of me like a hasty pigeon, the tail of her skirt sweeping a paintbrush pattern in the sand and rocks. “If I come to you, Elias, it’s because
I’m choosing to be careful, and you and I, I think we’ve come to learn the importance of discretion.”

  “There something wrong?”

  “Not wrong,” she said. “Just not quite right.”

  That was enough, whispered with just enough careful coolness that having any more scruples about Miss Garland’s judgment would have been willing ignorance. A lump of anxiety jumped into my throat. We whisked past the Horseshoe Junction, past the general store, down a muddy path that led to the tailor’s storefront and a gaggle of two-floored residences. Here, the noise of the night died away and if you stood still enough, it was like nothing in the world moved at all.

  “Down there,” Lachrimé said as we came to the mouth of an alley. She withdrew a crumpled cigarette from her sleeve-cuff and lit it with a match struck against her boot.

  “When’d you start smoking?”

  “When didn’t I?”

  “Never saw you partake in such a habit.”

  “Never buried a man before sunrise, neither.”

  I stared into the alley, seeing blackness, smelling nothing but stale piss and old brick. “This some kind of—” I waved a hand in the air, “—birthday surprise, like folks are gonna come leaping out of the woodwork blowing confetti at me?”

  “Is it your birthday?”

  I shrugged.

  “What a shitty birthday this would be.” Her cheeks darkened as she sucked in smoke. “All I know is I saw something, and it wasn’t normal, and since the Everett fiasco, I’m sure not willing to traipse into a dark alley by myself.”

  “So you want me to do it?”

  “I got things to live for,” she said, haughty about it.

  “Seems about like your only purpose in life is making mine hell.”

  “To you it’s hell,” she said. “To me it’s pure joy.”

  I rested a blistered palm on the cold handle of my Colt. A chill shot down my spine. I searched the darkness for silver eyes. When I tried to breathe, my chest refused to expand all the way. My hackles shot to attention. A hum in the air. Nothing you could hear, nothing you could barely even feel, just a dull sense, the same one that lights a fire under a kid’s ass as he stares into the darkness of a cellar. “What is it exactly I’m looking for, Miss Garland,” I asked.

  “I think you’ll see.”

  I damn well had no room for secrets, but I pulled my Colt and she shooed me forward with her hands. Regretfully, I started creeping forward into the alley, begging my eyes to adjust.

  The alley held nothing more than the discarded garbage of human business: some busted casks, rotted boxes, glass bottles. An old wheel missing its spokes. A broken trough someone had planned to dismantle but never got to. People clung to the presumption that garbage would just vanish after awhile, and that’s the way it seemed to be with most things.

  I did what any sensible fellow would do: I started nudging at objects with the mouth of my revolver.

  I turned my head. Looked back at Miss Garland for guidance.

  I damn well had no room for secrets, but I pulled my Colt and she shooed me forward with her hands.

  The alley held nothing more than the discarded garbage of human business. Busted casks, rotted boxes, bottles. Old wheel missing spokes. When, I thought, was someone going to take a hammer to that crumbled trough? I supposed garbage might just vanish after awhile, sink away, become nothing. That’s the way it seemed to be with—

  I turned my head. Looked back at Miss Garland for guidance.

  I certainly didn’t have time for secrets, but I pulled my Colt and—

  She pinched a cigarette out from her sleeve and lit it.

  We talked about something. About…

  “I got things to live for,” she said, haughty about it.

  Whiplash. Back. Back there. Standing.

  Miss Garland retrieved a rumpled cigarette from her sleeve. She struggled lighting it because cold rain punched the match-light out. “Oh, fuck off,” she said, and flicked the useless paper.

  “When’d you start smoking?” I asked.

  “When didn’t I?”

  I tripped over something, stubbing my boot-toe against it. I pitched forward in the alley and fell hands-first to the mud. “Would you believe some lazy prick,” I shouted back to Miss Garland, “just dumped their old trough back here, like what, it’s going to sprout wings and just fly away?”

  Her face lit up with fire as she sparked a cigarette pulled out from the cuff of her dress-sleeve. “I never liked smoking,” she announced.

  “Then why’d you start?”

  “To you,” she said, “it’s hell. To me—”

  What? I thought.

  “—it’s pure joy.”

  Whiplash. Back. Back there.

  Trundling into the alley, there seemed like there was just so much trash: a wagon-wheel rolled across in front of me, and boxes stacked themselves like puzzle-pieces in front of me. I thought Christ Almighty, how much garbage do these people make? I kept walking deeper and deeper until, out of nowhere, my ankle busted through a weak piece of discarded wood and I lost balance, pitched forward…

  Forward and through, pushing through some unseen blanket. A fog in my brain blew away. I fell...

  Fell, like a sack of bricks, at a pair of feet half-sunk in the mud.

  I followed them up to protruding ankles, knees bent, to a figure huddled like an oversized child in a crease of alley-cast shadow. What I saw there stared back at me, with eyes that gave off a wild array of green sparks, and when they blinked they went flicker-flack, flicker-flack like loose-hinged shutters, a sideways blink.

  A naked woman stared up at me through unclear layers of the world. A furious pounding began in my skull, pushing at its every corner. Up came her hand, a graceful but powerful hand that pushed at me, pushed toward me, trying to encourage me to...to…

  I needed to leave her be. Needed to ignore her. Needed to...

  I mean, after all, I supposed garbage might just vanish after awhile, sink away, become nothing. That’s the way it seemed to be with—

  I turned my head. Looked back at Miss Garland for guidance.

  Then I slammed my eyes shut and I barked, “Stop,” with all the ferocity of a trembling cat. It fizzled out from me, pushed out from deflated lungs. “Stop, stop,” I gasped, my heartbeat starting a relentless stampede. I was about to scream it, too, when the membrane cleared, as if wiped away by a careless palm.

  The strangeness melted away from the world.

  Clarity crashed back into me.

  I stared down at a frail but peculiar specimen of a living thing: a woman-that-was-not, hairless and more a living gem than a fleshy thing at all, with skin polished-smooth, shining gold and jade in an array of map-like patterns. When I tried to look at her, the air and wind and even the cigarette-smoke tried to drag my gaze away, shift my attention to something else.

  Lachrimé’s feet crunched down the alley. With a pale cigarette bobbing in her mouth, she tugged up the lap of her skirts, squatted down, and offered a hand to the hidden woman before us.

  “I watched it happen,” Lachrimé whispered, afraid Blackpeak would overhear. “I saw a star break out of the sky, clear as day, and fall to the ground. It was her, Elias. It was her.”

  18

  “And the first thing you thought to do,” I asked Lachrimé, “was come to get me?”

  “No, the first thing I thought to do after the impact was to get new britches, because I just about pissed myself.”

  The woman, hunkered in the mud, shot her gaze back and forth between me and Lachrimé. Her shape had all the strokes of an artist’s exaggeration, her legs and arms all lanky and overlong. Her skin smoked like an oiled pan, and her hairless head leaned back so she could take stock of both of us. Her body, the wild pattern of shining gold and green, breathed out its own subtle glow. More like a pieced-together antique than a woman at all. Could have flicked her and shattered her to a thousand pieces.

  With her hands scraping like crude tools,
she tore at the wet soil. She exhumed whole handfuls, scanned them, then threw them aside.

  We just watched. If not for all the mud, I could have sworn she shone like a jewel. This woman, if woman was even the word for her, stood out like a swollen thumb in the filth. “How did you come across her, Miss Garland?”

  “Exactly as I said. I noticed a spark in the sky…”

  “Yeah?”

  “And I was just about on the verge of doing what you do with shooting stars when I heard a whistle, phewpt.” Lachrimé took two fingers on a comet journey through the air and landed them in her opposite palm. “When I came out to check, here she was, glowing like a sparkler.”

  Miss Lachrimé Garland had never misguided me, and as we stared at this wiry geode-girl, I wondered why it had to be me dragged here to this shit-stinking alley.

  “You think we’ll encounter as much resistance going out as coming in?”

  Miss Garland reached back toward the invisible membrane, waved her fingers in the air, and shook her head. “I think whatever she put into place lost its purpose when you buffaloed your way in here.”

  In here. The words made me painfully aware of what I was missing here: the murmurs of voices through the thin walls, the sounds of night, the distant winds, howling things, hooting things, crunching footsteps, all the usual ambiance of a restless world. But not anymore. She’d cupped us all up inside some great invisible hand and muted the world to us.

  A fool’s advice: accept what you see in the moment, fill in the blanks later, preferably over a gallon of something foamy.

  With strangeness afoot, I found myself eerily calm. Heartbeat slowed to normal. Skin didn’t prickle with that get-your-ass-in-your-hand fear that comes with gunshots and knife-tips. I crouched down in front of the lost girl.

  She didn’t look at me. Just kept digging, her face set in frantic determination.

  “You think she can walk?”

  “She’s got legs,” Lachrimé said.

  I stage-whispered to our new charge from behind a hand, “Atrocious bedside manner if you ask me.” Then, very carefully, with the same soft-motion approach you take with bitey animals, I held out my palm. “Hey.”