He saw them clearly as the white fire fully illuminated their mottled, scaly proto-human forms. They hissed in unison like frightened cats and then the light tripled its intensity and traveled outward in so bright a blast that even the Rider in his Solomonic spectacles had to look away. He felt the stone shiver and explode like glass in his hand with a final crack and in an instant it was engulfed in light and disappeared, leaving his palm blackened and smoking. He squeezed his eyes shut and the violet silhouettes of the rearing creatures danced on his eyelids before he could look again.
When at last he could move, he lit his lantern and shined it outwards.
Of the Cold Ones there was no sign.
He calmed the animal with a reassuring scratch behind the ears and scrabbled out into the dark, revenant lights bouncing before him as he found the trail and ran up towards Red House.
Near where he’d seen the trees in the Yenne Velt, he came across Piishi’s bow and two of the arrows marked with the Elder Sign. He hastily gathered them up and kept going.
He found Piishi sitting at the base of the ancient wall with his head drooping between his knees. At first the Rider thought he was dead. When the lantern light shined on him, he lifted his head slowly and blinked. He was splattered in some viscous stuff, tar-like in color and consistency. There was a noxious odor permeating the whole area.
“What happened?” he asked, setting down the light and the bow and arrows and looking him over as the Indian had him after the Cold Ones’ ambush the night before.
Piishi shook his head.
“I was held in the arms of the monster,” he said, after finding his voice. “I saw the Black Goat Man. Then I saw…a bright light. It burned away…everything.” He rubbed the slime between his fingers. It was all that remained of the thing that had held him.
“What about the Goat Man?” The Rider asked.
“Down there,” Piishi said, nodding past the wall.
The Rider stood and moved towards the wall. Piishi grabbed the hem of his coat.
“You are going?”
The Rider nodded.
Piishi sighed and stood up, picking up the bow and the arrows.
“Alright. For Tats’adah, I will go with you.”
The Rider picked up the lantern and followed its light over the broken stones into the crumbling ruin of Red House. It wasn’t long before he found a sand-swept passage gaping black in the foundation, a concealing stone cast aside and shattered nearby.
He checked to make sure Piishi was still with him, then hurried down the stone steps. He knew the way.
Down to the black coolness, the light only penetrating a few feet in front of them though it shone brightly, as though the darkness were a thing tangible—not a mere shadow to be dispersed by lamplight, but a dense tangle of black webwork and they dauntless flies pressing through beyond all sense.
The Rider did not notice the smell this time. It was already all over Piishi, that yawning compost stink. When they reached the well room with its blasphemous idols squatting in their age-dusted alcoves, he was not surprised to find the transfigured Mauricio standing there as though waiting for the two of them.
He was as Piishi had seen him, but now his fur was patched and singed, and black skin showed through. One horn had snapped off.
He uttered some braying, unintelligible words as they gained the room, and the Rider felt a numbness envelope his throat.
He tried to again speak the word of power Chaksusa had taught him, but found his vocal chords were paralyzed, as numb as a limb without circulation. He swallowed, and found he could hardly work any of the muscles in his throat. Beside him, Piishi too had been affected by the spell. The bow and arrows clattered to his feet as the Apache slapped both hands to his constricting throat and stared wildly at the Rider, not understanding.
The lantern slipped from the Rider’s hands and fell to the rock floor, but did not break. It rolled back and forth. The light strobed hypnotically on the Black Goat Man as he spread his arms wide and turned, the movement jumpy and weird as he flashed in and out of the dark. He stood at the edge of the well and looked down.
* * * *
Mauricio turned his back contemptuously on the dirty savage and the walker between worlds, whose power was not near as threatening once robbed of the word of power the old bastard Chaksusa had taught him.
The ancient spell had been a powerful one, true. It had even wounded the extremities of his Love, and blasted him off the top of the wall so suddenly and with such force he had thought in a moment’s panic the world had ended. Old fears, instilled in him at an early age by sexless women in dark robes and ridiculous habits, their shapeless waists encircled by wooden beads and dangling crucifixes. Unfounded, now that the Old Gods were returning. The world would not end. It would begin again; remade in a more perfect image.
She retreated to her den, and he crawled down to join her. They would have their time to lick each other’s wounds with loving care, but not yet. She told him how to defeat Chaksusa’s man. Now that he was impotent, She would devour them both.
He told Her it was safe to rise. Not in words, but in the special, unspoken language they shared.
A moment’s more toil and then he could leave this cold world again and share Her dreams, nestled in the warm, poison heart of eternity.
* * * *
The Rider felt his throat closing. He glanced again at Piishi, whose eyes were bugging and tearing, his face purpling as his hands tore at the collar of his shirt, seeking to put his fingers on the unseen force that was strangling him.
The Rider shook his head violently and gesticulated toward Mauricio.
Piishi, eyes fluttering, gripped the handle of the knife on his belt and pulled it free. He drew back his hand, the sharp sky iron blade pressed between his thumb and forefinger, and flung it. The knife spun end over end and landed squarely in between Mauricio’s shoulder blades.
The Black Goat Man bellowed inhumanly and arched his back. Both hands reached blindly for the hilt of the offending blade.
The Rider felt the vice grip on his throat slacken.
The Goat Man turned, the knife forgotten, and glared at them with unfettered hate. He took a step toward them.
Suddenly a fierce blue shaft of light stabbed out of the depths of the well and glancing off of the ceiling, filling the chamber with a dim glow. In the dying memories of Amadeo, the Rider had been limited mainly to the physical senses. Now, he felt a tremor, not underfoot, but somewhere within the membranes of reality. It was like the feeling of an artillery shell crash landing amid the ranks back in the war. Not the fire and the heat, not the ensuing rain of bone and blood, but the shock, the unquantifiable pulse of force shuddered through the bones, resonated deep in the chest and left the hands trembling like struck tuning forks. Something was moving.
There came a scraping noise the Rider knew only too well, and suddenly great black, whipping vines sprung from the edge of the pit, forming a deadly moving halo around Mauricio. A half dozen more of thicker girth lodged themselves into the ground and began to double and strain, as if pulling a heavy load forth. The smell became overpowering, and the cold blue light intensified.
Piishi looked about for a weapon, his normally stoic face suddenly a disconcerting mask of terror. He fell to his knees and scrabbled to retrieve the bow.
The Rider massaged his throat, struggling to form the word of power again, but still it wouldn’t come.
Mauricio staggered back towards the well, trying to reach the hilt of the knife.
In the sporadic light of the lantern, a huge shapeless bulk seeded with innumerable quick, writhing stalks came into view, filling the diameter of the well. It was a great heap of shifting mud and creaking wicker, shot through with writhing things like massive nightcrawlers, snapping a variety of animal jaws and sporting hundreds of pedicle stalks bristling with strange splayed branches of spiky bone.
The blue glow became a searchlight, emanating from a single bulging, bioluminescent glo
be protruding like a great questing eye situated at the crest of the pulsing shape. It traced its beam down the ceiling, and the Rider felt that if he looked into that cold light dead on it would burn through the center of his mind, splitting his reason asunder as the light of the Elder Sign had burned away the Cold Ones. He knew too that this immense shape, whatever it was, was but a portion of the thing that dwelt below, like a questing little finger poking through a sheet, the knuckles of the greater hand bulging beneath. The floor began to shake and crack beneath his feet, attesting to this.
The hunched Goat Man staggered back toward the abomination emerging from its lair, and the dark tubers wove together into a kind of cradle to catch him. With a renewal of hot odor and a sickening wet sound as of a rotten fruit being pulled apart, some obfuscated fissure in its body opened and a moist vertical opening lined with two rows of curved horns like teeth split apart. The tubers stuffed the limp Mauricio hungrily inside.
The Rider fell to his knees. His lips worked, but no prayer would come forth as the tendrils slid across the ground toward him.
One of the larger growths encircled Piishi’s waist. The Apache was drawn swiftly towards the epicenter of the thing, sure to disappear into the same orifice Mauricio had passed through.
The blank eye swiveled towards Piishi, but instead of withering as he was fully bathed in the sickly light, the Apache drew back the string of his bow and let loose an arrow that whisked across the chamber and sank to the feathers in the gelatinous bulb. The blue light died and its generator burst like a punctured amniotic sac, spilling a thick liquid that glowed like molten moon milk.
There was an earth-shaking eruption of sound unlike anything the Rider could describe. The sick mass shuddered and the tendrils became a blur of violent motion. The Rider saw Piishi dashed hard against the ceiling before something struck him across the ribs and flung him clear out of the chamber. His head collided with stone and he fell unconscious.
* * * *
He dreamed of Chaksusa, Don Amadeo, the Moors, and the Papagos. But he had left his body enough times to know this was no dream. Sometimes he wondered if he would be able to tell the moment of his own death from any other time he left his body, or if he would wander like a man searching for a lost coat, forever hugging himself in the wind.
The ghosts were safe. There were no words directed at him, but a feeling of gratitude and relief. They were free of their half-life, and Chaksusa would fulfill his own prayer. He would be the light that guided them home.
* * * *
The Rider opened his eyes to see the sun shining down the stone steps. He smelled a fresh breeze that had passed through the fir trees and dispelled the previous stench. He sat up slowly, rubbing a hand across the back of his throbbing skull and coming away with blood.
The well chamber was cast in a dusty haze, and the Rider felt a chill when he saw the back of the hunched figure seated at the edge of the well, apparently staring down into it.
He found his pistol and rose slowly.
“She’s gone,” said the shadowed figure, and the Rider realized it was Piishi.
He walked across the chamber, briefly glancing at the three statues before he came to stand beside the Indian.
The Apache sat with his legs dangling child like over the edge, hands loose in his lap.
“Are you alright?”
“I saw things,” Piishi said. “She showed me…things.”
She, not it. In the moment they had looked into each other’s eyes, the thing had touched his mind.
The Rider put his hand on Piishi’s shoulder. As Piishi went on, describing what he had seen, it seemed to the Rider that he could see it too. Whether this was some residual ‘gift’ of the rapport he briefly shared with Amadeo through Chaksusa, or some symptom of the telepathic touch of the thing from the well, he didn’t know. He saw the dark reaches of void that stretched out beyond the farthest heaven, and the vast ranks of eldritch things that slept suspended there, spinning slowly in an ever tightening circle, a hunting orbit. These things, devoid of form as men knew it, waited. They waited at the threshold of this world, dreaming of their return—no, dreaming their return. Among them, one tremendous black shape stretched colossal wings, turned toward the universe and strained against unseen fetters, battering monotonously against its prison door. The whole universe shook with every impact.
The Rider felt his stomach plummet, as if he had been dropped from a great height and was falling. He felt his hackles rise, and a great, lonely coldness washed over his whole body, sank into his mind and settle there like death. It was a kind of death. The death of hope; something he had not felt since he was a child discovering his own mortality as he lay curled beneath his sheet in the dark, staring at the blank ceiling with wide, fearful eyes.
God, God, could such things be? And if so, why?
This particular horror was gone, and Her servant Mauricio was dead at long last. But She would find another willing proxy, and She would be back. Not through this passage, as the door had been compromised. Yet there were always others. Until then She would huddle in perfect darkness and lather Her trivial wound with a thousand eager black tongues. She did not yearn to avenge the injury they had inflicted, for it mattered little to one whose memory stretched back eons before antediluvian times. Their efforts would be forgotten. They were already forgotten. She could wait till long after the bones of their great grandchildren were gone to dust before She rose again. This, he knew. When Her kind at last came into their own, all that man held dear would be wiped out incidentally, without the slightest effort or knowing. In parting, She had told Piishi this. It was no threat, only the unconcerned reassurance of inevitability from a callous adult to a frightened child.
The Rider took his hand from Piishi’s shoulder and saw that it was trembling.
Piishi raised his hands to his face and his shoulders sagged with the burden of unwanted knowledge.
The Rider skirted the edge of the deep well and crossed to the three alcoves. One after another he pulled the idols down to smash on the floor. The pieces he swept into the well with the toe of his shoe, and he listened to them as they broke into smaller bits somewhere far below. But there never was the sound of a final impact, though he strained a long time to hear it, and so it gave him no comfort.
When he returned to Piishi’s side, the Apache raised his head to the Rider, and his grim cheeks were wet with tears.
His face was the face of an old man.
Episode Eight - The Pandæmonium Ride
Dorado stared at the writhing legs of the cockroach he had pinned to the table with his thumb, and grinned a golden smile of satisfaction as he slowly pushed down, hearing and feeling at last the little pop as its yellowish innards spurted from its behind. He watched it kick its last before he spoke.
“So who is he?” he said, indicating the skinny figure all in dusty black resting in his folded arms on the table in the corner, beside an untouched plate of beans around which the flies were beginning to congregate.
“Hell if I know,” said Ocobock, scratching at the sore on his cheek until it leaked blood, then frowning at the red on his fingertips as if he was at a loss as to how it had happened. “He’s been sittin’ there since we been here.” He put the bloody finger in his mouth and sucked at the nail.
“I know you idiots can’t read,” said Amonson at his side, “but are you blind too?” he took a drag of his drooping cigarette.
“I can read,” Dorado said, wiping the bug guts on his wooly vest.
“You can not,” said Ocobock, taking his finger out of his mouth and sitting up straight.
“I can read E’spanish,” he countered.
“Well this is America, and we don’t write nothin’ in E’spanish here,” Ocobock said.
“You wouldn’t know the difference,” Dorado grinned.
“Why don’t the both of you shut up and look at what I’m lookin’ at,” Amonson whispered, angling the smoking end of his drooping cigarette at the wall
over the stranger’s head.
The dingy east wall of The Senate Café, the most thriving business in the marginally established desert community of Escopeta, was papered with reward posters. The owner, Long George Lamartine, encouraged his diverse and mostly anonymous patrons to tack them up there. Over the years the wall had come to look as if it had been transplanted from a post office, being cluttered with yellowed bills depicting grim sketches of frowning, unshaven men and big bold type promising dollars for their blood. Some of them were autographed, complete with scrawled sentiments addressed to Long George, thanking him for his hospitality or good-naturedly cursing the abominable fare he dished out from the kitchen. Some of them had crude zeroes added to the dollar amounts by men who thought the initial offerings beneath them. One up there was notorious for being splashed with specks of dried brown liquid, which the poster had loudly proclaimed was the blood of the bearer who had come to collect on him. Sometimes men came in and took them down without a word, the scraps of torn paper still clinging to the wall. Sometimes half a phrase or the crown of a hat or one ragged slash of a face were all the dead left behind.
There was no question as to which of the myriad of paper faces Amonson was talking about. It hung like a bad joke over the head of the man at the corner table, and depicted the dozing diner himself.
“That’s a fair likeness,” Ocobock allowed.
“Ain’t it though?” Amonson said through his yellow teeth. “How’s your numbers, Dorado?”
Dorado had come to understand from looking at years’ worth of wanted posters that the first amount on a sheet was what a man got if the one in the picture was brought in dead, and the second (usually greater) amount was what a man got if he was brought in alive. But the third amount toward the bottom of the post confused him. More so, because it was the greatest number of the three.
“Five hundred dollars dead, and a thousand alive,” he mused. “But what’s that big number on the bottom for?”
Merkabah Rider: The Mensch With No Name Page 20