The Scribe (28 page)

But he saw, as he walked toward the sun dipping behind the ridges to the west, that the usual humid haze of the southern air had been abated by the cold front passing through. The air fairly sparkled with clarity. Every crimson leaf still clinging to the branches of the trees was lit crystalline.

Saw that it was going to be a goddamned beautiful sunset.

A
ND SO HE
found himself aboard the Western & Atlantic again, this time headed south.

They bore down, the tracks just perceptibly dropping in altitude beneath them with every mile as they descended into Atlanta, the long line of boxcars behind the engine pressing their weight forward with the dropping grade, pushing their speed. Canby looked out the cab's window to his left and saw the darkness moving in as the sun withdrew, like a curtain drawn from east to west across the flattening land.

Canby was watching the slice of moon rise in the east when the engineer touched him on his shoulder. He pointed toward the orange and white glow of Atlanta ahead and Canby saw a horse and rider cutting swiftly through the fields that ringed the city's outskirts, the rider's shirtless back a splash of white on the dark plain. Canby gave the Marlin to the engineer and began to climb up the side of the locomotive. The engineer leaned out of the engine as Canby found a hold and started up.

“Where's he heading, you reckon?”

“Just take it to the roundhouse. Don't let up.”

“I can't take it into the city running full-out like this.”

“Yes, you can. Stay on him.”

“You gone kill somebody, you know.”

“Yes,” Canby said, “I know.” He stretched himself out on the roof of the cab and rapped on the steel. The Marlin's barrel came up and he took it and shucked the lever to chamber a round, then looked down the barrel and through the iron sights.

“Mind that stack,” the engineer shouted. “She gets hot.”

Canby did not answer him. Through the sights he saw that Billingsley was hunched close over the horse's neck like an Indian rider. Steam poured from the horse's nostrils into the cold night air. He snugged the butt of the Marlin against his shoulder and tried to relax his body against the shuddering of the train and squeezed the trigger.

Billingsley rose from his crouch and sat back in the saddle. He turned and looked over his shoulder at the train and then to the roof of its cab and stretched his lips into the leer Canby had seen at Stillhouse Creek, the white stumps of his cracked teeth just visible as the train closed the distance between them. Canby shucked the lever for another round and as he did Billingsley stood in the stirrups to his full height and raised an arm, fist shaking above it, into the night air.

Canby fired again and Billingsley twisted quickly in the saddle as though shoved by an invisible hand. Canby chambered a fresh round and sighted and saw that Billingsley had begun to pull the reins to his left, away from the railroad tracks. He saw that the horse's eyes were walled and the bit pulled taut in her mouth was coated and dripping with froth. How the poor mare could be running at speed through this, the second of her day's journeys, Canby could not imagine. Still, she ran at full sprint as though she believed her speed could outdistance herself from the creature clinging to her back.

He squeezed the trigger and the horse shuddered and sidestepped. A burst of blood, slick-black against the dark hide, bloomed on her shoulder. Billingsley bent down over her neck again and pulled harder to the left, his heels kicking into her sides. The train was gaining ground on them. The moon was
rising and it shone down on the plain, where patches of ice glinted silver in its light. Canby looked ahead as the train pulled nearly alongside horse and rider and saw that the northernmost of the city's foundries was looming on the horizon, where it split the railroad tracks from the beginnings of Marietta Street.

Billingsley seemed to have seen it as well. As the horse veered farther from the tracks he flashed another of his broken smiles at Canby and Canby fired again and saw that blood was flowing down Billingsley's side. The train had pulled ahead now and Canby sat up and turned to take his aim alongside, backward. He leaned against the engine's stack, feeling the steam heat come through his jacket, burning, as he levered again and his shot went wild, the rifleman having lost count of the rounds he had left, and he fired again and saw another bloom of blood on the horse's haunch and Billingsley's fist rising into the air, and then as Canby raised the rifle his vision was truncated by the corrugated tin walls of the foundry and its loading docks, the dark tin hulk of it severing him from Marietta Street and his target, where Billingsley was now, he knew, making headway down the broad thoroughfare to the city's center.

The engineer pulled down on the steam whistle to warn the city of the missile entering its limits and Canby howled with it, the rage and frustration that billowed forth from his windpipe shaking his rib cage. He pounded the roof of the cab with the butt of the rifle until he dented the steel. He looked again to his left and could see, periodically, in the yards that marked gaps between the houses that lined Marietta Street, glimpses
of horse and rider making their own way south. In the moonlight and the flickering light of the street-corner lamps, both were glistening with free-running blood.

Then he was conscious of the pain in his back. He pulled himself away from the smokestack and felt the skin peeling away. He screamed again, his voice mingling with the shriek of the whistle. He leaned over, eyes smarting with tears, and pressed a fist to his forehead. The chill of the night air washed over his wounded back and when he trusted that he could stand again he tossed the Marlin into the cab, then, climbing down, followed it.

The engineer had one hand on the brake lever and the other hung on the strap that sounded the whistle as though he meant to pull it loose. If he had heard the rifle clatter to the floor he gave no sign of it, his eyes were so intently fixed on the tracks ahead and on the pedestrians hustling off the tracks. But he cut his eyes away from the tracks when Canby bent to pick up the Marlin.

“Christ, mister! I warned you about that stack.”

Canby rose with the rifle in his arms, wavered, then straightened. “Any whiskey on this train?”

Without looking aside again, the engineer took his hand off the brake and fished it into the front of his overalls. He pulled out a flask and held it for Canby to take.

“You may as well drink it all. They'll call me on the carpet in the morning, no doubt. Better it's you who wakes up with fumes on his breath than me.”

Canby turned it up and gulped the whiskey like water. He took a breath and turned it up again, pulling on the flask until
it was empty. He moved to drop the flask in the man's back pocket, but the engineer shook his head.

“Keep the flask. I'll get me another if I ever have another payday with the W&A. Can I slow it down now, captain?”

Canby looked out ahead. The gulch of the rail yard was ahead and beneath them. He could not see, but knew, that in a few blocks this single track would split into two, with two more splitting off those in turn, to make up all the siding lines that formed the yard before they whittled back down to the single set that entered the roundhouse from the north. There the trains could be turned, and repaired if need be, and spun around on the great wheeled machinery of the roundhouse either to go back in the direction from which they had come, or else turned onto the tracks running northeast and southwest, or southeast to Augusta or due west to Birmingham.

But all this, on the unlighted rails, he could not see. He saw instead the lighted grids of the city's gaslights, brightest at the center, subdivided out and diminishing into darkness at the borders. Saw, too, a set of brighter, clearer lights that clustered in the few blocks around Calhoun and Kimball streets, where the superior electric light originated, then ran in a straight westward line out to Oglethorpe Park, glowing in a white aura above the exposition.

“‘The darkness is mine,'” Canby said.

“What's that you say?”

“‘The black sky is mine and I will see you in it.' That's what he said. Hell if he will.”

“Not following you, captain.”

“You can slow it down at Calhoun Street. Stop it there, in fact. Get me as close to the Dixie Light station as you can.”

“That's close by the roundhouse.”

“Then I guess you'll have made your run for the night.”

“What's the power station got to do with that crazy bastard on the horse?”

“He owns Dixie Light. And he's going to try to shut it all off.”

C
ANBY WAS ACROSS
Calhoun and midway up the steps of Dixie Light—hurrying through the white light and grateful to hear the slender lines still humming above him—when the power was cut off. He thought he could hear the crackle of the electric current running past him, dying, chased by the silence racing in its wake down the lines from the station and out to the farthest reaches of its circuit as the lines went dead. He turned and looked out toward Oglethorpe Park, which was now as black as the countryside beyond it. He imagined he heard a collective gasp as the exposition went dark, but he dismissed the notion. But a few seconds later he heard, no questioning it, screaming, then more screams, a crescendo of them, coming from the park.

Yet the windows of Kimball House still glowed with the mellow cheer of gaslight, as did the blocks fanning out from the hotel to the roundhouse. Canby paused at the top of the steps, listening. He heard a grating sound, metal on metal, coming from the basement of Dixie Light. He was reaching for the building's door when the lights at Kimball House flickered, then went out in a quick succession from the street level
to its top floor. Grid by grid, the city's streetlights shut down in waves of spreading darkness. In a moment Atlanta was darker than he'd seen it since the nights of the siege.

He felt his way down the side of the building, counting out six paces away from the door, willing his eyes to adjust to the darkness and wishing the scant moon would rise higher. He was crouching down, the Marlin raised in front of him, when the door to the building burst open.

What emerged from Dixie Light was blacker than the darkness around it. For a moment Canby did not recognize the figure as human. But he saw as it moved into Calhoun Street that it was indeed a man, upright and walking on his toes, completely black, glistening in the faint light. Canby's hands shook as he raised the rifle, but he steadied the sights on the center of its back and fired.

It stopped and turned in the center of the street and Canby saw its eyes. They were the only points on the blackened body that gave back any light. Covered in the horse's blood, Canby thought, figuring that Billingsley had smeared himself with the dark matter for camouflage, concealment in the night's dark. As he shucked the Marlin's lever he saw, too, a flash of the broken teeth, white against the inky blackness, then the figure wheeled and plunged down Marietta Street toward the roundhouse. He fired once more then took off after it.

The night-shift mechanics who had gathered outside the roundhouse scattered before the dark apparition barreling up Marietta Street toward them. Only one remained when Canby reached the great building. The man pointed to its cavernous interior with a shaking hand.

“What the hell was that, mister?”

“We need light. Is there any light?”

“There's the furnace.”

“Throw it open. Fire it full-out,” Canby said as he moved into the shadows.

“What the hell
was
that?” the man said again.

Inside the roundhouse was a cacophony of unseen motion. In spite of the darkness, the building shook with the vibrations of the rails and the tonnages of steel that groaned on them, locomotives and boxcars grinding to a stop as the blackout stalled them, the smell of hot metal mingling with the acrid scents of creosote and cinders. Canby picked his way over the rails and crossties, every footstep in the gravel seeming to announce his position, until he made his way to the plank floor that formed the edge of the mechanics' workshop. He moved more slowly now, remembering the pit that marked dead center of old Terminus, where the rails came together in a pentacle of steel. It was here that the trains were turned and in the dugout beneath the center that the mechanics accessed the undersides of the cars and engines. The men had left their tools scattered in disarray across the floor when the gas had been shut off and he nearly stumbled over a toolbox as he circled the pit and he heard a movement below him and fired at the sound of it.

In the muzzle flash he caught sight of Billingsley crouched and blackened in the pit and saw that his shot had gone wide. He chambered another round and fired again, the rifle at his hip now, and saw that Billingsley was closing the distance between them. He fired again and saw in this flash that one of Billingsley's arms hung limp at his side, and as he worked the
lever again he felt his ankle grasped as though in a vise and his leg was pulled out from beneath him.

Canby hit the boards with force enough to knock the wind from him and the burns on his back sang out in pain. He worked the rifle down along his leg and fired it again, then rolled onto his stomach as he felt the hand on his ankle begin to pull him downward. His fingers played across the boards, seeking purchase, and he had nearly caught his fingertips in a gap in the boards when he felt something tear into his leg.

Canby screamed and the pain intensified, a clamping and wrenching, twisting. He felt the hand moving over his leg and realized that his calf was being chewed by the broken teeth. He felt something give in one of his muscles. For a second the pain lessened, then the ripping came again, higher up this time, and Canby was writhing on the boards. His hands flailed and as he felt himself beginning to go over the lip of the pit his right hand settled on a wooden handle and he lifted it and swung it into the source of his pain.