Merkabah Rider: The Mensch With No Name (19 page)

They
made for the light. It was several more minutes stumbling in the dark before
the pinhole became a ball, and then they could make out the lantern and Crazy
Horse Bob lying next to it, his back to a strangely flat rock wall. The light
was low and weak. The lantern was almost burned out. Behind him there was a
very much man-made niche, empty. There were primitive etchings surrounding the
small alcove, but the red light was dim and growing dimmer. They were
impossible to make out.

It
was cool down here. They were quite deep in the earth.

“That you Mather?
Doc?” the Indian called.

“It’s
Mather,” the marshal called back, crouching in the tunnel.

“You
didn’t bring a lantern?” he asked in a trembling voice. He looked to be
clutching his side, and the Rider saw there was dark blood on his shirt.

“Where’s
Dodgy?” Mather asked.

“That greedy son of a bitch!
He left me here.
Took the stone.
Shoulda known not to trust
no white man—let alone a Dutchman.
You didn’t pass him?”

The
Rider looked back over his shoulder. It was useless. The black was
impenetrable. The German might’ve waited in one of the side tunnels while they
passed. That sound might’ve been him. He might even now be sneaking up behind
them. He quietly pushed Spates to one side of the tunnel, while he slid to the
other. Had he heard something?
A huff of breath from
somewhere in the dark?
A scrape on the stone?

“Throw
out your gun, Crazy,” Mather ordered.

“I
ain’t got it. Dodgy slipped a knife in me. He took it. Listen—ain’t you brought
a red lantern with you? Mine’s almost out! That thing is in here! It’s in here
somewhere! We heard it!”

“Oh
God,” whispered Spates, and the Rider heard him fumbling with his lantern.

“Look!”
the Indian screamed.

He
cast a hand up to the blank wall behind him. A huge shadow had fallen across
him, amorphous, lumbering. The Rider could barely make out the movement of
limbs.

It
was in the tunnel with them.

Mather
turned and fired down the tunnel, his blazing taper erupting into burning
fragments that spewed in every direction. The sound was tremendous.

Spates
and the Rider rushed past him to leap into the glow of Crazy Horse Bob’s
lantern, but a jutting rock from the floor tripped up the professor and he fell
flailing. The lantern tipped and there was a smash. The wick touched the fuel,
or perhaps it was a piece of Mather’s burning handkerchief. Liquid fire
splashed everywhere, across Spates’ legs, and up the Indian’s arm.

Mather
grunted in the dark, and the Rider heard his body strike the side of the cave
wall. There was a snuffling sound, powerful, like the breath of an excited
bull. The Rider smelled a heavy animal musk.

Spates
and Crazy Horse Bob screamed together. Spates rolled away, trying to beat out
the fire on his legs. The Indian leapt to his feet, waving his flaming arm like
a brand. His wild flailing batted the Rider’s arm as he fired down the tunnel,
and two shots when whinging into the rock ceiling.

In
the light of the fire, the Rider saw the dust and debris that tumbled down fell
in strange directions, as if cascading down an obstacle that wasn’t there. A
single stone hung in the air for a moment, turned, and slipped to the floor,
like it had tumbled off a great shoulder.

Dimly
he saw Mather lying on his side. He was blinking away the blood flowing in his
eyes from his torn scalp, crawling down the tunnel back into the dark, where
one of his pistols glistened.

Then
Crazy Horse Bob leapt into the air—and hung there. Though nothing tethered him
to the cave ceiling, the top of his head brushed against it and he grimaced and
growled as if being strangled. He gripped at whatever had seized him, clawing
madly and wrestling with the unseen limbs that grasped him. His one burning arm
elicited an unearthly hooting howl from whatever stood in the tunnel, and
suddenly the offending arm straightened as if jolted. The Indian gave a
strangled scream, there was a sickly wet tearing and popping sound, and the
blazing arm burst from his shoulder and flopped to the ground. Blood erupted
from the torn socket and shreds of sinew and torn muscle waved like party
streamers.

The
Rider fired again, but he had no target, and he was trying not to hit Crazy
Horse Bob. The bullet screamed off down the tunnel, the thunder crashing in his
already ringing ears.

The
Indian’s screaming was pinched off, and the Rider saw the skin on either side
of his neck sink inward and then tear open. Dark holes opened in his throat and
blood trickled down his shoulders, and over his curling lips. He began to sag
in the thing’s grip, kicking wearily like a hanged man. The blood spilling from
the holes in his neck streamed down invisible arms, giving them a hint of form.
Then his whole body traveled swiftly up and struck the cave ceiling, mashing
the top of his skull flat.

The
Rider fired wildly, not caring what he hit now, so long as he hit something.
Bullets drove through the Indian’s back and clipped his elbow. The Rider tried
to fire around the dangling corpse, but it seemed to move to intercept his
bullets, jerking right and left like sickly a rag doll suspended in space. The
thing was using the corpse as a shield. It was intelligent.

The
Rider clicked on an empty chamber. He jerked open the loading gate and tried to
push a bullet in. It was only then that he noticed Bullshit’s revolver was
chambered for .44-40 cartridges, and he only had Dirty Dave’s belt of .45’s.

Crazy
Horse Bob’s bloody body fell to the floor.
Almost.
It
seemed to sit halfway
up,
its shoulders slumped, but
its bloody neck erect, those its head drooped, like a kitten held by the scruff
of its neck. Slowly, it began to drag down the tunnel towards them.

The
Rider yanked out his cold iron Bowie knife. It was all he had.

Then
Spates gave a warning yell and something small went end over end in the air and
crashed into glittering fragments as it struck the floor.

A
green cloud blossomed into being.

The
Rider threw himself back against the tunnel wall, shielding his face with his
sleeve.

The weird hoot-howling from before sounded deafening through the
tunnel once again.
Two black, glistening stumps seemed to sprout from
the floor as the cloud rose. They were as big around as oak trunks, and from
their base extended four evenly spaced tendril-like roots from the front, back,
and sides. The trunks grew before him, bent and slanted ever upwards, joining
into an apex and forming a greater, thicker branch that rippled with interlaced
roots.

Then,
the Rider watched in sick fascination as the flesh like bubbling molten wax
from Crazy Horse Bob’s corpse. It spilled down the cheeks revealing the muscle
limned skull and bulging eyes, the black tongue hanging from the drooping
skeletal jaw. The viscous, liquid epidermis pooled and ran over the stones.

It
was not something growing in the center of the tunnel, it was the cloud eating
away at the thing’s invisible hide, revealing
its
strange, midnight black anatomy.

Then
the thing stood revealed, trembling and screeching in agony. It was a towering,
vaguely simian figure, hunched in the passage, its massive shoulders nearly
spanning from wall to wall. The legs that rose above its splayed, four toed
feet were somewhat canine haunches, the knees at the back, but they did not
taper, did not look fragile. They were thick as a young elephant’s and
bristling with ropes of oily black musculature knotted over hard, greenish
bone, almost vegetable in appearance.

Its
face was horrendous, long and protruding like a horse’s, but with a close-set
maw of even, wickedly serrated triangular, shark-like black teeth that nestled
in thick, distended gums, mottled yellow in color. Its huge all-white eyes were
situated on opposite sides of is head and bulged like gigantic poached eggs,
without any vein or facet, somewhat like a housefly’s in proportion to its
head.

Crazy
Horse Bob’s skinless corpse plopped to the ground as the thing released it.

It
hoisted up its powerful arms, which ended in flipper-like hands, each sprouting
three twisted jags of sharp green bone and a strange, pulsing barbed growth
that extended four inches from each ‘palm.’ It staggered toward the Rider and
Spates, seeking to sweep them up in a quivering embrace, to demand of them the
reason for its sudden agony, to repay it with splintering skeletons and ripping
flesh and screams of their own.

The
Rider lashed out at the questing limbs. At first his knife glanced off the
thick talons, strong as blades themselves, but then they found the fleshy root,
and sent two of the thing’s claws spinning off, trailing blackish ichor, and
bit a wedge in the flipper-appendage.

It
recoiled only a little, the overall pain of its skinning overwhelming anything
the Rider could inflict upon it. Redoubling its effort, it lunged at the source
of this new pain, and the Rider found himself gathered up clumsily in the pit
of one rippling elbow. He turned the knife point down in his fist, nearly
dropping it, so slick was the oily tissue covering the arm he clung to. As the
thing drew him closer to its jutting maw, the Rider stabbed at its chest as
rapidly as he could, again and again, the blade punching noxious smelling holes
that gushed fonts of thick, burbling black grease, spattering his face,
blinding him to what happened next.

Its
hot reeking breath on his face nearly caused him to retch. The smell was like
vomit and rotten flesh. He struck blindly and wild, felt the blade glance off
something hard, heard its keening hoot-howl.

Then
he heard gunfire. More, he felt the shock of each report shuddering in the arm
that gripped him. He felt himself released, landed hard, bloodying his ear on
stone, filling his head with a skull shaking ring and his eyes with smashing
stars. He struggled to push himself up, but his arms and legs wobbled, and he
contented himself with wiping his eyes against his own shoulder to clear them
of the black slime.

When
the clamor and the blindness subsided, he felt human hands on him, helping him
to sit up. There was a diminishing hiss and that foul smell, but nothing more
than the heat and crackle of the fire on the walls.

“We’ve
got to go,” Spates said in his ear. “But you’ve got to help me. I don’t think I
can stand.”

The
Rider wasn’t sure he could himself until he lurched up on wobbling legs and
pulled the limping professor up with him.

The
thing lay on its side. The hissing was its death rattle, and they could see its
great chest subsiding as the last breath of air escaped its hideous face.

Across
the carcass, Mather stood with pistols smoking. He appeared to have emptied
both cylinders into the thing.

“Let’s
go,” he said.

As
they stepped around it, they had to be careful not to slip in the thick blood
pooling on the floor.

They
fled up the throat of the flaming cave as if from hell, choking on the stench
of smoke and then the reek that followed as the fire found the creature and
began to cook it.

When
they staggered out of the mine mouth, the Rider was surprised to see the
daylight.

“What
was it?” the Rider asked, when he had drunk in enough of the spotless mountain
air.

“Well,
I do believe I shall have the honor of naming it,” Spates said beside him. How
does iuguolus absconditus sound?”

“I
like ‘damned dingus’ better,” Mather said.

* * *
*

They limped back through the trees. The Rider dwelled heavily on the
thing he had seen. Spates went on at first about the creature and how he
regretted not observing it or saving its remains. He further wondered about the
creatures origins, whether this was its natural range, or whether perhaps it
migrated here from some remote location, or perhaps been transplanted by
whomever had first carved the tunnel. He speculated about its feeding habits,
but when it became apparent to him that Mather and the Rider did not care overly
to hear or even think about this or any other aspect of the thing they left
dead and immolating at the back of the mine, Spates turned his frustration to
Dodgy’s escape with the jewel.

“I
should like to have seen the treasure that dragon was guarding, at any rate.”

“You
think it was guarding that jewel?” the Rider piped up.

“Oh
of course not, just a figure of speech. Who’d tame a thing like that?”

The
Rider wasn’t so sure. He had seen the small niche at the back of the cave, and
according to Spates’s story the thing attacked the miners who had attempted to
extend the tunnel. Could it have been some sort of demon placed there to watch
over the stone, some guardian that the disturbance of its charge had awakened?
He had heard of such things as mazzikim being called down and bound as servants
to guard treasure. Solomon surely bound the mazzikim to his will to build the
Temple, after all. But he had never seen the like of this creature.
A thing undetectable yet subject to fire and lead?
Was it
possible the fire, being born of Sheardown’s concoction had some alchemical
properties which weakened it? Spates said he didn’t know the composition of the
stuff in the ampoules either; couldn’t that have been some mystically imbued
potion? It was low magic, but not improbable.