Ellen Datlow - The Beastly Bride

“Creegus blinks at me, finally says, ‘So what?’

“‘ So,’ I says, ‘do you want to hear it for yourself then?’

“‘ What, that you’re one of them poukha fellas?’ I nod, and he sneers and says, ‘Sure, you tell me my future.’ Then he trains that gun on me, like if I don’t give it up to his satisfaction he’ll shoot me right there.

“And so I did. I told him, ‘The most important thing is your line, and that’s good news, on account of your daughter’s going to do well for herself. She’s going to marry a fine young fella name of Thomas.’ ”

He stared straight at me when he said it, and Davy and Charlie and the others hooted and shoved at me till one of the men told them to settle down.

Doc said, “Creegus sneered at me, ‘Well, isn’t that fine? Why would I care a whit what happens to that girl? I want to know about me , Mr. Fortune-teller.’

“‘You?’ said I. ‘Ah, the truth of that is, you have no future at all.’ ”

Doc leaned back on the hay and smoked with an odd smile on his face. To no one in particular he added, “And wasn’t I right, too?”

McClendon spluttered, “But what happened to him, dammit? You keep putting that off.”

“I showed him that special horse I’d told him about. You’ll know this, McClendon, even if the others don’t.”

“I know what a poukha is, all right. It’s a nightmare horse that you never want to ride, so help ya God.”

“Just so. Well, right there in front of Creegus I changed so fast he couldn’t even find the trigger on that shotgun. I flipped the damnable fool up on my back and rode away with him, all the way out to Shandhill Butte. There I stamped the ground three times and the hillside split wide apart and I rode him right inside. He screamed the whole way till the earth closed up on him. And if anyone’s to ask, that’s where he is right now.”

Doc hoisted the jar and toasted the openmouthed crowd. I think I could have counted to ten before they all burst out laughing. McClendon slapped both thighs and doubled over. He waved his hand and said, “Doc, you old coot. First you’re avowing I have to lock you up for murder, and then you’re after telling me that you’re a poukha !”

“Jiminy Christmas,” Alan Petris guffawed. “Ever’body knows Creegus skedaddled to Chicago, where he’s got some cousins or something stashed away.”

“With a floozy!” cried Luke, and that set everybody off again. They slapped Doc on the back and clinked jars with him, and the conversation slowly turned into a round of stories about Mary’s father and where he’d gone, and even some reminiscences of things they’d seen him do. Doc, the mad storyteller, had got their goat, and now somehow it was all right to speak of things otherwise withheld.

One by one, we all went off to the auction or to the trestle table that had been set up and now brimmed with food. Slowly after that, folks headed home, most with a few items in their wagons; parents called their boys to come along. About half the people were gone by sunset.

Later, after dark, I was out strolling on my own, just killing time. Somebody’d stoked up a bonfire because the night had gotten cold. My family were one of the last to leave, as my mother was part of a committee at the church that were taking it upon themselves to help Mary settle things after the auction.

As I passed the barn someone said, “Thomas,” and I must have jumped halfway to the moon. There was Doc, still sitting on that hay bale like only a minute had gone by.

“Why, Doc,” I said, “you gave me a fright.”

“Oh, now, I couldn’t frighten you, lad.” He struck a match, and the flame caught and glimmered in his eyes as he lit his pipe. The fire seemed to be watching me. “Tell me something, Thomas. Shandhill Butte, that’d be on your property, wouldn’t it?”

My family owned the land, right enough, and I agreed with him.

“That’s good, because, you know, when I split that hillside open, I saw the richest vein of gold in there. Rich as the gold rush itself. I’m thinking you might be sure to keep that parcel of land in the family, as your young lady will be needing to live in style, and you’ll wish to provide for her.”

I looked at him, at his eyes that I knew to be gentle gleaming like hellfire in the glow of that clay pipe. “How can you know that about Mary? About me?”

“How?” he answered, and drew the pipe from between his lips. “How does anybody know about anybody?” That was all he would say on the matter.

I probably hadn’t thought about Doc MacPhellimey since his funeral. He was right about Mary. She’d had her eye on me for awhile, and with my mother taking her under her wing, we were thrown together, and something caught between us. In a year’s time we were engaged. The other boys telling everyone about Doc’s prediction probably helped things along considerably, too. When my father died in ’14, I took over the farm. Next year we sold off a piece of it, but I hung on to that seemingly worthless Shandhill Butte, and paid an assayer to take a look at it. Sure enough, just like Doc had sworn, there was gold in it. More gold than you’d know what to do with. With the money that brought us, I bought this ranch in Oregon, and Mary, the children, and I moved up here. My brother and his wife took over the farm. I guess it was two years after that he wrote to tell me Doc had passed. The entire town turned out for his wake. I’d have liked to have been there, too. They filled the whole of the day and night, my brother wrote, with stories about Doc, including how he claimed to have taken away Mary’s father in fair payment for his cruelty. Sometime in the night, a couple of the revelers came stumbling inside to announce they’d seen a black horse with flaming eyes run past the house. Nobody believed them, and a few of the more sober participants pointed out that you couldn’t see a black horse at night in the first place.

While I’d never quite forgot nor resolved that story of Doc’s, much less his forecast of my future, what brought him to mind today was another letter from my brother. He wrote:

Today, Tommy, the mining crew found the oddest thing in the hillside at Shandhill. It was a body. It was too deep in the ground to have been a proper burial. There was bits of cloth, like from rotted denims, so it wasn’t any native burial either. The strangest thing, Tommy, was that the fella’d been buried along with a length of wood tucked under the bones of his arm like a crutch. Nobody has the slightest idea how that body got wedged in that hill so deep they didn’t come upon him for all these years, and nobody has any idea who it might have been, save for your old friend Davy Crockett. He’s now the foreman of the crew, by the way. Davy swears on a stack of Bibles that we’ve found us Creegus Maxin for sure and that Doc MacPhellimey must have been, he says, “a pooka.” He says you’ll know what that means, even if hardly anybody else does, including me. I expect you won’t want to mention any of this to Mary on account of him saying it’s Creegus we found, but I thought you might want to know.

My brother was right about that. Nobody’s likely to believe Davy, what with his reputation for pulling folks’ legs, but I know. I’ve known ever since that night at Mary’s farm when I took one last look back at Doc across the yard and saw instead that black horse just disappearing beyond the barn, silent as moonlight.

GREGORY FROST is a writer of fantasy, science fiction, and supernatural thrillers. His latest work is the critically acclaimed Shadowbridge fantasy duology, Shadowbridge and Lord Tophet .