The Best New Horror 7

by Stephen Jones

  That didn’t go down too good, not in this county. Midas was a wanted man, sure. Everyone knew that. But the Gerlachs ruled the town of Fiddler, the whole damn county. A network of cousins and uncles and assorted bastards kept things going the way they’d always gone. No one was going to collect the bounty on Midas Gerlach. Especially not some nigger with a Navy Colt.

  The price on Midas’ head was a doozy, though. Truth be told, he was mighty proud of it. The larger the dollar sign, the larger the man. That’s what his granddaddy had always said. And Midas had earned it, too. Not in any pedestrian manner, mind you. Nothing so simple as the murder of man, woman, or child.

  People up in Sacramento City still talked about it. How some rich rancher staying at a ritzy hotel by the river carved up a whore with the French chef’s best cutlery. Paiute Injun whore who had a real taste for brandy with a slice of summer peach, and the law still held him accountable, even though anyone who knew the Gerlach clan from Midas’ granddaddy on down damn well knew that the whole bunch of them couldn’t control their passions when the brandy had them by the balls. Peached or straight it did not matter.

  But it wasn’t the cutting up part that had bothered the good citizens of Sacramento City. It was the simple fact that Midas (in the pixilated afterglow of a frolic similar to the one he’d just enjoyed with Lie) had sautéed the slut’s feet in the French chef’s best skillet, cooking her little toesies to a golden brown in a rich sauce of champagne and wild mushrooms and plenty of butter. When the hotel staff found him after the deed was done, sixty-two bones lay stripped clean on the hotel’s finest Staffordshire Blue china, and Midas was working his bicuspids with a toothpick. His disposition was later described as more than agreeable by the concierge, certainly polite despite a few discreet belches. In fact, everything seemed just fine and dandy until the hotel doorman peeked into the kitchen and confronted the untended remains of Midas’s gustatory extravaganza, at which point the hale and hearty Irishman promptly lost the half-pint of whiskey that had insulated him against the surprisingly intemperate June weather.

  The Sacramento City papers played it up big. Said that Midas was worse than that Alferd Packer fellow out Colorado way, worse than the miserable wretches who called themselves the Donner Party. And then the gentlemen of the press got to embellishing the story, and pretty soon Midas found that he had consumed not only the whore’s feet but also the French chef’s privates – cooked up with a big mess of oysters was how the story went – and that little tale put the noblest son of the house of Gerlach off his feed for a full week. Such embellishments continued, each revelation helping to jack the bounty on Midas’ head to Tower of Babel proportions, until it got to the point where Diamond Jim Brady himself might get all wet in the mouth and strap on a gun, let alone some buck with a scarred Colt that had most likely seen its last duty at Gettysburg.

  Such memories aroused a man’s thirst. Midas stepped across the courtyard of the Empress Dowager’s palace, bent low and removed the roof of a building that had housed the Empress’ eunuchs. He snatched up a bottle of tequila, taking dim satisfaction, as always, in his choice of hiding place.

  He washed the taste of Lie’s toes from his mouth, one pleasure eclipsing the other, while he watched the nigger work.

  Hell and damnation. Diamond Jim was going to have to get in line. Discounting the Pinkerton men, the buck was the third gunman to come looking for Midas just this month. He was the only one to get as far as the ranch. Or maybe he was just the first one to get to the ranch. And him with shaggy boots that looked to be made from dead rats and tattered clothes that maybe fit him when thirty or forty pounds of extra meat hung on his bones.

  Midas drank. This buck wasn’t scarecrow skinny, though. He was what you’d call rangy. Tough – all hungry-eyed and Sunday-serious. He made those Pinkerton men look like weepy choir boys. Took his beating like one of Midas’ prize horses, all proudlike. Even the ranch hands – trigger-happy desperadoes, every one – had to admit that this buck had a different stripe to him, and they were the kind of men who hated niggers more than any other creatures that walked on two legs.

  The buck could shoot, too. Clipped Midas’ ear, but that wasn’t anything to get excited about. Hell, it was Midas who shot the gun out of the buck’s hand just as slick and cool as Deadwood Dick.

  But all Midas had to do was take one look at the buck to know that the bastard was as good as finished. Buck out there digging a hole. Digging his own grave.

  Well that wasn’t rightly true. Not quite.

  Midas took a final swig of tequila, crunching the worm between his teeth as he glanced at Lie. She’d dried her buttocks with a towel. They didn’t shine like pearls anymore. No, now her sweetcheeks had the look of cool marble monuments that might have been carved by Michelangelo himself.

  Midas swallowed the worm. Such unsullied beauty as that of his bride-to-be couldn’t be forced to sit upon the outdoor privy Midas and his boys had employed lo these many years. That wasn’t to be. By God, the bride of Midas Gerlach would not suffer a splinter in her behind. Neither would she breathe the unseemly combustulations of a dozen sworn profligates.

  So the buck bounty man wasn’t digging his own grave. He was digging a new shit shaft for Midas Gerlach’s bride-to-be. The old shit shaft would be the buck’s grave, though Midas worried that it was slightly sacrilegious to bury a nigger in the same spot where lay Granddaddy Gerlach’s pecker, be it shit shaft or no.

  But he also figured that the buck could go to his final reward knowing that his last task on God’s green earth had been a noble one, for there was no nobler effort than shielding true beauty from the undeniable vulgarity which thrived beneath this veil of tears. At least, that was the opinion of a certain poet from the Mysterious East.

  Midas figured that the stranger wouldn’t understand that, though. It didn’t really matter, because the stranger didn’t have a whole lot more understanding to do.

  All he had to do was dig a hole.

  Then he had to take enough bullets so that he’d fall into another one.

  Then he had to die.

  Maybe not in that precise order. Midas chuckled. If the stranger was really smart, he’d stomach as much lead as he could, just to be sure he was dead through before he plummeted into the fetid abyss.

  The barbed wire had gouged a raw trench through the flesh of his wrist just as thoroughly as a crown – or more properly, a bracelet – of thorns might have done, and the bullet hole through his hand had the angry look of a cheap steak dredged in pepper and Louisiana Tabasco, but the stranger didn’t feel any pain. After hours of digging in the hot sun without water or a single minute’s rest, he barely felt anything. He only felt himself and the shovel, the hard earth, and the heat.

  He didn’t know who or where or even what he was. Not anymore. Not in this hellish furnace of a place. Not with slow trickles of blood weeping from his hand. Hand a part of the shovel handle. Booted feet stomping shovel blade. Left, then right. Biting the earth. His boots, each one bristling with the razor teeth of a dozen midnight horrors, biting the earth and making it whimper.

  No. Not the earth. That whimper came from his throat.

  It wasn’t a whimper of pain. The digging man was lost. Utterly. Completely. He knew that for sure and for certain, and that was what made him whimper. He’d been somebody when he came to this place. Somebody strong. And before that, he’d been somebody else. Somebody who wasn’t strong. But the Chinaman had changed him. The Chinaman had given him a pair of boots with teeth that could bite the earth and make it whimper. And it was the hell of losing that strength that made the stranger whimper like a motherless child.

  He scooped a shovelful of dirt out of the hole. The Chinaman. He seemed a real memory. White hair and coffee-coloured eyes that were as pretty as a woman’s. The Chinaman didn’t seem like someone the black man would imagine. Down South, he’d never seen a Chinaman at all. Down South, there were white folks and colored folks, and he’d seen plenty of both in his
time.

  That was another piece of it. He punched the shovel into the earth and the crown of thorns bit his wrist.

  Not a crown, a bracelet.

  No matter. Down South, he’d seen a crown of thorns. Down South, there was a church, and in that church was a preacher named Stackhouse, and that preacher named Stackhouse had carved himself a black Jesus with a crown of thorns that made you ache with pure misery could bring Satan’s own bitch to her knees like a gentle lamb. And that preacher named Stackhouse had had himself a son, a boy who didn’t want to have any lamb in him at all. A good-for-nothing lie-about who would do, but not do right. A boy who’d read, but wouldn’t read the good book. He’d read books stolen from the homes of indecent white folks. He’d work his fingers, but he’d work them around a deck of cards or a bottle, not around a shovel or a hoe.

  But the black man held a shovel now, so that preacher’s boy couldn’t be him. Still, the memory seemed so real. And the name was so familiar. Stack . . .

  What was it, now? Just there on his tongue a second ago, and now it was gone.

  Stack –

  “Stackalee . . .”

  The Chinaman’s voice echoed against the walls of the hole, and the black man glanced at the four dirt walls surrounding him before he realized that the word had spilled from his own lips.

  And then he remembered other words. Words heard out the backside of that church Down South, linked up so that they made stories. Stories about an eternal bad man who wore an oxblood Stetson, a man who made church-going women slick between the legs with a sharp glance, a man who shook up the earth with his feet, a man who scared a preacher’s youngest son but scared him with a fear that made his blood surge with all the power of a river come springtime.

  “Stackalee.” The name was on the digging man’s lips, and it seemed to fit there, just the way a man fits a woman.

  He sucked a deep breath. His blood surged. Suddenly, he knew why he was here in this hole with a shovel wired to his hand. He’d made a little mistake, and now he was paying for it with his sweat and blood. The men who’d put him here figured that he could never do what they’d asked of him.

  The men? No, that wasn’t right. The man. That fiery Southern preacher, him so high and mighty, speechifyin’ and preachifyin’. “Dig your hole deep, sonny boy. Gonna take a deep deep hole to hold all your shameless sins.”

  Oh, he could dig a hole deep, all right. Man name of Stackalee, he once dug a hole straight down to hell just so he could kick the devil’s brimstone ass. A man with fanged boots stitched by a Chinaman, he could put the bite to a shovel with those boots, make that shovel work a damn sight harder. Especially if his name was Stackalee.

  “That’s my name,” the man said, no whimper left in him. “Yes, that’s who I am.”

  He punched the shovel into the ground, again and again, and each time he brought it away he expected to see the white face of Satan beaming up at him from below.

  Things didn’t work out that way, though.

  Because, the first time he looked up, expecting to see the unforgiving sun wearing its implacable mask of indifference, there was old Satan, above him, waiting.

  Staring into the pit.

  Smiling.

  The white goblin was gone now.

  Lie was alone.

  She wasn’t supposed to be alone. But neither should she have lain naked in the white goblin’s bed, nor bear the marks of his teeth and lips upon her body. Father’s dark man was to have protected her from all of that. Him, with his six-gun and his magic boots.

  But Father’s dark man was outside, digging in the earth like a mole.

  Father had made the magic boots. Stitched them from the bodies of living bats that jerked and screamed when the dark man pulled the boots onto his feet for the first time. Father had promised that the boots would give the man the strength he had long wanted, and the man saw soon enough that Father’s words were true, because soon enough the dark man’s six-gun thundered and his enemies fell.

  With his fist the dark man crushed a deputy’s skull – not surprised to find that he could do such a thing, but certainly astonished to find that the simpering idiot actually had a brain inside his head. With nothing more than a sharp glance he severed a hangman’s rope, and the thunder in his boots turned the stone walls of a jail to powder and pebble.

  Father took the dark man’s money. Not only for the boots – there was the high price of a fugitive’s room and board, the higher price of silence. But Father told the man how he could get his money back. The man agreed with nothing more than a nod, and in that moment Lie had felt the power of the stranger’s razor-edged glance cut straight to the secret depths of her heart. She had felt, just for an instant, that a man who looked into her soul with such eyes could deal with a goblin who wrote letters that stank of lust and misery. Maybe Father could outsmart that monster, after all. Lie hoped so. For that monster, Father said, dined on human flesh, calculating the riches of a hundred men on an abacus of human bone. That monster, Father said, would fall before no ordinary man.

  But what would Father say now? His terror in fanged boots was digging in the ground like a railroad coolie. What would Father do if he saw that? Cut off the dark man’s feet with his ceremonial axe, the way he had taken the herbalist’s tongue?

  Would Father leave her here with the goblin who ate the flesh of humans?

  No. That could not happen. The very idea of being trapped in this furnace of a place chilled her, like a hot breeze sliced cold as it gusted through a forest of stone cemetery monuments.

  Lie had no faith in her father, a man who had used her as a poker chip. But her faith, somehow, swelled with the power of a razor-edged glance that could never be held.

  Until she looked through the window.

  And saw the pale goblin holding a gun in each hand.

  And her dark man.

  And his blood.

  The men had split the buck’s face into a dozen pieces – at least, that was the way it looked to Midas – but damned if the hardcase couldn’t still manage an uppity little grin.

  “That’s enough, boys.” Something about the buck had suddenly made Midas all twitchy, and he wanted to conclude this matter and get on with the business at hand. “Now, do like I told you.”

  “Damn thing’s gonna fall apart if’n we try to move it,” said one of the men.

  “Bullshit,” said another. “Didn’t fall apart last week when you pushed it over. And that was with me in it.”

  “You mebbe got a point there.”

  Everyone laughed. Even the buck. But when Midas’ men stopped laughing, the buck didn’t. His belly heaved until his eyes filled with tears. Midas waved his men to work with his six-guns, but that only made the buck laugh harder.

  The deadliest gunmen within a hundred miles heaved and struggled like a bunch of field hands, easing the old outhouse from above its horrid well. Midas planned to relocate the communal privy nearer the men’s quarters, and it looked like it was going to be rough going. One of the pistoleros slipped and nearly fell into the brimming shit shaft, grabbing the teetering structure for dear life, his gun-hand suddenly the home of a half-dozen splinters. Rivulets of blood wept from the buck’s split lip but still he smiled full and wide, tittering like a schoolgirl as Midas’ gun-dogs pulled their compadre from danger. “Smells like the gate of hell itself,” one of the men said, and the buck whispered, “Oh, you don’t know, you just don’t know.” And then the buck glanced at Midas, who stood in front of a brand new outdoor privy with a quarter moon cut in the door and

  MRS MIDAS GERLACH

  PRIVATE

  inscribed just below it, and he looked at the hole he’d dug in the hard earth of Fiddler and he laughed and laughed.

  The gunmen moved the pristine outhouse over the freshly excavated hole. The buck was nearly busting a gut now, tears spilling from his brown eyes. The entire display was an affront to Midas’ sensibilities. He had to make the buck understand, because he didn’t want t
his kind of thing happening in front of his men. “Death isn’t a laughing matter,” he intoned. “You should go to your grave with dignity. Your last action, digging this hole, has been a noble one. After all, the poets of the Mysterious East tell us that there is no nobler effort then the shielding of true beauty from the undeniable vulgarity which thrives beneath this veil of – ”

  The buck howled and hooted.

  Midas’ guts were as tight as fiddle strings. He knew his men had noticed his distress, and that wasn’t good. But there was something about the stranger’s roaring laughter that burrowed under his skin like a ravenous tick. And the stranger’s eyes were just as bad, all proud and haughty, cutting at Midas with little razor glances.

  Midas resolved to hold firm. “Now you hush up,” he ordered. “You’re acting like a scared woman. Act like a man.”

  Again a razor glance slashed him, and then the buck shook his head. “Oh, I won’t do that, boss, ’cause I ain’t no man. You’re about to find that out.”

  Now it was Midas’ turn to laugh. “Hear that boys? He ain’t a man, huh? Well . . . hell . . . I guess that is pretty plain to see after all.” The men chortled and guffawed, taking his meaning. “So, boy . . . why don’t you tell us just what you are?”

  The buck spit a red glob into the dust. “I’m a goblin killer,” he said, kicking up a swirl of bloody dust with his shaggy boots.

  The men went at him again, a whirlwind of fists and feet. But the buck refused to fall, and they backed off instinctively – tired, hot and confused – and when they had backed off the buck was still there under the hot sun, just as before, dust swirling around him, the look on his face all grit and sand and vinegar.