Into the edge of the firelight there rode a red and gleaming man atop a red and gleaming horse. At first the Rider thought they were draped in gore, dripping in blood like men he had seen in the war who had passed through a hard slaughter. Blood did drip on the ground, black and plentiful, like a pattering rain of crude oil wherever the horse stumbled. But a moment’s dwelling on them showed the blood was their own, leaking from the great and terrible wound man and animal shared; the skin and hide had been entirely flayed from their bodies, the mirage of bloody covering in actuality was their own muscle and ragged connective tissue exposed to the night air. The firelight magnified the sight, glistened on the long white teeth and bulging eyes of horse and rider, rendering them visions more apocalyptic and terrible than anything any of the three men, in their combined years of bloodshed and supernatural dealings had ever seen. This was no phantom, no spirit who had assumed some horrible shape. This was a mortal man and animal, walking dead but somehow hanging on to life, the ingrained black pepper grit of what must have been sand blowing off the mountains now wormed into their unprotected bodies visible evidence testifying as to the reason behind the agonized screams of man and horse lashed together in blasphemous, harrowing cacophony that continued to ring through the night.
The horse walked slowly forward toward the fire on shuddering legs, every secret of its locomotion on display, every twitch of sinew and precise tug of anatomy exposed. It shook its great neck, sending blood flying, sporadically shrieking the pain every step must elicit. Atop its back, the terrible man sat bolt aright, bloodstained, blue jeaned limbs (for although apparently entirely skinned, he still wore shirt, pants, and boots, as the horse wore its bridle and saddle) bouncing on the animal’s flanks, a living, trembling skeleton draped with meat like something dangling from a slaughterman’s hook. The muscles of his skull face drew taut and slack reflexively, and the screams piped from behind the bloody grin. The bulging eyes screwed crazily in its head, darting and crossing and rolling with madness brought on by extreme agony.
The Rider aimed first, hefting the unfamiliar pistol. He hesitated, and Mather was the first to fire. A big .45 bullet crashed between the red horseman’s horrifying eyes and sent a burst of soupy matter flying out into the night from which he had ridden. The figure fell back, slapping wetly against his mount’s hind end, before tumbling clumsily to the dirt.
The Rider and Doc opened up on the horse, Doc putting so many bullets into the thing it seemed he hoped to blow the memory of it from his mind.
When the gun smoke settled, the heaps of smoking meat and viscera lay like skinned buffalo before their campfire, unwilling to depart from them wholly.
The Rider bent over the corpse of the man and held gingerly picked the plastered, stained shirt away from the chest, peering inside.
“He’s been skinned.”
“And then somebody put his clothes back on?” Doc stammered, pulling a flask from his hip pocket and hastily unscrewing it.
“The horse still has its saddle too,” Mather observed, hunkering beside the carcass. “And take a look at the nameplate.”
They looked. ‘Property of William Nicholson,’ it read.
“Slap Jack Bill,” Doc said, staring down at the skinned man and taking a deep pull from his flask.
“What could have done this?” the Rider said aloud. He hadn’t seen anything like this on the physical plane.
“Apaches?” Mather suggested.
There was a pair of blood soaked saddlebags tied behind the cantle. Mather kicked open the flap with one boot, exposing a small packing crate within, and little else.
“They’d skin a white man, sure,” Doc affirmed. “But put his clothes back on him? And I never heard of ‘em doing something like this to a horse.”
But the Rider knew it wasn’t Indians. The bodies showed no signs of mutilation aside from the removal of their flesh, which had been done so expertly that not a ragged scrap remained. It was almost as if the clothes had never been removed; almost as if their hides had simply vanished.
The Rider knelt and slid the crate out of the bag. The inside was filled with packing straw and a half dozen broken glass vials smeared with a greenish residue that had the consistency of maple syrup.
“Looks like nitroglycerine,” said Mather.
“Looks like,” said Doc, peering down at the stuff. “But it ain’t.”
“If this man was one of the men we’re looking for, we should assume the rest are dead,” the Rider said.
Mather and Doc shared a look.
“Maybe Slap Jack wandered off from the others,” Mather said.
“So you don’t think we should turn back?” Doc said.
“I’m not going back,” the Rider declared. His pistol, the red glass lanterns, and now this. Adon and his man Sheardown had used Las Vegas as some sort of staging area, by their correspondence. Whatever was happening on Elk Mountain had to be connected. The strangeness of it all couldn’t be a coincidence.
“What about you, Doc?” Mather asked. “You’re the only one without a vested interest in going up there.”
Doc took another swig and grinned.
“Tryin’ to get rid of me?”
“You ain’t gonna get that money, Doc.”
“The question ain’t who’s going, Marshal,” Doc said. “It’s when?”
Mather sighed.
“It’s too dangerous to go up there in the dark, and if we use lanterns, they’ll see us coming.”
“If there’s anyone to see us coming at all,” the Rider reminded them.
“What do we do with these?” Doc said, indicating the dead horse with the toe of his boot and then grimacing and grinding his foot in the dirt.
In answer, Mather took out a handkerchief and tied it around his face.
“I was afraid you were going to say that,” said Doc.
He took out his own kerchief and did the same, then looked at the Rider expectantly over the blood speckled cloth.
The Rider held up his hands and took a step back from the carcasses. He had of course, buried the dead before, but always there had been a mikvah or else a period of seclusion to cleanse the impurity of tumat met. The last grave he filled had been Gershom’s. Whatever lay ahead, he would have need of all his abilities.
“I’m not supposed to handle the dead,” he explained.
“Convenient,” said Doc.
“Look at the mountain,” Mather said suddenly.
They looked in the direction they had last seen the rising cap of stone. In the pitch black it should have been invisible, but there was a cluster of glowing red dots visible like campfires.
Someone was alive up there.
After they dragged away the bodies and sent them sliding down the mountain, the men agreed on a watch. In the night the Rider said the kaddish over the dead man, but otherwise no further horrors shuffled out of the night. The red lights on the mountainside remained until dawn.
* * * *
They broke camp and set out at first light. The Rider took his blue glass spectacles out and set them on his nose. He had taken to leaving the mystically embossed lenses in their case as of late. They were designed to reveal supernatural entities, but Lilith’s arming her denizens with his true name had rendered them powerless against his most diligent enemies on the spiritual plane. They did come in handy against non-demonic creatures though, and he employed them now in case that was what they were up against.
Mather and Doc took no notice of them. The sun was out and glinting off the peaks. It was substantially cool, being winter after all, and Doc’s cough worsened exponentially the higher they went, reaching its apex when they could see their breath. At some point they came upon the edge of a stand of trees with frosted branches, that sprung from uneven ground lightly powdered with snow.
The Rider turned up the collar of his rekel coat to the chill wind, and shared the warmth of the onager, who managed better among the rocks than his companion’s horses did. By noon they were all thre
e of them on foot and consulting the map, and the Rider pointed out a thin trail of smoke rising above the tree line not far away.
“I’d guess that’s the cabin,” Mather said, squinting at the map and indicating a dead tree whose crudely drawn twin leaned beside the path on the wrinkled paper. “Yeah, should be right past here.”
“How should we do this?” the Rider whispered.
“I find the best way to break up a game is to walk right up and kick over the table,” Doc said.
Mather nodded. He slipped out of his saddle and looped the reins of his horse around the dead tree a few times, then took out his pistols, cocking them under his armpits to muffle the sound.
Doc and the Rider did the same.
They walked a ways through the woods, till they could smell the smoke and the low talk ahead muffled their crunching boots. So they were alive. Had they skinned Slap Jack and his horse and turned them loose as punishment for some transgression? It didn’t seem likely.
They came to a point where they could crouch among the trees unseen and observe a clearing just ahead, where a single room shack nestled with its back to an incline and leaked the thin stream of wood smoke they’d followed. Five horses were tied to a tree beside the shack, and four men stood in the clearing, looking down on what looked to be the body of a fifth. There was bright red blood on the snow. Each of them seemed to be carrying lanterns, lit despite the daylight.
Then pain lanced suddenly in both the Rider’s eyes, causing them to immediately stream tears. He winced and drove his thumb and forefinger under the Solomonic lenses, furiously rubbing the corners of his eyes, but it was no use. When he opened them again, there was the same pain, like he was snow blind, or like a sudden light had been directed into his eyes in a dark room.
He removed his spectacles to wipe away the tears, and the discomfort fled instantly. Blinking, he looked around.
Doc noticed his reaction and screwed his face up into a wordless question.
The Rider shook his head and held the spectacles up to his face, gingerly. His eyes spilled once more and there was a ringing ache.
He had felt this once before. He looked all around, glancing now and then through the lenses, until he spotted them.
Train lanterns. They had been hung on the branches of the trees encircling the clearing. Red ones. A few of them were lit, though sputtering low. Most appeared to have consumed their fuel and hung dim, the glass still warm.
Something about the faltering light from the red lanterns was sending a backlash through the Solomonic lenses, making it impossible for him to see through them. The last time he experienced this phenomenon was outside of The Bird Nest, the demon queen Lilith’s bordello in Tip Top. The red paper lanterns hung outside her door and the red lamp inside her parlor had rendered the lenses useless.
There was magic at work here, and it was the same sort Lilith and her succubi employed.
The Rider carefully folded his spectacles and stowed them in their case.
Doc had seen the lanterns too now, and Mather. They looked at them querulously, for they were all lit, although it was daylight.
“Lord, what’d it do to him?” said one of the men in the clearing, a diminutive red head with a ridiculous, half-crushed stovepipe hat.
“It’s plain what it did,” said another, an Indian with a slouch hat and hair down past his shoulders (probably this was Crazy Horse Bob). “The question is, how’d it get him?” The man looked over at a third individual in a checkered hunter’s coat and derby.
“You said them lanterns would keep it back, Professor.”
“He obviously wasn’t killed here,” said the Professor. He was a slight man, rail thin, excitable looking with buggy eyes and a thin mustache. “You heard the sound. It must have thrown him into the clearing. Look at the ground. There are no tracks.”
“He’s right,” said a man in a palpable German accent. He was the biggest of them, his buffalo coat made him seem bigger. “Christ, it’s got to be big to lift him up like that.”
“Well, obviously some of the lanterns have extinguished,” said the Professor. “I was afraid of that. We’ve got to go out there and refill them.”
“Yeah sure,” said the red head. “You go ahead, Professor.”
“We’re runnin’ low on that fancy oil,” said the German.
Mather and Doc stepped into the clearing abruptly.
“Let’s see your hands, boys,” Mather said.
All of them raised one palm, like men taking an oath, but not a one of them laid aside their lanterns.
The Rider stepped cautiously into the open behind them. His eyes passed over the three armed men, looking for his pistol, not seeing it.
“You can set the lanterns down too, boys, no sense in risking breaking them after all the trouble you all went through,” Doc said.
“Doc Holliday,” snarled the big German. His eyes went to Mather. “What the hell is he doing here?”
“I’ve been deputized, Dodgy,” Doc answered for him.
“That sonofabitch Slap Jack must’ve sold us out,” hissed the short red head.
“Don’t be stupid,” said Crazy Horse Bob. “He ain’t been gone that long.”
“You can thank Dirty Dave Rudabaugh for telling us where you all were,” Doc said, smiling and unfurling the map with a flourish.
“That yellow scumbelly,” the red head remarked. “Told you we shouldn’t have brought him in.”
“We shouldn’t of brought you in either, Bullshit,” said Dodgy.
“As to Slap Jack Bill,” Doc went on. “He won’t be telling much to anybody anymore.”
“So you killed him,” Dodgy said, spitting a line of brown tobacco juice into the snow. “You saved us the trouble.”
“We didn’t kill him,” Mather said.
Dodgy, the Indian, the Professor and Slap Jack all swapped glances.
“What did?” the Professor asked.
What, the Rider noted, not who.
“Somebody skinned him,” said Mather. “And his horse.”
“My ampoules!” the Professor exclaimed. Without a word, he suddenly turned and went for the cabin doorway.
“Hold it!” Mather shouted, aiming for the slight man’s back.
The other three men tensed, backing away.
Doc and the Rider covered them.
“Don’t move!” Doc warned. “The next step back lands you in hell!”
Mather cocked his pistol as the Professor continued hurrying toward the cabin.
Then there came a horrendous sound from behind them, similar to the weird shrieking in the dark that had preceded the appearance of the skinned man. This time there was no human accompaniment. It was the horses.
The Rider turned.
He could hardly make out the animals tethered back in the trees. They were thrashing wildly, and he saw a flash of blood spray into the air.
“What the hell is that?” Doc said.
The Professor had paused in the doorway of the cabin, and the Rider saw his breath puff out in the cool air as he looked past them into the trees. There was no fear on his face, only a wild exuberance.
He ducked inside.
Mather did not kill him. He had turned his attention to the horses.
The little red head’s eyes shifted from the trees to Mather, then to the similarly distracted Doc. The Rider read his intent, and his pistol cracked out as Bullshit’s gun left its holster. The little man fell clutching his shoulder and cursing.
Mather waved his gun back at the other two, but they just held up their hands reassuringly and stared into the woods.
“What’s out there?” the Rider demanded.
Dodgy and the Indian looked at him but just blinked.
The screaming of the horses continued, and the Rider saw one of the animals lifted bodily into the air. The kicking animal flew ten feet and fell with a tremendous crash into a stand of trees. Then there was silence.
Everyone stood in tense silence. The only sound was th
e groaning of Bullshit as he rolled in the snow, and muffled sounds of pans clattering from the cabin.
Mather remembered the Professor then, and shoved past Dodgy. He stalked up to the cabin, both guns drawn.
“Come on outta there, you little bastard!” he hollered.
The Professor came out straightaway, but not in answer to the marshal’s call. He looked flustered, and he bore in his hands an English saddlebag.
“Gone!” he said, his face flushed in anger. “He must’ve taken them in the night, the damned fool!” Seeing Mather’s twin pistols aiming at him, he dropped the bags with a start, said, “Oh!” and raised his hands.
The Rider glanced down and saw one of the red lanterns laying where Bullshit had dropped it. He snatched it up and stalked out of the clearing, headed for the vague, still shapes laying where they’d left the horses.
“Rider!” Doc called.
“I’ll be right back!”
His heart beat its way out of his chest and up into the back of his throat as he made his way through the trees. Something was out there. Something had attacked and probably killed the animals. His onager made no sound. The animal had been with him since Jerusalem. He hated to think whatever was out there had slaughtered it, after it had evaded pursuing demons, would-be thieves, and infernal cannon fire among other dangers.
He cocked his pistol as he got within sight of the spot where they’d left the mounts and a disbelieving smile split his face when he saw the pale onager standing a few feet from where it had been tied, its tether torn away. It did not look at him as he approached, but stared into the trees, as if it saw something. Its flanks trembled, and only when he stood beside it and touched its neck did it shudder and glance at him before returning to its wary vigil.
At first he thought he would have to put the animal down. It was covered in blood, but true to its peerless luck, almost none of it was its own. Doc’s horse lay where it had fallen, but its head hung still tied to the tree, black eyes glazed. Whatever had set upon it had torn entirely through its thick neck in nearly no time at all. There was blood everywhere. Mather’s horse had been the one he’d seen fly through the air. Its carcass lay suspended in the interlaced branches of the birches where it had been flung, its shimmering intestines hanging down like garland.
Merkabah Rider: The Mensch With No Name Page 11