The Curse of Jacob Tracy: A Novel

by Holly Messinger

  Trace balked at the sight of the canopied bed and the light, feminine furnishings. The chamber was sweltering and smelled of menthol.

  “Come sit, Mr. Tracy,” Miss Fairweather said, from the chaise near the blazing hearth. Her voice was rough, and weak. “It isn’t contagious, and I don’t have the strength to speak loudly.”

  She had been in bed, he realized, and had gotten up to receive him. She looked smaller and more peaked than usual, swathed in a heavy velvet dressing-gown and a pile of quilts. Trace had a vicious memory of seeing his wife’s face, just that drawn and drained of color, moments before he’d realized she was dead.

  Miss Fairweather smiled grimly at his expression. “I told you it was no fashionable ailment.”

  “Ma’am, forgive me for sayin so, but you look like you got one foot in the grave already. Have you had a doctor up here?”

  “Mr. Tracy, I expect you know how absurd that question is, so I will simply say, thank you for your concern. Please sit.”

  He sat, on the dainty upholstered chair near the foot of her chaise. “Is there anything I can do?”

  “Your continued and diligent service is the best treatment for now,” she said with a sigh, hitching the quilts higher over her arms. “But I am not sorry to have your company. I would have written to you earlier in the week, had I not suffered this attack. I expect the spirits have begun to present a nuisance, again? I must say you don’t appear much hardier than I.”

  Once again her directness—and her insight—set him back. She had a knack for saying just the right thing, so as to divert him from the things she didn’t say. Almost.

  “Yes ma’am, they are. Becoming a nuisance, that is.” Trace watched his hands shape the brim of his hat, and decided to match candor with candor. “Boz has a notion you’re lettin me alone just long enough for them to become that, so I’ll have a reason to come back and see you.”

  She lifted an eyebrow. “And do you share Mr. Bosley’s … notion?”

  “Well, let’s see. After I went down to Sikeston, the power died down for a couple weeks—long enough you sent me a note askin if things had been quiet. Then after the print shop, things got real quiet, for maybe a week and a half. They were startin to draw close again just before we left for Idaho. And then after we got back to town, there were three or four days when it was … less, but never really quiet.”

  She nodded, once. “Your interval is becoming shorter.”

  “So you have been watchin.” He tried not to feel so gratified about it.

  “I wanted to know how long it took for your abilities to replenish themselves. I had noticed the spirits gathering in greater numbers, of late.”

  “They’re gettin stronger, too.”

  “How so?”

  “Wakin me in the middle of the night, throwin things around—”

  “Moving material objects?”

  “One last night picked up the bed and shook it. Blasted thing’s made of iron, weighs more’n a steam locomotive. Shook it like a dog shakin a rat … And then he tried to hang me.”

  “To hang you?”

  He pulled his collar down to show her the rope burn; she looked properly concerned. “I can keep ‘em out when I’m awake, but when I’m asleep … I can’t tell if I’m gettin more attuned to them, or if they—”

  “Are feeding off your increasing strength?” she suggested, and he nodded. “I am certain it is both factors. That was one reason I proposed you take up residence here, so I could supervise your development. Have you noticed any other changes? Unusually lucid dreams? A sense of traveling through time or space? Any more premonitions?”

  “No…” He thought of all the far-fetched claims he’d read in the Spiritualist journals: spirit-walking and far-seeing and the like. “You think I might—?”

  “I am certain you will, and soon.” She tapped her lips with a fingertip. “I must say, you are much more sanguine about these matters than I would have expected. You have shed your fear of these powers, have you not?”

  Trace looked at the hat in his hands. “I guess I’m not worried they’re a curse from Perdition, anymore. I’m not too easy about what else they might be.”

  “Meaning?”

  Her intense scrutiny, combined with the intimate setting, was making him uneasy. He swung out of his chair and paced away in a circle, shrugging inside the tight wool coat. “You got it hotter than blazes in here.”

  “Then remove your coat. We needn’t adhere to social niceties.” She watched, frowning, as he peeled the coat from his shoulders. “I was under the impression, the last few times we spoke, that you had embraced the prospect of doing good with your power. Indeed you seemed to take pleasure in using it.”

  “I’ve taken pleasure in a lot of things weren’t good for me,” he retorted. She raised an eyebrow, and he sighed and tossed his coat over the back of the chair. “Look, lady, I spent five years in seminary, and the first thing they teach you is humility. You don’t have any power; you wield the Lord’s power for His glory. I don’t know why this thing was put in me, but I’m not fool enough to think it was for my pleasure. So yeah, we probably saved most of those people on the train—even Boz says so—but on the other hand I’ve seen more folks die this spring than since the war. And I got to wonder if this work we’ve been doin is the right thing, or if we’re makin excuses to do what we want to do.”

  Miss Fairweather considered him for a moment, fingers pressed to her lips. “Everyone you told of your curse died shortly thereafter, correct?”

  “My sergeant. The company chaplain. Our priest back home. Dr. Hardinger.” He took a deep breath. “My folks, and my … wife.”

  It felt overly personal, telling her that, and he saw the unease around her mouth, her fingers drawing awkward lines in the velvet lap-robe. “And how quickly did those deaths follow your revelation?”

  “A month, at the outside. Most cases it was a week or less.”

  “Yet after nearly two months, Mr. Bosley and I remain unscathed.”

  He paused in his pacing. “What are you drivin at?”

  “I am suggesting there may be factors more salient than the simple knowledge of your ability. Instead of asking why the others died, perhaps you should ask yourself why Mr. Bosley is still alive.”

  “The only difference I see is I’ve been workin for you.”

  “Precisely. Every fortnight or so, a purging of your power, thus rendering you less attractive to malicious spirits. Entities which, as you have seen, can destroy a family, prompt mysterious deaths in a secured cell overnight—”

  “Don’t.” Trace felt he’d been punched in the chest. “Don’t you dare—”

  “I am not implying those deaths were your fault. I cannot even say to a certainty that the deaths surrounding your curse were correlated to it. But this power you have is not an inert thing you can simply bury and ignore. If it is not used, it builds. And while you have been surprisingly successful at keeping it suppressed all this time, I think it best you put it to use, rather than risk—”

  “And ain’t that just convenient for you,” he snapped, testy because he knew she was right. “One more thing keepin me here, diggin me in deeper so I can’t say no when you finally tell me what it is you’re after.”

  That was too much candor, and he regretted it immediately.

  Her face went slack with surprise, and then hardened into brittle disdain. “Oh, I see. And I suppose now we progress to the threats and extortion phase of the partnership? You’re quicker than your philistine manner suggests, Mr. Tracy. I didn’t expect this display of backbone for at least another month.”

  Her tone was pure acid, and Trace stared at her for a second, wondering what had so poisoned her against the world—or if it was something about him that rubbed her the wrong way. Because God knew she brought out his worst behavior. He raked a hand through his hair and tried for a placating tone. “I just think maybe we could help each other, instead of all this bickerin and leadin me around by the nose.”<
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  She gave a hostile little laugh. “Mr. Tracy, you have fought me at every turn. You disregard my warnings, you refused my offer to teach you—”

  “Live here and be your house boy, you mean?”

  “—and frankly I suspect you prefer to be led, so you can pretend not to notice the muck of the black arts in which you wade. You are perfectly willing to take my money and go running to help your fellow Christians, but gods forfend you expend any effort toward my goals!”

  Trace ground his teeth. It was on the tip of his tongue to argue that he had asked what she wanted, more than once, and she had fobbed him off with that crap about finding a cure for her condition. Which might be true, but he was sure by now that small truth was connected to something larger, something shameful and probably dangerous, that she didn’t want him to know. And he saw no advantage to begging and wheedling that ugliness out of her. His wife had been fond of that trick—wounded silences and accusations of indifference to her feelings, until he was apologizing for all kinds of things he didn’t remember doing. But he wasn’t a boy anymore and he’d be damned if he would play women’s games with this conniving little harridan.

  He drew a deep, controlled breath. “Is there anything you can tell me—any trick you know that will stop the spirits comin around in my sleep?”

  “And so again, you come begging for my help—”

  “I’m not beggin for anything,” Trace said. “You said you had knowledge about my power, but all I’ve got from you is a lot of flimflam about bad men lookin to use me. You’re the one who wants to use me, and I’m the one who goes out and bleeds while you sit up here and rub your hands together.”

  “I don’t have your gifts,” she said, as if explaining yet again to an imbecile. “Any knowledge I have would be secondhand—”

  “Don’t give me that. You know more than any so-called medium I’ve met. I think you hold back answers cause you like to keep me twistin on the line.”

  “If I hold back answers it’s because you have not deigned to ask the questions—”

  “I’m askin you now.” Trace cut her off with a slash of his hand. “You said you found me by watchin the spirits gather round me. That means you been lookin awhile, and I’d bet fair money you know every half-talented medium and psychic this side of the Platte. So if you can’t help me, send me to one of them.”

  He braced himself for more vitriol, but the look she gave him was slow and grim and deliberate.

  “Very well,” she muttered. “I suppose it will serve…” She pushed herself higher in the chaise and pointed at the hearth. “Fetch that desk here, if you please.”

  Trace circled the chaise and picked up the lap-desk on the hearth. It held a few books, papers, an inkwell. He settled it across her blanketed limbs; she reached to pull it closer, and in doing so one of her thin white hands lapped over his.

  The contact spread through him like frost, as if he had plunged his hand into an icy mountain stream. Cold rushed up his arm, sucking greedily at his warmth and strength. Instantly his power reacted, throwing up that shield around his soul—but not only around himself: it spilled into her, too, like hot water into a bath, pushing back the cold.

  The lap-desk clattered across her knees as they both dropped it. Pens and papers cascaded to the floor.

  Trace stood back and stared at her. Miss Fairweather’s eyes were wide and startled, her hand clasped to her bosom. He could still feel the tingle of contact up his arm and into his heart and throat, a queer, electric feeling, as if his power was still reaching out toward that connection.

  “What did you do?” she said breathlessly.

  “What did I do? What have you got in you?”

  “What did you feel?”

  Trace rubbed his tingling hand. “Cold.” There was a gnawing in his belly, despite the breakfast he’d eaten an hour before. “Hunger. Whatever’s in you—it’s eatin you alive.” He became aware of chill sweat on his brow, and running down his back. “No wonder you got it so hot in here.”

  “It’s not I,” she said quickly. “It draws through me. A sort of psychic leech.”

  “A demon?”

  “No! Something I thought I could control, when I was young and foolish. The price of my knowledge, you might say.” She looked him over warily, as if he were something else she wasn’t sure about controlling, but her eyes were clear of fever, and her color was a lot better than when he’d entered the room. “Are you all right? Do you feel weakened at all?”

  “No. Just gave me a shock, I guess.” The shield of his power was relaxing in the absence of threat, and the feeling of drawing, of reaching toward her, was subsiding with it. “I think it did take off some of the pressure.”

  “I should think so!” Even her voice sounded stronger, and the bruised hollows were gone from under her eyes. Trace understood in a flash that he had done that—that transfer of power through their hands had beaten back whatever was harming her, at least temporarily.

  She was trying to gather her cool, controlling manner around her, but she was too flustered. “Names. Name. You wanted an address—” She picked up a leather-bound journal from the floor where it had fallen, flipped through it. “Yes. Herr Kieler.”

  She copied out a name and address onto a loose sheet of paper, held it out, and then pulled it back when he reached for it. “Mr. Tracy. I know you do not trust me, but I urge you to consider: my health, my life may well depend upon your continued assistance. That alone should convince you I do not wish you harm. And with that in mind, I strongly urge you to consult with me before you take any action Herr Kieler recommends to you.”

  “I’m touched by your concern,” Trace said.

  “I am not joking,” Miss Fairweather said. “Franz Kieler will probably appear laughable to you, and he may in fact be harmless and well-meaning. But dabbling in the spirit world is dangerous, especially for someone like you. Your fears of damnation pale in comparison to what is actually out there.”

  “Just let me worry about my own soul.” Trace took the paper, careful not to touch her again. “Sounds like you got your hands full with yours.”

  CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE

  The address Miss Fairweather had given him was near the market district of St. Louis, in a neighborhood of shabby but respectable businesses and shops. It was an unassuming little storefront, with a plate glass window heavily curtained on the inside, dead houseplants and a pair of dusty chimney lamps on the sill. Flaking gold letters on the glass said BOOKSHOP, but a hand-drawn sign on the sash offered Palmistry, Tea Leaves Read, Loved Ones Contacted. By Appointment.

  “What’s it say?” Boz asked.

  “It says ‘Come in and get duped,’” Trace muttered, trying not to feel so disappointed.

  “Aw, c’mon. Ain’t like you tried every table-rapper in the Union.”

  “I just can’t see anybody bona fide makin a livin off it.”

  “You got hired by her cause of it.”

  “You’re not really makin me feel better.”

  Boz sucked his teeth. “You know, every time you go see that woman you come back tetchier than before.”

  “Well she ain’t exactly a little ray of sunshine!”

  “I don’t got to live with her.”

  Trace scowled at himself. Met Boz’s eyes briefly in apology. “Fair enough.”

  He pushed open the door. They found themselves in a space that had once been a storefront; the shelves and glass-front display cases were still in place, but instead of goods for sale they were now packed with mounds of rubbish: books, baby bonnets, hand tools, wallets, watches, old clothes, ladies’ perfume bottles, jewel cases, and shoes. The contents of several attics, by the look of it, the kinds of things that one’s relatives cleared out after a funeral.

  And it was all whispering.

  A prickle went up the back of Trace’s neck. A thousand sighing voices, like the rustle of dry prairie grass in the wind, whispered around the fringes of his mind. Voices of the dead, imprinted in their
cast-off belongings.

  “Weird place,” Boz said, surveying the clutter with a curl to his lip.

  Even he can feel it, Trace thought. “There’s been a lot of people—a lot of spirits congregatin here.”

  “That a good thing?”

  “According to Miss Fairweather, it is. Means this Kieler is the real thing.”

  There was a narrow alley through the piles of junk and they picked their way through it, toward the murmur of voices and the smell of incense. The front room funneled into a short corridor that separated the back of the building from the storefront.

  A woman stood in the corridor, her back to them, arms folded loosely around her waist while she watched some scene in the room beyond. By her casual pose and bare head, Trace guessed she was Kieler’s wife or housekeeper.

  “Excuse me, ma’am,” he murmured. “We’re here to see Mr. Franz Kieler?”

  “He’s in a reading,” the lady whispered back, not looking at him. Trace edged into the doorway to see for himself.

  The back room was more what he had expected of a charlatan’s parlor: dark and womblike, with candles placed to create shadows rather than illuminate. Heavy drapes softened the walls and large gilt mirrors nestled among them, to fool the eye with illusions of movement. A thick, cloying scent caught at the throat and made the eyes feel heavy.

  In the center of the room was a table, covered in velvet. The two ladies seated at it were middle-aged and respectable, judging by their stout figures and fine hats. Their faces were obscured in the shadows of the wing chairs.

  The little man opposite them, however, was starkly and dramatically illuminated. He wore all black, so his pale face and hands appeared to float in the gloom. The lamp on the table threw his fine-boned face into sharp relief, making black pools of his eye sockets, except for a glitter of flame reflected from deep within.

  He held a pair of ladies’ gloves close to his chest, stroking them as if they were a small live creature. His gaze was blank and haunted, his jaw drawn long with concentration, an expression of tragic solemnity on his face.