The Saint, the Sinner and the Coward
a novel of the weird west
Brian J. Jarrett
Copyright © 2016 Brian J. Jarrett
Elegy Publishing, LLC
All rights reserved by the author. No part of this publication can be reproduced or transmitted by any means without the written consent of the author.
This book is a work of fiction. Any names, people, locales, or events are purely a product of the author’s imagination. Any resemblance to any person (either living or dead), to any event, or to any locale is coincidental or used fictitiously.
2016.TSTSATC.1.2
Dedicated to Tim Curran and Keith C. Blackmore for introducing me to a genre I never expected to love
CHAPTER 1
They came at night, when the moon shone full and the fog hovered like an apparition above the dry, stony ground. Rosetta Jennings heard them as they came, howling like wolves in the night, their cries a frightening combination of starvation and insanity. Gooseflesh raced across her entire body, the hair on the back of her neck standing up at attention like so many good soldiers. She rushed to the rifle leaned up against the wall of her small cabin and cocked the hammer back into firing position before turning an ear to the wind. She heard more howls carried across on a light breeze, the sound echoing throughout the valley like ghosts in the night.
People murmured outside her window, the sound of their frantic voices carried in through large gaps around the edges of her windows and doors, gaps that also allowed the freezing air inside on the coldest nights as the autumn season wore on. Rosetta heard Jed Polanski’s voice drift in, strong and confident. Jed had been their leader since they arrived at the outpost in early spring. A strong and capable leader—and not one prone to spook easily—he wouldn’t be up and about unless something important was going on.
Probably just wolves, Rosetta thought as she lowered the hammer slowly onto the firing pin. The last thing she needed was to accidentally shoot somebody else, or herself for that matter. Bad enough to be a woman among men in a far away outpost deep within Indian country; even worse to be a fuck up on top of it all. Becky Bernard was the only other female in the group and she was tough as nails—and goddamn good at running neck and neck with any of the boys. She could out drink, out fight and out fuck the best of them.
Rosetta, on the other hand, was a rich girl who’d found herself bored with her own lavishly decorated four walls. She longed for the world; the dirt and grime and the experiences that came with being out in the thick of things. She could almost hear her father’s voice in her head, chastising her once and again, threatening for the thousandth time to remove her from his will, to deny her her share of a family fortune she didn’t want.
But Father would never understand.
Now, standing in a one room cabin with the smallest of fires burning in a stove that was really no more than a glorified tin can, she wondered about some of her life choices. She didn’t regret them. She’d never regret choosing to live life, to take it by the balls and squeeze it for all it was worth, but if pressed she felt she might have to admit that some of her more extreme decisions might have been inspired more by spite than she cared to admit.
The howling sounded again, louder this time, riding in on the wind like a highwayman in the night. The sound…it sent chills all over her body, sinking deep into her flesh, the cold going all the way to the bone. Something wasn’t right about that sound. There was something…different now. She’d heard the sound of wolves more than enough times to have committed it to memory. This sound wasn’t even close.
She heard concerned whinnying come from the horses, the sound of Jonah Feldman’s voice a low murmur on the wind, calming his beasts. Rosetta felt raw, base fear well up inside her belly, a dark thing that felt like the world’s worst indigestion, spreading up and out through her entire body. Rosetta Jennings was a true believer in an animal’s ability to sense things that humans simply could not. Their primitive brains weren’t preoccupied with the chatter of human complications. Animals felt on an instinctual level, something humans were forgetting how to do.
But when the chatter subsided, when Rosetta’s human brain no longer concerned itself with what to wear to dinner parties, which side of the plate the knife and fork went on or who she might be expected to marry, she found that the ability to reconnect with the more primitive parts of her mind remained alive and well. Like the horses, she could feel the wrongness of those sounds blowing in on the cold, northeastern breeze.
No human could make those sounds.
No animal either.
Her mind drifted, searching for an explanation. Something to wipe away the base fear that covered her like a wet blanket. Terror started at the base of her spine, creeping up on long, spindly legs. It picked its way across each vertebra, finding a foothold and hauling itself up, closer and closer to her brain. Once it got there it would take hold, planting itself inside, biting down with forked pincers while it pumped the poison of absolute horror into her mind.
Wolves, she reminded herself. Stop getting yourself all wound up in a tizzy over a few glorified dogs.
But her gut told her otherwise. It wouldn’t accept the lie. Her educated brain not only accepted it; it invented the lie. But the lower level brain, something she’d studied in expensive boarding schools in another life a million years ago, that part knew bullshit when it smelled it.
No wolf made that sound.
The howling, again.
Closer.
The voices of her friends murmured outside, louder now.
A knock sounded on the door. “Rosetta?”
She knew that voice and yet she jumped at the sound. Jed. She made her way quickly to the door, lifting the crossbeam up and out of its mounting and setting to the side. She opened the door, making sure to point the rifle toward the floor.
Jed stood outside the door. She saw his eyes first. Eyes speak without words, she remembered one of her English teachers telling her. Ms. Jones; a woman with a common name and an uncommon streak of grit and determination. But that memory hardly mattered now as Jed’s eyes spoke to Rosetta, lit by the dim flame of the lantern he carried in his left hand. In his right hand, he held a pistol.
“To the church,” he said before hurrying off.
Rosetta had never had much use for church, a dogmatic belief system founded by old men bound and determined to keep entire groups of people quiet and obedient. But some of the folks in the outpost had championed (or more accurately argued vehemently) for the erection of a steepled structure built in the honor of the Sky Daddy. They’d gotten a shack for their effort, less than they wanted but more than Rosetta reckoned they deserved.
The church served a dual purpose as a meeting ground for times of emergency. If Jed was calling them there then things had gone south. She stepped outside and closed the door to her humble home (what her father would have most easily called a hovel) before taking a step toward the church. When she did a scream echoed throughout the valley.
A human scream.
Rosetta felt the fear that had been slowly making its way up her spine rush upward, clawing with hairy legs and sinking its pincers into her mind. She felt the horror flood her system as another inhuman howl came from the darkness surrounding her, this one closer than any of the others.
Someone else cried out into the night as she heard growling nearby. She caught a flash of movement out of the corner of her eye and turned, raising the rifle and cocking back the hammer. She could see nothing but darkness.
More sounds came from that darkness, the sound of movement in the underbrush of the forest surrounding their small outpost. Something moving in the perimeter of the woods, right along the edge of the trees. Something sinister and evil, something with only unspeakable things on its mind. Rosetta didn’t know how she knew that, but she knew it all the same.
The church sat at least a hundred yards west, deep inside the fog bank and enveloped in the cloaking darkness. Given the circumstances it might as well be on the moon. She had no time to make it there. She knew she’d never survive that journey. Whatever prowled in the night owned it, reveled in it, was quite possibly borne by it.
Rosetta turned back toward her house, fumbling with the crude wooden door handle. At first it wouldn’t open and a dagger of terror twist itself inside her gut. She felt the panic come on hard, like a swarm of bees. She yanked hard on the handle, panting, her heart racing in her chest so fast that she feared it might explode.
Then the door opened and she slipped inside, slamming it shut. She placed the crossbeam inside the mounts and backed away from the door. The crossbeam looked more like a toothpick than any real barrier to entry. She inspected the rusted metal hinges with a degree of scrutiny like none before. Her life hadn’t depended on them until now.
“Calm down,” she told herself. Her voice sounded small and weak inside the one-room cabin, like the squeaking of a rabbit as the fox closed in.
Outside the shrieks and growls began in earnest. Gunshots exploded in the night. Men shouted. Howling echoed through the valley.
Rosetta heard growling outside her door. She clutched the rifle tightly, feeling the trigger beneath her index finger. The gun felt like a toy in her hand.
She heard movement outside her door. Whatever was out there stopped. Rosetta held her breath as she listened. Whatever stood outside her door smelled the air for her scent. She backed against the small structure’s back wall, not more than twenty feet away from the door. She could almost smell herself in the small area, the fear coming off her like musk on a doe, giving her presence away to whatever stood outside.
A shrieking erupted from the other side of the door. Rosetta knew how to speak three languages, taught to her during a life of pampering and luxury, but she didn’t need to be bilingual to understand the language of the creature on the other side of her thin door. She knew it had found her.
The door rattled on its hinges as whatever lurked outside slammed itself into the thin wood. Dust billowed into the air, lit by the light from the lantern sitting on a small table inside the one-room structure.
The creature outside howled as it struck the door again. Rosetta raised the rifle, her hands shaking. Fear gripped her harder, squeezing her like a giant’s fist. She struggled to breathe as her heart hammered in her chest.
Another strike against the door tore it from its hinges, ripping the crossbeam out of the wall. The door tipped inward and slammed down hard on the floor, the wind nearly extinguishing the flame of the lantern. The creature howled as it stepped inside the small structure, into the feeble light of the lantern.
Although it stood upright like man, the thing standing before her was not a man. It stood seven feet tall, its body thin, lanky and emaciated. Its skin stretched taut over bones that jutted at hard angles. Large swatches of peeling skin hung from its body in jagged strips, exposing muscle and bright white bone beneath. The creature’s eyes were deep, black pools set in sunken eye sockets. In the dim light they looked like bottomless pits. It snarled as it fixed her in its sights, revealing fangs an inch long. Long, wispy hair hung in patches from its leathery scalp.
The monster standing before her might have once been a man, but looking into its gaunt face Rosetta knew that any humanity it might have once possessed had long since departed. A breeze blew in through the open door, carrying the stink of the thing inside. It smelled of rot and decay, like an animal carcass three days in the sun.
The creature opened its mouth as it took a step forward, unhinging its jaw, the skin stretching to create an opening as large as a man’s head. Rosetta felt her bladder let go as she raised the rifle with shaking hands, fumbling for the trigger.
Teeth bared, the creature leapt as Rosetta managed to pull the trigger.
BUY NOW |
|---|