Jebidiah grabbed the lantern, struck a match and lit it. Gimet was scuttling along the wall like a cockroach, racing to the edge of the window.
Jebidiah leaped forward, tossed the lit lantern, hit the beast full in the back as it fled through the window. The lantern burst into flames and soaked Gimlet’s back, causing a wave of fire to climb from the thing’s waist to the top of its head, scorching a horde of bees, dropping them from the sky like exhausted meteors.
Jebidiah drew his revolver, snapped off a shot. There was a howl of agony, and then the thing was gone.
Jebidiah raced out of the protective circle and the deputy followed. They stood at the open window, watched as Gimet, flame-wrapped, streaked through the night in the direction of the graveyard.
“I panicked a little,” Jebidiah said. “I should have been more resolute. Now he’s escaped.”
“I never even got off a shot,” the deputy said. “God, but you’re fast. What a draw.”
“Look, you stay here if you like. I’m going after him. But I tell you now, the circle of power has played out.”
The deputy glanced back at it. The pages had burned out and there was nothing now but a black ring on the floor.
“What in hell caused them to catch fire in the first place?”
“Evil,” Jebidiah said. “When he got close, the pages broke into flames. Gave us the protection of God. Unfortunately, as with most of God’s blessings, it doesn’t last long.”
“I stay here, you’d have to put down more pages.”
“I’ll be taking the Bible with me. I might need it.”
“Then I guess I’ll be sticking.”
They climbed out the window and moved up the hill. They could smell the odor of fire and rotted flesh in the air. The night was as cool and silent as the graves on the hill.
Moments later they moved amongst the stones and wooden crosses, until they came to a long wide hole in the earth. Jebidiah could see that there was a burrow at one end of the grave that dipped down deeper into the ground.
Jebidiah paused there. “He’s made this old grave his den. Dug it out and dug deeper.”
“How do you know?” the deputy asked.
“Experience...and it smells of smoke and burned skin. He crawled down there to hide. I think we surprised him a little.”
Jebidiah looked up at the sky. There was the faintest streak of pink on the horizon. “He’s running out of daylight, and soon he’ll be out of moon. For a while.”
“He damn sure surprised me. Why don’t we let him hide? You could come back when the moon isn’t full, or even half full. Back in the daylight, get him then.”
“I’m here now. And it’s my job.”
“That’s one hell of a job you got, mister.”
“I’m going to climb down for a better look.”
“Help yourself.”
Jebidiah struck a match and dropped himself into the grave, moved the match around at the mouth of the burrow, got down on his knees and stuck the match and his head into the opening.
“Very large,” he said, pulling his head out. “I can smell him. I’m going to have to go in.”
“What about me?”
“You keep guard at the lip of the grave,” Jebidiah said, standing. “He may have another hole somewhere, he could come out behind you for all I know. He could come out of that hole even as we speak.”
“That’s wonderful.”
Jebidiah dropped the now dead match on the ground. “I will tell you this. I can’t guarantee success. I lose, he’ll come for you, you can bet on that, and you better shoot those silvers as straight as William Tell’s arrows.”
“I’m not really that good a shot.”
“I’m sorry,” Jebidiah said, and struck another match along the length of his pants seam, then with his free hand drew one of his revolvers. He got down on his hands and knees again, stuck the match in the hole and looked around. When the match was near done, he blew it out.
“Ain’t you gonna need some light?” the deputy said. “A match ain’t nothin’.”
“I’ll have it.” Jebidiah removed the remains of the Bible from his pocket, tore it in half along the spine, pushed one half in his coat, pushed the other half before him, into the darkness of the burrow. The moment it entered the hole, it flamed.
“Ain’t your pocket gonna catch inside that hole?” the deputy asked.
“As long as I hold it or it’s on my person, it won’t harm me. But the minute I let go of it, and the aura of evil touches it, it’ll blaze. I got to hurry, boy.”
With that, Jebidiah wiggled inside the burrow.
In the burrow, Jebidiah used the tip of his pistol to push the Bible pages forward. They glowed brightly, but Jebidiah knew the light would be brief. It would burn longer than writing paper, but still, it would not last long.
After a goodly distance, Jebidiah discovered the burrow dropped off. He found himself inside a fairly large cavern. He could hear the sound of bats, and smell bat guano, which, in fact, greased his path as he slid along on his elbows until he could stand inside the higher cavern and look about. The last flames of the Bible burned itself out with a puff of blue light and a sound like an old man breathing his last.
Jebidiah listened in the dark for a long moment. He could hear the bats squeaking, moving about. The fact that they had given up the night sky let Jebidiah know daylight was not far off.
Jebidiah’s ears caught a sound, rocks shifting against the cave floor. Something was moving in the darkness, and he didn’t think it was the bats. It scuttled, and Jebidiah felt certain it was close to the floor, and by the sound of it, moving his way at a creeping pace. The hair on the back of Jebidiah’s neck bristled like porcupine quills. He felt his flesh bump up and crawl. The air became stiffer with the stench of burnt and rotting flesh. Jebidiah’s knees trembled. He reached cautiously inside his coat pocket, produced a match, struck it on his pants leg, held it up.
At that very moment, the thing stood up and was brightly lit in the glow of the match, the bees circling its skin-stripped skull. It snarled and darted forward. Jebidiah felt its rotten claws on his shirt front as he fired the revolver. The blaze from the bullet gave a brief, bright flare and was gone. At the same time, the match was knocked out of his hand and Jebidiah was knocked backwards, onto his back, the thing’s claws at his throat. The monster’s bees stung him. The stings felt like red-hot pokers entering his flesh. He stuck the revolver into the creature’s body and fired. Once. Twice. Three times. A fourth.
Then the hammer clicked empty. He realized he had already fired two other shots. Six dead silver soldiers were in his cylinders, and the thing still had hold of him.
He tried to draw his other gun, but before he could, the thing released him, and Jebidiah could hear it crawling away in the dark. The bats fluttered and screeched.
Confused, Jebidiah drew the pistol, managed to get to his feet. He waited, listening, his fresh revolver pointing into the darkness.
Jebidiah found another match, struck it.
The thing lay with its back draped over a rise of rock. Jebidiah eased toward it. The silver loads had torn into the hive. It oozed a dark, odiferous trail of death and decaying honey. Bees began to drop to the cavern floor. The hive in Gimet’s chest sizzled and pulsed like a large, black knot. Gimet opened his mouth, snarled, but otherwise didn’t move.
Couldn’t move.
Jebidiah, guided by the last wisps of his match, raised the pistol, stuck it against the black knot, and pulled the trigger. The knot exploded. Gimet let out with a shriek so sharp and loud it startled the bats to flight, drove them out of the cave, through the burrow, out into the remains of the night.
Gimet’s claw-like hands dug hard at the stones around him, then he was still and Jebidiah’s match went out.
Jebidiah found the remains of the Bible in his pocket, and as he removed it, tossed it on the ground, it burst into flames. Using the two pistol barrels like large tweezers, he lifted the burning pa
ges and dropped them into Gimet’s open chest. The body caught on fire immediately, crackled and popped dryly, and was soon nothing more than a blaze. It lit the cavern up bright as day.
Jebidiah watched the corpse being consumed by the biblical fire for a moment, then headed toward the burrow, bent down, squirmed through it, came up in the grave.
He looked for the deputy and didn’t see him. He climbed out of the grave and looked around. Jebidiah smiled. If the deputy had lasted until the bats charged out, that was most likely the last straw, and he had bolted.
Jebidiah looked back at the open grave. Smoke wisped out of the hole and out of the grave and climbed up to the sky. The moon was fading and the pink on the horizon was widening.
Gimet was truly dead now. The road was safe. His job was done.
At least for one brief moment.
Jebidiah walked down the hill, found his horse tied in the brush near the road where he had left it. The deputy’s horse was gone, of course, the deputy most likely having already finished out Deadman’s Road at a high gallop, on his way to Nacogdoches, perhaps to have a long drink of whisky and turn in his badge.
A little dust devil danced in front of Jebidiah Mercer’s horse, twisted up a few leaves in the street, carried them skittering and twisting across the road and through a gap made by a sagging wide door and into an abandoned livery stable. Inside, the tiny windstorm died out suddenly, dropping the leaves it had hoisted to the ground like scales scraped from a fish. Dust from the devil puffed in all directions and joined the dirt on the livery floor.
Jebidiah rode his horse to the front of the livery, looked inside. The door groaned on the one hinge that held it, moved slightly in the wind, but remained open. The interior of the livery was well lit from sunlight slicing through cracks in the wall like the edges of sharp weapons. Jebidiah saw a blacksmith’s anvil, some bellows, a few old, nasty clumps of hay, a pitchfork and some horse tackle gone green with mold draped over a stall. There were no human footprints in the dirt, but it was littered with all manner of animal prints.
Jebidiah dismounted, glanced down the street. Except for an overturned stagecoach near a weathered building that bore a sign that read GENTLEMAN'S HOTEL, the street was as empty as a wolf’s gut in winter. The rest of the buildings looked equally worn, and one, positioned across the street from the hotel, had burned down, leaving only blackened ruins and a batch of crows that moved about in the wreckage. The only sound was of the wind.
Jebidiah thought: Welcome to the town of Falling Rock.
He led his horse inside the livery, looked about. The animal tracks were what you would expect. Possum. Coon. Squirrel. Dog and cat. There were also some large and odd tracks that Jebidiah did not recognize. He studied them for a while, gave up on their recognition. But he knew one thing for sure. They were not human and they were not truly animal tracks. They were something quite different.
This was the place. Anyplace where evil lurked was his place. For he was God’s messenger, that old celestial sonofabitch. Jebidiah wished he were free of him, and even thought sometimes that being the devil’s assistant might be the better deal. But he had once gotten a glance of hell, and it was well short of appealing. The old bad devil was one of God’s own, because God liked hell as much as heaven. It was God’s game, heaven and hell, good and evil. That’s all it was, a game, and Jebidiah despised and feared God because of it. He had been chosen to be God’s avenger against evil, and he couldn’t give the job back. God didn’t work that way. He was mighty mean-spirited. He created man, then gave him a choice, but within the choice was a whore’s promise. And instead of making it easy for man, as any truly kind spirit might, he allowed evil and sin and hell and the devil to exist and blamed it all on man. God’s choice was simple. Do as I say, even if I make it hard on you to so. It didn’t make sense, but that’s how it was.
Jebidiah tied his horse in one of the stalls, took the pitchfork and moved the old hay about. He found some good hay in the middle of the stack, forked it out, shook the dust from it and tossed it to his horse. It wasn’t the best there was, but it would do, along with the grain he carried in a bag on his saddle. While the horse ate, Jebidiah put the fork aside, went into the stall and loosened the saddle, slid it off and hung it over the railing. He removed the bridle and reins, briefly interrupting his horse’s feed, slung it over the stall, went out and shut the gate. He didn’t like leaving his horse here in this bleak unattended stable, but he had come up on another of life’s evils and he had to be about his business. He didn’t know the particulars, but he could sense evil. It was the gift, or the curse, that God had given him for his sins. And this sense, this gift, had come alert the minute he had ridden into the ghost town of Falling Rock. His urge was to ride away. But he couldn’t. He had to do whatever it was that needed to be done. But for the moment, he needed to find water for his horse and himself, grain the horse, then find a safe place to bed down. Or as safe a place as possible.
Jebidiah walked down the street, and even though it was fall, he felt warm. The air was humid and the wind was hot. He walked until he came to the end of the street, finally walked back toward the Gentleman’s Hotel. He paused for a brief look at the overturned stagecoach, then turned and went into the hotel.
He saw immediately from the look of it that it had been a brothel. There was a bar and there were a series of stalls, not too unlike horse stalls. He had seen that sort of thing once before, in a town near Mexico. Women worked the stalls. Once there might have been curtains around the stalls, which would have come to the women’s waist. But business would have been done there in each of them, the women hiking up their dresses so that cowboys, at two bits a pop, could clean their pipes and happy up their spirits, be cheered on by their comrades as they rode the whores like bucking horses. Upstairs, in the beds, the finer girls would work, bringing in five Yankee dollars per roll in the sheets.
Jebidiah slid in behind the bar, saw that on the lower shelf were all manner of whiskey bottles. He chose one, held it up to the light. It was corked and full. He sat it on the bar and found some beer bottles with pry-up pressure caps. He took a couple of those as well. Clutching it all in his arms, he climbed the stairs. He kicked a few doors open, found a room with a large bed covered in dust. He placed the bottles on a night table, pulled the top blanket back, shook the dust onto the floor. After replacing the blanket, he went to the window and pushed it up. There wasn’t much air, and it was warm, but it was welcome in comparison to the still humidity of the room.
Jebidiah had found his camp. He sat on the bed and opened one of the beers and took a cautious sip. It was as flat as North Texas. He took it and the other beer, which he didn’t bother to open, and tossed them out the window, sent them breaking and splattering into the dry, dirt street below. He wasn’t sure what had possessed him to do such a thing, but now it was done and he felt better for having done it.
He went back to the nightstand, tugged the cork from the whisky with his teeth. He took a swig. The whiskey was warm both in temperature and spirit, and he could have cleaned his pistols with it, but it did the trick. He felt a comfortable heat in his throat and his stomach, a wave of relaxation soaking into his brain. It wasn’t food, and it wasn’t water, but it beat nothing in his stomach at all. After a moment, and a few more swigs, the whisky warmed him from head to toe, set a bit of a fire in his balls.
He sat on the bed and took several sips before returning the cork to the bottle and going downstairs. He went out into the street again, still looking for someplace with water. He glanced at the stagecoach lying on its side, horseless, and noted something he had not noted before. The runner to which the horses would be hooked was dark with blood. Jebidiah examined it. Dried gore was all along the runner. And now he noted there were horse hooves, bits of hair, even a gray horse ear, and what looked like a strip of skin lying in the street. Not to mention a hat and a shotgun. There was a smell, too. Not just the smell of dried blood, but a kind of wet stink in the air. Jebidi
ah was sure the source was not from the blood or the horse remains. It was the stink of evil, and the smell of it made him absently push back his long black coat and touch the revolvers in their holsters.
He heard a moan. It was coming from the stagecoach. Jebidiah scampered onto the runner and onto the side of the coach, moved along to the door with its cut away window, looked down and inside. Lying against the far side door that lay on the ground was a woman. Jebidiah reached through the open gap, grabbed the interior latch, swung the door open and climbed inside. He touched the woman’s throat. She moved a little, groaned again. Jebidiah turned her face and looked at it. She was a handsome woman with a big dark bruise on her forehead. Her hair was as red as a campfire. She wore a tight-fitting green dress, some fancy green shoes. She wore a lot of makeup. He lifted her to a sitting position. She fluttered her eyes open, jumped a little.
Jebidiah tried to give her a smile, but he was no good at it. “It’s okay, lady,” he said. “I am here to help.”
“Thanks. But I need you to let me lift my ass. I’m sitting on my umbrella.”
Jebidiah helped her out of the stagecoach, into the hotel and upstairs. He put her on the bed he had shaken the dust from, gave her a snort of the whisky, which she took like a trouper. In fact, she took the bottle from him and took a long deep swig. She slapped the umbrella, which had a loop for her wrist, against the bed.
“Damn, if that don’t cut the dust,” she said.
Jebidiah pulled a chair beside the bed and sat. “What’s your name?” he said.
“Mary,” she said disengaging herself from the umbrella, tossing it onto the end of the bed.
“I’m Jebidiah. What happened? Where are the stage horses?”
“Eat up,” she said. “Them, the driver, and the shotgunner too.”
Deadman's Crossing Page 4
