“Well, I was wrong, I think. He does live in this general area and actually knows some of the people he’s terrorized.” Kipp turned his head slightly to better see the dark figure.
“So why does he do it?”
“He’s a, uh, punk. He is a little man, inside I mean, who gets excitement from knowing that he has momentary power over others and then reads the paper to get the accounts afterward. He wants to be famous but has nothing to be famous for. So, he concocted this sad creature.” Kipp nestled closer as I welcomed his warm body pressing against me. “Not much here.”
I felt relatively philosophical about it. “Kipp, there have been some real punks with the ability to harm large numbers of people. Wars have started that way. At least this one man has limited ability to destroy populations and, although unfortunate, will only frighten a few people over the lifetime of his career.”
“Yeah, but I don’t like punks who pick on those who are weaker.”
We waited for the predictable as I pulled Kipp a little closer to me because I thought he needed some grounding of a familiar and loving arm. The man, who hesitated at the doorway of the cottage, was dressed in different attire than previously. The clothing beneath the sweeping dark cape appeared to be white, and he wore less of a hat and more of a helmet. The witnesses had supposed he was wearing oilskin, but I couldn’t make a determination about the fabric.
“The change in clothing is to help him not get burned when he does his fire breathing display,” Kipp observed, closing his eyes for a minute as he sifted through memories. “He got burned last time he tried it.” Kipp wanted to add “good” but held back.
Despite the cold in the air, I felt a bead of sweat trickle down my back. Even knowing in advance that the victim would survive the attack didn’t seem to help as we crouched in the darkness. My calf muscles began to ache, and I moved just a little, worried a Charlie horse might cripple me and prevent a pursuit.
The man began to knock on the door, proclaiming himself to be a policeman, shouting he’d caught Spring-heeled Jack. A moment later, a young girl appeared, her graceful silhouette in the doorway highlighted by the soft interior lights within the dwelling. At the demand of the fake policeman, she brought a lit candle outside and had just crossed the threshold when the man attacked her, following the same pattern as before. The iron talons he wore began to tear at her blouse, pulling it from her pale shoulders. This time, he was more aggressive and began to score the soft flesh of her neck and arms with the weapons. Screaming, she tried to get away as he pulled a plug of hair from her head; I grimaced as her sensation of pain empathetically shuddered through me. As members of her family began to arrive, summoned by her screams, the man turned and ran, moving in our direction before veering off down an alley.
“Let’s go!” Kipp ordered, and with a blur of auburn fur and toenails scratching on the dirt for a purchase, he was after the man, who began to zigzag when he realized he was being pursued.
I didn’t like Kipp getting so far ahead but knew that the physical skills of Jack were greater than mine, and with his spring propulsion, he would be gone in a flash. I honed in on Jack’s thoughts, and he was enjoying the chase, with the solid confidence that his cleverness and abilities were greater than ours. Consequently, he didn’t take to the rooftops as quickly as before. Once, he looked over his shoulder, and I caught a glimpse of teeth and a broad smile as he teased us closer. Just as Kipp got within pouncing distance, I had my accident. A man pushing a heavy cart filled with firewood appeared from a side alley and crashed into my left side. I spun like a demented top and lost my balance, falling hard against a stone wall. The minute I hit, I felt the bone in my upper left arm snap; all I knew was that the pain was sudden, intense, and my vision almost went black. Kipp immediately stopped, feeling my agony run through his body in the physical symbiotic link we shared in response to a severe injury.
“Keep going,” I panted, holding my arm and trying not to cry. It took the rest of my energy to reassure the old man who’d run into me to leave so that I didn’t have to keep talking with him and depleting my waning strength.
“Don’t be silly,” Kipp replied. “I got enough on Jack, and we weren’t gonna catch him anyway and change the timeline. It was just fun to give him a good run for his money and scare him a little.”
I plopped down on an empty crate and sat there holding my arm, praying for the pain to subside. Instead, it came in nauseous waves. Gingerly, I pulled up my coat sleeve and then my blouse; thank goodness the bone wasn’t sticking through the skin, I thought.
“We need to go home now,” Kipp ordered, meaning a return to our contemporary home.
“I want to go back to Miss Logan’s and leave her the money we brought.” I felt my lip poke out with stubborn determination. Kipp glanced at me before shaking his head.
“You’re irrational, but we’ll do it your way,” he said.
With my good hand curled into the fur of Kipp’s neck, we slowly began the walk, which was about two miles, to Miss Logan’s. Along the trip, I paused twice to throw up, trying to be discreet, in an alleyway. The locals didn’t object, just thinking me to be another alcoholic who’d had too much rotgut whiskey that night.
Kipp, each time we’d stop for me to rest, would lick my face, his warm tongue acting to revive me. I knew I had to get back because if I passed out, there was no telling where I’d end up…or Kipp, for that matter. Failure was not an option, and that motivated my steps as I glanced down at my feet…one forward, then the other.
We knew Miss Logan would be sound asleep, so Kipp managed to convince Queenie, as I used my key, to not bark. After staring at us for a minute, her butt wiggling with the wagging of her tail, she turned and trotted off to resume her place of honor at the end of Miss Logan’s bed. I was leaning on Kipp heavily by that point, as I wobbled up the narrow staircase. Once back in our room, I wrote a hasty note to our benefactor and told her that a family emergency had called us away. Taking all the money I had brought, along with the money concealed in Kipp’s collar, which we always took along as a backup stash, I was leaving her a sizeable amount of money that in the economy of the day would last her for a very long time. Putting everything in my reticule, I had Kipp take it back downstairs to place it on Miss Logan’s chair where she’d see it first thing in the morning.
Kipp returned to me, his toenails clicking softly against the wooden floor. I’d managed to climb on the bed, resting on my right side, cradling my fractured arm gently across my chest. The throbbing was no less, but at least I wasn’t moving, and that helped some. And I hadn’t vomited in the last twenty minutes, either.
“I remember when I was injured during our first trip together, you symbiotically shared my pain load so we could travel. You have to do that now, with me.” Kipp stared at me; there was only minimal ambient light softly glowing from the large window overlooking the street, and that tiny point of light seemed caught like an insect in the amber of Kipp’s eyes. One hates to bring pain to a friend, but there was no other choice, and I curled my right hand around Kipp’s back, hearing him grunt as the wave of pain hit him, just as it had me. I was able to relax, just a bit, when the intensity of the agony lessened.
As we came in balance, I felt the familiar rush of a time-shift and knew we’d be home in a few seconds. My mind was so consumed with pain that I left everything in Kipp’s capable paws, knowing he could pinpoint the time and place with no help from me. And he did just that.
“So, who was Spring-heeled Jack?” Philo asked.
During the course of the storytelling, we’d moved from kitchen to living room, and occasionally back again to snag a snack or two. The living room was a tumbled down mess with blankets and pillows still flung carelessly on the furniture and floor. We humanoids were enjoying a second pot of Earl Grey steeped at the experienced hands of Fitzhugh—and I never did figure out why his brew tasted so much better than mine—while the lupines finished off the rest of the brownies from the previous night. I
t was a good thing that lupines didn’t share the issues of dogs where chocolate was concerned. And after a little pre-agreement I’d made with Kipp, we breezed past the fact we had left Miss Logan with a financial endowment since I wasn’t in the mood to have Philo frown at me and question my judgment which was driven by an unexpected sentimentality.
“I finally could pin him down that last night, as all was quiet and still as he approached the cottage,” Kipp replied. He ignored the adoring glance tossed his way by Elani, who was discreetly using her paw to remove some fudge from her muzzle that made her nose look twice its normal size. “He was a local tradesman who, on the side, performed as a second class magician at parties and festivals…things like that. Like a lot of people who act out against others, he had built up a significant amount of anger over his childhood, which was not good. His father was brutal when he was not absent, and his mother spent most of her time drinking and bedridden. We can call him Jack, although his name was David, and scaring women, as well as men, fed some part of him that was in pain and enraged.”
“So, a man with no voice obtained one by becoming infamous,” Fitzhugh observed. “An all too frequent ailment of humanity.”
“And you had a perfect score of no real accidents despite all your years of traveling,” Philo said, careful to place his cup on a magazine versus the top of the coffee table. I cared not about such things, and the table already had enough rings to qualify as the Olympic symbol, if only they interlocked.
“I wish we could have gone with you.” Peter quickly looked away, embarrassed by the wistful tone of his voice.
“Well, we needed you all to have some time to work on couple’s skills, but now that you are back and Petra is finally healed, I think some rest and recreation is in order. And I want Peter and Elani to go with you since your arm probably can’t handle the stress of driving for long distances yet.” Philo smiled as I darted a quick glance at him, not sure where this was leading. “Kipp mentioned a haunted steamboat in Alabama…”
Six
“I’m not sure if our timing will be the best,” Kipp remarked as he munched on a saltine cracker from his vantage point in the rear of the SUV, “since some people have written that the Eliza Battle is most active during the late winter months, but we can always make a time-shift if needed to arrive at the appropriate time.”
Oh, great, I thought to myself, while trying to quickly guard my thoughts from my intrusive companion. Not only were we on a ghost hunt once again, we might have to couple that with a time-shift.
“I heard that, Petra,” Kipp interrupted my grumbling.
“Can I not have a moment for a private thought?” I replied, staring resolutely ahead at the interstate.
Peter was driving, which he enjoyed, and that suited me fine. Although I wouldn’t say anything, my left arm had never quite healed properly and tended to ache from time to time when I couldn’t move it freely. And hanging on to a steering wheel for hours was not preferable. Philo had commanded we leave town for a few days, and he actually moved in with Fitzhugh and Juno while we were gone, since he would be transporting the elder symbionts back and forth to work each day, he’d said. I knew that was bogus…Claire was at home, as was Silas, and Philo needed to escape the tension created by a toxic family.
The trip to south Alabama could be managed in a day, of course, but we decided to break up the journey because the lupines tended to get very restless when cramped for too long. We stopped in Chattanooga for the night before rising the next morning to pick up I-59, which wound down through the lower Appalachians where the gentle ridge of mountains trailed as far south as Birmingham, below there to ease into a line of lovely rolling hills. Due to a cold front which had chased a spring storm, the early morning sky was cluttered with fog, the sun struggling to find the landscape through the low hanging clouds that obscured the tops of the mountains flanking either side of the interstate.
“So, since we have a long ride, Kipp, why don’t you tell everyone about the Eliza Battle, so we will all be up to speed.” I thought that would get him out of my brain for a minute or two. But he was happy to share knowledge and show off a little with a topic about which the rest of us were happily ignorant.
“The Eliza Battle was a steamboat—a side paddle wheeler—that was considered the finest of her type on the river. She ran on the Tombigbee River, when the weather would permit, and that was usually during the winter and early spring months, due to the condition of the water. Her departures and travels were a point of great excitement for the local communities along the river, as she went from Columbus, Mississippi to Mobile. A calliope had been installed, and there were musicians to entertain the passengers. There was dancing and general festivities while she made her way along the river. The boat was used to transport goods to the Gulf, mainly large amounts of cotton from the plantations. On her last trip, the water in the river was swollen from an exceptionally rainy season, and the pilot as well as the captain had difficulty visualizing the usual landmarks. The pilot struggled to find the main channel so that the boat would have enough clearance in the water.
“The actual date of the disaster remains disputed, but apparently there is at least one grave of a victim where the tombstone mentions March 1, 1858 as the correct date. And no one knows how the fire started. There is speculation that a couple of the roustabouts…” Kipp paused. “I like that word, by the way. Maybe I can be a roustabout during one of our time-shifts?”
I sighed deeply. It was going to be a long drive.
“Anyway, there was one story that a couple of the workers were trying to rob a stateroom and deliberately fired the room to cover their tracks. Another is that someone carelessly tossed a lit cigar which landed in the cotton, and the ship was carrying tons of cotton, so you’d think they might have banned things like cigars, pipes, and cigarettes…just common sense from my way of thinking. Or maybe a passing boat was throwing off sparks that managed to land in the cotton? The point is, no one knows.”
Elani had some questions of her own. “With so many aspects of this event shrouded in mystery, why didn’t you just time-shift back and explore it yourself?”
Kipp fell quiet, and I knew why. After our recent trip on the Titanic, he would not ask me to replicate anything close to a maritime disaster time-shift again, at least not anytime soon. And despite my love for Kipp and my desire for him to get all the experiences he could in his young and wonderful life, I had no desire to go aboard that ill-fated steamship to figure out what caused the fire. As it was, I knew I’d never get the screaming of the dying passengers on the Titanic out of my brain.
“Uh,” Kipp stuttered, “I just wanted to see if we could pick up on the ghostly images this time,” he answered awkwardly. “I thought it might be fun,” he added, in case we’d missed the point.
Elani immediately realized her faux pas and became quiet, fearful she’d been insensitive of me, something of which I would never accuse her. She reminded me of what Juno must have been like in her prime…gentle, considerate, and bright. To reassure her, I turned in my seat, wincing a little when the seatbelt caught against my left shoulder. Smiling, I gave her a friendly wink to let her know all was okay.
Kipp pushed on. “The fire was discovered, and the crew was horrified to find that the water pumps on board didn’t work. Then, as the captain tried to steer to shore, the tiller ropes, which had been burned through, were useless, and the boat was left to drift, uncontrolled, down the river. People began to jump off into the freezing water, some using cotton bales as rafts. Other people climbed to the tops of the submerged trees, hanging there, trying to escape the water. Many of them froze to death and others, who survived, were haunted for the rest of their days by the sounds of bodies hitting the water as people fell back into the river. There is no way to know exactly how many people died, and the accounts varied greatly.”
As Kipp paused in his recitation, I signaled I needed a break. There was an exit at Springville, and Peter pulled off so that we cou
ld stretch and find something to eat. It was rather cool that day, and I pulled my jacket from the SUV as we walked around the parking lot and let the lupines caper about in the grassy verge. A wonderful aroma filled the air, drifting from one of the fast food joints that was busy frying up some chicken. I frowned at Peter, who was relishing the brisk weather in his short-sleeved shirt.
“What’s wrong?” he asked, seeing the expression on my face.
“Aren’t you cold?”
“No,” he replied.
I’m not certain why, but his response made me feel grumpier. Where had my youthful zest gone, I wondered. Yes, I was the elder of this quartet, but I was a young symbiont, still. Humans might think me to be in my latter twenties, if that. Hunching my shoulders, I walked away, staring at the interstate and the cars racing to their destinations. Lots of humans seemed to have important business, I thought.
“You’ve had a series of hard time-shifts,” Kipp responded to my private thoughts, as was his way. “Whitechapel devastated you. We followed with chasing the General, and that was physically a hard trip. And I don’t even have to speculate about the Titanic. I know your arm still hurts at times, even though you won’t say anything about it. When you feel that twinge, I feel it, too. You have good reason to want to huddle up, at home, with a good book, and not leave your chair for a few months,” he added. “But I’m not going to let you stop traveling…not yet, in any case.”
I glanced at him; he was standing in some early grass that was surprisingly overgrown due to the rainy spring. A wind was blowing from the west, and it caught his thick, ruddy fur, causing it to ripple, following the graceful patterns of the waving grass. My heart was soothed, and I knew he was right, of course. I was too young to give up my career, one which defined my very existence on earth. Symbionts were made to do just what Kipp and I were doing. Throwing up my hand in a little half wave, I signaled we were fine, as I took another sip of my coffee.
A Conspiracy to Murder, 1865 Page 6
