Beneath Ceaseless Skies #127 Read online

  Rosco nodded, like he understood, even though he really didn’t. Dimly he could hear Garth and Dylan shouting at him, shouting at each other, but he let their voices roll over him. He was talking to his Pappy. It was against the rules to talk while Pappy was talking. “I think so.”

  “Even the good folk, they can’t follow the law all the time. Sometimes more important things come along.”

  “What’s more important than the law, Pappy? Can’t have folks breaking the law just a-cause it suits them.”

  “See, I always said you’d make a good lawman, you with your sense of right and wrong. But folks ain’t so black and white. Sometimes they can hate real bad, and that makes ‘em dangerous. Sometimes they love too hard, and that ain’t no better.”

  “Pappy, what are you trying to tell me?”

  “You say you’re Momma’s good? She’s happy?”

  “Yes, Pappy.”

  “Do you remember, before I went away? Was she happy then?”

  Rosco choked a little. He wanted to say yes, but it was wrong to lie. Momma had never really been happy. Only sometimes, those times when Pappy was out working the range and Sheriff Dylan used to come by the homestead to check up on her, to check she was OK out there on the ranch all alone. Those times when they used to give Rosco a nickel to ride into town and buy himself an ice while they talked like grown-ups. Rosco caught a sob in his throat, like all the pain he had been hiding from ever since they’d brought back Pappy’s boots and gun was creeping up on him, huge dark wings spreading out, ready to open up its jaws and devour him.

  The voice at his shoulder softened. “Ask the sheriff about the stray shot, son. Ask him how we got split up from the rest of the posse that night, how we were lost in the Mile, how I rode on ahead a-ways. Ask him how he kept my boots and my gun and said how a demon took the rest. Ask him about the bullet that killed your Pa.”

  Rosco’s eyes were squeezed shut, but he felt something press into his hand. When he opened his eyes, Pappy was gone, if he had ever been there at all. A cold weight sat heavy in his palm. The same leaden chill hung on his heart.

  The moon lanced across the canyon, her feral eyes yellow, fever-touched. Rosco held the revolver close. His hands no longer shook. One held Pappy’s gun. The other, a shattered metal slug.

  Rosco pushed himself to his feet. His legs were steady. In the yellowed cast of the moon he could see a hunched figure in the gully, sighting down a polished rifle barrel. To his left, Garth had pulled himself tighter behind his rock.

  “Sheriff,” Rosco called, his fingers easy on the six-shooter, “I say we take this criminal in.”

  “You fool!” Garth swung around the rock, gun sweeping into view, but Pappy’s gun barked, true, like another hand was guiding Rosco’s. Like he was hanging outside himself, just watching. Garth howled, dropping his revolver. Another shot, a spray of bone and blood and brain, and he collapsed, still. Rosco stared at Garth’s shattered skull, suddenly bright in the moonlight, and felt nothing. “The only good wizard’s a dead wizard,” he mumbled, numbness seeping through him.

  “You made a good choice,” Sheriff Dylan called, rising brokenly from the shadows, his rifle dropping as he limped forwards. Grinning, grimacing, hiding his pain. So many people, so many faces, hiding their hurt, their shame, their guilt.

  Rosco nodded slowly. “You came down here looking for ghosts, Sheriff. You find any?”

  “There ain’t no ghosts, Deputy. Only the voices in your head.”

  “Maybe.”

  Dylan was bent nearly double, blood staining his buckskins from his hat to his boots. He stumbled forward to lean on the boulder where Garth lay sprawled and regarded the corpse. “Wizards, eh? Can’t trust ‘em.”

  “They just want to change the world, that’s all,” Rosco said. “Not as bad as cheats. Not as bad as murderers.”

  Dylan turned, real slow. “Rosco?”

  Rosco held up the slug. “I found me a ghost, Sheriff.”

  Dylan went for his six-shooter. Pappy’s gun cracked, twice, three times. This time, Rosco didn’t feel distant. He only felt the bleak seeping warmth of bloody justice.

  He looked at the body splayed across the boulder, how the bullet had pierced the sheriff’s badge shattering the star. Thought how there were laws, and how some folks would never be able to follow them. Thought how even the ones who wear their faces of goodness still hide their rot on the inside, hide their hurt, and steal love away from others to fill the holes in their own lives.

  “So,” came a voice at his shoulder, “now what?” As if someone was easing his arm down, the revolver dipped, slid into the holster. Like a puppet’s.

  “Well,” Rosco said, “I figure I’ve got me a couple wizards to take in for a bounty, for starters.”

  “You gonna tell your Momma what you know? About the sheriff?”

  He turned his face to the moon, to the dark shapes that crawled along the canyon walls, hungry for carrion. “That’d break her heart, I reckon.”

  “No doubt. But it’s wrong to lie, ain’t it?”

  “I think,” Rosco said, turning to face the empty night where his Pappy’s ghost should’ve been but wasn’t, “that sometimes, it’s better if we do.”

  “She was a cheat too, remember? She broke a law, the law between a man and his wife.”

  Rosco shrugged. “At least she didn’t kill no-one.”

  “You don’t think it was part her doing that killed me down here? You think she’s innocent?”

  “I reckon I don’t know, and I ain’t one to judge. I reckon Sheriff Dylan pulled the trigger, and for that he’s paid his due. And I reckon that you can’t talk me into killing no-one else, no matter how you try. I done enough of that, right here.” It was a hurt he’d have to hide, he knew, forever. “Because at first, I thought you were just a wizard’s trick, thought the way you were talking at me about the sheriff, you must’ve been something Garth had conjured up, like he brought up that awful stench, and tried to pretend like he weren’t the one magicking it. But then he was dead, and I could still feel you there. If you were his magic, you should’ve died with him. But the slug. When the sheriff saw it, I saw the guilt in him. He would’ve shot me down, so I knew it was true, what you said he did.”

  The shadows hissed and surged around him, creatures swarming closer, silvered shadows under yellow moonlight.

  “And maybe I wanted to shoot that wizard hunter, ‘cause of how he shamed me in the street. Maybe I wanted to shoot the sheriff, because he killed my Pa, and there ain’t no law as right as vengeance. If the Good Book taught me anything, it’s that revenge is right and lawful. So long as you only look at the old book.

  “But Momma? My Pappy wouldn’t never want my Momma’s heart broken. Wouldn’t never want her shamed. Don’t matter what she did, don’t matter that she weren’t happy, or that she loved another man. Pappy always loved her, better’n any man ever could. Even Pappy’s ghost couldn’t be that bitter. So that’s why I reckon you ain’t no ghost, you’re just a black old spirit trying to do mischief, trying to spread it out of the Crooked Mile. Like the ways you sat at a fire with some cowboy and told him how you was my Pappy, how you didn’t die that day, but you been hiding out here all this time waiting to get back at the man who killed you. Yeah, we all heard that story, but I guess the sheriff believed it more than me.

  “See, I came to terms with my Pappy being dead and gone long ago. I knew my Pappy never would’ve left me alone, never would’ve left me thinking he was dead just so’s he could get revenge. That ain’t right. But I guess Sheriff Dylan still had some guilt he’d never quite got past.”

  The night swelled around him, darkness billowing upwards to blot out the moon’s lupine gaze, swallowing him in a flurry of wings and claws and teeth, scraping and scratching at his skin. Yet he felt braver now than he ever had, even with Sheriff Dylan dead, even knowing his Pappy was truly, truly gone. He had a peace about him now, because he knew that he’d be making his own way from here on o
ut.

  “Martha!” He called through the tearing darkness. The veil broke apart, a mass of white and red surging towards him between the shifting black.

  “Don’t you worry about them,” Rosco said as he grabbed Martha’s reins and patted her on the neck, “they can’t hurt us. They’re against the law.” Rosco hauled first one body, then the other, onto Martha’s saddle and lashed them on, oblivious to the spirits swirling around him. Then he calmly let the horse walk, trusting her to take him out of the maze.

  “Goodbye, Pappy.”

  Shrieking, the darkness tore apart, wispy clouds against the night, drifting towards the coming dawn.

  Rosco walked slow, easy, up the canyon. Thought how funny it was that now he’d be the one come walking into town with two dead bodies on his horse, him with his eyes grown cold from the killing, and how if he was sheriff he wouldn’t trust him, neither. But, he guessed, he was the sheriff now. He wondered if his Pappy would be proud to see him, Town Sheriff, hauling away the dead, and him not daring to cry nor quiver.

  He rolled the broken hunk of lead between his fingers, thought how strange it was that something so small, just a little piece of metal, could do so much wrong in people’s lives, like rules writ down in a book or the way a man might feel about a woman in the quiet places where no-one could see, in those places where the rules and the laws didn’t make a whit of difference, down in the places where folk hide their hurt. How in places like this, down here among the dead and the crooked ghosts, there were no rules, no laws, only hurt.

  He raised his arm and tossed the slug into the darkness. That was a hurt he was done with hiding. It could stay here, with the ghosts, where it belonged.

  Copyright © 2013 Dan Rabarts

  Read Comments on this Story on the BCS Website

  Dan Rabarts is a New Zealand writer of fantasy, horror, science fiction and the odd things in between. He has twice been a finalist for New Zealand’s Sir Julius Vogel Awards, both for fiction and non-fiction. His fiction can be found in Andromeda Spaceways Inflight Magazine, Aurealis, in anthologies including Regeneration – New Zealand Speculative Fiction, and at the Tales from the Archives and Wily Writers’ podcasts. His audio narrations can be heard at StarShipSofa and Tales to Terrify, among others. Find him lurking on the web at dan.rabarts.com.

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  COVER ART

  “TheVillage,” by Sergio Diaz

  Sergio Diaz lives in Buenos Aires, Argentina. He has studied with artists such as Eduardo Labombarda, Marcelo Maccarrone, and Ariel Olivetti, and has worked for Bridger Conway Agency and Gizmo studio. He currently freelances for several studios and agencies whose clients include Coca-Cola, Ford, Nestlé, Panvel, Nissan, Royal, Honda, Arcor, The Radical Company, and Clarin. View more of his work at www.sergiodiaz.com.ar.

  Beneath Ceaseless Skies

  ISSN: 1946-1076

  Published by Firkin Press,

  a 501(c)3 Non-Profit Literary Organization

  Copyright © 2013 Firkin Press

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