Free American Ghosts & Old World Wonders by Angela Carter Page B

bridegroom leaps forward to attack him; shoots three -- four -- into the crowd of Mendoza desperadoes, two men fall.
                Teresa, in her wedding finery, stands speechless, shocked.
                Her mother, wailing, rushes from the crowd towards her dead husband.
                Johnny aims, shoots Maria. She drops dead on to the body of her husband.
                Teresa at last wakes up. She rushes through the havoc in the church; she is appalled, the world has come to an end.
                Roxana fights free of the crowd and goes running after her. The church is a melee of shots, noise, gunsmoke.
                Outside the church, the girl and woman meet. Teresa can't speak. Roxana hugs her, grabs her hand, pulls her down the path, towards the whorehouse.
                Johnny erupts from the church door. Now he's like a mad dog. Blazing, furious, deadly -- carrying a gun.
                By the scummy pool, Roxana hears Johnny coming after them. She drags Teresa faster, faster -- the girl stumbles over her white lace hem, now filthy with dust and blood. Faster, faster -- he's coming, the murderer's coming, the devil himself is coming!
                The Count's mistress and the beloved little Teresa run towards the whorehouse, where the Count gazes out of the window; run towards him, with the madman hot on their heels.
                The Count opens the whorehouse door.
                He's carrying the rifle that hangs on the wall of the bar.
                Slowly, shakily, he raises it.
                He's aiming at Johnny.
                Teresa sees him, breaks free of Roxana's hand, dashes back towards her lover -- to try to protect him? Some reason, sufficient to her hysteria.
                Johnny, startled, halts; so the old man's turned against him, has he? The old man's turned his own magic rifle on the young one, the acolyte!
                He takes aim at the Count, fires the seventh bullet.
                He's forgotten it's the seventh bullet, forgotten everything except the sudden ease with which he can kill.
                He fires the seventh bullet and Teresa drops dead by the side of the scummy pool. Her lace train slides down into the water.
                The Count bursts into a great fit of tears. Roxana kneels by the dead girl, uselessly speaks to her, closes her eyes gently. Crosses herself. Gives the weeping Count, slumped on the whorehouse veranda, a long, dark look.
                The crowd spills out of the church. Johnny drops his gun, turns, runs.
     
                Coda
                Almost the desert. White, fantastic rocks, sand, burning sun. Johnny stole one of the Mendozas' horses; now it founders beneath him. He shades his eyes; there's a village in the distance. . .
                But this village seems deserted. A weird, shabby figure in his music-student's black jacket, he draws water from the well, drinks. At last, a thin, ragged, filthy child emerges from the derelict house.
                "The smallpox came. All dead, all dead."
                Flies buzz on an unburied corpse in a murky interior. Johnny retches. He's white-faced, fevered -- you would have said, a man with the devil pursuing him.
                At the end of the village, gazing across the acres of desert before him, a figure is propped against the wall, a figure so still, so silent as at first to seem part of the landscape. He smiles to see Johnny stumbling towards him.
                "I was waiting for you," says the Indian who sold Johnny the gun. "We have some business to conclude."
     
     
     

 
     
The Merchant of Shadows
     
                I killed the car. And at once provoked such sudden, resonant quiet as if, when I switched off the ignition, I