by Alma Katsu
He opened his eyes again, and she saw nothing but a deep pit, and she saw, too, that he was smiling.
He knocked her backward. He leapt, or sprang, pinning her easily, and she knew in a wild way that the rest of it had been a trap, a lure to get her close and unguarded. He was on top of her, holding a knife. Where had it come from? “I won’t ask much.”
“Please,” she said. Her voice broke. She was no longer thinking straight. It was a dream, it had to be, a nightmare that would wake her up with a scream lodged in her throat. This madman was not Halloran. “Please, let me up.”
But he only gripped her harder. “You don’t know what it’s like, to be starving. The pain of it. It hollows you. It’s all I can think about. Even my blood is starving.” He bent to put his face against her neck—he inhaled, he breathed in the smell of her body, he moved his tongue across her sweat, as a dog would. This broke her; it was as if some invisible barrier had been irrevocably breached, as if with a single movement he had undone God’s work, and turned her from a woman to a sludge of flesh.
“I could take it if I had to, from you or one of the others. You see, don’t you, how easy it would be for me to take it?” He was everywhere and all over her. There was no end to him, to his weight and his stink and his hunger. “But I don’t want to do that. I’d rather you gave it to me freely, like a friend would.”
The pain in her wrists where he held her helped her focus. Mary had gone for help. She must have gone for help. She simply had to humor him, to play along until someone arrived. “Of course,” she said. “Of course. Like a friend would.” She wasn’t even sure if he heard her. “I’ve always taken care of you, haven’t I?”
She could gasp out the words—he was heavier, stronger than he should be. Madmen, she knew, were said to possess incredible strength. She was nearly blind with terror. If she got free, could she outrun him? It was a risk. And if he chased her down? He still had her pinned beneath him, though he was no longer leaning on her neck with one arm.
“You promise to help,” he said finally. “You promise you won’t let me go hungry?”
She could only nod. And after a moment, he eased his weight off her—and she managed to grab the knife out of his hand.
Just as her fingers closed around the handle, there was a commotion behind her, the rustle of reeds and the snap of dry wood and voices. She heard Mary Graves shout, “This way. Over here.”
Tamsen almost cried out with relief. She was saved.
But in that second, Halloran changed. At least she thought he did; she saw his whole being twist, contort, as if it had been winched around some broken internal dial, tethered down to hell. Broken apart and changed into something else. He wasn’t himself; he wasn’t even a man. His eyes were full black, as blank and featureless as the bottom of a well. His face seemed to have narrowed. She smelled blood on his breath. It was as though an animal inside him had erupted at that very moment, breaking through his human shell.
He bared his teeth. Give me what I want or I’ll take it . . . I’m starving.
The face she looked into wasn’t human anymore.
And just as Mary hurtled into the clearing, just as he drew back, showing his teeth, and she knew, in a single instant of calm, that she would die, Tamsen drove the tip of the blade into his throat and yanked it sideways, feeling the resistance of the tendons and the windpipe, snapping them, her hand quickly drenched in a gush of warm blood.
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
Cambridge, Massachusetts
My dear Edwin,
I am sending this letter to Sutter’s Fort as you suggested in the hope that it reaches you at the other end of the great Oregon Trail. I am not surprised that you are partaking in this grand American adventure, my friend, as it is surely in keeping with your bold and inquisitive nature. I am envious and wish I could join you, but I am a realist and too accustomed to the comforts of civilization to undertake such a challenge. Besides, I find that my new post here at Harvard University is enough of an adventure in its own right and so I will be content with that.
We arrived in Cambridge from Kentucky two months ago. Tilly found us furnished rooms in a lovely house on Prince Street and has already fallen in with a group of professors’ wives and does not think she will miss the Kentucky wilderness too much. We were pleased to read in your last letter that you are engaged. I am of the firm opinion that a man is better off wed than alone in the world.
But let me get to the real reason I am writing, an experience that you may find very interesting and in keeping with the theories you have formed and are so intent on pursuing. I recently had the opportunity to meet an English physician visiting Harvard as part of a professional exchange. His name is John Snow, a quiet man with an impressive high, broad dome of a forehead and piercing eyes radiating intelligence. We met at a departmental tea and after discussing a recent smallpox outbreak far west of Boston, he confessed to me that he was not convinced that conventional thinking that bad air is responsible for the spread of disease is correct. He is investigating other possible causes. He feels there are too many inconsistencies in the miasmic theory and that another, yet-unknown culprit is to blame. He has come to question the very nature of disease and how very specific, very different diseases can pass among us silently before springing suddenly to life and—in the case of some diseases, such as cholera and typhoid—erupt into epidemics. He even spoke of the way in which disease might travel invisibly, carried by people or creatures who show no signs of having it at all.
It was wild, interesting talk, to be sure. And he was so full of new ideas—and yet seemingly not so far from some of the things you proposed during our time together—that I began to think that if I could ever speak to anyone about our experience in Smithboro, it would be him. It was a risk, of course: I questioned the political wisdom of such an act but I, for one, had been haunted by Smithboro for too long and it was burning up within me, desperate for release.
And so I sought private conference with Snow and told every detail of our singular experience, withholding no detail no matter how bizarre. At the conclusion of my story, he sat stunned. I asked him whether he had ever heard of a case similar to this and he mumbled that he had not. Then I asked him by what means would it be possible for us to have witnessed what we did, and he beheld me gravely. “What you are describing is nothing but pagan superstition. Don’t you realize that?” he said in his thick, strange accent. “Let me remind you that we are men of science. I advise ye to look to the natural world for your explanations, not to the unnatural one.”
I fear I have made a grievous mistake; if he tells the rest of the faculty, they might think me horribly superstitious, and it will surely damage my reputation.
But his repudiation has made me see the light. Edwin, I advise you to abandon this quest you are on, seeking out tales of Indian deities who transform from one form to another—man by day and animal by night. Whether the answer to the mystery can be found in the natural world, as Snow insists it must, I cannot say. The beauty and frustration of nature, Edwin, is that it is infinite in its variations. You should not hold out false hope; it is entirely possible that we will never have answers.
I have gone on long enough. If you will not heed my advice—and I know what a long shot that is—for God’s sake do not take any unnecessary risks. Please take the advice of an old friend who wishes to see you again: Buy the soundest horse you can afford, do not travel alone into unknown territory, keep your doctoring kit well stocked, and carry a loaded firearm with you at all times.
Your dear friend,
Walton Gow
CHAPTER SIXTEEN
It wasn’t me, Elitha. Tell your stepmother it wasn’t my fault.
Halloran’s body hadn’t yet been returned to camp before she began to hear him—faintly at first, carried to her in snatches, as though on bits of phantom wind. Then louder, more insistent.
Please. Tell her.
Tell her I’m sorry.
Elitha put her hands over her ears and she didn’t care who saw. She tried bargaining with Halloran when she was alone, but he didn’t seem able to hear.
She couldn’t speak to the voices. She could only listen.
Please. That monster that wrestled Tamsen to the ground wasn’t me. I couldn’t stop it, but it wasn’t me.
The voices had only gotten worse since Fort Bridger. The only one she knew clearly was the voice of Luke Halloran, who for a week had moldered in the wagon, hovering between life and death. She knew now that the others were dead, and they mostly spoke gibberish. Only once in a while could she make out a word. Sometimes it was like coming in on the middle of a conversation, as if she were the trespasser in her own head and not the other way around.
She had tried to confide in Tamsen. She knew her stepmother believed in strange things, things beyond nature. She had seen Tamsen carefully braiding together stems of rosemary for protective charms, and muddling wolfsbane and lavender to daub behind her children’s ears, to keep demons from preying on them.
But when she said Halloran’s name, Tamsen’s face hardened. She seized Elitha by the shoulders.
“You must tell no one of this,” she said. “I never want to hear a word of it again. Swear it.”
Elitha had sworn, because she was frightened; Tamsen had gripped her so hard, she left bruises. Tamsen was frightened, too: because of what had happened with Halloran in the woods, and because of what people said about her now. Before Halloran’s death there had been whispers, hisses that followed Tamsen and even Elitha. But now the whispers, like the ones inside her head, had grown into a clamor. That she had bewitched him with her potions, turned him into a demon, made him her lover, turned him mad. She had killed him so she could collect his blood and drink it.
No one would speak to Tamsen now. Even Elitha felt the weight of everyone’s hatred. People drifted away when they saw her coming. None of the other girls, except for Mary Graves, would do their washing when Tamsen went down to the river, and when Elitha went in her place, she had to endure snickering and muttered insults.
Every bad thing that happened to the wagon train was laid at Tamsen’s feet, it seemed. Tamsen was good at pretending that it didn’t bother her, but at night, Elitha sometimes heard her weeping.
Elitha couldn’t pretend. She burned with shame. And still the voices crowded her head, whispering terrible things and leaving a deep tunnel of loneliness, as if their words were sharp and physical things hollowing out her center. She was desperate for quiet, for peace, for silence.
But Halloran’s voice was relentless—a low and nearly constant rhythm submerging her in a place of terror and guilt. He told her in detail things she did not want to hear. He told her of hunger that lodged not in his stomach, but his blood, an excavating hunger that festered like an unclean wound. He told her of the sweet smell of human skin, the deep flinty richness of human blood, the need for it that pulled at his whole being. He claimed to be ashamed but spoke of Tamsen’s body with longing, and in his darkest, angriest moments he whispered perverse, gross things to her that she couldn’t afterward forget.
I wonder what you taste like.
I wonder what it would be like to eat you.
I would start very small, a toe, or one of your soft, soft ears.
She began to think, increasingly, of wading into the river to drown herself. She began to dream of the cool dark silence of the water folding over her head.
* * *
• • •
AND THEN, SHE DID IT.
Tamsen had sent her to the river to do laundry when everyone in the family was busy unchaining the oxen and setting camp for the night. She had not planned to kill herself that night, but standing in the shade of the bank, watching the late sun play over the river, trying to ignore the continued abuse of phantom voices, she realized suddenly that there was only one solution, and it lay before her. The river looked to her like a bed made with clean linens. It looked like home.
She thought briefly about leaving her boots on the bank; footwear was expensive and there was no sense ruining them when her sisters might get some use out of them. But she was afraid that if she paused she would change her mind. She stepped off the rocks into the gently rushing water. It was colder than she expected but she kept walking. She kept going, to her waist now. She wondered whether she should have filled her pockets with rocks, but already her skirts were so heavy even walking was difficult. The current tugged at her. Farther out there were whitecaps; that was where the current was stronger. With any luck it would sweep her off her feet and carry her downstream.
It would not, then, be her fault. It would not be her choice. Her death would be in God’s hands, and she could still receive his mercy. She asked God to make it happen quickly.
The water reached her breasts and made her gasp. It was harder to keep her balance; the current kept snatching at her skirts and her ankles. Suddenly all of the voices in her head went silent, and in their place she felt a rush of panic. She thought of her little sister’s face, and Thomas. But it was too late for regrets; she was too deep, and could not make it back to the bank of the river, not in her sodden skirts, and the bodice that squeezed the air from her lungs. She thought of turning to call out for help but slipped on a rock. Her feet went out, and a rush of ice-cold water filled her nose and mouth and blinded her.
She could not kick out from the tangle of her skirts. She didn’t know which way the surface was. She was tossed in the currents and couldn’t breathe. It wasn’t at all like she imagined; it wasn’t peaceful, or like sleep. Her lungs cried out for air. Her throat closed around breaths full of nothing but water. Her whole body screamed in protest. She was in pain everywhere.
And the voices came back now, more furious than ever, an angry rush of them, until she knew they were the ones pulling her legs, drawing her under, turning her under the whitecaps.
Under the water, the voices were all that was left.
You’re mine now, girl. A stranger’s voice.
Join me, Elitha. Halloran, almost weeping. Tender sweet Elitha.
Then, suddenly, hands seized her. She came up gasping to the surface in Thomas’s arms. She had been carried downstream a hundred yards; he had edged out along a fallen tree to intercept her and now pulled her up beside him, grunting with the effort, as she cried and spit up water and the taste of vomit.
He didn’t say a word to her, not until they had inched along together back to the riverbank, not until she had finished shivering and coughing. He didn’t touch her, either, and didn’t look at her while she cried. But finally she was finished, and when she needed a handkerchief, he gave her a rag—wet, but clean—from his vest.
“Why?” he said simply.
She was exhausted, and her throat was raw. He had bundled her in his coat and she felt like going to sleep in his arms, but she didn’t see any way to answer him except with the truth. “I can hear the dead speaking to me,” she said. “They say awful things. I wanted quiet.”
When he lifted his head, a sweep of black hair fell across his face. He needed to have his hair cut; Elitha couldn’t help but think this, even in the middle of this chaos.
“When I was a boy”—Thomas always said that when he talked about his days with his tribe, never before I was made to live with whites—“they told me spirits could talk to us. Through the wind, water, even the trees.”
She shook her head. “That’s not what I mean.” She took a breath. “I mean . . . actual dead people.” She took a long breath; it seemed to cut her lungs open. “You probably think I’m crazy.”
He was quiet for a moment. “When my parents were killed, I thought I saw them sometimes, watching me. But they never spoke.”
Elitha remembered that her real mother came to her once and only once, the day her father remarried and Tamsen moved into their house. She was onl
y a shadow hovering at the foot of the bed, but Elitha knew it was her. Don’t be sad, her mother had said. Your father needs her.
“The priest said I only saw them because I wanted to.” Thomas shrugged. “He said it was all in my head. After that, I never saw them again.”
“So you think it’s all in my head?” That meant she was going crazy.
Thomas shook his head. “No,” he said simply. “I think the priest was wrong. I think my parents stopped visiting me because they knew I was okay. They knew I had to go on by myself.”
Elitha had felt sorry for herself when her father married Tamsen, thinking her whole world had been turned upside down, thinking he had betrayed their mother. What must it have been like for Thomas to lose his family, his tribe, everything he knew? She couldn’t fathom it. She couldn’t see how he would have the strength for it.
“So, you believe in spirits, and dark things like that?” she asked.
He didn’t seem embarrassed or afraid of what she thought. “Yes.”
“I do, too.”
He moved a little closer to her, and she shivered when their knees touched. “I am going to tell you something that I haven’t told anyone else.” He was quiet for a bit. She waited, holding her breath. “When I was with Mr. Bryant in the woods, we met a tribe of Washoe. He couldn’t understand them, but I could.” His voice was hoarse. He was very close to her, and when they accidentally touched, Elitha could feel how cold his skin was. As if he, too, was afraid. “They told me about a demon—a spirit that is very restless, very hungry. It has become many. They have taken on the skins of the men they have consumed.”
Spirits prowling the woods, dressed as men. My name is Legion, for we are many. Mark 5:9.
Thomas shook his head. “I think you are right. I think the dead speak when they are angry, or restless. I think there are spirits. I think there is reason to be afraid. Maybe the dead are trying to warn you.” He nodded toward the darkness. “Something’s waiting for us out there.”