Deadlands--Thunder Moon Rising

by Jeffrey Mariotte

  “Why?” she had asked. “What happens tonight?”

  He had gazed up at the sky. “The Thunder Moon rises,” he said. “That’s what they call July’s full moon, the first one after the monsoon rains wash the earth. I have been waiting for this Thunder Moon for a very long time. And for one more thing.”

  “What is that?”

  “The J Cross T. Tibbetts owned something I needed. Now it’s mine, and there is nothing in my way. Our way.”

  “I don’t understand.”

  “You will,” he had promised. “Soon enough, you will understand everything, Sadie. You’ll stand with me and your eyes will be opened to the glories that await us. Power, Sadie. Power you could never have imagined, derived from knowledge like no one on Earth has ever possessed. That’s what you’ll taste tonight, and then forever after. Power that most never even glimpse, but that you will hold in your hands, like a hammer or a shovel or any other tool. Are you excited by that?”

  She hadn’t been, not really. She had been numb, since the moment he had touched her hand in town, before she even climbed into his wagon. If she hadn’t been, she was certain she would have been frightened and excited and probably much more. As it was, she had taken in the information passively.

  That had been more than an hour ago. Since then, helping him build the fire and scratch out, with branches, a star-shaped pattern in the earth around it, the numbness had begun to wear off. She had become at the same time more interested and more scared, not sure what her purpose here was, not sure that he was what he claimed to be. But even though the numbness was leaving her, and her own feelings starting to return, she still found that she trusted Jasper, believed his every utterance as if she had seen the truth of it with her own eyes.

  Those utterances had been increasingly bizarre; she understood that, even if she couldn’t bring herself to doubt their veracity. “I am, Sadie, a magician,” he had told her. “I have spent many years—and a considerable part of the fortune that my father’s business interests provided me—studying what people sometimes call the Dark Arts. I have seen things, learned things, done things that would curdle your blood if I described them to you. Even in your current, compliant state. I have bought, stolen, and otherwise acquired rare books that promised knowledge and understanding of things most men never even dream of. You saw some in my house. The journal of a madman named Darius Hellstromme took thousands of dollars and three murders to get my hands on, but it provided a scientific basis for much that I was learning. My grimoires, ancient texts bound in human flesh, contain the secrets of others who studied those arts long before me. Certain artifacts and tools have taken considerable outlays of treasure to acquire. It is not, may I say, a pursuit to which any but the wealthy can devote themselves with any success. The wealthy or sometimes, if they’re lucky, the exceedingly ruthless. If they’re both, so much the better.”

  There had been something about his grin, and the glimmer in his eyes, that she might have taken for madness if not for the things she had already seen and the unquestioning faith with which she listened. “It is this course of study that has brought me here,” he continued. “Here, to this seemingly forsaken piece of ground. That has brought me to you, dear Sadie. Because here I have what I need—now, as of today, I have what I need—to take the next step. A step that will put me above those I learned from, more powerful and more feared and more accomplished in the arts. With you by my side, I will surpass every teacher, every past master. I will be the great deliverer, bringing forbidden knowledge into this world for the first time. And from this point forward, everyone who speaks of the great magicians will have to begin with the name of Jasper Montclair.”

  She recalled his words as she watched him. Behind them, outside the pattern they had inscribed on the earth, shadowy figures moved in a perverse sort of dance. Her gaze would not rest on any of them, as if some aspect of their being resisted being seen by human eyes. From them, she got a sense of darkness, of power, of danger. Her excitement grew, filling the emptiness. She didn’t know why she was taking on his ambition as if it was her own. A day before, she would have told him to leave her alone, might have told Del to direct his troopers to arrest Montclair, or to shoot him on sight.

  But on this day, he had stopped his wagon and spoken a few words and touched her hand, and from that moment, she had been his. Willingly and without reservation.

  Soon, she believed, she would understand why.

  * * *

  Wilson Harrell wanted nothing more than to wheel his horses around and race back to Carmichael, never to set foot on Montclair’s ranch again. But the land itself seemed determined to prevent his escape. The wagon path kept changing, sometimes right in front of him, as he watched. He was being herded somewhere. He couldn’t know where, or why, but it was entirely beyond his control to affect. If he tried to leave the path, mesquite or cactus sprang up to block his way with impenetrable walls of thorns. The horses had long since given up responding to his commands and instead followed the course set before them. And whenever he tried to leave the wagon, fissures opened up in the ground, belching steam that would have scalded the flesh from him and assailing his nostrils with a sulfurous stench.

  Eventually, he had just settled back in the seat. If he was being taken someplace, he would just wait and learn his destination. As clouds thickened in the sky, hiding the sun, he began to worry that he would be rained on after all. But whatever intelligence was behind his plight probably had worse ideas in store than that, so being soaked was only a minor concern.

  After a while, he saw the smoke of a fire in the near distance, and determined that his path would take him right to it. He checked the revolver he carried whenever he left the safety of town, making sure it was loaded, and then folded his arms and let the horses carry him along.

  When the path dropped down off a rise, through a sandy wash, and into a wide depression, the sight before him made his blood cold.

  Jasper Montclair stood on the far side of a blazing fire, half obscured by billowing smoke, naked as a newborn. Arcane symbols were painted on his body—every part of his body, Harrell noticed. Sadie Cuttrell was nearby, also naked and similarly painted. The colonel would have a stroke if he saw his wife here, looking like that. Montclair was holding his arms out in front of him, almost into the fire, perfectly parallel to the ground. He chanted something, but Harrell couldn’t make out any of the words, or even the language. Sadie clutched her hands to her full breasts like an excited schoolgirl. In a loose circle around them stood dark forms, vaguely human in appearance, but as Harrell drew closer he saw that they were not entirely so after all. Their limbs were too long and thin and their heads shaped wrong, as if they’d been squeezed at chin and cheeks and the excess had swelled the rest. He could barely make them out through the smoke. He believed they too were naked, but couldn’t tell for sure. He couldn’t distinguish much detail; they were like shadows, or silhouettes; but for their glowing yellow eyes, they were only black marks against the sunless sky.

  Then Montclair saw him approaching. He changed his stance, threw his arms toward the sky, and shouted at the heavens. As if in response, lightning darted to the ground, accompanied by a deafening crack of thunder. Harrell thought sure the bolt had struck Montclair, and when the flash had gone from his eyes and he was able to see, the rancher’s charred corpse would be on the ground before him.

  Ears ringing, Harrell rubbed his eyes. Instead of a corpse, he saw Montclair, still standing in the same place. His arms were at his sides, but if anything he seemed bigger than he had before the lightning. More substantial, somehow, as if it had lent him strength. The banker didn’t know what sort of scene he had happened upon, but he didn’t like it. Not a bit.

  “Mr. Montclair,” he said. His voice caught in his throat, and the words were barely audible. He spoke again, louder. “I have the deed for you. But I must object to the manner in which I was brought here, and further, I object to … to whatever in creation is taking place her
e.”

  “Let us have it,” Montclair said. He held out his hand, as if to accept the deed, but didn’t move from where he was. Harrell was going to have to get off the wagon and carry it to him. He didn’t want to do that. He didn’t want to go near Montclair or Mrs. Cuttrell, didn’t want to get close to those inhuman things standing around them. He wanted to hurry back to Carmichael and go into his house and bolt the doors and climb into his bed, and maybe when he woke in the morning, all this would be forgotten, like a dream too insignificant to recall.

  But he doubted the horses would obey any commands from him, and even if they did, the landscape itself would block him. Somehow—he didn’t know how, and didn’t want to know—Montclair had engineered all this.

  “Come on, man!” Montclair demanded. “I haven’t time for foolishness.”

  Harrell shifted, picked up his case from the footwell. The pistol in his coat pocket poked him in the side, and he thought about just how useless that would likely be. He tugged it free, bent over again, and laid it where the case had been. As he shifted in his seat, to exit the wagon, he realized just where he had wound up.

  Where the fire was, there had been a fence. Off to each side, the fence posts yet stood, barbed wire curling around them. But it had been cut and pulled away from the area where the fire was, and he suspected those posts might have been first to burn.

  Seeing the fence, he knew that this had been the line between Tibbetts’s land and Montclair’s. Tibbetts had fenced in his pastures when Montclair started buying up every acre in sight. Montclair hadn’t even waited to have the deed in hand.

  “Wilson!”

  Montclair’s patience was waning. Harrell didn’t want to find out what might happen when he lost it altogether. He slipped down from the wagon and tugged the deed from his case. His legs didn’t want to work. He feared they would fold on the spot, and then Montclair would send one of those stilted silhouettes to take the paper from him. But he made himself press forward, legs threatening to buckle at any moment. Montclair stood, arm out, hand making grasping motions.

  Finally, Harrell got close enough to hold the deed out and thrust it into that hand. Montclair closed his fingers over it and snatched it from him. He glanced at it, briefly, then tossed it into the fire. It ignited before it had a chance to come to rest.

  “Montclair!” Harrell said. “That is a legal document! That is what confirms your ownership of the J Cross T.”

  “I am aware of that, Wilson.”

  “Then why…?”

  “The laws of men have power,” Montclair said. “That power is not insignificant. But it is power that will no longer bind me, after tonight. I needed to have the deed, needed to have that legal affirmation of ownership. But having received it, I need it no longer. After this night, power rests with me.”

  “I … don’t understand.”

  “Nor need you,” Montclair said. “Sadie.”

  She walked to his side. Her gaze didn’t leave his face. Harrell felt ashamed of the fact that he took in the sway of her heavy breasts, the switching of her hips, the dark patch between her thighs. Even in the midst of the strangest, most terrifying moments of his life, he couldn’t help himself. When she reached him, Montclair stroked her cheeks, a lover’s touch. He bent over and lifted something from near his feet. When the firelight caught it, Harrell realized it was a knife. Montclair tangled his fingers in Sadie’s hair, and pulled her head back, exposing her throat. The motion made her arch her back. Harrell tried not to look at her breasts, but failed.

  Montclair kissed her once, a glancing brush of lips against cheek, and drove the knife deep into her chest. He made some swift motions, pushing the blade this way and that, and before she fell, he had carved an opening in her. Blood gushed from her in a torrent, washing down her front and pattering onto the dirt. He lowered her to the ground, then thrust his fist into the space he had made. When he brought it out again, it held her still-beating heart.

  Chapter Forty-two

  Jasper Montclair lifted Sadie Cuttrell’s heart toward the sky. As he did, thunder crashed even louder than before and lightning forked the ground, knocking Harrell off his feet. Struggling to rise, he realized that all the hair on his body was standing up, and he could barely see for the lingering effects on his eyes.

  At first, he attributed the incredible tableau to his impacted vision. Perhaps he had hit his head on a rock when he fell. But the longer it went on, the less convincing such an argument was.

  Lightning had blackened the heart that Montclair still held. He stared at a spot on the ground, just past the fire, on what had been Tibbetts’s land only that morning.

  And that spot, a grassy patch about a dozen feet across, was moving. Changing. First, Harrell noticed grass twitching, responding not to the wind but to some other force. Then it seemed to grow taller. It took more than a minute to understand that the grass wasn’t actually growing, but that the earth itself was rising beneath it. That became more evident the higher it thrust. Dirt and rocks cascaded down the sides as it pushed up two inches, four, then still more. Soil-caked roots showed at the exposed edge, reaching into empty air. As if gathering its strength, the upward motion paused briefly, but before the grass and weeds atop it had stopped trembling, the earth gave a last mighty heave. When it stopped this time, the surface was almost waist-high on Harrell, tall grass on top adding another eighteen inches or more.

  Harrell had not managed to stand yet, and during that display, had not bothered to try. He doubted that his legs would support him. What he saw should have been impossible, and that certainty compounded the horror of Sadie’s gruesome murder. He had left his pistol in the buckboard, a decision he now regretted. The only question was whether he would turn it on Montclair or himself.

  He was about to try to stand when the upthrust mound started to change yet more. Dirt and grass around its edges fell away, a miniature landslide dropping back to the level at which they had started. As the soil releasing itself got closer to the center, it fell faster, in big chunks. At last, that slowed, too, until the mound was almost a cone, like a miniature volcano that came to a rounded point at its exact center. A few last dribbles of dirt and small stones dropped away, revealing something that had been hidden until now.

  Harrell’s weight had been on his hands and one leg, but he collapsed again when he saw it. Darkness closed in at the edges of his vision, so he lowered his head and tried to breathe. What had he done? What was he a part of?

  Whatever it was, he wondered if it was too late to get out, and decided that it almost certainly was.

  * * *

  Montclair stood, transfixed, in this moment of triumph. Then he set Sadie Cuttrell’s lightning-charred heart in the dirt and stepped forward. He scooped up the ghastly treasure revealed by the earth. For the first time, he held the relic he had sought for so long, the skull of the ancient shaman, Thunder Moon. He turned it in his hands, admiring the yellow and black discoloration that almost seemed to suggest some sort of writing. The back of it had been caved in, leaving a dark hole nearly as large as Montclair’s palm.

  “Do you see it, Harrell?” he asked. “Do you see what you have delivered to me, by bringing me the deed to the J Cross T? Your part in this will not be forgotten, I assure you.”

  “What … what is that … that thing?” Harrell asked.

  “You have, no doubt, heard of the Spaniard named Francisco Vásquez de Coronado,” Montclair said.

  “Certainly.”

  “In 1540, he led an expedition up from Mexico, in search of the fabled but nonexistent cities of gold—the Seven Cities of Cibola. They crossed into what would become the Arizona territory, and the United States, a few miles south of this spot.

  “Before they arrived, an Apache shaman, a holy man, had visions of European encroachment, and what it would mean. He met the Coronado expedition’s leaders right here, on this precise spot, and tried to persuade them to turn back. When they refused, he implored the Indians traveling with th
em—there were about three hundred Spaniards, accompanied by almost eight hundred Indians—to rebel against the whites and slaughter them, else their ancestral homelands would be forever lost.

  “To quiet him, Coronado ordered him slain. One of the Spaniards fitted a bolt into his crossbow, which they called a ballesta, and dropped Thunder Moon with one shot.”

  “They killed him? Just for that?”

  “People are often killed for far less, Mr. Harrell. A few coins, a woman’s favor, a card game. However dear you might believe life is, the truth is that it’s cheap. Easily given and more easily taken away, as Thunder Moon’s story shows. Although he was important to the local people, to the Europeans he was worth less than a mule. In death, however, he achieved a significance he’d never had in life.

  “Thunder Moon was the first native killed by whites on that expedition, and quite possibly the first anywhere within the boundaries of what would become our country. He was left on this spot, where he fell, as none of the expedition’s members, Spanish or Indian, dared touch him. Neither did his own people. Presumably after the expedition passed, wolves or coyotes scattered his bones, but his skull remained here, where it has been ever since.” Montclair held the skull so that its empty sockets faced the mountains. “It stayed here, within sight of the Huachuca Mountains—the Thunder Mountains. Resting. Storing power. Waiting for this day and the coming night: the night of the Thunder Moon. And for the one man who could bring him once more into the light.”

  “I … I don’t understand,” Harrell managed. “How did you know about it?”

  Montclair chuckled drily. “That’s none of your concern, banker.” Still holding the skull in his right hand, with his left he made an almost casual motion with his fingers, as if shooing a fly. Harrell gave a brief groan, his eyes shut, and he dropped to the damp earth, unconscious. Montclair had better things to do than answer more of the man’s feeble questions.