The Curse of Jacob Tracy: A Novel

by Holly Messinger

  “Holy God.” Trace instinctively looked toward the front of the train, but of course there was nothing to see except the bunks down and jostling … and Miss Eliza, standing in the aisle in her nightdress.

  CHAPTER NINETEEN

  Trace hurtled out of his seat and up the aisle. Miss Eliza looked up, startled, as he loomed over her. He seized her by both arms and tossed her into the lower bunk alongside Kingsley, just as there was an awful, screaming, squalling roar that started at the front of the train and progressed backward, shuddering through the car as if the tracks themselves were shaking off their burden.

  Trace was sure, later, that the collision must’ve made one hell of a bang, when the second-class car struck the emigrant car in front of it. He just didn’t remember hearing it. The back end of the car bucked like an ornery bronc and Trace was flung forward. He landed on his chin and slid down the smooth-polished length of the aisle to end up in a heap next to the wood stove.

  He did hear the screaming then, and the tinkling of broken glass and luggage bouncing off bunks and shelves to the floor. A series of blows shook the car, accompanied by the deafening and then diminishing BANGbangbang of each car behind them colliding.

  At last the tremors stopped. The children were wailing and no few of the adults. Trace lay where he was for a minute, gingerly checking to make sure he was still alive. The back end of the car was elevated, propped up on the first-class car behind it, so he was cradled in the join of the floor to the front door. All manner of trash, luggage, hats, toys, bottles, and thirty pairs of shoes had slid down to the front of the car and buried him alive. He heard a pop, felt a flash of heat, and looked up to see a woolen stocking had fallen on the stove and burst into flame.

  He flipped the stocking into the ash bin, where it lay smoldering. Then he carefully sat up, shaking off bits of refuse and old luncheons. He could taste blood, his lower lip was mashed, but no teeth were missing. His jaw felt like he’d been punched.

  He got to his knees. The floor sloped up away from him, not too steep to walk but barely; all the oil lamps swung precariously on their hooks. People were trying to get out of their bunks, finding it hard to stand, casting about for clothes and belongings, calling out as to the whereabouts and welfare of companions. The porter was telling everyone to be calm, in a high and panicky voice. Brother Clark was praying and braying like a donkey.

  Trace put a hand on the wall behind him, used it for leverage to stand. The front door of the car was buckled inward, about halfway up. He tried the handle and it broke off in his hand.

  That left the back door or the windows. Trace started up the slope of the floor, straddling the aisle to step up each alternating berth leg, gently but firmly pushing people out of his way. “Stay down,” he advised. “Stay in your bunk. We’ll get the conductor down here, get the car settled down again. You just stay put.”

  He walk-climbed as far as Kingsley’s bunk; he and Miss Eliza were both unhurt and collected in wit.

  “What a piece of bravery!” Kingsley exclaimed. “To risk your own safety for that of another—”

  “Are you all right, Mr. Tracy?” Miss Eliza asked. “You were thrown some distance.”

  “Nothin broken,” Trace reported. “Can you see to those that are hurt? Try to get them up, get them dressed. Might have to get everybody off this car.”

  “Nobody’s leaving this car until the conductor says so,” the porter piped up. “The safety and comfort of the passengers is the responsibility of—”

  “That’s what I said.” Trace gripped the young man by his jacket and pointed him aft. “You and me are gonna go find the conductor, ain’t we?”

  “I’m not supposed to—”

  “Come on, son.” Trace pushed the porter ahead of him and they clambered up the aisle as far as Trace’s own seat.

  “Are you all right, my friend?” Ferris was grim-faced but appeared unhurt.

  “I’ll live.” Trace ran a hand down inside his bedroll, pulled out his gunbelt, and wrapped it around his hips. “You got a gun on you, Ferris?”

  “I can protect myself,” Ferris said.

  “You can’t carry firearms on this train!” the porter protested. “Only the conductor and the engineer are allowed to—”

  “Hush!” Trace held up a hand. Someone was knocking and rattling at the back door of the car. Trace climbed toward it, saw the handle move and the door buckle open a couple of inches. Several sets of human fingers curled into the opening. Trace added his to the effort, braced his feet against the wall of the gentlemen’s privy, and shoved.

  The door slammed back with a splintering of wood and screaming of metal. There was a whoop from outside, and five Negro faces clustered around the opening, Boz’s foremost among them.

  “Knew that’d be you,” he said, though Trace saw the raw edges of relief rimming his eyes.

  They handed him out, and Trace descended the crumpled iron railing, dropped to the gravel of the track bed.

  They were on a fairly gentle mountain slope, shallowly studded with scrub pines and juniper. The first-class car had not suffered much damage: only its front end was crumpled. Trace’s car was tipped up, as was the emigrant car in front of it, and the smoking car before that was wrenched nearly crosswise to the rails. Every window in that car had been shattered, and Trace looked appraisingly at the five black men clustered around him; they all had minor cuts and scrapes, and Boz’s lip looked swollen.

  The engine was still on the track, but its cabin had been crushed by the coal car, and the boiler was sending squalling jets of steam into the air. The third-class passengers were hanging out their windows and exclaiming.

  “Folks behind you didn’t get much more than a bump,” Boz said, gesturing with a thumb toward the first-class car. “All behind that’s freight.”

  Trace could hear the cattle bawling in the stock cars further back. And jogging up the track bed, the rhythmic crunch of boots on gravel. A dark human figure, jogging toward them in the moonlight.

  “Ho there! Anyone hurt?” It was the conductor, in his short white collar and spectacles, carrying a rifle. “You’re not my brakemen. What are you doing off the train?”

  “I told them!” the porter protested, climbing down from the mangled balcony. “I told them not to—”

  “Shut up, Willie,” the conductor said. “Anyone hurt on your car?” he said to Trace, who replied in the negative. “Good, then get back on board and stay out of our way.” He turned, scanning the top of the train for men who weren’t there. He lifted a whistle, on a cord around his neck, and blew several short blasts.

  They listened. Nothing answered, except a far-off crack, and a yelp that might have been a coyote.

  “Gunshot,” Boz said.

  The conductor gave him a look of dislike. “Get back on your car, boy, I’m not telling you again. Willie, you come with me.”

  Willie gave Trace a triumphant look and trotted off after the conductor toward the smoking engine. Trace looked at Boz, and at the colored men who hunkered on the roof and railing of the car. “You men heeled, any of you?”

  They all had revolvers. One man said there was a shotgun in his baggage.

  “Get it,” Trace said. “Stay watch up there.” He turned and started up the grade after the conductor.

  Boz followed. “What is it?”

  “Not Indians,” Trace said.

  The wind was cold and the air thin. The sky was bright with stars and the moon coming and going behind clouds. Bare-headed and in shirt sleeves, Trace could feel the chill on his skin, but it wasn’t getting through to his blood. His heart was thudding hard and slow, his senses alive with eerie clarity.

  The engine cabin was flat as a flapjack and burning.

  “Earl!” the conductor bawled into the dark. “Tommy?”

  “They woulda jumped,” Trace said, low. “Can’t be far.”

  “What’d we hit?” Boz wanted to know.

  They trotted to the front of the tracks, stepping over bits
of coal and smoldering wood. A sizeable cairn of rocks had been piled across the tracks—from the depth and extent of the scattered debris, Trace guessed the pile must’ve been half as high as the engine.

  Not a slide, either: there was plenty of stone on the ground, but they weren’t in an area where it was likely to fall. And there was no telltale skid of gravel on the bed above. “These were put here by hand,” Trace said.

  “You hear that?” Boz asked, and started downslope, into the dark.

  They found the fireman not ten yards from the train, trying to crawl back through the shale and juniper brush. He was sobbing in that broken, wheezy way Trace remembered from the battlefield. His shirt was wet and sticky when Trace touched his shoulder.

  “Easy, fella, we got you.” Trace turned the man onto his back in Boz’s arms. The fireman began to scream immediately, and bat at them with his shredded hands. His face was dark and shiny in the moonlight. The rest of him was shaking and cold, the breath rattling in his throat. “Conductor! We got your man down here!”

  There was a skidding and scuffling as the conductor and Willie scrambled down the grade. Willie’s lantern threw shards of light over the ground and the chewed-up fellow between them.

  “Tommy!” the conductor said, dropping to one knee. “Tommy, what happened? Where’s Earl?”

  The fireman gurgled, hands falling slack away from the conductor’s coat. His sleeves had been torn off, and there was a big chunk of meat missing out of his forearm. In the lamplight they could see a flap of scalp dangling over his brow. It looked like a bear had bitten into his head.

  Trace met Boz’s eyes, read the question there, and stood up, looking back toward the train.

  “What was it, Tommy?” the conductor asked. “Wolves? Did they get Earl?”

  Trace squinted. The windows of the passenger cars glowed dimly from the lamps; he could just make out people moving inside. Two men paced the roof of the first-class car, dark silhouettes against the moon-drenched sky. One of them had a spark of fire in his hand, which he raised to his lips.

  Something dark was slinking up the grade to the tracks. Something blacker than the train, darker than the shadows. It moved low to the ground, crawling like a frog but much faster, as big as a man. Another one, behind it. Two more, two cars down. Converging on the train.

  Trace skinned his Colt and shot the nearest one.

  He knew he hit it. It wasn’t a long shot and he saw the thing flinch; worse than that, he felt it squeal, a metal-on-metal shriek that pierced his skull. But it jumped—all the black shapes did—and scattered like roaches. The men on the roof jumped, too, spun around and looked toward them.

  “Back to the train,” Trace said. “Now.”

  “Son, I’ve got a man down here and at least five missing,” the conductor snapped.

  “Your train is under attack, mister, and that man’s bled out.” Trace thumbed another cartridge into the Colt’s chamber as he spoke, backing away up the grade, Boz already running for the tracks. “Unless you want to lose more passengers you’d best—”

  A scream from above. Cracks of gunfire followed, sounding thin and puny in the wind. Trace turned and hightailed it up the slope.

  He saw the two men go down off the roof of the first-class car—one flipped out flat as if his legs had been pulled from under him, and the other jumped. More gunfire came from the other side of the train, and a high, terrified scream. He saw Boz ahead of him, leaping across the link between the first-class car and the one behind it. Trace angled his steps to follow but then saw one of those black shapes appear on top of the second-class car.

  It perched on the upthrust edge of the roof for a moment, hunkered like a mountain cat or a circus monkey. Its shape was more or less human, but there was something bestial in its movements and the length of its back, the way it crouched on all fours. It swung its head to one side, and then there was another beside it, and another, and a fourth.

  They pushed and jostled at each other, like a crowd of young toughs egging each other to take a dare. Suddenly one of them went over the edge of the roof—and twisted as it fell, swinging clean through the doorway. Trace shouted and ran toward the car, shooting at the three on the roof. They scattered into the darkness.

  From inside the sleeper car came a rolling and screaming and crashing that sounded for all hell like a fox in a henhouse. A man in a nightshirt and boots clambered through the door, and was instantly snatched by a black shadow that hauled him down the grade to the underbrush. The lady behind him saw it and began to scream, but some panicked soul pushed her from behind and she fell, headfirst onto the gravel. A black shadow flung itself on her as if it meant to ravish her. She screamed and beat at it, but it caught her up in clawed arms and fastened its jaws on her throat, ending her scream in a choked gurgle.

  Trace ran up to the thing and kicked it in the ribs. It turned on him with a shriek of rage. All he saw was gaping mouth, filled with teeth and blood, yellow eyes reflecting hate and fire. He shot it between the mouth and the eyes. It rolled over backwards and down the grade—he had no idea whether it was dead or not. The woman was, her throat was torn out, and the emigrant car was rocking with the force of the battle going on inside.

  He clambered up the end of the car, all but throwing people out of his way. He shouted at them to get to the dining car, not knowing if they heard—the ruckus inside was deafening. Trace fell into the car and slid halfway down the aisle before he caught himself; for a moment he couldn’t see the monster. All the berths were still down and the oil lamps were swinging dangerously, people were falling over each other trying to get out of the way, while the battle surged back and forth across the front of the car, something dark and snarling in the middle of it.

  It resembled a man, but was gray and hairless, with the round flat eyes of a fish and a gaping wound of a mouth. In one long, spidery arm it held a child, limp and bloodied, while it used the other to grab those nearest it and fling them across the car. The men were trying to corner it, wielding chunks of firewood, walking sticks, and a fire-iron, but the beast was laughing. It held up the child by its hair and slung the lifeless body at them. The nearest man went down under the weight of it, and the thing leapt over him, took two more down with it and dashed their heads against the floor. One of the men brought the fire iron down on its back, but it only squalled and whipped an arm around, backhanded him into one of the berths.

  Trace took the opening and fired. The first shot hit it high in the shoulder, the second below the ribs. The sound it made was truly awful, a scream Trace had heard only in nightmares, but it crumpled, fell back in the aisle, and slid down a few feet.

  He dry-fired twice more at it, advancing by slow steps, while frantic people huddled on the berths and cowered in the aisle. It wasn’t moving, and neither were several of the passengers. Trace saw at least six lying in pools of blood, and the little girl with her neck bent at a terrible angle, and an old man with his chest torn open, as if the thing had shoved a fist in and pulled out his heart—

  It was Martin Kingsley. He had the fire-ax still clutched in his hands, a surprised expression on his face. Miss Eliza huddled on the berth behind him, her arms around his shoulders, looking at Trace with a blank, lost expression.

  “It was so strong,” she said faintly. “It tried to get me.”

  “Miss Eliza, you just come here,” Trace said.

  “Martin’s dead,” she said.

  “I see that, darlin, you just come here to me. That’s a good girl.”

  She blinked, slowly, and then her face tightened like a fist. She rolled her brother’s body off her lap and climbed over it to the aisle, taking Trace’s hand. The front of her bed jacket and nightdress were soaked with blood.

  “You hurt?” he said.

  “I—I don’t think so. Are there more of those things out there?”

  Trace could still hear screaming and gunfire coming from outside. “There are, but we can’t stay in here. We got to get to one of the othe
r cars, isn’t so damaged.”

  “I’m not going out there!” another woman cried.

  “Don’t like the idea myself, lady, but this car ain’t safe.” Trace flipped the Colt’s gate open and shucked the spent brass onto the floor. He pulled a fresh cartridge from his belt and thumbed it into place.

  “Look out!” Miss Eliza gasped, and he heard the snarl, the scuffle from the end of the aisle, and half-turned just before something heavy and stinking knocked him to the floor.

  His head struck and the weight of the beast drove the air from his lungs. His vision was blotted out in red, but he felt its hot exhalation on his face and jabbed his hand up blindly, wedged the heel of his hand under its chin so it couldn’t bite.

  It was horribly, demonically strong, and its arms seemed to be ten feet long. It stabbed him low under the ribs, claws punching through shirt and flesh, a feeling of tearing in his side and pain rushing in like an express engine.

  Trace hiked up a knee and got his heel wedged in the monster’s hip, sat up and shoved with everything he had. It threw it back a foot or so; Trace brought both feet together and drove them into its midsection as it pounced, threw it over his head and up the aisle.

  It landed hard on its head and Trace was up before it could turn around, snatched the fire-ax from Kingsley’s stiffening fingers. The creature lunged at him, snarling, and Trace twisted aside at the last second, swung the ax down at an angle.

  The blade sank into its side and it squalled, turned on that impossibly flexible spine, and swiped at him with its claws. He yanked the ax free and swung again, cutting up under the armpit this time, followed through with a kick to the chest. It somersaulted backward down the aisle with a hard grunt, as if he had winded it. Trace leapt after it with a yell and a wild swipe of the ax, buried the blade in the join of the neck and shoulder. The thing convulsed, unable to squeal with its throat mostly severed; one more fall of the ax and the job was done.

  Panting, Trace turned and marched back up the aisle. Miss Eliza held his Colt out to him and he took it, handing the ax off to one of the men. He began shoving bullets into the breech again, faster this time. “Now,” he said. “We got to get out of here. Get to the first-class car, ain’t so damaged. Got it?”