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by Scott J. Holliday

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  Scott J. Holliday

  Copyright 2017 Scott J. Holliday

  All rights reserved.

  ISBN-10: 0988555409

  ISBN-13: 978-0988555402

  This book is a work of fiction. The names, characters, places, and incidents are products of the writer’s imagination or have been used fictitiously and are not to be construed as real. Any resemblance to persons living or dead is entirely coincidental.

  All rights are reserved. With the exception of fair use excerpts for reviews and critical articles, no part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission from the author.

  Created with Vellum

  This is for my dad, who secretly believed his sons could do anything, and for my mom, who is the strongest person I know.

  Contents

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Chapter 28

  Chapter 29

  Chapter 30

  Chapter 31

  Chapter 32

  Chapter 33

  Chapter 34

  Chapter 35

  Chapter 36

  Chapter 37

  Chapter 38

  Chapter 39

  Chapter 40

  Chapter 41

  Chapter 42

  Chapter 43

  Epilogue

  1

  Redmine Prison, South Carolina — 1879

  Roy Pellerin’s cracked skin, patterned like a dry puddle, held no sweat glands, so his body’s moisture was thrown off through the eyes, leaving them constantly swollen and dripping. The salty tears drew gnats and flies, but Roy refused to swat at them. He breathed evenly as he repeatedly punched the earthen wall of his solitary confinement cell, alternating between left and right fists, and counting to himself with each sodden thud.

  Roy’s cell was a hole in the ground. Four feet wide, eight feet long, and six feet deep. The same dimensions as a grave, he thought, and not by coincidence. The walls and floor were damp, packed clay stained with the blood and lust of those who had come before. The air was rank with a scent like dead birds. When the guards looked down on him they pinched their noses closed. Watching them grimace was one of the few pleasures Roy allowed himself.

  The rest was work.

  Roy did sit-ups and push-ups—a thousand of each. He did pull-ups by dangling bent-kneed from the iron bars above his head. He balanced on his hands and marched around the cell on them for hours. He ran back and forth across the cold floor, knees high, from morning to night, without growing tired. He counted out a double-number pattern as he punched the earthen wall—one one, two two, three three—up to five-hundred for each hand.

  He was sickly thin, but physical pain no longer held sway, having been beaten into submission by methodical indifference. His muscles were like braided steel cables, his bones like the iron bars that had kept him prisoner for four-hundred-and-sixteen days.

  Each day’s passing was marked by the raising and lowering of a Confederate sponge bucket hanging from a rope in Roy’s cell. Etched into a brass plate on the bucket’s side was C.S. ARSENAL, 12th, SOUTH CAROLINA, VOL ARTILLERY. The bucket was once assigned to accompany a southern cannon during the war. It held the water for the sponge-head used to clean out and cool down the cannon’s tube after each fired shot. Now the demoted bucket held Roy’s urination and defecation. A guard came by each morning to bring it up and empty it, only to then refill it with the day’s water supply. For Roy’s first week the tainted water went untouched, but thirst, heat, and time conspired to crack his resolve.

  Dysentery came and went. As did influenza, whooping cough, and pneumonia. They took their shots and failed.

  Stale bread was Roy’s daily meal, dropped into his cell through the iron bars overhead. He’d secretly made a game of catching the bread before it touched the ground, but when the guards caught on they made things difficult. Instead of dropping it straight down, as before, they tossed the bread this way or that, sending Roy sprawling for his catch. A missed catch would garner cackling, a made catch garnered silence. Roy hadn’t missed his bread in forty-two days.

  His teeth were loose in their sockets. At night he clenched his jaw for fear they might fall into his throat while he slept. A ragged wool blanket—another demoted Confederate issue, complete with Bull Run bullet holes and bloodstains—was both his clothing and bed, and all that stood between his body and the floor. At night he folded the blanket narrow and thick, and lay on top to get what little distance he could from the dampness. During the day he used the same blanket to block out the sun, bunching it between the bars above his head. Roy held no quarrel with the sun itself, but with the memories it threw like spears into his cell. When imprisoned and stripped of the few dignities that once made him human, memories were like weapons—useful only to inflict pain.

  A sound stopped Roy’s punching—the fluttering pages of a book falling through the air before clapping down inside his cell. Roy dropped his fists to his sides. “Thank you,” he said aloud, knowing that the person, undoubtedly a guard with a Good Samaritan’s soul, had once again gifted him a dime novel. He wished he knew the guard’s name, or that he could for once see his face, but the man always arrived unexpectedly, and was gone before Roy could react.

  Roy went over and picked up the book. It was a rare, first edition Beadle’s Dime Novel. In the fading light of dusk he read the title—Malaeska, the Indian Wife of the White Hunter. Roy knew the story. He had read it some years ago while out on the sideshow circuit. It was good. He wished he could tell his benefactor how much he appreciated the gift. Moreover, he wished he could tell the kind stranger goodbye, for Roy Pellerin planned to die tonight.

  It was the dead cart that had inspired Roy’s plan. The wood-slatted, two-wheeled horse-drawn wagon on which the condemned rode in and the dead rode out of Redmine Prison. Roy imagined the cart a ferryboat, its driver Charon. The prison wall was the River Styx, and for passage he only need pay the fatal fare.

  But dying in his hole would be useless. He could lie there for hours or days without a guard taking notice. This wouldn’t do. He must die in the prison yard, where his body would be immediately found. He must die during the mercy hour.

  At eight p.m. every fourth Sunday, and after the other prisoners were returned to their cells or dropped back into their own solitary holes, Roy was given an hour to wander the empty yard alone, his shoulders covered with a burlap body bag so the guards would be spared the sight of his wretched skin. He’d overheard this above ground time called the mercy hour. It seemed the guards expected Roy to show his appreciation by running around the yard like a beast, grunting and squealing beneath the gas lamps, overjoyed at the time spent outside its cage. He obliged them, in part because he was overjoyed—the fresh air and open space were blessings, and the night sky somehow looked deeper, the stars brighter, when he was six feet closer to them—but his theatrics were mostly an act. He sucked in giant breaths and smiled like a pinhead for all to see. He talked to himself and stalked around the yard with animal steps. He howled like a dog. All as a means to show sharp contrast against his c
oming death.

  Roy had practiced dying for months, each night willing his body into perfect stillness, his heart to an undetectable beat. In the hole he died for hours at a time, steadily lengthening his will to remain still. The arms and legs had come quickly, and the feet and hands followed suit. The chest had been stubborn, but a few weeks back he won it over. His eyelids held out the longest. They twitched, seemingly of their own accord, even in Roy’s most solemn of states. The technique he found was to tear some lashes from each eye before dying. A dear price, for eyelashes were the only hair on his body. The pain seemed to paralyze the lids. Now they would no sooner twitch than hop off his face and dance a jig.

  Having won the eyelids, Roy could now die during their mercy hour. He believed himself ready, save for one concern. He understood the guards wouldn’t touch his skin to check for a pulse, but who knew their alternative methods for testing if he was still alive?

  The question nagged him, but in the end it mattered not. Tonight would not be practice. Roy would not stir during his death, regardless of their technique. After four-hundred-and-sixteen days he would leave Redmine, either as a body believed dead or a body truly dead, for if he were caught he would fight until they killed him. With his final thought he would curse Samson. With his final breath he would tell Jesse he’d be waiting for her in the afterlife.

  And what would she say if she could hear?

  Roy knew precisely. She would spit in the dirt and tell him to steel up. She would throw her fists against her hips and say the afterlife is for goosecaps. “If you believe some god is up there waitin’ for ya with tea and cakes, I’ve got a crate of snake oil to sell ya.” Then she’d laugh crazily at her own wit, and her eyes would outshine the moon.

  Roy beamed at the sound of Jesse’s voice in his head, smiled at her remembered scent, the touch of her skin. He moved his hand over the scarred word on his chest, tracing each letter with his finger:

  N O R M A L

  The word was the only smooth part of his skin, the only part that actually looked like what it spelled. He often found himself absently tracing the word, particularly when Jesse invaded his mind. At first he cursed the hand that went to scar, but over time he came to accept that it was part of him now, one of the chapters in his volume.

  As the sun fell away, Roy stacked his new book with the others against the far wall. He spread his wool blanket and folded it neatly. He smirked at his makeshift bed. It would be the last time he ever lay on the grimy thing. Later tonight he would lie amongst rotting bodies. Tomorrow night he would lie somewhere else, be it a real bed, a ditch, or a grave. It mattered not, so long as he was outside the wall. He closed his eyes hoping not to dream of the night he killed Jukey.

  No dice.

  Roy slept, and his dreaming hands still felt Jukey’s body jerk against the pillow. His dreaming eyes still saw Jukey’s lifeless face. His dreaming ears still heard the plinking notes of the failing music box.

  Paul Constantine snuck back toward the dead house. His hand was still sweaty from palming the dime novel he’d deftly dropped into Roy’s cell. He wiped the palm against his leg before opening the dead house door and stepping inside.

  Five bodies were stacked and waiting in the corner. Their final bowel movements filled the room with a cloying stench. Paul breathed through his mouth. He took a seat near the window and looked out.

  The prison grounds were featureless, save for a few crabgrass patches and the solitary confinement holes that dotted the yard like tiger traps. Paul watched the dark spot of Roy’s cell. He’d been watching the same spot every evening for over a year now. It’d been that long since the other guards had dragged his childhood friend through the prison gate, threw him in the hole, and closed the bars overhead. Paul hadn’t seen Roy since. In all the passed time he hadn’t allowed himself to be caught near his old friend’s cell, or even to look down while making one of his secret drops. Whatever friendship they once shared had been erased by one hard fact—the boy he knew had grown into the killer of a helpless man.

  Paul picked up a newspaper and twisted it in his hands, smearing ink on his fingers. The paper knotted tightly and tore. He shifted in the creaky chair. The sound echoed off the dead house walls and seemed to come back louder. He opened the tortured paper to the section he’d been reading prior to going out for his drop. The headline read Malaria Outbreak Shuts Down Local Schools. He turned to the In Memoriam section. A farmer named Kendall had dropped dead in his own tannery. A woman named Fitzgerald lost her husband to a stray bullet in a saloon shootout. A man named Smith had simply expired; the given cause of death was God’s will.

  Paul stopped reading and threw the newspaper aside. He dropped his forehead into his hands. How long until he found Roy’s body stacked with these others, decomposing and stinking of shit? Most solitary confinement prisoners didn’t last six months in the hole, much less the fourteen Roy was working on.

  For his own sake, and maybe Roy’s too, Paul prayed his old friend’s death would come soon.

  2

  “Rise and shine, beast. You’ve got an hour.”

  Beast.

  Four-hundred-and-seventeen days ago Roy had been Scales, the Crying Lizard. He was a feature act in Jack McLean’s Congress of Curiosities, the sideshow with which he’d spent years traveling the country. The show was a pocket of mystery riding in the wake of The Top Tent Circus, the exotic element that clung strangely to the family friendly three-ring like a vestigial tail. It existed in the shadows, hiding in a place where men hesitated to go, and where they first peered long and hard, and pulled their loved ones close, before daring forward.

  A vision of Jack McLean entered Roy’s mind as he awakened beneath the prison guard’s stare. McLean, the great man, stood impossibly tall behind the outside talker’s podium, black top hat low on his brow. He pointed his riding crop toward the light and color of The Top Tent Circus and gazed as if seeing the big tents for the first time. “There is the light, my children,” he called out, and then gestured toward the small tent behind him, “here the darkness. There is the spectacle, here the bizarre. There you will find what you have always found. But here?” A wink and a smirk. “Here there be monsters.”

  McLean’s charm was no skill, Roy thought, but a gift imparted upon the man at birth. A blood right. He spoke not to people, but to the demons lurking in the corners of their souls. He pulled back the sideshow curtain to reveal a demented world where such demons roamed free. Inside his tent there was nothing more than a straw-thatched floor and a dimly lit stage, but Roy and the others—most of them just by emerging from the shadows and sitting down—would make good on McLean’s promises. They were the stuff of children’s nightmares and adult fascinations. They were contradiction—a drawing repulsion, a terrifying treat. People pointed and gasped. They covered their mouths. They laughed. They cried. They screamed.

  Roy opened one eye to see the guard’s bulldog face beyond the bars, lit by a shaft of moonlight. His teeth were like pebbles with dark slits between. He was fat and had a drunkard’s nose, the vision of a man who passed too many things into his mouth.

  Roy rose and stood beneath the iron door. The guard’s face pulled away from the bars and moonlight reached down into the cell. Roy heard jingling keys. He looked over his hole to see what he always saw—the bucket, the blanket, and his stack of dime novels. More than a year of his life had been spent in this place, never with more than these three companions, and still there was a place called Hell? He felt no fear of it.

  “Let’s go, freak,” the guard said as he keyed open the lock. “Up ya come.”

  The door’s rusty joints shrieked like slaughterhouse pigs. Over time the sound had become a song in Roy’s ears, signifying a mercy hour. Tonight the sound was a symphony. The guard lowered the same old rope for Roy to climb from the hole. Roy gripped it, the hemp like a spine in his fist. He thought to speed up like a spider, giving the guard a fright that might stop his heart and drop him dead.

  No. S
tick to the plan.

  Roy fought adrenaline and climbed up painstakingly slow, the way a man near death might climb. His hands ached for action. His muscles tremored. He had entered solitary confinement with a vengeful seed in his guts, a dark embryo that had grown with each passing day. Inside him now was the full-grown vine, snaking its way through his chest, arms, and legs. It was alive and pulsating, ready to bloom in violent colors.

  Roy emerged from the hole to feel a twilight breeze, the peppering of windblown sand. The guard stepped back and away—one thick hand extended out in warning, the other hovering at the thumper on his waist. The yard was hard earth and spotted grass. No trees. The prison itself took up the entire south wall like a giant skull. There were bars over windows and the door to the interior was as wide as Girda, the Heaviest Woman Alive, featured in Jack McLean’s show. Girda’s banner claimed that she weighed over five hundred pounds, and Roy guessed it wasn’t far off. If the dog-faced guard could be accused of eating too much, Girda could be sent to Redmine for it. A former whorehouse madam, Jack McLean had picked up Girda at a saloon in Clarks Fork Bottom in the Montana Territory. The saloon’s proprietor begged McLean to take her off his hands, said she was literally eating up all the profits the whores took in. McLean had been all too happy to help the man out.