Dread Reckoning

by L. T. Phoenix

  LEGENDS OF THE WYRD WEST

  GHOST RIDERS

  Bound by the spectres of an old frontier myth, a posse must defy the forces of the Law to do what is right and go beyond legend.

  BROKEN WINGS

  Erica’s father suffers a manic fever to build a Flying Machine, but refuses to believe that a terrifying monster lurks below their ranch.

  DREAD RECKONING

  Royce Falco faces his last midnight in the haunted Hayworth Penitentiary before being sent to the gallows the next morning.

  HORSE NATION

  The Tobin brothers, investigating unexplained phenomena, become part of an Indian ceremony that they didn’t know they were destined to join.

  SILENT ECHOES

  The only evidence of people vanishing from Echo Station are the telegraphed messages wired to Sundown, telling of sinister plague doctors.

  Dread Reckoning

  Copyright © L.T. Phoenix 2021

  This is a work of fiction. Names, places, and incidents either are the products of the author’s imagination or used fictitiously. Some elements may be based upon real people, places, and events, but are used fictitiously. Some language conventions may be a product of their time and only used for the immersion of the fiction. No offense is intended toward any living or dead people, beliefs, places, or events.

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, distributed, or transmitted in any form or by any means, including photocopying, recording, or other electronic or mechanical methods, without the prior written permission of the author.

  The moral rights of the author are asserted.

  Published by Phoenix Forge.

  Print: ISBN: 9780994642653

  Digital ISBN: 9780994642639

  2.3

  “Any man's death diminishes me, because I am involved in mankind. And therefore never send to know for whom the bell tolls; it tolls for thee.”

  – John Donne

  “Devotions Upon Emergent Occasions,

  Meditation XVII”

  “That black cat is back again, crossing the road!” Michael McLaren couldn’t believe his eyes. “Our tower shift almost over; so of course something weird happens.”

  “What, I’d hardly call that weird,” the other guard on duty answered. “You sure it’s the same one, Mick?”

  “I dunno, cats all look the same to me. But it’s black, and it keeps crossing the Road to Hell. You never use the spyglass…” McLaren handed the small sentry telescope over. “Use the spyglass!” He shook his head again. “This is bad luck, Reed… Bad luck, I tell ya.”

  “Well fugg me six ways from Sunday or my name ain’t John Reed; that’s gotta be the same cat.” He wasn’t as superstitious as the other, but shared his curiosity. “Why does it keep coming back? Just sits out there, then crosses the road, disappears when we’re not looking, and comes back to cross the road again. And all in the cold like that with the night falling, to boot.”

  “And the storm clouds coming.”

  “Cats hate water; it’s gonna get soaked,” Reed agreed as he had an idea. “You know, I reckon that its master is probably inside.”

  “What, one of the prisoners? It’s not a dog.”

  “Yeah, doesn’t matter, it’s probably pining for its master locked behind bars inside somewhere.”

  “Like I said, it’s not a dog: it wouldn’t do that.”

  “Why not?”

  “I dunno, cat’s just don’t do that.” McLaren braced his hands at the edge of the sentry tower, staring out at the cat as though it would bring him answers. “Poor creepy weird muttonhead. Just keeps staring at the prison.”

  “I bet you two bits, Mick,” Reed reached inside his penitentiary uniform for the coins, “the cat is owned by one of the prisoners inside.”

  The other guard looked at the coins. “I’ll take that bet, ‘cos it’s now up to you to ask some of that filth inside if they own a black cat and try to get a straight answer from any of them.” McLaren laughed, adding, “Better start with Royce Falco and Clyde Mortimer; they won’t be around after 5 o’clock tomorrow,” while making a motion as though he was being choked by a noose.

  “Don’t remind me,” Reed sighed. “I’m on death-watch tonight and execution in the morning. When the fugg are we supposed to sleep?”

  “Me too, I’m with you for both. Hells teeth, who made the roster?” McLaren shivered. “I hate The Hole at night, and a black cat crossing the Road to Hell doesn’t help things. The cells give me the creeps, and more guards have been seeing-

  “Don’t say it, Mick…”

  A church bell rang across the prison, the sound so loud it hurt the ears.

  “Hells bells… what was that?” McLaren looked around after the tolling was finished, not realising the irony of his cuss, having never heard such a bell toll in Hayworth Penitentiary.

  “You just had to mention the hauntings, didn’t you?” Reed searched around from the high view of the sentry tower, already sure he’d never find what could have made such a sound. “Is there a church and bell here now since my last shift?”

  “I didn’t say anything about the hauntings,” McLaren argued, “but you did!”

  “That wasn’t the gallows bell, whatever it was; it’s nowhere near as loud as that…” Reed spoke what they both already knew as a coping mechanism against the strange bell that was probably going to be thought of by all the guards of Hayworth Penitentiary as another haunting of The Hole. As much as he tried to reason the strange occurrence, it didn’t help the unsettling feeling that began with the black cat continually crossing the aptly dubbed road that led into the prison and the effect both the animal and the mysterious bell tolling would have on them during the night shift. “So, why’s this bell tolling, who’s it for?”

  “It sounded like a passing bell, you know, rings like that from a church before someone… dies… There’s no executions at sundown to be tolled for,” McLaren added, “only the two at five o’clock in the morning for Mortimer and Falco…”

  The loud tolling of the unusual bell throughout the prison had unsettled guards and inmates of Hayworth Penitentiary.

  All except for Clyde Mortimer. The old man found the subduing effect it had on everybody amusing.

  As Royce Falco was led to the cell that he would spend his last night in, marched by guards beside the other prisoner considered by most to be a lunatic, a rat crossed their path.

  Mortimer jumped from his guard’s loose grip, possessing an uncanny agility despite his age and the shackles binding his wrists. With limbs like spindles, he stomped after the rat.

  “Mortimer! Get back here or I’ll knock you senseless again,” one of the guards threatened.

  Royce, as shackled as Clyde, wriggled free from his own guard’s hold in the commotion and shoulder-rushed the cruel old man against some cell bars. But, to Royce’s dismay, it wasn’t before Clyde had managed to injure the rat, the creature squealing and limping away.

  “Aww,” Mortimer began, a mock face of sympathy, “did the little rat getting hurt upset the infamous Royce Falco?”

  “If you men weren’t already hanging tomorrow, I’d beat you to pulp!” Royce’s guard went to reclaim his prisoner.

  Royce evaded, dodging. Then with his eyes set squarely on Mortimer, he launched at the lunatic. Royce’s forehead hit the front of the other’s skull with such force that the back of the old man’s head struck the bars of their new cells.

  Clyde Mortimer just laughed as Royce’s guard finally managed to grab him and keep him from attacking further. “Royce Falco, Red Roy, Famous Rat Lover of The Hole. They should call you Rat Roy instead!” His laughter became maniacal as the other guard brought him to his feet a
nd told him to, “Shut the fugg up.”

  Falco and Mortimer were put in separate cells beside each other. These spaces were to be where they would contemplate their last hours before being hanged to death by noose the next morning.

  As Mortimer’s guard exited the area with the other, he said without much sympathy, “God be with you…”

  Mortimer snorted. It was one of the strangest responses Royce had ever heard from the crazed man as he himself pondered the absurdness of the guard’s sentiment.

  Mortimer rubbed his bleeding head to see how much blood he could squeeze in his fingers. “You gonna say one of them little Injun prayers for the rat, Red Roy?”

  “Fugg off, Mortimer, don’t call me that.”

  “Awww, come on… Rat Roy… Alright… Royce… Say one for me.”

  “I wouldn’t fugging waste my breath on you, that’s for damned sure.”

  “But the guard said God be with you to me…” Mortimer sat with his legs huddled in his arms. “I must deserve a prayer.”

  “God be with you? What does that even mean to people before the gallows?” Royce looked to Mortimer, seeing the pathetic old man playing with the blood from his head wounds like a child. “You deserve nothing but the noose. You can wait for a preacher, I ain’t saying fugging nothing for you. The rat deserves a prayer more than you, the poor forsaken thing, after what you damn well did to it. But not you. Never you.”

  “But it’s just vermin, Royce.”

  “No, Clyde, you’re vermin. That rat had more class in just its tail than you have in your whole wrinkled body.”

  “And they say I’m crazy? Why would you pray for a filthy rodent and not the man across your cell going to the gallows with you?”

  “I dunno.” Royce nonchalantly replied, rubbing his forehead where he had struck Mortimer. “Probably just another bad habit I picked up from one of my brothers.”

  “Fugg!” Reed dropped his bits, the coins falling through the wood floorboards of the sentry tower. “Where’d he come from?”

  McLaren raised the spyglass to see. “When did he get there?”

  The cat never removed itself from the area. It switched at random moments between a staunch vigil staring at the front of Hayworth Penitentiary and making unnerving crossings of the road that led into the prison, despite the great tolling of the mysterious church bell.

  At some point the cat was doing neither activity, instead having its black coat scratched by the white-gloved hand of a stranger in blue.

  “That’s what I’m saying!”

  “Yeah,” McLaren said, “but I didn’t see him approach.”

  “Neither the fugg did I.” Reed explained again. “That’s what I’m talking about.”

  “Did he just sneak up?”

  “Well, where from?”

  Hayworth Penitentiary, located a safe and civilised distance outside La Grande, was situated in a large valley within a high hill. A Wakoda legend told that the formation was caused by a fire that fell from the sky to the earth. This garnered the penitentiary and the hill what some considered to be a misnomer; The Hole, as it is known among the prisoners and workers. From the sentry tower, anyone ascending the rise over the hill and descending into the valley toward the prison should be spotted with ease a literal mile away.

  And the road that led into the prison under the sentry tower was known across the territory as the Road to Hell. There was a small weathered sign almost out of sight from the sentry tower beside the road that McLaren had put up years earlier, that the Warden hadn’t had removed because of the reputation it garnered the prison among criminals. The branded letters read by anyone approaching the penitentiary and often recited out loud by prisoner wagon guards to their passengers bound for incarceration:

  Last Road into Hell.

  The man had kneeled to the cat, but not enough to put the crisp midnight-blue trousers to the cobbled road leading into Hayworth Penitentiary. As he scratched the animal under the chin, it looked as though he spoke to it.

  The stranger stood, pulling a pocket watch from his vest, checking it with a refined posture. Closing it, he stepped toward the prison entrance, the black cat remaining in place despite the approaching storm.

  “We’d better alert the gate, Mick, that we have an incoming visitor,” Reed stated.

  McLaren looked at the sentry tower’s old timepiece as some guards approached. “Ah, good. Our shift’s almost up, and here comes the tower night shift. We’ll just go down to the gate ourselves on our way to death-watch. I wanna know who walks alone all the way along the Road to Hell when a black cat keeps crossing it during an approaching storm!”

  “But, what you must ask yourselves, good sirs, is this…” There was a hanging pause as the distinguished accent drifted through the barren cell corridor like a gentle breeze. “Was the card you chose at the beginning of this simple prestidigitation really the card you had chosen at all?”

  Royce heard the guards’ exclamation of astonishment; he could even feel their sense of questioning awe from inside his cell.

  “You got a visitor, Falco,” McLaren called down the hall, then added with a humoured tone of disbelief, “says he’s your preacher.”

  John Reed and Michael McLaren’s curiosity about the approaching stranger paid off when they were treated to card tricks beyond belief, so much so that they agreed to escort him to see a prisoner in the exact location of where their next shift was. It was happenstance that defied convenience, McLaren chalked it up to good fortune.

  Mortimer chuckled from his cell, next to Royce’s. “The rat’s family have come to send you straight to Hell!”

  Royce’s brow clenched. “That doesn’t even make sense; you’re the one that was cruel to it.”

  “Life,” Mortimer screamed into his pillow, “doesn’t make sense.”

  Royce had an idea of who was coming; someone that hadn’t appeared in his life for some years. As soon as the distinguished gentleman walked in to view there was no doubt to the answer of Mortimer’s question of, “Who’s this, dandy?”

  Royce answered. “Charles Lafayette…”

  The visitor raised a finger to the brim of his wide hat as an interjection. “The One and Only, Charles Lafayette, Legendary Mysterio, Illusionist, Magician, Perceptivist, Master of Cosmology, Esoterica, Fortuna, Portentia and Mysticism…” He pulled on the brim of his hat as he gave a slight bow of acknowledgement to Mortimer.

  “That’s a lotta fugging turd words, mister.”

  “Charming…” Lafayette turned to face the other prisoner.

  Royce smirked. “So, how did you work your way into the restricted area that the guards call death-watch?”

  “Simple tricks,” the magician nodded his head back at Mortimer, “appease the simplest of minds.”

  “I’ll fugg you up,” Mortimer tried to rattle the bars of his cell, “you dandy Creole!”

  Lafayette returned to the wiry old man, twirling his moustache with thought, his azure gaze piercing. “Execution at the noose is too simple of an escape for the sins you have committed, Clyde Mortimer, but there’s a special place after the gallows where there is no escaping from what you did to that little girl at Rosewood…”

  Royce couldn’t believe it. He’d never seen Mortimer shut down like that. The man was without remorse, and no amount of reasoning could ever silence him. Only beatings by guards to the point of unconsciousness had any effect. Lafayette had somehow plucked just the right thread to unravel the lunatic, Mortimer weaking at the knees to almost fall to the floor, his wrinkled skin looking as though he’d spent a night out in the cold.

  Lafayette came back to Royce’s cell, those azure eyes gazing through the vertical bars at the prisoner. The man once known as Red Roy didn’t know what to make of the magician’s visit, but he knew such an appointment was never to be taken lightly. Royce didn’t know what to say, but tried, “It’s been a while, Chu-”

  Royce paused as the magician’s bro
w raised, rethinking his naming, “-arles…”

  Charles Lafayette nodded, Royce seeing a small, satisfied smile across his lips. Then the magician delivered mysterious words in the manner he was known for – by the few that did know him well enough for that.

  “This is where it all ends. As the evening passes and a storm of liberation descends upon Hayworth Penitentiary, you, Royce Falco, will face your Last Midnight.”

  Royce swallowed. “Grim tidings, Lafayette.”

  “Indeed.” The magician continued. “You will also confront your brothers and your last chance at redemption. One of these brothers, in particular, has seen to it that your execution is scheduled alongside this”- he was referring to Mortimer - “so that it may go unnoticed by your father of whom you are used to delivering your salvation against the Law.”

  “Kayne…” Royce knew it.

  “The very same.” Lafayette acknowledged. “The man that would be king among the Falco dynasty. Kayne Falco, he who vies with you for the coveted position as the Seventh Son of a Seventh Son.”

  “So why don’t you use one of your magic tricks to spring me from this prison so Kayne doesn’t get his way?”

  “Your Doom is upon you, Royce Falco,” Lafayette explained. “All the powers of the universe move in cohesion so that you face the reckoning of one Last Midnight. You must choose redemption or death as your Fate.”

  “Then I choose redemption! As if I’d choose anything else…”

  “Redemption, my dear Royce, isn’t simply a matter of uttering a succession of traditional words – no, not at all, that won’t do, that form of tyranny just will not do. You’ll need to tell them of your decision and mean it, because they can see right through any deceit.”

  “Who… Tell who?” Royce was wary.

  “You’ll know when the time is upon you. There’s many who still linger beyond death in Hayworth Penitentiary, and they are coming tonight…”