Gideon

by Alex Gordon

  “Only if she managed to spell herself as she died, and Eliza didn’t give her the time to think that through.” Maude put her arm around Eliza’s shoulders and hugged her close. “You freed us. Who knows what awaited us if she’d brought him back. What horrors he would’ve subjected our sons to. Our daughters.”

  Eliza shivered. “Someone else will have to inter her. I cannot.”

  “We will.” Maude gestured to the others, and as one they bowed their heads to the woman who had saved them from Nicholas Blaine’s wrath. “Mistress Blaylock.”

  THE WINTER CONTINUED hard, as the remnants of Nicholas Blaine’s rage spent themselves over Gideon. The women and children housed together, pooled their food and fuel, stripped bare the shelves of Hoard’s dry-goods store and burned any spare wood they could lay hands on.

  All but Blaine’s pyre. That remained in place through storm and sun and thaw, water swelling the boards until they creaked like footsteps, the fire stain dark as blood. No one touched it, not even the rowdiest children. Even the crows stayed away.

  In the spring, men arrived from the East, brothers and uncles and cousins, to marry the widows and adopt the children, to plow and plant. To guard the border, and watch over Blaine’s body.

  A year to the day after Tom’s death, Eliza accepted Henry Mullin’s proposal. He was a skilled carpenter, and he was kind, and she came to like him well enough. But she kept some of Tom’s hair in a locket pinned over her heart, and when Henry reached for her at night, she closed her eyes and saw Tom’s face.

  Years passed. Eliza bore Henry two sons and two daughters. A few considered her Mistress of Gideon no matter which poor unfortunate the Boston Council sent to assume the official title. But most others did not, and the rumors persisted. That she had been Nicholas Blaine’s lover. That she had helped Blaine do murder on the twentieth of December in the year eighteen and thirty-six. That she killed Ann Cateman when the woman discovered her plan, and now bided her time and awaited the call of her dark master.

  Henry Mullin heard the rumors, too, of course, as did the children. The daughters married outside Gideon in order to escape and the sons simply fled, leaving no one to inherit the family business. The chill with which Henry Mullin met the outside world gradually worked its way into his home, and when his heart finally failed him, his widow mourned a man but not a husband. Whatever affection they had felt for each other had died years before.

  As for Eliza herself, she turned aside every challenge, every insult. The truth, she said, would come out, eventually.

  And every so often, when her senses bade her, she went down into the catacombs beneath the meeting hall with her own blend of herbs, and ensured that Nicholas Blaine stayed where he’d been sent.

  PART TWO

  * * *

  GIDEON, ILLINOIS

  8 OCTOBER 1871

  For they will entreat, and bargain, and promise you all manner of things, and your desire to aid them will be great. But you must steel yourself to their pleas, and never forget that which defines the demon.

  —ENDOR 2, 7–8

  Joe Petrie held the wet blanket in front of him like a shield and ran into the burning house. Smoke already filled the entry, clawed his throat with every breath.

  He crouched below the level of the suffocating cloud, until he could see the floor and baseboards and legs of furniture, the first steps of the staircase. Caught motion from the corner of his eye, and turned in time to see the hem of a skirt vanish, a door close.

  “No. Mistress.” Petrie scuttled like a crab to the door. Pressed his hand to the panel to make sure it still felt cool, then turned the handle. Tried to turn the handle. Swore.

  Then he closed his eyes and concentrated. Locks. He had a gift for locks. A minor talent, but his own. He bent close to the door, and held his breath. Pressed fingers to metal and willed the movement of slides and bolts.

  Silence, at first. Then he heard the scrape as the key turned, then worked out of the keyhole, followed by the muffled thump as it fell to the carpet. He gripped the handle again, twisted and pushed with all his weight. The door flew open, and he tumbled through.

  “Mistress?” Petrie stayed low to the floor, even though the smoke had yet to enter this interior hallway. “I’ll get Billy and Ed and we will carry you out if we have to.” He waited, the only sounds the crackle of the flames and his own ragged breathing. “Mistress Mullin?” He looked into the gloom lit only by the faint flames of oil lamps, and imagined them exploding when the fire found them, shattered glass turned into shrapnel that would slash him like claws.

  He felt the growing heat at his back. Too late now to leave the way he had come. He closed the door just as the first tendrils of smoke drifted in.

  “Mistress Mullin?” Petrie set forth on his hands and knees. He peered under doors, alert to any sound, any movement. “I know you’re back here.” His heart pounded as panic tested its grip. “Please come out.” Sweat dripped down his nose, trickled down his back. The hall had grown hot as a smithy in summer, the air thick enough to cut. “We need you here, Mistress. Gideon needs you.” He stilled and listened, heard nothing but the growing roar of approaching death, and hammered the floor with his fists. “Mistress!”

  Then it came to him, faint as a breath, a low voice that set his teeth on edge even though he couldn’t pick out words or even tell whether it belonged to a man or woman. It came from the small storeroom at the hallway’s end, and he rose and walked toward it even as fear took hold, the urge to turn and flee even if doing so meant running through the flames. Death would be better than meeting the owner of that voice—worst witch in Gideon, Joe Petrie was, and even he could sense it.

  Petrie dropped the wet blanket to the floor, and drew his Army Colt from his belt. As he edged nearer the door, he finally heard Mistress Mullin’s chanting cadence, a slow, steady rhythm of words that continued even as the other voice grew stronger, harsher.

  A man’s voice. Petrie could hear it better now. Oh, my Lady. Memory charged up from the depths, images of storm and snow. His gun hand shook as he crept to the door and looked inside.

  “—I can return your husband to you. Not the one you married out of duty, but the one you loved. Yes, I can give Tom Blaylock back to you, as young and handsome as he was on the day he died.” The man stood in the center of the room, his back to the door. “No one will question your standing as Mistress of Gideon then. Barbara Cateman and her flock of twittering hens—I can help you silence them all. Those who plot against you, who seek to blame you for their crimes—I will expose them.” The weather had been brutally hot and dry for weeks, yet he had dressed as if for winter in an old-fashioned greatcoat and top hat. “I will be the friend you never had. I can grant you the respect you have always deserved. Be silent and think on it—you know I possess the power.”

  “I don’t care what Barbara and the rest of them say. I care even less for your power or anything else you offer.” Eliza Mullin paced the length of the room, right hand tracing sigils in the air. “You murdered my Tom. His soul has moved on. Whatever you brought back from the wilderness, it wouldn’t be him.” She had been a beauty once, tall and slender and dusky-haired. But now, in the half-light and shadow, she looked a crone, shoulders hunched, face lined and hair gone white as summer smoke.

  Petrie stepped closer to the door, then choked back a cry as something in another room—a lamp, a bottle of liquor—exploded with a sound like gunshot. He still had time to get Eliza Mullin out of the house. But he had to walk past the man to do it, and if he did, the man would see his face, and know him. Say his damned name. Petrie cursed his fear, even the hated appellation stuck in his throat. Young Nick. Nicholas Blaine, son of the Devil himself.

  Petrie had been but a boy when it happened, but he remembered it all as though it occurred yesterday. The murder of Dolly Hoard and the manhunt and the trial. The mounting tension as the day of the burning approached. The stink of his father’s barn and the waiting and the praying. Then, finally, th
at silent ride into Gideon, and the tears that coursed down his mother’s cheeks as they dug Eli Petrie out of his snowy grave.

  But how did he—? Petrie gripped the Colt more tightly. Cocked the hammer. What did it matter? However Blaine magicked his return to the land of the living, Petrie’s own path showed clear. Kill him. He had a clear shot. Kill him. One pull of the trigger and it would be over and he could rescue Mistress Mullin and flee this hell. Kill him.

  “But tell me, Joseph Petrie, son of Eli. How can you kill what’s already dead?” Blaine turned, and smiled.

  Petrie froze, Colt half raised, his cry silenced before it could escape. So many battlefield horrors he had seen, the damage that shrapnel, shot, cannon, and sword could inflict upon a man, but all were as nothing compared to this. How could Blaine talk with a face like raw meat, without flesh covering his cheeks and jaw? How could he see, with eyes bulged and split and leaking fluid that ran like thick, pale tears?

  Blaine doffed his hat in greeting, revealing a peeling scalp dotted with yellowed patches of exposed skull. “It appears you have a savior, Mistress, come to free you from my dire clutches.” He held a walking stick in one gloved hand, polished black wood capped with a silver ferrule that twinkled like a star. “Assuming he is able.” He raised the stick and pointed it at Petrie. “Assuming he can find the courage.”

  Eliza Mullin stopped pacing and turned to Petrie. “Get out, Joe.” Another sigil, the very air rippling with the movement of her hand. “Go. Now.”

  “I can’t leave you with him.” Petrie tried again to aim the Colt at Blaine, but his hand shook like palsy, too weak to pull the trigger. “I can’t.”

  “But you will.” Blaine wheeled, coat swirling like a mage’s gown. “Because you can smell the smoke and hear the flames roaring into the upper floors. The attic. The roof.” He took a step toward Petrie. Another. “Leave the lady behind, Joseph, as you left so many men behind on the battlefield. Men you called friend until you learned the coward’s truth, that friends are nothing more than bodies to hide behind.”

  “Don’t listen to him.” Eliza Mullin’s voice rose above the growing din. “He’ll fog your mind and turn your fears against you.” Her voice softened, a mother’s comforting murmur. “It’s all right to be afraid, Joe.”

  Petrie snorted. “You’re not.”

  “Shows what you know.” Eliza Mullin smiled sadly. “This is my fight to see through, not yours. Get out while you can.”

  “You heard your mistress, Joseph, son of Eli.” Blaine grinned, the ravaged remains of his face twitching as blood dripped like sweat. “Run to the others. Tell them who you saw. I’m sure they’ll believe you, just as they’ve believed all your other whiskey-sodden tales.”

  Petrie raised the Colt again, took aim at the flame-blackened smile. Then he sniffed and smelled the smoke, turned, and saw it seep beneath the door through which he had passed just a short time before, a door he knew would now be too hot to touch.

  Then came the licks of flame, like cats’ paws feeling for prey. In another room, a shatter of glass, followed by a crash.

  A sob rose in Petrie’s throat. He looked to Eliza Mullin, who now stood still, hands folded like a mourning angel.

  “Go, Joe.” Not a request this time. An order.

  “Yes, go, Joe!” Blaine clapped his hands, the sound muffled by his gloves. “Run, run, run—”

  Another crash sounded. It drove Petrie like a whip—he hurtled down the narrow hallway as the ceiling rained fire and Nick Blaine’s laughter rang in his ears. As he reached the rear door, he looked back in time to see flames shoot out of the parlor like the exhalation of a dragon. In the space of a heartbeat, the hallway became an inferno.

  Petrie fled into the night, past the other burning houses, through the ring of fire that had been Gideon’s town square. He ran past old men, women, and children, ignored the shouts and cries for help, the calls for missing loved ones.

  Run, Joseph Petrie. It’s what you do best.

  Petrie ran into the woods that encircled Gideon, and kept running even as the darkness deepened and the trees pressed close. He stumbled over a root, pitched headfirst into the mess of the forest floor, curled into a ball, and clapped his hands over his ears.

  But the cries of Gideon still found him. They tapped a well that had never run dry, released memories of other fires, other cries. The booms of cannon and rifle. His mother’s sobs as she wiped the snow from his father’s face.

  It’s all right to be afraid, Joe.

  Eliza Mullin’s gentle words, like acid in his ears. He muttered prayers, spells, gibberish, anything to drown them out. But still they burned.

  “JOE?”

  Petrie opened his eyes to find Edward Waycross standing over him.

  “Figured you’d be out here.” Ash and dirt blackened Waycross’s long face, his once-white shirt. He wore his own Army Colt stuck in the waist of his dungarees and leaned heavily on a shovel, as though he needed the support.

  Petrie stared up at his friend, then at the blue sky that showed through the trees. “It’s morning?”

  “Yup.” Waycross dug into his pocket and pulled out a flask. “It’s all over.” He uncapped it and took a long swig, then held it out.

  “What’s all over?” Petrie sat up slowly. “Where’s your uniform?” He took the flask, tossed back a healthy slug, shuddered as Waycross applejack seared its way down his throat and settled in his gut like live cinders.

  “No uniform.” Waycross shook his head. “We’re not in uniform anymore, Joe. We’re home. Been home for a while now.”

  “Home.” Petrie stared at his reflection in the side of the flask, his dirt-smeared face warped by the curve of the metal so that one eye bulged while the other shrank to nothing. “Home?” Then the smoke stench found him and the scenes of the night before flooded back, Mistress Mullin’s face and Nicholas Blaine’s laughter and how he ran so fast.

  Friends are just bodies to hide behind.

  “Gideon, Joe. Remember? You’re in Gideon, Illinois.” Waycross sighed. “What’s left of it.”

  Petrie struggled to his feet. “Is anyone looking for me? Does anybody know—?”

  “Nobody knows you’re out here.” Waycross wiped his sleeve across his brow, leaving a pale streak amid the grime. “Billy Petersbury asked where you were around dawn. I told him I sent you to check the Corey place. He was so rattled, he didn’t think to ask which Corey.” One shoulder twitched. “They all had enough to keep busy without worrying about you.”

  Petrie leaned against a tree. Took another swallow from the flask, then handed it back to Waycross. “Fire’s out?”

  “Yup. Master and Mistress Cateman got us settled, and we formed the circle and said the words. A wonder to behold, it was. The flames just . . . died. Like turning down an oil lamp.” Waycross drained the last drops of liquor, then capped the flask and shoved it back in his pocket. “Not that it mattered by that time.” He poked at the ground with the shovel. “What happened, Joe? Last I saw, you were headed to the Mullin place.” A pause. “We found her. Rear of the house. Room near the kitchen. Not much of her left. Must have been bad, where she was. Flame burns hottest at the source.” He poked the ground harder, and the shovel blade struck a rock with a sound like snapping bone. “What did you see, Joe? You know it goes better when you talk about it.”

  Petrie picked a leaf out of his hair, laid it out on the palm of his hand and examined it, bought time as he tried to figure out how to answer. “Did you find anyone else?” He tried to tear the leaf down the middle, but it proved too dry and crumbled to bits. He tossed away the mess, wiped his hand on his dungarees. Felt Waycross’s stare, as steady as a judge. “In the room with her. Did you find anyone?”

  “Why? Did you see someone?” Waycross struck the ground again. “Who? She lived by herself. Never wanted no one around, not even a maid.” He hoisted the shovel to his shoulder and started back toward Gideon. “She lived alone, and she died alone. Lady’s justice, if you
ask me.”

  Petrie stumbled after his friend, and kept his protests to himself. They had been through hell on earth together, he and Ed. Chickamauga. Kennesaw. Dozens of nameless skirmishes in between. Others might call Joseph Petrie soft in the head. A coward, even. But not Edward Waycross, who remembered what fear felt like, and who had lost both a father and an uncle to Nicholas Blaine.

  I can tell him. He’ll believe me. I can tell him who else I saw. But the others would find out, as they always did. Their voices sounded in Petrie’s head, sharp as snakebite, the hectoring of Hiram and Barbara Cateman, Alice Hoard, and the others. You had your gun, Joe—why didn’t you shoot him? You’re a witch—why didn’t you spell him? How could you let him get away? And as the questions piled one atop the other, he knew he would crumble like a dead leaf, and then even Edward Waycross would wash his hands of him. “No.” The word stuck in Petrie’s throat so that he had to cough it out. “No. I didn’t see no one else.” He trudged after Waycross.

  “Wouldn’t surprise me if those husbands of hers come to collect her. I imagine they would have a lot to talk about.” They had reached the edge of the wood, and there Waycross stopped, lowered his shovel, and plunged it into the drought-hard dirt. “Look at it.” His voice cracked. “Look at it.”

  Petrie drew alongside, shoving his hands in his pockets to still their shaking. He had seen before the devastation that fire wrought. In his nightmares, he relived the times he had set loose the beast himself.

  But this place of smoke and rubble, this was Gideon. Petersbury’s saloon, gone. Hoard’s dry-goods store. Corey’s smithy. Some of the finest houses in the county, columned and balconied merchant palaces, now nothing but a forest of bare brick chimneys. The dead had been moved to the center of the square, row after row of blanket-covered mounds, most so small that you would think only children had perished if you had never seen what savage heat could do to a full-grown body. Among them walked the living, heads bowed, hands slowly tracing sigils through the leaden air, the only sounds the crunch of footsteps on dead grass and the rise and fall of murmured prayers.