The Beast of Nightfall Lodge

by SA Sidor

  “Where is Gavin Earl?” he said.

  People were torn between the shock of the gun and the savage-looking man himself.

  “Not here,” I said. “His gang’s out on the mountain. Are you feeling better?”

  McTroy nodded. “I need whiskey.”

  Oscar brought him a bottle, newly opened. We watched him drink it.

  All of it.

  17

  Clue to the Green Elixir

  “I feel nothing,” McTroy said.

  I stepped forward. I took McTroy gently by the elbow and led him back to our room. The others stayed put in the anteroom to Nightfall. I heard a collective sigh of relief as we exited their company. McTroy tossed the empty whiskey bottle over his shoulder. It clunked and rolled along the floor. The pistol jutted from his left hand, pointing down the hallway. He sweated profusely.

  “You’ve had a hell of a day,” I said. “And you are scaring everyone, I’m afraid.”

  “Doc, I’m not right in my head. I feel hollowed out. I hear echoes inside me.”

  “Drinking that bottle of whiskey was questionable.”

  “It usually is. But listen to me. I don’t feel the liquor. I’m not drunk. Either Oscar waters down his own booze or there’s something mighty weird going on with my functions.”

  I led him into our room and shut the door behind us.

  “I’d feel better if you gave me your gun,” I said.

  “I’m keeping it,” McTroy sat on the edge of his bed. He laid his pistol on the blanket.

  I pulled a chair in front of him and sat down.

  “The back of my head hurts,” he said. He rubbed the base of his neck.

  “That’s where Pops injected you. Do you remember any of it?”

  McTroy shook his head.

  “I see stars,” he said.

  “You were shot in the chest. The wound was mortal. Pops injected a vial of an unknown solution into your… well, I imagine it went straight into your skull. Rather than bleeding to death, you came back. So, if nothing else, Pops saved your life. But I don’t think he was being kind. Earl only wanted to save you in order to prolong some sort of plan for revenge and further torment. He pummeled you until he was utterly spent. You killed Billy. Do you recall that? You shot him through the forehead. Billy the Kid number two is dead.”

  “I see stars like I’m flying up in them. Real stars and the blackest night… it goes forever.”

  McTroy ran his damaged hand over his face. Then he stared at its deformity.

  “Earl did that too,” I said. “He put a gun barrel between your fingers and…”

  McTroy tried to close his hand, but the fingers moved stiffly, pinching like a claw.

  “I can’t shoot with this.”

  “I think that was the idea. I take it you gave him a similar wound at Sully’s Fork?”

  “Sully’s Fork ain’t worth talking about. I’m thirsty. Hungry too…I could eat and eat…”

  “You need to rest for now. Why don’t you try lying down?” I lifted his legs and helped him get settled on a stack of pillows. “There now. That’s comfy.” Quickly I slipped his gun into my waistband as I covered him with the blanket.

  “I’m seeing things. I’m not ready to be with the world.”

  “What sorts of things?”

  “Before I left our room I saw a bat fly out of my ribs. It’s cold, but I’m in the desert someplace. I mean, I know we’re here outside Raton, but I’m in the desert too. The heat doesn’t get to me. It don’t feel hot enough for what I’m used to. I shut my eyes. Still I see things. It’s like I’m in a tight little box and can’t move a muscle. I smell dust and camphor. But I’m in the desert too. How can I be in all these places, Doc? They did worse than kill me. They made me crazy.”

  McTroy looked up at the ceiling as he talked. He pulled the blanket under his chin.

  “Soon you’ll feel better. Why, earlier today you were dead! You’re much improved.”

  “Don’t take my gun,” he said.

  So, even in his delirium he had noticed. “I think until you are in a clearer state of mind–”

  “Please, Doc. What if they come for me?”

  I turned and pushed the chair into the corner. While my back was to McTroy, I opened the cylinder and spilled out the bullets into my hand. I slipped them into my vest pocket.

  “I’ll leave the pistol on the chair over here in the corner. How does that sound?”

  “You need to find out what they did to me, Doc.”

  “I will do just that.”

  “Thanks for leaving my gun.”

  When I closed the door, I pressed my ear to the wood. I heard McTroy get out of bed and take the pistol from the chair. Then I heard him sink back onto the mattress.

  “So many stars… how am I going to find my way home?”

  After that he was quiet.

  The anteroom to the lodge had emptied except for Wu. He looked up at me with profound concern. McTroy’s disturbing appearance had shaken the boy. He was smart and knew that McTroy should be dead. Wu’s parents had turned into vampires some years ago. He feared undeadness as much as death itself. I had no illusions and understood that Yong Wu admired the bounty man much more than he did me. What did I have on my side except bookish habits, a love of ancient cultures, and the exceptional memory required to tell long-winded adventure stories? Rex McTroy on the other hand was a gunslinging, hard-riding catcher of evil men. It was no match. However, I had qualities McTroy did not. I brought calm, logic, and critical observation to the table instead of bullets and bravado. I was a thinker, a man of science and the future as well as the long-ago past. Wu needed me. So did McTroy in his current predicament. I thought Evangeline valued me as a friendly partner in adventure, business, and wherever else that may someday lead us. But where had she gone off without me?

  “Wu, you are exactly the person I was looking for. McTroy is resting. Uneasily, I should add. But we need to conduct a bit of clandestine investigation. Are you up for it, young man?”

  “I am, Dr Hardy,” he said. Wu stood at attention.

  “Excellent,” I said. “Do you know where Miss Evangeline is?”

  “She went with Mrs Adderly. They were talking about conducting a Seis Ants tonight. But I don’t know what six ants can do to help us. They must be magic ants.”

  “Seis… you mean the Spanish number six… Six Ants, you say?”

  “Six magic ants. That’s what they were talking about. The Seis Ants might tell them where the Beast hides here on the mountain.”

  “Might they have said ‘séance’? That is a French word for a sitting, or meeting, where the dead are contacted. Vivienne is a medium, as you know. She goes into a trance and seeks out the spirits. That spooky talk she had with Gustav the hunter at the Starry Eyes was a kind of séance.”

  “Oh, yes. That must be it.” Wu colored with embarrassment at his misinterpretation.

  “I wonder with whom they want to speak? Never mind. Let’s get busy with our own inquiry. Come! We must act quickly before the Silver Team returns to the lodge.”

  Wu followed me outside. The storm provided us a degree of privacy in our search. I had seen a niche cut into the mountain, right around the bend from Nightfall’s doors. It was wide and shallow and had only a low gate guarding it, which we discovered was unlocked. Inside the niche I found what I was looking for: Pops Spooner’s medicine wagon. His horses had been unhitched and stabled, watered, fed, and safely sheltered from the harsh elements. They were corralled at the other end of a cave-like pocket, munching hay and watching us. The wagon was left alone. Wood chocks were stuck under the wagon wheels to prevent the vehicle from rolling away. I closed the gate, gazing out into the snow, looking for any signs of human, or inhuman, activity. I saw none. From the higher vantage point of the niche, perched on a lip of stone overlooking the tree-studded valley below and the opposing ridge, the storm appeared like a white fog. Almost serene, cer
tainly mysterious. I wondered what terrors were lurking out there.

  “Wu, we need to search this wagon and see if we can find anything that gives us information about the eerie green elixir Pops used on McTroy. It healed his wounds and revived him. But it has left him altered. I fear if we do not deduce the origins of this solution, McTroy’s condition may deteriorate. He is hallucinating already. His mood is suspicious and unpredictable. That concoction is responsible. Now let’s see what the charlatan surgeon keeps in his cupboard.”

  The front end of the wagon sported a padded bench seat, a footrest, and a short awning to keep the sun and rain off the drivers. There was no access to the interior. The sides of the wagon were identically painted with jaundiced letters: Doc Spooner’s Famous Elixirs and Potent Remedies. The dry wood siding had faded to the color of old sunburn and it felt rough under my palm. But the painted letters were fresher. The sulfur-yellow pigment had cracked but hadn’t begun peeling. I used my ape-headed walking stick to tap the boards and see if any seemed loose or fashioned to hide a trick door. No, they were tight. At the back of the wagon was where the real action happened. The rear step extended to create a small platform whereupon Pops Spooner might ascend above the crowd to hawk his dubious wares. Pops lacked the charisma of a born peddler but he was amiable enough to charm a gathering of eager dullards. I imagine he sold his goods mostly to loggers and miners. Here were tired, uneducated men, often worked to the brink of death, with a life’s accumulation of aches and pains and a taste for stimulating intoxicants. If anyone said they cared about their troubles they would listen. Even the wariest would not be skeptical for long if Pops told them what they wanted to hear. Miracle cures! Hah! Most remedies I’ve come across are no more than alcohol masked with exotic flavorings. The stranger the taste, the better the sales – a shot of spirits improves a person’s mood if not their afflictions.

  I climbed up the step.

  Two doors and one large chain, looping like an ouroboros through the handles. Locked with a padlock.

  I pulled on the lock and found it secure.

  Wu was studying my problem-solving. “McTroy would shoot the hasp,” he suggested.

  “Would he now?”

  “Miss Evangeline might pick it with a pair of hairpins. She has a skillful touch.”

  “Yes, she would, and I’m sure she does. Quite a resourceful woman.”

  I lifted the lock, studied it. Weighty. The chain links were as thick as my bent little finger when I held it up side-by-side for comparison. I leaned in for a closer inspection. The doors looked dusty, cobwebbed in the corners. My nose nearly pressed at the doors. I smelled them.

  “What are you going to do?”

  “Hold this lock,” I said. “Out here to the side as far as it will stretch.”

  Wu grabbed the padlock with both hands and pulled the chain taut.

  “Keep pulling,” I said. Employing a two-handed grip, I raised my stick above my head.

  Wu shut his eyes as he prepared himself for the assault.

  Then I rammed the ape’s head through the brittle, rotting door.

  I inserted my ebony cane into the gap and broke out the softer wood surrounding the door-pull. The hardware soon dangled by its chain. I flung the doors wide. Upon gaining access I immediately started sliding out drawers and flipping open cabinets. Using my stick like a silver-headed hammer I smashed the glass display cases, discarding their contents willy-nilly, tossing them to either side as I continued searching for clues to the green elixir that vexed my friend.

  “How did you break through the door so easily?” Wu asked, astonished. He poked at the crumbly edges of the boards I had ripped out.

  “Dry rot,” I said. “Pops comes from the Northwoods where things are damp and fungi grow in abundance. The doors smelled like musty old blankets. That powdery substance looks like ordinary dust but is actually fungal spores. Those webs are too. The chain and lock were strong, but the wood it clamped together was weak. Help me examine these compartments.”

  “What are we looking for?”

  “I’m not sure. But I suspect we will know it when we find it. Think green.”

  Wu pulled out trays of brown glass bottles and crates of clear, corked jars. We found ointments, unguents, liniments, tonics, creams, suspensions, tinctures, and nostrums of every ilk. There were dried herbs tied in bundles or sealed in cans. I put my nose in them, and once I recognized the scent I tossed the plant materials on the ground outside the wagon. The liquids took me longer to sort. I identified opium, cocaine, corn liquor, tequila, and a small barrel keg of spiced rum.

  I was amazingly thirsty. I lifted the barrel and found it to be better than half-full. I opened the spigot and splashed a decent portion into the cleanest vial I spotted. After a cautious sniff, I drank a few swallows, drying my mouth with my coat sleeve. The rum tasted charred, and heavy on the star anise for my personal taste, but good. Part of me wanted to stop the search, sit down for a spell, and see if I couldn’t drain the contents of the barrel a great deal more. But I resisted.

  “There’s nothing here,” I said. “No sign of the green elixir Pops has in his bag.”

  Wu hopped down off the wagon step and walked beyond my view.

  “Interesting!”

  “What is it, Wu? Are you seeing something out there?” I refilled my vial.

  “These drawers and cabinets can’t go all the way to the front. The deepest ones on the bottom might, but not those on the top.” He struck the outside of the wagon. “There’s a space inside this wagon we haven’t reached yet.”

  I followed the sound of his knocking.

  “A secret compartment? Yes! Any medicinal agent that rejuvenates the mortally wounded would require a special hiding place to discourage common thieves.” I set aside my empty vial and tore open the top cabinet, hauling forth stacks of papers. Advertising handbills. Receipts for bulk ingredients. Formulas and recipes for various fraudulent concoctions. But none referred to the eerie elixir that heals gunshot injuries in hours and brings men back from the threshold of death. I threw the papers behind me and watched the swirling gusts of wind inside the rocky niche build them upward like a paper tornado and sweep them out over the gate and down the steep, icy mountainside. I tipped over a crate of unlabeled jars, spilling the breakage on the stone floor. I stood on the upended crate, peering into the hollow of the empty cabinet. I saw a rectangle of fresh, unstained pine at the back. I probed it with the tip of my stick. Hitting the pine barrier made a hollow sound.

  I tried driving my stick through the wood, with no success. It was new and solid.

  “There must be a catch, a lever of some sort that will gain us access to the inner cell.”

  “I’ll go under the wagon,” Wu said. “What am I looking for?”

  “Some mechanism that can be reached from the edge of the wagon. Pops isn’t going to contort himself like an acrobat or venture very far underneath. He’d want a discreet but simple release. He’d trip it by feel. A small, unobtrusive thing that draws no attention even from a curious observer.”

  Wu’s muffled voice came to me through the wagon’s floor. “Might it be an iron ring?”

  “It very well might.”

  “I see a ring. It hangs under the step where the driver climbs down from his seat.”

  “Give it a good hard pull, Wu. Let’s see what happens.”

  I lit a match and stuck my hand and then my face in the top compartment. Watching.

  Waiting.

  Wu pulled the ring. We both heard a smooth metallic ka-chunk, like the sound of a heavy key turning over, triggering a mechanism that draws back a stout, oiled bolt.

  The back of the compartment slid upward. The pine terminus was gone. Stale air blew out, flickering my flame as it tickled my eyelashes. The air smelled of camphor and spice. I pushed my arm in deeper. My eyes squinted into the dusty cubbyhole.

  A green thing stared horridly back at me.

  “Goo
d God!”

  I retreated quickly and bumped the top of my head, stumbling off the crate, losing my balance, and nearly pitching over the rail and falling off the rear platform.

  Wu scrambled out from under the wagon and met me at the door.

  “Did it work? Did we find a clue to the green elixir?”

  I nodded, while gingerly checking my head for blood. “You look. I swear I can’t trust my own eyes since we have arrived on this cursed mountain.”

  I tossed him my box of lucifers.

  Wu leaped upon the platform and rushed onto the overturned crate. He had grown taller during our months apart; desert life agreed with him, but he still had some inches to add in his maturity. Luckily Pops Spooner was a short man. The cabinetry was designed to his proportions. Wu’s hand reached the secret chamber’s opening, and, standing on the crate, the boy could easily peer inside. He struck a match off the corner of a half-open drawer overflowing with empty vials.

  “I warn you, Wu. Prepare for a shocking sight,” I said.

  Wu plunged his hand into the shadowy compartment. His head plugged the cramped opening as he strained to see inside the hidden chamber.

  “Is it a cabbage?”

  “I think not. Look closer.”

  In my mind’s eye I saw it again: two eyes trapped under a shimmering green layer of–

  Wu went up on his tiptoes. The crate tipped perilously as he shifted his weight.

  “A crystal? It shines like a green gemstone, Dr Hardy. But it is so big…”

  I went to him and placed my hand lightly on Wu’s back. My face pressed into the crevice. I smelled the odor of camphor and a spice I could not identify. And another layer of odor, like old ashes in a fireplace. The space was too small. It was awfully dark. Wu’s match had burned out. I could not get enough air in that sealed up wagon. My heart thumped in revolt until I retreated. Walking to the edge of the platform, I sucked in a lungful of cold blizzard blasts from the side of the wagon. I felt dizzy, unsteady. My sweaty hands kept sticking to the frozen iron railings. But at least I could breathe. My sight cleared. So too did my thoughts. Perhaps earlier my imagination had gotten the better of me. Certainly, I had not seen a gemmy crystal when I gazed in the compartment. No. Nor any putrefying cabbage. My vision was of something much stranger, and much, much worse. Should I take another look?