The Weird Wild West (The Weird and Wild Series) Read online

  “Plenty of Germans over there in Odessa,” I agreed. My folks liked to ride into Odessa at Christmastime. There were always dances, and the German women made special cookies with names like the crunching sounds snow makes underfoot.

  “Well, he never made it. He died trying to get his piano out the door by himself. Poor lonely old man.” He shrugged. “That’s all I know, I guess. It ain’t much.”

  “All but the first owner moving out, most far away. The old man up and dying like that. And then three mighty bad things happening in that house: The daughter taken by the bear. Lura’s dying. And now the Tucker family.”

  “I never thought about it like that. Three horrible things in a house less than fifty years old. You think that’s important?”

  A few days ago, I would have rolled my eyes at him, but today I was no longer a boy. Sass was a thing I would have to put behind me.

  I scanned the sky and noticed the mountains had drawn up more clouds. They’d begun to fill in the far edge of the sky, crowding the weak blue. The air didn’t smell like snow yet, but I wondered if it was coming.

  We passed by the edge of town, where everything sat silent. Normally I’d hear the blacksmith’s anvil singing to itself and the rattle of wagons coming and going from the general store. But it could well be Sunday out here, it was so quiet. Even the spirits stayed low. I felt a few eyes following me, and from their coolness, knew the spirits were measuring me up. I missed their usual chatter.

  Neither of us spoke the rest of the ride. Sheriff Toomey’s eyes had turned inward, their crisp blue lost in his own depths. I studied him sidewise. He wore ordinary denim workpants and the same indestructible, flannel-lined brown coat my pa wore when he worked in the cold. Sheriff Toomey was younger than my father, but the tired gray settling over his face, a deeper and unhappier gray than the bloom of beard along his jaw, was just the same as the gray in the lines of my father’s face. I wondered if anyone else could see that color, or if it was a spirit shade, a color a man’s own inner fire broadcast in its discomfort.

  Then we came up over the ridge of Bluwalter Bluff, and down by a narrow stream a house hunched, its walls whitewashed and freshly mended, surrounded by haze of searing black no ordinary eyes could see. I had to blink away rainbows from the fierce light of it, and a greenish-white nimbus floated over my vision, shaped like a steep-roofed farmhouse. Even up here, the ugliness was so strong it stole my breath.

  I stopped Fionn and took my ma’s bundle from my coat pocket. The rosemary sat on top of the sandwich, green and fresh and clean-smelling. I squeezed it between my fingers and breathed in that good smell a few seconds, till my stomach stopped churning and aching. Then I tucked the rosemary sprig into my shirt pocket, as close to my skin as I could get it.

  Sheriff Toomey sniffed as I caught up with him. “You know, that smell reminds me of old Mrs. Bluwalter—a mighty nice lady. She was from one of those old countries, Poland or Romania or something. While she was alive she washed the floor every day with her special herb soap. Said it kept peace in the house. Maybe she was right. Nothing bad ever happened there while she was alive.”

  His words made me break out in gooseflesh, and my hand went to my shirt pocket, pressing the herb until it scratched through the flannel. Three bad things had happened in that house, but none under the protective touch of rosemary. I was glad for Ma’s provision.

  Fionn whickered at me, almost too soft to hear. He could feel the house’s ugliness as strong as I could, but he kept his walk even, just as calm as the great hero he was named for. Sheriff Toomey’s horse tossed its head and shifted its weight around.

  “Come on, girl, it’ll be okay.” He patted the horse’s neck. “The animals smell the blood. They took the bodies back to town, but nobody’s cleaned the place up yet.”

  I cleared my throat. The question I needed to ask felt too large for my mouth. “Sheriff. I got to know, before we get down there. What happened to Lura?”

  He pulled short his mare and didn’t look at me. “You sure you want to know?”

  “I wouldn’t ask it of you if it weren’t important. Please, sir.”

  The hint of boyishness in the word “sir” seemed to strike him. From my place behind him, I saw his shoulders twitch. A boy like me should be at home finishing school work or starting some ordinary chore, like mending fence. He was the one who wanted to understand the house. He was the one who’d asked me to help.

  “She was working on a baby blanket,” he said, real lightly, like the words weren’t so bad to say. He made a noise then, something what could have been a cough or sigh or a choked off sob. “She’d picked out some real nice wool for it. Soft, white and yellow. I can’t tell you how many times she made me rub against my cheek to see if I thought it was soft enough.”

  I wanted to reach out to him, but I sat still.

  “I keep thinking that maybe if I’d been home, I could have stopped her. That she would have asked me to stop her. I keep wondering if I did something that made her do it.”

  His voice dropped to a whisper, but I heard every word.

  “I came home and I couldn’t understand it. I thought maybe she’d fallen on the damn thing, but there’s no way to fall on a crochet hook once and gouge out both eyes. Sometimes at night, I still see that damn crochet hook, sticking up out of her head, her beautiful face all covered in blood. Just like the moment I opened the front door and saw her.”

  The wind stirred the sagebrush, and for a second, I smelled snow. The clouds had thickened around the borders of the sky. I buttoned the top button of my coat.

  “Strangest thing of all, Will, is that I never found that yarn. I can’t think of what she did with it. It was so soft.”

  A strand of Fionn’s mane fluttered up on the wind, a long string of white like an unspoiled skein of yarn. I thought of the terrible darkness of the house, that burning bright blackness.

  Sheriff Toomey patted his horse’s neck, then rubbed his fingers into the winter’s thickness of her coat. “Come on, girl. It’ll be okay,” he repeated. He urged the mare forward.

  ~*~

  We left the horses at the bottom of the bluff, tied to the Tuckers’ windmill. The stillness of town had nothing on the dead silence of this place. Even the creak and squeal of the windmill seemed to come from someplace a thousand miles away, muffled by the distance. Sheriff Toomey’s breaths sounded quick and shallow in my ear.

  I’d never felt so alone. All my life the quiet presence of stone spirits and dust devils had kept me good company, the whispers of sagebrush and clover my constant companions. But whatever hid inside that house had somehow terrified the surrounding spirits into hiding. There was a deadness to the very earth under my boots. My heart gripped itself in my chest, stung with fear, and, yes, anger.

  “I guess we’ll start inside the house,” the sheriff said, his voice tight. He led me up the porch steps.

  “Wait,” I said. I stepped forward and set my hand on the doorknob. I wanted to be first inside, wanted to see what scurried into place or out of sight before the other man disturbed it.

  The knob wriggled beneath my palm like the back of a snake, cool and dry and slick. I jerked back, and the whole door rippled, laughing at me. I gritted my teeth and took hold of the knob again.

  It turned easily, and the door swung open without even a creak. A smell escaped the house, a waft of a dozen ordinary smells, beeswax and cedar chips and bacon and firewood, but beneath them the stench of outhouses, spoilt meat, bull piss. The house breathed it out like a sick man breathed out bad humors. I’d never met a house with its own spirit, but this one hummed with the energy of a spirit bent on trouble.

  For now, it just watched.

  I took a step forward, and the sheriff fell in beside me. Mrs. Tucker had made her front room fine. White lace curtains framed the windows. A many-colored rag rug filled nearly the whole floor, and a bookshelf stood beside the wood stove. There were real books on the shelves as well as an entire zoo of whittled wood
en animals. They called me to come touch them, but as I crossed the beautiful rug, something squished under my boot.

  I didn’t want to lift my foot.

  Sheriff Toomey went pale when I did, and we saw the white shell of Mrs. Tucker’s ear laying there, the soft shade of her skin a perfect match for her curtains. My gut heaved, but I didn’t throw up. Barely.

  The house chuckled, a low, dry sound.

  Sheriff Toomey balled his hands into fists and stood there with his eyes closed a minute. “Shit,” he whispered. I knew he was fighting the desire to turn around and run the hell out of this house—I had the same feeling. I wanted to set the damn place on fire and burn the darkness clean.

  That would be my last option. I knew from Ma’s stories, stories she’d heard from her granny: Sometimes things survived burning, and those things had a way of roaming. Whatever lived in this house, I wouldn’t want to face it again.

  We turned the corner into the kitchen, which was clean save for a long stripe of red-brown that Sheriff Toomey followed out into a little hall and then up a flight of stairs. The dark weight of the house pressed down upon me so that it was hard to breathe. The blood looked thicker on the steps, rich and chunky in some places.

  The staircase bucked beneath my feet and I had to grab the railing as it nearly shook me loose.

  The sheriff looked over his shoulder with a strange expression on his face. “You feel something?”

  I nodded. I couldn’t have answered if I had the breath to. I’d known that Sheriff Toomey was no unbeliever like my father. He must have felt something for the spirit world, or he would have never listened to the stories about Ma and come to us for help. But the strength of this thing was powerful enough to turn a believer into a senser. I felt a sudden liking for the man that went deeper than my respect for his badge and quiet manner.

  At the top of the stairs, a black cloud rose up, leaping over Toomey to claw at my face. Cold fingers seared my skin. Iron fists pummeled my nose, my gut. I dropped to my knees, but didn’t loosen my grip on the stair rail. I would not fall. I would not let this thing dominate me.

  My mind hardened and pushed back with a force I didn’t know I had. The black cloud snarled. There was a cold blast of rotting flesh and swamp water, and then I was alone at the top of the stairs, Sheriff Toomey staring down at me with wide eyes.

  “Are you all right?” He tugged me to my feet. “I shouldn’t have brought you here, damn it. Ain’t no place for a boy. You shouldn’t have to see this.”

  I realized he meant the great black puddle of blood that had dried on the landing. He hadn’t seen the cloud, whatever it was. He could feel, but not see. And the thing hadn’t touched him.

  “I’m all right.”

  He shook his head.

  I raised my hand. “I got to see this. All of it.” I had to see what had happened to understand it, and I had to understand it to fight this spirit. It was like no spirit I had ever encountered. I had only known ordinary spirits, the animate forces of the natural world and a few dead men passing through this plane on their way to someplace else. Whatever this spirit was, it had been taken from the ordinary course of things and forced into monstrosity.

  “We found little Michael Tucker up here. The blood keeps going—I reckon he was cut pretty bad in his room and then dragged out here. We had to gather up all his insides,” Sheriff Toomey’s voice broke, but he kept on, “because they were all spread out on the floor.”

  I followed the blood with my eyes, through an open door, where I could just make out a small bedstead with a blue quilt, a stuffed rabbit laying at the foot. The rabbit’s ear was bloody.

  “Mrs. Tucker was downstairs,” Sheriff Toomey whispered.

  The window of the little boy’s room exploded.

  We both dropped to our knees on the top of stairs as a window in the other bedroom burst. The doors to the rooms slammed shut.

  Black liquid dripped from the top of the doorframes and oozed down the doors, molasses slow. Pounding sounded all around, the whole house resounding like a drum.

  “Get downstairs!” Toomey shouted over the pounding, and he dragged me by the arm down the steps. We skidded into the kitchen, and the sound stopped.

  I paused. The kitchen was clean, like when we first came in, everything in its proper place as my ma commended. But there was something wrong there, something what weren’t there a minute ago: A black fur rug, draped over a chair back. The hairs rose on my neck. The rosemary sprig seemed to prickle and wriggle against my chest.

  I didn’t want to touch it, but I spread the thing out over the kitchen table anyway. The fur shone thick and lustrous in the light from the kitchen window. The pelt was heavy, and when I felt the leather of its hide, I felt a cold smoothness that rolled beneath my fingertips. I flipped it over.

  “Oh,” I breathed. A beaded border, all shimmering colors of mother-of-pearl and blue glass, followed the edge of the rug, and a neatly worked image of two horses and a little colt stood in the middle. It was beautiful. A treasure.

  I couldn’t help frowning at the ugly hole along one side, suspiciously round, like a bullet hole. A set of brown fingerprints marred one edge.

  “I’d forgotten this.” Sheriff Toomey put out his hand, but didn’t touch the beaded surface. “Mr. Bluwalter once showed it to me. He’d found it in a closet or something. Figured it was an Indian thing, some kind of memento Schwartzkopf had left behind. It’s the sort of thing you’d buy if you were getting older, I suppose. Something thick and warm for winters.”

  I touched it again, studying the beads. “Looks Nez Perce, maybe. And the fur ...” I broke off, remember what Toomey’d said: his daughter got drug off by a bear.

  By a bear.

  Sure felt like bear fur. The wheels of my mind spun, but something else exploded upstairs, and I smelled that smell again, thick swamp and dead things.

  My eyes went back to the bullet hole and fingerprints. The fur rippled and twisted, the fingerprints going black, bright black, stinging my eyes.

  “Let’s get out of here,” I said, and hurried out into the blessed chill air outside.

  I stood on the gravel footpath leading up to the front door and stared out over the land, seeing again its dead grayness. Out here, all was quiet and clean-smelling, but the color of the earth warned me that the house’s evil was spreading. The house had first forced one woman to kill herself, then a man to butcher his wife and son. Yes, it was getting stronger.

  And me? What did I have? That new strength what had come out of my mind might have been strong enough to push away one of the house’s manifestations, but I didn’t doubt that its power was greater than any power I yet held. I was new at this. Untested. Untaught.

  “What do we do?” Sheriff Toomey asked. “What’s in there, Will?”

  I shook my head. The only word I had for the spirit living in that house was evil, pure and simple.

  Something nudged my ankle.

  I looked down, surprised by the gentle touch. A pygmy rabbit stood on my boot, its tiny body a gray-brown that would have just matched the stem of a healthy sage bush. A faint line of light traced the outline of the rabbit’s fur, the only hint that it was not what it appeared to be.

  “Hello,” I whispered. The rabbit nodded, just once, and sprang off my boot, bouncing off in the direction of an outbuilding I’d somehow overlooked.

  “What’s that?” I pointed. “Root cellar?”

  Sheriff Toomey stared a moment, his blue eyes confused. “Well, shit. I plumb forgot about that. I always meant to tear it down since it wasn’t doing anything.” His eyes traveled from the building to my face, his usual focus coming back to them. “It’s an old cistern.”

  I eyed the windmill and its pump. “Don’t they have a well?”

  “Mr. Schwartzkopf put the well in when he was preparing to sell the place. Told folks there was never enough rain to make the cistern worthwhile and that it had a leak. Pa Bluwalter said he never used it.”

  I saw
a flicker of light by the old structure, and knew the spirits—the kinds of spirits that live in the good things of the world, my friends—had not left me. I pushed through the dead sagebrush and dried weeds to reach the abandoned cistern.

  “What are you doing? There’s nothing out here,” Sheriff Toomey reminded me.

  “There’s something,” I said. I pulled at on the door knob, but it wouldn’t turn.

  “It’s locked, boy. Not safe to have these things open.”

  I kicked the door. I felt my stomach twisting, my skin crawling. There was something in there, something that needed out. I had to get in there.

  “It’s not going to come open, boy.”

  “Shoot it, Sheriff. Shoot the knob off!”

  He blinked at me a second, then pushed me backward. “Cover your ears.” He took his revolver from his holster and pressed the muzzle to the base of the door knob. He pulled back the hammer.

  Even with my ears plugged, I heard the roar. The last bit of boy in me had to grin at the tremendous sound of it. He put his fingers into the hole he’d made, and then he yanked open the door.

  The hinges ripped free of the wood and the door fell to the ground, hitting me in the arm on its way. I stood rubbing my shoulder, staring inside. A god-awful stink came up out of the cistern, a smell like dirt and skunk and some deeper, muskier smell I couldn’t quite place. But it wasn’t the smell of dead things or swamp. Whatever was in here, it was not a part of the house’s spirit.

  A narrow lip ran around the edge of the cistern, and a ladder disappeared going down into it. Afternoon sunshine lit the building as bright as the inside of the house. I took a step inside, leaning over the pit. Everything was black down there.

  “There’s a lantern on the front porch,” Sheriff Toomey murmured. “I’ll go get it.”

  I stood waiting for him, listening. Silence still lay heavy out here, but I could have sworn I heard a sound like skin moving against fabric. I rubbed my stomach. It hurt worse than ever.