#maynia Day 9 – Cork’s Revenge
On the Clayton ranch – where the smell of gun smoke lingered from the battle just ended – Cork McGraw trussed Clayton up against the windmill in the door yard between the house and barn.
Clayton was coming to; Cork figured if he didn’t rouse by himself in time, he’d draw some water out of the trough and force him awake.
Off to one side, about twenty feet from the windmill, a tall white pole rose into the sky. It had a wide base set into the ground, and it tapered to a point higher than the roof of the house and barn. Cork figured it to be at least a hundred feet high. A pulley had been affixed near the top; Cork had pulled the rope off the pulley and used it to tie Clayton to the windmill. He’d left one end of the rope attached to a white cylinder of some kind, which it looked like the Clayton outfit had been fixing to mount on top the pole.
The Claytons were known for bringing newfangled gadgets into town to sell in their dry goods store; Cork had bought plenty of them over the years. He had no idea what this contraption was for – but there were more pressing questions he wanted Clayton to answer. Like why the outfit had been so fixated on killing Zack. Cork didn’t know how the Claytons and Zack were even connected.
And now there was the little priest, too, who claimed to know where Zack was. At the end of the wooden trough that ran from the wellhead toward the barn, Matilda sat thumbing through the man’s strange book. Cork had set the priest to digging a grave for the dead cowhand; the priest, of course, had been concerned about a proper burial for the man. Cork would just as soon have left the body in the barn.
“We’re all in here,” Matilda said.
“Hmpf,” Cork said. It was a wonder. So was the likeness of Zack on the cover of the book; it fit him to a T. “Does it say who the hell this Charles Renault is?”
“I don’t know. But it’s got Zack comin’ to town with the doctor, the Realm taking him … maybe it does tell where he is.”
Cork wished the doctor was there to consult – he had been the expert on dimension jumping. “We don’t know what that book is, Matilda. We don’t know that man either. I can’t let you go jumpin’ off to god knows where, into god knows what.”
“I suppose I’ll jump if I’m ready to jump, Mr. McGraw,” Matilda said.
“The priest said Zack went to the train station and talked to the doctor. But I buried doc with my own hands. So what, he rose from the grave?”
“I don’t know.” Matilda put the book in her lap and looked off, toward the hills. “When I was with Zack’s folks, they knew things. Things about me and Zack … like it hadn’t happened yet, but Zack had already told them.”
Now Cork really wished the doctor was there. “So, what?”
“It’s like I jumped time, not just place.”
Cork reached inside his overcoat and pulled a tinderbox from the pocket. He spun the wheel and made sparks while Matilda watched. He had no idea if time jumping was possible or not. Of course, the doctor had said he was from the 1940s, from someplace called America. But Cork hadn’t thought of it as the future, just as a different place. So the doctor had been almost a hundred years ahead of them? It was a lot to swallow.
And in the meantime there were things that needed doing. The first was to exact his revenge on Clayton – for burning his office and for the doctor’s death. Cork spun the wheel and walked toward the barn.
Yeah, he didn’t know what to make of it all, but the first thing was to burn the barn down and make Clayton watch.
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Base image from Pixabay, by geralt: https://pixabay.com/users/geralt-9301/