Skull Moon (27 page)

"Come on, Deputy, it--"

Then the beast was on its feet. It opened the bellies of two men, and tore the throats from a third and fourth. The air steaming with blood and spilled internals and cries of agony, Skullhead snatched up the fifth man and tossed his rifle over the rooftops. It was an old strategy and a good one. He held the fifth white before him like a shield, knowing the others with their rampant sentimentality would not attack and they didn't.

"Don't shoot!" Bowes told them. He only had three men left now. Many more had poured into the street, but were cowering well away from the beast and his appetites.

He'd told them not to get too close, by Christ he'd told them...

The posse had been butchered. There were four men in the street, ripped open, their stuffing scattered in all directions. The remaining members were vomiting.

The beast was in the doorway of the undertaker's again. It slipped through, taking the fifth man with him.

"That's my brother!" someone yelled.
"It's got my brother for the love of Christ!"

But not for long.

As the remaining gunmen and a few interested civilians slowly approached Spence's, there was a crash and an explosion of splintered glass blew out at them. The fifth man's broken body came out with it.

Bowes kneeled by it. "Dead," he muttered. The neck was broken, probably before he was launched through the window. The beast hadn't the time to properly maul the man, but he killed him for the sake of appearances.

"C'mon," Bowes told his men.

With them at his back, he charged into the undertaker's.

Perry was one of the last to arrive.

He did what he could for the injured men which was little more than pray for them. Most were dead when he got there. His brain just dead tired and worn to threads from all the killing and bodies and blood, he went into Spence's and viewed the carnage. Had a tornado slipped through there, it could have been no more complete. Cabinets were shattered, chemicals spilled. Vats overturned. Walls smashed to debris from the passage of the beast. And mixed in with that refuse, was what remained of Wynona Spence.

Jesus.

Perry remembered Marion upstairs.

Steeling himself and pressing a hand to his back, he went up. Went up those creaking, narrow stairs and into the apartment above which smelled of incense and wood smoke. Their was a slightly sickening stench of lilacs, as if Wynona had been spraying perfume liberally.

It didn't take him long to find Marion.

Took him even less to realize that she'd been dead for years. Her skin was tight and flaking, gray as cement. The lips blackened and shriveled. The eyes sunk into dark, hungry pits. The fingers were shrunken into fleshy pencils. Wynona had embalmed her, turned her lover into a mummy she could covet and coddle for years and years.

Perry, sobbing, went back downstairs. "Oh, Wynona," he said. "Oh dear Christ, what happened to you?"

The locals would feed off this like leeches. Wynona's father had been a good man and Perry thought that, down deep, she was a good woman. Yes, she had a body up there. But she had harmed no one. Never slandered or hurt a soul.

Perry fired up an oil lantern and got it burning bright.

Then he shattered it against the wall. Flames engulfed the room and, eventually, they would take the entire building. And that was a good thing. For fire purified and Wolf Creek was long overdue.

Next, Perry went to see Claussen.

Something dangerous was brewing with that man.

Perry had a syringe with him, loaded with morphine. This one wasn't for himself, however (he'd already had his taste and was swimming in an exotic sea), but for the madman who'd once been a reverend. A madman who now thought himself a pagan priest of some new, yet ancient blasphemous order.

Perry's head was full of fog, but he had a duty and he would perform it.

From all over town he could hear screams and gunshots. He paid them no mind and mounted the church steps. Inside, he stopped. There was a smell in the air. One that told him to run while he still had breath.

"Claussen?" he called. "Are you here?"

"The beast," a voice in the darkness said, "the beast."

Perry followed the voice and found the reverend slouched in a pew. He was pale, his face beaded with sweat. He looked terrible.

"Are you all right, Claussen?"

The reverend smiled, his chin wet with drool. "He returned as I knew he would."

It was dim in the church, a few feeble rays of light bled in through the stained glass windows. Dust motes danced in the beams, thick, clotted. Perry looked around, seeing nothing, hearing nothing. He swallowed dryly. There was only that smell, that gagging perfume of putrescence.

"I think you should come with me now," Perry said calmly.

"Where?"

"To my house. I can care for you there."

Claussen laughed shrilly. "Leave?" he said in a congested voice. "Leave?
This is my church!
The house of God! I can't leave here...you see, God has come, he's here now..."

Perry scowled slightly. "Yes, of course. Spiritually he--"

"Not him! Not that one! Not that false shepherd who I've prayed my soul out to and has yet to honor me with so much as a word, a sign!" Claussen was trembling now, his eyes rolling.
"He
has come! The Lord of the High Wood! The beast!"

"Stop this, Claussen. Come away with me."

"No!"

"You can't worship a mindless beast."

Claussen laughed. "Such blasphemy. You should be quiet about such things...if he hears you..."

"He won't."

The smell was strong now; violent, offensive. A brutal odor.

"Won't he?" Claussen seemed confused.

"Of course not, he's just an animal."

"Heretic! "Claussen cried, springing to his feet. "He is here! He is here now! He came and I made sacrifice to him!"

To prove this, Claussen pulled his hand from the pocket it had been thrust in...except there was no hand. Just a stump wadded up with red-stained cloth bandages. The man was bleeding to death. Slowly...but dying all the same.

"Christ, Claussen, how--"

"Don't say that name in here!"

Perry knew that now, more than ever, he had to give Claussen the injection. Unless the man was drugged, he'd never get him away from this place. The question was: How could he hope to subdue a crazy man even for the few precious moments it would take to empty the hypodermic into his arm? Perry, despite the painless dream-life morphine gave him, was in poor shape. His back was twisted, incapable of supporting more than his own fragile weight. It was in no condition to take the kind of abuse needed to overpower another man. And his age, too, was a factor. The doctor never would again see the good side of seventy.

Claussen hobbled away up to the altar. Perry followed.

"Blasphemy," Perry said.

Claussen smiled. "It has to be rebuilt, this altar, retooled with new and greater meaning."

The altar had been smashed and rent. Boards were pulled up, statues of the heavenly fathers broken into fragments, prayer books were freed of their pages. The altar cloth had been shredded. It was even worse than the other day.

"This is
his
church now, Doctor."

And indeed it was. This was the sort of obscene shrine only a demon of savage appetites would or could appreciate.

"I must commission new artworks," Claussen said, "in his image. Busts of the finest stone, paintings in livid colors...perhaps blood..."

"Where is he, Claussen?"

"I can't tell you that. Not yet. Know only that he is close..."

Perry scowled. "What you've done is blasphemy, Claussen. Disgusting."

"You're a fool, Doctor. This is
his
house now."

"In the name of Christ, man, get a hold of yourself."

Claussen grabbed Perry violently by the arm. "You shall not revere the names of false gods in this holy place."

"Fantasy..."

"Really?"

"Yes, I..."

Claussen cackled with laughter. "Behold," he said, "he stands at the door and knocks."

The stink had grown omnipotent now.

It dried the words on Perry's tongue, put a frost on his bones. And then, behind him, as his senses reeled with nausea, movement. Perry turned, his back wrenching and crying out. He ignored it for the Lord of the High Wood had arrived. The doctor looked on the beast with no reverence, no respect, only a sort of numbing awe at this mistake of evolution. It was huge, its shoulders twice the breadth of any man's, its head mammoth. A giant. Its gray flesh was stained with dried blood and those eyes...good God, those eyes...bleeding balls that ran with discolored tears.

Tears?

Yes.

Jesus wept.

The beast came closer, moving with a slow grace that was frightening for something its size. Its arms hung limp at its sides, matted with patchy fur, bulging with obscene muscularity, the fingers--impossibly long--ending in hooked claws. Rapiers. Its sex swung with pendulum strokes between the massive thighs proudly. Its skin was ruptured, torn, splitting open with a vile sap in a hundred places. But its eyes, these are what held Perry. And the mouth, the sneering, hateful mouth that opened with a wet smack exposing teeth that glimmered like sacrificial daggers.

"Jesus," Perry managed.

"Not Jesus," Claussen said, stepping between them. "The Lord has chased Jesus from this place on the cowering tails of the saints."

Claussen looked up at his god and made a quick benediction. The beast roared and with a single slap of its bleeding fist sent the reverend sailing over a row of pews.

Perry pulled his gun. "We'll see what kind of god you are."

The beast began to drool.

Skullhead stood on the altar, having finished with the old man and his little gun. He didn't bother snacking on this one--he was far too old, far too tough and meatless. No, the old ones served only one purpose and had for ages and that was to be broken by the will of the Lords, killed for amusement. This was all. Murdering the old was tradition amongst the Lords. The dark-skins held the aged in such reverence that these were the first the Lords had killed when they waged war on the little men. After that, the men. Women and children were a different matter.

Skullhead sat down on the altar, fatigued with all the excitement and bloodshed. He was hurting. Pain rolled through his great torso in sharp waves. Bullets. Too many bullets in him. But the agony was good. Often, in the old days, the Lords would cut and slash themselves to bring on pain before a battle. It made them fiercer, more savage fighters. But this pain...though it made him angry, a sadistic conqueror...was not good. There was simply too much of it. It clouded the mind and made the senses reel.

It had to be alleviated.

When the Lords fought the wars against the advancing dark-skins in those ancient, forgotten times, the dark-skins used arrows and spears. Both of these were far more painful than mere bullets--they opened great gaping wounds in the body. Once they were removed, the healing began and went quickly as was the way with the Lords' biology. But sometimes arrowheads broke off inside the flesh and had to be dug out by claws or teeth. If they weren't, the body would fester and rot and death would follow. Skullhead knew the tales of those old days, they boiled in his cells. He knew the bullets had to be removed.

But it was no easy task.

His flesh, usually as tough as a beetle's carapace, was sensitive and hurting from all the abuse it had taken. Still, it had to be done. Groaning, the last of the Lords of the High Wood began to dig the slugs free. Bloody, mangled and mushroomed bullets dropped to his feet. Many were near the surface, others were deeper. He worked his long bony fingers into his belly, searching and sorting through his internals. One by one, the slugs were removed. With a surgeon's finesse, he groped and probed and stroked the secrets of his anatomy.

It was some time before he'd finished.

He removed nearly twenty bullets and there were still four or five left. He didn't think they'd do any harm. There were other foreign bodies lodged in him, tokens of battles centuries gone, and they caused him no harm.

Lying back on the altar, he rested.

His flesh was resilient and in a short time, his wounds would scar over. He'd laid in that grave for some four centuries before the dark-skins had dug him back out. And though there was no consciousness, only vague dream, a spark of life remained in him. It was the way of his kind. If they weren't dismembered, they could not really die, not totally. A rugged sort of half-life would remain. His kin, with the exception of one or two whose graves were the closely-guarded secrets of the dark-skins, had all been pulled apart after they'd sickened and fell. The dark-skins saw to that. Though they'd worshipped the Lords for thousands of years in one form or another, in the final days when the Lords had fallen ill with unknown infections, they'd risen up and hacked their masters to bits. Skullhead knew those were the Dark Days, the end of his race. A few of his kind, no more than three or four, had proved immune to these new contagions. But the dark-skins, natural born traitors, had rebelled and attacked the remaining Lords. Bound with rope, leather, and twine, the surviving Lords were buried alive. Their graves, a secret to all but a few in the passing centuries.

Skullhead closed his eyes.

Gone were the old days when the children were offered in sacrifice, when virgins were staked out for breeding. The system of service had vanished. It was up to Skullhead now, as the last of his race, to set things right. He would be worshipped again. Meat would be offered. The old and the weak would once again be set free and naked and unarmed in the forest for sport. And women would be offered. This last thing was the most important. The race would not survive until women were impregnated with his seed.

Once the white-skins were beat into submission, this task would be the first order of business.