Chapelwood

by Cherie Priest

  “Nobody murdered them, that is correct.”

  Pedro wanted to know, “What was she like, Lizzie Borden? Do you think she killed those people?”

  “I think . . . I think that there was much more to the story than any of us will ever know,” he answered the second bit first. “As for the rest, it’s not for me to speculate. She was a small woman, average in appearance, but with a sturdy look to her—and she was stronger than you’d expect, or so I’d wager. Pleasant, well spoken, well educated. But very, very lonely. I liked what little I knew of her. I believe that she was trying hard . . . to do the right thing.”

  I thought it was a mighty strange way to sum up an axe murderess, or an alleged axe murderess, to borrow one of Chief Eagan’s expressions. Maybe he did, too, because he wound up finishing on a different note after all.

  “That said, all of this . . . her case, that other case . . . they were years and years ago. I should probably say something else instead: I hope these intervening years have treated her fairly—and she’s either found the peace she wished for, or the justice she had coming.”

  Leonard Kincaid, American Institute of Accountants (Former Member)

  BIRMINGHAM, ALABAMA SEPTEMBER 26, 1921

  The rail yard between the stationary boxcars was as dark as Chapelwood. Row by row those cars were lined up, like children’s blocks; all along the rails, sometimes eight or ten cars deep they sat. Many of them were packed with freight, stopped at this junction in order to switch engines or find themselves redirected elsewhere, but many of them were empty, too. Hobos knew about them, and they camped inside some of the better ones.

  I had to avoid those hobos when I caught wind of them, either by their tin-can cookery and small fires, or their mumbled conversations held upon the couplers, over a bottle of whatever booze was cheapest and easiest to get.

  I also had to avoid the rail yard men, though by that hour there weren’t so many of them. They were guards who took their guarding duties only semi-seriously—tired men, most of them, who’d rather be home in bed by midnight than stuck on the graveyard shift.

  Mostly they ignored the boxcar men, but sometimes they engaged them, trading cigarettes for news or letters. Rarely, if things got too rowdy or a fight broke out, they’d separate the participants and boot them from the grounds.

  Here and there a dog barked . . . at me, or at another dog, or at a man with a can of beans who might be persuaded to share. The dogs were not really guard dogs; they were only part of the background scenery, part of this weird and clandestine community that survived between the cracks.

  So too was Lorna Weeks.

  The women who’d sell themselves down by the boxcars . . . they weren’t there by preference, and there weren’t too many of them. It was a last stop of sorts; I could see that when I watched from the shadows. These were the lowest men, and lower still were the women who scavenged there among them. They traded in favors more than cash, and sometimes alcohol or cigarettes. They were sick, or addicted to something they could no longer afford. They were not women with options.

  It is true, I pitied them. I pity anyone without options.

  It is also true that I found them revolting. Not only the whores, but likewise the filthy men who watched them from the corners with their narrowed, bloodshot eyes. Some may have been merely unlucky, and fallen to a place where, like the women, they’d exhausted all other paths. Since I could not tell from looking who might be virtuous and who might be a criminal, I tried to give them each the benefit of a doubt even as I veered far away from any contact. Still, their odors settled and wafted between the lines—the reek of unwashed bodies and smoke, of illicit gin and rotten food. I felt the fog of it work into my hair and sink into my skin. The virtuous and the criminal all smelled alike to me.

  But I had a task.

  An unpleasant one, made all the more unpleasant by the surroundings. I tried to take comfort in knowing that Miss Weeks would be an easy capture, and her disappearance would be unlikely to make the news; and for that matter, I was nearly doing her a favor by removing her from this miserable life to which she clung, if barely. But try as I might to wring some good feeling from my excuses, I failed on every front.

  I watched for her from behind the station house, a good vantage point for the comings and goings of the folks and creatures who wandered in and out of the rail yard property.

  There was very little light. Only a few gas fixtures, and most of those were behind me, or at the edges of the fenced-off zones. Here and there, tiny fires were lit but closely guarded, and they were no help to me. Everything was black, so very black . . . that I looked up in case I might spot the moon or some useful glint of stars, but there was nothing at all up there. It might as well have been a well-washed blackboard.

  I thought of this comparison, and when I checked the sky a second time I could almost see my own handwriting inscribed upon it—my own sums, tallies, and figures with tiny notes of script slotted throughout. I watched the numbers wink in and out like the stars should have done, and it unnerved me.

  I closed my eyes and shook it all away.

  Except that when I opened my eyes again, the sky was still abnormally flat, and I felt like it was pressing down low, a smothering pillow held down upon my face. My scrawling script was gone, but the sense of menace remained.

  I wished to shake that away, too, but it wouldn’t leave and I couldn’t leave—not yet. Not until I’d found and killed and disposed of Lorna Weeks.

  I didn’t know what she looked like, but that didn’t matter. It hadn’t mattered in the last four or five killings, either; I could find them whether or not I had any description. This was one of the new skills I’d learned . . . or no, not a skill. More like a power, I should say.

  No amount of practice could teach a man to spy a coal black aura, the tendrils of something reaching through from someplace else, eager to claim a prize it felt it must be owed.

  I theorized that these smokelike edges, these grasping hands that weren’t hands—and had no fingers—had appeared and grown stronger around my recent victims because the thing on the other side was growing aggravated with me. I was stealing its spoils, if that’s what these people are. Its sacrifices, or its prey . . . I don’t know. It wants them, and it feels that it deserves them, and I won’t let it have them.

  Or else this is all conjecture.

  Or else . . . I’ve begun to hear God speaking after all, and this is what He says, and we Christians have misunderstood a great many things about Our Father, Who Art in Heaven. I hope we have not misunderstood. I hope it is something else I’m hearing, and I hope it is no god. I would sooner die than serve it, whatever it is. I would sooner kill.

  I spotted her when she came down past the station house, pausing beside an open boxcar. She asked a quiet question of someone inside, but I didn’t hear it. She nodded, then turned and limped away. Was she injured, or simply slowed by the coiling tendrils of living shadow that tangled between her feet like an eager cat? I could see them, these things even blacker than this cool, flat night down in the rail yards; I watched them tie themselves around her ankles, crawling up her shins, throttling her thighs beneath the old cotton dress she wore with a shawl to top it off. I saw them better than I saw any details of her appearance—her hair’s style or color, her age, the shape of her body.

  I saw only that she moved with a measure of difficulty, and that she would be easy to catch.

  She vanished into a block of cars parked on the lines. I wasn’t worried. She left a trail, not a scent exactly—not like the stink of old boots and stale beer—but more like a humming noise, but not a noise at all. This residue was a physical thing, and I could touch it.

  I crouched down in her wake and, yes, there it was: a rivulet of chilly air, fluttering where her feet had passed. I dipped my fingers into it, ran them through it. When I withdrew them, they were cold and a little bit wet. />
  Wherever the other thing lives, this is what it feels like there. Or maybe it’s not a home, exactly. It could be, this creature, this god, this interloper . . . it waits in some intermediary spot between earth and heaven. Or no, not heaven.

  The distant reach of space, that would be closer to what I mean.

  • • •

  As of late, I have pondered the great astronomers and their great debates. I have heard the arguments on both sides, and I feel that they wildly miss some larger point—that these are only the same things our ancestors asked, when the church told them to stop asking. The question is no longer, does the sun revolve around the Earth? The question has become, does the universe revolve around our solar system? Or our celestial neighborhood? Or our galaxy?

  Stupid, stupid, stupid—this insatiable demand to be at the center of something.

  Better to stay on the fringes, I say; rest on some outer ring or spiral of some small, insignificant corner of the infinite. And if we are very lucky, and if there is a greater space than infinity to hide us, then perhaps the terrible things on the other side of our universe will never take notice of us at all.

  Unless they are summoned by the likes of the idiot reverend, and his idiot followers.

  Fine, then. We have their attention. Perhaps I can persuade them to lose interest. It’s really all I can hope for.

  • • •

  I followed after Lorna with slow, quiet steps—my pants raised up above my socks so that I could follow her by the chilly vapor that trailed her, without stooping or drawing unwanted attention to myself. I used no light, and I kept my weapon the same simple piece I used at the start of this awful string of missions.

  (I did not wear black, but a dark brown that served well enough to conceal me in the shadows. It also did a fine job of hiding any bloodstains or spatters; in the evening, even under the brightest streetlights, no one would know the difference. Black might have been more thorough, but men who wear black are up to something. Or that’s the popular assessment.)

  The small hairs on my legs prickled and perked, dusted by the slick, icy mist.

  It was colder and colder as I grew closer and closer—the very opposite of the children’s guessing game. The stuff felt thicker and almost difficult to wade through, and I could see it so vividly (almost a shining black, almost a slick color that glinted, though there was no light at all). I watched it, and I listened for Lorna.

  I smelled her cigarette smoke, and only noticed it as an afterthought.

  I turned a corner and there she was. Smoking, leaning, her eyes closed as if her head ached and maybe it did. What a happy day, if I could do her the kindness of freeing her from such headaches, such a life. No, not happy. No, I was only lying to myself, and I don’t know why. It didn’t make the task any more pleasant, and it wasn’t the lies that made it easier. It was easier due to simple practice.

  She heard me, and then she saw me.

  She sniffed a coil of smoke up one nostril, smoke so white compared to the smoke around her legs. It was higher than that, I saw—now that I stood almost near enough to touch her. It had scaled her thighs and it settled around her hips, a pernicious fog that must’ve made her customers shudder.

  I wondered, could they feel it? Could they see it? Or is it only me? I had never yet had anyone else to ask, so I had no other experience to compare mine with.

  If she felt, or sensed, or was bothered by the weird shadow, she showed no sign of it.

  “You’re not one of the rail boys,” she said. Her voice was rocks and cinders, raked together after a fire.

  “No. Not one of them.”

  “Then what do you want?”

  Could she see me, beyond a mere outline of a man? Could she tell that I reached slowly toward my jacket, to get a firm grip on the axe handle? “A moment of your time.”

  “Can you pay for it?”

  “Of course.” I nodded. And then, I don’t know why, but I blurted it out: “I want to know about the black fog that follows you.”

  She sucked on the cigarette, a hand-rolled affair that was sloppily, lumpily created. The tiny burst of light showed her eyes going wide; then they settled back down to suspicious slits. “You’re drunk.”

  “No. And you’re lying, I can see that now. You know it’s there. You know what’s coming.” Such conviction I felt, just from that split moment of a reaction, when I asked her. She might not have known what it was, but she knew it was there. I couldn’t tell if she was afraid of it or not. I couldn’t tell if she was afraid of me.

  She dropped the cigarette and it fizzled to extinction upon contact with the pooling wet shadow that surrounded her shoes. We were in darkness again, but I knew that she didn’t need the light any more than I did. She made some shifting gesture that I couldn’t see, but it was fast.

  I made some shifting gesture, and maybe she couldn’t see it. But I was fast.

  The axe was in my hand and I hoped—and suspected from experience—that she would turn away and run, but that’s not what happened. She lunged for me! In her hand she had a weapon, too. It was a blade, the slender, sharp sort the Italians prefer for their violence, if the papers can be believed. (They can’t. I know they can’t, but I read them anyway.)

  She only winged me, catching a slice of my jacket. She struck again and cut across my knuckles, but it wasn’t deep, it was only hot and painful—because she caught me on the down stroke of my own fierce swing. Too weak or too slow to deflect me, I’d hit her, but the hit went lower than I liked. It caught her in the neck, somewhere between her collarbone and her throat. Soft tissue. Messy stuff, and gruesome to wound . . . but not enough to stop a determined enough victim.

  She slashed and sliced again, grunting and staggering. She nicked my wrist, and that was all.

  I grabbed her hand and twisted, and she dropped the knife. I spun her around with a yank. I swung the axe again, and this time, I heard it bang dully against bone. It landed wetly, heavily, behind her ears and above them.

  She fell to her knees and the smoke roiled and billowed, as if it wanted to fight me for her.

  Too late for that. I struck, and struck, and struck, sending bits of brain and bone flying, I know. I felt the spatter on my face, and heard it land against my collar. I felt my hands growing slick with it. My grip faltered, and I was winded.

  The cold fog quivered, and rallied to cover her. Then it drained away, vanishing as if it’d never been present at all—spilled back into the ground or back into the ether or wherever it went, as easily as blood washed down a drain.

  Inspector Simon Wolf

  BIRMINGHAM, ALABAMA SEPTEMBER 26, 1921

  Last night, I had dinner with the Gussmans.

  It was delicious, for starters; informative, for latters; and thought-provoking all the while. They are so afraid, bless them. They are lost in their own city, hiding from their own families. And, unsurprisingly, they are not entirely prepared to trust the goodwill of an outsider like me. Ruth (in particular) told me plenty . . . but she probably kept even more to herself. If she had nothing to hide, she wouldn’t be so exceedingly careful about what she reveals.

  Something is amiss in Alabama, that much is certain. This investigation of mine may prove useful to us yet, and the Quiet Society may well commend me for taking the time to visit.

  I ought to say, there’s plenty more than one something amiss. Chapelwood, the axe deaths, Father Coyle’s murder. Three components, related by proximity and context, and I want to believe there’s something else, too, though it’s difficult to say. The three come up together in conversation again and again, so closely aligned in the thoughts of everyone who knows anything about any of them.

  As I walked back to my hotel room, I pondered what connection might bind them.

  Yes, I walked. I’d realized how close they lived to my quarters, and the night was cool enough that I didn’t fee
l overburdened by the perambulation. I wanted to know the city better, anyway—I wanted to walk around it, smell it, sense it for myself. Everything I’d gleaned so far was hearsay at best, secondhand gossip at worst. I had much to learn. Much to think about.

  Aggravatingly, I kept finding ways to pin two of my three quandaries together, but nothing firm to hang them all upon.

  Edwin Stephenson was a member of the Chapelwood congregation, and likewise he was the killer of Father Coyle. The axe murders were committed against Catholics (initially, predominantly), and the Chapelwood congregation harbors an unhealthy hatred toward Catholics. But Father Coyle wasn’t subjected to anyone’s hatchet, and there’s nothing connecting Stephenson to the other murders, either . . . except by distant proxy, via his congregation.

  It’s a thin string. It would break with the slightest tension.

  And, I was forced to conclude, I was only tying Stephenson into the other two because I hated him. It’s not a kind or fair thing, to hate a man before ever setting eyes on him—not ordinarily. But this was a man who’d terrorized his own family and murdered a friend of mine.

  In all reality, he probably shot the priest because he was furious about his daughter’s impromptu elopement. A gun is a weapon of opportunity, of rashness and anger. It’s not the tool of a complicated plot, or a peculiar sect. It’s not a thing that requires much forethought or manipulation.

  Having come to this assessment, I forced myself to remove that man from the equation. If Coyle’s murder was a separate thing, much as I’d prefer it wasn’t . . . then the axe murders and Chapelwood still remained.

  Were they tethered purely by circumstance? Or was there something more driven and sinister behind them both?

  I walked past a newspaper stand. An older fellow was closing it down for the night, clearing away the day’s papers and making way for the new ones, which would arrive in another eight hours or so. I bought one off him anyway, for the news was only a little late—and I didn’t much care. I’d only made it through half the paper that morning, and now I needed the second half. If I wanted to learn about the local situation, I should start with the local news.