by Mark Frost
When darkness came, that was where he would begin.
Innes burst into the compartment, holding a telegram. "I've secured horses, maps, weapons, and supplies; they'll be waiting for us at the station in Prescott." He handed Doyle a copy of the manifest he'd drawn up. "Took the liberty of putting this together; if there's something else you think we need, there's still time to wire ahead for it."
The boy's military stripe coming to the fore, thought Doyle with no small satisfaction as he glanced at the list.
"More than adequate," said Doyle, handing it back.
"Repeating rifles; I assume you both know how to shoot," said Innes, looking around at Presto and Mary Williams.
They nodded. Presto resumed the story he was relaying to Doyle; Jack's behavior at the time of Rabbi Brachman's death.
"Are you sure the man can be trusted?" asked Presto. "He seems to have an alarming disregard for human life."
Doyle looked outside at the moonlit plains rushing past the window.
"Leave us a moment would you?" asked Doyle of the other men.
Innes and Presto exited the compartment; Doyle turned to Mary.
"You have a connection to Jack. Through the dream."
She nodded, her eyes not leaving his, steady and strong.
"I've done all I know how to do for him. My diagnosis ... offers no solutions. Do you have an idea about the reason for his illness?"
"Sometimes people are attacked by ... an outside force."
"What do you mean?"
She hesitated. "Evil."
"Do you believe evil exists? As a separate entity?"
"That is our teaching."
Doyle took a deep breath, stepping off into unknown territory.
"Then if you're going to try and heal him," he said to the Indian woman, "you'd better get on with it."
She looked at him solemnly, nodded once, and moved to the door.
"Anything I can do?" asked Doyle.
"No," she said and quietly left the compartment.
Buckskin waited until the light faded from the western sky before he left the shelter of the rocks. The singing from the hollow stopped before dark and the kids in the white shirts lit a big campfire as the cold came on. Before the moon rose up, Frank led his horse across the road, away from the guardhouse, where lamps were still burning, and along the perimeter of the fence.
Ten double strands of barbed wire had been slung between posts drilled twenty paces apart; sunk deep in the sand, filled with mortar, built to last. The wire was a mix of Ric Rac and Hollner Greenbriar, two strands with a serious bite; a run-in with this much of the stuff could cut an animal, or a man, to shreds. These folks knew how to build a righteous fence, he had to give them that; must be some ranch hands among the gospel thumpers. But were they raising cattle in there? This wasn't grazing country; three strands of wire was enough to do the job on any range, and no fence he'd ever seen needed to run seven feet high to contain a herd. No; this fence had been put up for keeping something out.
Every half mile inside the lines, they'd added a watchtower, a covered platform twenty-five feet high with a ladder running up to a cabin. Manned by white-shirted guards toting Winchesters; Frank had to ride back a few hundreds yards from each one to stay out of their sight.
A few miles along, coming back to the fence after skirting a tower, he saw a field of light shimmering five or six miles ahead across the sand; a good-sized town, the center of this strange settlement. If the Chinaman had been hiding in one of the actors' wagons, that was where he'd be now.
Frank sat still in the saddle, shivering in his coat, and studied the situation. The fence ran on ahead to the left out of sight; he had no reason to believe it wouldn't complete a ring all the way around the settlement. They'd most likely included another couple of gates somewhere along the loop, which meant he could try to ride past the guards there or cut his way in anywhere on the fence. How he was supposed to ride back out again with a dead Chinaman strapped to the butt of his horse was a different story.
Mexico, on the other hand, lay two easy days' ride south, and there were no fences or guards anywhere between here and there. He could shave off his moustache. Lighten his hair with some lemon juice like he'd heard about in prison.
That dark-haired gal was inside there, too. As he thought of her, the sight of Molly Fanshaw's body lying on that Tombtone street two stories below him with her sweet neck broke came back. The empty whiskey bottle in his hand ...
He shook it off; his face tightened painfully.
Bad enough living in a cell with those memories; on the outside, there's a thousand reminders of your every failing. And as it turns out, a whole lot more disgust about your old selfish ways than you ever knew was inside you, ain't there, Frankie boy?
Was that Molly's voice or his own? He'd been hearing Molly more and more inside his head. Helpful words, teasing and gentle, the way he liked to remember her. Did that mean he was just turning soft or going crazy? Was she dead and rone or riding shotgun in his mind?
Shit. Did it matter?
His eyes picked up light and movement inside the fence to his left; what was that? Long way off. He took out the field classes, scanned for the flickering he'd seen.
Torches. A wide column of white shirts giving off a faint glow in the early moonlight. Carrying rifles, parade formation, a hundred of them at least, and a big man in a long duster tilling alongside, watching like a drill sergeant.
Whatever the hell this added up to, it was a damn sight worse than some crazy Chinaman running around with a meat cleaver.
The dark-haired gal was in there.
Frank began to reach for the wire cutters in his saddlebag but stopped short when he heard Molly's voice:
You want to think you're doing it for the girl, that's fine, Frankie. But let's be clear about something: You got some serious scores to settle up with yourself first. You can go right ahead and make a martyr of yourself, Buckskin McQuethy, but nobody's insisting you have to be an ox about it. Cut your way through that fence and in ten minutes you're like to have a hundred rifles staring at your face. And be honest, Frank: talking your way out of trouble ain't never been your long suit.
Never could sneak a nickel past Molly; she knew him inside and out.
Frank turned his horse and rode down the fence line, looking for the next gate.
As Buckskin Frank bunked down outside to wait for the sunrise, Kanazuchi was using his hands to separate two strands on the inner fence. His long knife would have cut through the wire without trouble, but he couldn't leave tracks, and with only five minutes between patrols, he couldn't hesitate; the moon would be high soon and take away his only advantage.
He pulled open the wires like strings of a long bow and slipped smoothly through the narrow opening. The wound on his left side throbbed painfully as he called on the muscles around it to complete the difficult maneuver, careful not to snag his shirt on the razor-sharp barbs; if this had been his fence, he would have coated them with poison.
Easing the wires back into place, he erased his footprints in the sand and set off at a dead run for the nearest shelter, a shed one hundred yards away across open ground. If a patrol had been watching all they would have seen was a blur.
Folding into the shadows against the wall, he opened his senses; sounds from all over the town reached him here, two blocks off the main street. One-room shanties built nearly on top of each other stretched Out in every direction; wood fires burning in stoves, smoke rising from crude chimney pipes.' Food cooking. Chickens in backyard coops. Horses moving in stalls of a nearby stable. Smell of urine from a nearby latrine. Someone passed by; a white shirt, carrying yoked pails of water. Kanazuchi erased himself in the darkness. Waited for the footsteps to recede.
The tower stood half a mile off, its blackness carving an even darker hole in the night sky. Construction continuing; bright lights, hammering and scraping of rock. He could pick his way among the shacks to get there, avoiding the main street altoge
ther.
He dodged down alleys, retreating into hollows and shadows whenever anyone approached. Occasionally he caught glimpses of the white shirts in shacks through open windows, sitting motionless before their fires, silently at tables, lying on crude cots with their eyes open. As he stepped through a narrow gap between houses, he heard weeping: Through an open door he saw a woman sobbing, curled up on the floor; a man sat at a table, ignoring her, quietly eating from a bowl.
No dogs bothered him as he moved between the shacks; these people kept no pets. Strange in a community this size. And he heard no laughter; always a keynote in the night sounds of any city; families, lovers, people gathering, drinking. None here. Something else missing: He had seen no children. Many couples, but no children.
Turning a corner, he came face-to-face with the youngest person he'd seen, a boy perhaps fifteen, wearing the white shirt and carrying a bucket of slops. Neither of them moved; the boy stared at him without interest, dull and lifeless, then turned and trudged away.
Kanazuchi picked up a rock from the ground, glided around the next building, and waited; moments later, two adult males appeared from the direction the boy had gone, carrying cudgels and lanterns, raising them high, searching for an intruder. Kanazuchi threw the rock far in the opposite direction, rattling a tin roof; the men turned and headed toward the noise.
Soon Kanazuchi reached the edge of the settlement; a quarter mile of open ground inclined up a gradual rise to the construction site. The church's two wings extended out from either end of the building, in the shape of a capital "E" laid on its side; above its center section rose the black tower from his dream.
Spiraling minarets adorned the spired reaches of the structure; walls covered by a mass of irregular forms and shapes he could not distinguish from so far away. Stonemasons chiseled away at these forms from scaffolds wrapped around the wings.
The tower in the middle, as high as the building was long, looked closest to completion. Oblong slits perforated a bulging capsule at its peak, perhaps a bell tower, a black slate roof above.
Immense, narrow doors yawned open at the tower's base; sheets of suspended linen prevented Kanazuchi from glimpsing-its interior. Paths in the dirt circled the church and led out to work and supply stations; quarried squares of rock, a lumber mill, tool sheds, firing ovens for the bricks. The entire site teemed with an army of workers. He saw no overseers in the group; each man and woman seemed purposeful and self-directed.
A quarter mile behind the building rose a sheer mountain of smooth rock, a pale monolithic dome reaching twice again as high as the central tower. When viewed straight on, the rock provided a dramatic backdrop that accentuated the tower's stark visage. Between the construction site and the rock lay its rear entrance, less heavily trafficked.
He waited for the moon to drift behind a cloud, then left the cover of the shanties, moving into the open, away both from the tower and the town, then circled back to the outcroppings of the massive rock formation. The back of the church came into view; nowhere near the same level of activity back here. The rear facade exhibited nothing like the front's refinement and detail; its builder had designed his church to be viewed from the front.
Kanazuchi observed the workers' routines as white shirts periodically pushed wheelbarrows of debris out the back entrance, dumping their loads into a widespread area of waste a hundred paces toward the dome. He crept down to the edge of the site and concealed himself behind a mound of dirt.
When the next worker approached, Kanazuchi waited until he lifted the barrow to empty it, then snapped his neck with a single blow and dragged the body behind the dirt. He stripped the dead man's clothes, put them on over his own; white tunic, pants, and boots. A rough cotton weave, the pullover shirt had an open collar and hung to the middle of his thighs, leaving room for him to tuck the long knife, the wak-izashi, in the back of his belt. Pulling down the dirt with his hands, he quickly buried the body.
Retrieving the wheelbarrow, he encountered a second worker arriving with another load; the pale, slender young man dumped out his barrow, hardly noticing him. Kanazuchi grabbed the handles of his wheelbarrow and followed the man along the path back toward the rear doors. As they approached, the immense scale of the black cathedral came clear to him; the largest building he had ever seen. From its base, Kanazuchi looked up and could not see the summit of the central tower.
They entered down a ramp of wood set on a flight of stairs lit by torches in brackets on the walls. Workers were laying sheets of slate on one section of floor. Others chipped away at arches and portals; some applied mortar to cracks between the blocks of stones. Kanazuchi pushed his wheelbarrow into the central chamber of the church, unable to distinguish the high reaches of the walls rising above him in the dim light. Hut he could feel the cold, black sense of dread in the room.
He remembered drawings the priest at their monastery had shown him of European cathedrals and thought they must feel similar to this place; cold and threatening, designed to frighten and browbeat its worshipers. In his land, churches were gentle buildings, tied to the land around them, built to inspire harmony and inner peace. He wondered again what sort of god they followed in these Western countries that needed so badly to be feared.
In his vision, Kanazuchi had been shown a chamber buried below the main hall of the tower, a room where he had seen the Chinese men working. Perhaps it lay somewhere beneath where he was standing now; the debris behind the church could have come from such an excavation. If the room did exist, he needed time to search out its entrance.
A row of rectangular gaps in the walls on either side of the hall awaited windows, but stained glass had been installed in one opening; a round window directly above the rear doors was illuminated by a bright beam of moonlight that projected the image in the glass onto the black stone floor:
A perfect red circle of light, pierced by three jagged bolts of lightning.
He noticed the floor sloped in a gentle concavity toward its center, where this red circle projected. Kneeling to look closer, he saw that narrow gutters had been carved in the stone throughout the room, leading down to a network of connecting grills in the lowest point of this subtle basin. A cool wind blew up through the grillwork from below.
As Kanazuchi reached to examine the grills, bells in the tower above him began to ring, creating a deafening din inside the building. At the first strokes, the workers around him immediately stopped what they were doing, laid down their tools, and moved toward the front of the cathedral. Kanazuchi followed, mixing in with the workers as they funneled through the open doorway. He hid himself in their midst, a hundred of them, as they massed silently before the entrance; he spread his senses into the crowd around him and realized with a jolt: Only one mind at work here. No thoughts, no noise, no inner voices. One mind directing all these bodies.
Foremen dressed in black appeared on either side, armed with rifles. Looking ahead, Kanazuchi saw another equally sized group of white shirts approaching from the west: the next shift. More brown, black, and yellow faces than white, he noticed; the same as those around him.
The two work details moved past each other, exchanging only vacant smiles. The new group entered the church and the sounds of methodical labor resumed. Kanazuchi's shift marched half a mile west, splintered into smaller groups, and entered three low buildings; workers' residences. He obediently trailed the ones before him into their dormitory under the watchful eye of stationed armed guards; none paid him any attention.
Rows of double bunks lined the room's interior, accommodations for forty, both men and women. Exhausted workers dropped into the first bunk they came to; many fell asleep instantly.
Kanazuchi climbed into an upper bunk. The building closely watched from every side by guards. No other options; with the wound on his back still healing his body needed rest: He would sleep for a while.
The Reverend A. Glorious Day arrived an hour late for dinner. By then the actors, as was their custom, had long since consumed ev
ery edible substance placed within arm's reach. After passing what remained of the afternoon quietly at their hotel— the printed rules stated no one from outside the community could wander around town without an escort and none had been offered—the Penultimate Players had been summoned precisely at eight o'clock and led straight to the Reverend's private residence.
The House of Hope, announced the sign outside the large adobe hacienda, the most elegant of the buildings lining Main Street. Its dining room, like the rest of the quarters they caught a glimpse of on their way in, sported an odd melange of lavish decorative styles—plush Victorian chairs, light Norwegian hutches, Persian carpets, oriental statuary—as if a dozen millionaire's households had been scrambled and redistributed.
Silent, cheerful, and attentive white shirts served a dinner of satisfying fare spiced with a Mexican accent. At its conclusion, Rymer seized the floor and proposed a toast with the fine red wine they were drinking—although alcohol was forbidden in The New City, according to their fliers, the House of Hope apparently had a separate set of rules. Rymer spent the last live minutes of his oratory congratulating his own great good sense on having brought the Players to this obviously enlightened outpost of civilization.
"Bravo, Mr. Rymer; your graciousness is exceeded only by your epic loquacity."
They turned. Reverend Day stood in the open doorway; he'd been there throughout Bendigo's lengthy testimonial, but no one in the company had seen or heard him enter. Bendigo bowed deeply in the Reverend's direction, almost certain that he had been complimented.
"Now you really must explain for me," the Reverend went on, "how ever did you arrive at such a fascinating name for your little troupe?"
"Because if I do say so myself," came Rymer's reply, screwing himself up to his full sixty-seven inches, "we pride ourselves on providing our audiences with the penultimate in theatrical experience."
"Is that so?" said the Reverend, lowering into his seat; Eileen to his right, Bendigo to his left, then Jacob Stern. "Are you by any chance aware that the definition of penultimate is 'next to the last'?"
