The Shotgun Arcana

by R. S. Belcher

The torchlight jumped and shifted. Making a feeble, faltering circle of light in the dark, skeletal wood. Tucker’s boots crunched and slid on the packed snow and ice every few steps, making him lurch and stagger like an infant learning to walk. The woods and the snow ate the noise of his passing, his panting breath, making him feel claustrophobic and watched. He clutched his rifle tightly, waiting for shrieking, pallid cannibals to spill from the dead woods to rip and bite his flesh. Tucker was not a religious man, but he quietly began to mutter the Lord’s Prayer as he struggled through the all-devouring darkness.

  As he neared the Graves’ buried cabin, he began to imagine knocking on the cabin door, it flying open and dozens of scab-covered, talon-like hands tearing at him and pulling him into the putrid-smelling shadows of the cabin interior. He imagined being forced to participate in alien rituals to ravenous, inhuman gods. He imagined the sensation of teeth sinking into his flesh everywhere, a bloody morsel of impure meat being forced between his lips as obscene chants and prayers drummed into his brain.

  Tucker had no desire to knock on that door and no idea what waited on the other side. If it were daylight, with his fellow rescuers at his back, he knew that the buried cabin held starving men women and children. But here and now, alone on the stage of his fears and imagination, he saw only snapping, stained teeth and madness.

  A fear settled into him like the cold, turning his bones to frozen stone. And as many men do he began to attempt to rationalize a way to avoid his fear. Near the Graves settlement, he had spotted some horse tracks, which he took for Bick’s black stallion’s. Now, searching as quietly as he could near the cabin, he saw that the tracks went past the cabin and continued toward the Donner campsite, five or six miles distant. He decided to avoid the Graves and whatever waited within. Tucker trudged on, his fear spurring him to put more distance between himself and the cabin door.

  He neared the Donner camp after long hours of struggling, of near exhaustion at the efforts to navigate the jagged scar of a trail, to avoid falling asleep in the warm, narcotic slumber of the life-stealing cold.

  Dawn was near, a purple bruise across the throat of the east. Somewhere, crows cried out, laughing at his struggle in the ash-colored predawn. Tucker heard the choked gurgle of the creek mostly frozen but still fighting to escape.

  He saw a fire jumping, dancing in the smaller of the two tent shelters. He saw shadows moving about the fire, and he saw Bick’s horse waiting patiently outside the shelter. He cocked his rifle and made his way down, trying to shake the weariness, the dizzy fear and the numbing cold out of him.

  “I understand, Leanna, this was not your doing,” the voice said as Tucker approached the flaps to the shelter. The fire stood watch outside the roughly constructed tent. It was a fresh fire, newly made and set on a wooden base, like the campfires they had made during their ascent to Truckee Lake. The voice was warm oil, rubbed into leather—Bick.

  “But now we have to make this right, and I have come to help you with that,” Bick said. The voice paused. “Please, Captain Tucker, you must be cold from your trek. Come inside.”

  Tucker stepped around the campfire, dropping his torch into the fire. He pushed the rotting blanket aside, stepping into the shelter. There were dozens of people in the dirt-floored tent; most were too weak from hunger or exhaustion to stand. Near death, their eyes were already seeing into the lands of shade. They looked at Tucker with glassy, bulging orbs, but they were seeing things he could not. Some of them looked at Bick and mouthed words silently. One feebly crossed herself and smiled at him with rotted, stained teeth. Bick, seemingly untouched by the cold, the ice, the stench or the plight of the survivors, stood next to a little girl, maybe ten, perhaps twelve. It was hard to determine through the starvation and the neglect. She was wearing a filthy, torn nightshirt covered with dirt, shit and blood. Her hair was brown, long and matted. Tiny bones and black feathers were tied in her hair like ribbons. Her brown eyes were wide and sad.

  “Leanna, this nice man is Captain Tucker. He’s in charge of the rescue party I was telling you about. Captain Tucker, this is Leanna Donner.”

  “Bick,” Tucker said, leveling his rifle at the man in black, “what are you up to out here?”

  “Put the gun away, Tucker,” Bick said. “I’m here to help you and them.” Something in the timbre of his voice filled Tucker with an overwhelming desire to kneel, to bow his head to this man. The jumping light from the lantern in the tent cast Bick’s shadow larger, almost inhuman, like some great bird, on the rotting canvas. Tucker lowered the rifle.

  “Now, Leanna, please tell Mr. Tucker what you told me about how this all started.”

  Leanna looked at the ground, shyly, as if she had been caught in a naughty act. “It sang so pretty to me at first,” she said softly, with a bit of a lisp. “When we stopped at the end of the desert for water, I heard it singing to me, and I walked away from the others to go find where it was coming from. Momma would be very mad at me, but it sounded so pretty and so alone.”

  Tucker looked from the girl to Bick in bewilderment. “Bick, what is she talking about?”

  “Go on, Leanna,” Bick said, placing a hand on the child’s head.

  “I found it in a cave,” she said. “It asked if it could come to our new home with us and I said yes. It hated the cave and it couldn’t leave on its own. The songs of old men and angels kept it there. I hid it in my blankets. It was quiet except at night. It talked to me when I slept and sometimes it was in my dreams.”

  Tucker knelt so that he was looking into the girl’s eyes. She was crying a little bit, but her voice remained almost a monotone.

  “Did this man put all this fool nonsense into your head, darlin’?” Tucker asked.

  “Let her finish, Tucker,” Bick said. “This is important. Go on, Leanna.”

  “Everyone was really mad at each other a lot, and after I found it and brought it with us, things got worse,” she said. “Mr. Reed and Mr. Snyder, they fought. Mr. Reed killed Mr. Snyder, but folks said Mr. Snyder tried to kill Mr. Reed first. They made Mr. Reed go away on his own. Everyone kept getting angrier and breaking up into little gangs and groups. And it was whispering to them, in their dreams and behind their eyeballs. Then we were here, and Pa … Pa said we had to stay here until after the snow, and it got worse. It all got worse. We didn’t have much food and we ate shoes and rugs after the horses were all gone. But it told me what we needed to do to make everything better. It talked through me sometimes to everyone, and sometimes it told me the words to say.”

  Tucker looked at this small child who spoke so well … too well. It was hard to breathe. He felt like he was a few steps away from dizzy madness in his mind and a tight terror in his chest he would be helpless before, but what choice did he have in any of this? The little girl didn’t appear insane. She didn’t appear to be lying either. The eerie words of Mrs. Murphy came back to him. Murphy had said this sweet, disheveled child was the high priestess of a god.

  “Leanna, honey,” Tucker said. “You keep saying ‘it.’ What is it?”

  “I’ll show you,” she said with a joyless smile. “Come here. You, too, Mr. Bick, come.”

  She shuffled back into the shadows of the tent. The other occupants writhed on the floor, in the dirt, like maggots in a hot skillet. They moved to make a path for their priestess and the two pilgrims. Many of them began to whisper a chant through dried, aching throats. Bick and Tucker followed the little girl. Tucker clutched his rifle and tried to bury his fears from earlier in the night, but he was becoming drunk with terror. The horrible, ridiculous fantasies he had summoned alone in the woods were coming to life now. This was no dream, no nightmare. This was the waking world and nothing seemed sure anymore.

  “Meat,” the broken, starving faithful hissed, “meat, meat, meat…”

  At the back of the tent was a large black iron cook pot. The rancid stench was much stronger in the shelter here. Tucker gagged.

  “Meat, meat, meat,” the starving chanted.
>
  “Sweet Lord, save our souls,” he muttered, realizing he was praying like a child, terrified and seeking any protection he could find. He and Bick peered over the lip of the cauldron.

  Inside were the scabbed-on remains of old meals baked to the iron walls. There was a viscous liquid with islands of white grease and blue-green mold near the bottom of the pot. Jutting out of the rancid broth were human long bones—arms, legs—boiled clean and brittle from being cooked over and over again. Smaller finger and knuckle bones, dozens of them, clustered like colonies of pale grubs in the remains of the liquid. More bones crisscrossed near the base of the pot, and resting in the nest of bones was a human skull.

  “Meat, meat, meat,” the chanting grew louder, more insistent.

  The skull was yellow from age, obviously not the same as the other bleached and brittle bones in the pot. A thin spider web of hairline cracks radiated outward from the left brow, just above the dark, hollow orbits where eyes had once been. From the crown, and slightly back, was a several-inch-long fissure in the bone. It looked like a jack-o’-lantern’s smile. The mandible and the maxima were intact, but the sockets for the teeth were all cracked and empty.

  “No,” Bick said. “No, damn it! This is all wrong.”

  “Yeah, no kidding,” Tucker said. “These folks are eating each other, and it looks like they are worshiping a skull, a dammed skull!”

  “Damned,” Bick said. “Truer words were never spoken.”

  “Meat, meat, meat!” the weak and the dying snarled, thrashing on the dirt floor like snakes.

  “Stop!” Bick said softly, but his voice held thunder like a cannon. Everyone in the shelter heard it. A blast of frigid wind howled through the tent. The candles were snuffed out, and the lanterns guttered. The chanting stopped.

  Bick knelt by the girl. “Leanna, is this the way it was when you found it in the cave?” The little girl looked down again; she shuffled a little under the dark man’s gaze. “I promise you are in no trouble, Leanna, but I must know.”

  “Bick, leave her be,” Tucker said.

  “Mr. Tucker,” Bick said, “I like you, I see you have a kind soul. Please don’t interrupt me again.” Bick gently lifted Leanna’s chin until she was looking at him again. “Leanna?”

  “The teeth,” Leanna muttered. “It told me to pull all the teeth out.”

  “What did you do with them, Leanna?” Bick asked.

  “I … It … told me to scatter them outside, at dawn. The birds came and took them.”

  “Birds?” Tucker said. Leanna nodded.

  “Crows,” she said. “I’ve never seen so many crows. They made the sky dark again. They swooped on down and took them all, like bread crumbs. Then they flew off in every direction.”

  “When, Leanna?” Bick asked, standing.

  “Yesterday morning,” she said. “It told me you were coming.”

  Tucker looked at the dark rider. Bick ignored the captain’s gaze. He cupped the little girl’s face as she looked up at him. She was crying.

  “I’m sorry,” she said. “I did bad. I’m sorry.”

  “No, Leanna,” Bick said, his voice softened. “You just did what you were told. It’s all right. I want you to help Captain Tucker in any way you can. He is going to take you and your family home. You understand?”

  “Yes, sir,” she said.

  Bick removed his duster and carefully wrapped it around the skull in the pot. He took the bundle and placed it under his arm. Tucker noticed for the first time since he met Malachi Bick that the man’s breath didn’t stream out of his mouth and nose in a cloud of condensation like everyone else’s in the soul-numbing cold.

  “Leanna, you are going to forget about this,” Bick said. “All of this, in time. You all will. Life is a dream you wake from. Don’t let this nightmare ruin the rest of your dream. Good-bye, Leanna. You were very brave. Thank you, bless you.”

  Bick touched the girl gently on the head, nodded to Tucker, and made his way out of the shelter with the skull under his arm.

  Tucker followed him out into the gray light of morning. “One dammed minute, Bick! What is all this, some of the Devil’s work? Are you in league with ol’ Scratch?”

  Bick had placed the skull in one of his saddlebags and was climbing onto his horse, a beautiful Arabian the color of coal. His name was Pecado.

  “I only wish this was the Devil’s work,” Bick said. “It would make this much easier. This is far worse. And, no, like I told you, I’m here to help you. This isn’t my responsibility. I’m cleaning up someone else’s mess.”

  “Can you tell me what the hell is going on here?” Tucker said.

  Bick sighed, and then looked down at Reason Tucker. “You really want to know, don’t you? Very well. These people passed through my home on their way west. The little girl took the skull into her possession, unknown to me, or anyone else. The skull exuded certain … influence over these people, and this is the result—all this madness, murder, death, all this terrible hunger and rage.”

  “These were decent, normal, God-fearing people,” Tucker said. “What the hell did that skull do to them?”

  “Nothing that wasn’t already there,” Bick said. “I’m taking it back home and securing it. Unfortunately, now pieces of it have literally been scattered to the four winds. It wants to be loose in the world, it always has, and it seems to have found a way for fragments of it to be so.”

  “How did you know all this?” Tucker asked. “Why are you taking it? Are you some kind of expert in all this witchery? You wander around collecting cursed things?”

  “Actually, I’m more of a homebody,” Bick said. “Like I said, I’m cleaning up some other jackass’s mess. But I do seem to collect interesting … trinkets. Good luck, Captain Tucker. Safe journey to you and yours. I doubt we will meet again. I’d prefer you speak as little about all this as possible.”

  Tucker scratched his head. “I wouldn’t even know what to say. Careful heading down, and headed home, Mr. Bick. I can’t imagine a place with things like that skull, a body could ever truly call home.”

  “It’s as close to home as folks like me ever get,” Bick said as Pecado began to trot toward the frozen creek. The dark rider and his obscene prize rode away into the blinding, bitter white of the Sierra dawn. Overhead, the dark shapes of crows mocked him as he began his long decent.

  Judgment

  Twenty-three years later …

  November 18, 1870

  Nevada

  The moon was a bullet hole in the sable night, bleeding ghost light across the wasteland of the 40-Mile Desert. The 40-Mile was part of the price you paid for the West. That price was often paid in blood and tears, and yet still they came—headed west, headed just a little ways farther out, away from safety and rules and meaningless lives and anonymous deaths.

  Some were lured by promises of gold and silver, others came for the vision of a new world, a new life in a land big enough for everyone to have dreams. Some came hacked and hewn, inside or out, from the war, from the madness and the carnage, because they had nowhere else to go.

  They all headed west, where luck and fortune still flowed like milk and honey and where your fate wasn’t set in stone. You could be a hero, a villain, a self-made man, or you could vanish without a trace, erasing the person you once were.

  But first there was the crossing: there was the 40-Mile and other places just like it. Many met the crucible of the desert and failed. The floor of the wastes was littered with the bleached bones and artifacts of lives lost in the attempt.

  A soul would need to be crazier than a snake in the sun to leave behind civilization and kin, home and hearth, to travel for months in a wagon or on horseback to a land still more myth than reality, full of gunslingers and savages, outlaws and madmen, sickness, wild animals and spirit-crushing loneliness.

  And still they came. Hope is a powerful drug. The moonlight washed onto the shore of the desolate, murderous land and found at the very edge of the 40-Mile, a town. Hudd
led in the cradle between two small mountains, the town waited. She waited for those strong enough to endure the initiation of the 40-Mile, she waited for those seeking solace or redemption or anonymity: the blessed and damned.

  Golgotha waited with open arms, embracing the night. On the rooftops of Golgotha, two shadows pursued a third across the roof of the Dove’s Roost, a house of ill repute tucked away from the sanctity of Main Street behind Golgotha’s largest saloon, the Paradise Falls. One of the pursuers began to close the gap and the other shouted out in frustration and redoubled his efforts.

  “Mutt! Hey, Mutt!” Jim Negrey shouted, panting as he sprinted as fast as he could across the uneven and partly unstable roof of the cathouse. “Dang it, Mutt, I ain’t got no four-legged kin in my blood! Wait for me!”

  Jim was sixteen. His sand-colored hair whipped in the desert night’s cold wind. His eyes were bright but also old. He had his father’s six-gun holstered on his belt and a silver deputy’s star pinned to his vest. A small leather pouch, tied by a leather cord around his neck, bumped and jumped against his chest. The pouch held his dead father’s jade eye. Jim’s boots thudded like hammers as he gave all he could to catch up with his partner. Jim’s partner was a blur. Thin as a whip and twice as fast, his hair was longer than Jim’s, falling to his shoulders, oily and black. His battered leather Stetson had fallen off his head and jumped against his back, held on by a stampede cord. The man was an Indian, with a thin, pointy nose that showed signs of having been broken a time or two. The thick, black eyebrows above his crooked nose grew together and his narrow face was marred with scars and pockmarks. His teeth were yellow and crooked but his incisors were straight and prominent. He carried a pistol strapped to one thigh and a huge knife strapped to the other and, like Jim, he wore the silver star of a deputy. His people denied him a name. He called himself Mutt.

  “C’mon, lazy britches,” Mutt shouted back over his shoulder, grinning. “I’m only using two legs, and besides I’m tired of chasing this damn thing all over town. I’m of a mind to catch it tonight!”