Merkabah Rider: Have Glyphs Will Travel (7 page)

* * * *

In the blue light of predawn the
Rider awoke to the sound of shoveling.

He rose sleepily and went to the
cell door. Trooper Davies, who had apparently relieved Armendariz at some point
while they slept (for the Mexican was nowhere to be seen) was out on the parade
ground a few yards out from the guardhouse door, digging a small hole with a
short entrenching spade. The dirt scraping against the metal was the only sound
in the stillness.

The Rider watched Davies through the
door. He was on his knees, excavating. A small object sat alongside him,
waiting to be buried, it looked like. What it was, the Rider couldn’t tell. Why
was he burying it in the middle of the parade ground before reveille?

Then Belden blurted something
unintelligible from his cell, and the Rider heard his breathing, harsh and
fast.

“Dick?” the Rider called.

“Yeah. Yeah, I’m alright. Just…just
a crazy nightmare. Bugs. Any of that wine left?” Belden asked, rolling over in
his cot.

The Rider frowned. Nightmares he
knew, were not to be ignored. But what was Davies doing?

“I’m joking,” Belden said, when he
was met with silence.

“Davies is digging a hole,” the
Rider informed him.

There was the sound of Belden’s cot
creaking as he rose, and his boots scuffed the hard floor. Then the Rider could
see his fingers curling around the bars of the next cell.

“Davies!” Belden hissed.

Davies made no reply, and did not
even turn to look at them.

“What the hell is he doing?” Belden
wondered aloud. “Trooper Davies!” he called.

No answer.

“Crazy kid. Where the hell is
Armendariz anyway?”

“I assumed Davies relieved him.”

“This early? Guard’s not supposed to
change till after reveille.”

Kabede joined them at the door of
his cell, rubbing his eyes.

All three of them watched Davies dig
in silence for. In a little while, he set aside his tool and took the object
beside him and put it into the hole. It protruded out halfway. It was difficult
to see clearly in the shadow, but it looked like a small barrel.

Davies got up then, retrieved his
spade and came trotting over to the guardhouse door.

Davies pressed his face against the
bars of the little window. His eyes were wide and bulging, the irises small. He
was grinning ear to ear.

“
Ah
gut. Sie wach
,” he said excitedly, not only in German, but in a voice that
was deeper, and not his own.

There was some rattling behind the
door and his face disappeared for a moment. They heard the heavy bar fall away
and the door swung wide open, banging against the wall.

“Hey,
shau zu wie ich sterbe
,” said Davies, excitedly. He drew his pistol
then, and the Rider instinctively ducked back. But Davies turned and skipped
like a child back to the hole.

“Jesus,” said Belden.

That was when the Rider saw
Armendariz’s corpse lying in the doorway where it had fallen. He had been
decapitated, and his head lay near where Davies had hacked it inexpertly off
with the short spade. The blood was everywhere, dark as oil, pooling beneath
the door. Armendariz’s eyes were very white. One was screwed up in his socket,
and the other had drifted downwards. His expression was a grimace of pain, and
a great deal of blood covered his face, apparently having run there from a
gouge in his scalp where Davies must have initially struck him. How had they
not heard it?

The short spade lay across the
threshold, and the Rider could see the black blood on its edge.

Davies meanwhile, had returned to
his hole. He lay flat on his back, resting his head on the object in the hole
like a pillow, and called out in a loud voice, “
Shau zu wie ich sterb
.”

He fired his pistol into the dirt,
and something flared on the ground in the night, maybe two feet from the
guardhouse door. They watched as the bright flame not only burned, but began to
move, racing towards Davies like a thing alive, a Will ‘o Wisp or a ghost light
shooting along the ground.

They all smelled the gunpowder.

The flare reached the barrel under
Davies’ head. The resulting explosion sent a tremor under the soles of their
feet and rattled the bars of their cells. The Rider felt his clothes flatten
against his chest. Davies’ body jumped on the ground. His head and most of his
upper trunk disintegrated in a flash of yellow-white and red that blew up from
the hole in the ground. There was a brief precipitation of unidentifiable
matter on the ground, and a few scraps of flaming blue wool fluttered in the
sky and went out.

The camp came alive immediately.
Barrack doors flew open and men ran out in their red union suits, some pulling
on their trousers, a few with rifles. Soldiers shouted back and forth at each
other, and there were exclamations as they traced the smoke to the crater in
the ground and found Davies’ body, still shaking and flailing on the ground
like a chicken after the chopping block.

“Over here!” Belden called through
the bars.

A few wild-eyed soldiers hurried
over at the sound of his voice, and recoiled at Armendariz’s headless body in
the doorway.

“I’God. What happened here, Sarge?
Didja see it?” asked one of the privates, a tall fellow with a broad yellow
mustache.

“It was Davies. He killed Armendariz
and then blew himself up.”

“Davies? Why in the hell would he do
that?”

“You got me hangin,’” Belden
admitted.

“I know what happened,” the Rider
said.

So did Kabede, by the sound, for he
was reciting the
aleinu
in his cell
, “Aleinu l’shabeach la’Adon hakol…”

Recited seven times forwards and
backwards, it could prevent spiritual possession. Now if only they could
quickly teach it to every man here.

“Clear out of the way!” It was the
familiar voice of Manx.

The troopers snapped to attention as
the colonel came up, buttoning his tunic again. His hair was sleep tossed and
he looked terrible. His malady seemed to have worsened. His upper lip was slick
with it, and his nostrils were red and irritated, as were his eyes.

“What in God’s name happened here?
Sunderland?”

“Sir. Sergeant—” began the private
with the blonde mustache, but he caught himself and began again. “That is,
Mister
Belden reports Trooper Davies
killed Corporal Armendariz and then blew himself up, sir.”

“He spoke German,” Belden said in
wonder to the Rider.

“Yes I heard.” The Rider took out
his spectacle case, and slid the mystically embossed lenses over his eyes. “He
said, ’Watch how I die.’”

“
Jeder
fünf minuten
,
Reiter
,” said
Sunderland, smiling at him just as Davies had. He took out his pistol and put
the barrel in his own mouth.

The report was loud in the close
space, and the men surrounding Sunderland jumped back as his mouth filled with
light and smoke. His brains erupted through the top of his curly head, struck
the ceiling, and splattered down on them all.

The Rider wiped the blood and bone
fragments from his Solomonic lenses and saw Jacobi’s leering, shimmering astral
form standing there as Sunderland’s spurting, twitching body fell away like a
bathrobe. He had changed much since their last meeting. His beard and
payot
curls were gone. He had no hair to
speak of now, as if his flesh were salted earth, as if whatever evil now
resided within him would not sustain follicles. He was deathly pale. His irises
were somewhat overlarge, the black overcoming the white. He was garbed much
like the Rider, all in black, though his talismans appeared to be affixed to a
leather vest he wore beneath his frock coat. The talismans were strange, like
Sheardown’s had been. Not Solomonic in design. Some of the etchings reminded
him of characters in the Book of Zylac and Sheardown’s correspondences,
lettering Professor Spates had called
Tsath-Yo
.
Gone was the namesake short sword the Rider had been paralyzed by on their
first meeting. It had been replaced by a pistol in a horizontal draw holster
situated across his belly.

Still smiling, Jacobi’s astral self
twirled an engraved, etheric pistol on one finger idly as he turned and strode
out the door onto the parade ground. Dimly, the Rider noticed it was much like
his own.

“What—” Manx managed, gasping and
wide-eyed as a young private beside him clapped a bloody and brain-strewn hand
to his own mouth and lurched out of the guardhouse, vomit spurting out between
his fingers.

Belden dropped to his haunches,
reached through the bars, and suddenly had Sunderland’s bloody pistol in his
hand. He cocked it and pointed it through the bars.

“Open these doors!” he demanded.

Manx looked about to burst. His face
purpled.

“Get the keys from Armendariz,
colonel. Start with the man to my left.” Then, to the vomiting private and
another trooper, a tan faced young man with green eyes, he said, “You boys drop
your guns. And pull that door shut.”

“I’ll shoot you myself for this,
Belden,” Manx croaked, stooping over Armendariz’s body as the heaving private
set his carbine in the corner and put his hand on the guardhouse door.

A couple of soldiers who had been
standing over Davies’ corpse on the parade ground began to come over. Weeks was
at their head.

“Tell that sonofabitch Weeks to stop
or I’ll put a bullet through your ears, Colonel,” Belden warned.

“Stay back,” Manx yelled.

He stood up with the key ring.

“Close the door, Mandrell,” Belden
said.

The sickly looking private did as he
was told.

Manx turned and affixed Belden with
a hard look, then proceeded to unlock the Rider’s cell door.

“You’ll swing like Judas for this,
you know,” he said as he opened the door. “Your friend Milton won’t save you
this time.”

The Rider stepped out and picked up
Mandrell’s carbine, a Spencer, and covered Manx as the colonel moved on to
Belden’s cell.

“You know what’s happening?” Belden
asked him through the bars.

The Rider nodded.

“Jacobi possessed those men, and
forced them to kill themselves,” he said. It was an incredibly dangerous thing
to do. Apparently Jacobi was using the same method of invasion and possession
the Rider himself had used on occasion, disrupting the host’s willpower with an
etheric blast from his mystic pistol, then slipping in and taking over. But if
the host body died, a possessing spirit could very easily be swept off to
Sheol
along with the deceased. Lost. It
was like leaping for a flimsy branch as one’s raft sailed over the edge of a
waterfall.

The Rider doubted he could do it
himself, but Jacobi had done it twice, without hesitation. He was mad, or knew
something about possession the Rider didn’t.

Another report sounded outside, and
surprised exclamations. Another man dead.

“Can you stop him?”

“We can, but we will need our
things,” Kabede said.

“So much for a peaceful Sabbath,”
the Rider muttered.

Belden and the Rider arranged the
two privates and Colonel Manx into a human shield around them. The troopers
were understanding, and decidedly anxious for anyone to do anything about
stopping the horror they had seen. Manx raised more protestations, but Belden
pressed the muzzle of Sunderland’s pistol to the nape of his neck and assured
him he’d put an end to his complaints. He was quiet after that. The bloody
barrel left a perfect red circle on the back of the colonel’s neck.

When they kicked open the guardhouse
door, Weeks, Quincannon, and Cord were out front with their weapons drawn, and
a sea of blue wool were emulating them at their backs.

Manx ordered them all to stand down
as Belden, the Rider, and Kabede herded their hostages outside.

“These men need their accoutrements.
They can put a stop to what’s happening.” Belden shouted over Manx’s shoulder. “Bring
‘em here forthwith.”

Weeks looked questioningly at Manx
and the colonel nodded once. The big sergeant turned to Quincannon and in a
minute the corporal was bounding across the parade ground.

A sweaty man in shirtsleeves with a
blue black beard pushed through the wary soldiers.

“Two men just shot themselves, for
no apparent reason.”

“We know, Doc,” said Belden. “There’ll
be more. These men are going to do something about it presently.”

There was a startling pop. A dozen
men recoiled, exclaiming, as one of their number slumped to his knees, blood
fountaining from the top of his head, his carbine jammed under his chin.

The doctor, Milton, turned and
pushed his way back through the ranks to the fallen man.