The Scar That Stains Red the Gulch

I came to town, as begged by telegraph, as speedily as I could, to see about the problem of the women who’d all thrown themselves to death off Rushtown Gulch. I rode on the back of a sturdy chestnut mare with a crisp wind pummeling our heels and whipping up swirls of dirt. Rushtown wasn’t more than a few streets of store facades, eagerly set up to drain the miners of their gold. In the evening’s waning light, as the lamps began to flicker on, those windows looked as soulless and vapid as the men sitting about outside to stare at me.

The sheriff came out right away to demand any weapons I had on my person and demand my name.

“John Scobell,” I told him. I gave him the rifle from my back, and the two pieces of hot metal on either side of my hip.

Even gave him the Remington under my seat, that he hadn’t spotted, just to let him know I was cooperative.

Also gave him the sword I’d taken from that Lieutenant after I’d slit his throat, watched red stain gray, and then turn to black.

“What are you doing here?” he asked.

“Pinkerton,” I said, and showed him identification. “Came to retrieve Moll Smith’s remains, take them back to her sister.”

The sheriff frowned. 

“Moll?”

I leaned forward, made my voice all conspiratorial as I lied. “Turns out, she was from high quality folk. Fell from grace. Came out here. They want to bring her body back to the family plot.”

The sheriff thought about that for a while. Again, with the frown. He chewed at something non-existent for a while. “You sure you’re a *Pinkerton*?”

“Last I checked.” I sat back up fully. It was the skin color. They were used to the cowboys roaming around the west, Mexicans, free blacks, the ones coming up from the South after the war. But the law was usually white. And Pinkertons were… *kinda* the law.

Whole new world now. There was a black senator back down south now that the federal troops occupied the separatist states. When I have a kid, his name’ll be Hiram Rhodes. Because to the day I die, that shit will always be amazing to me.

Now this sheriff was staring at me like the way I figured the white folk down in Mississippi stared at portraits of their new representative to the congress.

“We don’t want no trouble here,” the sheriff said.

“I’m a Pinkerton,” I said.

“Right,” the sheriff said, glancing around, stumbling as he fell off his script.  “Right.”

“Anything else?” I asked.

“No,” the sheriff said. “Just… we don’t want—”

“No trouble. Got it.”

I looked over at the saloon doors and thought about fetching myself a whiskey. But no whiskey had ever tasted so good as the bottles we smashed to burn down George Albert’s farm. Shipped all the way from Scotland, and tasted like leather.

Instead I went to find White Charlie.

***

White Charlie stopped at the edge of the gulch and tied his horse off on one of the gnarled trees that seemed to huddle into itself against the wind.

“That’s where they did it, John,” he said, pushing against the wind to get to the lip of rock. He yawned mightily before continuing. “Just jumped on right off like they was gonna go for a swim.”

Only there was nothing but jagged rocks down in the old, dried-up streambed, like the shattered teeth of a gaping mouth.

I sat there with my legs over the edge, trying to think about what would make a bunch of white women walk all the up the trail, past all the cactus and scrub and boulders and howling coyotes, to jump off into that certain death.

“I was sweet on the one called Jane,” Charlie sighed.

“And I bet she was sweet back to you for a fistful of dollars,” I said.

Charlie smiled and shook his head. “Weren’t doing it like that. Just, looking for friendship. She had some secrets. She guessed mine. We looked out for each other.”

And she hadn’t been sad, or abused? Charlie didn’t think so. He hadn’t seen or heard anything.

“I read the doctor’s report,” I said, turning my back to the mouth of the gulch with a shiver. Somewhere in the back of my mind I remember my mother whispering the story of when she’d been back in one of the Caribe isles, before they had ripped her away north.

Telling the story of the Ibo warriors who had thrown themselves against the plantation owners to get free. They’d thought they were on a great land, the western equivalent of the coast they had been taken from.

“What would make them jump themselves off into that?” Charlie asked me.

When the Ibo, and the Yoruba and Iwe they had freed with them, had gotten to the edge of the small island, they had realized the horrible truth. With torches flickering in the distance and flintlocks firing into the night like lightning to reveal angry white faces behind them, they’d scrambled their way to the top of a cliff.

They’d jumped.

A leap of faith, his mother had called it. Even the plantation folk called it Selwin’s Leap when his mom had worked the house there as a child.

These white women, they’d been free. The doctor who examined them said no lesions to their brain, no disease other than the ones he expected, no lasting marks of abuse.

***

White Charlie lived in a hut near the back of the saloon that seemed to want to slump over to the right a bit.

“Saloon’s life can’t be easy,” I said to him. “Handful of them women, and all these men with gold in their eyes and dreams.”

“I been all up and down and around the territories,” Charlie said, washing his face. “They ain’t any worse treated than others. No one went and done that before.”

I ate some jerky and thought about it some. “What do you think happened? You think someone did it to them?”

“I had any stirrings toward thinking I knew who did it, you know what I woulda done already.”

We lay down in the bed, the ropes creaking underneath from my extra weight. It smelled of Charlie, and the mules he trained for the miners. The air was bitterly cold, and I could see it hanging above our heads as we breathed, like a spirit drifting up from our bodies.

“You talk fancy now. Like one of them,” Charlie said.

A flame of anger kindled in me, and my back straightened.

“It ain’t a bad thing,” he said quickly. “You got a job with the law folk. It suits you. You were smart. It’s why I telegraphed you. You get the thing. You always went and figured it out when we were down there.”

The last time we’d lay under a blanket trying to keep warm Charleston was burning in the distance. We were wandering the land, Charlie holding papers that said I was his. I had the eye for what was important, what the generals back north wanted to know. I could tell them where to head for the jugular. And Charlie, well, he looked white.

We were both useful.

The North, they acted like it was all battles and tactics that ended it. They never crowed about the folk who risked worse than death to slow production, sabotage crops, lose shipments, smuggle out information, and more.

There were a people that pulled the brakes of the train until it all came to a screaming halt, just sitting there, waiting to be overwhelmed when the armies marched south.

Can’t fight if you can’t eat.

“After, those Quakers asked me to go to their college,” I told Charlie. “Get an education.”

“You were good with a pen. I bet they loved you.”

I snorted. “They loved the idea of free men, in theory. When I actually showed up on their white campus, they shit themselves. They rioted. Freeing us in the South was an idea they worked hard for, but they sure as hell didn’t want me showing up in the North.”

“I shoulda done it. No riots for me. After, I coulda gone and said ‘Boo, I’m really a darkie.’ Good laughing there.”

“You’re a horse man,” I said. “Always and forever. Nothing for you in those halls.”

And Charlie, a good man, would never have told them about the secret stain. Can’t say I blamed him.

Sometimes.

Other times, I hated him for it. Not him being born as he was, but that he kept it hidden.

***

In the middle of the night the bed creaked. I half woke, waited for that sound of piss hitting the pot.

When it didn’t come, I opened my eyes.

“Jesus, Charlie,” I muttered. I pulled on the blanket, shivering.

White Charlie stood near the one small window in his hut, the view outside warped and twisted from the cheap glass. His skin gleamed in the moonlight, pale as a corpse.

“Charlie, what…?” I trailed off. It wasn’t anything I could put my finger to, but a sense of unease tugged at me. A feeling that pressed down on me from around the edges of the night.

Charlie stared at the window, as rigid as a marble statue.

Through the window, I saw figures move. I grabbed my overcoat and leaned over my bags to find one of the pistols I had hidden away.

When I stepped outside, cursing mightily, I halted in my own tracks like a man struck by a club.

They were all out on the dusty street between the store fronts. What seemed like every living person in the town. Their eyes, unseeing as I passed between them, all stared toward the far edge of the town. The direction of the gulch we had just sallied back from at sunset.

Something howled in the distance, and it sent fear to prickling down the back of my neck.

When the folk moved, and many of them did, it was as if some terrible child were playing with a mannequin, jerking their sorry limbs this way and that. Those that stumbled like this staggered their way off away from the town, while others milled about, staring toward something that I could not comprehend.

I stood there, pistol out, as the sheriff grunted and flailed past me without even so much as a glimmer of recognition.

***

I took White Charlie with me at high noon back to the gulch, now understanding his deep yawning for the symptom it was.

We pulled one of his mules along with us down the steep sides, kicking rock loose and sliding along the path that so many had already trod. Then we wound our way through the jagged boulders, still black with blood from the women that had fallen to their deaths on them as it had yet to rain.

“They all sleepwalked to here?” Charlie was dubious.

“Seen them do it. Followed the sheriff step by step.”

The gulch’s walls began to cast a shadow over us, and I felt a cool chill on my neck. I pulled my collar up against any wind, but the chill was still there, something of a cold hand on my nape.

“Here.”

We tied the mule off to a gnarled tree with roots that made a fist around the broken rock it made a stand upon. The smoothly worn wood of its twisted branches held the rope, and I would have thought it a good hanging tree.

It shivered slightly in the wind that crossed the top of the gulch.

I broke out a cannabis cigarette. A habit I picked up from the cowboys out here, who were more often Mexican than not. It steadied a nervous hand, and when I faced the shaft dug into the side of the gulch, I needed that.

CAIN’S CLAIM, it said on the wooden beam across the top.

I stared at it for a long time.

“This where they come?” Charlie said. He was looking around for footsteps, but the ground was hard and baked, mostly stone.

“Yep,” I said slowly.

“And they all walked on down in there?”

“Yep.”

I’d slapped the sheriff across the face so hard, the outline was still there when I saw him at my breakfast. But last night, he hadn’t blinked, just walked right on through me with a determination fueled by some sort of deviled animation.

No one could be stopped, until I’d tied up the doctor with a leash. He’d pulled at it so hard I got scared he’d hang himself, so I let him go.

Off into the dark of the mine.

I felt a coward for not following any of those damned souls in there. But there was only so much you could ask of a person. The rest is between him and his god, and I know mine would not pass judgement on my hesitancy.

There was no way in hell I would walk into that hellmouth of shadows without more than just a pistol and a sense of curiosity.

Charlie had licked his lips and shook his head when he found me sitting on his hand-carved chair just staring at him when he woke up. I’d told him what all I’d seen, with plain honesty, and he’d called me a fool and a liar.

Until he saw the tremor in my hands when I lit a cheroot to hand to him.

“Sometimes, I took to thinking you didn’t think much of my ability to mentate,” he told me after a deep lungful. “Here I was, the one who could walk you through the valley of death, and yet sometimes, I see things in your eye.”

“Brother…” I trailed off.

Charlie handed the cheroot back. “Don’t matter. I know your mettle. What we seen, what we been at. I could pass through them’s world, and I knew they would kill me just the same as you.”

I knew.

We smoked a bit as morning made its way on the world, and Charlie looked closely at me.

“You’re not funning me.”

“I didn’t travel all the way out here to make jokes, Charlie. We need to go back out to the gulch.”

***

As we probed the dark with our lanterns and left the rectangular entrance and its promise of light behind us for the gloom of shadows and hard rock, my heart fluttered. I did not know if we would find the hand of whoever murdered the women, but in my time as an investigator for the Pinkertons, I had come to learn to leave no coincidence alone.

There were numerous digs of which we found several dead ends to. I wasn’t sure of how far we’d walked, but we did several hours of it by my pocket watch.

We stopped to eat and drink from the heavy packs I’d carried in.

“Pinkerton,” Charlie said. “You stayed with the old spymaster?”

“He hired us. He saw us. He was an abolitionist.” I threw several of the heavy crackers to the ground, not interested in picking out the weevils. Was a time I’d eaten them all up and been grateful for it.

“Lot of hate for them breaking the leaseholders out by the new rail.”

“Pinkerton’s as good as you hire him to be,” I said.

Charlie snorted at that. We left our refuse, reshouldered our packs, and got to moving again. This time, we seemed to be following a main shaft. Or so Charlie said, who knew such things from being around the types who did that work.

The rock started to glitter by our light.

“Is that gold?” I asked, struck with a moment of wonder.

“Pyrite,” Charlie grunted. “Fool’s gold.”

“And what’s that?” I asked, looking further down where our lamps did not penetrate, where a sickly green glow seeped out of the walls.

Charlie did not know, but I scraped at it and came away with some sort of soft algae. The green light died in my fingers.

We pushed on, and the light grew to the point where we extinguished our lanterns. From there, it led us deeper and deeper into the heart of the earth, and to a great chamber within it, all lit in the eerie green glow of the living walls.

At the heart of the chamber was what I could only describe as a cocoon, gray and fibrous, a bulb of desiccated husk that stretched as tall as the two stories of the saloon.

It resisted our tools.

I even shot it with the shotgun from the pack. A spray of noxious dust sprang into the air, and green sparkles filled the space around the cocoon. But there was barely any crater to the shell of the thing.

“What is it?” Charlie asked.

“I have no idea,” I said. I checked the pocket watch. The sun had set above the rock we were deep inside. I eyed Charlie warily, but he showed no signs of becoming entranced.

“We oughta get the doctor,” Charlie said. “And the priest.”

“And lots of dynamite,” I added. There was a pressure building in the back of my head. Tension in the neck. And something else. A presence. A compulsion to do… something.

Ever had that feeling you forgot to do something, but you can’t quite remember what it was?

***

We camped after we climbed out, and I made a fire. I wanted to observe the night’s activity from on high, from a safe place.

“I don’t want to sleep,” Charlie said. “If what you said is true, I don’t to sleep.”

“We all gotta sleep, Charlie. I’ll look over you.”

He drank coffee, committed to fighting the urge. But by ten he pitched over. I saw him struggle against it, but something came up over him and his eyes rolled back.

For a while, it was just normal sleep. Some snoring.

At midnight he sat bolt upright.

Only this time, he began to flail and churn toward the cliff’s edge. I tackled him like a calf and roped him quick. I’d learned my lesson from last night, so I tied his feet and hands off, then hung him from a nearby tree.

He spent the whole night bucking about, much to the mule’s annoyance.

Wasn’t like when he was back in town. Being closer to the source, that left him more under the hand of the controlling force in that mine than he had been in town.

Down in the gulch, fifty people from town walked on toward the Cain’s Claim, just as they had previous. Only this time, I noticed that they were carrying things. I hadn’t cottoned to that last night.

I saw jars of chemicals. Sacks of cornstarch. Oils. Handfuls of nuts and bolts.

What would a demonic source need metal bolts for?

I could think of nothing, but as I sat and watched, my mind wandered. I’d slept little the night before, and as I mulled the problem, my eyes slipped closed.

“Jesus!” I cried out as I woke on the end of a rope leash I’d made for myself. I stood near the edge of the cliff, looking down, saved by a faint suspicion that even I would not be immune.

***

The ladies of the saloon were the most recent to town. I found this by asking about. And from old man Trevor, I was told the tale of a young boy who had gone missing from a camp on the gulch side of the edge of town.

“The effect must be more powerful the closer you are,” I told Charlie. “Like a magnet.”

And the longer one lived in town, the greater the effect.

The owner of the claim, one Cain Jenkins. Well, the last he’d been seen was three weeks ago.

“Most of the town came up just two months ago,” Charlie said. “That’s when Cain sent word to his brother he found a big old vein. Asked him for money. Word spread. People came to start digging. Big claims all around.”

Charlie got here three weeks ago.

Those poor women, their limbs twitching and jerking about, must have been marched off the cliff by whatever lay deep beneath the earth there in that gulch. Or maybe, recently come to the town, some small piece of their minds had rebelled, and like the Ibo at Selwin’s Leap, they had jumped rather than let themselves be enslaved to the malevolence in that mine.

***

The learned men of the town marveled at the cocoon.

Charlie had worked the magic that he was best at when my mind and his skin were married, convincing them that they needed to go looking for the missing Cain. We spread rumors around town, each to the purpose of getting folk to hunt the man down. I found a way to move the pieces around the board where I needed.

Some men hacked at the cocoon. The doctor poured acid on it. It was impervious to their hands.

Of course, dynamite was suggested, but with so many in the chamber the sheriff put a stop to it.

I was disappointed.

“Where’d it come from?” the sheriff asked.

One of the rock-men said it might have been here millions of years, like a fossil, and Cain had uncovered it. But another pointed out the rock above looked congealed. As if the cocoon had melted through it from above. In that case, maybe it had fallen to earth in great heat, and melted through to land in this cavern.

They would have to call out for scientists, and they would need to notify authorities higher up, and maybe even the army. There was a division sixty miles away.

Plans were made, but it was near sunset, and everyone hurried back to town.

“We should tell them,” Charlie said. “About the walking.”

“The army gets here, and scientists, they’ll know soon enough. I can’t go around saying I was slapping the sheriff, can I?”

I tied Charlie up to the bed, and I took the chair and a great pot of coffee.

My last night? I intended to spend it wide awake and ready for anything.

***

I saw the fire through the thick panes of the hut’s window.

“Mr. Scobell,” I said out loud. “Do not investigate this thing. Leave it be.”

But I did not heed my own counsel, and instead took my Winchester and some pistols with me. I heaved on my overcoat and stepped out.

The telegraph office burned merrily in the night.

Then the horses started screaming. I found a scene of butchery and horror in the stables, as the poor animals were being ripped apart by the very people who owned them.

Whatever force this was, it had woken to the threat against it.

I went back to the hut where Charlie strained against his bonds.

“I think I have to solve this one myself,” I told him, grabbing my pack full of weapons and slinging them over my shoulder.

I broke into the general store, jumped the counter, and in the back, found the crates of dynamite. The horses were dead, and I’d seen men moving on the mules as well.

So, I filled the inner pockets of my overcoat with dynamite, the outer pockets as well, and then joined the flow of people heading for the gulch, their arms full of knickknacks and oddities, their faces as vacant as a madman in an opium house.

***

I debated for a long time about taking in the explosives myself or hanging the sticks on someone else, but I felt it would be cowardly to hang the dynamite on some poor soul to walk it in and die with no consent on their part. 

I merged with the lines of people staggering down into the mine.

With no light, I panicked for a while as we shuffled in the dark. But I could feel the press of others near me, and soon the green glow greeted me.

It was stronger now. Not brighter, but it pushed against my mind with a persistence that made me want to shout back at it. And as I approached the chamber, I had to gasp. All around, my vision wavered, as if my eyes could not properly reflect what I saw.

There was no cocoon now. Instead, there was a rippling lack of nothingness that was something, a vastness in a tiny space, that made my head swim in confusion.

I wanted, more than anything, to drop to my knees and crawl in obeisance.

But I was awake, and strong. I had kept my own voice to myself when lashed with a whip. I had remained calm as Confederates questioned me, suspicion in their eyes. I had ridden under the hell of artillery slamming from overhead.

I huddled against the wall, tears streaming down my cheeks and lit stick after stick of dynamite in my coat.

When I last walked out of the mine, I had timed how long it took with my pocket watch out of a sense of general curiosity. That gave me a sense for how long to cut the dynamite’s cord before I lit it.

And after I threw the coat into that warped, shifting, changing place that wasn’t really there, I turned and ran.

***

The explosion happened before I got to the gulch. Either I miscalculated, or I hadn’t been running as fast as I thought. A hot wind slammed up through the mine, and I felt a shiver go through me.

Fear.

Anger.

Confusion.

And the eyes of people looking at me. Faces turning. Faces *seeing* me.

I ran then. Ran hard. Ran from the hands grasping at my shirt, pulling at my hair. I leapt over feet that tried to trip me.

They ran after me. Everything surged to catch me, and then I burst free of the mine. Up ahead, the gulch was closed off. Lined with angry faces that had dropped whatever they held and picked up rocks or sticks.

I’d left the pack hanging from the great tree near the mine’s entrance, and with half the town on my heels, I grabbed it. Without hardly a thought, I scrambled up the old tree.

The force within the townsfolk seemed to focus, and their movements became less spasmodic, more fluid.

I watched as old man Trevor grabbed the nearest branch to pull himself up after me. And then the sheriff came. And then more, until the tree shook and leaned with the weight of all the bodies crawling with malevolent intent toward me.

As they did, I calmly hung my pack on the branch to the right of my head, taking comfort in the ammunition and weapons I’d stored inside.

***

That night I killed thirty-seven white men who tried to climb the tree to kill me. I bathed its limbs in their blood, and I figured, come morning, I would likely hang from the same tree for what I had done.

But before dawn, the force that animated them gave up. It needed living bodies for something, and this did not suit it. There was a grand plan that I could not perceive from behind my human veil.

As the first birdsong echoed through the gulch, my pulse still pounding from fear, I climbed down and stepped over the corpses I had made as I headed cautiously back to town.

I packed what I had and didn’t even bother to go to the deputy to ask for my weapons back.

White Charlie and I left on our own feet.

We walked the whole day with no rest. And the next. But Charlie broke free of his ropes while I slept, and I couldn’t go after him. I couldn’t go any closer back without becoming one of them. I didn’t have any spirit left for resisting.

I wept for Charlie, I sucked on raw coffee beans, chewed them, and I kept walking. I had survived many things in this world. I determined to survive this as well.

I didn’t stop until I saw the Pacific Ocean.

I had nervous occasion to pass back through that damned town a year ago when the train linked up nearby and I knew I could be well away while it was still light out. I found a ghost town, and a hermit living in the ruins of the saloon.

“Never anything in any of those mines that I could find when I came here,” he told me after I gave him some cheese and liquor. “Never even a bank in town for their gold. Strange gold rush that, one with no bank.”

That was something I realized hadn’t even pierced my conscious nature the last time here. I wondered, not for the first time, just how much of a pall I had been struggling under here.

***

I still wake up from time to time with random things in my hands. And to the day I die, I will always sleep with a rope around my waist, hitched to something solid as if I were a horse.

There are some experiences that stain you, that you can never escape.

Something from that gulch still lingers deep within me, a scar in the back of my mind. I hope to never again pass the ruins of that town in my lifetime, even though I am sure that whatever came to dwell there seems long gone today.