The River of Souls

Table of Contents

Part One

One

Two

Three

Four

Five

Six

Seven

Eight

Part Two

Nine

Ten

Eleven

Twelve

Thirteen

Fourteen

Fifteen

Sixteen

Part Three

Seventeen

Eighteen

Nineteen

Twenty

Twenty-One

Twenty-Two

Twenty-Three

Twenty-Four

COPYRIGHT

Copyright © 2014 by The McCammon Corporation.

All rights reserved.

Dust jacket and interior illustrations Copyright © 2014 by Vincent Chong.

All rights reserved.

Print interior design Copyright © 2014 by Desert Isle Design, LLC.

All rights reserved.

Subterranean Press

PO Box 190106

Burton, MI 48519

subterraneanpress.com

ISBN:
978-1596066304

One

A Constant Player

One

The man was as big as a mountain. His shoulders were like boulders perched upon cliffs. His face was a sunbrowned patch of flesh above a wild growth of jetblack beard that hung halfway down a tobacco-stained shirt. In deference to the room he had removed his battered gray tricorn. His black hair was a bear-greased mop of a madman’s mane. From it issued a stink of dead ursines, and therefore had attracted the half-dozen big green flies that flitted and swooned about his glistening zenith. 

A moment after he had come through the curtains from the garden beyond, where the lights glowed in candlepots and cicadas chirred sweetly in the pear trees, the music that charged the dancing ceased. Violin, cello, harpsichord and clacker of the clacksticks stopped their rotes and rhythms, and thus the dancers upon the shining plank floor in the candlelit chamber also stopped their series of roundabouts. All eyes turned toward the massive black-garbed man who had just stomped his hard dirty boots upon the selfsame planks, and those who knew what was likely to happen drew breath to whisper and point. They pointed toward a young man named Matthew Corbett, who stood nearly at the center of the room next to the most beautiful woman who had ever lived. 

The mountain of a man gazed across the room in the flickering candlelight. From the ceiling hung streamers of red and white paper. Nearby was a long table upon which were placed the victuals of the evening: two roasted turkeys stuffed with oyster dressing, a roasted pig stuffed with mushrooms and bacon, grilled grouper and sea bass stuffed with crabmeat, and sundry potatoes stuffed with a variety of vegetables, sweetmeats and pickles. Platters held bottles of French wine and jugs of Carolina ale. Glasses sparkled, the music had been light and lively, the conversations keen and witty and the dancers high-stepping and precise in their turns. All in all, it had been an excellently festive party until this black-bearded, ebon-haired bull of the woods had just clomped in through the filmy curtains, and now in the absence of music and with the whispers dying down, there was only the noise of the flies, buzzing hungrily around the gleaming, smelly curls of matted hair. 

“Oh, no,” said the most beautiful woman, who stood grasping Matthew’s arm on the right. And again, as if to ward the beast away: “
Oh, no!
” 

The beast, however, just grunted with the sound of a horse team breaking wind. His iron-gray eyes had found the prize. 

Matthew sensed the beautiful woman’s distress and touched her arm reassuringly. “There, it’s all right,” he said, resplendent in his wine-red suit and white shirt with a high collar and a frothy fronting of Spanish lace. “Um…who
is
he?” 

She whispered in his direction, without taking her gorgeous and luminous violet eyes from the visage of impending violence, “He’s the man who’s going to kill you.” 

“
What
say?” asked Matthew. He thought she’d said something he’d rather not have heard. 

The monstrous mountain moved, and in so moving caused the throng of frozen dancers to by necessity thaw their legs and scurry out of the way. The boots pounded the planks like a drumbeat for the dead. The musicians, though they were safely upon a stage, drew back for the sake of further safety against a wall upon which hung a tapestry of the dual masks of comedy and tragedy, as the stage was normally used by the stalwart Charles Town Players. The bootpound drumbeats continued across the floor, step by ominous step, until the new arrival at the party stood looming over Matthew Corbett. 

“Not again!” said Pandora Prisskitt, her red-lipped mouth twisting. The violet eyes in her heart-shaped face flashed with both anger and supplication. “Please! I’m
begging
you!” 

The man shook his head as absolutely as a demon on doomsday. “No use beggin’,” he answered, in a voice as deep as the Pit and as rough as a rocky road. “What’s got to be done.” 

Matthew did not like the sound of that. “What’s got to be done?” he asked Pandora, and to his chagrin he heard his voice tremble just the bit. 

“
You
,” said the huge black-garbed man, who put a thick sausage of a grimy dirt-nailed finger upon Matthew’s chest, “have got to
die
.” 

“It’s a necessity?” 

“A certainty,” said the beast. “Now. Let’s get us to the fine points of the thing.” Reaching into a pocket of his long coat—which seemed to Matthew to be very much out of season on this sultry Friday night in late June—the man brought out a black leather glove which for all the world must’ve seen both the bottom of a pigsty and the floor of a horse-figged stable. He wasted no time in slapping Matthew across first the left cheek and then the right. Around the room there were gasps and shudders and a few licked chops of delight, for even the finest lads and ladies loved a spirited duel. 

“I challenge you!” the man growled, in a tone that made the fresh glasses on the table clink together and the harpsichord’s strings hum. 

“Magnus Muldoon!” said Pandora Prisskitt, her cheeks reddened. Her long hair was the color of the richest sable, clasped with a golden pin in the shape of a P. She wore a French gown the hue of the reddest rose in Colleton Park, enhanced by light pink ruffles at the throat and along the arms. “I won’t have it! Not another one!” 

“Another one
what
?” Matthew asked, thoroughly poleaxed.

“Another dead man on my conscience,” she told him, without taking her gaze from the monster of the moment. “Listen to me, Magnus! This has got
to stop
!” 

“Will stop. When all of ’em are dead.” 

“You can’t kill every one of them!” 

“Yes,” said Magnus Muldoon, the iron-gray eyes above the sharp nose and the beastly beard staring daggers through Matthew, “I
can
.” 

“I think,” said the young problem-solver from New York, “that I have come into this play in the second act.” He then happened to look up, and noted with some distress that hanging on leather cords right above his head was the symbol of the night’s festivity, a large painted wooden sword. It was, after all, Charles Town’s famous annual Sword of Damocles Ball. 

“All right, then!” growled Magnus Muldoon, oblivious to Pandora’s expression of pleading and her hand across Matthew’s chest as if to protect his heart from being ripped clean out. “How do you want to—” 

“I have had quite enough of this,” said the older gentleman who had just come to the side of the mountain, drawn a pistol from under the waistcoat of his dark blue suit, cocked the mean-looking weapon—as it did have a small bayonet beneath the barrel—and placed it alongside Muldoon’s fly-swarmed cranium. “You will withdraw from the sight of my daughter, sir, or blood shall be spilled!” 

Matthew felt like a loose button on a tight coat. Indeed, this second act was proceeding apace with him being a central character yet not having a dap of knowledge concerning the script. He felt he must have unwittingly stepped into a role as a Charles Town Player, but whether this was yet to be a comedy or tragedy the problem-solver had no clue. 

In this early summer of 1703, as his world seemed poised between gun barrel and grim brawler, Matthew Corbett was all of twenty-four years old, having turned that age in the merry month of May. He sometimes wondered, usually late at night in the silence of preparing for bed in his small residence in New York, how one could be young and old at the same time, for surely some of the things that had both perplexed him, challenged him and attached themselves to his life had the power to dim the candlelight of youthful exuberance and for certainty one’s outlook upon the world. He was older than his years, and more seasoned in his experiences. In the course of his investigations for his employer, the London-based Herrald Agency, he had been by turns fascinated, wary, burdened with despair, jubilant beyond measure and just plain scared nearly to death. And, it must be said, very nearly
put
to death on more occasions than he might like to recall. Yet recall he must, for such was his mind. He was a constant player at chess, though he might be sitting at no board and facing no physical pieces. It seemed also to him that he had become a constant player at the game of survival, and that this chess match he had unwittingly entered into with the eerie and powerful individual known as Professor Fell went on day and night whether he was present at the game table or not.