Nightmare

Cardinal Aequitas threw open the doors of Nightmare’s only saloon, the fire of the dying sun blazing like the vengeance of God at her back.

The clink of glasses and murmur of conversation stopped. All the patrons were men, aged and bent from a life laboring in the unforgiving elements. Shadowed eyes followed her through the haze of tobacco smoke, seized by the crimson of her dust-caked robes and the glitter of her clockwork hand. The faint tick of its gears was as deafening as her steps on the creaking floorboards

The bartender, a pale walrus of a man, stared at her as she neared. Circles dark as bruises hugged his eyes. He smeared the interior of a stained mug with an even dirtier rag until his gaze locked on the pair of shotgun pistols at her hips.

“I’ll need your cannons.” His voice cracked.

She swept aside the crumbs and spilled drink on the bar’s surface and put a booted foot on the rail.

He swallowed. Eyes fixed her pistols, he nodded over his shoulder at the sign above the bar. On it a knife and axe were crossed out. “Sign implies cannons, preacher.” His voice strained even more.

“Cardinal.”

“A lady Cardinal.”

“God sees not between your legs to mark you.”

He did not look up to the mark on her forehead.

“What’s your name, keeper?”

“Wilfred.”

She gestured to the bottle of whiskey at Wilfred’s elbow. “None touch my pistols but me.”

Wilfred crossed himself. The bottle mouth chattered against the glass. “Yes, fath… mother.” He set the bottle at her elbow.

“You’ve no cause to worry. I’m not in an absolving mood.” She downed the shot with her natural hand and reached for the bottle with her clockwork one. “But you have a problem in Nightmare, Wilfred.”

“You said you ain’t here to absolve,” he squeaked.

She filled her glass to the rim. “No mood to absolve doesn’t change you having a problem.”

Wilfred looked like he wanted nothing more than the conversation to end. “No problems here.”

“Who paints the town sign?”

His rattling moan told her the answer.

“You have trouble counting or painting, Wilfred?”

\“Mother?”

“Cardinal. This is Nightmare, yes? I could barely discern the town name. Yet the population count’s fresh.” She glanced around the bar. “I wager not on account of fertility.”

Wilfred busied himself with the glass again. “Damn dust scrubs it clean.”

“Awful select to renew just the count.”

Wilfred focused intently on the glass he cleaned. “We don’t want no trouble, Cardinal.”

“Not wanting doesn’t stop the getting. Where’s the sheriff?”

“Laying in a pine box past two weeks.”

She grunted and took a pull straight from the bottle. “Got a priest?”

“Preacher Ridge.”

“God give him that name?”

Wilfred cleared his throat. “Father Beckenridge.”

She screwed the cap back on the bottle and picked it up. “I’ll need your best room and a tub of hot water. I’ve slept on naught but dirt and a bedroll for longer than you been without law. I’ll speak with your priest after breaking fast.”

Wilfred bobbled the glass in his hand. Everyone started when it shattered behind the bar. “You ain’t wanting to stay in Nightmare, Cardinal.”

“You presume to know my desires?”

Wilfred’s head and shoulders sank as he grabbed a broom. “No, Cardinal.”

“Then fetch the key. I’m here to collect the five thousand your town owes in tithe, but it seems you have need of my services as well. I expect you experience consequence greater than my presence on account of your delinquency.”

***

“Cardinal Justice.” Father Beckenridge bowed as the Cardinal entered Nightmare’s chapel the next morning. “Blessings be upon you.”

“It’s Cardinal Aequitas,” she corrected. She scanned the modest chapel. Four rows of worn pews faced an unadorned pulpit and altar. A rusted clockwork organ looked not to have played in years. Morning light streamed through a window behind the pulpit, cut into bars by the shadow of a cross. Smoke from censers tainted the air.

“That explains your mark, then,” he said. “I failed to recognize it at first. Aequitas is an old form of the virtue.” His voice was faint and slim and she had difficulty hearing it over the hissing wind. She wondered how he could hope to deliver a homily.

“I did not present myself to test your knowledge of the marked.”

His manicured hands made a fluttering motion but he gave no apology.

Unlike the other townsfolk, the priest’s skin possessed the shade and smoothness of cream. His eyes were the pale of a cold sunrise, with no hint of the fatigue the others displayed. At his side he wore a burnished cavalry sword.

She nodded at the weapon. “It appears sin has not sullied your sword.”

Beckenridge shrugged. “Sheriff Hellmuth has rendered absolution in Nightmare unnecessary.”

“Until he died.”

Beckenridge pressed his lips into a thin line. His pale eyes searched her.

“How did you sleep last night?”

She sucked a breath through her teeth.

“Is that how the town got its name?”

“Since I arrived two years ago has been the case.”

“But the deaths are recent. The sheriff has been dead but a fortnight.”

“Those still draw breath know not to question the way of things in Nightmare. The sheriff did not content himself with keeping the peace.”

“This appears the work of a demon. Hellmuth confronted it. Yet you, the town’s priest, still live.”

“I’m no marked Cardinal. If I fought it, I would be dead and my flock would have no shepherd. Do I seem a fool?”

“I only just met you.”

The preacher’s expression darkened. “You may wear red, but this is still my chapel, Cardinal.”

“And you seem well-rested to maintain it. How is it you avoid the nightmares?”

As quickly as anger had split Beckenridge’s mask it was gone, replaced by a bland smile. “Only those with sin are haunted by the night terrors. It is why I preach purity rather than open rebellion.”

“If I sleep poorly, the blame lies with the memory of the horrors I absolve in my travels. And I need to know the name of this one if I am to absolve it.”

Beckenridge stared. “I saw no need to name it. Unlike you, I am not equipped to banish.”

Her fingers caressed the butt of her pistols as she imagined the priest’s head exploding.

“Explain its workings then.”

“Nightmares of a pale woman come nightly to all not pure of heart. The old and weak perish on occasion. But those attempting to quit the town, or wishing to confront the demon, are stricken dead by morning.” He smiled without humor. “This is the reason Nightmare has never tithed.”

Her chest churned in fury. “Join me in your library. With this meager information I must do in a day that which you have neglected for years.”

***

The bloated crimson sun had sunk under the horizon when she swept through the saloon, paying Wilfred and the patrons no heed. In moments she had closed and bolted her room door. She lowered herself into the room’s lone chair and searched in her satchel for her small, leatherbound black notebook. The most crucial tool she carried, even greater than her pistols. Her mechanical hand flipped through pages cramped with diagrams and writing with alacrity unmatched by human fingers. Now with the demon’s name, she needed to find the correct binding ritual.

A fist pounded her door.

“I wish not to be disturbed,” she said.

“This cannot wait, Cardinal.” The lilting voice was unmistakable. Her door flew open and Beckenridge strode into her room. “You cannot hope to defeat this demon with the sin you carry.”

He held her shotgun pistols trained on her chest.

“Those are my pistols,” she growled, but panic seized her.

“I have more right to them than you. Your soul will burn under the weight of your misdeeds.” He cocked one of the pistols and extended the twin barrels to arm’s length. “I absolve you of your Pride, sinner.”

Dream. If it wasn’t, she was dead anyway. She tore her eyes from the pistols and made the sign drawn on the page with her human hand.

“Megara of Azael, I bind you.”

No gunshots roared. Her pistols hung at her hips as they always had. She looked up.

In place of Beckenridge, before her closed door, stood a shapely woman with pale skin, solid black eyes and hair that sloped into a widow’s peak. Her red dress, ethereal like clouds, rained blood over her body.

She pointed a talon at the Cardinal’s mark and scoffed. “The likes of thee strives to banish me?”

“No. I wish to make a deal.”

***

Silence again blanketed the bar as she entered the next morning. This time it was only momentary. The floorboard groaned as every single person fell to their knees around her.

“First I slept the night since I can recollect,” Wilfred said as he bowed. “God be praised.”

“My absolution served its purpose, I gather.” She finished winding the key in her clockwork arm and flexed the fingers several times before taking the bottle of whiskey from the bar.

“God had no hand in what transpired under the Cardinal.”

The soft voice of Beckenridge at the saloon doors set her teeth on edge. Every eye turned to him.

Beckenridge drew his steel. His grip showed less skill than even she had suspected. “I know not what game this false Cardinal attempts, but-”

She lowered the bottle from her lips and wiped with her sleeve. Without turning her head, she drew her pistol and fired.

Beckenridge’s jaw exploded. He wheeled and collapsed to all fours. Teeth and blood poured from the gaping hole where his mouth had been. She stepped to his side, placed the barrel to the base of his skull and pulled the trigger. His head evaporated. The slug punched a ragged hole in the floor amidst a splatter of skull.

Her ears rang in the sudden stillness. The townspeople stared, no one breathing. She sheathed her pistols and returned to the bar. The whiskey bottle gurgled as she swallowed. She set it down empty and exhaled.

“Father Beckenridge was in league with the demon.”

Wilfred crossed himself. “I don’t rightly follow?”

“The demon revealed it before I banished her. It’s the reason it never affected him, and why he never banished it.”

Wilfred wrung his hands together. “But Nightmare now don’t have no preacher, no sheriff.”

“I trust that God will provide, as he provided an answer to your town’s predicament.” She straightened her crimson vestments and addressed the saloon. “I will collect Nightmare’s tithe from the chapel to put you right with the Church. If I pass this way again, I expect a name more appropriate on the town sign.”

***

The bonfire sent sparks floating into the vibrant carpet of stars above her. The scent of junipers and scrub tinged the smoke that drifted around her campsite. The heat of the day had stolen away before the frigid embrace of the night.

She took a torn page from the chapel’s library out of her pouch and smoothed it flat over the desert hardpan. Renditions of holy marks crowded the page. She tapped her brass finger on the mark of Aequitas.

“Twenty thousand dollars,” Megara’s sultry voice purred in her ear. “From a town so modest.”

“More than I dreamed,” she said, placing a mirror atop the money chest to compare the mark on her forehead with that on the page. The needle heating next to the fire hissed as she dipped it in the pot of ink.

“Thy mark improved needs must heal.”

“Next town’s a fortnight away. Time enough for you to feast on nightmares fresh before Cardinal Aequitas arrives to banish you.” She touched the needle to her mark and relished the spark of pain. “And mayhaps receive a tithe even greater than twenty thousand.”