by Tim Lebbon
Gabriel looked at me and his face seemed to break. The scars flexed and deepened, his good eye wrinkled almost shut and he let out harsh, barking coughs. It was only as he bent over and rested his hands on his knees that I realised he was laughing.
“So I guess you’re pleased.”
Gabriel looked up, crying tears and blood together. “Lad, Temple doesn’t die. There’s just too much of him.” He shook his head and sighed, wiped his face. As he stood I wondered why it had not registered before just what a huge man he was. Well over six feet tall and wide at the shoulders, his head sat like a rugged rock atop a boulder. Wounded and bloody though he was, simply the way he stood exuded strength.
“I don’t know what you mean,” I said. Demon? Doesn’t die? The guy was talking madness, and yet though I feared for my life he had me entranced. Day after day I did the same thing, served the same stuff to the same people. This was becoming an adventure.
“Most don’t,” he said, shaking his head. “It’s not easy to understand, and it’s even harder to explain. Let’s just say that Temple . . . isn’t something you want in your town. When he came in Death followed him, and before he goes it’ll have its way with some folks here. So, your friend. What’s his name?”
“Jack. And he’s not really a friend, just—”
“Good. That’s good. Means you won’t mourn him much when he dies.”
“You’re going to kill him?”
Gabriel rearranged his coat, made sure his revolvers were safe in their holsters and fixed me with his one good eye. “He’s already dead. Now show me where your undertaker works.”
We left my store and emerged onto a street less busy than normal for the time of day. The rains had stopped, and though the sun was out the street was still a quagmire of mud and horse shit. Those who did manage to cross were muddied up to their knees, and it had the effect of slowing Deadwood to a crawl.
Gabriel’s horse still lay in the muck. There was a pack of dogs worrying at the carcass, and before I could blink Gabriel had drawn his gun and shot one of them dead. Heads turned, people hurried into doorways off the street, a waft of gunsmoke drifted up to be caught and dispersed by a gentle breeze. The other dogs scampered off, whining and barking.
“Been a long way on that horse,” Gabriel said quietly. “Been through a lot.”
“Maybe we should get your saddle.”
“Don’t need it anymore.” He stepped down from the sidewalk and crossed, lifting his feet high so that his boots were not sucked off. I hesitated for only a few seconds, but it was long enough for him to turn and fix me with a bloody stare. “You not coming?” I heard no alternative so I nodded and followed.
By the time I met him on the opposite sidewalk he had frozen and was staring at the sky. “Gabriel,” I whispered, but there was no response, no indication that he had heard. The sun struck his face and he seemed to be staring right into it. The scars on his cheeks and chin stood out in stark relief, hiding no shadows in their knotty twists, and the hollowed eye socket caught sunlight and bled it back out. Blood dripped down his face and onto his coat, adding to old stains already there. He bled when he was close to Temple, he said. I wondered how many times that had been.
“Doug!” someone called, and Mrs. Harrison sauntered along the sidewalk in her old finery. She was a big woman and her weight crushed the timber boards down so that muddied water oozed up between them. Even her panting did nothing to stir Gabriel from his trance. “Doug,” she said, “isn’t the store open today? I was coming to . . .” She looked from me to Gabriel, made the connection between us and paused. “Who in Hell is that?”
“A stranger,” I said. “He asked me to show him to the stables.” I should have lied better than that, but my head was in a stir.
“Stranger? He’s trouble, Doug. I’m talking about you!” She gave Gabriel her harsh look—Mrs. Harrison was pretty fearsome when she wanted to be, which was often—but he did not respond. She looked back at me instead. “Take care, Doug,” she said. “You don’t need this sort of trouble. None of us do.” She obviously then changed her mind about visiting the store, because she turned and waddled back the way she had come.
“Gabriel!” I hissed. “Gabriel!”
Gabriel turned and frowned. “The timing’s all wrong,” he said. “It’s not quite right yet. Later today, that’ll be the time to face him.”
“I thought you wanted me to show you—”
“I’ve faced the monster before, lad,” he said, his body seeming to relax. “Every time he gives me a new scar. One day, if I’m not careful, he’ll scar me right through. So today I am being careful. The time’s not yet.”
My own curiosity was stirred now, and I looked past Gabriel and along the street to the hotel and stables. Behind them lay Old Man Newman’s place, and if what Jack had told me was true, there lay Temple. A dead stranger, that was all, not the weird demon-monster this one-eyed man made him out to be.
“Don’t be tempted,” Gabriel hissed. The sound was like a rattler kissing my ears and I shrank back, never having heard such threat in three short words. The air paused around us and movement seemed to cease, just for the instant it took for those words to leave his mouth and reach my ears. My skin went cold in the morning sun, my mouth dried, my balls shrivelled. Gabriel said no more as he turned and walked away. His manner suggested that he did not want me to follow, and I was only too pleased to obey.
With one final glance along to the stables I turned and fled back across the mud to my store. I was not one for drinking during the day, but there was a bottle of whiskey in the back room with my name on it.
After a few stiff whiskeys I opened the store an hour late. I stood behind the counter and stared out through the windows, expecting to see Gabriel at any moment. The man terrified me, with his scars and bleeding eye and those guns, but I was entranced as well. The way he spoke, the lilt of his gruff voice, the knowledge and passion and sadness in his tone could not help but draw me in. I had seen men similar to him before—they often rode into town flashing their guns and looking for trouble—but there was something that set him apart. Not his looks, but his attitude, and the fact that he seemed so driven and sure of his purpose. Vengeance empowered him, I was sure of that, and perhaps it had driven him mad with his talk of demons and monsters.
I wondered how the confirmation of Temple’s death would hit him. Perhaps it would set him free. Or maybe it would only make him more mad, but with no certain target for his insanity.
The whiskey had warmed me and gone some way to settling my nerves. Even when I saw Mrs. Harrison approaching I remained calm. She would have questions, no doubt, and she had probably already relayed news of the scarred stranger to all and sundry. Her grilling would be intensive. My head fuzzed by whiskey, I was not entirely sure that I could hold off telling her Gabriel’s tale.
She stormed into the store, shaking muck from her feet onto floor and launching straight at me. Thankfully, something else had grabbed her attention.
“Do you know who’s in town?”
“Nope.” What would she say? Temple, a monster? Temple, a dead man who can’t die because there’s just too much of him?
“Wild Bill Hickok!” she said. “Someone famous in this place for once, Doug! He’s the Prince of Pistoliers. They say he shot his deputy, you know! And he can kill five men with one bullet, he’s so quick! Do you think he’s here to put on a show, perhaps? Maybe over at No. 10’s?”
“Wild Bill Hickok?” I had heard the name and knew of the man, but his presence here disturbed me instantly. Yet another stranger in town, this one a gunslinger of dubious repute that had moved from killing into entertainment. I was young and green, but I still saw the sick irony in that.
“He killed a bear with his bare hands!” Mrs. Harrison said.
I had heard that, too. I imagined Gabriel fighting with Hickok and wondered whether the outcome would be as sure.
“Well, Mrs. Harrison, maybe we’ll see more of him over the ne
xt few days. You know how it is, people come, people go.”
“And sometimes they stay here, except underground.”
“Have you heard of any other strangers in town?” I asked.
“Other than that scarred ruffian you were with earlier?”
“He came in and asked me where he could find a place to stay,” I said. “I was only being polite showing him. Didn’t want him to think we’re an unwelcoming town now, did I?”
Mrs. Harrison looked around the store, took in the half-empty whiskey bottle, and her attention seemed drawn to the place where I had found Gabriel leaning against my counter only a couple of hours before, as if he had left a shadow of himself there. “Trouble,” she said, her usually gruff voice gentle and sad. “Men like that always bring trouble.”
You don’t know the half of it, I thought, and I was about to ask what I could get for her when she suddenly remembered my question.
“Stranger! Yes, there is another one. Old Man Newman is preparing him for burial even now. A middle-aged man named Temple, he told me, with a face smooth as a baby.”
“Two dead strangers?” I asked, thinking of Jack’s description of the corpse he had seen.
“Only one,” Mrs. Harrison said. “Don’t be greedy, Doug! Now, can you get me some of those eggs, and I’ll look at any plain material you have.”
I spent the next few minutes serving Mrs. Harrison, all the while dwelling on what she had said about the dead man called Temple. Face like leather, Jack had said. Face smooth as a baby, Mrs. Harrison had claimed. Obviously two dead men. Maybe they’d both ridden in a couple of days before, had an altercation and killed each other without anyone noticing. It happened on occasion, though usually in a town like Deadwood death was everyone’s business.
Later that afternoon Jack came into my store. He ignored me at first, choosing instead to browse my wares, picking items up now and then as if to check them over. He was the only customer. His boots clomped on the floorboards, and occasionally I heard a hint of his fast, shallow breathing.
I remained behind the counter, my hand never too far away from the shotgun I kept on a shelf underneath. Jack’s behaviour the previous day had surprised me, and maybe I could have attributed it to drink if it hadn’t been for events since then. And if I was honest with myself, Jack was a stranger too. We had become tentative friends, but he had only ridden into town six weeks earlier, and I knew so little about his past. I believed him to be harmless, but he had trouble in his eyes.
Right then, as I watched him killing time in the store, he was suddenly more unknown than ever. Seemed there were plenty of strangers in Deadwood lately, and some of them weren’t as dead as they should have been.
My hand stroked the butt of the shotgun. I had never fired it in anger, although I’d had to threaten a couple of guys with it the year before. They’d come into my store and started acting up, knocking over shelves, generally being aggressive for the sake of it. One quick look down the barrels of a shotgun had sent them on their way, even though I was shaking, sweating, aware that I could never pull the trigger.
Since then, I’d kept the shotgun loaded.
“You here to buy something, Jack?” I asked.
He paused, his back turned to me, and I kept my eye on his shooting hand. It was clasping and unclasping, fingers flexing.
“No,” he said. “I dunno . . .” His voice broke and he turned around to show me his tears. “Doug, I just dunno! He talks to me without moving his lips, and it’s like standing there with my own nightmares going on around me! He opens his hand and I see . . . I see all my terrors, he gives them to me, and I can’t turn around and run because he’ll send them after me, and I can’t turn my back because then they’ll get me. It’s only looking at them that keeps them away!”
“Who does this, Jack?” I asked, but somehow I already knew.
“Temple.” He whispered the name as if not really wishing to hear.
“The dead guy Temple?”
“The things he says, Doug! The things he asks! He’s stealing all my secrets for himself.”
I emerged from behind the counter, not realising until I was halfway across to Jack that I’d left the shotgun behind. I glanced nervously at his pistol but there was no threat there at all. He was like a terrified kid, afraid to move in case he lost the tenuous contact he and I had already made. I paused a couple of steps from him, held out my hand, dropped it again. I had no idea what to do. “You told me he was dead,” I said.
Jack frowned, shook his head, shrugged. “Maybe he was just sleeping.”
“Old Man Newman know of this?”
“I sneak in when he ain’t looking. He’s drunk half the time, you know?”
“You sneak in? Why? If you’re so afraid of him why go back for more?”
Jack started shaking then, sweat running down his face along with the tears. He looked up with the same wild look in his eyes that had been there when he’d started raging at me in the saloon. I stepped back, glanced down at his gun, but when I looked back up his expression had changed yet again. Now he was the saddest person I had ever seen. “’Cos there’s nothing else I can do,” he said. “You ever had a cut, let it scab over, then do nothing but pick and scratch at it until it opens up and bleeds again? Then it goes bad, itches like hell, and you get blood and stuff under your fingernails. It’s like that, Doug. Temple was dead, I thought, but now that he’s alive the only thing I can do is keep going back.”
“You want me to come with you?” I could not believe what I’d suggested. I had no wish to see a sleeping dead man talking without moving his lips, especially if he reduced someone like Jack—no killer, perhaps, but a guy that had seen his fair share of trouble—to this snotty, shaking wreck.
“No!” Jack said, and then that look was back in his eyes to stay. “You just keep the hell away!” he hissed, shouldering past me and barging from the store. He reached over and tumbled a stack of sacking across the floor, just to make a point, and then the door swung shut behind him.
I shut the store early and dropped by the saloon on the way home. I was hoping to see Gabriel there, though I knew his appearance would cause a stir. My heart stuttered as I walked through the doors and caught sight of a man wearing an eyepatch. His one good eye, blue as the sky, bored right through me. I recognised him from a few weeks before, one of the prospectors who had flooded South Dakota looking for gold. He wore two pistols on belts crossing his chest, and both handles were smoothed from use.
I looked away quickly and approached the bar, ordering a whiskey. Only one. I would stay there for a while, I thought, think things through, think about what Jack had said, why he’d turned so strange. He had come to my store for help, that much was obvious, but against what I could not dwell upon. A dead guy talking to him? He was insane. But then all those things Gabriel had said about Temple were insane too, and that wounded stranger had seemed as serious as could be. He had laughed when I said that Temple was dead.
Things were getting pretty weird.
I ordered a refill, leaned on the bar and looked around Nuttall & Mann’s No. 10 saloon. It was still quite early so there weren’t that many patrons—a card game already in full swing in the corner, a couple of farm guys sitting at a table in the window swapping apparently grand stories, the one-eyed prospector I’d seen and half a dozen more, all of them standing alone—but I knew that come dusk the place would be full. There was often trouble in here, and I rarely remained for long after the serious drinking began, but today I felt that I could face the danger. I was embroiled in something extraordinary, and although I had no understanding of what it was, the sense of mortal danger that Gabriel carried and Jack exuded had given me a brief flush of bravado.
Joe Pender came over for a chat, dragging his twisted foot behind him like a lazy dog on a leash. He’d been crushed years before in a wagon accident, and ever since he’d been known as Wheeler.
“How’s it been, Doug?”
“Howdy, Wheeler.”
Gabriel! I thought. “Nope.”
“Yeah, well, they reckon Gabe’s in for a killing, or so Max O’Hagan said! I saw him this afternoon over behind the Deadwood Hotel and I ran a mile!”
“Hobbled a mile.”
“You know what I mean.” He looked down at his misshapen foot bound in leather, and I felt bad for ragging on him.
“Who’s he here to kill?” I said. He told me his name, I thought, unreasonably jealous. I was the one he came to. Why should everyone else know about him?
“Killed fifty men!” Wheeler said. His voice rose and a few eyes turned our way. I buried my nose in the whiskey glass and drank. “Killed a whole load of Indians, too. He’s got a belt of Comanche hair and a saddlebag made of the skins of guys he’s shot!”
“Really?” I asked mildly. I tried to imagine Gabriel taking the time to skin the men he’d killed, but the image was all wrong. He was too driven. He’d probably leave the scene of any killing faster than the bullet he’d fired, forever on the trail of Temple.
“Yeah!” Wheeler said, smiling. “He killed a rattler by pissin’ on it, too, and he has five women each night, and his pecker puts a bison to shame.”
“Yeah, okay Wheeler.”
Wheeler laughed and pivoted on his good foot, hobbling towards the saloon doors and hawking up a great gob of spit as he went. I watched him go, shaking my head, frowning . . . and then I realised what was wrong with his story.
“Wheeler!” I shouted, and every face turned my way. I did not care. “How’d you know his name?”
But Wheeler was through the doors and gone, manic laughter his only answer.
“So Gabriel’s here,” a voice said. I spun around but could not see who had spoken. The card game had resumed, the guys at the window were pouring another drink and the prospectors were staring away into the distance, imagining gold in the fading sunlight filtering through dusty windows.
Spooked, I drained my glass and left. I looked around for Wheeler outside but the street was deserted, home only to sunset echoes. A dog sat licking its balls on the sidewalk and I thought of the mutt Gabriel had shot.