The Curse of Jacob Tracy: A Novel Read online

  Why was he surprised? Was he surprised? No, but he was madly curious as to what her game might be. “As a matter of fact, I just took a job with her myself. In fact I might’ve mentioned I had some other folks waitin to hear back from me about a guide job, so I’m not surprised if she took it on herself to pay your way. That’s just the kind of thing she’d do.”

  Kingsley beamed. “Well! Isn’t it Providential how these things work out? One good soul doing a turn for another, and all for the grace of God!”

  “Amen,” Trace said solemnly, and was interested to see a twist of amusement on Miss Eliza’s lips. She lowered her gaze and converted the smirk into a serene smile.

  “Well, I won’t keep you then,” Kingsley said. “I’m just relieved to know you haven’t been put in a state of privation by our change of plans. And I did take all of your cautions about rail travel into account. In fact I have some misgivings about acquiring supplies, once we reach Idaho, and I had half-hoped you might be persuaded to accompany us…”

  Kingsley went on talking, but his voice grew dim in Trace’s ears: at the word Idaho it was as if a cold fog had swarmed in around him, blotting out the comfortable clutter of Jameson’s store, and the air gone thin, chill, like the atmosphere in the mountains. Darkness filled his senses, and fire, and the sounds of people screaming and the snarling of beasts, and Kingsley’s face contorted before him, mouth full of blood—

  Trace gripped the edge of the counter and bowed from the waist. He gave his head a violent shake, and the screaming and the fog cleared, let him go.

  “Are you all right, Mr. Tracy?” Miss Eliza’s voice was alarmed.

  “Oh dear,” Kingsley said. “Did I say something untoward? But then I am taking up far too much of your time—”

  “No, no,” Trace said. “Don’t mind me. Just remembered … um, old battle memories. What route did you say you were takin, to Idaho?”

  * * *

  TRACE HAD NEVER before called at Miss Fairweather’s house without being summoned, so he wasn’t sure what kind of reception to expect, but Min Chan didn’t bat an eye. He ushered Trace inside and led him up to the laboratory in the attic.

  Miss Fairweather was wiping her hands on a towel as he breached the floor of the workroom, brows knit as she looked him over. She wore a bespeckled apron, and her sleeves were rolled up. He glanced at the table behind her; there was something bloody and flayed, stretched out in a cork-lined tray.

  “You are quite well?” she asked, once the courtesies were exchanged. “No importunate spirits loitering about, no demon possessions?”

  “No ma’am. Been pretty quiet, last couple weeks.”

  “No … unfamiliar persons attempting to make your acquaintance? Ingratiating themselves with you or Mr. Bosley?”

  “Just the opposite. Had some people runnin away from my company.”

  “I beg your pardon?”

  “I met with a man named Kingsley today,” Trace said, watching her face.

  “Oh?” Miss Fairweather’s brows lifted politely. He would have suspected nothing except her pale eyes riveted to his—suddenly cool, and focused.

  “Yes ma’am. In fact I’d been tryin to meet up with him for a couple weeks, but we kept missin each other.” Trace found himself lapsing into the exaggerated drawl he used around other working men, in deliberate challenge to her well-spoken mendacity. “Kingsley’s a missionary, wanted to hire me an’ Boz to lead his people out to Montana. But when I saw him today, he tells me some wealthy spinster lady gave him a big donation to take his congregation by train, instead.”

  “How fortunate for them,” Miss Fairweather said, as if butter wouldn’t melt in her mouth. “Especially since you were already engaged elsewhere.”

  “Yes ma’am, I told them that. But then a strange thing happened. As he was tellin me the route they planned to take, I got this vision of Kingsley bloody and dyin, and somethin … attacking them, up there in the mountains.” Trace felt his throat and chest tighten, as his annoyance with her was blotted out by a larger concern for the Baptists—and a certain exhilaration at what he had seen. “Somethin bad’s gonna happen out there. I saw it. I know it.”

  She stared at him, big-eyed, and then inhaled swiftly. “You had a premonition.” Her body swayed toward him, and for a heartbeat he thought she was going to throw her arms around him, but she controlled herself, pressing her hands beneath her bosom. “This is the first time? How long did it last? How clear was it?”

  “Pretty clear,” Trace said, as she spun away and crossed to the nearest trestle table. “I mean I couldn’t see the terrain, it was dark, but it felt like the Rockies, the air and the sky looked like mountain country. And there was somethin attackin people, like animals—”

  He broke off as he got close enough to see the map spread on the table, and her markings on it: long lines of railways, and an erratic march of red X’s from Utah up into Idaho, to a point just south of the continental divide. Trace knew the area fairly well; he’d spent several years working cattle in southern Wyoming before his marriage.

  “This is the proposed path of the Utah and Northern railway to Butte, Montana.” Miss Fairweather’s thin white finger tapped the map. “In the past five weeks there have been several mauling deaths in the workers’ camps. The railroad managers blame it on Indians or wild animals, but the attacks are too random for the former, too well organized for the latter.”

  She thrust a newspaper toward him. The headline read ANIMAL ATTACKS THREATEN RAILROAD’S PROGRESS.

  “According to this, the Chinese laborers have a superstitious fear of whatever is causing the attacks. The reporter was familiar enough with their language and customs to extract the term ‘keung-si’ from a survivor.” She pursed her lips. “It means ‘hopping corpse.’”

  “Which means what, exactly?”

  “I cannot say what, exactly, it means in this context. I have spent the last several days monitoring spirit activity in that area, and it does appear something supernatural is haunting that railway camp. But I don’t believe the attacks are the result of demonic influence. I believe there is something corporeal hunting the workers.”

  “A hopping corpse?” Trace said dubiously.

  “If one digs deeply enough into superstition and folklore, one tends to find kernels of truth. I believe your Christian mythology is full of stories about corpses being preserved, appearing lifelike long after death?”

  “Those were saints.”

  “And they are not the only examples. Nearly every culture in the world has a myth about deceased persons returning to prey on the living. Some drink the blood of their kin. Others suck out their souls. And in every system of primitive magic, there are myriad rituals for deterring such creatures.” She pulled toward her a stack of papers and pamphlets. “Only in so-called civilized areas, where our cities are increasingly well-lit, do we feel safe enough to make monsters into figures of comedy and entertainment.”

  The booklet she held out to him was yellowing and brittle. It showed a man in a greatcoat, the capes ruffled like crow’s feathers, his face distorted in an animal grin as he menaced the young lady beside him. Varney the Vampyre was the title.

  “A case in point,” Miss Fairweather said. “That particular drivel was serialized for three years, widely read by the masses in London.”

  Trace flipped through the little book. The illustrations were lurid. “So what’re you doin with it?”

  “Merely being thorough. I have an interest in rare diseases, for reasons you might deduce—particularly those that resemble anemia, or malnutrition. In many cases a simple change of diet will effect a cure, but until one understands the missing nutrient, such an illness might well appear to be the result of evil spirits. Or hopping corpses.”

  Trace had the feeling she was hopping around the subject herself. “So you’re interested in whatever’s out there attackin the workers, because you think it’s related to your … uh, condition?”

  She hesitated. “Not directl
y related, no. However, my own illness has a mystical component, and there are precious few references in the current medical journals. I must therefore chase down every possible lead.”

  Aha, Trace thought. “So you were thinkin to send me out there, to fetch you back a specimen.”

  “No!” Miss Fairweather looked at him in alarm, and actually laid a hand on his sleeve, before jerking it back as if he were too hot to touch. “No, I do not advise you to go anywhere near that area or those creatures. I would not have you risk yourself like that, whatever you may think of me.”

  “But you don’t mind sendin the Baptists out there to get slaughtered?”

  “I did not send them anywhere. I only provided the financial means to go by rail. They chose the route, and it appears they chose poorly.”

  “But if you knew there was somethin nasty out there—”

  “I did not know, until a few days ago.”

  “You know now,” Trace said.

  That stopped her cold. She stared at him, big-eyed. “Is that why you came up here? To get my sanction on some foolish heroic venture?”

  “Well I hadn’t thought of it that way, but I did think maybe you had some insight on why I had this vision. And come to find out, you know more than you let on … as usual.”

  She licked her lips. “Mr. Tracy, I do not hold back information merely to be perverse. There are things … I believe you would find your ideologies incompatible with certain truths—”

  “If that means I won’t stand by knowin those people are ridin into danger, you’re right. And what was that you told me a couple weeks ago, about the good work we could do together?”

  Miss Fairweather’s jaw clenched, and Trace felt a glint of satisfaction. He could see her struggling with herself—her plans for him, whatever they were, versus his unexpected volition.

  “You are too valuable,” she said, her voice strained. “I have been searching for someone—for a psychic like you, for so long…”

  That needy—no, hungry look was back in her face. The intensity of it repelled him. It was in his nature to want to help people when he could, but the darkness in her was so vast and single-minded, he thought it might consume him, if he let himself get drawn into it.

  “Well, I’m goin.” It seemed safer, ironically. “So if you know somethin that can help, best hand it over now.”

  * * *

  TRACE WAITED UNTIL noon to go see Boz at the slaughter yards. When the skinners and bung-hole men broke for dinner, Trace skirted the sea of blood and shit and sawdust, until he spied his partner’s long lean frame at the edge of the kill-pits. Boz had leaned his sledgehammer against a rail of the cattle-chute, and was using the edge of one hand to slick some of the blood and brains from his face.

  “Here,” Trace said, holding out his handkerchief over the rail.

  Boz turned, eyed Trace in his clean black suit, took the rag and wiped the lower half of his face in one hard gummy pass. “You been up to bow to Her Worship, I take it.”

  It had been a little more than a week since Trace had come home and announced he was taking Miss Fairweather’s retainer. Boz had said little about it, then or since; he had merely disappeared one morning and come back that night covered in beef blood.

  “Got a job at the stockyards,” he’d announced: tit for tat. The stink in their rooms had been a more lingering retaliation.

  “I met the Baptist this morning,” Trace said now. “Kingsley.”

  “Oh yeah? Where’s he been hidin?”

  “Turns out they raised the funds to go by rail, after all.”

  “Good for them,” Boz said, not sounding as if he meant it.

  Trace chose his next words carefully. “Thing is, the route they’re takin out past Ogden … there’s been some kind of animal attacks along the line.”

  “What animal?”

  “Dunno. Miss Fairweather thinks it’s a kind of specimen she’s never seen before, wants us to bring one back.”

  “Takes both of us to do that?”

  “Might. Somethin big’s been pickin off the workers. Railroad claims it’s wolves. Papers blame Indians.”

  Boz snorted. “They always blame Indians.”

  “That’s why I thought you’d be a help.” Boz’s years in the army had been spent hunting Cheyenne and Sioux in Kansas and Dakota Territory. Miss Fairweather had been adamant that he not undertake this fool’s crusade without Mr. Bosley’s assistance, at least, and Trace had no intention of doing so.

  Boz was intrigued; Trace could tell by the way his head cocked, the deliberate far-gazing toward the horizon. And a hunting expedition to the mountains had to beat the slaughter yards all hollow.

  “It’s ten dollars a day, for each of us,” Trace coaxed. “We’ll make a hundred apiece, easy.”

  “You know, if she’s interested in it, can’t be somethin as simple as animals.”

  “You want simple, I reckon you got it, here. I’ll be happy to leave you to your four bits a day.”

  Boz looked as if he was going to take issue, but at that moment the pit boss passed by and snapped, “Fifteen minutes for lunch, boy. No extra for standin ’round jawin.”

  Boz’s face took on the non-expression he used to conceal contempt, in the interest of self-preservation. “How we gettin there?”

  “Train. Take us about eight days, through Ogden. Got cash for the trip right here. And I’ll front you four bits for a bath.”

  Boz gave his hands a last swipe with the handkerchief and tossed it into the bloody sawdust. “Let’s go.”

  CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

  The planks of the depot trembled under Trace’s boots, as thirty tons of iron and steam shuddered and screamed to a halt along the platform. The crowd surged toward the train like cattle scenting water, but the conductor held up a hand and a clipboard, shouting orders no one could hear. Trace held back; he knew from experience the third-class car would be loaded first, as the most unruly cargo the railroad had to handle.

  Boz nudged him with an elbow. “That them?”

  Trace followed his line of sight down the platform, where Kingsley and his sister were driving a gaggle of drab-clad, smiling followers toward the second-class car. “That’s them. Kingsley’s the short bald one.”

  “That his wife?”

  “Sister. Spinster.”

  Boz looked again, assessingly. “She ain’t bad, for the strait-laced type.”

  Trace had to agree. Eliza Kingsley wore a plain, sensible dress and a plain, sensible coat, but they did fit her well. Where Kingsley was stocky and stout, Miss Eliza was round and shapely. And there was a dignified grace about her, even doing the thankless job of herding a score of well-meaning fools onto a train. She had her work cut out for her—Kingsley kept calling out platitudes and conflicting instructions, and some over-enthusiastic soul was trying to whip up a chorus of “Onward Christian Soldiers,” which only added to the general noise and chaos.

  Gradually the gaggle of Baptists funneled into the car. Boz swept up his saddlebags with a stoic glance at Trace, and the two of them ambled toward the train.

  The conductor punched their tickets without a word or a second glance, and they climbed aboard, bringing up the rear of the shuffle of passengers—everybody negotiating seats, juggling luggage, and the idiot in the broadcloth suit still singing battle hymns. Trace made for a pair of empty seats near the back, knowing there would be less fuss if everyone else was seated first.

  It might’ve worked, except the man in the broadcloth suit chanced to turn in the aisle, militantly conducting his choir with both arms, and cut off mid-note in a squawk when his eye landed on Boz. “You can’t be in here!”

  “He’s all right,” Trace said, in the tone of bland nonchalance that usually could embarrass minor complainants into holding their tongues. “He’s with me.” He bullied the little man back in the aisle so Boz could move into the seat, but Boz stood where he was, wearing that blank expression that suggested he had nothing to do with the madness of the white
folks around him.

  The missionary went quite red in the face. “Young man, I can tell by your clothes you live a rough life, no doubt squandering your earnings on drink and vice, but even you must have some respect for the virtue of womanhood! Can you condone the mingling of an inferior race among the purity of Christian females?”

  “Well I know he’s a fine specimen and all, but I reckon I can hold them off him,” Trace said.

  This drew a horse-laugh from the gangly fellow across the aisle, and a splutter from the little missionary. But their hold-up had attracted attention from Miss Eliza, who came up behind the indignant Christian soldier.

  “Brother Clark, perhaps we could let these gentlemen go about their business?” Miss Eliza said. “Mr. Tracy and his partner are respectable trail guides and we may be in need of their services when we reach Idaho.”

  “Sister Eliza, I have no doubt of their qualifications in the wild, but the conventions of civilization must be observed—”

  “What’s the matter here?” the conductor said, coming up behind Boz from the back of the car. “Take your seats, boys.”

  “Good sir!” Brother Clark pounced on him. “Is there not designated seating for Negroes on this train?”

  The conductor looked at him with dislike, and then at Boz. He jerked his chin toward the front of the train. “Smoking car is two cars forward. Or you can ride in the stock car with the drovers.”

  “Excuse me, but there’s laws against that in this city,” Trace argued. “We paid for second-class seats and this is the second-class car.”

  “Unless you want to stay in this city I suggest you find yourself a seat, son,” the conductor snapped.

  Miss Eliza and the gangly man tried to protest that they had seen nothing untoward in Boz’s demeanor and they were quite certain he could behave himself, but Boz took the matter into his own hands. He shouldered past Brother Clark and continued toward the front of the car. Trace ground his teeth and followed, caught up to him on the balcony between the cars.

  “Hey!” he said, and Boz stopped on the gangplank, one hand on the door of the emigrant car. The switchman working over the linkage below glanced up, but quickly decided it was none of his business. “Don’t you take that from the likes of him. You paid for a second-class ticket—”