The Last Ride

It was out here in the bleak plains that the world was cast in a sea of doubt. The sky was a rolling storm of danger and uncertainty and clouds hung thick in the air, thick and billowing like smoke from a wildfire. Lightning crashed and thunder clapped and nature put on a dazzling show for the riders, the world flashing from black to white and back again in an instant. Glenn could smell the rain in the air, he could taste it on his tongue and hear it in the howl of the wildlife running for cover. They were luckier than him. He?d have to tough it out.

His heels dug into the beast that trudged on with its ungrateful burden and he hunched over, the dangerous blue of his gaze sweeping along the darkening horizon until his companion came into sight.

?Ain?t we a couple of cursed bastards??

Skies so clear you could have skipped stones across them until the damned decided to ride. Keep the devil smiling. The sky hammered them until shirts were soaked. Madison let go one rein shielding her quarry the best that she could. A racket of trees, thick and tall, would be the place to stop. Madison whistled in that direction, nodding for the brooding branches, and slowed only once reaching their perimeter, to dismount and quickly bring Maida against her and under the most dense of them. A few birds screamed somewhere up there not unlike banshees. Madison watched Glenn from under her hat, combing fingers through milk thistle white, Maida stirring to peek over at the man and his horse and the hellish night time rage that flickered behind him. Madison drew in a chilling breath of air, felt it go right through her. ?We?ve got to find some cover. Might be shacks out this way. Old mining town only a few miles away, but the lightning is bad. What do you think?? shouting over the rain.

The tree and its gnarled, thick limbs were barely a respite from the raging storm when it exploded and flew to life. This particularly cursed soul could only stare on with what was plainly frustration and annoyance at the inconvenience and yet another act of miraculously awful luck. ?Better?n hidin? out under this tree!? he shouted back, catching Maida?s eye. ?Keep your head down, girl. It?s gonna get worse before it gets better,? he could hear the world around them trying to shrink away and hide from the storm, everything from the screaming birds overhead to the coyotes cowering in the underbrush far along the plains. Not even the natural world seemed to take joy in this sudden rain.

It was a lost place out here - nowhere and nothing, only fury.

There were few things more right, however, despite the seeming endless obstacle of life in this way. Few things more right than the three of them buckled down because if you have nothing you really own the world - anything becomes a possibility, on the plains of loss. Maida had burrowed her towhead into Madison?s blouse, and so, Madison was clung to by a drenched shirt and a tiny but fierce grip of a child who also was owed the desperation of that endless vision that spanned around them. The distance was too far to see, even out here, because the rain was that thick. Madison squinted against it, then turned, her eyes traveling thoughtfully over Glenn?s profile, as she had done so many times before, and still not losing fascination with the way she knew no more about what was ticking behind the eyes that blazed a thousand skies than she had guessed the last time. She sighed, despite herself, and simply placed her chin upon the child?s nape, protectively. Her free hand fidgeted with a rein, working the frayed leather back and forth beneath her thumb. No introspection for her, nothing to be garnered if Douglas was to look back at her, but a woman as damned as he was and who forfeited all she could possess for a promise of freedom?s potential.

?Ain?t much cover to be found,? he didn?t seem to be shouting, but Glenn had a way of being heard even over the roar of the storm. ?There?s a shack over the hills that way,? the crook nodded in that direction and clucked his tongue. ?Or there was, anyhow. Might be the wind?s knocked it down, or some wolf came for it. Only one way to find out.?

The sound he made spurred the steed onward at a trudging pace, but he gave the beast a kick and it sputtered to life and hurried onward. Rain came down in thick pellets then. It was cold as ice and felt like tiny rocks bouncing off of his shoulders and head. Within seconds his clothes were soaked through and his fingers were already starting to ache as they tightened around the reigns. Behind him the trail of dust first kicked up by the horse turned into splashes of mud and water and it stained his boots brown within seconds, but he continued.

There was nowhere else to go but forward.

?Wolf, aye?, she nearly laughed, mind traveling back down a dozen dirty roads to a coyote stiff-backed in the dark, glaring straight back at her through hours and years and dread filled days. But her response, words were gone to the wind, torn to shreds, fed to the rain. Manipulating Maida?s into a more easy angle, she bent forward and went heel, to spurn the beast on. Maida gave a protesting cry, but it was tired and the wind and the rain ate that too.

?You been there before, sure of it?? she asked, though the closer they came, less she could mistake the crooked outline of it there, hulk of a thing, dead and sullen and waiting. Maida cried again, burrowing her head as deep she could Madison?s breast. ?Might have to do a lap first of the place, don?t you reckon?? Her voice came howling out of the gale, tattered like pages of a soaked book to his ear. Their luck thus far had made it that testing the water always necessary. Another cast look at the dead, the sullen, the waiting shelter.

Days later, Madison would admit she hadn?t liked the look-feel of it one bit. The waiting place seemed to be staring right back, like that coyote, stiff-backed and glaring, in its infinite symbolism and antagonism, over their shoulders. Always. The past was always rearing back to bite.

The doorway was narrow and sealed shut. Glenn doubted they?d be able to get the horses inside but he?d try his best. He pulled up on the reins and tossed them over to Madison as he dismounted, sliding from the saddle and landing with a squelch in the mud below. One hand went to a gun at his hip while the other stretched out to curl around the rusted old handle of the door. ?You two stay here for a sec,? he said, putting his shoulder to the door as the six-gun came sliding out of the oiled leather. At least there under the eaves they were less inclined to get soaked in the ice water that came raining down. He shoved the door open with his shoulder, the old wooden board that locked it up exploded into huge splinters that tumbled into the floor. A smell came rushing out and it made him cover his nose and cough. He spit into the dirt and took a look inside.

Their clothes were dusty and old, their skin leather and sunken in. From inside he could see tiny rays of light from holes left in the shack and traced their paths to a few tears in the cadavers? chests. With a sigh he holstered his gun and grabbed a pair of legs to drag the bodies out into the rain.

Madison looked on from behind, eyes roving into the darkness that offered nothing more than vague shapes and then out into the rainy world. It wasn?t so much the place that bothered her, but the sense that something was wrong. Very wrong. A feeling she?d crossed into only a handful of times that made her skin crawl and her head swim with a nausea. She coddled the child closer to her, supposed of an unbearable need to protect, it stung her toes hot even in the wet boots that was sure to give her ill. The rain hadn?t backed off in more than three quarters of the hour, and only then, in thinking so, did she try and approximate at where night was coming at them from. Her bearings gathered as she applied herself to the stillness, something that even the storm couldn?t touch. Thunder blasted in her ears. The wooden shack vibrated with it, as though from it came that roaring.

The only other sound was the constant whine of a sign, faded to something nondescript and thatched, above the door. It was only acknowledge as she reached stillness? heart, and saw from where the light moved that late afternoon was racing them now. That the shack was their only bet.

Then Glenn came from that darkness and must and sore wood. The horses startled, making their commotion. Mud splashed. Madison hummed loud to soothe. The stink was all consuming, and the nausea felt intensified. Hauling Maida tightly and close, she slipped down side the mare. ?That it??

She walked over to inspect the cadaver?s closer, a hand running down the child?s sleeping head. ?What the hell is this place??, and eyes lifted, and read the sign, now closer to see its meaning.

White paint, long since blanched and twisted to gray, ghost of words, swinging in the wind.

?Above all,
Do No Harm?

In the failing light, the faces and what was left of their features were clearer to the eye. One set familiar to one of them, something plucked out of a memory and turned into a nightmare. One of the dead at their feet was a man named Cobb.

((As always, a heartfelt thank you and a good deal of credit goes to the player of Madison Rye))

The thistle-haired child raised her slumbering head and Madison backed up to the single table in the room, where a vase lay shattered on its side, and a few plates too. A spider scuttled across the surface. Madison only held the girl tighter, sliding away from where the critter went. "How long do you think those bodies were sat here before we came?"

The great westling wind bore down on the shack and the earth around was one great vacuum, and where the ragged wind hit hard, a deafening scream of it would fire, god was whistling.


"We can't stay here. This isn't right", knowing she didn't have to say it, for Douglas knew it, but better it be spoken aloud to the dead and the gloom of that shack, so whatever listened, even if it was only what the wind would carry or all the walls could manage, she voiced the acknowledgement that the place was touched in a bad way. "I'm hungry", the child's eyes round and dark with sleep, as she turned away from Rye's shoulder to look at Glenn across the room. "Where we going?"

Madison only ran a hand back through the thistle-pale hair, a gesture to pull the girl in. Maida falling back against her easy does, sucking on a dirty thumb. Eyes, fierce and solemn, watched over Maida's head, as Glenn sniffed out the bad way with a wicked sense, for the wild was greater in him, and his blood knew things hers never could. The instinct that anticipated what could not be seen. The wild dog in his eyes glimpsed. Lips pressed to the child's crown. "It's okay, baby."

"It's okay."

Reckless a move to leave the shack, of that she was sure, but she didn't like the place none. Penny Moon had gotten to have its own bad way and it was a sensation that always got her to leaving things behind and having to move. But they were in a two-bit sitch - nothing here to free them, and the rain was hard, and the menace of the unknown harder still. Coaxing the child up, she move towards one of the chairs the dead had been in, and regarded it warily. Dried blood played a nasty topcoat. A dark brow inched up, but she fell into its arms anyway, lifting Maida around so the girl lay across her. Hand at her back patted out a soothing beat. "If you want to catch some zee's say so. I'm not going to sleep for a while. I'll watch."

Where she sat was a vantage out over the angle of the porch that faced East and South. "I reloaded before we left." The dragoon he'd bestowed her glinted dully from her side. Leg swung over a leg, she inched the chair back until it rocked. Vagabond queen in a dead man's chair with the promise of death all around her. It sung its vile chorus, low and not forbidden and the grey world still wasn't sorry. Ah, and their West was still its own hell. This very well could have been the end of the world as known. There was no atonement nor salvation, liberation or contrition. Three souls at the edge of time. A place for only the gun to speak and crinkled luck to give a little.

A lengthy look at the man, and Rye slipped further down into the chair's stained embrace, rocking the child the entire time. Her lids grew heavy, and eventually they veiled the storm that brewed in antique blue. Sleep might come, but the nightmare would break its leash. She knew this with every fibre that threaded her into being, each scalding with the knowledge that this was no ordinary storm. And never was it so.

Thereafter, a brilliant flash of lightning illuminated the world outside - for an extended moment of such brilliance, twined this world was with a flash-flash-flash of black and white, fish-belly, coffin-dark, fish-belly. White as guilt. Black as murder. It was life and death in each flash. Flash, flash, flash.. The dead faced the sky in their final eternal stare , and the sky stared back, as unrelenting and sombre.


Madison dreamed of teeth upon her neck. Being dragged beneath the shack. Of coyote and gun smoke. All that lived in the final sight of the dead in the rain outside the shack. Only their dead eyes would tell of the falling sun and the silent chords of fear resonating through the fire and the downpour.

Creak.

Like a footfall on the porch-board. But it only the protestation of the thatching sign above the door. Ghost words in the wind.

Above all, do no harm.

But the dead knew better.

One eye was shut against the black, the other opening slowly to regard the door open wide on Glenn's ridden voice. She could hear as much as feel the heaviness in the way he spoke, and it gave her dreadful pause as she slowly sat forward. "No, I'm not awake, what's up?" That scarecrow woman appearing in the frame of the door beside him and looking out at the marks in the dust. Perhaps they'd gone to suit better graves. In that moment, strange though it was to think it, Madison had never seen Glenn Douglas more treasured to her - his presence, even at his most troubled, assuaged - how the feeling skipped a few snares in her chest and then beat on - so here, he steeled her against the soundless siren that sprang up in her belly and wailed throughout her every bone. Maida clung to her, deep in her rest. Hellish yonder, and still she had enough about her to make the best of it.

However...

"F*ck."

She closed her eyes against the biting wind that blew up still, enraged, but not quite as wily as it'd been through the night. Forcing them open, in a squint. What an eccentric portrait they were in a grey world side by side with this lost child in their claim. Nothing was absolute, even death. A wondering, side-long stare up at the man who reflected her. She put her shoulder to his, taking in the rest of the plains. Maida stirred and moved against her, fitful a moment in her dream.

Aloud, to him, to herself, to the past and its hysterical coyote laughing.

"Still can't keep the dead down."

And as far as the bet went, so too the potential for that freedom to rise and be caught, sustaining the creed with which they lived to embark them on winds stronger than these of fury. Perhaps the wind had only blown the deceased to smithereens. Cast them to bones and sackcloth far on far from there. It was soon that the trio were riding, carried further and faster on their own gale, a mad weather of their own speed and the saga of all they meant for. Purpose was, and as it did, and they did live with it.

"Going to be penniless soon. What do you say about that?" spat over her shoulder as she slowed the pace for the horse was panting and its flank greasy with sweat. A hand soothed through the fur. Maida no different with her quiet and watchfulness. Madison kept her close, arms over the child's shoulders where the reins jostled up and to the left to keep the horse in its gait as it was. "I've only got a few bills before I'll need to wire." True it was they could shoot their meals, but there wasn't more out here than sap and weed, and neither would keep them. "Maida's going to need something substantial. The grains are running low too", hanging off her saddle. Probably filled with weevil by now. Though her concern was on where they would dock, and what it would mean.

And why it was, despite the span of nothing, the feeling of eyes upon them was ceaseless. Even the rains did not wash this sensation away from Madison.

Look across the prairie,
'Cos, that is where the killers run
When they're comin' in to feed...

God kept whistling, the devil kept smiling, and the West in all its glorious desperate. You could say that the wind was the great howl of some lonely and surely forsaken beast, some far-off, edge of the world canine with its lungs blaring at the hell of all it made. It was a keening sound that blasted off the earth and off the sky and fell back in on itself, erupting in violent scores - a crescendo of menace that ricocheted like the fire of a thousand bullets - this not only the wicked gale, and the bad way which followed them along, scratching at their ragged shadows, their tattered legacy, but the words of the blue-eyed crook which vilified whatever ghost had put them to tire and damn. Whatever men or not-men that had risen. This world was not all it seemed, and there were understandings like secret doorway, things that could only be accessed if you, like the vile nothingness around them, beget desperation. It was not of want, or greed, but rather, that the soul of the ones that survived this place were shaped from its most ugly of parts. It was not an easy land. It did not breed man lean of complexity.

They rode on, with the promise of those most fearful teeth in the night blazing in their thoughts, so close, whiskers would touch the backs of their necks, craned and low and hunched as they galloped across the plains. Maida would not be the same child, again, ever again, and her being quarry of the two would see her changed again. She would in many years time say those very words of warning. Rhy'Din's towers loomed in the distance. Not close enough. The air chill with foreboding. In the thickest part of the woods to the East, Cobb, alive and well, looked on. Beside him stood the second son of a bitch to shake off his angels. The ravaged world bled away beyond. Old, fading painting. Old, fading painting. Fallen away to guilt and rust. Guilt and rust. All their whiskey and regret.

Rye considered her partner with a low-slung smile, the kind that couldn't help itself for the small effort of hiding it away..seemed like it shouldn't be, with their faces grey as the sky above and beyond and behind. These were the days she knew well, for they seemed to herald something in the air and in the blood and the bones, inherent with some electricity like a lie started in a hall over a year ago - even as fresh blood rose up and comforted her, unlike him, with tree and stone exuding some semblance of safety. For after certain times with which the sadness in her heart grew, she did not trust the wide open with the significance her heart once gave it. So freely, she had offered herself to some notion that she had bartered her life and was owed by the world. But maybe that was why coyotes and the wind laughed and laughed and laughed.. Only debt paid off was where your coins fell. The world didn't owe you a thing.

The most natural destination in the world that didn't give a damn, was the one place with the best illusion of harbour. There where the corner caught the trade winds and miracles could grow. The Penny Moon may not have been dually secure, but it was reliable, and sometimes, you need reliable more than you need the former. Boots mounted the staircase and into the hall, scarecrow and a child, staring down the barrel of darkness familiar. She gripped the girl's hand tight and sauntered forward, broken and broken hearted, looking for some fire to give the shadows their shape. Window was wide, curtains blowing. Madison breathed in the familiar air, it was not so foreboding and the dread slowly left her. Maida clung close, and Madison ran a dirty hand through her hair, black through milk-thistle, days and days of wild, yet purity at her side. She stood staring down at the child perplexed, confused, beloved, stricken. The girl lifted her eyes to Madison, and something passed between. "Wait here."

Hip to the recess in the wall where the dockets lived, and she took a key, and turned, and again, the window caught her eye. She watched the curtain blow, listless, lifeless, hypnotic. "Maida?"

The girl was no longer there, waiting. The room was an expanse of waves, dark and unfathomable, except the rare slices where the moon smiled. Hand to the Dragoon's handle, she moved back through the kitchen and into the hall, to see that there the girl also was not. "Maida?" Creaking stairs above her, Madison's eyes roved along the railing, and her feet followed. "Maida."

Up the stairs she went.

In the kitchen, a muted thump. The sound of free air ceasing. Window shut. Footsteps and a match to a cigarette.

Curtain wasn't blowing anymore.

"Maida?!"

There was an edge to her voice, as it fell away in the dust and dim. She was a shadow amongst shadows, eyes seeking the sable-eyed child who had seemingly drifted into thin air. There was a something about the girl that leant itself to the world of spectres, and like a shroud, unsettlement prickled, across her shoulders and down her spine. It was a lukewarm angst that filtered through her. But her eyes were burnished with the glow of the early evening, and they, not unlike Douglas', blazed as she began moving along the landing, trying door handles and searching the corners for the small form of a girl who, illogically, she worried may have, or may yet, become ephemeral. Her touch small and cold. And her eyes endlessly dismal. "Maida?"

A shadow stepped from the slanted light of a door whining open. Tall, lithe, and from behind it, another shadow, smaller. Crowned with matted near-white hair. Two shadows holding hands. Seeing, Madison froze, chin tilted, gaze drawing what lines it could to make a semblance. Features too blurred to make a recognition spark in her mind

"Good to see you again", said this questionable being. Mystery threaded in the very vibration of his tone in the empty hotel.

It was a voice that could crack clay.

It was there, that the man slain and very much dead, beside Maida in the town of Decrepit, long days ago, stepped forth. Maida pulled along. "This.... this can't be...." pale fingers traced along the handle, warming it in the shaken grip of her good arm. "This...." she trails off, and how many times had the dead risen? Were they not to sleep eternally, but rise, and return? Was there some dark compass that led her again here, this road, tread and retread, to faded velvet. The bells tolled in the dead city, and the desert had no answer. No the whistling wind on the plains, even though they were oddly cherished, known, remembered, once trusted to carry her and all the denials.

In an extended moment of delayed and vibrant horror, Madison saw that Maida no longer possessed eyes, but regarded her with the gruesome hollow of sockets staring back. Her Father, still in bloodied shirt and ruined skin, grave-dust and sin, he smiled. "Oh, love, but it is", cigarette smoke, curling up into the air, where answers were not of a reason the mind could reach... curling, up, up, up.

The gunslinger let the fear crawl and slither. Harnessed in its grip. If you let it come, let it curl up close, you can catch it. Own it. "No.... "

Refusing to believe it, astonishment painted her face.

whiskey, regret, rust, guilt.....

Maida screamed, inhuman and feral, a sound reserved for the myths you don't want to hear, and then she was no more. Her entire being desiccating before Madison's very eyes, to a pile of beetles and ash. The sound of their scuttling something to wear. Madison drew, aimed. Hand shaking bad.

The stranger smirked, stepped on his smoke, ground it into the floorboards with a waxed heel, and stepped away into nothing.

http://farm3.staticflickr.com/2881/10164232756_ddab51f8c2.jpg


And isn't it the way, that time stretches straight for a time, as far as the West met its sky, before it too became a circle again.

The dead city didn't ever cease its echo. The naked cacophony of carillon lived in the city, as a storm resonates in the tree. It was pervasive in all things, and too, all its people.

And isn't it the way, that time stretches straight for a time....

Once upon a time (twice) a building had burned down around her, and she had walked out. The sound of the bell tower was an old song.

-----



Rye, letting go handle, faced the staircase down, and felt obliged to descend, for there was no reason nothing left in this hotel. She would not pursue a spectre beyond the door for the oblique idea that she might never return from behind its mahogany panel, and she was not ready to close the lid yet. Carried out of her own grave (more than once) and it was enough to count as remorse for having ever asked the winds to chance her spirit onwards and into the peril that the circumstance did over. She squeezed her eyes shut, fighting against the burning clench in her throat. She could not mourn the girl that never was, and so it seemed.

The gunslinger left the hotel, ghosting out and back to the ever hazy, ever reddened, ever time-slow street. She issued a sigh, brow arched as she looked up the structure's height and saw through to the memories there, clanging, tolling, a repetitive signature that played on in her ears, loud and clear. It all said one thing.


"Time to go" and she walked out of the shade of the Penny Moon and the quarter and headed for where she was sure Douglas would be. From a front-facing window of the hotel watched a small girl and a tall stranger, with eyes that were not, but the rest of them as present and breathing as the tell-tale Cobb, who left an old tune with Glenn so he might hear it too and know it always, and now walked away. The child and the tall stranger did not follow. And Cobb was nowhere to be seen, only leaves turned in their sleep on the curb. The wind was not chill, and the foreboding had left it, without hurry it rolled and tossed and curled. There was no man walking away, his old boots telling stories to the earth with each step. Chimes danced in the wind.