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Old 03-17-2022, 11:02 AM   #4 (permalink)
Trollheart
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Extract from "The Last Temptation of Billy the Kid" (approx. 13,000 words)

He knew he was dead before he hit the ground. Seems he remembered that Ben Franklin had once written that there was nothing certain in this world except death and taxes, and while Billy had had no truck with the taxman, leaving such things as bank and train robberies to those better suited to them, like Jesse James and the Youngers, or Butch Cassidy and the Wild Bunch, and as a consequence (or coincidence, he was never sure which, nor cared) the US Government had not seen fit to bother him, death was very familiar to him. After riding side by side with that particular hombre – even if they was more like partners than adversaries – he sure recognised the Grim Reaper when his erstwhile riding buddy rode up to say howdy.

So this was it, he thought, less annoyed about being shot than the manner in which it had occurred. As something of a celebrity in the New Mexico territories, he had always assumed he would die in a gunfight, a shootout or at the hands of one of the many posses various law enforcement officials had set after him, probably most likely thanks to good ol’ Governor Wallace, who had been trying to capture him since he reneged on his promise to pardon the young gunslinger. Shot down, as it were, in a blaze of glory: that was how he wanted to go, how any young gun wanted to go. Like the Vikings a thousand years ago, of whom Billy knew nothing but surely would have approved, an honourable death in battle was what he had hoped for. What’s the point of reaching sixty or seventy and dyin’ in bed? No, go out on your feet, gun blazing at your hip, burning your legend into the consciousness of history. Make them remember you. Make sure nobody ever forgot the name William H. Bonney, better known as Billy the Kid.

But dyin’ here, alone in the dark, unable to see who had shot him, unable to react, defend himself, give a good account before he left, if that was what the Almighty willed? Not the end he had seen for himself. A cowardly thing to do, he mused sourly, as he listened to the blood roar in his ears and his heart begin to slow, unable to pump that blood on account of having a large bullet-hole right through its center. Shoot a man down without any warning, defenceless without his gun, and in the gloom of his bedroom. Bad as shooting a man in the back, and that was bad in Billy’s book.

Of course, in some ways he had known this was how it would end for him. Some years ago, just for fun, he had wandered into one of them county fair deals and allowed a fortune teller to read his palm. Mind you, much of the reason for that was on account of her bein’, far from old and wrinkled and ugly, young, vibrant and very pretty indeed. Mexican gal, black raven hair falling to her slim shoulders, the white dress cut in such a way as to expose more of the flesh of those shoulders than was strictly decent, but Billy wasn’t much concerned with decency. She had smiled at him, and he had sat down, and she had read his palm. But her smile had wavered, vanished as her eyes darkened and she shook her head.

She had looked up then, the smile returning, but one thing Billy was was a good reader of people, and he quietly warned the Mexican woman to give it to him straight. Not that he believed in that nonsense, but he did his best to deal fairly with people and felt it only right that folks ought to repay that respect. He had told her he would know if she was lying. Of course, he had no way of knowing that, but another of Billy’s talents was being real convincing; the six-shooter nestling at his side played a big part in that, he knew. This lady might not know exactly who he was, but she would have no doubt he was an experienced gunman, a cold-hearted cowboy who wouldn’t even think once of shooting her dead if she gave him reason to.

Not that he would, but sometimes people did all the convincing themselves, and if it was to his advantage, well, Billy was not about to go correcting them on their misinterpretations of his temperament, now was he? So, both reluctantly it seemed and with no small amount of fear for her own life (perhaps she was the genuine article and knew whose palm she was reading, knowledge sure to terrify anyone about to deliver such news) she told him what she had read in his future.

“You will die in the dark, alone,” she had told him, her voice flat, emotionless, as if she did not speak the words herself but was merely a vessel for someone or something else to convey the information. “You will never know who your killer is, nor will you have a chance to defend yourself. It will be very quick, over in seconds.” Then her eyes had burned brightly, flashed and lent further credence to the belief that something... something other was in possession of her. “Beware those you call your friends, Senor Bonney.”

The warning had not, at the time, had any great effect on Billy. He knew that many of the men he had ridden with, been imprisoned with, killed with during his short life would likely turn upon him for the enormous reward money being offered for his capture, or even for the prestige and notoriety of being the man who did Billy the Kid in. He had not needed Senorita Marquez to admonish him not to let anyone get too close, not to trust anyone, and really he never had. A lone wolf who occasionally ran with this or that pack, Billy trusted only one person in this world. Whether Pete Maxwell had sold him out to his pursuers or not he could not say – though he was pretty sure, despite the inky gloom into which he had walked just a few moments ago, that his old friend was there in the bedroom – but he knew who had killed him.

Garret was standing over him now, shaking his head (again, barely discernible in the darkness), no doubt proud of himself for having achieved what no other lawman in New Mexico had been capable of. Truth to tell, Sheriff Pat Garret had been on his trail for some time, and had even captured the notorious outlaw once before. Billy had escaped of course, but there was no escaping this. This was the end.

As if to taunt him (which Billy found a little odd, as he had never considered the sheriff a particularly cruel or vindictive man, just a guy doing his job, which Billy had to respect) Garrett was talking to him, though his voice sounded strange and the words didn’t sound right.

“Awful shame,” he said, “endin’ such a promisin’ life in such a manner. Don’t seem right, somehow.”

Billy reckoned he must be just about to step over that threshold and meet his maker, as he couldn’t feel any pain. Squinting down at his chest in the darkness he could have sworn the blood was no longer staining his jacket, but that must have been, he decided, a combination of the poor lighting and the onset of death. He tried to answer but found he couldn’t. That wasn’t surprising in the least. Dying men usually had little to say. Too busy gasping their last. Garrett was talking again.

“Don’t have to be this way, you know.”

Even in the gathering gloom, which, in addition to his eyesight failing from impending death, Billy could have sworn the sheriff’s eyes twinkled. Or flashed.

Now Garrett hunkered down beside him, and he wasn’t.
Garrett, that is. He wasn’t Garrett.

Billy knew Pat Garrett reasonably well – you tend to remember the details of the man who caught you and threw you in jail – and this was not him. This was nobody he knew. A stranger.

“Man oughta have a choice in life,” said the stranger in a philosophical voice. Suddenly, he grinned, his perfectly white teeth all but gleaming in the dark. Billy felt an almost irresistible urge to shield his eyes, though he couldn’t move any part of him, leastways his arms. “Or death,” added the Stranger.

Yeah. Stranger. Not just a stranger; this guy deserved the capitalisation. He wasn’t just some drifter, some unknown person, some nobody. No, no way. This was not nobody. This was about as Somebody as you could get. Billy had no idea why he knew this, but he knew it, was as certain about it as he ever had been about anything in his life.

The Stranger looked directly at him, and suddenly Billy could see everything as clear as if lamps had flooded the room with light, or as if it were day and the sunlight streaming through the windows showed him every detail of the place where he had just died.

Confirming that the Stranger was not Garrett, he now saw the sheriff standing by the bed, where his friend Maxwell also stood, the latter in a half-crouch, rising from the bed as if to either warn Billy (too late of course) or tackle Garrett, or perhaps even to point him out to his killer. There he is! That’s Bonney! Shoot him! No way to know which interpretation was correct; Pete Maxwell’s stance left room for doubt either way, though Billy did notice that his friend’s gun was still holstered, and from the position of his body Maxwell had not been making any attempt to draw it, so maybe he had betrayed the Kid. Who knew, and what did it matter now?

What did matter, and was surely a result of his losing consciousness (why was he not dead yet? Shouldn’t take this long, surely?) was that neither of the two figures by the bed were moving. As if caught in one of those new-fangled photographs, both Maxwell and Garrett seemed frozen in time. Garrett’s gun, pointed up at a sharp angle (no doubt following the recoil as it had been fired) was wreathed in smoke from the discharge, and yet, even this failed to move. Garrett’s eyes, narrowed to slits, surely the better to see in the gloom, looked over at the door through which Billy had made his last ever entrance in this world, and did not flick down to where the stricken gunslinger now lay, while those of Maxwell seemed to focus on Garrett’s revolver, his mouth open in a shout that could, again, have been a warning to Billy or a shout to alert Garrett that his long-sought prey had entered the room. Behind both men, a glass of whisky, knocked over as the two had jumped up, spilled over the side of the locker by the bed, its amber stream stopping halfway to the ground, suspended there as if it were an icicle that had hardened and remained where it was, never reaching the floor.

A quirk of fate had placed Billy in view of the clock, and he now saw that its hands too had been stopped in their usually inexorable journey around the face, prevented from joining together like separated lovers as midnight struck. The longer, thinner minute hand stood just past the painted numeral of eleven, while the hour hand waited impatiently at twelve, but it seemed the tryst would not be completed this night. Not only the men in the room, not only the objects therein, but time itself seemed to stand still. Everything was frozen in place.

Except, of course, for himself.

And the Stranger.

“You want a second chance, Henry?” It was he who now spoke, and his voice, though kind of friendly in an offhand sort of way, was very cold, as if his teeth, his very tongue were made of ice. To his surprise, Billy found he could talk. Not only could he talk, but he could do so without pain lancing through his body. In fact, there was, as he had already remarked to himself, no pain. None at all. And now that the room was brightly lit (whether through the agency of this mysterious grinning Stranger or because he was heading “into the light”) Billy could confirm that he was no longer bleeding. Looking down – an action that caused him, again, and to his considerable surprise, no pain – he could see the smoking hole that had been blown in his chest, could see the dark stain colouring his jacket and the shirt beneath, spreading out from the entry wound like some sort of scarlet spider, but the liquid had stopped dripping. His clothes weren’t dry, for the blood had soaked into his pants as it had exploded out of the wound and spurted down his legs, splashing his boots. But they weren’t getting any wetter.

The wound was still there, but it wasn’t leaking his life fluid out onto the wooden floor any more. The pain was gone, the blood had stopped, and everything bar him and this Stranger seemed to be frozen in place.
Surely, now, he was dead?

“Yes... and no.”
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