In sheer, futile defiance, Chess snatched up a handful of grit and hurled it, snarling. Only to see the stones multiply and fracture in mid-air, become a howling jet of razor-edged shards flashing from Chess’s palm to burst against the gunman-thing’s front, like the deluge from a perforated water tank. Rotten buckskins and pallid flesh peeled back from the thing’s body, sending it staggering backward. The shotgun fell from one disintegrating hand, flipping to discharge again as it hit the ground—right up into its former owner’s groin.
Stunned, Chess made the mistake of letting his own hand drop. At which point the earth-jet instantly ceased, leaving the truth laid bare most awfully.
The body beneath those buckskins had never been human; did not even look human, now. By the low-slung hips, black mouldy fur and short thick legs, its bottom half seemed mostly bear. The long wavering spine and deep ribs looked like the remains of a powerful bull’s, while the arms . . . scaly and undersized, their gloved-over paws’ “fingers” actually long nails made for digging, hovering foreshortened up around the creature’s belly. A lizard? Armadillo? Only the head bore any resemblance to a human’s, though slackly mask-like, and that was spoiled by the weird letters incised—black and smoking—on its white brow.
Glossing pressed his fingers to his mouth, looking absurdly dismayed. Then his rabbit-eyes tightened; with another subtle gesture, he sent the corpse-amalgam lumbering forward, ready and willing to crush by sheer weight what it had failed to shoot dead.
But Chess had the measure of his foe now, and this was hardly the first dead thing he and Morrow had dealt with. So as it approached he dropped below its clumsy swing and spun, planting a spurred heel square in the thing’s knee. The rotten joint burst, bones snapping; gravity took over and brought the thing down to the ground hard—
—and Morrow’s head was abruptly crystal clear, while Glossing was doubled over, clutching his own knee, screaming.
Before the dentist could recover, Morrow had already flipped himself off the couch, cursing as he crashed to the floor—the numb-spell was still on him, crawling back up his body even as Glossing regained his senses. He quick-humped toward the door and down the front steps, out into the street with Glossing on his heels. Yelling, as he did: “Cheh! Issa doc! Hessa hex—damn thing’s ’is puppet! Glossinssa hex—!”
White pain burst through Morrow’s head, blinding him; abruptly, he found himself on his back, insect-scrabbling with all four limbs at once. Glossing drew back his boot for another kick, face distorted in a snarl of rage—then buckled once more, grabbing his side as if knifed. Morrow rolled his head, just barely able to glimpse how Chess threw kick after kick into the thing as it twitched feebly on the ground. With each one, Glossing shrieked again, crumpling until he too lay helpless in the dusty street, barely able to watch as Chess dragged the whole huge, stinking mess of his creation over to him by one swollen leg.
Kneeling, Chess traced an invisible line from the thing’s letter-carved skull through the air, ’til his hand made contact with Glossing’s chest. So intent was Chess’s gaze that Morrow was fairly certain he wasn’t even noticing the small black shotgun pellets steadily work their way from his wounded shoulder, vanishing in tiny puffs of flame before they could even hit the ground.
“This,” he said to Glossing, hand moving like it was following a rope Morrow couldn’t see. “Little silver string—that’s how you make it dance, huh?” Without waiting for an answer he rose, then stamped down hard between puppet and puppeteer, like he was snuffing a fuse. Glossing groaned. The dead thing stopped moving. Chess stared at it, sick fascination plain on his face. “What the hell is that thing, anyway?” he demanded. “What do you even call it?”
Pain and dread had drawn Glossing’s face tight; his grim smile made him look like someone else entirely. Again, Morrow was reminded inexorably of both Songbird and Rook. “He’s . . . my friend. The proper word is golem. But I call him—Emmett.”
As the name echoed thickly in the air, Chess and Morrow both found their eyes snapping all unsummoned to those four alien letters on the monster’s skull; caught and held by black power, mouths agape, as the thing suddenly reared back up. Behind the word, a thunderous, brazen sound, like sheeting shook off-stage at the theatre—as though each letter had been embossed on the air.
Whether the spell was actually so strong it affected them both—or Morrow was just inadvertently sharing Chess’s senses again, through whatever connection Rook had bound upon them—they could all see it, now: A web of black cable strung from golem to hex, then leading back from both of them into the far distance, stretching across miles, toward—
“Rook,” breathed Chess. “That house-sized sonofabitch.”
On the floor, Glossing coughed. “I lie down every night,” he rasped, “with that sunk deep in my dreams, calling me; I rise up every morning knowing Reverend Rook’ll give me all the power I could ever want, if I only sign away my soul and follow it to its conclusion. And the best joke of all is, it isn’t even me he wants.” His eyes burned. “It’s you.”
“No, doc.” Chess shook his head. “This ain’t my doing.”
“But it is!” Glossing pushed himself up slightly, trembling. “Every hex between here and the Mississippi’s been bleeding power like a stuck pig for weeks, all so your ‘good’ Reverend can bring us to help serve you! He says he’ll make us gods, but he’s just one more like you, like me—all he wants is food, and I will not be his meal!”
Here he flung out a hand, grabbing for Chess’s; the power flare between them was so bright, hot and immediate that Morrow cringed back with a yell, hands over his eyes. He felt the sickening pulling even in his own gut, the nauseating wrench of power being sucked away, and knew it must be a thousand times worse for those who had power to lose. Chess’s startled cry was a shrike’s, so full of rage and pain it made him want to both cringe and weep.
Then—fury, red and sizzling, as the blazing stream reversed itself so suddenly that Morrow felt it rush right up into his throat: a gag, a noose, fit to strangle and choke. And saw Chess’s eyelids flutter just a tad, at the taste of it, hot and fresh, like heart’s-meat done up sizzling, straight from the spectral grill.
With dread Lady Ixchel’s voice crooning alongside, an ill refrain, from the darkest depths of Morrow’s memory: Jaguar Cactus Fruit, so flowery, little husbands. So precious. So . . .
(beautifulbeautifulbeautiful)
“Often as you claim to’ve been in consort with Rook,” Chess told the dentist, “don’t seem like you quite got the bulk of the message. I ain’t just any hex, to be sucked dry and dropped. I’m different.”
Glossing gave a bitter laugh. “Oh, you’re that, all right.”
He waved at “Emmett” one more time, like he couldn’t help it; it jerked forward, growling. But Chess just shot again, as if by way of reply—off-hand, without even looking. The final spell-bullet exploded out of Chess’s barrel, all bat-wings and squid-legs, writhing and snapping. It ripped the golem’s face right off, revealing a perforated horse’s skull whose long jaws were set with dog’s choppers underneath.
“Naw, I don’t think so,” Chess said. “’Cause for all you got some fancy tricks indeed, you still ain’t hex enough to mess with me.”
Glossing gulped and tried to scuttle, arm flopping hapless, like he’d momentarily forgotten he and Chess were still holding hands. And Chess gave a mean, familiar predator’s grin at the sight, gripping so hard his knuckles flared up white—drew in even harder, as though he meant to drink every last drop of the fat little man up through a rye grass straw.
It was sad, in its way—for both of ’em. Chess Pargeter, battle-proven killer of men, reduced to a child stepping on ant-hills. Doc Glossing, reduced to meat.
The dentist hissed, a near squeal. Then went all at once a-droop, overwhelmed and withering—a popped pig’s bladder.
“So po
werful,” he gasped, giving way. “So strong, and yet . . . you don’t know anything. Not a damn thing. Not even . . .”
An unintelligible mutter followed, resolving itself into: “. . . was right, ’bout you . . .”
At this, Chess’s eyes—already lit up with the surplus—literally snapped and flared. “Who was? Rook—that deathless bitch of his? Goddamn Songbird?” The man just shook his head, defeated, taking refuge in silence. “Tell me, shithead! I’ll yank your soul out through your eyeballs, see if I don’t!”
“Won’t get . . . a stitch more from me, Mister Pargeter. I’m done.”
“Oh, you got that right,” Chess snarled, pulling all the harder, ’til Glossing’s entire plump visage seemed about to cave in. “Question is—you want the end of it to go quick? Easy? Or anything Goddamn but?”
“Cheh,” Morrow said, warningly.
Too late. Glossing slumped, emptying himself into Chess in one foul gush. When Chess looked up once more his pupils blazed like lamps, slitted and triangular; a ghostly cat’s gaze, touched with Hellfire.
Across the street, doors were opening—citizens either stood frozen and staring or went scattering off to find guns, the Law, the nearest preacher equipped for a long-distance exorcism. At the sight, power crackled between each of Chess’s ten spread fingers, so sharp it made even him jump.
“And what’re you all lookin’ at?” He demanded.
“Cheh, I seh less go. Less juss—c’mon, now. Go.”
“We’re lookin’ at you, you hex from Hell!” Some brave soul yelled, meanwhile, before ducking back into the town’s one saloon.
“Damn straight; we heard your story, Chess Pargeter. Wrecking decent folks’ homes, destroying respectable businesses.”
As the only mundane combatant here engaged, Morrow could sympathize with their simple human outrage, even when a few started tossing horse-apples along with the abuse.
“Invert! Vandal!”
“For his name shall be called Abomination, and his place made desolate!”
“That a jacket, or a damn circus-rig?”
Above, the clear sky growled, like it was getting hungry. Chess flushed, furiously; jacked up on Glossing’s stolen juice, his own anger reached out wider, causing the shattered store-window glass to run and drip, mercurially refusing to merge with the street’s dust around it.
“You motherless bitches,” he said, the lightning flashing ’round his palms rising wrist-high. “Dare to quote the damn Bible at me—I’ve had that, from the best! So c’mon over here and try it to my face, you lily-livered—”
“Chess, fuh shissakes—”
Chess blew out a snarling breath, and shook his head. “Hold on,” he told Morrow, knitting his still-sparking fingers painfully in the bigger man’s shoulder.
And—they were gone, popped out and back into existence in a half-second, the town erased like blown-off mist. Nothing but empty rock, scrub and equally empty overhang of cloudlessness, sun the colour of a struck match.
Chess stumbled back a pace, then sat down, heavily, like he’d been gutted. Morrow collapsed on his side, hands automatically gone to his maimed mouth . . . only to find the raw hole plugged once more with a bare rim of new tooth—man-sized, smooth as china plate—poking up, impossibly, through tender flesh.
He wondered how long it’d take to grow out fully, and whether keeping himself drunk throughout would help or hinder the process.
“Crap,” Chess exclaimed, suddenly exhausted. “I left the Goddamn horses behind.”
CHAPTER TWO
That night, sparks flew upward from the fire only to die halfway, like lightning bugs with aspirations to be stars throwing themselves skyward, heedless of their own hubris. That last was a word Ash Rook had once taught Chess, Grecian in origin—idolators same as those Mex fools who’d once worshipped “Lady” Ixchel and her like, though with the added appeal of having apparently thought it a tad strange for a man not to lust after his own kind. Which made ’em a sight more worthy of respect than any One True God Almighty-worshipping Bible-thumper Chess’d ever met with . . . ’side from the Rev himself, of course.
Here, however, Chess felt a shiver at the very name, and grimaced. Just no getting away from Rook when the man’s betrayal ran all through him like a bruisy pain, far too fresh to touch directly.
Across from him, Chess saw Ed Morrow look up sharply, like he could hear what Chess was thinking. “You all right?”
“I look like I’m not?”
Morrow frowned. “All seriousness? Well . . . yeah.”
There were a fair few replies Chess might have made to that, but he well knew Morrow’d done nothing to warrant them, ’sides from offer him support in ways he hadn’t thought to ask for.
So he simply sighed, and answered: “Just tired, is all. How’s that tooth?”
“Better. Listen, though, Chess—that calling the Doc spoke on . . .you feel it too, don’t you?”
Here the fire gave a punctuational crack, as though some unseen wooden knot had suddenly flared through. Chess felt it ring straight through the space where his stolen heart should beat, Dentist Glossing’s stolen power galvanizing him with a current of pure arousal fit to make every last nerve pop at once, in similarly spectacular fashion; it hurt him so’s he had to forcibly restrain himself from grabbing poor Ed by both ears and shutting him up, mouth-first.
“Every night,” he replied, instead. “But I’m stronger than he was, Ed—so I don’t aim to go there ’til I’m good and ready.”
To which Morrow just nodded, sagely. And yet—
When’ll that be, exactly? Chess heard him think, nevertheless, no matter how he strained not to. The way he “heard” almost every damn thing around him, these days: two girls strolling east as Morrow and he rode toward the dentist’s shop, one of ’em sorting cake recipes, the other wondering when she’d have to start tying her apron higher (and how fast she could catch herself a Joseph-husband, ’fore what she was cooking in her oven started to show). An old man cleaning spittoons on the lodge-house stoop, hoping that pain in his stomach was last night’s stew, not cancer. A muscle-bound farm-hand moving west to trade for feed at the general store, casting eyes on Chess’s backside with the same interest Chess would have shown his, had their positions been reversed.
Hadn’t been for all that yammer, Chess might’ve seen Doc Glossing for what he was at the outset. Which was bad enough, and explained why his natural urge to shun even smallish cities had grown so almighty strong—get him and Morrow back out under a clear sky with enough miles ’round him to see horizon in every direction, and Chess felt immediately easier, if not a damn whit safer. But then things would start going in the opposite direction, a telescope reversed; every particle of “empty” country growing porous-sharp, leaking information like water, leaching memory like chalk. And letting in a whole new flood of voices which settled on him locust-loud, showing him things he didn’t know how he knew, and didn’t need to, either.
Songbird scrying in a dish of mercury and fingering the scar he’d given her, bright red on her ghost-pale face. . . .
Some band of Injuns riding fast enough to raise dust, with a warrior at their head whose face he almost felt he should know, if only from someone else’s memory. . . .
Doc Asbury in his travelling laboratory, throwing lightning between two steel balls—Pinkerton in his private train-car, scribbling dispatches—faceless agents dispersed to the wind, carrying all Chess and Morrow’s particulars in their pockets—red Weed growing wild, constantly turning its many floral heads at once to search out Chess’s scent, and re-orienting itself accordingly. . . .
While deep underground, Mictlan-Xibalba roiled like a crock-pot, throwing up cracks and sickness . . . and to the north, that city grew: dark spires rising, mortared with spells and pain; Lady Ixchel looking down on it all, her empty face
the moon set high above. While at her side stood an amused shadow, tall as some blood-watered tree.
This was how things had been for Asher Rook, Chess now understood—just like this, the entire Goddamn time. No wonder he did them things he did, with all this forever poking at him, never letting him rest.
Across the fire, Chess could see Morrow fixing him slant-eyed, with what was getting dangerously close to outright pity. To prevent himself from punching him right in the stupidly sentimental face, therefore, Chess broke off conversation entirely and lay down, trusting the annoying bastard to eventually follow suit.
To sleep, however, was always to lay oneself even further open, the way healing and infection both cracked a wound beyond its own stitchery.
Chess’d never been much of a one for reading—could do it in a pinch, but never for fun. But the dream began with words spilling out into the air before him—silver-white on black, reversed, thorny-twisted in the Gothic style. They hung there glinting, a spray of flickery nails. And next came the voice, as ever: Rook’s rasping tones, echoing straight down into a man’s groin. Reciting, while Chess felt his unwilling gaze pulled along those floating letters—
. . . His cheeks are like beds of spice
Yielding perfume
His lips are like lilies
Dripping with myrrh
His arms are like unto rods of gold
Set about with chrysolite
His belly is like unto polished ivory
Set about with lapis lazuli
His legs are like unto pillars of marble
Set on bases of pure gold
His body is like unto Lebanon
Choice as its cedars.
—Song of Solomon, 5:13 to 5:15.
Adding: That’s you, Chess, sin and ruinous doom incarnate. And quite the prettiest thing I ever saw in my whole life, too—before, or after.
Chess saw the sky peel away in front of him all at once, present becoming past with one quick rip, like lifting a scab—thrusting him back from this moment to that, from dream to memory, right into Rook’s fond embrace. The two of them set up in front of some roadhouse cheval-glass, Chess perched on Rook’s lap while the Rev hugged him hard from behind, curled into the bigger man’s all-enveloping heat like a purring cat; stripped almost to his skin, with proof of desire pushing hard out the front of his small-clothes as he let Rook puppet him ’round, one hand grazing up through the red-gold fleece of Chess’s chest to tweak at a nipple even as the other sank steadily lower, always travelling the other way . . . widdershins, counterclockwise. The broad and pleasant road to Hell.
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