The Six Messiahs - Mark Frost [165]
The five men well-dressed; dark clothes, covered with dust from a hard ride; one of them injured, the others helping him off his horse. Bloodstained bandage around what looked like a gunshot wound to his thigh. A tall, blond fella, the lead rider, hint of a foreign accent in his voice, shouting to the big man.
Something about a posse. Shit.
The big man barking instructions; white shirts leading their horses off. Others wearing all black running down from the House of Hope to help carry the wounded one inside. One of the riders, a smaller blond, lifting a briefcase from his saddle-bag before trailing the rest of them in. Over in less than a minute. Activity on the street returned instantly to normal; not a soul stopped to wonder or gossip about what they'd just seen.
Like no small town I've ever seen, thought Frank; a little excitement like that would set most folks off gabbing for an hour at least.
He watched the big man climb back up the stairs to the House of Hope and the realization nearly knocked off his hat.
He knew this fella from somewhere. Where was it?
Jesus, that was it: Cornelius Moncrief.
Head-buster deluxe for the railroad. Ten years ago, Moncrief came into Tombstone and nearly beat this poor little accountant fella to death in the middle of a full saloon. Claimed he'd run off after embezzling twenty thousand dollars from the home office. If it was true, Frank and the other deputies couldn't find any cash in the poor bastard's possession, but he refused to press charges so they couldn't stick Cornelius for the assault. And they could tell from Moncrief's attitude that he knew his position with the Southern Pacific brass made him untouchable.
Frank had escorted the big man to the edge of town on Wyatt's instructions and invited him to never set foot there again. Cornelius just laughed in his face and rode off; he was crazy and he liked to hurt people. That's why he lingered in the memory.
What the hell was he doing here?
"You'd better take me to the hotel," said Frank.
Kanazuchi slipped away from the workers' shacks after walking out to use the latrine. The guards weren't as sharp-eyed in the morning and they'd been busy doling out the workers' breakfasts, bowls of oatmeal and a crust of bread served in a mess hall between their huts.
Making his way through the shanties, Kanazuchi adopted the passive smiling face the white shirts wore and no one gave him a second glance. In the daylight, he saw that none of these buildings off the main street had been given paint or whitewash. No flowers or decoration. Only four thin walls and flat corrugated tin roofs. Filth and despair. The one attractive street served as a false display, to impress visitors. Or to keep the citizens in order.
His dream had told him he would find the Kojiki and the other holy books in the chamber below the church, but his mind had not found a way around the problem the church presented; how to search for an entrance with shifts of workers swarming over the area both night and day.
The rounded roof of a tall building to the south caught his eye and he moved in that direction. Along the way, he heard the sounds he had missed the night before:
Children's voices. Laughter.
He followed the sound to an enclosed compound, ringed by a fence of knotted barbed wire. Inside the circle, children were playing games in the dirt, over a hundred of them, running tossing balls back and forth. Boys and girls, different races None older than eight or nine. Low buildings lined the far side of the circle; their living quarters. A row of adults stood around the perimeter, not participating in the play, encouraging, or even supervising. Just watching.
Kanazuchi had seen enough now to realize the people in this city lived and moved under the most powerful form of mind control he'd ever witnessed; trying to probe beneath the surface of the workers' consciousness proved useless. How or why this group illusion gripped them so fiercely he could not determine; a blank, impenetrable wall had been