"There's another writer here tonight who writes under the name of Jack Ketchum and he has also written what may be the best book of his career, a long novella called The Crossings. Have you read it?"
— Stephen King, from his 2003 National Book Awards Acceptance Speech

The Crossings
by Jack Ketchum

It's the Arizona Territory. The year, 1848. The year the Mexican War ended. Fate and blazing pistols have just thrown together reporter and part-time drunk Marion T. Bell and the very nearly legendary John Charles Hart, mustanger and scout, in the Little Fanny Saloon. Plying the river-trade across the Colorado to the gold fields of California in the north, and war-torn Mexico to the south, the town of Gable's Ferry has sprung up overnight—lacking only a church, a schoolhouse and a jail.

Though some would say that only the jail was needed.

A rough place in a lawless era. About to become a hell of a lot more so one night when Hart, Bell and the easy-going giant Mother Knuckles stumble upon Elena, a fierce, young, badly wounded Mexican woman near the banks of the Colorado. She's naked. She's been bullwhipped, knifed and branded. And she tells them about the kidnap, rape and servitude she and her sister have endured at the hands of las hermanas de lupo, the deadly Valenzura Sisters and their henchman, the deserter Paddy Ryan, at the well-manned slave-camp across the river aptly called Garanta del Diablo—Mouth of the Devil.

It's just three hundred years since Cortez. Only three hundred years since the Old Gods of Mexico were in their full and fearsome flower.

Tezcatlipoca, god of the moon and the night. Tlazolteotl, Eater of Filth. Xipe, Lord of the Flayed.

Blood for rain. Blood for bounty.

For many, like the Valenzura Sisters, they have never died.

And Elena's sister's still there.

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Free Excerpt:
She said that it was sunset before they’d crossed the plains and reached the river.

She’d ridden all that way with her hands tied behind her back, perched high on the saddle in front of the tall wiry Indio whose name was Gustavo and many times over the journey she felt his prick harden up against her. He had already had both her and Celine but she guessed he wanted more.

She wondered if her sister was experiencing the same in front of Fredo, the fat one with the prickly mustache.

She was sore just about everywhere but especially against the saddle and very thirsty. As they crossed the shallows into Mexico she stayed alert for some means of escape — their horse missing its footing perhaps — but there were none. The Anglo riding point knew his river well. The crossing was smooth and steady.

When the fourth rider leading the pack horse from the back of which over a dozen chickens dangled reached the other side of the river Gustavo turned and said, Mexico. Is home, no? Why your people leave here?

She felt no wish to answer him.

“I see your eyes, little one,” he said. “I see the way you fight. You and the sisters, I think you are the same.”

She found it hard to believe that a foul-smelling dog like this had sisters of any kind so she asked him.

“What sisters?”

“Las hermanas de lupo. Las hermanas del diablo. As old as the mountains, little one. As old as the gods are old. Just like you.”

He laughed.

“You know,” he said, “I think maybe they will have to kill you.”

The night was moonless and starless beneath low-lying clouds and she saw the bonfires well before the settlement. There were four fires and as many wooden outbuildings on either side of an old hacienda which had seen better days and as they approached she was surprised and puzzled at how many people these mostly small buildings must have housed within, some of them soldados like the ones they rode with but most of them women, young and dirty and moving listlessly at their various chores, hauling water and wood and cooking and stoking the flames.

Even before the old crone stepped out of nowhere out of the smoke in front of them she knew there was something very wrong here because many of these women were Anglos — fragile-looking blonde women working side by side with Mexican peasant girls and she thought she already knew how this collection had come to be. Some of them wore little more than rags and some what appeared to be castoff dance-hall costumes badly torn and wore grotesque amounts of makeup on their bruised filthy faces perhaps to shame them and some were clearly ill and staggered under the burden of their toil.

She heard moans and laughter and from somewhere a muffled scream.

Then the old hechicera stepped out of the smoke billowing around them and her fears for their safety in this place turned to something more akin to dread.

As old as the hills? No, she thought. But old enough. Unknowably old.

Beneath the black concentric circles painted across her cheeks and chin and the black crescent moons which hollowed the eyes burning up at them and the black slashings across the lips and nose, her skin hung off her face like slugs crawling. She wore some kind of thin gown, ragged and nearly transparent so it was possible to see her withered layered flesh beneath and the dugs with their huge dark nipples pointed down toward the earth. Her hair was long and matted and she smelled of brimstone and rotted blood. On her head was the sunbleached hollowed-out skull of a coyote, its top row of teeth still intact.

The coyote’s grin seemed to match her own.

In each of her hands she held a living rattlesnake gripped below the heads which twisted writhing around her arms. At the sight of these or perhaps the smell of her the horses shied and whinnied and tried to move away.

Gustavo removed his hat to her. The Anglo Ryan merely nodded as they passed.

Still amazed by this apparition Elena turned in the saddle and saw two younger women step up beside her, these both middle-aged she thought, each dressed in black. One was bone-thin and hard-looking, grim and expressionless, clean and neat. The other stocky, with cruel peasant’s features.

She had just met the Valenzura sisters. Old Eva, Maria, and Lucia.

Her guardians in hell.

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