by David Boop
The gelding reared, shoving Soapy back. Both horses struggled against their ropes. The fence started to bend and rock with every tug. Soapy cursed and let the horses run free. They galloped away toward town. He cursed again and looked at me. “What spooked—look out!”
The rumbling thuds from underground increased in tempo. I spun and even without having seen McGinty or a photograph, I knew he was the ghoul lurching toward me in the dark. A gaunt brown face with empty eye sockets and a gaping mouth came into sharp relief. I had no air to scream, not that I’m given to it anyway. But if something would make me scream like a terrified little girl, that visage would be it.
I snatched at my revolver, but he reached me first and swung at me. His fist caught me across the temple. The world went wobbly and dark, but I instinctively struck out. My fist met a stomach like boiled leather, thick with no give. Like a wall. Pain shot up my hand and arm. Soapy shouted from behind me. I stumbled back, nearly falling over a rock. McGinty followed, hands outstretched. McGinty cinched his fingers around my throat, doing his damnedest to crush my windpipe. I tried to rip free, but his grip only tightened. I tore at the man’s arm. I might as well have been trying to break a thick tree branch.
Soapy tackled both of us, and even though I felt something snap in my middle, it served to knock his hands loose. I rolled free, consumed with gasping air. It felt like minutes but maybe was only seconds before I heard Soapy shouting and grunting again. I shoved my resistant body up. Soapy rolled on the ground with McGinty, trying to beat him into submission and not succeeding. “Goddammit, Cook, get over here and help me!”
I had no way to get a clear shot at McGinty, and how do you kill a dead man anyway?
I stepped forward, stripping off my coat. “Hold him.”
“If I could, damn it—oof!” McGinty headbutted him.
I grabbed one of McGinty’s legs, tough as a tree root, and wrenched it with sheer strength toward the other. He got free and kicked me in the jaw. I doggedly shoved back up and came at him again. McGinty struggled and Soapy was barely able to hold him, but I managed to tie his ankles together with my coat sleeves. McGinty never made a sound and his expression didn’t change, just his body moving herky-jerky like someone twitching on his strings. Then I stripped my belt, took the holster off, and together we wrangled it around his arms and body. McGinty convulsed on the ground trying to get free, but to no avail. We panted and wiped the blood off our faces with our sleeves.
“That’s my best coat,” I said. “My wife is going to tan my hide.”
“That’s your best coat?”
I punched his shoulder, hard. “This is all your fault. You strung me along knowing McGinty escaped himself.”
“You wouldn’t believe me. I tried to tell you, like I said.”
“You should have made me believe. Maybe I at least could have spared Robert Ford a beating.”
“Yeah, shame McGinty didn’t manage to do him in.” Soapy took on a musing expression. “I could build a cage. I reckon people’d pay fifty cents to see a dead man come to life.”
I lost my temper. “Blast it, you don’t even care about Maggie Maslow! You only care about the money you can make off this damned monster.”
“I never said I did care for her. Besides, I made it right, didn’t I?”
Made her death right by paying for her funeral? That was a messed up brand of logic right there. “He’s an abomination, not a sideshow. Besides, all these corpses are alive in their coffins. Won’t take long for someone else to figure it out. And it won’t take long after that for one of them to get dug up and kill someone else. No, we burn him up.”
“We agreed we’d bury him,” Soapy said.
“That was before I saw him.”
“We can’t. The whole valley’d go up. Remember the Middle Park fire?”
Tens of thousands of acres had burned some years back, bad enough to still remember. I nodded with a sigh. “Then we bury him with the rest of Creede’s dead, even though they all ought to burn.”
Graveyards in the high country often keep open graves for anyone who might pass away when the ground is frozen. This one was no different. Soapy grabbed McGinty’s shoulders, and I tucked my pistol into my dragging waistband and grabbed McGinty’s feet. We dropped him once as he convulsed, trying to get free, but finally we rustled him into the grave with the open coffin at the bottom. Soapy slammed the lid down and jumped down into hole, his boots thudding on the coffin. I handed over the hammer and nails, glad I’d taken the pack off the horses before they’d bolted. Then we went at the ground with shovels, dumping dirt onto the rattling pine box. Behind us, Maggie Maslow and the other corpses struggled in their coffins, keeping us eerie company.
Daylight stretched over the peaks by the time we finished, and the dead quieted in their graves. It was a bit of a walk home. We ate breakfast at Zang’s silently and I headed back on the train that afternoon, glad to put my back to McGinty, Creede, and Jeff “Soapy” Smith.
But it was not to be. Weeks after I solved the mystery of the Petrified Man, a fire took all of Creede, including the Orleans Club. It didn’t take Soapy long to come back to Denver and get back to his old tricks in town. I never could figure why the dead took their nightly sojourns in Creede, but Soapy told me the fire stopped all that anyway. We even solved another crime together…monsterless thankfully, before he headed further west and eventually settled in the Alaskan frontier.
I never heard much word about Soapy until his death, and even that not until months after. But when a fellow lawman visited from Washington Territory, he told me a story over whiskey about a series of severe beatings and murders that had taken place in late 1895 by an obviously deranged man. Then, suddenly, they just stopped.
“You ever catch who did it?” I asked.
“Nah. Damnedest thing. People thought this sideshow statue did it.”
I sat up straight. “A statue. What kind of statue?”
“I never saw it. People said it was a mummified man or something.”
“Mummified?” My eyes narrowed. “Or petrified?”
The lawman snorted. “Neither. Those traveling sideshows are full of tricks and lies. Anything in the name of the almighty dollar.”
Right. Anything for a dollar. I growled under my breath and ordered a double. Damn you, Soapy Smith.
STANDS TWICE AND THE MAGPIE MAN
Stephen Graham Jones
This was after the massacre Stands Twice had woken to, which was after the summer the white scabs burned through his tribe, which had been two years after the winter most of them starved, which was right after the treaty at the white tents that was supposed to have stopped the massacres from happening.
Stands Twice hadn’t run from the soldiers that morning, didn’t want to let them see him running from them like that, so their bullets threw him back into the lodge. He crawled out from those ashes hours later, touching his own chest and stomach, not sure where the holes were, not sure why he wasn’t in the sandhills with the rest of the dead. It was the same as when he’d tended his wife through her sickness, when she was dying: The scabs never boiled up from his armpits or the tops of his feet like they had at first with her. They never came at all. And, though he’d stumbled out of that starvation winter weighing what felt like half as much as he had in the fall, still, he’d been walking. Unlike so many.
What he came to figure, it wasn’t that he couldn’t be killed, it was that he was being punished—that the pale road that led to the ghost camp wasn’t for him. But there had to be a way to get there.
He stripped down to nothing, walked into the sacred hills without nodding to the four directions, and with no bite of fresh liver to leave on a smooth rock in offering.
If the soldiers and the cold and the starving couldn’t grant him passage, maybe poor behavior could. Maybe his death already lumbered through the dark trees, its breath steaming down in twin plumes against the pine needles.
What he got instead was a magpie.
“Go away,” he called ahead to it. “I’m looking for my death.”
The magpie laughed at him so he rushed forward, dove into the sky after it, only to come down into a creek that folded his ankle over with a crack. He limped up from the water, his hands balled into fists, and walked and walked and made himself walk, trying not to look at his swelling ankle.
That night he dropped a chunk of flint into his fire until it was hot enough, then used a stick to roll it downhill to another creek. The flint shattered in the cold water. With one of the sharp flakes, he split the purple skin of his ankle.
The swelling went down with the fire, and then was back again when he woke, and the ankle still didn’t work.
“Where are you!” he called up the mountain.
He was talking to his death.
Only the magpie answered, its chatter a laugh that didn’t echo.
Two days later, walking with the help of a thick branch, he made it to the center of the holy place. There was an old rifle there, the wood rotted off, the metal flaky and brown. There was a tall, round rock that had a story that went with it. There were braids of hair tied to the branches of the tree, the hair unbraiding year by year, becoming bird nests.
He rolled the rock away, he beat the rifle against a tree until it crumbled into nothing. He reached up to pull the hair down, but it felt like it was still attached to people somehow, so he left it there with the prayers it was tying down.
When he walked away the next morning, there were bear prints in the frost, but the bear had just walked past, hadn’t even cared about him. Probably because, in the fall like this, bears need fat for the winter, not stringy Indians who haven’t eaten for four days.
He followed the bear anyway.
It led him to a giant rotting log. The bear had dug into the soft wood for…something. Bugs? Rabbits? Snake eggs?
That night he slept in what was left of that log, waiting for the next bear, but it never came. The next morning, ravenous, he went down to the grass and dug some turnips, ate them without boiling them, and was sick the rest of the day.
The magpie watched him, but didn’t say anything.
Either the next day or the one after, he looked up into some birch he was trudging through and saw a young owl sleeping. He brought it down with a rock, chased it through the trees, and made himself build a fire to cook it instead of just chewing in. He threw the feathers back up in the sky, watched them drift away.
The magpie flitted at the edge of his vision. It didn’t care if he killed all the owls and ate them.
Instead of scaring the magpie into the sky this time, he followed it.
It swooped and glided ahead, led him down and down through the flat grasslands to what turned out to be a covered wagon just sitting there. He watched it for the rest of that day—nothing—and, nodding off with sleep, was pretty sure there wasn’t a fire that night either. At sunrise he was standing next to it.
Inside were four dead women, their wrists in chains, their hair long and black. Not Indian, but not white either.
From their dirty clothes he fashioned something to wear, and, removing their clothes like that, he found one of them had a knife wrapped around her thigh with wire. He took that too, left them in the wagon and, a half day later, he found the team that had been pulling the wagon, along with two men. They were all dead, but no arrows, no bullet holes. Stands Twice looked back in the direction of the wagon, tried to imagine the story that got them from there to here, but there were too many ways it could have happened.
He started to take one of the men’s boots because it had silver conches on the side, but when he pulled it off the dead foot, it was full of fluid and decay.
The magpie called, and he followed.
He wore one of the women’s bonnets now.
He walked into a prairie dog town, plugged up enough holes that he could dig down into one for some meat, down in the cool darkness.
He cut the prairie dog’s haunches thin with the knife, dried the strips on a rack of willow branches, a fire smoking beneath it. He carried the meat in the bonnet now.
“I’m trying to die,” he said to himself through the days.
The magpie laughed at him.
“What do you know?” he said to it.
It floated ahead, ahead.
Two weeks later, it led him to one of the square lodges the farmers liked to live in. In the gentle hill behind it was a dugout with wood framing the door to keep it up. He watched the family move from the stalls to the cabin to the dugout, and then nodded when the magpie landed on the top rail by one of the horses.
“This will do it,” he said.
When the chimney was just breathing smoke and the one window wasn’t yellow anymore, he crept down to the stall, rolled under the lowest rail, and cupped his hands around the horse’s nose and mouth to keep it quiet, whispering to it the whole time.
He was just feeling around the horse’s neck for a hank of mane to pull himself up with when twin hammers cocked behind him.
The farmer told him something in his white tongue. Stands Twice smiled into the horse’s neck—this was it, it had to be—and turned, the knife already in his hand.
The farmer stepped back, stumbled, fell, discharged both barrels of his shotgun into the sky. The flash left Stands Twice blind for a moment, the sound left him deaf, but, furious at the farmer for stumbling, for not finishing this as he was supposed to, for not playing his role, he rushed ahead, held the man’s chin up so the knife, dull now, could open his throat.
The man burbled and died, the horse snorting and stamping from the smell of blood.
Stands Twice looked to the door of the square lodge, to the woman standing there, holding her two children behind her, and he stood, was on them before she could even scream.
They were the ones who had brought the scabs, they were the ones who were supposed to have sent meat that winter, they were the ones behind the guns that morning of the massacre.
He lined the four bodies up in front of the house, heads north, faces up, and he regarded them. Instead of eating their food, he burned their square lodge and pulled down the wood frame of their dugout door. Instead of stealing the horse—it was for the plow, not for running—he chased it away to die somewhere else.
The magpie landed on the face of the woman, pulled at her lower lip.
“So you just wanted to eat?” Stands Twice said to it. “That’s why you brought me here?”
The magpie pulled, having to flap its wings to be strong enough to get any meat.
That night the coyotes came in to feast as well, their eyes flashing in the moonlight, their tails bushy to show how big they were, how scary they were.
Stands Twice opened his arms over the farmer and his family, said to take what they wanted. When he woke the next morning, sleeping on the other side of the stall he’d used for firewood, the girl was standing there staring at him.
He started back.
Her head was still crushed in on one side from where he’d hit her against the frame of the door over and over, and the coyotes had pulled a lot of her meat off, but she didn’t care.
“You too?” Stands Twice said to her.
He threw rocks at her until she fell down and couldn’t get up, and then he stomped on her and hit her with a board from the stall, and then he pulled her apart, piled her with some wood, burned her.
She didn’t rise from the flames.
Standing beside him now, though, was the farmer, his head lolling from how deep the cut on his throat was.
“What does it take to kill white people?” Stands Twice said.
The farmer didn’t answer.
“What does it take to kill me?” Stands Twice asked himself.
He thought of his wife and he watched the dead farmer who wouldn’t die, wondered if he thought about his
dead wife.
He tied the farmer to a smooth post, waited for the wife and son to rise, but they never did. What he figured was that there was one spirit, and it had been in the girl, but when she died it had gone to the farmer. If he died, it would go across to the wife or the son. But if he just stayed tied up, the spirit would stay there with him.
The days passed, and the sun cooked the farmer’s skin into leather, and the wife and the son dried up. Not even the birds were coming in for them anymore.
Far in the distance, a line of covered wagons passed like white tents being carried, to make some treaties somewhere.
Stands Twice ate turnips and boiled them in a pot he salvaged from the ashes, and he watched the tied-up farmer, and then he watched the magpie land on the rounded top of the smooth post the farmer was tied to.
Without waiting even a moment, the magpie jumped forward, onto the farmer’s shoulder, and then forced its head into the farmer’s mouth and clawed onto his lips with its feet, forced itself into the farmer’s mouth.
It lumped down the farmer’s throat, into his chest.
Stands Twice took two steps back, didn’t look away.
The farmer fell down in a pile and that night Stands Twice slept a walk away, in the trees. When he woke, the farmer was squatting across from him, his face still leathery with death but the cut on his throat covered now with a knotted sash. The farmer spoke with a magpie’s harsh voice at first, then settled down into a man’s voice.
“I should go to town,” it said.
“Why?” Stands Twice asked.
“Why,” the magpie man said back.
“They’ll shoot you,” Stands Twice said.
Magpie Man looked down at his caved-in leathery chest, touched it with his fingertips.
“I can still have children,” it said.
“You want to?” Stands Twice said.
Magpie Man stood, looked to the right, the west, like looking into the future, and said, “They’ll grow up to…well. They’ll be like me, I guess.”