The Rib From Which I Remake the World

by Ed Kurtz

  Praise for Ed Kurtz

  “The Rib From Which I Remake the World isn’t only the best book I’ve read this year, it is Ed Kurtz’s best book yet. While it echoes with the shadowy threatening of Bradbury’s Something Wicked This Way Comes and the religious dread of Hjortsberg’s Falling Angel, the clearest voice here is Kurtz’s own cry into the existential abyss. This is a haunting story of seeing through illusion and the terrifying reality of what it means to meet your maker.”

  —Bracken MacLeod, author of Mountain Home and Stranded

  “A Wind of Knives dusts off the classic western’s most enduring motifs and gives them a shine. With no lack of gunplay and bloodshed, the book also has heart and intelligence. In short, Kurtz delivers an intense, gritty, and moving story that takes a new look at the Old West.”

  —Lee Thomas, Bram Stoker Award and Lambda Literary Award-winning author of The German and Ash Street

  “[Nausea is] a gritty, hard-edged tale with just the right amount of feeling, making this one hell of a story. All of Ed’s gifts are on display here: fast pacing, memorable characters and brutal action that aren’t easy to forget, but make for great reading.”

  —Terrence McCauley, author of Sympathy for the Devil, Prohibition, and Slow Burn

  FIRST EDITION

  The Rib From Which I Remake the World © 2016 by Ed Kurtz

  Cover artwork © 2016 by Erik Mohr

  Cover and interior design © 2016 by Samantha Beiko

  All Rights Reserved.

  This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are either a product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

  Distributed in Canada by

  Publishers Group Canada

  76 Stafford Street, Unit 300

  Toronto, Ontario, M6J 2S1

  Toll Free: 800-747-8147

  e-mail: info@pgcbooks.ca

  Distributed in the U.S. by

  Consortium Book Sales & Distribution

  34 Thirteenth Avenue, NE, Suite 101

  Minneapolis, MN 55413

  Phone: (612) 746-2600

  e-mail: sales.orders@cbsd.com

  Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication

  Kurtz, Ed, 1977-, author

  The rib from which I remake the world / Ed Kurtz.

  Issued in print and electronic formats.

  ISBN 978-1-77148-390-2 (paperback).--ISBN 978-1-77148-391-9 (pdf)

  I. Title.

  PS3611.U775R53 2016 813’.6 C2016-901768-0

  C2016-901769-9

  CHIZINE PUBLICATIONS

  Peterborough, Canada

  www.chizinepub.com

  info@chizinepub.com

  Edited by Samantha Beiko

  Proofread by Leigh Teetzel

  We acknowledge the support of the Canada Council for the Arts which last year invested $20.1 million in writing and publishing throughout Canada.

  Published with the generous assistance of the Ontario Arts Council.

  “He was a monster that nature had made.”

  —Clark Ashton Smith, “Monsters in the Night”

  “Sure there’s a hell . . .” I could hear him saying it now, now, as I lay here in bed with her breath in my face, and her body squashed against me . . . “It is the drab desert where the sun sheds neither warmth nor light and Habit force-feeds senile Desire. It is the place where mortal Want dwells within immortal Necessity, and the night becomes hideous with the groans of one and the ecstatic shrieks of the other. Yes, there is a hell, my boy, and you do not have to dig for it . . .”

  —Jim Thompson, Savage Night

  Prologue

  The hurdy-gurdy to the left of him and the shrill calliope to the right competed for dominance—the result being a deafening cacophony of noise without order. The fellow with the former instrument played mainly for an audience of one, the fez-topped monkey at his feet that chattered and danced to the delight of every child, and not a few adults, who passed by. Tim Davis was less impressed; he’d listened to the leathery old gypsy’s abominable wheel fiddle for days on end now, and with each day that passed it sounded worse than the day before. Two days earlier, Tim gave the gypsy a look, one that said I don’t much like you, but the old man just flashed a largely toothless smile underneath that stringy black moustache of his and said, “Is good, yes? Monkey likes.”

  Traipsing away now, his feet shuffling through dirt and sawdust, Tim revisited the notion he’d had the night before, the idea that by killing that damned monkey he’d never have to listen to the gypsy’s hurdy-gurdy again. The calliope alone he could handle. Besides, it could hardly be called a proper circus without one. Monkeys were good for circuses, too, but monkeys were easier to come by than calliopes. Tim figured he could find a monkey within a day if he really wanted to. Even here, clear out in the middle of Nowhere, Arkansas.

  He must have had a scowl on his face, because halfway between the calliope and the makeshift fence cordoning off the sideshow grounds, Lion Jack materialized like a spectre from thin air and roared, “Why the long face?”

  It was sort of joke: Tim had a squat, round face. His scowl deepened. The strongman paused, patient as ever, rubbed the back of his freshly shaven head. He looked perfectly ridiculous in the spotted fur tunic he wore, but Tim couldn’t begrudge him that—it was part of the act, just like the chrome dome. Jack had probably just come from lifting something stupendous to the delight and amazement of a tent full of gawp-mouthed local yokels. It beat the hell out of dumping sawdust on vomit, a task Tim performed a dozen or more times a day. Christ, but how those rotten kids puked.

  The strongman said, “Minerva, again?”

  Minerva, the Snake Lady—not the original Snake Lady, who suffered from some terrible skin disease that made her flesh scaly and hard, but rather a snake charmer who was really quite nice looking—had rebuffed the young carny time and again to the point of steering clear of Tim in fear of harassment. Sometimes Tim sulked for hours thinking about it. Sometimes he spied on her through the window in her little wooden trailer, watched her roll around with whatever rough-and-ready country boy she’d hooked that day. She liked them tall, lean, and dumber than dirt. Tim could play dumb, but he was doomed to be short and bony and not at all handsome. Even surrounded by freaks and monsters and not a few fugitives, Tim Davis was never a handsome man.

  “No, not that.”

  He shouldered past the colossal strongman and continued on to the gate in the fence. He unlatched it, shut it behind him, and sauntered over to the periphery of the Ten-in-One tent. The afternoon sun was sinking, a slower process than usual with close to nothing on the terrain for it to hide behind. Hal White, the Human Skeleton, was lingering outside the flaps with a cigarette dangling from his white lips and a detective magazine in his bony, translucent hands. Per usual, he was naked to the waist, proudly displaying his startlingly gaunt, colourless torso.

  “Show over?” Tim asked him.

  “Yeah. Not such a good night.”

  “Small crowd?”

  Hal nodded. “The wolf boy wouldn’t stop crying and the geek passed out drunk.”

  Tim shook his head. Hal shrugged.

  “I expect it takes a good bit of firewater to wash down all that chicken blood.”

  The skeleton jammed one of his pitch cards into the magazine to mark his place, his own hollow face peering sorrowfully over the pages as he closed it and took the cigarette from his
mouth. The card had his life story printed on the back, not one word of it true.

  “Minerva’s gone to town,” he said.

  “What town?”

  Hal shrugged some more. Every time he did it, the bones in his shoulders jutted out so sharply it was a wonder his skin could take it.

  “Besides, I don’t care about her. I want to see Harry.”

  The skeleton stabbed the air with a wretchedly thin thumb.

  “Over yonder,” he said. “In the woods again.”

  Tim knitted his brow and stared off into the distant woods before he had to watch Hal shrug again. Somewhere out there, beyond the tree line and among the scrubby, naked elms and hackberries, was the one-and-only Black Harry Ashford. Tim gestured his thanks to the emaciated man and made a beeline for the woods.

  Though he was absolutely certain he’d seen it, out there amongst the shadows cast by the thicker branches and brambles, Harry could not see it if he looked at it directly. Only from the corners of his eyes, in his peripheral vision, could he make out the dark, shapeless form loping in the woods, and only barely. At once it was decidedly human, a man, and now something like a dog, perhaps a goat. Harry could not be sure, not without peering intently at the form, at which point it vanished entirely. The whole business was frustrating in the extreme.

  The figure came in the gloaming, as it had the night before and the night before that. The first night, Harry reckoned he’d summoned it. He had the grimoire; he’d said the words.

  “Lucifero, Ouyar, Chameron, Aliseon, Mandousin . . .

  “Premy, Oreit, Naydrus, Esmony, Eparineson, Estiot . . .

  “Dumosson, Danochar, Casmiel, Hayras . . .

  “Fabelleronthon, Sodirno, Peatham . . .

  “Come Lucifer, come.”

  Seven times. Light the black candle.

  Complete rubbish.

  He was a magician, but corny parlour tricks were his bag, despite the convoluted and irrefutably false genealogy he provided his audiences at the commencement of every performance—son of an endless line of black magick practitioners, all that garbage. Without fail, he always managed to elicit some terrified expressions, usually children and old women, but then he launched right into sleight of hand and card tricks and that hackneyed fake mindreading bit with the “volunteer” from the audience, lately young Tim Davis when he wasn’t cleaning up sick. Yet if anyone thought his act was a mountain of horse shit . . .

  Utter nonsense, this book and all its babbling idiocy.

  But still—the figure . . .

  He saw it again, cantering in the falling twilight, and this time Harry was careful not to turn his head, to keep the amorphous form just in sight. Instead, he kept his eyes centred on the sigil in the loam at his knees, the sign from the grimoire, carved with the tip of a dagger:

  Dime store Merlin, he thought.

  Black Harry, indeed. Earlier, in the Ten-in-One, some hillbilly from the heath called out, “He ain’t no black!” Not in any sense, no. Yet he would say the stupid words again, and scratch the sigil in a hundred forests, because what else could he do? And what could it possibly hurt?

  A slight breeze picked up, disturbing the denuded grey and black branches which clawed at one another with witches’ fingers. Gentle at first, but cold—and when it gathered momentum it blew the sigil apart, leaving nothing but the broken loam.

  And out in the darkening recesses of the woods, the figure danced at the outermost edge of Harry’s vision, changed shape, invited the building wind.

  Come Lucifer, come.

  Tim sensed the form, too, but he dismissed it as some woodland animal, maybe a deer. For a moment he stiffened, wondering if there could be anything more aggressive in the sticks of Arkansas, a boar or a bear, but the figure was quick and skittish—not a threat. A minute later he’d forgotten all about it. His mind was set on Harry.

  The magician sat cross legged on the ground, rotted detritus surrounding him so that it looked like a man rising from his own grave. His eyes were closed and the tattered leather-bound book in his lap lay open. Tim supposed the older man was asleep. He weighed the pros and cons of waking him up.

  Then Harry’s eyes opened, so quickly that it seemed as though his eyelids had simply evaporated. Tim’s back leapt and he let out a little yelp.

  “Harry?”

  The magician’s lips parted, only slightly at first, but as his jaw unhinged the mouth formed a gaping black pit. Tim stared into the opening. He could see no teeth.

  “Harry, it’s me. It’s Tim.”

  Harry groaned softly. The sound was barely audible beneath the greater groan of the gathering wind. Somewhere behind Tim, something rustled the ankle-deep carpet of decaying leaves. He turned instinctively to investigate, and for a fraction of an instant he thought he saw somebody crouching behind the trunk of diseased-looking hackberry tree. But no one was there.

  For some irrational reason he could not quite pinpoint, Tim got the idea that the monkey had followed him out there. He grinned at the ludicrous thought. It was impossible, of course. Stupid. He turned back to Harry.

  And he gasped. Harry’s eyes were pus-yellow, the irises washed over with the jaundiced coating. His mouth was open to an impossible degree, his chin digging into his throat. A trick, Tim thought. The old bastard’s trying to scare me.

  The old bastard was doing an exemplary job of it.

  Tim made a tight knit of his brow and said, “Cut it out, Harry—the tent’s over there and all the rubes went home, anyhow.”

  He’d barely finished speaking before Harry was up and upon him, all gaping, moaning mouth and clawing fingers. Tim screamed, staggered backward. His heel jammed up against a knotted root hidden by the leaves. He collapsed to the ground, and Harry went down with him.

  It was over before either of them knew it.

  Tim Davis went back to spreading sawdust on puke and cleaning up animal shit. He did not often speak to anyone, and he never bothered Minerva again. For the most part, the circus folks—carnies, freaks, and performers alike—steered clear of the strange, silent fellow who lurched gloomily among them. And since he kept to himself, everyone was satisfied with the arrangement.

  Black Harry Ashford never came out of the woods. People came and went from circuses all the time, running away to join and then running back home when things got rough. No one much bothered to wonder what had become of the magician.

  The show went on.

  Chapter One

  Jojo fished the matchbook out of his wallet, knocking his receipt tickets from the racetrack out on the floor. He tore one of the cardboard matches free and dragged the red bulb across the sandpaper strip. It crumbled without a spark. He sighed heavily, the exhalation making the Old Gold between his lips wobble. The matches were damp from the sweat seeping through the fabric of his trousers, his shirt, even his hat. It’s gonna be a hot one, the day clerk had chirped when Jojo arrived for his shift. No shit, he’d fired back. But the kid was right—half past seven in the evening and there was nothing for the heat. Between jobs, after the force and just before the war, Jojo might have been tempted to take in a show at the Palace as he often did in those down-and-out days. The picture didn’t matter (usually it was a woman’s picture or some dopey monster show), but he’d take it all in, cartoons and all, just for the air-conditioning. He saw a lot of pictures over the course of that terrible year, all kinds, so that he got to where he could discuss them at great length with the girls who worked at the Starlight who dreamed, dumbly, of becoming starlets themselves. The only ones he ever made a point of skipping were the ones that starred Irene Dunne. She looked too much like Beth, and that only made him that much sorer at the lousy shape of things. He sat through the first fifteen minutes of Penny Serenade back in ’41 before stamping out of the theatre in a huff. Couldn’t help but feel like the screen was mocking him, daring him to do something about it.
Then last year there was that girl from the drugstore who wanted him to take her to A Guy Named Joe. Jojo gave the broad an earful and never talked to her again.

  Fucking Irene Dunne.

  He bent over and picked the race tickets up off the soiled carpet. Oaklawn had been a bust: he’d gone safe and bet on Mar-Kell and Ocean Wave to show. Neither did, and now the two pasteboard tickets were just taking up space. Superficially, he went to Oaklawn for the corned beef sandwiches. Realistically, he was infuriated that a couple of so-called sure bets couldn’t even show. For no reason at all, he slipped the tickets back into the wallet.

  Tipping his hat back on the crown of his head, Jojo withdrew the handkerchief from his coat pocket and mopped his brow. The little metal fan beside his cluttered desk stopped working weeks ago, though Mr. Hibbs, the skinflint night manager, was in no great hurry to get it replaced for him. Said there was a decent breeze on the south side of the hotel at night if he’d only open a window. Jojo opened the window. No breeze.

  He opened up a drawer in his desk, fumbled his calloused fingers past the Smith & Wesson and the faded receipts and paystubs and, yes, ticket stubs from the Palace Theater, looking for another book of matches. He found none, slammed the drawer shut. The crystal cigarette lighter on top of his desk just sat there, covered in dust and devoid of a single drop of fuel.

  “Son of a bitch,” he groused.

  He swung his legs around and stood up, ignoring the audible creak of his knees and the twinge in the small of his back. Cop complaints. But he wasn’t a cop anymore.

  The night clerk was lounging in the cashier’s cage when Jojo emerged from the stuffy office, his club foot propped up on the safe. He was reading a crumpled paperback that he held about four inches from the tip of his crooked nose. Jojo rattled the mesh wire of the cage with his knuckles.

  “Hey, Jake—you got a match?”

  “The hell I need a match for?” Jake snapped back, never taking his eyes from the book. “I don’t smoke, Jojo. You know that.”