I waited until Benedict was out of the office. Parker Quail was a constant thorn in our sides. He had made a lot of money from his gambling and whoring businesses, money that he liked to flaunt as often as possible—the horseless carriage was a prime example. He also had a streak of mean in him that would have made a pit viper timid. On two occasions, Quail’s men had broken into the Town Marshal’s office and busted men out of jail. Once to free an associate, another time to enact brutal justice on a man who had crossed Quail. Neither of those things had been during my time as marshal, and I was not going to let it happen on my watch.
Still, I cast a wary glance at our new fortifications, the improved locks and reinforced window bars. Would someone be able to get in?
“For your sake, Abel, you might be better off in the cell. At least until tempers have died down.”
“I don’t care about… who’d you say the man was?”
“Parker Quail,” I said slowly. “You mean this really wasn’t about getting back at him?”
“Told you, Bill. It was about the machine, not the man. It’s always about the machines. They’re all that matter now.”
* * *
This is what Abel McCreedy told me, while he was still in custody.
I’ve never been sure of how much to believe, even allowing for what happened with Tommy Benedict later that night. Or of what happened to Abel, come to think of it. None of it, maybe. Perhaps just a little. But in all our time in the Legion, in all the years we bountied together, during our time under the Pinks, I never knew Abel McCreedy tell a lie or bend a truth. He just wasn’t the lying or exaggerating type. Never thought of him as having too much in the way of imagination.
“It started with the wreckin’ parties, Bill.”
“The wrecking parties,” I said, as if this was meant to mean something.
“The train wrecks. The ones they put on, for the show. Started as a fad, like it was going to come and go, way these things generally do. But there was money behind it. Money and power. Too much to stop, even when people started gettin’ maimed and dyin’ over it.”
I knew about the train wrecks, although it had taken Abel’s prompt to jolt my memory.
It was a lunatic thing to do, when you thought about it. Started in Texas, maybe Ohio—someone getting it into their head that there could be profit in staging train wrecks before a paying audience. They laid out maybe four miles of railroad track, straighter than an Apache arrow, and near the middle, where the two trains were due to collide, nature had seen fit to provide a natural amphitheater from which several tens of thousands of paying customers could view proceedings. They laid out more tracks to bring people in to watch, put in a new depot and telegraph station just to cope with the number of spectators. They put in a grandstand for VIPs, only two hundred yards from the rails, and a press box for photographers half as close again. Mister Edison even came with his new motion picture camera. There were medicine shows, hucksters, a bandstand, even a purpose-built jail. They hitched up cars behind the two locomotives and sold advertising space on the sides of them. They promoted the thing for months.
It was a grand success, and also a disaster.
They brought the trains together, then backed them off until they were two miles apart. Their engineers started them going then jumped off before they had got up too much speed. Soon the locomotives and their trains were rolling faster than a man could run. Then there was no force on Earth capable of stopping them.
During my time in the Legion, shortly before that shot at Antietam put me out of commission, I saw a Union munitions dump go up. I was a mile away and I have never heard, nor care to hear, a louder thing. They say there was twenty tons of explosive in that munitions dump. When the locomotives ran into each other, it was as if that dump contained fifty tons, maybe more. Their boilers were not meant to explode, but they did anyway. Pieces of metal landed half a mile away. People died. Not many, it was true, out of all who came to watch, but enough that there was an outcry. They sacked the promoter. There was a move to ban organized train wrecks.
“But someone didn’t want ’em banned,” Abel said. “A Utah Congressman tried to push through the necessary legislation. They found him dead. His brother tried to find out what happened. He disappeared. Then the brother’s wife hired me to dig a little deeper.” Through his beard I made out the cock-eyed smile of a man able to look back at his own mistakes with some detachment. “I shouldn’t have taken the case. I learned things, Bill. Things that you can’t never unlearn. Things that brought me here.”
“You’re not making much sense, Abel. What does train wrecking have to do with Parker Quail’s horseless carriage?”
“It’s machines, Bill—don’t you get it? It’s all just machines. They’re comin’, rollin’ toward us like those locomotives. There’s nothing we can do to stop them.”
“Still not making sense, sorry.”
Abel closed his eyes. I could almost feel him trying to organize the crazy clutter of his mind. “I followed the money. What you always do, right? I wanted to know who was willin’ to murder and intimidate government officials to keep these wrecks happenin’. And I followed it almost all the way. That’s when I met her.”
“Her.”
“The woman. Said her name was Miss Dolores C. Steel. Ten years and I can see her like she’s standin’ in front of me now. Dressed all in black, like a widow. Black silk gloves, black veil on her hat, always carried a black parasol.” Seeing the mental picture he must have thought he was painting, he added: “But she wasn’t old and dowdy, like one of them war widows. I’d have said she wasn’t no older’n thirty. Still a very comely woman, dressed in the latest Boston styles. Had a very particular way of speakin’, too. Had me wonderin’ if she wasn’t from our shores.”
“Where did you meet?”
“At a wreck in Idaho. But I’d seen her more than once before, at other wrecks. She was obviously close to the money. At first I thought that was because she was involved. Then I found out she was like me, tryin’ to get close to it.”
I nodded. “I’m guessing the woman—this Miss Steel—was connected to one of the victims. Either someone who died at one of the wrecks, or someone who got in the way of the next one happening.”
“What I thought as well. But it wasn’t like that.” Abel hesitated in his narrative, as if debating how much he dared tell me. “You knew me well in the old days, Bill. Would you say I had a level head?”
“None leveler.”
“Then make of this what you will. The day we met properly, before we’d even spoken, I followed Miss Steel into a huckster’s tent. I meant to speak to her quietly, to warn her that she was getting close to dangerous men. But she’d tricked me. There was no one in that tent save the woman herself—she’d been meaning for me to follow her! As soon as I’m inside, she spins round like a cornered cat. I start to raise my hands, let her know I mean her no harm. But I can’t! I’m totally frozen! I want to move but nothin’ happens. And I don’t mind telling you, Bill. I felt the fear of the good Lord run through me.” Again there came that hesitation. “I knew I was in the presence of somethin’ that wasn’t natural. That woman wasn’t a woman at all. Ten years ago and it feels like yesterday. You ever had that feeling before a thunderstorm, Bill? As if the air itself is all charged up and crackly?”
“Once or twice.”
“That was how I felt around Miss Steel. And it was comin’ off her. She lifted her veil, let me see her face properly. And then she did the thing I’ll never forget, not so long as I have another breath to draw.”
“Which was?”
“She took off her face.”
I repeated his words, in the hope they might make more sense coming out of my mouth than his. “She took off her face.”
Before Abel could answer there was a loud bang as Benedict came back through the door, flinging it wide open. I’d seen that determined look on his face and I knew it meant a particular breed of trouble.
“Som
ething up, Deputy?” I asked, tearing myself from Abel’s crazy narrative.
“Exactly what you feared, Bill: Quail’s men are up out of bed and spoiling for a fight.” Benedict went straight to the armory and took out his favorite Winchester shotgun, which he kept loaded and ready for occasions such as this. He strode back out with the Winchester held like a staff, barrel to the sky. My revolver still holstered from the earlier business, I followed him outside. It was still raining like Noah himself would have needed a second ark.
Benedict and I stood on the wooden sidewalk, head and shoulders above the men who had followed Benedict back to the office.
“We know you’ve got him, Bill!”
I nodded at the man who had spoken. “Go back to your bed, Parker. All of you.”
Normally Parker Quail dressed like an East Coast businessman, with his pinstriped suit and bowler hat—the very model of civic respectability. Tonight, dragged from his slumbers by news of the vandalism wrought on his horseless carriage, he had slipped a heavy coat on over a striped nightgown and jammed his trouserless legs into a pair of boots. His hair was uncombed and greasy.
I didn’t much care for Quail—never had. He knew it, too. He’d made his money through every form of skullduggery and intimidation known to man. His men were thugs, only now they were well-dressed thugs with friends in the right places.
“Word is your prisoner’s a friend,” Quail said. “Folk saw him drinking before he started off on his wrecking spree. Overheard him boasting about being Legion. Now who else do we know who fought in the Legion?”
I shrugged, still keeping my hand on my holster. “Friend or no friend, he’ll get the same treatment everyone gets.”
Quail spat into the mud. “What’s to say he won’t be gone by sun-up, spirited away so he won’t have to face justice?”
“My word as marshal.”
“Maybe your word isn’t worth as much as you think. McCreedy made a pretty mess of my auto-mobile.” I had never heard that expression and it did not sound as if it came naturally to Quail, more that he was trying it on for size, like a new style of hat.
“It’s just a machine, Parker. They’ll make you a new one. Now get back home!”
“Give us McCreedy, we’ll give it some consideration!” Quail said.
I glanced at Benedict. Benedict nodded and let off the shotgun, aiming it into the sky. Now none of these men were strangers to gunfire, or easily impressed. But when a lawman lets off a powerful firearm like that, a lawman that you know has the right and authority to employ that weapon within the city limits, it carries a certain conviction. Quail’s mob, yellow-bellies to a man, began to disperse.
“This ain’t over!” Quail called back to me, smearing a hand through his hair.
“Is that a threat, Mister Quail?” I relieved Benedict of the shotgun, made a point of lowering it so that the barrel wasn’t exactly aimed at Quail and wasn’t exactly not aimed at him either. “Think it over,” I said quietly.
I hoped that was the end of it, but experience told me it probably wasn’t. Quail and his men would retire to their saloon and drink until their rage and thirst for retribution overcame what little good sense they possessed. It was a pattern Benedict and I were already more than familiar with.
I closed the door, told Benedict not to bother racking the shotgun for now.
“Feeling we’ve got a long night ahead of us.” I examined the cold contents of my tin mug. “You want to set some fresh coffee on, deputy?”
Abel McCreedy was still in his chair. “Heard you give ’em both barrels, son,” he said, nodding appreciatively at Benedict, as the younger man went to light the stove.
“I doubt it made much difference,” I answered. “You really could have picked someone else to make an enemy of, Abel.”
“Told you, it wasn’t nothin’ to do with Parker Quail.”
“Right,” I said, trying to pick up the thread of what we’d been discussing. The woman in the huckster’s tent, that was it. “So tell me about the lady without a face,” I said, thinking it would pass the time to daybreak, if nothing else.
Benedict looked over his shoulder. “Lady without a face?”
“Never you mind,” I growled.
Abel waited until I gave a nod for him to continue. “She reached up and pulled it away, like it was a paper mask. Only it wasn’t no paper. There was no join there, no line around her face, and yet it just came away in one piece. Mouth, nose, eyes—and the worst part of it was, the mouth and eyes were still movin’ even as she took her face off, holdin’ it in her fingers all dainty and lady-like, like this was the proper thing, like takin’ off your hat in church.”
“And what was under the mask?”
“Nothin’. That was the worst, I think. I was lookin’ down a kind of tunnel, the same shape as her face. Went on and on, like a rifle barrel, stretchin’ too far into the distance. It should have come out the back of her head, but it didn’t! And there were things around the walls of this barrel, all movin’ and tickin’ like gears and levers… but the way they was doin’ what they was doin’, I could only look at them for a second before my eyes started hurtin’. I wanted to look away. Lord knows I tried. But my head wouldn’t move. Even my eyes wouldn’t move! God have mercy, she put her face back on. Makes a squelch like a boot in mud. Just pushed it back into place, and there’s no line, no gap, where it joined back up. And she says: ‘I find it helps to get to the point, Mister McCreedy.’”
“She knew your name?”
“I don’t know how. Then she says: ‘We have been taking an uncommon interest in each other. I understand your concern for me.’” Abel spoke these words slowly and clearly, like he was making a special effort. “‘But I must warn you that the concern should be for your own well-being. You are meddling in forces beyond your narrow comprehension.’ Then she allows me to speak. I feel as if she’s reached into my head and pulled a lever, like in the cab of a locomotive. I say: ‘Who are you?’ And she answers: ‘What are you would be more appropriate, sir. I am a machine intelligence, Mister McCreedy. A mechanical woman. Think of me as a kind of clockwork automaton, if that helps you.’”
I smiled. Like it or not, he was painting a strange picture in my mind. “Did it?”
“What do you think? She had me doubting my sanity, Bill. Even now, I know how this has to sound. But ask yourself: does a mad man ever ’fess up to doubting his own sanity?”
“Not in my limited experience.”
Benedict came over with three tin mugs of coffee, done the way we usually took it: black as night and strong as a mule’s kick. “Seems quieter out there now,” he said, “but reckon I’ll keep a watch on things just in case.”
“Good idea,” I said, accepting my mug and offering the second to Abel.
Benedict went out the door, not taking the shotgun this time, just his holstered revolver and a mug of coffee. I didn’t doubt that we’d have more trouble from Parker Quail before sun-up, but an armed and alert deputy is a fair deterrent for most kinds.
“Miss Steel told me she was here to put things right,” Abel said. “‘The rule of law is being broken,’” she said, ‘and I have come to enforce it. Unfortunately I travel alone, and my resources are extremely limited.’”
“Did you ask her where she came from?”
Abel let out a little laugh. “She told me she came from the Moon.”
“And you believed her?”
He shifted. “Not exactly. Thing is, she wasn’t made of no clockwork, either. Something else, something stranger.” He took a cautious sip from his coffee. “Reckon she was sugarin’ the pill for me, Bill.”
“So the truth was something stranger than her coming from the Moon?”
“Now you put it like that…”
“Guess it’s no madder than a woman who can take her face off and calls herself a machine intelligence. This ‘rule of law’ she came to enforce. What in blazes did it have to do with the wrecks?”
“That’s where it get
s weirder. She said there were others like her, other machine intelligences, only these other ones had come down from the Moon or wherever, to do something bad, something that was against their law. Like gamblin’ or whorin’ is against ours. And this woman… thing… this Miss Dolores C. Steel… was a kind of agent, like a Pinkerton, operatin’ for her government, tryin’ to track these outlaws down, only she was on her own and she needed to disguise herself up so she could walk around and sneak up on them, because they were tricked out like she was, made to look like ord’nary men and women.”
“She was happy to tell you all this?”
“Said it didn’t matter to her one way or the other whether I believed a dang word of it. Just that it was better for me if I kept out of things. She said she didn’t want people like me gettin’ hurt because of their differences.”
“And these differences… what these clockwork Moon people were falling out over… they somehow centered on train wrecks?”
“Machines, Bill—like I said right there at the start. According to Dolores C. Steel that’s all there is out there. Just machines. Clockwork folk like Miss Steel herself. Machine intelligences. Folks like you and me, made of flesh and blood, we’re a creek that don’t run nowhere. She said it’s like that on all the planets, wherever you go. Life starts out all creepy-crawly, with birds and bees and flowers, and monkeys and rattlesnakes and men and women. Then folks get lazy and start fashionin’ themselves all kinds of tools and accouterments—fancy ploughs and waterwheels, then steam hammers and riverboats, then locomotives and telegraphs and horseless carriages. Get so lazy they can’t even walk to see a spectacle, so they settle for lookin’ at photographs and Mister Edison’s vitascope instead. And it don’t stop with horseless carriages, neither. Miss Steel says that’s just the start of things—the first word on the first page! Before long there are flyin’ machines and talkin’ machines and machines makin’ more machines! And once that happens, it’s like setting the throttle on a steam locomotive, and jumpin’ off while she’s still movin’! You can’t stop it! Can’t slow it down! It’s techno-logical progress, Bill. Starts off seemin’ like a good thing, but it ends with machines takin’ over. Ain’t room for two kinds of folk, and the clockwork kind always win. Kill us, squeeze us out, just plain outlive us—don’t matter in the long run.”
Dead Man’s Hand Page 15