Skull Moon (12 page)

"Christ," Longtree muttered.

It was some sort of Indian chieftain done up in skins and beads and necklaces of animal teeth. The face had the texture and color of tanned animal hide, the skin just barely covering the ridges of the leering skull beneath. The eyes were empty, grizzled pits, the teeth broken and pitted like deadwood. A beetle crawled out of one eye socket and Benner brushed it aside.

"Almost two-thousand years old," he told Longtree. "Been baking in the sun and drying in the wind since before white men ever set foot here..."

Longtree shrugged and thought of the money they promised him in San Fran for it. A smile brushed his lips. "Some people'll pay good money for anything, I reckon."

But an Indian chief,
is what he was thinking.
I'm taking money to deliver an Indian chief. That's what it has come down to.

"Those Indians out there," Benner said in a whisper, "usually they have their October heathen service out in the hills where we can't see. But they brought it to town now that
he's
here. They're mighty ornery about me having stolen him. They want him back. Some sort of god to them, I guess."

"Don't look like a god to me," Longtree said.

Benner was staring at him. "You're kinda dark yourself friend...you ain't got no injun blood in you, do you?"

"No," Longtree lied.

"That's good. I can trust you then, I guess."

Longtree grunted and looked down at the chief and couldn't help shuddering: the old boy looked angry. His leathery, crumbled face was hitched in a sneer, it seemed. There was something else that bothered Longtree, too. Now that he studied the old ghoul's face, there seemed to be something slightly off-kilter about it, almost as if his bones weren't laying quite right. His face had a narrow, inhuman cast to it, the eyes too large, the jaws exaggerated. It was reptilian somehow, suggestive of the skull of a rattlesnake.

"We'll have to take him out the back way," Benner told him, "those injuns'll be angrier than a fistful of snakes if they know he's gone and you're taking him."

Longtree nodded.

Benner suddenly took a step backward, one trembling hand grasping his temples, his lips pale as fresh cream. He was whiter than flour in a sack. His eyes were lunatic, rolling balls shifting in their swollen sockets.

"What the hell is it?" Longtree asked.

Benner shook his head, mouthed a few unintelligible words and then seemed to calm down. For one awful moment he looked as if he'd seen something Longtree hadn't. "I'm okay," he said.

"You accustom to spells?"

"No, I'm fine," Benner assured him. "Just this place, I guess. Gets to a man after a time. Nothing here but injuns and sand and the wind. Goddamn snakes everywhere." He mopped his forehead with a discolored bandanna. "I wish them redskins would take that damn heathen ceremony somewheres else."

Benner put the lid back on the crate and opened the rear door. The wind slammed it violently against the outer wall and both men started. Longtree brought the wagon around. The box didn't weigh much and it was a simple matter to load it.

"Where did you find this, anyway?" Longtree asked him in the whispering darkness.

"Out in the hills," Benner said hesitantly. "Out in some burying ground the injuns call Old God Hollow. Lot of curious things out there. I'm probably the only white man who has ever been to that awful place. It's an ancient place and an evil one, friend, only in your nightmares will you ever see such a thing. Must be ten or fifteen other scaffolds there with injun corpses drying out on them, injuns with devil-faces like his. There's faces carved into the rocks and bones everywhere, piles of 'em. And scalps...Christ. Must be thousands, strung up on poles and not recent ones either, but old things tanned by the wind into leather." He paused, lowering his voice. "This old chief and the others I saw, there's something not right about 'em. I've heard stories about an older race...shit, I don't know. But somebody had to teach them injuns how to scalp folks."

"A fellah down in Tucson told me white folk started that," Longtree said.

Benner grinned. "You believe that, do you?"

"Nope. Just mentioning the fact."

"If you coulda seen them scalps in the Hollow, you'd think different."

"Where is this place?" Longtree asked.

"About ten mile, due east." That crazy look was in Benner's eyes again. "I heard about it from an old Kiowa name of Hunting Lizard or Hopping Lizard, can't remember which. He wasn't much then, just some old rummy who'd sell his soul for a bottle, but I guess in the old days he was some big shot medicine man. He called it the Snake Grounds. Told me there was gold up there, more than a man could carry away in a week. I fell for it. He got a bottle out of the deal and sent some white fool to his death, that being me. No gold there, of course, just them mummies and scalps and other things meant to drive a sane man crazy."

Longtree nodded with disinterest. "Gold, you say? Maybe you didn't look too good."

"Maybe not. I just wanted out. Goddamn place."

"So, you took one of these dead ones instead?"

Benner was brushing the palms of his hands against his pants as if he were trying to rub off some old stink. "Yeah. I was hoping I could sell it to a carnival or something. Damn. The wind was howling like nothing I'd ever heard before and there were snakes everywhere, biguns, coiled around them scalp poles and hiding in the rocks. Rattlers bigger than anything you'd want to see. Must've killed a dozen, barely got out of that devil-yard alive."

Longtree said, "Country's full of snakes."

"Not like these, friend, not like these." Benner was grinning like a desert-stripped skull. "If you coulda seen 'em, seen what was in their demon eyes..."

"I'd best be on my way," Longtree told him, wanting nothing more than to get out of that damn town.

"I hope God rides with you, son."

Longtree paid him and unhitched his horses.

"Good luck," Benner said and was gone.

A few of the injuns were eyeing up Longtree and what he had under the tarp in the back of the wagon. He set out his shotgun and Navy sixes on the seat next to him.

If it's killing you want, it's killing you'll get, Longtree thought at them. This old boy's going to a museum, Heathen Halloween or not.

The Indian's chanting took on a raw, expectant tone, the lot of them dancing in crazy circles, shaking bone and feather talismans and waving skulls about.

Longtree urged the horses around facing the way he'd come and started to make his run. He'd barely gotten them up to a trot before the Indians made their move. They came on foot, brandishing knives and ceremonial spears.They were a howling pack of crazy men, their eyes bulging, blood boiling like hot tar. If Longtree had ever seen true religious fervor reach its ugly, insane climax before, he would've known what this was, but he never had. He only knew they stood between him and freedom, him and a lot of cash.

He left them behind in a cloud of dust, laughing to himself.

It was a long, hard ride through the desert at night. Somehow, somewhere, he'd gotten turned around. There was heavy cloud cover so he couldn't see the stars, had no true way of navigating. It was just Longtree and that wagon and the body in the box. The horses started acting funny right away. They moved with starts and jerks, pulled the wagon in circles. Even the bite of the whip could not convince them to do his bidding.

After a time, Longtree just stopped them completely.

The desert had gone cold and lonely and silent as the crypt.

There was something in the air and he felt it then: heavy, ominous, enclosing. It seemed that the very air around him had gone strange. It was thick, suffocating, hard to pull into his lungs. It had the consistency of coagulated grease. He could actually
feel
it laying over his skin like a motheaten tarp. It smelled funny--like spices and age and things shut up for too long.

He stepped down off the wagon and could not get his bearings.

Longtree had been a scout. And it had once been said of him that he could track a pea through a blizzard...but now he was blind, his senses--always so preternaturally sharp--were completely shut down. Had he been dumped on the desolate plain of some alien world he could have been no more helpless.

He thought: What gives here? What is this about?

It was so black suddenly it was like being sewn-up tight in a bag of black velvet. The horses were snorting and neighing and pawing at the earth. A breeze had picked up, but it carried a horrible stagnant odor on it. Not natural in the least. Longtree had never smelled anything like it before, but it made his skin go cold, wrapped icy fingers around his heart.

He wanted to run.

Something in him was demanding it, screaming it in the blackness of his brain:
Run! Run, goddamn you! Take flight while you still can! Before, before--

The wind kept picking up, adding to his disorientation.

His own breathing seemed loud, almost deafening.

The wind was beginning to make a low, moaning noise that dragged fingernails up his spine. Distant, was that sound, but getting closer by the second and sounding like voices mourning in unison and coming from every direction.

Longtree uttered a strangled cry and pulled his Navy six.

The mesa and towers of black rock seemed to rise up higher and higher, reaching into the sky and...and then leaning out, pressing together, drawing over him like fingers trying to clutch and hold him.

The wind became gale force and picked up sand and bits of rock and grit that peppered his teeth and forced his eyes shut. And echoing everywhere, those voices moaning and screeching and whispering what seemed his name. And it became a real, full-blown sandstorm that whipped and howled and blasted everything in its path. It carried an odd half-light about it that created shadows and shapes and forms in a murky, surreal illumination. It forced Longtree to his knees next to the wagon and he pulled his neckerchief over his eyes and that was okay, that was just fine.

Because the sand was peopled now with lurching, angular forms that reached out for him, clutched at him. The wagon rocked and seemed to be pushed gradually by the force of the wind. Longtree held on, figuring it was his only link to the real.

The wind subsided a bit and he could see no forms through his squinted eyes...save for one.

In the maelstrom of raging, spitting sand, there was a shape--tall, skeletal, ragged. Bits of it flapped and shredded in the wind. It seemed to be looking in Longtree's direction and there was something about it that seized up his heart and made him want to wail like a child. It stood so still in that churning sand, impossibly still. Nothing living could withstand this, even the horses had been hammered down now.

Yet, it stood there, perfectly still and Longtree could almost feel its eyes on him, feel that remorseless, glaring hatred that ate through him like acid.

Then it was gone.

Gradually, almost casually it seemed, the shape stalked off into the wind and tornadic sands until it faded away and became part of them. A few minutes later, the storm abated. Longtree lay there, skin raw from the kiss of pulverized rock and sand granules. He pulled himself up, his legs and boots buried in dirt. Shaking himself off and seeing to the horses--they were all right, just frightened and skittish. He soothed them and dragged himself back to the wagon.

The clouds were gone.

The stars were out, the moon. But the crazy thing, the thing that stomped him down hard and would not let him up was the fact that he was miles away from where he last remembered. And not two or three, but twenty or thirty, possibly more. The landscape by moonlight proved it. Flat, empty desert. No mesas or cliffs or towers of sedimentary rock carved by ancient seas.

In the bed of the wagon, the box was open.

The chief was gone.

Longtree told Moonwind the story, realizing now that he had finished, he was shivering. Despite the blazing fire and Moonwind's warm body pressed to his own, he was shivering.

"You ask me if I believe in the supernatural," he said, rubbing his tired eyes. "And I guess I'd have to say yes. The white man in me conjures up all sorts of rational explanations for what happened that night, but none of 'em fit."

Moonwind held onto him, looked upon him with great compassion.

Longtree just shook his head. "I know what you must think--either that I'm totally crazy or that I pissed-off that ugly old chief and he taught me a lesson. And maybe you'd be right on both counts."

This elicited a short, but welcome laugh from her. "You weren't crazy. You ran up against a medicine so powerful it reached out from the grave. Such things are not unknown to our peoples, Joseph."

"I suppose. Since I came to Wolf Creek, I been thinking about that old chief and how they said he was part of some ancient race. It gives me pause to think. Food for thought, don't you think?"

But Moonwind pulled him down next to her and would hear no more.

The next morning, Dr. Perry spent an hour or so with the cadaver of Dewey Mayhew.

With forceps, scalpel, and post mortem knife, he urged the body to give up its secrets. What it told him was nothing he didn't know or suspect: Mayhew, like the others, had been killed by a large predator. He was, for the most part, less mauled and mutilated than the others, given the fact that the beast had been surprised as it plied its trade on him. Mayhew's abdomen had been opened from crotch to mid-chest, but none of the viscera were disturbed. Death had been caused probably from massive bleeding and trauma brought on either by the abdominal wound or the wedge of flesh and muscle bitten from his throat. And given such injuries, shock had played a major part.

"That's about it," he told Wynona Spence.

Wynona nodded and draped a sheet back over the body.

Perry packed his instruments back in their respective cases. He'd brought his microscope along for minute examination of fluids and tissue. This told him nothing new either. The only interesting, but not surprising, thing was the discovery of several coarse hairs lodged in the wounds. These matching the ones Perry had taken from Nate Segaris' house exactly.