Again Tooms fired, and the shot blew through the wall beside The Rider and sent the chair with the woman’s hairbrush tumbling end over end till it struck the back wall.
The power of Tooms’ rifle was unnatural. No musket made that The Rider had ever seen could retain its power after passing through so many obstacles at such a distance. He was lucky the bullet had only creased his shoulder, else it might have blown his heart clean out into the backyard.
He glanced down at the hole made in the floor and saw that the ball had burrowed relatively deep down into the dark ground beneath the house.
He brought his foot up and down, and the heel of his shoe crashed through the weakened board. He set to work prying aside the adjoining wood and breaking open a hole big enough for a man to fit through.
By Gawd, Japheth thought, why had he brought this poor man into this fight? It was evident that no force of man was going to stop Medgar Tooms.
He had prayed to the Lord after the healing touch had left him, that it be made known to him whether the end of Medgar Tooms’ reign of terror would come about by way of the bible or by way of the sword. Surely it was evident now that the sword had not been made that could slay Medgar Tooms. Already this Hebrew, he had felt sure would stand against Tooms, was attempting to flee. But Japheth knew there would be no escape. He had seen the dozens of bodies of those who had tried to escape Medgar Tooms. They lay only yards from the few who had tried to fight him.
Part of Japheth Tubal Lessmoor—the part that contained his body and mind—whispered in that there was no defying the infernal power of Medgar Tooms. These were the parts that had shaken and been cowed at the sight he had seen on this property years ago. But another part of him, the part of him that contained his spirit, told him that the Lord would prevail. His Faith had been shaken, and he had hidden from God in his locked church. Because he had shirked his duty as a man of God, so many had lost their lives to the vengeful hand of Medgar.
What it would take to stop him, he did not know, but he felt confident this would be the last day of Medgar Tooms’ murderous career. The killings and the wickedness would end here where it had begun, even if it had to end with his own death.
If he had been an Indian, J.T. Lessmoor might have sung his death song. As it was, he began to read from his Bible—from the Lord of the Thunderstorms—and as he did, he slowly stood.
“The glory of Gawd thundereth. The voice of the Lord is in power. The voice of the Lord is in majesty.”
The Rider kicked off the last bit of splintered board and glanced up at Japheth, who was slowly getting up from behind cover.
“The voice of the Lord breaketh the cedars,” the old preacher was saying, and as he did so he was beginning to tremble, and his voice was taking on a queer power.
“Get down, you damn fool!” The Rider hissed.
A bullet came buzzing through the doorway and flew right by the preacher’s face, destroying an old lantern sitting on a shelf only inches behind him. Japheth did not flinch, but began to walk toward the front door, his eyes glazed.
“The voice of the Lord cutteth out the flames of fire!” Japheth intoned.
On the rise, Medgar Tooms saw the old preacher step out onto the porch in plain view. He recognized him as the two-faced sonofabitch who had barked from the pulpit of the church in Gadara so many years ago, yet wouldn’t crack the doors for man, woman, or child when he’d swooped down on the town.
He finished priming his Whitworth and raised it to his shoulder again. The hogs stopped and swiveled their heads simultaneously to peer at the old man on the porch. Medgar Tooms pulled back the hammer of the Whitworth and squinted his eye, lining up the little wedge on the end of the muzzle with the old man’s chest.
When Japheth saw Medgar Tooms standing near the old tree with his rifle aimed at him, he pointed one violently trembling finger at Tooms and his voice sang out like a clarion;
“The voice of the Lord shaketh the wilderness!”
Medgar’s finger pulled the trigger just as a thundering chain blue whip of lightning struck the tree at its base, an explosion, like dynamite, going off in his ears. The young hogs who had been gathered around the dead mule were thrown every which way and lay still, smoke curling off their black bodies. Medgar himself lay face down and he heard the wounded, lingering cries of the hogs that had not been killed instantly.
The blackened tree curled with tongues of flickering flame. Medgar shook his head to rid himself of the ringing, and to calm his crackling, excited hair, which stood on end.
Medgar glared angrily up at the old man, who still stood untouched on the porch, his Bible in hand.
He packed and primed his rifle and sorely brought himself up to one knee, acrid smoke curling off his shoulders.
The six old hogs rose smoking, and gathered around him excitedly, as if urging him on.
Japheth trembled, his breathing excited and his eyes wide with revelation and his very veins aquiver like humming telegraph wires.
Beneath the house, The Rider crouched in the cold dark, which was lined with streaks of sunlight coming through the overhead floorboards. He had heard the loud rumble of thunder and the tremendous crash. He was at a loss as to what it might have been, as he had jumped through the hole just before the clamorous sound. However, he heard the old man’s weight on the porch, and could see his shadow. Through the lattice of crisscrossed wood beneath the porch facing out into the white yard, he saw Medgar Tooms raising his rifle for another shot. Had he missed?
He crawled over to the front and began to kick savagely at the boards blocking his way.
“The Lord sitteth upon the flood; yea, the Lord sitteth the King forever!” called Japheth.
As if on cue, the great black oak gave a sudden twisting groan and fell forward. Medgar Tooms barely sidestepped it, and one of the old hogs was crushed flat.
Medgar’s shot again went wild, and he cursed and stumbled, catching himself with his musket like a crutch.
He did not reload again, but instead took up his rifle and began to stride deliberately towards the house, bayonet first, in the old marching step of the soldier. His face was twisted with hate, and he hastened into the quick step as he got closer.
The pigs, like fellow troops eager to engage the enemy, scurried behind him.
Japheth came down the porch steps, into the yard, to meet him.
“The Lord will give strength unto his people; the Lord will bless his people with peace,” he called to the heavens, voice trembling.
“Gonna kill you, sky pilot,” Medgar Tooms called out, his voice a harsh drawl.
“The Lord will give strength unto his people; the Lord will bless his people with peace,” Japheth answered, his face surprisingly calm.
“I’d run if I was you,” Tooms drawled a little louder, getting closer. “Like you done that day. Remember?”
“The Lord will give strength unto his people,” Japheth repeated, a little less sure.
“When you locked yourself in your goddamned church house and listened to them all pounding and scratchin’ and screamin’ at the door...remember that? Where were you and God that day, preacher? That day when they were callin’ and beggin’ for you both?” Medgar went on.
Japheth faltered now, taking one hesitant step back. He shook his head.
“The Lord will bless his people...” he stammered, forgetting the words.
“Not you, preacher. Gonna stick you like a hog.”
“...with peace.”
At six yards, Medgar brought up his musket like a spear and gave a fearsome cry—the fabled Rebel Yell tempered in the flames of perdition. He ran full on, coat billowing behind him, bayonet tip red with blood, hogs pealing in hungry ecstasy and joining in his charge. His eyes were mad with bloodlust and his teeth drawn back like the maw of a black wolf bearing down on its prey.
The Rider fanned four shots rapidly up through the lattice under the porch, and caught Medgar in the chest and legs. One of the hogs skidded to tumbling a s
top, a bright red blossom bursting open in its thick pink forehead.
The bullets took Medgar Tooms by surprise, and he was blown back, his boots sliding out from under him in the snow. He landed on his back, the musket still clenched in his hand. He did not stir.
The hogs snuffled at the body of their master.
The Rider kicked aside the broken lattice and crawled out from under the porch
“Praise Gawd,” the old preacher said, closing his Bible and blinking his eyes as if to reassure himself that what he saw was still this world. “I thought you had abandoned me.”
The Rider grinned up at the old man and pulled himself up over the porch rail. Suddenly, Tooms’ bayonet was up to the muzzle in Japheth’s dog-eared bible, pinning it to his frail chest.
Japheth wheezed and doubled over.
Medgar Tooms drove the old man up the steps and down to the floor of the porch like a skewered varmint. He gave the musket a merciless twist that crackled with the sound of breaking bone and the rasp of torn cloth.
The Rider dropped to the porch. Numbly, as he cocked his pistol, he saw the five ugly old hogs standing on their hind legs, snorting hotly at the frigid air.
Tooms wrenched the musket out of the old man and slammed the butt of the heavy rifle into The Rider’s waist, knocking all the wind out of him and flipping him back over the porch rail, putting him flat on his back on the ground. The hogs fell to their four feet and tramped up the steps onto the porch, oblivious to the scuffle. They swarmed over the old man, who managed to expel one blood-curdling scream before being drowned out by the gleeful exclamations of the porcine ravagers.
Tooms vaulted the rail musket first, intending to pin him The Rider to the snowy ground, but he rolled and kicked out with both feet, separating the dark man from his Whitworth, which remained quivering, upright in the ground.
Tooms jerked a Remington pistol from his waistband and thumbed back the trigger as The Rider lost his last shot, shooting wildly and accidentally blowing one of the feasting hogs off the porch.
Tooms stumbled slightly as the hog tumbled down the front steps and fell heavily at his feet. The Rider seized the opportunity to jerk the stout barreled Derringer from under his arm and point it up at Tooms.
Tooms was faster. His Remington cracked once and struck The Rider’s Derringer, blowing it away and tearing off the tip of The Rider’s middle finger.
The Rider rolled forward on his knees, gripping his bleeding hand and staring at the bright red blots on the disturbed snow, sure it would be the last thing he saw of the mortal world before Tooms’ next shot blasted him out of his body for good.
But it didn’t come.
Instead, Tooms’ tall, horseman’s boots crunched backwards in the snow, and when The Rider glanced up, the tall gunman regarded him thoughtfully.
“We know you,” Tooms said. But it wasn’t Tooms. His voice was there, yes, but another, deeper, spoke in conjunction with his, and another past that, high and tinny, and the effect was sonorous and disjointed all at once. “We have seen you. You are The Rider who was turned away from the Holy Presence.”
The Rider did not answer. Numbly, he noticed the blackened tip of his finger lying nearby in the snow. As he watched, one of the pigs clattered off the porch and with one dip of its jaws, gobbled it up.
“Who are you?” he panted, tucking his hand under his arm to staunch the blood.
“Oh, we are Gestas and Nahash, Lamech and Zuleika....we are many,” came the answer, and it seemed to come from all around, in voices of various tones and pitch. The Rider shuddered, realizing some of the voices were coming from where the swine surrounded Japheth, and these spoke as through mouthfuls of food.
“Call us Legion,” said the pig who had swallowed his fingertip, in a mocking, child’s voice. “The reverend thought he could rebuke us.”
The Rider refused to look at the animal, but addressed the man.
“You’re a bunch of dybbukim,” he said. As he had thought. Criminal souls escaped from their sentence in the fires of Gehenna, come to join with a like-minded mortal to continue their ill will in the physical world.
“What of it?” said Tooms, in a discordant chorus. “Without your prayer quorum and your ram’s horn what can you do to us? Like the old man, alone, you have not the faith to cast us out and we will not leave.” He cocked his pistol and aimed at The Rider’s head. “We could kill you here and now, as we have so many others.”
“What stays your hand?”
“We will tell you,” they said to him. “You are right, Rider. We are dybbukim, sentenced for our sins after death to suffer the same fate as Haman for all eternity. But we dragged ourselves out of our damnable prison by a line woven from the hatred of this mortal and the will of....well, friends, let us say.”
“Who? Molech?” The Rider growled. “Asmodai? You could not do this yourselves. The powers he has...who gave them to you?”
Tooms smiled. It was an odd expression on his grim face, lined with anger and hardship.
“We will not tell. Suffice it to say, for ten years now we have done the work of our masters. We have cleared a path for the Hour of Incursion. Our period of servitude, like that of our charge, is ended. Yet...we will go on. We are henceforth free.”
“And?” The Rider dared, straightening. More of this strange, infernal plan. Somehow, these ragged dybbukim were tied to the cult of Molech worshipers he had disrupted in the San Pedro River Valley some months ago. Molech’s chief servant there had hinted towards some dark alliance, some monstrous plan that would culminate in an invasion of the physical world. Something again about The Hour of Incursion.
“It has been a crowded, stuffy decade, in the body of this killer,” they said.
“We need new vehicles,” the pig beside The Rider blurted in a child’s voice. “Tell him!”
Tooms looked annoyed, but shrugged.
“It is a rare thing to find a willing host such as dear Medgar, and we have decided not to let him go. But you have knowledge and abilities we can use to force our way into new hosts. You will accept one of us, and provide the rest with forms so that we may go our separate ways. If you refuse, Medgar Tooms will continue to soak this land with innocent blood.”
The Rider barely considered the proposition. Even if he were to agree, it would ultimately mean multiplying the death toll many times—once for every malicious spirit bestowed with a physical form; it would be like unleashing rabid dogs on the world.
In the snow, he thrilled to see the remnants of his Derringer. Tooms’ bullet had struck the trigger guard, blowing it and the grips from the pistol’s frame. Yet it had not exploded, and the trigger itself seemed to be intact. But even if it would fire, he had seen the effect of bullets on Tooms’ supernaturally fortified body. The smoking, bloodless holes in his grey coat attested to it.
It was inches away. But so was the barrel of Tooms’ Remington.
“With his training, we cannot penetrate his conscious without his leave,” the pig said. “He will die first. Kill him now!”
“Shut up,” said Tooms, or whatever spirit inhabited him at that moment.
Then from behind, on the porch, Japheth coughed.
The pig’s head turned. Tooms glanced up.
In one desperate decision, The Rider dove for the little holdout and jammed it against the temple of the pig. There was a fiery blast, and the pig pinwheeled violently away, spewing blood from its nose, ears, and head.
The Rider turned and fired at the pig on the porch, with its snout buried in Japheth’s chest. It blew a black hole behind its ear and its skull vomited up brains over the old man’s ragged wounds. It slumped lifeless.
The bullet continued on and burrowed into the eye of the fat sow that had been standing opposite, tugging at Japheth’s intestines. The slug erupted out her chin in a sloppy geyser. The sow stumbled off the porch and fell on its side, kicking and squealing.
The Rider wheeled the empty gun reflexively, futilely up at Tooms, and stopped.<
br />
Medgar Tooms stood quietly, his gun loose in the arm at his side, staring down at The Rider.
The remaining Thing had recoiled at the sudden departure of its cohorts. Without their power to bolster its own, its possession momentarily slipped, and it fell, flailing like a climber gripping at a sheer cliff face, plummeting to the back of Medgar Tooms’ mind. Without their presence like a hump on his back, whispering in his ear and curling around the base of his brain, injecting it with steady doses of blissful hate, Medgar Tooms found himself faced with a stark instant of terrible lucidity.
Connie Louise. His wife’s name was Connie Louise, and she had been as pretty as the sun stepping out over the hills. Then, the flood of the dead swelled behind his eyes. Neighbors, friends, yes, but more. Women, infants—people who had never heard of Gadara.
He shoved the muzzle of his Remington up under his own chin and with a pop that resounded far across the snow-covered countryside, Medgar Tooms’ fury turned from the Earth.
The Rider regained his feet slowly. He didn’t know what caused Tooms to turn his gun on himself. Most likely he would never know. Maybe whatever rage had fueled the entities possessing him had departed along with them and been replaced with an equal amount of contrition. He thought of the family in the dusty framed portrait in the house.
The Rider had no blood relation left. The murder of his surrogate, scholarly brothers had sent him on a seven year hunt for a man who had been like a father to him. Yet The Rider had a focus for his anger. Tooms’ loss, more terrible than The Rider’s, had no villain to lay the blame on. His animal wrath had flailed without rhyme or reason, egged on by the dybbukim, an ultimately impotent fury that had struck down blameless strangers. Even children.
The return of reason had perhaps brought a realization of this. To a one-time family man, maybe the revelation that he had become to others the villain whose throat he had sought to cut himself had been too much. In the end, maybe life had been too much to bear, and death had become a duty. In a way, at the hands of the dybbukim, he had committed a slow, painful suicide since the day his family died.
Merkabah Rider: Tales of a High Planes Drifter Page 18
