At Fear's Altar (12 page)

W
hether he’d been roused by the suffocating heat or the ubiquitous pain in his body Dobbs was unsure. So he harboured an odd gratitude for both, for it meant his wits were beginning to restore themselves. It meant he was alive.

Even with his eyes closed Dobbs was able to surmise that he was still laying face-up on the Plain, in the precise spot where his companions had left him for dead. Judging by the intensity of the sun, he guessed it was about noon. He could feel the sear upon his brow and cheeks, sense it melting his vision into a glaucoma glow. Its rays were seeping in through the dead-fish gape of his mouth in an attempt to bake his lungs crisp.

Dobbs flexed his fingers, pressed his palms against the earth, which singed him. He tried to hiss but found that his voice had withered.

It took great effort just to instruct his tongue to jut forward and trace his lower lip. The thirsty muscle emerged slowly, like a snail timidly spying the world beyond its shell. Dobbs’s desiccated lips felt sharp, brittle.

A blind groping of his hip confirmed that the bastards had taken his canteen. Dobbs absorbed this fact without reacting to it. Perhaps on some level he had already assessed and accepted his grave predicament.

He gave his eyes plenty of time to open. Then he tried to get his bearings.

The last thing Dobbs could recall was securing his cumbersome pack of gold onto his stead, then, just as he was hoisting himself up onto the saddle, something had lashed around his neck, perhaps a whip of coarse, cutting leather. It had carved his skin as it squeezed the air from his throat.

It had all happened so quickly. Before he could even attempt to turn his head to see if it was Emmett or Jack who’d attacked him, Dobbs was yanked backward by the neck. His body arced at an unfortunate angle that brought all his weight down on the back of his skull. His crash against the Plain stirred up a tremendous fog of dust, through which Dobbs could see nothing. But he had heard a great deal of shouting before his concussion winked him out of the world for a spell.

If Emmett and Jack had intended on leaving him for dead, they had failed.

He tried to sit up, but doing so made the world swoop and spin wildly.

Dobbs waited until the ground once again felt level before rising. The throbbing pain caused his face to screw up, his stomach to curdle. His eyelids fluttered in order to usher the world in a more tolerable flicker.

He performed a quick inventory, crushed by the discovery that the only things he’d been left with were the filthy clothes on his back, the boots on his feet, and, in his pockets, a dented tobacco tin that still held a few pinches of chew and a yellow-stained handkerchief.

‘But I’m still alive, you bastards,’ thought Dobbs. ‘For now.’

Before him stretched the Plain. Dobbs had never felt such
aloneness.
He’d been lonely, yes, plenty of times in fact, but he had never felt like this .   .   . marooned.

Using his rage as motivation, Dobbs finally brought himself to his feet.

He began to walk. The faces of Jack and Emmett filled his mind’s eye, infusing his step with a harsh determination.

***

The trio’s mission to the Plain had been, for all intents and purposes, a selfless one. They had travelled at the behest of the residents of Pearl River, a village that had never known great boons, but that had been, up until the last year, relatively stable.

They had ventured to the Plain on the thin hope that the legends were true. Dobbs had grown up with the yarns spun by the local raconteurs; tall tales of dead rivers whose parched beds sparkled with precious metal veins, where a mere brush of one’s hand could uncover fat gold nuggets. Dobbs knew it was all just fool’s stuff, and figured everybody else in Pearl River knew it too.

But then the drought came. Folks think differently once they see their prospects dwindling and find their stomachs vacant. The ‘dry spell,’ as it was then called, began in April. It took its time wringing every last taproot dry.

The townsfolk salvaged what food they could. In November they organized a communal larder in an attempt to stretch the collective harvests as far as possible. They divvied up potatoes, ears of corn. They pickled as much as they could, traded this item for that. Those families whose farms had yielded only dust were tearfully grateful for the scant donations they received.

The meat was the first to be depleted, of course. They rationed the salted pork and the smoke-dried horsemeat. But there were
so many
people. Dobbs had always thought the village of Pearl River small, but when he came to view it as a pack of gaping mouths, it seemed immense, a place of multitudes.

By midwinter the men had taken to talking at night, around the lukewarm flicker of woodstoves whose hulls were as poorly fed as their own bellies. Together they whispered in the wan light. They spoke of the Plain. But Dobbs knew these were no longer simple fireside stories. Desperation had given these yarns legs, and a backbone. And teeth.

It was Emmett who’d claimed that his father’s father had made it to the Plain and back. Twice. But the fortune he’d lugged back to Pearl River had been either lost at gambling tables or filtered through his liver. McArthur’s mother supposedly had a distant cousin who’d also made his nut from the loot he’d found there.

The men began to formulate a plan; a stick-and-rag solution that was lashed together with panic instead of wrought with logic. Some of them had begun urging Dobbs to make the journey on his own. Not because he had any experience with prospecting, or even because they felt him the bravest, but simply because he was a bachelor. Emmett and Jack were the next in line, being married men but not yet fathers. Dobbs reckoned they were almost as disposable as he was.

Dobbs had stayed mum during those early plotting sessions. He didn’t feel one way or the other about the whole thing. He was tired of living like a half-starved rat. It was as simple as that.

The trio had headed west at daybreak. Only the men and the wives of Emmett and Jack had been made aware of their quest. They hadn’t wanted the town to let its hopes reach too feverish a pitch. Or to let their fears overcome them.

Everyone in Pearl River knew about the Plain. Knew the legend of its gold, of course, but they knew the reason why no one had ever truly stripped the sands of its fortune.

It was said that there was something else in that flatland, something living and deadly.

With a need more potent than their fears, the trio armed themselves with three Colts and one Winchester long gun and rode off to bring back the means to buy their people nourishment.

It took six days of hard riding just to reach the outskirts of the great sun-baked mesa, and two more to crawl across the desert until at long last they saw the first sign of black sands of the Plain.

The terrain was vastly different from what Dobbs had been expecting. According to the longstanding yarns, the Plain’s treasure resided in a great riverbed that had dried up long ago. But when he, Emmett, and Jack came upon the first peppery granules, the Plain seemed to curve in a circular shape. Dobbs had studied the tongues of black sand, all of which flowed down into a ravine. It looked like a pictograph of a black sun, with rays blasting out from the great round centre.

The site did not feel natural. Dobbs sensed it. He even said as much to Jack, but Jack did not seem to care much. The air there smelled cloyingly of sulphur. Dobbs had kneaded some of the black grains between his fingers, determining that they felt more like ash than sand.

He had looked up at the sky, wondering, perhaps intuiting, that this stinking black indentation had been formed when some burning thing plunged down to the Earth from somewhere in the stars. Was that how the Plain had become the blasted land it had become? Had something smashed into and permanently scorched the sand long ago?

Whatever reservations Dobbs might have had faded once Jack began to scream, to cry that he had found gold.

Some of the nuggets were as small as almonds, others were as large as ripe apples. They were simply lying upon the sulphurous black circle like so much flotsam, as if someone had carelessly tossed them and departed.

Emmett and Jack had frantically begun to fill their packs. Dobbs eventually did the same, but every so often he felt the urge to peer about him.

“This ain’t right,” he’d told his companions. “Some sumbitch is trying to trap us. Nobody leaves this. Nobody.”

Emmett shouted at Dobbs to shut up and get busy. Dobbs even saw Jack reach for his Colt revolver. Dobbs filled his pack with more gold, thinking all the while.

Then there was the attack at the horses, after which Dobbs thought about nothing for a good long while.

By the late afternoon of that first solitary day Dobbs began to feel as insignificant as a beetle trying to cross the whole wide world. Every step drew him that much closer to a scorching nowhere. He thought about resting for a spell, but the notion of settling down anywhere on that blazing hardpan was somehow unbearable. He felt feverish and weak and unbearably thirsty.

Worse than this was his mounting realization of just how
wrong
the Plain was.

The whole expanse was not that large, a mile or two in diameter at most. He, Emmett, and Jack had made it to the centre of the circle and found the gold in no time. Dobbs had now been walking for hours in a straight line, yet the edge of the Plain was nowhere in sight.

He paused to sneeze out a ball of phlegm, and when he saw that it was solid red in colour Dobbs muttered a curse.

‘Bleedin’ inside,’ he thought. ‘Not good’

He watched with interest as the hot sand absorbed the red globule.

Although he could hardly stand, Dobbs willed his splitting boot heel to go in front of the other. And again, again, for there was nothing else he could do.

The sunlight had become a mortar and the endless flat black of the Plain its pestle, with Dobbs being ground to dust between the two.

Had he been staggering in the wrong direction, due west instead of eastward, back toward Pearl River, Dobbs wondered?

No, the sun that was burning a hole in his back assured him that, even in his pathetic state, his bearings were not so skewed.

Perhaps he’d been wandering in circles? This seemed impossible to him as well.

In a crazy fit, a manic impulse to make something
different
happen, Dobbs began to walk sideways. Caring nothing for which direction he was wobbling toward, Dobbs moved in a Cancer crab scuttle across the sand. When he tried to muster a suitable laugh, what came wheezing out of his mummy-dust throat was something nearer to a death-rattle.

He gazed down as he moved, watching the thin, sick clouds of dust stirring beneath his feet.

Dobbs grew winded too quickly, his lungs felt as though they’d been tightly stacked with baking brick. Like a fool he turned about to survey the wayward trail he’d forged, as though it was some monumental accomplishment to be admired.

His tracks had been smoothed. Dobbs squinted, shielded his eyes, checked in zones he had not yet roamed, as though his footprints might have somehow been displaced.

Dobbs walked on.

After he’d gone a little further, Dobbs began to measure. He stayed put long enough to confirm his suspicion: there was no breeze here, or certainly nothing with velocity enough to smooth and correct newly trod earth. But even if this was a fact, what of it? Pearl River was not going to make its way to him. He had to move on. It would be dark soon.

He trudged, praying that the sand before him would soon brighten from volcanic black to sandy brown. But there was only the Plain.

Exhausted and near-broken, Dobbs slumped down. He would have to make himself as comfortable as possible for the night and resume his journey in the morning.

Hearkening back to the wisdom of his father, Dobbs wearily fished out his handkerchief and the small tin from his pocket. With a trembling hand he shook out the tin, clawed a small pit into the sand and then wedged the tin into its bottom before finally carefully tenting the handkerchief over the hole. He secured the contraption with the tin’s lid.

He removed his boots and used them for a pillow. He lay back and looked up at the rising moon. His arms were folded across his chest as if this deathbed posture could somehow lull his troubled spirit.

The temperature sank, and for a while Dobbs let his fantasies of vengeance warm him. He thought about the looks on Emmett’s and Jack’s faces when he kicked in their doors. He pictured himself cutting them with a buck knife, smashing their teeth into gory gravel with the butt of his rifle. He thought of tying them down and forcing them to watch while he raped their wives.

But his hatred ebbed when he began to reason. Why had they robbed him? Dobbs wondered. It made no sense to drag him all the way out to the Plain just to leave him to die. Was there a plot in Pearl River, some conspiracy to liquidate its undesirable elements? Dobbs pondered whether the locals had brought others to the Plain and left them to die. He quivered and began to inventory all his worldly deeds, trying to pinpoint the ones that made him so unwanted in his community.

Dobbs got to thinking about his father some more, now twenty years in his grave. He’d been a quiet man too, something of a lone wolf. But he’d been a good man and had taught Dobbs many things. Before Dobbs knew it, he was weeping.

His tears were scant, and the shedding of each one made Dobbs wince at the prospect of his body losing moisture of any kind. He now felt as though he was carved out of bone.

He must have dozed off, for at one point the cold uniformity of the Plain was gone, as was the void behind his closed eyes.

Dobbs was parting, petals of mind and flesh and spirit were peeling back like flowers heeding their guiding darkness. He was upon an altogether different plain now, one of starwinds and netted glints of alien lights, and, upon this scintillating grid, beings. These shapes were not human, either in scope or shape. They passed through him and by him, whispering indecipherable words; sounds that hovered between hisses and far-distant howls.