The Good the Bad and the Infernal

by Guy Adams

  “If it’s anything like here, then it’ll be a disappointment,” said Jones, handing him the bottle.

  “Maybe so. But I’d sure like to have a word with its President.”

  It took a moment for the meaning of this to sink in for Jones, not being a man who thought often of God.

  “Well,” he said to Alonzo, “if you ever see Him, tell Him from me: I don’t think much of His work.”

  “Tell Him yourself,” Alonzo had replied. “I’m past chasing after an idea like that. They say the town only appears every hundred years, and the way into it is to pass through Hell itself. They say that the world goes mad, get close enough to it. Nature be damned, it’s monsters and demons all the way.”

  “Monsters and demons?” Jones smiled. “I’ve been called both in my time.”

  “I just bet you have.”

  At that, Alonzo had taken his bottle and gone to his bed.

  And over a while, the seed that had been planted in Jones’ head began slowly to grow.

  “‘Nature be damned,’” he said now, sat in the quiet, empty street of Serpent’s Creek. “Maybe that shows we’re closer than we think.”

  “Honey, I have no idea what you’re talking about,” said his wife.

  “The snakes,” he explained. “The closer you get to Wormwood, the stranger nature gets. Things become different, disturbed... this just might be a sign.”

  “Well, if it is, I can’t say I like it very much.”

  Henry held up his hand for quiet, cocking his head at a sharper angle. “We didn’t lose them yet,” he said. “I can hear them out there, their tails shaking.”

  “Wonderful. So what do we do? Keep riding or take cover?”

  Jones thought for a moment. “I’m not a man that takes naturally to running,” he said. “We’ll find us some cover.”

  HICKS HAD EXPERIENCED his fair share of encouraged unconsciousness. He had not led what could be termed a popular life and there had been many people only too happy to clout him around the head. In fact, his second wife used to make such a habit of it that he would joke that while some men had hot milk before bed time he partook of a frying pan. It certainly set him up for a full night’s sleep, although it didn’t take long before the headaches and bruising convinced him it was time to be single again.

  He was fairly sure this had been the first time he had been brained with a half-full bottle of whisky. He had known stupid people in his time, but never one so dumb as to waste good liquor. Licking his lips as he slowly returned to consciousness, he had to admit that the method had its benefits.

  “Stay still,” Hope whispered to him. His wrists were tied behind his back and his ankles bound together. Stay still? What other choice was there? He saw no mileage in wriggling; his head hurt enough as it was without encouraging it. There was one important object of business that he had to attend to, however:

  “Where’s my goddamn money?” he asked her.

  “He’s taken it,” she replied.

  “I am going to bite the fucking legs off that cocksucker,” he replied. “Where is he?”

  “He’s got Soldier Joe,” she said, panic creeping into her voice. “He’s dumping him outside.”

  GEORGE CAMPBELL WAS a very acquisitive man. If he liked something, he took it; always had.

  Sadly for him, circumstances had been such that great opportunities had never really come his way. When he had set up home in Serpent’s Creek, it had been as a barber. He was no great stylist with a pair of scissors, but he could just about set a fringe straight and he kept his mouth shut most of the time. This set him out as an improvement on the Mexican who had held sole rights to the trade before him. That boy would talk like it was Judgement Day. As nobody knew what the hell he was saying this far north of the border, his customers spent most of their time confused, deafened and suspicious that he was insulting them. Actually, he was reciting the stories his mother had told him as a child, because he liked them and it passed the time while he suffered the sullen company of gringos.

  George’s salon had flourished. Yet even a flourishing barber can hardly call himself a rich man, and he spent most of his days sitting on his porch and wishing the things he saw were his own. He particularly wished that about the life of Harry Fowkes, who owned the saloon. He wanted Harry’s business (thanks to his cut of the card games and whoring, Harry was a wealthy man), he wanted Harry’s horse (a fine gelding, chestnut in colour and the most beautiful animal George had ever seen), and he wanted Harry’s wife, Genevieve (George’s thoughts towards her were so carnal he could barely sleep at night due to penile distension).

  For most of the residents of Serpent’s Creek, the snakes had been the worst thing that could have happened. But not for George. Because George had an advantage over most people when it came to rattlesnakes: he was immune to their venom.

  When he was a kid, he had been playing in the fields. Throwing a ball for Jack, the family’s wolfhound, he had tripped and fallen into a nest of the snakes, twisting and turning as a clutch of them struck. The first his parents knew was when they saw their child running up to the house with snakes dangling from his arms.

  It should have killed him. His parents were quite sure it had: he’d been sick in bed for long enough, his skin puffing up into blisters that he retained as scars to this day.

  “Sometimes,” the doctor said, when the boy was up and around, “God just turns a blind eye.”

  Not only had he survived the experience, but it had left him with an immunity that went beyond that initial slow recovery. If a rattlesnake bit him, it pained him no more than a bee sting.

  And in Serpent’s Creek, that had made him king. Though he was forward thinking enough to keep it secret.

  In those early days when the town had simply locked its doors and hoped for the aberration to pass, George had taken to the streets. He waded his way through the creatures, ignoring them as they hissed and darted at him.

  His first attempt was by way of a test. He picked up a pair of the serpents and worked his way into the house of old Nora Clooney on the edge of town. She had nothing he wanted, but he was a cautious man, and he believed a good plan needed a dress rehearsal.

  He went to her bedroom and dropped the writhing snakes on her sleeping head. She woke up only briefly.

  He then prised back the screen on her back door, making it look like the snakes had entered through the gap, and gone home to his bed.

  The next morning he joined in the town’s gossip and sympathy. Poor old Nora hadn’t been secure enough, they all said; she’d missed a crack in the door, and look where it got her.

  Satisfied, he set his plan of action. Every night he went to the home of someone who had something he desired, broke in, blamed it on the snakes and helped himself to whatever it was.

  Harry Fowkes he had left until last, aware that he had to be cleverer in his planning. The last thing he wanted to do was let snakes into the building while Harry lay there with his wife. Only an idiot damages the thing he wishes to steal in the process of stealing it. Instead, he captured a couple of the snakes, keeping them in an empty jar that had contained hair oil. Then, when he saw Harry heading out one morning to pick up liquor supplies from Elwood, he had asked him if he might fetch him another jar of the oil.

  “Take this empty one with you,” he had said, “so you can make sure you get the right kind.”

  He had put the jar in the back of Herbert’s cart, the lid unscrewed. He reckoned it would be no time at all before either the jar fell over and tipped the snakes out or they figured out for themselves that freedom was at hand. Either way, Harry would be there and likely to get bitten.

  This turned out to be the case, the man’s body being brought back some time later, the apparent victim of an accident.

  George had watched Genevieve cry for days. She would clutch her young son (a precocious little brat, in George’s opinion) and wonder out loud about what the future might hold for them both.

  Eventually he had o
ffered his services. Friendly at first, just a man helping out someone in need, and then a clear suitor.

  In the meantime, the town of Serpent’s Creek was all but cleared out. People had started packing after the first couple of deaths and the exodus had been steady ever since.

  Stood in the middle of the main street, the town all but empty around him, he had felt like an emperor. A man that had got the things he needed.

  Not that Genevieve hadn’t taken some encouragement in the end, full of talk of being a grieving widow and needing a period of mourning. But he had used her feelings for her young son to his advantage. He had made his secret known: if she disobeyed him or tried to leave, he would make sure that little brat of hers was snake food. He illustrated as much by dangling one of the serpents over the boy’s bed as the child slept. He kept them locked in their rooms during the day and trapped by the snakes at night.

  After that, Genevieve was somewhat more willing to accede to his wishes.

  Now, pulling the retarded soldier along by his slack arm, he began to count the fortune he had come into. With the preacher’s gold, he figured he could pretty much do whatever he wanted. But could he ever leave? Here he had the advantage, he had a power and authority he could hold over the family. If they moved to another town, he’d be nothing again, and that wasn’t a backward step George Campbell was willing to make.

  “Sit there, you dumb bastard,” he said to Soldier Joe, pressing down on his shoulders and leaving him cross-legged in the middle of the street. “Some friends of mine are coming; they’ll keep you company soon enough.”

  SOLDIER JOE SAT down in the dirt and continued to listen to the noises in his head. Mostly they took the form of cannon fire and screaming.

  His awareness of the real word slipped in and out of focus. Sometimes he was as aware of it as a man might be looking at a picture: he could see its shapes and lines, but not his place in it. Sometimes it didn’t exist at all.

  The sun was setting, but he felt the drop in temperature only through an automatic reflex, the hairs on his arms rising as follicles tightened. The slight breeze moved his hair, but not him. He was just a shell that contained an old war.

  His wrists began to bleed, the blood soaking into the legs of his trousers and adding to old stains.

  “YOU CAN’T LEAVE him out there!” Hope had shouted once George Campbell had returned to the safety of the saloon.

  “I can and I will,” he replied. “He’s no use to me.”

  Neither were these two, of course; that much was already obvious to him. But first, he should find out a little bit more about them. There were no horses outside, and yet they could hardly have walked here. He had heard a coach pass earlier. Presumably it had dropped them off. Serpent’s Creek was not on the coach run. So where had they come from? Where were they going? And, most importantly of all, did they have any friends that were likely to turn up?

  He went behind the bar, retrieved his shotgun and pointed it at them. He had no doubt that it would help them answer his questions truthfully.

  JONES HAD STEERED the caravan into a small livery shed on the edge of town.

  He looked around. It seemed secure enough. There were no windows and the doors fit tightly.

  “It should keep us safe,” he said.

  “It stinks of horses,” The Geek complained, climbing out of the back of the caravan.

  “So does your breath,” said Knee High.

  “So”—Harmonium sat on an empty barrel—“we just wait it out in here? If they keep moving, I guess they’ll be past us soon enough.”

  “No,” said Jones. “First we have to find the preacher.”

  “Why?” she complained. “If they bite him, they bite him.”

  “He has the soldier and he has the gold,” Jones replied. “One of them might survive a snake attack, but the other sure as hell wouldn’t. He’s no use to us dead.”

  He unholstered his gun and made for the door. “You stay here. There’s little to be gained by us all going out there. If you hear me yell, then you come running.”

  “IF YOU DON’T tell me what I want to know,” said George Campbell, pointing the two barrels of his shotgun at Hope Lane, “I’ll happily blow her brains all over the closest wall.”

  “You’ll have to find them first,” said Hicks, much to Hope’s disgust. “And I’m afraid you have me down as a man who cares. Can’t say I’m bothered what you do with her.”

  Hope didn’t fool herself that this was a bluff on Hicks’ part. He cared for nothing but his gold and himself.

  “Then maybe I’d do better to just point this at you,” Campbell replied. “After all, I don’t have to kill outright with it. I bet you’d talk ten to the dozen after I’d blown one of your feet off.”

  “Maybe,” Hicks replied. “Or maybe I’d pass out and be no use to you whatsoever. That a risk you’re willing to take?”

  Campbell was getting more and more frustrated. His rise to power had been lucky, and right now he was losing his grip on it. These people just didn’t do as they were told.

  “All I want to know,” he repeated, “is who dropped you off here and where they’ve gone. Is that really worth risking a limb for?”

  “Well,” said Hicks, “here’s the thing. I’m a businessman and I know how commerce works. I have something you want and once you get it you’ll have no more need for me. That ain’t a position I intend to put myself in. You think I’m dumb enough to think you’ll let either of us live long once I’ve spilled my guts to you?”

  “There’s no profit in my killing you.”

  “Sure there is. Right now we’re a problem, a wrinkle in this plan of yours, whatever the hell it is... and believe me when I say I couldn’t give a shit about that. If you want to sit here till Judgement Day with this family of yours, it’s no problem of mine.

  “So here’s my suggestion. You let us go. You walk us out that door and close it behind us. Then we’re gone. Problem solved.”

  “Leaving your precious gold?”

  “Well, I won’t lie, the idea doesn’t sit well with me. But if it’s a choice between that and a face full of shot I guess I can make the sensible decision. We walk away, and then either we survive these snakes of yours...”—and Hicks was still far from convinced he even believed in them—“or we don’t. Either way, we’re gone from your life, and that’s the end of it as far as you’re concerned.”

  Campbell gave this some thought. He didn’t trust the man, but night was nearly on them and the snakes would soon be here. Throw these two out the door and life would certainly get a lot simpler.

  “Alright,” he said. “I can be a reasonable man.”

  “They’ll be dead within minutes,” said Genevieve. “You can’t just let them go out there.”

  Hicks wasn’t in the mood for her assistance, however well-meant. He had seen one way out of the current situation and one way only. “I guess that’s our choice to make as much as anyone else’s,” he said.

  “True enough,” said Campbell, looking to Hope. “Untie him. Slowly, mind. Either of you offer so much as an angry glance in my direction and I’ll shoot the pair of you and to hell with the consequences.”

  THE SNAKES FLOWED like water, the rising moon throwing pale white light across the undulating mass as they moved ever closer to Serpent’s Creek.

  Other wildlife moved before them, alerted by the sound of their tails, a war cry that carried far in the still of the evening. Not everything was quick enough, caught in the fanged mouths that hissed and snapped at anything that moved, including each other. Of course, most of the local fauna had moved on: much like the residents of Serpent’s Creek, they knew not to linger where death was a nightly possibility.

  The snakes raged, their tiny minds driven wild with a need to attack. The cause was beyond them, a coiled weapon of meat and bone. They simply surged forward, full of fear and rage.

  JONES WALKED DOWN the main street, head cocked, listening to the sound of the snakes as they slithe
red ever closer. The town around him was a map of creaking wood and scuffed earth. There, the nearby sound of raised voices. Nobody else could have understood the world the way he experienced it. He could not see, in any literal sense, and yet his sense of place was ever acute. All he had to do was to concentrate, and his environment would fall in place around him. Partly it was elevated hearing, partly some extra sense that was so automatic, so instinctual, that he couldn’t really explain it. It would have been like trying to explain smell to a man who had never possessed a nose.

  Certainly the world he lived in was a different world from everyone else’s. It was a place of echoes and murmurs. He was like a fish swimming in the dark depths of the ocean, aware of everything that moved through the water around him.

  When he met a person, he naturally absorbed their particular essence. Hicks was a lump of sweat, old whisky and noise. Hope Lane was sweeter, a delicate fish. Soldier Joe a funky, bloody presence whose heart beat slow just as his breath came laboured.

  The last was close now; he could hear the wheezing, smell the wounds that blossomed on the man’s arms, hear the slight creak of clothing as he rocked to and fro.

  “Where are you?” Jones asked. “What are you doing sitting out here alone?”

  “The devil,” came the whispered, slightly panicked response. “The devil is here.”

  Jones didn’t know if Soldier Joe was referring to him or not. It was possible. It certainly wasn’t the first time he had been labelled in such terms.

  He stood next to the man, squatted down and reached out for Soldier Joe’s face. “Where are the others?” he asked, only too aware that the man would probably not answer.

  “The devil,” Soldier Joe repeated. “The devil.”

  “Yeah.” Jones stood upright, his gun firm in his hand. “The devil is here.”

  “Hicks!” he shouted. “Get your ass out here!”