Quaternity Read online

  Praise for Kenneth Mark Hoover

  “The Old West wasn’t all darkness and murder, unless your name is John Marwood, a man, by his own assessment, ‘with a demon coiled like a watch spring in his marrow.’ Simply put—He is a killer. Yet that isn’t the half of him, and his true nature and his destiny alike remain a secret even to himself. Kenneth Mark Hoover tells the story of an immortal champion in an American West that never was, and so is all the truer for it.”

  —Richard Parks, author of Yamada Monogatari: To Break the Demon Gate

  “With Quaternity, Hoover paints a sparse and unflinching landscape, taking the reader down the dark trail his protagonist John Marwood rides while seeking what is lost and unremembered. As the gnawing hunger in his soul drives Marwood toward his ultimate destiny, the west as it was unfurls before the reader under Hoover’s steady hand. If you love realistic westerns and dark fantasy, this is the book for you!”

  —Michael Merriam, author of Last Car to Annwn Station and The Horror at Cold Springs

  “With a voice both sparse and poetic, Hoover takes on the hoary cliches of Western fiction and dismantles them one by one. In Quaternity, Hoover’s unflinching look at evil will challenge everything you know about yourself and the world we live in.”

  —Melissa Lenhardt, author of Stillwater

  “Hoover does it again. Quaternity starts with a bang and doesn’t quit until a satisfying conclusion. This is my kind of weird west. Love it!”

  —Jennifer Brozek, author of Apocalypse Girl Dreaming and Never Let Me Sleep

  “In Quaternity, his second outing in the richly evocative Haxan series, Kenneth Mark Hoover once again plunges us headlong into the bloody-minded fury of the Old West, mixing the raw violence of time and place with the eerie tenderness of a fantastical fever dream to gripping, visceral effect.”

  —Melia McClure, author of The Delphi Room

  “Kenneth Mark Hoover’s vivid prose delivers an unflinching look at the violent horrors and the stark beauty of the Old West.”

  —Amy Raby, author of Assassin’s Gambit and The Fire Seer

  “Twice as vicious as its predecessor, Quaternity is operatically mythological, a poetic, doom-laden Western soaked in blood and frenzy. This Cormac McCarthyesque terror fantasia of a prequel both frames and outstrips Hoover’s Haxan, lending it the perfect amount of context, as Hoover’s literally eternal protagonist Marshall John Marwood excavates his past in order to accept his future. Driven by philosophical musings both monstrous and humane, Marwood tracks an interlocking chain of massacres towards a lost city founded on “the long blood of violence,” the same dark current underlying almost everything in Hoover’s lawless, ultra-violent frontier . . . yet certain spots of brightness still occur here and there, inevitable collisions between fate and free will, love and justice. This is a hard book to read, but you’ll savour its bitter aftertaste.”

  —Gemma Files, author of the Hexslinger series, and We Will All Go Down Together: Stories of the Five-Family Coven

  Quaternity © 2015 by Kenneth Mark Hoover

  Cover artwork © 2015 by Erik Mohr

  Interior design by © 2015 by Jared Shapiro

  All Rights Reserved.

  This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are either a product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

  Distributed in Canada by

  Publishers Group Canada

  76 Stafford Street, Unit 300

  Toronto, Ontario

  M6J 2S1 Canada

  Toll Free: 800-747-8147

  e-mail: [email protected]

  Distributed in the U.S. by

  Diamond Comic Distributors, Inc.

  10150 York Road, Suite 300

  Hunt Valley, MD 21030

  Phone: (443) 318-8500

  e-mail: [email protected]

  Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication

  Hoover, Kenneth Mark, 1959-, author

  Quaternity / Kenneth Mark Hoover.

  Issued in print and electronic formats.

  ISBN 978-1-77148-361-2 (pbk.) -- ISBN 978-1-77148-362-9 (ebook)

  I. Title.

  PS3608.O625Q38 2015 813’.6 C2015-900096-3

  C2015-900097-1

  Edited by Andrew Wilmot

  Proofread by Michael Matheson

  CHIZINE PUBLICATIONS

  Toronto, Canada

  www.chizinepub.com

  [email protected]

  We acknowledge the support of the Canada Council for the Arts which last year invested $20.1 million in writing and publishing throughout Canada.

  Published with the generous assistance of the Ontario Arts Council.

  For John Kenneth Arbour

  “I do not point to the evil and pain of existence with the finger of reproach, but rather entertain the hope that life may one day become more evil and more full of suffering than it has ever been.” —Friedrich Nietzsche

  “I foresee that man will resign himself each day to new abominations, and soon that only bandits and soldiers will be left.” —Jorge Luis Borges

  “Hell is truth seen too late.” —Thomas Hobbes

  PART I

  The Long Red Light of the West

  CHAPTER 1

  The killer summered in Camp Eagle Pass, digging irrigation ditches for a plate of beans a day and found.

  In Galveston he rode guard for a mule train shipping dry freight back up through Texas. After falling out with the owner, he quit the salt sea thunder for life in the interior.

  The following months were ones of gnawing hunger and wanton theft for John Marwood. He walked into a Waco bank with his gun drawn. For five days he fought a running battle along the winding Brazos River and scattered oak mottes. Shotgun empty. Two cartridges left in his single-action .44 calibre Colt Dragoon. He lost the posse in the thick live oak and crumbling hill country of central Texas.

  On the first of November 1868, he rode into Neu-Braunfels. Raw sleet pelted his head and piled like torn rags in the road ruts. At an Indian trading post he upgraded his outfit. He purchased gunpowder, beans, coffee, salt, and lead enough to run pistol balls.

  He pulled for Laredo and rented a hotel room overlooking a convent. And there he thought about the men he must kill.

  From his second-floor window Marwood watched the solemn black robes walk between garden rows and marble statuary. He was alone in the world. A professional hunter, this did not trouble him. Throughout his life, what parts he remembered, he often lived alone, apart from other men.

  When he did seek out their company it was as much to kill them for bounty as anything else.

  After cleaning his gun he got into bed. The bronze church bell pealed matins, vespers, evensong. The bells were ringing when he fell asleep. When he woke, they were ringing still.

  He took supper in a dirt-floor cantina and bought an hour with a sloe-eyed Mexican girl. She sat at his table, dressed in long green velvet with the top half of her breasts exposed. Her blue-black hair fell to her waist. She was emaciated, barefoot, filthy.

  “I never go outside.” When she smiled he saw her lower teeth were broken. “My feet, they are always blue with cold.”

  Marwood followed her upstairs. She undressed and told him her name was Adoración. Marwood asked her if she had family. He did not think she did—he recognized a kindred spirit.

  “My father is a poor dirt farmer,” she said. “After the drought we had to slaughter stock and he sold me to
a whiskey drummer, who then sold me to this cantina. Jorge Maypearl owns this building. He is a most cruel man. He beats us so the bruises, they do not show.”

  She laid her dress on the back of a wooden chair. Marwood hung his gun on a bedpost and took off his pants.

  “My mother was a schoolteacher,” she went on. “She taught me English. She drank and met a Negro gambler from Baltimore. That is why my father hates me. I remind him of the wife who left.”

  “Have you no one at all?”

  “I had a baby last year, but it died before I had it baptized. Every night before I go to bed I say a prayer for its wicked soul.”

  Adoración turned down the embroidered counterpane and slipped into bed. She wore a frayed ivory chemise with a rounded neckline. There were stains down the front. She put her arms around his neck.

  Afterward, she watched from the rumpled bed with dark and wounded eyes while he dressed. There was no sound in the room other than her sobbing, the filtered traffic from the thoroughfare, and the bronze church bells ringing.

  Marwood put on his hat and descended the stairs. Maypearl stacked glasses behind the bar. He had a thick black moustache, a clipped beard with thinning hair, and mud-brown eyes. There was a fresh knife wound under his left ear. The scar was badly sutured with Yucca fibre, the puckered flesh proud and inflamed where it met the jaw.

  “You enjoyed Adoración?” Maypearl asked in a thick voice. He was dressed in a bright blue guayabera and black pants. The collar, cuffs, and seams of his clothes were frayed and ragged, and the elbows patched.

  “Coffee.”

  Maypearl poured a cup. “She is la amada de uno, yes? The cowboys like her very much.”

  Marwood drank the coffee black. There were four Mexican men in the cantina playing monte at a back table, and two girls watching with disinterest. He studied the men in the fly blown mirror behind the bar. The sour sawdust on the floor stank. On a deer antler hung a distended pig bladder filled with pulque.

  “You are needing work, señor?” Maypearl asked.

  “Maybe. Why?”

  “You have a gun. You fight with the pistola?”

  Marwood met his eyes. “Who wants to know?”

  “I had a man to protect my girls.” Maypearl shrugged. “He got drunk one night and tried to kick a goat. He fell into the del Norte and drowned. I need a man who is not a bufón.”

  “I’m not interested.”

  “Por favor, señor.”

  “How much does it pay?”

  “Nothing, but you can chingar the girls all you want.”

  Marwood pushed his empty cup forward. Maypearl refilled it from a blue enamel coffee pot.

  “I have no money, señor.” Maypearl blew his nose and wiped the bar with the dirty rag. “I pay sin tax. The doctor comes twice a month to inspect the whores for pox. Whiskey and clothes and broken furniture erase my profit. I will tell you a thing, señor. There is no money in whores. This is Texas. There is money in religion and politics and cattle. But never whores.”

  Adoración came downstairs and sat beside the rough adobe wall. The batwing doors to the cantina were latched open. Lighted carriages and wobbling, squeaking carretas rolled past. She watched them go by.

  “Adoración likes you,” Maypearl said.

  “Is that right.”

  Maypearl placed a hand over his heart. “On the blood of the Christ, señor.”

  Marwood paid for his coffee. “I’m not interested.”

  But Maypearl was not one to give up easily. “Señor,” he urged, “I am desperate. Where can I find you if you change your mind?”

  “I took a room at La Posada.”

  Maypearl smiled. “That is a fine hotel.”

  “Yes. You can hear the church bells.”

  Marwood pushed through the doors of the bar and looked up and down the thoroughfare, then checked the windows of the buildings opposite him. He crossed the wide street and walked to the livery stable to see about his horse, a narrow-chested grey mare with a round back and long legs. He returned to La Posada, retrieved his room key from the desk clerk, and mounted the stairs.

  On the first landing two men emerged from rooms on either side. Both had their hands inside their coats and were coming straight for him. Marwood pulled his gun and shot the first man point blank in the face. The noise from the Colt was terrific; the reverberation shook loose dust from the vigas and rattled a glass lamp in the wall.

  The back of the man’s head disintegrated. The wall splattered with brains and bone and blood in an upward spray that reached the vigas and ceiling lathes. His knees bowed and his feet skittered out from under him. As his boot heels rapped down the wooden stairs with staccato thumps, Marwood turned to the second man, who had drawn a small, single-shot derringer from his black Mackinaw.

  Marwood couldn’t turn his heavy gun in line to shoot fast enough. He clubbed the derringer aside and drove an elbow into the man’s chest. The assassin rebounded off the wall, gun hand wavering. Marwood kicked his knee with the sharp edge of his boot heel, tearing cloth and skin. The assassin brought his gun to bear and snap fired. Searing flame and heat ripped Marwood’s forearm.

  Something inside Marwood thundered. All he saw was red heat and hate and this man standing between him and the gates of death. There was nothing Marwood could do to save his life if he wanted to, and he did not. He was under control of the blind thing.

  Marwood whipped the octagonal barrel of his gun across the man’s cheekbone. The assassin reeled back and grabbed the blood-slicked bannister. Marwood came down the stairs after him. The assassin tried to get his legs under him, but Marwood kicked him in the jaw and stomped his face until the bones were broken fragile reeds under pulped skin. A patch of skull glistened red under a flap of hair.

  He rammed the gun barrel against the man’s head. “Are you working for John Chivington?”

  The man’s face and eyes were webbed with blood strings. His hair was in disarray.

  “Were you at Sand Creek?” Marwood asked. “You’re going to die anyway.”

  The assassin tried to speak, choked on the loose teeth in his throat.

  Marwood rolled the hammer back and fired. He shoved the body away with his boot, watched it roll down the last few steps and come to rest on a cochineal carpet in the lobby.

  “Stop there, you bastard.” A county sheriff rose from behind the front desk, pointing a double-barrelled shotgun at Marwood. Grey hairs dusted the tips of his thick red whiskers and upswept eyebrows.

  “Drop your gun and face that wall,” the sheriff ordered.

  The gun in Marwood’s hand dripped blood. “I am not going to die with my back turned.”

  “I’m keeping you alive long enough to watch you hang.” The twin barrels jerked a notch. “I will not repeat myself, mister.”

  Marwood set the hammer on half cock and placed the Colt on the bottom step. He had learned long ago never drop a loaded gun. Didn’t think much of anyone who thought it was a good idea.

  “Those men tried to assassinate me,” he said, straightening.

  “Well, you sure as hell did for them,” the sheriff replied. Three deputies rushed the hotel lobby with their own guns drawn and flanked the sheriff.

  “All right, boys,” the sheriff said. “But watch out. This mad wolf bites.”

  They manacled his hands in front with Pittsburgh steel. The sheriff walked up, beaming. He was all high hat and collar. Marwood let him get closer. He pulled a buck knife from under his belt and flipped it open. It was a long slender blade that would not close upon his fingers when he struck bone.

  The sheriff saw the knife and slammed the barrel of the shotgun across Marwood’s shoulders, and he fell.

  “Motherless bastard.” The sheriff kicked the knife from his hand. It skittered across the hardwood floor.

  “Goddamn if you ain’t right
, sheriff,” one of the deputies wheezed. “He’s a mean sumbitch.”

  “He’s a dead sumbitch now,” the older lawman said.

  The sheriff lifted and pile drived the gunstock down. There was a long sheer of horrible light, followed by black, and the ancient thing inside Marwood ceased to roar.

  CHAPTER 2

  Marwood awoke in a holding cell, half-buried in freezing mud. The walls were uncured adobe, many yards thick and rotting out. The floor was deep red clay with no bottom.

  His throat burned with unimaginable thirst. He wasn’t manacled, but he could not climb out of the pit. The walls were slick with mud and there was a heavy iron grate three feet above his head. His hooked his trembling fingers through the mesh, but was unable to lift himself from the sucking mud.

  He fell back, exhausted. The muck and mire oozed over his body. Light spilled from a tall window in the hallway outside the sunken cell. It was high morning, but he had lost track of the passing days.

  His flesh was striped with red welts. They covered his back and arms and legs. He could not remember how he got them. He tried to move around in the pit, a creature born of mud and pain, like some ancient thing birthed from a Celtic bog.

  The back of his head was matted and crusted with dried blood. He probed with his fingers and lay gasping when the pain rippled along his spine.

  The pain subsided in hammering waves, his blurred vision returned to normal. Marwood scraped muck from the walls and fashioned a poultice of sorts. He trowelled the cold mud into the wound, gritting his teeth. He could not stop shivering though his skin was hot to the touch. It was as if he had a fever.

  Marwood scraped mud off his chest. By degrees he examined the long worm-like welts covering his body; he was webbed with them. He could not stand because of the deep mud and low iron grating, which he was fine with because he didn’t trust his legs to carry his weight. They were coated to the knees. His feet were numb and his boots were gone. He shivered in the darkness, stocking feet poking red mud.