Imagine That: Tales of Places Strange and Fantastic

IMAGINE THAT

Tales of Places Strange and Fantastic by James D. Pratt

All stories © James D. Pratt

Smashwords Edition

Cover image © HeroMachine.com

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Smashwords Edition, License Notes

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Table of Contents

The Devil's Outhouse

The Awkward and Ill-Conceived Death of Baron Kritzler

The Haggard Brothers Go To Town

Emissary of Decay (A Tale of the Devil's Outhouse)

Tolkien World

THE DEVIL’S OUTHOUSE

I) Into the Devil’s Outhouse

Jacob Burden never set out to be a bad man. Fact was, he probably had more of a conscience than any of the local sophisticates making up the posse hot on his trail. And though he stood accused of shooting that fella back at the bank in cold-blood, Jacob could have sworn there’d been a pistol in his hand. But what’s done was done. The fella was dead, Jacob was galloping across the badlands on a stolen horse, and a pack of bloodthirsty sumbitches was close behind. By bullet or by noose, they were fixing to give Jacob his due and truth be told he didn’t half blame them.

The Devil’s Outhouse was understandably the last thing on Jacob’s mind. Oh, he’d overheard some stories about it after he blew into town, mostly old-timers trying to outdo each other by telling tall tales each more extravagant than the one before it. Some said the Outhouse was the devil’s own place on earth, a way-station for lost souls where even the most upright man might find himself were he to take a wrong turn at the wrong place at the wrong time. Others said it had always been here, that the Indians told stories about it long before the first paleface ever set foot in the New World. The local tribes, the Manuwati and the Chinnacooks, had no name for it. They just called it the place and claimed it was full of things far older than humanity; terrible, nameless things a thousand times worse than anything you’d find in the white man’s hell.

As for Jacob, he had a fondness for tall tales but had never paid them any real mind. As a veteran of the War of Northern Aggression, Jacob knew storybook horror from the real thing. Hell, he’d even been at Shiloh, slick with other men’s guts and in the thick of things when the hand-to-hand fighting was at its bloody worst. The stories about goblins and haunts his ma, God rest her soul, had raised him on before she went to be with Jesus were just meant to entertain. Even at the tender age of seven Jacob had declared if he ever did see that ol’ Boogie Man he’d just shoot him right in the crack of his ass. What he didn’t know at the time was that someday he would get the chance to do just that.

Jacob was actually thinking about his ma, about how sad she would have been to see what sort of man her little boy had become, as the posse drew closer and closer. But it wasn’t like he woke up one morning and decided to steal horses and rob banks. After Jacob’s pa died and the bank took the farm, soldiering had been the only thing keeping food in his belly. After the war ended there wasn’t much call for the sort of skills Jacob had. Construction, not destruction, was the order of the day.

Jacob wasn’t alone in that predicament. The war had churned out a lot of men who only knew how to live by the gun. But Jacob wasn’t as far gone as some. The fact that he hadn’t killed any civilians or bystanders in the course of his adventures, hadn’t really hurt a soul except in self-defense since the war (unless it was an asshole was really asking for it, of course), had been a source of pride. But even that had been taken from him by Miss Fortune and the squeeze of a trigger.

A simultaneous clap of thunder and frigid blast of air shocked Jacob out of his reverie. He felt like he’d plunged his face through a thin sheet of ice and into a frozen mountain lake. Apparently his horse had felt it too. Already half-dead from exhaustion, the poor, dumb beast stumbled and fell. As it went down heard-first one of its strong, spindly legs shattered with a sickening snap. Jacob went flying and hit the ground hard, luckily landing far enough away to avoid being crushed beneath the horse’s tumbling bulk. Dazed as he was, Jacob still managed to roll onto one side and draw a pistol for the final show-down. At that point the proper thing to do was just face facts and go out in a blaze of glory. He might even end up immortalized in one of those grisly postcards, a hollow-eyed coffin-trophy surrounded by stone-faced killers looking a trifle stiff and corpse-like themselves.

Except there was no posse. Jacob squinted, searching the desolate landscape. As far as he could tell, he was the only human being in sight.

Jacob grinned. Guess I lost ‘em after all, he said to a phallic cactus standing nearby. As if in reply Jacob’s stolen mount screeched. It was a blood-curdling noise unlike any sound he’d ever heard a horse make. After inspecting the shattered leg, Jacob gently placed his pistol against the horse’s head and put it out of its misery.

Awful sorry about all this, Jacob said, sounding like he meant it. He slung the loot-laden saddlebags over his left shoulder, tried to judge which way was south, and started walking.

II) Across the Badlands

Night fell fast and hard. The darkness was like a dollop of molasses, an oozing, bruise-purple presence much too thick for anything to move within it. But looks were deceiving. The night air twittered and buzzed with a cacophony of nocturnal activity. Night was when the desert came alive.

Jacob picked a spot to bed down for the night. He stared into the fire, an island of light in an endless black sea, looking glum as a whore on Sunday. The scene at the bank was once again playing in his head. The man he’d shot had looked familiar. It might have been the same chap he’d seen proudly escorting a pregnant young lady around town with a little boy in tow. It was a hell of a thing for a boy to grow up without a father. Jacob’s own pa had taught him everything he knew about hunting, fishing, shooting, and living off the land. To deprive a boy of that was about the lowest thing a man could do. The only worse thing Jacob could imagine was horse-stealing. It was that bad.

Jacob was gnawing on a leathery piece of jerky when he noticed the jackelope. It sat up on its brown-speckled haunches and curiously regarded him from across the fire. Up till that point Jacob had always thought the horned bunnies were just another tall tale. He couldn’t see what use a rabbit would have for a pair of antlers, yet there sat the biggest jack rabbit he’d ever laid eyes on and sure enough a miniature rack, maybe an 8-pointer, sprouted from its skull. Man and rabbit stared up one another for what might have been seconds or minutes, then Jacob broke the silence.

Howdy.

Whether disinclined to respond or lacking the capacity to do the same, the jackelope said nothing. It simply sat and stared, ears swiveling and occasionally sniffing the air but otherwise still as a statue. Jacob wished he’d packed something that he could have used as bait to lure the critter closer, but no such luck. Jerky and some hard biscuits were the only things on the menu. Suddenly the rabbit’s ears shot up and, perhaps suddenly remembering it was late for a very important date, it took off like a bat out of hell.

Jacob chuckled. I’ll be damned.

Something snarled in the darkness. Jacob squinted into the gloom and spotted a pair of feral eyes illuminated like lamps by reflected firelight. A lithe, furry shape padded into view. For a moment Jacob took it to be a wolf, albeit the biggest, scruffiest one he’d ever seen, but it was obvious the musculature was all wrong. The thing had massive shoulders and its forelegs bent the wrong way. The digits on its forepaws were far too long and weirdly jointed, almost like human fingers.

The wolf-thing reared up on its hind-legs to reveal a human-like torso, but it was the gun-belt around the creature’s waist that really caught Jacob’s attention. The creature threw back its shaggy head and howled at the gibbous moon (Sister Moon, the Manuwati Indians Jacob had lived with for a spell called her). Man and beast stared at each other for what seemed like an eternity, Jacob’s pond-scum green