And Jonah saw what was buried there.
Or rather half buried, half standing, like some ancient forgotten behemoth of old.
“And there were giants in the earth,” Zachaeus finished.
If Jonah could still breathe he would have let what was left of his breath out in one long slow disbelieving whistle.
“Well, I have seen the elephant,” Jonah said.
And he had.
* The Moon Man and The Great Green Ghost *
The Moon Man’s blue lights were burning brighter than a Texas whorehouse on Saturday night.
The colors whirled like a rainbow on peyote and the mountain bumped and shivered like a nine hundred year old hootchy-kootch dancer, stumbling on her last shaky leg.
“You said you’d show me power,” The Moon Man said. “And you’ve kept your word.”
He adjusted the controls. He fed a little more into the meat grinder circuits and drew that extra power deep into himself and he smiled, because it was so very good.
“Oh this is more like it. This is so much more like it.”
He inhaled and could taste the crackle of lightning sparking within his lungs. He could feel the power roaring through every fiber in his being.
This was what he wanted.
To fill himself with stolen power.
And dig for what was hidden beneath the dirt.
Once he had found it he would return to the century that had banished him. He would rain hell down upon them and he would teach them how to respect a scientist such as himself.
The Great Green Ghost sat behind the bars of his bright glowing cage, calmly watching what was left of his life flow away like a long forgotten river running slowly out to sea, and wondering if there was anything he could hope to do about it.
* Death’s Noon O’Clock Shadow *
There in the rock was something Jonah had never seen.
He saw a huge mountain of a beast, all dark with age and as hard as hammered stone. He had seen an elephant once before, and this looked something like an elephant that needed a haircut.
It was huge and heavy, the God of all elephants.
What was it?
There was bone and meat froze black on the bone. Long tusk horns, long as lances and curved like a pair of cavalry sabres. Legs as thick as tree trunks - so wide around that he couldn’t put his arms about them, even if he’d wanted to. The mountain shook and the shadows danced and just for a moment Jonah thought the damned elephant God was alive.
He thought of that elephant that he’d seen in that traveling circus. With a fellow who tumbled knives in the air, a painted clown, an acrobat, and a woman with a beard as long as a 900-year-old Billy goat.
That had been big, but this was bigger.
Way bigger.
And shaggier.
A man could get lost in the fur about its neck.
“There were giants in the earth.” Zachaeus howled again.
Still are, Jonah thought. Giants and monsters and Gods.
He remembered the faces in the tunnel walls and he shivered.
“There were thunder lizards before this one, all legs and teeth and scale,” Zachaeus went on. “And long before them thunder lizard critters there even bigger ones. Old ones, ones with names that ought not to be spoken.”
There were buffalo skeletons posed about the mammoth beast. Ticker tacked together with sinew and makeshift adobe. Size wise they looked like newborn pups playing beneath a Brahma bull.
“What are those for?” Jonah asked.
“Call them a homage. Idol worship from idle hands. Two bit time killers,” Zachaeus smiled. “You didn’t know I was an artist, did you?”
There were several standard buffalo, but some of them were mounted in decidedly unbuffalo-like poses. Reared on their hind legs, like bucking stallions. Kneeling down, like overweight hairy altar boys. One of them was mounted on what looked to a mixture of horse legs and bear paws.
“I had to improvise with some of them. I couldn’t find all the proper parts. Still, a body learns to make do when he got to.”
Jonah stared.
Make do.
That was about the kindest phrase he could think of.
“How do you like it? My own private freak show. It’s what God would do, isn’t it?” Zachaeus went on. “What he did? You ever take a look at a two-headed snake? Or how about Two Bump? Pretty funny, isn’t he? What about a turkey? Head like a pickled pizzle stick.”
He laughed aloud.
“What about us? Holes in both ends, tunnels on legs, in and out. Food goes in, food goes out. Air goes in, air goes out. Fuck a woman, and a baby comes out. The holes are what rules us. It’s all so damned pointless. Nothing but holes. One big circle, round and round. God’s joke. God’s great big joke. Pretty Goddamn funny, hey?”
He was off and running again.
“We’re just play things, is all. God’s play things. He’ll throw us down and he’ll break us and he’ll put us back together whatever way enters his cavernous haunted imagination.”
Jonah just stood there and stared in wonder and a little fear.
And as he stood there in the darkness, Jonah heard the grunts of large animals in the distance. He smelled dankness and heavy foliage. The rot of a century’s worth of trampled vegetation.
Heat and moisture, clamming up his senses.
A voice inside his head whispered--“Run.”
Which was about the most sensible word he’d heard all year.
He felt the muscles in his legs squeezing like he was getting set to jump across a canyon.
Fight.
His fists clenched and unclenched. His nostrils flared like he was trying to catch a scent on the breeze.
He growled.
He didn’t know what to do.
“Come on,” Zachaeus said. “We best get to it.”
Jonah followed back through the winding tunnels, in stony silence.
He didn’t see the faces. Didn’t see much of anything, until the two of them came around the final corner, and he saw the man standing there.
Leadbetter.
Lying there in the dirt, all long and lean as death’s noon o’clock shadow. Aiming one of the biggest and longest long rifles that Jonah had ever seen. The rifle looked to have so wide a bore you could drive a yoke of oxen straight up the middle without muddying up the sides.
And it was pointed straight at Zacheaus and Jonah.
The rifle barrel looked like a tunnel straight into hell.
Jonah had just enough of a chance to see Leadbetter’s wide corpse-grin spreading beneath the shadow of his flat black hat, and then all at once the barrel blossomed hot, blinding and white.
Then the rifle spoke like thunder and Zachaeus dropped to the ground, quicker than the trapdoor of a fresh sprung gallows, just as the bullet hit home.
* The Eyes Of A Mountain, The Eyes Of A God *
The Moon Man watched it all.
He could see it all as clear as death.
He was watching through the Great Green Ghost’s eyes. He was watching through the mountain’s eyes. Like a God, he thought.
This is how God looks down on all of us.
There was so much that man couldn’t see. So much that they didn’t want to see.
The stars were hung with cool glittering cobwebs, dark things hanging down, the sky was a wide gaping razorblade cutting a border between what was real and what could never be understood. The mountains stood like huge trolls, their roots digging deep into the dirt, playing toe games with each other deep in the planet’s core.
The earth was a bubble of light. Men danced upon its surface like pond skimmers, their lives crackling to the surface in a long continuous chain of soft ephemeral immortality. They danced, imagining their food chain superiority, not dreaming of things that were larger than themselves.
And there they were.
The three of them.
Zachaeus, the mountain man.
The hanged man.
A
life spent trying to live out of touch with everyone. A hermit in the making, desperate for conversation.
And there was Leadbetter, leaning against the barrel of his rifle like it was his only friend – a friend who spoke in a deep thundering tongue of gunpowder and lead.
Call him Death, then.
And of course, there was the cowboy. Jonah Walker. The fool, frozen eternally in midleap.
The Moon Man looked down through his God given God-goggles at the three of them.
At the three of them and beyond.
He saw who Leadbetter was looking at. The dead cowboy and the mountain man. The one called Zachaeus.
He didn’t care about either of them.
He had what he wanted now - the eyes of a God and the power of a mountain.
He looked down at Leadbetter. He watched him send that triumphant blast of powder and shot, straight at Zachaeus.
The cowboy, grabbing for his empty pistol.
Leadbetter, calmly shifting his aim.
Now you’re going to die, thought the Moon Man. Now you’ve finally run out of luck.
He looked past Leadbetter.
Past Zachaeus, and past the cowboy.
Down into the roots of the mountain.
Down to where the big horn stood.
He saw it, in the same way Jonah saw it before him.
Yes, he thought. I don’t need this. Not anymore.
His original plan had been to raise the mammoth and use it to lead his army of crawlers across the prairie. He would rule the country from East to West. From there he would harness the industrial power of this brave new world to reach back to the twenty-third century.
But for this he would need a body to house his spirit when his ancient decaying irradiated husk finally let go.
He would need the long horn - the mammoth that had slept so long beneath the mountain. The Moon Man had dreamed of inhabiting the perfect combination of brain and brute strength. His twenty-third century intelligence coupled with the power of the wooly mammoth.
But now that the Moon Man had stolen the Great Green Ghost’s power he no longer needed such a meat puppet.
No. Not needed it.
But he wanted it.
He felt the atrophied muscles in his legs squeezing and flexing like a baby reaching for a titty. He made a soft wet sound, way back in his throat, like a growl.
Somewhere in the back of his soul he felt Zachaeus going down. Somewhere further back he felt Leadbetter, making his last stand, outnumbered four to one.
He looked at what was buried in the rock, standing there like a hirsute elephant.
I want that, he thought.
And thinking that thought, the Moon Man leaped.
Leapt and landed, right where he wanted to.
Sitting square behind what was left of the soul and spirit of the big wooly mammoth.
It was cozy in here.
Almost comfortable.
He breathed in the funk of aeons and rot. Smelled the deaths of the millions of souls that had died on to the afterworld after this ancient mammal had laid down into the dirt.
He reached out his fingers.
Thought about fingernails and thought about stretch and then with a will and a craftsmanship that only a time-travelling mad scientist arch-sorcerer such as himself could muster – he crafted a set of ectoplasmic reins.
Long blue shimmering lashes of control.
He hooked them hard into the spirit meat of the mammoth.
One more breath.
In, out, in, out.
Then he said one word.
Said “Giddyup”.
Go.
* You Never See The Little Guys Coming *
Leadbetter knew it was a good shot.
You can feel it, if you’re shooting right.
He caught the old man right square in the left leg. Struck bone, judging by the way he went down.
The cowboy reached for his pistol.
It was empty. Leadbetter knew it. He wasn’t quite sure how he knew it, but he did.
The cowboy pointed it and fired nothing.
“You’re all out of bang, boy,” Leadbetter said, swinging his aim around to allow for the cowboy, but somebody beat him to the charge.
From out of the darkness came Two Bump, braying like he was trying to call a sea serpent from the depths, charging forward like a herd of ugly cavalry. He’d seen his master go down, and like some beast from an ancient battlefield he came charging ahead, determined to have his revenge.
Leadbetter shifted aim again. He caught the big ugly bastard square in the gullet and blew half its hairy throat out. The humpy brute fell like a puppet with its strings cut off, landing squarely across the fallen form of Zachaeus. Leadbetter re-cocked, just in time to catch the drop on the cowboy, who’d found a knife somewhere on his person and was coming up fast for him.
“Watch it, puppy,” Leadbetter warned. “I’ll blow your prick off and nail it to your nose.”
He had time to grin.
Then another tooth fell out of his mouth. He choked on it. He couldn’t help himself. And then, as he strained for his breath, still trying to squeeze the Springfield’s trigger, something caught hold of Leadbetter’s hand, and Leadbetter-toughest undead hunter and gunslinger in the deadlands--screamed like a little girl.
And meant it.
* A Nameless Gunslinger’s Last Cheap Cigar *
Jonah stared as Leadbetter took aim.
He was running at him with his knife out. The Goddamn pistol was still empty. What had he thought? That the fucking thing was going to grow bullets? He ran as fast as he could, but it felt like he was running uphill, through a thick river of chewing tobacco, molasses and melting tar.
He heard Leadbetter saying something about pricks and puppy noses.
He watched the man cock his piece and lay a bead square against Jonah’s brain bucket.
“Not again,” he moaned.
And then all at once things changed.
A severed head bounced out of the shadows like a tiny bony comet. It caught hold of Leadbetter, teeth clenching shut like a crazy bear trap, and tore his trigger finger clean off at the root.
Leadbetter squawled like a she-panther in heat.
The head hit the dirt rolling.
It came to rest in a heap of tumbled rocks.
Jonah swore the damn thing was grinning.
What was left of Leadbetter’s trigger finger jutted out from the mangle of the head’s lower jaw like the stump of a last cheap cigar.
The severed head chewed and grinned, clearly enjoying himself.
Leadbetter swore.
And then the mountain shook and rumbled and roared and a half a dozen varieties of hell broke loose.
* The Biggest Goddamn Buffalo *
Leadbetter stood there, staring at what was left of his hand.
“Jesus,” he swore.
Only it wasn’t Jesus. It wasn’t even close. It was the head of that fucked up crawler that he had blasted back when he’d first shot the cowboy. Grinning at him with one more tooth than Leadbetter could ever hope to own.
How did it get to be here, he wondered.
Who could have brought it down here?
The Moon Man?
Fate?
Then he heard something rumbling deep down below the ground.
The mountain shook so hard even a man as single-minded as Leadbetter couldn’t help but notice.
He heard a sound like pissed off thunder, come kettle drumming up from the depths of the tunnels.
Then out of the darkness it came.
The big horn, crashing through the ruins of the tunnel.
Nearly twelve feet tall and over eight tons of time-travelling-mad-scientist-back-from-the-dead-wooly-mammoth meat, moving hard.
Right towards him.
Damn, Leadbetter thought.
That’s the biggest Goddamn buffalo he’d ever seen.
* Jonah Seizes The Elephant *
Jonah stood there, wishin
g for a single bullet. Or maybe even an entire wagonload of bullets. Or maybe a whole cocked up steamboat full of bullets and a smokestack sized cannon to fire them out of.
And that still wouldn’t have been enough.
The big horn kept coming.
All Jonah had was a knife.
He wanted to run, but there was Zachaeus, crippled from where Leadbetter had shot him.
He just couldn’t leave him lying there like that.
What the fuck. He’d been dead once before. How badly could it hurt the second time around?
“Come on, you shaggy-headed, hose-nosed son of the apocalyptic horse turds. Come on and get me, I’m an Arkansas bellyache...”
He was going to say more, but by then the big horn was all over him.
Jonah stabbed at its trunk with his knife, figuring to cut the big bastard’s nose off. Only what he hadn’t reckoned on, was the forty thousand muscles that Goddamn nose was made out of.
The density of that trunk made a bull rattlesnake body look like a sissy’s lariat.
That and the Moon Man’s souped-up blue lightning magic.
A curl of blue snot snaked out from the wound in the big horn’s nose. The snot-snake grabbed Jonah’s knife just as easily as Jonah might have yanked a bean shooter from a four-year-old.
The snot-snake flipped the knife from his hand, end over end and into the dark.
The big horn reared up on its hind legs.
This is it, thought Jonah, as the shadow swallowed him whole.
He wondered briefly about the odds of Zachaeus successfully raising up a Jonah-sized flapjack from the dead.
* The History of Thorns *
Suddenly, things began to happen fast.
Zachaeus knew that he had to do something about it, just as fast.
He knew what he wanted to do, but for what he wanted he would need the pizon tree.
Which wasn’t anywhere handy.
He could hear that old tree calling to him.
He could even feel the pizon tree’s roots, just an hour’s walk above his head, assuming a back-from-the-dead mountain man could learn how to walk straight up through dirt.
Steve Vernon Special Edition Gift Pack, Vol 1 Page 8