Skull Moon (24 page)

Yes, that was how it had been in the Dark Days and would be again.

Skullhead, caked with dried blood, Chauncey's spine lying across his swelling belly, thought about these things. He knew there was a reason he was brought forth from the boiling firmament of the grave. It wasn't merely to kill the white men, it
was to kill everyone.
Appetite was his destiny and it was enough. What more could he want?

A poet might have said: He ate to live and lived to eat.

It was so childishly simple. Skullhead closed his eyes, belched, and waited for necessity or mere boredom to force him into the house, the dining hall. There were others there...he could smell their parts--hot, secret, wanting. Skullhead dreamed as the wind blew cold and the lantern went out. He dreamed of a fine tanned smock knitted from the soft hides of children. Warm and toasty, covering his innumerable bare spots.

He waited for carnage. It was all he knew.

After Longtree had turned over the body of Mike Ryan to Deputy Bowes, he had a look for Sheriff Lauters. No one had seen him. He wasn't at Doc Perry's and Perry claimed he didn't know where he was.

Longtree didn't believe him.

He knew the doctor was a friend of the sheriff's and had been for some time. Perry knew where he was, but he wouldn't tell, not even if Longtree put him under arrest and slapped him around. Perry was a very loyal man. Longtree respected this. Lauters was out there somewhere, holed up in some saloon or whorehouse, drinking himself blind. His career was over and he knew that now. He was in hiding and the only thing that would bring him out was the Skullhead. And sooner or later, this would happen.

Longtree stabled his horse in the livery across from the Serenity Hotel and set out on foot. He had to find Lauters and if that meant checking every saloon in town, then this is what he'd do. He didn't want to arrest Lauters just yet, merely put him under a sort of protective custody. Whether the sheriff liked that or not didn't concern Longtree. He wanted the man behind bars in the jailhouse so Bowes and he could get a crack at the beast when it came for him.

It was a plan.

The snow was still falling, the wind still blowing when Longtree passed the smithy shop. He stopped there. Dick Rikers was the blacksmith and according to Bowes' records, he'd been one of the few to witness the vigilantes actually stringing up Red Elk.

Longtree went in.

It was hot in there, Rikers working branding irons at the forge.

"Marshal. What can I do for you?" Rikers asked, his powerful arms wet with sweat.

"I'd like to ask you a couple questions, if I may."

Rikers nodded, setting aside his work and wiping his face and neck with a towel. "Just fashioning a new set of irons for the Ryan combine. It can wait, though."

"Mike Ryan?"

"Don't know of any other."

Longtree rolled a cigarette and lit it slowly. "Ryan's dead, Mr. Rikers," he said.

"Dead?"
Rikers looked shocked.

"Yeah, murdered. Killed by the same thing that's killed the others. The thing you saw, I believe."

Rikers went pale, remembering the night he'd seen the creature run off after assaulting Dewey Mayhew. "Ryan," he said, "Mike Ryan."

Longtree nodded. "I don't think he'll be the last, either."

"Something had better well be done."

"Oh, we're trying, Mr. Rikers, I assure you of this," Longtree said, exhaling a cloud of smoke. "But you see, this is a strange situation, a very strange one indeed. I'm of a mind that these deaths are connected with the lynching of that Blackfoot last year. You saw it, didn't you?"

Rikers swallowed. "I saw it, all right. But there was nothing I could've done for that boy except gotten myself killed, if that's what your insinuating."

"No, you did right, Mr. Rikers. No sense in tangling with outlaws like that."

"I don't know who they were--they wore masks."

"No, that's not what I'm interested in either. I want to ask you about the murder that led to all that."

Rikers features went slack. "The Carpenter girl?"

"Yes. What do you remember of her?"

Rikers sat down, licking his lips. "She was a pretty girl, Marshal. That and a very nice one. She was liked by everyone. Just a nice kid who never did any wrong by anyone."

"Did she have suitors that you recall?"

Rikers laughed. "She had too many, Marshal. Men crawled out of the woodwork when they got a look at her."

"You remember any in particular?"

"Hell, Marshal, " Rikers said, "it was some time ago. There were ranch hands, some of the miners, even Liberty, the dentist."

"A real popular girl, eh?"

"Yes, but a moral one, you understand. She never so much as dated a single man that I remember." Rikers laughed again. "She really did have her choice, though, even married men took a shine to her. I recall Sheriff Lauters was pretty sweet on her."

"Lauters?"

"Yeah, Big Bill was in love, I think."

Jimmy Lauters, aged twelve, collapsed in the snow outside his house. His head was spinning with dizziness, his eyesight blurred. As he lay there in the snow, trembling with shock, dry heaves wracking his body, he thought only of death.

In his mind, he saw only slaughter.

He tried to will himself to crawl the last few feet to the door, but movement, any movement seemed a chore. He heard the barn door swing open and slam against the wall. It made a great hammering noise as if it had been reduced to kindling. And no wind, Jimmy knew, had the strength to do that. He could hear heavy footfalls behind him and knew that the beast was coming.

He could feel its hot breath on his back.

Let it think I'm dead, he decided with iron nerve. Let it think that.

The beast sniffed a line down his spine and withdrew, just standing above him, tasting the air.

Jimmy launched himself to his feet with a cry, already running by this time. The beast howled and Jimmy felt the tips of its claws rip gashes into the back of his neck. Then he was at the door. A split-second later, through it. He threw the bolt and snatched the shotgun from above the hearth. He broke it open and fed shells into it with numbed fingers.

"What are you doing, boy?" his mother asked, crossing the room quickly.

He said: "The monster." Nothing more.

Abigail Lauters, her steel gray hair pulled back in a tight bun, wasn't impressed with this foolishness. "I told you to fetch your brother," she snapped. "It's bath night..."

He looked at her with crazed, dreaming eyes and the words died on her lips. His face was colorless, vomit smeared down the front of his shirt. His throat was bleeding.

"Dead," he muttered, "Chauncey's dead."

Abigail said nothing for a moment, the impact of those two words weighing in slowly, heavily. She could hear her cousin Virginia upstairs, singing a song as she bathed Jo Jo, the youngest. Dead? Chauncey couldn't be dead, why that was sheer nonsense--

"The monster got the horses," Jimmy sobbed. "It tore them apart...and Chauncey...it was eating him..."

His mother snatched the shotgun from his hands. There was a thud against the door.

Another.

Then another.

"Get upstairs," she said calmly, but with iron behind her words.

Jimmy
had never heard her use that tone before. Mechanically, he backed to the stairway, tears running from his eyes. The door was hit again and again. The plank that held it secure splintered, then split in two. The door seemed to
bulge
in its frame and then it exploded inward.

The beast stood there, breathing with a low, bestial grunting.

Abigail looked on it and decided it was a demon from hell. It could be nothing else. It had to stoop low to come through the door, a horror knitted with tufts of matted fur and scaly skin, stinking of slaughterhouses, dusted with snow. Its huge tail swung back and forth, casting aside tables and chairs. It came forward hunched and bent, but still its skull brushed the ceiling rafters. Ribbons of drool hung from its mouth.

Abigail shot it twice and it reeled with the impact, but never stopped. It came at her like a freight train, the gun slapped from her hands. As Jimmy watched, cowering on the third stair, the beast tore his mother apart. She looked, if anything, like a burst feather pillow stuffed with red. Bits of her rained in the air, sprayed and exploded in every conceivable direction..

Jimmy scrambled up the stairs.

His Aunt Virginia was standing up on the landing, little Jo Jo in her arms. She stared, shocked into stillness. Jimmy looked back and saw the beast, its armored torso red with his mother's blood.

"Jesus in Heaven," she whispered.

"Run!" Jimmy yelled. "Run for godsake!"

Virginia scampered down the hall, slamming and locking the door of the children's room behind her.

Jimmy dashed into his father's room and returned with a knife.

The beast came to him, vaulting up the stairs, its massive weight collapsing individual steps as if they were fashioned from balsa. Its obscene, hideous face was hooked in a crooked grin. Its nostrils flared at the boy's smell. It saw the knife and was unimpressed, two gaping bleeding holes already open in its chest.

Jimmy lifted the knife to strike.

The beast's lips drew back slickly from its dripping gums, rows of razored and serrated teeth gnashing together. Saliva spilled down its jutting chin, blood and bits of viscera were dropping from its mouth.

Jimmy threw himself at it, sinking the knife in its throat. Then it had him. The blade still buried in its neck, it brought its jaws together on Jimmy's head, his skull going with a muted wet pop. It ate him this way, feeding him between those rows of teeth until there were only bones, hair, and stringy tendrils of meat to show for twelve years of struggle.

Virginia held no illusions that she was safe in the bedroom. She was next and there were no two ways about this. The door shattered to brushwood and the beast stepped in, squeezing its bulk through and taking most of the doorframe with it. Virginia read from her Bible in a high, shivery voice.

"Thou shalt not be afraid for the terror by night," she read, "nor the arrow that flieth by day; nor the pestilence that walketh in darkness--"

Skullhead stood there, drunk with blood, listening to these words and disliking them for reasons he wasn't even sure of. In two steps, he was on her. He pulled her head free, examined it, turning up his nose at the perfume in her hair, and tossed it away through the door. It bounced down the steps like a meaty ball. He had no use for this one.

It was the child he wanted.

Under the bed, he heard it crying. Such sad sounds that were music to Skullhead, a choir of angels. He flipped the bed over and snatched the child up in his arms, crushing it against him.

In silence, he ate, pulling its juicy limbs free like a butterfly's wings.

Reverend Claussen heard the doors to the church slam open with a crash.

One was nearly torn off, snow and wind blowing in, but they did nothing to disguise the figure which stood there. Claussen was laying at the foot of the altar, bruised and hurting and filthy with his own urine and excrement. His mind had gone to mush now and he did not doubt what his eyes showed him.

The beast.

It came forward slowly with a raw and vile smell of death lingering about it. Its eyes found and held the reverend and in those eyes, dear Christ, was...
deliverance.
In those red and glistening orbs was a promise of purity. For, Claussen saw, it was no beast, it was a
god.
Not some storybook deity who couldn't be bothered to put in an appearance, let alone speak to and instruct his flock. This was a god in the flesh. Huge and pulsing and jutting and stinking and anxious to claim the faithful as his own.

It occurred to Claussen as his mind raged with religious awe, that this was one of the creatures mentioned in the book on Indian folklore. But unlike the phantoms and fairies of Christianity, it was real. It lived and breathed and lusted.

Its stink was like sacred incense to Claussen even though it put his stomach in his throat and made his bowels ache to be voided. It came forward and towered above him. He was on his knees before it, trembling, sickened by the noxious bouquet of its stench. It filled him, roiling his guts, and turning his thoughts to mud.

"Take me, oh Lord," he said in a screeching voice, "take me as sacrifice."

It reached down and grasped him by the neck with one immense hand, hoisting him skyward so his face was in its own. Its breath smelled of decay and vomit and blackness, hot and appalling. Claussen gazed into those unblinking red eyes and jolts of electricity thrummed through him, boiling his blood and filling his skull with white light. He saw--

He saw the world before man. He saw the civilizations that had risen and fallen. He saw things unknown and unguessed. He saw the Skullheads and their kingdom. He saw the world change and the red man come and the great, fierce Lords of the High Wood sicken and die. Their herds thinned as they could no longer bear children. Until there were only a few left that were worshipped, then entombed by the Indians. Where they waited and waited in solemn, suffocating darkness until they were called forth.

Yes, the knowledge had been passed.

Claussen was to become its priest.

To prove this, it bit off his left hand at the wrist and swallowed the meat and bone without chewing. The agony was beautiful. It dropped the reverend and mounted the altar. Its lashing tail shattered and tumbled the effigies of Christ and Mary. It pulled down the cross and urinated over holy relics and missives.

It claimed the church as its own.

Claussen, at last, had found meaning to his existence.

Early the next morning, just before light, Dr. Perry was up and about. His back wasn't too bad today, a bit sensitive. His cells were content, having been fed their ritual breakfast of morphine. Perry made rounds in his wagon, treating two cases of frostbite and mending a shattered leg up at one of the mining camps. When day broke, the sun came out, parting the clouds. There was every indication that today--though cool--would be a lovely day, Perry decided.