The Shotgun Arcana Page 17

  “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, ha
d 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.

  Most of the tanks were empty but a large one contained something that devoured the light of her lamp, some viscous darkness. Gillian stepped closer to it. There was a chain attached to a ceiling hook, hanging down and partly submerged in the oily black fluid.

  The sweet-burnt scent was very strong coming from the tank. It had taken on a musky quality as well and Gillian suddenly shuddered as she felt her body responding to the peculiar and slightly offensive smell. It was as though every square inch of her skin was alive but her mind began to feel as if it were stuffed with cotton. She was flushed and her clothing seemed too tight and the tightness was arousing her. Lascivious thoughts better left to the bedroom swarmed in her head, and Gillian fought to push them away. Only moments ago, she had been terrified and upset. This was not natural; this was something being done to her, done by the stench of the oily substance. She dipped her fingers into the tank, and suddenly pulled them back as reason reasserted itself. Gillian looked, horrified, at the thick black slime that coated her index and middle finger. The urge to stuff her wet, glistening fingers under her nose and deeply inhale the obscene scent was almost more than she could stand, but she knew instinctively that if she did so she would be lost to these alien thoughts and feelings. She knew what real desire was, knew true longing and the pleasure and awareness of her own body and this … this was a cheap narcotic shadow of it. She pushed it away, out of her head as much as she could, and wiped the ooze off on Will’s old pants. There was movement in the tank, something swimming through the midnight darkness, attracted by Gillian’s fingers. She leaned down close to the glass and tried to peer into the oily morass. It smashed against the glass with great force and Gillian jumped back with a shriek. She thought it was a snake. The burst of fear helped clear her head and she stared at whatever it was in the tank. There were several of them gliding through the oily slime like eels.

  A terrible memory assaulted Gillian. The Stained. Last year, after the troubles in which so many had died, they’d called it a plague of the Black Vomit, but Gillian knew better. Everyone did, but no one wanted to admit it. Some horrible, pneumonic sickness had gripped Golgotha and transformed friends, neighbors and family into soulless monsters who oozed a black oily substance from every orifice. The same black oily substance in the tank before her.

  “Oh Clayton,” she said. “Why couldn’t you just leave it alone, let it die?”

  She moved cautiously toward the tank again, reached carefully over the churning surface of the obsidian fluid and grabbed the chain that was submerged in it. She lifted the chain, which had some weight to it; something was hanging from it. Slowly, the decapitated, mostly rotted skull of a woman rose from the oozing blackness, her tattered scalp still clinging to dank hair, resembling black seaweed. Parts of her skull, picked clean, were evident and scraps of her flesh hung loosely to other parts of her head, drooping and clumping like wet paper. Her eyes were empty, raw sockets and her lipless mouth gaped stupidly. Black things, like segmented worms, about six inches long, slithered out of the head’s eye sockets, mouth and even the tattered ears. They made fat, plopping noises as they dropped back into the inky fluid of the tank.

  Gillian nearly retched and dropped the chain, causing the head to sink back into the tank with a slow suctioning sound. She staggered back, hand over her mouth, and tried desperately to push the thoughts and images out of her mind. She had no clue who this woman was or how Clay had come into possession of her severed head. The thoughts that had troubled her back on the road to the livery returned, but with a much more visceral, sinister taint to them. People disappeared all the time in Golgotha: strangers, wanderers, vagrants, prostitutes. What if Clay needed them, needed meat for his experiments?

  And Auggie, her Auggie. Sweet, kind, loyal … Auggie, with blood and women’s makeup on his clothes. Oh, no, no, no, no, no …

  She turned, the panic rising in her, struggling for a foothold of reason and calm. The light from her lantern caught another tank near the end of the row. The liquid in it was smoky, slightly amber-colored, as though it contained a diluted version of the worm oil substance. Another head floated in it, bobbing, submerged and apparently perfectly preserved. It was a young woman, perhaps in her twenties; she had been beautiful, her hair was black and floated behind her like drifting wings. There was something familiar about her. Gillian knew her but she couldn’t place …

  No!

  Gerta. It was Gerta, her best friend. Gerta with the gray hair and the wrinkles. Her dear old friend who had died at the age of forty-eight. Gerta, Gertie … Auggie’s Gertie … Oh Clay, how could you do this?

  The eyes of the head snapped open. They focused on Gillian, pupils narrowed in the bright lantern light. The mouth opened, tried to speak …

  Gillian ran, dropping the lantern. As she released the trigger, the flame vanished with a snap just before the lantern crashed to the floor and shattered, without igniting a fire. She snorted the stench of the tank room out of her nostrils as she bolted back into the main barn.

  There was the sound of a wagon arriving in the exercise yard just outside. Gillian spun about, looking for a place to hide. She ran to the large metal door at the back of the barn and struggled to open it, praying it led to an exit. The door hissed open and a blast of frigid air passed over her, colder than the winter wind outside. The strange squeaking metal-scraping noise was louder, having been muffled by the door. The light from the open door revealed nothing of the interior. There were no windows, no light, only a cold and sightless void. Gillian heard Auggie’s booming voice at the open door to the barn. She stepped quickly into the cold room and shut the metal door behind her. It was absolute darkness, like you experience underground. The squeaking noise, which Gillian was pretty certain was some type of contraption Clay had developed to keep the room so cold, was the only sound. The thick, metal door blocked out the sound from the rest of the barn.

  Gillian tried to calm herself. She knew both of these men. She thought highly of Clay, and was in wonder of his intellect. She understood how awkward he was trying to puzzle out people, who simply made no logical sense to his mind. And she loved Auggie, loved him with every ounce of her being.

  She backed away from the door; the thick insulating India rubber that sealed the jamb cut off even the tiny sliver of light from the cracks around it.

  Will had been the man she fell into love with, been charmed by, as a girl, but with his passing, with the mercy of experience that time grants, she knew Augustus Shultz was the love of her life. Surely these men would do her no harm. The image of the head in the tank, fat black worms sliding out of it, vomited into her brain. She struggled to push the idea of the man she was to marry being anything other than noble and good out of her racing mind.

  She bumped against something in the darkness. She turned, haltingly, toward it and gingerly felt the invisible form, trying to fathom what she was feeling. There was a table … and something cold and smooth atop it. She moved along
it its length until she felt fingers. It was an arm, icy, still, lifeless. It was a corpse on a table. She felt the rough cloth of a simple sheet partly covering the body, and suddenly Clay’s diagram with the cut lines was before her mind’s eye. She recoiled and moved away only to bump into something else in the darkness. The speed knocked her partly over it. Cold skin, breasts, and a ragged, damp cavity above the breast, which her fingers slipped into. Another table, another corpse.

  Gillian was reaching the end of her self-control; she envisioned a great frozen hall of tables in this unnaturally cold room, filled with dead women, raw material for Clay Turlough’s imagination. She staggered, hitting another table, another body. She had no idea where the door was, how to get out. She wanted to scream, but she swallowed it and steeled herself as best she could, being in the dark with the dead.

  There was whoosh of air escaping over the constant whine of the mysterious machinery and a bright square of light appeared to her left. She heard Auggie’s voice over the squeaking of the machine.

  “Where do you want me to put her?” Auggie said.

  Clay had one of the globe lanterns in his hands and its light stabbed into the darkness of the room. Gillian could see there were over a dozen tables with bodies in the cold room. They all seemed to be women. “Over here,” Clay said, stepping into the cold room, gesturing with the lantern to an empty bench off to the left of the door. Gillian slid down behind one of the occupied tables; the floor was smooth stone and cement, with clean straw scattered everywhere. She peeked over and saw Auggie carrying a woman’s corpse; she was dressed in tattered nightclothes and stockings. She looked like a prostitute. Her face was smudged with thick pancake makeup, dried blood and dirt, and her chest and belly bulged, as if the insides had been disturbed and then returned to the cavity. Her face was young and it was familiar to Gillian, but no name came to mind. She felt very sad for the anonymous girl cradled in Auggie’s strong arms. The look on her fiancé’s face in the lantern was not that of a savage leering killer; it was sadness. He felt for this girl, too, and he carried her gently, like she was fragile, and with respect. He lowered her gingerly on to the wooden table, covered her with a sheet and crossed himself.