Cape Hell (19 page)

“They react to sight and sound,” Childress said. “Those senses are remarkably acute. Unfortunately, their memories are poor clay. I have to keep repeating examples to refresh their understanding.”

I made no answer. He was treating me as some kind of student, perhaps an apprentice.

McCready swung down from the saddle and snapped a hand to the brim of his campaign hat. “Sir.”

“Proceed, Captain.”

He drew a saber from the scabbard on his belt. The sun, clear now of obstructions, flashed off the gold chasing on the blade. He raised it. The man standing over the man with his head on the mounting block drew his short-bladed machete and lifted it as if in imitation. It may have been just that, an ape's duplication of a gesture by a member of a superior race.

I'd seen hangings, fought hand to hand, slain men, without flinching. When the captain's sword swung down, I turned my head away before the machete followed; but I heard the thump and roll, and a collective gust of air from dozens of primitive throats in response. It sounded exactly like the feeble roar the slain grizzly had made when its remains were disturbed.

*   *   *

I despised myself
for looking away. I had no authority in that country, but as Blackthorne had told me often enough I was an agent of justice. If I could stand by while a helpless man was beheaded without trial, I could damn well witness the act.

The body lay without twitching, slumped sideways to the ground, the earth stained around the stump of its neck; there's no violent eruption after the initial severance, despite what they write in sensational fiction. The head, looking hardly less aware than it had in life, lay a few yards away where it had come to rest.

I hadn't seen the worst yet.

Captain McCready pointed his saber at two of the men assembled, who came forward to hoist the corpse by its wrists and ankles and bear it around the far corner of the house. Their vacant faces offered no indication that they connected the burden with anything more than a pile of sod.

The captain mounted, cantered over to the head, leaned down, and skewered it deftly with his saber. The sorrel was a trained warhorse: Apart from distending its nostrils during the grisly operation, it showed no reaction. It wheeled at the kick of a heel and trotted up to the line of skulls on display, where the rider plucked one free and, resting it against his pommel, removed the dripping head from the blade and jammed it onto the sharpened pike. He leaned over again to plunge the point of the weapon into the earth, cleansing it, and returned it to its scabbard.

He rode the length of the porch, the horse stepping high, neck curved in a Grecian arch. There was something obscene even in that, an arrogant coddled mount prancing as in an Independence Day parade. The skull it carried had every reason to leer.

McCready scooped up the skull, tossed it onto the mountain of bones, and swung round to salute the major.

“Muster 'em out, Captain.”

The dullards dispersed, feet dragging—another second lost between their brains and their extremities and they'd have toppled forward from the waist—but I paid them small attention.

It wasn't so much the spectacle of that nightmare rider, whose own hollow eye-socket resembled so closely those of the martially aligned skulls, or even the casual disposal of human remains, like slops emptied into an alley. I'd seen as bad in the most vicious war ever fought between man and man. This was more barbaric still. Plainly the dead man's body had been borne no farther than that same pile. And I knew now the source of the bones Childress ground to refine his sugar, and probably shape into the fine china cup I'd sipped from minutes ago.

My stomach did a slow roll, my vision blurred; black petals blossomed in the haze. But I remained upright, either by sheer force of will or because inch by inch I was becoming accustomed to darkness.

 

TWENTY-FIVE

Joseph's escort turned
him toward the front door. The beast-man's strength was ten times his ability to think; he bore 160 inert pounds, inches from the ground, as easily as a sack of grain. I asked Childress where Joseph was being taken.

“To an ambulance, and from there to a fully equipped infirmary. I'd have had you brought there, but you were in worse condition, if you can believe it, and might not have survived the journey. These Indians are hardy. He needs hydration and nourishment administered under close supervision and a dose of cinchona, just in case. The natives have used it to treat malaria for two hundred years, but it's been slow to catch on outside Mexico. I sent a paper to
The American Medical Journal,
but it was ignored, probably because of my affiliations. Medical science should rise above petty politics. As a beneficiary, perhaps you can make the case for the remedy.”

“I'll do my best; assuming I don't die of the cure.”

“It's not a cure. You'll revisit the symptoms again and again throughout your life, but they'll not be fatal. You came through the first time, thanks to the bark, and the chances are you'll survive the others. Once your friend has recovered, he'll share quarters with you in the barracks. I'm looking forward to having my own room back. Captain McCready is a fine officer, but he snores like a steam shovel. Are you up to a tour of the grounds?”

“Have I a choice?”

I'd transgressed. He looked at me with the expression of a host whose guest had insulted his accommodations. I had to keep reminding myself he was insane.

“You're free to go any time you feel up to the journey. I wouldn't recommend it until I'm satisfied you won't relapse anytime soon. Your horse is in good hands—you may examine it whenever you like, it's a splendid animal—and I'll provide you with directions to Cabo Falso. It would be ungrateful of me to reward you for the gift of the
Ghost
by making you a prisoner.”

“And Joseph?”

“He'll follow—once he's instructed my men in the operation of the locomotive.”

He read my thoughts. “No, I wouldn't charge these creatures with anything more complex than cutting cane. You've yet to meet the rest of my regulars. McCready trained the men under his direct command, and I trained him.

“You'll find your other things in the cabinet. Ysabel has cleaned and pressed them by now. You'll be more comfortable once you're out of these rags.”

As he spoke, he patted the pocket containing the Gatling round.

*   *   *

I left him
in his private study, cracking open a book the size and apparent weight of a paving stone, and entered the bedroom, well-lit now with a similar set of heavy green curtains spread on either side of a window as tall as the others. A scuttle-shaped iron bathtub, lined with white porcelain, steamed in the middle of the rug I'd stepped on earlier. If it had been there in the dark I'd have bumped into it, so Ysabel—if that was the Yaqui woman who'd served coffee—would have had to enlist a couple of Childress' trained monkeys to carry it in; those gnarled hands of hers would have found challenge enough lugging in buckets of scalding water. I'd been bathed repeatedly, I supposed, but although the heat was moderate that far above sea level, my skin glistened greasily once I'd stripped. Whatever effect Childress' justice had or hadn't had on its audience, it was enough to break me into a sweat even if I'd been in the midst of a winter in Montana Territory.

I took the cartridge out of the pocket of the coat, hefted it, and tossed it into a corner. I hadn't the slightest idea what use I might make of it, apart from the fact it was the one secret I'd managed to retain. His knowing it robbed it of all value. I'd gone up against men before who were smarter than I was, more ruthless, readier to act when the moment presented itself; this was the first time I found myself face-to-face with a man who embodied all three—

Virtues?
Make of it what you like. One or the other or the other yet had seen me to a ripe old age in my work.

The painting I'd glimpsed in the gloom wasn't much less murky in broad daylight. It was smaller than I'd thought—the heavy filigreed frame almost overwhelmed it—and darkened with age and layers of dirt, cheap varnish laid in over dirt, and more dirt laid in over the varnish, but it seemed to show a man bound in the rags of what must once have been grand martial attire, being disemboweled by a band of curly-haired men in some kind of peasant dress. There appeared to be a signature in the lower right-hand corner, illegible under the layers of grime and shellac. A ghastly thing, probably worth a lot of money to people in New York and St. Louis.

The clothes I'd packed, with some exceptions I noted later, were folded and hung in the cedar cabinet, with my range hat and the fawn-colored Montana pinch I wore to special occasions sharing the top shelf. There was no sign of the overalls and flannel shirt I'd borrowed from Joseph to wear while serving as fireman; Childress had been student enough of human behavior to separate them from my personality. He'd studied me as surely as his poets and philosophers. I suspected I had Felix Bonaparte, the Alamos attorney, to thank for supplying him with information. He'd be Childress' conduit to the greater world.

That thought nudged me in the ribs, painfully enough to hurt, but not enough to tell me why. I'd been threatened, shot at, shot almost through, weakened with plague, and stood to witness cold-blooded murder masquerading as execution. You don't count that kind of time in hours or days or weeks or years; centuries hardly answered. I'd forgotten everything about my meeting with Bonaparte apart from the man himself and his oily command of English.

I lowered myself into the tub gingerly, gasping with each inch, but the sensation of being parboiled melded into a deceptive feeling of well-being as the heat penetrated bruised muscles and strained tendons. Compared to the tarry yellow soap I'd been used to in boarding houses and railroad hotels, the cake in the dish, lavender-scented and impressed with an escutcheon of some kind, wouldn't have turned up the nose of Queen Victoria.

Lathering up, I noted for the first time that my injured hand had been re-bandaged with the same attention paid to my scalp. I attributed that to the woman as well; but I was as wrong about that as I was about the house being an illusion and the gourds that turned out to be skulls. After I'd dried myself with a towel as thick and soft as any to be found in the best hotels in Denver, I picked up the German book on the nightstand and found it dog-eared to a page with pen-and-ink illustrations detailing the process of cleansing and dressing open wounds, with whole paragraphs of text underscored in ink fresh enough to still carry a scent. A Mexican squaw might be able to interpret the drawings, but it seemed unlikely she'd read German, with Latin phrases interlaced, much less select passages for closer study.

Something else shared the nightstand: A sepia photograph in a silver frame of a pleasant-faced woman bombazined to the neck, the collar closed with the standard cameo brooch, with her hair skinned back into what would be a tight bun and—I couldn't shake the certainty—the devil's own time trying to appear grave for the man behind the camera; she seemed about to burst into laughter. This, I thought, would be the fiancée Childress had left in Virginia. Naked as I was, I slapped nonexistent pockets for the packet of letters I'd been given by lawyer Bonaparte.

I had it then, the most important part of our conversation; which is always the first to go under pressure. Bonaparte had given me the packet for delivery, and it had weighed less heavily in my pocket than the useless piece of ammunition Childress had known about all along.

He surely had the letters by now, if the walking corpses who'd brought me up the mountain hadn't burned them for kindling; or used them even less respectably.

I made a decision not to bring up the subject. If the wretches had mistreated the letters in their childish ignorance and he found out, there would be at least one more head on a pole, and another decapitated body on his utilitarian pile.

Why I should think any more of them than of a stag whose head might decorate the wall of some gentlemen's club, or a prize-winning bass mounted on a board in a saloon, eluded me; unless it was the conviction that, generations back, a normal woman had lain with a normal man, with no thought beyond creating a normal family, human at least. What had come from that was no one's fault; unless you embraced the existence of Satan.

Which I surely did. A man could not have seen what I'd seen, met whom I'd met, and still denied it. Tidy dress and a broad knowledge of science, literature, and the arts were cover enough for horns and a tail.

For some reason I couldn't recall, I'd packed a fine linen shirt I'd had made to my measure in San Francisco, and the suit of clothes I wore to make a good impression testifying in Judge Blackthorne's court. Maybe I thought I'd be invited to a state dinner in the governor's palace in Mexico City upon the successful completion of my mission. Someone had brushed the suit to a sheen. That the valise containing this finery had been carried up the mountain with greater care than my engineer, said something about the character of my escort; but I didn't dwell on that. The clothes, and a fresh set of cotton underdrawers, were laid out on the turned-down bed as if by a valet. On the floor at the foot of the bed stood my second-best pair of boots—I'd left the best behind to be resoled—blacked and buffed to a mirror finish. Oscar Childress, it appeared, was gearing up for diplomatic occasions, accustoming himself to entertaining elegant guests.

Well, what was so ludicrous about that? I hadn't much history compared to my host's, but if I'd never read beyond the Bible I'd still know that being mad has never posed much of a drawback to ruling a nation.

 

TWENTY-SIX

The old Mexican
woman knocked at the door while I was putting on my shirt. I let her in carrying a tray containing a pitcher of hot water, a fresh folded white towel, a pearl-handled razor, and another cake of the lavender-scented soap in a silver mug.