The Silver In Your Mouth, Mine
“You, too, are a fool, earthborn, to trust in demon-kind and to ride on a mare of smoke and night. What demons love they slay in the end, and the gifts of demons are snares. Go nowhere on a horse that fades, for your dreams will betray you.” - Tanith Lee
A loud crack split the visibly undulating heat and was immediately swallowed by it.
Rushton Lovelock stood motionless for a spell and then involuntarily reached to his belt, finding each protruding leather furrow to be vacant.
“So that’s my last bullet,” he said to nobody but a writhing, dying rattler.
He paused with his Colt single-action army revolver limply dangling from his index finger, unsure whether to holster it or let it fall. Monochrome desert hellscape blurred the noontime air and all around him, in every direction at once, boiled in callous indifference. Rushton eventually holstered his pistol and continued forward.
The sun was a compass he always walked away from, ever North, to a place where he could take all that he had and keep it for himself, forever. But it was also his greatest enemy. Relentlessly caressing him from on high, withering his flesh and consuming his energy. Reprieve came each evening, when the cloudless night sky became an impossibility of perfectly blended, yet conflicting colors of yellow, pink, and blue, a masterpiece of nature which itself was devoured by blackness and a smattering of infinite stars.
He was without water and about to die. With shuffling, uneven steps, he continued forward towards something which beckoned him. He had spotted it days ago, a scintillating beacon of light in a cave at the other end of a dry lake bed. If there was a chance for water in this God-forsaken hell, that campfire represented his only hope.
“Stay,” Abilene pleaded. “Where you say to go, not even the Paiute go,” her broken and thickly accented English poured out of quivering lips unlike any he had known in his youth. How long had it been? A dog’s age had passed since he set out from Virginia to stake his claim in the great silver rush of the Comstock Lode. Fame and fortune had awaited him, as promised by dime novels and barroom banter. And it was repeated by a voice inside of him, urging him towards reckless abandon in the pursuit of his ambition.
Just making it out West was an odyssey; eventually settling at Virginia City, he went in on a claim with some fellow carpetbaggers and after years of harsh, fruitless toil they were rewarded with a bonanza of sparkling, mottled yellow-grey stone. Weeks of straight inebriation ensued, and Rushton awoke in Abilene’s bedroom in a cat-house, with a satchel bag full of money and three dead men in his wake. The posse formed to apprehend him was fast on his heels, spurred on undoubtedly by his newfound riches, as Abilene, the half-Paiute whore who sheltered him, desperately tried to keep him from heading North into the Black Rock wilderness.
“Ain’t nothing up there. Man’s got to be able to find a spot to lay low,” he strapped on his gun belt and reached for the satchel bag.
“Not so,” Abilene shook. “Grandfather used to say, it is the land of the Si-Te-Cah, the giants, the eaters of men.”
Rushton laughed, unconvinced. Surely this whore was trying to lay one over on him.
“Ain’t never had no cause to be scared of children’s tales. Just you tell that same yarn to anyone who comes looking for me, I’ll make it worth your while.” He tapped the satchel bag reverently, and threw some money on her bed. Then he left.
How long ago was that? He couldn’t say. Days were measured by swallows from his canteen, but the canteen had been empty for some time and he was starting to feel just as empty. When he closed his eyes, he saw the faces of his friends as he shot them down. Something had come over him, something insatiable and intoxicating and empowering–a spirit of violence and greed unlike anything he had ever encountered, which grew in the continuous tallying of his filthy lucre, and ultimately overwhelmed him and caused him in a moment of drunken ecstasy to kill everyone and take it all for himself.
His horse had died several days earlier. He ate of it and drank its blood. The sun and the dehydration had a hallucinogenic effect on him: time blended and moved backwards, and the jagged, ascending spires of lifeless stone, surrounding impossibly flat mesas, took on the shades of demonic minions, cackling at him in their vast, endless array of hostility toward water-based beings. Not even birds flew overhead; everywhere he looked, he was greeted with the isolation he sought.
“Water!” he shouted to deaf stones. How much he would have paid for a sip from a horse’s trough!
Mustering the absolute last of his strength, Rushton forced himself forward. Clutching the satchel bag like a madman, loose bills spewing in his wake, discarding almost everything else, with a will as hard as sun-baked clay he forced himself forward. Frantically, feverishly, in the blackness of a moonless night, with only the distant campfire as his guide, he finally reached the cave. Through caked eyes he could see the figure sitting around it: a figure which cast an incredible shadow. It lurched as he approached, and stood as tall as the mountains themselves.
“Come to me, Rushton Lovelock,” the voice emanated from inside him, as the satchel bag slipped from his hands and the giant continued undressing him. Rushton immediately recognized the voice: the same voice that had encouraged him to try his luck out West, the same voice that told him to kill his friends and take the money for himself, the same voice that had told him to ignore Abilene’s warnings, it was the same silver tongue, so much like his own, but not his own.
“Welcome, my child,” the voice said. And with the remainder of his last breath, Rushton recoiled at the manifestation of that voice, a contorted, twisted face he would observe for all eternity, as the red-haired giant tore him limb from limb, eating his flesh raw and licking its lips of his sinews.