Part One: The Oblong Box

 

1

 

Utah Territory, 1882

The moon came up.

It slid from a satiny, wind-blown grave.

It came up over the mountains like some huge, luminous eye staring down from the misty sky above. Its pallid light sought and touched serrated horns of exposed rock, winked off drifts of snow, and imbued spruce and pine with a ghostly ambience. The wind blew and the trees bent, shadows dripping from them in writhing loops, finding craggy ground and slithering across the landscape like greasy black worms, filling hollows and glens and dark, secret places with night.

And high above, that bloated moon kept watch.

Not daring to blink.

If this was an omen, then it was a bad one.

 

2

The wagon came pounding down the hard-packed, frozen road that cut through the silver mining camps of the San Francisco Mountains. Like a jagged knife blade, it slit open the underbelly of night, probing, slicing. It bounced over deep-cut ruts laid down by ore wagons and was drawn by a team of black geldings blowing steam from their nostrils. Their iron-shod hoofs rang out like gunshots. A whip cracked and the team vaulted forward and the wagon thumped and bumped and careened.

“Christ almighty,” Tom Hyden said, clutching the plank seat for dear life. “You’re gonna get us killed, old man. You’re gonna pitch us straight down into one of them ravines. See if you don’t.”

Jack Goode grinned, a cigar stub protruding from his weathered lips. “Man pays me to do a job, sonny, and that job I do,” he said, cracking the whip again, his long white beard blowing up over his face like a loose neckerchief. “I do what he asks and I do it quick as I can on account I got better ways to spend my time.”

Hyden felt the wagon thrashing beneath him, wood groaning and iron creaking. His ass bones were getting jarred right up into his throat. He clung to the seat with one hand and his shotgun with the other. The box in the back rattled in its berth like dice in a cup.

“Dammit,” he cried, “all we got in the back is a body. A dead one at that. It don’t care if we’re early or late.”

Goode just laughed.

The road dipped, climbed, then cut through a shadowy cedar brake and leveled out as it meandered across a rocky plain. The moon washed everything down with ethereal, uneven light.

“There,” Goode said. “Whisper Lake ain’t but a cunt-hair down through that gorge. We can slow up some. Here, kid. Take these ribbons.” He passed the reins to Hyden and struck a stick match off his boot, cupping it in his hands, firing up his cigar again. He blew smoke and coughed. “We’re making good time. Luck holds, I’ll be in town just in time for a swallow and a tickle.”

Hyden could see sweat glistening on the horses’ flanks like dew. And maybe some of it was blood. Way the old bastard was working that bullwhip, he’d probably laid their flanks clear open. Hyden sighed, kept his eye on the countryside, kept imagining he saw dark shapes flitting about—shapes like little men. But he was tired, his eyes caked with sleep. If he didn’t put his head down and pretty goddamn soon, he was going to fall right out of the wagon. Squinting his eyes, he thought he saw something running across the twisting road ahead…something that ran upright.

“You see that?” he said to Goode.

Smoke barreled from Goode’s nostrils like fumes from a foundry stack. “Nope. Didn’t see a thing,” he said. “And I didn’t, because I ain’t looking. If there something out there, mayhap I don’t wanna see it.”

“It looked like…” Hyden sighed. “Nothing, I guess.”

“Sure, it was nothing. These goddamn mountains are full of nothing. That’s why I rode us so hard back there—if there was something back there, I didn’t want to see it. Particularly if it looked like little men that weren’t men.”

“You seen ‘em, then?”

“Nope. Ain’t seen nothing I wasn’t supposed to see.” Goode stretched, his back popping. “Listen to me, boy. Just keep yer eyes on Whisper Lake. We’ll be there in an hour or so. Just think of the women and the strong drink and the sins of the father.”

Hyden just shook his head. Sometimes he just couldn’t figure Goode out. Sumbitch had a way of talking about something while he was talking about something else entirely. Hyden watched and saw no more shapes. Imagination, that’s what. Fatigue. He didn’t believe in the tales of little men. It was some kind of Shoshone legend. Hyden’s grandpappy Joe, when he wasn’t pulling off a bottle of rye and reminiscing about all the gold strikes he’d been on, talked about ‘em. Said they were real. Said he’d seen ‘em in the mountains. Said he knew a trapper up in the Needle Range had shot one and stuffed it, sold the mummy to some sideshow fellow from Illinois for a case of Kentucky bourbon and a Sharps rifle.

But grandpappy Joe, he did go on.

Hyden had a packet of home-rolled cigarettes and lit one up. They’d been on the trail since the afternoon before. Were bringing a pine box and its occupant from the Goshute tribal lands of Skull Valley down to Whisper Lake in Beaver County. Fifty a piece some injun was paying ‘em. Just to bring a body home.

Shit, but it was a living.

“Hey, boy, how old you now?” Goode asked.

“Twenty-three come spring.”

“Twenty-three.” Goode laughed. “When I was twenty-goddamn-three I had me a Sioux wife and three young-uns up in Dakota Territory. Had me a strike of the yellow stuff worth near hundred thousand.”

“Then what the hell you doing hauling stiffs for a hundred bucks in this godforsaken land?”

“I spent it.” Goode went silent, thought about it. “Twenty-three, twenty-three. You ever get yer lily pressed, boy? By a white woman, I’m saying. Why, I know this one down Flagstaff way—runs herself a crib of meat-eating felines with more curves than a loose rope. This one, though, Madame Lorraine, she dunks you in a hot bath, rubs you down with oil and Louisiana perfume, then sucks yer Uncle Henry so goddamn hard, yer eyes get pulled back into yer head—“

“Quiet,” Hyden said. “I heard something.”

“Just my bowels blowing off steam, son.”

“No, damn you, not that.”

Goode listened. Couldn’t hear a thing but the wind skirting the trees and whipping through empty spaces. The sound of the horses hoofs. Not a damn thing else.

“Boy,” he said, “you quit worrying about them little folk. Got yerself spooked. You might be better looking than a bluetick, but you ain’t much smarter.”

“It ain’t that. It’s something else.” Hyden looked back in the hold, at that narrow pine box. Could see moonlight reflecting off the brass bands and square nail heads. “Something moved in there.”

“Stop with that. Dead ‘uns don’t move, take my word for it.”

Hyden just sat there, the countryside too dark and shadow-riven for his liking. He tried to think about Whisper Lake. A soft bed. Some hot food. But then he heard it again…a thumping sound. He was sure it came from inside that casket.

Goode would not look back there. He took the reins back and piloted them through the frosty night. A few snowflakes lit in the air like flies. With any luck, it wouldn’t build into anything before they reached Whisper Lake.

“What’s worrying you, son?” he finally said.

“What’s in that box, I guess.”

“It’s just a dead body.”

“I know it’s a dead body,” he said. “But I thought…”

“You better quit thinking, then,” Goode said. “We’re a long way from nowhere to be thinking such things. Dead ‘uns are dead ‘uns. They can’t hurt you no more than a rocking chair can. Keep that in mind.”

Hyden chewed his lip, clutched his shotgun tightly. “I guess I’m wondering what’s in there, what’s in that box. I don’t like it.”

“Dammit, boy, I don’t like what’s in yer head, but you don’t hear me complaining.”

They rode on and the moon slid behind a cloud and the night grew darker, went black to its roots, seemed to gather around them in clutching, sinister shadows.

“Boy, light that lantern.”

Hyden reached over the seat…froze-up tight when he thought he heard a shifting sound from inside the box…then quickly grabbed the oil lamp and lit it up with a cupped match. The shadows retreated, but the night seemed bunched around them like a fist anxious to grasp something. It hung to either side of the wagon in sheets and blankets of murk. The hold was creeping with stygian forms.

Goode said, “Yer hearing things back there and that ain’t so strange. Not really. This road is bad and that body is knocking around same as us. Don’t pay it no attention, son.”

But Hyden kept hearing those sounds and something was stirring his guts with a willow twig. “I just been thinking is all,” he said, his breath frosting from his lips. “Been thinking on Skull Valley where we got the box from. Kind of creepy up there. Kind of lonesome and desolate…it puts your mind to things.”

“What sort of things?”

“Skull Valley…that’s Spirit Moon’s grounds.”

The old man licked his lips slowly, deliberately. “I hear tell Spirit Moon’s dead.”

“Some say he don’t die same as others.”

Goode laughed. “Bullshit. Besides, Spirit Moon is from the Snake Nation, boy. Skull Valley is Goshute land. What would Spirit Moon be doing there?”

“The Snake is just Shoshone, anyhow. Goshutes are tight with ‘em. I heard his tribe is up there in the hills, doing what they do.”

“Maybe, son, but what you heard about Spirit Moon…those is just witch-tales, is all. Injuns think he’s some big bad medicine doctor, but a white man should know better. Just some Snake witch doctor. A damn injun and he don’t scare me none.”

But Hyden didn’t believe that. Goode even pronounced Spirit Moon’s name kind of low in a whisper…like he was afraid the old injun would hear him from his grave. And maybe he would at that.

“You ever hear of Walking Mist, boy?”

Hyden said he had. Another Snake medicine man, but from years back.

“Well, let me tell you about him. Walking Mist was a Snake hoodoo man, too, like Spirit Moon. In fact, he was his ancestral granddaddy. Well, back in the ‘30’s, so I was told, up in the Wasatch, Walking Mist got on the wrong side of a couple beaver trappers from Fort Crockett. The three of ‘em were boozed-up and looking for a fight and happened upon Walking Mist who, it was claimed, refused their offers of marriage to his sisters. They shot Walking Mist down, chopped off his head and buried it in a box. They buried his body somewheres else.” Goode’s face was set and stern in the lamplight. “Well, now old Walking Mist he had himself a high yeller girl for a wife, some nigger out of a Baton Rouge plantation. She was said to be one of them conjure-folk. Said she used to make up love potions and cures for the sick. Made little dolls out of clay and burlap, sprinkled the hair and fingernails from someone she didn’t like in ‘em and put the hex on ‘em. Folks used to pay her to do so…horses, skins, rifles, what not.

“Well, this high yeller girl goes into one of her voo-doo trances and, sure enough, she locates old Walking Mist’s head with a rod cut from an ash tree. She opens that box and old Walking Mist’s head, powerful crazy medicine man that he was, is still alive. Eyes open. He tells her where his body is buried. Not long after, Walking Mist is seen ambling around, head stitched back on, a funny light in his eyes.”

“And what about them trappers?”

Goode grinned like a bear skull. “They found ‘em one day. They had twenty-foot stakes shoved right up their asses. Up their asses and right into their throats. Just bobbing in the wind up atop them stakes that were driven into the ground. Thing was, nobody never did find their heads.” Goode spit his cigar butt into the night. “I heard that from an old Ute I used to do some drinking with.”

“I thought you didn’t like Indians?”

“This ‘un was different.”

Hyden was nodding his head up and down. “That story, I believe it. My grandpappy Joe said that Spirit Moon was part demon and part human, could do anything he set his mind to. Grandpappy said a copper miner lost his hand in a cave-in and Spirit Moon rubbed something on it and called names into the sky and a month later, that hand grew back. Grandpappy Joe said it was true. Said Spirit Moon had eyes like coals. When them eyes looked at you, you were never the same again.”

“Country’s ripe with bullshit, son.”

“Some of it’s true.”

“Maybe.”

“There was a Paiute from the Cedar Band that had two heads,” Hyden said. “I saw him once. It was true enough.”

Goode laughed. “Next you’ll be telling me you can rope a bronco with yer pecker and still have enough left to make a dance hall gal whistle Dixie in the dark.”

Hyden felt his ears burn like they’d been branded. “If you don’t believe in nothing, then why you tell me that story of Walking Mist?”

“To pass the time, boy, strictly to pass the time and to see how gullible you are. And dammit, yer gullible. That Ute believed what he told me, but I expected better from you being a white man. If I’d known you were afraid of spooks, I woulda got me another boy to ride shotgun.”

“My grandpappy Joe—“

“Yer grandpappy Joe was full of more shit that a privy pit,” Goode said. “And don’t take that the wrong way, son. But he liked to talk is all. Now, enough with this fool yarning, I say.”

And it was enough.

Hyden was thinking about Skull Valley. The day before, they’d pulled into a little Goshute camp situated at the base of a rise punched through with caves. Some young buck in an army shirt and bowler hat was waiting for them with the pine box at the side of the dirt trail. A couple old men in trade blankets were standing in a loose circle muttering some nonsense. The buck—didn’t look like no medicine man—paid Goode without so much as a word, seemed relieved almost. The body was that of some white man who had kin in Whisper Lake. They never learned what the Goshute were doing with it and they didn’t ask. But now, thinking on it, Hyden was wondering what those old men were up to and if that young buck was some kind of shirt-tail relation to Spirit Moon.

Hard to say.

Hyden didn’t know if they were Goshute or Snake. He’d only seen Spirit Moon once. Over at the store in Ophir, Toole County. Spirit Moon had been there with his sons, who were loading his wagon. The old man was wrapped up in a buffalo robe and there were beads and feathers braided into his hair. His face was a maze of tiny scars that seemed to move like writhing maggots. Hyden had turned away then, before the old man looked upon him. Before—

There was a shifting in the box and both of them heard it this time.

They looked at each other in the eerie, flickering lantern light, something like fear cut into their faces. They quickly looked away. Hyden licked his lips, but he didn’t have any saliva left.

Something was happening.

He could pretend otherwise, but something was building around them like heat lightning and they could both feel it. But they were men. Grown men with a job to do and it had to be done.

From the box there was a thump, then a rustling.

“Boy,” Goode said, his breath not coming real easy, “take a look back there for the love of Christ…what the hell am I hearing?”

Hyden felt a white-hot terror in his belly, felt it feeding up into his chest. He leaned over the seat, shotgun in one hand, lantern in the other. His skin was crawling in undulating waves. He was cold to the bone…but it was not from the clammy April night. He looked at the box, the lantern casting tongues of light over its lid. The brass hasps were still fitted into place. All them those—Jesus, had to be a hundred of them—still pounded into the lid. Only…only, didn’t it almost look like five or six of them were sticking up now? Like maybe something inside was pushing them through? Hyden felt a grim weight settle over him, crushing him down like a granite graveyard slab. He felt weak, paralyzed even. The atmosphere around him was blanched, soured, thick with something that just ripped the heart straight out of his chest.

As he watched, two of the nails slid out of the lid with a groaning sound. They popped free and clattered into the hold.

“What in the Christ?” Goode said, his voice sounding choked and dry. The moon came back out and his face was discolored and sickly. “Mind me, boy! What was that?”

“Nails…” Hyden tried to say, but there was no air in his lungs. Just something blowing and drifting like desert sand. “Them nails…they’re starting to pop free…”

“Yer imagining shit!” Goode said. “Or…or maybe that body’s bloating. Known ‘em to burst a box right open…happens sometimes.”

But Hyden just shook his head. Things like that didn’t happen in cold weather.

Then they both heard it. A noise from inside that box—a scraping, scratching sound like fingernails on wood. There was horror in both men’s eyes. A huge, relentless horror that spilled out like tears and into the night, surrounding them, enclosing them, wrapping them tight in a shroud. The darkness slithered and whispered.

Then: thump, thump, thump. Pounding fists.

Goode drew in a sharp breath: “Get up! Get up!” he cried to the horses, his whip cracking like thunder. “Get-up you sonsofbitches! Get-up!”

Hyden just kept watching the box, wondering maybe if his scattergun would be of any use against what tried to climb out of it. Whatever was happening in there, it wasn’t good. Wasn’t natural. There were arcane mysteries fermenting in there, dark alchemies brewing, spectral truths rattling their teeth. In the black, noisome darkness, something was breathing and aware. And that something was worse than anything Hyden could imagine.

The wagon was really rolling then, down a bend that cut through the hills and over a creaking wooden bridge that spanned a rushing, icy creek.

“Only a few miles now!” Goode cried out, the wagon thundering towards its destination, the horses pounding forward like the devil himself was chasing them…and maybe he was. Goode kept looking over at Hyden apprehensively, then back at the box. “Just hang tight! I can…yeah, I can see the lights below!”

Hyden took his word for it.

He did not turn and look.

He could not turn and look.

His eyes were wide and staring, that frosty wind buffeting him mercilessly. But he did not feel it. Did not feel his numb fingers on that wooden stock. Did not feel that icy mortuary chill that crept through his bones and locked them tight and hard as iron in a deep freeze. All he knew was the box. It was the center of his universe. It was a dark star and he was a speck of dust caught in its malefic orbit. All he could do was watch those nails twist up and pop free, one after the other.

And in the box, a flurry of scratching and pawing and thudding.

Something in Hyden suddenly snapped. A wild, shrieking terror ripped through him and he began to shout: “I’m getting out of here! I’m jumping out of here! This is crazy—“

But Goode forced him back down and told him to shut up, shut up, goddamn it, it was all in his head, all in his head. But the idea of being alone in that wagon with that box in the back and what it contained…Goode knew he couldn’t do it by himself. Just couldn’t. And Whisper Lake was right before him now. To either side were the derricks and mainframes and hunched shacks of the outlying mining camps.

Something back there made a loud, snapping sound and Goode didn’t need to turn to see that one of the brass bands had broken open and the other wouldn’t be far behind and then…and then…

Hyden’s breath was coming in sharp, hurtful gasps. He was shaking so badly he could not hold the shotgun. It clattered uselessly to his feet.

And then they were in town and whatever was in the box seemed to sense that, for it settled back down into its cold berth and waited things out. Goode and Hyden let out a collective sigh, but did not relax until they found the undertaker’s and got rid of the damnable thing.

 

3

Hiram Callister was who they found.

Rotund, greasy Hiram Callister, undertaker and cabinetmaker. He prepared the bodies and fashioned the boxes they were tucked carefully into. Cheap pine affairs or sometimes imported black mahogany shipped in by rail for rich miners or railroad men. Hiram preferred to work by lamplight just as his younger brother Caleb—and co-owner of Callister Brothers Mortuary—preferred the light of day. And when Hiram was not handling wood and deadwood, he secreted himself into his chambers above and poured over his collection of pornographic pictures, most of which were sent to him by a friend in New Orleans where such things were readily available to the connoisseur…for a price.

Hiram had never been very good with women.

With people in general.

At least, not living ones. He had been a plump, bookish child and had become a heavy, unsightly man with a bevy of quivering chins that herded about his lower jaw and neckline like pink hogs at a trough. He was fond of cakes and candies. Had an abnormal condition of the sebaceous glands which caused him to sweat profusely. His hands were oddly cold and he was given to stuttering in civilized company. Children often pointed to him on the streets. He could be found by night, chewing taffy and chocolates and French crèmes amongst the sheeted forms in the mortuary, dabbing continually at his moist face and brow with a handkerchief. For this was his world, a world of caskets and chemicals, corpses and silver gleaming instruments. A world that was close and dim and smelled of iodine and alcohol and less pleasant things.

But it was Hiram’s world and he coveted it.

Let Caleb have the daylight. For Caleb was something that belonged in the daylight—handsome and charming and sure. He spent his days consoling widows and his evenings in gambling dens and brothels telling off-color stories of the dead. People called him friend and lover just as they called Hiram ghoul and deviant, telling nasty stories about him.

Hiram did not care.

In the end—man, woman and child—they were always his.

He fancied the women. Particularly the young ones. Not the upstanding wives and sisters—if there were such things in a seething mining town like Whisper Lake—but the prostitutes. They had been touched and fondled in life, so Hiram figured it was no sin to do the same with them in death. But only the prostitutes. Never anyone else. Regardless of what people whispered about him, he did have standards, professional ethics.

When the two men with the casket showed up, Hiram had the body of a young whore stretched out before him like a cedar plank. She’d slit her wrists. Hiram was touching her, sweating and breathing heavily…then those two banged on the door. One was some old grizzled desert rat, the other a kid with freckles on his cheeks. But both had wide, unblinking eyes and hands that shook. They looked like they’d seen their own ghosts threading at them in the darkness.

Hiram had never seen two men so…afraid.

They brought in the box, set it on an empty table and got out just as fast as fast could be, practically fighting to be the first out the door. But some people, Hiram knew, were apprehensive around the dead. No matter.

He had been wired about the casket.

It contained the body of James Lee Cobb. Cobb had been something of a hired gun and outlaw, a notoriously sadistic, evil man and the world was better without him. His only kin was a Mormon squatter over in near-by Deliverance—one of the Mormon villages. A half-brother name of Eustice Harmony who was willing to plant him…long as Cobb’s injun friends footed the bill. And they had.

As Hiram looked over the box, he saw that many of the nails fastening it shut were missing. One of the brass hasps had broken free. Rough handling. But the sort of thing Cobb deserved.

Hiram left the box where it sat.

He had more pressing matters than dead outlaws.

 

4

Long after midnight, a sense of dread settled into him.

He could not explain it. Did not try to.

After he’d finished with the painted lady, had locked her down in a cheap cedar box paid for by her madam, Hiram started on the Byrd brothers, Thomas and Heck. He pulled back the sheets and studied their graying faces. A shame. Both had been business owners—Thomas owned a livery stable and Heck a meat market. And now, of course, they were only so much meat themselves. It was no secret they’d both been romancing the same woman…Heck’s wife…and it was only a matter of time before such wanton fornicating would lead them here.

Hiram knew only a few details.

They’d gotten into a drunken brawl at the Cider House Saloon and Heck had pulled his old Army Colt and shot Thomas and Thomas, before his blood had run out, had slid a skinning knife into his brother’s throat. They had died in a communal pool of their own blood, locked in a fighting embrace. They had been brought in that way. It had taken both Hiram and his brother to pull their stiffened limbs from one another. Heck’s wife Clarissa was paying for the funeral, wanted them in nice boxes and wanted them presentable so they could be photographed side-by-side, cheek-to-jowl for kin back in Missouri. She could afford it—as the only living relative, she owned a livery stable and meat market now.

With gray, watery eyes like wet tin, Hiram got down to work.

His fingers were nimble and busy, forever searching and prodding, slitting and plucking. He stitched and sewed, gummed and pasted. Knives flashed and saws bit, wax pooled into hollows and catgut sealed cadaveric mysteries intact. He embalmed the brothers with a solution of arsenic and covered them with sheets until the caskets arrived.

Pumping water into the basin, Hiram pulled off his rubber gloves and washed his hands thoroughly.

The wind picked-up outside and a tree limb scratched at the roof. For a reason Hiram could not understand, a chill swept up his spine. That sense of dread again. It had been gnawing at him for hours now…but why? He found himself thinking of the two men that had brought the casket.

They’d been scared white.

But why? Why? Fatigue, maybe. They’d been on the trail for two days from Toole County to Whisper Lake. And cold, inhospitable days they had been. Such deprivation and exposure could do strange things to men. Hiram cleaned up his instruments, decided against working on Cobb tonight. The oil stove in the corner was chugging away, yet he felt cold. Worse, his skin actually seemed to be crawling in turgid waves. He wanted out of the mortuary in a bad way and was not sure why.

He paused, a droplet of sweat coursing down the hill of his cheek.

There was something, something.

He could not hear anything, but…he turned around, staring at the casket. He stood there, watching it, his brain filled with cryptic thoughts. It was ridiculous…but he had the unnerving sensation that he was being watched, studied, stared at.

Children peeking in?

No, it was too late and the shades were drawn. Carefully, slowly, he went to the windows, peered around the shades. The dirt street outside was empty. He could see the town stretching out in the distanceclustered roofs climbing the hills and dipping into hollows. He could hear the wind skirting the lonesome spaces. Hear a wagon somewhere in the distance. The sound of voices over towards saloon-row. The ever-present rumble of mine machinery.

But no one looking in, watching him.

The shadows seemed to be growing longer in the mortuary, spilling out from crevices and cracks and crannies, tangling like mating snakes across the floor. The lanterns still burned bright, yet everything seemed oddly murky.

Eyes watching me.

Imagination?

Hiram had no use for superstition. He would have no truck with it. Yet, something in him was alive and electric and concerned, afraid maybe. He walked across the room to the casket. Licking his lips, he ran his hands over the roughhewn cedar, fingering nail holes and splintered knots.

Eyes staring at me.

That body in there…James Lee Cobb…Hiram began to wonder about it as something inexplicable began to take hold of him, but so gently he was not even aware of it. All he could think about was the body in the box, body in the box. Cobb had died up in Skull Valley, they said. His injun friends had bought him a casket, paid for him to be shipped back to Whisper Lake.

Now why would injuns do that for a white man?

Hiram wiped sweat from his brow. He knew there was a reason, but he couldn’t seem to remember what it was. Cobb had come home to the only kin he had. Sure. Had a half-brother over in Deliverance, the Mormon settlement just west of Whisper Lake. That’s why Cobb was sent. The half-brother was going to pick up the box day after next, he said.

Hiram’s hands were trembling now.

He mopped more sweat from his brow, thought: What the hell is wrong with me?

He couldn’t seem to think straight. His brain was filled with wild, leaping thoughts that could not be strung to together into anything reasonable. There was a tenseness behind his eyes. Perspiration was beading his face, pooling under his eyes, streaming down his jowls. A few droplets struck the surface of the box. Plop, plop.

For one irrational moment, Hiram thought it was blood.

Yes, like a sacrifice. A blood sacrifice offered up to some malefic pagan god. Blood. Burnt offerings. A tribute of blood and flesh and burned entrails. Atonement. Expiation. Some gods demanded these things, they—

Hiram began to whimper, tears mixing with sweat.

Eyes that won’t shut, won’t die, won’t stop staring.

He stumbled over to the tool bench, found a small crowbar.

Standing over the casket, he looked upwards, seeing only the stained tiles of the ceiling, but maybe hoping for some divine intervention from God. From the Lord Jesus Christ even though Hiram did not believe in him or anything else. Regardless, something had hold of Hiram now and his thoughts were a jumble and his brain a buzzing hive of wasps. His eyes were wide and unblinking, tears bled away, taking his sanity with them. His lips moved, but no sounds came out.

Blood offering.

Watching me.

Frantically, he began pulling the nails from the box, ripping them from the cheap plank coffin. One after the other until he was panting and wheezing and his heart was pounding and his temples throbbing. He broke the remaining brass band and it clattered to the floor along with the crowbar.

The eyes are watching me.

He tore the lid from the box and let it drop away. Then he was looking inside the box and seeing he did not know what. A body in a black burial suit, yes, but wrong, all wrong. Too many shadows crawling and slinking and shifting and maybe not shadows but the body itself.

Hiram’s heart thudded dully, his breath was locked in his lungs.

Something in him shattered like white ice and he saw the eye. A single green eye, wide open and staring. Like a silver coin, it shined and glimmered, reflecting a burning light that got inside Hiram’s head.

Then there was a scalpel in his hand and he held his left wrist out.

Blood offering. Expiation.

He slit his wrist, dark arterial blood streaming into the box in loops and spirals. Something in there moved and rustled.

“God help me…” Hiram’s voice echoed from another room.

And a single rawboned, fleshless hand snaked from that pit of conspiring shadows and took him by throat.

It was like the hand of God.

 

5

Early the next morning, Caleb Callister found his brother’s body.

It had been stuffed in the casket, white and bloodless and shrunken. Caleb did not cry out or go into theatrics. He summoned the coroner quite calmly for he was a man used to death in all its unpleasant forms.

The coroner came and gave his verdict of suicide.

An odd suicide at that. Hiram, for reasons unknown, had slit first his left wrist, then his right. Then he had climbed into the box. The scalpel was still locked in his fist. The box had contained the body of James Lee Cobb. But as to where that body had gotten to, no one could guess.

Suicide, then.

The only thing that concerned the coroner were the bruises at the throat, the crushed windpipe. But he was willing to overlook this on account he had no viable explanation and Caleb was not interested in pursuing it.

Let the dead rest, Caleb told him.

Forever Amen.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Part Two: Gone to Hell

 

1

 

Seven Months Later…

The black sky unbuttoned itself like a corset, spilling cold, freezing rain by buckets that found the wind, joined with it, becoming a raging, angry thing that pounded the landscape, lashing and whipping and driving anything with blood in its veins to cover. Dusty, sun-cracked soil became mud. Mud became swamp. Swamp became rivers and creeks that overflowed their banks and sank the world.

Two hours after sunset, the water began to freeze and the rain became snow and the San Francisco Mountains were sculpted in ice. Through the maelstrom came a lone rider trotting through muck and snow and freezing rain.

His name was Tyler Cabe and he was a bounty hunter.

A yellow slicker wrapped around him like a wet, flapping skin, Cabe rode into Whisper Lake. He couldn’t see much of the town through the snow that became pelting rain and then snow again, but was simply glad to be anywhere. Anywhere he could find warmth and hot food.

He brought his strawberry roan to a gallop and stabled it at the first livery he found. Stowed his saddlebags and guns. Then he crossed the muddy, sucking streets and fell through the door of a tent-roofed saloon called the Oasis. Inside, the floor was covered in sawdust. There was a bar and tables with pine benches pulled up to them. A woodstove in the corner belched greasy fumes that mixed with tobacco smoke, cheap cologne, and body odor. A dozen worn, beaten-looking men slouched over beers and whiskey. A lone gambler played solitaire in the corner.

Whisper Lake was a company town, Cabe knew. These men and everything around them would either belong to the company or exist through its permission.

Cabe shook the rain off his flat-brimmed Stetson with the rattlesnake skin band, pulled off his slicker and hung them both from a hook near the woodstove. Dressed in striped pants, high-shafted boots, and a black frock coat, he found himself a stool at the bar, studying the oil painting above the bar which showed some fleshy jezebel displaying her charms. He saw himself in the mirror—the scars across his bony face, the sharp green eyes peering from narrow draws.

“Thirsty, friend?”

Cabe looked over at the bartender, a heavy-set man with a neck thick as an old cottonwood stump. His nose was flattened, eyes peering out from puffy pads of flesh. He had the look of a barefisted fighter about him.

“Yeah,” Cabe said. “Damn if I ain’t.”

“Beer? Whiskey? Got some rye if it’s to your taste.”

Cabe shook his head. “No, nothing like that. Need something that’ll warm me up. I’m not sure if that’s a dick between my legs or an icicle.”

The bartender laughed. “Frank Carny,” he said.

Cabe introduced himself. “You fight?” he asked.

“Once,” Carny said. “Years back.”

“Do any good?”

“Held my own. Can’t see outta my left eye no more, too many hits. A wise man does something other with his head than use it for a punching bag.”

Cabe nodded at that, made good sense.

One of the miners at the bar laughed. “Where you from?”

“Been riding all day,” Cabe said. “From Nevada. Was starting to think I just wouldn’t make it.”

“Helluva day for a ride,” the miner said. He turned to the bartender. “Make him something special, Frank.”

Carny grinned. “Ever had a Brigham Young?”

Cabe just looked at him. “A what?”

“Brigham Young,” the miner said. “After one of those, you’ll become a confirmed polygamist.”

Cabe smiled.

“Or maybe a Wild Bill Hickok? Two swallows and you’re a crack shot gunman. You’ll pull iron on anyone.”

Cabe allowed himself a laugh.

The bartender shook his head. “Nope. I think our friend here needs a Crazy Horse. You put one back and you’re ready to take on the U.S. Seventh Cavalry.”

Carny started pouring and mixing and the smell of alcohol in the air was enough to curl the hairs at the back of Cabe’s neck. A glass was set before him. He didn’t even ask what was in it. As he brought it to his lips, he felt the fumes burn up through his nostrils and right into his brain. He put it to his lips and threw it back in one swallow.

Jesus.

It landed in his belly like liquid metal, melting ice and setting dry tinder ablaze in the mother of all firestorms. Cabe started coughing and gagging and sputtering and for one divine moment, he saw the face of Jesus…and then fingers of warmth were threading through him, igniting him in places he didn’t know could burn.

“Damn,” he said. “Goddamn.”

A couple miners were laughing. Carny was smiling.

Cabe found his seat again, ordered another. He rolled himself a cigarette and lit it up. Everything in him was blazing away nicely now and he honestly didn’t have a care in the world. He’d been following a man for near six weeks now, a killer, but right then he would’ve traded shots of whiskey with him. The Crazy Horse was one damn fine drink.

He sipped carefully on the second. “I don’t think my ass has been burned so thoroughly since the war, gentlemen.”

Carny nodded, wiped out some glasses. “What side you fight on?”

“Confederate,” Cabe said, offering no more. The war was in his mind every day, but he did not speak of it. Not unless he was with another veteran. Some things were better left in the past. “You?”

Carney shook his head. “Not me. Had me a brother died at Shiloh fighting for the Union, Eighth Illinois.”

“Sorry to hear that,” Cabe said and meant it. “I truly am. Lot of good boys died on both sides and the older I get, the more I start to wonder what the hell it was all about.”

“Amen,” said the miner.

Someone coughed, then gagged, then began to mumble something. Down at the end of the bar, a man in a filthy sheepskin coat raised his head. He pulled off what was left of his whiskey, gagged and spit most of it on the floor. He had a shaggy black beard that reached to his chest and eyes like setting suns.

“War, you say?” he managed, a tangle of drool hanging from his lips like a dirty ribbon. He wiped it away with one grubby fist. “War betwixt the States. No…War of Northern Aggression. Yes sir. I fought. I sure did. Goddamn blue bellies, goddamned Yankees. Sonsofbitches.”

The miner winced as he saw the bearded man begin to stagger over. Maybe it was that he knew trouble when he saw it or maybe it was the man’s smell…he stunk like a heap of rancid steer hides.

Cabe eyed him up, didn’t like what he saw. That long stringy hair, that heavy beard all knotted-up and filthy like he used it to wipe out spittoons. His rheumy eyes were red-rimmed, but beneath that haze of alcohol…just as dusky as open graves. Some drunken, ignorant hellbilly, that’s what.

Carny stopped wiping the bar. “Sit your ass down, Orv. Just sit it right down. The house’ll buy you another whiskey. Otherwise, you can get the hell out.”

“Fuck you,” the hellbilly said, scratching at that rug of beard. He came on with a stink of urine. The stains at his crotch said he’d pissed himself and it wasn’t the first time. “Goddamn war, yes sir. I was in that war. Yessum. Lost two brothers in that goddamn war.” He stared at Cabe, not liking what he saw. “Yankee, ain’t you?”

Cabe sighed. “No, Confederate. Second Arkansas. Popped my cherry at Wilson’s Creek and lost my soul at Pea Ridge.”

The hellbilly didn’t seem to hear or want to. “You was on our side? Hell you were. Probably some goddamn guerilla out killing babies and robbing farmers. Probably rode with Bloody Bill and his murdering, raping cowards, didn’t you? Not like me. No sir, not like me. Not a real soldier.”

The miner tapped a finger to his skull, indicating that the hellbilly was crazier than dancing cats. But Cabe had already deduced as much. Didn’t take a tree full of owls to figure that.

“Now, Orv,” Carny said and said very calmly like he was talking to his pet beagle that had just shit on the carpet. “This fellow’s just having himself a drink. He don’t want no trouble. He ain’t a Yankee like me or Bob here. He’s a Southern boy like you and he was a real soldier. So just let him be, hear?”

The hellbilly hawked up a gob of phlegm and spit it at his feet. “Fuck you know, you sumbitch.”

Cabe figured old Orv was making a mistake. By the looks of Carny, he could hammer cold steel into tent pegs with those fists of his. And you just didn’t want to think about how many faces he’d disfigured or skulls he’d fractured. You didn’t get on the bad side of a man like that. It was damn dangerous. That’s what Cabe was thinking…until the hellbilly’s sheepskin coat drifted open and he saw that big, mean-looking 1851 Colt Navy .44 hanging at his side.

Cabe stopped worrying about old Orv’s face and started wondering how quick the blood would run from a .44 hole in his own belly. He figured it would run pretty damn fast.

Licking his lips with a tongue drier than desert canvas, he let the fingers of his right hand casually drift down towards the butt of his Starr double-action .44 conversion. It was a smaller weapon than Orv’s Colt. He had no doubt he could pull it faster…but, hell, last thing he wanted was any killing. That’s not why he was here.

The hellbilly was still advancing, but coming on slow like a mad dog deciding where to sink its foamy teeth.

Cabe said, “Let me buy you a drink, friend. We’ll drink to the old CSA and all the good boys we lost. What say?”

Orv’s hand slid down to his belt, brushed the butt of the mankiller waiting in the holster…and proceeded to his crotch where it began to do some scratching.

Cabe relaxed slightly.

A couple of miners sitting at tables quietly excused themselves, slipping out the door in a blast of wet, black night. Those that remained kept their distance, staying well away. Cabe didn’t like any of that. Way he was figuring things, if people were getting out, then this wasn’t just some crazy drunk. He was a crazy drunk that liked to kill.

Carny made a move for something behind the bar and the hellbilly, maybe not quite as drunk as he looked, pivoted and brought out his Colt smooth and easy.

But Cabe was already on his feet, Starr in hand.

There was a moment of pained, tormented silence, the tension so thick you could’ve speared it with a stick.

The hellbilly was laughing, but there were tears in his eyes. “Got yerself a Starr, boy? I seen ‘em in the war. Cap and ball pistol, ain’t it?”

“Converted,” Cabe heard himself say, struck by the absurdity of two men about to kill each other discussing weapons. “Had it converted to metal cartridge. Easier that way.”

The hellbilly laughed, giggled really. Saliva ran from the corners of his trembling lips. “I like my 1851, yes sir. Cap and ball, roll yer own, eh? I killed me a score of Yankees with it at Fort Donelson, didn’t I? Bluebellies begged fer their lives and I scattered their brains, didn’t I?” He cackled madly now, that gun just shaking in his fist, hungry for flesh. “Tenth Tennessee, yes sir. Bloody Tenth, they called us. Know why? Because we killed so many and took so many casualties. Blood…hee, hee…all that blood. Just a-running everywhere. You couldn’t get away from all that blood, could you? Still can’t get it off m’hands. Yankees captured us, that it? M’brothers were all dead, all dead, you say? Yes sir, I believe they was. They sent me to Camp Douglas, the POW camp up near Chee-cago. Oh m’Lord, but them Yankees had fun with us! At night they’d shoot through the barracks walls, make bets on how many Johnny Rebs they could kill with a single ball? Hee, you remember that?”

Cabe cleared his throat of dust. “I was captured, too, Orv. After Pea Ridge. I was at Douglas. Later they exchanged us…we mustered back in, went to the fighting again—“

“Liar! Liar! Liar! Goddamn bluebelly liar!” the hellbilly stammered, drool flying from his mouth, his brown and yellow teeth snapping open and shut like a beartrap. “Yer a Yankee! I can smell yer stink! Dirty murdering bastards killing Roy and Jesse! Fucking bluebellies! I kill ‘em on sight, I kill ‘em on sight!”

He brought the gun up.

Cabe began to apply pressure to the trigger of the Starr.

“If you kill ‘em on sight,” Carny said. “Then you better ready yourself, because here comes one now.”

The door had swung open and a tall man had stepped in.

He wore a knee-length overcoat, the cuffs and collar trimmed in fur. Atop his head was a round buffalo fur cap. His face was narrow, angular, the mustache riding beneath the sharp nose trimmed immaculately. He was a handsome man and his pale blue eyes simmered with authority and bearing. There was a badge pinned to his breast. It read: SHERIFF BEAVER COUNTY UTAH.

The hellbilly was staring at him, but so was Cabe.

Cabe was speechless. Something hot and wet had spilled inside of him and it made him shake, made him angry, made him boil inside. But he said nothing, not yet.

“Orv,” the sheriff said in a flat tone. “Give me your gun. You don’t and I swear to God I’ll kill you where you stand.”

The sheriff hadn’t even opened his coat to show his guns…if he even had any. But those eyes…Cabe remembered those eyes…they were merciless. And when they looked at you and into you, your insides melted like butter on a stove lid.

The hellbilly looked to Cabe almost desperately. His head shook slightly from side to side.

The sheriff walked over. “The gun,” he said. “Right now.”

Old Orv looked fit to shit himself, except by the stink, he probably already had. His fingers tightened on that big life-eating 1851 Colt. His knuckles were strained white as pearl buttons. He looked from Cabe to Carny, cast a glance at the miners. He looked oddly helpless.

The sheriff unbuttoned his coat, made damn sure the hellbilly saw how slowly and calmly he did it. And made sure he got a good look at the butt of the short-barreled .45 Peacemaker waiting in the hip scabbard.

He held his left hand out. “The gun,” he said and those words were sharp enough to cut steel.

Old Orv made to hand the gun over…then maybe the tension of the moment or just plain machismo got to him, because he started to bring it back, his eyes gone ebon and savage. But the sheriff was too quick, too sure. He took hold of the hellbilly’s wrist with his right hand, gave it a nasty twist, and that big revolver dropped into his left. He took it by the barrel and, with no more thought than swatting a fly, smashed old Orv across the face five, six times with the butt until he sank to his knees. Orv clasped his bleeding face with those soiled fingers, moaning and gobbling.

A big man wearing a tin star on his Fish slicker came through the door, looked at the ‘billy, then at the sheriff.

“Lock this trash up,” the sheriff said. Then he turned to Cabe. “Sir, if you would please, leather that pistol.”

Cabe found himself doing so without even thinking. That voice, those eyes…they were almost hypnotic somehow. But then he came to himself as the deputy hauled the hellbilly non-too gently out the door. That cocky, crooked grin opened up in his face. “Well, well, well, Jackson Dirker,” he said. “As I live and breathe.”

The sheriff raised an eyebrow, showed no sign of recognition. “Do I know you, sir?”

Cabe smiled and that smile burned with hate. “You should.” He touched the old scars running from one cheek, across the bridge of his nose, and to the next cheek. “These marks I bear…”

“What about them?”

“You gave ‘em to me,” Cabe said.

 

2

The Beaver County Sheriff’s Office.

A dirty single-story brick edifice stuck in-between the county courthouse and a mine broker’s office, looking straight out at the town square and the taverns lined-up beyond like prostitutes offering an easy time.

Cabe stood outside in the blowing, wet wind, his boots caked with mud like wet cement.

He wasn’t sure what he was feeling just then, but it wasn’t good. Part of him wanted to kick though the door and gun down that arrogant sonofabitch of a county sheriff. But that wouldn’t do and he knew it. That was not how things were done in real life. He had thought of Jackson Dirker for years, playing out revenge fantasies in his mind for the time when they met up again—if ever—and now it all fell to his feet. Like the shed skin of a snake, these fantasies were simply dead.

He came through the door and saw the big deputy sipping from a tin cup of coffee. He was a large man, heavy in the middle, but broad in the shoulders and powerful-looking. He wore no gun. He hadn’t at the saloon either. Cabe figured he was like old “Bear River” Tom Smith down in Abilene years back, enforcing law and order with his bare fists.

“What can I do for you?” he asked. “I’m Henry Wilcox, deputy.”

“Tyler Cabe. I have business with Sheriff Dirker. He about?”

“In the back,” Wilcox said. “I’ll get him.”

Cabe found a straight-backed chair and pulled it up to what he assumed was Dirker’s desk—a big oaken antique outfit, papers and the like organized very neatly. Yeah, that would be Dirker. Officious, stern, militaristic.

Sure as shit.

Cabe had been in lawmen’s offices in dozens and dozens of towns, if not hundreds. Some were nothing more than tumbledown shacks with shackles bolted to concrete blocks to hold prisoners. Planks set over barrels for desks. But not here. Not in a rich mining county. The job of county sheriff would be a very lucrative one.

You could expect nothing less of Jackson Dirker.

Cabe waited there, lighting a cigarette and studying the wanted dodgers on the walls, town ordinances, a rack of repeating rifles chained into a hardwood case.

The door to the back—the holding cells, Cabe figured—opened and Dirker stepped out and Cabe felt butterflies take wing in his belly. Dirker wore a striped suit with a gold watch chain and a string tie. The sort of duds a banker might wear. But Dirker had impressive bearing and he would’ve looked like the man in charge had he worn a corset and dress.

He sat down across from Cabe. “You have business here, Cabe?”

Cabe felt his voice catch in his throat, snag there like denim on a nail head. For a moment he wondered if maybe he had the wrong man here…but no, there was only one Jackson Dirker. Cabe had known it was him the moment he’d come into the Oasis. The face was older, lined impeccably by experience. There was a touch of gray at the temples. But those eyes, you couldn’t forget them. Twenty years had not tempered their ferocity. They could still burn holes in cinderblock.

“You remember me, Dirker?”

The sheriff nodded. “I do.”

“Didn’t seem like you did back at the saloon…”

“It took a moment.”

“The scars refreshed your memory?”

Dirker arched an eyebrow. “Scars are hardly a novelty in this country, Cabe. Now what is it you want?” he said. “What’re you doing here?”

“I came to see the ocean, feel the spray.”

“The ocean is hundreds of miles from here.”

Cabe slapped his hat against his knee. “Damn…I must’ve taken a wrong turn.”

Dirker was not amused. “Is this business or personal?”

Now there was a question. Good old Crazy Jack Dirker. You just couldn’t rattle the man. He could talk about dismembering a baby same way he talked about trimming his toenails. That chiseled face was incapable of emotion. It knew not hate or anger, love nor happiness. Only the eyes were alive in that mask. Course, last time Cabe had seen him, he was wearing the dark blue sack coat and Jeff Davis hat of a Union Army lieutenant.

Cabe drew off his cigarette. “I tell you, Crazy Jack…folks still call you that?”

“They do not. During the war, only Johnny Rebs referred to me as that, I understand.” He said this indifferently. Names meant nothing to him. You could call his mother a whore and if he didn’t want to kill you, you couldn’t make him do it. But if he was in the mood, look out.

“I can’t tell you how long I’ve thought about you, what I’d do to you when I finally caught up with you.”

“The war’s over,” Dirker said. “Act like a man and move on. That’s what has to be done. The South underestimated the will and strength of the North. Such assumptions lose wars. Everyone did what they felt they had to do. Now it’s over. We’re united and have been for many years. We have to look to the future and learn from the past.”

Cabe’s teeth were clenched. “Sure enough, sure enough. I’d like to forget the whole sorry mess…but every time I look in damn mirror, Dirker, I remember. These scars don’t let me forget.” Cabe let himself simmer down. Dirker was in control, like always. He would not let the man win this discussion, make him into some hot-headed fool Southerner. Not this time. “We lost, Dirker. When you lose, it ain’t so easy to forgive and forget. You think of how it could have been different. It’s tough on a man.”

Dirker arched that eyebrow again. “Sometimes it’s tough on the victor as well. You think of what was done and how you could have treated your foes more civil, excused them for their transgressions.”

Goddammit. The sonofabitch was acting like a poet and preacher and statesman now. Trying to make Cabe think he actually had some sort of heart beating in that empty chest of his. But Cabe did not believe it. “Pea Ridge. You remember it? I do. We got our asses cut to threads there. You bluebellies scattered us to the four winds. Me and my boys…we weren’t even sure where we were. No shoes. No food. No ammunition. You rounded us up, Dirker. That bastard sergeant of yours shot down Little Willy Gibson! Then you took that whip of yours to the rest of us. When I begged you…begged you to stop, you did this to my face. I was down and you were still whipping me…”

Dirker’s lips had formed into a tight line now like a saber slash. “You boys…yes, I remember you boys. I remember what you did to those soldiers we found. Their corpses were mutilated, Cabe. It was disgusting. I should’ve killed you and the rest of that gutless Southern trash then and there. But I didn’t.”

Cabe was on his feet now. “You bastard! You goddamn fucking Yankee bastard! I told you then and I tell you know, we didn’t touch them bluebellies! When we came upon them, they were already like that…guts hanging out and faces hacked-off…we just wanted their guns, their food! We were starving for the love of Christ!”

Dirker listened to Cabe’s dramatics, did not believe a word of it. “We can discuss this until we’re blue in the face, Cabe, but it won’t bear flower. I don’t believe you. I never have.” He folded his hands on the desktop. “Now, did you come here to debate the war or was there something else on your mind?”

Cabe shrank down into his chair, very much feeling the weight of the gun at his hip. But once a man had made up his mind, you couldn’t change it. You had to let it lay, like it or not. “All right, Dirker. All right. I been tracking a fellow. Hunted him through Nevada and he went to ground, I think, around here somewhere. I don’t know his name and I have only the vaguest description of this animal. But I know what he did—”

“You’re a bounty hunter?”

“A man’s got to make a living.”

“I wasn’t judging you, merely establishing the fact. Go on.”

Cabe found it easier if he didn’t look at Dirker, so he looked at the wall, pretended he couldn’t hear the sound of that whip in his ears. “This fellow, newspapers call him the Sin City Strangler. He jumps from one mining town to the next, losing himself in the influx of strangers.”

Dirker nodded. “I’ve heard of this one.”

“Be hard not to. This sumbitch likes himself prostitutes, Dirker. Has what you might call a special taste for them,” Cabe said grimly. “He likes to get ‘em off somewheres alone where he can get a scarf around their throats, you know? Likes to fuck ‘em whilst they’s dying. And then he takes a big knife—skinning knife maybe—and cuts ‘em open, spreads their goodies all over the place.”

Dirker was unmoved. “Disgusting,” he said, but it was hard to tell if he really meant it or not.

Cabe agreed with him on that. It was disgusting. The Sin City Strangler had murdered six prostitutes in the past five months. First one was at the Barbary Hotel out in San Fran, followed by two more at hell-for-leather mining camps in Churchill County, Nevada. Then Eureka, Osceola, and finally Pinoche—all sprawling mining towns, all veritable “dens of iniquity”, as the preachers and reformers said. For once money started coming out of the ground, it attracted the parasites and bottom-feeders like blowflies to a carcass.

A pissed-off miner had first put the bounty on the Strangler.

A thousand dollars…even though no one had truly ever seen him or had any real idea what he looked like. Eyewitness descriptions ranged from tall and fair to short and swarthy and everywhere in-between. Some said the Strangler was a Mexican who’d slipped from some insane asylum and others were certain it was some European immigrant. Regardless, sickened by the severity of the crimes—and it took a lot to sicken folks in mining towns—more money was thrown at the Strangler and now the bounty was up near five-thousand. The governor of the Utah Territory had thrown another thousand on top of it for information leading to the identity and/or whereabouts of the Sin City Strangler.

“I been tracking this bastard since Eureka,” Cabe said. “That’s where I started after him. In Osceola I got a good long look at his handiwork…it was bad, Dirker. You and me…we both seen things in the war…but this, Jesus, I ain’t never seen nothing like this.”

“And you think this animal is here?” Dirker said.

“I think he’s in Beaver County. Whisper Lake is exactly the sort of place he’d come to hunt…I just have to wait and see. Sooner or later, he’s gonna fall into my lap.”

Dirker sighed, shook his head. “Cabe, ten years ago Whisper Lake was a placer camp with one store, a saloon, and a scattering of shacks. Then they struck a large silver ore deposit and pretty soon we had mining companies in here buying up everything—the Arcadian, Southview, Horn Silver. We have nearly five-thousand people in and around this town, another eight-thousand over in Frisco. Point being, we got hundreds of people tramping through here in a month…to find one man in that human stew, it’ll be a hell of a job.”

Cabe said, “I’ll get him, dead or alive.”

“Just make sure you get the right one.”

Cabe stood up, stretched, pulled on his slicker. “One of these days, Crazy Jack, we gotta have ourselves a chat about the war. Just you and me.”

“Get out of here, Cabe,” Dirker told him. “And don’t make any trouble. I already have my hands full.”

Cabe went out into the storm, grinning. Maybe if things worked out right, Dirker’s hands would be even fuller.

 

3

The hellbilly’s name was Orville DuChien.

His cell in the Whisper Lake lock-up was eight feet long and four wide. The walls were brick and the floor was covered with straw. It was cold and damp and water dripped from the ceiling. In the summer the cells were filled with bugs; in the winter, just as cold as an icehouse. The cot Orv sat on was barely wide enough to hold a man and the single army blanket issued was little protection against the frosty night.

So Orv sat there in his own commingled stench, scratching at his beard, thinking and remembering and becoming generally confused as always. For he was certain there was something he was supposed to remember, but for the life of him, he just drew a blank. But sometimes his mind was like that. Like some blackboard scribbled full of interesting and pertinent information, but if you didn’t run up there quick and read it, all those words and ideas just sort of faded away.

So Orv sat there and was glad it was cold because when it was cold it killed off the nits in his beard and hair. And those damn things, why, they could just about drive a sane man crazy with all the itching.

Orv thought: Quit thinking about yer livestock, you damn idiot, you ain’t here on account of that. Yer her because…because…

Dammit, there went the old memory again. Like a chip of lake ice caught in July sunshine, it just plumb melted away. Made Orv wonder sometimes if he was crazy and maybe he was, but just because his brain had gone to grass, didn’t mean he was raving. Though, sometimes, sure, he raved and maybe got a little out of control. And when that happened, Dirker had Henry Wilcox or Pete Slade or one of them other deputies lock him up like a pea in a poke and that was okay.

Beaver County jail?

Hell, it was damn comfortable compared to that Yankee military prison at Camp Douglas. Food was better, too. You didn’t get beaten or used for target practice. You didn’t have to drink out of the cesspool or watch all them good boys with empty bellies wander about like living, breathing skeletons just this side of the grave. And that had been just pitiful, when you thought about it, because the bluebellies had food. Had plenty of it, but they liked to watch their enemies starve.

Starvation.

Now that was a hell of a plot to hoe. Used to be a sergeant at Douglas from Alabama had just gone mad. Was so thin you could’ve slipped him in an envelope. Orv only heard him say one sane thing whole time he was there. Boy, he said, way I’m a-figuring it, I’m about six-hundred miles from home and six-inches from hell.” Orv never forgot that. Most of the time that sergeant was trying to dig bugs up from the dirt or hiding rat corpses under the shacks for a sweet midnight snack or telling the guards he wanted to speak with President Lincoln and that Andrew Davis could kiss his white Alabammy ass for leaving him rot in that hole. And if old Andy Davis wanted to bang his sister Nell, why just go right on ahead, because she’d laid with everything from injuns to wild boars and a lying politician ought to slide in just about right.

Orv tried to pull his head back out of the war and it was no easy feat.

Sometimes all he could see were Yankees. Dead ones and living ones. Dirker was a Yankee, so was Henry Wilcox. Peter Slade, too…no, that wasn’t right. Slade was from Mississippi. But he smelled like one. Orv hated that Northerner smell they had about ‘em. Like that one time over in the Oasis, that Yankee sumbitch said he was with the 2^nd Arkansas. Said he was at Pea Ridge, but it was a lie. Sumbitch carried a Starr revolver and had that red-blonde hair to his shoulders and them scars on his face. Probably some Kansas redleg out murdering honest folk. Yeah, goddamn Yankee, lying like that. Who’d he think he was?

Orv told himself to pay it no mind for that was years back.

No, no, that wasn’t right either. Yesterday or maybe today. Sure, because Dirker had taken away his 1851 Colt Navy, same gun he’d carried since the Bloody Tenth where he’d taken it off an officer. Taken if off him when he hid under them bodies…and, damn, where were Roy and Jesse?

Oh, dead and dead. Sure, for years now. Died in the war.

Orv clasped his head in his hands and tried to make his brain work, but it just didn’t want to and how was that for a bag of beans?

Listen.

Sure, Orv’s mind was clearing some now.

He could hear things up in the hills, bad things. Things riding horseback that looked like men maybe, but weren’t really men. Oh, it was bad, bad, bad. His people were from the Smokey Mountains in Tennessee. His mother’s kin were all conjure folk and they had the second sight and sometimes Orv did, too. Sometimes he’d see things in his head before they happened…only it didn’t do him much good because he always forgot by the time they came around. Mother’s people were like that. Grandpappy Jeremiah Hill was like that, too. Time them farmers from up in Hawkins County had cheated him out of his prize hogs, but did it legal-like so Jeremiah couldn’t do much about it but curse and dance a jig. Only, Jeremiah went into a black mood and hexed them boys and crows came in the dead of night and pecked their eyes out which wasn’t a bad thing really, because Jeremiah’s witching had shown ‘em things they didn’t want to look on no more.

Orv went to the tiny barred window.

Damp wind blew in his face and it felt good and he looked up into the shadowy hills climbing above the town, knowing that was where the evil was, where the bad things roosted. He could see faces and forms in his mind, but they were indistinct and the voices were only a little clearer. And it all made something black and toxic twist in Orv’s belly because he could smell death, death circling the town. Just like he’d smelled it in Camp Douglas and heard it there at nights, picking through the piles of bones and rags and unburied corpses. Now death was here and his mind showed him that and he knew, as always, that death was always hungry and its belly always empty.

Knowing this, Orville DuChien slid down the wall like a teardrop and began to whimper, praying for dawn.

 

4

Tyler Cabe came into the St. James Hostelry out of the storm, rain dripping from the brim of his Stetson. He wiped the mud from his boots, crossed to the fire in the hearth and warmed himself. A slim woman in a blue denim bustle dress was polishing the banister with a rag.

“Good evening,” she said.

“Ma’am,” Cabe said. “I need me a room. Maybe for a week, maybe more. Possibly less.”

The woman walked over to the desk, opened the ledger. “I’m sure we can set you up, Mister—”

“Cabe. Tyler Cabe.”

He got a good look at her and saw she was quite pretty. Her hair was just this side of midnight, her cheekbones high, her eyes like melting chocolates. And her voice was nice, too. Velvety, sweet. It had a fine Southern twang to it…but one softened by an upper class upbringing. Cabe figured she was from a fine family.

“And your business?” she asked.

Cabe just looked at her. Most hotels and rooming houses did not ask such questions. But Whisper Lake was a wild town by all appearances, so you couldn’t blame the lady for being particular.

“I’m a bounty hunter, ma’am,” he said, neither proud nor ashamed. “I hunt down folks for a living. Sometimes animals. That bothers some people. Does it bother you, ma’am?”

“Not in the least.” She wrote these things in the ledger. “Just let’s understand ourselves right off, Mr. Cabe. What you do is your own business, just don’t drag it back here. This is a respectable place for respectable people. You want to drink, whore, and gamble, that’s your affair, but keep it out there. I won’t have it under my roof. Is that understood, Mister Cabe?”

He walked over from the fire, rubbing his hands together. “Yes, ma’am. It is. I’m not here to hell around, I’m here on business.”

“Very good. The rooms are five dollars a day. Breakfast is at eight and supper at five, promptly. Lunch is your own affair.”

“Five dollars…that’s pretty steep, ma’am.”

She nodded. “Yes, it is. But this is a mining town, Mr. Cabe. There are other hotels that charge fifty dollars a night. But if you prefer something more economical, there are many bunkhouses you can get a bed at. A straw-filled mattress for two bits a day, still warm from its previous occupant. But here, the rooms are clean. There are no bugs. And the food is good.”

Cabe paid her for two days. “Guess you talked me into it.”

Grabbing his bag, he followed her up the stairs. His room was small, but comfortable. Bed, bureau, wash basin, tiny closet. A window looked out over the rainy/snowy streets.

She lit an oil lamp with a stick match. “So you’re a bounty hunter. Hmm. Never met a bounty hunter before. You hunt down men and collect the bounties. How does that make you feel, Mr. Cabe? Does it make you feel important? Like a big man?”

“No, ma’am. More like a small man with a full belly.”

She smiled at that. “An impertinent answer to an impertinent question.”

Cabe sat on the bed. “I could use a bath, ma’am, if you could arrange it. By the way…I didn’t catch your name?”

“Oh…yes, how rude of me. Janice Dirker,” she said.

 

5

Well, this was really gonna be something, wasn’t it?

Cabe soaked in the hot water and thought about the war and Jackson Dirker—his wife and the hotel he owned. More he thought about it, more he started thinking how funny it all was. How everything comes back to a man sooner or later. His past was like some ghost he’d stuck away in a box, trying to forget about it, and now it had gotten loose, was coming right back at him.

And Dirker? Jackson Dirker?

How did he honestly feel about him? That was a good question. He did not like the man, not really…yet, he didn’t exactly hate him anymore. Time had dulled his anger. He felt neutral, if anything. It would have been much easier to hate him if Dirker was more offensive, was inclined to brag about what he’d done. But that’s not the sort of man he was. Sure, Dirker was still a dirty son of a whore, but he was hardly the demon that had plagued Cabe’s memories all these years.

And that only made things tougher.

Cabe thought: You ain’t here to address past wrongs. Keep that in mind. Giving Dirker trouble won’t fill your poke. You’re here to find that Strangler, to run that mad bastard to ground. That’s it. You start trying to crowd Dirker, there’s gonna be trouble. He’s the county sheriff. He could make life real unpleasant for you.

But…Sammy, Pete, Little Willy Gibson. What of them?

Gibson had died in the woods that day, Sammy at Camp Douglas. Pete had been exchanged with Cabe, mustered out to another unit. Was it justifiable to hate twenty years after the fact? The bible preached forgiveness, but Cabe had never been a real forgiving sort and wasn’t much on scripture. But on the other hand, he was not a hateful nor violent man, despite his occupation. Whenever possible he tried to get by on his wits, to outsmart his adversaries.

But Jackson Dirker…dammit, the man knew how to yank his chain. Cabe had gone into his office, planning on staying in control and that sonofabitch had worked him into a lather without never once raising his voice.

The South had lost the war. It was a fact. Like any good son of the Confederacy, that still hurt some, still burned in a secret place. But Cabe couldn’t sit around stewing that the Yankees had trampled the family holdings like others. His people were dirt poor sharecroppers from Yell County, Arkansas…they never had shit to begin with. If the Yankees had burned the farm, it would have been a distinct improvement.

So he couldn’t cling to that.

Sometimes, he wondered just what there was to cling to.

Running callused fingers over the scars threading his face, he decided to hell with Dirker. He’d sort that out later, if and when the time came. Now there was business and money to be made.

 

6

Sometimes Caleb Callister thought about his life and the building blocks that it was erected from. But not often. Now that Hiram was dead and buried some seven months, Caleb was the sole owner of the Callister Brothers Mortuary which would soon be renamed Callister Funeral Parlor. Occasionally, Caleb missed his brother, but not too often. They’d always had a pretty good arrangement—Caleb made the coffins and Hiram embalmed the bodies. Handling corpses was nothing Caleb cared for. After Hiram died, he’d tried his hand at it for a time, but it made him sick touching that cold clay so he’d hired an embalmer named Moss out from Stockton, California.

Moss was capable and he minded his own business, which was a plus. Caleb didn’t have that much to hide—not since Hiram’s passing that was—but last thing he needed was some young snip fresh out of mortuary school nosing into his affairs. Caleb was a gambler and a womanizer and most knew it, but he liked to keep such things quiet. For by day he was a respectable business owner. And he didn’t need Moss spreading stories about the teenage girls Caleb had brought to the mortuary or what he did with them in the rooms above.

Some things had to be kept secret.

Like the history of the Callister brothers, for instance.

Nobody in town knew much about them. Like everyone else they had just drifted in like leaves before a harsh Autumn wind. They blew in and set up a cabinetry shop and then the local undertaker had died, so Hiram decided they should get into that end of things, too, since most cabinetmakers were undertakers as well.

So they did and in a town with a very high mortality rate like Whisper Lake, it proved very lucrative. Extremely so. Eventually (and with the population boom) the Callisters gave up making cabinets and concentrated on coffins and undertaking. And this is all people really knew about the Callister brothers, aside from whispers and gossip.

They didn’t know that they were from Logansport in western Louisiana or that their father had been a cabinetmaker and his father before him. They didn’t know what it was like growing up with a man who was hardened by life and physically powerful from uncounted years of harsh manual labor. A man that liked to drink and use his fists on his family. Caleb himself had tasted the fury of those fists on numerous occasions as had Hiram. And that time the old man had caught Hiram out in the barn with that other boy doing those disgusting things, he’d nearly beaten him to death.

Only Caleb’s intervention had saved his life.

And sometimes Caleb wondered why he’d bothered because as the old man said, Hiram was “touched and not by the hand of the Lord.” Hiram was a strange boy, plump and bookish. He didn’t run and play with the other children. He collected beetles and toads and anything dead he happened upon. Liked to sun-dry dead things and sit around and look at them. Caleb thought it was sick, but Hiram was blood and what could he do but protect him? Except, the older they got, the more peculiar Hiram became. And it was Caleb himself, just shy of his twentieth birthday, that had to pay that boy off after what Hiram had done to him. And it wasn’t the first time. For Hiram was a pervert and he had fondness for children, especially boys. But Caleb protected him and kept his secret, though sometimes he’d wake in the middle of the night, his skin crawling at the memory of things he’d seen.

But that was a secret.

The Callisters had been good at secrets. The old man had a few of his own. By the time he was fifteen, Caleb had been to the local brothel more than once, striking up friendships with some of the girls. Most, barely older than himself. They had confided in him that his father would come in drunk, throw money around, then want to take one of the girls upstairs. That he liked to use his belt on them. That was one of his secrets. Another was what happened to their mother. The old man didn’t think the boys knew, but they knew, all right. They didn’t believe she had up and run off. They knew the old man had come home one night in a drunken rage, stinking of whorehouse perfume and their mother had mentioned the fact. And the old man had savagely beat her. Kept beating her long after she was unconscious, pounding her skull with those massive fists until her brain had hemorrhaged and she had died. And that the old man had thrown her body in an abandoned well…where her bones still lay. Yes, the boys knew this, but they kept it secret.

Secrets, secrets.

Like how the old man had taken to regularly beating Hiram because he was so sick ashamed of “that queer little bastard.” Yet, Hiram remained at home even after Caleb had long since moved out. But trouble was going to come in spades and it finally did. Caleb had gone home to visit after three solid days of debauchery and found Hiram, naked and bloody, standing over the old man’s corpse with a hatchet in his hand. Hiram had nearly cut his head off. So another secret was born. They bagged up the old man in sack cloth weighed down with rocks and sank him in the depths of the Sabine River where he could spend eternity with his own kind—alligators and water moccasins and all the other slimy, slinking nightmares that called those dark bottoms home. Shortly afterwards, once the old man was declared deadon account he just vanished and nobody in town liked him anywaythey sold off the properties and business and came west.

People in Whisper Lake did not know these things.

Nor did they know what Hiram did with the corpses of dead prostitutes that came into the mortuary. Or how Caleb had happened in one night and found him having sex with one of them. And by that point, Caleb was just damn sick of covering up for that goddamn deviant even if he was his older brother. And that when Caleb found him dead—suicide, coroner said, even thought they both knew it was far from the truth—it was really a blessing because sooner or later, Hiram was going to get caught doing something unpleasant and it would destroy everything Caleb had worked for. And when Hiram was buried, a lot of secrets were buried with him.

But there were secrets even Caleb did not know.

Like maybe how it was for Hiram that night when black, malevolent voices got into his head and made him see things and feel things and hear things that were just plain awful. Or how he opened James Lee Cobb’s casket and Cobb was awake in there, staring, staring with a single eye like a coal glowing in a furnace, taking the blood sacrifice offered him. Or how Hiram went mad when Cobb took him by the throat and tried to scream but had no voice and his heart finally gave out, knowing, knowing that nothing could look like Cobb and live.

Caleb did not know about that, but he sometimes guessed awful truths.

People in town could not know these things. Nor would they honestly want to. Just like they didn’t know that Caleb Callister hated Mormons and was part of a vigilante gang that had murdered no less than twelve of their members or how omnipotent he felt when he pulled on that white hood and got down to business. And they didn’t know about those two Mormon girls the vigilantes had happened upon picking berries and how they had raped them continually until they’d bled and then slit their soft white throats and buried them in shallow graves no one would ever find. Or how the vigilantes laughed when renegade Indians were blamed for the disappearance of the girls. Nobody knew about that. Nor did they know that of all the Mormon camps and villages scattered in the hills and valleys, the vigilantes did not raid in the one called Deliverance. Because even the Mormons shunned that place and whatever had happened there, it was Devil’s work.

And above all, nobody guessed that the disappearance of James Lee Cobb’s body and the hideous degeneration of Deliverance from a God-fearing Mormon hamlet to a place of dark, nameless rites was not coincidental, but very much connected.

Like the Callisters, these secrets were tended in the lonely tracts of the town’s sordid soul.

 

7

Despite being warm from his bath and just as relaxed and easy as a kitty curled up in a drawer, Tyler Cabe threw on a deerskin jacket and a pair of gray woolen pants and went back out into the elements. The rain had stopped and the wind had died down, but it was still cold and his boots sank four inches into the mud sea of the road.

At the Oasis, Frank Carny was still on duty. A swamper was mopping bloody sawdust from the plank floor. There had been a knife fight, Cabe learned. No one had died, but it had been a messy affair as such things often were. A few men were playing poker and a few others were huddled at tables, telling stories of strikes in the Montana goldfields.

Cabe drank beer and told Carny why he was there and the two got down to some serious talking.

“Well, I’m sorry to hear that you and the sheriff don’t get on so well. All I can say is that he’s a good man, far as I can tell,” Carny said. “Like him or not, you gotta admit that boy’s got a real set on him. Shit, I’ll wade in on anybody with my bare fists…but they got a gun? Forget it. I become a coward then. Dirker? Hell, he goes right after anybody, he figures they’re causing trouble in his county.”

Cabe sipped off his beer. “I ain’t saying he’s a bad sort, Frank. Ain’t saying that at all. We just have a history is what. So much water under that fucking bridge, it’d drown a bull elephant.”

He hadn’t told Frank Carny everything. Just enough so he’d understand the lay of the land, so to speak. Understand who and what Tyler Cabe was and who and what Jackson Dirker was to him. Cabe figured that was important, because he needed a friend in this town, someone he could trust and was plugged into the local grapevine. Sometimes a little confession softened a person. Sometimes you had to expose your flanks to win the battle.

Carny put his elbows on the bar, looked Cabe dead in the eye. “Listen, Tyler. You seem like a right sort to me, so I’ll tell you something. Dirker’s got a lot friends in this town…and he’s got a lot of enemies. I tell you this, just so as you don’t speak out of school to the wrong person. I like Dirker…but I’ve been around, I understand how it must be for you. I’ve got enough lumps and bumps and scars…but, we’ll say they were self-inflicted. Your scars are of a different stripe, aren’t they?”

Cabe swallowed his beer. “I would say so.”

Carny drew himself a beer from a wooden keg. “Can I be bold here, Tyler?”

“I wish you would be.”

Carny poured half the mug down his throat in a single swallow, wiped foam from his wiry mustache. “Wars are bad business. Never been in one, but you don’t have to be to figure that. You and Dirker…you were twenty years younger back then. Full of piss and vinegar. Both fighting your asses off for a cause you firmly believed in. But you were kids, neither of you had the common sense and tolerance that comes with age and experience. Keep that in mind.”

Cabe licked his lips. “Young and randy?”

Carny laughed. “Exactly. Hot-headed, pissed and pumped with the sort of craziness only youth knows and which wars—and the bastards who start ‘em—like to exploit. Just keep that in mind, friend. I’m of a mind that neither of you are the same men you were.”

Part of Cabe didn’t like Carny telling him his business and how he should feel about the shit he’d waded through…but, damn if he hadn’t asked for it. It was food for thought. So Cabe took a bite, swallowed, found it didn’t lay so bad in his belly after all. He didn’t hate Yankees like some. Maybe the rich easterners pulling the strings, but not your common man or soldier. Just cogs was what they were, he figured. Hell, up in Dakota Territory he’d struck up a friendship with a Union vet who’d lost a leg at Gettysburg. And the bottom line there was that, old enemies or not, sometimes only vets could understand other vets and what they’d been through.

“I’ll keep that in mind,” Cabe told the bartender in all sincerity.

Carny served a few beers, poured a few shots, came back. He clipped the end off a cigar and fired it up, lighting Cabe’s cigarette for him. Watching each other, maybe understanding each other, they did not speak for a time.

“Tell me about Whisper Lake,” Cabe finally said.

“It’s a mining town, Tyler. Not a company town per se, more of a three-company town—the Southview, the Arcadian, Horn Silver. They don’t own everything here, but most of it. They’re always trying to buy one another out and steal away each other’s workers and the like. The strings they pull are big ones. Caught in-between are the miners and prospectors and some of ‘em are pretty tough types. They come from back east or across the sea, just about everywhere. Then you got the usual assortment of prostitutes, gamblers, shootists, outlaws, petty criminals, you name it. Stuck in the mess are the business owners. Just one big human soup simmering away and, as you might figure, the worst possible things can and do happen here.”

“Sounds like every mining town I’ve ever known.”

“Sure. World’s full of places like Whisper Lake, Tyler. Once they strike ore, it’s all over but the dying and the scheming. Once the paint’s dry, the people show and the garbage starts piling up and said garbage collects flies.”

Cabe listened and didn’t hear anything he hadn’t heard before…yet, he had the oddest feeling that Carny was trying to say something without saying it. He finished his beer. “And?” he said.

“And what?”

Cabe studied him long and hard, his green eyes refusing to blink. “There’s something else. I can hear it in your voice.”

Carny set his cigar in the ashtray, put his elbows on the bar again. “This place is a cauldron like I was saying. Only it’s about to boil over. See, there’s trouble here. We’ve got hardrock miners vanishing out in the hills and people saying it’s Mormon militias that are responsible.”

“You believe that?”

Carny shook his head. “No, I don’t. I mean, hell Utah Territory is mostly Mormons. But mining towns like this one or Frisco are mostly gentile. Mormons don’t care for places like this—bastions of sin, they call ‘em—but I can’t see them murdering folks on account of it. They have some blood on their hands after that Mountain Meadow Massacre and the rest, but I found them to be generally peaceful folk. Clannish, but always willing to help a stranger in need. You can understand how they might not like places like this, places that might corrupt their sons and daughters.”

Cabe understood that. Mormons were no different from ordinary Christians in that respect. Places like Whisper Lake had a way of expanding their boundaries, drawing in the worst sort of people and practices. He said, “But you don’t think they had anything to do with these disappearances?”

“No, sir, I do not.” Carny re-lit his cigar. “But get folks around here to believe it. Shit. I’ve heard there’s vigilantes that have formed, are planning revenge against the Mormon camps.”

“Sounds like Dirker’s got his hands full.”

“In more ways than you can guess, friend.” Carny’s voice dropped down to a whisper and he continued. “See…there’s been not just disappearances, but murders. And I’m not talking shootings or knifings because people here don’t pay them any more mind than the brothels or gamblers. These murders I’m talking about…goddamn, folks have been slaughtered, Tyler. Mutilated in the worse ways. Heads torn off, bellies opened up, limbs ripped free. I’ve heard rumors that these bodies, they were eaten.”

A long gray ash fell from Cabe’s cigarette. “Eaten? Well, shit, sounds more like wolves or a wild dog pack. I’ve heard stories about Mormons, but never that they ate folks.”

“I agree. But, again, get people here to believe that. They’ve formed vigilance committees and are shooting at shadows. Things are getting crazy.”

But Cabe could understand it. The Mormons. They were different, they made good targets. Good ones to vent your frustrations on. Because when people got scared, they formed into gangs and these gangs needed a common enemy. If they couldn’t find one, they created one.

“I guess all I’m saying to you,” Carny began, “is that this Sin City Strangler of yours, he couldn’t have found a better place to squat. He’ll fit into this madhouse like a needle into a button hole.”

Cabe didn’t doubt that at all.

 

8

Later, in his room, Cabe did some thinking.

A mining town. Dance houses, gambling halls, saloons, brothels. There was nothing money could not buy in such a place. The riches coming out of the ground would attract killers and thieves and scoundrels of every conceivable stripe. Immigrants would flood in, bringing trash from every corner of the country with them. The mining companies would pay men three-dollars a day for ten and twelve-hours workdays, six days a week if not seven. Drillers and muckers and jackers. Powermen would gouge out drifts and slopes, gut the mountains to extract ore. And the mines would hum around the clock and timber would be stripped from hillsides for bunkhouses and shacks and offices. Run-off from the smelters would kill the vegetation and foul the creeks and rivers and the lake with waste. The fish would all die and those that remained would be fouled with toxins. The town itself would be just as filthy and stinking as a boring cob. The company—or three of them, in this case—would own just about everything and everyone. It would have stores that sold everything from beef to Bibles to bed sheets and the miners would pay in company script, keeping the workers nicely in debt. There would be company doctors and company housing and company stables. And, if all else failed, a company coffin in six-feet of rank company earth.

Men would come by the hundreds to sell their souls to the malefic company god. Lots of men would die in the shafts—from cave-ins, from gas, from explosions, from dangerous equipment—but that wouldn’t bother the company none because they had ten men lined-up and ready to take the company oath…soon as they pushed your corpse out of the way.

Yeah, that was Whisper Lake.

Like some huge human hive where flesh and blood were as cheap as desert dirt and the rich owners and their lily-white board of directors sat up in the high offices, pressed and starched and spotless. Never caring how much blood was on their hands because it always washed off and if there was enough green, it canceled out oceans of red.

Whisper Lake. A human cesspool where humanity was a commodity like hides or whores.

Then you add to that heady mix these murders and the Mormons and the vigilantes and too many hot-hands and not enough cool heads and you had real trouble.

And that, Cabe knew, was Whisper Lake laid bare. The town stripped of skin—raw quilts of muscle, yellow fat, and greasy rank blood that stank of mordant corruption.

The perfect stalking ground for the Sin City Strangler.

Looking out his window at the muddy streets below, Cabe waited. Maybe for the Strangler. Maybe for something else. Because whatever it was, it was coming. And it was going to be bad.

 

 

 

9

The prostitute’s name was Katherine Modine, but folks in Whisper Lake just knew her as Mizzy Modine, Dirty Mizzy, or “Old-Squirm-and-Kick”. Behind her back she was called “The Crab Queen of Beaver County”…and more than one scratching miner could attest to that one. But to her face she was never called anything but Mizzy. And mainly because she had a vile temper and packed a Smith & Wesson pocket .38 and was not afraid to use it. She had killed one man and shot up three others.

Mizzy was freelance, operated out of a crib over on Piney Hill, which sat in the brooding, gray shadow of the Arcadian mine…or one of them, at any rate. Her crib was a glorified shack that stunk of cheap whiskey and cheaper perfume, body odor and twenty-dollar sex. When the wind blew, the shack rattled and swayed and quite often it rattled and swayed when no wind blew. While townspeople might have said old Dirty Mizzy was “horizontally employed”, Mizzy didn’t look upon herself as a whore. She’d been selling what God gave her since she was fifteen and had worked dozens of mining camps, cow towns, and military depots from West Texas to the Wyoming Territory and had missed very little real estate in-between.

Mizzy considered herself something of an entrepreneur.

And maybe she was. In Whisper Lake, she serviced a steady stream of customers who weren’t real particular as to where they stuck their business…just grateful there was such a place. For those with more respect for what dangled between their legs, there were always the painted ladies who operated out of the sporting houses or high-dollar brothels where ten minutes with an imported French or Portuguese delight could cost you $400 or more.

Mizzy was an equal opportunity nightworker and was willing to spread her legs for any who could pay the price, regardless of race or cultural affiliation. And at twenty bucks a pop, what she offered was a bargain. And particularly in a mining town where prices tended to get inflated. And if you didn’t have twenty dollars, Mizzy was always willing to take what you did have in trade. Be that horses or cattle, buffalo furs or customized Winchester rifles, injun ceremonial daggers or a fancy pair of lizard boots. Because when she wasn’t whoring, she was selling goods out of her little shop…and she always had an eye on the inventory.

Some nights were busy, some nights were slow.

And tonight was just plain dead. So when there was a knock at the door of her crib, Mizzy grinned and the cash register in her mind rang up a sale. She quick lighted up the red tapers and turned down the oil lamp and prepared to receive a gentleman caller.

He came in out of the wind, his face just as pallid as spilled milk, offset by a sharp black mustache and eyes just as dark as chipped coal. He was tall and thin, dressed in a ankle-length frock coat and matching bowler hat.

“Well, come in, kind sir,” Mizzy told him, “and just make yourself comfortable. Name’s Mizzy. Can I get you a drink Mister—”

“No thank you, madam. That’s not why I’m here.”

Music to Mizzy’s ears. She sat back on the bed, a large fleshy woman with breasts the size of bunk pillows and a face painted-up brighter than carnival glass. Her visitor dropped a twenty-dollar gold piece in Mizzy’s glass compote tray and set his hat on the chiffonier, laid his coat across it. Mizzy loved the sound of that money ringing out against the glass. Maybe she didn’t like this fellow with those dark eyes and that graveyard marble skin and that hard slash of pink mouth…but she liked his money just fine, thank you very much.

He was not the romantic type.

He ordered her to strip and she did and he pushed himself into her almost immediately, an odd passionless look on his face as if he found the very act tedious and banal.

“Oh yes, baby, oh yes,” Mizzy said, going through her spiel, pretending to be beside herself with his masculine talents, moaning and groaning and making the sharp little squeaking sounds that always got them going.

But it wasn’t getting this one going.

His thrusts had not become more frantic; they were even and slow, impartial really, possibly disinterested. His face betrayed no emotion…it was white and smooth set with those opaque, unblinking eyes and was for all the world like the face of a manikin or a bust cut from granite.

Mizzy was a businesswoman. She liked to bring things to a close quick as could be. Hated to keep other customers waiting in line…even though there probably weren’t any more on a stormy, bleak night like this.

She laid it on thick, just totally beside herself at the sight of his greased member sliding into her, cooing and muttering filthy words and throwing down the whore-talk spicy and hot like Mexican peppers.

“Close your eyes,” the man suddenly said, his voice just as dead and flat as a crushed possum.

Mizzy did so, hoping he was getting close now. He was squeezing her breasts roughly, but if that’s what he liked, that’s what he liked…so be it. Her eyes pressed shut and her pelvis meeting his every thrust, Mizzy heard a swish of something satiny and before she could do more than gasp, he’d looped a silken scarf around her throat, pulling it tight and tighter like a jungle python trying to squeeze her life away.

She fought and thrashed and tried all the tricks she knew to throw off an unwelcome rider…but he persisted, slamming into her now as black dots danced before her eyes. Her lungs began to ache and she felt that scarf shutting down the flow of blood to her head until her face was hot and felt like it would explode from the pressure.

And he was panting.

He was drooling.

His eyes were huge and black and glistening.

“You love me…don’t you?” his voice was saying. “You love me…you love me…don’t you…don’t you…don’t you…”

Mizzy’s fingers kept trying to find that little .38, but it was gone, just gone.

And then the scarf was so tight that she sank into a darkness that just kept getting darker and more complete and from some far-off place she could feel him slamming into her and she was dying, but didn’t seem to mind so much because what was it all worth? All the struggling and swindling and whoring? Who needed that when you could slip down into ocean depths and fields of black velvet…

“…don’t you…don’t you…don’t you…”

Some five minutes after Mizzy was clinically dead, the tall man stopped thrusting, spending his seed in the cooling lower regions of Mizzy Modine, shooting life where there was now only death. When he was finished and had calmed, he took a skinning knife and slit Mizzy from navel to throat, pulling out the dripping jewels and loops of meat he found within, scattering them happily about the room. Then he slit her breasts off, cut her eyes out and replaced them with silver coins.

Then he sat and smoked a cigar and marveled at his handiwork.

Before he left, he violated Mizzy’s corpse one last time. Then he donned his coat and bowler hat and slipped out into the blowing, frigid night, became a shadow that was swallowed by others and then did not exist.

And it was a strange, ominous night in Whisper Lake. The wind blew and dogs barked and a raw malicious evil twisted thickly in the air.

 

 

10

Tyler Cabe did not like to think of the war, but sometimes it reared up in his head, big and hungry and dark, chewing right through him like a cancer. And often in the dead of night when he was alone and all the little worries and fragments of guilt a man has hidden away in his soul started coming back to him, nipping at the edge of reason and resolve. The war, then, would return as he tried to sleep…or it would jerk him awake at four a.m. with cold sweats and shakes. It would not be a memory, but a physical, palpable thing that he could feel and see, taste and smell as it oozed from his pores like diseased blood, drowning him in horror.

Cabe had been a member of the 2^nd Arkansas Mounted Rifles.

His first engagement was at the battle of Wilson’s Creek where all his wide-eyed naivete had been purged from him in the worst possible way. He often thought that it was here that he truly lost his virginity. And if that was true, it was no sweet lovemaking in the dark, but a brutal violation. A rape of all he had known and believed in up to that point. Twelve miles southwest of Springfield, Missouri, on Wilson’s Creek, General Nathaniel Lyon’s Union forces struck at the Confederate lines at five in the morning. The fighting that ensued was savage and horrible. Cabe saw men—men he’d known and trained with—blown to ground meat all around him. He was splattered with their blood and entrails. A grisly baptismal. He crawled through their remains, ducked under their anatomies that dangled from tree limbs like garland, tasted their hot, salty blood on his lips.

In the billowing smoke and confusion, half out of his mind, all he could hear was the thundering cannonade and the screams of the dying. The 2^nd pulled back from what was known as Bloody Hill, but then through sheer zeal and fortitude, were able to stabilize their positions. The Confederate forces attacked Union positions no less than three times, inflicting and taking horrendous casualties. After the third charge, the Yankee columns fell back to Springfield, but the 2^nd Arkansas and others were just too beaten-up and threadbare to pursue them. The Confederate victory—if you wanted to call it that with some 1200 dead—bolstered Southern sympathy in Missouri, but the cost was staggering.

Cabe came out of that shocked, distraught, burned and bruised and damaged.

That was his first taste, his induction into man’s oldest preoccupation.

After that, the 2^nd was sent to Indian Territory to quell an uprising by the Creeks and Seminoles. By then, Cabe was desensitized by combat and, instead of wanting to run and hide as he had at Wilson’s Creek, he dove into battle viciously. The Indian fighting was often close-in and barbaric and he found that he liked it that way. There was something far too impersonal about putting a ball through a man from a distance or shelling him indiscriminately…when you came at him with pistol and knife, were splashed with his blood and saw his agony, it woke up some primal beast that lusted for more.

And there was always more.

Pea Ridge came next.

The 2^nd Arkansas, mustered into the CS Army of the West and, thrown together under the command of Generals Price and McCulloch, began the bloody affair on the southern tip of the Ozark Mountains. The combined force stood at over 20,000 including 5,000 Indians from the Five Civilized Tribes. With a near-two-to-one superiority in numbers, the Confederates, sensing a sure victory, split their army into two columns and attacked from front and rear. But Curtis, the wily Union general, flanked both Confederate armies and mercilessly pounded them with artillery fire until the Southerners were forced to retreat.

For Cabe and the 2^nd, it was a living hell.

There’d been a blizzard a few days before and the weather was bitterly cold. Everyone was tired and hungry and near-frozen when Confederate General Van Dorn forced them into the fight. They deployed just east of Leetown in Morgan’s Woods. Confederate generals McCulloch and McIntosh were killed just two hours into the fighting and the 2^nd was left leaderless, pounded and harassed by the 36^th and 44^th Illinois relentlessly. The Confederate army was now in full retreat, pursed by the 1^st and 2^nd Union Divisions. Cabe’s company, cut off now, took shelter in an abandoned farmhouse.

Shoes worn to threads, uniforms hanging in ragged strips, Cabe and the others shivered in the cold. Starving, scratched, torn and bleeding, they waited for relief that never came. There was no food to forage and scarcely any blankets or overcoats to keep warm with. Ammunition was long used-up. Many of the men were wounded, some severely. Just a tattered band strung together with bloody bandages and pride that was quickly eroding.

Within an hour, the shelling began.

The walls collapsed, the roof caved-in. The wounded and weak were buried alive in the rubble. Johnny Miller, Cabe’s best friend in the world, was decapitated by shrapnel. The survivors tried in haste to dig the others out—their screams and pathetic whimpers echoing through the frosty air—but it was hopeless. As the Yankees pressed in, shrieking and blood-hungry, Cabe slipped off into the woods with three others—Sammy Morrow, Pete Oland, and little Willy Gibson. They trudged through swamps and crawled through bramble thickets until they were caked with cold mud, their faces scratched to the bone and uniforms cut to ribbons.

Little Willy was out of his mind, alternately giggling and sobbing and Sammy Morrow kept yelling at him, calling him a mama’s boy and telling him it was time to get weaned off that fucking tit already. But Little Willy ignored him, carrying on conversations with men long dead.

“He’s crazy, Tyler,” Sammy told Cabe. “We can’t make a run with this bastard at our heels. He’ll give us away.”

“We can’t leave him.”

“Why the hell not?” Sammy wanted to know.

But Cabe figured if he didn’t know the answer to that one, what was the point of explaining it to him?

Just around sunset, fatigued and shivering, having had no food in well over twenty-four hours, they were ready to lay down and die. Pete Oland, reconnoitering ahead, discovered a tangle of dead Yankees in a little clearing flanked by a dark, denuded thicket. Cabe counted ten men. Ten men in blue rags that had been obscenely mutilated. They had been scalped and dismembered. Faces had been gouged from the skulls beneath. Their bellies had been opened, internals yanked out and strewn in every which direction like bailing wire.

“Goddamn,” Pete said. “Ye ever seen anything like it?”

“Injuns,” Sammy told them. “All them Injuns under Pike.”

And maybe he was right, Cabe had thought. The Cherokee and Creek, Chocktaw and Chickasaw. Wouldn’t have been the first time that Indian troops had gotten a little excited in the carnage and reverted to their old ways.

“I don’t like them Yankee bastards,” Sammy said and kept saying. “But this…Christ in Heaven, there ain’t no reason for this! Ye hear me? Ain’t no reason! Goddamn injuns! Civilized tribes, my ass!”

Cabe told them to get control of themselves. The men were dead and they had died horribly and savagely, but they were dead. There was nothing to be done for them. He had his boys dig through the corpses and viscera, stripping off greatcoats, blankets, knapsacks, and cap boxes. Any food they could find and especially weapons. Whoever had slaughtered these men had left their Enfield rifles. Cabe figured that well-supplied and well-armed, his group could make it back to the retreating Confederate lines.

It was a plan…only it didn’t happen.

As they looted through the dead, disgusted to a man, a platoon of Yankee cavalry came bounding out of the thickets, ringing in the Confederate soldiers like a noose. There was no escape. No quarter. No nothing. Cabe had been through a lot up to that point…but robbing the enemy dead and then being caught at it like a bunch of ghouls…well, that was pretty much the end of the sad, old road.

The bluebellies dismounted.

Although a lot of them looked a little worse for wear with their dirty, ripped uniforms and gaunt faces drawn hard by war and atrocity, they were looking pretty good compared to Cabe and his men.

The Yankee soldiers got real excited when they saw the condition of their fallen comrades. They had to be physically restrained by their sergeants. As it was, they were like a bunch of slavering mad dogs surrounding the Southerners.

Then an officer walked through their ranks.

A tall, wiry lieutenant in a flapping blue frock coat and a Hardy hat, campaign sword at his side catching the dying sunlight. His face was set hard as marble, those blue eyes just as electric as ball lightening. He walked around the litter pile of the dead Yankees. Flipped one over with his shiny black boot. He showed no emotion, but his eyebrows kept arching, the corners of his lips pulled into a skullish frown.

Cabe knew he had to defuse an ugly situation. “Corporal Tyler Cabe, Second Arkansas Mounted Rifles, sir.”

The lieutenant announced he was Jackson Dirker of the 59^th Illinois.

Something about his bearing and steely silence made Cabe’s blood run cold. Here was a man who obviously garnered instant respect from his troops and was no doubt a good soldier…but here also was a man who, despite his reserve and indifferent manner, seemed to have an almost violent, savage aura about him that bubbled just beneath those crystal blue eyes like acid waiting to devour flesh and bone.

“Sir…we, we came upon these bodies in this condition. Our unit was chopped up at Pea Ridge, we’ve been on the dodge since yesterday. My men haven’t had a decent meal in days,” Cabe explained, his voice shrill and cracking, because, God, he knew how bad it looked. “We were only going to gather some weapons and food off these…these dead…just enough to survive with.”

The Union soldiers were all shaking and filled with a blank, mindless rage. Little Willy started babbling nonsense that no one could understand and a burly sergeant told him in an Irish brogue to shut his peckerwood Johnny Reb mouth and shut it right fucking now. But Little Willy was crazy and lost in some dream world and he kept right on, choosing the worst possible moment to begin bragging about how many Yankees the 2^nd had killed. The sergeant made a pained, choking sound and pulled an Army Colt and shot him in the head. Little Willy’s skull came apart like a shattered glass vase and his brains vomited into the grass and he fell straight over like a dead tree.

Cabe and the others started shouting and yelling and the Yankees quickly overpowered them. Cabe was knocked to the ground with a rifle butt to the temple and Sammy and Pete were roped to ash trees, then stripped to the waist.

Dirker came walking back from his mount with a bullwhip, something about him just as dark and venomous as rattlesnakes coiled in a ditch. “Graverobbers, ghouls,” he said in a weird, whispering voice. “Killing a man is one thing…but to mutilate him, to do…something…like…this…”

The whip began to snap in the air, its braided length curling and unfurling, waking and stretching…and then Dirker began venting himself. The whip lashed against the bare flesh of Pete and Sammy’s backs, laying them both open in bloody gashes. Dirker kept snapping that whip until both men quit screaming and went limp, their backs like bleeding meat. Cabe came to his senses about then and threw two Yankees out of the way, making for Dirker and then that whip licked him across the face with an explosion of biting agony that dropped him to his knees. It lashed out again and ripped into his cheeks, opened his nose in a ragged laceration. Then he was down and near senseless and that whip clawed at his face again and again and again.

The next thing Cabe knew, he was in a field with maybe a hundred other Confederate soldiers. They were force-marched to the Mississippi River where they were loaded onto the rotting hulks of old steamboats. They were packed into the lower decks and the next week or so was spent down there in the filthy, cold blackness, eating and sleeping and living on stone coal that was two-feet deep. The boat took them up the Mississippi via St. Louis to Alton, Illinois where they were loaded into cattle cars for the trip to Chicago. By the time they reached port, there were dozens of staring corpses packed down there with them…men who had succumbed to the cold, starvation, disease.

In Chicago, the Confederate soldiers were marched some two miles to Camp Douglas through icy mud and stagnant water. Their wet uniforms frozen stiff as steerhide. People came out to gawk and stare and jeer the columns of beaten Southerners…though many did seem sympathetic and some looked almost ashamed at it all. Children sometimes threw things. Other times they waved and smiled. At least…until their parents told them better.

Cabe spent six months at Camp Douglas.

Originally erected as a training base for the Union Army, it had been converted into a POW camp after the Confederate surrender at Fort Donelson. There were over 7,000 prisoners and a single surgeon to see to their needs which were many. The camp was a cesspool of standing water, unburied corpses, rotting bones, rampant disease, and vermin. Rats roamed the grounds freely, feeding off the dead and sometimes the living who were simply too weak and sick to move. Men froze death. Men were beaten to death. Men were executed and tortured for the most minor offenses. Famine killed hundreds. Outbreaks of smallpox and dysentery killed hundreds more. The water was polluted with run-off from the latrines to the point that wounds cleansed with the foul stuff quickly became infected with gangrene. In the summer, the camp became a hive of buzzing flies and biting mosquitoes which filled the air in dense clouds. The unburied dead and heaped refuse became breeding grounds for maggots and rats.

The guards were called “The Hospital Rats” and were sadistic beyond reason, often preferring to toss food into the garbage rather than see the prisoners eat it. They beat men mercilessly, made them stand naked in the snow, and often held lotteries as to which prisoner could survive the longest without food or medical care. An average of eighteen prisoners died each day. Death wagons were pulled through the camp on an irregular basis, cadavers stacked upon them like cordwood in tangles of broomstick-thin limbs and hollowed faces. Often those near-death were thrown on as well. The wagons were often left to broil in the sun for days at a time until the heaped corpses literally shuddered and writhed from the action of feasting worms and rats, expanding gases.

Cabe had not been fed very well while in the CSA.

By the time of Pea Ridge, he was down from his trim 170 pounds to a gaunt 140…but by the time he left Camp Douglas as part of a prisoner exchange, he weighed barely over a hundred pounds. A stick figure scrawled hurriedly by a child’s hand, one dressed in rags and sewn-together bits of uniform and filth-caked blankets.

After a short stay in a Confederate hospital, Cabe was mustered back into the 2^nd Arkansas which was merged with Bragg’s Army of Tennessee. Cabe saw action at Murfreesboro, was under General Joe Johnston’s ill-fated attempt to relieve the Union siege of Vicksburg. And, afterwards…Chickamauga, Chattanooga, the Atlanta Campaign. He was badly wounded by shrapnel during the Carolinas Campaign, but survived to stand with his brothers when the Army of Tennessee surrendered in North Carolina in April, 1865.

After the war he drove steers from Texas up to Kansas, worked as a nightherder, a railroad detective, and rode shotgun on a bullion stage into California. He took up bounty hunting not long after.

But for all he had seen, all he had done, the horrors of war and the living nightmares of Camp Douglas, one event still overshadowed all else…his capture in Morgan’s Woods following the Battle of Pea Ridge.

And his first meeting with Jackson Dirker.

The man who would become his own personal bogeyman and haunt his dreams for years and, very often, his waking moments.

 

11

The job of county sheriff was not an easy one.

Jackson Dirker kept busy seven days a week, very often putting in fifteen-hour days. Besides enforcing law and order in the county—no easy feat with wild boomtowns like Whisper Lake and Frisco under his jurisdiction—Dirker was also charged with the upkeep of the county jail, serving court orders, and maintaining order in police court. He spent several days a week giving evidence at trials, arranging prisoner transfers, overseeing his deputies, and charging through the mountain of paperwork all this entailed. He was also something of a fire inspector, health inspector, and sanitation commissioner. He was called in to settle disputes between the mining companies and the local army of independent prospectors, townsfolk and immigrants populations, Indians and Mormon enclaves. He was part soldier and part diplomat, part clerk and part regulator.

He was everything and all to the folks of Beaver County.

When good things happened, he was the last one to know. But when the shit rained down, he was expected to be the first on the scene with the biggest shovel.

But for all its trouble, the position was also quite lucrative.

As a high-ranking county official appointed by the territorial governor himself, Dirker was also the county’s chief tax collector. And he kept 10% of everything he brought in, which was quite a bit. He also collected licensing fees from saloons, brothels, and gambling houses. This, along, with dispensing county contracts for new roads and bridges, brought Dirker upwards of $30,000 a year.

He also owned the St. James Hostelry, which in itself was a fairly profitable venture. But he had nothing to do with that. His wife, Janice, ran the entire enterprise. From the purchase of the hotel some four years before to its renovation and operation, Janice was completely in charge.

For Jackson Dirker was a busy man.

He spent more time these days pouring over arrest records and selling the property of tax delinquents than running down fugitives—these tasks he dispensed to his deputies more often than not—but there were still things he liked to keep his hand in. Things the people expected of him.

Things that were simply too dirty to pass down to his deputies.

And these were the things that haunted Dirker.

Because when he threw it all together in his mind, mixed it up like some foul stew, the stink of it all made him wince. So he slid it to the back burner where the smell wasn’t so bad and simply brooded over it.

Because, in his thinking, Whisper Lake was a cauldron that was getting ready to boil over. And when that happened, a lot of people were going to get burned.

There was the vigilante problem. Dirker didn’t know who they were—though he had certain suspicions—but he had no doubt they existed. Some vigilance committee that had formed to harass the local Mormons. The townsfolk blamed the Mormons anytime anything went wrong. And with all the disappearances out in the hills and the savage slaughter of no less than a dozen miners so far, people were scared. Dirker understood that. But to put the blame on the Mormons when those murders were clearly the work of a marauding dog or wolf pack was ridiculous. Dirker had put bounties on the animals and as far as the missing people went, shit, this was mining country. People came and went by the hundreds each month.

The real criminals here were the vigilantes.

And what they were doing was stirring up a mess of trouble. For already there was talk of Mormon militias out seeking revenge. The Mormons were building themselves a town up on the Beaver River and people seemed to see this as evidence that the Mormons were up to no good. Again, ridiculous. As county sheriff, Dirker found them by far to be the easiest group to manage. He had much more trouble with the gentiles. The mines had brought in squatters and immigrants and outlaws. Shootings and knifings were commonplace and not a one of those incidents had ever involved the Mormons.

They were insular, isolationist, but God-fearing and law-abiding from what Dirker had seen in these past five years as county sheriff.

But, for some reason, people just couldn’t swallow that.

Maybe it was because they hated anything they didn’t understand or maybe it was because of Deliverance, another Mormon town about four miles outside of Whisper Lake. Something had happened there, something had gone bad, it was said, and the town had gone bad with it. There were crazy rumors of devil-worship and witchcraft and even the Mormons themselves shunned the place. Dirker figured Deliverance had merely splintered from the teachings of Joseph Smith and become perhaps more puritanical and offbeat, but all those stories were nonsense.

He himself hadn’t been over to Deliverance in months and months.

Last time was when he’d provided an escort for a federal prisoner wagon passing through Beaver County. They’d stopped in Deliverance to water their horses. The place was very clannish, very odd, but the people were peaceable enough, if not exactly friendly.

No, the Mormons and Deliverance were just another symptom of the cancer that was eating away the heart of Whisper Lake. Vigilantes. Mormon militias. Outlaws. Immigrants. Crazy miners. Weird animal attacks. Yes, it was all building and it was going to blow.

And into this steaming stew had come Tyler Cabe hunting his deranged maniac.

That gave Dirker another headache.

He didn’t need another killer stirring up the population. And he sure as hell didn’t need Cabe constantly baiting him and rubbing the war in his face. If it kept on, there was going to be trouble. And although Dirker was a fair man and an honest one, he fully realized he could only be pushed so far.

And if Cabe kept pushing, there could only be one outcome.

God help him, if he made a nuisance of himself.

With all this bubbling away in his brain and making his temples throb, Dirker poured himself a cup of coffee. As he brought the tin cup to his lips, the door opened and the wind blew in, scattering papers from his desk.

Pete Slade stood there in the doorway, water dripping from the brim of his pinch-crowned hat.

“Shut that damn door,” Dirker told him, maybe a little more harshly than intended.

Slade did.

He was Dirker’s undersheriff. Whereas Henry Wilcox was big and fleshy, Slade was long and lank, a mustache just as thick as a grooming brush sprouting from beneath his nose. It completely covered his mouth. Slade was a dependable man and a tough one. He regularly hunted down horse thieves and gunmen single-handedly in the mountains.

And right then he looked scared, looked weary…looked something.

“Sheriff,” he managed and that voice was filled with dread. “Sheriff…we got us a murder.”

Dirker stared at him, wondering why a simple killing had him so spooked to the point of being physically ill. But, deep down, he knew it would be nothing simple.

“Bad?” he said.

Slade nodded. “Dear Christ…I…I never seen nothing like it…”

 

12

Once upon a time, Sunrise had been a booming gold town, but the ore had all but played out within a year or two and now it was nothing more than a little placer camp. A collection of hollow-eyed buildings and skeletal cabins, it sat on a little gravel butte between two towering rises of shale that sheltered it from the elements. The town was maybe two miles as the crow flies from Whisper Lake, but in reality more than a dozen along treacherous roads that climbed steep hills and plunged into rugged canyons.

It was isolated, hard to reach, and pretty much forgotten in its remote location. Except by the placer miners that worked the mountain streams and the prospectors who came there but two, three times a year to provision up at the remaining general store. A place that was a combination store, brothel, assayer’s office, and saloon.

It had whiskey. It had women. It had gambling.

And for the hard luck miners that refused to move on when the real deposits dried up, it was home. If you broke your ass panning for gold from sunup to sundown, you might get a few nuggets…enough, at least, to keep you in whiskey and gambling until it was time to crawl off to one of the dozens of abandoned homes and buildings to sleep it off. Most of these places were little better than shacks. Many had been torn down for firewood. But if you weren’t too choosy and didn’t mind the wind howling through the walls or the rain dripping through the roof, you had yourself a bunk.

That was life in a failed mining town.

 

***

It was night and Sunrise was dark.

The red-earth that showed through clumps of witchgrass and broomweed had turned to mud with the passing of the storm. Everywhere, it seemed, water dripped and pooled and ran.

Jack Turner, pissed to the high seventh on Taos Lightening, was leaning up against a shack across the road from the store. He was shaking the dew off his lilyand pissing most of it right down his legwhen he saw the riders coming in down the high trail. Though his vision wasn’t much after all the juice he’d swallowed and the night was just blacker than a mineshaft, he could see that there were maybe six or seven of them.

Quiet forms on quiet mounts.

No talking, no laughing, no griping. No nothing. Just the sound of hooves sinking into that muck and being pulled out again. The rustle of cloth and the muted jingle of spurs and equipment. They rode down into the remains of Sunrise single-file in that busy flurry of silence.

Turner stood there, swaying, his business in his hand, thinking for one crazy moment that the riders’ eyes…all of them…shined a luminous yellow-green in the darkness. Like the eyes of wolves reflected by firelight. But then it was gone and he blinked, figured it was just the hooch kicking up hell in his brain.

Sometimes, you got a belly full of that stuff, you saw all sorts of things that weren’t there.

The riders came on, just as silent as tombstone marble. Turner was going to call out to them, but he was just too damn drunk.

He slipped into the shack, threw the bolt on the door so someone else wouldn’t fall on top of him, found his bedroll on the floor and it was enough for him, enough for one night. As he drifted off, the riders passed by his shack, then paused outside the store, their horses snorting. For one moment, Turner smelled something, something sharp and musky like the stench from a snakepit…but he did not acquaint it with the riders.

Maybe it was just his britches.

He passed out.

 

***

Inside the store, Hiley was telling a tall tale of a gigantic gold nugget he’d pulled out of a streambed in California during the big rush of ’49. How the damn thing was so heavy he near threw out his back dragging it up the hillside. Said it took two mules and three stout men to get it up into the assayer’s office there. “But I made it, all right,” he told them. “Shit if I didn’t. It kept me in booze, cards, and hot women for near two months. Maybe if I’d been smart, I’d have banked it, but, damn, nobody ever said I was smart.”

“Amen to that,” a scraggly miner said, tearing off a strip of jerky with his remaining teeth.

There was laughter at that.

Hiley laughed, too. He could afford to laugh. Of all the men in the room, Hiley was the only one really making it. He owned the store. He owned the rooms above. He took a juicy cut from what his whores took in. The booze was his. The barrels and sacks of dry goods. The sides of ham and salted beef. Anything worth having in Sunrise belonged to Hiley. He’d long ago given up hardrock mining, deciding and deciding wisely that there was more money to be made selling than digging and panning.

While most of the men in the room were a slat-thin, desperate-looking bunch whose worldly possessions consisted of a pick, a sluice box, and the ratty, stained clothes on their backs, Hiley was ruddy-cheeked with a belly just as round and full as a medicine ball. That gut was a source of endless barbs, but Hiley took them all, smiled, and proudly said it was merely a trapping of success. As he was often wont to point out: “When you got a tool like mine, boys, you gotta build a shed over it.”

There was a plank bar down one side and maybe a dozen grubby men pushed up to it. There were a few tables where the whores were working their prospects, trying to part the ragged, leather-faced men from the gold dust they’d collected in their buckskin pokes. Under the glare of hurricane lamps a half dozen others were playing a hand of poker with greasy cards and well-thumbed chips.

The whores were laughing, the men were drinking, the gamblers were losing…and all and all it was an average night in Sunrise and by dawn the only one richer would be Hiley.

The double-doors opened and two men in gray dusters stepped in. They wore wide-brimmed hats that thrust their faces into pools of shadow. Their eyes seemed to glisten like wet copper.

Everyone stopped what they were doing, watched the strangers.

The two of them stood there a moment, looking around, drinking it all in. Behind them, out in the darkness, a horse snorted…or something did. The strangers closed the doors. They looked on all and everyone with flat, dead eyes, hungry eyes. The eyes of wolves taking in a tasty herd of steer, wondering which one they would take down first.

The men looked at each other, nodded, then came into that crowded room just as smooth and oily as serpents sliding up out of a crevice. Their spurs rang out on the plank flooring, their dusters swished. They took their time, admiring the racks of picks and shovels, the barrels of salt pork and beans, the soiled doves working the miners. They seemed to like what they saw, grinning with smiles of narrow yellow teeth. One was bearded, the other clean-shaven with pitted scars along his jawline.

Together, they leaned against the bar, set identical sawed-off Remington pumps on its surface.

They did not speak and all eyes were on them.

Maybe everyone was smelling something bad coming off these two, some inexplicable, savage odor that turned their insides to sauce. Because it was definitely there. A strange and heady odor of slaughterhouses and bone pits. The smell, say, wild dogs might carry with them from hunting and scavenging, chewing on dead things.

Hiley managed to clear his throat of whatever was lodged in it. “You gents thirsty?” he asked.

The bearded one laughed and it was a hollow, barking sound. “You hear that, Hood? Man wants to know if we’re thirsty.” He laughed again. “You thirsty, son?”

Hood stroked that scarred jaw. “Reckon I am. But I don’t see my favorite drink distilled anywheres. Figure I’ll have to tap my own keg in my own way. You understand my meaning, Cook?”

“Suspect I do.”

A miner at the bar with a Remington model 1858 .44 hanging at his hip, said, “What the hell’s that supposed to mean?”

“Here that, Hood? This one wants to know what that means.”

That made Hood laugh. A staccato, metallic laugh like a hammer banging at a forge. It was not a human sound. “I heard him. Figure this feller just don’t understand what we’re about is all.”

“Maybe you should show him,” Cook said.

“Maybe I’ll have to.”

Hiley, behind the bar, his hand resting on the stock of an Army carbine just out of view, licked his lips carefully. “We don’t want no trouble here, gents. All of us are just drinking and playing cards and minding our own. I suggest you do the same.”

Hood was grinning again and it was the sort of grin a corpse might have…two months in the ground. “That some sort of threat?”

The miner with the .44 nodded. “Damn straight it is, boy. You can either be sociable and peaceful…or things can happen the hard way. There’s only two of you and there’s about two dozen of us, give or take. You might want to weigh that out.”

“I suspect I will,” Hood said, “being outgunned and all.”

Cook wiped the back of his hand over his beard, said, “You’ll have to excuse us. Hungry is what we are. Bellies are just plain empty, growling something fierce.”

It was Hiley’s turn to laugh now, only it was more of a nervous tittering. “Shit, boys, all you had to do was say so.”

“Believe we just did,” Cook reminded him.

Hiley didn’t seem to catch that or want to. He could feel every set of eyes in the place watching him now, seeing how he was going to handle these hardcases. He knew the situation had not been pacified yet, that just about everyone in the room was armed and lead could begin flying at any moment. He did not want this. This was his place and bullets caused damage. That cost money. Bodies he could sweep out with the trash…but stock, now that wasn’t easily replaceable up here on the far left side of the Devil’s asshole.

“What you boys need,” he said, “is a some meat in your bellies. That’ll fix you up.”

Hood and Cook looked at each other and laughed. Then they looked around the room, taking in all they saw. Their faces were drawn and sallow, their eyes wide, unblinking, just as dark as open graves.

“Meat,” Cook said. “You hear that? Feller here’s offering us meat.”

“I heard it and I figure that’s right neighborly of ‘em,” Hood said, wiping drool from his lips. “Because meat’s what we came for. Fresh meat. I like my meat raw. That’s what. Nice and raw. Like that taste of blood, hear? Puts iron in my pants.”

Some eyes widened at that. Others narrowed. Bodies shifted in chairs. Fingers slid down towards holstered pistols. One whore made a face, another smiled…finding these men interesting.

The miner with the .44, said, “What is it you boys do?”

Cook drummed his fingers on the bar. Hiley saw that a pelt of reddish hair covered the man’s wrist, that it flowed over the back of his hand like wild grass and furred his fingers…which were oddly long, thin enough to pick locks.

“We’re what you call Hide-Hunters,” Cook told him. “Thing is we don’t hunt animal hides. We hunt the other sort.”

The miner was about to say something about that and maybe Hiley was, tooor any number of othersbut there was a pounding at the door. A thudding sound and not like a fist would make, but maybe the butt of a rifle. Whatever it was, it kept banging away.

“You gonna answer that, Hiley?” one of the poker players said, but in such a voice like maybe he thought it wouldn’t be a good idea.

Hiley looked at the strangers, then at the others. He swallowed hard. “I suppose I’ll have to.”

“It would be neighborly,” Hood said. “Wouldn’t want them out there bursting in uninvited and all.”

All eyes on him again, Hiley went to the doors, taking the carbine with him. He stopped a few feet away, seemed to smell something or hear something that just laid on him wrong. He looked back into the bar, maybe for help, maybe for divine guidance, but got none.

“See who it is,” someone said, a strange edge to their voice.

Swallowing again, Hiley threw open the doors.

In the barroom, people saw that darkness out there just as black as bubbling pitch. Saw it shifting and swirling and oozing. Then there was motion. A blur. A wild, rending activity. Hiley shouted, maybe he screamed. But it all happened so fast no one could do anything but jump to their feet, reach for their guns.

And by then, it was over.

Hiley was gone.

The doors swung shut and there was a spattering of blood on one of them.

In a wild, shrieking voice, a miner said, “Something grabbed him! Something took him! Something dragged him out into the night…”

Those words echoed and died in the silence.

No one moved.

No one spoke.

No one did a damn thing. Maybe they were all waiting for someone else to do something. Herd instinct. They would all move…but not until they were led. That’s how things worked in tense situations and this one was so tense, apprehension hung in the air thick as fog.

Silence.

Blood glistening on the grubby plank door.

Outside, there rose a shrill howling sound that went through everyone like a sharp knife.

The miner with the .44 started moving, then stopped. The hairs were standing up on the back of his neck and his balls had gone small and hard and cold. He turned to the strangers, unleathered his pistol. “You two! Goddammit, you two brought this!” The pistol shook in his hand. “What’s out there? What the hell sort of game you playing?”

Cook just smiled…and it was funny, but his teeth had gone just as long and shiny as leather punches, his lips shriveling away from them. His eyes were huge, glassy, just as green as emeralds. The pupils were horribly dilated.

“Ain’t no game, friend,” Hood said and it seemed that shaggy beard of his had crawled up his jaw, was encroaching on his cheekbones. The bones of his face were thrusting out, stretching the skin taut as a drumhead, the nose flattening and going canine. His jaws pushed out, teeth flashing now like knifeblades.

Somebody started screaming.

The miner backed away. “Dear Jesus,” he uttered.

“Ain’t got nothing to do with him,” Cook said, his face a skullish, wolflike expanse of jutting bone and deep hollows. His teeth were long and sharp and his voice dropped two, three octaves to the growl of a rabid dog. “Nothing to do with him whatsoever…”

Hood advanced on the miner, his eyes gone yellow as swamp gas, the pupils just pinpricks of black. The miner saw those long teeth like hooked needles…and then Hood leaped and those needles were in the miner’s face, shearing the flesh from the bone.

And the barroom came alive with shooting and shouting and screaming. People tried to run and they ran into each other, knocked each other out of the way, went right over the top of one another. Upstairs there was the shattering of glass and thumping and thudding sounds. More screams. Guns going off. People shouting.

Hell had come calling…and some fool had let it in.

Just as a gang of miners made it to the doors, they exploded in and five or six men thundered in on horses just as black as midnight. Like Cook and Hood, they wore wide-brimmed hats and dusters. And like them they had wolf faces and sharp teeth. Tables went over, cards and chips raining in the air. The horses plowed bodies to the floor and their hooves crushed and stomped bone and flesh. The riders…the Hide-Hunters…dove from their mounts into the mass of screeching, fighting people. Their hands were furry, the long fingers ending in claws like the talons of hunting hawks.

The carnage began.

 

***

Upstairs, a whore named Milly Short was trying to push her white, heaving bulk under a bed. A miner had been on top of her, pumping away like a derrick, and then the door blew in, coming apart like kindling and something like a man…but, God, not a man…had pulled him off her and dragged him out into the corridor. She heard a tearing, ripping sound and the miner tried to make it back into the room, maybe to his gun. But something had hold of him and dragged him back out there.

His fingernails clawed ruts into the floor as he was pulled away.

His face had been pinched gray and bloody and Milly had never in her born years seen such a grimace of absolute horror.

And Milly, caught in some gray netherworld between shock and terror, tried to make it under the bed. But she was a large woman, fleshy and full and wide, and it was like trying to force a barrel through a bullet hole. There was a deafening roar and then the sound of spurred boots coming into the room.

Milly looked over her shoulder, sweat beading her face.

She saw a set of worn cavalry boots. Saw drops of blood falling onto them, splattering.

Something grabbed her by the ankle, flipped her over…and she was staring up at a lewd face that belonged to a demonic wolf, but whose owner walked upright like a man. Lips shivered back from teeth like icicles and a low, snarling sound came from the tunnel of that dark throat.

Milly screamed and thrashed and the thing pulled her to her feet as if she were weightless. She fought and kicked and hit, crying, screaming, saying: “Dear Christ…dear Christ in Heaven…what is this? What is this?”

The beast pressed her to him like a long lost lover and she could smell the spicy, raw tang of its bloody pelt, felt herself being swallowed by those huge yellow-green eyes full and leering like sacrificial moons. Loops of bloody drool dangled from the gnashing teeth…and a voice…not human nor animal, but somewhere in-between said, “It’s the skin medicine, ma’am, it does things to a man…”

And the voice became a growling and she was crushed in the beast’s arms, her bones snapping, her insides pressed to jelly and foaming from her mouth. Then the teeth sank in her throat, nearly severing her head in a single bite

 

***

Downstairs, it was certainly no better.

The beasts were clawing and chomping, severing limbs and opening bellies. Bones were splintering beneath powerful jaws and flesh was divorced from quivering meat. And the screams of the dying were only eclipsed by the howling of their tormentors and the firing of guns. The air was thick with smoke and mists of red.

Everywhere there was blood and wreckage and bodies and things that could have been men but were not men, devouring and eating and tearing. It looked like some grisly scene from a medieval hell.

A whore trying to leap away over the dead and dying was bowled over as a decapitated head struck her in the back.

A man crying out for Jesus and Mary was battered senseless with his own dismembered limbs.

Two of the Hide-Hunters, laughing with hideous mirth, gored a gambler to death one bite at a time.