I'd protested early on that chronicling my adventures would let von Kreiger know I was looking for him, but August had disagreed. He said von Kreiger probably didn't know who I was anyway, and even if he did, he'd dismiss me since these adventures were all so improbable. More important, even if von Kreiger did decide I was a problem, he'd look to be killing Sterling—in the camp he always struck at the head of any protest group—and since Sterling didn't exist, von Kreiger, in his frustration, would not be looking in the direction I'd be coming from.
August and I knew Dr. Sterling didn't exist, but not so thousands of readers like Wilson and Quilt. Sterling got lots of mail at the publisher. Folks asked him to find lost items, look for kin who vanished in the war and other more odd things. Sterling was known to be a man of science, always at war with superstition, and he always managed to explain how something seemingly supernatural was really a trick of some foul villain.
August added those parts. Not that he don't know how the world works; but because he knows enough to know others don't want to know. There are times, I'll admit, when I read Sterling's adventures and wish his logic were something I could load into my six-gun.
There in Parker, in room 214, I set down some notes on my experience up in Nevada, near the Groom Mine, and the strange goings-on there, for to send on to August. I reckoned he'd call it something on the order of the Gruesome Gauntlet of Groom. I'd just gone to turn the wick up on the lamp there, when the thunder of hooves started in the distance. I set my pen down, then opened a window and poked my head out, looking toward the east, not being sure what I'd see coming my way.
Parker, it's laid out on one main street which is dirt where it's not mud, running east to west, with west pointing down toward the Colorado River. At that west end of town is the church-Congregationalist, I think, but in the tale we said it was Methodist since the Congregationalists write too many angry letters to the publisher. From there in, on the north side of the street, is the General Store, the Golden Rule Saloon and Maud's Rooming House and Restaurant. On the south side, between the church and the Grand Hotel was the Municipal building, which housed a school, library and the sheriff's office. On the east side was a red building known locally as Friendly House, which, near as I could make out as 1 came into town, was a rooming house for women. It had a big parlor for entertaining menfolk guests, and them women must have had good senses of humor because I heard giggling a lot from over there. Past them, at the edge of the street, was the smithy and stable. Back beyond the main buildings were small clusters of houses, and there were ranches ranging out all over the surrounding area.
Night had fallen, and the few weak gaslights on the street just made sure gloom covered Parker. Out of the east that sound of thundering hooves grew, then coming past the stable I saw them. The very sight sent a shiver through me and dropped my left hand to the six-gun riding on my left hip.
Buffalo, hundreds of them. Their eyes glowed with a pus-green light and their approach sent a tremor through the hotel. A huge white buffalo led the herd, and I knew it was a symbol of powerful magic among the Indians. Behind it came a flood of hide and hooves, horns and muscle wide enough to scrape chairs and barrels off the boardwalk in front of the saloon and send the women of Friendly House backing away from the edge of their porch.
As the buffalo came abreast of me, I climbed out of my window, onto the roof covering the hotel's porch, and ran to the edge. I drew my pistol and fanned it, blasting bullet after bullet into the brown meat avalanche. I knew it was futile, but I also knew I had to try it. A pistol cartridge wouldn't have brought one of them beasts down if all were normal, and it weren't. I didn't know if they'd been hexed so no shots would hit them, but they might as well have been for all the good my shots were doing.
Still, using a pistol to stop them was easier than trying to do it the other way.
As I said, things weren't normal with these buffalo. Even in the dim night light I could see bones poking through holes in hide, and places where the hide had been sliced clean through. I suspected these buffalo had been some of the thousands that had been slaughtered for the amusement of Easterners out for a visit, most having been shot from moving trains. A few had their tongues taken, other delicacies cut out, but most had just been killed for sport. They'd been reanimated and made to do someone's bidding, and that bidding looked like it was bent on driving them like a spear through the Church.
I sighed and dropped my gloved hand into the pocket of my vest. Despite the Church being of the Congregationalist denomination, I felt a bit of an obligation to save it. Not that I had any ties to that particular brand of Christianity, mind you, but something in me found it just plumb rude to run zombie-buffalo through a House of Worship.
I closed my eyes and concentrated for a moment, flashing on an image of the Hunting Grounds. To me that place almost made Parker into Paris, France in terms of desirable, and I don't really take to the French all that powerful. Shadowy figures, some big and spiky, others small and slithery, moved through the Grounds. I latched me on to one of them and we wrestled a bit, but he saw things my way.
Back in Parker I glanced at the deck of cards I pulled from my pocket and saw I'd thumbed a half-dozen and one cards off the deck, from which I had a straight. I melted into the shadows of the hotel and appeared again out by the school house. I'd tried for the shadow of the Church but hadn't been good enough with the hex. Instead of being in front of the stampede, I was just parallel with the white monster leading it.
Though a touch winded, I needed to use another hex. In the Hunting Grounds I grabbed hold of the tail of the manitou I'd used an eyeblink before and tied him up in knots all good and tight. His outrage poured down through me and the full house of cards I'd drawn. From my left palm poured out a bolt of ethereal energy that landed beneath the white buffalo's feet, then exploded like twenty sticks of TNT, casting his body up into the air and breaking it into little bits. The blast also gouged a huge hole in the ground and scattered the lead buffalo it didn't kill.
The rest of them kept on coming, of course, but passed around the crater, leaping over their re-dead brethren. Without the white buffalo to lead them, they remained split, never forming back up again, least ways, not until they got past the Church. I was hoping that if they did keep running, they'd run straight into the river and get washed on down Mexico way.
That was a concern for later, though. I slumped back against the municipal building's wall and let the exertion of casting hexes claim me. I did manage to get my cards back in my pocket before I closed my eyes, but only just barely and that didn't work out as badly as it might have.
***
Wilson pulled a grey handkerchief from his pocket and mopped sweat from his brow. "I will say, sir, that I was pure-D-amazed at how quick thinking that Doctor Sterling is. I mean, being there in the Methodist Church, saying his devotionals, and hearing the hooves. He comes out and sees that big, white automaton buffalo charging straight at the Church. I would have fainted dead way."
Quilt nodded in agreement. "But Doc Sterling, he just slipped back inside the door, takes the oil lamp there, and throws it so precisely at the buffalo that the machine explodes, just busting it apart into pieces."
Wilson held his hands up. "And I don't take it as none of a disgrace, Mr. Kilbane, that you'd slunk off away from that mechanical terror. I woulda done that myself."
"And it was you who happened to see where they had come from, after all." Quilt gave me a favorable nod. "You see, Mr. Johns, after Doctor Sterling sent that buffalo flying, he got to thinking and found out a lot about the secrets being harbored in Parker. And then there comes the part I liked best."
"Yes," Wilson smiled broadly, "Miss Jezebel Knox."
***
I was awakened quickly enough by some of the citizens of Parker who were afraid I had been hurt in the stampede. I assured them that I was fine, just that I'd caught a lung full of the dust the beasts were raising. I coughed all weak like to make that point. Several of th
e women were sympathetic, but most of the men looked at me as if I'd declared myself delicate. That might have rankled but if it kept them away from me, at least for the moment, it meant there was less of a chance they'd discover I was a disciple of the Great Hoyle.
I didn't take it, from the nature of the conversation about the stampede, that the folks in Parker were too partial to those who could work arcana. It weren't that they were all Hellfire and angry about the obvious magic that had just pounded down their main street. Instead, they talked about the stampede as if it were normal. In their minds they'd already transformed it into a stampede of cattle, and talk quickly ran toward a debate about fencing off the ranges and why or why not that might be the death of freedom on the continent.
The people of Parker clearly wanted to remain ignorant of what powers were at work here, and in that way they were nigh onto normal for most folks. They'd immediately picked up on one fact that had nested in the back of my brain, which was almost as odd as the fact of the buffalo being undead. The fact was that buffalo come from the plains, and Arizona is a desert. It was possible someone marched them down from wherever they'd been killed, but that would take a lot of power and time. The payoff for that sort of investment had to be huge, and, looking at Parker, there just wasn't enough there to make it make sense.
I dusted myself off and headed back to the Grand Hotel. The desk clerk, who I took to calling Scrub in my mind for a variety of reasons, beckoned me over in a method guaranteed to attract major attention while supposedly doing just the opposite. I sidled over, letting urgency paint my face, and tipped my hat in his direction.
"You seen the stampede, did ya?"
"Is that what it was?"
"Yep, but different, this time." He leaned closer to me, his breath as sour as the miasma from an old spittoon. "Before they was just ghosts, but this time, they was real."
I nodded. "I saw that."
Scrub eyed me slyly. "What does Doctor Sterling think? He on the trail already?"
"He's on the trail, and he wanted me to enlist your help." I lowered my voice. "Who would you guess is behind this?"
He thought for a moment, though I knew he had an answer on the tip of his tongue from the start. "The Lividians. They's behind it."
"Lividians. You mentioned them early on. Who are they?"
"Perhaps," came a female voice from behind me, "you should ask someone who can answer the question."
I turned and, standing there, in the hotel lobby, was one of the most beautiful women I'd ever seen in my life. She wore her long, black hair simply plaited and hadn't a touch of warpaint on her face. The dress she wore wouldn't have been called more than plain by anyone who had any sense about clothes. No rings, no necklace, no bonnet nor gloves; she didn't have none of those things and still she would have been the toast of London or Paris or New York or Boston.
I immediately removed my hat. "It has been a long time, Miss Knox."
"It has, Mr. Kilbane, the hardships of which are forgotten upon seeing you again." Her blue eyes raked me up and down, prompting a blush, which made her smile. "You've not changed that much."
"No, I reckon not." I waved her toward the chairs in the lobby. "Shall we talk?"
She glanced past me at Scrub, then wrinkled her nose. "What I have to say is for your ears, not the town's. Your room, perhaps?"
"After you."
Scrub scurried out as we mounted the stairs, but I was too aware of Jeze to pay him much mind. She lifted her skirts enough to expose dainty feet and a well-turned pair of ankles as she ascended. I knew I'd seen those boots before and I recollected where, which took me back years, years before Colton.
In the war men go and do things about which they are not proud. After The Battle of the Dead River, in which both sides had been broken and broken badly, I had been cut off and lost my way, heading south when I should have gone any other direction. I found myself in the root cellar of a burned-out plantation house and hid there, when Jezebel, her two sisters Lilith and Salome, and her pappy, Leviticus Knox, came down to join me.
Leviticus Knox was a General in the Reb army, but the battle that had broken my unit had crushed his command, too. The man had always been powerful built, with a flowing mane of black hair and a big black beard. He looked enough like John Brown for men to call him John Black, and he was famous for his towering rages and fiery speeches to his troops. We used to call him Lividicus Knox, given that he'd get red in the face, or so we were told.
At Dead River, so Jeze told me, her father had seen things that put the fear of God into him. He knew he was involved with things that weren't right and it had "fatigued" him. The man I saw was more than tired—he was haunted. He knew things I'd not know until Colton. His mind might not have been broken yet, but it was hurt bad.
Knox just kept mumbling Bible quotes-lots from Revelations, which ain't the sort of thing you want to be hearing in a dark cellar with troops roaming about. I knew that if the Rebs caught me, I'd be a prisoner, and Jeze was afeared of her father being shot for a deserter. I doubted they'd do that since he was one of their better Generals. His experience as an engineer before the war, and the staff he'd assembled, gave him a good tactical sense for battles. When you faced the 3rd Georgia Volunteers, you knew it was on a battlefield that would be to their benefit, not yours.
Jezebel didn't say anything as we walked down the hallway to my room. I opened the door for her and closed it behind us, but wasn't prepared for her turn and hang her arms around my neck. She kissed me once, hard, with an urgency that melted the years away. I slipped my arms around her and held her close, kissing her back, hoping the years since we'd last kissed would somehow be kept at bay.
Finally our mouths parted and she rested her head against my shoulder. "Thank God, you have come. I wrote that letter to your publisher months ago. I wrote it in code, but I knew you'd see through the ruse and know it was me. And you came."
I didn't know of any letter, and I wasn't sure August would have seen through any code she'd used. He knew of Jeze, but didn't know who she'd really been. We'd remained hidden in the cellar for days, then someone had to go get water. I volunteered, having stripped out of my uniform so the Rebs wouldn't shoot me on sight. In the interim, though, the Union had taken the area and the First Massachusetts Regiment, my old unit, was camped around us.
I found August, my lieutenant, and assured him I'd not deserted. I presented to him the Knox family, calling them the Whites, and said Leviticus was a preacher who had been treated poorly. August arranged for safe passage for all of them out of the area and that was the last I'd seen of Jeze until Parker.
"I need to know more than you could put in your letter. In that time things must have changed."
She nodded solemnly, wisps of her hair tickling my throat. "They have. They've gotten worse. I'll tell you all about it. In the morning."
"Morning is a fair piece off, Miss Knox."
"I know, Mr. Kilbane." She pulled away from me, but took my hands in hers and drew me deeper into the room. "I never had a chance to thank you for saving my father, my sisters and me. I'd not have you thinking me ungrateful."
She gave me a smile that set my heart to flame, and that fire spread through my body. Jezebel Knox let go of my hands for a moment, just long enough to turn down the wick on the lamp, then we passed the time in a room just about as dark as the cellar had been, but a lot more inviting.
***
Wilson swiped more sweat from his brow. "For Doc Sterling to meet the one woman who had broken his heart all those years ago, then to gallantly stand guard as she slept in his bed and got her rest, well, sir, that's the kind of honorable man Doctor Sterling is."
Quilt toed my left boot. "If you hadn't a run off in your terror, you could have stood guard outside their door and let them have some privacy."
Johns sniffed. "It sounds as if Doctor Sterling wouldn't have taken advantage of the woman had such an opportunity arisen. No gentleman would."
"Then don't paint me
a gentleman!" Wilson's laugh shook his jowls fiercely.
Quilt gave his seat companion half of a wall-eyed stare. "I don't think you'd have been the sort who could have saved Jezebel and her family from the Bengali uprising in Lahore— that was before you were with Doctor Sterling, wasn't it?"
I nodded. "It was. A harrowing time, I hear tell."
"It might have been scary, but what Doctor Sterling ran into out there at Resurrection Farms..." Quilt shivered as if he found himself naked in a block of ice. "I won't be forgetting that any time soon."
From the road, "Resurrection Farms seemed almost a mirror of the plantation lands the Knoxes had left behind in the Deep South. A dirt track wriggled its way up a hill toward the big house. I reckoned as how that house must have cost a fortune to build, given that the lumber would have had to be trekked in from Flagstaff, or thereabouts. The two-story structure had glass in the windows, two chimneys at each end of the building and huge, tall pillars supporting a portico. It was as impressive a structure I'd seen since torching plantations in the South years past.
I also noticed, like with the buffalo, someone had gone to a lot of work to put something big where it ought not to have been.
Jeze brought her horse close enough to mine that our knees touched. "Father calls the house the Holy Sepulchre."
I frowned. "That's where the Lord rested until his resurrection, ain't it?"
She nodded slowly, and I could sense the dread in her. "After we were out here for a bit, I was required to go back to Georgia and deal with certain business matters. My father and sisters remained here. In the three months I was gone, things changed. The mansion was raised and the other things came into being."
The other things she mentioned became visible as we came up on the top of the hill and could see past the mansion, down toward the Colorado river in the distance. The illusion of a southern plantation had been wounded because of the saguaro cacti and dusty red rocks everywhere. The squatter's camp of shacks beyond the mansion dealt that illusion a coup de grace. Little ramshackle buildings, half constructed out of mud bricks, with mismatched wooden slats and gaping roofs, spread out down the back side of the hill. They were squatter shacks, no doubt about it, similar to the things I'd seen near the silver mines in Nevada, though thrown up more hastily. Beyond them were some terraces built up for farming, but the plants looked stunted and shriveled in the hot sun.
A Fist Full O' Dead Guys Page 20