Hawthorne: Tales of a Weirder West by Heath Lowrance

Author:Heath Lowrance [Lowrance, Heath]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: General
Publisher: BEAT to a PULP
Published: 2013-10-16T06:00:00+00:00

The girl's name was Anpao, she told him, and the boy was Enapay. "His name means 'to give a brave appearance'," she said with a faint smile at her cousin.

"Yes," Enapay said. "But that doesn't mean I'm not brave. I am a man, cousin. I am a warrior."

Hawthorne said, "Warriors don't usually run away, boy."

Enapay shrugged.

Earlier, the boy and Hawthorne had removed the old woman's corpse and Anpao cleaned up as well as she could. They had a small store of food and water in the cave, enough to last a couple of days, and the three of them sat and ate by lamp light.

Anpao squatted down next to an oddly long narrow sack, said, "They attacked our camp very early this morning, before light. All nine of them. They had been waiting, I think."

"For what?" Hawthorne asked.

"For there to be no sign of your Army. I believe ... I believe they fear the whites, for some reason. They can sense any threat against them, no matter where it is."

"A rival tribe?"

Anpao and Enapay glanced at each other, and Anpao said, "That would not be quite accurate. They are demons, in the most literal sense you can imagine."

She looked as if she expected him to balk at the idea, but he only nodded.

The lamp light danced, and Anpao looked at the ground. She used a knife to slice off a chunk of dried venison, ate it. When she had swallowed, she said, "The Iktomi are ... ancient. Some believe they are the bastard offspring of the Spider Woman, who wove the world out of silk in the dawn of time. The wretched offspring of a brutal rape. But they rise from the earth in times when blood soaks the Black Hills. And now, White Man, there is more blood here than ever before."

"How did they do that to the old woman?"

Anpao gazed at the ground where her elder had been, at the stained spot in the dirt that couldn't come clean. She said, "They ... they simply ... what is your English word? Manifest? They manifest their arachnid phantoms, ghosts seeking incarnation. They ... seed their victims."

Hawthorne frowned. "Seed?"

"With the taint of their fallen grace. The spider ... it symbolizes many things. It is creation, and it is destruction as well. The Iktomi—they feed on the fear and hate in man's brain. It makes them real."

Hawthorne didn't question any of what the girl said. He had seen many nightmarish creatures in his wanderings, had destroyed countless manifestations of evil. He was not a skeptic in matters of the supernatural. But one question nagged him. He said, "How do you know all this?"

Enapay spoke up, "Because her great-grandfather was the warrior who defeated the Spider Tribe over a hundred years ago, when the Lakota first came to these hills and fought the Arapahoe to keep them."

Hawthorne said, "So, they can be defeated."

Anpao looked him hard in the eyes. "Yes. Perhaps. But it would take a special human being. And the bow of my great-grandfather.

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