Beneath Ceaseless Skies #172

by E. Catherine Tobler

  “Put that down!” He left his top button undone and reached for the gun. “That’s what men do—”

  “But I’m a man!” Junior said.

  Eldred growled. Merrill’s wolf paced around Eldred, scenting the horse’s meat. Then it jumped backwards with a yelp, revealing one of Junior’s misplaced slugs on the ground.

  “Watch it. Silver.” Halpern leaned over and pocketed the slug. When he rose again, the devil men and his nephew were staring at him. “You seen what that thing done to the nag.” He shrugged. “I’d throw Bible pages at it, if I thought it would care.”

  Junior looked in horror at the gun in his hand, grabbed the barrel, and gingerly offered Halpern its grip. Halpern took it.

  But he didn’t reholster. The monster was nearby.

  * * *

  They dismembered the horse. Merrill, content to stay in wolf-form, dragged the front half of the carcass behind him in a harness Eldred’d rigged up around his furry shoulders. Even Halpern could smell it, entrails dragging behind them, as the high road finally took them down. When everything around them was quiet except for the slide of the horse’s flesh, Halpern’s boots, and Junior’s breathing, Eldred looked back.

  “We’re not tracking it,” Halpern said. “It’s tracking us.”

  “How long will half a horse sate it?”

  Halpern still hadn’t put his gun away. “It won’t.”

  * * *

  A shining afternoon turned into a greasy dusk, and they reached the place where the wagon’d been left behind. Pieces of wood jutted out like bone, though actual bones were absent. The gouges that Halpern had seen, that mirrored the marks on the horsemeat, stood out like frozen ripples on a pond.

  Merrill’s wolf stopped. “Stay here, or go on?”

  Halpern grunted. “There’s no good place to fight one of them.”

  Eldred stared up at the sky, then looked to Halpern. “The brighter the moon, the stronger we are. Tonight’s the night to kill it. We’ll build a fire, then wait.”

  Junior scampered off to bring in pieces of wagon wood and brush to burn, under Halpern’s watchful eyes. Merrill freed himself from the harness and arranged himself behind what remained of the horse, his back to the nascent fire, his eyes out at the thin forest beyond. Eldred paced the edge of what was probably safe, sniffing deep.

  Halpern sat down by the fire and watched its colors change. Junior sat beside him. “What is it you’re hunting?” he asked.

  “Used to be a man.”

  “What happened to it?”

  “It—he—ate someone. Now he’s cursed to always be hungry,” Halpern answered, as Junior stared in frank disbelief. “It’s an Indian curse. Same as yours, I guess.”

  “I never did nothing to no Indian,” Junior said. He gathered his knees to his chest.

  Halpern grunted in agreement, then picked up another branch and tossed it into the fire.

  * * *

  As the night went on, Halpern stoked the embers of the fire. The wind kept shifting, and each time it did he felt like he could feel the thing, breathing on him. Only Merrill’s and Eldred’s stillness kept him calm.

  “I taught your momma how to shoot,” he said, after the third time he’d caught Junior dozing off too near the fire. “She was good, too. A dead-eye.”

  Junior’s eyes glittered with the memories flashing inside his mind. “I never knew that.”

  “Bet I know a lot of things about her that you don’t.”

  “Maybe so, maybe not,” Eldred’s voice warned from the darkness outside the firelight.

  “Her favorite number was thirteen. She always wanted to have a palomino colt. She could play the harmonica good as any man.”

  Junior laughed. “I knew that one.”

  “The merits of harmonica playing are debatable,” Merrill said from his station by the carcass.

  “And I know she prolly would have wanted a different life for you.”

  Eldred made a warning noise, deep inside his throat. “Halpern—”

  “How do you mean?” Junior asked, cutting Eldred off.

  “School, for one. How can you expect to come down into town when you can’t read nor write? And secondly, it wouldn’t kill you to go to church now and then.”

  Merrill laughed. “Shows what you know.”

  Halpern looked over his shoulder at the wolf. “I ain’t talking to you.”

  Junior stared into the fire. “I miss her.”

  “Me too.” Halpern wondered if he missed her so much as he missed the chance to make things right. As long as she’d been alive, there’d always been a chance. Now, though—he stared into the fire too, looking for answers, reliving his past.

  A small sound escaped Junior’s throat, and then he sat straight up, hands clutched around the edge of the log he sat on. He reached for his own throat.

  “What’s—what’s happening?” Junior’s voice rose an octave and broke. His hands clawed at his face. “I can’t breathe—”

  Halpern looked at his nephew and started kicking dirt at the fire. “Did someone burn poison oak?”

  Eldred ran over and Merrill leapt near as Junior stood up, head whipping back and forth, panicked, same as when Halpern had once seen a man fall out of a boat and drown.

  “Junior,” Eldred warned, waving his hands calmly. The boy’s eyes got big, and Junior let out a tiny broken howl and raced off into the underbrush.

  “No!” Eldred yelled, but it was too late. Merrill made to go after him. “Hold!” Eldred commanded.

  And the change took him then. He wasn’t like Merrill, sleek and dark—the change threw him to the ground and broke him. His clothes strained, split, then hung off him in shreds, cuff and paw, and the belt that’d been around his waist snapped off like a whip. He was as grey as a winter cloud, and as large a wolf as he was a man. “Stay here,” he said, his voice like tumbling steel, before running off.

  Halpern found himself standing, gun out, staring impotently after both of them.

  * * *

  Halpern paced in the clearing by the now-dying fire. “That was the change, wasn’t it.”

  “What do you think?” Merrill’s wolf asked him back.

  A deep and abiding fury for what had been lost rose up inside of Halpern. “He’s not like you—”

  “The boy knows exactly what he is.”

  “He’s still my sister’s boy.”

  “I don’t know if you noticed, Halpern, but your sister’s dead.” The black wolf looked at him, eyes golden in the night. “When she whelped a puppy instead of a man-child.”

  “Shut up.”

  “I saw it before they buried her with it.” The wolf rose and stalked around him, like he was an unlucky doe. “Four paws. Black nose.”

  Halpern shook his gun. “I said for you to shut up!”

  Merrill dashed away, laughing, and Halpern shot after his shadow.

  * * *

  Whatever was left of the man inside the wendigo liked these new and better odds. The familiar scrape of the horse carcass sliding over earth sounded behind Halpern. He turned just as the wind changed, now blowing towards him a stench that he didn’t even need their nose to smell. He remembered one flood season back home, when the riverbank had taken a side of the cemetery away, leaving arm bones and leg bones and pieces of rotting meat to wave out in the wind—it smelled like that, like the earth itself had burped up something sick.

  The wendigo lumbered into the clearing, over the destruction of the wagon, and the vestiges of the fire gave Halpern a clear view. It looked like a rotting pelt, patches of sickly fur alternating with too-pale skin. It was tall and gape-mouthed, and he knew he wanted it dead.

  He shot at it. The flash blinded him, and he shot at it again. It ought to have been too big to miss—but it might be too big to die. He broke open the revolver, slotted more shells into it, and shot again.

  The sound of the shots punctuated his thoughts. Goddamn Merrill—shot—goddamn devil-men—shot. What the hell had happened t
o Junior? Shot. Why couldn’t things be what they were supposed to be? Shot.

  A dark form separated from the forest and launched itself at the wendigo’s side. Halpern held his fire and reloaded again, the hot cylinder burning his hands. The wolf latched its teeth into the wendigo’s neck and dug at its side with hind-leg claws. Maybe it found a bullet hole Halpern had already made—it rent the creature’s side, a gush of fluid rushed out, and the smell got even worse.

  Halpern ran nearer, looking for a shot in the fire’s dying light. He found one, took it. The wendigo yelled out with an inhuman cry, the throat once used for voice long since ruined by eating dirt and stones when man-meat wasn’t near.

  It threw the wolf aside. Halpern heard the crunch when it landed, like half-burned tinder, but he didn’t look away. Sarah hadn’t been the only one with a good eye –- he shot, and shot again, walking forward, aiming for where he hoped the monster still had a heart. The wendigo fell to its knees and reached for him, swatted him down with a too-long arm, knocking the wind from him. A blackness not entirely of the night fell upon him, and Halpern expected to die.

  Did men who let their sisters marry devils go to heaven, or to hell? The clawed hand that’d fallen didn’t rise up again, and Halpern shoved it off of him with an angry shout.

  Merrill’s wolf stepped forward. Halpern leveled his gun and shot at it. It bolted into the dark.

  “I killed your monster, Halpern,” said a gravel-edged voice.

  Halpern stood in the clearing, panting, shaking. “Not yet, you didn’t.”

  He turned and aimed at where the voice had come from, but shot too slowly—then a blur of fur knocked him to his right. He fell against a piece of wagon, felt a rib snap, and shot again, wild. The moon broke free from the branches above and cast everything in its gunmetal light. Halpern crouched and reloaded.

  “Uncle!” cried a tortured voice at the edge of the clearing. A creature half again as tall as him stood there, man-shaped, half-hidden in shadow. Halpern stared, then was bowled over from the side. Teeth ground against bone in his shoulder, and he raised his gun to shoot the wolf as the man-shaped thing joined the fray. He jerked his wrist to miss and his shot sailed at the moon as he was slammed to the ground, and his gun spun off, grey as everything else in the moon’s light.

  The monsters rolled off of him, fighting viciously, both snarling. The man-thing had hands, but the wolf had teeth, and Halpern wished he could better see what was going on. He held onto his shoulder, feeling blood well up and trickle down.

  And then there was the click of a cocking gun, and three shots in quick succession. He saw Eldred in the flashes of report-light, and the fighting stopped. The winner rose up, and Halpern saw it wasn’t much different than the wendigo he’d slaughtered.

  “Junior?” Halpern whispered to himself.

  “He bit you good,” Eldred said, coming near, naked in the clearing. “Swallow a silver bullet whole—it’ll burn the wolf out of you by the time it reaches the other side.”

  Halpern stumbled up to stand. “Junior, is that you?”

  Eldred stepped over to Junior and put a hand on his shoulder. “Merrill forgot his place. He was blood, but we’re family. Wasn’t his place to fight you.”

  The thing that must have been Junior nodded.

  Eldred tossed the gun at Halpern’s feet. “You got what you wanted, Halpern.”

  Halpern lunged for the gun, then looked up. Junior’s face was misshapen by half a muzzle and jutting teeth. Oh Sarah! “Why’d you save me?” he asked Eldred, without taking his eyes off his nephew.

  “Your last shot,” Eldred said. “You shot wide, intentional.”

  And then Eldred was on all fours again, and Halpern heard the sounds of his change, till his wolf stood there instead of him. “You can walk back,” it told him. Then it raced into the forest, Junior close behind.

  “Eldred! Sarah always said you were a good man!” Halpern stumbled after them. “Junior! You can come into town, anytime! Tomorrow! I’ll be there! Come into town Junior!”

  Halpern yelled until his voice gave.

  The empty dark never answered back.

  Copyright © 2015 Erin Cashier

  Read Comments on this Story on the BCS Website

  Erin Cashier is a registered nurse in the Bay Area. She’s been published by Shimmer, Abyss & Apex, Writers of the Future, Escape Pod, Podcastle, Neil Clarke’s Upgraded anthology, and numerous times in Beneath Ceaseless Skies, including “The Alchemist’s Feather” in BCS #25 and the Best of BCS, Year One anthology.

  Read more Beneath Ceaseless Skies

  THE SNAKE-OIL SALESMAN AND THE PROPHET’S HEAD

  by Shannon Peavey

  They’d preserved his brother’s head in grain alcohol and floated it in a dirty glass jar. Leo peered through the glass and his own face looked back at him, slack-jawed and cloudy-eyed.

  “Don’t know him,” Leo said.

  “He has your face,” said Colonel Klee. Rumors tilted on a daily basis as to the origins of the man’s military title. Some said he was cast out of the Army for some misdeed. Most said he invented the rank for the showman’s sound of it, the clack of hard ks in the back of the throat.

  “Doesn’t mean I know him.” Leo backed off from the jar. His jaw hurt from clenching it. “Somewhere there’s probably some man looks like you, Colonel.”

  The Colonel smiled and said, “I wouldn’t wish that on anyone.”

  “Yeah, well, this guy’s not looking so good, himself.”

  The Colonel had an easy laugh, low and kind. The sort of laugh that made people think they were his friends right off. He patted the jar with the back of his hand and his knuckles pinged off the glass and left smudges in the dust. “I like you, kid,” he said. “You’ve got nerve.”

  “I don’t know about that,” Leo said. “I suppose it’s never been tested.” He didn’t think that was true—he’d been tested plenty. But it was the right thing to say.

  The Colonel clapped him on the shoulder and turned to leave the tent. “Give it time. When you get to be as old as me, you’ll have been tested more than you think you can bear.”

  He walked with heavy steps, pausing once in the square of light streaming in at the open tent flap.

  “Some people say that thing talks at night,” he said. “Haven’t heard it, myself.”

  Leo said nothing.

  “Bet they’d pay a pretty sum to hear a dead man speak,” the Colonel said, and chuckled to himself. He vanished through the doorway, into the heat and the searing sunlight and the chatter of a new crowd of suckers looking for cheap entertainment. Leaving Leo alone with his brother’s head.

  Leo stepped closer to the jar. Cary’s white-blond hair floated up from his skull, the tips waving slightly. It looked like strands of spiderweb, or exposed nerves.

  “You still telling people things they don’t want to hear?” He tapped on the glass. As if he might rouse it to speech.

  The head blinked, eyelids slipping and slow over eyes that didn’t fit right anymore. Its mouth worked, and Cary spoke. “Someone’s got to say it, if you won’t.”

  * * *

  Leo was welcome wherever he went. People liked talking to him. He always knew just the right thing to say.

  He hadn’t worked at the medicine show very long, but he fit in there. He shilled the crowd during the shows, and he tended the mules and the horses and he liked doing it. He liked how sometimes the animals flattened their ears and snapped at him while he called them sons of bitches and the words came out of his mouth just like he’d formed them in his head.

  At night he slept with a girl from Mexico who told fortunes. Her name was Sabina, and she had a little booth near the medicine wagon where she would take customer’s hands, palm up, and rattle off loud prophecies in Spanish while an old man from Kentucky pretended to interpret for her. Really he made up his own fortunes, and they got wilder and more ominous the more he tipped from his hip-flask.

  Sabina spoke English fairly
well, but she and Leo never used it together. That wasn’t what she wanted to hear.

  “Ciérrale que se mete el chiflón,” she said that night, when he slipped into her tent. “¿Pus ónde tabas?”

  “Trabajando, mujer. Un caballo se enfermó,” he said, shucking off his boots. “Usté disculpe si la desperté.”

  It still gave him a sick jump in his gut to hear the Spanish pouring from his mouth like water from a spring. He didn’t speak a lick of Spanish. He had no idea what he’d just said. But her face eased, and she shifted over to make a space for him. He understood that.

  He told her: I’m sorry I was late. I was talking with my brother’s head. I put a knife in his throat six months ago because he told me something I couldn’t accept.

  But what came out of his mouth was Spanish, and gentle, and made a blush spread across her face. She reached up for him, and he didn’t speak anymore.

  * * *

  The Colonel put Cary’s jar in a dark tent, squashed between a whale’s jawbone and a mummified cat. People paid a penny to enter the tent and see THE WORLD’S MOST DEPRAVED TREASURES—FROM ACROSS THE SEVEN SEAS! A little bit of cardstock in front of Cary’s jar billed him as head of a biblical prophet. But he did not speak to his visitors.

  Leo snuck in late at night, after the showmen had gone to bed or retired with their bottles of mezcal and chosen company. Sometimes he spoke. Sometimes he just watched his brother’s head resting at the bottom of the jar.

  “I’m sorry I killed you,” Leo said, though what he meant to say was I wish they’d never found you.

  But for Cary, it never mattered what someone said aloud. His mouth curved into a smile and it was ghastly on that dead face. “Don’t you ever miss me?”

  Leo hesitated. “Yes,” he said, and didn’t know what he’d meant to say. It had just spilled out.

  “I see.” Cary’s smile faded away.

  Leo turned away and busied himself with the other exhibits, turning the whale’s jawbone over in his fingers and counting the vampire’s teeth. The mummified cat was leaking sawdust all over the table.