The Very Best of Fantasy & Science Fiction, Volume 1

by Gordon Van Gelder

  “On my mother’s name!”

  “Do you believe in the eternal love of Jesus?”

  He began to weep. “Your fucking-a I do—”

  “He forgives you that, Jonson.”

  “Praise God,” Jonson said, still weeping, unaware of what he had said or done.

  “I know he forgives you just as I know he will cast out the unrepentant from his palaces and into the place of burning darkness.”

  “Praise God.” The congregation, drained, spoke it solemnly.

  “Just as I know this Interloper, this Satan, this Lord of Flies and Serpents will be cast down and crushed... will you crush him if you see him, Jonson?”

  “Yes and praise God!” Jonson wept.

  “Will you crush him if you see him, brothers and sisters?”

  “Yess...” Sated.

  “If you see him sashaying down Main St. tomorrow?”

  “Praise God...”

  The gunslinger, amused and unsettled at the same time, faded back out the door and headed for town. The smell of the desert was clear in the air. Almost time to move on. Almost.

  XIII

  In bed again.

  “She won’t see you,” Allie said. She sounded frightened. “She doesn’t see anybody. She only comes out on Sunday evenings to scare the hell out of everybody.”

  “How long has she been here?”

  “Twelve years or so. Let’s not talk about her.”

  “Where did she come from? Which direction?”

  “I don’t know.” Lying.

  “Allie?”

  “I don’t know!”

  “Allie?”

  “All right! All right! She came from the dwellers! From the desert!”

  “I thought so.” He relaxed a little. “Where does she live?”

  Her voice dropped a notch. “If l tell you, will you make love to me?”

  “You know the answer to that.”

  She sighed. It was an old, yellow sound, like turning pages. “She has a house over the knoll in back of the church. A little shack. It’s where the... the real minister used to live until he moved out. Is that enough? Are you satisfied?”

  “No. Not yet.” And he rolled on top of her.

  XIV

  It was the last day, and he knew it.

  The sky was an ugly, bruised purple, weirdly lit from above with the first fingers of dawn. Allie moved about like a wraith, lighting lamps, tending the corn fritters that spluttered in the skillet. He had loved her hard after she had told him what he had to know, and she sensed the coming end and had given more than she had ever given, and she had given it with desperation against the coming of dawn, given it with the tireless energy of sixteen. And she was pale this morning, on the brink of menopause again.

  She served him without a word. He ate rapidly, chewing, swallowing, chasing each bite with hot coffee. Allie went to the batwings and stood staring out at the morning, at the silent battalions of slow-moving clouds.

  “It’s going to dust up today.”

  “I’m not surprised.”

  “Are you ever?” She asked ironically, and turned to watch him get his hat. He clapped it on his head and brushed past her.

  “Sometimes,” he told her. He only saw her once more alive.

  XV

  By the time he reached Sylvia Pittston’s shack, the wind had died utterly and the whole world seemed to wait. He had been in desert country long enough to know that the longer the lull, the harder the wind would blow when it finally decided to start up. A queer, flat light hung over everything.

  There was a large wooden cross nailed to the door of the place, which was leaning and tired. He rapped and waited. No answer. He rapped again. No answer. He drew back and kicked in the door with one hard shot of his right boot. A small bolt on the inside ripped free. The door banged against a haphazardly planked wall and scared rats into skittering flight. Sylvia Pittston sat in the hall, sat in a mammoth darkwood rocker, and looked at him calmly with those great and dark eyes. The stormlight fell on her cheeks in terrifying half-tones. She wore a shawl. The rocker made tiny squeaking noises.

  They looked at each other for a long, clockless moment.

  “You will never catch him,” she said. “You walk in the way of evil.”

  “He came to you,” the gunslinger said.

  “And to my bed. He spoke to me in the Tongue. He—”

  “He screwed you.”

  She did not flinch. “You walk an evil way, gunslinger. You stand in shadows. You stood in the shadows of the holy place last night. Did you think I couldn’t see you?”

  “Why did he heal the weed-eater?”

  “He was an angel of God. He said so.”

  “I hope he smiled when he said it.”

  She drew her lip back from her teeth in an unconsciously feral gesture. “He told me you would follow. He told me what to do. He said you are the Antichrist.”

  The gunslinger shook his head. “He didn’t say that.”

  She smiled up at him lazily. “He said you would want to bed me. Do you?”

  “Yes.”

  “The price is your life, gunslinger. He has got me with child... the child of an angel. If you invade me—” She let the lazy smile complete her thought. At the same time she gestured with her huge, mountainous thighs. They stretched beneath her garment like pure marble slabs. The effect was dizzying.

  The gunslinger dropped his hands to the butts of his pistols. “You have a demon, woman. I can remove it.”

  The effect was instantaneous. She recoiled against the chair, and a weasel look flashed on her face. “Don’t touch me! Don’t come near me! You dare not touch the Bride of God!”

  “Blow it out,” the gunslinger said, grinning. He stepped toward her.

  The flesh on the huge frame quaked. Her face had become a caricature of crazed terror, and she stabbed the sign of the Eye at him with pronged fingers.

  “The desert,” the gunslinger said. “What after the desert?”

  “You’ll never catch him! Never! Never! You’ll burn! He told me so!”

  “I’ll catch him,” the gunslinger said. “We both know it. What is beyond the desert?”

  “No!”

  “Answer me!”

  “No!”

  He slid forward, dropped to his knees, and grabbed her thighs. Her legs locked like a vise. She made strange, lustful keening noises.

  “The demon, then,” he said.

  “No—”

  He pried the legs apart and unholstered one of his guns.

  “No! No! No!” Her breath came in short, savage grunts.

  “Answer me.”

  She rocked in the chair and the floor trembled. Prayers and garbled bits of jargon flew from her lips.

  He rammed the barrel of the gun forward. He could feel the terrified wind sucked into her lungs more than he could hear it. Her hands beat at his head; her legs drummed against the floor. And at the same time the huge body tried to take the invader and enwomb it. Outside nothing watched them but the bruised sky.

  She screamed something, high and inarticulate.

  “What?”

  “Mountains!”

  “What about them?”

  “He stops... on the other side... s-s-sweet Jesus!.... to m-make his strength. Med-m-meditation, do you understand? Oh... I’m... I’m...”

  The whole huge mountain of flesh suddenly strained forward and upward, yet he was careful not to let her secret flesh touch him.

  Then she seemed to wilt and grow smaller, and she wept with her hands in her lap.

  “So,” he said, getting up. “The demon is served, eh?”

  “Get out. You’ve killed the child. Get out. Get out.”

  He stopped at the door and looked back. “No child,” he said briefly. “No angel, no demon.”

  “Leave me alone.”

  He did.

  XVI

  By the time he arrived at Kennerly’s, a queer obscurity had come over the northern horizon and he k
new it was dust. Over Tull the air was still dead quiet.

  Kennerly was waiting for him on the chaff-strewn stage that was the floor of his barn. “Leaving?” He grinned abjectly at the gunslinger.

  “Yes.”

  “Not before the storm?”

  “Ahead of it.”

  “The wind goes faster than a man on a mule. In the open it can kill you.”

  “I’ll want the mule now,” the gunslinger said simply.

  “Sure.” But Kennerly did not turn away, merely stood as if searching for something further to say, grinning his groveling, hate-filled grin, and his eyes flicked up and over the gunslinger’s shoulder.

  The gunslinger sidestepped and turned at the same time, and the heavy stick of stovewood that the girl Soobie held swished through the air, grazing his elbow only. She lost hold of it with the force of her swing and it clattered over the floor. In the explosive height of the loft, barnswallows took shadowed wing.

  The girl looked at him bovinely. Her breasts thrust with overripe grandeur at the wash-faded shirt she wore. One thumb sought the haven of her mouth with dreamlike slowness.

  The gunslinger turned back to Kennerly. The grin was huge. His skin was waxy yellow. His eyes rolled in their sockets. “I—” he began in a phlegm-filled whisper and could not continue.

  “The mule,” the gunslinger prodded gently.

  “Sure, sure, sure,” Kennerly whispered, the grin now touched with incredulity. He shuffled after it.

  He moved to where he could watch Kennerly. The hostler brought the mule back and handed him the bridle. “You get in an’ tend your sister,” he said to Soobie.

  Soobie tossed her head and didn’t move.

  The gunslinger left them there, staring at each other across the dusty, droppings-strewn floor, he with his sick grin, she with dumb, animal defiance. Outside the heat was still like a hammer.

  XVII

  He walked the mule up the center of the street, his boots sending up squirts of dust. His waterbags were strapped across the mule’s back.

  He stopped at Sheb’s, and Allie was not there. The place was deserted, battened for the storm, but still dirty from the night before. She had not begun her cleaning and the place was as fetid as a wet dog.

  He filled his tote sack with corn meal, dried and roasted corn, and half of the raw hamburger in the cooler. He left four gold pieces stacked on the planked counter. Allie did not come down. Sheb’s piano bid him a silent, yellow-toothed good-by. He stepped back out and cinched the tote sack across the mule’s back. There was a tight feeling in his throat. He might still avoid the trap, but the chances were small. He was, after all, the interloper.

  He walked past the shuttered, waiting buildings, feeling the eyes that peered through cracks and chinks. The man in black had played God in Tull. Was it only a sense of the cosmic comic, or a matter of desperation? It was a question of some importance.

  There was a shrill, harried scream from behind him, and doors suddenly threw themselves open. Forms lunged. The trap was sprung, then. Men in longhandles and men in dirty dungarees. Women in slacks and in faded dresses. Even children, tagging after their parents. And in every hand there was a chunk of wood or a knife.

  His reaction was automatic, instantaneous, inbred. He whirled on his heels while his hands pulled the guns from their holsters, the hafts heavy and sure in his hands. It was Allie, and of course it had to be Allie, coming at him with her face distorted, the scar a hellish, distorted purple in the lowering light. He saw that she was held hostage; the distorted, grimacing face of Sheb peered over her shoulder like a witch’s familiar. She was his shield and sacrifice. He saw it all, clear and shadowless in the frozen deathless light of the sterile calm, and heard her:

  “He’s got me O Jesus don’t shoot don’t don’t don’t—” But the hands were trained. He was the last of his breed and it was not only his mouth that knew the High Speech. The guns beat their heavy, atonal music into the air. Her mouth flapped and she sagged and the guns fired again. Sheb’s head snapped back. They both fell into the dust.

  Sticks flew through the air, rained on him. He staggered, fended them off. One with a nail pounded raggedly through it ripped at his arm and drew blood. A man with a beard stubble and sweat-stained armpits lunged flying at him with a dull kitchen knife held in one paw. The gunslinger shot him dead and the man thumped into the street. His teeth clicked audibly as his chin struck.

  “SATAN!” Someone was screaming: “THE ACCURSED! BRING HIM DOWN!”

  “THE INTERLOPER!” Another voice cried. Sticks rained on him. A knife struck his boot and bounced. “THE INTERLOPER! THE ANTICHRIST!”

  He blasted his way through the middle of them, running as the bodies fell, his hands picking the targets with dreadful accuracy. Two men and a woman went down, and he ran through the hole they left.

  He led them a feverish parade across the street and toward the rickety general store-barbershop that faced Sheb’s. He mounted the boardwalk, turned again, and fired the rest of his loads into the charging crowd. Behind them, Sheb and Allie and the others lay crucified in the dust.

  They never hesitated or faltered, although every shot he fired found a vital spot and although they had probably never seen a gun except for pictures in old magazines.

  He retreated, moving his body like a dancer to avoid the flying missiles. He reloaded as he went, with a rapidity that had also been trained into his fingers. They shuttled busily between gunbelts and cylinders. The mob came up over the boardwalk and he stepped into the general store and rammed the door closed. The large display window to the right shattered inward and three men crowded through. Their faces were zealously blank, their eyes filled with bland fire. He shot them all, and the two that followed them. They fell in the window, hung on the jutting shards of glass, choking the opening.

  The door crashed and shuddered with their weight and he could hear her voice: “THE KILLER! YOUR SOULS! THE CLOVEN HOOF!”

  The door ripped off its hinges and fell straight in, making a flat handclap. Dust puffed up from the floor. Men, women, and children charged him. Spittle and stovewood flew. He shot his guns empty and they fell like ninepins. He retreated, shoving over a flour barrel, rolling it at them, into the barbershop, throwing a pan of boiling water that contained two nicked straight-razors. They came on, screaming with frantic incoherency. From somewhere, Sylvia Pittston exhorted them, her voice rising and falling on blind inflections. He pushed shells into hot chambers, smelling the smells of shave and tonsure, smelling his own flesh as the calluses at the tips of his fingers singed.

  He went through the back door and onto the porch. The flat scrubland was at his back now, flatly denying the town that crouched against its huge haunch. Three men hustled around the corner, with large betrayer grins on their faces. They saw him, saw him seeing them, and the grins curdled in the second before he mowed them down. A woman had followed them, howling. She was large and fat and known to the patrons of Sheb’s as Aunt Mill. The gunslinger blew her backwards and she landed in a whorish sprawl, her skirt kinked up between her thighs.

  He went down the steps and walked backwards into the desert, ten paces, twenty. The back door of the barber shop flew open and they boiled out. He caught a glimpse of Sylvia Pittston. He opened up. They fell in squats, they fell backwards, they tumbled over the railing into the dust. They cast no shadows in the deathless purple light of the day. He realized he was screaming. He had been screaming all along. His eyes felt like cracked ball bearings. His balls had drawn up against his belly. His legs were wood. His ears were iron.

  The guns were empty and they boiled at him, transmogrified into an Eye and a Hand, and he stood, screaming and reloading, his mind far away and absent, letting his hands do their reloading trick. Could he hold up a hand, tell them he had spent twenty-five years learning this trick and others, tell them of the guns and the blood that had blessed them? Not with his mouth. But his hands could speak their own tale.

  They were in throwing
range as he finished, and a stick struck him on the forehead and brought blood in abraded drops. In two seconds they would be in gripping distance. In the forefront he saw Kennerly; Kennerly’s younger daughter, perhaps eleven; Soobie; two male barflies; a female barfly named Amy Feldon. He let them all have it, and the ones behind them. Their bodies thumped like scarecrows. Blood and brains flew in streamers.

  They halted for a moment, startled, the mob face shivering into individual, bewildered faces. A man ran in a large, screaming circle. A woman with blisters on her hands turned her head up and cackled feverishly at the sky. The man whom he had first seen sitting gravely on the steps of the mercantile store made a sudden and amazing load in his pants.

  He had time to reload one gun.

  Then it was Sylvia Pittston, running at him, waving a wooden cross in each hand. “DEVIL! DEVIL! DEVIL! CHILD-KILLER! MONSTER!

  DESTROY HIM, BROTHERS AND SISTERS! DESTROY THE CHILD-KILLING INTERLOPER!”

  He put a shot into each of the crosspieces, blowing the roods to splinters, and four more into the woman’s head. She seemed to accordion into herself and waver like a shimmer of heat.

  They all stared at her for a moment in tableau, while the gunslinger’s fingers did their reloading trick. The tips of his fingers sizzled and burned. Neat circles were branded into the tips of each one.

  There were less of them, now; he had run through them like a mower’s scythe. He thought they would break with the woman dead, but someone threw a knife. The hilt struck him squarely between the eyes and knocked him over. They ran at him in a reaching, vicious clot. He fired his guns empty again, lying in his own spent shells. His head hurt and he saw large brown circles in front of his eyes. He missed one shot, downed eleven.

  But they were on him, the ones that were left. He fired the four shells he had reloaded, and then they were beating him, stabbing him. He threw a pair of them off his left arm and rolled away. His hands began doing their infallible trick. He was stabbed in the shoulder. He was stabbed in the back. He was hit across the ribs. He was stabbed in the ass. A small boy squirmed at him and made the only deep cut, across the bulge of his calf. The gunslinger blew his head off.