by Pratt, Tim
The Spirit cocked its head. “Lawman's coming,” it remarked. The wind screamed, and the wooden buildings creaked dangerously. “Let's go kill him."
The Spirit whipped the mount's reins and galloped toward the outskirts of town, leaping over the stacked dead, and Kentucky Tom Granger followed.
Tom reined in his horse under a wooden arch with a steer skull nailed to the crossbeam. The Spirit stopped a little farther on, its mount walking back and forth beyond the edge of town. Tom had entered Tolerance through that same arch this morning, and didn't want to leave again unless he had to.
“Your horse is dead, Tom,” Cos said.
Tom jerked, and his horse danced a few feet sideways. Cos leaned against a rain barrel. Poor old cuss, Tom thought. He stays close to water as best he can. “I noticed."
“See that dust storm?"
Tom looked toward the horizon, where a hazy curtain hung. “Yep."
“That's the Lawman and his ghost-posse. Better shine up your badges if you want to scare them. I hear the Earps are riding with him."
Tom frowned. “Morgan? He's the only one who died."
“Virgil, too ... or at least part of him. His ruined arm, maybe. And Wyatt."
“But Wyatt's not dead!” Tom protested.
Cos rolled a cigarette, his seven fingers flying. “No, but he isn't a marshal any more. His career as a peacekeeper is dead ... and the ghost of that career is on its way. Ghosts ride with the Lawman, but so do memories, and fragments. They're drawn to him, to his big shiny badge, like moths to a candle.” Cos licked his cigarette closed and tossed it to Tom, who caught it without thinking. “The condemned man gets a last smoke,” Cos said.
“I can't decide if I like you,” Tom said, tucking the cigarette into his shirt pocket. “But I thank you. I'll smoke it after we kill the Lawman."
Cos nodded. “I don't know if I like you, either. I'm going back to the Trail Blossom. I'll leave town when the buildings blow over ... or I'll wait to congratulate you.” He walked over and stuck out his hand. Tom leaned from horseback and shook with him, once. His fingers came away moist. Cos walked back toward the center of town, whistling.
“Tom!” the Spirit said, and Tom kicked his horse forward without even thinking, drawing up along side the towering Spirit.
Figures resolved out of the dust, one clearly in the lead, leaning forward in his saddle. Riding a white horse, Tom thought. Figures.
“Stand true, partner,” the Spirit drawled.
The Lawman stopped in a cloud of dust. His posse hung back. Tom's head hurt when he tried to count them. He saw Wyatt Earp, mustache drooping, and Texas John Slaughter, and a few other faces familiar from pictures. Faces familiar from life, too, several belonging to men Tom had killed. None of them wore badges. Some lacked arms, or legs, or eyes, and all of them flickered, as if they had no substance of their own, only bodies drawn from dust and animated by justice.
The Lawman was solid, though, built on the same larger-than-life scale as the Spirit. His clear blue eyes regarded the Spirit coldly. Not a speck of dirt marred his clothes, and his blond hair looked perfectly combed. The gold star pinned on his vest shone like the sun. He chilled Tom's blood, then boiled it. That's the one, Tom thought. The one who broke the west, come to finish the job.
“No place for the law here,” the Spirit said.
“The Law makes its own place,” the Lawman said. “We're taking you in, or taking you down. Your choice."
The Spirit didn't reply, but for a moment, Tom saw through its dirty cowboy gear, to something fundamental. Something red, made of leaping flames. Something with scorpions for fingers and a face made of smoke. Tom felt chilled, and remembered Cosmocrator saying I sided with a djinn named Shaitan.
But Kentucky Tom Granger had cast his lot, and he wouldn't change his bet at the last minute.
Tom threw back his coat to show off his badges. He didn't know why, exactly; just seemed like it might piss the Lawman off. The Lawman didn't appear to notice, only kept staring at the Spirit, as if they were having a showdown Tom couldn't understand.
The posse, however, became agitated. They looked at one another, and at the Lawman, and back at Tom. A few of them nudged their horses forward, uncertainly.
Tom laughed out loud, and the Lawman jerked in his saddle, noticing him for the first time. Men like that hate the sound of laughing, Tom thought, and laughed harder. He touched his Texas Ranger's badge. “Come on, boys!” he shouted. “You're backing the wrong man!” A few of the ghosts and fragments moved away from the rest, hesitating. He didn't expect the ghosts to believe him, but he'd certainly confused them. If the Lawman's shiny badge attracted them, then Tom's could, too. “Sure, he's got a Godalmighty big badge, but I've got lots of badges! I'm the Lawman here!"
Now the Spirit laughed, a dirty chuckle. A laugh with the pox, Tom thought, which made him laugh all the harder.
The Lawman growled and went for his gun, a shiny Colt with gold and ivory grips. Tom knew he couldn't outdraw him. He didn't try. He whipped the razor-strop from around his neck and smacked the Lawman's oversized hand with it. Tom shouldn't have been fast enough, but he was. Maybe the strop's bloody origin gave it power, or maybe the Spirit lent Tom some extra speed. Either way, the Lawman's shot, aimed for Tom's chest, went wild. The Lawman dropped his gun and yelped. Just like whipping a kid with a belt, Tom thought, pleased.
The Lawman stared at Tom, stunned, and then looked at his bleeding hand.
“About to shoot me in cold blood!” Tom shouted. “Didn't even give me a chance to surrender! What kind of Lawman is that?"
Several of the posse turned their horses and galloped away, dissolving to dust before they got far. A few others moved forward, as if planning to stand with Tom.
“Enough of this shit.” The Lawman dipped for his other gun.
The Spirit drew first.
Tom saw the bullet fly, really saw it, moving slow as a gliding hawk. The bullet writhed like a scorpion, a stinger lashing from one end, venomous fangs sliding out of the other. The living bullet smashed into the Lawman's startled face.
The Lawman's hat fell off. A moment later, he tumbled from his horse. The Lawman's hand twitched as if still reaching for his gun.
“Cheap shot,” the Spirit said. “I had to take it."
The remaining members of the posse (among them the scarred Texas Ranger Tom had barely killed outside Amarillo) opened fire on the Spirit. Tom's horse screamed and buckled under him, and Tom fell to the dirt, hard. He cracked his head on the hardpacked ground, and all the wind whooshed out of him. I'm hit, I'm hit, he thought wildly, but nothing hurt except his back and his head.
The Spirit fell, too, along with its barbed-wire-and-mud horse. The bullets pounded into the Spirit, making its huge body jerk like a strip of bacon frying, but none of the bullets hit Tom. The posse didn't aim for him, or else their ghost bullets were fit only for killing a djinn.
The posse blew away, dissolving to dust, their pistol shots fading, eventually sounding like nothing more than distant echoes.
Tom's looked at the Spirit's unmoving body, then lowered his pounding head. Goddamn, he thought, and passed out.
Tom opened his eyes and saw Cosmocrator's face, thin lips, scummy green eyes, and gleaming seashell teeth. “You alive?” Cos said. “Guess so. I wanted to bring you some water, but...” He shrugged. “Shit. You know.” He shook a bottle of whiskey over Tom's face. “Want to drink this now?"
“Sure,” Tom croaked, and sat up. He drank from the bottle, the whiskey burning his throat but exploding to warmth in his belly.
“They killed the Spirit,” Cos said.
Tom looked at the pile of mud and filthy clothes, all that remained of the Spirit of the bleeding west. “But we got the Lawman."
Cos laughed, a little nervously. “Tolerance is still here. The buildings didn't fall down. I guess...” He swallowed. “I guess you're the big gun around here now.” Cos looked over his shoulder. “There's people riding around ou
tside town ... or maybe ghosts. I got a good look at one, he had a white scar on his cheek.” Cos drew a finger down his face to illustrate.
Tom put the bottle aside and crawled to where the Lawman had fallen. The body was gone, but his gold star still glittered in the sand. Tom picked it up. The badge felt warm in his hand.
Tom pinned it to his vest, right above the Ranger's badge. He fished the cigarette out of his shirt pocket and stuck it in his mouth. “Bring ‘em on,” he said. He clapped Cosmocrator on the shoulder. “Like you said. It wouldn't be the west without a showdown."
Sharing the bottle, they walked back to the Trail Blossom.
Behemoth
I answered the doorbell. A punk stood on my front porch, silver fish-hooks glinting in his nose and earlobes. He wore colored contact lenses, one eye yellow as piss, the other black. Dirt caked his undershirt and torn corduroys.
“Selling girl scout cookies?” I asked, trying to smile, hoping he didn't want to kill me for my pension check.
He shifted from foot to foot nervously, and I wondered what drugs he'd taken that day. Something that made him jittery. “Are you Adonis Sinclair?” he asked.
I looked at him, thinking: It can't be. “Harry. Harry Sinclair. I go by my middle name. Mom had high hopes for my looks."
He didn't smile. “You have to come with us, Mr. Sinclair."
I looked past him to the street and saw a beat-to-shit gray sedan idling on the curb, spattered with mud up to the windows. “Why's that?"
He answered with a question, his voice hoarse. “Did you really do it? Find him, all those years ago, and start the Order?"
“The Order?"
“The Order of Watchful Vigilance."
I didn't laugh, though I wanted to. It's impolite to laugh at someone's religion. Dean came up with that name, I thought. “I guess I did. I never called it that, and neither did Dean, when I knew him, but I imagine we're talking about the same thing."
“Dean didn't think we'd find you,” the boy said.
“He's still around, then.” I hadn't seen Dean in almost fifty years. “I'm glad to hear that. We were best friends, a long time ago."
“We need you to come, Mr. Sinclair."
I leaned against the doorjamb. I didn't want him to see me shaking. “I'm old, son. I'm not inclined to take any long trips."
“He's moving,” the boy whispered.
I shrugged. “He moves. Not often, but sometimes."
The boy shook his head. “No, he's moving. Walking around. And he asked for you, Mr. Sinclair. How do you think we found you? He told us where you were. Showed us in a vision."
“Moving.” I licked my lips. It's hard to believe, I know, but I hadn't thought about Behemoth in years. Hadn't seen him, either, not since the last time I saw Dean. “Did he say where he planned on going?"
The boy squirmed. “In the dream we saw something. Like a snake, but bigger. And beautiful.” He swallowed. “And dying, scales flaking off into the water, showing bone."
“Oh, shit,” I said. “Let's go."
Me and Dean found Behemoth when we were ten and eleven years old, respectively. We lived in a little nothing Georgia town called Pomegranate Grove. We spent a lot of time raising hell in the woods outside town, whooping like Indians, playing at war, creeping through the brambles like jungle explorers. We never discovered the limits of the woods, but they extended farther than they should have. I'm not talking about any funny business with time and space, just that people owned title to wooded land they should have cleared, good land they could have used for farming or development, but instead left wild. Behemoth's woods are special, maybe even sacred, and people just ... overlook the real estate possibilities, I guess. I got curious a few dozen years back, after I received a barely legible postcard from Dean about the new acolytes, and tracked down some satellite photos of Georgia.
That huge swath of untouched forest shows up perfectly clear on satellite photos, and it's even bigger than I imagined. I don't remember the exact dimensions, but it's big enough for a dozen people and Behemoth to live in, undiscovered, forever. I doubt anyone will clear the forest, not as long as the (potentially) largest land animal in the history of the world resides there.
Me and Dean finally convinced our parents to let us go camping for three days. Our Dads gave permission, despite our Moms’ protests. Both our fathers loved the woods. They went deer hunting together, and they taught us a fair bit of woodcraft. Two days into our trip, deeper in the woods than we (and probably any human) had ever penetrated, we found Behemoth.
We made camp against his side. Behemoth hadn't moved in decades, maybe centuries, and moss and lichen grew all over his body. His side looked like a gray mound of rock, and that evening I leaned back against him. Behemoth breathes about twelve times a day, and his heart beats even less frequently, so I didn't notice any unusual vibrations. We probably never would have realized what we'd found if Dean hadn't tried to carve his initials into the “rock” with his pocketknife.
He didn't make a mark, and he scratched harder, and still no mark, so he held the blade like an icepick and jammed it in. Even back then Dean never gave up, no matter how trivial the challenge before him.
Behemoth didn't roar or jump or anything like that. If he had, we would have run, and things would have been different for me and Dean. Instead, Behemoth simply rose on his elephant legs and bear's-paw feet and swung his ivy-covered crocodile head toward us.
I froze, because that's what you're supposed to do when a rhinoceros gets angry at you, and I wanted to believe Behemoth was a rhinoceros, or something similar.
Dean, on the other hand, screamed and fell over.
Behemoth spoke to us, but not with words. He spoke into our minds, with pictures and blurry strange imaginings that somehow conveyed this: Be peaceful. Don't fear. Don't run.
My heartbeat slowed. Dean picked up his knife, looked at it, looked at Behemoth (even then, at his smallest, twelve feet high and twenty feet long), and folded the blade shut.
“Hi there,” I said. “I'm Harry."
Adonis, Behemoth thought.I saw an image from the myth, the part where the boar gores Adonis, fatally wounding him. Red flowers sprang from the spilled blood.
Okay, I thought. I'll be Adonis, much as I hated the name. The 600-pound gorilla can call me whatever he wants.
“I'm Dean Mather,” Dean said. Behemoth thought of a man in pilgrim garb, and women hanging from a gallows. Years later I realized he was thinking of Cotton Mather, the witch-hunter. Behemoth has a peculiar sort of awareness.
He didn't send Dean the image of the witch hunter, and I knew he didn't show him the next image, either: Dean as a frolicking, bumbling jester, wearing cap-and-bells and ugly yellow leggings. Understand, Behemoth's thought wasn't cruel—I even sensed affection in the image, but also brutal dismissal. You can laugh at the clown, and even like him, but you don't trust him with anything important. You don't love him.
Sit down boys, Behemoth suggested, showing an image of us around a small fire, with me and Dean laughing.
Sit down, he said without words, and I'll tell you about an apocalypse deferred, and about the only one I love in all the world.
The acolytes drove all night and into the next day, down new interstates toward the old town of Pomegranate Grove, Georgia. I didn't have to notify anyone about my trip. I'd been moldering in retirement for five years, and there hadn't been any family for a long time. Not since I lost my wife, two years after we got married. She didn't die—I just lost her. Lost. I make it sound like a set of keys that got misplaced. It would be truer to say that I threw her away, like someone might accidentally toss a winning lottery ticket into the trash.
The punk drove for a while, then the dreadlocked hippie. He offered me some marijuana, but I turned him down. I've never tried the stuff. I had a steady job during the Summer of Love, and even then I was too old to be trusted. The willowy-pretty girl in the back seat with me never spoke, not once, but she looked at me with
flat-out adoration. If I'd been even thirty years younger, and the type to take advantage ... Well, I wasn't, on either count, so I didn't think about it. At my age, that's not as difficult as it used to be. The car slowly filled with the reek of pot, too many bodies, and bad fast food.
We reached Pomegranate Grove at first light. My kidneys throbbed like rotten teeth. The kids stopped to let me pee every couple hours, but the nonstop driving played hell with my body. It interrupted my sleep cycle, too. I snapped at the kids and sat sullenly as the pines and fields flowed by. Just inside the Georgia border, it hit me. We were going to see Behemoth, the friend I had abandoned for a woman, but who still loved me enough to call me back in his time of need. That thought sobered me some, and broke my bad temper. I didn't feel any better, really, but I realized how petty it was to bitch at these kids when Behemoth certainly felt much, much worse.
We passed through Pomegranate Grove, past different stores on the same old streets, and then drove into the woods.
Right into them. I screamed and put my arms over my face, sure we'd hit a tree, and the girl patted me on the leg reassuringly. I uncovered my face and looked. A path opened before us, as smooth as any well-graded dirt road can be, winding ever deeper into the trees. I wondered if the road always existed, and people simply overlooked it, or if Behemoth created the road when we needed it.
We drove into a large clearing, a space filled mostly with Behemoth's reclining body.
I got out of the car and took a hesitant step forward. I'd forgotten the smells. Mainly the pine of the woods, but under it all the earthy scent of Behemoth himself, a smell like wet red clay. Behemoth looked smaller than I remembered, and I wondered if I suffered from an enlarged perception of the past, or if he had actually lost stature over the years.
“Behemoth,” I said. His head, part crocodile, part elephant, part the rest of the menagerie, swung toward me.
Adonis, he said, again with the image of the beautiful youth facing off against the boar.
I thought about Aphrodite, the goddess of beauty, and how she'd loved Adonis. She never truly loved anyone else.
