Merkabah Rider: High Planes Drifter

by Edward M. Erdelac

  “The wife don’t trust them. All the babies they delivered has died in a couple days. She thinks they got the evil eye. Please, George! She ain’t gonna wait!”

  Wager looked at The Rider, then at Behan.

  “Aw, go on, Hank,” Behan urged. “This one’ll keep till you get back.”

  Wager closed his eyes and sighed.

  “Alright, Pete, let’s go.”

  “Constable!” The Rider called as he made for the door with the brewer.

  Wager stopped and looked over his shoulder.

  The Rider pointed through the bars at the two amulets he’d made, scattered amongst the rest.

  “Those two there.” The Rider indicated. “The ones with the three names on them. Take one for the baby.”

  Wager stood there, considering.

  “Please, George!” Pete Arnold hissed from the dark.

  Wager shook his head and went out after him, leaving the door open. It was black outside.

  The Rider hung his head against the bars.

  Johnny Behan sat on the desk and looked at The Rider. He smiled and threw a thumb over his shoulder.

  “Say adios to your one chance of gettin’ outta here.”

  He picked up The Rider’s Volcanic and turned it over in the light, spinning it on his trigger finger.

  “You sure got bad taste in iron, cousin. Slappin’ silver and gold on this old thumb-buster’s like dressin’ up a pig in a wedding gown.”

  “Johnny,” The Rider whispered miserably, “you’ve got to let me out. I’ll come back in a few hours.”

  Behan laughed.

  “Sure you will.”

  “If I don’t, it’ll be because I’m dead.”

  “That’s the most tempting offer you’ve made me yet,” Behan said, still twirling the Volcanic.

  “I’m the only one that can stop this.”

  “Stop what?”

  “All the babies dying, and the dreams....”

  “Listen,” Behan said, cutting The Rider off with a wave of his hand. “You might have that poor shitkicker three quarters bunco’d, and you might have my little Sadie all set to light out with you, but from one pimp to another, you ought to know, I would just as soon burn you down for tryin’ to escape as let you out. You run a good game, buster, I’ll give you that. But no Yid ever got the best of Johnny Behan.”

  He was so pleased with himself it was almost disappointing to see the stock of the Winchester sweep up behind him and hear it crack against the side of his skull.

  Almost.

  It was Wager’s rifle, which he’d left propped against the wall beside the door. Sadie stood there holding it by the barrel as Behan crashed senseless to the floor.

  She immediately took a knee and turned him over, feeling his swelling head where she had hit him.

  “I’ve heard him like that before. There’s just no talking to him when he’s full of himself,” she explained apologetically, almost as if to Behan himself.

  “He’ll be alright?” The Rider asked, watching her look of concern with a strange tightness in his chest.

  She nodded and straightened.

  “I think so. Where are the keys?”

  The Rider gestured to an iron hook on the far wall. She replaced the rifle by the door and went to it. In a few moments he was at the desk, gathering his weapons and ducking into his talismans.

  “He told you I was here?” The Rider asked, nodding to the unconscious Behan.

  “No.” She watched him loop amulet after amulet over his neck with a frown. “Hetta did.”

  Hetta was standing outside in the dark, her face shining with worrisome sweat and tears.

  “They got my baby in there, mister,” she sobbed when they came out of the little jail. “They got my baby boy. My little Alfred…”

  The Rider nodded.

  “I’ll get him. Tell me what happened.”

  “When the law come and took you, Mr. Junior wasn’t dead. I thought he was. I thought I seen you kill him, but he got up. And after he told Mr. Johnny and Mr. Henry what happened, he come inside and told me to give him that charm you give me for Alfred. I lied, told him I din’t have it. He just about broke my arm to get it. He took Alfred out my arms and dragged me to Miss Lilly. He showed her the charm and she told him to get rid of it. Then she told me to run and fetch Miss Sadie to fetch you.”

  “How does she know me? I don’t even know her,” Sadie interrupted.

  “She know ever’body in town, Miss Sadie. She know ever’thing about ever’body. She know which men goin’ come and which of her girls they goin’ ask for before they show up. Sometime I think she know what they goin’ want before they know they selves.”

  “But how?” Sadie insisted.

  “She a devil woman, Miss Sadie. They all is. Lord, I don’t know how I got mixed up with them. The things that go on there. I can’t hardly sleep for the nightmares I has. Most nights I just stays in my room with Alfred. I just needed someplace to stay and have my baby. I got rid of the babies for them—for all the gals in town got theyselves in a way and didn’t want it. I knows it’s hard. I’s just tryin’ to help them girls. You got to understand that. But I’m the one put babies in all them graves, got no markers.”

  She put her hands over her face, and they slowly slid down to reveal her wide, frightened eyes, streaming.

  “I was the one that German gal come to. The one with the baby by the soldier boy. They kilt him too. Mr. Junior done it hisself. He a real bad man. That soldier boy come lookin’ for a place to hide cause he run off from the other soldiers. He come to get that German gal. Ms. Lilly said they’d put him up and hide him. Mr. Junior took a shine to him. He locked himself in the room with him. I don’t know what he did, but I heard that soldier boy cryin’ through the walls like a baby. I never even seen his body, but I had to scrub blood off them walls.”

  She rocked where she stood and Sadie gingerly put her arms around her.

  “I was just goin’ stay and have my baby and then move on. Oh Lord, the things I done! They goin’ kill him, I know it. God goin’ take him from me for all the little ones I done in.”

  “Why did she tell you to come and get me, Hetta?” The Rider asked.

  She straightened and looked at him over Sadie’s shoulder.

  “I don’t know as I can say why, mister. She just say she want you to come alone. She say she don’t want to fight. Please…tell me you can get my Alfred back.”

  So it was a parley then. But could he trust the mother of all demons? He didn’t trust Junior, that was for certain.

  “If I don’t do anything else I’ll do that,” he said. “Sadie, take her back to the No. 2. I’ll bring the baby there.”

  “What’s happening? What’s going on?” she asked. There was a trembling in her voice. She wanted reassurance, needed it. She needed to know what was real.

  “Don’t worry about it,” he said. “I’ll take care of it. Here. Take these.”

  He pressed the two amulets he’d made into her soft hand. He lingered there, and this time she looked down and saw his hand holding hers. By the time she looked back up, he had released it.

  He took his blue tinted spectacles from his coat pocket and put the Solomonic lenses over his eyes and walked off into the night.

  * * * *

  The Rider stood outside the red glow of the lanterns and watched men stumble in and out of The Bird Nest for an hour before he decided to go in. The stream of patrons was unending. He had hoped to enter during a lull in business, but for The Bird Nest, there was no lull. Chortling, drunken men of every creed and station were drawn to the place; the ubiquitous miners and dusty prospectors, giggling young cowpunchers, bemused saddle tramps, and the furtive ‘respectable’ men in high collared coats and hats pulled low, the white strip of absent bands as stark as the mark of Cain on their sun tanned fingers if The Rider made an effort to look.

  But it was not these desperate, ultimately unscrupulous men who concerned him most. He had seen their ilk
everywhere: men who believed their sins blameless and victimless, thinking no more of the women beneath them than the horses that brought them there, and most times less.

  Through the mystic Solomonic seals embossed on the lenses of his spectacles, he saw the night sky above the stone house encircled by newborn ruhin. They were mazzikim of every size and order, atrocious, shrieking amalgams of man, child, and animal cluttering in a revolving, demoniac gurge of flapping leathern wings, gnashing teeth, and black-quilled, swishing tails. The cacophonous maelstrom seemed to emanate from the chimney of the house and vomit its gibbering contents across the dark firmament in a spurting geyser of kicking, twisting demons. It was terrible to behold.

  They were spreading everywhere, to every corner of the Earth. A pop-eyed thing on two warty ostrich legs with spindly monkey arms, the face of an old man, and the body of barracuda protruding with bone spurs flopped down before him, squawking and vomiting black ichor before it finally righted itself. It grinned a dripping, milk curdling smile up at him and burrowed into the earth, disappearing with an insolent flick of its spiny cauda, which also bore a shriveled, leering face.

  A moment later its mortal father, a sparsely whiskered old man with the exact same face stepped out of The Bird Nest and went down the dim street whistling airily, his shirt front poking out between the sloppily fastened buttons of his fly, completely unaware of the thing he had fathered only minutes ago.

  The Rider looked up again at the monstrous volcano of tumbling obscenities. It was as if this were the polluted wellspring of every demon in the world. Yes, Lilith was here. And this was her crowning achievement; a caustic nursery. A fitting birth pit for all the Adversary’s evil servants to spew over the world like slime.

  The graves Hetta had filled in the cemetery were nothing compared to this. These were the real children of Tip Top. One hellborn bastard for every skulking visit to this, the town’s most popular whorehouse, one for every castaway seed, even those of the unwary and blameless sleepers. The men of this town were being milked like dumb cattle, all to swell the ranks of a dark army, a legion of chattering nightmares. Ruhin were born moments after conception. They were multiplying at a cunicular rate.

  The Rider checked the loads of his pistols and stalked out of the shadows into the red lantern light. Here he paused. Something in the glow of the lanterns on either side of the door caused his eyes to well and flush with tears. He leaned against the wall, momentarily blinded. Blinking back tears, he slid his spectacles off his nose and dabbed at his eyes with his fingertips. When he opened them again he could see normally, but when he replaced his blued glasses, they immediately began to gush again. There was a powerful magic in those lanterns. Whatever unseen force was emanating from them was interfering with the warded lenses. Wearing them in close proximity was almost painful, like staring too long at the sun. He folded them and tucked them into his coat pocket and blinked rapidly until his vision cleared again.

  He didn’t know what to expect. He had no real plan. Maybe Junior would shoot him as the door opened. He balled his fist and pounded anyway. He was not fully prepared for this encounter, he knew. He had not fasted, nor prepared any particular prayers or wards, and now he was without his Solomonic lenses. But he had his amulets and his weapons, and he had his wits.

  The latter at least, failed him almost entirely when the door creaked open and the smiling woman from his dream stood before him. She wore only a white cotton chemise, and her dark skin seemed to glow through it and the knee high stockings. Wavy black hair spilled thickly over her shoulders, as it had when he’d glimpsed her through the shuttered window earlier. Her beauty was tenfold as he stood in her presence, and he had stood before physical manifestations of angels. Yet this was a different kind of beauty.

  With angels, he had perceived a heartbreaking loveliness to be appreciated but not consumed. Being so near the woman in the door was like starving near a lavish supper table. He suddenly wanted to grab her by the shoulders and fling her to the ground, feel her limbs entwine him, feel her smiling, perfect mouth melt between his lips. But more too, he wanted to bite her smooth skin, defile her and himself in animal fashion before a crowd of howling spectators as she screamed and laughed in his ear and dug her fingernails into his flesh.

  He stepped back bodily, blinking.

  She giggled.

  “Come in Rider,” she said, in a musical voice that lilted like the twang of sitars, a voice he instantly remembered as being that of the singer in his dream. “We’ve been waiting for you all night.” She turned over her shoulder, but kept her luxurious, fancifully painted eyes locked on his. “Eisie, Aggie,” she called loudly, “pass coins for the gentlemen, please. Our special guest has arrived.”

  She turned, keeping her eyes on him until the last possible moment, and went inside, giving him a full view of her swinging form.

  He went in behind her, fighting another wave of intense lust. Beneath the chemise, her body burned like a hooded candle flame.

  The parlor was lit by many candles, giving the room a subterranean, mysterious feel, like a catacomb. Another curtained doorway was situated across the room. In one corner on a stool, a well-dressed Negro dwarf sat strumming an unobtrusive melody on a polished lute. The room was outfitted with modern furniture and the walls were decorated with paintings graphically depicting all sorts of physical liaisons that only somewhat dispelled the hypogeal air.

  A richly upholstered red davenport sat in a corner beside another of the red lanterns, sitting on a table near a crackling fireplace. As he entered through a curtained partition, a curly, yellow haired woman as striking as the one at the door and similarly dressed, slid like a cat out of the lap of a red faced fat man in shirt sleeves and went to a little box on the mantle, flashing him a meaningful smile and producing a couple of clinking coins.

  Across the room, a black woman with skin like oil, in a red corset and bloomers, dismounted a scrawny, long haired Mexican vaquero lying on a sofa and whispered in his ear, flashing a white, playful smile and more as she rose up, guiding him dreamily to his feet.

  “Hell, what is this?” the fat man protested, as the blonde girl gave a coin to the black woman, who slid it deep into the laughing Mexican’s pants pocket.

  The black woman led the chortling Mexican out to the front door without protest, and slipped behind the curtain, but the fat man refused to budge.

  “Time to go, honey,” said the blonde, in an enticing, girlish drawl. “Special party. But here’s two pass coins for your trouble. Come back tomorrow.”

  “Hell with that!” the fat man said, bunching his piggish fists and turning his attention to The Rider. “Who the fuck is this anyway? The goddamned mayor don’t get his run of this place!”

  “Now daddy,” said the blonde girl, reaching out for his hand, “rules are rules. Don’t let’s have me call Junior over.”

  “Who, silk sock Sam the sheik from Alabam?” the fat man chuckled. “You go ahead and call that little gamahucher, sugar tits. Day I can’t handle some Mary in a lace shirt and tight pants, I’ll swallow my own pecker.”

  “Don’t say that,” The Rider snapped. “You should go.”

  “You stay outta this, mister,” snarled the fat man.

  The curtain to the adjoining rooms opened and a third woman, a stunning Oriental girl with slightly disheveled black hair and painted, upswept eyes entered, trailing a drowsy looking black man in a corduroy coat. Her eyes flitted from The Rider to the other two women, and finally to the fat man.

  “Come on, lover,” she said to the black man, and led him across the room. She drew back the curtain to the exit as the black woman returned. “Last one,” she said, as she ushered the smiling black man outside.

  The woman who admitted The Rider put her hands on her hips and stared at the fat man, who had folded his arms across his paunch like a stubborn child.

  The yellow haired girl folded her arms too and shook her head.

  “Last chance, honey,” she said.
<
br />   “Get out of here, you fool!” The Rider hissed. He started to step forward, but the woman beside him raised one hand, barring him. He could have pushed her aside, but frankly, he feared to touch her.

  “Fool?” the fat man remarked, agape, turning his attention back to The Rider. “Look here Mordecai, just who in the hell do you think…?”

  They all heard the front door open and shut, and a bolt slide home.

  In an instant, the blonde woman leapt atop the fat man, straddling him. Her head darted forward, stopping up his words with a passionate kiss, as she thrust her two white hands at his beltline.

  Over her creamy shoulders, The Rider saw the fat man’s expression change rapidly from anger to ecstasy, and then to surprise and horror in quick succession. At first his stubby, sweaty fingers gripped her by the buttocks, pulling her close, then they dandled up and down her body beneath her chemise, finally pulling down her sheer covering to her slim waist. Then they gripped her shoulders with white knuckles.

  A great spillage of blood gushed down between the man’s knees, spattering the floor as the woman threw back her arms. She had thrust them with incredible force right into his fat belly, and they were red with blood and gore up to the elbows. She opened her claw like hands and unidentifiable hunks of matter plopped wetly onto the floor.

  The man’s screams were muffled by her own mouth clamped over his, and they turned into desperate, manic shrieks and finally gurgles.

  The fat man’s struggles grew weaker, and his hands gripped her long blonde hair and pulled. It came easily away, being nothing more than a sheitel, a wig. Her bald, stubble-less pate was exposed. Demonesses possessed no natural hair, The Rider knew.

  The Rider looked away and closed his eyes, hearing the man’s death rattle. There was a crash, as with a final kick the fat man upset the table with the red lantern. Then he heard the creak of the davenport as the woman slid off his lap for the second time, and spit something that made the hearth fire sizzle. An unfortunately delectable smell wafted into the air.

  The dwarf meanwhile, had seamlessly changed his tune at some point during the killing of the fat man, and The Rider recognized the haunting, melancholy song from his dream.