From the beginning there had been a glow in Tongue Kills’s eyes, a particular glow that made Malone suddenly squint with recognition. He realized that he’d seen that exact thing before in another place, far off in the southern seas. It wasn’t a glow that belonged in a man’s eyes, which led him to a corollary that was as revelatory as it was inescapable.
“You win,” he gasped, his throat scalded, the skin on the back of his neck beginning to curl from the heat. “I can’t match you fury for fury, hot word for hot word. You’ve beat me.”
Tongue Kills’s triumphant expression twisted into a sneer. “It is good that you realize this, but it will not save you. I warned you, and you did not heed but chose instead to challenge. You will die, as will all who try to come to this place.”
Malone was down to his long johns now, and only the fact that they hadn’t had any contact with soap or water for an inexcusable length of time kept him from being spontaneously combusted right then and there by Tongue Kills’s unceasing cataract of execration.
“What’ll happen to me, I don’t know, but there’s just one thing more I have to say about you,” he rasped out. “It’s a durn shame that your mastery of heated language happens to be inversely proportional to your humanity.”
Tongue Kills gave a start, then a cry of outraged realization as the paradox wrapped him in its inescapable grip. His fury imploded, inescapably self-contained. Malone shielded his face with an arm as heat, the by-product of all that anger, rushed outward in waves from his antagonist. Frustration, volatile as black powder, erupted. Somewhere behind him Worthless was whinnying loudly while trying to simultaneously keep all four feet off ground grown suddenly intolerably warm.
“You vile apparition, you imposition that walks on two legs; your existence outrages the world!”
“Yeah, well,” Malone bellowed in response as he continued to shield his face, “you ain’t no rose o’ creation yourself!”
Tongue Kills’s skin began to ripple and run like taffy, his flesh to sag. Malone had been witness to that phenomenon before, too, in the same places where he had seen the unholy glow, both in the Sandwich Islands and in the still-farther, distant Land of the Long White Cloud.
Even as he continued to shower fulminations on the mountain man, Tongue Kills was melting, unable to deny the uncontrollable fury and anger that were reducing him to his natural state. The vibrant red and orange and yellow of him spread out upon the ground, racing to take possession of the fertile valley. Where his colors, like his words, ran hot, the ground split like stale pudding and belched forth fresh fury, the earth itself melting and bubbling, until the entire region seemed to be seething and echoing the maledictions of its master.
“Enough of words!” screamed the column of molten contumeliousness that had been Tongue Kills. It towered higher than the tops of the pines, bathing the lean-to in hellish yellow light, twisting like a pillar of coiled sulfur. Malone prepared to defend himself against something stronger than fiery language.
“That weapon will not protect you!” the quivering pillar snarled. “Nothing made of man can affect me!” A pseudopod of orange fire reached for the nearly naked Malone, intent on securing him in its grasp and crushing him to a crisp.
The mountain man crouched and parried, flicking the flaming tendril aside. A moan of frustration emerged from the unstable column. Its cohesion spent, it promptly began to shrink and collapse in on itself.
Somehow Malone’s voice carried above the dispersing hell that confronted him. He gripped tightly the knife Grass-in-Hair had given him. “This here blade’s good traditional obsidian, and it ain’t of man. It’s of you.”
“Excretion of carbon!” the disintegrating pillar shrieked. “Boil upon the earth’s buttocks! You cannot take this place for your own. You cannot drive me from it. Here I have been, and here I will remain, to shout the words that will keep you from this place! Where I am now, no grass shall grow, no animals live! The land will be denied you, and the very water itself I will season so sharply that it kills! I will remain forever, deny burbleiss shussh…!”
Tongue Kills continued his epithetic diatribe without pause, but having been reduced by Malone’s carefully applied paradox to his true self, he could speak now only in the language of the earth from which he’d sprung. Malone could comprehend that speech as few others could but protected himself from it not with magic but by the simple expedient of stuffing his ears with bits of duck down extracted from his bedroll. As the mountain man gathered up his scorched but still-intact clothing, Tongue Kills continued to rage all around him. He had indeed managed to render much of the fertile region useless but had also been compelled to leave many places untouched. Malone had neither triumphed nor been defeated. He had half won and was lucky to have managed that.
Only when they were well clear of the valley and beyond earshot of Tongue Kills’s pursuing screams did man and mount pause gratefully at a clean, untrammeled pool to cool their blistered feet. Thus assuaged, a chastened but relatively pleased Malone sought additional absolution in the mountain man’s ultimate sacrifice. He undertook to have a bath.
* * *
—
“Ah-weh,” Grass-in-Hair muttered understandingly. “It is no wonder, then, none could outtalk him, for he was not a man but a spirit.” The chief frowned slightly. “What happened to your face?”
Malone gingerly felt of his scorched pinnacle of a proboscis. “As it progressed, our exchange grew heated. In my face you see the result.”
“You say he is still there?” Two-Feathers-Falling said uncertainly.
Malone nodded. “Still there, still a-screamin’ and a-hollerin’. But the words he shouts now can’t hurt y’all because you won’t understand ’em proper unless you get too close to him. So stay clear o’ the places where he’s doin’ his insultin’ and complainin’, and you’ll be okay. There’s still plenty o’ game about and water he ain’t poisoned with his anger.”
Grass-in-Hair replied thankfully. “You have helped us much, and we are grateful. We will move camp in three days.”
“Suit yourselves. Me, I think I’m gonna head on south. Seen all o’ this Yellowstone country I want to for a spell.” He leaned back against a heaping pile of buffalo robes.
“I mean it, though, when I say you need to keep your kinfolks away from the places Tongue Kills has kept for himself. His words may not be able to hurt you no more, but I’ll be damned if he can’t still spit.”
What You See…
It’s hard writing stories to order. Well, to request, anyway. I love writing short stories. I’d write a lot more if this was the 1930s or 1940s and the heyday of the pulps. But yo, you know, I don’t make enough to pay Stephen King’s tax bill (but then, neither does Mozambique). To stay alive as a writer, you have to write novels, which fortunately I also enjoy doing.
Which brings us to Amos Malone’s saddlebags. What’s in them, nobody knows. Not even Malone, I think. They’re big, and floppy, and full of compartments, and generally speaking not a real smart place to go rooting around in without permission.
It’s dark in there.
* * *
—
“…Bunions, lumbago, bad back, consumption, whooping cough, dysentery, yellow fever, heart problems, liver trouble, infertility! Afflictions of the eye, the ear, the nose, and the throat! Broken bones, sprains, strains, disfigurations of the skin, and suppuration of all kinds!”
Now, the blacksmith, he had a disposition not dissimilar to that of the mules he frequently shod, but so suave and convincing was the stranger’s pitch that the square-brick man with the arms like railroad ties stepped to the front of the milling crowd and squinted up at the platform.
“Thet leetle bottle, it can cure all thet?”
From the back of the garishly decorated wagon, Dr. Mohet Ramses gazed down benevolently at the first (and hopefully not the last) of the warm af
ternoon’s potential supplicants.
“Sir, I would not claim it were it not true.” He held up the compact, winsome black bottle, letting the sunlight fall flush on the florid label. “All that and more can the Elixir of the Pharaohs cure.”
“Then you best take some yourself,” shouted someone from the back of the crowd. “Maybe it’ll keep you from runnin’ off at the mouth!”
Dr. Ramses was undaunted by the scattered laughter this rude sally brought forth. He drew himself up to his full height, which though just over six feet seemed greater because of his parsimonious construction, and glared haughtily at the cloddish locutor.
“For twenty years I have endured the slurs of disbelievers, and yet fate finds me still plying my trade. Why is that? I ask you. It is because the Elixir of the Pharaohs works, my friends!”
The blacksmith scratched dubiously at his bewhiskered chin. “A dollar a bottle seems awful high, Doc.”
Ramses leaned low, bringing his voice down with him. “Not when compared to what it can buy, my friend. How much is your health worth? How much another year of life, or two, or ten? For you see,” he said, straightening and raising aloft the inimitable, the peerless black bottle, “this venerable elixir not only cures, not only prevents, but actually extends the life of the user!
“Unlike the traveling charlatans you good people have doubtless encountered before, I do not claim that my wondrous tonic cures every ailment, every time. Only most ailments, most of the time. I have records of hundreds of exhaustively documented cases from across this great country and from the Continent itself in which the elixir has proved itself time and time again. I speak only the truth when I say that it can add to your life, actually make you live longer.”
“How much longer?” wondered a woman in the front row on whose cheeks the blush of youth had grown stale.
“A year per bottle, madam. One year of life, of good and vigorous and healthy existence, for each bottle you ingest according to instructions. One dollar for three hundred sixty-four days of continued subsistence on this good green earth. Is that not worth a little sweat of the brow?”
“A dollar a bottle’s too high,” said a farmer angrily. “At them rates we can’t afford to try it.”
Dr. Mohet Ramses smiled compassionately. “Ah, my good sir, all things are granted freely in heaven, but in this world, sad it is to say, nothing comes without cost. You should not think that you can’t afford to purchase the Elixir of the Pharaohs but rather that you can’t not afford to buy it.”
Near the front a middle-aged lady looked at her husband. She hadn’t been feeling well lately, had if the truth be known been in fact doing poorly. A dollar was a lot of money, but…if it did only a tenth of what the doctor claimed…
She struggled with her purse and dug out a handful of coins, holding them up toward the wagon. “I’ll buy a bottle, Doctor. What have I got to lose?”
“A dollar,” her husband muttered under his breath.
She glared at him. “See if I give you any, William.”
Dr. Ramses’s smile widened as he exchanged brimming black bottles for coins. When one well-dressed citizen eagerly pressed a quarter eagle into the erstwhile physician’s perfumed palm, he positively beamed.
Bit by bit the crowd thinned, clutching the precious bottles tightly to shirt or bodice. Eventually there was but a single old woman left. She was so small and insignificant, Dr. Ramses hardly noticed her as he contentedly tallied his take for the day. Time it was to move on. Other towns waited just over the horizon; other needful communities beckoned. All needed his services; all doted on his presentation as eagerly as they did on his marvelous solution.
The elixir really was a wondrous concoction, he knew. Versatile as well, depending as it did for the bulk of its constituency on whatever creek he happened to cut across whenever his stock was running low.
He very rarely had trouble because, unlike that of so many traveling snake-oil salesmen, his pitch was different. Contrary to the rest of his silver-tongued brethren, he promised not merely cures but hope. For when his purchasers passed on, it was invariably with the conviction that the Elixir of the Pharaohs had truly extended their lives. He smiled to himself. A difficult assertion to disprove when the principal complainants against him were all dead.
Only then did he notice the woman. His initial reaction was to ignore her, but he hesitated. She had remained throughout his talk and remained still after all the others had departed. Her dress was simple patched homespun, and the bonnet she wore to shield herself from the sun was fraying. No fine Irish lace decorated the hem of her dress; no clever tatting softened the edge of her cuffs. Still, he owed it to her to repeat the offer one last time. Mohet Ramses was nothing if not magnanimous.
He knelt on the platform. “Can l be of assistance, madam?”
The woman hesitated. On her face could be seen the aftereffects of a long lonely life of hard work and toil. It was clear she was not used to speaking to anyone more educated than the town schoolmaster or the local parson. Her expression was a mournful mix of hope and despair. She managed a hesitant reply.
“It ain’t fer me, Doctor, sir. It’s Emmitt. My husband.”
Doctor Ramses smiled tolerantly. “So I assumed, madam.”
“He’s in the wagon, Doctor.” She pointed, and Ramses noted a gutted buckboard and team tied to a rail outside the nearby general store. “Emmitt, he’s gettin’ on to still be herdin’, but he just tells me to shut up…he don’t mean nothin’ by it…and gits on with his work.
“It happened yesterday. Got the last of our twenty head in the corral; time to market ’em, don’t you know, and that cursed old nag of his spooked. Still don’t know what done it, but Emmitt, he went a-flyin’. Panicked the cattle, one kicked him, and, well, I’d be beholden if you’d come an’ see for yourself, Doctor.”
Ramses hesitated. It really was time to pack up the store and get a move on. There was invariably some local who would ignore the finely printed instructions and chug an entire bottle of the noxious brew in hopes of quickly curing some bumptious black eye, or constipation, or some other mundane ill, only to have his hopes dashed. Whereupon, fierce of eye and palpitating of heart, he would set out in search of the good doctor’s whereabouts. As a purely prophylactic measure, Ramses historically had found it prudent not to linger in the vicinity of prior sales.
As the streets were presently devoid of any more potential customers, however, this was an internal debate easily resolved.
“Tell me, madam, do you have a dollar?”
She nodded slowly. “ ’Bout all I do have right now, sir. See, when the cattle git sold, that’s the only time all year Emmitt and me have any real money. I was goin’ to pay the regular doctor with it, but he don’t come to town but once a week, and this bein’ Friday, I don’t expect him for another four days.” She sniffed, and the leathery skin twitched. “My man’s a tough one, but he took that kick right hard.” She rubbed the back of one hand under her nose. “I ain’t sure he can last another four days.”
Dr. Ramses reached down to take the woman’s hand comfortingly in his own. “Fear not, good woman. Your husband is about to receive a dose of the most efficacious medication known to nineteenth-century man. Lead the way, and I shall accompany you.”
“God bless you, Doctor!”
“There, now,” he said as he hopped off the back of the floridly painted wagon, “control yourself, madam. It is only my Hippocritical duty I am doing.”
He winced at the sight of the battered, lanky old man lying in the rear of the wagon. He lay on his back atop a dirty, bloodied quilt, a feather pillow jammed beneath his head. His eyes were closed, and his thin brown hair had long since passed retreating to the region above the temples. Several veins had ruptured in his nose, which reminded Ramses of a map he’d once sold that purported to depict in some detail the delta of the Mississi
ppi.
A crude bandage had slipped from the left side of the old man’s head. A glance revealed that the force of the blow he had received had caved in the bone. Dried blood had run and caked everywhere: on the pillow, on his weathered skull, on the floor of the buckboard. His mouth hung half-open, and his sallow chest heaved with pained reluctance. As they looked on, the aged unfortunate raised a trembling hand toward the woman. It fell back, and Ramses had to fight to maintain the smile on his face. Turning away from the disagreeable scene, he held out to the anxious woman a small black bottle.
“One dollar, madam. One dollar to extend your husband’s life. A worthy trifle, I am sure you will agree.”
She fumbled with her purse, and Ramses, eager to be away from this rustic municipality, waited impatiently while she counted out the money in pennies and nickels. Only when the count had reached one hundred U.S. cents did he pass to her the precious container. She accepted it with trembling fingers.
“You’re sure this’ll work, Doctor?”
“My good woman, it has never been known to fail. Ten years.” He thrust high a declamatory finger. “Ten years did I live among the multitudes of heathen Aegypt, perusing the primordial scrolls, learning all there was to learn, acquiring great knowledge, until at last I understood the mystic formula of the great and wise pharaohs. Trust in me, and all will be well.”
In point of fact, Dr. Mohet Ramses had never been to Aegypt. But he had been to Cairo. Cairo, Illinois, where he had practiced a number of trades, none of which were remotely related to medicine, until the furious father of an outraged daughter had gone searching for him with gun in hand. At which point Dr. Mohet Ramses, alias Dickie Beals of Baltimore, Maryland, had sought and found expediency in a life on the road. A most profitable life.
The sun was going down, the town’s two saloons were lighting up, and the venerable doctor was anxious to be on his way.