The Six Messiahs - Mark Frost [161]
Walks Alone took another breath and looked at him directly for the first time; this was the moment.
"You must heal yourself. Before you try again," she said. He stared at her, the last armor of protective rage melting away, vulnerable and real, tears pooling in his eyes. "I don't know how to begin," he whispered. "But you will try to stop him, anyway." "Yes."
"Then you will fail again. Is that what you want?" "No."
"You have no choice then."
He shook his head, agreeing. Tears ran freely down his cheeks.
She took his hands and held them tight. He looked at her. "I will help you," she said.
The first scream from the adjoining berth woke Doyle instantly from a restless sleep. He rushed out his door, followed quickly by Innes; both men paused and listened at the door to Jack's compartment. A rhythmic chanting reached them, the woman's voice, and the musky odor of burning sage. Falling and rising above the chant they could hear low moaning, then another protracted scream that stood their hair on end.
"Good Christ," said Doyle.
"Sounds like he's being roast on a spit," said Innes.
Doyle pushed through the door; the sight greeting them stopped them in their tracks.
The cramped room blisteringly hot. Jack lay flat in the narrow space between seats, Walks Alone kneeling beside him. Jack unconscious, naked to the waist, his torso daubed with diagonal streaks of red and white paint; Mary Williams, wearing a loincloth and halter top, displayed some of the same colors patterned on her face. Smoke from two smudge pots, burning sage, choked the close air. A long wooden pipe lay on one of the seats and a four-foot length of willow stick, topped with an eagle feather, rested on the floor near Jack's head.
Both of them drenched with sweat, Jack writhed in agonizing pain as she rotated her hands, as if rapidly kneading dough, above his rib cage. Lost in fevered concentration, her features tense and sculpted, repeating over and over again the same incomprehensible incantation, she did not even glance up at the Doyles' arrival.
Another dreadful scream broke Jack's lips and his body bridged off the floor, taut as a bowstring. Realizing his cries could be heard up and down the length of the car, Doyle thought to close the compartment door, but he could not respond to the impulse when he saw something appear in her hands as she quickly raised them from Jack's chest:
A wobbly transparent mass of pink-and-red tissues about the size of an oblong grapefruit, a hot black jellied nugget burning in its center, mottled all around with curved bands of a sickly gray substance that like ribs seemed to give the object structure.
Something fetal, a larva, more insectoid than human, thought Doyle. He turned to Innes; his face had gone white as an egg. Doyle felt strangely reassured; at least Innes was seeing it, too.
The woman's hands continued to agitate, vibrating at such an impossibly high rate it made it difficult for them to determine whether the queasy handful was being shaken by her or animated by its own odious energy. Part of their minds questioned whether she held anything in her hands at all.
Jack's body collapsed hard onto the floor.
Doyle grabbed Innes and pulled him back out into the hall, closing the door quickly behind them. They stared at each other in shock, Innes blinking rapidly, his mouth working but producing no words.
Doyle raised a finger to his lips and shook his head. Innes walked immediately back to their cabin and retrieved a bottle of whiskey from his bag. Sitting down across from each other on their bunks, the brothers plied themselves with measured, medicinal doses and waited for the whiskey to expunge the repellent memory from their brains.
They said nothing further about it; no more cries were heard from next door during what little remained of the night.
SKULL CANYON, ARIZONA
The posse had already spend one