The Curse of Jacob Tracy: A Novel Page 16
“Waddya gonna do, Trace?” Boz said. “You gonna fight the railroad, the passengers, the whole world? That might make us late gettin out to Idaho, and I wouldn’t count on Her Ladyship bailin you out of jail too many more times.”
“Well what am I supposed to do, stand by and take it? I don’t like seein you treated like that, it ain’t right—” Trace broke off as the switchman finished his chore and stood upright, staring up at Trace as if to offer the full effect of his mangled torso—the dragging of the leg from the crushed pelvis, the chest pinched nearly in two when a foot had slipped, or the signal came too late, or the eye misjudged.
Trace looked away, suppressing a shudder. The spirits had been drawing close again the past few days, especially when he was distracted by other things. He pushed the power down into the back of his mind, and the switchman vanished.
“What?” Boz demanded.
“Railroads,” Trace said shortly. “Graveyards on wheels.”
Boz inhaled and took a step forward, poked a finger in Trace’s chest. “That’s what I don’t like—you flinchin at things I can’t see. But if I can’t do nothin about it, least I can keep my mouth shut while you deal with it.” He backed up, groping for the door handle. “You picked your battle, Trace. Let me pick mine.”
* * *
MARTIN KINGSLEY AND Miss Eliza both apologized to Trace about Brother Clark’s behavior. And when the train stopped in St. Joseph the next morning, while Trace and Boz were grabbing biscuits and coffee at the back door of the depot kitchen, the Kingsleys sought them out, with Clark in tow, to assure them that both men were welcome to join their party in Idaho, should they find themselves in need of lodging or company. Brother Clark did his best to look penitent and forbearing, but it came out gassy.
Boz swallowed his bile and said he appreciated the hospitality. Trace concurred. The men went away, but Miss Eliza lingered a moment.
“The offer presumes, of course, that you are going to Butte,” she said. “Martin assumed you were, but I don’t remember you mentioning your destination, Mr. Tracy.” Her eyes rested on him, warmly. “I would not, of course, pry into your business.”
Boz lifted an eyebrow and became very interested in his coffee, turning discreetly away from the conversation.
“More speculation than business, ma’am,” Trace said. “I’m not sure yet where we’ll end up.”
“Well, I hope you will consider joining us. Martin thinks highly of you, and we could use a man of your … ah, worldly experience. My brother means well but sometimes I think his zeal outweighs his good sense.” Her lips pursed in amusement. “Now you mustn’t tell him I said that.”
“Your secret’s safe with me, ma’am.”
“Yes.” Miss Eliza looked at him closely. “You’re good at keeping secrets, aren’t you?”
Trace smiled. “What are you, a mind-reader?”
“I used to know a man like you.”
“You’ve got a few secrets of your own, then,” he said, and she met his eyes for a brief, bold moment. Not so innocent as one might expect, he thought, and his opinion of her warmed a few degrees.
She lowered her gaze, retreating behind the serene missionary’s smile. “Good morning, Mr. Tracy … Mr. Bosley?”
“Ma’am,” Boz said, and they watched her walk off, to rejoin her flock. “Guess now you’re glad I wasn’t bunkin with you last night.”
If only the sleeping arrangements had been quite that agreeable, Trace thought. “I’d take you over that scarecrow across the way. Fella talks in his sleep.”
“Which one’s that?” Boz asked, and Trace pointed out the man who had stuck up for them the day before: gangling and concave, with ears that stuck out from his head, a nose like a lumpy potato, and skin rough as a Colorado creekbed.
Sylvane Ferris was the man’s name, and he did love to talk. He had introduced himself to Trace—and everyone else in the car—as a lifelong circus performer: “Ferris the Fire-Master! I don’t expect you to have heard of me. I haven’t performed in six years.” He was between jobs at the moment, he said, and on his way to Sacramento in hopes of joining a new outfit. It was hard to imagine Ferris having any kind of charisma onstage, but he was gracious and intelligent as well as loquacious, and Trace found him curiously appealing.
By the time they reached Ogden he had figured out why.
The train was positively lousy with spirits—a dead brakeman at every exit; an old woman sitting forever silent and patient in the dining car; a black man who’d been knifed and left to bleed out on the floor of the smoking car. Three days into the journey, Trace was starting to have a hard time blocking them out. If he didn’t pay attention to keeping that wall up around his thoughts, he knew they would start talking at him, pawing at him, wanting him to do things.
On the fourth day of the trip, Trace was in the smoking car, playing cards with Boz and a couple of young cowboys, when Ferris came on board. Ferris looked directly at the place where the knifed man lay, his lip curled with distaste, and made a surreptitious sidle around the invisible body before choosing a seat at Trace’s elbow and asking to be dealt in. Trace tossed him five cards, meeting Ferris’s eyes briefly; the scarecrow said nothing for once but the expression on his face was eloquent enough. And Trace noted the sensation in his own head—like passing a hand through a candle flame—and understood that his power, for the first time, had recognized another like himself.
It was also perhaps the first time he’d felt the power as a part of himself. Not some harness he carried around on his back, but something as integral and familiar as a muscle. He could remember passing through an awkward growth spurt at fourteen, feeling gawky and out of control for a while, but somewhere around his nineteenth birthday—it must’ve been after he’d enlisted, and saw himself in comparison to the other recruits—he’d realized he was taller and stronger than most of them, that this long lean body was his, and it was not a bad hand he’d been dealt, at all.
“I call,” Boz said. “What you got?”
Trace laid down his cards. “Full house.”
* * *
THE AIR GOT cooler and thinner as they passed into Utah, and Trace’s power got pricklier with each passing mile. It wasn’t just the ghosts gathering near; his curse was sending out those alarm-twinges, just as it had in the presence of Reynolds and the other demons. His dreams had turned sinister, full of weeping statues and dark, faceless monks. In one particularly lurid vision, the leathery, preserved corpses of saints and martyrs, stiff with bindings and ornamental robes, had left their sarcophagi to hop ludicrously and yet menacingly toward some dreadful purpose. Meanwhile Trace knelt before the altar, alongside his old classmates and not a few of his long-dead company mates—all of them oblivious to danger, and he unable to move or cry out a warning.
“You doin all right?” Boz asked, the first evening out of Ogden.
They were having a smoke on the balcony outside the smoking car. It was windy and loud out there, but it was the one spot on the train where there didn’t seem to be a lingering ghost to muck up his psychic compass.
“We’re gettin close,” Trace said. “I can feel it.” The words sounded vague and pompous even to himself, like something Miss Fairweather might say.
“You, ah, you got any better idea what we’re lookin for?”
“No, sorry.”
“Don’t be sorry,” Boz said. “Ain’t like that woman gives you much to go on.”
Trace didn’t answer. He had not told Boz about the vision that had prompted this trip. There was no better source of information there, and hearing about it would just make Boz worry.
“That Miss Eliza,” Boz said. “Kingsley’s sister?”
As if he didn’t know who she was. “Yeah?”
“Seems to have a good head on her shoulders.”
“She’s a good Christian woman. Even if she is a Baptist.”
“Aw, when did that stop you? What about that Mrs. Robards, out to Santa Fe last season? She wasn’t Catho
lic.”
Trace half-grinned. “Not even sure she was a missus.” The lady in question had claimed to be a widow, but he had not demanded the details. They’d had a discreet, friendly arrangement for a couple of months, and parted on amiable terms when the wagon party reached Santa Fe. “But Miss Eliza ain’t the kind you dally with.”
“I ain’t talkin bout dallyin,” Boz said, and Trace looked at him in surprise. “I’m just sayin, if you want to go on to Butte, I reckon either of us could find work out there, just as easy.”
“Cripes, you must be eager to get rid of me.”
“I’m just sayin, maybe it’s time we move stakes. We both know we can’t keep workin out of St. Louis, and you, ah, seem to be gettin a handle on this thing…”
If only that were true, Trace thought, but he turned the idea over in his head. For the first time in a long time, it seemed like a possibility: settling down, having a home of his own. Children, maybe.
But then his mind slipped backwards, to his last memory of Dorothea—sunken eyes half-closed, lips peeled back in the grimace of death, and the grotesque contrast of her swollen belly, a mockery of life and potential, distorting her stiffening body.
He shuddered, hard. “No, Boz. I ain’t takin that chance again.”
Boz was quiet for a while. When he spoke again, his voice was flat and businesslike. “We catch this killer, how you want to fetch it back to Her Worship?”
“Dunno. Figure on crossin that bridge when we come to it.”
“You figure on walkin off a cliff if she points you that direction?”
Old grief and guilt made him tetchy. “I ain’t out here cause she sent me, Boz.”
“What, you tellin me there ain’t any animal attackin folks?”
“Oh, there is. But she didn’t want anything to do with it. Tried to talk me outta comin out here.”
Boz turned his head sharply. There was an agitated quality to his next breath, but he just stared at the side of Trace’s face, waiting.
“I had a vision. Of the Baptists, in danger. I went to ask her what it meant. She told me there was somethin bad out here, and to stay away from it. But it didn’t seem right I should know these folks were headed for trouble, and not do somethin about it.”
“Christ on a crutch.” Boz stood back, pressing into a corner of the railing as if his partner’s stupidity were catching. “D’you wanna die? Cuz if you do, there’s quicker ways.”
“No.” Trace thought about it for a minute. “No, I don’t think God’s gonna let me off that easy.”
“Shit.” Boz ground out his cigar on the railing. “So now it ain’t enough, bein able to control it? Now you gotta be tapped by the Almighty for some holy purpose?”
Trace swung his head from side to side, wearily. “That ain’t what I’m sayin.”
Boz’s response was foul. He spat at the ground and went back inside.
* * *
TRACE’S PRICKLY FEELING intensified as the sun went down. Miss Eliza tried to draw him into conversation, but he found himself being short with her, almost surly. His argument with Boz had resurrected that feeling of being unclean, poisonous—set apart, like Cain. He resented Eliza Kingsley for representing what he couldn’t have, and that was hardly fair to her.
Ferris seemed to sense Trace’s mood, because he was unusually charming and gentle, engaging Miss Eliza’s attention and leaving Trace to wallow in his brown study.
Around eight o’clock, the porters began to come around and let down the sleeping berths. Those passengers with children began the arduous rituals of putting the little ones to bed—a process that involved a lot of wailing and shushing from the back of the car. Miss Eliza said good night, and went away to her own bunk, above her brother’s. Trace declined the porter’s offer to let down his berth—he knew he wasn’t going to sleep tonight, and if he did, he’d as soon doze upright in the seat, rather than cramped into a bunk that was head and foot too short for him.
He pulled the little Varney the Vampyre book from his vest pocket and doubled it inside out, to the page where Miss Fairweather had summed up her research on predatory corpses:
Commonalities~
Consmptn. of blood
Exceptional strength
Nocturnal; averse to sunlight
Diff. to kill; most often purifying methds—fire, water, pure metals/woods, medicnl garlic, salt
Not much help there. He had tried to get a description from her of what a Chinese keung-si looked like and acted like, but she had flatly refused, saying she didn’t want to hamper him with any preconceived notions.
“If the spiritual signature of this creature is any indication,” she’d said, “you may well encounter something that has never existed in this world before—a corruption of nature into some new … abomination.”
Trace had looked at her hard. “What do you know that you’re not tellin me?”
“Many things,” Miss Fairweather said grimly. “None that would give you any comfort.”
Now, Trace was aware of Ferris watching him, as the man pulled off his own coat and boots, and made ready for bed.
“If I may be so bold as to intrude, Mr. Tracy,” Ferris said, “what is in that book that makes you frown so? I have seen you study it many times, but it never seems to bring you any comfort.”
Trace smiled, humorlessly. “You believe in demons, Ferris?”
“Indeed I do,” the other said. “In fact I have seen things—events in my own life—which might best be explained as the work of evil forces.”
“What did you do?”
“I prayed. Until I thought my heart would break. And then it did break. And after that, I am ashamed to say, there was no more room in me for faith. And so I turned to … to darker forces, darker places inside myself, in search of answers. But there was no solace there. You know the story of Sisyphus, Mr. Tracy?” Trace nodded, and so did Ferris. “Truly, to offer hope, with no intent of fulfilling it, is the cruelest bargain imaginable.”
Trace nodded again, thinking of Miss Fairweather, of that sense he’d had that getting involved with her was a bottomless pit of despair, but he couldn’t put a finger on what it was about her that disturbed him so. He had been the one to turn up the last two jobs—though come to find out she already knew about them. Was she watching him that closely? Were they both in tune with the spirit world in such a way that they noticed the same disturbances? Or was some other force driving his choices? He knew there was something driving her, he just didn’t know what it was, or what influence it might exert over him.
“Ferris,” Trace said slowly, “do you ever think there’s some … invisible web between folks? I ain’t talkin about destiny, or God leadin our footsteps. I mean, I met two people this last month, and come to find out they met each other, maybe because of me, though I never introduced them, and somehow knowin the two of them prompted me to take this trip because of some fourth thing that involves all three of us. How can that be? How can the three of us have met because we have somethin in common that hasn’t happened yet?”
Ferris appeared to be considering the question very seriously. “I do have the opinion that time operates in both directions, although most of us can only perceive it from one perspective. Perhaps … if you will forgive me, I have had the impression that your perceptions are broader than most?”
Trace nodded, after the barest hesitation.
“Perhaps you have the rare gift of seeing ahead. I have known a few who did, in my career. It is not an easy gift to bear. All men question their place in the world, the purpose for which they were designed. The sad truth is, most of us will only ever live a small and mundane existence.” Ferris eyed Trace’s face thoughtfully. “I do not think that will be your fate.”
Trace wanted to ask what made him think so, but it felt like fishing for praise. “My bein on this train is no accident,” he said instead, and handed the Varney pamphlet across the aisle. “I did see ahead—and I think there’s somethin bad waitin for us.”
“Beg pardon?”
“It would appear, Mr. Tracy, that I was sent here to protect you.”
“You know what we’re ridin into?” Trace said, shocked.
“I have heard rumors.” Ferris’s mouth was etched around with deep anger, though it was not directed at Trace. He leaned across the aisle, lowering his voice. “Tell me … who are the two persons you mentioned, whose future you share?”
“The Baptist, Kingsley. And a woman named Sabine Fairweather.”
“Fairweather?” Ferris’s brows lifted in surprise, and a series of calculations rippled across his animated features. “I have never met the lady,” he said carefully. “So I cannot guess what her interest might be in these matters…”
“What’s your interest?” Trace demanded, but Ferris only shook his head.
“I have even less volition in these machinations than you, my godly friend, and I am not free to speak of the forces that compel me. I will only say, I believe you are right to think another hand is guiding your steps … or soon will be, if my presence here is any indication.”
“Somebody’s keepin an eye on me, then?”
Ferris allowed a single nod, though his usually open manner was withdrawing, and Trace sensed he would not get much more out of him. “For good or ill?”
Ferris’s smile twisted. “I suppose that depends upon one’s perspective, does it not?”
The train whistle began to blow, making them both jump. The sound was eerie, nightmarish. It echoed off the valleys and bounced back at them, whooo-whooo-whooo-whooo, like a deep-voiced mechanical owl. Then a single short whoop.
“There’s an obstruction on the tracks,” Ferris said, his voice taut.