The Flickering Tilly

I purchased the tilly lamp from the old chandler on the quayside. A black cage shackling a kerosene flame, it lit my way that night as the fret rolled over the port like a mad posse.

After four gruelling weeks, from the western shore on a merciless sea, the harbour was strewn with the detritus of branded cowboys.

Like many others I had come in search of a destiny, a glorious claim to the dark hills, where the horses ran in herds of gold waiting to be tamed. 

But driving me on was a secret shame. I had run out from my past like blood from a bullet hole. I had shunned my God-given responsibilities and fled the devil feeding on my soul.

I kicked a dented water can out of the way. It spun across the dirt, a dervish in the dust, eventually pointing to a trail I'd not considered, where a hooker preened beneath a candle-lit window like a broken bird.

"Hi Mister, wanna show a gal a good time?"

"Thanks but no thanks Sister, I'm good tonight but here's a nickel for a light."

The haggard, ageing brunette held out her cigarette. I placed my lamp on the ground and I cupped my hand gently around it, touching her fingers. As my tobacco flared the red glow gave her face a saintly appearance like Mary Magdalene and I was overcome with remorse.

I tipped my Stetson.

"Night Sister."

I strode on with my lamp, my spurs clicking in the emptiness, as the night embraced the smoke from my nose and mouth like the endless sable sea I'd endured to reach this point. Here the Fates would decide if my demon would follow me.

The rigging of the spice sloops clinked in the distance, a wet sound in the dry mouth of darkness. I needed a drink and soon a saloon emerged from the gloom, where I downed a sour mash whisky, splashed my sweating neck and ate a soft tangerine.

As I exited through the swinging gate, picked up my lantern and crunched the grit with my boots, I heard the gate swing again. 

Turning I saw no-one. 

I stared a while longer.

"So that's the way its gonna be!" I whispered.

I clasped my colt and heard the ancient leather creak beneath my grip. I flipped the stud and resumed my walk to the far side of town, where I was to meet up with an old gaucho at his camp.

The wooden structures of the main street faded. A pack of black dogs loped past and with them the comfort of my fellow man. Even the saints receded into the safety of the town and I craved another whisky dampening my brittled lips.

The parched brush bade me in. I held my lamp high and measured up the dirt path's length to the site of the camp at the foot of the pitch-black hills.

A gigantic, scraggy turkey vulture flapped its wings as it roosted low in a withered dwarf, its face and neck red with the blood of the land. My tilly stammered and went out in its sordid gust.

"Damn death-rat, scram you old ghastly bastard!"

I kicked a cloud of dirt into the thing's face and it squawked like a sick child before rising into the air and leaving me be.

My cigarette had just enough left in it to relight my lamp and the safe yellow flame lit once more. As the scene returned I saw a horse pelting by the arroyo. On its back was a silhouetted figure bent low on the mane, charging the mare as if devil-bent on some vengeful errand in that skinless place.

I shivered, discarded my stub and trudged on along the arid crunching path between the mesquite scrub.

By my reckoning it was the dead of night when I reached the camp of the gaucho. It was silent for a horse tethered to a thorn shrub.  

There was a decent fire with a coffee pot dangling over it. It smelt good in the lifeless air. 

"Help yourself."

I heard the voice but couldn't see its owner. 

"Thankyou."

I took a tin cup from the chattels by the fire and poured the steaming brew into it. I sipped with gratitude, the steam rising round my hat.

"Sit," said the voice.

I sat on a flat rock and drank.

"Your arrival is timely."

"I have travelled many, many days to get here," I replied.

"My apologies, it was not you I was addressing."

I stopped drinking.

"It is the man sat next to you with whom I speak."

Without warning the fire was extinguished and the blackness of forever enveloped me.

I hefted my colt, turned my head and raised my lantern.

It flickered and sputtered as if being blown but before it could die I saw the face of the figure beside me.

"Son of a bitch!"

The demon had followed me across the sea! Across the desert! To this very arroyo. 

It had been with me the whole while!

"Damn you Demon!" I yelled in its dreadful countenance.

Smoke, sulphur and steam began to billow from it's gaping mouth, from where I heard the wounded cry of frightened child within its ghastly chamber.

At turns the demon's contorted face was Mary Magdalene's imploring me to stay the night, then that blood-drenched turkey vulture pecking at my gut-filled bullets and worst of all, the desperate wife and daughter I had cruelly discarded, staggering like dissolving phantoms in the unforgiving mountains of my cowardly past.

I pointed my gun, pulled the trigger and blew its fucking brains out.

Falling into a reddening hell, where burning horses bolted over slopes of bones, it was then and only then that I saw whom the demon really was.

It was I.

It had been all along.

And as the devils of eternity prized apart my dripping skull in the flickering glow of my tilly, it was upon that arroyo I slowly died.