Fearie Tales

by Fearie Tales- Stories of the Grimm

  “He’s going for the desert, which don’t make sense,” announced Bucon as they reined in at the top of the last rise before the said desert, and looked down and ahead about four miles and saw the speck that was a horse bearing two riders, attended closely by a big plume of dust, all heading due west with nothing but flat red rock and drifting white sands ahead. “Least it don’t make sense unless …”

  The sheriff’s voice trailed off, and he blinked his tired eyes and then rubbed them a little with the underside of his kerchief, which wasn’t so dusty. The other men likewise peered and blinked, and shielded their eyes with their palms, and the horses hung their heads, taking a breather. Rose stood high in her stirrups, her fierce gaze on that plume, which looked to be lessening, the dust falling and growing darker.

  “The bastard’s stopped,” she said, her voice full of a promise that made the menfolk feel uneasy in their parts, like something cold and very unwelcome had suddenly intruded into regions unwanted. “We’ve got him now.”

  Bucon wiped his eyes again, and looked at Rose somewhere about her midsection, not wanting to meet her gaze, or get into trouble looking down the top of her shirt, and in fact would have looked at her horse’s head if he could have got away with that, only that would have invited trouble as well.

  “We ain’t got him,” he said slowly. “He’s crossed the line, gone through.”

  “Gone through? Gone through where?” Rose snapped out the question, sharp as a gunshot, and Bucon flinched almost like a bullet had whistled past his ear, close enough to feel the angels singing a death in its wake.

  “You know,” he said. “You know. There. She’s gone, Rose.”

  “There ain’t no gate,” said Rose, but her voice, usually so strident with certainty, was suddenly small and lost. “I never heard of a gate out this way.”

  “Some says they can make gates, when they need ’em,” said Bucon. “And there’s more around than we can see, for sure. We’d best be getting back. I’d like to make town before sundown. I’m real sorry, Rose.”

  A frog-chorus of relieved men, guttural and dust-choked, echoed his words as the posse joined in: “Sorry. Sorry. Sorry. Sorry. Sorry—”

  “I’m going after her,” interrupted Rose. She wheeled her horse to face the posse, a tough woman in her late thirties, still handsome in her looks and doubly so in her character, her once-flaxen hair now a dull gold under her sombrero cordobés, which was presumably black underneath the dust. She wore a once-white shirt of heavy cotton, somewhat unbuttoned at the top, below a red and white kerchief that she’d pulled down to speak, and a split riding skirt of soft calf leather lined with pale silk, above a pair of men’s boots, big wheel stirrups and all. In addition to the Sharps carbine in the bucket holster by her saddle, she had her husband’s Frontier Colt .45 holstered on her right thigh, a knife on her belt, and the eyes and hands to use all these weapons, as had been discovered to their sorrow by various parties over the years, them thinking her husband Broad Bill with the shoulders so wide and the long arms like a gorilla was the dangerous one of the pair.

  “I don’t expect any of you to come … Hell … I know it’s crazy,” she continued. “But she’s my daughter!”

  “That waterskin full?” asked Bucon. “Got any food? You can’t eat or drink nothing there, lest it’s given the right way, or you’ll never come back.”

  “There’s salt beef and bread in my blanket roll, and the water’s full up,” said Rose. “I was fixing to ride out to the Pepper Tree this morning, see how Kaleb and the boys were doing with my herd. Got to move ’em on soon. I’d be obliged if you’d tell Kaleb to take them slow over to the Big Hole.”

  “I’ll tell him,” said Bucon. “Rose …”

  He hesitated, and fidgeted with the sheathed knife he wore on a leather thong around his neck: a small thing, ivory-handled, more like a letter-opener than a proper piece of steel, sort of unfitting for a sheriff. People had noted it before, one of them often enough and in the wrong way, so it ended with him having its razor-sharp blade drawn across the back of his hand as a reminder about manners and suchlike.

  “What?” asked Rose. “You got something to say, Bucon, say it. I ain’t got time to waste.”

  The sheriff chewed his mustache a little, showing yellow teeth, looked ahead, then lifted the knife over his head and flicked it to Rose. She caught it by the leather thong and looked at it with some puzzlement.

  “I got a knife,” she said. “I don’t need some little razor to trim my mustache.”

  “You need this knife,” said Bucon, glancing at the other men, who stared in fascination. This was even better than Laramay’s kidnapping, since it didn’t look like it would entail them being involved in anything dark and dangerous and could be talked about for months or even years.

  “I bin there,” said the sheriff, real quiet, so everyone leaned forward in their saddles, even the horses going quiet as if they knew a matter of import was to be discussed. “I bin there, a long time ago, when I was a younger man … and … not righteous. I was riding with some bad fellows, and with one thing and another … we had to cross the line. Within a couple of days, I was the only one left, death coming for us thick and fast, every which way, creatures I ain’t never seen and never wish to see again, and things happening, the very ground against us. I was set to die, when I got helped out by a man who come upon me, in my extremities. He got me out and set me on my right path. He gave me this knife and said if ever I had to go there again, for some good reason that couldn’t, simply couldn’t be gone against, then I should stick this here knife in the first tree I see. Ask first, and stick it gentle, just like you might skinning, when you want to take it in your hand again in a moment, because the trees ain’t always trees. Leave it there and just say some words about being in need of help. So you take it, Rose, and do that, and maybe he will come.”

  “We talking forty years ago or more,” sniffed Rose. “And how does sticking a knife in a tree do anything?”

  “Things are different there, Rose,” said Bucon. “Time is different too. Tell me you’ll do as I say and use the knife.”

  Rose slipped her hat back and put the thong over her head, the knife resting down about her stomach, a little below her breasts. Bucon looked away and cleared his throat.

  “I’ll do it,” said Rose. “I’ll be seeing you, boys. With my Laramay.”

  With that, she dug in her knees and chirruped to her horse, named Darcy, a rig who had been gelded wrong so he still had one testicle, and acted like a stallion. He was named after the gelder, who left Rose’s employ precipitately, fearing for his own equipment when she discovered he’d been drunk and botched the business with half a dozen mounts. The other horses had been fixed proper, but Rose had come to like the bit of fire that Darcy the horse retained, so he was left as he was, neither full stallion nor gelding.

  “Good luck, Rose,” said Bucon. He took off his hat and waved it after her, the rest of the posse doing likewise, though there were no catcalls or hurrahs. It had the feel of a permanent parting, and not a happy one.

  Rose rode down toward the desert, the ground beneath changing under Darcy’s hooves, the red rock sinking under the blowing sands that came from the desert, the stunted salt bushes giving up even their lackluster hold, till there was nothing but sand and some mighty stones that still protruded here and there, like swimmers breasting an unlovely sea, sure to drown before too long.

  And after some hard riding, there was the gate. Rose knew it at once, though she had never seen one, and those who had were generally loath to talk about it. It simply couldn’t be anything else, a sunken roadway in the sand that descended twenty feet in twenty yards, with sheer, unsupported walls all along and the end of it an archway that was not sand but a shimmering pattern somewhat like a chance-caught glimpse of a rough-cut opal by a candle flame, stone and light and color swirling and shimmering.

  A saddle and harness lay at the entrance to the ramp, and to Rose’s surprise the skel
eton of a horse, shreds of fresh flesh sticking off of it as if it had been sucked almost clean by some giant glutton. A pair of saddlebags lay nearby, open, their contents strewn as if they had been hurriedly ransacked for wanted items; the things left behind that immediately caught Rose’s eye were wrapped food packets, water bottles, ammunition boxes and even a canvas bag of the kind used to carry a considerable sum of gold. The rifle she had seen at Alhambra’s side was also there, thrown away as if it could not serve him beyond the gate.

  Perhaps that was true, she thought, but she rested her hand on the worn, skin-smoothed bird’s-head grip of her own Colt, trusting to its power that she knew well. The horse bones troubled her more than the other abandoned stuff, because the skeleton was so fresh, and it had to be the round-headed man’s mount. But what had he done to it, how and why?

  She encouraged Darcy forward to descend the ramp, but he balked, answering neither knee nor even the prick of her spurs, tilting his head back and showing the whites of his eyes, though he made no sound of protest, as if scared even beyond that. She backed him a little, and had to hold him hard to stop him bolting away. Eventually he answered to pressure of leg and rein, but she knew she could not even lead him through the gate. Dismounting, she took off gear and saddle, bridle and bit, and stacked them neatly on the ground, somewhat away from the ramp.

  “Go home,” she said to Darcy, and smacked him on the rump. He took off fast, straight as an arrow back toward the ridge. She had no idea if he would go home, all the way to the ranch, but like as not he would follow the posse’s horses, and get back to town at least. Bucon would keep him for her, for a while …

  It was quiet without the horse’s movement and breath, and the air was still. It felt cooler than it should, Rose thought, and shivered. The desert heat was absent by the ramp, though there was no shade. She set her mind on her daughter, and took a tin box of bullets from her saddlebag and wrapped it with the bread and meat in her blanket roll, which went over her shoulder with the waterskin. Cradling the Sharps in her arms, she set off down the ramp toward the gate of twisting colors—and without hesitation strode straight into and through it, disappearing from the regular world as if she had never been there.

  Rose came out in a forested high glade, partway up a small mountain, tall trees above and below and the sun that got through the puzzle of piney branches significantly less warm than would be right for anything within five hundred miles of the Star-Circle Ranch. It could well even snow a little higher up, Rose adjudged, and shivered. She shivered again as she slowly spun around, hands tight on the Sharps, finger tapping the trigger guard till she willed it to stop. There was no gate behind her, no shimmering colors, nothing but the slope of downward-marching pines, littered beneath with fallen pinecones and small branches.

  She began to look around for trail signs, bending close to examine the forest floor. As she leaned, the small knife around her neck swung out, almost as if it was reminding her of Bucon’s instructions.

  “Nothing to lose by it, I expect,” she whispered to herself, not wanting to admit that she felt cowed by the strange place she had entered. Even the trees didn’t seem quite right, not exactly any kind of pine she had ever known. The cones, seen up close, had barbs, and the stiff green bristles on the fallen branches wound around like tight, thin springs.

  She unsheathed the knife and addressed the nearest tree, feeling not at all abashed as she might have done back on the other side. She hoped no one or nothing was watching, but that wasn’t for fear of embarrassment. That was just plain old-fashioned fear, simple, pure and strong.

  “Begging your pardon, tree,” she said. “I’ve got to stick this here knife in you just a tiny fraction, enough to get a hold.”

  She stabbed as she spoke, the point of the blade breaking through the tough bark. Sap spewed out, amber-colored and strong-smelling, but again, not the pine-smell she was used to.

  Rose stood up and addressed the knife. “I need help all right, so I’m hoping whoever gave this blade to old Bucon can come along and help me and my daughter. Thank you, sir.”

  Nothing happened, save that a breeze began to tickle the treetops above and a few more of the barbed pinecones fell, one narrowly missing Rose’s head. She ignored the falling tree debris and began to cast about in a wider circle, looking for evidence of the passage of Alhambra and Laramay. When she found it, a small tear cropped up, to be immediately blinked away, because the boot-heel mark and the slipper-print were side by side, and that meant Laramay was walking along willing, like, or at least easy, something Rose had always feared. Laramay was a good girl, but she’d always been kind of absent, going along with whatever anyone told her to do. Mostly the teller was Rose, and things worked out fine, but with a kidnapper of uncertain morals, and now, given their whereabouts, uncertain humanity, the case was much different and more dire. The only saving grace, and the slightest of comforts to Rose, was the knowledge that Laramay probably wasn’t even affrighted, thinking herself on a picnic or some gambol.

  She began to follow the tracks, trying to stay quiet herself, though that was difficult, with the forest floor so strewn with sticks and cones, and the ground underneath it damp and slippery. Not mud, not quite, but clear indication that it had rained recently, and would again, though Rose couldn’t see much cloud at present, when she got a clear glimpse of the sky through the thick weave of the pine branches above. Rose got warm climbing the slope, but it was the kind of sticky warmth that was only temporary, and she knew it would freeze on her later. As far as she could gauge, it was past four in the afternoon, and once the sun set in a few hours, it would be very cold.

  Maybe a mile along and a few hundred feet up from where she’d come through, still following boot-and slipper-prints, Rose realized that for some time now she’d been hearing something else beside the scuff and slip of her own footsteps, the choof of her breath, now steaming out her mouth as the air cooled around, and the beat of her working heart. There was another sound, a stealthier, nastier sound, someone or something sneaking up behind her …

  She turned, carbine ready, and fired one shot before the thing was upon her, so fast and strange that she couldn’t fix her eye and mind on what it was, save hairy and fanged and twice the size of any dog, its dimensions all awry anyway, too long in the back and the legs uneven and the snout wide like a fan, with teeth every which way, and she was working the lever to get another round up the spout when it hit her and she had to flick the carbine diagonally across its huge mouth to hold it off, and it threw her back, chewing and whittling on the weapon, and she knew she’d hit it the first time and it hadn’t done a thing and she brought her foot up and kicked it in the guts, shouting out words that the Mothers’ Club would have expelled her for, if they’d ever let her join in the first place, but the kicks didn’t daunt it and then it spat out the carbine and raised its foul head to let out a roar that blew her hat off, the roar being a mistake because in that moment Rose dropped the carbine, drew her knife that had been Broad Bill’s and plunged it right up to the crosshilt in the puffy, less hairy flesh under the great jaw that she figured was the critter’s throat, twisted it twice, and pulled it out again.

  Black, steaming, vile-smelling blood spewed out like a train venting steam, Rose dodging it as she stumbled backward, colliding with the trunk of one of the pines, which was as richly decorated with tiny barbs as the cones. The creature, wolf-weasel-widemouth, whatever it was, turned in a circle like a cat settling and then went straight down in a heap, the blood gushing from under its head running down the slope in an ugly rivulet.

  “That’s a mighty fine display of knife-work,” said an admiring male voice a little ways up the mountain. Rose whirled around. Already holding the knife, she turned the Colt on her right sideways in its holster and drew it with her left hand, a move she’d learned from a friend of her late husband’s, a gunslinger called Lefty Truss, who carried on his right but drew with his left and not a cross-draw neither, which when it worked confused
and dismayed his enemies, but as he eventually found out was slower and less effective than sticking to the basics.

  The man who had spoken held his palms out and open by his sides as Rose drew a bead on his chest. Metal glinted on the breast of his oat-colored coat, a star within a circle, with some writing around the circle’s edge that Rose didn’t need to even read, she just instantly recognized the pattern and knew it said U.S. MARSHAL.

  Rose lowered the Colt, not all the way to pointing it at the ground, because you never knew for sure, and a metal badge could come unstuck and get put on someone different, particularly when the rightful bearer was dead. And this was across the line, through the gate, over the border … It paid to take extra care.

  They took stock of each other for a moment or two. Rose saw a very tall, lean, good-looking man, about fifty, maybe even older, with plenty of sun-lines around his eyes under his pale Stetson, and though clean-shaven within the past day or so, the stubble on his chin was white and he didn’t look to have a lot of hair beneath the hat. He was well covered against the cold, his coat lined with fleece, though he had it unbuttoned and open at the front, showing a leather waistcoat and the big silver buckle of his belt, a broad swath of odd-looking bullets through the loops, silver at the tip, and a revolver on either side, older guns than Rose’s—Remingtons, she thought, like her father had favored.

  “Name’s Thornton,” said the man. “You did real well there, ma’am, figuring so fast a bullet wouldn’t work.”

  “What was that thing?” asked Rose, but she didn’t take her gaze away or holster the pistol. She liked the look of the man—he seemed straight enough, and civil—but …