Merkabah Rider: The Mensch With No Name

by Edward M. Erdelac

  Amonson smiled, and silently thanked the Lord he was blessed with ignorant partners. Five thousand dollars for the return of a scroll, which he knew was a roll of paper. The man at the table had a set of black saddlebags next to him on the bench, and right on the table before him, a leather tube with a carrying strap that made Amonson’s pulse flutter beneath his kerchief.

  “Oh that’s for his gang,” Amonson said.

  “Too bad they ain’t here,” Ocobock remarked.

  “A thousand dollars…” said Dorado, his eyes flitting to the ceiling for a moment as he rapidly divided in his head. “That’s more than…three hundred dollars apiece, if we bring him in alive.”

  “What’s it say, Amonson?” said Ocobock. “What’d he do? Kill a rich fella?”

  “Killed a whole lotta fellas,” Amonson said, squinting at the poster. “’Manasseh Maizel, the Killer Jew of Varruga Tanks.’ Killed seven men and dynamited a waterin’ hole in New Mexico.”

  “He don’t look so tough,” Dorado said.

  It was true. The man slumped over the table looked anything but a hard case. He was thin as a rail, grey skinned and sickly looking. His odd black frock coat was patchy and covered in trail dust, and the brim of his black hat was beaten and frayed. He had a bristly, dirty beard and two scraggly black curls on either side of his face. His thin, bony wrists were crossed as a cradle for his head, and poked out of the sleeves of his coat. A tarnished silver ring caught the light on the third finger of his right hand. He had some kind of a pistol on his right hip, and a big Bowie knife drooped on the left side of his cracked belt, but he didn’t look like he had the strength to pull it, let alone use it. His eyes were half-lidded and shaded by deep dark circles, and a pair of blue glass spectacles rested upside down on the table.

  He looked like a starving bookkeeper or a down on his luck medicine peddler.

  Still, you never could tell about these killer types. He might look like a scarecrow, but somebody wanted him bad enough to pay out a fat lot of cash for him.

  “Well let’s go palaver with the man,” Amonson whispered, shifting his pistol forward from where it had wandered to the small of his back.

  The three of them got up in unison and stepped over the long bench.

  Long George, the rawboned, one-eyed proprietor called to them from the counter.

  “You ain’t paid yet.”

  Amonson looked back at the man. Long George kept this place way out on the trail as a kind of haven for outlaw types, having reputedly been an outlaw himself once somewhere. But the bullet holes in the walls and the torn reward posters attested to his standing non-interference policy. The badge-toting law wasn’t welcome in The Senate, but not every man who came to tear down a poster was on the side of the law. When dollars were concerned, an outlaw could take the law’s side for a little while.

  Case in point.

  “We ain’t leavin’ just yet,” Amonson said, winking at Long George, a gesture he realized might be misconstrued by a one-eyed man.

  He turned and led the way to the Killer Jew’s table.

  The three of them stood over him for what seemed like a long time before Amonson finally cleared his throat and the skinny man stirred and blinked weary eyes up at him. He was a hell of a sight up close. There appeared to be a slew of faint crisscrossing scars all over his face and hands, as if he’d tumbled through a briar patch or something.

  The thin man took them in with half-lidded brown eyes that hung in the midst of bloodshot webs, and slowly raised his head. He looked like he was about to pass out.

  “Manasseh Maizel,” said Amonson, folding his arms, while at either elbow, Ocobock and Dorado rested their hands on their guns.

  The man blinked slowly. Did he even speak English?

  Amonson nodded to the poster hanging behind the man’s head.

  “How about it? That’s you, ain’t it?” he pressed, the cigarette bouncing in his lips as he spoke.

  The thin man slowly straightened, palms flat on the table, and turned to look back over his shoulder at his own face. The only sound was that of the flies buzzing about his untouched repast.

  He turned back and nodded, not looking at them any more.

  Dorado and Ocobock exchanged a look and took out their pistols, cocking them.

  Amonson reached down and picked the leather tube off the table, turned it over in his hands.

  The Killer Jew made no move, but seemed to waver with the effort of sitting up.

  Amonson popped the top off the tube and peered inside at the roll of old paper or cloth. Satisfied, he snapped it shut again.

  “What’s that?” said Ocobock.

  “Nothin,’” Amonson said offhandedly. “Thought it might be a shotgun or something.”

  He tossed it over his shoulder, making a note as to where it landed.

  “Well, I guess you’re comin’ with us,” Amonson said. He pulled out his own pistol and flicked his cigarette at the man. It bounced off his arm, trailing a momentary shower of flaring ash. “Get up.”

  “Leave him be,” said a deep voice from the doorway to the café.

  In the doorway stood the silhouette of a man, pitch black with the desert sun behind him. He was the strangest figure Amonson, Dorado, or Ocobock had ever seen in all their lives between them.

  He was a tall Negro, broad shouldered, and dressed like something out of The Arabian Nights. He wore a blue and white head wrap that draped across his shoulders, a long white shirt beneath a sheep hide tunic, and white cotton pants like a peon’s. His feet were sandaled, and he had what looked like a long, curled ram’s horn strung over his shoulder resting at his hip. He carried a pole with a knotted top and there was a curved knife in a golden sheath tucked into a green sash wound around his waist.

  Amonson broke into a grin and looked to Dorado in mock disbelief. Dorado shared his bemused, dubious expression.

  “What the hell are you supposed to be, boy?”

  The black man in the doorway said nothing.

  Ocobock sniggered.

  “Hey boy,” Amonson said, “you talk to a man like that, you best have a pistol to see it through.”

  It was on the word ‘see’ that the man in the doorway began to move. He darted across the threshold and halved the distance between the entrance and the table, moving faster than a man of his size should have been able to move. The staff hissed through his palm, and lashed out in a wide arc, striking Ocobock in the left temple. Ocobock went down flailing but without a sound. He crashed against Amonson, whose pistol went off like an ear ringing cannon burst in the closeness and lodged a bullet in the door frame.

  He shrugged the falling Ocobock aside, but before his body hit the floor, the hard wood of the staff shot back and forth again like a billiards cue in the Negro’s hand, and bashed Amonson full in the face, mashing his lips bloody and cracking his right front teeth off with an unsettling ‘crump.’

  Amonson fell backwards, hearing Dorado cuss in E’spanish. He landed flat on his back, both hands clapped to his bleeding mouth, and in an instant Dorado was beside him, clutching his purpling wrist and groaning.

  The Negro poised over them for a moment, knees slightly bent, the dark wood pole in both hands. Amonson could see that the butt end was sharp like a spear, and he counted it a blessing that at least it wasn’t that end that had come at his face.

  The Negro relaxed then, and straightened. He turned to the man he had saved, but the Killer Jew had his pistol out, a boxy, brassy looking thing, and appeared to be pointing it straight at him.

  “Move,” the Killer Jew rasped.

  The Negro pivoted deftly, as if to let a man pass, and the Killer Jew’s gun barked.

  There was a crash from behind them, and Amonson looked over to see Long George Lamartine (who welcomed outlaw and bounty hunter alike into his place but did not abide Negroes) tumble back against the stove with its bubbling pot of beans, squeezing his bleeding collarbone with one hand and struggling to raise his Colt Navy with the other.
There was a terrible hissing as the hot stove burned through his shirt and scorched his back, and he screamed, gave up the pistol, and fell behind the counter, overturning the hot pot of beans and wailing again as the contents spilled over him.

  Then Amonson saw how the Killer Jew might have been at Varruga Tanks, just for an instant. He looked down on them with hard eyes and levered his weird pistol. He looked to Amonson like a corpse animated by hate just then and only held together by his frayed clothes, an evil scarecrow that had jumped down from its pole in the Devil’s alkali fields.

  “Shuck your guns,” he croaked in a hanged man’s whisper, undercut only by the flies and Long George’s moaning.

  They did as he told them, slinging their pistols into a far corner. Amonson had to get rid of Ocobock’s himself, as he was out cold and bleeding from the nose, a big, mad welt rising on the side of his head. Dorado’s wrist was twice its normal size.

  “Get out,” he said then, and Amonson and Dorado picked up Ocobock between them and dragged him out of The Senate, his boot heels hissing in the hard packed earth and bumping over the rocky ground outside as they fled into the sunlight.

  * * * *

  The Rider was dying.

  He had not been able to eat a thing in nearly forty days, and for the last three days he found himself unable to even drink water from a canteen. He was succumbing to Lilith’s unseen persecutors at last. His food was unpalatable—he couldn’t even get it down his throat, and his water tasted like blood mash. In the Yenne Velt, they had poisoned him steadily. More than that, he had given up hope.

  Since the well beneath Red House, since Mauricio and Chaksusa’s revelations, he had felt his reserve strength and all his resistance crumble. The world was not as it seemed. The universe was not the abode of a just God. It was populated by insatiable, indescribable monsters that were gods themselves, and cared no more for their devoted worshipers or for the soul of unwitting man then a man cared for the life of a tick. Dark and alien thoughts had poisoned his mind in the interim, even as the ruahim had nightly envenomed his body.

  What if the Lord he had gone his whole life serving was just another of these things, these Great Old Ones or Outer Gods or whatever? How else could they be allowed to exist? He often deflected his concerns about evil with what The Sons of the Essenes had taught him; that the world was the crucible of the soul and evil a necessity. That it was the duty of a righteous man to perform tikkun—to scrape away the kelipot, the husks of evil encasing all things; to uncover and return to its origin the inner light of scattered Creation, the inherent divinity in all things ill or benevolent to the Creator.

  What part of Creation was Shub-Niggurath? What part the Great Old Ones? Even facing the vilest demons he had always felt the presence of God, even in the Sitra Achra, where no heavenly light penetrated, he had been assured of God because he had known that the beings he faced were but emanations of Him.

  He had felt none of these things beneath Red House. He had torn at the husk and found nothing beneath, only ash.

  Something nagged him, whispered in his ears, interlaced with the incessant chattering of the demons which he had grown used to. There was another voice, relentless and unendurable, a single, calm, listless voice among the gibbering. This voice said death was the only release. It said that the Hour of the Incursion was coming, that it was inevitable. It had been ordained long before Creation. Heaven and hell were but transitory states, sinking islands that would be enveloped by the black waters of chaos in which the Great Old Ones swam. Best to go swiftly to Eden and study the Torah, while it was still there.

  The soul was the treasure of God. To the Great Old Ones, it was a trinket. They were coming, and the old ways would be reinstated, and there would be no place for God, or angels, or man.

  He did not know how he knew this. He did not know to whom or what the still, insistent voice belonged. But it had been with him since Red House, and as much as the dehydration, as much as the slow and strangling starvation, it was killing him.

  He did not care. He was alone and terrified of the dark, but he saw no point in living. The punishment of Adon, finding Nehema again, none of it meant anything because none of it would last. Satisfaction, love, hate, it would all burn in the furnace of the eons. He would be nothing.

  His faith was shattered.

  Yes, he had stood before the throne of God, yes he had seen His works, seen the hekhalots and the holy Watchtowers in all their glory.

  He had seen Shub-Niggurath too, felt Her timeless presence, a consciousness so old and so utterly devoid of humanity it was like learning that all of the universe consisted of a soap bubble. He had not felt anything so ancient in the upper reaches of heaven. Not the megalithic angel Metatron, and nothing that emanated from the Throne itself. Worse, he had felt that She was not even the oldest of Her kind. He remembered the statue of the black worm, the blind dragon-thing, and Chaksusa’s admonitions about a nameless entity, something he would not speak of.

  Other universes. Chaksusa had spoken of other universes, and tried to assure him that these things were creations of God as well. But the Rider didn’t feel that. Was it a lie? What was true? He didn’t know. He just didn’t know.

  He wavered where he stood, feeling once more the unbearable weight of doom on his shoulders. He tried to replace his pistol, but fumbled it on the lip of the holster. It clattered to the floor. He leaned heavily on the table.

  “We must go,” said the black man before him, stooping to retrieve his pistol.

  The Rider had quite forgotten his rescuer.

  “Who are you?” the Rider managed, though in truth, he hardly cared.

  “My name is Kabede, Manasseh Maizel,” said the black man lowly. He touched a hand to his chest and bowed slightly. “I am of the Balankab enclave. A yored merkabah of The Sons of the Essenes, and keeper of the Order’s Sefer ha-Chayyim. I have come a long way to find you.”

  But the black man’s musical accent, is deep intonations, so like a song, drew the Rider’s heavy eyelids closed, and he fell forward onto the table, not knowing if he would ever understand what he had heard.

  * * * *

  When next he opened his eyes, he was lying flat on his back in the shade of a tall desert cypress. It was coming on towards evening, by the light in the sky. A melody was in his ears, resonant and haunting. It seemed to float out across the barren, cracked earth to meander among the boulders and the pitahaya. It took him back to his eastern travels, reminded him of Ein Gedi and Jerusalem, and invariably of Nehema, as all music somehow did now. From this thought he turned away.

  The man who saved him from the bounty hunters, the man who called himself Kabede, sat in the dust a little ways off, blowing into a bamboo flute, his long dark fingers rising and falling across the holes.

  The Rider’s sense of place was distorted again. Kabede was dressed in a burnoose-like garment of clean white cotton with blue accents, and his feet were encircled in sandals though he wore white socks against the chill of the failing day. There was what looked like a shofar, a ceremonial ram’s horn hanging from a string over his shoulder. He wore a white turban with a flat gold disc that caught the sinking light over his forehead, and two long braids tied off with blue and white beads hung over his eyebrows. He had a slightly pointed beard (no mustache), and his features were wholly African, dark and undiluted.

  The Rider blinked wearily as the man continued his piping, and a strange, but welcome feeling was over him, one not unfamiliar but one he had long thought lost. He felt satisfied. More, he did not thirst.

  For months he suffered through incurable pangs of hunger and unquenchable thirst. Now he felt no tightness, no exhaustion, only a pleasant drowsiness.

  He found that he even had the strength to rise up on one elbow, and freeing his bare arm from the warm blanket, he did so.

  His things were nearby. His rekel coat neatly folded, along with his tallit, white shirt, and trousers. His wide brimmed hat was upon the pile, his gun belt and weapons
coiled beside. It looked as if his clothes had been cleaned and even darned. Resting beside the pile was Sheardown’s leather case with the scroll.

  The scroll…Adon’s men wanted it. Enough to blatantly post a reward for it on a bill authorized by New Mexico’s governor. Was this man Kabede an agent of Adon? Had he contacted his fellows to come and retrieve it? The poster had offered a greater reward for his capture than for his death. Maybe Adon himself was coming.

  The one-eared onager stood nearby, bare of packsaddle and hackamore, nibbling lazily at some brush with an unshorn gray ass at its side. The Rider had never seen the animal tolerate the presence of another creature for any length of time.

  Kabede finished his piping and sat regarding the setting sun.

  He swallowed, unused to the sensation of his own throat unless it was dry as sandpaper.

  “There is no enclave at Balankab,” he said, surprised at the rough quality of his own voice. “Wherever that is.”

  The black man rose, and smiled a clean and winning grin. He was younger than the Rider, but in his eyes, there was something venerable.

  “It is in Ethiopia, in Aksum,” he said. He threw the ends of his headdress over his shoulder and drew open the wool shirt beneath, revealing a clutch of Solomonic talismans much like the Rider’s own.

  “Each enclave of the Order is governed by a counsel of four tzadikim and there are said to be thirty-six. Yet you know only of eight enclaves.” He spread his hands. “So what of the remaining four?”

  “They are hidden.”

  “Yes. The Nistarim. We of the Balankab Enclave are the Hidden, secret even from the rest of our brothers, entrusted with its treasures and records. How else could I know your name, Manasseh Maizel?”

  The Rider managed a rueful smile.

  “Look outside any marshal’s office from here to Santa Fe.”

  “Yes,” said Kabede, coming over to hunker down beside him. “You must tell me how that came to be. I have come a long way to find you.”