And the Hills Opened Up (12 page)

21

Peace settled over the Cooke house after Hollis Wells stopped his sputtering and had the good sense to expire.  The National man was harder to kill than he’d looked, with more life clinging to his bones than Revis Cooke would have allowed, just looking at him.  Perhaps it was living on the road that coarsened a man like that, the sun beating down all day long and the wind curing your skin until it was like hide on a cow.  The stagecoach rolling along beneath you, every bump jarring the teeth in your jaw while you watched the trees for road agents, a shotgun set out across your lap.

But even hard road living was no match for a good fire iron applied with leverage and appropriate vigor.

“Isn’t that right, Mr. Wells?”

Revis Cooke laughed, turning onto his side to properly view the corpse.  Cooke had fallen to the floor after administering the beating, winded yet exhilarated.  Even after his chest was half-caved and both forearms shattered, the National man had begged for his life.  The words “no” and “please” rising from his lips like brief, useless prayers. 

“But your men didn’t come running to save you, did they?  All that fuss and they’re probably still in that damn saloon, drinking themselves into a stupor.  And tomorrow, after they wake up rough beside some faded whore, they’ll stumble out into the warm light of day while you’ll be stiff as a board.”

Mr. Dennison wouldn’t be pleased, of course.  Cooke understood that.  He understood that Mr. Dennison was a businessman, first and foremost, and that as a businessman he was interested in his operations (even a backwater one such as this) running as fluidly as possible.  Men in the employ of National Bank, an institution which Mr. Dennison did a great volume of business, were not supposed to be reported dead after safely arriving at their destination, their bodies robustly beaten by his trusted accountant.  Even if that accountant had been physically attacked, while his back was turned, for no logical reason whatsoever.

Happily, the wheels had already begun to turn in the finely tuned mind of Revis Cooke.  The bludgeoning had cleared his thoughts, flushing out all the boredom and ennui of dwelling two years in Red Earth like a hard rain washing the soiled streets of San Francisco.  Yes.  He would lump Wells’ death in with that of the other shotgun killed in the Runoff Saloon.  All it would take was some coin placed in the right hand—Sheriff Atkins was a young man with a family.  He’d be glad to earn some fat on the side for altering his report and testifying to the court in Rawlins.  A few weeks from now, the whole messy event would be swept out the door.

Cooke crawled across the floor and brought his face near to the dead man’s.  The shotgun’s eyes were open and aimed toward the ceiling, still wide with shock.  Cooke scratched the stubble of the dead man’s cheek with his fingernail, a hooked grin playing at the corner of his mouth.

“You probably thought you mattered, didn’t you?  You probably thought the world itself would cease when you died.  That bell towers would ring out across the world as women rent their clothes, wailing your name at the top of their lungs while their children lit candles for you in the darkest, most forlorn corners of their rooms.  Alas, the world has lost a glorified messenger boy!  Another stagecoach guard, taken from this mortal coil too soon!”

The dead man smelled like blood but Cooke’s nose had garnered other scents as well.  Wells had soiled himself, filling his trousers in his death throes like a frightened infant, and several internal organs had burst as well.  The gastric organs, Cooke supposed.  Perhaps the spleen—that was said to process bile and other waste, was it not? 

Cooke pulled himself up into a sitting position, careful to avoid the blood pooling beneath the body like a small red lake.  He’d seen dead men before, but he’d never encountered one in such an intimate manner. 

“I have to say, Mr. Wells, you certainly are a mess.  Even compared with the dregs of humanity currently ambulating around town tonight, looking for something wet to stick their pricks into.”

Revis Cooke giggled, appreciating his own joke even if the dead man could not.  He reached across the shoreline of pooled blood and brushed at a curl of hair that had settled out of place on the dead man’s forehead.  The curly lock, matted with blood itself, had hardened and gave way reluctantly.  Wells’ face was actually more or less intact—by the time Cooke had finished cracking the rest of him, it was already apparent his job was complete.

Cooke licked his lips, realizing that he was thirsty, possibly as thirsty as he’d ever been in his life.  He looked back at his desk, which was still piled with coins and bills.  His glass of water was sitting on the desk’s far edge, beside the tallying books.  A long distance to cross—

Someone knocked at the front door. 

Not the bashing of a drunk’s fist, as you might expect from one of the stagecoach guards, or some grimy miner come to collect his wages a day early, despite the company’s firmly stated policy.  No, the knocking was a soft rapping, hesitant yet eager. 

“Hello?” a woman’s voice called through the door.  “Mr. Cooke?”

The accountant rose from his spot on the floor, groaning from the needles he felt floating in his legs.  He’d been sitting on the floor longer than he’d thought, chatting with the dead man as if they were old school pals.  It was strange how you felt after murdering a man, like you suddenly knew him better than anybody you’d ever known in your life. 

“Mr. Cooke?  It’s Ingrid.  Ingrid Blomvik.”

“Yes, yes,” Cooke called back, shaking his legs out as he went round to his desk.  “Just a moment.”  He drank the rest of the water in his glass and poured himself another from the clay pitcher beside it.  His hands were sore, the flesh tender where he’d gripped the fire iron with such ferocity.  They felt more like gnarled claws than the hands of a well-educated bookkeeper. 

Cooke grinned and brushed the hair from his eyes.  He took his time crossing the room again, going up to the iron front door, and sliding back the view slot.  A draft of cold air blew in through the slot.

“Good evening, Miss Blomvik.”

“Good evening, Mr. Cooke.  I hope I am not disrupting your work.”

The accountant leaned closer toward the door.  The Norwegian whore was standing alone on his doorstep, hands clasped together.  She was dressed in a low cut dress he’d never seen before, possibly borrowed from one of the other saloon girls, and the frock revealed an enticing amount of cleavage. 

“That remains to be seen, Miss Blomvik.  What do you need from me?”

The whore nibbled on her plump bottom lip. 

“Did you hear about the shootout, Mr. Cooke?”

“Yes.  One of the coach guards was killed by some transient.  A tragedy, to be certain, but the sun will still rise tomorrow.”

“That was only the first,” the whore said, frowning.  “You haven’t heard about the others?”

Cooke blinked, his eyes made teary by the wind.  He recalled the exchange of the shots that had riled his visitor to the point of attack, how each dry pop had made Wells’ fists ball ever tighter.

“Oh, yes.  The second round of shots.  How did that turn out?”

“Not well,” the whore said, stepping closer to the door.  “Three more guards were killed and a fourth was shot in the knee.  You can hear his moaning still—we’ve set him up in a room for the night.”

“Three more killed?”

“Yes, sir.”

A throaty laugh rose from Cooke’s throat.  He shook his head and wiped his eyes.

“Hell’s high tower.  That makes for a heavy one-day loss for National Bank, doesn’t it?  Three more.  Who killed these?  Don’t tell me Atkins released that hot-tempered boy from earlier.”

“No, it wasn’t Johnny Miller.  It was his friends.  They didn’t take well to Miller going to jail.”

A fresh gust of wind ruffled the whore’s scanty dress.  She shivered and hugged herself, pushing her breasts together beneath the flimsy fabric.

“Would you mind if I came inside, Mr. Cooke?  It’s cold out here and I’m hardly dressed for it.”

Cooke stared a moment at the whore, registering the question.  He looked back into the house where Hollis Wells was lying in his own blood, still quite dead.  The color had drained from Wells’ face, leaving it as pale as a trout’s belly.

“I’m sorry, miss, but I cannot currently accept visitors.”

The whore’s red lips pursed into a pout, her eyes so blue and clear they dazzled even in the dim light.  “Please, Mr. Cooke?  I was hoping you could comfort me after the day’s events.  I saw three men die with my own eyes.”

“Yes, I am sure that was very disconcerting, Miss Blomvik, but I’m afraid that I am not allowed to unlock this door the same evening I hear a great quantity of gunfire exchanged.  As you well know, the stagecoach that arrived earlier delivered the company’s payroll to my office.  I cannot take any chances with its security.”

The whore looked back toward the Runoff Saloon. 

“But the fighting’s over, sir.  The men have all taken a girl and gone upstairs—they’ve reserved the entire second floor to celebrate their victory.  They were already soused when I left.”

“I am sorry, madam.  I do not dictate company policy.”

The whore sniffled and rubbed her shoulders.  Her cheeks glowed pink from the chill—another minute and she’d catch ill.

“You’re a hard man, Mr. Cooke.”

The accountant nodded in agreement.  A series of lewd images, most involving the Norwegian whore and the fireplace iron, flitted through his mind, each image more arousing than the next. 

But he’d already indulged his base urges enough for one day, hadn’t he?

“Good evening, Miss Blomvik.”

Cooke closed the viewing slot with a satisfying flick of his wrist, its dark bar obscuring the whore as if she no longer existed at all.  He returned to his man on the floor and nudged him with his foot.

“Did you hear that, Mr. Wells?  It appears that Red Earth does not have an affinity for men of your profession.” 

Cooke bent nearer to the corpse, lowering his voice to a stage whisper. “Personally, I’m beginning to think these hills do not appreciate our presence here much at all.”

22

The Dennison man closed the little peek-a-boo slot in his fancy iron door.  Ingrid Blomvik remained on the front steps a few moments longer, shivering and hugging her shoulders.  She looked small, and young, and Elwood Hayes had never felt a stronger urge to fold a woman into his arms.  He wanted to give her his own warmth, like a gift for her to have, and take all her coldness onto himself.  To act as a counterweight to Revis Cooke and his strange, warbling voice that had sounded near mad.

Instead, Elwood held back in the shadows along with the other thieves. 

“He’s not buying it,” Owen whispered, breathing too loud.  “He knows we’re out here waiting to pounce.”

“He don’t know bull,” Roach Clayton whispered back.  “He’s like all them other stubborn company men.  They follow the company line, not their peckers.  The shooting scared him to ground.”

They had their guns out, ready to make the rush as soon as Cooke opened his door.  Clem Stubbs was back at the Runoff Saloon, drunk and resting his hurt shoulder.  The plan was to take care of the accountant first, pack up the money, and hole up the night in his stone house.  In the morning, once Stubbs had sobered up enough to ride, one of them would get the horses and they’d all ride out of town, hopefully before anybody, including the sheriff, caught on. 

Ingrid looked toward them, three grown men peering around the corner of Cooke’s house like Peeping Toms.  Elwood straightened and stepped out into the front yard, waving her over.  He put his gun away and signaled Owen and Roach toward the street.  Ingrid crossed the yard swiftly, rubbing her arms.

“The bastard wouldn’t take me in.”

“It’s fine.  We’ll go back and rethink it.”

“Am I still going to get my cut?”

“Sure.  You’ll have a part, too.”

Owen and Roach glanced at him, their eyebrows lifted.  Elwood hadn’t told them about Ingrid’s cut yet—they thought he’d just charmed her into getting through Cooke’s door.  They didn’t understand much about women.

“Why don’t you go back to the saloon and warm yourself,” Elwood said, touching Ingrid’s elbow.  “We’ll be back shortly.”

Ingrid looked from the other men to him.  Her pale skin had a tint of lavender to it in the starlight.

“You gave your word, Mr. Hayes.”

“I did.  I will stay to it.”

She broke from them after one last piercing glance and crossed the street.  They watched her walk up the street and go into the saloon.

“You offered her a cut?” Roach said in wonderment.  “A full cut?”

“I don’t mind,” Owen said. “She can have a cut of anything she wants.”

“You’re still off from that shootout earlier.  You both are.”

Elwood held his tongue.  Roach may have been right.  Every time he tried to think, the whore appeared in his thoughts and turned them into a swirling fog.  They’d been out in the woods too long, sleeping on the ground and eating game.  It made the first woman you saw in town seem an angel sent from heaven above.

South down the street, four men stepped onto the front porch of the general store and looked out into the night.  One of them said something and they went down the porch steps and started up the street.  They carried rifles and shotguns two or three apiece, as if going to war.

Roach whistled softly.

“Sheriff’s got himself a posse.”

Owen shifted from one foot to the other, a nervous habit he’d had since he’d been a little boy. 

“I don’t want another shootout, Elwood.  And it’s three against four.”

The men were marching with purpose, coming up the street fast.  They should have been fanning out but they kept close together, their guns pointed at angles impractical for shooting.

“Keep quiet,” Elwood told the other two men.  “I’ll speak with them.”

The men neared so you could make out faces.  Sheriff Atkins was leading the posse, sure enough, but his face remained blank when he saw Elwood and the two other men standing in the street, huddled outside the Cooke house with no apparent purpose.

“Town meeting, Mr. Hayes,” the sheriff called out.  “We’d be pleased if you all attended.”

Atkins and his posse marched past without stopping.  Elwood noted the stiffness to their gait, the purpose.  Something was happening beyond the normal business of a sleepy camp town.  Something bigger than the shootout earlier and the dead men lying in the church.

“Should we go?” Owen asked, hopping from foot to foot.  “Might be a trap.”

Elwood glanced at Roach, who shrugged and looked up the street.

“Owen, you go on back to the saloon and tell Stubbs we’re heading to the meeting.  If we don’t come back in an hour, you boys will have to spring us free.”

“Spring you free?”

“That’s right.  You wanted to be an outlaw, didn’t you?  Well, outlaws spring each other free.”

Owen rubbed his hands and blew into them. 

“Right.  Spring you free.  I’ll go tell Stubbs.”

They watched as the younger Hayes brother lurched down the street, shot thigh and all.  Roach removed his spectacles and wiped the one good lens.

“He won’t be coming to our rescue, El.”

“I hope not,” Elwood said, straightening his hat.  “We’d all get shot then.”

The lobby of the Copper Hotel was packed, with more folks assembled along the second floor railing to watch the proceedings below.  Elwood and Roach managed to wedge themselves through the front door and find a place at the edge of the crowd, backed up against the hotel’s front bay window.  Almost as many women were in the crowd as men.  They’d gathered around Sheriff Atkins, who’d raised his hand for silence, and shouted questions about the miners still not back from their shift.  Atkins made no effort to respond, simply holding his hand in the air like a school boy waiting to be called upon.  Gone was the puffed lawman Elwood had encountered earlier—there was no strut to the way he held himself this evening, no cocky gleam to his eyes.

Eventually, the sheriff’s gesture for quiet worked, as eerie and uncommon as it was, and the shouted questions trailed off into silence.  Atkins lowered his arm and looked around the room.

“You all aren’t going to like what I’m going to tell you, but it’s the truth.  Leg Jameson and his boy will tell you the same as I’m about to.”

Atkins crossed his arms.

“They unearthed something in the Dennison Mine.  Something wicked.”

The crowd broke into a racket again, everybody turning toward their neighbor to shoot off their mouth.  Atkins waited out the first wave of yammering and shouted over the second.

“It killed the miners down there.  All of them.  It killed Hank Chambers, too, when we tried to seal the mine.”

The racket tripled this time, louder than a dozen hens crammed into a barrel with a hungry fox.  Elwood and Roach glanced at each other, wondering at this news and whether it would help or hinder their own scheming.  The crowd shouted a barrage of questions until Sheriff Atkins, lips tightening, took out his pistol and fired it into the air, causing the folks along the hotel’s second floor railing to start and draw back.

“We don’t have time for jawing and hair pulling.  If we’re going to live out the night we need as many men armed as possible.  If you’ve got a gun, make sure it’s loaded and ready to fire.  We blew the mine shut, but it broke out anyway.  Burrowed right through the loose rock.” 

“But what is it?” a man called out.  “Bear?”

The sheriff shook his head and holstered his pistol.

“No.  Not a bear.  Looks like a human, but its skin is burnt up and it’s got hands like claws.  Hank Chambers called it the Charred Man.” 

A thoughtful silence fell over the crowd as everyone tried to picture this creature in their own minds.  Hayes tried to figure it himself. 

“That’s why you blew the mine shut?” a man on the second floor called down.  “Because you’re ’fraid of a goddamn critter?”

The sheriff looked toward his critic on the second floor.  Elwood noticed a disturbance in the crowd at the far back of the room, in front of the hotel’s kitchen door.  It looked like somebody had stumbled and taken a few others down with them.  Then a woman screamed, and the crowd turned into a scrambling, hollering mass as something charged through it. 

Elwood stepped up on the bay window’s sill for a better view.  He saw a spray of blood erupt like water from a geyser and a tall, soot-colored man clawing his way through the crowd, tossing bodies like a farmer harvesting wheat.  Elwood looked down to Roach, whose mouth had dropped open.

“Well, I reckon that’s what a demon looks like.”

Most of the town, except the dead miners, was in the Copper Hotel when the Charred Man entered.  Men, women, and a handful of children surged back in terror as he tore among them, slashing at their vulnerable spots with his clawed hands, crushing their skulls as if they were made of eggshells.  The crowd trampled each other in their mad terror and clogged the hotel’s two exits.  The few armed men fired their weapons without having the time or proper stance to do so—elbows flew into their backs, tossed bodies sailed at their knees—and their shots went wide, missing the Charred Man and hitting other folks instead.  When the armed men tried to reload, their shaking fingers failed them and the Charred Man knocked away their guns and fell upon them with uncanny strength.

For the second instance that day, time slowed for Elwood Hayes.  The crowd, wild as it was, receded into the shadows of his vision as he focused upon the unnatural thing in their midst.  It was shaped like a man, with arms and legs, but it wore the form like an ill-fitting skin.  A damaged skin—somehow the creature had been badly burned, but it’d been too stubborn and unnatural to die.

The creature lifted a man off his feet, bit into his neck, and ripped out his throat.  Amid the spray of arterial blood, Hayes noticed patches of clammy white poking through the creature’s blackened skin. 

The Charred Man was growing himself a new hide, like a snake.

“God almighty,” Hayes shouted above the din, reaching behind his back and removing his revolver from its holster.  “Roach, try and aim for the white spots.  They might be weaker.”

“Hell,” Roach shouted back, leveling his gun and spreading his feet.  “I think we’re just going to rile it further.”

Roach Clayton was right.  They emptied their pistols at the Charred Man, but either they missed him as he whirled about or the bullets had no effect.  He kept tearing through the crowd, knocking folks down and going at them.  The hotel’s floor was covered in bodies and gore and, as they watched, a scrambling fat man, not minding himself, stepped onto an infant as she lay flailing, caving her chest in as he plowed mindlessly forward.

“Nothing we can do,” Roach said, grabbing Elwood’s arm.  “You saw how those shots didn’t do nothing.”

At the back of the room, two women fought over a pistol until it went off, shooting a third woman in the back.  The shot woman dropped to her knees and keeled over while the other two kept up the fight.

“We need to git,” Roach shouted in his ear.  “Right now.”

Elwood turned to his friend, his mind still fogged.  Roach’s eyes darted in their sockets like hummingbirds.  Behind him, the hotel’s bay window reflected the whole bloody scene.  The smell of piss and blood and smoke filled the room, a scent somewhere between slaughterhouse and coal fire.    

Elwood shrugged off the fog and raised his pistol above his head. 

“Mind your eyes, Roach.” 

The bay window shattered beautifully as Elwood brought the butt of his gun down on the wide and expensive pane, closing his eyes as shards of glass laced the air.  A cold draft of air rolled into the room.  They jumped over the windowsill and into the night, already running as they touched the ground.  Elwood sprinted with his head down, as if he was being shot at, and when he looked to his side he saw Roach doing the same.  The juiced feel of escaping after a robbery had come over him, shooting through his veins like heat lightning.  “Runoff,” Elwood shouted, though they were both already headed there anyhow.  He could see his brother standing on the saloon’s front porch, looking confused in the spill of torchlight.

Elwood pulled up at the porch, gasping.  Owen stepped down.

“Good hell, brother.  What’s happening over there?”

Elwood turned to look at the hotel.  Folks were breaking windows on the second floor and jumping out while the Charred Man, a choppy blur, swept behind them.  Those who’d managed to escape stood scattered in the street, watching like he was.  Several had fallen to the ground, badly hurt, and their moans competed with the cries inside the hotel.  Nobody seemed to know where to go or what to do.

Owen came over and stood beside him.  Roach was bent over beside the saloon’s porch, dry heaving.

“What is it, El?  What?”

Elwood took a breath and tried to pull the strands of his mind together.  A light was snuffed out on the hotel’s second floor, then another.  More screams erupted behind the broken windows—tortured, ugly screams.  He was still holding his pistol upside down, his hand frozen around it.

“We had a meeting,” Elwood said, finding his voice.  “We had a meeting and a demon showed up.”

Roach heaved again as more lights were snuffed out and the hotel’s entire second floor went dark.  The screams came less frequent now, but Elwood could hear a repeated snapping that reminded him of breaking dried branches for kindling.