The Shotgun Arcana (21 page)

An additional twenty-eight “subjects” died as he developed and refined his method to pump and maintain saline water in the subjects’ bodies and then add the proper chemical mixtures, along with copper wire implants to the brain, spine and heart, via catheters. The end result was an organic voltic pile—a living battery capable of storing and releasing electrical current. Granted the batteries tended to scream endlessly in agony until they caught fire and exploded from within, but in later models he would simply remove their vocal cords to eliminate that distracting byproduct. It was all a manner of fine-tuning the process to keep the batteries alive indefinitely. He was so close to achieving his life’s work, and it was so infuriating to have to pretend to hide his genius because the world was run by moral cowards without a shred of will to do what science demanded.

So, when the letter arrived from California, written on sturdy, cured human skin, and told him that his longtime patron had taken an interest in seeing his work come to fruition and wanted to know if he would enjoy working with a bigger laboratory with many more test subjects, the professor agreed eagerly. He set out with a wagon full of his finest inventions, a human nervous system floating in a jar that he was tinkering with, and, of course, the token of his patron’s devotion and, dare he say it, love. Professor Zenith possessed the ninth one.

The Nine of Cups

Gillian Proctor felt very self-conscious as she waited in the darkness in the small stand of bushes behind Shultz’s General Store. A year ago she, Auggie and Clay had hidden here as they’d tried to avoid the hideous stained creatures their fellow townsfolk had been transformed into. Now she waited here to find out the truth about her future husband and the reason for his own transformation into a sullen stranger.

Maude Stapleton had given her the idea the other day when the two were having coffee and discussing Gillian’s obvious upset.

“I can’t spy on him. I love him, Maude,” Gillian had said. Maude Stapleton had a sadness and a wisdom in her eyes, and in the year since Maude’s husband, Arthur, had died, the two had become good friends. Gillian remembered how terrifying it had been to lose her own husband, Will, years ago and how difficult it could be to be a woman alone at the ragged edges of the world. Gillian knew Maude held secrets and didn’t press about them, but she also knew Maude was a good person and a good friend, and that was really all Gillian needed to know.

“You love him, right?” Maude had asked as they sat on the porch of Gillian’s home, which she had turned into a boardinghouse to make ends meet after Will had died. The two had developed a ritual of having coffee and talking before they began their busy days.

“With all my heart,” Gillian said. “He’s a decent, loving, caring man, the best man I ever met.”

Maude nodded and sipped her coffee. “Auggie has been nothing but decent and as open as a book as long as I’ve known him,” she said. “So if he’s behaving this way, shutting you out, he’s in some kind of trouble and you and I both know very well that men think they can handle any trouble that comes their way and that they love to protect us ‘shrinking violets’ from it.”

Gillian sighed and nodded.

“You are probably right, but I can’t just meddle in his private business.”

“When people you love are in trouble, you do what you have to do,” Maude said. “Often you discover what you are capable of when push comes to shove. It can surprise you.”

“I wouldn’t even know how to,” Gillian said.

Maude smiled. “Well, I might be able to give you a few suggestions.…”

It was dark, except for the few sparse streetlights that had been lit about an hour ago, and Gillian was dressed in a very unfamiliar way for her. A dark shirt and dark trousers that had belonged to Will. She had a belt tied tight about her waist to hold the loose clothes on. Her hair was tied in a tight bun to stay out of her face. She felt like a skulking thief, but there was a thrill to this, she had to admit.

There was a clatter of wagon wheels down Dry Well Road, behind her, then the sound of the wagon leaving the road to turn just past the Salvation Square flophouse that a former preacher, Christopher Marlowe, ran. There were worn ruts where so many delivery wagons and horses had taken the shortcut to gain access to the back doors. Folks joked that in a few more years, it would be its own unofficial little road running between Main and Dry Well.

A wagon came into view and stopped behind Auggie’s store. The lone occupant was Clay Turlough. Clay climbed down from the seat and knocked on the back door to Auggie’s. After a moment Auggie appeared, grim faced and looking exhausted.

“Clayton,” he said. “I … we need to talk. I am done with this madness. It is wrong, what you are doing is sick. Those girls…”

Clay regarded Auggie, then shrugged. Gillian couldn’t see Clay’s face, but from Auggie’s pained expression, the odd inventor to whom emotion was a greater mystery than any science had let a tiny drop of hurt and disappointment slip from his visage for a second.

“Suit yourself, Auggie.” Clay turned and headed back to the wagon. “I started this on my own and I can finish it on my own.”

Auggie stepped out of the doorway. “Clay! You can’t do this, your health is poor, man, and since the fire … you can’t handle them alone. You need to…”

Struggling, Clay managed to climb back into the wagon with great effort. “Tonight is the last one I need, by the dawn my work will be complete. I’ll manage, Auggie, don’t you fret. I know it’s a lot to ask of someone. I appreciate the help.”

“I appreciate the help you’ve given me with the store, the loans,” Auggie said. “Can’t you just stop this?”

Clay looked at him but said nothing. Auggie muttered a curse in German and then locked the door to the store and climbed in the wagon. “
Verrückte
,” he mumbled as he climbed into the seat. “Let’s get this over with,
ja
?”

Clay slapped the reins and the wagon clattered down the narrow alley between the two streets, headed toward Prosperity Street.

Gillian waited until the wagon was swallowed by the darkness between the streetlights, and then she ran quickly down the alley. Her feet felt odd in oversized boots, and she almost stumbled a few times. She was out of breath by the time she reached Prosperity. Then she could see the wagon turning onto Pratt Road. Clay’s livery, his home and barns were all off Pratt. Gillian began to walk up the road as the wagon disappeared from sight.

It took her about fifteen minutes to reach Clay’s. She stood on the road and tried to make out any details in the pitch darkness. The only light came from the moon and stars, which were playing hide-and-seek with banks of swift-moving dark clouds. The bunkhouse for Clay’s workmen had been built inside his fences in the last six months. It was dark, too, as the hands had to be up and at work with the horses well before sunup and were already asleep.

Gillian walked up the road. The wind was cold, a reminder that winter would be upon them all soon even here in the desert and that the Earth was tilting far from the sun and deeper toward the void. The high grasses that bordered the road and Clay’s fences swayed in the November night. Gillian felt a little fear trickle into her chest. It was a dark, lonely road and this was Golgotha. People disappeared or worse here all the time. She looked back and saw the feeble flickers of the streetlights, the dark silhouettes of slumbering homes and the warm but distant glow of the mining camp up on Argent, which was pretty much alive and awake around the clock. It suddenly dawned on her just how narrow a ledge of civilization separated her, separated all of the good folk of Golgotha, from the ravenous beast of the wilderness. Gillian quickened her pace up the road to Clay’s livery. The wagon wasn’t here. Gillian cursed silently. Pratt Road dead-ended at Clay’s place. If Clay’s wagon wasn’t here, he and Auggie had turned onto Old Stone Road. That meant they could be headed along that seldom-used eastern road out of Golgotha, or south to Rose Road that ran along the backside of Rose Hill, or north up Pauper’s Rest Road, headed to either the old graveyard that had been there as long as anyone can remember, or past that to Boot Hill where the poor and the nameless were all buried. Gillian moved across the exercise yard to the entrance of Clay’s smaller barn that was opposite the stables. Clay had made substantial improvements and expansions to both the stable and the barn in the last year and Gillian was sure that the barn’s expansion was more for Clay’s experiments than to accommodate more client horses. She struggled with the heavy wooden door and was afraid for a moment it was locked. She dug in her heels and pulled with all her might. The door creaked open and Gillian fell backward on her rump. Getting to her feet, she noticed the interior of the door was reinforced with heavy lead plates.

There was a strange sound from inside the dark building. It was a shrill squeaking, like metal scraping against metal rhythmically. The barn had an odd smell, combining something burnt, the smell in the air after a thunderstorm, sour chemical odors, and the faint whiff of feces and rotting meat. It dawned on Gillian that Clay usually smelled this way as well.

There was a row of oil lanterns hanging on a hook next to the door. Gillian took one and examined it. It was a strange design. It had a handle on the bottom of the metal oil reservoir, and there was a trigger-like device alongside the handle. The globe of the lantern was an orb instead of the typical slender chimney and there was no hole in the top of the globe for smoke to escape from, or for air to feed the flame. Gillian squeezed the trigger. There was a sharp click and the cloth wick in the center of the orb ignited with a bright flame. Gillian looked at the wondrous device, smiled and then entered the dark barn with the light guiding the way.

There was a workbench to the left and a large flat table near the center of the room. An odd contraption that looked like a wagon wheel with glass globes was suspended by a chain over the central table. She noticed a new addition: a large metal door on the back wall of the barn. There was an odd-looking switch beside the door. The peculiar squeaking, scraping sounds seemed to be coming from behind the metal door.

Gillian drifted to the workbench. It was covered in wooden crates overflowing with all manner of wire, gears, cogs and scraps of metal. There were also clear glass jars with mummified animal parts floating in a yellowish fluid. One held a dead toad with two heads growing out of its squat, gray body. There were piles of rolled paper and more papers stretched out on the table and held down with animal skulls and a rusty hacksaw. The papers were covered with scrawled diagrams and plans for all manner of machines and devices. The most prominent was some kind of engine or device Clay visualized mounted on the back of a wagon, complete with a large flagpole extension. Its purpose was a complete mystery to Gillian. She noticed a picture frame in one of the boxes next to a pair of rusted buggy seat springs. She picked up the frame; the glass cover was cracked. It was a medical diploma, with honors, from the Medical College of Hampden-Sydney, with Clay’s name on it. It was dated 1845.

“You wily old coot,” Gillian muttered. “Clayton, you are a doctor.”

She replaced the diploma and moved with the lantern to the right side of the room. There was a military-style cot there with crumpled, stained blankets and a pile of books at least two feet high next to the bed. A smokeless lantern-globe like hers hung on the wall by the cot. There was also a closed door on the right wall near the foot of the cot.

The majority of the rest of the wall was covered in butcher-paper sheets, filled with drawings, scribbled notes and esoteric formula. There were weather pattern predictions and calculations for the whole world formulated from bird migrations, anatomical diagrams of wasps and worms, a calculus to determine political victories and losses into the 1900s based upon the population density of states and predicted states and the lunar cycle, star charts and extrapolations of the locations of stars unseen from Earth due to a “shroud of dark material,” detailed drawings of the canals and possible cities upon Mars, diagrams for devices that used eyeballs to capture images like a camera, something called a “spirit lantern” to make ghosts visible to the human eye (its primary component was a cat’s brain), an odd mathematical formula based on the overall casualties from the Civil War that seemed related to Jon Highfather’s famous ability to cheat death and plans for a balloon vehicle designed to reach the stars.

Gillian was in awe. It was Clay Turlough’s mind spread out on paper. It was beautiful and complex and bewildering. It was wonderful. Then she noticed another island of drawings and formulas pinned farther down the wall, away from all the rest, and her smile faded. Anatomy sketches of a human, female body occupied several large pages of butcher paper tacked to the wall. The figure in the drawings was headless and there were disturbing segmented lines at various places along the form that reminded Gillian of the placard at the butcher shop showing the customer the various locations of the different cuts of meat one could obtain from different animals. Meat.

The measurements of the headless form were on one of the diagrams as well. They were Gillian’s measurements, exactly.

The fear came back, rushing in, taking her breath. Reason almost left her, but she struggled to maintain it and won. Fear and panic did her and Auggie no good now. She had started this to discover what trouble her love was in and now she knew. Auggie had told her how Clay had helped him keep Auggie’s dead wife Gerta’s head alive, in a sense; how fiercely Clay had fought to do it. Auggie said it was the most emotional he had ever seen the odd genius. Gerta had perished in the fire, and Gillian agreed with Auggie that was for the best. Clay’s obsession with death, and with preserving, playing with life, had reached some horrible new height. And Augustus, sweet, loyal to a fault Augustus, was up to his bushy eyebrows in it.

Gillian steeled herself and attempted to open the door near the cot. It opened easily and she stepped inside the dark room, holding the lantern before her like a shield. The first thing that struck her was the scent, like burnt molasses, acrid and sweet. There were large barrels and crates in the room, scattered everywhere. She stepped deeper into the room, sweeping the lamp before her. There were glass-walled tanks on tables running along the walls of the room. One cylindrical tank in the corner held a bizarre creature floating in a clear, but slightly cloudy, solution. It was three or four feet tall, barrel chested, hairy all over with a large head, massive closed eyes and razor-sharp teeth like a reptile. Membranes drooped under the dead thing’s arms, like wings, and its hands had sharp, wicked-looking claws. Fresh bullet holes covered its chest. A simple placard mounted on the front of the tank said
Goat-vampire, xeno-specimen G174
. Gillian shuddered and turned the light away from the creature’s tube.