The Six-Gun Tarot (32 page)

He looked down Argent at the slumbering town below. They had no idea what their homesteads were huddled up against. No idea what was coming down the mountain to gobble them up.

Gobble, gobble.

The porch in front of the Mother Lode was vacant. No drunks sleeping off the night’s adventures, no old men without a place to go Deerfield could never recall it being that way. He pushed through the blanket-door into the smoky, musty interior. The bar was full; a row of backs greeted him as he staggered toward the bar.

“Listen to me; listen! We’ve got to go get the sheriff, right now! There are things, things under the mountain, in the mine! I’m not crazy! We have to—”

The men at the bar turned in unison. He was greeted by a row of faces bleeding night. Behind him was a rustle as the curtain was pushed aside.

The mine, the camp, the town. Gobble, gobble.

A large hand came to rest on Deerfield’s shoulder. It was Moore’s. The fingers were thick and caked in blood and something infinitely darker.

Deerfield wished he hadn’t lost the gun, wished he still had a bullet in it for himself, a final act of stubborn defiance.

After a time, he no longer desired the gun.

The Ace of Swords

Jon Highfather opened his eyes. It was morning and the bullet was waiting for him. It was on the bedside table. He had laid it out the night before, like he always did. He sat up in the bed and picked up the bullet.

He took a moment to study it, as he often did as he knocked sleep loose from his mind. He had begun the ritual in the whiskey-soaked months following Saltville. It stuck. The closest he had ever come to using the bullet was a few years back.

It had been a short time after he had come to Golgotha and been drafted into the job of sheriff. The last sheriff managed to get himself hollowed out, filled with sawdust and sewed back up again—it was a long story. Highfather had met someone during that mess; her name was Eden. She died. They always died. He had almost used the bullet afterward.

Highfather swung his legs over the side of the bed and touched the cold wood floor. He slept naked. His body was a map of violent topography—the puckered pale hills of old bullet holes, the ugly raised, forking rivers of knife wounds, the wastelands of old burns, of the lash, of claws and bites and, of course, the coiled scars of the ropes superimposed over his neck three times, like rutted roads leading back upon themselves.

He sniffed, coughed a few times. He looked over to the bedside table. His star lay there, always next to the bullet. He stood up, pushed his memories into the dark hole they leaked out of each morning.

There was something, something moving silently through Golgotha like a poisonous rumor. It lurked in the narrow, muddy streets, and in the shadows of the temples and the churches. It had no name, but Highfather marked it—the same feeling that had come over him when Earl Gibson had gone mad and tried to kill Auggie.

Highfather’s family had all been farmers before him and his brother, Larson. His father was born to it. He was able to sniff the crisp pre-dawn air and know what was coming out of the sky that day—storm or snow, drought or flood. Jon knew Golgotha as well as his father had known the fields and he sensed the fundamental wrongness. It wasn’t the first time he’d had this feeling since becoming sheriff of this odd little town. Almost every time he had it, people died, badly. Like Eden, like Old Mike, like Larson.

The memories threatened to choke him, drag him down into a place of old regrets, old, dull pain—the kind that can be endured but never, ever healed.

He splashed cold water on his face from the basin, said good-bye to the ghosts for another day, stuffing them back into their hole. He got dressed, put the bullet away and got on with the day.

As he rode from his small shack, off of Absalom Road, to the jail, he always did a slow ride-through of the town to see what was what. The streets were not as crowded or as bustling as they should have been for the morning. He noticed several shops shuttered and dark along Main Street. A pack of Johnnymen walked quickly by, clustered closely together, staring at him with hooded, almost accusing, eyes. He nodded curtly to the party, who ignored the gesture and continued on their way.

He stopped and talked with Toby Mantle for a few minutes outside the First Golgotha Bank. Toby was a cowpuncher for the Circle-Star Ranch, out past Carson. He was a slender black man with an ugly pink scar running down the right side of his face, his remembrance from the war.

“What do you know good, Toby?” Jon asked as he sidled his horse up next to Mantle’s.

“Getting hard to find a banker around these parts,” Toby said. “You-all had one killed the other night, and today the one I was supposed to meet with is home sick.”

“Clement isn’t in?” Highfather said. “That’s damn odd.”

“Everything about this town of yours is odd, Jon,” Toby said, offering Highfather a pouch of chaw. The sheriff declined and the cowboy stuffed his cheek with the tobacco. “Pretty much always been that way, ain’t it?”

“Yeah,” Highfather said, “but there’s odd and then there is damned odd.”

At the edge of Main Street, he cut past the old dry well, down the short, narrow road that took its name from it, and arrived at the jail. He tied his horse out front, unlocked the door and went in to check on Earl.

The old man was sleeping fitfully in one of the rear cells. Highfather figured that Judge Kane would be here next week and they could get the matter of Earl’s assault on Auggie Shultz out of the way then. They used to have a judge of their own here in town, but he went missing about a year or two ago. Only a few people knew what happened to him. Jon wished he wasn’t one of them.

“Coming,” the old man muttered with dry, cracked lips. “It’s coming for us.” Earl groaned, rolled over and started snoring.

Highfather fell into the routine of the job. He wrote a few brief correspondences: one to the U.S. Marshals over in Virginia City, another to his parents and one to an old friend in Richmond. He cleaned and oiled the collection of rifles, scatterguns and pistols that were caged in iron bars behind his desk. He also made sure the other objects locked in the gun cage—wooden stakes, silver bullets, various Indian and Chinese charms and amulets, a crucifix and several vials of holy water, blessed by the Holy Father himself all the way from Rome—were all in equally good condition.

During all this a few of the towns folk came by to visit. The Widow Proctor brought him by a pot of hot coffee, some oatmeal with apple peel and a hunk of sourdough bread and butter for breakfast. Gillian seemed a little fancier in her appearance today than usual, and when Jon complimented her she blushed. He figured what he had heard about her and Auggie must have some truth to it.

A few others dropped by with disputes, or legal questions. Doug Stack made his weekly appearance to complain about his neighbor Clancy Gower’s goat getting onto Doug’s property. Ulysses Comb came by to get his pistol back after tying on a good one last week at the Paradise Falls. Jon had had to take the gun away from him and lock him up for a few days for the trouble.

Jon sat on the porch rail outside the jail, the wanted posters flapping and snapping behind him in the warm mid-day wind. Mutt wasn’t back yet from the We’lmelti camps and that made him uneasy. He knew Mutt could handle pretty much anything that got in his way. Still, he worried.

At high noon Highfather rode out to check on the salt circle. It was located in the old graveyard about a half mile east of Clay Turlough’s place. His horse, Bright, which had charged into raging gun battles at full gallop with no hesitation, shuffled nervously at the edge of the boneyard. Bright never set foot on the weed-choked land; no animal ever did.

The graveyard was older than the town. No one knew exactly how old. It was bordered by a small, crooked wooden fence. The single entrance was a broken gate, hanging on a single rusted hinge. Uneven tombstones, worn featureless by the desert’s wind and sand, jutted out of red dirt at odd angles, like jagged, fractured teeth.

Highfather patted Bright’s neck, dismounted and fished the bag of rock salt out of his saddlebag. He walked gingerly across the yard, careful to navigate the haphazard arrangement of graves.

He had learned about the salt circle and its care shortly after becoming sheriff. Something began killing and draining animals in Golgotha. It began with dogs and coyotes, even rats and chickens; soon cows, goats and horses were being found each morning—empty, wrinkled sacks of flesh—no blood, no water, not a drop of anything wet.

Soon everyone in town began to hear the droning hum at night, the frantic scratches at the windows and doors. Two women in Golgotha miscarried after hearing the hum. Then there was the first human victim, a nine-year-old boy named Cole Glen, whose parents left the window cracked on a very hot, black August night. Highfather saw the boy—his sunken, wrinkled face, the dark pits where his eyes had once been. The puckered O of his mouth dried into a mask of horror. Highfather visited Cole Glen every night when he closed his eyes.

That was when the note came to him, slipped under the door of the jail. It was on very old parchment. The handwriting was spidery—thin and shaky. Some of the words were spelled in the British fashion. The note gave him the directions to the old graveyard and the exact location of the circle.

Mend the circle,
it said.
Bring salt, nothing else will hold it. Do it before dark or there will be another death.

So Highfather rode out, just as he had done today, and brought salt, just like he carried now, all these years later, and he renewed the old salt circle, worn away by wind and rain, around a particular nameless old grave, just like he did now. And the killings stopped; the humming stopped. Everything went back to normal.

That was when Highfather really began to understand what being the sheriff here meant. It meant lying down at night with things in your head that the good folk of Golgotha couldn’t possibly believe or understand, or ever, ever know. It meant accepting that he alone had to carry that load; he had to stare into the night, afraid to close his eyes, afraid to keep them open, so others could sleep.

He tended to the circle quickly. As he left the graveyard he thought he heard a low hum, the rustle of some sagebrush behind him. He tried not to run, to jump onto Bright. He rode back into town and back to work.

Jim was waiting for him when he got back. The boy did his chores, sweeping up the jail and running errands.

Around noon, the Widow Proctor brought them, and Earl, the afternoon dinner—bread, some hard cheese and a few slices of roast beef and a pot of coffee. The sheriff and the boy sat around Highfather’s desk and ended up talking about billiards. Jim was pretty good at the game, as was Jon. They agreed to play together one day at the Paradise Falls on one of the big red-felt tables. Jim let it slip that his father had taught him how to play the game; then he clammed up about his family and his home again.

Jim kept mentioning Mutt all during the meal.

“I’m sure Mutt is okay,” Highfather said, sipping his coffee. “Probably just decided to stay a spell and visit family.”

“Mutt ain’t got no family,” Jim said. “None that counts to him, anyway, ’cept you.”

“Told you that, huh?”

“Didn’t need to,” Jim said.

Highfather rode the town a few more times in the afternoon, still too few people around. Seemed like a lot of folk were down with something; the ones who weren’t looked scared.

“You think they’ll cancel the big church do Saturday night?” Gilbert Hollister asked him as they talked in front of the town hall.

“Nope,” Highfather said. “There ain’t no reason to be getting alloverish, now, Gil. Everything is fine. ’Sides, Anne Toller’s little girl would have my hide if I canceled the event where she was giving her wedding day announcement!”

“Sheriff,” Hollister said, “I’ve lived in this town my whole life, and I sure as hell know better. Just hope there ain’t no damn rat people running around this time. I hated those things.”

“I don’t think they were actually rats.… Look, I got to go. Don’t be starting a panic now, Gil, you hear me?”

“All right, Jon, but you be careful. Folks around here like you—you’ve lasted longer than any other sheriff we’ve ever had. And they damn well were rats—big as dogs and on two legs to boot!”

The sun was bleeding its last light over the mountains. Still no Mutt. Highfather sent Jim home around supper time and then had a bite to eat with Earl. The old man awoke sullenly and had a bit of broth and some water. He stared with red-rimmed, anger-filled eyes at Jonathan while they ate; then he fell back asleep.

“Almost here,” he muttered, and then began to snore.

Highfather walked over to the Paradise Falls and sat on the porch as the evening crowd shuffled in. He noticed that there were no miners with them. In fact, he hadn’t seen anyone from either the mining camp or the squatter town today. Highfather resolved to head up there tomorrow, hopefully with Mutt. If not, then he’d have to go looking for his deputy pretty soon.

It was past nine and Main Street was dark and still. Even the crowd in the Paradise was small and subdued. Highfather made his way back to the jail and decided to catch some sleep in the empty cell’s bunk, just in case something came up.

He opened the door. The lamp he had lit for Earl was guttering. There was a strange smell in the office and it seemed too hot in the room.

Holly Pratt smiled at him out of the shivering shadows cast by the dying lamp.

“Hello, Jon. I understand you’ve been looking for me?”

She was wearing a long military coat. She was beautiful but somehow odd, in the dim light. Something wasn’t right. Her pale skin looked bruised, her eyes too dark and wide. He closed the door behind him.

“Here I am,” she purred, slipping off the coat and letting it fall. Her bare, porcelain flesh was lined by ink-black veins. The smell in the place was pungent and powerful, making his nostrils flare. The smell came from her and it was speaking to his back-brain, to this body.