Merkabah Rider: Have Glyphs Will Travel

by Edward M. Erdelac

  Adon had only come with this far hoping the Rider’s friends would be out here waiting for him, that he would lead Adon to his precious scroll so that he could repossess it, or call his minions to retrieve it.

  The Rider eased the hammer down on the pistol.

  “What do you intend to do with us?” one of the guards asked nervously.

  The Rider sat down in the driver’s seat, the pistol still trained on them. He was about to order them to start walking back when Adon/Auspitz reeled suddenly away from them, stumbling a few steps off the road.

  “Let’s kill ‘em! Let’s kill ‘em all!!” he screamed.

  He put his hands to his head, groaning.

  Then he seemed to shudder. He turned to face the wagon. Just like that, he was Auspitz again. The Rider could see it, even in the moonlight. It was in his gait, in his confused expression.

  Laird moved swiftly behind him, grabbing at him.

  And then there was a boom and Auspitz’s face blew to pieces.

  The bullet continued on into Laird, driving fragments of bullet and bone into the acting superintendant’s head, just above the eyebrow. He fell with Auspitz, and blood spattered the two guards. They froze in the road for a second before scattering into the dark, chains clinking like the traces of the buckboard horse.

  The horse reared and bucked. The Rider tumbled backwards from the driver’s seat and rolled into the back of the buckboard. The impact on his broken rib nearly made him pass out.

  Two more shots rang out again, and the rifle bullets zipped overhead.

  Someone from the prison had followed them.

  But no one gave a command for him to halt or give up. No shrill police whistle, no thunder of posse hooves.

  A lone rifleman.

  Somehow, the Rider knew it must be one of the Quechans.

  Adon had sensed his presence somehow. Maybe he had seen him skulking in the dark. He had given an uncharacteristic yell, a yell he knew would instigate the Indian into shooting, and so he had killed Jethro Auspitz.

  This one wasn’t his fault. There was no way it was his fault.

  He glanced to his left and saw Auspitz lying on his belly in the road. Laird was draped across his legs, and the guards were clinking around cursing in the dark.

  Laird. He wouldn’t have been here if the Rider hadn’t taken him hostage.

  One of the guards shouted;

  “They’s only one of ‘em!”

  And the other hollered, “For Chrissake! Don’t shoot us!”

  The Rider lay in the dark, just trying to breathe.

  The Quechan was out there. One Quechan. LaChappa no doubt. Because really, with his luck who else would it be? Why was he alone?

  That didn’t matter much, because in the next minute he heard the train whistle.

  It was far off, but persistent. Approaching. A lonely shriek getting louder.

  He risked a glance, and saw the light, a shining pinprick in the night, a glimmer in the distance.

  He crawled painfully over the seat, flopping back into the driver’s seat and gripping the reins, thanking the Lord they hadn’t fallen.

  He gave the horse a resounding crack and shouted.

  The horse broke down the road. The Rider gritted his teeth and pulled the horse left. He was feeling the various agonies Croc had inflicted on him. It almost took his breath away just to command the horse. It galloped off the Devil’s Highway and the buckboard went shuddering and banging, threatening to fling him to the ground or drive his broken rib through his lung.

  The rifle cracked out twice behind him.

  He risked a look and saw a horseman barreling down the road, firing from the saddle.

  He hunkered low and snapped the reins, driving the horse mercilessly, smashing the commandment against bestial cruelty.

  He had to.

  He had a train to catch.

  The train, closer. The whistle a piping, a howling, the flickering light a juggernaut eye plowing through the dark, projecting a cone before it that burned the night away.

  The horse’s flanks glowed, the moonlight injecting its foaming sweat with a phantasmal luminescence, rendering it a ghostly horse, its neck rising and falling, mane whipping, breath coming out in ragged grunts that matched the relentless chug of the engine now coming to his ears, of his own labored inhalation.

  The slamming of the buckboard as it crested and jumped pebbly hills and came crashing down into the brushy, rock strewn troughs beneath was withering. It kept him in a prodigious sweat of constant pain. Every time the wheels jumped he feared the axle would crack, or else his body would.

  The flat, pot and pan sound of the rifle behind then, and his hat blew apart and fell away. The shot was quite close, and he chanced another look, saw the muscular form leaning low over a charging piebald, flipping the lever action on a Winchester with one hand and taking aim.

  He leaned further between his own knees, the pain excruciating, his face bathed in a chill sweat. If he passed out he would tumble right down, bash his face on the tongue and probably mash himself beneath the horse’s rear hooves or the shivering wheels.

  The horse was slowing now, but the train wasn’t. He could see impressions of the pistons working in the glow from the front of the engine now. He could count the cars. Just four, and the tender and the caboose, the latter lit up like a cabin on wheels.

  He lashed the horse again and it redoubled its flagging efforts.

  Then there was a tremendous jolt that almost pitched him. He barely held onto the reins with his intact fingers and the thumb of his wounded hand. He turned painfully around and saw the Indian LaChappa rising from his knees in the buckboard. The stubby club was in his hand.

  The Rider pulled his stolen pistol and managed to squeeze off one shot before the club came down against the barrel and sent it whipping off into the dark.

  He didn’t want to kill the man, just get him off the buckboard. He had to get to the train.

  The engine was passing, now the tender. The exhausted, maddened horse would have ploughed into the streaking baggage car then if he hadn’t pulled hard on the reins and brought it alongside the speeding train.

  LaChappa was on him then, hooting and hollering with savage excitement. He gripped the Rider’s shoulder and brought the club down, but another lurch of the rig spoiled his aim and the Rider suffered a glancing blow to his collarbone. It was enough to beat the wind out of him however, and he wheezed and fell forward, eyes rolling, lids fluttering as he fought to stay conscious.

  It was all that saved him.

  The keen eyes of the horse spied some low obstacle in its path and leapt. The buckboard couldn’t follow, and crashed into whatever it was. A low boulder or a track switch, the Rider didn’t know what. Whatever it was, it broke the already splintering buckboard to pieces.

  LaChappa lost his grip on the Rider and fell with the wreckage. The Rider held onto the reins and found himself being dragged behind the protesting horse along with the remains of the hitch, the rocks and brush tearing at his legs.

  He gave a yell to match the horse’s own and laboriously pulled himself up onto the horse’s back. The exertion on his harried lung threatened to drag him down, the pain in his twitching taped fingers making him scream as he pulled.

  The caboose was passing as he reached out for one of the iron platform rails and kicked off the dying, bellowing horse with one foot.

  It was all or nothing, safety or death in the rushing space between the train and the horse.

  The grip of his one good hand saved him again.

  He pulled himself onto the rear platform and fell over the rail in a heap. Leaning against the bars, he watched the exhausted horse fall behind, and prayed its heart hadn’t burst in its worthy chest.

  He managed to avoid the train bulls, lying flat and spent on the roof of one of the passenger cars until almost daybreak, when he crawled painfully down into the freight car and lay delirious and sweating among the crates.

  Around noontime
the train came to a hissing halt to take on water at a desert tank and a red faced conductor dragged him out from among the boxes by his collar and the seat of his pants, and flung him off the train without a word.

  The Rider lay on his face for a few minutes in silent agony before something nuzzled him in the back of the head and he looked up into the face of his own shaggy, pale onager, still wearing the pack saddle full of provisions.

  The Rider rolled on his back and grinned, in spite of all that had happened. He held the animal’s face between his hands and stroked its long jaw. His eyes leaked ecstatic tears. Was he dead? Was this another dream?

  “Where’ve you been, my friend?” he whispered, in a voice that seemed to come from the bottom of a grave.

  He lay like that until the train blew its whistle and shuddered off once more.

  He found he was chuckling uncontrollably, each gulp of air taxing his contracting ribs until the sound of the train died away, and then he stopped and sat up to see just where they were. There was only the lonesome water tank nearby, the spout still dripping, the rails stretching off to the horizon in both directions, the empty desert all around.

  Perhaps the onager had wandered to it, drawn to the smell of the water.

  “He came to us on his own,” said a familiar voice. “Led us here and then wouldn’t budge. I guess he knew you were coming.”

  The Rider looked for the source, and saw the old man in the blue velvet coat and topper, sitting on the steps of his marvelous carved vardo.

  The dusty camels were kneeling in the traces, just raising their ugly heads and blinking their long lashes groggily.

  It was all so surreal, and yet he knew it wasn’t a dream. At least, not one induced by Adon, because Adon knew nothing of Faustus Montague.

  The Rider stood slowly, achingly, leaning on the trusty animal.

  “Who’s ‘us’?” the Rider asked in a drawn, ragged voice that was almost as painful to hear as it was to muster.

  From behind the lead camel, Kabede rose from his prayer of thanksgiving, the Rod of Aaron in his hand. He smiled haltingly at the sight of the Rider’s bald head and face, not to mention his generally ragged appearance. He was much bruised and mashed from Croc O’Doyle’s treatment.

  “It is good to see you…” His voice trailed off, his struggling smile failing finally. He took a step toward the Rider, concerned.

  Gone were his striking traditional clothes. As per the Rider’s half-joking suggestion, he had been westernized. He wore a wide brimmed hat and a navy blue frock over his loose cotton pants, tucked into boots. He had retained his sash with its attendant dagger and shofar, but they were partially hidden by the coat.

  Kabede noticed the attention the Rider gave his new accoutrements.

  “I caused something of a stir in Tombstone. Dick bought me this fine coat and hat,” he explained.

  The Rider leaned heavily on the animal with both hands then, a cold feeling in the pit of his stomach.

  “Where…where’s Dick?”

  “Waiting for us in Tombstone.”

  What about the letters? Had Spates mailed them to Sadie yet?

  “How did you get here?” the Rider croaked at Faustus.

  Faustus gestured to the onager.

  “He found me. I saw this…brightness out on the road one night. It was his coat in the dark. When I caught him, he still had on his pack with most of your possessions. I thought you might need looking after.”

  “And I had a dream about you,” said Kabede. “The Angel of Dreams told me to find you. After I left Tombstone, I found them both on the road.”

  “He’s a remarkable animal. Do you trust me now?” Faustus asked.

  The Rider shrugged.

  “They’ll all be after me,” croaked the Rider. “It’s not safe to travel with me.”

  “You can’t very well travel alone,” Faustus said. “You’re a mess, Rider.”

  As if in agreement, the Rider fainted dead away.

  Episode Thirteen - The Fire King Triumphant

  “There are two things we need to discuss,” Faustus said, as he packed the last of the camping gear into its niche in the vardo.

  It was strange, but the Rider had noticed in the past week that no matter how much gear Faustus managed to stow into the numerous hutches inside the wagon, there was always ample space, though the dimensions of the interior did not change in any way. Rifles slid lengthwise into spaces that shouldn’t have accommodated them. Oversized boxes fit on tiny shelves. He detected no visual change in anything, but the ornate gypsy wagon seemed to have an infinite capacity.

  The Rider now trusted this strange man from another universe, despite his former lack of candor in regards to his brother, Misquamacus. Kabede did not fully yet, but it seemed he was coming around.

  The Rider and Faustus had come to the same understanding; if there was hope for stopping The Hour of Incursion, it lay with Kabede. He was a tzadik.

  Kabede was still rigid in his dedication to the traditions he had been raised in. The Rider felt a little worldlier now, though he envied Kabede’s simpler, more honest belief. The Lord was not the Lord he knew, not precisely. Not if Adon had told the truth, and he felt somehow that he had.

  Maybe it was better that Kabede cling to his simpler ways. There was no doubt in the younger man. That unshakable faith would serve him.

  “The first,” Faustus said, “is Adon.”

  “I’ve told you everything he told me.”

  Everything. Even more than he had told Kabede, because frankly, Kabede didn’t need to know Adon’s thoughts on the origins of the Lord and Creation. In the three weeks they had spent laid up in camps, moving slowly in the direction of Tombstone by a circuitous route while he recovered from his beating at the hands of Croc O’Doyle in the Yuma Penitentiary, he had had ample time to discuss Adon’s revelations with both of them.

  At first he had wanted to drive them away from him, sure Adon and his Creed would be on his trail. But Faustus had assured him no power Adon commanded could find him while he was within the vardo, and no one could physically track them either. Miraculously, its tyres left no ruts, its camels no tracks. Even the onager left no trail when it was tied to the vardo.

  He still felt it was urgent to get to Tombstone. Kabede had told him that when he and Belden had arrived and sought out Sadie Marcus in the hopes that Spates had mailed her the translated letters between Adon and Sheardown, they had found her living in a boarding house. She had given them a sealed letter from Professor Spates himself saying he was staying in the Grand Hotel with the linguistics colleague he had spoken of, a mister W.C. Rice. They were prepared to remain there until the Rider himself came to speak to them about the letters. He and Kabede had not yet agreed to tell Faustus any of that. As far as the old man knew, they were only going to pick up Dick Belden.

  “Yes, but I want to talk about Adon himself,” said Faustus. “You say he induced and invaded your dreams.”

  “Yes,” the Rider affirmed. “Until Ragshiel woke the world and flushed him out.”

  Kabede and Faustus had both experienced the same dream of tremendous drums the guards and inmates at Yuma had complained about that night. Every sleeper on earth had, apparently.

  “Have you ever experienced anything like such a being?” Kabede asked. He respected Faustus’ knowledge if nothing else.

  “I have,” Faustus agreed. “It’s a formidable power I have seen the Old Ones grant some of their servants. But everything comes with a price. You say all your life you knew him as this man Auspitz, but he possessed the prison official Laird as well?”

  “Yes.”

  “You said you knew Laird was Adon as soon as you saw him?”

  “I said as soon as he spoke. In Aramaic.”

  “You told me it was as soon as you saw him.”

  The Rider paused. Had he said that? Yes, he had. Had he known Adon on sight? He didn’t remember thinking it at the time, but there had been something in Laird’s eyes that had fel
t familiar to him.

  “I could tell when he occupied Auspitz again from his expression.”

  “Think back, Rider,” Faustus urged. “Did they have any similar physical characteristics?”

  The Rider pondered for a minute.

  “Well Auspitz had a full beard and Laird didn’t. There was something around their eyes that was the same, yes. I assumed it was Adon looking out.”

  “Once I met a man who could possess dreamers,” Faustus said, lighting his pipe, the rich heavy smell filling the closeness of the vardo. “But while he could invade anyone’s dreams, he could not possess just anyone. Only compatible hosts.”

  “Compatible how?” Kabede asked.

  “Blood relations. Even distant relatives,” Faustus said. “The family thought him a curse, but like electricity through copper, his spirit could only be conducted through compatible blood, so that was why he haunted them, as it were. Tell me Kabede, did Elisha ben Abuyah have a son?”

  “The Midrash doesn’t say,” Kabede said.

  “Even a brother or a sister?”

  “I don’t know,” Kabede shrugged.

  “You mean to say that Adon can only possess his own descendants?” the Rider asked.

  “It may be.”

  “But Auspitz and Laird weren’t related.”

  “Adon has been around for two thousand years,” Faustus said. “While possessing a relative, he very well could have sired children outside his own family to extend his influence. Sort of an investment in his own future. Like buying a summer cottage.”

  “So Auspitz and Laird could have both been descendants of Elisha ben Abuyah and not know it?”

  “It’s certainly possible,” Faustus said gravely.

  “He could have relatives all over the world,” Kabede exclaimed.

  “Again, possible. But the thinner the blood, the less stable the possession. If he did not actively maintain his bloodline all over the world, those descendant lines would eventually become diffuse and inadequate for his purposes. He is still only a spirit. He cannot traverse the earth instantaneously. He is bound by geography both earthly and celestial. And right now, in this region, we know he has two less avenues of escape.”