by Andy Monk
They turned at the sound of hooves, thirty or so men, mainly deputies, thundered down Main Street.
“None of them have white horses…” Amelia announced, still jumping up and down as the dust began to settle.
“Why would any of them have white horses?”
“The hero always has a white horse.”
“He does?”
Amelia nodded vigorously as they started walking again, “Though not always, Amos doesn’t have a white horse.”
She smiled and waved away the dust hanging in the air about them.
Shame the big hero didn’t stay and look after us, eh kiddo?
“So,” Amelia continued to explain, “sometimes the hero rides a white horse and sometimes he rides a black horse like Amos, but Death always rides a grey horse.”
She stopped and looked down at the girl, “Death rides a grey horse?”
“Uh-huh.”
“Where did you get that from?”
“Amos.”
“When’d he say that?”
“Dunno…” Amelia shrugged “…but he’s always thinking about the Thin Rider on the grey horse. That’s what he calls Death. The Thin Rider.”
She crouched down in front of Amelia, “How do you know he thinks about the Thin Rider all the time, did he tell you?”
Amos had never mentioned anything about a Thin Rider to her. It didn’t seem an appropriate story to tell a little girl, and she knew a lot more about being inappropriate than most people.
Amelia shuffled a bit and looked up at the sky.
“It’s ok hun, you can tell me.”
“Mommy tells me not to say anything about it,” Amelia dropped her gaze, her eyes had taken on the slightly cloudy look she got when she talked about her Mom, the way some people do when they can’t quite catch hold of a memory.
“About what?”
“Catching stuff.”
“Catching stuff?”
Amelia nodded and looked serious, like she’d been caught doing something she knew was naughty.
“Stuff in people’s heads.”
Her stomach did a slow roll.
Oh fuck, not you too!
She winced inside.
“Can you tell what I’m thinking?”
Amelia shook her head, “I only get bits of stuff now and again,” she gave her a rather stern look, “but you do think lots of bad words.”
Oh boy…
“And your Mommy tells you not to say anything about it?”
“She says it would freak people.”
“Freak people?”
“Scare people.”
“I guess…” she straightened up and took hold of the girl’s hand again.
“Don’t suppose you know where Amos went do you?”
“He was going to see the Thin Rider about a bad man called Hope.”
A chill rippled over her skin.
“Do you know why?”
“The bad man Hope hurt Megan…” she shrugged and shuffled her feet. She didn’t look comfortable, like she was being forced to tell tales.
“It’s ok kiddo…”
She swallowed and walked on. Megan had been Amos’ wife and this man Hope, presumably the same one Sam had said he’d seen with Amos, must have had something to do with her murder. That was why he’d gone!
Why the fuck didn’t he tell me?
Amelia stopped and looked up at her.
“Because he loves you…”
*
People were drifting up Main Street towards Pioneer Square as news of the attacks spread. Folk liked to gather together when they felt threatened and in difficult times. Molly and Amelia were walking in the opposite direction.
She was trying not to think about Amelia’s words, partially as she didn’t want any of her foul-minded thoughts leaking into the girl’s head. But mainly because she thought she might start crying and she fucking hated crying.
There was no Thin Rider, obviously, that was a… what did they call it? A metaphor? Yeah, a metaphor for death. Amos had gone to see one of the men who’d raped and murdered his wife, but whose death was he expecting. Hope’s or his own. If he killed Hope why hadn’t he come back for her?
Because he loves you…
She shook the thoughts away. Maybe he was dead, maybe he wasn’t, either way she and Amelia were alone in a town run by a monster. Well, almost alone.
John’s store had still been closed and as they passed Ash’s barbershop she could see that still was too.
The Mayor had said she and Amelia were safe in town, but what about the others who had all been conspicuous by their absence?
“Hey, let’s take a detour,” she said, tugging on Amelia’ hand.
“Where we going?”
“Gonna make a house call…”
*
The Godbold’s home was modest and unnoteworthy. There were flowers in pots outside, the exterior had been freshly painted and well-maintained. It didn’t look terribly different from Molly’s own home. She didn’t know Ash well and she’d never much liked making social calls, but she was worried and alone. And with a child to look after she wasn’t able to find her usual refuge in the bottle.
She was therefore prepared to resort to such desperate measures as being neighbourly.
“Who lives here?” Amelia asked.
“Ash. And his family.”
“They have nice flowers.”
“I guess.”
“Why don’t you have flowers?”
“Erm… I’m not much good at making things grow.”
Amelia giggled, “But it’s easy. You just gotta give them water and love!”
She grinned and flicked the girl’s hair, sending her into more giggles.
Pouring water on em I can do, it’s the other thing I have trouble with…
“Can I help you?”
She turned around to find a blonde teenage girl behind them clutching a couple of books. She was a pretty girl, though her eyes were red and slightly darkened. A combination of tears and sleeplessness.
“We’ve come to see Ash. I have got the right house, haven’t I?”
The girl nodded, “Yeah, but my Dad will be at work right now.”
“His shop’s closed so I thought I’d call by here. I’m Molly, this is Amelia.”
“I know who you are… I’m Ruthie Godbold,” she nodded and gave them a faint smile “…come in, but I doubt Dad’s home…”
How comes everybody knows who I am…
Ruthie opened the door and ushered them inside.
“She’s very sad…” Amelia whispered, looking up with eyes seemingly a lot older than the rest of her.
“Mom! Dad!” Ruthie called out, “Someone here to see you!”
She hovered behind the girl and listened to the silence.
Ruthie frowned when a second call got no response, “Maybe they’re out back…”
She left them in the hall and went through to the kitchen. When she returned a moment later her frown had deepened.
“Mom wouldn’t go out and leave Em on her own…” she opened the door to the front room, “…why don’t you wait in here while I check upstairs.”
Molly led Amelia through behind Ruthie only to pull up short. A man was standing in the middle of the room
“I’m here for your mother,” Deputy Blane drawled…
The Gunsmith
The last time he’d wallowed in bed for days it had been because of a girl too. The bucolically named Juniper Lane. They’d gone out – if that was the right expression when you were fifteen – for nearly two months and he’d been convinced she was the love of his life.
Then she’d dumped him in favour of Harlen Rose who played quarterback for the school team and was, in his fifteen-year-old self’s considered opinion, a greasy smart-ass who would end up living in a trailer park, an over-sized glob of grease seeing out his days through the comforting haze of substance abuse. Any sensible girl would have steered clear for no other reason than fear of end
ing up being called Juniper Rose.
He’d spent a whole weekend in bed imagining the love of his life in a washed-out, soulless trailer park, wearing a pink velour leisure suit with her hideous horticultural name and several screaming brats who’d be dealing drugs as soon as they got to junior high.
A few months later his family moved to Connecticut, but by then he’d long since stopped caring about Juniper and Harlen. He never did find out where they ended up.
He knew he was far, far too old to toss and turn in bed feeling sorry for himself and he didn’t even have the consolation of day-dreaming about the awful life Cece would have without him. He’d already ruined her life.
Several times someone came knocking on the door of his store. Maybe it was Cece, or Molly, or Kate or some other woman whose life he’d managed to fuck up in some way. Or maybe it was good ol Deputy Blane stopping by for a re-match or the Mayor wanting to know why he’d been sniffing around his business. Maybe that wouldn’t be such a bad thing. Maybe he could buy one of those little black bottles and forget his melancholy heart.
Or it was just some schmuck who wanted to buy a gun. There were plenty of those in Hawker’s Drift after all.
Whoever it was, he’d rolled over and ignored them. John X Smith was closed for business. Maybe permanently.
There was no reason for him to be here. Not now. He’d only stayed in town for Cece and, on reflection, that had probably been a mistake. Even if she didn’t hate him for what he’d done, it was absurd to think they could just carry on where they’d left off. He wasn’t the same man she’d loved and she wasn’t quite the young woman he remembered. He’d had fifty plus years to coat her memory in sugar and stardust. No different from any old guy wistfully recalling a lost love from his past. Except his past had now stepped into the present and it wasn’t falling gratefully into his arms.
His past was spitting feathers.
Might as well pack up the old kit bag and head off into this big, increasingly empty, world. Maybe find a quiet cold lake under a mountain and build himself a cabin and a boat so he could spend the rest of his days fishing and staring at the ripples on the water.
He’d always hated the idea of fishing. Seemed a damn fool waste of anyone’s time unless you had a real big appetite for fish, but, suddenly, the idea of doing nothing all day long but sitting in a boat with a fishing rod and an empty mind seemed a pretty appealing way of seeing out the remainder of his misbegotten life.
He lost track of time in the darkened bedroom, which he left only to forage for whatever was left in his pantry that hadn’t evolved into something life threatening. Otherwise, he spent his time rebounding between dreams and memories and a sense of loss more profound than any he’d previously experienced.
It was evening again when it dawned on him that he was no longer alone.
None of his alarms had sounded, so he initially dismissed the idea someone else was in the house, but several times the soft creaking of floorboards insisted otherwise.
He’d lived here a long time. Long enough to have become more intimately familiar with the building’s whims and idiosyncrasies than he ever had with any woman.
Blane was a sociopath, but there was no way he was smart enough to get in without triggering something. The Mayor, on the other hand, he would put nothing past. He had a habit of appearing unexpectedly, though he’d never done it inside his home before now.
There was another long drawn out creak. He remembered the noises he’d heard when he’d been testing the bottle he’d plucked from Sye’s pocket down in the basement right before it had started screaming. He’d almost written those noises off as imagination, even if he hadn’t been able to do the same with the black candy.
So yeah, maybe the Mayor could get in. And didn’t Blane work for the Mayor…
He slipped his hand down the side of the bed where he kept a little snub-nosed automatic. Not the kind of weapon he’d carry on the street given it belonged in this world no more than he did, but it was a lot more comfortable to sleep with than one of the big ol’ pieces of iron the locals were fond of blowing chunks off each other with.
He eased himself out of bed and moved to the doorway. Peering out into the landing he could see orange lamplight spilling from beneath the door of his monitoring room. He hadn’t been in there for a couple of days, let alone lit a lamp.
He licked his lips and edged across the landing. There was only one way in and one way out of the room, he could wait and see who came strolling out of the door rather than making a target of himself, but he had a lot of valuable stuff in there.
Actually, that wasn’t true. He had a load of cobbled together shit in there, but for this world, it was priceless.
Carefully edging along the wall, he made it across the landing, if not with cat-like stealth, then at least without tripping over his own feet. He took a deep breath and counted to three before throwing back the door and charging in gun first.
Cece was sitting in his comfortable leather armchair in front of the dials, gauges and readouts of his makeshift monitoring station. She raised an eyebrow as she looked up at him, her beautiful face still a curious mixture of the strange and familiar after so many years.
“Couldn’t you even have dressed first?”
*
Once he’d put on some clothes he returned to find Cece still sitting in the chair, her hands in her lap along with a quantum mapper. He’d brought several with him, but they’d long since been cannibalised for his monitoring station. Building twenty-second century technology with largely Victorian-era components had been challenging to say the least.
“You’ve been busy,” she nodded towards the contraptions spread along a table running the length of the room’s wall.
“Had plenty of time to kill,” he pulled a hard-backed wooden chair over and slumped into it.
“Does this shit do anything bar hum and flash a few lights?”
“Told me when you finally showed up…” he raised his chin.
“I’m not here to disrespect your science project.”
“Then why are you here?”
“I need your help.”
“To do what?”
“Get home?”
“Cece-”
She held up her hand, “I know, the beacons are gone, I checked. Trust me, I believe you were insane enough to do it.”
“I wasn’t insane, I-”
She raised her hand for a second time, “I’m not going to debate your reasoning either. I’m sure it was flawlessly logical. Everything always was… is with you. I’m here to find another way home.”
“We can’t.”
“We can’t get back to our home, but we can find a way back to somewhere that is more our home than this place.”
When he looked blankly at her she continued, “We’re not the only people here from… elsewhere, are we?”
He shook his head, “No.”
“There’s Amelia for a start. Does she come from our Earth?”
“I don’t know,” he nodded towards his monitoring equipment, “she came through a small transitory fissure in town, my equipment isn’t sensitive enough to map fissures back to origin.”
“Her memories are still scrambled from the transit, but from what I’ve been able to get out of her it sounds late twentieth century. Whether or not it’s our twentieth century or another one…” she shrugged.
“Not so many twentieth centuries out there and most habited alternates were radically different.”
“Tell me about it, I saw the shit Henson brought back from that Mongol Alternate,” she said with a shudder.
“There have been others too, over the years, each time I thought it was you finally arriving, each time I was disappointed.”
“Where did the others come from?”
“I don’t know. By the time I tracked them down they didn’t remember anything about where they’d come from.”
“Transit sickness, like Amelia had?”
“That’s what I
’d assumed, though none of them were phasing like Amelia did…. Now I’m not so sure.”
Cece raised an eyebrow.
“I didn’t know about the Mayor’s little black bottles and the way they change people’s memories.”
“You think he wiped their memories?”
“Well, I think we can safely say he’s from elsewhere too.”
“Somewhere where they know the Rolling Stones anyway.”
“Huh?”
“He sung Satisfaction to me the first time I went to the Residence.”
“Huh?”
“Sorry, I forgot you’ve got no interest in musical history, have you?” Cece rolled her eyes, “The Rolling Stones were a hugely successful and influential rock band from the second half of the twentieth century. I would have thought even you might have heard of them.”
“The name’s vaguely familiar.”
“Anyway… they’re not from this alternate, in this world there was no Rolling Stones.”
“No anything else after the 1863 divergent point either.”
“Precisely.”
John took a deep breath, “I still don’t see how this helps with getting home? Without the beacon, you could end up anywhere and anywhen. And there are plenty worse alternates to be in than this one. At least this one has air you can breathe.”
“I can’t stay here,” Cece’s eyes held his for a few seconds before slipping away.
Because I’m here…
He kept his face neutral and ignored the gut-kicking sensation that made him want to roll up into a ball.
“So, how can I help?”
“The Mayor’s ranch.”
“What about it?”
“Ever been inside it?”
“No, he kinda keeps the place to himself.”
“You know its throbbing with resonance, don’t you?”
“I did some mapping when I first arrived,” he jerked his head towards the makeshift monitoring station, “before I cannibalised my gear.”
“And what did you conclude from your enquiries, Professor Quayle?”
“The whole area is riddled with fissures, it’s not surprising…”
Cece raised her eyes to stare at him again, “That isn’t much of a conclusion.”
He shrugged.
“You were always so damned curious about everything, it was one of the things that attracted me to you in the first place. You spend decades here, in a town run by someone who is… something else, a town sitting amongst a network of cracks in the fabric of space/time and is humming virtually off the scale with spatial and temporal resonance, where people are popping up from other realities and you don’t even bother to see if there is a connection?”