Merkabah Rider: High Planes Drifter

by Edward M. Erdelac

  “What’ll it be then?” he hissed at the Jew.

  The Rider shook his head at the curly blonde man behind the bar. “I don’t want a drink,” he answered evenly.

  The well-dressed one’s face fell a little then. His hospitality only extended so far.

  “Is it a room then? Ah. Sorry. We’re full up. You can try Little Jerusalem east of town.”

  “Jewtown?” laughed the bartender. “Yeah. Good luck getting in.”

  Out of the corner of his eye, The Rider watched the stubby man who had spit at him from the balcony descend the staircase. He was an ugly little man with a crooked scar that ploughed from one corner of his forehead to the opposite corner of his chin, disrupting his nose in between. There was a large, swaggering man at his side. The Rider ignored them, even as the ugly little one called out above the murmurs of the gambling;

  “You got a lotta sand comin’ here askin’ for a room, Christ killer.”

  The Rider spoke for the first time to the well-dressed man, whom the bartender had called Dan.

  “What does he mean about me needing luck to get into the settlement?”

  “I’m talkin’ to you, dude!” the ugly man on the stairs shouted again. “Or can’t you hear me through them pretty, pretty pigtails?”

  “Pretty pigtails,” the big one repeated, chuckling. Slowly, The Rider turned his attention to them. He put his elbow on the bar. The other hand, he hitched near his belt line. The pistol on his jutting hip spoke a clear warning.

  The ugly man only seemed incensed and practically skipped the rest of the way down.

  “Never known one of your kind to favor a pistol before. That’s a real fancy lookin’ one too.”

  Truth be told, it was an exceptional weapon. The ugly one was like a fool bird who only saw a shiny something. It was an antique, a Volcanic pistol. They had gone out of favor some years back. Its finish was gold gilded and silver chased, stamped with intricate designs and glyphs of a nature none in the saloon would have understood even if The Rider had the patience and time to explain.

  “I wanna touch it,” said the big one.

  The ugly one and his partner stopped at the end of the bar, and the ugly one put his foot on the brass rail casually. He had a pistol too, a newer model, the blunted horn of its handle curving out of the lip of his stripy pants. The big one was likewise heeled, some heavy horse pistol sagging in his right hand pocket.

  “That’s too pretty a pistol to be shootin’,” the ugly one quipped. “Why don’t you slide it down the bar and let me and my partner take a gander at it?”

  “If you keep at it,” The Rider said, “you’ll see it soon enough.”

  The ugly one’s face got uglier. The scar flushed red. He slapped his hand on his pistol belt, hollering;

  “What’d you say to me?”

  But he stopped, for as promised, The Rider’s pistol now rested naked in the lamp light for all to see, its squarish barrel angled somewhere in the direction of Cut Tom’s forehead.

  Bull Bannock blinked.

  There was a crash behind the bar. Burly had snatched up a sawed off shotgun from beneath it, but the alacrity of The Rider’s movement had so startled him, he’d jerked it back and upset a shelf of brandies and sent it smashing to the floor. It should have been enough noise to start both men shooting, but The Rider only aimed. Cut Tom’s hand still gripped his pistol butt, though he didn’t draw it out. Two by two his fingers uncurled and straightened.

  A few chairs groaned in the background. A few breaths hissed out. Someone dropped a poker chip into a pile on a table.

  “Left hands,” The Rider said after a moment. “Both of you, leave your pistols on the bar.”

  Tom complied, putting up his right hand and easing the pistol out with two fingers of his left. It clunked on the bar top.

  Beside, him Bull Bannock reached for his gun with his right hand and The Rider’s hammer cocked back.

  “The other hand, jughead,” Tom warned.

  In a moment, the big man’s pistol lay beside his compatriot’s.

  The Rider motioned to the front door.

  “Don’t come back for them until after I’ve gone.”

  Silently the ugly one and his big partner shuffled chins down through the gaping card players and blinking drinkers. The bang of the bat wings told all they’d reached the street.

  The Rider slipped the silver and gold pistol back into its holster.

  “It looks like we just got a vacancy, mister,” said Dan.

  The Rider turned once more to the man with the pomaded hair and carefully sculpted moustache.

  “It’s alright. Tell me now, why would I have trouble getting into Little Jerusalem?”

  The man’s shoulders shrugged beneath his silken shirt. “Your religious persuasion isn’t exactly popular around here right now, not since a few months ago when the pig farmers started complaining about their hogs going missing.”

  The Rider listened as Dan told the rest.

  It began with livid pig farmers, cursing over their sows’ empty teats. The poor blacks were blamed first, then the vagrants and the street gamins. But no one really missed a few piglets enough to bother rooting through the hovels and shacks for their little bones.

  Then Justus Saunders of the Lazy S Ranch stormed into town one night with a gang of his hands and howled for the blood of whatever thief had pilfered six calves from his spread. Theft of cattle was a step up in severity, and they had necessarily roused the marshal, Billy Shivers, to ride out into the night and run down the culprits. But a driving rain had kicked up before the posse could organize, and turned the country to mud. They’d never cut any sign.

  Then the Mexes started missin’ ‘em,” Dan explained gravely.

  “Cattle?” asked The Rider.

  “No, not cattle.”

  First, a man named Trujillo had barged into the saloon weeping, clutching a scrap of homespun swaddling and saying how his infant son had been snatched from his cradle. No trace had been left, and no arrest made. Then the Garza family lost one of its seven children, a girl of six years.

  The old whispers had started with that, and heads had begun turning towards Little Jerusalem.

  Two days ago, the whispers had turned to howls for blood when somewhere between the schoolhouse and her home, Reverend Shallbetter’s golden haired girl of thirteen turned up missing.

  “Shivers hired a tracker,” Dan said. “That Injin led the posse right to Little Jerusalem.”

  “No surprise there,” Burly said, eyeing the Jew with contempt. “Everybody knows the Heebs drink the blood of Christian babies in their Mass.”

  As he spoke, the curly headed bartender saw his own face reflected in the blue glass of the Jew’s spectacles, and remembered how fast that pistol had been brought to bear.

  “Well,” he amended, “some of ‘em do, anyhow.” Dan sighed.

  “If you come to see somebody there, you’re too late. Marshal Shivers has got Jewtown ringed in, and the Reverend is whipping a posse up for slaughter. They hollered for them to let the girl come out, if she’s alive, but the Jews played it dumb. Cardin and his fool sheep herders. They call him the Mayor of Jewtown. Don’t know why they don’t just give the guilty party up. If they don’t, the whole lot of ‘em will get burned out by dawn.”

  The Rider considered all this.

  “I suppose I’ll need that room after all.”

  * * * *

  The Rider listened to the owner admonish the bartender regarding the lost liquor as he ascended the stair. The first door on the right in the dim lit hall led to his recently vacated room, but it was to the door across the hall, number seven, which he turned to first.

  There was a glow beneath the door that spilled out across the floor of the hall. It was too bright, too white for the yellow of the oil lamp. It was a light he knew well.

  He didn’t bother to knock.

  Any other man would have seen the albino woman in rich petticoats seated by the window and called her
beautiful, although she was not quite possessed of the hearty contours favored in the art and pornography of the day. She was slender of limb and delicate. A poet might have called her swan-like, with her long neck, sparse, unpainted features and prim posture. She was indeed like a settled swan in that regard. The poet would have called her hair ivory. It was shock white, not bleached as in sickness, but pure as a snowcap. Her eyes were startlingly light too, and not the pink of the true albino; something else. Almost...silver. Unearthly. The whiteness of her seemed to spill across the walls and the ceiling. She emanated light from the pores of her skin. It was the light that had led The Rider to her.

  She.

  The Rider thought of it as she, but the being before him could no more be pinned down by that inadequate pronoun than the first beam of the morning sunlight is encompassed by ‘it.’

  Still, she was a breathtaking sight to any man, even without seeing her as she truly was, as The Rider saw her, through the filter of the Solomonic seals mystically embossed on the blued lenses of his spectacles.

  She was forty thousand times the glory of any mortal woman. With the aid of the magic lenses, The Rider could see behind the flare of white, as through a porthole into the heavenly spectrum, and peer at the myriad of dazzling colors that made up her dress and otherwise invisible wings. Colors as living and diverse as the wild plumage of some rarely glimpsed tropical bird. Colors for which mortal man had no name.

  “Hello, Rider,” she greeted him, in a voice like the trilling of a silver flute. The door swung shut behind him of its own accord.

  “Hello.” He nodded. “It’s been a long time.” Despite their acquaintance, he did not know her name, nor he suspected, did she know his. He felt the majesty of her office. It had grown, even in the mortal years that had passed since their last encounter—a moment’s time to one of her kind.

  “Yes,” she said. “Since your last excursion through the one hundred twenty-one gates. How long ago was that? I sometimes forget the difference in time.”

  “No you don’t,” The Rider said, settling onto the edge of the bed across from her. “You’re a malakh. You don’t forget anything. This must be serious if He sent you.”

  “Like Sodom and Gomorrah, on a lesser scale,” she said, not without pity. “An old friend of yours abides in this town now.”

  “I don’t have any old friends.”

  “I was being sardonic.”

  “What old friend?” said The Rider.

  Her face seemed to wrinkle before she spoke, like the face of one about to do a necessary pain.

  “The old bull.”

  The Rider shook his head. When would they learn?

  “Molech,” he muttered.

  “Did you know?” she asked. She turned to regard him. “Is that why you’re here?”

  “I’m here because I need a favor.”

  She stiffened.

  “I cannot grant any clemency, Rider. It has already been decided.”

  “I only ask what Abraham asked.”

  “Fifty righteous people?” One pale eyebrow arched. “There aren’t fifty living in the whole settlement. And those there are…you know what they have done, Rider. Their seed has passed through the fire. They have even begun stealing the children of the innocent.”

  “Not fifty,” said The Rider. “Like you say, we’re working on a lesser scale. Only…let three be spared.”

  “I thought you said you didn’t have any old friends,” she said, raising her eyebrows.

  The Rider opened his hands.

  “Three. Is it so much to ask?”

  She tilted her head. Her mercurial eyes darted skyward, and in an instant were regarding him again.

  “You have until dawn.”

  The Rider stood and bowed his chin in thanks. It was all he could hope for.

  He turned and left the room.

  Stepping into his own room after squinting from the angel’s light was like being dropped into a deep sack. His eyes adjusted quickly enough to spot the pale movement behind the door, and for the second time that night the pistol jumped into his hand but did not fire.

  A lean limbed Chinese girl crouched behind the door, her dark eyes shining in the rising moonlight from the window. Her undergarments were torn, and even with both fists on the pair of sharp scissors she brandished, she could not stop trembling.

  He removed his spectacles. They only hampered him now in this dimness. In the pale light from the door that led to the balcony, he could see the burns on her skin, the swelling in the corner of her lips, the bruises on her wrists and legs.

  He stepped back, giving her a wide berth.

  “They won’t be coming back tonight,” he said.

  She stared. He wasn’t sure she could speak or understand English. He repeated himself, in as gentle a tone as he could muster. Then he slowly gestured to the door with an open hand.

  “Please leave.”

  Fung Jiang-Li rose unsteadily, pushing her back against the wall and feeling the blood run into her cramped legs. She did not answer the soft eyed man in the black coat. She could hardly comprehend. Kindness had become a foreign language to her. For a year and a half now, she had not known gentle words or guileless intent from any man.

  Four years ago when she was a girl of twelve, the Apache had descended on the town and she had hid in the mines with the other children. When they returned, it had been to a charnel house. She had starved in the alleys for a time, remembering her late father’s admonitions to have no dealings with the Chinese men who loitered about the Tong Shan Eatery. But there was no charity from the Americans, and she had seen no other course, though she knew she would wind up a pillow girl.

  Dan Spector had seemed a deliverer when he had called her to him one day and given her a fresh meal. He had been handsome and affluent, kind at first. But where had that led? Here she was, being used in ways she had never conceived even in her most private moments by men, who but for a few clenched dollars, were little more than vagrants.

  She had intended to cross the scar of Cut Tom with the scissors she’d gotten from the dresser drawer; to skewer his eye maybe, on the points. She knew he would kill her for it. Perhaps he and his friend would do even worse to her before she died, but this afternoon had been too much.

  Now, when she was at her lowest, here was this strange looking man turning her from the room with respect. Where were Cut Tom and the other gwai lo? He spoke as if he were the reason they would not be back tonight. She didn’t know what to make of him.

  He held his gesture, smiling thinly behind his thick beard, his brown eyes sharing the expression.

  After a moment, she straightened from the wall, staring at him the whole time, and left the room.

  To Jiang-Li’s continued astonishment, he closed the door behind her.

  * * * *

  The Rider had fasted and prayed for three days in the mountains in preparation for this.

  He drew his inscribed cold iron Bowie knife and held it to the cardinal directions, muttering as he did so.

  “At my right, Michael. At my left, Gabriel. Before me, Uriel. Behind me, Raphael....”

  He rolled up the rug, and with the knife, described a Solomonic circle in the center of the floor. He placed the requisite tallow candles at each of the four six pointed stars before etching the characters of the Ineffable Name, and began the long incantation.

  This was an old ritual; old for his people, and old for him as well. It was old long before Solomon’s seal and the summoner’s triangle had been transcribed into the pages of the Lemegeton. It had been taught to him by a rebbe of the Sons of the Essenes, who had been taught by his father, and so on, back to the days before the Second Temple fell, back when the Ark rested within the Kodesh Hakodashim of the Tabernacle and the almond Rod of Aaron, with its core of brilliant sapphire, was still the scepter of the Hebrew Kings.

  In those days, the Merkabah riders had been scholarly mystics inspired by the vision of Ezekial and the Chariot of God. Entering
into ecstatic trances, they left their bodies to explore the upper reaches of the celestial Empyrean, transcribing accounts of their journeys into sacred homilies. The most dedicated eventually came to stand in the innermost of the seven hekhalots of Araboth, the highest heaven, before the Divine Image of the Most High.

  But The Rider had never made it that far.

  He worked against the procession of the hour. There was much to be done, many formulas to be enacted before the battle could be joined. The sword of the Lord was about to fall on Little Jerusalem, and His will be done, maybe it was not unwarranted. But before it cut, The Rider had to know. He had to know if Joseph Klein and his family were deserving of their punishment.

  The Rider had lied to the angel. He did have a few old friends left. Joseph Klein was one.

  The angel knew this of course. She had seen through his careless talk. It was an unavoidable habit he had picked up in his travels through this country of liars, killers, and blasphemers. One must be prepared to speak lightly of death, to give at least the appearance of nonchalance on the subject if one was to be permitted to keep company in the smoky places where evil did business. Like earlier in the saloon, that foolish posturing. Though the tzadikim and the rebbes would have clamped their hands over their ears and shut their eyes to hear and see it, such braggadocio was a necessity in his line, as was the gun.

  The Sanhedrin had written:

  “If a man comes to kill you, kill him first.”

  In this world of swaggering toughs, if you broke a man’s pride, you could avoid killing him.

  The Rider had known men who truly believed their own talk, though. He had seen them die. Sometimes he had consigned them to death himself. Yet always in the fading eyes of these men had he seen the truth he had known since his first excursion into the high planes; what awaited a man’s soul was not to be taken lightly.

  Now, as he worked, he thought of what lay in store for Joseph’s soul in the morning. It was not just a frenzied posse of vengeful gunmen mustered around the settlement east of Delirium Tremens. It was the malakhim, the angels of the Lord sharpening their poisonous swords.