Little Gods (17 page)

The posse blew away, dissolving to dust, their pistol shots fading, eventually sounding like nothing more than distant echoes.

Tom's looked at the Spirit's unmoving body, then lowered his pounding head.
Goddamn
, he thought, and passed out.

Tom opened his eyes and saw Cosmocrator's face, thin lips, scummy green eyes, and gleaming seashell teeth. “You alive?” Cos said. “Guess so. I wanted to bring you some water, but...” He shrugged. “Shit. You know.” He shook a bottle of whiskey over Tom's face. “Want to drink this now?"

“Sure,” Tom croaked, and sat up. He drank from the bottle, the whiskey burning his throat but exploding to warmth in his belly.

“They killed the Spirit,” Cos said.

Tom looked at the pile of mud and filthy clothes, all that remained of the Spirit of the bleeding west. “But we got the Lawman."

Cos laughed, a little nervously. “Tolerance is still here. The buildings didn't fall down. I guess...” He swallowed. “I guess you're the big gun around here now.” Cos looked over his shoulder. “There's people riding around outside town ... or maybe ghosts. I got a good look at one, he had a white scar on his cheek.” Cos drew a finger down his face to illustrate.

Tom put the bottle aside and crawled to where the Lawman had fallen. The body was gone, but his gold star still glittered in the sand. Tom picked it up. The badge felt warm in his hand.

Tom pinned it to his vest, right above the Ranger's badge. He fished the cigarette out of his shirt pocket and stuck it in his mouth. “Bring ‘em on,” he said. He clapped Cosmocrator on the shoulder. “Like you said. It wouldn't be the west without a showdown."

Sharing the bottle, they walked back to the Trail Blossom.

Behemoth

I answered the doorbell. A punk stood on my front porch, silver fish-hooks glinting in his nose and earlobes. He wore colored contact lenses, one eye yellow as piss, the other black. Dirt caked his undershirt and torn corduroys.

“Selling girl scout cookies?” I asked, trying to smile, hoping he didn't want to kill me for my pension check.

He shifted from foot to foot nervously, and I wondered what drugs he'd taken that day. Something that made him jittery. “Are you Adonis Sinclair?” he asked.

I looked at him, thinking: It can't be. “Harry. Harry Sinclair. I go by my middle name. Mom had high hopes for my looks."

He didn't smile. “You have to come with us, Mr. Sinclair."

I looked past him to the street and saw a beat-to-shit gray sedan idling on the curb, spattered with mud up to the windows. “Why's that?"

He answered with a question, his voice hoarse. “Did you really do it? Find him, all those years ago, and start the Order?"

“The Order?"

“The Order of Watchful Vigilance."

I didn't laugh, though I wanted to. It's impolite to laugh at someone's religion. Dean came up with that name, I thought. “I guess I did. I never called it that, and neither did Dean, when I knew him, but I imagine we're talking about the same thing."

“Dean didn't think we'd find you,” the boy said.

“He's still around, then.” I hadn't seen Dean in almost fifty years. “I'm glad to hear that. We were best friends, a long time ago."

“We need you to come, Mr. Sinclair."

I leaned against the doorjamb. I didn't want him to see me shaking. “I'm old, son. I'm not inclined to take any long trips."

“He's moving,” the boy whispered.

I shrugged. “He moves. Not often, but sometimes."

The boy shook his head. “No, he's
moving
. Walking around. And he asked for you, Mr. Sinclair. How do you think we found you? He told us where you were. Showed us in a vision."

“Moving.” I licked my lips. It's hard to believe, I know, but I hadn't thought about Behemoth in years. Hadn't seen him, either, not since the last time I saw Dean. “Did he say where he planned on going?"

The boy squirmed. “In the dream we saw something. Like a snake, but bigger. And beautiful.” He swallowed. “And dying, scales flaking off into the water, showing bone."

“Oh, shit,” I said. “Let's go."

Me and Dean found Behemoth when we were ten and eleven years old, respectively. We lived in a little nothing Georgia town called Pomegranate Grove. We spent a lot of time raising hell in the woods outside town, whooping like Indians, playing at war, creeping through the brambles like jungle explorers. We never discovered the limits of the woods, but they extended farther than they should have. I'm not talking about any funny business with time and space, just that people owned title to wooded land they should have cleared, good land they could have used for farming or development, but instead left wild. Behemoth's woods are special, maybe even sacred, and people just ... overlook the real estate possibilities, I guess. I got curious a few dozen years back, after I received a barely legible postcard from Dean about the new acolytes, and tracked down some satellite photos of Georgia.

That huge swath of untouched forest shows up perfectly clear on satellite photos, and it's even bigger than I imagined. I don't remember the exact dimensions, but it's big enough for a dozen people and Behemoth to live in, undiscovered, forever. I doubt anyone will clear the forest, not as long as the (potentially) largest land animal in the history of the world resides there.

Me and Dean finally convinced our parents to let us go camping for three days. Our Dads gave permission, despite our Moms’ protests. Both our fathers loved the woods. They went deer hunting together, and they taught us a fair bit of woodcraft. Two days into our trip, deeper in the woods than we (and probably any human) had ever penetrated, we found Behemoth.

We made camp against his side. Behemoth hadn't moved in decades, maybe centuries, and moss and lichen grew all over his body. His side looked like a gray mound of rock, and that evening I leaned back against him. Behemoth breathes about twelve times a day, and his heart beats even less frequently, so I didn't notice any unusual vibrations. We probably never would have realized what we'd found if Dean hadn't tried to carve his initials into the “rock” with his pocketknife.

He didn't make a mark, and he scratched harder, and still no mark, so he held the blade like an icepick and jammed it in. Even back then Dean never gave up, no matter how trivial the challenge before him.

Behemoth didn't roar or jump or anything like that. If he had, we would have run, and things would have been different for me and Dean. Instead, Behemoth simply rose on his elephant legs and bear's-paw feet and swung his ivy-covered crocodile head toward us.

I froze, because that's what you're supposed to do when a rhinoceros gets angry at you, and I wanted to believe Behemoth was a rhinoceros, or something similar.

Dean, on the other hand, screamed and fell over.

Behemoth spoke to us, but not with words. He spoke into our minds, with pictures and blurry strange imaginings that somehow conveyed this: Be peaceful. Don't fear. Don't run.

My heartbeat slowed. Dean picked up his knife, looked at it, looked at Behemoth (even then, at his smallest, twelve feet high and twenty feet long), and folded the blade shut.

“Hi there,” I said. “I'm Harry."

Adonis, Behemoth thought.I saw an image from the myth, the part where the boar gores Adonis, fatally wounding him. Red flowers sprang from the spilled blood.

Okay, I thought. I'll be Adonis, much as I hated the name. The 600-pound gorilla can call me whatever he wants.

“I'm Dean Mather,” Dean said. Behemoth thought of a man in pilgrim garb, and women hanging from a gallows. Years later I realized he was thinking of Cotton Mather, the witch-hunter. Behemoth has a peculiar sort of awareness.

He didn't send Dean the image of the witch hunter, and I knew he didn't show him the next image, either: Dean as a frolicking, bumbling jester, wearing cap-and-bells and ugly yellow leggings. Understand, Behemoth's thought wasn't
cruel
—I even sensed affection in the image, but also brutal dismissal. You can laugh at the clown, and even like him, but you don't trust him with anything important. You don't love him.

Sit down boys, Behemoth suggested, showing an image of us around a small fire, with me and Dean laughing.

Sit down, he said without words, and I'll tell you about an apocalypse deferred, and about the only one I love in all the world.

The acolytes drove all night and into the next day, down new interstates toward the old town of Pomegranate Grove, Georgia. I didn't have to notify anyone about my trip. I'd been moldering in retirement for five years, and there hadn't been any family for a long time. Not since I lost my wife, two years after we got married. She didn't die—I just lost her. Lost. I make it sound like a set of keys that got misplaced. It would be truer to say that I threw her away, like someone might accidentally toss a winning lottery ticket into the trash.

The punk drove for a while, then the dreadlocked hippie. He offered me some marijuana, but I turned him down. I've never tried the stuff. I had a steady job during the Summer of Love, and even then I was too old to be trusted. The willowy-pretty girl in the back seat with me never spoke, not once, but she looked at me with flat-out adoration. If I'd been even thirty years younger, and the type to take advantage ... Well, I wasn't, on either count, so I didn't think about it. At my age, that's not as difficult as it used to be. The car slowly filled with the reek of pot, too many bodies, and bad fast food.

We reached Pomegranate Grove at first light. My kidneys throbbed like rotten teeth. The kids stopped to let me pee every couple hours, but the nonstop driving played hell with my body. It interrupted my sleep cycle, too. I snapped at the kids and sat sullenly as the pines and fields flowed by. Just inside the Georgia border, it hit me. We were going to see Behemoth, the friend I had abandoned for a woman, but who still loved me enough to call me back in his time of need. That thought sobered me some, and broke my bad temper. I didn't feel any better, really, but I realized how petty it was to bitch at these kids when Behemoth certainly felt much, much worse.

We passed through Pomegranate Grove, past different stores on the same old streets, and then drove into the woods.

Right into them. I screamed and put my arms over my face, sure we'd hit a tree, and the girl patted me on the leg reassuringly. I uncovered my face and looked. A path opened before us, as smooth as any well-graded dirt road can be, winding ever deeper into the trees. I wondered if the road always existed, and people simply overlooked it, or if Behemoth created the road when we needed it.

We drove into a large clearing, a space filled mostly with Behemoth's reclining body.

I got out of the car and took a hesitant step forward. I'd forgotten the smells. Mainly the pine of the woods, but under it all the earthy scent of Behemoth himself, a smell like wet red clay. Behemoth looked smaller than I remembered, and I wondered if I suffered from an enlarged perception of the past, or if he had actually lost stature over the years.

“Behemoth,” I said. His head, part crocodile, part elephant, part the rest of the menagerie, swung toward me.

Adonis, he said, again with the image of the beautiful youth facing off against the boar.

I thought about Aphrodite, the goddess of beauty, and how she'd loved Adonis. She never truly loved anyone else.

You came, Behemoth said.

“Of course I did,” I said aloud. Several acolytes stood around, watching. I didn't see Dean anywhere. When you live with your God physically on a daily basis, I guess you get used to it. It must be a thrill to meet the long-lost co-founder of the Order. People need someone to idealize. “They said you needed me. They said ... something about a beautiful snake."

Yes, Behemoth said, and showed me the same vision he'd given his followers, a golden serpent writhing in shallow, frothing water under a steel gray sky. Shining scales fell from her head like shingles torn from a shack roof in a hurricane. The acolytes had never heard Behemoth's whole story, so they hadn't understood him properly. I did.

Behemoth said: Leviathan is dying.

That first night with Behemoth me and Dean made a fire and ate beef jerky. Dean offered some to Behemoth, and he politely refused. Behemoth eats a little grass once in a while, but that's all.

Behemoth told his story in pictures, and sometimes the images still show up in my nightmares. Tree branches hung with streamers of torn flesh. The moon cracking like an egg, spilling blood into the sky. Great black dogs, big as mountains, charging across the clouds, lips peeled back and snarling.

Behemoth showed us images of an overdue apocalypse. He told us the end hadn't come on schedule, and Behemoth's life couldn't proceed until it did. He had a role in the end days as the chief monster of the earth, leveling mountains, destroying cities, and ravaging the land.

At the time I wondered how he could manage that much devastation, but later I discovered that his body could change, especially when he wanted to go somewhere quickly. He didn't hate mankind, but he would destroy us, acting as an instrument of the powers-that-be, whom Behemoth had never met. He came into existence with the knowledge of his role, his strength, and his single limitation: He is a creature of the land, and cannot touch water.

Behemoth knew about Leviathan from the first, too.

Leviathan, his female counterpart, lived in the sea. She could never touch land.

In the last days Leviathan would destroy all trace of man on the oceans and devastate the coastal cities. Behemoth looked forward to those days, not because he particularly cared about destroying the world, but because at the end of the world he could finally join Leviathan.

He loved Leviathan more than I can even imagine loving. I cannot describe the visions he gave us to convey that emotion. He knew what Leviathan looked like, though he'd never seen her with his eyes, and he showed us. Despite her fearsome serpentine shape Dean and I fell in love with her, too. Behemoth perceived her as the most lovely creature in the world, and we saw her as he did.

They couldn't be together until the last days, when blood would saturate the soil and fill the seas. Either one could travel in blood. That was their mutual medium.