transcript

Speaker 1:
[00:00] K-Pop Demon Hunters, Saja Boys Breakfast Meal and Huntrix Meal have just dropped at McDonald's. They're calling this a battle for the fans. What do you say to that, Rumi?

Speaker 2:
[00:09] It's not a battle.

Speaker 3:
[00:10] So glad the Saja Boys could take breakfast and give our meal the rest of the day.

Speaker 4:
[00:14] It is an honor to share.

Speaker 1:
[00:16] No, it's our honor.

Speaker 5:
[00:17] It is our larger honor.

Speaker 6:
[00:19] No, really, stop.

Speaker 1:
[00:21] You can really feel the respect in this battle. Pick a meal to pick a side.

Speaker 4:
[00:28] I participate in McDonald's while supplies last.

Speaker 6:
[00:30] Flowing ad budget on metrics that look great till the CFO sees them, that's bull spend and marketers are calling it out in Dashboard Confessions.

Speaker 5:
[00:39] I remember telling my boss, it'll be good for the brand when leads were slow. Yeah, it wasn't.

Speaker 6:
[00:47] Cut the bull spend. LinkedIn lets you target by company, job title, and more. Advertise on LinkedIn. Spend $250 on your first campaign and get a $250 credit. linkedin.com/campaignterms and conditions apply.

Speaker 2:
[01:00] Pepsi prebiotic cola in original and cherry vanilla. That Pepsi tastes you low with no artificial sweeteners and three grams of prebiotic fiber. Pepsi prebiotic cola, unbelievably Pepsi.

Speaker 7:
[01:15] Hey friends, it's me again. You know what's really easy to do and even easier to forget? Help me out and hit that like button if you're listening on YouTube. If you're listening somewhere else, what the hell? Pop in and give me a thumb. Say hi while you're at it. Helps me a ton with that damn algorithm. And besides, it's always nice to see you there. Alright then, let's hop on that crazy train. Ha ha ha, welcome back, friend. Hey, how's you make it out on tax day? I know it's a little late at this point, but here's a pro tip for next year. Use your pet alligator as a co-host, and you can write off all of his food. Yes, sir. No, you're still getting old Roy, pal. It's a write-off, not a deduction. Learned that one from old Jeff. He's half a count, you know. Anyway, come on in, Brent. That ship has sailed, at least till next year. Hey, check out simplyscarypodcast.com and become a patron. For as little as $7.99 a month, you can get their entire catalog ad-free and available to download or stream. Plus a bunch of exclusive stuff, I understand. It's a great way to show your support and we really appreciate it. Also, check out patreon.com/drewbloodsometime, huh? Old Uncle Sam really stuck it up my ass this year. Ouch. Well, tonight we welcome back author DR. Wisniewski. This one's a tribute to his favorite novel Blood Meridian and complete with all the impossibly long sentences. Just busting balls, DR. Fantastic story. I think old Cormac would be proud. So, without further delay, from author DR. Wisniewski, I give you Youngblood. They called him Eustace Youngblood, and they said it the way you say a curse, quick and under the breath, and with the eyes already cutting away. He was nineteen years old and had killed six men, though the true count depended on whether you included the Navajo boy outside of Tucson, whom Eustace had gut shot and left to wander the scrub land until whatever God presided over that forsaken earth saw fit to finish the work. Eustace did not include him. He did not think about him at all, or said he didn't. And if in the small hours of the night some dark shape crossed the field of his sleeping mind, he could not say whose it was when morning came. He rode a gray mare he called Smoke and wore two Colt revolvers on his hip like a man wearing his sins openly and without shame. His face was lean and sun scorched, and his eyes were the pale color of water in a tin cup. He was from Texas, the hard limestone country west of San Antonio, where the cedars grew thick, and the rivers ran clear and cold in winter, and by August were nothing but white rock and dry memory. He had left that country at fifteen with a stolen horse and his stepfather's pistol, and he had not looked back and did not intend to. He had ridden with two different outlaw bands and betrayed both, walking away from the second with three saddlebags of stolen currency and a bullet crease along his left rib cage that had healed into a rope of shiny tissue he liked to show women in saloons, working his shirt up slow and watching their faces. He was vain in the way that only very young and very dangerous men are, completely and without apology. The year was 1878. The territory was New Mexico, and it was the kind of country that made certain men understand, for the first time in their lives perhaps, that the earth itself was indifferent to them, that the sun overhead was not watching, and the red rock distances cared nothing for whether they lived or died on them. Some men were humbled by this. Eustace Youngblood was not among them. He looked at the desert and felt something like recognition. He felt at home. He was riding south toward a town called Perdición del Rio, which appeared on no official map when he first heard the name. The settlement had no real name, just a cluster of adobe buildings around the well that had mostly gone dry, and a saloon that doubled as a trading post and occasionally as a morgue. The bodies laid out in the back room until someone came to claim them, or until they became sufficiently disagreeable and were buried in the flat hard earth behind the building. The man who ran it was a former army farrier named Delacroix, who had one eye and no discernible morality, and who watered his whiskey so aggressively it could barely be said to remember what it had once been. He used to sit at the bar in the thin afternoon light and drink two glasses of the pale ghost of whiskey and listen to the room. There were four other men in the place, all of them the sort of drifting human debris the territory accumulated and never quite disposed of. Old men gone to ruin, a young Mexican with a badly set broken nose, a one-armed man in the Confederate coat so old and bleached it had gone the color of old bone. None of them looked at Eustace directly, which was correct behavior. He was on his third drink when he asked Delacroix about the trail south. South, the barman said. He said it without inflection, the way a man says a word that has more than one meaning. I'm headed to Pridicium. I'm told it's three days ride south and slightly east. You can make it in three days, Delacroix said. He was polishing the glass with a rag that was making the glass objectively dirtier, provided you don't run into trouble on the hornata. What kind of trouble? Eustace said. The barman set the glass down. He looked at Eustace with his one good eye and his one clouded eye. There's a company of men moving through the hornata del Muerto. Been there three, four weeks. They've been trading with the settlements, but maybe trading is not the right word. They take what they want and they leave what they decide to leave. Two men from the Rodriguez Ranch rode out to parlay with them about a string of horses that went missing, and those two men have not been seen since. And many in the company used to say, hard to say, numbers change, men come and go. But there's one man who leads them, or who moves among them, and the men who've seen him and come back to say so, all use the same words to describe him. What words? Delacroix set down the glass and the rag both. They say he is thin, extremely thin, the way a man is thin when he's been starved for a long time. But he has not been starved. He eats when he eats, like a man stoking a furnace. They say he is very tall, six and a half feet or near enough that it makes no difference. They say his hair is the color of old ash, not gray, but ash, and he wears it long and loose. They say his eyes are two different colors, one pale green, one black as a borehole. And they say, he paused, they say he sings, used to say nothing. Not songs a man would know, Delacroix said, not any song anyone has heard before or since. One man told me the deacon, that is what they call him, the deacon. One man told me the deacon sang at the edge of their camp in the dark, and that listening to it made a man feel he has been somewhere else his whole life. And had only now arrived at where he actually was. And that where he actually was had no church and no law and no bottom to it. He stopped. I am not a superstitious man, son. I can see that, Eustace said. I am telling you this as information. You can do with it what you want. But I would go around to Hornada if I were riding south. Eustace finished his drink. He set the glass down with a small clean click. I don't go around things. He left Delacroix to his dirty glass and rode south into the failing afternoon. The Hornada del Muerto, the journey of the dead man, was a 90-mile stretch of desert that had been killing travelers since before anyone now living had been born to see it. A place the Spanish had named with the directness of a people who had no interest in predefying the truth. There was no water on the Hornada. There was no shade worth the name. There were only the black volcanic fields and the white alkali flats and the mountains in the far distance that seemed always the same distance no matter how long you rode toward them, and the bones of horses and men along the trail picked clean and bleached and half-sunk in the pale earth. Eustace rode through the first day without incident. He had two full canteens and enough jerky and heart attack to last five days if he was careful, and he was always careful about practical things even if he was reckless about everything else. He made camp in the leave of a salt formation as the sun went down. He hobbled smoke, ate without pleasure, and laid down with his saddle for a pillow and his rifles close to hand. He slept, and in sleeping, he dreamed. The dream was simple and terrible. He was standing in an open space, not the desert, not any place he recognized, and across from him stood something tall. He could not see it clearly. It had the shape of a man, but the shape was wrong. It was very tall and very thin, and its hair moved in the wind that was not blowing. It opened its mouth, and he could see it was about to sing, and he woke before the first note came. Eustace woke with a gasp and sat up in the darkness, and put his hand on the nearest colt, and held it there until his heart slowed. The desert was silent around him, and the stars were out in their millions, and smoke stood in her hobbles, and watched him with her large dark eye. He did not sleep again that night. He found them the next afternoon, or they found him. Later he would not be entirely certain which. He was riding through a shallow canyon, the walls of pale rock rising thirty feet on either side, when he came around the bend, and they were simply there. A loose gathering of men and animals, and the wreckage of provisioning spread across the canyon floor, fires going despite the heat, the smell of blood and smoke and unwashed bodies on the air. They were perhaps twenty men. They were a collection of the most violent-looking human beings Eustace Youngblood had ever seen, and he had seen some. Former soldiers, some of them, in bits and pieces of military dress, Mexican irregulars, men who appeared to be of no nation or allegiance whatsoever, men who had the look of having burned their origins behind them like bridges. Some were cleaning weapons. Some were eating from a common pot. Several men near the far wall of the canyon were occupied with something on the ground, and Eustace looked and then looked away. They watched him ride in. Nobody moved toward him and nobody moved away. A man came forward. He was perhaps forty, gray-bearded with quick eyes. He introduced himself as Grimshaw. You're welcome to camp with us, Grimshaw said, and his voice contained not a single molecule of welcome. I'm just passing through, Eustace said. He kept his hands visible and his eyes moving. He was counting men and angles and exits. Nobody just passes through the ornata, Grimshaw said. Where are you headed? Perdición del Rio, Eustace said. Grimshaw looked at him for a moment with no expression. The deacon will want to speak with you, he said. I've got no particular interest in speaking with any deacon. That's of no consequence, Grimshaw said. The deacon has an interest in everyone. He did not wait for a response. He turned and walked back into camp and the men around Eustace shifted just slightly, just enough, and Eustace understood the geometry of the situation. He rode forward. He was seated on the large flat rock at the far end of the camp and he was reading. This was the first thing Eustace noticed. Not his height, which was considerable. Not his thinness, which was extraordinary. Not the long ash-colored hair that fell loose past his collar. The first thing he noticed was that the man was reading a book, a large leather-bound volume, with the absorption of a man who was found in the written word something the living world consistently fails to provide. Then the deacon looked up. He was the tallest man Eustace had ever seen and the thinnest. And these two facts together produced something wrong. The way a shadow is wrong when it falls at an angle the sun cannot account for. He was tall enough that sitting on the rock he was still at eye level with a standing man of average height. His face was long and deeply lined despite what appeared to be no great age. Not in old man's lines but the lines of someone who has made many expressions over a very long span as if his face had been used hard and often. His hair was the color of old fireplace ash and lay across his shoulders without order. And his eyes, when they fixed on Eustace, were exactly as Delacroix had described. The left one was a pale washed out green and the right one so dark it showed no iris at all. Just black from edge to edge. He was dressed in the clothes of a man who had once dressed well and had let the clothes go to ruin without apology. A black coat worn at the elbows, a colorless shirt of uncertain original color, good boots that had walked a thousand miles, a pistol on his hip and a long knife in his belt and across his knees. Beside the book, a black felt hat with a flat brim that had been rained on and dried out so many times, it had forgotten what shape it was meant to hold. He smiled when he saw Eustace, and the smile rearranged all those deep lines in a way that did not make the face friendlier. Come, he said. His voice was dry and unheard, and had in it a faint remnant of some accent Eustace could not place. He gestured at the ground before him, and Eustace dismounted and tied smoke to a scrub of grease wood and walked over, and did not sit. A young man, the deacon said. He said that the way a naturalist names a specimen, and armed as if he means it. I'm just passing through, Eustace said. So Grimshaw told me, he said. What is your name? Youngblood. Youngblood. He said it slowly. And is that the name you were born with, or the name you made? Does it matter? Everything matters. That is my fundamental disagreement with the world. The world believes certain things are trivial. I believe nothing is trivial. The name a man carries, given or chosen, reveals the shape of his soul as surely as the way a man walks reveals the history of every road he has been on. He tilted his long angular head. Tell me, Youngblood, how many men have you killed? The directness of it silenced you just for a moment. That's not your business. Everything is my business. I am the deacon. I have given last rites to more men than any priest living, and I intend to give a great many more. He closed the book on his lap. Six men. You have killed six men. The seventh was a boy, and you are uncertain about the boy. And this uncertainty discomforts you in ways you would rather not examine. Eustace felt something move through him. You don't know me. I know you completely, the deacon said. You are young and you are mean, and you have confused meanness for strength your entire life, and no one has yet corrected you. The men you have killed, two were cowards, two were fools, one was dangerous and you killed him by luck, and the sixth, the deacon paused, the sixth you killed because he frightened you, not physically. Something about him frightened you in a way you couldn't name, so you put a bullet in that feeling and it worked, temporarily, and now you carry the gun like it will always work, like fear is a thing you can simply shoot. The silence that followed was complete. Sit down, the deacon said. You still sat.

Speaker 8:
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Speaker 9:
[23:58] So you're saying with Hilton Honors, I can use points for a free night stay anywhere?

Speaker 6:
[24:03] Anywhere.

Speaker 9:
[24:04] What about fancy places like the Canopy in Paris?

Speaker 6:
[24:06] Yeah, Hilton Honors, baby.

Speaker 9:
[24:08] Or relaxing sanctuaries like the Conrad in Touloume?

Speaker 6:
[24:12] Hilton Honors, baby.

Speaker 9:
[24:14] What about the five-star Waldorf Astoria in the Maldives? Are you going to do this for all 9,000 properties?

Speaker 3:
[24:20] When you want points that can take you anywhere, anytime, it matters where you stay. Hilton, for the stay. Book your spring break now.

Speaker 7:
[24:30] They fed him. The meat from the common pot was some kind of game animal, and he did not ask what kind. He ate with the men around the fire as the sun went down, and the men talked and drank and behaved on the surface of it, like any company of rough men sharing a camp. There was laughter. There were stories. A man named Fitch played the harmonica badly, but there was something underneath all of it. Eustace had spent years in the company of dangerous men, and he had developed a sense for the texture of danger, for the particular quality that distinguished ordinary violence, which was common and cheap, for something else, something organized around a different principle, something that had looked at the ordinary human contract and simply declined it. He had felt this in the James Younger gang, briefly, and he had walked away from that quickly enough. He felt it here at a magnitude he had never encountered. It was not the individual men, though individually several of them would have been more than enough. It was the company, the company had character and the character was the deacon's character. Extended out were through every man, as if he had infected them with something of himself. Some fundamental contempt for the lines that ordinary men drew and agreed to live within. He ate and said little and watched and tried to count his options. The deacon did not eat. He sat apart at his rock, reading in the fire line, and occasionally the men would go to him and speak quietly with him, and he would respond, and they would return to the fire with some new purpose in their faces. He was the axle around which everything turned. After supper a man named Dodd came and sat beside Eustace, and they passed a bottle between them. Dodd had the manner of a man who had once been respectable and who had understood at some specific moment he would not describe that respectability was a lie and that the lie no longer served him. How long have you ridden with the deacon? Going on eight months. You came with him from somewhere? From everywhere. He doesn't go from one place to another. He circulates. You get caught in him like you get caught in weather. You look up one day and there he is and then you're inside of it. I rode with a company in Chihuahua. We came across the deacon in the mountains. He rode with us for a week and by the end of the week he was leading us and none of us could tell you exactly how it happened. What was your leader doing while the deacon took over? Dodd looked at the fire. He was dead. He had some kind of accident. What kind? Eustace said. Dodd passed the bottle back. The kind of accident that happens when the deacon wants something and something else is in the way. He looked at Eustace. Don't think about leaving tonight. He's already told a few of the boys to keep an eye on your horse. He has, Eustace said. He wants to talk to you more. He takes an interest in certain people. Dodd stood. I'll tell you one thing, son. If you find yourself in a situation where it looks like the deacon is offering you something, a place in the company, some proposition or another, think very carefully before you accept and think carefully before you refuse. What happens if you refuse? Dodd stretched and looked at the black sky. I've seen a man refuse him. Once, he said nothing more about it and walked back to the fire. In the night, a sound woke Eustace. He lay still with his eyes open and identified it. It was the sound of something happening near the canyon wall, on the far side of camp, where the men he had looked away from earlier had been occupied with something on the ground. He did not go and look. He was not afraid to look, he told himself. It was only that he made an accurate calculation of what looking would cost him and had determined the cost was too high. But he listened. There was a voice, a single voice, low and measured, and it was singing. Not any song Eustace knew, not any song that had the shape of a song he had heard. No verse, no chorus, no melody that repeated and resolved. It was a long unbroken line of sound, dry as the deacon's speaking voice, but transformed by the singing into something that had no human equivalent Eustace could name. It did not rise or fall with emotion. It simply continued, note after note, relentless and without destination for a long time. Then it stopped. Then there was the other sound. He would not describe the sound later. Not to Delacroix. Not to the men in Pridicione when he eventually arrived there. He would describe everything else. And when pressed, he simply shook his head. Not with the dramatic reticence of a man who wants his silence noted, but with the flat refusal of a man who has decided a thing is not going to be said. In the morning, there was nothing in that part of the canyon. Whatever had been there had been dealt with. The deacon came to him at dawn. Eustace had not slipped since the singing and the night. He was sitting with his back to the canyon wall drinking the bitter remnants of the previous night's coffee when the deacon folded himself down beside him. The act of a very tall man sitting requires a series of distinct adjustments, like a piece of furniture being collapsed, and opened his book across his knees. May I show you something? The deacon said. He turned the book so Eustace could see it. It was not printed. It was handwritten and drawn. Meticulous, detailed drawings rendered with precision page after page. Animals, plants, insects, the star arrangements of the southern sky annotated in three languages, maps of river systems, human faces, dozens of them, drawn from memory and labeled with names and dates and small dense paragraphs of text. Musical notation so intricate, they looked more like mathematics than music. The drawings were the work of a mind that had observed the world closely and reproduced what it found there with the care of a man who believes that to name and record a thing is to own it. I make a record of everything I encounter, the deacon said. Every place, every event, every person of interest. To know a thing completely is to hold it. The man who keeps the record keeps the world. Eustace looked at the pages. You've been drawing this your whole life? I have been keeping this record for longer than you would believe, the deacon said, and said nothing more about the length of his record keeping or what it might mean. You said you wanted to talk to me. I am talking to you. You said more. The deacon closed the book. He looked at the canyon walls and the sky above them. You are at a crossroads, Youngblood. You have been riding alone since you left Donnelly's gang in the spring. Yes, I know about Donnelly. I knew Donnelly, in fact, briefly. And Donnelly came to understand certain things about himself that he would rather not have understood. You have been riding alone and you have been trying to decide what you are. What you want to be. You still said nothing. I am offering you a destination, the deacon said. Ride with us. Your skills are clear. Your nerve is adequate. You have a certain quality of rooflessness that is raw and untrained. Like iron ore before smelting. I can smelt you. I don't need smelting. Everyone needs smelting. The only question is who does the smelting and to what end? The deacon turned his mismatched eyes on Eustace, the pale green one and the lightless black one, and neither of them looked like a human eye looked when a human being was behind it. You are 19 years old and you are going to die before you are 35. That is simply the mathematics of the life you have chosen. I am offering you the chance to die in the service of something larger than yourself, which is the only kind of death worth having. And what are you in the service of, Eustace said? Eustace said, Ruin, not destruction for its own sake, ruin as revelation. Every man I have ever met carries inside of him a constructed version of the world, a version in which there are rules and purposes and some arrangement of justice waiting somewhere down the road. I am in the service of showing men what is actually there when you pull that construction down. I am in the service of the truth underneath. He looked at the book in his hands. Most men cannot survive the seeing of it. Those who can are of use to me. And what happens to the men who can't survive it? Eustace said. They become part of the record, the deacon said. He smiled again with those deeply used lines pulling in every direction. What do you say? Eustace thought about the singing in the night. He thought about the men near the canyon wall and what might have been there and what was not there now. He thought about what Dodd had said, about refusing and about accepting and about the one man he had seen refuse. I'll ride with you to Perdition. I can decide there. The deacon looked at him and his look held more amusement than a man had any right to express and Eustace understood that the deacon heard the exact content of what he was not saying. Of course, the deacon said. He stood, unfolding his great height and stages. Of course. They rode south. Eustace rode in the middle of the company, not by choice. The men had arranged themselves around him with the casual authority of men long practiced at Hurton, and there was nothing overt about it, nothing he could point to. It was simply that whenever he drifted toward the edge of the column, someone was already there, already moving in a way that made drifting further seem like aggression. And aggression against twenty armed men was a different kind of mathematics than the kind Eustace was used to running. The deacon rode at the front. He sat his horse oddly. His legs too long for any horse to accommodate naturally. His knees high. The ash colored hair moving in the dry wind. Eustace worked on a plan. The plan was simple, as plans in his experience needed to be. Complicated plans failed. Simple plans either worked or they failed fast enough that you could improvise from the rubble. He would wait until they stopped for the night, until the men were settled and sleeping or close to it, and he would walk to where smoke was tied, and he would walk slowly so as not to attract attention, and then he would ride, and he would ride hard, and he would not stop until there was enough distance between himself and this company. This was the plan. What he did not factor into the plan was the Deacon. On the second day of riding south, they came across a freight wagon on the open desert road. Two men on the bench seed and a third riding alongside on a mule. The wagon was loaded with trade goods, bolts of cloth, crated tools, sacks of flour and cornmeal, bound south for one of the small settlements on the far side of the Hernada. The three men saw the company coming and pulled the wagon over and sat with the stillness of men hoping to be passed. They were not passed. The deacon rode to the wagon alone and spoke with the men on the bench for perhaps two minutes. Eustace could not hear what was said. He watched from twenty yards back. The conversation appeared civil. The man on the left side of the bench was nodding. Then the deacon turned his horse and rode back through the company without stopping and continued south. Grimshaw gave a short whistle. What happened next took less than a minute. Eustace watched it and did not move and did not look away because he understood that looking away was not an option he had. That what he was being shown was deliberate. That the deacon had orchestrated this in the same way the deacon orchestrated everything. As a demonstration, as a lesson, as a page in the record. The man who had been nodding on the bench was the last to stop moving. And when he stopped, he fell sideways off the bench and hit the desert floor and did not get up. The mule ran. Two of the company's men caught it. The wagon was unloaded with practical efficiency, and what could be used was distributed, and what could not was left where it fell in the alkali dust. The whole of it was accomplished without raised voices or apparent haste. The way men accomplish a task they performed many times and see no reason to perform differently now. The deacon did not look back. Eustace rode forward and kept his eyes on the horizon and his hands loose at his sides, and felt something settle in to him that was not acceptance and was not approval, but was the specific cold knowledge of the true nature of the thing he was inside of. He had thought he understood it. He had not understood it. He understood it now. They rode on, the wagons sat in the road behind them, and the desert absorbed it the way the desert absorbed everything, without comment, without record, without the least alteration of its own indifference. That night in camp nobody spoke of it. There was nothing in the manner of any man around the fire to indicate that the day had been different from any other day. And this, Eustace thought, was the most terrible thing. Not what had been done. The fact that what had been done had not changed the temperature of a single man in the company by so much as a degree. They camped in a wide flat space between two rock formations, and the fires went up, and the supper was made and eaten, and the bottle went around, and the men settled into their eating rhythms. Eustace ate and passed the bottle, and smiled when smiling seemed called for, and said little and watched the dark rim of the campfire light. The deacon was, as usual, apart. He sat at the edge of the firelight with his book, writing in it by the light of a small separate fire he had built for himself, bent over the pages. Eustace watched him for a long time, trying to determine whether the man slept, whether the man had any of the ordinary human vulnerabilities, whether there was a moment, some window between wakefulness and sleep, when the deacon would simply be a very tall thin man sitting on the ground. He could not find such a moment. Around midnight, most of the men were asleep or close to it. Grimshaw had posted two watches, one at each end of the camp, and Eustace had spent considerable time calculating the arc of their patrol and the window their pattern opened, and he had determined the window was approximately 80 seconds, which was enough. He stood slowly. He stretched. He walked to where smoke was tied, as if walking toward his horse for no particular reason. Nobody moved. The watch at the near end of the camp was looking the other way. He began to unknot the reins. You'll want to hear this, the deacon said. His voice came from directly behind him, and used to spun with his hand already on the colt and his thumb already back on the hammer. And the deacon was standing two feet away, and he was smiling with all his teeth, which were very wide and very even, and too many of them seemed to be showing. Eustace had not heard him approach. The man was six and a half feet tall, and he had crossed twenty feet of gravel and dry scrub in absolute silence. Hear what? Eustace said. His voice was steady. He was proud of how steady his voice was. Watch, the deacon said, and turned. He walked to the open space between the camp and the rock formations, and he raised his face to the sky, and he began to sing. It was the same sound Eustace had heard in the night from the far end of the canyon, and hearing it now from twenty feet away was a different experience. It was not music. It was a sequence of notes that had no resolution, no refrain, no architecture of any kind that Eustace could trace, and the long unbroken thread of it going up and going out into the dark. The deacon stood very still while he sang, not the stillness of concentration, but the stillness of something that does not need to move because it has already arrived wherever it means to be. The horses were wrong. This was the thing. Every horse in the camp, including smoke, had gone rigid. Not the rigid of a frightened horse. A frightened horse moves, dances, pulls at its ropes. This was different. They stood with their heads up and their ears flat and their eyes very wide and they did not move at all. They did not make a sound and they looked not at the deacon but away from them. Away into the dark at the edge of the camp. At something in that direction that Eustace could not see. He looked where the horses were looking. He looked for a long time. He did not see anything he could name. He looked back at the deacon. The deacon was looking at him. Still singing, his mismatched eyes fixed on Eustace across the dark. And the pale green one and the lightless black one both held the firelight. And both were full of something Eustace could not read. Not malice, not hunger, nothing so ordinary as those. The singing went on for a long time. When it ended, the deacon lowered his face from the sky and turned to Eustace and said nothing. His expression was the expression of a man who has finished a task that satisfied him. Go to sleep, he said. We ride early. Eustace went to sleep.

Speaker 4:
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Speaker 10:
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Speaker 6:
[50:07] There's no one like you, and there never will be.

Speaker 11:
[50:10] From the producer of Bohemian Rhapsody, there are many legends, but there is only one. Michael, rated PG-13, in theaters April 24.

Speaker 7:
[50:23] Two days later, they were in the foothills, and Eustace had stopped planning and had started only enduring. He ate with the men and rode with the men, and watched the deacon with the focused attention of a man watching a rattlesnake he could not get away from. They made camp in the Box Canyon the third night out from the Hornada, and in the morning, three men went into the rocks above the camp to scow and did not come back. Grimshaw sent two more. They came back quickly, and they were pale, and Grimshaw went to the deacon who was reading at his rock. Eustace walked to the base of the rocks and looked up. He could not see anything. He climbed. What he found was not the men themselves. The men were gone, as completely gone as the whatever it was on the floor of the other canyon, but what they had left behind. He sat for a long time on the flat rock and looked at what they had left and felt the world tilt slightly on its axis. He felt the easy contempt he had always carried for the world and its softness creak and settle at different angles. He climbed back down and Grimshaw was standing at the bottom looking at him. What did you see? Grimshaw said, Nothing. He was lying and they both knew it, but Grimshaw nodded and walked away and Eustace understood that among this company, what you saw and did not speak of was simply understood to be its own category of experience, a category that had become necessary because of the company they kept. The deacon did not send anyone else into the rocks. He did not mention the three men. When they broke camp and rode west, the camp was simply three men smaller, and this fact settled over the group like sediment and was incorporated and forgotten. That evening at the fire, Eustace sat next to Dodd. What happened to those men? Eustace said. Dodd ate his food and did not look at them. I told you, he said, think carefully about accepting and think carefully about refusing. Those men did one or the other, Eustace said. Dodd said nothing. What did they do? Eustace said. They found something in the rocks, something that the deacon had found first and was not finished with. They intruded on it. That was all. He set down his tin plate. That was enough. He killed three of his own men. They were not his men, Dodd said. No one is the deacon's man. We ride with him. It's a different thing. He looked at Eustace. I'll tell you this once and then I won't speak of it again. There is no leaving. You understand? There's no leaving tonight and there's no leaving tomorrow and there's no leaving next week. When you see the shape of that, you can start working on the real question, which is not how to leave, but how to stay alive and undecrated for as long as possible. Some men have ridden away eventually. The deacon lets some go. He decides something is finished with them and he lets them go. How do I make him decide to let me go? Dodd almost smiled. That, he said, is the question. On the fourth day out from the Box Canyon, they came to a settlement, a real one, a small town on a creek, and the deacon rode into it in the afternoon with his company behind him, and the people in the street looked at him coming and began gradually to disappear. They were peaceful. Eustace had braced for violence, had found himself calculating angles and exits and the exact choreography of what he would do when it started. But the deacon was civil. He went to the trading post and traded. He sat in the saloon and drank and conversed with whoever could be persuaded to sit with him, and he conversed with the range and fluency of a man who has read everything and forgotten nothing. The saloon keeper, a large Irishman with elaborate whiskers held a conversation with the deacon for nearly 20 minutes before finding a reason to be elsewhere. Eustace sat at a table alone and drank real whiskey for the first time in a week and thought. He thought about what Dodd had said. He thought about the three men in the rocks. He thought about the singing in the first night's camp and the thing at the canyon wall, and the horses standing rigid in the dark looking at something he could not see. He thought about the wagon on the desert road and the man who had been nodding on the bench seat and about how the whole thing had taken less than a minute and how nobody in the company had said a word about it afterward. Not that night, not the night's following, as if the event had simply not occurred. Eustace thought, this man, if he is a man, has killed more people than I will ever know the count of. He is going to keep killing. The men who ride with him know this and have accepted it the way men accept a great and terrible truth, with the non-fatalism of the fully comprehending. He thought, I cannot beat this man with a gun. He has no fear of being shot. He has no fear of dying, because either he cannot die, or he does not care whether he does. He thought, the only thing I have is what he said himself. He takes an interest in certain people. He collects them. He catalogs them. And at some point, the catalog is complete, and the collected thing is no longer of interest, and it is released or discarded. If I can become something that maintains his interest without becoming his, he stopped himself there because this line of thinking was leading somewhere he could not quite see, and the somewhere made his stomach move. The deacon came and sat across from him. Just the two of them, in the corner of the saloon, in the afternoon light that came through the dirty glass. You're trying to work it out, the deacon said. I'm drinking, Eustace said. You're trying to work out the geometry, how to stay alive, how to stay yourself. He poured from Eustace's bottle into Eustace's own glass. You are correct that ordinary measures will not serve. You are correct that the pistol does not apply here. I haven't decided to apply anything. You've been deciding since the first night. You are not a passive man by nature, Youngblood. The waiting has cost you something. He drank. Let me tell you something honest. I take this as an act of generosity, so receive it as such. Eustace said nothing. I was interested in you because you are young and because you are cruel in a particular way, clean and without relish, which is the rarest kind. Most men who enjoy kill and show it, it contaminates them. You do not enjoy it. You do it because it is the tool most appropriate to your purposes, and when it is done, you set it down. I was curious what you would become. And? And I am less curious now, the deacon said. He said it not unkindly. You are afraid. That is fine. Fear is information and the intelligent man uses his fear. But you are becoming only afraid. You have stopped thinking about anything except me. And the man who is only reacting, who has surrendered the initiative entirely, has become something I have already seen. Something I no longer need to watch. Eustace felt the shift between them. So what happens now? That depends on what you do next. He had the whiskey glass in his right hand and the colt on his right hip and the deacon across from him and the saloon around them and the afternoon light thin and the flies moving in it. He thought about what Dodd had said, think carefully before you accept and think carefully before you refuse. He thought about the men and the rocks, not what was there, not the thing he would not describe, but the fact of it. Three men who had seen what they shouldn't, and that had been that. He set the glass down. I'll ride with you, he said, full and honest, not to perdition, wherever you're going. The deacon looked at them for a long moment, and then something moved in those mismatched eyes. Not pleasure, not satisfaction, but the look of a completed equation, a problem resolved. Good, the deacon said. He stood, all those long angles unfolding upwards. There's a man in Sonora who requires our attention. We leave in the morning. He walked back to the bar and resumed his conversation with whoever was there. Eustace sat alone and felt the shape of what he had just done. It was a clean feeling and it was also completely horrible. He had made a transaction. He had bought himself time with a currency he could not recover. He had said yes when the only other option was something in the rocks of a box canyon. He was alive, and he was Eustace Youngblood, and he was 19 years old, and he had just made a bargain with whatever the deacon was. And the bargain was this. He would stop trying to leave. He would stop planning. He would put down the arithmetic of escape and pick up the arithmetic of endurance. And he would ride with this company and do whatever the company did. And at some point, not soon, but at some point, the deacon would look at him and find the ledger closed. The account settled. The specimen cataloged and complete. And he would let him go. Or he would not. But he would be alive until one of those two things happened. He drank the whiskey. It tasted like nothing at all. He rode with the deacon's company for eleven months. He would not speak in later years of most of what occurred in those eleven months. He would say there was a man in Sonora and there was some business in Chihuahua. And, there were things in the mountains of Durango that he would not describe. He would say he killed men, more than six, more than he had killed before, and differently he did not set the tools of it down with indifference afterward. He set them down, but they left marks. He became a man who carried marks. The deacon was, in those months, everything Eustace had understood him to be, and also more. He was brilliant. He was inexhaustible. Eustace genuinely never saw him sleep. He was capable of extraordinary violence executed with the calm of a man performing a familiar task. And, he was capable of long discourse on the nature of civilization, on the history of the continent beneath their horses' feet, on the mathematics of celestial navigation, on the medicinal properties of desert plants, on the precise mechanism by which the human conscience constructs and then dismantles its own authority. He knew things no single living man should have known from a single life study. He spoke of events distant in time and place as a man speaks of things he witnessed. He was capable of a kind of care, not human care. Not the kind with sentiment at its root, but the care of a man who values his specimens and wants them preserved correctly. He never threatened Eustace directly. He did not need to. In the third month in Sonora, the company was moving through a dry wash below a ridge when six Mexican Ruales came down off the ridge at a canter and spread across the wash in a line and told the company to stop and put down its arms. The company stopped. Nobody put down anything. The Ruale captain was a compact man with a black mustache and a new carbine across his saddle and the look of a man who has done this before and found it uncomplicated. He spoke to Grimshaw who spoke some Spanish and Grimshaw translated for anyone who cared to listen. The Ruales wanted the company to turn out its saddle bags and present its papers and submit to a search of its persons and possessions. The captain's voice was level and his men sat their horses in a practiced way and the whole tableau had the appearance of something that would be resolved without bloodshed if the company chose to cooperate. Eustace measured the six men and their angles and their distances from each other and did the arithmetic. The deacon sat his horse at the front of the company and looked at the Ruali captain and then he looked at Eustace. Youngblood! That was all he said. Eustace understood. What happened in the next four seconds had never happened to Eustace Youngblood before, not in that exact form. Though he had been building toward it his entire short, violent life, the right hand colt came out of its holster and the hammer was back before his arm had fully extended and he put the captain from the saddle with a single shot that crossed thirty feet and struck the man in the center of his chest. The captain was still falling when the left hand colt cleared leather and used his fire twice more in a long fluid motion that swung left across the line of horses and dropped the two Ruralis on the far end before they had fully registered that the captain was gone. The remaining three Ruralis had their weapons up by then and the air filled with shots and two of the company's men went down and Eustace was already moving smoke left and firing again. The fourth Rurali took the shot in the shoulder. He spun from his saddle and the fifth and sixth scattered into the brush on the far bank of the wash. Grimshaw and two others rode them down before they reached the ridge. The whole of it had taken less than thirty seconds. Eustace holstered the left cold and reloaded the right from his belt and looked at the six shapes in the dust of the wash and felt the particular quality of silence that follows gunfire in the open desert. Smoke moved beneath him, settling, and he put one hand on the flat of her neck. He was aware that the company was looking at him, not the way men look at a man who has done something impressive, the way men look at a thing they have just now correctly identified after mistaking it for something else. The deacon rode forward until he was beside Eustace and looked at the wash and looked at Eustace and said nothing for a moment. There it is, the deacon said. There it is, Eustace said. The deacon looked at him with both those wrong eyes and the look was the closest thing to satisfaction Eustace had ever seen in him. He turned his horse and rode on and the company followed and the wash and the six Fruales receded behind them and the desert went back to its old and different business. Pitch, riding beside Eustace, looked at the holstered guns and then looked at the road ahead and said nothing for a long time. I have never don't, Eustace said. Pitch did not. In the fifth month they came to a small village in the foothills of the Sierra Madre called Cerro Quieto, a quiet hill which had perhaps 40 people in it, farmers and their families, a priest, a blacksmith, a man who kept a small store. The village had a well in its center plaza and a church at the north end and a cemetery behind the church with wooden crosses going silver in the mountain weather. The deacon rode in to Cerro Quieto in the late afternoon, and the company came behind him, and the people in the plaza stopped what they were doing and looked. Children were called inside. A dog that had been sleeping in the sun got up and walked around the corner of a building and was not seen again. The deacon dismounted in the plaza and went to the well and drew water and drank from the bucket and poured what remained over the back of his neck. He looked around the plaza with his mismatched eyes. Then he spoke to the priest who had come out of the church and stood on its steps. The deacon's Spanish was perfect. He asked the priest what the village grew and what it traded and how far it was to the next settlement. He was polite. The priest answered him carefully, watching the company spread out through the plaza, watching the men dismount and move to the store and go inside without asking. Eustace stayed on smoke. He looked at the village and at the faces appearing in the windows of the houses, and at the door of the store where two of the company's men had gone in, and at the deacon talking pleasantly with the priest on the church steps. The deacon glanced at Eustace, and Eustace understood that his staying mounted had been noted. After a time, Grimshaw whistled, and the men came out of the store with their arms full and went back to their horses. The storekeeper came to his doorway and stood there and did not speak. He was an old man with white hair, and both his hands were shaken, and he held them pressed flat against his thighs so as not to show it. One of the men, a young Texan named Pell who had joined the company in Sonora, went back to the storekeeper and said something Eustace could not hear. The storekeeper shook his head. Pell hit him once across the face with the back of his hand, and the old man went down in the doorway and stayed down. The deacon did not look in that direction. He was still talking to the priest. Eustace watched the old man get himself up off the doorstep, slowly, using the door frame. The man's nose was bleeding and he was still trying to hold his hand steady against his thighs, and he was not entirely succeeding. Eustace looked at his own hands on smoke's reins. They were steady. They were entirely steady. This was the thing he would not think about later. Not what Pell had done, which was ordinary enough by the standards of the company, but the steadiness of his own hands watching it. A year ago his hands would not have been so steady. A year ago he would have felt something that would have shown. He didn't know if this was the scene the deacon spoke of eroding, or simply a man growing up in a particular environment in which he found himself, the way a tree grows toward whatever light is available. The company rode out of Cerro Quieto as the sun went down behind the Sierra Madre, and the shadow of the mountains lay across the village like a hand-pressed fly, and the people came out of their houses and stood in the plaza, and watched the company go, and nobody said anything, and the priest was still on the church steps, and his lips were moving. That night in camp, Eustace did not eat. Dodd noticed and said something. In the tenth month, he told the deacon about the boy. He didn't plan to tell him. They were sitting alone, the deacon writing in his book, Eustace cleaning his revolvers by a firelight. And the memory was simply there. And he described it without elaboration. The way you describe a thing when you are more tired than you have ever been. The deacon listened without looking up from his book. When Eustace had finished, the deacon said, And what troubles you about it? I don't know, Eustace said. Yes you do. He did. He was a boy. He wasn't anything. He wasn't a threat. He was in the wrong place and I shot him because I was angry. And then I rode away and let him bleed in the dirt. The others I killed in a fight. I can account for those. This one I can't account for. The deacon wrote something in his book. There is nothing to account for, he said. The accountant is the lie. The idea that violence must justify itself, must have a proportional cause, must arise from threat or defense. This is the scaffolding men erect over the true shape of what they are. Pull the scaffolding down and there is no accounting. There is only what you did and what you did not do. That's not what I'm saying, Eustace said. The deacon looked up. I know what you're saying. You're saying that the boy mattered, that he had a value independent of his usefulness or threat, that his dying had a weight that cannot be dissolved by philosophy. He looked at Eustace with both of those wrong eyes. You're saying that this is the thing you cannot escape. Yes, Eustace said. The deacon looked at them for a long time. The fire burned between them. Then you cannot be made, the deacon said. There was neither judgment nor disappointment in his voice, only the recognition of a fact. I was wrong about you, Youngblood. Not wrong that you are capable. Wrong about the limit of what you will become. There is a seam in you that will not smelt out. Most men don't have it. In most men, I can find the place where the human sentiment lives and I can work on that place until it breaks or dissolves or empties out. In you, he touched the closed cover of his book. In you, it goes too deep. Is that why you are going to let me go? Who said I was going to let you go? The fear came back. The full weight of it. After ten months of careful management. I am going to let you go, the deacon said. Because you are finished. Not because you have proven insufficient. You have been more than sufficient. But because you are complete. The record is made. The specimen is catalogued. He looked at the book. You will ride north in the morning. You will ride fast and you will not look back. And I strongly suggest you put as much distance between yourself and this territory as you can manage in the time you have. Why? What's going to happen in this territory? Eustace said. The deacon picked up his book and opened it to a new blank page and took up his pen. Something that doesn't require you, he said. He left before dawn, before the camp was fully awake. Smoke was glad to move fast in Eustace's letter. He rode north through the gray pre-dawn and the desert opened around him. The same desert he had ridden into so many months before but changed. Or he was changed. The desert was constant. The desert was always and incorruptibly itself. The white alkali and the red rock and the bones on the trail. The indifferent mountains. He rode for six hours without stoppin. At midday he stopped at a seep he knew from the southward ride and watered smoke and ate and sat in the thin shade of a rock and looked at his hands. They were the same hands. The calluses were in the same places. The crease of the old bullet wound on his left rib cage had not changed. He was externally identical. He thought about the deacon's book. He thought about his own entry in it. Whatever notation had been made in that careful hand. Whatever drawing or description had been constructed in those meticulous pages to capture and fix and own him. He was in there now. A specimen in the great record. He would be in there until the book no longer existed. Which might be never. Because he was not at all sure if the deacon was subject to the ordinary endings that eventually concluded every human project. It was not exactly guilt. He did not know if he had the equipment for guilt. But it was something. It was a weight distributed through him that he could not put down and did not want to. He thought about the old storekeeper at Cerro Quieto, holding his shaking hands flat against his thighs. He thought about the storekeeper shaking hands for a long time. He thought about his own steady ones. He had not become what the deacon had wanted him to become. He had gone some distance toward it. He had gone some distance and he had stopped. And the stopping had been the thing, the seam the deacon had described, the thing that went too deep. He didn't know what the thing was. He knew it had to be the shape of the boy, the Navajo boy in the scrubland outside the Tucson, dying slowly into dirt. He knew that it had the shape of a Baptist preacher in the hill country west of San Antonio saying something about rocks and water. He knew it had the shape of an old man shaking hands. He did not know if these shapes added up to something he could live by. He thought they might be all he had. He mounted up and rode north. He reached the town he had originally been heading to three weeks after leaving the Deacons Company. It was smaller than he had imagined. A dozen buildings, a church, a saloon, the creek it was named for reduced to a trickle by the dry summer. He rode in on a Wednesday afternoon, and nobody in the street paid him particular attention. And this normalcy was so extraordinary to him after eleven months that he sat on smoke for a full minute before he could make himself dismount. He went to the saloon. He drank a real whiskey and it tasted of something. There was a man at the bar who had the look of someone who had been in the territory a long time and seen what the territory had to show. Eustace sat next to him and they drank in silence for a while. And then the man said, You look like a man who's seen something. I've seen some things, Eustace said. There's a company moving through the country south of here, the man said. Bunch of hard cases riding with some kind of scarecrow. Real tall and thin. Hair like a dead fire. You hear about this? Eustace drank his whiskey. People are saying they hit three settlements in the last two weeks, the man said. Army is going to have to do something, is what people are saying. Can't have a company like that moving through the territory with no one to answer for it. The army won't do anything, Eustace said. The man looked at him. Why do you say that? Eustace thought about the deacons' two wrong eyes and the singing in the dark and the book and the sound in the night and the three men who had gone into the rocks and not come back and the horses standing rigid looking at something in the dark, something that he could not see and the six Rualis in the dust of the Sonoran wash and the old store keeper Acero-Quieto and the question of what the deacon was and whether the army or any other human institution had a category for it. Just a feeling, he said. He put his money on the bar and walked out into the afternoon light of Perdición del Rio, the town at the end of the dead man's road. And he squinted into the south, where the mountains were already going dark with distance. He did not look for long. He went to find a room and a bed, and he lay down in the dark of an actual room, and he slept, and he dreamed of the boy, and the dream was terrible. He woke from it and was still alive, and this, he had come to understand, was as much as anyone could say. In the Deacon's Book, on a page between a chart of the southern constellations and a pressed specimen of a desert sage, there was a careful ink portrait of a young man with pale water-colored eyes and a lean sun-scorched face and two Colt revolvers on his hips. Beneath the portrait, in the Deacon's precise hand, E. Youngblood, age 19, Texas-born, New Mexico Territory, capable but bounded, the seam held. Below that, and a different ink added later, released. And below that, in the same different ink, two small words. For now. And that was Youngblood by DR. Wisniewski, a good reminder that if you need to think carefully before you accept and think carefully before you refuse, you're probably not going to make the right decisions. A little about the author. Old DR. Wisniewski is a writer and IT analyst from Kansas City, Missouri. He's a fan of all things horror, particularly of the cosmic variety. He's working on the book of Western Horror Stories as we speak, and he hopes to finish editing it sometime this year. We'll keep you posted. Hey, thanks DR. That was one hell of a story, my friend.

Speaker 12:
[88:57] And do old Drew Blood a favor, would you? Subscribe to his podcast wherever you do your listening and leave him a five-star review and a kind word, even if you're listening on YouTube. He needs soldiers on all fronts to win this battle, and he appreciates it. To hear a premium ad free edition of The Knights and all the other episodes, visit simplyscarypodcast.com today and click patrons in the upper menu. You'll find yourself at chillintalesfordarkknights.com, where you can become a patron for as little as $5 per month and get access to their entire audio archive, all ad free and available to download or stream. Thank you for your time and for supporting our sponsors. When you support our sponsors, you support this show. If you happen to use Facebook, Twitter, Instagram or YouTube, you can follow and subscribe to Chillin Tales for Dark Knights there, where you'll get all the latest updates and new releases and have the chance to interact with them each and every week. Oh, and you can find Drew Blood on Facebook and Instagram and sometimes Twitter. The Drew Bloods Dark Tales Podcast is accepting submissions, friend. If you've got a story or two you'd like to be featured on the show, send it to drewbloodhorroratgmail.com. If selected, you'll get the full treatment. Tin Bananas.

Speaker 7:
[90:19] Well, I'm afraid this is where we part ways, friend. At least till next week. So go ahead and grab a drink for the road. Sadly, they're warm this time of year. Get up patreon.com/drewblood and help your old pal buy a beer fridge. Everyone wins. So may the wind be at your back, and may the road rise up to meet you. I'll see you all next week, same time, same place, by God. And until then, y'all go fuck yourselves. Good night, my friends. Good night.

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