by David Boop
The train chugged on across the river, and the engine passed us close enough that the wind from it blew off the old man’s hat. He didn’t try to chase it down. He may not have even known he’d lost it, so intent was he on that strange, black train.
The train stopped with part of it on the tracks stretching across the river, but with a lot of it on the river bank. The engine was right next to us. You could hear the train crackle as the hot engine was being cooled by the air. We was still on our stools, but now we stood up, and I could see that the old man was trembling like a naked man in a snow storm. Zach seemed remarkably calm. He pushed his coat back so that the hilt of the hoodoo gun showed. He took a deep breath.
Then came a snapping sound, like a big bone breaking, and a door on the side of the train sprang open. Down came some steps. They just flopped right out of the train and expanded, with the bottom step lying flat out on the ground.
Something moved inside the doorway, and then it leaped out, not bothering with the steps. It was a kind of black frog, I think, and yet, it looked somewhat like a man, bent low and held up by its squatty legs. Its hands were in front of it, and the thing was rubbing them together like a fat man ready for lunch. It had a mouthful of long, sharp teeth.
Another one of those things sprang into view, pale and larger than the other, more upright. It didn’t have no teeth at all, just pink gums the way the old man had described them.
A boot stuck out of the doorway, rested heavy on the top step. A leg grew up from the boot, and then another boot came out of the train, and a leg grew up inside of that, and then above the legs the air darkened and took the shape of a man dressed all in white, except for black stripes on his pants. He wore a snow-white hat and had on a long white duster. He smiled. It was how the old man had described. The tops of his lips nearly touched his ears, and that mouth was like an open doorway to somewhere you didn’t want to go. It was filled with teeth that made you think of murder and cannibals. The man’s eyes—if it was a man—had a dead look, but in the whites of his eyes were little red shadows. They flickered and crawled. His forked tongue lashed out and whipped back inside his mouth like a snake discovering the weather was bad.
It was the Dueling Man, of course.
The Dueling Man turned his head from side to side, as if trying to figure us, and then he pushed his duster back on both sides, and you could see his guns, and they were just as the old man had described them.
Zach stepped so that he was centered with the man, and when he did he said, “Move the mirror up beside me, son. Now!”
I did just that. The mirror was so light and easy to handle I managed it in instants.
The Dueling Man’s expression hadn’t changed. He wiggled his long fingers and the whites of his eyes were no longer white with red shadows flicking around the edges. They had turned completely blood red. The frog-things squatted on either side of him.
“Take the cloth off the mirror,” Zach said.
I whipped it off, and when I did, the Dueling Man’s head pivoted slightly to take in his reflection in that silver mirror. I looked at that reflection. It was of a handsome man in the Dueling Man’s clothes, not nearly as tall, normal teeth. Fact was, he was quite handsome in that reflection. Squatting beside him was a sad-looking naked man on one side, and an even sadder-looking naked woman on the other side of him. Tears fat as rain drops began to run down their faces.
I glanced at them, back to the mirror. The handsome reflection of the Dueling Man drooped, and he rested his hands on the hilts of his pistols like he was all worn out. He sagged inside his duster and white clothes. His unique boots looked worn and scuffed, and as I watched his white suit frayed and became covered in dust that made the cloth gray. The brim of his hat lost its snap and wilted.
The wide, ear-licking smile on the Dueling Man’s face closed slowly, and he just stood there, looking at his reflection in the mirror, thinking on who he had been before he became a slave to the train and the Engineer. I felt sure that’s what the reflection was. Who he had been.
In that instant Zach drew.
It was a cheater’s way to do it, but it was still the right way to do it. The Dueling Man, distracted by who he once was, hesitated, and that’s when Zach’s pistol cracked. A hole about the size of the tip of my thumb spotted him between the eyes and you could hear what had been in his head splattering out behind him.
His long legs wiggled and then they collapsed inside his boots and all of him, clothes and flesh, went into those boots and the white hat fell down on top.
The demons came for Zach.
The old man looked as if he might run.
“Hold up,” I said.
“I got him,” Zach said, and even as those demons rushed forward, he whipped the gun over his shoulder and shot the old man right in the chest, without even looking.
The old man crumpled, ended up on his knees. He held his hand to his chest and fell forward, his face in the dirt.
“Consider that an extra good deed,” Zach said as he shot one of the demons solid in the head, and then shot the other. It was all so fast and so calm you would have thought Zach wasn’t doing nothing more than out target shooting.
The demons collapsed onto the river bank and the next instant they were gone to dust. The train fired up, and I bolted for the steps, hit them with a leap and was inside the train just as the steps clapped up behind me and the door slammed shut.
The train’s corridor ran left and right, and I was in a kind of gap between them. I could see all the way up to the open engine, and I could see the Engineer with his big engineer’s hat on and his dirty overalls, his flesh all taught, the bones in his face breaking through in spots. I swear he had an extra set of arms that lifted up out of his overalls. He and the Fireman, who was short and stout and dark from soot, sweat-licked from the fire in the engine, was loading gut-wrapped bodies into the fire.
They stared at me, but neither moved toward me. They kept loading those bodies, working to get that train to run. If it did, and I couldn’t get off before my protection went thin, then I would be trapped.
I took a deep breath and turned in the other direction, started through the cars. The seats were full and the people in them, if you can call them that, were coming out of them. They were blistered and scarred and their hair was in patches. They all reached out for me, but soon as they touched me the spell in my pocket coated them with fire.
They leapt back and the flames went away. I moved on through the box car, yelling, “Miss Jenny, I am a hoodoo man, and I’ve come for you.”
A man and a woman stood up from a seat and moved into the aisle in front of me. At first, they were just two scab-covered monsters, like all the rest, and then one of them called my name and I knew immediately who they were.
My mother and father. I won’t lie to you, hate them as I did, I was sad to think of where they ended up. Somewhere along the line, they’d gotten in the hoodoo and, when they was killed, they took the train ride. I felt my heart melt. But pretty soon, it was solid again. What they wanted wasn’t me, it was a way off that train. Zach was my family. Not them.
By then, the train was chugging and moving and rocking, and it was hot in there. It was as if the heat was lessened by that charm in my pocket, but I could feel it pushing at the air around me. I was starting to grow weak.
I kind of closed my eyes and forced myself between my mother and father, remembering how my father had beat me with a strop, and my mother had cheered him on. They reached out to touch me as I passed, and their hands flamed. They screamed and stepped back into their row.
“Miss Jenny!” I called out again and again.
Then, as I entered the next boxcar, a little figure came out of one of the seats and staggered toward me. I could see that she was female, but her boiled skin flapped off her face and her neck was broken so that her head was on her shoulder. She was naked, but it wasn’t an exciting kind of naked. It was the kind that made your stomach churn and your brain deny.
I hesitated, but finally stuck out my hand. She took it. No flames came off of me and jumped on her. It was Jenny all right. I turned and started pulling her after me as I ran back through the box cars.
We hadn’t gone far when I seen the old man that had hired Zach. He had been hoodooed onto the train, and his baggage was full grown now, weighting him down so much he was nearly bent double. He lifted an eye and looked up at me. The baggage, a filthy old woman that I knew was Consuela, grinned rotten teeth at me.
“Help me,” he said.
“You earned your place,” I said, and pushed by him and the thing on his back. I yanked at Jenny’s hand and glanced back at her, saw her head was straight now. The flesh on her face was flapping back into place and her skin was turning to its former coffee and cream color that the old man had described.
We came to the doorway and the steps. I opened the door with my free hand, kicked the steps out.
When I looked up the Engineer was hustling from his place up front, coming along the floor like a spider, using those extra arms to launch him forward. His engineer hat tilted to one side, but it stayed on his head.
Behind him, in the engine room the Fireman’s face turned soft, and he yelled in a voice that coughed out in smoke. “Run! Run for all you’re worth!”
There wasn’t really anyplace to run, but there was the open door now and the night outside, the moonlight.
I said to Jenny, “Jump.”
I stood Jenny in front of me and gave her a bit of a push, and she jumped. I stepped onto the top step, coiled my legs and leaped, just as the Engineer grabbed my boot, and it come off in his hand.
I went tumbling, and it was like I’d never stop. Down a grassy hill and into a wad of briars and brush. I hit something hard then and I was out.
* * *
When I awoke, my head was in Jenny’s lap. She was put back together, so to speak. Her features were smooth and beautiful, and her skin looked like chocolate there in the moonlight. She was stroking my forehead. Tears were running down her cheeks.
“You got me off that awful train, away from that awful place.”
I sat up slowly and looked around. There wasn’t no train tracks and no train, and I had no idea where we was.
After I got to my feet and looked around, placed the moon, which was beginning to slide down behind the trees, I knew the direction to go. I was all cut up from the briars and such, but Jenny had pulled me out of them, and wiped me off with the folds of her dress, staining it with my blood. I had nothing worse than a missing boot and a slight limp that was going away even as we walked. Jenny had hit ahead of the briars and wasn’t cut up at all. Her blue dress was ripped a little and there were pieces of weeds and cockleburs in her hair, but she looked fine.
We finally managed to get to where Zach was. He had covered the mirror and was sitting on one of the stools eating some ham and bread.
Except for the Dueling Man’s boots and his hat on top of them, there was nothing left of him. The body of the old man was there, but I knew his soul was on that train with his baggage, riding on and on for a bleak eternity. And I knew too, from the way Zach was smiling, his baggage was gone.
“Hello there,” Zach said.
* * *
Jenny stayed on with us, which suited me fine. She didn’t have any connection to her old life. The café she had worked at, and the people there, were long gone. I found me and her kind of suited one another.
Since I didn’t have no baggage on me, I felt I could have a life, a relationship, not like before when I was linked to Zach. You see, after that night, I was done with the hoodoo in any shape or form.
I quit working at the gun shop too. Zach insisted. He wrapped the hoodoo gun up and put it away.
Me and Jenny was hitched by the justice of the peace, got a place of our own. In our little home, no demons came out after midnight, and I could get up and have a glass of water or go to the outhouse anytime I pleased.
One day, when I went to visit Zach, just to see how he was, not to get involved in anything, he and everything in the shop was gone.
A man down at the livery told me Zach bought a wagon, hitched his horses to them, and that was the last he had seen of him. But Zach had left me something, figuring I’d come to the livery to ask about him, since a wagon would have to be rented or purchased to haul off all that was in the shop.
What Zach left me was a wooden box.
“It don’t have no key,” said the man at the livery.
I took it home and used a chisel to pry it open. Inside was the bag of silver the old man had given Zach. In the bottom of the box was a note.
SO YOU AND JENNY DON’T HAVE TO WORRY NONE.
Well, so far, me and Jenny don’t have no worries, but now and again I think about Zach and wonder where he is, and if he’s still gunsmithing, or if he might be back heavy in the hoodoo business again.
As Long as Grass Shall Grow
MERCEDES LACKEY
They called this part of Oklahoma Territory the “Cherokee Outlet,” because it was supposed to give the Cherokee, whose tribal reservation lay to the east of it, a way to get to their traditional hunting grounds. Andy Falk figured they probably did use it for that, but they also leased it to cattle ranchers for grazing and, normally in April, that would be all you would see out here—cattle and whatever wild critters shared the land with them.
But this was not a normal April, and the cattle had been forced to share the southern boundary of the Outlet with a strange and motley assortment of human beings, riding and driving beasts and contraptions that stretched for miles along the northern border of what was called the “Unassigned Lands”—a parcel of territory that had not been assigned to any particular tribe when so many thousands of unfortunate Indians had been ripped from their homelands and sent marching out here to be “resettled.” In Andy’s opinion, that was a far-too polite word for what it had been, which was unvarnished theft. Members of what were called the “Five Civilized Tribes” in particular had “assimilated” in the East on their ancestral homelands, made farms and prospered in the image of whites, in the belief—as white men had assured them—that if they imitated white men, they should have the same privileges and protection of the law as white men.
That had been a lie, of course. As soon as white men wanted those lands, white men got them, and Five Civilized Tribes got rounded up and marched westward, with only as much as they could carry in their wagons or on their backs.
Andy sighed, looking eastward, and thought about those promises.
Andy had no intention of joining in any successive land thefts after this one. In fact, he wouldn’t be here now if it hadn’t been for an accident and a promise of his own.
A promise that had been made two weeks ago, when he had been in the town of Caldwell in Kansas, with no more intention of participating in this venture than he had of flying.
* * *
Andy Falk of Milwaukee, Wisconsin, would still have been at home in Wisconsin instead of this—at least to him—unseasonable heat of Kansas, if he had not been sent to find someone.
The love of his life, the clever and witty Elsa Baumgartner (she of the flaxen hair, merry blue eyes, and rosy cheeks) and her family had not heard from her father, Heinrich, for weeks, and they were worried. He was a land surveyor, and like dozens of others, he’d taken work with the federal government to survey and lay out 160-acre parcels in the Unassigned Lands of Indian Territory in advance of the Land Run that was to take place in April. The work should have been done; Heinrich Baumgartner should have been home, or at least have sent a letter if he’d been delayed. And Andy reckoned that volunteering to find the head of the household would put him farther up in the list of potential suitors in Elsa’s eyes than he was now, which was just short of the middle. So he saddled his horse, Prinz, and headed south.
To be sure, Andy had never been further south
than Chicago, but he considered that he was well prepared for Kansas, having read several stories for boys about the Wild West by Karl May in Der Gute Kammerad.
Andy, and Elsa, and all of Elsa’s family were, of course, German, and had immigrated to Milwaukee and the colony of Germans there. But no one ever took Andy for anything but an American, because Andy had a secret.
Andy Falk—born Andreas—was an Elemental Master, a master of Earth Magic and its Elementals and, as an Elemental Master, he could summon a local Elemental to teach him any local language overnight. The Elemental he had summoned his first night in New York City had not only taught him American English, but taught it to him with the local accent, a fact that always made him chuckle.
But he very quickly discovered that Karl May’s stories had left him woefully unprepared for Kansas and his “eastern” accent made him a target for sharpsters, at least until he bought himself a revolver and wore it openly.
Fortunately, he knew how to use it.
Andy was a stubborn fellow, and his dogged persistence paid off. He traced Baumgartner like a hunting hound until he came to the border town of Caldwell, a town that had swelled to some fifty thousand people in anticipation of the Land Run. And that was where he found the surveyor, exhausted from lack of sleep, in an army-issue two-man tent at the edge of town, tending to a fellow surveyor who was deathly sick with cholera. He had not contacted his family because he had not dared leave his partner’s side long enough to send a wire or a letter. No one here wanted to help him. Their minds were fixed on Harrison’s Hoss Race.
* * *
“Get some sleep,” Andy said, forcefully. Heinrich was too exhausted and grateful to argue. He stumbled to the other side of the sheet dividing the tent into two living spaces, fell onto the cot and was snoring in less than a minute. Andy turned his attention to the cholera-stricken surveyor.