Weird Women

by Leslie S. Klinger

  The limbs were still lax enough with recent life to settle slowly as they stirred the body; there were no wounds upon it, but blood had gushed freely from the nose and mouth. It was a smallish man of no particular color or complexion, with that slight distortion of the joints common in a country of leaded ores. By these marks, as they discovered themselves in the sharp light, the Pocket-Hunter was able to identify him as a man Shorty had never seen, last heard of at Tres Piños, where he had fallen by rage into some such seizure as had apparently overtaken him upon the trail. That he should be here at all, and in such a case as this, was sufficiently horrifying, but it was nothing to the appalling wonder as to what had become of Tom.

  There was the impress of his body upon the bed, and the blanket, shed in loose folds across the foot, now lifted a little and buoyed by the wind, and in all the wide day nothing to hide a man, except where, miles behind, the sheer bulk of Tinpah was split by shadowy gulfs of cañons. Shorty was, for the time, fairly tottering in his mind. He would pry foolishly about the camp, getting back by quick turns and pounces to the stretched body on the sand, as though in the interim it might have recovered from its extraordinary illusion and become the body of his friend again. By degrees the Pocket-Hunter constrained him to piece out the probable circumstance.

  They had to begin, of course, with Tom’s not being dead, and to go on from that to the previous fact of Mac working his poor body over the long stretches between Tres Piños and the Jawbone, where he must have learned that Creelman was hiding. Well, he had a poor body, and it must have given out under him just as he arrived in camp, very shortly after Shorty had left it, and, over-ridden by his errand, had persuaded Long Tom, then recovering from his trance or swoon, to rise and go on with it.

  “To kill Creelman! Tom?”

  Shorty’s imagination flagged visibly in the eye of Tom’s huge amiability, but the PocketHunter came around triumphantly.

  “Well, he went!”

  “But he couldn’t have,” Shorty put forward, hopefully, as if any bar to his partner’s leaving the camp might somehow result in proving him still there. “He hadn’t stood on his feet for twenty-four hours, and suffered something awful. Besides, he didn’t know there was a cabin; if he had, I’d have gone there yesterday.”

  “Mac would have told him, of course.”

  Shorty drooped dejectedly before a supposition that, however large the hope it entailed of finding his partner still in the flesh, afforded no relief to the incontrovertible persistence of evidence in his own mind. “But he croaked, I tell you—they’re dead when they croak, ain’t they?”

  Whatever was said to that was said by the zt-z-z-t of desert flies punctuating the heavy heat. At the sound of it little beads of sweat broke out on Shorty’s face.

  “Look a-here,” he brought out, finally, “if this other fellow, Mac here, was as bad off as you say, why didn’t Tom go to him; kind of ease him off like? What for did he go off and leave him crumpled up like that?”

  “He wouldn’t have died until after Tom left, Mac wouldn’t,” the Pocket-Hunter reminded him. “What makes you so sure?”

  “Tom never walked none after we struck camp.” Shorty was secure of his ground here. “And there’s no tracks of him except where he came in alongside of me—and goin’ out—there!” The print of Tom’s large feet had turned toward the Jawbone. “Besides,” he returned to it with anxiety, “what would he go to Creelman’s for?”

  This was a point, and the Pocket-Hunter took as much time as was necessary to shroud the dead man in Tom’s blanket to consider it. He found this at last:

  “Tom,” he said, “was a peaceable man?”

  “None peaceabler,” admitted Tom’s partner.

  “Well, then, when he found this little—” (the adjective checked out of respect to the object of it being as he was) “Mac here so set on killing, he thought it no more than right to get on ahead and give Creelman a hint of what was coming to him.”

  This being so much what might have been expected of Tom, it appeared insensibly to give greater plausibility to the whole occasion. It left them for the moment free to set out on Tom’s trail with almost a movement of naturalness. It lasted, however, only long enough to see them into the steady, flowing stride of desert travel; the recurrence of that motion, perhaps, set up again in Shorty’s mind the consciousness of loss in which it had some two hours earlier begun, and the consideration of mere practical details, such as the distance from the camp to Creelman’s, swept back to the full conviction of unreality.

  Looking ahead at the long trudge between them and the mouth of the cañon, where in that clear light, on that level mesa, no man could have moved unespied by them, where, in fact, no man at that moment was moving, he broke out in a kind of exasperated wail:

  “But he couldn’t have, I tell you; he couldn’t have walked it.… He was dead, I tell you.… He croaked and I covered him up.…”

  It became momentarily clearer to the PocketHunter that unless they came soon, behind some screening weed, in some unguessed hollow, upon Long Tom’s huddled body, collapsed in the recurrent weakness of his disorder, so to restore the event to reasonableness, he must find himself swamped again in the horror of the inexplicable, out of which they had been speciously pulled by the Pocket-Hunter’s argument.

  It was not until they came to the loose shale and sand at the mouth of the cañon that Shorty reverted again to the form of his amazement.

  “Did you notice,” said he, “anything queer about Tom’s tracks?”

  “Queer, how?”

  “Well—different?”

  “Like he thought he had a game leg?” suggested the Pocket-Hunter.

  “Well, he hadn’t … but the other man … back yonder … he had a game leg.”

  “Shorty! Shorty!” the Pocket-Hunter fairly begged. “You ain’t … you mustn’t … let your mind run on them things!”

  “Well, he had,” persisted Wells. His voice clicked with dryness, trailed off whispering. It seemed to the Pocket-Hunter, suddenly, that the twenty steps or so between the man so certainly dead in his tracks on one side the fire back there, and the supposedly dead arising in his on the other, had swelled to immeasurable space. It was then there came into his mind the remainder of that singular obsession of the trail in the notice of which our conversation had begun. He saw on the instant Mac inching out from Tres Piños on his unmatched poor legs, his hate riding far before him, blown forward by some devil’s blast, tugging at him like a kite at its ballast, lifting him past incredible stretches of hot sand and cutting stone, until it dropped him there. He wrenched his mind away from that by an effort, and fixed it on the pale pine-colored square of Creelman’s cabin, where it began to show in the shadowy gulf of the cañon.

  The door was open and the curtains of the two small windows on either side half drawn against a glare which would have been gone from that side of the canon more than an hour ago.

  Here, as they halted to take notice of it, some expiring gasps of bluish smoke from Creelman’s breakfast fire went up from the tin chimney against the basalt wall. As they came near they observed a large flaccid hand hanging out over the sill. What they made out further was Creelman’s body, extended face downward, barring the door. A small lizard tic-tacked on the unpainted boards across the hand that did not start at it, and disappeared into the shadow of the room, where, as if this intrusion gave them leave to look, they perceived among the broken plates and disordered furniture a broken pack-stick, Creelman’s knife, open and blooded—the figure of Long Tom, half propped against the footboard of the bunk, dropping weakly from a wound. It was Tom, though over his face as it leered up at them was spread a strange new expressiveness, such a superficial and furtive change as frivolous passers-by will add sometimes to the face of a poster with pencil touches, provoking to half-startled laughter; plain enough to have shocked them back, even as against the witness of clothes and hair and features, from the instant’s recognition, to produce in them an amazement,
momentary, yet long enough for the dying man to take note of them unfriendlily, and to have addressed himself to the Pocket-Hunter.

  “Came to see the fight, did you? It’s damned well over … but I did for him … the—, —, —!” His body sank visibly with the stream of curses.

  But the faith of Shorty was proof even against this. He had cleared the body of Creelman at a stride, and was on his knees beside his partner, crying very simply.

  “Oh, Tom, Tom,” he begged, “you never done it? Say you never done it, pardner, say you never!”

  “Aw, who the hell are you?” The lewd eyes rolled up at him, he gave two or three long gasps which ended in a short choking gurgle, the body started slightly, and dropped.

  “Come away, Shorty, he’s croaked,” said the Pocket-Hunter not unkindly; but Shorty knelt on there, crying quietly as he watched the dead man’s features settle and stiffen to the likeness of his friend.

  I. In her book The Land of Little Rain, Mary Austin describes the Pocket-Hunter as a kind of prospector in search of pockets: “A pocket, you must know, is a small body of rich ore occurring by itself, in a vein of poorer stuff. Nearly every mineral ledge contains such, if only one has the luck to hit upon them without too much labor.”

  II. Spanish for “walk.”

  III. A few place names in Austin’s fiction are real, but for the most part her colorful place names are fictitious.

  IV. A quaking-aspen tree.

  V. “Tinpah” is probably a play on “Tonopah,” a silver-rich Nevada mining town.

  Marjorie Bowen (1885–1952) was a prolific British writer of over 150 books, mainly in the genres of historical fiction, horror tales, popular history, and biographies (including This Shining Woman, about Mary Wollstonecraft Godwin, Mary Shelley’s mother). She wrote her first novel, The Viper of Milan, at 16; when it was published, it became a bestseller. Bowen would go on to be cited as an influence by Graham Greene, and her entry in The Penguin Encyclopedia of Horror and the Supernatural (1986) calls her “one of the great supernatural writers of this century.” “Twilight” first appeared in her collection God’s Playthings (1912), in which each story is about a different historical figure, their name announced just below the title.

  Twilight by Marjorie Bowen

  Lucrezia Borgia, Duchess d’EsteI

  Three women stood before a marble-margined pool in the grounds of the Ducal palace at Ferrara;II behind them three cypresses waved against a purple sky from which the sun was beginning to fade; at the base of these trees grew laurel, ilex, and rose bushes. Round the pool was a sweep of smooth green across which the light wind lifted and chased the red, white and pink rose leaves.

  Beyond the pool the gardens descended, terrace on terrace of opulent trees and flowers; behind the pool the square strength of the palace rose, with winding steps leading to balustraded balconies. Further still, beyond palace and garden, hung vineyard and cornfield in the last warm maze of heat.

  All was spacious, noble, silent; ambrosial scents rose from the heated earth–the scent of pine, lily, rose and grape.

  The centre woman of the three who stood by the pool was the Spanish Duchess, Lucrezia, daughter of the Borgia Pope. The other two held her up under the arms, for her limbs were weak beneath her.

  The pool was spread with the thick-veined leaves of water-lilies and upright plants with succulent stalks broke the surface of the water. In between the sky was reflected placidly, and the Duchess looked down at the counterfeit of her face as clearly given as if in a hand-mirror.

  It was no longer a young face; beauty was painted on it skilfully; false red, false white, bleached hair cunningly dyed, faded eyes darkened on brow and lash, lips glistening with red ointment, the lost loveliness of throat and shoulders concealed under a lace of gold and pearls, made her look like a portrait of a fair woman, painted crudely.

  And, also like one composed for her picture, her face was expressionless save for a certain air of gentleness, which seemed as false as everything else about her—false and exquisite, inscrutable and alluring—alluring still with a certain sickly and tainted charm, slightly revolting as were the perfumes of her unguents when compared to the pure scents of trees and flowers. Her women had painted faces, too, but they were plainly gowned, one in violet, one in crimson, while the Duchess blazed in every device of splendour.

  Her dress, of citron-coloured velvet, trailed about her in huge folds, her bodice and her enormous sleeves sparkled with tight-sewn jewels; her hair was twisted into plaits and curls and ringlets; in her ears were pearls so large that they touched her shoulders.

  She trembled in her splendour and her knees bent; the two women stood silent, holding her up–they were little more than slaves.

  She continued to gaze at the reflection of herself; in the water she was fair enough. Presently she moistened her painted lips with a quick movement of her tongue.

  “Will you go in, Madonna?” asked one of the women.

  The Duchess shook her head; the pearls tinkled among the dyed curls.

  “Leave me here,” she said.

  She drew herself from their support and sank heavily and wearily on the marble rim of the pool.

  “Bring me my cloak.”

  They fetched it from a seat among the laurels; it was white velvet, unwieldy with silver and crimson embroidery.

  Lucrezia drew it round her shoulders with a little shudder.

  “Leave me here,” she repeated.

  They moved obediently across the soft grass and disappeared up the laurel-shaded steps that led to the terraces before the high-built palace.

  The Duchess lifted her stiff fingers, that were rendered almost useless by the load of gems on them, to her breast.

  Trails of pink vapour, mere wraiths of clouds began to float about the west; the long Italian twilight had fallen.

  A young man parted the bushes and stepped on to the grass; he carried a lute slung by a red ribbon across his violet jacket; he moved delicately, as if reverent of the great beauty of the hour.

  Lucrezia turned her head and watched him with weary eyes.

  He came lightly nearer, not seeing her. A flock of homing doves passed over his head; he swung on his heel to look at them and the reluctantly departing sunshine was golden on his upturned face.

  Lucrezia still watched him, intently, narrowly; he came nearer again, saw her, and paused in confusion, pulling off his black velvet cap.

  “Come here,” she said in a chill, hoarse voice.

  He obeyed with an exquisite swiftness and fell on one knee before her; his dropped hand touched the ground a pace beyond the furthest-flung edge of her gown.

  “Who are you?” she asked.

  “Ormfredo Orsini,III one of the Duke’s gentlemen, Madonna,” he answered.

  He looked at her frankly surprised to see her alone in the garden at the turn of the day. He was used to see her surrounded by her poets, her courtiers, her women; she was the goddess of a cultured court and persistently worshipped.

  “One of the Orsini,” she said. “Get up from your knees.”

  He thought she was thinking of her degraded lineage, of the bad, bad blood in her veins. As he rose he considered these things for the first time. She had lived decorously at Ferrara for twenty-one years,IV nearly the whole of his lifetime; but he had heard tales, though he had never dwelt on them.

  “You look as if you were afraid of me—”

  “Afraid of you—I, Madonna?”

  “Sit down,” she said.

  He seated himself on the marble rim and stared at her; his fresh face wore a puzzled expression.

  “What do you want of me, Madonna?” he asked.

  “Ahè!” she cried. “How very young you are, Orsini!”

  Her eyes flickered over him impatiently, greedily; the twilight was beginning to fall over her, a merciful veil; but he saw her for the first time as an old woman. Slightly he drew back, and his lute touched the marble rim as he moved, and the strings jangled.

 
; “When I was your age,” she said, “I had been betrothed to one man and married to another, and soon I was wedded to a third. I have forgotten all of them.”

  “You have been so long our lady here,” he answered. “You may well have forgotten the world, Madonna, beyond Ferrara.”

  “You are a Roman?”

  “Yes, Madonna.”

  She put out her right hand and clasped his arm.

  “Oh, for an hour of Rome!—in the old days!”

  Her whole face, with its artificial beauty and undisguisable look of age, was close to his; he felt the sense of her as the sense of something evil.

  She was no longer the honoured Duchess of Ferrara, but Lucrezia, the Borgia’s lure, Cesare’s sister, Alessandro’s daughter, the heroine of a thousand orgies, the inspiration of a hundred crimes.

  The force with which this feeling came over him made him shiver; he shrank beneath her hand.

  “Have you heard things of me?” she asked in a piercing voice.

  “There is no one in Italy who has not heard of you, Madonna.”

  “That is no answer, Orsini. And I do not want your barren flatteries.”

  “You are the Duke’s wife,” he said, “and I am the servant of the Duke.”

  “Does that mean that you must lie to me?”

  She leant even nearer to him; her whitened chin, circled by the stiff goldwork of her collar, touched his shoulder.

  “Tell me I am beautiful,” she said. “I must hear that once more—from young lips.”

  “You are beautiful, Madonna.”

  She moved back and her eyes flared.

  “Did I not say I would not have your flatteries?”