The Black Widow

by John J. McLaglen

  Herne let him take half a dozen staggering steps along the corridor, blood from the exit wound patching the back of his jacket, before he called him.

  ‘Luke Stanwyck!’

  The boy stopped as though someone had pulled him up on a choke rein, spinning round, falling into the gunfighter’s pose, looking back into the ochre gloom.

  ‘Who the Hell are you?’

  ‘You’re Luke Stanwyck?’

  ‘Yeah. And you must be … ’

  ‘Jedediah Herne. You caused my wife’s death back in March. I’ve come for the reckoning.’

  The gun in Luke’s hand shook. He brought the other hand across to help, wiping the blood off on the leg of his pants, leaving a scarlet palm-print.

  ‘Why don’t you shoot me, then? You cowardly bastard, why don’t you shoot me? Your friend in there’s done for me.’

  ‘No, boy. You done for yourself.’

  From behind the bedroom door there was a piercing scream. A woman’s voice. And Jed saw the knob of the door beginning to turn slowly.

  ‘Hold it, Whitey!’ he shouted, hearing his voice echo through the dusty corridor. ‘I got some business to settle out here. Wait on in there!’

  ‘Watch for the others!’ shouted Coburn, opening the door the narrowest fraction, squinting through the gap. ‘Must be somewheres round here. I’ll cover your back.’

  Luke fired a second shot, the bullet hitting the wall close to the door. Missing both men.

  Jed looked at him. Feeling a touch of pity for the boy. Leaning against a bureau, trying to steady himself to fire again. Painfully slowly he brought the gun up, so that it pointed in the general direction of Herne. Who wasn’t about to get himself killed just for a touch of pity.

  He fired at Luke, the bullet hitting him in the right arm, close to the shoulder. The gun clattered to the floor, and the boy tried to bend down to pick it up. It was at that moment that Jed fired a second time. The bullet ploughed clean through the top of Luke’s skull, smashing his brain into exploding shards of splintered bone and gobbets of soft flesh.

  The boy toppled backwards as though he’d been kicked, falling in a sitting position, his face set in a frozen position of horror. Blood poured from nose and mouth, vomiting over the once-immaculate suit, soaking into the carpet. By some macabre freak of reflex, the jaw muscles worked continuously, as though he was about to speak, and kept forgetting the words he wished to utter.

  Thumbing bade the hammer, Herne put another bullet between the eyes of Luke Stanwyck, removing even the most superficial shreds of life, leaving him a silent corpse in the quiet corridor.

  The reek of cordite overhung the tang of the smoking lamps, and Herne coughed to clear his throat, emptying out the used cartridges, and reloading the Colt.

  Whitey came out and joined him, shutting the door on the noise of a woman crying, hardly glancing at the boy’s body.

  ‘He was injecting himself with morphine. Or heroin. One of those junk things. Came in while I was ... while I was with Ruth Stanwyck, and he was all hopped up, ready for another of his jabs. Shot at me, and I fired a couple of times. Guess I hit him once. Yeah, that bullet there’d be mine. Two in the head are yourn. So that’s one more down. One to go.’

  It suddenly occurred to Herne that the shooting ought to have brought Mark and the other gunman out of hiding. Since they hadn’t appeared, it probably meant that they were preparing an ambush somewhere.

  ‘Where are they? The other two?’

  ‘Better go look for them.’

  The noise from behind the door had stopped and-Herne looked enquiringly at his partner, ‘Why doesn’t she come out see what’s happening?’

  ‘She’s kind of tied up at the moment. Should I let her loose to tend to her boy?’

  ‘Why not? Guess she won’t harm us none.’

  Herne waited in the passage while Whitey went in, drawing a knife. He was in the room for a couple of minutes. When he came out again he looked shaken.

  ‘I cut her free, and told her that Luke was dead. She stood there, bear-naked, and smiled at me. Turned my blood cold. Said she’d get dressed to care for him. Didn’t seem to get through to her what’s happened.’

  ‘Forget her. Let’s go get us the last of the breed. Can’t have gone far.’

  The first three doors they tried were open, and the rooms empty. The next was a bathroom. The next was another echoingly deserted bedroom, with only a moth-eaten tapestry hanging across one window. The snow had stopped once more, and the late afternoon sun broke through the stained glass of the window, casting a web of gules and argent across the empty room.

  There were two more rooms along that side of the house, and both were empty. Herne looked at Whitey, his face showing his bewilderment. ‘How in hell do you get to the top part of this place? There wasn’t no staircase the other end, and there’s nothing here either.’

  The corridor ended in a blank wall, decorated with a fine tapestry, in far better condition than the one in the bedroom. Woven in faded colors, it portrayed the beheading of Saint Eulogius of Cordova. As they stood there, Jed noticed that the bottom corner of it fluttered, as though there was some kind of draught. Yet the corridor was virtually airless.

  ‘Here!’ he exclaimed, stepping forward and pulling the heavy curtain aside. There was a narrow staircase winding upwards, the stone steps worn down in their centers.

  ‘Careful,’ warned Whitey, following Herne behind the tapestry, Colt cocked in his right hand.

  The stairs wound upwards, with only slits of windows to lighten them, with the surrounding valley falling away beneath them. The walls were a good three feet thick, closing off the rest of the house from the tower. There was another door at the top, with a massive ring for a handle. Herne paused with his left hand on the ring.

  ‘Whitey?’

  ‘What?’

  ‘If they’re up here, then I guess they can’t have heard all that going on down there.’

  ‘All that shootin’ and screamin’, and you reckon they wouldn’t hear it?’

  ‘This place is built like a jail. Walls that thick. Solid doors. Those heavy curtains. You could murder someone ten feet away and not have anyone know.’

  Coburn nodded. ‘Could be, Jed. You going first up there?’

  The handle turned slowly, and Jed set his shoulder carefully to the door, controlling it from opening too far too fast. Putting his face to the crack, and checking it was clear. He saw another corridor. But much shorter, ending this time in a blank wall with no decoration. And only one door opening off it. To the right. Opposite another of those narrow windows.

  It was very cold, with a faint smell of perfume. There was a worn Persian carpet down the center of the passage, and Herne stepped cautiously on to it, followed closely by Whitey. The door to the room off the corridor was standing ajar, and they could hear voices. A high-pitched voice, giggling, and another. Deeper.

  Jed glanced quickly round to see if Whitey thought the same as he did. The tall albino nodded, setting his lips in a thin line, shrugging his shoulders to ease the weight of his coat.

  ‘Straight in?’

  ‘Straight in.’

  Herne lifted his foot, kicking out hard at the door, sending it swinging back on its hinges, jumping in, gun ready, moving right, with Whitey already at his elbow on the left.

  It was the end of that long trail of revenge. In front of him he saw the last of the men who had raped and tortured his wife. Killed Becky’s mother.

  ‘Mark Stanwyck?’

  There were two men in bed. One with a dark moustache, and shoulder-length dark hair. The other paler skinned, with soft features. Younger.

  Neither of them moved as Coburn and Jed stepped round, one on each side of the bottom of the bed, standing there looking at them.

  ‘Fuckin’ unnatural bastards!’ spat Whitey, looking across in disgust at his partner.

  ‘We’re not harming anyone,’ said the younger boy, putting an arm across the shoulders of the other man.
‘Did my mother send you up to scare me? She’s always doing that. Well, you ought to know that my brother and I rule Mount Abora. And if you want to keep your jobs here, then you’d better learn your manners.’ He stared fascinated at Coburn’s tumbling mane of white hair. ‘What lovely locks! I wish I could get mine like that. It’s so fine and soft-looking. Anyway, now you’ve had your joke you’d better go and tell my mama it didn’t work. Go on, before I tell my brother.’

  ‘Your brother is dead, Mark. I shot him down like the dog he was.’

  ‘No! I don’t believe it. Nobody would have...’ There was a sudden silence, as realization came to him. ‘You’re Herne. It was your wife...’

  ‘Yes, boy. It was my wife. Now get up. I don’t take to killin’ a naked boy in his bed.’

  Mark Stanwyck looked desperately from face to face, seeking help. His lover, the last of the castle’s gunmen, remained quite still, as though he hoped that they might somehow overlook him, and that he might live,

  He might have done.

  If it hadn’t been for Mark. The boy had a derringer under his pillow, and he suddenly pulled it out, firing a shot at Coburn, the bullet plucking waspishly at the cuff of his sleeve. Immediately he pulled the other man in the bed to him, spoiling Herne’s aim.

  Then, with equal speed, Mark pushed the man from him, right at Herne, while he fired a second shot at the figure of Coburn, who was also maneuvering for a clear sight of him.

  In the small room there was chaos. Whitey shouted out as the small caliber bullet hit him in the leg, toppling him over against a carved chair. The naked gunman lurched at Herne, arms reaching out for him to save himself from falling. Taking advantage of the confusion, Mark made his leap for the door.

  Herne never knew whether the man who clung to him was trying to fight him or simply escape from him with the un-coordination of blind panic. It didn’t make a whole lot of difference.

  He squeezed the trigger of the Colt, ramming the barrel hard into the gunman’s stomach, the noise of the shot muffled by flesh. With a scream of pain the man fell away from him, hands clutching for the wound. A tiny hole, smoke-blackened at its edges, leaking a thread of dark blood over the sweat-tangled pubic hairs and the limp genitals.

  ‘Jesus! That hurts like nothing I ever known. Jesus but that hurts.’

  The man sat down on the edge of the bed, reaching round behind him, his hand coming away covered with blood from the massive exit wound, the size of a man’s fist, where the forty-five bullet had blown him apart.

  Herne ignored him, walking fast round the room to where Coburn was standing up, feeling at his leg with a grimace of pain. He could hear the noise of Mark Stanwyck’s bare feet pattering down the stone stairs, but he ignored it. There wasn’t anywhere the boy could run.

  ‘Bad?’

  ‘Nope. Nipped the outside here. Give me the cord off that coat on the bed.’

  The coat was an ornate robe in bright silk, with dragons twining about each other against a background of red and green temples. Herne ripped the belt from it and passed it to his partner, watching while he bound it round his injured leg, a few inches above the knee.

  ‘Better.’ Coburn stamped a few times, experimenting with the amount of movement he’d got. ‘Might stiffen later, but right now I’m good for a whiles. Let’s get after that boy.’

  ‘Can you do something for me, Mister?’ said the boy who had been on the bed. He now lay against the bottom of the bed, leaving behind him a slobbered trail, like that of a giant scarlet snail, where he’d slipped down.

  ‘Nothing to do for you. You shouldn’t have left your farm, boy. I’m sorry.’

  The naked figure watched them go, the incomprehension of death beginning to cloud his eyes. There wasn’t a thing that either of them could have done for him.

  Even if they’d wanted to.

  The sun lay lower over the Sierras as they made their way carefully down the stone stairs from the tower, leaving the last gunman dead behind them. As they’d left, Jed had pulled the coverlet over the man’s face.

  Whitey’s leg was paining him, but he seemed to be walking on it without too much discomfort. The tapestry at the foot of the stairs fluttered slightly in the cool air, and they brushed past it to emerge on the dusty main corridor.

  Although they moved cautiously, with Whitey several paces ahead, covered by Jed, nothing happened all the way along. The body of Luke Stanwyck still lay where it had fallen, the blood congealing on the heavy carpet, the limbs stiffening in death. Someone - Ruth they assumed - had folded the arms across the bloody breast of the corpse, and had laid a small hymnal in the pale, waxen hands.

  They reached the head of the staircase, certain that nothing lived on all that top floor.

  It was as Herne started to walk down the stairs that they heard talking in one of the main reception rooms overlooking the front of the house. It was the voice of a woman, but it wasn’t possible to hear what she was saying. When Jed turned round in confusion, his partner simply shrugged his shoulders.

  They reached the bottom of the stairs, Whitey keeping looking back up to the landing as though he expected to see Mark Stanwyck. But the banisters were the dark bars on an empty prison.

  The voice came from the room to the right of the front entrance to Mount Abora. Across from what they already knew was the library. Closer now, they could hear the words.

  ‘Nothing can happen to you. Just remain here with me, Mark, and all will be well. And I shall tell you of the future that I have planned.’

  The words were emotional, but the tone was flat and dead. They heard an answering voice, but it spoke more quietly. Although they were now close against the paneled door, they couldn’t make out any of the words. But it was undeniably the voice of Mark Stanwyck.

  ‘In?’ whispered Herne.

  ‘Like before. I’m right behind you, Jed.’

  Herne couldn’t understand it. The boy must know that they would come after him. And yet he hadn’t bothered to try and ambush them. Or hide. It sounded as though he was just in there, waiting for them, like a good host waiting for his guests to arrive.

  The door handle turned easily under his hand, and he gave it a push, sending it silently back on its brass hinges, revealing the living-room. With two occupants.

  Ruth Stanwyck stood by the sofa, one white hand resting on its velvet back. Smiling gently at the two men standing in the doorway. With guns in their hands. She had dressed herself after Whitey had released her, and now wore a tight dress of black satin, with a wide belt, its only splash of color a great red stone at its center. Her hair was neatly brushed back in place, and she had put some powder on her cheeks.

  Mark stood close by her, the empty derringer on a table at his elbow. If it was empty. There’d certainly been time enough for him to reload the little gun. He had snatched a loose robe from somewhere and wore it wrapped around his nakedness. His hands moved constantly against each other, as though they had some perverse life of their own, the fingers nibbling at the air, then lying still with startling suddenness.

  Neither of them spoke.

  ‘Mrs. Stanwyck. I’m sorry that you should have the pain of this, but it’s only a mite of what I’ve been suffering for near eight months.’

  ‘Your suffering is easing, Mister Herne. I fear that mine is scarcely begun.’

  Her voice was husky. Chilling, yet strangely sensual. Coburn found himself becoming curiously roused, but made a positive effort to turn his mind away from the woman, concentrating on the boy.

  ‘Mama. You promised me that they wouldn’t hurt me. I could have run.’

  ‘Where to, boy? Your runnin’s long done. Ain’t nowheres to go. Out in the snow? We’d track you and take you in a half hour. On the trail? No horse goin’ to move you far in this weather in the high country. Nowhere to run, boy. This is the end of the road for you,’ said Herne coldly.

  ‘And the end of the chasing for you, Mister Herne? I offered your partner money. I take it that...’
/>   ‘No. Ma’am, not money. Not anything.’

  ‘Mama?’

  ‘You have taken one of my boys from me. In only a week, he would have been twenty-one.’

  There was a long silence, and both men stood uneasily. The boy was clearly unarmed, and neither of them wanted to gun him down like that.

  ‘If he has a gun, I’d feel happier if he...’

  ‘So you could kill him and feel a sense of justification, Mister Herne? I am disappointed in you. If you have come to kill, then you must not be persuaded against it.’

  ‘Please, Mama. Don’t let them!’

  Mark Stanwyck moved closer behind his mother, but she ignored him, her face set like stone towards the two men.

  The room was getting dark. A single lamp in the far comer, near a small harmonium, the only source of light. Herne glanced sideways at Coburn, unsure for once how to play the hand.

  Mark saw the two gunmen exchange a look and made his move. Grabbing at his mother’s hand, hidden behind the sofa, and wrestling from her another derringer. Plated and inlaid, Herne noted in passing, finger tightening on the trigger of his own gun.

  But the boy was safely behind his mother, holding her round the waist with one hand, pointing the gun at the men with the other. This time he wasn’t going to be foolish enough to risk snapping off a shot and missing. The gun was his only card, linked with his cover of his mother’s body. Together they seemed a fair enough bet.

  But not against Herne the Hunter.

  ‘Stand away, boy.’

  ‘You stand away, Herne. Stand right away. And you too, whiteface. Right out of the path. Drop your guns before I gun you down! I mean it.’

  ‘Mark! I’d rather not do it this way, but I’ve come here to kill you for what you done to my Louise. And using your mother for a shield isn’t goin’ to save you. For the very last time move away!’

  ‘Don’t, Mark. He wouldn’t shoot.’

  ‘I know, Mama. I know.’

  ‘Hell.’

  The word was flat. Resigned. Aiming carefully, Herne fired once, the bullet hitting Ruth Stanwyck in the stomach, low down on the right side, under the ribs. Passing clean through, uninterrupted by any bone. Its nose slightly flattened by the impact, and its velocity considerably slowed. But not slowed anywhere like enough to save Mark Stanwyck, standing pressed close against his loving mother.