Merkabah Rider: Tales of a High Planes Drifter

by Edward M. Erdelac

  Then Justus Saunders of the Lazy S Ranch stormed into town one night with a gang of his hands and howled for the blood of whatever thief had pilfered six calves from his spread. Theft of cattle was a step up in severity, and they had necessarily roused the marshal, Billy Shivers, to ride out into the night and run down the culprits. But a driving rain had kicked up before the posse could organize, and turned the country to mud. They’d never cut any sign.

  Then the Mexes started missin’ ‘em,” Dan explained gravely.

  “Cattle?” asked The Rider.

  “No, not cattle.”

  First, a man named Trujillo had barged into the saloon weeping, clutching a scrap of homespun swaddling and saying how his infant son had been snatched from his cradle. No trace had been left, and no arrest made. Then the Garza family lost one of its seven children, a girl of six years.

  The old whispers had started with that, and heads had begun turning towards Little Jerusalem.

  Two days ago, the whispers had turned to howls for blood when somewhere between the schoolhouse and her home, Reverend Shallbetter’s golden haired girl of thirteen turned up missing.

  “Shivers hired a tracker,” Dan said. “That Injin led the posse right to Little Jerusalem.”

  “No surprise there,” Burly said, eyeing the Jew with contempt. “Everybody knows the Heebs drink the blood of Christian babies in their mass.”

  As he spoke, the curly headed bartender saw his own face reflected in the blue glass of the Jew’s spectacles, and remembered how fast that pistol had been brought to bear.

  “Well,” he amended, “some of ‘em do, anyhow.”

  Dan sighed.

  “If you come to see somebody there, you’re too late. Marshal Shivers has got Jewtown ringed in, and the reverend is whipping a posse up for slaughter. They hollered for them to let the girl come out, if she’s alive, but the Jews played it dumb. Cardin and his fool sheep herders. The call him the Mayor of Jewtown. Don’t know why they don’t just give the guilty party up. If they don’t, the whole lot of ‘em will get burned out by dawn.”

  The Rider considered all this.

  “I suppose I will need that room after all.”

  * * * *

  The Rider listened to the owner admonish the bartender regarding the lost liquor as he ascended the stair. The first door on the right in the dim lit hall led to his recently vacated room, but it was to the door across the hall, number seven, which he turned to first.

  There was a glow beneath the door that spilled out across the floor of the hall. It was too bright, too white for the yellow of the oil lamp. It was a light he knew well.

  He didn’t bother to knock.

  Any other man would have seen the albino woman in rich petticoats seated by the window and called her beautiful, although she was not quite possessed of the hearty contours favored in the art and pornography of the day. She was slender of limb and delicate. A poet might have called her swan-like, with her long neck, sparse, unpainted features and prim posture. She was indeed like a settled swan in that regard. The poet would have called her hair ivory. It was shock white, not bleached as in sickness, but pure as a snowcap. Her eyes were startlingly light too, and not the pink of the true albino; something else. Almost...silver. Unearthly. The whiteness of her seemed to spill across the walls and the ceiling. She emanated light from the pores of her skin. It was the light that had led The Rider to her.

  She. The Rider thought of it as she, but the being before him could no more be pinned down by that inadequate pronoun than the first beam of the morning sunlight is encompassed by ‘it.’

  Still, she (as it were) was a breathtaking sight to any man, even without seeing her as she truly was—as The Rider saw her, through the filter of the Solomonic seals mystically embossed on the blued lenses of his spectacles.

  She was forty thousand times the glory of any mortal woman. With the aid of the magic lenses, The Rider could see behind the flare of white, as through a porthole into the heavenly spectrum, and peer at the myriad of dazzling colors that made up her dress and otherwise invisible wings. Colors as living and diverse as the wild plumage of some rarely glimpsed tropic bird. Colors for which mortal man had no name.

  “Hello, Rider,” she greeted him, in a voice like the trilling of a silver flute. The door swung shut behind him of its own accord.

  “Hello.” He nodded. “It’s been a long time.” Despite their acquaintance, he did not know her name, nor he suspected, did she know his. He felt the majesty of her office. It had grown, even in the mortal years that had passed since their last encounter—a moment’s time to one of her kind.

  “Yes,” she said. “Since your last excursion through the one hundred twenty-one gates. How long ago was that? I sometimes forget the difference in time.”

  “No you don’t,” The Rider said, settling onto the edge of the bed across from her. “You’re a malakh. You don’t forget anything. This must be serious if He sent you.”

  “Like Sodom and Gomorrah, on a lesser scale,” she said, not without pity. “An old friend of yours abides in this town now.”

  “I don’t have any old friends.”

  “I was being sardonic.”

  “What old friend?”

  Her face seemed to wrinkle before she spoke, like the face of one about to do a necessary pain.

  “The old bull.”

  The Rider shook his head. When would they learn?

  “Molech,” he muttered.

  “Did you know?” she asked. She turned to regard him. “Is that why you’re here?”

  “I’m here because I need a favor.”

  She stiffened. “I cannot grant any clemency, Rider. It has already been decided.”

  “I only ask what Abraham asked.”

  “Fifty righteous people?” One pale eyebrow arched. “There aren’t fifty living in the whole settlement. And those there are…you know what they have done, Rider. Their seed has passed through the fire. They have even begun stealing the children of the innocent.”

  “Not fifty,” said The Rider. “Like you say, we’re working on a lesser scale. Only…let three be spared.”

  “I thought you said you didn’t have any old friends.”

  The Rider opened his hands.

  “Three. Is it so much to ask?”

  She tilted her head. Her mercurial eyes darted skyward, and in an instant were regarding him again.

  “You have until dawn.”

  The Rider stood and bowed his chin in thanks. It was all he could hope for.

  He turned and left the room.

  Stepping into his own room after squinting from the angel’s light was like being dropped into a deep sack. His eyes adjusted quickly enough to spot the pale movement behind the door, and for the second time that night the pistol jumped into his hand but did not fire.

  A lean limbed Chinese girl crouched behind the door, her dark eyes shining in the rising moonlight from the window. Her undergarments were torn, and even with both fists on the pair of sharp scissors she brandished, she could not stop trembling.

  He removed his spectacles. They only hampered him now in this dimness. In the pale light from the door that led to the balcony, he could see the burns on her skin, the swelling in the corner of her lips, the bruises on her wrists and legs.

  He stepped back, giving her a wide berth.

  “They will not be coming back tonight,” he said.

  She stared. He wasn’t sure she could speak or understand English. He repeated himself, in as gentle a tone as he could muster. Then he slowly gestured to the door with an open hand.

  “Please leave.”

  Fung Jiang-Li rose unsteadily, pushing her back against the wall and feeling the blood run into her cramped legs. She did not answer the soft eyed man in the black coat. She could hardly comprehend. Kindness had become a foreign language to her. For a year and a half now, she had not known gentle words or guileless intent from any man.

  Four years ago when she was a girl of twe
lve, the Apache had descended on the town and she had hid in the mines with the other children. When they returned, it had been to a charnel house. She had starved in the alleys for a time, remembering her late father’s admonitions to have no dealings with the Chinese men who loitered about the Tong Shan Eatery. But there was no charity from the Americans, and she had seen no other course, though she knew she would wind up a pillow girl.

  Dan Spector had seemed a deliverer when he had called her to him one day and given her a fresh meal. He had been handsome and affluent, kind at first. But where had that led? Here she was four years later, being used in ways she had never conceived even in her most private moments by men, who but for a few clenched dollars, were little more than vagrants.

  She had intended to cross the scar of Cut Tom with the scissors she’d gotten from the dresser drawer—to skewer his eye maybe, on the points. She knew he would kill her for it. Perhaps he and his friend would do even worse to her before she died, but this afternoon had been too much.

  Now, when she was at her lowest, here was this strange looking man turning her from the room with respect. Where were Cut Tom and the other gwai lo? He spoke as if he were the reason they would not be back tonight. She didn’t know what to make of him.

  He held his gesture, smiling thinly behind his thick beard, his brown eyes sharing the expression.

  After a moment, she straightened from the wall, staring at him the whole time, and left the room.

  To Jiang-Li’s continued astonishment, he closed the door behind her.

  * * * *

  The Rider had fasted and prayed for three days in the mountains in preparation for this.

  He drew his inscribed cold iron Bowie knife and held it to the cardinal directions, muttering as he did so.

  “At my right, Michael. At my left, Gabriel. Before me, Uriel. Behind me, Raphael....”

  He rolled up the rug, and with the knife, described a Solomonic circle in the center of the floor. He placed the requisite tallow candles at each of the four six pointed stars before etching the characters of the Ineffable Name, and began the long incantation.

  This was an old ritual; old for his people, and old for him as well. It was old long before Solomon’s seal and the summoner’s triangle had been transcribed into the pages of the Lemegeton. It had been taught to him by a rebbe of the Sons of the Essenes, who had been taught by his father, and so on, back to the days before the Second Temple fell. Back when the Ark rested within the Kodesh Hakodashim of the Tabernacle and the Almond Rod of Aaron, with its core of brilliant sapphire, was still the scepter of the Hebrew Kings.

  In those days, the Merkabah Riders had been scholarly mystics inspired by the vision of Ezekial and the Chariot of God. Entering into ecstatic trances, they left their bodies to explore the upper reaches of the celestial Empyrean, transcribing accounts of their journeys into sacred homilies. The most dedicated eventually came to stand in the innermost of the seven hekhalots of Araboth, the highest heaven, before the Divine Image of the Most High.

  But The Rider had never made it that far.

  He worked against the procession of the hour. There was much to be done, many formulas to be enacted before the battle could be joined. The sword of the Lord was about to fall on Little Jerusalem, and His will be done, maybe it was not unwarranted. But before it cut, The Rider had to know. He had to know if Joseph Klein and his family were deserving of their punishment.

  The Rider had lied to the angel. He did have a few old friends left, Joseph Klein was one.

  The angel knew this of course. She had seen through his offhanded talk. It was an unavoidable habit he had picked up in his travels through this country of liars, killers, and blasphemers. One must be prepared to speak lightly of death—to give at least the appearance of nonchalance on the subject if one was to be permitted to keep company in the smoky places where evil did business. Like earlier in the saloon, that foolish posturing. Though the tzadikim and the rebbes would have clamped their hands over their ears and shut their eyes to hear and see it, such braggadocio was a necessity in his line, as was the gun.

  The Sanhedrin had written: “If a man comes to kill you, kill him first.”

  In this world of swaggering toughs, if you broke a man’s pride, you could avoid killing him.

  The Rider had known men who truly believed their own talk, though. He had seen them die. Sometimes he had consigned them to death himself. Yet always in the fading eyes of these men had he seen the truth he had known since his first excursion into the high planes—what awaited a man’s soul was not to be taken lightly.

  Now, as he worked, he thought of what lay in store for Joseph’s soul in the morning. It was not just a frenzied posse of vengeful gunmen mustered around the settlement east of Delirium Tremens. It was the malakhim, the angels of the Lord sharpening their poisonous swords.

  Why was Joseph here, in this refuge of blasphemy?

  Molech, the old bull. The angel had said he was here.

  The Rider had encountered him before, during one of his more hazardous astral expeditions. A demon and marshal of hell who had set himself up as a king in ages past, who gorged on the cooked flesh of infants and washed it down with tears. The sinful Jews of Canaan had sacrificed to him, beating drums to drown out the wailing of mothers. Even Solomon had paid him bloody tribute before men of God had toppled his glowing idols.

  Now, to find him here...and to find Joseph among his flock!

  Joseph had been a mentor to him in his early studies of the Kabbalah, back when he had been a wide eyed young scholar—a talmidei khakhamim, only guessing at the wonders and terrors that existed in the world beyond. He had been called not Canaanite or blasphemer then, but prodigy, and allowed to study the mystic teachings at an unheard of age.

  He pressed his forehead to the floor between his knees in the posture of ultimate supplication, and prepared to venture forth again.

  * * * *

  It was well on into night when Cut Tom and Bull swaggered back into the El Moderado and cornered Dan at the bar, cajoling him for their guns so they could go upstairs and kill the sleeping Jew. Burly had swept the busted glass up behind the bar and mopped up twenty five dollars of wasted liquor. Now he was tending bar again.

  “I don’t think so. Once he’s shot you two idiots,” said Dan, riffling a deck of cards, “he’ll come down and put one in me.”

  “He’s gotta be sleepin’ by now,” Tom pleaded, sensing that the time they’d spent seeking courage in the bottom of a whiskey bottle and trying to persuade Dan was not going to be wasted. “We’ll just sneak upstairs and get his gun from him.”

  “He won’t just hand it over,” Dan said, dealing solitaire on the bar.

  “I don’t want him to.” Tom leered. “By God, you know I don’t. Let us have him, Dan.” He leaned in and lowered his voice, and Dan had to blink back the odor of condensed liquor that puffed out with the effort. “We’ll cut you in.”

  Dan seemed to consider, then nodded to Burly.

  “Alright, but don’t put any holes in the walls.”

  In a moment the guns were back on the bar, along with a spare key to the Jew’s room. Tom and Bull both reached eagerly for them, but Dan slapped a hand over the key and met Tom’s eyes first.

  “You can keep that fancy pistol. But I want his kit. That Jew was jingling with shekels goin’ up the stairs.”

  Cut Tom licked his lips and looked once back at Bull.

  “Deal,” he said, and headed for the stairs, key in one fist, gun in the other.

  * * * *

  The Rider stood.

  It was an airy feeling, weightless. The familiar pains were gone, inhabiting the empty amalgamation of tissue and bone that still knelt on the floor in the center of the circle. The hunger and thirst that had tempered his body like a penitent’s belt of nails was gone, but seemed to call from afar for his return. He ignored them, and drew his ethereal legs from the top of his drooping skull like a man stepping out of a pair of pants.


  The bodiless journey of a Merkabah Rider was never easy. One’s travel was often impeded by the intercession of baleful spirits. Not just the guardian angels that would let a soul pass with the proper incantations, but also demons that would tear an unprotected spirit apart. Merkabah traditions had prescribed the use of certain protective incantations and wards. This was not an intrusion into the seven heavens, but merely a journey to the Yenne Velt, the shadow world of earthbound ghosts, and so did not require his most complex preparations. Yet knowing that Molech was involved, it didn’t hurt to be prepared.

  He not so much looked for, but felt the presence of the corresponding talismans and mystic implements about his etheric body. Every charm, every snatch of holy text, bit of rare colored animal, Turkish eye, and sacred stone he wore, lent their individual power and protection to his ethereal double.

  It had been a point of vehement contention between The Rider, his master (called Adon), and his other teachers, that he employed not only the holy tefillin phylacteries with their sacred inscriptions, the Hamesh hand amulet and other strictly kabbalistic talismans to protect against spiritual assault on his ethereal form, but also such non-Jewish bodyguards as he had first been introduced to by his master, such as the powerful Mohammaden Ayat-Al Kursi amulet, the Tibetan Ga’u box, the Hindu svastika, and the Abbada Ke Dabra.

  The rebbes had assailed Adon with the law he knew only too well;

  “Against him that turns after familiar spirits and after wizards, I will set my face and cut him off from among his people.”

  He and Adon both had been dubbed idolaters and Canaanites. For a time, The Rider had resented their ire. His master had taught him that God had opened many avenues to His glory, and to fetter oneself in dogma was to insist on riding an ass across the ocean.

  It was only after the war he came to realize the truth lay somewhere in between. Adon had not sought God, except as a metaphor for power. The Rider had narrowly avoided following his teacher down a dark and sinful road. Adon’s teachings had made him an outcast among the Hasidim and his secret order, the Sons of the Essenes, though he still wore their trappings and considered himself one of their number.