A Fistful of Horror - Tales Of Terror From The Old West (4 page)

Keen’s eyes welled with bitter tears, as his hard lips quivered like a child. Bones and flesh were fused in unnatural ways, undulating and oozing as the thing breathe din the life of Buxtan. Faces and beaks duelled for prominence on its hunched, eyeless head, cawing and moaning in perfect harmony. As he looked, he saw the truth of the fiend. He recognised the flesh which made the creature. Nothing angelic, nothing profane. It was meat; sculpted, twisted meat, built and shaped by sick imaginations, but meat all the same. He drew his pistol.

Before he could fire, the blind cultists surged towards him, grasping his hands and shoulders, dragging him to his knees with a flurry of desperate strikes. The Pastor’s voice whispered close to Keen’s ear. “Isn’t it beautiful? We made Him beautiful.”

The beast tossed aside the whimpering, skinless form of Buxtan, standing tall upon many legs, casting a great shadow over the bounty hunter and his captors.

“You made…that? I know those parts…oh no…oh, Jesus, no…!” Keen muttered in mounting despair.

There were faces, stitched into the coiling hide of the creature, alongside the vulture wings and curving talons and beaks. He knew the faces, from posters pinned to the sheriff’s office. Pickpockets and delinquents he had brought to justice…to…Solitude. He couldn’t look at the sagging grey portraits that now assailed him. He had been complicit.

“It read our books, and took the Lord’s words, straight from the good book and made them real. It filled us with divine light, and it taught us how to make angel flesh. Glorious is His divine messenger! As he is the Lord, and the Son was of us, so look upon the Spirit clothed in flesh!” Bartholomew panted ecstatically. “But the key was you. It breathed its delicious words into my mind as I dreamed. It said ‘bring me a base thing; a faithless dolt, so that I may know him and be reborn.’ Are its words not wondrous?” Bartholomew purred. Keen was certain no answer he gave would matter, so he simply spat at his captor hatefully.

Keen continued to shout and curse incoherently as the vile patchwork monster advanced upon him. The monster’s jaws were opening; so many folding joints and mandibles. Slavering maws filled with broken teeth.

“What the fuck are you?” he screamed, trying to affect a defiant sneer of disgust.

To his surprise, the fiend also paused. Bartholomew’s grip slackened in similar surprise.

“What…am…I…? Tell me…” the thing’s many voices hissed as one.

“Ignore the heathen! You are an ang-” Bartholomew began. Keen interrupted him with an elbow to the throat, sending the Pastor gagging into the dirt.

“You’re no angel! You’re a monster; a killer! And I brought them to you…I’m as much a killer as you’ll ever be, you sonofabitch!” Keen screamed in its formless face.

It plunged a talon through Keen’s shoulder, snatching him painfully from the cultists’ grip, before flinging him to the ground. His body slumped to the ground, showering the creature with gore as his bowels were opened as the beast savaged him.

“A killer…as much a killer as you…” it seemed to speak to itself, its oily voice rasping from too many mouths.

Bartholomew and his men backed away from their angel, as it raised its talons against them. A vast, six-winged shadow loomed over the cowering cultists.

They finally stopped smiling then

***

When Mormon settlers passed through Solitude on the road to their Salt Lake, they found a town burnt to ashes. The inhabitants of the town must have been slaughtered by some Indian band, who took their eyes as trophies, while some bodies were too severely butchered to identify as people at all.

There was one survivor, who they picked up miles down the road. There wasn’t a shred of clothes on his body and he was dirty as a vagrant, covered in soot and blood, with ugly wounds all over his ruined body. He could barely stand without the aid of the burliest of the settlers. One of the older men of the caravan recognised the man’s face from the papers; a Mister Abel Keen. Apparently he’d been a bit of a legend in the wild taverns of the west. Nevertheless, they took him in. Despite his dread reputation, his mind was clearly broken. He spoke little, and seemed to stare at the sky in mute bewilderment.

“It’s okay now, we’ll look after you,” one man said kindly, draping a blanket over Keen’s scarred shoulders.

“Am I a killer now…?” was all the mad man could muster by way of a slurred response. “What am I now?”

MEDICINE MAN

Lisamarie Lamb

Quan was tired. It was late afternoon and he had been performing healing ceremonies all day, on little sleep. Cures for headaches, for cuts and grazes, for insomnia. He had even been asked to help a young man who feared he had been cursed by the mountain witch since he could no longer shoot an arrow straight and true.

There had been three births during the night, and he had been needed there too. Not in the tipi, no men were allowed in there during a birth, not even the medicine man, but outside, giving advice through the tent flaps, helping the mothers to breathe, to focus and having the honour of naming each child as it came into the world.

He named all the children.

And now, his healing done for the day, he had found the time to heal himself in the noisy peace of the town’s saloon. He sipped his fourth whiskey and licked his lips and watched the locals fighting over cards.

It was always the same in this place and that is why he liked it – one of the reasons he liked it. Another reason was Miss Pearl who owned the bar and who worked there most nights, when she wasn’t working upstairs as a madam. She was there now, dealing with a cowboy who thought himself better than he was and who couldn’t hold his drink.

“Well now, it’s you again.” Miss Pearl didn’t smile. She didn’t frown. She just stood with her hands on her hips and her ringlets bouncing on her shoulders. “Didn’t I tell you last time you weren’t welcome here no more?”

The cowboy slumped onto a barstool and grinned drunkenly. He slipped, catching his chin on the thick, beer soaked, mahogany bar, cutting his lip on his own tooth. He didn’t seem to notice, and hauled himself up again, never taking his eyes from Miss Pearl’s chest. “Aw, come on now, darlin’. Just one little drink, that’s all I’m asking.” The drunk jabbed a calloused finger toward Quan and sneered. “And you’re serving this here injun, so you’ve got to serve a white boy like me.” Then he laughed, snorted, gave Quan the slightest of scowls.

Quan ran his hand over his long, grey hair, tugging at the braids. He rubbed at his scalp where it parted perfectly in the middle, the red clay he used to decorate the skin coming off on his hands. He was suddenly self conscious, the only Native American in the saloon. It wasn’t normally a problem, his tribe was good for trade, good for money, so he was generally left alone.

But every now and then…

Quan turned to the man. “Now, kwitap, I may be an injun, but I am not deaf.” He smiled sweetly. “And I am a medicine man. So unless you are looking to be cursed, I would do what the good lady says and get out of here. Now.”

“What did you call me, Co-manch?” The cowboy slid from his stool and took six paces, unsteady, intoxicated paces, so that he was standing face to face with Quan. “Cos you know I don’t speak no voodoo.”

Quan smiled, feeling a little light headed himself, feeling brave with it. Feeling powerful. “There’s no need for you to worry, gunsel, it’s just a word. Just a word like rustler is just a word.”

The cowboy’s face turned puce. His fingers clicked across the gun that sat hitched in a holster on his scarred old belt. The saloon was silent now. Quan had taken one step over the line that shouldn’t be crossed, but it was too late to backtrack now. He had to just keep going and damn the consequences.

“What the hell did you say?” The words came out straight and sharp, with no hint of liquor behind them now.

Quan knocked back his whiskey, glanced at the gun, and winked. “Why, you’re not afraid of a few little words, are you?” Under his breath, Quan began to mutter strange incantations. He was panicking just slightly, tipping back and forth between thinking he was about to die and thinking he might just get out of the saloon without starting a brawl and him shot to hell in the middle of it. The words were oddments, some Comanche, some Dutch, some completely made up on the spot. It didn’t matter. What mattered was making the cowboy piss his pants.

“Are you cursing me? Are you cursing me, redskin? Is that what you’re doing?” The cowboy’s voice had risen an octave or so, and he peered around the room, wide-eyed, to make sure everyone knew what was happening. “Because if you are-”

The drunk reached for his gun, drew it and never finished his sentence. The swing door of the saloon burst open and six Comanche entered. They were sweating, the day’s late sun still hot on their backs. And the cowboy shrieked and fell to the floor, his hands on his head. “Don’t hurt me, I’m sorry! Just don’t hurt me!”

The Comanche ignored him. It was Quan they were looking for. The rest of the saloon went back to their drinking and their card games, and the sobbing cowboy stayed where he was, too afraid to move.

“Quan, you must come back to the reservation. We need a healer.”

Quan recognised grief and shock in that voice. But he was so tired. And he was a little drunk. He couldn’t heal anyone like this. He tried to calm the man who had spoken. “Come now, Ahdoche, what can be the matter?”

There were tears on the other man’s face. And tears on this man’s face meant trouble. He was the war chief, and as such was a revered and important member of the tribe. And he never, ever cried.

“It’s Nocona. My Nocona. He is hurt. He fell from his horse and was crushed by the hooves. Please, Quan, he needs you. I need you. Please.”

A child then. That made a difference. That made all the difference. A child was a gift to the Comanche – precious, perfect, poised to become the elders, to take the tribe onwards towards paradise. And this one, Nocona, the war chief’s youngest son, was particularly special.

Everyone knew it.

Everyone loved him.

He would be something. Or he would be if he survived.

So he had to survive.

“Please, Quan, hurry. He is dying.”

The heavy lidded brown eyes that pleaded with the medicine man were full and the tears were ready to come again, no matter who saw it or what they thought.

With a final guilty look back at the bar, at the empty shot glass, at Miss Pearl who knew everything but said nothing, Quan nodded quickly and ushered the group of Comanche out of the door. He put a comforting – he hoped – arm around Ahdoche’s broad shoulders, and felt the fear and the grief that were fighting within the man’s body and mind….in his soul.

Quan mounted his horse feeling queasy. He hadn’t expected to have to ride, and had planned a leisurely walk back to the reservation, his horse following behind, if he even remembered he had one. But now, now that time was of the upmost importance, he had to move quickly. The dusty dusky scenery passed by with a dizzying, nauseating speed, and Quan was grateful when he could finally leap from the animal. He stumbled as he landed in the sand, but the rest of the group had already run onwards, and they did not notice.

“Over here! Hurry!” Ahdoche yelled out to the medicine man, and then knelt on the ground by a little bundle, something wrapped in blankets that had been placed by a small fire. The flames were crackling and smoking, and the bundle was completely still.

Quan jogged, his head already full of an ache that he would have to wait to soothe. He knelt next to Ahdoche and pulled back the blanket.

Nocona.

A tiny boy, the runt of a large litter, Quan remembered his birth, his naming ceremony. He remembered last week when the child had come running to him, scared after his elder sister had told him the story of the Pia Mupitsi – the Big Cannibal Owl – and how it was on its way to eat him.

Nocona had come to him, to Quan, and not his father. The war chief would have laughed, and told the boy not to be silly, not to believe his sister’s scary stories. And that was fine, only, as Nocona knew, they weren’t just silly, scary stories at all. They were true. So he had come to Quan because the medicine man never laughed at him, never told him that the legends were made up simply to terrify naughty children.

Quan told him the truth. Quan told him the real stories behind the myths.

Now Quan looked down at the broken body of the boy, bruised, bloody, trampled by a heavy horse and yet still trying to live. He took a deep breath and looked away as he exhaled so that no one smelled the liquor. “He needs to be inside, in the healing tipi. Let me take him, and I will see what I can do.”

Ahdoche reached out and took Quan’s hand, looked him directly in his eyes. “Oh, thank you. Thank you.”

Quan took his hand back and put it against Nocona’s chill forehead. “Don’t thank me yet, Ahdoche. I cannot promise anything.”

But Ahdoche chose not to hear the warning. Instead he smiled, an uneasy, unsure sort of smile, and nodded. “Thank you.”

Quan lifted the dying boy as carefully as he could, but despite his gentleness he still heard bones snapping. Was that Nocona’s back? His neck? He gritted his teeth against the sound and walked away from the growing crowd. He needed space. He needed a mug of coffee. He needed some air.