New Havant was not a prosperous town, but it was a prospecting one. Established during a gold rush sometime around the year 1813, it wasn’t until a couple of decades later that the settlement found its true (though ultimately short-lived) purpose: lode mining. None of that shallow panning nonsense. Big shafts all the way.
Things were looking up. There’d been talk of building a proper schoolhouse with desks and everything. But it hadn’t taken long for the mines to grow exhausted, and anyone still young and hungry enough to hold a taste for the digging business had fled for the promise of work in California, in the second gold rush of 1849.
Our trio arrived, tired and sweaty, in the August of 1850.
Nobody came out to greet them, save for the mandatory tumbleweed that rolled across the town’s one and only road (which was called Main Street, of course). A sign’s hinges creaked in the welcome breeze. Somewhere a chicken clucked.
‘Should we knock or something?’ whispered Viola.
‘How long has it been since you left this place?’ asked Pierre, out the corner of his mouth.
‘About ten years,’ grumbled Wesker, standing beside him. His hands were stuffed into his pockets. ‘Give or take.’
‘How old were you when you left?’
Wesker clenched his teeth. ‘About twenty-four, twenty-five, I think.’
‘Wait, you’re thirty-five?’ laughed Viola. ‘What? How come you look so…’
Pierre shot her a look.
‘…gruff?’ she finished.
‘Life here wasn’t easy,’ he huffed. ‘People grew up fast.’
Viola snorted. ‘Please. My old life was hardly a walk in the park and you don’t see me looking like the skin from an overcooked jacket potato.’
‘Stop it, both of you,’ said Pierre, sensing the temperature rise to either side of him. He ushered them down the empty street and, turning to Wesker, asked, ‘Is it always this quiet?’
‘No,’ he replied. He looked uneasy, his eyes flickering from storefront to storefront. ‘It’s never been a busy town, but this is… this is wrong. Something must have happened.’
‘I’m sure everyone is okay,’ said Pierre, his words about as strong as candy floss in a puddle.
‘Then where are they?’ Viola pondered.
They wandered down the dusty Main Street, listening to the crunch of dirt under their shoes and the cries of birds circling high above. The first building on their right was the town stable, similar to a barn in structure. No stablehand could be seen sweeping its floor, but a pitchfork had been stabbed into what looked like a freshly turned mound of hay. Bales of it were piled outside the stable’s twin doors and a single gelded horse was reined to a post belonging to one of the stalls inside. It was pacing impatiently.
‘That’s the undertaker’s place over there,’ said Wesker, nodding towards a dark and gloomy building across the street from the stable. There was a range of coffins reclining on its wooden porch. One was made of simple, unmarked pine; another was painted in golds and blacks. The one at the end of their short row was only a few feet in length, designed for a child.
‘Old Mr. Bonnetide was the undertaker when I left,’ he continued, craning his neck in an attempt to see through the slits in the window’s shutters. ‘Always nice to me, he was. Gave me a biscuit once after the other children trapped me in one of his display coffins. I wonder if he’s still shuffling about…’
‘Doesn’t seem to be doing a lot of business,’ said Viola. ‘I guess we should see that as a good thing?’
‘You don’t think the octowürm has already been through here, do you?’ asked Wesker, suddenly turning stiff and timid.
Pierre quickly shook his head. ‘If it had, we’d see the mess. Remember the state of the warehouse? I doubt there’d be much more than a splinter of this town left.’
A cockerel weathervane swung lazily atop a chemist’s roof. CAMPBELL’S CHEMIST was printed on its window; through it Pierre could make out a polished bronze cash register and glass bottles in all sorts of shapes and sizes. Some were small and full of tonic. Others were as large as bell jars and full to the brim with soda crackers and ginger drops. Nothing appeared to have been looted in the people’s absence. The same could be said of the cobbler and the general store further down the street.
‘If there are two places people in this town would be,’ said Wesker, after stopping to peer into the smithy’s open doorway, ‘it’s the church or the saloon. I’m sure they’d try to say it’s mostly the former, but it ain’t. Best chance we’ve got of finding someone is in there.’
So he led Pierre and Viola towards the saloon, with its flapping twin doors and its cobbled-together balcony on the second floor, and its hitching posts and water troughs standing guard before its porch, and not towards the church down the far end of the street, whose spire towered above all the other buildings.
Wesker’s boots stomped up the wooden steps that led up to the door, and planks creaked beneath him. Viola followed but Pierre paused at the bottom. Something was bothering him.
He looked back across the dust-swept town and saw a goat, tethered to a stump of a post by a thin piece of rope. It was staring at him and chewing.
We want our goat back, drifted a choir of ghostly voices from the recesses of his mind. He recognised them as belonging to the dodgy monks back at the hotel. You don’t want to be left empty-handed in your time of goat-need, do you?
‘Load of bloody nonsense,’ Pierre muttered to himself, rolling his eyes. He climbed the steps and pushed open the doors of the saloon.
The goat kept staring and chewing, quite uninterested.
It was just as Pierre had expected: the inside looked as deserted as the rest of the town. Nobody sat laughing or playing cards around the five round, battered tables. Nobody was stumbling and spilling their drinks onto the floor (which was in desperate need of a good sweep, Pierre couldn’t help noticing). No barman stood behind the bar; no wenches sold their wares to drunk gentlemen; no old man sat tinkling the ivory keys.
‘It’s like being on a movie set,’ said Pierre, taken aback by how loud his voice sounded amongst the quiet.
Wesker managed a laugh, but it was a short and nervous breed. ‘It’s exactly how I remember it,’ he said. ‘Minus all the people bustling about, and the awful din, and the risk of losing a finger. Look,’ he added, pointing to a gash in one of the tables. ‘That’s where Mad Mendelson once stabbed a knife through a card he accused of cheating.’
‘You mean he thought the other player was cheating?’ asked Viola.
‘No. The card.’
Stairs led up to a landing that doubled as a sort of balcony above. Pierre took a mental note that all the doors to the guest rooms were closed. Deliberately so, it seemed. And if there was anyone who knew the potential connotations of doors and guest rooms, it was Pierre.
He pushed his way through the throng of tables and chairs to the bar itself. Much like the chemist’s apothecary, the bottles were untouched. Un-looted. The mirror on the back wall had been polished only recently. Leaning forwards, he could even see a glass left behind the bar, half-full of whiskey, as if somebody had poured it and then quickly hidden it out of sight.
As if…
Pierre had another look at all the chairs he’d squeezed past. If the saloon staff had planned on leaving, they would have stacked the chairs and stools on top of the tables. Standard practice when closing shop. But none of the chairs were overturned, and there were no smashed glasses on the floor either. The town’s population may have vanished, but if so it must have been in a calm and quiet manner…
‘Put your hands in the air where I can see ‘em,’ came a thunderous voice from the door.
All three of them turned around, slowly, doing as the man had said. Pierre kept an eye on Viola - or rather, the gun she had stuffed into the waistband of her trousers.
The man in the doorway was hard to make out beyond his silhouette - the sun followed him through the door in a brilliant halo.
He presented a short but stocky figure, bolstered by a tall and wide-brimmed hat. His heavy boots were set just as wide apart. The only part of him not cast in stark monochrome was the revolver he had pointed at Pierre. Its muzzle glistened a tarnished silver colour.
‘I don’t know what trouble you folks are plannin’ to do in this ‘ere town,’ said the man, his voice not wavering an inch. ‘But I won’t be havin’ none of it. How many of you are there?’
‘Erm… it’s just the three of us,’ said Viola. One of her hands - her shooting hand - was starting to descend, millimetre by millimetre. ‘Who else were you expecting?’
‘Don’t lie to me, woman,’ snapped the man, spitting out the last word as if it were an insult. ‘And keep your hands where they are, goddammit. I’ve seen that six-shooter stuck down the back of your pants, so don’t go tryin’ nothin’.’
‘We’re not interested in any trouble, sir,’ said Pierre. The man’s gun flashed back towards him. Pierre’s raised arms felt very heavy all of a sudden. ‘We were tracking something through here, and we wondered where…’
The man in the doorway cocked his revolver and took a step forward, away from the light. The immediate silence was deafening.
‘This town’s full of good and godly people, you hear?’ he hissed. ‘Good and…’
‘Sheriff Ketchum?’ said Wesker, interrupting. ‘Is that you?’
The man kept his gun raised, but his expression softened. Now he looked more confused than anything else.
‘Wait, you’re not… you’re not old Wesker’s boy, are you? Henry?’
Wesker and Sheriff Ketchum slowly broke into a nervous laughter, and then Wesker grabbed Ketchum’s free hand and shook it. Stuffing his revolver back into its holster, the sheriff gave Wesker a hearty slap on the back in return.
Pierre and Viola looked at one another in disbelief.
‘Henry?’ they said, together.
Chapter Ten
Ketchum sat the three of them down in his sheriff’s office and pulled open one of the drawers of his desk. Now in better lighting, Pierre could see he was a slightly older gentleman - probably approaching the end of middle-age - and one prone to a great deal of sweating. He’d been dabbing at his forehead with a handkerchief ever since they left the saloon.
His bulbous red nose gave away the contents of the drawer before his hand did. He slammed a bottle of unlabelled whiskey onto the top of the desk and then let himself drop into his poor, protesting chair.
‘Fetch us four glasses, Derricks, will you?’ he shouted. The sound of hurried footsteps approached, and then a young, nervous and spotty face peered around the corner.
‘Y-yes, sir. Right away,’ he spluttered, then scarpered off.
Pierre looked around at the sheriff’s office. He’d seen its kind before in a dozen old movies, but never up close and in person. The walls at the front of the building were made of the same wood as the rest of the town, but the back walls - in particular, round the corner where the cells were - had been built with bricks and mortar. There was a gun rack in which a few rifles were stored. There was a table, and on it a hand-carved chess set. There wasn’t much in the way of decoration, but a stag’s head had been mounted on the wall.
‘Sorry ‘bout all that back there in the saloon,’ said Ketchum, leaning back in his chair and steepling his fingers. ‘Just never can be too careful these days. Had we known one of yous was a local, well…’ He sat forwards and studied Wesker. ‘Man, is it good to see you. What’s it been - a year, year and a half since you left? Though you look like a man gone for a lot longer, if you’ll pardon me sayin’.’
Viola turned to Wesker and grinned. Wesker ignored her and offered Sheriff Ketchum a pleasant smile instead.
‘It’s that hard California sun,’ he replied. ‘It’s hell for your skin.’
‘I’ll believe it,’ said Ketchum, nodding, which frankly Pierre found quite astonishing. Wesker looked twice the age of the sheriff thought him to be. ‘I suppose you twos both know the story of how our Henry here upped and left us, eh?’
Pierre and Viola shot each other a curious glance and shook their heads. Wesker sighed.
‘Can’t blame him, not really,’ the sheriff continued. ‘This town’s a shadow of what it once was, and even then it never shined as bright as the gold we were supposed to find here. The mine’s been shut… what? Ten, twelve years now? Not much work goin’ round for a young man, at any rate.’
Young man. With questioning eyebrows, Pierre and Viola turned to look at the gruff, grizzled man sitting beside them. Wesker gave them a subtle shrug.
‘Offered to make him a deputy, but that wouldn’t have stemmed the boredom much,’ said Ketchum. ‘No, Henry here went off to seek his fortune in the gold mines of the west coast, ain’t that right?’
Wesker huffed in good humour. ‘Don’t know about fortune, but I sure found something.’
A door, Pierre guessed. With a pang of guilt he realised he’d never actually asked Wesker how he’d come to work at Le Petit Monde. Most people passing through did so deliberately, but Wesker must have stumbled across a doorway by mistake.
‘Well, it’s sure great to see you again. What did you say you were doin’ now…?’
‘Tracking,’ said Viola, quickly. ‘We’re tracking down rare beasts. And people, sometimes. When they’re in need of being found.’
Sheriff Ketchum looked each one of them over, then nodded. ‘Good money for good work,’ he said, approvingly. ‘As much as anyone out here can ask for, I suppose.’
Pierre looked out of the window to his right. The town had returned to normal, now that its sheriff had confirmed that the three of them weren’t bandits. Women in frilly dresses were returning to hang their washing on clotheslines. Dogs had been let out to sniff various wooden posts and mud puddles in the street. Men in stained vests were working at the smithy and the butcher’s, often interchangeably.
‘Got you those glasses, sir,’ said the young man, returning from the rear of the building. He was barely more than a boy, and scrawny like a stray cat. His waistcoat hung loose from his chest. A pistol was strapped to his hip. He laid out the four whiskey glasses in a line beside the bottle.
‘Good lad,’ replied Sheriff Ketchum. He picked up the bottle but paused before pouring. ‘Well? What are you waitin’ around for, lad? It’s not like you’re gettin’ any. Get back to cleanin’ the cells.’
‘Yessir,’ snapped the boy. He scurried away in a hurry as Ketchum dealt each of the glasses a fair share of drink. The sheriff pushed one glass to each of them and lifted one from the table for himself.
‘To old friends arrivin’ in times of need,’ he said, in the voice of somebody toasting a funeral.
They all drank - or at least, Viola and Wesker did. Ketchum swigged, and Pierre sipped.
‘Wait a second,’ said Wesker, putting down his glass. ‘What do you mean, times of need?’
Sheriff Ketchum paused whilst reaching for the bottle again. ‘You ain’t seriously tellin’ me you guys don’t know, are ya? What kind of trackers are you supposed to be?’ He shook his head. ‘Christ almighty.’
‘What sort of trouble are you in?’ asked Viola, angling for a refill. ‘Not something involving a big, angry space worm, by any chance?’
Pierre elbowed her in the ribs.
The sheriff looked at her and scrunched up his face. It looked like a rotten apple.
‘No, why would you…?’ he started, before shaking his head in disbelief. ‘Haven’t you fools ever heard of the Bowder Boys?’
Once more Viola and Pierre turned to look at Wesker. He shrugged his shoulders.
‘Should we have?’ he asked.
‘Of course you should ‘ave! You’ve been in California, not under a goddamn rock! Jesus. Well if you don’t know, you’re gonna find out soon enough. Word has it they’re on their way here this very moment. That’s why we all were hidin’ when you fellas strolled into town. And you, ma’am. There’s lasses in with those Bowder
Boys, too.’
‘Too right,’ replied Viola, swatting a particularly persistent fly off her shoulder. ‘But what on Earth do these Bowder Boys have against New Havant?’
‘Nothin’,’ said the sheriff, ‘and everythin’! We ain’t got nothin’ they want or need, that’s for sure. Nobody’s worked the mines since Henry here were a boy. We don’t have much to trade, and what we grow we keep for ourselves. That’s alright for most folks like us. We keep to ourselves. We like the quiet. Things tick along just fine. But it makes us an easy target for bands of outlaws, and those Bowder Boys are headed this way. Or so we’ve heard. In the past couple of weeks they’ve hit Little Brook and Franklin. Both are only a few days’ ride south from here.’
‘Could be they’ve already moved on,’ said Wesker. ‘New Havant is barely big enough to earn a spot on a map. Maybe they didn’t think it was worth their time.’
‘Well they took out Little Brook, didn’t they?’ laughed Ketchum, nervously. He poured himself another glass of whiskey, and Pierre noticed that his hand was shaking. ‘And they’ve hardly got three houses and a chicken to their name.’
‘Took out?’ Wesker put down his glass. ‘What do you mean, took out?’
Ketchum threw his own glass of whiskey down his throat before replying. ‘Not sure this is a conversation suitable for present company, gentlemen.’
They all turned to Viola, who had already crossed her arms.
‘Try me,’ she said.
‘Well…’ the sheriff began, clearing his throat, ‘the men got away with their lives, though they beat old Mr. Turrell pretty bad when he first tried to stop them comin’ into town. Gonna need new spectacles and his knee won’t ever bend the same. He got lucky. They came for the wives and daughters, mostly. And whatever meats and skins the townsfolk had stored away… but that ain’t so great a concern.’
‘And the wives and daughters?’ asked Viola.
‘Alive,’ said Ketchum, nodding slowly. ‘Not feelin’ all that much better for it though, can’t imagine. Franklin was much worse. Nobody told ‘em the Boys were comin’. Half of the men were shot down tryin’ to get their little ones into cubby holes and the like. And the women… Well. Some lived, and some were carried off when the Boys left town. Nobody ain’t seen them again, and I dare say we can all guess why.’
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