He reached inside his shirt and pulled out a small rectangle of silver that hung from his neck by a leather thong. The figure of an eagle in flight was engraved upon it. He squeezed his fist around it and held it tight, as if it had some special power that could help him, that might preserve him, keep him alive just long enough to get his revenge. He seemed to gather some strength from it and after a while, he let go of it and lifted the bowl to his mouth, held his nose, and poured the mush down his throat.
The morning dragged on as it always did. He watched the other carnival attractions walk by his cage on their way from the chow tent to their own tents, where they would prepare for the day’s show. Samar the Malaysian Snake boy, 16 years old with the skin of a reptile walked by, and as he got close to the cage, his two-foot-long tongue shot out and snatched a fly from the air. Niko the Geek, the man who bit the heads off live chickens, walked past his cage with a hot cup of coffee in his hands. His hands shook and the coffee spilled over the brim as he walked. His hangover was worse than usual today. Naka, the 500 pound dark-skinned fat woman from Borneo, dressed in a grass skirt, waddled on by. She gave him a lascivious wink and said, “Hya, handsome!” as she waddled by.
The Beast Man noticed that despite the differences in each of their appearances, due to the exotic locations they came from, they all had one thing in common. Even though they seemed outwardly calm and well adjusted, they reeked of fear. He could smell it on them. They were afraid of the man with the whip and the gun. The man who had plucked them out of whatever miserable environment he had found them in during the course of his sea-faring travels. He’d found them and lured them with promises of food and shelter for the rest of their lives in some cases. In others, the freaks who could not speak, or had much mobility, like the legless man from Siam, and the girl with no arms and no tongue, it had been a matter of outright kidnapping. They were his property now, his chattel. He could do what he wanted with them because there was no one else who cared about these castoffs of society. They were the unwanted, the discarded, the wreckage that could only be looked at by civilized society through the bars of a cage.
Later, at what he judged from the position of the sun to be ten o’clock, she came and stopped by his cage again. The way she did every morning over the four weeks he’d been there. She came from Captain Carlson’s wagon on her way to her own sideshow tent. She stopped and stood there looking in at him, Elois, the Mermaid Girl, with her large green eyes, eyes the color of the sea. She was beautiful. Her small oval face was framed by long yellow hair that seemed made of spun gold. She wore a simple calico dress that, despite its plainness, revealed a delicate, but shapely figure. The gold slippers on her feet gave her the look of a princess. She stood there for a long minute staring up at him.
“I know how you feel,” she said. Her words startled him. It was the first time she had spoken to him. Her voice was as soft and melodious as he imagined it would be. “I know what you must be suffering.” He stepped closer to the bars. “I’m a prisoner too,” she said. “I don’t know if you can understand me,” she said. “But I want you to know that I suffer too.”
He knew she must have suffered a great deal. He had seen the bruises on her arms and shoulders that Captain Carlson had given her. Today there were fresh marks on her wrist and neck, where his fingers had left their impression.
“Every night in my tent I swim in a big tank of water,” she said. “I dive underwater and stay down five minutes, and everyone marvels, and applauds. They think it’s a trick. They come back the next day or evening, to see if they can figure out how I do it. But it’s not a trick. The water is my home. Not the water in the tank. My home was in the sea.” A tear spilled out of the corner of her eye and glistened on her cheek. “There are many kinds of cages, Beast Man. They come in many shapes. I hate my tank as much as you hate these bars.” She smiled at him sadly. “I want to go back to my home, where my kind live. But I can’t. I have been away too long. I have been on dry land so long, that if I swam out to sea, I would drown like any other woman.”
The Beast Man grabbed hold of the bars and stared down at her.
“I am trapped here,” the girl said. “We all live in one kind of cage or another.”
The Beast Man reached a hand out through the bars. He tried to speak but all that came out of his throat was the grunt of an animal, and at that moment Captain Carlson came strutting down the midway.
“Elois,” he yelled. “What are you doing here? Haven’t I told you I don’t want you getting near him? He’s very dangerous.”
“I shouldn’t wonder,” the girl said. “The way you keep him locked up.”
“It’s necessary, my love,” the captain said. He put his arm around her shoulders and looked up at the Beast Man. “Eventually he will learn how to behave here in our little world. He will learn the lesson of the whip and the gun. And then, perhaps, we can let him out of his cage.” He turned to her and raised his hand and caressed her cheek with his short, thick fingers. “Until then, my dear, please, stay away from him.” His fingers moved to her chin, and lifted her face up, and he kissed her. “Now, don’t you have something to do? Didn’t you say you wanted to try a new dive today? Shouldn’t you be practicing it?”
“Yes, Eric,” Elois said. “As you say. I have things to do.” She shot a last short glance up at the Beast Man then walked off to her tent.
Captain Carlson stood with his hands on his hips, smiling up at the Beast Man. “I know what you’re thinking,” he said. “I know what a beast like you has on his mind.” He uncoiled the whip looped over his shoulder and cracked it loud in between the bars. The Beast Man jumped back, growling. “Don’t even think of entertaining a thought like that,” Captain Carlson said, cracking the whip again and again. “Don’t,” he said, “or I’ll kill you.”
Later Haney pushed his cage back inside his tent. He was new to the carnival, so only a makeshift sign was written on a small sheet of plywood that hung outside on the front of the tent. The words, “Beast Man” were written crude letters in black paint.
It was a Saturday and the carnival was set up just outside the city limits of Tucson. When the noon hour came, the gates opened, and a crowd of kids and adults poured into carnival. The captain himself stood on a stage not far from the entrance, barking them in.
“Come one, come all!” he began. “Welcome to Captain Carlson’s Carnival of the Fantastic! For one thin dime, ladies and gentlemen your eyes will see things they have never seen before. I promise you a world of wonders from all over the globe. Freaks of nature from exotic places you never dreamed of.” He pointed to a tent to his left. “In yonder tent you will find Samar, the Malaysian Snake Boy, half cobra, half-human—a one of a kind marvel. Further down, see the 500 pound bearded fat lady of Borneo. See Niko the Geek, all the way from Patagonia, who will bite the head off a live chicken right before your very eyes!” He cracked his whip in the air.
“Gathered from the far corners of the world,” he yelled, “during my sea journeys to far and dangerous places, these attractions are presented for your amusement and amazement.” He pointed at the farthest tent. “Over there, for example, ladies and gentlemen, in that tent, a special added attraction, brand new to the carnival. Perhaps the wildest, strangest, most fearsome feature here on the midway.” He cracked the whip again and it sounded like a pistol shot. “Half Man-Half Wolf! This creature has only just recently been captured. He’s still wild, so be careful when you enter his tent. Believe me, if he got free he’d tear each and every one of you limb from limb. He’d tear your gizzard out and eat your liver!”
Half a dozen wide-eyed boys and their equally spellbound fathers, stood gaping up at the Captain. He jumped down from the stage and marched with them to the tent with the makeshift wooden sign, where Haney waited, ready to take their money.
Haney pulled the tent flap away and the crowd poured inside. Captain Carlson led them right up to the cage that stood on big red wheels against the back wall.
; “Ladies and Gentlemen,” Captain Carlson bellowed, “I present for your amusement—the Beast Man!”
They stood in awe of the monster standing at the bars, growling and spitting at them; a savage man-wolf.
Mordecai Slate looked at the crowd standing in front of his cage—the saucer-eyed farm boys, their amazed fathers and their horrified mothers. A little girl cried and a woman screamed. Slate grabbed hold of the bars of his cage and shook them with an angry growl. Mordecai Slate, once the greatest monster hunter of the West, now a newly transformed creature, half-man, half-wolf—something out of a nightmare, now an attraction in a carnival sideshow.
That night, after the crowd was gone, after the last farm boy walked away, wondering if he would be able to sleep, Mordecai Slate, now known simply as the Beast Man, lay in his cage in the silent darkness of the tent. He lay there and, as he had every night since he had been there, he tried to remember. Maybe if he replayed it all in his mind, every detail, he could find his way out of the nightmare he had fallen into. For indeed, what had happened to him was the nightmarish realization of the greatest fear that a monster hunter can have: he had become the thing he had hunted.
It had happened at Rancho Diablo, the outlaw hideout in the Sonoran Desert, hidden in a canyon in the Cabeza Prietas Mountains. He had tracked Mitch Logan, a lycanthrope, to the hideout. He paid for a room, sliding gold across wood to none other than Liz Duval, the owner and proprietress of the infamous outlaw sanctuary.
Slate had only been hunting one werewolf, and he brazenly joined the outlaws for dinner. He realized how badly he had judged the situation when the moon rose and they all turned, even Liz Duval. Sharp teeth and razor-edged claws were everywhere, seeking the flesh of his throat and limbs. In a mad, red fury, he drew a knife hidden in a leather sheath under his shirt and hacked and slashed with the blade, tearing hair-covered throats open, ripping lupine faces and limbs, as pieces of fur and flesh flew away. Covered in blood and gore, Slate got to his feet with eight creatures half-dead on the floor around him. He searched for his carbine, and found it where Mitch Logan had tossed it. Only the silver bullets in the spare cylinder he had in his pocket could finish the job, and now there was time to reload.
He stood in the room after, the last man standing. He was battered and bruised. There were some scratches, but he didn’t think he’d been bitten. He thought he’d come out of it unscathed. One more battle won. Then, he felt the pain in the calf of his right leg. He saw blood shining on the back of his leg though the black denim. An icy shiver ran down his spine and he sat on the floor and cut the denim away from his calf with his knife. He saw the bite marks, deep and bloody and his heart stopped. The day he dreaded had finally arrived.
For a moment, the horror of it paralyzed him, and he simply sat there staring at the wound. But he knew he couldn’t afford to panic. He was prepared for this eventuality, but he would have to take action, and take it quickly. He tried to get control of his nerves, and cut an X across the bite and let it bleed. He took a small glass phial out of a pocket stitched into the inside of his boot. He uncorked the phial and poured a thick, green, viscous fluid over the bite. Valcobre, a cure for werewolf bite. Cha-Qal-Tan, the Coyotera medicine man had given it to him. What was in it, Slate did not know. He had carried it with him a long time, but had never had to use it until now. The medicine was cool on his wound and the pain subsided a bit. He raised the phial to his lips and drank half of what was left in it, less than an ounce, then put it away.
In a daze, he found his Peacemaker and gunbelt behind the bar where Liz Duval had stored it, and staggered out of the cantina. He fetched Dutch from the stable and rode away from Rancho Diablo under the full yellow moon, out into the desert, half delirious. After riding for hours, he passed out and toppled out of the saddle onto the desert sand.
He woke up under the hot sun, parched, his body aching. The wolf-bite still burned and was now a bright crimson in color, filled with yellow pus. He felt nauseous and light headed. He wanted to lie down, to think, but he knew he had to move. He knew what was coming, and he had to find a place where it could happen with the least harm to any innocent bystanders. He mounted Dutch and started back toward the Cabeza Prietas mountains, but further east than the canyon where Rancho Diablo was located. He had to find shelter before moonrise.
He rode until late afternoon and found himself high up in the mountains. As the light of day faded into evening, he came to a small cave overlooking an empty canyon. He tied Dutch up to a Chinaberry tree near the entrance, put a fresh cylinder into his rifle and fired two shots into the cave. No wild animals came out of it. He took Dutch’s saddle off and carried it and the saddlebags into the cave’s interior. He was sick and felt feverish. He sat down next to his saddle and looked out through the cave entrance and watched the evening grow dark.
When it was time, he took the small glass phial out of his boot and drank the remaining contents. It was bitter to the taste and if it had any beneficial effect, he could not feel it. He reached into his saddlebag and pulled out a set of arm and leg shackles. He held them for a long minute, the metal cold and hard in his hands. He’d used them many times on the monsters he’d hunted over the last twenty years. And now it had come to this. He locked them around his ankles and wrists and threw the key out through the cave entrance. He heard it ring when it hit a rock somewhere down below.
He sat down cross-legged and stared out through the mouth of the cave and watched the top of the moon appear, rising up behind a mountain peak opposite the cave. At first he felt nothing and wondered if the Valcobre had worked. He watched as the moon rose, its full circumference now well above the mountain. Slate felt his heart begin to beat irregularly. He caught his breath. The back of his hands began to itch. He raised his shackled right hand to scratch his left and froze. The back of his hand was covered in hair. He could feel the hair growing out of his skin. His heart began to hammer, pounding brutally against his chest.
He jumped to his feet and started to cry out. No human sound came out of his mouth. Instead a bestial growl rumbled up from his chest and reverberated around the walls of the cave. His knees and elbows, the joints of his fingers suddenly ached terribly and he felt his arms, his legs, his hands, all growing bigger. His fingernails extended and curved and became sharp claws. His hands went to his face and he could feel it was all changed. Distorted. An animal snout had replaced his nose and his teeth were long and sharp.
Rage flooded over him. He growled and grunted, his long teeth snapped the air, his claws flailing out in front of him. Deep, insane urges rose in a swelling tide inside him. Hatred, fear, and the urge to kill all crashed against the wall of his psyche like storm-blown waves. He did not know how long that wall would hold. He knew if it cracked he would be swept away into total animal savagery and madness. He leaped forward and the shackles around his ankles brought him to his knees. He roared in a fury and jumped to his feet again. He pulled his arms wide apart suddenly, again and again, and tried to break the chain. But the chrome steel was made to withstand greater forces than that.
He reached for the Colt Peacemaker tied to his leg but his beast-fingers could not grasp the weapon and it fell out of the holster onto the cave floor. He grabbed a rock lying on the floor of the cave and sat down and pounded the chain between his ankles. But the steel would not break. Mad with frustration, Slate jumped to his feet and hobbled out toward the cave entrance. He came out into the moonlight and stared up at the silvery disc now higher in the night sky. He stood there roaring like a wild beast. He heard Dutch’s frightened whinny and watched helplessly as the buckskin reared up and tore free of the Chinaberry tree he was tethered to. He ran down the sloping trail and Slate tried to call to him, but all that escaped from his throat was the strange, almost frightened cry of an animal. Slate watched the terrified horse galloping down the trail in the ghostly moonlight, running toward the desert below.
He took a few hobbled steps after him, tripped and fell. He lay there, his chest he
aving in panic. He stood up and raised his face up to the moon that seemed to dance in the dark sky over his head. He threw his head back, opened his mouth, and sent up a cry that could never have been emitted from a human throat. And he realized he no longer was human. He had heard that cry many times before from the Man-Wolves he had hunted. He felt a strange, terrifying, yet almost ecstatic sensation sweep over him. His blood had changed. He had become one of them. He had joined the Tribe of the Man-Wolf-Who-Walks-On-Two-Legs, the name the Apaches gave to the werewolf. A dark, raging cloud swirled all around him and Slate felt his mind being swallowed by its fury. With one last roar, he dropped to his knees, and fell into darkness.
In the morning, consciousness returned, and he sat up and the harsh daylight that came in through the cave entrance hurt his eyes. He raised his hand up and stopped when he saw that it was misshapen, oversized, and hair still covered the back of it. He raised his other hand and it was the same. He touched his face and could feel the distension of his cheeks and chin. There were tufts of hair on his neck and on his chest and forearms. In panic, he got to his feet and still bound by the shackles, hobbled out toward the daylight. He ran his hands over his body and a horrible realization swept over him in a sick yellow wave of nausea. He was no longer the Man-Wolf-Who-Walks-On-Two-Legs, but neither was he completely restored to his fully human self. He was something in between. He fell to his knees and let out a howl. Why? What had happened? He had hunted Man-Wolves many years and he had never heard of such a thing. After the transformation on the three nights of the full moon, the werewolf always returns to his human form. You could not tell a werewolf from any other human, in the daylight when they had changed back. Why hadn’t he returned to his former self?
He didn’t know. But he did know one thing: he could not live like this. He had become a monster, something that would be hunted. It would only be a matter of time before men hunted him, as he had hunted the other dark creatures of the world. With a guttural cry, he got on his feet and went back into the cave and found his Peacemaker lying where he’d dropped it on the cave floor. Even though his hands were misshapen and uncoordinated, he was able to pick it up. He held the weapon with both hands and clumsily turned it on himself. He could only get the tips of his thumbnails inside the trigger housing, but it would be enough. He raised the gun and put the barrel inside his open mouth.
Use Enough Gun (Legends of the Monster Hunter Book 3) Page 36
