Untitled

taku wašté na taku šíče iyúha čhaŋgléška yuštáŋpi

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‘THE HOLE DAMNED SCHMEER’®, and, ‘pukka puffs et d’autres shite’®, présentes [>]

may this become the quintessential western, forever synonymous with the name:

‘UNTITLED’

♰

my enduring gratitude to you for reading, and love for subscribing.

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Chapter I: The Opening

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The sun wasn’t a disc; it was a suppurating cataract in the eye of a forgotten God, weeping a pus-yellow light over the endless alkali flats. Beneath the oppressive silence, a drone vibrated – not a guitar string, but the taut nerve of the world itself, stretched thin and humming with the promise of imminent, catastrophic gothic americana twang.

Colt Mathews rode with his spine rigid as a tombstone inscription. To him, the desert wasn’t landscape; it was Euclid’s fever dream, a geometric proof of absolute, indifferent law. In his pocket, his silver watch click-ticked-clicked again, . . . A metronome measuring the finite beats of a man who believed his will could etch itself onto the indifferent face of eternity. He was Kant’s nightmare, a creature of the categorical imperative convinced the universe bent to moral architecture.

There were no exceptions. There was no mercy.

Beside him, “Silver” Jack Wilde listed and swayed, a gaudy carousel horse unmoored from its pole. His spurs rang a high, lonesome C-sharp – the precise sound of a scalpel drawn across a mausoleum slab.

“The light… hits the screen just so,” Jack rasped, his voice velvet soaked in cheap bourbon and grave dust. He angled a small, tarnished mirror, practicing a squint meant to imply fathomless, tragic depths. A depth that was pure illusion, for behind the eyes was only a polished, reflective void, a soul tormented by secrets he didn’t actually possess.

“A man is not an image, Jack,” Colt ground out, his voice like stones dragged over bedrock. “He is an end. To frame the transition into the void as mere spectacle… it’s a lie spat in the face of creation’s gravity.”

Jack’s laugh was the sound of dry beetles scuttling inside a sealed coffin. “Creation? This Earth ain’t nothin’ but a dusty stage with a busted fiddle where its heart should be a thump. You fret over the Why, Colt, old son. Me? I’m fixated on the How. Always the How.”

Night in the high desert was a different kind of violence—a blue, freezing weight smelling of creosote and old iron.

They rode on, two vultures circling a carcass that hadn’t finished dying.

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Chapter II: The Camp

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They made camp beneath a sandstone outcrop – a jagged, rotten jawbone thrust from the earth. Their fire wasn’t warmth; it was a small, spiteful eye, gnawing at the encroaching dark. Jack perched on his saddle, meticulously polishing his Smith & Wesson. His movements were fluid, predatory, yet devoid of hunger for flesh – only for the stark, consuming glare of attention.

Colt sat cross-legged, dissecting an apple with a surgeon’s scalpel. The peel fell in a single, perfect, spiral, like a discarded noose. “Sound is vibration, Jack,” he stated, his eyes fixed on the blade. “The law will endure, I’m told, silent and absolute, whether an audience applauds or not. Its silence,” he paused, circled his knife toward the heavens, “is its judgment.”

“The Law!?” Jack smirked, firelight carving caverns into his face, turning him into a grotesque puppet. “A badly scribbled tune, Colt. Forgotten lyrics. A song needs a singer. People don’t crave truth; they crave a melody simple enough to whistle while they shovel shit. You fancy yourself a martyr? You’re just… a costume. A change of scenery.”

Three hours crawled by in a static hum, a dissonant chord held too long on a cello string stretched to the point of snapping.

In the heavy, dead-of-night silence, click-tick, Colt checked his watch. 2:57 AM. “You really are resonance without substance.” He noticed Jack peeking at his reflection. “You act solely for the effect… as superficial as a damn ghost.”

“Maybe,” Jack breathed, leaning so close to the fire his features liquefied in the heat haze. “But I’m the ghost whose tune they hum in the dark. Tomorrow, when we step onto the stage…” He gestured vaguely towards the unseen flat. “…I’ll make damn sure the world hears the only song it ever dreamed hear.”

He paused for what seemed like an eternity, “Loud and goddam---”

THWAUNK.

A sound like a giant hornet tearing through sackcloth ripped the silence apart. Not a whistle, not a cry, just the brutal, indifferent, incalculable vector splitting the air.

Six paces from Colt. Six paces from Jack. Six equal and opposite. Embedded deep in the pulpy, water-starved heart of a lone, skeletal Pipe Organ cactus, an arrow stood quivering. Its shaft, pale bone-wood, pointed accusingly at the bruised velvet sky. Fletching – turkey feathers dyed an unnatural, crimson red – vibrated with the fading violence of its flight, a hummingbird’s death rattle. Sap, thick and dark as clotting blood, welled obscenely around the wound, glistening like a morbid jewel beside the fire’s dying embers.

The world narrowed to that arrow’s tremor. For Jack, the polished void behind his eyes rippled. The threat was immediate, visceral—a blade aimed at his ego. His performance shattered. He rolled backward, pistol flashing in the firelight, boots scrambling in the dirt like a gutshot coyote. “Shit! Indians!” he spat, his voice muffled and raw.

Colt did not flinch. He watched the arrow after it struck, as if observing a theorem materialize in the wood. The shot had come from the absolute dark—an incompleteness: a violent, silent proof that the universe’s “indifferent law” contained gaps no moral architecture could fill. It was not a random act; it was undecidable. A message from a system beyond his own, rendering his certainties insufficient. That they both still drew breath was a statistical anomaly—a fluke of physics that remained perfectly consistent with a universe that did not care if they lived or died.

For a heartbeat that stretched into an aeon, the desert held its breath. The law, the song, the performance – all grand designs crumbled into absurdity before this single, silent, equidistant punctuation mark driven into the indifferent earth. The arrow offered no answer, only questions hanging in the chill air, as sharp and unresolved as its point buried deep within the cactus.

The universe declares her possibilities equally indifferent, suspended in the desert night.

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Chapter III: The Gallows

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The bone-arrow’s hum had died days before, but the silence it left festered like gangrene in the air. They rode now, not towards salvation, but drawn by a gravity colder than the high desert’s midnight breath. The drone beneath that silence had thickened, curdled into a physical pressure behind the eyes – a sickening thrum vibrating teeth, making the horizon swim. The world felt like a taut nerve singing the prelude to its own snapping. The wasteland stretched before them, a bleached sheepskin awaiting a final, terrible signature written in void.

Everything hummed with low-grating feedback.

Then, emerged from the heat shimmer not as structure, but as presence. The Gallows. Three titanic ribs of bark, fused at a crooked apex like the petrified claws of some sunken leviathan caught mid-lunge. No rope hung visible, only a palpable sense of suspension, a waiting hunger in the air beneath the sagging branches. Its shadow defied the sickly sun, stretching long and thin – a noose laid upon the land itself, its open loop yawning towards their approach. The ground around its base wasn’t stained crimson; it was void-black, a circle of absolute negation that drank the feeble light and radiated a cold deeper than space.

And then, the FLOCK.

They materialized from the bleached landscape like figures stepping through a bend in the world’s fabric. Not Apaches. Not outlaws. Ten, perhaps twenty, figures draped in heavy, coarse-weave robes the colour of dried arterial blood, and sun-bleached bone. Their faces were hidden not by hoods, but by masks. Not simple cloth, but something resembling hardened clay or lacquered leather, moulded into expressions of eternal, silent judgment – a hanging judge’s glacial fury, a widow’s bottomless grief, a debtor’s slack-jawed ruin, a crime on death row. Each mask was unique, a gallery of tormented archetypes frozen in their agony. Behind the narrow slits, no eyes gleamed; only an absolute, polished void stared out, a darkness that seemed to pull at the soul.

They moved with a chilling, synchronized slowness. Not walking, but processing. Each step deliberate, unhurried, as if pacing the perimeter of an invisible ritual ground centered on the Gallows. No sound came from them – no rustle of cloth, no scrape of boot, no whisper of breath. Only the oppressive drone of the desert, now amplified, vibrating up through the hooves of Colt’s horse, resonating deep in his marrow. It felt less like sound, more like the thrum of a colossal, hidden engine turning over beneath the earth’s guts.

Jack reined in hard, his horse skittering sideways, eyes rolling white. The polished void behind his eyes churned, reflecting the eyeless masks. “God be damned in hell...!?” he breathed, the bourbon-velvet stripped from his voice, replaced by a thin, metallic reek of pure biblical fear that coated the tongue. His hand flew to his gun, fingers spasming against the grip, too tremulous to draw. The sheer, silent wrongness of these morbid shepherds paralyzed even his deepest well of performative bravado. “What the the the f u c k . . .“

Colt said nothing. He dismounted, movements stiff, automatic, like a clockwork figure winding down. His silver watch, clutched in his fist, click-ticked-clicked – a frantic, insectile counterpoint to the Flock’s dreadful silence. He understood. These weren’t pursuers. They were disciples. Functionaries of the absolute law that governed this place, a law written in geometry and entropy, caring nothing for human justice or mercy, only the cold, final calculus of consequence. Euclid’s fever dream made flesh, horrifyingly orderly ... or something infinitely colder. The arrow hadn’t been a threat; it had been an invitation. A coordinate delivered by the universe’s silent clerks.

One reaper-like figure detached from the slow procession. Taller, his mask depicting a face caught in a rictus of ecstatic torment, mouth stretched wide in a silent scream that seemed to suck the air from the clearing. He held no weapon. He simply raised one hand, encased in a glove of the same coarse, blood-dark fabric, and pointed a single, unnaturally long finger.

Not at Colt.

At Jack.

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Chapter IV: The Reckoning

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Jack’s performative terror curdled into something colder. His hand, frozen on his gun, spasmed once and fell limp. The metallic reek of his fear soured to something cloying and rotten. He understood now, not with his mind, but in the marrow-deep chill spreading through his frame.

Colt said nothing. The frantic click-tick-click of his silver watch ceased. The gears were no longer turning; they were grinding into silver dust. The Roman numerals slid off the face like lead shot falling through ash and the residue of spiraling cordite. He had dismounted fully, his movements stiff and automation-like, devoid now of even his mechanical purpose. He walked toward the Gallows, drawn not by ropes but by the implacable logic of the place. The void-black circle beneath the structure pulsed, a hungry maw. The Flock’s procession halted, their eyeless masks turning in unison, a perfect circle of polished voids drinking the scene. The incessant macabre drone intensified, vibrating up from the hardpan, resonating in the cavity-ridden teeth—a dirge played on the world’s raw exposed nerves.

As Colt stepped onto the stage, the wood did not yield; it absorbed. The three titanic ribs of the Gallows groaned with the sound of ancient stone cracking under impossible pressure. From the crooked apex where the petrified claws met, hemp descended.

It resembled a root, thick as a cobra, oiled and glistening and pulsing with a faint, sickly internal light. The rope writhed, alive with a malice that was geological and patient and utterly devoid of mercy. It descended toward Colt, who stood motionless, his face a mask of chilling indifference finally cracking at the edges to reveal a dawning, terrible recognition of the machine he had served. The slicked serpent coiled around his neck with the sound of grinding stone. It was a claiming. A cold, absolute ownership that seeped into the soul and froze the core of him. He gasped—a ragged, dry sound, the first true vulnerability he had shown. His eyes, wide and suddenly lucid, flickered toward Jack, not pleading, but accusing.

How? Why?

Then the hanging began. Not a drop, but a pulling.

The Gallows flexed. The earth’s root retracted upward with agonizing, deliberate slowness. Colt’s boots left the void-black circle. His body lifted, feet dangling, twitching with the shock of the cold and the pressure and the violation. The rope tightened incrementally, a vice of frozen darkness. A guttural, choking rattle escaped his lips—the sound of a system failing, a landscape strangled. His face purpled and the veins stood out like black cords against his whitening skin. Blood began to seep from his nose and his ears, tracing dark, glistening paths down his neck. The silence was broken only by the hideous, wet straining of his throat and the groan of the ancient wood and the amplified drone that now felt like the planet screaming.

Jack watched. Forced to watch. He was not the condemned; he was the witness. The chronicler of consequence. The sentence was eternal observation. The actor made audience. The Flock’s masks, those frozen agonies, seemed to drink in his helplessness. The Reaper’s finger remained extended, a constant, silent command: You. Observe. Remember. Jack’s own breath came in shallow, panicked hitches. He wanted to scream, to look away, to draw his useless gun, but his body was stone and his will was ash. He saw the cold calculation in Colt’s dying eyes replaced by raw, animal agony. He saw the slow, systematic destruction of the man who embodied the Western outlaw’s venerated march—the indifference made flesh, now unmade by the very entropy it had unleashed.

As Colt’s struggles grew weaker, a final figure emerged. Not from the Flock, nor from the shimmering heat, but from the land itself.

Behind the Gallows, the bleached earth parted. A Sioux warrior stood, tall and unbending. He wore no war paint of celebration, but the stark pigments of ceremony and mourning—ash-white, charcoal-black, and ochre the color of dried blood. Thick. Aged. Like pancake batter. His face was etched with the harsh lines of the wasteland, eyes like black poker chips holding the cold fire of stars and unspeakable grief. In his hand, he held an ancient crossbow, its last arrow tipped with the same shard of flint that once pierced the cosmic, yet terrifyingly close distance between Jack and Colt with precision.

He did not look at the dying Colt. He did not look at the paralyzed Jack. His gaze was fixed beyond the Gallows, beyond the Flock, on the vast, wounded expanse of the stolen land. He stood as an embodiment—the spirit of the earth that had endured, that remembered the songs and the balance before the plunder. He was the unyielding principle, the enduring strength that refused annihilation even in the face of HELL itself. His presence was a silent, devastating counterpoint to the Gallows: life’s tenacious claim against the machinery of death.

The hangman’s rope gave a final, terrible jerk. Colt’s neck snapped with a sound like a green branch breaking under ice. His body hung limp, swaying slightly, blood dripping rhythmically onto the void-black circle below, each drop vanishing without a trace, consumed by the negation. The drone reached a deafening crescendo, shaking Jack to his core.

The Reaper’s finger slowly lowered. The Flock’s procession began again, circling the Gallows, circling the hanging corpse, circling the trapped observer. Their silent, synchronized steps were the drumbeat of eternity.

Jack remained frozen. His eyes were wide and unblinking, fixed on the ruined thing that was Colt, then drawn inexorably to the Sioux warrior. The warrior had not moved. He stood sentinel, a monument to resistance carved from grief and stone.

The message was etched in blood and void and stoic endurance.

The void beneath the Gallows deepened. The drone settled into a permanent, bone-chilling thrum. The Flock circled. The warrior stood. Colt hung. Jack watched. The rhythm endured.

Forever.

The land does not forgive.

the concept of the circle is foundational to Lakota (Sioux) philosophy, representing the interconnectedness of all life and the cyclical nature of the universe.

THE END