The Shotgun Arcana

by R. S. Belcher

  They turned down the narrow, dark alley between the saloon and the hotel, headed back toward the Dove’s Roost and Lover’s Grove, both on Bick Street.

  “What you think Mrs. Proctor will have for makings for Thanksgiving,” Jim asked.

  “We just shot something that looked like the devil’s asshole and you’re thinking about Thanksgiving dinner?” Mutt said, shaking his head.

  “Not even a week away,” Jim said, “and a fella works up a powerful hunger battling evil little flying goat vampires.”

  A look of longing crossed Mutt’s bloody face. “I hope she can git some of those fancy oysters on the half-shell like last year. Damn, they were good.”

  “Ma used to do up a fine suckling pig too,” Jim said, looking down and fiddling with the bag hanging at his chest. Mutt slapped him on the back and ruffled his hair.

  “I know it ain’t home, but you got family here, Jim. We’ll have a Thanksgiving to beat the Dutch.” Something scuttled in the dark of the alley, running from the deputies.

  Jim laughed. “You gonna go see Doc Tumblety about those scratches?”

  “Only if I want them to get worse,” Mutt said. “Man could put a hurting on a corpse. Worst sawbones I ever did see. You my momma now, boy, fretting over little cut and bump?”

  “Figured a face like that, you need as few additions as you can get,” Jim said. Both men chuckled.

  “Gives me character,” Mutt said, grinning.

  “That it does,” Jim said.

  Jim tugged on Mutt’s sleeve to stop as they reached the border between the Dove’s Roost and Scutty’s boardinghouse. Many of the girls from the Dove were out on the porch or sitting on the windowsills, chatting up prospective clients from the crowd of men milling near the front doors and porch. “Before we go get the goat kid,” Jim said. “When we were chasing that thing I thought I heard a commotion and I saw someone messing around in that alley. Check it out?” Mutt shrugged. “Most likely one of Bick’s whores doing a little side work, but we’ll go double-check. ’Sides, give you an excuse to see if Miss Becky made it home safe and sound.”

  “Shut up,” Jim said, smiling a little and getting a lot red in the face.

  “Think I can cook some fatback up on those big old glowing red ears right now,” Mutt said, laughing. He stopped laughing when they turned into the alley and saw what was there to greet them.

  Near the back of the alley, where the shadows were deepest, was the body of a woman, or at least parts of her body. The woman had been ripped open, from throat to groin, and her insides had been poured out onto the mud- and shit-covered floor of the alley. Several lengths of her guts, radiating out of her split torso, were stretched taut and nailed to the simple wooden fences on either side of the alley. It looked like a dripping spider web made of intestines. The whole alley reeked like a slaughterhouse.

  Jim had seen a lot of things in his year in Golgotha, but nothing prepared him for this. He felt horror and nausea swell up in him like a balloon. Jim recognized the woman’s face, but he didn’t know her name. She was one of the Dove’s girls, he knew that. He had seen her numerous times on the street. She’d always smiled at him with that mouth that was now split ear to ear, and she was always nice to him, just ’cause. Always.

  Jim staggered back to the entrance of the alleyway. He dropped to his knees, retching.

  Mutt stood looking at the hellish exhibition. He was very still. “Jim, you stay up there,” he said. “You hear me? I want you go fetch Clay. Not Clay’s men—Clay. Tell him I said get his ass out here. Get that jackass Tumblety, too, and go tell Mr. Ladenhiem; he’s the manager at the Dove. Tell ’em. Tell ’em all to come quick. Go on, git.”

  Mutt heard Jim sprint away behind him. He hated the boy had to see this. No one should ever have to hold this in the bone gallery of memory.

  “Damn sight uglier than anything else I saw tonight,” Mutt said to the atrocity and the darkness. He wanted to spit, but his mouth was dry. “A damn sight.”

  The Seven of Swords

  Maude Stapleton crouched low to the debris-strewn stone floor of the buried temple. The mountain lion was twenty feet away. It knew, as Maude did, that the chase had come to an end. Maude locked her gaze with the big cat’s through the miasma of sick, unnatural, yellow light. The cougar was a female and it was beautiful. Nearly three feet tall at the shoulders, almost seven feet long, nose to tail, and at least 175 pounds. Teeth and claws designed to do one thing: kill quickly and effectively. It had eyes like gold, and fur to match. Maude had no desire to kill the beast—it would be like murdering a sunrise—and no desire to be killed by it.

  This cougar had mauled and killed a five-year-old boy from one of the ranches that existed in the green belt of pasture and scrubland straddling Golgotha. It hadn’t been provoked, and it seemed to be in excellent health, as the deep jagged wound on Maude’s upper back attested. If Maude hadn’t twisted at the last second, her spine would have been severed and she would be dead: a fine meal for this golden lady.

  Something was unsound with the cougar’s mind. Maude could tell by its movements, the dilation of its pupils, the beating of its heart, the way it was breathing, that something was wrong with it.

  So far everything was happening as Constance’s dream had foretold, except for the location. Her daughter’s disturbing dreams had started a few months ago. The setting was always the same—an alien city, made of the bones of giants, squatting in the middle of a vast, humid grassland. Even when the dreams involved the local folks of Golgotha, they were always transplanted to a courtyard of sunbaked stones and marrow-yellow portcullises within the bone city. Maude had asked if the city had a name.

  “Carcosa,” Constance said.

  “I saw you fighting a lion there,” Constance had said when Maude had calmed the fourteen-year-old, who always awoke from the dreams terrified. Maude brushed the brown hair out of Constance’s eyes and caressed her daughter’s cheek. “It was very quiet, it snuck up on you.”

  “Did I win?” Maude asked, smiling. Her beautiful daughter looked up at her with her dead father’s soulful brown eyes.

  “The lion lives,” Constance said, and hugged her mother very tightly.

  Maude had picked up the rogue cat’s trail at the farm where it killed the little boy, Nathan Diachuk. She had arrived at the Diachuk ranch in the dead of night, dressed in loose black clothing suited to a man, her long auburn hair, shot through with strands of red-gold and silver, tied up into a ponytail, and a neckerchief covering half her face. She’d added to her disguise by employing techniques taught to her that allowed her to alter her posture, body language, even voice. To an observer, she stood, moved and talked like a man, which was exactly what Maude wanted them to see.

  Her skills had come after a decade of training under the supervision of her maternal great-great-great-grandmother, an ancient woman she was introduced to at the age of nine as Bonnie Cormac, but who the world knew as the pirate queen, Anne Bonny.

  Gran Bonny taught Maude how to live, truly live. She disclosed to her the secret history of the world, the story of Lilith—the first human to rebel against the tyranny of Heaven and declare herself truly free. Anne educated her in the discipline and the doctrine of the Daughters of Lilith, an esoteric order of women who had protected and guided humanity since the dawn of time.

  The Daughters’ duty was known to them as The Load, and Maude took it up when she drank deep of Lilith’s blood on a night long ago, under a bright, swollen moon, like the one that hung silently in the sky tonight. The training, the blood, made her powerful—the better of any foe she had ever faced. She had full control over her own body and mind, an innate understanding of the nature of human physiology and psychology as well as an intuitive mastery of the physical world. The one thing in this world that could lay Maude low was herself, and she did just that.

  Maude met a man shortly after Gran Bonny died. She still, to this day, could not understand why she fell in love with Arthur Stapleton; why she h
ad married him. She was thankful for the union, though, for it had given her the joy of her daughter, Constance. Constance was worth it all, even though she had allowed her training to lie fallow for over fifteen years while she was a wife to Arthur, a mother to Constance; even though she had allowed the confines of society to bury the Daughter of Lilith alive.

  It took nearly the end of everything in the universe to bring her back to herself: Arthur’s murder, Constance’s abduction and forced initiation into a murderous cult of nihilists. In the end, Maude had saved her daughter and healed the Earth by using the very last drop of Lilith’s blood. Constance would be the last of the Daughters of Lilith.

  Maude wondered if Constance’s strange dreams were perhaps a byproduct of her taking Lilith’s blood last year, to counteract the horrible effects of the blood of the Wurm, forced upon her by the cultists.

  It took Maude three days and nights to find the mountain lion. Her tracking skills were rusty and that was exactly the reason she was using them. She knew if she had asked Mutt to accompany her and track the cat, he would. But she had expressly asked him to do none of that.

  “Okay, can you please explain this to me again,” Mutt had said to her as they stood on the porch of the Golgotha jail a few days ago. Mutt was leaning against the wooden rail of the porch. Behind him, wanted posters tacked to the wooden board next to the door shuddered in the hot, high wind next to pinned sprigs of agrimony, wolfsbane and garlic that the sheriff refreshed regularly. “Can you start with the part where you’re going after a crazy man-eatin’ mountain lion alone?”

  “I think you have the gist of my plan,” Maude said.

  “Why in the world would you do a fool thing like that, Maude?”

  People wandered by, walking down Dry Well Road. Across the street, the new town butcher, Garvey Hatlock, was loading a pair of cured hams on the back of a buggy for Mrs. Higbee, the cooper’s wife.

  “It killed Alfred and Erna Diachuk’s little boy,” Maude said. “Isn’t that reason enough?”

  Mutt tapped the silver star on his coat lapel. “I don’t see one of these on you, and this sounds more like work for the law.”

  “Then deputize me,” Maude said with a smile. Mutt laughed, a wide grin crossing his coarse face. Maude loved his laugh, his true laugh, and she loved bringing it out. “I can ‘whup,’ as you’d put it, the entire Golgotha sheriff’s office, if need be.”

  “Yeah,” Mutt nodded, still smiling. “I’ve seen you with your dander up and I’m pretty damn sure you could at that. But I deputize a woman and all those folks who want to string me up in this town would throw me a first-rate lynchin’ and then a right fine party to boot.”

  Maude laughed.

  “They would be majestically huffed about it,” he said. “Come to think of it, that’s another good reason to do it.”

  Several folks noticed the widow talking unchaperoned with the half-breed Indian deputy. Maude could read their disdain in the silent language of their movement and posture. Not that she needed those special skills. The majority had their disapproval spilling out of their faces. It was one of the reasons she and Mutt tried to always talk in public, to defuse the whispers of scandal and innuendo. The other reason was that those rumors had a basis in fact, and both Maude and Mutt were skittish about what might happen if they did find themselves together, alone.

  “You do cultivate a way with people,” Maude said. “That is for sure.”

  “So, seriously,” Mutt said. “Acknowledge the corn, Maude. Why are you bent on tracking this cat?”

  “Most men would simply forbid me to do it and be done with it,” Maude said. “You are not most men.”

  “I am a unique desert bloom,” Mutt said, lowering his eyes at her compliment. “’Sides, we have already established you could most likely pummel me good and sound, so I don’t think me orderin’ you to do anything would end too well for me.”

  She smiled, but then it faded.

  “Mutt, I’m going because I need to know. I need to know what I’ve lost after all these years. The training, the power. I have to test myself and see what I can still do, what I can’t do.”

  “You were a sight to behold in the mine, last year,” Mutt said. “You saved my life. You saved Constance. Hell, for all we know you saved the whole damned world, Maude.”

  “That was different,” Maude said. “That was me fighting for the people I love, to keep them alive, keep them safe. It was one part skill to three parts desperation. I need to know what I can do when my mind is clear and my emotions are in check. I need this to find out how much of me, the me I built up so long ago, is still alive.”

  Mutt started to put his hands on her shoulders but stopped himself, crossing his arms instead. “Thank you for saving my ragged hide and thank you for counting me as someone you … care about.”

  “I do,” Maude said taking a step closer to the deputy. “Very much so … care about you.”

  They could both feel the eyes, the hatred, from the passersby. In this breath, neither of them cared. The world was two, only two. The realization of consequence settled back over them and they both took a step back, not for themselves, not for fear for self, but for what taking another step forward might cost the other one.

  “Why hunt the mountain lion?” Mutt said. “Particularly.”

  “Because it has to be done,” Maude said. “It killed that little boy and it will do it again, if someone doesn’t stop it. You’re shorthanded with the sheriff away and so many more people coming into town these days.…”

  “And the real reason?” Mutt asked.

  “Because I don’t know if I can stop it, and it frightens me,” Maude said. “I was trained to face any human being and know their weaknesses, their soft points, how to kill them. But this … this isn’t a human being; it doesn’t have the same motivations, the same anatomy, the same mind. This will be a test of my ability, my skill and courage. Without my courage, all the skill in the world is useless to me. I’m going after the cougar because the cougar can kill me.”

  Neither of them said anything for a while. They looked at one another, their eyes speaking.

  “I understand,” Mutt said after a moment, “what it means to lose your way, lose faith in yourself. All we got in this life that we can count on, birth to bones, is our soul. It’s worse than death to be walkin’ around and not know who you are. Be careful, Maude. I’ll check on Constance for you.”

  “Gillian Proctor is as well,” Maude said. “Thank you, Mutt. You’re the only one in my life that could understand.”

  “Come home quick,” the deputy said. “We’ll miss you.”

  Maude took no water, no food, no horse and no weapons with her. Her satchel contained only packets of herbs she could not find in the desert and a small coil of rope. Her excuse for leaving town was to fetch supplies for her new business in Virginia City. After Arthur’s death and the settlement of his estate, Maude and Constance were left a sum of money that was enough for them to live comfortably for some time, but not forever. Furthermore, Maude’s father, Martin Anderton, had set up the newly married couple’s financial affairs so that Arthur, and then Martin, were the custodians of the sizable inheritance that Gran Bonny had left to her, including Anne’s estate southwest of Charleston, Grande Folly.

  The few correspondences Maude had conducted by mail with her father in the past year had not helped the situation. Martin was resolute that he remain the caretaker of the properties and her money. Given that Maude was a woman, most courts were still inclined to view her as an emotional child, unable to handle her own economic destiny, so she had little in the way of recourse.

  Maude decided to do exactly what Gran Bonny had always told her to do—rely on no one but herself for her fortune or her life. She used some of the money her father gave her as an “allowance” to start her own business in Golgotha—a laundry, the town’s first.

  At first it was just her and Constance doing the work, but as more orders came in and Golgotha contin
ued to grow from the opening of the Argent Mine, Maude needed more laundresses. Gillian Proctor helped as much as she could, given her own jobs of running a boardinghouse and preparing and delivering meals to many of the town’s citizens, and her impending marriage to Auggie Shultz.

  It was a bit of problem finding women out on the frontier that could work, and wanted to. Most were either wives or prostitutes; both were often forbidden to work outside their respective houses. The solution came when she met and engaged some of the Chinese women of Johnny Town, the sprawling Chinese community that made up the northwestern corner of Golgotha. With primary work on the transcontinental railroad finished, more Chinese were pouring into Golgotha daily, looking for work in the mines or on the proposed doglegs off the main railroad line.

  The Chinese women were impressed that Maude spoke some of the Yue dialect that Gran had taught her. After some negotiations, three women, Jiao, Ron and Chuan, agreed to accept positions at the laundry and Maude’s business had enough people to keep up with the growing demand.

  Maude also found in her late husband Arthur’s connections to the floundering Golgotha Bank and Trust a means to secure a position as a bookkeeper for the bank, which was now under the ownership of three gentlemen recently from Kansas City. Once Maude pointed out her discovery that one of the investors was covertly diverting funds, there were only two owners.

  Maude approached the bankers, Daniel Bracken and Roger McCredle, with a quiet offer: she would invest her own capital into the bank in exchange for becoming a secret partner of the two men in the venture. After the two men reviewed the numbers and realized how much of an asset Maude had already been to them by uncovering the embezzlement, they agreed, with the implicit understanding she would remain silent about her stake in the bank.

  With her immediate economic challenges conquered, Maude’s attention returned to the thing that kept her awake at night, the thing that haunted her dreams when she did sleep—nagging fear. Fear of having lost all the things she had worked so hard to obtain, in her flesh and in her heart; seeing how much of her years of training had been buried under almost two decades of neglect. And that led her to the cougar.