Hawthorne: Tales of a Weirder West (4 page)

If anyone could smell the rot on him, they didn't say anything.

He found his seat as the train whistle sounded. The engine hissed steam and smoke, the wheels caught, and the locomotive began chugging out of Denver.

A refined lady sat opposite him. He smiled at her and tipped his hat. Something about his wide, bland face made her uncomfortable, and she looked out the window, away from him. He didn't mind. As the city fell behind them, he opened the valise on his lap and gazed at his instruments.

It was all there, shiny steel in slotted rows. Butcher knife, hacksaw, gutting blade, bone scrapper. The suture kit. All the tools he'd need for the journey.

He closed his beady little eyes and let a delicious shiver of anticipation wash over him. Blood and flesh, sliced oh-so-neatly. Fountains of blood gushing out in a hot wash. Under the valise, he felt the stirring in his lap.

A large rat sat on his shoulder, unseen by anyone but him. The vermin nuzzled his neck, and whispered in his ear—
for His glory ... for His glory, transform this train into an engine of death. Transform it into a holy charnel house ...

And the big man nodded, said, "Yes. Yes, I will. I will transform it."

The refined lady glanced at him, then looked away again.

The train had stopped at Fallen Pine the night before to take on water, and Bill Cobb bought two tickets, dragged Bette by the arm, and found seats in one of the three passenger cars just before the wheels starting chugging again.

Bette had stopped sobbing, but her face was still streaked with tears and her lower lip quivered. She wouldn't look at Cobb when he spoke to her.

"You might as well get yourself accustomed to it, woman," he said between gritted teeth. "You got no one to blame but your own damn self."

She turned her head from him, gazing out the window at the night-shrouded camp. The whistle blew, and the train picked up speed.

The two of them sat opposite each other, Bette next to a very well-heeled looking woman who perched stiffly on her wooden seat. Cobb had no choice but to seat himself next to a huge, round man who took up most of the space. It would be a long trip, pushed up against the window by the big man's girth.

It had taken the better part of four months to track Bette down after she'd lit out from their home in Santa Fe. Bill Cobb had woken one morning after a three-day bender to find her gone, wedding ring on the sink, and after asking around for another three days, he'd determined that she'd run off to her sister in Carson City.

Telling lies to everyone along the way, too. Accusing Cobb of beating her up and subjecting her to all manner of mental and emotional cruelty. And those were just flat-out lies. Sure, he'd broken her arm once, and on many other occasions he'd been forced to remind her with the back of his hand of her wifely duties. But that was a husband's job, the way Bill Cobb figured it.

The train gathered steam, bellowing, and the miserable useless camp of Fallen Pine fell away behind them, lost somewhere in the night.

The big man sat there grinning at no one in particular, clutching his little valise in hands that looked like ham hocks. Cobb shifted uncomfortably against the window, glanced at Bette across from him. She wouldn't meet his gaze. The tears that streaked her face were obvious, and Cobb wondered if the fat man or the refined woman would say something about it. He hoped not. He'd hate to be forced into a confrontation with the fat man.

In the silence, he thought about Carson City and the nightmarish events there. He'd found Bette's sister, Marie. The bitch wouldn't tell Cobb where Bette had lit off to, and things had gotten a little nasty. He'd only meant to knock her around a little, but when she came at him with a heavy lamp, things got out of hand. He had to punch her, hard.

And who the hell ever heard of someone dying from a punch in the face, anyway? It was goddamn ridiculous. But that was what happened—he slammed his fist into her nose, and next thing he knew, she'd dropped dead right in front of him.

He'd managed to beat one bit of information out of Marie: Bette was heading east, toward Denver.

Bette never made it there. Cobb had caught up with her at Fallen Pine.

And now here they were, on the Denver-Rio Grande, heading back home. Cobb had some serious punishment in mind for his wayward wife, once they reached their destination, but for now he allowed himself a little self-congratulation at a job well-done.

The fat man said, "Surprising to see passengers get on from that place."

His voice was thick and phlegmy. Cobb looked at him, said, "What?"

"That ragged little town. The porter mentioned that we'd only stopped for water, and that he didn't expect any passengers."

Cobb said, "Yeah. Well, my wife and me, we ... we ain't from there."

The fat man nodded, his wide face split by a bizarre, beatific grin. Something about it gave Cobb the willies. It was like a smiling mask made of flesh, with no soul or heart behind it. And Cobb began to notice the odd smell of him—like sulfur, or rot.

"No," the fat man said. "Of course, you aren't. You aren't from that town. You're from somewhere else."

Cobb frowned. "Right."

"You're from somewhere far away from here. So am I. So is everyone. We are all from somewhere else, a place we all long to return to."

"Yeah," Cobb said. "Santa Fe."

He felt the fat man's body quivering against his shoulder, realized the fella was laughing silently. That annoyed Cobb. He wanted to ask just what the hell was so funny, but looking at the fat man's face again, he decided against it. A fine sheen of sweat covered the fat man's forehead and jaw now, and his smile had begun to resemble the rictus grin of a dead man.

Bette had come out of her silent mourning enough to notice the odd behavior as well. She and the refined lady next to her glanced at each other, but said nothing.

The fat man sighed. "All any of us want," he said. "All any of us want is to go home again. But sacrifices must be made for that to happen. Don't you think that's true?"

Cobb said, "I don't rightly know what you're talking about, mister."

The smile dropped away from the fat man's face. Looking at Cobb, he said, "You wouldn't. No, you wouldn't. None of you would. And yet I always ask, don't I? I always ask, like some kind of fool. No one understands about sacrifice. I always have to ... I always have to show them."

"Show them what?" Cobb said uneasily. He looked at Bette, saw that her gaze had at last rested on him, although her eyes were wide with alarm. Same with the lady next to her.

The big man opened the valise on his lap, reached in. His voice was petulant when he spoke, "Everyone wants to go home, but no one wants to make the sacrifice. It's selfish. It's just selfish."

He fished around in the valise, and his thick fingers came out holding a long, wicked-looking blade.

"I always have to show them!"

"Whoa, mister, take it easy—"

The big man leaned forward, his face twisted with something like grief. The blade glittered in the gaslight above them, flicked forward and out, and then the refined woman's throat came open like a gaping mouth, blood cascading down her frock. She tried to speak, made a pathetic gurgling sound, and her delicate hands came up to staunch the flow of blood.

The man sliced again, half-up out of his seat, grunting with the effort of it, and cut both arms nearly all the way through. Blood splattered everywhere.

Cobb sat dumbly, hardly believing what he was seeing, and for what seemed like a long moment nothing happened. He and Bette sat there, covered in the woman's blood, and the other passengers started to become aware that something horrible was happening, and the big man grinned and wiped blood out of his eyes.

And then Bette screamed, and the big man began his ritual slaughter.

There were strange, unsettling noises coming out of the gathering dusk.

The Morgan nickered uneasily, and the rider reined it in for a moment, quieted it with a hand on its neck.

To a less trained ear, it would have been easy to mistake the noises as wind, sweeping down the hills and whistling low through the trees. But the man recognized the sound, and understood why the horse was so nervous.

They were moans. Human moans, of such intense sadness and misery that hearing them could make a man of lesser grit despair.

He flicked the reins and the horse started forward, along the rails.

The train tracks cut through the low hills of the Western Slope, heading away from Denver and south, toward Santa Fe. The rider in gray had trotted the black Morgan out of the shadowed woods and along the tracks just as evening was descending.

Now, horse and rider ambled along and the rider kept his right hand near the grip of his Smith & Wesson Schofield .45. The night was coming fast the way it always did in this country, and the tracks in front of him were disappearing into the darkness.

The moans were coming louder now, and there was a smell, too. Blood.

He rode on, ignoring the instinct to turn around and go the other way. He'd heard moans of agony before—had caused them on numerous occasions—but there was something off about these. They sounded other-worldly. Ghost-like.

There had always been talk, since the first white settlers had come to this territory, of things haunting the dark pines at night. The demonic ghosts of savage Indians, some folks said. Preying on lone travelers, swooping down upon them in the darkness and scalping them alive. And the man in gray thought,
Well, so what? It doesn't take a ghost to scalp someone. A living Indian can do that just as well.

But the sharp tang of blood in the air, and the sad moaning, like the hopeless cries of the damned, made him feel decidedly less flippant about it.

The man was called Hawthorne. He was tall and lean in the saddle, a severe figure in a gray frock coat, somewhere between thirty and forty years old. His long, sharp face hadn't seen a razor in several days. The eyes that gleamed under the brim of his hat were gray and impassive.

He had tracked sign left by his quarry to a mining camp twenty miles back. The man he hunted had boarded the train there, the locals said, headed south. And so Hawthorne pursued.

Another hundred yards along the tracks, cutting a curving path through the pines, and the moaning was unmistakable now, although it was coming sporadically. The horse was becoming harder to control, pulling against the reins, reluctant to go forward. Hawthorne planted his spurs in the animal's sides and, head down, it obeyed.

Horse and rider came around a curve, and Hawthorne spotted something in the middle of the tracks. At first glance it looked like a small animal, mangled by a train. But the closer he drew to it, the more it resembled what it actually was.

A body part. A human body part.

The moaning sounded again, somewhere farther along the tracks. Hawthorne dismounted, took the nervous horse's reins so it wouldn't bolt, and walked it closer. It was almost full dark now, and the dim light from the moon filtered flickering shadows through the pine trees. Hawthorne knelt down to examine the thing on the tracks.

A human arm, severed roughly at the elbow. The flesh of it was white, but blood still dripped from the stump. It showed no signs of attention from scavengers yet.

Hawthorne picked it up by the hand, surprised that it still felt fairly pliant. The fingers were long and lean, a woman's fingers. There was a gold ring on the index finger.

He glanced up the tracks, his gray eyes going hard. He knew it was unlikely that any of this had anything to do with the man he hunted, and he toyed very briefly with the idea of letting it go, of not getting involved in it.

But he knew he couldn't do that. There was a smoldering anger in Hawthorne all the time, a rage just under his surface, and the victimization of the innocent sparked that rage and turned it into a blazing fire. There was something evil at work here, and he could not rest now until it was burned away from the earth forever.

In his hand, the arm twitched.

He dropped it and it thudded on the tracks, twitched again, and the fingers spasmed crazily and grabbed his boot.

Hawthorne grunted in surprise, almost fell. He tried to shake the arm off, but it clung tight, with all the strength of a living limb. He reached down and gripped it by the wrist, wrenched it off. The fingers curled and uncurled, groping. He threw it into the trees.

He heard it thud against a pine in the darkness, and then the rustle of dead needles. He heard it dragging itself laboriously through the underbrush, away and into the night like a rat.

For a long moment, he stood there staring into the dark where he'd thrown the arm, letting the horror of what he'd just seen wash away from him. The moaning from up the tracks became more and more insistent.

He took a deep breath and looked around for the horse. It had wandered off down the tracks. He caught up to it and, with some trouble, managed to get the reins in his hand and the horse calmed enough to mount.

He continued on up the tracks.

Around another bend, and the pines receded enough on each side of the tracks to allow the washed-out moon to illuminate the way better. About twenty-five yards or so ahead, Hawthorne could see something else on the tracks, something bulkier. And bloodier.

It was moving slightly, like weak branches in a light breeze. The moaning was coming from it.

Hawthorne dismounted again and tied the horse to a tree so it wouldn't wander off. He drew his Schofield and made his way along the rails toward the thing.

He was about ten feet away when the thing stopped moaning. A pair of dark eyes turned to look at him, and Hawthorne stopped cold, hardly believing what he was seeing.

It was a man, to some extent, or at least it had once been a man. Now, it was a torso and a head, arms and legs gone, stomach and chest ripped open. The lipless mouth opened and closed and opened, and the haunted eyes stared at Hawthorne with abject misery.

"What the hell," Hawthorne said, his fingers tight on the revolver.