Dead Man’s Hand Read online

  There was movement on the roof, heavy as an elephant one moment, and then light and skittering like an excited squirrel.

  The Reverend backed across the room and found a corner just as the thing stuck its head through the gap in the roof again. It stretched its neck, which was long and barely covered in skin, showing little, greasy disks of bone that creaked when its long neck swayed.

  Like a serpent, it stretched through the roof, dropping its hands forward, the fingers long and multiple jointed, clicking together like bug legs. It was hanging from the gap by its feet. It was naked, but whatever its sex, that had long dissolved to dust—and there was only a parchment of skin over its ribs, and its pelvis was nothing more than bone, its legs being little more than withered gray muscle tight against the bone. It twisted its head and looked at the Reverend. The Reverend cocked his revolvers.

  The monster snapped its feet together, disengaging from the roof, allowing it to fall. It dropped lightly, landed on the damp horse, lifted its head, and sniffed the air. It spotted the Reverend, but the dead animal was too inviting. It swung its head and snapped its teeth into the side of the dead horse’s neck, made a sucking noise that brought blood out of the beast in a spray that decorated the vampire’s face and mouth. Spots of blood fell on the sun-lit floor like rose petals.

  It roved one red eye toward the Reverend as it ate; it had the kind of look that said: “You’re next.”

  The Reverend fired his pistols. The bullets tore into the creature, blue hell-fire blasting out of the wounds they made. The thing sprang like a cricket, came across the floor toward the Reverend, who fired both revolvers rapidly, emptying them, knocking wounds in the thing that spurted sanctified flames, but still it came.

  The Reverend let loose with a grunt and a groan, racked the monster upside the head with the heavy .44. It was like striking a tree. Then he was flung backwards by two strong arms, against the window packed with limbs and leaves and mud. The impact knocked the revolvers from his hands.

  It came at him like a shot, hissing as if it were a snake. The Reverend’s boot caught the skin-and-bone brute in the chest and drove it back until it hit the floor. It bounced up immediately, charged again. The Reverend snapped out a left jab and hooked with a right, caught the thing with both punches, rocked its rotten head. But still it came. The Reverend jabbed again, crossed with a right, uppercut with a left, and slammed a right hook to the ribs; one of them popped loose and poked through the skin like a barrel stave that had come undone.

  It sprang forward and clutched the Reverend’s throat with both hands, would have plunged its teeth into his face had the Reverend not grabbed it under the chin and shoved it back and kicked it hard in the chest, sending it tumbling over the horse’s body.

  The Reverend sprang toward the iron bar, grabbed it, swung it, and hit the fiend a brisk blow across the neck, driving it to the ground. His next move was to plunge the bar into it, pinning it once again to the ground in the manner it had been pinned in its grave. But he was too slow.

  The creature scrambled across the floor on all fours, avoiding the stab, which clunked into the hard dirt floor. It sprang up and through the hole in the roof before the Reverend could react. As the last of it disappeared, the Reverend fell back, exhausted, watching the gap for its reemergence.

  Nothing.

  The Reverend found his pistols and reloaded. They hadn’t done much to kill the thing, but he liked to believe his blessed loads had at least hampered it some. He worked the saddlebag off his horse, flung it over his shoulder. He tried the door and couldn’t open it. Too much debris had rammed up against it. He stood on his dead mount and poked the bar through the hole in the ceiling, pushed it through the gap far enough that he could use both ends of it to rest on the roof and chin himself up. On the roof, he looked about for it, saw it scuttling over a mass of mud and broken trees like a spider, toward a darkening horizon; night was coming, dripping in on wet, dark feet.

  The Reverend thought that if his reading on the subject was right, this descendant of Judas would gain strength as the night came. Not a good thing for a man that had almost been whipped and eaten by it during the time when it was supposed to be at its weakest.

  Once again, the Reverend considered defying that which God had given him to do, but he knew it was pointless. Terror would come to him if he did not go to it. And any reward he might have had in Heaven would instead be a punishment in Hell. As it was, even doing God’s bidding, he was uncertain of reward, or of Heaven’s existence. All he knew was there was a God, and it didn’t like much of anything besides its sport.

  The Reverend climbed down from the roof with the rod, stepping on the mass of debris covering the door and window, wiggled his way through broken trees, went in the direction the vampire had gone. He went fast, like a deranged mouse eager to throw itself into the jaws of a lion.

  As he wound his way up the hill, it started to rain again. This was followed by hail the size of .44 slugs. He noticed off to his left a bit of the graveyard that remained: a few stones and a great, shadowy hole where the rod had been. With the night coming, he was sure the vampire would be close by, and though he didn’t think it would return to the grave where it had been pinned for who knew how long, he went there to check. The grave was dark and empty except for rising rainwater. It was a deep hole, that grave, maybe ten feet deep. Someone had known what that thing was and how to stop it, at least until time released it.

  The light of the day was completely gone now, and there was no moon. With the way the weather had turned, he would be better off fleeing back to the house and waiting until morning to pursue. He knew where it would be going if it didn’t come back for him: the first available town and a free lunch. He was about to fulfill that plan of hole up and wait and see when the dark became darker, and in that instant he knew it was coming up behind him. It was said these things did not cast a reflection, but they certainly cast a shadow, even when it was too dark for there to be one.

  The Reverend wheeled with the iron bar in hand, and the thing hit him with a flying leap and knocked him backwards into the grave, splashing down into the water. The bar ended up lying across the grave above them. The Reverend pulled his .44 as he kicked the beast back. It was on him as he fired, clamping its teeth over the barrel of the revolver. The Reverend’s shot took out a huge chunk at the back of the thing’s head, but still it stood, growling and gnawing and shaking the barrel of the gun like a dog worrying a bone.

  The barrel snapped like a rotten twig. The vampire spat it out. The Reverend hit him with what remained of the gun. It had about as much effect as swatting a bull with a feather. The Reverend dropped the weapon and grasped the thing at its biceps, trying to hold it back. They went down together, splashing in the cold, muddy water of the grave, the vampire trying to bring its teeth close to the Reverend’s face. The Reverend slugged the thing repeatedly.

  Kicking the thing off of him, the Reverend came to his feet, leaped and grabbed the bar, swung up on it, and out of the grave. Still clutching the bar, he stumbled backwards. The vampire hopped out of the hole effortlessly, as if the grave had been no deeper than the depth of a cup.

  As it sprang, the Reverend, weary, fell back and brought the rod up. The sky grew darker as the thing came down in a blind lunge of shape and shadow. Its body caught the tip of the rod, and the point of it tore through the monster with a sound like someone bending too-quick in tight pants and tearing the ass out of them. The vampire screamed so loud and oddly the Reverend thought the sound might knock him out with the sureness of a blow. But he held fast, the world wavering, the thing struggling on the end of the rod, slowly sliding down, its body swirling around the metal spear like a snake on a spit, then bunching up like a doodle bug to make a knot at the end of the makeshift spear. Then it was still.

  The Reverend dropped the bar and came up on one knee and looked at the thing pinned on it. It was nothing more now than a ball of bone and tattered flesh. The Reverend lifted the rod and vam
pire into the wet grave, shoved the iron shaft into the ground, hard. Rain and hail pounded the Reverend’s back, but still he pushed at the bar until it was deep and the thing was beneath the rising water in the grave.

  Weakly, the Reverend staggered down the hill, climbed over the debris in the cabin, and dropped through the roof. He found a place in the corner where he could sit upright, rest his back against the wall. He pulled out his .36 Navy and sat there with it on his thigh, not quite sleeping, but dozing off and on like a cat.

  As he slept, he dreamed the thing came loose of the grave several times during the night. Each time he awoke, snapping his eyes open in fright; the fiend he expected was nothing more than dream. He breathed a sigh of relief. He was fine. He was in the cabin. There was no vampire, only the pounding of rain and hail through the hole in the roof, splashing and smacking against the corpse of his horse.

  The next morning, the Reverend climbed out of the cabin by means of his horse footstool, and went out through the hole in the roof. He walked back to the grave. He found his saddlebags on the edge of it, where they had fallen during the attack. He had forgotten all about them.

  Pistol drawn, he looked into the grave. It was near filled with muddy water. He put the revolver away, grabbed hold of the rod, and worked it loose, lifted it out to see if the thing was still pinned.

  It was, knotted up on the rod like a horrid ball of messy twine.

  The Reverend worked it back into the grave, pushing the bar as deep as he could, then dropped to his knees and set about pushing mud and debris into the hole.

  It took him all of the morning and past high noon to finish up.

  When he was done, he took a Bible from his saddlebags and read some verses. Then he poked the book into the mud on top of the grave. It and the rod would help to hold the thing down. With luck, the redheaded dead would stay truly dead for a long time.

  When he was done, the Reverend opened his saddlebags and found that his matches wrapped in wax paper had stayed dry. He sighed with relief. With the saddlebags flung over his shoulder, he went back to the cabin to cut offa slab of horsemeat. He had hopes he could find enough dry wood to cook it before starting his long walk out, going to where he was led by the godly fire that burned in his head.

  —In memory of and tribute to Robert E. Howard

  THE OLD SLOW MAN AND HIS GOLD GUN FROM SPACE

  BEN H. WINTERS

  Sacramento, California, 1851

  Whether Caleb and Crane came out to California separate and partnered up later on—or whether they knew each other from some eastern clime and made their way westward as a pair—well, who the devil can tell and what the devil does it matter? Suffice it to say that whether they came to their claim as partners or came to it alone, Crane and Caleb came the same as all the rest of ’em: maybe overland on some slow-rolling desperation caravan from Oxford, Mississippi or Albany, New York, jouncing on rutted wheels through Salt Lake, Deadwood, Barstow; maybe aboard a leaky old cutter, or rounding down around Cape Horn, dipping and rolling on the seasick waves.

  Some way or other, the point is, they came. Drawn like iron shavings to a magnet, drawn to the golden promises of Sutter’s Mill. Drawn by hope, fool’s hope, by that same mania that had lit up the eyes of poor men and rich men and credulous men and wise, that had seized ’em up and drawn ’em down from all across the continent and all around the world.

  Caleb and Crane weren’t nothing special and never would they have been, if it weren’t for the spaceman.

  “Tomorrow,” Caleb would assure his partner, every night, before stretching out weary on his thin rucksack, emptying out his day’s sad pocketful of flakes and powder. “We’ll strike it rich tomorrow.”

  “Tomorrow,” Crane would answer, and then they’d close their eyes, the both of ’em closed their weary eyes and dreamed their dead dreams of gold.

  Tomorrow never seemed to come though, not for most of ’em out there, and certainly not for Caleb and Crane. April through May, May to June. Heavy work, long days. Flakes and dust, a teensy nugget now and again; now and again a tiny little half of a half of a half ounce of gold. Nothing to speak of. Nothing to hold. Just enough to keep you scratching at it.

  This was the summer of 1851. Long ago the easy pickins had been picked. Long ago them few big winners that was ever gonna be had filled their pockets, filled their buckets, filled their wagonbeds up with gold and rolled away.

  And yet they said it, Caleb and Crane, and felt it, too, in aching bones—needed to know that it was true:

  “Tomorrow.”

  “Tomorrow.”

  * * *

  Caleb—so you know—was big. Legs like ox-legs, neck like a bull neck, torso like the petrified trunk of an old-growth tree, sturdy and unbending. He looked not like a man-of-woman-born, but like a figure of a man someone carved in a barn door and animated by some manner of charm. A sturdy muscled golem, fit to hoe a row, work a shovel, dig a mine.

  Crane was little. Taut and thin and steely as a loop of wire, with a long nose, and little delicate glasses perched on the end of it.

  You’d have seen the two of them—Caleb with his ropy neck and ship’s-anchor fists, Crane with his spectacles—and you’d have figured Crane was the brains of the operation. But you’d’ve been wrong: there weren’t no brains to this operation. Just sweat and hope and tired exhausted dreams of the mother lode.

  June to July, August to September, camped out there on the lip of their rutted square acre on the Sacramento banks, their dope’s claim. Giant Caleb and wiry Crane with their ramshackle cabin and rickety apparatuses, digging and muttering about tomorrow; six months their drumbeat was the flat thud of shovel on clay, the rat-a-tat of new handfuls of gravel—the daylong rush of water sluicing through the Long Tom, the rusty scrick of the cradle as it rocked, separating, separating, seeking.

  If you’d’a said to big Caleb, at some point, that long summer, “You’re madmen, you and your friend,” he’d’a laughed, a snorting bull’s laughter. Pointed you away with the long barrel of his rifle.

  If you’d’a said to Crane, “You’re madmen, you’re dunces—you’ll die out here before you strike it rich,” he’d’ve chuckled bitterly, told you to go do something dirty with a donkey, twisted his small bent body back to the work of his shovel.

  It would’a been as crazy as to say that a man from Neptune will come, and make you a strange proposition, and then die of violence on the banks of your claim.

  That’s what happened though. One night—late September—that is indeed what did occur.

  * * *

  “Wake up, there, you boys. I got a proposition for you.”

  This’s what the old man said by way of greeting, but too quiet to rouse Caleb and Crane from their respective golden-castle dreams.

  “Wake up, there,” he repeated, a little louder—loud enough, now.

  “Who’s that?” said Crane, blinking awake.

  “It’s a goddamn tramp,” answered Caleb, “is who it is,” and hefted himself into a sitting position and landed his big bear feet on the dirt floor of the cabin. It was so late it was almost early, almost the next day; the old man, ancient and tiny and slow, was surrounded by dawn’s first glow, so that with his wild uncombed white hair and his lined face, he looked a little like a saint, a little like a ghost.

  “Oh, good,” muttered the man. “You’re stirrin’.”

  The old man’s voice was harsh and gravelly. He was bent with age, and his right arm was shriveled and deformed. His mustache was bushy, yellow, and unkempt. He wheezed heavily. Over his shoulder was a black sack.

  Caleb was on his feet by now, holding the old man steady with the creaky long-barreled hunting rifle he’d fetched out from under his pillow. “The heck you want?”

  “I already said.” The old man cleared his throat laboriously, tottered unsteadily into the cabin, cast a quick glance at big Caleb’s long rifle like it was a children’s finger-puller. “I got a proposition for ya.”

  “Now wa
it a minute, wait just one minute,” sputtered Crane, snatching his spectacles from beside his bedroll and sliding them into place. “Just who the devil are you?”

  “Well I reckon that I could tell you m’name, but it won’t do much good,” said the old slow man. His white hair was a wiry tangle atop his thin head. “It’s in a language you won’t understand.”

  “If you mean Spanish, you’re wrong about that,” said Crane, who prided himself on his ¿como estas? and his uno-dos-tres, which he’d picked up off a Mexican whore.

  The old man snorted. “Not Español, son. I’m from Neptune. The dark side of the planet Neptune.”

  There was a long silence in that moment, after the old slow man said he had come from the dark side of the planet Neptune. In the dawn outside the cabin you could hear the pleasant morning babbling of the creek, hear the gentle morning calling of the California birds roosting in their California trees. If someone in the proper frame of mind were there, they might have felt that the surroundings were downright peaceful. It might have occurred, to such a tranquil observer, that whatever precious metals were or were not to be found beneath the surface, there was a copious bounty of a different kind—the squirrels at play, the sun glimmering off the green—right here out in the open.

  No one in the present company, however, was in such a frame of mind.

  “Did you say you’re from Neptune?” said Caleb.

  “Yep,” said the old man, and coughed. “The dark side.”

  Caleb drew back the hammer of the rifle.

  “What? Where is Neptune?” said Crane, looking from the old slow man to Caleb and back to the man. “What is that?”

  “It’s a planet,” said Caleb, gesturing heavenward with the barrel of the gun. “But this man ain’t from there. He’s from a drunk tank or an alleyway. He’s a tramp and a thief.”