Last Testament of the Sea Kings

“Treasure hunting is dangerous business.” A flaring match lit the sharp features of the speaker’s face. It looked like a scaffolding of acute triangles with parchment stretched across, or a jumble of old tools welded together in simulacrum of a man: knives for ears, pointed at both ends, the nose a scythe, and a chin like a grave-digger’s spade. His forehead slanted rather than sloped backwards, and long, stringy gray hair hung down limply from the peak of his skull to his shoulders. His ugliness was more than ample even before considering his sallow and pock-marked complexion.

The man he spoke to required fewer analogies to describe. Caleb Gibson was barely visible beneath his black greatcoat and blacker cavalry stetson, a lean and rangy shadow with hands and a strong, stubble-covered chin. His eyes showed only as red points in the firelight beneath the rain-soaked brim of his hat.

“Who said I was treasure hunting?” Caleb tried to recall the last time he had sat down with someone so sinister looking. The answer was never.

The flame disappeared into the bowl of the other man’s pipe. In the softer light of the lantern that hung above them from a hook in the low, chinked roof, his appearance improved from God-forsaken to merely ghastly. Judged by the jaundice alone, Caleb reckoned he was counting down his last weeks, if not days. A strange and vile smoke filled the room, too wet and too earthy to be tobacco. Whatever it was, it crackled in the pipe like dry twigs and a black dust drifted down from the curling vapor, and the visitor did not wonder about the cause of the man’s poor health.

The man’s yellow eyes swept across the bare and weathered wood of the table and settled on Caleb, and his dry parchment lips spread apart over gray-yellow teeth. A charitable man might have called it a smile.

“I beg your pardon. I was referring to the body we have just laid in the cave, not you.” He gestured vaguely with the long, horny stem of his pipe. “You may lay your wet hat and coat on the table in lieu of a coat rack. I apologize for the spartan appointments.”

Indeed, the cabin was almost as empty as the table, and it did not escape Caleb’s notice that there was neither bed, nor wardrobe, nor provender in the one-room hovel. The table, chairs, lantern, a cast-iron stove, and a bundle of faggots suspended in a net accounted for the whole of the room’s contents. An hour before, when the ugly old man, lurking in the gloam beneath the pine eaves, had spooked Caleb’s corpse-laden horse on the road from the logging camp, he had invited him to wait out the storm in his home. But it was evident that this shack was no one’s home. The traveller wondered about the deception.

“I’ll keep them on, if you don’t mind. I have a bad habit of forgetting them when I lay them aside,” Caleb replied with a deception of his own. Wanting to avoid further discussion about removing his hat, he quickly returned to the original subject. “Why do you say the man was treasure hunting? Do you know him?”

“Not by name or reputation. He’s not from these parts. But his business was obvious enough,” the other man said between puffs of foulness. “He was always about the woods with a forked hazel switch, sniffing the ground. The Mormons call it ‘the gift of Aaron,’ but to everyone else, it’s just hunting for buried treasure.”

Caleb’s gaze flicked to the bundle of sticks hanging in the net, but his mind was on the dead man’s blood-spattered satchel, bulging with bronze plates. This being Utah, a certain sequence of events suggested themselves to Caleb’s imagination: the dead man had hammered out an old tea kettle and scratched some vaguely Egyptian-looking hieroglyphs on them, and set about to bury them in the mountains, where he would miraculously discover them later. The man who’d caved in his skull would be the second party in a ruptured partnership, or maybe a local who’d caught wind of the scheme and didn’t like the rude jest being made at the expense of his religion. Or so it seemed to the mind of one who had long been a frontier lawman. But it was not so neat an explanation as it had first appeared, for there were no carvings on the plates, nothing at all but mould and verdigris. And then there was the matter of the contents of the man’s wallet: the mysterious writ from Washington, D.C., with the imprimatur of an obscurity called the United States Secret Survey.

Someone else would have to answer those riddles. He wasn’t a detective; he was a manhunter. The only matter that needed concern him was finding out whom he hunted. Once again, he had fooled himself into thinking his wandering was of his own volition, that his passage through the Sanpete Valley was one route among many, but the business of the dead government man had laid that delusion in the cold ground. Whether he was drawn to trouble or it was drawn to him, he was not his own man anymore; he was the instrumentality of a vast and inscrutable power. It had been so ever since the Apaches staked him out in the desert, where he died hard and slow, until the night his iron-stiff limbs uncoiled from their rigor and he walked out of the wastes wearing nothing but his leather-brown skin. That night men stopped speaking of Caleb Gibson and started whispering about the Devil Rider and the Cyclone Ranger.

“Why wouldn’t the loggers take him?” asked the lawman. “They made their excuses, of course. Do you reckon they know who did it, and they’re afraid?”

“Oh, I’m sure they think they know,” said the ugly man. “The first thing every rodsman learns, before they ever cut their first switch, is how the starry spirits guard their valuables. Finding it is the easy part. You can’t just dig it up and take it, you see. You have to set other powers to wrestle with them, constrain them. Otherwise they might spirit it away from the spade, swallow it deeper in the earth. Or maybe rise up and strike you down forever.”

The air in the small, shut room was growing thick, and as the old man talked, it seemed to Caleb that the mephitic pipe-smoke was twisting into definite shapes at the edge of his vision, but when he shifted his gaze, it reverted to formlessness.

“Treasure hunting is dangerous business,” the ugly man repeated. This sentiment was evidently very satisfying to him, for his evil rictus returned.

Caleb loosened the sash on his coat and leaned back in the chair, revealing the bottom of a red waistcoat and the leather gun belt that sagged with its heavy load. “It would have had to be a spirit with a mattock, I think, from the way his skull was punched through.”

The ugly man laughed, a very shrill and grating sound. “Maybe so! Maybe so!”

“You’re very knowledgeable about treasure digging.” Caleb cocked his head toward the sticks bound up in the net. “I take it you're a rodsman yourself, Mr… Forgive me, I just realized I don’t know your name, nor rightly introduced myself. My name’s Caleb Gibson, from Arizona.”

“Treacle,” the ugly man said, and nodded in politeness, or a theatrical imitation thereof. “Vin Treacle, I’m called. I know more than any man knows about the rod and the secrets in the earth, and that’s no boast. You might say I was born with one in my hand, and that was an age ago. You mean to inquire if the poor unfortunate consulted with me in his expedition, eh? It is to his everlasting regret that he did not.”

“A moment ago, you said the Mormons call it the gift of Aaron. Is that not what you call it?”

“Oh, not at all. Why should I? I have not wished to be received into the fellowship of Joseph Smith, nor have they wished to offer it to me.”

“I meant no offense,” said Caleb, “But you must admit the assumption seemed a natural one.”

“I will not admit it,” the other hissed. “The best of them are dilettantes with the rod and the stone, and they have no divine right to this land. I was here before they came over the mountains. They’re late-comers compared to my people.”

“You’re an Indian, then,” Caleb said, and he watched Treacle’s reaction carefully.

The ugly man made a scornful noise. “In the memory of my people, the red-skinned savages came but a little earlier than the Mormons.”

Caleb’s mouth opened to ask the obvious question, but he was silenced by the crash of thunder outside, very nearby and very violent. It rattled the little shack so that some of the chinks in the roof crumbled to the table. A sudden downpour pounded on the shutters and the room filled with the noise of hail ricocheting off the weatherboard.

The old man slanted his head at the ceiling, the shadow of his beak monstrous in the swaying lantern light. Once he was satisfied that his roof was still present, he let out a little hoot of excitement and looked over at Caleb. “My, my! You have brought the tempest with you!”

‘You don’t know the half of it,’ thought the Cyclone Ranger.

Presently, the fury of the storm died down enough to speak, and Caleb decided at that moment, quite impulsively, that he would share some of the details he’d learned about the murdered man and see how Treacle took it.

“Maybe you’re right about it being a spirit after all,” he said. “If he’d been killed by a robber, it stands to reason he’d have been robbed. But I found money on him and an expensive pocket watch. Even left his sack full of plates with him.”

The old man leaned forward. “What kind of plates?”

“Brass, I think, or maybe copper. Dug up, by the look of it. Not much of a treasure.”

The ugly man’s eyelids crawled back, and as Caleb watched his pupils shrink to slits in the dim, amber light, they seemed rather the eyes of a cat than a man. And then Caleb noticed for the first time the peculiar way he gripped his pipe, though he could not immediately say in what way it was peculiar. A moment later, Caleb decided his fingers were arranged in the wrong order, for the man’s ring finger was the longest on each hand, and this realization brought a frisson of alarm and disgust.

“Not all treasure is money,” said the ugly old man around the stem of his pipe, if man he was.

Caleb sat in silence for a moment. He was thinking about those fingers, the slitted eyes behind the sickle-nose, and the bilious integument. “Well, the ghost must have disagreed, or else he’d have taken it back with him,” he said at last.

“Exceedingly strange,” said the other, and he, too, seemed to be musing on the mystery. Suddenly he stood up, looking very intent. “Show me the plates.”

“There’s nothing on them.” Caleb shrugged, a sardonic smile tugging on his mouth. “Not even Reformed Egyptian.”

Treacle’s yellow eyes almost started from his skull. “No, there wouldn’t be. They aren’t read by eyesight. It requires the aid of—”

“Rocks,” Caleb interrupted.

“Rocks! Not the river pebbles of the charlatan, but—” The ugly man had grown very excited, and now he fought to master himself. He turned his back on Caleb for the first time since they’d met and slithered away from the table, his fluid movement belying his decrepitude. He wore a long, bone-colored gown instead of pants, right down to the dirty floor, and so swiftly and quietly he moved that Caleb would not have been able to swear he had legs.

“I’ll buy them,” said Treacle, peering out at the rain through a crack in the shutters. “I’ll pay what you call real treasure: gold.”

At least that removed Vin Treacle from the list of suspects.

The manhunter stroked his chin. “I wouldn't feel right about that. His possessions rightfully belong to his kin.”

“You’re a hard bargainer, Caleb” Treacle turned round again. “Very well. You’re not interested in gold. What are you after? What did you come all the way up from Arizona to find? The love of a woman? The blood of a man? I can give you these.”

Caleb leaned back in his chair and blew out a lungful of air, stretching his legs out like he was saddle sore. What he was actually doing was making sure he could reach his holster.

“That’d make you the most generous host I’ve had in a coon’s age, Mr. Treacle,” Caleb said archly. “But the only thing I rightfully want now is to bury that poor unfortunate and get moving on. And the digging will go a lot quicker with your help, if you’re still willing.”

Vin Treacle sighed with disappointment. He slithered over to the bundle of rods and ran his bony finger over one of them. “If that’s the way you want it, Mr. Gibson. But I prophesy you’ll come to regret it.”

Caleb touched the brim of his stetson and nodded. “It’s most apprecia—” he began, but finished with a cruse as his chair suddenly toppled backwards. He knew the back legs must have given out, but there was no snap, and he never hit the floor. Though he had thrown out his arms in the natural instinct to regain balance, he soon found that they were arrested by a steely grip about both his forearms. Something snaked up his back, fast as lightning, prisoning his shoulders. To his horror, he realized it was the backrest. The wood of the chair was warping around him, crawling and writhing like a living thing.

“I told you that I know more about the rod than any man,” the ugly old man intoned. He held one of the rods in his hands now, and the captive could see that it was no mere dried switch, but wonderfully carved with flowing patterns, or if not carved, then twisted and woven by some art he could not imagine. And whatever way Treacle turned the rod, so bent the writhing chair.

“You would have profited greatly from my patronage. I would have revealed secrets to you, like that cave where we laid the treasure-hunter; the still, dark pool in the back where the minerals will draw all the fat out of a man’s body so that you can make candles with them, candles whose flame will lead you to whatever you seek, whether treasure or vengeance or liberty. And many wonderful things besides.

“You understand your error now, too late. High-handed and foolish men always think they can have their own way, but they always realize the power of the Shonokins.”

Treacle thrust the rod to the side, and the chair loped in nightmarish fashion, taking no care for the comfort of its prisoner. Caleb yelled in agony as the backrest wrenched on his left arm, dislocating it from his shoulder. Spiked knots twisted into his spine, forcing it into a horrific curvature. Every shallow breath was fire. He strained to reach his pistol, but it was impossible.

“After I break your body, I’ll throw you in the pool with him, and there you’ll lay with all the others, until the tale of your life and all your kin passes out of memory. Until I have need of a candle, that is.” Treacle flashed his yellow-grey rictus again. “One corpse or another, it doesn’t matter which.”

The living backrest wrenched his neck. The Devil Rider roared with exertion, summoning the last of his strength to resist its inexorable push. For an instant, the serpentine wood lost its grip and his head shot backwards, knocking his hat off. No longer hidden beneath his sodden brim, the crimson embers of his eyes flared in the darkness. The unexpected sight startled Treacle. The Shonokin jumped back, lost his grip on the rod, and the chair crashed to the ground and went limp.

Cursing, Treacle lunged for the rod, but the Cyclone Ranger rolled in front of him, his Colt Single-Action Army out and cocked. He blew a hole through the Shonokin’s belly, sending him backwards onto the table and crashing it to splinters.

Caleb staggered over, looked down to see Treacle’s darting cat-eyes and his mouth filling with black blood. His thumb drew back the hammer on his smoking revolver.

“Any corpse will do, huh?” he said, breathless. “Good to know.”

And then he blasted a crater out of Treacle’s nose.

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