The Shotgun Arcana (45 page)

Highfather looked at Bick for a long time. He sighed and reached into his pocket and placed a single bullet on Bick’s desk. “This I save special for blowing my head off one day. It’s silver, in case the bullshit people say about me is true. Most nights I have nightmares, other nights I just can’t sleep at all. I stare at that bullet and try to make a list of reasons not to use it and so far the list is longer than the urge. Being sheriff of this madhouse actually helps more than you can guess. It’s been a long time since I felt anything remotely like human comfort or peace. A long time.

“I saw men, fine, decent human beings, sons, brothers, fathers, torn apart in front of my eyes. Have you ever seen rivers of blood, Bick, rivers of human blood with islands of corpses between? Gettysburg, Chickamauga, Shiloh, Antietam. Then you had the horror show of trying to patch and cut and sew the ones not fortunate enough to just die, and I saw what was left of them after. The addictions, the madness, still breathing with legs and arms and souls amputated. I saw human beings act like animals to one another, worse than animals—cruelty for hatred’s sake or vengeance or just plain boredom. I watched my brother, who had been a smiling, laughing, happy little boy, who I loved more than my own breath—change into someone sick at his very core, then watched him die as close to me as you are now, in the blink of an eye, and there was nothing I could do, nothing.

“So don’t talk to me about evil in this world, don’t talk to me about senseless cruelty. If there is some kind of a plan, we all missed the damn meeting. A man carries his faith in him, not in some god or book or manifest destiny. If those exist, fine, if not, fine—makes me no nevermind. I have a duty to myself and what I hold true. That’s what keeps me going, one foot in front of the other till the end of my days. Till that bullet catches up with me.”

Bick set the glass down. He seemed sober now to Highfather. The sheriff put his bullet away.

“My apologies,” Bick said. “It is always horrible when brother fights brother. I know.”

“Zeal,” Highfather said softly.

“As you know,” Bick said, “my family has been tasked with the duty of guarding these lands for a very long time. Ray Zeal was given a similar task, to stand watch over a very special artifact.”

“Given a task by whom?” Highfather asked. “Who made you watchman? Who made Zeal?”

“You wouldn’t believe me, even if I told you,” Bick said. “After a time, Zeal grew tired of his duties and began to shirk them. Our families were well acquainted and he unburdened his charge with me, here in Golgotha, and I relieved him of his guardianship forever. His carelessness and inattention to his duty cost lives and I refused to allow that to happen again.”

“He was guarding a skull?” Highfather said.

“Has it ever occurred to you, Sheriff, how things come to be? How basic human behaviors, human concepts come into existence?”

“Well, since you pointed out, I’m a pretty simple fella, no, it hasn’t,” Highfather said.

“For everything there is a first,” Bick said. “In the dim recesses of human existence there was a man, one of the first men, and in his beautiful, terrifying palace of gray matter, he created something that had never been before that moment.”

“What?” Highfather asked.

“Murder,” Bick said.

Highfather shook his head, “Malachi, things have been killing other things as long as there has been anything breathing.”

“No, you misunderstand, Sheriff,” Bick said. “Not killing, not death—murder. The conscious act of visualizing and ending another being, not as a basic human need, but for rage or lust or vengeance. The forbidden thrill of cannibalism: not just hunger, but the desire for alien, forbidden flesh, out of sexual need or desire to control, to play god, or merely slaying for sport—any of those other reasons you said you had witnessed. The baseless cruelty in mankind during the war, blood slaying blood.”

“Like Cain and Abel,” Highfather said.

“The names and the stories differ depending on the culture, the society, the part of the world. In one version of the story, the murderer and the victim are kin and they are called Kabil and Habil and the murder involves jealousy over a woman as much as jealousy over the favor of God. Not surprising, the woman ends up taking the blame of the first murder, as well as the first sin. Elsewhere, the murderer and the victim are known as Ahriman and Ahura Mazda, warring brother gods.

“The people of this land have many such stories. The Nez Perce tell of a cannibal brother catching his siblings with a rope made of intestines and eating them. The cannibal’s tribe is rescued by Coyote, who tells them to shun him and flee. The Huron tell a story of the Divine Woman, creator of the universe, and her two sons. The evil one was Tawis-karong. The good one was Tijus-keha. In their version, the good son kills the evil one with a deer horn, but the evil one lives on even after his body dies, a spirit-force in the earth—a Manitou.

“The Gnostics claim Cain is the son of Lucifer, who seduced Eve and impregnated her with his breath in the Garden of Eden, so Cain was partly of the divine and hated God as much as God looked on him with disfavor.”

“Which one is true?” Highfather asked.

“To a degree, they all are,” Bick said. “To parse the fact from the myth is counter to the nature of myth itself, but the story of the first murder is something in the memory of the race, a dark stain—a footnote on human nature.

“I can tell you what my family knows. Long ago, a human created an idea—the thought-form of ending life—to become an anticreator. This human was the first to practice murder on another of his kind, and the act, the power derived from the act, soaked into the very soil of the earth as the blood of the first victim did. It became a compact between man and the infinite. It tainted humanity with the terrible curse of that act.”

“You saying murder was invented, not in our natures to begin with?” Highfather leaned forward in the chair.

“Sadly, no. It was always there. Do you understand what a human being truly is, Jonathan? It is a wickedly smart, bloodthirsty primate with a shard of the divine, of the universe, in it. You can create such works of ephemeral beauty, beauty to match and surpass the spires of Heaven. And you can create murder, undoing with the same genius, the same soul. Your capacity for cruelty is fathomless.

“The potential was always in you, it was just fully realized, the abstract made concrete, by one human in one terrible instant, and that act gave him power—power enough to make gods take notice, to make them rage and fear.”

“So,” Highfather said. “What do angry, frightened gods do, exactly?”

“They punish, Sheriff,” Bick said. “The First Murderer was cast out of all human society, forced to live in the fringes of it, marked with an invisible warning, a feeling of unease that made him forever seen as a predator to his own kind. Angry at God, at the universe, for rejecting him, for punishing him for simply being what he was created to be, and furious at the feminine—the representation of the generative force of life—for creating instead of destroying. The First Murderer was given a guardian to ensure he did not harm mankind and never exercised the power inside him again to slay, not even himself.

“Zeal?” Highfather said. “Was he the guardian? Because that would mean he’s ancient.…”

“Zeal is not human,” Bick said. “He guarded the man until he passed, watched most of his remains turn to dust and blow away and was given that which remained of the First Murderer to guard. Even after the Murderer’s death finally claimed him, the force he conjured into the universe resided, imprisoned, in the bone of his skull, locked away and contained as much as it can be.

“Contained?” Highfather said.

“When human blood was first spilled, it soaked into the earth, tainting the future generations of man, making men susceptible to the force of what the First Murderer created. Like catching a mental cold,” Bick said.

“Maybe it was helped by that worm-thing we dealt with last year? You said it hated all life everywhere and it was chained up in the earth,” Highfather said.

“Perhaps,” Bick nodded. “A wise assumption. At any rate, close proximity to the skull for a time can turn even the most civilized men into savages and coarse men into monsters.”

Highfather rubbed his face. “Where are you keeping it? Why are the answers to so many questions I ask this week the same?”

“Here,” Bick said. “In one of the old cave dwellings on the eastern face of Argent. It’s been there for about seventy years or so, when Zeal originally dropped it off with my family. It escaped about twenty years ago with the unsuspecting aid of a child. It cost forty-one people their lives.”

“Escaped?” Highfather said. “This skull is alive and can reason?”

“Not exactly,” Bick said. “It wants free, like a caged animal. It will work with whoever it can influence to get free and rage across the world, like a wind of madness and hatred. The child, for example, helped it by pulling the teeth out of the skull and allowing them to be scattered across the world, giving the force more access to pawns susceptible to its influence.”

“Well, I think it’s been a damn sight busy this week,” Highfather said.

“What do you mean?” Bick said.

“I mean, I have our esteemed Dr. Tumblety down in the clink for mutilating four women. I have a renegade Paiute, calls himself Snake-Man, who’s working for Zeal in there with him. Snake-Man was fetching the skull for Zeal, but Mutt stopped him. Malachi, is it possible this skull pushed Tumblety to do what he did? Could it be making the people in this town eager to see your blood, any blood, run in the streets?”

“It’s possible,” Bick said. “But human beings don’t need some supernatural impetus to commit atrocity. Sadly, it in them already.”

“You said the power in the skull made a little girl pull out and scatter the teeth?” Highfather said. Bick nodded. Highfather reached under his coat and took out an envelope. “Like these? Tumblety gave Vellas’ body a once-over for me. He said these were his only possessions that survived the fire. They were in his jacket pocket. Snake-Man, our renegade, had one on him as well.”

He opened the envelope and dropped a large white feather and two yellowed teeth on Bick’s desk blotter.

Bick slowly reached down and picked up one of the teeth as if he were reaching for a rattlesnake. He held it up and turned it before his eyes.

“These,” he said, “are teeth from the skull of the First Murderer. They have a tiny portion of the power from inside the skull. If Vellas had this, then it’s a safe bet Zeal’s crew has the others. That just means they are more unstable and more dangerous than we imagined. Did Tumblety possess one?”

“No,” Highfather said. “But we haven’t had a chance to check his house yet. Why does he want this skull now, if he gave it up so long ago?”

“I truly don’t know. He’s insane,” Bick said. “But I do know that if he destroys the skull, the mental energy, the power of that first act of all-encompassing destruction, will spread across the world like a psychic plague, overpowering the will of every man, woman and child, turning them into vicious, amoral killers. Cities will become slaughterhouses, civilizations will burn and in time, slowly, painfully, the human race will die, screaming, at its own hands.”

Highfather rested his elbow on the desk and covered his face with his palm.

“Never can be easy, can it? We thought this up? We envisioned something so ugly … No wonder God doesn’t talk to us. He’s either too disappointed or too damned scared of us.”

“I would have disagreed with you once,” Bick said, looking at the whiskey and then dismissing it. “It’s much harder for me to do so anymore. God keeps his own council. We’re on our own and Zeal is coming for the skull, Sheriff, and you need to stay out of his way. He knows you killed Vellas, his son.” Bick held up the pure white feather, examined it and slid it into his desk drawer along with the teeth. “He wants your blood too. I think you should leave town till this unpleasant business is over.”

“I came here to suggest the same thing to you,” Highfather said.

“I can’t leave,” Bick said. “I wish I could. I have a duty to protect Golgotha’s secrets and her dark treasures. I can’t let Zeal and his men gain access to them. I must do my job.”

“I have a duty too,” Highfather said. “Caught it the day I pinned this star on. I can’t leave these people, this town, to a bunch of killers and worse, like Zeal’s crew. I’m in, Malachi, same as you.”

“It is very rare we agree,” Bick said. “I have to admit, in this case, I like it.”

“Usually only takes the end of the world for us to get along,” Highfather said. “We need a plan.”

“I have an inkling of one,” Bick said. “But it requires a great deal from both of us and we don’t have much time.”

“Then let’s get to it, “Highfather said. “Daylight’s burning.”

The Eight of Swords

Maude and Kate stood mute in the dining room of Gillian Proctor’s boardinghouse. All around the breakfast table were the still-warm bodies of most of Gillian’s boarders, their faces contorted in shock, fear and pain as their poisoned food claimed them.

Maude closed her eyes and recalled sitting at this very table a few nights ago with Mutt. It had been so perfect, so good
. It could have been Mutt or Gillian and Auggie or Jim dead at this table, if they had made it to breakfast today.
There was Bill Caruthers and Tommy Oates, Stuart Goggins … others Maude didn’t know, but she had seen their faces over the years. Dead.

“Damn,” Kate muttered, her revolver out. She moved toward the kitchen, kicking open the door and sweeping the bright room. No one was there. Kate lowered her gun and turned to Maude, who had followed her into the kitchen, leaving the dead to their feast.

“Okay, that was a good guess they might double back to here,” Kate said. “But just like everywhere else in town, we’ve missed them, but not by long by the condition of the bodies.”

All told, about a hundred people were either dead or sick from poisoning. It appeared to Maude that the Brechts had targeted individuals and families that might stand with the law when Zeal arrived in town tomorrow.