She drew to a stop, her madness staunched like a flaming bough plunged into a bucket of blood. Jonas lay full on her back, the cooling sweat from his belly soaking his jeans and pooling in his boots, mixing with the loam foaming white on her dark coat. His limbs hung limp and spent. He whispered loving words into her heaving withers as she savagely grunted between bites.
It was late when Jonas led the mare into her stall and staggered into the house to collapse on his bed, his jeans and skin crusted with grit and blood.
He was drifting off into another dream of slaughter when he heard the mare nicker and sat up.
He put on his coat and crept barefoot through the quiet house and out onto the porch. The stable he had just left dark was all aglow.
Panos turned when he heard the stable door creak open.
The old Greek had his shotgun. The one he’d used on the colt and her mother last spring.
“I thought you were asleep,” he said. “I meant to wait till you were.”
Jonas’s heart quickened as he saw Panos turn the gun on the mare. He took the pitchfork from where it rested against the wall and rushed.
The prongs sank to the cross bar in Panos’ back and drove him against the stall gate. Panos fumbled the shotgun and dropped it.
The old man gripped the top of the gate and wheezed, looking up into the face of the blood bay mare.
It seemed as if she bent her head to kiss the old man, but at the last moment her jaws opened and clamped over his face. Panos screamed. It was a muffled sound, quickly overcome by the sharp crackling of bone as his jaw collapsed and blood coursed down his throat. His eyes bugged. She threw back her head and lifted him off the floor with her powerful neck. She shook him as she had the coyote and his whole skeleton undulated like a bullwhacker’s whip snapping in the air. The pitchfork popped from his back and fell away. She slammed him twice across the stall gate. The third time his limbs hung loose and rubbery as plough lines and his knees scraped the floor. He swung like a pendulum from her muzzle, three rivers of dark blood oozing from his back and flecking the straw.
She backed up and pulled him most of the way over the gate, until only his feet protruded over the edge. Jonas heard the crackling and wet sucking of her feeding. He glimpsed pink and stark red beneath the door.
Jonas sat down in the hay and put his back against the wall. He hugged his knees and thereon rested his chin. His eyelids were heavy.
Xanthe, he thought as he dozed off. That’s your name, isn’t it?
He did not dream.
In the morning, Jonas got up early and went to the house to wash and change his clothes. When he came into the kitchen, his nostrils filled with a delicious, sweet smell unlike any he’d ever known.
Claire was dappled in white flour, her shirt sleeves rolled and her sunny hair escaping from a bun in wiry strands. She smiled. Jonas stood in the doorway and smiled back.
“It’s gonna be a little while till it cools. I can’t put it on the sill. Sand gets into everything around here.” She said, and gestured to the fresh baked pie. “Hope you like peach.”
“I never had it,” he said.
Her smile fell.
“But I’m sure I’ll love it.”
She smiled again.
“Well good.”
“I’m gonna go check on Xanthe.”
“Who?”
“My horse.”
“Oh. I thought your daddy said you called her Blondie.”
“Be right back.”
Jonas opened Xanthe’s stall. Her coat was stiff with blood, the white blaze black with it.
He stroked her chin and whispered to her, cheek to cheek.
“You ain’t still hungry are you?”
The mare flicked her ears.
“I thought so,” he chuckled. “Yeah, you can always eat, can’t you? Come on.”
He put Henry’s old saddle on her, tied up his bedroll and bags and strapped Panos’ shotgun across the cantle.
He mounted and eased her across the yard, clomping right up onto the porch. He blasted the front door off its hinges with the shotgun. Horses were not known to easily abide setting foot indoors. Panos had told him that. Xanthe didn’t mind.
They each partook of their favorite meals, and then took the trail south toward Polvo Arrido and Mexico.
Famous and Clem came home from Bisbee a week later and noticed the open door to the bronc stable. Famous made a note to scold Jonas about leaving it open, though of course not too harshly, as it was the first time he’d done it. While Clem took the new horses to their stalls, Famous found the remains of Panos, knowing him by his three gold teeth.
He backed out of the stable with a rising gorge. When he saw the front door and the black hoof prints scattered across the porch, he went running, wiping his mouth with the back of his hand and choking out Claire’s name through the taste of bile and breakfast beans.
A minute later Clem heard the shot that signaled his inheritance of Famous’s Horses.
The reporters in The Shootist and The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance provided the inspiration for this story, along with the legend of Lilith, the latter of which is expanded upon more in the last novel of my Merkabah Rider series, Once Upon A Time In The Weird West. Much of the Angel of Death’s story that was excised from that book wound up here.
The Exclusive
Tom Cotter was no man to be trifled with. He had rustled Mexican steer along the border into a sizeable herd in his youth, and had built himself an empire as one of the first outfits to drive cattle to the Missouri railheads, putting beef in the bellies of starving soldiers during the War Between The States. He owned a good chunk of New Mexico, and was a king among cattlemen. There were senators that doffed their hats to him, and he in turn did their dirty work on occasion, sending out his hired villains to execute foreclosures on land he didn’t own, and gunning down those who tried to resist. He had a beef contract with the local Indian reservation which he rarely fulfilled, yet the government money filled his war bag every month on schedule just the same.
Everybody knew this, but Barry Twiggs, editor-in-chief of The Perryville Premonitor, dared to print it, and often. He had been warned off in various ways by Cotter’s men. They had burned down his offices twice, hired a drunk to bust his knee with a stick of firewood, and shot his horse out from under him on the way back from church two weeks ago. He had expected another reprisal after the Sunday edition’s front page headline linked Cotter to a prominent member of The Bill Ord Gang, but not the one he got.
Now, as his flesh was scraped away by creosote brambles and his bleeding wounds filled with grit, as he bounced along the ground through cactus patches, towed behind a galloping palamino by his ankle, he wished he had taken a drinking colleague’s advice and bought himself a .44. As it was, Cotter had sent a group of masked men to answer Twiggs’s latest libelous attack on his person with axe handles and lariats. They had yanked him and his printing press out of the office, knocked him ass over teakettle, then dragged the both of them out of town.
The frictional burning all about his body was a blinding agony, but if he opened his mouth to scream he choked on clots of dirt and dust kicked up by the horses. He could hear their laughter above the noise of his body dragging, and the banging of his press as it tumbled behind the other rider’s horse.
He tried to retreat into his mind, away from the nightmare that was engulfing him, but composing accusatory editorial rebuttals in his pain-wracked brain gave him no comfort. He doubted he would live to print another edition.
He took some comfort in thoughts of Junia, but then a stone would dash against his face or another bone would snap, and he would be cast back into hellish reality.
When they stopped, he didn’t know, nor did he know how long he lay there. He thought he imagined their remarks.
“He’s still alive!”
“He don’t look t’be. Lost enough hide to half-sole an elephant.”
“Well he is. Listen to him breathin’!”
“Big Tom wants him dead.”
“Shoot him.”
“You shoot him.”
“Tie him to his printin’ machine and sink him in the river.”
Laughter.
He felt them cut the latigo chord that had dug through his flesh until it was wrapped around the bone of his ankle. Then he was propped up, head lolling like a rag doll, something blocky and cold jutting sharp edges into his back. They lashed him to it, and he was lifted, horny fingers digging into his bleeding elbows and ragged ankles. He got a last look at the sun burning itself out in the high desert sand before he was heaved into a chilly, throbbing darkness.
He sank and struck the bottom. He hadn’t had the presence of mind to catch a deep breath before they chucked him in, and his lungs quickly burned and quivered. He gritted his broken teeth and weakly strained against his fetters, but it was no use. He gulped water in place of needed air.
He panicked, thrashed, whimpered and bucked, but his broken bones and torn muscles wouldn’t do the job.
He felt his eyes burning, bulging as he looked around the dark river bottom for any kind of way out.
And then someone broke the bright surface of the water way above his head, and came straight down at him like a diving duck. He had long dark hair like a woman’s, but he was definitely a man, because he was naked as a jaybird, the wavy watery light playing across his lean muscles.
Strong as he looked though, how would he cut him loose? Nice try, fella, and I appreciate the effort, thought Twiggs. But I’m done in.
His coulda-been savior drifted to a stop in front of him and inspected his bonds. That was when Twiggs noticed the long knife in his hand. Actually it was more like a sword; and not one of those cavalry sabers either, but the sort of thing you think of a Roman soldier having. The dwindling light trickled down the length of the silvery blade, and in a few quick flashes, Twiggs was loose and floating, and he felt the stranger’s powerful arm encircle his chest and draw him up and out.
He lay upon his belly on the riverbank, trembling like a bass plucked out of its habitat. He waited for the stranger to help him up, bear him to a horse or a wagon.
But the man did none of these things. He turned from Twiggs and stood staring at the setting sun, the sword propped on his shoulder.
He made no move to put any clothes on, and Twiggs saw no rig or horse nearby, nor even a pile of duds.
There was something odd about this man, to be sure. He was too dang perfect. The water didn’t speckle or shine on his skin. By God, his hair wasn’t even wet.
For that matter, neither was Twiggs’s. He ran his hand over his own head, then his face, and coming away with no blood, nor detecting any of the wounds the cruel New Mexican foliage had opened up on his body, he inspected his hands and feet furtively as St. Thomas. He found no marks anywhere on him. His left foot, from which they’d dragged him, should have been hanging by a scrap of flesh.
But there was nothing.
No pain, either. Not even the dull ache in between his shoulder blades he’d been working on for the past three years, or the permanent stiffness in the knee Cotter’s paid wino had given him.
As the sun dipped behind the faraway mountains, the naked stranger turned and regarded him with a pair of stark white eyes, devoid of iris or pigment.
Twiggs felt a sinking feeling in the pit of his stomach as the man said;
“Ready to go?”
His voice was deep and bespoke infinite tiredness.
“Almighty b’damned,” Twiggs spluttered. “What in hell’s goin’ on here?” Although he knew well, or at least had a better than average inkling.
The naked man sighed and let the sword come down off his shoulder. He advanced, the keen looking blade swinging idly in his hand.
“Whoa whoa whoa!” Twiggs stammered. “Hang on now. Alright. That was a stupid question. You’re a busy man, and you must get that reaction a lot. You’re way past having the patience to play out the same old scenario over and over again, I’d warrant.”
The man stopped before him, but said nothing.
Twiggs let his eyes run up and down the imposing, weird figure before him, and he grimaced a bit when he saw that below the waist, the man had been cut, apparently a long time ago, and not in the Jewish sense, unless the rabbi had been in the throes of the St. Vitus Dance during the job. He was mutilated, overall like a master sculptor’s statue, a perfect male specimen but for the lack of that vital organ that warranted the appellation, as if it’d been neatly chipped away by some prudish art critic. Twiggs’s curiosity over this burned him more than had the ground from town to the river, but it was not something one began a conversation with.
“I know who you are, sure,” said Twiggs, thinking quickly. “Tell me something, do you know who I am?”
“I neither know nor care,” said the stranger.
“Well sir, I am a newspaper man. Barry Twiggs, of the Shreveport Twiggses. Founder and editor-in-chief of The Perryville Premonitor, with a circulation encompassing the better part of two counties in the territory of New Mexico.”
He paused here.
“Ah, incidentally, what do I call you?”
“What?” the stranger blinked, as if he had been only half-listening.
“You must have a name. Death, or more properly, Angel of Death, that’s just an official title, right?”
“Mr. Twiggs, what do you want?”
“A busy man, yes indeed. Well sir, as I said before, I am a newspaper man. By a turn of fate in life I was a crusader, a voice for the people. But I never set out to be such. The whims of fortune do turn a man from his intended path though, do they not? Oh yes. When I came out west, I only meant for journalism to be a sideline to my real calling. I wanted to be a biographer, you see. At that time all the newspapers back east were filled with blood and thunder articles on Wild Bill Hickok’s shootout with Dave Tutt, the exploits of the James gang, etcetera. I came out to find one of these shootists, these up-and-coming killers. I thought I could hitch my wagon to one of them, become a Buntline or a Nichols or a Beadle. You get a sense of the real man and then embellish the rest, live off the residuals. That was all I wanted.”
He trailed off, watching a gibbous moon emerging in the darkening sky, then shook himself, for Death hadn’t the patience to wait long.
“To be brief, sir, I find the stirring of my calling. Here I sit, in front of the most famous killer extant, whose career trumps the tally of any gunman who ever lived – who ever will live, even. I doubt you are in the business of granting last requests. I should think a man in your line would hardly pause to say hello and goodbye after a time. But I think sir, that you have a tale to tell. I’ll bet you millions of folks ask you ‘why’ and ‘how come’ and ‘where am I going’ and the like, but not a one of them has asked to hear your story.”
Death regarded the man.
“You do realize you’re dead, Mr. Twiggs?”
“Please, Barry. I figured that out, yessir.”
“Then who do you intend to relate my tale to?”
“Why, if there’s an afterlife, I’ll regale my fellow souls with it.”
“And what if there is nothing?”
“Well, you’ll pardon me, but if you’re here, I’ll bet there’s something.”
Death nodded slightly.
“From here, you go to hell.”
Twiggs stiffened, but had nothing to say to that.
“You’ll be purged in fire for a time, until your iniquities and your earthly concerns are burned away. You won’t care at all for your stories and your curiosity will be gone.”
“And after my time’s served?”
Death turned to look at the moon.
“My God,” said Twiggs, settling down on a rock. “You don’t know do you?”
Death wheeled on him, and lifted the sword, angry.
“Wait,” said Twiggs. “Tell me your story. If not for me, then for yourself. When’s the last time anybody listened to you?”
Death seemed to hesitate, the sword poised to whistle down. It did not strike.
“Come on. I’m all ears. Let’s start....with your name. What’s your name?”
“There is no deceiving me, Mr. Twiggs. In all the eons I have been Death I have never been once cheated out of my task.”
Well, so much for that. It had been in the back of Twiggs’s mind of course, maybe to get that sword away from him somehow.
“No tricks,” Twiggs said. “No deals, no last minute entreaties.”
Death lowered the sword again, and he turned it in his hand and drove the point in the muddy bank.
“Samael was my name.”
“Samael. Sam. There. That’s a start. Pleased to meet you, sir.” Twiggs’s tongue touched his lip. He knew of course, that this was a useless gesture. He wasn’t even in his body anymore. That bloodied and battered corpse of his was a buffet for fish at the bottom of the river. But whatever he was for the moment anyway, soul or shade or what-have-you, it was still his own. He didn’t like what Death (or Sam, it was easier to talk to him that way) had said about losing his curiosity and desires, but at least hell wasn’t eternal.
“How did you get picked to be the Angel of Death?”
“It is not an honor I was selected for,” said Sam. “It is a punishment.”
“And you’re the only one that does it? You don’t have helpers?”
“I do not visit every mortal soul. I know some pass on without me. So I think there may be others. But we have never met. I cannot perceive nor be perceived by anyone but the souls of the dying, those in transition.”
“Not even other angels?”
“No. I exist outside of Creation.”
It was like a prison, then; a prison that spanned the world and held but one inmate.
“What did you do to warrant this?”
“I fought in the Great Rebellion, under The Light Bearer.”
“That really happened?”
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