A Fistful of Horror - Tales Of Terror From The Old West (2 page)

The man was ranting like a loon, brandishing the shotgun like a sceptre as he spoke. The fool might blast a hole in his chest by accident if he wasn’t careful! Warily, Keen backed up from the armed man. He wasn’t sure if the old man could hit him from this distance, but he took cover behind a rock either way.

“Put down the gun mister, and we can talk. Who took your friends?”

“Sightless, but not demons! They’re like you and me, but something else... something worse,” he spat. “But they ain’t alone. It came out with them. Their faith feeds it but it is constrained. It is only what they say. It whispered to me; hungers for the faithless, it craves a new revelation!”

“Whatever they were, whatever it was, they ain’t here anymore. Trust me friend. They’re gone. Now if you’d give me clear passage through this road, I-“

“Blasphemy! A new idea to defile! The harvest of faith yields the realization of holy truth, to be sown again for their children!” the man howled in his mania, before the shotgun bucked in his hand. Keen ducked low as a chunk of stone exploded mere inches above him.

“Don’t make me put a hole in you! Drop the shotgun; now!”

Keen snapped off a warning shot. It pegged the mirror in the man’s hand, shattering it into gleaming pieces. The man threw up his shotgun and fired, sending Keen diving back behind his rock.

Wide shot.

Keen knew the man needed to reload now. He pumped the lever of his repeater. His next shot would put the madman down.

A shadow passed across him, as if a cloud or a vulture had swept overhead and blotted out the moon, however briefly. He threw a glance skywards.

Nothing. But he could hear a beat of wings; something powering itself across the heavens unbelievably fast. He looked back towards Buxtan. He was quiet as he sagged over Keen’s mount. Everything was quiet; not even the insects chirped.

The old man too had been silenced. Keen suddenly leapt up from cover, his Winchester at his shoulder as he aimed towards the burning star.

Blood.

A pentagram scratched in the dirt, with a shotgun snapped in two by its side. Inside the pentagram, a smouldering wing tip lay where the old man had been before. Instinctively, he swept his rifle up towards the heavens, but whatever had swooped down and took the man had vanished.

“How did negotiations go? Do we have the road?” Buxtan asked, spitting at Keen’s feet as the bounty hunter returned.

“We have the road,” Keen replied, his eyes downcast.

“You shot him is why I bet, you sonofabitch! You can’t take me to that town! I can’t go back.”

Keen wasn’t listening. He mounted his horse after carefully replacing his rifle. His mind was consumed by the strange sight he had just witnessed. What was out there, waiting in the wilderness? What the hell was going on?

Keen shook his head, eyes focusing on the distant cluster of lights on the black horizon that twinkled like a constellation of stars fallen to earth.

They were finally where they needed to be; the town of Solitude.

***

Solitude was an old town, by the standards of the western frontier. Prosperous when the gold was plentiful, and a dried up hole of a place after it was picked clean by greedy madmen. Around the dwindling wooden shops, saloons and churches of the town lay a dozen great mines. Their workers still picked at the cliff face for whatever they could find of worth.

Preachers came, and homesteaders. Since Keen had known the town, it had grown and recovered some of its former vitality. The foot soldiers of the Good Book had made the town a pious refuge. Its bars had closed and the undesirables were rooted out for the most part. The damned friendly bastards didn’t even need a sheriff once the prayer groups had started up.

Keen hated the place. It was so sterile, so ordered. Everyone had been so serene. If it hadn’t been for the bounty they had placed upon Buxtan’s head, he would have left the place along with the drunks and murderers, who felt more like kin than the strange men and women in their crisp pressed clothes and paper-thin smiles.

If they paid well though, that might change his less than stellar opinion of them. Keen smirked inwardly, though this mirth never reached his hard-bitten face.

As they neared the town, Buxtan began to wail and weep openly, desperately biting at his dry lips. Keen punched him in the kidneys without turning around.

“Shut up or I swear I’ll gag you too,” he hissed.

“You don’t understand. I had to kill her. It was the only way…”

Keen punched him again until he stopped wriggling.

“They’ll take your eye too…” Buxtan finally wheezed before he fell silent. Keen ignored him. Keen hadn’t had trouble the last time he came; he was always roping drifters and petty crooks for Solitude, and though they paid a pittance, they always paid. Catching a murderer, one of their own, would surely net him a far larger reward. Nothing Buxtan’s depraved mind could conjure up would stop Keen getting him into town.

Men with miners’ lamps were waiting to greet them; a great half-circle of men wearing what looked like their Sunday best. Each of the men wore wide, friendly grins on their faces, as if they had smoked some soothing herb from the orient. Yet, even more strangely, they all wore dark, round eye glasses, that reflected the torch light.

“Oh praise be! Our champion returns! And he brings back our wayward brother, alive no less! ‘Tis a glorious display of God’s favour! Praise be!” the leader of this group proclaimed in a clarion-clear voice, raising his hands above his head as he pontificated.

“Yeah praise or whatever,” Keen replied in his deep voice, half-heartedly making the sign of the cross. “I’m just here for the reward. I’ll set him off at the court house for the judge. You can pay me after.”

The men paused, as if considering Keen’s offer.

“We can take him now,” one replied, a little too quickly.

Keen frowned. “I’m doing this by the book, understand? I’ll take him to the court; make this official.”

“We are doing it by the book also; by the only book man need abide by. The Good Book,” the Pastor (or preacher, Keen had no clue) retorted with a calm smile.

Keen shook his head. “I’ll take him to the court house now then you can do whatever the hell you want with him, once everything is signed. Now make way you here?” Keen replied, in a voice which brooked no argument.

Slowly, the men parted before his horse. As he trotted into town, the heads of the men turned to follow him.

Throughout the altercation, Buxtan was utterly silent, as he tried desperately to make himself as small as possible.

Keen’s horse walked slowly through the town, bathed in the artificial glow of oil lampposts and candlelight in doorways. Everywhere he looked, people stared from their houses like ghosts, small black glasses making them appear ghoulish in the half-light.

As he moved through the eerie town, he spotted Solitude’s chapel, sitting upon a load hill, apart from the rest of the settlement. It was a small wooden building, painted glaring white, with a small bell tower rising at the front of the building. Yet, despite its size, it felt larger. It felt like the cresting peak of an iceberg, with the majority of the thing hidden deep below. It glowered, cyclopean in the moonlight. Keen turned away, back towards his destination. But Buxtan suddenly began to shiver.

“It was real…oh God, it was real…” he whimpered, squeezing his remaining eye shut.

The Court house jail was the only structure in the town made exclusively of brick, giving it a solid, dependable weight; almost reassuring amidst the strangely ethereal town. With a grunt, Keen hauled the thrashing form of Buxtan from the horse and dragged him up the steps into the jail.

The man at the desk was another grinning simpleton like the others, and wore the same funny little glasses; perhaps a uniform of their freak show cult? Keen didn’t know, or particularly care.

“Praise to the God and the Angel! You returned him to us! Bless you! Doctor Irvan! They brought the wayward one home!” the jailer called to another man, who sat on a chair in the lobby before the jailer’s desk. The doctor wore a white suit, with leather gloves and those same black glasses perched upon a hook-like nose. He also smiled, but it was a wry smile; less disturbingly earnest than his fellow cultists. Slowly, he folded his newspaper, and walked up to Abel Keen and his cowering prisoner, who sobbed and gasped in his restraints.

Irvan sniffed, drawing the scent across his nostrils. He cocked his head to one side.

“Are you a man of faith, Mister Keen?” he asked with a sibilant voice. Keen turned to glare at the man, his hand resting lightly on his hip, close to his pistol.

“I do not see how it any of your business.”

“So, a no?” the man nodded, grinning smugly.

Keen stared into the impenetrable black glasses, seeing his own hateful scarred face glaring back at him in the reflection. Irvan turned to Buxtan, who avoided the Doctor’s scrutiny as best he could.

“Welcome back Godfrey,” he said, nodding to Buxtan. The doctor turned and left, snatching his wide-brimmed hat from the hat stand on the way out.

Keen relaxed his hand. “What in the hell was that about?”

The jailer smiled dreamily, sighing. “Buxtan killed his wife.”

***

Keen accompanied Buxtan to his cell, making sure he was sealed in by the jailer.

“You can go now Keen. Your job is done.”

Keen shook his head. “I’m staying here,” he stated bluntly, setting a stool down opposite Buxtan’s cell. The jailer’s smile faltered slightly.

“Why? You fulfilled your purpose and brought him here. God-willing, justice shall be enacted upon him.”

Keen sat down, setting his rifle across his lap. “God has nothing to do with it friend. Nothing. I saw your boys out there, greeting us with torches and a mob. I won’t have this man lynched. I’ll wait till I see a proper official; a judge, or a fed or something. Otherwise, you can kindly fuck off with your talk of God’s will. I follow the laws of man, not the laws of God. I shall sit right here till morning thank you.”

The jailer’s false smile returned. “Of course, of course. Sleep well then bounty hunter. You shall receive your reward at daybreak. God be with you.”

Keen just shrugged as the man left the room. As he left, Keen rose from his seat, to check all the drawers and cabinets nearby.

“This is a dry town now mister Keen. Any liquor they had they locked up in the saloon after they boarded the place up. You’ll not find a drop in here,” Buxtan called out from his cell.

The prisoner sat upon the floor, his hands on his knees. Tears had dried on his cheeks, and now his face seemed set in a bitter countenance.

Keen muttered something in reply, before he rummaged in his jacket pockets. Minutes later, he produced a hip flask of bourbon and took a swig, before tossing the almost-empty flask to Buxtan, who quietly tried to coax the last few drops out of the container with an outstretched tongue.

“You killed Irvan’s wife then?” Keen asked, sitting back down upon the stool.

“I did. But it wasn’t like what you think it was.”

“Oh? Then how was it?” Keen asked in his usual gruff, faintly disinterested tone.

“I thought you didn’t want to hear my sob story? You beat me ragged when I tried it the first time we met,” Buxtan replied. His tone had lost its pleading tone now. It seemed as if something had changed in his mind once he had reached Solitude. It was either despair or acceptance, Keen couldn’t tell.

“I’ve got you to jail now. I didn’t want to hear your stories when I had you hogtied; you’d have said anything to get me to let you go…or blow your head off. Now, you’ve got nowhere to go. I may as well listen now,” Keen replied levelly. He’d hear the man’s story, because Abel suspected those who had set the bounty on Buxtan’s head were devious little bastards. Keen firmly believed in finding out all he could about those who sought to screw him out of his money.

“’Spose that makes sense,” Buxtan conceded warily. “I had to kill her. It was me or her. I was a ranch hand on the old Northallen ranch. Cattle had been going missing and shit like that, so they sent me down here to ask around; find out if any bandits or rustlers had sold them cattle on the sly.”

“Aren’t you a little old to be a ranch hand?” frowned Keen, as he lazily checked his rifle.

“Not many avenues of advancement opened up to me, mister Keen. But that isn’t the point. You have to listen to me!” Buxtan was frantic again, his eyes darting around, as if the walls themselves might reach out and shred his skin. “I met the doctor and his wife. They were decent to me…at first. They gave me food and a place to stay for the night. Then they asked if I was religious. Now of course I said yes; the whole town is full of this ‘Blessed of Bartholomew’ bible-thumping bunch. That’s when it started.

“They put something in the food to stop my feet working properly, and stoppered-up my mouth with gauze; calm every step of the way. The doctor didn’t even flinch when he took out my eye. They took my eye Abel! I thrashed and moaned like a horse in a snare, but they didn’t care. They said ‘To take your sight is the greatest demonstration of faith. Trust in the Lord’s messenger to be your guide’. That’s why they wear the glasses. They gave their eyes to it…to the messenger…”