Red Snow (2017), page 2
“There’s no safety on these plains.” Mrs Knox ladled fat-scummed liquid from a pot chained over the fire, after he’d seen to the pinto and shaken off his wet outer clothes. “Things were better before the railroad. The Injuns didn’t care about a few trappers and settlers. They’re less forgiving now.”
“Where are you from?” he asked, taking the bowl.
“Scotland, originally. Came across after we were evicted by the laird. We were young then, scarcely married, and I was with child. Lost our land so the laird could stock it with sheep. Lost the bairn on the voyage over. Aye, an’ lost a lot of other things since. Were told before we staked our claim that the land out here was as good as back in Sutherland.”
The steam of the lumpen fluid she’d given him mingled with the room’s other smogs and stinks. He felt his tongue explore a hurting sharpness in his teeth. “Is that…” He half-raised the wooden spoon. Then he put it down. “Is that how you’ve found it to be?”
“Nearest you get to the Highlands out here are these storms. The winters are freezing and the summers are hotter than all the furnaces in hell. Sometimes I move around here naked as Eve. Not that he cares…” Mrs Knox cocked an eyebrow at her husband. “Came back from the war the way you see him now. Lost his senses the way other men lost an eye or a leg.”
Karl Haupmann nodded. He’d examined many similar cases back when he was serving as a physician. The textbooks called it Soldier’s Heart.
“The good Lord made this life as nothing but a test…” Mrs Knox watched him set the food aside. “But you’ll maybe slip through quicker than he’s expecting into the next if you don’t take on good sustenance.”
He knew without reference to his notebook that the moon was thinning to almost nothing somewhere far above this roof. A hole in the sky, or a black mirror held to the earth. Better if he hadn’t come to this house. As it was, he’d need some excuse to go outside into the storm with his saddlebag, although he supposed there had to be a privy of some kind out there.
“May as well wash yourself.”
Mrs Knox filled him a copper-hooped bucket from a tin kettle. He took off his gloves and tinted spectacles and set them aside. The air clammed his back as he loosened his belt and braces, and hooked his shirt around his waist.
“Got that in the war, did you?”
“Yes…” He didn’t like the way she was standing and studying him so close as her fingers explored the shine of scar tissue at the junction of his shoulder and neck.
“This as well?” She lifted, turned, examined the seared mess in the palm of his left hand.
“You could say.”
“Must be hard…”
“It can be sometimes.” He tried not to shiver. “That, I’ll admit.”
“Aye, and you look and try to act like a cowpoke when it’s plain you’re an educated man.” Her fingers still lingered across his back and shoulders as he took the sliver of soap from a chipped plate and sluiced clouded water over his hands. As he did so, he caught a faint scent from it which, like a message from a dream, reminded him powerfully of something lost.
“Go easy with that soap. It’s about the only thing we got here that don’t reek of smoke and hog. Which way you heading?”
“A place called Sweetwater.”
“Locals around here mostly call it Slaughter on account of what’s supposed to happen there when the place is done. Mister Knox and I went that way this spring to stock up our supplies.”
“Is it far?”
“Not by the ways of out here. I’d say, the horse you got, three good day’s ride.”
“What’s it like?”
“It’s a town like any else. Or will be when it’s finished. For now, it’s a few bits of building that ain’t yet made up their minds what they are. You should use this to dry yourself.” Mrs Knox passed him a square of coarse cloth.
“Do you know about the people who own it?” he asked as he rubbed himself. “A man by the name of Callaghan? His sister?”
“They live in the big house. People don’t see much of the sister, though it’s said she’s passing pretty. There’s some maintain she ain’t well. Can’t tell you much else.”
He felt her lay her hand again across his shoulder. “My, but you’re cold.” Callused fingers squeezed. “Him over there. My so-called husband. You hear him now…?”
In a thin, high voice, Mister Knox was singing.
“Does that sometimes. It’s nothing new that he ever sings of. Nothing that belongs to this soil. Sings about Cailleach Bheur. Sometimes she’s a maiden and sometimes she’s a hag and sometimes he can hear her wandering around and tapping her staff outside these very walls. There are things like that everywhere across this nation—things that are lost but trying to find their way in an alien land. Have you heard of the Baobhan Sith? They prey on unwary travellers, suck a man right clean of his wits. I’m of the opinion that it was one of those creatures my husband encountered on whatever field of battle it was that the man I knew was lost.”
“I’m sorry, Mrs Knox.” Karl Haupmann shook his head and tried to step back from her. “But I really don’t hold with such things.” Still, it could have been just the rain, but he thought that he could hear a dragging shuffle and the tip-tap of a staff outside. More distant things as well. Voices, or maybe animal cries. But her hands were around him and her breath was quick, and everything else threatened to dissolve.
“My, Mister, you’re young enough, and strong, but you’re so very cold. I’ve scarce felt skin with this much need to put some heat in it since I bundled up my lost bairn on board that ship. It’s as if you’re made of dead marble. Some kind of wounded statue of a man.” Still, her fingers were tracing. “Or you’re filled with something that’s out there in the dark. But maybes there’s a touch of warmth somewhere inside the both of us that I can help you find? Him over there, we don’t need to bother about. It’ll just be a wee moment between ourselves.”
The beasts at the far end of the low black room stirred. Saliva was filling his mouth, the air was sharpening like a knife drawn across a whetstone, the fire was dying, and the cottage seemed to be dwindling to nothing but shadows. Only Mrs Knox was clear to him now. She was pressing against his body, her need raised toward his own. Her heat and flesh shone out like a flame of marshgas. In another moment, his desire would be beyond rational control.
He pushed her away and stumbled back, knocking over things. He hunched shivering against the wall.
Mrs Knox’s eyes were wide in the lantern light. Her hands trembled the shape of a cross. “What…?”
“It’s nothing,” he slurred. The sharpness still bitter in his mouth, and burning his throat. “Just a condition that I have.”
Another few moments as she stood looking down at him, then the strangeness began to settle. He could see her thoughts readjusting. Soon, like any other sane being, she’d set aside whatever she’d really seen as a mere flicker of nightmare, or nothing at all.
“In that case, I’ll get you some bedding.” She turned away from him. Then she turned back. “But I’ll ask you to sleep over there with the beasts, and keep away from me, mister, with whatever it is that ails you, and whatever you really are. And bear in mind that I’m the kind of a woman that sleeps with a loaded gun.”
He settled himself in the barricaded space with the animals. Waited for Mrs Knox and her husband’s breathing to slow. Then, he fumbled in his saddlebag and drew out one of his blue bottles and tipped some into his hand and licked and swallowed at the dry, bitter powder inside until the poison’s spreading blackness finally took hold. For a while, it seemed that he was in some high workshop filled with the remnants of old churches, and the strangely beautiful woman who stood before him was shaking her golden hair from a dark hood. Then he was standing on the sidewalk of some city street, where it was near-dark and almost snowing, and strange long, lit machines thrummed by and gave off smoke. Then he was nowhere at all.
4
Still a taste like wet rust in the back of his mouth next morning as Mrs Knox stood watching at her doorway while he fixed the pinto’s saddle. Her old gun was propped at her side.
“I’m sorry for any trouble I’ve caused,” he said. “If you want more than I’ve already paid—”
“Ach, No—you’ve paid plenty.” He saw her shiver. Could still see the throb in the tender well of her throat where the jugular ran sweet and exposed. “So you might as well be gone.”
He nodded and mounted. Flicked the reins and dug his heels. The sky was clear and open but for a few fast white clouds. The prairie soil was splashy under the pinto’s gait, and spread in far-glinting puddles that the wind chased in flashes. Even wearing his tinted glasses and with his hat dragged down, he felt like he was staring right up at the sun.
He remembered his long pursuit of the men called Timo Thacker and Elmer Buckley, and the reports that had finally led him to Monasta, Missouri, and how the people there had seemed trapped in a terrible dream.
The last leg of his trail reached to some wooded hills east of the town; these men had plainly come to assume themselves invulnerable, and had made no serious attempt to cover their tracks. It was evening when he got close. He tethered the horse he was then riding at the base of the final rise, and set about preparing his Navy Colt. Rodding the barrel and tipping out his normal lead slugs. Oiling the mechanism and loading the six from the wrap of packing he’d kept them in since he’d had them specially made by a silversmith in St. Louis, careful as he did so not to touch the metal. The thought struck him as he clicked back the loading gate and spun the cylinder that he might even say a prayer. But he wasn’t—had never been—that kind of man.
The moon hung bright and full, and seemed as strong to him now as had once the midday sun. Swiftly, he began to climb. The trunks of the birch trees caught like flashes of flame. Then came voices and wafts of smoke. When he emerged into the clearing where the two men sat drinking and laughing, he remained so much a part of the dark that not even their three bony horses noticed his presence until he stepped closer toward the fire.
“Hello…” he said.
Behind them, a few straggling thorn bushes clung to the otherwise bare rock of a near-sheer sandstone cliff face, and it was from their branches, like coats hung from coathooks, that their most recent victims had been hung. Back when they’d been serving with him in the Union Army, he remembered Elmer Buckley and Timo Thacker telling him how they’d worked as cattlemen, and noticed how neatly the knots were hitched, although the decay was such that some of the bodies were starting to dismember under their own weight. The smell of awful.
“I just happened to be passing this way.”
Immediately, their hands went to their guns. But it was his experience that even the worst killers tended to wait until someone had finished talking before they tried to shoot them dead. What, anyway, could these two creatures imagine they had to fear? Timo Thacker and Elmer Buckley would have acquired a sense of invulnerability during their spree across these plains, and he could see from the fire-flicker on their ruined faces that they were amused rather than threatened by the sudden arrival of a lone man. Then recognition came.
“Is that…?” Timo Thacker peered through the fire’s shimmer. “I do believe it’s Captain Haupmann…!” He nudged his mate by the elbow. “Remember? He was a medic we hauled stretchers for under General Sherman’s command.”
Elmer Buckley was peering forward as well. Rubbing his eyes in a near-comic parody of understanding. “But it can’t be!”
“There’s no need to stand,” Karl Haupmann said as he sat down on the far side of the fire. “We’re all civilians now.”
“Reckon that’s the case.” Timo Thacker had always been the leader of the two men, although his eyes had sunken so deep in his once-round face you couldn’t see them as anything more than ruby glints, and he looked sickly-bloated and ill beyond mere illness, and was scarecrow-dressed in a man’s frock coat and a woman’s gingham blouse. If ever he’d needed independent evidence of the horror of his contagion, it was surely here.
Elmer Buckley giggled. As much as Timo Thacker had maintained some diseased puffball residue of his old plumpness, Elmer Buckley, who’d always been skinny, was now a pile of sinew-strung bones. He was wearing the rotted uniform of a soldier of the United States, although the insignia and rank were varied. Both men had their boots off and were stretching their feet toward the fire as if they scarcely felt its heat, although both lacked several toes. Provided you could ignore the horror of how they looked and everything which surrounded them, they could almost have been withered children playing dress-up. Elmer Buckley reached down beside him, lifted a large brown jug, and tipped it up to take a long gulp.
“Want some?”
He had no desire to drink whatever was on offer, but accepted the jug as another way of buying time. The thought that it might be filled with human blood only came to him as he raised it. It wasn’t—although the stuff burned, and made him gasp.
“Way there!” Elmer Buckley wheezingly giggled some more. “Rubbing alkee-hol. An’ ain’t it the truth it’s strong stuff.”
“I was wondering,” he said, leaning over to return the jug, “exactly how much you two men remember of the last time we were in each other’s company?”
“Ain’t much to say, really, is there?” Timo Thacker replied. “One minute we was fine and young, and the next along comes the draft and we’re stuffed into uniforms like cheap sausages and wheeled out for target practise for the fucking Secessionist guns. An’ pardon my French, sir.”
“You can say whatever you like.”
Timo Thacker seemed to find this bitterly funny. When he’d finished laughing, he hawked a large, dark gob of something that wasn’t merely phlegm into the fire.
“So there we was, an’ it seemed like bein’ stretcher-bearers was better than bein’ bayonet bags for downhome boys from Alabamee, although a’ course they don’t tell you that you got to go out when the guns is still firing. Still, orders is orders, an’ if you don’t do as you’re told you soon find out there’s plenty other ways of gettin’ shot…”
Timo Thacker was gazing into the fire, suddenly filled with the same kind of empty stillness Karl Haupmann sometimes felt coming over himself.
“So?” he prompted. “What do you remember of that last skirmish?”
“Oh? You mean in North Carolina?”
“I believe it’s now called the Battle of Bentonville.”
“It weren’t no battle, was it? Not when you’ve seen so fucking many of the things, Captain, as we alls have.”
“I suppose that’s true.”
“Not much to say. Apart, anyways, from it being right at the sorry arse end of the war.” Timo Thacker peered forward, as if recognising his old captain afresh. “An’ we was on stretcher duty with you, wasn’t we, sir? Out there doin’ our best to sort the livin’ from the dead.”
“That’s how I remember it too.”
“Exactly… An’ then—an’ then…”
“Then?”
Timo Thacker’s features loosened like a deflated balloon. “There was this other character out there at the end of the battle, wasn’t there? Some ragged sort of man, as I recall. At least, what we could see of him, it being close to nightfall. Up to no good a-pickin’ about the bodies. Something off about his fingers, as well. Like they was broken down to claws. A face that didn’t bear much lookin’ at either. But lootin’s a crime, ain’t it, Captain? It goes against all that’s decent and good.”
He hadn’t expected to be drawn so strongly back. Could smell the mud and smoke of that twilit battlefield. Could see that ragged figure stooping, moving on, quick and crablike and oddly fast. Could hear the surprised catch in his own voice as he called out for it to stop.
“Sure as hell it weren’t up to God’s business. For then it scurries off, into yonder wood. An’ we follow. Isn’t that what you recall, Captain, as well?”
“Pretty much,” he agreed. “But what happened then?”
With a plain effort to draw himself back to the present, Timo Thacker picked up a long stick, or possibly a burnt human thigh bone, and used it to stir the fire. “Well, that’s the thing of it, Captain. An’ it was a pure long time ago. Whole lot of blood and shit gone under the bridge since then. How’s about you, Elmer?” His voice quavered, oddly hopeful, toward his friend. “Is there much about this business the good Captain here is askin’ after that you recollect?”
“Me?” Elmer Buckley shuffled his bones like a scolded back-of-the-class kid. “What I mostly remember is…” His cracked lips made a splitting sound. Then he stopped, and gave another of his spastic giggles. “Almost nothing at all.”
“There was a struggle…?”
“Guess there may have been,” Timo Thacker conceded, although his voice had now assumed the wary air of a private being questioned by an officer over some alleged misdeed. “But back then, there was a whole hell of a lot a’ most things. All I knows is that it wasn’t long after that the whole sorry war ended, and Halleluiah for that.”
“Halleluiah indeed. And how did you two get on after? How did you feel?”
“Get on! Feel?!” For Timo Thacker, this truly was hilarious. He rocked back and forth, twitching and wheezing. “You hear that, Elmer? Ain’t that just the kind a’ bullshit that got us right to where we now is!”
“Your teeth, for example?”
“Well,” Timo Thacker grinned a black, rotten grin. “I long said goodbye to them. An’ good riddance, seein’ as they only ever hurt.”
“Any increased sensitivity to daylight?”
“Increased sense-iv-ity an’ how-do-you do! Now the Captain’s a-talking like the posh Eastern doctor he always was.”
“But still—”
“But still nothing, Captain. Although I think I can speak for both me and Elmer when I says we’ve always much preferred a nice bit of the dark. It’s when the cathouses are open. That, and the bars.”
