Merkabah Rider: The Mensch With No Name (29 page)

She
retreated to her den, and he crawled down to join her. They would have their
time to lick each other’s wounds with loving care, but not yet. She told him
how to defeat Chaksusa’s man. Now that he was impotent,
She
would devour them both.

He
told
Her
it was safe to rise. Not in words, but in the
special, unspoken language they shared.

A
moment’s more toil and then he could leave this cold world again and share
Her
dreams, nestled in the warm, poison heart of eternity.

* * *
*

The Rider felt his throat closing.
He glanced again at Piishi, whose eyes were bugging and tearing, his face
purpling as his hands tore at the collar of his shirt, seeking to put his
fingers on the unseen force that was strangling him.

The
Rider shook his head violently and gesticulated toward Mauricio.

Piishi,
eyes fluttering, gripped the handle of the knife on his belt and pulled it
free. He drew back his hand, the sharp sky iron blade pressed between his thumb
and forefinger, and flung it. The knife spun end over end and landed squarely
in between Mauricio’s shoulder blades.

The
Black Goat Man bellowed inhumanly and arched his back. Both hands reached
blindly for the hilt of the offending blade.

The
Rider felt the vice grip on his throat slacken.

The
Goat Man turned, the knife forgotten, and glared at them with unfettered hate.
He took a step toward them.

Suddenly
a fierce blue shaft of light stabbed out of the depths of the well and glancing
off of the ceiling, filling the chamber with a dim glow. In the dying memories
of Amadeo, the Rider had been limited mainly to the physical senses. Now, he
felt a tremor, not underfoot, but somewhere within the membranes of reality. It
was like the feeling of an artillery shell crash landing amid the ranks back in
the war. Not the fire and the heat, not the ensuing rain of bone and blood, but
the shock, the unquantifiable pulse of force shuddered through the bones,
resonated deep in the chest and left the hands trembling like struck tuning
forks. Something was moving.

There
came a scraping noise the Rider knew only too well, and suddenly great black,
whipping vines sprung from the edge of the pit, forming a deadly moving halo
around Mauricio. A half dozen more of thicker girth lodged themselves into the
ground and began to double and strain, as if pulling a heavy load forth. The
smell became overpowering, and the cold blue light intensified.

Piishi
looked about for a weapon, his normally stoic face suddenly a disconcerting
mask of terror. He fell to his knees and scrabbled to retrieve the bow.

The
Rider massaged his throat, struggling to form the word of power again, but
still it wouldn’t come.

Mauricio
staggered back towards the well, trying to reach the hilt of the knife.

In
the sporadic light of the lantern, a huge shapeless bulk seeded with
innumerable quick, writhing stalks came into view, filling the diameter of the
well. It was a great heap of shifting mud and creaking wicker, shot through
with writhing things like massive nightcrawlers, snapping a variety of animal
jaws and sporting hundreds of pedicle stalks bristling with strange splayed
branches of spiky bone.

The
blue glow became a searchlight, emanating from a single bulging, bioluminescent
globe protruding like a great questing eye situated at the crest of the pulsing
shape. It traced its beam down the ceiling, and the Rider felt that if he
looked into that cold light dead on it would burn through the center of his
mind, splitting his reason asunder as the light of the Elder Sign had burned away
the Cold Ones. He knew too that this immense shape, whatever it was, was but a
portion of the thing that dwelt below, like a questing little finger poking
through a sheet, the knuckles of the greater hand bulging beneath. The floor
began to shake and crack beneath his feet, attesting to this.

The
hunched Goat Man staggered back toward the abomination emerging from its lair,
and the dark tubers wove together into a kind of cradle to catch him. With a
renewal of hot odor and a sickening wet sound as of a rotten fruit being pulled
apart, some obfuscated fissure in its body opened and a moist vertical opening
lined with two rows of curved horns like teeth split apart. The tubers stuffed
the limp Mauricio hungrily inside.

The
Rider fell to his knees. His lips worked, but no prayer would come forth as the
tendrils slid across the ground toward him.

One
of the larger growths encircled Piishi’s waist. The Apache was drawn swiftly
towards the epicenter of the thing, sure to disappear into the same orifice Mauricio
had passed through.

The
blank eye swiveled towards Piishi, but instead of withering as he was fully
bathed in the sickly light, the Apache drew back the string of his bow and let
loose an arrow that whisked across the chamber and sank to the feathers in the
gelatinous bulb. The blue light died and its generator burst like a punctured
amniotic sac, spilling a thick liquid that glowed like molten moon milk.

There
was an earth-shaking eruption of sound unlike anything the Rider could
describe. The sick mass shuddered and the tendrils became a blur of violent
motion. The Rider saw Piishi dashed hard against the ceiling before something
struck him across the ribs and flung him clear out of the chamber. His head
collided with stone and he fell unconscious.

* * *
*

He
dreamed of Chaksusa, Don Amadeo, the Moors, and the Papagos. But he had left
his body enough times to know this was no dream. Sometimes he wondered if he
would be able to tell the moment of his own death from any other time he left
his body, or if he would wander like a man searching for a lost coat, forever
hugging himself in the wind.

The
ghosts were safe. There were no words directed at him, but a feeling of
gratitude and relief. They were free of their half-life, and Chaksusa would fulfill
his own prayer. He would be the light that guided them home.

* * * *

The
Rider opened his eyes to see the sun shining down the stone steps. He smelled a
fresh breeze that had passed through the fir trees and dispelled the previous
stench. He sat up slowly, rubbing a hand across the back of his throbbing skull
and coming away with blood.

The
well chamber was cast in a dusty haze, and the Rider felt a chill when he saw
the back of the hunched figure seated at the edge of the well, apparently staring
down into it.

He
found his pistol and rose slowly.

“She’s
gone,” said the shadowed figure, and the Rider realized it was Piishi.

He
walked across the chamber, briefly glancing at the three statues before he came
to stand beside the Indian.

The
Apache sat with his legs dangling child like over the edge, hands loose in his
lap.

“Are
you alright?”

“I
saw things,” Piishi said. “She showed me…things.”

She, not it.
In the moment they had looked into each other’s
eyes, the thing had touched his mind.

The
Rider put his hand on Piishi’s shoulder. As Piishi went on, describing what he
had seen, it seemed to the Rider that he could see it too. Whether this was
some residual ‘gift’ of the rapport he briefly shared with Amadeo through
Chaksusa, or some symptom of the telepathic touch of the thing from the well,
he didn’t know. He saw the dark reaches of void that stretched out beyond the
farthest heaven, and the vast ranks of eldritch things that slept suspended
there, spinning slowly in an ever tightening circle, a hunting orbit. These
things, devoid of form as men knew it, waited. They waited at the threshold of
this world, dreaming of their return—no, dreaming their return. Among them, one
tremendous black shape stretched colossal wings, turned toward the universe and
strained against unseen fetters, battering monotonously against its prison
door. The whole universe shook with every impact.

The
Rider felt his stomach plummet, as if he had been dropped from a great height
and was falling. He felt his hackles rise, and a great, lonely coldness washed
over his whole body, sank into his mind and settle there like death. It was a
kind of death. The death of hope; something he had not felt since he was a
child discovering his own mortality as he lay curled beneath his sheet in the
dark, staring at the blank ceiling with wide, fearful eyes.

God,
God, could such things be?
And if so, why?

This
particular horror was gone, and
Her
servant Mauricio
was dead at long last. But
She
would find another
willing proxy, and She would be back. Not through this passage, as the door had
been compromised. Yet there were always others. Until then
She
would huddle in perfect darkness and lather Her trivial wound with a thousand
eager black tongues. She did not yearn to avenge the injury they had inflicted,
for it mattered little to one whose memory stretched back eons before
antediluvian times. Their efforts would be forgotten. They were already
forgotten. She could wait till long after the bones of their great grandchildren
were gone to dust before
She
rose again. This, he
knew. When Her kind at last came into their own, all that man held dear would
be wiped out incidentally, without the slightest effort or knowing. In parting,
She
had told Piishi this. It was no threat, only the
unconcerned reassurance of inevitability from a callous adult to a frightened
child.

The
Rider took his hand from Piishi’s shoulder and saw that it was trembling.

Piishi
raised his hands to his face and his shoulders sagged with the burden of unwanted
knowledge.

The
Rider skirted the edge of the deep well and crossed to the three alcoves. One
after another he pulled the idols down to smash on the floor. The pieces he
swept into the well with the toe of his shoe, and he listened to them as they
broke into smaller bits somewhere far below. But there never was the sound of a
final impact, though he strained a long time to hear it, and so it gave him no
comfort.

When
he returned to Piishi’s side, the Apache raised his head to the Rider, and his
grim cheeks were wet with tears.

His
face was the face of an old man.

Dorado
stared at the writhing legs of the cockroach he had pinned to the table with
his thumb, and grinned a golden smile of satisfaction as he slowly pushed down,
hearing and feeling at last the little pop as its yellowish innards spurted
from its behind. He watched it kick its last before he spoke.

“So
who is he?” he said, indicating the skinny figure all in dusty black resting in
his folded arms on the table in the corner, beside an untouched plate of beans
around which the flies were beginning to congregate.

“Hell
if I know,” said Ocobock, scratching at the sore on his cheek until it leaked
blood, then frowning at the red on his fingertips as if he was at a loss as to
how it had happened. “He’s been sittin’ there since we been here.” He put the
bloody finger in his mouth and sucked at the nail.

“I
know you idiots can’t read,” said Amonson at his side, “but are you blind too?”
he took a drag of his drooping cigarette.

“I
can read,” Dorado said, wiping the bug guts on his wooly vest.

“You
can not,” said Ocobock, taking his finger out of his mouth and sitting up
straight.

“I
can read E’spanish,” he countered.

“Well
this is America, and
we don’t write nothin’ in E’spanish
here,
” Ocobock said.

“You
wouldn’t know the difference,” Dorado grinned.

“Why
don’t the both of you shut up and look at what I’m lookin’ at,” Amonson
whispered, angling the smoking end of his drooping cigarette at the wall over
the stranger’s head.

The
dingy east wall of The Senate Café, the most thriving business in the
marginally established desert community of Escopeta, was papered with reward
posters. The owner, Long George Lamartine, encouraged his diverse and mostly
anonymous patrons to tack them up there. Over the years the wall had come to
look as if it had been transplanted from a post office, being cluttered with
yellowed bills depicting grim sketches of frowning, unshaven men and big bold
type promising dollars for their blood. Some of them were autographed, complete
with scrawled sentiments addressed to Long George, thanking him for his
hospitality or good-naturedly cursing the abominable fare he dished out from
the kitchen. Some of them had crude zeroes added to the dollar amounts by men
who thought the initial offerings beneath them. One up there was notorious for
being splashed with specks of dried brown liquid, which the poster had loudly
proclaimed was the blood of the bearer who had come to collect on him.
Sometimes men came in and took them down without a word, the scraps of torn
paper still clinging to the wall. Sometimes half a phrase or the
crown of a hat or one ragged slash
of a face were all the
dead left behind.