The Shotgun Arcana Read online

  The miner struggled to his feet. Mutt frowned and wrinkled up his nose. “Get your ass home, and for God’s sake, clean it up, you done gone and shit yourself.”

  The miner staggered-ran toward his buddies, who rushed him away into the night, at arm’s length. He was rubbing his ears from the blast of the gun.

  Jim walked up, still a little pale, with a big gent beside him.

  “Doc Tumblety weren’t home,” Jim said. “I left a message with his boy, Rowley. Clay said he’d come, but he weren’t none too happy about it. And this here is the Dove’s manager.”

  The man was over six foot eight, a good foot taller than Mutt at least. His muscles were barely contained by his clothing. He was dressed in an odd mixture of workingman and dandy: a simple linen white work shirt with a short collar, denim dungarees and heavy boots like those the miners wore, but also a proper gentleman’s waistcoat, made of brown dyed linen with brass buttons, and a gold watch chain attached to the coat and arching to the pocket. The man had brown hair cut fashionably short with a thick part from forehead almost to his nape. He had a short, neatly groomed beard and hazel eyes that gave away nothing of the intent behind them. He had an ugly wooden cudgel that looked small in his hands. He carried it as a walking stick. Mutt nodded at the giant.

  “You’re the manager now?” Mutt said. “What happened to Ladenhiem?”

  “Left town,” the man said. “Seems there was some kind of a problem with spiders? Things crawling out of people’s dreams, webbing them up, drinking them dry, or some such nonsense. Man was obviously a laudanum fiend.”

  “Oh, yeah,” Mutt said, snapping his fingers. “He was one of the ones got caught up in all that. Funny, I thought old Ladenhiem had more sand in him than that. Oh, well. Handle’s Mutt, pleased to make your acquaintance.”

  The manager nodded. “The girls call me the Scholar,” he said. “As good a name as any. How do you do, Deputy? Mr. Negrey here says we have an issue in the alleyway.”

  “If by issue you mean a cut-up whore, then yes, we do,” Mutt said. “Can you tell me who she is?”

  “I’ve seen her about,” Jim said. “Never got her name, though.”

  The Scholar nodded in the direction of the body and the two men started back toward the closed-off alleyway. Jim fell in to follow them, but Mutt stopped him.

  “Crowd control, Jim,” Mutt said.

  “Mutt, I ain’t gonna fire and fall back no more,” Jim said. “Promise.”

  “I need you out here,” Mutt said. “These folks like you a damn sight more than me. I’ll fetch you presently. And don’t worry about getting sick. A man sees something like that and don’t get queasy, something broken in him.”

  Mutt and the Scholar parted the blankets and entered the alleyway. The stench hit them instantly. Mutt noticed the Scholar seemed unaffected. They moved down past the open alleyway door and around the small crowd of Doves and clients that were gathered. One man, with salt-and-pepper hair and wide muttonchops in an unbuttoned pair of trousers and nothing else, was ducking under one of the slimy lengths of suspended gut, trying to reach the dead girl’s torn body.

  “Take another step and I’ll throw your ass in jail,” Mutt said to the man’s back.

  “Go to hell, Chief,” the man said, trying to avoid the blood and bile dripping off the intestines. “I don’t gotta listen to you when the real law is out of town. ’Sides, I always wanted to know what it was like to diddle a dead…”

  The Scholar grabbed the man by the spine. His fingers, the sizes of gun barrels, squeezed the flesh and bone. He yanked the man back and lifted him several feet off the ground, one-handed. The man screamed. The Scholar tightened his grip on the spine.

  “Be quiet,” the Scholar said softly. “Take the pain.” The man tried to stop screaming, and began to sob and whimper. Mutt stood back and pushed his hat up on his head, watching the show.

  “If I apply a little more pressure, you will never feel pain again below your neck,” the Scholar said to the man, turning him around to view his face. “Mr. Macomber.”

  “Well I’ll be damned,” Mutt said, “Max Macomber. Your wives know you out cattin’ about, Max? Not very churchgoin’ kind of behavior, now is that?”

  “I’ll have your filthy mongrel hide hung up to tan,” Macomber snarled through tears of pain. “I am a personal friend of Mr. Bick and when he…”

  “Mr. Bick has entrusted me to manage his business here,” the Scholar said. “You disgust me with what you proposed to do with the dead woman’s body and furthermore, you had not negotiated an acceptable price with the house to undertake such activities, Mr. Macomber.”

  The Scholar moved the dangling man back to the alley door of the Dove’s Roost and set him down. Macomber doubled over in pain, gasping. He looked up at the manager and the deputy.

  “I’ll see both of you fired for this! That popinjay, Pratt, was a fool to ever let Highfather hire you. Can’t trust a savage like you to guard an outhouse, and I will talk to Malachi about you tomorrow, you lummox, I assure you.”

  “Very good, Mr. Macomber,” the Scholar said. “Good evening, sir.”

  Macomber disappeared inside, aided by a few of the Doves. A few girls and patrons still hovered by the open door.

  “Could y’all please stay the hell back!” Mutt said. He and the Scholar moved closer to the girl’s body. Someone had set a lamp near the edge of the black lake of blood.

  “Old Max means it,” Mutt said. “He’s part of the Bevalier machine. Rich as he is ornery. He’s going to give Harry Pratt a hard time next year in the mayoral election. You may not be at this job very long.”

  The Scholar said nothing. He leaned closer to look at the dead woman’s sliced face, wrapped in blood and shadow.

  “Molly James,” the Scholar said. “They call her Sweet Molly, or called her, to be more precise. She was an employee here for the past year, I believe.”

  Mutt looked hard at the Scholar. “This means less to you than a spit, doesn’t it?”

  “Deputy, I’m paid to look after Mr. Bick’s business interests here,” the Scholar said. “Miss James was a commodity and, as such, her loss is regrettable. But I sincerely doubt you will go home and shed any tears for a dead whore, as you so elegantly put it.”

  Mutt didn’t reply. There was a commotion from the alley entrance as Jim and Clay Turlough stepped through the blankets. The sky was lightening to a slate blue. Somewhere a nightjar was singing.

  “Well, I want to know who the ‘commodity’ was dating tonight,” Mutt said. “I’m sure a meticulous fella like you has all kinds of records and such.”

  “I’ll discuss it with Mr. Bick,” the Scholar said.

  “You do that,” Mutt said. “Then have that information over to the sheriff’s office by noon today, y’hear?”

  “Well, I’m here,” Clay said, walking up on the two men.

  Clay Turlough always had a weird smell about him, Mutt thought. Chemicals, and something sour, something spoiled and not right. Mutt was amazed that horses loved Clay as much as they did, given his scent. He owned the only livery in Golgotha and was also the town’s resident taxidermist. Clay was skinny, almost cadaverous, dressed in a stained work shirt, suspenders holding up baggy canvas work pants. Tufts of white hair orbited, like sparse clouds, around his liver-spotted pate. His hands and half his vulture-like face were pitted and streaked with scars from a fire he had survived last year. Clay made no attempt to hide his disfigurement; in fact, most times Mutt thought Clay wasn’t even aware of it.

  “Mind telling me why you needed me out here, Mutt,” Clay said. “My experiments are at a very crucial…”

  Clay trailed off as he regarded the girl’s body and what had been done to it.

  “You want me to … untangle her and take her home,” Clay said.

  “Yes,” Mutt said. “Clay, you think you can help us figure out what sumbitch did this to her?”

  Turlough scratched his head and walked closer to the tangle of guts th
at stretched out of the victim. He no longer heard Mutt; he was deep in his own mind, now. Seeing the scene in multiple dimensions, formulating, equating.

  He touched one of the taut tubes of intestine with his forefinger and traced it back, walking to the wall of the alley fence where it was nailed. It vibrated slightly as he did and gore spattered off into the pool of blood. He examined the nail. Jim looked at Mutt and then back to Clay.

  “He’s no carpenter, doesn’t know his way around a hammer,” Clay said. “Wrong kind of nails to use for this wood. He used old A cuts, when B cuts would have been better. He also has half-moon divots in the wood where he missed the nail several times and hit the wood.”

  “You said ‘he,’” Jim said.

  “Mmhhm,” Clay said, only half listening to Jim. “Men’s shoes, not boots like you and Mutt tromped all over the scene, but a gentleman’s shoe. Size eight and a half, I’d wager. This was a man’s work. A man with a great deal of hatred for the female of the species and very little fear of capture or consequence. He has nothing but contempt for the law, fellas.”

  “Wish we had a photographer to catch all this stuff,” Mutt said. “Might be things here that could help us find the sick bastard. I’d like Jon to give it a once-over too.”

  Clay seemed to snap out of his fog and shuffled off, muttering about getting something out of the wagon.

  “Did you get his scent?” Jim asked. Mutt shook his head.

  “Nope, whole place smells of death and crazy,” he said. “I couldn’t pick a man scent out of all that. Can’t pick up much of anything.”

  “I trust you will get this cleaned up as quickly as possible,” the Scholar said. “This has been a disruption of the evening’s activities and while I am sympathetic to the cause of justice, I have Mr. Bick’s business to run.”

  “Well, ain’t Mr. Bick jist the biggest toad in the puddle,” Mutt said.

  The two men continued bantering. Jim shook his head and looked toward the dead girl they were arguing over. For some reason Jim thought about his little sister, Lottie, grinning, laughing. She’d be nine now and Jim wondered if she was safe, if she was even alive. He wondered who Sweet Molly was to someone somewhere—daughter, sister, friend?

  A woman, one of the Doves, was kneeling near Sweet Molly’s body. Jim hadn’t even noticed her walk over. She was looking at the shoe print Clay had pointed out. The woman was in her thirties and slender, with brown hair falling down her shoulders. She had a rather ordinary face, not plain but not beautiful either. Her dark eyes were bright and intelligent. Jim saw the woman kneel closer to study the shoe print.

  “Ma’am, you need to leave that be,” Jim said, stepping forward.

  The woman looked up and saw Jim staring at her and smiled. Her whole face seemed to change and the intelligent look behind her eyes dimmed. She opened her robe and let Jim get a better look at her thin undergarment and stockings. Jim blushed and looked away.

  “Ummm, Mutt,” Jim said, patting the deputy on the shoulder.

  “Yeah?” Mutt said, pausing from his verbal sparring match with the Scholar. Jim pointed in the woman’s direction. “Oh,” Mutt said. “You want us to get this finished, then you need to keep your girls out of the damn alley, Scholar.”

  The giant looked up and gestured to the woman, who was already stepping away from the body and the blood.

  “Kitty, inside. Now,” the Scholar said, and the woman rushed to the alley door and darted inside. She gave Jim one last look, and for a second the gleam returned to her eye.

  “Who is she?” Jim asked.

  Mutt grinned. “Trouble for you, short britches.”

  “Her name is Kitty Warren,” the Scholar said. “She’s new.”

  Jim started to say something about the woman’s close examination of the print and then decided to bite his tongue in front of Bick’s man.

  “I’ll leave you to your business, Deputies,” the Scholar said. “It has been a pleasure to meet you both. I will discuss your request for client information with Mr. Bick today, Deputy Mutt. Good morning.”

  “I liked Ladenhiem better,” Mutt said to Jim as the giant walked away. “Even with the spider-things all over him.”

  Clay returned a few minutes after the Scholar and the last few onlookers from the Dove had retired inside. It was almost dawn and the alley and the street were blissfully quiet, at least for a little while. He was carrying four large glass jars and several smaller ones balanced on top of them. He also had a large wooden box-like contraption slung over his shoulder on a strap and a large coil of copper wire wrapped over his other shoulder.

  “What is all this humbug, Clay?” Mutt asked.

  Clay began to set the jars up carefully in different positions around the alleyway. There were strange objects bobbing and floating inside the glass containers. Clay affixed copper wire to a metal post on the lid of each jar. Jim walked over to one as Clay set it up. At first he thought there was a bunch of grapes hanging in the fluid-filled jar. Then he saw what it actually was.

  “Are those … eyeballs?” Jim asked, squinting in the predawn.

  “Yep, they are, Jim,” Clay said. “Strands of eyeballs, connected by their optic nerves at the back of the eye to a cable of copper electrical wiring running up through the top of the jar and now connected to an external set of wiring.”

  Jim looked to Mutt. Mutt shrugged.

  “Well, Clay, I have to tell you those are … the … finest … eyeballs all stuck together in a jar like that, that I’ve … ever seen,” Mutt said. “Yessir. What are you going to do with your fine jars of eyeballs, Clay?”

  “This here,” Clay said, connecting the last of the jars to the coil of wire, “is my occustereograph.”

  “Oh,” Mutt said. “That clears things up.”

  “This device is based off another invention of mine, the occuscope,” Clay said, either unaware of or uncaring of the deputy’s mocking tone. “The occustereograph imprints images off the eyes from multiple angles and directions. I then can use my occuscope to merge the images into a truly fully immersive photographic view. It’s based off the work of Professor Wilhelm Kuhne, head of the Department of Physiology at the University of Amsterdam. Herr Professor holds the theory that the eye can hold its final image for some time after death. We’ve corresponded quite a bit over the last few years.”

  “Are these human eyes?” Jim asked.

  “Ya know, Clay, I can fetch Bertrand Fisher, over at the Golgotha Scribe. He takes pictures,” Mutt said. “No need to use up all your fancy eyeballs.”

  If Clay heard either of them, he didn’t reply. He connected the copper wire to posts on top of the wooden box. The box had a large hand crank on the side, and it reminded Jim a little of a dynamite detonator. Clay nodded to answer some question in his own head and began to crank the wooden box. As he turned the crank faster and faster, blue sparks snapped from the posts. The thick gel-like fluid in the jars began to glow with a faint blue light. Jim swore he saw one of the eyeballs move, then focus.

  The whole process took about ten minutes. Some of the jars began to bubble and smoke, and several of the eyeballs popped from the heat the process produced. The sun was peeking up over the ridge of Rose Hill when Clay finished his work with the device and began to pack up. A few work wagons were beginning to make their way down Bick Street on their appointed rounds. The town was waking up, and they were finished, just in time. Clay carefully gathered up Sweet Molly’s remains with Mutt’s help, even taking samples from the swamp of blood and mud on the alley’s floor. He measured and sketched the boot print and made meticulous notes of every detail of the alleyway.

  Jim noticed the tenderness and care Clay used in the process, and part of his concern for Clay’s sanity began to fade. Then Jim recalled when he had first met Clay in the desert, how the old man had studied and pondered over the carcass of a dead coyote. A strange look of peace and something else, something Jim didn’t want to try to understand, had crossed Clay’s face as he watche
d the animal breathe its last breath. Jim realized that the taxidermist was looking at Molly’s body the same way he had looked at the coyote.

  “Jon and I will meet up with you in the next day or so, Clay, so you can tell us what’s what. Square?” Mutt said. Clay grunted in the affirmative. He climbed up on the wagon and drove away without another word. As the wagon bumped and jumped down Bick Street, one of the girls that worked at the Dove came out back with a bucket of water and dumped it on the pool of blood. Jim watched as she repeated the process, until the alley was no longer what it had been a few hours ago, no longer a door to Hell. It was just an alley outside a whorehouse.

  “C’mon,” Mutt said, slapping him on the back. “Let’s git that baby goat and git home. Mrs. Proctor should have breakfast waiting.”

  In the wagon, Clay Turlough’s mind was a crashing torrent of thought and theory, cause and effect. He was eager to get the female’s remains back to his workshop at the livery. The girl still had good hands, good feet, and some of the organs had not been completely butchered. In fact, the exact ones he needed were still pristine and he had to race against the enemy of time to secure them. He’d slap some data together for Jon Highfather and Mutt to give them a trail to chase, a killer to find. But now his mind was on the grand project and how this female’s death put him maddeningly close to completion of phase one. A few more deaths and everything should be ready.

  Whatever this one’s name had been he couldn’t recall at this moment. Jim had said it, but it was lost to Clay; she would join the company of the others in the heavy, still darkness of the cold room, awaiting immortality, of a sort, as a bride awaits her groom.

  The Ace of Cups (Reversed)

  The night was near its end when Augustus Shultz returned to his little cottage, nestled in the green cradle of Rose Hill. The house had only been finished a few months ago, and it still took Auggie some effort to think of this place as home. Rose Hill was where the well-off folk of Golgotha settled: the Mormon businessmen, whose families had helped found Golgotha over twenty years ago; the mayor; the bankers and those who had struck it rich with silver and wanted to show off their good fortune—they all built fine homes up on Rose Hill.