Of Grave Concern

by Max McCoy

  “Where did you meet this Malleus?” Calder asked.

  “On Bridge Street,” I said. “The freight caravan was coming back into town from someplace in Texas. On Wednesday, I think. They had a problem with a wheel and Malleus bumped into me. It was unpleasant. There was also a handsome man who rode with them, a whiskey trader.”

  “Vanderslice,” Calder said with venom.

  “He did not tell me his name.”

  “What color was his shirt?”

  “Black, with mother-of-pearl buttons.”

  “That’s Vanderslice,” Calder said. “He’s a bad type. I received a federal warrant for his arrest this morning. He’s been selling liquor to the Indians.”

  “Then why don’t you arrest him?”

  “I would, but he left yesterday with the freight wagon train to Fort Elliott. He travels with the train nearly to the Canadian, then breaks off and heads west, toward a hideout nobody’s ever seen. Rumor is that he keeps a Comanche wife and child there.”

  Doc McCarty threw a sheet over the body.

  “Sorry you had to witness that,” he told me.

  I mumbled something and stepped out of the drugstore to Front Street.

  Using the technique of looking while not looking, which Jonathan had first taught me so long ago, I scanned the people around me: cowboys with red or yellow auras, businessmen with hues that ranged from green to tan, a few working girls who were out early and whose auras ran the gamut, including some blacks and orange.

  Then I looked at myself in a shop window.

  Nothing. No violet, no yellow, no blue.

  I no longer had an aura.

  This creature, this Malleus, had stolen my aura and trapped it in a leather bag, along with the rest of his collection, and was now somewhere on the southern plains.

  The thought made me sick.

  I fell to my knees there in the mud and heaved until nothing more would come up.

  21

  “I am Kate Bender and I address you from hell.”

  The voice was cold and proud and had some foreign accent, but not German. Greek, perhaps. I was aware that the words were coming from me, and I knew I was standing on the stage of the opera house, but I was asleep.

  The question that had preceded the trance—“Are you Kate Bender?”—had come near the end of the performance, but there were still a few minutes of candle left, so I had to give some kind of answer. There are, of course, a thousand ways of replying without answering. I was just about to launch into one of those long-winded, but meaningless, monologues, when I involuntarily uttered a single word: “Yes.”

  I had never heard a crowd go so quiet.

  Fils de salope, I thought. What was wrong with me? Was it still the aftereffects of the hangover? Did losing my aura also make me stupid? I cursed myself and prepared another tack, this one about how we really were all Kate Bender, because there lurks the capacity for great evil in all of us. It was then I slipped into the trance and began talking with this voice that was not my own.

  “Now we’re getting somewhere,” the cowboy with the auburn curls, who had come back for the repeat performance, declared. “Tell us, Kate Bender, how did you and your murderous kin escape?”

  “Magic,” the voice said. “Only magic. How else could this supposed family, the four most wanted people in America, disappear without a trace?”

  The fingers of my left hand moved up and unbuttoned my vest.

  “What kind of magic?” the cowboy asked.

  “The forbidden kind,” the voice said.

  My fingers now unbuttoned the top of my blouse and spread the collar, exposing some cleavage. Strangely, the cowboys were quiet. Then my hands pulled out my shirttail and smoothed it over my pants.

  “Can you tell us why you killed all those people? Was it for the money?”

  “The money?” the voice asked. “What fool kills for money? There is only one reason for murder, and that is for power. Our master required human blood, and we gave it to him, by the bucketful.”

  “Ask another question,” somebody urged the cowboy with the curls.

  “All right,” he said, less confident now. “Do you serve Satan?”

  “It is easier to name those who don’t,” the voice said.

  “Tell Old Scratch to go on down to the Saratoga,” somebody called. “Old Chalk Beeson’ll serve anybody!”

  This got some laughs.

  “You are amused,” the voice said. Now my fingers were fussing with my hair, smoothing it over one ear. “But the one I serve walks among you, like a wolf among lambs. He is the hammer that will pound the stob of man down beyond the ground. From the world of darkness, he hath loosed devils and demons. He maketh me to lie down with putrefaction, and he hath led us down the paths of wickedness for damnation’s sake.”

  My back arched and my shoulders spread as if I had wings.

  “The master bade us become pioneers,” the voice said. “Pioneers of a new kind of evil, a random and serial evil, an evil that will make people distrust their neighbors while at the same time creating an obscene craving for every detail of depravity.”

  I felt my face grow tight with a smile.

  “You want to know, don’t you?” the voice asked. “What does it feel like to drive a hammer into a man’s skull, to feel that terrible weight bury itself in flesh and brain and bone? Would you like me to share the ecstasy of that first splash of warm blood, the smell of copper and salt, the thrill of squashing a human life as you would squash a bug in your hand?”

  My left fist was clenched tightly in front of me.

  “Of course, you would,” the voice said.

  The smile changed to a leer. My hands cupped my breasts and then went down my sides to my hips.

  “This body—so like mine was. You find it pleasing, no?”

  Nobody answered.

  “Cowards,” the voice taunted.

  The feet carried me to the edge of the stage.

  “You!”

  My finger jabbed at the cowboy with the auburn curls. “‘Come here and touch this body and connect with my soul. Feel what men have died for. Die yourself, in the fire of my embrace. ’”

  The cowboy didn’t move.

  “Fool,” the voice sneered. “I offer you the chance to commit one great unholy act, to be consumed by a passion you did not know existed, to have your name writ large beside mine in the nightmares of mortals, and you sit with your hands crossed over your member like a frightened schoolboy.”

  My finger admonished all of them, trailing a bit of flame from the tip.

  “You are nothing,” the voice said. “All of you—nothing. In a few short years, you will be in the ground. In a few years after that, everyone who knew you will lie in silent graves as well. Who will remember any of you? It will be as if you never existed. But in a hundred years, the name ‘Kate Bender’ will still burn on living tongues!”

  The candle flame shuddered and went out. Then my eyes rolled back to show only whites, my body shook, and I collapsed on the stage.

  22

  Sitting cross-legged on my uncomfortable bed in the Dodge House, I was feeling very sorry for myself. I looked at my aura-less image in the mirror above the dresser. Never had I looked older. There were dark circles under my eyes, wrinkles, and crow’s-feet. My complexion was even more pale than usual. The image that stared back at me was not that of a twenty-eight-year-old woman but that of a crone.

  Save for my image, the mirror was empty.

  Not even Horrible Hank was interested.

  Silent tears stained my cheeks.

  I didn’t know if I had really become a channel for the damned Kate Bender, or whether the loss of my aura had made me susceptible to some meddlesome spirit, or whether I was just sinking ever deeper into insanity.

  It all made me want to drink a barrel of mezcal.

  Sometimes, I just wanted someone to talk to.

  Then came a knock on the door.

  “Just a moment,” I called, wiping
away my tears with a handkerchief embroidered with Jonathan’s initials.

  “Well, Eddie,” I said quietly. “It seems that I am coming apart. You might be wise to find a new mistress, or there might not be any more bread crumbs or raisins or treats of beef jerky for you. What do you think of that?”

  Eddie shifted his head to look at me with first one eye and then the other, but he voiced no opinion.

  “All right,” I said. “We’ll play this one straight, just for once.”

  I climbed down from the bed and didn’t even bother to arrange myself before opening the door. There stood Dog Kelley and Hoodoo Brown. Kelley appeared to be dressed in the same foxhunting getup he had worn the other day, and three hounds serpentined underfoot.

  “Professor,” Kelley said, removing his top hat with a sweeping gesture as if he were addressing a duchess. “We have come at the appointed hour. I trust we are expected?”

  “Of course, Mayor,” I said. “But I beg you to leave your dogs in the hall or, better yet, downstairs. Dogs make my raven nervous, and it would not be conducive to a good session.”

  “But I go everywhere with the hounds.”

  “Please,” I said. “There can be no séance with canine tumult.”

  “Very well,” he said, and sulked. “Hoodoo, would you take the boys downstairs and have the night man watch after them?”

  Brown knelt down, petted each dog on the head and around the ears, and then took off down the hall, with the dogs bounding after him.

  “Come in,” I said.

  “You have the best rooms in the city.”

  “That is sad,” I said. “The wind blows the dust through the walls.”

  “One becomes used to it.”

  “Not this one,” I said tiredly.

  We walked over to a round table in the corner, not far from Eddie’s cage, and I motioned for Kelley to sit. He did, and then removed fifty dollars in gold from his vest pocket. He placed the coins on the table.

  I picked up the money and felt its weight.

  “Is there any charity in Dodge City?” I asked.

  “Of the biblical kind, madam?”

  “I mean of the widows-and-orphans kind,” I said. “Has there been a fund established to help the less fortunate, or to feed the hungry, or to do any other kind of work to relieve human suffering?”

  Kelley thought a moment.

  “There’s the sanitary committee,” he said. “Doctors McCarty and Galland head it up. They are always harping on the need to establish a hospital here in town, rather than being required to send the desperately ill five miles out to the infirmary at Fort Dodge.”

  “Then I want to be an anonymous donor to that committee,” I said, and pushed the money back to him. “See that Doc McCarty receives it for the purpose stated. And, Mayor, I expect to read about that donation in the next edition of the Times.”

  “Of course,” he said, scooping up the coins. “I will deliver it to Doctor McCarty the first thing in the morning.”

  I had left the door ajar and Hoodoo Brown walked in, followed by Timothy, my polite tramp.

  “You’re late,” I told Timothy.

  He put his hands together beneath his chin, begging forgiveness. Then he made a motion as if dealing cards.

  “You’ll lose all your money,” I told him, and he gave me a look that said, Well, hey, I don’t need money. I’m a tramp.

  Brown and Timothy took their seats at the table.

  I went around the room, blowing out the lamps, and came back with a lit white candle in a brass holder. I placed the candle in the center of the table and took a deep breath; then I looked at the faces of the men around me. It had been a long time since I had conducted a session in earnest.

  “Does anyone have the time?”

  Brown opened his pocket watch.

  “Five minutes after midnight.”

  I nodded.

  “It is Sunday, the Thirteenth of May,” I said. “We will attempt two spirit communications this morning. The first will be to contact the ghost of the girl who walks the railroad right-of-way. In the second, we will endeavor to contact the spirit of Jonathan Wylde, my forever-young husband, killed on this day, thirteen years ago.”

  Kelley and Brown made some small sympathetic remarks, which I ignored.

  “Now there are a few rules to discuss,” I said. “Once we touch hands, we cannot let go, no matter what happens. To do so is to break the bond of trust we have established. If an apparition appears, you may ask questions, but expect the answers to be circular or nonsensical, as ghosts are obsessed with their own unfinished business. Understood?”

  The men nodded their understanding.

  “Let us join hands.”

  We clasped each other’s hands. This was unpleasant for me, with Dog Kelley on one side and Hoodoo Brown on the other. As I’ve told you, I don’t like to be touched. Kelley’s hand was soft and sweaty, but Brown’s was rough, like burlap.

  We concentrated on the candle flame.

  By and by, everything became very still, and even Eddie stopped fidgeting around in his cage.

  “This is Ophelia Wylde,” I said in a soothing voice. “I am here with some earnest men from Dodge City who wish to contact the spirit of the girl slain on the meridian marker. Can you show us some sign that you are with us?”

  The candle flame rippled, as if we might have some success.

  But then, nothing.

  For another half hour, we tried. I kept up the appeals to the spirit of the dead girl, but nothing came through. Finally, admitting defeat, I brought the first portion of the session to a close.

  “Let us take a short break,” I said.

  We unclasped our hands and rubbed them to restore circulation.

  “That was disappointing,” Kelley said.

  “It often is,” I said. “But the spirits choose their own time and place to appear. Are we ready for the second half?”

  We clasped hands again, and this time we spent a longer time staring into the candle flame. I was reluctant to begin, knowing that this was the last time I would attempt to contact my lost husband.

  “Jonathan,” I said at last. “It’s me, Ophelia.”

  The flame did not waver.

  “Today is the thirteenth anniversary of your death, and I so would like to make contact with you. Do you remember what you used to tell me, that love survives death? I’m asking now, for the last time, for you to send proof from the other side. We had a secret message. Do you remember? Could you communicate that to one of these men?”

  Silence in the room.

  Cowboys howled along Front Street.

  Coyotes cried at the edge of town.

  “I miss you so much,” I said. “We were so young, and we had so little time together. And I was so much in love with you! You were so naïve. And how I came to resent that naivety, to hate how you went to that damned war and left me all alone, forever.”

  I was weeping, again.

  “Not knowing how you died has haunted me,” I said. “It would be such a comfort just to know of your last few minutes, to know what comrades surrounded you, to learn what you said with your last breath there in the trenches at Spottsylvania.”

  At this, Brown squeezed my hand tightly.

  “What I wouldn’t give to touch your cheek one more time,” I said. “What I have tried to give to touch your cheek one more time. Oh, Jonathan, if only you knew, you would be so ashamed. I have been so weak with loss for so many years. I have lost the path. I mourn for the life we should have had. I ache with the thought of our children unborn. I am alone, Jonathan—a woman alone.”

  I had not cried so in years.

  A bubble of snot clung to one of my nostrils, but I kept my grip.

  “Nothing, Jonathan?” I asked. “No sign?”

  The men were staring at their laps, afraid to look at me.

  “Very well,” I said, sniffling. “I still miss you more than I ever thought it possible to miss another human being. I have trie
d everything within my power to reach you, but to no effect. I hope that we will meet again, in Summerland or whatever the hereafter might be called, but I don’t think there’s such a place. But I will say a prayer each night that I am wrong.”

  I released the hands on either side of me.

  “Thank you, gentlemen,” I said. “This ends our session.”

  “We should stay for just a few minutes,” Brown said.

  “Careful, Mister Brown, or somebody just might mistake you for a gentleman,” I said. Then I buried my face in a handkerchief and blew my nose. “Truly, I’ll be fine. I apologize that the session was unproductive.”

  Kelley and Brown left, and then I urged Timothy to depart as well.

  “Go,” I said, “I just need to get some sleep.”

  He shook his head and indicated he would sit at the table while I slept.

  “How in the world am I supposed to sleep with a man hovering over me?” I asked. “Thank you for your kindness, but for the last time, go.”

  I shut the door behind him and turned to Eddie.

  “Well, I guess that’s that,” I said. “What do you think we should do for the next thirteen years?”

  23

  I couldn’t sleep.

  At two o’clock I got up, pulled on my clothes, and walked downstairs. Dodge City was still rolling from the momentum of Saturday night. Every joint along both Front Streets was lit up like Nero’s Rome. Everywhere was laughter and shouts and cowboy music. In the shadows between the buildings, rough men and easy women made furtive bargains. Over it all, the leaden disk of a new moon hung in the southwest like a cipher.

  I shouldered my way into the Saratoga and headed for the bar. In the corner, some half-drunk cowpuncher was strumming a guitar and singing: “As I rode down by Tom Sherman’s barroom, Tom Sherman’s barroom so early one day.”

  The bartender smiled and asked if I wanted a mezcal.

  “Thanks, but no,” I said.

  “There I spied a handsome young ranger, all wrapped in white linen, as cold as the clay.”

  “Whiskey?” the bartender asked.