A Fistful of Horror - Tales Of Terror From The Old West (5 page)

Instead of getting anything that he needed, Quan entered the small, close healing tipi. It was dark inside and once he had placed Nocona on the mat laid out on the sandy floor there was only room enough for Quan to sit cross-legged next to him and whisper prayers and incantations.

Even though he knew, now, that it was no good.

On the short journey from the fireside to the tipi, Nocona had died. Now Quan could only send up pleas to the gods to look after the little spirit, for his shadow soul to rest quietly with his body in eternal sleep, and for his free soul to wander happily in the after life.

Quan waited for as long as he could, as long as seemed appropriate. So that it seemed that he had done something, that he had tried at least. And then he left the tipi alone to find Ahdoche.

The man crumpled when Quan told him that his son had died. The big war chief sobbed and would not be comforted. “Did you do everything?” he asked, his voice hitching, disappearing, coming back weakly. “Did you?”

“Of course I did. Of course. But poor little Nocona… his injuries were so great, he was so badly hurt, there was no saving him.” Quan felt his palms spring with sweat. Had he done everything? Could he have been quicker? Or could he perhaps, had he not been drunk, have thought of something more, a different healing, an alternative prayer? “Of course I did.”

“I don’t know what to do now.” Ahdoche was lost. He sat, the firelight flickering on his normally strong face, and looked around him. The tribe had formed a circle of grief, all of them already missing the little boy who had been such a life force. Once.

“You should pray. Ask the spirits to help you now. I will speak to the women,” said Quan. “They will prepare the body. And then tomorrow a rider can take him into the mountains. I have already asked for safe and happy passage for his souls.”

“Thank you, Quan.” This time the thanks was ragged and hopeless.

Quan slept little that night. His remorse kept him awake, kept him thinking and thinking.

In the morning, with the tiny body cleaned and wrapped in a newly weaved blanket, Ahdoche lifted it lovingly, kissed it, buried his face in the little patch of hair that was showing, and placed it on a horse behind a volunteer rider. The grieving father stepped back, running his hand along the body until he lost contact. “Take him safely,” he instructed the rider. “Look after him.”

And then the body, the rider, and the horse were gone, kicking up dust in their wake.

Up in the mountains, it was cold and bright. The rider dismounted when his horse began to have trouble climbing and he led it onwards, clicking his tongue and easing the animal through cracks and crevices.

He knew where he was heading. It was where he always took the bodies. It was cool and safe, unseen and unheard and unknown to all but him. He had been the death rider ever since he could carry a body, ever since he had lost his father in a hunt and had volunteered to take him up. Now he always did it. It wasn’t that he enjoyed it exactly, but he did feel at peace with it. The dead held no fear for him.

He just hoped that when it was his time there would be someone to take his body and shadow soul up to rest in peace.

The cave had been created by two enormous rocks that had fallen against one another, leaving just a small opening and then darkness beyond it. The rider stepped inside, Nocona’s body light in his arms. When the darkness had calmed and he could see, the man stepped forward and found a clear space amidst the bones on his tribes people. And there he left Nocona to sleep forever.

The tribe was ready for him when he returned. Ahdoche waited patiently as he drew closer, waited for confirmation that Nocona’s remains were safe, and then he let out a mighty wail, signalling to the others that they could now perform the grieving ceremony.

Everything that the little boy had owned – everything he had loved and cherished during his short life – was placed on a bonfire and burned to ashes. Ahdoche took a hunting knife and slashed at his arms, letting the blood drip onto the flames. And then he danced around the fire, singing, weeping openly.

It was done.

Spent, the group drifted away to try and think of something else, to get on with things.

Only Quan was left by the smouldering ruins. He had spoken little since the boy’s body had been ridden away that morning. He hadn’t eaten. He had barely had anything to drink. The guilt of what he had done, and what he hadn’t done, was crushing him. He could feel it standing on his chest. He could feel his heart grow sharp claws and try to slice its way out of him.

And he had seen something. When the rider had returned, had rounded the corner and come back into the reservation, Quan had noticed something behind him. An owl. In daylight. A small owl, a small, dirty owl. It fluttered around the dusty trail that the horse left, swooping in and out of the sandy clouds.

If it hadn’t been for the memory of Nocona’s fear of the Big Cannibal Owl, Quan might not have thought too much of it. A strange anomaly, nothing more, just an owl out in the daylight. It happened. But he couldn’t forget the look in the little boy’s eyes when he talked about the Pia Mupitsi. Fear and awe. Terror and fascination.

“So,” he had said, “The Owl was a man whose free soul wouldn’t rest?”

“That’s right.” Quan had patted the boy on the head, glad he had assuaged some of the fear at least. “So the free soul became a monster, and it vowed to avenge his death which had happened too soon. It took the children of those who it thought had caused its body’s demise.”

Nocona had seemed to understand. But as he stood to leave, he had asked one last question; “But what if no one was really to blame? What then?”

And Quan had had no answer to that. But he had thought it best to answer, to say anything; “I imagine,” the medicine man had replied, “That the Owl would have come for the tribe’s medicine man. Because he had failed to save the man.”

Why had he said it? The boy had nodded sagely, happy to understand.

But Quan felt nervous as soon as the words were out, and it had pulled and picked at his thoughts.

The owl that had followed the rider down from the mountain alighted on Quan’s tipi. It stared down at him.

Quan chose to sleep under the stars that night, away from the camp, away from Ahdoche and the guilt, away from the owl. But sleep was a distant friend. Every time Quan closed his eyes he felt something tickling his face, crawling over his eyelids, its spindly little legs caressing his parched lips.

The medicine man sat up, scratching at his skin, wiping away something that wasn’t there. The first time, he thought it was ants come to feast on him. The second time he was convinced it was the owl hovering above him, waiting to pierce his eyes with its talons. The third time he was sure it was Nocona, intent on revenge, the body back from the cave in the mountains, scraping its bony fingers over his face.

When he awoke he huddled against the rocks, his thin blanket wrapped around his shoulders. He could still feel the boy’s fingertips on him, the owl’s wings above him, the ants all over him. He sat and shivered and did not dare close his eyes again.

In the morning, when the sun finally rose and granted the medicine man a little peace, Quan crawled back to the healing tipi and hid inside, whispering magic words to himself, protecting his body and his souls from the undead, from the monsters that waited for him outside.

The tribe left him alone. He told them, when they asked, that he was preparing balms and cures, that they had run low on everything and that he could feel a battle coming. No one questioned him. He was the medicine man, after all.

They let him get on with his work and they whispered between themselves if they had concerns.

The owl never left.

It sat on the tipi and watched everything with interest. It never seemed to sleep.

When he was sure there was no one around, Quan tried to speak to the bird. “Nocona? Nocona, I know that it’s you. Are you angry with me? Have you come for revenge? Oh, Nocona, I’m so sorry, I truly am! Please forgive me!”

But the owl said nothing and continued to watch the world.

The owl didn’t sleep and neither did Quan. He tried, he was so tired, but the fingers – definitely fingers, he knew that now – came for him, touched him, dug into his flesh and made him bleed. When he dared to look he saw thin trails of blood running down his stomach, along his cheeks. And the owl kept watching.

But sleep is a powerful monster, and it has to come in the end.

When it came for Quan he could feel it seeping through his bones, his weary eyes were pulled closed, and although he fought it, he couldn’t win.

After ten days the tribe could no longer believe that all was right with Quan. Medicine did not take that long to make. And they told one another that they thought they had heard the man weeping in the night, they thought they had seen him talking to nothing and no one. Although over the past week they had heard nothing and Quan had not been seen.

Ahdoche eventually moved through the sea of people congregating outside of the hut. “Let me through, let me in.” He pulled open the tipi flaps and recoiled at the stench inside. It was sweet and putrid. It was death and decay. In the corner of the tipi, surrounding by oils and herbs and plants, was a heap of clothes and rotting flesh that was crawling with hundreds of hungry black ants.

And yet, the body that had been Quan was still living.

It heaved in a breath through ragged, leaking lips, and with a skeletal hand it grasped Ahdoche’s buckskin. “Pia Mupitsi.”

Even the war chief – a man who had seen so much death in his life – was disgusted. He stumbled back, kicking out at Quan’s remains, trying to get away, succeeding only in detaching the medicine man’s hand from his wrist.

The decaying monster spoke again. “Pia Mupitsi. The Cannibal Owl came for me. And it was Nocona. I had to sleep, Ahdoche, I had to. And when I did it came for me. It ate me, devoured my souls, and now I cannot rest, I will never rest.”

Ahdoche couldn’t understand. The words were jumbled, a mumbled mess.

But he knelt and drew his hunting knife. “Oh, Quan. When Nocona died and my heart was breaking, you told me to ask the spirits for help. So I did. I prayed for death to come to you. And I prayed for you to suffer because you failed my son.” The war chief smiled as he slit the gnawed, mouldering skin on Quan’s throat.

“You give good advice, medicine man. I see my prayers were answered.”

As the blood drained from Quan’s body, the owl, unseen and unheard and unknown, took flight, back into the mountains. It was time to sleep.

THE GUN OF EL LOBO

Donald Jacob Uitvlugt

Orestes Grayson pushes past the saloon doors and walks out toward the street. The heels of his boots clomp on the boardwalk only to fall silent as he reaches the packed earth of Silver Creek’s only road. Already the dry Arizona air burns in his nostrils. The town hall clock tower begins to chime. Noon.

Scenes from the past days flash before Grayson’s eyes. The dry trail up to Silver Creek. The stares from second-story windows and people on the boardwalk. The silence that falls in the saloon. He was not usually so self-conscious about his gun.

“I hear you have a problem.”

No one said anything. Grayson walked up to the bar and turned to face the room.

“El Lobo. Let him know I’m gunning for him.”

A silhouette appears across from Grayson. It moves slowly, with the tense energy of a rattlesnake about to strike. As it walks closer, Grayson realizes El Lobo is not as he imagined him. A beanpole thing, scarcely more than a scarecrow. This is the terror of Arizona?

“Señor Orestes. Do not go tomorrow.”

Grayson stopped kissing Rosita’s neck. He breathed deeply of her skin and cheap perfume. “I’m not afraid of any man, no matter how many people he’s killed.”

The girl trembled in his lap. “It is not the man you must fear, Señor. It is his gun.”

Grayson laughed and ran rough hands down smooth caramel skin. “Trust me, Rosita. I’m the quickest draw alive.”

She shook her head. “You don’t understand. El Lobo’s gun, she never misses.”

He kissed her full red lips. “I won’t lose.”

She sighed as he laid her down. He could have sworn before they made love, she whispered the words, “This is what I fear…”

“You ready, El Lobo?”

The figure across the way nods his head. The wide brim of his hat still shadows his face. Grayson likes to see a man's eyes before he kills him. He frowns. In the whole town there is not a sound, not even an insect. Grayson feels eyes on them, watching and waiting for the outcome of this duel. He flexes his fingers, aware of each muscle and tendon in his hand.

“Then draw.”

He’s fast, but El Lobo is faster. Three shots ring out before Grayson fires his first. El Lobo’s gun empties and clicks on spent cartridges. Grayson looks down at himself and laughs. El Lobo missed.

Rosita hadn’t wanted to let him go in the morning. She clung to him as he washed his face in the chipped enamel basin. He had to pry her away so he could put on his shirt.

“You’ll see, Rosita. I don’t plan on dying today.”