Dead Man’s Hand (2 page)

As he rode, to his left, mixed in with the pines and a great oak that dipped its boughs
almost to the ground, was a graveyard. He saw at a glance the gravestones had slipped
and cracked, been torn up by tree roots, erosion, and time. One grave had a long,
metal rod poking up from it, nearly six feet out of the ground; the rod was leaning
from the ground at a precarious due west. It appeared as if it were about to fall
loose of the earth.

The pine-needle trail wound around the trees and dipped down into a clay path that
was becoming wet and slick and blood red. When he turned yet another curve, he saw
tucked into the side of a hill a crude cabin made of logs and the dirt that surrounded
it. The roof was covered in dried mud, probably packed down over some kind of pine
slab roofing.

The Reverend rode his horse right up to the door and called out. No one answered.
He dismounted. The door was held in place by a flip up switch of wood. The Reverend
pressed it and opened it, led his horse inside. There was a bar of crudely split wood
against the wall. He lifted it and clunked it into position between two rusted metal
hooks on either side of the doorway. There was a window with fragments of parchment
paper in place of glass; there was more open space than parchment, and the pieces
that remained fluttered in the wind like peeling, dead skin. Rain splattered through.

Down through the trees swirled the black meanness from Heaven, gnawing trees out of
the ground and turning them upside down, throwing their roots to the sky like desperate
fingers, the fingers shedding wads of red clay as if it were clotted blood.

The Reverend’s horse did a strange thing: it went to its knees and ducked its head,
as if in prayer. The storm tumbled down the mountain in a rumbling wave of blackness,
gave off a locomotive sound. This was followed by trees and the hill sliding down
toward the cabin at tremendous speed, like mash potatoes slipping along a leaning
plate.

Gravestones flew through the air. The Reverend saw that great iron bar, sailing his
way like a javelin. He threw himself to the floor.

All the world screamed. The Reverend did not pray, having decided long ago his boss
had already made up his mind about things.

The cabin groaned and the roof peeled at the center and a gap was torn open in the
ceiling. The rain came through it in a deluge, splattering heavily on the Reverend’s
back as he lay face down, expecting at any moment to be lifted up by the wind and
drawn and quartered by the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse.

Then it was over. There was no light at the window because mud and trees had plugged
it. There was a bit of daylight coming from the hole in the roof. It filled the room
with a kind of hazy shade of gold.

When the Reverend rose up, he discovered the steel bar had come through the window
and gone straight through his horse’s head; the animal still rested forward on its
front legs, its butt up, the bar having gone into one ear and out the other. The horse
had gone dead before it knew it was struck.

The only advantage to his dead mount, the Reverend thought, was that now he would
have fresh meat. He had been surviving on corn dodgers for a week, going where God
sent him by directions nestled inside his head. In that moment, the Reverend realized
that God had brought him here for a reason. It was never a pleasant reason. There
would be some horror, as always, and he would be pitted against it—less, he thought,
for need of destroying evil, but more out of heavenly entertainment, like burning
ants to a crisp with the magnified heat of the sun shining through the lens of a pair
of spectacles.

The Reverend studied the iron bar that had killed his horse. There was writing on
it. He knelt down and looked at it. It was Latin, and the words trailed off into the
horse’s ear. The Reverend grabbed the bar and twisted the horse’s head toward the
floor, put his boot against the horse’s skull, and pulled. The bar came out with a
pop and a slurp, covered in blood and brain matter. The Reverend took a rag from the
saddlebag and wiped the rod clean.

Knowing Latin, he read the words. They simply said:
And this shall hold him down.

“Ah, hell,” the Reverend said, and tossed the bar to the floor.

This would be where God had sent him, and what was coming he could only guess, but
a bar like that one, made of pure iron, was often used to pin something in its grave.
Iron was a nemesis of evil, and Latin, besides being a nemesis to a student of language,
often contained more powerful spells than any other tongue, alive or dead. And if
what was out there was in need of pinning, then the fact the twister had pulled the
bar free by means of the literal wet and windy hand of God, meant something that should
not be free was loose.

For the first time in a long time, Reverend Mercer thought he might defy God and find
his way out of here if he could. But he knew it was useless. Whatever had been freed
was coming, and it was his job to stop it. If he didn’t stop it, then it would stop
him, and not only would his life end, but his soul would be flung from him to who
knows where. Heaven as a possibility would not be on the list. If there was in fact
a Heaven.

There was a clatter on the roof and the Reverend looked up, caught sight of something
leering through the gap. When he did, it pulled back and out of sight. The Reverend
lifted his guns out of their holsters, a .44 converted Colt at his hip and a .36 Navy
Colt in the shoulder holster under his arm. He had the .44 in his right fist, the
Navy in his left. His bullets were touched with drops of silver, blessed by himself
with readings from the Bible. Against Hell’s minions it was better than nothing, which
was a little like saying it was better than a poke in the eye with a sharp stick.

The face had sent a chill up his back like a wet-leg scorpion scuttling along his
spine. It was hardly a face at all. Mostly bone with rags of flesh where cheeks once
were, dark pads of rotting meat above its eyes. The top of its head had been curiously
full of fire-red hair, all of it wild and wadded and touched with clay. The mouth
had been drawn back in the grin of a ghoul, long fangs showing. The eyes had been
the worst: red as blood spots, hot as fire.

Reverend Mercer knew immediately what it was: the progeny of Judas. A vampire, those
that had descended from he who had given death to Christ for a handful of silver.
Christ, that ineffectual demigod that had fooled many into thinking the heart of God
had changed. It had not; that delusion was all part of the great bastard’s game.

There was movement on the roof, heavy as an elephant one moment, and then light and
skittering like an excited squirrel.

The Reverend backed across the room and found a corner just as the thing stuck its
head through the gap in the roof again. It stretched its neck, which was long and
barely covered in skin, showing little, greasy disks of bone that creaked when its
long neck swayed.

Like a serpent, it stretched through the roof, dropping its hands forward, the fingers
long and multiple jointed, clicking together like bug legs. It was hanging from the
gap by its feet. It was naked, but whatever its sex, that had long dissolved to dust—and
there was only a parchment of skin over its ribs, and its pelvis was nothing more
than bone, its legs being little more than withered gray muscle tight against the
bone. It twisted its head and looked at the Reverend. The Reverend cocked his revolvers.

The monster snapped its feet together, disengaging from the roof, allowing it to fall.
It dropped lightly, landed on the damp horse, lifted its head, and sniffed the air.
It spotted the Reverend, but the dead animal was too inviting. It swung its head and
snapped its teeth into the side of the dead horse’s neck, made a sucking noise that
brought blood out of the beast in a spray that decorated the vampire’s face and mouth.
Spots of blood fell on the sun-lit floor like rose petals.

It roved one red eye toward the Reverend as it ate; it had the kind of look that said:
“You’re next.”

The Reverend fired his pistols. The bullets tore into the creature, blue hell-fire
blasting out of the wounds they made. The thing sprang like a cricket, came across
the floor toward the Reverend, who fired both revolvers rapidly, emptying them, knocking
wounds in the thing that spurted sanctified flames, but still it came.

The Reverend let loose with a grunt and a groan, racked the monster upside the head
with the heavy .44. It was like striking a tree. Then he was flung backwards by two
strong arms, against the window packed with limbs and leaves and mud. The impact knocked
the revolvers from his hands.

It came at him like a shot, hissing as if it were a snake. The Reverend’s boot caught
the skin-and-bone brute in the chest and drove it back until it hit the floor. It
bounced up immediately, charged again. The Reverend snapped out a left jab and hooked
with a right, caught the thing with both punches, rocked its rotten head. But still
it came. The Reverend jabbed again, crossed with a right, uppercut with a left, and
slammed a right hook to the ribs; one of them popped loose and poked through the skin
like a barrel stave that had come undone.

It sprang forward and clutched the Reverend’s throat with both hands, would have plunged
its teeth into his face had the Reverend not grabbed it under the chin and shoved
it back and kicked it hard in the chest, sending it tumbling over the horse’s body.

The Reverend sprang toward the iron bar, grabbed it, swung it, and hit the fiend a
brisk blow across the neck, driving it to the ground. His next move was to plunge
the bar into it, pinning it once again to the ground in the manner it had been pinned
in its grave. But he was too slow.

The creature scrambled across the floor on all fours, avoiding the stab, which clunked
into the hard dirt floor. It sprang up and through the hole in the roof before the
Reverend could react. As the last of it disappeared, the Reverend fell back, exhausted,
watching the gap for its reemergence.

Nothing.

The Reverend found his pistols and reloaded. They hadn’t done much to kill the thing,
but he liked to believe his blessed loads had at least hampered it some. He worked
the saddlebag off his horse, flung it over his shoulder. He tried the door and couldn’t
open it. Too much debris had rammed up against it. He stood on his dead mount and
poked the bar through the hole in the ceiling, pushed it through the gap far enough
that he could use both ends of it to rest on the roof and chin himself up. On the
roof, he looked about for it, saw it scuttling over a mass of mud and broken trees
like a spider, toward a darkening horizon; night was coming, dripping in on wet, dark
feet.

The Reverend thought that if his reading on the subject was right, this descendant
of Judas would gain strength as the night came. Not a good thing for a man that had
almost been whipped and eaten by it during the time when it was supposed to be at
its weakest.

Once again, the Reverend considered defying that which God had given him to do, but
he knew it was pointless. Terror would come to him if he did not go to it. And any
reward he might have had in Heaven would instead be a punishment in Hell. As it was,
even doing God’s bidding, he was uncertain of reward, or of Heaven’s existence. All
he knew was there was a God, and it didn’t like much of anything besides its sport.

The Reverend climbed down from the roof with the rod, stepping on the mass of debris
covering the door and window, wiggled his way through broken trees, went in the direction
the vampire had gone. He went fast, like a deranged mouse eager to throw itself into
the jaws of a lion.

As he wound his way up the hill, it started to rain again. This was followed by hail
the size of .44 slugs. He noticed off to his left a bit of the graveyard that remained:
a few stones and a great, shadowy hole where the rod had been. With the night coming,
he was sure the vampire would be close by, and though he didn’t think it would return
to the grave where it had been pinned for who knew how long, he went there to check.
The grave was dark and empty except for rising rainwater. It was a deep hole, that
grave, maybe ten feet deep. Someone had known what that thing was and how to stop
it, at least until time released it.

The light of the day was completely gone now, and there was no moon. With the way
the weather had turned, he would be better off fleeing back to the house and waiting
until morning to pursue. He knew where it would be going if it didn’t come back for
him: the first available town and a free lunch. He was about to fulfill that plan
of
hole up and wait and see
when the dark became darker, and in that instant he knew it was coming up behind
him. It was said these things did not cast a reflection, but they certainly cast a
shadow, even when it was too dark for there to be one.

The Reverend wheeled with the iron bar in hand, and the thing hit him with a flying
leap and knocked him backwards into the grave, splashing down into the water. The
bar ended up lying across the grave above them. The Reverend pulled his .44 as he
kicked the beast back. It was on him as he fired, clamping its teeth over the barrel
of the revolver. The Reverend’s shot took out a huge chunk at the back of the thing’s
head, but still it stood, growling and gnawing and shaking the barrel of the gun like
a dog worrying a bone.

The barrel snapped like a rotten twig. The vampire spat it out. The Reverend hit him
with what remained of the gun. It had about as much effect as swatting a bull with
a feather. The Reverend dropped the weapon and grasped the thing at its biceps, trying
to hold it back. They went down together, splashing in the cold, muddy water of the
grave, the vampire trying to bring its teeth close to the Reverend’s face. The Reverend
slugged the thing repeatedly.

Kicking the thing off of him, the Reverend came to his feet, leaped and grabbed the
bar, swung up on it, and out of the grave. Still clutching the bar, he stumbled backwards.
The vampire hopped out of the hole effortlessly, as if the grave had been no deeper
than the depth of a cup.