Skull Moon

1

Longtree had himself a room now at the Serenity Hotel in Wolf Creek. It wasn’t much, but the bed was comfortable and there was a livery stable across the street for his black. There was a saloon just off the lobby and the food wasn’t bad. The door bolted from the inside and the window was painted shut; it was very unlikely anyone could sneak up on him whilst he slept. And while he was awake, he didn’t see that as a problem. All things considered, it beat the hell out of sleeping outside…particularly when there were men trying to kill you and maybe something worse. He enjoyed the outdoors, found it spiritually refreshing, but the white man in him often yearned for material comforts.

He’d gotten a pint of rum from the bar and lay on his bed now, sipping from it. He’d come to Wolf Creek under order from Tom Rivers. As a special deputy U.S. Marshal, he had no actual territory to call his own. He was merely sent wherever Rivers thought he was needed, where his skills as a lawman and former scout and bounty hunter would come in handy.

And Rivers had thought Wolf Creek needed him.

But Longtree wasn’t so sure.

There’d been nothing but trouble since he’d arrived-with Lauters, with Gantz. And even without those two, this entire situation was well out of his experience. As a bounty hunter and then lawman, he’d brought in nearly every man he’d been sent after. There were few who’d escaped Joe Longtree. He brought them in alive, dead, and nearly dead. He was a hunter of men and he played this hand well. There was no one better at it. He’d taken in murderers, robbers, renegade Indians, road agents, bootleggers, and even entire gangs in his time. Longtree’d had some of the most vicious men (and women) in the west come at him with guns, knives, hatchets, clubs, even their bare hands. He’d been in a hundred near scrapes with death and escaped every time. Oh, he’d been shot several times, stabbed, beaten, and even hanged (that injury still pained him some, but he’d survived). As a scout, he’d even been tortured for three days after capture by a Cheyenne war party.

But this…this business was too much for even him.

It was a complicated affair. First there was the Gang of Ten, the rustlers, of which he was pretty certain only two still lived and Lauters was one of them. He was sure of this now. He even suspected Lauters had something to do with Gantz trying to kill him…but there was no proof. The rustlers, Longtree was sure, had been found out by Red Elk and before the Blackfoot could speak his piece, he was blamed for the murder of that Carpenter girl. But Longtree didn’t think Red Elk was guilty…one of the rustlers had been. Arresting Red Elk and then lynching him killed two birds with a single well-thrown stone: the real murderer could go free and Red Elk’s tongue would be forever silenced. The rustlers were probably pretty proud of themselves at the time for how easily they’d covered their tracks…until a year later.

Longtree took another drink, the rum filling him with warmth.

And what had happened a year later? Longtree wasn’t entirely sure. The Blackfeet had sought revenge via the Skull Society which had called up some beast to kill the vigilantes. Longtree wasn’t sure what this beast was, not really. According to Moonwind, some primeval monster that had once been worshipped by the Skull Society centuries and centuries before. Bowes and he had seen something like it at the burial ground that night. But the one on the loose was no zombie, no hulking mummy, but a creature very much alive…or something like it. Now Crazytail said that once the guilty parties were all killed, this Skullhead would continue killing. So who, Longtree wondered, were the real victims here? Red Elk and his people or all the innocents that would suffer because of the actions of a group of criminals and resultant actions of some blood-hungry Indians?

There seemed to be only one course of action: find out who all the members of this Skull Society were and arrest them. One of them had to know where this beast was…and if not? Well, then more problems. But Longtree couldn’t arrest any Indians on suspicion of something like this. The Indian Agent in the district would go crazy. What did you arrest them for? he’d ask. Because, Longtree would tell him, one of them is harboring a monster.

It was ludicrous.

There was, really, nothing he could do. Nothing at all. His only hopes were to find this beast and destroy it. And when that was done, he was putting Lauters under arrest, too. If he could convince Tom Rivers to issue the warrant, that was.

Longtree corked the bottle. Enough drinking. He strapped his guns on, donned his coat and hat, and left his room, 1873 Winchester. 44 in hand. The sun was setting and the beast would be active again.

Time to kill it or be killed.

Outside, Longtree got his horse, saddled it, and rode out of Wolf Creek. Crazytail had said the beast would come after him, too, and the marshal was inviting it to. He started riding up to the Blackfeet camp.

He’d been riding about twenty minutes when he heard galloping hooves. The light was fading fast and he was approaching a little ridge that marked the end of the little valley he was in. He swallowed down hard, knowing it was trouble, and one hand snaked down and slipped the Winchester from its boot.

Who would it be this time?

Lauters? Maybe someone he’d hired? Or maybe Blackfeet braves, out to stop him from nosing around.

He rode up out of the valley and followed a thin, hard-packed snow trail into a stand of pines. Here, he paused. He didn’t hear a thing now. He hadn’t been able to tell from which direction the rider had been coming, just that he was riding fast.

“Well, show yourself already,” Longtree said under his breath.

He lit a cigar and got the black to moving again. Its pace was slow, barely a trot, Longtree’s ears attuned to every sound. He had a bad feeling suddenly, realizing that these trees and their shadowy depths were the perfect place to spring an ambush. He stopped.

There was a hint of movement off to his left.

Longtree threw himself off his horse just as shots were fired. The aim was poor, the bullets thudding into the branches overhead. The black trotted away up the trail, stopping a good distance away, as if knowing what was coming.

Longtree peeked his head out from behind the pine that covered him and there was a crack and a bullet whistled past his ear. He drew back and then darted out again, firing a few quick shots at where he thought the gunman was.

“You over there!” he called out. “I’m a United States Marshal! Throw down your weapon!”

A few more bullets bit into the pine.

I guess it’s gotta be done the hard way then, Longtree thought.

He tensed himself and dove to the cover of another tree. More bullets kicked up snow a few feet from him. He hadn’t been able to tell from which direction the rider following him had been coming…but it wasn’t from in front of him. Which meant there was another one out there, probably getting a bead on him right now. Longtree almost laughed to himself at how slow he’d gotten through the years. The rider following him had forced him into these trees where the gunman was waiting. It was a simple strategy and one that Longtree should’ve recognized.

He heard sticks breaking on the rise above him. It could only be the rider.

Longtree didn’t shoot; he waited. Waited for the assassin to get within visual range. His partner across the trail probably figured this out for he began to pepper Longtree’s location with gunfire, trying to make him shoot, warning his partner.

Longtree smiled and waited.

He saw a gray form moving through the trees, down the rise. He couldn’t see the man’s face: he wore a black hood. Across the trail, the other gunman crept silently from his hiding place.

Longtree let him get close.

Or tried to. The man coming down the rise began shooting and there was nothing to do but return fire. Longtree clipped off a few shots, one of which knocked the hat from the gunman’s head, the other went clear as he dove for cover. More bullets from across the trail pounded into the pines around the marshal. Longtree waited until this volley was over and fired two more bullets at the man on the rise and then leaped out from behind his tree, shooting at the other one. This guy wore a hood, too. He fired at Longtree and missed. Longtree shot back, hitting him in the arm. He let out a cry of pain and fell back, stumbling through the brush.

The gunman on the rise pulled back, firing a few bullets as he ran. They screamed harmlessly through the air. As dark settled in, the man on the rise was gone. Longtree heard the other moaning and plowing through the trees. A few seconds later, he heard horses riding off.

Longtree ran down the trail and caught sight of two riders galloping back in the direction of Wolf Creek. One of which was hunched over in his saddle. The marshal figured he could’ve picked one of them off, but didn’t bother.

There was no point.

One of them was winged and it wouldn’t be too hard to find a man with a bullet in his arm.

Particularly when he was the sheriff.

2

An hour later, Mike Ryan was back at his ranch.

They’d failed; Longtree was still very much alive. That was bad. And what made it worse was that Lauters had taken a bullet in his gun arm. He’d be of no real use for some time…if he ever was again.

It was quiet at the ranch. Most of the men were over at the cookhouse eating or at the bunkhouses playing cards and snoozing. Ryan could hear a harmonica playing somewhere. It was a nice evening, not too cool.

There were men out riding the perimeters of Ryan’s lands, twice the usual number, a good idea Ryan thought under the circumstances. And there were men down in the valley with the herds and half a dozen more walking the grounds. Nothing would come in tonight that wasn’t supposed to be there.

Ryan had put together an army of over sixty men that would ride at first light against the Blackfeet camp. That problem would be solved, but as for Longtree…that was another matter entirely. He had to be killed and soon. There wasn’t enough time to bring in a professional killer and most of those wouldn’t care too much to go after a federal marshal, particularly one with Longtree’s reputation for cunning.

No, there was only one man for the job.

Ryan himself.

He considered himself a businessman, not a killer. He wasn’t fast with a gun, but he was a good shot. Something he’d picked up in the sixties as a buffalo hunter. And he wouldn’t need to be fast…he planned on shooting the marshal in the back. It was the way most professionals did it, he knew. Safe, sure. The accepted method.

But it had to be done tonight.

And doing it would mean leaving the security of the ranch.

That was dangerous. But it was equally as dangerous letting Longtree live. He knew the truth of who the rustlers were and who lynched that injun. It was only a matter of time before he obtained the proper warrants. Ryan was a powerful man and he could probably block said warrants for a time, but not forever, not without looking damn guilty.

He devised a plan.

He found one of the men on watch. Cal Shannon. Shannon was a good man, but he liked the wild life and this is what Ryan needed.

“Cal,” he told him, “I need you to ride into Wolf Creek for me.”

Shannon’s eyes lit up. He knew he could stop for a drink and maybe a round of quick fun at Madame Tillie’s. “But the watch…”

“I’ll get another man.”

“What do you need, sir?”

Ryan told him. He was to go see Wynona Spence, the undertaker, and check on the progress of the monument. Have Spence put in writing the progress she was making. Then he was to go to the Serenity Hotel and procure a case of their best champagne. After that, there were some dry goods needed. But before he did any of that, he was to track down Marshal Longtree and tell him to ride up to the ranch immediately. And after these things were done, he could spend the night as he chose. Ryan even slipped him some money.

“No hurry to come back in the morning,” Ryan said. “Have a good time. You need a day off, I think.”

Shannon hooked up a wagon immediately and rode off.

Ryan took his guns and rode off a few minutes after Shannon was gone. He found a good spot on the trail to spring his ambush. Then he waited. The spot he’d selected was a shelf of rock rising a good twenty feet above the ground. Ryan could lay up here and shoot Longtree in the back as he rode by. There was no margin for error-if he didn’t kill Longtree, Longtree would kill him. He had no doubt of that.

But there would be no error here.

Ryan had a Sharps 1875,. 50 caliber. The “Big Fifty” as it was called, a buffalo gun. It could drop a bull with ease. No man would live if hit. And Longtree wouldn’t live. It was dark, but the moon was full. Plenty of light to shoot and die by.

Ryan waited.

He figured, at best, it would take a good thirty or forty minutes before Longtree would arrive. He only hoped Shannon could find him. If he couldn’t, this entire plan was doomed to failure. It would mean that Ryan would have to go into town himself and shoot the marshal and such an idea was ripe with dangers. But the cold fact remained: Joseph Longtree had to die.

There were no two ways about that.

Ryan wetted his lips and waited for his victim, knowing when the time came, he’d better be damn sure it was Longtree he was shooting and not someone else. The idea of murder didn’t sit well with Ryan and if some innocent was killed by accident…no, that was unthinkable.

The wind began to pick up slightly. It had a warmth to it. A mere hint of heat to dispel the cold. It wasn’t possible, he knew, but there it was blowing on him, driving the chill from his bones and starting a fire of madness in his brain.

It can’t be, he told himself repeatedly, just can’t be.

But it was. A warmth that seemed to burn hotter by the moment, an almost feverish heat. A trickle of sweat rolled down Ryan’s temple, his shirt clung to his back, an obnoxious gassy smell filled his nose.

By God, what is this?

Then a shadow fell over him: huge, nameless.

3

Skullhead stood over Ryan, his skin crusted with sores, scant irregular patches of coarse gray fur blowing in the wind. A sickening warmth oozed from his skin in sheets. He’d slipped up the back of the rock outcropping Ryan laid on with a preternatural silence and now he stood at his full height, staring down at the former vigilante with bleeding eyes, his huge skeletal tail whipping like a serpent.

A suffocating stench issued from the beast’s hide and it was this, more than anything, that often froze its victims in fear. Skullhead drew in sharp gasps of breath, his head reeling with savage appetite. His stomach growled. His tongue trembled fatly in his mouth.

His lips parted, a guttural bark ripping forth.

He shook his head, momentarily attempting to dislodge the hunger that burned in him like a fever dream. He clawed out for the intelligence to communicate, but it was denied him. Eat, his brain said, kill.

His huge misshapen skull was an architecture of bone knitted with poorly-fitting gray and pink skin, rubbed raw and infested with beetles and worms. He flinched each time one of these parasites worked at a strand of nerve.

Ryan moved then, as Skullhead knew he would. He brought up his weapon and pointed the long barrel at Skullhead’s huge plated chest. Blinking his eyes, he pulled the trigger. The chamber explosion was deafening, noise beyond noise, but Skullhead had little time to be angered at this as a. 50 caliber slug ripped through his chest and exploded out his back. Skullhead was thrown from the rocks, an agony that was at once sweet and numbing threading through his chest.

But more than pain, there was rage.

Skullhead scrambled back up the rocks with impossible speed. Ryan brought up his weapon and the beast knocked it from his hands with a single lethal blow. Ryan cowered: crying, whimpering.

Skullhead stood over him. Black blood and bile ran from the hole in his breast. His face was twisted up in a ragged sneer, yellow teeth protruding from the gums like knife blades. He was larger than any man, a giant, his arms longer, his skeletal fingers sharpened stakes. He pressed his face in that of Ryan, enjoying the terror that it produced in the man-making his bladder and bowels void, his eyes roll madly in their sockets. Skullhead licked his cowering face with a spiny tongue, the taste of fear making his loins ache. He drew back his great, bobbing head, lips peeling back inches from slavering jaws that jutted like a steel bear trap.

One fleshless hand gripped Ryan, pulling him up. Skullhead towered over him by more than two feet. With a flick of his wrist, he sent Ryan tumbling through the air. No hurry in eating, a bit of play first.

4

Ryan was dazed when he pulled himself up, his right wrist bent in agony. Skullhead stood before him, bathing him in the acrid heat of his shadow. Ryan made to run and the beast snared him by the head with one immense hand, the fingers of which covered his face. Skullhead drew the spindly, rawboned fingers back, taking Ryan’s scalp with them.

Ryan fell to his knees, his scalp hanging by a thread of meat, great furrows dug in his skull. Blood washed down into his eyes and he pushed it angrily away with shaking fingers. He knew he was going to die. There was no question of this; it was only a matter of when. His stomach convulsed at the commingled hot grave odor of the beast and his own rich, flowing blood. He tried to stand, bile squirting into his mouth, and the beast pulled him forward, so he could stare into the merciless face of death one more time.

Skullhead knew it had to be this way. Kill, but take time to savor the fear, to sip it like wine.

Skullhead’s face was huge in the grainy moonlight, the color of fresh cream, a tapestry of abraided flesh pitted with sores. And the eyes…crimson, slitted orbs sunk in bony, angular depressions.

Ryan studied this nightmare in detail. It gave him something other to think about than pain or death. He viewed the face like a map. Here were craters, there valleys, and there occasional matted growths of fur that grew in and out of the skin. The snout was pressed in, only vaguely vulpine, the nostrils flattened and wet, the teeth hooked like sickles.

Skullhead growled with a blast of hot, fetid breath and pulled Ryan’s arms free with wet, rending snaps. He dropped the limbs and studied the horror on the man’s face. It wasn’t enough. He buried his claws in Ryan’s groin and slit him up to the throat, marveling at the bounty of glistening jewels that bulged out. Ryan slumped and Skullhead caught him. He chewed his face free from the muscled housing of his skull and broke the dying man on the rocks, slamming him against them with titan force until Ryan came apart like a drenched and running rag doll.

Then and only then, did he dine.

5

Longtree lit a cigarette and exhaled in the wind. “Did he say what he wanted?”

“No, sir,” Cal Shannon told him, “he just said how he wanted to see you right away. That it was important.”

“I see.”

“If you ask me, Marshal, something strange is going on up there. Mr. Ryan’s got men walking guard, twice the number of riders with the herds…peculiar, if you ask me. Don’t tell him how I said so, though.”

“Course not.”

“His race horses got slaughtered last night. Boys are saying how maybe it’s that beast folks are talking about.”

“Could be.”

Shannon shrugged. “Anyway, he said to ride up there right away.”

Longtree nodded. “I will. Thanks, Shannon.”

Shannon jumped up on his wagon and rode off, leaving Longtree outside the livery barn alone. He never made it up to the Blackfeet camp. After the masked gunmen had attacked him and rode off, Longtree found his horse nearly a mile up the trail and returned to town. He’d been planning on searching out Lauters, but that could wait…the sheriff’s wound wouldn’t heal for some time.

6

By ten that night, the blizzard hit.

It had been threatening for days, finally arriving with screaming winds and blowing snow. About the time the first snowflakes fell, Skullhead was miles away from the scene of his crime, lurking around the outskirts of town. There was only one left now, he knew, and after that…well he decided, for reasons even unknown to himself, he would keep on killing. It was such good sport.

Longtree didn’t let the snow deter him from his appointment with Ryan. He’d plowed through many a blizzard and now was hardly the time to cower behind doors. He rode and rode hard.

Sheriff Lauters was at Dr. Perry’s getting a bullet dug out of his arm. Despite Perry’s repeated questioning, he would say little save that someone had taken a shot at him. But Perry didn’t believe a word of this. Not for a minute.

Deputy Bowes stood in the doorway of the jailhouse watching the good and not-so good citizens of Wolf Creek go about their lives despite the wind-driven snow that blanketed the streets. He had a bad feeling in his gut and had for days.

And at the Congregational Church, a battered and bruised version of Reverend Claussen crouched on the altar, praying. He prayed to Jesus, he prayed to Mary, he prayed to any gods that would listen. Things had to be put right in this town, he knew, and couldn’t be until Sheriff Lauters was resting in peace in the cemetery outside town. But how to accomplish this? There lie the question. Claussen couldn’t do it himself and he refused to hire some sinful gunslinger. Yet, it had to be done. Prayer seemed the only viable answer. Claussen had been praying for hours, his knees aching, his back knotted with pain. But suffering was part of the process, only true discomfort could bring results. So Claussen prayed to any gods that would give him audience. More so, he prayed for his guardian angel to be sent to him.

But there were other things going on in Wolf Creek, other secrets tended in dark gardens of the soul. Many of which were closely-guarded and coveted like sin.

One of them was that Wynona Spence, that shrewd businesswoman with the morbid tongue, kept the body of her lesbian lover embalmed in her rooms above the mortuary. She had died two years before, but Wynona would not let her go. She chatted with her, fixed her hair and make up, read her poetry and took her meals with her. And at night, she slept beside her happy as only the true necrophile could be.

Another was that Dr. Perry had a serious morphine habit which grew worse week by week. It helped with his back pain but often plunged his usually meticulous and analytical brain into a fog of hallucination and dream. And lately, those dreams were becoming nightmares where he was once again a Union battlefield surgeon during the War Between the States. He was in a misty valley during the Shiloh campaign, in a barn which was being used as a field hospital. The injured and dying and mutilated were piling up around him as he performed amputation after amputation, limbs heaped like cordwood. It was a nightmare, yes, but he’d witnessed such a thing firsthand and although a man could close his eyes, some things would never go away.

Then there was the Skull Society.

No white man (and precious few Indians, for that matter) knew how exactly it had happened, how it was to call a primal monster from its grave. They didn’t know that for three weeks before Skullhead’s first appearance, the Skull Society-all twelve members-had prayed and fasted in the sacred grove, denying themselves any and all comforts until they were purified to a point where they could literally see one another’s thoughts. Until their brains functioned as a single unit. For the last week, not a word was spoken. It didn’t need to be-the extracts of certain sacred herbs and roots had amplified their latent telepathic abilities. As a single brain they were able to call up the beast from its grave, resurrect him to full potential via the Blood-Medicine-a heady brew of their own blood, reptile toxins, plant saps, and the juices of a deadly mushroom found only deep within the mountain caves. Through this, Skullhead was restored to fleshy vitality and not the mummy Longtree and Bowes had seen. In the sweat lodge each night, they would concentrate on the image of the next victim and transmit it to the Lord of the High Wood. The only drawback being, that if Skullhead could not find said victim, his bloodlust would be sated on anything and anyone he could find. And when the enemies of the tribe were gone, Skullhead would continue murdering, destroying, and devouring until he himself was destroyed.

These were the ways of the Skull Society and they were secret, taken to the grave.

The people of Wolf Creek knew little of the Gang of Ten, but they speculated endlessly as was their way. Sometimes, even the most gruesome speculation paled beside reality.

Abe Runyon, the first victim of Skullhead, was a veteran Indian-hater. Or so he thought until he took a fancy to a Blackfoot girl barely in her teens. She spurned his advances and Runyon decided that was unthinkable. He abducted her and kept her in his little cabin outside town where he repeatedly raped her until, overcome with guilt, he staved in her head with a hammer. He buried her beneath the floorboards of his cabin where she still lays, a skeleton dressed in a rotting elkskin dress, dreaming away eternity in a rage of moss.

Cal Sevens, the second victim, had been a quiet man. A loner in every sense of the word. But at night in his room above the smithy shop, he would dream of a prostitute he had known in Kansas City and masturbate fiercely…and then, overcome with guilt, would read from the Bible.

Charlie Mears, the third, was a highwayman who specialized in robbing and murdering miners in the hills. He was perpetually drunk and had been since the night he’d tipped over an oil lamp and his house had burned to the ground, taking his wife and infant son with it.

And Pete Olak, the fourth victim, was thought to have been a good father and provider for his little family. But it was he who pulled the noose over Red Elk’s head and tightened it, smiling as he did so. The fifth, sixth, and seventh victims-George Reiko, Nathan Segaris, and Curly DelVecchio respectively-had been the ones who had cooked up the lynching of Red Elk and had done so under Mike Ryan’s supervision. They dragged Red Elk through the streets, kicking and cussing him all the way. As a final gesture of hatred and disrespect, they had urinated on him. And Dewey Mayhew, who had pretty much stood by and watched the hanging, his bowels tight and his bones rattling beneath his skin, lived a cursed and haunted life. Like that nameless miner, he had been told the exact date of his death by Ghost Hand, Herbert Crazytail’s father. And told it would be violent, painful, and unpleasant. It was. Mike Ryan, the most recent victim of Skullhead, was a very rich and powerful man. Equally respected and feared. But for all his bravado and barrel-chested machismo, Ryan had a taste for young men and, whenever possible, satisfied his urges with a male prostitute in Laramie.

The last surviving member of the Gang of Ten was Sheriff Bill Lauters. He had a fine farm and wonderful family, but he, too, was haunted. Ever since Red Elk’s lynching he had been drinking heavily. Sometimes it was the only way he could get the boy’s face out of his mind-that distended visage livid as a bruise, those bulging sightless eyes, crooked neck, and lolling blackened tongue. Sometimes Lauters would dream that Red Elk came to him, a dead thing, bone shaft jutting from his broken neck. He would carry a noose in his hands. His own. Lauters would wake in a cold sweat and immediately hit the bottle. Sometimes, he prayed for death.

These were the secrets of the town, a sampling at best. There were worse things, but they would never be known. For as Deputy Bowes had commented, Wolf Creek was a seething cauldron ready to boil over.

This, then, was the scene before the slaughter.

7

Longtree found the body about half a mile from Ryan’s ranch. It was covered in a light dusting of snow, the world’s oldest shroud. He would’ve missed it save that it was sprawled over the trail, twisted and flayed, a cast-off from an abattoir. It was still warm.

Lighting the oil lantern he always carried for times like this, Longtree investigated.

The face had been torn free as had the throat. The body had no arms and one leg was missing It had been eviscerated, plucked, bitten, clawed, and chewed. Longtree, nausea like a plug of grease in his stomach, searched the surrounding area and found the arms, some bloody meat that might have been a regurgitated face, much frozen blood, but no leg. A snack carted away for the trail, he decided.

In the snow and the wind, his horse whinnying with displeasure, Longtree made a fairly through examination of the crime area. He found nothing here he hadn’t seen at the others: carnage, simple and brutal. Nothing more.

Yet, he knew there was always more to be gleaned than what struck the eye. This was the work of the Skullhead, the marshal full well knew, an act of revenge perpetrated with an animal’s hunger and a man’s sadistic imagination. This man, whoever he might have been, had to be one of the Gang of Ten. Unless the Skullhead had allowed a serious slip in methodology, it could be no one else. The mysterious ninth member. But who?

He searched the corpse for signs of identification and found none.

It was no easy task. Such was the degree of atrocities performed on the cadaver that its clothes and flesh were threaded together. Both were frozen stiff with blood, it being hard to determine where one started and the other left off. After a few minutes of this with nothing to show for it but filthy gloves, Longtree gave up.

His horse had pawed through the snow and was happily munching some tender grasses. But he heard whinnying. He looked around. The snowfall obscured everything. The lantern’s light was growing dim, fuel running low. It sputtered and spat. He set out on foot, trying to pinpoint the direction of the sound. Noises were broken up by the wind, scattered, and set back upon themselves so it was impossible to trust his ears. He found a rifle in the snow, a Sharps buffalo rifle,. 50 caliber. It had to belong to the dead man. From the smell of powder on the barrel, it had been fired recently. Maybe at the beast.

Longtree searched the area in ever-widening concentric circles that slowly brought him out of range of his own horse. Had he not been a scout at one time, he would never had attempted this. It was dangerous to wander off in a blizzard in such desolate country, but Longtree’s sense of orientation was flawless.

He found the horse some time later, picketed behind a high shelf of rocks. It was a fine muscular gelding, sleek and proud. A rich man’s horse. He searched the saddlebags and found some papers of a business nature, all bearing the signature of Mike Ryan. He also found a Springfield 1865 Allin Conversion in the rifle boot, finely customized. A brass plate on the butt identified it as Mike Ryan’s weapon. There was no doubt then, the body was either that of Mike Ryan or someone who had robbed him. Longtree decided on the former.

Mike Ryan had been the ninth member.

But why was he out here? Shannon had said he was expecting him at the ranch. So why would Ryan be out here?

Then it came to Longtree. It was all too obvious, a child’s leap of logic. Ryan had asked him up here in order to kill him. He had hidden on the trail, probably atop the rock outcropping, waiting for Longtree to ride by, the Sharps rifle at the ready. But the Skullhead had found him first.

Another assassination attempt thwarted. This time by the killer himself…or itself.

Quite by accident, Skullhead had saved the lawman’s life.

Longtree laughed grimly in the wind, taking Ryan’s horse back to the body. He now knew who all the rustlers were. Only one remained alive. Lauters. Ryan had probably been the other masked rider with Lauters. It all fit together seamlessly. If Longtree wanted to stop the beast, it was only a matter of sticking close to Lauters.

Because the beast would come sooner or later.

And as unpleasant as it was, Longtree would have to follow the sheriff wherever he went.

8

Sheriff Bill Lauters had a little farm outside Wolf Creek. And as the storm picked up its intensity, the eldest of his three sons-Chauncey-was sent out into the cold. As the eldest, he was considered man of the house when his father was away, which was often. More often than not, Chauncey, with the assistance of his brothers, pretty much took care of the place. They milked the cows, fed the chickens and slaughtered them, slopped the hogs, tended the grounds-everything. When their father was around, which was seldom, he was often too drunk to do more than sit on the porch or collapse in bed.

Tonight, Chauncey braved the elements to drive the hogs into the barn where they’d be safe from the cold. His brothers were supposed to do it when they got loose and do it before sundown, but as usual they’d forgotten.

“Git!” Chauncey cried, kicking the sows towards the barn, snow hitting him in the face like granules of sand. “Get a move on, will ya? If you think I like being out in this cold, yer damn wrong!”

The barn door was open, swinging back and forth in the wind. Another thing his brothers had forgotten to do. No surprise there. Chauncey wrestled the hogs through the door, knowing they’d be paid in full for their treachery once slaughter-time rolled around.

“And I’ll enjoy it this time,” he promised them.

The last time he hadn’t. It was hard to care for an animal for years and then kill it, particularly when the animal in question didn’t die easy. But fought and screeched till the bitter end.

The hogs safely in their pen, Chauncey froze. There was a stink in the barn. A viscid, rotten odor of spoiled meat. It hung high and hot in the air despite the chill. Swallowing, Chauncey lit the lantern that hung on the wall and checked the horses on the other end. They were silent. They usually started snorting when someone came, thinking it was feeding time, hungry for attention.

“Old Joe?” he called. “Blue Boy?”

The first thing Chauncey’s brain took notice of was that their stables were broken open, the wood shattered as if by an ax and cast about. The next thing it took notice of brought him to his knees and stopped his heart.

Oh, God, no…

The horses had been killed; more so, butchered. There was blood everywhere, the straw red with it. They’d been taken apart like dolls a child has grown tired of-bits of them scattered everywhere. They’d been gutted, decapitated, stripped to the bone. The head of Old Joe was impaled atop a corral post. Blue Boy had been skinned, his hide driven into the wall with spikes. The wet, still steaming intestines of both were strung like Christmas garland through the stable fencing and up into the rafters.

Chauncey went down on his knees, vomiting, his head spinning. This couldn’t be, this just couldn’t be. Nothing could do this…nothing. No beast was this savage, no man this deranged. When the dry heaves had subsided, Chauncey looked upon the atrocities once more, tears in eyes, bile on his chin.

Something wet struck him in the back of the head.

Chauncey turned. There was a clump of damp warmth in his hair. With a cry he pulled it free. A piece of bloody meat…no much worse: a tentacle of flesh connected to a single swollen eye. Blue Boy’s. Chauncey threw it aside, his guts churning. Another object came whirling out of the darkness, flipping end over end. It came to rest against a stack of hay bales. The remains of Blue Boy’s head…skull cracked like an egg, brains scooped out, tongue chewed free, eyes licked from their orbits.

Chauncey screamed.

Something else whistled from above: A femur stained red, shattered, a hunk of bloody meat and white ligament trailing from the knob of bone like a pennant. He ducked and it missed him.

Chauncey went red with anger, gray with fear. He glared up at the hayloft. “Who’s up there?” he croaked. “Who the hell’s up there? I’ve got a gun…”

A lie, but it gave him strength.

There was a low growling sound, then a wet ripping followed by chewing. Nothing more. A segment of vertebrae was dropped into the hay. It had been sucked clean.

Chauncey’s brain was telling him to run; anything that could take apart two draft horses with such ease would make a nasty mess of him. But he couldn’t run. He wanted to see this thing, look it in the eye and make it feel his raw hate.

There was a groan from up in the loft and a blur of motion.

No time to run now.

The beast landed about seven feet away. Chauncey stared at it, drinking in every hideous detail. Chauncey was nearly six feet tall, but this thing dwarfed him. Its flesh was scarred and raw. And that face, lewd and colorless and revolting.

The beast took a step forward. Its huge, misshapen head quivered with grotesque musculature, scant, threadbare tufts of fur bristled. Its jaw was thrust out, almost like a snout, its eyes red as spilled blood and slitted, covered with a shiny transparent membrane.

Chauncey turned to run and promptly slipped on the horses’ entrails, stumbling forward and catching a coil of intestine across the neck that put him promptly on his back.

The beast had him by then, one huge hand locked in his hair, bending him back over the bony ridge of its knee. Chauncey opened his eyes and saw the mouth opening, the shaft of the black throat. Crooked teeth jutted from discolored gums which were pitted with wormholes. Chauncey smelled the charnel odor of its breath, saw the flickering lantern light gleam off those needled teeth and then they were in his throat, buried to the hilt. When they came away, he had no throat, just a bleeding flap of flesh. The pigs began to squeal.

Skullhead moaned low in his throat, the taste of hot human blood an ecstasy of no slight intoxication. It filled his being with a sense of roaring omnipotence that was almost too much for even him. The horses had been amusing, sweet tidbits to torture then kill, but they were gamy things, they lacked the satisfying richness of the boy. Skullhead ate him slowly, savoring every honeyed clot of marrow, every hot sip of blood, every sweet nibble of gray matter.

And then it occurred to him and he couldn’t understand why it hadn’t before: He was a god. A king. A lord. Nothing less. And the people, those that had called him and those that opposed him, were his servants, his cattle. He could picture it in the hazy, red confines of his brain. Picking out the tasty ones, killing the others for sport; slaughtering the old ones to relieve boredom, dining on the young ones. It was their destiny-to fill his belly. He’d eat women and boys, pull apart the men like fragile flowers, snack on the heads of infants like candies.

Yes, that was how it had been in the Dark Days and would be again.

Skullhead, caked with dried blood, Chauncey’s spine lying across his swelling belly, thought about these things. He knew there was a reason he was brought forth from the boiling firmament of the grave. It wasn’t merely to kill the white men, it was to kill everyone. Appetite was his destiny and it was enough. What more could he want?

A poet might have said: He ate to live and lived to eat.

It was so childishly simple. Skullhead closed his eyes, belched, and waited for necessity or mere boredom to force him into the house, the dining hall. There were others there…he could smell their parts-hot, secret, wanting. Skullhead dreamed as the wind blew cold and the lantern went out. He dreamed of a fine tanned smock knitted from the soft hides of children. Warm and toasty, covering his innumerable bare spots.

He waited for carnage. It was all he knew.

9

After Longtree had turned over the body of Mike Ryan to Deputy Bowes, he had a look for Sheriff Lauters. No one had seen him. He wasn’t at Doc Perry’s and Perry claimed he didn’t know where he was.

Longtree didn’t believe him.

He knew the doctor was a friend of the sheriff’s and had been for some time. Perry knew where he was, but he wouldn’t tell, not even if Longtree put him under arrest and slapped him around. Perry was a very loyal man. Longtree respected this. Lauters was out there somewhere, holed up in some saloon or whorehouse, drinking himself blind. His career was over and he knew that now. He was in hiding and the only thing that would bring him out was the Skullhead. And sooner or later, this would happen.

Longtree stabled his horse in the livery across from the Serenity Hotel and set out on foot. He had to find Lauters and if that meant checking every saloon in town, then this is what he’d do. He didn’t want to arrest Lauters just yet, merely put him under a sort of protective custody. Whether the sheriff liked that or not didn’t concern Longtree. He wanted the man behind bars in the jailhouse so Bowes and he could get a crack at the beast when it came for him.

It was a plan.

The snow was still falling, the wind still blowing when Longtree passed the smithy shop. He stopped there. Dick Rikers was the blacksmith and according to Bowes’ records, he’d been one of the few to witness the vigilantes actually stringing up Red Elk.

Longtree went in.

It was hot in there, Rikers working branding irons at the forge.

“Marshal. What can I do for you?” Rikers asked, his powerful arms wet with sweat.

“I’d like to ask you a couple questions, if I may.”

Rikers nodded, setting aside his work and wiping his face and neck with a towel. “Just fashioning a new set of irons for the Ryan combine. It can wait, though.”

“Mike Ryan?”

“Don’t know of any other.”

Longtree rolled a cigarette and lit it slowly. “Ryan’s dead, Mr. Rikers,” he said.

“Dead?” Rikers looked shocked.

“Yeah, murdered. Killed by the same thing that’s killed the others. The thing you saw, I believe.”

Rikers went pale, remembering the night he’d seen the creature run off after assaulting Dewey Mayhew. “Ryan,” he said, “Mike Ryan.”

Longtree nodded. “I don’t think he’ll be the last, either.”

“Something had better well be done.”

“Oh, we’re trying, Mr. Rikers, I assure you of this,” Longtree said, exhaling a cloud of smoke. “But you see, this is a strange situation, a very strange one indeed. I’m of a mind that these deaths are connected with the lynching of that Blackfoot last year. You saw it, didn’t you?”

Rikers swallowed. “I saw it, all right. But there was nothing I could’ve done for that boy except gotten myself killed, if that’s what your insinuating.”

“No, you did right, Mr. Rikers. No sense in tangling with outlaws like that.”

“I don’t know who they were-they wore masks.”

“No, that’s not what I’m interested in either. I want to ask you about the murder that led to all that.”

Rikers features went slack. “The Carpenter girl?”

“Yes. What do you remember of her?”

Rikers sat down, licking his lips. “She was a pretty girl, Marshal. That and a very nice one. She was liked by everyone. Just a nice kid who never did any wrong by anyone.”

“Did she have suitors that you recall?”

Rikers laughed. “She had too many, Marshal. Men crawled out of the woodwork when they got a look at her.”

“You remember any in particular?”

“Hell, Marshal, “ Rikers said, “it was some time ago. There were ranch hands, some of the miners, even Liberty, the dentist.”

“A real popular girl, eh?”

“Yes, but a moral one, you understand. She never so much as dated a single man that I remember.” Rikers laughed again. “She really did have her choice, though, even married men took a shine to her. I recall Sheriff Lauters was pretty sweet on her.”

“Lauters?”

“Yeah, Big Bill was in love, I think.”

10

Jimmy Lauters, aged twelve, collapsed in the snow outside his house. His head was spinning with dizziness, his eyesight blurred. As he lay there in the snow, trembling with shock, dry heaves wracking his body, he thought only of death.

In his mind, he saw only slaughter.

He tried to will himself to crawl the last few feet to the door, but movement, any movement seemed a chore. He heard the barn door swing open and slam against the wall. It made a great hammering noise as if it had been reduced to kindling. And no wind, Jimmy knew, had the strength to do that. He could hear heavy footfalls behind him and knew that the beast was coming.

He could feel its hot breath on his back.

Let it think I’m dead, he decided with iron nerve. Let it think that.

The beast sniffed a line down his spine and withdrew, just standing above him, tasting the air.

Jimmy launched himself to his feet with a cry, already running by this time. The beast howled and Jimmy felt the tips of its claws rip gashes into the back of his neck. Then he was at the door. A split-second later, through it. He threw the bolt and snatched the shotgun from above the hearth. He broke it open and fed shells into it with numbed fingers.

“What are you doing, boy?” his mother asked, crossing the room quickly.

He said: “The monster.” Nothing more.

Abigail Lauters, her steel gray hair pulled back in a tight bun, wasn’t impressed with this foolishness. “I told you to fetch your brother,” she snapped. “It’s bath night…”

He looked at her with crazed, dreaming eyes and the words died on her lips. His face was colorless, vomit smeared down the front of his shirt. His throat was bleeding.

“Dead,” he muttered, “Chauncey’s dead.”

Abigail said nothing for a moment, the impact of those two words weighing in slowly, heavily. She could hear her cousin Virginia upstairs, singing a song as she bathed Jo Jo, the youngest. Dead? Chauncey couldn’t be dead, why that was sheer nonsense-

“The monster got the horses,” Jimmy sobbed. “It tore them apart…and Chauncey…it was eating him…”

His mother snatched the shotgun from his hands. There was a thud against the door.

Another.

Then another.

“Get upstairs,” she said calmly, but with iron behind her words.

Jimmy had never heard her use that tone before. Mechanically, he backed to the stairway, tears running from his eyes. The door was hit again and again. The plank that held it secure splintered, then split in two. The door seemed to bulge in its frame and then it exploded inward.

The beast stood there, breathing with a low, bestial grunting.

Abigail looked on it and decided it was a demon from hell. It could be nothing else. It had to stoop low to come through the door, a horror knitted with tufts of matted fur and scaly skin, stinking of slaughterhouses, dusted with snow. Its huge tail swung back and forth, casting aside tables and chairs. It came forward hunched and bent, but still its skull brushed the ceiling rafters. Ribbons of drool hung from its mouth.

Abigail shot it twice and it reeled with the impact, but never stopped. It came at her like a freight train, the gun slapped from her hands. As Jimmy watched, cowering on the third stair, the beast tore his mother apart. She looked, if anything, like a burst feather pillow stuffed with red. Bits of her rained in the air, sprayed and exploded in every conceivable direction..

Jimmy scrambled up the stairs.

His Aunt Virginia was standing up on the landing, little Jo Jo in her arms. She stared, shocked into stillness. Jimmy looked back and saw the beast, its armored torso red with his mother’s blood.

“Jesus in Heaven,” she whispered.

“Run!” Jimmy yelled. “Run for godsake!”

Virginia scampered down the hall, slamming and locking the door of the children’s room behind her.

Jimmy dashed into his father’s room and returned with a knife.

The beast came to him, vaulting up the stairs, its massive weight collapsing individual steps as if they were fashioned from balsa. Its obscene, hideous face was hooked in a crooked grin. Its nostrils flared at the boy’s smell. It saw the knife and was unimpressed, two gaping bleeding holes already open in its chest.

Jimmy lifted the knife to strike.

The beast’s lips drew back slickly from its dripping gums, rows of razored and serrated teeth gnashing together. Saliva spilled down its jutting chin, blood and bits of viscera were dropping from its mouth.

Jimmy threw himself at it, sinking the knife in its throat. Then it had him. The blade still buried in its neck, it brought its jaws together on Jimmy’s head, his skull going with a muted wet pop. It ate him this way, feeding him between those rows of teeth until there were only bones, hair, and stringy tendrils of meat to show for twelve years of struggle.

Virginia held no illusions that she was safe in the bedroom. She was next and there were no two ways about this. The door shattered to brushwood and the beast stepped in, squeezing its bulk through and taking most of the doorframe with it. Virginia read from her Bible in a high, shivery voice.

“Thou shalt not be afraid for the terror by night,” she read, “nor the arrow that flieth by day; nor the pestilence that walketh in darkness—”

Skullhead stood there, drunk with blood, listening to these words and disliking them for reasons he wasn’t even sure of. In two steps, he was on her. He pulled her head free, examined it, turning up his nose at the perfume in her hair, and tossed it away through the door. It bounced down the steps like a meaty ball. He had no use for this one.

It was the child he wanted.

Under the bed, he heard it crying. Such sad sounds that were music to Skullhead, a choir of angels. He flipped the bed over and snatched the child up in his arms, crushing it against him.

In silence, he ate, pulling its juicy limbs free like a butterfly’s wings.

11

Reverend Claussen heard the doors to the church slam open with a crash.

One was nearly torn off, snow and wind blowing in, but they did nothing to disguise the figure which stood there. Claussen was laying at the foot of the altar, bruised and hurting and filthy with his own urine and excrement. His mind had gone to mush now and he did not doubt what his eyes showed him.

The beast.

It came forward slowly with a raw and vile smell of death lingering about it. Its eyes found and held the reverend and in those eyes, dear Christ, was… deliverance. In those red and glistening orbs was a promise of purity. For, Claussen saw, it was no beast, it was a god. Not some storybook deity who couldn’t be bothered to put in an appearance, let alone speak to and instruct his flock. This was a god in the flesh. Huge and pulsing and jutting and stinking and anxious to claim the faithful as his own.

It occurred to Claussen as his mind raged with religious awe, that this was one of the creatures mentioned in the book on Indian folklore. But unlike the phantoms and fairies of Christianity, it was real. It lived and breathed and lusted.

Its stink was like sacred incense to Claussen even though it put his stomach in his throat and made his bowels ache to be voided. It came forward and towered above him. He was on his knees before it, trembling, sickened by the noxious bouquet of its stench. It filled him, roiling his guts, and turning his thoughts to mud.

“Take me, oh Lord,” he said in a screeching voice, “take me as sacrifice.”

It reached down and grasped him by the neck with one immense hand, hoisting him skyward so his face was in its own. Its breath smelled of decay and vomit and blackness, hot and appalling. Claussen gazed into those unblinking red eyes and jolts of electricity thrummed through him, boiling his blood and filling his skull with white light. He saw-

He saw the world before man. He saw the civilizations that had risen and fallen. He saw things unknown and unguessed. He saw the Skullheads and their kingdom. He saw the world change and the red man come and the great, fierce Lords of the High Wood sicken and die. Their herds thinned as they could no longer bear children. Until there were only a few left that were worshipped, then entombed by the Indians. Where they waited and waited in solemn, suffocating darkness until they were called forth.

Yes, the knowledge had been passed.

Claussen was to become its priest.

To prove this, it bit off his left hand at the wrist and swallowed the meat and bone without chewing. The agony was beautiful. It dropped the reverend and mounted the altar. Its lashing tail shattered and tumbled the effigies of Christ and Mary. It pulled down the cross and urinated over holy relics and missives.

It claimed the church as its own.

Claussen, at last, had found meaning to his existence.

12

Early the next morning, just before light, Dr. Perry was up and about. His back wasn’t too bad today, a bit sensitive. His cells were content, having been fed their ritual breakfast of morphine. Perry made rounds in his wagon, treating two cases of frostbite and mending a shattered leg up at one of the mining camps. When day broke, the sun came out, parting the clouds. There was every indication that today-though cool-would be a lovely day, Perry decided.

He couldn’t have been more wrong.

On a whim, he stopped by the church.

He didn’t like to think that Lauters had killed the reverend. It was the last thing he wanted to believe, but, as Marshal Longtree had pointed out a few days before, the sheriff was entirely out of control. And Reverend Claussen was missing.

In the church, much to the doctor’s surprise, he found Claussen at the altar, reveling in something. He soon saw what. The altar had been destroyed. It was smeared with excrement and worse things. Everything was destroyed and defiled.

“Good Christ,” Perry said. The church smelled like an abbatoir.

Claussen turned. “Do not profane in this house, sir,” he said.

Perry was speechless. The reverend’s face was bruised and swollen.

“What happened to you, man?” he demanded.

“Baptismal under fire,” the reverend laughed.

Perry went to him, but the reverend pulled away. “I don’t need your help, sir.”

“Tell me who did this.”

Claussen grinned. “Oh, I think you know.”

Perry sat down on the first step of the altar. Claussen was right, of course: Perry did know. Lauters. The sheriff hadn’t been lying to Perry the night before when he’d said he hadn’t killed the reverend. He hadn’t committed murder, he’d merely assaulted the man. Perry had always known Lauters to be a bit heavy-handed and particularly in the past few years-there’d been more than one feisty prisoner he’d had to stitch up and set-but never nothing to this degree. A beating of such magnitude could never be blamed on mere self-defense except in a lunatic’s brain-this was a crime and the man who had committed it, a criminal.

“When did this happen?” the doctor inquired. “Did he do this, too?” He indicated the altar, the jackstraw tumble of pews, the shredded tapestries, the ravaged statues.

“Hardly.”

“When?”

“In the dim past.”

The doctor took a deep, pained breath. “You’ll have to press charges, of course.”

“Nonsense.”

Perry just stared at him. He wanted nothing more than an injection right now; nothing else could hope to sort this mess out.

“Lauters will face punishment, yes, but not by the law,” Claussen said with abnormal calm, “but by His hand.”

“God?” Perry said without knowing he had.

Claussen smiled again: It was awful, like a cadaver’s grin. “God? Yes, perhaps, but not the one you mean, not the one I’ve thrown my life away on.”

Perry stroked his mustache. “Easy, Reverend.” He had a nasty feeling Claussen had lost his mind. “I’d like you to come back to my home with me,” he said, picking his words carefully. “You’ve been through a shock, you need rest. I can see that you get it. I’ll have Deputy Bowes and Marshal Longtree come by.”

“For what possible purpose?”

“To arrest the man who did this.”

Claussen laughed softly. “I don’t need them, Doctor. None of us do. You see, there’s only one law now- his law.”

“Who are you speaking of?”

“You know, you know very well. You borrowed my books—”

“I didn’t read them,” Perry lied. “There hasn’t been time.”

“Much to your disadvantage, then, I would think.” Claussen went back to the wreckage of the altar. “When he takes command, when he assumes his throne, he’ll need educated men like you and I to help him sort out affairs. But you must read the books, you must know of his past…”

Perry just looked at him.

Claussen grinned. “You see, Doctor, he is a king. He ruled this land once. When our relations came from Europe, they brought European gods with them. This was a mistake. They know nothing of this land, its history, its needs, its course.”

“Yes, well—”

“The Indians know they weren’t the first race here, that there were older races.” Claussen smiled at the idea. “So wise, those people…and we call them savages.” He shook is head. “No matter. The old race were called the Lords of the High Wood. When the Indians first migrated into this land countless thousands of years ago, the Lords were still here. Not many still survived, but some. Enough, I would say.”

“What does this have to do with anything?” Perry wanted to know.

“I’m instructing you, Doctor, on the new religion which is actually quite old. These are things you’d do well to remember.” Claussen touched a finger to his chin. “Now, at present, our lawmen are hunting a beast, a creature that is slaughtering people. But this creature is not new, in fact it is very old. It is a direct descendent of these Lords, the Kings of the Hunt. You see, in ancient times, the Indians worshipped these creatures. They were gods. They made sacrifice to them, offered them virgins to breed with. Eventually the Lords died out-oh, due perhaps to changes in climate, destruction of their habitats-but a few survived.”

“You’re insane,” Perry told him.

“On the contrary, I’m probably the only sane person left,” Claussen said, stabbing a finger at the doctor. “I told you once of the Skull Society. Do you remember? Well, this Skull Society is an ancient cult. At one time they were priests of the order that selected sacrifice to the Lords. They were the law-makers, holy men of a cult of barbarity.”

Perry sighed. “Are you trying to tell me one of these… things still exists?”

Claussen massaged his temples wearily. “Yes, exactly. Most of these Lords, these gods of old died out long ago, but a few survived into modern times. Certain tribes believe until quite recently.”

“Stop it, Reverend. You—”

Claussen silenced him with a look, lost in his new religion. “Do you know what are meant by the ‘dog days,’ Doctor?”

Perry nodded. The dog days referred to the pre-horse period of the tribes when all activities were accomplished with canine assistance: camp moving, hunting, etc.

“Many of the tribes, our own Blackfeet included, believe a few of these Lords survived into the dog days-which, would mean within the last four or five-hundred years or so.”

Perry’s back was aching fiercely now. Claussen explained all this with such cold, compelling logic, it was hard not to believe him. But it was fantasy. Had to be. Perry was something of a naturalist himself and he didn’t doubt for a moment that the earth had been populated at various times by bizarre animalistic peoples and nameless beasts. But they were all extinct now. To accept, even for a moment, that some primordial horror had survived…

“Nonsense,” Perry maintained.

“Is it?”

“Of course. Even if there were such creatures, they are long gone.”

“Not at all, Doctor,” Claussen said as if he were addressing a child. “One has survived.”

Perry just stared at him. It was insanity; there could be no shred of underlying truth in this.

“Read the books, Doctor. It’s all there. What we know comes from legend, tribal memory, but legend is the only glimpse we have of those ancient times and ways.”

“You need rest,” Perry said weakly.

“The Blackfeet call him Skullhead.”

“Why?”

“Because his head is like a huge skull. The Skullheads, you see, wear their skeletons on the outsides of their bodies like insects. Throwbacks to prehistory, Doctor. Lords of the High Wood. Beings whose savage appetites can never be satisfied.” Claussen grinned ghoulishly.

It was all madness; Perry did not want to hear it. Claussen had kept his left hand stuffed inside his coat the entire time. Perry had not wanted to ask why. But now he did.

“That doesn’t concern you. When the time comes…”

Perry stood up and began walking to the door, silently.

“He’s here to feed on us,” Claussen gloated. “To destroy all we’ve built, to take back his lands. And to breed. Blood is his wine…give unto him…”

13

Perry said, “The church has been wrecked. Claussen is out of his mind.”

Longtree heard him out and did not like any of it. Lauters had assaulted the man and he had now gone quietly-or not so quietly-out of his mind. That much was true. Lauters needed to be put under arrest.

Perry just shook his head. “He’s raving, Marshal. He believes this creature is some sort of god and he is its priest.”

“Did he call it by name?”

“Yes.” Perry swallowed. “Lord of the High Wood. Skullhead.”

Longtree paled. “Maybe he’s not as crazy as you think.”

Perry just stared at him. “What do you mean by that?”

So Longtree told him everything he knew. Told him in detail even though he didn’t really have the time to do much explaining. But it was important that the doctor know.

“Like some sort of ogre,” was all Perry said. “A monster from a story book.”

“Yes,” Longtree admitted. “But far worse.”

14

An hour later, the carnage at Sheriff Lauters’ farm was discovered. And as the fates would have it, Lauters discovered it himself. He was sober when he rode out to the farm, his hurt arm bandaged and aching. He knew something was wrong when he’d rounded the little hill that overlooked his spread.

I had a funny feeling, he said later, a tickle at the back of my neck…

He’d paused up there on the hill. What he saw was a cold, unnatural stillness enveloping the grounds. The boys weren’t out tending to things. No chickens squawked, no pigs squealed, no horses whinnied. No trail of smoke issued from the chimney.

What he found was slaughter. His family murdered.

Longtree could pretty much put together the rest. Lauters had rode into town and informed everyone, before collapsing with hysteria. He was now at Dr. Perry’s, sedated. Perry said he’d sleep until evening.

Longtree toured the crime scene, his stomach in his throat. The remains of Lauters’ eldest son, Chauncey, were discovered in the barn, mixed in with those of several pigs, two horses, and a blizzard of feathers from the chickens. In the house, a body ripped like a bag of meat and cast about was thought to be what was left of Lauters’ wife, Abigail. Upstairs, were the headless corpse of Abigail’s cousin Virginia Krebs and a collection of pitted bones thought to belong to Jimmy Lauters. The youngest boy, Jo Jo, was nowhere to be found. The window to the children’s room was broken outward, so it was thought the fiend leapt out with the three-year old in tow. Bloody, inhuman footprints nearly covered by snow wound out into the distance.

Alden Bowes was, for all purposes, the sheriff of Wolf Creek now. He knew Lauters’ family well and none of it was easy for him. But he had a job to do and do it he would.

“I can’t believe this,” Bowes kept saying. “What kind of animal does something like this?”

“No animal,” Longtree said.

Bowes narrowed his eyes. “These people had nothing to do with that lynching, Marshal. I think… this puts your little theory to bed.”

Longtree frowned. “Not at all, Deputy. It couldn’t find him, so it went for his family.”

Bowes paled and walked off, joining Spence and Perry as they examined the atrocities in the barn. Longtree didn’t blame the man for how he felt; the other victims were bad enough, but this…this was obscene. No other word could be applied here. Women and children. Longtree had seen plenty of killing in his time. Enough to turn most men sick with the awful potential of their fellow man. But never had he experienced the aftermath of such gruesome savagery before.

Longtree joined the others in the barn.

Perry was examining a human femur stripped of flesh. There were huge indentations in it. “Teeth marks,” he said in disgust. “This thing must be incredibly powerful. I’ve seen the leftovers from a grizzly’s meal…but never anything like this…” He coughed then, fighting against tears.

“It must be insane,” Wynona Spence said, “this beast. Even a pack of hungry wolves stop…they fill themselves and let the scavengers have the rest. But this thing…by God, it eats and eats. It kills for pleasure, for the fun of it.”

Longtree lit a hand-rolled. “You better get a posse together, Deputy. You get some men and tracking dogs on that thing’s trail, you might find it. Trail’s still fresh.”

Bowes nodded. “You coming?”

“I’ll join you later. Something I have to follow up first.”

Bowes got on his horse and rode off.

Longtree pulled Perry aside. “I hate to add insult to injury, Doc, but when this is wound up, I may have to arrest the sheriff.”

Perry didn’t look surprised. “Why?”

Longtree told him about the masked gunman. “I figure you dug a bullet out of Lauters’ arm last night, did you not?”

Perry nodded grimly. “Just wait until this is over, son. Do that for me. I suspect the sheriff is guilty of a great many crimes around here.” He looked back at the litter of bodies. “God help him,” he sobbed. “Oh, Jesus, Marshal, the children…”

Longtree watched him walk away stiffly, wondering just what the doctor knew and what he didn’t know. And feeling for him, this entire town, a great compassion.

15

Skullhead, the last of the Lords of the High Wood, was far away from Wolf Creek by the time the posse was organized and dispatched. He was watching the Blackfeet camp in the hills, his stomach growling. He’d slept off last night’s feast in a shelf of rock a half mile from town. He woke just after dawn, realizing he’d fallen asleep, bloated and gassy, while in the process of eating the child. The boy’s innards were strung around him like a threadbare blanket. They were quite frozen and unpalatable.

He left the remains for scavengers.

After his long walk up into the hills, he was famished. He still had one more of the white men to kill, but no law stated that he couldn’t take his sacrifice before they were all dead.

He approached the camp carefully, being silent as possible. Once the dogs started barking, he’d have to kill them. Too bad there wasn’t some way he could simply slip in there and twist their necks without being noticed. But that was impossible. No longer able to contain his lusts, he moved into the camp.

The dogs began to bark.

Two of them ran at Skullhead and he slashed them into ribbons with a single swipe of his nails. A third and forth were torn asunder by a sweep of his bony, jagged tail. No more came. There was screaming now, crying. People were running about, gathering up children and retreating into the forest. Skullhead let them go. He went from one lodge to the other, tearing them down and stomping them into the snow with childish glee. A few of the tribal elders weren’t quick enough to escape their lodges and Skullhead grinned as their fragile bones crunched beneath him.

There was shooting suddenly and Skullhead grimaced in pain as bullets swept over his back. He turned and chased down the defiant ones. He killed the first by merely tearing out his throat, the second by detaching his limbs, and the third by crushing him in a hug that forced his viscera to exit from any available opening. There was another and Skullhead beat him into submission with ragged, bleeding parts of the others, then opened his skull with a blow from his own rifle.

But this was merely for amusement.

His real interest was the sweat lodge. It was set away from the others at the fringe of the forest. It was in here that would be the men who summoned him, the Skull Society members. They knew their debts and would not run. Skullhead forced his way in, the tanned flap of buffalo skin that served as a door coming apart in his fingers. The men in here squatted on the earthen floor, their naked bodies painted up with streaks of white, black, and red. They chanted and mumbled meaningless prayers.

They did not attempt to hide or flee.

These were the ones that had called him. It seemed so silly to think that these weak, cowering creatures had summoned him from his grave. Of all the absurdities. Skullhead emasculated them one by one, laughing with a dry roaring sound as he did so. He watched them bleed and cry and moan and writhe on the ground. Bored with this display, he crushed their heads to jelly and brought the lodge down on top of them. It was how sacrifice was offered and received.

Outside, he smelled meat cooking on the fire. Strips of it smoking and sizzling on wooden racks. The stench was sickening…yet Skullhead was curious. He snatched a strip and chewed the vile substance, forcing it down the cavern of his throat. When it hit his stomach, the reaction was instantaneous: he went to his knees and vomited. This done, he pulled himself up dizzily, remembering now the ancient taboos concerning cooked flesh.

He would do well not to forget again.

Skullhead decided now that these dark-skinned people were not worthy of worshipping him. As he devoured a woman and her child he decided they could only be of use as meat. The white men and their kin…they would be his new flock. They were the ones with power, with imagination. They reared cities like the ancients. A brutal and savage people. Skullhead liked them. They would do.

Moving into the forest, he found small packs of the dark-skins hiding under the cover of trees and rock. He took his time in claiming them. When he’d filled his belly to the point of bursting, he staggered back into camp and doused the fire with a stream of piss. Remembering that this was an old way of marking territory, he emptied his bladder throughout the camp. All who came here would know now that this place belonged to a king.

A Lord of the High Wood.

16

As the posse ran in circles outside town, Wynona Spence returned to the body of Mike Ryan. It had been very fortuitous of Ryan to order his elaborate headstone some days earlier. There were various stories circulating about how he had known of his approaching demise-everything from death threats to second sight-but Wynona was of the school that some men just knew when their time was coming. It hadn’t been the first time a man had ordered a stone only to be placed beneath it a few short days afterward.

Such was life…and death.

Wynona had spent most of the morning at Sheriff Lauters’ farm, sorting through the rain of flesh and bone, separating human from animal. The remains of Lauters’ family had already been buried in the cemetery outside town in one mass grave. A headstone would be placed tomorrow. It took a team of five men, volunteers all, several hours to dig through the snow and frozen ground and hollow out the grave. Nasty business that. But Wynona was used to death and dying and nothing surprised her anymore. The money was good, but her heart was heavy. This town was cursed.

She covered Ryan’s body with a sheet and settled into her chair, her head aching. She’d always considered herself something of an optimist. Her father had said that both optimists and pessimists were in truth fantasists; that a realist was someone tucked safely between. And maybe he was right. Her optimism told her, assured her, that this beast, this monster would be caught and killed. Pessimism told her it would never happen: the beast would kill everyone and then move on. And realism told her it would be killed but not before it slaughtered a great many others.

Realism was safe; it avoided the extremes.

Sitting there, thinking of Marion and her love for her, Wynona decided she would be a realist now. Under the circumstances, it was a safe thing to be. A cloak of pragmatism that could be donned and would safeguard against all circumstances.

But she forgot about fatalism.

Until she heard the door to the back room crash in, that was. And suddenly she knew some things were unavoidable. As she peered into the back room, her eyes trembling with awe on the blood-encrusted giant standing there, its massive head brushing the roof beams, she knew it was all at an end. She was dead. No weapons or locked doors would change that. The beast was here and the beast had business with her.

She’d flirted with death for years and now here it was, huge and pissed-off and smelling.

“My God,” she muttered.

And the beast advanced, teeth gnashing.

17

Lauters was awake when Longtree walked into Dr. Perry’s surgery.

Longtree wasn’t surprised; he expected this very thing. Perry had said he’d given the sheriff enough drugs to keep him unconscious most of the day, but somehow, Longtree figured, given the state of the sheriff’s mind, he wouldn’t be out for long.

“Sheriff,” Longtree said, staring down the barrel of his gun, “there’s no need for that.”

Lauters was a big man. Huge, really, bloated from alcoholism, but still a very large man in his own right. His eyes were red and puffy, presumably from crying, his face damp with perspiration.

“I’ve taken as much as I’m going to from you, Longtree,” he hissed, “you’ve pushed me around for the last time. My family…oh, Jesus…”

Longtree felt pity for the man. But he also felt the gun on him.

“Put it away, Sheriff. Please.”

Lauters gaped at him through tear-filled eyes. His bandaged nose making him look all the more pathetic, pitiful.

Longtree swallowed. The sheriff had his Colt on him. Even if he drew and drew fast, Lauters would still shoot him and probably in the chest. Such a wound had a high mortality rate.

Longtree held his hands out before him, innocently. “If you’re gonna kill me, Sheriff, least you can do is hear me out first. That ain’t asking too much, is it?”

Lauters stared at him. “I’m listening.”

Longtree eased himself slowly in a chair. “You killed that Carpenter girl, didn’t you?”

“Yes.” Atrocity had brought honesty at last.

Longtree nodded. “You were part of that ring, the Gang of Ten. You boys set up Red Elk with that murder because he knew about you, then the other gang members lynched him and you stepped aside. Am I right?”

“You are.”

“And now you’re the only one left, the last of the gang.”

Lauters nodded. “You’re very good, Marshal. I always knew you were and that’s why I didn’t want you here. The beast is coming for me now…even the law can’t change that. Your badge is useless, boy.”

Longtree licked his lips. “What you did was wrong, Sheriff, and I think you know that more than any man could. But you’ve been punished beyond the limits of the law…I’m not going to arrest you.”

Lauters lowered his gun. “Then why are you here?”

“Because I wanted to have this little talk with you.” Longtree slipped a cigar from his pocket and lit it up. “You lost your family to this monster, Sheriff. You’ve suffered enough. Putting you on trial would be pointless, particularly given the fact that the witnesses and co-conspirators are all dead now.” Longtree let that sink in. “What happened a year ago happened and we’d just better forget about it. The people in this town have a lot of respect for you and I’ve got no interest in dragging your name through the mud. Let ’em think you’re a good lawman…because down deep, you probably are.”

Lauters said nothing to any of this. A single tear slid down his cheek.

“We’ve got us a real problem here, Sheriff. We’ve got a monster that’s killed a lot of people and it’ll keep on killing until it’s stopped. I think it’s up to you and me to stop it.”

“How?” Lauters asked.

“I don’t rightly know,” Longtree admitted. “But I do know that it’ll be coming for you and I’m going to be there when it does.”

“All that’ll do is get yourself killed.”

Longtree stood up. “It’s my job to die fighting this thing same as it’s yours. So get dressed. It’s time we go hunting.”

“You want me to help you?”

“Damn right. We’re lawmen. Let’s kill this thing or die trying.”

It was about this time they heard shooting in the distance.

18

The posse led by Deputy Bowes was made up of eight men. Bowes had gathered the best and bravest shooters from the mining camps and the various ranches outside Wolf Creek. They were tough men, Bowes decided, but more than that they were angry men. They were sick of the killings, sick of being able to do nothing. They lived hard, frustrating lives. They had a lot of aggression to spend and they had been given a target to spend it on.

“There!” someone cried. “The undertaking parlor!”

Bowes turned his head and saw. It seemed impossible in that first second of realization that something this hideous could possibly walk, let alone in full daylight. It moved hunched-over, knees bent, arms crooked, hands dangling limply. Its great tail swung from side to side and when it stooped over (as it did coming through the door of the undertaker’s), the tail rose up as if it were part of some fulcrum that balanced the beast. The beast staggered out into the streets, taking the door to Spence’s place off its hinges in the process. It waltzed out and stood up to its full height.

The men dismounted their horses. The horses had to be immediately tethered: some vague racial memory had stirred in them and they remembered this thing, its kin, and what they were capable of. The horses whinnied and bucked, some throwing riders before they could hop off. Others ran off down the streets.

And Skullhead, Lord of the High Wood, advanced on his flock.

“All right, you men,” Bowes cried out, “hold your fire! Spread out, goddammit! Spread out!”

The men, most of them pale and trembling like babes now, fanned out in a skirmish line as the beast approached. There was a stink of feces and Bowes knew someone had shit their pants. He did not blame them.

Bowes watched the creature. It gave off a sickening, acrid stink. It was tall, bulging with muscularity. Its huge and deformed head bobbed, blood freezing on its lips.

Some brave woman had circled behind it and slipped into the undertaker’s. She stormed out now, falling into the street, vomiting. “Wynona!” she gagged. “It got Wynona…she’s…all over the place…”

Bowes motioned for someone to get her inside. A man, presumably her husband, did just this.

“Let’s shoot the bastard!” someone yelled.

“Take aim,” Bowes told them, knowing if he didn’t let them shoot and soon, they’d do it anyway or just run off. “Steady, steady, hold it…”

Skullhead was ignorant to what was happening here. He could remember in the old days, the forgotten days, how the dark-skins would gather around like this and await the blessing of his claws and teeth.

“Fire!” Bowes screamed.

The beast roared.

The first barrage hit the beast and he stumbled back, blood oozing from a dozen holes in his chest. The pain was intense. Pain was something he was used to, but having these white-skins bestow it upon him with no regard for ceremony or sacrifice angered him. They were to be his chosen children. This was unforgivable. He was an animal at heart, a night-stalker, an eater of flesh, a devourer of bones and babes, but he was an intelligent killer with a love of ceremony, a pagan’s love of pageantry. He did now what instinct told him he must do.

He charged.

The next barrage of bullets brought him to his knees, the agony intense and irresistible. It had been a mistake doing this, he knew, their weapons hurtful. And although his kind didn’t die very easy-it was this stubborn survivability that had kept his race alive eons after it should have went extinct with other such species-he was afraid. Afraid that the white-skins he’d underestimated would surround him and fill him with bullets so that even he would have to concede death. But no, he wouldn’t let this happen. He would lie still, feign death until they got close. It was an ancient way. Many thousands of years before, when his race was thinning and dying out, and the dark-skins first came, they had waged war on the Lords of the High Wood. Only by killing hundreds of them, had the Lords survived, beating the dark-skins at their own game of supremacy, enslaving the newcomers. But before this…there were strategies, ways to draw in the dark-skins, methods to fool their superior numbers.

Skullhead did this now.

And these whites, oh they were easy prey. They waltzed right into the jaws of death. The beast was wise with the ages as a score of victims could attest to. Century upon endless century of hunting and stalking had taught him much.

“You men!” Bowes shouted. “Get away from it!”

Five men were circled around the dying beast, prodding it with their rifles.

“It can’t hurt anyone now,” one of them said.

“Come on, Deputy, it—”

Then the beast was on its feet. It opened the bellies of two men, and tore the throats from a third and fourth. The air steaming with blood and spilled internals and cries of agony, Skullhead snatched up the fifth man and tossed his rifle over the rooftops. It was an old strategy and a good one. He held the fifth white before him like a shield, knowing the others with their rampant sentimentality would not attack and they didn’t.

“Don’t shoot!” Bowes told them. He only had three men left now. Many more had poured into the street, but were cowering well away from the beast and his appetites.

He’d told them not to get too close, by Christ he’d told them…

The posse had been butchered. There were four men in the street, ripped open, their stuffing scattered in all directions. The remaining members were vomiting.

The beast was in the doorway of the undertaker’s again. It slipped through, taking the fifth man with him.

“That’s my brother!” someone yelled. “It’s got my brother for the love of Christ!”

But not for long.

As the remaining gunmen and a few interested civilians slowly approached Spence’s, there was a crash and an explosion of splintered glass blew out at them. The fifth man’s broken body came out with it.

Bowes kneeled by it. “Dead,” he muttered. The neck was broken, probably before he was launched through the window. The beast hadn’t the time to properly maul the man, but he killed him for the sake of appearances.

“C’mon,” Bowes told his men.

With them at his back, he charged into the undertaker’s.

19

Perry was one of the last to arrive.

He did what he could for the injured men which was little more than pray for them. Most were dead when he got there. His brain just dead tired and worn to threads from all the killing and bodies and blood, he went into Spence’s and viewed the carnage. Had a tornado slipped through there, it could have been no more complete. Cabinets were shattered, chemicals spilled. Vats overturned. Walls smashed to debris from the passage of the beast. And mixed in with that refuse, was what remained of Wynona Spence.

Jesus.

Perry remembered Marion upstairs.

Steeling himself and pressing a hand to his back, he went up. Went up those creaking, narrow stairs and into the apartment above which smelled of incense and wood smoke. Their was a slightly sickening stench of lilacs, as if Wynona had been spraying perfume liberally.

It didn’t take him long to find Marion.

Took him even less to realize that she’d been dead for years. Her skin was tight and flaking, gray as cement. The lips blackened and shriveled. The eyes sunk into dark, hungry pits. The fingers were shrunken into fleshy pencils. Wynona had embalmed her, turned her lover into a mummy she could covet and coddle for years and years.

Perry, sobbing, went back downstairs. “Oh, Wynona,” he said. “Oh dear Christ, what happened to you?”

The locals would feed off this like leeches. Wynona’s father had been a good man and Perry thought that, down deep, she was a good woman. Yes, she had a body up there. But she had harmed no one. Never slandered or hurt a soul.

Perry fired up an oil lantern and got it burning bright.

Then he shattered it against the wall. Flames engulfed the room and, eventually, they would take the entire building. And that was a good thing. For fire purified and Wolf Creek was long overdue.

20

Next, Perry went to see Claussen.

Something dangerous was brewing with that man.

Perry had a syringe with him, loaded with morphine. This one wasn’t for himself, however (he’d already had his taste and was swimming in an exotic sea), but for the madman who’d once been a reverend. A madman who now thought himself a pagan priest of some new, yet ancient blasphemous order.

Perry’s head was full of fog, but he had a duty and he would perform it.

From all over town he could hear screams and gunshots. He paid them no mind and mounted the church steps. Inside, he stopped. There was a smell in the air. One that told him to run while he still had breath.

“Claussen?” he called. “Are you here?”

“The beast,” a voice in the darkness said, “the beast.”

Perry followed the voice and found the reverend slouched in a pew. He was pale, his face beaded with sweat. He looked terrible.

“Are you all right, Claussen?”

The reverend smiled, his chin wet with drool. “He returned as I knew he would.”

It was dim in the church, a few feeble rays of light bled in through the stained glass windows. Dust motes danced in the beams, thick, clotted. Perry looked around, seeing nothing, hearing nothing. He swallowed dryly. There was only that smell, that gagging perfume of putrescence.

“I think you should come with me now,” Perry said calmly.

“Where?”

“To my house. I can care for you there.”

Claussen laughed shrilly. “Leave?” he said in a congested voice. “Leave? This is my church! The house of God! I can’t leave here…you see, God has come, he’s here now…”

Perry scowled slightly. “Yes, of course. Spiritually he—”

“Not him! Not that one! Not that false shepherd who I’ve prayed my soul out to and has yet to honor me with so much as a word, a sign!” Claussen was trembling now, his eyes rolling. “He has come! The Lord of the High Wood! The beast!”

“Stop this, Claussen. Come away with me.”

“No!”

“You can’t worship a mindless beast.”

Claussen laughed. “Such blasphemy. You should be quiet about such things…if he hears you…”

“He won’t.”

The smell was strong now; violent, offensive. A brutal odor.

“Won’t he?” Claussen seemed confused.

“Of course not, he’s just an animal.”

“Heretic! “Claussen cried, springing to his feet. “He is here! He is here now! He came and I made sacrifice to him!”

To prove this, Claussen pulled his hand from the pocket it had been thrust in…except there was no hand. Just a stump wadded up with red-stained cloth bandages. The man was bleeding to death. Slowly…but dying all the same.

“Christ, Claussen, how—”

“Don’t say that name in here!”

Perry knew that now, more than ever, he had to give Claussen the injection. Unless the man was drugged, he’d never get him away from this place. The question was: How could he hope to subdue a crazy man even for the few precious moments it would take to empty the hypodermic into his arm? Perry, despite the painless dream-life morphine gave him, was in poor shape. His back was twisted, incapable of supporting more than his own fragile weight. It was in no condition to take the kind of abuse needed to overpower another man. And his age, too, was a factor. The doctor never would again see the good side of seventy.

Claussen hobbled away up to the altar. Perry followed.

“Blasphemy,” Perry said.

Claussen smiled. “It has to be rebuilt, this altar, retooled with new and greater meaning.”

The altar had been smashed and rent. Boards were pulled up, statues of the heavenly fathers broken into fragments, prayer books were freed of their pages. The altar cloth had been shredded. It was even worse than the other day.

“This is his church now, Doctor.”

And indeed it was. This was the sort of obscene shrine only a demon of savage appetites would or could appreciate.

“I must commission new artworks,” Claussen said, “in his image. Busts of the finest stone, paintings in livid colors…perhaps blood…”

“Where is he, Claussen?”

“I can’t tell you that. Not yet. Know only that he is close…”

Perry scowled. “What you’ve done is blasphemy, Claussen. Disgusting.”

“You’re a fool, Doctor. This is his house now.”

“In the name of Christ, man, get a hold of yourself.”

Claussen grabbed Perry violently by the arm. “You shall not revere the names of false gods in this holy place.”

“Fantasy…”

“Really?”

“Yes, I…”

Claussen cackled with laughter. “Behold,” he said, “he stands at the door and knocks.”

The stink had grown omnipotent now.

It dried the words on Perry’s tongue, put a frost on his bones. And then, behind him, as his senses reeled with nausea, movement. Perry turned, his back wrenching and crying out. He ignored it for the Lord of the High Wood had arrived. The doctor looked on the beast with no reverence, no respect, only a sort of numbing awe at this mistake of evolution. It was huge, its shoulders twice the breadth of any man’s, its head mammoth. A giant. Its gray flesh was stained with dried blood and those eyes…good God, those eyes…bleeding balls that ran with discolored tears.

Tears?

Yes.

Jesus wept.

The beast came closer, moving with a slow grace that was frightening for something its size. Its arms hung limp at its sides, matted with patchy fur, bulging with obscene muscularity, the fingers-impossibly long-ending in hooked claws. Rapiers. Its sex swung with pendulum strokes between the massive thighs proudly. Its skin was ruptured, torn, splitting open with a vile sap in a hundred places. But its eyes, these are what held Perry. And the mouth, the sneering, hateful mouth that opened with a wet smack exposing teeth that glimmered like sacrificial daggers.

“Jesus,” Perry managed.

“Not Jesus,” Claussen said, stepping between them. “The Lord has chased Jesus from this place on the cowering tails of the saints.”

Claussen looked up at his god and made a quick benediction. The beast roared and with a single slap of its bleeding fist sent the reverend sailing over a row of pews.

Perry pulled his gun. “We’ll see what kind of god you are.”

The beast began to drool.

21

Skullhead stood on the altar, having finished with the old man and his little gun. He didn’t bother snacking on this one-he was far too old, far too tough and meatless. No, the old ones served only one purpose and had for ages and that was to be broken by the will of the Lords, killed for amusement. This was all. Murdering the old was tradition amongst the Lords. The dark-skins held the aged in such reverence that these were the first the Lords had killed when they waged war on the little men. After that, the men. Women and children were a different matter.

Skullhead sat down on the altar, fatigued with all the excitement and bloodshed. He was hurting. Pain rolled through his great torso in sharp waves. Bullets. Too many bullets in him. But the agony was good. Often, in the old days, the Lords would cut and slash themselves to bring on pain before a battle. It made them fiercer, more savage fighters. But this pain…though it made him angry, a sadistic conqueror…was not good. There was simply too much of it. It clouded the mind and made the senses reel.

It had to be alleviated.

When the Lords fought the wars against the advancing dark-skins in those ancient, forgotten times, the dark-skins used arrows and spears. Both of these were far more painful than mere bullets-they opened great gaping wounds in the body. Once they were removed, the healing began and went quickly as was the way with the Lords’ biology. But sometimes arrowheads broke off inside the flesh and had to be dug out by claws or teeth. If they weren’t, the body would fester and rot and death would follow. Skullhead knew the tales of those old days, they boiled in his cells. He knew the bullets had to be removed.

But it was no easy task.

His flesh, usually as tough as a beetle’s carapace, was sensitive and hurting from all the abuse it had taken. Still, it had to be done. Groaning, the last of the Lords of the High Wood began to dig the slugs free. Bloody, mangled and mushroomed bullets dropped to his feet. Many were near the surface, others were deeper. He worked his long bony fingers into his belly, searching and sorting through his internals. One by one, the slugs were removed. With a surgeon’s finesse, he groped and probed and stroked the secrets of his anatomy.

It was some time before he’d finished.

He removed nearly twenty bullets and there were still four or five left. He didn’t think they’d do any harm. There were other foreign bodies lodged in him, tokens of battles centuries gone, and they caused him no harm.

Lying back on the altar, he rested.

His flesh was resilient and in a short time, his wounds would scar over. He’d laid in that grave for some four centuries before the dark-skins had dug him back out. And though there was no consciousness, only vague dream, a spark of life remained in him. It was the way of his kind. If they weren’t dismembered, they could not really die, not totally. A rugged sort of half-life would remain. His kin, with the exception of one or two whose graves were the closely-guarded secrets of the dark-skins, had all been pulled apart after they’d sickened and fell. The dark-skins saw to that. Though they’d worshipped the Lords for thousands of years in one form or another, in the final days when the Lords had fallen ill with unknown infections, they’d risen up and hacked their masters to bits. Skullhead knew those were the Dark Days, the end of his race. A few of his kind, no more than three or four, had proved immune to these new contagions. But the dark-skins, natural born traitors, had rebelled and attacked the remaining Lords. Bound with rope, leather, and twine, the surviving Lords were buried alive. Their graves, a secret to all but a few in the passing centuries.

Skullhead closed his eyes.

Gone were the old days when the children were offered in sacrifice, when virgins were staked out for breeding. The system of service had vanished. It was up to Skullhead now, as the last of his race, to set things right. He would be worshipped again. Meat would be offered. The old and the weak would once again be set free and naked and unarmed in the forest for sport. And women would be offered. This last thing was the most important. The race would not survive until women were impregnated with his seed.

Once the white-skins were beat into submission, this task would be the first order of business.

22

Marshal Joseph Longtree watched Wolf Creek burn.

It had started for mysterious reasons in the undertaking parlor. But once started, it had found the chemicals therein and exploded into life.

It turned into a major blaze within minutes.

Whether the fire was unleashed by accident or on purpose, it didn’t matter-the town was burning. Longtree had arrived with Lauters moments after the slaughter had occurred. By then, the beast was long gone. But the evidence it left was all-too apparent. The beast had broken through the rear wall of the mortuary.

The fire was spreading fast. Almost effortlessly, cheered on by the winds that screamed out of the north. The buildings and houses in Wolf Creek were all packed together very closely and the flames jumped from roof to roof.

Longtree and Lauters were stalking the beast.

There was no posse to be had. All available men (and women) were busy fighting the blaze and this included Bowes. Even the sixty men Ryan had assembled to exterminate the Blackfeet, were helping out.

The trail of the beast was easy to follow, though somewhat erratic. It was only a matter of following the path of wreckage and death. Wherever it went, people were killed, homes or buildings destroyed. It had charged through the wall of a saloon, murdering six people and maiming a dozen others. Then it kicked down the door of a miner’s little home and decapitated his family. Next, the trail led to a dry goods store. The proprietor was crushed like a bundle of old sticks and stuffed into a coal furnace. One valiant, though suicidal, man had attempted to stop the fiend as it left the store. They found his shotgun bent into a V and his body driven headfirst like a fencing post through the snow and into the frozen earth. Only his wrenched legs were visible. Wherever the lawmen went, the tale was the same: atrocity upon atrocity.

“It’s taking back its lands,” Longtree commented as they slipped through the caved-in wall of a dance hall.

Lauters studied the stomped furniture and shattered fixtures. “Its lands?”

“Yes,” Longtree said. “Once there were many like it. They ruled this land, the Blackfeet and other tribes worshipped them. Now it’s come back and it’s taking back its property.”

Lauters looked at him like he was crazy. “It’s a monster.”

“But not a mindless one.’’

“You’re giving it a lot of credit, aren’t you? Maybe it can reason a bit, but it’s still a monster.”

There was no arguing with that.

Longtree was wondering if the beast was on the run or merely hiding out in one of these ruined structures, awaiting the man he needed to kill. Or had he forgotten now, in the inebriation of massacre, why he’d been called back? What his reason for being was. Anything was possible with this creature, anything at all.

“I take it,” Lauters said, scanning the debris for bodies, “that you’ve been talking with Crazytail and his bunch.”

“I have.”

“And you believe those tales they tell?” the sheriff said incredulously.

Longtree sighed, realizing he still disliked this man. And why not? He was a rapist, a murderer, a vigilante, a cattle rustler, would-be assassin (and God knew what else) parading as a lawman. “If you have a better explanation about the origin of this beast, Sheriff, I’m all ears,” Longtree said patiently. “It came from somewhere.”

Lauters spat. “Hell. That’s where it came from.”

“Regardless,” Longtree sighed, “that’s where it’s going.”

They moved along, Lauters in the lead. There was blood in the beast’s tracks now. Fresh blood.

“If it bleeds,” Lauters said happily, “it can die.”

The trail suddenly ended. The only possible place the beast could have gone was the building leaning before them. The church. Together they circled around it. No tracks led away.

“We’ve got it.” Lauters was jubilant. “We’ve got the sonofabitch.”

“We’ll need help.”

“Stay here,” Lauters ordered. “I’ll get some men.”

Longtree watched him vault away, moving quickly through the drifts. Longtree studied the church. Why had the beast come here? Was it for the obvious reason that it simply needed shelter, a place to mend its wounds? Or was it something else entirely? Did it know a house of worship when it saw one? Did it think in its unflappable egotism that it belonged here, a god to be kneeled before? Regardless, Claussen had been right-he was its priest now.

Longtree waited. If the beast tried to escape now, he would have to try and stop it…and no doubt perish in the attempt. There was nothing to do but wait for reinforcements. He toyed with the idea of wiring Fort Ellis for Army troops, but getting them when they were needed was like getting a child to open its mouth so you could pull a tooth. Besides, it would take them a day or so to reach Wolf Creek…and the beast surely wouldn’t sit still that long.

So the marshal waited, smelling the smoke of the burning town. Like Nero, he fiddled while Rome burned.

23

Dr. Perry was alive.

Despite the abuse put to him by the fiend, he still lived. The spark that burned in his body for seventy odd years refused to be snuffed. Bones were broken, limbs twisted and crippled, blood spilling from a dozen wounds, yet he lived and in living, was awake. He looked down on the fiend below him with a consuming hatred that would smolder, he was certain, long after death had claimed him and the fiend was so many ashes in God’s palm.

24

Lauters knew more pain than the doctor could ever dream of in his most anguished moments. He’d lost friends, he’d lost his family, he’d lost his way of life. Much of it was due to the beast, but Longtree was hardly innocent. When that ravaging monster was put to rest finally, he’d have a word or two to say to the marshal. He was beyond caring whether or not Longtree wanted to arrest him. He planned on dying at the beast’s hands or with Longtree’s bullets in him. Either way, he was going to die. And if he slew the beast and Longtree and lived, then he’d put his gun to his head and end it. Having no reason to live, Lauters took satisfaction in his own coming death.

A third of the town was ablaze now. The conflagration had eaten its way through most of the businesses and was busy blackening homes, hungry for new conquests.

“I need men,” Lauters told Bowes when he found him in the mulling confusion. “We found it. I need men to kill it.”

Bowes, black with soot, coughed. “The town’s burning,” he said dryly. “Burning.”

“I don’t give a fuck about this town,” Lauters snapped. “I found the monster and we have to kill it. Get some men.”

Bowes efficiently went about the task of rounding up what men could be spared, even though, technically, there were none. He came back with four smoke-blackened men.

“These are the only ones who’ll come,” the deputy said.

“Shit. All right.”

Grimacing as he took one final pull from a bottle of rye in his desk drawer, Lauters handed out rifles and ammunition. His eyes blazing with revenge, he led the posse to their deaths.

25

Skullhead, grinder of flesh and render of souls, lay sleeping on the altar as the dogs of war inched closer. He snoozed and dreamed of the old days of slaughter and barbarity. He was sure these days would come again.

His arrogance would allow him to accept nothing less.

But what he failed to realize in the blood-misted corridors of his brain was that this was a new age and men had little use for the old gods. In these times, men wanted gods that were quiet, that didn’t interfere with their own plans and conquests. Advisors, not active participants. The days when men offered up their sons and daughters to primeval monsters were long gone. In the collective psychology of the masses, this was unthinkable.

But none of this would have made any sense to Skullhead.

His was a reptilian brain-a mass of nervous tissue devoted to need, want, and desire. He was hungry, so he ate; thirsty, so he drank. His loins ached, so he raped; his territory was threatened, so he killed. Simplicity itself. The perfect hunter, the ultimate predator. There was logic and reasoning in that brain, too, but it was generally only applied to methods of the hunt, to slaughter, to self-indulgence. The little men existed only to feed, clothe, and worship him. And they should do these things, his brain decided, because he wished it.

So the beast lay on the altar, beneath ravaged symbols of Christianity, a god in his own thinking, sainted by atrocity, immortal through his own appetites. In God’s house he waited, bloated with sin and suffering, his belly fat with human meat. A Christian demon, as it were, in the flesh.

26

Longtree grew tired of waiting.

When the posse was but five minutes away, he entered the church. He was carrying his usual armaments-Winchester rifle, Colt pistols, and Bowie knife. There was death in his eyes as he entered through the main door. It was hanging from one hinge as if it had taken a tremendous blow and from the claw marks drawn into the wood, the marshal knew what had struck it. He paused just inside, lighting a cigarette and listening. He could hear movement, but the movement of a man, a sort of limping gait.

He moved up the nave, sighting the man just ahead. It was Claussen or a beaten, bleeding, and bedraggled version of the same. There was a fire going in the aisle, a small one fed by prayer books and shards of wood.

“The marshal,” Claussen said lifelessly. “I wondered when you’d show.”

Longtree looked at his arm. There was no hand, just a stump burnt black. “What happened, Reverend?” he asked calmly.

“I was bleeding. The master…he took my hand…sacrifice,” Claussen mumbled. “I cauterized it.” He grinned madly at the idea.

No sane man could thrust his arm in a fire even if it meant saving his own life. The pain would be unthinkable. “Where is it?” Longtree inquired. “The beast.”

“The master?” Claussen looked suddenly sheepish, but his eyes blazed with the embers of lunacy. “Have you come to serve? To worship?”

“I’ve come to kill it.”

“Get out of here,” Claussen demanded.

Longtree scanned the dimness, eyes bright. “Where?”

“You can’t kill him, Marshal. No man can. If you’ve not come as a brother to him, then run before he discovers you.”

There was a glint of humanity left in the reverend, but little more. “You’re ill, Reverend. You’d best leave now, I’ve got business—”

“You’ve no business here. Not anymore.”

Longtree moved up the aisle. Claussen blocked his path.

“Step aside, Reverend, or I’ll shoot you,” he said, spitting out his cigarette.

Claussen launched himself forward and Longtree easily sidestepped him. He slammed the butt of the Winchester into the man’s belly and snapped it up aside his head. Claussen fell, whimpering.

“Where is it?” Longtree demanded.

Then a sound: a single grumbling moan.

Longtree looked up to the altar. In the shadows…the beast.

And in the time it took him to see the horror, its wretched form, Claussen was on him. The icy fingers of his remaining hand were cutting into Longtree’s throat, the stump beating him around the face, eliciting cries of pain from its owner each time it struck. It was as much the insanity of the situation as the attack that made the marshal drop his rifle and stagger back, shielding his eyes. Claussen was on him, kicking, striking, clawing, trying to bite. Longtree shoved him away, kicked him fiercely in his lamed leg and struck him in the face with a series of quick jabs. Claussen, old cuts on his face opening, fell to his knees.

Longtree, picking up his rifle, walked slowly to the altar.

A ghostly, smoky light rained in through the stained glass windows. They had been defaced with perverse drawings now. The pulpit loomed ahead, the defiled altar, and the beast, bleeding and asleep.

Dr. Perry had been added to the fiend’s roll call of victims. He had been crucified on the great wooden cross, spikes stolen from the shattered altar driven through his hands and ankles. He hung above the beast, an aged and depraved Christ, rivers of red wine staining the altar cloth below.

Longtree looked down on the beast.

He wondered if it was dead. For just one hopeful, fleeting moment, he thought it might be. Dead or dying. But he knew it was neither. In his mind he saw the butchered faces of its victims, the dead children. Had it visited the Blackfeet camp yet? Were Laughing Moonwind and her folk dead now?

No time to think.

The beast was sprawled on the altar. A blood-streaked, stinking mass of foul intent. It was tight with throbbing muscle and jutting bone. Its shoulders broad, its head huge. Its cavernous mouth open, black spiny tongue stuck to its lower lip. Its eyes were wide and staring, but it did not have lids as such.

It was a horror.

Longtree thought it seemed to be composed of many things. It had bits of fur like a mammal. The thorny, exaggerated flesh of a lizard. The ridged, armored torso of insect. The hooked, yellowed claws of a bird of prey. The spiked and skeletal tail of a saurian. Yet, it resembled a man, in form only, but it did all the same. Some bastard, perverse uncle of humanity.

Longtree took aim at its head.

There was a bustle of commotion from the vestibule. Lauters, Bowes, and a few others stomped in, shoving Claussen aside.

“Longtree!” Lauters shouted.

The beast stirred.

Christ, Longtree thought, so close, so close…

The men were charging up the altar now, talking excitedly amongst themselves at how the marshal had slain the monster. Longtree backed away into the chancel.

“It’s alive,” he muttered.

And it was.

One sheer membranous eyelid opened crustily, then another. Slitted pupils stirred in seas of glowing red. They expanded to take in light. The mouth dropped open, lips thinned and drew away from swollen, black gums, teeth sliding forth like arrows from a quiver. The beast was awake.

It stood up before Longtree, easily eight feet in height. It was, Longtree decided, his finger tickling the trigger of his rifle, an amazing exercise in lethal anatomy.

It looked to be armored for battle like a knight of old. Like a fleshy, living skeleton. Its arms fed into sockets just beneath the shoulders which were shielded by jutting plates. The legs, the same, plates concealing their origin. Its torso was gleaming with ribbed mounds, knitted with a black oily skin that bled into gray, riddled with numerous lacerations and punctures. It had no neck, the head firmly mounted on the sloping shoulders, jaw protruding in a quasi-snout, nostrils flattened and bulging with each rasping breath. There seemed to be barely enough flesh to cover the protruding architecture of the massive skull. It was drawn tight, scarred and thinning. Silver and gray tufts of fur sprouted here and there like weeds through cracks in rock.

A thing engineered to stalk and kill and take any amount of abuse thrown at it. The ultimate hunter. Built to survive in a savage world of half-humans and monsters that no longer existed.

The beast took one step forward.

One of the men-the one who’d lost his brother to this horror-charged forth, screaming out a battle cry. The beast took his knife in the abdomen and then took the man himself. Before the cowering, helpless eyes of the posse, the man was pulled apart, his viscera decorating the altar. There was nothing to do but watch.

The body was dropped. The beast crushed the head with a grinding of a bony heel, wetting the remains down with a gush of viscous, steaming piss.

Longtree and the others fell back, shooting.

Skullhead felt more bullets pierce his hide. He took them and roared, still standing. He’d been deceived into thinking these white-skins had brought offerings of themselves. But it was not so; they refused to obey the ancient laws. So, great instructor in all things bloody and agonizing, Skullhead would teach them.

Longtree watched the beast move. It had just absorbed no less than a dozen bullets, and here it leaped like an angry child, that great tail thrashing. It knocked Lauters aside and grabbed the first available man. With a grinding, an awful wet snapping, it separated the first man at the hip, tossing legs one way and body the other. The man screamed and flopped, legless, blood coming out in a flood.

As more shots were fired, Longtree ran to the small fire Claussen had built and removed a chair leg, the end of which was a flaming red coal. As the monster turned on him, he jumped up and jammed the torch in its face, falling back before he was swatted away. Its left eye and much of the flesh around it was incinerated into a sap of blackened fluid. The beast roared, swinging out madly in all directions, claws whistling through the air seeking life to take.

Bowes got behind it and opened up its muscled back with blasts from his shotgun. It turned on him and Lauters and another assailed it from the front with bullets. The beast howled with rage, pounding dust from the rafters overhead. Its back was ripped wide, glistening vertebrae exposed.

“Its eye!” Longtree shouted. “Shoot out its eye!”

As the men attempted to do this, Longtree turned and saw Laughing Moonwind and Herbert Crazytail coming up the aisle. The old man was dressed out in his finest. He wore a shirt of antelope skin, matching leggings. Both ornamented with colored beads, feathers, and dyed porcupine quills. He wore a skull mask over his face and carried a medicine club decorated with wolf fur, weasel skin pendants, and topped by the foot of a wolf, claws extended. He pushed past Longtree and the others, facing the beast.

At the sight of him, Skullhead stopped dead.

Crazytail took items from his medicine bag-bits of herb, pinches of colored powder, feathered talismans-and threw them at the beast. He chanted and sang, circling the beast now, forming a circle of powder around it.

“What’s that crazy injun doing?” Lauters asked.

No one answered. The beast had paused now, whether held by magic or by curiosity, it was held all the same.

“It killed everyone in the village,” Moonwind said sternly. “Only a few of us escaped…”

“What is your father doing?” Longtree asked.

“Binding him.”

“Will it work?”

She shook her head. “No, but he feels responsible. He and the others brought it back. It should never have seen the light of day again.”

The beast suddenly grew bored with the ceremony. Teeth went in motion, burying in the old man’s head, his skull pulped under the jaws. He fell dead at the monster’s feet.

Laughing Moonwind screamed.

Lauters walked right up to it, emptying his rifle into its hide. “No more! Goddammit, this ends now!”

The beast put hands to either side of Lauters’ head, lifting him into the air and crushing his skull slowly into mush. Longtree dashed away to get another stick from the fire and saw salvation: pushed beneath a pew was a can of kerosene.

The beast charged him and he uncapped the metal jug, letting its contents wash it down. Skullhead ignored this benediction and slammed into him, sending the marshal sailing through open air. In the process, the beast stumbled into the fire. In the time it took him to feel the pain of the embers beneath his feet, flames had licked up and over him. He spun and danced, trying to shake the kiss of fire.

No good.

Skullhead had never known such pain. He and his kind had no use for fire; it was something the little men used. Cooked meat was repulsive. In the old days when a finger of lightning set a dry forest ablaze, the Lords fled, migrating to safer environs. Fire destroyed. Fire hurt. Fire consumed. He slapped at himself and threw his body on the floor, rolling and rolling. It was no good. The fire ate at his flesh, incinerating his being, cremating his will. When all the hair was gone from his skin, the flames died out. He pulled himself weakly to his feet, singed, blackened, blind, his face a distorted running mess.

“Now,” Longtree said, directing his remaining troops, “kill it.”

Keeping well away from the clawing fingers of the beast, they began to shoot and shoot. Reloading when chambers were empty. Finally the fiend fell to its knees. Its crisped flesh was open in dozens of places, mangled and bleeding viscera bulging forth.

Claussen dragged himself forth now. He had an ax. With a single vicious swing, he buried it in the monster’s spine. It went down face first, jerking with convulsions, a sickly mewing deep in its throat. It was beaten now and all knew this.

“Hack into pieces,” Moonwind directed. “It can only die if its pulled apart.”

Bowes, Longtree, Moonwind, and the two survivors from the posse went to work on the primal monster that would be a god. As Claussen looked on at his fallen idol, they each took the ax and chopped at the beast. Its hide was incredibly tough, but its assassins worked with an almost superhuman diligence. Soon its torso split. Its arms were severed free, it legs divorced from their thorny housings. Longtree cleaved the head free himself, kicking it away to the altar. To his amazement, the jaws still chattered, the legs still trembled. With a few more blows the skull collapsed, brains emptying at his feet.

“Not a god,” Claussen mumbled. “Jesus help me.”

Longtree looked down at the wreck of Skullhead with Moonwind by his side. It was a great butchered slab of meat now, bleeding black blood and yellow fluid. Its guts steamed with a foul odor. The altar was stained with bits of it and would have to be destroyed.

But Skullhead was dead.

27

Two days later, it was over.

The fire had been contained the same day the beast died. A heavy snowfall drowned the flames. Half of the town had been destroyed. The survivors quickly began rebuilding. Reverend Claussen died from his injuries that night and was given a Christian burial along with Perry, Lauters, and the other members of the posse. Herbert Crazytail was buried in the Blackfeet cemetery. Only Longtree, Moonwind, and a few others were present. The remains of the beast were assembled in sacks, tied shut, and buried in another part of the burial ground-the same grave they’d been originally interred in centuries before.

The church was burned to ashes.

“I don’t know what I’m going to do about all this,” Bowes said to Longtree as they sat and sipped coffee at the jailhouse. “How I’m going to explain this.”

“There’s nothing to explain. The beast is dead.”

“But all the deaths…”

“People know what happened. Let it go. In a year, it’ll be forgotten.”

Bowes looked at him. “Do you really believe that?”

Longtree didn’t answer. He stood and pulled on his coat and gloves. “I guess I’m done here,” he said.

“Thanks for your…help,” Bowes said.

Longtree nodded and walked out into the cool air, listening to the sounds of sawing and hammering as the town was put to right. People wouldn’t forget what happened, he knew, but they probably wouldn’t talk much about it. In time, the entire experience would take on the connotations of legend. A twice-told tale. A myth. Something to frighten children with on stormy nights. Nothing more. A dark bit of collective memory that would seem all the more unreal as the coming days of normalcy blotted out its darker elements into the stuff of nightmares.

Longtree rode out of town, hoping he’d never have to return. He would ride to Fort Ellis and put in his report. Tom Rivers wasn’t going to like the truth about this matter, but the truth was the truth. On the way, he would meet Laughing Moonwind. They were bonded now, he knew, from these horrors. Parts of them were linked. He couldn’t imagine being without her.

A cigar in his mouth, the wind at his back, Joseph Longtree rode away from Wolf Creek.