The very air rippled with heat; it was hard to breathe, to think. The fear was on her again, awoken by the old man’s calm, warm, sincere insane voice. Fear, like a mad bird trapped in a chimney, fluttering, smashing itself blindly. Its instincts crying to fly, to escape to be free.
“What is wrong with you people?” she screamed as she tried to free herself from Ambrose’s steely grip “Dear Lord, please help me! Somebody help me!”
“Oh, it will help you,” Ambrose said as he dragged her forward, toward the well. It was a simple ring of stone within another ring of silver. At its center was darkness. The crawling symbols gave name to something that existed before the time of names. Their silent chants drummed into Holly’s mind—a relentless tattoo of obscenity.
“You are the one we have awaited,” he said as he forced her to her knees before the well. “The Bride of the Greate Wurm, the Whore of Babylon, the Bitch-Mother of a thousand young.”
Phillips approached her. He held a huge knife. He opened his wrist before her wide, frightened eyes as casually as one might snip a hangnail. She screamed as he turned his wrist over. Instead of blood gushing out, a viscous stream of black, foul-smelling ooze slowly drained from his opened vein.
“Dear God!” she screamed. “This is not happening; this is not really happening!”
“Take the communion from your bridegroom,” Ambrose said, clutching the back of her head. “Drink, whore.”
She struggled as Phillips’s massive wrist was slowly smashed to her lips. She fought to clamp her mouth closed as the foul, oily substance was smeared across her face.
Where are you, Harry? Why didn’t you come? Why?
Her nose was pinched closed with iron-vice fingers.
“Drink the Milk of the Wurm; grow in strength and understanding from the communion,” he said, his voice full of mad joy. “Glory unto the True God, the First God, the Keeper of Darkness and Patron of Unmaking. Ia, ia, Muhog-ian, fhtagluhian! Glory to the First God!”
She gagged as the “milk” made its way past her lips. Its stench, its vile taste, awoke some old, dreaming part of her brain, of her soul—a part that knew the well, knew what was on the other side of it. Knew the chanting and knew it meant something far more terrible and unnatural than death. She swallowed the blackness and felt it open her, fold her like paper.
“Glory to God,” Ambrose said as Phillips lifted her like a rag doll and threw her into the maw of the well. “Accept this offering, that you may be free.”
She fell into hot, humming, dizzy darkness. The place between stars, the moment between the last breath of life and the rattle of death, the black pause of awareness before murder. She fell.
And then it caught her, impaled her, upon its appendage, like a great rope of smooth, undulating muscle slick with mucus and oil. It tore upward through her sex, buried itself deep in her belly, ripping, bursting.
She hung there for an infinite instant. The flutter of fly’s wing, the time between the birth and death of stars.
A million tentacles swarmed over her, binding her wrists, her ankles, forcing open her eyes, her ears, her throat, her most intimate places. It entered her, violated her everywhere, in every way. Filled her, engulfed her, pumping the black milk into her every cell. The pain was glorious and horrible. It sent her above God and beyond mortal understanding. The pain explained everything to her.
Holly Pratt’s soul jumped and fluttered against the cage of her ribs, like a mine canary sniffing gas. It struggled and finally was still, disappearing beneath the oily surface.
She arose from the well, carried aloft on a throne of tentacles. Her clothes were tattered rags, but her skin, her hair, was lustrous, like Beltane moonlight. The black milk glistened on her skin. It leaked from her eyes, her mouth, from her nipples, from between her legs. She regarded the two tiny monkeys named Phillips and Ambrose who groveled on the ground before her.
“Glory to the First God, Glory to the Black Madonna, Bitch-Mother of a thousand young!” Ambrose wailed as he wept tears of blood.
She smiled and spoke with a voice that heralded the death of saints and suns.
“Rise,” she said. “We are ready to begin the end.”
The Hermit
The sun was low in the west; fading gold filtered through the high sacaton grass that brushed the tips of Jim’s shoes, in the saddle, and tickled Promise’s flank. The grass bowed in the cooling wind that heralded the coming of night to the desert.
Jim was never a Holy Roller, none of his family was, especially not Pa, but as he watched the light move across the plain he felt connected to something, something good and gentle and loving, something that didn’t speak much, ’cause the message might get lost in the noise.
Jim let Promise graze while he watched the desert bury the sun. He rubbed her neck gently.
“Don’t worry, girl; we’re not going back out there again. You earned your rest.”
In the few days since their arrival in Golgotha, Promise had made a remarkable recovery. Food, water and the ministrations of Clay and Jim had done wonders for her hurt leg. This was the first time he had ridden her since they were in the 40-Mile Desert, and she had handled it with no apparent pain. The little mare seemed happy to be with her boy again.
“This place is a good home, isn’t it, girl?” he said. “Folks here don’t know us, don’t know what I’ve done, but they took us in. Treated us like kin. I like it here, Promise. I’m going to hate to have to leave.”
The horse snorted. She had had her fill of the bitter desert grass. Jim turned her back toward Clay’s livery. He could barely make out the rough split-rail fence that surrounded the property.
Clay’s place was at the end of Pratt Road, next to an old Indian graveyard that Mutt said had been here for a long time before the town. As far as anyone knew, the only white folk buried in there were some distant members of the Bick family, who came out here seeking their fortunes decades before the Mormons had made the crossing.
Jim stopped Promise at the entrance to the stable. He heard the clatter of wagon wheels and saw Mutt heading back toward town in an empty buckboard carriage. He urged Promise to catch up to the wagon with a click of his tongue and flap of the reins. The wind felt good in his face and Promise was eager to gallop for a bit. They caught up, slowed and then paced the wagon as it crossed Old Stone Road, headed for Prosperity Street.
“Mutt!” Jim called.
The deputy nodded. “Hunk of horseflesh looks a damn sight better than the last time I saw her,” he said. “Good work, Jim.”
“Promise did all the work,” Jim said. “She’s tougher than she looks.”
“I imagine she is.”
“What you doing out here, Mutt?”
“Dropping off Stapleton’s body for Clay to take a gander at. I was going to stay, but Harry Pratt is waking snakes about one of his wives not coming home last night, so me and Jonathan gotta go hunting for her.”
“You don’t sound too worried.”
“I ain’t. If I had to live with Harry, I’d run off every now and then too.”
He stopped the wagon. “Why don’t you let me know what Clay finds out, okay? You can tell us tomorrow morning at the jail.”
“Will do,” Jim said. He spun Promise back toward Clay’s and they galloped up the road.
He led Promise to her stall, removed her saddle, dried her down, gave her fresh water and then brushed her. She enjoyed the attention from Jim and nuzzled his neck with her dark, wet nose.
“Okay, okay, cut it out,” he said. “You’re tickling!”
He held her head, scratched her between her ears and breathed in her musky smell. He felt a pang of homesickness crawl up on him.
“I was so worried about you, girl. I’m glad you’re better.”
By the time Jim walked out of the stables, the stars were out and it had cooled off considerably. Across from the stables was another large, barn-like structure Clay called his tinkering place. Jim saw lantern light through the window an
d walked over. The big wooden doors were open and Jim saw Clay inside, scratching his chin while he looked at something on the big, flat table in front of him. A white sheet, spattered with something dark in the feeble lantern’s light, covered it.
Clay seemed deep in thought. He suddenly looked up, like he had been struck with a notion, and noticed Jim standing in the doorway.
“Come on in, boy,” he said. “You can help me git the lights workin’.”
There was a byzantine arrangement of enameled glass globes lying on the floor, near the examination table. Each globe was loaded with a pair of charcoal rods, which Clay carefully inserted vertically into an iron frame, inside the glass globe.
“What is this thing?” Jim asked.
“Called an arc lamp,” Clay said.
The mechanism was connected by braided metal wires to another globe with an identical arrangement. There were six globes in all, mounted around the circumference of an old iron wagon wheel. The whole affair reminded Jim of a chandelier.
At the center of the wheel was a large rope that was threaded though a block and tackle mounted to a ceiling beam above the table. Clay and Jim, together, pulled the wheel up until it was suspended about seven feet above the table.
“Careful,” Clay whispered as he struggled to pull it off the ground. “If anything is knocked loose, we’ll have to pull it down and it will take half the night to fix it.”
“This some kind of lantern, Clay?”
“Kind of sums it up, Jim,” he said as he strained to pull the wheel higher. “Real powerful one too. English fella named Davy came up with the idea about sixty years ago, but they haven’t had good enough dynamos around to power ’em till lately. Fella named Gramme has been working on some interesting ideas to generate electricity. He’s pretty close to what I came up with here. See, you send electricity between the rods and you keep them at just the right distance and it produces light. Bright light. If you don’t do all that just right, though, the fool thing just blows up, stinks up the place and make a mess.”
“You made all this, Clay?” Jim asked as he dug in his heels and held the chain. Clay anchored the chain to large iron hook mounted on the wall.
“Yup. Wrote Davy a few times when I was puzzling it out to ask some questions, Gramme too. Hell, Gramme even wrote me back asking me about my dynamo. Nice fella.”
They both let go of the chain. The wagon wheel groaned and swung gently. A little dust fell from the eaves. The rocking slowed and then stopped. Clay fastidiously examined the wires running down from the hanging contraption, leading back to an ominous-looking device made of wood, wire spools and metal connected to a large hand crank. He connected a few wires to posts. He began turning the crank, gently at first but then with greater ferocity. There was a soft metallic whining sound as he turned it. The whine was gradually drowned out by a humming. Sparks whip-cracked from the contraption and made Jim jump. Clay kept cranking.
The air smelled funny, like the way it smelled after a thunderstorm. Jim saw Clay’s white mane of hair rise up on his scalp and felt a tickle across his skin, like ants crawling. There was another cascade of cracks and pops, and blue-white sparks rained down on Stapleton’s body. There was the smell of smoke and then the workshop was suddenly bathed in a harsh, white light. Jim looked up and saw the globes glowing; he squinted at the brightness.
Clay stopped cranking and the lights dimmed slightly but remained lit. He shaded his eyes and squinted up at the globes.
“Modern Prometheus,” he muttered. “I envy you, Jim, the world you’re going to live in. Man has just begun to harness the powers of nature.” He groaned as he rose from crouching beside the dynamo. “Mark my words, boy, you will live in a time of miracles, of wonder. Now let’s shake a leg; we only got about an hour or two before those charcoal rods burn out.”
Under the bright light, Clay pulled back the sheet. Jim stepped back in spite of himself. He had seen a dead man before but never one that had been cut open under a doctor’s knife. Stapleton’s skin looked like wax, smooth and pale and not quite real. His eyes were closed and an ugly, jagged Y-shaped incision stretched from his shoulders to his groin.
Clay sighed, his vulture features turned in a scowl. “Damn Tumblety. Man’s damn near a butcher. If he’s a doctor, I’m the Queen of Sheba.”
He knelt over the body and opened the dead man’s eyes. “Eyes are all wrong for opiate poisoning. No pinpoint pupils. Jim, back there on the workbench is a box. Bring me a scalpel out of there.”
“Like a knife?” Jim said as his eyes scanned over the table.
“Um-hum.”
The workbench was full of all manner of odd things. Many of them seemed more disturbing under the harsh light: brass clock gears and tiny springs, a spool of copper wire, a small, mummified animal paw covered in tufts of white fur. There were sealed jars filled with an oily yellowish-green substance and dark, oblong things floated in them. There were empty bullet jackets and crumpled, partially burned papers covered with illegible scrawling and crude diagrams. Some of them had drawings of a woman’s naked body, without a head.
“Clay?”
“Mmm?”
“Why do you like dead things so much?”
“The dead don’t disappoint you, boy. You know what to expect out of ’em … and they don’t talk too damn much.”
Jim found the box and carefully avoided the rusty, stained hacksaw. The small, sharp surgical knife wasn’t in much better condition. There was a frame in the box too and he fished it out. His eyes widened.
“Clay, are you a doctor? This paper you’ve got here says you attended the Medical Department of Hampden-Sydney College. Got a degree and everything.”
Clay walked over and examined the diploma.
“Why don’t you got this hanging up somewhere?” Jim asked.
“I thought about being a doctor for a spell,” Clay said, plucking the scalpel out of Jim’s hand and returning to the body. “My family all died when I was a boy. All of ’em. It was yellow jack that took ’em. Last one to go was my mother. Always stronger than she looked. It took them a week to find me out at the homestead after she passed.”
Jim watched Clay’s narrow back hunched over the body. He didn’t pause in his work as he spoke.
“How old were you?”
“Four. I thought about making a career out of medicine, but I didn’t think the right way for learned professors. I don’t see it the way they got it laid out in their fancy books.”
“How’s that?”
“Jim, remember what I said about the dead not talking too damn much.…”
“Sorry.”
Jim sat on a pile of crates and watched Clay work. Occasionally the arc lamps would sputter or snap and the lights would dim for a second. The smell of something sour drifted over the room and Jim tried to breathe through his mouth. Clay pulled things out of the body and plopped them into metal trays for closer examination. He opened the dead man’s mouth and peered inside.
“This is all wrong, Jim,” Clay finally said after what seemed like hours to Jim. “The eyes, the gums, have no discoloration; the chambers of the heart show no undue strain or damage. None of what I see here is consistent with death by opiate poisoning. Tumblety is an idiot. However…”
“So what killed Mr. Stapleton?” Jim asked.
Clay rummaged around the workbench with bloody hands until he uncovered a large hypodermic-like device with a suction bulb. He slowly slid the needle into Stapleton’s left leg. “I still think it was poison, but not an opiate, not anything I’ve ever seen before.”
He squeezed the bulb slowly and nodded as the chamber filled with an oil-like fluid.
“If my occuscope was finished, I could try to get a final image off his eye nerves,” he said. “It might still not be too late for them to hold a residual image, but I’m afraid I’m still weeks off from completion. Pity, his dead eyes might have been able to show us his killer’s face.”
Clay carefully retracted the needle.
“Clay,” Jim said. “Do you believe in haints?”
“Ghosts?” Clay looked hard at the boy. When he turned his head he reminded Jim of a barn owl regarding him with big, yellow eyes.
“I don’t cotton to the ignorance of the peasant or the arrogant certainty of the academician or the priest. I believe that at the end of breathing we stand on the shore of a great, black sea. We don’t know what lies on the other shore, but I am certain there is another shore, boy, and one day we shall cross that stygian rift, back and forth, as easily as we today cross the Atlantic. Knowledge shall be the lamp that guides our way. Knowledge, not dogma.”
Jim blinked and cocked his head. “So … you’re sayin’ you do believe in haints … right?”
Clay took the hypodermic and injected some of the black substance he had acquired from Stapleton’s body onto a glass slide.
“There are dead folks talking all around us, Jim. Tryin’ to tell us what’s on the other shore. People just won’t clamp up long enough to listen to ’em. Too blasted busy living, I suppose.”
He took a small pipette and dribbled a few drops of a clear substance from a brown bottle on the workbench onto the slide. “Why you ask?”
“Nothing, just wondern’,” the boy said.
The oily stuff on the slide began to foam violently. Clay frowned and set the slide on the workbench. He picked up the syringe.
“Damn peculiar. I’ll be right back. I need to run a few more tests on this with my equipment in the house, and I need to look at a few of my books.”
He walked out the open doors, into the cool night.
Jim sat in the old barn and listened to the snap and crack of the lights burning their way to oblivion. The shadows jumped and lengthened as the intensity of the light shifted. Stapleton lay on the table, eyes and chest wide open, perfectly still. The glass slide hissed a little as it foamed on the worktable.
“What you got to say?” Jim finally said.
The corpse was still.
“Not as mouthy as Clay, that’s for sure.”
The Six-Gun Tarot Page 19
