by D. J. Butler
He felt himself wanting to curse this God and his sky. He wished he had told Diana what he really thought of her and her cynicism. He could go back, but that wouldn’t do any good, and time was slipping away from him.
He’d been inside Lloyd Preece’s cabin. Was that where the bearer bonds were? It seemed likely. Putting them in Erasmus Green’s bank wouldn’t be a good way to keep them secret from the rest of the herd.
There’s a fortune to be had in a man’s good opinion of himself.
What did that mean? Did it mean anything at all? Preece had loved the hunt. Had he stuffed the bearer bonds inside one of the mounted animal heads in his cabin? Up the big elk’s nose? But surely, Addy and Diana would have looked there.
But still…Addy knew that her father had bearer bonds, and she thought he would have hidden them at his cabin. She hadn’t found them herself, but that didn’t make her wrong.
Michael threw himself into the Double-A and drove away, fast.
Chapter Twenty-Six
Hiram scrambled down the cottonwood quickly and reached the ground shortly after the Revered Majestic stood up again.
“That didn’t hurt your feet?” Hiram asked.
“The left foot, yes.” Earl Bill Clay’s voice was calm, and his face, at least what Hiram could see of it in the darkness, was relatively sane. “I haven’t felt anything in my right foot for some time.”
Hiram pushed himself into a fast lope, heading up the wash toward where he’d seen the trees. The sand under his feet was dry, and the cloud cover overhead was nearly gone, though he still saw the play of lightning on the horizon. He couldn’t shake the feeling that he’d seen this place before, but southeastern Utah had ten thousand arroyos, and in the dark, they all looked the same. “What does ‘some time’ mean? A week? A month?”
“Forty years in the wilderness,” Clay mumbled. “So am I Joshua, about to cross into the promised land? Or Moses, to be buried on the sacred mountain? Or Jesus, to be crucified?”
“Or Earl Bill Clay,” Hiram said, “who should probably have a doctor look at his foot.”
“I don’t look at it myself. Why should I? It doesn’t bother me.”
“You don’t look at your foot?”
“I last took my boots off in nineteen hundred and thirty. What year is this?”
Hiram shook his head, thinking of the smell of rot that surrounded the desert preacher. “When you do take the boots off, I don’t want to be present. But after you’ve given both your feet a good wash, maybe in rubbing alcohol, you might need to show them to a doctor.”
“Satan!” Clay shouted. “Get thee behind me, Satan!”
“I’m just worried about your health,” Hiram said.
“Sataaaaaaaan!”
Hiram looked where Clay was pointing, and saw two wolf-beasts down the canyon behind them. A thicket of scrub brush bunched around the base of a living cottonwood tree and along a fallen cottonwood trunk lay nearby—it would do. Fortunately, thanks to a sandstone overhang above, the wood was dry as paper. It was also split by age and weather into a bouquet of shavings and sheets that would make great natural tinder.
Hiram sloshed the remaining spirits onto the fallen tree and hit it with his Zippo. Flame sprang up from the wood.
“Noooo!” Preacher Bill wailed.
Hiram wheeled, expecting to see the wolves falling upon him, and instead saw the Revered Majestic staring bleakly at the flames.
“The liquor,” he whimpered.
The wolves had moved only slightly closer. Where there had been two of them, there were now six.
The wood of the tree had taken fire, but only barely. Hiram tried to force Diana Artemis from his mind, and the very effort made her seem more important and central than ever. It wasn’t that she was beautiful, it was that she was…alive. Energetic. Responsive. She stimulated his imagination, despite the fact that he knew she was at least in part a fraud.
Or possibly because of that fact?
She had helped kill Lloyd Preece in some way. For all Hiram knew, she had slit his throat herself.
The thought was a bucket of cold water on Hiram’s burning desire, and his thoughts snapped into focus again.
“If I be a man of God,” he shouted, quoting Elijah in the Book of Kings, “then let fire come down from heaven!”
Fire didn’t drop from the sky, but the fire that had already taken root in the fallen wood exploded in volume and intensity.
“Amen, Brother Hiram!” Clay shouted.
“Throw more wood on!” Hiram yelled to him.
The preacher stumbled to obey, and Hiram seized a branch of the fallen tree. The end of it connected to the trunk was in flames, but the tapering length of it was still free of fire. It looked something like a flaming baseball bat, if slightly curved.
Hiram wrenched the branch from the trunk and turned to face the wolves.
The canyon was narrow in this stretch, only fifteen feet across. With the fallen tree on fire, about half the canyon was blocked by flame. A bold man might run and jump over the fire, so Hiram could only hope that the men in half-wolf form had enough animal instinct to be held back. If Hiram himself could then defend the remaining seven feet of open canyon with a brand, he could keep wolf-men from coming around and attacking him from behind.
Assuming he was right to think he was in a box canyon, since he hadn’t had the time to thoroughly confirm that perception.
And how long did he have to hold out? Hiram looked at the sky, hoping to get a sense of how much time had passed since sunset, and saw something surprising.
The Schoolmarm’s Bloomers.
He’d been trying to reach this place, but he’d had no idea he was so close. He had been in this wash before; this was where he had come looking for the ghost of Jimmy Udall. Jimmy who had been killed in the Tithe eight months earlier. The Tithe was a recurring hunt that took place on the Monument—did it always take place around the Bloomers?
Six wolf-men crept toward Hiram on their hind legs, muzzles nosing at the air and claws groping before them. He stood in the gap, flaming tree to his right and stone wall to his left, and raised the brand in his fist. Hiram prayed in his heart that both fires would last long enough. What he said out loud was, “I will send a fire on Magog, and among them that dwell carelessly in the isles.”
The flame in his hand burned brighter, but it definitely meant that the wood was being consumed. And that he was in his right mind again.
Two of the man-wolves slunk ahead, attempting to dash between Hiram and the canyon wall. Hiram stepped forward to meet them, swinging the flaming brand to close the space. The burning tip struck one of the wolves on the snout, sending up a shower of sparks. The monsters yelped and piled on top of each other trying to back away, but that gave Hiram not a moment’s rest—two of the remaining wolf-men threw themselves at the other corner, close to the fire.
Hiram swung again, and struck one of the beasts in the chest. It was the second wolf-man, though, and not the foremost.
The monster in front got through.
Hiram spun. Was the end here already? He tried to back against the stone wall, but he could already hear the wolves charging him from behind, even as he committed with the impetus of his body’s motion to trying to keep the one that had slipped through from killing Preacher Bill.
The Revered Majestic cowered, dropped a branch that he had been dragging to throw onto the fire. The wolf leaped—
Hiram expected to feel teeth dig into the back of his neck—
he swung his burning club and struck the wolf in his ribs with all his might. The beast missed his attack, flew a yard to the side, and landed in the fire. With a howl that seemed to be an animal noise wrapped around a high-pitched human cuss-word, the wolf-man rolled out of the fire, on the far side, and fled into the night.
The skin on the back of Hiram’s neck prickled. How had he not been killed by the other werewolves?
He spun about, still expecting a fanged wall of hairy death to take
him at any second, and saw the five monsters, standing at bay beyond the fire in a loose semicircle. They whimpered, and looked at a figure standing between them and Hiram.
A boy in a frayed and oversized jacket, who held his arms up to the sky, revealing rows of circular bite marks.
Jimmy Udall.
The wolf-men whined.
Hiram stepped forward, holding his torch away from the specter; not that he thought the fire would harm the ghost, but he didn’t want it to feel threatened or insulted.
“You’re Jimmy Udall,” Hiram said. “I know who killed you. I’ll see that justice is done.”
The boy nodded without smiling, then slowly faded from view.
But what justice could Hiram possibly bring to the Fang when it was about to tear him to pieces?
Preacher Bill dumped an armload of wood at Hiram’s feet. “More!” Hiram barked. “And more on the burning log, and connect them! We need the fire to spread, and block off the canyon entirely!”
How much trouble would Hiram be in if he lit fire to the Monument? Lighting fires in mid-summer in such a dry place was not the best idea. He imagined Bishop Smith overriding John Wells and going straight to excommunication and prison for Hiram Woolley.
Hiram wished he had a better option.
He kicked some of the wood into place, shouting more fire verses and willing the fire to spread faster.
The wolf-beasts had disappeared into the canyons, which Hiram didn’t find reassuring. The flames licked along the new branches, and in a few short minutes, the wall of fire stretched entirely across the canyon. Hiram dragged more brush wood out onto the fire—the nearest grove was entirely stripped of usable wood now, short of having an ax to chop down the living cottonwood, and Hiram eyed the trembling dark masses farther up the canyon that represented more trees, junipers and cottonwoods.
Preacher Bill panted, leaning with one hand against the canyon’s rock wall.
“Can you get more wood?” Hiram asked.
“Acacia wood, five cubits long and five cubits wide?” Clay snapped. “Not that I know what a goddamn cubit is. Satan can kiss my ass, regardless, him and the rest of the National Recovery Administration with him!”
Hiram would get the wood, then. But could he keep the fire burning until dawn? And if he did, would that matter?
Howling in the canyon on the other side of the fire stopped him. Seconds later, a deer-man came leaping into view. It was moving slower than Hiram would have expected, and its bounds were wobbly, as if one of its legs were injured. Only when it drew close enough to be lit by the fire, and then reared back in panic at the flames themselves, did Hiram see the monster’s scabby red skin.
Erasmus Green.
The banker-turned-deer-beast stopped on the other side of the fire, shying back and rearing up. He scrabbled with large hooves at the red rock on the side of the canyon, looking for purchase, and couldn’t find any.
Werewolves appeared in the depths of the canyon.
“Green!” Hiram called out. “Jump the fire!”
The deer-monster made a desperate shrieking noise and reared back again. The man-wolves rushed forward, roaring and snapping at the air with slavering jaws.
The fire worked on the pack, and it worked on the herd, too, and now it meant that Erasmus Green was trapped. Hiram struggled with this realization in his heart. Erasmus Green might deserve punishment—he had certainly tried to attack Adelaide Tunstall and her family, for instance. And more broadly, he was a member of a single cult, the Fang and Hoof, that killed. And Green had kept the secrets of that cult.
On the other hand, Green himself hadn’t killed anyone. Not Lloyd Preece, not Jimmy Udall.
And it was Hiram who had captured and interrogated him, and because Hiram had done so, Jack Del Rose had wounded the banker in the leg. And probably because the banker had been injured, he was now cornered against Hiram’s fire.
Erasmus Green had made his own bed to some degree, but he didn’t deserve to die.
And if he died now, it would be Hiram’s fault. Like Davison Rockefeller.
Hiram touched his chi-rho amulet. “Lo, I see four men loose, walking in the midst of the fire, and they have no hurt.” He leaped across the flames himself, feeling a wave of heat strike his face and wrists as he did so.
The werewolves raced soundlessly toward him, and toward Green. Hiram had no time; he stepped away from the panicked beast-man to get a better angle, and then he charged it. He waved his flaming branch and yelled, “They have no hurt!”
He slapped the brand against the deer’s flank.
Erasmus Green burst across the line of the fire, kicking the flaming wood in all directions.
Hiram stared at the deer’s hindquarters as he bounded up the box canyon. Hiram had saved the banker, but he had destroyed his own defensive wall.
Hiram slipped and fell to his knees. He dropped the brand, which lay beside him on the sand. He struggled to regain his footing and stand, but the sand was soft and deep, and yielded to his Redwing Harvesters so that he had a hard time getting any purchase.
“Roosevelt!”
The Reverend Majestic Earl Bill Clay lurched past Hiram. He held his own flaming brand above his head, and he swung it in a full circle like a bullroarer. The trail of sparks and the imprint of the light on Hiram’s eyes made the preacher seem to have a halo of fire and he charged the wolves.
“Sataaaaaaaaan!”
Hiram finally got his fingers wrapped around his torch and kicked himself to his feet. He turned in time to see two wolves tear the preacher down to the ground. One had its jaws clamped on Clay’s throat, which cut his screaming short. The other tore at his boot, and as the preacher hit the sand, silenced forever, the wolf tore the boot from his foot—
revealing bones.
In the light of his shattered wall of fire, Hiram saw a mass of black rot that was the preacher’s ankle. The rot swarmed with maggots, which must be the only reason Earl Bill Clay hadn’t died weeks or maybe months ago, because naked bones protruded from that swollen, festering stump, ending in further black gobbets that had once been toes.
Satan, indeed.
Hiram was alone, his defensive wall broken, but at least for the moment, the wolves were distracted. He turned and ran.
His legs hurt and his breath hammered in his lungs. The canyon he was in was not a box canyon, after all; at his first sight of the Schoolmarm’s Bloomers, he should have remembered that the Bloomers were approachable from below, from the arroyo that Hiram was in. Rounding the corner, cringing at every shadow, Hiram came to the steep but scalable slickrock slope that ascended to the stone arch.
He began to climb, holding his torch.
The other side of the arch, he was certain, was not an impassable cliff. If they had wanted to, why couldn’t the pack have come at Hiram from this angle, and attacked him from behind?
Had they been busy chasing the herd instead?
Hiram’s leg muscles burned.
Above and to his left, he saw a stone ridge that ran to the base of the promontory on which the Bloomers stood. It was hard to be certain in the darkness—they could be branches instead—but he thought he saw antlers silhouetted against the stars on the height of the ridge. Maybe that was a good sign—maybe it meant that Hiram had stumbled into a passage that was free of the wolf-men, or safe from them.
As he climbed onto the knob of stone on which the Bloomers stood, Hiram heard howling behind him. Turning, he saw half a dozen werewolves slink from the sandy canyon floor onto the lower reaches of the slickrock, and then come padding toward him. They spread out as they came, forming into a fanged horseshoe of menace.
Turning again, Hiram stepped up his pace. His brand began to burn low, and though he muttered more Bible verses at the wood, there was simply nothing left for the fire to burn.
He looked left, seeking a route past and away from the arch, toward where the deer-men stood in apparent impunity. He saw instead two werewolves, blocking off that route.
>
Through the arch itself, he spotted distant Scorpio, in the south, and within it, the planet Jupiter, staring coldly.
Hiram raced up into the arch—was there a way down the other side?
But beyond the enormous red pillars that were apparently the ankles of the schoolmarm, he saw a short curve before a steep fall, and standing on the curve were more wolves.
He was surrounded.
He had been herded here. Here, where Jimmy Udall had been killed.
Here, under the Monument’s great arch.
It was an altar, and he was the intended sacrifice.
His torch sputtered and died.
Chapter Twenty-Seven
Michael drove by his and Pap’s campsite in the hope that his father might be there, cleaning up after the attack, and all the wolf-men and deer-men up in the Monument, chasing each other around. The werewolves were gone, all right, but there was no sign of Hiram.
The headlights showed him the scuffed dirt, the ripped tarpaulins, the shattered lantern, and the sandy blankets, all strewn about along the black water of the Colorado River. His heart hurt, but he had no time to grieve or be afraid.
Dust smoked in his headlights as he pulled into the wide patch of ground in front of the Preece cabin. Carrying the shotgun, Michael climbed onto the back to the truck, opened the toolbox, and fished out the flashlight from on top. Below, from the secret tray, he took a Y-shaped length of witch hazel.
He stuck the rod in his back pocket. Then he started forward, shotgun in his right hand, balanced on the crook of his left arm, flashlight in his left hand.
A shotgun was a nice weapon: not a lot of aiming, just point it in the general direction of what you wanted to shoot and pull the trigger. If something came for him, he’d unload one barrel, then the other. The bolt-action rifle held more bullets in the magazine, but re-loading took longer. With the shotgun, he had two tries before he had to reach for the extra ammo he had poured into his pocket.
The shotgun only knocked the wolf-men and the deer-men down. Maybe that was why Lloyd Preece had been killed with a silver dagger.