“‘The darkness is mine,’” Canby said.
“What’s that you say?”
“‘The black sky is mine and I will see you in it.’ That’s what he said. Hell if he will.”
“Not following you, captain.”
“You can slow it down at Calhoun Street. Stop it there, in fact. Get me as close to the Dixie Light station as you can.”
“That’s close by the roundhouse.”
“Then I guess you’ll have made your run for the night.”
“What’s the power station got to do with that crazy bastard on the horse?”
“He owns Dixie Light. And he’s going to try to shut it all off.”
CANBY WAS ACROSS Calhoun and midway up the steps of Dixie Light—hurrying through the white light and grateful to hear the slender lines still humming above him—when the power was cut off. He thought he could hear the crackle of the electric current running past him, dying, chased by the silence racing in its wake down the lines from the station and out to the farthest reaches of its circuit as the lines went dead. He turned and looked out toward Oglethorpe Park, which was now as black as the countryside beyond it. He imagined he heard a collective gasp as the exposition went dark, but he dismissed the notion. But a few seconds later he heard, no questioning it, screaming, then more screams, a crescendo of them, coming from the park.
Yet the windows of Kimball House still glowed with the mellow cheer of gaslight, as did the blocks fanning out from the hotel to the roundhouse. Canby paused at the top of the steps, listening. He heard a grating sound, metal on metal, coming from the basement of Dixie Light. He was reaching for the building’s door when the lights at Kimball House flickered, then went out in a quick succession from the street level to its top floor. Grid by grid, the city’s streetlights shut down in waves of spreading darkness. In a moment Atlanta was darker than he’d seen it since the nights of the siege.
He felt his way down the side of the building, counting out six paces away from the door, willing his eyes to adjust to the darkness and wishing the scant moon would rise higher. He was crouching down, the Marlin raised in front of him, when the door to the building burst open.
What emerged from Dixie Light was blacker than the darkness around it. For a moment Canby did not recognize the figure as human. But he saw as it moved into Calhoun Street that it was indeed a man, upright and walking on his toes, completely black, glistening in the faint light. Canby’s hands shook as he raised the rifle, but he steadied the sights on the center of its back and fired.
It stopped and turned in the center of the street and Canby saw its eyes. They were the only points on the blackened body that gave back any light. Covered in the horse’s blood, Canby thought, figuring that Billingsley had smeared himself with the dark matter for camouflage, concealment in the night’s dark. As he shucked the Marlin’s lever he saw, too, a flash of the broken teeth, white against the inky blackness, then the figure wheeled and plunged down Marietta Street toward the roundhouse. He fired once more then took off after it.
The night-shift mechanics who had gathered outside the roundhouse scattered before the dark apparition barreling up Marietta Street toward them. Only one remained when Canby reached the great building. The man pointed to its cavernous interior with a shaking hand.
“What the hell was that, mister?”
“We need light. Is there any light?”
“There’s the furnace.”
“Throw it open. Fire it full-out,” Canby said as he moved into the shadows.
“What the hell was that?” the man said again.
Inside the roundhouse was a cacophony of unseen motion. In spite of the darkness, the building shook with the vibrations of the rails and the tonnages of steel that groaned on them, locomotives and boxcars grinding to a stop as the blackout stalled them, the smell of hot metal mingling with the acrid scents of creosote and cinders. Canby picked his way over the rails and crossties, every footstep in the gravel seeming to announce his position, until he made his way to the plank floor that formed the edge of the mechanics’ workshop. He moved more slowly now, remembering the pit that marked dead center of old Terminus, where the rails came together in a pentacle of steel. It was here that the trains were turned and in the dugout beneath the center that the mechanics accessed the undersides of the cars and engines. The men had left their tools scattered in disarray across the floor when the gas had been shut off and he nearly stumbled over a toolbox as he circled the pit and he heard a movement below him and fired at the sound of it.
In the muzzle flash he caught sight of Billingsley crouched and blackened in the pit and saw that his shot had gone wide. He chambered another round and fired again, the rifle at his hip now, and saw that Billingsley was closing the distance between them. He fired again and saw in this flash that one of Billingsley’s arms hung limp at his side, and as he worked the lever again he felt his ankle grasped as though in a vise and his leg was pulled out from beneath him.
Canby hit the boards with force enough to knock the wind from him and the burns on his back sang out in pain. He worked the rifle down along his leg and fired it again, then rolled onto his stomach as he felt the hand on his ankle begin to pull him downward. His fingers played across the boards, seeking purchase, and he had nearly caught his fingertips in a gap in the boards when he felt something tear into his leg.
Canby screamed and the pain intensified, a clamping and wrenching, twisting. He felt the hand moving over his leg and realized that his calf was being chewed by the broken teeth. He felt something give in one of his muscles. For a second the pain lessened, then the ripping came again, higher up this time, and Canby was writhing on the boards. His hands flailed and as he felt himself beginning to go over the lip of the pit his right hand settled on a wooden handle and he lifted it and swung it into the source of his pain.
The grip on his ankle and the tearing went away. He sat up on the edge of the pit, legs dangling over it, and gathered his weapon in his lap. He felt of it. Some kind of mallet. One end of its head was peened and the other, flatter side was slicked with blood. He was raising it to strike again when he heard the squealing of hinges and the hulking forms of the engines and boxcars sprung forth from the dark roundhouse. He looked behind him and saw that the mechanic had flung open the furnace and was shoveling coal into it, showers of yellow sparks and orange light pouring out of the furnace door.
The pit was bathed in flickering light and shadow. Billings ley was down in it, down on one knee, his good hand pressed against his blackened face. Freshets of blood poured from his open mouth. Canby dropped into the pit and began to circle him. Billingsley was trying to work his jaw, but the mallet had broken the bone past functioning. The left side of it hung loose in the ripped flesh as though it had been shot away. With every clenching of it came a clicking sound and another spurt of blood. He looked up at Canby, his jaw working its strange new circuit, guttural sounds coming from behind the cracked and broken teeth. His eyes flashed in anger and pain.
“Speak, Malthus,” Canby said.
He brought the mallet down with both hands gripping its shaft and the full force of his weight behind the blow. Billingsley’s head came apart at the stitches the doctors had sewn into it, the plates of the skull separating. Canby raised the hammer and struck again. And again.
His arm had begun to waver, flagging with fatigue, when the mechanics pulled him off Billingsley’s ragged body and carried him to the roundhouse office. There, under the light of the yardmaster’s green-shaded lamp, they doctored his wounded leg with kerosene and wrapped it tightly. Then wiped the blood from his face and arms. After some time, nursing the pint of whiskey they’d given him, Canby was aware that the gaslights had come back on and that the trains were moving through the roundhouse again, the iron horses that graced the city’s seal rumbling through Terminus and back out into the southern night again. He watched the trains come and go, watched the nimble hustle of the mechanics and flagmen and signalmen stepping li
ghtly over the rails and crossties, moving unscathed among the steaming and clanking machinery that dwarfed them. All of them going about their business as though the bloody-sheeted corpse laid outside the office were not there, had never been there.
Atlanta, he thought, just before the fatigue and the wounds and the whiskey claimed him, his head nodding. Restored to her timetables. It did his soul good to see it.
VERNON THOUGHT that the evening’s breeze, though cold, held all the elements of a perfect Georgia night. It carried on it the reassuring tide of people-noise above the crowded exhibits, the music of the calliope piping from the east end of Oglethorpe Park, the myriad good odors that the food vendors sent up into the night air. And he savored, best of all, what was not in it: the shrieking of police whistles, cries of alarm.
Yet still there was this crowd of gawkers that surrounded Sherman and the entourage like a cloud of mosquitoes. Vernon hung close to the general’s elbow, but Underwood had been pushed back now to the periphery by Grady and the men of prominence. Every one of them wanted a word with Sherman. Grady making sure that none of Atlanta’s or the I.C.E.’s virtues escaped the general’s notice; Kimball and his circle leaning close to the man’s ear, no doubt pressing further investment ventures. All of them flushed by close proximity to this celebrity, faces lit up like jack-o’-lanterns. And the autograph-seeking boys dashing up out of the crowd constantly, dozens of them.
They passed the last of the industrial buildings. Ahead of them, at the park’s western edge, lay the racetrack. It was now ringed by what Kimball had dubbed “Horticultural Avenue,” a collection of flowering plants and shrubbery of which only the azaleas were native, and many of which, Vernon thought, would not likely survive this night’s frost. A brass band of a dozen musicians was lined up on the track, in the blue and green uniforms of the exposition staff. The conductor, spying Sherman in the crowd, raised his baton above a braided shoulder and the band broke into “Dixie.” Knees raised high, the band members began a prancing circuit around the track. Apparently the conductor had an ironic sense of humor, Vernon thought. Or an ax yet to grind. But just a few bars into the song the man signaled again and the horns segued into “The Star-Spangled Banner.” Vernon did not need to turn his head to see that Grady was smiling.
Then it all went dark.
The sounds followed the light. Behind him, Vernon heard the calliope wheeze into silence, and out front the brass horns fell off, one after another, in sputtering decrescendo. Then there was scattered noise: the nervous laughter of the women and the muttering of men fumbling for matches. The procession halted.
Vernon pulled a match out of his jacket pocket and struck it with his thumbnail. Other matches began to flare and he saw a new face working its way through the ranks of the autograph-seekers. Vernon felt some stirring of his memory as he regarded the boy, sorting through the inventory of faces he’d stored over a long career. The boy smiled at Vernon and he realized that though the boy’s hair was black as pitch, the eyebrows were white. He studied the distinction as the match’s flame ebbed down into a steady glow, and he was watching the face as a bead of sweat ran down the side of its forehead, in spite of the night’s chill. The sweat ran black as a woman’s makeup through tears.
The boy stepped closer, and as he raised a hand with a paper in it the smile on his face twisted into a snarl of rage beyond his years. The breeze lifted the paper away and Vernon saw that it had covered a derringer, which the boy raised higher as he pressed through the crowd toward Sherman.
Underwood stepped forward.
WHILE THE SHOT was still echoing in Grady’s ears, and his eyes were fixed on the black man on the ground, the others of the Ring were in his face, at his ear, his elbow.
“We can’t let this get out, Henry.”
“God, this is worse than Greenberg.”
“What will Chicago say?”
“We are so close, Henry.”
And above it all he could hear Hannibal Kimball shouting to the crowd: “Just a child’s popgun, ladies and gentlemen! No cause for alarm!” over and over while the Negro detective whose name he could not remember lay bleeding on the exposition turf. It was the first serious violence Grady had ever seen close-up and the amount of blood that was flowing from the black man’s upper arm was staggering. And the expression on the child’s face—the grimace, Grady thought—just as he let off the shot and as he turned to run through the crowd with one of the policemen behind him. Grady felt overwhelmed.
“We still have a month to go, Henry. Think about attendance.”
“You can bury the story, or not run it at all.”
“It doesn’t have to get out.”
Grady looked around him at the faces of Atlanta’s first citizens, the expression on his own face like that of a man pulled abruptly from an unpleasant dream.
“An ambulance,” Grady said.
“What?”
The crowd was now, at Kimball’s urging, moving away. Bearing with it General Sherman away from the scene, to safety. No one had moved to assist the black man where he lay writhing on the ground.
“An ambulance, I said.”
The others looked at him in bewilderment.
“Gentlemen,” Grady said, waving a hand at the backs of the departing crowd, then at Underwood where he lay, “is this what we want for our Atlanta?”
IT WAS THE silence that woke him. Canby started from the chair and then winced at the burst of pain from his calf, looked around the roundhouse, and saw that it was still, the trains mute hulks on the tracks. The body was still where it had been laid out but all the railroad workers were gone. Nothing in motion but the pulsing glow of the great furnace. Then he caught the scent of cigar smoke on the night air.
“Found you sleeping on the job, didn’t I?”
“Vernon?”
Vernon stepped out of the darkness at the edge of the W&A platform. “I hear you got our man.”
Canby nodded. “Where is everyone?”
“On break until the eleven o’clock trains come through. Courtesy of the Atlanta P.D. You and I have one last bit of business here.” He moved through the shop with his cigar clamped in his teeth, sorting through the tools and oil cans, until he found a pair of railroad gloves. He pulled them on and walked to the furnace, pulled its door open.
“What do you aim to do?”
Vernon walked over to the body and squatted beside it. He lifted the sheet and stared down at the broken face for a moment, his expression stern, chewing on the cigar.
“You gave him hell, didn’t you?”
“He had it coming.”
Vernon nodded and dropped the sheet. “In spades. Come help me with this.”
Canby found himself loath to touch the corpse. He took an ankle in each hand and hoisted and they lurched with it to the furnace. At the open door, Vernon looked at Canby and nodded, wincing at the blast of heat. They heaved the body in.
It crumpled upon itself as the head went into the coals, bending nearly double. The sheet caught fire and the flames began to lick around it and the outline of the body came clear, blackening, the blood smeared on it beginning to crackle and peel. When they could smell burning flesh Vernon shut the door and latched it.
“And that’s an end to that,” Vernon said. He took off the gloves and dropped them to the ground. He tapped the ash from the end of his cigar and looked at Canby. “Probably headed for the exhibition when you got him.”
“Likely so.”
“Johnny Drew was there.”
“According to plan,” Canby said.
“In the flesh. Right after the electric cut out. Little black-haired boy like any other. Came out of the crowd as they do, out front of the Exhibition Hall. Black-haired, I said, or else I’d have known the bishop’s son. But, Thomas, as this boy comes closer, I see his brow is slick with sweat, spite of the cold, then a bead of it runs down his cheek, black as coal. Underwood saw it, too.
“Little single-shot derringer, it was. Popped off a ro
und meant for General Sherman but Underwood was there. He took it in the arm.”
Vernon saw the concern in Canby’s face. “Underwood will be all right. I sent him down to Doctor Johnston’s clinic.”
Canby nodded. “What about John Drew?”
“Disappeared into the crowd. Maddox was right behind him.”
“Maddox better be careful.”
“Always is. He’s got him collared by now, I wager.”
“And how will the prosecution of that case be handled?”
Vernon looked weary. “God knows,” he said. Then he raised his eyes to Canby’s. “You’ve not mentioned Julia.”
Canby shook his head.
Vernon took in a long breath. “I don’t know what to say.”
“There’s not much to be said. She’s gone.”
Vernon took Canby’s shoulders in his hands.
“It’s all a bunch of shite in the end.”
“No. It is not. That’s no fit benediction for that good woman’s life.”
Canby felt his throat hitch. He fought it back by thinking of the body in the furnace. “I’ve got nothing left.”
“Yes, you do. There’s the difference between you and Julia. And Angus. And that bastard,” he said, jerking a thumb toward the furnace, “whose name I’ll not speak aloud. You’re alive.”
He clapped Canby’s shoulders, softly. “I’ll wait for you outside.”
Canby watched his old friend walk out of the roundhouse, feeling certain that Vernon would have the hansom waiting at the curb, that he’d be able to sleep for a week, if he needed it, at the house on Butler. Then he picked up the gloves Vernon had dropped and opened the furnace. The flesh was burning away from the body. Its skull was now peeled of skin, the broken dome of it blackening in the bed of coals. Malthus subsiding to ash.
He shut the door and walked out into the night.
November 20
The Scribe Page 21