by Tim Lebbon
I looked around, missing someone, knowing that I should not have been alone but taking several precious, innocent seconds to remember who had been here when I was last awake. And then I remembered Gabriel battered down into the mud, the demon Temple raging and roaring as he slashed and tore at his hunter’s body, and I looked around for Gabriel’s corpse. For some reason I did not expect to find it—my memory of the last couple of days was of strangeness, impossibilities, things that should not be—but when I caught sight of the coat buried in the mud I knew that it would contain Gabriel’s cooling corpse.
“Oh, no,” I said, more because Temple was still alive than because the one-eyed man was dead. I crawled across the ground, hands cracking the hardened surface and sinking down into still-moist mud. And as I reached the body and saw that he had been driven down deep, saw the blood and scraps of ruptured flesh scattered around, saw his face turned sideways, his empty eye socket staring at the sun, it dawned on me for the first time that Temple had left me alive.
The main street was not as busy as it should have been. A couple of prospectors wandered around, mourning another empty day. They glanced at me and away again when they saw the wounds, the blood sticking my clothes to my skin. One gash on my back had opened and I felt the coolness of blood running down my legs, leaving a speckled trace on the ground behind me. I moved slowly, keeping a lookout for shadows that might have been Temple, a stranger watching me from across the street, anything that could have been that demon in one of his guises.
A dog trotted by and glanced up at me, snuffling and hurrying on as if I stank of death. I leaned against the front of the hotel and heat soaked into me from the timber cladding, soothing aches, carrying pain away. I could stay here in the sun forever, letting its gentle glow calm the violence of my wounds. Dizziness threatened to spill me to the sidewalk so I opened my eyes and stood upright again . . . and then I remembered Jack. Poor weak Jack, no trouble to anyone but himself, and now he was in the most terrible danger. . . .
It was already midafternoon. I must have been unconscious behind the hotel for eight hours; long enough certainly for the ground to dry around me. Temple had been gone for that long, and whatever he had come to Deadwood to do must surely be over now.
The streets were all but silent.
He’s killed so often before, Gabriel had said, but now he’s changed his approach. Now he does it for pay. Death on commission.
Where had everybody gone?
Another dog passed by and I could not help checking its muzzle for blood. Surely one man could never kill a whole town, monster or not? Surely there were those here that could stop him? But then I remembered the flashes of gunshots that morning as Gabriel emptied his revolver into Temple, and then Temple’s wink at me as he stood and faced Gabriel down once more.
I stumbled on, quickening my pace, eager to find evidence of life and not death. I walked through pain but fear almost stopped me in my tracks.
I did not have far to go. As I drew close to the saloon I became aware of the sounds of rustling and movement, the unmistakable noise of a crowd trying to remain silent. I tried to quiet my footfalls. Behind me, bloody footsteps marked my route along the sidewalk, the blood smeared where I had shuffled and leaned against walls for support. I slumped down and crawled the final few steps on my hands and knees, kneeling at the last moment to look in the saloon window.
The place was full. Farmhands and prospectors, townsfolk and strangers, and all of them seemed to be looking in the same direction. I followed their gaze and tried to make out what was so special about the four men playing cards.
And then I realised: One of them was Wild Bill Hickok. Killed a bear with his bare hands, so it was said. Killed five men with one bullet. To me he looked like just another gambler. A bit more refined than most, perhaps—although the riverboat captain sitting across from him would surely win in the best-dressed stakes—and more confident in his movements, but a gambler nonetheless. A bottle of whiskey sat by his side. He had his back to the door. And everyone in Nuttall & Mann’s No. 10 saloon was fascinated by this famous gunslinger.
I searched the faces for Jack but I could not see him. I looked for Temple as well, but perhaps he had gone. Maybe it was over now that Gabriel was dead. I turned and looked up at the sun and prayed that to be the case.
“Need to borrow this, Doug,” Jack whispered. He grabbed me from behind, slipped his hand inside my bloodied jacket and pulled out my single-shot pistol. The sun blinded me to his face but I already knew the truth. I could hear it in his voice.
“You’re not Jack.”
He moved his head to shield the sun so that I could see his eyes, and he smiled. He looked like Jack, but I knew I was right, and he confirmed it by leaning forward and whispering into my ear: “Wouldn’t want to be that poor boy right now.” And then he marched into the saloon.
I knew instantly why he was here. It was not to kill Gabriel, or me, or even Jack, but someone more famous, someone who was a true challenge. I watched that demon, that Twin stride across to the men playing cards, my own pistol grasped in his right hand. I raised my hand to rap on the glass of the window, warn them, get Hickok to turn around and kill that son of a bitch! But my hand kept going—the window was open, the crowd almost completely silent—and I heard the final words that Hickok would ever hear.
“Damn you, take that,” Temple said. And then he shot the Prince of Pistoliers in the back of the head.
The man fell, a set of cards still clasped in his hand. I only caught a quick glimpse before someone snatched them away, but I knew that Hickok would have won.
Temple burst through the saloon’s swinging doors and grinned at me with my friend’s face. For an instant his skin was flushed with the heat of the kill, and then he turned and ran. I never saw him again.
I sat slumped outside the saloon and tried to absorb what I had just witnessed. As Temple had loped off along the street, casting aside all pretence of being Jack, a sense of utter sadness had flooded me. It left me drained and weakened, not only from my wounds but by the reality of the days just past, the realisation that there were far more things in the world than I could ever hope to imagine, and that many of them were very, very bad.
There was shouting inside the saloon, chairs falling over, someone crying out in pain, and then the doors burst open and several men stumbled out after Temple. One of them saw me, spun around and knelt by my side, but once he realised that my blood was dry he stood and joined in the chase without a backward glance. Only new wounds interested him at present. I might have been bleeding to death, but I was not a part of this current excitement.
People passed into and out of the saloon, almost all of them ignoring me. There was more famous blood on the floor inside, I guessed, and I could understand what drove them. “He’s dead!” someone shouted. “He’s dead and gone!” A glass smashed, a table tumbled, and I thought I heard someone else say, “Good riddance.”
The sun blasted down into my upturned eyes. I hoped that it would burn the image of Temple from my mind but he remained there still, that demon Twin that looked like Jack and other men, a face like leather Jack had said, face smooth as a baby’s Mrs. Harrison had gushed. He winked at me as I closed my eyes, or maybe it was a bird passing before the sun. I remembered Gabriel being crushed down into the ground and wondered how long it would be before someone found his corpse. He was a drifter, a stranger, and no one would mourn his passing. Not when there was much larger sport to be had.
When they caught Jack, I knew, they would hang him.
There was little I could do. Slowly, wincing with the pain, I pushed myself into a standing position. It took an hour for me to make my way cautiously along the street to my shop. Many people dashed by. None of them stopped. Wheeler hobbled past as if he had a purpose for the first time in many years. Mrs. Harrison breezed by without sparing me a glance. And when I finally reached the store’s front door, I was more than happy to fall inside and let the shadows welcome me in.
/>
Jack was there. I guess I knew he would be, and the sound of his sobbing came as no great surprise. He was down behind the counter clutching a shotgun that looked older than some of the gold mined from the hills. If he pulled the trigger it would likely explode in his face. I tried not to get too close.
“You’ve met him!” he said, looking me up and down. “He didn’t kill you!”
“He didn’t quite let me die, no,” I whispered. “Not the same thing.”
“Where is he?”
“Gone.” I sat down a few paces away from Jack.
“He can’t be. He wouldn’t!”
“What did he promise you? What did he say you could have if you just hid yourself away for a day, Jack?”
“He said I’d be a famous gunfighter,” Jack said. “Said they’d breathe my name in the same breath as John Hardin and Wild Bill Hickok.”
I sighed and rested my head back against the timber counter, closing my eyes. “Well, they might at that.”
“He can’t be gone,” Jack said.
I wondered at the things Gabriel had told me about Temple, mused on the few brief moments I had watched him in action, and I shook my head. “He hasn’t gone. He never will be. He’s just moved on somewhere different.”
“I don’t understand!”
They were going to hang him. When they found Jack they’d hang him, no questions asked. I knew that he was innocent, but really, what could I say? Just what?
“Put the gun down, Jack,” I said. “You won’t see Temple again.”
His face crumpled like a baby’s. Tears squeezed out from his screwed-up eyes and dripped onto his shirt, reminding me of the blood from Gabriel’s empty eye socket.
I could have warned him. But running would not have saved him. So I remained there with my eyes closed and tried to shut out the agonies still writhing through my body. Jack cried beside me like a kid that’s lost his dog.
It didn’t take them long. They smashed the door from its hinges kicking it open, stormed in, knocking over my wares and trampling them into the floor, hauling Jack up by his lapels and hair, snatching the shotgun from his hands and beating him around the head with its rusted barrel, kicking him when he was down, ignoring his shouts his cries his screams for mercy, dismissing his pleas to just tell him what the hell was going on!
I never opened my eyes. And after making sure I was not dead the men left me alone, dragging the screaming Jack behind them.
Eventually, somehow, I drifted off to sleep. I lay that night where Gabriel had slept before, leaning against my counter with wounds that may have imitated his own, and perhaps his nightmares had been the same as well. Dreams of failure, fear and guilt, and of not belonging anywhere anymore.
I left the store the following morning and made my way slowly back to the hotel. I was aware that Jack was probably going to be hanged that day, but I heard or saw no sign of him or his captors. The guilt bit in hard. But there was nothing I could do, and I hoped that Jack would understand. Though I knew the truth, it was not a tale that could be told.
Gabriel had gone. There was a depression in the ground as if something had hauled itself out, and a trail of crumbled, bloodied mud led away from the hotel, past the funeral parlour and out of town. Someone dragged him away to bury him, I thought. Maybe, maybe not. Either way that was the last I saw of Gabriel or Temple, the Twin.
But not the last I thought of them. They haunted me.
They haunt me still.
They didn’t hang Jack until spring of the next year.
Even through his fear and confusion, he managed to fabricate a story that got him off the hook in Deadwood. Faced with the certain knowledge that the truth could not save him, he launched into a series of lies about what had happened. He admitted the killing because there was no real alternative, but he claimed that it was in revenge for Hickok slaying his brother. And set free with this lie in his head he expanded upon it, revelling in the growing notoriety his non-crime garnered, until in the end his own misplaced arrogance proved to be his downfall. I guess in a way, that demon’s promise to him came true. I heard he was screaming as they put the noose around his neck, begging for something called Temple to come to his aid. Jack died a convicted killer, having never killed a man in his life.
What I knew could have saved him. But I took a small amount of comfort in something Gabriel said when I asked him if he was going to kill Jack.
He’s already dead.
I grew old in South Dakota. Things changed for me again and I found myself taking over from Old Man Newman, providing a service to the inhabitants of the town that could not be done without. Trouble seemed drawn to Deadwood. Business was good.
I was nothing to those men—those things—that used Deadwood as one of their battlegrounds. I knew that there was a whole world for them to fight over, and that we innocents were little more than pawns.
And yet each night before going home, I made sure that every single coffin was nailed shut.
The Assassin Book Two
Pieces of Hate
GABRIEL DREAMED of the last time he was truly alive.
After all he had been through—the exotic places, the violent encounters, the disappointments and victories—this memory should have been a bland speck in his seas of experiences. There was just him, and some trees, and the man with a snake in his eye. But the image was important, because it was the last time he could remember having any sense of excitement or hope for the future. Then he had been a man with a family; now, he was barely even a man. It stood out from all his other memories as the moment when his soul had been corrupted by three simple words:
Feed your hate.
The fallen oak was Gabriel’s favourite place. He often came here from the village, seeking time alone to think, muse on life, watch nature go by. The forest went on for hundreds of miles in every direction, and though he had seen much of it, he had never found anywhere to match this place and the atmosphere it gave him. It was a part of the forest marked by the past, and rich with it. The trees that still stood around the clearing were scarred by strange symbols and sigils, evidence of old, old magic. Beneath the fallen oak lay a smooth flat rock, split in two when the tree had dropped when Gabriel was a child. He could still remember that storm, when the greatest bursts of lightning and thunder seemed reserved for its very last breath. The moment the great tree had been struck. Some said the stone was a sacrificial altar. His wife often claimed to dream herself to the clearing at night, watch events unfold, bear witness to ghastly sacrifices. But for Gabriel it was just another leftover from old magic. It was sad and broken now, but still imbued with some ethereal power, rich from the pain that must have soaked it over the centuries. A bush grew from the moist places underneath, fat roses hanging like drops of blood always ready to fall.
Gabriel absently nudged one of the roses with his foot, and this was where his recollection froze. Every time he dreamed or summoned the memory whilst awake, this was the point at which everything changed. Perhaps it was as he noticed the man with the snake in his eye approaching through the trees.
Or maybe it was the precise moment when his family was being butchered.
The rose swayed to a halt. Gabriel looked down at his swinging feet, felt the cool moss on the old bark beneath him, and his hand crawled for the knife at his belt. A second later he looked up and understood why he was reaching for the blade.
He slid from the tree and landed beside the split rock. The knife was in his hand. The man stood at the edge of the clearing, swaying slightly as if mimicking the rosebush, inviting Gabriel to kick him as well. Gabriel was suddenly aware of his own breathing, fast and shallow with shock. Not fear, not yet. A stranger travelling through the forest was not unusual. But this stranger . . . there was something about him, something wrong, something that Gabriel had never seen before. A myth that he had only heard of in tales, whispered at night when fires kept darkness at bay.
The old man was a conjurer. Around his waist, a belt of tin
y bones. Across his shoulders, a black pelt filled with tricks and charms. And in his eyes, the look of a snake.
“Who are you?” Gabriel asked. “Do you need shelter? Food for the night? We have little, but what little we have we can share.” You’re so trusting, his wife said on those occasions when he brought a stranger home. But none of the travellers had ever given them trouble. In truth Gabriel liked listening to their stories, and if it weren’t for his family he would have once become a traveller himself. He had always known that there was more to see than trees and the spaces in between.
The man shook his head, and the light reflecting from his eyes seemed ancient. Dirty, Gabriel thought, dirty light.
That was when he smelled fire.
He glanced away from the old man and back over the fallen oak, in the direction of the village. Above the forest canopy, heavy black smoke rose lazily into the sky, as if the wood itself were bleeding to the heavens. The sight of it seemed to alert his other senses; he tasted smoke on the air, smelled burning flesh within the tang of flaming wood. And finally he heard the screams.
“No,” he said. He leaped the oak and readied himself to run through the forest.
“Too late,” the old man croaked. Gabriel was not certain whether he heard mockery or sadness in that voice.
“My family,” Gabriel said, but something made him pause and look back.
The conjurer shuffled sideways for a few paces, his movement grotesque and animalistic. He never took his gaze from Gabriel’s face. When he came within reach of an old beech tree he tapped at a sigil with his knuckles. It must have been carved into the tree centuries ago, but the old man touched it without looking, as if he had put it there himself.
