Arcane

by Nathan Shumate

  And as Kamé says, since I have unearthed it all hearts among the Children are one with The Heart again.

  EL DIABLO DE PASEO GRANDE

  Milo James Fowler

  1. Nowhere Barn

  They hadn’t known what to expect, but it sure as hell wasn’t this.

  The barn stood alone in the middle of a barren stretch of hardpan where weeds might have sprung up from the godforsaken earth once upon a time. Plenty of land for wheat fields or grazing pasture stretched between hills at each compass point, perfect for protection from harsh winter winds and run-off during spring rains. It could have been a thriving ranch or farm long ago, but now the whole spread lay cold and abandoned, nothing more than a forgotten memory. There were no remains of a farmhouse, no sign of the settlers who’d once built this sun-bleached, dilapidated barn. The edifice looked as if it had sprung up out of the lifeless ground of its own accord, which didn’t bode well for what would be found inside.

  They’d been following a trail for the past two days, and it led straight to these lopsided doors, chained shut and padlocked as if to keep something unsavory contained inside. But that couldn’t be. Whatever had sucked the life out of the animals they’d passed along the way would have had no trouble snapping through this chain, just as it had snapped the neck of every cow, horse, sheep and goat they’d counted so far.

  Now they stood just inside the dusty threshold, staring upward, unable to believe their eyes.

  “So, what do you make of it?” Coyote Cal managed once he’d found his voice, fingers crawling for the holstered six-gun tied down to his thigh.

  Donna Jamison, resident expert on all things weird and wicked in the Wild West, let loose a low whistle through her teeth, shaking her head in bewilderment.

  Big Yap—Cal’s loyal sidekick who was old enough to be his father, maybe even his grandfather—kept his sawed-off shotgun at the ready, the same weapon he’d used to blast off the padlock and allow them entry.

  Manuel, their trusted guide from the town of Paseo Grande, crossed himself repeatedly with his mouth hanging wide open. “Hijos del Diablo!” he gasped.

  “Steady,” said Cal. “We knew it wouldn’t be pretty.”

  “Hijos del Diablo!”

  “What the heck is he babbling about?” Big Yap grumbled.

  “The devil’s children,” Cal mused.

  Flocks of dust motes danced in streaks of white sunlight piercing the barn's dim interior, just enough light to see the cows strung up to the rafters by their hooves, skinned and glistening bloody in the intermittent light, each one of them decapitated with their necks sewn shut. There had to be at least a dozen. But they weren’t the worst of it. The swollen middle of each suspended carcass looked very much alive, squirming with something inside.

  “So what’re we looking at here?” Yap spat to the side in disgust. “The thing’s nest?”

  “Only one way to tell.” Donna stepped forward with her buck knife open and ready for business.

  “Wait.” Cal reached after her, but she shook off his hand without a glance back. “We don’t know—”

  “Reckon we’ll find out.” The pulsating carcasses were well beyond her reach—ten feet above the barn floor—but for a woman like Donna, trained in the dark arts that New Orleans was famous for, it posed little trouble. With a wink back at Cal and a shake of her flowing crimson locks, she took a breath to steady her nerves and closed her eyes for a moment. Then she looked upward.

  “What’s she up to now?” Yap whispered to Coyote Cal.

  But our hero only reached to grab hold of Manuel’s collar.

  “Señor?” The guide looked confused.

  “Don’t be afraid,” Cal said.

  At that moment, Donna started floating upward toward her target with her blade extended at arm’s length.

  “Bruja!” Manuel shrieked, struggling in a frenzy to escape.

  “You said you wanted our help.” Cal held onto him. “This is it.”

  “Meet Donna ‘The Witch’ Jamison,” Big Yap muttered and spat again.

  “Cover her,” said Cal.

  Grumbling under his breath, Yap took aim with both barrels, and for a moment it looked like his muzzle had toyed with the back of the levitating woman before he’d trained his sights on the pulsing abdomen of the mutilated creature above her.

  “No, no! Hijos del Diablo—we must leave this place!” Manuel insisted. “Vámanos!”

  Donna rose to match the height of the cow-corpse and surveyed the thick lengths of cord knotted at its hooves.

  “She gonna cut it down?” Yap said.

  Cal kept one hand on Manuel and drew his Colt six-shooter. “Don’t think so.”

  2. Premature Birth

  With something akin to a banshee’s shriek, Donna plunged her knife hilt-deep into the flank of the carcass and sliced it open, meeting little resistance.

  “Dios mio!” Manuel gasped. “Señor, why do you keep company with such a woman as this?”

  “Good question,” Yap muttered, adjusting his stance but holding his aim steady.

  Cal raised an eyebrow. “You see, Manuel, a while back in the town of Little Creek, Yap and I learned that the days of the Wild West were long past. This is the Weird West now. So, we obtained the services of Miss Jamison here to be our supernatural guide—”

  “But I am your guide, señor.” Manuel pounded his chest once. “I tell you I will lead you to the creature, and I do.”

  Cal was about to reply, but that’s when a slick black shape dropped writhing out of the carcass Donna had carved open. It fell squealing to the dirt and sawdust below, looking like something between a frog and a baby goat. But nobody got a real good look at it, for as soon as it hit the ground and started clambering straight for Big Yap, he let loose with both barrels. The thing exploded in a burst of black ink, some of it splashing onto Yap’s boots.

  “Madre de Dios!” Manuel cried, clapping both hands over his ears. To the uninitiated, a shotgun blast in closed quarters could be something this side of deafening.

  “What was that?” Yap sputtered.

  “Hard to tell now.” Donna drifted downward, wiping the blade of her knife across her trousers and leaving streaks of the black stuff. Her boots made contact with the barn floor as she sheathed her weapon.

  Cal moved to join her, dragging Manuel by the collar as he did so. “Is this what we’re looking for?” He forced their guide to take a closer look at the remains.

  “Un hijo del Diablo! Sí, sí! Señor, por favor, let me go!”

  “I’d take that as a yes,” Donna said.

  “Then we’re on the right track.” Cal released his hold on Manuel, who took off running to vomit outside.

  “That’s…” Yap jerked a nod toward the splattered remains. “That’s what’s inside all of ’em?” He looked about ready to join Manuel as he surveyed the squirming carcasses suspended above them.

  “We must assume so. But the real question is, who does this land belong to, and who would go through all the trouble of stringing up these…” At a loss, Cal merely gestured toward the improvised incubation sacs.

  “What do you want to do with them?” The light caught a pronounced scar along the side of Donna’s jaw, the last trace of an old knife fight. She wasn’t bad to look at, truth be told, even in her manly attire; that scar was the only flaw in her features.

  “If Manuel is correct, then we must assume these are the spawn of the very creature we’ve been tracking. If we want to put an end to the mayhem that ungodly abomination has wrought upon the ranchers and herdsmen of Paseo Grande—and if we don’t want to spend the next week of our lives following a trail of blood-drained livestock along the way—then it would be in the best interest of all involved to—”

  “Torch the place.” Donna nodded, sucking at her teeth as she studied the barn’s interior. “It would go up like a tinder box.”

  Cal blinked, slightly perturbed by her interruption.

  Yap cleared his throat. “Yo
u sure we should go and do a thing like that, Cal? Set the whole place to blazes? If what you’re saying is so, and these are the monster’s young, then won’t it get awful riled if we go and kill ’em all?”

  Coyote Cal nodded to show he’d given the matter considerable thought. “That’s the idea, my friend. We’re done tracking this thing.” He narrowed his heroic gaze. “We’re going to bring it straight to us.”

  3. Goat-Sucker

  Silence held the moment—broken only by Manuel’s subsiding dry heaves in the background. Yap licked at his chapped lips and glanced from Cal to Donna and back again.

  “Mind if we have a word?”

  Donna took the hint and ambled off. “I’ll see if I can find some kerosene.”

  Yap waited until she was out of earshot before he stepped up to Cal, keeping his voice low. “Look, I understand what you’re saying, that we could ride our mounts into the grave before we catch up with this thing, and in the meanwhile the folks of Manuel’s town—good, honest, hardworking people—will have their livelihood snatched out from under ’em with every cow, sheep, and horse this monster kills. So if you want to bring it here, lure it into an ambush so’s we can kill it, then yessirree, I’m all for that.”

  “Then what’s the trouble, Yap?”

  “Her.” The older timer jerked his head after Donna. “That witch and her dark arts. It ain’t right for a hero such as yourself to be in cahoots with somebody like that. I’m telling you, the Wild West was doing just fine without her and all that hocus-pocus, not to mention the freaks of nature we’ve come across since we joined up with her. None of it’s natural, I’m telling you!”

  Cal placed a steady hand on his sidekick’s shoulder. “So what are you saying, old friend?”

  “The thing of it is this,” Yap said with a sigh. “I’ve been thinking. Two’s company, but this is something more than a crowd.”

  Our hero nodded to show he was listening. “You think we should send Manuel back to his people.”

  “Huh?” Yap blinked. “No, that ain’t it. The way I'm seeing things, there can’t be two sidekicks in a story. Right now, it's feeling a mite crowded around here. So you’re gonna have to make a choice, and I hate to put you on the spot like this—”

  A door creaked from the barn’s far corner where the intermittent sunlight didn’t reach.

  “Cal. You’re gonna want to see this,” Donna’s voice beckoned.

  He met her at the threshold of what appeared to be a lean-to built for storage at the back of the barn. With all the reeking decay dangling from the rafters, it was no surprise they hadn’t been able to smell what lay out here rotting in the dark.

  “More of the same.” Donna gestured toward a dead steer on the ground beside an open doorway leading outside. The animal looked exactly like every other one they’d passed while tracking the devil of Paseo Grande: flabby and deflated, with two puncture wounds at the throat. The monster had sucked it dry. “But this one’s fresh.” She rested the palm of her hand on its ribbed flank. “Still warm.”

  Cal drew back his shoulders, inhaling through flared nostrils despite the stench. “It’s close, then.”

  Yap came up behind them to peer inside. “Not another one,” he grumbled at the sight of the poor beast. “They can’t all be from Paseo Grande. It’s over twenty miles from there, clear to the south with plenty of hill country in between. And if you think this monster we’re tracking carried these bovines all the way up here—”

  Donna glanced above him at the rafters. “How else do you explain it? They had to come from somewhere. Manuel says this thing’s been carrying off their livestock for months now.”

  “There must be other ranches nearby, just over the rise there, north, east, or west. Take your pick.” Yap spat into the dust.

  “Possibly.” Cal pondered that for a moment. “Yet Manuel was adamant his town had been cursed, that this—what did he call it?”

  “Chupacabra,” Donna said, rising to her feet. “Means ‘goat sucker.’”

  Cal nodded. “This goat-sucker has targeted the people of Paseo Grande, and they need us to save the day. I believe we’re up to the challenge, don’t you?”

  Donna shrugged. “You’re the hero.”

  “We’re just your lowly sidekicks,” Yap added with a disdainful glance in the witch’s direction. “But if you mean to bring the fight to us by burning this place to the ground, I say we do it sooner than later. We’re losing daylight.”

  Donna pointed out two rusty cans of kerosene sitting in the corner.

  “Torch it,” Cal said.

  4. Blazing Inferno

  Leaving Yap and Donna to douse as much of the place as the two cans would allow, Cal joined Manuel outside where his flea-bitten mule and the horses were tethered.

  “Let’s put some distance between us and this place.”

  The Paseo Grande native agreed, nodding and wiping his chin across the sleeve of his cotton shirt. He rose from a pool of fresh vomit and untied both his mule and Yap’s mount, Blossom, while Coyote Cal loosed Donna’s horse and his own trusty steed, Thunder.

  “You will kill them all,” Manuel said, grimacing at the bad taste in his mouth.

  Cal set his jaw and nodded, lips pressed together in a firm line.

  “Hijos del Diablo,” Manuel repeated, nodding to himself and seeming to fall into some sort of reverie. “Bueno,” he said at length. “Paseo Grande will be saved thanks to you, señor.”

  “That is our hope, Manuel. But there is still plenty to be done. First, we must of course set fire to this barn.” As if on cue, Donna and Yap came sprinting outside with orange flames licking upward in their wake. “Then we must find higher ground, a good vantage point.” He lifted the reins he held. “In progress.” He flashed a heroic smile, and Manuel had to blink at the brightness of his pearly whites. “And then we’ll wait for your goat-sucker to appear on the scene. A shot or two from my Winchester here—” he patted the rifle boot in Thunder’s saddle “—and the people of Paseo Grande will no longer be cursed. You will return to them a hero, Manuel!”

  For the first time in days, the flicker of something other than fear and loathing appeared on the guide’s tanned face.

  Yap scurried to join them as Donna reclaimed her horse’s reins from Cal, and the four of them mounted up.

  “It's gonna go up!” the old sidekick crowed as they kicked their mounts into a gallop for the western hills.

  They could already hear the popping carcasses inside and the screeching of the monster’s spawn being roasted alive. Eventually the entire structure burst into flames, fed by the free-flowing air from the open doors up through the broken roof.

  “Listen to ’em in there,” Yap said. “If that don’t bring back the monster, I don’t know what will.”

  Manuel craned his neck to watch as the barn crumbled in on itself in the raging inferno, punctuated by the unearthly screams of the unborn creatures. He made the sign of the cross once and whispered, “Hijos del Diablo,” as he prayed. But it was unclear who his petitions were meant for.

  “We’ll make camp here,” said Cal, dismounting as they came to clumps of sage on the hillside a hundred and fifty yards from the barn’s west side. “Not much cover, so we’ll all need to keep vigilant watch.” The sun had already begun to dip behind an outcropping of rock atop the hill behind him. “Starting now.”

  “Keep your mounts close,” Donna said. “That thing’s gonna be none too happy when it shows up. The tracks lead north out from behind the barn, but we can’t assume it’ll come back that way.”

  “You see some prints the rest of us didn’t?” Yap turned to squint at her.

  She smirked at him. “Might want to get those peepers of yours checked, old timer. Those tracks were plain as day.”

  Dusk came quick and cold, but Cal didn’t let them start a fire. There would be more than enough moonlight to see by, and he wanted only the smoldering ruins of the barn to draw the creature’s attention. As the night began to w
ear on, quiet and chilled, Manuel broke out his canteen and nudged our hero.

  “To keep you warm, señor.”

  Cal unscrewed the cap and twisted it off to dangle by its chain. One whiff of the stuff inside made him jerk back with a slight wince.

  “Tequila, señor,” said Manuel. “Good for nights such as this.”

  Cal nodded with uncertain appreciation and took a sip. It was unlike anything he’d ever imbibed, exploding with strong flavors foreign to his palate. He coughed as he handed it back. “Gracias, Manuel,” he wheezed.

  “Pass it around, señor,” Manuel insisted.

  “Don’t mind if I do,” Donna said, and tossed it back for a big mouthful. Smacking her lips, she shoved the canteen toward Yap.

  “It’s cold. Reckon a man’s gotta do something to keep warm.” He knocked back a swig and wiped the dribbling remnants from his grizzled beard and mustache with his sleeve. “Gracias, Manuel.”

  The guide received the half-empty canteen with a broad smile. “De nada, mis amigos. Mejor, sí?”

  “May whore?” Big Yap’s bushy eyebrows knitted into a quizzical frown.

  “Yes, much better,” said Cal, clapping their guide on the back. “How about you? No more intestinal distress?”

  Now it was Manuel’s turn to frown quizzically. But Big Yap mimed coughing up his cookies, and the guide immediately understood. “No, no, señor. Mucho mejor, gracias.”

  Cal nodded, keeping a wary eye on the spread of land below them. “Must say I’ve never seen anything like it, the way that baby critter came out squealing like a rabid piglet, and how it went straight for ol’ Yap that way—” He turned to find his sidekick suddenly out cold, starting up a snore that was sure to wake the folks in any neighboring towns. “Yap?” The old timer was supposed to be keeping watch at the rear of camp. “Wake up!”