Chapter Twenty-Four
Hiram regained consciousness in a splash of cold water. His vision swam. His cheek was chafed by sandpaper.
“You can call it Jupiter all you like,” a man’s voice snarled. “I know Satan when I see him! An asshole is an asshole is an asshole! Tell your master, Kaiser Roosevelt, that I said hello!”
“Surely, this is some kind of practical joke,” a second voice said. This voice, too, belonged to a man, but it had a refined, vaguely English sound to it. “I pledged at university, I understand. What do you need me to do, run a mile naked or drink a gallon of milk or something?”
Not sandpaper, but sand.
Hiram raised his head and then dropped it again from the sheer weight. His temples throbbed.
Rain battered him.
He knew the voices. He tried to focus and think through what he was hearing. He saw blurred charcoal smudges moving against deeper darkness.
“This is no joke.” This voice was definitely Gudmund Gudmundson’s. Who had killed Lloyd Preece, and was now going to kill Hiram. “You are not being hazed. This is a hunt, in deadly earnest, and I do not think that you, Mr. Rock, are going to survive.”
Rock. Davison Rock. The uranium prospector. With the fancy accent.
And the other voice belonged to the Reverend Majestic, Earl Bill Clay.
Boots. Hiram saw the toes of boots, pointed at him and barely visible in dim light. He was outside, and lying on sand. On the Monument somewhere? Was this how the Tithe began?
It was raining. Lightning flashed, illuminating a distant red ridge.
Hiram hoped that Michael was still at large. He didn’t want Michael to rescue him, he wanted Michael to run far away. To Harvard or Stanford, or some other magical place where smart young women would talk to Michael, and he would become a geologist or a botanist or lawyer or spaceship pilot or whatever he wanted. Where no one would ever threaten Michael’s life, by means natural or supernatural.
If Hiram lived through the night, Mahonri Young was going to kill him.
Means natural and supernatural. Gudmundson had killed Lloyd Preece with his own knife. That struck Hiram now as a curious detail, as grays and silver began to bleed into his vision and the men about him slowly took visible form. Why with Preece’s own knife? It seemed too specific to be a coincidence.
Was it a symbolic act? Was Gudmundson showing that the First of Fang was superior to the First of Hoof by using Preece’s own talisman?
Or, more likely, was it a tactical choice? Had Preece been vulnerable to his own weapon, in a way that he wasn’t vulnerable to others? Hiram hadn’t been able to pierce the bishop’s skin with his clasp knife—maybe the Jupiter knife overcame the wolf-man’s thick hide?
Or by surprising him and taking his weapon away, had Gudmundson removed from Preece the power effectively to strike back?
The knives channeled the strength of Jupiter into the men for whom they were made. They were not unlike Hiram’s ring in that regard, which channeled the power of Saturn. But where Saturn gave dreams and insight and melancholy, Jupiter gave wealth and rule.
Wealth to the deer-men.
Rule to the werewolves.
Had Lloyd Preece’s Jupiter knife made him wealthy? Was the possession of a Jupiter dagger what made Gudmundson as strong as he was? Hiram was well-muscled from his farming work, but Gudmundson had flung him about like a rag doll.
“My name’s not really Rock,” the prospector said. “I call myself that to avoid attracting attention, especially when I’m out here on the Monument all by myself, but my name is Rockefeller.”
A round of raucous laughter. Lightning flashed. The rain was already letting up, brief summer storm that it had been. Hiram saw men’s legs in a circle, surrounding him, Rock, and the Reverend Majestic.
“As in John D. Rockefeller?” Rock pressed.
More laughter.
“Listen,” Rock continued, “I don’t understand the game here, but what I’m telling you is that my family has money. A lot of money. I have cousins who could pay for Moab with the cash they have lying around the house. They’ll bluster, and you’ll have to duck a P.I. or two, but I’m confident they’ll ransom me. I can give you an address, just have one of your number here send a telegraph from Salt Lake—”
“Shut up,” Jack Del Rose said.
“I don’t think this one is hardly even worth the eating.” That voice belonged to Clem.
“Any man is worth the eating,” Bishop Gudmundson said. “Some men are merely appetizers, and others are a main course.”
“You Satanic bastards!” the Reverend Majestic yelled. “I’ve eaten bigger shits than you for breakfast!”
“Yeah,” Del Rose said. “From the smell, I’m guessing you eat shit for breakfast on a regular basis.”
Hiram tried to stand, had a hard time balancing, and was hauled roughly to his feet by hands he couldn’t see. He patted down his pockets—he had the bogus Uranus cross, the chi-rho medallion, and his Zippo lighter, but that was all. His revolver and even his clasp knife lay on the desert floor.
It took him a moment to remember that he had given the bloodstone to Michael.
How far was he from his truck?
“You’re remembering now that we threw your gun away,” Del Rose told him. Was it the starlight, or were the man’s teeth elongating?
There were perhaps fifteen men surrounding Hiram. He saw Clem and Russ and the sheriff, and other faces he knew but couldn’t connect to a name. Was this the entire…Fang? Pack? Or might there be more of them? Hiram took a deep breath to steady himself and found Gudmundson in the circle.
“It’s not too late to repent,” Hiram said. “God is still ready to extend His mercy to you.”
“God-Yahweh is ready.” The bishop smiled. “And God-Hiram Woolley. But God-Jupiter and God-Gudmund Gudmundson have something entirely different from mercy on their minds.”
“Satan!” Clay punched Russ Pickens in the jaw. It took the man by surprise and knocked him down, but then the others pushed Clay back and filled in their ranks.
Hiram nodded. “You were warned.”
“So were you,” Gudmundson said.
The crowd parted at one end and Hiram saw that he stood atop a knuckle of stone that looked dark brown in the light, but was probably a shade of red. A steep, sandy path now firmed up by the brief squall led down through the parted men to a flat-bottomed canyon, spotted with dark blotches that might be prickly pear. On the far side of the canyon rose a ridge of stone, and standing on that ridge, Hiram saw a herd of deer-men. They were tall and man-shaped, and antlers rose above their heads they turned toward the men. Was he fooling himself, or did he see a crumpled ear on one of the beasts?
“The hunt begins when your feet touch the stone of that ridge,” Gudmundson said.
“Where are we?” Hiram asked.
“We’re on the Monument,” Davison Rock said. “I’ve seen this rock before.” He pointed toward the horizon with both hands, in two different directions. “My campsite is that way. The Schoolmarm’s Bloomers, if you know the Monument at all, are over there.” The Bloomers were beyond the ridge full of deer-monsters.
Gudmundson was quiet.
“If we refuse to go, you’ll just kill us here,” Hiram guessed.
He heard the snicker-snack of a bolt action. “Damn straight,” Jack Del Rose said.
“You’ll lose the magic of the hunt,” Hiram pointed out.
“The magic of the kill,” Gudmundson corrected him. “And you will lose the chance, however slim, of escape.”
“The deer are faster than we are,” Hiram said.
“Hard to be the slow ones in the herd.” Gudmundson shrugged.
“There’s poor little Erasmus Green.” Clem laughed, a guttural, ugly sound. “He’ll be slowed a bit on account of his leg.”
“And Jimmy Udall?” Hiram asked. The boy had died eight months earlier, which would have been about the time of a hunt. “Did you have to hobble him, too, or were you able to run down a ten-year-old boy without that advantage?”
Gudmundson nodded. “An accident. Jimmy was taken in the Tithe. It happens. The Fang takes not only from the Hoof, but from all the animals that live on the Monument, including man. Jimmy should have been home earlier that night.”
“Is that what you said at this funeral?” And was this why Jimmy was a ghost—his own trusted bishop had murdered him, and then presided over his graveside service.
“Angering me will not make me go any easier on you, cunning man.” Gudmund Gudmundson shrugged out of his shirt, pulling his arms through the sleeves. Starlight glinted off a hard wall of chest muscles.
Other men kicked off their boots and began unbuckling belts.
Hiram started walking. Reverend Clay followed with him immediately, stumping from his good foot to his bad with surprising alacrity, and then Davison Rock—Rockefeller—jogged to catch up.
Behind them, Hiram heard the sound of chanting. It was a chant unlike any he’d heard before, part wail and part rhythmic surge, the two parts seeming to intersect modally at some impossible, inaudible point, and then blend to give the impression of hungry hunting beasts, surging forward in a pack.
He shuddered. Sweat chilled on his lower back.
“This is all pantomime, right?” the prospector asked. “Play-acting? They’re letting us go, but now we’re supposed to have…learned a lesson or something. Received a warning. What was it, did I trespass on someone’s land? This isn’t about that child, is it? No one thinks I killed Jimmy Udall, or Lloyd Preece?”
“No one thinks you killed anyone,” Hiram said. “I’m betting the cult thinks you know more than you do. Maybe because you were out here in February, or perhaps from just talking to me.”
Which would make Davison Rock’s death Hiram’s fault.
“False words and shallow comfort,” the Reverend grumbled. “He isn’t innocent. We’re all murderers, every man jack of us. I was born a murderer and a whoremonger and a cheater at cards, and so were you two. The only path to redemption is the spiritual and saving grace of money! O Benjamin Franklin, rain down thy grace upon us!”
“Cult?” Rock bellowed. “Cult?”
“Cult,” Hiram said. “Human sacrifice cult. Cannibals, I think, or at least, sort of cannibals. Who did you believe we were dealing with, the Kiwanis?”
He regretted that jibe immediately. It was the sort of thing Michael would say, but it wasn’t really Hiram’s style of wit.
He hoped Michael was safe.
Rockefeller snorted several times, high pitched sounds that reminded Hiram of a horse. “Don’t these people realize what my family is capable of? The Pinkertons will be down here by tomorrow morning!”
Hiram looked back over his shoulder and saw the silhouettes of the hunters standing on the knuckle of rock. “We need to locate weapons as soon as we can,” he said. “And we need to stake out a defensible position. I’d love to find a high overhang, or a ledge with only one entrance, or better still a cave, but I don’t know this place and it’s dark. How about it, Mr. Rock…Rockefeller, that is? You’ve been prospecting around here for months. Do you know any good places to hunker down and defend ourselves?”
“Hunker down?” Rockefeller squeaked. “Are you serious? This is a nightmare. This can’t be happening.”
Preacher Bill laughed heartily. “We shall prevail, my friends, for a ‘Sceptre shall rise out of Israel, and shall smite the corners of Moab, and destroy all the children of Sheth.’”
An actual Bible verse coming from the Reverend Majestic made Hiram smile, but he couldn’t let himself get sidetracked. “Davison, Bill, come on, is there a cave where we can hide?”
“Who do you think I am?” Rockefeller squealed.
Hiram, slightly ahead of the other two, was just about to step onto the sandstone of the ridge. Above him, he saw deer antlers tremble in anticipation. He wished he had a gun, but if the hunters were as hard to injure as the deer-men…a few bullets might not make a difference.
“If we can block ourselves in somewhere, find some dry wood, maybe we can get a fire started,” Hiram suggested. “Fire is a good basic countermagic, most dark and evil things are afraid of fire.” But had the hunters left him the Zippo because they had no fear of the power of fire? Hiram climbed the ridge, and the Revered Majestic climbed with him. “I don’t suppose you have a stashed gasoline can anywhere near here? I’d give a lot for a gallon of gasoline.”
Rockefeller stopped. “No. I’m calling this bluff. I stop right here, this is all nonsense, and I’m not going to budge. They can ransom me and I’m sure my family will pay, but I’m not going to give into this ridiculous story, because you’re only saying these terrible things to make me afraid. You’re one of them, Mr. Woolley.”
Hiram looked down at Rockefeller’s feet; the man was standing on stone.
He looked up again, at the men on the knuckle of rock. They were all naked now, and they swayed back and forth and shuddered, the gesture reminding Hiram uncomfortably of the seizures he sometimes experienced. Then one of them leaped forward—was it Clem? hard to tell in the poor light—and when he hit the ground, streaking down the rock, he was no longer a man. A wolf-like head sprouted above massive, shaggy shoulders, and long limbs ending in claws. From a distance, he seemed as large as a pony.
“Run!” Hiram shouted.
Earl Bill Clay burst into a shuffling lope, sometimes touching the stone with his hands as he stooped to rush up the rock.
“No!” Rockefeller spread his arms defiantly. “What are they going to do to me, really?”
The single wolf-man slammed into Davison Rock from behind, dragging the prospector instantly to the ground and then falling on his throat. Rockefeller screamed once and then fell silent, but jets of blood squirted up and his booted feet kicked at the sand repeatedly.
“Asshole should’ve been paying more attention!” Preacher Bill shouted.
He and Hiram ran.
Fear put steel rods into Hiram’s legs and stoked a fire in his tinder. He charged up the hill, cresting the top of the stone just in time to see large deer-monsters bolting away in various directions. One of the slowest, and the last to vanish from his sight, was red-skinned and scabby, and bled from a wound in its hindquarters.
Hiram shot a glance back, not to see Rockefeller’s remains, but to look at the werewolves. They were leaping off the knuckle of rock now, one at a time, each leap beginning in the shape of a man but hitting the base of the boulder in monstrous form.
“Satan!” Reverend Clay roared. “Get thee behind me!”
Hiram was inclined to agree, but he wasn’t willing to waste his breath.
He ran.
He tried to stick to the ridge, because it would be harder to follow them, and he tried to get out of sight immediately. How good was the wolves’ sense of smell? If it was as good as the smell of a natural wolf, then maybe any effort to hide tracks was a complete waste. He also tried to aim for the Bloomers, as Davison Rock had indicated the way. If nothing else, once he got there, he would have some ability to orient himself. Also, the arch itself stood on high ground, and might be at least somewhat defensible.
At the end of the ridge, one deer-man, startled by Hiram and Earl Bill Clay crashing into its hiding space, leaped away. Hiram turned up a crack between two cliff faces, struggling to step over a thicket of prickly pear in the dark without spearing himself. Clay made the same climb and then stopped, panting.
“Need…drink,” he huffed, and then produced a fifth of some spirituous alcohol from inside his ragged coat.
At the same moment, leaping down off the ridge forty feet away, came two of the wolf-beasts. They were bigger than ponies, they were the size of small horses, and though they were shaped like men, they ran on all fours. The one in front threw back his head and howled.
Hiram snatched the bottle from the Reverend.
“Satan!” Clay objected.
The wolves leaped forward.
Hiram sloshed alcohol across the bed of cactus, and all the dried foliage packed in around it, and then touched his Zippo to it.
Fire burst up in a thin line. The wolves hesitated, back slightly away, and Hiram shouted a Biblical fire verse.
The fire vamped higher, and one wolf whined.
“This way!” Hiram grabbed Clay’s sleeve and dragged him up the narrow crack.
They climbed a stair built of choking boulders and flash flood jetsam, up toward the top of the mesa. Looking down, Hiram saw five or six of the wolves, pacing anxiously as they waited for the fire to die down.
He wasn’t going to be able to do that all night. He had enough spirits in the bottle, he guessed, to light one more fire. Memories of Helper came back to him. Fire had saved them then. It could save them again, but he’d have to be clever.
Emerging at the height of the crack, he ran along the top of a cliff. He wasn’t looking for ways down, but for holes to hide in. A cave or a dead-end canyon, preferably with wood he could use to start a real defensive fire.
How would the hunt end? Did the pack transform back into men at dawn, and slink away home? Would the law of this bloody hunt somehow guarantee that, in the future, Fang and Hoof would leave Hiram alone?
A strange little thought tickled him: did the fact that Hiram was participating as the hunted mean that his survival would bring prosperity to his farm? Or was that only true for herders, and not for farmers?
It was after all, Fang and Hoof, and not Fang and Beet.
“There.” Hiram stopped and pointed.
“Give me back my liquor.” Clay was out of breath, and leaned over onto his knees to spit stringy saliva onto the rocks.
“No.”
“You’re as bad as one of them children of Sheth.”
Hiram grinned. “You know that’s not right.”
Preacher Bill smiled back. “Naw, probably just a Mormon.”
Hiram saw a canyon that looked as if it dead-ended. The walls were steep; he couldn’t be certain in the darkness, but he thought he was seeing a narrow box canyon. But what he knew for sure was that there were trees. Wood for a fire.
“I’m going down there,” Hiram said. “You want to come with me, do. We’ll use your spirits and start a bonfire.”
“That’ll attract the monsters.” Ironic that the insane preacher was more clear-eyed about the nature of what chased them than the scientist had been.
“And be a weapon.” A stand of cottonwoods grew close enough to the cliff at this point that Hiram could touch them. He reached out, grabbed a trunk, and began to shimmy down.
“Satan, you can kiss my ass,” the Reverend Majestic Earl Bill Clay grumbled again, and jumped.