Finding Slade was more difficult than he hoped. The man lit no fire, so Clay was obliged to sneak around in the moonlight, watching every step he took to ensure that he made no noise; his prey might be nearer than he thought. The moon hung low and heavy, softly glowing, illuminating the desert with a silvery-blue light. Clay could see as well as hear tiny rodents scuttling across the ground, and once was able to detect a rattlesnake with his eyes before it shook its tail at his approach. He could make out individual twigs on the waist-high brush, the exact lineaments of every rock he passed by, the location of the planet Venus and the silhouette of nearby mountains against the stars, but he could not see Slade.
He stopped and thought what he might do now, given the hopelessness of stumbling across the killer by good luck. Slade was silent. Had he heard Clay moving around, and hidden himself? Could he be stalking Clay, at the same time Clay was stalking him? Clay spun around, ready to fend off the hairy creature that might have been rushing at him, knife in hand, eyes burning with the inner fires of madness. There was nothing. His heartbeat had accelerated over nothing more dangerous than his own imagination. Where was the blue-faced girl when he needed her silently pointing finger most?
Then he heard the voice, a male voice, speaking softly. It came from his left, and Clay began walking carefully in that direction, his breathing suddenly tight with expectation, the blood thundering through him so strongly it seemed he must alert Slade to his presence with its roaring. Now the voice was louder, sometimes pausing, sometimes breaking into a tuneless humming for several minutes before resuming its one-sided conversation.
And there was the speaker, seated in a clearing, addressing himself to some object in his hands. Moonlight reflecting from spectacles on the thing told Clay it was a human head. He had no doubt that sunlight glancing from those same lenses had been what he saw in the late afternoon, nor did he doubt that the head belonged to the man left with his wife and boy at the windmill. Slade wore a hat, and did not appear to be a large man, to Clay’s surprise. He listened to the words dribbling from Slade’s mouth in a childish singsong, but could not make them out. Made bold by his luck, Clay cocked both hammers on his shotgun and stepped forward.
The small man cradling the head in his hands looked up and became silent. Clay waited for a sudden move, any indication that Slade did not intend to surrender peacefully, but there was not the least suggestion in the figure seated before him that he considered himself in any way threatened by the sudden presence of a stranger with an aimed gun.
The silence became too much for Clay. “Put it down,” he croaked, then cleared his throat and said, with greater sternness, “Put it down, the head, put it down right now.”
The head was placed on the ground.
“Take off your hat,” Clay ordered, and was obeyed.
The face bathed in moonlight was familiar to him, despite bearing no resemblance whatever to the depictions of Slade every newspaper had provided.
“Wixson …”
“Dugan? Is that Dugan …?”
“Where’d you get that head, Wixson …? What the hell are you doing here anyway?”
“Dugan … what a small world.”
“I said, where’d you get that head?”
“This head?” Reverend Wixson picked it up again.
“That head.”
“From off somebody’s neck, Dugan, where else would I get it, do you think?”
“Where is he? Are you a team?”
“Team? To whom do you refer, Dugan?”
“Him! Slade! Where is he?”
“Could this be the man?” asked Wixson, proffering the head. Clay felt confusion invading him, causing his arms to shake. He lowered the shotgun.
“Wixson, are you saying you’re the one …?”
“What one?”
“The one … the one that’s been cutting people up around here. Are you him?”
“I have my work, Dugan. You, of all people, should know that.”
“What work? What are you saying?”
“To find the soul. A mechanical device was not the way, I saw that very clearly after what happened in … wherever it was. No more weights and balances, I told myself. The thing is, Dugan, it requires another approach entirely.”
“You cut them open to … look for their souls?”
“It may be in the heart, or it may be in the head. Or it may be in a place no one has ever suspected. I have to examine every part of the deceased.”
“But you killed them, you crazy man! You killed them yourself!”
“And it was necessary. An interior search has to be conducted while the blood is still warm, the heart still beating, sometimes. That’s the best moment, in my experience. The soul is small and fleet, a tiny twinkling star, and it migrates from place to place within the body, I suspect, when death is near, attempting to revive the physical being. When that cannot be done, why then, it leaves, and although I don’t hope to snare an actual soul, I know I can observe its departure.”
Clay understood at last that everyone was wrong. There was no Slade, or if there was, he had died or disappeared since being released from Brannan’s mine. The atrocities blamed on Slade were the work of Wixson. No one had ever seen the face of the murderer and lived. The labeling of Slade as the one responsible had been a mistake, an assumption unsupported by factual evidence. It had been Wixson all along. He had fooled them all, and was probably not even aware of the furor he had created with his bloody delvings for the soul.
“How many has it been so far, Wixson? Do you keep count?”
“No; why would I do that? It doesn’t matter how many. However many it takes, that will be how many it takes. The work is too important for counting and tallying. You can see that, can’t you, Dugan?”
“I see … a crazy man, that’s what I see.”
Wixson smiled forgivingly. “Then you aren’t the man I thought you were.”
“You’re sure as hell not the man I thought you were. Did you know there’s ten thousand dollars reward for you, and they’re calling you by the name of Slade?”
“The one you’re looking for?”
“You’re the one. It’s a mix-up. I’ll straighten it out all right. Jesus, Wixson, I had you figured for a fool, but not … for any of this that you’ve been doing. Did God tell you to do it?”
“God has told me nothing, not outright. I have used logic to see the waste of time the balance had become. The people of … what was that place again?”
“Dry Wash,” said Clay, reminding himself painfully of Madge Clifton and all that had not happened between them.
“That’s the town. They did me a service, opened my eyes, so to say. They made me think out the whole thing, Dugan. I owe them my thanks.”
“I’ll be sure and pass it on. You hear what I said about the money, Wixson?”
“You imagine someone will give you thousands of dollars for me?”
“I don’t imagine anything—I know.”
“The work is worth far more. It’s a priceless endeavor, something you could share with me. You’re a stronger man than me, Dugan. Sometimes I … I have to struggle with them. The Lord gives me strength when I need it, but I fear my body is becoming worn out. Sometimes I faint dead away for no reason. This is harsh country, but the desert places are where a man finds his maker, Dugan.”
“Could be right. You’re about to make me rich, Wixson.”
“You don’t know anything.”
“I know that much.”
“The people who have helped me, the ones who gave up their bodies for me, they all have a place in heaven.”
“Then you won’t be seeing them again. I’d say you’re hell-bound for sure when they drop you on a rope.”
“That can never happen, not to me. I have a special dispensation from the Lord. He watches over me, even in my most painful hour.”
Clay shook his head pityingly. “You’re gone from this world, and you haven’t even left it yet. What made you crazy, Wix
son—too much Bible studying?”
Wixson’s smile mirrored Clay’s. “You are one of the minions sent to deter me,” he said, sounding vaguely disappointed.
“What kind of minion would that be?”
“Satan’s own. I should have guessed it when you crossed my path a second time, and now you’re here for a third. Evil moves in threes, did you know? But of course you do.”
Wixson stood. Clay lifted the sawed-off with a lazy slowness. Wixson dusted himself off. His clothing was ragged, his boots in need of repair, so badly worn he had them wrapped in filthy strips of cloth to hold the upper to the sole. Clay guessed it was the rags that had obscured what few tracks Wixson left behind him. He had achieved stealth by accident. The irony of it was depressing.
“You’re a sorry figure for the Lord’s right hand,” Clay said.
“And you are exactly right for what you are, Dugan, if that’s your true name.”
“I guess you’d have one of those long, foreign-sounding angelic names, doing the holy work you’re engaged in.”
Wixson smiled more broadly and took a hatchet from his belt. Clay chided himself for not having made him surrender what weapons he had earlier.
“All right, now, you can just drop that.”
Wixson began walking toward Clay, smiling still.
“He has given me many names, but only one purpose, and he watches from on high to protect me for that purpose.”
“He won’t stop a load of double-aught, so hold it right there and drop the ax.”
Wixson advanced with a smile, like a man greeting a long-lost friend. The hatchet was not even lifted yet to strike. The foolhardiness of it frightened Clay more than the blade; anyone that careless of his life was capable of the unexpected, and that could be what Wixson was counting on. Clay could call the bluff of any normal man without a qualm, but Wixson wore the blithe face of unreason, and Clay was scared.
“I’m telling you straight—you put it down and quit walking or you’re a dead man.”
“My name is my own, for me and him who made me to know.”
Clay was backing away, unwilling to kill a man for whom he had no horse on which to carry the body away.
“Quit it now, Wixson. I don’t want to be the one that kills you.…”
“Liar,” sighed Wixson, sounding tired, “liar from Satan. You can’t help lying, I know.…”
Clay fired both barrels. Wixson was flung back several yards before collapsing. Clay listened to the reverberation of the double blast. It seemed to travel outward from the gun like ripples on the surface of a pond, line after curving line leaving his hands, stretching wider, wider, bowed strings already traveling at distances of a hundred miles, two hundred, expanding outward from him forever, a circle of sound that would one day reach the edge of all things and be swallowed, by which time Clay would himself be dust.
The empty shotgun fell at his feet. He felt nothing in his heart to equal the trembling in his hands. Wixson lay dead, his innards bared like those of his victims. Clay wondered if the preacher’s soul had departed intact, or was drifting in shreds on the night breeze. If Wixson’s soul were weighed, as Wixson had attempted to do with the souls of others, it would be found wanting. In Wixson’s soul a deficit would be found, the missing portion made note of. Did incomplete souls wander the earth? Clay asked himself, knowing that the answer, if one existed, would never be given.
He stared at the sky for some time, then reloaded his gun and lay down to sleep. There was a deep satisfaction creeping into him, now that the twitching had left his hands. He had killed the man everyone mistakenly called Slade. It would be interesting to see the reaction when he informed the nation of its error. The story would be plastered across every newspaper’s front page. He would be a famous man. Even Sophie wouldn’t dare try shooting at him again. And there was the money, those ten thousand beautiful dollars, an impossible sum, but his for the taking, because he had earned it by squashing the nastiest bug in existence. His life would never be the same again. It would be heaven on earth. And he would … he would use his fame to seek out Zoe and Drew! Clay sat upright, excited by the brilliance of the idea. Everyone from one side of the country to the other would be eager to read about the man who had killed Slade, even if Slade was only pathetic little Wixson, and when it became known that he sought a brother and a sister lost to him so long ago, every reader would ask himself if he knew the man or woman Clay Dugan called his kin.
It would be a whole new story for the newspapers to follow, this search for the Dugan siblings. They would be found, sooner or later, and then his life would be complete. Clay lay back on the desert floor and hugged himself. Everything would be wonderful, better than a flawed man like himself deserved to have, but he would grab hold of all the wonderfulness with both hands anyway, because not to do so would be the act of a fool, and Nettie Dugan had raised no fools. He lay awake another hour or more, congratulating himself on accomplishing what he had, alone and unassisted. He wouldn’t tell the newspapers about his guardian angel; they would look at him askance, and he could not blame them for that; he was not sure the blue-faced girl was not something that had slipped into his brain out of sheer exhaustion. The subject was best left in limbo.
The morning was well advanced before Clay awoke. He sat up and looked at the crumpled body of Wixson, wondering for several seconds what it was. When he remembered, he recaptured all the attendant planning and happy expectation that had been his before he fell asleep the night before. The one problem facing him was transportation of Wixson’s body to the nearest town. He would need to take the spectacled head too, as confirmation of his story. The revelation that Wixson was the notorious Slade would require proof. Clay had no idea where the nearest town might be, nor how he might find the strength to carry Wixson’s body to it. His ebullient mood began to dissipate in the light of these insoluble practicalities. Without Wixson and the head he had no proof of anything, and proof was the very thing his dreams of greatness and contentment rested upon.
Disturbed now, he began searching among Wixson’s few possessions to find extra food that might make the task ahead easier. He found nothing in the battered canvas sack at the edge of the clearing but a Bible. Clay leafed through it in annoyance. It was a book that had seen better days, its cover slightly scorched, as if it had fallen briefly into a fire. He flipped through the thousand and more pages in idle irritation, and arrived at the flyleaf in front. There, penned in a careful hand, were the usual entries of births and deaths recorded for posterity in a family Bible. Clay browsed among the fading lines for mention of the name Wixson, but it was not there. Had he stolen the Bible from one of his victims? The name that cropped up again and again was Kindred. The latest owner of the book, according to the notations, was one Morgan Kindred. This man and his wife, Sylvie, were apparently childless, having conceived nothing but a string of five stillborns, their names set down in the Bible according to custom. But then, Clay read, they had adopted a boy by the name of Drew Dugan. Clay read that line several times. The adoption had taken place in May of 1869, the month Clay and Zoe and Drew had been placed aboard the orphan train and sent west to find new families.
He set the Bible down, then picked it up again. The coincidence was too fantastic, but there it was, in brown ink: Drew Dugan. Was Wixson actually Morgan Kindred? Had Clay’s brother been raised by the man whom Clay shot the night before? It couldn’t be so! And yet it might. The last notation on the flyleaf, after mention of Drew’s adoption into the family, was a cryptic entry reading: We leave for the Desert Place. The Lord will Provide. Hadn’t Wixson mentioned something about a desert place moments before Clay shot him? Clay was sure he had.
He began searching through the Bible again, this time reading several of the notations in pencil along the borders and margins. None of the comments beside underlined passages made much sense to Clay, since he had never studied religious matters, but the hand that wrote the notations was the same hand that had written on the flyle
af. Clay dug into the canvas bag again, looking for a pencil, and found one, a stub less than two inches long. He scrawled a few curlicues alongside the penciled notations to compare the color of the lead, and it looked like a reasonable match to him. But the writer would have used many pencils over the years, so this test meant nothing. And yet Clay was convinced Wixson was Kindred, a man who had gone, presumably with his wife and adopted son, to a desert place. What had happened there? He read again the notations, ignoring the cramps of hunger in his belly. The story of Abraham and Isaac was heavily underscored, and beside it was written: Drew. Had Wixson/Kindred intended killing Drew as a sacrifice to God? It was not impossible, given the despicable acts of murder to follow later on. But had it actually happened? Clay was forced to acknowledge that it probably had. If Wixson, unmuscular though he had been, was able to kill so many, what chance would a boy have stood? Drew had most likely been gone from the world a long, long time, but fate had provided him with vengeance in the form of his older brother, who slew the man who had taken Drew away. Now it wouldn’t matter if Clay became famous and asked the newspaper readers of the nation to find his brother. Drew was gone. Clay wondered if Zoe might not have met with misfortune also, and his mood admitted the possibility.
He felt sick. He could never share any of this with anyone. Brannan could keep his ten thousand dollars; Clay had no means of transporting the body of Wixson back to civilization in any case, and his story would be laughed at. Clay’s greatest stalk and kill, with its personal revelations, had occurred in a vacuum. Wixson/Kindred’s death under the stars had no meaning now for anyone but Clay. He would never tell a soul, would mourn for Drew in silence, alone. It was meant to be this way, Clay could see that much, even if he could not understand how it had happened in so neat a fashion, the retribution visited upon the wicked by his hand. It was all beyond him. He would most likely die himself soon, if he failed to find a way out of the wilderness, and that would compound the abstruse secret he had uncovered. It was fitting.