Merkabah Rider: The Mensch With No Name (10 page)

The
Rider left the onager’s side and went to them, sinking to his knees.

As
his shadow fell across the pale body, the boy’s eyes fluttered and he stared
up, half-lidded.

The
Rider brushed aside Gershom’s long hair and gently moved Purdee’s hand, still
pressing the blood soaked bandanna to his neck.

When
it came away, blood seeped, but only a little. There was not much left in his
body. The Rider got a glance of the small, ragged bite wound, then replaced
Purdee’s bandanna.

He
looked into the boy’s fading eyes. He had not had much time to speak with this
boy, but he had been instantly fond of him. When he had seen Gershom weep
openly over the death of Hash, the Rider had bled for him. He knew what it
meant to lose a father. He had thought once more of his desire to leave all
this horror and strife and lead a normal life, perhaps to start a family,
perhaps to be a father himself.

Yet
in the boy’s willingness to learn about his heritage, the Rider realized he had
seen much more than a surrogate son. He had seen a potential student. Someone
to whom he could pass on the teachings he had for so long thought would end
with him. Perhaps that had been the true desire of his soul. This boy had been
something special after all.
A living Nazirite.
A champion of the Lord, waiting for a knowing hand to point him in
the direction of the Adversary.

But
to what had the Rider led him, he could not help but ask himself.

Gershom’s
lips moved, and the Rider leaned close, realized he was summoning the strength
to speak, and laid his ear against them.

“I
could have helped you,” he said.

“You
did,” the Rider told him.

This
seemed to lighten his sorrowful expression, and he nearly drifted away then,
but his lids snapped open and his tongue darted. He strained to speak again.

“He
said…he said….tell you…he will find you…another time.”

The
Rider nodded. He knew that was so. He wanted it to be so.

“Some-thing
else…,” he stammered. “Said…said...tell you…Nehema…”

The
Rider tensed.
Nehema.
What about her? Had Lilith’s
children learned of her betrayal?

“Ne-hema…”

The
Rider stared, willing him to live a little longer.

The
boy rattled then in Purdee’s arms, and he stared at the Rider, as if he wanted
to take his face with him wherever he was bound.

And
then with a hiss, he went there.

“What’d
he say? What’s Nehema?” the Colonel pressed.

The
Rider said nothing, but gently closed Gershom’s eyelids with his fingertips.

“He
was the bravest, most amazin’ boy I ever seen,” Purdee said.

No
one could say otherwise.

* * * *

They left together. That is, the Colonel, Purdee, Marina and her son,
and Trib, after they saw the dead buried and prayed over.

The
Rider said the
kaddish
over Gershom himself.

Purdee
and the Colonel fixed Baines’ wagon, and the Rider caught the two black horses
the shedim had rode. They were not entirely natural creatures, having been
willing to bear shedim, but when he fashioned horse brass marked with the 22nd
and 32nd seals and fixed them to their harness collars, they were bound to
obey.

They
waved to each other in parting, but said nothing. The Rider and the Colonel
made two signs from scrap wood that read ‘Varruga Tanks—DEAD. NO WATER. TURN
BACK,’
and Trib wrote the same words over again beneath in
Spanish. They took one with them in the wagon and headed down the west trail,
and the Rider resolved to take the other east.

First
he found Sheardown’s body, and possessions, for the man had spoken of a scroll
he was supposed to take to Adon.

The
onager shied from the shack where the dead man lay, and would not approach it.

Sheardown’s amulets and pistol bore strange
markings that filled the Rider with an instinctual revulsion. They depicted scenes
of bestiality and abomination, and belonged to no sect of magic he had
personally encountered east or west. He built a hot fire and threw them in,
breaking Sheardown’s gun to pieces on a rock and tossing the fragments in
after.

At
last, he found a bag packed with papers bound in twine, a leather tube
containing a brittle old scroll, and an old book bound in leather. The scroll,
comprised of frayed papyrus, was written entirely in a language he did not
know, composed of various pictograms, some like the images he had seen embossed
on Sheardown’s amulets. He did notice an Egyptian ankh amid the symbols, and
supposed the rest of the work might be Egyptian as well. He hesitated to burn
it. Adon wanted one of these works. He would send his turncoat riders to regain
it. Maybe, he would come himself. The Rider put the tube and its carrying strap
over his shoulder.

The
other was a heavy bound book written in old form Greek, which he could read, if
not well. It was not as venerable as the scroll, and bore the title The Wisdom
And Sacred Magic Of Zylac The
Mage. He was familiar with
many magical works by reputation, but he had never heard of this one, nor had
he ever heard of this ‘Zylac.’

He
put it in his bags.

The
rest of Sheardown’s papers were bound letters. The Rider leafed through them
briefly. Many were written in some sort of cipher, a series of bizarre
characters whose ordered repetition convinced the Rider they weren’t just
nonsense. These he found folded together in a torn envelope addressed to a box
at the Las Vegas, New Mexico post office. He put them aside, thinking perhaps
the key to the code might lie in the book or the scroll. There was an official
letter from a Dr. Allen Halsey, dean of a new medical school opening in
Massachusetts, informing Sheardown that his application to teach anatomy there
had been ‘regrettably denied.’ There was also a faded clipping from a Mankato,
Minnesota newspaper dated 1862 that mentioned Sheardown as having obtained
samples of human skin from a group of condemned Indians publicly executed after
the Dakota Sioux uprising there.

Of
Amos Sheardown, or how he had come to know Adon, there was nothing more.

The
Rider strapped the warning sign to the onager’s back and walked east down the
dead trail, the last living man to ever visit Varruga Tanks.

The Rider squinted over the yellow pages of The Wisdom
And Sacred Magic Of Zylac The
Mage and lost his place once
again as a shuddering jolt of the train sent his tired eyes bouncing off the
page. He closed the book on his forefinger and rubbed tears from them, then
stared through the glass at the empty landscape flashing by. The sky was
darkening with the onset of evening. It was full of churning, monolithic clouds
that had arrived too late to be burned away by the sun. The sweeping desert and
far off mountains were bleeding red, but congealing to an evening blue. It was
like running past a wall of John Martin paintings.

He
opened the book again, but it was no use. His eyes wouldn’t settle.

Thus
far, his study of the book he had taken from Adon’s self-styled ‘favorite
pupil’ had proved distracting, but for the most part worthless. It polished his
dull command of Greek to a keener edge, but otherwise it was much like reading
any number of magical pseudoepigraphical books like The Lesser Key of Solomon
or The Book of Abramelin. It was full of precise, complex rituals and rambling
invocations, and references to pagan deities with mind-boggling names like
Tsathoggua and Shub-Niggurath, but it was mostly nonsense.

The
difference was that unlike most books of questionable antiquity that attributed
their authorship to ancient Judaic mystics like Solomon and Moses, or Christian
and Egyptian luminaries like John Dee, Nicolas Flamel, and Hermes Trismegistus,
this book did not purport to be the work of, nor indeed, did it even make
mention of any real life personages the Rider was familiar with. There was a
great deal on Zon Mezzamalech, Eibon, Milaab, and Gargalesh, but who any of
these people were the Rider could only guess. It mentioned places like
Commoriom and Phenquor, but gave no hint as to where these locations might be.
Of course, place names had changed over the centuries, but, for
all the
Rider’s learning, he could not even identify a linguistic
origin for some of the names in the book. Two places did jump out at him as he
studied; Atlantis and Hyperborea.

Of
course, Atlantis was the fabled land spoken of by Plato, which supposedly
housed a wondrously advanced society that sank beneath the sea nearly ten
thousand years before his writings. Most serious scholars discounted its
existence, though many esoteric cults of questionable veracity liked to claim
their traditions originated there. The author of this work spoke of Atlantis in
terms that suggested it was not only a real place, but that it was
contemporaneous to his writing.

Hyperborea
was an equally idealized land, said to have been somewhere near the top of the
world, ‘beyond the Boreas’ or North Winds. The Hyperboreans were supposed to
live for a thousand years in perpetual sunlight and bounty and, if the Greek
poet Pindar was to be believed, ‘far from labor and battle.’

Pindar
had also written of Hyperborea:

‘Never
on land or by sea will you
find

the
marvelous road to the feast of Hyperborea’

It
satisfied the Rider that it, too, was a make believe kingdom cited by would-be
mystics to lend their gibberish an air of eldritch authority.

The
book placed its eponymous subject and his contemporaries within the borders of
Hyperborea, and so the Rider had decided that it was either a fanciful work of
fiction or a convincing fraud.

Surely
the exploits of Zylac and his apprentice Eibon lent itself to the former, with
its descriptions of serpent men societies and toad gods and an enchanted tower
of black gneiss situated on ‘the peninsula of Mhu Thulan’ (wherever that was).
The spells recorded in its pages dealt with detecting invisible creatures,
magic lamps that ‘projected abominable mysteries,’ ‘triple circles of
protection,’ and many glyphs and runes for the binding of and protection
against a being called ‘Azathoth.’

Yet
two things kept the Rider from entirely dismissing the book as a useless work
of fantasy; the oft-repeated use of the term Great Old Ones. He had heard it
before from the dybbukim in possession of the killer Medgar Tooms, and from the
Canaanite Hayim Cardin, and he knew it had something to do with The Hour
Of
Incursion they and Amos Sheardown had spoken of. Was this
book some sort of key to their peculiar occult lexicon? He knew there were no
such entities, but perhaps they were names by which the Fallen sometimes went.
Cryptic names of recent invention that he didn’t know. He had seen instances of
demons masquerading as pagan gods before. But the book itself was obviously
very old. The printing was of the movable type such as was still used by many
of the small frontier newspapers but had mainly been abandoned in larger cities
in favor of the rotary press. The paper was extremely old and yellowed. It was
puzzling.

The
other important thing contained in The Sacred Wisdom and Magic
Of Zylac The
Mage were its pictograms and glyphs. One
delineated as ‘The Elder Sign’ appeared now and then in the crumbling scroll of
apparently Egyptian pictographs that was utterly indecipherable to him.

So
the two works were related somehow.

The
scroll, with its weighty assurance of knowledge, was almost as frustrating to
the Rider as the reams of letters written in weird, angular cipher between
Sheardown and his undisclosed correspondent; particularly because the Rider
recognized the penmanship of that unnamed correspondent as belonging to Adon
himself.

What
had they written of? Why was this scroll so important to Adon? Why had
Sheardown been bringing it to him?

He
was stirred from his thoughts by the return of his seatmate from the
observation car, a thin, well dressed man in a bowler and black frock who
smelled of cigar smoke and liquor and bad breath and leaned on a fashionable
walking stick

The
man did his best to step over the Rider, but his bum knee jostled the book in
his hand and sent it tumbling.

The
Rider lunged to catch it, but the other man stooped with surprising quickness
and grabbed it first.

“My
apologies,” he said, in a slow southern drawl. He smiled behind a long,
drooping mustache, and the Rider noticed an old scar above his lip. He had a
gaunt, pale face, but his voice made the Rider realize he was a bit younger
than he’d first thought. A diamond stickpin twinkled in the fashionable black
ascot below his collar.

The
Rider reached out for the book, but the man turned it around and frowned at the
cover, blue eyes scanning the title.

“Well,
graecum
est
; non legitur,” he quipped, and passed it
back.