Dead Iron

by Devon Monk

  Cedar stared after her, his heart pounding so hard, he couldn’t hear the mule’s hoof beats over the noise of it.

  The ear-cracking pop of a rail matic expelling steam ricocheted through the hills. Then the low hum of the matic chugging, and another pop, finally shook Cedar clear of his racing thoughts.

  Sunset. Just one day to decide if ending his curse was worth finding a man’s killer, and abandoning his hunt for the Gregors’ boy.

  It seemed far too many decisions for such an early hour. Though he was sorely tempted to ride after the widow, he couldn’t abandon the boy lost in the wilds, who might still have a chance at living if Cedar was quick enough to the hunt. Cedar decided his own curse, and what the widow Lindson knew of it, would wait a while longer.

  He took a deep breath and nodded to himself. First, he’d go looking for the Gregors’ boy. If he could find him fast enough, there might still be a chance he could talk to the widow, see what she knew about his curse. The boy, if he was still alive, didn’t have much time left.

  Cedar strode into the cabin and shut and locked the door. He lifted the lid on the trunk against the wall. His hunting gear was there, wrapped in a wool blanket. Everything a man could cobble together to aid in tracking, catching, and killing lay within those folds. Waiting.

  Cedar removed the first wrapped parcel and placed it on his bunk, deciding his course of action.

  Time was running out to save the boy. But the dead man would stay dead no matter how long the widow Lindson grieved.

  Jeb Lindson did not like the dirt or rocks or worms. It was cold. It was too cold.

  But there was a need pulling him. Like a sweet song calling. Something he should rise for, something he should fight for, on the other side of this dirt and cold that weighed his bones down. Something he loved more than life and wanted more than death.

  His brain, not being all it used to be, took time to worry an answer free. By and by it came to him.

  Mae. His beautiful Mae. She was the answer. She was waiting for him. Calling.

  He had vowed to be hers until death did them part. And he was not dead.

  It took time, maybe minutes, maybe hours, until his right hand found the silver box over his heart.

  The iron key was there. Colder than the grave, silenced by the dirt.

  It took time, maybe minutes, maybe hours, before he knew what to do. Finally, thick fingers dug away the dirt around his heart. And his thoughts singled to one slow chant: The key. The key. Turn the key.

  He grasped the key between his fingers and thumb.

  Cold. So cold.

  But cold could not stop him. Death could not stop him. Nothing could stop him. Not even Mr. Shard LeFel.

  He turned the key. Once. Twice. Thrice.

  His heart rushed with something warmer than blood, liquid fire pulsing fast and hot as the clockwork dragonfly’s wings rattled to life.

  It fueled him. It strengthened him. Jeb Lindson pushed at the dirt and rocks above him, digging his way free from the stones, digging his way into the world of daylight, into Mae’s world.

  Because he had a new thought now. A thought that filled him with a different kind of fire. He was going to kill Mr. Shard LeFel.

  Beneath the shadow of a tree, a small matic clicked and whirred. Sensing the tremble of stones and dirt falling from the dead man’s grave, it rose up upon spider legs, balancing its portly copper teapot body. The gyroscope and compass set within its belly pointed the ticker east. It skittered off on quick, spindly feet. East. To the rail. To the man who had left it spying here. To Mr. Shard LeFel.

  CHAPTER FOUR

  Cedar gave the cinch on his horse, Flint, one last tug, then swung up into the saddle. It hadn’t taken long to gear up. Guns and goggles in the saddlebags, canteen of water, and fry bread wrapped and warm. He’d hunt for the boy in the day, then find his way home before the beast took him.

  He had two more nights of the change. Fight as he might, he’d never been able to push off the change for the three nights when the moon came full. For three nights a month, a beast he’d be. Empty of a man’s thoughts, with nothing but a killer’s hunger. And he was not going to spend this night or the next as a blood-hungry beast out in the forest. It would be too easy to kill the very child he was looking for.

  Day was his charm right now. He’d need to talk to Elbert’s father and ride by their house to catch a scent or sign of what stole the boy.

  Cedar turned his horse’s nose to the wind, and started off to town. It was still early enough that dew clung to the underbrush of the forest and birds sang and rattled in the high branches of the ponderosa pines. He could taste the green and sage of needles crushing beneath Flint’s hooves, could hear the distant cluck of the creek over stones. Days after the change always made the world seem clearer somehow, like he’d been stretched out so far, he needed to take in the whole world to fill up his senses and the space inside him.

  Days after the change, he still carried some of the beast close beneath his skin, keen sight, keen smell, keen hearing. Enough that hunting the boy would be easier for him than any other man. He didn’t like it, but admitted it was the other gift the curse gave him. And he’d used it to his advantage more than once.

  Slants of sunlight through the pine and Douglas fir promised an afternoon warm enough to melt the morning’s dew. Far off, the clatter and chug of matics working the rail sent out a stuttering pulse. They were crawling closer every day, trees falling, rocks crushing, iron and spikes driving, as the rail pounded down.

  He’d heard folk in town say the dandy was going to run the rail from Council Bluffs straight through town, and then clean over the seam between the mountains, breaking them in two. The track would snake onward, catching the mighty Columbia River, and opening the town to traffic from both the east and the Pacific Ocean.

  If it was true, the rail would be a life vein to such a little town. But Cedar reckoned there were easier ways across this territory. A man didn’t build and blast his way over a mountain unless he had a powerful need to.

  And it made him wonder why, of all the little towns in Oregon, Mr. Shard LeFel was aiming to bust his way right down the middle of Hallelujah.

  Cedar rode out from under the cover of the forest and made his way down into town. In contrast to the general commotion of yesterday, things seemed settled, folk going about their business of readying for the coming winter. About a dozen people halfway down Main Street surrounded a coach that was unloading three passengers and their trunks. One of the riders was striding off to the mercantile, a large letter bag with the wing and horseshoe patch clearly marking it as air-trail service. The month’s mail had arrived from Portland.

  Cedar rode on past. He knew there’d be no letters for him. There wasn’t a soul in this world left for him, not a home that would welcome him in.

  Folk looked up, and looked away as he went by, conversations dying out, then picking back up as if he harrowed winter’s chill behind him. It used to bother him, back when he’d first been cursed. But he’d grudgingly accepted that he could no longer count himself rightly among civilized men and women. Surviving these untamed lands took having a healthy sense of self-preservation. And even though he wore a man’s skin on the outside, folk sensed the beast in his soul.

  They were wise to shun him.

  He took his time riding to the blacksmith’s shop. Other than the constant clack and clamber of the matics working the rail, and the occasional rattle of the smaller town-bound matics and tickers clicking through the simple chores of shucking corn or milling grain, the day was strangely absent of the sound of hammer and anvil. With the rail come to town, the blacksmith hired on a dozen men for repair and forging of the peculiar hex-headed spikes, bolts, screws, and fishplates the dandy LeFel required to hold the rail together.

  That sort of work, and the added business in the saloon, bordello, and mercantile, had done the town some good too.

  But there was no sound from the forge this morning. No sound
since the blacksmith’s boy had gone missing.

  Cedar dismounted in front of the shop and hitched his horse. Shop was quiet as a boneyard. There was no heat radiating from the place, only a damp smell of oil, metal, and coal. The shush of water and clack of chains from the water tower a few yards off suddenly seemed too loud in the absence of the hammer.

  Cedar walked into the open shop, expecting it to be empty. It nearly was. Only Mr. Robert Gregor was there, leaning both arms on the worktable, a bottle of whiskey at his elbow, his back turned from the light.

  “We’re closed today,” he said to the sound of Cedar’s boots on the packed dirt.

  “Mr. Gregor, I’m here to offer you my services.”

  Mr. Gregor did not stir.

  “I’m here for your son,” Cedar said.

  “My son is dead.” Mr. Gregor turned, a tin cup in his hand, and squinted against the morning light. “Unless you are a preacher or a gravedigger, you’ll do me no good.” He took a long swallow out of the cup, then drew it down, empty. He twisted and refilled the cup. The bottle was well over half gone, though the sun hadn’t half climbed the sky yet.

  “Are you a preacher, Mr. Hunt?” he demanded. “A man of God?”

  Cedar shook his head. “Just a hunter, Mr. Gregor. I didn’t know your boy had been found. Last I heard, he’d gone missing.” He tipped his hat. “I’ll leave you with my condolences.”

  “Didn’t say he’s been found.” Mr. Gregor straightened and took a few steps forward, looking like a man hoping to eventuate the conversation with his fists. “Gone the night into the wilds. We searched as far as he could have run. Farther. Spent the day and the night searching. No sign of him. Not a scent, a scrap, a sound. He’s gone. My Elbert . . .” Mr. Gregor clenched the cup, but did not bring it back to his lips. He swallowed several times, choking his sorrow down, his face red, his eyes fevered.

  There was no worse heartache than losing a child.

  “Children have a way of enduring,” Cedar said, “of holding on when there’s scarce hope left to hold. Your son’s a strong boy. I’d like to look for him, just the same.”

  “Why? Are you thinking a foolish man in his grief will be parted from his money? That you can plank me for a week’s pay?”

  “No, sir. I’m not asking you to pay. For all I don’t mingle, I understand the death of a child, the pain of it.” Cedar stopped, surprised at how hard that was to admit. He had spoken so little of his loss. Not even to his own brother. “If there’s a chance I can find your son, or his body for burial, then my services are yours.”

  Mr. Gregor gave him a long look.

  “A son?” Mr. Gregor asked.

  “Daughter,” Cedar said. It was more than he’d shared with anyone in the last four years, and there was no more he would say about it.

  Again the long look. Finally Mr. Gregor said, “I’ll show you his window. We looked for tracks, for . . . blood.”

  Cedar waited as the blacksmith paced out of the shop, then followed. The man was a good hand taller than Cedar, thick in the shoulders and arms. He stank of whiskey and sweat, but his stride was even and strong as he led the way around the back of the shop and to the house beside it, which, with the second floor above, comprised the Gregors’ home.

  Two tall, thin glass windows were fitted upon the ground floor of the house, with a taller, thinner window centered above them beneath the peaked roof on the second floor. The rest of the house, with a proper porch and a plot of garden gone to seed, spread off to their right. Mr. Gregor stopped between the bottom-floor windows.

  White lace curtains, likely brought in from England, were closed behind the glass panes. The windows began about waist-high and rose a good way above Cedar’s head. The wooden sills were recently whitewashed, clean and unmarked.

  “Which one?” Cedar asked.

  Mr. Gregor stabbed one finger in the air. “Attic.”

  Cedar craned his neck, then took a few steps back to get a look at the second-story window. Narrower than the two windows below, it was built in the same manner: strong wooden casing, double-hung sash, no broken panes.

  “Boy’s four, five?” Cedar asked.

  “Four this winter.”

  “Ever opened the window on his own?”

  “No. It stays locked and he is . . . was . . . too little to reach. But he’s always been curious. Head in the clouds, stars in his eyes. Easy to wander. And such stories he’d tell . . .” He swallowed, his words too thin to carry the weight of his voice.

  Cedar studied the lengths of dark clapboard above and below the window, looking for marks or scraping of ladder or rope. Even with his sharpened vision, nothing seemed disturbed.

  He studied the ground a few strides away from the window, out where the boy would have landed if he took a fall. He knelt, fingered the hard soil. The blacksmith was right. There was no sign of blood or scuffle. He glanced back up at the window, reckoning the angle of fall. This was where Elbert would have landed and yet there was no sign of an impact.

  “You sure he didn’t wander out the door?”

  The blacksmith shook his head, wild red hair jostling. “Lock’s set up too high. I make sure it’s in place every evening. Had to unlock the door before I went out looking for him in the morning.”

  Cedar stood, dusted his hands, and walked across the dried grass and patch of dirt toward the house again. Leaning in close to the wall, he stood between the lower windows and craned his neck to look up. From this perspective he could see the bottom of the sill. Two thumb-sized holes were burned into the wood.

  Cedar pressed his hand against the wall to get a better angle.

  A vibration tickled across his palm like sunlight over a cold limb. He held his breath. Within the space of three heartbeats, he heard music. Distant, sour, pipe and strings. Not music of this world. That vibration, that song, was the mark of the Strange.

  The Strange had been here. Left a trace of music in the wood, though it was a faint mark that would soon fade. If Cedar hadn’t just been bound by moonlight, he wouldn’t have sensed it at all.

  The child hadn’t fallen out of the window. He’d been taken by the Strange.

  The porch door opened and Mr. Gregor’s wife stepped out. She was a tiny plump woman with dark curls in a storm around her head.

  “Robert?” She caught sight of the two men, then walked across the yard to stand next to her husband. Her head reached only as high as the blacksmith’s chest, and she held a dishrag in her hand as if she’d forgotten it was there. He could tell she’d been cooking, likely for the funeral. And crying.

  “Good day, Mr. Hunt,” she said, looking at the rag in her hand, and nothing else.

  “Mrs. Gregor.” He nodded.

  “Will you be by for the service?”

  “I don’t believe I will, ma’am. I have business that, regretfully, will keep me.”

  “Yes,” she said, as if she hadn’t heard his reply. “I understand.” She stepped closer to her husband, but did not look away from her hands.

  “Now, Hannah,” Mr. Gregor said, “Mr. Hunt’s a tracker. He’s going to do what he can for us.”

  She inhaled a quick breath, a spark of hope flushing her cheeks as she looked up at her husband.

  “To find him. For the burial,” the blacksmith said gently.

  Mrs. Gregor made a soft sob, and clutched her husband’s shirtsleeve. She tipped her head down again, hiding her tears.

  “I’ll do what I can,” Cedar said. He planned to look for more than the boy’s body. He planned to find him whole and breathing, and return him to his parents. He didn’t tell them that the Strange were likely involved. He wasn’t even sure these God-fearing folk believed in the Strange.

  There was a chance, pale as it was, that the Strange had swept off with Elbert for folly designed to keep him alive, though he’d ask no odds on it.

  “You have my word I’ll do all I can.”

  Mrs. Gregor pressed her face into her husband’s sleeve, weeping openly now. The
blacksmith wrapped his arms around her like a bear with a cub. He turned his back on Cedar, protecting his wife’s privacy.

  “I’m obliged to you, Mr. Hunt. Now, if you’ll excuse us.” He walked with his wife, shushing her muffled sobs as he guided her back to the house.

  Cedar knew better than to give either of them false hope when the Strange were involved. He had tangled with the Strange before. The curse the god harnessed him with meant he could sense them most times. Worse, they seemed to be drawn to him like a needle pointing north. And though the god had compelled him to hunt the Strange, at every full moon, Cedar fought that urge and chained himself down, denying the god’s will.

  He’d be no one’s pawn, man or god, cursed or otherwise.

  But now his sense of the Strange would aid in finding the boy, though he’d need more than a keen eye to track them in time. More than just his instincts and luck. He’d need tools. And if those tools were made of the metal beneath the ground on which the Strange walked, all the better.

  Silver was best. Which was his first bit of luck. He happened to know three men who had silver at their disposal, and who might have a passing acquaintance with the ways of the Strange.

  Cedar strode back around the building, unhitched his horse, and swung into the saddle. The water tower clacked, splashed, then gave out a three-tone pipe-organ whistle, like a chorus of steam angels hollering for all their might. Daylight was burning. He’d need to work quickly if he wanted to find the boy before night took his soul again, and still have time to ask the widow Lindson what she could do to break his curse.

  He turned north and set Flint at a lope to the mountains and the Madder brothers’ mine.

  CHAPTER FIVE

  Jeb Lindson had learned that night was better for walking, even though the dark made it hard to see. So he had walked through the night. One foot up, one foot down, forward, forward. No matter the dark. No matter the blood dripping from his fingertips, or the rattle of the dragonfly’s wing shivering in his chest, working like a bellows to keep his heart beating.