Grind of Night

Brady rode up Peavine Mountain with the easy cadence of a man who’d spent too many mornings in a saddle. The Mustang ate the uneven slope without complaint; the sky above Reno unrolled itself like an old map.

He came upon a trickle of water and beside it, the ghosts of a fire, a ring of scorched stone guarding charred splinters and bone fragments that looked older than memory. An old hunting camp, Brady thought, and untied the horse.

He gathered deadfall, dried sage, the cracked coins of cow chips, and coaxed a small, obedient flame from the tinder. The sun slid toward the west, and the air thinned and cooled so that the heat of the fire felt like a private sun against his face. He ate bacon and beans, drank coffee black as obsidian, rolled a cigarette, and lay back, saddle for a pillow, watching stars prick themselves into the long, dark dome.

Sleep came because the body always gives up first. Brady flicked the cigarette into the embers, blinking, half-lidded, and then scrambled upright because a thing had come out of the black.

It was easily eight feet tall. Naked but for a loincloth, a coat of rough red hair like splintered copper, a thick frame that made the Mustang look childish in the dark.

In its left hand, it waved a stone axe as a man might wave a greeting card. In its mouth, between terrible teeth, its smile was wide enough to swallow the campfire.

Brady reached for the reins, and the horse bolted into the night. The giant only watched, amused. It spoke, not grunts but clear, fluent English that slipped from its throat as if learning language were the easiest work in the world.

“There is nowhere to run, my child,” it said, chuckling.

Brady had heard talk, once, of red-headed people in the old stories: a nursery rhyme like a stone that keeps rolling downhill. The giant said its name as though it were a door: “I am Baker.”

“Baker?” Brady said.

“As in the rhyme,” the giant sang. “Be he live or be he dead, I’ll grind his bones to make my bread…”

Recognition was a hot wire. The rhyme was a hinge through which a hundred old terrors swung.

Brady did not wait. He drew his Colt and poured metal into the chest that filled the night.

The beast staggered back, hair whipped by the light, the grin becoming a retracted memory, the axe clattering to the stones. It collapsed like aged lumber.

Brady breathed as if struck.

“Damned horse,” he muttered, reloaded with fingers that shook, and set off after the Mustang’s spoor.

The trail made sense at first, hoof prints and the pale tracks of a man with a gun, and then the world began to warp. The stars rearranged themselves into angles that did not belong to Euclid: a compass rose of cold lights that pointed away from the valley and into the bones of the mountain.

The sage underfoot smelled not of herb but of cooked marrow and old bread. He told himself he was tired. He believed the shot had scattered his mind.

He found the horse where the tracks ended, not grazing but staring at the ground as if watching something breathe beneath the dust. Around the old fire-ring, the charred bones had shifted of their own accord; they had leaned against one another and formed a crude, serried wall.

Between the bones, hairless faces, not quite faces, peered with coal-fired hollows. When Brady moved, they moved in a subtle, inevitable ballet.

“Baker?” he said, because the mouth wants to name the teeth of a storm.

From the bone wall, a voice answered not the guttural hum of the fallen giant but its afterimage, like a whisper threaded through rock and marrow. “Be he live or be he dead…”

The rhyme filled the air like flour dust. It was everywhere and nowhere, in the crackle of gunpowder, in the Mustang’s flaring nostrils, in the ache of his hands. Through the syllables, Brady felt a pressure like a meal ground between two enormous stones.

The world rearranged around that pressure. The sky was not empty but a lid, and something beneath it had begun to stir.

The bones along the ring scraped like teeth, aligning into the silhouette of a head turned away from him. The hair on the head was not hair at all but the rusted ends of a million tiny axes. Where the giant had fallen, earth bled black soot.

Brady backed away until his boot struck the lip of the firepit. Behind him, the Mustang whinnied, not fear but invitation.

Its eyes were like polished bone. The campfire, a moment ago a refuge, flared with a light that showed what the night had been hiding: not an Indian camp, not any human hearth, but an apparatus, rings of bone sharpened into grinders, old skulls lashed into a hopper, the circumference of the place laid out like a mill.

“You can run,” said the voice, not from a throat but from everywhere. “You can live. You can die. The grind is the same.”

Brady aimed his pistol one last time at the bone-mouth that formed where the giant should have been. He fired until the cylinder was empty.

For a breath that stretched until it might have been a year, the sounds of his life, the crackle of the fire, the rattle of a saddle, the hollow thud of a name falling, held together like spun glass. When the noise stopped, the Mustang leaned its head against his chest.

He felt the hardness there, and then, impossibly, mercifully, felt the warm thrum of a heart. The giant’s red hair lay spread about the fire like coals. The bones had settled back into the earth and seemed at first like any other stones.

Somewhere behind the comforting logic of his breath, the rhyme continued, softer now and threaded through the valley wind: Be he live or be he dead, I’ll grind his bones to make my bread.

Brady put the horse in its halter and mounted in a motion that was more muscle than will. He rode down under a sky that might have been the same one he’d left, though altered just enough that when he looked back over his shoulder, the mountain’s silhouette carried a notch he had not seen before, the impression of a long, grinding tooth.

He told himself he had killed a thing and that the world, as before, would remain stubbornly human. But the cigarette he tucked away between his teeth tasted suddenly of flour, and in the back of his mouth, where the taste was worst, a small, ancient grinding began to echo.