The Six-Gun Tarot (34 page)

“That’s impressive. I’ve never seen anyone ever even make him blink from a punch before, except your—”

Caleb’s hand wrapped around Phillips’s ankle. He yanked as hard as his battered body would allow. The deacon crashed to the floor and Caleb was ready, pouncing on him, hitting him with blow after blow.

“Father, run!”

A fist launched up from beneath Caleb, like a piston. The force of it sent the black giant’s teeth flying in a spray of blood. The vise-like hand clamped itself onto Caleb’s throat.

Father’s and son’s eyes locked. There wasn’t enough time.

“Run!” he gasped.

Bick sprinted for the massive fan-shaped window overlooking Main Street. From the corner of his eye he saw Ambrose drawing a gun. There was a wet snapping sound and Bick knew Caleb was dead. He felt a burning hammer strike his back, heard the thunder of the gun. He crashed through the window, falling two stories to land in the mud and dirt, glass rain falling all around him. He scrambled to his feet. His legs were clumsy and numb. It was getting hard to think. Another thunderclap, the ground exploded beside him. He ran, ran into the darkness between the buildings, ran for the desert.

“Go on!” Ambrose’s voice echoed through the night. “Hide! You failed! Your family failed! It’s mine! Golgotha is mine! Lick your wounds while you can! Tomorrow is the last sunrise this miserable world of lies will ever see!”

The laughter chased him all the way out into the desert. Golgotha was a distant shadow at his back, nothing more. He stumbled, fell, fought to his feet again and staggered on. He reached a small hill that he remembered from long ago. It was covered in desert grass, and he sensed, more than saw, the big rock at its peak. He slumped against it, leaving a dark smear of blood. Above him the stars blazed, a million shards of frozen, brilliant light. Jupiter and Saturn rose above the eastern line, shimmering against the darkness of the mountains.

The pain was exceptional. He honestly couldn’t recall the last time he had even felt physical discomfort. He knew what he had to do, but he was frightened. For the first time in his entire life, he was terrified. Ambrose knew. He knew about the well; he knew about the Darkling.

He shuddered as recalled the force of Phillips’s blows. He knew it was craven and dishonorable, but he was afraid of them. They had hurt him, badly, and they were going to free it, free it and destroy everything.

“I’m sorry,” he whispered to the million lights looking down on him. “I’m so sorry!” he screamed to the night.

He groaned and struggled to his knees, each movement a new bloom of pain. He knelt in supplication, his eyes fixed above.

“Please help me. I’m sorry I let you down. I just got so lonely here. Please, they are good people at heart. They don’t deserve to end like this, not because of me, my mistakes, my hubris. Please, I beg you. I’m sorry.”

Malachi Bick, the high angel Biqa, called out again to a sky of indifferent stars.

“Please.…”

Justice

James Ringo’s hands danced across the piano’s keyboard, darting fast, like a hummingbird, then gently hovering, like a butterfly. They were not the ordinary hands of a piano player; they were calloused and scarred—his difficult, often violent, life laid out for the world to see.

His voice was not smooth, not melodic, but it had tightness, a bite, that made you forget melody. It carried the scars of his soul up and out of him and across the Celestial Palace.

“I have sailed death-alien skies;

I have trod the desert path;

I have seen the storm arise,

Like a giant in his wrath;

Evil danger I have known

That a reckless life can fill,

Yet her presence is not flown;

Her bright smile haunts me still!

Evil danger I have known

That a reckless life can fill,

Yet her presence is not flown;

Her bright smile haunts me still”

As the ballad came to a close, a few drunks thumped their hands on the tables. The Chinamen ignored him. Ringo paused long enough to take a long drag on his beer and roll and light a cigarette.

The Celestial Palace was usually a lot quieter than Bick’s place, the Paradise Falls. The clientele were looking for the vices not easily obtained outside of Johnny Town—opium and exotic whores, willing to sate the most jaded pleasures. Ringo knew this kind of saloon very well. He had played piano in dives along the Barbary Coast in San Francisco. That was where he had met the Palace’s owner, Ch’eng-Huang—the undisputed master of every Chinatown between Golgotha and the coast and patron of the Green Ribbon Tong.

Tonight, the crowd was even smaller than usual and Ringo could feel the tension and fear swirl around the room, like smoke. Many of the regulars were gone. People were going missing all over Golgotha; others were hiding, and staying locked in their homes. A few had left town.

It had been this way since that banker had died in the alleyway down the street. Then Harry’s wife Holly had gone missing. Ringo hadn’t seen Harry since the night Stapleton died, but he worried about him. Holly Pratt had caused him a lot of pain in their marriage, but Harry often spoke about when they were young, how he always thought he could share his secret with her in time, the way things had worked out with Sarah, his other wife. In his own way, Harry loved Holly.

Ringo began to play again, Lloyd’s “Bonnie Bell.” A drunk in the corner nodded and tried to mumble the words to Ringo’s instrumental version of the ballad.

Ringo often wondered how he and Harry Pratt had managed to survive anything past that first night together. They were completely different people, from different worlds. But Harry was kind to him, gentle and never arrogant or rude. Harry treated him better than anyone else ever had, including Ringo’s drunk of a mother and his abusive-when-he-wasn’t-absent sailor father.

For his part, Ringo accepted and loved Harry for who he was, not what he was supposed to be. Ringo didn’t want him to be a leader in the church, didn’t want him to become mayor and didn’t want him to be imprisoned as caretaker of his father’s old life. All Ringo wanted was for Harry to be free and for them to be together and happy. There wasn’t much of that for their kind in this world.

Half the time Ringo thought Harry was ready to chuck it all, then the ghost of his father would settle over him and he would go away for a while, play the role of good church elder, good mayor, good husband, good son. But eventually he came back to himself and to what, and who, made him really happy.

Harry cared for the people of Golgotha; Ringo knew that. He also knew Harry hated himself for feeling that way very often. Ringo suspected that right now, when all the strangeness was beginning to crop up in town again, when the wife Harry hated, yet loved, had gone missing, this was one of those times he would hate himself for being an honorable man.

As if on cue, Pratt entered the Palace through the beaded curtain that separated the saloon from the cloakroom. He looked tired, but still beautiful, Ringo thought.

“Give me the usual phlegm-cutter, Chen,” Harry said to the bartender as he slid him a slender pile of bills across the bar. “And see if my girl is available tonight; it’s been a Jessie of a week.”

Chen was practiced at playing along in this game. He smiled and nodded to the mayor. “Very good, Mr. Pratt. I’ll make sure the room is prepared for you. We get you girl, nice girl.”

Ringo finished the song, grabbed his beer and slid into his usual booth. He rolled two new cigarettes and handed one of them to Pratt as he slid in the opposite side of the booth.

“Harry,” Ringo said, with a nod.

“Jimmy, how are you, you son of a bitch?”

“Better than most, Harry, better than most.”

They shook hands, slapped each other on the back and laughed. The game got old sometimes. The pretending, the stupid, idle chitchat. But it was part of the life they both had to live, if they wanted to be together here. After about twenty minutes of it. Chen approached the booth.

“Mr. Pratt, the room is ready and your girl is waiting.”

“Thanks, Chen.” More money passed hands. “Hey, Jimmy, you feel up to helping me break this filly?”

“I reckon I’m done playing for the night. Sure.” More laughter, more backslapping. Chen knew the truth, hell, most of the patrons knew it, but the pretense gave everyone the ability to look the other way, and Ringo knew how important that was to survival when you were different.

He and Harry went into the back room, down the hall past opium dens and private brothels, out the alley door and half a block down to Ringo’s flop on the second floor of a small warehouse owned by Ch’eng-Huang and the Green Ribbon Tong.

Once they were there, behind locked doors, they finally held each other and kissed.

“I was worried. I’m sorry about Holly,” Ringo said.

“It’s bad,” Harry said. There is more going on here. Jon Highfather is trying to get to the bottom of it.” He held Ringo’s face and looked into his eyes. “I missed you. I’m sorry for all the—”

“Just shut up,” Ringo said, pulling Harry closer for another kiss. “Come here.”

Time passed; the night crept toward day. In the darkness, Harry finally spoke.

“I need to tell you some things. I had a meeting with the elders.”

“Why? About what?”

Harry told him.

Elder Rony Bevalier looked like he was constantly dipped in baker’s flour. His hair, his skin, even his watery blue eyes all were pale to the point of being painful to the observer. His dour brown suit only accentuated the whiteness of him.

“You did what?” Bevalier said, leaning across the table to glare at Harry.

“The golden plates,” Harry said. “They opened for me, there was writing on them and I read it. We don’t have much time.”

“That’s impossible,” Brodin Chaffin said. The elder was closer to Harry’s age. Chaffin was a tailor in Golgotha, running a small store on Rose Hill. It had belonged to his father, one of Harry’s father’s friends. Harry remembered sneaking a sip of moonshine with Brodin out by the old church ruins when he was ten and Brodin was fifteen. “The plates only revealed themselves to Joseph Smith, and even then he required the Urim and Thummim—the seer stones—to translate them into English. Did you use them?”

“No! Look, I’m telling you the truth,” Harry said. “And, trust me, I had no desire to discuss this with you, or anyone else, but we have to do something. The plates revealed that the final days are upon us, that the keys to the bottomless pit are free and in the hands of the prophet of darkness. This whole town is about to be wiped from the face of the earth! We need to get everyone together and prepare to get out of here!”

“Abandon Golgotha?” Bevalier sneered. “Leave our fine homes, our businesses and our fortunes, our temple, for God’s sake, to a bunch of unbelieving drunkards and whores? I think not.”

“Besides,” Chaffin added, “the relics! We can’t leave them and we can’t move them from True Cumorah! Joseph Smith commissioned your family to guard them, protect them, and to keep them here!”

“We all know how much you enjoyed running off to college, Harry,” Bevalier said. “Wallowing in that cesspool of moral turpitude. Perhaps this is just your latest ploy to abandon your sacred duty and leave Golgotha.”

“No,” Harry said.

“A poor showing, too,” the pale elder continued, as if Harry hadn’t spoken at all. “With Holly missing, Lord only knows what has become of her, you decided to fabricate this nonsense to—”

“No!” Harry said, smashing his fist down on the table. The sound echoed through the tabernacle’s office. Bevalier fell silent.

“I am not trying to run away,” Harry said. “God only knows why, but I am not. There was an earthquake in the cave, the plates fell to the floor and the pages were revealed to me. I read them, but it was more like I was being given an insight, a feeling of certainty about something I didn’t, couldn’t possibly, know. A great evil is about to be unleashed on Golgotha, on the whole world. It begins here. I don’t know if anyone can stop it, but the pages implied that it could be averted. I know that we must get the people of this town ready to flee as far away as we possibly can, for their own safety, and those of us who can must prepare to fight.”

He stood and regarded all three of the men at the table. “I plan to stay to find Holly, and to guard the relics. I’m not trying to run. I’m begging you to.”

The table was silent. Finally, Antrim Zezrom Slaughter cleared his throat; it was his usual way of announcing he had something important to say. Slaughter was Golgotha’s highest-ranking Mormon—a high priest. He had been ordained by Joseph Smith himself. Slaughter was not quite as old as Elder Bevalier, but he was easily as formidable a presence, dressed in black, with silver hair and eyes like the sky in a storm.

“Harry, you are familiar with the prophecy of the One Mighty and Strong, aren’t you?” Slaughter said softly.

“Vaguely, sir.”

“A little over thirty years ago, Joseph Smith was given a message by our Lord, Jesus, that one would come that would set in order the house of God and arrange for the inheritance of the saints. He is said to come in our hour of darkest need. He is a guardian and a protector of the faith and of all mankind.”

“You can’t be serious?” Bevalier said. “You don’t think this soap lock is the One Mighty and Strong, do you? Impossible!”

“Rony,” Slaughter said with a smile. “I know you love the sound of your own voice, but you need to be quiet now.”

“Sir, I’m not—,” Harry said.

“That remains to be seen,” Slaughter interrupted. “The sealed portions of the golden plates are a revelation from God, from the beginning of the world, to the ending thereof. As their keeper, I believe what you say to be true.”

“Thank you, sir.”

Slaughter smiled. “We will prepare those of the faith to depart Golgotha, we will also try to convince as many of our friends and neighbors to leave as we can, but none of this can be discussed with them. It must all remain secrets of the faith. Are we agreed?”