Merkabah Rider: Have Glyphs Will Travel

by Edward M. Erdelac

  “That’s right.”

  Something ran through his mind briefly, something from the Midrash of Esther. Ten measures of witchcraft were given to the world; nine measures went to Egypt.

  “We’ll burn it,” Faustus said. “Scatter the ashes. Eat them.” Then he stopped and gripped the Rider’s arm. “Is there anything else you’re withholding from me? Anything at all? No matter how insignificant you may think it is?”

  The Rider shook his head. Of what real interest was his own impending death? None, to the matter at hand.

  “Then let’s be about our business,” he said.

  They went outside. The Rider was surprised at the time that had passed, and felt a wash of guilt for leaving Kabede standing out on the boardwalk. He hated these towns and their skewed, meshuggeneh laws.

  That guilty feeling was quickly dispersed when they saw one of the Chinese highbinders they had seen outside the Chinese grocery standing where they had last seen Kabede.

  “Shit,” said Faustus plainly, glowering at the Chinaman, who smiled upon seeing him, though not with his eyes.

  “What’s this?” Belden asked. “Where’s Kabede?”

  “I think this gentleman knows,” said Faustus, walking over. To the highbinder, he said, “Ni hao ma, my friend?”

  “Mrs. Ah Lum, ask for you,” the Chinaman replied.

  “Is our friend with Mrs. Ah Lum?” Faustus asked.

  The highbinder smiled in answer, to which Belden replied by grabbing hold of the front of his shirt with both hands.

  “Listen here, John boy—” he began.

  The Rider saw the highbinder reach under his shirt for the hatchet dangling there, and he pulled Belden back.

  A few passersby turned their heads at the brief scuffle, and across the street, a deputy marshal took an interest in them.

  “Please,” Faustus urged. “We don’t need that kind of attention.” To the highbinder, he smiled and nodded, grinning. “Alright, my friend. Alright. Hei hei. Let’s go.”

  He guided the Chinaman down the street and said over his shoulder, “They wouldn’t hurt him. Not if they want to speak to me.”

  The Rider and Belden followed Faustus and the highbinder back to the Chinese quarter, where he ushered them all into the Can Can Chop House, an eatery.

  The interior was low and smoke-filled, the hot, hissing kitchen in the back giving off a constant aroma of fried food.

  Seated at one of the tables was Kabede, contentedly enjoying a bowl of noodles.

  When the highbinder walked them past the incurious diners to their friend, Kabede was finishing up.

  “I didn’t put up a fight,” he said, patting his face with a napkin. “I assumed they would come for you anyway.”

  “At least you got a free meal,” Belden remarked.

  “You are finished?” their escort asked Kabede.

  He nodded.

  “Please to come in back,” he said, smiling still.

  They passed the kitchen and went down a short corridor, through a beaded curtain. A room in back was set aside for gambling, both poker and mahjong. In attendance were six or seven men of nearly every creed and color, so Kabede turned no heads here.

  In fact, he was nothing compared to the main attraction of the room. Seated in a corner, playing stud with a stout, scruffy bearded young miner in a turned up hat and a long haired Spaniard with a bushy goatee down almost to the middle of his chest, was the most remarkable looking man they’d ever seen.

  He was dressed neatly in an embroidered silk shirt and planter’s hat, and his long hair and drooping mustache were oil black with flecks of gray. Every inch of his exposed skin was apparently stained a deep, metallic blue.

  “Somebody lose a bet?” Belden whispered.

  Faustus hissed him quiet at the blue man’s silvery eyes fitted up at the sound of his voice.

  “Careful, Dick,” he said. “That’s Moon Fugate.”

  The Rider had heard the name somewhere, mentioned in the same breath as Clay Allison, Rhett Deeds, and John Wesley Hardin. A brutal killer. He had heard once that the man was blue, but he had taken it for a turn of phrase.

  Belden smirked.

  “Moon?”

  The Rider pushed him along.

  They were directed to an office in the back where at last they found China Mary (or Missus Ah Lum, as the highbinder introduced her) seated at an ornate desk of oriental design, smoking from a long cigarette holder.

  “Hello, Yīshēng Hung Jeuk,” said the woman, in a high, somewhat grating voice.

  Faustus took off his hat.

  “Hello again, Mary,” he said. “May I ask humbly why you’ve taken such steps to get me here?”

  “I saw your wagon. Why you no stop and say hello?”

  “I had an appointment to keep.” He turned to the others. “May I introduce my associates? Mister Rider, Mister Belden.”

  “I know that one,” she said, waving her hand. “He work for Lepsy. He who I want talk about.”

  “Belden?” Faustus asked, looking to Belden.

  “Not him. Lepsy. Lepsy mógu—a demon. You kill demons. Yes?”

  “What are you talking about, Mary?”

  “Bing Kong Tong come to my husband…”

  “Tong?” the Rider asked.

  “A sort of union,” Faustus explained. “An arm of the Six Companies. The one that doesn’t mind all the prostitution and opium.”

  China Mary had stopped speaking at the interruption and was glaring at them all.

  “Sorry,” the Rider said.

  “Bing Kong Tong come to my husband, say Lepsy hire coolies in Dudleyville. Ship gold, silver, much work. When coolies come for pay, Lepsy no pay. Lepsy burn them.”

  “Burn them?” Faustus repeated.

  “Fire! Burn!”

  “I know, I understand.”

  “Tong go to marshal. Tell them. Marshal get pussy…”

  “Posse,” said Faustus and Belden.

  “Get posse. Go to Lepsy. Lepsy burn them too.”

  “What do you mean he burned them?” the Rider asked. “How? You mean burn them down? Shoot them?”

  “No, no, no, no shoot,” China Mary said, waving her hands. “Hie hie! I show you.”

  She stood up and walked past them, waving aside the highbinder and stepping out into the gambling den.

  “What does Yee-shang Hoong Gerk mean?” Belden asked, murdering the pronunciation.

  Faustus frowned.

  “It’s what they call me here in Hoptown. It means Doctor Peacock.”

  Belden was about to say something snide when a loud bang made them all jump.

  Moon Fugate was rising from the chair, a tiny pistol glittering and bleeding smoke in his blue hand. He didn’t look at anyone as he pulled the dollars in the middle of the table towards him.

  The Spaniard and the miner watched the entire operation with wide eyes, but neither made a move.

  Fugate stuffed the cashinto his pocket and picked up his coat off his chair. He strode out the front door, whistling a familiar tune. The gaping diners who had rushed to the doorway parted before him and closed behind.

  The Spaniard tipped forward then and fell face down on the table.

  China Mary inhaled with a sharp hiss and threw up her hands. She chattered angrily to the highbinder, who rushed to the eatery door to push the rubberneckers back to their meals, and pointed at a faro dealer at another table, who nodded and went over to fuss over the dead Spaniard.

  Without another word, she pulled open an exterior door and marched out into the back lot, muttering something in mixed English and Cantonese, like ‘goddamn gwailo.’

  They followed her out back to a wagon where a coffin sat under a piece of white canvas.

  “Tong send hatchet man,” she said, gesturing to the coffin.

  They all looked at each other.

  Belden pursed his lips.

  “Right right. No corpses either.”

  He went forward and pulled off the canvas, slid h
is fingers under the lid, and pushed it off. He backed away, wrinkling his nose at the hard smell that spilled out, and the other inched forward.

  Inside was the body of a Chinese man, though he was only recognizable as such by the cut of his cheongsam shirt, which had blackened and fused to his crisp, dried out skin. The teeth in the man’s mouth had melted and run together like melted marshmallows in his pain-twisted mouth. Whatever fire had burned him had to have been furnace hot.

  “I heard of Indians burning men to death,” Belden remarked. “But never with a fire hot enough to melt a man’s teeth.”

  He pushed the coffin lid closed.

  “What do you want us to do, Mary?” Faustus asked. “We’re not hatchet men.”

  “Lepsy hire coolies now. White men, niggers too,” she said, pointing to Belden. “You work for Lepsy. He pay you?”

  “Not so’s you’d notice,” Belden said uncomfortably.

  “When work done, workers come for money, same thing happen. Tong say Lepsy do this lots of times. Before Dudleyville. Our hatchet men, no go. Sheriff Behan,” and she paused to spit in the dirt, “asshole! He say Lepsy tell him we after his mine. He say we threaten him. Hah! He burn tong hatchet man. Behan listen? Huh.” She spat again. “Asshole!”

  “Where does he ship the gold and silver to?” Kabede asked.

  “Nobody know. West. Tong try follow wagons, no come back never. Get killed on road, probably. Something else,” she said, lowering her voice. “My man go with hatchet man. He say no silver come from hole. No silver in barrels.”

  They looked at Belden.

  “Well they’re goddamned heavy enough,” Belden said.

  “He say Hundun in hole!”

  “Hundun?” Faustus repeated.

  “What’s that?” Belden asked.

  Faustus shrugged.

  “It means different things…soup, formless, dumpling…”

  “Dumpling?”

  “Like a blobby, shapeless kind of food.”

  She threw up her hands.

  “I don’t know. He crazy.” She pointed to a corner of the yard.

  There, crouched in a rubbish pile, they were surprised to see a filthy man sitting there, watching them. He was youngish, and naked but for a loincloth. He was completely filthy, covered in ashes, his own excrement caked about his legs.

  There was a look in his eye, quivering among the obvious madness, a terror that the Rider knew all too well.

  “Dick,” he said, taking out his Solomonic spectacles and slipping them over his nose, “let’s go take a look at your job.”

  It was early evening when they reached Toughnut and Fifth, where Russ House stood. Through the windows, they could see the proprietress setting down plates for the dinner crowd. A whistle blew somewhere, and lines of dirty miners working the big Contention and Tough Nut mines emerged blinking from the darkness as their replacements disappeared in their wake.

  Walking down the alley that led to the yard behind Russ House, where a canvas pavilion had been erected and fenced in to prevent drunks from wandering in and falling into the mine shaft, the Rider stopped and whipped his spectacles off his head.

  Faustus, Belden, and Kabede stared after him, at the tears running from his eyes as he brushed them away.

  “What’s the matter?” Kabede asked.

  The Rider looked all about the alley leading to the diggings. He had felt a stabbing pain in his eyes as soon as they’d left the street. His ears still rang from it. He recognized the sensation and found its source, an innocuous looking pair of red lanterns hanging over the crude sign which read, in English and Chinese letters:

  FIRE KING DIGGINGS

  KEEP OUT

  A pair of freight wagons were parked nearby, workers loading one of them with barrels, horses waiting in the traces.

  “Kabede,” the Rider said, folding up his spectacles. “Go with Faustus and get the staff and pistols.”

  “What’s the matter?” Faustus asked.

  The Rider pointed to the lanterns.

  “The Creed uses the substance in those lanterns. It interferes with my spectacles somehow. Dick and I will have a look at those barrels, and then try and find this Lepsy.”

  “He takes his dinners at Tivoli’s,” Belden said. “Right over there on Allen.”

  “Tivoli’s,” Kabede said, nodding. “I have seen it.”

  “Come on, Dick,” the Rider said, walking towards the dig site.

  Faustus caught his arm.

  “You’re unarmed. Don’t make a move till we return.”

  The Rider nodded.

  They parted aways, Kabede and Faustus departing at a half run. They had to cross all the way back to the Chinese quarter, to the livery.

  The Rider and Belden walked purposefully toward the diggings. There was an employee sitting on a stool out front, a thick armed black man with a stick of firewood who had been paid to keep people out. He nodded to Belden as they approached, and they went through the little gate without incident.

  The Rider went to one of the wagons as a laborer emerged from the pavilion and hefted a barrel into the back. He was a skinny man, too thin to be trusted to lift a heavy barrel. His burden slammed down too hard, knocking one of the hoop rivets loose. The wagon sagged on its springs. The man stood there panting a bit, then went back for another. When he was gone, the Rider and Belden went to examine it.

  “Just an ordinary barrel,” Belden said.

  The Rider ran his finger along it.

  “Not quite ordinary,” he said. “Look, there’s tar in-between the planks.”

  Belden nodded.

  “You don’t need to waterproof an ore barrel.”

  “Not usually,” he agreed. He knocked on the barrel with the back of his hand, twice.

  Something knocked back.

  “Jesus,” Belden whispered. He moved quickly toward the barrel. “Is there somebody in there?”

  “Wait a minute, Dick,” the Rider cautioned.

  The skinny man returned, struggling with another barrel.

  “Hey beanpole, you seen the boss man?” Belden asked.

  “Tivoli’s,” the man grunted, pushing another barrel next to the first.

  “You know where these are getting shipped to?” the Rider asked.

  “Ask the teamster,” the man said, panting again as he dumped his burden.

  “Where’s he?”

  “Tivoli’s.”

  The Rider and Belden walked away without another word.

  Though there was a canvas topped beer garden out back, which they could see from the diggings, they left by the way they’d come and circled the block up Fourth Street to come in the saloon by the front.

  It was dark by the time they walked in, and an exceedingly hairy bartender was going around lighting the lamps.

  They paused at the door and looked all around the dark little bar. Mostly miners. Mostly from the Fire King.

  Belden waved the bartender over as he made his way back to the nicked and stained counter to the right.

  “Lepsy in?”

  “Out back eatin’ his supper,” the bartender said, and went behind the bar.

  “That one’s a teamster,” Belden observed nudging the Rider and indicating a man in a dark coat seated at the bar worrying a spotty glass of beer. He didn’t look like a teamster. He looked like somebody Spates might know.

  The Rider started towards him, Belden alongside.

  The man reached for his beer and glanced up, and the Rider pulled his hat low and kept walking, for a silvery talisman had slid momentarily from the teamster’s sleeve.

  “What’s the matter?” Belden whispered as they walked out the back.

  “He’s Creed,” the Rider whispered back.

  A canvas awning supported by simple wood poles stretched over an area big enough to fit six long tables and benches, each with a hissing lantern in the middle. Miners sat drinking beers and eating tin plates of beans which a Mexican woman dished out through a window in a small adjoi
ning building, evidently a makeshift kitchen. Further back they could see a row of outhouses.

  “There’s Lepsy,” Belden said, nodding to a man eating at one of the tables.

  He was sort of unkempt, with a bushy beard. What hair he had on the back of his balding head was wild and knotty. He wore a faded red coat with torn black silk lapels and smile pockets. It didn’t fit him any better than his role as a mine owner did.

  “What now?” Belden asked.

  “Eat some beans,” the Rider said.

  They went through the line, bought their plates, and sat down at a table in view of Lepsy.

  As Belden dug into his food and watched the teamster through the door, the Rider slipped on his glasses again and took a look at Lepsy.

  There was a man there, but inside the man, as though driving him (which he essentially was), was an impish demon; a corrupted cherub. His skin was a mottled red color, spotted with blackheads. His features were infantile but grossly distorted, as if a man had lived a full life of corruption in the body of a baby. His face was pinched and ugly, his ears overlarge and sprouting with wiry hair. The top of his head was almost entirely covered with a cracked, yellowish crust of cradle cap, the hairs that poked through the scabby scalp bleached and dead. His stubby fingers ended in jagged yellow nails and were webbed. He had a pair of glossy black cock wings folded on his back.

  The Rider did not know this spirit. He was a demon. One of the Fallen, surely, by his wings, and this Lepsy had willingly allowed himself to be possessed. There was no other way one of the Fallen could inhabit a mortal body.

  One of the renegade demons Lucifer had mentioned then.

  He had only his knife to combat this thing. It would likely be powerful. He wished for his pistol, or a quiet place where he could slip into the Yenne Velt and surprise the thing.

  He would have to do that anyway. There was no other way to defeat it without killing the host. Although Lepsy was no innocent, he was not anxious to publicly murder another person in the Arizona Territory. He supposed the only reason the local law hadn’t yet grabbed him was his drastic change in appearance and the fact that he’d been incarcerated in Yuma under a different name. But once the authorities in Yuma sorted through the confusion, the death of acting warden Laird would settle on the Killer Jew of Varruga Tanks as well.