by David Boop
The magistrate unfolded the transfer of liability. He snorted. “Boy, if you’re too dumb to read, you are sure as hell too dumb to be selling medicine.”
“What?” Holly snatched the page back and took his first proper look at the elegantly scrawled name.
Lagniappe
Holly’s gaze drifted back to the small, dark, slightly bent fellow in the corner, the page wilting in his hands.
Then it crumpled in his fist. “And since when do you let ‘indigenous persons’ work as doctors?” he demanded, his voice channeling the unspoken slur.
The magistrate’s face reddened. “Since right after they started graduating from doctor school!”
The indigenous person in question said nothing, but Holly was aware in his dimmest extremity of a slight up-tilt in the native fellow’s fine-boned chin, a promissory glint in his dark eyes.
Article 6, Section 8: Be it further enacted that Article 6, Section 7, may be suspended in individual cases by order of federally-recognized military authority, or recommendation of any provincially licensed medical board.
Holly could not read the diploma’s three signatures from this distance…but then, he hardly needed to. He had sold opiates to a mereau—a fishman, a “hellbender,” whatever they called those false-faced egg-suckers out here—and now the doctor, this licensed and practicing indigenous God-damned person, was going to have him strung up to dry.
The magistrate advanced on him, his country twang flattening to pass formal sentence. “I find you guilty of violating the Commercial Intercourse Act, and fine you two hundred dollars for the offense.” He pulled a pair of handcuffs from his pocket. “And you don’t look worth more’n twenty.”
Holly backed up and ran a hand through his hair, his outrage melting into desperation. “No—I mean, just wait a minute, can you? Look there, you see, I’ve got valuable medicine and a bill showing its agreed value at $216, and since I haven’t received payment yet, it’s still my property. That’s far more valuable than a man in a cell, isn’t it?” And then Holly could mark the product lost in the accident, and let Digby go barking at the Gideon-Wright Overland Freight Company for compensation, and then—
The magistrate turned to the appr—to Dr. Tuberculosis Fitch, Hockit’s diminutive and highly irregular physician of record, who had since finished prising the top from the crate. “What do you reckon, Doc? Two hundred plus?”
The doctor hefted out one of the bottles, uncorked it, and took a whiff. “Unlikely. It seems to rely on chloroform and alcohol to react with an aniline dye. An entertaining presentation, but I wouldn’t drink it.”
The magistrate looked back at Holly, his anger now sanded down into smooth malice. “Well, partner, it looks like you picked the wrong place to peddle your juice. Got any other entertainments for us?”
Why, certainly: If they thought the bog yam demonstration was diverting, they’d be positively thrilled when Holly made a break for the door.
“If I may, sir…” Dr. Fitch’s slender brown fingers picked idly at a loose corner of the bottle’s label. “This Mr. Holly came to us yesterday bleeding from a head wound. My apprentice and I observed headache, nausea, vomiting, and emotional excess, to which I might today add some irregularity of sleep. It’s my opinion that he’s suffered a concussive brain injury. If that’s so, he can’t be held legally liable for his actions while his judgment is so afflicted.”
Holly stared at him, struggling to grasp the idea. Did this mean he was off the hook?
The magistrate folded his arms, his tone verging on annoyance. “What’re you saying, Doc?”
Fitch put down the bottle. “A concussion persists for days or weeks, sir…you remember what Asa Burroughs was like after that horse kicked him. It would be irresponsible of us to turn Mr. Holly out of town until he’s fully recovered his faculties.” This, with a serious demeanor and a perfectly straight face.
The magistrate’s moustache did a poor job of hiding his smile as he finally caught on. “Irresponsible, yes. Can’t have it. All right then, Mr. Holly: I hereby remand you to the doctor’s custody ’til further notice. You can have your juice back when he says you’re free to go.” And he started for the door.
Holly stood still, stunned to utter impotence. The magistrate stopped beside him, and pulled him in to whispering range. “And if I catch you makin’ a run for it, or selling your swill here ever again, I will pour it down your throat ’til you piss purple. Got it?”
He smelled of aftershave and gunpowder.
Holly nodded.
“Y’all have a nice day, now.” The magistrate clapped him on the shoulder and ambled on out.
The daylight at Holly’s feet faded with the closing of the door.
There was some silence after that.
Finally, the mereau spoke up. “What do we do now?”
Fitch tipped his head, left and right. “Well, he’s your patient, Lagniappe. What do you think we should do?”
The lanky blond apprentice brightened at this grand responsibility. “Oh! I so wanted to give him those stitches, you know, because it’d be such a shame if the cut festered…but it’ll have all scabbed over by now.”
Fitch smiled. “I think that’s a fine idea. Why don’t you fetch the needle and suture? It’s high time I showed you how to debride a wound.”
Lagniappe positively leapt to his feet at the suggestion. “Yes, doctor! Oh, and we’ve got to make him comfortable. Come along, Mr. Holly, come sit down, and I’ll just take your bag. Don’t worry a bit, now; you’ll feel so much better for having it properly seen to. And after we’re done, I’ll have a look at your teeth! You have to care for your teeth, and with the wonderful new fillings we have nowadays, there’s no reason not to have them done while you’re here…”
Holly was dimly aware of being led back to that hated chair, felt himself seated in preparation for something truly awful.
No, he decided, travel was really quite a splendid business: If you were hell bound regardless, you might as well get there on your own initiative.
Ghost Men of Sunrise Mesa
JONATHAN MABERRY
– 1 –
“They say you’re a bit strange.”
That’s what the man said to him. The first thing. Before hello. Before introductions. Just that. That was yesterday morning and now it was well into a hot afternoon, and those words followed him out of town and into the hills like a pack of dogs.
They say you’re a bit strange.
Red MacGill hated when people said those kinds of things. Even though it was true. He was strange. Always was. Always would be.
That’s why people hired him. A strange man for strange jobs.
Like this one. Like hunting ghosts out here in the Kansas hills.
– 2 –
It was hot as hell out there. Desert hot, with the hardpan and rocks taking the heat like a frying pan, with every plant, tree, and animal cooking in their own juices. Sweat ran down inside Red’s clothes and glistened on the neck and flanks of his big horse, Nightmare. He cut covert looks at the man who hired him, a thin stick of a farmer named Mathew Hollister, but he seemed unaffected by the burning sun. Probably because all of the life had already been cooked out of him.
“How far?” asked Red.
Hollister squinted into the glare ahead. “Few more miles.”
Ahead of them the ground sloped very gradually toward a cluster of broken hills surrounding a lopsided mesa. On maps it was called Sunrise Mesa because it faced east, but everyone around here called it Ghost Mesa. Though, it did not look particularly ominous. Well, except for the buzzards swirling in big, slow circles. Above them the sky was so hard a blue you could scratch a kitchen match on it. Not a goddamn cloud anywhere, nothing to provide shade.
Even so, he brushed his fingertips along the walnut grips of his pistol and loosened the Winchester in its scabbard. Touching the guns was a ritual for him. The barrels of each were covered with sacred symbols—not just of his mother’s people or his fa
ther’s faith, but of dozens of religions around the world. The weight of the bowie knife strapped to his left leg was a comfort.
He had planned on leaving Kansas and heading out toward California and the blue Pacific, or possibly heading down to Mexico. The trip out here had been frustrating and a rare failure for him. He’d been hired by a rich man who was more than a little crazy. The man believed that either bands of Arapaho had somehow managed to steal three complete freight trains—engines, caboose and all; or the demons the Arapaho prayed to had done it. Red, who more or less believed in demons, thought the old bastard was plain crazy, and thought it more likely that bands of white men had ambushed and robbed the trains. But that had proved a dead end. No one he talked to—white or red—had a clue, and none of the cargo, which was raw and processed metals, industrial crystals, machine parts, and tools had turned up in the hands of the people who traded in stolen goods. Red wasted several weeks of his time and a lot of the old man’s money and ended up getting fired for being useless. Fair enough. But now he was broke and needed a stake to finance his trip out of this part of the country. He was down to his last dollar when Mathew Hollister found him in the town saloon.
“Tell it to me again,” Red said.
Hollister looked at him. “I done told it four times.”
“This will make five, then.”
Hollister licked dry lips and glanced away. First toward Ghost Mesa, then up at the uninformative sky, then down at his own hands folded over his pommel.
“Like I said, Reverend Kit Smoke was through here last spring,” said the farmer. “He told us all a lot of tales.”
That part made sense. Reverend Smoke was, like him, half breed. Red was white and Comanche, while the reverend was black and Apache. But Smoke was a good man most days, though he was mad as the moon. Red had been of some use to the good reverend a few years back and now the preacher was wont to tell anyone, who would stand still long enough to hear about it, the full story. And, from what Red picked up, that story had grown considerably in the telling so that now it bore no resemblance to anything that ever happened. Stories were like that, and Red seldom bothered to set people straight. The real story was strange enough, and the fiction brought in good business.
His business was that of a “sorter of problems.” Not wolf packs or cattle thieves. Stranger problems. It was not a crowded profession, and it brought people like Hollister to him.
“Reverend Smoke said you knew how to deal with unnatural stuff,” continued Hollister. “Ghosts and suchlike.”
“That’s the part I don’t quite follow,” said Red. “Do ghosts need settling? Seems to me they mostly leave people alone.”
“Not these ghosts,” declared Hollister and now, as before, there were tears in his eyes that broke and rolled down his weathered cheeks. “These spooks have been slaughtering wild animals and cattle, and now I think they’ve gone and killed my brother.”
– 3 –
Mathew Hollister owned a medium-sized farm out by Sunrise Mesa where he grew wheat and rye and some other crops. He and his brother, Jack, who was a lawyer in town, amused themselves by doing a bit of prospecting. Red had laughed at that, because there was a very short list of people who’d pulled gold from this part of the Great Plains. When Hollister showed him the map, Red shook his head. It was like a thousand he’d seen—printed on parchment paper and boiled in tea. Sold for a dime, which meant that it wasn’t even worth the weight of the silver it cost to buy it.
They rode on, watching the buzzards. They were closer now, and Red could see that there were more of them than he thought.
“Um,” began Hollister, “about those stories the reverend told us…they was all pretty wild. Campfire stories, I guess. Like you’d tell a kid to get him to eat all his peas so the boogeyman didn’t come for him.”
Red said nothing. He’d had this same conversation fifty different ways over the years.
“I mean,” continued the farmer, “that was mostly Reverend Smoke being Reverend Smoke, if you follow me.”
Red said nothing.
“But…he said some things that plum made the hair stand up on the back of my neck. Like about the screaming woman people see on farm roads down near the Rio Grande. The one they say’s looking for the baby she drowned. And those two brothers in Albuquerque who turned into wolves. I mean, they didn’t really turn into wolves, did they? They couldn’t, right?”
Red said nothing.
They rode on with Hollister staring at him. Red tried not to laugh, though not all of it was funny. Reverend Smoke was one of several people who seemed compelled to tell stories about the half-breed problem sorter. Sometimes it got good business, and more than once it got Red ushered out of town by deputies and townsfolk who didn’t want his kind around. And in those cases that had nothing to do with Red’s Comanche mother.
As for the individual stories…even Reverend Smoke did not know all of them. Or even all the details of the ones he told. Like the two brothers in Albuquerque. Hell, it was only the younger one that was the problem, and a silver bullet sorted him out right quick.
“Tell me again what you saw,” he said. “The ghost, or whatever it was. Tell that part again.”
Despite the heat, Hollister shivered. “I only caught that one glimpse. Jack and I were supposed to meet out here and work a big cave we found. Sure, we knew that it was probably only going to be more fool’s gold—iron pyrite—but we had fun up there. Talking old times and shootin’ the breeze. With his lawyering and my farm, it’s the only time we ever get to talk.”
Red made an impatient twirling motion with his finger.
“Well, I saw Big Al—that’s Jack’s horse—wandering free on this slope that goes straight up to the cave mouth. I called out, but not too loud. Didn’t want to spook Big Al. But Jack didn’t answer. So I tied my own horse to a tree and went up on foot, slow-like, trying to calm Big Al, but he suddenly bolted and ran across the slope past the cave and began climbing a rocky path. I ran to follow, afraid the fool horse would break a leg in all those rocks, but just as I passed the cave I saw it.”
“‘It,’” echoed Red. “Tell me exactly what you saw.”
Hollister let his horse walk a dozen paces before he answered.
“I saw its skin first,” he said in a hushed voice. “Just inside the cave mouth, lying over a flat rock. It was like some animal, some great lizard, had shed its skin. But the more I looked the more I realized that the skin was not lizard shaped. It was man shaped! I picked it up and it was heavier than I thought it should be. A lizard or snake skin is thin when it’s shed. This wasn’t, nor was it kind of see-through, like a shed snake skin. This was more like a garment, like overalls, but it wasn’t any kind of denim of anything else I ever touched before. It fair made my skin crawl to handle it, and the smell! God above, there was a stink rising from that skin like whatever shed it was sick and dying. I flung it away from me and then…well…that’s when I saw it.”
“Ah,” said Red, leaning forward with interest.
“Well, now…remember when I told you about that orange monkey I saw in the zoo? It was like that. A bit like that, anyway, but it didn’t walk about on its knuckles and feet. This thing stood erect, and it wore some kind of garment, like a long breechcloth an Indian would…” He let the rest trail off and looked away in obvious embarrassment. Red wanted to laugh. White men were so funny at times.
“Like a breechcloth…” he prompted. “Tell me about the ghost.”
Hollister cleared his throat again and continued. His voice trembled as he described the monster in the cave. “Well, I’m not completely sure it was a ghost, but I don’t know what else to call it. It weren’t natural, I can tell you that. It was shorter than me, but broad at the shoulders and covered all over with pale hair. Not blonde, not like my wife’s, nor the pure white of an albino, like the farrier’s eldest son. No, this thing’s hair was dead-looking, as if all the color was somehow plum sucked out of it. Its skin was as pale and gray and
mottled as a mushroom, like some foul thing that grew in the dark. The face was no monkey’s face, nor anything worn by a man. Maybe Judas has a face like that when he burns in hell—you can ask the Reverend Smoke next time you see him. Let me tell you, though, that face will haunt my nightmares the rest of my life. No chin to speak of, and a wide mouth full of crooked teeth that were smeared with blood. I kept trying not to believe it was my brother, Jack’s, blood. God a’mighty! But, let me tell you—it was the eyes that were the worst. Big and round like a fish’s, but gray and red, like blood mixed with river mud. It was horrible—horrible I tell you.”
“And you just turned around and ran?” asked Red.
Hollister stared at him. “Wouldn’t you?”
Red said nothing.
In fact, he wasn’t at all sure he would have stood his ground. Not because he thought it really was a ghost, but because what Hollister claimed to have seen reminded Red of a monster from his mother’s people, the Mu Pitz—the wild cannibal men of Comanche legend. It was a persistent monster that appeared in a number of ways in the stories of other native peoples. It was the Manito to the Obinwa, the Nun’ Yunu’ Wi to the Cherokee, the Shampe to the Choctaw. There were so many monster legends, and Red had stopped believing that all of them were superstitious nonsense. He’d left that prejudice behind a long time ago because experience was an effective, though cruel, teacher.
They rounded a bend in the trail and Red could see the black mouth of the cave where Hollister had seen his ghost. Or whatever it was.
“We’re there,” said Mathew Hollister. “It’s just up the…”
His words died in the hot, still air.
Halfway up the slope was a congregation of vultures. Not flying, but clustered tightly around something that lay red and lumpen on the rocky ground. Flies in their thousands buzzed with frantic determination to take their portion of the grisly feast and lay their eggs for the maggots waiting to be born.