Merkabah Rider: Tales of a High Planes Drifter Page 17

  Japheth smiled.

  “Remember, I’ve been to your heart. Now, I am beholden to your experiences, but I believe you put the wagon before the horse. Why did you really seek a shortcut to the Lord in His abode? Tell me true.”

  The Rider thought for a moment.

  “I wanted…to know that He was.”

  Japheth laughed out loud.

  “Glory! After all that you had already seen? Choirs of angels and the mighty host of the Lord all in formation! What did you think, that angels ruled the heavens and made a figurehead for us to worship? You are like your ancestors in the wilderness. I never could figure how a man could walk dry footed across the Red Sea with a pillar of fire to guide him by night and still doubt the Lord. The rest of the world has had to keep faith seein’ the Lord only in the new day dawnin’ and the fallin’ rain and the bloomin’ bud. But you’ve seen with your own soul all that heaven has. You think you weren’t worthy because of your mentor’s heathen trinkets, like your teachers told you, or you think the Lord set you to some other purpose so you could be worthy of Him. But what led you to them heathen things in the first place? You stood outside the Lord’s front gate, and you still weren’t satisfied. That’s why that angel barred your way. No other reason. For all you’d seen already, you still needed to prove your faith.”

  The Rider was silent for a long while. As the reverend said, he had been to his heart, and with an outsider’s objectivity, he had come to know a thing that ate at The Rider every day of his life. It was a comfort and it planted in him a deep seed of peace, but still there was Adon blocking that shoot from breaking the surface. Adon, who had gone from teacher to father to enemy in the span of a few years. Adon, who had tried to turn him from the Lord by appealing to his deepest, most secret failing; an enthusiasm to learn beyond all doubt, even at the cost of his soul.

  “Why does Tooms kill?” The Rider asked to change the subject.

  Japheth sighed heavily.

  “When a man is wronged, he can fill up with hate at a fearsome rate. Look at Cain, snubbed at the altar of Gawd, or Saul, who slew the whole city of Nob for helping David. I guess I don’t need to tell you that hate’s like a beacon to the underworld. It’ll attract the damndest things.”

  The Rider knew of what the old man spoke of course, being intimately familiar with spiritual transmigration. He also knew the will was the key to the locked door of the soul. He had mystic instruments for forcing open those locks, but a disembodied spirit, like a demon or a dybbuk—a wicked soul escaped from the torments of Gehenna—was barred, as was any consciousness dwelling in the shadow lands of Sheol.

  It was said though, that a man could welcome a spirit into himself if he were in a sufficient mode of mind. The Rider had seen evidence of this too. The right sort of spirit would naturally be drawn to an intense psychic emanation like overwhelming grief or hatred, as a child would to a dinner bell. ‘Like readily consorts with like,’ as Cicero wrote.

  “That’s why you’ve got to tread lightly, son,” said Japheth, “when it comes to the man you’re hunting. There’s many a man who wound up worse than the wrong they tried to put right.”

  Whether the old man meant Adon or this Tooms, The Rider didn’t know.

  After a bit, they came out on the other side of the woods to a long abandoned farmhouse in the middle of a blinding field of icy bleach. The paint was flaking and the old porch was covered in piles of dead brown leaves powdered white by the sifting snow.

  A collapsed fence surrounded the place, and a small barn, beaten down by the harsh storms, lay dying a slow death a few yards from the house.

  A once grand oak that must have supplied fine shade to the house in the bright summers was choked and expired—not in the relatively brief sleep of the winter time, but in the mortification of the rotten dead.

  It was a decent enough place, but the air of ruin lent it an eerie foreboding. The Rider brought the buggy to a stop.

  Japheth rubbed his hands together and blew a hot blast of breath into them. He pointed to a low hill on the property, and The Rider urged the mule toward it.

  There came to his ears a cracking sound, as of a pistol reporting, and The Rider dropped a hand to his own sidearm, then saw that the chilly noontime wind was beating an old shutter senseless against the side of the house.

  Japheth clapped a frail hand on his shoulder, reassuringly. He got his walking stick down from the buggy and they went on.

  The top of a crumbling headstone barely poked out of the fresh snow on the low knoll as The Rider helped Japheth down from the buggy. It was a particularly cold morning and the heavy snowfall of the storm the night before had frozen to a hard crust. Their feet crunched through the ice and they sunk to their ankles as they made their way to the grave. Japheth had to chip away at the ice with the end of his staff to clear the marker.

  The inscription on the plain gray stone read:

  BELOVED WIFE

  CONSTANCE LOUISE TOOMS

  AND SON

  EXPIRED

  MAY 12th 1870

  Japheth said a prayer over the grave and bowed his head as The Rider crouched beside the stone to read the words.

  “He never named the boy,” Japheth said quietly. “The Lord took ‘em both. Gawd save ‘em. The cholera was goin’ about town that summer and the doctor, a man named Tibbens, never made it out here. All Gadara had it, and that poor man was up to his elbows in sickly folk. He done the best he could. Tooms’ wife was poorly, and their baby was due, but Doc Tibbens just couldn’t make it. The Landers’ baby was on the verge of dyin,’ and he spent the whole night tryin’ to keep that boy in this world—did it too, Gawd bless him, for all the good it did later. He went to see Tooms that very morning when little Perry Landers’ fever broke.”

  Japheth frowned and patted the headstone.

  “He found Medgar Tooms diggin’ this grave. Doc tried to talk to him, and Medgar put a bullet in his elbow for his trouble, ran him off the place.”

  The Rider imagined Medgar Tooms waist-high in the fresh grave, with his wife and still-born son swaddled in sack cloth nearby. ‘When a man is wronged, he can fill up with hate at a fearsome rate.’

  “Nobody could get near this place after that. No sir. They sent the Marshal, old Red Seth Hogan. Medgar shot him in the guts. He was a sharpshooter for the Rebs during the war—used to blow the brass buttons off blue belly officers at two hundred yards or more, so I hear.”

  The Rider stood up, looking down at the snowy grave. He imagined the woman six feet beneath the ice and sod, her nameless baby clutched in her dead arms. A shiver went down his back that was not induced by the penetrating wind.

  “After Red Seth crawled home and died, the town wanted to burn Tooms out,” Japheth went on. “But I thought with the Lord’s help I could bring back Medgar Tooms; reach farther with the long arm of the Lord than mortal man could stretch.”

  He shook his head, as if at his own folly.

  “Gawd forgives, but some things a mortal man like Medgar Tooms just can’t never forget, I guess. He blamed the whole town for what had happened. Blessed Je-sus.”

  Japheth put his staff under his arm and shoved his hands in the pockets of his coat and breathed a puff of air.

  “I remember, I come up the rise from Gadara with my mule Sarah and I seen a sight. A sight that made me jump down from the buggy and hug ‘ol Sarah to me and pray for us both. Almighty. Medgar Tooms had plied his trade as a hog farmer. I seen him step off the porch, and those hogs of his, six of ‘em, there were. They was standing a’right on their hind legs in the yard, in a circle, like they was dancin.’ They was squealin’, and I could’ve sworn I heard a sound like voices ‘mongst all that animal noise. One of ‘em was high, like a child’s voice.”

  The old man’s face was drawn tight across his skull in fear. He spoke with a tremolo, and he was shaking all over.

  “Gawd Almighty. It was like a piece of red rock candy hung in front of the sun that day. Ever thing was the color o
f fire, like as if a blaze had sprung up in the woods. Medgar went up to the circle of ‘em, and they parted, and he stepped right into the middle. Blessed Je-sus preserve us! I seen a cloud—a red cloud. Like a thunderhead, but it was boiling all of a sudden on the ground, swirlin’ around Medgar and them hogs like a puff of the Devil’s breath. So help me Gawd, I saw red lightnin’ hit that old oak tree over there, and it was dead in a second, all the leaves turned brown and dropped off.”

  Japheth bit his knuckle, trying to stifle his own trembling. He could not. He just shook and stared out at the empty field and at the house and the dead tree, eyes wide. After some time, Japheth hugged himself and spoke again.

  “I never been so scared in all my life. I climbed into that buggy, and Gawd forgive me, I whipped Sarah like I never whipped another living creature in my life—or ever will again, Gawd willin.’ I drove back on over to Gadara an’ locked myself tight inside my church. I barred the doors and hid ‘neath the pulpit....”

  He couldn’t speak the rest, though his eyes shined with tears he would not let fall.

  The Rider thought of the barred door he had seen in his vision. He thought of the pounding hands, the screams.

  Japheth looked at the house. His eyes peered across the empty yard.

  “Nothin’ growed here since that day. Even the grass is gone. It must’ve died right there underneath our feet. Medgar Tooms, and all his hogs....they disappeared.”

  It had been long years of living in the cabin near the road, watching. Waiting. Knowing Tooms would be back. Fearing it at first. Running from it, like Jonah. Then, resignation. He had become the lone watchman of Gadara. Praying for Medgar Tooms’ inevitable return, the waiting his own personal penance.

  Japheth took a step towards the house, hesitated, and stopped.

  “His chickens were all dead. His old draft horse too. Not a mark on ‘em. They were just dead, dropped where they’d stood. All his belongings he left behind—‘cept for his gun and the old Whitworth rifle. You could see the spot on the wall where the mold and powder flask hung over the mantle. Only thing he did leave behind is scratched on the wall where that rifle was.”

  Japheth looked over his shoulder at The Rider.

  “I expect it’s still there, if you’d care to see.”

  The Rider narrowed his eyes, and stood up slowly. He recalled the visions of the broken bodies, the slaughtered families strewn across the meadows, the Chinamen with their eyes shot out. He remembered the Yaqui boy in the well.

  “I suppose I would.”

  They trudged on toward the house.

  The approach to the house was like a dreadful march toward killing ground. Something was chilling about the emptiness of the place. The only sound was the hiss of the winter wind clacking the dead branches of the rotten oak, and the banging of the lonely shutter. As they got further away from the buggy, The Rider began to feel more and more disquiet, as if the mule were the only living thing in miles besides himself and the old man.

  The floorboards of the porch groaned with the tread of their feet. They kicked up crackling piles of dead leaves as they stepped across the threshold, shaded by the afternoon sun. The front door lay on the floor inside, its hinges long rusted away.

  Inside the main room was a world of dust, lit only by the scattered shafts of sun that bore down through the holes in the roof. No nesting birds took nervous flight in the rafters upon their entrance, no weasels or mice scurried into hidden nooks. There was no spoor, no caches of nuts, nor anything that might bespeak a sleepy possum or industrious squirrel. The Rider did not even see cobwebs.

  The furniture was still intact, though in disarray. A rocking chair sat in a corner beneath a blanket of dust, weathered by rain from a hole in the roof.

  With such a place so close to a town, it would be certain someone would have come across it and made off with whatever was handy, but nothing was touched. Old pictures of solemn strangers sat on the mantle, their faces obscured by layers of age. A pipe sat on a table near the rocking chair, and a woman’s tarnished, silver hairbrush lay waiting on a dingy flower print stool for a head of hair that had long since stopped growing. In one corner The Rider spied a carved baby’s cradle that Tooms might have bought, or made, for a son who would never again be rocked to sleep in it.

  Over the mantle, scratched in the wall in a crude, violent hand was the legend;

  ‘Mene Mene Tekel.’

  It was scrawled in the Ashuri script.

  The Rider furrowed his brow at the sight of it.

  “It’s part of the inscription on the wall of King Belshazzar, from the Book of Daniel,” he said.

  “It is.” Japheth frowned. Daniel translated it as ‘Daniel said it meant ‘the days of thy kingdom are numbered,’ and ‘Thou art weighed in the balance and found wanting.’” The old man’s lip curled. “Blasphemy.”

  Then he turned to face The Rider.

  “For ten years he’s been out killing.”

  The old man’s face was dead serious.

  “Just a little ways up the road lies Gadara. He’s come home, and the power of the Beast is with him.”

  The Rider picked a portrait off the mantelpiece. It was a tintype of a younger Tooms, garbed in the gray of a Georgia infantryman, his wife, a blonde haired, freckled girl with happy eyes and a hoop skirt standing at his side, one porcelain white hand poised daintily on his arm.

  “It may be he ain’t too far gone, Gawd willing,” Japheth said, mildly. “I am going to do all I can to win him back—to save his soul.” He clutched The Rider’s elbow firmly. “But if he can’t be saved....my son, will you help me?”

  The Rider looked at the writing on the wall, touched the gilded Volcanic pistol at his hip. It was primarily designed for fighting on the astral and ethereal planes, though it could fire lead if he so wished it. He had used it to kill men, but he was far from an expert, and far from eager.

  “I’ll help you,” The Rider said, placing the picture back on the mantle. “But you should know. When a man gives himself up to a dybbuk—to an evil spirit, like I suspect this one is—all that he was is consumed. The man who killed all those people is an agent of darkness, not the man you knew.”

  “No man is beyond redemption,” Japheth intoned.

  “Some men are,” The Rider said, “because they choose to be.”

  Outside, the mule in the traces gave a strangled bray as Medgar Tooms cut its throat.

  He stood there beside the old preacher’s buggy with the bloody bayonet in his hand, watching the sighing animal sag to its knees. The pigs were already swarming around it, loath to wait for its death. Its kicking hooves caught one young shoat and sent it flopping brokenly against the dead oak, while three others buried their snouts under the mule’s jaw in the wide wound made by Medgar’s blade.

  Tooms saw this place in another time, when the grasses swayed in the spring breeze, and the hawks lit on the fence posts as though a reassurance of protection. He saw a woman as though she had been painted into the picture—a woman with hay golden hair through which the afternoon sun shined, and a flushed face indicative of daily toils. She bore slop buckets for the pigs, her thin arms tense with the weight. Then he saw the two blue-green eyes, dreamy like far off misty ridges he had seen before the slaughter and the fury. They peered at him and the smile opened up like a June blossom, all sign of hardship melted away. She had loved him, this woman, and he had loved her more than life. Anyone’s life.

  Lost in his mind, he leaned briefly to the side, and his hand brushed the cold cruel stone that stood in the snow like a petrified tree trunk. More images came to him. Of the woman’s swollen belly, full of a mysterious, fluttering life. It wasn’t life in the end, but the stirrings of death. The woman, frail and crying, her dove skin taut with pain, tears streaming down her cheeks. Her white knees exposed and quivering. The small, bloody form quiet and still in his arms. The ragged sound of her last breath hissing like a snake from her chapped and bleeding lips.

  The ha
te came back like a sharp spur to his ribs. Medgar fixed the bayonet to his rifle. He got down on one knee, lifted the rifle to his shoulder, and fired at the pale face that gawked at him through the window of the house.

  The huge .450 caliber bullet smashed through the front windowpane like a freight train, sending powdered glass sprinkling through the air to intermingle with the sunlit dust. The Rider barely got out of the way, and fell to the floor with a burning crease in his right shoulder.

  He rolled across the floor and put his back to the wall. The Volcanic rasped from his holster.

  He checked his loads, and listened to Japheth rustle the pages of his Bible. The old man was huddled behind the corner of the mantle.

  A second shot boomed and a heavy ball punched through the wood wall in a scattering of slivers. The bullet burst the floorboard at Japtheth’s right foot and buried itself in a shallow grave beneath the house.

  “Blessed be the Lord, my strength, which teacheth my hands to war and my fingers to fight,” murmured Japheth, ignoring the crater and brushing away the splinters which had painted little red slashes across his face.

  A third bullet screamed in through the open doorway and swept the knickknacks and portraits off the mantelpiece like a raging, angry arm. Their remnants rained down on the old man, and he had to shake broken glass from the pages of his bible before continuing.

  “My goodness and my fortress; my high tower, and my deliverer; my shield, and He whom I trust.”

  The Rider watched the old man, his mind racing. If what he had said were true, that Tooms could not be hurt by mortal means, what option was left to them? The Volcanic was only an ordinary pistol on the physical plane. He had no special means with which to kill men; he had never needed any. Had they time, he could have prepared, he could have engaged the dybbukim in the Yenne Velt, maybe drawn it out of Tooms. There was no time to prepare for that now.

  Blood coursed down his quivering shoulder. It was the most shallow of wounds, but it bled fiercely.

  The Rider risked a glance out the smashed window above his head and saw Tooms crouched by the grave. His pigs were all around him, up to their snouts in the now dead mule. With his pistol he could never hope to hit Tooms at this range, and even if he did, it would do no good.