by Cameron Judd
Bess found herself drawn toward that wagon. She crossed the street, nearly falling herself in the strong and rising wind, and almost dropping Dewitt’s bottle. The driver of the wagon noticed her as she came close, and greeted her, as most did on first glance, as “sir.”
“I’m no ‘sir,’” she said. “But never mind it. I’m curious about who that is beside you.”
“This is none other than the famous and departed Tennessee Kid,” Anubis replied. “His face is covered because of the gruesome manner of his death.”
Bess opened her mouth to request that the hood be removed, but the issue was rendered moot when a new jolt of wind caught the hood and tore it off the dead man’s head. It blew away and Bess gasped at the terrible sight of the shotgun-ruined face.
Yet something drew her around the wagon to the other side, where the dead man was perched. She had to look more closely at the meaty remains of that face, hideous though it was.
Anubis seemed embarrassed by the exposure of the destroyed face, and actually tried to cover it with his hand, then his hat. No matter. Bess hiked herself up on the side of the wagon and looked closely at the dead man’s right ear, and the area just behind it.
“Good God!” she whispered.
“I know, ma’am,” Anubis said. “It is a horrible vision to see. That’s why we keep it covered. Damn this wind…”
Bess shook her head vigorously. “No…no. That’s not what I’m reacting to. Mister, this dead man beside you, I know him. I know him by the scarring around his ear…that’s scarring that resulted from him being attacked by a biting dog when he was only six years old. Almost tore his ear off, that dog did. And left him with very distinctive scars that stayed with him for good.”
“What are you talking about, ma’am?”
“This man isn’t any ‘Tennessee Kid,’ sir. This man is Ben Keely. My brother.”
Anubis’s mouth worked like that of a dying fish out of water, gasping vainly.
Bess Keely drew the Remington pistol she carried in a holster on her right hip, and leveled it at Anubis. “Is your name Raintree, mister?”
At that moment, from the railed platform in the open portion of the steeple of the Methodist church a little down the street, a boyish voice pierced through the howl of the wind.
“Twister!” Oliver Wicks, the climbing boy, called down. “Off to the west! Big one, and coming this way!”
CHAPTER NINETEEN
Oliver Wicks clung to the platform rail, fighting the wind’s efforts to tear him away, and watched the monstrous, twisting funnel tear its way across the landscape. He could see almost nothing of it except in those moments lightning allowed it, but each new jolt of light revealed that the spinning finger of Satan was moving closer.
For the first time in his life Oliver felt afraid to be where he was, clinging like an ant to a high place. He was a confident boy, secure in his practiced abilities to move squirrel-like through the heights with little danger of falling…but his confidence faded in the face of the oncoming cyclone. Yet he made no move to descend; he was frozen, paralyzed by terror. All he could do was cling and watch and call out his warning to the town below, and pray that before it reached him, the twister would either die away of its own accord or leap over the area where he was.
The former option didn’t seem likely. The twister seemed to be growing stronger and larger, not diminishing. Oliver ceased his warning shouts; the wind was so strong now as to blow away his words like feeble straws, and the roar was louder than anything the boy had ever heard. Oliver held fast to the railing and prayed hard that he would go to heaven when the twister got him, for he was sure now that it would. It was something he just knew.
A couple of streets over, another person watched the coming tornado from a high perch and began to anticipate his own death just as Oliver was. Simon Montague’s old eyes were feeble, but the lightning was so bright that even he could see with clarity what it illuminated…and what he saw was a black, moving, spinning wall that seemed intent upon reaching and striking the town of Wiles. The old man’s spit-dribbled lips moved in a silent prayer and he backed away from the window that provided his only accessible view of the world outside. The glass of the window was rattling hard in its frame, ready to break out under the buffeting air.
The old man moved back toward his chair, but stumbled and went down hard on his knees. He grunted at the impact of kneecaps on floor, but managed not to fall completely over. He groped at and found the chair he’d been attempting to reach, and used it to prop himself up.
“Lord God, forgive my sins and take me to your glory,” he said. “My time has come to die, and I am ready. Forgive me, Lord, for my transgressions—”
His further words were cut off by an explosive, shattering, splintering burst, a noise filling his ears like the roar of cannon, as the front wall of the emporium, struck by the hard winds moving in advance of the tornado funnel, ripped away and flew like a gigantic, mad bird across the rooftops of Wiles, Kansas.
The old man felt his feeble body being lifted by the incredibly powerful air and pulled toward the vacant space that had previously been filled by the front wall of his secret residence. Desperately he put his hands out and randomly found a hold on an upright beam. A half second’s decline in the wind’s force allowed him time to wrap his arms around that beam and clasp his hands together on its far side in an embrace of life.
Simon Montague expected to die, but he would not be pulled to his doom without a fight.
Katrina Haus wished she had not left the hotel. Perhaps she would have been equally unsafe there as she was here on the street, but at least she would have walls around her and not be exposed directly to the stinging wind and bulletlike rain.
She had left the hotel in order to fulfill the request on Howard Ashworth’s card, to meet him at the specified time near the emporium. Of course, at the time he’d written that request he had certainly not been expecting such weather as this. If he could have seen this coming, Katrina knew, he would have asked to meet her at a different time, and certainly at a different place, not in an open lot on the edge of town.
The weather had already been bad when Katrina left the hotel, but it had degraded much further and faster than she had anticipated as she walked across town. But she’d always been that sort who, once she had set her course or her plan, was not prone to deviate. If Howard Ashworth wanted to meet her tonight, she would meet him. Unpleasant, plain man that he was, he was also a man of means, and was willing to pay well for what she provided him. Katrina had known many men such as Ashworth in her day, men whose wives had grown old and harsh and unloving. Men to whom a young beauty such as she was could hardly be resisted.
Finding a momentary refuge in an alley, where the rain was lessened and the wind deflected, she caught her breath and made herself think through her situation. Why should she go on? At this point, no one would be waiting for her in any open lot near the emporium. The storm had seen to that. Not even alley cats and skunks would undertake coition in this weather.
But perhaps Ashworth would be nearby, in some shed or barn or other shelter, watching for her. And if the storm lessened, she and he could have their rendezvous, she could collect her money for services rendered, and the evening would not be wasted.
Then she remembered the warning given her by Jimmy Wills back at the hotel. What if he proved right, and it wasn’t Howard Ashworth seeking to meet her at all, but Howard’s wife? Maybe the woman had learned somehow of her husband’s carnal tryst with the beautiful traveling prostitute. Maybe she had in mind a bit of vengeful repayment.
Katrina vowed to herself to be wary and ready, then began moving down the alley. She reached Emporium Street just as the wind doubled and tripled its intensity, and watched in shock as the upper front of the big building tore away and twisted off in the stout wind almost as easily as had that piece of paper that had blown from her hand.
A stray and splintering board torn free from a shed at the end of the street
struck Katrina in the side of the head and send her flailing to the dirt. Groaning, she managed to reach up and touch the tender and bleeding fresh wound on the side of her head before she passed out.
The huge twister entering the town made a sudden change, rising into the clouds and skipping over the rest of the town. Over in his church steeple, Oliver Wicks breathed a prayer of thanks that he had managed to hang on to his perch. Mere moments before it had looked as though the cyclone was going to strike the church directly.
Oliver’s sense of relief did not last long. Looking back out across the plains and low, rolling terrain west of town, he saw that another twister was forming, this one perhaps larger even than the one that had just spared him, and most of the town.
Time to descend. Even for a climbing boy who was at home in high places, the ground was sometimes the best place to be. There was a ditch beside one of the back alleys, and that, Oliver decided, was where he needed to place himself.
By the time Oliver had reached that ditch and thrown himself down in it, trying to ignore the water running beneath and around him, Katrina Haus was coming to and slowly pushing herself to her feet. Woozy and unfocused, she staggered to the left, her feet getting caught up in the hem of her dress and tripping her. She went down again, bumping her shoulder against the base of a telegraph pole. She did not pass out again, but felt astonishingly weak.
She lost all ambition to meet Howard Ashworth in the designated lot near the emporium. The mere thought of trying to endure an encounter with a man while she felt this unstable was enough to sicken her. Yet she moved forward is if she had a clear destination. It was all done unthinkingly by this point; her only focused desire now was to find a place that was safe from the storm.
Yet she had just seen a portion of the biggest and strongest building in town ripped apart as if it were made of twigs. Where could she go? Was there any safe place at all in this town at the moment?
She looked up at the ruptured and gaping front of the emporium and saw something that brought her to a stop despite the driving rain in her face. An old man, bearded, was clinging in obvious fright to a support beam in what remained of the emporium attic. Wiping rain and grit from her eyes, Katrina looked at the man and decided she had never seen him before. He reminded her of Campbell Montague, but Campbell had no beard and did not seem as feeble as this man.
Lightning flashed and bathed the entire scene in bright light, and she knew he saw her as clearly as she saw him. He stared hard at her. Then darkness filled the street again, and when the next lightning flash came, she was no longer there, and Simon Montague could not see where she had gone.
At that moment Simon realized how exposed he was. He’d managed to hide from the world up here, behind the wall that was now a gaping hole, but there was no hiding to be done now. All he could do now was hope that the building continued to stand until he could get out of it, and that no other funnel clouds would come ripping through to suck him out of the gutted attic portion.
“Uncle Simon!”
The call came from Macky, who appeared at the largely undamaged rear section of Simon’s attic, having climbed the private stairs from below. Macky came up and put his arm around his uncle’s stooped shoulders and looked with concern at his face.
“I’m fine, Macky, fine,” Simon said. “What about you?”
“There was, there was a big, huge thing, twisting all around, turning and blowing and roaring so loud!”
“It was a twister, Macky. A cyclone. They happen sometimes in this part of the country. Did it hurt you?”
“No…scared me. Scared me bad. It hurt the store, Uncle Simon. It tore off your wall, and now, if people look up here, they can see you’re here. Won’t be secret no more.”
“It won’t matter, Macky. People aren’t going to care about such things for a while, not with the weather this dangerous.”
Macky held to his uncle, shivering in fright. He stared out the open front of the emporium as though he expected to see Satan rise from the street below and float in to consume them like a great beast. The rain and wind continued, not at tornado force at the moment, but touched with a chill and somehow bitter on the lips and tongue.
“Macky, there was a woman in the street below, a young woman, very pretty. Nobody I had seen out the window before. Then she moved away and was gone. Do you know who it might have been?”
“It might have been my friend, Miss Haus. She’s a real pretty lady, and nice. She told me I could be her friend.”
“Why is she in town?”
“She talks to dead people, Uncle. They tell her things and she tells their kinfolk.”
“Don’t believe in such things, Macky. That’s not real. That’s not the way the world really works.”
The wind began to rise again suddenly, and from the west came a renewed roaring that seemed, as before, to be coming toward the town. “We should get down from here, Uncle Simon,” Macky said. “It might blow down the rest of the store with us in it.”
The old man loathed the thought of leaving what had been his refuge for a good while now, the place he could hide from a harsh and judgmental world. But he knew Macky was right. The upper reaches of an already damaged and weakened building were not where to be when a tornado was sweeping in.
Time to descend to the street before the next twister arrived.
“Let’s go, Macky,” the old man said.
They descended. Exiting the building into an alley, they were buffeted by the harsh weather and Simon found himself unsure where to go. After a few moments of indecision, during which the approaching roar grew much louder, they headed toward the rear of the alley and into a nearby lot filled with brush and wild grass. A couple of rough sheds stood around the rear perimeter. They went to the closest one.
Inside, they stood in shock and looked down at what lay in the middle of the dirt floor. The old man shook his head. “The storm killed her somehow. Something hitting her in the head, I suppose.”
Macky, though, knelt and examined the corpse of Katrina Haus more closely. He opened his mouth as if to point out something, then seemingly changed his mind and stood again without a word.
Even if he had spoken, he would not have been heard. The sound of a second twister hitting the remnant of the Montague Emporium, and the sound of the building exploding, was so loud and intense that anything Macky might have said would have been masked and lost.
He and his uncle crouched together beside the body of the most beautiful woman ever to pass through Wiles, Kansas, and clung to each other, both wondering if they would survive, if their kinsman Campbell Montague had survived the storm, or would, and what would become of the town of Wiles when at last this horrible night was over.
Macky closed his eyes tightly, unwilling to be looking in case the twister struck the shed that sheltered them, or in case some heavy piece of the shattered emporium came falling through the shed roof. He prayed for safety, and while he did so, made a promise: Lord, I’ll tell Luke Cable about what I saw when I looked at Miss Haus. Because I think I know what it means, and he needs to know.
CHAPTER TWENTY
“You’ve told me some of this story before, Father,” said a man in his midtwenties to the older man beside him. “But I don’t recall how it was you got free of that tree you were tied to.”
“I owe that to a man who came along at just the right time,” said Luke Cable to his son. They were standing on a boardwalk along Emporium Avenue in the town of Wiles, in a year early in a new century, more than two decades past the day two major twisters had devastated that Kansas town and turned the Montague Emporium into a huge pile of rubble. “In a way, you might be able to say that Scar Nolan had saved my life by tying me to that tree after he clonked me on the skull. That twister passed right over, and made splinters out of the Outlaw Train just yards from where I was, but being tied to that tree kept me from maybe getting blown off into the sky like a leaf. Nearly tore my arms out of my shoulder sockets, but probably kept me alive, to
o.”
“But how did you get loose after the whirlwinds had blown over?”
“I’ve got a traveling journalist to thank for that. Man by the last name of Baum who had come to Wiles to find Percival Raintree and his Outlaw Train. Like most everybody else in town that day, Baum got surprised by the weather. He picked just the wrong time to rent a horse and ride out to the Outlaw Train, but it’s lucky for me he did. He saw me there on the ground, still tied to that tree, not even back to consciousness yet. He came over and cut me free, and it was about that time I woke up.”
“Did Baum put you in his newspaper?”
“Ha! That man didn’t work for any newspaper, not like you’d think of a newspaper. He wrote stories about ghosts and spooks and the like for a journal magazine, the Argus of something or other. He wrote a story up that said the Outlaw Train had been destroyed by a demon conjured up by Scar Nolan, who was angry about Raintree having a display related to one of his brothers. He mentioned me in his story by my title, but not by name, which suited me. There was some truth in the account he published, but not much. Nolan, sure enough, was angry about what was in the Outlaw Train, I suspect, but there wasn’t any demon-conjuring involved in what he did about it. No demon other than Nolan himself, anyway.”
“He shot Raintree?”
“Blew his brains all over the inside of that display car. There was just enough of it left to figure out what had happened.”
The younger man looked across the street, where a large church reached skyward. “So that’s where the emporium stood, is it?”
“That’s the spot. It was a sight to see, that store. Bigger even than that Baptist church house there. When the twister took it down, it ruined poor old Campbell Montague, though. Made him a sad and withdrawn kind of man. He built another store to replace it, just a small one, still standing over on that corner there. See? But he sold it off within a year of building it, and pretty much just hid himself away, almost like his brother Simon had done up in the attic of the original store. Funny twist in all that. Simon finally came out and joined the world again, and his brother turned hermit, doing nothing but hiding away and taking care of Macky as long as Macky lived. Campbell himself died the year after Macky was killed.”
