The Six-Gun Tarot

by R. S. Belcher

  Earl sobbed; he loosened his grip on the gun.

  Auggie turned so he could see his captor’s face. “You know I understand how it is to lose someone, Earl, yes? When Gertie passed, I thought I had died along with her. I still wish I had most days.”

  “But … but isn’t that her singing, upstairs? Singing along with the music box?” Earl groaned. Auggie’s face paled, his mouth opened, but nothing came out.

  “There … there’s no one singing, Earl,” Highfather said softly. “Gert’s passed. Daisy is gone too. I’m sorry, but that is the way of it. People die. It’s sad but—”

  “Shut up!” Earl screamed. “You dumb sumbitch! You don’t know what they do up there on that mountain, do you, Sheriff? It’s tossing and turning! It eats the heart of the world, like a worm burrowing an apple! Maybe the preacher’s right and my faith is just shivering, weak—is it wrong for me to try to keep them from hollowing me out from inside? I should just blow all of you stupid bastards back to Kingdom Come, while it’s still there! Before they burn down Heaven and feast on the corpse. Maybe we should all die now, better that way!”

  Highfather edged closer. He managed to maneuver the old man so his back was to the counter.

  “People die, Earl, up on the mountain, down in the valley; everyone dies.”

  “Everyone but you, Jon,” the old man muttered.

  Everyone but me,” Highfather said. “You’ve heard the stories, haven’t you, Earl? The stories about me?”

  “They say you sold your soul to the Devil, Jon; that’s what they say.”

  Highfather moved closer to Earl. He held the old man’s gaze with his voice, his shimmering gray eyes. Behind them was a faint click. Earl didn’t notice it.

  “I’ve heard that one too, Earl, heard all of them. They tried to kill me back in the war, Earl. Strung me up on the end of a hangman’s rope. Three times, want to see?”

  Highfather pulled back the bandana and tugged down the collar of his shirt. Three lines of ugly, striated scars crisscrossed each other around the sheriff’s neck. Their gruesome orbits intersected and blurred into pale raised scar tissue at different points all around his throat.

  “See, Earl. That shotgun can’t kill me. Nothing on this earth can kill me. Now you give it to me right now, or I swear on the gallows tree, I’m going to take it away from you.”

  Earl froze, his eyes locked on the scars. “Dead man, they say you’re a walking dead man.… Not your time—”

  Highfather grabbed the shotgun by the smooth, oily barrel. Earl yanked, screamed and pulled the triggers. Highfather’s thumb jammed one of the hammers, even as he twisted to avoid the blast directly in front of him. The shotgun’s roar filled the universe, filled everything, with heat and light and acrid smoke. Highfather could barely perceive anything. He felt the pain in his hand and a burning, then numbness in his side. The shotgun clattered to the floor and Auggie was diving for it. Earl was in Highfather’s face, pale, with tears running down his rheumy eyes.

  “See,” Highfather croaked, “told you.”

  Mutt was over the counter, spinning Earl around and pinning his arms. The boy, Jim, came crashing through the front door, the Colt steady in his hands as he swept the place left to right.

  The Indian looked at Highfather. “You okay? You hit?”

  Highfather could barely make out the words over the pain and ringing in his ears, like a water glass vibrating, humming. He looked down to see a smoking hole in his barn coat. It went in about six inches above his belt and exited in the back. His shirt was blackened on that side and the flesh underneath was blistered and sore, but the slug had passed by, missing cutting him in half by inches. If the other barrel had fired, it would have ripped right through him.

  “I’m okay. Good thing he wasn’t firing shot, and I managed to block the right hammer, huh?”

  “Luck still holding,” Mutt said. “You count on her being there too damn much.”

  “Not my time yet,” Highfather said.

  “Thanks, Jon,” Auggie said, eagerly pumping the sheriff’s hand while Highfather pulled up his collar and once again hid his neck. “The poor old fella is balled up something terrible, yes?”

  Highfather winced, but tried to ignore the pain that was beginning to filter into his nerves from the powder burns on his flank. He shook Auggie’s hand and steadied himself on the counter.

  “We’ll be pressing charges for the firearms discharge in the town limits and the assault, Auggie. Do you want to file any charges for the destruction of property?”

  “I know I should, but Gert always says to turn the other cheek. So, no, I will not press the charges.”

  “I’m sorry we had to bring Gertie up, Auggie. He was just so … well, I hope you understand it weren’t anything speaking to her character at all. I was just trying to spook him.”

  “No, Jon, no. You are good man. Gert, she always like you.”

  Mutt led Earl outside. The old man was still raving, but when he looked out onto the street amidst the whoops and cheers of the townsfolk he seemed to pause, as if he was seeing something, hearing something, fitting the pieces in his head.…

  “Jon, you’ve got to stop them! Stop them, I tell you! They sing terrible songs, Jon, horrible songs! The worms! They’re coming, Jon. Worms, eating to the core of us. They eat life, they will eat up time and reason and then they will eat the light! They’ll eat the light, Jon! Please, Jon, you’ve got to stop them, stop me, stop him!”

  Mutt pulled Earl aside, wrestled his arms behind him, again, and applied a pair of iron cuffs to his wrists.

  Highfather placed a hand on Mutt’s shoulder. “This is the third person off the ridge to go bughouse crazy in the last few weeks.”

  The Indian nodded as he struggled to keep Earl from twisting loose of his grasp. “You think someone is running bad hooch up there again?”

  “Don’t know. Earl’s breath don’t smell like whiskey; neither does his clothes. I want you to head up there to the ridge tomorrow. See if anyone is brewing up anything they shouldn’t be.”

  “Get right on it, boss,” Mutt said, then,“What about the kid?”

  Highfather regarded Jim carefully, like he was weighing his soul. After a long pause he asked, “Jim, you looking for work?” He took the gun out of the boy’s hand.

  “Yessir, and a place to stay.”

  “All right, come on back to the jail with us and we’ll see what we can do about that.”

  “Thank you, sir,” he said as he handed the sheriff his gun belt.

  Highfather watched the boy leading his horse by his reins, back around the corner to the jail. Mutt and their mad prisoner walked beside them. The deputy paused to watch Maude Stapleton gather up her long hair and hide it under her bonnet. Their eyes met and held for too long to be healthy. Mutt finally nodded and tipped his hat. Maude hurried away with her daughter trailing behind her.

  Highfather handled the crowds and the incessant demands for retelling of what happened inside the store with as few words and descriptions as possible. Several noted the bullet hole and whistled. He knew many of them were whispering again that Golgotha had a walking dead man for a sheriff, a lucky corpse, two steps and a handshake ahead of death. But he knew the truth behind all the myths and the tall tales.

  He looked up to Argent Mountain—Golgotha’s empty promise. Home to human hangers-on: lost souls in tents and shanties, setting up there in the kingdom of broken dreams, poisoned rotgut and busted silver veins.

  And he felt, more than saw, something up there. Something that shambled more than walked, something that drove good men mad and mad men to murder. Something unnamed, vast and terrible in its comprehension.

  This was the beginning. Of what, he still did not know, but he had best figure it out before the killing started up again. These things always ended with killing.

  He looked down his Main Street. Life was back to normal. Argent was just a mountain again, not a squatting alien colossus, threatening to rise and crush his to
wn. The people went about their business, and why shouldn’t they? The sheriff was back and the bad guy was on his way to jail. End of story.

  Highfather limped down the sidewalk, wincing at the pain in his side. He looked at the charred hole in his jacket and shook his head in regret.

  Third one ruined this month.

  The World

  He rode a steed of divine fire across the Fields of Radiance in search of the truant angel.

  His mount was one of the Equina, a proud and beautiful steed whose every stride covered what would one day be known as parsecs. It was rumored that the Lord had decided to infuse the essence of the Equina into one of the new beasts that would reside on the sphere known as Earth, much as He had once remarked that He might distill His own essence into the beast to be known as man. The angel tried to imagine such sights—lesser, pale forms of universal absolutes hacked from crude matter, but like many in the Host, he was a little short on imagination. The concept troubled him even if he did not fully understand it.

  If not for his mission he would have enjoyed the ride out across the fields. Heaven, its newly raised great arch, stood at his back. Even though work upon the Earth had been delayed by the war, the Almighty was insistent that Heaven’s progress continue unabated.

  He felt the arch at his back and it comforted him, quelling his unease about the mission to create and populate the Earth with reflections of the divine. He was a warrior of the Ninth Choir, Fifth Host. He believed in the will of God, in the vision of the Almighty and the properness of the advancement of Heaven’s influence. He had slain in God’s name and was proud of the fact. He was building a better world and that world sang to him and soothed him. God had named him Aputel.

  In the passage of time Aputel came to the edge of the Radiance, where the Darkness still held dominion, and there he found Biqa. The angel was well suited to this brooding place. Unlike his fellow, Biqa’s countenance reflected the bleak shadows of this most hated of places—a common trait of the Third Host. Here Heaven’s light and song were distant echoes. This was a place of silence and cold, far too close to the enemy’s domain for Aputel’s taste.

  “There you are!” Aputel shouted as he reined his mount to stop beside the other angel’s Equina. “Everyone was looking for you. Did you not heed Gabriel’s horn? The battle is upon us.”

  “Yes, I know. The final battle.”

  “Then why are you here?”

  “I have no stomach for it, Aputel. No desire to take part in ending, murdering, an entire breed of creature.”

  “Murdering? Biqa, there is no murder here—those creatures are an abomination.”

  “To who? God?”

  “Well, yes, actually. He has great plans, good plans, and those things were just going to ruin everything.”

  Biqa stared out into the Darkness. “So, God says, ‘Let there be light,’ and when there is, He sees that the darkness is full of these … beings, all coiled and slumbering together. It’s difficult to tell where one of them ends and the next begins. And because of that, because His ideas, His will, did not plan for such a thing, they all must be destroyed. Why can He not change his plans?”

  Aputel furtively glanced back toward Heaven.

  “Keep it down; do you want someone to hear you?”

  “I no longer care.”

  “That much is obvious. God is our creator, Biqa, the creator of all things. His will, His plan, must be done.”

  “His future is built on the bones of the past. His Heaven is being constructed from the husks of those dead things—you know that, don’t you? Our homes are the corpses of those things in the Darkness. His precious Earth is being built of the same cadaverous matter as well.

  “His will is not infallible, His dominion not absolute. He didn’t create them, did He?”

  “Most of us doubt they are truly alive; they may well be some kind of parasitic canker on the walls of eternity. Why does it matter?”

  “They fight too well, too craftily, too savagely to be unaware,” Biqa said. “They fight to win, to survive, and that scares Him.”

  “Silence!” Aputel cringed awaiting the blistering presence of the Almighty, but it did not come. “You speak blasphemy! The Lord fears nothing.”

  “Then why did He banish the Darkness? Why did He make us? Why does He plan to create an entire universe of doppelgangers to worship Him?”

  Aputel was silent. His own annoying concerns on the ride out returned to him, but he kept his own counsel.

  Biqa nodded. “He was afraid of being alone. A natural enough fear, one we can all understand, surely. But after He was no longer alone He grew fearful of losing control of it all, of no longer being the one whose thoughts and feelings, moods and whims mattered the most in the entire cosmos. He has become obsessed with the Voidlings—they represent something He cannot control and didn’t create. And for that crime, they must all be obliterated so that His glorious new universe may proceed along, unhindered.”

  “But, but they are so, so unnatural,” Aputel said. “I mean they hate, us, Biqa—surely we have as much right to endure, our way to endure, as they do. Surely.”

  Biqa smiled, a sad, fleeting thing. “I hate them too. I’ve seen them rip apart my brethren, my friends, and feast on their ichor, like wine. No, Aputel, we are invested now. It’s war. I just blame Him for making us to fight and suffer and die in His place; I blame Him for creating more and more layers of control and isolation between Himself and those He creates, those He claims to love.”

  “Have care, Biqa; you again tempt His anger!”

  The dark angel shrugged and turned back to the yawning eternal night.

  “Mark my words, one day it will be His undoing. But today, I do my duty. I know my place and I shall serve Him and do His bidding. However, in this commission I shall not act with the zeal He breathed into us. I’ve had my fill of war.”

  “You would do well to be careful,” Aputel said gently. “Others know of your disquiet. Some say you are correct; others call you dangerous and think the Almighty should punish you. Even Lucifer has been heard speaking of the merit of your arguments.”

  “Sharp one, that Lucifer. I see why he is God’s most beloved. Best watch himself, though, if he wants to stay at the head of the table. No, my friend, I have no desire to make my concerns a cause, or my misgivings a revolt. I’m loyal and I always shall be—I give you my oath.” The angel loosened his blade in its scabbard. “Let’s get it over with.”

  “Let us be about our duty, my friend,” Aputel said eagerly, hoping to infect his dark companion with some enthusiasm for the task to come.

  The two angels turned their mounts in the direction of the battle when the Darkness began to roil. Great nebulas of dirty light bubbled up through the oily infinity. A sound vomited from the depths of the Darkness. It was unlike anything either of them had ever heard. The closest approximation to its timbre and its scope was the voice of the Almighty, singing. But this was no hymn; it was a dirge. In its annihilating cadence there was the menace of retribution, of an awful reckoning, an endless chorus of pain.

  Behind them, Heaven’s first great arch groaned, shuddered and fell. The Darkness swelled and crashed all about them; massive waves of night threatened to crash upon the shores of light, drowning everything. All that was rippled, threatened to tear, to break like Heaven’s gate, but before that point of no return was reached the noise diminished, growing fainter and less expansive until finally all of creation was once again silent and still.

  “We should get back,” Biqa said.

  The angels turned toward the glittering dust settling over Heaven’s ruins. But before they could spur their Equina on, another rider appeared across the radiant plane. It became clear as he approached it was Jophiel, one of the highest of the Hosts. He did not look happy.

  “Rejoice,” the dour angel said. “Lo, I bring you glad tidings. While you two tarried and shirked your obligations, the rest of us have tasted sweet victory in the glorious name of our Lord.
The last of the enemy has been vanquished.”

  “It has been destroyed?” Aputel said.

  Jophiel’s naturally bitter demeanor deepened before he replied. “The beast was overpowered and about to be slain when the Lord saw fit, in His infinite justice and mercy, to stay His hand of rightly deserved vengeance and to order the creature to be bound and imprisoned.”

  Aputel looked to Biqa, as if to see if this explanation satisfied the troubled angel’s mind.

  “How many?” Biqa asked Jophiel.

  “Pardon?”

  “How many of our brethren were destroyed before He realized you couldn’t kill it?”

  “What are you yammering on about now, Biqa? Perhaps it was best you were not in the fray—your judgment has been unsound as of late.”

  “I’m calling you a liar, Jophiel. Is that clear enough?”

  The Archangel darkened. His hand dropped to the hilt of his blade. “Remember to whom you speak, Biqa. To contradict my tale is to challenge the words of the Almighty Himself. The beast is to be imprisoned, locked away in chains of divine light for all time. Our losses are irrelevant. We exist to serve, to perish, as our Lord commands. Besides, if you were so concerned about your brethren you could have made your way to the battlefield.”

  Biqa shook his head. “You couldn’t kill it. It’s the oldest of them, the largest; the others seemed to suckle it like they drew dark nectar from its form. It was too old, too powerful, to ever end. What unfathomable arrogance makes you think you can keep it chained up?”

  The Archangel smiled for the first time. It was as disquieting as the turmoil earlier. “All has been attended to, you shall see. Now, I came to give you this news and to escort you, Biqa, into the presence of the Almighty, personally.”

  “Very well,” the dark angel said. “Why am I to be so honored?”

  “Do not dare to mock the privilege given unto you,” Jophiel snapped. “You are ordered to attend and you shall. That is all you need know.”

  “It is merely a question, Jophiel.”

  “Yes. You ask far too many of those for my taste, Biqa. Attend me, now. The Lord commands it.”