There was power in those stories, in seeing them slide up against one another like cards in a poker hand you know will win the pot.
Part One: Rumson’s Saloon
They heard the bounty killer an hour before they saw him. Out there in the desert night. Playing that harmonica of his, though the sounds that came out of it weren’t anything you’d call music. But he kept at it, and the racket carved the desert sands like Lucifer trenching a brimstone field with his pitchfork. A man who could raise that kind of hell with a harmonica was a man who could unsettle a room full of other men.
And that’s why the customers sitting in Rumson’s saloon did the things they did. Some slapped coin to the bar and made their exits. Others ordered up and drank more deeply, which pleased the barkeep. Still others unbuckled their gunbelts as the man with the harmonica drew nearer. They rolled leather studded with sheathed bullets around holstered Colts, and they stowed those weapons far from reluctant hands.
Outside, the harmonica had grown silent. The creak of saddle-leather put a crease in the night. Then footsteps sounded across plank boards, and the bounty killer came through the batwings of Rumson’s place.
He wore a patched coat the color of the desert, and he was dragging a man on a chain. One yank and the bounty killer bellied up to the bar. The gunman set his harmonica on the nicked pine surface. No one noticed the blood on the tarnished instrument, not with the poor skinny bastard trussed up in chains and padlocks crouching at the killer’s feet. As far as the occupants of Rumson’s saloon were concerned, that was the hunk of misery worth looking at, not a bloodstained Hohner that blew sour even on days that were sweet.
The bartender asked the bounty killer where he’d captured the man, and the gunman shook his head. Said the raw-boned Mex was a dynamite man who’d been locked up for years, and just tonight the bounty killer had broken him out of Yuma Territorial. “His name is Indio. If he put his mind to it, he could blow the gates off hell with a pissed-on fuse and a quarter-stick sweating nitro.”
“The hell you say,” Rumson said.
“The hell I do,” said the bounty killer.
The bartender shrugged. “What can I get you?”
“Salt. Tequila. A guide.”
“A guide? Where to?”
“Vampire Lake.”
The bartender raised an eyebrow. “Most folks say there ain’t no place like that in the world. It’s just a legend, like the cave that’s supposed to hold it. Of course, other folks say differently.”
“That’s what I hear. Same way I hear there’s a kid in this town who’s paid hell’s own tab for a visit to that brimstone pit. Same way I hear there’s a saloon-keeper who keeps that kid locked up in a cage and charges folks a double eagle to hear his story.”
“Sounds to me like you’re talking about a man who’s got a piece of property and a piece of business. And that business would be the kid talking, not getting on a horse and riding to hell and gone out of here. A piece of business like you’re talking about would be worth a good deal more than the freight you’d pay to hear an evening’s worth of words.”
“Let me talk to the boy about that.”
“Let me see the color of your money.”
“I think you’ve seen plenty enough money out of this deal already. My business is with the boy, not the half-shingled bastard who keeps him locked up like a circus chimp.”
At the sound of those words, the bartender jerked in his boots. The two men stared at each other across the bar, nothing between them but dim quiet. Both of them watching and waiting for the thing that would happen next.
It was the dynamite man who broke the silence. “Amigo. If you’re so soft on men in cages, what about me? I’ve been in a cage up in Yuma for three damn years. Why don’t you crank a key in these locks and let me go, and we can call it square?”
“Shut up,” the bounty killer said. “You’re doing time for armed robbery and murder. Three years ago, you blew out a bank wall in Tucumcari and killed four men. I caught up to you in a whorehouse, stuck a pistol in your face, and the Territory of Arizona locked you in the poke. But I’m the one who put you in there, so I figure that gives me the right to take you out if I have the need. Once I’m done with you, maybe I’ll take you back.”
“You can get started on that little trip right now,” Rumson said. “Get the hell out of my bar, and take that Mexican trash with you.”
“Uh-uh. I don’t move until you bring me that boy.”
“You’ll move. And directly—”
Rumson reached under the bar for a sawed-off shotgun. Before his hands could make the trip the barkeep lost the equipment to say anything. The stranger’s pistol saw to that. It came out of its holster rattler-quick and sprayed Rumson’s head across the barroom wall. In the brief moment after the bullet did its work, what was left of Rumson’s skull looked like a diseased egg dropped by one sick chicken. By the time that bloody hunk of gristle hit the floor, the bounty killer’s black rattler of a pistol was back in its holster.
Rumson’s corpse followed his head, thudding against the bar, toppling bottles on its way to the floor. After that, the only sound was the barkeep’s blood dripping off the wall and ceiling, making scarlet divots in a patch of sawdust behind the bar. Leastways, that was the only sound until the real commotion started. Chair legs scraped hardwood as men scrambled for the batwing doors, but it was the click of pistol hammers in the hands of fools with more guts than brains that brought the bounty killer’s gun out of its holster again. When that happened there was more terror and tumult in Rumson’s Saloon than there were shadows, and the gleam of that black Colt springing through the darkness sent a stampede scrambling for the doorway as the first shots were fired. As the crowd scrambled more men filled their hands with pistols of their own, but none of those pistols would put a man in mind of a snake.
The bounty killer’s black rattler did its work. And when it was empty he ducked behind the bar and came up with Rumson’s shotgun. And when that was empty, it was all over.
Or more properly: It had just begun.
Four men remained alive in the bar. The bounty killer. The dynamite man on a chain. A dark-eyed blacksmith roughly the size of a barn door. And a calculating preacher who kept a running ledger on the flyleaf pages of the prayer book tucked inside a pocket of his claw-hammer coat.
“Where’s the boy?” the gunman asked.
“Probably out back eating a live chicken, feathers and all,” the preacher said. “That child is crazy, mister. Apaches captured him in the desert. God knows what lies he told those red bastards, but it put them in a temper. A few days later some scalphunters found the boy tied to a wagon wheel, his head cooking over a Mescalaro fire along with a couple of scrawny prairie hens. The birds had gone to cinders, but the kid had it worse. Half his face was burned off, and his brain was boiling in his skull like a Christmas pudding. Just because that misery scorched some nightmares in his head don’t make them true.”
“You talk but you don’t tell me anything I need to know.” The killer reloaded his pistol, slapped the cylinder closed, and gave it a spin for emphasis. “I asked one question. That question was: Where?”
“You don’t need gun for answer.” The blacksmith’s voice was heavy with an accent born in a German forest he’d never see again. “Boy is out back—in cage in barn, behind horse stalls. No rivets in cage; all welds. Three locks on it. Hasps as strong as bars. Double-thick, like plates.”
“How do you know all that?”
The blacksmith blinked. Words jumped from one tongue to another in his head, then made the trip through his lips. “I forge bars. I build locks and hasps. I make cage.”
The bounty killer cocked his black rattler.
“Let’s take a look,” he said.
The barn doors swung open. Boots whispered over the dirty hay that covered the barn floor. A lantern swung on a creaky handle in the preacher’s hand. It was close to midnight now, and the place was so dark it seemed the night had heaved in a dozen extra buckets of shadow.
The darkness lay heaviest in a patch transfixed by iron bars near the back corner of the barn. “Give me that lantern,” the bounty killer said. Light played across the black bars as he took it from the preacher, and light painted the occupant along with the contents of the cage—a scuffed plate that didn’t get used much and a few tattered books that did: Idylls of the King, The Thousand and One Nights, and a dime novel about Billy the Kid.
“Look at that damned animal,” the preacher said. “Face like a scorched biscuit. The brain of a kicked chicken. Stinks like an Arizona outhouse in August.”
Everyone squinted in the lantern’s glow. Only the blacksmith knew better than to look. He stared down at his mule-eared boots. But the dynamite man didn’t know better. He took a good long look. Then he turned his head and retched up his supper.
The bounty killer stared through the bars without saying a word. He fished the dead bartender’s key ring from his pocket. A moment later he went to work with three of the keys, slipping padlocks from hasps, opening the door.
Part Two: The Town
“Come out of there,” the bounty killer said.
“Yes, sir,” I said.
I picked up my chicken. Henrietta flapped some, shedding a few of the feathers I hadn’t plucked. I petted her and told her to hush, but she flapped her naked wings and squawked up a storm.
“Looks like we interrupted his supper,” the preacher said.
I glared at him and didn’t say a word, though there were plenty inside me I could have put to work. Instead I held Henrietta close, stretched myself in the lantern glow, and watched my shadow cast a path that led straight to the door.
We stood outside around an empty barrel, the lantern set on top of it. The bounty killer pulled a bank book from his pocket. “You get me to Vampire Lake, what’s in this book is yours. It amounts to twenty years of killing and twenty years of bounties. The four of you get back alive, you can split it four ways.” With that, he slapped the book on the barrelhead next to the lantern so we could get a look at it.
The blacksmith was confused. “This is book. Just paper.”
“These days money is just paper, too, amigo,” Indio said. “Banks are full of it, and one page from a book like this can bring many dollars. What our friend here collected for me and my gang alone would keep us in whores for a year.”
“But I am blacksmith. Not killer.”
“I take care of that job,” the bounty killer said. “But there are other jobs that need doing. The kid here, he’s our guide. He’ll take us through the desert, find that cave, lead us down to the underground lake where those dead things roost. And Indio will take care of any trouble we run into along the way that can be handled with dynamite.”
The big man said it again: “But I am blacksmith.”
“Yeah. That’s what you’ve got inside you, but it’s bundled up in one hell of a package. Where we’re going, I need a man who tops a couple hundred pounds and doesn’t mind the scorch of hot coals. You’re elected.”
“Those three I understand.” The preacher picked up the bank book and stared hard at the balance. “You need yourself a birddog, you’ve got a biscuit-faced geek uglier than Satan’s own bitch. You think you’re going to dynamite the gates of hell, you want the Mex along. The other one is a freight train on legs and too stupid to think for himself. But what about me? Why do you want a preacher along?”
“That’s a lot of hard tongue for a man who carries a Bible,” the bounty killer said.
“Fair enough . . . but right now I’m not behind a pulpit, friend. I’m doing business, and business calls for straight tongue. So what is it? What do you want from me? Is there something down in that devil’s shithole that you want prayed to death?”
The gunslinger didn’t blink.
“It’s simple. I want words said over anything I kill tonight. The way I see it, you may not be the best man for the job, but you’re the only one around tonight.”
The preacher bit off a hard laugh. “Sometimes finding work is just a matter of being in the right place at the right time. And as far as words go, no one said a single damn one over those poor bastards you slaughtered back in the saloon.”
“We’re going to fix that right now.”
“Well, we can talk about it. You killed a lot of men back there. Generally my fees for funeral services are one per customer. And since this piece of business doesn’t have anything to do with going down in a cave, it’s got to be a separate deal—”
“I already told you the deal.” The bounty killer snatched the bank book out of the preacher’s hand and grabbed him by the collar. The fuss the preacher put up did not last long, not after a couple hard slaps put the button to his lip.
We went back to the bar. Except for the dead men, it was empty. Even the whores were gone. God knows where the ladies had hustled off to, but they’d made themselves scarce after the gunfight.
The blacksmith and the bounty killer took a few doors off their hinges in the whores’ rooms upstairs. They placed the doors flat, each one resting between a couple of chairs, and they laid the dead men on top of them. They crossed the corpses’ arms over their chests—the ones who had two arms, anyway. One of the men who’d been sprayed with Rumson’s sawed-off street howitzer was missing a wing. He lay there just as still as the others, the stiffening fingers of his remaining hand embracing the ruined socket just north of his heart. Rumson’s headless corpse lay next to him; the leavings of his skull were in a canvas bag at his feet.
Once the dead were settled, the preacher said his piece. It was a short piece, and bereft of flowers. That was just fine with me. I was not much on flowers. As it turned out, the preacher was not much on words . . . especially when payday was a ways off.
When the praying was over, he sidled past the dynamite man.
A little blood trickled from the preacher’s lip, and he wiped it away.
“He’s one dirty bastard we’re working for,” he said. “But that was money in the bank.”
The blacksmith did most of the grunt work. He harnessed a team of swaybacks to a wagon while Indio and the preacher looted the general store for supplies. I tipped a dude’s beaver-skinned bowler out of a hatbox and nestled Henrietta inside it, then helped myself to a new set of clothes. It had been a while since I’d had one. I was almost seventeen, and had been wearing the set I had on for something like two years. They were tight and stiff with the sweat of misery. The preacher watched me as I stripped out of them.
“Jesus, you’re ugly. You look worse than that half-plucked chicken.”
“I don’t have to speak to you,” I said.
“Tell the truth. When we found you in that cage, you were ready to eat that chicken raw. You’re probably still going to eat it as soon as you get a chance. Why else would you pluck the damn bird, anyway?”
“I keep Henrietta’s wings plucked so she won’t get away. She’s not half-grown, even. She needs me to keep her warm. And that man with the gun is right. You don’t talk like a preacher.”
The man in black laughed. “Hell, I talk the way I please when there’s not a collection plate around. And as for pets, you want one, get a dog. You want victuals, get a chicken. That’s what god intended, son . . . unless you’re a damn heathen Apache that’ll eat both and follow the meal with a little skin jerky baked off a white boy’s face for dessert.”
I ignored him. After I had dressed, I helped myself to a wide-brimmed hat to shadow my scars. That was when I heard the others chattering over the events in Rumson’s saloon. I closed my eyes and listened, saw everything happen in my head. It was just the way I pictured things when I read a book. When the men finished the story, the blacksmith and I loaded up the supplies in the wagon.
While I worked, I added pieces of the story to the things I’d already learned about the men. And I’ll admit it. I thought about money while I did that. I thought about freedom, too. A place where I could be by myself, except for Henrietta and maybe some old tomcat. It’d be a place where I wouldn’t have to tell that story about the cave, or have anyone look at me at all if I didn’t want them to. Maybe it’d be a place where I could tell other stories, write them down and send them off to folks who would print them between hard covers. They’d send me money, and I’d write more when I wanted to. It seemed like that would be a square deal, and a lot better than the one I’d had at Rumson’s place.
I thought about it long and hard.
Pretty soon I’d made a decision.
A smart person might risk just about anything for a setup like that.
Even a return trip to hell.
Soon the wagon was loaded, and that put the end to my thoughts. It was time to move on. The preacher and Indio went off somewhere and came back with a crate of dynamite. After the murders in Rumson’s saloon, it was easy pickings in town tonight. We left the general store with the door wide open. It didn’t matter. Sheriff Needham was nowhere in sight. I didn’t know where the hard-eyed little lawdog and his deputy had got to, but whether they had made the trip out of luck or fear I figured they were smart to be clear of things this night.
We returned to the bar to get the bounty killer. He’d remained with the dead men, knowing there was no worry about any of us running off now that the numbers from his bank book were dancing in our heads. The desert night was cold, wind blowing down from the mountain. Dust devils swirled around us, erasing the footsteps of the men who lay dead in Rumson’s bar. It was like the night wanted to clear off the last trace of them. The moon was full up by then, and it hung low in the sky, and light spilled from it like an Apache buck’s knife had slit it straight across and turned all that bleeding white loose.
I sat in the wagon with the reins in my hands. Henrietta was asleep in the hatbox at my side. The other men were on horseback. We heard the bounty killer coughing inside Rumson’s place as he walked from dead man to dead man, not getting too close to any of them, staring down at each one. Between coughs, he tried to work words through his lips. The batwings creaked in the wind, swinging in and out, and the gunman seemed to be strangling on those words, and through the gap I saw him go down on his knees as quick as if someone had clubbed him with an ax-handle.
He started to retch, and we heard a thick splatter slap the floorboards.
“The bastard gunned those men down like dogs,” the preacher said. “You’d think he’d have the nerve to face them dead.”
“Nerve ain’t his problem,” Indio said. “He’s got plenty of nerve.”
I wondered about that as I watched the bounty killer there in the shadows. His guts bucked him something awful. The sound was horrible, like something alive trying to eat its way out of him. We all looked away.
I closed my eyes. The night was black, but the only color in my head was red. It painted the barroom floor and the bounty killer’s lips and the things I saw. They were things that had happened in the night, some that I’d seen and some that I hadn’t, but all of them were broiling in my thoughts nonetheless. The bloodstained harmonica on the bar. The murders in the barroom. Rumson’s head toppling off his shoulders, kicking up a sawdust cloud as it hit the floor. I saw all that like the blood on King Arthur’s sword in the tales I read, and Aladdin’s scimitar flashing through Arabian shadows, and Billy the Kid blasting a man’s guts to ribbons with a shotgun. Everything I saw played to the sound of a harmonica scrabbling over the ribs of the night, and gunshots from a black rattler of a pistol, and whispered voices in a general store at midnight. All of it was red, and it went down my spine like a bucket of ice, and it made me sit up straight on that wagon box with my breath trapped in my throat.
And that was a long time ago. The night it happened, I mean. But I knew even then that there was power in those stories, in seeing them slide up against one another like cards in a poker hand you know will win the pot. That was like having a headful of magic, and a brain that could cast a thousand-league spell, and I let it spin awhile.
I didn’t open my eyes until I heard the stiff creak of batwing doors. The bounty killer stepped out of Rumson’s saloon. His pistol was in its holster, and his harmonica was in his hand.
He coughed a few times, then spit a mouthful of blood in the dirt.
“Let’s ride,” was all he said.
Part Three: The Desert
The morning wasn’t bright. Not right off, anyway. It churned up out of the night slow and gray, like a dull reflection in an old mirror. I rode in the wagon behind the men. All I saw of them that morning was their backs and the dust raised by their horses. The gray light washed over them and the dust churned at their stirruped heels just as sure as the gray light, and when the light married up with the dirt it was like heaven and earth were stitching shrouds for the four men who’d walked out of Rumson’s saloon alive the night before.
That was not an image born of fancy. I stared hard and saw straight through the men to things that lay ahead of them. Doing that was like reading a book, and seeing a scene bloom in my head before I so much as turned the page and sent my eyes across the black lines that told the same tale I’d imagined.
Some folks say that’s a kind of witchcraft. They call it second sight. I say it’s just paying attention. That’s why I understood about Rumson and the rest of them in that town before they showed their true colors. I watched them and paid attention. In my mind’s eye, I saw them do the things they’d do before they so much as thought about doing them. I understood which way they’d jump when push came to shove. I knew it the way I knew what Rumson did with his whores when the bar was closed and I was locked up tight in my cage, the same way I knew what he’d do if anyone ever challenged him the way the bounty killer did.
And I saw these men the same way. Bits of the night came back to me, that reverie in red glimpsed just hours before. Words blew at me through the wind, and the fisted nubs of my scorched ears caught them. They built the story that waited ahead of us. It sang in my head the way my memories sang, and with it came the crackle of fires that had warmed me and maimed me, and the red glow of the fire we’d build in the night that waited ahead. And in that night were other deeds and stories, some I saw clear and some I only felt like an October wind that promises the stark cold of November.
But everywhere I looked, the men were there. The preacher, with his ledger book Bible. The blacksmith, a man who found it easier to do what others told him than the things he might want to do for himself. And Indio, the dynamite man, whose mind was set on a life without shackles.
Those three were easy to know. But some men aren’t so easy. You can’t tell what they’ll do until they do it. That’s the way it was with the bounty killer. Men like that come straight at you, but you can’t shear them of surprises. They have faces that show you nothing, and hearts that hold secrets maybe even they don’t understand.
Of course, it took me a lifetime to learn that. I had good teachers. I learned the lesson from dead men with hearts built from shadows, who came out of a grave-hole in the desert and took me down to hell. I learned it from Apaches who tied me to a wagon wheel and roasted my face while their faces wore no expressions at all. I learned that lesson, and I learned it as well as the story I told in Rumson’s saloon. Red or white, living or dead, sooner or later most men show you what they have inside . . . even if you can’t see it coming.
I figured that’s the way it would be with the bounty killer.
I figured it was only a matter of time.
Towards dusk, we camped in the middle of nothing. Just a playa of cracked earth that powdered an inch deep with every step so that it was like walking on pie crust. The preacher wrung the necks of a couple of hens he’d stolen from a coop behind the general store, and Indio cleaned them and set those birds on a spit over the fire. The blacksmith rigged a little crank on the end of the spit, turning it with a hand which had long ago befriended the lick of flame. The wind came at us and churned the white earth as I told my story, and the campfire kicked up spark and cinder that snapped at those dead birds like a hungry dog.
“We were part of a wagon train,” I said, holding Henrietta close. “My family and me. One night we camped in a place like this. Big open space. White everywhere, too much white for the night to blanket. Just a little sliver of a moon above, but it lit up the whole place just as sure as that full moon is doing tonight. And I don’t know—maybe this was the very same place where we camped. It could be, I guess. It seems just like it.”
“Ain’t that always the way it is.” The preacher snorted a laugh. “Watch out, boys—there might be a booger-man behind you.”
“Button it,” the bounty killer said.
I went on with the story. “They came for us in the night. They didn’t look like men. Looked more like shadows. Just patches of black moving with the wind, sliding over that desert with faces as white as smoke. They rose up out of a hole in the ground no bigger than a dug grave and did their business. Snatched blankets off folks so quick it was like they were tearing up the night, and they tossed those blankets to the wind and ripped folks open with clawed hands. Did it so fast it was like they’d popped the stitches on a goatskin canteen and spilled a fiesta’s worth of Mexican wine.
“They gathered around drinking their fill before the earth soaked it up. There must have been fifty of those things, and they killed most everyone before we even knew what was happening. I woke up in a puddle of my older sister’s blood with a leather strap tied around my ankles. I guess by then those bloodsuckers had chugged down their fill of blood, same way cowhands get their fill of whiskey when they’re on a spree. But they weren’t so full that they didn’t want to rustle a bottle from behind the bar to see them through the next day and the night beyond.
“One yank of that strap and I dropped from the wagon bed. Another and I skidded across the sand. The dead man dragging me had no more trouble than if he was pulling a canteen behind him. He was just a shadow, but he was strong, with hands and arms like vined midnight. He turned that face built of smoke in my direction and smiled a butcher-shop smile. I screamed my head off, but there was no one to help me—every one of us who was still sucking wind was in the same fix. But those shadows didn’t care. They just dragged us along, through the dirt and the patches of blood spilled by our kinfolks. And we set up a chorus of screams that sounded sure enough like a parade of souls headed straight for Satan’s pit.”
The wind rose just then, and the fire kicked up a crackle. The Mex crossed himself, and so did the blacksmith. Their eyes were trained on the campfire and the white smoke that rose from it, which swirled and twisted like it was trying to knot the darkness.
“Jesus, Mary, and Joseph,” the blacksmith said.
Indio nodded. “Madre de dios.”
“What a load of horseshit,” the preacher said.
“I told you once to shut up,” the bounty killer warned. And to me: “Go on.”
“They dragged us into that coffin hole one by one, then through a burrow no wider than one a wolf would dig. That burrow widened into a tunnel, and then a cave. It was nothing but dark in there. Still, I heard things and nailed them up in my memory. The scrape of a key in a lock. A creaking iron door. Wind through a wall of bars. Then that door swinging shut on rusty hinges, and a key finding its notch. One turn and that door locked. The vampires put us on our feet on the other side of the gate and cut our bonds. Then they marched us down black tunnels, deep into the earth. A mole would have been lost in that darkness. Miles and miles we went, lower and deeper, with no sound but our footsteps, and folks crying, and walls that talked. Those walls told us, ‘Welcome to hell, pilgrims,’ laughing at us as we passed by. And if you reached out a hand in the darkness to steady yourself, you’d bring it back bit and bloody, because those walls were hungry for a taste of what the vampires had gorged on that night.
“The deeper we went, the lighter it got. Not any kind of light you’d find in the sky above you, but a kind that was just bright enough so you could keep your bearings. Mushrooms grew in patches on the wall, glowing the way fireflies do. So did smears of fungus that lay like a carpet at our feet. Air blew up the tunnel like it couldn’t wait to escape through that grave hole up above in the piecrust earth, and the bite of that wind was as sharp as the bite of those things that lived in the walls behind us.
“And with that wind came the smell of Vampire Lake. It was waiting below. One whiff and I knew the water would be black. Suddenly I could see the shore in my mind’s eye, the sand as white as bones. I knew there’d be dead men sitting there on coffin boxes. Waiting, just waiting, for us.”
“I think you ate yourself a bellyful of those mushrooms down there in that hole,” the preacher said. “And a couple bushels of loco weed, too.”
I ignored him. “They kept me locked up down there for weeks. Months, maybe. I was never sure how much time had passed. We were corralled in a barred cave near a bridge that stretched out across the black water. The bridge was narrow, made of old planks that had nearly rotted through with time. It led to a small island in the middle of the lake. One of the guards told us that was where the vampire queen roosted, as solitary as a black widow spider. At least once a day the guards would come and get a prisoner. More often two. They’d march those folks across that bridge, and it was like watching someone mount the steps to a gallows. The shadow-faced guards marched them forward, and those old planks creaked under their tread, and that black water churned beneath them with every step. Something was down there, beneath the surface, waiting. Something just as hungry as those dead men and that wicked queen—”
“Save that part for later,” the bounty killer said. “Tell us about that queen. What was her story?”
“I never saw her. Leastways, not face to face. That guard, he said she’d been down there since the days of the conquistadors. Made a trip into that cave with a captain and his men looking for Indian gold, found a lake that bubbled up out of hell. Of course, they didn’t know that then. They camped down there in the dark while they searched for treasure. Drank from that lake. Swam in its waters. And one day those soldiers weren’t men any more, and that señorita wasn’t a woman. After that, they say she drank down a thousand men, and still she was always thirsty. Skinny as a rake she was, out there alone on that island with only a Navajo slave girl for company. She used that girl for a footstool. Made her sit still for hours, her cold bony feet on that girl’s back, toenails digging in like tiny shovels. She’d sit there on a throne of bones with her feet up on that Navajo girl, her eyes so black they looked like giant ticks burrowed into her sockets. Staring across that dark water, never blinking, always watching. Waiting for a full belly she could never have no matter how many souls she drank down.”
“And what made you so special?” the preacher asked, staring at the coals. “Why didn’t that queen bee suck on you? You weren’t as ugly then as you are now.”
“She might have done the job . . . had I waited around. One night I managed to sneak out of there. The guards dragged off a couple of the younger girls. There was a big shivaree around the coffin boxes near the shore as the dead men took them down, and while that was going on I worked some rocks loose and made a gap near the end bar along the edge of the cave mouth. Soon enough, I wriggled my way out. I found a tunnel and followed those glowing mushrooms, and when the mushrooms started to thin out and the light began to dim I smeared myself all over with that fungus from the floor, made the rest of the trip glowing like a funeral candle with a short wick. I could hardly see at all, but I saw enough, and the things I saw set me running. I don’t even remember what I did when I came to the gate at the end of the tunnel, but I figure I was so skinny and greased with sweat that I must have squeezed my way between the bars. I crawled out of that grave hole into another pocket of darkness. It was night, and the air was so fresh it seemed like ice poured straight into my lungs. I saw the stars above and they set me running again. I ran for miles, stumbling into the middle of an Apache camp. They grabbed me, and—”
“And you was out of the frying pan and into the fire.” The preacher laughed heartily. “Then those red bastards took one look at you, thought you was some kind of devil, and cinched you to a wagon wheel. Cooked you up just like these here hens.”
“I’m not going to tell you a third time,” the bounty killer said.
“Yeah,” said Indio. “Let the kid be.”
The preacher cussed a blue streak. “You men are as weepy as a church choir. Let’s all take up a collection plate for poor little biscuit-face, why don’t we?” He turned to me, grinning. “Boy, I’ve got to say that bartender taught you one hell of a story to feed the rubes. Did he give you a live chicken to chew on when you finally learned to tell it right? I mean, I know telling whoppers is the only way a geek like you could make a living, but it’s hell’s own price for us to have to stare at the leavings of your face while you do the work.”
With the sound of those words, Indio and the bounty killer started to move. The blacksmith was faster. He snatched the preacher by the scruff of the neck, lifted him off his feet like he was a sack of sugar. Then he spilled him across one knee as he crouched, and held his face just short of the fire.
“You like to talk. Maybe we fix your face now, and then you tell us story.”
“Jesus!” the preacher shouted. “Get this bastard off me!”
Disgusted, the blacksmith chucked him backwards. The preacher flew a few feet, landing on his ass. A puff of desert playa rose up around him, and he scrambled around on all fours like a spider popping on a hot griddle before he gained his feet.
“I’ll get even with you, you goddamn square-headed Heinie bastard,” the preacher said. “And then you’ll be a quarter-mile past sorry.”
The blacksmith thought about that for a long moment.
“No,” he said finally. “You can put bullet in me. You can put knife in me. You can open Bible and bring Jehovah down on white horse and have him twist me to a leper. You can do what you want. But I won’t be sorry.”
It was quiet after that. I stared at the fire. At the spit. I watched as the blacksmith turned his little homemade crank, and I watched the chickens go ’round and ’round. One was bigger than the other. The skin on that one started to crack and drip juice, while the little one’s skin crisped up like a shell. Watching that, I started to sweat a little bit, and the scars on my face began to itch.
Finally, the bounty killer said, “Tell the rest of it, boy.”
“No. I’ve said enough. Right now, you either believe me or you don’t. Tomorrow, you can see for yourselves.”
No one said anything for a while. The bounty killer tore a loaf of brown bread into four sections and gave one to everybody but the preacher. Soon, the first chicken was ready. Indio took a knife and carved up the scrawny bird. He passed hunks around on tin plates. He didn’t give one to the preacher. By the time the Mexican was done with that knife, all that was left was the gizzard, and one black wing, and a knotted little lump of a head. The preacher helped himself to all that, swearing a little bit, and moved off from the fire to a spot behind the blacksmith.
Soon the other bird was done, but by then the men had eaten their fill . . . except the blacksmith, of course. The big German ate a couple of legs and half a breast, then left the rest of the chicken on his plate. I could tell that the preacher was eyeing the meal, but he didn’t come into the blacksmith’s range. Despite his hard tongue, he didn’t dare.
But a little while later, the man in black passed me by. He bent low at my ear and shook that blackened chicken head like it was some big medicine.
Inside, the bird’s dry brain rattled around like a pea in a whistle, and the preacher laughed. “That’s all most folks have inside their skulls. You and me know that, don’t we, boy?”
The other men rolled up in their blankets. All but the preacher and me. He sat ten feet distant, just short of the fire’s glow, toting numbers in the back of his Bible. I stared into the fire’s dying flames while Henrietta skirted the withering coals, her naked wings flapping against her fat little body. ’Round and ’round the fire she went, but in a different way than those birds we’d cooked. And all the while she pecked at the piecrust playa, her little beak burying itself in the white dirt time and time again. There was nothing much to eat there, but she kept at it. That’s the way she was.
I guess I was, too. My brain kept pecking at the story churning in my head. The old and familiar parts had slipped over my tongue just an hour before, but it was the new parts that were on the boil and wouldn’t let go of me. They tumbled around in my head along with the heartbeat of the day—the desert heat that had put all of us on edge, those pole-ax blows the preacher had landed with his tongue and not his fists, the greasy chicken I could barely choke down. I thought long and hard about all that, and the tale I’d told, and the way my heart had thundered when the blacksmith held the preacher’s face to the fire.
And I remembered the way the men’s eyes had flashed while they heard the different parts my story, the way some of them had looked away and some of them had tried to look deep inside me as the tale hit its peaks and valleys. But most of all I remember the one question the bounty killer had asked—that question about the vampire queen.
The bounty killer’s voice was there in my head, and so was his question, and so was the sound of his bloodstained harmonica. Suddenly my gaze seemed to burrow into that dying fire circled with chicken tracks, and down through those glowing coals, and I found myself standing at the edge of Vampire Lake. The sandy shoreline gleamed like powdered bone, and the waves beyond were a dark whisper. Dead men sat on their coffin boxes, their faces bloody from a whipping they’d never expected. Funeral clothes hung in tatters from their cleaved skin. Others were history, dead straight through this time, their black blood spilled by blades and bullets coated with silver.
Beyond the carnage, that narrow bridge stretched across black water. In my vision I traveled across it like a bat on the wing, following an empty mile of hanging planks. I plunged headlong through a burrow of shadow, dropping to roost before the vampire queen.
She waited on a throne of bones, her tick eyes unblinking. She did not seem to notice me. Her black lace dress was tightly gathered around her narrow waist and the layered architecture of her collar bones and ribs. Her naked white feet rested hard on the bent back of the Navajo slave girl who served as her footstool. Now and then, the queen curled her toes and her sharp nails sliced into the girl’s back, deep enough to raise a tiny scream. And even so the vampire did not smile. For she was waiting, staring across the water with no expression on her face, waiting with a cigarillo between her cold lips. Tobacco smoke traveled from her dead lungs through tight nostrils, whispering into the air on lifeless breaths.
And I turned away and saw why the vampire queen stared and didn’t blink. I saw why she waited. The bounty killer was walking across the bridge, coming toward her. Black water gleamed through gaps in the rotten boards, churning beneath his every step. Albino alligators snapped against the water. Their great armored tails thrashed, casting guillotine ripples in waves that couldn’t hold a shadow. Tired of a diet of dead carcasses discarded by the queen and her minions, the reptiles gnashed their teeth for a taste of something vital and alive. The bounty killer’s scent drove them wild; it was as if they scented the dead men’s shadows that dragged at his heels and thundered in his heart.
And that was something I felt in my gut as much as my head, for nothing in the bounty killer’s expression conjured so much as a single word. He was a stone, and the expression he wore made the one on the face of the vampire queen seem as expressive as a Mexican carnival mask.
And then the vision was over, and just that fast. I blinked and I was back on the playa. Henrietta still circled the fire, pecking at the dirt. Shivering, I drew closer to the coals. The cold shadow of midnight had descended, so I wrapped up Henrietta in a Mexican sash one of Rumson’s whores had given me and tucked her inside my coat. I put a little more wood on the fire. Suddenly I was hungry, and I slipped the leavings of the second chicken off the blacksmith’s plate. I skewered the half-picked carcass and hung it over the fire to warm. Soon enough, the bird sizzled against the flame.
Just as before, the sound brought back memories. When memories came for you, you had to sit with them. I knew that much. If you were the kind who carried them with you, there was no way around it.
I was that kind, but that didn’t mean I had to let those memories have their way with me.
I listened to the chicken crackle on the spit.
But I ate it all the same.
For now I was hungry, and the chicken tasted good.
I woke in the middle of the night and rose from my blankets. The moon still hung above, fat and full, and I moved easily beneath its light. I put the wagon between myself and the campfire, following a straight line behind my shadow for a couple hundred feet. Then I undid my drawers and waited for nature to make its call.
“Hey, pretty,” the preacher said.
He was behind me, and I jerked as if slapped. Quickly, I buttoned my pants and turned to face him. There he was, maybe fifteen feet away. Laughing a little bit. Walking my way. His shadow spilling before him against the moonlight, that Bible in his hands. He held it up and gave it a tap. And then he started talking.
“I know something about stories, boy. This book is full of ’em. I know what they’re good for and what they ain’t. I know how to put them to work and which ones to use to get what you want. If you’re straight with me, you and I can do that together. With a little training you’d make one hell of a preacher, and I’ve got the contacts to get you into the biggest churches from here to ’Frisco. The Apache business is a good start, but it’s the trip to Vampire Lake that’ll hook the suckers like fat trout. Anyway, we get that story fixed up for the holy-roller crowd and the sky is the limit. After that, it’ll be champagne and oysters in any town where we want to shed starched collars and kick it up. Of course, I’ll take a percentage of everything you make, but that’s only fair with what I’d be teaching you and the business I’d push your way.”
“It sounds like you’ve made lots of plans,” I said. “You shouldn’t.”
“What do you mean?”
“You’d better worry about living through tomorrow, is what I think.”
The preacher chuckled. “You want to drive a hard bargain, son, well step right up. But save the rest of it for the rubes. You and me both know that yarn of yours is a yard deep and a mile long, but it’s the only divot you’ll find on this playa. There’s no cave out here, especially not one full up with dead men. And that means that bounty killer will never give us one red cent’s worth of the loot in that bank book. Fact is, we’ll be lucky if he doesn’t get a little testy once he figures out he’s been had. But we can avoid any ruckus. Hell, we can shake hands on a deal, get out of here tonight if you want.”
“You want to partner up with me?”
“Yeah.” The preacher smiled. “That’s the idea.”
“I tell the stories, and you take a percentage?”
“Now you’ve got it.”
“Okay then. But I’ve got another story to tell you first.”
I leaned forward and put a hand on the preacher’s shoulder. My face twitched a little as my scarred lips twisted into an expression that passed for a smile. The preacher smiled back and reached out for my other hand.
“This story is kind of short,” I said.
“Do tell,” he said.
I bucked my knee into the soft spot between his legs. The preacher’s breath shot by my ear, and he dropped to the ground like something that drops from the wrong end of a horse.
“You want to remember that one,” I said as I turned my back on him. “And you want to remember this: You don’t know anything about stories, or what they mean. But tomorrow, you’re going to find out.”
Part Four: The Cave
Indio lit a fuse and a minute later a dynamite blast ripped through the cave. Iron bars tore and twisted. Severed heads skewered on metal spikes exploded, and skull shrapnel shattered against the cave walls. Rivets from a lock forged in hell ricocheted up the tunnel like rounds from a Gatling gun, and flying metal tore at us in places that didn’t much matter. We spilled blood in fat droplets on the ground while swirling smoke wrapped us like mummies, but we were none of us close to dying so we hurried down the tunnel and toward the wreckage, following the lead of the bounty killer’s torch.
The flames tore a patch through the haze and the air cleared around the gunman. Smoke tumbleweeds rolled by us, low and slow, driven by a fetid wind from far below. I caught a familiar black scent on that gray stampede of nothing, and my throat seemed to blister at the taste of it, but I pushed on because the bounty killer was moving fast now, nearing the wrecked gate.
“Every devil in hell must have heard that noise,” the Mexican said from behind. “And they’ll be coming for us.”
“Doesn’t matter,” the bounty killer said. “They’ll hear a lot worse before we’re done.”
“But they know we’re coming,” the preacher said. “All that noise, there’s no way they won’t.”
“I’m not here to throw them a surprise party,” the gunman said. “I’m here to blaze a trail to hell.”
No one said a word to that. It was the cave that did the talking now. The place was like a throat filled up with whispers, and they washed over the big stone gullet and hushed past us on their way to the narrow grave of a mouth above. Thanks to Indio’s dynamite, the iron gate that corralled the vampires’ corner of the world was now a twisted mess. That gate had once been a hell of a sight, scored with chains the blacksmith could never have cut, and spikes set with dead men’s skulls and tattered human hides that flapped like scarecrow warnings in the subterranean breeze. But now the whole thing was so much scrap—just something to get on through, and get on past.
And that’s what we did. The bounty killer hurried through the shorn hunk of darkness where the barred door had stood, past broken skulls and those tattered sheets of jerky flesh. Flames from his coal-oil torch licked the cold stone ceiling as we continued our descent. We followed, our torches blazing orange streaks where the bounty killer had passed.
The gunman had parceled out supplies before we entered the cave. He had come prepared and then some, and we all had our own stock. There were the torches, of course, and other things that gleamed in their light—and most everything that gleamed did the job with silver. The bounty killer had his black rattler tied down low, plus a pair of bandoleers crisscrossing his chest that held four other pistols charged with silver bullets. Indio carried a rucksack packed with dynamite, fuses, and a couple boxes of Lucifers, plus a Bowie knife with a silver-dipped blade sheathed on his hip in a rig not unlike the holster that held the gunman’s black rattler. A steel can filled with coal oil was strapped to the blacksmith’s back. He carried a branding iron in his big right hand, the brand-piece a silver cross cinched in place with a hard twist of barbed-wire. Me, I had Rumson’s sawed-off shotgun and the pictures in my head. And the preacher didn’t have anything but his Bible, which he held as if he wished it was a gun, or a knife, or a silver-plated pole ax.
But as fast as we were moving, there was no watching any of the men too closely. The air rippled against the flames from our torches, and the sound was like oars cutting water as we traveled lower. Our lungs pumped like bellows as we advanced down that black gullet, moving fast, and lower . . . and lower . . . and lower still. The bounty killer pulled ahead of us, his desert-colored coat like a hunk of the surface world misplaced in its belly. I was glad I’d left Henrietta on the surface, one leg tied to a wagon wheel. If she were here with me, wrapped up in that Mexican sash, she would have been wriggling as if she’d been sucked down and swallowed whole by the hungry earth itself.
But it was only the four of us who’d suffered that fate. Deeper we went, and lower, and deeper still. The tunnel grew narrower. Our torches began to flicker, flames licking low. We stopped to charge them—we had to stop. My heart thundered drumbeats, and the pulse filled my ears, and I could barely hear the talk that went back and forth in the darkness. The bounty killer tossed orders, telling the blacksmith to unstopper his coal-oil can and get busy charging those torches, and mind that oil around the flame because nary a one of us was bacon ready for the skillet and neither were those dynamite sticks Indio carried in his rucksack.
The blacksmith set about his work, slipping that steel tank off his back. Dying blue fire rippled over the torch heads. As darkness closed in, the patchy fungus carpet at our feet began to glow. Then the light from the torches grew dimmer still, and fat round blotches shimmered into view on the cave walls—those glowing mushrooms I remembered.
The preacher’s torch went out. Suddenly the mushrooms glowed bigger . . . fuller . . . brighter. They put a filter to the rising wall of eternal night that loomed ahead of us, but it was light you couldn’t trust, one that was only fit for ghosts. The walls seemed alive with it, rippling and pulsing in the growing darkness, and—
“Torches,” the blacksmith said. “Put heads together.”
And we did. Knotted lengths of oak gripped tightly in our hands, thick torch heads meeting between us. Dying flames danced as they joined, and the blacksmith poured coal oil over the top. Blue fire surged, then rose to a sunflower yellow, and soon the torch heads glowed between us like the fat moon that had hung in the desert sky the night before. Light swelled around us, finding the cave walls. The mushrooms seemed to turn their heads to it, and then some of them started moving—
A wind rose deep in the cavern. Just that fast, light filled the cave like whiskey brimming in a full bottle. It found the things that lived between those mushrooms, things that had been trapped alone in the darkness on my last trip to the cave. Since then a fresh crop of mushrooms had filled this corridor—growing along its walls, pillowing its ceiling as they spread—and now the unseen things that had once cursed a wagon party on their way to hell were wedged between them.
Splashes of whiskey light washed those creatures, and every one of them screamed with Satan’s own fury. I saw them clearly now, nestling between thriving fungus on guano-caked walls. Some had faces like sick babies, and others looked like wretched old men with walnut skulls that begged to be cracked. I had no idea who they were or what they were. Maybe they were the lost souls of the vampires’ victims, and they’d been trapped after death as they tried to make their journey to the surface and the heavens above. They sure enough screamed like creatures worthy of such a horror.
One other thing was sure—the tunnel was full of them. They roiled in their mushroom nests like maggots feeding on a rotting carcass, and their curses put the freeze to my bones and sent the preacher to his knees. He wasn’t moving. I wasn’t moving. Neither were Indio and the blacksmith. At first I thought the bounty killer was frozen, too. And maybe part of him was . . . but the part that pulled the black rattler wasn’t.
The pistol fired six times. Mushrooms flew apart like dropped cakes, sending glowing spatters raining to the floor. Walnut skulls exploded, and dark blood slapped against stone. And then the gunman yanked another pistol from his bandoleer and put it to work. And another. And soon the bounty killer yelled: “Torches! Now!”
And in an instant we were all moving, raking our torches across the walls of the tunnel. Those mushrooms caught fire, caps burning as quickly as crumpled parchment. The screaming heads burrowed between them had no place to go. Fire licked the walls, and the mushrooms flaked to lumped coal and cindered off to smoke. And that smoke swirled around us and snaked deep into our lungs like a crawling thing, and I nearly hit the ground at the stink of it, and it busted off the cinches on everything I saw.
The bounty killer’s pistol hissed past me in the haze. There were fangs set in its barrel, and reptile scales on the gunman’s hand, and his eyes were yellow with black-pupil slits. The preacher screamed in one corner of the cavern, begging for mercy while walnut-faced devils roped him to a wagon wheel and set it turning over a brimstone spit. Then Indio carved through the smoke wearing armor like King Arthur of old, swinging his silver Bowie knife like Excalibur. And with him came Billy the Kid, loaded for bear, and Aladdin, and forty thieves ready to lay siege to hell.
And then the bounty killer grabbed me and shook me loose from my reverie. He pulled me out of there, into another tunnel. The subterranean wind whipped at me as the gunman sent me stumbling, and I caught that other scent on its breath . . . the scent of Vampire Lake.
We kept moving.
The mushroom smoke worked through me.
Pretty soon it was a bad memory, and we charged into an enormous cavern.
That’s when all hell really broke loose.
Part Five: The Lake
I’d seen Apaches do their worst. I’d seen white men match them sin for sin and then go them one better. But I never saw anything like the horror I saw at Vampire Lake.
Indio and the blacksmith worked as a team, moving from coffin to coffin along the shore. One threw open the lid, and the other set to business. The Mexican slashing away like a wild butcher with that silver-bladed Bowie knife, carving until the throbbing pound of flesh in the vampire’s chest came a cropper. The blacksmith roasting dead men’s flesh with his silver branding-iron cross, planting his big hand over each squirming bloodsucker’s heart while the poor devil bucked against the pain of unforgiving metal. And I did my part, too, taking care of any vampires who rushed Indio or the blacksmith. They came at any of us, they got a taste of Rumson’s sawed-off shotgun.
I worked steady, blasting dead men with loads of silver and buckshot. I blew the fangs through the backs of their heads and reloaded as quickly as I could. But stack me up against the bounty killer and I was a full bucket of nothing at all. He was a clockwork reaping machine, working that black rattler and those four other pistols he kept holstered in his bandoleers, trading one for the other as the legion of shadowmen rushed him.
You can’t truly believe something like that unless you’ve seen it. For the next few minutes, the shore of that lake was a flurry of black whispers and bloody fireworks. The bounty killer moved forward, dead men rushing him from all directions. Across the sand he went, and through the shadows, slaughtering the dead queen’s minions as they tried to slow his progress toward that bridge.
He moved forward without a pause, pistols blazing, leaving nothing but gunsmoke where darkness had reigned. And the bridge was closer now. Behind the bounty killer lay a trail of paintbrush splatters and corpses that had hit the ground without so much as the rattle of a medicine man’s spirit pouch. His narrowed lids squinted tight across cat-green eyes, as if the gunman were watching the whole blazing hell-riot from behind an iron mask. And when the killing was over you’d have thought he might have smiled, but he didn’t have it in him. Instead he went down on his knees at the foot of the bridge, a litter of dead men behind him, surrounded by nothing except the pistols he dropped in the sand.
He started heaving again, and now it was his own blood that paintbrushed the shore. It was an awful sight—just as it had been back at the saloon. The bounty killer tried to get up, drove his fists down against the sand and pushed for all he was worth, but such was his misery he couldn’t make the trip.
“Preacher,” he said. “I’m out of steam. Say the words.”
I looked around, because I’d lost track of the man in black. He was hiding behind a clutch of rocks further down the shore, crouching like a crab dreading a boiling pot.
“Preacher!” the gunman yelled. “Time to earn your money! Get over here now!”
The preacher hurried toward us, clutching his Bible, his face whiter than the faces of the devils we’d killed. His hands were shaking so badly he could barely open the book, but soon he managed to find the verse he was looking for, and he began to read.
“Louder!” the bounty killer said. “Make those damn words count!”
And the preacher tried. I really think he gave it his all, and maybe for the first time ever. His voice rang out over the bodies of men who’d died, and lived, and died again. It rang across the water. And it filled up the cavern, but at its heart it was a hollow echo. Soon enough, another sound eclipsed it.
It was the bounty killer. He was back on his knees, retching blood again. Red rushed from his mouth in a torrent. I’d never seen that much blood spill out of anything living in my life. It was as if the gullet that traveled from his mouth to his belly was his very own grave-hole of a cave, and men and monsters were doing battle in a cavern beneath his ribs, ripping him up from deep inside, filling every hollow space with blood.
This was the one time the preacher didn’t twitch. In spite of the horror, he knelt at the bounty killer’s side and kept on reading. His words charged harder now, and he spoke of Lazarus, and Jonah and the whale, and Noah and the flood. He put one hand on the gunman’s shoulder and the words spilled out of his mouth as he begged for deliverance. But the bounty killer only cried out, his body bucking hard against the misery convulsing inside him. It looked like the devil had hold of his tongue and was going to yank him inside-out.
With one hand, the gunman pushed the preacher away.
He hawked another mouthful of blood on the ground.
“Damn,” he said. “Damn.”
Then he got to his feet. I saw it happen, but I still can’t believe it. I don’t know how the bounty man did it, but I do know it didn’t have anything to do with any of the words the preacher had said. No. The gunman made the trip on his own, the same way a man climbs a gallows stairway. He made the journey deliberately, as if every inch of movement cost him more than he had inside, and once he was up he had the look of a man who wasn’t going down again unless it was his own idea.
Spatters of blood were thick on his shirt and face. The preacher took one look at him and backed away. Other words rushed from the spindly man’s mouth, and they were about money, and the deal he’d made with the bounty killer, and how there might be another bit of business he could try if the gunman cut him in for a bigger piece of the pie—
“I can’t believe I spent a night and a day listening to you jabber like a damn parrot in a cage,” the bounty killer said. “You’re useless. It’s time your feathers flew.”
The black rattler filled the gunman’s hand. None of us had even seen the bounty killer snatch it from the sand. One finger did all the work. Three quick tugs and three bullets hit the preacher square, and the man in black crumpled among the dead vampires.
Bank notes spilled from the preacher’s prayer book as he hit the ground.
That low subterranean wind caught them.
Some of the money blew into the black water.
Some clung to patches of spilled blood on the shore.
But there wasn’t one of us wanted to touch any of it.
We left that money alone, and we did the same with the preacher.
The bounty killer went down to the water and washed his face in the lapping waves. I gathered up his pistols and walked to his side.
“Need any help?” I asked.
He smiled at me, red lines of blood filling the creased spaces between his teeth. “I’ve killed a lot of men,” he said. “They’re still inside me. That’s why I’m here. I’m full up with dead men, and there ain’t nothing that can turn them loose.”
“That isn’t so bad,” I said. “I’ve got nothing but alone inside me. Sometimes I think it would be nice to have some company.”
The bounty killer laughed at that, and then he stifled a cough. “You know, it’s funny how life sets you on a trail. I first heard about you in a bar down in Tombstone. Brought in a dead horse-thief and collected the bounty from the marshal. After he handed over my bankroll, Virgil Earp told me your story over a beer. The marshal said he heard the tale from a prisoner who’d visited Rumson’s place. That was the first I heard of Vampire Lake. First I’d heard of the vampire queen, too.
“Earp said she was a devil woman who could never drink her fill of blood. By then I’d been heaving red for three months, and the dead men trapped inside me were never far from my thoughts. They haunted me night and day. I knew I had to get shed of them. I figured that queen was the only woman who could see me clear of the hell I was living. I figured I’d track her down and let her drink her fill, and maybe if I managed to walk away I’d be a different man. That’s when I busted Indio out of jail and came looking for you . . . and that’s what brought us down in this hole tonight.”
“But if you let her do that . . . If that queen sinks her fangs into you—”
“I let her do it. And I see where that trail takes me.”
“But—”
The bounty killer held up a hand. “There’s different kinds of death, boy. Different kinds of life, too. I don’t want one spent down on my knees, strangling on my own blood. I don’t want one that sidles up alongside me when my back is turned, wearing the face of some tinhorn who wants to prove he can gun down hell’s worst. No. I want one I can stare square in the eye. One that’ll stare right back and not blink so much as an eyelash. That queen sounds like the ticket to me.”
“But what if she drinks you dry?”
“That’s a chance I’ll take. Whatever hand I draw out there on that island is the hand I’ll play. A man can’t do more than that.”
The bounty killer splashed water on his face and wiped it clean with the back of his sleeve. He stood up. I stared at his face, but there was nothing else there. Not a single sign that could put the measure to his words. Just those cat-green eyes, slitted in his skin. He didn’t even blink as he unbuckled his gunbelt and handed his sheathed black rattler over to me.
“You keep this for me,” he said. “If you never see me again, you can call it yours.”
“But what about you?”
The gunman patted the bandoleers crisscrossing his chest. “I still have four pistols here. Whatever’s coming, they should see me through.”
The bounty killer turned away from me then. Just that fast. Like he was done.
He motioned at the blacksmith. “You. Come here.”
The big man came over, still sweating from exertion. The bounty killer pulled out his bank book. He asked us for our names, wrote them on the flyleaf, then scrawled a note and signed it.
“Ain’t none of us lawyers, but this’ll seal our bargain.” He pressed the book into the German’s hands. “I’m giving this to you, because I’m sure as hell not giving it to Indio. You’ll see this job through for me, won’t you?”
The blacksmith nodded. None of us knew what else to say. We stood there a moment, and it seemed it was as quiet as it had ever been in the world. And then the bounty killer turned toward the lake, and he took out his harmonica. He started playing, his eyes trained on that island, and the uneasy music that had raked over the desert two nights before seemed right at home down here in the earth’s own belly.
Out there in the darkness, the bridge started to creak and sway as the Navajo slave girl started across it. She was just a slip of a thing, and the bounty killer watched her as she drew nearer.
He slipped his harmonica into his pocket. She walked up to him, barely making a sound.
The girl said a few words in Spanish, and that was it.
The bounty killer turned to Indio.
“What’d she say?” he asked.
“That dead queen wants you,” Indio said. “She wants you now.”
There was no reason for us to stay down there in the cavern after that, but we did. Even the Navajo slave girl stuck close to the shore. We watched the bounty killer walk over the half-planked bridge, heard the old wood moan beneath his tread. Those albino gators thrashed in the water beneath him, driven wild by the scent of the dead men’s tide rushing through his veins.
Once the bounty killer hit the shore of the island, that queen didn’t parley long. She rose from her throne of bones, tossed her cigarillo into the water. Next came a couple minutes of jaw, and one long stare between them that said more than any words could. Maybe that was the thing that did the trick. Whatever it was, a second later she attacked the bounty killer like a ravenous spider.
That was what he wanted, after all. Her skinny arms scrabbled over his big shoulders. That black dress hiked up around the shanks of her white legs as she wrapped herself around his hips like a harlot flying the eagle. But it was those teeth of hers that did the work no words could. Her fangs trenched the bounty killer’s neck, digging in like coffin nails. We heard him grunt even though we were far across the water, and we watched blood geyser from his wounds. The red shower caught the shadows and matched their darkness inch for inch, and it flowed over the shrouded island and seeped into the ebony water beyond.
They say that queen had drank down a thousand men, but it was a fact she’d never met one like the bounty killer. He was a gusher, filled up with life and filled up with death, and too much of both had spent years stoppered up inside him. He was more than that queen could handle. The wet sound of her feasting sent a horrible echo rippling through the cavern, and soon she began to swell like some monstrous babe that had nursed too long at the devil’s own teat. The back of her dress ripped apart, black lace shredding like cobwebs. Still, the queen didn’t cut loose of the gunman’s pumping artery. She hung on and burrowed in deeper, and still she drank.
Another vein let loose, spewing blood from the bounty killer’s neck. Red mist sprayed across the island, and dead men rose in its wake. We’d had no hint that the queen had companions out there, but there must have been one last pack of shadowmen that served as bodyguards. They hurried to her side, fanged maws spreading for bad business, teeth latching onto the bounty killer as if he were a lone steer turned loose in an empty butcher shop.
But he did not fall, and he did not go to his knees. The killer stood there with those things roiling over him. Every bite was like another hole burrowed into a dam. The bounty man’s blood was everywhere now. It was a red mist driven by underground winds, spreading over the water. It ran in thick rivulets over his shirt and down his boots and across the island shore, sending scarlet veins rushing into the lapping tide. That was when the gators went crazy. They swam toward the island, thick tails cutting steely wakes, thrashing in the blood-charged water as if the lake itself were on the boil.
And soon that lake wasn’t black anymore. It was as red as everything else. On the island, a few of the vampires burst like ticks. Others drank furiously. Still others tried to stopper the bounty killer’s wounds with clawed hands, but there was no plugging the dike. Everything on the island was the color of blood, and the red lake was rising all around it.
At last, the queen and her shadowmen broke away from that wild gusher of a man. They started across the bridge, coming our way. The queen was sow-fat now, her tattered lace dress a rag on the shore. She ran naked and white and round like the moon, the bridge swaying under her weight. It was her and her followers above the lake, and those rotten planks between, and a riptide of white gators below. And the whole pack of them were coming our way, with nothing behind them but the bounty killer, dancing alone on that island like a man trapped in a scarlet hurricane.
And the lake was rising higher, blood lapping the bone-colored beach at our feet. The gators and vampires were closer now. One of the albino reptiles charged between a couple rocks and latched onto the blacksmith. The big German went over like a falling redwood, and two more gators hit him like bait on a hook. I saw the bounty killer’s bank book tumble from his shorn pocket, watched it disappear into a gator’s mouth. Then the blacksmith screamed as the same beast came after him, and he caught a pair of snapping jawbones between his big hands.
I yanked the bounty killer’s black rattler, but by the time I got it out of the holster the blacksmith’s head was already gone. I fired at the gator anyway. The bullets drilled it straight through. Three of the other beasts set on the dead monster and slaked their hunger. By the time I reloaded the bounty killer’s Colt, Indio had shoved me backward. He had his rucksack open, and dynamite sticks filled his hand.
He scratched a Lucifer alive and put those sticks to work.
The bridge exploded in a million toothpicks.
The queen and her men did just about the same.
Blood was everywhere, but the gators didn’t mind.
They were hungry.
They ate.
Part Six: Rumson’s Saloon
We came up out of that empty grave hole in the desert. Indio and I did, plus the Navajo girl. Double-quick, we grabbed that crate of dynamite out of the wagon and took it into the cave. Indio set a couple charges near the twisted iron gate, set another couple further down the tunnel, then ran fuses through the burrow that led to the surface. He put a match to them and we slapped leather for safety, Indio on horseback and me with the Navajo girl in the wagon.
Henrietta was with us, too. In the ruckus I almost forgot to untie the rawhide cord that held her to the wagon wheel, but I remembered at the last moment. We were less than a mile away when thunder exploded in the earth’s belly. A huge cloud coughed out of the ground like the wave of blood that had risen from the lake. Only this wave caught us, then overtook us, then set us riding even faster with bandanas wrapped around our faces. Me in the wagon slapping the ribbons while Henrietta squawked from her hatbox nest beneath the seat, and the Navajo girl holding on for dear life at my side, and Indio in front of us giving his horse plenty of spur.
In other words, we didn’t look back. What was behind us had been blown to hell and gone, and we knew it. The deal was finished, and in more ways than one. Without the bounty killer’s bank book there was nothing between Indio and me at all anymore. That book was in some dead gator’s belly down there in hell, and we’d never touch it in this lifetime. So there was nothing to fight over, and nothing to celebrate. We parted ways without much more than a handshake, and Indio headed south for Mexico.
The Navajo girl and I camped in the desert that night. When I awoke the next morning, she was gone. So I came back to town. There really wasn’t anywhere else to go. After a few weeks I discovered Rumson had written a will, leaving his saloon to the whores. They decided to go into another business—or the same business, but minus the beds upstairs—and they hired me. So here I am, standing behind the bar where Rumson used to stand.
Still minus half a face, of course.
But plus another story.
Besides the whiskey, that’s what we sell around here. I tend this bar night after night and tell it, and then I sleep the wee hours through and get up in the morning and do it all over again.
And some nights, even as the words spill out of my mouth, I think about the bounty killer. A man like that, you want to imagine there was something else in him. Something that could excuse the killing, and his hard ways, and the things that brought him to the point where he’d ride into a town and do the horrible things he did, then go down in a hole in the ground and do worse. And maybe there was something, and maybe there wasn’t. Maybe there was only a kind of desire. The kind you can’t really know until death starts to push the door closed behind you. The kind that pushes at you when you put the spurs to a horse and ride it hard toward a place you’ve never been.
Some nights I think it was one way, and some nights I think it might have been another. And maybe that’s what keeps me here, night after night, telling the story. The wondering, I mean. Maybe that’s why I do what I do. I don’t rightly know. I can’t rightly say.
But that’s my story, stranger. You can believe it or not. If you want to know more, come back tomorrow morning. We’ve got a little museum out back. You can see the bounty killer’s black rattler of a pistol. You can look at Rumson’s sawed-off shotgun, too. There’s a glass case with Indio’s shackles, and a letter from the warden up at Yuma which testifies to the fact that they’re real. In one corner there’s the hatbox I took from the general store on the night Rumson died, and most afternoons you’ll find Henrietta sleeping in it. She’s old now, doesn’t get around much. You can even buy a book I wrote where I set down the story straight. It’s illustrated by a fellow from Philadelphia who does drawings for all the Eastern magazines. I’ll even sign it for you if you want.
But the story you heard tonight, that one’s cash on the barrelhead.
Now pay up and hit the trail, amigo.
We’re closed for the night.