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While the preacher slept, he dreamt of Lilly and Myra. He saw them clearly, looking just as sweet and fresh as the last time he’d seen them alive, almost six months before, when’d left to do his circuit. Lilly’s one good eye sparkled with tear-dew, the other covered by her familiar calico eye patch. Myra stood at her mama’s side, barely up to her hip, clinging to her skirts. They waved as Delphi nosed his horse round and turned his back on them, starting down the path toward the outlying Creek Hill farms and the west-bound road.
Looking back, Delphi got one good, last look at them. Lilly and Myra stood in the doorway waving, and though they smiled, he saw the sadness in their eyes that he always saw when he left for a long ride.
Then it was night. His house was the church and the church was on fire. People screamed inside and battered at the shuttered windows, trying to escape the inferno. A man with a gun in each hand stood guard as the flames roared and the church roof began to shudder and collapse. From where he stood, Delphi couldn’t see the gunman’s face. Nonetheless, he knew he was smiling.
Barabbas. That was Barabbas.
The preacher ran toward the burning church. His horse was gone. No matter how hard he ran, how fast he thought he was going, he couldn’t seem to get there fast enough. Running to stand still, too late to do any good.
And there was someone—something—following close behind. It called his name. He thought that might be Tooms, but he wouldn’t dare a look back to find out.
Among the screams and pleas from within the burning church, Delphi thought he heard Lily and Myra calling out to him. The voices were theirs, no mistake, but they seemed to be speak in some strange tongue he didn’t recognize. From the way the syllables lurched and hissed, he guessed they were cursing him as they burned. Why did he ever choose his damned circuit over them?
Why did he leave them, alone and defenseless, so that a man like this Barabbas could lock them in the church with all the others and set it ablaze?
Myra didn’t die there, he reminded himself. They took her.
But who took her? And where?
He didn’t know. He might never know.
She might as well be dead, just like the others…
Then the preacher woke. He heard those same strange words—those alien curses from his wife and daughter—but now he was wide awake and the wind carried them and they were almost lost among the breezy susurration of the orchard trees above and around where he lay. He wasn’t dreaming those terrible words, he was hearing them. If he guessed right, they came back from the direction of the house.
Those words, and the voice that spoke them, were wholly unnatural.
Slinging his gunbelt over his shoulder, the preacher retraced the path through the orchard, following the voices back to the house.
When he reached the edge of the orchard and the yard, he realized the voices didn’t come from the house itself, but from the big old barn on its north side.
He heard Mill and Ellie clearly now, the two engaged in a hysterical argument, neither really hearing the other… then there was a third voice: harsh, inhuman, spouting animal ejaculations and quick-fire litanies in languages the preacher had never imagined human tongues could utter.
Then that same third voice spat forth in perfect, gnarled English, “Do as your man says, bitch, or he may rap you the way he rapped me.”
“You shut your goddamned filthy mouth!” Mill roared.
“Mill, you took your hand to him?” Ellie sobbed.
“Don’t make me tell you again!” Mill said. “Get the hell out and stay out! Don’t listen to a goddamn word comes outta this boy’s mouth!”
Again, the sickly voice broke in. “When’s the last time he gave you what-for between the sheets, mama? Cunny gone dry for want’a prime?”
Flesh on flesh—the sound of a hard slap. Ellie was conspicuously silent—struck dumb by that terrible, insensate question, most likely. The preacher felt a knot in his belly. That voice was like rusty spurs in a scabbed flank, but the things it said . . .
Is that their kid? he wondered. Sounds like some mad old man . . .
The preacher suddenly realized two things: he was ready to be on his way, and he needed to be, fast. If they came out of that barn and found him…
They’re gonna ask for help, he thought, and I ain’t in any state to give it. Can’t no preacher wrestle with the devil with hate in his heart and blood on his hands…
And that was the voice of the Devil I heard. There’s no mistake.
He strode back to his little camp amid the trees, slipped on his boots, and snatched up his horse’s saddle and blanket. The horse snorted where it stood, aware that soon it would once more be carrying its master’s weight.
The preacher spoke to it soothingly as he threw the blanket over its withers and cinched the saddle in place. “Meant to give you a little more rest—sorry—but all indications suggest a speedy departure . . .”
His mount was ready and so was he. The preacher took the reins and turned to lead the horse out into the night. Ellie stood in the path that led out of the orchard, a shadow rimmed in moonlight. Even in the dark he could see how her hair frayed this way and that, how her face was a mask of horror and grief, how her eyes and cheeks shone with fresh new tears atop the crust of older ones.
“Where’re you goin’?” she asked, her voice barely a whisper.
“Rested up,” he said. “Best be on my way.” He drew the horse forward.
Ellie didn’t move. “God brought you here,” she said through gritted teeth. “You ain’t goin’.”
The preacher stood immobile, not sure what to do.
Then Mill appeared. To the preacher’s dismay, he carried the scattergun that he’d greeted him with earlier.
They all waited for a time—the preacher with his hands on his horse’s lead, Ellie blocking the path, Mill looking shamed and puzzled but still clutching that shotgun—but it was Ellie who finally spoke. She turned, studied Mill’s slack face and red-rimmed eyes, then studied the shotgun. “What are you gonna do with that, Mill?” she asked.
The preacher watched Mill’s face carefully. He could read men well—it had always been one of the few talents he’d been born with, and not simply acquired. He saw in the pained expression on Mill’s face and the furtive darting of Mill’s eyes that his intended use for the shotgun might have been worse than even the preacher suspected. In a breath, the preacher’s mind’s eye painted a trio of stark images: the gutter-mouth in that barn with a ragged hole clean through him; Ellie too, maybe right in the barn; Mill calmly reloading the shotgun’s open breech, snapping it shut, and closing his mouth around the hot barrels.
Good Christ, but those are the eyes of a man at the end of his rope, the preacher thought. That’s why he had the gun in his hand when I came to the door. I interrupted something . . .
“Get outta here, reverend,” Mill said. “I’m sorry, but our hospitality’s spent.”
“Like hell,” Ellie said.
“I should go,” the preacher interjected, and drew his horse forward.
Ellie stepped up, laying hands on his coat and shaking him. She was small, but she was strong. “You ain’t goin’!” she shouted. “Not ‘till you do what you was brought here for!”
“Ma’am,” the preacher said, and took her hands in his to guide them away, “you need to let go of me—”
“Don’t touch her!” Mill suddenly screamed, and raised both barrels. The preacher stared into them. The feeling it gave him wasn’t a feeling he relished.
Just like looking down the barrel of Tooms’s two big Colt Dragoons…
“I aim no harm,” the preacher said. “Just tell your wife to get her hands off of me—”
Ellie snatched her hands away from his. She beat him with closed fists then, and before he could try to calm her, she had slapped him full across the face. The preacher’s cheek stung, and for a moment—just a moment—he had a good mind to take the woman’s hair in one fi
st and pummel the grief out of her face with the other.
But he knew that was just his own madness at work, and he let the feeling pass.
“You’re a man of God and you’re gonna walk by us in our hour of need!”
Shame, indeed. You’re a shepherd, after all . . .
No more! I’m a hunter now—and hunted! Every moment I waste here cools the trail, or makes it easier for Tooms to catch up with me…
I ain’t gonna let that son of a bitch hang me while Myra’s still out there somewhere.
“Let him go, Ellie,” Mill said, shotgun still pointed at the preacher. “It ain’t his concern.”
“No, it ain’t,” the preacher agreed, then met Ellie’s accusing gaze. “I’m sorry.” He pushed her aside and led his horse up the path. He did his best not to stare at Mill, but he felt the shotgun’s hungry black barrels following him all the way.
Before he knew it, he had his left boot in the stirrup and his hands up on the pommel of his saddle. Ellie didn’t say anything else. She collapsed on the path, a sobbing heap. Mill was doing his best to ignore her and make sure the preacher set off.
Delphi swung up into the saddle. He’d barely settled when he heard that croaky old man’s voice drift down from the barn far behind them.
“Carry on, reverend! Take your silver and your guilty conscience and run, run, run!”
Delphi felt as though he’d just fallen through ice into a frozen lake.
“Shut your mouth!” Mill shouted into the night.
Ellie kept crying, as though she hadn’t heard a thing out of the ordinary.
Delphi was blind for a moment, his vision awash with fireflies and his heartbeat thumping in his ears like a regimental drum. Trying to blink away that momentary blindness, he turned and stared back up the path toward the house. The trees obscured the barn, but he still knew it was there.
He heard it. Take your silver and your guilty conscience and run, run, run . . .
The preacher swung down out of the saddle and stalked up the path to Mill. “Show me,” he said. Only after he spoke did he realize the shotgun barrels were planted square in the center of his chest, just below his sternum.
“I told you,” Mill said, looking more frightened than angry, “it ain’t your affair.”
“You say it ain’t, I say it is.” The preacher knew that he should run while he still could, that in truth, it wasn’t his affair . . . but that voice . . . that challenge . . . run, run, run . . .
Maybe, if he were really lucky, Mill would just snap and blow a hole in him, and the whole stinking mess would be done with. Then, the blood and soot under his fingernails and the sights he could never unsee and the aching, empty hole at the center of him would just cease to matter.
Luckier, he might slip into the big empty and find there wasn’t a god or a devil, a Heaven or a Hell, after all.
Peace. At last. I could only pray for such a simple end . . .
But it didn’t happen that way. Instead, the preacher just reached up and snatched the shotgun out of Mill’s hands, tired of waiting for Mill to summon the sand to shoot him. Without looking—his fingers knew their jobs well enough—he cracked the breach and plucked out the shells, then shoved the empty shotgun back into Mill’s chest.
“Show me,” he ordered.
Mill did as he was told.