Merkabah Rider: Have Glyphs Will Travel

by Edward M. Erdelac

  “Aww,” Emory said.

  “Emory,” her father insisted.

  “Alright.” She came over to the Rider first, as he was closest, and he stooped to let her kiss his cheek. She came away scratching her upper lip. “You ought to go to town and get a shave, Uncle Rider,” she suggested.

  “Emory,” Haddox hissed.

  The Rider smiled.

  She kissed her brother, and her father, and then went to Nehema, who leaned forward to accept a kiss, with apparent reluctance.

  “Nemmy, maybe you could sing me an Arabee song and teach me the words. I’d like to be able to speak Arabee, I think.”

  “Perhaps,” Nehema said.

  “Tuck me in, Robert?”

  “Alright,” said the boy, coming from the window and walking out with her hanging on his leg.

  “We ought to be getting to bed too,” said Haddox.

  “Of course,” said Nehema.

  Haddox rose and stretched his arms.

  “You’re welcome to the shed outside. Or you can lay here on the kitchen floor, if you don’t care to head back to town for the hotel, that is.”

  “Either would be fine,” the Rider said. “Thanks.”

  Haddox nodded, yawned, and went to the doorway to the bedrooms, slipping off his coat and letting his suspenders fall.

  He paused in the doorway, and saw Nehema and the Rider both seated.

  “Coming to bed, Nemmy?”

  Nehema rose.

  “Yes, of course. Good night, Rider.”

  And without a word she followed him out of the kitchen.

  The Rider stood dumbstruck. Why hadn’t she stayed to talk? He stood up, a little angry, and pushed the chair in.

  What the hell was he doing here anyway? Kabede had been right. He had been a fool to come, but not because it was a trap, because Lucifer had played him for a fool. Nehema wasn’t being tortured for her betrayal of Lilith, she was hiding out in plain sight, settling down into a perfectly normal life. Who knew why? Perhaps she had just decided to stay out of her mother’s way.

  He went outside and stood on the porch for a bit, watching the moonlight on the river. That was when he realized his onager was gone. He went to the rail where he’d left the animal, and found the frayed end of its lead hanging there.

  Now where had that stubborn jackass gotten off to?

  He walked down the river, and went up and down the bank for quite a while, thinking of Nehema more than looking for the animal. The night grew cool though, and soon his thoughts went to his bedroll, which was strapped to the animal’s back. Where had it gone?

  He hiked back up to the house after an hour’s search, having decided he would sleep on the kitchen floor and look for the wayward animal in the morning.

  Nehema was standing on the porch, tightly wrapped in a multicolored afghan throw, through which her long white nightgown showed. The breeze rustled her dark hair.

  He stopped at the foot of the porch, and she stepped down. She was barefoot. She walked past him without a word and headed toward the woodyard.

  He followed close, watching the movements of her calf muscles, the stretching of her Achilles tendons, the sway of her black hair down the middle of her back. His blood rose, boiled, and thundered in his ears.

  They walked in silence, and when they reached the woodyard, she let the afghan fall from her shoulders, discarding it. She turned a corner, kept walking. Now he could see the swell of her hips, the darkness of her skin through the cotton shift, the bulge of her backside as it alternately rose and fell from left to right.

  They were deep in the woodyard now, the dark total, the house hidden by the tall ricks. She lifted her hand to the sides of her head, and undid the false wig. She drew it off her head, and the moon shined on her smooth pate. Being a demoness, she was hairless, he knew. Did Haddox know?

  She slung the wig into the dark.

  She walked on, her rounded shoulders visible to him now, and the nape of her long neck, gazelle-like.

  God, he thought. God, what am I doing?

  She came to a dead end in the wooden maze. She walked to the stack at the end and made as if to climb it, putting one bare foot up on a jutting pallet. But she stopped and looked over her shoulder, the whites of her eyes and her shift almost all that could be seen. Then one slim arm snaked down and drew up the hem of her garment into her fist, unveiling herself midway to the small of her back.

  She only stared.

  He stopped.

  He knew that if he took out his spectacles and looked at her, he would see her true form, the repellant grey hag she was.

  Instead, he unbuttoned his rekel coat and walked slowly up behind her.

  He trembled, his eyes struggling to penetrate the darkness, to see all that she displayed for him. The mystery made it more irresistible.

  He touched her. His hands went to her shoulders, shaking. When his fingers closed on her, her hands went up and gripped his. His breath came out in gasps. She moaned tantalizingly, and guided his hands, pulled him closer, until his body was against hers. She arched her back and moved, pressing herself against him, drawing his awkward angularness against her round contours. She drew his hands to her chest, ran them over her bosom, each of his fingers tracing her nipples through the fabric at her command.

  Her back was against his chest, and she let out a cry of pain. She let him go and pushed him away and put her own back to the wood pile, some of the buttons of his shirt coming off in her hands.

  He blinked, as if in a haze. His shirt was untucked and open, and the Solomonic talismans shined in the dark.

  “Your talismans,” she whispered.

  He mechanically grabbed a fistful of them and snapped the chords that suspended them from his neck. He let them clink to the ground.

  She was smiling. He could see her grin flashing between her lips as she eased herself onto the woodpile, her knees drawn up, a void of deep shadow opening beneath the shift, between her legs. He drew close again, tearing the bodyguards and talismans from his neck as he came. He had worn them so long. When they fell away he felt light, as if he could leap to her. He did.

  She pulled him close, nipped wetly at his neck, her breath hot against his chest, her fingernails digging into his skin.

  This was what he wanted. What he’d wanted since he’d dreamed of her that restless night in Tip Top.

  Her flesh was warm and smooth against his. He held her head in his hands, kissed her savagely on the lips, parting them with his hungry tongue and finding her’s just as eager. He sucked at the cleft of her chin. She giggled and moaned, squeezing her knees against either side of him, crossing her ankles behind his back.

  He grabbed her hips violently and crushed her against him. One of her arms slid around his neck and grabbed a fistful of his hair, pulling his face against her chest. He mopped at her neck with his tongue, worked his face beneath the cotton. Her other hand moved down his heaving chest and gripped his belt.

  “Do you want me?” she hissed hotly in his ear.

  “Yes,” he gasped, his voice muffled by her breasts. He felt afire, and her skin was cooling in the night. She could staunch his burning if he could only plunge into her.

  “I knew you would come. Take me, Rider. Save me.”

  He bit into her shoulder and she squealed, rolling her neck in abandon and her other hand joined the first. His gunbelt fell to his feet.

  “How I’ve suffered, Rider,” she said breathlessly “You don’t know the torture. The hell I have been through. Worse even than the hell into which I was born. Oh!”

  He thrust against her, eager. So eager. He had lived the life of a monk for too long. What good was all this self-righteous denial? Shomer negiah! All these stupid rules he had bound his life to. In the back of his mind he knew she was not the same woman he had seen once in a marketplace. But that fleeting glimpse, the smile that unknown woman had given him then. She had been the woman for so many years. Her image and the personality he had imagined for her had some
how kept him going. In his loneliest moments, when he had felt inhuman and detached, the pleasant glance she had afforded him that one instant had kept him sane. Instead of the life he led, he had crafted and lived a life with her, a life of love, a home, and children. Now, illusion though she was, that woman was here before him, entangled with him. It was pathetic, he knew. But he didn’t care.

  “I want you,” he blurted, love and lust an indiscernible tangle in him. “I love you.”

  Suddenly, Nehema stopped moving. Her hands retreated from his belt line and for the second time she shoved him away, this time hard, with her bare feet.

  He was afire now, and he rushed back at her. She slapped him hard with both sides of one hand, then, as an afterthought, slashed his cheek with the nails of the other.

  He backed away, holding his face. The sharp, stinging pain, the blood running down, it blew him out of the crazed passion he had been in, like a gust of wind blows away a fog.

  “You love me?” she repeated in open disgust. Her face was a mask of outrage, and she drew her shift about her like a woman wronged. “You love me? You bastard! My rescuer…my hero…did I not risk my very existence for you? Did I not undergo agonies for you? I expected the abandonment of Lucifer. But you?”

  “What are you talking about?”

  “Can it be you do not know?” she put her head in her hands for a moment, then eased off the woodpile. When her face rose again, her cheeks were running with tears. “I am a succubus, Rider. A Queen of Hell. A dark angel of prostitution. When I went against my mother and sisters to aid you, when they learned of what I’d done, Lilith damned me. She gave me the worst punishment she could inflict. As her daughter I am bound by her commands, and she directed me to marry the first virtuous man I came across, then she sent her eyes out into the world and found this Harry Haddox, and she set the ruhin on me and drove me across the desert to him. I enticed him. I tried to corrupt him, but I could not. He proposed to me, and I was condemned to accept.”

  She held up her hand, and her wedding ring glinted on her finger.

  “Now this band of gold chains me to him. Every night he comes to me,” she hissed, and ran her fingers like swarming spiders up and down her body, “and gropes my body with his gentle, clumsy caresses, with love in his heart.” She began to sob. “He whispers hateful endearments into my ears, dripping with perverse honesty and vile devotion. He fills me with shame. He rapes my dark soul again and again, night after night with his selfless affection.”

  The Rider shook his head, unable to comprehend. Not wanting to.

  “Lust and corruption and debasement are my joys. I want to be the pillow I was, the glorious receptacle of mortal baseness and wantonness. This is my hell!”

  “What did you expect me to do?” the Rider stammered.

  “Kill him, Rider. Free me.”

  The Rider swallowed and turned away. He found his gun belt and picked it up.

  “You will do this thing for me?” she asked eagerly.

  “No,” said the Rider, buckling his belt. “Of course not. Why didn’t you just seduce some saloon bum?”

  “I cannot be unfaithful. I am bound by the wedding vow. Till death do us part, they say.”

  “You came pretty close to being unfaithful just now,” the Rider chuckled bitterly, stooping to pick the ground for his talismans.

  “You are different. You are the only one who can break the spell because Lilith’s curse doesn’t have any bearing on you. You have no name.”

  “How did you know I had no name?” the Rider said sharply. He glanced at her. Had this been some kind of plot? Had Lucifer somehow anticipated Kabede’s solution to the problem of Lilith’s ruhim? Had he orchestrated all this to strip him of his name, make him a weapon against the Lilith and the Outer Gods?

  Her expression told him nothing. She was only concerned about herself. Just as she always had been.

  “Never mind,” said the Rider. “I don’t care.”

  She came forward and grabbed his elbow.

  “Rider. I can’t even bear children.”

  He pulled away from her.

  “By children you mean ruhin, those dream demons you and your sisters churned out by the hundreds in Tip Top. Well, they almost killed me, so you’ll excuse me if I don’t shed too many tears.”

  “But they didn’t kill you. I saved you.

  “At Lucifer’s command. What did he promise you?”

  She saw that pleading would do nothing, and wiped away her tears.

  “Only that Lilith would be kept from Samael.”

  “Your father. Your lover. The Angel of Death. Lucifer said he’s imprisoned in his own dimension. You can’t even be with him.”

  “Lilith will not be with him either.”

  “What’s Samael’s part in all this? What do the Old Ones want him for?”

  “I don’t know. Only Lilith does.”

  He shook his head. He looked about for his talismans, hunting them up on the dark ground.

  “Rider. I have had to make due with the sweaty dreams of a boy till now. This golden band contracepts my powers,” she said, holding up her hand. The plain wedding band shined in the night. “For all the seed he spills, I can conceive neither shedim nor ruhin. I thought I could turn him against Harry, but his damned love for his father confuses him. He lusts for me, but he won’t consummate. He won’t kill for me.”

  “Neither will I, Nehema,” the Rider snapped, shoving a handful of his wards into his coat pocket.

  “You’ve got to. Oh, if only you didn’t love me. Then you could just free me. Why did you have to say that? You don’t mean it do you? Not really.”

  “No,” said the Rider, standing, looking down at her. “No, I guess I don’t.”

  She smiled, and with one motion stepped out of the cotton shift.

  “Yessss,” she hissed, and began to sway, closing her eyes. “You see? You can do it. Remember Tip Top? I felt your sweet lust for me then. And you were so good. So chaste. Have you been with anyone since?” She sniffed at him, like a dog testing the wind. “Mmmmm…no. You haven’t. Come here…”

  She reached out for his hand again, but he had his spectacles on and was staring at her in all her true, monstrous ugliness. The spell was broken.

  He turned away.

  “Rider,” she snarled, flapping her drooping bat wings and stomping her cumbersome mule leg. Then, she put one of her clawed hands to the side of her grey, sagging face and screamed. Long and loud, dragging her hooked nails through her own flesh as she did so.

  He guessed her intent, and broke into a run. He turned the corner of the wood stack and ran headlong into Robert, skulking in his long underwear.

  “You son of a bitch!” the boy shouted.

  “Wait, Robert,” the Rider said. “It’s not what you think.”

  “Help me,” Nehema called behind him. “Harry! Harry!”

  “You dirty son of a bitch!” Robert yelled, and took a wild, boyish swing at the Rider, glancing his chin. The Rider turned and pushed him, the boy’s momentum sending him clattering against the wood.

  He kept going. He had to get out of here now. Haddox would come. Haddox would try to kill him, and then he would have to kill Haddox.

  He turned another corner. Robert was sending up a ruckus clambering out of the wood. Nehema was wailing now, sobbing.

  Lord, what a nightmare this was. What a damn fool he’d been. What the hell had he been thinking letting an illusion govern him like this? His teachers had all warned him against falling for such demonic wiles. He’d successfully resisted them for so long, he’d taken them for granted. Now, to have fallen for this simplest, this most obvious of tricks. Hadn’t Kabede, hadn’t Dick Belden even told him? He felt like an idiot. Like a dog on the tracks.

  He had come to save a demoness. Why hadn’t he thought about what her punishment might entail? What were the fire and rape and torture he had imagined to one who had been born in Hell? How else could evil be rescued, except by evil? Somewher
e, Lucifer was watching all this and laughing.

  Maybe Adon and Lilith too.

  Maybe HaShem and all His angels even.

  He had worried so much about Lilith and her shedim, he hadn’t even considered Nehema’s rescue itself could have been a trap.

  He came out of the woodyard to see the house lamps lit. The front door was open and Haddox was standing on the porch pointing a shotgun.

  Damn, thought the Rider. How could he possibly get out of this without hurting or killing this man? Haddox loved Nehema. How much of that was her demonic glamour, he didn’t know, but Haddox loved her, and he would fight for her. And if he fought the Rider, he would die for her too.

  Robert was out of the woodpile and running down the twisting path. Was he headed for the Rider, or to Nehema? If he came to the Rider, maybe he could take the boy hostage long enough to escape…

  How had he even come to such a thought? Could he really hold his pistol to an innocent boy’s head to stay his father’s hand?

  No, of course he couldn’t.

  Maybe it was better to just let Harry Haddox kill him. He was a father to those children. They needed him. Who needed the Rider? The world had Kabede to defend it from the Great Old Ones. At the rate he was going the Rider would wind up in the Creed himself.

  He stood at the edge of the woodyard and raised his hands to his shoulders. Maybe he could explain somehow.

  But Haddox wasn’t aiming at him.

  “What do you all want?” he called out into the dark.

  Then the Rider saw them, standing at the mouth of the path little Emory had led him down this morning, just at the edge of the light thrown out by the open door.

  Twelve riders, and a black buggy between them just inside the woodyard. Murky shadow men and shadow women with soulless all white eyes and a single, black gowned, black veiled woman seated in the buggy.

  Beside the driver, a diminutive shape stood up in the seat and said, in a pleasing, almost musical accent the Rider knew too well;

  “We don’t want you, old man. We’re here for him.”

  All the horsemen turned in their saddles, following the stubby gesture of Mazzamauriello, who had spied the Rider emerging from the woodyard to their left. They eased their horses forward, and the house light touched their faces. Some of them were hideously misshapen. They all bore the rosette badges and guns; rifles, carbines, braces of pistols, each with murder and hate in their eyes. One, a leering hunchback, wore a bandolier of cartridges around his mangy head. Another, with a humongous distorted face like some kind of obscene, newspaper caricature brought to life, flipped a feathered tomahawk over and over idly in his hand like it was a toy.