As if sensing my frustration, the cause of their consternation came into view. A mounted bandit wearing a black tricorn. His dirty brown jacket covered a stained white shirt and even more blemished brown breeches, and his battered riding boots were falling apart at the seams. He brandished a rusted gun that seemed more likely to blow his own hand off than injure the person it threatened. A dirty red kerchief hid the lower third of his face.
“Gimme yer valuables!” he snarled. The couple snapped to, laying a load of jewelry and cash into the hat he held out to them. He had to lean over to collect his loot, and when he sat back up in the saddle the kerchief slipped off his face.
“Randy,” gasped the woman, “howcould you?”
“Goddammit!” swore the bandit. “Now I have ter kill ye!”
The old man stood up. “No, wait!”
Randy leveled his gun, but before he could fire, another rider came into view, pulling up so hard that clods of dirt flew and a cloud of dust lifted at his arrival. He’d run his horse so fast its sweat-soaked flanks heaved as it panted for air.
The man himself looked harmless enough. If you had to pick him out of a lineup you’d say, “No, he couldn’t have beaten that poor woman over the head with a tire iron. He must be the desk sergeant you slipped in there to fool the witness.” He did have the broad-shouldered, straight-faced, lean-on-me look of the dependable cop. But when he turned his head to wink at the old folks, it blurred, as if another face hid behind the one he showed the world.
“Who er you?” Randy demanded.
The man grinned, exposing crooked yellow teeth and a hint of something horrid lurking behind them. “My name is Frederick Wyatt, and I am a great admirer of yours. Ah, Randy”—he rolled the R around his mouth as if it tasted like chocolate—“someday you will provide me with such pleasures. But just now, I have a job to do. So off with you. Shoo!” He smiled as a third eye opened in the middle of his forehead, making Randy scream like a kid in a haunted house. The bandit wheeled his horse around and galloped away.
When Wyatt turned to the couple, that extra sphere rolling gleefully in its socket as it beheld their terrified faces, I thought the old guy was going to have a heart attack. He slapped his right hand to his chest and fell back in his seat, his hat flying out the rear of the carriage as his wife screamed and screamed.
“Shut up, you old bat!” Wyatt kicked his horse forward so he could slap her across the face, leaving a thin line of blood on her cheekbone.
It didn’t work. She just shrieked louder. “Run, Joshua, run! It is Satan made flesh!” They rolled out of their seats onto the floor of the carriage. From there they dropped to the ground. But Wyatt hemmed them in with his horse, edging those sharpened steel hooves close enough to keep them pinned beside the back wheel.
“I feel I must correct you,” he said. “I am, in fact, only a servant of the Great Taker. Though we reavers are his favorites.” He chuckled fondly as he dismounted. I expected the horse to wander off, but it stayed close, dripping globs of sweat and stringy bits of spit all over Joshua’s bald head. The reaver went to the old gal and lifted her by the scruff of the neck.
“Now, you stop flailing and shut it tight, or I’ll rip your lungs out and call it self-defense,” he said, throwing her back into the carriage and returning for her husband.
The picture froze just as Wyatt sunk his hands/claws into Joshua’s chest.
“I fainted then,” said the tired, hopeless voice of Joshua’s widow. “The next thing I knew . . .”
Wyatt had remounted. Joshua’s body lay across his legs, his chest torn open, his soul struggling for freedom as the reaver bent to run his spiked tongue over it. As I’d just witnessed, the soul slowly drained of color even as the reaver’s third eye filled. In the end, the husk of Joshua’s soul disintegrated, falling back into his body, which jerked eerily at the impact.
Another fade to black, this time with no accompanying narration.Poor woman . My mind would supply no other thought.Poor, poor woman.
When she came to again, the woman had been moved, along with her carriage, to the site of an old, abandoned cemetery. Tombstones peered through long tufts of grass. Most of them leaned hard to the left, as if a gigantic pissed-off chess player had tried to clear the board before stomping off into the hills beyond.
Wyatt spurred his horse to the middle of the stones, reached into the corpse’s chest, yanked out the heart, and fastballed it at a vine-covered tree stump. When the vines blackened and crumbled, I realized the stump was actually a tall, spire-shaped monument.
The woman hadn’t made a sound since the reaver’s threat to her life. In fact, I figured she was nearly catatonic by now.
But when the heart hit that stone and shattered, and the etchings began to ooze thick gobbets of blood down the white marble, she moaned like a dying animal. I reluctantly acknowledged a growing feeling of we’re-so-screwed as my hands itched for my playing cards. I’d left them in the RV.For the last time , I vowed.This is some sick shit we’ve stepped into.
As soon as the blood touched the ground it solidified, growing, building into a fence, a wall, an arched doorway that pulsed like a gigantic aorta. The reaver rode up to it, tossing Joshua’s body aside as he went. A smaller, fist-sized door within the door appeared in the middle about three-quarters of the way up. Wyatt leaned toward it, his saddle creaking eerily as he moved. The small door flew open with abang ! Out of it shot a thick, sinewy, red tentacle covered with tiny suction cups. It latched on to the reaver’s third eye and yanked, making the reaver scream and pound his fists on the door.
Eventually the eye gave and the tentacle retreated with it, slamming the small door behind it. Wyatt leaned his bleeding forehead against the big door for several minutes while the stunned old woman looked on. Then it turned to her. “I cannot take your life,” it said in a fearfully joyous voice, “but I find I have need of your eye.”
The picture faded as he advanced on her, grinning malevolently.
But we weren’t done. Next came a slide show narrated by a woman whose delivery reminded me of all the times I’d slept through Environmental Biology.
“This is the only visual record we have of a reaver,” the professor said blandly as a still shot of Frederick Wyatt appeared. “Our research tells us they are parasitic fiends, which must find host bodies in order to move among humans. The reaver’s sole purpose is to rip souls from hapless victims and transfer them to the netherworld. This is not a random occurrence, but one governed by rules wherein the murder must either be commissioned by an enemy of the victim, or perpetrated by one human against another. In the latter case, the reaver acts as a scavenger, snagging the soul before it can release.
“Reavers are known to run singly and in packs and can often be found traveling on the shirttails of human evildoers. The reaver is extremely difficult to vanquish. In fact, all sources recommend the wisest tactic when encountering such is to retreat. Quickly. Please note: True Believers are somewhat immune to their powers. See also, Holy Dagger of Anan. See also, Reaver Pack Tactics.”
The picture faded to black this time. Bergman watched theEnkyklios nervously, as if at any moment some new horror flick might leap out of it. He scanned the parking lot, looked over each shoulder repeatedly. “I don’tsee a pack.”
“I do not think there is one,” said Vayl.
“Why?” demanded Bergman.