“Alain Gans!” said a deep voice that harrowed his soul. “I name you moser!”
With that last condemning word, suddenly the blazing staff darted towards him, piercing his chest. His whole form rippled, and he was knocked back into a dark corner of his subconscious, like a prisoner cast into a deep well. Far above he could see, as if through a pinprick, his own hands picking up his rifle, looking down on the embattled soldiers, rising unsteadily, and picking his way through the rocks.
He was possessed.The goddamned nègre had penetrated all his wards and possessed him.It was unthinkable.Even as his mind reeled in a deep psychic shock, he was filled with indignation. No being on any plane had ever pierced his defenses and actually inhabited him against his will.
He felt sick with rage.
Whatever the staff was, it had cut through his barriers like a scythe through straw. To top it all off, the savage had called him by name!
How could this be?
Perhaps he had been caught off guard, but he would be damned if he would allow this insufferable black bastard to go on wearing him like a coat.
He turned all his considerable willpower towards regaining his body. Slowly he began to crawl up the dark hole to the bright light of consciousness.
Then that damned nègre would pay…
“Go, Gershom,” said DeKorte. “Embrace him.”
Belden backed away from the Rider as he crouched in the dirt and roared through his clenched teeth like an animal. He tore the lapel from his own coat in his rage, the tendons standing out like organ pipes on his splayed hands.
The thing that stepped out of the grave was mottled and bluish in color, the flesh bloated in death. The youthful handsomeness was gone, the features distorted and repellant. A ragged black hole stained with congealed blood showed in the side of his bullish neck. The death wound the shed Mazzamauriello had inflicted with his teeth. There were grave maggots dropping from his long, knotted hair and tumbling down the sleeves of his filthy coat. Gone was the benign look from the once striking eyes. One eye had been pushed, or had sunk, back into the half exposed skull. The other was a milky, clouded color, dead and white as smoke in glass. The blackened lips hung slack from yellowish teeth.
The Rider knew it was not Gershom Turiel staggering across the graveyard towards him, yet he was overcome by the sight of this poor boy’s corpse in such a state. He knew this was only dead flesh animated by the detestable bone conjurer, for that was what DeKorte was. No longer a rider, no more a Son of the Essenes. A damned necromancer.
Still, all the guilt of Varruga Tanks came back to him, personified in the heap of unnaturally moving rotten meat that lurched towards him on a frame of brittle bones.
He felt the same despair he had felt in the pit of Sheol, in the Adversary’s drawing room at the sight of the endless Falls of the Damned. Somehow this was worse.
This miraculous boy had died because of him. Not content with his death, the Creed had taken out his luz bone, denying him the bodily resurrection of the world to come. Further, DeKorte had taken what should have lain honorably at rest and melted peacefully away to rejoin the earth and torn it free, pumped its dry veins full of his stinking dark magic, and sent it waddling off like a wind-up tin toy.
Belden raised his pistol again and fired four shots into the advancing shape. The bullets punched into its barrel chest and kicked dust and faint traces of smoky ether from its coat, but did nothing to slow it.
When his hammer snapped down on an empty chamber, Belden cursed and rushed at the thing.
It backhanded him with such force that he broke the grave marker he crashed against. Belden lay stunned, rolling slowly to his side.
The Rider felt tired beyond all reason. His head sagged back on his shoulders. It was then he caught sight of the three white stars twinkling far off in the night sky.
Havdala was upon them. The end of the Sabbath.
He closed his eyes and prayed, the Yiddish words of the Got vun Avram coming from his trembling in fitful bursts.
“G-t fin avrum in fin Yitskhok in fin Yankev, bahit dayn libe folk yisruel fin ale bayzn in daynem loyb…”
Gradually, the rapid mantra of words slowed along with his breathing, and the tremor in his limbs ceased. By the time had finished the prayer, what had once been Gershom stood over him, so close he could see the night crawlers wriggling in the skin of his ankles, just above the lips of his dirty shoes. He could smell the sour earth and rot.
The thing stretched out its arms to crush the Rider’s head between gigantic hands.
“Stop a moment,” said DeKorte.
Gershom ceased to move, his arms akimbo, the massive hands open like some Christian icon.
“Give me the scroll freely, Rider, or Gershom will pluck the luz from your back and I’ll get it that way.”
“Stop calling it Gershom,” the Rider hissed. “It’s not Gershom.”
DeKorte shrugged.
“I need an answer.”
The Rider looked at Belden, his arms shaking as he pushed himself up to one knee.
He looked straight ahead at the thing before him. He would not look up at its face, but he saw, peeking below the torn and mud stained shirt, the golden sash Gershom had worn during his strongman performances.
He slowly unfastened the strap for the scroll case on his back, and held it in his hands. He turned it over, looking down at it lingeringly, before he leaned and tossed it past the silent monolithic corpse. The hard leather case bumped end over end and rolled to a stop at DeKorte’s feet.
DeKorte frowned and looked down at the case.
He stooped and retrieved it, then drew his own pistol, an engraved, nickel plated double action of some sort, and popped the top off the tube.
He peered inside and his frown deepened. He turned the case over, spilling its contents to the ground. A small, ornate silver spice box the Rider filled with cloves for the end of Sabbath, and his braided foot long blue and white Havdala candle.
He looked down at the two items for a bit, then stared at the Rider, unamused.
“Gut Shabbes,” the Rider said, shrugging.
“Kill him,” said DeKorte.
The Rider dropped to his belly as Gershom’s massive hands came together with a resounding clap where his head had only just been.
Belden, now on his feet, whipped up his fist and sent a stone hurtling at DeKorte. This was the man who had hunted the Blue Ridge Mountains for rabbit and fox as a boy with only a pocketful of such stones. When it left his hand there was no doubt it would find its mark. It struck DeKorte in the eye and he threw up his hands, cursing.
Just as he did so, something bounced to the ground beside the Rider. It was oblong and thin, and sparking like a dying star on one end. He smelled the burning, heard the hiss.
Quickly he dove between Gershom’s legs and stumbled to his feet. Rushing straight ahead, he tackled Belden, carrying him for a few feet in the direction of DeKorte, who, with one hand clapped to his eye and leaking blood, opened fire.
DeKorte was half-blind. He squeezed the trigger as fast as he could, and bullets struck the ground, punched holes in the grave markers, and snapped in the air near the Rider’s ear. One did clip Belden’s left shoulder, and he groaned as the Rider’s momentum carried them both into Gershom’s open grave.
As the Rider landed on top of him, Belden was squashed between the jutting broken boards of the empty coffin and his friend’s weight. His groan turned into a wheezing hiss as all the air was forced out of his lungs.
Then the stick of dynamite which had landed at Gershom’s feet exploded.
From the depths of the grave, the Rider felt the earth tremor from the concussion, and saw the flash of light overhead. DeKorte uttered a Dutch curse and the Rider heard him fall.
“Here’s another one for you, you sonsabitches!”
It was Sergeant Weeks. Shortly after they heard his voice, another explosion knocked loose the grave dirt and covered them both.
The walk fro
m the ridge through the marauding undead and to the guardhouse was arduous. Every step was a passion, as the souls of Gans and Kabede warred within the Frenchman’s body for control. This was not a relatable contention of astral bodies in the Yenne Velt, but an abstract battle of intent, with Kabede struggling like a man astraddle a thrashing crocodile to keep the consciousness of Gans from pulling itself up and aright.
Gans saw his plan right away. The nègre intended to force him from cover so the soldiers could kill him. But to his evident chagrin when he broke from the safety of the rocks and walked haltingly down the ridge, there were no soldiers to be found. They were either dead or had holed themselves up somewhere from the assault of the horde. Gans laughed and the nègre spitefully let his body stumble and fall for the last ten feet down the ridge, where he rolled to a stop, battered and bleeding.
Gans felt the African working his body like an unfamiliar operator, and inwardly laughed again when he saw himself walk toward the zombies.
They would not attack him of course. He had wards prepared personally by Het Bot to keep the undead from molesting his person.
Gans contented himself to let the African control him for a bit, as he obviously had no further plan, and would not dare try and turn his rifle on himself in the manner Jacobi had done.
“What now, nègre?” he taunted.
Then he was walking toward the guardhouse. Here Gans would have outright guffawed had he the means. The door was shut to the structure. Obviously the nègre had holed inside to safely leave his body and enter the Yenne Velt. The black fool was leading him straight to his own helpless body.
Gans affected to resist, and projected feelings of outrage and a need to fight, but secretly reserved his efforts, gathering strength for a final push that would regain control of his physical form.
Let the fool think he was winning. His plan was so unsubtle and stupid. It was only a matter of assuming control of his own body before the black could regain his—and his enemy had to release Gans first. In that moment Gans would kill him as he sat reposed. Let him think his victory assured for now.
He watched his own hands reach out and fumble with the guardhouse door. The black had very little aptitude for the finer points of possession. Gans almost shoved his faltering will aside just to get it over with. But no, he thought. Savor what is to come. He only hoped the black would open his own eyes to see his death.
The door swung open and his body nearly fell in sprawling, but caught itself on the frame.
Careful, savage! He thought. He didn’t want to return to the pain of a broken wrist.
The guardhouse was a bank of three cells on the right hand side, a plain earth and stone floor. Seated against the far wall was the black’s body, in the middle of a scrawled pentacle with his eyes closed.
See if your Solomonic seals protect you against my bullets, nègre, he thought.
His body moved forward, falling first against the stone wall and then against the bars of the cells.
Carefully, you idiot!
It was exasperating to watch this ape handle his body. He couldn’t even walk straight.
He passed the first cell.
Now, monkey. Release me.
He lurched against the wall, then he swayed and fell against the cell bars, rattling them.
Then, as if someone had been sitting on his chest and had suddenly stood up, the presence of the nègre was gone.
With a silent mental cry of triumph Gans’ conscious soared from the dark limbo of imprisonment straight toward the growing light of his own perception.
In a matter of an instant he was back, drawing breath and correcting the unfamiliar posture he had affected under the black’s control.
He raised his rifle. Stupid of the black not to have thrown it away.
Then something struck him simultaneously at two points on the right side of his face. Something had leapt from the shadows of the cell and clung to the bars. It had reached through the bars and latched onto him. He screamed and struggled to get a look at what it was. It hissed and chittered close in his ear.
Kabede’s eyes snapped open and he blinked them into focus. Fighting the needles of numbness in his arm, he brought up Hale’s pistol, cocked, took aim, and fired in one motion.
The bullet struck the insect thing that had emerged from Colonel Manx’s body. Without the Elder Sign to keep it at bay, it had lashed out at the first person to pass close to it. And Kabede had made sure that was Gans.
It had been difficult to hide his plan from Gans. The Frenchman had possessed an incredible sense of self, even in the face of possession. Kabede had played the fool, telegraphing his surface plans, feigning frustration when they didn’t work (as he had known they wouldn’t), even mimicking a lack of finesse in his control of Gans’s body (and secretly relishing every knock he purposefully inflicted on the man).
The bullet that struck the creature caused it to explode, as he had known it would. Gans was thrown up into the corner of the far wall and ceiling by the concussion, and actually hung there, plastered in place by the thick, noxious green stuff that had trapped the soldiers earlier. He was entirely coated, only his twitching hands and the tips of his boots visible in the dripping muck.
Kabede supposed he would suffocate if the smashing into the ceiling had not killed him already. He thought to try and use his dagger to cut a hole for him to breathe, but it was a passing thought. The sound of the dynamite explosion from down the path, down in the direction of the cemetery, drove it from his mind.
Then there was a second.
He gathered his robes to him and the staff, being careful not to get caught in the slime that now coated the hall as he leapt over the most sizable patch.
Hale was at the bars of his cell.
“Holy shit,” he said admiringly.
Kabede whipped open the cell door and tossed him back his pistol.
“Come with me.”
Weeks laughed crazily in his deep, barking voice, and punctuated the laughter with a third explosion.
In the grave, Belden groaned as the Rider shifted off of him, brushing the loose dirt from his shoulders.
“Weeks!” Belden exclaimed. “The stupid sonofabitch must’ve snuck off and got into the dynamite.”
The Rider drew his Volcanic and put his back to the cold wall of the grave, giving them both room enough to crouch.
Belden fished for his Schofield and found it.
“You alright?” the Rider asked, seeing the shimmer of blood running down his arm.
“I’ll be alright. Just shaved me. Let’s go get that bastard before Weeks lobs a stick in this hole.”
“On three,” the Rider nodded.
They counted together, and sprang from the grave, training the muzzles of their pistols at the spot DeKorte had been standing on before the first explosion had blown him off his feet.
But he was gone.
All that was left of him was the empty scroll case, the Rider’s spice box and candle, and the bit of root he’d been chewing on, pale enough to see in the dark.
They flinched as a fourth stick of dynamite went off in the midst of the four undead walkers that remained standing around the outer edge of the graveyard. The explosion kicked them high into the air and brought them down in wet pieces.
Weeks was standing at the edge of the cemetery, a rifle in the crook of his arm, a pistol in his belt. As they watched, he stooped and lit a cigar on the flame flickering in Gershom’s cooking remains.
“Thought that bald bastard was gonna be a lot of trouble,” Weeks remarked casually, leering in the light of the end of his fat cigar. “Guess he wasn’t as much trouble as me.”
He took a step towards them, boots squishing in bloody bits littering the ground. Mercifully they were nothing more than a muddy glistening in the night, though there was an aroma of cooked meat and the acrid gunpowder smell of the dynamite hanging over everything.
The Rider glanced about. The twelve zombies and Gershom had all been blown to bi
ts. Many bits. Enough to coat the ground.
Then Weeks went down flat on his face, as if he’d tripped over something.
The ground began to move beneath their feet. The Rider felt warm and wet somethings wriggling between his toes like slugs. They curled and slithered up his pant leg.
Weeks bellowed in terror and then gurgled, as something rope-like lashed around his neck. It was a length of burned intestines belonging to the headless body of Gershom, which got up on its one stump of a leg and pulled him toward its exposed cavity with one intact arm. Its guts shared the work, drawing him closer, springing into his gaping mouth, wriggling down his throat, cutting off his screams and choking him from within. One strong hand reached around and grabbed hold of the sergeant’s belly, squeezing blood through the fabric, and the things’ rib cage began to creak open and closed around the body, as if it were trying to chew him.
“Oh shit!” Belden exclaimed, as the top half of a woman trailing a blackened lower rib cage and spinal column lunged out of the dark and wrapped its arms around his ankle
The Rider shook his leg to dislodge the nameless bits of animate matter that were assailing him. He put the barrel of his Volcanic against the half-woman’s face and fired, blowing her lower jaw away. It slackened, and Belden whimpered and kicked its arms away.
“Let’s get the hell outta here.” Belden stammered.
But the Rider tarried. What had caused the woman to drop dead finally? He looked closer, and saw in the scattered ruins of her lower jaw, a white piece of parchment half burned away that had been lodged in her mouth.
He reached down and picked it up, holding it close to see.
“Now what are you doing?” Belden hollered, turning in a circle. “Let’s go!”
It was a glyph. Not something he knew the meaning of, but something he had seen before somewhere. In the scroll, maybe.
He backtracked toward the grave.
Merkabah Rider: Have Glyphs Will Travel Page 11
