He stumbled out of the car, his legs weak beneath him, shocked and terrified by what he’d seen. Were those half-formed beings the train’s hidden cargo, on their way to be exterminated – the remains of scientific experiments that had gone horribly wrong?
In the corridor, there was half-light. Dawn had broken, providing feeble illumination across the landscape that could now be seen through the train windows. Grey pulled up the nearest window and leant outside. A chill blast of air buffeted his head, rumpling his white hair and making his eyes water. As far as he could see was a vast and dusty plateau, its monotony broken only by a myriad of tumble-weeds and lunar craters. The sky was a sheet of total blackness. It could not account for the dying dawn creeping across the landscape, trailing gaunt shadows in its wake.
Grey tried to see the end or beginning of the train, but it appeared to be turning a huge curve on the railroad and he was looking at the outside bend. He passed to the opposite side of the corridor and threw open a window there, so he could see the length of the inside bend of the train. Straight ahead, across almost a mile, he spotted a white-haired man staring back at him.
The train charted a circle, a gigantic wheel turning endlessly, a self-enclosed universe of railroad cars, without end or beginning.
ALBERT E. COWDREY
* * *
The Overseer
ALBERT E. COWDREY WAS BORN in New Orleans and attended Tulane and Johns Hopkins Universities. Equipped with a doctorate, he spent thirty years working as a historian, mostly in Washington, DC – teaching, writing for trade and university presses, and turning out official histories for the US Army.
At retirement he uttered a silent but heartfelt vow that henceforth he would do what he had to, and what he wanted to, but never again what he ought to. The result has been a second career in science fiction and fantasy.
His new bibliography includes a novel from Tor Books, Crux (2004), as well as forty-five novellas and short stories already published or soon to appear in The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction. His work has been much anthologized in English and reprinted in languages he can’t read, including Russian, Polish, Czech, Romanian, Hebrew and Chinese.
He has received awards both from the American Historical Association (1984) and the World Fantasy Convention (2002). Not many writers can make that statement; perhaps not many would want to.
“‘The Overseer’” is the product of a long wrestling match between the historian and the writer of fantasy,” admits Cowdrey. “First it was mostly history and didn’t work as a story; then Felix Marron came stalking out of some trapdoor in my subconscious, took the tale over and gave it point and meaning.
“Demons are of course quite real, though fortunately rare, and without a single exception they all are or have been human.”
THOUGH APPROPRIATELY RUNDOWN, Nicholas Lerner’s big house on Exposition Boulevard in uptown New Orleans was not haunted. The same could not be said of its owner.
That spring morning in 1903 the old man was getting ready for the day. Or rather, Morse was making him ready.
“So, Mr Nick,” murmured the valet, applying shaving soap to his employer’s face with an ivory-handled brush, “are you writing a book?”
Damn him, thought Lerner. He knows I detest conversation with a razor at my throat.
“My memoirs,” he muttered. “A few jottings only. Waiting to die is such a bore, I write to pass the time.”
Was that the real reason he’d become a late-blooming scribbler – mere boredom? Most of his life had been devoted to hiding the truth, not revealing it. And yet now . . .
“I think you must be writing secrets,” smiled Morse, piloting the blade beneath his left ear. “The way you lock your papers in the safe at night.”
“I lock them up,” Lerner snapped, getting soap in his mouth, “because they are private.”
And had better remain so, he thought wryly. The other memorabilia in his small safe – an ancient, rusted Colt revolver; a bill from a Natchez midwife; a forty-year-old spelling book; a faded telegram saying RELIABLE MAN WILL MEET YOU RR LANDING STOP – would mean nothing to any living person.
Then why should he write the story out, give evidence against himself? It seemed to make no sense. And yet, having started, somehow he couldn’t stop.
Humming an old ballad called “Among My Souvenirs”, he pondered the problem but reached no conclusion. He closed his eyes and dozed, only to wake suddenly when Morse asked, “Who is Monsieur Felix?”
Lerner heard his own voice quaver as he replied, “Someone I . . . knew, long ago. Where did you hear of him?”
“Last night, after you took your medicine, you spoke his name over and over in your sleep.”
“Then I must have seen him in a dream.”
Shrewd comment. Morse knew that the opium he obtained for the old man caused intense dreams, and would ask no more questions.
Without further comment he burnished his employer’s face with a hot towel, combed his hair, and neatly pinned up his empty left sleeve. He removed the sheet that protected Lerner’s costly, old-fashioned Prince Albert suit from spatter, and bore all the shaving gear through the door to the adjoining den and out into the hall. Remotely, Lerner heard Morse’s voice – now raised imperiously – issuing orders to the housemaid and the cook.
Good boy! thought Lerner, checking his image in a long, dusky pier glass. Make ’em jump!
He was rubbing his smooth upper lip to make sure no bristles had been left, when suddenly he leaned forward, staring. Then, with startling energy, his one big hand whirled his chair around.
Of course nobody was standing behind him. A trick of his old eyes and the brown shadows of his bedchamber with its single door, its barred and ever-darkened window. Or maybe a result of talking about Monsieur Felix, whom he would always associate with mirrors, fog, winter darkness, summertime mirages – with anything, bright or dark, that deceived the eye.
“Ah, you devil,” he muttered, “I’ll exorcise you with my pen. Then burn both you and the damned manuscript!”
Maybe that was the point of his scribbling – to rid himself of the creature once and for all. Smiling grimly, he trundled into his den.
Like its owner, his safe was an antique, the combination lock encircled with worn red letters instead of numbers. He dialed a five-letter word – perdu, meaning lost, a word with many meanings as applied to its contents. He jerked open the heavy door, drew out a pack of cream-laid writing paper and carried it to his old writing desk, a burled walnut monster honeycombed with secret compartments.
On the wall above, his dead wife smiled from a pastel portrait. Elmira as she’d been when young – conventionally pretty, not knowing yet that her short life would be devoted mainly to bearing stillborn children. On her lap she held their first boy, the only one born alive, but who, less than a month after the artist finished the picture, had suffocated in his crib, in the mysterious way of small children.
Bereft, surrounded by servants who did everything for her, idle, dissatisfied, Elmira had died a little too. Her husband had granted her everything she wanted except entry into his head and heart.
“Why don’t you trust me?” she’d asked him a thousand times, and he’d always answered, “My dear, I trust you as I do no other human being.”
She’d never quite found the handle of that reply. Morse’s father and mother would have understood the irony – the fact that he really trusted no one – but of course they were dead too.
They saw into my soul, Lerner thought, but it didn’t save them, either one.
He shrugged, dismissing Elmira and all the other ghosts. Time to introduce the Overseer into his story. But first he wanted to sharpen his unreliable memory by rereading what he’d written so far. He drew the papers closer to his nose and flicked on a new lamp with a glaring Edison bulb that had recently replaced the old, dim, comfortable gaslight. Squinting balefully at his own spidery, old-fashioned handwriting, he began to read.
CHAPTER THE FIR
ST
Wherein I Gain, Then Lose, My Personal Eden
As I look back upon the scenes of a stormy life, filled with strange adventures and haunted by a stranger spirit, I am astonished to reflect how humble, peaceable and commonplace were my origins.
My ancestors were poor German peasants, who in 1720 fled the incessant wars of Europe and found refuge on Louisiana’s Cote des Allemands, or German coast, near the village of Nouvelle Orléans. Their descendants migrated northward to the Red River country, still farming the land but, like the good Americans they had become, acquiring slaves to assist their labours.
Here in 1843 I was born into the lost world that people of our new-minted Twentieth Century call the Old South. The term annoys me, for to us who lived then ’twas neither old nor new, but simply the world – our world. I first saw light on a plantation called Mon Repos, a few miles from the village of Red River Landing, and there spent my boyhood with Papa and Cousin Rose. Our servants were three adult slaves and a son born to one of them, whom Papa had named Royal, according to the crude humour of those times, which delighted in giving pompous names to Negroes.
Our lives resembled not at all the silly phantasies I read nowadays of opulent masters and smiling servants. Our plantation was but a large ramshackle farm, its only adornment a long alley of noble oaks that Papa had saved when felling the forest. Our lives were simple and hard; many a day at planting or harvest-time Papa worked in the fields beside the hands, his sweat like theirs running down and moistening the earth.
In our house Cousin Rose counted for little, for she was but a poor relation whose parents had died in the same outbreak of Yellow-Jack that claimed my mother. Ever pale and fragile as a porcelain cup, she spent most days in her bedroom, more like a ghost than a girl. The slave boy Royal, on the other hand, counted for much – at least in my life.
How I envied him! He never had to study, and went barefoot nine months of the year. I was beaten often by the schoolmaster, but Royal escaped with a scolding even when he was caught stealing flowers from the garden, or roaming the house above stairs, where only the family and the housemaid were allowed to go. Indeed, Papa so favoured him that I came to understand (though nothing was ever said) that he was my half-brother.
Spirits, too, inhabited our little world. All who dwelt in that benighted region believed in divining rods and seer stones, in ghosts and curses, in prophetick dreams, buried treasure, and magical cures. Royal and I were credulous boys, like those Mark Twain so well describes in Tom Sawyer, and we met often in the bushes near the servants’ graveyard at midnight to whisper home-made incantations, half-fearing and half-hoping to raise a “sperrit” that might shew us the way to an hoard of gold – though none ever appeared.
In these expeditions Royal was always bolder than I, as he was also in our daylight adventures. He dove from higher branches of the oak overleaning our swimming-hole than I dared to; he was a better shot than I, often bearing the long-rifle when, as older boys, we fire-hunted for deer. Ah, even now I can see and smell those autumn nights! The flickering of the fire-pan; the frosty crimson and gold leaves crackling under our feet; the sudden green shine of a deer’s eyes, the loud shot, the sharp sulphurous smell of burnt powder, and the dogs leaping into the darkness to bring down the wounded animal!
Are we not all killers at heart? Scenes of death having about them a kind of ecstasy, however we deny it, greater even than the scenes of love.
Preceded by a clink of china, Morse spun the door handle and backed into the den, hefting a tray with a dish under a silver cover, a folded napkin, and a goblet of red wine.
“When,” demanded Lerner testily, “will you learn to knock, my boy?”
“Mr Nick, I ain’t got enough hands to carry the tray, open the door and knock, too.”
A doubtful excuse, thought Lerner; a table stood in the hallway convenient to the door, where Morse could have rested the tray. Frowning, he turned his pages face down on the desk.
Morse set his lunch on a side table, moved the wheelchair, shook out the stiff linen napkin and tied it around Lerner’s neck.
“Should I cut the meat for you, Mr. Nick?”
“Yes, yes. Then leave me alone. And don’t come back until I ring.”
“You’ll be wanting your medicine at the usual time?”
“Yes, yes. But wait for my ring.”
In leaving, Morse took a long look at the half-open safe, a fact that did not escape the old man. Lerner ate lunch slowly, pondering. His dependence on Morse reminded him all too clearly of how his father had become the servant of his own servant after Monsieur Felix entered Mon Repos. That had been the beginning of many things, all of them bad.
I will not suffer that to happen again, he thought.
Lerner had an old man’s appetite, ravenous at the beginning but quickly appeased. Without finishing his lunch, he hastily swallowed the wine at a gulp, wheeled back to his desk, took up his manuscript and again began to read.
The Eden of my childhood did not last long. In the Fifties the world’s demand for cotton soared, and Papa began to dream of growing rich.
He was not alone. The steamboats that huffed and puffed up and down the Mississippi began delivering carven furniture, pier-glasses, and Taris fashions to our community of backwoodsmen. Ladies – it seemed overnight – graduated from sun-bonnets to hoopskirts, and the men were as bad or worse, with their sudden need for blooded horses and silk cravats and silver-mounted pistols and long Cuban segars.
In this flush atmosphere, Papa borrowed from the banks and cotton factors and bought new acres, though land had become very dear. He made trips to New Orleans to barter for workers in the slave markets at Maspero’s Exchange and the St Charles Hotel, and he rebuilt our comfortable log house as a mansion with six white columns, which – like our prosperity – were hollow and meant only for shew. But he remained a farmer, not a businessman; he overspent for everything, and could not make the new hands work, for he was too soft to wield the whip as a slave-driver must. Soon he was in debt and facing ruin, and so in 1855, during one of his trips to the city, he hired an Overseer to do the driving for him.
’Tis hard for me to remember Felix Marron as a man of flesh. I see him in my mind’s eye as the sort of shadow that looms up in a morning fog, briefly takes human form, then fades again into a luminous dazzle.
Yet when first we met, he seemed merely freakish. Royal and I were returning from a fishing jaunt when we espied him talking to Papa, and we stared and giggled like the bumpkins we were. I suppose he was then about forty, but seemed ageless, as if he never had been born – a strange creature, very tall and sinewy, his long bony face a kind of living Mardi Gras mask with grotesquely prominent nose and chin. Though ’twas August, he wore an old musty black suit, and I remember that despite the stifling Delta heat, his grey face shewed not a drop of sweat.
When Papa introduced us, he ignored Royal but swept off his stovepipe hat to me, loosing a cloud of scent from his pomade, and in a penetrating stage whisper exclaimed, “Bonjour, bonjour, ’ow be you, young sir?” Shifting an old carpetbag to his left hand, he clasped my right in his cool bony grip, causing a braided whip he carried over that arm to swing and dance. Then Papa led him away to view the quarters, and Royal and I laughed out loud – thereby proving that neither of us was gifted with prophecy.
Papa hired Monsieur Felix (as he preferred to be called) upon the understanding that he would have a free hand to extract profit from our people and our acres. At first the bargain seemed to be a good one, for the Overseer was restless and tireless, keeping on the move (as the slaves said) from can’t-see in the morning to can’t-see at dusk. He had a strange way of walking, lunging ahead with long silent strides that ate up the ground, and appearing suddenly and without warning where he was not expected. And woe to any slave he found idling! Not one escaped flogging under his regime, not even Royal, whose days of idleness and indulgence came to an abrupt end. Soon he learned to dread the hoarse whisper, “Aha, tu p’
tit diable,” the Overseer’s sole warning before the lash fell.
At first Papa resisted this abuse of his darker son. But the Overseer argued that to favour one slave was to corrupt all by setting them a bad example; further, that Royal (then twelve years of age) was no longer a child, and must be broken in to the duties of his station in life. Finally, that unless he could impose discipline on all our hands, Monsieur Felix would leave Papa’s employ, and seek a position on a plantation that was properly run. So Papa yielded, and by so doing began to lose mastery over his own house.
I watched Royal’s first beating with fascination and horror. My own floggings at the schoolmaster’s hands were but the gentle flutter of a palmetto fan compared to the savage blows administered by Monsieur Felix. Had I been the victim, I would have raised the whole country with my howls; but Royal remained obstinately silent, which the Overseer rightly saw as a kind of resistance, and added six more to the six blows first proposed, and then six again, leaving Royal scarce able to walk for three or four days.
Thus began several years of tyranny. Even when he grew older and stronger, Royal could not strike back – for a slave to assault a white man, whatever the provocation, meant death – nor could he flee, for the patterollers (as we called the cruel men of the slave patrols) scoured the neighbourhood. And so he bore his whippings as the others did, and let his hatred grow. In my innocence I loathed the Overseer, for I was too young to understand that he flogged our people not out of cruelty, nor indeed of any feeling at all, but as an herdsman prods his ox or a plowman lashes his mule – to wring work from them, and wealth from his acres.
In that he succeeded. With the crops heavy – with the hands hard at work – with prices rising, and dollars rolling in, Papa felt himself no longer the descendant of Westphalian peasants, but rather a great planter and a member of the ruling class. He bought leather-bound books by the linear foot, and installed them in his den, though he did not attempt to read them; he drank from crystal goblets, though his tipple was corn whiskey drawn from his own still. He paid Monsieur Felix well, and built him a substantial house midway between Mon Repos and the slave quarters, which was where the Overseer himself stood, in the southern scheme of things. Papa thought he would be content to live there and receive wages that grew from year to year, and mayhap marry in time some poor-white slattern of the neighbourhood. But in this he misjudged the Overseer’s ambition.
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