by D. J. Butler
Hiram shook his head. “Do you want the mine reopened? Do you want to stop Callista’s killer? That thing has murdered three people—do you think it’s finished?”
“You think Gus Dollar will help you?”
Hiram considered the question. “No,” he said. “Clearly he won’t. But Gus knows things he isn’t telling me, and I want to know what before I have to face the thing in the pit. And I have to put an end to his hexing me before I can trust anything he says.”
Mary folded her arms across her chest and took a deep breath. “Utah,” she muttered. “McClatchy warned me.”
“Please,” Hiram said. “I don’t want to kill Gus. Drawing blood from a sorcerer who is bewitching you is a strong counter magic.”
“It’s a recipe for chaos. If everyone thought every bit of bad luck they had was to be blamed on their ugliest neighbor, and the best way to fix it was to go break that neighbor’s nose, society would fall apart in an afternoon.”
“True.” That’s why we need cunning men, Hiram thought but didn’t say. Cunning folk were needed so that people could resort to other kinds of defensive charms first, when there really was a witch involved.
Mary McGill shook her head. “I can’t believe this tale of demons, Hiram. Your sage leaf with apostles on it—maybe that worked, and maybe it didn’t. But I can’t be party to you getting to the ring with an old man, not when your reason for doing so is monster under the bed.”
“Under the general store.” Hiram rubbed his eyes. “Will you turn me into the police, then?”
Mary seemed to consider the possibility. “No. Not yet, anyway. But this talk of monsters and madness has given me a different idea.”
Hiram was almost afraid to ask. “A different idea?”
“Samuel Kimball,” she said. “He’s lost his mind. Might he be capable of murder in his state?”
Hiram said nothing.
“Maybe madness runs in the Kimball family,” Mary said. “Maybe violence does, too.”
“Teancum Kimball had a number of children die young,” Hiram said slowly. Was it possible that Mary was right, and that he wasn’t thinking clearly?
“I’ll see how far back the Helper Journal’s records go,” she continued, “and what I can learn about the clan that may shed light on the murders. If you can calm down, I’m happy to have you come with me. Michael will probably show up on his own, and if the police find him, I’ll call Jimmy Nichols.”
But no, Hiram had seen the demon. He couldn’t go spend time in a newspaper office, trying to find out how Teancum Kimball’s children had died.
His limbs sank against the car’s seat like lead bars. “I guess our paths part here. Good luck in the records.”
“Whatever demons you’re wrestling with, Hiram Woolley…real or metaphorical…I hope you conquer them.”
“Mary…”
But she had iron in her eyes, so he stepped out of her car, removed his toolbox, and watched her drive away.
Hiram stood in the leafless trees above the river, considering his options.
What was Gus’s connection with the fly demon Mahoun? He likely wanted to summon and control it, using the Book of the Spirits Hiram had destroyed. Or he already controlled it, and he wanted to channel its power to summon and control something greater. Hiram had heard tales from Grandma Hettie about witches who had begun by dominating and binding earthly and infernal spirits with the goal of summoning more celestial beings.
The stories ended badly, at least the way Grandma Hettie told them. Summoning was not the business of mortal man; devils were too dangerous and tricky to work with, and angels deserved better treatment.
And why did that Book of the Spirits include a lamen designed to bring down walls?
To stop the demon, Hiram needed to find out the truth. And that meant he needed to get information from Gus Dollar that he was certain wasn’t distorted by a charm.
Time to bleed Gus.
* * *
Hiram rode a stolen donkey up Spring Canyon.
He was wanted for murder, so a little borrowing of a farm animal wouldn’t weigh too heavily in the scales. He picked a donkey rather than a horse for its dependable gait, and also because it reminded him of Balaam, in the Book of Numbers.
There was magic in an ass. Hiram could use any angel’s warning he might get.
He borrowed the donkey and its saddle from a stable beside an adobe bungalow on the north end of Helper, underneath the stark, staring face of the white cliff. He also took a thick wool serape and a sombrero, to disguise his appearance. The sombrero went on right over his fedora.
From the same stable, he took a bullwhip.
As he crossed the river, a blast of wind scoured out of the canyon. The sky had grown cast-iron dark, and now the cutting front edge of a snowstorm rushed along the Price River and slammed into Helper. The force of the gale very nearly drove Hiram and his donkey off the railroad-tie bridge and into the waters. The serape, over his army coat, kept him comfortable, but his fingers froze in his gloves. He worked his digits to keep the blood flow going and longed for thicker socks.
Once he’d crossed the river, he cut away from the road. The wind was less once he was no longer directly before the canyon, but the snow fell thickly, obscuring the ground.
He used Spring Creek as his guide, and every bit of greenery he could as his shelter. When any cars were visible, he stuck to the trees, waiting for solitude to cross from copse to copse.
The donkey wasn’t lazy, and once pointed in a direction tended to keep going in a straight line, so Hiram dozed. Fading in and out, toolbox clutched to his lap, he dreamed. In between dreams, in waking moments, he remembered his earlier dreams, of searching for Michael in vain and of a booming voice in a dark pit.
A gust of freezing wind, throwing snow, blew him awake.
He’d managed to reach Dollar’s with the sun low in the sky and a storm coming on fast. Hiram checked the canyon for traffic, found none, and crossed the river. He unsaddled the donkey and picketed it to a fallen log within reach of many tufts of grass, poking up from the snow and standing up bravely to the stiff wind.
“You stay here.” He stroked the beast’s neck and shoulders. “I’ll get you home.”
He climbed up a steep bank to the edge of the road, toolbox in one hand and whip in the other. He was about to step into the tall grass on the other side, approaching the store, when he heard the tell-tale rattle of Utah’s most common venomous snake. It was an irregular rasp, that started slowly, shook into full rattle, and then trailed off. The snake was barred with interlinked diamond shapes all along its body, and its head was an evil wedge-shape.
In a snowstorm in February? The snake should have been hibernating in a pit somewhere.
But if flies, why not snakes?
The rattler raised its head, twitched its tail. Hiram retreated. Circling counterclockwise to get out of that snake’s territory, he walked toward the store again—and again heard a rattle.
He leaped back. Could it have been the same snake?
But no, looking left, he saw the original snake still, lying in a lazy S-shape across the snow.
Taking no shortcuts, this time he walked fifty feet to his right, and again started forward.
A rattler lunged at him from the tall grass. Only its eagerness, or its irritability, made it miss; it attacked from far enough away that Hiram saw it, and was able to shuffle aside. Darting forward, he grabbed the rattlesnake by the tail and flung it far to his right, near the base of the ridge.
Gus Dollar had surrounded his store with rattlesnakes.
Chapter Thirty-One
The snakes were impossible; they defied nature’s common-sense rhythms.
Gus had summoned them.
No problem. The Bible was full of charms for snakes.
Headlights flashed past Hiram, briefly throwing his shadow up against a wall of yellow rock.
He turned and saw one of the Helper Police Model Bs turning with the winding of the c
anyon’s road. Clouds darkened the sun as it settled down behind the western ridge, but there was still enough light to make out the words helper city police.
Was there enough light for the driver to have seen him? Police Chief Fox might or might not have jurisdiction in Spring Canyon, but he could still slow Hiram down by arresting him. Or beating him up.
The car stopped.
Hiram turned to run, and a fierce rattle reminded him that he still had a snake problem. Only he wanted to address that issue with a clear mind and heart, and not in a fear-pumped panic.
He turned and jogged the other direction, away from the store.
But had they seen him already?
He crouched behind a lone juniper tree, peering through its dark green screen.
Police Chief Asael Fox stood beside the car and scanned the canyon. Hiram’s heart, already driving over the speed limit, took a ninety-degree turn and hit the brakes.
He tried to hold perfectly still.
Fox’s sergeant, Shanks, was down along the bank of Spring Creek, looking at something.
The donkey. They had found the donkey.
Would Chief Fox and his sergeant now set about looking for the thief?
As if in answer to his unspoken question, Chief Fox walked in Hiram’s direction.
Hiram lowered himself onto hands and knees, checked visibility, and then lowered himself again, onto his belly in the snow. Thank goodness for the serape and his gloves. His toes, though, were ice.
“The snakes,” he murmured to himself. “Not toward the snakes.”
If he crawled on his belly into a rattler, he’d take an immediate bite in a very painful and dangerous location.
“They shall take up serpents,” he murmured, “it shall not hurt them.” It was the simplest of charms for a snake. He hoped it was enough, and he repeated it several times.
He hoped the snakes were all behind him.
He dragged himself a hundred feet without to rising to check his progress or look at the policemen. Once he was curled behind two dead tree trunks leaning against a crumbling yellow rock, he levered himself up onto his feet and cast an eye in their direction.
The police chief had turned southward, paralleling Hiram’s own path. Had he seen Hiram? No, he was looking at something in a tangle of gambol oak. From Hiram’s position, it was clearly a faded old canvas tarpaulin, once stretched out by a traveler as a tent. To Chief Fox, it must appear to be a man in a serape.
All Fox had to do was cross Hiram’s path, and the man would see his tracks in the snow.
Where was Dixon? Either in the car, or with the donkey, in either case, unseen in a twilight that grew darker by the second.
With the chief coming this direction, Hiram dared head the other way, toward Dollar’s.
He started with a phrase he had memorized from Reginald Scot: “I conjure you, O serpents, in this hour, by the five holy wounds of our Lord, that you not remove out of your places, but that you stay.”
The five wounds were the wounds of Christ, the manner in which the serpent had wounded the heel of the seed of Eve, bringing to its climax God’s great curse on mankind. The threat Hiram was making to the snakes was their heads would be crushed, as God had warned in Genesis. He filled his heart with a prayer and focused his will on directing the snakes to remain calm.
He wished he had an amulet against snakes. He touched the chi-rho and the protective bronze Oremus lamen in his coat pocket, but their power was weaker for being broad.
Also, the old German witch had beat Hiram before.
As he neared the place where he had nearly been bitten before, in his best estimation, he tried another charm. This one came directly from the Bible, and it was the most triumphant serpent-verse he could think of: “And he laid hold on the dragon, that old serpent, which is the Devil, and Satan, and bound him a thousand years.”
He shed his gloves and reached inside his shirt to touch the iron of the chi-rho talisman directly, and at the same time grasped the heliotropius with his bare fingers. He had never heard that the heliotropius had power against serpents, but it was supposed to purge poison. And if poison, why not venom? And if it would purge venom, might it also drive away creatures that bore venom?
His fingers were numb from the cold and felt like ice against his chest. Snow was beginning to pile up on the sombrero and the shoulders of the serape.
Hiram heard the rattle of a snake in the darkness, but it was slow.
He repeated the Scot incantation, and the verse from the Book of Revelation, and watched very carefully where he placed his Harvesters. He stepped forward slowly, and again…and again.
And there was the first snake. It sat coiled directly ahead of him, looking at him with its treacherous beads for eyes, tongue flicking slowly in and out, rattle shaking from side to side.
But the rattle’s movement was slow.
“…bound him a thousand years,” Hiram said, focusing his will and his prayer on this snake in particular. It wasn’t easy. His hands shook, his temples were beginning to throb—was that the cost of the intense concentration, or part of the caffeine poisoning Mary had warned him about, or from the cold?
He couldn’t feel his feet.
Hiram locked eyes with the snake. If he could walk past this one, he could walk past them all.
And if this one bit him, he would turn and run, and Chief Fox would throw him in jail.
“They shall take up serpents, and it shall not hurt them. They shall pass by serpents, and not be seen.”
He eased his left foot forward, placing the Redwing boot firmly on the soil beside the rattlesnake, and very definitely not on top of it.
He eased his weight forward onto his front foot.
He kept his gaze locked on the snake’s eyes, weirdly visible to him in the gloom. The snake turned its head as Hiram leaned into his step, and then moved his other foot forward, shifting weight onto that boot…
And then he was past the first rattlesnake.
He took a deep breath. Dollar’s was perhaps a hundred yards ahead, barely visible in the growing darkness. How many more snakes could there be in a hundred yards?
* * *
Mary McGill wanted to kick herself. Hiram Woolley wanted to assault an old man. The farmer had turned out to be…what? A wizard? A madman? A murderer?
None of those words felt right, though.
Hiram said things that sounded crazy, but he didn’t seem insane. He seemed humble, and hard-working, and self-sacrificing.
And scared.
She approached the newspaper office, just off Main Street.
When she explained what she wanted, the old man standing in the door of the nondescript brick building frowned. “We don’t generally open our archives to the public.”
He was thin and bent as a question mark. A green eyeshade, like a bank teller’s, caught light from the street, casting a green splotch on his face. It made him look like a goblin—that and his large nose and pronounced ears.
“I’m not the public.” Mary smiled her most ladylike smile, trying not to wince at the knowledge that the old man was looking at her birthmark and feeling revulsion. She fought to keep her hand away from her face.
Hiram Woolley might be nuts, but he’d been a gentleman.
“You aren’t Helper City government, and you aren’t Carbon County. I know all those people. Are you someone down from Salt Lake City, then?”
There was nothing for it. “Mr.…Bowen, did you say your name was?”
The goblin creaked his assent.
“Mr. Bowen, how do you feel about protecting the rights and improving the quality of the working man, here in Helper?”
“Ah, you’re that kind of not-the-public. Well, you can’t unionize the Helper Journal,” Bowen said. “There aren’t enough of us. Most days, it’s just me.”
“I mean the miners.”
“Oh, yeah, well, those poor devils. Why didn’t you say so? Come on in.”
Ten minutes later, she was lo
oking at a row of four filing cabinets squatting beneath a precarious stack of manila folders. Bowen was setting text at a Linotype machine in the corner, and on a card table between them stood an open bottle of whiskey and two paper cups.
“Where did all this come from?” she asked.
“Paper itself is only three years old. Most of this comes from the city’s archives,” Bowen said. “They were going to throw it out, and I asked if I could have it instead. I can use it for background, you see, and research, and archive photographs. In a pinch, I can fill in a few column-inches with a Remember When? feature. It’s not official records, it’s all the other stuff they had sitting around in their shelves. There’s maps in there, and photos, and handbills, and paintings, and sketch books, and half a dozen journals. I was looking for a photo the other day and I found a shopping list written on the back of a receipt from Lowenstein Mercantile. There are boxes of letters and postcards and telegrams that couldn’t get delivered for one reason or another, so they ended up at the city. Someday, we’ll get a proper museum. God help the poor bastard who has to run it.”
Mary McGill was an organizer of people, not of objects. Another person, confronted with a heterogeneous stack of materials, would have spent many hours segregating the various papers and volumes and photographs into stacks of related material, for more easy digestion.
Mary just started at the top and dove in.
She found several photographs of Naaman Rettig near the top of the pile, which made them recent. They were thought-provoking, so while Bowen was looking the other way, she pocketed them.
From handwritten journal accounts and letters dated from the nineteenth century, she got a picture of Teancum Kimball’s life and dealings. Each of his three surviving children was born to a different mother. References in a picnic flyer seemed to suggest Teancum’s marriages were at least partially overlapping, and that no one at the time batted an eye. For a polygamist, that seemed like a small family, and in newsletters and old announcements, she found multiple references to Kimball family stillbirths.