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Chapter Sixteen

When Michael parked the Double-A in front of Edna’s bungalow, Diana was standing out in front, her shadow swallowed in the dark skirts around the cottonwood tree. In the night, she appeared ghostly as she stepped to Hiram’s window.

There was something about her that tugged at Hiram’s mind, but it was drowned out by the things about her that tugged at Hiram’s other parts. The sight of her left him breathless.

There was no sign of Addy Tunstall’s red Ford Cabriolet.

“Is everything okay?” Hiram asked.

Diana nodded. “The Tunstalls are inside. I just wanted to get a look at you, all to myself.”

“Hey, I’m here,” Michael said.

She winked at him. “I meant the plural you.”

“We’d better get going.” Hiram cleared his throat.

“Addy is lucky to have men like you two to protect her. Men with strong muscles, from working the farm.”

“For your information,” Michael said, “what you mostly get from working a farm is dirt under your nails and a callus in the palm of your hand from the gear-shift of the John Deere. Also, lots of splinters and a strange tan.”

“I just didn’t see her car,” Hiram said.

“She parked it a few blocks away,” Diana explained. “We thought it might draw attention, parked here.”

Hiram nodded.

Diana patted the door of the Double-A as if she were stroking a beloved horse. “She’s packed. The kids and Guy are here, too.”

“No one gave you any trouble?” Hiram asked.

“Not a lick.” Diana smiled. “Your jewelry worked perfectly, so I figure you’re going to want it back, now.” She leaned forward, pushing a cloud of sweet scent in through the window, and filling Hiram’s eyes with a very distracting view. She pulled the chi-rho medallion off and handed it to Hiram, who put it on.

He found that he had mixed feeling about getting his medallion back. He’d be grateful for the additional protection, but she was no longer wearing something of Hiram’s—

her hat. She was wearing a hat, he realized, and it looked just like the hat from the cabin. The one Michael had said was six years out of fashion. Or maybe it was the hat from Lloyd Preece’s cabin.

A cold icicle of fear and doubt stabbed into the warm, confused droning of Hiram’s heart. Of course, there would be two such hats. Or of course, if needing to pack had required Adelaide Tunstall to go to her father’s cabin, perhaps Adelaide had given the hat to Diana Artemis.

But why would the Tunstalls go to Lloyd Preece’s house to pack, if they hadn’t been there for years?

He realized he was sitting silently. “Well, ma’am, maybe tell them to come out now, then.”

Diana went inside, and Hiram and Michael exited the truck. Hiram began anchoring rope to the truck’s bed, so that he could strap the family’s belongings down tight, and also to create a safety harness for himself and Mr. Tunstall. He thought Adelaide and the children would fit into the truck’s cab with Michael, but that would just about fill the Double-A to capacity.

“Did you notice the hat?” Michael whispered.

Hiram nodded.

“You realize,” Michael said in a low voice as he looped the rope through an anchor ring, “that this means Mrs. Tunstall went back to the cabin looking for her dad’s money.”

“Seems like a reasonable bet,” Hiram agreed.

“So what you have to ask yourself,” Michael said, “is what Mrs. Artemis was thinking. She and Adelaide obviously knew each other. They called each other pet names. Di and Addy, but when you suggested Diana stay with her for protection, Mrs. Tunstall was reluctant.”

“Small town,” Hiram said.

“Maybe Adelaide was less than enthusiastic about spending time with Diana because she knew Diana and her father were…ooh la la. Which would also explain why Diana might have left a hat at Lloyd Preece’s cabin.”

The idea hurt Hiram. “Maybe. Or maybe she’d just heard the rumors about Diana and didn’t want those rumors to rub off on her.”

“And if Diana and Lloyd Preece were indeed…ooh la la…then maybe she knew he had a stack of bearer bonds. And maybe she was happy to go watch Adelaide’s kids because it meant she might get a chance to look for the bonds. Or maybe Adelaide would lead her to them.”

“These are guesses.”

Michael frowned. “Of course, they’re guesses. And if Diana Artemis is willing to rob a family trying to leave town for fear of their lives—might she have been willing to murder Lloyd Preece?”

“Hold on, now.”

“Pap, what about the hat?”

Hiram sighed. “What about the hat.” It wasn’t a question.

“Sorry to infringe on your romantic inclinations, Pap.” Michael blew out a breath.

“I don’t…there’s no…”

“Or look,” Michael continued, “maybe there were other extenuating circumstances. Maybe Lloyd tried to force himself on her, or he owed her money, or she was trying to break it off and he attacked her. But we ought to go take a look inside Preece’s cabin, and if the hat is no longer hanging on its peg, then it’s the one perched on Diana Artemis’s noggin.”

Before Hiram could sufficiently collect his thought to be able to comment on what Michael was suggesting, the Tunstalls emerged.

The children were small, the youngest a baby in a basket and the oldest maybe five. They were sleepy and cooperative, though the baby cried, softly. Guy Tunstall smiled faintly, with unfocused eyes wandering about him. He was a tall man, thin, with a big shock of white blond hair, parted with an uneven series of scars above his left ear. Spit dribbled from his big pink lips. He dragged a heavy steamer trunk down the front walk, generating a loud scraping noise until Hiram and Michael intervened. More spit leaked from Guy’s mouth to paint his shirt in speckles. Once they had the trunk on top of the truck, they went inside to grab several more cases Diana indicated to them, and then lashed it all down in the middle of the truck’s bed, creating a space between the cab and the luggage where Hiram and Guy would sit.

Guy smiled the entire time and said nothing. He continued to drool on himself, not apparently noticing.

While Michael worked to squeeze Adelaide Tunstall and her three children into the cab of the Double-A, Hiram roped Guy securely to the truck bed. He tied the man in firmly, so that he could barely move. Guy drooled again while Hiram was tying the last knot.

“You okay, Mr. Tunstall?” Hiram asked.

“Uh, yep,” the big man said, eyes moving in strange circles.

Hiram took his revolver, along with the full moon loader and a handful of spare shells, and climbed into the back of the truck with Guy Tunstall.

Then he anchored himself. He couldn’t leave himself much room to move and still be safe, but his harness was looser than Guy’s, to allow him to slide around a bit, and pivot if he needed to. He had his clasp knife in his pocket, in case he needed to cut himself free.

If this were a more routine drive, he might have just sat on the truck bed and held on with his hands. But if Lloyd Preece’s killer chased them, Michael might have to drive fast.

And if Lloyd’s killer made no appearance, and Hiram rode to Provo tied into the back of his truck, there would be no harm done.

“All aboard!” Michael called. “Toot toot!”

The five-year-old, a boy with bright yellow hair, giggled from the front. “Mommy, we’re on a train!”

“Uh, yep,” Guy muttered.

Hiram raised a hand in farewell to Diana Artemis, and she waved back. Under the moonless sky, she was quickly a shadow, and then lost in the darkness.

And if she were the killer? Would she now get in her own car and follow Hiram and Michael, to be able to kill the Tunstalls once he had dropped them off? Or had she perhaps divined the hiding place of Lloyd Preece’s money during her time watching the Tunstall children that afternoon, and would she now go back to the cabin, or the Tunstalls’ house, and steal the bearer bonds?

Those things all seemed impossible. Surely, there were better explanations. Diana had liked the hat, and Adelaide had given it to her. Or Diana had known Lloyd Preece—maybe even romantically—and had recovered a hat she had left at the cabin earlier.

Or there were simply two similar hats.

But Hiram couldn’t bring himself to relax.

Michael took the road north out of town. It led through a wide slalom S of a canyon past the Monument. Hiram couldn’t see any of the arches, but he saw looming masses of stone to his left as they went, blocking out the light of the stars. Then they drove north across the desert toward the highway, and Hiram found himself looking at the constellation Scorpio. It stood tall on the horizon, one of the few constellations that really looked like what it was supposed to be, a scorpion with a long, J-shaped tail and a red heart. And an extra star—a new star? Hiram rubbed his eyes.

No, of course, a planet. A planet that bright had to be Jupiter, slowly making its way across Scorpio. Hiram knew his stars basically, but he hadn’t spent any real time stargazing since he was a boy.

“Uh, yep. Thank you,” Guy Tunstall said, without turning to face Hiram.

They turned west on the highway and kept driving. The town of Green River passed by as a swarm of lights near a bridge, and Michael didn’t stop. He turned north and they passed Price, and Hiram began to wonder how much gas the Double-A had in the tank.

Michael pulled off the road at Helper and parked at a Conoco service station. Guy had fallen asleep, but Hiram untied himself to stretch his legs.

While the Conoco man filled the truck’s tank and the spare can, Hiram and Michael stood at the edge of the street and looked down the gaudy midnight lights of the coal and railroad boomtown. The nearer of the town’s cinema marquees announced that WEREWOLF OF LONDON was playing.

“Ah, Helper,” Michael said. “Babylon of the slickrock.”

“Do we put them on a train here?” Hiram asked.

“She wants to go to Provo.”

“Ah, yes. Provo it is.”

“Sorry I didn’t tell you I went to see the movie, Pap. I guess…I guess I thought you wanted me to go to the dance, and might not approve of the film.”

“It’s just a movie.” Hiram shrugged. “You have to make decisions for yourself. It would be okay if you told me these things.” He smiled at his son. “And it’s okay that you didn’t.”

As Hiram was tying himself back into place and Michael started the truck, Hiram saw a man standing across the street. He almost missed the fellow in the darkness, and what caught his eye was the fact that the man was naked.

A shiver went through Hiram. He blinked. Was he seeing things?

Before he could call out, Michael set the truck into motion. They drove down Helper’s Main Street, past saloons, movie theaters, bordellos, and a bowling alley.

The naked man followed.

Main Street was lined with all its businesses on one side, and on the other with the railroad yard. The naked man walked in the shadow of the yard, and if the drunken revelers noticed him, they didn’t shout or interfere. The man walked with his arms straight at his side, unnaturally, and leaned slightly forward with his head and shoulders.

And he stared at Hiram.

And then Hiram saw a second man. He was also naked, and he walked in the same strange fashion, not far behind the first.

Hiram took his revolver into his hands and rotated the cylinder off the empty chamber.

Nearing the end of Main Street, Michael slowed to take the left turn that would cross the railroad-tie bridge and put them back onto the highway. The brightest of the lights were behind them, and to Hiram’s left rose a low hill thick with adobe bungalows, and above it a white cliff.

On the bridge, Michael abruptly stopped.

The two naked men began to run.

“Michael?” Hiram called.

Adelaide screamed.

Guy jolted upright as if he had been stabbed. He scrambled, trying to free himself of the ropes, but Hiram was a better knotsman than that, and Guy was working with his bare fingers in the dark. Hiram crouched and turned, looking through the cab of the truck—

and saw two more naked men, standing on the far bank of the river, blocking their path.

Bang! Hiram fired at the sky. He hated to attract attention, but he didn’t have a choice.

“Get out of the way!” he shouted over the cab. “Right now!”

Looking over his shoulder, he saw three more naked men, running toward the truck.

The Double-A abruptly rocked. Looking forward again, Hiram saw that one of the naked men had leaped onto the hood of the truck and leaned forward, grinning.

Michael shifted into gear and hit the gas. The truck knocked aside the naked man still on the ground, but the fellow on the hood rocked to one side and then managed to keep his grip. Hiram swiveled, just in time to see the first of the naked men leap up onto the back of the Double-A.

As he landed, he was no longer a man. In the moment of his jump, antlers had sprouted from his forehead, and he opened his mouth, shrieking, with teeth big and flat like an ungulate. Hiram blinked. Was he seeing clearly?

Bang! Hiram’s bullet took the man-thing in the center of his chest. The naked man sat down with a stupid expression on his antlered face, bounced once, and then fell off the back of the truck.

For a moment, Hiram felt guilt. He didn’t want to shoot anyone, even naked lunatics swarming his truck in the middle of the night. Then, in the light from a house near the highway, he saw the man stand up again, saw again, more clearly now, the antlers sprouting from his head, and his guilt was washed away in a flood of fear.

Then the other two naked men leaped onto the back of the truck. They crawled forward, howling, fur sprouting from their faces and horns budding from their skulls.

Guy screamed. Adelaide screamed. At least one of the children was screaming, too.

Hiram unloaded his revolver, two shots into the chest of one man and his last bullet into the belly of the second. His heart raced and his breath came in shallow gasps, but his hand was steady, and the shots knocked the two men—monsters—to the highway.

He couldn’t make out their faces clearly in the moving shadows. He heard grunts of surprise as his bullets hit the men, but not screams of pain, and no blood.

What hellish sorcery was this?

Hiram shook out the casings. They bounced away with a rattle of brass. He snapped in six new bullets with the full moon even as he turned and rose to one knee.

The naked man from the hood was climbing around the passenger side of the truck, reaching in to try to paw at Adelaide Tunstall. Despite the darkness, Hiram thought he had seen the man before. He’d been in Helper in February, and some of the coal miners, desperate for food, had tried to rob Hiram on the road. Was this more banditry?

But who ever heard of naked bandits?

Naked, bulletproof, shape-changing bandits?

Hiram pressed his revolver to the naked man’s skull. “Get off now, friend.”

The naked man bleated loudly, and leaped at Hiram—

Hiram pistol-whipped him across the cheek, sending him skidding along the roof of the cab and bouncing to the road.

Hiram turned back, and his heart froze in his chest. Three large deer raced behind the truck.

No, not deer—deer-monsters. They ran like men on two legs and they had enormous spreads of antlers. Their long snouts were misshapen, with eyes in the wrong places and mouths twisted at angles that seemed human. Their backs seemed elastic and snapped back and forth, so that at moments they seemed to be running with chests parallel to the ground and yet on two legs, while at other times they took long, single-legged bounds, like some kind of perverse parody of a track and field event. Even in their deerishness, they didn’t resemble any deer species Hiram knew—not mule deer or white-tailed deer, but something larger and redder.

Hiram tasted bile at the back of this throat.

And then, behind the deer, he saw the men he’d just knocked from the truck rise to his feet. The naked man—old, he looked like an old man—leaped forward, not like a man jumps who expects to land on his feet, but like a good swimmer dives into water, face first, hands extended past his head—

and he hit the ground running, in the form of a shuddering deer-beast.

Hiram saw no gradual reshaping, just an instantaneous transformation.

Something was odd about the deer’s head. Its ear, Hiram realized. Its ear was crumpled against the side of its head, like a plum shriveled into a prune.

And then he saw other deer-men. Seven, eight? All following the truck, and all gaining on it.

“Faster!” Hiram yelled.

“There are curves coming, Pap!” Michael’s words were nearly whipped away by the wind created by the racing truck.

“Faster!”

Hiram fumbled bullets into the full moon, careful not to drop it. A couple of the bullets fell to the truck bed and spun off into the night, but he managed to get the entire clip filled and safely back into his pocket, and then the revolver into his hand.

One of the monsters coursed ahead of the others, parallel to Hiram. It was a tall man-buck with a broad forehead, majestic, though its eyes seemed to be set in the front of its skull rather than on the sides, and there was something wrong with its skin. Its brown fur was interrupted with large patches of scaly red skin.

Hiram fired three times at the deer-man, point-blank. The creature rocked back and shied briefly away, as if the bullets had pushed it or slapped it, but not penetrated its skin.

Hiram clutched at the chi-rho amulet. It felt so cold, it burned.

“Lord Divine,” Hiram begged. “Give me aid.”

The monster leaped forward, stabbing at Hiram with its antlers. Hiram shuffled back and the beast collided with the side of the truck, which knocked it away into the darkness. The stench of it, an excited, wet animal smell, filled Hiram’s nose. The impact knocked Hiram flat, and the antlers tore his skin in his shoulder, his upper arm, and his thigh.

Hiram lay on the truck, feeling dazed. He heard Guy Tunstall weeping.

The scaly deer-thing leaped into his vision again—

bang! Hiram shot it, and the deer dropped out of his sight. The truck was accelerating, tipping slightly up onto two wheels as Michael took a sharp turn. Hiram knew the canyons well enough to know that if Michael lost control of the truck, they might all fall fifty feet to their deaths in the Price River.

Hiram hoped the lamen, the defensive written amulet, in the door of the truck would help Michael. He needed a charm to give the wheels stronger grip—would there be such a piece of lore? Given Hohman’s prayers that were supposed to ward off bullets, why not a hex that would keep a truck upright on a hairpin curve?

Hiram felt the bed of the truck rise up beneath him at a sharp angle and he heard Guy Tunstall make a choking sound, as if the man were vomiting. Was this it? Was Hiram about to fall to his death?

Then the truck slammed flat to the earth again with a loud groan of protest. Hiram heard the engine growl an objection as Michael threw gears and pedals all into grinding out as much speed as possible.

Finally, the deer-monstrosities began to drop back.

Hiram didn’t waste any more shots on them. He reloaded slowly, his hands now trembling, as Michael climbed the ridge.

Deer-men. Men-deer. Men-deer-monsters. He had seen, with his own eyes, a man change shape into a beast. There were many stories, in the folklore of many people, including Yas Yazzie, of people who assumed the shapes of animals. Grandma Hettie had never given Hiram any indication that those stories were true.

But he had seen it.

Had deer-men killed Lloyd Preece? Why would men who could transform into deer want to kill a wealthy rancher, and why would they be chasing his family?

Could this possibly be about the money?

Or was this just a damned corner of the land? Hiram had defeated a demon that lived in the hills near Helper before—were the deer-men tied to the demon, or caused by the same unseen factor in the landscape?

“Thank you,” Guy Tunstall said, between his tears. “Uh, yep. Thank you.”

Hiram put his arm around the man to comfort him.


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