The Six Messiahs

For my family

For Lynn

Many thanks to Ed Victor, Susie Putnam, Howard Kaminsky, Will Schwalbe, and Bob Mecoy

prologue

EAST TEXAS, JULY 1889

The scorpion sat motionless on the back of the gambler's hand. A tremor racked its ribbed, leathery torso, but the insect's aggressive instincts were overruled by a superior force its simple nervous system had no capacity to question.

It only knew: Not yet.

The gambler felt the same power pin him to the ground like a mantle of flat rocks. Spread-eagled, muscles and bones fused. His eyes could still move, wild and wide, and he could see the scorpion but not the humpbacked Preacher Man, pacing behind him, boots crunching in the crusty dirt. Terror sang in the gambler, caterwauling loud as that Eye-talian opera he'd seen in St. Louis. His thoughts melted like spring snow before they could form, the mind he'd labored so hard to educate useless to him now as a dry well.

The Preacher Man came into view, stopped, spat a hot splash of tobacco juice across the gambler's rigid face, and smiled down at the hapless dandy in his vest and spats, pegged taut as a tent in the dust.

'Promise you this; a man cheats at poker with me, friend, and I will favor him with more than a bullet for his trouble,' said the Preacher, in his honey-dipped Alabama drawl. 'Pay attention now, son, and I will deliver unto you a reward more righteous than a blade through your belly.'

The Preacher shook out his arms and felt the Holy Fire rumble up his spine: Oh yes, he thought, this is how the Good Lord rewards his Faithful Servant; my ceaseless pain, the lost years, that black stretch of empty road down the center of my mind all forgotten: I have been sown with the seed of the Prophet! I have been chosen! The Vision coming into my dreams these past months is a gift from God, my destiny set before me, clear as ice: I will lead the multitudes into the wasteland and build a New Jerusalem in the desert. We shall strike the hammer of Salvation down on a wicked world.

The Preacher sneered contemptuously at the gambler. And this tinhorn card sharp with the ace down his boot and the derringer in his belt buckle and the rest of these prairie shit-heel peckerheads are just a sea of empty vessels waiting for me to pour purpose into their puny souls. The Archangel lifts me on his wing and fills my soul with the Power!

As he had trained himself, the Preacher grabbed hold of the Power churning his insides and shot it out across the desert like the sweep of a lighthouse beacon. A dry rattle answered and the sand boiled with life in the red dying light. He peered out, shielding his eyes against the low-lying sun: pincers, scales, spiny claws, a living wave clattering, swarming toward him. Rattlers, centipedes, adders, toads, tarantulas, all caught in the net, the magnetic promise of his Word.

The Preacher twisted his crooked, perpetually stiff neck in mock surprise at the sight.

'Why bless my soul,' he whispered, 'who would have thought there'd be so many of them out there?'

The swell of scorpions and spiders and snakes rose up and stopped cold an inch shy of the gambler, a wall outlining his body in the dirt. Swaying above him, the column obscured the sunset, but the man's reeling brain could make no sense of what he saw.

The Preacher pushed his hands out and his will flowed into the massed creatures; with one mind the vermin crawled forward and blanketed every square inch of the gambler's body. His feeble breath rasped as it filtered through a forest of busy, scuttling limbs. There the creatures froze, paralyzed as the man beneath them, obediently waiting their next instruction.

The Preacher Man stepped back, folded his arms, and stroked his chin, a parody of an artist admiring his canvas.

'A figure of a man, rendered in insect and reptile. Seems to me ... we are in need of a title for this fine work, wouldn't you agree, neighbor?' said the Preacher, then, snapping his fingers: 'I've got it: Desert Still Life.'

A wet laugh bubbled from his lips. Folding his hand around the gambler's thick bankroll in his pocket, the Preacher felt joy wash over him like warm seawater.

Yes. This was better than waking by the side of a road, cold and shaking, without a name, unable to speak, no past or future, a dumb beast trapped in a crevice of time. Resurrected. Born again in His image. Here to spread the Word and begin the Holy Work.

This was so much more . . .fulfilling.

The Preacher raised his hands dramatically, a conductor in command of his orchestra. The instruments responded; lifting tails, opening mandibles, baring fangs.

The gambler felt the change around him and what remained of his mind fled like a burglar.

Now.

Discharged, the still life instantly dissolved, scurrying back into the desert, mindless again, separate and fearful.

The Preacher tried to think of some appropriate remarks to say over the gambler's body but lost interest when his gaze slipped past the dead man to the cow town in the distance, its buildings black against the red-and- orange horizon: A lamp in the upper window of the saloon where they had played the poker game winked on.

What do they call this place again?

Texas.

Godforsaken provincial wilderness, this American West; no culture, no theater or coffeehouses. What a waste of perfectly good real estate.

But on the other hand, the people are so much more impressionable.

The Preacher Man tossed a handful of dirt onto the swollen, discolored corpse, turned on his heel, and headed back toward town, silver spurs jangling as his ruined leg trailed half a step behind.

I'm going to have to read the Bible, he realized. That's the very least these yokels will expect of me.

BOOK ONE

The Elbe