Merkabah Rider: Tales of a High Planes Drifter

by Edward M. Erdelac

  The room smelled of burning candles and strong liquor.

  He moved warily into the grand room, where the drums were thunderous, like the pounding of the hearts of gods, sharing in some Elysian ecstasy. He had taken care to wear his Solomonic lenses this time. The black man’s hypnotic eye would not entrap his mind again.

  The sorcerer was there, standing in his coat and hat and smoking a cigar, staring through the hole in the roof up at the moon. The Rider’s amulets and talismans had joined the bone necklaces and fetishes he had been wearing the last time they’d met.

  As he crossed the threshold, the sorcerer gestured to a pair of pale figures on the landing overhead, and the blurred hands that beat out the violent rhythm ceased abruptly. The sudden silence was like a violence unto itself.

  The Rider looked up and saw two women, one the beautiful black haired woman from the picture in the watch he’d taken from Sucio, the other pale and yellow haired with freckled skin. Both were bare breasted and coated in a sheen of sweat that shined in the moonlight, their smooth shoulders rising and falling from the exertion of their drumming. They wore white cotton skirts, their hair bound up in white kerchiefs. They had the same empty expressions as the people in the mine. Candles flickered on the stairs, making a path.

  The sorcerer spoke without turning away from the moon.

  “You return, blanc.” He took the cigar from his mouth and pointed it at him. “It was you who did away with my wind djab, wasn’t it? I have been calling it all day.”

  “It won’t be coming back,” The Rider said.

  He moved further into the room, raising the revolver.

  “That won’t do anything,” the black man said.

  The Rider pulled the trigger of the pistol, and it clicked on as if on an empty chamber, though he had rechecked the loads twice outside.

  “I told you,” he said, in a sing-song voice, taking a long drag of his cigar.

  More magic. The Rider let the pistol fall to the floor.

  “What have you done to these people?”

  “I have done what pleases Kalfou, and fulfills my own ambitions.”

  “Who is Kalfou?”

  “Kalfou is the loa of the crossroads, blanc. The master of left-handed magic. It is his power I have wielded over these cattle. I am his favored cheval.”

  “Tell Kalfou to release them then,”

  “Tell him yourself,” the black man said, turning to look at him for the first time. “He is coming, blanc. When I could not call the djab, I called him.”

  The black man raised his milky lens again, favoring him with the pale eye.

  Through the blue tint of the Solomonic glass, The Rider observed the energies emanating from the eye in concentric patterns. The eye was like some filter that tapped into the etheric plane and expelled a tangible force into this world.

  “That won’t do anything,” The Rider mocked.

  The black man frowned and took his spectacles off entirely, focusing all his attention upon The Rider.

  “I told you.” The Rider smiled.

  Kelly wanted to spit. This strange, bearded blanc was indeed a nuisance. Why had not the wind djab fleshed him to the bone as it had the troublesome marshal? He had heard the commotion in the street and felt the dying of the wind. Immediately, he had called the women and started the drums speaking, but to no avail. Who was this bearded freak out of the desert who could resist and deflect a servant of the Petro loa?

  Kelly had thought the destruction of Scarchilli and his band would be the only magic he worked tonight. He had long known of their impending treachery, and assumed the loss of the wind djab would give their shaky courage the bolstering it needed to turn against him, He had set the zhambis to kill anyone and everyone they came across, assuming the unsuspecting bandits and their chief would be overcome in their sleep or torn to scraps in the mines. He had not anticipated this blanc escaping to his very door. The zhambis would be at his heels.

  This was all supposed to have been a simple matter; bleed the mine dry, dry gulch Scarchilli and his pawns, and make off with the gold to set himself up somewhere as a king with his two willing brides, churning out followers for Kalfou. He had even entertained thoughts of seeing the land of his ancestors.

  Scarchilli’s plotting had necessitated his acceleration of the plan. It was no matter. The gold was already piled high in the stable, and would be sufficient to keep him fat for the rest of his days.

  But this blanc. This miserable, tricky blanc with his strings of amulets and powerful talismans. He used magic Kelly was unfamiliar with. White man’s magic. He could feel the power humming in the objects he’d stripped from this blanc, but as of yet he’d been unable to unlock their secrets.

  Who was this man, and what was he doing here?

  He had consulted with Kalfou, and now Kalfou was coming. The matter was in the hands of the master of the crossroads now.

  Without another word, Kelly turned his back on the blanc. He glanced up at the two women on the landing, admiring their forms and thinking how it would be to be with them. He smiled and gazed up through the open roof at the clear night sky. He was heady from the rum and potions and the spells he had worked this night, opening himself to the approaching spirit wending down through the stars. He took the cigar from his mouth and lit the veve as a beacon for his master.

  The Rider opened his mouth to speak, and stepped back as the black man took his cigar from his lips and dropped it to the floor.

  It was the smell that made him recoil, for he knew it well. The gunpowder on the floor flared as the heat of the cigar touched it off, and soon the intricate tetramorph was traced out in brilliant fire. There was rum there too, and it burned, dancing as the black man stood still and raised his thin arms. The pattern seared itself on The Rider’s eyeballs.

  The Rider backed further away. He could feel a presence turning its attention to the fire; he could feel it approaching. He crouched down and tore open the seam of his rekel coat, pulling out the lining and a bit of chalk he kept secured there.

  Hastily he began to describe a Solomonic seal on the floor, drawing the circle around him and inscribing the Ineffable Name. He did it quickly, with practiced hand, muttering the Psalm of exorcism and the formulas from the Testament of Solomon he had memorized long ago.

  He glanced up in his work as a swirling ethereal funnel plunged through the hole in the roof and landed squarely on the black man’s shoulders, staggering him. As it began to take shape, he heard the first of the pounding on the front door.

  The townspeople had arrived.

  He returned to his work.

  He had finished the inscriptions and was sitting in the circle, whispering his ecstatic mantra and loosening the moorings on his soul when a guttural voice like the creak of an ancient chest opening, clattered an inquiry from the black man’s lips, in what sounded like French.

  The Rider looked up, and saw the sorcerer had turned to face him. He stood in the hunched posture of a man possessed with a heavy burden, his shoulders sloping and his waist bent as if he bore it on his back. His eyes were blank, rolled up in his skull, and his lower jaw protruded, showing the bottom row of white teeth.

  This was the man.

  Through the lenses, The Rider saw the spirit. It was in the form of a small, half naked, withered old black man in torn red breeches and a straw hat clinging to the sorcerer’s back and peering over his shoulder. The hands that gripped the sorcerer’s shoulder were capped in curved, black taloned fingernails that dug into his body like those of a hunting hawk. Agate, shining eyes shown in a dark, prodigiously wrinkled and drawn face, and a terrible smile revealed teeth that were filed to carnivorous points.

  The Rider closed his eyes.

  When he saw again, it was with his spirit, and he stepped out of his body, facing Kalfou in the Yenne Velt.

  “Kalfou,” The Rider said.

  “Who are you, white man?” the guttural voice came again, this time in words that The Rider could understand
.

  “Tell me your name, demon,” The Rider retorted. “You are not what you pretend to be.”

  The entity cocked its head, frowning, waiting for an explanation.

  “No spirit could have called Lix Tetrax to do its bidding, only a marshal of demons.”

  Kalfou’s teeth disappeared, and he removed his straw hat.

  “Very well.” He snarled. “Then let us be frank with each other.”

  Instantly, ten horn yellow spikes sprouted from the top of the old black man’s skull, splitting it down the middle. The dark eyes flashed, and then the spikes lanced upward, sprouting pale, fleshy arms beneath them. The arms, coated in wiry golden hairs, parted and rent the elderly visage asunder, and a brutish form burst forth from the withered body like an overlarge bird from an egg. Pigeon gray wings, flecked with black markings like peacock’s feathers, unfurled and spread out over the sorcerer’s head. The sorcerer bent further, going to his knees with the weight of the shape that now perched upon his shoulders.

  Eyes that glimmered, only hinted at behind the blackened lenses of the facade form of Kalfou, now shone and wavered like yellow fires in a jack-o’-lantern from beneath a single bristling orange eyebrow, which capped the distorted, swollen face that regarded him anew. The densely freckled visage drooped with ponderous jowls and sat upon a double stack of ample chin. It was a face that had once been handsome and masculine, but now seemed disturbingly childlike with the weight of incalculable gluttony. The bright red hair on its head had once been full and shining. It still hung low, spilling over sloping, hairy shoulders, but had grown stringy and greasy, sparse at the source. The upper body seemed like that of a dying athlete, encased in a grub-like, wasted mass. The wrinkles and emaciation of Kalfou had been replaced by faint stretch marks and rolls of fat, sheathed in a brushy carpet of rusty hair that sprung unruly and unkempt inches from the sickly, sagging white flesh. Beneath the tremendous gut was a lower body garbed entirely in dirty orange hair, and possessed of thin haunches and cloven black hooves.

  The Rider wavered, but did not give.

  “Do you know me, man?” the awful figure demanded, showing decaying, yellow teeth.

  “No,” The Rider said, managing not to stammer before the towering apparition that rose above the sorcerer, all of ten feet tall, crouching beneath the high ceiling of the house. “We’ve never met. But I know what you are, Grigori.”

  The despised of the Fallen, shunned as an embarrassment even by Lucifer’s disciples.

  “How do you know?” the wasteful shape demanded, bemused at the insignificant thing before him.

  “Because of them,” The Rider said, motioning to the women who stood naked on the landing. “You kept the most beautiful for yourself, probably telling your servant they were for him. You are one of Samyaza’s Fallen: The Watchers who turned from their duty to God for the carnal pleasures of mortal women and let loose the bastard Nephilim on the Earth in the days of Enoch.” The Rider curled his lip in disdain. “You’re nothing but a deviant.” The Rider nodded to the sorcerer. “And this man is your pimp.”

  The Watcher raged at this, and stooped as if to snatch The Rider with both tremendous black clawed hands, but stopped short at the circle he had inscribed around himself.

  “Leave off of this town and its people, Grigori,” The Rider demanded.

  “You will call me by name, wretch!” the Watcher raged, hissing through teeth like jagged tombstones of piss-stained limestone. “You address Armoni, once a marshal of the Third Legion of Fire! It was I who taught you bumbling, feckless vermin the working of enchantments ten thousand years before your so called King Solomon was squeezed bloody and bawling into this miserable world, when your race feared flame and was content to roll in shit and fight with jackals over the bones of rotting animals!”

  “Once a marshal of the Third Legion of Fire. Now a lecher.” The Rider shrugged.

  The Watcher drew closer, enraged.

  “You know nothing of what you speak! It was love that drove my kind to fall....”

  The Rider laughed in the monstrous face before him.

  “Lust! The malach were born knowing only the love of Ha Shem. You Watchers were sent to record the time of man and strayed from your tasks to root at our women like dogs in heat. Look at you! You’re disgusting! You wear your sin plainly. You bartered magic like a pederast peddling sweets and trinkets to lure young innocents. How many times since have you called yourself a god and promised power only to grope and fumble at human women through some unwary mit like this sorcerer?”

  Armoni loomed, its boyish face contorted and ugly in its wrath. Yes, how many cults had this being presided over? The drunken orgies of Bacchus or Pan? And what nameless dark doings had he wrought in the name of this Kalfou, his latest incarnation?

  “You insignificant bowel worm! Do you think your measly scribblings and incantations can turn me aside? It I who taught this knowledge to your forebears! I could blow you to hell with a blast of my nostrils! I can even now call upon forty legions of demons to shred your soul to rags!”

  “Then why don’t you?” The Rider challenged.

  Armoni folded his arms across his womanly chest at that and smiled a crooked smile.

  “I don’t have to.”

  The Rider glanced about him, and was almost jerked back into his earthly body by what he saw. The heavy doors had not held. They hung shattered inward on their hinges, and the gray, mindless mob was clambering through, stumbling over the wheelbarrow, scrabbling across the floor toward his motionless body.

  The Rider snapped back into focus. He could do nothing in his exhausted flesh, but he had a slim chance on this plane.

  “So you’re a coward too!” he called out to Armoni.

  The gigantic face sneered.

  “You’ll soon trouble me no more,” it said flatly.

  “Then I’ll keep those women from your paws at least!” The Rider yelled, and dove for his body.

  “No!” Armoni bellowed, and lanced out at The Rider with one trembling hand. As it passed through the circle, there was a flash of golden fire that seared the hand of Armoni, igniting it in blazing fire. But those seeking claws closed on The Rider’s etheric heel and swept him out of his protection circle like a bun from a hot oven.

  Armoni had not lied at least about that. Few of the Fallen could penetrate the seal at all let alone pluck its author from it. Such was the Grigori’s uncontrollable lust, which The Rider had counted on, that it risked agony for two human women.

  As the Watcher rose up, drawing The Rider’s flailing spirit along, he laid his hands on the last talisman he had left, one which even he did not truly know the worth of, and prayed. This was the last defense Adon had taught him. There were seventy two sequences of the two hundred sixteen letter name of Ha Shem, the Lord God Yaweh. These names were often unutterable, and were believed to contain the very formulas with which God had created the universe, encompassing aspects of His own divine nature. The Sons of the Essenes had taught him to meditate upon these names, and use them for protection.

  The last task of a Merkabah Rider of The Sons of the Essenes was to stitch by hand with threaded gold all seventy two names into the inner seam of his rekel coat. It was a painstaking process, long months of work. He had never had to use it. Had he not been relieved of his other talismans he would not have fallen upon it now, but as it was, everything depended on it.

  He turned the coat inside out as Armoni brought him up to his face. Whirling, he thrust the garment like a blanket over the Watcher’s eyes. There was a tremendous lightning crack and a flash of brilliant fire. He heard Armoni scream and saw his great beating wings burst into flame. He felt an electric jolt shiver through his soul. For an instant he felt himself disincorporating, as if whatever mysterious particles composed his very being had momentarily lost their interconnectedness to each other.

  Then with a gasp of burning air, he was back in his body, and from behind, dozens of clenching hands were reaching out, tearing at
his hair, his limbs, his clothes. He lurched away from them, diving forward to his hands and knees. He scrambled out of his circle, through the licking, searing flames of the sorcerer’s burning tetramorph, searing his hands and face, singing his beard.

  Kelly was staggering in the center of the veve. He felt Kalfou’s terror. The terror of a god! But it had been so unlike Kalfou, this presence. As if...some veil had lifted and Kalfou had disappeared along with it. He had no idea what had happened after being mounted by the loa, only that he felt sick. Blood was gushing from his nose in a bubbling river.

  Then he saw the bearded blanc, the fires of Kalfou’s veve flashing in his blue glass eyes as he sprung up at Kelly and grabbed his left hand, jerking something from his finger—a silver ring he had taken.

  The zhambis. They were in the house! Two of them rushed heedlessly into the burning veve and their clothes bloomed flames. They wheeled away, and amazingly, the sight of their burning brethren gave the remainders pause. They considered the fire, animal eyes glistening with wonder.

  The blanc drew something from his pants—the golden gun Scarchilli had claimed. Kelly clamped his hands on the blanc’s arm and they wrestled amid the flames.

  The Rider struggled in the sorcerer’s grip. The man was thin, but wiry and surprisingly strong. The gun exploded uselessly, blasting away the rail of the stairs. The sorcerer seemed surprised to see the pistol fire. His spells had no effect on its mechanism, now that The Rider reclaimed the ring that authorized its use.

  They lurched back and forth amid the flaming pattern, and the sorcerer forced his arm into the high flame. The Rider gritted his teeth and screamed as the fire burned his arm, but he refused to release his hold on the pistol.

  Kelly cooked the blanc’s arm in the fire, but he wouldn’t let go. He threw an elbow into the man’s face, knocking off his blued spectacles. He smiled, and willed his witch’s eye to batter down this treacherous fool once and for all.

  The Rider felt the spectacles leave his face and tasted blood in his mouth as the black man’s elbow cracked against his jaw. He clenched his eyes tight, and felt the man’s grip change. He was looking at him now, with that strange eye. He could almost feel the dizzying gaze sounding its invisible energies against his eyelids.