Deadman's Crossing (7 page)

Jebidiah thought: Welcome to the town of Falling Rock.

He led his horse inside the livery, looked about. The animal
tracks were what you would expect. Possum. Coon. Squirrel. Dog
and cat. There were also some large and odd tracks that Jebidiah
did not recognize. He studied them for a while, gave up on their
recognition. But he knew one thing for sure. They were not human and they were not truly animal tracks. They were something
quite different.

This was the place. Anyplace where evil lurked was his place.
For he was God’s messenger, that old celestial sonofabitch.
Jebidiah wished he were free of him, and even thought sometimes
that being the devil’s assistant might be the better deal. But he
had once gotten a glance of hell, and it was well short of appealing.
The old bad devil was one of God’s own, because God liked hell
as much as heaven. It was God’s game, heaven and hell, good
and evil. That’s all it was, a game, and Jebidiah despised and
feared God because of it. He had been chosen to be God’s avenger
against evil, and he couldn’t give the job back. God didn’t work
that way. He was mighty mean-spirited. He created man, then
gave him a choice, but within the choice was a whore’s promise.
And instead of making it easy for man, as any truly kind spirit
might, he allowed evil and sin and hell and the devil to exist and
blamed it all on man. God’s choice was simple. Do as I say, even
if I make it hard on you to so. It didn’t make sense, but that’s
how
it was.

Jebidiah tied his horse in one of the stalls, took the pitchfork
and moved the old hay about. He found some good hay in the
middle of the stack, forked it out, shook the dust from it and tossed
it to his horse. It wasn’t the best there was, but it would do, along
with the grain he carried in a bag on his saddle. While the horse
ate, Jebidiah put the fork aside, went into the stall and loosened
the saddle, slid it off and hung it over the railing. He removed
the bridle and reins, briefly interrupting his horse’s feed, slung it
over the stall, went out and shut the gate. He didn’t like leaving
his horse here in this bleak unattended stable, but he had come up
on another of life’s evils and he had to be about his business. He
didn’t know the particulars, but he could sense evil. It was the gift,
or the curse, that God had given him for his sins. And this sense,
this gift, had come alert the minute he had ridden into the ghost
town of Falling Rock. His urge was to ride away. But he couldn’t.
He had to do whatever it was that needed to be done. But for the
moment, he needed to find water for his horse and himself, grain
the horse, then find a safe place to bed down. Or as safe a place as
possible.

Jebidiah walked down the street, and even though it was fall,
he felt warm. The air was humid and the wind was hot. He walked
until he came to the end of the street, finally walked back toward
the Gentleman’s Hotel. He paused for a brief look at the overturned
stagecoach, then turned and went into the hotel.

He saw immediately from the look of it that it had been a
brothel. There was a bar and there were a series of stalls, not too
unlike horse stalls. He had seen that sort of thing once before, in
a town near Mexico. Women worked the stalls. Once there might
have been curtains around the stalls, which would have come to the
women’s waist. But business would have been done there in each
of them, the women hiking up their dresses so that cowboys, at two
bits a pop, could clean their pipes and happy up their spirits, be
cheered on by their comrades as they rode the whores like bucking
horses. Upstairs, in the beds, the finer girls would work, bringing
in five Yankee dollars per roll in the sheets.

Jebidiah slid in behind the bar, saw that on the lower shelf were
all manner of whiskey bottles. He chose one, held it up to the light.
It was corked and full. He sat it on the bar and found some beer
bottles with pry-up pressure caps. He took a couple of those as
well. Clutching it all in his arms, he climbed the stairs. He kicked
a few doors open, found a room with a large bed covered in dust.
He placed the bottles on a night table, pulled the top blanket back,
shook the dust onto the floor. After replacing the blanket, he went
to the window and pushed it up. There wasn’t much air, and it was
warm, but it was welcome in comparison to the still humidity of
the room.

Jebidiah had found his camp. He sat on the bed and opened one
of the beers and took a cautious sip. It was as flat as North Texas.
He took it and the other beer, which he didn’t bother to open, and
tossed them out the window, sent them breaking and splattering
into the dry, dirt street below. He wasn’t sure what had possessed
him to do such a thing, but now it was done and he felt better for
having done it.

He went back to the nightstand, tugged the cork from the
whisky with his teeth. He took a swig. The whiskey was warm both
in temperature and spirit, and he could have cleaned his pistols
with it, but it did the trick. He felt a comfortable heat in his throat
and his stomach, a wave of relaxation soaking into his brain. It
wasn’t food, and it wasn’t water, but it beat nothing in his stomach
at all. After a moment, and a few more swigs, the whisky warmed
him from head to toe, set a bit of a fire in his balls.

He sat on the bed and took several sips before returning the
cork to the bottle and going downstairs. He went out into the
street again, still looking for someplace with water. He glanced at
the stagecoach lying on its side, horseless, and noted something
he had not noted before. The runner to which the horses would be
hooked was dark with blood. Jebidiah examined it. Dried gore was
all along the runner. And now he noted there were horse hooves,
bits of hair, even a gray horse ear, and what looked like a strip of
skin lying in the street. Not to mention a hat and a shotgun. There
was a smell, too. Not just the smell of dried blood, but a kind of
wet stink in the air. Jebidiah was sure the source was not from the
blood or the horse remains. It was the stink of evil, and the smell
of it made him absently push back his long black coat and touch
the revolvers in their holsters.

He heard a moan. It was coming from the stagecoach. Jebidiah
scampered onto the runner and onto the side of the coach, moved
along to the door with its cut away window, looked down and
inside. Lying against the far side door that lay on the ground
was a woman. Jebidiah reached through the open gap, grabbed
the interior latch, swung the door open and climbed inside. He
touched the woman’s throat. She moved a little, groaned again.
Jebidiah turned her face and looked at it. She was a handsome
woman with a big dark bruise on her forehead. Her hair was as
red as a campfire. She wore a tight-fitting green dress, some fancy
green shoes. She wore a lot of makeup. He lifted her to a sitting
position. She fluttered her eyes open, jumped a little.

Jebidiah tried to give her a smile, but he was no good at it. “It’s
okay, lady,” he said. “I am here to help.”

“Thanks. But I need you to let me lift my ass. I’m sitting on my
umbrella.”

Jebidiah helped her out of the stagecoach, into the hotel and
upstairs. He put her on the bed he had shaken the dust from, gave
her a snort of the whisky, which she took like a trouper. In fact, she
took the bottle from him and took a long deep swig. She slapped
the umbrella, which had a loop for her wrist, against the bed.

“Damn, if that don’t cut the dust,” she said.

Jebidiah pulled a chair beside the bed and sat. “What’s your
name?” he said.

“Mary,” she said disengaging herself from the umbrella, tossing
it onto the end of the bed.

“I’m Jebidiah. What happened? Where are the stage horses?”

“Eat up,” she said. “Them, the driver, and the shotgunner too.”

“Eaten?”

Mary nodded.

“Tell me about it.”

“You wouldn’t believe me if I told you.”

“You might be surprised.”

And then, after another shot of whisky, she told it.

“I’m a working girl, as you may have already noticed. I am late of
Austin, Texas, and Miss Mattie Jane’s establishment. But Mattie
met a man, got married, sold her place, made a deal with the madam
here in Falling Rock for my services, as well as the remaining girls.
I was the only one that took her up on the deal. The others spread
out across Texas like prairie chickens.

“Must say, I thought there would be more to Falling Rock than
this. Thought it would be a sizable town. And maybe it was. I
figure what ever got the driver and shotgunner, as well as a whisky
drummer in the coach with me, got most of the town, too. Hadn’t
been for my umbrella, I’d be dead. I was surprised at how well I
was able to protect myself with it.

“We came into town late last night, me ready to start my job
here at the Gentleman’s Hotel, ready to buck pussy, when a strange
thing occurred. No sooner had the stage entered the town, then
a shadow, heavy as if it had weight, fell across the place and sort
of lay there. You could see the moon, you could see the town, but
the shadow flowed between buildings and into the stagecoach. It
became hard to breathe. It was like trying to suck down flannel
instead of air. Then the stage shadow flowed away and the stage
rolled on, stopped in front of the hotel. The stage shook real hard
and then I heard a noise. A kind of screech, unlike anything I had
ever heard. Then I remembered one of my old johns telling about
being in an Indian fight, and that it had been close and hand to
hand, and the horses had been wounded, and there had been a fire
in a barn that the Indians set, and the horses inside burned alive.
He said the horses screamed. Somehow, I knew that was what I was
hearing. Screaming horses. Except there wasn’t any fire to burn
them. But something was scaring them, causing them pain.

“The stagecoach shook and tumbled over. I heard the shotgun
go off a couple of times, and next thing I knew the driver and the
shotgunner were yelling. The whisky drummer stuck his head out
of the overturned window, jerked it back again. He turned and
looked at me. His face, even in the night, was as white as the hairs
on an albino’s ass. He pulled a derringer, then there was a face at
the window. I ain’t never seen a face like it. I couldn’t place it. My
mind wouldn’t wrap around it.

“The drummer fired his derringer, and the face jerked back,
then it filled the window again. An arm, a hairy arm with what
looked like hooks on it snapped through the window and caught
the drummer in the face, peeled him from his left ear to the side
of his lip. I remember seeing his teeth exposed through a gap in
his jaw. Then the hairy hooked hand had him by the throat. The
drummer fought, slamming the derringer into the thing’s face,
pounding on its hands with the butt of the gun. He was snatched
through the window in a spray of blood.

“I didn’t know nothing but to grab up my umbrella. It’s all I
had. Then the face was there again, tugging at the door, about to
pull it off, I figured, so I jumped forward and stabbed out with
the tip of the umbrella and got the thing in the eye. It let out a
horrible howl, moved away. But two more ugly hairy faces took its
place. Yellow eyes glowing, and all those teeth, dripping spit. I’m
not brave, but fear drove me to jump at them and stab into them,
and I got one of them, and it, he, whatever it was, jumped back and
went away.

“I don’t think I scared them, I just think they sort of, well, got
bored or something. Or more likely...full. Cause I could hear them
prowling around and around the stage, and I could hear other
things, snapping sounds, gnawing sounds, a kind of excitement
that sounded like miners at a free lunch.