“Dear lad, you have to turn the opposite direction to focus the naked ladies.” Helios Augustus smiled and shook his head at my provincial curiosity. He passed me a cigar, but I’d never acquired a taste for them and stuck with my Lucky Strike. He was in town on business, having relocated to San Francisco. His fortunes had waned in recent years; the proletarians preferred large stage productions with mirrors and cannon-smoke, acrobats and wild animals to his urbane and intimate style of magic. He lamented the recent deaths of the famed composer Moritz Moszkowski and the Polish novelist Wladislaw Reymont, both of whom he’d briefly entertained during his adventures abroad. Did I, by chance, enjoy classical arts? I confessed my tastes ran more toward Mark Twain and Fletch Henderson and Coleman Hawkins. “Well, big band is a worthy enough pleasure. A certain earthy complexity appropriate to an earthy man. I lived nearly eighteen years on the Continent. Played in the grandest and oldest theatres in Europe. Two shows on the Orient Express. Now I give myself away on a weeknight to faux royalty and well-dressed rabble. Woe is me!” He laughed without much bitterness and poured another drink.
Finally, I said, “What did you call me here to jaw about?”
“Rumor has it Conrad Paxton seeks the pleasure of your company.”
“Yeah, that’s the name. And let’s get it straight—I’m looking for him with a passion. Who the hell is he?”
“Doubtless you’ve heard of Eadweard Muybridge, the rather infamous inventor. Muybridge created the first moving picture.”
“Dad knew him from the Army. Didn’t talk about him much. Muybridge went soft in the head and they parted ways.” I had a sip of sherry.
“A brilliant, scandalous figure who was the pet of California high society for many years. He passed away around the turn of the century. Paxton was his estranged son and protégé. It’s a long story—he put the boy up for adoption; they were later reconciled after a fashion. I met the lad when he debuted from the ether in Seattle as the inheritor of Muybridge’s American estate. No one knew that he was actually Muybridge’s son at the time. Initially he was widely celebrated as a disciple of Muybridge and a bibliophile specializing in the arcane and the occult, an acquirer of morbid photography and cinema as well. He owns a vault of Muybridge’s photographic plates and short films I’m certain many historians would give an eye tooth to examine.”
“According to my information, he lives north of here these days,” I said.
“He didn’t fare well in California and moved on after the war. Ransom Hollow, a collection of villages near the Cascades. You shot two of his men in Seattle. Quite a rumpus, eh?”
“Maybe they were doing a job for this character, but they weren’t his men. Dirk and Bane are traveling guns.”
“Be that as it may, you would do well to fear Conrad’s intentions.”
“That’s backwards, as I said.”
“So, you do mean to track him to ground. Don’t go alone. He’s well-protected. Take some of your meaner hoodlum associates, is my suggestion.”
“What’s his beef? Does he have the curse on me?”
“It seems plausible. He killed your father.”
I nodded and finished my latest round of booze. I set aside the glass and drew my pistol and chambered a round and rested the weapon across my knee, barrel fixed on the magician’s navel. My head was woozy and I wasn’t sure of hitting the side of a barn if push came to shove. “Our palaver has taken a peculiar and unwelcome turn. Please, explain how you’ve come into this bit of news. Quick and to the point is my best advice.”
The magician puffed on his cigar, and regarded me with a half smile that the overly civilized reserve for scofflaws and bounders such as myself. I resisted the temptation to jam a cushion over his face and dust him then and there, because I knew slippery devils like him always came in first and they survived by stepping on the heads of drowning men. He removed the cigar from his mouth and said, “Conrad Paxton confessed it to some associates of mine several years ago.”
“Horse shit.”
“The source is . . . trustworthy.”
“Dad kicked from a heart attack. Are you saying this lug got to him somehow? Poisoned him?” It was difficult to speak. My vision had narrowed as it did when blood was in my eye. I wanted to strangle, to stab, to empty the Luger. “Did my old man rub out somebody near and dear to Paxton? Thump him one? What?”
“Conrad didn’t specify a method, didn’t express a motive, only that he’d committed the deed.”
“You’ve taken your sweet time reporting the news,” I said.
“The pistol aimed at my John Thomas suggests my caution was well-founded. At the time I didn’t believe the story, thinking Paxton a loud-mouthed eccentric. He is a loud-mouthed eccentric—I simply thought this more rubbish.”
“I expect bragging of murder is a sure way to spoil a fellow’s reputation in your refined circles.” My collar tightened and my vision was streaky from my elevated pulse, which in turn caused everything on me that was broken, crushed, or punctured to throb. I kept my cool by fantasizing about what I was going to do to my enemy when I tracked him to ground. Better, much better.
“It also didn’t help when the squalid details of Conrad’s provenance and subsequent upbringing eventually came to light. The poor chap was in and out of institutions for most of his youth. He worked as a clerk at university and there reunited with Papa Muybridge and ultimately joined the photographer’s staff. If not for Eadweard Muybridge’s patronage, today Conrad would likely be in a gutter or dead.”
“Oh, I see. Paxton didn’t become a hermit by choice, your people shunned him like the good folks in Utah do it.”
“In a nutshell, yes. Conrad’s childhood history is sufficiently macabre to warrant such treatment. Not much is known about the Paxtons except they owned a fishery. Conrad’s adoptive sister vanished when she was eight and he nine. All fingers pointed to his involvement. At age sixteen he drowned a rival at school and was sent to an asylum until he reached majority. The rich and beautiful are somewhat phobic regarding the criminally insane no matter how affluent the latter might be. Institutional taint isn’t fashionable unless one derives from old money. Alas, Conrad is new money and what he’s got isn’t much by the standards of California high society.”
“I don’t know whether to thank you or shoot you,” I said. “I’m inclined to accept your word for the moment. It would be an unfortunate thing were I to discover this information of yours is a hoax. Who are these associates that heard Paxton’s confession?”
“The Corning Sisters. The sisters dwell in Luster, one of several rustic burghs in Ransom Hollow. If anyone can help you against Conrad, it’ll be the crones. I admired Donald. Your father was a killer with the eye of an artist, the heart of a poet. A conflicted man, but a loyal friend. I’d like to know why Conrad wanted him dead.”
“I’m more interested in discovering why he wants to bop me,” I said. Actually, I was more preoccupied with deciding on a gun or a dull knife.
“He may not necessarily wish to kill you, my boy. It may be worse than that. Do you enjoy films? There’s one that may be of particular importance to you.”
Dick gave me a look when I brought Helios Augustus to the curb. He drove us to the Redfield Museum of Natural History without comment, although Bly’s nephew Vernon frowned and muttered and cast suspicious glances into the rearview. I’d met the lug once at a speakeasy on the south side; lanky kid with red-rimmed eyes and a leaky nose. Pale as milk and mean as a snake. No scholar, either. I smiled at him, though not friendly like.
Helios Augustus rang the doorbell until a pasty clerk who pulled duty as a night watchman and janitor admitted us. The magician held a brief, muttered conference and we were soon guided to the basement archives where the public was never ever allowed. The screening area for visiting big cheeses, donors, and dignitaries was located in an isolated region near the boiler room and the heat was oppressive. At least the seats were comfortable old wingbacks and I rested in one while they fu
ssed and bustled around and eventually got the boxy projector rolling. The room was already dim and then Helios Augustus killed the lone floor lamp and we were at the bottom of a mineshaft, except for a blotch of light from the camera aperture spattered against a cloth panel. The clerk cranked dutifully and Helios Augustus settled beside me. He smelled of brandy and dust and when he leaned in to whisper his narration of the film, tiny specks of fire glinted in his irises.
What he showed me was a silent film montage of various projects by Eadweard Muybridge. The first several appeared innocuous—simple renderings of the dead photographer’s various plates and the famous Horse in Motion reel that settled once and for all the matter of whether all four feet of the animal leave the ground during full gallop. For some reason the jittering frames of the buffalo plunging across the prairie made me uneasy. The images repeated until they shivered and the beast’s hide grew thick and lustrous, until I swore foam bubbled from its snout, that its eye was fixed upon me with a malign purpose, and I squirmed in my seat and felt blood from my belly wound soaking the bandages. Sensing my discomfort, Helios Augustus patted my arm and advised me to steel myself for what was to come.
After the horse and buffalo, there arrived a stream of increasingly disjointed images that the magician informed me originated with numerous photographic experiments Muybridge indulged during his years teaching at university. These often involved men and women, likely students or staff, performing mundane tasks such as arranging books, or folding clothes, or sifting flour, in mundane settings such as parlors and kitchens. The routine gradually segued into strange territory. The subjects continued their plebian labors, but did so partially unclothed, and soon modesty was abandoned as were all garments. Yet there was nothing overtly sexual or erotic about the succeeding imagery. No, the sensations that crept over me were of anxiety and revulsion as a naked woman of middle age silently trundled about the confines of a workshop, fetching pails of water from a cistern and dumping them into a barrel. Much like the buffalo charging in place, she retraced her route with manic stoicism, endlessly, endlessly. A three-legged dog tracked her circuit by swiveling its misshapen skull. The dog fretted and scratched behind its ear and finally froze, snout pointed at the camera. The dog shuddered and rolled onto its side and frothed at the mouth while the woman continued, heedless, damned.
Next came a sequence of weirdly static shots of a dark, watery expanse. The quality was blurred and seemed alternately too close and too far. Milk-white mist crept into the frame. Eventually something large disturbed the flat ocean—a whale breaching, an iceberg bobbing to the surface. Ropes, or cables lashed and writhed and whipped the water to a sudsy froth. Scores of ropes, scores of cables. The spectacle hurt my brain. Mist thickened to pea soup and swallowed the final frame.
I hoped for the lights to come up and the film to end. Instead, Helios Augustus squeezed my forearm in warning as upon the screen a boy, naked as a jay, scuttled on all fours from a stony archway in what might’ve been a cathedral. The boy’s expression distorted in the manner of a wild animal caged, or of a man as the noose tightens around his neck. His eyes and tongue protruded. He raised his head so sharply it seemed impossible that his spine wasn’t wrenched, and his alacrity at advancing and retreating was wholly unnatural . . . well, ye gods, that had to be a trick of the camera. A horrid trick. “The boy is quite real,” Helios Augustus said. “All that you see is real. No illusion, no stagecraft.”
I tugged a handkerchief from my pocket and dabbed my brow. My hand was clammy. “Why in hell did he take those pictures?”
“No one knows. Muybridge was a man of varied moods. There were sides to him seen only under certain conditions and by certain people. He conducted these more questionable film experiments with strict secrecy. I imagine the tone and content disturbed the prudish elements at university—”
“You mean the sane folks.”
“As you wish, the sane folks. None dared stand in the way of his scientific pursuits. The administration understood how much glory his fame would bring them, and all the money.”
“Yeah,” I said. “Yeah. The money. Thanks for the show, old man. Could have done without it, all the same.”
“I wanted you to meet young master Conrad,” the magician said. “Before you met Conrad the elder.”
The boy on the screen opened his mouth. His silent scream pierced my eye, then my brain. For the first time in I don’t know, I made the sign of the cross.
We loaded my luggage then swung by Dick, Bly, and Vernon’s joints to fetch their essentials—a change of clothes, guns, and any extra hooch that was lying around. Then we made for the station and the evening train. Ah, the silken rapture of riding the Starlight Express in a Pullman sleeper. Thank you, dear Mr. Arden, sir.
My companions shared the sleeper next to mine and they vowed to keep a watch over me as I rested. They’d already broken out a deck of cards and uncorked a bottle of whiskey as I limped from their quarters, so I wasn’t expecting much in the way of protection. It was dark as the train steamed along between Olympia and Tacoma. I sat in the gloom and put the Thompson together and laid it beneath the coverlet. This was more from habit than expediency. Firing the gun would be a bastard with my busted fingers and I hoped it wouldn’t come to that. I’d removed the bandages and let it be—a mass of purple and yellow bruises from the nails to my wrist. I could sort of make a fist and that was all that mattered, really.
I fell asleep, lulled by the rattle and sway of the car on the tracks, and dreamed of Bane’s face, his bulging eyes, all that blood. Bane’s death mask shimmered and sloughed into that of the boy in the film, an adolescent Conrad Paxton being put through his paces by an offstage tormentor. A celebrated ghoul who’d notched his place in the history books with some fancy imagination and a clever arrangement of lenses, bulbs, and springs.
Didn’t last long, thank god, as I snapped to when the train shuddered and slowed. Lamplight from some unknown station filtered through the blinds and sent shadows skittering across the ceiling and down the walls. I pointed the barrel at a figure hunched near the door, but the figure dissolved as the light shifted and revealed nothing more dangerous than my suitcase, the bulk of my jacket slung across a chair. I sat there a long while, breathing heavily as distant twinkly lights of passing towns floated in the great darkness.
The train rolled into Ransom Hollow and we disembarked at the Luster depot without incident. A cab relayed us to the Sycamore Hotel, the only game in the village. This was wild and wooly country, deep in the forested hills near the foot of the mountains. Ransom Hollow comprised a long, shallow river valley that eventually climbed into those mountains. An old roadmap marked the existence of three towns and a half-dozen villages in the vicinity, each of them established during or prior to the westward expansion of the 1830s. Judging by the moss and shingle roofs of the squat and rude houses, most of them saltbox or shotgun shacks, the rutted boardwalks and goats wandering the unpaved lanes, not much had changed since the era of mountain men trappers and gold rush placer miners.
The next morning we ate breakfast at a shop a couple of blocks from the hotel, then Dick and Bly departed to reconnoiter Paxton’s estate while Vernon stayed with me. My hand and ear were throbbing. I stepped into the alley and had a gulp from a flask I’d stashed in my coat, and smoked one of the reefers Doc Green had slipped me the other day. Dope wasn’t my preference, but it killed the pain far better than the booze did.
It was a scorcher of an autumn day and I hailed a cab and we rode in the back with the window rolled down. I smoked another cigarette and finished the whiskey; my mood was notably improved by the time the driver deposited us at our destination. The Corning sisters lived in a wooded neighborhood north of the town square. Theirs was a brick bungalow behind a steep walkup and gated entrance. Hedges blocked in the yard and its well-tended beds of roses and begonias. Several lawn gnomes crouched in the grass or peeked from the shrubbery; squat, wooden monstrosities of shin height, exaggerated features, pop
-eyed and leering.
The bungalow itself had a European-style peaked roof and was painted a cheery yellow. Wooden shutters bracketed the windows. Faces, similar to the sinister gnomes, were carved into the wood. The iron knocker on the main door was also shaped into a grinning, demonic visage. A naked man reclined against the hedge. He was average height, brawny as a Viking rower and sunburned. All over. His eyes were yellow. He spat in the grass and turned and slipped sideways through the hedge and vanished.
“What in hell?” Vernon said. He’d dressed in a bowler and an out-of-fashion jacket that didn’t quite fit his lanky frame. He kept removing his tiny spectacles and smearing them around on his frayed sleeve. “See that lug? He was stark starin’ nude!”
I doffed my Homburg and rapped the door, eschewing the knocker.
“Hello, Mr. Cope. And you must be Vernon. You’re exactly how I imagined.” A woman approached toward my left from around the corner of the house. She was tall, eye to eye with me, and softly middle-aged. Her hair was shoulder-length and black, her breasts full beneath a common-sense shirt and blouse. She wore pants and sandals. Her hands were dirty and she held a trowel loosely at hip level. I kept an eye on the trowel—her manner reminded me of a Mexican knife fighter I’d tangled with once. The scar from the Mexican’s blade traversed a span between my collarbone and left nipple.
“I didn’t realize you were expecting me,” I said, calculating the implications of Helios Augustus wiring ahead to warn her of my impending arrival.
“Taller than your father,” she said. Her voice was harsh. The way she carefully enunciated each syllable suggested her roots were far from Washington. Norway, perhaps. The garden gnomes were definitely Old World knick-knacks.
“You knew my father? I had no idea.”
The Year's Best Dark Fantasy & Horror, 2013 Edition Page 65
