Cloudmaker

by Malcolm Brooks

  “Popular box,” he remarked.

  She felt her pulse rise but he only made a little flourish with his wrist and with a slight tremor scribbled something in his book. It took him a couple of shaky tries to reposition the pencil above the arm of his spectacles. “Right this way.”

  He led her into the back, through a maze of crates and bulging canvas sacks stenciled U.S. MAIL, then around a sorting table to a vault door set in the wall. He told her to look the other way. She heard the dial turn and, when she stole a peek, saw his thin shoulder blades like folded wings beneath the black satin of his vest.

  She heard the rotating whine of the lever, the nearly ominous muffled clank of the retracting bolts, and she let herself look again. The heavy door swung without a sound.

  He beckoned her into the vault, which was tinier than she would have predicted from the formidable look of the door—only about the size of an average bathroom, with a small library table and a single chair. The three interior walls were lined with rows of numbered metal doors, each about the size of a dictionary’s spine and each containing a single dial combination centered between a pair of keyholes.

  The postmaster eased his way around the table and found the correct box on the back wall. Somebody dinged the service bell at the front desk. He jittered his way through several attempts to stab his key into one of the locks, mumbling in frustration but finally succeeding. He turned the key and stepped back. The bell dinged again.

  “You may use the table,” he informed her. “I’ll be up front.”

  She waited until he’d shuffled out, then loosed the key from the thong and put the satchel on the table. She tried the other slot. The key wouldn’t enter at all, and she saw then that a little metal barrier behind the portal blocked its passage. She looked to the combination lock.

  She reached for the dial and saw that she herself had a shake, worse even than the elderly postmaster’s. She looked up, sucked in and blew out a couple of giant breaths at the whitewashed ceiling. Concrete, she could tell the longer she looked. She had gooseflesh on her bare arms despite the July heat. She was in a concrete room, a true vault, even the air somehow as still as death. She got herself settled and reached again for the lock.

  With the initial 5 canceled out the remaining two-digit numbers were 33/19/17. She assumed the thing worked in the usual right-left-right fashion but was still shocked when she spun to a stop at the terminal integer and heard a slight shift inside the mechanism. She raised her key again and inserted it cleanly within the slot, turned it, cleared the hasp, and swung the little door.

  The box felt so light she immediately wondered if the thing might actually be empty. What a slap that would be, if someone had beaten her to whatever was supposed to be inside. Or maybe there never had been anything to begin with, the whole cat-and-mouse charade more along the lines of a practical joke foisted by a dead man. She levered the hasp and raised the lid.

  Not entirely empty, but nearly so. A single sealed envelope, unmarked on the outside, which she snatched up and thrust into the satchel. She wanted to run in a sort of eleventh-hour dread, a near certainty the whole jig was about to unravel after so many puzzles and so many doors, and she wanted nothing so much as to be gone, back with her prize and her boys in the Stude outside.

  Again she collected herself, enough at least to return the box to its slot and clap the door closed. She wheeled for the exit with the key still in her grip, slipped past the postmaster and his customer at the counter, and forced herself to tap and not run through the marble and columns of the station.

  “It’s a map. Sort of.” She was wedged between Houston and McKee, barely two blocks down from the depot. The torn envelope had fallen to her lap. She held the unfolded page in her hands.

  “Of course it is.” McKee slowed to a stop at the next light and looked over. “Sort of. Not much of one. What’s New Breton?”

  The words appeared in ink toward the top of the sheet, almost certainly in the same hand as the diary notations. A small and pretty artfully executed sketch of a Wild West street front crossed the page below, featuring a saloon with the usual bat-wing doors and hitching post, a false-fronted building marked “General Store,” and another marked “Assay Office.” A stylized arrow meandered down to a second sketch in the lower-right corner, labeled “Boot Hill” and consisting of a handful of grave markers. A single stone structure sat to the side, labeled “Pere DeMers” and emblazoned with an X.

  “A town, I guess?” she said.

  “It’s a ghost town,” said Houston. “I think.”

  “But you’ve heard of it?”

  He racked his brain. “Yeah, seems like. Can’t remember where, though.”

  “Where it is, you mean.”

  He shook his head. “Not exactly. What I mean is, I can’t remember how I even know that. Maybe something Pop told me? Or Raleigh, probably. But I could be totally wrong.”

  The light turned and McKee let out the clutch. “It would make sense, just from the drawing. Boot Hill and a saloon and all. It’s a starting point, anyway.”

  “Yeah,” Raleigh told him, “New Breton. People used to call it Frenchville, too. Canuck settlement, been abandoned for years.”

  He’d been gone two weeks, and the water under the bridge in the meantime made his voice through the telephone sound all the more pipsqueak. He was as encyclopedic as ever, though. “It’s up in Fergus County. One of those places the railroad passed by, so everybody up and moved.”

  “You know if there’s a, uh, cemetery up there?” Huck asked. He was grappling with how much to spill. Raleigh had been in it at the outset, then drifted out of the line of fire without ever realizing it. Maybe the less he knew now, the better. Or maybe that wasn’t Huck’s call to make in the first place.

  “Cemetery? Reckon there’s got to be.” Huck could practically hear Raleigh chewing on things through the line. “What all’s afoot, Houston? This about the rev and the watch and Detective Blank again?”

  Huck was at a loss. Never in his born days would he make a born liar. That was Annelise’s department. “Something like that, yeah.”

  “Let me guess. Not over the phone?”

  “Yeah. Something just like that.”

  “All right, I’ll get over there soon as I can. Maybe not today, though. But if you really want to know about Frenchville? Old Man Neuman’s the one to ask. He was born up thataway.”

  McKee and his landlord were in the habit of taking a nip of an evening anyway, so McKee did the honors. He came back to the shop the next morning greener than usual, eyes clamped as though the very light of day bored like a drill.

  Huck watched him gimp to the sink. “What got into you?”

  McKee cranked the water and thrust his entire head beneath the flow. He came up sputtering, then tilted back and stood there dripping. “Ol’ Neuman’s hooch is what got into me. Should’ve stuck to Highlander.”

  “He say anything?”

  McKee swabbed his eyes and blew a breath. “Oh yeah. You get him going on Frenchville, he don’t know the word quit.” He looked at Huck, still with the squint. “But get this. There is a cemetery up there, with a crypt. A pretty roughshod one. Built to house the town founder, some old boy named Jacques DeMers.”

  “Whoa. Just like the map.”

  McKee yawned. “That ain’t the half of it. He told me when they mothballed the old cuss back in the nineties, they put him to rest in a glass-topped casket.”

  5

  “A glass-topped casket,” said Annelise, for maybe the twentieth time. “That is so weird.”

  “Not exactly unheard of, forty or fifty years ago.”

  They were in the Stude the following Saturday, winding along the new U.S. highway north and then west into Fergus County. McKee was back to his usual devil-may-care deportment, although still vowing to “stick to the beer from now on.”

 
He said, “I saw plenty of old funeral pictures as a kid down in Utah. Some of the crates for the big chiefs were downright cock-for-Dolly—black lacquer, silver trim, you name it. And yeah, glass windows on a few of them.”

  She shook her head. “I don’t get it.”

  Raleigh was perched on an upended milk crate behind the seat, not yet totally up to speed but a regular font of information regardless.

  “The Victorians had a real death fetish,” he piped up. “They used to take family portraits with the deceased, like the body was still alive. Had these special contraptions to prop it in a chair, and everybody would sit around like it was just another day in the parlor.”

  “That is so weird.”

  “Know what’s even weirder? Sometimes in those old pictures, the quick ones will look a little blurry and the dead ’un will be clear as day, ’cause the cadaver was the only one to keep perfectly still during the exposure.”

  “What you might call a dead giveaway,” said McKee.

  “Uh-zackly.”

  “They must have stepped pretty quick to catch the moment,” Annelise mused. “From the deathbed straight to the sitting room. I mean, can you imagine if somebody keeled over in that heat a few days ago? He’d be ripe as a fish in no time.”

  “Oh, the Victorians had ’er figured pretty slick. They’d ice the body and siphon the blood right on out. Completely drain it. Then the undertaker would pump it full of arsenic and lead. Total preservation.”

  “How do you know this stuff?” asked McKee.

  “Actually, I’m not sure. But I’m pretty curious to get a look—he’s probably lying under glass like he kicked off yesterday.”

  “You’re going to give me nightmares,” Annelise said.

  The land shifted as they drove. The rims and tables fell away, and they entered rolling grassland. Better ranches with better water, and ricks of hay like giant loaves in the bottoms. Mountain ranges rose in the distance, pine-green islands out of cured-straw sea, the Snowies to the south and the Judiths steadily approaching.

  Old Man Neuman hadn’t been home in years but he’d given McKee a pretty straightforward route into the place. Gilt Edge Road just up to the base of the hills, then south and west two miles on the old Lewistown stage road and due south from there on the New Breton cutoff. McKee called the county extension office and determined that the route in was still passable, at least within a half mile or so of the abandoned town site.

  The end of the line turned out to be a collapsed bridge across what was now a sheer-sided if utterly chalk-dry creek bottom. They parked the rig in the withered grass and went forward on foot, packing a set of bolt cutters and a hacksaw as well as a one-inch cold chisel and a hand sledge. Annelise toted the carbide lamps and her Kodak Brownie, Raleigh a kerosene hurricane lamp.

  They followed the trace up into a draw, a pair of mostly bare hills rising steeply left and right and a smaller dry drainage just down off the old road grade. The ravine curved around into an open bowl, and they saw the dregs of the town up ahead, mainly a couple of hollow-eyed stone buildings in steep disrepair and a handful of framed structures as well, sagging and slumping toward the ground in various stages of collapse.

  McKee looked at Annelise. “Ever seen a ghost town before?”

  She shook her head. “Uh-uh. Well, that’s not true, either—we flew over one out in the desert once, during a lesson. But it just looked like a bunch of buildings from that perspective. How long has this place been abandoned?”

  “Turn of the century or so. Ol’ Neuman would probably have a heart attack if he saw the place now.”

  The brutal heat from the early part of the week had backed off considerably, but even so, Huck felt beads of sweat trickle down his ribs beneath his shirt. Despite this, he swore he saw Annelise shiver.

  They walked through the scatter of derelict buildings on what had obviously been the town’s central street, with the remains of other foundations visible in the grass on either side.

  “All right,” said McKee, “let’s divide and conquer. I’m guessing the cemetery’s a little way from town, as usual. Huck, you and Raleigh head over that way toward the trees. We’ll walk up toward the top of the bowl on this side. Try to stay in earshot.”

  A little later Raleigh whistled Huck over to a low rise in the contour. They looked down on a fenced-in square of grave markers, some wooden and invariably weather-battered, others lichen-specked stone, and most of them askew this way or that. Ornate iron picketry bordered a few of the more elaborate stones, spindles and finials laced with overgrown grass. And sure enough, off to one side, a low-slung structure of masoned fieldstone.

  “X marks the spot,” said Raleigh. “How in the heck did you guys figure this out?”

  Huck shielded his eyes and scanned the bowl. Annelise and McKee emerged around the upper end of a hawthorn draw. “Believe me, it’s an epic. I’ll tell you on the drive back.”

  Two deer exited the low side of the tangle into a patch of snowberries, a sleek doe and her gangly fawn, white spots visible even from here. Huck cupped his hands around his mouth and hollered. The deer stopped and looked, and so did his cousin and McKee. Huck waved his arms overhead, and the other two started toward him. The deer bounded away.

  By the time they made their way across the shallow bottom and back up again, Huck and Raleigh had examined the little stone crypt from all sides. The roof was made of granular concrete, maybe five feet above grade at the ridge and shallow-pitched. A set of iron shutters blocked the only entry, rusted and held fast with a crossbar that looked to have been peened into existence in some medieval torture pit. A padlock of newer vintage held the bar closed.

  Annie and McKee came up through the grass. McKee rapped his knuckles on the iron door. “Anybody home?” He took hold of the padlock and rattled it around on the hasp. “Definitely not as old as the rest of this relic.” He pointed at Annelise. “Crack the champagne, milady?”

  She shook her head. “Nope.”

  “Hand ’er over, then.”

  She fished beneath her collar and produced the key, hung on a string around her neck. She lifted the loop over her head and held it out. Her mouth had that grim set to it, and Huck couldn’t blame her a bit, because his own felt about as dry as that creek bottom back at the crippled bridge.

  The shackle disengaged with a clank. The lock flopped open, and Yak slipped it from the hasp on the crossbar and popped the bar out of its saddle, then up and around with a rusted screech. McKee took up his flashlight and shot the beam into the doorway.

  A short set of wooden steps ran to the floor, which appeared, like the roof, to be made of concrete. Then Huck let his eyes wander with the light, and he was looking at a casket. Part of one anyway, what could be seen through the frame of the portal.

  McKee looked at Annelise. “Okay, then. You first.”

  She shook her head. “Nothing doing, bucko.”

  He laughed and hunched under the low transom to test the first step, then the second. He went down and disappeared into the vault. Huck sensed Annelise shift closer to him, sensed her but didn’t actually see her, because he couldn’t pry his eyes loose from the open maw. He watched the flicker and bob as the beam panned around, then felt the thump of his heart when the light cut out.

  Then an actual thump, or maybe a thud, out of the eerie darkness of the vault, and the flinching stab of Annelise’s grip.

  McKee appeared in the doorway. “Just kidding!” He beckoned with the flashlight. “Come on, water’s fine.”

  Still Annelise’s grip. “I hate you,” she said. “You never know when to quit.”

  “What’s your legal term? Mea culpa?” He stuck his head up into the daylight. “But the thing is, nothing down here can hurt you. Just a bunch of stiffs.”

  “How many?” Raleigh asked.

  McKee ducked back in, flashed the beam around. His voi
ce came out of the hollow with a sort of tin-can projection. “Eight.”

  “Whoa.”

  “Yeah.”

  “All glass?”

  “Only two.”

  “Whoa. Is it weird?”

  McKee surfaced again. “Yeah, pretty weird. Come see for yourself.” He hesitated. “Be warned, though. One of them’s a kid.”

  Annelise still had Huck’s arm, a grip like a trap. “I don’t know if I can do it.”

  Raleigh already had a match to the hurricane lamp. “I’m game,” he said. He looked over. “Huckleberry? Ready for the initiation? Sign the robbers’ oath on a casket?” He shifted to Annelise. “No girls allowed, by the way.”

  She gave Huck’s arm one last tight squeeze. “In this particular case I’m not going to argue.”

  McKee’s tin-can chortle echoed out of the tomb. “Jackpot.”

  Raleigh took in a deep breath, held the lantern out ahead and stepped down into the vault. Huck saw the toe end of a casket again in the new throw of light. He looked once more at his cousin.

  “Give me a report,” she said. “I need to know what to expect.”

  “Ho-ly,” said Raleigh, his voice as hollow as McKee’s.

  Huck held a miner’s lamp but didn’t spark it, what with the interior now plainly aglow. He could see the vague pulsing of shadow and light as the pair of them moved about, Raleigh no doubt waving the lantern around like a semaphore. He heard McKee say something that he couldn’t quite make out. “You still on the fence?”

  She puffed her cheeks and blew out air like a deflating balloon. “I’ll probably do it. Nightmares or no.”

  “Okay. I’m doing it.”

  “Why am I so creeped out by this?”

  “Because it’s a dern creep-out,” he told her, and ducked his head under.

  The air inside the chamber was cool and stale, an inert density not so different from that in a mine shaft. Two steps down and he found himself surrounded by caskets. The concrete ceiling was hardly an inch or two above his head, and the unnerving nearness of all that hanging, crushing weight triggered a sort of fun-house confusion about his own equilibrium. He felt himself sway in place and quickly looked down, not sure if he was still on a step or totally descended to the floor.