The silverberg business, p.8
The Silverberg Business, page 8
A grand staircase jutted into my path. I looked back—the distance I had walked surprised me. I started up the stairs, holding the bannister for support. The stairs ended at the mezzanine; I could go right or left. I chose right, the side Mrs. Conroy had shot from. A walkway extended back the way I had come, with a railing on one side and a wall on the other. Paintings decorated the wall, but time had left them murky. The opposite mezzanine was identical, except there were doors on that wall, spaced twenty or so feet apart. I hoped Mrs. Conroy wasn’t hiding behind one.
Some ways on, my walkway turned to connect with the other side, to a stairway leading up. I was nearly to the first landing when the scrape of a boot on pavement sounded from above. My moccasins had kept my progress silent. I backed down to the mezzanine and waited near the stairway’s entrance. The sound of footsteps stopped. I imagined Mrs. Conroy standing there, listening. I could outlast her, I could stay so still that no one. . . . She screamed, a banshee wail of attack, and ran at me with that Sharps. I fired. Red splashed her chest; that Sharps went over the rail and clattered at the bottom. I was very happy to see it go.
My head throbbed. The boom of that Sharps and my own gun hadn’t helped. I squatted by her body. What does it mean to eat someone’s cooking and a few hours later have to kill her? Good of her not to have poisoned my dinner.
“You fixed me a fine plate of beans, Mrs. Conroy. I’ll take you back and bury you with your husband, if he’s dead.”
I slung her over my shoulders and set off toward the staircase, then down and across the long gallery. Spotting the Sharps, I dumped Mrs. Conroy’s body. I picked the gun up by the barrel and slammed the hammer against the stone floor until I was satisfied that it would take a gunsmith to make it work again.
Echoes of clattering faded, and I heard something—the sound of many feet on stairs. Feet that weren’t booted, feet that sounded like bare bones on pavement. A stench of rotting seaweed and wrecked ships descended with the sound. I ran. At the blanket-curtain, I paused to look back. In the shimmery distance, shapes moved, low and wide shapes that reminded me of crabs. I pushed through the curtain.
Conroy . . . I thought it was Conroy . . . sat in a chair by the door. A pile of sand covered his feet, and I caught more of that rotten ocean smell. His head was a nude skull, dry, yellowy-white bone. The revolver that I had flung into the marsh grass—or another like it—lay in his dead hands, dead fleshy hands. Then his skull-head turned toward me, and the gun-hand lifted. I sprayed my remaining bullets at his face. Bone fragments and smoke filled the air. He dropped his revolver.
Something fell from his mouth and struck the revolver, making a metallic clink. I picked it up. A copper disk, with a design scratched into its surface, the shape of Conroy’s cattle brand, with that same gash of mouth. Like the savage face on the sand hill. I threw it into the fireplace.
I stayed long enough to do two things: take Silverberg’s watch from Conroy’s pocket and shatter the lit oil lamp against the wall timbers.
Night-dark still covered the sky, but the burning cabin brightened the barn enough for me to load my things onto Patience and Blue Swamp. I left the gate open for Conroy’s horse, donkey, and cow to do as they pleased. And off I rode.
Some time later, the trail led up through a gap between tumbled boulders. In retrospect, the rocks should have been a clue—this wasn’t a region where such things normally abound.
The boulders were twisted, misshapen things. They reminded me of the hardened sand hill where I had found Silverberg’s remains. A whistling blur of feathers hurtled down. Solo. Blue Swamp bolted into the rocks, dragging Patience along. I managed to slow him, then stop. The boulders had risen to form a high and narrow cleft. I tried to back Blue Swamp, but the damn mule Patience wouldn’t move. We had no choice but forward. Solo circled overhead, cried, and flapped off into darkness. Had he been trying to keep us from going through the gap?
Daylight, or something like daylight, showed me a landscape resembling churned and twisted mud that had hardened into rock. Purple sky banished the sun. Nothing lived, nothing grew. No birds passed above. If the sun still existed, no hint shone through, nothing to cheer a hopeless traveler. I’ve seen land after the battering of hurricane or flood. I’ve seen lava beds out west, but even those crack and erode and admit life. This void showed no trace of ever having looked different. If all water was removed from the lifeless bottom of the ocean, exposing whatever muck covered the seafloor, and a thousand degree sun baked it for a century, it might look something like this.
The gulf should have appeared by now. From Conroy’s house to the bay couldn’t have been more than a mile. But no water, nothing to interrupt the endless hardened muck. Where have you gone, oh water of my youth? Perhaps this dryscape would continue until we reached Florida. Desiring someone to talk to besides my horse, I twisted around to get Silverberg’s skull from its saddlebag. I rested the skull on the pommel. “See where we are?” I said. “Not the nicest place for an excursion.”
Onslaught of dry and cold and crippled earth . . . permeation of nothing, nothingness that subtracted life, drained color. What of time? . . . what of . . . ? Without features to vary the monotony, without sun or even cloud . . . mind dulled . . . deadness of thought joined deadness of land. Images . . . can I find the images of memory? Only those will expel the nothingness: childhood . . . a small man with a pencil . . . a woman playing the piano . . . waves of gray-green water lashing the shore. Hold them, tumble through the choking surf, ride ivory steps upward and farther upward, into the light, the dancing light, light that smiles and sings. Hold now and breathe, breathe in light, breathe out air. Waves pass unseen. And again. Crusted land, crusted and buried. Is this the end? Life smothered and dried into this tortured crust?
I don’t know how long I rode. At some point, Blue Swamp refused to continue. I dismounted. “Sorry big guy. We should stop here. One place looks like another. Nothing for you to graze on.” My watch had stopped, as had Silverberg’s. I looked for a smooth, or at least smoother, place to lay my bedroll. The animals followed, staying close. “I guess this will have to do,” I said, dropping my bedroll. I unsaddled them. Neither showed an inclination to wander. I filled the Dutch oven with water and spread some corn on the saddle blanket. The water would only last another day at most. Before slipping into my bedroll, I opened the flaps of the saddlebag that held Silverberg’s skull. I didn’t remember putting it back in there. “I have your watch,” I said. “But I’ve gotten us lost. I’ll find our way back. Don’t worry.”
Sleep didn’t come easily. I moved my bedroll several times, searching for a smoother surface. Night never appeared, though the purple sky might have darkened some. In the morning, or at least in the period that followed my lack of sleep, Patience was gone. I scouted for tracks, but nothing penetrated the iron landscape. All I found was a smear of what might have been dried blood, but it looked too old to be hers.
There wasn’t much in her pack that I needed. With no fuel for fire, I left the cookware but took the bacon, hardtack, and condensed milk. I would eat the bacon cold if I needed to. With water low, I hesitated over the powdered milk and cornmeal, but brought them. Ever the optimist.
“You’ll have to carry some things,” I said to Blue Swamp, and led him away.
I walked for a while, wanting to spare him the extra weight. Air pressed on me. My weight, weight of air, weight of time . . . time banished—buried with the concretized muck. Horizon . . . horizon moved, keeping me distant. Somewhere past the curve of earth I would find a spring, a meadow, the gentle shade of cottonwoods. Something moved . . . distant . . . a flicker . . . bird? . . . beast? Blue Swamp whickered. “You saw it too? Well, let’s ride.” I mounted. “Not too fast, boy, not too fast.” But some force rushed us onward. Jagged air tore my cheeks. I tied a neckerchief over my mouth to spare my throat. Through slitted eyes loomed an upthrust rock wall. I yanked the reins. Blue Swamp reared and bucked. I flew.
Consciousness danced at the end of a tunnel, an opening so distant that all the steps in the world couldn’t take me there. Consciousness flickered, beckoned . . . I crawled. What else could I do? Though the effort had defeated stronger men. If only a sun awaited me, a sun and a sweet breeze, but those didn’t exist, had never existed . . . fantasy wrapped itself around me, dreams of a soft world, a place where laughter danced and birds flew in complex formations, changing direction in the clear, cold air . . . if only there could truly be such a world. In the nothingness, my laugh sounded brittle. I crawled toward the sound of agony, crawled until I found another, my companion, whose strength had carried me, now broken.
I put a bullet in Blue Swamp’s head and collapsed against him. Were those my tears? My head filled with them, rain, the only rain this blasted land could know.
8
A Saloon full of Skull-Heads
The ground rose. The slope was too gradual to see, but my legs felt it. Their ache turned to a lance of pain that ground its way through my calves. I labored on, weighted by saddlebags and the Greener, inventing games and tricks to keep the feet moving. Talking to Silverberg’s skull helped—I hadn’t left it, I couldn’t. I told it what I saw and what I wanted to see. “Just past the horizon there’ll be a western sky, peaks and ridges flecked with gold, and the trees, aspens and firs . . . a warm summer sun . . . soft green grass to rest on . . . a perfumed breeze . . . her hand in mine.”
But who was “her?” Never mind, there was always a her in this kind of fantasy, and the next ten steps would take me to her, the next twenty, fifty . . . and on. When I needed rest, when I knew that I couldn’t go farther, I pretended that the sun was setting, and I stopped to make my bed. I even slept, but something woke me, some subtle change in the flat and heaving air.
I sat up and looked around. Lights flickered. Real lights? Or fragments drawn from my desperate imaginings.
Off I went, hopeful, but expecting the lights to vanish, or keep ever-distant, like the mirage of water that confounds desert travelers. I trudged, getting no closer. When I stopped, unable to go farther, a structure sprawled into view, a two-story frame building with a false front. A couple of pillars remained to support what used to be a porch roof. A faded and indecipherable sign hung above the second-story windows. The building reminded me of a saloon I had been to once, on the trail to somewhere west of the Mississippi, a little town I couldn’t remember the name of. Except here, a strange mess jutted from the roof, rounded painted shapes, brown-and-gold checkerboards, raspberry, pink, and silver stripes, a gold hat. Closer, I could see that the shapes were connected, with more shapes beneath, like hats on a hat stand. The false front screened any view of how the hat shapes joined the roof.
The door was a simple bat-wing, like any saloon. Inside was even more dim, despite the lights that had drawn me. Instinctively, I stepped to my left, not wanting to be framed by the glow of the doorway. I held the Greener pointed down but ready to bring into action. Nothing moved in the dusky interior. My eyes adjusted. I made out tables and a bar. A man slumped over the bar, head down and unmoving.
Someone yanked the Greener away, and a pile of bricks smacked the back of my head, sending me to meet the floor.
I came back to life with a throbbing head, again. A scene emerged: someone had propped me in a chair, across a round table from a man . . . a man with a bare skull jutting from his shoulders, like Conroy’s when I fled from the dead mansion. The skull-headed man was dressed like a ship’s captain, double-breasted blue jacket with brass buttons, white shirt collar. The jacket showed some mends and fading, but was brushed clean. On the table between us sat two glasses and a bottle of liquor marked with a label in some Eastern European script. The skull-headed man filled the glasses and glided one toward me with his left hand, a nimble, long-fingered hand, a hand of flesh connected to a wrist of flesh that emerged from a coat sleeve. His skin was a deep bronze color. He wore a ring on one of his long fingers, a gold band set with a wine-colored, rectangular stone. An imaged was carved into it, the upper body and head of a winged woman, with one breast bared. Nike, I thought, but my knowledge of classical imagery isn’t the best.
The Greener wasn’t in sight, and my outside holster was empty.
The skull-head lifted his glass to his lipless mouth, tipped it back, and drank. Throat muscles worked the drink down. Grayish flesh, like exposed ligament, filled in the bottom of his lower jaw and connected it to upper jaw and neck. A ridge at the back of the jaw showed where an ear should be. The rest was bone.
I left my glass where it was.
Other skull-heads sat at a nearby table, playing cards, drinking, like a Day-of-the-Dead tableaux. I had left Victoria amidst Day-of-the-Dead preparations and now here I was, awakened to some macabre dream-version of the festival in which skeletons walk (and more than walk, as I was to discover). Past the table of skull-heads, stairs led up to a second floor. Another skull-head descended from there. This newcomer . . . curvaceous body . . . scant costume . . . said saloon girl, and on reaching us, the newcomer flopped onto my table-companion’s lap and wrapped her arms around him.
My skull-head . . . Ring Hand . . . pushed her off. He stood, bowed toward me, then pointed to the card-players’ table.
I shook my head. “Thanks, but I’ll pass if you don’t mind. Not interested in cards right now.”
He bowed again, made a noise at me that came from his throat, and carried the bottle to the table of card players. Not knowing the stakes, or the nature of my opponents, playing poker seemed like a bad idea. That was what part of me thought—the part that was here . . . here? . . . the part that didn’t run screaming, the part that said if I did try to leave, Ring Hand, or whoever had clipped my head, might do worse to me. Though I wasn’t playing poker, the same rules applied—watch, wait, calculate odds, keep the train on the tracks. The right side of my head throbbed. I ran my fingers over a lump. At least it wasn’t the same place that had gotten stomped back in Victoria—Victoria . . . how long ago that felt, another person had begun a journey there.
The skull-woman claimed Ring Hand’s seat. She leaned toward me, throating something that sounded like a question. The table pushed her breasts up. Soft shadow of cleavage . . . nipples indenting the flimsy garment, but . . . in the hollow at the base of her neck, smooth, rosy skin turned to gray ligament and ended in bone nightmare. My eyes must have looked too long at the dark wonderland of her cleavage. She got up and plopped sideways onto my lap. Before I could react, she put an arm around me and squeezed my face into her breasts. I tried to push her away, but nothing I did had an effect. One arm—that was all she needed to hold me. Her other hand rubbed my groin. I responded like you would expect—that part of me acts independent of reason. My erection brought a sound from her, a lower throating, and she loosened her grip on my head. I turned my face to breathe. Then I jerked away; the chair fell, taking us with it. I was able to roll her off me. She got up, throated, and walked away—an annoyed flounce in any language.
The lump of my Bulldog pushed into my chest. I stood, leaving the chair where it had fallen. The gun’s presence reassured me. I wouldn’t use it, yet.
Watch and wait. There were six of the skull-heads, including the bartender and saloon girl. I walked toward the bar. And . . . discovered that the slumping bartender wasn’t a skull-head. Dark hair surrounded a bare spot at the crown. He wore a tan work vest with extra loops and clips hanging off of it, all empty. Scattered along the surface of the bar were a compass, sextant, and other tools. The bar was a fancy affair—especially considering where it was—with carved scrollwork, and on the back wall a mirror with a frame that matched the bar’s carving.
I pushed on the man’s shoulder.
“Hauen Sie ab! It is not the time, it cannot be the time.”
That’s what I thought he said, but I couldn’t be sure of the exact words. The first part wasn’t English and the rest had a Germanic accent that was tough to understand.
He lifted his head, noticed me, and stepped back. His mustache-lidded mouth opened, a look of what I assumed was surprise. “Mein Got! You are not on of the Dämonkreaturs.” He stared, taking in my presence. “Who are you and how did you come to this hell-place?”
There was a sink behind him. I asked for a glass of water. He worked the pump and filled a glass. I told him something of my story, starting with Conroy’s cabin.
“Your horse,” he said. “How far? I wonder, would they allow me to go to it? Meat, you see. My training is as a butcher and there is no meat here, no fresh meat. Some of my supplies . . . they allowed me to retrieve from my craft—”
“Those things”—I pointed back at the skull people—“what do they eat?”
“They drink, profuse amounts. Liquor is the only thing I have seen go into their mouths.” He ducked behind the bar, emerging a moment later with a burlap sack and a collection of knives wrapped in leather. “I am sorry, I have no manners left. My name is Dellschau, Charles Dellschau. I have forgotten how it is to speak with another person. You don’t mind eating your horse?”
I said horse-butchery was fine. Curious to see how Dellschau communicated with them, I followed him to Ring Hand’s table. I can’t say I relished the idea of eating Blue Swamp or watching Dellschau eat him, but such a faithful animal shouldn’t be wasted. I’m practical, and I like to eat. There are worse things out there than horseflesh.
Dellschau stopped beside Ring Hand’s chair. “This man has left his expired horse a short distance away. I would like to go and collect some of its flesh for us to eat.” He pantomimed, cutting with knife, eating.
