Power in the Blood

by Greg Matthews

  “I’m here, Bryce,” she said, and stepped around in front of him. Bryce was appalled to see that she carried the front of her skirts at waist height, like a saloon dancer. A scabbard or sheath of some kind was attached to a garter around her lovely thigh, and he could see the whitely billowing froth of her undergarments too. Why was she doing this, and why was she unaware of his pain? Had he been struck by a heart attack? The pain was worsening, and still he could not breathe. “Cassie …,” he gasped again, and in response she yanked down her pantaloons to reveal a penis. Bryce felt the life ebbing from him, and collapsed onto the ground, still unable to understand what had happened. The pain became excruciating as the stiletto’s long triangular blade was extracted from his back and wiped clean on his new jacket, and then Bryce died.

  Tatum looked around to ensure that there was no one in sight, then lifted his skirts and squatted to piss in Bryce’s face. Finished, he stood and arranged himself, making sure that the weapon was tightly encased in its hideaway, then walked swiftly to the street again, and became part of the human stream flowing there.

  The murder was not a great sensation, even in Glory Hole; news of another attack by Slade in southern Colorado eclipsed press interest in the stabbing of an unknown man. Slade had dissected his latest victims, a woman and a boy, in a particularly repulsive fashion before opening their skulls, as if searching for something there. Leo decided that if there was another killing by the cannibal (reportedly he had eaten no part of his victims since escaping from Glory Hole), he would increase the reward even further. He spent more time reading about Slade than he did about Aspinall, and when Rowland Price entered the room, neither man mentioned the business that had been so swiftly taken care of.

  At Imogen’s house that evening, Leo found himself unable to perform even the simplest act of love, and when asked if there was something troubling him, replied only that production figures at both the Flatiron and the Sinbad mines had dipped slightly. Imogen patted his hand and told him things would surely improve, and Leo appreciated her concern. Zoe would have glared at him and said, “You mean you’ll make a thousand dollars less today than yesterday? How awful for you.” Imogen was a superior class of woman in many ways, a thoughtful person, never sarcastic. It would be a wrenching moment when he was obliged to remove her from his life prior to Zoe’s homecoming, but no woman, even a sweet and considerate creature such as Imogen Starr, was worth losing Brannan Mining over. Leo had decided to adopt Rowland’s plan for a remarriage to Zoe, a reconsecration of their vows to reawaken the love that had dimmed between them. Leo could not help but imagine Zoe’s reply to such an offer: “You wish us to repeat our original mistake? What kind of businessman invests good money on top of bad?” It galled him to recall the tone her voice had taken since the accident. Zoe was an embittered and cheerless woman, but he would have to persuade her that the ceremony was necessary, without arousing in her any suspicion of an ulterior motive. It should not prove so difficult, he told himself, since Zoe was genuinely uninterested in every aspect of the mines. Her ignorance was his best weapon, in fact his only one, unless he decided to arrange for Zoe what Price had arranged for Aspinall. He thrust the thought from him, ashamed to have allowed it into his mind even for a second. His head began to throb. Leo had not felt well all day.

  “Is there nothing I can do, my dear?” asked Imogen.

  “Nothing, no. I believe I’ll return home. I am not the best company tonight, I regret.”

  “There’s no need for that. I shall make a bed for myself in the spare room.”

  “Please don’t trouble yourself. Good night, Imogen.”

  Lovey Doll escorted him to the door and blew a kiss at his departing back. Alone, she allowed her expression to drop and harden to its habitual look of glacial contempt. The worm was out of sorts tonight, all because of some stupid list of numbers, a feeble excuse for misery, in Lovey Doll’s opinion. She took herself into the living room and poured for herself a generous measure of brandy. She knew she should not drink, since it coarsened the skin and expanded the waistline, but sometimes Leo Brannan and his whining was enough to make her overcome caution.

  It was high time she broached the subject of divorce from his one-armed shrew. Imogen Starr deserved to take Zoe’s place, Lovey Doll would hint, and after a few extra touches to the performances and acts she knew pleased him, Leo would begin accepting her suggestions as worth his consideration. Soon he would no more think of taking the shrew back into his home and bed than he would a side of beef. The man was stubborn, in a childish way, peevish and irritable more often than not of late, but Lovey Doll was confident her influence was increasing with every visit Leo Brannan made to her door.

  38

  Even before the Acropolis reached Bermuda there was concern among the passengers over the appearance of a man on the forward deck at night, a tall man in a long dark coat, his skull-like face half hidden by a wide hat. The truly disturbing aspect of the entity, who matched the description of no one aboard, were the holes in his cheeks. When she heard of the tall man, Zoe went to her cabin, where Omie lay on her bunk, still as a corpse.

  “What can you tell me of the man everyone has seen?”

  “I don’t know what man you mean.”

  “Yes you do. You described him to me once, back home. Why is he here?”

  “I don’t know,” said Omie, rolling her face and body away from her mother’s eyes.

  “You do know. You have brought him here; don’t tell me you haven’t. Now look at me and explain yourself. Look at me when I say!”

  Omie reluctantly faced her, and admitted she knew the man was there, even if she had not actually laid eyes on him herself, being in her bunk asleep at the time of his visitations. She could not say with any certainty why it was that he had chosen to visit with her again after so long an absence from her dreams, and Omie tearfully exonerated herself from any scheme intended deliberately to frighten or alarm the other passengers.

  “He just does what he wants, Mama; I can’t stop him. He doesn’t even know himself why he’s here. He looks lost and lonely when I see him, and sometimes he can’t see me at all. I think … I think he’s drunk, Mama.”

  “Drunk? A dream man drunk? How could that be?”

  “I don’t know. The night before last he saw me, and I told him to go away and behave himself, but he only laughed and said who did I think I was to give him orders. Then he asked me who I was, and where we both were. He said he never saw the ocean before. I think he was scared of it, being so big and wide the way it is. He’s a very sad man, Mama, only he won’t tell me why.”

  “Can’t you make him go away?”

  “I told him to, but he won’t. He said no one else would have him.”

  “What on earth does that mean?”

  Omie shrugged, her blotched face miserable. Zoe felt a pang of love, and put her arm around her daughter. “I know you’ve done nothing wrong. If the man comes wherever you are, that’s not a bad thing. He must be lonely, as you say, and sad people must be helped, if possible. Say nothing to anyone about him, though.”

  “Well, of course not, Mama; they’d throw me over the side, and you too.”

  “Captain Crandall is a very nice gentleman, and would permit no such thing.”

  “They’d commit mutiny, all the crew and the other passengers, and make us walk the plank.”

  “Indeed they would not. Now cease and desist with such nonsense, before I become angry with you and the dark man both.”

  She released Omie and stood up, supporting herself against the vessel’s leisurely pitch and roll by grasping the bunk post.

  “There’s a storm coming, Mama.”

  “Will it be terrible and frightening?”

  “No, but Doolin will get killed.”

  Doolin was a crew member much admired by the passengers for his ability to perform acrobatics for their amusement in the rigging, against the mock protests of Captain Crandall, who knew better than to stop anything that p
ut his guests, as he referred to the passenger list, in a playful mood. Doolin was the ship’s monkey, Crandall said several times at the dinner table, and could only understand human English once in a long while, so everyone was stuck with his careless caperings against the shrouds and the sky.

  “How will it happen?” asked Zoe.

  “He’ll fall.”

  “Is there no way to prevent this from happening?”

  “No, Mama, but he’ll be happy after he dies.”

  “How can you know that?”

  “I just do.”

  Zoe recalled Omie’s description of the life led by their housekeeper, Mrs. Scoville, after she died and had gone to hell. “She deserved to,” stated Omie. “She was horrible.”

  “Were you peeking into my mind just now?”

  “I didn’t mean to. I can do that again without even trying. I couldn’t do it for ever so long, not since I was sick with the fever, but I can now, Mama, a little bit, and see things that are going to happen, like the storm coming and Doolin falling. Does it mean I’m getting better after all this time?”

  “I don’t know what it means, but you mustn’t discuss it with anyone but me.”

  “I know, Mama.”

  The dark man did not make an appearance that night. Captain Crandall had assigned extra men on watch to look out for the mysterious stowaway, even though every part of the ship had already been searched and found empty of anyone not on the passenger list. He had not seen the dark man himself, but several of the crew swore they had witnessed events similar to those described by the passengers, usually a fleeting glimpse of the fellow,—“a string-bean shadow man,” as one crew member put it, “with a face like death.”

  The dark man’s failure to reveal himself was of little relief to the captain, who by midmorning was more concerned over the falling barometer than about phantoms. He also had knowledge of stirrings in the fo’c’sle, where several of the men had begun spreading stories about the little Brannan girl with the unfortunate blue face mark. Doolin, his unofficial spy among the crew, had informed him there was a plan brewing to insist that the girl and her mother be put ashore in Bermuda; they were fearful of crossing the North Atlantic with the blue-faced girl aboard. Pressed for reasons why they should feel as they did, one of the men had told Doolin, “She’s got the mark of a witch, that one, little as she be.” Another man swore he had seen the girl promenading amidships with the dark man, “and not either one with their feet a-touchin’ the timbers, so help me!”

  Captain Crandall was in no mood for supernatural tales and moon talk on his ship, not with a storm coming down hard on them from the south. As the barometer plunged before his eyes, he ordered all unnecessary sail furled, and all passengers below decks. The Acropolis was battened down and made ready for the wall of darkness approaching like runaway cliffs. The captain had seen worse storms racing toward him, and had weathered them all with a minimum of inconvenience or damage, but as he watched the latest of them looming along the southern horizon, and felt the ship heel hard to port as the first of its wind reached out, he experienced something a man as stoic and professionally unruffled as himself seldom felt: the captain became aware of a sensation he could describe only as dread creeping from the region of his solar plexus; it came stealthily up his spinal column like a magically sprouting vine, and wrapped his brain with its tendrils. Sweat sprang from every pore in his skin, and he fought for breath as the dreadful vine sent creepers down into his chest to surround his heart and lungs. It was not the storm his vessel was headed into that provoked the fear inside him, but some presence aboard. Was it the dark man? he asked himself. He did not believe in omens and portents or forces that could not be measured with compass and sextant, but Captain Crandall could not deny he was sailing into uncharted waters, no matter that he knew the precise location by latitude and longitude of himself and his ship.

  Now the wind was gusting fiercely, snapping the sails, coating Crandall’s lips with the taste of spume, whipping the words he attempted to pass to the helmsman soundlessly away. He was unsure if he had actually spoken or not, and commanded his lips to move, but they remained as before, rimed with salt spray, numbed by the same dread that held him now in an invisible vise, rooted to the poop deck like a mast. It was no storm to fear, no wind beyond coping, but he felt a clawing at his breast as the creeper planted in him grew thorns to rake his heart, rake it till the blood must gush from its bag. He thought briefly of his two wives, the one in Manchester and the one on Rhode Island, and could not be sure which one he loved best. It had always irritated him that he, a man of decision, had never been able to place one above the other when at sea, although he was generally happiest with whichever wife happened to be the one he was with. I am a fool and a weakling, he told himself, and the thorns tore him open.

  The helmsman became aware that all was not well with the captain when no orders came to bring the ship closer to the wind. Captain Crandall stood beside him, deathly white, his eyes fixed on some distant thing, and then he came crashing to the deck like a fallen tree. The helmsman stared, then began bawling for the first mate.

  Omie had taken to her bunk when the ship began to be buffeted by high winds. Zoe thought at first she might be seasick, but Omie simply lay there, grasping the edges of her bunk to keep from rolling out onto the cabin floor. Zoe preferred to sit on a chair bolted to the floor; lying down only made her nauseous, and she had no wish to thicken the close air inside their cabin with the reek of vomit. She attempted to divert herself from the pitching and tossing with thoughts of home, but home was a concept that had become increasingly abstract. Home was a town where Leo had his hussy woman; home was a huge house without a husband in it; home was a place she had been attempting to find ever since departing Schenectady as a girl. Home, the last real home she could think of, had been the waterless tenement in which Nettie Dugan had died. Home had died with her, and all the years since then had been a search for another. Whatever the town, whatever the man whose ring she wore, the home she had thought was hers had been taken from her. The one constant was Omie, who belonged with Zoe as Zoe had always hoped someday to belong in a home. She wondered, watching her daughter stare at the planking of the bunk above her, if Omie regarded home as the place, wherever it happened to be, wherein they shared each other’s life. It was a sparsely appointed home, to be sure, but perhaps the only one that could not be taken away by anything less than death. Zoe held on to the chair with her only hand, waiting for time and the storm to pass.

  After a night of rough weather, the Acropolis was left wallowing in the choppy seas remaining in the storm’s wake. News of Captain Crandall’s death was given to the passengers by Doolin, who did not pass on the newest fo’c’sle rumblings over Omie Brannan. After a makeshift breakfast, everyone aboard gathered at the starboard rail for the captain’s sea burial. His body was wrapped in sailmaker’s canvas and weighted with five yards of chain. There being no man of God among them, the mate elected to read a few verses from the captain’s own Bible, and when he was done, the mate nodded to Doolin and another crewman to tip forward the plank on which Captain Crandall’s body lay. They heaved up the ship-side end, but the captain remained where he was. The plank was raised to an angle of fifty degrees without shifting its burden more than a few inches toward the seaward end, and there was whispered comment among the crew.

  One sailor said aloud, pointing to Omie, “He won’t be going while she’s there to watch, by God.”

  His words created louder whisperings, and the mate was obliged to order silence. The plank was tipped higher, almost vertical now, and the captain’s body sagged within its canvas shroud, but did not slide off into the deep.

  “Get her below!” called the same sailor, and Zoe took Omie by the hand to march with her across to the port side. She would not take her below, since that would have been a victory of sorts for whatever foolish suspicions the crew clearly held; nor would she allow Omie to remain where the sailor could point and shout at h
er; the port side rail was a compromise, but going to it improved Omie’s standing not at all, since no sooner did mother and daughter turn away than the splinter snagging the canvas broke off, and the dead man slipped from the plank with a rush and plummeted into a rolling trough of blue-green that swallowed him instantly.

  Ocean foam had barely passed over Captain Crandall when the sailor clenched his fist and shook it at the departing woman and child. “See there! When the devil turns his back on good folk, they can go about their business!” The mate again ordered the man to be quiet, but he could not ignore the buzz of excited talk passing among the passengers, most of whom were watching Zoe and Omie to see what they would do. The mate ordered his crew to their stations, then suggested to the passengers that they likewise remove themselves. All the while, as the gathering behind them slowly dispersed, Zoe and Omie stood by the port rail, looking at the sea and sky.

  The mate approached them, somewhat abashed. “My apologies, ma’am. Some of these fellows, they don’t know much, but that doesn’t stop them.”

  “It was none of your doing. How far are we from our next port of call?”

  “Bermuda in two days, ma’am.”

  “We will disembark there and allow you to continue without us. Please tell the crew. Tell them also that I carry a pistol with me at all times,” lied Zoe. “If any man touches my daughter or attempts in any way whatsoever to intimidate her, I will shoot him dead.”

  “Ma’am, I’ll tell them. They’re not educated, most of them, and they believe what they see and hear.”

  “They will see and hear us depart in Bermuda.”