The Six-Gun Tarot

by R. S. Belcher

  “A room! There’s a room in the mountain!”

  The jagged incision of a passage gave way to smooth walls covered in tiny, crowded script that seemed to crawl like hungry maggots across the beams of the lanterns. The chamber was vast, stretching well past the feeble lights. The wind howled all around the huge open space and cold drafts of air raked the miners’ faces. The floor was covered with the thin, shaky symbols as well, layer after layer, circles in circles. Moore tried to not look at them too long, pulling his lantern’s beam away from the floor.

  “Steady, lads,” Deerfield said as they spread out from the narrow tunnel. He fumbled for his pistol. This place was old, older than he could fully comprehend. He could feel the press of its age seeping into his bones with the cold. This place wasn’t some fluke, some naturally occurring cave—it was hacked from the living stone long before men walked upright. Smoothed with devoted hands, working until they were bloody, age after age, generation after generation.

  One of the men near the rear of the party tried to sound out the things on the wall. He retched, suddenly and violently. Another recited the Lord’s Prayer. Someone chambered a round into a rifle

  Something moved in the infinite darkness, something without shape, without borders. There was a sound—a snake’s scales scratching, crunching across dry, dirty stone.

  “I think something is in here,” Moore whispered. “Let’s get the hell out of—”

  “Shut up, Jacob,” Deerfield muttered. He turned to Kelly. “Have your men focus their light in this direction. Keep the hoods shrouded partly. This wind will kill the lamps.”

  The sound came closer—shuffle, crunch.

  Deerfield’s pistol was slippery in his palm; he clutched it tighter—he wished he could wipe his palm on his pants, but there was no way he was lowering his lantern. He could hear Moore wheezing behind him and he wanted so badly to strike him. Fear was to be controlled, to be mastered—not wallowed in, like a sow in mud. Only a weakling and a fool put his fear on display for the world to see.

  “Steady!” Deerfield called out to the men, then to the darkness, “Who goes there! We are armed and will fire! Identify yourself!”

  The scratching, shuffling stopped.

  “I am a servant of God!” a voice in the darkness said. “I am the instrument of His will and His will shall be done. Glorious Hallelujah!”

  The voice carried more than a little of the New England Puritan in it—booming, confident, almost arrogant. As it rose in volume, it became shriller in timbre, nearly feminine. It reverberated oddly in the blustery darkness.

  “Ambrose?” Deerfield called out. “To damnation, man! Is that you?”

  An old man stepped into the buttery light. He was nude, covered in something glistening that seemed to eat the lantern’s light, shimmering. His hair and beard were also dripping in the viscous muck.

  “Is that oil?” a miner said.

  “Blood?” another voice responded.

  “Hello, Oscar, m’boy,” Ambrose said with a wet, black smile. He held a curved blade in his hand. It bore the same unknowable, slithering marks as the floor. “Jacob, it’s wonderful to see you here as well. All are welcome in the temple.”

  “Temple? What the blazes is all this, damn you!” Deerfield barked. “I have had enough of your nonsense, ‘Reverend’! Where are my men?”

  “They were never your men, Oscar,” Ambrose said as he slowly raked the blade across his wiry, muscular chest. Several of the men gasped; a few uttered prayers. The wind howled around them and the lanterns began to gutter. “We all belong to God—to the Greate Olde One Who predates time, predates matter, Who was usurped by the false god—the Demiurge. He built his sickening Heaven upon the bodies of the Lord’s fallen children, built this sick parody of a world with their bones.”

  They all sensed something gathering around them in the darkness and the miners instinctively fell together, back-to-back. Guns were brandished, cocked, leveled, trembling. Moore and Deerfield found themselves next to one another, neither able to take his eyes off the old priest. Deerfield raised his pocket gun; his hand was steady, despite the humming desire inside of him to scream and flee.

  “Stop it,” Deerfield whispered.

  “Made this earth His cage, His prison, for that which existed before death cannot die—cannot die! Cannot be destroyed, even by the God of this hollow world! Can never die! Hallelujah! Nephren-Ka, N’gai, Eibon Thasaidon, Yegg-ha, Yegg-ha, Yegg-ha! Nyogtha! He is waking! He is rising! He is almost free, Oscar, and you belong to Him—we all belong to Him! Rejoice! You shall know the glory of oblivion—the ecstasy of negation!”

  Ambrose stopped doodling in his flesh with the knife. Other figures, shuffling, appeared at the ragged edges of the lantern’s light. They walked shoulder to shoulder and their numbers were legion. The other shifts, all of them, their black eyes wept darkness, glistening, like a slug’s trail. The midnight fluid leaked from their noses, their ears, drooling from their mouths. They were full of it—a weeping mask that devoured the light.

  And Oscar could suddenly hear singing—tuneless, an idiot falsetto parroting Genesis in a language not designed for human ears. Mocking, the whine of a flute made out of a human femur rattlesnake whirred an ice-knife tune up and down his spine.

  The lost shifts shuffled forward, toward their former companions, toward the feeble illumination these men of daylight had carried into the temple.

  “All glory to the Greate Olde Wurm!” Ambrose proclaimed as the horde surged past him.

  Deerfield saw a man—he thought his name was Gill; he vaguely remembered talking to him over the camp coffeepot one morning, laughing at some inane joke—stagger toward him with his weeping face of oil, hands outstretched to his throat. Deerfield emptied the pocket gun into Gill’s face. The head exploded and the man fell. Deerfield’s hand was numb. His ears were ringing.

  There was screaming beyond the hum in his ears and more guns firing. He grabbed Jacob’s sleeve and tried to pull him along as he spun and headed for the crevasse. But several of the damned had Moore now and the large man was struggling with more fury than Deerfield could ever remember to tear loose from the mob.

  “Please for the love of God! Oscar! Help me!”

  “Hang on!” Deerfield shouted, tugging on his partner’s sleeve. He suddenly remembered the gun and let go of Moore to grab shells from his pocket.

  “No! No, damn you, Oscar! Don’t leave me!”

  Moore was screaming. Deerfield ignored it. Only a second, two hot, empty cartridges out, two cool new ones in, close the breech with a snap and eyes up and—

  Moore was gone, lost to the darkness. Even his scream was lost over the frenzied sounds of struggle.

  Another one of the things lurched toward Deerfield. Oscar shot, emptying both barrels of the gun into the miner’s chest. It staggered backward from the blast, then righted itself, and began moving toward him again.

  There was a screaming in Deerfield’s brain, like a kettle left on the stove. Over the sounds of gunfire, of miners crying, praying, begging and cursing, was the maniacal laughter of the old man. The alien falsetto, the bone flute.

  Deerfield ran, ran like an animal. No thought, no plan, just run and live. He stumbled over the bodies of dead miners. He scrambled to his feet, hands clutching at his coat, at his hair, his arms. He screamed and ran into the darkness. He didn’t remember where he found the lantern, or how he thought to use it to make his way thorough the narrow, ripping, cutting tunnels. The dizzying darkness yawned all about him, and whenever he would pause to gulp a lungful of sweet, sweet air he would feel rough, awkward hands clawing at his back. So he ran, and fell and stumbled to his feet and ran some more.

  Then he saw the dull gray daylight cutting a square out of the mine’s darkness. He staggered into the ashen pre-dawn gloom. Where were the guards? They had left guards. No matter. He dropped the lantern and ran, ran past the horses, ran past the wagons, ran through the gates of the mine compound and ran until he rea
ched the squatter camp.

  The camp was still quiet and still. The tent flaps drawn against the desert night’s cold, last night’s cook fire a mass of blackened rocks and soot. No one was up yet, but maybe at the Mother Lode they would still be up. There he could find help, find someone to help him off the mountain, away from this damned place.

  He looked down Argent at the slumbering town below. They had no idea what their homesteads were huddled up against. No idea what was coming down the mountain to gobble them up.

  Gobble, gobble.

  The porch in front of the Mother Lode was vacant. No drunks sleeping off the night’s adventures, no old men without a place to go Deerfield could never recall it being that way. He pushed through the blanket-door into the smoky, musty interior. The bar was full; a row of backs greeted him as he staggered toward the bar.

  “Listen to me; listen! We’ve got to go get the sheriff, right now! There are things, things under the mountain, in the mine! I’m not crazy! We have to—”

  The men at the bar turned in unison. He was greeted by a row of faces bleeding night. Behind him was a rustle as the curtain was pushed aside.

  The mine, the camp, the town. Gobble, gobble.

  A large hand came to rest on Deerfield’s shoulder. It was Moore’s. The fingers were thick and caked in blood and something infinitely darker.

  Deerfield wished he hadn’t lost the gun, wished he still had a bullet in it for himself, a final act of stubborn defiance.

  After a time, he no longer desired the gun.

  The Ace of Swords

  Jon Highfather opened his eyes. It was morning and the bullet was waiting for him. It was on the bedside table. He had laid it out the night before, like he always did. He sat up in the bed and picked up the bullet.

  He took a moment to study it, as he often did as he knocked sleep loose from his mind. He had begun the ritual in the whiskey-soaked months following Saltville. It stuck. The closest he had ever come to using the bullet was a few years back.

  It had been a short time after he had come to Golgotha and been drafted into the job of sheriff. The last sheriff managed to get himself hollowed out, filled with sawdust and sewed back up again—it was a long story. Highfather had met someone during that mess; her name was Eden. She died. They always died. He had almost used the bullet afterward.

  Highfather swung his legs over the side of the bed and touched the cold wood floor. He slept naked. His body was a map of violent topography—the puckered pale hills of old bullet holes, the ugly raised, forking rivers of knife wounds, the wastelands of old burns, of the lash, of claws and bites and, of course, the coiled scars of the ropes superimposed over his neck three times, like rutted roads leading back upon themselves.

  He sniffed, coughed a few times. He looked over to the bedside table. His star lay there, always next to the bullet. He stood up, pushed his memories into the dark hole they leaked out of each morning.

  There was something, something moving silently through Golgotha like a poisonous rumor. It lurked in the narrow, muddy streets, and in the shadows of the temples and the churches. It had no name, but Highfather marked it—the same feeling that had come over him when Earl Gibson had gone mad and tried to kill Auggie.

  Highfather’s family had all been farmers before him and his brother, Larson. His father was born to it. He was able to sniff the crisp pre-dawn air and know what was coming out of the sky that day—storm or snow, drought or flood. Jon knew Golgotha as well as his father had known the fields and he sensed the fundamental wrongness. It wasn’t the first time he’d had this feeling since becoming sheriff of this odd little town. Almost every time he had it, people died, badly. Like Eden, like Old Mike, like Larson.

  The memories threatened to choke him, drag him down into a place of old regrets, old, dull pain—the kind that can be endured but never, ever healed.

  He splashed cold water on his face from the basin, said good-bye to the ghosts for another day, stuffing them back into their hole. He got dressed, put the bullet away and got on with the day.

  As he rode from his small shack, off of Absalom Road, to the jail, he always did a slow ride-through of the town to see what was what. The streets were not as crowded or as bustling as they should have been for the morning. He noticed several shops shuttered and dark along Main Street. A pack of Johnnymen walked quickly by, clustered closely together, staring at him with hooded, almost accusing, eyes. He nodded curtly to the party, who ignored the gesture and continued on their way.

  He stopped and talked with Toby Mantle for a few minutes outside the First Golgotha Bank. Toby was a cowpuncher for the Circle-Star Ranch, out past Carson. He was a slender black man with an ugly pink scar running down the right side of his face, his remembrance from the war.

  “What do you know good, Toby?” Jon asked as he sidled his horse up next to Mantle’s.

  “Getting hard to find a banker around these parts,” Toby said. “You-all had one killed the other night, and today the one I was supposed to meet with is home sick.”

  “Clement isn’t in?” Highfather said. “That’s damn odd.”

  “Everything about this town of yours is odd, Jon,” Toby said, offering Highfather a pouch of chaw. The sheriff declined and the cowboy stuffed his cheek with the tobacco. “Pretty much always been that way, ain’t it?”

  “Yeah,” Highfather said, “but there’s odd and then there is damned odd.”

  At the edge of Main Street, he cut past the old dry well, down the short, narrow road that took its name from it, and arrived at the jail. He tied his horse out front, unlocked the door and went in to check on Earl.

  The old man was sleeping fitfully in one of the rear cells. Highfather figured that Judge Kane would be here next week and they could get the matter of Earl’s assault on Auggie Shultz out of the way then. They used to have a judge of their own here in town, but he went missing about a year or two ago. Only a few people knew what happened to him. Jon wished he wasn’t one of them.

  “Coming,” the old man muttered with dry, cracked lips. “It’s coming for us.” Earl groaned, rolled over and started snoring.

  Highfather fell into the routine of the job. He wrote a few brief correspondences: one to the U.S. Marshals over in Virginia City, another to his parents and one to an old friend in Richmond. He cleaned and oiled the collection of rifles, scatterguns and pistols that were caged in iron bars behind his desk. He also made sure the other objects locked in the gun cage—wooden stakes, silver bullets, various Indian and Chinese charms and amulets, a crucifix and several vials of holy water, blessed by the Holy Father himself all the way from Rome—were all in equally good condition.

  During all this a few of the towns folk came by to visit. The Widow Proctor brought him by a pot of hot coffee, some oatmeal with apple peel and a hunk of sourdough bread and butter for breakfast. Gillian seemed a little fancier in her appearance today than usual, and when Jon complimented her she blushed. He figured what he had heard about her and Auggie must have some truth to it.

  A few others dropped by with disputes, or legal questions. Doug Stack made his weekly appearance to complain about his neighbor Clancy Gower’s goat getting onto Doug’s property. Ulysses Comb came by to get his pistol back after tying on a good one last week at the Paradise Falls. Jon had had to take the gun away from him and lock him up for a few days for the trouble.

  Jon sat on the porch rail outside the jail, the wanted posters flapping and snapping behind him in the warm mid-day wind. Mutt wasn’t back yet from the We’lmelti camps and that made him uneasy. He knew Mutt could handle pretty much anything that got in his way. Still, he worried.

  At high noon Highfather rode out to check on the salt circle. It was located in the old graveyard about a half mile east of Clay Turlough’s place. His horse, Bright, which had charged into raging gun battles at full gallop with no hesitation, shuffled nervously at the edge of the boneyard. Bright never set foot on the weed-choked land; no animal ever did.

  Th
e graveyard was older than the town. No one knew exactly how old. It was bordered by a small, crooked wooden fence. The single entrance was a broken gate, hanging on a single rusted hinge. Uneven tombstones, worn featureless by the desert’s wind and sand, jutted out of red dirt at odd angles, like jagged, fractured teeth.

  Highfather patted Bright’s neck, dismounted and fished the bag of rock salt out of his saddlebag. He walked gingerly across the yard, careful to navigate the haphazard arrangement of graves.

  He had learned about the salt circle and its care shortly after becoming sheriff. Something began killing and draining animals in Golgotha. It began with dogs and coyotes, even rats and chickens; soon cows, goats and horses were being found each morning—empty, wrinkled sacks of flesh—no blood, no water, not a drop of anything wet.

  Soon everyone in town began to hear the droning hum at night, the frantic scratches at the windows and doors. Two women in Golgotha miscarried after hearing the hum. Then there was the first human victim, a nine-year-old boy named Cole Glen, whose parents left the window cracked on a very hot, black August night. Highfather saw the boy—his sunken, wrinkled face, the dark pits where his eyes had once been. The puckered O of his mouth dried into a mask of horror. Highfather visited Cole Glen every night when he closed his eyes.

  That was when the note came to him, slipped under the door of the jail. It was on very old parchment. The handwriting was spidery—thin and shaky. Some of the words were spelled in the British fashion. The note gave him the directions to the old graveyard and the exact location of the circle.

  Mend the circle, it said. Bring salt, nothing else will hold it. Do it before dark or there will be another death.

  So Highfather rode out, just as he had done today, and brought salt, just like he carried now, all these years later, and he renewed the old salt circle, worn away by wind and rain, around a particular nameless old grave, just like he did now. And the killings stopped; the humming stopped. Everything went back to normal.