Prologue
Prologue:
1888 – Borland, New Mexico
They bring the woman forward, this mob of frontiersmen, torches, pitchforks in hand. The night is orange with their fire, hot with their anger, so hot that it rolls off them in waves. Father John can feel it, stinging at his face, scraping, the smoke acrid and making his eyes water. He glances up, blinking back tears. The stars are gone from the sky.
“Let her go!” John says, but the men do not respond. “Let her go, she’s not an animal!”
In response, one of the men, Roger Smith, spits in the witch’s face, and kicks her so hard that her gasping, wheezing breath cuts through the angry yells of the crowd. Silence falls as she retches and chokes on the ground. John takes it in in an instant. Her dress is torn, her back covered in bruises and scratches. Where her skirts have been ripped, he can see blood and filth running down her legs.
"What did you do?” John says. “What in the name of God…”
“God is exactly why we brought her here,” Roger says. “This cunt’s had the devil in her!”
The men cheer their agreement.
“What do you mean?” John says. “This woman is…”
“She’s a slut, and a whore, and she’s sold herself to the devil himself,” Roger says. “You know as well as I do, Father! Look at her!”
He reaches down and with savage strength, twists her hair in his hands and wrenches her face up into the light. John does recognize her. Cassandra. One of the whores who works at Madame MacMurray’s saloon. She’s always friendly to John, always kind, always gentle. And yet, John cannot help but think of the sins she must have committed, willingly, taking pleasure in them. Even now, even seeing her tormented by these savages he calls his parish, he finds himself thinking of her sins.
“Sh-she’s not a witch,” John says at last. “There’s no evidence of any such thing, and even if she was, we live in civilized times.”
He straightens his back, imagines he’s standing at a pulpit, he prays that God will speak through him, that his words will calm the crowd.
“We have courts, we have judges, we have juries,” John says. “Do not derelict your duty to the law, of man or God!”
The crowd murmurs, Roger drops Cassandra to the ground.
“So,” Roger says. “She’s got her claws in you?”
“I…,” John steps back, puzzled, and the heat of the torches is hot on his face. “What? What are you talking about?”
“You’re standing between us and doing what we all know is right,” Roger says. “So, now I’m thinking of why. What’s she done to you?”
“She hasn’t done…,” John says, “We haven’t done…”
“I’ll do the same to you as I did to her,” Roger says, lips peeling back in a grin as the men around him shift uncomfortably. “So tell me…”
John takes another step back, the heat from the flames is burning him, and he can’t think, he can’t even breathe. Roger yanks Cassandra up again, and she screams.
“Is this cunt a witch, or isn’t she?”
John looks at Cassandra, bleeding from a cut on her nose, face streaked with dirt and tears, eyes pleading and glistening. Her hands scrabble against Roger’s, trying to pry them away, and her feet kick, tangled in her skirts, raising a cloud of dust. John sees the dark prints of strong hands on her throat, imagines himself being throttled by those same hands, imagines his own blood spilling in the dirt, imagines all these men taking their turn at beating him until his body is broken.
“Yes,” he whispers. “She’s… she’s a witch.”
“And she’s laid with the devil,” Roger says.
“And she’s laid with the devil,” John says.
“And by God’s own law, we must see her burned,” Roger says.
“And by…,” John’s throat seizes shut. “And by God’s own law, we must see her burned.”
And the fire grows hotter than ever, swirling through the air, as the men scream and cheer and chant, and they drag Cassandra through the town as she screams, spitting on her when she struggles, kicking her. John is swept along with the crowd, and more than once sees men reaching down to grope at her breasts. She kicks and thrashes until two men pick her up by the ankles, and two more by the wrists, and they carry her, writhing and spread-eagled to a pyre they’ve built at the edge of the town.
“Too bad,” John hears someone mutter. “She was the best ride in town.”
Someone laughs in response, and John can only look away, he can only close his eyes.
“No!” Cassandra screams, and John can’t look. He hears it all, hears wood splintering, hears as they drag her on top of the pine logs. He hears the tearing of cloth, Cassandra’s whimpering voice. “Won’t somebody help me?!”
She’s screaming, and there’s only laughter in reply.
John keeps his eyes down, glancing through the crowd, smiling, horrible, angry, all these faces, enraged and distant and full of a twisted joy he cannot understand. He looks up, and sees Cassandra, naked and bloody, lashed to a post.
“She burns!” Roger says. “In the name of Valefar, she burns!”
In the name of… who? is all John can think.
“To the flames we give her,” Roger says, “to the Duke below, we give a child, give to us in turn by her father above!”
“No,” John whispers, but none can hear it. They’re changing, screaming, screeching in a tongue he cannot understand.
John shoves his way through the crowd, pushes past people, trips, picks himself up, but the pyre never seems any closer.
“To the great lion who is a man,” Roger says, “we give this flesh.”
“Stop it!” John says. “Stop! STOP! STOP!”
And the fires go out.
Roger, silhouetted against the blue of the night sky twists and turns, the words dead in his throat. Cassandra continues to cry. The men stop their chanting, and the words John hears are plain English.
“What happened?”
“Did it work?”
“Are we rich?”
And then fire.
Far away, but approaching fast.
“Is that him?”
“It worked! It worked!”
“That’s Valefar?”
“I was imagining something more…”
“I thought it was a lion.”
“Right, and look!”
The bobbing fire in the distance is close enough now to see that it’s a being, wreathed in flame, four legs, sprinting across the desert sands. But John is watching more closely than the rest. John doesn’t assume he knows what it is, and even as the men begin to cheer and shout, even as Roger raises his arms, hooting victory to the air, John sees that this is no lion.
It’s a horse.
And upon it, a rider.
“Valefar! Valefar! We’ve summoned you,” Roger cries out across the plains. “And now, we bind you! Now you will show us the way to…”
A burst of light in the distance.
Roger’s head snaps back, a streak of fire and sparks trailing from his ruined skull. Roger falls on the pyre and doesn’t move.
Cassandra screams, and thrashes with renewed desperation against her ropes.
And then the cold thunder of a rifle-shot echoes across the plains.
A horse and a rider, now they can all see it. They can see the sphere of flames on the horse, growing closer and closer. They’re shifting, glancing at each other, not knowing what to do. John pushes past them in their daze and mounts the pyre. It’s sticky with sap, sharp with splinters, but he manages to crawl over the top edge. The rider is upon the town, and John knows that he cannot look.
“You,” a dreadful voice says, a whisper seeping from the ground like a hundred voices from hell. “Evil men.”
John squints at the knots that keep Cassandra bound, and picks at them with his fingers. They’re shaking to much to be of any use.
“Evil men reek,” the voice continues to whisper, and the rider is circling. John looks his way, and wishes he hadn’t.
The rider’s head is like no human head he has seen. It’s a skull, with eye sockets deep and empty, a jaw moving, speaking, and with each word a puff of embers and ash.
“The knife,” Cassandra’s voice says, small and very close.
“What?” John says, for the skull’s hollow eyes are staring into his, his stomach dropping, the rest of the world following, and all he sees is the fire. The eye sockets aren’t empty at all. They’re full. They’re overflowing with an absence that’s reaching out and reminding John of every horrible thing he’s ever done. What business does he have being a priest?
All at once, he realizes it. What business does he have?
He’s an evil man. As evil as all the rest.
“Rog’s knife,” Cassandra says, more loudly.
“The sins of this world are upon all of you,” the rider says. “And I’ve come to take the devil’s due.”
From the rider’s hands drops a chain, red hot and dripping with flames.
“GET HIS FUCKING KNIFE AND CUT ME LOOSE!” Cassandra screams, and the chain whips forward. A man on the edge of the crowd is gone in a burst of flames, in a scream that echoes and continues long after he is nothing but ash on the ground.
The sight snaps John back to reality, and he looks down. In Roger’s belt is a knife, cruel and sharp, so bright that John can almost hear its keening edge. He pulls it out of the belt, and hacks at Cassandra’s rope. They come apart like uncoiling snakes.
The rider’s horse rears up, and the chain whips in a wide circle. Its tip wraps around a man’s leg, and he’s dragged to the ground as the horse comes back down. His leg is gone, and his scream joins the first. And then another scream, and another and another, as the rider charges into the crowd.
That horrible skull darts this way and that, the mouth open and belching fire and smoke. The men gather themselves, the evil men, and they charge back at the rider, swarming over him, coming away clutching at stumps of burning hands, clothes smoldering, faces stained with white ash. But when twenty men swarm the rider, they drag him off his horse, and the horse wheels and kicks away from him.
“Let’s go!” Cassandra says. Her hand grasps John’s, and she pulls him away from the scene, across the pyre, down the other side.
“Y-your clothes,” John says.
“Fuck my clothes, I’d rather have my life.”
John turns, in time to see a burst of flame, a mushroom cloud of thick, black smoke, glowing from within, and the rider is back on his feet, looking their way.
“You can’t run from me,” the voice is saying, the whisper now a scream, and beneath it, a sound of grinding stones that sounds almost like laughter. “You think you can run, John?”
“Yes we fucking can,” Cassandra pulls his arm, but he’s frozen, staring.
“I CAN FOLLOW YOUR STINK TO THE ENDS OF THE EARTH,” the rider screams, “FLESH AND GUILT AND ROT IN YOUR SOUL!”
One of the men jams his pitchfork into the rider’s ribcage. The rider turns, fixes him with a glare, and the man springs back. Without a sound, the man reaches up to his eyes, and John watches as his fingers, his filth-caked nails, bury themselves in his eyelids. He hears the man’s animal scream, and watches as the blood flows and flows and flows, as the man pulls his hands away from his eye-sockets, clutching fistfuls of red pulp that leak between his fingers, two empty holes left behind. He’s screaming, he’s screaming, he’s screaming when the rider draws a pistol from his belt and sends a bolt of fire through man’s chest.
“Filth,” the rider says, and spits a stream of fire on the corpse.
Cassandra pulls away from John, shouting at him to follow. The rider aims, cocks the flaming skull that sits on his shoulders to one side. He lowers his gun.
“Run, then,” the rider says. “And always remember. You gave her to them. You gave her up. Always remember.”
Their eyes meet, and John knows that he always will.
Ghost Rider: Fallen Angel