Steve Vernon Special Edition Gift Pack, Vol 1

by Vernon, Steve

  But the Moon Man had changed all that. Since he had come, the bones of the upper chambers had learned to walk. The Moon Man had raised these bones, building flesh of a sort upon them. He had used these bones to dig and root in the lower chambers.

  The Moon Man was looking for something to make himself larger.

  To make himself powerful.

  The Great Green Ghost moved a little closer to the mountain. He foraged deep into the burial chamber where the Great Green Ghost called his home. He touched the bodies there, one by one, with his great green fire. It was a wonderful feeling as he cindered them down into pieces too small for the Moon Man’s scientific magic to touch. One by one, they gave themselves back to the darkness of the deep earth.

  “Sleep, little fears. Sleep in the darkness of the stone and silence. Your digging is no longer necessary. Sleep. Sleep.”

  And so it continued, working his way through the depths of the mountain, until a great blue light blossomed within the cavern and a voice hissed forth like a snake that has learned to talk.

  A snake or something worse.

  “So you’re the one who’s been stealing all my crawlers.”

  It was the Moon Man.

  “I am doing nothing but returning what was stolen back into the earth,” The Great Green Ghost said. “These bodies were meant to rest. To return themselves slowly back to the earth. It takes a long time to live. It should take a longer time to die.”

  “I do it all at once,” said the Moon Man.

  “You do it badly,” said the Great Green Ghost. “You are a thief.”

  He was talking in Indian sometimes, and something older than that, but in either tongue the Moon Man seemed to understand what he was saying.

  “A thief? I took what I found. They were salvage. I found them and they were mine to do with what I wanted.”

  He gestured and the walls lit in shiny laughing blue flames. The light glintered from the burning blue spectral tubes. The energy fissured and swarmed, raging into the higher ranges of power.

  The Great Green Ghost stared about at all the glass and shiny blue lightning and smiled.

  “All those glass tubes. Do they make your man root any bigger? Do they give you more women? Do they fill your stomach or quench your thirst? What good are they?”

  For the most part he was trying to enrage the Moon Man, for there is weakness to be found in another man’s anger but a part of him was honestly curious. He had grown so long in the darkness and the rock. Science was a mystery to him. A fool’s game, to be sure, yet a mystery that he foolishly felt the need to explore.

  “They give me what I want,” answered the Moon Man. “They give me power.”

  At this the Great Green Ghost laughed. It was a gentle laugh, like soft Summer thunder, rolling before the lightning’s crash.

  “You call this bed of lights power?”

  He shook his great green head softly.

  “I will show you power, little crater.”

  The Great Green Ghost waved one great green hand, and the mountain moved. The walls shook like a blanket in the wind. The glass tubes rattled in an eerie high-pitched trill, like icicles falling from a frozen cliff.

  “This is power.”

  The wind boomed up like drums in the heart of the darkness below. The dust whirled and the air grew dank and thick and hard to breath.

  “This is power, Man Who Looks Like A Moon.”

  But there was something wrong. The Moon Man wasn’t frightened. The Moon Man was laughing. He was laughing like he’d seen the funniest thing since man crawled out of the rock.

  “Do you think I am funny?” The Great Green Ghost boomed.

  “I’m sorry,” The Moon Man apologized. “I’m being rude.”

  He gestured, and an electric blue cage slid down from out of the ceiling.

  “There are rules in nature,” The Moon Man proclaimed.

  The Great Green Ghost hadn’t noticed the cage. In truth it hadn’t been there, until that moment in time.

  He looked up at the cage. He told himself he wasn’t afraid.

  “First rule of nature,” The Moon Man said. “Everything is made of something. Nothing can be truly destroyed. Even ghosts have atoms.”

  He waved and the blue cage slowly descended. The Great Green Ghost tried to flee, but his body seemed to betray him. It was pulled towards the cage like a moth hovering too close to a campfire.

  “Even ectoplasm has its own form of energy, and as such can be trapped.”

  The cage closed about the Great Green Ghost. He tried to shake the bars, but when he touched them he felt himself grow smaller, as if the bars were living leeches.

  The Moon Man laughed all the harder.

  “You cannot destroy me,” The Great Green Ghost said.

  “I don’t plan to. I’ll use you as power. I will use you as a giant green battery.” The Moon Man answered. “Why not? After all, nothing can be destroyed, so nothing ought to go to waste.”

  The blue glass tubes began to glow.

  The Great Green Ghost felt himself receding. He felt himself dwindling down into the guts of the Moon Man’s unholy machine.

  The night fell.

  The winds blew lonesome and low from the shadows that haunted between the stars, and the mountain that men called the Devil’s Anvil trembled itself in fear of what might come.

  * The Straight And Curving Song Of The Bullet *

  Leadbetter spent the night wide awake.

  He didn’t need to sleep, any more than he needed to breathe.

  Still, sometimes it was nice to close your eyes and pretend.

  He stroked the cool soothing linearity of his rifle barrel.

  Straight lines were so easy to understand.

  Yet there was nothing straight in nature. Even the long plains curved slowly around the face of the earth.

  He stroked the gun.

  It was funny, the uses that men made of their guns. Some made them a crutch, fuck tools, pry bars. Still others hung their rifles over fireplaces and draped them heavily with tall tales and imaginary kills.

  Leadbetter’s gun was more a part of him.

  And yet even here and there were curves. He felt the roundness of the bore and the rifle cartridge. He even felt the fine long parabola a bullet carved as it chewed through the air.

  There were so many lines and so many curves.

  He remembered where he’d got the gun from.

  The mountain man: Zachaeus.

  In his memory’s eye Leadbetter saw Zachaeus kicking there, hung by his neck and a winding of horsehair rope. Kicking and dancing and shitting himself and looking so God damned funny that Leadbetter just had to turn his back and tell a joke.

  It hadn’t even been particularly funny, the way he remembered it.

  While his back was turned, Zachaeus had pulled out a pocket pistol, one of those little things that gamblers use.

  He put a bullet in Leadbetter’s back.

  From high and above.

  Leadbetter still remembered the feel of his beating heart.

  He remembered the taste of his own blood.

  He walked this memory road all night long, stroking his rifle like he was getting set to fuck with it. He only emerged from the personal labyrinth of private recollection, when the sound of footsteps through the darkness woke him up.

  When he saw Zachaeus and the cowboy he didn’t stop to think.

  He’d been aiming the damn thing all night long.

  He grinned, and made double sure of his aim.

  And then he let the gun come in one thunderous gunpowder burst.

  * Snake Bitten Apples *

  “Are you up yet?”

  Jonah opened his eyes. He wasn’t certain he’d ever been sleeping. Just lying there with closed eyes, like a window blind at rest. The truth was, he wasn’t certain he needed to, yet it had felt good to stop thinking for just a short while.

  “Up as I’ll ever be.”

  “Good, but don’t stop there. Get
up all the way. We got somewhere I want to show you, before we head on out.”

  Jonah yawned out of habit.

  “Where we going to?” he asked.

  “To see the Moon Man, where else? He’s the one got you shot.”

  Jonah smiled like a drawn knife, thinking about the taste of revenge.

  “Yeah. Let’s go see the Moon Man.”

  “And Leadbetter. He’ll be there too.”

  “Who’s he?”

  “He’s the bastard what put you under. Sitting up high with a rifle he ain’t got no right to use. A rifle he stole from me, after he hung me.”

  He touched the double rope burns.

  “He hung me twice, the dirty bastard.”

  “Twice?”

  “He hung me standing up. He slung a rope into the pizon tree and tied me off. Then they set to digging. Just under my feet, until there was nothing between me and the dirt but my shadow.”

  “That’s what killed you?”

  “That’s what give me the first burn, anyway. Then old Leadbetter got feeling good. Taunting me. Telling jokes. He turned his back once, and that was all I needed. I pulled my little belly gun out and popped him square in the back. Don’t usually cotton to back shooters much, but he’d called it down on himself, hanging me the way he did.”

  “So he hung you and you shot him.”

  “I shot him dead. That’s when he hung me the second time around.”

  “I still don’t get that.”

  “After I shot him, he fell on me, and his weight was all that was needed to take me down under. Last thing I remember was the sound of a snap...”

  He remembered a lot more than that.

  A snap, bright and sharp, like a corner being turned.

  He remembered the feeling of his life yanking from out of his throat. Hanging there, dangled and twisting between Heaven and Earth. He saw a great vision of a thousand white buffalo stampeding over a frozen stone waterfall.

  He remembered dreaming a dream of being tied to an anthill by his neck. He remembered the feel of all of those hot sharp bites, digging into him, like a rain of a thousand teeth. All those thorns on the tree he was hanging against. The prickly hot venom, needling him. He dreamed God was talking to him. Telling him what he needed to do.

  Where he needed to go.

  He’d always hated lectures. He leaned back upon the anthill and fired his Nock Volley gun. He shouldn’t have been able to. Leadbetter’s last steerboy had stolen it from him by this time. But in the dream it didn’t matter. The gun was his and he could hold it and fire it.

  He liked the big gun. It was the reason he never had to listen to too many lectures in his life. There was nobody who argued too long or successfully with a man holding a seven-barreled cannon.

  He let it fire, free and clear. It blew holes in the sky, and the sky rained hot blood down upon him, and in his dream he awoke as he had awoken back then, so long ago, hanging on that pizon tree, all the thorns digging into him, pumping him full of that unholy juice.

  He could never die. He had soaked too much of the pizon into his system. He would outlive the rocks. He would outlive the sky.

  He would very likely outlive God.

  How’d you like them snake-bitten apples, Methuselah?

  Zacheus opened his eyes.

  He looked grimly into Jonah’s wondering features.

  “I don’t know he if he even knew it,” Zacheus said. “Being shot dead at the time, and all. I aim to stand straight before him and tell him that last little joke, the funniest of all, how he killed me after he died, and then I aim to put him under once and for all time.”

  Jonah swallowed hard. After eating that crawler’s walking legs he thought he could handle anything, but the story was rougher than any he’d heard.

  Zachaeus smiled.

  “Come on with me then. I’ll show you something stranger yet.”

  * The Vision Walk Of No Ears *

  No Ears lurked in the shadow of the walking dead man, thinking of the white buffalo.

  It was an old legend his people told about a hungry Summer when a woman came to the people’s camp. One man wanted this woman, but when he tried to touch her secret place, he sizzled like burning buffalo fat. She walked four times around the camp, and the grass grew tall and green where she walked. Then she turned into a white buffalo, and ran away. For years his people believed that someday the white buffalo would rise again and the red nations would rise like tall grass and rule the whites.

  Now they were all dead. All of his people. He could hear the ghosts of his people talking down here. They were talking to him from out of the dead stone walls. They were frightened of something. Frightened of something that had happened to the great Green Mountain Spirit.

  That didn’t matter to No Ears. The Great Green spirit had wanted to put him down and under, once and for all.

  No Ears didn’t want that.

  Not yet.

  His people’s ghosts did.

  They called to him. They wanted him to join them in death and the darkness of their long stone slumber.

  He might. Some day he might.

  But not yet.

  He wasn’t ready to go yet.

  There was something else he had to see.

  A debt he had to pay.

  He closed his one ruined eye.

  In the back of what was left of his mind he saw a vision.

  A vision of rolling white thunder.

  Soon, the white buffalo would run.

  * What the Blind Men Saw *

  How deep does a mountain grow?

  Jonah followed Zachaeus through the winding tunnel. They left Two Bump behind in the cavern. The tunnel had grown too low and narrow to accommodate the beast. It was getting snug even for Jonah.

  “Tight fit, isn’t it?” Zachaeus asked.

  “Get used to it,” he went on, without waiting for Jonah to answer. “It’s the way of the West. Or rather the way the east is eating the wWst. Pretty soon there won’t be room enough for a man to turn around and spit.”

  “I don’t follow,” Jonah said.

  “That’s all you can do is to follow the rolling thunder of the white man,” Zacheus said. “Follow it as it rolls across the prairie like a great white stampede.”

  It grew too dark even for a dead man’s eyes.

  All Jonah could do was follow Zachaeus’s voice.

  Maybe that’s why the old man was doing so much damn talking.

  “They’re eating it all, from the east right straight across to the West. Chewing it up and shitting it out. And when they get as far West as they can get, when they run smack dab into the distant coast, well then they’ll swallow what’s left. The whole damned Pacific and whatever is floating out there: whales, islands, people. The whole damned shivaree. It’s the way we’re built. People. Man. All of us. No better than the crawlers. All gullet, no guilt. Just eat, eat, eat.”

  He shook his head.

  “Land of opportunity, they call it. Ha. A land of opportunists is more like it. What do they know about the roots of this country? Where we come from? What we did to build it? What do they know about the roots of a mountain?”

  A part of Jonah wished the old man would shut up. Too damn much talking. A load of claptrap and windy gas. Yet a darker part of him was glad for the cranky creaky voice. There were lights in the darkness. There were eyes glinting and watching from the shadows.

  And Zachaeus kept on talking.

  “These rocks are older than eons. Do you know how fucking old an eon is? Older than God. Older than all the Gods that God ever dreamed of.”

  For just an instant Jonah saw a face staring out of the wall. A strong face, with cheeks and forehead like carven rock. An open puzzled hungry mouth. Eyes like two round question marks floating in the darkness.

  We are the people of the night, the face seemed to say. We are the shadows of history, long forgotten. We are the mysteries that coil like snakes in the darkness. We are everything that you ought
to fear, everything you should do your double damnedest to remember.

  We are ghosts, and stories told around the campfires of the Gods.

  And Zachaeus kept on talking.

  “Let me tell you a story,” the old man said.

  “I thought that’s what you were doing.”

  Zachaeus ignored Jonah’s sarcasm.

  “See, there were these three fellows got their eyes poked out for looking where they shouldn’t. And they were walking along together and they bumped into something that none of them could move.”

  Now the faces were laughing at him. Their laughter like silent tom toms, drumming in a dead man’s pulse beat. The wings of invisible moths, hovering about the silent howling hunger of the moon’s endless wink.

  And Zachaeus kept on talking.

  “What the hell’s in front of us one of them asked. So the three of them felt about the shape of the thing, trying to find out just exactly what it is. You see, being blind and all they couldn’t really see it.”

  Jonah stared at the faces, mocking and friendly. There were people living down here in the dark places.

  Old people, forgotten by time.

  These are the ones the Moon Man’s looking for, Jonah thought. Only he’s not likely to find them. He’d have to dig away the earth itself, and then they’d only hide in the shadows between the stars.

  And Zachaeus kept on talking.

  “So the first one grabs hold and he says it’s a snake.”

  We are hunger, said the first face.

  “The second grabs hold and he says it’s a tree.”

  We are want.

  “Then the third grabs hold and says you are both full of elephant shit, it is a Goddamn rope.”

  We’re the boogey man and the shadow in the bottom of the privy hole. We’re the whispering creak beneath your bed. We're the reason you fear to put your foot one step forward on a long moonless night. We're the long forgotten and we can never truly go away.

  Jonah followed Zachaeus around a sudden winding corner.

  The darkness burned away in a sudden splash of light.

  The faces vanished, if they’d ever been there.