by Max McCoy
He shook his head.
“I’ve never felt anything was right since,” he said. “We were on the trail to Kansas a month later—and found ourselves in the middle of the Red River War.”
“What happened?”
“At Sharp’s Creek, in the Texas Panhandle, we came upon Quanah Parker and his band of about three hundred Indians,” Calder said. “They spotted us, of course. It’s hard to hide a wagon loaded with household goods. There was a wagon train in front of us, and they made a run for Adobe Walls, an outpost of buffalo hunters, just north of the Canadian. The train made it. We broke an axle. That was on June seventh.”
He rubbed his eyes.
“While Parker assaulted the Walls, a raiding party of Comanche found us and our broken wagon. There were about five of them, on a low ridge maybe three hundred yards away, watching us. We were going to ride away, to leave them the wagon and everything else, because that’s what they wanted—they needed food. I had just boosted Sarah up into the saddle of one horse and handed her the boy, then turned to mount the other horse, when I heard Sarah make a pitiful sound. She pitched backward from the saddle before I heard the thunder of the rifle. It was an old fifty-caliber ball. Do you know how big that is? Half an inch in diameter. Bigger around than your thumb.”
Calder took a breath.
“The bullet had passed through both her and the boy. They were dead before they hit the ground.”
“Oh, God,” I said.
“What God?” Calder asked. “There was no God, at least not on Sharp’s Creek that day.”
“What did you do?”
“Before or after I tracked down and killed three of the war party?” Calder smiled. “That’s how I became a bounty hunter. I discovered I have a talent for tracking down and killing people. The three Comanche were dead by nightfall. Then it was dark, and I went back and dug graves for Sarah and the boy, and built a big fire, using parts from the wagon. I kept guard over the bodies to keep the wolves away. Then at dawn I buried them, burned what was left of the wagon and the truck inside, and rode away.”
“That’s horrific.”
“I went to Adobe Walls, where the hunters had driven away Parker with their buffalo rifles, because of their longer range. They packed up and headed home to Dodge City, and I went with them.”
“How far are we from—”
“Those graves along Sharp’s Creek?” Calder asked. “Sixty or seventy miles, I reckon. You know, it’s funny. The Comanche believe that the dead travel the road to the west. I reckon they’re right.”
He paused.
“I’ve never told anybody that story,” he said. “At least not all of it.”
“Do you feel better?”
“No,” he said. “There were still two Comanche that got away. Now it’s your turn. No holding back. Pretend I’m one of your woman friends and we’ve just finished low tea or whatever it is that women do before they get down to hen talk. Tell me what you miss most about your lost man.”
“That one’s easy,” I said. “His smell.”
31
In the morning, we pulled on our cold and wet clothes and rode along the creek in the direction of Ciudad Perdida. The water snaked through a series of rolling hills, and gradually the bluffs got steeper, and soon we were riding right down the middle of the shallow creek.
In an hour, we came upon the broken body of Pollux Adams tangled up in the branches of a willow tree. His neck was bent at an angle that was painful to look at.
“Wonder what it felt like,” I mused.
“Which part?” Calder asked. “The flying or the dying?”
“The flying.”
“Why don’t you ask him?”
“Ghosts can’t answer a direct question,” I said. “Besides, I don’t hear anything. His spirit isn’t here. Back at the cabin, maybe.”
We urged our horses on.
The banks along the river became steeper, and there began to appear square and rectangular holes here and there—windows and doorways leading to rooms filled with dirt and debris. At the back of my mind, I could hear murmuring voices, but I couldn’t make out what they were saying.
“We’re getting close,” Calder said.
“Do you have a plan?”
“Nope,” he said. “I was hoping you’d have one. After all, you’re the one who talks to the dead.”
I shrugged. “I can hear voices, but they’re very old voices,” I said. “I don’t know what they’re saying. They just sound sad, mostly.”
We went another quarter of a mile, and the bluff dwellings became thicker along the north side of the creek. In some places, the walls had collapsed, revealing steps going down and rooms that were so big they hadn’t been all filled in with dirt yet.
“How many people could have lived here?” I asked.
In my head, the voices had become a chorus of loss.
“Thousands,” Calder said. “You’ve got fresh water here, you’re protected from the worst of the winter wind, and there had to be plenty of buffalo and other game. It must not have been a bad life. You could raise a family here.”
He was staring at the silver trunk of a cottonwood when he said it, and I knew he was thinking about when he had his own family, not so long ago in Presidio County.
“Come back, Jack.”
“I’m here,” he said, standing in the saddle and peering down the creek. “There’s smoke there, through the trees. I think we are upon the whiskey trader’s hideout.”
“I see it. And it smells like they’re roasting some kind of meat.”
“Okay, here’s the plan,” Calder said decisively. “I am going to ride on in by myself and kill the sonuvabitch, and you’re going to wait here. If I don’t come back in an hour, you turn that Arabian around and head back toward the trail.”
“That’s the dumbest plan I ever heard, Jack. First off, we want to bring the whiskey trader back for trial. Second off, if you get in trouble, I’m no good to come in and get you out of it. So it’s obvious that I’m the one who has to go in by myself, and you wait here. And if I don’t come back soon, then you shoot your way in.”
“I don’t like it,” Calder said. “Maybe we should try to smoke them out first.”
“If we were after ordinary criminals, that might work,” I said. “But Vanderslice is something there’s not even a word for yet, and Malleus isn’t even human. I don’t think smoke is going to bother them.”
“But if you walk in there first, they have you as a hostage.”
“I’m only good as a hostage as long as I’m not willing to die,” I said. “Jack, you know that I’m not expecting to come out of this alive. Unless I get my aura back, there’s no point in my coming out alive. I’ll just turn into something more and more ugly. You have to promise that if they threaten to kill me to get you to throw down your guns, that you won’t do it. Shoot me if you have to, to prove the point.”
“I won’t shoot you.”
“That’s sweet, but not helpful.”
Calder smiled.
“Jack,” I said. “There’s something I need to tell you.”
“Well,” he said, “me too. But you first.”
“There’s a thousand-dollar reward out for my capture, dead or alive, in Ohio. I conned a pork baron there out of a few thousand dollars and he squealed pretty loud. So I’m not Kate Bender, but there is a pretty price on my head. If I’m dead when this is over, you ought to ship my body back to Cincinnati and ask for the reward.”
He looked a bit odd.
“Now, why the hell would you tell me that?” he asked.
“I’d rather you get the money than County Attorney Sutton,” I said. “Now, what is it you want to tell me?”
“It was nothing,” he said.
“Nothing?”
“Just that when we get out of this, you should stop cussing in French. It disturbs people. That’s all.”
Calder dismounted and tied the reins of the horse to a bush. Then he checked his revolve
r and pulled the rifle from the saddle scabbard and cradled it in one arm. Finally he pulled a cigar from his vest pocket and stuck it in the corner of his mouth.
“All right,” he said, “I’m ready. Let’s kill us a demon.”
I dismounted and handed Fatima’s reins over to Calder. Then I closed my eyes, said a silent prayer to whomever or whatever good might listen, and began walking toward the smoke. I was nervous, but I walked deliberately. My head was high, and the breeze trailed the black ribbon behind my hat. They had to hear me coming, because my ankle-high shoes made an awful racket scraping against the gravel and sloshing in the water.
When I rounded a bend in the creek, I saw the hideout, a big complex of ancient rooms tucked into the bluff. The rooms and the stairs going down to them had been cleared of mud, and I could see shadows moving inside.
Outside, on the broad sandbar in front of the complex, stood Vanderslice surrounded by at least a dozen of the wild whackers I had seen before. Some of the whackers were dressed in rags, and others had no clothes at all. They were clustered around a hunk of browned meat being turned on a spit over a fire, and Vanderslice had the bone-handled skinning knife in his hand. He was carving off slices of meat and throwing them to the whackers, who snapped and snarled at one another.
“Down, boys,” Vanderslice said. “There’s plenty for everyone.”
Also on the sandbar was a farm wagon, a buckboard, unhitched but with barrels of whiskey in the back. More barrels were on the sandbar, not far from the stairs leading down into the ancient rooms. Around the barrels were bottles of all shapes and sizes, ready to be filled and corked. An Indian woman and a boy of about twelve were working to fill the bottles, ladling whiskey from the barrels and pouring it into metal funnels in the necks of the bottles, and then stopping the bottles with a cork.
The woman wore a stained buckskin skirt, fringed at the bottom, a blue blouse, and a bead-and-shell necklace around her neck. I could not tell her age. She might have been thirty or fifty. Although her body seemed strong, her face was deeply lined, and her eyes were dark with sorrow. The boy wore dark wool pants, moccasins, and a red print shirt. His bright eyes warily watched Vanderslice as he worked on the meat.
As I drew closer, I could see that what was being turned on the spit was the torso of a man.
“Knew you’d come,” Vanderslice said to me, throwing another strip of meat to the whackers. “Women are just dying to meet me.”
“I come because of the Russian girl.”
His hand went to the pocket with the missing button.
“So . . . what they say about you is true,” Vanderslice said. “You do talk to the dead. What did pretty, stupid, dead little Anna have to say?”
“That you betrayed and then killed her.”
“But of course,” Vanderslice said. “I sold my soul to Malleus.”
“I hope it was worth it.”
“He’ll give me you,” he said. “He’ll kill you, in the end. But before he does, he’ll turn you over to me. And you’ll be sorry that you were so rude to me on the street in Dodge City.”
“I think not.”
“I’m guessing you’re not here alone,” Vanderslice said, his eyes darting over the creek. “But I reckon we’ll find out who and how many soon enough.”
“Is that Castor Adams?” I asked.
“The same,” he said. “One of the boys did wrong in killing him, but it seemed a shame to let the meat go to waste.”
He carved another slice, but instead of throwing it to the whackers, he took a bite. He chewed, then offered it to me.
“Hungry?”
“Not now,” I said.
“Oh, it ain’t half bad,” he said. “I don’t see what all the fuss was, with the Donner Party and old Alfie Packer. Meat is meat. We’re all animals, right? Seems to me, a good many human animals would be of more use as vittles anyhow.”
He threw the rest of the slice to the whackers. One of them jumped and caught it in his mouth.
“Is Malleus here?”
“In the temple,” Vanderslice said, jerking his head back to the ruins.
“Call him out,” I said. “I want my soul’s shadow back.”
Vanderslice laughed. “That ain’t going to happen,” he said. “Old Malleus is very particular about those shiny bits of stuff that he keeps in a bag on his belt. It’s where his power comes from. He reaches up through the solar plexus and snatches them from people. He keeps the bigger and brighter ones, like yours. The others, the dull ones, he uses to turn wolves into whackers.”
“So they’re not werewolves.”
“Just the opposite,” Vanderslice said. “Weremen.”
“That’s why they go back to wolves when you kill them,” I said.
“My, you do catch on.”
“But what about Shadrach?”
“Oh, he was a real man, all right,” Vanderslice answered. “Not much of a man, I’ll grant you. Old Malleus had quite enough of his stupidity after he busted another wheel, so he shot him with somebody else’s aura. When that happens, it’s like two bottles of nitroglycerin being smashed together—kaboom!—it blows your whole chest apart.”
“That’s what Malleus uses that antique pistol on his belt for.”
“It’s good that you’re still dressed for a funeral,” Vanderslice said, and smirked. “Because the next one’s going to be your own.”
Then something stirred deep in the ruins Vanderslice called the temple, and I could see a shadow walking up the stairs. I was expecting Malleus, but what emerged, instead, into the daylight was a woman wearing a black silk robe, open to the waist, with nothing beneath. She was about my age—and was nearly my image in every other respect.
Her face was smeared with red ochre, and abalone baubles dangled from her earlobes. She moved with an animal grace, like a lazy housecat walking across a porch warmed by the sun. The whackers seemed both excited and repelled by her; and even though they scrambled back out of her way, their hungry eyes locked on her body.
“Whiskey trader, you talk too much,” the woman said.
“I was only—”
“Shut up,” the woman said. Her voice had the same odd accent that I had detected in Malleus’s voice.
“I should have let Malleus cut out your tongue long ago. How much have you told her? Oh, never mind. I’m going to assume everything.”
The woman walked over to me and smiled. She reached out with a cold hand and lifted my chin.
“Now we see through a glass, darkly.”
It was Katie Bender.
32
The woman took my left hand in hers and pulled me toward the stone steps leading down into the shadows, but I resisted.
“Come along,” she said. “You came here to see Malleus, didn’t you?”
“Yes,” I said, and stumbled after her. I looked over my shoulder, hoping to catch a glimpse of Calder striding across the gravel bar, but there was nothing but woods and water.
“I’ve been feeling you for a long while,” the woman said. “Years, in fact. Always at the edge of my consciousness, like a half-remembered dream when daylight comes. But here you are in the flesh, at last.”
“What should I call you?”
“Ah, there’s a problem,” she said, stopping. She leaned close and cupped a hand around my ear, brushing away the hair. “Don’t call me ‘Katie,’ because that is a weak and diminutive form of my name. But your modern tongue would break itself in attempting to pronounce ‘Aikaterini.’”
“What language is that?”
“Ancient Macedonian.”
She kissed me. Her lips were as cold as steel.
“Where are the others?” I asked, pulling away.
“There are no others.”
“Ma and Pa Bender? Your brother, John?”
“Ah,” she said. “Them. The old ones were merely slaves, and the stupid young one only a consort. They are dead. I killed them all, soon after we left that wretched cabin. As mortals they thirsted
after land, and now they have their wish—they sleep beneath the prairie for eternity.”
“Did you slit their throats?”
“There was no time for pleasure, darling,” she said. “I shot them all, with a marvelous invention—the Colt 1873 revolving pistol, a forty-five-caliber, also called ‘the Peacemaker.’ Oh, how I love you Americans and your sense of humor!” She laughed wickedly. “Oh, would that Alexander had a thousand such weapons. Macedonians would rule the world still, instead of yet and again.”
“You knew Alexander the Great?”
“A casual relationship,” she said. “He loved boys more.”
“That had to sting.”
“Enough talk!” she said. “Malleus awaits.”
At the bottom of the steps was a room with a fire pit in the center and all manner of objects piled against the walls: expensive clothes flung carelessly about, caskets overflowing with jewelry, books, marble busts of Greek and Roman statesmen, dusty wine bottles. Also piled about were human skulls the color of parchment. The ghosts here were old—very old. Their voices were the murmur of a shallow river in a deep cave unseen by any man.
Malleus was sitting—or rather squatting—on a throne that looked like it would have been at home in the court of Nero. He was wearing a dressing gown over his enormous body, and from a wide leather belt dangled the antique pistol and the leather bag. His hands were the color of dead fish and were resting on the silver handle of a walking stick.
“Take off your hat,” she said.
When I refused, she knocked it to the floor.
Then Katie dropped to one knee and attempted to pull me down with her, but I refused.
“Malleus, my lord,” she said. “I have brought the other.”
“Welcome to hell,” Malleus said, opening his arms. Then he smiled, revealing those teeth the color of old tusk, and I could not help but shudder.
