THE STEAM MAN OF THE PRAIRIE AND THE DARK RIDER GETS DOWN : A DIME NOVEL

by Joe R. Lansdale

Table of Contents

Foreword

In Search Of

In the Bad Country

The Dark Rider Awakes

Sticks A'Steppin'

Things Get Pissy

Steam All Messed Up

Getting the Shaft

A View from Doom

Ruckus

Epilogue

About the novel: Joe's Recollections

Foreword

SOMEWHERE OUT IN SPACE THE DAMAGED SHUTTLE circled, unable to come down. Its occupants were confused and frightened.

Forever to the left of the ship was a rip in the sky. And through the rip they saw all sorts of things. Daylight and dark. Odd events.

And dat ole shuttle jes go'n roun' and roun' and roun'.

THE STEAM MAN OF THE PRAIRIE AND THE DARK RIDER GET DOWN

A DIME NOVEL

for Philip Jose Farmer

1

In Search Of

The shiny steam man, forty feet tall and twenty feet wide, not counting his ten-foot-high conical hat, hissed across the prairie, farted up hills, waded and puffed through streams and rivers. He clanked and clattered. He made good time. His silver metal skin was bright with the sun. The steam from his hat was white as frost. Inside of him, where the four men rode in swaying leather chairs, it was very hot, even with the steam fan blowing.

But they pushed on, working the gears, valves, and faucets, forever closing on the Dark Rider. Or so they hoped.

Bill Beadle, captain of the expedition, took off his wool cap and wiped the sweat from his face with an already damp forearm. He tried to do this casually. He did not want the other three to know how near heat exhaustion he was. He took deep breaths, ran a hand through his sweat-soaked hair, and put his cap back on. The cap was hot, and though there was really nothing official about his uniform or his title of captain, he tried to live by a code that maintained the importance of both.

Hamner and Blake looked at him casually. They were red-faced and sweat-popped. They shifted uncomfortably in their blue woolen uniforms. Through the stained glass eyes of the steam man they could see the hills they had entered, see they were burned brown from the sun.

It was midday, and this gave them several hours to reach the land of the Dark Rider, but by then it would be night, and the Dark Rider and his minions, the apes in trousers, would be out and powerful.

Only John Feather, their Indian guide, looked cool in his breechcloth and headband holding back his long, beaded, black hair. He had removed his moccasins and was therefore barefoot. Unlike the others, he was not interested in a uniform, or to be more precise, he was not interested in being hot when he didn't have to be. He could never figure out the ways of white men, though he often considered on them. But mostly he considered the steam man, and thought: Neat. This cocksucker can go. A little bouncy on the ass, even in these spring-loaded seats, but the ole boy can go. The white men do come up with a good thing now and then.

They clanked through the hills some more, and through the right ear canal of the steam man, also stained glass, they could see the wrecks.

Beadle was always mystified by the wrecks.

Most people called them saucers. They lay in heaps and shatters all over the place.

Strange skeletons that weren't quite bone had been found in some of them, and there were even mummified remains of others. Green squid with multiple eyes and fragments of clothing.

There was no longer anyone alive who really knew what had happened, but what had been handed down was there had been a war, and though damn near everybody came, nobody really won. Not the world, not the saucer people. But the weapons they used, they had brought about strange things.

Like rips in the sky, and the Dark Rider.

Or so it was rumored. No one really knew. Story was the saucers had ripped open the sky and come to this world through a path alongside the sky. And that after the war, when the saucer men gave it up and went home, the Earth changed and the rips stayed. What was odd about the rips was you could toss things into them, people could enter them, and things could come out. And there were things to see. Great batlike creatures with monstrous wingspans. Snake-headed critters with flippers and rows of teeth, paddling across the blue-green ether inside the rip. Strange craft jetting across odd landscapes. All manner of things. If you stood near the dark openings, which reached from sky to ground, you could feel them pulling at you, like a vacuum, and if you stepped too close, well then you were gone. Sucked into the beyond. Sometimes the people who were pulled, or went by choice into the rips, came back. Sometime they didn't. But even those that came back bore no real information. It was even reported by a few that the moment they stepped through the rip, they merely exited where they had entered.

Curious.

As for the Dark Rider, no one knew his origin. A disease caused by something from one of the saucers was the usual guess, but that's all it was. A guess. The Dark Rider sucked blood like a vampire, had prodigious strength and odd powers, but had no aversion to crosses, garlic, or any of the classical defenses. Except one. Sunlight. He could not tolerate it. That much had been established.

He also had an army of apelike critters who traveled with him and did most of the shit work. When the Dark Rider was not able to do it, he sent the apes in britches to do his work. Rape. Murder. Torture. Usually by impalement. His method was to have the victim stripped naked and placed on an upright stake with the point in the anus. The pressure of the victim's weight would push him or her down the length of the shaft until the point came out the upper part of the torso. Usually the neck or mouth, or even at times through the top of the head.

Beadle had seen enough of this to give him nightmares for the rest of his life, and he had determined that if it ever appeared he was about to be captured alive by the Dark Rider or his minions, he would kill himself. He kept a double-barreled derringer in his boot for just such a circumstance.

The steam man clanked on.

It was near nightfall when they stomped out of the foothills and into the vast forest that grew tall and dark before them and was bordered by a river. It was a good thing, this forest and river. They were out of wood and water, and therefore out of steam.

Though the night brought bad possibilities, it was also preferable to the long, hot days.

They grabbed their water bags, pulled their Webb rifles over their shoulders on straps, and disembarked from the steam man via a ladder that they poked out of its ass. Like automated turds, they dropped out of the steam man's butt and into the coolness of the night.

The white men left John Feather to guard the steam man with an automatic pistol and a knife on his hip, a Webb rifle slung over his shoulder on a strap, a bow and a quiver of arrows, and went down to the river for water.

John Feather knew he would be better off inside the steam man, in case the Dark Rider and his bunch showed up, but the night air felt great and sucked at a man's common sense. Behind him the steam man popped and crackled as the nocturnal air cooled it.

John Feather tapped the ammo belt strapped across his chest and back, just to make sure it was there. He took one of the heavy clips from his bandolier and squeezed it with his fingers, a habit he had developed when nervous. After a time, he put the oiled clip back on the bandolier and wiped his greasy fingers on his thigh. He looked for a time in every direction, listened intently. Normally, though he liked them, he didn't miss the white men much, but tonight, he would be glad to have them back. Safety in numbers.

Beadle, Hamner, and Blake inched down the slick riverbank, stopped at the water, and listened to it roar and churn dirt from the bank. There had been a big rain as of late, and the river was wild from it. The reflection of the moon was on the river and it wavered in the water as if it were something bright lying beneath the ripples.

Beadle felt good outside of the metal man. It was wonderful to not have his ass bouncing and his insides shook, to be away from all that hissing and metal clanking.

The roar of the river, the wind through the pines, the moon on the water, the real moon in the sky, bright and gold and nearly full, was soothing.

He eased one of his water bags into the river, listened to it gurgle as it filled.

"We ought to bring Steam down here, Captain," Hamner said. He had removed his cap, which was pretty much the understanding when nightfall came, and fixed it through his belt. The moonlight shone on his red hair and made it appear to be a copper bowl. "We could camp closer to the water."

"I'm afraid Steam's furnaces may be too cold and too low of fuel to walk another inch,"

Beadle said, "There's just enough left for us to get settled for the night. It would take an hour to heat him up. At least. I'm not sure it's worth it just to have him walk a few hundred feet."

"It is pleasant here, though," Hammer said.

"Not so pleasant we don't need to get this over with and get inside," Beadle said.

This indirect reference to the Dark Rider settled down on them suddenly, and the need for fresh air, wood, and water was eclipsed by a wave of fear. Just a wave. It passed over them and was tucked away. They had grown used to fear. When you hunted the Dark Rider and his boys, you had to learn to put fear on the back burner. You thought about it too much, you'd never breathe night air again. With the Dark Rider, fear and horror were a constant.

Beadle looked at the nearly full moon and wondered if the Dark Rider was looking up at it too. Beadle had sworn to get the Dark Rider. It's what he was being paid for, he and his team. He had formed Steam Man and Company a year back, and during that time he had killed many of the Dark Rider's ape boys, his minions as Beadle liked to call them, and his employers had been very happy, even giving him the honorary title of Captain. But he hadn't gotten the Dark Rider. There was the real deal. And the big money. The reward for the Dark Rider was phenomenal. And Beadle wanted the bastard, reward or not. He thought of him all the time. He wrote dime novels based on his team's exploits, stretching the truth only slightly. He had made a silent vow to pursue the Dark Rider to the ends of the Earth.

As Beadle looked at the moon, he saw the last of the white steam that was issuing from the steam man's tall, conical hat float across the sky, blurring it, and then the steam dissipated.

"Let's finish," Beadle said.

They made numerous trips with their bags of water, but soon they were finished. Then, leaving John Feather once again to guard Steam, they gathered wood. That accomplished, they took tools from inside the steam man, chopped and sawed the wood and hauled it inside with the water.

As Beadle had expected, the furnaces had cooled. They were lucky they had been able to find water. They might have had to spend a long night in Steam with little to drink until the morning, when it was safe. This way, they could be more comfortable. Even baths could be taken.

"Do you think the Dark Rider is near?" Beadle asked John Feather as they stacked the wood inside the steam man.

"He is always near, and always far away," John Feather said.

This was one of the Indian's odd answers that disturbed Beadle. He knew if he asked John Feather to decipher it, he would merely give him another hard-to-understand remark. It was best to consider the answer given, or just discard it. When John Feather was in this kind of mood, there was no reasoning with him.

Beadle decided to answer his own question, which actually had been foolish, sprung out of fear and the need for something to say. The truth was obvious: they couldn't be too far away from the Dark Rider. Just the day before, they had passed through the burnt and reeking remains of a village with a hundred inhabitants or so with stakes rammed up their asses. Even cats and dogs and three parakeets had been crucified. It was the Dark Rider's calling card. Therefore, he could not be far away. And he always fled to this part of the world, amongst the thick, dark woods with its bad things, near the place where the sky was most ripped and you could see into it and view all manner of strange and terrifying things not seen elsewhere.

Beadle pulled up Steam's ass flap and locked it for the night with bolt and key. While the wood burned and the water heated, they ate a cold supper of beef jerky and hardtack and washed it down with water, then each retired to his own devices. Beadle had wanted to read, but the kerosene lamps made the place smoky and uncomfortable, even with the steam man's vents. After first usage of the lamps and a miserable night of smoke and kerosene stink, they had decided to withhold from using them. He could, of course, read by candle light, but he found this uncomfortable and only resorted to this when he was absolutely bored out of his mind.

He did, however, light a candle and put it in a candle hat and used the ladder to descend into one of the steam man's legs, past the machinery that made it walk, and into the foot where he found a can of oil.

Steam had been well-oiled the night before, but it never hurt to do it again. There was always a fear of rusty devices, gritty gears, a metal rod gone bad. And considering who they were hunting, it wouldn't do to have Steam play out.

When he finished there, he went throughout the steam man with his candle hat and his can of oil, dripping the liquid into all of its parts. He paid special attention to the backup controls in the trunk of the steam man. If the head controls failed, these, though simpler, cruder, could manage the machine's basic movements.

After a time the water was heated, and they drew straws for who bathed first, as the others would have the same water. Beadle lucked out. He got naked and climbed in the tub at the top of Steam's head. He set the timer. He had fifteen minutes before the next bather had a shot at the suds, and he greatly enjoyed every minute of his time.

Deep in the woods, outside his compound, hanging about for lack of anything else to do, the Dark Rider, alias the Time Traveler, alias many other names, turned his face to the moon as he jerked his dick and thought of blood. At his climax he gave up blood and sperm in thick, waddy ropes that splattered on the leaf mold and the body of the dog. He imagined the dog a woman, but it had been days since he had had a woman, tasted a soft throat and sweet blood. He would have settled for a man or child, an old person, but none had been available. Just the dog, and it had been a gamey wild dog at that. Still, feeding on anything made him horny, which was both a blessing and a curse.

Finished, he made the mistake of haste, caught a hunk of dick in his zipper and cursed.

The others, who had been patiently waiting for the Dark Rider to finish, said nothing.

You didn't laugh at the Dark Rider, not even if he caught his dick in a zipper. Laugh at him, you might find your face on the other side of your head.

The Dark Rider worked for a while, managed his whang free, put it in his pants and zipped up, looked around for anyone with a smile on their face. Most of his minions, as the dime novels written by his nemesis, Beadle, called them, were looking about, as if expecting someone.

In a way they were. Beadle and his regulators, and that infernal tin man.

When the Dark Rider was certain he was fixed, he nodded to his flunkies, and they waddled forward to take the dog and to lick the blood and sperm on the ground. The toadies began to fight amongst themselves, tearing at the dog, rolling and thrashing about in a hungry fury, ripping at the meat, scattering fur, spewing what blood was left in the critter.

After waiting for a while, the Dark Rider became bored. He took hold of one of the apes and threw him on the ground and pulled his britches down. He took out his dong again and ass fucked the beast. It wasn't very pleasant, and he grew angry at himself for resorting to such entertainment, but he went ahead and did it anyway. Consummated, he snapped the animal's neck and gave him to the others as a gift. Some of the ape men fucked the corpse, but pretty soon they were eating it. The dog just hadn't been enough.

The Dark Rider thought about what he had done. If he kept popping the necks of these little beasts, pretty soon he might have to gather wood for the impalement stakes himself.

He'd have to go easier on them. They were not limitless. It was too big a pain to get others.

When they had all bathed and the water was run out of the tub and down the pipes and out what served as Steam's penis —a tube with a flap over it—they settled in for the night, secure in the giant man.

Beadle, in his hammock at the top of Steam's head, dreamed pleasantly at first of a lost love, but then the dream changed, and the Dark Rider came into it. He was dressed, as always, in dark pants and shirt, high black boots, wide black hat, and long black cape. His eyes were flaming sockets, his teeth white as snow, sharp as sin. In the dream, the Dark Rider took Beadle's love, Matilda of the long, blonde hair and sleek, rich body, and carried her away.

Beadle awoke in a sweat. It was a dream too real.

Matilda. Sucked dry of blood, and then, for the sport of it, impaled through the vagina, left for the heat, bugs, and birds. That had been the beginning for Beadle. The beginning of Steam and Company, his hunt for the Dark Rider. His vow to pursue him to the ends of the Earth.

2

In the Bad Country

The next morning, early, just as light was tearing back the black curtain, they worked the bellows inside the steam man and made the furnace hotter. The steam man began to chug, cough, sput, and rock with indigestion. They cranked him up and worked the gears and twisted the faucets and checked the valves. When the steam man's belly was volcanic, they climbed into their chairs, at their controls, Beadle in the command seat.

"Let's do it," Beadle said, and he pulled a gear, twisted a faucet, and took hold of the throttle. The steam man began to walk.

He went down the riverbank with a clank and into the river with a splash. The water rose up to his waist, and though there was resistance, and Beadle had to give him nearly full throttle, Steam waded the river and stepped up on the bank. The step would have been a climb for a man.

Now the woods were before the steam man. These woods were the known domain of the Dark Rider, and only a few had ever been this far and returned alive. The survivors told of not only the dark woods, but of the wild creatures there, and of the Dark Rider and his white apes, and beyond the forest, a great rip in the sky. Perhaps the biggest rip there was. A rip so big and wide you could see not only creatures inside it, but stars, and at times, a strange sun, blurred and running like a busted egg yolk. Beadle wondered if the Dark Rider would run again. That was his strategy. Hit and run and hide. But would he run from here, his own stronghold? Would he be prepared to stand and fight? Or would he go to ground, hide and wait them out?

The good thing was they had the day on their side, but even during the day, the Dark Rider had his protection.

It was best not to think about it, Beadle decided. It was best to push on, take it as it came, play it as it laid.

Deep down in the cool, damp ground, the Dark Rider lay wrapped in clear plastic hauled from one of many possible futures, plastic used to keep dirt off his clothes.

The grave was deep. Twenty feet. It had been dug by the ape men, or as they were more properly known, the Moorlocks. A sheet of lumber had been placed over the top of the grave to keep out stray strands of daylight.

Nearby, in underground catacombs, the Moorlocks rested. Unlike him they were not destroyed by light, just made uncomfortable. It was their eyes; they were like moles, only not really blind, just light sensitive. He had tried building sunglasses for them from pieces of stained glass and wire framing, but the daylight still affected them. Beneath their white fur, their pink skin was highly sensitive. He had taught them to sew shirts and pants, make shoes from skins, but the sun burned right through their clothes. They had abandoned shoes, shirts, and glasses, but they still wore the pants. Something about the pants appealed to the Moorlocks. Maybe they liked the confinement of trousers better than letting their hammers swing, their snatches grab dust.

As the Dark Rider lay there, hiding from the light, he began to cry. How in God's name ...

No, fuck God. God had put him here. Surely it was God. Fate. Whatever. But the bottom line was still . . . Why?

Once upon a time, though which time he was uncertain, he had been an inventor and had traveled the ages via machine. A time machine.

Then there had been the dimensional juncture.

If he could but do that moment over he would not be what he had become. Sometimes, it was almost as if his old self had never been, and there had always been what he was now, the Dark Rider.

And Weena. How he missed her. She had been the most wonderful moment of his life.

Once upon a time, he had lived as an Englishman in the year 1895, wherever that now existed, if it existed. He had been an inventor, and the result of this invention was a machine that traveled through time.

Oh, but he had been noble. Saw himself as a hero. He traveled to the far future where he discovered a world of soft, simple people who lived above ground, were supplied goods by the machinery of the Moorlocks below ground. And they, without wishing to, supplied the Moorlocks with a food source. Themselves.

These simple people were called the Eloi.

While in this future, he met a beautiful and simple Eloi maiden named Weena. He made love to her, and came to love her. She was stolen by the Moorlocks, and after a desperate but futile battle to find and rescue her, he was forced to escape in the time machine. But he had pushed the gear forward, went farther into the future, to a world with a near burned-out sun, populated by crablike creatures and a dull, dead ocean.

He returned then to his own time to tell his tale. But he was not believed when he explained that there were four dimensions, not three. Length, width, depth . . . and time.

Returning to the era of the Eloi, he discovered Weena had escaped from the Moorlocks, and he decided then and there to become the champion of the Eloi, and within a short time he had taught the mild-mannered people how to do for themselves. He traveled through time and brought to the Eloi animals that no longer existed in their future. He taught them to raise meat and vegetables. He taught them how to fight the Moorlocks.

It was a great time, ten years he judged it.

But then he discovered on one of his exploratory journeys through time that there was a fifth dimension. It existed alongside the others; a place where time took different routes, numerous routes.

Somehow, by his travel he had opened some kind of wormhole in time, and now it had all run together and its very fabric had begun to rip. It was believed in this time that the rips had been caused by squidlike invaders in saucers, but in fact, they were the result of his blunders through the Swiss cheese holes of time.

Returning to the Eloi and Weena, he discovered, through his dimensional traveling, he had not only screwed up time and cross-hatched it and connected it in spots and disconnected it in others, but he had also contracted some strange malady.

He craved blood. He was like a vampire. He had to have blood to survive.

Weena stood by him, and he made the Moorlocks his prey. He discovered other side effects of the dimensional plague. He had tremendous strength, speed, and agility and a constant erection.

But there was a great sourness in him, and soon he began to change. Even when he did not want to change, he changed. Day became repellant, and he found that he enjoyed being amongst the bodies of the dead Moorlocks that he fed on. He liked the smell of death, of rotting meat.

Weena tried to help him, make him whole again. But there was nothing she could do.

And in a moment of anger, he struck her and killed her. It was the final straw. Gloom and doom and the desire to hold destruction in his hand overwhelmed him. He fell in love with the horrors.

Only the memory of Weena remained clean. He had her body mummified in the deep sands beyond the garden world of the Elloi, and he had her placed in a coffin made of oak and maple. Then he buried it in one of the great gardens and a tree was planted to mark it.

Time took the tree and the garden, and now there was just the dirt and her mummified remains, and even that, eventually, his former joy, and now his nemesis, time, would take.

He had made an old museum his home. It housed the wares of many centuries. It was unique, It was a ruined palace of green porcelain, fronted by a giant sphinx that had been some sort of monument. Below the museum, beneath the sphinx, and other sites, were the Moorlocks' tunnels and their machines. Machines that had ground out simple goods for the Eloi.

He became their king, and in time, the Eloi became their food again. And his.

The machines roared below ground once more.

The Eloi quivered again.

And then came the rip.

Time lies tight between, within, and behind dimensional curtains, and these curtains are strong and not easy to tear, but somehow, presumed the Dark Rider, his machine had violated the structures of time, and by its presence, its traveling through, it had torn this fabric and other times had slipped into the world of the Eloi and the Moorlocks, slipped in so subtly that a new time was created with a past and a present and a possible future.

There was not only a shift in time, but in space, and the Wild West of America collided with a Steam Age where inventors from his own time, who had never made such inventions, were suddenly now building steam ships and flying ships and submarines.

Time and space were all a jumble.

The disease in him would not kill him. It just made him live on and on with a burning need to kill, maim, and destroy. Perhaps his disease was merely one that all mankind bore in its genes. A disease buried deep in the minds of every human being, dormant in some, active in others, but in him, not buried at all.

Was he not merely a natural device, a plague, helping to monitor a corner(s) of the universe? Was he not nature's way of saying: I'd like to destroy all this and start over. Just take this Petri dish and wash it off and disinfect it?

The Dark Rider liked to believe he was the ultimate in Darwinism, and that he was merely doing what needed to be done with a world of losers. Instead of combating evil, did it not make more sense to merely be evil so that mankind could go back to what it had originally been?

Nothing.

The sun was scorching again, and inside the steam man it was hotter than the day before.

Beadle and his companions sweated profusely, worked the steam man forward with their levers and valves. Steam tore at trees with his great metal hands, uprooting them, tossing them aside, making a path through the forest as they went in search of the Dark Rider's lair, which though not entirely known, was suspected to lie somewhere within, or on the other side of, the great forest.

As the hot day wore on, and more trees were ripped and tossed, a road began to appear through the great forest. Inside the steam man it was hotter yet as Hamner and John Feather tossed logs into the furnace and worked the bellows and stoked the flames that chewed at the wood and boiled the vast tank of water and produced the steam that gave power to the steam man's working parts.

The steam man clanked and hissed on, and finally they broke from the trees, and in the distance they could see a great, white sphinx, and near it another building of green stone.

Though run down and vine-climbed, both had a majestic air about them.

Beadle said, "If I were the Dark Rider, that would be my den." John Feather made a grunting noise. The others nodded. The steam man pushed on.

Then the ground opened up, and the steam man staggered and fell in. His knee struck the rim of the trench and he was knocked backward, then sideways, came to rest in that position, one leg deep in the hole, the other pushed up and behind him and on the surface.

His left shoulder and head leaned against one side of the trench.

The fall caused logs and flames to leap from the furnace, and Blake's pants leg caught on fire. He came out of his chair with a scream, lost control of his levers and valves, and the steam man faltered even more, its hands clutching madly at the edge of the trench, tearing out great clods of soil. Wads of steam spurted from Steam's hat and his metal body heaved and screeched at the grinding of machinery.

John Feather leaped forward, shut the furnace, threw the guard latch in place. Beadle, thrown from his chair, standing on the side of the steam man, since the floor was now askance, wobbled to the controls, turned off the steam.

"We seem to have stepped into a trap," Beadle said, slapping cinders off his pants.

"Goddamn it," Blake said, from his position on the floor. "Its my fault. I let go of my controls."

"No," Beadle said. "You had no choice, and beside, Steam was already falling. It's the Dark Rider's fault. Let's not brood. Let's assess the damage."

They went up the winding staircase to the steam man's hat and used the emergency opening over his ear. They threw open the door and lowered the flexible ramp.

Outside, in the midday sun, what they saw upset them. But it was not as bad as they had feared. Steam's left leg lay on the back side of the trench, while his other leg and lower torso were in it. His head and chest poked out of the deep ditch, and he was leaning to port. The leg that was bent behind him looked to be solidly connected, stretched a bit, but serviceable.

"Maybe he can climb out," Blake said.

Beadle shook his head. "Not with his leg like that. He may pull himself out, but I think there's a chance he'll twist his leg off, then where will we be?"

"Where are we now?" Blake said.

"In a hole," Hamner said. "That's where we are."

"The tripod and winch," John Feather said.

"Yes," Beadle said. "The tripod and winch."

Inside the steam man, stored in a number of connecting parts, was a tripod and winch device. It was there for moving large trees when heating materials were needed and small wood was not available. So far, it had never been used, but it was just the ticket.

They unloaded and fastened the device together, set the tripod up over the trench, fastened the cables to the steam man, then set about lifting him.

The sun was past noon and starting to dip.

By late day, they had lifted the steam man three times, and each time his great weight had sagged the crane, and he had fallen back into the pit, straining the leg even more.

Finally, in desperation, they cut some of the smaller trees from the forest behind them, and used them to reinforce their apparatus. This was hard business, and the four of them, even with the smaller trees trimmed and topped, had a hard time moving them, pushing them upright and into place, lodging them tight against the ground.

When they had a tripod of trees to reinforce their tripod and winch, John Feather climbed to the top with Hamner, and they bound the trees tightly to their metal tripod with cable.

All set, they checked and tightened the cables, made sure the steam man was solidly fastened, and set about lifting him once more. Shadows spread across the ground as they worked, filled the trench and cooled the air.

Beadle, dirty and sweaty, an itch in his ass, looked up from the winch lever they were working and saw that the sun was falling down behind the sphinx and the building of green stone. "Gentleman," he said. "I suggest we hasten."

3

The Dark Rider Awakes

Beneath the green rock museum, in the darkness of his grave, the Dark Rider stirred, removed the plastic and sat up. Almost at the same moment, the Moorlocks removed the wooden cover.

Effortlessly, the Dark Rider leaped from the pit, landed at its edge, straightened and looked out at the mass of red eyes around him. When he looked, the red eyes blinked.

In a corner of the dark room sat the Time Machine, draped in spiderwebs. All except the saddle, which the Dark Rider used as his throne.

The Dark Rider took his place on the saddle and a Moorlock brought him his black hat.

He sat there, and for a moment, astride his old machine, he felt as if he were about to venture again into time and space. A wave of his old self swelled up inside of him and washed him from head to foot. There were warm visions of Weena. But as always, it passed as immediately as it swelled.

His old self was gone, and venturing forth in his machine was impossible. The machine had worn out long ago, and he had never been able to repair it. Certain elements were no longer available. For a while, he searched, but eventually came to the conclusion that what he needed would never be found.

And besides. What was the point? Time and space were collapsing. Not more than a month ago he had come upon men and women from the Stone Age killing and eating a family in a Winnebago.

He and his Moorlocks fought and impaled the prehistorics, and he only lost ten Moorlocks in the process. Once upon a time the loss of the Moorlocks would not have bothered him at all, but with the death of most of the Moorlock women through sheer chance and his own meanness, there were only a few females left. He kept them in special breeding centers in caverns beneath the ground. But though the Moorlocks loved to fight, they did not dearly love to fuck. Oh, now and then they'd rape some of the women they came across, before they impaled them, but it just wasn't the way it used to be. When they got home they weren't excited like they had been once upon a time; so excited they'd mate with the Moorlock women, impregnating them. Nature was trying desperately to play them out.

Thinking on this, the Dark Rider frowned. It wasn't that he cared all that much for the Moorlocks, it was simply that he liked servants. He supposed he could enslave others, but the Moorlocks were really perfect. Strong, obedient, and not overly bright. Other races had a tendency to revolt, but the Moorlocks actually thrived on stupidity and control, as long as they were allowed their little delights now and then.

But he had more immediate worries tonight. The steam man and the fools inside it. But the whole operation might cost him a kit and caboodle of the Moorlocks.

Sighing, the Dark Rider concluded that their loss was one of the necessities of business.

Which was, simply defined, fear and destruction and a good solid meal.

One of the Moorlocks waddled up to the Dark Rider with his head held down.

"What is it, Asshole?"

Asshole was the Dark Rider's favorite of the Moorlocks.

Asshole leaped about, slapped his chest, made some noise.

"They are near?" asked the Dark Rider.

"Uh, you betcha," Asshole nodded vigorously.

"Then, I suppose, we should go greet them. Get Sticks."

Just about everything that could go wrong, had gone wrong. The tripod had turned over.

Blake had fallen and sprained an ankle, but was otherwise all right. They cut him a crutch from an oak tree, and he hobbled about, tugging on ropes and struggling to free Steam.

Eventually everything was in place again, and Steam was lifted just enough to free his leg. Beadle climbed back inside and stoked up the dying embers. John Feather climbed in after him and handed him new wood from the stockpile. Beadle put it in on top of the meager flames, then they worked the bellows. The flame flared up and the logs got hot, and still they worked the bellows.

When the fire was going good, Beadle went out on the ramp under Steam's ear and called down to Blake and Hamner. "Crank the winch up tight, then stand back."

When Beadle disappeared back inside Steam, Hamner and Blake took hold of the winch crank together and set to work. They managed to lift Steam even more, allowing his trapped leg to slip into the pit with the other, It was hard work, and when they were finished, it was all they could do to keep standing.

Inside, Beadle and John Feather worked the controls, and Steam climbed easily out of the pit. When he stood on solid ground again, Hamner and Blake cheered, and inside Steam, Beadle and John Feather did the same.

But it was a short-lived celebration.

John Feather pointed at one of Steam's eyes, said, "Bad shit coming."

"My God," Beadle said. "Lower the ladder, let them in."

4

Sticks A'Steppin'

The Dark Rider's contraption was a man made of sticks and it stood at least twenty feet higher than Steam. The sticks had been interlaced with strips of rawhide, woven and strapped, tied to form the shape of a man. There were gaps in the shape, and through the gaps you could see the apes in trousers, as well as flashes of metal. It made cranking and clanking sounds. And the damn thing walked.

John Feather lowered the ladder in Steam's butt, and Hamner scrambled up, followed by the not so scrambling Blake and his crude crutch.

Once inside they took their seats and ran their hands over their controls.

"Steam is bound to be stronger than a man of sticks," Hamner said.

"Don't underestimate the Dark Rider," Beadle said. "We have before, and each time we've regretted it,"

Hamner nodded. He remembered when their team had consisted of several others.

Mistakes and miscalculations had whittled them down to this.

"What's the game plan then?" Blake asked.

"We approach him cautiously, feel him out."

"I don't think we'll have to worry about approaching him," Hamner said. "He seems to be coming at a right smart clip."

And indeed, he was.

Sticks and Steam approached one another. From the rooftop of the museum, the Dark Rider watched. He hoped a kill could be made soon. He was very hungry. And he dearly wanted Beadle, The bastard had been chasing him forever. He would impale the others, but Beadle, he would have some fun with first. To humiliate him, he would fuck him.

Maybe fuck a wound he would tear in his body with his hands, then he'd torture him some, and drink his blood of course, and call him bad names and pull out his hair, and maybe fuck another wound, then he'd have him impaled after boiling his feet raw, coating them with salt and having a goat lick the soles until the skin stripped off.

Well, he might have to lose that part with the goat. He'd already killed and sucked dry every damn goat in these parts, not to mention sheep, a lot of dogs, a good mess of cats, deer, and of course there wasn't a human outside of Beadle and his bunch within a hundred miles. Not a living one anyway. That was the problem with having his kind of urges. You soon ran out of victims. Rats were plentiful, of course, but even for him they were hard to catch.

Then a thought occurred to him. He could get Asshole to do the foot-licking part. He could be the goat. Asshole, like all the Moorlocks, had a rough tongue, and dearly loved salt any way he could get it. With this in mind, the Dark Rider began to feel content and confident again.

Up close, Beadle and his boys could hear machinery inside of Sticks, and they could see into the huge, open eyes, and there they saw the apes in trousers, howling, barking, running about, the moonlight illuminating their little, red peepers.

Inside Sticks, the Moorlocks worked furiously. Most of their equipment ran on sprockets and cables and bicycle gears, and in the center of the stick man, and at the back of his head, were bicycle seats and pedals, and on the seats, peddling wildly, were the Moorlocks. The pedaling engaged gears and sprockets, and allowed the head Moorlock, Asshole, who sat in a swinging wicker basket, to work levers and guide gears.

As the steam man and the stick man came in range of one another, Asshole pulled levers and yelled and barked at his humanoid engines, and Sticks reached out and grabbed Steam by the head, brought a stick and wicker knee up into his tight, tin stomach.

The clang of the knee attack inside of Steam resounded so loudly, Beadle, without thinking, jerked both hands over his ears, and for a moment, Steam wobbled slightly.

Embarrassed, Beadle grabbed at his gears and went to work. He made Steam throw a left, and Sticks took it in the eye, scattering a handful of Moorlocks, but others rushed to take their place.

Blake, who worked the right arm, tried to follow with a right cross, but he was late.

Sticks brought up his left arm and wrapped it around Steam's right, and they were into a tussle.

Beadle realized quickly that from a striking standpoint Steam was more powerful, but in close, Sticks, with his basket woven parts, was more flexible.

Blake tried to work Steam's right arm free, but it was no go. Sticks brought his right leg around and put it behind Steam's right, kicked back, and threw Steam to the ground, climbed on top of him and tried to pummel him with both tightly woven fists.

Great dents jumped into Steam's metal and poked out in humps on the inside. Sticks used a three-finger poke (he only had four fingers on each hand) to knock out one of Steam's stained glass eyes. The fingers probed inside the gap as if trying to find an eyeball, touched Beadle slightly, and disappeared.

Lying on his back as he was, Steam rocked right and left, and inside of him his parasites worked their gears and valves and cussed. Finally it came to Beadle to have Steam's right leg lift up and latch around Sticks's left leg. Then he did the same with the other side, brought both knees together so Steam could crush Sticks's ribwork and the Moorlocks inside.

But the ribwork proved stronger and more flexible than Beadle had imagined. It moved but did not give. He decided it was Steam's turn to grab Sticks's eye sockets. He called out orders, and soon Steam's hands rose and he grabbed at the corners of Sticks's eye sockets with metal thumbs, shook Sticks's head so savagely Moor-locks flew out of the eyeholes.

Moorlocks began to bail through the eyeholes onto Steam's chest, poured in through the busted left eye of Steam.

John Feather leaped out of his harness seat, drew his knife and went at them. Blood flew amidst screams of pain. John Feather slashed and stabbed, killed while he sang his death song. The Moorlocks leaped on top of him. Hamner started to free himself to help John Feather, but Beadle called, "Work the controls."

Sticks's head began to tear and twist off, came loose in a burst of basket work and sticks that flipped and scattered Moorlocks like water drops shaken from a wet dog's back.

Bicycle parts went hither and yon, crashed to the ground. One Moorlock lay with a bicycle chain wrapped around his head, another had a fragment of a pedal in his ass.

Inside Steam, John Feather still fought while Beadle and his crew worked the gears and made Steam roll on his right side. In the process, John Feather crashed about, along with the Moorlocks.

Then Steam stood up. John Feather and the Moorlocks fell back, past the seats and the controls and down the long drop of the left leg to the bottom of Steam's left foot. Beadle heard the horrid crash and winced. It was unlikely there were any survivors, Moorlocks or John Feather.

Beadle steeled himself to his present task, began to walk Steam, stomping fleeing Moorlocks with the machine, spurting them in all directions like overstuffed jelly rolls.

From his position atop the museum, the Dark Rider watched and grew angry. Damn dumb Moorlocks. Never give an ape a vampire's job.

The Dark Rider rushed downstairs with a swirl of his cape. He went so fast, the front of his hat blew back.

Near the anterior of the museum stood the Dark Rider's clockwork horse. It stood ten hands high and was made of woven wooden struts and thin metal straps, and at its center, like a heart, was a clockwork mechanism that made it run.

The Dark Rider took a key from his belt, reached inside the horse, inserted the key, turned it, wound the clock. As he wound, the horse lifted its head and made a metal noise.

Lights came on behind its wide, red eyes.

The Dark Rider pulled himself on top of his horse, whom he had named Clockwork, sat in the bicycle seat there, put his feet on the pedals, and began to pump. Effortless, the bicycle horse moved forward at a rapid gait, its steel hooves pounding the worn floor of the museum, knocking up tile chips.

Two Moorlocks who stood guard at the front of the museum jumped to it and opened the door. With a burst of wind that knocked the Moorlocks down, the Dark Rider blew past them and out into the night.

5

Things Get Pissy

"The Dark Rider," said Hamner.

Beadle and Blake looked. Sure enough, there he was, bright in the moonlight, astride his well-known mechanical horse. Its hooves threw up chunks of dirt and its head bobbed up and down as the Dark Rider pedaled so furiously his legs were nothing more than the blurs of his black pants.

"He looks pissed off," said Blake.

"He's always pissed off," said Beadle.

Beadle set the course for Steam, and just as the old metal boy made strides in the Dark Rider's direction, a Moorlock, bloodied and angry, came hissing out of the stairway in the left leg of Steam and leaped at Beadle.

Beadle lost control of his business, and Steam suddenly stopped, his left arm dropping to his side and his head lilting. This nearly caused Steam to tip over, and it was all Blake could do to shut down his side of the machine.

The Moorlock opened its mouth wide and bit into Beadle's shoulder. Beadle grabbed it by the scruff of the neck and pulled, but the Moorlock wouldn't come loose. Hamner came out of his seat and jumped at the Moorlock, sticking his thumbs in its eyes, but even though Hamner pushed at the beast's head, causing its eyes to burst into bleeding lumps, still it clung to Beadle.

Beadle beat dramatically at the Moorlock's side, but still it held. Both men hammered at the beast, but still, no go. The old boy was latched in and meant business.

Then John Feather, bloodied and as crazed as the Moorlock, appeared. He had a knife in his teeth. He put it in his hand and said, "Step back, Hamner."

Hamner did, and John Feather cut the Moorlock's throat. With a spew of blood and a gurgle, the Moorlock died, but still its dead head bit tight into Beadle's shoulder.

John Feather sheathed the knife. He and Hamner tried to free the head, but it wouldn't let go. Its teeth were latched deep.

"Cut the head off," Beadle said.

John Feather went to work. As he cut, Beadle said, "I thought you were dead."

"Not hardly," John Feather said. "I got some bumps and my ass hurts, but the Moorlocks cushioned my fall, and I cushioned this guys."

"Shit," said Blake, who, with his injured leg had not left his chair, "he's on us."

The Dark Rider, moving at an amazing clip, was riding lickety-split around Steam, and he was whirling above his head a hook on a long-ass rope. He let go of the rope with one hand and the hook went out and buried itself in the right tin leg of Steam and held.

The Dark Rider continued to ride furiously around Steam, binding its legs with the rope, pulling them tighter and tighter with the power of the mechanical horse.

Beadle, the head of the Moorlock hanging from his shoulder, struggled at the controls, tried to work the legs to break the rope. But it was too late.

Steam began to topple.

6

Steam All Messed Up

Steam fell with a terrific crash, fell so hard his head, containing Beadle and his crew, came off and rolled over the Dark Rider and his horse, knocking Clockwork for more than a few flips, causing it to shit horse turds of clockwork innards. Steam's head rolled right over the Dark Rider, driving him partially into the ground, but it had no effect.

Inside Steam's torso Beadle unfastened his seat belt, fell out of his seat, got up and wobbled, trying to adjust to the Moorlock's head affixed to his shoulder.

One glance revealed that Hamner was dead. His seat had come unfastened from the floor and had thrown him into Steam's right eye, shattering it, poking glass through him. Blake was loose from his seat and on his crutch. He reached and took a Webb rifle off the wall.

John Feather reached his bow and arrows from the wall, unfastened the top of his quiver and threw it back, slipped the quiver over his shoulder and took his bow and drew an arrow.

Beadle took a Webb rifle off the wall. Beadle looked at John Feather, said: "Today is a good day to die,"

"It's night," John Feather said, "and I don't intend to die. I'm gonna kill me some assholes."

Actually, it was Asshole himself who was approaching the beheaded Steam, and with him was a pack of Moorlocks previously scattered from the remains of Stick.

Beadle and his crew went out the hole under Steam's ear. "I'm gonna die," Beadle said,

"I'd rather do it out in the open."

Nearby lay Steam's body, leaking from its neck the remains of the exploded furnace: embers, fiery logs, lots of smoke and steam.

The Moorlocks came in a bounding, yelling, growling rush. Strategy was not their strong point. All they really knew was what the Dark Rider told them, and good, old-fashioned, direct ass whipping. The Webb rifles cracked. Arrows flew. Moorlocks went down. But still they closed, and soon the fighting was hand to hand. The Moorlocks were strong and would have won, had not their leader, Asshole, leaping up and down and shouting orders, received one of John Feather's arrows in the mouth.

Asshole, still talking in his barking manner, bit down on the shaft, shattering teeth, then, appearing more than a bit startled, turned himself completely around and fell on his face, driving the shaft deeper, poking it out of the back of his neck.

In this instant, the Moorlocks lost courage and bolted.

The Dark Rider came then, called: "Get the fuck back here, or I'll impale you all myself."

These seemed like words of wisdom to the Moorlocks. They turned and began to stalk forward. Beadle picked out the Dark Rider and shot at him, hit him full in the chest. The bullet went through him with a jerk of flesh, an explosion of cloth and dust.

The Dark Rider, though knocked down and dazed, was unharmed.

Slowly, the Dark Rider stood up.

"That's not good," said Beadle.

"No," John Feather said. "It's not. I guess tonight is a good night to die. And while we're at it, if we're gonna go, I must tell you something, Beadle."

"What?"

"I've always wanted to fuck you."

"Huh," said Beadle, and John Feather let out with a laugh and loosed an arrow that took a Moorlock full in the chest, added: "Not!"

Amidst laughter, Beadle began to fire, and the Moorlocks began to drop.

But the ole Dark Rider, he just keep comin' on.

The Dark Rider was on them in a rush. He tossed John Feather hard against Steam's head, grabbed at Beadle, missed, grabbed at Blake who was hitting him with his crutch.

When Beadle regained his feet, the Dark Rider had Blake down and was poking at his ass so hard with the crutch, he had ripped a hole in his pants.

Before the Dark Rider could impale him, Beadle shot the Dark Rider in the back of the head. It was a good shot. No blood came out, just some skull tissue, and the Dark Rider flipped forward and over and came up on his feet, hatless.

He reached down and picked up his hat, dusted it on his knee, and put it on. He looked mad as hell.

John Feather had recovered. He let loose an arrow and it struck the Dark Rider in the chest with a thump, stayed there. The Dark Rider sighed, snapped the arrow off close to his chest.

The Moorlocks surrounded them.

The Dark Rider said, "And now it ends."

Then the Moorlocks swarmed them. Shots were fired, an arrow flew. But there were too many Moorlocks. In a matter of seconds, it was all over.

7

Getting the Shaft

They were carried away to a place outside of the museum, stripped nude, tied with their hands behind their backs, then surrounded by Moorlocks.

Though Hamner was dead, he was the first to be impaled. His body was partially feasted on by the Dark Rider and the Moorlocks, then he was raised into the moonlight with a freshly cut wooden shaft in his ass. The end of it was dropped into a prearranged hole.

His dead weight traveled down the length of the stake and the point of it gouged out of his right eye. He continued to slide down it until his bloody buttocks touched the ground.

Second, the Dark Rider, out of some perverse desire for revenge, had Steam impaled. A large, sharpened tree was run through the trap door in the steam man's ass, poked through his neck, then the battered, steeple-topped head was placed on top of the stake.

With arms tied behind their backs, Beadle and his Moorlock head, John Feather, and Blake, who could not stand because of his leg, awaited their turn. The Moorlocks were salivating at the thought of their blood and flesh, and Beadle was reminded of a pack of hunting hounds at feeding time. He regretted that he had not gotten to his derringer in time, but the derringer was no longer an issue; like his clothes, it had been taken from him.

The Dark Rider, his hat removed, his face red with Hamner's blood, strands of Hamner's flesh hanging from his teeth, said, "I'm going to save you, Mr. Beadle, until last, and just before you the Indian. And you, what is your name?"

"Blake. Mr. James Blake to you."

"Ah, Blakey. Defiance to the last. "Moorlocks. . ." the Dark Rider said.

The Moorlocks all leaned forward, as if listening at a keyhole. "Gnaw his balls off."

They rushed Blake, and there was an awful commotion. Beadle and John Feather struggled valiantly to loose themselves from their bonds and help their friend, but the best they could manage were some lame, ignored kicks.

Blake was lifted up screaming, and while his legs were held apart by Moorlocks, the others, their heads popping forward like snapping turtles, tore at Blake's testicles, and when they were nothing more than ragged flesh (they got the penis too), a stake was rammed in his ass and he was dropped down on it. He screamed so loud Beadle felt as if the noise was rocking his very bones.

The Moorlocks carried Blake to a prearranged hole, dropped him in, pushed in dirt, and left him there. Courageously, Blake yelled, threw his legs up as high as he could. The movement dropped his weight, and the sharpened stick went through him and out of his throat, killing him quickly.

"That will be the way to do it," John Feather said. "It's how we should do it."

Beadle nodded.

The Dark Rider, who sat in a large, wooden chair that had been brought outside from the museum, said, "My, but he was brave. Quite brave."

"Unlike you," Beadle said.

"Ah," the Dark Rider said, "I suppose this is where you are going to challenge me, and with my ego at stake, and your ass at stake, so to speak, I'm going to take you on, one on one, and the winner survives. If I win, you die. If I lose, well, you all go to the house."

"Are you too much of a coward to do that?" Beadle said.

The Dark Rider removed a handkerchief from inside his vest and wiped Hamner's blood from his face and put on his hat. He tossed the handkerchief aside. A Moorlock grabbed it and began to suck at the blood on the cloth. A fight broke out over the handkerchief, and in the struggle one of the Moorlocks was killed.

When this moment had passed, the Dark Rider turned his attention back to Beadle.

"I don't much care how I'm thought of, Mr. Beadle. Since very little causes me damage, and I have the strength of ten men, it's sort of hard to be concerned about such a threat. And besides, in the rare case you did win, my Moorlocks would eat you anyway. In fact, if I should die, they would eat me. Right, boys?"

A murmur of agreement went up from the Moorlocks. Except for those eating the corpse of the loser of the handkerchief battle. They were preoccupied.

"No, I'm not going to do that," the Dark Rider said. "That would be too quick for you.

And it would give you some sense of dignity. I'm against that. In fact, I actually have other plans for you. You will get the stake, but not before we've had a bit of torture. As for the red man, well, I can see now that the stake, if you're courageous like your friend, can be beat. I could tie your legs, Indian man, of course, stop that nonsense. But no. I'm going to crucify you. Upside down. And keep the boys off of you for a while so you'll suffer. As I remember, a saint was crucified upside down. Perhaps, Mr. Red Man, you will be made a saint. But I doubt it."

A cross was made and John Feather was put on it and his hands were nailed and his feet, after being overlapped, were also nailed. John Feather made not a sound while the Moorlocks worked, driving the nails into his flesh. The cross was put in the ground upside down, John Feather's head three feet from the dirt, his long hair dangling.

Beadle was taken away to the museum. The Moorlocks were given Blake's body to eat, all except the left arm which was wrapped in cloth and given directly to the Dark Rider for later.

Beadle was placed on a long table and tied to it. The Dark Rider disappeared for a time, about some other mission, and while Beadle waited for the horrors to come, the lone Moorlock left to watch him played with Beadle's dick.

"Lif id ub, pud id down," he said as he played. "Lif id ub, pud id down."

"Would you stop that, for heaven's sake?" Beadle said. The Moorlock frowned, popped Beadle's balls with the back of his hand, and went back to his game. "Lif id ub, pud id down . . ."

8

A View from Doom

John Feather, in pain so intense he could no longer really feel it, could see the horizon, upside down, and he could see the ground and a bunch of ants. He had been taught that the ants, like all things in nature, were one, his kin. But he didn't like them. He knew what they wanted. Pretty soon they'd be on the cross, then the blood on his hands and feet. Then would come the flies. With kinfolks like ants and flies, who needed enemies?

He could kind of get into accepting rocks and trees as his kinfolk, though he was, in fact, crucified on one of his kin, but ants and flies. Uh-uh.

He heard a squawk, lifted his head and looked up. At the top of the cross, waiting patiently, a buzzard had alighted.

John Feather remembered he had never had any use for buzzards, either. Come to think of it, he didn't like coyotes that much, and the way his luck was running, pretty soon they'd show up.

They didn't, but he did hear flies buzzing, and soon felt them alight on his bloody hands and feet.

When the Dark Rider showed, the first thing he did was light a kerosene lamp, and the first thing he said was, "I suppose we shall remove the Moorlock head. This will give us a wound to work with."

The Dark Rider took hold of the Moorlock's jaws, pried them apart, tossed the head, sent it bouncing across the floor. The assisting Moorlock watched it bounce. He looked longingly at the Dark Rider.

"Do your job here," the Dark Rider said, "and you can have it all to yourself."

The Moorlock looked pleased.

The Dark Rider, who had brought a roll of leather, placed it just above Beadle's head and uncoiled it. It was full of shiny instruments. The first one he pulled out was a long metal probe, sharpened on one end.

He held it up so Beadle could see it. It caught the lamplight and sparkled.

Beadle told himself he would not scream.

The Dark Rider poked the probe into the bite wound on his shoulder, and Beadle, in spite of himself, screamed. In fact, to his embarrassment, he thought he screamed like a girl, but with less restraint.

Inside the great time and space cosmic rip, the metal ship hurtled by again, and inside the ship, or as they called it, the shuttle, peering out one of its portholes, was an astronaut named McCormic. He was frightened. He was confused. And he was hungry. He and his partners, a Russian cosmonaut and a French astronaut, had recently finished their last tube of food and the water didn't look good. Another forty-eight hours they'd be out of it, another three or four days they'd be crazy and drinking their urine, maybe starting to think of each other as hot lunches.

Through a series of misfortunes they had lost most of their fuel and could not return to Earth. They were the Flying Dutchman, circling the globe. They had lost contact with home base. The radio waves were silent. It was as if the world beneath them had died. To add tension to all this, their air supply was draining. It would in fact play out at about the same time as the water supply, so maybe they would never get to drink their urine or dine on one another.

To top it off, McCormic was having trouble with his hemorrhoids, which was their way, to appear only at the least opportune time.

And then, there was the rip.

No matter where they were while circling the Earth, the rip was always to their left. They watched it constantly, saw inside it strange things. The rip made no sense. It fit nothing they knew or thought they knew. McCormic felt certain it was widening, even as they watched.

McCormic turned to his partners. The Russian was sitting on the floor. His name was Kruschev. Like his companions, he had removed his helmet some time ago. He was reading from the Frenchman's copy of Huckleberry Finn, in French. He didn't understand the jokes.

The Frenchman, Gisbone, said, "I know what you are thinking, my friend McCormic. I am thinking of the same."

McCormic glanced at the Russian. The Russian nodded. "It is closer than our Earth, comrade."

McCormic said, "It would be easy to use the thrusters. Turn into it. I say we do it."

John Feather thought perhaps the best thing he could do was pull with all his might and tear his hands free. The flesh there was not that strong, and if he could pull them through the nails, and was able to free his hands, then . . . Well, then he could hang upside down by his feet and die slowly of what he was already dying of, only with his hands free. Loss of blood.

But hell, it was something. He balled his hands into fists around the nails and pulled with everything he had.

Boy did it hurt.

Boy did it hurt a lot.

He pulled the flesh of his palms forward until the nails touched his clenched fingers. He jerked forward, and with a scream and burst of blood, John Feather's hands were free.

At about that time the shuttle, blasting on the last of its fuel, came hurtling through the crack in the sky, whizzed right by him so hard it caused the impaled steam man to rattle and the cross on which John Feather was crucified to lean dramatically.

The shuttle's wheels came down, but it hit at such an angle they crumpled and the great craft slid along on its belly.

John Feather, from his unique vantage point, watched as the ship tore up dirt, smashed through what was left of the smoldering stick man, turned sideways, spun in several circles and stopped. There was a popping sound from the craft, as if metal were cooling.

After a long moment, the door of the craft opened. John Feather waited for a squid in harness and overalls to appear. But something else came out. Something white and puffy, shaped like a man, but with a bright face that made it look like some kind of insect.

At this moment, John Feather's cross finally came loose in the ground and toppled to the earth with him on top of it. He let out a howl of pain.

Fuck that stoic red man shit.

McConnic was first. He wore his helmet, had his oxygen tank turned on. After a moment, he turned off the oxygen and removed the helmet. He came down the flexible staircase breathing deeply of the air.

"Very fresh," he said.

The Frenchman and the Russian came after him, removing their helmets.

"I believe it ees our Earth," said the Frenchman. "Only fugged up."

From where he lay, John Feather tried to yell, but found that he had lost his voice. That scream had taken it out of him. He was hoarse and weak. But if he could get their attention, whoever, whatever they were, they might help him. They might eat him too, but considering his condition, he was willing to take the chance.

He tried to yell, but the voice just wasn't there. He tried several times.

The men with parts of their heads in their hands, turned away from the ship, walked around it, and headed away from him, in the direction from which he and his friends and the steam man had come.

When they were dots in the distance, John Feather's voice returned to him in a squeak.

But it didn't matter now. They were out of earshot.

All he could manage was a weak "Shit."

The Dark Rider had a lot of fun poking Beadle's wound, but he eventually became bored of that, left, came back with a salt shaker. He shook salt in the wound. Beadle groaned.

The Moorlock hopped up and down. He hadn't had this much fun since he'd helped eat his first-born young. The Dark Rider smiled, tried not to think of Weena.

After lying there for a while, John Feather sat up and looked at his crucified feet. They hurt like a bitch. It took balls, but he reached down and grabbed both feet with his hands, and jerked with all his might.

The nail groaned, came loose, but not completely. The pain that shot through John Feather was so intense he lay back down, He prayed to the Great Spirit, then to the white man's god Jesus. He threw in a couple words for Buddha as well, even though he couldn't remember if Buddha actually did anything or not. Wasn't he just kind of an inspiration or something? He tried to remember the name of the Arabic god he had heard mentioned, but it wouldn't come to him.

Great Spirit, Jesus, Buddha, all seemed on vacation. The men carrying their heads didn't show up either.

John Feather sat up, took hold of his feet again, wrenched with all his might.

This time the nail came free, and John Feather passed out.

With pliers, one by one, the Dark Rider removed, with a slow wrench, Beadle's toenails.

John Feather found he could stand, but it was painful. He preferred to go forward on knuckles and knees, but that wasn't doing his hands any good.

Finally, using a combination of stand and crawl, he made it to the steam man, looked up at the spike in its ass, saw there was room to enter inside between shaft and passageway.

Painfully, he took hold of the shaft and attempted to climb it. It was very difficult. His hands and feet hurt beyond anything he could imagine and the wounds from them slicked the stake with blood.

He fell twice and hit the ground hard before finally rubbing dirt in his wounds and trying a third time. It was slow and deliberate. But this time he made it.

"And this little piggy cried wee-wee-wee, all the way . . . HOME!"

With that, the Dark Rider jerked out the last toenail on Beadle's left foot.

Beadle groaned so loud, for a moment, even the Moorlock was startled.

"Now," the Dark Rider said, "let's go for the other one. What do you say?"

Beadle was too much in pain to say anything. And besides, what would it matter? He was going to save his breath for groaning and screaming.

Inside Steam, John Feather found water and washed the dirt from his wounds and used herbs and roots from his medicine and utility bag, applied them in a quick poultice, then bound them with ripped sheets from one of the locked cabinets. He made a breech cloth from some of the sheet, found his extra pair of soft moccasins and slid inside of them. His feet had swollen, but the leather was soft and stretched. He was able to put them on without too much trouble, and he found the cleansing and dressing had relieved the pain in his feet enough so that he could stand. It wasn't by any means comfortable to do so, but he felt he had to.

He tied his medicine bag around his waist, got a Webb rifle from its rack, his extra bow and quiver of forty-five thin arrows with long, steel points.

Then he paused.

He put the rifle, the bow and quiver of arrows aside. He looked out of Steam's ass at the shaft that ran through it and out the neck, looked at the head balanced on top.

John Feather climbed down inside the right leg and took a canister off the wall. He carried it to the gap in Steam's ass and opened it, even though the action caused his hands to bleed. Inside was kerosene. He poured the kerosene down the shaft. He took flint and steel from his medicine pouch and struck up a spark that hit the soaked shaft and caused it to burst into flame. Fire ran down the length of the shaft and it began to burn.

John Feather took wood from the sealed hoppers, built a fire in Steam's belly.

"Just two more to go on this foot," the Dark Rider said, "then we start on the fingernails.

Then we're going to see if you've been circumcised. And if not, we're going to do that.

And if so, we're going to do it really close, if you know what I mean."

"Can I have 'em? Can I have 'em?" the Moorlock asked.

"You can have them, but as it looks to me, you should start on and finish your head."

The Moorlock grabbed the head of his brethren and began chewing on it.

Between bites he said, "Thank you, Master. Thank you."

"Let's do the right thumb first," the Dark Rider said. "What do you say?"

It was a rhetorical question. Beadle knew it was useless to ask for mercy from his enemy.

He kept wishing he'd just pass out, but so far, no such luck. This hurt like hell, but was survivable, and therefore stretched out the possibilities. None of them good. It was made all the worse by the fact that the Dark Rider took his time. A little tug here, a little tug there, almost a tug, then a tug, easing the nails out one slow nail at a time.

Not to mention that the Dark Rider liked to pause with his pliers to squeeze the joints themselves, or to pause and poke at the wound in his shoulder.

The Dark Rider seemed to be having the time of his life.

Beadle wished he could say the same.

John Feather worked the bellows. The fire was going nicely. It wasn't normally a wise thing to do, but John Feather doused the interior of the furnace with kerosene, and as a result, a rush of fire burst out of it and singed his eyebrows, but the wood blazed.

John Feather checked the shaft in Steam's ass.

Burning nicely.

He went back to the bellows, worked there vigorously, stoking up the flame. The water in the chambers began to heat, and John Feather continued to work the bellows. Smoke came up through Steam's ass as the shaft blazed and caught solid.

"Now we have the pinky on the right hand . . . And, there, isn't that better just having it done with?"

Beadle couldn't understand what the Dark Rider was saying. He couldn't understand because he couldn't quit screaming.

The Dark Rider said, "And now let's do that lefty."

Vapor from the pipes pumped up and out of Steam's headless neck. Steam toppled forward and struck the ground hard, throwing John Feather against the side of the furnace, and in that instant, John Feather realized the shaft had burned through. Slightly burned from the furnace, John Feather recovered his feet, closed the furnace door, crawled along the side of Steam and began to work the emergency controls in the mid-body of the machine. They were serviceable at best.

Working these controls, he was able to make Steam put his hands beneath him and right himself.

John Feather clung to a cabinet until Steam was standing straight, then he took his stance on the platform in front of the seats and moved from one position to the other, working levers, observing dials.

It was erratic, but John Feather managed to have Steam lurch forward, find his head, and set it in place. Or almost in place. It set slightly tilted to the left.

John Feather climbed into the head and refastened the steam cables that had come unsnapped when the head came loose. He had to replace one from the backup stock. He tried the main controls. The fall Steam had taken had affected them; they were a little rough, but they worked.

John Feather started Steam toward the museum.

Condensation not only came out of the hole in the steam man's hat, but it hissed out of his eye holes and neck as well. He walked as if drunk.

9

Ruckus

The wall came apart and Steam tore off part of the roof too. He grabbed a rip in the roof and shook it. A big block of granite fell from the ceiling, just missed Beadle on the table, passed to the left elbow of the Dark Rider, and got his Moorlock companion square, just as he was sucking an eyeball from the head he had been eating.

Steam ducked his head and entered the remains of the museum.

"I swore what I'd do to you Beadle," the Dark Rider said. "And I'll do it."

With that, the Dark Rider ducked under the table Beadle was strapped to, lifted it on his back, his arms outstretched, his hands turned backward to clasp the table's sides, and with little visible effort, darted for the staircase.

Steam, head ducked, tried to pursue him, but as he went up the stairs the ceiling was too low. John Feather made Steam push at the ceiling with his head and shoulders like Atlas bearing the weight of the world, and Steam lifted.

The ceiling began to fall all around and on Steam.

The Dark Rider was up the stairs now, heading for the opening to the roof. When he came to the opening, he flung the table backward so that Beadle landed on his face, breaking his nose, bamming his knee caps, and in the process, not doing his already maligned toes any good.

The Dark Rider grabbed the table and tore it apart, causing the straps that bound Beadle to be released. He grabbed Beadle by the head, like a kid not knowing how to carry a puppy, and started up a ladder to the roof.

When the Dark Rider reached the summit of the ladder, he used his free hand to throw open the trap, then, still holding the struggling Beadle by the head, pulled him onto the moonlit roof.

To the Dark Rider's right, he saw that the rip in the sky had grown, and that a rip within the rip had opened up a gap of darkness in which strange, unidentifiable shapes moved.

Below his feet the roof shook, then exploded. Steam's crooked head poked through. And then rose. It was obvious the steam man was coming up the stairs, and he was tearing the roof apart.

The Dark Rider picked Beadle up by shoulder and thigh, raised him over his head. The Dark Rider thought the easy thing would be to toss Beadle from the roof.

Game over.

But that was the easy thing. He wanted this bastard to suffer.

And then he knew. He'd take his chances inside the rip. If he and Beadle survived it, he'd continue to make Beadle suffer slowly. Nothing else beyond that mattered. He realized suddenly that Beadle had been all that mattered for some time now, and when Beadle was dead, he would have only the memory of Weena again. Nothing else to preoccupy his thoughts. No more Beadle, no more steam man or regulators.

With Beadle raised over his head, the Dark Rider growled and started to run toward the rip.

John Feather saw through the shattered eye of Steam what the Dark Rider planned.

Painfully, he grabbed at the quiver he had discarded, picked up his bow, took a coil of thin rope from the wall, tied it to the arrow with one quick loop, and watched as the Dark Rider completed the edge of the museum's roof, which was where the rip in the sky joined it.

The Dark Rider leaped.

John Feather let the arrow fly, dropped the bow, grabbed at the loose end of the rope and listened to the rest of it feed out.

The shot was a good one. It was right on the money. It went through Beadle's left thigh, right on through, and into his inner right thigh.

John Feather heard Beadle yell just as he jerked the rope with all his might. Beadle came loose from the Dark Rider's grasp in midair and was pulled back and slammed onto the museum roof, but the Dark Rider leapt into the dark rip with a curse that reverberated back into this world, then was nothing more than a fading echo.

The Dark Rider's leap had carried him into a place of complete cold darkness. His element. Or so it seemed.

He passed between shapes. Giant bats. They snapped smelly teeth at him and missed.

In time, he thought it would have been better had they not missed.

Because he was falling.

Falling .. . falling.

His leap had carried him into an abyss. Seemingly bottomless, because he fell and fell and fell, and if he had been able to keep time, he would have realized that days passed, and still he fell. And had he needed oxygen like normal men he would have long been dead, but he did not need it, and therefore he did not die.

He just continued to fall.

He thought of Weena. He wondered if there really was a plane on which her soul survived, wondered if he could join her there, if she would want him now that he was what he was.

And he fell and he fell . . . and he is falling still. . . .

But, back to John Feather and Beadle.

John Feather found a knife, dropped the ladder out from under Steam's ear, hobbled down it and out to Beadle. John Feather, while Beadle protested, cut the arrowhead out of Beadle's thigh, hacked the arrow off at the shaft, and using one injured, bleeding foot against the outside of Beadle's leg, jerked it free.

"We're going to have to help one another," John Feather said. "I'm not feeling too strong.

My hands are seizing up."

"Did you have to shoot me with an arrow?"

"It was that, or follow him. And if he had gone into that rip, I would not have followed. I'm not that much of a friend."

The two of them, supporting one another, hobbled back to Steam.

Inside, Beadle found spare pants and shirt and boots and put them on. John Feather doctored his wounds again. Then, in their control chairs, they worked Steam and brought him out of the remains of the museum. They saw a few Moorlocks through Steam's eyes, but they were scattering. The sun was coming up.

"We should try and kill them all," Beadle said.

"I'm not up to killing much of anything," John Feather said.

"Yeah," Beadle said. "Me either."

"Without their leader, they aren't much."

"I think we're making a mistake."

John Feather sighed. "You may be right. But. .."

"Yeah. Let's take Steam home."

John Feather, in considerable pain, looked through one of Steam's eyes at the landscape bathed in the orange-red light of the rising sun. There were more rips out there than before, and he saw things spilling out of some of them.

"If we still have a home," said John Feather.

Epilogue

The astronauts, who had shed their heavy pressure suits and were wearing orange jumps, stopped walking as a green Dodge Caravan driven by a blonde woman with two kids in it, a boy and a girl, stopped beside them.

She lowered an electric window.

"You look lost," she said.

"Very," said McCormic.

"I suggest you get in." She nodded to the rear.

The astronauts glanced in that direction. A herd of small but very aggressive looking dinosaurs were thundering in their direction.

"We'll take you up on that suggestion," McCormic said.

They hustled inside. The boy and girl looked terrified. The astronauts smiled at them.

The blonde woman put her foot to the gas and they tore off.

Behind them the dinosaurs continued to pursue. The woman soon had the Caravan up to eighty and the dinosaurs were no longer visible.

"How much gas do you have?" asked McCormic.

"Over half a tank," she said. "Where are we?"

McCormic looked at the others. They shrugged. He said, "We haven't a clue. But I think we're home, and yet, we aren't."

"I guess," said the blonde woman, "that's as good an answer as I'm going to find."

The Caravan drove on.

All about, earth and sky resounded with the sounds of time and space coming apart.

About the novel: Joe's Recollections

I've always loved Jules Verne. He was the first sf writer / became aware of. First through films based on his work, then the books.

Yeah, I know, it can be argued that he wrote adventure travelogue, not sf, and he certainly did that, but he is undoubtedly one of the greatest sf writers of all time as well, even if no one knew what sf was then.

I should hasten to add, I had read some sf (Tom Swift, Jr.) before Verne, but his was the first name I had ever encountered that made an impact, and therefore, he was the first sf writer I knew of. He was also someone my mother knew of, and she told me about him long before I really understood who he was or what he wrote. I don’t think she, herself, ever read a Verne story in her life, but she knew who he was. She was always dropping tidbits like that on me. Anyway, later, Verne became someone whose books I looked for.

Later, I came across H. G. Wells. He was even better. Like Verne, he had a sense of wonder. This is something that seems to have mostly died out in sf, and I don’t think it's just being older and jaded that has led me to that belief.

Sometimes I come across older sf books I haven't read, and in the best of them, I can find just this element.

For that matter, sometimes in the worst of them I can find it.

Anyway, these writers influenced me greatly when I was growing up. They made me want to be a writer.

When I discovered Edgar Rice, Burroughs, I went a little crazy. I knew I HAD TO BE A WRITER.'

This story is a kind of tribute to the old stuff, with a touch of the new. There is also another influence.

Philip Jose Farmer. If Burroughs is my sentimental favorite of all time, Philip Jose Farmer is my outright favorite.

He's a mixed bag.

I don’t love it all. His prose ranges from sloppy to genius. But, good God, when he's on, he can't be touched. He has that sense of wonder, and he never lost it. He has the magic.

Bless him. He has kept the inner reaches of my heart alive with that sense of wonder and joy. He reminds me that sf, in the broader sense of its term, is in many ways the most wonderful form of fiction in creation.

There are other influences at work here as well. Bram Stoker. Old dime novels, which are in fact the catalyst for this story.

Dime novels were a product of the Old West. They grew out of hero worship.

Wild Bill Hickok and Buffalo Bill had novels written about them, as did others. In fact, a large number of them were reprinted in the 1970s. At least I think it was the 1970s. Sometime in there. The books do not bear copyright information.

I read a number of them. The reprints usually contained a complete dime novel and a story in the back.

One I'm looking at right now is titled Buffalo Bill's Spy Shadower, and it contains a Jesse James story titled "The Boys at Cracker Nefk." They're the heroes of the story, despite the fact that in real life they were murdering looters.

The one that was the catalyst for the following story was "Frank Reads, the Inventor, Chasing the James Boys with his Steam Train."

In this, Jesse James was not a hero, and the steam train was a team of metallic, steam-driven horses.

Cool, huh?

I read this story, thought, wow, this isn't that well written, but what a cool idea. *

For some reason, the way James was represented in the dime novel story, I thought of him as a vampire. Can't explain it, but that led to me thinking, always dangerous for me, and pretty soon this came out.

It has only been printed in one place, a collection of novellas called The Long Ones. This was the only new piece in that collection, and it's unlikely that many readers have seen it.

* Verne wrote a story about a Steam Elephant called "The Demon of Cawnpore" and it just now occurred to me that it too is an influence.

Table of Contents

THE STEAM MAN OF THE PRAIRIE AND THE DARK RIDER GETS DOWN : A DIME NOVEL

Table of Contents

Foreword

Chapter 1: In Search Of

Chapter 2: In the Bad Country

Chapter 3: The Dark Rider Awakes

Chapter 4: Sticks A'Steppin'

Chapter 5: Things Get Pissy

Chapter 6: Steam All Messed Up

Chapter 7: Getting the Shaft

Chapter 8: A View from Doom

Chapter 9: Ruckus

Epilogue

About the novel: Joe's Recollections