Genesis came into his mind then.
And Joseph called the name of the first-born Manasseh: ‘for God hath made me forget all my toil, and all my father’s house.’
It was the passage Rabbi Belinski came upon when he had renamed the Rider at his mother’s request, to avert an ailment he’d had as a boy.
“Kabede,” he said. “What’s to stop me from renaming myself?”
“You propose another shinnui shem—a renaming ceremony.”
“Yes.”
“I had thought of that, but you have no name at all now. It’s a strange circumstance. We cannot hold a proper brit milah and name you, as you are, I presume, already circumcised.”
“Yes,” said the Rider, rather quickly.
“We would need the Orit,” Kabede said. “I don’t think a simple bound chumash copy would do either. We would need a living Sefer Torah, in scroll form, and a minyan for the blessing. Not easy to find in these parts.”
A living Torah scroll, and a prayer quorum of ten Jews.
“Not easy, but not impossible. There’s a town called Tombstone…I passed through it some time back. There were Jews there,” the Rider mused. He had only been there briefly, but he had seen Jewish graves, and a few Jewish stores. He knew that Josephine Marcus had gone there. The town had sprung into his mind when he’d needed a place for Professor Spates to send the translations of Sheardown’s letters to Adon. Perhaps HaShem was guiding him yet.
“Then there’s hope,” Kabede said.
The Rider lay back down and watched the candlelight flickering on the walls, his eyes growing heavy.
“Yes,” he said. “Some. Gut Shabbes,” he said, rolling on his side.
“Shabbat Shalom,” said Kabede.
* * * *
In the blue light of predawn the Rider awoke to the sound of shoveling.
He rose sleepily and went to the cell door. Trooper Davies, who had apparently relieved Armendariz at some point while they slept (for the Mexican was nowhere to be seen) was out on the parade ground a few yards out from the guardhouse door, digging a small hole with a short entrenching spade. The dirt scraping against the metal was the only sound in the stillness.
The Rider watched Davies through the door. He was on his knees, excavating. A small object sat alongside him, waiting to be buried, it looked like. What it was, the Rider couldn’t tell. Why was he burying it in the middle of the parade ground before reveille?
Then Belden blurted something unintelligible from his cell, and the Rider heard his breathing, harsh and fast.
“Dick?” the Rider called.
“Yeah. Yeah, I’m alright. Just…just a crazy nightmare. Bugs. Any of that wine left?” Belden asked, rolling over in his cot.
The Rider frowned. Nightmares he knew, were not to be ignored. But what was Davies doing?
“I’m joking,” Belden said, when he was met with silence.
“Davies is digging a hole,” the Rider informed him.
There was the sound of Belden’s cot creaking as he rose, and his boots scuffed the hard floor. Then the Rider could see his fingers curling around the bars of the next cell.
“Davies!” Belden hissed.
Davies made no reply, and did not even turn to look at them.
“What the hell is he doing?” Belden wondered aloud. “Trooper Davies!” he called.
No answer.
“Crazy kid. Where the hell is Armendariz anyway?”
“I assumed Davies relieved him.”
“This early? Guard’s not supposed to change till after reveille.”
Kabede joined them at the door of his cell, rubbing his eyes.
All three of them watched Davies dig in silence for. In a little while, he set aside his tool and took the object beside him and put it into the hole. It protruded out halfway. It was difficult to see clearly in the shadow, but it looked like a small barrel.
Davies got up then, retrieved his spade and came trotting over to the guardhouse door.
Davies pressed his face against the bars of the little window. His eyes were wide and bulging, the irises small. He was grinning ear to ear.
“Ah gut. Sie wach,” he said excitedly, not only in German, but in a voice that was deeper, and not his own.
There was some rattling behind the door and his face disappeared for a moment. They heard the heavy bar fall away and the door swung wide open, banging against the wall.
“Hey, shau zu wie ich sterbe,” said Davies, excitedly. He drew his pistol then, and the Rider instinctively ducked back. But Davies turned and skipped like a child back to the hole.
“Jesus,” said Belden.
That was when the Rider saw Armendariz’s corpse lying in the doorway where it had fallen. He had been decapitated, and his head lay near where Davies had hacked it inexpertly off with the short spade. The blood was everywhere, dark as oil, pooling beneath the door. Armendariz’s eyes were very white. One was screwed up in his socket, and the other had drifted downwards. His expression was a grimace of pain, and a great deal of blood covered his face, apparently having run there from a gouge in his scalp where Davies must have initially struck him. How had they not heard it?
The short spade lay across the threshold, and the Rider could see the black blood on its edge.
Davies meanwhile, had returned to his hole. He lay flat on his back, resting his head on the object in the hole like a pillow, and called out in a loud voice, “Shau zu wie ich sterb.”
He fired his pistol into the dirt, and something flared on the ground in the night, maybe two feet from the guardhouse door. They watched as the bright flame not only burned, but began to move, racing towards Davies like a thing alive, a Will ‘o Wisp or a ghost light shooting along the ground.
They all smelled the gunpowder.
The flare reached the barrel under Davies’ head. The resulting explosion sent a tremor under the soles of their feet and rattled the bars of their cells. The Rider felt his clothes flatten against his chest. Davies’ body jumped on the ground. His head and most of his upper trunk disintegrated in a flash of yellow-white and red that blew up from the hole in the ground. There was a brief precipitation of unidentifiable matter on the ground, and a few scraps of flaming blue wool fluttered in the sky and went out.
The camp came alive immediately. Barrack doors flew open and men ran out in their red union suits, some pulling on their trousers, a few with rifles. Soldiers shouted back and forth at each other, and there were exclamations as they traced the smoke to the crater in the ground and found Davies’ body, still shaking and flailing on the ground like a chicken after the chopping block.
“Over here!” Belden called through the bars.
A few wild-eyed soldiers hurried over at the sound of his voice, and recoiled at Armendariz’s headless body in the doorway.
“I’God. What happened here, Sarge? Didja see it?” asked one of the privates, a tall fellow with a broad yellow mustache.
“It was Davies. He killed Armendariz and then blew himself up.”
“Davies? Why in the hell would he do that?”
“You got me hangin,’” Belden admitted.
“I know what happened,” the Rider said.
So did Kabede, by the sound, for he was reciting the aleinu in his cell, “Aleinu l’shabeach la’Adon hakol…”
Recited seven times forwards and backwards, it could prevent spiritual possession. Now if only they could quickly teach it to every man here.
“Clear out of the way!” It was the familiar voice of Manx.
The troopers snapped to attention as the colonel came up, buttoning his tunic again. His hair was sleep tossed and he looked terrible. His malady seemed to have worsened. His upper lip was slick with it, and his nostrils were red and irritated, as were his eyes.
“What in God’s name happened here? Sunderland?”
“Sir. Sergeant—” began the private with the blonde mustache, but he caught himself and began again. “That is, Mister Belden reports Trooper Davies k
illed Corporal Armendariz and then blew himself up, sir.”
“He spoke German,” Belden said in wonder to the Rider.
“Yes I heard.” The Rider took out his spectacle case, and slid the mystically embossed lenses over his eyes. “He said, ’Watch how I die.’”
“Jeder fünf minuten, Reiter,” said Sunderland, smiling at him just as Davies had. He took out his pistol and put the barrel in his own mouth.
The report was loud in the close space, and the men surrounding Sunderland jumped back as his mouth filled with light and smoke. His brains erupted through the top of his curly head, struck the ceiling, and splattered down on them all.
The Rider wiped the blood and bone fragments from his Solomonic lenses and saw Jacobi’s leering, shimmering astral form standing there as Sunderland’s spurting, twitching body fell away like a bathrobe. He had changed much since their last meeting. His beard and payot curls were gone. He had no hair to speak of now, as if his flesh were salted earth, as if whatever evil now resided within him would not sustain follicles. He was deathly pale. His irises were somewhat overlarge, the black overcoming the white. He was garbed much like the Rider, all in black, though his talismans appeared to be affixed to a leather vest he wore beneath his frock coat. The talismans were strange, like Sheardown’s had been. Not Solomonic in design. Some of the etchings reminded him of characters in the Book of Zylac and Sheardown’s correspondences, lettering Professor Spates had called Tsath-Yo. Gone was the namesake short sword the Rider had been paralyzed by on their first meeting. It had been replaced by a pistol in a horizontal draw holster situated across his belly.
Still smiling, Jacobi’s astral self twirled an engraved, etheric pistol on one finger idly as he turned and strode out the door onto the parade ground. Dimly, the Rider noticed it was much like his own.
“What—” Manx managed, gasping and wide-eyed as a young private beside him clapped a bloody and brain-strewn hand to his own mouth and lurched out of the guardhouse, vomit spurting out between his fingers.
Belden dropped to his haunches, reached through the bars, and suddenly had Sunderland’s bloody pistol in his hand. He cocked it and pointed it through the bars.
“Open these doors!” he demanded.
Manx looked about to burst. His face purpled.
“Get the keys from Armendariz, colonel. Start with the man to my left.” Then, to the vomiting private and another trooper, a tan faced young man with green eyes, he said, “You boys drop your guns. And pull that door shut.”
“I’ll shoot you myself for this, Belden,” Manx croaked, stooping over Armendariz’s body as the heaving private set his carbine in the corner and put his hand on the guardhouse door.
A couple of soldiers who had been standing over Davies’ corpse on the parade ground began to come over. Weeks was at their head.
“Tell that sonofabitch Weeks to stop or I’ll put a bullet through your ears, Colonel,” Belden warned.
“Stay back,” Manx yelled.
He stood up with the key ring.
“Close the door, Mandrell,” Belden said.
The sickly looking private did as he was told.
Manx turned and affixed Belden with a hard look, then proceeded to unlock the Rider’s cell door.
“You’ll swing like Judas for this, you know,” he said as he opened the door. “Your friend Milton won’t save you this time.”
The Rider stepped out and picked up Mandrell’s carbine, a Spencer, and covered Manx as the colonel moved on to Belden’s cell.
“You know what’s happening?” Belden asked him through the bars.
The Rider nodded.
“Jacobi possessed those men, and forced them to kill themselves,” he said. It was an incredibly dangerous thing to do. Apparently Jacobi was using the same method of invasion and possession the Rider himself had used on occasion, disrupting the host’s willpower with an etheric blast from his mystic pistol, then slipping in and taking over. But if the host body died, a possessing spirit could very easily be swept off to Sheol along with the deceased. Lost. It was like leaping for a flimsy branch as one’s raft sailed over the edge of a waterfall.
The Rider doubted he could do it himself, but Jacobi had done it twice, without hesitation. He was mad, or knew something about possession the Rider didn’t.
Another report sounded outside, and surprised exclamations. Another man dead.
“Can you stop him?”
“We can, but we will need our things,” Kabede said.
“So much for a peaceful Sabbath,” the Rider muttered.
Belden and the Rider arranged the two privates and Colonel Manx into a human shield around them. The troopers were understanding, and decidedly anxious for anyone to do anything about stopping the horror they had seen. Manx raised more protestations, but Belden pressed the muzzle of Sunderland’s pistol to the nape of his neck and assured him he’d put an end to his complaints. He was quiet after that. The bloody barrel left a perfect red circle on the back of the colonel’s neck.
When they kicked open the guardhouse door, Weeks, Quincannon, and Cord were out front with their weapons drawn, and a sea of blue wool were emulating them at their backs.
Manx ordered them all to stand down as Belden, the Rider, and Kabede herded their hostages outside.
“These men need their accoutrements. They can put a stop to what’s happening.” Belden shouted over Manx’s shoulder. “Bring ‘em here forthwith.”
Weeks looked questioningly at Manx and the colonel nodded once. The big sergeant turned to Quincannon and in a minute the corporal was bounding across the parade ground.
A sweaty man in shirtsleeves with a blue black beard pushed through the wary soldiers.
“Two men just shot themselves, for no apparent reason.”
“We know, Doc,” said Belden. “There’ll be more. These men are going to do something about it presently.”
There was a startling pop. A dozen men recoiled, exclaiming, as one of their number slumped to his knees, blood fountaining from the top of his head, his carbine jammed under his chin.
The doctor, Milton, turned and pushed his way back through the ranks to the fallen man.
The soldiers were muttering, shaking their heads, looking nervously at each other. The Rider saw Jacobi’s astral body strolling away from the dead man, smiling.
“What the hell is going on?” Milton exclaimed as he pressed cotton to the dead man’s bloody head wound.
Mandrell, the sickly private the Rider was covering with the Spencer, suddenly turned and leered at him, bug eyed and grinning.
“Ich warte auf dich, Reiter.”
He turned and broke from the Rider’s grasp, and ran full tilt at the stone wall of the guardhouse. He collided with it face first with a bone crunching thud, leaving a bloody smudge on the wall.
Mandrell collapsed on his back, his nose smashed, teeth and blood dribbling from his ruined mouth, eyes fluttering in his head.
Jacobi’s astral form sat up from the unconscious young man. He stood slowly and made a show of brushing at his sleeves, then extended his arms outward in a gesture of exaggerated expectation. He mouthed the words again, ‘Ich warte auf dich, Reiter.’
“You won’t have to wait much longer,” the Rider promised.
“What happened?” Kabede pressed.
Through his lenses, the Rider watched Jacobi mosey over to the line of men. He stopped before each one, as if inspecting them, and looked back at the Rider, leering ominously.
“He’s goading me. Threatening to kill more.”
“He is baiting you,” Kabede warned.
“I know, but what can I do?”
Jacobi put his etheric pistol to the forehead of a young trooper and pulled the trigger. There was a brilliant red flash from the muzzle and the man physically jolted. In the Yenne Velt, a great blue wound opened in the soldier’s head, spilling light, and Jacobi dove right in, his form contorting and shrinking to conform to the other man’s proportions.
The Rider could see him, like a faint outline superimposed on the trooper. The man blinked his eyes, shook his head, and assumed Jacobi’s malevolent expression. He looked around at his comrades.
“No!” the Rider shouted. He pointed at the corporal. “Restrain that man.”
It was too late. The trooper put his side arm to the back of the head of the man in front of him and blew a wide furrow through the top half of his skull. As the dead man sank to his knees, his face a mass of blood, the men on either side of the trooper grabbed his arms. One of them was Lieutenant Cord, who stared at the offending man in disbelief.
The trooper didn’t struggle, but threw back his head and giggled ecstatically.
“Wie viele männer, Reiter?Wie viele?“
How many more men indeed? The Rider bit his lip.
Quincannon came rushing up, the Rider’s gun belt over one shoulder, Kabede’s shofar under his arm.
“My God, what is happening?” Manx stammered.
“Give them their stuff, Quincannon!” Belden shouted.
The corporal came over to Kabede and the Rider and held out their weapons and gear.
The Rider snatched his belt and buckled it hastily on.
Kabede took his shofar.
“You should prepare.”
“There’s no time,” the Rider snapped.
No time for protective circles, no time for ecstatic chants or consecrations. The Rider could slip easily into the Yenne Velt, but he would not be at his full strength.
“Go then,” Kabede said, clapping him on the shoulder. “Remember, today the soul is doubled.”
The Rider nodded, and with a heave of his breath, his eyes rolled up and he fell forward into Kabede’s arms.
Merkabah Rider: Have Glyphs Will Travel Page 5
