A Fistful of Horror - Tales Of Terror From The Old West Read Online Free PDF Page B

particularly special.
    Everyone knew it.
    Everyone loved him.
    He would be something. Or he would be if he survived.
    So he had to survive.
    “Please, Quan, hurry. He is dying.”
    The heavy lidded brown eyes that pleaded with the medicine man were full and the tears were ready to come again, no matter who saw it or what they thought.
    With a final guilty look back at the bar, at the empty shot glass, at Miss Pearl who knew everything but said nothing, Quan nodded quickly and ushered the group of Comanche out of the door. He put a comforting – he hoped – arm around Ahdoche’s broad shoulders, and felt the fear and the grief that were fighting within the man’s body and mind….in his soul.
    Quan mounted his horse feeling queasy. He hadn’t expected to have to ride, and had planned a leisurely walk back to the reservation, his horse following behind, if he even remembered he had one. But now, now that time was of the upmost importance, he had to move quickly. The dusty dusky scenery passed by with a dizzying, nauseating speed, and Quan was grateful when he could finally leap from the animal. He stumbled as he landed in the sand, but the rest of the group had already run onwards, and they did not notice.
    “Over here! Hurry!” Ahdoche yelled out to the medicine man, and then knelt on the ground by a little bundle, something wrapped in blankets that had been placed by a small fire. The flames were crackling and smoking, and the bundle was completely still.
    Quan jogged, his head already full of an ache that he would have to wait to soothe. He knelt next to Ahdoche and pulled back the blanket.
    Nocona.
    A tiny boy, the runt of a large litter, Quan remembered his birth, his naming ceremony. He remembered last week when the child had come running to him, scared after his elder sister had told him the story of the Pia Mupitsi – the Big Cannibal Owl – and how it was on its way to eat him.
    Nocona had come to him, to Quan, and not his father. The war chief would have laughed, and told the boy not to be silly, not to believe his sister’s scary stories. And that was fine, only, as Nocona knew, they weren’t just silly, scary stories at all. They were true. So he had come to Quan because the medicine man never laughed at him, never told him that the legends were made up simply to terrify naughty children.
    Quan told him the truth. Quan told him the real stories behind the myths.
    Now Quan looked down at the broken body of the boy, bruised, bloody, trampled by a heavy horse and yet still trying to live. He took a deep breath and looked away as he exhaled so that no one smelled the liquor. “He needs to be inside, in the healing tipi. Let me take him, and I will see what I can do.”
    Ahdoche reached out and took Quan’s hand, looked him directly in his eyes. “Oh, thank you. Thank you.”
    Quan took his hand back and put it against Nocona’s chill forehead. “Don’t thank me yet, Ahdoche. I cannot promise anything.”
    But Ahdoche chose not to hear the warning. Instead he smiled, an uneasy, unsure sort of smile, and nodded. “Thank you.”
    Quan lifted the dying boy as carefully as he could, but despite his gentleness he still heard bones snapping. Was that Nocona’s back? His neck? He gritted his teeth against the sound and walked away from the growing crowd. He needed space. He needed a mug of coffee. He needed some air.
    Instead of getting anything that he needed, Quan entered the small, close healing tipi. It was dark inside and once he had placed Nocona on the mat laid out on the sandy floor there was only room enough for Quan to sit cross-legged next to him and whisper prayers and incantations.
    Even though he knew, now, that it was no good.
    On the short journey from the fireside to the tipi, Nocona had died. Now Quan could only send up pleas to the gods to look after the little spirit, for his shadow soul to rest quietly with his body in eternal sleep, and for his free soul to wander happily in the after