The wagons began to roll out. The head foreman and his wife were gone the next morning after it had happened, left everything behind that couldn’t be thrown into a single trunk. Sheriff McKee had to be awakened from a drunken stupor by the thin Chinese girl who slept on his porch like a lovesick mongrel. Even Doc Lewis thought about running for it, but he was on his last legs anyway, he had no family, he was a horse waiting to be shot. He decided to stick it out, with a little lotus leaf to steady his nerves.
Daniel Kiley called a gathering in front of the stone church. It had to be in broad daylight, because no one walked the streets after sundown. He addressed the remaining seventy or so frightened people in what many considered a voice carved from the Rock Of Ages. He stood firm before them, with his family at his side, and commanded the crowd to also stand firm. He lifted up his Bible and told them he had found his purpose here, his calling, his truth. He had found what he’d been looking for, in one way or another, all his weak and miserable life.
He had found a fight with Satan. And by God he was not going to let Satan take his town.
At that point, about thirty more people headed to their wagons at a pretty quick clip, but the forty who stood their ground spat their tobacco and scratched their balls and hollered back at the reverend in the Greek language, in Chinese, in the Nordic tongue, in the brogues of old Ireland and the burrs of Scotland and in the toughened timbres of men who have learned to sleep standing up with one eye open.
They would send their wives and children down the mountain to safety—if they could, because some of the wives spat their tobacco and the children scratched their balls just like Papa did. But what was life if it was lived like a scared sheep?
“Now that’s where it runs off the tracks,” Nomad said. “Nobody would’ve stayed in that town. Nobody. My ass would be going down that road.” He realized, quite suddenly, that his ass was currently going up that road.
“Maybe.” Ariel saw, as True did, a double sign pointing to a turnoff on the right. The top sign said Vendors and the bottom one Artists. “But, according to what I read, the people who elected to stay were told the Company was sending a bonus for every man who would go back into the mine. The Company didn’t know what was happening—they thought it was a work stoppage over the air pumps—but they were sending a strongbox of gold dust from San Francisco. And no one had been hurt yet. There was the music, the woman, and the threat of harm from the telegraph, but the telegraph had stopped its chattering.”
“What do you mean, no one had been hurt ‘yet’?” Berke frowned. “That sounds fucking ominous.”
“For a few weeks, nothing else happened. The miners went back to work. The music had stopped. There were no more half-seen figures in the dark. Even some of those people who’d left came back. Then whatever it was…evil, Satan, whatever you want to call that force…left the mine and entered the town.”
Did Daniel Kiley want to go into the mine, to meet the woman—the creature—who called him? Did the reverend’s wife throw herself in his way, and beg him not to go? He didn’t go. Then…one morning they found their little girl dead in her bed. There were bruises on her face. The reverend’s sons woke up to the noise of horror…and one of them said he’d had a dream, a bad bad dream, in which he’d walked quietly into their room while they were sleeping and looked into his sister’s bed and had seen a snake coiled next to her head. And in this dream he’d had a pillow already in his hands, and he’d smashed it down upon the reptile, had pressed down hard with all his strength, and when he’d tried to call for help…the strangest thing…his voice was gone. His voice had been stolen from him, there in the night. But he kept pressing down, and pressing down, and at last he’d lifted up the pillow and seen that the snake was dead. He’d told his father that he thought he was a real hero, in that dream, and maybe he ought to earn a medal.
A Company wagon bearing the strongbox of gold dust from San Francisco arrived the next day. It was accompanied by four men with the names of Barton Taggett, Miles Branco, Jerrod Spade and Duke Chanderley. They wore dirty Stetsons on their heads and notched Colts in their holsters. They were ready to declare war, in the name of the Company, on sluggards and malingerers and weak-willed sonsofbitches who didn’t want to dig for silver just because of an old air pump. When they found fifty or so people where four hundred used to be, and the new head foreman a red-bearded Scotsman with one leg, they changed their attitude. When they heard the stories and talked to Sheriff McKee and Doc Lewis and Daniel Kiley, and when they saw the body of the little girl in its casket and the haunted eyes of the boy who’d suffocated her in a bad dream, they sat down for a while in the last remaining saloon with the last of the soiled doves looking on, and they drank some whiskey and smoked some cigars and figured they were getting too old for this shit.
But the thing was, they were moral men who had had immoralities thrust upon them. So as the night went on and the lamps burned across Stone Church, and the church itself stood silent and solid in the center of the town, the Company enforcers decided they didn’t know if demons could bleed, red blood or black, but maybe it was up to four Civil War hellraisers to find out.
“They went down into the mine with Daniel Kiley and Sheriff McKee,” Ariel said, as the Scumbucket passed a huge gated parking lot full of trucks, vans and trailers. Vendors Park Here, a sign directed. “They went down to find the woman. The thing. Whatever she was. It was. And that’s the end of the story.”
“The fuck it is!” Berke had nearly yelled it.
“Come on!” Terry said. “That can’t be the end!”
“There’s no good end,” Ariel clarified.
True scanned the vehicles in the vendors’ lot. Rings Of Saturn Tattoos, Inc. Body Art by Sarafina. ShockIt Tattoos. Tribal Attitudes. The Living Needle.
“Finish it,” he said, as he drove on.
“I’ve heard and read about a daily journal in a library somewhere. Kept under lock-and-key, available for study only to parapsychologists and the clergy.” Ariel said quietly. “It was written by one of the Stone Church prostitutes. The story is that she and all but two others of her profession left on a wagon as the enforcers, the sheriff and the reverend were walking into the mine. The women didn’t look back. But all the details come from that journal. They talked about it in that documentary on the History Channel. The women heard nothing. They just kept going. But when the Company didn’t hear anything more, they sent a Pinkerton’s detective from Tucson to find out what was happening with their investment. The detective found…nothing and no one. Fifty-something people, and the four enforcers, were gone. There was no evidence of a fight. The horses, mules, cows and pigs…all gone. There was not a living thing left in Stone Church. But clothes still hung on lines, dishes were stacked up in washbasins, and mops and brooms leaned in corners as if their owners had just stepped out for a minute. A pan of browned biscuits sat on a table. Some of the doors to the houses were open, some closed. The strongbox was locked in a cell in the sheriff’s office. All the sacks of gold dust were still there. An empty casket was found in the parlor of the reverend’s house. Child-sized. Two other things…the Pinkerton detective found that all the gravestones in the cemetery had been knocked flat, and the windows had been blown out of the church from the inside.” She’d been looking to her right, through the green tint, and now she narrowed her eyes slightly. “There it is,” she said.