The magician puffed on his cigar, and regarded me with a half smile that the overly civilized reserve for scofflaws and bounders such as myself. I resisted the temptation to jam a cushion over his face and dust him then and there, because I knew slippery devils like him always came in first and they survived by stepping on the heads of drowning men. He removed the cigar from his mouth and said, “Conrad Paxton confessed it to some associates of mine several years ago.”
“Horse shit.”
“The source is…trustworthy.”
“Dad kicked from a heart attack. Are you saying this lug got to him somehow? Poisoned him?” It was difficult to speak. My vision had narrowed as it did when blood was in my eye. I wanted to strangle, to stab, to empty the Luger. “Did my old man rub out somebody near and dear to Paxton? Thump him one? What?”
“Conrad didn’t specify a method, didn’t express a motive, only that he’d committed the deed.”
“You’ve taken your sweet time reporting the news,” I said.
“The pistol aimed at my John Thomas suggests my caution was well-founded. At the time I didn’t believe the story, thinking Paxton a loud-mouthed eccentric. He is a loud-mouthed eccentric—I simply thought this more rubbish.”
“I expect bragging of murder is a sure way to spoil a fellow’s reputation in your refined circles.” My collar tightened and my vision was streaky from my elevated pulse, which in turn caused everything on me that was broken, crushed, or punctured to throb. I kept my cool by fantasizing about what I was going to do to my enemy when I tracked him to ground. Better, much better.
“It also didn’t help when the squalid details of Conrad’s provenance and subsequent upbringing eventually came to light. The poor chap was in and out of institutions for most of his youth. He worked as a clerk at (illegible) University and there reunited with papa Muybridge and ultimately joined the photographer’s staff. If not for Eadweard Muybridge’s patronage, today Conrad would likely be in a gutter or dead.”
“Oh, I see. Paxton didn’t become a hermit by choice, your people shunned him like the good folks in Utah do it.”
“In a nutshell, yes. Conrad’s childhood history is sufficiently macabre to warrant such treatment. Not much is known about the Paxtons except they owned a fishery. Conrad’s adoptive sister vanished when she was eight and he nine. All fingers pointed to his involvement. At age sixteen he drowned a rival at school and was sent to an asylum until he reached majority. The rich and beautiful are somewhat phobic regarding the criminally insane no matter how affluent the latter might be. Institutional taint isn’t fashionable unless one derives from old money. Alas, Conrad is new money and what he’s got isn’t much by the standards of California high society.”
“I don’t know whether to thank you or shoot you,” I said. “I’m inclined to accept your word for the moment. It would be an unfortunate thing were I to discover this information of yours is a hoax. Who are these associates that heard Paxton’s confession?”
“The Corning Sisters. The sisters dwell in Luster, one of several rustic burghs in Ransom Hollow. If anyone can help you against Conrad, it’ll be the crones. I admired Donald. Your father was a killer with the eye of an artist, the heart of a poet. A conflicted man, but a loyal friend. I’d like to know why Conrad wanted him dead.”
“I’m more interested in discovering why he wants to bop me,” I said. Actually, I was more preoccupied with deciding on a gun or a dull knife.
“He may not necessarily wish to kill you, my boy. It may be worse than that. Do you enjoy films? There’s one that may be of particular importance to you.”
* * *
Dick gave me a look when I brought Helios Augustus to the curb. He drove us to the Redfield Museum of Natural History without comment, although Bly’s nephew Vernon frowned and muttered and cast suspicious glances into the rearview. I’d met the lug once at a speakeasy on the south side; lanky kid with red-rimmed eyes and a leaky nose. Pale as milk and mean as a snake. No scholar, either. I smiled at him, though not friendly like.
Helios Augustus rang the doorbell until a pasty clerk who pulled duty as a night watchman and janitor admitted us. The magician held a brief, muttered conference and we were soon guided to the basement archives where the public was never ever allowed. The screening area for visiting big cheeses, donors and dignitaries was located in an isolated region near the boiler room and the heat was oppressive. At least the seats were comfortable old wingbacks and I rested in one while they fussed and bustled around and eventually got the boxy projector rolling. The room was already dim and then Helios Augustus killed the lone floor lamp and we were at the bottom of a mine shaft, except for a blotch of light from the camera aperture spattered against a cloth panel. The clerk cranked dutifully and Helios Augustus settled beside me. He smelled of brandy and dust and when he leaned in to whisper his narration of the film, tiny specks of fire glinted in his irises.
What he showed me was a silent film montage of various projects by Eadweard Muybridge. The first several appeared innocuous—simple renderings of the dead photographer’s various plates and the famous Horse in Motion reel that settled once and for all the matter of whether all four feet of the animal leave the ground during full gallop. For some reason the jittering frames of the buffalo plunging across the prairie made me uneasy. The images repeated until they shivered and the beast’s hide grew thick and lustrous, until I swore foam bubbled from its snout, that its eye was fixed upon me with a malign purpose, and I squirmed in my seat and felt blood from my belly wound soaking the bandages. Sensing my discomfort, Helios Augustus patted my arm and advised me to steel myself for what was to come.
After the horse and buffalo, there arrived a stream of increasingly disjointed images that the magician informed me originated with numerous photographic experiments Muybridge indulged during his years teaching at university. These often involved men and women, likely students or staff, performing mundane tasks such as arranging books, or folding clothes, or sifting flour, in mundane settings such as parlors and kitchens. The routine gradually segued into strange territory. The subjects continued their plebian labors, but did so partially unclothed, and soon modesty was abandoned as were all garments. Yet there was nothing overtly sexual or erotic about the succeeding imagery. No, the sensations that crept over me were of anxiety and revulsion as a naked woman of middle age silently trundled about the confines of a workshop, fetching pails of water from a cistern and dumping them into a barrel. Much like the buffalo charging in place, she retraced her route with manic stoicism, endlessly, endlessly. A three-legged dog tracked her circuit by swiveling its misshapen skull. The dog fretted and scratched behind its ear and finally froze, snout pointed at the camera. The dog shuddered and rolled onto its side and frothed at the mouth while the woman continued, heedless, damned.
Next came a sequence of weirdly static shots of a dark, watery expanse. The quality was blurred and seemed alternately too close and too far. Milk-white mist crept into the frame. Eventually something large disturbed the flat ocean—a whale breaching, an iceberg bobbing to the surface. Ropes, or cables lashed and writhed and whipped the water to a sudsy froth. Scores of ropes, scores of cables. The spectacle hurt my brain. Mist thickened to pea soup and swallowed the final frame.
I hoped for the lights to come up and the film to end. Instead, Helios Augustus squeezed my forearm in warning as upon the screen a boy, naked as a jay, scuttled on all fours from a stony archway in what might’ve been a cathedral. The boy’s expression distorted in the manner of a wild animal caged, or of a man as the noose tightens around his neck. His eyes and tongue protruded. He raised his head so sharply it seemed impossible that his spine wasn’t wrenched, and his alacrity at advancing and retreating was wholly unnatural…well, ye gods, that had to be a trick of the camera. A horrid trick. “The boy is quite real,” Helios Augustus said. “All that you see is real. No illusion, no stagecraft.”
I tugged a handkerchief from my pocket and dabbed my brow. My hand was
clammy. “Why in hell did he take those pictures?”
“No one knows. Muybridge was a man of varied moods. There were sides to him seen only under certain conditions and by certain people. He conducted these more questionable film experiments with strict secrecy. I imagine the tone and content disturbed the prudish elements at university—”
“You mean the sane folks.”
“As you wish, the sane folks. None dared stand in the way of his scientific pursuits. The administration understood how much glory his fame would bring them, and all the money.”
“Yeah,” I said. “Yeah. The money. Thanks for the show, old man. Could have done without it, all the same.”
“I wanted you to meet young master Conrad,” the magician said. “Before you met Conrad the elder.”
The boy on the screen opened his mouth. His silent scream pierced my eye, then my brain. For the first time in I don’t know, I made the sign of the cross.
* * *
We loaded my luggage then swung by Dick, Bly, and Vernon’s joints to fetch their essentials—a change of clothes, guns, and any extra hooch that was lying around. Then we made for the station and the evening train. Ah, the silken rapture of riding the Starlight Express in a Pullman sleeper. Thank you, dear Mr. Arden, sir.
My companions shared the sleeper next to mine and they vowed to keep a watch over me as I rested. They’d already broken out a deck of cards and uncorked a bottle of whiskey as I limped from their quarters, so I wasn’t expecting much in the way of protection. It was dark as the train steamed along between Olympia and Tacoma. I sat in the gloom and put the Thompson together and laid it beneath the coverlet. This was more from habit than expediency. Firing the gun would be a bastard with my busted fingers and I hoped it wouldn’t come to that. I’d removed the bandages and let it be—a mass of purple and yellow bruises from the nails to my wrist. I could sort of make a fist and that was all that mattered, really.
I fell asleep, lulled by the rattle and sway of the car on the tracks, and dreamed of Bane’s face, his bulging eyes, all that blood. Bane’s death mask shimmered and sloughed into that of the boy in the film, an adolescent Conrad Paxton being put through his paces by an offstage tormentor. A celebrated ghoul who’d notched his place in the history books with some fancy imagination and a clever arrangement of lenses, bulbs, and springs.
Didn’t last long, thank god as I snapped to when the train shuddered and slowed. Lamplight from some unknown station filtered through the blinds and sent shadows skittering across the ceiling and down the walls. I pointed the barrel at a figure hunched near the door, but the figure dissolved as the light shifted and revealed nothing more dangerous than my suitcase, the bulk of my jacket slung across a chair. I sat there a long while, breathing heavily as distant twinkly lights of passing towns floated in the great darkness.
The train rolled into Ransom Hollow and we disembarked at the Luster depot without incident. A cab relayed us to the Sycamore Hotel, the only game in the village. This was wild and wooly country, deep in the forested hills near the foot of the mountains. Ransom Hollow comprised a long, shallow river valley that eventually climbed into those mountains. An old roadmap marked the existence of three towns and a half dozen villages in the vicinity, each of them established during or prior to the westward expansion of the 1830s. Judging by the moss and shingle roofs of the squat and rude houses, most of them saltbox or shotgun shacks, the rutted boardwalks and goats wandering the unpaved lanes, not much had changed since the era of mountain men trappers and gold rush placer miners.
The next morning we ate breakfast at a shop a couple of blocks from the hotel, then Dick and Bly departed to reconnoiter Paxton’s estate while Vernon stayed with me. My hand and ear were throbbing. I stepped into the alley and had a gulp from a flask I’d stashed in my coat, and smoked one of the reefers Doc Green had slipped me the other day. Dope wasn’t my preference, but it killed the pain far better than the booze did.
It was a scorcher of an autumn day and I hailed a cab and we rode in the back with the window rolled down. I smoked another cigarette and finished the whiskey; my mood was notably improved by the time the driver deposited us at our destination. The Corning sisters lived in a wooded neighborhood north of the town square. Theirs was a brick bungalow behind a steep walkup and gated entrance. Hedges blocked in the yard and its well-tended beds of roses and begonias. Several lawn gnomes crouched in the grass or peeked from the shrubbery; squat, wooden monstrosities of shin height, exaggerated features, pop-eyed and leering.
The bungalow itself had a European style peaked roof and was painted a cheery yellow. Wooden shutters bracketed the windows. Faces, similar to the sinister gnomes, were carved into the wood. The iron knocker on the main door was also shaped into a grinning, demonic visage. A naked man reclined against the hedge. He was average height, brawny as a Viking rower and sunburned. All over. His eyes were yellow. He spat in the grass and turned and slipped sideways through the hedge and vanished.
“What in hell?” Vernon said. He’d dressed in a bowler and an out of fashion jacket that didn’t quite fit his lanky frame. He kept removing his tiny spectacles and smearing them around on his frayed sleeve. “See that lug? He was stark starin’ nude!”
I doffed my Homburg and rapped the door, eschewing the knocker.
“Hello, Mr. Cope. And you must be Vernon. You’re exactly how I imagined.” A woman approached toward my left from around the corner of the house. She was tall, eye to eye with me, and softly middle-aged. Her hair was shoulder-length and black, her breasts full beneath a common-sense shirt and blouse. She wore pants and sandals. Her hands were dirty and she held a trowel loosely at hip level. I kept an eye on the trowel—her manner reminded me of a Mexican knife fighter I’d tangled with once. The scar from the Mexican’s blade traversed a span between my collar bone and left nipple.
“I didn’t realize you were expecting me,” I said, calculating the implications of Helios Augustus wiring ahead to warn her of my impending arrival.
“Taller than your father,” she said. Her voice was harsh. The way she carefully enunciated each syllable suggested her roots were far from Washington. Norway, perhaps. The garden gnomes were definitely Old World knick-knacks.
“You knew my father? I had no idea.”
“I’ve met the majority of Augustus’ American friends. He enjoys putting them on display.”
“Mrs. Corning —”
“Not Mrs.,” she said. “This is a house of spinsters. I’m Carling. You’ll not encounter Groa and Vilborg, alas. Come inside from this hateful sunlight. I’ll make you a pudding.” She hesitated and looked Vernon north to south and then smiled an unpleasant little smile that made me happy for some reason. “Your friend can take his ease out here under the magnolia. We don’t allow pets in the cottage.”
“Shut up,” I said to Vernon when he opened his mouth to argue.
Carling led me into the dim interior of the bungalow and barred the door. The air was sour and close. Meat hooks dangled from low rafter beams and forced me to stoop lest I whack my skull. An iron cauldron steamed and burbled upon the banked coals of a hearth. A wide plank table ran along the wall. The table was scarred. I noted an oversized meat cleaver stuck into a plank near a platter full of curdled blood. The floor was filthy. I immediately began to reassess the situation and kept my coat open in case I needed to draw my pistol in a hurry.
“Shakespearean digs you’ve got here, Ma’am,” I said as I brushed dead leaves from a chair and sat. “No thanks on the pudding, if you don’t mind.”
“Your hand is broken. And you seem to be missing a portion of your ear. Your father didn’t get into such trouble.”
“He got himself dead, didn’t he?”
In the next room, a baby cried briefly. Spinsters with a baby. I didn’t like it. My belly hurt and my ear throbbed in time with my spindled fingers and I wondered, the thought drifting out of the blue, if she could smell the blood soaking my undershirt.
Carling’
s left eye drooped in either a twitch or a wink. She rummaged in a cabinet and then sprinkled a pinch of what appeared to be tea leaves into a cloudy glass. Down came a bottle of something that gurgled when she shook it. She poured three fingers into the glass and set it before me. Then she leaned against the counter and regarded me, idly drumming her fingers against her thigh. “We weren’t expecting you. However, your appearance isn’t particularly a surprise. Doubtless the magician expressed his good will by revealing Conrad Paxton’s designs upon you. The magician was sincerely fond of your father. He fancies himself an urbane and sophisticated man. Such individuals always have room for one or two brutes in their menagerie of acquaintances.”
“That was Dad, all right,” I said and withdrew a cigarette, pausing before striking the match until she nodded. I smoked for a bit while we stared at one another.
“I’ll read your fortune when you’ve finished,” she said indicating the glass of alcohol and the noisome vapors drifting forth. In the bluish light her features seemed more haggard and vulpine than they had in the bright, clean sunshine. “Although, I think I can guess.”
“Where’s Groa and Vilborg?” I snapped open the Korn switchblade I carried in the breast pocket of my shirt and stirred the thick dark booze with the point. The knife was a small comfort, but I was taking it where I could find it.
“Wise, very wise to remember their names, Johnny, may I call you Johnny?—and to utter them. Names do have power. My sisters are in the cellar finishing the task we’d begun prior to this interruption. You have us at a disadvantage. Were it otherwise…But you lead a charmed life, don’t you? There’s not much chance of your return after this, more is the pity.”
The Book of Cthulhu 2 Page 52