Merkabah Rider: High Planes Drifter

by Edward M. Erdelac

  The Rider shook his head and clenched his eyes. He didn’t know if this was true or not. He didn’t want to.

  “Alright, alright,” she said, pushing him lightly down into the chair and crossing back to the dressing table, her long hair swaying behind her. “Don’t go rending your garments. You wanted to hear about Adon. I’ll tell you what I know, and then we’ll find out the rest. But first, your word.”

  The Rider leaned forward in the chair and clasped his hands between his knees. She could be lying about everything. She was the mother of all demons. Yet she did know his name. Everything was in her power. She could give him over to her succubi, or call in any of the myriad devils circling in the sky to come down and rend him to pieces. It was a position he was not used to being in.

  “Alright,” he said. “You’ve got my word.”

  “Thank you,” she said, and opened a drawer of the dresser, taking out cigarette papers and a sack of tobacco. “Do you smoke, Rider?”

  “No.”

  “You might take it up, and drinking, after this is over. It’s a good thing you’re sitting down.” She proceeded to sift out a measure of tobacco and expertly roll it on the dresser.

  He waited quietly while she sealed the cigarette, lit it, and smoked. The smell wafted across the room to him, acrid.

  “When’s the last time you’ve spoken to the surviving chapters of your Order?”

  The Rider shrugged. After he had mustered out at Ft. Leavenworth, tired and battered from the war, he had drifted for a time to clear his head. When he’d finally returned to San Francisco he’d nearly been killed by a pair of Merkabah Riders from the Berlin enclave who had been tasked with finding him. They had told him of Adon’s treachery, and he had gone with them to stand before the Council of Yahad at Ein Gedi to plead his innocence before the ruling tzadikim. He had been found blameless of collusion in his former teacher’s crimes, but had nonetheless been shunned and excluded from the sanctioned hunt for Adon.

  In the eyes of the council, Adon’s teachings had tainted him and he could not be trusted. That had been in 1872. In the interim, he had traveled the world searching for Adon himself, and had only returned to America last year out of desperation. Yet the Order hadn’t caught Adon either. The tzadikim had promised to inform him if they had.

  “It’s been a while, hasn’t it?” Lilith said, dragging on her cigarette and looking at him in the mirror.

  Had she really paid that much attention to his career? It was almost flattering.

  “How did you know that?”

  “Because it was just about eight years ago that Adon showed up in Palestine and massacred The Riders at Ein Gedi.”

  The Rider half stood in his chair, but his knees buckled and he fell back heavily.

  The Council of Yahad was a temporary body that met only in matters of extreme importance to the entire sect. It was composed of the leading tzadikim from each of the eight worldwide enclaves. If Adon had destroyed that body, he had cut off the heads of the Sons of the Essenes. All thirty two of them.

  “No—when could it have happened? I was there.”

  “Not long after you left, I would think,” Lilith said.

  A gathering of the Council was made known only to those invited to attend. How could Adon have learned of its meeting at Ein Gedi? Unless Adon had followed him there. Which meant Adon could have guessed that as his known apprentice the foreign enclaves would have sought him out and brought him before the Council when he returned. Was Adon that calculating? Could he have murdered the San Francisco chapters while The Rider was away fighting in the war simply as a first step towards eliminating the Council?

  The Rider’s thoughts began to recess further back into his history with Adon. Suddenly he was seeing conspiracies in the most minute events. Why had Adon chosen him as his favored pupil? Why had he introduced so many arcane, forbidden teachings to him? To discredit him from the start? This was dangerous thinking. It compounded his growing sense of helplessness.

  “How do you know this?”

  “My children tell me things. I have eyes everywhere.”

  The Rider pulled at his beard and reeled back in the chair. The Council of Yahad, dead. Thirty two elder rebbes of the Order, the honorable tzadikim. It was such a loss!

  “There’s more, Rider,” she said. “Adon went on something of an overseas tour around that time. He left a fair number of corpses behind in Berlin, Livorno, Amsterdam, Thessaloniki, Owernah, and Krakow. Do these places mean anything to you?”

  He shook his head. They did. They were the six European cities that housed enclaves of the Order: Germany, Italy, the Netherlands, Greece, France, and Poland.

  The Rider held his head in his hands and trembled.

  All of them? All?

  “That’s what I thought,” Lilith said. “With your San Francisco chapter, and the bunch that died at Ein Gedi, that makes eight cities.” She turned her head to look at him out of the corner of her eye. “Are there any more of you anywhere?”

  The Rider clenched his eyes, his heart sinking with the immeasurable sense of loss and loneliness. Faces flashed through his mind; visiting rebbes and their pupils, brothers from the overseas enclaves with whom he had prayed and shared the Sabbath.

  He was not just the last American Merkabah Rider. He was the last of the Sons of the Essenes. He was entirely alone.

  “No,” he whispered. “There are none.”

  “All the more reason you need to survive,” she said, grinding her cigarette out in a brass ashtray. “It seems the participants in this little affair are clearing out the opposition. They hired me to bolster their own forces. I think your Adon is part of it too. Maybe I can give you a hand.”

  With that, she opened another dresser drawer, and took out a silver dish, which she laid beside the smoldering ashtray. She turned her attention to the mirror and held open her left eye, pulling the respective lids up and down like she was searching for an elusive grain of sand. Then, as The Rider watched through watery vision, she neatly slid her thumb and forefinger behind the eye and plucked it out, setting it on the silver dish, where it turned of its own accord. There was no blood.

  She looked at him with her good eye, and the disembodied bloodshot eyeball spun on the plate, of its own volition, to regard him as well.

  He jerked in his chair, fumbling his blued spectacles over his face. He had felt the effects of the evil eye before, and this was a kind of magic he had never seen.

  “Relax,” she said. “God is merciful in His way, even to an old whore like me. You know my story, Rider? About how He sent three angels to kill me on the shores of the Red Sea?”

  The Rider nodded, speechless, too overwhelmed by all he had learned and seen this night to speak. He felt weary, as if he had been punched in both lungs.

  “You know I made a deal with them. But when they went back, God wasn’t too happy. He came to Samael and me. Samael,” she said again, lingering on the name, “my lovely Angel of Death. Well, he lost his position, to put it lightly. God cast him down and separated us. I was more alone than I’d ever been then. I’d lost Adam, I’d lost my angel, and every day, I was condemned to lose a hundred of my children. But God gave me a choice. I could choose to see them die or not. I could choose to see or be blind.”

  She popped out the second eye and set it on the dish, then feeling for it, blinking her empty sockets, she picked up the dish and her spectacles and turned away from the mirror. She slowly made her way towards the window, one hand splayed before her, groping in the manner of the blind.

  “Wherever one of my children is, my eyes can find them. And my children are everywhere. Let’s see where your Adon is now.”

  The Rider watched the green eyes on the dish move. As she paused and raised the sash with one hand, they rose from the dish and shot out into the night as if from a slingshot.

  “It may take awhile,” she said, sighing and setting the black lenses on her nose.

  “Can’t you tell me why you’re doin
g this?” he murmured. “Can’t you tell me who employed you?”

  “The Sons of the Essenes were butchers to me, Rider, and you are the worst of them. But what’s coming is worse than you. And it takes a butcher to fight a butcher. I have my place in this world. These things which you will oppose do not. As to my employer, that’s a matter of professional courtesy.”

  These ‘things.’ Did she mean The Old Ones?

  Hayim Cardin, the escaped dybbukim, they had all mentioned this Hour of The Incursion and these Old Ones. What were they? Demonic presences even he wasn’t aware of? Manifestations of The Adversary himself? His thoughts turned to Hell and the catalog of names he had learned during the course of his studies. He tried to think if any had ever born the title Old Ones. Of course, many fallen angels had been worshiped as gods. Molech, Ba’al, any number of them had set themselves up as deities in the ancient world. Even Lilith had been worshiped for a time in Sumeria. But these Old Ones had been spoken of as being separate from the Fallen, even by the Fallen. Then what were they, that could cause Lilith unease, and what did Adon have to do with them?

  Then all hell broke loose.

  “Murderin’ whores!” yelled a thick, German accented voice from outside Lilith’s window.

  There was an explosion of a shotgun, and the half-open window was blown to splinters and shards in a thunderous blast that lit up the room like lightning. Lilith was flung across the bedroom. She smashed against the far wall and fell bloodied to the bed with a blanket of glass and stone over her.

  The Rider overturned his chair getting to his feet.

  The curtain was torn from the rungs as Junior stormed into the room. Seeing Lilith struggling to rise amid the wreckage on the bed, seeing The Rider standing in the corner, he snarled and ripped at his pistol.

  “Bastard!” he roared.

  The Rider had no choice. He dropped to his knee, jerking his Volcanic loose as the first bullet smacked into the wall where his head had been a moment ago.

  The Rider fired blindly, and Junior staggered as the anointed bullets, with their cores of pure salt, tore into his guts, blowing viscous holes in his trunk that dripped the nameless black slime of which all shedim were composed. Junior managed to fan two more shots at The Rider, one of which caught him in the elbow of his gun arm. He shouted in pain and fell back against the wall.

  A large figure pulled itself through the shattered window and dropped to the floor. It was Alph Gersten, and he snapped the shotgun in his hands closed and swung it up.

  Fire spurted from the barrels and peppered Junior in buckshot, the force nearly blowing him clean out of the room.

  “That’s for my sister!” Alph roared triumphantly.

  Lilith’s head turned at the sound of his voice. One of her dark lenses was shattered and the empty socket flexed behind the wire frame.

  “No!” she screamed.

  Suddenly her hair writhed as if alive. It rose from the bed and stretched impossibly before The Rider’s eyes, a thousand serpentine locks that lashed like coach whips. They knocked one of the lamps over, smashing it and sending fire up the wall. The ropy, curling red strands spread across the room like creeping vines. When they found Alph Gersten, they swept his feet out from under him as he struggled to break open his shotgun and stuff more shells in. He landed hard on his side and six or seven shells spilled from his vest pocket and scattered across the floor. Lilith’s hair flowed around him, thickening, snaking around his neck, squeezing him until his face purpled and his eyes bulged. The hair blanketed his face, flowed into his gaping mouth and wormed its way down his throat.

  Junior staggered back into the room firing straight armed and laughing like a maniac. His skin was a mass of black specks bleeding slime. Alph fell back against the window ledge, his face full of blood and bullets. He kicked a few times and slid to the floor. Lilith’s hair retreated from him, and began to cascade up the walls, questing like unseeing tentacles.

  Junior stumbled against the edge of the bed and seemed to remember The Rider, who found he could not raise his gun arm. Still yelling, black foam frothing from his lips, he squeezed the double action pistol again and again, sending bullets smashing into the floor and wall all around. The noise was deafening in the close space, and The Rider’s ears were already ringing from the thunderous shotgun blasts.

  “No, Junior!” Lilith shrieked, turning her head toward these new sounds.

  A stray bullet destroyed one of the lamps and vomited flaming oil across the floor. The second fire joined the first and swept up Lilith’s hair, racing back towards its source.

  With a flick of his free hand The Rider drew out the silver and gold chased Derringer and charged Junior, pushing it into his chest and blasting him once. Junior wrestled with him. He was immensely strong, but The Rider squeezed off the Derringer’s second shot as Junior slapped his arm upward, and the salted bullet burst beneath Junior’s chin, erupting out of the top of his skull in a gout of foul smelling black mucous. The shot sent him flailing back over the edge of the bed. As Junior fell, The Rider saw his body dry and brown before his eyes. Too much of his vital fluid had been lost. By the time he crashed onto the floor, Junior was a desiccated husk, and partially exploded in a puff of rank dust. No laughter from him now.

  The Rider leaned against the bedpost, panting. Lilith was crawling across the bed, feeling through the cutting glass and wood for Junior. Then suddenly the oil fire reached the bed, shooting up her wild hair like fuse sparks. Instantly the whole bed was engulfed and the stench of burning hair and flesh drove The Rider back.

  Lilith screamed. Maybe she was immortal and maybe not. Fire was a primal substance. She surely felt the pain of burning. She flailed on the bed, and her blazing, animated hair spread the fire around the room.

  The Rider dropped the Derringer into his coat pocket and tried to make for the washbasin, but the fire rising from the burning hair and oil on the floor was too high and hot, her whipping tresses spreading it too rapidly.

  A second later the heat touched off the first of Alph’s discarded shotgun shells and the washbasin was blown to pieces. He backed away, prying the bloody Volcanic from his numb right hand. There would be no explaining this.

  “I’m sorry,” he groaned, flinching as another explosion blew a chunk out of the wall.

  If he stayed any longer he risked losing an ankle. He staggered out of the burning room into the hallway, the shotgun shells blowing off in rapid succession behind him.

  Outside was a kaleidoscope of shifting shadow shapes. Dark figures lurched out of the silvery mirrors, spilling into the hall. The Rider knew of these mazzikim. They were of the Order of Gamaliel, Lilith’s personal legion. Great, muscular black soldier demons with swinging Brahma bull heads and blazing yellow eyes. They were conjoined in pairs, belly to back like Siamese twins. They scuttled on four powerful legs and flailed with gargantuan arms, charging into the hall, rebounding off the walls with a shuddering force The Rider could feel in the soles of his feet.

  They were of a high order, and solidified into flesh in moments. Such a thing was normally impossible, but Lilith had probably made this house a middle ground with her enchantments. The mirrors were portals, windows to their mustering grounds of hell itself. The Rider aimed for them, shattering the mirrors in succession even as more soldier demons hung halfway out and were disincorporated as their gateways collapsed. Three made it through, filling the hallway. They were enough to batter him into paste. He was considering running back into the fire behind him and making a dive for the window when he heard the baby wailing from one of the rooms past the mirrors, down the hall.

  There was nothing for it then.

  He met their charge head on, screaming the ninety first Psalm and emptying his pistol. One of the fiends tumbled face down and blew away into ether, but the other two he went toe to toe with, battering at them with the barrel of the pistol, trusting to the mystic wards and pentacles to deter them. He was beaten and gouged, but before the flashing Volcanic, th
e shadow things gave way. The Rider saw the Hand of Miriam sigil on the barrel sear their demon flesh wherever it touched like a hot branding iron, leaving a glowing imprint behind that blazed orange in their shadow hides.

  The mazzikim bellowed and roared their frustration as he beat his way through them to the room where he stumbled in, bleeding from a dozen cuts, lips mashed, his right hand scarlet with blood pouring down his sleeve from the wound in his elbow.

  The baby Alfred was kicking and screaming on the floor beside the bed where he’d apparently rolled off and fallen. The Rider stooped down and scooped him up, poised to feel the weight of Eshieth on his back, to feel her claws and teeth dig into his skin. But of the succubi, he saw no sign.

  He did not dare the hall again. The things out there were cowed and did not follow him into the room, but he was not stupid enough to think they would make way for him if he tried to pass through them a second time.

  He tucked the screaming baby in the crook of his good arm and kicked out the bedroom window, half leaping and half falling over the sash. He struck the ground hard and rolled, gained his feet and staggered off into the dark behind the buildings.

  Above him, the whirling ruhin caught sight of him. They had taken no notice of the men going in and out before, but now they had heard their mother’s screams. Perhaps she had screamed his name. The whirling funnel of unspeakable, mad shapes unraveled and became a lashing, sentient stream, and that cacophonous, flapping body of shaking, tumbling fiends surged towards him like a flock of sparrows.

  The Rider staggered through the night. There was no outrunning them. He stopped and set the screaming baby on the ground, dropped his empty Volcanic and drew his cold iron Bowie. He plunged it into the soft ground and turned quickly, describing a circle in the dirt large enough to contain himself and the child. He muttered his incantations, spluttered out names both angelic and ineffable, but he could not see in the dark to make the proper inscriptions in the ground. There was no time to strike a match. No time. They were coursing down towards them, spewing bile and obscenities.