Skull Moon

by Tim Curran

  "It's taking back its lands," Longtree commented as they slipped through the caved-in wall of a dance hall.

  Lauters studied the stomped furniture and shattered fixtures. "Its lands?"

  "Yes," Longtree said. "Once there were many like it. They ruled this land, the Blackfeet and other tribes worshipped them. Now it's come back and it's taking back its property."

  Lauters looked at him like he was crazy. "It's a monster."

  "But not a mindless one.''

  "You're giving it a lot of credit, aren't you? Maybe it can reason a bit, but it's still a monster."

  There was no arguing with that.

  Longtree was wondering if the beast was on the run or merely hiding out in one of these ruined structures, awaiting the man he needed to kill. Or had he forgotten now, in the inebriation of massacre, why he'd been called back? What his reason for being was. Anything was possible with this creature, anything at all.

  "I take it," Lauters said, scanning the debris for bodies, "that you've been talking with Crazytail and his bunch."

  "I have."

  "And you believe those tales they tell?" the sheriff said incredulously.

  Longtree sighed, realizing he still disliked this man. And why not? He was a rapist, a murderer, a vigilante, a cattle rustler, would-be assassin (and God knew what else) parading as a lawman. "If you have a better explanation about the origin of this beast, Sheriff, I'm all ears," Longtree said patiently. "It came from somewhere."

  Lauters spat. "Hell. That's where it came from."

  "Regardless," Longtree sighed, "that's where it's going."

  They moved along, Lauters in the lead. There was blood in the beast's tracks now. Fresh blood.

  "If it bleeds," Lauters said happily, "it can die."

  The trail suddenly ended. The only possible place the beast could have gone was the building leaning before them. The church. Together they circled around it. No tracks led away.

  "We've got it." Lauters was jubilant. "We've got the sonofabitch."

  "We'll need help."

  "Stay here," Lauters ordered. "I'll get some men."

  Longtree watched him vault away, moving quickly through the drifts. Longtree studied the church. Why had the beast come here? Was it for the obvious reason that it simply needed shelter, a place to mend its wounds? Or was it something else entirely? Did it know a house of worship when it saw one? Did it think in its unflappable egotism that it belonged here, a god to be kneeled before? Regardless, Claussen had been right-he was its priest now.

  Longtree waited. If the beast tried to escape now, he would have to try and stop it…and no doubt perish in the attempt. There was nothing to do but wait for reinforcements. He toyed with the idea of wiring Fort Ellis for Army troops, but getting them when they were needed was like getting a child to open its mouth so you could pull a tooth. Besides, it would take them a day or so to reach Wolf Creek…and the beast surely wouldn't sit still that long.

  So the marshal waited, smelling the smoke of the burning town. Like Nero, he fiddled while Rome burned.

  23

  Dr. Perry was alive.

  Despite the abuse put to him by the fiend, he still lived. The spark that burned in his body for seventy odd years refused to be snuffed. Bones were broken, limbs twisted and crippled, blood spilling from a dozen wounds, yet he lived and in living, was awake. He looked down on the fiend below him with a consuming hatred that would smolder, he was certain, long after death had claimed him and the fiend was so many ashes in God's palm.

  24

  Lauters knew more pain than the doctor could ever dream of in his most anguished moments. He'd lost friends, he'd lost his family, he'd lost his way of life. Much of it was due to the beast, but Longtree was hardly innocent. When that ravaging monster was put to rest finally, he'd have a word or two to say to the marshal. He was beyond caring whether or not Longtree wanted to arrest him. He planned on dying at the beast's hands or with Longtree's bullets in him. Either way, he was going to die. And if he slew the beast and Longtree and lived, then he'd put his gun to his head and end it. Having no reason to live, Lauters took satisfaction in his own coming death.

  A third of the town was ablaze now. The conflagration had eaten its way through most of the businesses and was busy blackening homes, hungry for new conquests.

  "I need men," Lauters told Bowes when he found him in the mulling confusion. "We found it. I need men to kill it."

  Bowes, black with soot, coughed. "The town's burning," he said dryly. "Burning."

  "I don't give a fuck about this town," Lauters snapped. "I found the monster and we have to kill it. Get some men."

  Bowes efficiently went about the task of rounding up what men could be spared, even though, technically, there were none. He came back with four smoke-blackened men.

  "These are the only ones who'll come," the deputy said.

  "Shit. All right."

  Grimacing as he took one final pull from a bottle of rye in his desk drawer, Lauters handed out rifles and ammunition. His eyes blazing with revenge, he led the posse to their deaths.

  25

  Skullhead, grinder of flesh and render of souls, lay sleeping on the altar as the dogs of war inched closer. He snoozed and dreamed of the old days of slaughter and barbarity. He was sure these days would come again.

  His arrogance would allow him to accept nothing less.

  But what he failed to realize in the blood-misted corridors of his brain was that this was a new age and men had little use for the old gods. In these times, men wanted gods that were quiet, that didn't interfere with their own plans and conquests. Advisors, not active participants. The days when men offered up their sons and daughters to primeval monsters were long gone. In the collective psychology of the masses, this was unthinkable.

  But none of this would have made any sense to Skullhead.

  His was a reptilian brain-a mass of nervous tissue devoted to need, want, and desire. He was hungry, so he ate; thirsty, so he drank. His loins ached, so he raped; his territory was threatened, so he killed. Simplicity itself. The perfect hunter, the ultimate predator. There was logic and reasoning in that brain, too, but it was generally only applied to methods of the hunt, to slaughter, to self-indulgence. The little men existed only to feed, clothe, and worship him. And they should do these things, his brain decided, because he wished it.

  So the beast lay on the altar, beneath ravaged symbols of Christianity, a god in his own thinking, sainted by atrocity, immortal through his own appetites. In God's house he waited, bloated with sin and suffering, his belly fat with human meat. A Christian demon, as it were, in the flesh.

  26

  Longtree grew tired of waiting.

  When the posse was but five minutes away, he entered the church. He was carrying his usual armaments-Winchester rifle, Colt pistols, and Bowie knife. There was death in his eyes as he entered through the main door. It was hanging from one hinge as if it had taken a tremendous blow and from the claw marks drawn into the wood, the marshal knew what had struck it. He paused just inside, lighting a cigarette and listening. He could hear movement, but the movement of a man, a sort of limping gait.

  He moved up the nave, sighting the man just ahead. It was Claussen or a beaten, bleeding, and bedraggled version of the same. There was a fire going in the aisle, a small one fed by prayer books and shards of wood.

  "The marshal," Claussen said lifelessly. "I wondered when you'd show."

  Longtree looked at his arm. There was no hand, just a stump burnt black. "What happened, Reverend?" he asked calmly.

  "I was bleeding. The master…he took my hand…sacrifice," Claussen mumbled. "I cauterized it." He grinned madly at the idea.

  No sane man could thrust his arm in a fire even if it meant saving his own life. The pain would be unthinkable. "Where is it?" Longtree inquired. "The beast."

  "The master?" Claussen looked suddenly sheepish, but his eyes blazed with the embers of lunacy. "Have you come to serve? To worship?"r />
  "I've come to kill it."

  "Get out of here," Claussen demanded.

  Longtree scanned the dimness, eyes bright. "Where?"

  "You can't kill him, Marshal. No man can. If you've not come as a brother to him, then run before he discovers you."

  There was a glint of humanity left in the reverend, but little more. "You're ill, Reverend. You'd best leave now, I've got business-"

  "You've no business here. Not anymore."

  Longtree moved up the aisle. Claussen blocked his path.

  "Step aside, Reverend, or I'll shoot you," he said, spitting out his cigarette.

  Claussen launched himself forward and Longtree easily sidestepped him. He slammed the butt of the Winchester into the man's belly and snapped it up aside his head. Claussen fell, whimpering.

  "Where is it?" Longtree demanded.

  Then a sound: a single grumbling moan.

  Longtree looked up to the altar. In the shadows…the beast.

  And in the time it took him to see the horror, its wretched form, Claussen was on him. The icy fingers of his remaining hand were cutting into Longtree's throat, the stump beating him around the face, eliciting cries of pain from its owner each time it struck. It was as much the insanity of the situation as the attack that made the marshal drop his rifle and stagger back, shielding his eyes. Claussen was on him, kicking, striking, clawing, trying to bite. Longtree shoved him away, kicked him fiercely in his lamed leg and struck him in the face with a series of quick jabs. Claussen, old cuts on his face opening, fell to his knees.

  Longtree, picking up his rifle, walked slowly to the altar.

  A ghostly, smoky light rained in through the stained glass windows. They had been defaced with perverse drawings now. The pulpit loomed ahead, the defiled altar, and the beast, bleeding and asleep.

  Dr. Perry had been added to the fiend's roll call of victims. He had been crucified on the great wooden cross, spikes stolen from the shattered altar driven through his hands and ankles. He hung above the beast, an aged and depraved Christ, rivers of red wine staining the altar cloth below.

  Longtree looked down on the beast.

  He wondered if it was dead. For just one hopeful, fleeting moment, he thought it might be. Dead or dying. But he knew it was neither. In his mind he saw the butchered faces of its victims, the dead children. Had it visited the Blackfeet camp yet? Were Laughing Moonwind and her folk dead now?

  No time to think.

  The beast was sprawled on the altar. A blood-streaked, stinking mass of foul intent. It was tight with throbbing muscle and jutting bone. Its shoulders broad, its head huge. Its cavernous mouth open, black spiny tongue stuck to its lower lip. Its eyes were wide and staring, but it did not have lids as such.

  It was a horror.

  Longtree thought it seemed to be composed of many things. It had bits of fur like a mammal. The thorny, exaggerated flesh of a lizard. The ridged, armored torso of insect. The hooked, yellowed claws of a bird of prey. The spiked and skeletal tail of a saurian. Yet, it resembled a man, in form only, but it did all the same. Some bastard, perverse uncle of humanity.

  Longtree took aim at its head.

  There was a bustle of commotion from the vestibule. Lauters, Bowes, and a few others stomped in, shoving Claussen aside.

  "Longtree!" Lauters shouted.

  The beast stirred.

  Christ, Longtree thought, so close, so close…

  The men were charging up the altar now, talking excitedly amongst themselves at how the marshal had slain the monster. Longtree backed away into the chancel.

  "It's alive," he muttered.

  And it was.

  One sheer membranous eyelid opened crustily, then another. Slitted pupils stirred in seas of glowing red. They expanded to take in light. The mouth dropped open, lips thinned and drew away from swollen, black gums, teeth sliding forth like arrows from a quiver. The beast was awake.

  It stood up before Longtree, easily eight feet in height. It was, Longtree decided, his finger tickling the trigger of his rifle, an amazing exercise in lethal anatomy.

  It looked to be armored for battle like a knight of old. Like a fleshy, living skeleton. Its arms fed into sockets just beneath the shoulders which were shielded by jutting plates. The legs, the same, plates concealing their origin. Its torso was gleaming with ribbed mounds, knitted with a black oily skin that bled into gray, riddled with numerous lacerations and punctures. It had no neck, the head firmly mounted on the sloping shoulders, jaw protruding in a quasi-snout, nostrils flattened and bulging with each rasping breath. There seemed to be barely enough flesh to cover the protruding architecture of the massive skull. It was drawn tight, scarred and thinning. Silver and gray tufts of fur sprouted here and there like weeds through cracks in rock.

  A thing engineered to stalk and kill and take any amount of abuse thrown at it. The ultimate hunter. Built to survive in a savage world of half-humans and monsters that no longer existed.

  The beast took one step forward.

  One of the men-the one who'd lost his brother to this horror-charged forth, screaming out a battle cry. The beast took his knife in the abdomen and then took the man himself. Before the cowering, helpless eyes of the posse, the man was pulled apart, his viscera decorating the altar. There was nothing to do but watch.

  The body was dropped. The beast crushed the head with a grinding of a bony heel, wetting the remains down with a gush of viscous, steaming piss.

  Longtree and the others fell back, shooting.

  Skullhead felt more bullets pierce his hide. He took them and roared, still standing. He'd been deceived into thinking these white-skins had brought offerings of themselves. But it was not so; they refused to obey the ancient laws. So, great instructor in all things bloody and agonizing, Skullhead would teach them.

  Longtree watched the beast move. It had just absorbed no less than a dozen bullets, and here it leaped like an angry child, that great tail thrashing. It knocked Lauters aside and grabbed the first available man. With a grinding, an awful wet snapping, it separated the first man at the hip, tossing legs one way and body the other. The man screamed and flopped, legless, blood coming out in a flood.

  As more shots were fired, Longtree ran to the small fire Claussen had built and removed a chair leg, the end of which was a flaming red coal. As the monster turned on him, he jumped up and jammed the torch in its face, falling back before he was swatted away. Its left eye and much of the flesh around it was incinerated into a sap of blackened fluid. The beast roared, swinging out madly in all directions, claws whistling through the air seeking life to take.

  Bowes got behind it and opened up its muscled back with blasts from his shotgun. It turned on him and Lauters and another assailed it from the front with bullets. The beast howled with rage, pounding dust from the rafters overhead. Its back was ripped wide, glistening vertebrae exposed.

  "Its eye!" Longtree shouted. "Shoot out its eye!"

  As the men attempted to do this, Longtree turned and saw Laughing Moonwind and Herbert Crazytail coming up the aisle. The old man was dressed out in his finest. He wore a shirt of antelope skin, matching leggings. Both ornamented with colored beads, feathers, and dyed porcupine quills. He wore a skull mask over his face and carried a medicine club decorated with wolf fur, weasel skin pendants, and topped by the foot of a wolf, claws extended. He pushed past Longtree and the others, facing the beast.

  At the sight of him, Skullhead stopped dead.

  Crazytail took items from his medicine bag-bits of herb, pinches of colored powder, feathered talismans-and threw them at the beast. He chanted and sang, circling the beast now, forming a circle of powder around it.

  "What's that crazy injun doing?" Lauters asked.

  No one answered. The beast had paused now, whether held by magic or by curiosity, it was held all the same.

  "It killed everyone in the village," Moonwind said sternly. "Only a few of us escaped…"

  "What is your father doing?" Longtree as
ked.

  "Binding him."

  "Will it work?"

  She shook her head. "No, but he feels responsible. He and the others brought it back. It should never have seen the light of day again."

  The beast suddenly grew bored with the ceremony. Teeth went in motion, burying in the old man's head, his skull pulped under the jaws. He fell dead at the monster's feet.

  Laughing Moonwind screamed.

  Lauters walked right up to it, emptying his rifle into its hide. "No more! Goddammit, this ends now!"

  The beast put hands to either side of Lauters' head, lifting him into the air and crushing his skull slowly into mush. Longtree dashed away to get another stick from the fire and saw salvation: pushed beneath a pew was a can of kerosene.

  The beast charged him and he uncapped the metal jug, letting its contents wash it down. Skullhead ignored this benediction and slammed into him, sending the marshal sailing through open air. In the process, the beast stumbled into the fire. In the time it took him to feel the pain of the embers beneath his feet, flames had licked up and over him. He spun and danced, trying to shake the kiss of fire.

  No good.

  Skullhead had never known such pain. He and his kind had no use for fire; it was something the little men used. Cooked meat was repulsive. In the old days when a finger of lightning set a dry forest ablaze, the Lords fled, migrating to safer environs. Fire destroyed. Fire hurt. Fire consumed. He slapped at himself and threw his body on the floor, rolling and rolling. It was no good. The fire ate at his flesh, incinerating his being, cremating his will. When all the hair was gone from his skin, the flames died out. He pulled himself weakly to his feet, singed, blackened, blind, his face a distorted running mess.

  "Now," Longtree said, directing his remaining troops, "kill it."

  Keeping well away from the clawing fingers of the beast, they began to shoot and shoot. Reloading when chambers were empty. Finally the fiend fell to its knees. Its crisped flesh was open in dozens of places, mangled and bleeding viscera bulging forth.