They were alone with a roomful of statues, looking out through the smashed mirror onto a familiar plain. A thin horizon separated white land from white sky. The remaining spears of mirror fell out of the frame and scattered across the plain, sucked by an unfelt wind.
The tavern doors pushed inward and the company was joined. A man, his head hooded, staggered in, arms stretched out, and wound a way between the statues. The dummies represented the drinkers who had been in Gunner's Hall when Hendrik first entered, posed in attitudes of revelry, grins painted on their faces, prop tankards lifted.
The newcomer's head lolled unnaturally and Hendrik recognised his brother. Joseph reached up and snatched off the hood. His face was discoloured and the top of his spine poked out of the skin under one ear. A waxy mould spread under his face and a red rope-weal ringed the stretched neck like a cravat. The apparition, its voice-box crushed, could not speak. It staggered towards the bar and came to a halt, eyes swivelling between Hendrik and Eddy.
Another had slipped into the room. It was the Ute, dressed as a Josephite Elder, eyes reflecting in the shadow of his hat-brim.
"Not enough blood," the Ute said to Hendrik, "not nearly enough…"
Hendrik knew he was entrapped again, that he must return to the Path of Joseph. He stood away from the bar and Joseph clapped a cold hand on his shoulder.
He surrendered his purpose.
Eddy stayed by the bar, turning to look at the Ute. The mock Indian took off his mirror glasses and held them out again. Eddy was trembling throughout his body. A tiny dribble of blood emerged from between his lips.
Hendrik saw the Ute's broad, black-covered back as he faced down Eddy Poe. The poet looked at the offered spectacles, then up at the Ute's face. His trembling froze.
"Friend," Eddy said, "what can be discerned with these adornments is as nothing set beside what I see in your eyes."
Eddy turned away and the Ute put his glasses back on. The dummies moved again, voices buzzed all around.
Joseph and the Ute were gone. Hendrik was jostled.
"Eddy…?"
The poet shook his head but would not turn. In the intact mirror, Hendrik saw Eddy's stricken face. He looked worse than the apparition of the hanged Joseph. Hendrik backed away, with increasing haste. People got in the way and he could no longer see Eddy. He turned and ran from the tavern. The icy rain outside washed away his fear.
A Josephite party would be gathering soon to leave for the Settlement. He would return to the Path. Only blood could free him.
X
He pulled his bowie out of the Gentile's neck-vein and was blinded by the burst of blood. Hendrik shook his eyes clear and looked into the dying face. He saw nothing he had not seen before. He scored a deep line across the settler's forehead with his knife-point, then lifted the hair. It came away in a ragged cap. The light went from the Gentile's eyes.
Hendrik gave voice to a shout of savage victory.
Eddy Poe had been discovered in Gunner's Hall, having been missing for some days, by an acquaintance who surmised he was deathly sick. He wore ill-fitting clothes believed not to be his own and was in a semi-conscious state taken for severe intoxication. Conveyed to the hospital of Washington Medical College, he babbled constant delirium, addressing spectral and imaginary objects on the walls.
"Tekeli-li, tekeli-li, tekeli-li..."
All around. New Canaan burned. Hendrik had lost count of those he had sacrificed this morning. His painted skin was crusted with drying blood. Scalps lay strewn in his wake. He did not keep trophies.
When a doctor told Eddy he would soon be enjoying the company of his friends, he broke out with much energy and said the best thing a friend could do would be to blow out his brains with a pistol. Raving for a full day or more, he exhausted himself and, quietly moving his head as he said "Lord help my poor soul", expired. Baltimore newspapers reported that the poet's death was caused by "congestion of the brain" or "cerebral inflammation".
With Brother Carey, Hendrik hunted down Gentile families. He razored off a mother's eyelids and forced her to watch as Carey eased his jackknife into her sons' throats. Her anguish was an offering. Gathering the woman's hair in his fist, he slid his blade around her skull, feeling the razor-edge scrape bone. He scalped her alive then stove in her brains with his boot-heel.
He yelled to the skies, to his dead brother, to goat-horned Jesus. Blood flowed into the American earth around his boots. He waded through the rivers of his sacrifices. Fresh water from the prized well of New Canaan would run pink for years.
His war cry choked and he had to catch his breath. Three Paiute braves stood a little way off, watching the Josephites make sacrifice of the Gentiles. The Indians seemed appalled. The practice of scalping had been introduced to the Americas by the French, Hendrik knew. Savagery came from men's hearts, not their skins.
"From this day," said Crow Who Mourns, the Paiute chief, indicating Hendrik, "you are Bonnet of Death, killer of women and children …"
There was no condemnation, exactly, in the Paiute's naming. Bui there was a recognition that Hendrik Shatner was not of the red man.
"This is a new land," he shouted, a hank of long, bloody hair in his fist, "and we are the new people!"
The Gentiles had been taken by surprise. The men, having invested so many hours of agony in their crops, tried first to save the fields, leaving their families for the knives and guns of the Josephites. They had quickly seen their mistake. There were bloody black hats in the dust and Indians had fallen too.
But Hendrik was invincible. He might have taken another ball in his leg, but he could feel nothing.
Bonnet of Death, killer of women and children, abandoned his bowie in the chest of an old man and continued to make sacrifice with his razor. The blade was thick and slippery with blood but its edge was not dulled.
Animals, freed from pens, ran loose. Josephites put bullets into goats and horses, though the Paiute let the animals pass. Crow Who Mourns had made treaty with the Josephites because a hard winter had carried off too many of the animals of the tribe, and he needed to replenish livestock through raiding. Unheeding pain, Brother Clegg charged at houses, tearing with his hands, scattering stone, uprooting timbers, felling roofs.
In flashes, Hendrik saw the white plain extending around the burning blotch of New Canaan. The plain could absorb any amount of blood and flame.
The Ute strode through it all, approving the sacrifices, silently killing where he could. Eddy Poe had been one more sacrifice, important enough for the Ute to take a personal interest. Hendrik understood that the poet had been some crazed kind of three-fifths genius. The greater the potential that was lost, the greater the offering. He wondered if men or women of genius had died this morning in New Canaan. Was there a child among the dead who would have been a painter, a discoverer, a singer?
In the centre of the nascent town was a half-built church, a raised wooden floor and the skeleton of a tower. A bell, laboriously conveyed through the desert, stood ready to be hauled up. At intervals, Josephites would fire shots at the bell, producing an unresonant dinging.
Brother Carey found a preacher, stripped of his collar but still wearing his black shirt, and pinned him down on the churchless floor, piercing his hands and feet with knife-thrusts. The Josephite had emptied his gun minutes ago. The preacher opened his mouth – to pray? to curse? – and Carey jammed a stone into it. Brother Carey fell upon the Gentile and stabbed him again and again in the belly, ripping free the ropes of his innards, strewing them across the boards.
Hendrik walked towards Brother Carey and the preacher. As he stepped, he froze. Carey was distracted by some sound and looked away. Hendrik saw the perfect circle of his black hat for an instant before its centre became a red splash. Carey fell dead on his still-living sacrifice, his face shot away. At that moment, timbers burned through and the church tower collapsed like a straw house.