Nightingale, Sing

by Karsten Knight

  I gingerly picked it up, my trembling fingers grasping the brittle document by the corner. There was writing on both sides, but by two different hands. On one side, someone had scrawled a letter on journal stationery, the cursive barely legible, the tiny words spilling out to the margins. On the reverse, a second person had copied a short, twelve-line poem with measured, precise pen strokes.

  A poem that read suspiciously like another riddle.

  The full gravity of what I was holding didn’t sink in until I read the date scrawled below the letterhead at the very top of the journal entry.

  February 13, 1865.

  “Holy shit,” I whispered.

  FROM THE JOURNAL OF DR. CUMBERLAND WARWICK

  Charleston, South Carolina | February 13, 1865

  Dearest Adelaide,

  It has been four months now since the carnage I witnessed at Winchester, four months since I fled the Shenandoah Valley. Every night, the events of that ruinous month haunt my dreams. I can hardly close my eyes without seeing the spilled blood of my brethren painting the banks of the Cedar.

  However, my fear for our future weighs on me far heavier than any wartime atrocities. I fear that I shall never get to send these letters, and that you will never know how hard I tried to return to Baton Rouge to take my rightful spot at your side. I fear that General Early himself will track me down and string me from the gallows, a deserter’s death. More than anything, I fear that even if heaven consents to bring me home, you will not desire a coward for a husband.

  Still, I must put aside these woes for now to tell you of the queerest thing that happened this evening, so peculiar, indeed, that I eagerly write this now by lantern light.

  Six days had I spent in the forests outside Charleston, with no roof over my head and rarely a morsel to be eaten. The Carolina rains sought to best me. And so, needing refuge from the elements, I found a barn on the outskirts where I could nest a bed for myself amongst the cattle and hay.

  I had hardly made myself at home in my new sanctuary when I discerned a glow from an empty stall. It was a radiant blue the likes that I had never in this world seen. Though the source of the light was in part shrouded under a burlap concealment, I instantly knew I was in the presence of something divine, and so I edged closer with cautious trepidation.

  My approach came to an unexpected stop when I felt the edge of a blade pressed against my neck. Holding the knife was a dark man of impressive stature—a slave, I assumed, by the fresh lashings recently branded upon his bare flesh.

  “Please, sir. I am a friend,” I promised him, though I expected he may doubt my honesty given my pallor and the soiled gray of my uniform. I noted a particularly inflamed wound upon his chest, tinged with the earliest whispers of infection, and I added, “I am also a doctor.”

  After much wordless scrutiny, he relented, and answered my prayers when he sheathed his blade.

  My curiosity overcame my relief, and so, as my new companion knelt in the hay beside the glowing artifact, of which he seemed quite familiar, I dared to ask, “What is that heavenly thing?”

  His silence endured so long I deemed that he may be a mute. In time, however, he whispered, “Yakuti Serengeti.” Then, remarkably, he spoke to me in English, his accent harsh and alien, but his words powerful and certain in a way I shall never forget. “It is the Serengeti Sapphire,” he said. “And it is the only thing that can save my son.”

  And then he promptly collapsed.

  On castle grounds

  ‘Top drumlin’s perch

  Where griffins gaze

  O’er shore and shoals

  Where statues flank

  Long halls of pine

  The hill rolls down

  To taste the sea

  As roses watch

  The fount’ runs dry

  The truth entombed

  Exhumed at last.

  By the time the train chugged slowly into the final station, it was after 1 a.m. and I was the only passenger remaining in my car. An attendant in a black cap strutted down the aisle and called out, “Rockport—end of the line.”

  I hoped he was only being literal.

  As I stepped off the train onto the cement platform, I anxiously touched the pouch of my hooded sweatshirt to make sure the journal page was still there. I didn’t know much about the preservation of artifacts, but I imagined that a few museum curators might faint at the thought of me stuffing a 150-year-old document into a hoodie. Still, my brother had gone to great lengths to conceal it from somebody, and I had no intentions of letting it out of my sight.

  I left the railroad tracks in my dust, leaving the conductor to put the purple-striped train to bed for the night. I followed the main road on foot, toward the smell of the ocean. Surrounded on three sides by the sea, Rockport formed the eastern terminus of the Cape Ann peninsula, one of the earliest landing sites for English settlers traveling to the New World.

  Today, the town was a strange relic of an old family fishing industry. Throughout the generations of fishermen, the Atlantic had reportedly claimed the lives of more than ten thousand of Cape Ann’s husbands and sons. To this day, their names were inscribed in the nearby town hall of Gloucester.

  It was amazing, I realized as I reflected on this historical trivia that had lain dormant in my brain, how much information I’d actually absorbed from Jack’s frequent historical ravings.

  The road curved through Bearskin Neck, the quaint but touristy stretch of town that overlooked a ship-dotted harbor. With its tiny, sea-weathered storefronts and colorful infestation of ships, the village was a popular destination for film crews in search of a rustic, coastal, all-American feel.

  In the dead of night, it was so quiet that I could practically hear the buoys bobbing with the soft swell of the sea.

  A short walk later, I arrived at the Windward Bluffs Country Club. The golf course’s perimeter was protected only by a low metal fence, which was probably intended more to keep rogue balls from smashing car windows than it was to keep out late-night intruders. In the brush near the cart trail, I spotted a score card that somebody had discarded, and I used its map to navigate my way to the eleventh green.

  As I hiked across the dark, empty fairway, my path lit only by a thin veil of moonlight filtering through the tall pines, I suddenly grew aware of how stupidly dangerous this trip to Rockport could be. I’d agreed to come to an empty golf course to meet a near stranger, who was at least tangentially involved in the death of my brother.

  And I’d told absolutely no one where I was going.

  It would be easy enough for Smitty and whoever else to ambush me, lash me to an anchor, and drop me into the middle of Sandy Bay. No one would ever hear from me again, until the ropes binding me one day rotted through and my fish-nibbled body washed ashore by the yacht club.

  When I reached the eleventh green, I could see why Smitty had picked it as the spot for our clandestine rendezvous. It was the highest point in the whole course, situated at the top of a hill so you could see in all directions if somebody was coming.

  For better or worse, the skittish bartender had yet to arrive, so I plopped down on the edge of a bunker. In the spirit of superstition, I pocketed a small handful of sand from the trap, just as Jack had taught me while he was teaching me to swim. Granted, this was a country club, not the beach, but there were dark currents at play now, and a little spiritual protection from my brother couldn’t hurt.

  While I waited, the automatic sprinklers clicked on, popping out of their hiding places around the green like steel gophers. Soon, a fine mist floated through the air, and even though it was probably too cold out to be getting wet, I found the dewy touch against my face refreshing.

  After this past week, it was nice to feel something other than confusion, anger, or sorrow.

  It felt like I’d been waiting forever when I heard the hum of a motor approaching. A golf cart rolled swiftly over the fairway, making its way up the hill. I stood and grabbed the sand rake from the bunker to use a
s a weapon if I needed.

  Fortunately, Smitty had come alone. With a final dying put-put-put, the cart’s motor idled into silence and Smitty rolled to a stop beside the green.

  “Nice wheels,” I said.

  Smitty didn’t smile. He stuffed his hands into his trousers—he was still wearing his uniform from the Nightingale. He looked so tense that his face might crack if the cape breeze hit him the wrong way. “Sorry to haul you all the way out here,” he said. “This is where I grew up. I’ve been caddying at this golf course every summer since I was fourteen. I guess I wanted to be somewhere I felt safe.”

  “Safe from whom, Smitty?” I asked.

  Smitty didn’t answer at first. He floated a few steps across the green and ran a finger down the flag pole. Finally, without meeting my gaze, he said, “Horace Nox.”

  The name snapped a guitar string in my mind. Horace Nox. I didn’t know him, per se, but most people who lived in Boston or even picked up a copy of the Globe had at least heard of him. He was an entrepreneur. He was also purportedly a “gangster,” whatever that meant these days.

  “Is that who killed my brother?” I asked, my voice dead.

  Smitty looked sharply at me. “Did you come here just for the spoilers?” he snapped. “Or did you want the whole story?”

  I swallowed the anger that had billowed up at the sound of Nox’s name and nodded at Smitty. The how and the why were every bit as important as the who.

  Smitty wandered over to the sand trap. I tossed the rake away and took a seat beside him. “How much do you know about Nox?” he asked me.

  “Not much.” Newspaper images and snippets of news footage surfaced in my memory. Nox was most notorious for wanting to open up a casino on the South Shore a few years back. The city council members shut him down before he could ever break ground. Officially, they claimed it was because he failed to produce viable evidence that he was one-eighth Algonquin Indian, as he had claimed, and that the influx of gamblers consuming copious amounts of alcohol posed a threat to the safety of their citizens.

  Off the record, it was because of Nox’s unsavory reputation.

  Smitty scooped up a handful of sand. “A lot of what I’m about to tell you is stitched together from little stories I’ve heard in whispers here and there. Horace Nox is not the kind of guy who has a clean little bio you can read about on Wikipedia. He’s a ghost who you don’t touch and you don’t talk about. The pieces of his story are like dinosaur bones in a desert—you dust them off one at a time, and at the end of the day, you hope you’ve got enough to glue them together and get a glimpse of the whole monster. Still,” the bartender said solemnly as he opened his fingers and let the sand sift through, “I believe every word of what I’m about to tell you.”

  “Start at the beginning,” I said. “Leave nothing out.”

  Smitty cleared his throat. “They say he grew up just outside Boston, down in Dorchester—your hometown, from what I gather. Don’t know much about his parents, but Nox had an older brother named Wilbur, so if you ask me, his folks had no idea what side of the nineteenth century they were on. Even though Wilbur grew up perfectly healthy, Nox got the shit end of the gene pool and was born with some rare autoimmune disease that left him in constant pain, so bad that his hair turned permanently gray from the trauma by the time he finished elementary school. His muscles atrophied. Arthritis feasted on his joints. His kidneys started to fail. Nobody thought the kid would make it past his twelfth birthday.”

  I tightened my fingers around a tuft of grass at the edge of the sand trap, savoring the snap as each blade ripped free. “I usually root for sick children to pull through, but in his case …”

  “He probably wouldn’t have, if it weren’t for his big brother,” Smitty continued. “See, Wilbur was a science geek, a bona fide prodigy, and he doted on Horace. He had his PhD in biochemistry by the time he turned twenty-one, but his true passion was botany.”

  “Botany? Like plants?”

  “Sounds dumb when you put it that way, right? But many of the world’s drugs, good and bad, come from plants and fungus—antibiotics, pharmaceuticals, narcotics—so it’s not all that bizarre. In the end, because he loved Horace, Wilbur agreed to do whatever it took to find something that would alleviate his little brother’s pain. The elder Nox experimented using plants from every continent, until he stumbled across a curious little organism from the Brazilian rainforest. Some sort of lichen that grows on the banks of the Amazon River. With the right processes, Wilbur figured out how to distill it down into a serum that stabilized Horace’s immune system, stimulated his muscle growth, and restored function to his failing organs. A chemical that finally quelled Nox’s pain.” Smitty paused, then added, “That’s how they discovered Blyss.”

  The last word was one that I’d come to know well, especially since I started pedicabbing and seeing the “late-night” side of Boston. Blyss was fairly new to the drug world, but it was gaining popularity fast.

  To illustrate his story, Smitty pulled a vial of the potion out of his pocket, rolling it between his thumb and pointer finger. In the darkness of the golf course, the Blyss phosphoresced softly, the murky contents undulating. At first glance, it was white and milky, like someone had bottled a cloud and it was trying to break out of the glass. Because you drank it instead of smoking it or injecting it, it was easy to consume in public without arousing suspicion. I had never tried it, but I knew plenty of people who had, including Rufus, who indulged whenever he had the cash. Out of curiosity, I had asked him once what it felt like.

  “Cleanest high you’ll ever get,” Rufus had mused. “Suddenly, you feel this molten energy radiating out of everything around you, and your body soaks it up. Your senses of sight, sound, taste, and smell are heightened until you notice all the little details that you’d never given a damn about before—the scent of the perfume of the girl who walked past you, the screech of the train’s brakes as it comes into Bowdoin. Meanwhile, it slows your reflexes and fries your sense of touch. Hell, I walked around Beacon Hill for three straight hours in bare feet, and it was like I was gliding over the cobblestones. And for a short while, I felt completely invincible …”

  It had scared me to hear Rufus like that, the tendrils of addiction in his voice, as though he were talking about a new lover he couldn’t get enough of. But he wasn’t alone. I’d seen some of my fares sharing sips from a flask in the back of my pedicab, giggling for no other reason than how the wind whistled past their ears. Kids from my high school parked in dark fields and lay in their truck beds, drinking Blyss until the stars swallowed them up.

  I’d never known where the drug got its start.

  Smitty fished a pack of cigarettes out of his trousers and tapped it against the edge of his palm until one came loose. “Mind if I smoke?” he asked.

  I scooted away from him. “As long as you don’t die from emphysema before you reach the end of the story.”

  When Smitty lifted the cigarette to his lips, I saw how bad the man was trembling. He dropped it twice into his lap before he managed to slip the end into his mouth and light it.

  Smitty took a long drag, closed his eyes, and let a gray cloud billow out of him, like he was trying to exhale his fear. The tremor in his voice quieted as he picked up the tale again. “Within weeks of starting Horace on daily doses of Blyss, the symptoms of his disease began to retreat. His internal organs sprang back to life. His muscles grew strong. All that pain faded away. By the time Nox graduated from high school, he was in such peak health that he enlisted in the Marines and headed off to Iraq. While he was there, his convoy tripped an explosive device in the road, but Nox survived the ambush with just a few shrapnel wounds and a scratchy voice. Suddenly, the kid who once seemed doomed to wither away had transformed into a man of steel.”

  The few newspaper clippings I’d read had mentioned Nox’s wartime exploits. They painted him as a war hero who’d fallen from grace once he’d returned to the mainland. “If he’s some superman,” I said,
“then let’s talk about his kryptonite.”

  Smitty’s eyes lit up. “Now that involves a bit of irony. See, the problem for Horace is that in the early days, Wilbur hadn’t quite perfected the recipe for Blyss. While the drug was taking away Nox’s pain and kickstarting his immune system, it was also silently planting the seeds of a little something nasty that’s been growing in him all these years.”

  “Nox … has cancer?” I asked.

  Smitty shrugged. “Something like that. Something the doctors had never seen. Something they couldn’t cure. Either way, the man is dying.” He dropped his cigarette into the sand and toed it out in the dirt.

  So the very plant that Nox had thought would be his guardian angel turned out to be the grim reaper in disguise. “Great bedtime story,” I told Smitty. “But it’s about time you get to the part where my brother ended up on the bad side of a dying, drug-dealing kingpin.”

  Something came over Smitty’s face, and I could tell he was struggling with how to phrase what happened next. Was that shame in his expression?

  He drew in a deep breath. “The night your brother died, I was working the bar, like the police report said. And your brother was at the Nightingale, too. Only he wasn’t upstairs pounding shots.”

  Whatever excitement I’d felt before at the prospect of finally getting answers turned to ice.

  Smitty’s eyes were glassy. Tears pooled in the corners, ready to spill over. “Toward the end of my shift, we ran out of Newport Lager, so I went downstairs to change the keg. Partway down the steps, I heard Nox interrogating your brother. Had a couple of his goons with him, too.”

  “Was one of those goons,” I asked slowly, “a chick with some interesting metal hardware on her head?” My mind chillingly flashed to the grin of the horned driver who’d run down my brother.