Merkabah Rider: Tales of a High Planes Drifter
Author: Edward M. Erdelac
Date: 2000-01-01 05:00:00+00:00
Keywords: Fiction; Horror; Westerns
Description: "The last of an ancient order of Jewish mystics capable of extraplanar travel, The Merkabah Rider roams the demon haunted American West of 1879 in search of the renegade teacher who betrayed his enclave. But as the trail grows fresher, shadows gather, and The Hour Of The Incursion draws near... Four novella episodes in one book. In a town hungry for blood, the Rider encounters a cult of Molech worshippers bent on human sacrifice('The Blood Libel'). A murderous, possessed gunman descends upon a mountain town, and only the Rider stands in his way ('Hell's Hired Gun'). A powerful ju ju man with p
Publisher: Damnation Books

Merkabah Rider: High Planes Drifter

By Edward M. Erdelac

Merkabah Rider: High Planes Drifter

Copyright © 2018 by Edward M. Erdelac. All rights reserved.

Previously published as Merkabah Rider: Tales of A High Planes Drifter, Damnation Books,

December 1st, 2009.

The Shomer Express previously appeared in The Trigger Reflex: Legends of The Monster Hunter

II, Pill Hill Press, November 17, 2011.

The characters and events portrayed in this book are fictitious or fictitious recreations of
actual historical persons. Any similarity to real persons, living or dead, is coincidental and not
intended by the authors unless otherwise specified. This book or any portion thereof may not
be reproduced or used in any manner whatsoever without the express written permission of
the publisher except for the use of brief quotations in a book review.

Cover Illustration: Juri Umagami

Interior Illustrations: M Wayne Miller

Cover Design & Interior Layout: STK•Kreations

Worldwide Rights

Created in the United States of America

Table of Contents
Introduction
I: The Blood Libel
II: The Dust Devils
III: Hell’s Hired Gun
The Shomer Express
Lexicon

Also By Edward M. Erdelac

Novels

Buff Tea

Coyote’s Trail

Terovolas

Andersonville

Monstrumführer

Mindbreaker (in Bond Unknown)

Perennial (in Humanity 2.0)

The Knight With Two Swords

The Merkabah Rider Series

High Planes Drifter

The Mensch With No Name

Have Glyphs Will Travel

Once Upon A Time In The Weird West

Collections

With Sword And Pistol

Angler In Darkness

For Adonai and my family.

Thanks to Bob, Joe, Richard, Larry, Louis, and Howard for the inspiration.

Introduction:

First, a thousand and one thank yous for picking up this first volume of Merkabah Rider.

It’s been almost ten years since the original publication of Tales Of A High Planes Drifter, and I’m pleased to finally have the opportunity to go back and correct all the mistakes that have vexed me over the years; little things like the spelling of ‘Planes’ not matching on the spine, a wrong word or inconsistent use here and there, and The Rider grabbing too many cards in the poker game in The Dust Devils (thanks to the Goodreads reviewer who pointed that one out years ago).

The Rider grew partly from the excitement I got reading Robert E. Howard’s Solomon Kane stories in high school and particularly the Lancer paperbacks of Conan, with the amazing painted Frazetta covers and black and white interior illustrations. I’m especially glad to have The Rider’s adventures out in the way I’d always wanted to present them, emulating those old paperbacks.

For those totally new to the series, welcome, and again, thanks for taking a chance on such an admittedly bizarre concept.  Though this book may read like a collection, it’s really the first of four novels presented like a bundle of episodic novellas, as that was how I read the Kane and Conan adventures. Think of each novella as an extra-long chapter.

I’ll write just a little about how this idea came to be here, and save the rest for future introductions. I mentioned my love for Solomon Kane above. My first encounter with the weird western genre was a collection of Howard’s called Trails In Darkness, which included classic genre mashups like The Terror In The Mound, The Thunder Rider, and Old Garfield’s Heart.  About the time I read those I had gotten heavy into westerns after having seen the Leone Dollars Trilogy, The Shootist, and delving into all the classic stuff (my favorite is still Winchester ‘73). Frontier western history and culture got under my skin, and I read a lot of Larry McMurtry, Richard Matheson (yeah, he wrote westerns), and Elmore Leonard. Dee Brown’s sobering chronicle of Native American history, Bury My Heart At Wounded Knee, affected me greatly, especially the horrendous account of the Sand Creek Massacre in Colorado. I guess as a kind of catharsis, I filled notebooks with stories about a Colorado cavalryman called The Ghost Dancer, killed by his comrades for attempting to stop the massacre and resurrected by a vengeful old Cheyenne shaman to hunt down six of the worst of the massacre’s perpetrators, in a cycle of stories I never finished but thought of as Six Bullets For Six Badmen. Those half a dozen stories and plot fragments were lost to time and computer malfunction long ago, but one of them, Dancer Amid Dust, became The Dust Devils in the book you’re now reading.

My first novels were straight, no-ghoulies westerns, but they didn’t sell very well, so I had the idea of blowing the dust off the old weird western stories still sitting in my brain, and reworking them into something new. Joe Lansdale’s two Jonah Hex miniseries for Vertigo were also a big hit with me, and I think that was my impetus to try something of my own in that genre.

The bonus story included at the end of this book, The Shomer Express, takes place first in terms of continuity, but was written somewhere between the publication of the first and second books and appeared separately in a little seen anthology called Trigger Reflex. It makes some assumptions and doesn’t work all that well as an introduction to the character, which is why I included it last.

Longtime Merkabah Rider fans might skip right to that after reading this introduction though. To new readers, your discretion.

-EME, 3/15/2018

I: The Blood Libel

The Merkabah Rider passed into the San Pedro River valley on a narrow, stony path through the Huachucas. It was an old road white men and Mexicans wouldn’t use. They dreaded the Apache purported to skulk in the rocky places drunk on tiswin, plotting the rape of virgins and devising new ways to make the blue bellied soldiers scream.

The Chiricahua shunned it too, reckoning it too arduous and remote a pass. Some among them believed it sank into the heart of the mountains and passed through the shadowy worlds of wicker and web where only Coyote dared, to finally open up into the dark place where it was said the ravenous thunderbirds of old nested, dreaming lightning dreams, and stirring at the smell of a man’s terror.

The Rider had encountered none of these things.

Thirst and shifting stones and steep paths were all the evils that plagued him. As for the shaggy white onager he led, perhaps it had sensed all manner of evils. It had balked and shivered enough times on the journey, but whether that was from preternatural unease or inborn wild ass stubbornness, he couldn’t say.

He had spent the day passing through the foothills and trekking across the flat anvil of the baking valley floor in the direction of the river. There was a town there, haphazardly arranged as if some ungainly colossus had tripped over the ribbon of water and spilled the clapboard and adobe buildings from its arms, then stumbled on.

DRUCKER & DOBBS MINING COMPANY

WELCOMES YOU TO DELIRIUM TREMENS

POP 180

The letters were carved into a plank sign bolted to a boulder set along a road, which appeared quite suddenly. It was a rutted swath that slashed through the rough tumble of ominous saguaro and mean dry brush and drove down the center of the town. The Rider followed it.

It was on a dying, red sun Friday when he passed into the town; only the black gummed growl of a scrawny, long-nippled cur that slid from underneath the shadows of a boardwalk, welcomed him. Though there were people locking up stores and heading for their homes, they greeted him in much the same way as the bitch, but in their own, more insidious manner.

Curtains drew. Fleshy lips moved behind lily hands. Whispers carried words he’d heard a hundred times before in towns better than this. Questions both bemused (What do you make of that?) and pregnant with fear-born threat (Who does he think he is?). Speculations (Some kinda Mennonite? A Mormon? A Mexican?). Then, probably from some drummer who had been out of the valley once or twice— maybe as far as Tombstone or Bisbee he heard another; Jew.

That was all it took to tip the murmurs spilling. They came gushing over curled lips like the salivation of wagging dogs smelling a kill. They crawled up, pestilent and envenomed, from the throats of shopkeepers—men in aprons, who if they knew whom they were addressing, would have hunkered down behind the counters of their stores and averted their gaze like peons before a passing maharajah. They squeezed through the gritted yellow teeth of posturing men with wide belts and big pistols who thought themselves hard, but would have scrabbled with their fingers in the earth to hide their eyes from all The Rider had seen.

The words meant nothing to The Rider. They were just more words.

Christ-Killer. Heeb. Dirty Jew.

He knew what he was to them, in his strange black garb and his long, blue-black beard and curled payot. He knew they looked on the four white fringes of his prayer tallit with nervous hatred. He was alien to them who knew only mine dust and horse stink, faded calico, and the red faced brimstone clamor of the gospel peddler. He was a weird apparition that stoked distrust in the most neighborly breast. He was a strange mirage shimmering down the desert road, salted in moon dust and smelling of foreign lands.

As he passed a sundry, where a fat clerk leaned in the doorway speaking with a rail thin man in overalls who straddled a barrel, he heard the clerk say;

“One of them. And right down the middle of the street! Someone should...”

The Rider paused in his walk, feeling the onager nuzzle against the small of his back and snort, wondering why they were lingering when water was so near. The Rider fixed his stare on the fat clerk, looking at the man’s pinched face over the golden rims of the blue tinted spectacles he wore. The clerk gave pause, and his eyes flitted to The Rider’s frock where he saw the gilded pistol strapped to his waist. Those eyes met The Rider’s once more, then darted with sudden interest to a sign on the wall—an advertisement for Proven Gall Bitters, which promised a relief to habitual feminine maladies. Neither the clerk nor the barrel rider spoke again till he was gone.

The Rider was a man who understood the root of fear, but would not suffer its fruits.

He went on towards the looming shadow of the two-story building that stood like a promontory, splitting the dry river of the dusty street in two. It was the El Moderado Gambling Hall and Saloon, a backwater palace, the shining citadel of Delirium Tremens. The second story wood edifice, bearing the fancy painted sign, rose transcendent above its humble adobe beginnings, as it did above its shoddy neighbors. The pale walls of its baked mud foundation were chipped, the edges streaked with black from a long ago fire. The second floor had been a recent addition, a rakish hat of slatted brilliance.

On the long plank balcony above the sign, Cut Tom Duggan stood smoking a cigarette in his sweat stained long johns, leaning over the flaking white railing. He fingered the namesake scar that split his face diagonally and watched the man in black leading the onager down the street.

The dull-eyed Chinee whore, sitting with her narrow hips pressed against the inside of Tom’s bare feet, pressed her painted face through the bars to watch the newcomer while she kicked her stocking legs back and forth girlishly over the edge. Cut Tom glanced down at the tangled nest of black hair beneath him. Through the sheer camisole, fresh cigar burns could be seen on her bare, pockmarked shoulders.

It never failed to amaze him what a woman would let a man, or two men, do to her for money.

As the man in black reached the hitch and trough in front of the porch, Cut Tom leaned closer, eyeing him from above. He was dressed like a preacher, in a long black frock and wide hat. He clinked when he walked, but had on no spurs. Not even boots, just a pair of dusty, black shoes. The cream colored donkey had saddlebags and a bedroll, but little else. The man was no prospector.

He had long, John Brown whiskers. They were black like his clothes, blue where the sun gleamed, and a long nose poked out over them. Displayed on either side of his head was a pair of womanly curls, long enough to sway when he worked at tethering the animal.

Something in the man’s appearance stirred up the catamount in Cut Tom. He knew a Jew when he saw one. This one was some kind of Jew priest. Come to read the last rites to his folk? Maybe the ones cowering in their rat holes down in Little Jerusalem had wired for him to talk Billy Shivers and the Reverend Shallbetter out of slaughtering the whole lot of them. Maybe all that clinking he heard was Jew gold come to buy them an exodus.

Then, as a gust of dry wind blew up the Jew’s coattails, he knew what it was that put him off. Strapped to the Jew’s waist, as brazen as if it were a standing challenge to all Christian men, was a pistol.

So that’s what he was. Those Heebs had hired themselves a Jew killer to come down and save them from the fire. He tightened his grip on the rail and it creaked. The Jew looked up at him. The setting sun flashed for a minute on his fancy blued spectacles, his pale face drawn and expressionless, like a mask.

Cut Tom drew up the rust and tobacco taste from the back of his throat and spit it over the rail. It landed with a smack on the boards at the Jew’s feet. The man didn’t move. He stared up at Cut Tom through those blue glasses. As they caught the sun again, Tom thought he glimpsed a design etched into them, like a pair of big, circled stars. He held the empty look and squinted at those blue glasses. His daddy had told him never to look away from any man, and he hadn’t ever. Not even from the one who’d given him his scar.

Then the Jew lowered his face and disappeared under the awning. Cut Tom could hear his clinking step on the boards, and the creak of the bat wing doors swinging open down below. The Jew’s onager dipped its nose in the trough.

Tom smiled.

The Chinee girl turned her broad face to look up at him, a hint of sharpness in her expression. The bruise in the corner of her mouth was a shining plum.

“You want somethin?” he said, feeling big again, feeling mean.

She looked away.

Cut Tom flicked his smoke off the balcony and turned to the doorway where his partner lay, still passed out naked on the bed, the greasy bottle tucked into the crook of his meaty arm like it was the Chinee girl’s neck. Bull Bannock was so called because he was a steer of a man, covered head to toe in greasy black hair and pale flesh that sagged on his gargantuan frame like bread dough on a Greek statue. Tom didn’t like to wake his partner, not when he was close up. Sometimes Bannock woke up flailing like a startled baby, and one of those tree trunk arms could knock a man sideways whether Bull meant it or not.

“Hey Bull!” Tom called.

It only took once. The big man’s slitted eyes creaked open, bright and blue in his ruddy face. He blinked once and stared over his brushy moustache. He snorted like a roused bear.

“Get dressed. Let’s go downstairs.”

* * * *

The dying light shined in dusty shafts through the sugared glass of the saloon. It crept across angular men in dirty coats huddled over stained tables, squinting at smudged cards while sleepy, immodest women, trailing sheer yellow-white fabrics, moved like phantasms unnoticed among them lighting the lamps, their rising sun. The dealers were tired looking women in their underwear, their bosoms bulging ridiculously over the lips of their lurid corsets. White and red and brown and yellow skinned, they shined with sweat and spilt whiskey. They smiled brightly through painted, chapped lips, but their eyes were as dead as the dreams of murdered men.

Burly Holt pretended to read the daily edition of the Pure Life Picayune but watched the tall man in the black coat push in from the failing light, the same as every other man and woman in the Moderado. He was a sight in all that black and beard. A real Jew, such as Burly had seen in his youth back east, though he had never known them to go around heeled.

By God, this one had picked the wrong time to visit. When he reached the bar, turning the heads of even the most dedicated gamblers in the process, Burly folded his paper and told him so.

The Jew said nothing, but put his hands on the bar.

“Maybe you misunderstood me, Shylock,” Burly whispered. “We don’t cater to your creed here.”

“Of course we do.”

The voice came from Dan Spector, the owner, who sat at the end of the bar sipping coffee and smoking a thin cigarillo. Dan got up from his seat and slid down the bar to stand beside the Jew, who still had not looked anywhere but at Burly since he’d spoken. Burly was no coward, though his fighting prowess had mainly been tested against dallying drunks and whore beaters. But the way Dan could not see the Jew’s eyes through those blue spectacles...it put him a little on edge.

“Aw...but Dan....”

“But nothing,” said Dan, sparing him a look of stern disapproval that his carefully groomed whiskers seemed to emphasize “This man’s a newcomer to town, nothing to do with that business. If he has money...,” Dan paused, and looked the Jew up and down, from the top of his dusty black hat to the gold gilded pistol and finely tooled belt at his waist, “and his kind always does, then he’s welcome and you’re to serve him.”

He smiled up at the stoic stranger, nodded to Burly, and said in a voice loud enough for the rest of the saloon to hear;

“Commerce knows no creed. If you knew that, you’d be running this place, not tending bar, Burly.”

Burly bit his lip. Dan was too smart for his own good. He was an alright sport, but Burly hated to be cowed in front of everybody that way. He swore to himself, the first regular who tried any lip with him tonight would wind up kissing the bung starter.

“What’ll it be then?” he hissed at the Jew.

The Rider shook his head at the curly blonde man behind the bar. “I don’t want a drink,” he answered evenly.

The well-dressed one’s face fell a little then. His hospitality only extended so far.

“Is it a room then? Ah. Sorry. We’re full up. You can try Little Jerusalem east of town.”

“Jewtown?” laughed the bartender. “Yeah. Good luck getting in.”

Out of the corner of his eye, The Rider watched the stubby man who had spit at him from the balcony descend the staircase. He was an ugly little man with a crooked scar that ploughed from one corner of his forehead to the opposite corner of his chin, disrupting his nose in between. There was a large, swaggering man at his side. The Rider ignored them, even as the ugly little one called out above the murmurs of the gambling;

“You got a lotta sand comin’ here askin’ for a room, Christ killer.”

The Rider spoke for the first time to the well-dressed man, whom the bartender had called Dan.

“What does he mean about me needing luck to get into the settlement?”

“I’m talkin’ to you, dude!” the ugly man on the stairs shouted again. “Or can’t you hear me through them pretty, pretty pigtails?”

“Pretty pigtails,” the big one repeated, chuckling. Slowly, The Rider turned his attention to them. He put his elbow on the bar. The other hand, he hitched near his belt line. The pistol on his jutting hip spoke a clear warning.

The ugly man only seemed incensed and practically skipped the rest of the way down.

“Never known one of your kind to favor a pistol before. That’s a real fancy lookin’ one too.”

Truth be told, it was an exceptional weapon. The ugly one was like a fool bird who only saw a shiny something. It was an antique, a Volcanic pistol. They had gone out of favor some years back. Its finish was gold gilded and silver chased, stamped with intricate designs and glyphs of a nature none in the saloon would have understood even if The Rider had the patience and time to explain.

“I wanna touch it,” said the big one.

The ugly one and his partner stopped at the end of the bar, and the ugly one put his foot on the brass rail casually. He had a pistol too, a newer model, the blunted horn of its handle curving out of the lip of his stripy pants. The big one was likewise heeled, some heavy horse pistol sagging in his right hand pocket.

“That’s too pretty a pistol to be shootin’,” the ugly one quipped. “Why don’t you slide it down the bar and let me and my partner take a gander at it?”

“If you keep at it,” The Rider said, “you’ll see it soon enough.”

The ugly one’s face got uglier. The scar flushed red. He slapped his hand on his pistol belt, hollering;

“What’d you say to me?”

But he stopped, for as promised, The Rider’s pistol now rested naked in the lamp light for all to see, its squarish barrel angled somewhere in the direction of Cut Tom’s forehead.

Bull Bannock blinked.

There was a crash behind the bar. Burly had snatched up a sawed off shotgun from beneath it, but the alacrity of The Rider’s movement had so startled him, he’d jerked it back and upset a shelf of brandies and sent it smashing to the floor. It should have been enough noise to start both men shooting, but The Rider only aimed. Cut Tom’s hand still gripped his pistol butt, though he didn’t draw it out. Two by two his fingers uncurled and straightened.

A few chairs groaned in the background. A few breaths hissed out. Someone dropped a poker chip into a pile on a table.

“Left hands,” The Rider said after a moment. “Both of you, leave your pistols on the bar.”

Tom complied, putting up his right hand and easing the pistol out with two fingers of his left. It clunked on the bar top.

Beside, him Bull Bannock reached for his gun with his right hand and The Rider’s hammer cocked back.

“The other hand, jughead,” Tom warned.

In a moment, the big man’s pistol lay beside his compatriot’s.

The Rider motioned to the front door.

“Don’t come back for them until after I’ve gone.”

Silently the ugly one and his big partner shuffled chins down through the gaping card players and blinking drinkers. The bang of the bat wings told all they’d reached the street.

The Rider slipped the silver and gold pistol back into its holster.

“It looks like we just got a vacancy, mister,” said Dan.

The Rider turned once more to the man with the pomaded hair and carefully sculpted moustache.

“It’s alright. Tell me now, why would I have trouble getting into Little Jerusalem?”

The man’s shoulders shrugged beneath his silken shirt. “Your religious persuasion isn’t exactly popular around here right now, not since a few months ago when the pig farmers started complaining about their hogs going missing.”

The Rider listened as Dan told the rest.

It began with livid pig farmers, cursing over their sows’ empty teats. The poor blacks were blamed first, then the vagrants and the street gamins. But no one really missed a few piglets enough to bother rooting through the hovels and shacks for their little bones.

Then Justus Saunders of the Lazy S Ranch stormed into town one night with a gang of his hands and howled for the blood of whatever thief had pilfered six calves from his spread. Theft of cattle was a step up in severity, and they had necessarily roused the marshal, Billy Shivers, to ride out into the night and run down the culprits. But a driving rain had kicked up before the posse could organize, and turned the country to mud. They’d never cut any sign.

Then the Mexes started missin’ ‘em,” Dan explained gravely.

“Cattle?” asked The Rider.

“No, not cattle.”

First, a man named Trujillo had barged into the saloon weeping, clutching a scrap of homespun swaddling and saying how his infant son had been snatched from his cradle. No trace had been left, and no arrest made. Then the Garza family lost one of its seven children, a girl of six years.

The old whispers had started with that, and heads had begun turning towards Little Jerusalem.

Two days ago, the whispers had turned to howls for blood when somewhere between the schoolhouse and her home, Reverend Shallbetter’s golden haired girl of thirteen turned up missing.

“Shivers hired a tracker,” Dan said. “That Injin led the posse right to Little Jerusalem.”

“No surprise there,” Burly said, eyeing the Jew with contempt. “Everybody knows the Heebs drink the blood of Christian babies in their Mass.”

As he spoke, the curly headed bartender saw his own face reflected in the blue glass of the Jew’s spectacles, and remembered how fast that pistol had been brought to bear.

“Well,” he amended, “some of ‘em do, anyhow.” Dan sighed.

“If you come to see somebody there, you’re too late. Marshal Shivers has got Jewtown ringed in, and the Reverend is whipping a posse up for slaughter. They hollered for them to let the girl come out, if she’s alive, but the Jews played it dumb. Cardin and his fool sheep herders. They call him the Mayor of Jewtown. Don’t know why they don’t just give the guilty party up. If they don’t, the whole lot of ‘em will get burned out by dawn.”

The Rider considered all this.

“I suppose I’ll need that room after all.”

* * * *

The Rider listened to the owner admonish the bartender regarding the lost liquor as he ascended the stair. The first door on the right in the dim lit hall led to his recently vacated room, but it was to the door across the hall, number seven, which he turned to first.

There was a glow beneath the door that spilled out across the floor of the hall. It was too bright, too white for the yellow of the oil lamp. It was a light he knew well.

He didn’t bother to knock.

Any other man would have seen the albino woman in rich petticoats seated by the window and called her beautiful, although she was not quite possessed of the hearty contours favored in the art and pornography of the day. She was slender of limb and delicate. A poet might have called her swan-like, with her long neck, sparse, unpainted features and prim posture. She was indeed like a settled swan in that regard. The poet would have called her hair ivory. It was shock white, not bleached as in sickness, but pure as a snowcap. Her eyes were startlingly light too, and not the pink of the true albino; something else. Almost...silver. Unearthly. The whiteness of her seemed to spill across the walls and the ceiling. She emanated light from the pores of her skin. It was the light that had led The Rider to her.

She.

The Rider thought of it as she, but the being before him could no more be pinned down by that inadequate pronoun than the first beam of the morning sunlight is encompassed by ‘it.’

Still, she was a breathtaking sight to any man, even without seeing her as she truly was, as The Rider saw her, through the filter of the Solomonic seals mystically embossed on the blued lenses of his spectacles.

She was forty thousand times the glory of any mortal woman. With the aid of the magic lenses, The Rider could see behind the flare of white, as through a porthole into the heavenly spectrum, and peer at the myriad of dazzling colors that made up her dress and otherwise invisible wings. Colors as living and diverse as the wild plumage of some rarely glimpsed tropical bird. Colors for which mortal man had no name.

“Hello, Rider,” she greeted him, in a voice like the trilling of a silver flute. The door swung shut behind him of its own accord.

“Hello.” He nodded. “It’s been a long time.” Despite their acquaintance, he did not know her name, nor he suspected, did she know his. He felt the majesty of her office. It had grown, even in the mortal years that had passed since their last encounter—a moment’s time to one of her kind.

“Yes,” she said. “Since your last excursion through the one hundred twenty-one gates. How long ago was that? I sometimes forget the difference in time.”

“No you don’t,” The Rider said, settling onto the edge of the bed across from her. “You’re a malakh. You don’t forget anything. This must be serious if He sent you.”

“Like Sodom and Gomorrah, on a lesser scale,” she said, not without pity. “An old friend of yours abides in this town now.”

“I don’t have any old friends.”

“I was being sardonic.”

“What old friend?” said The Rider.

Her face seemed to wrinkle before she spoke, like the face of one about to do a necessary pain.

“The old bull.”

The Rider shook his head. When would they learn?

“Molech,” he muttered.

“Did you know?” she asked. She turned to regard him. “Is that why you’re here?”

“I’m here because I need a favor.”

She stiffened.

“I cannot grant any clemency, Rider. It has already been decided.”

“I only ask what Abraham asked.”

“Fifty righteous people?” One pale eyebrow arched. “There aren’t fifty living in the whole settlement. And those there are…you know what they have done, Rider. Their seed has passed through the fire. They have even begun stealing the children of the innocent.”

“Not fifty,” said The Rider. “Like you say, we’re working on a lesser scale. Only…let three be spared.”

“I thought you said you didn’t have any old friends,” she said, raising her eyebrows.

The Rider opened his hands.

“Three. Is it so much to ask?”

She tilted her head. Her mercurial eyes darted skyward, and in an instant were regarding him again.

“You have until dawn.”

The Rider stood and bowed his chin in thanks. It was all he could hope for.

He turned and left the room.

Stepping into his own room after squinting from the angel’s light was like being dropped into a deep sack. His eyes adjusted quickly enough to spot the pale movement behind the door, and for the second time that night the pistol jumped into his hand but did not fire.

A lean limbed Chinese girl crouched behind the door, her dark eyes shining in the rising moonlight from the window. Her undergarments were torn, and even with both fists on the pair of sharp scissors she brandished, she could not stop trembling.

He removed his spectacles. They only hampered him now in this dimness. In the pale light from the door that led to the balcony, he could see the burns on her skin, the swelling in the corner of her lips, the bruises on her wrists and legs.

He stepped back, giving her a wide berth.

“They won’t be coming back tonight,” he said.

She stared. He wasn’t sure she could speak or understand English. He repeated himself, in as gentle a tone as he could muster. Then he slowly gestured to the door with an open hand.

“Please leave.”

Fung Jiang-Li rose unsteadily, pushing her back against the wall and feeling the blood run into her cramped legs. She did not answer the soft eyed man in the black coat. She could hardly comprehend. Kindness had become a foreign language to her. For a year and a half now, she had not known gentle words or guileless intent from any man.

Four years ago when she was a girl of twelve, the Apache had descended on the town and she had hid in the mines with the other children. When they returned, it had been to a charnel house. She had starved in the alleys for a time, remembering her late father’s admonitions to have no dealings with the Chinese men who loitered about the Tong Shan Eatery. But there was no charity from the Americans, and she had seen no other course, though she knew she would wind up a pillow girl.

Dan Spector had seemed a deliverer when he had called her to him one day and given her a fresh meal. He had been handsome and affluent, kind at first. But where had that led? Here she was, being used in ways she had never conceived even in her most private moments by men, who but for a few clenched dollars, were little more than vagrants.

She had intended to cross the scar of Cut Tom with the scissors she’d gotten from the dresser drawer; to skewer his eye maybe, on the points. She knew he would kill her for it. Perhaps he and his friend would do even worse to her before she died, but this afternoon had been too much.

Now, when she was at her lowest, here was this strange looking man turning her from the room with respect. Where were Cut Tom and the other gwai lo? He spoke as if he were the reason they would not be back tonight. She didn’t know what to make of him.

He held his gesture, smiling thinly behind his thick beard, his brown eyes sharing the expression.

After a moment, she straightened from the wall, staring at him the whole time, and left the room.

To Jiang-Li’s continued astonishment, he closed the door behind her.

* * * *

The Rider had fasted and prayed for three days in the mountains in preparation for this.

He drew his inscribed cold iron Bowie knife and held it to the cardinal directions, muttering as he did so.

“At my right, Michael. At my left, Gabriel. Before me, Uriel. Behind me, Raphael....”

He rolled up the rug, and with the knife, described a Solomonic circle in the center of the floor. He placed the requisite tallow candles at each of the four six pointed stars before etching the characters of the Ineffable Name, and began the long incantation.

This was an old ritual; old for his people, and old for him as well. It was old long before Solomon’s seal and the summoner’s triangle had been transcribed into the pages of the Lemegeton. It had been taught to him by a rebbe of the Sons of the Essenes, who had been taught by his father, and so on, back to the days before the Second Temple fell, back when the Ark rested within the Kodesh Hakodashim of the Tabernacle and the almond Rod of Aaron, with its core of brilliant sapphire, was still the scepter of the Hebrew Kings.

In those days, the Merkabah riders had been scholarly mystics inspired by the vision of Ezekial and the Chariot of God. Entering into ecstatic trances, they left their bodies to explore the upper reaches of the celestial Empyrean, transcribing accounts of their journeys into sacred homilies. The most dedicated eventually came to stand in the innermost of the seven hekhalots of Araboth, the highest heaven, before the Divine Image of the Most High.

But The Rider had never made it that far.

He worked against the procession of the hour. There was much to be done, many formulas to be enacted before the battle could be joined. The sword of the Lord was about to fall on Little Jerusalem, and His will be done, maybe it was not unwarranted. But before it cut, The Rider had to know. He had to know if Joseph Klein and his family were deserving of their punishment.

The Rider had lied to the angel. He did have a few old friends left. Joseph Klein was one.

The angel knew this of course. She had seen through his careless talk. It was an unavoidable habit he had picked up in his travels through this country of liars, killers, and blasphemers. One must be prepared to speak lightly of death, to give at least the appearance of nonchalance on the subject if one was to be permitted to keep company in the smoky places where evil did business. Like earlier in the saloon, that foolish posturing. Though the tzadikim and the rebbes would have clamped their hands over their ears and shut their eyes to hear and see it, such braggadocio was a necessity in his line, as was the gun.

The Sanhedrin had written:

“If a man comes to kill you, kill him first.”

In this world of swaggering toughs, if you broke a man’s pride, you could avoid killing him.

The Rider had known men who truly believed their own talk, though. He had seen them die. Sometimes he had consigned them to death himself. Yet always in the fading eyes of these men had he seen the truth he had known since his first excursion into the high planes; what awaited a man’s soul was not to be taken lightly.

Now, as he worked, he thought of what lay in store for Joseph’s soul in the morning. It was not just a frenzied posse of vengeful gunmen mustered around the settlement east of Delirium Tremens. It was the malakhim, the angels of the Lord sharpening their poisonous swords.

Why was Joseph here, in this refuge of blasphemy?

Molech, the old bull. The angel had said he was here.

The Rider had encountered him before, during one of his more hazardous astral expeditions. A demon and marshal of Hell who had set himself up as a king in ages past, who gorged on the cooked flesh of infants and washed it down with tears. The sinful Jews of Canaan had sacrificed to him, beating drums to drown out the wailing of mothers. Even Solomon had paid him bloody tribute before men of God had toppled his glowing idols.

Now, to find him here...and to find Joseph among his flock!

Joseph had been a mentor to him in his early studies of the Kabbalah, back when he had been a wide eyed young scholar, a talmidei khakham, only guessing at the wonders and terrors that existed in the world beyond. He had been called not Canaanite or blasphemer then, but prodigy, and allowed to study the mystic teachings at an unheard of age.

He pressed his forehead to the floor between his knees in the posture of ultimate supplication, and prepared to venture forth again.

* * * *

It was well on into night when Cut Tom and Bull swaggered back into the El Moderado and cornered Dan at the bar, cajoling him for their guns so they could go upstairs and kill the sleeping Jew. Burly had swept the busted glass up behind the bar and mopped up twenty five dollars of wasted liquor. Now he was at the bar, dealing solitaire.

“I don’t think so. Once he’s shot you two idiots,” said Dan, riffling the cards, “he’ll come down and put one in me.”

“He’s gotta be sleepin’ by now,” Tom pleaded, sensing that the time they’d spent seeking courage in the bottom of a whiskey bottle and trying to persuade Dan was not going to be wasted. “We’ll just sneak upstairs and get his gun from him.”

“He won’t just hand it over,” Dan said.

“I don’t want him to.” Tom leered. “By God, you know I don’t. Let us have him, Dan.” He leaned in and lowered his voice, and Dan had to blink back the odor of condensed liquor that puffed out with the effort. “We’ll cut you in.”

Dan seemed to consider, then nodded to Burly.

“Alright, but don’t put any holes in the walls.”

In a moment the guns were back on the bar, along with a spare key to the Jew’s room. Tom and Bull both reached eagerly for them, but Dan slapped a hand over the key and met Tom’s eyes first.

“You can keep that fancy pistol. But I want his kit. That Jew was jingling with shekels goin’ up the stairs.”

Cut Tom licked his lips and looked once back at Bull.

“Deal,” he said, and headed for the stairs, key in one fist, gun in the other.

* * * *

The Rider stood.

It was an airy feeling, weightless. The familiar pains were gone, inhabiting the empty amalgamation of tissue and bone that still knelt on the floor in the center of the circle. The hunger and thirst that had tempered his body like a penitent’s belt of nails was gone, but seemed to call from afar for his return. He ignored them, and drew his ethereal legs from the top of his drooping skull like a man stepping out of a pair of pants.

The bodiless journey of a Merkabah rider was never easy. One’s travel was often impeded by the intercession of baleful spirits. Not just the guardian angels that would let a soul pass with the proper incantations, but also demons that would tear an unprotected spirit apart. Merkabah traditions had prescribed the use of certain protective incantations and wards. This was not an intrusion into the seven heavens, but merely a journey to the Yenne Velt, the shadow world of earthbound ghosts, and so did not require his most complex preparations. Yet knowing that Molech was involved, it didn’t hurt to be prepared.

He not so much looked for, but felt the presence of the corresponding talismans and mystic implements about his etheric body. Every charm, every snatch of holy text, bit of rare colored animal, Turkish eye, and sacred stone he wore, lent their individual power and protection to his ethereal double.

It had been a point of vehement contention between The Rider, his master, Adon, and his other teachers, that he employed not only the holy tefillin phylacteries with their sacred inscriptions, the Hamesh hand amulet and other strictly Kabbalistic talismans to protect against spiritual assault on his ethereal form, but also such non-Jewish bodyguards as he had first been introduced to by his master, such as the powerful Mohammaden Ayat-Al Kursi amulet, the Tibetan Ga’u box, the Hindu svastika, and the Abbada Ke Dabra.

The rebbes had assailed Adon with the law he knew only too well;

“Against him that turns after familiar spirits and after wizards, I will set my face and cut him off from among his people.”

He and Adon both had been dubbed apostates and minim. For a time, The Rider had resented their ire. His master had taught him that God had opened many avenues to His glory, and to fetter oneself in dogma was to insist on riding an ass across the ocean.

It was only after the war he came to realize the truth lay somewhere in between. Adon had not sought God, except as a metaphor for power. The Rider had narrowly avoided following his teacher down a dark and sinful road. Adon’s teachings had made him an outcast among the Hasidim and his secret order, the Sons of the Essenes, though he still wore their trappings and considered himself one of their number.

He was the last of the American enclave. Adon had seen to that. He had employed his powers to murder the San Francisco Essenes, destroying the Order’s foothold in America.

Yet because of his master, he was one of the most accomplished Merkabah explorers of his age. In his time, he had immersed himself in the waters of eternity, had witnessed the thunderous ecstasy of God’s Chariot with all its fiery attendants, and had visited with the glorious ministers of the Holy Palaces.

The fearsome angel Metatron had barred him from the object of his journey in the end, denied him from attaining the ultimate audience with the Lord in the seventh heaven of Araboth. Whether it was due to his employment of ‘idolatrous’ artifacts or some failing in his own spiritual purification, he didn’t know for certain.

He had come away from the path of glory a troubled failure, with only more questions. Though he had passed time among the purest of spirits and learned many unutterable mysteries, The Rider had still felt the pull of his mortal heart anchoring him to the earthly realm; he could still hear the lamentations of the innocent and the cackle of the demons that tormented and misguided them. He came to believe that perhaps he had been denied the climactic joining with the Divine because he had a task to perform on earth.

When he had learned of the treachery of Adon, he believed he had found that task. So he had bent his knowledge and abilities to the opposition of the dark powers his master called forth in his relentless search for power, and sought since to follow him and avenge the evil acts he had committed.

It was an arduous undertaking, he knew, for Adon had proceeded farther down the arcane paths of forbidden knowledge than anyone living. The Rider himself had turned aside prematurely, and was not his equal in power. More, he was not trusted by the surviving foreign enclaves. Indeed, he had nearly escaped being hunted down as Adon’s accomplice by the German Essenes, and had been formally shunned after presenting himself to the Council Of Yahad at Ein Gedi in Palestine. He could expect no help from them. Yet he could see no other course.

Now The Rider passed like a tuft of cotton on a ghostly breeze through the window and into the open night.

Reaching into his pocket, he withdrew a crude talisman in the shape of a horse molded from red clay. It had been the gift of Misquamacus, the great Cheyenne medicine man, and with a few moments’ gesturing, The Rider called upon the ethereal energies in which he swam. The horse fetish drew them as a magnet draws filaments from all corners, fashioning them into an equine form whose mane shone like golden fire, and whose brassy hooves stamped impatient sparks upon the shadow ground. Onto the back of this spirit animal, he allowed his etheric self to gently settle, and gripping the brilliant mane in his fists, he gave his heels to its flanks and set off east, across the dark land at the speed of forgotten dreams.

He gave no thought to the mortal flesh he left entranced within the protective circle. No hell-born minion of Molech’s, nor any vagabond spirit of ill intent, could circumvent the ancient wards.

It was no spirit that crossed his magic lines.

* * * *

Cut Tom and Bull crept into the room expecting to find the Jew asleep in bed. They didn’t even plan to fire their guns, just dash his skull to pieces on the pillow with the barrels. When they quietly as cats unlocked the door to the room and slipped in from the hall, they almost leapt out the open window for fright at what appeared to be the Jew crouching in the middle of the floor, expectant.

No flash lit the room beyond the dim flickering candles the Jew had set up, and no lead screamed across the darkness to punch holes in their bodies.

The Jew sat there, still as a gravestone.

“What is he?” Bull hissed. “Asleep?”

“He ain’t never gonna wake up,” Tom murmured, cocking his .44.

Tom crossed the creaking floor, peering hesitantly at the calm face of the Jew in the waving light. He took note of the weird scratches on the floor, but they meant nothing to him. The Jew’s coat was lying on the bed, though his pistol was still strapped around his waist.

What commanded Tom’s eye was the amount of doodads the Jew wore. He was entirely draped in baubles and trinkets, stuff that had the look of Indian and gypsy jewelry. Bangles and armbands, dozens of necklaces, brooches and rings clung to his body, nearly blotting out the white shirt beneath. Stones of every color gleamed in the sputtering candlelight. That was the source of the clinking. Was this some kind of Jew peddler then, so afraid of thieves he kept all his wares about his person?

He had heard Jews were avaricious, but he hadn’t guessed the extent. He hunkered down in front of the Jew and spit in his face. It smacked wetly against the bearded man’s cheek, but even then, his closed eyelids didn’t flinch.

“Wake up, you son of a bitch,” Tom hissed, pressing the barrel of his pistol to the Jew’s forehead. “Wake up, and die!”

The Chinee girl almost killed him.

“Leave him be, you sunnabitch!” she yelled from the hallway. He hadn’t even known she could speak any American besides what he’d paid her to say that rowdy afternoon.

She pointed the silvery barrel of a little .32 pistol at him. He could see it perfect in the dim light, it was so bright and clean. He even saw the blunt noses of the cartridges in the wheel, assuring him it was no joke.

Bull saved him. He turned and smacked the girl hard with the back of his hand. The pistol spit a bullet into the ceiling and she fell hard against the opposite wall. In a minute they could hear Burly tromping up the stairs. Tom had promised Dan no holes in the walls.

Cut Tom turned back to the Jew and wrinkled his nose.

“No fun,” said Bull, who had come to stand over him.

“You got that right,” agreed Tom. “Don’t know what his deal is.” He flicked his finger hard across the Jew’s nose, sending a trickle of blood from one nostril into the curls of his beard. Still, the Jew didn’t move. “It’s like he’s dead already.”

He stood, knees popping. He eased the hammer down on his .44 and shrugged.

“Hoist him up, Bull. Let’s take him downstairs and have some fun with him.”

* * * *

Marshal Billy Shivers watched the light from the four campfires dance like devils on the sides of the dark dwellings of Little Jerusalem.

Jackrabbit John, the Navajo tracker, sat on a boulder with his back to the fire, sipping his coffee and looking up at the stars. Reverend Shallbetter was stalking back and forth, pulling his curly chin whiskers and slinging low, Biblically inspired threats at the unseen Jews.

All the men could taste the salt of Shallbetter’s bloodlust, even Billy. The man had every right. He had a little girl somewhere in there, probably murdered. But that didn’t give Billy the go ahead to unleash a bunch of mad dogs on a town of fifty people who might not have anything to do with it. He had heard all the blood drinking Jew talk since this bad business had begun, and had felt the heart of the town turn against these people, just as he’d felt all the eyes turning to him for satisfaction. Billy had been marshal here ever since the Apache troubles. He had never had too many dealings with the Jews. They were a private people, only coming to town to pick up packages and groceries and to sell wool and the occasional mutton. Nobody’d ever had a problem with them much, until now.

He was the only man holding the leash, and even their respect of his authority wouldn’t last forever. His badge was the only thing that kept them from being a flat out lynch mob. He had done all he could do, hollering out to Hayim Cardin to give up the culprit and the kidnapped girl alive or dead. Maybe the Jews were forted up, terrified of what would happen if they gave up a dead girl to them. Maybe they had every reason to be afraid. Billy had no doubt a good deal of these men with him tonight had signed on not so much for the right of it, but for the sanction to kill.

A lot of strangers had volunteered. Some were rough men who did bloody business on the border. Men whose faces probably belonged on the wall of his office. Others he had never seen at all. They were quiet men with clean faces, too pretty for the valley, but who also looked like they would not suffer you suggesting it; men who might not listen to him if he told them to quit. A lot of knives were out and scraping. The smell of gun oil was in the air.

Little Jerusalem would burn if these men and Reverend Shallbetter had their way.

Just then, the reverend stooped down beside him, the fire writhing in his dark eyes and chasing his silver beard with living orange.

“When, Marshal?” He trembled and spat into the fire, like he was spitting in the Devil’s own face. “When?”

“Just give it till dawn, preacher,” he said for the fifth time. “We go in there before first light with all these guns and we’ll just wind up shootin’ each other. Besides, dawn’s the deadline I gave ‘em.”

“But my daughter!” the reverend pleaded, foaming at the lips, frantic to get in there. “Those heathens…”

Then Jackrabbit John let out a wild scream unlike any Billy had ever heard come out of a grown man. He jumped from his boulder, sending his tin coffee mug clanging down, and went running off into the dark, not even stopping to grab his blanket.

“What the hell got into that Injin?” somebody from the other fire called out.

All the men were on their feet, unnerved by the display. All the men, Billy noticed, but the quiet, clean bunch sharing a fire.

They could hear the tracker’s feet pounding through the sand, receding into the night. He never came back.

What John Ghacho (whom the Indah called Jackrabbit John) had seen was a light out in the dark, between Delirium Tremens and Little Jerusalem. He’d watched it for a minute as it got bigger and brighter, and become the ghostly, translucent apparition of a dark rider bent low over a horse of flame, galloping through the blackness. A witch, or the restless ghost of some man murdered in the desert. John Ghacho had watched his uncle wither and die from a skinwalker’s curse, and as a boy he’d seen a witch cavorting with evil spirits on a dark mountaintop. He’d had all the dealings he’d cared to with such things, and departed forthwith for home.

Let the angry sin buster, and the lawman, and these blood mad Indah, fight witches and ghosts. He had no interest in losing his soul tonight.

The quiet, clean men turned from their fire.

They did not look after the fleeing Indian, but towards the town. Then a moment’s silent conference seemed to pass between them, and they went back to staring into the flames.

* * * *

The Rider drew his ethereal mount to a stop in the middle of the dark, quiet settlement. There was not much time. God’s killers were already among the marshal’s posse. He had seen them sitting around the fire, silent figures in the guise of gunmen, their black wings unfurling at the sight of him. He had been sure they would intercept him, but true to her word, the angel kept them in check.

He set to his purpose.

The windows of the squat mud jacals were uniformly dim and shuttered, locked tight and either empty or populated by men and women who slept unaware of the invaders camped at their outskirts, waiting for the dawn to ride in and kill them all.

The Rider wove his mount through the buildings, and after one pass found the synagogue. The wood of its steps had trapped several blowing tumbleweeds. The mezuzah in the door jamb lay broken in its housing. The door was chained with links of rusty iron.

He frowned. This was not the temple of a devout community. It was a place of spiders. He urged the horse up the broken steps, but it balked, refusing to cross the mezuzah.

There would be nothing in there to see anyway. He could not even feel the presence of a Torah behind these walls. The Lord had not been welcome in this house for a long time.

He turned his mount about and trotted back toward the houses.

Before the door of a nondescript cabin, he swung down from the back of his spirit horse and patted it fondly on the withers with the Cheyenne fetish. It dipped its head obediently and faded into nothingness.

Insubstantial, The Rider passed through the bolted door of the home and peered about for a moment at a tidy but empty dwelling devoid of ornamentation. No menorah in the cupboards, no scripture, but a brick of salt pork in the pantry. A second home was also empty. Where were the Jews of Little Jerusalem?

He sank through the wall of the second place, and spied another small home with a sliver of lamplight glowing beneath its door. He moved to it.

* * * *

Joseph Klein prayed over his meal. He prayed as he always did, first for thanksgiving; that he and his wife and son lived still by the mercy and grace of the Lord. Then, as always, he prayed for forgiveness, and that atonement for his horrible sin might be made possible. Tonight, he prayed also for the life of the Christian girl, and for the lives of his family. He asked God to stay His imminent wrath from the neck of his boy, Eli, who was yet four years shy of manhood. These last prayers were silent. He did not want to upset his wife, Rebech.

He watched his son eat from across the table. Here was a young mensch. He knew his scripture, he was obedient. How proud of him Joseph was! Must he die for what his cowardly father had done? Was it not written that ‘a son shall not be put to death for the sins of his father, nor a father for the sins of his son?’ Yet who was he to remind the Lord of this? Who was he, who had forgotten it was also said his own blood was not redder than any other’s? Yet he lived, and his family lived. And many had died.

Rebech set down her fork loudly and put her fingers to her head. When he dared to look his wife in the eye, it was a red rimmed gaze that met his, a face lined and burdened as he knew his own must be.

“Papa,” she said, her voice cracking in her throat. “We cannot do this anymore. We cannot just sit here!”

He closed his eyes. The old argument. And what was his side of it? Cowardice. Fear. Yet, sinner that he was, he held to it.

“Rebech...we’ve prayed. What else can we do?

You’re frightening Eli. Please. Let’s eat.”

Coward.

“Don’t tell me that!” she nearly shouted, making the boy jump. “Will you let us burn with those others? At least let’s go and speak to the marshal....”

Joseph put his head in his hands, thinking of how he had flinched at her words. Burn with those others. God, did he not deserve to be burned?

“If we go to them, they will shoot us down like we were one of the others. We cannot. Rebech, we are in God’s hands now.”

“Joseph.”

Joseph looked up in shock. It was Eli who had spoken. He was sitting straight up in his chair. He had laid aside his fork and was staring solemnly at him. Eli never composed himself in that way, and he had never called Joseph by name. Why, he was his father! What…

“Joseph,” the boy said again, and not in the voice of a precocious boy, but in one of gravity, and with a familiarity and wholeness of mind the nine year old had never possessed. Further, his words came in a flawless Aramaic, the boy having never even heard let alone commanded it. “Where are they? Where is the girl?”

Rebech stared speechless at her son and looked to Joseph.

“What...,” she began.

But Joseph ignored her. He was not at this table now, cowering in the hell he had built around them all. He was fifteen or twenty years ago, all the old mystic teachings coming back to him. And this was not his son. Oh, his son was there, dozing somewhere behind those suddenly fierce eyes, but it was someone else who looked out from them.

Someone he thought he knew.

“Rebech, go to the bedroom and shut the door.”

“What is going on?”

“Bashert, do as I say, as you love the Lord and obey me,” he mumbled, unable to look away from the bold gaze of his own son.

She looked to Eli now.

“What is wrong? Eli!”

“Go!” Joseph shouted.

She jumped to her feet, lingered over the table, and then he heard her cross the kitchen to their room and open the door.

“Please, my bashert. Do not listen at the door either,” he said meekly, sorry for his outburst.

“I-I won’t,” she stammered.

He heard the door close.

In Aramaic, he spoke to whoever possessed his son.

“Who are you? I think I know you.”

“You do,” said the boy. “Or did. Just now you were praying. I guess the Lord has sent a minuth in answer.”

“A heretic….you?” Joseph leaned forward, incredulous, thinking back to his days as a teacher among The Sons of the Essenes. There had been an American born boy of exceptional promise, with favorable lines and promising physiognomy who had grown into a man of phenomenal prowess in the mystic arts of the sacred Merkabah tradition. Every member of the Order took a new name. It was a necessity when dealing with demons and angels, for should one of those entities learn a man’s true name, he could be rendered dangerously powerless. Before this boy and his traitorous master (who had taken the name Adon, or ‘lord’ in his unmitigated narcissism) had turned their backs on the mitzvah and been cast out, before he was called Mumar, he had come to be known only as The Rider.

“I’ve been looking for Adon. I didn’t know what drew me here,” the man in his boy went on. “It was only when I got over the mountains that I realized it was the prayer of a tzadik.”

Joseph’s cheeks reddened. He lowered his chin and shook his head, feeling a hotness in his eyes.

“Ha-Shem would send you.” Joseph smiled, the tears leaking now from his eyes, “to humble me. I deserve it. I have forsaken my duty, more so even than your master did.”

“Can one of the hidden saints forsake his duty? Isn’t it hashgakha pratit?” The Rider asked through the lips of his son, using the Hebrew words for divine providence.

Hashgakha pratit! Joseph thought bitterly. If only he could have given up his own measly resolve and bound it to the will of the Lord.

“Isn’t it said that if even one of the thirty-six saintly tzadikim falls, the world will perish?” The Rider went on.

The Rider referred to him by his old title among the Sons of the Essenes, who were said to be governed by the Tzadikim Nistarim, the thirty-six hidden saints, whose very existence ensured the continuance of the world. But the tzadik was a transitory position; it could be earned and it could be lost. He had left the Order for love of his Rebech, and the mantle of living saint had passed on to another, scant years before Adon had turned on them all, destroying their foothold in this new land and proving that the legend of the Nistarim was only a folktale.

“God.” Joseph wept now. “How you shame me, Rider. Perhaps it is only for that reason my family and I are alive. Because these Canaanites, and these are real Canaanites, Rider, maybe they think I am a tzadik. If ever I was one, I am no longer.”

“Tell me what’s happened, rebbe,” the boy said after a moment, abandoning all venom.

“Four years ago we came to this place at the invitation of my brother, who was a miner and the founder of the chevra kadisha burial society. He had written to me about how the Jews here needed a synagogue, for they were praying in a picket shtiebl. We came with Jews from Bisbee and built a Temple.

You must have seen it. It was beautiful. The Jews from Bisbee stayed, and also those who worked in the mines sent for their families. It was a good place to live, for a year.

Then Cardin and his people came. They were from...I do not know where they were from. They said they were shepherds, and had been living somewhere down across the border in Mexico. They were hard people, you know? But it seemed to us they had to be, to protect their flocks. They were Jews, and what else was there? Hakhnasat orkhim, you know? Hospitality. They had a good many sheep, and they mingled their flocks with the sheep already here. Things began to change in town.

Cardin’s folk, they were not kosher. Cardin claimed he was a shokhet and opened a butcher’s, but the rebbe said he was lax in observing the kashrut rules and was sloppy with his knife. Cardin’s people hunted game and they sold the meat and passed it as kosher. At first the people wouldn’t buy from him, but then Vladek, the old butcher, disappeared one night. He just left his shop abandoned. There was a fire a few days later, and the old shop was lost. Some of us kept to the laws as best we could, but others, particularly the miners, got lazy and began to do business with Cardin rather than go to the trouble. Those that did this, they also stopped going to Temple.

Then the gossip started. People started saying Vladek had been run off by Cardin. Others said Cardin killed him and buried him in the desert. The worst said he had cut up the old butcher and sold him as meat.

Some people started getting sick. The rebbe said it was the food Cardin sold. I don’t know if it was. My family didn’t fall ill. But the rebbe did, and he died one night. My brother, he was in charge of the burial society, you remember? They were very busy preparing bodies and working in the cemetery. But the night the rebbe died, he came to my house in the middle of the night, and he was very drunk. He told me there were marks on the rebbe’s body.”

“What kind of marks?” asked The Rider.

Joseph held his trembling fingers up to his throat and mimicked a stranglehold.

“Like this, you see? Our rebbe had been murdered! This, he told me. And I asked him, who could have done it? And he told me, ‘Who do you think, Joseph?’ The next day, they found him in the river. He had fallen in drunk and drowned. That’s what they said. But I walked him home that night, and I waited with him until he fell asleep before I went back to my house, so I know he didn’t go to the river by himself.

One of Cardin’s men took over the burial society, and then we didn’t see my brother’s friends much anymore. They went into town a lot to buy things. They brought back whiskey, and most nights, once even over the Seder, we could hear them singing filthy songs.

Cardin’s people never went to Temple. Now, without a rebbe, nobody did. We locked up the Temple, and I kept the Torah, because I didn’t want it to be stolen. I didn’t trust Cardin or his people. Then Y’ishmael, he was one of the Bisbee Jews, a carpenter and the gabbai at the Temple, he suggested I hold services in my house, because he knew I’d been a teacher and could read the Torah from talks we’d had. We started meeting in my home. I became ba’al koh-rey, and would read to them the weekly portions from the Torah. It was all we could do. There weren’t many of us, not even enough to make a minyan, and it seemed like every week less came.

Then then the children started disappearing. There weren’t many children in the settlement. Not many young families. Probably, there weren’t much more then ten, from babies on to about Eli’s age now.”

Joseph paused, and he looked at his son. New tears ran down his old cheeks.

“He’s not in pain,” The Rider said, through Eli.

“I know. I know. I just...,” He shook his head, and for a while he couldn’t speak. Then he continued;

“Cardin came to my house one night after our prayer meeting. He told me...he told me everything.”

“What did he tell you?” The Rider pressed.

“He told me, and he said these things without any guilt, without any fear of the Lord, mind you! And that was what scared me so about him. He didn’t fear Ha-Shem at all. He told me they had taken the children. Right there, in my house, with my son and my wife in the next room, he told me this. He told me they needed more children and they were going to take Eli next unless I did something for them. I said no. I was furious. I was outraged. I wanted to throw him out, you know, and go to the marshal and tell him. Then he said other things. Things about Rebech. Things I never imagined anyone saying. It made me angry, but it made me scared too. I knew if I didn’t do what they wanted, I wouldn’t leave the house alive, and he would do everything he said he would to Eli and Rebech when I was dead.”

“What did he want you to do?”

“I had worked with metal, you remember. For the Essenes, I taught the engraving of amulets, and… and sculpture. God...forgive me. I did what they wanted. Like Aaron. I built them their golden calf. It wasn’t a calf, though. It was…”

“A bull. You built them a bull.”

“Like a bull, yes! He told me it was their god. And I knew right away, when they showed me the plans, I knew what it was. And I thought, my God, the Canaanites have come and they have taken over. We called you and your master that, remember? Canaanite, because of the heathen talismans. It was in poor taste. But I never knew…I never knew. In the histories you see? To read about them and what they did for Molech, one is removed. One reads the words, but does not feel them. These were not Jews, but Canaanites. I built it for them. God forgive me. And they used it. Time and time again, for two years they used it.”

“How?” asked The Rider. “You said there were only ten children. And the children only started disappearing from the town a few months ago.” Joseph squeezed his eyes shut.

“Do not make me speak it.”

“Tell me.”

When he opened his eyes, they were like shattered panes of glass.

“The women. They began…taking the women. Do you understand? In groups. The Bisbee Jews, Y’ishmael and the rest, they tried to fight. Cardin and the others killed them all. Right out in the street, they killed them with machetes. No man escaped. The women, they took them and kept them. Old women, young girls. The old women, if they were found to be barren, well, they were killed. And the children…the children who were born. They went to Molech. All of them. Again and again. The women were kept alive to bear children. And those who did not kill themselves eventually died in childbirth. And the babies were given to him.”

He said this to The Rider, but it was into the face of his son. And it was more than he could bear. He rose from the table and came around to kneel beside the boy. He held him about the waist and he put his old face into his boy’s narrow shoulder and wailed.

“God! God! What I have done! They once called me a saint. They once called me a tzadik!”

He listened for the voice of his son to tell him words of comfort. He ached for his son to embrace him. But the words were The Rider’s.

“You’re no tzadik,” The Rider said coldly in Eli’s voice. His expression was blank as a puppet’s, but Joseph could feel The Rider’s spirit recoil at his touch. He released his son and stepped back, looking down at him.

“Not any longer,” The Rider went on. He looked up, with accusing eyes. “You once taught me a man can only truly be forgiven by those he’s wronged. You can’t be forgiven by the dead. But you have also wronged the Lord. So long as there is a God there is teshuva. Wait here, and pray. Is the girl alive?”

“I don’t know. If she is, she’s in their temple.”

“Where?”

“Beneath the cemetery. I built it down there. That’s where they keep it. But there’s no time! The Marshal and the men from town...”

“Keep the door barred and leave them to me.”

“But listen to me, Rider...Cardin…he doesn’t fear God.”

The boy looked at him with The Rider’s eyes, full of fire.

“He will.”

Joseph shivered. Whether it was a draft in the night that had come through the crack under the door, or the passing of something, he wasn’t sure.

Eli blinked his eyes and looked up at him. The hard expression was gone from his face.

“Papa, where’s mama gone?” he said in the small voice Joseph had always known.

He fell to his knees again and took his son into his arms.

* * * *

The cemetery was on a low hill, staggered with jutting tombstones, and ringed by wooden pickets. The wind-blasted grey stone archway rose against the dark sky. It was carved with the Star of David and the year of its erection, 1876. The ground was encompassed in a strange, swirling smoke that rolled like gray, fitful dreamers and smelled noxious and unnatural.

Passing through the open gate, The Rider took inventory of his surroundings and noticed a low stone stele placed behind the arch, its cap jutting just above the ground smoke. He stooped to inspect it and found it covered in obscure carvings. Some dead language even he had never encountered. It was engraved with totemic depictions of the bull god Molech, roosting amid fire and swallowing babies. It stood out among the standing stones of the dead, like a bullet among sewing needles.

“You don’t belong here,” The Rider muttered to it.

“Nor do you,” came a voice from the cemetery.

The Rider straightened. Where there had been no one a moment before, now three gaunt figures stood among the graves as if they had solidified out of the stinking fog. They were draped in grayish, tattered shrouds, filthy with crumbling dirt. They were spirits of the restless dead. Their bound faces and knotted shrouds had not saved them from being employed by sorcery as night wardens of Molech’s front porch. These had been Jews once, but whether they were enslaved, or men of the burial society corrupted by Cardin’s influence, or members of his clan who had willingly (it could be argued, witlessly) given up their immortal souls to his will, The Rider didn’t know.

The Rider’s hand moved to float above his pistol as he faced them.

“Who are you?” he demanded.

“We watch this place,” answered one whose face was covered entirely by its shroud.

“It is our task,” said another, whose face was bared, and whose beard was a nest of crawling earthworms.

“Who are you to trespass?” declared the third and tallest, that leaned on a spade like a crutch.

“One who still follows the Commandments,” The Rider answered. “Who set you to this task?”

This answer seemed to agitate the three dead men and they moved as one, moaning their frustration and bounding with unearthly celerity over the graves directly at him.

The Rider’s ethereal pistol cleared its holster, firing jets of blue mystic fire. The first shot caught the tall one with the spade in the chest and sent it flipping backwards to the ground. The second blew a pale, swaddled head to ectoplasmic fragments. The third spirit collided with The Rider and pinned him against the side of the archway, clinging to him with its bare feet like a monkey, tearing at his wispy form with jagged fingers.

The spirit’s eyes bulged, and its jaws clamped down on the side of The Rider’s weapon. Its long fingers, which ended in bare, skeletal tips raked at him, shredding his sleeves and nicking into the spirit flesh beneath, causing him actual pain and making corresponding blood stripes appear on his physical body miles away.

“The master…demands…,” the spirit growled, as if explaining its own actions.

“You have another master,” The Rider told it, trying to appeal to what was left of its human soul while struggling to ward off its ferocious attack and free his pistol.

“Yes!” the spirit said, faltering, its feral expression slackening. Then instantly its features contorted once more into an animalistic mask. “No!”

The Rider spit full in the dead man’s face. The spittle of a fasting man was an irritant to evil spirits. The creature threw its head back and howled in agony as the rigid flesh on its skull seared.

Still it held on, and The Rider’s gun was trapped. With his free hand, he found the big iron knife at his belt and drew it, passing the blade through the trunk of the dead man. The spirit screamed as its lower half fell away, and it released The Rider and fell to the ground writhing, bisected. Its legs scuffled in the dust while its top half twisted about crazily.

The Rider leveled his pistol down at the spindly thing which alternately clawed its smoking face and pawed at its kicking, severed legs. It looked up at him and mewled, crossing its thin arms before itself as if to block the coming finality of oblivion.

The Rider did not fire.

“Tell Molech I’m coming.”

The grisly half-corpse slowly lowered its arms, then dipped its head once, swung around, and was gone, bounding over the graves and swinging nimbly away on the flats of its hands.

The Rider followed, racing and wending through the tombstones, keeping pace with the scuttling form. Finally he found himself at a large hole in the earth, half concealed by a heavy stone. Cut into the earth were steps, slanting down into a fathomless dark.

He could hear the slapping of the corpse spirit’s hands as it leapt down the stairs.

The Rider plunged down after it, into darkness more total than the midnight sky.

* * * *

At the Moderado, business was being disrupted by the grandstanding of Cut Tom. He had commandeered one of the Faro tables as a platform and was shaking his fists and trying to stir up bored men who had only come to get drunk, whore, and lose their wages.

“Damn dirty Jews!” he hollered. “Stealin’ Christian babies out their cradles like a buncha black wolves! It ain’t to be stood for!”

Some men nodded, but most looked longingly at the girls or the neglected cards spread on the tables.

One of the gamblers leaned back in his chair and observed the Jew Tom had dragged from the upstairs room. He was limp as a dead dog in the arms of Tom’s partner Bull Bannock. The Jew’s head lolled on his shoulders. He was strung with all sorts of fofarrow and bits of junk from head to toe.

“That Heeb don’t look too dangerous, Tom. You sure he’s alive?”

Cut Tom turned.

“He’s playin’ possum! You all seen how fast with his gun he was. He’s some kinda Jew killer, or a priest. You ever seen one like him before?”

The gambler shrugged.

“Can’t say I ever paid much attention, but I reckon not.”

“‘Course not!” Tom said excitedly, licking his lips and jabbing a finger accusingly at the unconscious Jew. “That’s cause he’s their goddamned pope, come to officiate over their black mass, where they drink the blood of them young kids!”

“Damn straight!” Bull Bannock interjected, like he was at some kind of skewed version of a tent revival.

A few of the men, mostly the herders and locals, sat or stood up at this, nodding their heads in agreement. One man stepped forward. It was Trujillo, still wearing the torn homespun his baby had been swaddled in wrapped around his fist. His eyes were grave but bloodshot in his dark face. He was thinner than anybody remembered. Some recalled seeing him sleeping in the alley behind the Mex cantina since the night he’d lost his infant.

“If what you say is so, señor,” he muttered, “he must not see the morning.”

“That’s the truth.” Tom nodded. “You see here? This man knows.”

At the bar, Dan Spector nodded too. It was not that he was caught up in all this rabble rousing, it was in appreciation of Cut Tom’s scheme to deal the Jew out legally. He would murder this man in the street and half the town would be accomplices before he was through.

The Jew had no money it turned out, just a lot of five cent jewelry by the look of him. Dan had no idea why the Jew was in the state he was in. He looked to be bleeding down his arms where the boys had handled him roughly, but no amount of jostling or slapping roused him. He had heard tell once of a man who slept so soundly he could be dragged from his bed and left in the middle of the road. Maybe this Jew suffered from the same condition. Well, it was lucky for Tom and Bull, maybe for him as well. They hadn’t yet claimed that pistol. It was still in the holster. He could see it, gleaming in the light. He wondered if it really was chased with gold as it looked, or if it was just more tin plated Jew bijouterie. There was only one way to find out. He finished his coffee and slammed the mug down on the bar.

“Hang that sonofabitch!” he hollered.

In moments the cry was being taken up all over the saloon.

* * * *

The Rider passed down the rough-hewn steps. He did not know how much time passed before he reached the bottom. The stars could no longer be seen through the faraway opening, and he had quickly lost track of his corpse guide, skipping and finally rolling down the stair, heedless of harm. He could not feel the air, but knew it must be cool. His ethereal vision was not obscured by the encompassing subterranean night as mortal’s eyes would have been. He could see the bottom of the long stair and need not imagine the half-corpse lurking in the shadow to pounce upon him.

Finally the last step came, and the passage widened into an ossuary chamber. Heaped against the far wall were unstable ricks of blackened bones, partially devoured by fire and gnawed by scuttling vermin. Maybe they were the desecrated remains of the Jews displaced from the graveyard by the excavations of the temple. Some of the bones, he noticed, were smaller than the others.

Around a bend lay another aperture, and the floor there was soaked in reddish light. He stalked toward this light and heard the chanting and the resounding boom of a great drum echoing against the rock walls.

Here was a new chamber, one more marvelous than any other. It was the heart of the structure, with a high ceiling supported by four columns decorated on every side with blasphemous images. The grandeur of the chamber did not fail to impress The Rider, although every carving made his soul blanch. This was a structure built to withstand the ages, not simply to appease a blood mad cult of lunatics. There was method here. Purpose. He wondered how random the appearance of Cardin and his followers had been in Little Jerusalem. It all seemed to point towards some grander scheme.

In the center of the chamber towered Joseph Klein’s vile masterwork. The old tzadik had spoken of the plans Cardin had provided him with. Here stood its fruits, as it must have stood centuries ago in Ammon and Canaan, and in Babylon. As it had stood perhaps in Sodom and in Gomorrah, and in a hundred other benighted lands of the ancient world; a titanic, genuflecting nude figure of black wrought iron, with the torso and arms of a man, the head of a bull, and the gigantic eyes and feet of an owl. It was hung with brass ornamentation and was grossly obese. An uncircumcised phallus thrust up from beneath its drooping belly, flaunting the Covenant in deliberate audacity. Its great arms were stretched before it, palms upward, not in a gesture of supplication to Heaven, but in unbridled revelry. The arms were constructed as separate pieces and draped with pulleys and chains. They were built to tilt upwards at an angle. The jaw of the elephantine horned bull head was hinged and its maw gaped red, as did its two wide, owlish eye sockets, which were ringed with dark, carved feathers.

Molech the King.

At the base of the sculpture, between its tridactyl clawed feet, two crimson robed acolytes stoked a pile of burning coals and salted it with what looked like sulfur. The smoke was drawn up the chamber to a series of openings in the ceiling, which vented the noxious clouds to the surface; the source of the stinking smoke that drifted across the cemetery grounds. The coal fire spread a red glow up the superheated iron and caused an unearthly scarlet gloaming in the eyes and mouth. The statue was hollow. It had to be, to receive its victims.

The sacrifice would be cradled in the arms of the statue. Then the attendants would work the pulleys, raising the mighty arms and sending the victim tumbling into the open mouth, to perish slowly in the furnace of the statue’s iron belly. A door built into the back allowed the so-called priests to gather what remained once the deity had cooled.

Before their god the flock had gathered. About two dozen red robed worshipers chanted while one of their number struck an enormous hide drum. Here were mumarim. Here were Canaanites.

A high scream riled The Rider from his silent observations, and as he watched, the Canaanites lifted their arms as one. Riding their upturned hands was a small, thin figure bound tightly in white linen, spilling yellow golden hair from her head. Their offering: the reverend’s daughter; a struggling, tear-streaked girl of no more than thirteen.

The shrieking girl was quickly passed the length of the congregation to where a pair of men, at the head, set up a wooden ladder and received her, ascending it to place her in the waiting arms of the idol.

The Rider moved swiftly into the chamber, and through their midst, unnoticed, until he reached the front. Then a tall man with a hooked nose and a long, curled black beard seasoned with gray, turned as though he had been tapped on the shoulder. He faced The Rider. He was ruddy skinned and cruel faced, and his lips were uncommonly red, as though forever stained with the innocent blood that had passed over them. His barbarically painted eyes glowered beneath a downturned brow, the irises almost completely black. This was their chief and the architect of the damnation of Little Jerusalem, bespangled in gold and garish finery, strong and tall, but pot-bellied from a life of luxuriant wantonness.

Hayim Cardin, as great a traitor to his race as The Rider’s own master.

The Rider stopped, surprised to be perceived by one not inhabiting the shadow plane. He detected movement near the ground, and saw the half-corpse from the graveyard clinging spider-like to the hem of Cardin’s robe, peering up at him like a child chastised by a stranger.

The ceremony continued, few of the other worshipers taking note of their leader’s demeanor. Then The Rider heard the voice of Cardin, although his lips made no movement.

“You have no place here, Rider!”

“Hayim Cardin,” The Rider answered, squaring his shoulders and savoring what he said next. “Poshea Yisrael and Canaanite. You have broken the mitzvah against avoda zara and betrayed the Lord, your God. It is you who have no place anywhere on this Earth.”

The shambling corpse thing traded nervous looks from its master to The Rider and back again, as The Rider’s hand once more poised above his pistol.

Hayim Cardin smiled, and imperceptibly at his side, his left hand closed into a fist. The two outermost fingers extended, the red jewels on his rings glinting in the furnace light. It was the cornuto, the beast’s horns, normally employed against evil. The Rider could almost hear the dark power buzzing as it generated between Cardin’s fingers, arcing like red lightning across his clenched knuckles as he turned his palm up.

“I was told to expect you, Rider. You will have the honor of dying upon holy ground, on the threshold of the new kingdom.”

“What new kingdom?”

“The kingdom that is to come; when the Hour of Incursion strikes and The Great Old Ones take their place beside the infernal lords as masters of this insignificant world.”

“Would you build a carpet of murdered children to welcome your masters upon? You’re a fool, Cardin. You’re worse than dead. You’re damned.”

They stared at each other for a moment, the corpse the only spectator to their duel.

Cardin’s hand came up first, jabbing at The Rider, sending a wild chain of scarlet energy roping towards him. The Rider pivoted as he drew his pistol, and felt the violent, crackling field of red lightning sear as it snaked past. He squeezed off one shot, and a brilliant blue white hole appeared in the center of Cardin’s chest. Against a physical form, the ethereal pistol was not fatal, but its fire was a psychic shock to the individual’s soul, which resulted in a brief arrest of the body and consciousness. It would do little more than stun Cardin, but it opened him up to other attacks.

Cardin flew backwards, arms flailing wildly, and struck the stone floor hard. Instantly the corpse hopped over the body of its master and sprung, its eyes rolling back as it lashed out. The Rider’s second shot cut the undead thing dead center, blowing it to greenish bits, the weapon more effective on creatures of unnatural composition.

The Rider dropped the Volcanic back in its housing, as he rushed towards Cardin’s body. He did not notice that upon releasing it, the ethereal pistol vanished entirely.

* * * *

They flowed from the Moderado, into the dark avenue.

Hallen, the old black lamplighter, shrank from the mob and its burden, as he had from a similar scene in his youth in Alabama. He’d seen the white folks plant a black ditch digger in a cottonwood tree for stealing from the big house. He knew the voice of a lynching, knew the smell and the sound. He didn’t know what poor bastard was being dragged around at the center of that rush of angry voices, but he didn’t want to get in the way of it. He ducked into an alley and let them pass, catching a glimpse of a limp, bearded man being dragged along. He caught snatches of mad words and the sounds of blows and nervous, too-loud laughter.

Then they were gone, headed off down the street looking for a tree or a beam to set the man dangling. Hallen shook his head and went back to the street lamps. Mister Mayor paid him a half a dollar a week to keep the lights, and he was looking forward to a chicken dinner on Saturday.

Martin Fisher from the Lazy S, lassoed the Pure Life Picayune’s sign and jerked it down to free up the sturdy beam, while French, the bank clerk, called again for somebody to lend a horse to the condemned so nobody broke their back hoisting him up.

As Martin set to work tying his reata into a hangman’s knot, Cut Tom grabbed it from him and shoved him aside.

“Let me do it,” he said, and waved Bull over.

“You can use my horse, Tom,” said Martin, still eager to be of help.

“That nag’s gonna finally be good for something,” said Heck Barstow, one of his pards, guffawing as Martin led the animal up onto the boardwalk.

Burly was there, scratching his head.

“Shouldn’t we wait till Shivers gets back?”

“Show me a law book says it’s against the law to lynch a Jew,” Tom said, working at the knot.

Dan appeared just then, and shouldered past Burly to get nearer to the Jew.

“Can’t argue with that logic,” he muttered. “Hang on. I believe we had a deal.”

He reached out and neatly plucked the pistol from the Jew’s belt, and hell and be-damned if it wasn’t honest to God gold and silver, stamped with all kinds of Jew writing and seals. What kind of man carried a fancy iron like this one? In a half a minute’s deliberation, Dan had the answer.

“You hang on, fancy man,” Tom said, letting his hand fall to his own gun. “The deal was for his money, not that gun. That’s mine and Bull’s.”

Dan took a step away to avoid being clocked by Bull and raised and cocked the Jew’s pistol, pointing it right at Cut Tom.

The milling crowd shrank back. The men who’d been pushing their way in from the outer edges to get a good look spun on their boot heels and ran off down the street, holding their hats on their heads.

Cut Tom was so surprised he only had time to drop his jaw before the hammer fell on the Jew’s gun.

Nothing happened.

Dan smirked and spun the pistol on his finger, pulled the trigger twice more and then offered him the butt.

“Damn Jew gun is deactivated, Tom,” he chuckled. “And it ain’t even gold, just brass and nickel. He must’ve carried it just to keep people at a distance. If you still want it, you can have it. But I’ll give you both three dollars to let me hang it over the bar for a laugh.”

Tom hesitated and looked at Bull. The big man shrugged.

“Three dollars?” Bull asked.

Dan nodded.

The mob started to step closer again.

“I don’t care,” Tom said after a minute. “Gun that don’t shoot ain’t no good to me. Take it, but you owe me three dollars.”

Dan smiled and tucked the Jew’s pistol in his pants and thought about how swiftly a fool and his money were parted.

“How are you tyin’ that rope, Tom?” Martin asked, looking skeptically over Tom’s shoulder at the half-finished noose. “There ain’t gonna be enough rope left over to tie his arms.”

“Don’t hardly need to tie him up do we?” Bull said, shaking the limp form of the Jew and giggling.

“Judo maldito,” Trujillo muttered, and struck the Jew full in the face. There was a dribble of blood from his lips, but still no reaction.

“Christ,” said Heck Barstow, “he ain’t even gonna wake up till he’s in hell.”

Tom shook his head. This wasn’t a bit satisfying.

He flung the length of rope in Martin’s face. “Aww, do it your damn self, Martin Fisher, you pup.”

“Get him up on the horse!” somebody yelled.

Tom just stared holes in the Jew while Bull carried him to Martin’s horse.

* * * *

The Canaanites clustered around their fallen leader. Even the two acolytes manning the chains of the idol halted at Cardin’s collapse. The girl in its black arms screamed shrilly.

Cardin’s eyes fluttered and opened, looking all around.

“Hayim?” whispered one of the red robed cultists, tentatively.

They pulled Cardin to his feet and he wobbled unsteadily on his legs, saying nothing.

“Are you ill?”

Cardin shook off his delirium, then turned to look at the idol. With a sudden violent motion, he pulled his arms free of the men and lurched drunkenly forward. He gained the ladder and scurried up the rungs before anyone could react. When he reached the left arm of the idol, he straddled the thick forearm and began to drag the bound and screaming girl from the statue’s grip.

Shock gave way to alarm. The Canaanites rushed to stop their crazed leader. The two coal-tenders ascended the ladder. The first reached the top and leapt upon Cardin as he tore the linen wrappings of the sacrifice. After a brief and precarious struggle, Cardin kicked the acolyte in the stomach. The man desperately tried to regain his footing, but stumbled backwards and fell headfirst with a terrified shriek into the open mouth of the statue. His robes caught fire immediately and he was heard banging against the inside of the reddening iron throat and screaming before he landed with a heavy thud in its superheated bowels.

Cardin turned as the second cultist reached the top, and with another kick, tipped the ladder over and sent its clinging ascendants crashing to the floor below.

Cardin lifted the writhing girl on his shoulder and prepared to leap from the arms of the idol, when all of a sudden, his eyes rolled up in his head and his entire body seized and went limp. The hysterical girl and her captor fell from the statue down to the stone floor below with a sickening sound, like a dropped sack of dry kindling.

At first, The Rider had no inkling of what had happened. The spells on the pistol had weakened Cardin’s natural psychic barriers, making it a simple thing to possess his unconscious body. The fiery blue hole punched in those defenses had formed a mystical entryway to Cardin’s body, into which The Rider had dove, rapidly bending and compacting his ethereal form. He had then used his will to nudge aside Cardin’s dazed consciousness and seize the unfamiliar controls of his physical machine, effectively donning him like an ill-fitting suit. He’d known, of course, as soon as he’d freed the girl the acolytes would turn on him. All things considered, he’d thought he’d been doing well before he’d suddenly found his ethereal body plucked from the nape of Cardin’s neck like a kitten from a basket of yarn.

He looked with concern past his dangling feet at the twisted body of Cardin sprawled on the stone below. Thankfully Cardin’s thick frame had broken the girl’s fall. She wrestled with the tangled remains of her bonds, one long leg kicking free of the wrappings with an audible rip. The bewildered cultists were already gathering about their fallen leader and the escaping sacrifice.

Then, The Rider felt the hot breath on the back of his neck, something he shouldn’t have been able to feel considering his state. He heard the heavy bellows of titanic lungs, accustomed to the intake of fire and brimstone, and smelled the fetid breath, laced with the harbor stench of pollution and burning abortions, beating down upon him.

He looked into the bugging owl eyes of Molech, the King of Gehenna, Marshal of the Demonic Order of Thamiel.

The immense demon stood on its weird avian legs half out of the glowing iron statue. The colossal, speckled brown wings protruding regally from its back, not depicted in the carving, were all that remained to mark its long ago heritage among the ranks of the archangels. Now, Molech was entirely demon, twisted and made bestial by the blasphemous offerings of its worshipers like a fattened hedonist marked by his many vile propensities. It held The Rider with one massive, flabby arm. Twin strands of shimmering black mucus, like crude oil, hung almost to the floor from its flaring nostrils, matching the inky sheen of the row of tombstone teeth clenched between its curling animal lips. The inanimate image of the statue and the knowledge of its purpose had been horrible enough. Seeing that which had inspired the sculpture and the vile practice that was tied to it was enough to stop the heart of the most resolute man.

Fortunately, The Rider’s heart was elsewhere.

It boomed at him in the language of the infernals, a cacophony like the wailing of dying children mewling in the bellies of ten thousand baying curs. Its voice was the roar of ravenous, unnamable beasts thrown into a pit to tear each other to pieces. He understood, rather than heard its outrage at his interruption of its vile adoration ceremony.

The Rider quivered beneath that gaze, simply being in the presence of such a malignant force made his very soul wither. Without his mystic training and the protection of his pentacles and seals, his spirit would have been obliterated at the touch of an infernal presence of this magnitude. He had once before encountered Molech in the lower worlds, and had managed to elude it. It was disconcerting to be in the demon’s very grip, particularly here. The Rider could feel its pestilential influence spreading from its fingertips and mortifying his ethereal elements like a tactile plague. When the angel had spoken of Molech being in this town, he hadn’t thought she meant literally. He was woefully unprepared to do direct battle with a marshal of Hell. What was Molech doing in the Yenne Velt? Why had it chosen this place and time to manifest?

It took all the courage he could muster, all his faith, just to answer.

“Don’t you remember me, old baby burner?”

The grotesque infernal’s brow slackened for a half an instant, apparently shocked by the tiny apparition’s defiance. Then, an expression played across the horrible face that could only be recognition. It was as if Molech recounted the loss of the impudent soul, and its glaring, pop-eyed face became a mask of hatred at the memory.

Molech stepped wholly from the statue and dangled The Rider like a morsel high over its head, the hot, fell breath wafting up around him like a volcanic updraft.

Its baying voice took on a mocking tone, like the high pitched bellows of a pack of hyenas. What it said The Rider couldn’t catch, but its intent was clear.

The Rider stared down into the widening jaws of Molech and imagined the slivered bones of infants jammed between its teeth. There was a hope his wards would make his soul indigestible. If they didn’t, despite all his training, he truly had no idea of what awaited him in the demon’s belly. He imagined the shriveled infant souls that already passed through its fires and began to rapidly utter the ninety-first Psalm as he reached to free his pistol, hoping its Solomonic attributes would be enough to expel the evil spirit.

“Thou shalt not be afraid for the terror by night…”

That was when his ethereal hand closed on the empty space where the butt of his pistol should have been.

The demon seemed to notice his distress and elicited a shrieking crone-like laugh that shook its thick shoulders, causing its vile body, made hermaphroditic by its brushy haired, sagging, atrophied chest and disproportionate nether regions, dance revoltingly. That terrible sound threatened to drown out The Rider’s recitation.

“Thou shalt tread upon the lion and asp, the young lion and the dragon shalt thou trample...”

Molech continued to laugh. The Rider saw the girl in the arms of the robed figures again. Two were righting the ladder and struggling to secure her bonds and reset her in the arms of the idol. The rest were puzzling over their leader.

With a jolt, Molech lowered The Rider towards its jaws and seemed to address him, its voice taking on a more human aspect, but uttering guttural words of a language that could not have been a far cry from the animal grunts of the first stooping men. Men who made war with fists full of rock and broken tree limbs, and who drove the sharpened ends of animal bones into the bellies of their enemies, then described their conquests on the cold, hidden walls of caves in crude paintings of blood and berries far beneath the earth.

It mocked him again, this eater of stolen babes, this bather in blood and fire. It seemed that The Rider could almost understand its speech, could almost hear it asking how he could have expected to come into its presence for a second time and live.

The Rider paused in his incantation and stared at the incomprehensible visage.

Then, with a flick of his wrist, the alchemically enchanted silver Derringer strapped to the inside of his left forearm slipped into his hand. It was a minor tool compared to the more powerful Volcanic, but it was inscribed with strong offensive runes. This was one of the tools his teachers would have dismissed him for. Now it, and his faith in the Most High, were all he had.

He jammed it into Molech’s eye and fired, resuming his recitation, his own voice ringing above Molech’s laughter as the explosion of mystical force cut short the demon’s mirth.

“With long life will I satisfy him, and show him my salvation!”

Blue-white fire, from the muzzle of the little silver pistol, flared and filled the eye of the raging bull god. A stream of murky black ichor spilled from the wound, which continued to burn and flare like it held a live firework.

Molech let out a scream and released The Rider, clapping its hand to the spurting wound.

Its cry of pain was like the lowing of bulls being slaughtered, the howl of lions ripped asunder.

The Rider hovered for a moment between the arm of the statue and the flailing, wounded god. Down below, amid a mass of blood, he was amazed to see Hayim Cardin stir and slowly turn at the call of his master.

But Cardin was a shattered vessel. No good to anyone. His warnings went unheeded by the distrustful brethren, who were returning to their murderous ceremony, drawing away the ladder from the idol and ignoring the bubbles of blood that frothed at Cardin’s lips.

The Rider sought his only avenue and dove for the top of the girl’s head.

It was not as easy as possessing Cardin had been. The girl’s spirit was strong and in distress. It took a maximum effort to drive her hyper-aware consciousness to the background. But then in a rush, the unearthly roaring of Molech was gone, replaced by the chanting of the Canaanites and the booming of their great drum as he descended once more into the physical world. Hot, sulfur laced air filled the girl’s aching lungs and the smells of the temple were all around. The arms of the idol were searing to the touch, and the heat coming off it was not unlike the oppressive air of the demon itself.

In the body of the girl The Rider twisted with new vigor, the acolytes put their weight into the chains that draped from the idol and its arms jerked upwards. She rolled, straight for the open mouth, but turned and stopped, bracing her bare feet against the scalding iron jaws.

The girl’s terror had leant her body strength, and The Rider’s resolve doubled that. They had repaired her shredded linen wrap with silken cords taken from the waists of their robes. Now the flames that licked from the aperture caught the cord between her ankles.

The Rider prayed for an infinitesimal measure of the strength God had granted Samson in the temple of Dagon.

It was enough.

The Canaanites watched awestruck as the slip of a girl disrupted their most sacred ceremony for the second time and scrambled to her badly scorched feet, pulling her hands free with her teeth and clinging like a white monkey to their god’s upraised arm. She sprung from the statue and seemed to float suspended for a half a moment in the acrid air above the congregation, her broken fetters whipping wildly about her, the torn linen filling with air, almost angelic. Then she landed full with her heels on the crumpled form of Cardin as he fought to rise, gripping the robe of one of the worshipers and gesticulating desperately at empty air. There was a final crack that was audible even above the enraged exclamations of the worshipers and the faltering beat of the drum.

The tarnished soul of Hayim Cardin fled its broken shell.

The Rider/girl spared no time, but fell to her hands and scurried like an animal through the legs of the men who lined up to recapture her. Breaking through the other side of the congregation, she plunged out into the relative cool of the ossuary. She scrambled over scattered bones, and bounded up the hewn stairs that led to the stinking cemetery.

The Rider was forced to contend with the terrified girl’s limitations. The stairs had been a negligible thing in ethereal form, but encased within this small and exhausted body, it was rigor. The cool steps were no relief to her scalded bare feet. Every step was a newborn hell coursing up her burned legs, singing an endless ballad of pain whose purpose was to sway her wavering fortitude, begging her pause to rest, to sit.

The clamor of the Canaanites echoed up the rock passage from below, and grew louder. There could be no rest. No respite, without death.

Then, something happened somewhere down below in the belly of the sanctum. The Rider could only surmise it was the departure of Molech. An earth shaking tremor and clamor of sound like two steam engines colliding, followed by an explosion of fire and heat and screams, belched up the passage, almost knocking the fleeing girl to her hands.

It was the statue, The Rider knew. The symbol of Molech’s influence and power had toppled like the one in Nebuchadnezzar’s dream. What had physically occurred hardly mattered. The defeat of Molech in the Yenne Velt required a corresponding action in the physical world. Or perhaps the indelicate treatment of the arm mechanism had caused some imbalance when the girl had jumped.

Whatever it was, he heard the screams of the stragglers in the temple and knew the fire that had kindled in the guts of the idol had vomited forth when it cracked, engulfing those who had strayed too far behind. The drum had ceased. Now there were only the curses of the pursuers as they renewed their chase.

The girl emerged from the passage coughing and stumbling, blinking at the bluing predawn sky. Inky smoke flowed from the passage, joining the foul smelling vapors that swirled on the ground from the temple vents. The angry shouts of the Canaanites had become cries of fear and desperation as their lair filled with wafting death.

Down below, they scrabbled like rats, pulling at each other to escape, trampling, catching handfuls of their fellows’ robes and jerking them down the stone steps in their haste to ascend. Some collapsed from exertion, thirsty lungs gulping oily, poisonous smoke. They died clawing at their hot throats, faces purpling. Some crashed down the stairs, killed as if by a beating, or survived the lengthy tumble only to land paralyzed in the lake of fire that had spilled from the idol and chewed at the blackened bones of the ossuary, still eager for new fuel.

There was a final tremor and the graveyard collapsed in upon itself in a cloud of dust and a final burp of smoke.

Of the two dozen The Rider had estimated in the flock of Molech, only six emerged, faces blackened, robes singed, their eyes filled with a burning not from the fumes alone. They fanned out from the opening and hunted through the toppled tombstones like questing wolves, till one of them sounded a cry and pointed to the fleeting bright figure stumbling through the cemetery gate and toward the dwellings.

Those six ran after her.

* * * *

Joseph nearly leapt from his skin as his front door sounded with insistent pounding. So The Rider was too late. The posse from town had come, or else the Canaanites had finally broken their bargain, as he had suspected they would.

Rebech gripped his shoulders, and in his arms, Eli stirred awake.

“Joseph!” came the small, hoarse voice of a child from outside. “Joseph hurry!”

Joseph moved. He thrust his blinking son into Rebech’s arms and ran to the door, throwing up the bar and wrenching it open.

A haggard looking yellow haired girl leaned out of breath in the doorway, clothed in ragged strips of dirty linen, her thin, trembling legs covered in scrapes and cuts. Her bare, burned feet were swollen and filthy.

She looked up at him with exhausted eyes.

“Joseph…”

She fell forward. Joseph caught her, drew her up into his arms. She weighed almost nothing. As he straightened, he saw the six men, Cardin’s, come running around the corner, filthy red robes billowing about them.

“Klein!” shouted one he knew, by face but not by name, as one who had come from the mountains with Cardin.

“Rebech!” he called, retreating into the house with the girl. “Shut the door!”

Rebech lunged forward and pushed the door shut and threw the bar down in time for the door to bang hard against it.

Twice more it shuddered from the impact of a heavy shoulder, but the thick bar did not give. Y’shmael had fashioned it. It would hold.

“Klein!” screamed the man outside like a rabid animal. “Open this door!”

Joseph set the girl on the table. She was weaker than ever, her head lolling in fatigue.

“God,” said Rebech. “God.”

“Draw water for this child,” Joseph called, trying to keep the panic from his voice, trying to sound strong as he had never been, trying to drown out the violent calls of the men outside. He held the waifish girl’s hollow cheeks between his hands. “Are you alright?” he said, in Aramaic.

The girl shook her head tiredly, a fear in her brimming eyes that was not there when he’d opened the door.

“Who are you?” she bawled in English.

* * * *

They had finally gotten Martin’s goddamned horse under control, but it had taken a lot of wind out of the proceedings. The animal had balked every time they’d lifted the Jew onto it, and once it had broken free and they’d had to chase it down. Finally Tom threatened to shoot the jugheaded animal, which almost caused a fight with the Lazy S boys.

Dan cooled them down and reminded them why they were all there, to see the Jew priest swing. Martin coaxed the horse into finally sitting still, and at last Bull had lifted the unconscious Jew into the saddle and cinched the noose around his neck.

Stupid Jew luck had caused this party to carry on way too long.

Now, Bull raised one huge hand to finally do the honors.

“See you in hell,” said Cut Tom. “Finally.”

He thought he saw the Jew’s eyes open, but it must have been a trick of the predawn light.

Bull’s hand slapped down on the horse’s rump and it bolted out from under the Jew. The rope pulled tight and he swung from the arm of the newspaper office sign—

—for about the time it took a flea to fart.

Then the Jew’s hands (which they hadn’t bound because they hadn’t bothered to rustle up the extra rope) flew up and grabbed the noose. With a hard tug, he drew it open and dropped to the boards free and clear, right in front of Dan, who looked about fit to go running after Martin’s horse.

It was like seeing a dead man come back to life. Tom shook off the surprise and wiped away the blood that spilled from the fresh hole he’d bit in his own lip.

“Playin’ possum, huh?” he quipped, and pulled his pistol.

When the Jew turned, he had already yanked his own weapon out of the lip of a stupefied Dan’s trousers. So what? Fast or no, that twenty dollar shoehorn of flashy tin wasn’t going to do anything. Hadn’t Dan tried it? Hadn’t he said it was just for show, some cowardly Jew bastard’s notion of safety? It wasn’t going to spit a blue pill into him.

But it did.

As Cut Tom flew backwards, propelled by the bullet in his chest, Bull Bannock moved. The hammer of his horse pistol caught on the edge of his pants pocket with a rip. Tom had always told him he needed to invest in a belt and holster or else put the thing in the front of his pants where he could get at it. But Bull had always been afraid he would blow his pecker off. It was such a big target, he used to laugh and say. Then the Jew’s bullet smacked dead center into his forehead and he briefly conceded that Tom had been right before he wavered and fell on his face.

The crowd stood stock still. Martin and Heck made no move for their guns. Alvin took a step back, and Burly was way ahead of him, trotting expeditiously back to the Moderado as if he’d just remembered he’d left a pot of beans on the stove.

Dan Spector stared at the bodies of Tom and Bull, at the smoke curling from their wounds. He’d tried that pistol himself. He’d tried it. It hadn’t worked. It hadn’t.

“How?” he stammered.

The Jew just put the pistol back where it belonged.

Then he turned, and where his eyes fell the mob cleared a respectful path. That path led straight to his donkey, dozing at the trough in front of the Moderado.

The Rider walked down the silent aisle of staring eyes. The pistol was primarily a correspondence ward for use on the ethereal plane, but it was also a deadly weapon. Of course, it wouldn’t fire for any man who didn’t wear the little lapis lazuli ring embossed with the seal of Solomon, to which it had been married by ancient alchemical rites. A corresponding relief, barely perceptible, rode on the inside ring on the Volcanic’s lever, where the ring naturally touched it when he held the pistol. The ring flashed on the middle finger of The Rider’s hand, catching the lamplight. To any other, the pistol was a pretty trinket.

Trujillo started to walk after The Rider, squeezing his fist. He stopped short, Dan’s fingers on his sleeve.

“Best not, amigo,” Dan mumbled.

* * * *

The hour had come, though Shallbetter and the other men had been saddled and ready before the first hint of blue had crept into the night sky. That group of clean, quiet men had been waiting already when the others stirred, as if they hadn’t even slept.

Now they rode, and hell went before them.

Billy Shivers had no doubt every Jew in Little Jerusalem would be dead before the sun was yellow. It was behind their backs, and when they galloped as one body into the town with the rest of the posse heading in blind from the west, he figured they must look like the avenging army of fiery angels Shallbetter wanted them to be.

That little girl was dead for sure by now, and Cardin, and every other damn Jew in the settlement was going to go with her. Why the hell hadn’t Cardin negotiated? Was he really in on it somehow?

They tore through the center of town, the men squeezing off a few shots into empty cabins, killing nothing but glass and ammunition, all, except for the clean, quiet riders, who seemed to pull ahead as if they knew where they were going.

Then they saw six men in red robes outside one of the cabins in the middle of the street. When these men saw them coming, they spread out in every direction, hollering and screaming in fear.

Shallbetter was set to join the others in riding them down, but Billy pulled up alongside him and grabbed his reins.

“Get out of my way!” Shallbetter snarled.

“You want blood, or you want your daughter?” Billy shouted. “You ride in with that lot and you’re gonna put a bullet in her before you even see her.”

Shallbetter soured, pale.

“What do you intend?”

Billy pointed again to the cabin, and steered his horse that way.

“Looked like they were tryin’ to get in there, to me.”

The bullets started flying. The whooping of the rough men followed, but the only sounds the clean, quiet men made came from their shining pistols. Somewhere on the other side of the settlement, he noticed a pillar of black smoke rising against the lightening sky. How had they fired the place so fast? He hadn’t even seen them light any torches.

When they reached the little cabin, the door flew open. Billy hadn’t expected that, and thought ironically that for all the discretion he’d imposed upon the preacher, now they were both dead.

And then, an old Jew stepped out with the pale girl wrapped in a blanket in his arms.

Shallbetter pointed his gun.

“Papa!” the girl shrieked.

The Jew on the porch hesitated. He stared at the preacher’s gun, then glanced over his shoulder. Out of nowhere, there was a boy, maybe nine or ten hugging his leg with both arms. The Jew looked fearfully at Shallbetter.

“Put her down,” Shallbetter said, his voice as cold as the morning. “Put her down and step aside.”

Billy looked from Shallbetter to the Jew. He had to admit, if he was in Shallbetter’s place, he’d do the same thing.

Then the girl said;

“Daddy, Mr. Klein saved me!”

Billy stared.

The Jew looked as if he would cry.

Shallbetter lowered the hammer on his pistol. He put down the gun, and he went to his daughter.

He knelt on the porch of Klein’s cabin, holding her tight, his shoulders shaking.

The Jew’s wife came up behind him, tears spilling down her pink face.

For awhile, all that could be heard were the gun shots, cracking in the distance.

“Mr. Klein,” said Reverend Shallbetter, muffled by his daughter’s matted hair. “Thank you.”

* * * *

After The Rider had retrieved his things, he untied the onager.

The Chinese girl watched him from the upstairs balcony, wrapped in a shawl against the cool morning air. There was a fresh cut on her lip. She said nothing.

He pondered the mystery of Molech’s appearance here in this backwater town and the last words of Cardin. ‘When the Hour of Incursion strikes and The Great Old Ones take their place beside the infernal lords,’ he had said.

The Great Old Ones.

No infernal spirit could inhabit this earth without a physical body. Were Cardin’s ravings the hopeful delusions of a lunatic coaxed to madness by the tongue of Molech, or were they truly the portents of a vanguard assault upon the physical realm by some other threat allied with the Adversary?

In his travels, The Rider had heard whisperings of the existence of another, elder race of beings on par with the infernals.

The Great Old Ones.

That phrase was what had triggered his memory. But he had thought them nothing more than myths. Yet on the other hand, in his trade, it was not wise to discount myth. The matter would require further investigation. Whatever the case, Molech would not take part in that supposed assault. That at least, was certain.

There was another matter to consider. Cardin had been told to expect him. Told by who? It could only be Adon. The Rider’s former master. Then he must have crossed paths with these Canaanites. He was still in America. Cardin had come up from Mexico, Joseph had said.

With a click of his tongue, The Rider urged the animal away from the trough and turned south down the road, passing the saloon on the left.

As he walked, he glanced up at one of the windows, and saw the angel seated at the window through a part in the curtains. She raised one white, gloved hand of delicate lace and there was the glint of the newborn sun on the pane. Then she was gone; to join her subordinates in the scouring of the remaining Canaanites, no doubt.

He fished in his coat for his spectacles and found them in their case. He put them on, enjoying the sudden flood of brilliant, transcendent colors that shined down into the street.

The Chinese girl leaned far over the rail and watched him until he disappeared.

He tipped his hat to her and moved on.

II: The Dust Devils

POLVO ARIDO
population 103

Juan Miguel Alejandro-Dominguez, Mayor SALUDOS AMIGOS!

NO FIREARMS ALLOWED!

As a dry Sonoran wind blew a choking cloud of fine white grit towards the lonesome border town, only two pairs of eyes, narrowed against the stinging sand were present to read the black words flaking on the faded sign.

One pair belonged to a white, unshorn onager.

The second belonged to a man who called himself The Rider. He peered out at the sign from beneath the down turned brim of his wide black hat.

They were brown eyes, protected from the adventurous grains that sought to swim in his tears by a pair of blue lenses embossed with geometric seals only visible when the sun glanced off them just so. His eyes narrowed further at the last line of the battered sign, not for fear of relinquishing the gold and silver chased Volcanic pistol belted around his waist, nor the similarly gilded two-shot Derringer tucked up his sleeve, but because the sign itself was perforated with bullet-holes; relatively fresh ones, by the brightness of the broken wood.

“Someone’s not obeying the local ordinance,” he murmured to the onager.

The animal shuddered insistently behind him, nudging his back. He slowly headed past the sign.

“Alright, let’s go, my friend.”

He had come south across the border looking for a man, following whim and rumor more than a trail. There was no asking about this man, as no one alive knew his real name. To know a man’s name was to have power over him. It was one of the first lessons his old master had taught him. It was why The Rider had stopped using his own name years ago. ‘Adon’ (or ‘Lord’) was the only name his master had ever given. Anyone who knew Adon’s true name was dead now. His master had made sure of it, by making sure The Rider was the last of the American enclave of his mystical order, The Sons of the Essenes.

Though The Rider could barely make out the buildings of the town through the swirling dust, it seemed as they moved on that the storm was a violent membrane, which once penetrated, proved comparatively calm at heart. Though still buffeted by mournful gusts, the town was at the epicenter of the gale, and the weather was peaceful if insistent once The Rider and the onager crossed the town’s boundary.

Polvo Arido was a prosperous looking place for a border town not on the map, with its clean bright adobe buildings and neat boardwalks. Its main street led to a half-built, columned manor house in the distance, anachronistic for the region. Construction scaffolds stood steadfast against the whipping winds like the forgotten siege towers of a battle lost long ago.

The Rider and the onager passed a blacksmith and a laundry, a lonesome telegraph office with a pair of frayed lines that swayed in the wind like broken fiesta streamers. A tall, rusty windmill squeaked in the constant wind behind the buildings. No faces pressed against the sugared glass of the shops to acknowledge their arrival, and no doors opened to welcome them.

They came upon a livery barn with a peaked roof, but when The Rider tried the door, he found it barred from within.

He looked at the onager. It shook its bristly mane in irritation.

“No room at the inn.”

An urgent rapping noise caught his attention, just barely discernable over the incessant howl of the wind.

The Rider looked towards the sound and saw a long thin face with a bony fist rapping the glass in the window of the neighboring dry goods store. The figure waved him over in a frantic manner, then disappeared within.

The Rider led the onager between the buildings and emerged out back, just as an impossibly tall, thin man ducked out from a low doorway on a modest back porch.

The figure shielded his eyes as a gust picked up, blowing three little cyclones across the porch and through the dust of the small, fenced in yard behind the store, in a corner of which there stood a rickety-looking open shed covered with flapping canvas weighed down by nails and flat stones on the roof.

The tall man cupped his hands and threw his deep voice at him.

“P-Put your animal in there!”

He motioned to the shed.

The Rider was unsure of the tall man’s motives. Did he expect to collect some steep fee for letting him put his donkey in a shed? Why was the livery closed, at any rate? It didn’t seem likely that it was filled to capacity. This was a small enough town, and he himself had only come across it because the sudden attack of the desert storm had bewildered and driven him here.

Where was everyone?

Nevertheless, it wouldn’t do to let the onager suffer through the blow without shelter. He led the dusty animal into the rickety shed and hitched him to the wheel of an old surrey with a set of broken spokes.

When he turned, the giant was still stooped in the doorway looking anxiously about and motioning for him to come inside. He shrugged at the onager and pulled the canvas down across the entrance.

The Rider started over with a sour taste in his mouth, fishing in his pockets for his wallet. The gaunt figure retreated inside.

When he stepped through the door and pulled it shut behind him, he found himself in a back hall with a short staircase leading up to where the proprietor most likely lived. He followed the tall thin man into the store proper, his eyes level with the space between the man’s shoulder blades.

The man was dressed in a pair of pin-striped pants whose cuffs ended halfway down his ankles, revealing a pair of mismatched socks stuffed into two of the largest black shoes The Rider had ever seen. The sleeves of his white shirt, stained by dust and sweat, were rolled to his elbows to hide the fact they didn’t quite reach his simian wrists. He wore two elastic arm garters more for show, The Rider guessed, than for practicality. His black vest crept up the middle of his back as though his bony shoulders were a pair of angry parents dragging the love struck garment away from an intimate rendezvous with his waistline.

The man had a long neck, which curved to keep the top of his ghoulish skull from skinning on the ceiling. He had thinning brown hair with a pair of obscenely fuzzy sideburns that ran down the sides of his face like ladies’ boots. His heavy steps resounded on the planks.

When they reached the store front, the giant turned to The Rider and motioned for him to crouch down and follow him.

What happened next was almost enough to make The Rider laugh out loud. The tall man got down on his hands and knees and crawled behind the counter, then poked his angular head up and furrowed a set of anxious eyebrows back at him.

“Well? W-w-w-what are you waiting for? D-dd-don’t you want to get a luh-look at them?” The voice came in a scared, stuttering whisper that cracked several times.

The Rider’s querulous grin wavered and fell.

Here was this physically imposing figure, hunched behind his counter and trembling at the ghostly moans of the wind outside. Sweat shined on the man’s forehead, and his long face was drawn tight across his skull. His nostrils flared nervously like those of a sorrel in a barn fire.

“What?” The Rider asked.

Maybe this man was crazy. Maybe he had wandered into an abandoned town where the population consisted solely of this tall lunatic.

Maybe the gold had run out, or the trails had changed, or the railroad had clanked by a few miles to the north. Perhaps everyone had packed up and left, except for this poor, towering stutterer who had invested his life savings in this shabby little dry goods store and would not admit defeat. Maybe he was too lazy to fix the wheel of his surrey and drive out of here.

The gaunt figure balked, his face shriveling, aghast.

“Aren’t you the muh-muhmuh-marshal?”

In answer, The Rider undid the buttons of his dusty rekel coat. There was no badge pinned to the white shirt beneath, only ropes of dangling amulets and charms. Did he really look anything at all like a marshal, with his beard and payot curls, and the fringes of his votive apron hanging down from beneath his black frock? Would a marshal come leading a donkey into town?

The giant held one scrawny arm before his face and grimaced as though he was about to be hit.

“Lord. You’re one of them...?”

The Rider peered at the cowering giant.

“One of who?”

He didn’t like to see a grown man so cowed. He ran a finger absently over a tin of lamp oil and came back with almost as much dust as he might have picked up outside. How long had this man been hiding here?

There was a violent clatter from behind the counter and The Rider dropped his hand to his Volcanic pistol.

The giant had stumbled to his knees and upset a stack of canteens. He ducked behind the counter and peered cautiously out the front window, as if to see if he had been heard.

The Rider took a step to the window, to see what he was looking at.

“No don’t!” the giant wailed. “Listen, muhmister. You gotta g-get outta here. I don’t want no truhtrouble. Just go on out the buh-buh-back, will you?

Puh-please?”

His voice was on the verge of breaking down into infantile sobs.

The Rider stared at the man.

“What’s the matter here?”

The giant looked back out the window and what little color was left ran right out of his face.

“Oh God!” he said, and fell flat to the floor.

Taking the hint, The Rider ducked down behind the stack of lamp oil, but kept an eye on the window, which looked out across the windblown street toward an adobe cantina.

Through the grimy glass, he saw two men in wide sombreros ride their horses into the narrow alley between the cantina and the adjoining building, which looked to be an assayer’s office.

In a moment the two men had dismounted and tied their horses, crossed the planks in front of the cantina, and disappeared through the swinging half-doors into the darkness within. One of them clearly wore a gun belt, and the other a bandolier of bullets.

The giant glanced out the window, barely rising above the counter top, then immediately resumed his stuttering entreaties.

“Puh-please m-mister, you gotta get outta here. If they ca-catch you here...”

“You mean if they catch you here,” The Rider said. “Where are the rest of the people in this town? Who are those men?”

The giant answered with a quivering lip that bit back at his own words, chewing them and swallowing them like an incriminating letter.

“What about this marshal? How long ago did you send for him?”

The giant glanced out the window.

“We d-didn’t send for one. I juh-just hoped another might’ve come.”

“Another?”

“They k-killed the last one. Tied him to the old w-w-windmill outside the teh-telegraph office. Left him in the storm.”

As if with new resolve, the gaunt man shook his head violently.

“Mister, you have to g-go. If they find me, you duh-don’t know what they’ll do.”

“How many of them are there?”

“I d-d- I don’t know,” the giant said. “Tuh-ten or twenty.”

The Rider pursed his lips.

“Ten or twenty? Which is it?”

The shopkeeper shook his head and got down on the floor, clasping his big hands over the back of his neck.

The Rider sighed. He had gotten all he would get out of this man. He turned and went out the back hallway.

“Muh-mister?” He heard the man’s voice, sounding as though it came from far away. “Puh-puhplease don’t tuh-tell ‘em about me?”

The Rider answered with the bang of the back door slamming shut.

He watered the onager and left it in the tool shed, then went around the west wall of the dry goods store to the street, where he could get a good view of the horses from the meager protection of the buildings.

He could not go back into the storm and try to find help. The only town he knew of was twelve or thirteen miles to the north. He had learned from the past that sometimes the best way to meet a problem was head on.

Across the way were a flea-bit piebald and a dun, both with gaudy Mexican saddles whose studs glinted even in the sand filtered sun. The mounts tied to the hitch nickered nervously; they didn’t like the storm one bit.

The Rider looked up and down the avenue, and satisfied no one would see him, he bounded across the street to get a better look at their horses.

He found, on the piebald, a Winchester ‘76 rifle in good condition, decorated with a pattern of brass tacks on the butt. He drew the rifle from its boiled leather scabbard and ejected all the shells, one at a time, putting them in his coat pocket before replacing the rifle. Rummaging through the saddlebags, he came across a bottle of liquor and a gold watch with a chain wrapped in an old bandanna. Opening the watch, he found a tintype portrait of a beautiful Mexican woman. She had dark features and lustrous hair, pushed up stylishly into a bun with two curly rivulets running down the sides of her face. He tucked the watch into his shirt pocket and turned to the dun.

No rifle hung on the horse, but in the cracked leather bags, he found a pouch of gold dust stuffed under a spare shirt and a razor. He put the pouch in his coat pocket.

He gave one more glance down the empty street, then lowered his chin to the wind and stepped up onto the planks.

* * * *

Fiero saw the bearded gringo step in first. He always sat facing the door. He was grinning toothily at the hand he had cleverly dealt himself from the bottom of the deck. On the other side of the table, Sucio wrinkled his forehead at what he had been passed.

Fiero liked to sit far across from Sucio because the man smelled so badly. He was the sort who never took a bath, even when the opportunity arose.

Many of the men went for days without baths, especially when they were on the run from federales, but here in town, there was plenty of time for such things. They had been here for a week now, and Sucio still hadn’t taken a bath. The man was a pig.

Once, Fiero asked Sucio why he never took a bath. Sucio told him it was because if he stank bad enough, he believed it would keep evil spirits away. Fiero laughed and called him campesino, but he had not clapped Sucio on the shoulders in good humor as was his custom with his other compañeros, for he could never stand to get very close to him.

Sucio’s filthiness not only kept evil spirits away, it kept everyone away; men, women, and even some animals. Only the flies kept to Sucio. His horse was cleaner than he was.

Sucio was a bad card player as well. That was why Fiero had decided to offer him a few hands. If it had been up to him, they would have been playing Faro right now, but this little cantina had no table, and it turned out that poker was the only game Sucio knew how to play anyway.

There was no real reason for them to play for money, as they would all soon be equally rich, but Fiero thought that to play cards for anything less was to not play at all.

When the bearded gringo with the long curls and blue glasses stepped in from the sandstorm, it was Fiero who booted Sucio in the shins under the table.

“Maldito!” Sucio cursed, glaring at Fiero. “What the hell did you do that for?”

Fiero nodded, his eyes over Sucio’s shoulder. He did not make any sudden moves, but beneath the table, his hand touched the Smith and Wesson in the buscadero holster on his belt.

Sucio half-turned in his chair and fumbled his hand in surprise. He didn’t even have his rifle. He’d left it on his horse.

The gringo was pale with dust, from the black crown of his wide-brimmed hat down to the toes of his shoes. He was not a vaquero, for no spurs clung to his heels, though he seemed to clink when he walked. No star or shield hung on his chest, so he was no lawman either. He was of slight build, and his eyes were hidden by his blue spectacles. Two girlish curls of dark hair fell over his ears. He was all in black like a preacher, but a shiny pistol rode on his right hip.

“Room for one more?” the gringo said.

Sucio pushed his chair back with a groan of wood on wood and began to stand, but Fiero hissed at him.

“Siéntate, pendejo.”

Then he looked up at the gringo and smiled, gesturing to the empty chair on his right. “Sure, señor,” he said, in his friendliest sing-song American. “Just let us finish this hand.”

The Rider walked over to the table, slowly. The dirty one with his back to the door watched him with blatant distrust, but he was slow, and not to be feared. The smarter one continued to smile, but only let his eyes linger for a moment, before returning to his cards. He was quick, and would have to be watched. The rest of the saloon was empty but for a thin Mexican boy who stood behind the bar counter, looking fearful. Half-drained drinks sat in dusty glasses on the tables among scattered cards. Cigars smoldered in brass ashtrays, discarded.

“It’s so goddamn hot in here,” the quick one said, taking his big sombrero off his head and fanning his dusky face lightly. He half-turned in his chair and called out to the boy. “Hey, muchacho! Why don’t you get that fan going? That’s what it’s for, right?”

The quick one turned back to the table and grinned again at The Rider. He set the big sombrero on his right knee.

“That goddamn kid. Sometimes I think he don’t speak no American and no E’spanish neither,” he chuckled.

The Rider watched as the boy behind the bar began to crank something unseen. Then he felt a change in the still air. He looked up and saw the big cloth blades of a fan above the table swirling in slow, concentric motions above them.

“That’s better. Pretty goddamn fancy, no?” the quick one said, still grinning, his eyes like cocked pistols. “This is a rich town, señor.”

The Rider nodded. For such a remote town, they did have a lot of luxuries—the telegraph, the columned house, this cantina with its fan and brass ashtrays.

“It seems like a nice place,” The Rider said. “And so generous.”

The quick one continued to beam. He said something in Spanish to his friend and the man smiled faintly.

“Where are all the people?” The Rider asked pointedly.

The quick one’s lips closed finally around his teeth, but he did not relax his grin.

“Oh, they’re just all at work. Let us finish this hand so you can play. Why don’t you sit down already? You want a drink?”

The Rider took the seat to the right of the quick one.

“No thank you.”

The two Mexicans resumed their play, and the slap of the cards on the liquor-stained table joined the howl of the wind outside and the rickety creaking of the big fan overhead. The Rider glanced at the boy behind the bar.

He was a slight youth of about sixteen or so, with smooth, swarthy skin and curly black hair. His clothes were simple creamed corn cotton. His dark eyes studied the strange looking gringo at the table with a mix of disbelief and desperation.

The game ended with a gleeful cackle and a trio of kings from the quick one, and a grunt and a pair of twos from the slow one.

The quick one leaned across the table and dragged his winnings closer. Beneath the wide sombrero on his knee, The Rider watched the hidden hand toil briefly at something and then return to a seemingly natural position. Leaning back in his chair, he saw that the pistol was now missing from the quick one’s holster.

The Rider smiled, and the quick one smiled too, for he had not seen the gringo’s eyes move behind his blue lenses.

“Maybe you would like to shuffle the cards, señor?”

The Rider shook his head slowly.

“No, it’s your deck.”

The quick one shrugged and gestured to the slow one, who took up the deck, still staring at The Rider as he began to slowly riffle the cards.

“Fiero?” said the slow one.

Fiero wrinkled his brow and nodded, then went back to smiling at The Rider.

“Perdón, señor,” said Fiero. “Sucio here only knows how to play five card stud. Is that alright with you?” His eyes glistened like a cat’s, secure in the knowledge of the gun beneath the sombrero.

“Sure.” The Rider returned the smile. “I’m afraid you won’t find me much of a challenge. I’m not really a very good card player. But I would like the company after such a long walk.”

Sucio shuffled the cards deliberately, as though it were an honor bestowed upon him. Fiero never let Sucio shuffle the cards. He wondered why Fiero had not killed the gringo yet, and again cursed himself for not having brought in his rifle. He considered running down the street to tell Scarchilli about the gringo, but he supposed Fiero knew what he was doing.

He began to deal the cards.

“Where did you come from?” Fiero asked.

“North.”

“And where are you going?”

The gringo shrugged.

“South.”

“What’s your name?”

“I’m The Rider.”

Fiero said nothing. For a man wanting company the gringo had little use for conversation.

The cards slid one after the other around the tabletop. Once Sucio accidentally passed The Rider two cards, and broke the rhythm of his dealing. All the while The Rider and Fiero looked each other in the eye, and Fiero smiled.

The light breeze of the overhead fan made dealing even more difficult for Sucio, and twice he had to catch his own cards from blowing off the table.

“What’s the ante?” The Rider asked when his fifth card streaked across the table to his hands.

“How about two dollars?” Fiero ventured, smiling and removing two American dollars from his shirt pocket. They clinked in the middle of the table.

Sucio began fishing in his own pockets.

The Rider slapped down a couple of coins.

“How about five? I’m feeling lucky.”

Sucio looked at Fiero, but Fiero ignored him, his face again splitting into the obnoxious grin.

“OK, five dollars is fine.”

The Rider watched Fiero take out more dollars and place them on the table. His pocket clinked with the promise of more. For what looked to him to be a couple of border trash banditos, these two were doing well for themselves. They hadn’t blinked at the notion of a five dollar ante. The gold dust in the dun’s saddlebags insured that. Perhaps the watch with the portrait of the woman inside belonged to whatever hapless person they had bushwhacked for their prize, some wealthy traveler, or a lost merchant, maybe a miner.

To his left, Sucio grumbled in Spanish.

Fiero turned a disapproving eye on his partner and hissed.

“Well now the ante is cinco. So shut up and play.”

The Rider’s hand was decent enough. Two jacks, a two, a four, and a ten. He opted to drop the two and the four, and the one called Sucio dealt him another ten, and an ace of diamonds.

Sucio frowned a lot and muttered. He was a novice card player, to be sure. The Rider was no card player himself, but he knew the basics from his time spent in places much like this one. He suspected, of all of them, Fiero had the advantage at a gaming table. He wondered if he could handle his pistol as well as a playing card. He thought of the gun palmed under Fiero’s big hat like a waiting ace, and believed he knew the answer.

Fiero raised the stakes two dollars. He always grinned. It could very well be a bluff. The Rider was curious, but he was not here to beat the man at cards.

He sat back in his chair, and pulling out two dollars, he called.

The quick one lay down three somber kings and a pair of deuces.

Sucio slapped his hand down without showing.

“Maldito!”

The Rider overturned his own hand with a shrug.

The quick one laughed and pulled in his winnings, then raised an eyebrow at The Rider, still grinning. “Again, señor?” The Rider nodded.

“Sure, sure. But you deal this time.” The Rider reached across and took the deck from in front of Sucio and passed it to Fiero.

For the first time Fiero’s smile faltered.

“Señor Rider.” He turned his eyes to regard Sucio. “Do you got a problem with Sucio’s dealing, maybe?” Like a dog poked with a stick, Sucio seemed to awaken and look sharply at The Rider, his lips pursed and his fists knotted on the table.

“No, no,” The Rider said, holding up his palms. “No offense meant. I just thought a change of pace might be nice. And it’s just Rider.”

Fiero did not like the funny looking gringo with his puta curls. He thought perhaps now that the gringo had guessed his pistol was in his hand, and was calling him out.

He sat back in his chair and did not grin. Under his hat, his thumb began to tug at the hammer.

The Rider’s hand reached up to his breast, but before his fingertips had disappeared within his coat, Sucio had leapt to his feet and overturned his chair with a crash.

The Rider and Fiero did not move. Fiero did not get the sense that the gringo was reaching for a gun.

The Rider smirked.

“Sit down, pendejo!” Fiero hissed.

Sucio stood for a moment, glaring tensely at the gringo, who did not acknowledge him. Then he stooped down and righted his chair.

“I’m afraid you’ve cleaned me out of cash,” The Rider said.

He reached into his pocket and took out the gold watch and chain.

“But I’m willing to wager this that I win the next hand.”

At the sight of the gold watch, both bandits’ eyes lit up, but for different reasons. Whilst Fiero’s look was born of sheer gold lust, Sucio felt a heat wave of anger, for the watch had come from his own saddlebags.

He wanted to kill the gringo right there. He wanted to jump him and strangle him. But he stopped, his anger quelled as he remembered Fiero.

The gold watch had come from the pocket of the alcalde of this town. When they had taken Polvo Arido, Scarchilli had forbidden them from taking anything of value for themselves from the inhabitants. Everything was to be turned over and divided equally. But when Sucio had found the fine gold watch, he had stashed it in his bandanna, knowing full well he would not see it again if he didn’t. Scarchilli or El Brujo Negro would get it, and he would have to settle for dust and coins.

Now, if he killed the gringo and took the watch back, Fiero would probably make him turn it over to Scarchilli anyway. He thought that if he tried to tell Fiero the watch was his, Fiero would not believe him, and would know Sucio had taken it from the alcalde, as his daughter’s picture was inside. He would tell Scarchilli and the jefe would be angry, maybe kill him.

The Rider set the glittering watch down on the table, and Sucio’s eyes followed its descent.

How could he get the watch back, unless he won it? He was a miserable card player, and he knew it. If Fiero dealt, he would have no chance. The man was a cheat, and a good one.

Fiero sat forward and said, “Alright, Rider. I’ll deal.”

Fiero wanted the gold watch. If he killed the gringo and took it, Scarchilli would expect him to give it over. But if he won the watch from the gringo in cards, and then killed him, Scarchilli would have no right to it. Neither would Sucio be able to contend. The watch would be his. Then he would shoot the gringo.

He balanced his pistol on his knee, leaned forward, and took up the deck.

The Rider watched the oily grin return to the quick one’s face as his nimble hands began to shuffle the deck in an expert blur.

The cards hissed across the table. Out of the corner of his eye, The Rider saw the boy behind the bar watching.

The Rider’s hand attested to the skill of the Fiero’s card savvy. His hand was about as ripe with possibility as a mare in a pen full of geldings.

He glanced at Sucio, who was furrowing his brow and pursing his lips, shuffling cards back and forth in his hand as though some special sequence might miraculously change their value.

Of course, Fiero was smiling.

The discards came around, and Sucio fiddled with his cards. The Rider came back with a pair of queens. Fiero did not swap a single card from his hand. He was sly alright. He probably knew what everyone at the table had.

The Rider caught Fiero’s eyes.

“So what do I get if I win?”

Fiero’s eyes did not falter. He shook his head and laughed in The Rider’s face.

“Maybe we’ll let you walk out of here, eh?”

“Well then,” said The Rider. “I should probably raise the stakes.”

Fiero leaned back, and his right hand slipped back under his sombrero.

“And how are you gonna do that, gringo?”

The Rider reached into his coat again with his fingertips and slowly produced the bag of gold dust he’d taken from Fiero’s horse.

He leaned back in his chair, almost enjoying the look of utter rage that fell across the Mexican’s face.

“I call,” The Rider said, and flipped the bag of dust over to Fiero, who without thinking, tried to catch it.

The Rider fired his Volcanic under the table, punching a hole in Fiero’s midsection, sending him tipping back to the floor with a crash. His sombrero rolled away, and the pistol beneath was flung aside. The gold dust spilled out in a glittering cloud that settled slowly over his body.

The Rider stood and cocked the Volcanic to fire again, but Fiero did not stir. He only gurgled and gazed up at the fan, his legs propped up on the chair.

Sucio had already gone crashing through the swinging doors, and The Rider had time to step behind the bar where the Mexican boy was huddled before he came rushing back through, rifle in his hands.

“Hijo de puta!”

Sucio spat foam and cocked his empty rifle.

He raised the rifle up to his shoulder and fired nothing. He looked once at the empty rifle, surprised. He never left the rifle unloaded. He threw it aside and glanced at Fiero’s gun.

The Rider pointed his pistol and shook his head in warning.

Sucio dove for the pistol and The Rider blasted him twice.

Sucio staggered back through the doors and collapsed in the street, the sand blowing an instant grave over him.

The Rider turned to the boy, still half-crouched behind the bar, speechless.

“Where are the rest of the people in this town?”

The boy said nothing, only stared at the pooling death on the floorboards around the card table.

“How many bandits?” The Rider urged, reloading his pistol.

“Who are you, señor?” The boy stammered, looking scared. “You ain’t the marshal.”

“No, I’m The Rider. How many are there?”

“Quince—fifteen.” The boy looked at the dead men again. “You killed them.”

“Yes. Now there are thirteen. Do they have a chief?”

“They call him Scarchilli. He’s living in the mayor’s house with the black man and the mayor’s daughter.”

“What black man?”

“I don’t know his name. He’s a brujo.”

The Rider cocked his head at the boy.

“A what?”

“Witch,” said the boy. “He makes the people do what Scarchilli wants. He keeps the storm going.”

“Where are the townspeople?”

Suddenly there came from outside, above the howl of the wind, the sound of many boots clomping down the boardwalk.

The Rider turned toward the door and gestured to the boy.

“Get down.”

He didn’t need to tell him at all.

Three Mexicans came to a halt outside the bat wing doors of the saloon. The Rider heard the shuffle of a few more heels on the boardwalk as he stepped out from behind the bar.

The middle man had a hard, unshaven face, brown from the sun, in which his dark eyes shone like cannon bores. His black eyebrows knotted across a wrinkled, thick forehead. He was shorter than The Rider, but he walked tall. His shoulders were broad and his neck bullish. His hair was unruly and streaked with either dust or age, The Rider couldn’t tell which. His puggish nose was many times broken, and a pink scar ran lightly from his left nostril down beneath his bearded chin, enhancing an already harsh and imperious natural sneer. When he smiled he looked like the Devil’s uncle.

He leaned forward casually, and folded two thick and hairy arms over the tops of the swinging doors. He rested his chin on his big hands.

As he did so, the two men at his flanks produced rifles and laid them across his shoulders at either side, aiming them in at The Rider. The rifles cocked simultaneously, and two dark faces in sombreros appeared on the other ends.

“Draw one last breath, gringo,” he said in an authoritative, but casual Spanish accent. “Tell me why you killed my men.”

His men. Then this was Scarchilli.

“They tried to cheat me,” The Rider said, not lowering his own pistol.

“Fiero. He was a sly one,” Scarchilli said, motioning to the man dead on the floor.

“Not that sly,” said The Rider carelessly.

Scarchilli smiled, and pushed his way inside. The two riflemen remained in the doorway, skinny shadows in cotton and leather that sprouted from the depths of their massive hats.

He was dressed in a short, embroidered jacket that did not suit him, and a pair of dusty leather chapaderos that did. His feet were sheathed in fine boots with ornate silver spurs in the shape of smiling sunbursts on the heels, and his ample waist was surrounded by a sharp red sash. The butt of a pistol peeked over the lip of the sash, and a basket hilt cavalry saber hung at his side from a baldric slung over his shoulder. The tarnished buckle bore the seal of Old Mexico.

When he walked, the sunburst spurs laughed like girls.

The two banditos behind him were nondescript gunman, cholos with murder on their minds. They looked anxious for their jefe to throw them the gringo, like dogs wishing for a scrap. They kept their rifles trained on The Rider’s heart.

Scarchilli walked over the bodies of his men and paused to look down on them.

He wrinkled his nose at the half-spilt bag of gold dust that lay beside Fiero. He spied the gold pocket watch and shook his head.

“Greedy goddamn ladrones. You saved me the trouble of killing these two myself.”

He stooped down to retrieve the watch.

The Rider cleared his throat.

“That’s mine. I won it honestly.”

Scarchilli let the watch dangle idly from his hand and peered at the gringo. He raised his eyebrows.

The Rider did not waver.

Scarchilli walked up to The Rider and reached one hand out and took the lapel of his black coat between two fingers.

Close up, Scarchilli watched the gringo’s blue tinted eyes for a hint of objection or threat. Had he seen it, he would have killed him before the look could have become an action. But the gringo just stared, and allowed Scarchilli to lift back his coat, revealing the many magic wards and talismans strung about his neck.

Scarchilli frowned, and peered at The Rider.

“Superstitious, aren’t you?”

“I like to be prepared.”

Scarchilli dropped the watch into The Rider’s inside coat pocket, then let go, resting his hand on the pommel of his sword.

“Who are you, eh?”

“The Rider.”

“Where do you come from?”

“North.”

“And what brings you here?”

“The storm.”

“That is what brought us here.” Scarchilli grinned, but it was not the oily grin of Fiero. It was more calculating, like the tight lipped smile of the rattler before it strikes. “But I saw no horse.”

“I don’t have a horse,” The Rider said.

Scarchilli chuckled.

“A Rider who walks.”

With a whirl that was slightly theatrical, Scarchilli turned his back on The Rider and took the few steps to the doors.

He motioned for his men to lower their rifles, and then faced The Rider once again, his hands resting lightly on his waist and on the sword.

“I am Hector Scarchilli,” he said with a note of haughty pride.

The Rider put his gun away.

“Scarchilli...is that a Mexican name?” He asked because the man was not like other Mexicans he had encountered.

“My father was un Italiano,” Scarchilli said. He raised his prominent eyebrows. “And what are you, Rider? You don’t look like no gringo. Not really.”

“I’m a Jew.”

The Rider shrugged.

Scarchilli laughed a lively, rapid laugh.

The Rider waited.

“Well, come with me. I got somebody you’ll want to meet.”

Scarchilli pushed through the bat wing doors and left them banging in the howling wind. The two rifles receded. The Rider did not glance back to see if the boy still hid behind the bar. He followed Scarchilli outside onto the boardwalk.

Four banditos lined the boardwalk besides Scarchilli and the two riflemen. They stirred as he came into their midst, like coyotes sensing a rabbit in their den. The fangs in their murderous hearts slavered, but when they saw their jefe slow and walk side by side with the gringo, they parted for them, watching him with eyes of quiet hunger. They knew he had killed two of their number, and though their master kept them in check, they would devour him at the first opportunity.

The Rider did not bother to glance at them. He just walked along the dusty boards beside their chief, talismans clinking beneath his coat.

“Where are all the people in this town?” The Rider asked yet again.

“They are all at work,” Scarchilli said simply, and offered no more.

Behind them, the banditos fell into a disorderly column like children itching to see a fight.

The whole of the procession marched along the boardwalks towards the half-built manor house at the far end of the town, and though the bandit chief had attested to it, The Rider saw no shopkeepers peering from the windows of the stores they passed. No sounds came from Bailey’s Bath and Shave, and no miners stepped out of their way outside the assayer.

It was as if the entire town had packed up and left the buildings in perfect condition.

Only the dust, Scarchilli, and the Mexicans passed through the empty streets.

The big house loomed closer, ominous. Its peaked roof was fairly a mountain among the plain, squat buildings of Polvo Arido. Skeletal platforms and scaffolds clung to its sides. They swayed with the incessant gusts, and the planks groaned like the ghosts of the trees that had fallen to make them. It looked almost as though a great tall ship had run aground in the desert, its rigging tangled, its spars snapped, its crew long deserted to forage for food. They had died somewhere out in the trackless sands, their gasping throats filled with dust, their eyes stinging with granules of blowing grit and barren earth; or else, they were these Mexicans, and Scarchilli their laughing captain.

The roof was unfinished, and the great canvas tarp that had covered the gap had blown free and now hung from the eaves, billowing like a torn sail, enhancing the illusion of a hapless shipwreck. The veranda, so out of place for this part of the country, was a deck. The Rider half-expected to see ship’s guns poking through the ornate banisters, stacks of cannon balls and barrels of powder waiting alongside.

Scarchilli motioned for The Rider to follow and walked out into the street, towards the house. The Rider held onto his hat and followed, feeling the wind whip around him in the unprotected street. The Mexicans came behind him.

Scarchilli did not flinch from the stinging sand, as though it were his element. It blew through his curly hair and scraped across his rough cheeks. It rippled his shirt and caused his chaps to flap like leather flags.

They came into the yard through an iron gate, in a half erected fence. The tools of the workers, their wheelbarrows, lumber, sacks of nails, lay half-covered in the dust. No one labored. No one scurried to rescue a favorite hammer from the sand.

Scarchilli stepped onto the veranda and opened the double oak doors upon which there was an empty hole where a knocker would have gone.

The Rider imagined an unveiling ceremony for a grand white house that would never be. He saw great silver scissors cutting a bright red ribbon, photographers doing their magic, people clapping as a brass band played.

He stepped into the house, behind Scarchilli.

“Be careful where you walk,” Scarchilli warned.

The house was dim in the afternoon light that sifted through shuttered windows, so it took a few moments for The Rider’s eyes to adjust. He took off his blue spectacles and folded them in their case. The brightest light came from the great hole in the roof, through which blowing dust intruded continually, though not as harshly as it had outside.

They were in what was to be a grand foyer, modeled in the tradition of the great southern plantation houses, with a long staircase, sweeping banister, and tile floors. The stair was there, but the banister was of rough, unfinished wood, as was the floor, which had probably been intended for shellacking and a high polish. The house would remain unpainted and bare. What had befallen the workers?

The Rider’s attention was directed to a series of shapes traced in some kind of fine, dark powder upon the whole expanse of floor. It was not a picture, he realized, so much as it was a pictogram. Four joined Archimedean spirals intersecting over an equilateral cross, the ends of which were capped with four sectioned kite and leaf shapes, the east-west arms ridden by a pair of saltire intersected with Greek crosses. Eight small circles were arranged along its length. At specific points, stubby candles stood awaiting the flame, lodged securely in bases of cold molten wax.

“Do not step through it, señor,” Scarchilli warned. “Muy peligroso.”

His own Merkabah training had acquainted him with the nature of mystic circles and the inherent dangers of crossing them. Yet these specific glyphs were entirely alien to him.

He heard a creak from somewhere above him, and inclined his gaze up the staircase. He saw two pale, vaguely feminine forms move somewhere in the upper dark.

Then something stirred in the dim light that made him jump inwardly.

Something sat hunched on the floor near the edge of the pictogram. Some dark human form that now regarded him with black void eyes, in which the low afternoon light sparkled as it died.

The figure rose from its haunches and set aside some shadowy implements that clattered lightly on the wood floor. It came quietly over, skirting the edge of the pictogram, until it emerged from the shadows into a shaft of dusty light cast down from the unfinished hole in the ceiling.

Whoever the strange-looking man was, he seemed to have left his natural element as he entered the light. His skin was coal black. There was no blue sheen to it, as The Rider had seen some dark skinned men bear, nor was there any hint of brown. He seemed like a living shadow; his skin swallowed the light whole.

He wore wire framed spectacles such as The Rider himself favored, but his left eye was hidden behind a shroud of milky, whitish fog, while his other was masked by a black tinted lens. His head was bald beneath the brim of his tall stovepipe hat. The arms of the spectacles reached back and over two large apricot ears, which stuck out like open coach doors and drooped with their weight of two great gold hoops.

His face was long, and sloped down into a pointed chin and curling lips lined with the stretching of old age. The Rider thought that he was smiling slightly, a toothless, prim-lipped grin, though it was hard to make out his expressions in the dimness.

He was thin, and his long arms were bent like charred chicken wing bones, his oyster-like hands clasped before him as though in satisfaction. They poked out from the threadbare sleeves of a patched red flannel shirt. Dangling from around his thin neck were many bones and teeth, some flowers, and little plates of metal bearing half-moons and symbols like the ones in the pictogram. A woven straw satchel hung over his shoulder. His pants were checkered and loose on his frail form, and his long feet were bare.

He swiveled the hinged dark glass over his right eye open and regarded The Rider with one startlingly light, amber pupil. Then he closed the lens and mechanically raised the other, revealing a lighter, milky gray eye.

The Rider stared at the strange eye. It seemed to possess two irises, which when focused upon, created a mesmerizing concentric effect, like gazing too long at a bullseye.

“This is Kelly,” said Scarchilli. “We call him El Crepusculo. He is a brujo, señor, A ju-ju man. He can see both into the real world and into the world of the spirit. He can see people as they appear and as they really are. Mira, that is his spirit eye. Do you see it?”

The Rider felt waves of drowsiness assailing him suddenly.

He nodded dimly, as Scarchilli reached over and neatly took his gun from its holster. He did not protest or lift his hand. He was surprised to find that he didn’t want to. Somewhere, something in the back of his mind screamed for action.

Kelly just stood there, staring at The Rider with that swirling, clouded gray-blue double eye, his crooked hand poised above the shutter of the glass lens.

The Rider wavered where he stood, eyes unblinking. Something in that eye filled him with dread. He felt all that he was retreating slowly away from it, lolling sleepily in the back of his mind until his vision was like a bright window at the end of a long, dim hall.

Scarchilli grinned beside him and admired the gold and silver chased Volcanic pistol with its intricate etchings and peculiar filigree. He tested the feel of it and watched the little jewels set into the handle catch the light before he stuck it through his sash.

“And now tell us, señor,” Scarchilli said, drawing his saber in a rasp of steel on dry leather, “how you came to Polvo Arido.”

The Rider’s eyelids drooped heavily, and he tottered on drunken legs. The voice seemed to come from the milky double eye and would suffer no lies. He was lost in a dreamy place between wakefulness and sleep, and he only wanted to please the voice so it would leave him be and let him rest.

His lips were rubbery as a sot’s, and he formed an answer with difficulty, not knowing why or how he answered;

“Walked.”

Scarchilli sneered, and held the yard of sharpened steel up to his face, admiring his own reflection in the scratched mirror of the blade.

“I’ve spitted more Christians on this sword than a Roman emperor, señor,” and he glared at The Rider pointedly. “A Jew would not be too much trouble.”

With that, he pressed the sharp tip of the saber to The Rider’s throat, and raised his lolling head up by his bearded chin. He stared with the reserved fury of the man used to red-handedness into The Rider’s eyes, which were fixed on the pale eye of Kelly, fluttering with an effort to keep from rolling in their sockets.

“How did you get here through the storm, pendejo?” Scarchilli hissed.

The Rider’s chin began to fall to his chest, and Scarchilli brought it sharply back up with the sword.

“Walked,” he repeated.

“He’s not lying,” said the black man in a musical, French accent. “He can’t.”

The conjure-man peered at the white man through his spirit-eye. The mystic field of the strange, bearded blanc was awash with the manipulation of magical energy, like a baker dusted with flour. He cast no shadow upon the floor, which meant that like a man at midday, his soul had disappeared or was hidden. In both the penumbra and the real world, he stood unchanging. He was not a zhambi, for his ti bon ange spirit was intact. He was a walker between the worlds, his shoes muddy with ether.

Kelly Le Malfacteur had been a conjure-man of great renown among the slave huts of lower Arkansas when he had decided to leave his shoddy cabin and find his fortune as a traveling sorcerer. Powerful magic swam the hemic channels of his veins.

His grandfather had been an outlaw bokor in the mountains around Port Au Prince in the early days of San Dominique, in the Black Republic, a favored horse of wicked Kalfou, the loa of the crossroads. His African born grandmother had married that knowledge to the ways of Hoodoo and taught them to her son. They had fled Haiti not long after the revolution, only to have their ship overtaken by slavers. Kelly’s father had been auctioned to a cotton planter. His grandmother had died on the passage to America.

Kelly’s father had embraced the white man’s religion for the love of his goodly Christian wife, and disdained the application of magic for many years. There, Kelly had been born in a ramshackle slave cabin under the shadow of the metrize’s great house, the toil song of the field hand his baptismal canticle.

His mother had been beautiful; dark as a creek bed with glorious, feral hair, her blood untainted by the touch of a white man. His father had been the same. When night fell they had become invisible in each other’s arms. As a boy he had thought it was a special kind of magic that bound them to the darkness and made it their constant protector. He had never been afraid of the dark. Not ever.

Then came the day when the foul attentions of the metrize had turned toward Kelly’s mother, and his wife, the maîtresse, had beat her ugly with a stick of firewood and sold her down the river.  His last sight of his once lovely mother had been as she tried to wipe the bloody tears out of her blind, swollen eyes with broken fingers, her bruised arms draped in clinking chains, struggling for one last look at her family as the trader’s wagon lurched off down the country road.

Kelly’s father had turned angrily from the white God and looked once more to the old ways. Fingers dipped in black cock’s blood and weaving dark energies, father and son had together wandered down dark roads, calling in the witching hour upon the left handed forces to give their hatred black tentacles with which to wring the churlish metrize and his hated wife free of their baleful souls.

He himself had laced their breakfast with the yellow poison his papa had taught him to draw from the cotton—that which the blancs called gossypol— creeping through the kitchen on bare feet, invisible to the fat house mammy who later had the audacity to wail and tear her apron when she found the metrize, his lady, and their two fat white weevils scattered and purple faced in the dining room, as if she had lost her own children.

While the blancs young and old lay dead, Kelly and his papa had drawn out their ti bon anges and sealed their vile souls in the cotton crop. The night their bodies were laid out and wept over by their neighbors and kin in the candlelit house, he and his papa had stood before the quiet field. He remembered how his papa had pointed to the pale bolls waving on their stems in the evening breeze and bid him light the brand for the love of his lost mother. They had set fire to the field, and Kelly had imagined (or had he?) he heard the metrize and his children screaming on the night wind as their souls were consumed.

How he had loved his papa then! How he had loved the twisting flames in his dark eyes and the strong hand that gripped his shoulder as the fiery field blazed high and bright in the dark, a crop of vengeance sown with bitter seed and watered with white blood in the cursed, ashen soil of Hell.

They had set out to find his mother then, but the dogs had caught them in the swamp. The whites had boiled his papa alive in a great laundry kettle until the dark flesh slipped from his bones, while the Methodist preacher read words over his screams and the white children pelted him with horseshit. When they dumped out the big black iron pot the dogs fought for what was left, searing their long tongues in their eagerness.

They had sold Kelly to an Arkansas tobacco farm, and the pink, piggish women clucked their tongues behind their fans and remarked on what a shame it was to be a bastard little picaninny with a father screaming in Hell. He had prayed they were wrong. He did not want his father to spend eternity in the same place as the metrize and his devil wife and children.

On the banks of Tulip Creek he had continued to advance his powers.  In the meantime he had secretly come to rule the downtrodden blacks there, guiding them away from the lying God of the whites and inciting them to rise up against their overseers, making his fortune on their gullibility, luring them into his power with ‘conjers’ and tuberculosis cures whose effectiveness was questionable.

But eventually the call to real power had superseded his care for the fate of his people—his people? Bah. These cowering wool heads and stooping house niggers were no more his people than were the weakling blancs. He had set out west alone to find new avenues of power. He had become a thief of fortune and a slaver of souls who numbered cruel spirits among his fondest companions. Once he had been tall and strong. But long ago he had abandoned the upkeep of his physical shell for the reinforcement of his mystic self.

He was already an heir of eldritch traditions when he came to share bowls of blood with a Navajo witch and learned the lore of the skinwalkers and the dark desert spirits. His training had culminated in the revelation of a secret shamanic poudre the witch had blown into his eye. The powder had burned like lemon, and he had touched it with a lightning struck stake, thus blinding the eye to the physical world and opening it to the perception of the pale shadow land of spirits. In addition, the eye gave him wondrous power over the wills of other men.

That was how Kelly could see the fiery aura of this bearded blanc with the womanly curls. That was how he knew he was dangerous, even fastened to his will as he was now.

No man should have been able to penetrate the storm he had woven around this town.  The wind djab should have turned him aside or torn him to shreds had he persisted. Yet by his own admission, this blanc had simply walked through. He had power.

Kelly wanted to know the secret of that power.

The conjurer stepped closer, not breaking his mesmerizing gaze. He pulled open The Rider’s coat and marveled at the many talismans that hung there. Their number rivaled even his own.

“We give him to the storm,” said Scarchilli, picking his teeth and leaning against the wall. It was not a question.

Kelly’s fingers moved among the wards, fingering them.

“He has power, this one.” Kelly inspected a bit of pink coral that hung from one of many leather cords around The Rider’s neck.

“Greater than yours?”

Kelly wheeled on the bandit chief. Theirs’ was already a tenuous alliance. Kelly suspected Scarchilli planned to turn on him once his usefulness had ended. But if that were his plan, the man was more of a fool than he looked. Kelly could command forces that would turn the bandit’s pistol on himself if he so chose.

Scarchilli winced. He had never believed much in the witchery of the mestizos and fearful talk of ghosts before he’d met Kelly. He had never been entirely sure the things the black brujo did weren’t some fakery that bent weak minds to his will until he had seen what had become of the marshal the day they had beaten him and strapped him to the windmill. When he closed his eyes he could still see the flesh being stripped from the man’s body by the very wind. Scarchilli made the old sign against the eye, but he did it behind his back, where the black man couldn’t see.

“Don’t turn that eye on me,” he warned, keeping the tremor from his voice.

Kelly closed the smoky white glass and regarded him silently behind his lenses.

“You said no one would be able to come through the storm,” said Scarchilli, putting away his sword.

“As I said,” Kelly said, turning back to the bearded gringo. “He has power.”

“Two of my men are dead. Not good men, but mine nonetheless.”

“Leave me his goods then.” Kelly shrugged. “Give his flesh to the djab. It will appreciate another offering. When he’s in place, take your men indoors. I could barely keep it from killing them the last time it was loosed.”

Scarchilli nodded.

“Will it kill him though? Or will this power of his protect him?”

“No one can withstand the winds of Hell,” Kelly said, selecting the coral pendant necklace and slipping it up over The Rider’s head, then putting it over his own before gazing at it thoughtfully.

* * * *

When The Rider awoke, it was to a distinct agony in his ankles and wrists. The prickling numbness of his limbs was nearly unbearable. His skull thundered, and the roar of the wind was in his ears, playing his payot across his face, filling his beard with dust.

The ruddy face of one of Scarchilli’s Mexicans was inches from his own. As the dark eyed man saw The Rider’s eyes open, he smiled a golden toothed smile and his eyes flitted downward. The Rider realized the source of his pain were the tight leather cords lashed around his extremities and torso, and the full weight of his body which caused them to gnaw into his flesh. He was suspended in the air, tied to the blades of the creaky windmill he’d seen over the roof of the telegraph on the way into town; the one the shopkeeper had said they’d tied the marshal to. The Rider had been stripped of his coat and his shoes, and all his talismans and bodyguards.

Looking down, he saw Scarchilli himself standing at the foot of the ladder with his fists on his hips, looking up at him. The Rider’s gold and silver chased pistol gleamed in the bandit’s sash. The Rider’s coat lay in a black puddle with his shoes in the sand at Scarchilli’s feet. His amulets were nowhere to be seen.

A couple of Mexicans stood on either side of him, anxious to go. They kept looking off across the open desert where the dust storm still raged, a beige curtain fluttering over the sky and the distant mountains, making one indistinguishable from the other.

“Well!” he called. “I hope Miguel did not make the ropes too tight. I would hate for your hands to blue up and drop off before El Diablo comes for you!”

Miguel, the man on the ladder, laughed and grabbed the edge of one of the mill blades. He gave it a rough pull and The Rider’s head swam as the ground and the sky began to methodically swap places. The windmill’s metallic groaning increased as he spun, and the bonds drew taut first around his ankles and then around his wrists as his posture warranted. He shut a moan behind his teeth.

Miguel slid down the ladder and landed lightly beside his chief.

“Just tight enough to keep you where you are, eh?” Scarchilli clapped Miguel on the shoulder appreciatively, raising a puff of filth, which quickly caught the wind and was gone.

The Rider saw them only in blurred, alternating fits as he turned an endless cartwheel, the blood rushing back and forth from his head to his toes, intoxicating him. The windmill sang a tired song. He bit his lip as the cords creaked against his flesh, pinching the veins in his arms, slowly strangling the life from his fingertips and toes. The wind howled, kicking up a hiss of dust, rattling along the metal fans and through the wooden supports.

One of the Mexicans gibbered excitedly.

“Alright, alright, we’ll go,” said Scarchilli. “I wanted to stay and watch your end, Rider, but my men, they are afraid of It. They saw what It did to the marshal and that was enough for them. They are like my children. I don’t want them to have nightmares. I spoil them sometimes.”

“We should go to the mine, jefe,” Miguel said. “It’s the safest place.”

“You know, I feel a little like Pontius Pilate leaving a Jew to hang like this,” Scarchilli mused. “Adios, Rider.”

The Rider saw him salute. He strode off at the head of his pack, who all the while spared anxious glances over their shoulders.

“Vámonos paisanos!”

The Rider could hardly struggle with his fetters; he could barely think at all as his world flip-flopped, the supports creaking as the leather cords sank deeper into his wrists and ankles. The wind was increasing in volume and violence, and with it quickened the revolution of the mill fan. It flung sand in his eyes and ears and the distant howl became a roar.

What had become of the marshal? The shopkeeper had said Scarchilli’s bandits had killed the man and tied him to the windmill, or killed him by tying him to the windmill; he couldn’t remember which. Scarchilli had said something about El Diablo and what it had done to the marshal. He knew only a smattering of Spanish, but his studies had given him a passable knowledge of Latin, and he knew that diablo was devil.

The black man had overcome him with some powerful magic. That eye. That terrible, milky eye. The Rider had removed his spectacles in the low light, and had thus foolishly cast off his protection. The fifth pentacle of Jupiter and fourth pentacle of the Sun embossed on the blue glass of the lenses would have guarded him. He dimly remembered being asked about how he had managed to pass through the storm. What was this storm, then? Some kind of spectral force summoned by the black sorcerer to turn aside travelers, or to keep them in? It was unnatural to be sure. In the time since Scarchilli and his men had departed its severity seemed to have doubled, rocking the windmill and churning the world into dust-ridden nonsense about him. He closed his eyes to stop the spinning of his vision. He felt the contents of his body shifting, trying madly to compensate for frequent, drastic changes in his position. He sickened, feeling his stomach shake. He didn’t know how long he could possibly stand this. Was this how the marshal had died? Spun to death, the blood mixed in his body until it had drowned his muddled brain and taxed his vessels to bursting?

Then suddenly, there was a shuddering impact and he jolted painfully to a stop, his wrists and ankles flaring with bright agony, his brain thrown violently against the inside of his skull.  He was thankfully aright. His eyes flew open, but it was a moment’s confused rolling in their sockets before they could again make sense of the jumbled, howling world.

The Mexican boy from the cantina was on the ladder Miguel had used. He had jammed something into the whirling blades of the windmill. A clothes pole maybe, or some bit of discarded lumber. The force of the turning mill had almost shivered the pole entirely, but it held, quivering. The boy’s hands gripped The Rider’s trunk, holding him steady.

“Señor!” he called above the storm. “Señor?”

The Rider nodded slightly, unable to form words that would make sense on his tongue.  His stomach heaved dangerously.

“I’ll cut you down!”

He took a sharp kitchen knife from his belt and began to saw at the cords. The Rider laid his head against the mill’s axis and clenched his eyes against the wind, willing himself to clarity. When he was able to focus on his surroundings again, his right arm was free, and he held the boy by the shoulder in a weary half embrace, feeling the needling in his fingertips as the blood rushed back into his dead hand.

His chin on the boy’s shoulder, he whispered in his ear, “Where are they? Where did they go?”

“To the mine, where are the others. Pero, they will be back!”

The mine, yes. Miguel had said something about seeing to a mine.

“Feet first, or I’ll fall,” The Rider said.

The boy nodded and crouched to saw at The Rider’s ankle cords.

He looked over the boy’s shoulder and shivered.

Gliding towards them across the empty waste was a dark, cyclonic concentration of whirling dust. He had seen such eddies in miniature all across the desert— little tornados that kicked up dry grass and dust in a wild tantrum and then dissipated. Dust devils, he had heard them called. They weren’t devils of course, just frustrated earthbound souls with only will enough to agitate the wind, raging impotently in the boundless wastes. He had stopped to help them when he could.

But this was nothing like those. It was twice the size of the windmill, a spinning funnel of stinging dust and bits of stone that tapered into a fine point, which wavered drunkenly, threatening to topple over. It made straight for them, gathering up sand and ripping up cacti and brush like a brawler arming itself for a fight with anything it could find. The debris was flung outward at them on the arms of the slashing wind, and The Rider’s face was torn by creosote brambles and cactus thorns. Was this how the marshal had died? Flayed to bones by a demon wind? He hunched his shoulders and shielded the boy with his arm as he worked.

The boy shouted, but his voice was lost.

The ladder teetered and the boy flailed for balance. The Rider gripped his shirt, but the sleeve tore and the boy fell backwards with a faraway yell. The Rider slipped and dangled from the rocking windmill, screaming as all his weight fell on his left wrist and the cord around his torso burned up his flanks. Both feet hung free, but he was almost sure his wrist, maybe his arm, was broken. He twisted for an agonizing instant in the wind before his hand popped free, the leather tearing away the flesh from his wrist and knuckles.

Then he was suspended by the cords around his midsection that burrowed painfully into his underarms. He found his feet on the support beams, pushed up briefly and raised his arms like a boy being taken out of a sweater by his mother. Then he fell hard to the ground, praising God he had not landed on his ankles or shattered either of his legs.

He rolled on his belly and crawled across the whipping sand on his elbows, reaching the boy, who was flat on his back with the ladder across him. He dragged the ladder off the boy and pulled him near by the shirt front.

The boy cried out, alive.

The Rider said another prayer of thanks and dragged the boy to the meager shelter beneath the legs of the windmill itself. Depositing him there between the struts, he saw his coat had been blown up across one of the beams, and he reached for it. As he swept it towards him, he uncovered a long bleached bone stuck half in the sand, on the end of it, the spread of a human hand, like the array of a pipe organ clinging by a thread of browned sinew. It was swathed in a scrap of tattered broadcloth, to which was pinned the faded tin star of a territorial marshal’s badge. So much for the fate of the lawman.

The Rider searched his coat pocket, finding his spectacle case where he’d left it.

Crouching in the blowing wind beneath the tower beside the boy, he bit the case open with his teeth and fumbled to put the blue lenses on his nose. Then, peering up at the looming whirlwind, squinting through the Solomonic seals etched into the glass, he knew what it was he faced.

A long dark shadow dwelt suspended in the center of the whirlwind. As it towered over their heads, The Rider could make out its shape. It was a thin, wraith-like form swaddled in filthy, ragged linen that writhed and snaked like a living corona in the wind. Its overlarge feet and pitiful spindly legs tapered to a point like the cyclone it inhabited, its skeletal arms folded across its wasted chest. From the tangle of swaddling there craned a long, serpentine neck on the end of which drooped a heavy head, hook-beaked, and sheathed in crosshatched sinew and muscle—in overall impression not unlike a skinless flamingo. Glittering avian eyes regarded The Rider with a malevolent glare.

“Lix Tetrax!” The Rider shouted into the blowing wind, and the ragged wind demon paused and cocked its head to hear its own name. There was power in names, Adon had always said. Here the power was in distraction.

The Rider looked frantically about and spied the many rusted, iron nails driven into the foundation of the old windmill, in the rotten wood. He fell forward and dug his fingers as far into the wood as he could, at last prying one of the six inch nails free.

The whirlwind demon’s hooked maw dropped open and let out a harsh condor call only The Rider could distinguish from the scream of the wind, and swept towards him. The tin of the windmill blades rattled violently and the entire tower shook, threatening to uproot.

The Rider pulled off his glasses and held the nail aloft like a talisman. He placed the nail behind one of the lenses with its seal and called out;

“By the treachery of Ornias, and by the Pentalpha seal granted unto Solomon by the highest Sabaoth, I seal thee, Lix Tetrax, called Ephippas, by the holy and precious name of the Almighty God! Adonay, Prerai, Tetragrammaton, Anaphexeton, Inessenfatall, Pathatumon, and Itemon!  I bind you in iron!”

Through the lens, The Rider saw the thing in the cyclone throw back its long neck and wail miserably. It seemed to melt like black ice, dissipating on the wind like ink in a running river. The dark fluid concentrated and flowed towards the blue lens and the nail as if into a vortex, and with a shudder and a fiery impact that traveled like a shock up the length of The Rider’s arms and threatened to fling his hands wide, it poured through the lens, siphoned into the nail behind.

When it was done, the iron nail trembled between The Rider’s two fingers as if it had been charged with lightning. He jammed the nail as hard as he could into the wood from which he’d pried it.

The Rider fell on his side, panting from the effort. Lix Tetrax was not a demon of the highest order, but a demon nonetheless, and subject to a Solomonic seal—the Pentalpha—and the Ineffable Name.

But it was not over yet. The wind shrieked and blew, rattling the windmill, and the sand bit at their flesh. Tiny bits of flying stone caused hairline streaks of blood to open on their exposed skin. The pentacle of the sun which he had used was not the proper binding seal. It would not last, although the creature was corporeal for the moment.

The Mexican boy stared as The Rider weakly pushed himself up, tucking his tender wrist to his side and shouldering into his billowing coat.

There was a colossal snapping sound and a terrible groan from the windmill.

“It’s going to fall!” the boy squealed, scrambling out from underneath it.

The Rider had retrieved his shoes, and he caught the boy by the shoulder and led him quickly away.

“Let’s get to the cantina,” he hollered urgently over the blow. “Be quick, and don’t look back no matter what you hear!”

They rushed between the outbuildings rattling with flying sand, the boy panting as the crackling and groaning continued behind them. He was terrified at the gringo’s words. Why could he not look back? What would he see? Though they went past the telegraph office and back to the empty street, he could still hear the cracking of the old windmill close, as if they had not left it behind at all. He thought perhaps they were running the length of it as it fell, blown down by the wind. Yet though he expected at any moment to feel and hear the great impact, it never came. Only the snapping and groaning as of breaking wood and twisting tin and the hurricane roar.

His curiosity got the best of him as they reached the boardwalk, and he glanced over his shoulder, expecting to see the windmill come crashing down into the street.

Instead, he saw something he would never see again and yet would carry with him always—something he would remember in his loneliest, darkest moments, up until he lay alone in a dim, still room many years later, waiting for death.

The base of the windmill stood in the alley between the buildings, uprooted from its foundation. He only wondered how the windmill had come to be there for a half an instant.

As he watched with unbelieving eyes, the spindly beams of the windmill moved. They scuttled independently, like the legs of a crippled fly or a maimed spider, and, towering over the flapping shop awnings, it lurched out into the street. The splayed face turned jerkily like the head of a questing tin daisy peering up and down the street, seeking them. The blades flashed in the sun as they swiveled with a slow, tortuous squeaking sound and the ‘head’ regarded them. Then it was staggering unnaturally into the middle of the street in pursuit of them, the entire unwieldy structure pitching and shambling like an ungainly, animated milking stool.

The boy screamed as he had never known he could.

Then the gringo had him by the shirt front. He pitched him into the open doorway of the cantina, through the clacking doors. He fell to the floor, still screaming.

“Bring a bottle of liquor and the bung starter! Fast! Now!” he yelled.

The boy pulled himself up. He caught a glimpse of the windmill’s wooden legs stomping toward the cantina, quivering with each step, and he spun on his belly and got to his feet and ran for the bar, numbly noticing the blood on the floor from the last time the gringo had been in there.

He dove over the counter top and fell behind. He almost hugged his knees and buried his face and stayed there. Almost. He mumbled as he worked, trembling hands knocking over bottles and smashing whole shelves of liquor as they sought the bung starter. Prayers he had not said since he was very young rattled off so quickly the words made no sense, but they were empowered with a true and desperate desire to be heard and understood. To God and Jesus and Our Lady, and to all the saints.

He heard a gigantic crash and felt the building shudder. The bung starter fell from the shelf and landed at his feet. He gripped it in one hand and a bottle of clear aguardiente in the other, then he staggered around the edge of the bar.

The gringo stood spraddle-legged in the doorway, as though he had just ducked inside.  Filling up the whole entrance was the turning head of the wind mill. It strained against the frame. The adobe flaked from the wall. Cracks appeared like lightning. The wind gusted in through the door like the thing’s raging breath, tearing away the curtains and sending the playing cards funneling across the room to scatter in every direction.

The bearded gringo had a shred of flying black fabric torn from his coat. He held out his hand and hollered for him to come.

The Rider took the bottle and bit the cork out, jamming the scrap of his coat sleeve into the neck. Then he began striking the bung starter, trying to light the makeshift fuse as the head of the animated windmill pushed further into the entrance, blades squealing and bending backwards, windows smashing, tables overturning.

The cloth lit, into a lively, fluttering fire.

He turned to face the unnatural thing, hearing its shrill keening in his ears.

It was said that the angels had pursued the fugitive Lilith, the mother of all demons to the Red Sea, and spared her life only when she agreed to allow one hundred of her children to die every day.

Today was this one’s turn.

The Rider flung the bottle into the face of the windmill and it shattered, splashing liquid fire. The old wood of the tower frame quickly caught and spread down its length. It screamed, a sound like howling wind bending metal and The Rider backed up into the cantina, hands clamped to his ears.

The metal daisy face withdrew and the flaming tower spun in the middle of the street, flailing as the brittle wood blackened and began to collapse, shedding fiery beams and crackling as it shook itself to pieces.

The wind lessened almost immediately, and a fine rain of dust fell for a few seconds in a gentle cloud over everything, dwindling the fire and half-burying the broken windmill.

Nothing truly died, of course, but the shock of disincorporation was akin to death for a demon or any possessing spirit. Defeated on the physical plane, the violent entity would dissipate into the ether and return to whatever hellish wellspring had birthed it to gather its will. It would be a long time before it visited the earth again.

The Rider fell into one of the empty chairs.

The boy stood nearby, lips moving soundlessly.

“I told you not to look,” The Rider admonished him, gripping his own wrist and grimacing.

The boy reached for one of the clear bottles under the bar and poured the strong smelling liquid into a clean glass, spilling some all around with his shaking hand.

He had only ever tasted beer and hated it, but the hard clean burning of the aguardinte was not like beer. It spread across his raging stomach and made him pleasantly drowsy, so that it was not long before the blood on the floor and the crackling and popping of the windmill smoldering in the street did not bother him so much, and he felt he could speak without gibbering.

“They came from the desert,” he said.

The Rider looked up. He had bound up his wrist tightly with a bar towel and was opening and closing his fingers.

“The men with the guns,” said the boy. “We thought they were rurales come to water their horses. The big man and the black man were out front. The mayor and the marshal went to the cantina to talk to them, and the big man killed the mayor in the street with his sword…cut off his head.”

The boy looked into the street, and The Rider was unsure if it was the burning windmill or the rolling head he was seeing.

“They took the marshal’s guns and they locked him in the jail. One of the men found the telegraph operator. He was trying to wire for help. He killed him, and they cut the wires. We all hoped that the message had gone through....”

“Where are all the others?” The Rider pressed, pulling on his shoes. “Dead?”

“Working in the mine. In the gold mine.”

The town had a gold mine. Probably it was newly discovered. That was why the little hamlet looked on the verge of prosperity. The unfinished manor house, so out of place on the border, the clean buildings. They had foolishly advertised their good fortune like a lady wearing diamonds in an alley, and the first band of renegades that had come along had taken it.

Scarchilli was an admittedly industrious bandit, forcing the townspeople to work the mine.  With the help of the black sorcerer to turn aside unwary travelers with the wind demon, they could have stayed in the town as long as they wanted, eating and drinking their fill, then finally leaving with sacks of gold when they were through.

It was quite an accomplishment, keeping an entire town hostage with only ten or twenty men, armed or no. Freeing them would be difficult, especially if Scarchilli kept the children or the women in some central place to insure the mens’ obedience.

“Where are the women and the children?”

“I told you, señor. In the mine.”

“When do they take the people out of the mine then for the night?”

“They do not leave,” the boy said. “They work until they are dead.”

The Rider stood and went to the door. The sorcerer waited in the big house. But he was ill-equipped to face him without even his enchanted pistol, still shoved through Scarchilli’s waistband.

“You’d better find another hiding place,” he said. “They might come looking for me.”

“Señor!” the boy started, gripping his sleeve.

The Rider turned.

“In the jail are some of the marshal’s guns. He keeps the key to the rifle rack on a little hook behind the door, and there are bullets in his desk. Maybe the banditos have not got them.”

The Rider nodded.

“Thank you.”

“Señor.”

The Rider paused again at the doorway.

“My papa whose cantina this is. Maybe he is not dead yet. He is called Eladio. He is...”

“I know,” said The Rider. “In the mine.”

* * * *

The business in the cantina with the two Mexicans had been more a matter of wits and advantage than the sort of strict gun prowess touted by men who killed for a living. The Rider had practiced drawing quickly, but doubted he could be relied upon to hit anything beyond a few feet. Long years of reading by candlelight had rendered him nearsighted.

Of course, he had learned to kill.

He was not the sort of man to dwell on the war, as so many men on the frontier were.  Nearly twenty years later, men still died by the relativity of their birthplace to the Mason-Dixon Line.

The Rider’s participation in the war had been his ultimate reason for breaking with his enclave. The rebbes hadn’t understood his willingness to fight in a conflict that did not directly concern their isolated commune. In their eyes, it had been a war of industry versus agriculture, a conflict of opposing political ideologies, both entirely too Christian for their tastes. At the very least, it was a war to free the unfortunate schvartzes. And while this had been a noble endeavor, in their opinion it was not enough to warrant his breaking from his mystic studies.

The Rider had tried to tell them of the forces he had observed massing in Heaven and in the Yenne Velt which so mirrored their own—that the opposing forces of the Rebellion were both divinely and infernally inspired. Was it not written in the Bereshit Raba that ‘both Heaven and Earth are balanced by each other?’ ‘As above, so below.’ There was a correspondence to be perceived in all levels of the universe. There had been more at stake than the emancipation of slaves or the preservation of agricultural economics, although these were empirical symptoms of the greater universal War. The Rebellion, like a satellite conflict localized in the mortal world, had sprung from a greater border war, and the borders were between Heaven and Hell.

They had called him blasphemer, and refused to believe that God or the Adversary would take a direct interest in the wars of men. Blind foolishness. Hadn’t God Himself felled the walls of Jericho? Hadn’t He invigorated Samson against the Philistines, and sent fire and death on the Egyptians? Why these righteous men of faith had readily accepted these doctrines and been so hard hearted against the idea that God favored one army of Christians over another, he hadn’t been able to understand.

The rebbes had even suggested he had worn the blue so that he could fulfill some ungodly bloodlust fostered in his soul by the forbidden teachings of his master, Adon. For this he had been barred from their company. They had long sought an excuse to expel him. He had given it to them at last when he enlisted in Ford’s Independent Company in Colorado.

The war had taught him that men could think themselves righteous and be not so, just as it had taught him to kill. But unlike the lessons of the Merkabah, he had never truly taken to the latter. Anticipation or aftermath, it still caused his hands to shake, his palms to sweat, as if it were the first time he’d held a rifle.

This time was no different.

The rifle he held now was a Henry repeater. He had found it, and the box of cartridges, in the jail where the boy had told him they would be. It was cool in his hands, but he knew with a dozen armed men to face, it would soon be hot to the touch.

The mine was a mile out of town, driven into the base of the rocky hills, a crude cave blasted wide enough for two men to walk abreast.

Two men stood there now, in the aperture, lighting lamps against the setting sun, their rifles leaned against the stone wall. The Rider recognized them as two of the men who had presided over his would-be execution at the windmill. They had been anxious to go. Now, they seemed fearful to stay. They kept whispering to each other, and looking to the dark sky.

Nearby, a large remuda of horses slept within a makeshift corral of brambles and rope. It could have been all the horses in the town, and the bandits’ besides.

He wished he could call forth one of the little whirlwinds now to send them running, but he was no magician.

His wrist throbbed. The boy had bound it tightly, but he could barely feel his fingers on his left hand. He could move it, with difficulty. At least it wasn’t broken. If he managed to kill these two with his rifle, he might be able to kill a couple more as they ran out of the mine. Scarchilli would not come out though, and the next gunshots heard would probably mean the death of the townspeople inside.

He needed a way in. He needed to free the people inside, or else kill Scarchilli and the bandits before they could turn on the kidnapped workers.

Slowly, on quiet feet, he began to make his way around the low hill toward the entrance. The war had taught him how to kill, yes.

It had taught him other lessons as well.

* * * *

Hector Scarchilli bit into a hard biscuit and spat the stale mess onto the dirt floor.

Miguel turned to look at him, glanced at the wet shreds of bread and smiled.

“How much longer till we can leave this goddamned town?” Scarchilli muttered.

“I guess that depends on how rich you want us all to be, jefe,” Miguel shrugged.

Scarchilli nodded. He had promised his men they would all be rich enough to never have to work again. Banditry was work. Killing was work, and to hell with any son of a bitch who claimed otherwise. There was a stupid notion among the campesinos and the holy padres and the viejas that banditos were shiftless and lazy. Goddamn! Had they ever spent weeks in the deep desert with rurales and bounty killers on their trail? Had they ever truly thirsted? So badly one felt as if their soul itself were drying up and their brain was cracking beneath the hot skull like baked clay?

How many of these soft bellied bastards would suffer such a thirst or hunger and then be strong enough to resist riding into a town that housed a cool, clear well or whose air hung with the smell of warm tortillas and yet hid fifty murderous pistolas in the shade?

How many of them were man enough to leave behind a life of certainty for the crazy life, where not even the trustworthiness of one’s own comrades or the coming of a new day was guaranteed without paying the price of lead and powder?

The life of a bandit was hard; the life of a chief of bandits, even more so. One had to inspire love and fear in the wolves beneath, or be torn apart at the first opportunity.

He promised his men an end to this life. A return to sweethearts and mothers, and homes long left behind in a trail of blood and dust. All for a deal with that black devil out of Hell. It hadn’t seemed a bad deal. All the gold from the new mine at Polvo Arido in exchange for an equal share and two women Kelly would select himself from among the town. He had taken the mayor’s daughter and a straw haired girl who worked in the eatery. The only other demand he’d made was to live alone in the big house.

Now, Scarchilli was not as sure as he had been. He weighed that soft bellied life against the dread that grew daily in his soul. He was a man who had been, for many years, neighborly with death, and had done deeds worthy of a place of honor in the lowest country of Hell. Always he had reasoned that men were animals anyway, not capable of right or wrong, only deserving of survival if they earned it through strength or action. A wolf killed sheep to sustain itself.

The magic of the black man made him look over his shoulder. He had never feared death, or what came after, before he had seen Kelly’s powers, and what it had done to the people of this town.

“How much gold does a man need, Miguel, when you weigh it against his soul?” Scarchilli mused, patting the gilded pistol he had taken from the bearded gringo. The stones on the handle of this trinket alone could keep him alive for years in his hometown, and probably buy him the alcalde’s office as well.

Miguel listened to the monotonous ringing of tools for a moment longer. The room where the men gathered was quiet but for the snoring of the drunk and the slowing melody of sleepy Diego strumming a ballad idly on his guitar as he too began to doze in the corner. Each echo of metal on rock was a beat of time whose rhythm challenged the idleness of the dying music.

“You want to break our deal with El Crepusculo?” Miguel murmured.

The evil storm had broken at some point before nightfall. They had come up from looking over the people in the mines and noticed the stillness. It was strange after living with the wind for so long. But they had heard Kelly’s drums pounding from town, and none of them wanted to go near the big house when the drums were beating.

“I don’t think that black bastard cares for gold,” Scarchilli said, coming to stand beside him.

“What then?”

“I don’t know, paisano.” He listened to the unending clinking in the tunnel. “I don’t know what he wants. He’s like a hungry dog for it, whatever it is. Pero, whatever it is, I don’t want him to take it from me. Maybe he is the Devil. Maybe it’s all of our souls he wants to take.” He nodded out to the dark tunnel. “Like he took theirs’.”

“Some of the men think the way you do,” Miguel said. He did not say if he was one of those men. “Others see only the sacks filled with gold, fatter every day. You promised them each a fortune to bear home.”

“Fiero and Sucio are dead,” Scarchilli said, stepping over one of his sleeping men and plucking a half empty bottle of tequila from the crook of the man’s arm. “That’s two less fortunes to make.”

Miguel was quiet as Scarchilli tipped back. He saw the scar down his face flare pink, as if it indicated the potency of the drink that drained from the spotty bottle. Miguel had been with him in Monterrey when a gringo’s Bowie knife had lashed across a cantina table and done that to him. They had shot their way through Tejanos and Apaches and rurales together. Many years choking on blood and dust and powder smoke. Many women and friends were gone or buried or dried up bones in some nameless land that had drunk their blood. Yet never had Miguel blamed him for any trouble they’d seen.

But he blamed him now. It was Scarchilli that had made the deal with that black devil. Truth be told, if Scarchilli had not suggested it, Miguel would eventually have put his blade in the brujo himself and cut him into little pieces, if his evil blood didn’t melt his steel. He feared they would all die dealing with this Kelly.

“We kill him and go, then?” Miguel ventured.

Scarchilli shook his head. “We just go, amigo. Pack up what we can carry and go. Before he gets the storm up again and we’re stuck in here with him.”

“If we leave him alive, he’ll find us.”

“Maybe so. Pero, he’s one man. What can one man do on foot?”

A man’s scream echoed down the tunnel mouth. A few of the men stirred from their palettes on the floor, blinking sleepily and reaching for their guns.

Scarchilli unlimbered his pistol and Miguel snatched up his carbine and rushed out into the tunnel.

* * * *

The Rider mouthed a curse as the stone he’d hurled struck the lantern in the guard’s hands while he lifted it to the hook. The man had paused a moment longer than he’d expected to lean forward and light a cigarette between his lips on the lantern wick. The lantern exploded in a flash of fire and glass, dousing his face and shoulders in flaming oil. The guard screamed and flailed backwards, twisting and lurching like a blazing tornado in the dark. His partner cursed and shielded his eyes.

A corporal in Ford’s Company, Dick Belden from Tennessee, had taught The Rider to pitch stones in camp sometime before the fight at Glorieta Pass, though he had never gotten as adept. Belden had an arm like a catapult and could knock a running rabbit spinning. He’d been from a poor mountain family, and without a rifle, that was how they’d got their supper. The Rider had gotten good enough to peg squirrels out of trees under the corporal’s tutelage, but hadn’t tried out his throwing arm in some time. Case in point, he’d been aiming for the man’s temple, not the lantern. He hadn’t intended the noise, or he would’ve used the rifle outright. Still, no one had fired a shot yet. Maybe they would think it was an accident.

The other guard overcame his surprise and shoved his partner to the dirt, pulling his own serape over his head to beat the burning man out. As the serape cleared his head, The Rider’s second rock pegged him in the forehead like a bullet from David’s sling and put him down.

The burning man rolled frantically in the dust, still screaming, as The Rider slipped down through the rocks toward the mine’s mouth.

Two figures emerged from the tunnel as The Rider reached a stand of boulders to the right of the entrance.

“Ay mi Dios!” exclaimed the first, who bent to extinguish the first guard. The Rider caught the glint of gold teeth as he spoke, and recognized his gait as that of Miguel, the man who’d strapped him to the windmill.

The Rider called out;

“Miguel!”

Miguel’s head snapped up in dumbfounded surprise at the sound of his own name coming at him out of the dark.

The Rider was already charging, and Miguel registered shock as the stock of The Rider’s Henry rifle bashed him across the jaw, sending three of his gold teeth spinning out into the night.

The second man out of the tunnel was Scarchilli. His big pistol exploded, flinging a huge bullet past The Rider’s shoulder, so close he could feel the heat and smell its passing. Scarchilli backed away, cocking the pistol with both hands. In the glow of the lantern light, his face registered confusion. He didn’t even know who his attacker was.

The Rider spun the rifle and levered two fast shots blindly at the bandit chief as he kept running. His wrist sang with the effort. No use in refraining from gunplay now. The ones inside would know now they were under attack. One bullet whanged the side of the mine entrance, kicking up dust and bits of stone. He didn’t see the second one hit, but Scarchilli fell backwards and landed in a heap.

The Rider plunged into the dark mine mouth, feeling the cool air, feeling his heart thundering. Glorieta Pass and Cabin Creek had taught him; when the time came, hit fast and hard and keep moving. Don’t give the enemy a chance to organize his thoughts enough to mount a defense. He only prayed none of the townspeople were this close to the entrance when the real shooting started.

As the light of the lantern receded behind him, he rushed down the dark passage towards a new glow, that of a rectangle of light. An open doorway cut into the left side of the passage. He heard Spanish, jumbled and running together from a dozen different throats.

He slid to one knee and shot the first four men who stumbled clumsily out into the main tunnel. They were easy targets in the light. They fell gasping, three in the dark tunnel and one flailing back into the lighted room.

The Rider was up and running toward the light before the last one’s gun fell clattering to the stone.

The voices in the side chamber went from exclamatory yells to hushed               interrogatives and commands of “Cállate!”

The Rider paused only to grab a rifle from the trembling grip of one of the three men gasping in the tunnel. He charged right into the room, before he had the time to think or hesitate.

Two of the bandits inside were crouched over the one who’d been hit. They looked up in surprise in the first instant, and were lying shot the next. A third man who’d been leaning against the side of the wall next to the doorway almost killed The Rider, but his shot went wild.  He was unused to the sound of gunfire in close quarters. The Rider knocked him senseless with the barrel of the rifle and dove to the floor, landing behind the first shot man (the one whose comrades had been inspecting him) as the bullets began to fly.

The Rider put his ear to the dirt floor and pressed himself behind the fallen bandit, using him as a breastwork while the first rapid volley exploded overhead. A few bullets meant for him struck the bleeding bandit, and the man jerked and groaned as his compañeros finished The Rider’s work.

The Rider marked the direction of the shots as best he could, then took up the fresh rifle and rolled out of cover firing. Two shots went wild, but the third and fourth took off a pair of bandits at the shins and they fell howling.

To his surprise and relief, The Rider found that a good portion of the bandits had apparently retired for the evening quite drunk. Some of the men were just now rising from their bedrolls, some still fumbling for their guns. One bleary-eyed bandit took a swing at The Rider with the only thing he had on hand, a guitar. The Rider raised the rifle and the instrument splintered against the barrel. The Rider bashed the guitar player with the rifle and killed the man behind him as he rose from his bedding triumphantly brandishing a misplaced pistol.

Lead sought him, but in the confusion, found fellows. Bandits shot bandits. Men swore drunkenly and screamed as the smoke roiled thick and heavy in the close rock room like the steam from a barreling locomotive filling a tunnel. The bandits had to discern their fellows and hesitated to shoot at an obscure form. The Rider had no such compunctions and let loose on everything that moved. Shadows rose before him in the acrid white fog only to fall again. The Rider took pistols out of dying hands and used them till they were spent.

When it was done, The Rider crouched behind a riddled, overturned table, drenched in liquor and flecked with strange blood, his ears ringing and his arms trembling, his nose filled with the smell of gunpowder. ‘Devil’s Tobacco,’ Major Ford had once called that smell. No other man stirred. He had no idea how many he had killed and how many had died at the hands of their friends. He knew only that his God had surely spared him a glance.

A few men groaned in the relative quiet, but none moved.

He stood up slowly, and threw up his gun at the figure that appeared in the doorway.  The hammer fell on an empty chamber with a click like the closing of a coffin lid.

Scarchilli stood, a trickle of blood from under his scalp bisecting his face, dripping from his beard. He regarded the devastation the gringo had wrought on his band. He knew all these men. Knew them by name. He had ridden with most of them for years. None so long as Miguel, but he knew their laughter, and their ways, better than he knew that of his own bastard children.

Diego’s guitar was in pieces, the strings coiling up the broken neck like frayed hairs on an old woman’s head. Pablo’s ridiculous yellow sombrero had been torn to scraps by bullets.  The strident voice of fat, laughing Manolo would never be heard again. There was blood everywhere, pooled on the floor and splashed on the walls. The blood of his men. His.

“You killed them all pretty goddamned good, you skinny son of a bitch,” Scarchilli growled. He had lost his Dragoon in the dark. His hand went to his sash and pulled the gringo’s own golden pistol.

He pointed it dead at The Rider’s chest, cocked the hammer, and pulled the trigger.

The Rider stepped around the table. The pistol was warded against being fired by anyone who didn’t bear the lapis lazuli sigil he wore on the middle finger of his right hand. Unfortunately, he’d been stripped of that ring along with all his other mystical bodyguards. The pistol wouldn’t do either of them any good.

Scarchilli let the pistol fall, and with a flourish and a rasp, drew out his broad cavalry saber. The cutting edge shone in the meager light.

“I’m going to slash you from your eyes to your huevos, cabron.”

The Rider spied a mattock leaning in a nearby corner and snatched it up.

Scarchilli and The Rider circled each other, picking their way over the bodies and drawing closer, as if carried on the inexorable current of a whirlpool.

They met, Scarchilli chopping savagely with his sword and The Rider beating back the ringing blows with the iron head of the mattock. His wrist was on fire. His left pe’ah parted and the end of hair fell away as the keen edge whistled past, nearly cleaving him from shoulder to waist.

The Rider ducked under a broad swing and swept the mattock up, nearly knocking the saber from Scarchilli’s hand. The bandit was nimbler than he looked. He danced backwards and lunged forward, the point jabbing The Rider in the shoulder before he retreated.

Blood leaked from the wound immediately, spreading across The Rider’s shirt. The bandit’s blade arced overhead as he pressed forward. The Rider blocked it with the upheld cross of the mattock and he spun and caught Scarchilli on the shoulder with the back end.

Scarchilli grunted and landed a biting slash across The Rider’s knee, tearing his pant leg and the skin beneath.

The Rider gave ground, limping back and lashing defensively.

Scarchilli laughed and gave the sword a flick that sent The Rider’s blood spattering on the rock wall. He described a figure eight and touched the flat of the sword lightly to his forehead, plainly intending to draw the last measure of blood with the next cut.

“Got a prayer ready, gringo?”

The Rider held the mattock in both hands, shoulder level like a woodsman’s axe.

“Just for you,” he quipped in a haggard voice.

Scarchilli chuckled and moved in, feinting a backhanded cut, then twisting it into a lunge at The Rider’s heart.

The Rider in turn made as if to intercept the false attack and brought the mattock in hard to batter aside the next.

Surprised, Scarchilli slipped forward to regain his sword, but caught the toe of his boot on in the crook of a dead man’s arm. He staggered, and The Rider brought the mattock down on the top of his head with a shuddering impact that drove his skull down between his shoulders.

The Rider released the tool and the bandit fell with it, blood gushing from his nose.

He went to the center of the room and retrieved his gilded Volcanic pistol, pushing it into the lip of his pants. After a minute’s searching, he left the room with a lit lantern and a loaded revolver.

He stepped out into the black tunnel and turned the light toward the back.

“Hello!” he called out, his voice resounding. “Don’t be afraid! Come out!”

He waited, and his voice was met only with a monotonous ringing of metal on stone.

He frowned, and headed down the tunnel. Was it possible that the main body of the townspeople was so far back in the mine that they hadn’t heard him? Maybe on some lower level?

He broke into a trot, racing the advancing glow of the lantern light as it ate away the blackness. Surely they didn’t make these people work in total darkness. How would they be able to see what they were doing? He looked for a pinprick of light in the distance. There was nothing. Maybe around some bend in the passage.

Another thought occurred to him. Who was overseeing their toil? The tall clerk had told him there were about twenty bandits in all, the boy had said fifteen. He had killed two in the cantina, incapacitated two guards at the mine entrance and knocked Miguel senseless. Four had died in the tunnel, and he’d left ten lying dead or wounded in the room along with Scarchilli. There had to be more. Or else, who was guarding the townspeople?

“Eladio!” he called, thinking of the name the boy had given him. His father, the cantina’s proprietor.

“Eladio!”

Still no answer.

The Rider turned a corner, holding his procured revolver at the ready and shining the light down the passage. He stopped and peered dumbfounded at what he saw.

Seven or eight men and women, filthy and emaciated to skeletons stood or crouched in the dark tunnel, chipping away at the rock with various implements while a few small, silent children on their knees sifted through the fresh gravel and dropped flecks of mineral into iron buckets. Their homespun clothes hung like loose drapery on their wraithlike frames.

They did not react to his appearance, nor cease their drudgery.

“Hey there!” The Rider called.

Nothing.

He took a few steps towards them.

Then, of a sudden, they stopped their work simultaneously and stood upright in one motion, as if choreographed, or possessing of one mind. They turned and looked at him.

The Rider took a few steps backwards, his hackles raising, dread running cold fingers up his spine.

They stared at him with dark, dilated eyes, their expressions mournful from lack of sustenance. Colorless cheeks, fleshless and hollow, black eyes sunken, hair matted on large, embryonic skulls, lips drawn and cracked. Their arms hung at their sides, picks, hammers and shovels dangling from long fingers, swaying at the ends of arms whose musculature had so atrophied that they were like bone painted with flesh and dusted with powder. They looked like bodies excavated from the very mine in which they toiled, mummified archaeological curiosities given a parchment covering and a semblance of life. They were starving, exhausted.

Then as before, they moved as one, with a swiftness that seemed impossible for their wasted forms to muster. They moved towards him, their tools rising to their shoulders, poised to strike, to pick and cut and bash him to pieces.

The only sound they made was the scrabble of their feet on the rock floor. The entire passage filled with pounding and shuffling as they ran.

The Rider dropped the lantern, turned, and fled.

* * * *

A full moon shone on the twisting, rocky avenues between the boulders and over the low sand hills and through to Polvo Arido. The dying glow of the smoldering windmill in the center of town was a faint beacon that drew The Rider like a lost ship.

He had not seen his pursuers since they had vomited gray and shambling from the mouth of the mine in a cloud of ore dust. In the light of the lone lantern and like a many armed wave, they had overcome the groggy Miguel and the guards who were only just coming to. The banditos had no chance to defend themselves from the press of mindless, silent humanity. The Rider had not seen clearly what became of them, but he saw the falling picks and shovels, and heard their screams and the popping of bones. Then it had been only the earth shaking tramp of fifty or more men, women, and children running en masse, full speed across the hills after him.

He noticed as he ran that those among the maddened townspeople who stumbled and fell silently were trampled without hesitation by those bringing up the rear, like herd animals in a stampede.

They ran, but they were limited by the potential of their wasted bodies. The Rider was exhausted and wounded. The blood still ran from the stab wound in his shoulder, his sprained wrist had swollen to three times its size, and his knee sang. Yet he was stronger. He was soon far enough ahead to slow his pace and his racing heart.

The black sorcerer had put some unfathomable spell upon these people, to make them work without food or rest. How many had died already down in those dungeon dark mines?  The Rider hesitated to turn and fight them. They were bewitched and starved. One at a time their malnourished bones would break like dry kindling from any blow he gave, but together they were a rabid juggernaut, as the death of the Mexicans at the mouth of the mine attested to. He couldn’t fight them all off, and he didn’t think he could lose them either.

Then he heard the drums. They were a steady, bass rhythm, alien to the silent border village, which should have been swirling with joyous brass, lively guitars, and the boisterous calls of Mexican balladeers. The drums were ominous, promising nothing but oblivion, but making a good argument for coming anyway.

The Rider knew where they were coming from without stopping to listen.

A wooden pipe dangled from a string over the doorway of the unfinished manor house. It brushed against The Rider’s head as he entered. The revolver was in his good hand. When he was inside, he turned and closed the door, then strained to push an abandoned wheelbarrow against it. He overturned it and wedged it close. It wouldn’t hold long.

The room smelled of burning candles and strong liquor.

He moved warily into the grand room, where the drums were thunderous, like the pounding of the hearts of gods, sharing in some Elysian ecstasy. He had taken care to wear his Solomonic lenses this time. The black man’s hypnotic eye would not entrap his mind again.

The sorcerer was there, standing in his coat and hat and smoking a cigar, staring through the hole in the roof up at the moon. The Rider’s amulets and talismans had joined the bone necklaces and fetishes he had been wearing the last time they’d met.

As he crossed the threshold, the sorcerer gestured to a pair of pale figures on the landing overhead, and the blurred hands that beat out the violent rhythm ceased abruptly. The sudden silence was like a violence unto itself.

The Rider looked up and saw two women, one the beautiful black haired woman from the picture in the watch he’d taken from Sucio, the other pale and yellow haired with freckled skin. Both were bare breasted and coated in a sheen of sweat that shined in the moonlight, their smooth shoulders rising and falling from the exertion of their drumming. They wore white cotton skirts, their hair bound up in white kerchiefs. They had the same empty expressions as the people in the mine. Candles flickered on the stairs, making a path.

The sorcerer spoke without turning away from the moon.

“You return, blanc.” He took the cigar from his mouth and pointed it at him. “It was you who did away with my wind djab, wasn’t it? I have been calling it all day.”

“It won’t be coming back,” The Rider said.

He moved further into the room, raising the revolver.

“That won’t do anything,” the black man said.

The Rider pulled the trigger of the pistol, and it clicked on as if on an empty chamber, though he had checked the loads twice outside.

“I told you,” he said, in a sing-song voice, taking a long drag of his cigar.

More magic. The Rider let the pistol fall to the floor.

“What have you done to these people?”

“I have done what pleases Kalfou, and fulfills my own ambitions.”

“Who is Kalfou?”

“Kalfou is the loa of the crossroads, blanc. The master of left-handed magic. It is his power I have wielded over these cattle. I am his favored cheval.”

“Tell Kalfou to release them then,”

“Tell him yourself,” the black man said, turning to look at him for the first time. “He is coming, blanc. When the djab did not answer, I called him.”

The black man raised his milky lens again, favoring him with the pale eye.

Through the blue tint of the Solomonic glass, The Rider observed the energies emanating from the eye in swirling patterns. The eye was like some filter that tapped into the etheric plane and expelled a tangible force into this world.

“That won’t do anything,” The Rider mocked.

The black man frowned and took his spectacles off entirely, focusing all his attention upon The Rider.

“I told you.” The Rider smiled.

Kelly wanted to spit. This strange, bearded blanc was indeed a nuisance. Why had not the wind djab fleshed him to the bone as it had the troublesome marshal? He had heard the commotion in the street and felt the dying of the wind. Immediately, he had called the women and started the drums speaking, but to no avail. Who was this freak out of the desert who could resist and deflect a servant of the Petro loa?

Kelly had thought the destruction of Scarchilli and his band would be the only magic he worked tonight. He had long known of their impending treachery, and assumed the loss of the wind djab would give their shaky courage the bolstering it needed to turn against him, He had set the zhambis to kill anyone and everyone they came across, assuming the unsuspecting bandits and their chief would be overcome in their sleep or torn to scraps in the mines. He had not anticipated this blanc escaping to his very door. The zhambis would be at his heels.

This was all supposed to have been a simple matter; bleed the mine dry, dry gulch Scarchilli and his pawns, and make off with the gold to set himself up somewhere as a king with his two willing brides, churning out followers for Kalfou. He had even entertained thoughts of seeing the land of his ancestors.

Scarchilli’s plotting had necessitated the acceleration of his plan. It was no matter. The gold was already piled high in the stable, and would be sufficient to keep him fat for the rest of his days.

But this blanc. This miserable, tricky blanc with his strings of amulets and powerful talismans. He used magic Kelly was unfamiliar with. He could feel the power humming in the objects he’d stripped from this blanc, but as of yet he’d been unable to unlock their secrets.

Who was this man, and what was he doing here?

He had consulted with Kalfou, and now Kalfou was coming. The matter was in the hands of the master of the crossroads now.

Without another word, Kelly turned his back on the blanc. He glanced up at the two women on the landing, admiring their forms and thinking how it would be to be with them. He smiled and gazed up through the open roof at the clear night sky. He was heady from the rum and potions and the spells he had worked this night, opening himself to the approaching spirit wending down through the stars. He took the cigar from his mouth and lit the veve as a beacon for his master.

The Rider opened his mouth to speak, and stepped back as the black man took his cigar from his lips and dropped it to the floor.

It was the smell that made him recoil, for he knew it well. The gunpowder on the floor flared as the heat of the cigar touched it off, and soon the intricate tetramorph was traced out in brilliant fire. There was rum there too, and it burned, dancing as the black man stood still and raised his thin arms. The pattern seared itself on The Rider’s eyeballs.

The Rider backed further away. He could feel a presence turning its attention to the fire; he could feel it approaching. He crouched down and tore open the seam of his rekel coat, pulling out the lining and a bit of chalk he kept secured there.

Hastily he began to describe a Solomonic seal on the floor, drawing the circle around him and inscribing the Ineffable Name. He did it quickly, with practiced hand, muttering the Psalm of exorcism and the formulas from the Testament of Solomon he had memorized long ago.

He glanced up in his work as a swirling ethereal funnel plunged through the hole in the roof and landed squarely on the black man’s shoulders, staggering him. As it began to take shape, he heard the first of the pounding on the front door.

The townspeople had arrived.

He returned to his work.

He had finished the inscriptions and was sitting in the circle, whispering his ecstatic mantra and loosening the moorings on his soul when a guttural voice like the creak of an ancient chest opening, clattered an inquiry from the black man’s lips, in what sounded like French.

The Rider looked up, and saw the sorcerer had turned to face him. He stood in the hunched posture of a man possessed with a heavy burden, his shoulders sloping and his waist bent as if he bore it on his back. His eyes were blank, rolled up in his skull, and his lower jaw protruded, showing the bottom row of white teeth.

This was the man.

Through the lenses, The Rider saw the spirit.

It was in the form of a small, half naked, withered old black man in torn red breeches and a straw hat clinging to the sorcerer’s back and peering over his shoulder. The hands that gripped the sorcerer’s shoulder were capped in curved, black taloned fingernails that dug into his body like those of a hunting hawk. Agate eyes shown in a dark, prodigiously wrinkled and drawn face, and a terrible smile revealed teeth that were filed to carnivorous points.

The Rider closed his eyes.

When he saw again, it was with his spirit, and he stepped out of his body, facing Kalfou in the Yenne Velt.

“Kalfou,” The Rider said.

“Who are you, white man?” the guttural voice came again, this time in words that The Rider could understand.

“Tell me your name, demon,” The Rider retorted. “You are not what you pretend to be.”

The entity cocked its head, frowning, waiting for an explanation.

“No spirit could have called Lix Tetrax to do its bidding, only a marshal of demons.”

Kalfou’s teeth disappeared, and he removed his straw hat.

“Very well.” He snarled. “Then let us be frank with each other.”

Instantly, ten horn yellow spikes sprouted from the top of the old black man’s skull, splitting it down the middle. The dark eyes flashed, and then the spikes lanced upward, sprouting pale, fleshy arms beneath them. The arms, coated in wiry golden hairs, parted and rent the elderly visage asunder, and a brutish form burst forth from the withered body like an overlarge bird from an egg. Pigeon gray wings, flecked with black markings like peacock’s feathers, unfurled and spread out over the sorcerer’s head. The sorcerer bent further, going to his knees with the weight of the shape that now perched upon his shoulders.

Eyes that glimmered, only hinted at behind the blackened lenses of the facade form of Kalfou, now shone and wavered like yellow fires in a jack-o’lantern from beneath a single bristling orange eyebrow, which capped the distorted, swollen white face that regarded him anew. The densely freckled visage drooped with ponderous jowls and sat upon a double stack of ample chin. It was a face that had once been handsome and masculine, but now seemed disturbingly childlike with the weight of incalculable gluttony. The bright red hair on its head had once been full and shining. It still hung low, spilling over sloping, hairy shoulders, but had grown stringy and greasy, sparse at the source. The upper body seemed like that of a dying athlete, encased in a grub-like, wasted mass. The wrinkles and emaciation of Kalfou had been replaced by faint stretch marks and rolls of fat, sheathed in a brushy carpet of rusty hair that sprung unruly and unkempt inches from the sickly, sagging white flesh. Beneath the tremendous gut was a lower body garbed entirely in dirty orange hair, and possessed of thin haunches and cloven black hooves.

The Rider wavered, but did not give.

“Do you know me, man?” the awful figure demanded, showing decaying, yellow teeth.

“No,” The Rider said, managing not to stammer before the towering apparition that rose above the sorcerer, all of ten feet tall, crouching even beneath the high ceiling of the house. “We’ve never met. But I know what you are, Grigori.”

The despised of the Fallen, shunned as an embarrassment even by Lucifer’s disciples.

“How do you know?” the wasteful shape demanded, bemused at the insignificant thing before him.

“Because of them,” The Rider said, motioning to the women who stood naked on the landing. “You kept the most beautiful for yourself, probably telling your servant they were for him. You are one of Samyaza’s Fallen: The Watchers who turned from their duty to God for the carnal pleasures of mortal women and let loose the bastard Nephilim on the Earth in the days of Enoch.” The Rider curled his lip in disdain. “You’re nothing but a deviant, posing as a god.” The Rider nodded to the sorcerer. “And this man is your pimp.”

The Watcher raged at this, and stooped as if to snatch The Rider with both tremendous black clawed hands, but stopped short at the circle he had inscribed around himself.

“Leave this town and its people, Grigori,” The Rider demanded.

“You will call me by name, wretch!” the Watcher raged, hissing through teeth like jagged tombstones of piss-stained limestone. “You address Armoni, once a marshal of the Third Legion of Fire! It was I who taught you bumbling, feckless vermin the working of enchantments ten thousand years before your so called King Solomon was squeezed bloody and bawling into this miserable world; when your race feared flame and was content to roll in shit and fight with jackals over the bones of rotting animals!”

“Once a marshal of the Third Legion of Fire. Now a lecher.” The Rider shrugged.

The Watcher drew closer, enraged.

“You know nothing of what you speak! It was love that drove my kind to fall....”

The Rider laughed in the monstrous face before him.

“Lust! The malachim were born knowing only the love of Ha Shem. You Watchers were sent to record the time of man and strayed from your tasks to root at our women like dogs in heat. Look at you! You’re disgusting! You wear your sin plainly. You bartered magic like a pederast peddling sweets and trinkets to lure young innocents. How many times since have you called yourself a god and promised power only to grope and fumble at human women through some unwary mit like this sorcerer?”

Armoni loomed, its boyish face contorted and ugly in its wrath. Yes, how many cults had this being presided over? The drunken orgies of Bacchus or Pan? And what nameless dark doings had he wrought in the name of this Kalfou, his latest incarnation?

“You insignificant bowel worm!” the Watcher roared. “Do you think your measly scribblings and incantations can turn me aside? It was I who taught this knowledge to your forebears! I could blow you to Hell with a blast of my nostrils! I can even now call upon forty legions of demons to shred your soul to rags!”

“Then why don’t you?” The Rider challenged.

Armoni folded his arms across his sagging chest at that and smiled a crooked smile.

“I don’t have to.”

The Rider glanced about him, and was almost jerked back into his earthly body by what he saw. The heavy doors had not held. They hung shattered inward on their hinges, and the gray, mindless mob was clambering through, stumbling over the wheelbarrow, scrabbling across the floor toward his motionless body.

The Rider snapped back into focus. He could do nothing in his exhausted flesh, but he had a slim chance on this plane.

“So you’re a coward too!” he called out to Armoni.

The gigantic face sneered.

“You’ll soon trouble me no more,” it said flatly.

“Then I’ll keep those women from your paws at least!” The Rider yelled, and dove for his body.

“No!” Armoni bellowed, and lanced out at The Rider with one trembling hand. As it passed through the circle, there was a flash of golden fire that seared the hand of Armoni, igniting it in blazing fire. But those seeking claws closed on The Rider’s etheric heel and swept him out of his protection circle like a bun from a hot oven.

Armoni had not lied at least about that. Few of the Fallen could penetrate the seal at all let alone pluck its author from it. Such was the Grigori’s uncontrollable lust, which The Rider had counted on, that it risked agony for two human women.

As the Watcher rose up, drawing The Rider’s flailing spirit along, he laid his hands on the last talisman he had left, one which even he did not truly know the worth of, and prayed. This was the last defense Adon had taught him. There were seventy two sequences of the two hundred sixteen letter name of Ha Shem, the Lord God Yahweh. These names were often unutterable, and were believed to contain the very formulas with which God had created the universe, encompassing aspects of His own divine nature. The Sons of the Essenes had taught him to meditate upon these names, and use them for protection.

The last task of a Merkabah Rider of The Sons of the Essenes was to stitch by hand with threaded gold all seventy two names into the inner seam of his rekel coat. It was a painstaking process, long months of work.  He had never had to use it. Had he not been relieved of his other talismans he would not have fallen upon it now, but as it was, everything depended on it.

He turned the coat inside out as Armoni brought him up to his face. Whirling, he thrust the garment like a blanket over the Watcher’s eyes. There was a tremendous lightning crack and a flash of brilliant fire. He heard Armoni scream and saw his great beating wings burst into flame. He felt an electric jolt shiver through his soul. For an instant he felt himself disincorporating, as if whatever mysterious particles composed his very being had momentarily lost their interconnectedness to each other.

Then with a gasp of burning air, he was back in his body, and from behind, dozens of clenching hands were reaching out, tearing at his hair, his limbs, his clothes. He lurched away from them, diving forward to his hands and knees. He scrambled out of his circle, through the licking, searing flames of the sorcerer’s burning tetramorph, searing his hands and face, singing his beard.

Kelly staggered in the center of the veve.

He felt Kalfou’s terror. The terror of a god! But it had been so unlike Kalfou, this presence. As if...some veil had lifted and Kalfou had disappeared along with it. He had no idea what had happened after being mounted by the loa, only that he felt sick. Blood was gushing from his nose in a bubbling river.

Then he saw the bearded blanc, the fires of Kalfou’s veve flashing in his blue glass eyes as he sprung up at Kelly and grabbed his left hand, jerking something from his finger, a blue ring he had taken from the man’s possessions.

The zhambis. They were in the house! Two of them rushed heedlessly into the burning veve and their clothes bloomed flames. They wheeled away, and amazingly, the sight of their burning brethren gave the remainder pause. They considered the fire, animal eyes glistening with wonder.

The blanc drew something from his pants, the golden gun Scarchilli had claimed. Kelly clamped his hands on the blanc’s arm and they wrestled amid the flames.

The Rider struggled in the sorcerer’s grip. The man was thin, but wiry and surprisingly strong. The gun exploded uselessly, blasting away the rail of the stairs. The sorcerer seemed surprised to see the pistol fire. His spells had no effect on its mechanism, now that The Rider reclaimed the ring that authorized its use.

They lurched back and forth amid the flaming pattern, and the sorcerer forced his arm into the high flame. The Rider gritted his teeth and screamed as the fire burned his arm, but he refused to release his hold on the pistol.

Kelly cooked the blanc’s arm in the fire, but he wouldn’t let go. He threw an elbow into the man’s face, knocking off his blued spectacles. He smiled, and willed his witch’s eye to batter down this treacherous fool once and for all.

The Rider felt the spectacles leave his face and tasted blood in his mouth as the black man’s elbow cracked against his jaw. He clenched his eyes tight, and felt the man’s grip change. He was looking at him now, with that strange eye. He could almost feel the dizzying gaze sounding its invisible energies against his eyelids.

He twisted his arms desperately, seeking the weakest part of his opponent’s grip , the thumbs. For a moment his wrist broke free. It was enough. He jammed the pistol into the black man’s chest and fired.

Kelly spat blood in the blanc’s face as the mule kick of the pistol coughed fire and smoke into his heart. He flew backwards, arms flailing, sailing through the veve fire. He glimpsed the women on the stairs, looking down on him with dispassionate eyes. He remembered slipping on a muddy clay bank as a child, seeing the willow trees waving above him, wheeling crazily, white fluff of a dandelion he’d been blowing spiraling and drifting, fearing the rocks at the bottom of the shallow creek, feeling his father’s arms catching him, remembering his whispered admonitions against fear and carelessness.

He felt those arms now, but they were many.

They saved him from the fall. They embraced him now, tighter. Tighter. Pulling him in every direction, like the good road his mother preached, and the one he followed his father down that led to burning bolls in the night and boiled black flesh and screams, and death and evil. He felt his joints straining, stretching, popping, felt ligaments stretch to their farthest point, then tear. The warm gush of blood in his ears, over his ruined chest and down his arms. Even fingers being jerked from his hands by tiny, clammy fists. Fists and shovels and mattocks falling, excavating his life like gold from the earth of his body.

Kalfou! Kalfou! Papa…?

He screamed, alone in the mob.

The Rider heard the sorcerer scream, and watched the mob of raging, foaming men and women and children swallow him whole and chew him ravenously.

Still they raged on, braving even the fire now and reaching for him, arms bloody to the elbows some of them, eyes bulging and rolling insanely in their sockets.

The Rider turned and ran again for his only avenue. The stairs. He bounded up them two at a time. Ankle buckling, he gripped the rail and pulled himself on. They stumbled up behind him, trampling each other in their eagerness to drag him down.

He gained the landing. The two women stared down at the fire below, oblivious of the mob ascending the stair, oblivious of him. Behind them was a door that led to an unknown room. He grabbed each of them around their slim waists and pulled them inside. He spun and slammed the door, first on a questing arm, again and again until he heard it snap and it recoiled. He threw his shoulder against it, drew the bolt. He turned and yanked an unpainted chifferobe down across the doorway.

He turned and looked about the room, looking for a window he could open, maybe pull these two waifs with him. Yes. There were two windows. And more. Much more. A grand, canopied bed, the sheets disturbed, strange to see a furnished room in an otherwise incomplete house. No doubt the sorcerer had prepared it to share with these two women in their drugged stupor, the leering Grigori Armoni in lecherous ecstasy.

There was a table and chairs. Accoutrements of the sorcerer’s trade lay on the table. Bottles, mortar, pestle. The straw satchel he had worn on their earlier meeting was draped over one of the chairs.

They pounded on the door, the unpainted frame cracking. Fingernails scrabbled on wood. The hinges shuddered. The overturned wardrobe groaned an inch across the floor.

The Rider had thought the spell would end with the sorcerer’s death. How to end it then?  How to return the townspeople to their natural state? Would they follow his last command and then simply stop, to stand and await orders that would never come until they wasted away at last and dropped one at a time?

The two women lay on the floor where he had roughly thrown them. They made no move to pick themselves up, only stared, empty, like inanimate dolls. Where then were they, if not there? To what place had he conjured their souls?

Then The Rider saw them.

He had taken no notice of the candles burning along the wall of the grand bedroom at first. They were like a votive arrangement in some Catholic church. The candlelight danced on shelves of glass jars—no, bottles. Row upon row of them, containing....what? Nothing he could see. Some dark stain on the glass as if by burning. He stepped closer, inspecting them. They were sealed with wax.

The door shuddered and a crack split down the middle. The bureau held. The hinges burst from the wall and a long arm reached through.

The Rider turned and pointed his pistol at the shelves of bottles. He emptied his gun as fast as he could, wildly. The bullets smashed into the shelves, shattering bottles and sending glass flying.

As the gun clicked empty, he let it fall.

One of the girls on the floor, the Mexican, was huddled against the foot of the bed, the palms of her hands pressed against her ears, hair and elbows tucked over her breasts. She stared up at him in wild horror, tears streaming down her cheeks.

“Por favor! Por favor!” she wailed as he loomed over her.

Outside, in the foyer. A few screams and exclamations. Men. Women. Children.

He glanced at the shelves. Most of the bottles had survived his volley. He raced across the room and took up one of the chairs, overturning the table in his haste. The door burst open, and a skinny, white haired form fell over the wardrobe and struggled to rise, snatching at The Rider’s pant leg as he rushed past.

The Rider swung the chair against the shelves like a madman, knocking them clear of the little bottles. He hit the shelves until the chair broke apart, then took to pounding them with his fists, heedless of the glass that cut into his hands, and the splinters of wood that lanced his skin as he broke them to pieces. He kicked the shelves down. He stomped across the floor, seeking every rolling bottle, sending bits of glass flying everywhere.

The dark haired woman thrust her head in her lap and screamed.

The Rider screamed too. He jumped up and down, kicked out, fell bodily on the floor and began to roll in the broken glass, bashing his elbows against the floor like a man in the throes of the St. Vitus Dance.

When at last he lay spent and panting from exertion, bleeding from a dozen cuts, he let the back of his head fall to the floor, and permitted himself to look.

The Mexican woman was praying in Spanish, rocking back and forth. The white girl cowered in a corner, weeping, covering herself in the blanket from the bed.

The thin man who had burst into the room lay crumpled on the floor on one bony cheek, staring at him. His face was splashed with blood that wasn’t his.

“My God,” said the emaciated horror in a rasping voice. “What has happened here?”

“What’s your name?” The Rider panted.

“Eladio.”

* * * *

The last dead man found and buried was the tall clerk from the dry goods store. He had attempted to steal The Rider’s faithful onager from the shed where he’d been tied. The indentation in his skull, just over one of his wide, staring eyes attested both to the animal’s decidedly monogamous nature and the final cowardice of the tall man.

The Rider stayed in Polvo Arido until he was healed. All that remained of the gold stitching in the lining of his coat were smudged inscriptions of black ash that he could sweep away with his hand.

He left one day, taking only water and some food Eladio, the bar boy’s father, had cooked him. He led his onager out of town, the sounds of the grave spades ringing in his ears.

III: Hell’s Hired Gun

“And when he was come out of the ship, immediately there met him out of the tombs, a man with an unclean spirit.” -Mark 5:2

The heavy gate swung open easily.

Into the silent adobe walled courtyard walked the Merkabah Rider, leading his white onager.

The animal shied at the thick stench of corruption that wafted on the hot wind like the smell from a broken tomb.

The Rider spoke low words of encouragement to coax the animal within the sun blasted walls. Even his cooing seemed loud and obtrusive in the supreme stillness, which was undercut only by the incessant low buzzing of flies.

He put his sleeve over his face and pulled the animal in, tethering it to the winch post of a stone well in the middle of the yard.

“It’s alright,” he assured the animal again.

The Rider had crossed the desert.

He and the onager yearned for fresh, cool water, but when he drew up the wood bucket, it was filled with blood. He let it fall, the squeal of the pulley receding until its burden splashed somewhere far below, echoing off unseen walls. The flies were visible clouds of darkness, swirling in the bright sky and settling on the bodies that lay cooling in the long, noontime shadows.

At the shattered door of the chapel, a Catholic monk lay face down, dead in his brown robes, the hard packed sand sucking up his blood.

Yaqui men, women, and children, bright in their peon’s clothes and rainbow colored serapes, bright in their straw sombreros, bright in death, lay scattered like dry leaves in the courtyard.

Their bodies were torn open, their bellies emptied of gut and bowel. In some cases the intestines had been drawn out for yards, nicked and torn and plastered with sand. Some lay without faces, some with limbs pulled or blown off. No one had been spared.

In the sand around the mutilated bodies there were the imprints of small cloven hooves, yet The Rider saw no livestock.

The Rider waved away the flies, and wetting a handkerchief with his canteen, tied it over the onager’s nostrils. He tucked his face into the crook of his arm and moved to the chapel, patting the animal’s neck reassuringly before he went. The plaster was picked away by gunfire, exposing the chipped brickwork beneath.

Just inside the vestibule, another monk had been shot through the chest by a large bore bullet. His back was a wet mass, his heart blown clear of his body. Ants flowed to and from him in busy conveyance.

The Rider stepped over the corpse and into the dimness of the chapel.

It was a charnel house.

A dozen Yaqui men had tried to brace the door against whatever enemy had done this. They lay in a heap, their bodies broken and irregular, as if they had been bodily plucked up and shaken like infants until their bones snapped. There were bullet wounds among them too, like the ravenous bites of a great beast. Torsos were blasted half away, forearms hung from strings of shredded flesh, necks ceased in blackened, ragged stumps.

Dead, ruined faces stared up at him as though they had been left half completed by a creator who had suddenly been called away. The weapons they had mustered lay unsullied. Sickles and wooden pitchforks, chair legs, machetes, butcher’s knives, all clean but for the flecked blood of their wielders, still grasped in pale hands that had never managed to land a blow. Blood dried on the floor and clung to the bottoms of his shoes, making slow sucking noises as he passed down the center aisle.

Women and children lay dead among the pews, jammed beneath the kneelers and the seats, clutching each other in final fear. The benches were splintered and broken by gunfire. Among some of these lay more monks who appeared to have thrown themselves across the innocents and been shot through, intermixing their blood and bones.

A statue of St. Francis, the patriarch of this order, if The Rider was not mistaken, leaned in its alcove, its head blown off. A monk lay on his back across the votive candles, smoking and charred; he had roasted slowly since his death. The smell was of meat and sweet candle wax, incense and burning cloth.

The altar was befouled by clumps of animal spoor, and was a bastion of flies. The table itself was overturned, and a young monk who had curled beneath it like a hiding child was hacked and battered to pieces. The sacred monstrance lay nearby, its gold edges dented and bloodstained as if he had been beaten to death with it. His gaping mouth was stuffed with stacks of communion wafers like poker chips, and the great heavy cross had been pulled from the wall and lay broken at its axis across his twisted back.

The Rider leaned against the pew at the sight and felt the bile rise. Who could have done this? Who would have? The Apache? Even their hatred for the brown robes and the religion of their oppressors was not this great. The golden objects of the altar had been left behind and the women untouched, so this was no bandit raid either.

Then he heard a wet, shuddering cough.

He made his way quickly to the sound, wending through the shattered pews and blasted bodies to the side of the chapel where stood the wooden confessional box. The carved door with its relief of the Christian apostles, behind which he knew the priest sat to dispense absolution of sins, bore a massive hole and hung half on its hinges. Blood seeped from beneath it. He drew his Volcanic pistol and pulled the door aside.

Sitting on the floor, in a puddle of dark crimson, was a Franciscan of about The Rider’s age, a pallid Negro man, with both hands clutched, as if in prayer, across his blood soaked belly. What remained of his organs, which the instrument of his doom had not destroyed, seemed to have spilled onto his lap. The smell was horrific. The Rider recoiled, pressing the back of his own hand to his nose and again forcing down the burning in his throat. The monk’s head was tilted back, and though his eyes did not react to the light from the open door, his eyelids fluttered instinctively as though to protect their dying charges.

The monk’s red stained lips trembled. He knew someone was there, but he was long past seeing.

The Rider leaned forward, eager to catch some hint as to the identity of the perpetrator of this blasphemous defilement from this, its only living witness before he departed.

“Gadara,” the monk said. His amber eyes darted north and he died.

The Rider passed a hand over the dead man’s eyes and straightened.

* * * *

It took him two days to bury all the dead and commend their souls to God. Facing Jerusalem, his lone voice recited the funerary kaddish.

He lingered for half a day more, utilizing his mystic exercises to step into the Yenne Velt to make sure no restless spirit remained behind to torment, or be tormented. It was a harrowing journey, for the residue of murder and sudden, shocking death clung to the place like a thick, black fog. No presence remained in the desolate mission to bear witness to what had happened.

But from the depths of the well, there was ghostly weeping.

A frightened child’s cry.

The Rider, who had crossed the threshold of Hell, had no inherent fear of the dead. Admittedly though, his soul trembled at the audacity of what had been done to this place of worship. He did not know if it was the work of men or something else.

Staring down into the blackness of the poisoned well was like peering into the fog of the unknowable, with the certainty that terrible knowledge awaited those who were but willing to descend.

He drew upon the mystic training of his teachers and the experience of a life spent in the exploration of the empyreal. He drew no circle this time, recited no incantations, made no sacred preparations, just sat beside the well and entered into a practiced meditative state, drawing upon inner reserves of power through measured breath and the sacred incantations of his Merkabah forebears until he felt the release of all he was from the machinery of his physical body.

Slowly, riding the invisible currents of the ether, he allowed his spirit to sink into the well, so deep that the light could not pass through to its bottom. It was not long before he found himself in the waist high water, looking at a small form bobbing on the cold, murky surface.

He felt the presence of the spirit before it showed itself, a pale thing, curled into a fearful ball beneath its bloated, floating body, distorted by the dark water and anchored to the earth by dread. The Rider reached down gingerly and drew the little spirit up.

It broke the surface of the inky pool, the pale, hollow faced ghost of a black eyed mestizo boy, with long, ragged hair plastered to his small head. He cowered against the dank wall of the well and stared at his own little corpse floating face down, black as oil in the impenetrable subterranean shadow. A bullet had pierced one of his eyes and blown the back of his head apart like a china cup. He peered at The Rider from a ruined face, one dark eye wide and terror struck, the other a bloody, gaping hole.

In life, they could never have communicated, but here in the Yenne Velt, the shadow world of spirits, they spoke one language. Yet The Rider’s was the tongue of adulthood, and the boy was no more than six years old. He did not understand where he was or what had happened, and babbled on and on at the sight of The Rider, of whom he was afraid and called Devil.

He did not know where his parents were, and wailed for them. When, at last, The Rider managed to convince him he was not the Devil but an angel of the Lord come to take him away, the boy calmed, but spoke only haltingly of pigs and a tall white man with a long rifle.

One man.

He gathered the boy’s small ethereal form to his like a wavering candle flame and brought him up out of the dark. When they had ascended to the surface, he released him to the luminous celestial winds like a handful of leaves. The boy’s spirit scattered, thanking him at last before his tiny voice was lost in the rushing tide of the eternal.

When he returned to his physical form, The Rider broke apart the well winch with an axe and sent it clattering into the befouled water. He covered the well-turned-tomb with boards and said a prayer over its nameless charge.

He had come here seeking the betrayer and murderer of his mystic enclave, his renegade master, Adon. But here, there had been another killer, and whether men hunted him seeking justice, The Rider did not know. As such, it was for him to take up the task.

With chalk, he scrawled ‘All Dead’ and ‘Todos Muertos’ in large letters upon the gate with paint from the priests’ workshed.

He and the onager took the road north, leaving the empty Mission de San Fransisco de Los Campesinos to sleep in secret silence.

* * * *

It was a bleary-eyed drummer, headed in the opposite direction, who first put meaning to the word ‘Gadara’ beyond its Gospel connotation. He had come across a sign for a town by that name, he’d said. Far to the north, in the hills. He had flipped a coin and come this way instead. The Rider warned him not to stop for water at the mission, and they parted ways.

The Rider had sought that road for a few weeks before he’d come across a weather beaten sign naming the town in faded letters, and delineating a long, lonely path up through the cold high country.

The storm overtook him the third day like a marauding white gang. The balmy dusk, rather pleasant after so long down in the arid desert, swiftly turned into an impenetrable night of flaking snow, which accumulated at an alarming rate and soon hid the road from his step.

That first night he clung to the onager for warmth and slept little.

The snow continued to fall on the fourth day. The wind that had brought it hunkered down in the valleys and blew frantically, battering against the hillsides and kicking up eddies of icy powder like a trapped animal raging.

The Rider had not dressed for inclemency; he had not expected to see his breath at all on the journey. Yet there it was, billowing like steam from an engine in his reddened and wind lashed hands, easing them momentarily of their ache before surrendering once more to the cold air.  The ends of his ears were hot to the touch and his nose ran into his beard.

That night was terrible. He slept not at all. The snow fell steadily, and he was not inclined to lie down, for fear that he would be encased in a frosty bed from which only the Messiah could awaken him. He crouched before the onager until his shivering limbs ached, warming himself in the hot breath that puffed from its nostrils.

In the morning, dread settled on him with the fresh layer of snow. He was too cold to get out the tefillin to pray, and knew if he did not keep moving until he found warmth, he would die.  Like a fool he had not thought to gather kindling and there was none dry to be found now.

He considered it strange that death could lurk in the beautiful, unsullied whiteness of the land. An untouched snowfield was the closest thing to the splendor of Heaven The Rider had yet seen on earth. It was peaceful when the howling of the wind died. The sound of his own feet and the onager’s hooves punching through the hard snow was comforting, as though they were sharing some intimate experience, which the Lord had made them alone privy to.

Yes, it was beautiful. But it was a desert of a different kind, with its own hazards. No sunning serpents with beadwork coats sought to strike him or the onager unawares. Instead they were both bitten constantly again and again by the unseen snakes that twisted at them in the blowing of the chill wind. Their venom was no less poisonous. It debilitated them both, slowly, with a creeping, freezing ache that promised a quiet, sleepy death. It planted the seed of sickness down in his throat and strangled the life from the ends of his fingers until they glowed red in alarm.

Back in the desert, there had been no water, only an abundance of dry heat that siphoned the moisture of the body like a creeping thief. Here there was plenty of water, but with his soaked garments, no way to remain dry and retain precious warmth.

The snow briefly ceased falling and the land continued to ascend toward a high, treed place. The onager’s lungs rattled wetly and the creeping feeling in the pit of his throat had become a fitful cough that expelled loosened mucus with every wracking convulsion.

Then he saw the old man waving to him from a hill off the road. It was no trick of the snow light.

He was a thin greybeard in a red and black striped blanket coat. He wore a long white muffler with gray mittens and a black cap that covered his ears. He stood alone in the white with a twisted, outstretched staff, a snowbound Moses. The Rider stumbled toward him, pulling the onager behind.

“Been watchin’ you,” the old man said, his voice clear and strident in the stillness. He cut such an odd, prophetic figure, the Rider wasn’t sure if the old man meant he had watched his progress through the snow from where he stood, or augured the entirety of his career in some omniscient, divinatory manner.

The Rider only sniffed and nodded.

“Come on up to my place,” he said, “and get warm.”

Without waiting for an answer, the old man turned and walked off, heading higher up the alabaster hills and further back, leaving a clear trail behind for the Rider to step in.

They walked this way for an hour, never speaking, The Rider trusting. By dusk they had reached a squat, friendly cabin nestled at the edge of a bosque of ice gilded cedars, overlooking a nameless frozen stream. A heavy fever alighted and settled on The Rider’s brow like a perching vulture, and pierced his body with an irresistible shiver. The cold had breached like an army and now plundered his strength within.

They brought the onager in with them and placed it in the back room. The old man kept a mule, and the two animals took to each other’s company, the onager relieved by the heat of the other. The place smelled of pipe smoke and hung with the heavy spice of the unwashed, and a faint, sweet odor of fruit. It was warm from a fire left smoldering in the fat iron stove, which the old man stoked with a bundle of kindling wrapped in cheesecloth. The walls were stacked with precarious towers of canned goods, like the master storehouse of an accomplished glutton. The corners overflowed with the empty tin shells, the labels recalling departed peaches and jams by their faded print and lingering sweetness. The old man propped his staff in a corner and took off his hat and muffler.

The change in the temperature made The Rider light-headed, and he shivered in his wet coat and coughed, catching himself on the table as the old man ran one long, bony finger over the labels, selecting a can from the wall like a scholar picking a relevant book from a high library shelf.

The Rider unbuckled his gun belt, setting the gold and silver chased pistol on the table. It would need oiling. If the old man was disturbed by the gun or impressed by its peculiar ornamentation, he showed no sign. The Rider saw no weapon in the house, not even a squirrel rifle.

He stripped off the heavy, damp coat and shirt and spread them on the floor before the stove. Beneath his coat, his body was draped with strings of pendants, bodyguards and talismans. The old man seemed to take no notice of that either. He gave The Rider a wool blanket and invited him to sit at the plain, wood table on an upturned barrel that was the only chair.

Soon, the old man had a broth bubbling in a pan, and he offered it to The Rider with a wooden spoon.

The Rider hesitated. He doubted the soup the old man offered was kosher, but he quietly asked forgiveness and that his impending sickness be taken into consideration as an extenuating attribute.

“Praise Gawd,” said the old man, smiling. He was dirty, and one of his blue eyes wandered.  He was balding and looked as if he had not shaved in many months, for the bushy grey of his wild beard sprung from his thin neck.

The broth was good, and seemed to embolden The Rider’s stiff limbs. He whispered a bracha for the nourishment, however unclean it might be.

The old man prayed too, but The Rider caught only the low intonations of ‘Gawd’ and ‘sustenance.’

“Praise Gawd, praise Gawd!” the old man said, with ever-increasing exultation. “Just you rest easy now, son. Let this fill and warm the nooks o’ your body like the healin’ power of the Holy Spirit. Yessir. I watched you comin’ up the hill. Watched you for a long while. Thank you Je-sus. Were you lost?”

The broth purged The Rider of the memory of the bitter cold, yet the mounting fever sought to remind him. Wailing outside in the black stovepipe, the wind cracked the stiff hides nailed across the windows and made the rafters creak as it ran barefoot and exuberant over the snow blanketed roof.

“I was following a road...but the storm caught me. I don’t know if I’m still on it.”

“The only road up here is the one that leads to Gadara.”

The old man dragged a low crate across the floor to sit on.

“Yes. Gadara. That’s where I’m headed.”

The old man stared with one eye.

“Glory. And why might you be going to Gadara?”

The Rider thought of the boy in the well. Of the monk doubled over in his chapel, of the bodies in the sand.

“I’m looking for someone. A man.”

The old man clapped a wrinkled hand to his lips as if he had been struck, and his eyes widened.

“Give unto the Lord, O ye mighty. Give unto the Lord glory and strength. Give unto the Lord the glory due unto his name...”

And with each ‘give,’ always there came an insistent rocking back and forth and the punctuation of his knobby hands clapping. His knuckles and fingers were distorted from some wasting arthritis, threatening to poke through the threadbare gloves, yet still he slapped them together.

“Praise Gawd. Do you know what the name of that prayer is, son?” He spoke excitedly, and without pause, as The Rider had once before heard a cattle auctioneer in San Francisco speak.

“Psalm twenty-nine. ‘The Lord of the Thunderstorms,’” The Rider murmured.

The old man’s eyes lit, and he smiled.

“Yes sir, that’s right. You know your Scripture. Good! Good! The Lord God Almighty is the Lord of the Thunderstorms. It is His Divine Power that makes the lightning strike, makes the clouds boil in the sky, and makes the thunder crash on the mountainside.” The old man laughed. “Yes sir! Praise Him. That’s His voice you hear when the thunder rolls and the crop-buds bust through the black soil in springtime. Glory!”

The Rider smiled and nodded. The man hardly took a breath. He was like a preacher long without a congregation. He kept rising from his crate in his excitement.

“But He’s not just Lord of the Thunderstorms, no sir. He’s the master of every storm. Everything sleeps in the winter but the Lord. Good Gawd! He already had His seventh day of rest, y’see. Yes sir! Even this old snowstorm blowin’ outside. He brought that with a cool blast of his nostrils. Praised be His Name!”

“I almost wish....,” The Rider whispered, trying out his weakened voice and blinking back the discomfort of speaking. “I almost wish He hadn’t.”

The old man laughed and clapped his hands indulgently again.

“Well but, I don’t know about that.” The old man went on. “The storm is the chariot of Gawd. He’s out tonight, a’visitin.’ The King is out among His servants in the guise of the storm, visiting His subjects like the king in that Shakespeare story. Blowin’ their doors and their shutters shut, so’s they’ll stay safe tonight.”

With that, he made the gesture of doors swinging shut with his twisted hands.

The Rider supped, and listened to the wind. The old man watched him and seemed to take pleasure in the sharing of his hospitality. The Rider’s head felt as if it weighed forty pounds, and lolled on his neck if he let it.

“Praise Him!” the old man ejaculated again. “But every once in a while there’s a stray lamb loses his way.” He grinned pointedly, and there was a sparkle in his anxious eyes. “Every once in a while, He waylays a lost traveler, just like He sent the fish to waylay Jonah, and when he knocked Saul down off his horse on the road to Damascus. Glory.”

The old man dipped his clouded chin with each heavenly intonation. Once The Rider had seen a man who would curse uncontrollably, as though he were sneezing out profanity, but here was an old man who convulsively spit salvation.

“Jonah was diverted from his course because God had work for him,” he muttered, finishing the soup.

The old man’s face became suddenly solemn, and he rose to stand by the open door of the stove and looked at the fire inside.

When he turned toward The Rider again, the stove glow danced portentously across his weathered face, like lamp light on old parchment. He motioned towards the barred front door.

“That He did, boy. That He did. You say you’re lookin’ for a man. Medgar Tooms.” The old man raised his eyebrows, laconically. “That’s his name, if you’re headed for Gadara. You give thanks you didn’t run into him out there. Not in the state you’re in. Oh, he’s out there, don’t make no mistake. He’s the only man headed up there. But The Lord of Storms is watchin’ out for the faithful tonight.”

The old man uttered a final “Praise Him!” and took the empty bowl from The Rider and set it on the stove.

* * * *

Medgar Tooms crossed the blowing landscape and a herd of pigs marched behind him.

They squealed at the biting cold, and shouldered to be near him and take part in his unnatural warmth.

The snow swirled around Tooms and cut into his face, but he did not flinch. The wind whipped at his long gray coat and tried to knock the broad brimmed hat off his head like a rambunctious schoolboy. Tooms was not amused. He didn’t shiver and he didn’t blink, even as the white flecks scraped at him like icy grains of iron birdshot, desperately trying to penetrate the slot thin slashes of his dark eyes.

One of the lagging little shoats behind him gave a high, shrill cry and stopped in its tracks. It nosed the snow up to its belly, then shuddered and collapsed. Several of the larger hogs circled around it and began to worry it immediately, tearing its wind-burned flesh.

Tooms did not stop. In all, there were about thirteen pigs following him. Blue hogs, wire-haired shoats, and pot-bellied pigs, their pink skin flushed red from the winter storm. They scuttled along in a milling herd like piper’s rats, their swirling breath like the smoke of thirteen little fires. Tooms did not wait for the ones who fell behind. They would catch up or they would die.

Though the storm would surely impede him, it could never stop him. He walked on, letting his long legs break holes in the dunes of bright white and piston methodically, carrying him surely northward. He did not hasten, nor did he slow. His breath puffed like the steam of a black engine. The big Whitworth rifle was propped over his right shoulder, while his left arm hung loose at his side. Broken manacles, and their long lengths of chain, rasped metallically and cut shallow furrows in the tramped snow, first one, then the other, monotonously. Their iron was cold against his wrists, yet he did not hug himself for warmth, as if he disdained comfort.

The storm assailed him with another gust, pleading with him to turn aside from his course. He shrugged it off as he would an entreating woman clinging to his greatcoat.

There was killing to be done.

* * * *

“Who is Medgar Tooms?” The Rider asked. He felt cold suddenly, although it was warm enough in the little cabin, and fever sweat trickled down between his shoulders.

“I heard you before I saw you,” the old man smiled faintly. “All them doodads you got on. The clinkin’. I thought it was him. Medgar Tooms,” said the old man, wistful, as he ladled more broth.

He looked up at the ceiling then, and closed his eyes.

“And they went into the country of the Gadarenes,” the old man recited. “And when He came up out of the ship, immediately there met Him out of the tombs, a man with an unclean spirit.”

The Rider put his elbows on the rickety table. He ran the back of his hand across his sweating forehead. He was not overly familiar with the Christian Gospel, though he had read it.

Still the old man intoned, blind in the blissful trance of recall, or so it seemed to The Rider, for he sighed pleasantly between passages;

“And no man could bind him, no, not with chains. Because that, he had been often bound with fetters and chains, and the chains had been plucked asunder by him, and the fetters broken into pieces.”

The old man looked over at him from the stove.

“You’re an Israelite, aren’t you, son?”

The Rider nodded slowly.

“Then you’re not saved?”

The Rider’s eyes fluttered, and his forehead began to blossom with sweat. He tried to answer, but forgot the question. Something slurred and unintelligible stumbled from his dry lips, like the yammering of an excessive imbiber.

The old man looked at the Hebrew at his table. The stranger was flushed with the fever, and his slight shoulders shivered beneath the blanket. His eyes fell to the leather belt curled like a black serpent in repose on his table. Here was a man of violence, with a gun and with the mark of the gun upon his pale flesh.

‘Thou shalt not kill,’ said the Lord’s Holy Law, and the old man said a low ‘amen’ to that. The Bible spoke of those who lived by the sword dying in a similar manner, and the old man nodded a solemn ‘hallelujah’ to that, too.

Seized with the impulse, he got down on his old knees, though they cracked like busting twigs, and clasped his twisted hands fiercely together, as if to generate the power of his prayer between his two palms until he could no longer stop it from soaring up to Heaven. It pained him, but he squeezed.

“But Lord,” said the old man, “when Joshua led the Israelites into Jericho, surely there was slaughter, and when Samson confronted the Philistines with the jawbone of an ass at Ramath-lehi, it’s written that he slew a thousand men.

“Lord, now I can tell from the look of this fella he’s a killer. I knowed it the minute I seen him leadin’ that donkey through the snow. But You led him to me for a reason, Lord. Now I believe, and You can go ahead and give me a sign if my thinkin’ be otherwise, I believe that reason is to stop Medgar Tooms and cleanse me of the sin I have born these many long years.”

He stopped in his prayer and opened his eyes and listened for a while, but there was no sound save the popping of the wood in the stove, the howl of the wind, and the raspy breathing of the stranger, whose head lay on the table.

The old man closed his eyes and continued.

“Now, I don’t know if the way is to be by the sword or by the Good Book, but You know in Your heavenly wisdom that I ain’t hardly a keen enough sword to be wielded in Your Blessed Hand. If this man a’settin’ here, this killer Jew out of the wilderness, if he be the instrument You have prepared to set against Medgar Tooms in the comin’ conflict, then Good Lord, give me stay to save this man’s life. I’ve done all in my power, but by the look of this fella, it ain’t enough. The fever is upon him. I need Your touch, Blessed Jesus.”

With that, he unclasped his hands and raised them high to the ceiling.

“I need Your heavenly touch, praise Jesus, to heal this man,” the old man said loudly, making the Hebrew jump and blink his eyes. “Hear my prayer, O Lord. Give ear to my supplications: in Thy faithfulness answer me, and in Thy righteousness. Enter not into judgment with Thy servant: for in Thy sight shall no man living be justified.”

His eyes still clenched tight, his arms still outstretched, he rose unsteadily, moving along the edge of the table with one hip for guidance, and came to stand over the stranger.

The wind howled outside, but the old man was delirious. He had felt the Holy Ghost enter his fingertips, like lightning on an outstretched rod, and felt the tingling run down his arms. His hands began to shake. It was the old Power come upon him from high, as it had when he was but a boy skipping down the aisle of the little clapboard mountain church to the delight of his mother and the other parishioners, back when he was worthy of it.

It made him feel like that bright eyed boy again, dancing in God’s light, loving Him, and wanting to do His will. He had not felt the Power since that night in Gadara when he had failed God and his neighbors so utterly. To him, it meant that God was once again looking his way, and what he suspected about the Hebrew was right; he was here to stop Medgar Tooms.

“I stretch forth my hands.” He allowed himself a happy grin then, and ejaculated, “Praise Him! My soul thirsteth for Thee, as a thirsty land.”

Sweat began to bead on his forehead, and his arms shook wildly, barely under control. He held them over the stranger, and he laughed once, like he was trying to hold a squirming, greased pig. He spoke quickly and excitedly now, barely able to contain himself.

“Oh Glory! Glory! Hear me speedily, O Lord:  my spirit...Oh Glory! Praise Jes-us! Hide not Thy face from me, lest I be like unto them that go down into the pit. Cause me to hear Thy loving kindness; for in Thee do I trust: cause me to know the way wherein I should walk, for I lift up my soul to thee.”

He began to slowly force his madly trembling arms down toward the stranger, who shook feverishly, oblivious to what was happening.

Then his hands fell on the stranger’s sweat plastered head, and the sickly man sat suddenly bolt upright, eyes wide and mouth agape.

In that stretch of a moment, the old man, who was the Right Reverend Japheth Tubal Lessmoor, was assailed with visions. First he perceived a young Jewish boy with a thirst for knowledge like that of a man in the wasteland, and he felt the boy’s excitement at being selected by a body of bearded elders for instruction in mysteries most never perceived the existence of. He saw a kindly older man in the trappings of a Hebrew, offering the boy insight that even that venerable body of instructors didn’t, or wouldn’t, offer. This man was a mentor, a second father. A name, no, not a name; a title. Adon. And such things he showed the boy!

The eye of Japheth’s mind was momentarily blinded by the sight of flocks of seraphim flitting busily through glorious, heavenly chambers. The ears of his soul filled with a music so beauteous and incomparable that his eyes flooded with tears.

He saw and heard and felt what years of faith had taught his heart to only imagine, and he knew his years of devotion to the Lord were in that instant repaid. He saw the wheels of Ezekiel’s chariot, its four bronze bearers impossible to look upon. Though as he saw this, a great white hand rose up, barring the vision. It was the span of a continent from its thumb to little finger, and its meaning was plain.

Then he was assailed by terrible sights, which he knew were of Hell. Hell, and perhaps something else. Dreadful visions of a ferocious twelve-winged serpent, the bunching, luminous black coils of incomprehensible, gargantuan entities suspended like terrible misshapen embryos in a cold womb of starless night. The mocking laughter of a blood-soaked bull god draped in pagan ornaments, grinding mewling babes between its bloody jaws. He saw vast armies whose ranks were the damned, murderous dead, and felt the burning of fetid breath and heard the fearful beating of giant wings. As much elation as had filled him at the sight of Heaven, now gave way to such dread, far more than even Medgar Tooms had ever inspired.

He saw too the dark face of the boy’s (no, not a boy, a man now) mentor, Adon, twisted like a pine knot into a visage of evil, saw the bones of men splintered and burned and bearing the marks of teeth, and knew them to be the remains of the bearded old teachers. He felt betrayal, and an overwhelming guilt, a need to correct this Adon’s mistakes, and to punish him.

As The Rider felt the fever drawn from his throbbing temples through the bony fingers of the old man, he saw the dark figure, Tooms.

Tooms, with his long musket and Confederate coat, an escort of snuffling hogs tromping at his back. As he had found the monks of the mission, he now saw smoldering cabins and bullet riddled farmers in a similar state all across the land. He saw men lying dead in their fields under shining black coats of pecking ravens, women draped over hitching posts, their backs broken in two. He saw the pale, upturned faces of children stuffed into rain barrels brimming with blood, and bloated livestock kicking their last. He saw the spires of Christian churches tremble amid nests of shooting flames, before toppling.

Always the dead were half-eaten; stomachs torn open and guts pulled across the prairie by the snuffling swine. He saw black smoke curling across the red sky and heard the screams and pleading cries of women, and another sound, like the beating of dozens of fists on a door. He felt fear. Overwhelming, crippling. And then…guilt as monumental as the terror.

He fell back to unconsciousness.

* * * *

Medgar Tooms stared into the fire that curled out from beneath the door of the cabin. He listened to the woman screaming within. He leaned on his big Whitworth and narrowed his eyes as the dervish form exploded out into the snow, twisting and turning and shrieking; dancing strangely in her bright ball gown of flame.

She was blind, her eyes boiled like eggs in her sockets, so she didn’t see the old wagon wheel half buried in the dirty snow. She stumbled over it, and though she rolled over a few times, she did not rise again. She wailed a little, till either the smoke of her own burning flesh choked her voice, or the searing heat sealed her throat forever. She twitched, and then was still. Smoke curled off her body, and the oil-fed flame continued to dance across her cotton dress. Her face and arms blackened, and the only other sound was the popping of the fire consuming her.

A beam fell in the cabin with a crash, sending up a shimmer of glowing cinders briefly into the black smoke like a passel of damned souls scrambling up the shaft of Hell in a doomed bid for Heaven. They died quickly in the cold night, far short of refuge.

The hogs squealed appreciatively around him. A few of the younger ones scurried to the burning body and jumped back at the heat, crying out like children meeting a hot stove for the first time. The older, wiser ones stayed at his side and waited patiently, with black, glowering eyes that reflected back the conflagration. These had been with Tooms from the start, and they knew what the flames meant. Cooked meat was a delicacy as yet unknown to the younger ones.

The cold morning air did not bother Tooms, though not because of the warmth that left the blazing cabin in sheets. Like the cold, he didn’t feel the heat either. He felt nothing. Perhaps it was his own lack of feeling that made it so essential for him to force feeling onto others, to see children cry or the faces of men shriveled in pain or fear.

A federale sergeant had blasted him with a short barreled shotgun once, and though he had stumbled back a bit, he hadn’t felt a thing. Nothing but a dull force like someone had pitched a bale of hay, or a fat down pillow at him.

The sergeant had screamed long for that. He had begged for God, but no angel came to help him, so he had died cursing Him instead. That had pleased the Things inside Tooms immensely.

Back when he had first made the acquaintance of the Things, he had felt wrath and sorrow. But it seemed like a long time ago. Now these things were just a dull ache; an old man’s creaky joint in a rainstorm or the imagined contraction of a phantom limb.

When he had started, the faces of his wife and child had been so painfully clear in his mind. Now he could not call to mind their names. He had quite forgotten whether he’d had a son or a daughter.

It seemed to him, as he leaned on his rifle, watching the young hogs slaver at the smoldering body, that he had been wronged once. He had been insulted or hurt somehow and had sought retribution. The Things had come to him to help him to get satisfaction.

He called them Things for want of a better word. They hadn’t exactly had any kind of appearance he remembered. They weren’t some pack of horned, hoofed Things clambering from a fiery pit with flicking tongues and arrow-head tails and big bat wings. No, the Things hadn’t come to him that way. They hadn’t come as serpents spiraling up his legs, or a mysterious man in black beckoning from a crossroads like in the Hoodoo stories the mammies used to tell in the hot afternoons of his Savannah boyhood.

It had been a mild summer day, with the grasshoppers gliding from blade to blade and the sun bleaching the tall grass, shimmering emerald through the leaves on the tree boughs. The Things had just been there in the corner of the room, hunched up in a cold spot on the floor. Unseen, but undeniable.

He remembered the galaxies of dust swirling in the sunlight that poured through the dim, empty house, just as dreamy and blissful as the twittering of the finches nesting in the porch eaves. He remembered the gentle breeze stirring the leaves on the graves of his family, though his own mind had been as dark and tempestuous as a Gulfstream gale. He had been sitting in the rocking chair where he once held a baby but now held a loaded gun and an empty whiskey bottle.

He had been afraid at first. It had scared him mightily to know he could have such Things in his house, way out in the middle of the sun-blessed meadow with the light of day streaming in the windows.

At first.

But that passed when the Things had shown him what they had to offer. The whole town of Gadara in flames. All those damned people dead in the streets, hogs glutting themselves on the bodies.

That had pleased Medgar Tooms; that thought the Things pushed into his head. Because Gadara was to blame. He didn’t know why or what for anymore, but all of them were to blame. So he had accepted the Things. He was willing to do whatever they wanted as long as they could make Gadara suffer, as he suffered. However he had suffered.

So the Things had made good on their word. In exchange, they had given him errands. Tasks. Years of work. He couldn’t recall exactly how much.

They had taken him all over, these errands. He had killed many people, hunted down many a cowering priest and preacher. When he would get a shakiness, or think of putting a gun barrel in his mouth, the Things knew how to strengthen his resolve.

They reminded him of the preacher, Lessmoor. One last cowering slave of a mean-hearted God that had seen fit to visit sorrow and pain on his household alone among all that goddamned town; a selfish old coward who had locked out his precious congregation and listened to their screams as Tooms had slaughtered them to the last bawling infant on the very steps of his goddamned church.

In the Territories and in Mexico, they had called him El Hombre con los Cerdos Malos.

At night the mestizos prayed to their house gods that he would not visit them, and the Comanche and the Apache and the Yaqui all had learned to turn aside when they struck his trail. He had walked the Llano at night under the moon, and where there was not already death on that barren plain, he had brought it. He had killed lonely travelers and weary camps of nighthawks, stampeding their herds. He had butchered buffalo hunters and left them like they had the buffalo, naked of skin and tongue, feasts for flies and varmints. He had burned out villages of Indians, sending droves of them running for their mountain strongholds. Where he crossed the stage lanes, the coaches never reached their destinations.

A few times the law, whether it had been rangers, federales, troopers, or marshals, had tried to catch him. Some had even succeeded. But the broken chains around his wrists and the knee high stacks of old leg irons clanking on his legs attested to the outcome of his brief stays in little calabooses and one-room jails across the country. He became a rumor to be ignored, a telegraph best left unanswered.

In Colorado he had burned out a Chinese mining camp. He had tied the coolies together by their pigtails and put their eyes out with bullets. At such times, he had watched them stumble about and fall over each other, and felt the Things chortling like giddy children. He himself felt nothing at all. In Colorado he had forgotten his wife’s name, and then in Sonora he had forgotten whether it was a son or a daughter he’d once had.

It had gotten to where he couldn’t figure which part of him was the Things and which part of him was, or had once been, Medgar Tooms. He didn’t know any more if he did what he did because of the Things or because he wanted to. He didn’t care. The world became Gadara, and every holy man was Lessmoor. He killed them all, over and over again.

Now, because of the Things, he could no more feel regret or love or even the wrath that had brought him to his state, any more than he could feel the sting of the bullets or knives or arrows or fire. They were all the same as the sun, or the cold, or the dancing of a tick on the back of his neck. He could only recall the dull memory of the hate that had called the Things to him. That, and the need to see blood and hear the screams of Gadara.

One of the young hogs persistently poked his snout at the smoldering corpse and jumped back at the heat.

Tooms turned and walked off toward the barn, where he had pinned the woman’s husband to the buckboard wagon with a pitchfork. He could still hear the man groaning. As he got closer, the sound of the man was louder, and the wet sounds of the hogs grew fainter.

The older, wiser swine spared a quick glance at the impetuous young ones braving the scorched body. They turned and followed their master to the barn.

* * * *

The Rider shrugged into his coat and stepped out of the rickety shack into the bright white day. The old man was hitching his mule to an old black buggy and looking off into the distance anxiously.

The air was brisk. The Rider’s fever was completely gone, but he had suffered fearful nightmares.

The old man nodded to him.

“Gawd’s morning to you,” the old man said, though his voice was twinged with worry. “I didn’t introduce myself last night. I’m the Right Reverend J.T. Lessmoor. You can just call me J.T., or Japheth, or Reverend, if you like. I didn’t get your name.”

“My fever’s gone,” The Rider said warily, feeling his own face pensively. “How did you do that?”

“I didn’t do nothing,” Japheth said. “I fed your donkey. We can leave him here. He should be fine. I thought we might ride the buggy. My old Sarah is ready to go.”

The Rider stared at the old man, and looked across the snowy field. There was a column of gray smoke down in the valley from where he’d walked, its source hidden by trees. It was too much for a chimney or a stovepipe.

“I’d appreciate it if you’d take the reins,” said Japheth. “Cold makes these old paws stiff.” He took a deep, satisfying breath and smiled. “Praise Gawd. A fine day. Glorious day for the comin’ battle.”

The Rider walked toward the buggy. The memory of the dark man with the hogs returned to him, like the flash of a waking dream.

Japheth pointed to the smoke, his smile gone.

“That’d be the Simmons’ place. Polly Simmons was three months with child. Gawd give us the strength to beat him.”

“Who is he?” The Rider asked. “Who is Tooms?”

“I’ll tell you that when we get where we’re goin.’” Japheth climbed into the buggy. “You just head northeast. We’ll come to the road again.” He took out a weathered, creased Bible from his coat pocket and began to read to himself.

The Rider just looked at the smoke.

Japheth caught his look and shook his head.

“We can’t help them now, son. They’re dead. It’s their souls I’m worried about. If we’re gonna help ‘em at all, we’d best strengthen our resolve, by Gawd.”

“How long have you been out here?”

“Since it started,” said Japheth. “I’ve watched the road, waited for him to come back.”

They said no more for a moment. Then Japheth closed his Bible and spoke.

“Mister, you’ve got a killer’s air about you. Not the sort that turns aside children and critters, but I know you’ve walked now and then down a dark and narrow trail.”

“I was a soldier,” The Rider explained. “In the war….”

“Hold on now,” Japheth said. “I’ve seen the other roads you’ve traveled too, and they’re wondrous to me as a....” he shook his head and stared out at the passing trees draped in snow, searching for words, “as if I were a baby bird staring at the world for the first time through the hole in my shell. Glory. You are blessed, mister, to have been given a vision of Heaven before your time. Make no mistake. You are blessed. I know you were turned aside in the end, and I know the reason.”

The Rider looked at him. He had explored what Lessmoor called Heaven to the very doorstep of the Most High, but the angel Metatron had in the last, barred his way.

His teachers had all had various theories as to why he had been refused the Presence, most having to do with his use of ungodly talismans and incantations to aid him in his out of body expeditions. It was a possibility. His teacher Adon had introduced him to those devices, dubbing them alternative paths to God. But power was the only god that man had known. In the end he had used his arts to betray and destroy The Rider’s enclave, in the process forever barring him from the rest of The Order by his association. Even in the face of that betrayal, the rejection by Metatron still plagued his soul.

But he had never told anyone that. Who could he speak of it to? He had no friends, no companions. And even if he had they could not have understood his secret failure.

But this man…for whatever reason, they now knew something of each other.

“And what is that?” he asked.

“Your teachers said you were rejected because you took an easier path—because you used ungodly devices and all them heathen trappings to aid you in your travels. The scripture does say things agin dealing with such witchery, and your mentor led you knowingly into it, and so the greater sin is his. But answer me this; what’s the reason you felt the need to seek out avenues other than the ones your teachers gave you?”

“I wanted to stand before God,” The Rider answered immediately. “To bask in His glory. I was impatient…”

Japheth smiled.

“Remember, I’ve been to your heart. Now, I am beholden to your experiences, but I believe you put the wagon before the horse. Why did you really seek a quicker path to the Lord in His abode? Tell me true.”

The Rider thought for a moment.

“I wanted…I just wanted to know that He was.”

Japheth laughed out loud and slapped his bony knees.

“Glory! After all that you had already seen? Choirs of angels and the mighty host of the Lord all in formation! What did you think, that angels ruled the heavens and made a figurehead for us to worship? You are like your ancestors in the wilderness. I never could figure how a man could walk dry footed across the Red Sea with a pillar of fire to guide him by night and still doubt the Lord. The rest of the world has had to keep faith seein’ the Lord only in the new day dawnin’ and the fallin’ rain and the bloomin’ bud. But you’ve seen with your own soul all that Heaven has. You think you weren’t worthy because of your mentor’s heathen trinkets, like your teachers told you, or you think the Lord set you to some other purpose so you could be worthy of Him. But what led you to them heathen things in the first place? Never mind that they still took you where you were going. You stood outside the Lord’s front gate, and you still weren’t satisfied. That’s why that angel barred your way. No other reason. For all you’d seen already, you still needed proof.”

The Rider was silent for a long while.

As the reverend said, he had been to his heart, and with an outsider’s objectivity, he had come to know a thing that ate at The Rider every day of his life. It was a comfort and it planted in him a deep seed of peace, but still there was Adon blocking that shoot from breaking the surface. Adon, who had gone from teacher to father to enemy in the span of a few years. Adon, who had tried to turn him from the Lord by appealing to his deepest, most secret failing; an enthusiasm to learn beyond all doubt, even at the cost of his soul.

“Why does Tooms kill?” The Rider asked, to change the subject.

Japheth sighed heavily.

“When a man is wronged, he can fill up with hate at a fearsome rate. Look at Cain, snubbed at the altar of Gawd, or Saul, who slew the whole city of Nob for helping David. I guess I don’t need to tell you that hate’s like a beacon to the underworld. It’ll attract the damndest things.”

The Rider knew of what the old man spoke of course, being intimately familiar with spiritual transmigration. He also knew the will was the key to the locked door of the soul. He had mystic instruments for forcing open those locks, but a disembodied spirit, like a demon or a dybbuk—a wicked soul escaped from the torments of Gehenna—was barred, as was any consciousness dwelling in the shadow lands of Sheol.

It was said though, that a man could welcome a spirit into himself if he were in a sufficient mode of mind. The Rider had seen evidence of this too. The right sort of spirit would naturally be drawn to an intense psychic emanation like overwhelming grief or hatred, as a child would run to a dinner bell.

‘Like readily consorts with like,’ as Cicero wrote.

“That’s why you’ve got to tread lightly, son,” said Japheth, “when it comes to the man you’re hunting. There’s many a man who wound up worse than the wrong they tried to put right.”

Whether the old man meant Adon or this Tooms, The Rider didn’t know.

After a bit, they came out on the other side of the woods to a long abandoned farmhouse in the middle of a blinding field of icy bleach. The paint was flaking and the old porch was covered in piles of dead brown leaves powdered white by the sifting snow.

A collapsed fence surrounded the place, and a small barn, beaten down by the harsh storms, lay dying a slow death a few yards from the house.

A once grand oak that must have supplied fine shade to the house in the bright summers was choked and bare—not in the relatively brief sleep of the winter time, but in the mortification of the rotten dead.

It was a decent enough place, but the air of ruin lent it an eerie foreboding. The Rider brought the buggy to a stop.

Japheth rubbed his hands together and blew a hot blast of breath into them. He pointed to a low hill on the property, and The Rider urged the mule toward it.

There came to his ears a cracking sound, as of a pistol reporting, and The Rider dropped a hand to his own sidearm, then saw that the chilly noontime wind was beating an old shutter senseless against the side of the house.

Japheth clapped a frail hand on his shoulder, reassuringly. He got his walking stick down from the buggy and they went on.

The top of a crumbling headstone barely poked out of the fresh snow on the low knoll as The Rider helped Japheth down from the buggy. It was a particularly cold morning and the heavy snowfall of the storm the night before had frozen to a hard crust. Their feet crunched through the ice and they sunk to their ankles as they made their way to the grave. Japheth had to chip away at the ice with the end of his staff to clear the wood marker.

The inscription read:

BELOVED WIFE

CONSTANCE LOUISE TOOMS

AND SON

EXPIRED

MAY 12th 1870

Japheth said a prayer over the grave and bowed his head as The Rider crouched beside the plank to read the words.

“He never named the boy,” Japheth said quietly. “The Lord took ‘em both. Gawd save ‘em. The cholera was goin’ about town that summer and the doctor, a man named Tibbens, never made it out here. All Gadara had it, and that poor man was up to his elbows in sickly folk. He done the best he could. Tooms’ wife was poorly, and their baby was due, but Doc Tibbens just couldn’t make it. The Landers’ baby was on the verge of dyin,’ and he spent the whole night tryin’ to keep that boy in this world. Did it too, Gawd bless him, for all the good it did later. He went to see Tooms that very morning when little Perry Landers’ fever broke.”

Japheth frowned and patted the headstone.

“He found Medgar Tooms diggin’ this grave. Doc tried to talk to him, and Medgar put a bullet in his elbow for his trouble, ran him off the place.”

The Rider imagined Medgar Tooms waist-high in the fresh grave, with his wife and still-born son swaddled in sack cloth nearby.

‘When a man is wronged, he can fill up with hate at a fearsome rate.’

“Nobody could get near this place after that. No sir. They sent the Marshal, old Red Seth Hogan. Medgar shot him in the guts. He was a sharpshooter for the Rebs during the war—used to blow the brass buttons off blue belly officers at two hundred yards or more, so I hear.”

The Rider stood up, looking down at the snowy grave. He imagined the woman six feet beneath the ice and sod, her nameless baby clutched in her dead arms. A shiver went down his back that was not induced by the penetrating wind.

“After Red Seth crawled home and died, the town wanted to burn Tooms out,” Japheth went on. “But I thought with the Lord’s help I could bring back Medgar Tooms; reach farther with the long arm of the Lord than mortal man could stretch.”

He shook his head, as if at his own folly.

“Gawd forgives, but some things a mortal man like Medgar Tooms just can’t never forget, I guess. He blamed the whole town for what had happened. Blessed Je-sus.”

Japheth put his staff under his arm and shoved his hands in the pockets of his coat and breathed a puff of air.

“I remember, I come up the rise from Gadara and I seen a sight. A sight that made me jump down from the buggy and hug ‘ol Sarah to me and pray for us both. Almighty. Medgar Tooms had plied his trade as a hog farmer. I seen him step off the porch, and those hogs of his, six of ‘em, there were. They was standing a’right on their hind legs in the yard, in a circle, like they was dancin.’ They was squealin’, and I could’ve sworn I heard a sound like voices ‘mongst all that animal noise. One of ‘em was high, like a child’s voice.”

The old man’s face was drawn tight across his skull in fear. He spoke with a tremolo, and he was shaking all over.

“Gawd Almighty. It was like a piece of red rock candy hung in front of the sun that day. Ever thing was the color of fire, like as if a blaze had sprung up in the woods. Medgar went up to the circle of ‘em, and they parted, and he stepped right into the middle. Blessed Je-sus preserve us! I seen a cloud—a red cloud. Like a thunderhead, but it was boiling all of a sudden on the ground, swirlin’ around Medgar and them hogs like a puff of the Devil’s breath. So help me Gawd, I saw red lightnin’ hit that old oak tree over there, and it was dead in a second, all the leaves turned brown and dropped off.”

Japheth bit his knuckle, trying to stifle his own trembling. He could not. He just shook and stared out at the empty field and at the house and the dead tree, eyes wide. After some time, Japheth hugged himself and spoke again.

“I never been so scared in all my life. I climbed into that buggy, and Gawd forgive me, I whipped Sarah like I never whipped another living creature in my life, or ever will again, Gawd willin.’ I drove back on over to Gadara an’ locked myself tight inside my church. I barred the doors and hid ‘neath the pulpit....”

He couldn’t speak the rest, though his eyes shined with tears he would not let fall.

The Rider thought of the barred door he had seen in his vision. He thought of the pounding hands, the screams.

Japheth looked at the house. His eyes peered across the empty yard.

“Nothin’ growed here since that day. Even the grass is gone. It must’ve died right there underneath our feet. Medgar Tooms, and all his hogs....they disappeared.”

It had been long years of living in the cabin near the road, watching. Waiting. Knowing Tooms would be back. Fearing it at first. Running from it, like Jonah. Then, resignation. He had become the lone watchman of Gadara. Praying for Medgar Tooms’ inevitable return, the waiting his own personal penance.

Japheth took a step towards the house, hesitated, and stopped.

“His chickens were all dead. His old draft horse too. Not a mark on ‘em. They were just dead, dropped where they’d stood. All his belongings he left behind, ‘cept for his gun and the old Whitworth rifle. You could see the spot on the wall where the mold and powder flask hung over the mantle. Only thing he did leave behind is scratched on the wall where that rifle was.”

Japheth looked over his shoulder at The Rider.

“I expect it’s still there, if you’d care to see.”

The Rider narrowed his eyes, and stood up slowly. He recalled the visions of the broken bodies, the slaughtered families strewn across the meadows, the Chinamen with their eyes shot out.  He remembered the Yaqui boy in the well.

“I suppose I would.”

They trudged on toward the house.

The approach was like a dreadful march toward an execution ground. Something was chilling about the emptiness of the place. The only sound was the hiss of the winter wind clacking the dead branches of the rotten oak, and the banging of the lonely shutter. As they got further away from the buggy, The Rider began to feel more and more disquiet, as if the mule were the only living thing in miles besides himself and the old man.

The floorboards of the porch groaned with the tread of their feet. They kicked up crackling piles of dead leaves as they stepped across the threshold, shaded by the afternoon sun. The front door lay on the floor inside, its hinges long rusted away.

Inside the main room was a world of dust, lit only by the scattered shafts of sun that bore down through the holes in the roof. No nesting birds took nervous flight in the rafters upon their entrance, no weasels or mice scurried into hidden nooks. There was no spoor, no caches of nuts, nor anything that might bespeak a sleepy possum or industrious squirrel. The Rider did not even see cobwebs.

The furniture was still intact, though in disarray. A rocking chair sat in a corner beneath a blanket of dust, weathered by rain from a hole in the roof.

With such a place so close to a town, it would be certain someone would have come across it and made off with whatever was handy, but nothing was touched. Old pictures of solemn strangers sat on the mantle, their faces obscured by layers of age. A pipe sat on a table near the rocking chair, and a woman’s tarnished, silver hairbrush lay waiting on a dingy flower print stool for a head of hair that had long since stopped growing. In one corner The Rider spied a carved baby’s cradle that Tooms might have bought, or made for a son who would never again be rocked to sleep in it.

Over the mantle, scratched in the wall in a crude, violent hand was the legend;

‘Mene Mene Tekel.’

It was scrawled in the Ashuri script.

The Rider furrowed his brow at the sight of it.

“It’s part of the inscription on the wall of King Belshazzar, from the Book of Daniel,” he said.

“It is.” Japheth frowned.

Daniel translated it as ‘the days of thy kingdom are numbered,’ and ‘Thou art weighed in the balance and found wanting.’

The old man’s lip curled. “Blasphemy.” Then he turned to face The Rider.

“For ten years he’s been out killing.”

The old man’s face was dead serious.

“Just a little ways up the road lies Gadara. He’s come home, and the power of the Beast is with him.”

The Rider picked a portrait off the mantelpiece. It was a tintype of a younger Tooms, garbed in the gray of a Georgia infantryman, his wife, a blonde haired, freckled girl with happy eyes and a hoop skirt standing at his side, one porcelain white hand poised daintily on his arm.

“It may be he ain’t too far gone, Gawd willing,” Japheth said, mildly. “I am going to do all I can to win him back, to save his soul.” He clutched The Rider’s elbow firmly. “But if he can’t be saved....my son, will you help me?”

The Rider looked at the writing on the wall, touched the gilded Volcanic pistol at his hip. It was primarily designed for fighting on the astral and ethereal planes, though it could fire lead if he so wished it. He had used it to kill men, but he was far from an expert, and far from eager.

“I’ll help you,” The Rider said, placing the picture back on the mantle. “But you should know. When a man gives himself up to a dybbuk—to an evil spirit, like I suspect this one is—all that he was is consumed. The man who killed all those people is an agent of darkness, not the man you knew.”

“No man is beyond redemption,” Japheth intoned.

“Some men are,” The Rider said, “because they choose to be.”

Outside, the mule in the traces gave a strangled bray as Medgar Tooms cut its throat.

He stood there beside the old preacher’s buggy with the bloody bayonet in his hand, watching the sighing animal sag to its knees. The pigs were already swarming around it, loath to wait for its death. Its kicking hooves caught one young shoat and sent it flopping brokenly against the dead oak, while three others buried their snouts under the mule’s jaw in the wide wound made by Medgar’s blade.

Tooms saw this place in another time, when the grasses swayed in the spring breeze, and the hawks lit on the fence posts as though a reassurance of protection. He saw a woman as though she had been painted into the picture, a woman with hay golden hair through which the afternoon sun shined, and a flushed face indicative of daily toils. She bore slop buckets for the pigs, her thin arms tense with the weight. Then he saw the two blue green eyes, dreamy like far off misty ridges he had seen before the slaughter and the fury. They peered at him and the smile opened up like a June blossom, all sign of hardship melted away. She had loved him, this woman, and he had loved her more than life. Anyone’s life.

Lost in his mind, he leaned briefly to the side, and his hand brushed the plank that stood in the snow like a petrified tree trunk. More images came to him. Of the woman’s swollen belly, full of a mysterious, fluttering life. It wasn’t life in the end, but the stirrings of death. The woman, frail and crying, her dove skin taut with pain, tears streaming down her cheeks. Her white knees exposed and quivering. The small, bloody form quiet and still in his arms. The ragged sound of her last breath hissing like a snake from her chapped and bleeding lips.

The hate came back like a sharp spur to his ribs. Medgar fixed the bayonet to his rifle. He got down on one knee, lifted the rifle to his shoulder, and fired at the pale face that gawked at him through the window of the house.

The huge .450 caliber bullet smashed through the front windowpane like a freight train, sending powdered glass sprinkling through the air to intermingle with the sunlit dust. The Rider barely got out of the way, and fell to the floor with a burning crease in his right shoulder.

He rolled across the floor and put his back to the wall. The Volcanic rasped from his holster.

He checked his loads, and listened to Japheth rustle the pages of his Bible. The old man was huddled behind the corner of the mantle.

A second shot boomed and a heavy ball punched through the wood wall in a scattering of slivers. The bullet burst the floorboard at Japtheth’s right foot and buried itself in a shallow grave beneath the house.

“Blessed be the Lord, my strength, which teacheth my hands to war and my fingers to fight,” murmured Japheth, opening his Bible, ignoring the crater and brushing away the splinters which had painted little red slashes across his face.

A third bullet screamed in through the open doorway and swept the knickknacks and portraits off the mantelpiece like a raging, angry arm. Their remnants rained down on the old man, and he had to shake broken glass from the pages of his Bible before continuing.

“My goodness and my fortress; my high tower, and my deliverer; my shield, and He whom I trust.”

The Rider watched the old man, his mind racing. If what he had said were true, that Tooms could not be hurt by mortal means, what option was left to them? The Volcanic was only an ordinary pistol on the physical plane. He had no special means with which to kill men; he had never needed any. Had they time, he could have prepared, he could have engaged the dybbukim in the Yenne Velt, maybe drawn it out of Tooms. There was no time to prepare for that now.

Blood coursed down his quivering shoulder. It was the most shallow of wounds, but it bled fiercely.

The Rider risked a glance out the smashed window above his head and saw Tooms crouched by the grave. His pigs were all around him, up to their snouts in the now dead mule. With his pistol he could never hope to hit Tooms at this range, and even if he did, it would do no good.

Again Tooms fired, and the shot blew through the wall beside The Rider and sent the table with the woman’s hairbrush tumbling end over end till it struck the back wall.

The power of Tooms’ rifle was unnatural. No musket made that The Rider had ever seen could retain its power after passing through so many obstacles at such a distance. He was lucky the bullet had only creased his shoulder, else it might have blown his heart clean out into the backyard.

He glanced down at the hole made in the floor and saw that the ball had burrowed relatively deep down into the dark ground beneath the house.

He brought his foot up and down, and the heel of his shoe crashed through the weakened board. He set to work prying aside the adjoining wood and breaking open a hole big enough for a man to fit through.

By Gawd, Japheth thought, why had he brought this poor man into this fight? It was evident that no force of man was going to stop Medgar Tooms.

He had prayed to the Lord after the healing touch had left him, that it be made known to him whether the end of Medgar Tooms’ reign of terror would come about by way of the Bible or by way of the sword. Surely it was evident now that the sword had not been made that could slay Medgar Tooms. Already this Hebrew, who he had felt sure would stand against Tooms, was attempting to flee. But Japheth knew there would be no escape. He had seen the dozens of bodies of those who had tried to escape Medgar Tooms. They lay only yards from the few who had tried to fight him.

Part of Japheth Tubal Lessmoor, the part that contained his body and mind, whispered that there was no defying the infernal power of Medgar Tooms. These were the parts that had shaken and been cowed at the sight he had seen on this property years ago. But another part of him, the part of him that contained his spirit, told him that the Lord would prevail. His Faith had been shaken, and he had hidden from God in his locked church. Because he had shirked his duty as a man of God, so many had lost their lives to the vengeful hand of Medgar.

What it would take to stop him, he did not know, but he felt confident this would be the last day of Medgar Tooms’ murderous career. The killings and the wickedness would end here where it had begun, even if it had to end with his own death.

If he had been an Indian, J.T. Lessmoor might have sung his death song. As it was, he began to read from his Bible, from the Lord of the Thunderstorms, and as he did, he slowly stood.

“The glory of Gawd thundereth. The voice of the Lord is in power. The voice of the Lord is in majesty.”

The Rider kicked off the last bit of splintered board and glanced up at Japheth, who was slowly getting up from behind cover.

“The voice of the Lord breaketh the cedars,” the old preacher was saying, and as he did so he was beginning to tremble, and his voice was taking on a queer power.

“Get down, you damn fool!” The Rider hissed.

A bullet came buzzing through the doorway and flew right by the preacher’s face, destroying an old lantern sitting on a shelf only inches behind him. Japheth did not flinch, but began to walk toward the front door, his eyes glazed.

“The voice of the Lord cutteth out the flames of fire!” Japheth intoned.

On the rise, Medgar Tooms saw the old preacher step out onto the porch in plain view. He recognized him as the two-faced sonofabitch who had barked from the pulpit of the church in Gadara so many years ago, yet wouldn’t crack the doors for man, woman, or child when he’d swooped down on the town.

He finished priming his Whitworth and raised it to his shoulder again. The hogs stopped and swiveled their heads simultaneously to peer at the old man on the porch. Medgar Tooms pulled back the hammer of the Whitworth and lined up the little wedge on the end of the muzzle with the old man’s chest.

When Japheth saw Medgar Tooms standing near the old tree with his rifle aimed at him, he pointed one violently trembling finger at Tooms and his voice sang out like a clarion;

“The voice of the Lord shaketh the wilderness!”

Medgar’s finger pulled the trigger just as a thundering chain blue whip of lightning struck the tree at its base, an explosion like dynamite going off in his ears. The young hogs who had been gathered around the dead mule were thrown every which way and lay still, smoke curling off their black bodies. Medgar himself lay face down and he heard the wounded, lingering cries of the hogs that had not been killed instantly.

The blackened tree curled with tongues of flickering flame. Medgar shook his head to rid himself of the ringing, and to calm his crackling, excited hair, which stood on end.

Medgar glared angrily up at the old man, who still stood untouched on the porch, his Bible in hand.

He packed and primed his rifle and sorely brought himself up to one knee, acrid smoke curling off his shoulders.

The six old hogs rose smoking, and gathered around him excitedly, as if urging him on.

Japheth trembled, his breathing excited and his eyes wide with revelation, his very veins aquiver like humming telegraph wires.

Beneath the house, The Rider crouched in the cold dark, which was lined with streaks of sunlight coming through the overhead floorboards. He had heard the loud rumble of thunder and the tremendous crash. He was at a loss as to what it might have been, as he had jumped through the hole just before the clamorous sound. However, he heard the old man’s weight on the porch, and could see his shadow. Through the lattice of crisscrossed wood beneath the porch facing out into the white yard, he saw Medgar Tooms raising his rifle for another shot. Had he missed?

He crawled over to the front and began to kick savagely at the boards blocking his way.

“The Lord sitteth upon the flood; yea, the Lord sitteth the King forever!” called Japheth.

As if on cue, the great black oak gave a sudden twisting groan and fell forward. Medgar Tooms barely sidestepped it, and one of the old hogs was crushed flat.

Medgar’s shot again went wild, and he cursed and stumbled, catching himself with his musket like a crutch.

He did not reload again, but instead took up his rifle and began to stride deliberately towards the house, bayonet first, in the old marching step of the soldier. His face was twisted with hate, and he hastened into the quick step as he got closer.

The pigs, like fellow troops eager to engage the enemy, scurried behind him.

Japheth came down the porch steps, into the yard, to meet him.

“The Lord will give strength unto his people; the Lord will bless his people with peace,” he called to the heavens, voice trembling.

“Gonna kill you, sky pilot,” Medgar Tooms called out, his voice a harsh drawl.

“The Lord will give strength unto his people; the Lord will bless his people with peace,” Japheth repeated, his face surprisingly calm.

“I’d run if I was you,” Tooms drawled a little louder, getting closer. “Like you done that day. Remember?”

“The Lord will give strength unto his people,” Japheth said again, a little less sure.

“When you locked yourself in your goddamned church house and listened to them all poundin’ and scratchin’ and screamin’ at the door...remember that? Where were you and God that day, preacher? That day when they were callin’ and beggin’ for you both?” Medgar went on.

Japheth faltered now, taking one hesitant step back. He shook his head.

“The Lord will bless his people...” he stammered.

“Not you, preacher. Gonna stick you like a hog.”

“...with peace.”

At six yards, Medgar brought up his musket like a spear and gave a fearsome cry—the fabled Rebel Yell tempered in the flames of perdition. He ran full on, coat billowing behind him, bayonet tip red with blood, hogs pealing in hungry ecstasy and joining in his charge. His eyes were mad with bloodlust and his teeth drawn back like the maw of a black wolf bearing down on its prey.

The Rider levered four shots rapidly up through the lattice under the porch, and caught Medgar in the chest and legs. One of the hogs skidded to tumbling a stop, a bright red blossom bursting open in its thick pink forehead.

The bullets took Medgar Tooms by surprise, and he was blown back, his boots sliding out from under him in the snow. He landed on his back, the musket still clenched in his hand. He did not stir.

The hogs snuffled at the body of their master.

The Rider kicked aside the broken lattice and crawled out from under the porch

“Praise Gawd,” the old preacher said, closing his Bible and blinking his eyes as if to reassure himself that what he saw was still this world. “I thought you had abandoned me.”

The Rider grinned up at the old man and pulled himself up over the porch rail.

Suddenly, Tooms’ bayonet was up to the muzzle in Japheth’s dog-eared Bible, pinning it to his frail chest.

Japheth wheezed and doubled over.

Medgar Tooms drove the old man up the steps and down to the floor of the porch like a skewered varmint. He gave the musket a merciless twist that crackled with the sound of breaking bone and the rasp of torn cloth.

The Rider dropped to the porch. As he cocked his pistol, he saw the five ugly old hogs standing on their hind legs, snorting hotly at the frigid air.

Tooms wrenched the musket out of the old man and slammed the butt of the heavy rifle into The Rider’s waist, knocking all the wind out of him and flipping him back over the porch rail, putting him flat on his back on the ground. The hogs fell to their four feet and tramped up the steps onto the porch, oblivious to the scuffle. They swarmed over the old man, who managed to expel one blood-curdling scream before being drowned out by the gleeful, grunting exclamations of the porcine ravagers.

Tooms vaulted the rail musket first, intending to pin the Rider to the snowy ground, but he rolled and kicked out with both feet, separating the dark man from his Whitworth, which remained quivering, upright in the ground.

Tooms jerked a Remington pistol from his waistband and thumbed back the trigger as The Rider lost his last shot, shooting wildly and accidentally blowing one of the feasting hogs off the porch.

Tooms stumbled slightly as the hog tumbled down the front steps and fell heavily at his feet. The Rider seized the opportunity to jerk the stout barreled Derringer from under his arm and point it up at Tooms.

Tooms was faster. His Remington cracked once and struck The Rider’s Derringer, blowing it away and tearing off the tip of The Rider’s middle finger.

The Rider rolled forward on his knees, gripping his bleeding hand and staring at the bright red blots on the disturbed snow, sure it would be the last thing he saw of the mortal world before Tooms’ next shot blasted him out of his body for good.

But it didn’t come.

Instead, Tooms’ tall, horseman’s boots crunched backwards in the snow, and when The Rider glanced up, the gunman regarded him thoughtfully.

“We know you,” Tooms said. But it wasn’t Tooms. His voice was there, yes, but another, deeper, spoke in conjunction with his, and another past that, high and tinny, and the effect was sonorous and disjointed all at once. “We have seen you. You are The Rider who was turned away from the Holy Presence.”

The Rider did not answer. He noticed the blackened tip of his finger lying nearby in the snow. As he watched, one of the pigs clattered off the porch and with one dip of its jaws, gobbled it up.

“Who are you?” he panted, tucking his hand under his arm to staunch the blood.

“Oh, we are Gestas and Nahash, Lamech and Zuleika....we are many,” came the answer, and it seemed to come from all around, in voices of various tones and pitch. The Rider shuddered, realizing some of the voices were coming from where the swine surrounded Japheth, and these spoke as through mouthfuls of food.

“Call us Legion,” said the pig who had swallowed his fingertip, in a mocking, child’s voice. “The reverend thought he could rebuke us.”

The Rider refused to look at the animal, but addressed the man.

“You’re a bunch of dybbukim,” he said. As he had thought. Criminal souls escaped from their sentence in the fires of Gehenna, come to join with a like-minded mortal to continue their ill will in the physical world.

“What of it?” said Tooms, in a discordant chorus. “Without your prayer quorum and your ram’s horn what can you do to us? Like the old man, alone, you have not the faith to cast us out and we will not leave.” He cocked his pistol and aimed at The Rider’s head. “We could kill you here and now, as we have so many others.”

“What stays your hand?”

“We will tell you,” they said to him. “You are right, Rider. We are dybbukim, sentenced for our sins after death to suffer the same fate as Haman for all eternity. But we dragged ourselves out of our damnable prison by a line woven from the hatred of this mortal and the will of....well, friends, let us say.”

“Who? Molech?” The Rider growled. “Asmodai? You could not do this yourselves. The powers he has... who gave them to you?”

Tooms smiled. It was an odd expression on his grim face, lined with anger and hardship.

“We will not tell. Suffice it to say, for ten years now we have done the work of our masters.  We have cleared a path for the Hour of Incursion. Our period of servitude, like that of our charge, is ending. Yet...we will go on. We are henceforth free.”

“And?” The Rider dared, straightening. More of this strange, infernal plan. Somehow, these ragged dybbukim were tied to the cult of Molech worshipers he had disrupted in the San Pedro River Valley some months ago. Molech’s chief servant there had hinted towards some dark alliance, some monstrous plan that would culminate in an invasion of the physical world. Something again about The Hour of Incursion.

“It has been a crowded, stuffy decade, in the body of this killer,” they said.

“We need new vehicles,” the pig beside The Rider blurted in a child’s voice. “Tell him!”

Tooms looked annoyed, but shrugged.

“It is a rare thing to find a willing host such as dear Medgar, and we have decided not to let him go. But you have knowledge and abilities we can use to force our way into new hosts. You will accept one of us, and provide the rest with forms so that we may go our separate ways. If you refuse, Medgar Tooms will continue to soak this land with innocent blood.”

The Rider barely considered the proposition. Even if he were to agree, it would ultimately mean multiplying the death toll many times—once for every malicious spirit bestowed with a physical form; it would be like unleashing rabid dogs on the world.

In the snow, he thrilled to see the remnants of his Derringer. Tooms’ bullet had blown the grips from the pistol’s frame.

Yet it had not exploded, and the trigger itself seemed to be intact. But even if it would fire, he had seen the effect of bullets on Tooms’ supernaturally fortified body. The smoking, bloodless holes in his grey coat attested to it.

It was inches away. But so was the barrel of Tooms’ Remington.

“With his training, we cannot penetrate his conscious without his leave,” the pig said. “He will die first. Kill him now!”

“Shut up,” said Tooms, or whatever spirit inhabited him at that moment.

Then from behind, on the porch, Japheth coughed.

The pig’s head turned. Tooms glanced up.

In one desperate decision, The Rider dove for the little holdout and jammed it against the temple of the pig. There was a fiery blast, and the pig pinwheeled violently away, spewing blood from its nose, ears, and head.

The Rider turned and fired at the pig on the porch, with its snout buried in Japheth’s chest.  He blew a black hole behind its ear and its skull vomited up brains over the old man’s ragged wounds. It slumped lifeless.

The bullet continued on and burrowed into the eye of the fat sow that had been standing opposite, tugging at Japheth’s intestines. The slug erupted out her chin in a sloppy geyser. The sow stumbled off the porch and fell on its side, kicking and squealing.

The Rider wheeled the empty gun reflexively, futilely up at Tooms, and stopped.

Medgar Tooms stood quietly, his gun loose in the arm at his side, staring down at The Rider.

The remaining Thing had recoiled at the sudden departure of its cohorts. Without their power to bolster its own, its possession momentarily slipped, and it fell, flailing like a climber gripping at a sheer cliff face, plummeting to the back of Medgar Tooms’ mind. Without their presence like a hump on his back, whispering in his ear and curling around the base of his brain, injecting it with steady doses of blissful hate, Medgar Tooms found himself faced with a stark instant of terrible lucidity.

Connie Louise. His wife’s name was Connie Louise, and she had been as pretty as the sun stepping out over the hills. Then, the flood of the dead swelled behind his eyes. Neighbors, friends, yes, but more. Women, infants, people who had never heard of Gadara.

He shoved the muzzle of his Remington up under his own chin and with a pop that resounded far across the snow-covered countryside, Medgar Tooms’ fury turned from the Earth.

The Rider regained his feet slowly. He didn’t know what had caused Tooms to turn his gun on himself. Most likely he would never know. Maybe whatever rage had fueled the entities possessing him had departed along with them and been replaced with an equal amount of contrition. He thought of the family in the dusty framed portrait in the house.

The Rider had no blood relation left. The murder of his surrogate, scholarly brothers had sent him on a seven year hunt for a man who had been like a father to him. Yet The Rider had a focus for his anger. Tooms’ loss, more terrible than The Rider’s, had no villain to lay the blame on. His animal wrath had flailed without rhyme or reason, egged on by the dybbukim, an ultimately impotent fury that had struck down blameless strangers. Even children, very like the one whose loss had spurred him to rage.

The return of reason had perhaps brought a realization of this. To a one-time family man, maybe the revelation that he had become to others the villain whose throat he had sought to cut himself had been too much. In the end, maybe life had been too much to bear, and death had become a duty. In a way, at the hands of the dybbukim, he had committed a slow, painful suicide since the day his family died.

The Rider turned and looked on the grisly scene on the porch.

J.T. Lessmoor was dying. His guts had been ripped open and gnawed at savagely by the industrious devil-hogs. His blood ran in a pool over the porch, mingling with that of the scattered, dead pigs. His limbs were crooked and useless and his wound was quivering and gaping. Yet his face was calm, his eyes aware. He stared up at The Rider.

“By the Bible, and the sword,” Japheth wheezed weakly. He shook his head in one final intonation. “Glory be.”

The Rider closed the old man’s eyes with his fingertips. Surely here was a righteous mensch, one of the hasidei ummot ha-olam. No less burdened by guilt than Tooms had been, in his way, surely he had found redemption at last. This strange old goy had healed him, body and soul, both with the raw, miraculous power he had called down from The Lord, and with a stranger’s objective insight into his prideful failing. Before this man, The Rider had doubted his purpose on a fundamental level. Now, he knew that one day he would stand before God as surely as this Christian, this Noah. Japheth had taken away The Rider’s doubt. He thought too, that in the end, he had lost his own. It was written in the Tosefta Sanhedrin that the righteous of the nations of the world have their portion in the world to come. He grieved, but he felt sure he would see this man again.

The Rider bound his own open wounds and gathered the old man up, slowly, painfully.  He wrapped him in a blanket from the buggy. The ground, he thought, would be too cold to break with a shovel, but after securing a spade from the tool shed, he found the earth near the grave of Tooms’ wife and child to be surprisingly yielding, as though it had been kept warm and waiting, like the bed of an absent loved one.

It took him until sunset, and it was back breaking work, but he buried the old preacher and Medgar Tooms and said the Kaddish over them. As a marker for Tooms, he left the Whitworth rifle, bayonet buried in the little mound beneath which he lie. For the preacher, he broke the hitch of the buggy and fashioned a crude Christian cross.

“Tell the angel Metatron I’ll see him again, Reverend,” he whispered.

The hogs, he put into a heap and doused with old oil from a lamp in the house. He could still smell the odor of their immolation as he walked into the sleepy main street of Gadara and collapsed in a doorway.

He slept, though fitfully. Animal shrieks sounded in his dark dreams, and he kept jerking awake, a nervous anxiety about the mysterious Hour of Incursion stemming the tide of slumber. Each time he opened his eyes, he feared it had already come.

When he awoke, he realized he was sleeping in the doorway from his vision, the door to the old church, Japheth’s church. It was here that he’d heard the screams and the desperate pounding; the people of Gadara, pleading with their preacher to be let inside God’s house.

The town was empty, the buildings and shops and homes peppered with large bore bullet holes.

He made his way back to Japheth’s cabin, where the onager waited.

IV: The Nightjar Women

The Rider shared a desert camp with an unimaginably dirty prospector from Mobile, Alabama with the unlikely name of Pete Boggs. Pete had taken him for another prospector because they shared the same long growth of beard. Whereas The Rider’s chin whiskers were a matter of halakha, to this vagabond it was necessity; he plied his trade far from a regular source of water and couldn’t afford to waste it on ablutions.

Pete offered to buy The Rider’s onager right off, citing its pale color and singular dark stripe as ‘the damndest thing he’d ever seen,’ but The Rider declined. The animal had come all the way from Jerusalem, after all. To get rid of the faithful, if obstinate, creature now would be like betraying his oldest friend.

It had been a difficult visit at first. The Rider could not share the man’s food, or his whiskey, or even his cup.

“By God, you are a conspicuous son of a bitch, ain’t you?” Pete finally said, throwing up his hands as The Rider took his own crockery off the onager, then proceeded to brew his coffee after refusing Pete’s own. “A more sensitive feller might get his feelings hurt campin’ with you.”

Pete put voice to a nearly constant concern of The Rider in his travels. His customs made it difficult to associate with the world through which he walked. He couldn’t share a meal or drink with most people because of the kashrut, couldn’t travel or work on the Shabbat, couldn’t even ride a horse or give his real name because of his oath to the Sons of the Essenes. It made for a lonely existence. Sometimes it led to violence. He still remembered the drunken drover he had crippled for trying to shave him with a Bowie knife in Leadville.

The Rider did his best to explain his ways to Pete, as he had to dozens of other goyim in the past. Of course, in his life, he had committed sins both large and small, and sometimes he had slipped in his observance of the mitzvot. Traveling in the desert made it particularly hard to immerse oneself in a naturally occurring spring, for instance. But his Merkabah abilities in part depended upon remaining shomer shabbo; they could wax or wane according to his spiritual purity.

And he had need of the skills The Sons of the Essenes had taught him. Adon, his renegade teacher, was still loose in the world. Seven years now the Rider had hunted him, following his murderous track across the world, and finally back to America where Adon had begun his blasphemous career, baptizing himself in the blood of the San Francisco enclave.

It was because of that, he sometimes felt an even greater need to adhere to the mitzvot than perhaps he had before. He was the last graduate of his yeshiva, the last of the San Francisco Sons of The Essenes.

“How about women?” Pete asked out of the blue as they lay across from each other, the fire spluttering low between them.

“What?” The Rider asked. He had almost been asleep.

“I said how about women? Can you…?”

The Rider cut him off.

“Not with unmarried women.”

Pete was quiet for a moment.

“You mean…a woman you ain’t married to yourself.”

The Rider smirked.

“That’s right.”

“Well, but everybody’s s’posed to stick to that one,” Pete mused. “I mean…bein’ way out here…don’t you never think to take it as you can get it?”

The Rider turned his head sharply.

“I mean with a woman,” Pete said quickly. “There’s women to be had. You know, hurdy gurdy gals…town women.”

“No,” The Rider said, closing his eyes. “Technically I’m supposed to cover my ears if I hear a woman singing.”

“By God,” Pete chuckled sleepily. “You Jews are harder on yourselves than Baptists even.”

Why had he volunteered that? He knew Pete would ridicule the notion. To him it was absurd. Maybe The Rider even felt it was a little absurd himself. Was it confirmation he was seeking?

He slept fitfully.

In the morning, Pete did not offer The Rider breakfast. He ate his own and watched him wind his tefilin straps around his arm and head and don his fringed prayer shawl. He listened curiously as The Rider recited his morning prayers.

When The Rider had packed up his onager, Pete patted the animal and shook his hand.

“You take care of yourself, Rider.”

“And you, my friend.”

“Keep skirtin’ them mountains, you’ll come to Cottonwood Creek. Follow it and it’ll come up along a road. That’ll take you to Tip Top.”

“I’m not going to Tip Top,” The Rider said.

“Sure you are. There’s women in Tip Top,” Pete winked. “Six or seven the last I heard. Pretty ones.”

The Rider broke into a grin and shook his head. Pete stood waving for a while until he was out of sight. Yet when the time came to turn towards Prescott, The Rider instead chose to edge along the mountains as Pete had suggested. The way was rugged and seemed to physically discourage him and the onager. He had an uneasy feeling. He did not know, or did not claim to know why he had turned from his course. He reasoned that Adon, as a fugitive, would surely not flee to a town as large as Prescott. He had long suspected that if ever he found his teacher, it would be in one of these ramshackle frontier camps. The last he had heard of him was that he was in Arizona Territory…but he knew this was all self-delusion. In truth, he had lain awake for a long time thinking of his conversation with Pete.

He prayed often while he walked, but there was shame in his heart, for he still didn’t turn aside. It was foolishness. He had never before sought the company of a paid woman, had on occasion even rebuffed their advances, and this had made him sinfully proud in his worst moments.

But he was a man, and he had been alone for a long time. A man craved company. The importance of his mission had caused him to shun companionship of any sort for so long. In a way, he was like the onager, far from home, far from its own kind, far from attaining any sort of normal life.

He walked into Tip Top in the dead of night, into the narrow valley the creek had cut into the rocky hills centuries ago. He would have been there sooner, but he had actually stopped to bathe in the creek, reinforcing in his mind his intent to forswear his vows.

God, what was this? He had felt such temptations before, but never like this. Maybe the frustration of his long and so far fruitless search for Adon was compounding it. He felt like breaking all his vows, just casting off all the tradition, shaving his beard and walking away from the responsibility.

While a soldier in Ford’s Company (later, the 2nd Colorado Cavalry), he had broken many of the commandments, often out of necessity. Yet always, when his comrades had sought out women, he had remained shomer negiah. While some of them had spent the nights leading up to a battle cavorting and finding solace wherever and with whomever they could find, even among each other, he had confined his attentions solely to prayer and usually alone. He might have died a hundred times in battles from New Mexico to Kansas and never known a single feminine gesture. It seemed madness to him now. Now he longed to touch a woman, and perhaps more.

He walked swiftly down the street, which was crowded with drunken miners even at this late hour. He was confounded. He listened for the sound of a woman’s voice, the telltale shrill giggle or snatch of bawdy song he had gone out of his way to avoid in the past.

What was he doing?

The onager lagged behind as if counseling him to tarry and think. He pulled its lead taut, urging it to quicken its pace as he doubled his own in his eagerness.

He passed a corral and a dark candy store before he came across a squat stone hotel and a saloon. The hotel was dim and silent. A clerk could be seen with his head down beside a failing lamp on the desk through the open door. The saloon was bright and alive with male voices. Foolishness. This was foolishness. What was he looking for? A whore not surrounded by men? Even in sin he was too particular.

He walked down the stony, winding road past a dark cemetery alive with the strange churring of some night birds and a lonesome, silent windmill. He spared a glance at that, hunched his shoulders, and went on. He passed more stone houses, miner’s tents and frame huts, lit from within like paper lanterns, then past more glowing, busy saloons, dim businesses and a sprawling, silent mill. Soon he found himself clear on the other side of town.

He was uncomfortable and walked with his head down. He was considering a red lamp burning before a house in the distance, when a dark haired young woman in a green and violet dress crossed the street in front of him.

She wasn’t much more than eighteen, but her smooth face had a pursed, knowing expression. Her dark, deep set eyes were bold and didn’t flinch from the shambling drunks who ogled her. She gripped the skirts of her dress in white fists as she hustled across the road, dark stockings showing on her small ankles. She had night black hair, unsuccessfully piled on her head, threatening to burst into a long and full bodied mane. Her lips seemed almost the same color as her white face, and The Rider was struck by the definition of her form.

Sensing they would collide given her pace, he stopped in front of the unimaginatively named No. 2 Saloon (so called, although it was the fourth he’d seen) and stared at her as she came closer. Even this simple pleasure of watching a beautiful woman, he thought sourly, was a violation of the halakha.

She met his eyes as she made for the open door of the saloon, and her black eyebrows knotted.

He found himself opening his mouth to speak, embarrassed she had caught him looking.

“Ah…excuse me, miss,” he began hurriedly.

“Look,” she snapped, “I’m going in for the night, alright? I’m going to bed. Alone.”

He touched the brim of his hat and his eyes fell. He lowered his head slightly to hide his own blushing. He had been face to face with demons of Hell. This was somehow worse.

“I’m sorry…please…I was just looking for a place to stay.”

“You blind, mister? You passed the goddamned hotel,” she muttered. “Why…”

And then she stopped. She stood poised, one small foot on the plank board in front of the No. 2. She came over and stood in front of him.

Miserably, he ventured to raise his head, and saw she was staring at him, looking him up and down, even as he had her.

“My God,” she said, and her face went from furrowed curiosity to a hint of hesitant pleasure, as if he were an old friend. “You’re Hasid?”

Her inflection, her pronunciation was unmistakable. He smiled slightly and nodded, amazed at the coincidence. She was Jewish.

Her own smile split her face. It lit up the night.

“Well! You’re not from around here. Where are you from?”

“San Francisco.”

Her cheeks swelled and she clutched her hands like a little girl in obvious enjoyment.

“I’m from San Francisco too. Near South Park.”

“My father was a dry goods clerk,” The Rider said. Strange, that he should tell a stranger all that. “We lived south of the Slot.”

She smirked.

“Oh, you caught me in a lie,” she admitted. “My father was a baker. We lived south of the Slot too.”

It was hardly a lie. South of the Slot was a working class neighborhood, surrounded by industry and immigrant slums. South Park was more affluent, and he’d known a lot of proud Jews who had claimed to live ‘near South Park.’ The two areas were close, after all.

“Well, you told me yourself,” The Rider smiled, “so it’s not a lie.”

“I’m Sadie.”

He faltered. He wanted to tell her his name, but he said;

“Rider.”

She cocked an eyebrow.

“What kind of name is Rider for a Hasid on foot?”

“Well,” he shrugged, “what sort of name is Sadie for a Jewish girl from south of the Slot?”

She giggled. It was absolutely musical.

“Alright, alright,” she said, warming to him. “What happened? They wouldn’t let you in at the hotel?” She didn’t let him answer. “Those bastards. Come inside.” She nodded to the No. 2. “It’s not very nice, but I know the owner, and there’s a cot you can sleep on in the back. Tie up your mule out front for now.”

He did, as she went inside, smiling fetchingly over her shoulder, oblivious to the lustful thoughts he conjured in his head.

The onager seemed to sense it, and threw back its head suddenly, catching him in the chin.

“Alright!” he hissed at the animal. “So you’re not a mule,” he whispered. “Well neither am I.”

He took his saddlebags and went in after her.

There was no door on the place, just a dusty muslin curtain that was drawn to the side. The floor was hard packed earth, the ceiling low and hung with straw. The bar was plank and barrel, candlelit. Behind it, a thin haired man with a large moustache in a nice, but rumpled shirt and pinstriped trousers stood pouring himself a glass of whiskey with an unsteady hand. There was a .44 lying on the bar beside the bottle.

“This all you brang in tonight?” he was saying as The Rider walked in. Sadie stood at the bar across from him. She laid a couple of coins on the wood. “You still just usin’ your hand? Didn’t I tell you you can’t make nothin’ just usin’ your hand?”

The man looked up at The Rider and fixed him with a pair of dark, bleary eyes. He scraped the money off the bar and tucked it into his pants pocket.

“We’re closin’ up,” he slurred. Then his eyes shot to Sadie and back. “‘Less you’re here for somethin’ quick, bud.”

The Rider felt his ears burn, and his fists balled at his sides. The money on the bar, his rough talk…

“Johnny, this is my cousin from San Francisco,” Sadie said quickly. “Rider, this is Johnny Behan.”

“Cousin?” said Behan, staring at The Rider and taking a moment to slam back his whiskey. “What the fuck does he want?”

“Just a place to sleep tonight,” Sadie said.

“What’s the matter, your cousin can’t talk for himself? Or does he only speak Heeb?”

“I speak English,” The Rider said, crossing the floor.

“What’s the matter with the hotel up the street?”

“They wouldn’t take him, Johnny,” Sadie said.

He shot her a look, then leaned on the bar and looked at The Rider.

“What makes you think I will?”

“Please Johnny?” Sadie said. “He’s got no place…”

“Alright, alright. He stays in the cot and he’s got to pay, same as everybody else.”

“He’s my cousin.”

“C’mon now, I ain’t sayin’ he’s got to do nothin,’ I’m just sayin’ that cot’s a place of business and no matter what he wants it for, I lose money if it’s occupied.”

“You’re drunk,” Sadie said, stepping away from the bar. She looked pleadingly at The Rider. “He wouldn’t talk this way if he weren’t drunk.”

Behan lunged across and caught her arm, pulling her back.

“Wouldn’t I?”

The Rider took a step forward.

“Let her go,” he said.

“You can keep your filial piety, cousin,” said Behan. “You just show me the color of your money or you can turn your Yid ass around and sleep out there with the pigs.”

The Rider’s thoughts went to the golden Volcanic pistol on his hip. He had dealt with men like Behan before. Sadie was right. He would not talk this way if he wasn’t drunk. The liquor hadn’t buoyed his courage, it had drowned his sense. He had an urge to lay the barrel of his gun alongside this pimp’s nose.

Then Sadie let out a shriek.

At first The Rider thought it was directed at him. Maybe she had seen his hand brush his pistol and thought he was going to gun her Johnny Behan down. He easily could have. The Rider doubted Behan was sober enough to get to the .44 and cock it.

But then he realized she had been startled by something else. Following her eyes, he turned toward the door.

There in the doorway leaned the haggard figure of a woman. She was dead pale and hollow eyed, her sandy hair soaked with sweat and clinging about her neck. Her grayish nightdress was plastered to her thin body. She clutched something wrapped in a black and orange afghan to her chest. Everything from below her waist to the ankles of her spindly, wobbling legs was bright red with blood. It was trickling down the insides of her knees in such copious amounts they could hear it puddling on the floor between her bare feet. Her face was screwed up into a trembling grimace, dark eyelids drooping, cheeks slashed with tears.

Sadie overcame her shock and rushed forward. The bloody woman staggered into the room, crashed against a chair, overturning it, and fell into Sadie’s arms.

“Oh my God.” Sadie sunk to the floor with the woman across her lap. “Oh my God, she’s dead!”

The Rider wasn’t looking at the woman. Her bundle had slipped from her arms as she collapsed, and its bloody little burden rolled out onto the dirt floor. It was an infant, or the beginnings of an infant, only a little less than nine or ten inches long. Gray and half-formed, it was curled like a salamander on the floor. The overpowering sea reek of it made The Rider touch the back of his hand to his lips.

“Good God almighty!” whispered Behan, making a cursory sign of the cross.

Protruding from the barely formed shoulder blades of the fetus were a pair of knobby protrusions, bent like spindly little elbows. The crooks of these growths were webbed with thin, fleshy membranes, like bloody, featherless wings.

* * * *

By the time Henry Wager the constable could be found, roused from sleep, and urged to put on his star and his boots, a crowd of noisy miners had already gathered. Behan stood at the door and kept them at bay, while Sadie wrapped the dead woman in a blanket and The Rider stood at the bar considering the thing in the afghan.

Constable Wager was a squint eyed, rawboned desert dweller with graying hair and baked skin. He could have been thirty or sixty. He arrived at last in only his long underwear, boots, and coat, with his belt and holster over his shoulder, but no gun in it.

He knew the dead woman right off.

“Whalp,” he said over his shoulder as he stood over the body, idly scratching his behind, “somebody go wake up Alph Gersten and tell him his sister’s layin’ here in the No. 2 dead.”

To Sadie, he said;

“You find her?”

“She found us,” Sadie said. Her arms were caked in the dead woman’s drying blood.

Wager went over to the thing lying half covered in the afghan and exposed it with the toe of his boot.

His eyes widened and he took a step back at the sight of it.

“What the fuck is this?”

“She carried it in here,” Sadie said dully. She had covered it herself, and she came over and did it again, gently. “Getting it out of her is probably what killed her.”

“But what is it?” Wager pressed. “Some kinda…”

There was a commotion from the street, and a booming voice drew closer, calling out a name over and over again in a thick German accent.

“Rica? Rica? Where is she?”

Wager gestured hurriedly to Sadie.

“Come here and stand over it, girl, don’t let Alph see this damn thing.”

Sadie wrinkled her nose.

“Let him see it,” she said.

The man that appeared at the doorway was broad shouldered and red faced, with close cropped hair, huge ears, and a great, bushy moustache. Roused from his sleep like Wager, he had on only his trousers and braces, and great heaving muscles worked beneath the bushy hair that sprouted from his chest, belly and arms. He swept aside the miners and Behan and came into the room like thunder, calling his sister’s name over and over.

When he saw her lying on the floor at Sadie’s feet, he paused, then gave a great wail and fell to his knees beside her, lifting her easily in his arms. He commenced to shake her, as if to wake her, and called her name again.

Sadie came over and slapped him.

He stared up at her, his blue fire eyes gushing tears, and looked to Wager.

“What happened?” he managed.

“She did what you wanted,” Sadie answered coldly. “She got rid of it. It’s layin’ over there,” she said, pointing out the small form in the afghan. “Go on and look.”

Alph got to his feet and shook his head.

“I don’t want to see it.” He turned and went to the door.

Sadie took off her shoe and flung it. It bounced off the back of Alph’s head, hard enough to leave a red mark, but he didn’t stop. The men at the door stood aside and he bore the corpse of his sister out into the night.

Behan shot a disapproving look at Sadie, then his eyes went to the stillborn thing, and he called out after Alph.

“Well somebody better come and get this thing outta my place, goddammit!”

Wager scratched the back of his neck.

“Whalp,” he said. “I guess…I can take it.”

“I’ll bury it tomorrow,” Sadie said. “It’ll just wind up in a jar of whiskey at a penny-a-look otherwise.”

She wrapped the little body up in a tight bundle.

Behan came to stand by her.

“Say…,” Behan began.

“Good night, Johnny,” she hissed. She went into the backroom with the bundle and drew the ragged curtain shut.

Behan put his fists on his hips and called after her.

“Hey!”

The Rider dragged a chair from one of the tables across the floor and propped it against the wall beside the curtained doorway. He sat down and stared at Behan until the man broke into an uneasy grin and turned to the other men gathered in the doorway.

“Hey fellas, how about some drinks while you’re all clutterin’ up my front porch?”

As the men filed in, all talking at once, The Rider put his hat over his eyes and tilted the chair back.

He dreamed in red, as if through rock candy. All was the color of the lantern he had seen in the dark distance on the edge of Tip Top. In his dream it was night, the full moon scarlet in the sky.

He was naked and chasing a pale figure across a bed of stony, unending desert. The figure was a woman, one he had never seen before, or perhaps he had glimpsed once in the Jerusalem market. Her features were Palestinian. She had a long, prominent nose and bold eyes with a wide, full lipped mouth. There was an ecstatic smile on her face as she looked at him over her shoulder, a smile almost mad in its sheer abandon. She was naked too, and entirely hairless. She had no eyebrows, even. The red moonlight shone on her smooth head and on the curve of her ample posterior as she scampered lightly across the stones.

Although he was certain he had never seen her before, in the manner of dreams, she was Sadie.

His bodily excitement increased as his pursuit continued, and though the ground between them lessened, she never quite slowed, and so the distance was perpetual. She laughed, a high, titillating laugh, like clashing anklets, and shot him gleeful looks over her bare shoulder. It maddened him.

They passed through a grove of cactus, and the curved arms of the saguaros were suddenly alive with movement as dozens of perching birds took to the night sky. Their fluttering, speckled wings blotted out the moon.

Then he stood before a still, feminine figure entirely amorphous because of her long hair, which brushed the ground and was so full as to entirely obscure her body.

He felt ashamed by his nakedness and arousal. Then the figure before him sprouted slender, pale arms on either side, and lowered to the ground. From the mass of hair, a pair of shapely hips and well-formed legs appeared. She fell into a swaying, shaking dance that slowly built into a whirling frenzy. She turned graceful circles and wove mesmerizing patterns in the air with her twisting arms. He was aware of a tune, gentle and melancholy, almost courtly, and a beauteous voice whose operatic words he could not quite catch.

The Rider’s dream self turned in a dizzying circle and peered intently at the brazen form, desperate to catch a glimpse of her body and face. As her hair flew about her, he was rewarded with flashes of shuddering breasts, freckled shoulders, of a heaving belly and smiling, painted lips barely covering rows of straight white teeth.

He reached out to touch her and the dancing and singing abruptly ceased. She stood before him once more, frozen in a spraddle-legged, squatting pose, fingers interlaced above her head.

Then, from between her legs, through the curtain of hanging hair, a giant, shining black scorpion tail lashed out.

As the venomous stinger pierced his body, his chair slid out from under him and he crashed to the floor of the No. 2 with a fearful exclamation.

Behan peered over at him from the bar, as if he had never moved. Maybe he hadn’t.

“Whatever you had last night, I wish I could bottle it, cousin,” he said.

The Rider got to his feet and righted the chair. He was bathed in sweat and his body was still in a state of excitement brought on by the torridness of the dream. Pete Boggs would have laughed it off and told him to go behind a rock and take care of it. Pete would not have had an inkling of what The Rider knew. Dreams were not random mental associations for The Rider. He knew that the self sometimes slipped from its physical shell during sleep and that at such times, all manner of forces could assail it. Normally he took careful preventive measures including nightly prayers with the tefilin. But last night he had been so tired he had dozed off.

“Where’s Sadie?” he managed. His throat was dry. He nearly asked Behan for a whiskey.

“At the funeral,” Behan said.

The Rider went out the front door of the No. 2 with his saddlebags over his shoulder into a cool and windy morning. A few men were hawking tools and supplies in the street, and he deflected an offer for the onager as he fed it. Then he headed off down the road, back to the cemetery he’d passed in the night.

There was a decent turnout. Alph Gersten was there, and Constable Wager. Some men bound for the mine and the mill had stopped to pay their respects. There were women there too, four of them, scattered among the mourners on the arms of their husbands. Nine more women stood at a respectful distance from the open grave, in various states of dress, ranging from stylish silks and bustles, to simple shifts of cotton and shabby homespun dresses. They were of every race, but shared a common, dull eyed expression, as if life were a thing to be weathered.

Sadie stood off alone. The Rider came up beside her as a balding man in a patched grey frock coat, who looked so much like the constable that The Rider’s eyes passed quickly between them both to reassure him they were not the same man, took out a Bible and began to read lowly over Rica Gersten’s simple coffin. His voice hardly carried above the wind and the churring of the birds, oddly enough, the same birds he had heard when he’d passed the graveyard last night.

Sadie looked at him, but said nothing.

The Rider’s eyes passed from the man in the frock to Alph Gersten, whose thunderous grief of the night before had burned down into a glowering resentment, which he directed solely at his sister’s coffin with glistening, heavy eyes. An older man with a graying red beard stood beside him, a straw hat pressed to his chest and a solemn, stocky woman with almost albino blonde hair and invisible eyebrows clutching his arm.

“The baby?” The Rider whispered.

Sadie looked at him again.

“I buried him with the other infants,” she said, and nodded to a row of small plank markers in the back of the cemetery, near a stand of brush.

“It was a boy?” The Rider asked.

She nodded.

“How many infants have died in this town?”

She shrugged.

“Count the graves…four.”

“The woman…Rica. Did you know her well?”

“Not well. I don’t know why she would’ve come to me. Last March a troop of soldiers stopped here for a couple days. She told her brother she intended to go off with one of ‘em. I guess she meant to follow the troop to their fort, work as a washerwoman so she could be close to him. Alph told her he wouldn’t have it, locked her in her room.”

“And the soldiers left?”

“That’s the sad part. All of ‘em left but her soldier boy. He ran off from his troop to stay with her. Hung out a couple of days. I think he really meant to take her away.”

“What happened?”

“Nobody knows. Johnny thinks Alph ran him off, or killed him. Some soldiers came back looking for him, but nobody could say what happened to him.”

“And she was found to be with child?”

“She hadn’t been with anybody else. A girl like that? She could hardly speak English. ‘Course Alph let her have it when he found out. Told her he would disown her and run her out of town himself. I expect that’s why she tried to get rid of it. Goddamn, but the things men will drive a woman to and then turn around and blame her for.”

The Rider looked at her fully.

“Listen to me, Sadie. This is important…”

The preacher had ceased his reading and the gathered mourners began to sing a disorderly version of ‘Shall We Gather at the River’ as some of the miners began to lower the box in the grave. Alph suddenly shook off the comforting hand of the man beside him and went to the lip of the grave and spun on the others.

“Who done it?” he yelled above the singers until they petered out one after another. “Who done this to my sister?”

He paced back and forth before the grave like a caged animal, and then went toward the group of women at the back. They shrank before him, all except a group of three out front who were a little better dressed, a little more powdered and well-kept than the others. The Rider couldn’t see them well from where he stood, but among them was a sharply appareled, slim man in a wide, pancake hat, who stepped between Alph and a red haired woman with a peacock feathered parasol and black velvet bustle.

“Which one of you whores done it? Which one of you?”

The slim man held up one manicured hand and with his other, flung back the tails of his crushed blue velvet frock to display a silvery, pearl handled pistol in a holster on his left hip.

The big German paused, red in the face, and threw his impotent fury over the women with a withering but useless glare.

No one said anything, and The Rider noted that several of the men and women mourners looked away as though embarrassed.

The red bearded man and his sunny haired wife came over at last and took Alph by his elbows and led him away. The woman spared a glance at the slim man and the prostitutes, but quickly dropped her eyes.

“Who are they?” The Rider whispered.

“Pete and Eileen Arnold. They run the brewery. Alph works for them,” Sadie said. “They’re Germans too.”

“No, no,” said The Rider. But he caught himself, for he almost said ‘the prostitutes.’ He felt suddenly embarrassed again. He didn’t know just what to say to Sadie.

As the coffin was lowered, the hymn was forgotten, and many of the mourners replaced their hats and dispersed as the mill whistle blew sharp and steady. The women went off in different directions. Many of them were a sickly, tired looking lot who gave off an air of being beaten down. Their eyes never left the ground. It was early in the morning, but several were painted for their work already. Perhaps they had never retired for the night.

The trio of well dressed women, one Oriental, the other yellow haired, and a red head, turned almost as one and went out of the cemetery together with their garishly dressed escort. These were not like the others. They were remarkably attractive and well-groomed considering their profession and location. They were like fine drapery in a shack, or blooming flowers in a dry gulch.

They walked amid lace and silk and feathers, more like dolls than real women. They did not hang their heads either, but walked with a haughtiness that was undeniably intriguing. In the middle of them, the slim man led the red headed woman with the peacock feather parasol with the crook of his arm. She wore a pair of blackened glasses and stumbled slightly, betraying her own significant if slightly matronly beauty with a strange lack of grace…no. Not a lack of grace. The Rider watched the upwards tilt of her head which he had mistaken for haughtiness, and the overly trusting way in which she drew herself close to her thin escort. She was blind.

The man at her side could hardly be called such, except that the gun he wore and the manner in which he had interposed himself between his mistress and the raging German said plainly that he would not suffer to be questioned on the matter. His garb was outrageously over-stylish. He contended with the women around him in the deportment of lace and silk. It poked out from his collar and sleeves. His pale face and expression were respectively smooth and womanly, and the trim, golden moustache over his noticeably red lips was ridiculous when taken into account with his tightly curled blonde hair, just visible beneath the tremendous brim of his rakishly tilted navy and white trimmed pancake hat. He wore leather trousers that accentuated his waifishness, and shining, high heeled boots with silver spurs that caught the light. The most euphemistic word The Rider could have mustered to describe the man would have been ‘dandy’— something he had heard in his western travels.

He watched them pass as he might watch a colorful parade. They went off down the road past the No. 2, toward the far outskirts of town.

When he turned his attention back to Sadie, he found that they were the last mourners left to watch the dirt fall on Rica’s coffin.

“Her lovin’, grievin’ brother,” she hissed under her breath, “couldn’t even stay with her in the end.”

“Sadie,” The Rider said. “Do you know…who would have performed the abortion?”

Sadie looked at him.

“You think I ought to know, is that it?” her expression was hard, and her voice trembled. “We all move in the same circles, isn’t that it?”

“I’m sorry,” was all he could think to say. “I didn’t mean it that way…”

He moved to touch her hand, but stopped himself.

She stared at him, looked at his hands, frozen in midair, watched them retreat. For a moment he thought she would spit in his face, thinking he was recoiling from her because of what she was. Then her face seemed to relax.

“You’re not supposed to touch a woman are you?” she said.

“Shomer negiah,” he said, nodding.

“I remember.” Her eyes looked far away for a moment. “You only touch the woman you’re going to marry.”

He blanched slightly, to hear it spoken by her. It was true. He had been taught that touch was a sacred, personal thing, the first among all intimate physical connections, and not something to be dispensed casually. It was not disgust that stayed his hand. It was a deep, ingrained respect. And he had come to this town to throw that away.

“Please,” he stammered. “Tell me, why are you with this Johnny Behan?”

She sighed.

“It’s complicated, you know? I didn’t come out here thinking I would…I mean, I never wanted to…I don’t think any woman wants to…”

She looked at him, and her eyes looked so heavy and wet that he almost embraced her. Instead, he clasped his hands before him.

“But you know how it was, living in those tenements. Four families under a roof. I couldn’t breathe there. I wanted to just get out. My friend and I, we came out here to be actresses.” She chuckled, shaking her head, and brushed away a tear. “We joined up with the Pauline Markham Pinafore Troupe. We were headed to Prescott when I met Johnny on the trail. He was campaigning then, for County Sheriff. He had a way about him. A big way of talking. He made it sound like he could lay the world at your feet. When he didn’t win…well, we traveled together for a while. And there wasn’t much money. And it was either I…either I got us some, or we starved.”

She turned, and looked out across the graves. “I managed to…a man…helped me. I went home for awhile, but…home had never really been home to me anyway. Johnny sent for me. He said we could be married. He had all these schemes…we put our money in the No. 2. And well, it hasn’t taken off yet.” She balled her fists, and struck them against her thighs. “I said this wouldn’t happen again. I said I wouldn’t do it.”

She turned, and looked at The Rider. Her cheeks were wet with tears.

“But here I am.”

He wanted to reach out to her then. He wanted to pull her by the hand and march out of Tip Top with her….what? Atop his onager? Where would they go? What would they do? Could he offer her any more than Johnny Behan could?

“I don’t know who gave her the abortion,” she said, wiping her eyes. “I’ve heard some girls go to the two Chinese sisters who run the laundry.”

He looked past her for a moment, and fell on the four little graves near the brush. A little brown bird was perched on one of the planks, its throat moving as it made the queer churring sound he’d heard all through the service. A little brown bird with white dappled wings, like tree bark. It seemed familiar.

“What is that bird?” he asked.

She turned and looked as it beat its small wings and flew off from the plank.

“Johnny calls them nightjars,” she said.

The Rider stepped past her slowly, listening to the spades of the gravediggers biting into the earth. He stood over the plank where the nightjar had perched. Its crude inscription read ‘Unnamed Infant – Mar 1878.’ The other three were similarly marked, two from last year, two from this year, and the mound of fresh turned earth below which lay the aborted baby of Rica Gersten and her soldier. He wondered if the other children were the same as Rica’s. Then he noticed the other unmarked mounds. Three more, in a line.

Four little marked graves, four married women, and no children at the funeral.

“What about these?” he said, pointing to the unmarked graves.

“They were here before I got here,” Sadie shrugged. “I don’t know what’s in them. I guess maybe unwanted babies.”

“How long have you been here, Sadie?” he asked, as he heard her come up behind him.

“Since February.”

“Are there any children in town?”

Sadie paused, frowning.

“I’ve never seen any, no.”

“Are there any other pregnant women?”

“Manuel Calles’ wife is due in a few months,” she said. “He’s one of the saloonkeepers. Then there’s Eileen Arnold’s—she’s due any day now, and there’s a colored girl…I’ve seen her hanging clothes out back of The Bird Nest. She’s pretty well along. I haven’t seen her in a while. It may be she’s already had her baby.”

Pete Arnold’s wife. The blonde haired woman on the arm of the red bearded man beside Alph at the funeral. She wasn’t stocky, she was pregnant.

He went without a word out of the graveyard, and Sadie followed, asking again and again what the matter was.

He didn’t answer until he had his rotating vice locked onto the edge of the No. 2’s bar, and had spread out his engraving tools and some small blank plates and medallions from his saddlebags on a piece of black velvet. Three blank rectangular plates.

“Did your father or your mother ever tell you stories when you were a little girl?” he asked, when he had rolled up his sleeves and set his jeweler’s eyepiece in his eye.

It was early yet, but Behan was on the other end of the bar pouring whiskey to a couple of bleary eyed men who had apparently hit the other four saloons on the road before stumbling into this one. The Rider watched them out of the corner of his eye. They were taking an interest in what he was doing, and in Sadie as she leaned on the bar beside him.

“Sure, some.”

“Did they ever tell you stories from the Talmud?”

“Of course. Like…Moses, Noah, Adam and Eve…”

He looked up at her and smiled.

“Yes, exactly. Like Adam and Eve.”

He took up his push graver and a tiny hammer. Joseph Klein, one of his old teachers among the Sons of the Essenes, had taught him engraving. He had chiseled and tapped the mystic etchings into his own pistol, and he had crafted most of the Solomonic amulets he wore. Those had been complex jobs. The pistol alone had taken months. This was relatively simple work. He scraped and graved as he spoke.

“But did you know that Eve wasn’t Adam’s first wife?”

She looked at him, waiting for his explanation.

“In the Alphabet of Ben Sira, it says that God created another woman for Adam out of the dust, just as he was made. This woman was named Lilith, and she argued with Adam all the time.”

“About what?”

“Everything.” The Rider shrugged, fitting a plate into the vice and cranking it tight. “Even… sexual positions.”

Sadie smirked.

“My kind of lady.”

He took up the little hammer and carefully began to tap letters into the plate with the iron grave.

“Some say she fled Eden, or that she seduced, or was seduced by, an angel and ran off with him. Some say she learned magic, either from the fruit of the Tree of Knowledge, or from her angel lover.”

“She traded up,” Sadie said, looking down the bar at Behan, who was now looking at them, his hands on his hips as he whispered to the two drunks. “I can understand that.”

“Hey buster,” called one of the drunks. “Why don’t you quit that infernal tappin’?”

The Rider glanced over at them, held their eyes until they looked at each other, and went back to work.

“Maybe he don’t hear so good,” said the other.

“Maybe he don’t speak English,” said the first.

The second man slapped his hand on the plank, upsetting The Rider’s tools, nearly causing him to fumble the etching.

The Rider sighed and straightened. He looked at them again.

Behan smiled and poured the two of them another drink each.

“On the house, gents,” Behan said.

The Rider carefully folded up his tools in the black velvet.

The two drunks shared a chuckle.

“I guess he speaks that language well enough,” said one of them.

They reached for their drinks.

The Rider took out his Volcanic pistol and slammed it heavily on the plank.

The impact jarred the whiskey glasses on the other end, spilling liquor over their hands and shirt fronts.

The Rider looked at them expectantly, his hand resting lightly on the gold and silver chased pistol, fingers drumming lightly.

The two drunks looked at each other briefly, lips slightly parted. They touched the frayed brims of their hats to first The Rider and then to Behan, and excused themselves and headed outside.

“Well that’s just fine,” Behan said, mopping up the bar with a moldy towel. “Say just what the hell are you doin’ over there anyway?”

The Rider sat back down and methodically unfolded his tools again.

“What do you care, Johnny?” Sadie interjected.

Behan pursed his lips and snapped the towel on the bar.

“You’re right, Sadie,” he muttered. “I don’t.”

He came from around the bar with his hat in his hand and his coat over his arm.

“How much longer will your cousin be gracing us with his presence?”

“Not much longer,” The Rider answered.

Sadie looked at him and he saw, but he pretended not to notice. He turned back to his meticulous work.

“Well you be sure and tell me when,” Behan said, slapping on his hat and shouldering into his coat. “I’d hate to miss sayin’ my goodbyes.”

He went to the door and with an order for them to watch the bar, he was gone.

“You could trade up too, Sadie,” The Rider murmured in the quiet.

“I guess any man would be an angel after Johnny Behan,” Sadie said, going behind the bar. “But where am I gonna find an angel out here, in the middle of hell?”

She looked at him pointedly, but he didn’t answer. The fact was, he didn’t know.

“So what happened to Lilith?” she said, after the only sound for a few minutes was the tapping of his little hammer. Her voice seemed haggard.

“Adam told God what had happened, and God sent three angels out to bring her back. They found her on the Red Sea. She didn’t want to return. She cursed Adam and said she would put her hand against all his children for generations to come.”

He cleared his throat, putting the finishing touches on the amulet, blowing away the excess now.

“The angels said they would drown her, but she made a deal with them for her life. She would have dominion over newborns. The first eight days of a boy’s life are for her to dominate, and the first twenty for a girl. In this time, if a baby sickened, it would be because of her. But she promised that if she saw the names of the angels on an amulet about a child’s neck, she would leave them alone.”

The Rider sat back, rubbing his eyes. He gave the vise a twist, catching the amulet. He turned its face towards her.

On it, he had inscribed the names Senoy, Sansenoy, and Semangelof.

He shrugged.

“I guess even angels want to be remembered for something.”

Sadie’s mouth opened slightly, and she took the little amulet from The Rider. Their fingertips brushed slightly, but Sadie didn’t seem to notice. The Rider felt as if all his nerve endings had turned to his fingers, like a plant turning towards the sun. He didn’t recoil, but he felt his ears grow hot.

He quickly put another blank amulet in the vice.

“I had something like this, when I was a little girl. My mother told me it had been hers—that my grandmother had made it.”

“Your grandmother was a knowledgeable woman,” The Rider said.

Her eyes were smiling, as they had smiled when they’d first talked about San Francisco. She was far away, and The Rider wished they were in that place together. Who knew? Had Adon not found him, perhaps Sadie and he might have met near South Park, in her father’s bakery. He might have seen her in the neighborhood or at Temple. They might have found one another in the brief, simple time before their respective lives had gotten underway and diverged so dramatically, become so irrevocably complex.

Her expression fell slightly, and she stared at him.

“So wait, what are you saying here?”

“Do you trust me?”

She looked at him sideways, smiling nervously, placating.

“Do I trust you? We don’t even know each other’s real names.”

“Does Johnny?”

It was a terrible thing to say, and he had said it almost without thinking. Why? She put the amulet down on the bar.

There was a commotion by the door as four sweaty, parched looking men tromped in and stood at the end of the bar.

“Sadie, I’m sorry…,” The Rider began.

“My name’s not Sadie,” she said. “And I’ve got customers.”

He watched her for a while, as if he were down in a dark and lowly place and she were elevated. She smiled, and the men seemed to reflect her smile as best they could with their missing and rotten teeth. They drank. They drank to her. They drank with her. They slapped her on the behind when she turned around and she laughed when they laughed. It was as if he were a ghost. She never looked back at him.

He finished the other two amulets quietly, gathered up his tools and his pistol and coat, and slipped out unnoticed, brushing shoulders with more dirty men coming in as he went out into the street.

Had he been able to convince Sadie of his belief, it might have saved him trouble. That would have been a task in and of itself. Now he had to find a way to convince these three women in town, two of them married Christians and the third a prostitute, to accept and put these Hebrew charms about their infants’ necks. The amulets would protect them, and the employment of these bodyguards against Lilith would cause the demon mother to show herself, to try and stop his interference.

He thought back to the vivid dream he had had the previous night. It was possible she was already aware of him. There was more to Lilith’s story he had not told Sadie. Lilith had had a daughter by Samael, the angel of death. She was called Nehema, the first of the lilin, the night spirits, or succubi. Nehema had then born her father three more daughters. These were the Queens of Hell, the so-called angels of prostitution. They were demonesses possessed of human form, capable of traversing the earth, the Yenne Velt, and the lower world. They visited mortal men in their dreams, weaving erotic, vivid tapestries so sensuous and real as to stimulate the physical body in repose. The seed of man contained the proto-essence of human souls, and its scattering in the physical realm outside of a woman’s body allowed a succubus to gather this primordial matter into her own demonic womb, and in this way beget more evil spirits, or ruhin.

The Rider had suspected the presence of Lilith herself long before that dream; he had guessed it at the sight of Rica Gersten’s aborted fetus.

Rab Judah had written of the prophet Samuel saying that an aborted infant, unclean by reason of its birth, could bear the likeness of Lilith.

Rica Gersten had aborted a child conceived out of wedlock in the presence of Lilith, resulting in her imprint on the unformed child.

There could be no doubt. Lilith, and perhaps her daughters, were in Tip Top. The dead infants attested to it, and the deformed aspect of the aborted child confirmed it.

He wondered if the other men in town had experienced the same vivid dreams. Maybe it was the reason he had been drawn to Tip Top in the first place. Maybe it wasn’t his own weakness that had brought him here. Perhaps it had been Providence, some perception of the infernal too subtle for him to notice outright. Perhaps Tip Top was a crucible to test his baser instincts, to make him face his most basic temptations.

More probably, he was just fooling himself.

Sadie had said the colored girl at The Bird Nest may have already had her child, so her need was the most urgent.

Finding the place wasn’t difficult. The first man he stopped on the street gave him directions, smiling the whole time.

“Enjoy yourself, buster,” the man said with a wink. “Finest damned women I’ve seen since crossin’ the Picket Wire. Damn near any flavor you’d like, and they’ll do damn near anything you want. I’ll tell you, you ask for Aggie if you want somethin’ real special.”

The Rider took the man’s directions and wound up at a large stone single story house on the edge of town, well kept, with its own porch and timber awning. Red Chinese paper lanterns hung from the eaves, and there were fanciful rosettes carved into the wood shutters, and on the board sign above the door, which read ‘The Bird Nest’ and had a painting of one of the nightjars from the cemetery in flight on it.

As luck would have it, a black woman in a red striped dress and a blue kerchief tied about her head was sweeping the porch.

The Rider walked up and cleared his throat, indicating the sign.

“That’s a nightjar on the sign isn’t it?”

She seemed to recoil slightly, hunching her shoulders at the sound of his voice, and wheeling on him.

He held up his hands and stopped where he was.

“Please, I didn’t mean to startle you.”

“Thas’ awright, sir,” she muttered, looking away. “They help you inside.”

“Actually, I’m looking for you. At least, I think I am. You just had a baby didn’t you?”

The woman looked at him sharply, all trace of fear gone.

“What you know about it?”

“Sadie told me. Over at the No. 2.”

“So what?” she snapped, and her voice was louder. “Mr. Junior!” she called over her shoulder at the house, not taking her wary eyes off The Rider.

It was going south fast. He wished Sadie was with him. He held up the amulet, the light catching its surface.

“Put this around your baby’s neck,” he urged. “It’s for protection.”

He tried to push it into her hands, but she knocked it away. It flew end over end and bounced onto the porch, stopping against the shiny high heeled boot of the dandy who had been at the funeral service earlier. He was standing in the open doorway now, his tooled gun belt loaded and strapped, shining brass encircling his narrow waist. He was fanning himself lightly with a laced handkerchief.

“What’s the trouble here, Hetta?” Junior called, in a high toned voice as silky as his billowing shirt. It had a hint of southern, but affected, not natural born. His bright blue eyes were on The Rider, looking him up and down. A thin lipped smile played across his face beneath his narrow moustache, as if he saw something he liked.

The Rider looked at the amulet lying at his feet, and Junior followed his look. He tucked his handkerchief in his vest pocket, stooped down, and came up with the little amulet between his fingers. It made the round of his knuckles a few times, then he held it up and arched one eyebrow.

“Is this yours?”

“No,” The Rider said, looking to Hetta. “It’s hers.”

“Hetta?” Junior said. “Why don’t you come in the house. Your little boy’s bawlin’ again, wants some suck. Momma says he’s disturbing the gentlemen.”

“Yessir, Mr. Junior,” she said, leaning the broom against the porch pole.

“Excuse me,” came a voice from inside. The Rider recognized its owner before Junior stepped aside and let him come out onto the porch.

It was Johnny Behan, tucking in his shirt front.

Behan saw him at the same time, and opened his mouth, but The Rider held up his hand and called to Junior as Hetta shouldered past him into the house.

“Just a minute,” he said.

Hetta looked back. Junior flipped the amulet and caught it and looked at him expectantly.

“Will you give that to her please?” The Rider asked.

Hetta stared at The Rider, then moved slowly to take the amulet from Junior, but the dandy closed his fist around it.

“That is mine, Mr. Junior,” she said quietly.

“Is it?” he held it up again, looking from it to her. “I’ve never seen you wear it before, Hetta.”

“It’s my boy’s,” she said carefully, looking at The Rider. “Can I have it?”

“You know you’re not supposed to accept gifts from the gentlemen, Hetta. Don’t Momma and I take care of you?”

“Let her have it,” The Rider said. He didn’t like Junior, or the way he talked to this woman.

“Oh Mr. Behan,” Junior called.

Johnny had stood there stupidly the whole time, and had only begun to finally walk past. He stopped now and looked back.

“Would you be so kind as to and run and fetch Constable Wager for me? I believe this gentleman and I are on the cusp of an altercation.”

Behan tipped his hat to The Rider and smiled, hastening off down the street.

“There doesn’t have to be a problem,” The Rider said evenly.

“Oh but there does, if you mean to tell me how to regulate my affairs, sir,” Junior rattled out. “Do you mean to do that?”

The Rider slowly shook his head. He had no desire to shoot it out in the street with this overdressed pimp.

“Then Hetta, get in the house.”

“Mr. Junior, I swear, he didn’t give me…”

Junior’s lanky hand came up and cracked the woman sharply across the ear, so hard she cried out.

“You get your lyin’ black ass inside!”

“Don’t do that!” The Rider shouted, hunching his shoulders and slapping his hand on the butt of his pistol.

Junior was grinning, showing all the teeth he could. His hand went to his own gun.

“Pull it!” he hissed, his eyes suddenly alight. “Go on, pull it out. Show it to me!”

The Rider eased slightly. He didn’t want this.

Just then one of the shutters creaked open and his eyes darted to the window.

In that instant Junior gasped. The Rider’s eyes went back to him in time to see the dandy’s fancy holster tilt upwards on his belt, the barrel suddenly pointing at him through the open bottom. It was a trick he had heard of, but never seen—a swivel rig.

Hetta screamed and sank to her knees, arms thrown up across her face. She pressed herself against the doorframe.

The Rider’s Volcanic cleared his holster as he turned on his heels, presenting his profile to Junior while the pimp blasted at him from the hip. He heard the bullet pop as it buzzed by, felt it whip past his belly like a tiny comet.

The Rider fired back once. Junior folded back into the dim doorway as a dark spot appeared in the middle of his pristine shirt. His eyes were wide open and he was giggling as he flew backwards into the shadows.

The Rider’s gaze went back to the window. A woman was framed there, a dark haired woman in a brazenly unbuttoned camisole. The sun shined on her small breasts, poking through the dark lustrous hair that hung wildly down. But The Rider did not look away. Her long nose, her dark eyes, that same gleeful, ecstatic expression; it was the woman from his dream. She was no amalgamation of Sadie and a half-remembered girl glimpsed in a Palestinian market. She was real. She was smiling that wide, wanton grin.

Then something hard struck the back of his head, and he fell heavily on his stomach in the dust. As his vision rippled and then retreated to the back of his screaming skull, he saw Hetta on her knees with the amulet he’d made in her hand. She was staring at him with wide, fearful eyes, running with tears.

* * * *

The Rider awoke in the Tip Top jail, to an all-encompassing ache in his head and the hissing of a lamp. The jail was rock walled and dirt floored, and had more of the feel of a little cave than any kind of manmade structure. The iron bars of the cage were set right into the stone, and but for a tin pot, the cell was empty. He was laying face down on the bare floor.

Beyond the bars were a stool and a chipped desk on which the lamp sat. In the light was Johnny Behan and Constable Wager, looking down on all The Rider’s weapons and accoutrements piled there. Constable Wager had the silver and gold Volcanic and the Derringer in his hands. He was peering at the Hebrew inscriptions and wards in the light.

They heard The Rider’s shoe stir on the stone floor and both of them looked in his direction.

“Whalp,” said Wager, “I ain’t seen a fancier rig in all my born days. Mister, you even got that sissy Junior beat for ostentatiousness.”

“He shot first,” The Rider moaned, pushing himself up and rolling back to sit against the wall.

“That ain’t how he tells it.”

“What do you mean how he tells it?” The Rider asked sharply.

“He says he cuffed that nigger gal and you voiced your objection by takin’ a shot at him.”

“He’s alive?”

“You blew out his collarbone,” Behan said. “That’s when I come in and put a stop to it.”

So it had been Behan who had cold cocked him.

“Don’t know why you didn’t make Yuvapai sheriff, Johnny,” Wager said, putting the pistols back down on the desk among the scattered talismans and bowie knife.

“You just vote for me next time I run, Hank,” Behan quipped, hooking his thumbs on his belt loops.

The Rider had seen his bullet cut Junior dead center in the chest. It was not possible he’d survived.

But of course, there was another type of mazzik. Shedim, who possessed physical bodies, and could eat and drink. A lili could choose to physically conceive a child with a mortal. The shedim were carried to term and reputedly ‘birthed’ out of the rectum. They were lesser in power than the lilin, and could not affect the ethereal world like pure ruhin, but they were more resilient than mortals, and could at least perceive the Yenne Velt. Half-demons, like the half-angelic Nephillim of old. The Rider had tools to combat them, but common bullets weren’t enough. If Junior lived among the lilin in The Bird Nest, he could very well be a shed.

“You know I didn’t shoot first, Behan,” said The Rider.

Behan licked his lips.

“I said what I saw, cousin.”

Well, Behan didn’t like him, and wanted him gone. The truth wasn’t going to get in the way of that, apparently.

“What I can’t figure out,” Wager said, scratching his chin and looking at The Rider’s possessions on his desk, “is just what all this bullshit is for. You got more jewelry here than the goddamned Queen of England, and them pistols got enough gold and silver on ‘em to buy this town twice over.” He turned back to The Rider. “Who the hell are you, mister?”

The Rider stood up slowly and came to the bars, closing his fingers around them.

“Do you dream about The Bird Nest women?”

He saw the immediate downward glance flicker in their eyes.

“Do you dream of chasing them in the desert? One of them in particular? Maybe it’s Aggie. Maybe it’s different for each of you. Maybe it’s different every night. But you dream of them every night. She’s naked when you see her, and hairless, and she leads you to the other. The woman you can’t see. The one with hair touching the ground. The one who dances.”

“My God,” Wager stammered, putting the desk between himself and the bars. “How do you know that?”

The Rider opened his hands.

“That’s who the hell I am.”

The men stared at him, each reliving his personal nocturnal encounters, no doubt. Every night these women came to the men of Tip Top, of that The Rider was now certain. Only his own knowledge and talismans had kept his dream from ‘consummating.’ In his dream, the long haired woman had attacked. Their dreams probably differed. Maybe they caught the woman they chased, or the long haired woman. On some deep, terrible level, he envied them that experience. But he pushed that aside. This place was Hell’s spawning ground. It was said that every day one hundred demons died. But here in Tip Top, with a mostly male population, every night, how many were born?

“He’s some kinda hypnotist,” Behan said dismissively. “That’s what all these trinkets are. A lotta Jew mesmerism and hoodoo.”

But Wager was staring at The Rider.

“They’re not women, Constable,” The Rider said to him, forgetting Behan for the moment.

“What do you mean?”

“They’re the reason no child can survive in this town. They’re the reason Rica Gersten’s baby was the way it was, and why Eileen Arnold is going to lose her’s. The colored girl Hetta too, and in a couple months, Manuel Calles’ wife, if you don’t let me put a stop to it.”

Wager slid his hand across his forehead and set his hat back on his head.

“I don’t know about this…”

“What’s not to know?” Behan chuckled nervously. “You’re not buyin’ into this hogshit, are you, Hank?”

“I don’t know,” Wager admitted. “I don’t know. I got to think on it. Got to clear my head. It don’t seem real.”

“Come on! That’s ‘cause it ain’t,” Behan spat.

“The children started dying when they showed up in town, didn’t they?” The Rider pressed. What time was it? How long had he been here?

“My God, my God, I believe they did. That Chinese family…they lost two little boys the morning after Junior and Miss Lilly showed up.”

“Miss Lilly?”

“Junior’s blind momma. She runs the Bird Nest.”

“I remember,” said The Rider. “She was at the funeral.”

God, he had seen her and not recognized her for what she was. How was that possible? It seemed obvious now. She and her girls had stood out like Mormons among the other soiled doves. Was it because he was so enraptured with Sadie? He tried to think back…no, he had not had his Solomonic lenses on. He hadn’t put them on since he’d got to Tip Top last night. She’d driven his most rudimentary precautions out of mind.

There was a rap on the door that made Wager and Behan both jump. Pete Arnold, the German brewer stepped in, his hat in his hands, and a worrisome expression on his face.

“George?”

“Pete! God, you like to scared the pants off me,” Wager admitted.

“George, it’s time. My Anna…she ain’t gonna wait. Can you come?”

Wager leaned on the desk on his knuckles.

“Christ, this is all I need.”

“You’re the closest thing we got to a doctor,” Pete pleaded.

“Aw hell, Pete. I helped Barney Williams’ mare drop a foal, once. It ain’t the same thing. Get one of them laundry women.”

“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.

“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.

The dwarf began to sing lowly in a milky falsetto that would have been beautiful anywhere else.

“Flow, my tears, fall from your springs!

Exiled forever, let me mourn;

Where night’s black bird her sad infamy sings, There let me live forlorn.”

“That was a missed opportunity, Eisheth,” said the black woman, from behind The Rider. “You really should have made him swallow his pecker.”

“He would have enjoyed it too much,” Eisheth laughed, and when The Rider opened his eyes again, she stood, framed in the firelight, her face and naked body splashed with blood, a very picture of the infernal creature she was.

The three succubi giggled, an enticing sound even in the light of this horror. The fat man still sat in the davenport, head lolling, gaping mouth silently oozing red, two gaping holes in his belly which continued to empty blood and threatened to dump his quivering organs.

“Very amusing sister-daughters,” said the one who had admitted him, “but I think your sport is upsetting our guest.”

“Fuck him.” Eisheth passed the back of her hand across her bloody lips.

“If only he would succumb,” said the first woman in mocking regret, passing her eyes over The Rider.

“Take away his baubles and pentacles and he will, mother-sister,” said the black one, her chin suddenly perched over his shoulder, her soft lips whispering in his ear. She had taken off her own wig, and her dark skull was smooth as a creek stone.

“Manners, Agrat,” said the Oriental one, who slid into view on his left, pulling her own wig away and draping it over her shoulder, exposing her small chest between the fringes of her silken robe. “These Hebrews put much stake in hospitality. Let me have your coat, Rider. It is a start.”

“Don’t be vulgar, Lamia,” the first woman chastened her. “Cover yourself. The Rider isn’t here for you.”

The Rider shuddered.

“Yes,” she smiled widely, letting the end of the word linger like a snake’s hiss. “You are for me, are you not?”

“No,” The Rider managed with difficulty. They were all gathering close around him now. It was almost unbearable. What he had felt in the doorway was nothing compared to now.

The lute music was rising like the spluttering flames consuming the fat man’s tongue in the hearth. The dwarf sang, and Nehema sang in unison, her voice electric and serpentine.

“Down vain lights, shine you no more! No nights are dark enough for those

That in despair their lost fortunes deplore. Light doth but shame disclose.”

“But I came to you,” she reasoned. “You remember? Do you remember that song?”

“I remember.”

“Yes,” she said again, the word drawing into a lingering hiss. She was close in his face now, her breath hot on his lips. The others were huddled close, cheek to cheek. Their hands were moving over each other beneath his field of vision. He dared not look away from her eyes.

“Do you know who I am?”

“No,” The Rider admitted, shuddering.

“My mother called me Nehema, and my father, my lover, made me Marshal of the Order of Nehemoth. My sister-daughters and I, we are the Queens of Hell. Have you ever touched a queen, Rider? Have you ever touched any woman?”

The Rider wanted to squeeze his eyes shut, to close them out of his mind. Even with his various periapts and talismans, he could feel their influence. Without them…God, what would happen to him without them? He wondered…

“He has,” laughed Agrat gaily.

“A woman right here in Tip Top,” said Eisheth in his ear.

“Ah, he’s spoiled,” pouted Lamia.

“I would say seasoned,” said Nehema, her eyes flashing. “And only lightly. Anyway, I’m not particular.”

She sang with the dwarf again.

“Never may my woes be relieved, Since pity is fled:

And tears and sighs and groans my weary days Of all joys have deprived.”

It was as if they sang of him, not to him. Her words, so sorrowful despite their delivery. He physically trembled. It was a lament of unimaginable despair and absolute loneliness, insidious in its assault on his heart when combined with the attack on his physical senses. He suddenly pitied this woman. He wanted to comfort her. A creature that could summon such beauty could not possibly be entirely evil. And yet…

The red lantern. The fat man had kicked the table with the lantern over.  He slowly, gingerly reached into his coat for his spectacles, afraid of what would happen should even the back of his hand brush against any part of these succubi.

When he felt the cold lenses between his hot fingertips, he gained some reassurance, and drew them out, fumbling them over his eyes.

“Hark! You shadows that in darkness dwell,

Learn to condemn the light, Happy, happy they that in hell, feel not the world’s despite.”

When he looked up, he saw the women as they truly were, cadaverous and putrid. He could hardly tell them apart but for their sparse clothing. They did not possess any human ethnic characteristics, and The Rider realized those he had observed in them were entirely a product of his own desires. It was no coincidence that Nehema resembled a Palestinian girl he had seen in a market once fleetingly. The others too were amalgams of women he had seen in his travels. He realized Lamia for instance drew her features from both a Tibetan girl he had once known and a Chinese prostitute he had recently encountered in Delirium Tremens.

In reality, such as it was, they were almost uniform in appearance. The gray flesh drooped from their emaciated frames, bellies swollen in perpetual, malignant pregnancy, their bodies covered in suppurating sores. Their groping fingers were hooked. Each bore one leg of a mangy mule, and gargoyle-like bat wings sprouted ungainly from beneath their jutting shoulder blades.

Before his eyes, one of their grotesque newborns flopped onto the floor, spilling like a calf from Lamia’s womb. It bore the likeness of the black man she had escorted out, and scuttled on centipede legs and webbed feet. The infant demon matured almost instantly, flapped a few inches off the floor on black vulture wings, and hurtled itself mewling into the hearth fire. This baptism complete, it went shrieking up the chimney to join the mass exodus going on above.

As he recoiled, the black toothed harridans withdrew from around him, and from the corner, the music of the dwarf stopped.

“He sees us now,” said Agrat flatly.

“Yes, feel it? He’s gone,” said Eisheth.

“Ah! So close!” said Lamia, shaking her head.

“Yes,” said Nehema, her hideous face fallen into what could have been disappointment. “It is regrettable.”

“I was told you called me here to talk,” said The Rider, fighting back his revulsion now, instead of his ardor. All sense of temptation had bled from him at the sight before his filtered eyes.

“Yes, but not to us, and not on our authority,” said Nehema.

She pointed to the curtained partition.

“Mother is through there,” she said.

“What about the baby?”

Her expression filled The Rider with dread. It was as if she did not know what he was referring to at first. Then she nodded.

“The baby. Yes. With Mother.”

The Rider backed away from them toward the doorway.

They made no move to follow.

“Whatever happens,” Nehema said suddenly stepping forward, to the apparent surprise of her sister-daughters, “remember the song of the Order Of Nehemoth, Rider. Remember the angels of prostitution.”

She held out her hand to The Rider, and dangled a coin from her fingers. It was one of the pass coins Eisheth had tried to give the fat man.

He hesitated, then opened his palm.

She dropped it into the middle of his hand. It was a simple copper coin with a rosette design in the center.

Nehema smiled strangely and turned back to the others.

The Rider drew back the curtain, and nodded once. He wasn’t sure what Nehema meant by her admonition. Whatever it was, it did not sit well with the others. He turned and went into the dim hall beyond, slipping the pass coin into his pocket.

The house was deceptive. It didn’t seem quite so large without, but this hallway was long. He wasn’t sure if it was some trick of the architect or a result of illusory magic.

Two small bedrooms branched off on either side, and lining the remaining wall space were six full length mirrors, three on each side.

At the end of the hall was another curtained doorway, and leaning against the wall beside it was Junior, looking as if he could be shot and killed a couple times over and still think it a mild day. He had changed his shirt to a dark paisley blouse with a matching kerchief. The Rider could smell him from the other end of the hall. Junior had apparently bathed in some sort of rosewater perfume.

Junior said nothing as The Rider slowly made his way down the hall, ready to pull his Volcanic if the shed made a move for his own gun. Halfway down the hall he caught a hulking movement in the corner of his eye, but when he looked, there was nothing but his reflection staring out of one of the polished mirrors.

He went on, until he stood before the doorway.

Junior had been still as a statue the entire time. He hadn’t even blinked. Then, when The Rider reached out to pull back the curtain, Junior moved. Blindingly fast, he slapped his open hand to The Rider’s chest and held it there, so quick his palm cracked audibly on The Rider’s coat. He grinned widely as The Rider jumped and touched his gun.

“I could’ve killed you,” Junior assured him. Through the Solomonic lenses, his eyes were a ghostly white, devoid of irises, confirming The Rider’s suspicions about his infernal nature.

He hadn’t gone near his gun.

The Rider relaxed his grip on the Volcanic. He hated to be startled like that. Whether Junior was referring to earlier today or just now, The Rider didn’t know, but he retorted;

“Maybe. But you won’t have another chance.”

It was all bluster, but Junior didn’t care for it.

“Stop pestering the man, Junior,” came a woman’s voice from behind the curtain. It was like whiskey in a broken china cup.

Junior took his hand off The Rider’s chest and drew the curtain aside for him in one swipe. The Rider stepped through the doorway, into a well-furnished bedroom dominated by a large, four-poster double bed with a red coverlet with white rose patterns. There was a mirrored dresser against the back wall and a wash stand with a white porcelain basin near the window, to the right. The room was lit by kerosene lamps, poppy designs etched into the red glass breaking up the light, casting chimeric patterns on the walls.

The Rider saw a woman standing at the washbasin in the lamplight. She was indeed beautiful, but not in the otherworldly way the illusions of the succubi had been. She was broad hipped and heavy breasted, and her dairy white skin was heavily freckled. She wore the same dark lace dress he had seen her in at the funeral. The peacock feather parasol stood in a corner, and the dark glasses he had seen her wearing were folded on a nightstand beside the bed. Her hair was unbound, and fell in a thick mane of scarlet nearly to her heels. The light coming through window shone in her hair, painting it like curling rivers of dripping moon milk. She was drying her red nailed hands, and as he watched, she ran her fingers over her pleasant face and through her hair, then turned from the window towards him. She smiled a full lipped, generous smile. He had thought her blind when he saw her at the funeral, but the bright green eyes that regarded him were direct and alive.

What struck The Rider was what he saw of her through the Solomonic lenses.

Nothing. Only the faintest hint of magic glow clung to her like wisps of St. Elmo’s Fire. She was entirely human.

“We’ve never met,” she said, in her husky voice. “But I feel like I know you already. You’ve met quite a few of my family. My children.”

He tensed.

“Relax,” she said, taking a towel off the washstand and drying her hands. “If I wanted you dead, you wouldn’t see it coming. I’m not a demon, so your wards don’t work against me, and your bullets won’t kill me. I never ate from the Tree of Knowledge, and I left Eden on my own. I’m quite immortal. About the only thing you can do to me, you’ve already failed to do with your miserable little trinkets. Why don’t you take off those ridiculous spectacles?” She nodded to the nightstand. “I’m not wearing mine.”

He took off his lenses and folded them, but kept them in his hand.

“Yes,” she smiled. “You’ve got his eyes. You mortals always have either his eyes or hers. I’m glad you have his,” she said, hanging up the towel. “It’ll make you a little easier to deal with. It’s not the easiest thing in the world for me to do you know, entertain you like this when you’ve hurt so many of my children.”

“Why have you asked me here?”

She crossed the room towards him, the moonlight and shadows playing over her bright skin, her hips rolling suggestively, but quite unconsciously. Her powers of attraction weren’t as vulgar as her daughters,’ but they were just as potent.

“I know you’re going to try and bust up my operation with your silly little talismans and spells. Your Order has harried me and my kind all over the Earth for generations. But I want to parley, Rider.”

“Parley?”

“Yes. A truce. I’ll provide you with information in exchange for you letting me pull up stakes peacefully.”

“What’s The Hour of Incursion?” he asked promptly.

“No, I’m afraid that’s not on the table. You don’t get to ask me anything, but if you let myself and my daughters go, I’ll tell you a great deal. I’ll tell you some things you don’t know about Adon.”

The Rider’s eyes must have betrayed his emotion at hearing his renegade teacher’s name, for she nodded.

“Oh yes, that Adon. Your ambitious ex-teacher. He destroyed your enclave in San Francisco, killed all your friends and faculty. He’s been very busy the past seven years.”

“Tell me,” The Rider pressed, almost breathless.

“First, your word,” she said, holding up one finger. “We’ll cut our losses here, but you don’t harm my dear daughters, or any of my children this night.”

The Rider stared. Could he trust her? Could he deal with this ageless creature, when she had been responsible for the deaths of innumerable children since the dawn of time?

“How can I trust you?”

She inched toward him now, leaning forward to whisper in his ear.

“You must, Manasseh Maizel.”

The Rider felt cold sweat break out all over his body. She knew his name. His true name.

Adon had warned him about taking an alias early on, to prevent anyone or anything from gaining a hold over him. Demons, even angels could be controlled if their names were known. It was the basis for most of the protective magic The Sons of the Essenes had taught him. Some entities could likewise gain power over mortals in the same way. They could circumvent his preventive charms.

“Now you understand the power I hold,” she said, straightening. “I know you, Rider. I’ve known you since your cradle, as I have known your father before you on back to Adam. I could render you forever powerless against my children. All I have to do is whisper to them what I just whispered to you.”

“Why haven’t you?” The Rider said, after taking a moment to find his voice again. It was true. With a word she could destroy him. She could put him at the mercy of mazzik and malakh alike. If she had known his name all these years, why hadn’t she destroyed him before now?

She smiled, and walked a little past him to a low table next to the door where a decanter of some clear, hard smelling liquor sat on a tray of glasses beside a chair. She poured herself a drink. The trickling and clinking in the pregnant interim was like the ticking of a strange crystal clock.

“It’s not that I haven’t had ample opportunity. I’ve watched you a long time. I’ve seen your work. You’re good, Rider. There’s a new kind of war coming. Sneakier than the one you’re used to, but the stakes are more immediate and far reaching. I’m not on your side, but I don’t much care for some of the participants. It might be that you’ll wind up all that stands in their way when the time comes.”

“I don’t understand. What do you mean?”

“No more questions,” she said, putting the glass to her lips and knocking it back with a swift, practiced hand. “Your word, or we can have this out.”

The Rider swallowed bile, desperate for a way out of the deal he was set to make. He had been so long without purpose, so long without a clear trail to follow.

“You’ll just set up your operation somewhere else.”

“Well of course,” she said, pouring another glass for herself. “We all have our roles to play in creation, Rider. All doled out long ago. If God had no reason for me He’d have taken me out of this world Himself, ages ago. I didn’t say I wouldn’t set up somewhere else. But it won’t be on this scale. My daughter and I can’t usually stay very long in the same place. Familial difficulties you don’t want to hear about it. We’ll go on doing our work, but we’ll spread out again. This, what I was doing here, was a favor for someone, Rider. I’m willing to call it quits myself if you’ll go easy this time out.”

She pushed one finger at his face and lowered her brow.

“But if you don’t, I promise you I won’t go easy on you either.”

She drained her drink.

“I have a caveat,” said The Rider.

“Please,” she said, rolling her eyes and replacing the glass. “No caveats.”

“I want Hetta’s baby, if it’s alive.”

She closed her eyes.

“The baby.” She opened them again. “Alright. Done. Hetta was a good girl for a while, doing Tamiel’s work on all those daughters of Eve. She’s one of mine you know,” she grinned, a hint of pride in her voice. “I can always tell.”

“What do you mean?” he asked sharply, for he hadn’t noticed anything strange about her.

“Oh, not a demon.” She dispelled the notion with a wave of her hand. “I have human descendants too, Rider. Adam didn’t want anything to do with Eve after their expulsion. He blamed her. He always blamed women for his shortcomings. We spent a hundred and seventy days together in Nod, just for old time’s sake. But he was an idiot. You can trace most of mankind’s general idiocy back to him.”

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 doing 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, the 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.

He stood and raised the knife defiantly, shrieking out a spell that made the blade blaze with celestial light. The things balked from the brilliant balefire in his hand, but only briefly, and the braver, eager ones behind, scrambled past the cowards in front.

Something long and pale slashed a talon through his good arm, rending the fabric of his rekel coat. Something else latched onto his leg and bit him six times in the calf in the time it took for him to hack it away with the shining knife. The rest swarmed over him, and he crouched over the baby, struggling to keep himself between the cackling, yammering phantasms and the wailing infant, still shouting prayers and hoping that somewhere among the strings of amulets about his person there was something with the power to protect them. They poured over him, staggering him, worming into his ears and up his nostrils, pulling even at his clenched eyelids with clawed little feet, nearly lifting him from his knees, seeking to pull him into the air and tear him apart, to peel away his body and bones to get at his quaking soul.

He struck out with the blazing knife, but there were too many. He stuck his hand in his pocket, hoping he could load the Derringer. His hand closed on something else, something small and round. He pulled it out in desperation. Angry exclamations in every pitch and tone filled his bleeding ears, and in an instant, every claw, every tooth, every invasion was abruptly ripped away. Without their support, he slumped face first into the dark earth over the baby and knew nothing more.

When he could open his eyes next, The Rider found that he had kept his word to Johnny Behan. He did not know how long he lay on his back staring at the stone ceiling before he realized it was not a tomb or some grotto of Hell that he was in, but the cell in the Tip Top jailhouse. It was cool, and with relief, when he turned his head, he saw the sun lighting the drifting dust particles in the open doorway.

Henry Wager was at his desk and as before, silhouetted and limned in light, almost an angel himself. The Rider’s pistols lay before him. He thought perhaps he had dreamed The Bird Nest, but when he moved, his pervading aches were proof enough it had been real.

His arm was bandaged and tied in a sling. He found that he could move his fingers, even make a fist.

Constable Wager saw the movement and shifted in his seat to stare at him.

“You been layin’ there for near two days,” Wager said. “You want something to eat?”

The Rider shook his head and struggled to sit up. They had afforded him a pallet on the floor this time, and a blanket. When he shifted the coverlet, he caught sight of his hands. They were covered from fingertips to wrists in tiny hairs-breadth cuts, scabbed over black, even his palms and the webbing between his fingers. He touched his face, and felt the grooves that had not been there before. Every inch of his skin that had been exposed was so marked.

“Don’t know how all that’s gonna heal up,” Wager murmured. “Sadie said you busted outta there through a whole mess of glass. She’s the one brought you two back to the No. 2 and took care of you till we came lookin.’ Can you tell me what happened?”

The Rider shrugged.

“Would you believe anything I said?”

“That house burned so hot the fire brigade couldn’t do nothing but keep it where it was. Like a goddamned oven. It finally went out this morning.”

“Did you…did you find any bodies?”

“Two. One was a fat bastard of a cardsharp called Big Poppa Seabert.”

“The other is Alph Gersten,” The Rider said. “He broke in there yelling about his sister, shot up the place with a shotgun. The lamps. That’s what started the fire.”

“What were you doing in there?”

“The baby. Hetta’s baby?”

“Safe with Hetta at the No. 2. You gonna tell me you busted outta my jail to get that colored woman’s baby? Why?”

“It wasn’t a good place for a baby.”

Wager stared at him.

“So Hetta’s the one cold cocked Johnny Behan and let you out?”

“Are you asking me as a lawman?”

Wager stood up and came to stand at the bars.

“As a lawman, I’m s’posed to take you to the court in Prescott. You shot a man, busted outta jail, and you might could’ve burnt out a place of business. Maybe you killed some people too.”

“And so, you’ll take me to Prescott?”

Wager reached into his pocket and took out the keys to the cell. He fit them in the lock and swung the door open.

“Maybe I’ll let you take yourself on your own recognizance.”

Standing was hell, but The Rider did.

Wager produced The Rider’s hat and held it out to him.

The Rider took it.

“Maybe?”

“You won’t never tell me what happened in there will you?” Wager said. “You won’t never tell me what them women were.”

“It’s better if you don’t know.”

“Are they dead?”

“No.”

The Rider closed his eyes. It would be simpler if they were.

“Will they be back?”

“I don’t know. I don’t think so. Not here, anyway.”

The Rider felt in his pockets, and came away with three pieces of metal. Two he gave to Wager.

They were the talismans he had engraved himself.

“Here. In case I’m wrong.”

The Rider gathered up his guns and limped painfully outside, turning over the third amulet in his hands. It was the rosette pass coin Nehema had given him. It had been the thing he’d brought out of his pocket in lieu of the Derringer. Why had it protected him? Had the ruhin recognized it? Did it afford him some unknown protection? It was a simple copper coin worn from use and greening on the edges. On the back it was engraved with the same fanciful image of a nesting bird that had been on The Bird Nest sign. Why had Nehema given this to him?

He didn’t know why he was alive. Had Lilith called her children off? Did she know he hadn’t intended to break his word to her? Was anything she’d told him even true? Yes. He had a feeling that at least was so.

He knew.

Somehow he knew he was the last Merkabah Rider.

He was turning the coin in his hands and thinking when a familiar pair came down the street towards him. It was Sadie, leading the white onager, loaded up for travel.

She smiled when she caught sight of him, and gestured to the onager. It was trotting now at the sight of him, nearly leading her.

“I think he knew you were up and around. He fussed like hell till I unhitched him.”

“Thanks for taking care of him.”

Her smile faded somewhat as she got closer.

“I’m a mess,” he said, touching his nose and feeling self-conscious about his appearance for the first time in his life.

“I packed you some salve,” she said as she got close enough to pass him the onager’s lead. “It’s in the right hand pack. If you use it, maybe you won’t scar too bad.”

“What’s in it?”

“Don’t worry, it’s kosher.”

He smiled.

“Wager said you found us and took us in.”

“Hetta and me both. When we heard the shots I went out to see and Hetta wouldn’t stay behind.”

“What did you see, when you found us?” The Rider asked, curious.

She pursed her lips.

“Nightjars. You were on your knees, and you were covered with nightjars. They were going crazy, pecking at you, scratching. Then, they all just took off. I guess we scared them. They flew…right into the fire.”

He nodded.

“Rider, I don’t understand…”

“You saved me,” he said, cutting her off. “Thank you. And thank Hetta.”

She shrugged.

“You could return the favor.”

“What do you mean?”

“Johnny’s gonna sell the bar. He wants to head to Tombstone. Try his luck at sheriff in Cochise County.”

“You’re going with?”

“Unless you got a better idea.”

They stared at each other, until The Rider looked away.

“I’m sorry,” he said. “I’m not the angel you’re looking for.”

“I know.” She shrugged. “I’m beginning to disbelieve in angels.”

“You shouldn’t,” he said quickly.

He went to his saddlebags and after a moment’s fishing, brought out his cleaning kit and drew out a small driver. He took the glittering silver and gold Derringer out of his pocket. In less than thirty seconds he had taken the little gun apart.

“What are you doing?”

He pushed the components into her hands.

“Have the pieces melted down. They’re real gold, real silver. Give some of it to Hetta and her son. Take the rest for yourself. You go to Tombstone, but get your own place. Start fresh. Find somebody.”

He had been looking at the pieces of the pistol in her white hands as he spoke. Now he looked up. There were tears brimming in her eyes, but they would not fall.

“Josie,” she said. “My name is Josephine. Josephine Marcus.”

“I’m Manasseh Maizel,” said The Rider.

He gently pushed her fingers shut over the metal pieces with his hand. He held it there for a second.

“Pleased to meet you,” he said.

She smiled, and brushed at her eyes.

“Now goodbye.”

Her face darted in quickly. Their lips touched, and she turned and walked away.

He watched her pass down the street. She never looked back.

The onager nudged his shoulder.

“Ow,” he said. “Alright, let’s go.”

Remember the song of the Order Of Nehemoth, Nehema had said. Remember the angels of prostitution.

He felt the rosette pass coin in his coat pocket as he walked out of town, more afraid and alone than he had been in many long years.

The Shomer Express

The Merkabah Rider had managed to doze through the rocking and squealing of the wooden passenger car as the train groaned slowly across the desert. He had managed to ignore the stifling heat of the day, in spite of his black wool rekel coat and the tallit katan apron wound around his torso beneath his shirt. He had slept through the commotion of the oily brakeman charging up and down the aisle to twist the iron wheels and slow the train at the lonely desert watering tank. He had even successfully dozed through the complaints of his fellow passengers as the hissing train had suffered through an inordinately long delay until dusk before chugging off at last again into the darkening west.

The complaints had probably been warranted. This was supposed to be an express after all, and they’d lost a good hour and a half idling by that water tank.

But now, though the sky was black outside the yellowed window and the air had cooled, he found himself unable to ignore the insistent jostling of the tearful man who crouched before him, a shaky hand on his shoulder.

“Mister,” the man huskily whispered in Yiddish. “Mister. Please.”

The Rider rubbed his eyes and sat up in his seat. It was late. Perhaps so late it was early. He couldn’t tell.

“What’s the matter?” he answered in kind.

He had seen this man come through the car earlier in the day and marked him for a Jew. He had stood out as sorely as The Rider himself did, in his kippa skullcap and the tallit prayer fringes dangling from beneath his shirt, though he did not cultivate the payot curls as The Rider did.

It should have been comforting to speak with another of his kind. He had not encountered a fellow Jew for months now.

But this man looked to be offering anything but comfort. His thin lips trembled like something about to shatter, and his green eyes were red as if he had been crying and would do so again if he didn’t get some good news soon.

“I need help. I don’t know who else to ask. Please, you are a Hasid are you not?”

The Rider nodded.

“Will you come with me to the baggage car?”

“The baggage car?”

“Please, mister. I need….I need some sort of help.”

The man looked desperate, and it was a mitzvah after all that he could not refuse a fellow Jew assistance.

“Alright,” The Rider sighed.

The man was already at the front of the carriage by the time The Rider had risen stiffly from the green upholstered wood bench. He navigated the dim aisle using the brass handrails overhead, disrupting a woman’s feathery hat and whispering an apology, skirting the hot iron stove in the center which heated the low lit car against the desert coolness.

When he reached him, the man’s eyes were regarding him suspiciously.

“I’m sorry,” he said in Yiddish, in a low tone so as not to disturb the sleeping passengers. “Didn’t you say you were a Hasid?”

“I am.”

“I never saw a Hasid carrying one of those,” the man said, gesturing to The Rider’s waist.

The Rider looked down. In lifting his arms to grip the rail, his coat had come undone, and the black leather belt with its gold and silver plated Volcanic pistol was exposed, as was the big iron Bowie knife sheathed on his other hip.

“Isn’t it written in the Talmud, ‘when a man comes to kill you, rise up and kill him first?’” The Rider said.

“What? What kind of a Hasid are you?” the man asked, wrinkling his brow.

“The impatient kind,” The Rider said. “Do you need my help or not?”

The man nodded slowly.

“Alright. Alright, come on.”

He pulled open the door and they gradually made their way forward through the head end cars, passing through the livestock car, where the horses and The Rider’s own pale onager were kept in stalls, and coming at last to the baggage.

As they reached the end of the car and prepared to leave the animals behind, the man turned and spoke to him in a voice which could be heard above the clanking rails beneath their feet, but not so loud as to disturb the horses.

“My name is Noah Leitner.”

“Rider.”

“Rider? That’s it?”

It was an old problem in making introductions. The Rider had given up his true name and assumed a title as part of his initiation into his secret mystic sect, The Sons of The Essenes. Name substitution provided basic protection from the influence of malevolent forces. But Noah Leitner hardly needed to know all that.

“That’s it.”

“I noticed, you clink when you walk,” said Noah. “Are you a jeweler? You’d better be careful. If I can hear your money, it’s a good bet other people can too. Maybe you think that gun’s enough to keep the goniffim off you….”

“Tachliss!” The Rider hissed.  “Are you going to tell me what you want, or give me advice about money I don’t have?”

The truth was the clinking was the myriad of talismans he kept strung about his person under his vest. In his line of work, such as it was, bodyguards came in handy.  He had amassed quite a collection, beyond even the forty four coin-sized Solomonic wards he had made himself as part of his training; enough to make him clink when he walked anyway.

“Alright, alright,” said Noah. “You know your business. Back in Tuscon I’m a bank teller. I’m used to telling people how to keep their money about them.”

“Tell me what’s wrong,” The Rider said impatiently. Why didn’t the man get to the point, so he could go back to sleep?

“My papa….died yesterday. My mother followed him,” Noah said, dabbing at his eyes. “They were old. They were glad to go together. It was my papa’s last wish that he be buried next to his brother in San Francisco. So I bathed them and dressed them, and had their coffins loaded.”

The Rider nodded slowly. What was this about?

Noah balled his fist and pressed it to his lips, asking for a moment with his other hand as he squeezed his eyes to keep the tears from falling.

“It’s better if I just show you,” he blurted at last, turning quickly and exiting the car.

They stepped gingerly across the gap over the banging coupling and the rushing land, through the iron rail and onto the little platform outside the baggage car.

Noah wrenched open the door and held it open. The Rider stepped inside.

The stacks of baggage and piles of twine-wrapped mail gently rocked on the swaying shelve. The light was dim and mostly intermittent. The moon flashing through the ventilation slats above was the only illumination.

The Rider stepped inside and let the door slam. He expected a protesting train employee or mail guard to accost them any moment, but no such encounter came.

Noah turned and took a trainman’s lantern from a hook and lit it, casting a warm glow about the car.

“There, toward the front,” he said, and moved ahead of The Rider.

The Rider followed, and stiffened as he saw the light shine on a pair of plain wood coffins side by side. Dealing with the dead was a spiritually unclean practice, but it wasn’t the presence of corpses that put him at unease. It was the condition of the left hand container and presumably its occupant.

The lid was ajar, showing gaps at the head and foot where it had been moved aside. The nails securing it to the box had been wrenched from the wood, the twisted points glinting, the lid splintered and broken, not as though it had been pried loose with a hammer, but physically torn free in one effort.

Noah sobbed.

“My mother….she….I came to say tehillim over them….”

The Rider patted Noah’s shoulder and took the lantern from him, moving past him toward the defiled coffin. The law dictated that a body waiting to be buried should be watched over, the Psalms recited over it at least every twenty minutes. Normally this was done by a shomer, a watcher, who volunteered or was paid to sit by the corpse and keep it safe. He remembered he had seen Noah pass through the car more than a few times earlier today. He must have been performing the duty himself.

“Shouldn’t there be a man posted here to watch the baggage?” The Rider asked.

“The brakeman was here this morning. I explained to him about the shomer’s duty, and he let me pass all day. But this last time I came back here, he wasn’t here. No one was. I came in, and I found this.”

The Rider angled the light of the lantern into the coffin and grimaced at what he saw.

The elderly woman’s corpse inside had not only been disturbed, it had been positively defiled. Only the box itself held the body together. The white burial clothes were shredded and stained with blackish blood. The exposed flesh beneath had been torn open, even the ribcage partially forced open. The stomach cavity appeared to have been burrowed into and emptied or sucked dry of its organs. Blood had splashed all over the inside of the coffin, and there were two deep wounds just above the collarbone, with four matching ragged furrows on the back of each shoulder, as if a pair of long nailed hands had gripped the skinny old woman with such intensity they had broken through the withered skin. The attitude and condition of the wounds suggested someone had made the initial gash with their teeth; buried their face in her trunk and steadied themselves with outstretched hands on her shoulders. Blood stained her parted lips, and The Rider squinted and saw that her tongue had been bitten out.

“Who could have done this?” Noah blubbered over his shoulder, turning away from the sight. “There was a meshuggeneh preacher with a box of snakes in my car. He kept trying to get me to repent. Kept calling me Christ killer and all that. You think he came up here and did this?”

The Rider straightened and shook his head.

“I don’t think even a Protestant would eat a corpse just to spite a Jew.” He thought for a moment. “An atheist? Eh, maybe.”

The door clattered open just then, and a fat bellied, red faced conductor with a prodigious, drooping black moustache stepped in behind them.

“Hey you two!” he hollered. “What in hell you doing up here? You can’t be in here…” He stopped his bull rush when he saw the mess they were shining a light on.

“Great jumpin bald-headed Jesus palomino! What the hell happened here?”

“Where’s the man who’s supposed to be on watch in here?” The Rider demanded.

“Heywood. The brakeman. Don’t know. He was here earlier. You mean to say nobody’s in here?”

“Not for the last hour,” Noah said. “Maybe not since we stopped for water. And look what’s been done to my mother’s body!”

The fat conductor eased his pillbox cap back on his head and put the hairy back of his hand to his mouth, threatening to revisit his lunch.

The Rider moved the light away from the hideous scene.

“When we stopped for water earlier, why did it take so long?” he asked.

“It was Heywood’s fault actually,” the conductor answered. “We couldn’t find him. He stepped off the train to take a piss and disappeared for about fifteen minutes. We called all over for him.”

“What happened?”

“Nothing. He came over like he hadn’t heard. Said a coyote bit him.”

“A coyote?”

“It was just a little nip in the wrist, bloodied up his sleeve some. I never heard of a coyote gettin’ close enough to bite somebody.”

“They don’t, generally. Nobody talked to him after that?”

“He came in here, as far as I know. We don’t have a caboose, so he sleeps in here,” he said, pointing to an empty cot against the wall. We get the new Westinghouse brakes fitted after this trip. Right now if we need to slow down, Heywood goes and turns the manual brakes at each car. If the engineer sent him back to brake the car, he could be anywhere on the train.”

“But you came from the rear the same as us. Did you see him?”

“No,” the conductor admitted. “Maybe he’s be up in the locomotive.”

“Why don’t you go and try to find him?” The Rider suggested.

“Look, I’m real sorry about what happened to your maw here. But you don’t really think Heywood done this?”

“Either he did, or whatever did do it got to him,” said The Rider.

“What do you mean?” asked Noah.

“I mean I’ve seen something like this happen before. In Arabia, a lot of years back.”

“Arabia? What are you talkin’ about?” the conductor pressed.

“Something else might’ve gotten on the train when we stopped for water,” he said.

“What?” the conductor repeated. “An animal?”

“Take a look for your man. We’ll wait here and see if he comes back.”

“Passengers ain’t allowed to stay in this car.”

“Fine, you hunt us up some nails and box up this mess and we’ll go look for him,” The Rider said, setting down the lantern.

The conductor’s face screwed and he backed away, hand to his mouth again.

“I guess it’s alright if you stay here. I’ll go forward and see if I can find him, then check back with you.”

The Rider touched the brim of his hat as the conductor walked stiffly past them and the grisly coffin and lurched through the rocking doorway, letting the door clash shut behind him again.

“What did you mean you’d seen something like this before?” Noah asked.

The Rider reached into his coat pocket and produced a hard spectacle case, which he popped open, revealing a pair of thick, blue tinted lenses which he slid onto his face.

“The Bedouin called it a ghul. They’re desert demons, born in the light of the Rosh ha Satan star.”

“Demons? What are you talking about?” Noah chuckled nervously.

The Rider picked up the lantern again, and shined the light once more on the desecrated corpse, peering at it through the blue lenses.

Through the Solomonic seals mystically embossed on the glass, The Rider looked over the corpse once more, and saw, near the base of the coffin, the telltale hoofmarks scuffed in the blood. They were invisible to the naked eye, but the trace etheric residue of the infernal creature showed up sickly and luminous in the light of the mystic lenses.

The Rider nodded to himself.

“These things are ravenous.”

“I don’t believe you’re saying this. You’re saying a demon did this?” His voice threatened to reach a shrill tone, and The Rider decided it best to deflect further talk.

“Let’s replace the lid,” he said. “We’ll keep watch.”

A departed soul generally remained hanging confused about its corpse for three days after death. The ritual of shemira was meant to comfort the momentarily baffled soul, and ease it into death through prayer and comfort. Through the Solomonic lenses, The Rider could clearly see the translucent spirits of the old couple standing near their bodies in their funerary garb. The old woman was quite agitated to see her body in such a state, and the old man comforted her as best he could. She calmed some when the lid had been replaced and nailed down again, and more when The Rider produced his battered chumash and took turns reciting the Psalms.

Noah seemed to take comfort too. The Rider didn’t tell the man he could see his parents’ spirits. It would be too much of a distraction from the task at hand, no mere shemira over the departed, but a guard against the ghul he was sure was aboard the train somewhere and would return. The thing could devour a living man, but dead flesh was a delicacy to it. The older the better.

He could have slipped into the Yenne Velt and conversed with the two spirits, of course, but he suspected he wouldn’t learn anything from the two souls anyway. They were as baffled as Noah in regards to the creature, and leaving the bodies unguarded (or having to explain the whole process to the already skeptic Noah) didn’t appeal to him.

Fishing beneath his shirt, he produced a small golden square covered with Arabic type. He laid it on the mother’s coffin.

“What’s that?” Noah asked sharply when he saw it.

“It’s a protective talisman,” The Rider explained. “The Ayat al-Kursi.”

Noah picked it off the coffin and peered at it.

“These aren’t Hebrew letters.”

“It’s Arabic.”

“A Muslim prayer?”

The Rider nodded, sensing what was coming next.

“Don’t put this on my mother’s coffin,” Noah said. “What kind of Jew are you?”

“Ghulan aren’t Hebrew,” The Rider said. “I don’t think Judaic wards will have any effect.”

Noah held the amulet out stoically.

The Rider sighed and put it back in his pocket.

“Just stick to the tehillim, will you?” Noah returned to his seat and shook his head. “Oi gevalt. What are you, some kinda minuth?”

His own teachers had called him the same thing when he’d begun using non-Hebrew talismans. It was part of the reason he’d left.

“No, I’m not a heretic. I’m a Jew. You know, you’re lucky to have me here.”

“Sure. You’re about as kosher as pig’s feet.”

The conductor returned.

“Well, Heywood ain’t in the locomotive and neither the engineer nor the fireman has seen him in the last two hours.” He put his hairy hands on the lapels of his frock coat. “Guess I’ll search the passenger coaches. Maybe he’s takin’ a nap somewhere.”

“Maybe,” said The Rider doubtfully.

He pointed his chair toward the rear door as the conductor left. As an afterthought, he dimmed the lantern to a soft, hooded glow.

“Why’d you do that?” Noah asked sharply.

“So as not to alert the culprit, if he returns,” The Rider said. “Let’s pray.”

“Sure,” said Noah warily. “In Hebrew, if you please.”

“You asked me for help,” The Rider reminded him. “I could go back to sleep.”

But I won’t, he thought tiredly. Not now.

“Do what you feel is right,” said Noah, flipping through his prayer book.

They returned to the Psalms.

Noah was lulled from his earlier panic and outrage into a half sleeping state by the pleasant drone of the Hebrew prayers and rhythmic motion of the car, and was soon resting his head on his hand and snoring in the watchman’s chair.

The Rider grew hoarse, quitting the prayers for a while. In the relative silence that ensued, he thought he heard a scratching sound on the roof, but couldn’t be sure it wasn’t sand sifting across from the surrounding desert.

He waited an hour in silence in the dark, but never heard the sound again, and found himself growing drowsy in the presence of such an accomplished sleeper as Noah. His hand went into his pocket, fingering the Moslem talisman. Where was the conductor? As his eyes grew heavy and flitted, he took the spectacles off and rubbed them, shifting in his seat, eliciting a groan from the wood across the floor.

He replaced the spectacles, and the luminous spirit of the old dead woman was suddenly right in front of him, gesticulating in a frantic pantomime, her expression drawn and bug eyed, filling his vision, making him nearly jump to his feet in surprise. She was pointing insistently behind him.

He turned in his seat and what he saw did induce him to abruptly stand, knocking over his chair with a clatter.

“What is it?” Noah exclaimed, blinking awake.

Standing in the doorway in a square of silver moonlight, in baggy overalls and a dirty sack coat whose long sleeves concealed her hands in its depths, was an old woman cradling something in the crook of her left arm. It was the same lined and sagging face The Rider had seen in the broken coffin, the same bug-eyes phantom that had warned him from the Yenne Velt. In the dimness the shadows filled the crevices of her face like oil, and her deep set eyes were invisible, glinting slightly in the dark like treasure or perhaps teeth glimpsed in the depths of a secret cave.

“Mama?” Noah stammered, starting to rush forward, still in a daze of half-sleep.

The Rider caught his arm.

“Look at her feet!” The Rider hissed, turning up the lantern.

As the woman threw up one arm and shrank back from the light, they saw, poking out from beneath the dragging cuffs of the striped trousers, a pair of black hooves, like those of an ass.

Then the sleeve fell away from the upraised arm, and they saw the gray skin, the too-long hand, with spindly, branch-like fingers that ended in yellow, hooked nails. The arm dropped, and they both recoiled at the visage that hissed at them from the doorway. It was still the old woman’s familiar face, but it was stretched across a ridiculously wide grin lined with black gums and stubby, triangular teeth. Its mouth was a mass of fresh blood. Revealed, the eyes bulged too far from the sockets.

Its disguise was failing. Ghulan retained the form of their most recent repast, but only so long as it took their bodies to digest and absorb the victim. Then they began to revert to their true appearance. It must have been living off of animals in the desert. It had attacked Heywood as a coyote, devoured him, and replaced him. That was why there’d been a delay at the water tank. It probably lurked there, feeding off of thirsty animals and hoping for human travelers. Hoping for this train. How it had come to be there in the first place, who knew?

A ghul then, or more properly, a guleh. And how did one stop a ghuleh?

The Rider instinctively flung back his rekel coat and slapped his hand on the gilded Volcanic pistol at his side, pulling it clear of the holster in his next motion.

The glittering pistol caught the lantern light, dancing fire across the myriad of etchings, the twenty two seals, the Aleph Lamed Dalet inscription against the evil eye, the Hand of Miriam ward, the protective shin, the Hay Zayin Yud key and the jeweled Sephiroth tree inset with banded gold into the handle. The weapon was designed for combat in the Yenne Velt, the spiritual realm, but it still served as a firearm.

He thumbed back the hammer, levered the pistol, and fired.

The bullet caught Noah’s ‘mother’ dead center and her frail form rocked back with the impact, but she staggered and caught herself in the doorway with one arm.

Bullets didn’t work then, not even with a salt core, like the ones The Rider employed, and not from a pistol inscribed with Judaic wards. In Arabia The Rider had seen the work of a ghul, but never fought one. What had that old imam told him? He struggled to remember as the thing brought its burden to bear.

Then they saw why the conductor had not returned. He must have discovered the thing skulking somewhere in the rear cars. He had seen the old woman’s corpse, recognized her face probably. Likely he hadn’t had time to react before it twisted his head from his shoulders. Now the ghuleh held his head in one hand, long fingers gripping it through the empty eye sockets like a bowling ball, mouth hanging open beneath the brushy moustache, tongueless, like the old woman’s corpse had been.

“What is it? What is it?” Noah was screaming.

His yelling was cut short as the ghuleh pitched the conductor’s head at them with considerable accuracy. It struck Noah dead in the face and he fell back flailing and screaming hysterically. The Rider was knocked off balance, and then the ghuleh was among them, slashing and snarling.

The Rider heard its talons shred his sleeve and tried to bring his pistol up, if only to blast the thing away. He did get off another shot, but only seared the thing’s arm with the muzzle flash. The bullet smashed into the floor uselessly.

The rear door slammed open and a sturdy looking passenger filled the opening with broad shoulders and a prodigious range hat.

“What in hell’s….?” he began, but the ghuleh sprang at him, the weight carrying them both through the door and flipping the well-meaning man over the platform rail and grinding him almost instantly beneath the juggernaut wheels of the train without further comment.

The Rider was already running to the door. He jammed the toe of his shoe in as it slid shut, kicked it open and swung out into the rushing wind. His hand was on the Moslem talisman. He drew it out.

A long, clawed arm, trailing smoke from the muzzle burn, slashed at him from above, knocking the golden talisman back into the car. He’d never find out if it would’ve worked now. He crouched and fired upwards, caught a glimpse of it scrambling over the roof of the car.

Another passenger, a spectacled man in a derby and striped coat was poised in the doorway of the livestock car, looking aghast.

“Get back! Get back!” The Rider hollered, waving his pistol.

The man retreated into the car.

He shoved the pistol into his belt and gripped the iron rungs, pulling himself up the side.

The door opened below and Noah poked his head out. He was splattered with blood from the conductor’s head.

“Rider!”

He paused, looking down, his payot curls whipping in his eyes.

“What?”

“Forzikhtig!”

The Rider pursed his lips. Hard to be careful chasing a ghuleh atop a moving train.

“Keep the people back!” he hollered. He didn’t want any more dying.

Then he pulled himself onto the top of the car.

The wind nearly blew him back down the ladder. He fell to his belly and hugged the roof until he got his bearings.

The smoke from the engine was billowing back in his face. It was thick as an acrid fog here so near to the big balloon stack, which he could see poking out of the top of the black engine out front, belching spumes of glowing cinder like a beacon light.

Into that fog the spindly figure he pursued plunged, shrugging off the hindering sack coat and pants scampering lightly along the car roof, leaping down out of sight onto the tender.

It seemed to be headed for the engine. Why didn’t it just jump off the train?

For that matter, why hadn’t it eaten the conductor, taken his form? Why had it kept his head? Ghulan, the old imam had told him, looked upon living flesh the way men looked upon raw meat. Probably it had killed and eaten Heywood the brakeman solely to take his form and steal aboard the train. When it had discovered the bodies of Noah’s parents, it had broken open his mother’s coffin and masticated in a frenzy. Maybe it had killed the conductor and born part of him along to ‘ferment.’ It had returned to the baggage car to feast upon the other corpse there.

The conductor had said Heywood had explained away his bloody hand as a coyote bite. All this meant that it had a little more than a rudimentary intelligence. It could lie. It could plan.

What if it meant to derail the train? A wreck out here in the desert would mean plenty of time alone with plenty of dead bodies.

The Rider gingerly rose to a crouch and made his way as quickly as he dared after it. The fantastic colors of the Yenne Velt were a distraction up here, and he took the spectacles off and shoved them in his shirt pocket. He shielded his face with his arm and made his way carefully but swiftly through the roaring wind and smoke, leaning into the blow.

The desert was blue and bare all around and the stars in the night sky above were lost in the glow of the moon. The train shuddered beneath his feet and the car swayed dangerously as he followed the creature’s path, heart hammering in his chest, lungs burning from the smoke.

The Bowie knife had been proof against many creatures. The mystic etchings on the blade and pommel usually took care of what the cold iron did not. He drew it now.

He slowed as the smoke thickened to an impenetrable degree, and waded through it carefully, the knife before him. Denied of sight, it was almost impossible to navigate, let alone listen for the ghuleh above the clamor of the train. He only hoped it was at the same disadvantage.

He nearly stepped off the edge and into the deadly clanking gap between the coal tender and the baggage car.

He waited for one of the wispy gaps in the smoke and leapt down onto the U-shaped water jacket behind the coal bunker. Dashing his knees on the iron, he clung with one hand to the rim of the bunker and blinked through his tearing eyes, looking around.

Then, atop the black coal pile, he saw it; a naked old woman outlined briefly against the night sky, long, ragged hair blowing in the wind. It looked over its shoulder at him, then scampered the length of the tender.

He scrabbled onto the pile after it, losing his footing again and again, struggling to find a grip and keep from being buried in the shifting coal, or plunging over the sides.

He was beneath the smoke plume now, and could breathe and see, but it was still pitch dark. He could see the engineer moving obliviously about his work in the cab, the fireman crossing the platform between the tender and the engine with a shovelful of coal to the open firebox. They hadn’t heard the gunshots then. They didn’t see the nightmarish skeletal figure creeping low across the coal bunker.

The Rider drew his pistol again and fired twice after the thing.

He grazed it once in the shoulder, but the thing only staggered and kept on. The shots however, bore fruit. The fireman flinched. He had seen the gunman, not the gray horror slipping towards him. However, he dropped his shovel and fled the tender. In a moment The Rider could see him in the cab shaking the engineer from his apathy and pointing frantically out the back of the locomotive.

The engineer gave a few shrill blasts on the train whistle, evidently a signal for the other trainmen to come to the front.

But no one was coming.

The thing had reached the decline of the coal bunker and was skating down the slope toward the connecting platform.

The Rider stowed his pistol and dove after it, flying a few feet through the air before he came down hard on his belly and skidded down the coal pile.

But the gamble worked. He caught the ghuleh by the ankle as it lunged, and brought it down hard on the iron platform.

It slashed down at him angrily, painting the back of his hand red. He withdrew, but came back with the knife and chopped into its limb just above the hard hoof.

It did not cry out, but turned on him and erupted into a slashing frenzy which he did his best to batter aside with the knife. Suddenly the quarry had been cornered and turned.

The Rider was an annoyance. He couldn’t damage the ghuleh, but he was hindering it from its purpose.

The engineer and the fireman huddled in the cab, suddenly unsure of who to root for. The man in black had fired on them, yes, but the grey wraith slicing his coat to tatters and yowling like a wild catamount didn’t look to have their best interests in mind either.

The Rider now blinked through blood as well as soot and cinder. The pungent smell of the burning coal in the firebox was close in the air, and hot, but the thing that straddled him, battering him with its powerful limbs, smothering him with its pendulous withered breasts and every instant growing more and more inhuman, gave off a powerful stench too. As he slid the blade of the Bowie knife between its teeth to keep it from biting into his face, he smelled its breath, and it was like a swampy grave brimming with bloated floating corpses.

Then he noticed its forearm. All the blows he had dealt it with bullet and blade had left neither cut nor bruise, but the mark on the forearm from the muzzle flash remained a black and festering burn.

Then he remembered what the imam had advised him.

When dealing with ghulan, always lahab. Fire.

He ceased to try and keep the thing on him, away from the engine. Instead he pushed, and the surprised ghuleh slipped backwards, stumbling across the platform into the engine cab, still flailing, still clawing, hooves clomping on the iron. The knife clattered to the floor of the cab.

The Rider drove the ghuleh against the firebox door, pressing it against the dark iron. Its skin sizzled and scorched. It let out a horrible, withering screech.

The Rider held a desperate grip on its wrists. He turned his attention from the terrible contorted face for a moment and saw the coal blackened fireman and the engineer standing by, stricken at the sight of them.

“Get this door open!” The Rider yelled. “We have to get it inside!”

The fireman blinked and nodded dumbly, and the engineer pressed his back to the wall of the cab, almost ready to leap out the window.

He had to get the thing away from the door long enough for the fireman to get it open. That, at least, would be easy. The ghuleh was bucking in his hands to do so anyway. Getting it back to the firebox door however, would be next to impossible. It had tasted the heat, knew there was fire there.

Still, The Rider had to try. He pivoted, intending to once again use its own momentum to fling it to the floor across his outstretched ankle and then keeping hold of its wrists, drag it into the open flame. But he lost his grip on the bony wrists and it broke free and hopped easily over his leg.

The fireman kicked open the door with his boot. The fire inside crackled and yawned, the heat coming out like a devil’s excited breath, the blazing coals like infernal teeth waiting to grind.

The Rider lost his balance and nearly pitched off the platform, off the train. He wheeled. The thing would bound back up the coal pile, head back to the passenger cars.

But no, sliding down the coal pile came Noah Leitner. He barreled into the raving thing that was barely holding onto the visage of his deceased mother.

Once again surprised, it flailed backwards.

The Rider picked up the fireman’s fallen coal shovel and swung it from the shoulder, smashing the ghuleh’s face with a hollow metallic ring, moving it faster along its backward path, toward the raging firebox.

It fell in ass first. It howled and quickly began to extricate itself.

The engineer reacted at last, and drew a heavy wrench from his belt. He swung it two handed, smashing it against the outstretched fingers, snapping them.

The Rider charged in with the blade of the shovel, chopping at the torso, the face, the neck, not severing, not cutting, but bashing the ghuleh, stuffing it backward into the too small aperture. Limbs snapped. The dirty hair caught fire and the flame raced up to the ugly skull, ate the sunken gray flesh as hungrily as it had eaten the corpse of Noah’s mother. The face shriveled and drew back from the wicked teeth. The black gums sizzled, the pop eyes burst in the sockets and began to run, as if melted by its own agonized tears.

The thing howled nightmarishly, but The Rider didn’t stop. He shoved the heavy shovel blade against the face until the body folded, and the torso and burning head disappeared inside the iron enclosed holocaust. The broken hands and hoofed feet were the last to disappear inside. The body flopped on the coals, thrust and knocked and kicked against the white iron.

The Rider slammed the door shut with the butt end of the shovel and knocked the latch closed.

The three men in the engine cab fell back and panted against the rocking walls, their burning lungs gasping for the cool night air to exorcise the stench of burning flesh coming now from the firebox. The engineer clamped his hands over his ears to shut out the mad howling.

They watched the iron door rattle on its hinges a few times, the din within growing progressively more feeble until the door settled at last in its housing and was still.

Noah fell to his hands and knees on the coal scattered platform, the wind whipping the fringes of his tallit.

“Mister,” said the engineer at last, “what in God’s own name was that thing?”

The Rider stared at Noah and Noah shook his head.

“I don’t know,” he lied, stooping to retrieve his knife from the corner of the cab. “But it killed your brakeman, and the conductor, and one of the passengers.”

“Hell,” said the fireman, “we wouldn’t have heard the goddamn thing coming. It was damn lucky you were back there.”

He reached out one blackened hand. The Rider took it, and then the engineer’s, and finally Noah’s.

“We were all lucky,” said Noah, grasping it heartily.

Lexicon

Numerous Hebrew, Yiddish, and Aramaic terms necessarily find their way into the chronicles of The Rider. An alphabetized lexicon is here provided for the reader’s convenience. –EME

Adonay, Prerai, Tetragrammaton, Anaphexeton, Inessenfatall, Pathatumon, and Itemon – Substitutional names for God. Powerful words in most cases considered ineffable. In Kabbalistic circles a 216 letter name broken down into 72 names of three letters each was thought to encompass and channel various facets of God’s power. These names were said to be used in the creation of the universe.

Aleph Lamed Dalet – Three letters of the Hebrew alphabet representing the initials of one of the 72 names of God, particularly useful against the evil eye.

avoda zara – Idol worship.

ba’al koh-rey – The public reader of the Torah during worship services.

bashert – The Yiddish word for ‘destiny,’ used in a romantic sense to refer to one’s spouse.

bishul akum – Non-Jewish cooking.

bracha – A short blessing recited before a meal.

chevra kadisha – Jewish burial society, who sees to the proper internment of the dead according to Jewish law.

chumash – A bound edition of the Torah. The Torah in book form.

Council Of Yahad – The ruling body of the Order of The Sons of the Essenes, composed of the thirty two tzadikim (four rebbes from each of the nine worldwide enclaves). The Council seldom convenes in one location.

dybbuk (plural: dybbukim) – The departed soul of an evil or sinful person, imprisoned in Gehenna.

forzikhtig – ‘Careful.’

gabbai – A layman in a synagogue, responsible for keeping ritual order during the service.

Gehenna – Hell. One of the four precincts of Sheol. A place of torment reserved for wicked souls.

goniff  (plural: goniffim) - A thief.

goy (plural: goyim) – A non-Jew.

hakhnasat orkhim – The Jewish commandment of hospitality.

halakha – Collective practical Jewish law.

Hamesh or Hamsa – A hand shaped amulet used as defense against the evil eye. Also called a Hand Of Miriam. The Rider’s Hamesh is inscribed with the Shema prayer - Shema Yisrael Adonai Eloheinu Adonai Echad - Hear, O Israel: the Lord is our God, the Lord is One.

Ha-Shem –‘The Name.’ A commonly used substitution for the name of God.

Hasid – A branch of Orthodox Judaism formed by Rabbi Israel ben Eliezer (also called the Ba’al Shem Tov, or Master of The Good Name).

hasidei ummot ha-olam – A righteous gentile or non-Jew who accepts and follows the seven Noahide laws (so-called because of Noah, who was righteous prior to Abraham’s covenant with God); prohibition against injustice, prohibition against blasphemy, prohibition against idolatry, prohibition against murder and suicide, prohibition against sexual immorality, prohibition against theft, and prohibition against cruelty towards animals.

hashgaka pratit – Divine providence.

hekhalot – ‘palace.’ One of the seven holy halls a mystic must pass through before approaching the Divine chariot.

Kabbalah – A mystical discipline of Jewish thought concerned with defining the relationship between the Creator and His creations.

kaddish – In this use, the Mourner’s Kaddish. A prayer over the dead.

kashrut – Jewish dietary laws.

Kodesh Hakodashim – The Holy of Holies – the inner sanctum of the Temple where the presence of God is said to dwell.

lili (plural: lilin) – ‘night spirit.’ A succubus. Either Nehema the daughter of Lilith, the first woman, and Samiel the disgraced Angel of Death or one of her three incestuously begotten daughters. They visit mortal men in their dreams and can conceive demonic children by them.

malakh (plural: malakhim) – ‘messenger.’ An angel of the Lord. A sentient entity of celestial light.

mazzik (plural: mazzikim) – ‘harmer.’ A demon. (see: lil, shed, ruhin). Also the original fallen angels who sided with Lucifer in the rebellion against God at the time of the creation of man, and the Grigori (‘watchers’) who succumbed to lust for mortal women in the time after the expulsion from Eden.

menorah – A seven or nine branched candelabrum used in the Temple and during Hanukah celebrations.

mensch- ‘man.’

Merkabah Rider – A Jewish mystic able to leave his physical body and explore the upper and lower worlds of Heaven and Hell through the study of various Solomonic and Hebrew magical texts. The Merkabah or Merkavah is the fiery chariot of the Lord revealed to Ezekiel in a vision.

meschumad – ‘destroyed one.’ A Jew who has lost his faith.

meshuggeneh – ‘crazy.’

mezuzah – A specially prepared piece of parchment kept in a case and set into the doorway of a Jewish home. The parchment is inscribed with Deuteronomy 6:4-9 and 11:12-21, which constitutes in part, the Shema prayer (see Hamesh).

mitzvah (plural: mitzvot) – The 613 Jewish commandments related in the Torah and the seven Rabbinical mitzvot.

mikvah – A naturally fed ritual bath used for purposes of purification.

minuth (plural: minim) – Heretic.

minyan – A quorum of ten men required for the reading of community prayers.

mumar (plural: mumarim) – An apostate. One who has rejected one religion for another.

Nephilim – Half-angels, born from the union of lustful angels (specifically The Grigori) and human women in the early days of the world after the expulsion of Adam and Eve from the garden of Eden and before the Great Flood.

pe’ah – (plural: payot) ‘forelock.’ The unshorn locks on either side of a Hasid’s head. Mystically thought to divide the front part of the brain governing abstract thought from the back part which controls the physical body.

Poshea Yisrael – Transgressor of Israel.

rebbe – ‘teacher.’ The leader or teacher of a Hasidic Jewish movement.

rekel (plural rekelech) – Black wool frock coat worn by Hasidic Jewish men. Buttoned right over left.

ruah (plural: ruhin) – ‘spirits.’ Demonic entities without perceivable physical forms, dedicated to the destruction and corruption of mankind. They are the children of Lilith and the succubi, who mate with mortal men through erotic dreams. Capable of possessing physical bodies for a time.

Seder – The sacred dinner table ceremony held during the first two night of Pesach (Passover).

Sephiroth – The ten emanations through which God reveals Himself.

Shabbat – The seventh day of the Jewish week, between sundown Friday and the appearance of three stars on Saturday night. Shabbat is subject to strict rules and rituals including prohibition against melakha (‘work,’ but specifically, creative work) and travel.

shed (plural: shedim) – Half mortal half demon, physically conceived and born from the union of a mortal man and a succubus. Able to perceive the spirit world, but cannot enter or affect it. They are faster, stronger, and more personally magnetic than mortals. They are nearly immortal themselves and cannot be killed by normal physical means. They sustain themselves on a diet of water and slime.

Sheol – The netherworld. A formless realm where departed souls (the rephaim) await the coming of the Messiah either in comfort (sometimes called the Bosom of Abraham – particularly by Christians) or in torment. (see Gehenna).

shin – Four-pronged Hebrew letter said to represent the human heart, Shaddai (a name of God), the Shema Yisrael prayer (Hear, O Israel: the Lord our God, the Lord is one), or the three valleys of Jerusalem.

shokhet – ‘slaughterman’ or ‘butcher.’ One who prepares meat according to Jewish law.

shomer (plural: shomrim)  – ‘watcher.’ A Jewish legal guardian entrusted with another’s property. In this case, one who watchers over the dead prior to burial.

shomer negiah – Observant of Jewish sexual conduct laws.

shomer shabbo – Observant of Jewish law.

shtiebel – ‘stable.’

The Sons of the Essenes – A secret mystic order of Jewish scholars who claim descent from the Essenes, an ancient Hebrew monastic sect mentioned by Philo of Alexandria and Pliny The Elder from around the time of Christ. Their central teachings culminate in the Merkabah Riders. There are nine enclaves located in cities across the world, with the main enclave located at Ein Gedi in Palestine.

tachliss –  ‘ultimate purpose.’ Get to the point.

tallit katan – ‘small prayer shawl.’ A four-fringed poncho like undergarment worn beneath the shirt.

talmidei khakhamim – ‘wise student.’ A Torah scholar.

tefillin –Prayer phylacteries. Black leather straps which are wrapped around the arm (shel yad) and head (shel yosh) and bear two small leather boxes containing parchment scrolls inscribed with Bible verses.

tehillim (singular: tehil) ‘praises’ or ‘Book of Praises.’ The Biblical Psalms.

teshuva – Redemption or repentance. A return to God from sin. Traditionally sins against individuals must be rectified by atonement to that individual – making murder a particularly grievous offense.

Torah – (‘teaching’) The Pentateuch – the five books of Moses (Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers, and Deuteronomy).

tzadik nistari (plural: tzadikim nistarim) ‘hidden righteous one.’ One of the fabled 36 Hidden Saints. Every generation there are born 36 righteous Jews whose presence in the world justifies the continued existence of mankind in the eyes of God, even in the face of barbarism. It is said that if even one of the Nistarim dies the world will end. Tradition holds that a tzadik is not aware of his own nature. In the Order of The Sons of the Essenes, the ruling rebbes of each enclave are bestowed the title tzadik and are thought to be actual Nistarim, although there are only thirty two.

tzitzit – Four fringes traditionally attached to a tallit which hang down outside the clothes, worn as a remembrance to keep the commandments.

Yenne Velt – The ‘other world.’ The astral plane perceived and navigated by mystics. A shadowy spirit world mainly inhabited by lost ghosts, a reflection of the physical world, but not Heaven, not Hell.

Edward M. Erdelac is the author of twelve novels including Andersonville, The Knight With Two Swords, and Monstrumfuhrer. His fiction has appeared in numerous anthologies and periodicals ranging from Occult Detective Quarterly to Star Wars Insider Magazine. Born in Indiana, educated in Chicago, he resides in the Los Angeles area with his family. News and excerpts from his work can be found at http://www.emerdelac.wordpress.com

M. Wayne Miller has become a well-known name in the field of horror illustration, and is equally adept with science fiction, fantasy, and young adult themes. Welcoming the opportunities of each genre and, frequently, combining them all, he has carved a place among the best in the industry, and continues his quest to learn and grow as an artist and illustrator. His list of clients includes Dark Regions Press, Thunderstorm Books, Modiphius Entertainment, Chaosium, TOR, Pinnacle Entertainment Group, and Necro Publications, among many others. Visit his gallery of work online at http://www.mwaynemiller.com or contact him at illustrator@mwaynemiller.com.

Hailing from Tochigi, Japan, cover artist Juri Umagami started painting at Uskukubo Art Ateilier when she was only 8 years old and received her BFA from Otis College of Art and Design.  She now lives in the Los Angeles area where she works as an instructor at the Kline Academy of Fine Art. For commission inquiries, she may be contacted at umajuri78@gmail.com

ANDERSONVILLE (Del Rey-Hydra)

In 1864, 30,000 ragged Union soldiers pray for a way out of the disease ridden confines of the South’s most notorious prison camp, unaware they are about to become unwitting accomplices in a dark ritual enacted by a madman to turn the tide of the Civil War. When Mary Todd Lincoln’s spiritual advisor has a vision of the nation awash in blood, Union Black Dispatch agent Barclay Lourdes is dispatched to infiltrate Andersonville prison and put a stop to the terrible events about to enfold….

PRAISE FOR ANDERSONVILLE

“[Edward M.] Erdelac makes a heady brew out of dreadful true events, angel and demon lore, secret societies, and the trappings of Southern gothic novels. This is thoughtful horror at its best, and not at all for the faint of heart.”—Publishers Weekly Starred Review

“Andersonville is a raw, groundbreaking supernatural knuckle-punch. Erdelac absolutely owns Civil War and Wild West horror fiction.”—Weston Ochse, bestselling author of SEAL Team 666

“If you took a tale of atmospheric horror by Ambrose Bierce and infused it with the energy of Elmore Leonard, you would come close to what Edward Erdelac has accomplished with Andersonville. But even that combination would sell the novel short. What Erdelac has done is not just splice genres together but create his own voice in telling of the horrors, real and supernatural, inhabiting the most infamous prison camp of the Civil War. This is U.S. history seen through the eyes of the tortured dead, told with amazing skill by an author who knows how to create genre literature with a purpose.”—C. Courtney Joyner, author of Shotgun and Nemo Rising

“Andersonville definitely stands out . . . with its nuanced language, complicated characters, engrossing narrative, and subtle commentary on the past and the present.”—LitReactor

MONSTRUMFUHRER (Comet Press)

In 1936 Dr. Josef Mengele discovers the lab journals of Victor Frankenstein and is tasked with replicating his reanimation procedure by the Reich Institute.

In 1945, a Jewish boy uncovers the secrets of Mengele’s horrific experiments behind the barbed wire of Auschwitz KZ. He escapes and heads north in search of the only being on earth who can stop the Reich’s insidious project – Frankenstein’s original creature.

But the Creature has its price….

PRAISE FOR MONSTRUMFUHRER

“….profound; a wrenching and tragic look at the horrors of war, tortured dynamics of father-and-son relationships, race and ideology, pride, belief, ambition, survival, philosophy, brotherhood, the very nature of humanity and life, and the darkest insights into our collective psyches.” – The Horror Fiction Review’

“….absolutely devastating.” – Cemetery Dance

“Highest possible recommendation.” – Confessions of a Reviewer.

TEROVOLAS (Journalstone)

The recovered personal papers of Professor Abraham Van Helsing recount the events which took place immediately following the account of Bram Stoker’s DRACULA.

Following the killing of the nefarious count and his vampiric wives, Van Helsing suffers from violent, recurring fantasies and commits himself to Jack Seward’s Purfleet Asylum for treatment. Upon his release and seeking a relaxing holiday, Van Helsing volunteers to transport the remains and earthly effects of Quincey P. Morris back to the Morris family ranch in Sorefoot, Texas.

He finds Quincey’s brother Cole embroiled in escalating tensions with a neighboring outfit of Norwegian cattle ranchers led by the enigmatic Sig Skoll. When men and animals start turning horrible mutilated, Van Helsing suspects a preternatural culprit, but is a shapechanger really loose on the Texas plains, or are the delusions of his previously disordered mind returning?

PRAISE FOR TEROVOLAS

“Professor Abraham Van Helsing in the Wild West! What more could one ask for? [Erdelac] melds the stylistic concepts [of Dracula] perfectly with those of the classic western tales.”  - The British Fantasy Society

“Erdelac manages to recreate the style of Stoker without lacking originality as one might expect. By staying true to the tradition laid down by Dracula while simultaneously putting his own spin on the story, Erdelac breathes new life into an old tale. The action scenes are crisp, the characters well developed, the plot filled with surprises.” – Brett J. Talley, Stoker award winning author of That Which Should Not Be.

COYOTE’S TRAIL (Comet Press)

In 1886 a bloodied and battered Chiricahua Apache boy drags himself out of the Arizona desert, intent on revenge. He kidnaps a Mexican prostitute and with the help of a sadistic whiskey peddler, uses her as bait to lure the cavalrymen who massacred his family out from the safety of their fort, unaware that the woman is pursuing her own bizarre course of revenge.

"With COYOTE'S TRAIL, Ed Erdelac has created a story as raw as the wound from a bullwhip. His blistering prose, combined with superb use of time, place, and character, gives COYOTE'S TRAIL the kind of life that springs off the page and into the reader's consciousness. That's a rare thing these days, and in the world of genre fiction, rarer still. This is a damn hard story about damn hard men, and told damn well." --C. Courtney Joyner, Author of SHOTGUN and NEMO RISING

ANGLER IN DARKNESS
In this collection, a frontiersman of bizarre pedigree is peculiarly suited to tracking down a group of creatures rampaging across the settlements of the Texas Hill Country….. A great white hunter is shaken to his core by a quarry he cannot conceive of…. A bullied inner city kid finds the power to strike back against his tormentors and finds he can’t stop using it…. Outraged plumbing plots its revenge…. Here Blackfoot Indians hunt the undead, the fate of nations is decided by colossal monsters, a salaryman learns the price of abandoning his own life, and even the Angel of Death tells his story.

PRAISE FOR ANGLER IN DARKNESS

“If you’re new to Erdelac’s work, Angler in Darkness is a fabulous introduction, a bizarre medley of the perverse, sinister, and strange. Erdelac weaves a refreshingly unabashed tapestry, his blunt naturalistic dialogue hitting as hard as the visceral thrills splashing across the pages. Most importantly, his work gives voice to diverse points-of-view, his protagonists arriving from walks of life often overlooked in genre fiction. Angler in Darkness is a provocative, compelling, and deliciously devilish anthology from one of the most talented voices in fantasy fiction, and a must read for aficionados of the unusual.” – Cemetery Dance

“Erdelac’s first collection of 15 reprints and three previously unpublished stories runs the gamut of monster mayhem and historical weirdness, with plenty of gore to satisfy horror aficionados…. Erdelac has a gift for inspiring fascination with whatever era he chooses to write about, especially the Wild West, where he shines. This entertaining and varied collection, enhanced by the author’s story prefaces, will appeal to a wide variety of horror readers.” – Publisher’s Weekly

"You'll find history not sanitized and prettied up for modern sensibilities; this is the raw stuff, the gritty stuff, with the ugliness and racism right there alongside the bravery and beauty. Sometimes, the tales focus on the small-scale, families or individuals, lonely journeys, confrontations with cruel mortality and truth. In others, the fates of nations are at stake. There's variety here, a display of ranges -- temporal, stylistic, genre -- and it all serves to reinforce my initial opinion. Whatever the era, Ed Erdelac does historical fiction RIGHT." - This Is Horror

WITH SWORD AND PISTOL (Crossroads Press)

Collects four fantasy adventure novellas.

RED SAILS - In 1740 a British marine and a Dominican Blackfriar are captured on the high seas by a blood guzzling pirate captain and turned loose on a cannibal isle to be hunted down for sport under the full moon by his shapeshifting crew.

NIGHT OF THE JIKININKI - In 1737 three disparate men, a casteless bandit, a sadistic samurai sword tester, and a mad, child killing monk band together to fight their way out of a feudal Japanese prison as it fills with the walking dead.

SINBAD AND THE SWORD OF SOLOMON - In 796, Sinbad the Sailor and motley crew undertake a mission from the Caliph of Baghdad to retrieve a magic sword from a demon on an enchanted island.

GULLY GODS - In 2005 a young South Houston gangster learns the horrific secret behind the power behind a seemingly unstoppable clique of Liberian ex-child soldiers taking over a South Chicago neighborhood.

Hundreds of years removed. Thousands of miles apart. They all make their end WITH SWORD AND PISTOL.

If you enjoyed the Rider's adventures, you might also enjoy the adventures of Ashe Armstrong’s gunslinging orc, Grimluk. Join Grimluk as he travels his world, fighting demons in A Demon in the Desert, DemonHaunted, and coming October 2018, The Demons Within!

Table of Contents

- Introduction:
- I: The Blood Libel
- II: The Dust Devils
- III: Hell’s Hired Gun
- The Shomer Express