Drovers and Demons: A Weird Tale of the Old West (Murphy and Loco Book 1)

by Scott Langrel

  “Point taken,” Murphy said, embarrassed. “Okay then, you guard the door and I’ll check both the closet and under the bed. Since the room is obviously occupied by someone.”

  Loco nodded and moved back toward the ruined door. To his credit, the Apache didn’t seem to be gloating over Murphy’s shortcomings the way some men might, but his tone had seemed a bit condescending, nonetheless. Trying to hide his disappointment in himself, Murphy moved to the closet door and jerked it open.

  A frightened mewl escaped the darkness from inside the closet. Murphy stepped back and leveled the Exterminator at the shadows within, but was courteous enough to refrain from firing until he knew what he was shooting at.

  “Bring that light over here,” he said to Loco, who quickly complied.

  The Apache thrust the lamp into the closet’s interior, dispelling the shadows and revealing a frightened man cowering in the back corner.

  “Don’t kill me,” the man said plaintively.

  “Are you a demon?” Murphy asked.

  “No,” the man said.

  “Then I won’t kill you,” Murphy assured him. “But come out here where we can get a better look at you.”

  The man set about doing as he’d been told, albeit with a bit too much enthusiasm for Murphy’s liking.

  “You slow down, or I’ll knock you into a cocked hat,” Murphy promised the stranger. The man froze, then resumed his retreat from the closet with slower, more deliberate movements. He was a smallish fellow, and definitely not a miner or cowboy. His clothes were clean and well-fitting, and looked as if they had been made for him in a city. On his head was a bowler which looked as out of place in the Arizona desert as a saddlebag preacher in a whorehouse.

  “Who are you?” Loco wanted to know.

  “Alvin Allen Seaver,” the man replied.

  “You go by Alvin or Allen?” Murphy asked.

  “Mister Seaver, usually,” the man replied. Murphy found that to be a bit pretentious, but then the man looked to be in his thirties and wore muttonchops, so…

  “How long have you been hiding in that closet, Mr. Seaver?” Loco asked.

  “The better part of three hours, I’d say. Since the storm hit, at any rate. That’s when the trouble started down at the White Dog.”

  “You were there?” Murphy asked.

  “I’d just walked in and ordered a whiskey,” Seaver explained. “I was coming back from the assay office, where I’d been overseeing the operation.” He paused and seemed to gather himself as he looked at Murphy and Loco. “I guess you can tell that I’m not from these parts.”

  “You don’t say,” Murphy remarked.

  “Mr. Northwood and his partners brought me in from Philadelphia,” Seaver said. “I was to spend three weeks observing the processes in the assay office, then report any recommendations.” He scratched at one of the muttonchops. “In retrospect, it would have been healthier to stay back east.”

  “You think?” Loco asked. “How did you become aware that there was trouble starting?”

  Seaver cocked his head in concentration. “It was probably when the bartender came running down the stairs screaming, with one of the working girls on his back, chewing his left ear off.”

  “That’d be a pretty good indication,” Murphy agreed.

  “He’d gone upstairs because there was a commotion in one of the rooms,” Seaver continued. “I heard him muttering under his breath as he came out from behind the bar. He was damning someone all to hell—someone named Betty, if memory serves. I guess she was a little livelier than he’d been expecting, though. He made it to the bottom of the stairs before collapsing, her on top of him like a wolf on an antelope. It was a hell of a sight, let me tell you.”

  Neither Murphy nor Loco doubted it one bit. Poor old Calvin. Murphy had only met the man once, and he hadn’t cared much about the saloon owner one way or the other, but being eaten by a demon was certainly a hell of a way to go out. Murphy wouldn’t wish that on pretty much anyone.

  “Do you have any means of transportation, Mr. Seaver?” Loco asked.

  The little man shook his head. “I came in on the stagecoach. I’m afraid I’m not much of a horseman.”

  “I have a feeling you’ll be learning before too long,” the Apache said. “The next stage won’t arrive until tomorrow afternoon, if it shows up at all. I doubt you’ll want to stick around until then.”

  “I’ve always been wary of horses,” Seaver said. “Right now, though, I’m a whole lot warier of crazed, cannibalistic saloon girls. I think I can manage if I have to.”

  “You can ride out with us when we leave,” Murphy said.

  “I’ll get my effects,” Seaver said, moving toward the chiffonier which sat beside the bed.

  “Well,” Murphy said, “the thing is, we’re not riding out just yet. We have some more business to attend to.”

  Seaver stopped and turned to look at the pair, aghast. “Are the two of you daft? Didn’t you hear what I just told you? We’re in danger every minute we stay in this dreadful town!”

  “You’ll get no argument from me on that point,” Murphy said. “But those people who are killing other people, well, they’re kind of ancient Indian demons. My partner here and I have to try to destroy them, or at least as many as we can, before we can leave.”

  Seaver shifted his gaze to Loco, who merely shrugged.

  “The Anasazi must be contained and destroyed,” the Apache agreed. “No one is safe as long as they are allowed to roam free.”

  “What’s your name again?” Seaver asked.

  “My name is Loco,” the Apache said. “This is Murphy O’Bannon.”

  “Well,” Seaver said, “I don’t know about him, but whoever named you was eerily intuitive.” He began to walk back towards the closet. “As far as I’m concerned, you’re both loony. I’ll take my chances in here. Lock the door on your way out, if you don’t mind.”

  “Now hold on,” Murphy protested. “You can’t stay here.”

  “I’d like to know why not,” Seaver said. He walked into the closet and stood there, arms folded across his chest defiantly. He looked to Murphy like a hairy little child who was refusing to take a bath.

  “Because you’re going to help us,” Murphy said. “We need to make sure nothing tries to escape the town while we’re busy cleaning it up, and it takes both of us to go room to room killing demons. We need someone to watch the trail going out of town and warn us if anyone tries to skedaddle.”

  Loco nodded approvingly. “That’s a good idea, Coyote. It’ll certainly save us some guesswork.”

  Seaver’s eyes widened. “And what makes you think I’d put my life in jeopardy on such a foolish task?”

  “Because if you don’t,” Murphy said, raising the mare’s leg, “we’ll tie you up in the middle of town and use you as bait to draw those things out.”

  Seaver looked down the muzzle of the Exterminator, and apparently saw the light.

  “Give me a gun, at least,” he whimpered.

  Chapter Twelve

  Murphy waited in the boarding house while Loco led Seaver out to the trail and positioned him in the bushes, with explicit instructions to fire a shot if anyone came riding out of the town. Seaver looked so inept and miserable that Loco felt bad about leaving the man there. In all honesty, though, it would be safer hiding on the outskirts of town than in a closet in the midst of things. Besides, it was critical that they be warned in case one or more of the Anasazi tried to escape to the south, toward Phoenix and beyond.

  “You think he’ll make a run for it?” Murphy asked as Loco rejoined him at the entrance to the boarding house.

  “I doubt it,” Loco replied, shaking his head. “He’s just as scared of what might lie out in the desert as he is of what’s in town. He’s also pretty frightened of you. He believes you would have actually tied him up and used him as bait.”

  “Who’s to say I wouldn’t have?” Murphy asked. “It would have saved us a lot of time and energy.”r />
  Loco gave the hired gun a sideways glance which said he’d heard hogwash coming from a man’s mouth before.

  “Okay, I wouldn’t have done it,” Murphy admitted. “But I did think about it, a little.”

  They moved to the next boarding house, where Murphy had acquired a room only a few days before. As soon as they opened the door and stepped inside, it became readily apparent that they would not find this building as vacant as the previous two. The smell of blood and death hung heavy in the air, along with something else which neither Murphy nor Loco could quite place. It was possibly a smell which had been hinted at when they’d been down inside the mine; an acrid odor which combined sulfur and the alkaline smell of a man’s urine after he’s been on a three-day drinking binge. To call the smell unpleasant would have been an understatement.

  “This one’s bad,” Murphy whispered as they stepped into the front hall. Beside him, Loco gave a barely perceptible nod; the Apache’s expression was as grim as Murphy had ever seen it. Perhaps Loco could sense something beyond what Murphy himself could. After all, he’d been on the track to becoming a medicine man before being expelled from his tribe. But if it was really bad mojo that Loco was smelling, he wished the Apache would be more conversational about it.

  Moving as quietly as possible, they cleared the first two rooms easily enough, finding them unoccupied by either human or nonhuman entities. They heard nothing as they went about their stealthy business, but the foul odor seemed to grow stronger as they moved toward the back of the building. It seemed to Murphy that the worse the smell got, the darker and more substantial the shadows surrounding them became. More than once, he nearly chambered a round into the Exterminator, convinced that he’d seen movement off to his side, only to discover that nothing was there.

  Loco was being more taciturn than usual, and that was saying something. The Apache had not spoken a single word since they’d entered the building, and he seemed wound tighter than Dick’s hatband. Murphy found himself glancing at his partner more and more often, just to make sure Loco was still there.

  In the third room, they found a lot of blood but no bodies. There had obviously been a violent struggle; none of the room’s meager furnishings had escaped being overturned or smashed. The closet door stood wide open, and the space beyond it proved to be empty.

  “There’s going to be something bad in one of the rooms at the end of the hall, isn’t there?” Murphy asked Loco before they left the room.

  The Apache hesitated. “Yes,” he uttered at length, and said no more. This frustrated Murphy to no end, but Loco had already moved back into the hallway before Murphy could question him any further. Since there was nothing else to do but follow, that’s what Murphy did.

  Loco knew that his friend was exasperated at his behavior, but he found that he honestly couldn’t articulate the danger they were about to face. There were going to be Anasazi, yes, and that was bad enough. But there was also something else waiting for them at the end of the hall, something far worse than the spirits of a few dead Indians. As to exactly what this something was, Loco genuinely had no clue. He only knew that it was bad, far worse than any entity he had sensed before. It would have been useless to try to convey that to Murphy, so he had chosen not to. Whatever was waiting for them, they would face it together. And either they would destroy it, or it would destroy them.

  Also, the Apache was trying hard to hide the fact that he was scared shitless.

  The fourth room was much like the third, only slightly less bloody. That left the two rooms at the end of the hall. The stench was so bad now that both men had retrieved bandanas from their pockets and tied them around their mouths and noses. It helped a little, but not all that much.

  Looking like a pair of nervous bandits, Murphy and Loco advanced warily on the two remaining rooms. Both of the doors were closed, standing rigidly shut like sentries blocking unwanted interlopers from entering. Murphy stopped in the middle of the hall, looking back and forth between the two doors. They looked pretty much the same, so visual appearance wouldn’t be the deciding factor in determining which one to open. He deferred to his sense of smell, and in that contest, there was a clear winner.

  Turning to Loco, Murphy nodded to the door on the right. Loco gave a nod back, indicating that he understood and agreed. While Murphy stood across the hall, ready to chamber a round into the Exterminator, Loco eased to the door, gently put a hand on the knob, and gave it a slight turn. It was unlocked. After giving his partner another quick glance to make sure they were on the same page, the Apache gave the knob a full twist and pushed the door open before hopping back out of Murphy’s way.

  An invisible yet almost palpable wave of terror and doom washed into the hallway through the open door, causing Murphy to grit his teeth and chamber a magical round, though the darkness within the room had not yet revealed anything for him to aim at. He was tempted to start firing anyway, to just shoot into the darkness and hope like hell he hit something. Because there was something in there, and it was bad. He was now feeling what Loco had felt when they’d entered the building—the sense of something impossibly evil and powerful. Murphy had never before experienced such a sensation, and it was currently scaring the hell out of him.

  Still, the hired gun managed to stay his hand, though he knew the bullet now in the Exterminator’s chamber would be useless against anything supernatural by the time he got around to firing it. But there was no use shooting until he could see something to shoot at, so he just stood there, holding the mare’s leg and waiting.

  Someone walked out of the room.

  The someone in question was a woman, and she was beautiful. Murphy barely had time to think about it, but he supposed she was the most beautiful woman he’d ever seen. If he’d had plenty of time to consider it, he likely would have reached the same conclusion. She appeared to be young—maybe her early twenties, but certainly no older—and had blonde hair the color of freshly harvested wheat. She was thin but not waiflike; she had curves under her dark robe in all the places men liked them to be. Her features were delicate and pleasing, but it was her eyes which held Murphy transfixed. They were a bluish gray, and they seemed to almost glow in their sockets. Murphy felt all the wind rush out of him, and he struggled to draw some back in.

  Loco, as well, stood frozen in place, unable to take his eyes off the woman who had walked out of the room, his knife gripped loosely in his hand, which was hanging limply at his side. The woman’s beauty was so radiant that she almost seemed to glow. The Apache wasn’t sure what he’d been expecting to come out of that room, but this certainly wasn’t it.

  Murphy tried to ask the woman’s name, but he found that his voice had up and skedaddled. In fact, he was utterly incapable of doing anything much besides standing there and gawking like a total imbecile.

  “What do we have here?” the woman asked, and her voice was like melted butter flowing over velvet. Her striking eyes caressed first Murphy, then Loco. Each man quivered involuntarily as her gaze passed over them, and all thoughts of the Anasazi—or anything else—were immediately and totally forgotten.

  The woman walked over to Murphy and gave the hired gun a closer inspection, her lips twitching sexily as she did so.

  “You’re a handsome specimen,” the woman said, “for a—” She gave a brief pause, and Murphy had the strangest notion that she was about to say human. But “cowboy” was the word which finally escaped her full lips. She let her gaze linger on him for a moment longer, then turned her attention to Loco.

  “I like the hair on this one,” she said as she moved to the Apache. She took a handful of his long hair and let it cascade through her fingers. “So virile.” Loco shivered as he was assaulted with simultaneous feelings of desire and revulsion. He wanted to touch her and hold her in his arms, but at the same time, he wanted to drive his knife into her. The feelings were so conflicting that he couldn’t do anything but stand there, just like Murphy.

  “I am Ardat Lili,” the woman sai
d. She said it like it should mean something to them, but Murphy had never heard the name before. He couldn’t say for sure about Loco.

  “I guess you could say I’m new in town,” Ardat Lili said. “An unfortunate series of events led to my being here, and I can’t say that I’m too happy about it.” She eased back to the door and leaned against the jamb.

  “Now,” she said, eyeing the pair, “what should I do with the two of you?”

  Neither Murphy nor Loco were capable of replying.

  “I suppose I could feed you to my new friends,” Ardat Lili said. “They’ve eaten well tonight, but they’re still hungry. I suppose being imprisoned in a tomb for several centuries tends to have that effect on one.”

  As if to accentuate her threat, a low, hungry moan escaped the darkness inside the room.

  “Succubus,” someone said in a jittery voice. At first, Murphy had no idea who might have uttered the word, then he remembered Loco. Straining, he turned his head just enough so that he could see the Apache in his peripheral vision. Loco’s entire body was shaking, and he was obviously under great stress. Murphy figured it had taken everything the Apache had just to get that one word out.

  “Succubus?” Ardat Lili asked, a surprised look on her angelic face. Then she gave a shrill laugh. “I’m so much more than that, you simpleton. Thousands have worshipped me. Hundreds of thousands.” Her expression grew hard and cruel, and she spat at Loco. “They call me Lilith. I could crush you like a bug, if I so wished. And you would die in the thrall of the best orgasm you’ve ever experienced.”