Merkabah Rider: Have Glyphs Will Travel (58 page)

Walking down the alley that led to
the yard behind Russ House, where a canvas pavilion had been erected and fenced
in to prevent drunks from wandering in and falling into the mine shaft, the
Rider stopped and whipped his spectacles off his head.

Faustus, Belden, and Kabede stared
after him, at the tears running from his eyes as he brushed them away.

“What’s the matter?” Kabede asked.

The Rider looked all about the alley
leading to the diggings. He had felt a stabbing pain in his eyes as soon as
they’d left the street. His ears still rang from it. He recognized the
sensation and found its source, an innocuous looking pair of red lanterns hanging
over the crude sign which read, in English and Chinese letters:

FIRE
KING DIGGINGS

KEEP
OUT

A pair of freight wagons were parked
nearby, workers loading one of them with barrels, horses waiting in the traces.

“Kabede,” the Rider said, folding up
his spectacles. “Go with Faustus and get the staff and pistols.”

“What’s the matter?” Faustus asked.

The Rider pointed to the lanterns.

“The Creed uses the substance in
those lanterns. It interferes with my spectacles somehow. Dick and I will have
a look at those barrels, and then try and find this Lepsy.”

“He takes his dinners at Tivoli’s,”
Belden said. “Right over there on Allen.”

“Tivoli’s,” Kabede said, nodding. “I
have seen it.”

“Come on, Dick,” the Rider said,
walking towards the dig site.

Faustus caught his arm.

“You’re unarmed. Don’t make a move
till we return.”

The Rider nodded.

They parted aways, Kabede and
Faustus departing at a half run. They had to cross all the way back to the
Chinese quarter, to the livery.

The Rider and Belden walked
purposefully toward the diggings. There was an employee sitting on a stool out
front, a thick armed black man with a stick of firewood who had been paid to
keep people out. He nodded to Belden as they approached, and they went through
the little gate without incident.

The Rider went to one of the wagons
as a laborer emerged from the pavilion and hefted a barrel into the back. He
was a skinny man, too thin to be trusted to lift a heavy barrel. His burden
slammed down too hard, knocking one of the hoop rivets loose. The wagon sagged
on its springs. The man stood there panting a bit, then went back for another.
When he was gone, the Rider and Belden went to examine it.

“Just an ordinary barrel,” Belden
said.

The Rider ran his finger along it.

“Not quite ordinary,” he said. “Look,
there’s tar in-between the planks.”

Belden nodded.

“You don’t need to waterproof an ore
barrel.”

“Not usually,” he agreed. He knocked
on the barrel with the back of his hand, twice.

Something knocked back.

“Jesus,” Belden whispered. He moved
quickly toward the barrel. “Is there somebody in there?”

“Wait a minute, Dick,” the Rider
cautioned.

The skinny man returned, struggling
with another barrel.

“Hey beanpole, you seen the boss
man?” Belden asked.

“Tivoli’s,” the man grunted, pushing
another barrel next to the first.

“You know where these are getting
shipped to?” the Rider asked.

“Ask the teamster,” the man said,
panting again as he dumped his burden.

“Where’s he?”

“Tivoli’s.”

The Rider and Belden walked away
without another word.

Though there was a canvas topped
beer garden out back, which they could see from the diggings, they left by the
way they’d come and circled the block up Fourth Street to come in the saloon by
the front.

It was dark by the time they walked
in, and an exceedingly hairy bartender was going around lighting the lamps.

They paused at the door and looked
all around the dark little bar. Mostly miners. Mostly from the Fire King.

Belden waved the bartender over as
he made his way back to the nicked and stained counter to the right.

“Lepsy in?”

“Out back eatin’ his supper,” the
bartender said, and went behind the bar.

“That one’s a teamster,” Belden
observed nudging the Rider and indicating a man in a dark coat seated at the
bar worrying a spotty glass of beer. He didn’t look like a teamster. He looked
like somebody Spates might know.

The Rider started towards him,
Belden alongside.

The man reached for his beer and
glanced up, and the Rider pulled his hat low and kept walking, for a silvery
talisman had slid momentarily from the teamster’s sleeve.

“What’s the matter?” Belden
whispered as they walked out the back.

“He’s Creed,” the Rider whispered
back.

A canvas awning supported by simple
wood poles stretched over an area big enough to fit six long tables and
benches, each with a hissing lantern in the middle. Miners sat drinking beers
and eating tin plates of beans which a Mexican woman dished out through a
window in a small adjoining building, evidently a makeshift kitchen. Further
back they could see a row of outhouses.

“There’s Lepsy,” Belden said,
nodding to a man eating at one of the tables.

He was sort of unkempt, with a bushy
beard. What hair he had on the back of his balding head was wild and knotty. He
wore a faded red coat with torn black silk lapels and smile pockets. It didn’t
fit him any better than his role as a mine owner did.

“What now?” Belden asked.

“Eat some beans,” the Rider said.

They went through the line, bought
their plates, and sat down at a table in view of Lepsy.

As Belden dug into his food and
watched the teamster through the door, the Rider slipped on his glasses again
and took a look at Lepsy.

There was a man there, but inside
the man, as though driving him (which he essentially was), was an impish demon;
a corrupted
cherub.
His skin was a
mottled red color, spotted with blackheads. His features were infantile but
grossly distorted, as if a man had lived a full life of corruption in the body
of a baby. His face was pinched and ugly, his ears overlarge and sprouting with
wiry hair. The top of his head was almost entirely covered with a cracked,
yellowish crust of cradle cap, the hairs that poked through the scabby scalp
bleached and dead. His stubby fingers ended in jagged yellow nails and were
webbed. He had a pair of glossy black cock wings folded on his back.

The Rider did not know this spirit.
He was a demon. One of the Fallen, surely, by his wings, and this Lepsy had
willingly allowed himself to be possessed. There was no other way one of the
Fallen could inhabit a mortal body.

One of the renegade demons Lucifer
had mentioned then.

He had only his knife to combat this
thing. It would likely be powerful. He wished for his pistol, or a quiet place
where he could slip into the
Yenne Velt
and surprise the thing.

He would have to do that anyway.
There was no other way to defeat it without killing the host. Although Lepsy
was no innocent, he was not anxious to publicly murder another person in the
Arizona Territory. He supposed the only reason the local law hadn’t yet grabbed
him was his drastic change in appearance and the fact that he’d been
incarcerated in Yuma under a different name. But once the authorities in Yuma
sorted through the confusion, the death of acting warden Laird would settle on
the Killer Jew of Varruga Tanks as well.

No, he didn’t care to do it that
way. He didn’t want a fool like Johnny Behan arresting him.

He took the glasses off and put them
away. He watched Lepsy’s dinner dwindle, and wondered how long it would be
before Kabede and Faustus returned.

Then the teamster came outside with
a bottle of whiskey, got a plate of beans, and took his seat next to the
possessed man, setting the bottle down between them.

They talked lowly to each other, and
again the Rider wished he could somehow get close enough to hear.

Then he heard a bang that drew his
attention to the slamming door of one of the wood outhouses.

“Dick,” the Rider said quietly,
rising. “Wait here and keep an eye on them.”

“Where are you going?”

“I’ll be right back.”

“Can’t you hold it?” Belden muttered
as the Rider walked off towards the jakes.

The Rider closed the door and
settled down, trying to ignore the stench, to calm himself. He closed his eyes,
gripping the knife beneath his coat and muttering his prayers. He had the
protection of his talismans if anything went wrong.

He slipped into the murky colors of
the
Yenne Velt
and moved through the
outhouse door, back to the purple lights of the beer garden where the angry red
infant crouched inside the man and the teamster (
what was he? One of Adon’s students surely
) conversed.

The Rider crept along slowly, the
patrons moving through him unawares.

As he got closer, he heard the demon
say through the lips of the man Lepsy;

“I tell you the chinks are onto us.
When the last barrels are loaded, you head out with what we got. We dynamite
the hole tonight.”

“Adon wants the hole emptied,” said
the teamster.

“Don’t worry about what Adon wants,”
the demon snarled, uncorking the bottle of whiskey. “I’m losing ten a day down
there and I can’t keep the inspectors out much longer. They’ve got their ass
hairs up about the water table and seepage. What does Adon expect me to do?
Pretty soon the law’s gonna come sniffing around. We’ve been lucky with that
whole Earp fiasco keepin’ the Sheriff busy. Somebody’s gonna get loose, or file
a complaint and then we’re up shit’s creek. We can barely keep those things
down there under control as it is.”

The Rider drew the knife. He could
end this, whatever it was, right here. Send this thing to Lucifer to deal with.
He probably couldn’t possess the teamster with what he had on hand, but he
could get back to his body and likely overpower the man with Belden’s help.

Then he heard a commotion behind
him. Turning, he was aghast to see a miner shaking the door to his privy and
shouting.

“Hey buster! You fall in?”

When he looked back, he was staring
into the beady eyes of the demon.

“Change of plans,” the demon said.

The Rider rushed back to his body,
leaping through the man kicking the outhouse door and back into his own form.

He gasped and blinked, peering
through the spaces between the wood.

“I’m in here,” he shouted, affecting
annoyance. “I’m coming out.”

He fumbled with the door handle and
pushed open the door, but a hand caught it mid-swing.

Lepsy was standing there, and the
teamster was behind him, shoving the complaining miner away.

“No, Rider,” he said, grinning
behind his thick beard. “Have a seat.”

He kicked the Rider in the chest as
he rose, nearly sending him splashing through the shitter hole.

Then, from the hand poised on the
door frame of the outhouse, fire burst forth, seeming to spring from under
Lepsy’s fingertips. It shot up the side of the dry wood and spread across the
wall and ceiling of the outhouse like water.

Lepsy cackled, a high, girlish laugh
that was strange coming from his filthy, hairy face. The fire danced in his
crazed eyes and he slammed the door shut.

The Rider fought to unwedge himself
from the privy hole as fire filled the outhouse.

Outside, men were beginning to
shout, and Belden was among them.

The Rider kicked out and found Lepsy
had wedged the door shut somehow. He couldn’t get the leverage to force it
open. With a huge effort, he grunted and freed himself, then began to batter
against the door. The whole structure shook, and weakened by the flames,
presently cracked apart and gave way.

The Rider fell out on his hands and
knees and rolled to put out the flames that had dripped from the roof onto his
shoulders.

Smoking, he rose, pulling the knife.

Belden had tackled the teamster and
with both hands full of his hair, was beating his face against the ground.

The men were running to the flaming
outhouse and trying to beat out the flames with their coats. Lepsy walked
through them chuckling. He put out a hand and randomly touched some of them,
and wherever his fingers idly fell a man burst into flames and screamed.

The flames leapt into the air and
quickly caught the canvas roof, eating it ravenously away, climbing onto the
roof of Tivoli’s and the little kitchen, springing like a live thing, riding
the fluttering, blackening canvas as it parted, riding it onto the adjoining
buildings, racing with glee up their sides.