Giving Up the Ghost (3 page)

“So, what do you think, my friend?”

The raven mocked me with a raucous chuckle and flew with dash and determination from the top of Jefferson's head to his other favorite spot in the agency, the newel post at the bottom of the stairs that led up to the rented room above the furniture store.

“You're right, of course,” I said. “You always are.”

There was only one thing left to do.

I grasped the back of the chair and dragged it over to the bookcase containing the law books. Then I stepped up on the seat of the chair. The whiskey had made balance a matter to be negotiated, so I crouched like a cat for a few moments to get the hang of things, and then I cautiously stood fully upright.

I reached to the top shelf, still far above my head, and grasped the nearest of a series of books bound in leather and some sand-colored cloth.
Laws of Kansas, 1878,
the serious letters on the spine said.

Once I had the volume and myself safely down, I placed the book on the desk and thumbed impatiently through the pages of civil law. It didn't take long to find the statute on divorce—and the enumeration of grounds permitted in Kansas. These included bigamy, abandonment, adultery, habitual drunkenness, impotency, gross neglect of duty, extreme cruelty, fraudulent contract, conviction of a felony or imprisonment, and cases where the wife is pregnant by another man at the time of the marriage. The law also required a state residency of one year, that at least one of the marital parties live in the state, and that the case be filed in the county of residence.

I slammed the book closed.

It gave enough of a jar to the spirit telegraph in the desk drawer to elicit that familiar string of biblical dits and dahs. I opened the drawer and repositioned the key to jam the lever.

“Hush up,” I told the device. “You got me into this mess. Now, be still while I get myself out of it.”

It was the fourteenth day of October, during that singular time of year when the heat of summer has passed and winter is still a holiday or so away, when the cottonwoods along the banks of the Arkansas River turn to gold, and when the harvest has filled both cellar and larder. I have always been more attuned to the fall than any other season, perhaps because of my naturally somber and melancholy nature, but if there has been any day in my life that you could point to and say that I was happy, this would be the day.

I had finished my labor for the second volume of psychical detection, and it was bundled safely in a hat box and on the eastbound Santa Fe train to make its eventual way to my editor, Mr. Garrick Sloane of Old Statehouse Publishers in Boston. A copy of the first volume was on my shelf, and I had subscribers across the country; nearly every day, the mail brought letters from people I had never heard of, but who had read my book, and were compelled to write because I had pleased them, or angered them, or left them in some state that they could not define, despite their ability to form sentences. Some wrote asking for help with their own mysteries and their own ghosts, or asking for money, or proposing marriage. The most creative letters were from those few that warned of my impending eternal damnation; the writers of these clearly delighted in describing the tortures that awaited me at the hands of a merciful God.

A few of the letters I answered, if the writer was courteous and able to spell
cat,
but most of them had a kind of pathos that frightened me. The amount of personal detail in these letters was shocking—
I am hopelessly dependent on potassium bromide and in my weakened state the ghost of my dead father returns to humiliate me—
and revealed clues that are more properly the domain of the priest or the psychic, not a detective. But on this day, my mind did not dwell on disturbed ramblings from strangers.

It was evening, not long after dusk, and the sky was crushed velvet, pierced by the evening star and smudged by a few clouds in the west. It was unusually quiet, because at present there were no cattle or trains or saloon music, and off in the distance I could hear a lonesome coyote calling to his brothers.

The air was so mild that the door to the agency was propped open, using one of the unusually heavy black stones the cowboys sometimes carry in from the prairie; I allowed Eddie to come or go as he pleased, having decided that it was criminal to imprison such an intelligent animal in a cage, so the open doorway posed no special hazard. He seemed largely uninterested in the world beyond the doorway, however, and when he wasn't upstairs with me in the rented room, he spent most of his time monitoring the business of the agency from atop Lincoln's head.

I was sitting at my desk with a freshly brewed cup of tea, reading by lamplight the Kansas City and Topeka papers, making notes in a ledger about items I found of interest: the passenger steamer
Princess Alice
had sunk in the Thames after colliding with a collier, drowning 640 persons; the Edison Electric Light Company had, in New Jersey, unveiled a dynamo-powered system with which to illuminate entire city blocks, at a cost far below that of gas; and in Kansas, Dull Knife was still leading his followers toward the ancestral Cheyenne home on the northern plains, and raiding and killing along the way, despite the efforts of the U.S. Army and assorted local authorities to return them to the reservation in Indian Territory.

Then I put down my pen and rested my chin in my hand, pondering a dream I'd had the night before. The dream didn't frighten me, but it had been unusual, and it must have been that oddness that woke me—and what made me remember it later. I decided I should record the dream in the ledger book:

At that moment I glimpsed from the corner of my eye a streak of light on the southern horizon. I looked up, thinking it was an odd time for a storm, and scanned the sky, but saw nothing that resembled lightning. After a moment, I returned to my ledger book.

I stopped scribbling, because I heard some commotion from the depot, a half a block to the south. I looked up in time to see Mackie, the station's telegrapher, standing in the middle of Front Street, imploring Wyatt Earp to help him. From the way Earp stood, with his arms folded across his chest, he appeared unmoved by the appeal. But Mackie, a small birdlike man with a wisp of gray hair on the top of his head, was insistent; he clutched the sleeve of Earp's shirt and attempted to drag him toward the depot.

“What's the trouble?” Doc McCarty asked from the doorway. “I heard Mackie all the way down at my place. Is it a health crisis?”

“I don't know.”

“Then we'd better find out,” McCarty said.

I took another quick sip of my tea, then followed.

Earp remained with his arms folded, with the little man circling around him. Earp was the assistant city marshal, and had been on and off the local police force several times in the last two years, once having gone to Deadwood in the Dakotas in pursuit of fortune and then spending some weeks pursuing unspecified affairs in Texas. I had met Earp while investigating a case back in the summer, and had formed a not very favorable impression of the thirty-year-old marshal. Nothing had happened since then to convince me otherwise.

Mackie took hold of Earp's sleeve and tried to tug him toward the depot, but the marshal jerked his arm away.

“Stop it, or I will give you the what for,” Earp warned, it seemed, a bit louder and more threatening than the situation allowed. “Do not drag me over there to look at your nonsense.”

Mackie was talking so fast that I could only catch part of what he was saying, but I did hear the word
fire
repeated.

“What's on fire?” McCarty asked.

“
Blue
fire,” Mackie said. “Shooting out of the key to dance across my fingers. Nonsense coming from the sounder, and the wire all tied up. Please, I'm afraid to go back into the station by myself.”

“Sounds like Mackie has been drinking,” Earp said.

“Of course I've been drinking,” the telegrapher said. “There isn't much else to do on a lonely night like this. But I'm not drunk, and I know what I saw and heard, and you'd believe me if you would just—”

At that moment, a falling star streaked across the sky, like the most brilliant fireworks display you'd ever seen, except brighter and grander. The star was sparkling white, with hints of red and green, and it broke into a shower of golden sparks somewhere above the southern plains.

“Did you see that?” Mackie asked.

“Hard to miss,” Earp said.

Two more stars fell, spectacularly.

“That's odd,” McCarty said.

Now, while one celestial event may inspire a warm and hopeful feeling, three introduce something between confusion and dread. Smaller fireballs were now zinging overhead, tipping the scale decidedly toward dread.

“It's the end of the world,” Mackie said.

“I've heard no trumpets,” Earp said. I could not tell whether he was making a joke or was being serious, and before I could make up my mind there was another considerable pyrotechnic display to admire.

“It's a meteor shower,” McCarty said. “A spectacular one, but only a meteor shower. It is not the end of anything.”

Then we saw something that resembled a shimmering curtain of pink and green undulate across the sky. The wires hanging between the telegraph poles began to glow blue, faintly at first, and then brighter. Sparks dripped from the wires, scattering on the ground or sliding down the roof of the depot.

“Will it burn?” Mackie asked.

“Yes, Doc,” I said. “Is this sort of thing to be expected from a meteor shower?”

“No.”

“Is it likely going to set anything on fire?” I asked.

“I don't know,” McCarty said. “I've never read about anything similar, except perhaps Saint Elmo's fire on the tops of the masts of ships at sea. But that's associated with electrical storms, not meteor showers.”

“Whatever it is,” Earp said, “I don't like it.”

“I tried to tell you something was wrong,” Mackie said. “The telegraph was going crazy. Ghosts are on the line.”

“Show us,” McCarty said.

“Not me,” Earp said.

“Come now,” McCarty said. “You have a reputation for being fearless. You're not afraid, are you, Wyatt?”

“I just don't have time for this,” Earp growled.

“Leave him,” I said. “Mackie, show me the trouble.”

With the lines overhead still sparking, we dashed down the street to the depot and climbed the steps to the platform. Earp hesitated, and then ran after us. Even from outside the station, we could hear the clatter coming from inside, a barrage of dits and dahs punctuated by the occasional electric crackle and pop.

Mackie led us past the ticket windows into the station master's office, the walls of which were covered with drawers and cubbyholes and where an octagonal-faced clock marked time with a lazy brass pendulum. On the mainline track side of the depot was a bay window, and beneath the windows a desk with assorted telegraph apparatus connected to wires going to the outside. I can't tell you what all of the equipment was, but I did recognize the telegraph key and the sounding box. The jittering key was wreathed in blue flame, and ghostly smoke was rising from the sounder, which was chattering so hard that I feared its cabinet would crack.

“What's it saying?” Calder asked.

“Which one?” Mackie said. “The key is sending, but there are four or five other fists coming through the sounder. The first message I heard is the one the key is sending now. ‘Canst thou send lightnings, that they may go, and say unto thee, Here we are?' It's not unusual for an operator in the pay of one of the wire services to keep the line open by sending Bible verses, but this one just keeps repeating. It's a fist I don't recognize.”

“What do you mean, ‘fist'?” McCarty asked.

“All operators develop a distinctive style of sending, which is called their fist. We call it this because you use your whole hand to send, in a motion that comes from the wrist, and involves more than just your fingers on the lever. Once you get the hang of it, recognizing an operator by his fist is as easy as recognizing one of your friends from the sound of his voice. I know all of the operators on the circuit, and whoever is sending the Bible passage has a fist that is strange to me.”