Merkabah Rider: Tales of a High Planes Drifter Read online

  He twisted his arms desperately, seeking the weakest part of his opponent’s grip - the thumbs. For a moment his wrist broke free. It was enough. He jammed the pistol into the black man’s chest and fired.

  Kelly spat blood in the blanc’s face as the mule kick of the pistol coughed fire and smoke into his heart. He flew backwards, arms flailing, sailing through the veve fire. He glimpsed the women on the stairs, looking down on him with dispassionate eyes. He remembered slipping on a muddy clay bank as a child, seeing the willow trees waving above him, wheeling crazily, white fluff of a dandelion he’d been blowing spiraling and drifting, fearing the rocks at the bottom of the shallow creek, feeling his father’s arms catching him, remembering his whispered admonitions against fear and carelessness.

  He felt those arms now, but they were many. They saved him from the fall. They embraced him now, tighter. Tighter. Pulling him in every direction, like the good road his mother preached, and the one he followed his father down that led to burning bolls in the night and boiled black flesh and screams, and death and evil. He felt his joints straining, stretching, popping, felt ligaments stretch to their farthest point, then tear. The warm gush of blood in his ears, over his ruined chest and down his arms. Even fingers being jerked from his hands by tiny, clammy fists. Fists and shovels and mattocks falling, excavating his life like gold from the earth of his body.

  Kalfou! Kalfou! Papa…?

  He screamed, alone in the mob.

  The Rider heard the sorcerer scream, and watched the mob of raging, foaming men and women and children swallow him whole and chew him ravenously.

  Still they raged on, braving even the fire now and reaching for him, arms bloody to the elbows some of them, eyes bulging and rolling insanely in their sockets.

  The Rider turned and ran again for his only avenue. The stairs. He bounded up them two at a time. Ankle buckling, he gripped the rail and pulled himself on. They stumbled up behind him, trampling each other in their eagerness to drag him down. They caught the tail of his coat and he shrugged out of it.

  He gained the landing. The two women stared down at the fire below, oblivious of the mob ascending the stair, oblivious of him. Behind them was a door that led to an unknown room. He grabbed each of them around their slim waists and pulled them inside. He spun and slammed the door, first on a questing arm, again and again until he heard it snap and it recoiled. He threw his shoulder against it, drew the bolt. He turned and yanked a chifferobe down across the doorway.

  He turned and looked about the room, looking for a window he could open, maybe pull these two waifs with him. Yes. There were two windows. And more. Much more. A grand, canopied bed, the sheets disturbed. No doubt the sorcerer had shared it with these two in their drugged stupor, the leering Grigori Armoni in lecherous ecstasy.

  There was a table and chairs. Accoutrements of the sorcerer’s trade lay on the table. Bottles, mortar, pestle. The straw satchel he had worn on their earlier meeting was draped over one of the chairs.

  They pounded on the door, the unpainted frame cracking. Fingernails scrabbled on wood. The hinges shuddered. The overturned wardrobe groaned an inch across the floor.

  The Rider had thought the spell would end with the sorcerer’s death. How to end it then? How to return them to their natural state? Would they follow his last command and then simply stop, to stand and await orders that would never come until they wasted away at last and dropped one at a time?

  The two women lay on the floor where he had roughly thrown them. They made no move to pick themselves up, only stared, empty, as if they were inanimate dolls. Where then were they, if not there? To what place had he conjured their souls with his black magic?

  Then The Rider saw them.

  He had taken no notice of the candles burning along the wall of the grand bedroom at first. They were like a votive arrangement in some Catholic church. The candlelight danced on shelves of glass jars—no, bottles. Row upon row of them, containing....what? Nothing he could see. Some dark stain on the glass as if by burning. He stepped closer, inspecting them. They were sealed with wax.

  The door shuddered and a crack split down the middle. The bureau held. The hinges burst from the wall and a long arm reached through.

  The Rider turned and pointed his pistol at the shelves of bottles. Slamming the palm of his weakened hand on the hammer, he emptied his gun as fast as he could, wildly. The bullets smashed into the shelves, shattering bottles and sending glass flying.

  As the gun clicked empty, he let it fall.

  One of the girls on the floor, the Mexican, was huddled against the foot of the bed, the palms of her hands pressed against her ears, hair and elbows tucked over her breasts. She stared up at him in wild horror, tears streaming down her cheeks.

  “Por favor! Por favor!” she wailed as he loomed over her.

  Outside, in the foyer. A few screams and exclamations. Men. Women. Children.

  He glanced at the shelves. Most of the bottles had survived his volley. He raced across the room and took up one of the chairs, overturning the table in his haste. The door burst open, and a skinny, white haired form fell over the wardrobe and struggled to rise, snatching at The Rider’s pant leg as he rushed past.

  The Rider swung the chair against the shelves like a madman, knocking them clear of the little bottles. He hit the shelves until the chair blew apart, then took to pounding them with his fists, heedless of the glass that cut into his hands, and the splinters of wood that lanced his skin as he broke them to pieces. He kicked the shelves down. He stomped across the floor, seeking every bottle, sending bits of glass flying everywhere.

  The dark haired woman thrust her head in her lap and screamed.

  The Rider screamed too. He jumped up and down, kicked out, fell bodily on the floor and began to roll in the broken glass, bashing his elbows against the floor like a man in the throes of the St. Vitus Dance.

  When at last he lay spent and panting from exertion, bleeding from a dozen cuts, he let the back of his head fall to the floor, and permitted himself to look.

  The Mexican woman was praying in Spanish, rocking back and forth. The white girl cowered in a corner, weeping, covering herself in the blanket from the bed.

  The thin man who had burst into the room lay crumpled on the floor on one bony cheek, staring at him. His face was splashed with blood that wasn’t his.

  “My God,” said the emaciated horror in a rasping voice. “What has happened here?”

  “What’s your name?” The Rider panted.

  “Eladio.”

  * * * *

  The last dead man found and buried was the tall clerk from the dry goods store. He had attempted to steal The Rider’s faithful onager from the shed where he’d been tied. The indentation in his skull, just over one of his wide, staring eyes attested both to the animal’s decidedly monogamous nature and the final cowardice of the tall man.

  The Rider stayed in Polvo Arrido until he was healed. All that remained of the gold stitching in the lining of his coat were smudged inscriptions of black ash that he could sweep away with his hand.

  He left one day, taking only water and some food Eladio had cooked him. He led his onager out of town, the sounds of the grave spades ringing in his ears.

  Episode Three - Hell’s Hired Gun

  “And when he was come out of the ship, immediately there met him out of the tombs, a man with an unclean spirit.” -Mark 5:2

  The heavy gate swung open easily. Into the silent adobe walled courtyard walked the Merkabah Rider, leading his white onager.

  The animal shied at the thick stench of corruption that wafted on the hot wind like the smell from a broken tomb.

  The Rider spoke low words of encouragement to coax the animal within the sun blasted walls. Even his cooing seemed loud and obtrusive in the supreme stillness, which was undercut only by the incessant low buzzing of flies.

  He put his sleeve over his face and pulled the animal in, tethering it to the winch post of a stone well in the mid
dle of the yard.

  “It’s alright,” he assured the donkey again.

  The Rider had crossed the desert. He and the onager yearned for fresh, cool water, but when he drew up the wood bucket, it was filled with blood. He let it fall, the squeal of the pulley receding until its burden splashed somewhere far below, echoing off unseen walls. The flies were visible clouds of darkness, swirling in the bright sky and settling on the bodies that lay cooling in the long noontime shadows.

  At the shattered door of the chapel, a Catholic monk lay face down, dead in his brown robes, the hard packed sand sucking up his blood. Yaqui men, women, and children, bright in their peon’s clothes and rainbow colored serapes, bright in their straw sombreros, bright in death, lay scattered like dry leaves in the courtyard.

  Their bodies were torn open, their bellies emptied of gut and bowel. In some cases the intestines had been drawn out for yards, nicked and torn and plastered with sand. Some lay without faces, some with limbs pulled or blown off. No one had been spared.

  In the sand around the mutilated bodies there were the imprints of small cloven hooves, yet The Rider saw no livestock.

  The Rider waved away the flies, and wetting a handkerchief with his canteen, tied it over the onager’s nostrils. He tucked his face into the crook of his arm and moved to the chapel, patting the animal’s neck fondly before he went. The plaster was scabbed away by gunfire, exposing the chipped brickwork beneath.

  Just inside the vestibule, another monk had been shot through the chest by a large bore bullet. His back was a wet mass, his heart blown clear of his body. Ants flowed to and from him in busy conveyance.

  The Rider stepped over the corpse and into the dimness of the chapel.

  It was a charnel house.

  A dozen Yaqui men had tried to brace the door against whatever enemy had done this. They lay in a heap, their bodies broken and irregular, as if they had been bodily plucked up and shaken like infants until their bones snapped. There were bullet wounds among them too, like the ravenous bites of a great beast. Torsos were blasted half away, forearms hung from strings of shredded flesh, necks ceased in blackened, ragged stumps.

  Dead, ruined faces stared up at him as though they had been left half completed by a creator who had suddenly been called away. The weapons they had mustered lay unsullied. Sickles and pitchforks, chair legs, machetes, butcher’s knives, all clean but for the flecked blood of their wielders, still grasped in pale hands that had never managed to land a blow. Blood dried on the floor and clung to the bottoms of his shoes, making slow sucking noises as he passed down the center aisle.

  Women and children lay dead among the pews, jammed beneath the kneelers and the seats, clutching each other in final fear. The benches were splintered and broken by gunfire. Among some of these lay more monks who appeared to have thrown themselves across the innocents and been shot through, intermixing their blood and bones.

  A statue of St. Francis, the patriarch of this order, if The Rider was not mistaken, leaned in its alcove, its head blown off. A monk lie on his back across the votive candles, smoking and charred; he had roasted slowly since his death. The smell was of meat and sweet candle wax, incense and burning cloth.

  The altar was befouled by clumps of animal spoor, and was a bastion of flies. The table itself was overturned, and a young monk who had curled beneath it like a hiding child was hacked and battered to pieces. The holy monstrance lay nearby, its gold edges dented and bloodstained as if he had been beaten to death with it. His gaping mouth was stuffed with stacks of communion wafers like poker chips, and the great heavy cross had been pulled from the wall and lay broken at its axis across his twisted back.

  The Rider leaned against the pew at the sight and felt the bile rise. Who could have done this? Who would have? The Apache? Even their hatred for the brown robes and the religion of their oppressors was not this great. The golden objects of the altar had been left behind and the women untouched, so this was no bandit raid either.

  Then he heard a wet, shuddering cough.

  He made his way quickly to the sound, wending through the shattered pews and blasted bodies to the side of the chapel where stood the wooden confessional box. The carved door with its relief of the Christian apostles, behind which he knew the priest sat to dispense absolution of sins, bore a massive hole and hung half on its hinges. Blood seeped from beneath it. He drew his Volcanic pistol and pulled the door aside.

  Sitting on the floor, in a puddle of dark crimson, was a Franciscan of about The Rider’s age, a pallid Negro man, with both hands clutched, as if in prayer, across his blood soaked belly. What remained of his organs, which the instrument of his doom had not destroyed, seemed to have spilled onto his lap. The smell was horrific. The Rider recoiled, pressing the back of his own hand to his nose and again forcing down the burning in his throat. The monk’s head was tilted back, and though his eyes did not react to the light from the open door, his eyelids fluttered instinctively as though to protect their dying charges.

  The monk’s red stained lips trembled. He knew someone was there, but he was long past seeing.

  The Rider leaned forward, eager to catch some hint as to the identity of the perpetrator of this blasphemous defilement from this, its only living witness before he departed.

  “Gadara,” the monk said. His amber eyes darted north and he died.

  The Rider passed a hand over the dead man’s eyes and straightened.

  * * * *

  It took him two days to bury all the dead and commend their souls to God. He lingered for half a day more, utilizing his mystic exercises to step into the Yenne Velt to make sure no restless spirit remained behind to torment, or be tormented. It was a harrowing journey, for the residue of murder and sudden, shocking death clung to the place like a thick, black fog. No presence remained in the desolate mission to bear witness to what had happened.

  But from the depths of the well, there was ghostly weeping.

  A frightened child’s cry.

  The Rider, who had crossed the threshold of hell, had no inherent fear of the dead. Admittedly though, his soul was trembling at the audacity of what had been done to this place of worship. He did not know if it was the work of men or something else.

  Staring down into the blackness of the well was like peering into the fog of the unknowable, with the certainty that terrible knowledge awaited those who were but willing to descend.

  He drew upon the mystic training of his teachers and the experience of a life spent in the exploration of the empyreal. He drew no circle this time, recited no incantations, made no sacred preparations, just sat beside the well and entered into a practiced meditative state, drawing upon inner reserves of power through measured breath and the sacred incantations of his Merkabah forebears until he felt the release of all he was from the machinery of his physical body.

  Slowly, riding the invisible currents of the ether, he allowed his spirit to sink into the well, so deep that the light could not pass through to its bottom. It was not long before he found himself in the waist high water, looking at a small form bobbing on the cold, bloody surface.

  He felt the presence of the spirit before it showed itself, a pale thing, curled into a fearful ball beneath its floating body, distorted by the murky water and anchored to the earth by its dread. The Rider reached down gingerly and drew the little spirit up.

  It broke the surface of the inky pool, the pale, hollow faced ghost of a black eyed mestizo boy, with long, ragged hair plastered to his small head. He cowered against the dank wall of the well and stared at his own little corpse floating face down, black as oil in the impenetrable subterranean shadow. A bullet had pierced one of his eyes and blown the back of his head apart like a china cup. He peered at The Rider from a ruined face, one dark eye wide and terror struck, the other a bloody, gaping hole.

  In life, they could never have communicated, but here in the Yenne Velt, the shadow world of spirits, they spoke one language. Yet The Rider’s was the tongue of adulthood, and
the boy was no more than six years old. He did not understand where he was or what had happened, and babbled on and on at the sight of The Rider, of whom he was afraid and called Devil.

  He did not know where his parents were, and wailed for them. When, at last, The Rider managed to convince him he was not the Devil but an angel of the Lord come to take him away, the boy calmed, but spoke only haltingly of pigs and a tall white man with a long rifle.

  One man.

  He gathered the boy’s small ethereal form to his like a wavering candle flame and brought him up out of the dark. When they had ascended to the surface, he released him to the luminous celestial winds like a handful of leaves. The boy’s spirit scattered, thanking him at last before his tiny voice was lost in the rushing tide of the eternal.

  When he returned to his physical form, The Rider broke apart the well winch with an axe and sent it clattering into the befouled water. He covered the well-turned-tomb with boards and said a prayer over its nameless charge.

  He had come here seeking the betrayer of his mystic enclave—his renegade master, Adon. But here, there had been another killer, and whether men hunted him seeking justice, The Rider did not know. As such, it was for him to take up the task.

  With chalk, he scrawled ‘All Dead’ and ‘Todos Muertos’ in large letters upon the gate.

  He and the donkey took the road north, leaving the empty Mission de San Fransisco de Los Campesinos to sleep in secret silence.

  * * * *

  It was a bleary eyed drummer, headed in the opposite direction, who first put meaning to the word ‘Gadara’ beyond its gospel connotation. He had come across a sign for a town by that name, he’d said. Far to the north, in the hills. He had flipped a coin and come this way instead. The Rider warned him not to stop for water at the mission, and they parted ways.