I smelled good tobacco. I’ve never gotten the habit, but I knew the aroma of the cigars Judge Blackthorne had brought in by boat and train from Havana, and the air here smelled even more refined.
“I grow it myself,” said a voice behind me. “Just a small patch, for my pipe; I can’t spare any more because of the amount of land the cane needs to flourish. The curing is done by one of those revenants you’ve met. It’s ideal work for creatures without wits. Their capacity for undistracted concentration is remarkable.”
I turned to look at the man who’d entered through a side door. He was bald, as I’d predicted he’d be, based on his receding hairline in an old tintype; but I’d been wrong about his going native. A man like Oscar Childress, I saw instantly, would expect nature to go his way rather than the other way around.
TWENTY-FOUR
He wore conventional dress, if the conventions of Boston, Denver, and San Francisco were in order: a black morning coat, striped trousers, dove-gray gaiters. He lacked only a cravat, having buttoned his shirt to his throat. As there was some swelling there, the beginnings of a goiter or dropsy, there was no room for it. Beyond that, his skull was obvious beneath a layer of skin no thicker than the sap from a rubber tree, and the skin itself the dead gray of stagnant water. His eyes, glistening plums floating in deep sockets, were brilliant, with the unnatural brightness of a star burning itself out. That explained the stove; it was there for a sick man, after all. Here was a man dying, who would no more conquer Mexico City than a leper groping for alms with a hand without fingers. I smelled the corruption as surely as from the dead grizzly on the rails, but the exact location of the cancer was a mystery, only that it was the cause.
My journey was useless; if killing Childress to prevent a second Civil War had been why I’d undertaken it.
He joined me before the map. At that range the odor was feral.
“It’s fashionable to poke fun at those old cartographers who swarmed the uncharted regions with monsters. They didn’t believe in them any more than you or I. It was a ruse to frighten others from the treasures they knew were there.”
I was about to ask him what he used in place of monsters when something shook the floor at my feet. The books on the shelves jumped against the strips of wood that restrained them, and I knew then their purpose. A deep bellowing explosion came on the heels of the shake, and something the size and shape of a barrel hoop drifted past the window from which I’d drawn the curtains. I hadn’t seen the smoke ring from a discharged cannon since Lee’s surrender. The silvery thin strains of a bugle followed, distorted by distance and the irregular topography.
Childress was watching me. His pale eyes were bordered by paler lashes. “I order it fired three times a week. I wanted to conserve powder, but having the brutes practice less often was a mistake. Captain McCready had to re-teach them the rudiments every time. During reveille is best. It’s important to keep the experienced troops on edge, and necessary to pound the lesson into the empty heads of the others.”
“McCready’s the officer with one eye?”
“He lost it at Petersburg. It’s disconcerting, I know. I ordered him to wear a patch, but he said the itching was a distraction. I’d rather not risk it in the heat of battle.”
He approached the desk, his back straight as from disciplined effort, and stroked the mirror finish. “I don’t expect you to appreciate this item. It belonged to a marshal of France. He brought it with him to New Orleans when he fled the Bourbons. I bought it by telegraphic bid at his estate auction and had it shipped by rail to Cabo Falso and hauled up here by wagon. There was a revolution on at the time, and some men lost their lives in the endeavor. I like to think it a vessel for their wandering souls.”
“I’m sure they’d appreciate it.” So he was insane as well as physically ill. I’d considered the possibility; but it’s one thing to assume and another to experience it at first-hand.
Someone tapped gently and a woman entered, a Yaqui I thought, wearing a muslin blouse and a flowered skirt, huaraches on her bare feet. She carried a silver decanter and china on a tray, which she set on the desk. Her face and hands were as gnarled as an old root.
“Coffee?” Childress offered. “I’m forced to barter for it in Central America. I tried growing my own, but it won’t cooperate at this altitude. I couldn’t afford the acreage in any case. Sugar’s greedy.”
I realized then I wasn’t thirsty anymore; someone had seen to that while I was suffering. But just the rich smell seemed to level off the pounding in my head. I accepted a cup and sat balancing it on its saucer in a straight chair facing the desk. The china was paper-thin; my fingers made shadows on the other side of the rim. He dismissed the woman, seated himself in the leather chair, rummaged inside the top drawer, and poured white powder from a paper into his cup, stirring it with a tiny spoon. He patted his flat belly.
“A bromide. After all these years I can’t get used to the local diet.” He sipped the steaming brew. His eyes brightened further. He’d lied; I wondered if he grew his own coca leaves, and if the sugar cane resented them. “You’re here to kill me,” he said.
If he’d expected to ambush me with that one, I disappointed him. For all I knew his chain of spies extended as far as Helena. I fell back on the original lie.
“I’m not a hired gun. Washington’s heard some things, and I was sent to hear them myself, from the horse’s mouth if possible, and report back.”
“And yet I was told you came to offer me a train in return for a commission with my irregulars.”
It came as no shock that Blackthorne had furnished me with two lies of my own, the second to cover the first. An experienced tactician would expect a ruse, and possibly be satisfied once he’d exploded it. It was another example of which fist held the penny.
I sipped from the cup. The coffee was strong but not bitter; he’d made a good trade. “If you found out as much about me as I did about you, you saw through that one right away. What if you succeed in commandeering the Mexican Army and reversing Appomattox? After you conquer a country you have to govern it. What would I be then, attorney general? I’ve never been comfortable on that side of a desk.”
“You can report that everything Washington heard is true. I intend to capture Mexico City, annex the federales, and invade El Paso. Once you control the border, you control international trade. The Ghost stays here. It will expedite securing supplies and provisions, and once I’ve acquired the additional rolling stock, I can have my troops in the capital in half the time—when they’re ready.”
“Those animals who brought me here never will be.”
“I’ll lend you my Machiavelli. Cannon fodder wins wars. Once the enemy has spent itself on that carrion, my professionals will be rested and ready to take the field.”
“Is this to be a four-year education or a crash course? In other words, how long are you holding me?”
“You’ve been very ill, and the rainy season is almost upon us. If you set out tomorrow, you’d never make it to Cabo Falso alive.”
“What about Joseph? My engineer,” I said, when he showed no reaction.
He drew a plain steel watch from his waistcoat, popped the lid, and put it back. The bones of his hands showed through the skin on the backs as clearly as my own fingers through his china; the bright eyes bulged slightly as he pushed himself to his feet. Apart from that he dissembled the expenditure of energy required. “Come with me.”
I got up and followed him out the door he’d come in through. A narrow hallway, properly plastered and painted green, led the way to the front of the house between more portraits of prominent Virginians suspended from a picture rail ending in another door. It opened onto one end of the front porch. There hung the flowering plants of my fever-dream; there was the rocking chair and table, and just visible at the opposite end of the porch the curve of the great heap of bones. The torches placed in front, extinguished now, looked like oversize burnt matches, smelling of coal-oil rather than sulphur, and be
tween them the objects I’d thought had been set on their posts to perform as rifle targets. In the light of day they were human skulls.
It was no wonder I’d taken them for gourds. The temples were sunken, as if the meat had been scooped out, and they sloped back shallowly from just above the beetled brows. They were human, but just barely. I’d made the trip up the mountain in the company of their brothers.
Childress saw me looking at them. “I gave up trying to discipline them by rewarding good behavior. The brutes respond only to fear, and while the concept of death itself is beyond their understanding, they share with the rest of us a terror of the unknown.”
As he spoke, a pair of his creatures came around the end where the bones were piled with a third between them, his wrists behind his back. Dressed as they all were, in identical shapeless white shirts and trousers, tall boots, bandoleers, and tattered straw sombreros, heads concave on both sides, expressions vapid, I was more convinced than ever that they were related in an unhealthy way.
“What are they?” I asked.
“Revenants. Animated corpses. I rescued them from starvation in an extinct village carved into the side of a mountain by ancient ancestors they don’t know ever existed. The women are housed in a building attached to the sugar refinery. They’re useless in most of what’s required of the sex except the obvious, so I keep them to placate the men. If it weren’t for grass and small game slow enough to slay with rocks, they wouldn’t have lasted long enough for me to recruit them. They do the sort of work that frees up their betters for more worthy duty.
“I can’t tell you what tribe they belong to. I doubt they could themselves, as they’re barely capable of speech in any language; everything human has been bred out of them through generations of incest. But they retain all the resentments inherent between the tribes, which is why your man was so mistreated against my orders. That’s another reason I keep them around, as subjects of study. Why reasoning should perish and fear and hatred remain as potent as ever is a question no one has answered.”
The man with his hands behind his back was forced to kneel in front of the blue enamel mounting block alongside the flagged path. His wrists, I saw then, were bound with a thong. Without protest, he laid his cheek on the block.
“I don’t even know if he’s the one responsible for that crude punishment,” Childress said. “The brutes all look alike, and I suspect they can’t tell even one another apart. I gave up having them whipped for their misbehavior; their minds are so weak they are either unable to feel pain or to connect it with their actions. In any case the lesson is lost. So I teach by example.”
He thrust two fingers into the corners of his mouth and blew an ear-splitting whistle. Slow as erosion the two men standing turned their heads in the direction of the noise. He jerked a palm up from his waist. Another long pause before one of them separated himself from the others, slouched back around the bonepile, and returned a moment later supporting Joseph’s weight on his shoulders. The engineer was hollow-cheeked, his head down and his hair in his eyes. The soles of his boots scraped the earth. He was barely able to lift them.
By then the major’s whistle had summoned a crowd. From either end of the house and from below the drop of the mountain, Childress’ creatures shambled into a rough formation strung out facing the house. Hoofbeats pounded, and then some stragglers joined it, driven over the incline by Captain McCready aboard his well-fed sorrel, herding them with his head cocked to one side to monitor them with his single eye. The man who’d brought Joseph mounted the steps to the porch, half-carrying his charge. At another signal, he turned him to face the group. Very slowly, Joseph raised his chin. He may have seen me out the corner of his eye, but he showed no recognition.
“They react to sight and sound,” Childress said. “Those senses are remarkably acute. Unfortunately, their memories are poor clay. I have to keep repeating examples to refresh their understanding.”
I made no answer. He was treating me as some kind of student, perhaps an apprentice.
McCready swung down from the saddle and snapped a hand to the brim of his campaign hat. “Sir.”
“Proceed, Captain.”
He drew a saber from the scabbard on his belt. The sun, clear now of obstructions, flashed off the gold chasing on the blade. He raised it. The man standing over the man with his head on the mounting block drew his short-bladed machete and lifted it as if in imitation. It may have been just that, an ape’s duplication of a gesture by a member of a superior race.
I’d seen hangings, fought hand to hand, slain men, without flinching. When the captain’s sword swung down, I turned my head away before the machete followed; but I heard the thump and roll, and a collective gust of air from dozens of primitive throats in response. It sounded exactly like the feeble roar the slain grizzly had made when its remains were disturbed.
* * *
I despised myself for looking away. I had no authority in that country, but as Blackthorne had told me often enough I was an agent of justice. If I could stand by while a helpless man was beheaded without trial, I could damn well witness the act.
The body lay without twitching, slumped sideways to the ground, the earth stained around the stump of its neck; there’s no violent eruption after the initial severance, despite what they write in sensational fiction. The head, looking hardly less aware than it had in life, lay a few yards away where it had come to rest.
I hadn’t seen the worst yet.
Captain McCready pointed his saber at two of the men assembled, who came forward to hoist the corpse by its wrists and ankles and bear it around the far corner of the house. Their vacant faces offered no indication that they connected the burden with anything more than a pile of sod.
The captain mounted, cantered over to the head, leaned down, and skewered it deftly with his saber. The sorrel was a trained warhorse: Apart from distending its nostrils during the grisly operation, it showed no reaction. It wheeled at the kick of a heel and trotted up to the line of skulls on display, where the rider plucked one free and, resting it against his pommel, removed the dripping head from the blade and jammed it onto the sharpened pike. He leaned over again to plunge the point of the weapon into the earth, cleansing it, and returned it to its scabbard.
He rode the length of the porch, the horse stepping high, neck curved in a Grecian arch. There was something obscene even in that, an arrogant coddled mount prancing as in an Independence Day parade. The skull it carried had every reason to leer.
McCready scooped up the skull, tossed it onto the mountain of bones, and swung round to salute the major.
“Muster ’em out, Captain.”
The dullards dispersed, feet dragging—another second lost between their brains and their extremities and they’d have toppled forward from the waist—but I paid them small attention.
It wasn’t so much the spectacle of that nightmare rider, whose own hollow eye-socket resembled so closely those of the martially aligned skulls, or even the casual disposal of human remains, like slops emptied into an alley. I’d seen as bad in the most vicious war ever fought between man and man. This was more barbaric still. Plainly the dead man’s body had been borne no farther than that same pile. And I knew now the source of the bones Childress ground to refine his sugar, and probably shape into the fine china cup I’d sipped from minutes ago.
My stomach did a slow roll, my vision blurred; black petals blossomed in the haze. But I remained upright, either by sheer force of will or because inch by inch I was becoming accustomed to darkness.
TWENTY-FIVE
Joseph’s escort turned him toward the front door. The beast-man’s strength was ten times his ability to think; he bore 160 inert pounds, inches from the ground, as easily as a sack of grain. I asked Childress where Joseph was being taken.
“To an ambulance, and from there to a fully equipped infirmary. I’d have had you brought there, but you were in worse condition, if you can believe it, and might not have survived the journey. These
Indians are hardy. He needs hydration and nourishment administered under close supervision and a dose of cinchona, just in case. The natives have used it to treat malaria for two hundred years, but it’s been slow to catch on outside Mexico. I sent a paper to The American Medical Journal, but it was ignored, probably because of my affiliations. Medical science should rise above petty politics. As a beneficiary, perhaps you can make the case for the remedy.”
“I’ll do my best; assuming I don’t die of the cure.”
“It’s not a cure. You’ll revisit the symptoms again and again throughout your life, but they’ll not be fatal. You came through the first time, thanks to the bark, and the chances are you’ll survive the others. Once your friend has recovered, he’ll share quarters with you in the barracks. I’m looking forward to having my own room back. Captain McCready is a fine officer, but he snores like a steam shovel. Are you up to a tour of the grounds?”
“Have I a choice?”
I’d transgressed. He looked at me with the expression of a host whose guest had insulted his accommodations. I had to keep reminding myself he was insane.
“You’re free to go any time you feel up to the journey. I wouldn’t recommend it until I’m satisfied you won’t relapse anytime soon. Your horse is in good hands—you may examine it whenever you like, it’s a splendid animal—and I’ll provide you with directions to Cabo Falso. It would be ungrateful of me to reward you for the gift of the Ghost by making you a prisoner.”
“And Joseph?”
“He’ll follow—once he’s instructed my men in the operation of the locomotive.”
He read my thoughts. “No, I wouldn’t charge these creatures with anything more complex than cutting cane. You’ve yet to meet the rest of my regulars. McCready trained the men under his direct command, and I trained him.
“You’ll find your other things in the cabinet. Ysabel has cleaned and pressed them by now. You’ll be more comfortable once you’re out of these rags.”
Cape Hell Page 14