Edward Lee: Selected Stories

by Edward Lee

  Brock was Suttonville’s sheriff.

  He struggled for breath. He left his cock stuffed up in her, let it limpen and eventually fall out. Then he collapsed to her bosom, exhausted.

  She was exhausted too, from the frenetic working over he’d just given her. Three times in less than an hour. His cock hurt; he could only imagine how she felt.

  But in his exhaustion, he shivered.

  “You’re not catchin’ sick, are ya?”

  “No,” Brock mouthed into the hot skin between her breasts. Instead, he was simply horrified.

  The little sod house stank: of sweat, sperm, and the daub of pig fat burning in the betty lamp. Her breath stank, too; her teeth had gone to rot. Yet Brock felt soothed as her long pretty fingers slid through his hair. “What’choo so pent up about, honey?”

  Brock didn’t answer—he just lay there on her sweat-slick flesh like a baby suckling. No, it wasn’t any surge of lust that had brought him here (Brock routinely fucked at least every other day), it was diversion.

  Brock needed to be distracted from the memory of what he’d seen this morning. The images shouted at him whenever he closed his eyes.

  God in Heaven…

  He wondered if he’d ever be able to sleep again.

  “There’s rumors goin’ round,” Mary posed.

  “Oh yeah?”

  “Virgil at the Short Branch said he saw you’n Clyde Nale bring in a dead man this morning in Clyde’s wagon.”

  “It wasn’t a dead man,” Brock’s voice grated back. “Doc says he’s unconscious, in a coma.”

  “A—What’s that?”

  Brock couldn’t get the strange man’s face out of his head. “Never you mind. That’s all fer the rumors?”

  “Naw, somethin’ about the Bowen Place. Virgil said he heard they was all kilt.”

  Brock squeezed his eyes shut hard.

  She nudged him. “Well? Is it true?”

  Then the rest of the images followed. Those people. The child.

  And all the blood.

  “Never you mind,” Brock whispered.

  Back in his boots and buckskins, Sheriff Brock walked down Front Street, the high sun at his back. Several wagons owned by skinners sat hitched before the Short Branch, their owners hooting up a good day’s work beyond the swing doors. Old Man Harding leisurely chewed a plug from his rocking chair in front of the Overland Telegraph office. Men strode in and out of the wainwright’s shop, and the barreler’s, the smith’s. Children frolicked about the general store, rejoicing over fat sugar cones, pinafored girls working whirligigs, and overalled boys spinning their teetotums in the earthen street, pretending to be gamblers. Dogs lolled in the sun; women bickered over lye and sorghum prices.

  A nice normal town.

  My town, Brock thought.

  Since the Homestead Act, Suttonville had boomed from a typical cow town to a bustling trade point for the government and the treatied Indians. At first, Brock feared that all the extra commerce could turn Suttonville into another Dodge City, the Gomorrah of the Plains. Not even the hot guns like Earp and Masterton could keep a rein on that hellhole. But this close to Fort Benteen, Suttonville kept its true face. Sure, Brock would get some trouble now and again, a little rustling, a bad lynching or two, a panner trying to pass pyrite as gold. There were plenty of Saturday night fights, too, but Brock had never had a problem handling any of it. Indeed, Suttonville was as fine a town as he could ever hope for.

  Until this morning.

  He’d seen his share of atrocity in his time. First, the War, of course. After his discharge, he’d worked for Pinkerton’s, and there’d been that dock strike in Portsmouth. Five men hung upside down from trammels, their bellies opened by a hay knife. The smell was extraordinary, and the way their innards looked lying on the floor defied description. Brock had also witnessed a number of lynching victims days after the event: bodies the size of cattle via gas distension. Then there was the time when Brock served as a Centralia deputy sheriff in the Missouri Territories; he discovered a range brothel where all the women had been branded to death. Just for the hell of it, Brock realized. They’d each been tied down, breasts and faces cooked off, red-hot pokers teased into vaginas and rectums. Brock stood appalled as the lingering stench of baked shit swept into his nostrils. Madness…When he’d caught the men responsible—two escapees from Gallatin federal stockade—he’d gutshot them both with his Winchester 73, let them lie there and caterwaul for an hour till they died.

  All that…

  But now this.

  Brock had never seen anything like this.

  All his life, he’d believed in God. Now he believed in the Devil. Only the Devil or one of his acolytes could have ministered to that which Brock witnessed at the Bowen Place this morning. One of Nale’s boys had come to fetch him. When Brock had walked in…

  The images assailed him again. He nearly collapsed to his knees in the street.

  He couldn’t think of it.

  Should he go back to Mary and her sod house, pungent with the malodor of old sperm? But if he did, how long would the reprise of distraction last? Minutes, he realized. Or perhaps he should go to the saloon and blanch his memory with whiskey. But he couldn’t do that either, in case Doc called for him.

  There was no escaping his memory…

  No getting away from it. I have a job to do, and good people depending on me.

  Dust rose behind his rawhide boots as he strode for the jail.

  The man he and Clyde Nale had found in the Bowen Place now lay perfectly still on the rope cot in the first jail cell.

  Brock’s vision seemed to shift as he peered in.

  The man looked just plain…odd.

  Brock got a chill—and an impression that he was looking at a corpse.

  Almost as skinny as some of the men Brock had seen at Andersonville. Short hair and a long thin face. Trousers and shirt made of a funny-lookin’ fabric that made Brock think of city folk.

  “Still nothing,” Doc Hall said, coming down the jail corridor. “No movement, and not a word.”

  Brock continued to gaze fixedly through the bars. “You sure he ain’t dead?”

  The lean doctor ran a finger through one of his great muttonchop sideburns. Perplexion drew runnels across his bald pate. “He blinks, and his heartbeat’s normal. Normal respiratory expansion and pupillary dilation. It’s the strangest case of catatonia I’ve ever seen.”

  Brock smirked at the doctor’s lexicon. “Come on, Doc. All that fancy medical talk don’t do me no good. What’cha reckon happened to him?”

  “It’s impossible to say, Sheriff. During my internship in Boston, we’d make weekly rounds at the sanatorium to examine the most immoderate mental cases. Some of the elderly victims of what’s known as dementia praecox would often lapse into comas—but nothing like this.”

  Brock smirked again. Auto…WHAT? Dementia peacock?

  “The heart rate would plummet, autonomic responses would drop to practically nothing. What I’m trying to tell you is that, based on my examination, I can find no clinical reason for this man to be unconscious.”

  “And you say he could be in this here coma—”

  “For years,” Doc Hall answered.

  “Years, huh? Well, I ain’t got years and neither has justice.” Brock looked Doc Hall square in the eye. “You and I both know that the man in that cell is the one who kilt the Bowens, and there ain’t a judge in the entire country who’d see otherwise. There ain’t gonna be no waitin’ years for that skinny murderer to git what he deserves.”

  Hall raised a brow that might be considered a gesture of criticism. “You don’t know that, Sheriff. And if ya want my medical opinion, I don’t see how a man—’specially a man as slight as him—could’ve done those things to them people. Don’t see how any man could.”

  Brock’s memory drifted back to the scene he’d witnessed hours earlier when he’d walked into the Bowen house…

  Chester Bowen—a well-respected farmer in
his forties—lay sprawled on his back before the family’s cherry wood hope chest. He was fully naked. From his mouth hung a long plume of some unidentifiable material, glistening wet. Doc Hall later ascertained that this “material” was Chester Bowen’s innards: stomach, heart, lungs—everything. In addition, his sexual parts were not in evidence betwixt his legs. Ripped right out of his groin, it seemed. It was Clyde Nale who later noticed them in Bowen’s own clawed hand.

  Mrs. Bowen was worse—far worse. At first, neither Brock nor Clyde Nale could speak when they saw the perfectly clean skeleton settled in the corner by the pot-bellied stove. If it were Dora Bowen, she must’ve died months ago for that’s how long it would take for a corpse to decompose so completely—yet Brock had greeted her himself just two days ago buying a trivet and some treenware at the general store. When Clyde had glanced behind the grinding quern…

  That’s when he’d run out of the house, shouting for God’s protection.

  Brock had taken a glance himself, and just gaped.

  Two eyes sat atop a stagnant pile of flesh, something like a stretched face settled in the middle of the mass.

  The shock and revulsion pinned Brock to the tabby-brick wall. He would’ve run out of there himself but…

  The girl, he remembered. The little girl…

  The Bowens had a daughter—Kelly Ann, not but six years old. Brock knew he was no man at all if he ran out now. I’ve got to find her, he vowed, even as his stomach convulsed. She might still be alive…

  Brock found her in the loft.

  She was not still alive.

  She’d been splayed out naked on the floor, her breastless chest the hue of candle wax, her little legs parted so extremely that the hip joints must surely be dislocated or broken. Her small jaw, too, appeared dislocated as if pried apart in order to force something huge down her throat. And her privates—

  Brock cut off the rest of the memory, biting his lip till he tasted blood, his eyes squeezed shut.

  When he opened them again, he was looking back at the bizarre man unconscious in the jail cell.

  What had Doc Hall been saying? “I don’t see how a man—’specially a man as slight as him—could’ve done those things to them people. Don’t see how any man could.”

  “No, Doc, maybe not a typical man,” Brock returned to the conversation. “But how about a man in league with Lucifer?”

  Doc Hall frowned but bid no comment.

  “Come on, Doc. You saw them bodies. You saw what he done to ’em. It’s the Devil’s work if there ever was.” Brock jabbed a finger at the jail cell’s motionless occupant. “And that fella there? He’s surely an acolyte of the Devil.”

  They sat up front in the sheriff’s room, sipping coffee from tin cups, Brock ringing the spittoon every few minutes. He knew Doc Hall wasn’t pleased, just as he knew the Constitution and the Bill of Rights were noble pieces of work which granted that all men, ’cept niggrahs, was created equal and due certain inalienable rights. Brock, in fact, believed that niggrahs was too, just like President Lincoln had said, and he strongly disapproved of lynchings.

  All men accused of a crime were entitled to a trial by a jury of their peers.

  But not Devilers, Brock thought, and not injuns neither.

  “If he doesn’t come out of the coma,” Doc Hall broke the silence, “then ya don’t have to worry about it. He’ll starve to death by the time ya report it to the governor’s office. Ya only got to worry about a trial if he does come out of it. Just as I was sayin’ earlier, some comas last for years. But some only hours.”

  “Hours, huh?” Brock spat another plume of juice into the spittoon. “You don’t get it, do ya, Doc? I ain’t sittin’ here waitin’ for him ta wake up. I’m just waitin’ for sundown. Coma or not, once it’s dark, I’m ridin’ him out to Tunstall Gulch—” Brock raised his Colt Model 62, 44-40—“where I’ll shoot him proper’n leave him fer the buzzards.”

  “Ya can’t do that, Sheriff,” Hall warned. “It ain’t right.”

  “Tell that to the Bowens. Tell that to that little girl.”

  “He deserves a fair trial!”

  Brock rested back against his chair, his rawhide boots up on the desk. “He’s a deviler, pure’n simple. Folks’d ask questions if there was a trial. That’s why I got my deputy and some men buryin’ the bodies right now. We’ll say it was typhoid.”

  “But it wasn’t typhoid!” Hall yelled.

  But Brock yelled back, louder, “To give that man a fair trial, I’d have to ride clear to the Collier County seat to fetch a judge! And a trial like this? The town’d be cursed. Just like Salem! We’d never live down the rumors of deviltry. Folks’d move away, to California or down south. There’d be nothing left. We’d be a ghost town in a year!”

  The two men stared each other down.

  “So that’s the story,” Brock said more quietly. “Typhoid is what kilt the Bowens. And you’ll verify it ta anyone who asks.”

  Hall simmered. “And if I don’t?”

  “If you don’t, I call in the U.S. Marshals from Springfield. They’ll be very interested in what’cha been doin’ on the side. What’s the word? Abortion? Same as killin’ babies is the way the government sees it. Don’t think I don’t know about that, Doc.”

  Hall’s face paled.

  “Best we just stay friends’n you see things my way, huh?”

  “Typhoid, yes,” Hall muttered. “A family out in the hills, no chance of contagion to the rest of the town. Expeditious burial…was the only course of action.”

  Brock nodded, took another bite out of his plug. He set a bottle of sour mash on the desk and two glasses. “Now while I’m pourin’ us a drink, why don’t you go take a peek in on our guest? See if he’s still in this coma’re not.”

  Deviler, he thought

  Kansas whiskey wasn’t nothing like what they made in Kentucky and Tennessee, but it was good enough for Brock. He belted three neat shots in a row to help take some of the edge off of the day. Half-drunk, he figured, was a fine state to be in when he wagoned his convict out to the gulch and gutshot him, watched him bleed out slow, real slow. In the War, Brock had seen many a man die in howling agony from gutshots; they’d shriek in the field for hours. That’s what Brock would do to this man. Then a final 44-40 shot to that gaunt face.

  Job done. Justice served.

  And God avenged.

  Deviler…

  There was no place in the Lord’s domain, nor in Brock’s town, for such an emissary of evil. Brock’s gun would do God’s work.

  He was about to pour himself another shot when…

  Holy—WHAT!

  A smell, quite rich, drifted into the room. Brock’s nose crinkled when he sniffed.

  Smells like…shit…

  And the smell was coming from the jail room.

  Brock was up and striding across the floorboards, thoroughly addled. When he stepped into the hall and took another sniff, his suspicions were confirmed—doubly. The odor of fresh excrement slapped him in the face. “Hey, Doc!” he called out. “What’s going on back here? That fella in the cell up’n shit hisself?”

  This seemed the only logical explanation…but when Brock turned the corner and faced the jail hall, what he saw was not logical at all. It was insane.

  It was deviltry.

  Doc Hall’s trousers had been ripped clean off, and he was being pressed face-first against the wall. What was pressing him, though, was a long, fat hose-like thing which had reached through the bars of the jail cell and had girded about the doctor’s waist. Brock, in spite of his horror, knew what the thing was.

  A demon’s tail, he thought, staring.

  The tail of a serpent from Hell.

  He only saw it for a moment but a moment was enough. Doc Hall, in a second of deranged realization, looked over his trembling shoulder to glance helplessly at Brock.

  But the doctor’s eyeballs had already come unseated from their sockets. They dangled against his cheeks by nerves.

&nb
sp; Hall’s excrement was freely dropping from his anus to the floor, where a considerable pile had already amassed.

  Brock had no choice but to conclude: A-A-A demon’s got its tail wrapped ’round the Doc’s belly’n it’s squeezin’ all the shit out of him!

  In the next second, the tail constricted more tightly, and when no more feces could be squeezed out, out came the doctor’s entire intestinal tract. And in the second after that, Hall was released, collapsing dead to the dusty floor as the tail withdrew back into the cell.

  Brock’s psyche shattered. He could not much calculate beyond the basics of observation. There was deviltry afoot, all right—just as he’d suspected—and he knew that when he looked into that cell, he would find a devil.

  He drew his long Colt pistol, cocked the hammer. Then he stepped fully into the hallway and turned to face the first jail cell.

  “My period of inactivity, quite aimlessly misdiagnosed by the good doctor, was not an aspect of catatonia at all,” a snide snippish voice told him. “It was instead a necessary component of sensory transfer based on, one, the limitations of the human body and, two, the accommodating time-effect of such a transfer of information.”

  Brock stood stock-still, staring in. He expected to find a demon in full incarnation: horns, fangs, taloned hands, and the great python-like tail. But all that faced him, standing now, was the thin, oddly dressed man he’d locked up in there several hours ago.

  Brock was speechless.

  “My master is quite smarter than yours,” the gaunt-faced man said next. “It’s merely an assimilation of informational synergy as a form of resolute action. It’s all transitive mathematics, in a sense, and elemental malleability. Identifying a transpositional point of valence is rather simple; it all boils down to the exploitation of a particular atom with the capacity of forming a single bond with hydrogen, which then allows a transposition of time with regard to a selected physical mass—such as a human body. Past, present, and future, then, are wielded as effectively as a juggler’s pins. Do you understand?”