The King of Pentacles

Introducing Tobias Issachar, Bounty Hunter

1.

Tobias Issachar rode into Wyrmtomb just after noon on a Sunday. The town’s three churches (Anglican, Methodist, and Congregationalist) had let out only moments before his arrival, and the main street was thronged with the faithful. Some of them chanced to look up at him from the dusty thoroughfare.

Their eyes didn’t linger long.

Sitting atop his grey mare, Tobias looked rather uncannily like the Adversary made flesh. He stood a little over six feet tall, and covered his lank frame in a long starless black duster coat. His hat was black to match.

His clean shaven face laid bare a violent physiognomy of angular features knit together from a ruinous fabric of suntanned skin. Two well oiled pistols sat heavy on his hips. Tobias paid his observers no mind.

He was in Wyrmtomb on business.

The handbill was vague regarding the particulars of his quarry’s crimes. Something about the desecration of a church back east somewhere or other. “Blasphemer,” it called him. Not that it mattered much to Tobias. The terms of payment were clear as a crystal: two hundred dollars cash on the delivery of one Manfri Heron, dead or alive, to any sheriff of the Arizona territory. Easy money.

Or so he had thought.

Tobias had been following Manfri’s progress across the territory for the last five weeks and had yet to lay eyes on the man. He had taken on an ever more beastly appearance in Tobias’ imagination during this time. Manfri’s body sprouted dozens of hairy and insectile legs, his mouth filled up with yellow fangs. By the time Tobias reached Wyrmtomb, his prey had become something wholly unnatural in his mind’s eye. Something closer to a solifugid than to a man.

But now it seemed as though Manfri was finally within reach.

A whore in the last town had let slip to Tobias that she had been consulting a gypsy fortune teller who had recently set up his wagon (“He calls it a vardo,” she told him) out in the desert near Wyrmtomb.

“Maybe I’ll stop in and have him read my palms when I ride through,” Tobias said, pulling up his pants. “What’s this fortune teller’s name? ” he asked, more out of professional courtesy than any genuine desire to know. Tobias was not a superstitious man by nature.

“He calls himself ‘The Heron,’ but I’m sure that ain’t really it,” she replied.

“That’s the finest thing you’ve done with your tongue all night, miss.”

And a day later, Tobias was in Wyrmtomb.

Tobias navigated his horse through the crowd towards the sheriff’s office. Reaching his destination, Tobias dismounted and hitched his steed to the post outside. “This’ll only take a minute, Crumb,” he said, scratching the creature’s muzzle affectionately. Crumb snorted.

His footfalls resounded like thunderclaps as he walked across the edifice’s porch to its entrance. Tobias entered, and addressed himself to the deputy sitting at a desk in the lobby.

“I’ll be delivering the body of an outlaw by the name of Manfri Heron here by dawn tomorrow,” he declared. “I expect my payment in full at that time.”

The deputy rose from his seat, saying: “And just what the hell gives you the authority to come in here and start making demands of us?” The deputy was alone.

“This,” Tobias said, and laid the crumpled handbill on the desk.

“I can’t read,” the lawman admitted.

“Then allow me,” he smiled coolly. “It says: ‘The sum of five hundred dollars cash shall be paid for the capture or killing of the vile blasphemer and child murderer Manfri Heron to whichever man can present satisfactory evidence of said deed to an agent of the law by the Government of the United States of America.’” Tobias’ elaborations on the actual content of the contract went unnoticed and unchallenged. “Aren’t you an agent of the law, mister...?”

“Deputy. Deputy Crenshaw. And that I am.”

“Then see that the money is here, in full, when I return tomorrow morning with Mr. Heron’s body in tow,” Tobias said. He turned and walked out of the building.

2.

The landscape on the fringes of Wyrmtomb does little to prepare the erstwhile traveler for the creosote hell that lies further out into the pan. The scraggly bushes, fed by the town’s runoff, obscure the cruel reality of rattlesnakes and sundried bones beyond. Far from the eyes of man. That is where Manfri made his camp.

It was twilight when Tobias arrived there. Manfri’s fire had burned down to its coals and cast the scene in a strange light. A wagon sat lonely on the plain. Two horses stood under its yoke, dreaming. The slogan Hex Work is Real Work had been carefully stenciled onto the vehicle’s rear bumper in a garishly Germanic font.

“Manfri?” Tobias ventured. “Manfri Heron?”

Something or someone stirred inside the wagon. Tobias’ hand went to his revolver on instinct. He’d been caught unawares once before but never again since. The curtain at the rear of the wagon was withdrawn, and the face of Manfri Heron emerged.

Manfri bore little resemblance to the creature that shared his name and dwelt only in the folds and creases of Tobias’ mind. He wore a fine purple dress jacket despite the late hour. A studiously maintained patch of hair grew to a point off the end of his olive colored chin. On the whole, he looked more like a dandy on desert holiday than an itinerant gypsy mystic. Or a solifugid man-spider hybrid, for that matter

“That is me,” Manfri said with the precise diction of a man to whom English did not come naturally, but rather as the product of careful study. “How may I be of service to you this evening?”

“I was hoping to learn my future,” Tobias replied.

“Then you have come to the right place, my friend.”

Manfri turned back into his wagon and pulled a small wooden folding table and two chairs from the inky darkness within. These he set up beside the embers of his cookfire before returning to his home and producing a lantern and a deck of oversized playing cards. Tobias halfway expected him to produce a crystal ball as well, but was disappointed.

“Please, have a seat,” Manfri said, gesturing to his impromptu parlor.

“Much obliged.”

Tobias would’ve felt some real affection for the man and his manners if it weren’t for the price on his head. Manfri took the seat opposite him, saying: “Have you had your fortune told to you ever before?”

“I haven’t.”

“Then perhaps some explanation is in order,” Manfri said. “I employ Tarot in my work.”

“Tarot?”

“It is an ancient Egyptian practice. The use of cards to see the future. To look beyond.”

Manfri placed the deck on the table and fanned the cards out with a deftness in his hands that Tobias had only seen in gamblers and cardsharps.

“Pick three. The first symbolizes your past, that which led you to where you are now. The second is your present, the moments that are even now slipping by us. And the third is what you are here for: your future.”

Tobias pulled three of the cards from the fan at random. For whatever reason, he found himself caught up in his own ruse. The ritual of which he was the focus captivated him.

“Are you sure?” Manfri asked.

“As I can be, I s’pose.”

“Good, good. We will begin with the past,” Manfri said, flipping the first card. It looked like a joker to Tobias, but Manfri said otherwise. “This is the Fool. A life of wandering has led you to me, it seems.”

“Seems so,” Tobias said. And indeed it had.

“Present,” Manfri continued, overturning the next card and revealing the image of a skeleton riding atop a pale horse. “Death,” He paused, frowned. “You have come to collect the bounty on my head, have you not?”

“That’s correct.”

“And I suppose there is nothing I can do to dissuade you of this.”

“Not unless you’ve got two hundred dollars cash in that wagon, no.”

“I do not.”

“Shame.”

Tobias’ pistol appeared in his hand, flashed once, and a third eye opened in the center of the seer’s forehead. The bullet bounced around his brain pan for only a moment before coming to a rest just behind his hypothalamus. A clean kill.

He rose from his seat opposite the corpse. The final card still lay face down on the table. Curiosity overtook Tobias and he flipped it, revealing the King of Pentacles sitting atop his throne. Without Manfri alive to interpret, the image was meaningless to him. Nonetheless, Tobias took the card and inserted it into his pocket. He wanted to remember this.

The bounty hunter then set about completing the more mundane work of his occupation, binding the body that had been Manfri’s limbs together for easier transport, and laying this bundle across Crumb’s back. Crumb had grown accustomed to carrying dead weight over the years.

Tobias also liberated Manfri’s two mares, cutting the ties that had bound them to the wagon for God only knows how long. They would’ve been too much trouble to sell. “You two are officially unemployed,” Tobias said.

His tasks completed and the burden thus secured, Tobias turned his face again toward Wyrmtomb and the reward that waited for him there.

3.

Tobias deposited the thing that had lately been the blasphemer Manfri Heron on the wooden porch of the sheriff’s office with a thud as the first of the cocks began to crow in the east.

“Mr. Crenshaw,” Tobias called. “I believe you owe me the sum of five hundred dollars cash.”

The door opened a crack, then all the way. Deputy Crenshaw stepped out.

“Jesus,” he said, looking at the corpse. “Get that thing in here and off of the street before anyone sees it. This’s a God fearing town.”

“This body has been delivered into the custody of a member of law enforcement and as such is no longer any of my responsibility or concern. If you want it inside, you can drag it yourself. Now,” Tobias said, stepping forward. “I intend to collect what’s due to me.”

Deputy Crenshaw, his fear of Tobias being far greater than any concern he might have had for the moral sensibilities of the good people of Wyrmtomb, retreated two steps, stammering out: “Th-the money’s inside.”

“Very good.”

Tobias crossed the threshold and was directed to a tall stack of emerald green banknotes. As he stood counting them, Tobias swore that he heard Manfri’s voice whisper in his ear: “The King of Pentacles portends great wealth.”

THE END