A Prequel to Sour Lake

Sort of. One of the main characters in Sour Lake was the irascible Ranger Jewel Lightfoot, who shows up midway through the story to lend some grit to the makeshift team of townsfolk who have resolved to take on the creature that is murdering their fellow East Texans. My new novel In the Land of Dead Horses shows us how Sergeant Lightfoot came to know his true calling: battling evil in all its many manifestations in the American Southwest. Here's the first chapter, which--as you will see--doesn't feature Lightfoot at all. Instead we see the manifestation of darkness he'll find himself fighting. Enjoy...

In The Land of Dead Horses

1. The Mine
A Miraculous Discovery—Assessing the Trove—Complications Arise.

J. P. Kelso ran a hand through his greasy hair and allowed himself to savor half a slice of optimism. It was working. The rock was almost out. Ramon’s mules hadn’t been strong enough to budge it—not even with Paco and Norberto pulling alongside them. So Kelso had reluctantly reached into his wallet and sent two of the Mexicans off to buy a horse in San Luis, six miles to the west. The purchase cost him fourteen dollars and most of the day. The horse was a sway-backed old thing, gone in the teeth and ill-tempered to boot, but big and still plenty strong. And now, with the horse, two mules, and four men pulling—four men, because Kelso himself grabbed one of the ropes and heaved against the great weight—the stone was starting to move. It was a massive slab of limestone, cleverly wedged into a three foot-by-three foot aperture in the earth. A ton of dead weight. Maybe two.
But now it was shifting.
Gravel and dirt showered down around it. The mules stamped and danced and Ramon’s quirt snaked out to pop the flesh of the nearest animal. Ramon, tall and sullen, had a habit of whipping the animals. Sometimes it irritated Kelso, who had a soft spot for beasts, particularly horses.
Now, though, it seemed appropriate.
“Pull!” said Kelso. “Halar, goddammit!”
Paco grunted as he strained at the rope. He was a big man—the biggest Mexican Kelso had ever seen—and his fleshy shoulders shook with the intensity of his effort. Slowly, ever so slowly, the megalith shifted. It slid toward them. An inch, maybe. Now two. And coming faster. At last the rock stood up on one end and fell toward them in a cloud of dust. The sound was a god’s footstep, a distant thunder clap. The entrance to the little cave stood like a black eye in the side of the arroyo.
The men paused to consider their work. They’d spent three days trying to find the rock. They’d spent another two digging and hacking at the native brush to get to it, several hours hammering a set of steel pins into the boulder, and most of today attempting to pry and pull it from its resting place. It was clearly the right stone—the glyph was unmistakable, and matched the map—but it couldn’t have been any harder to move if it had been cemented in place. Kelso had seriously weighed the possibility of blasting it out, but dismissed this idea for fear of what the dynamite might do to the cave that was supposed to be hidden beyond the rock. And now they’d done it. The entrance was open, but he had no clear plan for what to do next.
Other than the obvious, of course.
Go in.
Paco and Norberto glanced at Kelso. Normally sedate, the Mexicans now seemed fully alert. Funny how the prospect of sudden wealth could boost a man’s faculties, thought Kelso. Only Ramon, their leader, remained reserved. Kelso blotted the sweat from his forehead. He wanted to say something enthusiastic and stirring, but the words eluded him. He was too damn tired. And too damned sober.
“Take the traces off,” he grunted, between gulps of warm water from his canteen.
“Ahora?” answered Norberto. The scrawniest of the Mexicans, further distinguishable by his ruined teeth and the wispy moustache that clung to his upper lip, Norberto was also the hardest to tolerate. He seemed unable to follow a direct order, and echoed every one of Kelso’s commands with a question. He was a skulker. An ingrate. A cutter of corners. Kelso was going to be glad to be rid of the skulking sonofabitch when they found what they’d come for.
“Si. Now. Let the animals rest.”
They sat for a while in the dust, contemplating the toes of their boots and waiting for their hearts to slow. The sun had set below the western rim of the little arroyo and the canyon floor, choked with achiote and mesquite trees, was shading from purple to blue. In a few minutes the sweat in their shirts would start to cool as the evening grew chilly. Kelso wasn’t going to wait for that. He’d never been able to sit still. Since the age of sixteen, he’d spent his life on the move, always searching, sometimes fleeing, perpetrator and victim both of a seemingly endless series of small scams and disappointments, from the frozen fields of the Klondike south through the teeming foothills of the Comstock in Nevada and now down into the harsh brown badlands of the Chihuahan Desert. Though he wasn’t always as honest as he might have been with his partners and investors, he nevertheless believed in his soul that treasures rested beneath the earth, just waiting for the man with sufficient energy, intelligence, and good fortune to find them. Most of the time, that man wasn’t him. But maybe his luck was changing. He was nearly destitute deep in the middle of nowhere, sweltering in the autumn sun of west Texas and surrounded by the gloomiest sons of whores he’d ever had the displeasure to work with. The Mexicans he traveled with didn’t even drink, for Christ’s sake. He’d never known a Mexican to refuse a tipple. And yet faith strengthened him still. He was John Patrick Kelso from County Clare, by way of the Bowery and a dozen more sordid neighborhoods to boot. But on the way up. Watched over by saints. IMPRESARIO OF THE UNDERWORLD, his business card said. MINER OF THE WORLD’S LOST WONDERS. TREASURE FINDER. He had a well-heeled client waiting for news back in Austin—a client who’d shown no qualms at all in funding his dig in the first place. Incredibly, the cave was right where the Mexicans’ battered old map had said it would be. And now it was open. So maybe it was his turn at last. Fortune and glory. Champagne and chocolates. Women stroking the soft skin on the back of his neck. The entrance to the cave loomed like an invitation. Or a challenge. Was it one more rat hole in a long line of ruined prospects? Or was it finally, after so many disappointments, the dark portal to his own prosperity?
There was only one way to find out.
“Listo?” he said at last. He stood and swatted the dirt from the seat of his pants.
“Si,” said Ramon. “But I enter first. Primero.”
Kelso shook his head at the absurdity of the suggestion. In truth, though, he might have guessed. Ramon was the undisputed ringleader of the three Mexicans. He was slender and observant, and he rarely spoke. He wore his long hair in a ponytail that fell to the middle of his spine. By some invisible but unquestioned authority his word was law. Paco and Norberto made sure he ate first. They carried his personal effects—two leather satchels and a duffel bag, the contents of which Kelso had never managed to see. Ramon had been carefully deferential to Kelso all during the trip. But he’d clearly had to think about it on several occasions. Now, perhaps, he was thinking again. The Irishman knew he had to respond decisively. “Not a chance. I’m first.”
“Nosotros carta, senor.” Ramon said this as if it settled the question. “Our map.”
“Your map. Mi plata.”
“Yours?”
“As far as you’re concerned, yes. I obtained the funds. I paid for the provisions. Therefore, it’s my expedition. I go first.”
Ramon glanced at his companions before he gave a small shrug. “As you say.”
“You’re damn right as I say. What about you, Paco? You ready?”
Paco remained impassive. In the twilight the big man’s mouth looked like a gash across his face. Kelso recognized this as his time-to-do business demeanor. In less focused moments he smiled easily, the better to show off the gold caps on his two front teeth.
Kelso wrinkled his nose and spat.
“Saints preserve us. I’ve had livelier company in a graveyard, so I have. There’s something dead in there, if you hadn’t noticed. Smells like Satan’s arse. Light the torches, amigos.”
The sound was unmistakable. It was the sudden deep drumming of hooves. The pack animals were running. Leaving.
“Jesus, Mary, and Joseph. They weren’t hobbled?”
“Just tied, jefe,” said Norberto. “But they don’t go far, I think.”
“You’d better hope not. We’re gonna need ‘em to haul off whatever we find in here. Let’s take a look.”
The entrance to the cave was so small that they had to crawl for several yards, but it led to a narrow passage that was almost five feet tall. The passage proceeded gradually downward. Holding his torch directly in front of him, Kelso couldn’t see more than a few feet forward. He heard the commotion before he could spot it, and was therefore startled when a swarm of bats came churning past them, all frenzy and confusion. Kelso ducked and pulled his chin to his chest. The skinny man at the rear of the file dropped flat on his stomach. Kelso looked back and couldn’t help but laugh.
“Need to change your trousers, Norberto?”
The Mexicans either didn’t get the joke or didn’t think it was funny. Perhaps they were too busy surveying the cave. Just a few yards further in, the passage opened up into a rectangular chamber, roughly the size of a rich man’s library and at least thirty feet from floor to ceiling. Variations in the darkness indicated there were gaps in the rock that formed the roof of the cave. Against the near wall of the chamber stood two piles of bones, many of them broken. Two bronze helmets lay nearby, alongside an ancient halberd.
The torches flickered in a sudden draft. Silence hung like a shroud from the distant ceiling of the cavern. The smell of bats and bat shit and foul water weighted the air. And beneath it, like the piers of a crumbling house, the stench of death.
“Mother of God,” Kelso whispered. “What is this place?”

*
Near the far end of the chamber stood what looked, at first glance, like a row boat hewn from an outcropping of the native rock. Kelso moved toward it, stumbling over the remnants of a wooden shield as he did so. Squinting in the gloom, he used the torch to inspect the images carved into the stone. Once he’d focused, he recoiled involuntarily from the bizarre iconography. Strutting demons held daggers as they drove tiny human figures in chains before them. A snake coiled around the legs of a naked woman, its monstrous head looming directly above her, its mouth open wide as if to swallow her whole. A creature with the body of a man and the features of a bat held a severed human head as if to display it as a warning to any viewer who should happen upon the scene in the long centuries to come.
The Irishman realized with a shudder that he was looking at something unbelievably strange and old. His Catholicism had been beaten into him many years before by a grandmother who was fond of lashing him with a leather strap as she recited the names of the saints. It was her voice he heard now, screaming at him to look away, to hide his eyes. The dark doings of pagans, she shrieked. Abominations in the eyes of the Lord! But something about the pictures held Kelso in place. Lurid and unsettling as they were, it was several minutes before he could break the stares of the figures that gazed out at him from the carvings, cold and implacable, amused at his horror, frozen forever in their acts of carnage.
It was the odor that brought him back. The smell of mortality, rank and cloying, like an invisible poison in the room. A voice in the back of his brain suggested he get back to business and out of this temple of shadows as quickly as possible.
Kelso’s vertebrae crackled as he straightened to examine the wall of the cavern in front of him. Unlike the other walls, which were rough and unfinished, this one had been planed to geometrical perfection, and elaborately sculpted to mimic the facade of a massive palace, with columns and doors, a symmetrical roof line, and a giant throne carved into the rock. A stack of weapons—spears, staffs, and a pair of strangely shaped clubs—stood to the right of the throne. A mound of skulls rose at its foot. The wall receded into darkness where it joined with the cavern ceiling, but every foot of it seemed to have been decorated with the intricate carvings. Kelso realized he was gaping. A scrap of burlap drifted away from his torch and the Irishman followed its path to the floor. This brought him back to the contents of the little boat. But it wasn’t a boat, he realized. It was a sarcophagus, fashioned so that the halves of each end curved to meet the other like the bow and stern of a ship.
Kelso took two steps forward and gazed down into the sarcophagus at the figure of a man—or what might have been a man at some point in the past. The mummified corpse was naked but for a black loincloth around its midsection and a crown of beaten gold encircling its head. Age and decay had eaten away the thing’s features, leaving the face looking grotesquely angular and vaguely threatening, with pronounced cheekbones and enlarged nasal sockets. Through some trick of the arid environment here on the eastern outskirts of the Chihuahuan Desert the eyes were intact and open, though yellowed and sunk deep in their sockets. The lips were drawn back in a grinning rictus of death, exposing age-darkened teeth filed to sharp points. The figure’s arms rested beside it on what Kelso guessed was some sort of soft scrim or sheet, though it looked almost as if the material was fastened to the mummy’s inner forearms. The hands lay open and unlined, ending in long black fingernails. The lid of the sarcophagus, also cut from solid stone, lay broken in pieces on the far side of the vessel.
Looting bastards, thought Kelso. They’ve been here before me. Such was the case in Egypt. After centuries of theft and plunder, there was precious little left in the tombs of the pharaohs to be carried off. But if looters had been active here in central Texas, they’d missed something important. Kelso’s attention drifted to the dark jewels in the cadaver’s crown.
Finally.
Treasure.
He was two feet away from a fortune. After all these years of dirt and doubt and dismay it was suddenly right here in front of him. His heart was pounding in his chest. He felt tears start in his eyes. He reached for the diadem without quite realizing what he was doing. Just before he could touch it, though, his arm was seized and held by a dark brown hand.
Paco.
The Irishman chuckled. He’d jumped a foot at the unexpected contact. But the big man’s grip was powerful, and the next thing Kelso felt was a surge of anger.
“You daft brute. What are you—?”
He raised the torch with his other hand and glanced at the men around him. They were contemplating the figure in the sarcophagus with rapt attention.
Almost devotion.
“Who gave you leave,” said Ramon, “to steal from a god?”
It wasn’t the shock of hearing Ramon speak his suddenly unaccented English that raised the flesh on Kelso’s forearms. It wasn’t even the words he spoke, which made little sense to the Irishman. It was the realization that the three Mexicans who were his only company in this underground chamber were gazing at him with unmistakably bad intentions, their dark eyes glittering in the flickering light of the torches. It was the sense that he’d misjudged his companions, and that this misjudgment was going to be awfully difficult to remedy.
“Sweet baby Jesus,” said Kelso. “And what manner of mischief is this?”
The Mexicans were silent.
“Let’s not louse this up, boys. Hermanos. We’ve come too far. You want a bigger share? It can be arranged. This stuff—” Kelso gestured at the weapons and stone statues around them—“will bring a fortune back east. It’s got to be five hundred years old. My client has already offered...”
“We don’t give a damn about your client.”
Kelso tried to work up a companionly chuckle. He’d been in tight spots before, and he knew the drill. He had to keep talking, first of all. Nothing terrible could happen as long as you kept talking. “Aw, hell. Neither do I, if you want the truth of it. He’s got the soul of a bookkeeper, that one. So let’s forget him and get down to brass tacks, as they say. Is it the gold you’ll be wanting? Hey. Listen. You fancy the crown?”
Ramon shook his head.
“There is only one thing we want from you, Senor Kelso.”
Paco placed one of his huge hands on Kelso’s shoulder.
“It is a great honor,” he said, his voice a low rumble.
Norberto chuckled behind him. He was so close that Kelso could feel the little man’s breath on the back of his neck, sticky and warm, like an unwanted kiss.
“But maybe,” he whispered, “you don’t like it so much.”
Kelso wondered if he was going to throw up. But he persevered.
“I’m not opposed,” he insisted, “to any reasonable offer.”
To this statement he added a wink.

*
Say what you will about the Irish. Centuries of madness, mud, and starvation have toughened them up. They don’t die easy. Paco stood six feet four and weighed two hundred and forty pounds. Despite his great bulk, he and Norberto had trouble pinning Kelso’s arms to his sides. When they finally did, the Irishman flailed so violently that he extinguished one of the torches. His screams were an assault all their own, piercing and pathetic. Finally, though, the Mexicans managed to spread the Irishman out on a large, flat rock just a few feet from the sarcophagus. Norberto shattered his knee caps with a chunk of limestone, which ended the kicking, though it did nothing for the noise. Paco finally shoved a wad of burlap into his mouth, which lowered the volume considerably. And now Ramon fished into his woven bag and brought out a thin knife unlike any J.P. Kelso had seen before. The handle was fashioned of wood, elaborately curved, like a question mark, and the blade was hewn from jagged dark stone. The Irishman fought even harder when Ramon ripped open his waistcoat and shirt, and he shrieked and sobbed through whatever invocation Ramon spoke to the skies that couldn’t see them, the heavens beyond the rock roof that hid them from the world.
Ramon, Kelso thought—insofar as he was still capable of thought. Of course. He knew he’d been the leader all along. The man with the mysteriously acquired map. The man with the silent comrades, the muscle, willing—at Ramon’s bidding—to do as the gringo commanded. He’d been watchful, Kelso recalled. As patient as a spider. But no more. Now Ramon’s face was flushed with victory and anticipation. He nodded at the Irishman as if they were partners in an enterprise of secret and terrible significance, and this was when the swindler realized his run of luck had finally expired. He started singing then, an old song, as Irish as the green fields of Mayo. Of course it didn’t sound like a song. Beneath the burlap stuffed in his mouth, Kelso’s ballad sounded more like the cries of an angry baby. Ramon paused, momentarily puzzled. He exchanged glances with his companions. Then he reared back and raised the dagger over his head. The gag popped out of the Irishman’s mouth at that same moment, and the cavern filled with the ancient music of fear and misfortune as overhead, in the darkness, a storm of bats filled the air with the voiceless panic of their sudden flight.