by David Boop
Joan’s brow furrowed as she looked at the pale child. “But—”
“I’m fading, Joan. I’ve seen the thing from the mine. It’s a curse on the whole town. Even if I leave here, I’ll fade. That’s the truth. That’s why I renamed the damned town. Sorry. It is damned. That’s why I said it.”
Joan just stared at the child, so worried about swearing in the face of her own extinction, about being the good preacher’s daughter, an upstanding example for her community of one.
No, Joan realized. Her community of two. She cares about what I think of her.
A tendril wrapped itself around Joan’s neck and pulled, hard. What a fool I am. I forget what’s important, what’s all around me. Joan knew that, too, was truth.
She tugged the tendril with her free hand, but it dragged her back to the waiting eyes. Margaret’s stricken face receded. Joan tried to position the candle to burn the tendril, but it kept shifting, even as it kept its chokehold. She waved the candle in circles. She couldn’t quite get it to a spot where it wouldn’t also burn her.
This is it. It finally has me. I just hope it will be too sated to take Margaret too. She could hope that, she knew, but she also knew the Thing couldn’t be sated. It would consume all of creation.
More tendrils grabbed her arms, pinned them to her side. They lifted her off the ground and drew her toward the maelstrom. Her hat blew off and was consumed. Her head would be next, she knew.
The Thing screamed in triumph, a long, ululating sound, deep and high at once.
Then it just dropped her, tendrils curling into itself.
Joan drew in a breath. Her lungs spasmed as they filled with the dusty air, but something got through. She drew a second breath.
Her eyes focused on Margaret, facing away from her. She’d plunged her lamp into the maelstrom and now dragged it along like a dredge behind her.
The Thing was screaming all right, but in pain.
Joan grinned as she stood up, despite her own pain. “That’s a great idea, kid. Maybe with both of us doing it, we could get somewhere.” She looked down at her candle and cursed. It had gone out in the fall. With her matches back at the church, she’d have to light it from the lamp, which meant pulling that back out. Another opening for attacks, this time on both of them.
Might as well tell the kid now. Joan took a ragged breath and stepped toward Margaret.
The Thing screeched and all but a dozen eyes vanished into the maelstrom. Margaret pulled the lamp back out and turned to Joan. “I didn’t do that, did I?”
Joan shook her head. “No. It’s looking at something other than us now.”
From the direction of the stream, they heard a tearing noise, and another scream from the Thing. They shared a puzzled look, as the rest of the eyes vanished from sight. Another tear came and another, and the wall that encircled them became a wall to one side.
They backed away from the stream and from the Thing, now locked in combat with a silent clay giant. The golem, for that’s what it surely was, had reached rough, misshapen hands into the Thing and pulled out fists of the stuff. Whenever an eye came free, the golem threw it to the ground and stomped on it.
The Thing lashed at it with tendril after tendril, then tried to smother it with its own flesh, all to no avail. The golem had no breath to smother, no heart upon which to focus its jealousy. It probably seemed to the Thing that it was being torn apart by nothing at all.
In short order, the Thing had diminished so that it no longer loomed over the golem, which itself had to be twelve feet tall. Soon the golem towered over it. Then it stood over the quivering remains. The last remaining eye looked away from it and found Joan. It narrowed in rage before the golem’s foot came down, obliterating it.
Being a creature without a soul, the golem did not speak nor utter the smallest of victory cries. When it had finished its task, it stood totally still. Then it turned toward Margaret and Joan.
“Run!” Joan called, and turned to do so, but the kid just stood there.
“Ain’t no point,” Margaret said. “You can’t outrun it. I’ve seen people try.”
Without hardly noticing she’d done it, Joan dropped her lifeless candle and drew her Colt. She fired as the golem stepped toward them, hitting it square in the chest three times. Big chunks of clay flew off with each impact, but it didn’t slow down.
“That don’t work neither,” Margaret said.
“You’ve seen people try that too, huh?” Joan didn’t wait for an answer. She fired again, backing up to give her some space, this time aiming at the face. The first shot missed, but the second blew off one if its eyes. It didn’t seem to care. At least, it didn’t slow down.
The golem raised its arms when it reached the edge of the stream, but by then Joan and Margaret had backed up maybe twenty yards. They couldn’t outrun it, the kid was right about that, but it hadn’t started running yet.
Joan peered closely at the golem’s emotionless face. She had one bullet left. She’d been lucky to take out one eye, and she wasn’t sure she’d get that lucky twice. Naturally, her spare bullets were all back at the church with her matches and everything else.
The golem sped up now. Joan backed up faster, not wanting yet to turn and run, given the futility. There was something nagging at her. Something about its face.
Joan changed direction, backing toward the west side of the street. The golem turned to track her and, in so doing, faced directly into the moonlight. There. Something written in chalk on its forehead.
And she remembered. The golem was powered by the Hebrew word for “truth.” The way to stop it was to remove the first letter, which changed it to the word for “dead.”
“The trouble is,” Joan said aloud. “I can’t read Hebrew.” She shrugged, bone weary. “Well, it’s all I’ve got.”
Joan stopped backing up. She took the Colt in both hands, aimed at the left side of the word on its forehead, and waited for it to get closer. From her left, Margaret was calling to her, telling her to hide, to try and make it inside a building, but Joan ignored her.
The golem got so close that Joan aimed nearly straight up. It raised its hands, making them into a pair of fists. Joan waited. It leaned over her, so as to aim its killing blow.
Joan fired.
One of the fists got in the way. Though she blew it to bits, the other one came down. She dodged to the left, saw it smash into the dirt.
Still the golem didn’t utter a sound. Even a scream of pain or frustration would have been oddly reassuring. The silence, she knew, was the silence of death.
Now Joan ran. She dropped the useless gun and sprinted away from the golem, toward a house where Margaret stood in the door, calling her name. Joan reached out to her, wondering even then if it were Margaret’s own house she ran toward. Then the golem grabbed her leg with its remaining hand and pulled her into the air.
The town and stream and star-filled sky flew around her as she was lifted upside down toward the golem. For a moment she worried that it would eat her, but then her logic told her no, it would probably just dash her on the ground, maybe crush her for good measure.
“Run, Margaret! Run! Get away from here!” she screamed. The golem lifted her above its head so that she dangled in front of its good eye. It paused there a moment, regarding her with its immobile, passionless face. She saw the ragged chunk her bullet had blown off. She saw its good eye, which was a bit of quartz, and she saw the Hebrew word for truth in that strange, boxy script.
Looking at it upside down, she remembered something else her mother had said about Hebrew: they wrote it backward. Hell. Even if I’d hit it, I’d have blown off the wrong letter.
Then the face flew away from her as the golem raised her up, ready to throw her down to the ground.
Joan twisted in its grip. It had her by one leg, just below the knee, so that joint screamed at her when she moved. She managed to get a swing going, though. She turned it into a back and forth movement.
When it threw her
down, she flew at it in an arc. The whole time, her eyes focused just on that mysterious letter, farthest on the right, and she reached for it. Stretching, straining.
Her thumb jammed painfully into the golem’s face. Her forehead smashed into its chest. She went head over heels, landed on her boots, careened forward, and rolled.
She wound up on her back, panting, waiting for the killing blow.
But the golem didn’t move. It would never move again.
When she had her breath back, Joan sat up. Her knees were killing her. Her head screamed. She nonetheless found the strength to call Margaret’s name.
No response came. Joan tried again and again. Finally, when she had no more breath left, not even for crying, she faced the truth. She was alone.
* * *
Joan searched the house, of course, and more of the town besides, calling Margaret’s name the whole time. She also looked, as much as she didn’t want to, among the chalk remains for another silhouette, one that would be painfully familiar. She didn’t find a trace.
At length, as the sun crept toward noon, she faced the inevitable. She faced the mine.
Joan ate a full meal, scrounged at the general store, drank her fill at the river, and took care of her other needs before she forded the stream. She brought her Colt, fully loaded, and her Bowie knife, though she knew neither one would do any good. She brought the stick of chalk from the church. She left the Bible.
Joan had the lamp with her—she’d found it by itself inside the house, still lit—refilled and burning bright. She held it in her left hand and the chalk in her right.
The day had already grown hot, so entering the mine was cool and refreshing, though not like the stream had been. The tunnel sloped gently down, largely straight. She only had to crouch a little to follow it. Doubtless the brothers who’d dug it had been taller than her.
She didn’t call out. There was only one way it could have taken Margaret, if it had taken her at all. No sense in alerting it to her presence any more than her lamp already did.
After a while, the passage branched, but one branch only went a dozen yards. Joan took the other, and that’s when she found the forest. It was strange enough that she paused a moment, holding the lamp close.
Leaves of stone, as if carved into the ceiling and along one wall by some crazed but highly skilled sculptor. Fossils of vanished ferns. They looked tropical. She had trouble picturing Arizona ever having been like that, but here it was. Had she found the remains of Eden? She couldn’t have. That was supposed to be by the Tigris and Euphrates.
She followed the tunnel as it changed, from straight into a downward spiral. Everywhere along the walls and ceiling and floor, the plants intertwined with one another. Joan had traveled all over the western part of the continent, but she recognized none of them. What antediluvian world once thrived here? How long ago? As she descended, she formed the impression the brothers must at some point have stopped searching for silver and simply dug deeper into that primeval forest.
Joan reached Margaret without warning. She rounded more of the spiral, intrigued by the birdlike creatures that had appeared on and beneath the branches and leaves, and there the child sat at the end of the tunnel.
She was translucent now, her dress as well as her skin. She looked back at Joan with wide, empty eyes that didn’t focus.
Next to her stood a feathered reptilian form, or the shadow of one. Even in the light, its body was dark as tar, the feathers more an impression of flight than anything else. Only its chalk-white teeth shone bright.
The creature focused on Joan and charged.
This works or it doesn’t. Joan dropped to one knee and drew a solid line with the chalk across its path, then scuttled backward out of range.
The beast stopped at the line, jaws snapping. These too, Joan noticed, did not cross.
“Well,” she told herself as she stood painfully up. “That’s half the battle.”
She walked up to the creature, stopping maybe a foot away, and held the light up to its face. It didn’t flinch. “You’re out of your time. The Flood is long gone now. It’s our time. You should be at your rest. How can I help you?”
It thrashed about, as if it understood her speech and found it unsettling, then returned to glare at her with its tar-black eyes. It couldn’t pass the barrier. No part of it could.
But I can. Slowly, Joan put the lamp down on the floor of the cavern. She glanced at Margaret, who lay on the dirt now, transparent. She could see where the girl would leave her chalk impression.
Joan returned her attention to this strange shadow of an antediluvian beast.
Then she leapt.
She drew a line over one of its eyes before it twisted its head and caught her. It snapped its jaws across her chest, though it didn’t pull her anywhere, just clamped down. The teeth tore through clothes and flesh, but they didn’t rend. Instead it felt like dozens of ice-cold knives slicing into her. Joan felt weaker, tired, exhausted really, but in no more pain than she’d already been. With careful deliberation, she found and crossed out its other eye.
Now it did lift her off her feet and shake her back and forth. Joan saw her own flesh begin to fade. Its color drained until it was as pale as Margaret’s had been when they’d met. Then it got paler still. She let herself go limp, and the blind beast stopped thrashing enough for her to focus on its body again.
“Maybe this.” She drew a line across its neck, slitting its throat with the chalk.
The beast didn’t so much drop her as fall apart around her. It became dirt, then dust, then nothing at all. By the time Joan crashed onto the shaft floor, it was gone.
But it had left her something. Joan’s color was back. In fact, her skin glowed. A black light poured from it, drowned out the pure light of the lamp. She felt the tug of the ages, a call across time into a wild past, one she could reach out toward, could fall into. She knew now where the souls of Truth, Arizona, had gone, and she longed to join them with a kind of mindless abandon.
No. Margaret deserves a life here, now. I can give her that. I can use this light, transform it.
Joan rose. She stood tall, head against the top of the shaft, free of the pain from her long walk, her many falls, from the abuse she’d put her body through for the last many days of running, then fighting. She approached the dying child and laid her hands upon her.
* * *
“Where will you go?” Margaret sat on the front steps of the church and turned toward Joan, seated beside her. She passed back the bottle of whorehouse whisky that Joan had let her take one—and only one—sip from. The girl hadn’t coughed and sputtered, so Joan figured that wasn’t her first sip of whisky. Probably not the only thing her pa didn’t know about. Still, the kid was too young for drink. Plenty of time for that when she grew up, now that she would grow up. She’d never be a teetotaler, that much was clear.
“Don’t know where I’ll go,” Joan said. “Up to Deadwood, maybe. You?”
“Got an aunt in Tombstone, Pa’s younger sister.”
Joan nodded. She put the bottle back in a saddlebag. She’d have to keep track of how full it was. “I’ll take you.”
Margaret gave her a quizzical look. “Ain’t that a bit out of your way?”
Joan shrugged. “Tombstone’s still Arizona. That makes it a local stop, right?”
Margaret grinned. “I suppose it does.”
Joan stood, offered the kid a hand. Without hesitation, Margaret accepted.
THE SPINNERS
Jennifer Campbell-Hicks
The Spinners resided in a ghost town under big prairie skies. Eloise rode in on a main street reclaimed by grasses. Hitching posts and broken shutters marked what used to be the feed store, the smithy and the sheriff’s office.
Wind gusted through grass with a sound like a hundred rattlers. Eloise pressed a hand to her wide-brimmed hat, while the long braid of her hair whipped around her. Her horse snorted and pranced.
“It’s all right.” Eloise dismou
nted and rubbed his nose. “This place gives me the willies, too. It doesn’t feel solid, like it might blow away.”
She stayed on foot and led the horse toward a decrepit saloon with holes for windows and a hawk’s nest on the eaves. The horse planted its hooves and refused to go any closer. When it reared and almost kicked Eloise, she backtracked to tie him to a hitching post that wasn’t rotted through.
“Don’t you run off,” she said. “You do that, and I’ll be stuck here.”
Satisfied the horse would stay put, Eloise returned to the saloon. Her spurs jingled and her boots clomped up three steps and across a wooden porch to a door that creaked on rusty hinges.
The place smelled like a barn. Animals had left behind nests, scat and bones. Sunlight shafted through broken windows onto dust-covered tables and chairs, some overturned, some splintered or missing legs. Broken bottles littered the floor. Behind the bar was a mural of a tree, bare branched and bristling with brambles.
Eloise’s heart quickened.
This was the place.
After months of searching, on a horse she had stolen from her father’s ranch, with money she pinched from her father’s safe, with impossible hopes in her heart, she had finally arrived.
“Hello?” she said.
A voice came from the shadows like the rumble of an avalanche. “Why are you here?”
Her hand flew to Peter’s gun on her belt. Beside it hung the knife that had once belonged to her sister, Annie—buried in the ground these last ten years. None of Eloise’s belongings, it seemed, were her own. The most important—her heart—she had given to Peter, only to have it die alongside him.
What did that leave her with?
“Show yourself,” she said.
“Why?”
“I’m here to deal. That’s what you do, right? You make deals.”
Outside the saloon, clouds crossed the sun, and the shadows deepened. They swirled and slithered across the walls, and an eerie sense of déjà vu came over Eloise, that of a recurring dream of shadows and darkness, and of falling into darkness, falling so long and so far that she would never hit ground. She shivered as the shadows coalesced behind the bar in a semiopaque silhouette that was humanlike, but also not.