Last Train from Perdition

One.

“Yes,” he had said nearly six months ago in the ghost of a Louisiana swamp town, after a night of almost unspeakable horror. He’d been answering a question posed to him by the woman who now stood at his side, and that question had been: Will you let me help you?

Trevor Lawson wondered if Ann ever thought of that affirmative reply as a curse, or as a sentence to be cast into the world of the Dark Society. There could be no return from that world without victory, and victory might be impossible but it was sure that flesh would be torn and blood would be consumed through hungry fangs.

He hoped, as he listened to the shrill voice of the wind that seemed to make this building shudder, it would not be his fangs that did such work on her throat. Or any other fangs, if he could help it.

If.

A dangerous word.

They had entered through the building’s back door. They ascended side-by-side up a stairway to a door inset with frosted glass as gas lamps hissed upon the walls. Small diamonds of ice glittered on their hats and coats. A freezing rain had settled in just after nightfall. The weather prognosticator in the day’s edition of the Omaha Bee had by chicken bones, Indian dreamsmoke or telegraph reports predicted the eastward movement of a tremendous storm swirling itself down from Canada, sure to be as the reporter wrote, a “veritable behemoth of a snow-thrower”, indicating that he was paid by the word. It was early December of 1886. Any simpleton could see from the swollen bellies of the dark clouds hiding the sun all afternoon that the front edge of winter was going to be very sharp this year.

Trevor Lawson and Ann Kingsley had together come to many doors since that hot July night in Louisiana. Any door might open into the maw of the Dark Society, and Lawson knew they waited for him. They tracked him. They watched him from their holes, their basements, their ruins. They felt him in the currents of the night just as he felt them when they got close enough. He knew they must be so much better at this sense than he, but it was a condition growing stronger in him. Part of the “gift” they’d given him, one of many such. He could laugh himself to tears over that but now on those rare times when the heartsick pain lanced him deeply enough and he had the fluid to spare his tears ran red down a gaunt face that was becoming the color of the finest white paper sold to any scribe in New Orleans, his choice of home. Or rather to say, losing all color except that of the moon. He was writing his own story, month by week by day by hour. His story was one of great loss, of hardship, of time spent as a family man and young lawyer in Alabama, then on to the battlefield of the War Of Secession. He’d felt it was his honorable duty to serve, and instead he had been served.

Served up, to her.

The one in red. The creature who had turned him.

She watched him now, through many eyes. He was sure of it. Sure also that there were humans in service to their cause—their war against the daytime world—for whatever such befouled humans could gain from that dubious enrichment. Perhaps she watched him through human eyes, so he couldn’t breathe her essence of perfumed evil and know how close she stood. If only he could see her, could find her…if only…

If.

A dangerous word.

Upon the frosted glass of the door was painted in bold black letters R. Robertson Cavanaugh, Mining And Investments. There glimmered light beyond: what appeared to be a double-wicked candelabra whose two small yellow flames wavered back and forth like luminous cat’s-eyes. “The correct place and the correct time,” Lawson said to Ann, as he noted the hour of eight on his silver pocketwatch. He returned it to the pocket of his ebony waistcoat, sewn from Italian silk. Under his long black leather coat with a fleece collar he wore an expensive gray suit. On his head was a black felt Stetson with a cattleman’s crease and a thin band made from rattlesnake skin. If he was turning inexorably into more of a horror than he already was, he figured he should dress well doing it. As an adventurer and sometime gun-for-hire he could thankfully afford such indulgences. And around his narrow waist—if not his raison d’etre then certainly his reasonable companion—was the black holster that held two backward-facing Colt .44s. The Colt on the right had a rosewood grip and the Colt on the left had a grip formed of yellowed bone. Each pistol held six slugs. The gun on the right side held regular lead bullets, while the one on the left did not. Lawson had been instructed to enter the office directly at eight. He reached for a brass doorknob polished by many wealthy hands. As he did he saw Ann wince just a fraction and he knew exactly what demon had surfaced from her mind.

Another door to be opened. Another threshold to cross, and what lay within?

She had dreaded doors and thresholds since Lawson had returned with her to her father’s mansion just outside Shreveport after the events of July. Under a scythe of a moon they had found the barn’s doors open and David Kingsley’s prized horses gone. The nightblack house was empty, though its front door was also wide open. The servants were not to be found. Kingsley did not answer his elder daughter’s calls. The flare of the oil lamp that Lawson had bought in the swamp town of St. Benedicta on the return trip revealed evidence of violence. Firstly, a painting of Ann’s cherished mother, dead from consumption these last ten years, had been torn from the wall and ripped apart. Shredded would be the word.

And secondly, in the library where Ann’s father in brighter days liked to take his repast by smoking his cigars and reading the classics, if horse-racing news might be called such…

Lawson had heard the hideous humming of the flies at work beyond the closed door before Ann had. Without horses to nip upon in barn or pasture, the flies had come in through a broken window and surely filled the room like roiling clouds. They worked by night as well as by day, and like the vampires they were voracious and greedy in their feasting.

“Enter,” said a rough voice beyond the frosted glass of this new door before Lawson could turn the knob. Of course the man in there could see their shapes illuminated by the gas lamps. The personage who had summoned Trevor Lawson from New Orleans sat nearly in complete darkness save for the double candles. Lawson understood; the letter had said this was a very personal matter. Sometimes those were best left to the mercies of the dark.

He opened the door and went in first, with Ann right behind him. He had the feeling she wanted very much to draw her own Remington Army pistol from beneath her violet-colored coat, if just as a precaution, but she did not and he thought that was good: though their worlds of existence were both far apart and by necessity like joined shadows thrown by the same light, she trusted him.

“Two of you,” said the man who sat behind a desk that seemed as broad as a Nebraska cornfield. “I expected only yourself, Mr. Lawson.”

“My associate travels with me,” was the response. “Pardon my not telling you that in the return letter.”

“Is she good with a gun?”

“I am,” Ann said, and the note in her voice told him he ought to believe it.

Lawson said, “I hope that gunplay will not be the first requirement for this job. I prefer it to be the last.”

“As do I,” answered R. Robertson Cavanaugh, “but where I will ask you to go, you’ll need bullets, a steady aim and a cool head.”

“Ah.” Lawson offered a thin smile. “A destination I’ve already visited.”

A silence stretched. Lawson might have thrown his Eye into the head of R. Robertson Cavanaugh to learn everything in a few seconds, but the silence itself spoke. The heaviness of it said that this was a man who was careful in his dealings with people, that he probably did not trust people very much nor necessarily like them, and that he had secrets he wished to keep close to his chest. He was a gambler also, for he had gambled that Trevor Lawson would come all this way by train from New Orleans simply from a letter that already had Lawson’s business card in it.

It was a plain white card, this one a little smudged around the edges revealing that it was no youngster. Beneath Lawson’s name and the address of the Hotel Sanctuaire was the line All Matters Handled. And below that: I Travel By Night.

The letter itself had been brief, written in blue ink by a strong hand: A very personal matter. See me in Omaha, 8 p.m. 10^th December. R. Robertson Cavanaugh Mining And Investments office, 1220 3^rd Street. Discretion of course.

Signed, Cavanaugh.

The gambler’s hand had been aided by the inclusion of a banker’s check for one thousand dollars and a series of railroad tickets for sleeping car service on connecting lines that would get Lawson to Omaha on the appointed day. Lawson had not failed to note that the tickets were all for night trains.

It had been a small matter to pay for Ann’s tickets for her own berths in the sleeping cars, and then a slightly larger matter to gird himself for a long trip that might yet put him within reach of one of his most furious enemies, the sun.

“There’s a key in the lock,” Cavanaugh said. “Turn it.”

Ann did. “Sit.” It was spoken like a command. There was only one chair before the desk. “Another chair in the corner. Drag it over. I wasn’t expecting a woman.”

“And here you have a lady,” Ann said. She lifted her chin slightly in a little display of fire. Lawson thought she’d earned the right, as she’d seen sights that would drive R. Robertson Cavanaugh gobbling mad and cause him to cast what appeared to be a barrel-chested bulk diving out the canvas-shaded window behind him. Lawson started for the extra chair, but Ann said, “I’ll get it,” and was already tending to the task.

He couldn’t help but admire her. She had followed him from the swamp and been with him on several jobs for clients. Hers were the eyes that could bear the steely heat of the sun. They were as black as charcoal and fixed with an intense purpose that could frighten even a vampire. For the month of October she’d gone back to her name of Annie Remington and done a stretch of trick-shot shows for the Remington Company. But, alas, though her aim was ever true her heart was no longer in such displays, and as Lawson worried They could attack and take her at any time, and They would either tear her to pieces or turn her or use her in some hideous way best not dwelled upon, he was glad she’d moved into a room in the Sanctuaire on the floor just above his.

After all, she had no home to go back to. She would never go back to that house, where the flies made so merry.

Ann was twenty-four years old, she was tall and lithe and had light brown hair that fell about her shoulders. She was wearing a dark purple jockey’s cap, a style she favored. Her chin was firm and square and her nose was sharp and tilted up at the tip. She was a very attractive woman, if one was attracted to a female who could blow a bullet hole through the eye of the King of Diamonds while it was on the fly. She was good and she knew it, and therefore of immense value to Trevor Lawson.

When the two visitors from New Orleans had removed their coats and settled in their chairs, R. Robertson Cavanaugh folded a pair of big-knuckled hands on the green blotter that sat like a small island upon a golden sea of wheat-toned wood. He wore a black suit and a black stringtie over a plain white shirt. His large head was bald, his ears prominent as if pushed forward to gather every whisper in the finest parlors and lowest dives of Omaha. He had a black beard shot through with gray, his eyebrows being all gray set as thickets above a pair of deep-set brown eyes that held no warmth nor charity, but rather only chill and caution. His nose and mouth were small for such a large face, adding to the impression of a human battering-ram.

He was not one to waste time on pleasantries or small talk. “Do you have any idea who I am?” The question was directed to Lawson.

“I would’ve made inquiries, but as you made a point of discretion I did not.”

“That’s good. Two years ago you helped the brother of a friend of mine. A preacher in Oklahoma kidnapped a fourteen-year-old girl from his congregation. He went raving-mad and thought she was the rebirth of the Virgin Mary. He was trying to get her to Mexico to start a new religion with her as his bride. My friend’s brother is the one who paid you, he was—still is—the town’s bank president. It was more self-promotion than civic duty, but it’s seemed to solidify his position there. Do you recall?”

“I do.” A complication had been that Preacher Shine in his own past life had been known as Handsome Harry Ravenwing, a killer of note who with a sawed-off shotgun had sent to their otherworldly rewards eight men, two women, a little boy and a federal marshal’s horse in a robbery and murder spree from Arizona to Texas. Preacher Shine had still been carrying the shotgun when Lawson had caught up with he and the laudanum-dazed young girl in the cactus-stubbled nighttime badlands just on the Texas side of the border. The girl had been returned relatively unharmed to her father, while Preacher Shine alias Harry Ravenwing had flown away with a .44 bullet between his eyes. A mad dog on a holy mission could not be brought in tame on a leash. Lawson particularly was challenged on that job because of the large distances he had to ride on his horse Phoenix, under the threat of sunlight, but even two years ago he could dare at least the dawn and dusk more comfortably than at present.

“I got your card a roundabout way,” Cavanaugh went on. “Needless to say, I didn’t spill any beans to my friend except to say I needed the help of a professional.”

Lawson was about to say I am here, but he corrected himself before it was spoken. “We are here. What’s the nature of your problem?”

“I’m a rich man,” said Cavanaugh. “A well-connected man.”

“Undoubtedly.”

“I have aspirations and a solid foundation of loyal customers and supporters. In fact I am in the process of conversations that might direct me to the United States Senate in the near future.”

“Congratulations,” said Ann with a bit of an edge to it. Cavanaugh paid her no attention. He kept his small dark eyes focused on the vampire sitting across the desk from him.

“You’re very pallid, sir,” came the remark that Lawson had expected. “Even in this light. May I ask…are you ill? Is that the reason you travel only by—”

“I have a skin condition that sunlight affects. My eyes also are afflicted. But you can be sure I—we—are able to get the job done.”

“If history is truthful, then I have no reservations on that account.”

History was indeed truthful, Lawson thought. No ifs there. He knew what he looked like: lean and rawboned, pale as a New York accountant, a tracery of blue veins at his temples carrying the strange ichor of the vampiric tribe, clean-shaven because he no longer had to shave—a result of his condition—and blonde hair combed back from a high forehead and left shaggy at the neck. Likewise, he no longer needed the clippers of a barber’s shop. His blue eyes were intense and clear, though sometimes he thought that a mirror could catch the spark of red embers in their pupils, though this image was fleeting and it might have been his imagination only. He had been called handsome by the wife he had left behind and by the female creature who in a blur of red had gone for his throat and afterward whispered with crusted lips at his ear, I’m going to make you my finest creation.

Trevor Lawson appeared to be a man of about thirty but that counting of years no longer mattered after April of 1862 at the battle of Shiloh. In human years he was fifty-four. In the counting of the vampiric span he was yet a child.

Though an angry child who sought not so much revenge as the freedom to live and die as a human being.

“I didn’t want us to be disturbed tonight,” Cavanaugh said. “I doubt there are many out because of the weather, but I take no chances that someone I know might see a light here and come up for a visit. As I say, I am well-connected.”

“And secretive,” said Lawson. “There must be a compelling reason.”

Cavanaugh nodded. “My wife and I have three sons. One is a lawyer here, another works in the land trade business in San Francisco. It is my third son, the youngest, who is in need of your services just as much as I.”

Neither Lawson nor Ann spoke; they waited for the rest of it.

“Eric was rebellious,” the rich man of Omaha went on. “He hated the life of wealth and privilege. Why, when his brothers took to it so well?” The large shoulders shrugged. “Who can say? But he spurned every chance he was offered and went off to, as he told me, make his own life, on his own terms. We’re speaking of a twenty-year-old here, who hardly knew his mind nor anything of the world. Well…he is twenty-three now. He has been educated by rough hands, and he wishes to come home.”

“All right,” Lawson ventured. “And the problem is…?”

“Eight months ago he threw in his lot with three other individuals. He understood they wanted to go north to work the goldfields of the Montana Territory. But on the circuitous way there, he realized they were cutthroats and thieves who thought they had discovered as wild a buck as themselves. They were recruiting new blood for their gang.”

“New blood,” said Lawson. He lifted his eyebrows. “Hm.”

“He couldn’t get away from them after he witnessed the first murder of a stagecoach driver. It’s been difficult for him to get letters out, but he’s managed to send two at the risk of his life.”

“A high risk,” Lawson said. “He’s going by his real name?”

“No, he was smart enough not to use the family name. He’s calling himself Eric James. He hasn’t been required to kill anyone but he had to take part in two bank robberies in the Wyoming Territory, to prove himself. Thank God no one else was killed in those, or Eric killed…or captured by the law. Do you see where I’m headed?”

“A bad place,” said Ann.

“Damn right,” Cavanaugh answered, and for the first time looked at her as if she really had a role to play in this. His eyes slid back to Lawson’s. “They have taken my son to their winter…shall we say politely…quarters. A town called Perdition, about thirty miles north of Helena by rail. If those men find out who my son really is, they could hold him for an extreme sum of ransom. Plus…” He hesitated, staring at his clasped hands. “Plus,” he went on, “my own future and that of my family would be destroyed.”

Lawson had the picture, and it was not a pretty one. “You want us to bring your son home out of a snakepit.”

“Eric wrote they have rewards on their heads from previous crimes. They’re wanted dead or alive in both the Wyoming and Dakota territories.”

“Their names?”

“The leader is named Deuce Mathias. The others are called Keene Presco and Johnny Rebinaux. They seem to be very good with their guns.”

“What a coincidence,” said Ann.

Lawson was silent. He listened to the wind shrilling outside the walls. The glass trembled in its windowframe. He was thirsty. His body ached. So did his soul. From a pocket inside his suit jacket he brought forth a small red bottle, a Japanese antique purchased in New Orleans. He uncorked it and wafted it back and forth under his nostrils. It was a heady scent that made iridescent colors bloom behind his eyes. Usually a spool of the thick crimson liquid would go into his favorite libation of rye whiskey, simple syrup and orange bitters, but tonight…

He drank just a sip, just enough to get a taste, just enough…

He recorked it and put it away.

“Good for what ails me,” he told Cavanaugh. “My little sin.”

“We all have them,” was the rich man’s response. He leaned forward on his blotter, planting his elbows like bulwarks to defend his pride, his ambition, and in this case also his desperation. In the eyes of that broad face perhaps there was a hint of pleading that this office had never witnessed by day. “Will you get my son out of there, and home?” Cavanaugh asked.

There was no need to confer with Ann. She trusted him as much he did her, and Lawson knew what she would’ve said, in his place. It was a job worth doing, especially for the extra two thousand dollars he would require.

He spoke for both himself and his associate.

His answer was, “Yes.”