Beneath Ceaseless Skies #127 Read online

  Not to worry. The stranger was riding into the Crooked Mile. Oft times folks didn’t come back from the Crooked Mile. It was what kept Sheriff Dylan so busy down that twisting road so many days and nights in the month. Whatever the stranger thought he knew on account of his years hunting wizards, he ain’t never seen the likes of what lay down the Crooked Mile.

  When Rosco couldn’t see the stranger’s back no more, he retreated to the cool shade of the awning and his mug of ice tea. Carefully, he unloaded his revolver and began to clean it. Chances were good he’d need it before this was all over.

  * * *

  Rosco woke with a start. Summer lightning, and thunder, that was all. Not a gunshot. Sleep had been a long time coming, him jumping at every sound, worrying the wizard hunter would steal back in the dead of night to put a bullet in him while he slept.

  The night was hot, the crickets whirring up a storm, and Rosco wasn’t getting back to sleep. He got up, shrugged into his clothes and gunbelt, and stepped out into the muggy night to cast an eye over Gutshank.

  What a fool he’d been to say the things he’d said. Damned hothead. Who’d dare stand up to a man who made a life killing himself wizards for coin? Sheriff Dylan maybe, but not many others. Most honest folk, sensible folk, they’d hide themselves away from that sort of trouble.

  A riderless horse came limping up the street. Rosco thought it was a paint, white with brown or black patches, but something about the way it stumped closer sent a shiver through him. Thing was hurt, for sure, but where was its rider?

  Summer lightning crackled, leaving Rosco with flickering after-images of white and red. He stumbled back, fumbling for his gun. Horse weren’t no paint. It was covered in blood. And Rosco knew that horse, knew her like he’d know his own Momma by the smell of her biscuits.

  He reached out and gently took her reins, suddenly feeling a fool, holding his revolver like an idiot frightened of thunder. He holstered it and looked to the horse, checking her over to see what injury she’d done herself. “Martha? Hey girl, where’s your master? Where’s the sheriff?”

  Despite all that blood, it weren’t Martha’s, which could only mean one thing. One awful, awful thing.

  Rosco thought about Sheriff Dylan, thought about bringing him back in little bits and pieces, scraps of meat and bone and buckskin, like they’d brought back his Pappy. His stomach churned, and only a voice from behind stopped him from keeling over there and then and baptizing the road with the beans and beef and pumpernickel he’d eaten for his supper.

  “Hey, Deputy,” the voice sang, deliciously high, “there’s sweeter company inside than out there with that old nag. Discount for lawmen, you know?”

  Rosco felt his face flush, refused to turn and look; refused to let the whores see his shame. Momma didn’t hold with whores, and Rosco was a good boy. Loving between a man and a woman was for married folks; that was the law. He gripped Martha’s saddle and swung up onto her back. “Sorry ladies,” he grunted, without looking to where they hung over the rails of the brothel on the far side of the street, their bosoms struggling to burst free of their thin tight dresses, “duty calls.” He urged Martha into an awkward trot.

  Gutshank seemed to fade from around him as he realized what he was doing. He was leaving his post. He was disobeying the sheriff. He was riding into the Crooked Mile, where dead wizards would be the least of a man’s troubles. He was going to find the sheriff, because the sheriff might be shot up, or cut up, or worse, and Rosco was the only one who knew. He was heading into the Crooked Mile, where Pappy’s ghost was waiting for him.

  At least he had Pappy’s gun. Not that it had done Pappy a whit of good.

  * * *

  Gutshank didn’t disappear around a corner or into the distance. The town just vanished with a hiss. There one second, gone the next, now nothing but stunted acacia clinging to wind-howl ravines at Rosco’s back. Even the moon above the canyon walls was different here, her visage twisted into something that Rosco thought more wolf, or maybe rat.

  He resisted the urge to pull his gun, knowing he needed both hands on the reins. He didn’t want to have Martha fall lame under him. She knew the way out, and Rosco didn’t. All he knew was that the way out of the Mile weren’t never the same as the way in, and you never arrived in the Crooked Mile at the same place twice. He scanned the barren rock for signs of passage, traces of blood, but it was no use. He was as much a tracker as he was a marksman, which is to say he could as well find his way in the dark in unfamiliar territory as he could hit the moon with a rifleshot.

  “Come on Martha,” he patted the mare’s neck, “take me to Sheriff Dylan.”

  * * *

  Rosco found trouble before he found the sheriff. Water cackled over a dark ford and Martha slipped, skidded, threw him, hard. By the time Rosco staggered out of the narrow creek she was off down the gully, favoring a leg but still scarpering into the twisting canyons of the Mile faster than Rosco might hope to catch her up on foot. “Martha!” he shouted, but she was gone, gone like she ain’t never been there.

  “Martha!”

  “Well, look what we have here.”

  Rosco spun, fumbling for his gun. Always with the fumbling.

  The wizard hunter’s cold eyes glistened manic in the broken moonlight, his revolver already raised. Rosco put his hands up, wondering where the wizard hunter’s horse was and why he was leaning so heavy on that boulder at his back, why his shirt looked wet and slick, why he held one arm real close to his side. Like Martha, hiding her hurt.

  “Guess you found the sheriff then, and he weren’t too pleased to see you?” Rosco’s knees might’ve been weak under him, but he had bluff and bluster. When a man’s got you dead to rights and all you got is your tongue ‘cause your hands are thick as treacle, then your tongue best be quick on the draw.

  “You didn’t warn me your sheriff was a necro.”

  “A what?”

  “I seen lots of sour things in my time, Deputy, but you know what I ain’t never had the mighty bad luck to come across? I ain’t never before tonight come across a necromancer right in the middle of casting a witching what for to raise the dead, right when I happened to be in the unfortunate possession of two dead wizards.

  “Now, suddenly, I find myself outnumbered by two wizards, them all angry as hell on account of my having shot ‘em all up to pieces, and one necromancer posing as a sheriff so’s he can carry on with his gruesome deeds out here where no-one dares come looking for him, not to mention whatever the hell it was that he was pulling up from the ground.” He wheezed, like his speaking was an effort. “So yeah, I might’ve been caught a bit off my guard and got on the wrong end of a load of buckshot, but I gave back pretty good too. Way I figure it, Deputy, is you gotta ask yourself this: whose side am I really on?”

  Rosco dropped his eyes. It couldn’t be true. Sheriff Dylan weren’t no wizard, sure weren’t no wizard what brought the dead back to life. At least Rosco didn’t think he was. Mind you, he sure did spend a lot of nights down here in the Mile. Down here among the dead.

  He lifted his face to the wizard hunter’s. “You say there’s a bounty for wizards, then?”

  The old man cracked a smile that glinted silver in the starlight. “That’s my boy. See, I knew you had gumption, way you stood up to me back in that hole of a town. You know what’s right from what’s wrong, and that’s what matters, ain’t it?”

  Rosco nodded. “You show me that Sheriff Dylan’s breaking the law, and I’ll help you bring him in, dead or alive. That’s the law.”

  The wizard hunter holstered his revolver and extended his hand, not moving from the rock, as if he expected Rosco to come on up to him and shake it but he wasn’t up to the walking needed to meet him halfway. “Call me Garth.”

  Rosco lowered his hands. “You got a last name?”

  “Naw. Sold it long ago.”

  Rosco frowned. He was used to the folk about town jesting at him, but with a wizard hunter, who knew what was hot air and
what was God’s own truth? “You’re hurt pretty bad.”

  “This? Just a scratch. Nothing a hot bath won’t fix.”

  “Can you shoot?”

  “You’re gonna need me for more than just shooting when we find this little clutch of hellspawn. You ever fought a wizard before?”

  Rosco ain’t never seen wizards before today, and they were a couple dead ones. Apart from Sheriff Dylan, of course, if what Garth said was true. But he just said, “Sure. Plenty.”

  “Course you have,” Garth slapped him on the shoulder and staggered forward. “Now, why the hell’d you let that horse get away?”

  * * *

  The Crooked Mile bent and twisted away from them as they rode down one canyon, then up another. Finding Martha had turned out to be easy enough, her trail of wet hoofprints leading Rosco to a patch of clover she’d been chewing on. The blood on her coat was drying to a crust, all crackling and crinkled like the faces of the dead wizards. She didn’t complain when Rosco hefted Garth into the saddle and then led her by the reins down the gulch. He was glad to be wearing his good boots.

  “So how’d you find me, then?”

  The question took Rosco by surprise. “How’d you mean?”

  “Well, I saw your sheriff after I shot him, bleeding like a stuck pig all over his horse as it spooked away, and then up comes his deputy on that same horse, from a completely different direction, like he’s a-come looking for me. Don’t it seem odd to you?”

  Rosco didn’t look back. He could almost feel the steely gaze of Garth’s revolver at his back. “I didn’t come looking for you. I came for Sheriff Dylan.”

  “Still don’t explain how you got around behind me.”

  “These canyons is haunted. You ain’t figured that yet?”

  Garth fell silent for a while. Then: “That’s the most sensible thing you’ve said all day.”

  “It don’t seem strange to you?”

  “Son, I spent my life hunting wizards. Ain’t much surprises me.” Garth sat up awkwardly, and Rosco thought he was mighty stiff for a man who ought be ready for fighting. “Up there. What’s that?”

  Rosco looked where he was pointing. Ghostly lights shifted and danced on the canyon walls. “Wizards?”

  Garth frowned, his face collapsing into crags and shadow. “Nope. It’s a lure cast by wizards to draw in greenhorns like you. Like as not they’re behind us already.” He twisted, gun raised, scanning the darkness. He winced.

  Rosco peered between the black slashes cast by the windblasted upthrusts, trying to pretend that his legs weren’t shaking as bad as they were.

  Something huge and equally dark slid through the night, an indistinct shape rasping its bulk across dust and stone, sharp edges scraping rock with an eerie squeal. Rosco thought of his Pappy, how he’d ridden into the Mile and come back nothing more than a few scraps of blood and bone. He thought of the teeth, the claws that must have done that to his Pappy. Thought how the thing must have smelled his blood, blood it had a taste for, a hunger for.

  “Don’t you shoot at that now. It’s only as real as you let it be.”

  Rosco realized he had his Pappy’s gun drawn, was aiming into the dark where there was nothing to shoot at, nothing but the memory of the thing that had taken his Pappy. He hadn’t even known he’d pulled it.

  “Don’t let them wizards get to you,” Garth warned. “We’re in their spellcrafting now, to be sure. You let ‘em, they’ll try to put one of your own bullets in me, or in you. Easier that way. Course, if you waste all your ammo shooting at shadows, well, that’s just about as good.”

  Rosco nodded and holstered the revolver. Its grip was warm in his hand, like his blood was running hot. What if, he wondered, it weren’t a spell? Something had killed Pappy, after all. Something lived down here, down here in the twisting maze, down here among the dead.

  “Just you watch,” Garth muttered, “they’ll bring up the wind next. Wind so hot and sharp it rips the air from your lungs and fills your eyes with sand ‘til you want to lie down and curl up until it’s done, or until you’re dead.”

  But it weren’t wind that came up, just a cool evening breeze, chilling the sweat on his spine. Rosco managed a chuckle. “Maybe the wizards are getting tired. They’re dead, after all.”

  Then came the smell. It might have started in the bottom of a potato sack, where a bad spot had grown soft and moist and white and turned first to spoil and then to rot but then it had rolled through an open latrine trench, gaining the hot stench of human waste. More foulness followed, the stink of dead bodies, like when the cattle pox had taken Pappy’s goats and he’d dragged them down the gulch and left them to rot, and the vultures had come down and ripped open the dead things’ guts, strewing them about in the sun, dragging them across the sand with those claws of theirs. Rosco gagged, reaching for a kerchief to wrap around his face.

  Garth chuckled. “Looks like your beasty just did itself a good old-fashioned dump. Eyes forward, soldier, they want you looking at the ground.”

  Through watering eyes, Rosco scanned the trail, saw nothing, and wanted to vomit.

  “Enough with the parlor tricks,” Garth muttered, and when Rosco glanced back, he was still talking, low and to himself, his fingers twitching oddly where they hugged his bloody chest. “Time to finish this.”

  As if on cue, Garth was suddenly hurled backwards off Martha in a spray of dark blood. The sound of the gunshot rang around the canyon a sharp breath later. Martha bucked, and Rosco with his hand still looped in the reins could barely think about getting to his own gun or running for cover until he had calmed the horse. Garth was lying somewhere in the shadows, scraping across the rock. Not dead then, not crying out, just shot. Hiding his hurt.

  Martha reared, her hoofs thrashing at air. Rosco abandoned his valiant attempt to rein her in and let her clatter away into the night. Then he scrambled for cover, wondering why the gunman hadn’t shot him down already.

  “Don’t you worry about bringing this one in, Deputy,” came Sheriff Dylan’s voice from the darkness. “Hanging’s too good for ‘im.”

  “Sheriff?” Rosco scanned the shadows, trying to spot Dylan among the boulders along the canyon floor. “What’s going on? Garth here tells me you’re a wizard or some such, down here messing with the dead.”

  “You believe a wizard hunter, Deputy? Only wizard down here is him. Don’t know who those two dead fellers were he brought with him, but I’d guess his game is crossing this land killing innocents and falsely claiming wizard bounties for ‘em.”

  “Don’t you believe him, lad,” Garth wheezed from behind a boulder. Rosco could only see his boots.

  He realized he was the only one here who hadn’t been shot. Whoever he decided to trust, they’d need him to get them back to the doc’s in Gutshank. If they made it that far.

  “You’ve known me since you were a boy, Deputy. Who was it took your Momma in when your Pappy died? Who was it taught you how to clean your gun and shoot it straight? Who was it gave you a good job? This feller, he’s nothing but a murdering trickster, and he’s done gone and shot up a sheriff, and who knows how many innocent folk.” Dylan’s voice was bouncing around the rocks, making it hard for Rosco to guess at where he might be. “Do your job, Deputy. I’d say dead or alive, but as long as he’s alive he’ll be trying to trick you into letting him go.”

  “I dunno, Sheriff. Why don’t you come on out so’s I can see you.”

  Beyond him, something moved. Something that scraped and rasped and vanished into the gloom. Something hungry.

  “You’re wondering why I come down here, boy? Why I come down the Mile, nights at a time? Someone been filling your head with nonsense about me being a wizard? Well, Deputy, it’s time for the truth. I come down here on account of your Momma, and your Pappy. I come looking for answers. If you want to try and take me in for that, that’s your right. But if you do, we’ll never know what happened to your Pappy. You want to know what happened, don’t you? What killed him?”


  Rosco’s hands shook. The shifting shadows in the back of his eyes, in the back of his mind, took on a more menacing shape. “What about my Pappy?”

  “Ask your friend there. Ask him why your Pappy came down here.”

  “He’s lying, Deputy,” Garth called. “I ain’t never been down here before.”

  Rosco swallowed hard. He knew the law, and he knew how guilty men talked, their tongues shivering like rattlers. “The sheriff didn’t say you had been, but you denying it like that makes me think you got a case of the guilts, mister.”

  “The posse your Pappy was in,” Dylan continued, “we came hunting some feller, way back. Rumor was he was a wizard what wanted to use the haunting in the Mile to bring demons across from Hell’s own fires so that he could use them for himself, but he didn’t know how to control ‘em. Fool went and let ‘em loose instead. Can’t you hear ‘em out there? Sniffing you out? That’s how your Pappy died. That’s why there weren’t nothing left of him.”

  “Pappy?” Rosco squeezed his eyes shut, blinked them open. Damn dust in the air, making them go all watery like that.

  “He’s playing you like a fiddle, Deputy,” Garth growled. “The only monsters out there are in your mind.”

  “Stop it!” Rosco screamed. “Both of you!” He clutched his hands to his ears, felt the cold press of his Pappy’s gun against his face. Again, he had the revolver in hand. Again, he hadn’t known it.

  “Glad to see you kept it clean for me,” came a new voice, a soothing presence at his shoulder. A voice he knew. A voice he had longed to hear for more years than he cared to remember. “Pappy?” Rosco was too afraid to move, to turn and look. Afraid what he might see. There were too many ghosts down here, too many beasts, too many crooked roads and broken memories.

  “How’s your Momma doing?”

  Rosco’s voice was barely a creak in the night. “She’s doing good, Pa. She’s happy. Sheriff Dylan looks after her real good.”

  “Son, I know you were always a special kid, always good with rules but never so good with people. That weren’t your fault. None of us can help how we were born. But you made good choices. You learned your law, and you know what it means. But there’s more to people and what they do than just laws. You understand? People and laws, they don’t really go together real well. The worst of ‘em, they just don’t fit inside of laws, right? Cattle rustlers and the like, outlaws, wizards. Some of ‘em break laws because they figure they’re too good for ‘em, some just because they need to know how far they can push a law before it breaks. You know what I’m saying, son?”