Merkabah Rider: The Mensch With No Name (17 page)

The
Rider wiped at the blood staining the
onager’s
hide.
Something had dealt it a glancing blow. There was a trio of large cuts in its
shoulder, ragged and claw-like, but oddly grouped, not like the mark of any
bear or cougar he had ever seen. Whatever had done it had sheared through its
hide and muscle, nearly to the bone. He prayed the wound wasn’t septic.

He
heard a snap of movement out in the trees then, and spun. Ever since Tip Top he
had felt the gaze of unseen observers. He knew these were the shapeless demons
hounding him, the minions of Lilith that kept him awake at night. They made his
drink bitter and his food ashen, and worried him in a hundred annoying little
ways that were altogether taking their toll on his health and nerves. He knew
of these, though he was powerless to perceive or affect them, just as they
could not end his misery with an all out assault, thanks to Nehema the
succubus’s rosette token. But there was something else out there.
Another presence.
Not demonic, yet malevolent. Not
intelligent, but cunning.
Savage, animalistic.
It was
as if a tiger watched him, raising his hackles. Something was out there.
Something he couldn’t see.
Something strong enough to
decapitate a horse and fling another into the air.
Something
that could physically kill him.

Yet
it was the lantern he held up, not his pistol. The meager light barely shined,
casting little more than a faint red tint on the already bloodstained snow.
Nothing moved. Somehow, he knew the lantern was holding it at bay, like a torch
waved in the face of
a hungry
wolf padding around the
edge of vision, eyes shining in the night. But there were no eyes to be seen
here. There was nothing.

He
dropped the pistol in his belt, took the onager by its bridle and led it back
to the clearing, holding up the lantern before them like a man navigating a
dense fog. It was ridiculous, but somehow, he knew it spared them.

Doc
had his gun out still, and Dodgy and the Indian had shed their pistol belts,
but held on to their lanterns.

Mather
was dragging the Professor back from the cabin by the scruff of his neck, and
as the Rider stepped out of the trees, the skinny Englishman was flung down
beside the wounded Bullshit.

“What
the hell?” Doc said, at the sight of the bloodied onager.

“The
horses are dead.”

“Skinned?”
asked Mather.

“No,
not skinned.
Ripped apart.”

“What
killed ‘em?”

The
Rider came closer, and motioned to the dead man lying there. The one they had
all forgotten, whom Dodgy, the Indian, Bullshit and the Professor had been
talking over only a few minutes ago.

“Probably
the same thing that killed this man,” the Rider said.

The
corpse’s wounds were very much like those of the horses. He had been completely
disemboweled. It looked as if something had swept its great claws down his
front and ripped open his chest. The animal appendage (huge, it must have been)
had broken through chest bone and ribs and taken out every organ behind, even
scoring the exposed vertebrae. It had ripped out the stomach and left it
partially hanging over the lip of the dead man’s pants, attached by torn shreds
of connective tissue. The man’s expression was wide-eyed, his face a bloody
toothed grimace. His neck was broken, and his limbs were at odd,
cringe-inducing angles. One swipe of those wicked claws and then he had been
flung into the clearing, bones snapping as they smashed through tree branches
and finally smacked down on the cold hard ground.

“You’re
right about that,” said the Professor from the ground.

“That
damned dingus,” Bullshit said from his side.

The
Professor closed his eyes, as if in pain.

“Please
don’t call it that.”

“What
do you call it?” the Rider asked.

“Ah!”
the Professor smiled, leaning forward, wide-eyed. “You believe? Well! You’re an
open-minded fellow. It took quite some time to convince these men it existed at
all.”

“Who
the hell are you?” Doc interrupted.

“Oh, of course—A.W.W. Spates.
Professor
Arthur William Wallace Spates.
Arthur for the king,
William Wallace for the knight.
Father was a great admirer of legendary
personages. Father was of Scottish stock, mother was a Londoner. Arthur is
fine. Professor is better.”

The
little Englishman rattled all this off in moments.

“I’m
sorry,” he said at the Rider’s blank look. “I’m used to explaining my name
moments after giving it.
Force of habit.”

“Professor
of what?” the Rider asked when he stopped to take a breath.

“Ah
yes.
Professor of zoology, Cambridge University.
Well,
formerly. I’m on something of a professional sabbatical. Well, I was, until my
funding was pulled….although Brown University has expressed interest in my
findings. You see I’m compiling a sort of a field catalog of.…”

“Save
all that, and tell us what’s out there,” Doc snapped.

Spates
stopped in mid-sentence and raised his eyebrows.

“Well,”
he admitted, “I don’t know. It’s an animal of some sort, I should think.
Whatever it is, its hide is of a color imperceptible to the unaided human eye.”

“In plain English!”
Mather demanded.

“He
means you can’t see it,” Crazy Horse Bob said.

“That
don’t make any goddamned sense,” Doc said.

“We
didn’t believe him neither at first,” said Bullshit. “But hell, look at what it
done to Cady.”

Cady
lay in silent, mutilated affirmation.

The
Rider’s mind reeled. He had experience with invisible forces, but never had he
been unable to perceive a creature that existed on the physical plane. What of
the lanterns? There was definite magic here.

“Why
the lanterns?” he asked.

“Ah!
You’re so clever! Well, they render the thing’s shadow visible. It also seems
to have some sort of a deterring effect, though I haven’t quite come up with a
plausible explanation for that.”

“It
shows up in the light of red glass?”

“Just the shadow.
But it’s not the glass at all,” Spates
said. “Well, it is partially the glass, which is why I asked these men to
collect as much of it as they could. Red glass isn’t easy to come by in this area.
The fuel is the catalyst, however. Here. Let me show you.”

He
gestured for the Rider to hand over the brakeman’s lantern. Reluctantly, he did
so.

As
Spates worked at disassembling the lantern, Doc prodded the Rider’s arm.

“You
don’t buy into this do you?”

“Something
killed the horses,” the Rider said.

“The horses.
Why’d it spare your mule, anyway?”

“It’s
not a mule,” the Rider said.

But
it was a good question. Why had the onager survived yet another near death
scrape—literally, this time? Thinking back, the creature had managed to pass
mainly unscathed through some abominable situations. It had even killed a thief
once. He had jokingly thought of it as living a charmed existence, but in
truth, it did. It was as if some protective spell encircled the animal. Of
course, if there really were anything special about it, he would have detected
it long ago.

“There!”
Spates exclaimed. He had removed the red glass globe (scorching his fingertips
in the process), and was unscrewing the fount. “It’s not kerosene, but a
composite fuel derived partially from a substance I haven’t been able to
identify. It burns much faster, and appears to give off some sort of actinic
emission, the light of which reveals the thing’s shadow.”

“Wait,”
said the Rider. “If you don’t know the composition of this stuff, how did you
know it would ‘reveal’ this thing? Where did you get it?”

“Oh,
I was given a couple barrels of it by my associate, a chemist. I believe he
invented it.”

“What
chemist?”

“A
gentleman of medical science I became acquainted with via correspondence while
I was in Pine Barrens investigating the Jersey Devil. He had learned of my
proposed catalog of hitherto unknown creatures and wrote me of the existence of
this invisible thing here in the mountains. I confess even with all I have seen
already in the course of my work, I was somewhat skeptical, but he certainly
made a believer out of me.”

“Was
his name Sheardown?” the Rider ventured.

Spates’
face lit up.

“Yes
indeed! Dr. Amos Sheardown. Are you an acquaintance?”

“We’ve
met,” the Rider affirmed.
“Once.”

“I
haven’t been able to reach him in weeks! I’ve left several messages for him at
the post.”

“He
met with an accident,” the Rider said.

“Oh
my…nothing too serious I hope? What sort of an accident?”

Me,
he thought.

“So
you’re saying there’s something out here we can’t see,” Doc began, grinning
sardonically, “and all the red lamps you all took off the train are what’s
keeping it from ripping us to shreds?”

Dodgy,
Crazy Horse Bob, and Bullshit looked somewhat embarrassed.

“I
don’t expect you to believe us, Doc,” Dodgy said.

“I
believe it,” Mather said.

“Et
tu, Brute?” said Doc.

“More
things in heaven and earth, Fellatio,” Mather shot back.

“Horatio,”
Doc, Spates, and the Rider all said at once.

“Whatever,”
Mather said. “In that year I spent at sea, I saw plenty I never would’ve
thought was true. Somethin’ of a color you can’t see, that doesn’t sound so
crazy to me. But my question is
,
how’d this skinny
little limey convince you all to rob the train and come up here?”

“I
didn’t really convince them,” Spates said. “My colleague, Dr. Sheardown
promised them a substantial reward…well, through me.”

“What for?”

“There’s
a passage beneath the mountain.
Remnants of a previous excavation.
Mining or archaeological, I don’t know which. Dr. Sheardown said there was an
artifact that had been uncovered in the dig and left behind.”

“What
kind of an artifact?”

“A jewel or a stone.
I shouldn’t think it’s naturally
occurring—possibly of native craft. He asked me to procure it for him, and as
payment, he provided me with the means to catalog, maybe catch, or at the
worst, kill the creature dwelling on this mountain. Actually, I suspect the
tunnel is its den.”

“Jewel,
huh?” Mather said, noting the greedy light in the eyes of Bullshit, Dodgy, and
Crazy Horse Bob.

“Yes,
possibly more than one. Apparently he’s been looking for them for some time.
Star-Stones of Mnar, he called them. There’s folklore around them.
A lot of mumbo-jumbo.
It seems one or more of them were
buried up here some time before your revolution. They were rediscovered
recently, but the creature killed one of the diggers and drove off the rest.”

What
was this? Some scheme of Sheardown’s, or something he had been tasked with
doing by Adon? If the latter, then surely these ‘star-stones,’ whatever they
were, were better off out of Adon’s hands. The connection of the lanterns with
Lilith in Tip Top bothered him. She had said that a war was coming. A war she
had not chosen sides in, but that Adon would be a part of. Yet she had employed
lanterns with presumably the very same fuel Sheardown had given to Spates.

That
Spates was oblivious of all this, the Rider highly suspected. He doubted this
man was so good an actor. If Sheardown had been any indication of the type of
individuals Adon had recruited to take part in this “Hour of the Incursion’
plot, then they were not much on subtlety.

Spates
meanwhile,
had pulled a leather notebook from his coat
pocket and riffled speedily through the pages. Finally, he came to what he had
been seeking, and he thrust the open book at the Rider.

“There
you are. He said I’d know the stones by that marking.”

The
Rider froze.

The
sketch in Spates’ notebook was of a stylized five pointed star with a blazing
eye in the center surrounded by three circles.

The
Wisdom and Sacred Magic
Of Zylac The
Mage had the same
drawing in its pages. So did the scroll. It was the Elder Sign.

“I know this emblem,” the Rider said, taking
the notebook.

“So
do
I
,” said Mather beside him.

The
Rider turned, and saw that Mather had rolled up his sleeve. Up past his
Mariner’s Cross, just below the pit of his elbow on the inside of his forearm,
was the exact same glyph in blue ink.

“What
the hell?” Doc remarked. “Is this some kinda joke?”

“Where
did you get that?” the Rider asked.