Resurrection House

by James Chambers

  “Go to the parlor two doors down from Black’s Melodeon. Knock twice. Ask for Ling,” they said.

  Those who followed the instructions were promised pleasures of the flesh unlike any they had known before. Word spread, and once it reached Dan, it never occurred to him not to go.

  One night he arrived on the front porch of the house, having polished off a prodigious amount of whiskey back at Chesmire’s in order to develop a light buzz, and he was feeling fine. A storm had just blown through, leaving the streets wet and muddy and the air crisp with that particular tang of having just been cleansed. The clouds broke away and a three-quarters moon glared down at the city like a sleepy eye. Dan kicked his boots against the plank risers to knock loose the clumps of wet dirt slopped onto them, cleared his throat, spat, and then knocked twice.

  Inside the house was darker than out, and Dan could barely see the shape standing behind the door looking out at him. Somebody further inside lit a candle which burned with an odd red flame, and the door opened wider revealing a true giant of a man whose scornful stare would have made most men think twice about doing the business they came to do. But Dan craned back his neck, looked right up at the giant and said, “I’m here to see Ling.”

  The giant pulled the door full open and cleared space for Dan to enter. Another man stood waiting in the foyer, a Chinese man dressed in delicate green clothing that resembled a robe. Dan knew Sun Chou from business they had conducted together in the past, the exact nature of which remained a well-guarded secret.

  “O’Barry. I thought it would not be long before we saw you here.” Chou spoke better English than most of the Chinese (and most Americans for that matter) in this part of town, and his accent was mild, at least when it suited him.

  “Been a while, ain’t it?” Dan nodded toward the giant. “Where’d you dig up this little tyke?”

  “Mr. Fairchild is from out of town. He’s quite capable in most ways, but a little slow and utterly mute. Still, he excels at his job.”

  Dan noticed the way Fairchild’s muscles made his clothes look a size too small, and he didn’t need to ask what that job was. Chou led the way through the corridor to a back staircase. Two low candles in wall sconces afforded some dim illumination, and a pungent haze of opium smoke drifting from behind a closed door marked a room wherein men answered a stronger call than any Ling could exercise. Upstairs Chou set the strange red candle in a sconce beside the frame of another door. Dan could barely contain himself, so when his guide reached out and grabbed his hand away from the doorknob, nothing more than Dan’s preoccupation with entering Ling’s room kept him from beating his old acquaintance like a useless horse.

  “You pay now,” Chou said.

  “I pay when our business is done,” Dan said. “Then we can negotiate a fee based on the quality of the service.”

  What went through Chou’s mind at that moment must remain forever a point of speculation, but it may be that he weighed Dan’s reputation for trouble against his good business sense and decided he’d rather risk dealing with Dan after the man had relieved some of his tension. He let go Dan’s arm, and Dan entered the dark room.

  Across the space he discerned a canopy bed placed upon a low platform, and behind the filmy veil of its curtains, reclined a curvaceous silhouette. Incense burned and filled the entire room with a tenacious haze that dizzied Dan, but it failed to mask the poppy stink that meant Ling was most likely kept drugged by her employer. The figure on the bed writhed behind the curtain, becoming more distinct in the flicker of candles placed on small stands near the wall beyond. Something whispered in Dan’s ear, and his blood warmed. His face flushed with heat, and his heartbeat quickened. That sound whispered again, but in the strange atmosphere Dan couldn’t be sure if it was the wind, or the house creaking, or Ling’s come hither call. For one moment he felt a completely alien sense of self-doubt.

  It was only a moment.

  This was Black Danny O’Barry, fugitive, prospector, brawler, legend, both wealthy and brazen, and no slip of a whore was going to unseat his ironclad assurance. Dan swept the curtain away with bluster and bravado and gazed upon his purchase.

  Now accounts of Ling’s appearance taken from those lucky enough to have enjoyed her company vary in the details. Her patrons spoke of her flawless, dusky skin; her jet-black, silken hair; eyes deep enough to calm the most tempestuous soul; the lush fullness of her lips; the gentle infinite curves of her body. Every man who knew her described her in a different way, but every one of them did so with a sense of awe and respect truly rare among the rough and brawny prospectors who tumbled down out of the mountains like hungry, caged animals let loose in the larder. The one thing they all agreed on was that Ling’s beauty could stop a man in his tracks.

  So with all that in mind, it’s safe to say the young lady of the night left Dan suitably impressed.

  One might also guess that Chou’s confidence in Ling’s charms to completely enthrall her customers might explain the foolishness he got himself up to that night. Eager to take his money’s worth, Dan set to his congress with Ling with fiery determination. The fact that Chou made it as far as he did is perhaps the greatest testament to Ling’s remarkable skills and Dan’s unquestioned pleasure in their exhibition. The very idea of that rough-hewn, black-hearted beast tumbling and rolling alongside Ling’s delicate beauty amounts to enough to make most men shudder, but apparently it didn’t give Chou so much as a moment of pause. He pushed open the disguised, well-oiled panel in the wainscoting and crept out onto the floor, inching his way toward the pile of clothes Dan left behind, as if Dan was any average customer whose purse was there for the taking. Many a guest of Ling’s left her bed a sight poorer than they rightly should have, not that one of them would own up to the fact. They all more or less found their time with Ling well worth the price, and those who became repeat customers knew not to carry more than the going price next time.

  But Dan, despite his fortune, didn’t have it in his nature to be so liberal with his funds, and all those nights of light sleeping gave him an uncanny sensitivity to certain sounds.

  The second he heard Chou scuffing along the floor, he was up on his feet, naked as the day he was born, Ling forgotten and practically dumped head over heels off the far side of the bed. Chou mustered all the surprise he could as Dan’s iron grip closed around his throat and his thirsty Bowie knife licked at the skin behind his ear. He struggled, then thought better of it and belted out words whose meaning became obvious when the door snapped open and Mr. Fairchild entered, a shotgun tucked neatly across his arm.

  It became abundantly clear to Dan where things were heading, and it took him half a heartbeat to choose his course of action. Chou became the recipient of about six inches of steel delivered quickly to his brain through the skin behind his ear. The moment of shock that stayed Mr. Fairchild’s trigger finger afforded Dan time to twist Chou’s body around for cover, and when the brute finally did take his shot, only one barrel fired. Apparently the other hadn’t been loaded, and Chou’s body handily stopped the spray of shot flying across the room. All in all Dan’s particular streak of luck held up long enough to keep him breathing. All he had to do to stay that way was defeat the hulking Mr. Fairchild barehanded.

  The giant thought about reloading his gun, but Dan left him no time as he threw himself across the room, doing himself some credit by actually staggering his target as he tackled him. Unfortunately, no three men with ropes could have easily taken down Mr. Fairchild, and even Dan’s unbridled temper and expert brawling techniques seemed cold comfort as the giant rained blow after blow down on Dan’s bare body. Dan’s first instinct to go for his Colt abandoned somewhere in the rumpled mound of clothing might have worked if the giant hadn’t moved himself between Dan and his weapon. Besides which that brought him closer to Ling, and he worried what might happen if she tangled him up and held him back while he tried to fight. But as it always had when it felt as if the moment could become no more desperate, Dan’s uneart
hly luck dealt him an uncommon hand.

  Mr. Fairchild moved faster than his bulk would indicate. He managed to get Dan up into a powerful bear hug, lifting him from the ground and squeezing the breath out of him. Dan strained and shook and cursed and pounded with every shred of strength he possessed. He even craned his neck up and clamped down tight on Mr. Fairchild’s nose with his teeth, but other than opening up a gush of blood, the bite only resulted in an even angrier opponent. But then Dan felt the stubs of twin Derringers holstered at the giant’s back, and a calm came over him. Dan had left Mr. Fairchild no opportunity to reach around and draw them, and so there they waited, ready salvation for Dan, who yanked them loose, placed one against each of the giant’s temples, clenched his eyes shut, and fired. The subsequent smoke choked Dan, but he found the sudden loosening of his chest and rush of air back to his lungs wholly satisfactory. Mr. Fairchild toppled backward, padding Dan’s fall in the final burst of luck due him that night.

  Dan breathed a sigh of relief at his good fortune to have survived the encounter, for even the meanest of men can appreciate the hard-won extension of his breathing days. So imagine his surprise when he looked up only to see Ling sitting on the bed with his very own Colt freshly retrieved from his discarded holster and now cocked and aimed squarely between his eyes.

  At least that’s where Dan claimed it was pointed; some folks suggest it was actually aimed a fair bit lower.

  Ling still drifted in the grip of the opium fed to her by Chou. Her eyes remained foggy and glazed and she most probably snatched up Dan’s gun out of some instinctive response to the violence taking place around her and her own urge to defend herself. Dan reckoned all this, but it didn’t make him any more predisposed to take a bullet than if Ling had come at him in a blind fury. So he tried talking and said sweet things and kind words to let Ling know he harbored no intention of harming her. He asked for his gun. He asked her to put it down on the bed. He tried everything he could think of to make Ling let go of the weapon so they could both walk out of there alive. Had Ling understood a thing Dan said, chances are she would’ve listened to him and acted accordingly. As it was she wouldn’t have been able to run for water if you told her she was on fire.

  Her first shot jerked her hands wild and the slug missed Dan by a good three feet, but it was enough to get him jumping. He leaped furiously at Ling, meaning to disarm her and pin her down, and that was when, for maybe the second or third time in his life—and ask five people about those other times and you’ll get five different stories—Dan’s luck betrayed him. He caught his feet in the bundle of clothes he’d left on the floor, stumbled and fell forward to the bed, the force of his movement carrying him over much faster and harder than he’d intended. He hit Ling, and as the two of them tumbled backwards roughly, Dan heard two sounds in quick order—a stray gunshot and a snap that chilled his blood. Ling fell against the headboard with all the force needed to snap her neck.

  It can honestly be said that Dan felt a qualm of sadness at the end of the scuffle. Cold as he was, he was still human, and it’s hard for any man to feel nothing when he kills the woman with whom he has just been intimate, even if by accident. Dan did what he could to lay her out peacefully on the bed, then dressed himself and readied to leave. Before he went he spent a solid fifteen minutes kicking Chou’s head unrecognizable and cussing him a blue streak.

  The way Dan saw it, Ling’s death was all Chou’s fault for trying to rob him in the first place and keeping Ling drugged so that Dan couldn’t communicate with her when he needed to, which isn’t to say he’d seen anything wrong with that when he was a paying customer.

  The whole episode left Dan somewhat disturbed, and he took himself to the nearest saloon for a shot of whiskey to settle his nerves. By the next morning the bodies of Chou and Mr. Fairchild had been discovered, most likely by one of the sleepers in the den below in search of additional opium. The news made its way around town in short order, the most interesting bit being the report of Ling’s disappearance. From the state of the room, the constable surmised her murder, but her body could not be located. That week found more than a few men favoring the local saloon keepers as they drowned their sorrows in the bottle. Eventually the incident came back to Dan, and he didn’t bother to deny it or confirm it. The fact that he had single-handedly killed Mr. Fairchild enhanced his status as a brawler, but his refusal to explain what had happened to Ling led people to believe he’d killed her out of sheer spite. The assumption confirmed the opinions of those who labeled Dan a mean-spirited son of a bitch whose heart most closely resembled a chunk of coal.

  Such commotions were not uncommon, then, and Dan trusted that the whole event would soon cease to be an issue as people lost interest and got on with things as they always had in the past. No one stepped forward to take Dan to task, and seeing as how no witnesses offered testimony to compel the law to keep after the case, that’s exactly what happened.

  Or that’s what would’ve happened if it hadn’t been for the murder of Tom, a Chinese man with a knack for handling horses which he did for Sun Chou in return for opium. Now a dead opium eater was about as common in San Francisco as manure in a stable, and under normal circumstances, Tom’s death would not have merited much attention. But the nature of his demise was so utterly gruesome that it could not easily be overlooked, seeing as how it chilled to the bone anyone who heard its account.

  They found him in the stable where he worked and slept, suspended upside down from ropes by one ankle, his body white as salt and drained dry, his head no longer fixed to his neck. The doctor guessed several hours had passed since Tom died. All along his arms and legs glistened tracks of tiny puncture wounds, which looked as if snakes had been lined up in rows to bite him and his blood sipped carefully away from its rightful location. Piled on the floor below the body, beyond arm’s reach waited the opium that would’ve released him from his torture even as he died, cruelly taunting him with salvation he could never obtain. Even worse, Tom’s head rested beside a pile of hay, its dead eyes looking up at its body. The most unnerving detail about the entire scene emerged only when the doctor thought to elicit opinions as to how such mayhem could have been carried out while leaving but six or seven small spatters of blood on the stable floor.

  No one considered the greater implications of Tom’s murder or connected it in any way to Black Danny O’Barry until word spread of the second murder. A third soon followed.

  Tom’s death took place nearly a week after Dan’s fateful visit to Ling’s, and every other night since then, a similar killing occurred in the small hours. Each was tortured, drained of their blood, and viciously dismembered. The particulars differed—the setting, the treatment of the victim—but one thing quickly became apparent. They all had connections to Sun Chou.

  In a matter of three weeks, nearly none of Chou’s business associates remained alive, though a clever few had fled town, and hardly a soul in the city still knew the man by more than reputation. The constable took to the case night and day, but made about as much headway as he would’ve spitting into the wind. The streets stood empty after dark, and business on the waterfront fell into a true slump. The only shred of evidence he turned up were reports of a strange, green phosphorescence seen in the night in the vicinity of the murders, lending an eerie flavor to the entire episode. Some speculated Chou’s enemies meant to take over his trades. Others claimed a madman ran loose. A few even went so far as to appoint demonic forces as the culprit and warn others that the end days as described in the Good Book were justly nigh.

  Dan kept his wits and whiskey at hand.

  He realized there was a good chance that the killer meant to add him to the list of victims, as he had often enjoyed the services of Chou, with whom he had also taken part in certain unpublicized entrepreneurial ventures, linking them closer than anyone suspected. Only Dan knew the full extent of his involvement, and it was enough to make him cautious. Had anyone else known Dan’s exact situation, they would have marveled at t
he fact that he didn’t run out of town on the fastest horse he could find.

  To Dan’s way of thinking, this new wrinkle was no different from the risky life he’d become accustomed to living. So he maintained his normal routine, sleeping all day, drinking at night at Chesmire’s, and generally catering to whatever fancy popped into his whiskey-damped brain. It got to be that some people began whispering Dan’s name as the killer, so unaffected did he seem to be. But that notion proved short-lived.

  It was during this time that a preacher told Dan that the Devil had come to San Francisco to collect his own, and that given the life Dan had led, one couldn’t expect to go on forever before evil birthed into the world sought reunion with its parentage. Dan needed to repent while he was still walking under his own will, save his life, and avoid visiting that land of fire and brimstone that waited to welcome him. Dan carefully explained that since he’d never had any truck with God, he couldn’t reckon as how he could rightly associate with his counterpart, the Devil, and that even if he did, well that was just fine with him as it seemed the Devil was more agreeable to Dan’s nature than the man upstairs. And with that, Dan suggested the priest take his message out to “the heathen Chinese,” who apparently needed a great deal more “saving” than he did.

  The significance of that encounter has since been disputed. On the one hand, it may have been nothing but coincidence that brought an overzealous young preacher down among the waterfront sinners to try his hand at saving the soul universally agreed upon as the most damned on all the West Coast. On the other hand, it may have been the last touch of Dan’s luck trying to do right by its possessor. And if that’s the case it’s safe to say Dan was mostly responsible for his own fate for not having learned after all those years of hard-living just when to let his own natural good fortune steer him right. For the priest was not that far from the mark when he described Dan’s situation, though he got the specifics wrong due to his being a man of the cloth and only able to see the world in terms of God and the Devil. Had Dan known then that the hate with his name on its lips wasn’t that of an ordinary robber and that its thirst was not for his gold, he might’ve done things differently.