“Who? Molech?” The Rider growled. “Asmodai? You could not do this yourselves. The powers he has... who gave them to you?”
Tooms smiled. It was an odd expression on his grim face, lined with anger and hardship.
“We will not tell. Suffice it to say, for ten years now we have done the work of our masters. We have cleared a path for the Hour of Incursion. Our period of servitude, like that of our charge, is ending. Yet...we will go on. We are henceforth free.”
“And?” The Rider dared, straightening. More of this strange, infernal plan. Somehow, these ragged dybbukim were tied to the cult of Molech worshipers he had disrupted in the San Pedro River Valley some months ago. Molech’s chief servant there had hinted towards some dark alliance, some monstrous plan that would culminate in an invasion of the physical world. Something again about The Hour of Incursion.
“It has been a crowded, stuffy decade, in the body of this killer,” they said.
“We need new vehicles,” the pig beside The Rider blurted in a child’s voice. “Tell him!”
Tooms looked annoyed, but shrugged.
“It is a rare thing to find a willing host such as dear Medgar, and we have decided not to let him go. But you have knowledge and abilities we can use to force our way into new hosts. You will accept one of us, and provide the rest with forms so that we may go our separate ways. If you refuse, Medgar Tooms will continue to soak this land with innocent blood.”
The Rider barely considered the proposition. Even if he were to agree, it would ultimately mean multiplying the death toll many times—once for every malicious spirit bestowed with a physical form; it would be like unleashing rabid dogs on the world.
In the snow, he thrilled to see the remnants of his Derringer. Tooms’ bullet had blown the grips from the pistol’s frame.
Yet it had not exploded, and the trigger itself seemed to be intact. But even if it would fire, he had seen the effect of bullets on Tooms’ supernaturally fortified body. The smoking, bloodless holes in his grey coat attested to it.
It was inches away. But so was the barrel of Tooms’ Remington.
“With his training, we cannot penetrate his conscious without his leave,” the pig said. “He will die first. Kill him now!”
“Shut up,” said Tooms, or whatever spirit inhabited him at that moment.
Then from behind, on the porch, Japheth coughed.
The pig’s head turned. Tooms glanced up.
In one desperate decision, The Rider dove for the little holdout and jammed it against the temple of the pig. There was a fiery blast, and the pig pinwheeled violently away, spewing blood from its nose, ears, and head.
The Rider turned and fired at the pig on the porch, with its snout buried in Japheth’s chest. He blew a black hole behind its ear and its skull vomited up brains over the old man’s ragged wounds. It slumped lifeless.
The bullet continued on and burrowed into the eye of the fat sow that had been standing opposite, tugging at Japheth’s intestines. The slug erupted out her chin in a sloppy geyser. The sow stumbled off the porch and fell on its side, kicking and squealing.
The Rider wheeled the empty gun reflexively, futilely up at Tooms, and stopped.
Medgar Tooms stood quietly, his gun loose in the arm at his side, staring down at The Rider.
The remaining Thing had recoiled at the sudden departure of its cohorts. Without their power to bolster its own, its possession momentarily slipped, and it fell, flailing like a climber gripping at a sheer cliff face, plummeting to the back of Medgar Tooms’ mind. Without their presence like a hump on his back, whispering in his ear and curling around the base of his brain, injecting it with steady doses of blissful hate, Medgar Tooms found himself faced with a stark instant of terrible lucidity.
Connie Louise. His wife’s name was Connie Louise, and she had been as pretty as the sun stepping out over the hills. Then, the flood of the dead swelled behind his eyes. Neighbors, friends, yes, but more. Women, infants, people who had never heard of Gadara.
He shoved the muzzle of his Remington up under his own chin and with a pop that resounded far across the snow-covered countryside, Medgar Tooms’ fury turned from the Earth.
The Rider regained his feet slowly. He didn’t know what had caused Tooms to turn his gun on himself. Most likely he would never know. Maybe whatever rage had fueled the entities possessing him had departed along with them and been replaced with an equal amount of contrition. He thought of the family in the dusty framed portrait in the house.
The Rider had no blood relation left. The murder of his surrogate, scholarly brothers had sent him on a seven year hunt for a man who had been like a father to him. Yet The Rider had a focus for his anger. Tooms’ loss, more terrible than The Rider’s, had no villain to lay the blame on. His animal wrath had flailed without rhyme or reason, egged on by the dybbukim, an ultimately impotent fury that had struck down blameless strangers. Even children, very like the one whose loss had spurred him to rage.
The return of reason had perhaps brought a realization of this. To a one-time family man, maybe the revelation that he had become to others the villain whose throat he had sought to cut himself had been too much. In the end, maybe life had been too much to bear, and death had become a duty. In a way, at the hands of the dybbukim, he had committed a slow, painful suicide since the day his family died.
The Rider turned and looked on the grisly scene on the porch.
J.T. Lessmoor was dying. His guts had been ripped open and gnawed at savagely by the industrious devil-hogs. His blood ran in a pool over the porch, mingling with that of the scattered, dead pigs. His limbs were crooked and useless and his wound was quivering and gaping. Yet his face was calm, his eyes aware. He stared up at The Rider.
“By the Bible, and the sword,” Japheth wheezed weakly. He shook his head in one final intonation. “Glory be.”
The Rider closed the old man’s eyes with his fingertips. Surely here was a righteous mensch, one of the hasidei ummot ha-olam. No less burdened by guilt than Tooms had been, in his way, surely he had found redemption at last. This strange old goy had healed him, body and soul, both with the raw, miraculous power he had called down from The Lord, and with a stranger’s objective insight into his prideful failing. Before this man, The Rider had doubted his purpose on a fundamental level. Now, he knew that one day he would stand before God as surely as this Christian, this Noah. Japheth had taken away The Rider’s doubt. He thought too, that in the end, he had lost his own. It was written in the Tosefta Sanhedrin that the righteous of the nations of the world have their portion in the world to come. He grieved, but he felt sure he would see this man again.
The Rider bound his own open wounds and gathered the old man up, slowly, painfully. He wrapped him in a blanket from the buggy. The ground, he thought, would be too cold to break with a shovel, but after securing a spade from the tool shed, he found the earth near the grave of Tooms’ wife and child to be surprisingly yielding, as though it had been kept warm and waiting, like the bed of an absent loved one.
It took him until sunset, and it was back breaking work, but he buried the old preacher and Medgar Tooms and said the Kaddish over them. As a marker for Tooms, he left the Whitworth rifle, bayonet buried in the little mound beneath which he lie. For the preacher, he broke the hitch of the buggy and fashioned a crude Christian cross.
“Tell the angel Metatron I’ll see him again, Reverend,” he whispered.
The hogs, he put into a heap and doused with old oil from a lamp in the house. He could still smell the odor of their immolation as he walked into the sleepy main street of Gadara and collapsed in a doorway.
He slept, though fitfully. Animal shrieks sounded in his dark dreams, and he kept jerking awake, a nervous anxiety about the mysterious Hour of Incursion stemming the tide of slumber. Each time he opened his eyes, he feared it had already come.
When he awoke, he realized he was sleeping in the doorway from his vision, the door to the old church, Japheth’s
church. It was here that he’d heard the screams and the desperate pounding; the people of Gadara, pleading with their preacher to be let inside God’s house.
The town was empty, the buildings and shops and homes peppered with large bore bullet holes.
He made his way back to Japheth’s cabin, where the onager waited.
IV: The Nightjar Women
The Rider shared a desert camp with an unimaginably dirty prospector from Mobile, Alabama with the unlikely name of Pete Boggs. Pete had taken him for another prospector because they shared the same long growth of beard. Whereas The Rider’s chin whiskers were a matter of halakha, to this vagabond it was necessity; he plied his trade far from a regular source of water and couldn’t afford to waste it on ablutions.
Pete offered to buy The Rider’s onager right off, citing its pale color and singular dark stripe as ‘the damndest thing he’d ever seen,’ but The Rider declined. The animal had come all the way from Jerusalem, after all. To get rid of the faithful, if obstinate, creature now would be like betraying his oldest friend.
It had been a difficult visit at first. The Rider could not share the man’s food, or his whiskey, or even his cup.
“By God, you are a conspicuous son of a bitch, ain’t you?” Pete finally said, throwing up his hands as The Rider took his own crockery off the onager, then proceeded to brew his coffee after refusing Pete’s own. “A more sensitive feller might get his feelings hurt campin’ with you.”
Pete put voice to a nearly constant concern of The Rider in his travels. His customs made it difficult to associate with the world through which he walked. He couldn’t share a meal or drink with most people because of the kashrut, couldn’t travel or work on the Shabbat, couldn’t even ride a horse or give his real name because of his oath to the Sons of the Essenes. It made for a lonely existence. Sometimes it led to violence. He still remembered the drunken drover he had crippled for trying to shave him with a Bowie knife in Leadville.
The Rider did his best to explain his ways to Pete, as he had to dozens of other goyim in the past. Of course, in his life, he had committed sins both large and small, and sometimes he had slipped in his observance of the mitzvot. Traveling in the desert made it particularly hard to immerse oneself in a naturally occurring spring, for instance. But his Merkabah abilities in part depended upon remaining shomer shabbo; they could wax or wane according to his spiritual purity.
And he had need of the skills The Sons of the Essenes had taught him. Adon, his renegade teacher, was still loose in the world. Seven years now the Rider had hunted him, following his murderous track across the world, and finally back to America where Adon had begun his blasphemous career, baptizing himself in the blood of the San Francisco enclave.
It was because of that, he sometimes felt an even greater need to adhere to the mitzvot than perhaps he had before. He was the last graduate of his yeshiva, the last of the San Francisco Sons of The Essenes.
“How about women?” Pete asked out of the blue as they lay across from each other, the fire spluttering low between them.
“What?” The Rider asked. He had almost been asleep.
“I said how about women? Can you…?”
The Rider cut him off.
“Not with unmarried women.”
Pete was quiet for a moment.
“You mean…a woman you ain’t married to yourself.”
The Rider smirked.
“That’s right.”
“Well, but everybody’s s’posed to stick to that one,” Pete mused. “I mean…bein’ way out here…don’t you never think to take it as you can get it?”
The Rider turned his head sharply.
“I mean with a woman,” Pete said quickly. “There’s women to be had. You know, hurdy gurdy gals…town women.”
“No,” The Rider said, closing his eyes. “Technically I’m supposed to cover my ears if I hear a woman singing.”
“By God,” Pete chuckled sleepily. “You Jews are harder on yourselves than Baptists even.”
Why had he volunteered that? He knew Pete would ridicule the notion. To him it was absurd. Maybe The Rider even felt it was a little absurd himself. Was it confirmation he was seeking?
He slept fitfully.
In the morning, Pete did not offer The Rider breakfast. He ate his own and watched him wind his tefilin straps around his arm and head and don his fringed prayer shawl. He listened curiously as The Rider recited his morning prayers.
When The Rider had packed up his onager, Pete patted the animal and shook his hand.
“You take care of yourself, Rider.”
“And you, my friend.”
“Keep skirtin’ them mountains, you’ll come to Cottonwood Creek. Follow it and it’ll come up along a road. That’ll take you to Tip Top.”
“I’m not going to Tip Top,” The Rider said.
“Sure you are. There’s women in Tip Top,” Pete winked. “Six or seven the last I heard. Pretty ones.”
The Rider broke into a grin and shook his head. Pete stood waving for a while until he was out of sight. Yet when the time came to turn towards Prescott, The Rider instead chose to edge along the mountains as Pete had suggested. The way was rugged and seemed to physically discourage him and the onager. He had an uneasy feeling. He did not know, or did not claim to know why he had turned from his course. He reasoned that Adon, as a fugitive, would surely not flee to a town as large as Prescott. He had long suspected that if ever he found his teacher, it would be in one of these ramshackle frontier camps. The last he had heard of him was that he was in Arizona Territory…but he knew this was all self-delusion. In truth, he had lain awake for a long time thinking of his conversation with Pete.
He prayed often while he walked, but there was shame in his heart, for he still didn’t turn aside. It was foolishness. He had never before sought the company of a paid woman, had on occasion even rebuffed their advances, and this had made him sinfully proud in his worst moments.
But he was a man, and he had been alone for a long time. A man craved company. The importance of his mission had caused him to shun companionship of any sort for so long. In a way, he was like the onager, far from home, far from its own kind, far from attaining any sort of normal life.
He walked into Tip Top in the dead of night, into the narrow valley the creek had cut into the rocky hills centuries ago. He would have been there sooner, but he had actually stopped to bathe in the creek, reinforcing in his mind his intent to forswear his vows.
God, what was this? He had felt such temptations before, but never like this. Maybe the frustration of his long and so far fruitless search for Adon was compounding it. He felt like breaking all his vows, just casting off all the tradition, shaving his beard and walking away from the responsibility.
While a soldier in Ford’s Company (later, the 2nd Colorado Cavalry), he had broken many of the commandments, often out of necessity. Yet always, when his comrades had sought out women, he had remained shomer negiah. While some of them had spent the nights leading up to a battle cavorting and finding solace wherever and with whomever they could find, even among each other, he had confined his attentions solely to prayer and usually alone. He might have died a hundred times in battles from New Mexico to Kansas and never known a single feminine gesture. It seemed madness to him now. Now he longed to touch a woman, and perhaps more.
He walked swiftly down the street, which was crowded with drunken miners even at this late hour. He was confounded. He listened for the sound of a woman’s voice, the telltale shrill giggle or snatch of bawdy song he had gone out of his way to avoid in the past.
What was he doing?
The onager lagged behind as if counseling him to tarry and think. He pulled its lead taut, urging it to quicken its pace as he doubled his own in his eagerness.
He passed a corral and a dark candy store before he came across a squat stone hotel and a saloon. The hotel was dim and silent. A clerk could be seen with his head down beside a failing lamp on the desk throug
h the open door. The saloon was bright and alive with male voices. Foolishness. This was foolishness. What was he looking for? A whore not surrounded by men? Even in sin he was too particular.
He walked down the stony, winding road past a dark cemetery alive with the strange churring of some night birds and a lonesome, silent windmill. He spared a glance at that, hunched his shoulders, and went on. He passed more stone houses, miner’s tents and frame huts, lit from within like paper lanterns, then past more glowing, busy saloons, dim businesses and a sprawling, silent mill. Soon he found himself clear on the other side of town.
He was uncomfortable and walked with his head down. He was considering a red lamp burning before a house in the distance, when a dark haired young woman in a green and violet dress crossed the street in front of him.
She wasn’t much more than eighteen, but her smooth face had a pursed, knowing expression. Her dark, deep set eyes were bold and didn’t flinch from the shambling drunks who ogled her. She gripped the skirts of her dress in white fists as she hustled across the road, dark stockings showing on her small ankles. She had night black hair, unsuccessfully piled on her head, threatening to burst into a long and full bodied mane. Her lips seemed almost the same color as her white face, and The Rider was struck by the definition of her form.
Sensing they would collide given her pace, he stopped in front of the unimaginatively named No. 2 Saloon (so called, although it was the fourth he’d seen) and stared at her as she came closer. Even this simple pleasure of watching a beautiful woman, he thought sourly, was a violation of the halakha.
She met his eyes as she made for the open door of the saloon, and her black eyebrows knotted.
He found himself opening his mouth to speak, embarrassed she had caught him looking.
“Ah…excuse me, miss,” he began hurriedly.
“Look,” she snapped, “I’m going in for the night, alright? I’m going to bed. Alone.”
Merkabah Rider: High Planes Drifter Page 19