The Book of Cthulhu 2

Hand of Glory

Laird Barron

From the pages of a partially burned manuscript discovered in the charred ruins of a mansion in Ransom Hollow, Washington:

That buffalo charges across the eternal prairie, mad black eye rolling at the photographer. The photographer is Old Scratch’s left hand man. Every few seconds the buffalo rumbles past the same tussock, the same tumbleweed, the same bleached skull of its brother or sister. That poor buffalo is Sisyphus without the stone, without the hill, without a larger sense of futility. The beast’s hooves are worn to bone. Blood foams at its muzzle. The dumb brute doesn’t understand where we are.

But I do.

CP, Nov. 1925

* * *

This is the house my father built stone by stone in Anno Domini 1898. I was seven. Mother died of consumption that winter, and my baby brothers Earl and William followed her through the Pearly Gates directly. Hell of a housewarming.

Dad never remarried. He just dug in and redoubled his efforts on behalf of his boss, Myron Arden. The Arden family own the politicos, the cops, the stevedores and the stevedores’ dogs. They owned Dad too, but he didn’t mind. Four bullets through the chest, a knife in the gut, two car wrecks, and a bottle a day booze habit weren’t enough to rub him out. It required a broken heart from missing his wife. He collapsed, stone dead, on a job in Seattle in 1916 and I inherited his worldly possessions, such as they were. The debts, too.

The passing of Donald Cope was a mournful day commemorated with a crowded wake—mostly populated by Mr. Myron Arden’s family and henchmen who constituted Dad’s only real friends—and the requisite violins, excessive drinking of Jameson’s, fistfights, and drunken profanities roared at passersby, although in truth, there hadn’t been much left of the old man since Mother went.

My sister Lucy returned to Ireland and joined a convent. Big brother Acton lives here in Olympia. He’s a surgeon. When his friends and associates ask about his kin at garden parties, I don’t think my name comes up much. That’s okay. Dad always liked me better.

I’ve a reputation in this town. I’ve let my share of blood, taken my share of scalps. You want an enemy bled, burnt, blasted into Kingdom Come, ask for Johnny Cope. My viciousness and cruelty are without peer. There are bad men in this business, and worse men, and then there’s me. But I must admit, any lug who quakes in his boots at the mention of my name should’ve gotten a load of the old man. There was Mr. Death’s blue-eyed boy himself, like mr. cummings said.

* * *

A dark hallway parallels the bedroom. Dad was a short, wiry man from short wiry stock and he fitted the house accordingly. The walls are close, the windows narrow, and so the passage is dim even in daylight. When night falls it becomes a mineshaft and I lie awake, listening. Listening for a voice in the darkness, a dragging footstep, or something else, possibly something I’ve not heard in this life. Perversely, the light from the lamp down the street, or the moonlight, or the starlight, make that black gap of a bedroom door a deeper mystery.

I resemble Mother’s people: lanky, with a horse’s jaw and rawboned hands meant for spadework, or tying nooses on ropes, and I have to duck when passing through these low doorways; but at heart, I’m my father’s son. I knock down the better portion of a bottle of Bushmill’s every evening while I count my wins and losses from the track. My closet is stacked with crates of the stuff. I don’t pay for liquor—it’s a bequest from Mr. Arden, that first class bootlegger; a mark of sentimental appreciation for my father’s steadfast service to the cause. When I sleep, I sleep fully dressed, suit and tie, left hand draped across the Thompson like a lover. Fear is a second heartbeat, my following shadow.

This has gone on a while.

* * *

The first time I got shot was in the fall of 1914.

I was twenty-one and freshly escaped from the private academy Dad spent the last of his money shipping me off to. He loved me so much he’d hoped I wouldn’t come back, that I’d join Acton in medicine, or get into engineering, or stow away on a tramp steamer and spend my life hunting ivory and drinking and whoring my way across the globe into Terra Incognita; anything but the family business. No such luck. My grades were pathetic, barely sufficient to graduate as I’d spent too many study nights gambling, and weekends fighting sailors at the docks. I wasn’t as smart as Acton anyway, and I found it much easier and more satisfying to break things rather than build them. Mine was a talent for reading and leading people. I didn’t mind manipulating them, I didn’t mind destroying them if it came to that. It’s not as if we dealt with real folks, anyway. In our world, everybody was part of the machine.

Dad had been teaching me the trade for a few months, taking me along on lightweight jobs. There was this Guinea named Alfonso who owed Mr. Arden big and skipped town on the debt. Dad and I tracked the fellow to Vancouver and caught him late one night, dead drunk in his shack. Alfonso didn’t have the money, but we knew his relatives were good for it, so we only roughed him up: Knocked some teeth loose and broke his leg. Dad used a mattock handle with a bunch of bolts drilled into the fat end. It required more swings than I’d expected.

Unfortunately, Alfonso was entertaining a couple of whores from the dance hall. The girls thought we were murdering the poor bastard and that they’d be next. One jumped through a window, and the other, a half-naked, heavyset lass who was in no shape to run anywhere, pulled a derringer from her brassiere and popped me in the ribs. Probably aiming for my face. Dad didn’t stop to think about the gun being a one-shot rig—he took three strides and whacked her in the back of the head with the mattock handle. Just as thick-skulled as Alfonso, she didn’t die, although that was a pity, considering the results. One of her eyes fell out later and she never talked right again. Life is just one long train wreck.

They say you become a man when you lose your virginity. Not my baptism, alas, alack. Having a lima bean-sized hole blown through me and enduring the fevered hours afterward was the real crucible, the mettle-tester. I remember sprawling in the front seat of the car near the river and Dad pressing a doubled handkerchief against the wound. Blood dripped shiny on the floorboard. It didn’t hurt much, more like the after-effects of a solid punch to the body. However, my vision was too acute, too close; black and white flashes scorched my brain.

Seagulls circled the car, their shadows so much larger than seemed possible, the shadows of angels ready to carry me into Kingdom Come. Dad gave me a dose of whiskey from his hip flask. He drove with the pedal on the floor and that rattletrap car shuddered on the verge of tearing itself apart, yet as I slumped against the door, the landscape lay frozen, immobile as the glacier that ended everything in the world the first time. Bands of light, God’s pillars of blazing fire, bisected the scenery into a glaring triptych that shattered my mind. Dad gripped my shoulder and laughed and shook me now and again to keep me from falling unconscious.

Dr. Green, a sawbones on the Arden payroll, fished out the bullet and patched the wound and kept me on ice in the spare room at his house. That’s when I discovered I had the recovery power of a brutish animal, a bear that retreats to the cave to lick its wounds before lumbering forth again in short order. To some, such a capacity suggests the lack of a higher degree of acumen, the lack of a fully developed imagination. I’m inured to pain and suffering, and whether it’s breeding or nature I don’t give a damn.

Two weeks later I was on the mend. To celebrate, I threw Gahan Kirk, a no account lackey for the Eastside crew, off the White Building roof for cheating at cards. Such is the making of a legend. The reality was, I pushed the man while he was distracted with begging Dad and Sonny Hopkins, Mr. Arden’s number two enforcer, not to rub him out. Eight stories. He flipped like a ragdoll, smashing into a couple of fire escapes and crashing one down atop him in the alley. It was hideously spectacular.

The second time I got shot was during the Great War.

Mr. Arden was unhappy to see me sign on for the trip to Europe. He saw I was hell-bent to do my small part and thus gave his reluctant blessing, assuring me I’d have work when I came home from ‘Killing the Huns.’ Five minutes after I landed in France I was damned sorry for such a foolish impulse toward patriotism.

One night our platoon negotiated a mine field, smashed a machine gun bunker with a volley of pineapples, clambered through barbed wire, and assaulted an enemy trench. Toward the end of the action, me and a squad mate were in hand to hand combat with a German officer we’d cornered. I’d run dry on ammo five minutes before and gone charging like a rhino through the encampment, and thank Holy Mother Mary it was a ghost town from the shelling or else I’d have been ventilated inside of twenty paces. The German rattled off half a dozen rounds with his Luger before I stuck a bayonet through his neck. I didn’t realize I was clipped until the sleeve of my uniform went sopping black. Two bullets, spaced tight as a quarter zipped through my left shoulder. Couldn’t have asked for a cleaner wound and I hopped back into the fray come the dawn advance. I confiscated the German’s pistol and the wicked bayonet he’d kept in his boot. They’d come in handy on many a bloody occasion since.

The third time…we’ll get to that.

* * *

11/11/25

Autumn of 1925 saw my existence in decline. Then I killed some guys and it was downhill in a wagon with no brakes from there.

Trouble followed after a string of anonymous calls to my home. Heavy breathing and hang-ups. The caller waited until the dead of night when I was drunk and too addled to do more than slur curses into the phone. I figured it was some dame I’d miffed, or a lug I’d thrashed, maybe even somebody with a real grudge—a widow or an orphan. My detractors are many. Whoever it was only spoke once upon the occasion of their final call. Amid crackling as of a bonfire, the male voice said, “I love you son. I love you son. I love you son.”

I was drunk beyond drunk and I fell on the floor and wept. The calls stopped and I put it out of my mind.

Toward the end of September I hit a jackpot on a twenty to one pony and collected a cool grand at the window, which I used to pay off three markers in one fell swoop. I squandered the remainder on a trip to Seattle, embarking upon a bender that saw me tour every dance hall and speakeasy from the harbor inland. The ride lasted until I awakened flat broke one morning in a swanky penthouse suite of the Wilsonian Hotel in the embrace of an over the hill burlesque dancer named Pearl.

Pearl was statuesque, going to flab in the middle and the ass. Jesus, what an ass it was, though. We’d known one another for a while—I courted her younger sister Madison before she made for the bright lights of Chi-Town. Last I heard, she was a gangster’s moll. Roy Night, a button man who rubbed out guys for Capone, could afford to keep Maddie in furs and diamonds and steak dinners. Good for her. Pearl wasn’t any Maddie, but she wasn’t half bad. Just slightly beaten down, a little tired, standing at the crossroads where Maddie herself would be in six or seven years. Me, I’d likely be dead by then so no time like the present.

I was hung-over and broke, and with two of my last ten bucks tipped the kid who pushed the breakfast cart. He handed me the fateful telegram, its envelope smudged and mussed. I must’ve paid the kid off pretty well during my stay, because he pocketed the money and said there were a couple of men downstairs asking what room I was in. They’d come around twice the day before, too. Bruisers, he said. Blood in their eyes, he said.

My first suspicion was of T-Men or Pinkertons. I asked him to describe the lugs. He did. I said thanks and told him to relay the gentlemen my room number on the sly and pick up some coin for his trouble. These were no lawmen, rather the opposite; a couple of Johnson brothers. Freelance guns, just like me.

Bobby Dirk and Curtis Bane, The Long and The Short, so-called, and that appellation had nothing to do with their stature, but rather stemmed from an embarrassing incident in a bathhouse.

I’d seen them around over the years, shared a drink or two in passing. Dirk was stoop-shouldered and sallow; Bane was stocky with watery eyes and a receding chin. Snowbirds and sad sack gamblers, both of them, which accounted for their uneven temperament and willingness to stoop to the foulest of deeds. Anybody could’ve put them on my trail. There were plenty of folks who’d be pleased to pony up the coin if it meant seeing me into a pine box.

While Pearl dressed I drank coffee and watched rain hit the window. Pearl knew the party was over—she’d fished through my wallet enough times. She was a good sport and rubbed my shoulders while I ate cold eggs. She had the grip of a stonemason. “You’d better get along,” I said.

“Why’s that?” she said.

“Because, in a few minutes a couple of men are probably going to break down the door and try to rub me out,” I said, and lighted another cigarette.

She laughed and kissed my ear. “Day in the life of Johnny Cope. See ya around, doll. I’m hotfooting it outta here.”

I unsnapped the violin case and leaned it against the closet. I assembled the Thompson on the breakfast table, locking pieces together while I watched the rain and thought about Pearl’s ass. When I’d finished, I wiped away the excess cleaning oil with a monogrammed hotel napkin. I sipped the dregs of the coffee and opened a new deck of Lucky Strike and smoked a couple of them. After half an hour and still no visitors, I knotted my tie, slipped my automatic into its shoulder holster and shrugged on my suit jacket, then the greatcoat. Pacific Northwest gloom and rain has always agreed with me. Eight months out of the year I can comfortably wear bulky clothes to hide my weapons. Dad had always insisted on nice suits for work. He claimed Mr. Arden appreciated we dressed as gentlemen.

The hall was dim and I moved quickly to the stairwell exit. Elevators are deathtraps. You’d never catch me in one. I could tell you stories about fools who met their untimely ends like rats in a box. I descended briskly, paused at the door, then stepped into the alley. A cold drizzle misted everything, made the concrete slick and treacherous. I lighted a cigarette and stuck it in the corner of my mouth and began to move for the street.

For a couple of seconds I thought I had it made. Yeah. I always thought that.

Curtis Bane drifted from the inset threshold of a service door about ten feet to the street side. He raised his hand, palm out to forestall me. I wasn’t buying. I hurled the empty violin case at his head and whipped around. And yes indeed, that rotten cur Bobby Dirk was sneaking up on my flank. I brought the trench broom from under my coat and squeezed off half the drum, rat-a-tat-tat. Oh, that sweet ratcheting burr; spurts of flame lighted the gloomy alley. Some of the bullets blasted brick from the wall, but enough ripped through a shocked and amazed Bobby Dirk to cut him nearly in half in a gout of black blood and smoke. What remained of him danced, baby, danced and flew backward and fell straight down, all ties to the here and now severed.

Curtis Bane screamed and though I came around fast and fired in the same motion, he’d already pulled a heater and begun pumping metal at me. We both missed and I was empty, that drum clicking uselessly. I went straight at him. Happily, he too was out of bullets and I closed the gap and slammed the butt of the rifle into his chest. Should’ve knocked him down, but no. The bastard was squat and powerful as a wild animal, thanks to being a coke fiend, no doubt. He ripped the rifle from my grasp and flung it aside. He locked his fists and swung them up into my chin, and it was like getting clobbered with a hammer, and I sprawled into a row of trash cans. Stars zipped through my vision. A leather cosh dropped from his sleeve into his hand and he knew what to do with it all right. He swung it in a short chopping blow at my face and I got my left hand up and the blow snapped my two smallest fingers, and he swung again and I turned my head just enough that it only squashed my ear and you better believe that hurt, but now I’d drawn the sawback bayonet I kept strapped to my hip, a fourteen-inch grooved steel blade with notched and pitted edges—Jesus-fuck who knew how many Yankee boys the Kraut who’d owned it gashed before I did for him—and stabbed it to the guard into Bane’s groin. Took a couple of seconds for Bane to register it was curtains. His face whitened and his mouth slackened, breath steaming in the chill, his evil soul coming untethered. He had lots of gold fillings. He lurched away and I clutched his sleeve awkwardly with my broken hand and rose, twisting the handle of the blade side to side, turning it like a car crank into his guts and bladder, putting my shoulder and hip into it for leverage. He moaned in panic and dropped the cosh and pried at my wrist, but the strength was draining from him and I slammed him against the wall and worked the handle with murderous joy. The cords of his neck went taut and he looked away, as if embarrassed, eyes milky, a doomed petitioner gaping at Hell in all its fiery majesty. I freed the blade with a cork-like pop and blood spurted down his leg in a nice thick stream and he collapsed, folding into himself like a bug does when it dies.

Nobody had stuck their head into the alley to see what all the ruckus was about, nor did I hear sirens yet, so I took a moment to collect the dead men’s wallets and light a fresh cigarette. Then I gathered my Thompson and its case and retreated into the hotel stairwell to pack the gun, scrape the blood from my shoes and comb my hair. Composed, I walked out through the lobby and the front door, winking at a rosy-cheeked lass and her wintery dame escort. A tear formed at the corner of my eye.

Two cops rolled up and climbed from their Model T. The taller of the pair barely fit into his uniform. He cradled a shotgun. The other pig carried a Billy club. I smiled at the big one as we passed, eyes level, our shoulders almost brushing, the heavy violin case bumping against my leg, the pistol hidden in the sleeve of my coat, already cocked. My hand burned like fire and I was close to vomiting, and surely the pig saw the gory lump of my ear, the snail-trail of blood streaking my cheek. His piggy little eyes were red and dulled, and I recognized him as a brother in inveterate drunkenness. We all kept walking, violent forces drifting along the razor’s edge of an apocalyptic clash. They entered the hotel and I hopped a trolley to the train station. I steamed home to Olympia without incident, except by the time I staggered into the house and fell in a heap on the bed, I was out of my mind with agony and fever.

I didn’t realize I’d been shot until waking to find myself lying in a pool of blood. There was a neat hole an inch above my hip. I plugged it with my pinky and went to sleep.

Number three. A banner day. Dad would be so proud.

* * *

Dick found me a day and a half later, blood everywhere, like somebody had slaughtered a cow in my bed. Miraculously, the wound had clotted enough to keep me from bleeding out. He took a long look at me (I was partially naked and had somehow gotten hold of a couple of bottles of the Bushmill’s, which were empty by this point, although I didn’t recall drinking them) and then rang Leroy Bly to come over and help salvage the situation as I was in no condition to assist. I think he was also afraid I might be far enough gone to mistake him for a foe and start shooting or cutting. Later, he explained it was the unpleasant-looking man watching my house from a catbird’s seat down the way that gave him pause. The guy screwed when Dick approached him, so there was no telling what his intentions were.

The two of them got me into the tub. Good old Dr. Green swung by with his little black bag of goodies and plucked the bullet from my innards, clucking and muttering as he worked. After stitching me inside and out, he put a cast on my hand, bandaged my ear, and shot enough dope into me to pacify a Clydesdale, then gave me another dose for the fever. The boys settled in to watch over me on account of my helpless condition. They fretted that somebody from Seattle was gunning for payback. News of my rubbing out The Long and Short had gotten around. Two or three of the Seattle bosses were partial to them, so it was reasonable to expect they might take the matter personally.

Dick’s full name was Richard Stiff and he’d worked for the railroad since he was a boy, just as his father had before him. He was a thick, jowly lug with forearms as round as my calf. Unloading steel off boxcars all day will do that for a man. He was married and had eleven children—a devout Catholic, my comrade Dick. Mr. Arden used him on occasion when a bit of extra muscle was needed. Dick didn’t have the stomach for killing, but was more than happy to give some sorry bugger an oak rubdown if that’s what Mr. Arden wanted.

The honest money only went so far. The best story I can tell about him is that when the railroad boys gathered for their union hall meetings roll call was done surname first, thus the man reading off the muster would request “Stiff, Dick” to signal his attendance, this to the inevitable jeers and hoots from the rowdy crowd. As for Leroy Bly, he was a short, handsome middle-aged Irishman who kept an eye on a couple of local speakeasies for the Arden family and did a bit of enforcement for Arden’s bookmakers as well. Not a button man by trade, nonetheless I’d heard he’d blipped off at least two men and left their remains in the high timber west of town. Rumor had it one of the poor saps was the boyfriend of a dame Bly had taken a shine to—so he was a jealous bastard as well. Nice to know as I’d never been above snaking a fella’s chickadee if the mood was right.

A week passed in a confusion of delirium tremens and plain old delirium. Half dead from blood loss, sure, but it was the withdrawal from life-succoring whiskey and tobacco that threatened to do me in.

Eventually the fever broke I emerged into the light, growling for breakfast and hooch and a cigarette. Dick said someone from The Broadsword Hotel had called at least a dozen times—wouldn’t leave a message, had to speak with me personal like. Meanwhile, Bly informed me that Mr. Arden was quite worried about the untimely deaths of The Long and Short. Dick’s suspicions that the powers that be wanted my hide proved accurate. It had come down through the bush telegraph I’d do well to take to the air for a few weeks. Perhaps a holiday in a sunnier clime. Bly set a small butcher paper package on the table. The package contained three hundred dollars of “vacation” money. Bly watched as I stuck the cash into my pocket. He was ostensibly Dick’s chum and to a lesser degree mine, however I suspected he’d cheerfully plant an ice pick between my shoulder blades should I defy Mr. Arden’s wishes. In fact, I figured the old man had sent him to keep tabs on my activities.

I’d read the name of one Conrad Paxton scribbled on the back of a card in Curtis Bane’s wallet, so it seemed possible this mystery man dispatched the pair to blip me. A few subtle inquiries led me to believe my antagonist resided somewhere in Western Washington beyond the principal cities. Since getting shy of Olympia was the order of the day, I’d decided to track Paxton down and pay him a visit. To this effect, would the boys be willing to accompany me for expenses and a few laughs?

Both Dick and Bly agreed, Bly with the proviso he could bring along his nephew Vernon. Yeah, I was in Dutch with Mr. Arden, no question—no way Bly would drop his gig here in town unless it was to spy on me, maybe awaiting the word to blip me off. And young master Vernon, he was a sad sack gambler and snowbird known for taking any low deed that presented itself, thus I assumed Bly wanted him to tag along as backup when the moment came to slip me the shiv. Mr. Arden was likely assessing my continued value to his family versus the ire of his colleagues in Seattle. There was nothing for it but to lie low for a while and see what was what after the dust settled.

I uncapped a bottle and poured myself the first shot of many to come. I stared into the bottom of the glass. The crystal ball hinted this Conrad Paxton fellow was in for a world of pain.

* * *

Later that afternoon I received yet another call from management at the Broadsword Hotel passing along the message that an old friend of my father’s, one Helios Augustus, desired my presence after his evening show. I hung up without committing, poured a drink and turned over the possibilities. In the end, I struggled into my best suit and had Dick drive me to the hotel.

The boys smuggled me out the back of the house and through a hole in the fence on the off chance sore friends of The Long and Short might be watching. I wondered who that weird bird lurking down the street represented—a Seattle boss, or Paxton, or even somebody on Arden’s payroll, a gun he’d called from out of town? I hated to worry like this; it gave me acid, had me jumping at shadows. Rattle a man enough he’s going to make a mistake and get himself clipped.

I came into the performance late and took a seat on the edge of the smoky lounge where I could sag against the wall and ordered a steak sandwich and a glass of milk while the magician did his thing to mild applause.

Helios Augustus had grown a bit long in the tooth, a portly figure dressed in an elegant suit and a cape of darkest purple silk. However, his white hair and craggy features complemented the melodic and cultured timbre of his voice. He’d honed that voice in Shakespearean theatre and claimed descent from a distinguished lineage of Greek poets and prestidigitators. I’d met him at a nightclub in Seattle a couple of years before the Great War. He’d been slimmer and handsomer, and made doves appear and lovely female assistants disappear in puffs of smoke. Dad took me to watch the show because he’d known Helios Augustus before the magician became famous and was dealing cards on a barge in Port Angeles. Dad told me the fellow wasn’t Greek—his real name was Phillip Wary and he’d come from the Midwest, son of a meat packer.

I smoked and waited for the magician to wrap up his routine with a series of elaborate card tricks, all of which required the assistance of a mature lady in a low cut gown and jade necklace, a real duchess. The hand didn’t need to be quicker than the eye with that much artfully-lighted bosom to serve as a distraction. As the audience headed for the exits, he saw me and came over and shook my hand. “Johnny Cope in the flesh,” he said. “You look like you’ve been on the wrong end of a stick. I’m sorry about your father.” He did not add, he was a good man. I appreciated a little honesty, so far as it went. Goodness was not among Dad’s virtues. He hadn’t even liked to talk about it.

We adjourned to his dressing room where the old fellow produced a bottle of sherry and poured a couple of glasses. His quarters were plush, albeit cramped with his makeup desk and gold-framed mirror, steamer trunks plastered with stamps from exotic ports, a walnut armoire that scraped the ceiling, and shelves of arcane trinkets—bleached skulls and beakers, thick black books and cold braziers. A waxen, emaciated hand, gray as mud and severed at the wrist, jutted from an urn decorated with weird scrollwork like chains of teeny death’s heads. The severed hand clutched a black candle. A brass kaleidoscope of particularly ornate make caught my attention. I squinted through the aperture and turned the dial. The metal felt damnably cold. Jigsaw pieces of painted crystal rattled around inside, revealing tantalizing glimpses of naked thighs and breasts, black corsets and red, pouty smiles. The image fell into place and it was no longer a burlesque dancer primping for my pleasure. Instead I beheld a horrid portrait of some rugose beast—all trunk and tentacle and squirming maw. I dropped the kaleidoscope like it was hot.

“Dear lad, you have to turn the opposite direction to focus the naked ladies.” Helios Augustus smiled and shook his head at my provincial curiosity. He passed me a cigar, but I’d never acquired a taste for them and stuck with my Lucky Strike. He was in town on business, having relocated to San Francisco. His fortunes had waned in recent years; the proletariats preferred large stage productions with mirrors and cannon-smoke, acrobats and wild animals to his urbane and intimate style of magic. He lamented the recent deaths of the famed composer Moritz Moszkowski and the Polish novelist Wladislaw Reymont, both of whom he’d briefly entertained during his adventures abroad. Did I, by chance, enjoy classical arts? I confessed my tastes ran more toward Mark Twain and Fletch Henderson and Coleman Hawkins. “Well, big band is a worthy enough pleasure. A certain earthy complexity appropriate to an earthy man. I lived nearly eighteen years on the Continent. Played in the grandest and oldest theatres in Europe. Two shows on the Orient Express. Now I give myself away on a weeknight to faux royalty and well-dressed rabble. Woe is me!” He laughed without much bitterness and poured another drink.

Finally, I said, “What did you call me here to jaw about?”

“Rumor has it Conrad Paxton seeks the pleasure of your company.”

“Yeah, that’s the name. And let’s get it straight—I’m looking for him with a passion. Who the hell is he?”

“Doubtless you’ve heard of Eadweard Muybridge, the rather infamous inventor. Muybridge created the first moving picture.”

“Dad knew him from the Army. Didn’t talk about him much. Muybridge went soft in the head and they parted ways.” I had a sip of sherry.

“A brilliant, scandalous figure who was the pet of California high society for many years. He passed away around the turn of the century. Paxton was his estranged son and protégé. It’s a long story—he put the boy up for adoption; they were later reconciled after a fashion. I met the lad when he debuted from the ether in Seattle as the inheritor of Muybridge’s American estate. No one knew that he was actually Muybridge’s son at the time. Initially he was widely celebrated as a disciple of Muybridge and a bibliophile specializing in the arcane and the occult, an acquirer of morbid photography and cinema as well. He owns a vault of Muybridge’s photographic plates and short films I’m certain many historians would give an eye tooth to examine.”

“According to my information, he lives north of here these days,” I said.

“He didn’t fare well in California and moved on after the war. Ransom Hollow, a collection of villages near the Cascades. You shot two of his men in Seattle. Quite a rumpus, eh?”

“Maybe they were doing a job for this character, but they weren’t his men. Dirk and Bane are traveling guns.”

“Be that as it may, you would do well to fear Conrad’s intentions.”

“That’s backwards, as I said.”

“So, you do mean to track him to ground. Don’t go alone. He’s well-protected. Take some of your meaner hoodlum associates, is my suggestion.”

“What’s his beef? Does he have the curse on me?”

“It seems plausible. He killed your father.”

I nodded and finished my latest round of booze. I set aside the glass and drew my pistol and chambered a round and rested the weapon across my knee, barrel fixed on the magician’s navel. My head was woozy and I wasn’t sure of hitting the side of a barn if push came to shove. “Our palaver has taken a peculiar and unwelcome turn. Please, explain how you’ve come into this bit of news. Quick and to the point is my best advice.”

The magician puffed on his cigar, and regarded me with a half smile that the overly civilized reserve for scofflaws and bounders such as myself. I resisted the temptation to jam a cushion over his face and dust him then and there, because I knew slippery devils like him always came in first and they survived by stepping on the heads of drowning men. He removed the cigar from his mouth and said, “Conrad Paxton confessed it to some associates of mine several years ago.”

“Horse shit.”

“The source is…trustworthy.”

“Dad kicked from a heart attack. Are you saying this lug got to him somehow? Poisoned him?” It was difficult to speak. My vision had narrowed as it did when blood was in my eye. I wanted to strangle, to stab, to empty the Luger. “Did my old man rub out somebody near and dear to Paxton? Thump him one? What?”

“Conrad didn’t specify a method, didn’t express a motive, only that he’d committed the deed.”

“You’ve taken your sweet time reporting the news,” I said.

“The pistol aimed at my John Thomas suggests my caution was well-founded. At the time I didn’t believe the story, thinking Paxton a loud-mouthed eccentric. He is a loud-mouthed eccentric—I simply thought this more rubbish.”

“I expect bragging of murder is a sure way to spoil a fellow’s reputation in your refined circles.” My collar tightened and my vision was streaky from my elevated pulse, which in turn caused everything on me that was broken, crushed, or punctured to throb. I kept my cool by fantasizing about what I was going to do to my enemy when I tracked him to ground. Better, much better.

“It also didn’t help when the squalid details of Conrad’s provenance and subsequent upbringing eventually came to light. The poor chap was in and out of institutions for most of his youth. He worked as a clerk at (illegible) University and there reunited with papa Muybridge and ultimately joined the photographer’s staff. If not for Eadweard Muybridge’s patronage, today Conrad would likely be in a gutter or dead.”

“Oh, I see. Paxton didn’t become a hermit by choice, your people shunned him like the good folks in Utah do it.”

“In a nutshell, yes. Conrad’s childhood history is sufficiently macabre to warrant such treatment. Not much is known about the Paxtons except they owned a fishery. Conrad’s adoptive sister vanished when she was eight and he nine. All fingers pointed to his involvement. At age sixteen he drowned a rival at school and was sent to an asylum until he reached majority. The rich and beautiful are somewhat phobic regarding the criminally insane no matter how affluent the latter might be. Institutional taint isn’t fashionable unless one derives from old money. Alas, Conrad is new money and what he’s got isn’t much by the standards of California high society.”

“I don’t know whether to thank you or shoot you,” I said. “I’m inclined to accept your word for the moment. It would be an unfortunate thing were I to discover this information of yours is a hoax. Who are these associates that heard Paxton’s confession?”

“The Corning Sisters. The sisters dwell in Luster, one of several rustic burghs in Ransom Hollow. If anyone can help you against Conrad, it’ll be the crones. I admired Donald. Your father was a killer with the eye of an artist, the heart of a poet. A conflicted man, but a loyal friend. I’d like to know why Conrad wanted him dead.”

“I’m more interested in discovering why he wants to bop me,” I said. Actually, I was more preoccupied with deciding on a gun or a dull knife.

“He may not necessarily wish to kill you, my boy. It may be worse than that. Do you enjoy films? There’s one that may be of particular importance to you.”

* * *

Dick gave me a look when I brought Helios Augustus to the curb. He drove us to the Redfield Museum of Natural History without comment, although Bly’s nephew Vernon frowned and muttered and cast suspicious glances into the rearview. I’d met the lug once at a speakeasy on the south side; lanky kid with red-rimmed eyes and a leaky nose. Pale as milk and mean as a snake. No scholar, either. I smiled at him, though not friendly like.

Helios Augustus rang the doorbell until a pasty clerk who pulled duty as a night watchman and janitor admitted us. The magician held a brief, muttered conference and we were soon guided to the basement archives where the public was never ever allowed. The screening area for visiting big cheeses, donors and dignitaries was located in an isolated region near the boiler room and the heat was oppressive. At least the seats were comfortable old wingbacks and I rested in one while they fussed and bustled around and eventually got the boxy projector rolling. The room was already dim and then Helios Augustus killed the lone floor lamp and we were at the bottom of a mine shaft, except for a blotch of light from the camera aperture spattered against a cloth panel. The clerk cranked dutifully and Helios Augustus settled beside me. He smelled of brandy and dust and when he leaned in to whisper his narration of the film, tiny specks of fire glinted in his irises.

What he showed me was a silent film montage of various projects by Eadweard Muybridge. The first several appeared innocuous—simple renderings of the dead photographer’s various plates and the famous Horse in Motion reel that settled once and for all the matter of whether all four feet of the animal leave the ground during full gallop. For some reason the jittering frames of the buffalo plunging across the prairie made me uneasy. The images repeated until they shivered and the beast’s hide grew thick and lustrous, until I swore foam bubbled from its snout, that its eye was fixed upon me with a malign purpose, and I squirmed in my seat and felt blood from my belly wound soaking the bandages. Sensing my discomfort, Helios Augustus patted my arm and advised me to steel myself for what was to come.

After the horse and buffalo, there arrived a stream of increasingly disjointed images that the magician informed me originated with numerous photographic experiments Muybridge indulged during his years teaching at university. These often involved men and women, likely students or staff, performing mundane tasks such as arranging books, or folding clothes, or sifting flour, in mundane settings such as parlors and kitchens. The routine gradually segued into strange territory. The subjects continued their plebian labors, but did so partially unclothed, and soon modesty was abandoned as were all garments. Yet there was nothing overtly sexual or erotic about the succeeding imagery. No, the sensations that crept over me were of anxiety and revulsion as a naked woman of middle age silently trundled about the confines of a workshop, fetching pails of water from a cistern and dumping them into a barrel. Much like the buffalo charging in place, she retraced her route with manic stoicism, endlessly, endlessly. A three-legged dog tracked her circuit by swiveling its misshapen skull. The dog fretted and scratched behind its ear and finally froze, snout pointed at the camera. The dog shuddered and rolled onto its side and frothed at the mouth while the woman continued, heedless, damned.

Next came a sequence of weirdly static shots of a dark, watery expanse. The quality was blurred and seemed alternately too close and too far. Milk-white mist crept into the frame. Eventually something large disturbed the flat ocean—a whale breaching, an iceberg bobbing to the surface. Ropes, or cables lashed and writhed and whipped the water to a sudsy froth. Scores of ropes, scores of cables. The spectacle hurt my brain. Mist thickened to pea soup and swallowed the final frame.

I hoped for the lights to come up and the film to end. Instead, Helios Augustus squeezed my forearm in warning as upon the screen a boy, naked as a jay, scuttled on all fours from a stony archway in what might’ve been a cathedral. The boy’s expression distorted in the manner of a wild animal caged, or of a man as the noose tightens around his neck. His eyes and tongue protruded. He raised his head so sharply it seemed impossible that his spine wasn’t wrenched, and his alacrity at advancing and retreating was wholly unnatural…well, ye gods, that had to be a trick of the camera. A horrid trick. “The boy is quite real,” Helios Augustus said. “All that you see is real. No illusion, no stagecraft.”

I tugged a handkerchief from my pocket and dabbed my brow. My hand was clammy. “Why in hell did he take those pictures?”

“No one knows. Muybridge was a man of varied moods. There were sides to him seen only under certain conditions and by certain people. He conducted these more questionable film experiments with strict secrecy. I imagine the tone and content disturbed the prudish elements at university—”

“You mean the sane folks.”

“As you wish, the sane folks. None dared stand in the way of his scientific pursuits. The administration understood how much glory his fame would bring them, and all the money.”

“Yeah,” I said. “Yeah. The money. Thanks for the show, old man. Could have done without it, all the same.”

“I wanted you to meet young master Conrad,” the magician said. “Before you met Conrad the elder.”

The boy on the screen opened his mouth. His silent scream pierced my eye, then my brain. For the first time in I don’t know, I made the sign of the cross.

* * *

We loaded my luggage then swung by Dick, Bly, and Vernon’s joints to fetch their essentials—a change of clothes, guns, and any extra hooch that was lying around. Then we made for the station and the evening train. Ah, the silken rapture of riding the Starlight Express in a Pullman sleeper. Thank you, dear Mr. Arden, sir.

My companions shared the sleeper next to mine and they vowed to keep a watch over me as I rested. They’d already broken out a deck of cards and uncorked a bottle of whiskey as I limped from their quarters, so I wasn’t expecting much in the way of protection. It was dark as the train steamed along between Olympia and Tacoma. I sat in the gloom and put the Thompson together and laid it beneath the coverlet. This was more from habit than expediency. Firing the gun would be a bastard with my busted fingers and I hoped it wouldn’t come to that. I’d removed the bandages and let it be—a mass of purple and yellow bruises from the nails to my wrist. I could sort of make a fist and that was all that mattered, really.

I fell asleep, lulled by the rattle and sway of the car on the tracks, and dreamed of Bane’s face, his bulging eyes, all that blood. Bane’s death mask shimmered and sloughed into that of the boy in the film, an adolescent Conrad Paxton being put through his paces by an offstage tormentor. A celebrated ghoul who’d notched his place in the history books with some fancy imagination and a clever arrangement of lenses, bulbs, and springs.

Didn’t last long, thank god as I snapped to when the train shuddered and slowed. Lamplight from some unknown station filtered through the blinds and sent shadows skittering across the ceiling and down the walls. I pointed the barrel at a figure hunched near the door, but the figure dissolved as the light shifted and revealed nothing more dangerous than my suitcase, the bulk of my jacket slung across a chair. I sat there a long while, breathing heavily as distant twinkly lights of passing towns floated in the great darkness.

The train rolled into Ransom Hollow and we disembarked at the Luster depot without incident. A cab relayed us to the Sycamore Hotel, the only game in the village. This was wild and wooly country, deep in the forested hills near the foot of the mountains. Ransom Hollow comprised a long, shallow river valley that eventually climbed into those mountains. An old roadmap marked the existence of three towns and a half dozen villages in the vicinity, each of them established during or prior to the westward expansion of the 1830s. Judging by the moss and shingle roofs of the squat and rude houses, most of them saltbox or shotgun shacks, the rutted boardwalks and goats wandering the unpaved lanes, not much had changed since the era of mountain men trappers and gold rush placer miners.

The next morning we ate breakfast at a shop a couple of blocks from the hotel, then Dick and Bly departed to reconnoiter Paxton’s estate while Vernon stayed with me. My hand and ear were throbbing. I stepped into the alley and had a gulp from a flask I’d stashed in my coat, and smoked one of the reefers Doc Green had slipped me the other day. Dope wasn’t my preference, but it killed the pain far better than the booze did.

It was a scorcher of an autumn day and I hailed a cab and we rode in the back with the window rolled down. I smoked another cigarette and finished the whiskey; my mood was notably improved by the time the driver deposited us at our destination. The Corning sisters lived in a wooded neighborhood north of the town square. Theirs was a brick bungalow behind a steep walkup and gated entrance. Hedges blocked in the yard and its well-tended beds of roses and begonias. Several lawn gnomes crouched in the grass or peeked from the shrubbery; squat, wooden monstrosities of shin height, exaggerated features, pop-eyed and leering.

The bungalow itself had a European style peaked roof and was painted a cheery yellow. Wooden shutters bracketed the windows. Faces, similar to the sinister gnomes, were carved into the wood. The iron knocker on the main door was also shaped into a grinning, demonic visage. A naked man reclined against the hedge. He was average height, brawny as a Viking rower and sunburned. All over. His eyes were yellow. He spat in the grass and turned and slipped sideways through the hedge and vanished.

“What in hell?” Vernon said. He’d dressed in a bowler and an out of fashion jacket that didn’t quite fit his lanky frame. He kept removing his tiny spectacles and smearing them around on his frayed sleeve. “See that lug? He was stark starin’ nude!”

I doffed my Homburg and rapped the door, eschewing the knocker.

“Hello, Mr. Cope. And you must be Vernon. You’re exactly how I imagined.” A woman approached toward my left from around the corner of the house. She was tall, eye to eye with me, and softly middle-aged. Her hair was shoulder-length and black, her breasts full beneath a common-sense shirt and blouse. She wore pants and sandals. Her hands were dirty and she held a trowel loosely at hip level. I kept an eye on the trowel—her manner reminded me of a Mexican knife fighter I’d tangled with once. The scar from the Mexican’s blade traversed a span between my collar bone and left nipple.

“I didn’t realize you were expecting me,” I said, calculating the implications of Helios Augustus wiring ahead to warn her of my impending arrival.

“Taller than your father,” she said. Her voice was harsh. The way she carefully enunciated each syllable suggested her roots were far from Washington. Norway, perhaps. The garden gnomes were definitely Old World knick-knacks.

“You knew my father? I had no idea.”

“I’ve met the majority of Augustus’ American friends. He enjoys putting them on display.”

“Mrs. Corning —”

“Not Mrs.,” she said. “This is a house of spinsters. I’m Carling. You’ll not encounter Groa and Vilborg, alas. Come inside from this hateful sunlight. I’ll make you a pudding.” She hesitated and looked Vernon north to south and then smiled an unpleasant little smile that made me happy for some reason. “Your friend can take his ease out here under the magnolia. We don’t allow pets in the cottage.”

“Shut up,” I said to Vernon when he opened his mouth to argue.

Carling led me into the dim interior of the bungalow and barred the door. The air was sour and close. Meat hooks dangled from low rafter beams and forced me to stoop lest I whack my skull. An iron cauldron steamed and burbled upon the banked coals of a hearth. A wide plank table ran along the wall. The table was scarred. I noted an oversized meat cleaver stuck into a plank near a platter full of curdled blood. The floor was filthy. I immediately began to reassess the situation and kept my coat open in case I needed to draw my pistol in a hurry.

“Shakespearean digs you’ve got here, Ma’am,” I said as I brushed dead leaves from a chair and sat. “No thanks on the pudding, if you don’t mind.”

“Your hand is broken. And you seem to be missing a portion of your ear. Your father didn’t get into such trouble.”

“He got himself dead, didn’t he?”

In the next room, a baby cried briefly. Spinsters with a baby. I didn’t like it. My belly hurt and my ear throbbed in time with my spindled fingers and I wondered, the thought drifting out of the blue, if she could smell the blood soaking my undershirt.

Carling’s left eye drooped in either a twitch or a wink. She rummaged in a cabinet and then sprinkled a pinch of what appeared to be tea leaves into a cloudy glass. Down came a bottle of something that gurgled when she shook it. She poured three fingers into the glass and set it before me. Then she leaned against the counter and regarded me, idly drumming her fingers against her thigh. “We weren’t expecting you. However, your appearance isn’t particularly a surprise. Doubtless the magician expressed his good will by revealing Conrad Paxton’s designs upon you. The magician was sincerely fond of your father. He fancies himself an urbane and sophisticated man. Such individuals always have room for one or two brutes in their menagerie of acquaintances.”

“That was Dad, all right,” I said and withdrew a cigarette, pausing before striking the match until she nodded. I smoked for a bit while we stared at one another.

“I’ll read your fortune when you’ve finished,” she said indicating the glass of alcohol and the noisome vapors drifting forth. In the bluish light her features seemed more haggard and vulpine than they had in the bright, clean sunshine. “Although, I think I can guess.”

“Where’s Groa and Vilborg?” I snapped open the Korn switchblade I carried in the breast pocket of my shirt and stirred the thick dark booze with the point. The knife was a small comfort, but I was taking it where I could find it.

“Wise, very wise to remember their names, Johnny, may I call you Johnny?—and to utter them. Names do have power. My sisters are in the cellar finishing the task we’d begun prior to this interruption. You have us at a disadvantage. Were it otherwise…But you lead a charmed life, don’t you? There’s not much chance of your return after this, more is the pity.”

“What kind of task would that be?”

“The dark of the moon is upon us tonight. We conduct a ritual of longevity during the reaping season. It requires the most ancient and potent of sacrifices. Three days and three nights of intense labor, of which this morning counts as the first.”

“Cutting apart a hapless virgin, are we?”

Carling ran her thumbnail between her front teeth. A black dog padded into the kitchen from the passage that let from the living room where the cries had emanated and I thought perhaps it had uttered the noise. The dog’s eyes were yellow. It was the length and mass of a Saint Bernard, although its breed suggested that of a wolf. The dog smiled at me. Carling spoke a guttural phrase and unbarred the door and let it out. She shut the door and pressed her forehead against the frame.

“How do you know Paxton?” I said, idly considering her earlier comment about banning pets from the house.

“My sisters and I have ever been great fans of Eadweard’s photography. Absolute genius, and quite the conversationalist. I have some postcards he sent us from his travels. Very thoughtful in his own, idiosyncratic way. Quite loyal to those who showed the same to him. Conrad is Eadweard Muybridge’s dead wife’s son, a few minutes the elder of his brother, Florado. The Paxtons took him to replace their own infant who’d died at birth the very night Muybridge’s boys came into the world. Florado spent his youth in the institution. No talent to speak of. Worthless.”

“But there must’ve been some question of paternity in Muybridge’s mind. He left them to an institution in the first place. Kind of a rotten trick, you ask me.”

“Eadweard tried to convince himself the children were the get of that retired colonel his wife had been humping.”

“But they weren’t.”

“Oh, no—they belonged to Eadweard.”

“Yet, one remained at the orphanage, and Conrad was adopted. Why did Muybridge come back into the kid’s life? Guilt? Couldn’t be guilt since he left the twin to rot.”

“You couldn’t understand. Conrad was special, possessed of a peculiar darkness that Eadweard recognized later, after traveling in Central America doing goddess knows what. The boy was key to something very large and very important. We all knew that. Don’t ask and I’ll tell you no lies. Take it up with Conrad when you see him.”

“I don’t believe Paxton murdered my father,” I said. The baby in the other room moaned and I resisted the urge to look in that direction.

“Oh, then this is a social call? I would’ve fixed my hair, naughty boy.”

“I’m here because he sent a pair of guns after me in Seattle. I didn’t appreciate the gesture. Maybe I’m wrong, maybe he did blip my father. Two reasons to buzz him. Helios says you know the book on this guy. So, I come to you before I go to him.”

“Reconnaissance is always wisest. Murder is not precisely what occurred. Conrad drained your father’s life energy, siphoned it away via soul taking. You know of what I speak—photography, if done in a prescribed and ritualistic manner, can steal the subject’s life force. This had a side consequence of effecting Mr. Cope’s death. To be honest, Conrad didn’t do it personally. He isn’t talented in that area. He’s a dilettante of the black arts. He had it done by proxy, much the way your employer Mr. Arden has you do the dirty work for him.”

She was insane, obviously. Barking mad and probably very dangerous. God alone knew how many types of poison she had stashed up her sleeve. That cauldron of soup was likely fuming with nightshade, and my booze…I pushed it aside and brushed the blade against my pants leg. “Voodoo?” I said, just making conversation, wondering if I should rough her up a bit, if that was even wise, what with her dog and the naked guy roaming around. No confidence in Vernon whatsoever.

“There are many faiths at the crossroads here in the Hollow,” Carling said, bending to stir the pot and good god her shoulders were broad as a logger’s. “Voodoo is not one of them. I can’t tell you who did in your father, only that it was done and that Conrad ordered it so. I recommend you make haste to the Paxton estate and do what you do best—rub the little shit out before he does for you. He tried once, he’ll definitely take another crack at it.”

“Awfully harsh words for your old chum,” I said to her brawny backside. “Two of you must have had a lovers’ quarrel.”

“He’s more of a godson. I don’t have a problem with Conrad. He’s vicious and vengeful and wants my head on a stick, but I don’t hold that against him in the slightest.”

“Then why are you so interested in seeing him get blipped?”

“You seem like a nice boy, Johnny.” Carling turned slowly and there was something amiss with her face that I couldn’t quite figure out. That nasty grin was back, though. “Speaking of treachery and violence, that other fellow you brought is no good. I wager he’ll bite.”

“Think so?” I said. “He’s just along for the ride.”

“Bah. Let us bargain. Leave your friend with us and I’ll give you a present. I make knick-knacks, charms, trinkets and such. What you really need if you’re going to visit the Paxton estate is a talisman to ward off the diabolic. It wouldn’t do to go traipsing in there as you are.”

“I agree. I’ll be sure to pack a shotgun.”

She cackled. Actually and truly cackled. “Yes, yes, for the best. Here’s a secret few know—I wasn’t always a spinster. In another life I traveled to India and China and laid with many, many men, handsomer than you even. They were younger and unspoiled. I nearly, very, very nearly married a rich Chinaman who owned a great deal of Hainan.”

“Didn’t work out, eh? Sorry to hear it, Ms. Corning.”

“He raised monkeys. I hate monkeys worse than Christ.” She went through the door into the next room and I put my hand on the pistol from reflex and perhaps a touch of fear, but she returned with nothing more sinister than a shriveled black leaf in her open palm. Not a leaf, I discovered upon receiving it, but a dry cocoon. She dropped it into my shirt pocket, just leaned over and did it without asking and up close she smelled of spice and dirt and unwashed flesh.

“Thanks,” I said recoiling from the proximity of her many large, sharp teeth.

“Drink your whiskey and run along.”

I stared at the glass. It smelled worse than turpentine.

“Drink your fucking whiskey,” she said.

And I did, automatic as you please. It burned like acid.

She snatched the empty glass and regarded the constellation of dregs at the bottom. She grinned, sharp as a pickaxe. “He’s throwing a party in a couple of nights. Does one every week. Costumes, pretty girls, rich trappers and furriers, our rustic nobility. It augers well for you to attend.”

I finally got my breath back. “In that case, the furriers’ ball it is.”

She smiled and patted my cheek. “Good luck. Keep the charm on your person. Else…” She smiled sadly and straightened to her full height. “Might want to keep this visit between you and me.”

* * *

Vernon was missing when I hit the street. The cab driver shrugged and said he hadn’t seen anything. No reason not to believe him, but I dragged him by the hair from the car and belted him around some on the off chance he was lying. Guy wasn’t lying, though. There wasn’t any way I’d go back into that abattoir of a cottage to hunt for the lost snowbird, so I decided on a plausible story to tell the boys. Vernon was the type slated to end it face down in a ditch, anyway. Wouldn’t be too hard to sell the tale and frankly, watching Bly stew and fret would be a treat.

Never did see Vernon again.

* * *

Dick and Bly hadn’t gotten very close to the Paxton mansion. The estate was guarded by a bramble-covered stone wall out of Sleeping Beauty, a half mile of wildwood and overgrown gardens, then croquet courses, polo fields, and a small barracks that housed a contingent of fifteen or so backwoods thugs armed with shotguns and dogs. God alone knew where Paxton had recruited such a gang. I figured they must be either locals pressed into service or real talent from out of state. No way to tell without tangling with them, though.

Dick had cased the joint with field glasses and concluded a daylight approach would be risky as hell. Retreat and regrouping seemed the preferable course, thus we decided to cool our heels and get skunk drunk.

The boys had caught wind of a nasty speakeasy in a cellar near Belson Creek in neighboring Olde Towne. A girl Bly had picked up in the parking lot of Luster’s one and only hardware store claimed men with real hard bark on them hung around there. Abigail and Bly were real chummy, it seemed, and he told her we were looking to put the arm on a certain country gentleman. The girl suggested low at the heel scoundrels who tenanted the dive might be helpful.

The speakeasy was called Satan’s Bung and the password at the door was Van Iblis, all of this Dick had discovered from his own temporary girls, Wanda and Clementine, which made me think they’d spent most of the day reconnoitering a watering hole rather than pursuing our mission with any zeal. In any event, we sashayed into that den of iniquity with sweet little chippies who still had most of their teeth, a deck of unmarked cards, and a bottle of sour mash. There were a few tough guys hanging around, as advertised; lumberjacks in wool coats and sawdust-sprinkled caps and cork boots; the meanest of the lot even hoisted his axe onto the bar. One gander at my crew and they looked the other way right smartly. Some good old boys came down from the hills or out of the swamp, hitched their overalls and commenced to picking banjos, banging drums, and harmonizing in an angelic chorus that belied their sodden, bloated, and warty features, their shaggy beards and knurled scalps. They clogged barefoot, stamping like bulls ready for battle.

Dick, seven sails to the wind, wondered aloud what could be done in the face of determined and violent opposition entrenched at the Paxton estate and I laughed and told him not to worry too much, this was a vacation. Relax and enjoy himself—I’d think of something. I always thought of something.

Truth of it was, I’d lost a bit of my stomach for the game after tea and cake at the Corning Sisters’ house and the resultant disappearance of Vernon. If it hadn’t been for the rifling of my home, the attack by the Long and the Short, the mystery of whether Paxton really bopped Dad would’ve remained a mystery. Thus, despite my reassurances to the contrary, I wasn’t drinking and plotting a clever plan of assault or infiltration of the estate, but rather simply drinking and finagling a way to get my ashes hauled by one of the chippies.

One thing led to another, a second bottle of rotgut to a third, and Clementine climbed into my lap and nuzzled my neck and unbuttoned my pants and slipped her hand inside. Meanwhile a huge man in a red and black checkered coat and coonskin cap pranced, nimble as a Russian ballerina, and wheedled a strange tune on a flute of lacquered black ivory. This flautist was a hirsute, wiry fellow with a jagged visage hacked from a stone, truly more beast than man by his gesticulations and the manner he gyrated his crotch, thrusting to the beat, and likely the product of generations of inbreeding, yet he piped with an evil and sinuous grace that captured the admiration of me, my companions, the entire roomful of seedy and desperate characters. The lug seemed to fixate upon me, glaring and smirking as he clicked his heels and puffed his cheeks and capered among the tables like a faun.

I conjectured aloud as to his odd behavior, upon which Dick replied in a slur that if I wanted him to give the bird a thrashing, just make the sign. My girl, deep into her cups, mumbled that the flautist was named Dan Blackwood, last scion of a venerable Ransom Hollow family renowned as hunters and furriers without peer, but these days runners of moonshine. A rapist and murderer who’d skated out of prison by decree of the prince of Darkness Hissownself, or so the fireside talk went. A fearful and loathsome brute, his friends were few and of similar malignant ilk and were known as the Blackwood Boys. Her friend Abigail paused from licking Bly’s earlobe to concur.

Dan Blackwood trilled his oddly sinister tune while a pair of hillbillies accompanied him with banjo and fiddle and a brawny lad with golden locks shouldered aside the piano player and pawed the ivories to create a kind of screeching cacophony not unlike a train wreck while the paper lanterns dripped down blood-red light and the cellar audience clenched into a tighter knot and swayed on their feet, their stools and stumps, stamping time against the muddy floor. From that cacophony a dark and primitive rhythm emerged as each instrument fell into line with its brother and soon that wattled and toad-like orchestra found unity with their piper and produced a song that put ice in my loins and welded me to my seat. Each staccato burst from the snare drum, each shrill from the flute, each discordant clink from the piano, each nails on slate shriek of violin and fiddle, pierced my brain, caused a sweet, agonizing lurch of my innards, and patient Clementine jerked my cock, out of joint, so to speak.

The song ended with a bang and a crash and the crowd swooned. More tunes followed and more people entered that cramped space and added to the sensation we were supplicants or convicts in a special circle of hell, such was the ripe taint of filthy work clothes and matted hair and belched booze like sulfurous counterpoint to the maniacal contortions of the performers, the rich foul effluvium of their concert.

During an intermission, I extricated myself from industrious Clementine and made my way up the stairs into the alley to piss against the side of the building. The darkness was profound, moonless as Carling had stated, and the stars were covered by a thin veil of cloud. Despite my best efforts, I wasn’t particularly impaired and thus wary and ready for trouble when the door opened and a group of men, one bearing a lantern that oozed the hideous red glow, spilled forth and mounted the stairs. The trio stopped at the sight of me and raised the lantern high so that it scattered a nest of rats into the hinder of the lane. I turned to face them, hand on pistol, and I smiled and hoped Dick or Bly might come tripping up the steps at any moment.

But there was no menace evinced by this group, at least not aimed at me. The leader was the handsome blond lad who’d hammered the piano into submission. He saluted me with two fingers and said, “Hey, now city feller. My name’s Candy. How’n ya like our burg?” The young man didn’t wait for an answer, but grunted at his comrades, the toad-like fiddler and banjo picker who might’ve once been conjoined and later separated with an axe blow, then said to me in his thick, unfamiliar accent, “So, chum, the telegraph sez you in Ransom Holler on dirty business. My boss knows who yer gunnin’ for and he’d be pleased as punch to make yer acquaintance.”

“That’s right civilized. I was thinking of closing this joint down, though…”

“Naw, naw, ol’ son. Ya gotta pay the piper round this neck of the woods.”

I asked who and where and the kid laughed and said to get my friends and follow him, and to ease my mind the men opened their coats to show they weren’t packing heat. Big knives and braining clubs wrapped in leather and nail-studded, but no pea shooters and I thought again how Dick had managed to learn of this place and recalled something about one of the girls, perhaps Abigail, whispering the name into his ear and a small chill crept along my spine. Certainly Paxton could be laying a trap, and he wasn’t the only candidate for skullduggery. Only the good lord knew how strongly the Corning sisters interfered in the politics of the Hollow and if they’d set the Blackwood Gang upon us, and of course this caused my suspicious mind to circle back to Helios Augustus and his interest in the affair. Increasingly I kicked myself for not having shot him when I’d the chance and before he could take action against me, assuming my paranoid suppositions bore weight. So, I nodded and tipped my hat and told the Blackwood Boys to bide a moment.

Dick and Bly were barely coherent when I returned to gather them and the girls. Bly, collar undone, eyes crossed and blinking, professed incredulity that we would even consider traveling with these crazed locals to some as yet unknown location. Dick didn’t say anything, although his mouth curved down at the corners with the distaste of a man who’d gulped castor oil. We both understood the score; no way on God’s green earth we’d make it back to Luster and our heavy armament if the gang wanted our skins. Probably wouldn’t matter even if we actually managed to get armed. This was the heart of midnight and the best and only card to turn was to go for a ride with the devil. He grabbed Bly’s arm and dragged him along after me, the goodtime girls staggering in our wake. Ferocious lasses—they weren’t keen on allowing their meal tickets to escape, and clutched our sleeves and wailed like the damned.

Young master Candy gave our ragged assembly a bemused once-over, then shrugged and told us to get a move on, starlight was wasting. He led us to a great creaking behemoth of a farm truck with raised sides to pen in livestock and bade us pile into the bed. His compatriot the fiddler was already a boulder slumped behind the steering wheel.

I don’t recall the way because it was pitch black and the night wind stung my eyes. We drove along Belson Creek and crossed it on rickety narrow bridges and were soon among ancient groves of poplar and fir, well removed from Olde Towne or any other lighted habitation. The road was rutted and the jarring threatened to rip my belly open. I spent most of the thankfully brief ride doubled, hands pressed hard against the wound, hoping against hope to keep my guts on the inside.

The truck stopped briefly and Candy climbed down to scrape the ruined carcass of a raccoon or opossum from the dirt and chucked it into the bed near our feet. Bly groaned and puked onto his shoes and the girls screamed or laughed or both. Dick was a blurry white splotch in the shadows and from the manner he hunched, I suspected he had a finger on the trigger of the revolver in his pocket. Most likely, he figured I’d done in poor, stupid Vernon and was fixing to dust that weasel Bly next, hell maybe I’d go all in and make a play for Mr. Arden. These ideas were far from my mind (well, dusting Bly was a possibility), naturally. Suicide wasn’t my intent. Nonetheless, I couldn’t fault Dick for worrying; could only wonder, between shocks to my kidneys and gut from the washboard track, how he would land if it ever came time to choose teams.

The fiddler swung the truck along a tongue of gravel that unrolled deep inside a bog and we came to a ramshackle hut, a trapper or fisherman’s abode, raised on stilts that leaned every which way like a spindly, decrepit daddy longlegs with a house on its back. Dull, scaly light flickered through windows with tanned skins for curtains and vaguely illuminated the squelching morass of a yard with its weeds and moss and rusty barrels half sunk in the muck, and close by in the shadows came the slosh of Belson Creek churning fitfully as it dreamed. Another truck rolled in behind us and half a dozen more goons wordlessly unloaded and stood around, their faces obscured in the gloom. All of them bore clubs, mattock handles, and gaff hooks.

There was a kind of ladder descending from a trapdoor and on either side were strung moldering nets and the moth-eaten hides of beasts slaughtered decades ago and chains of animal bones and antlers that jangled when we bumped them in passing. I went first, hoping to not reinjure my hand while entertaining visions of a sledgehammer smashing my skull, or a machete lopping my melon at the neck as I passed through the opening. Ducks in Tin Pan Alley is what we were.

Nobody clobbered me with a hammer, nobody chopped me with an axe and I hoisted myself into the sooty confines of Dan Blackwood’s shanty. Beaver hides were stretched into circles and tacked on the walls, probably to cover the knotholes and chinks in a vain effort to bar the gnats and mosquitoes that swarmed the bog. Bundles of fox and muskrat hide were twined at the muzzle and hung everywhere and black bear furs lay in heaps and crawled with sluggish flies. A rat crouched enthroned high atop one mound, sucking its paws. It regarded me with skepticism. Light came from scores of candles, coagulated slag of black and white, and rustic kerosene lamps I wagered had seen duty in Gold Rush mines. The overwhelming odors were that of animal musk, lye, and peat smoke. Already, already sweat poured from me and I wanted another dose of mash.

That sinister flautist Dan Blackwood tended a cast iron stove, fry pan in one fist, spatula in the other. He had already prepared several platters of flapjacks. He wore a pork pie hat cocked at a precipitous angle. A bear skin covered him after a burlesque fashion.

“Going to be one of those nights, isn’t it?” I said as my friends and hangers on clambered through the hatch and stood blinking and gawping at their surroundings, this taxidermy post in Hades.

“Hello, cousin. Drag up a stump. Breakfast is at hand.” Blackwood’s voice was harsh and thin and came through his long nose. At proximity, his astounding grotesqueness altered into a perverse beauty, such were the chiseled planes and crags of his brow and cheek, the lustrous blackness of his matted hair that ran riot over his entire body. His teeth were perfectly white when he smiled, and he smiled often.

The cakes, fried in pure lard and smothered in butter and maple syrup, were pretty fucking divine. Blackwood ate with almost dainty precision and his small, dark eyes shone brightly in the candle flame and ye gods the heat from the stove was as the heat from a blast furnace and soon all of us were in shirt sleeves or less, the girls quickly divested themselves of blouse and skirt and lounged around in their dainties. I didn’t care about the naked chickadees; my attention was divided between my recurrent pains of hand and ear, and gazing in wonder at our satyr host, lacking only his hooves to complete the image of the great god Pan taking a mortal turn as a simple gang boss. We had him alone—his men remained below in the dark—and yet, in my bones I felt it was me and Dick and Bly who were at a disadvantage if matters went south.

“Don’t get a lot of fellows with your kind of bark around here,” Blackwood said. He reclined in a heavy wooden chair padded with furs, not unlike the throne of a feudal lord who was contemplating the fate of some unwelcome itinerant vagabonds. “Oh, there’s wild men and murderous types aplenty, but not professional gunslingers. I hear tell you’ve come to the Hollow with blood in your eye, and who put it there? Why dear little Connie Paxton, of course; the moneybags who rules from his castle a few miles yonder as the crow wings it.”

“Friend of yours?” I said, returning his brilliant smile with one of my own as I gauged the speed I could draw the Luger and pump lead into that hairy torso. Clementine slithered over and caressed my shoulders and kissed my neck. Her husband had been a merchant marine during the Big One, had lain in Davey Jones’s Locker since 1918. Her nipples were hard as she pressed against my back.

Blackwood kept right on smiling. “Friend is a powerful word, cousin. Almost as powerful as a true name. It’s more proper to say Mr. Paxton and I have a pact. Keepin’ the peace so we can all conduct our nefarious trades, well that’s a sacred duty.”

“I understand why you’d like things to stay peaceful,” I said.

“No, cousin, you don’t understand. The Hollow is far from peaceful. We do surely love our bloodlettin’, make no mistake. Children go missin’ from their beds and tender maidens are ravished by Black Bill of the Wood,” he winked at slack-jawed and insensate Abigail who lay against Bly, “and just the other day the good constable Jarred Brown discovered the severed head of his best deputy floatin’ in Belson Creek. Alas, poor Ned Smedley. I knew him, Johnny! Peaceful, this territory ain’t. On the other hand, we’ve avoided full scale battle since that machine gun incident at the Luster court house in 1910. This fragile balance between big predators is oh so delicately strung. And along come you Gatlin-totin’ hard-asses from the big town to upset everything. What shall I do with you, cousin, oh what?”

“Jesus, these are swell flapjacks, Mr. Blackwood,” Bly said. His rummy eyes were glazed as a stuffed dog’s.

“Why, thank you, sirrah. At the risk of soundin’ trite, it’s an old family recipe. Wheat flour, salt, sugar, eggs from a black speckled virgin hen, dust from the bones of a Pinkerton, a few drops of his heart blood. Awful decadent, I’ll be so gauche as to agree.”

None of us said anything until Clementine muttered into my good ear, “Relax, baby. You ain’t a lawman, are you? You finer than frog’s hair.” She nipped me.

“Yes, it is true,” Blackwood said. “Our faithful government employees have a tendency to get short shrift. The Hollow voted and decided we’d be best off if such folk weren’t allowed to bear tales. This summer a couple government rats, Pinkerton men, came sniffin’ round for moonshine stills and such. Leto, Brutus and Candy, you’ve met ’em, dragged those two agents into the bog and buried ’em chest deep in the mud. My lads took turns batterin’ out their brains with those thumpers they carry on their belts. I imagine it took a while. Boys play rough. Candy worked in a stockyard. He brained the cattle when they came through the chute. Got a taste for it.” He glanced at the trap door when he said this.

“Powerful glad I’m no Pinkerton,” I said.

He opened his hand and reached across the space between us as if he meant to grasp my neck, and at the last moment he flinched and withdrew and his smile faded and the beast in him came near the surface. “You’ve been to see those bitches.”

“The Corning ladies? Come to think of it, yes, I had a drink with the sisters. Now I’m having breakfast with you. Don’t be jealous, Dan.” I remained perfectly still and as poised as one can be with sweat in his eyes, a hard-on in progress, and consumed by rolling waves of blue-black pain. My own beast was growling and slamming its Stone Age muzzle against the bars. It wanted blood to quench its terror, wanted loose. “What do you have against old ladies. They didn’t mention you.”

“Our business interests lie at cross-purposes. I don’t relish no competition. Wait. Wait a minute… Did you see the child?” Blackwood asked this in a hushed tone, and his face smoothed into a false calmness, probably a mirror of my own. Oh, we were trying very hard not to slaughter one another. He cocked his head and whispered, “John, did you see the child?”

That surely spooked me, and the teary light in his eyes spooked me too, but not half so much as the recollection of the cries in the dim room at the Corning bungalow. “No. I didn’t.”

He watched me for a while, watched me until even Dick and Bly began to rouse from their reveries to straighten and cast puzzled looks between us. Blackwood kept flexing his hand, clenching and tearing at an invisible throat, perhaps. “All right. That’s hunkum-bunkum.” His smile returned. “The crones don’t have no children.”

I wiped my palms to dry the sweat and lighted a cigarette and smoked it to cover my expression. After a few moments I said, “Does Paxton know I’m here?”

“Yes. Of course. The forest has eyes, the swamp ears. Why you’ve come to give him the buzz is the mystery.”

“Hell with that. Some say he’s at the root of trouble with my kin. Then there’s the goons he sent my way. I didn’t start this. Going to end it, though.”

“Mighty enterprising, aren’t you? A real dyed in the wool bad man.”

“What is this pact? I wager it involves plenty of cabbage.”

“An alliance, bad man. He and I versus the damnable crones and that rotgut they try to pass off as whiskey. Little Lord Paxton is moneyed up real good. He inherited well. In any event, he keeps palms greased at the Governor’s mansion and in turn, I watch his back. Been that way for a while. It’s not perfect; I don’t cotton to bowing and scraping. Man does what man must.”

“Who funds the sisters?”

“Some say they buried a fortune in mason jars. Gold ingots from the Old World. Maybe, after they’re gone, me and the lads will go treasure hunting on their land.”

So, I’d well and truly fallen from fry pan to fire. Paxton wanted me dead, or captured, thus far the jury remained out on that detail, and here I’d skipped into the grasp of his chief enforcer. “Hell, I made it easy for you lugs, eh? Walked right into the box.” I nodded and decided that this was the end of the line and prepared to draw my pistol and go pay Saint Peter my respects with an empty clip. “Don’t think I’ll go quietly. We Copes die real hard.”

“Hold on a second,” Bly said, sobering in a hurry. I didn’t think the Bly clan had a similar tradition.

Blackwood patted him on the head. “No need for heroics, gents. We’ve broken bread, haven’t we? You can hop on Shank’s Mare and head for the tall timber anytime you like. Nobody here’s gonna try to stop you. On the other paw, I was kind of hoping you might stick around the Hollow, see this affair through.”

I sat there and gaped, thunderstruck. “We can walk out of here.” My senses strained, alert for the snare that must lurk within his affable offer. “What do you want, Dan?”

“Me and the boys recently were proposed a deal by…Well, that’s none of your concern. A certain party has entered the picture, is enough to say. We been offered terms that trump our arrangement with Paxton. Trump it in spades. Problem is, I’ve sworn an oath to do him no harm, so that ties my hands.”

“That’s where I come in.”

“You’ve said a mouthful, and no need to say more. We’ll let it ride, see how far it takes us.”

“And if I want to cash in and take my leave?”

He shrugged and left me to dangle in the wind. I started to ask another question, and thought better of it and sat quietly, my mind off to the races. Dan’s smile got even wider. “Candy will squire you back to the Sycamore. There’s a garden party and dinner. All the pretty folk will be there tying one on. Dress accordingly, eh?”

* * *

Candy returned us to the hotel where my entourage collapsed, semi-clothed and pawing one another, into a couple of piles on the beds. Dawn leaked through the curtains and I was queerly energized despite heavy drinking and nagging wounds, so I visited the nearby café as the first customer. I drank bad coffee in a corner booth as locals staggered in and ordered plates of hash and eggs and muttered and glowered at one another; beasts awakened too soon from hibernation. I fished in my pocket and retrieved the cocoon Carling had given me and lay it on the edge of the saucer. It resembled a slug withered by salt and dried in the hot sun. I wondered if my father, a solid, yet philosophically ambiguous, Catholic, ever carried a good luck charm. What else was a crucifix or a rosary?

“You know you’re playing the fool.” I said this aloud, barely a mutter, just enough to clear the air between my passions and my higher faculties. Possibly I thought giving voice to the suspicion would formalize matters, break the spell and justify turning the boat around and sailing home, or making tracks for sunny Mexico and a few days encamping on a beach with a bottle of whiskey and a couple of señoritas who didn’t habla inglés. At that moment a goose waddled over my grave and the light reflecting from the waitress’s coffee pot bent strangely and the back of my neck went cold. I looked down the aisle through the doorway glass and spotted a couple of the Blackwood Boys loitering in the bushes of a vacant lot across the way. One was the big fiddler, the other wore overalls and a coonskin cap. The fiddler rested his weight on the handle of what at first I took for a shovel. When he raised the object and laid it across his shoulder I recognized it as a sword, one of those Scottish claymores.

A party and in my finest suit and tie it would be. Goddamn, if they were going to be this way about it I’d go see the barber after breakfast and have a haircut and a shave.

* * *

It was as Blackwood promised. We drove over to the mansion in a Cadillac I rented from the night clerk at the hotel. Even if the guys hadn’t scoped the joint out previously, we would’ve easily found our way by following a small parade of fancy vehicles bound for the estate. Bly rolled through the hoary, moss-encrusted gates and the mansion loomed like a castle on the horizon. He eased around the side and parked in the back. We came through the servants’ entrance. Dick and Bly packing shotguns, me with the Thompson slung under my arm. Men in livery were frantically arranging matters for the weekly estate hoedown and the ugly mugs with the guns made themselves scarce.

Conrad Paxton was on the veranda. He didn’t seem at all surprised when I barged in and introduced myself. He smiled a thin, deadly smile and waved to an empty seat. “Et tu Daniel?” he said to himself, and chuckled. “Please, have a drink. Reynolds,” he snapped his fingers at a bland older man wearing a dated suit, “fetch, would you? And, John, please, tell your comrades to take a walk. Time for the men to chat.”

Dick and Bly waited. I gave the sign and they put the iron away under their trench coats and scrammed. A minute or two later, they reappeared on the lawn amid the hubbub and stood where they could watch us. Everybody ignored them.

I leaned the Thompson against the railing and sat across from my host. We regarded each other for a while as more guests arrived and the party got underway.

Finally, he said, “This moment was inevitable. One can only contend with the likes of Blackwood and his ilk for a finite period before they turn on one like the wild animals they are. I’d considered moving overseas, somewhere with a more hospitable clime. No use, my enemies will never cease to pursue, and I’d rather die in my home. Well, Eadweard’s, technically.” Conrad Paxton’s face was long and narrow. His fingers were slender. He smoked fancy European cigarettes with a filter and an ivory cigarette holder. Too effete for cigars, I imagined. Well, me too, chum, me too.

“Maybe if you hadn’t done me and mine dirt you’d be adding candles to your cake for a spell yet.”

“Ah, done you dirt. I can only imagine what poppycock you’ve been told to set you upon me. My father knew your father. Now the sons meet. Too bad it’s not a social call—I’m hell with social calls. You have the look of a soldier.”

“Did my bit.”

“What did you do in the war, John?”

“I shot people.”

“Ha. So did my father, albeit with a camera. As for me, I do nothing of consequence except drink my inheritance, collect moldy tomes, and also the envy of those who’d love to appropriate what I safeguard in this place. You may think of me as a lonely, rich caretaker.”

“Sounds miserable,” I said.

Afternoon light was dimming to red through the trees that walled in the unkempt concourses of green lawn. Some twenty minutes after our arrival, and still more Model Ts, Packards and Studebakers formed a shiny black and white procession along the crushed gravel drive, assembling around the central fountain, a twelve-foot-tall marble faun gone slightly green around the gills from decades of mold. Oh, the feather boas and peacock feather hats, homburgs and stovepipes! Ponderously loaded tables of hors d’oeuvres, including a splendid tiered cake, and pails of frosty cold punch, liberally dosed with rum, were arrayed beneath fluttering silk pavilions. Servants darted among the gathering throng and unpacked orchestral instruments on a nearby dais. Several others worked the polo fields, hoisting buckets as they bent to reapply chalk lines, or smooth divots, or whatever.

Dick and Bly, resigned to their fate, loitered next to the punch, faces gray and pained even at this hour, following the legendary excesses of the previous evening. Both had cups in hand and were tipping them regularly. As for Paxton’s goons, those gents continued to maintain a low profile, confined to the fancy bunkhouse at the edge of the property, although doubtless a few of them lurked in the shrubbery or behind the trees. My fingers were crossed that Blackwood meant to keep his bargain. Best plan I had.

A bluff man with a pretty young girl stuck on his arm waved to us. Paxton indolently returned the gesture. He inserted the filter between his lips and dragged exaggeratedly. “That would be the mayor. Best friend of whores and moonshiners in the entire county.”

“I like that in a politician,” I said. “Let’s talk about you.”

“My story is rather dreary. Father bundled me off to the orphanage then disappeared into Central America for several years. Another of his many expeditions. None of them made him famous. He became famous for murdering that colonel and driving Mother into an early grave. I also have his slide collection and his money.” Paxton didn’t sound too angry for someone with such a petulant mouth. I supposed the fortune he’d inherited when his father died sweetened life’s bitter pills.

“My birth father, Eadweard Muybridge, died in his native England in 1904. I missed the funeral, and my brother Florado’s as well. I’m a cad that way. Floddie got whacked by a car in San Francisco. Of all the bloody luck, eh? Father originally sent me and my brother to the orphanage where I was adopted by the Paxtons as an infant. My real mother named me Conrad after a distant cousin. Conrad Gallatry was a soldier and died in the Philippines fighting in the Spanish-American War.

“As a youth, I took scant interest in my genealogy, preferring to eschew the coarseness of these roots, and knew the barest facts regarding Eadweard Muybridge beyond his reputation as a master photographer and eccentric. Father was a peculiar individual. In 1875 Eadweard killed his wife’s, and my dearest mum, presumed lover—he’d presented that worthy, a retired colonel, with an incriminating romantic letter addressed to Mrs. Muybridge in the Colonel’s hand, uttered a pithy remark, and then shot him dead. Father’s defense consisted of not insubstantial celebrity, his value to science, and a claim of insanity as the result of an old coach accident that crushed his skull, in addition to the understandable anguish at discovering Mum’s betrayal. I can attest the attribution of insanity was correct, albeit nothing to do with the crash, as I seemed to have come by my moods and anxieties honestly. Blood will tell.”

“You drowned a boy at your school,” I said. “And before that, your stepsister vanished. Somewhat of a scoundrel as a lad, weren’t you?”

“So they say. What they say is far kinder than the truth. Especially for my adopted Mum and Da. My stepsister left evidence behind, which, predictably, the Paxtons obscured for reasons of propriety. They suspected the truth and those suspicions were confirmed when I killed that nit Abelard Fries in our dormitory. A much bolder act, that murder. And again, the truth was obfuscated by the authorities, by my family. No, word of what I’d really done could not be allowed to escape our circle. You see, for me, it had already begun. I was already on the path of enlightenment, seeker and sometimes keeper of Mysterium Tremendum et fascinans. Even at that tender age.”

“All of you kooky bastards in this county into black magic?” I’d let his insinuations regarding the fate of his sister slide from my mind, dismissing a host of ghastly speculative images as they manifested and hung between us like phantom smoke rings.

“Only the better class of people.”

“You sold your soul at age nine, or thereabouts. Is that it, man? Then daddy came home from the jungle one day and took you in because…because why?”

“Sold my soul? Hardly. I traded up. You didn’t come to me to speak of that. You’re an interesting person, John. Not interesting enough for this path of mine. Your evils are definitely, tragically lowercase.”

“Fine, let’s not dance. Word is, you did for my father. Frankly, I was attached to him. That means we’ve got business.”

“Farfetched, isn’t it? Didn’t he choke on a sandwich or something?”

“I’m beginning to wonder. More pressing: Why did you try to have me rubbed out? To keep me in the dark about you bopping my dad? That wasn’t neighborly.”

“I didn’t harm your father. Never met the man, although Eadweard spoke of him, wrote of him. Your old man made a whale of an impression on people he didn’t kill. Nor did I dispatch those hooligans who braced you in Seattle. Until you and your squad lumbered into Ransom Hollow, I had scant knowledge and exactly zero interest in your existence. Helios Augustus certainly engineered the whole charade. The old goat knew full well you’d respond unkindly to the ministrations of fellow Johnson Brothers, that you’d do for them, or they for you, and the winner, spurred by his wise counsel, would come seeking my scalp.”

“Ridiculous. Hand them a roll of bills and they’ll blip anyone you please, no skullduggery required.”

“This is as much a game as anything. Your father was responsible for Eadweard’s troubles with the law. Donald Cope is the one who put the idea of murder in his head, the one who mailed the gun that Eadweard eventually used on the retired officer who’d dallied with my mother. Eadweard wasn’t violent, but your father was the devil on his shoulder telling him to be a man, to smite his enemy. After pulling the trigger, my father went off the rails, disappeared into the world and when he returned, he had no use for Helios Augustus, or anyone. He was his own man, in a demented fashion. Meanwhile, Helios Augustus, who had spent many painstaking years cultivating and mentoring Eadweard, was beside himself. The magician was no simple cardsharp on a barge whom your father just happened to meet. One of his myriad disguises. His posturing as a magician, famous or not, is yet another. Helios Augustus is a servant of evil and he manipulates everyone, your father included. Donald Cope was meant to be a tool, a protector of Eadweard. A loyal dog. He wasn’t supposed to dispense wisdom, certainly not his own homespun brand of hooliganism. He ruined the magician’s plan. Ruined everything, it seems.”

I was accustomed to liars, bold-faced or wide-eyed, silver tongued or pleading, often with the barrel of my gun directed at them as they babbled their last prayers to an indifferent god, squirted their last tears into the indifferent earth. A man will utter any falsehood, commit any debasement, sell his own children down the river, to avoid that final sweet goodnight.

Paxton wasn’t a liar, though. I studied him and his sallow, indolent affectation of plantation suzerainty, the dark power in his gaze, and beheld with clarity he was a being who had no need for deception, that all was delivered to him on a platter. He wasn’t afraid, either. I couldn’t decide whether that lack of fear depended upon his access to the Blackwood Boys, his supreme and overweening sense of superiority, an utter lack of self-preservation instincts, or something else as yet to make its presence felt. Something dread and terrible in the wings was my guess, based upon the pit that opened in my gut as we talked while the sun sank into the mountains and the shadows of the gibbering and jabbering gentry spread grotesquely across the grass.

“You said Augustus groomed Muybridge.”

“Yes. Groomed him to spread darkness with his art. And Father did, though not to the degree or with the potency Helios Augustus desired. The sorcerer and his allies believed Eadweard was tantalizingly close to unlocking something vast and inimical to human existence.”

The guests stirred and the band ascended the dais, each member lavishly dressed in a black suit, hair slicked with oil and banded in gold or silver, each cradling an oboe, a violin, a horn, a double bass, and of course, of fucking course, Dan Blackwood at the fore with his majestic flute, decked in a classical white suit and black tie, his buttered down hair shining like an angel’s satin wing. They nodded to one another and began to play soft and sweet chamber music from some German symphony that was popular when lederhosen reigned at court. Music to calm a bellicose Holy Roman Emperor. Music beautiful enough to bring a tear to a killer’s eye.

I realized Dick and Bly had disappeared. I stood, free hand pressed to my side to keep the bandage from coming unstuck. “Your hospitality is right kingly, Mr. Paxton, sir—”

“Indeed? You haven’t touched your brandy. I’m guessing that’s a difficult bit of self restraint for an Irishman. It’s not poisoned. Heavens, man, I couldn’t harm you if that were my fiercest desire.”

“Mr. Paxton, I’d like to take you at your word. Problem is, Curtis Bane had a card with your name written on it in his pocket. That’s how I got wind of you.”

“Extraordinarily convenient. And world famous magician Phil Wary, oh dear, my mistake—Helios Augustus—showed you some films my father made and told you I’d set the dogs on your trail. Am I correct?”

“Yeah, that’s right.” The pit in my belly kept crumbling away. It would be an abyss pretty soon. It wasn’t that the pale aristocrat had put the puzzle together that made me sick with nerves, it was his boredom and malicious glee at revealing the obvious to a baboon. My distress was honey to him.

“And let me ponder this… Unnecessary. Helios put you in contact with those women in Luster. The crones, as some rudely call them.”

“I think the ladies prefer it, actually.”

“The crones were coy, that’s their game. As you were permitted to depart their presence with your hide, I’ll wager they confirmed the magician’s slander of my character. Wily monsters, the Corning women. Man-haters, man-eaters. Men are pawns or provender, often both. Word to the wise—never go back there.”

Just like that the sun snuffed as a burning wick under a thumb and darkness was all around, held at bay by a few lanterns in the yard, a trickle of light from the open doors on the porch and a handful of windows. The guests milled and drank and laughed above the beautiful music, and several couples assayed a waltz before the dais. I squinted, becoming desperate to catch a glimpse of my comrades, and still couldn’t pick them out of the moiling crowd. I swayed as the blood rushed from my head and there were two, no, three, Conrad Paxton’s seated in the gathering gloom, faces obscured except for the glinting eyes narrowed in curiosity, the curve of a sardonic smile. “Why would they lie?” I said. “What’s in it for them?”

Paxton rose and made as if to take my elbow to steady me, although if I crashed to earth, there wasn’t much chance the bony bastard would be able to do more than slow my fall. Much as Blackwood had done, he hesitated and then edged away toward the threshold of the French doors that let into a study, abruptly loath to touch me. “You are unwell. Come inside away from the heat and the noise.”

“Hands off. I asked a question.”

“My destruction is their motivation and ultimate goal. Each for his or her personal reason. The sorcerer desires the secrets within my vault: the cases of photographic plates, the reels, a life’s work. Father’s store of esoteric theory. Helios Augustus can practically taste the wickedness that broods there, black as a tanner’s chimney. Eadweard’s macabre films caused quite a stir in certain circles. They suggest great depths of depravity, of a dehumanizing element inherent in photography. A property of anti-life.”

“You’re pulling my leg. That’s—”

“Preposterous? Absurd? Any loonier than swearing your life upon a book that preaches of virgin births and wandering Jews risen from the grave to spare the world from blood and thunder and annihilation?”

“I’ve lapsed,” I said.

“The magician once speculated to me that he had a plan to create moving images that would wipe minds clean and imprint upon them all manner of base, un-sublimated desires. The desire to bow and scrape, to lick the boots of an overlord. It was madness, yet appealing. How his face animated when he mused on the spectacle of thousands of common folk streaming from theatres, faces slack with lust and carnal hunger. For the magician, Eadweard’s lost work is paramount. My enemies want the specimens as yet hidden from the academic community, the plates and reels whispered of in darkened council chambers.”

“That what the crones want too? To see a black pope in the debauched Vatican, and Old Scratch on the throne?”

“No, no, those lovelies have simpler tastes. They wish to devour the souls my father supposedly trapped in his pictures. So delightfully primitive to entertain the notion that film can steal our animating force. Not much more sophisticated than the tribals who believe you mustn’t point at another person, else they’ll die. Eadweard was many, many things, and many of them repugnant. He was not, however, a soul taker. Soul taking is a myth with a single exception. There is but One and that worthy needs no aperture, no lens, no box.

“Look here, John: thaumaturgy, geomancy, black magic, all that is stuff and nonsense, hooey, claptrap, if you will. Certainly, I serve the master and attend Black Mass. Not a thing to do with the supernatural, I’m not barmy. It’s a matter of philosophy, of acclimating oneself to the natural forces of the world and the universe. Right thinking, as it were. Ask me if Satan exists, I’ll say yes and slice a virgin’s throat in the Dark Lord’s honor. Ask me if I believe He manipulates and rewards, again yes. Directly? Does He imbue his acolytes with the power of miracles as Helios Augustus surely believes, as the crones believe their old gods do? I will laugh in your face. Satan no more interferes in any meaningful way than God does. Which is to say, by no discernable measure.”

“Color me relieved. Got to admit, the old magician almost had my goat. I thought there might be something to all this horseshit mumbo-jumbo.”

“Of course, mysticism was invented for the peasantry. You are far out of your depth. You are being turned like a card between masters. The Ace of Clubs. In all of this you are but a blunt instrument. If anyone murdered your father, it was Helios Augustus. Likely by poison. Poison and lies are the sorcerer’s best friends.”

I took the blackened cocoon from my shirt pocket. So trivial a thing, so withered a husk, yet even as I brandished it between thumb and forefinger, my host shrank farther away until he’d stepped into the house proper and regarded me from the sweep of a velvet curtain, drawn across his face like a cowl or a cape, and for an instant the ice in my heart suggested that it was a trick, that he was indeed the creature of a forsaken angel, that he meant to lull me into complacency and would then laugh and devour me, skin, bones, and soul. Beneath the balcony the music changed; it sizzled and snapped and strange guttural cries and glottal croaks resounded here and there.

A quick glance, no more, but plenty for me to take it in—the guests were all pairing now, and many had already removed their clothes. The shorn and scorched patches of bare earth farther out hadn’t suffered from the ravages of ponies or cleats. Servants were not reapplying chalk lines; it must’ve been pitch in their buckets, for one knelt and laid a torch down and flames shot waist high and quickly blossomed into a series of crisscross angles of an occult nature. The mighty pentagram spanned dozens of yards and it shed a most hellish radiance, which I figured was the point of the exercise. Thus, evidently, was the weekly spectacle at the Paxton estate.

“Don’t look so horrified, it’s not as if they’re going to rut in the field,” Paxton said from the safety of the door. “Granted, a few might observe the rituals. The majority will dance and make merry. Harmless as can be. I hadn’t estimated you for a prude.”

My hand came away from my side wet. I drew the Luger. “I don’t care whether they fuck or not,” I said, advancing until I’d backed him further into the study. It was dim and antiquated as could be expected. A marble desk and plush chairs, towering stacks of leathery tomes accessed by a ladder on a sliding rail. Obscured by a lush, ornamental tree was a dark statue of a devil missing its right arm. The horned head was intact, though, and its hollow eyes reminded me of the vacuous gaze of the boy in Muybridge’s film. “No one is gonna hear it when I put a bullet in you. No one is gonna weep, either. You’re not a likeable fella, Mr. Paxton.”

“You aren’t the first the sorcerer has sent to murder me. He’s gathered so many fools over the years, sent them traipsing to their doom. Swine, apes, rodents. Whatever dregs take on such work, whatever scum stoop to such dirty deeds. I’m exhausted. Let this be the end of the tedious affair.”

“I’m here for revenge,” I said. “My heart is pure.” I shot him in the gut.

“The road to Hell, etcetera, etcetera.” Paxton slumped against the desk. He painstakingly lighted another cigarette. His silk shirt went black. “Father, the crones, other, much darker personages who shall remain nameless for both our sakes, had sky high ambitions for me when I was born. That’s why I went to a surrogate family while Floddie got shuffled to a sty of an orphanage. It must be admitted that I’m a substantial disappointment. An individual of power, certainly. Still, they’d read the portents and dared hope I would herald a new age, that I would be the chosen one, that I would cast down the tyrants and light the great fires of the end days. Alas, here I dwell, a philosopher hermit, a casual entertainer and dilettante of the left-hand path. I don’t begrudge their bitterness and spite. I don’t blame them for seeking my destruction. They want someone to shriek and bleed to repay their lost dreams. Who better than the architect of their disillusionment?”

To test my theory that no one would notice, or care, and to change the subject, I shot him again. In the thigh this time.

“See, I told you. I’m but a mortal, and now I die.” He sagged to the floor, still clutching his cigarette. His eyes glittered and dripped. “Yes, yes, again.” And after he took the third bullet, this one in the ribs an inch or two above the very first, he smiled and blood oozed from his mouth. “Frankly, I thought you’d extort me for money. Or use me to bargain for your friends whom you’ve so quaintly and clumsily searched for since they wandered away a few minutes ago.”

“My friends are dead. Or dying. Probably chained in the cellar getting the Broderick with a hammer. It’s what I’d do if I were in your shoes.” I grudgingly admired his grit in the face of certain death. He’d a lot more pluck than his demeanor suggested.

“I hope your animal paranoia serves you well all the days of your life. Your friends aren’t dead. Nor tortured; not on my account. Although, maybe Daniel wasn’t satisfied with one double cross. I suppose it’s possible he’s already dug a hole for you in the woods. May you be so fortunate.” He wheezed and his face drained of color, become gauzy in the dimness. After the fit subsided, he gestured at my chest. “Give me the charm, if you please.”

I limped to his side and took the cigarette from him and had a drag. Then I placed the cocoon in his hand. He nodded and more blood dribbled forth as he popped the bits of leaf and silk and chrysalis into his mouth and chewed. He said, “A fake. What else could it be?” His voice was fading and his head lolled. “If I’d been born the Antichrist, none of this would’ve happened. Anyway…I’m innocent. You’re bound for the fire, big fellow.”

I knelt and grasped his tie to pull him close. “Innocent? The first one was for my dad. Don’t really give a damn whether you done him or not, so I’ll go with what feels good. And this does indeed feel good. The other two were for your sister and that poor sap in boarding school. Probably not enough fire in Hell for you. Should we meet down there? You’d best get shy of me.”

“In a few minutes, then,” Paxton said and his face relaxed. When I let loose of his tie, he toppled sideways and lay motionless. Jeeves, or Reynolds, or whatever the butler’s name was, opened the door and froze in mid-stride. He calmly assessed the situation, turned sharply as a Kraut infantryman on parade, and shut it again.

Lights from the fires painted the window and flowed in the curtains and made the devil statue’s grin widen until everything seemed to warp and I covered my eyes and listened to Dan Blackwood piping and the mad laughter of his thralls. I shook myself and fetched the Thompson and made myself comfortable behind the desk in the captain’s chair, and waited. Smoked half a deck of ciggies while I did.

Betting man that I am, I laid odds that either some random goons, Blackwood, or one of my chums, would come through the door fairly soon, and in that order of likelihood. The universe continued to reveal its mysteries a bit later when Helios Augustus walked in, dressed to the nines in yellow and purple silk, with a stovepipe hat and a black cane with a lump of gold at the grip. He bowed, sweeping his hat, and damn me for an idiot, I should’ve cut him down right then, but I didn’t. I had it in my mind to palaver since it had gone so swimmingly with Paxton.

Bad mistake, because, what with the magician and his expert prestidigitation and such, his hat vanished and he easily produced a weapon that settled my hash. For an instant my brain saw a gun and instinctively my finger tightened on the trigger of the Thompson. Or tried to. Odd, thing, I couldn’t move a muscle, couldn’t so much as bat a lash. My body sat, a big useless lump. I heard and felt everything. No difficulties there, and then I recognized what Helios had brandished was the mummified severed hand he’d kept in his dressing room at the Hotel Broadsword. I wondered when he’d gotten into town. Had Blackwood dialed him on the blower this morning? The way things were going, I half suspected the creepy bastard might’ve hidden in the shrubbery days ago and waited, patient as a spider, for this, his moment of sweet, sweet triumph.

That horrid, preserved hand, yet clutching a fat black candle captivated me…. I knew from a passage of a book on folklore, read to me by some chippie I humped in college, that what I was looking at must be a hand of glory. Hacked from a murderer and pickled for use in the blackest of magic rituals. I couldn’t quite recall what it was supposed to do, exactly. Paralyzing jackasses such as myself, for one, obviously.

“Say, Johnny, did Conrad happen to tell you where he stowed the key to his vault?” The magician was in high spirits. He glided toward me, waltzing to the notes of Blackwood’s flute.

I discovered my mouth was in working order. I coughed to clear my throat. “Nope,” I said.

He nodded and poured himself a glass of sherry from a decanter and drank it with relish. “Indeed, I imagine this is the blood of my foes.”

“Hey,” I said. “How’d you turn the Blackwood Boys anyhow?”

“Them? The boys are true believers, and with good reason considering who roams the woods around here. I got my hands on a film of Eadweard’s, one that might’ve seen him burned alive even in this modern age. In the film, young Conrad and some other nubile youths were having congress with the great ram of the black forest. Old Bill stepped from the grove of blood and took a bow. I must confess, it was a spectacular bit of photography. I informed the boys that instead of hoarding Muybridge’s genius for myself, it would be share and share alike. Dan and his associates were convinced.”

“I’m sorry I asked.”

“Does everyone beg you for mercy at the end?”

“The ones who see it coming.”

“Do you ever grant quarter?”

“Nope.”

“Will you beg me for mercy?”

“Sure, why not?”

The magician laughed and snapped his fingers. “Alas! Alack! I would spare you, for sentimental reasons, and because I was such a cad to send the Long and the Short gunning for you, and to curse Donald purely from spite. Unfortunately, ’tis Danny of the Blackwood who means to skin you alive on a corroded altar to Old Bill. Sorry, lad. Entertaining as I’m sure that will prove, I’m on a mission. You sit tight, Uncle Phil needs to see to his prize. Thanks oodles, boy. As the heathens and savages are wont to say, you done good.” He ignored the torrent of profanity that I unleashed upon his revelation that he’d killed my father, and casually swirled his elegant cape around his shoulders and used my own matches to strike a flame to the black candle. Woe and gloom, it was a macabre and chilling sight, that flame guttering and licking at dead fingers as he thrust it forth as a torch.

Helios Augustus proved familiar with the layout. He promptly made an adjustment to the devil statue and ten feet away one of the massive bookcases pivoted to reveal a steel door, blank save for a keyhole. The magician drew a deep breath and spent several minutes chanting in Latin or Greek, or bits of both and soon the door gave way with a mere push from his index finger. He threw back his head and laughed. I admit, that sound was so cold and diabolical if I’d been able to piss myself right then, I would’ve. Then he wiped his eyes and disappeared into a well of darkness and was gone for what felt like an age.

I spent the duration listening to the Blackwood Boys reciting an opera while straining with all of my might and main to lift my hand, turn my head, wiggle a toe, to no avail. This reminded me, most unpleasantly, of soldiers in France I’d seen lying trussed up in bandages at the hospital, the poor bastards unable to blink as they rotted in their ruined bodies. I sweated and tried to reconcile myself with an imminent fate worse than death, accompanied by death. ‘Hacked to pieces by a band of hillbilly satanists’ hadn’t ever made my list of imagined ways of getting rubbed out—and as the Samurai warriors of yore meditated on a thousand demises, I too had imagined a whole lot of ways of kicking.

Helios Augustus’s candle flame flickered in the black opening. He carried a satchel and it appeared heavily laden by its bulges; doubtless stuffed with Eadweard Muybridge’s priceless lost films. He paused to set the grisly hand in its sconce before me on the desk. The candle had melted to a blob of shallow grease. It smelled of burnt human flesh, which I figured was about right. Probably baby fat, assuming my former chippie girlfriend was on the money in her description.

Helios said, “Tata, lad. By the by, since you’ve naught else to occupy you, it may be in order to inspect this talisman more closely. I’d rather thought you might twig to my ruse back in Olympia. You’re a nice boy, but not much of a detective, sorry to say.” He waved cheerily and departed.

I stared into the flame and thought murderous thoughts and a glint on the ring finger arrested my attention. The ring was slightly sunken into the flesh, and that’s why I hadn’t noted it straight away. My father’s wedding band. Helios Augustus, that louse, that conniving, filthy sonofawhore, had not only murdered my father by his own admission, but later defiled his grave and chopped off his left hand to make a grotesque charm.

Rage had a sobering effect upon me. The agony from my wounds receded, along with the rising panic at being trapped like a rabbit in a snare and my brain ticked along its circuit, methodical and accountant-like. It occurred to me that despite his callous speech, the magician might’ve left me a chance, whether intentionally or as an oversight, the devil only knew. I huffed and puffed and blew out the candle, and the invisible force that had clamped me in its vise evaporated. Not one to sit around contemplating my navel, nor one to look askance at good fortune, I lurched to my feet and into action.

I took a few moments to set the curtains aflame, fueling the blaze with the crystal decanter of booze. I wrapped Dad’s awful hand in a kerchief and jammed it into my pocket. Wasn’t going to leave even this small, gruesome remnant of him in the house of Satan.

An excellent thing I made my escape when I did, because I met a couple of Blackwood’s boys on the grand staircase. “Hello, fellas,” I said, and sprayed them with hellfire of my own, sent them tumbling like Jack and Jill down the steps, notched the columns and the walls with bullet holes. I exulted at their destruction. My hand didn’t bother me a whit.

Somebody, somewhere, cut the electricity and the mansion went dark as a tomb except for the fire licking along the upper reaches of the balcony and the sporadic muzzle flashes of my trench broom, the guns of my enemies, for indeed those rat bastards, slicked and powdered for the performance, yet animals by their inbred faces and bestial snarls, poured in from everywhere and I was chivvied through the foyer and an antechamber where I swung the Thompson like a fireman with a hose. When the drum clicked empty I dropped the rifle and jumped through the patio doors in a crash of glass and splintered wood, and loped, dragging curtains in my wake, across the lawn for the trees. I weaved between the mighty lines of the burning pentagrams that now merely smoldered, and the trailing edge of my train caught fire and flames consumed the curtains and began eating their way toward me, made me Kipling’s rogue tiger zigzagging into the night, enemies in close pursuit. Back there in the yard echoed a chorus of screams as the top of the house bloomed red and orange and the hillbillies swarmed after me, small arms popping and cracking and it was just like the war all over again.

The fox hunt lasted half the night. I blundered through the woods while the enemy gave chase, and it was an eerie, eerie several hours as Dan Blackwood’s pipe and his cousins’ fiddle and banjo continued to play and they drove me through briar and marsh and barbwire fence until I stumbled across a lonely dirt road and stole a farm truck from behind a barn and roared out of the Hollow, skin intact. Didn’t slow down until the sun crept over the horizon and I’d reached the Seattle city limits. The world tottered and fell on my head and I coasted through a guardrail and came to a grinding halt in a field, grass scraping against the metal of the cab like a thousand fingernails. It got hazy after that.

* * *

Dick sat by my bedside for three days. He handed me a bottle of whiskey when I opened my eyes. I expressed surprise to find him among the living, convinced as I’d been that he and Bly got bopped and dumped in a shallow grave. Turned out Bly had snuck off with some patrician’s wife and had a hump in the bushes while Dick accidentally nodded off under a tree. Everything was burning and Armageddon was in full swing when they came to, so they rendezvoused and did the smart thing—sneaked away with tails between legs.

Good news was, Mr. Arden wanted us back in Olympia soonest; he’d gotten into a dispute with a gangster in Portland. Seemed that all was forgiven in regard to my rubbing out the Long and the Short. The boss needed every gun in his army.

Neither Dick nor the docs ever mentioned the severed hand in my pocket. It was missing when I retrieved my clothes and I decided to let the matter drop. I returned to Olympia and had a warm chat with Mr. Arden and everything was peaches and cream. The boss didn’t even ask about Vernon. Ha!

He sent me and a few of the boys to Portland with a message for his competition. I bought a brand spanking new Chicago-typewriter for the occasion. I also stopped by the Broadsword where the manager, after a little physical persuasion, told me that Helios Augustus had skipped town days prior on the Starlight Express, headed to California, if not points beyond. Yeah, well, revenge and cold dishes, and so forth. Meanwhile, I’d probably avoid motion pictures and stick to light reading.

During the ride to Portland, I sat in back and watched the farms and fields roll past and thought of returning to Ransom Hollow with troops and paying tribute to the crones and the Blackwood Boys; fantasized of torching the entire valley and its miserable settlements. Of course, Mr. Arden would never sanction such a drastic engagement. That’s when I got to thinking that maybe, just maybe I wasn’t my father’s son, maybe I wanted more than a long leash and a pat on the head. Maybe the leash would feel better in my fist. I chuckled and stroked the Thompson lying across my knees.

“Johnny?” Dick said when he glimpsed my smile in the rearview.

I winked at him and pulled my Homburg down low over my eyes and had a sweet dream as we approached Portland in a black cloud like angels of death.

•