The Mexican fell back and put a bullet in the ceiling.
The Rider sprung, the tenth Solomonic seal for resisting enemies in the palm of his left hand, the fourteenth for the protection of the Divine against all evil in his right.
He tackled the shed to the floor and straddling him, thrust the coin-sized talismans against his eyes, and called out the sixth verse of Psalm 109, forward and backwards in Hebrew:
“Set thou a wicked man over him; and let Satan stand at his right hand!”
It wasn’t Shamblaparn, and there was no prerequisite prayer quorum. It was a prayer normally prescribed for exorcising dybbukim, but with the amulets it did the trick. Though they were cool to the Rider’s touch, the shed’s eyes immediately began to pour smoke and sizzle, and he screamed and convulsed, dropping his rifle and trying to pull the Rider off. The Rider kept on though, and leaned forward, locking even his knees around the Mexican shed’s torso. Soon his fingers and hands sunk into the man’s eye sockets, the flesh seeming not only to melt but to physically retreat from the two seals, until the wards touched the floor on the other side of the shed’s head and his skull crumbled away and fell into a murky pool.
The Rider extricated his dripping hands from the mess and flung the fragments away.
That was fine, but he couldn’t wrestle them all.
Then he saw the stick of dynamite the other shed had dropped. It had rolled into the back hallway.
“Come on,” he shouted at Haddox and Emory as the hinges flew off the front door and the kitchen table groaned across the floor.
Haddox turned awkwardly to pull Emory, hopping on his one leg, but the Rider intervened and scooped her up into his arm.
He rushed down the hall, pausing only to snatch up his pistol and jam it into his pants.
Haddox was hopping as fast as he could behind.
“Come on! Come on!” the Rider urged.
There was a smash in the kitchen as the shedim broke the table barring the door to pieces.
The Rider ran to the back door and picked up the stick of dynamite. He looked around madly. He had no light.
Haddox got to the doorway and took Emory from his arms, saw the dynamite and without a word stumbled off the back porch with her.
The Rider dropped to his haunches and pried one of the shedim’s pistols from their dead hand.
The first to enter the hallway was Mazzamauriello. He saw the pistol in the Rider’s hand and ducked back around the edge of the kitchen doorframe as the gun went off, thinking he was being shot at.
The muzzle of the pistol hadn’t been pointed down the hallway. The Rider had held it against the end of the fuse, and the flame from the barrel flicked out and sparked it to life.
Mazzamauriello peered around the edge of the doorway, one of his nickel plated .36 revolvers in hand. His eyes widened, and he held the pistol up in his open hand, placatingly.
“Rider,” he called. “Wait.”
The Rider’s only answer was to fling the dynamite stick down the hallway and run.
The dynamite went end over end over Mazzamauriello’s head, and he ran too, pumping his small arms and legs as hard as he could, propelling himself down the hallway, racing up the walls in his haste and fright.
Behind him, the stick landed in the kitchen and rolled to the toe of a shed called Puzzolente’s boot. The man was extremely tall and thin, and he blinked at the sparking thing as his brothers and sisters around him retreated, trying to shove their way three at a time through the front door or unbolt the shutters and wriggle through the windows.
Puzzolente picked up his size twenty foot and stomped down on the fuse as hard as he could. The little light died, and he permitted himself a grin.
“It’s alright,” he said to the others.
Then the spark reemerged from the other side of his boot and slipped into the stick of dynamite like a rabbit retreating into its hole.
Puzzolente’s smile fell.
The front of the Haddox home blew open with a tremendous clamor, sending the roof and bits of wood and metal and limbs and organs streaking into the sky, to come crashing down on the flaming woodpile that surrounded it. The whole place was a burning mass of dead wood now.
Lilith’s nostrils flared and her scarred cheeks grew wet as she detected another familiar scent curling through the rest, a sweet odor that took her back to the fire at the Bird Nest in Tip Top which had cost her her favorite son, her beauty, and her hair.
“Goddamn you, Rider,” she hissed, and moved to the driver’s seat of the buggy. She took up the coach whip as over her shoulder, she heard the sounds of men’s voices and galloping horses coming down the road from Yuma.
“Goddamn you!”
She lashed the rumps of the horses savagely, letting the buggy sweep her off into the cool dark night, away from the climbing flames that stung her burnt flesh with the pain of bitter memory.
Haddox and Emory had been knocked flat by the explosion of their home, and the little girl was unconscious.
When the Rider came over, Haddox was hefting her onto his shoulder.
“Let me help you,” he said.
“Don’t need, it don’t want it. You wanna help me, help me find Robert and Nemmy.”
The Rider swallowed. “Robert…is dead.”
Haddox froze.
“What?”
“I found him in the woodpile down near the river,” the Rider said quietly. “Over there.”
He pointed, and Haddox went lurching off, heedless of his burns, or the weight of the limp little girl, or his missing leg.
The Rider moved to accompany him when he heard a groan from behind.
He followed it to a small dark lump on the ground, bristling with slivers of wood and shuddering in the tattered remains of a pinstriped coat and red filigreed silk vest.
The Rider went through his own pockets, then slowly took off his coat.
“Maz-za-mauri-ello,” he said slowly, accentuating the syllables in an almost sing-song voice. He spread his coat on the ground beside the burned, stunned dwarf. He must have been blown entirely clear.
The dwarf rolled on his back and opened one eye. The other was bruised or burned shut.
The Rider took hold of the dwarf’s ankle and dragged him onto the coat, then began to gather the ends and sleeves in a makeshift sack.
“What do you intend to do, Rider?” the dwarf stammered hoarsely, struggling to sit up.
The Rider said nothing, but as he drew the sack closed, he held his fist over the opening, seeing the small black face glaring up at him from its depths in the flickering light from the fires.
He opened his fist, and the talismans fell, their golden facets twinkling like coins.
Mazzamauriello held up his small hands and the Rider drew the crude sack shut and hoisted it over his shoulder.
He walked towards the river, ignoring the dwarf’s muffled protests.
As he walked, he began to recite the sixth verse of Psalm 109, backwards and forwards, over and over again.
By the time he reached the riverbank, the little shed’s screaming had stopped, and the smoking coat sack was wet against the small of his back. He gave it a swing and deposited the whole mess as far out in the middle of the river as he could.
He watched the black remains of his coat turn as it was caught up in the current, and move swiftly down the river into the dark. It took his talismans too. He would have to make more. Kabede could help him.
He could be of use after all. He could help Kabede. It had been selfish and delusional for him to come here. Lilith would be more wrathful than ever before. They knew of Kabede by now. DeKorte had surely told them. They would be looking for him, and the Rider would be there. He would fight alongside Kabede for as long as he could.
When he turned, Nehema was standing there, the light of the fire shining through her cotton shift. She looked like what she was: an angel of hell, beautiful and terrible amid the rising cinders and the snap and pop of blazing rubble. She had h
er wig on again, and the night breeze that made the flames swirl in turgid designs so too stirred her artificial locks, likely cut from the head of some witless madwoman and woven to complete her illusion.
“I never cared for Mazzamauriello,” she said. “He was Agrat’s brat. Always scheming. He had a pretty voice though…did you have to kill the rest?”
The Rider stared at her, drinking her in.
“Did you have to kill the boy?” he asked quietly.
She was the only one in the woodyard. It wasn’t possible that the shedim had gotten to Robert first. Now, her careless expression confirmed it. How had he convinced himself that he loved this thing before him? He had burned himself so badly in adoration of her twisted heart.
“You killed him, Rider,” she said. “When you refused to help me escape. That’s what you came here for, remember?”
“What do you think Harry will do when he find out?”
She shrugged.
“It will break his poor, loving heart. He will kill me. This body’s wearing a bit thin anyhow. I could do with a trip to the home fires.”
“He won’t ever love again,” the Rider said aloud, mostly to himself. “Even Emory will suffer for it.” So much loss in one life. He might even kill himself, he thought.
“I’m going to tell him now,” she said. “I just wanted to say goodbye, Rider.” She looked back at the climbing flames.
A gaggle of men from town had arrived, the fire brigade presumably, and they were yelling back and forth at each other in the light of the yard, not doing much of anything to fight the inferno.
When she turned back to the Rider he was right before her. He had closed the distance silently. She hadn’t heard him, and when the knife rammed home just beneath her ribcage, the enchanted point angling up and pricking her heart, she appeared genuinely surprised.
She fell against him, and stroked his beard affectionately.
“Thank you, Rider.”
She kissed his cheek gently, and her head fell against his shoulder.
The Rider eased her body down, and let her lay crumpled on the dark earth. She did not erode or melt away like the shed. She was just a dead woman. No. He had to remember she was not just a woman. The corrupt spirit that animated this form was gone, he knew. Back to hell, where she could report to her master Lucifer all that had happened, and rest for a few hundred years till she could manifest a new earthly form.
He looked at her lying there in the night, gilded by the fire. She remained beautiful, as if sleeping. He imagined this was how she might’ve looked had he woken up beside her some still morning, or rose in the deep of night to put his ear on his fist and watch her.
He felt sick, and turned back to the river to wash her blood from his hand.
Harry Haddox was standing there, leaning on a piece of wood, his eye pinched in anger and spilling tears, seeming to bleed fire. Emory was thankfully still unconscious against his shoulder. The Rider could see the rising and falling of her chest.
Haddox’s mouth was in a tight, trembling line, like a tense wire, or a bowstring set to release.
“Harry,” the Rider said, conscious of the bloody knife in his hand. He ached for the man, ached for what he had seen and what the Rider could never hope to make him understand.
“Over here, boys,” he bellowed, his shoulders trembling, the tears coursing down his face, into that angry beard.
The Rider looked back over his shoulder.
Men were running down from the burning house. Men with guns.
“What’s goin’ on here, Haddox?” called a deep voice.
The Rider sighed and turned to meet them. The firelight shone on his bloody knife and the body of the woman at his feet.
One of the shadow men stepped forward, and the Rider saw a glittering star on his chest just before the barrel of a pistol snaked out and struck him above the eyebrow, knocking him into oblivion.
His dreams were a roiling vortex of blurred images and faces. He saw Mazzamauriello, and the Indian shed, and Harry Haddox, and Robert, and Emory, and Reverend Lessmoor clapping his hands, and the Chinese girl from Delirium Tremens, and the girl in the market who was Nehema, and Sadie tearful, thankful, and the boy from Polvo Arrido, and Rabbi Belinski raising a cup of wine and shouting “Mazeltov!” at his Bar Mitzvah. Abe Lillard was lying dead from a Texas sharpshooter’s bullet and Dick Belden was pulling him up by the collar and yelling for him to get his ass moving. Kabede was looking out on the Valle del Torreon, and there was his mother and father on the day he left for The Sons and then the angel who had walked with him through the hekhalots, and she looked pained, and she tilted her head and stroked the long locks from the sleeping face of The Child of Calamity, who was sprawled on his back in her lap like a pietà.
She looked at him and opened her mouth to speak, and someone was singing.
He opened his eyes and saw a stone ceiling.
A man’s voice was singing Sweet Betsy from Pike.
He rose slowly, and felt his head. A deep gash had been stitched shut over his right eyebrow, and another over his left. He must have looked sort of comical.
He was in his shirtsleeves, his pockets emptied, his pistol and knife gone.
He sat up on a rope cot and swung his boots to the floor. His head was pounding, and he put his hands against his temples and looked between his knees at a cockroach scurrying across the dirty floor.
The singing man must have heard his boot heels as the Rider heard a creak of a chair and footsteps.
A burly looking man, about the same shape as the one who had hit him, stood there in a dark vest and rolled up blue shirtsleeves, a badge marking him as a Territorial Marshal. He was in his late thirties or early forties, and had a hardcase look about him, a drooping mustache that made him perpetually frown, above a well groomed goatee. His blue eyes were bright as robin’s eggs, but there was nothing cheery about them as they regarded the Rider.
“Know where you are?” he asked gruffly.
The Rider stared at the black iron bars of his cage. He could easily guess.
He nodded.
“Guess you know why then.”
There was no point in arguing his innocence. He wasn’t innocent. He had for all intents and purposes murdered a woman in front of witnesses.
“What’s going to happen?”
“You’ll be tried and sentenced.”
The Rider looked up at him.
“Sentenced to hang?”
“Oh, don’t worry. We ain’t uncivilized here. No, we ain’t gonna stretch your neck. Got a nice big prison up on the hill. Maybe you seen it comin’ in. They’re expanding every day. Got a need for laborers, and knifin’ a woman to death in front of her husband signs you on for twenty, twenty five years at the very least, probably life. That’s if Harry Haddox don’t decide to come in here and invalidate your contract first.” He sipped his coffee.
The Rider stood up slowly and came to the bars.
The marshal took a dutiful step back, but out of good sense, not fear.
The Rider gripped the cool iron and winced. He’d forgotten his broken fingers. They were stiffly bound up with surgical tape. He laid his aching head against them. It was hot in here.
“How is Harry Haddox?”
“That’s a helluva thing for you to ask.”
“How’s his little girl? Emory?”
The marshal’s look hardened.
“You’d do well to cut that talk.”
The Rider shook his head.
“I mean, is she alright?”
“She’s fine,” the marshal said, looking at him sideways now. “What happened out there? Haddox says a whole gang of riders blew up his place, shot his wooden leg out from under him. The little girl says it too. We found twelve horses and some burned up remains all over the place. Haddox said they came there asking for you.”
The Rider shrugged. What point was there in going to any of that? The shedim were dead and he had still murdered Nehema.
“Wh
at about Robert Haddox? Am I being charged with killing him?”
“Why would you be?” said the marshal. “It’s plain that he fell off one of them woodpiles, or maybe a horse during the shootout. How else could his head get twisted ‘round like that? No, you’ll go down for Nemmy Haddox and that’s all. Unless there’s somethin’ about Robert’s death you wanna tell me.”
The Rider said nothing.
The marshal studied the Rider for a moment.
“I’m supposed to ask your name. For the court papers.”
“Joe Lillard,” said the Rider.
“Funny,” said Books. “Harry Haddox says you gave him the name Joe Rider. And the little girl says you’re her uncle.”
The Rider said nothing again, though he cursed himself for having used that name. Now it was inevitable that he’d be traced to his New Mexico warrant.
“What’s your name?” he asked the marshal.
“Books,” said the marshal. “Haddox said you knew his wife, but he didn’t claim no kinship.”
“I knew her. We weren’t kin.”
“She owe you money?”
“No.”
“Jilt you?”
“No.”
“Then what’d you kill her for?”
The Rider shrugged. “You wouldn’t believe me.”
Marshal Books scratched his nose and went back to his office out front.
“Between you and your Maker now, I guess,” he called, settling back into his protesting chair.
“Yes,” said the Rider, closing his eyes. “I guess it is.”
The Rider turned away and went back to the cot.
Episode Twelve - The Man Called Other
At thy rebuke they fled; at the voice of thy thunder they hasted away. They go up by the mountains; they go down by the valleys unto the place which thou hast founded for them. Thou hast set a bound that they may not pass over; that they turn not again to cover the earth. —Psalms 104:7-9
On his second afternoon in the county jail across the street from the Yuma courthouse, the Rider watched the double funeral possession through his barred window as it bore the bodies of Nehema and Robert Haddox in their coffins up to the military cemetery at Fort Yuma. Though he glimpsed the tearful little Emory Haddox in the arms of a woman he didn’t know, he saw nothing of her father, Harry.
Merkabah Rider: Have Glyphs Will Travel Page 29