Chapter Text
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The town had no name.
It did not need one. It was one of many across the empty, barren spaces of the West, where for a time, life might form when the conditions were right and then faded away into nothingness with a sudden shift of the wind. In its life, the town was peopled with all the colourful characters and stolid, staple fixtures making up a community. The preacher who bellowed hellfire from the pulpit to the sheriff who tried to keep things orderly and the local gossip who spread confusion and rumour for want of anything better to do.
As the town burned out of existence, the flames providing the amber palette for the painting of the twilight sky, there was no one left to prevent this fiery display. Those who had fought to save the town failed. The others chose to vanish into the surrounding night, to mourn the end in their own way. Some rode away on horses and covered wagons, seeing the shift early on and fleeing while they had the chance, while others remained to the end and could only slink away in the aftermath, changed forever. Then were those who could not bear the outcome, they rode away from the town as bloated bodies carried downstream
They did not speak of what happened, not even to each other, for speaking of it would give it power, and they were so afraid of such a happenstance, it was best not to make any mention of it all. It was easier to go their separate ways, to not encounter the faces of those who remembered, who could unearth the memory all of them would be trying so hard to hide. Yet no matter how far any one of them ran, even if their flight took them to the four corners of the world, where the language spoken did not provide the articulation to tell the truth, they could not outrun whatever happened.
The event was burned into their minds. Doomed only to surface in the darkness of slumber, where the mind lowered the drawbridge of all its traumas.
By the time the buildings in the town became kindling, its windows shattering, and glass heated beyond tolerances, it was already abandoned by its inhabitants. Amongst the wreckage in the buildings becoming a cinder, were those who had tried to fight and failed. Their bodies were left to burn, erasing all traces of their attempts to prevail and ensuring they left no markers behind for others to give reverence to their passing.
As the water boiled in the horse troughs, and signs swayed in the wind, caught fire as the flames climbed up posts, ignited the dry hay of stables and spread across banners, no one was left to pay attention to the caravan rumbling away in the distance. With only the stars above to watch its departure, the procession of wagons left the town in a wholly opposite way that it had entered.
Ahead of the caravan, the flat land beckoned, with only the erratic line of mountains in the distance to indicate they were not travelling to the edge of the Earth, where they could tumble off its great precipice into space. It was a journey they had taken numerous times before, a trip they would take until the world stopped turning or the sun grew so large in the sky, they were all reduced to ash.
The two men sat beside each other, while one commanded the pair of dark Friesians pulling the wagon into the night. The first was a caricature of a snake oil merchant, complete with tophat, mismatched clothes and garish taste. With a large bow tie drooping beneath his chin, there was still a hint of grease paint left against his skin. He was in his fifties, his liver on its way to being utterly rotten with sclerosis, and a face jaundiced from too many cheap cigars and shots of rum. With a bulbous nose and a pudgy face, he looked as worn as his clothes.
“Now what Polidori?”
“We keep going.”
A world apart from Darvell, Polidori did not answer immediately. His hawkish dark eyes stared into the emptiness, seeing worlds no one else remembered, from ages just as distant. He thought of the times when the world was quiet, where you could walk for days and not hear a human voice, where a scream could be lost in the wilderness, like an owl hooting in the black.
“Perhaps we should do just that, keep going until we hit Canada. It’s quieter there,” Darvell glanced over his shoulder at the town, burning away. “Here, there are more and more people coming out west.”
“Sheep.”
“Yes,” Darvell wasn’t about to argue. “But sheep always have shepherds, and we don’t need to run into any of those.”
Polidori did not look at him and snorted derisively. “I have no fear of goat herders and simpletons. They never know what is happening until it is too late and we have sent enough of them into the fire to be of any concern. They should have just let us take what we want and remained silent about it. The fire is for those who think they can change the way things have always been. We will keep going on our course as intended.”
Darvell wasn’t so sure, but he was Polidori’s creature, and as it was when he was a child, he had no will of his own to demand his will to be carried out. Besides, Polidori was correct, this town would be no different than the others before it. Those in it, never understood the trap until it was sprung, and when it was sprung, it was already too late. They almost always surrendered and gave Polidori what he wanted.
When they did not, they burned like the town behind them.
Then the caravan would move on because punters were always welcoming them with open arms,. Children would wave happily, expecting a spectacle and Polidori was an attraction on his own because the women lovxed him. Darvell would distract everyone else, with God on one side and clowns, card games, fortune tellers and knife throwers on the other.
After all, who didn’t love a carnival?