“I have an unfortunate condition,” said Lawson, as he prepared to deal. “Also…like you, Mr. Brannigan…I work at night. Same game?”
“Absolutely,” said the cardsharp, tapping ashes upon the floorboards.
When the cards were dealt, Lawson had a queen of spades, a four of clubs, a six of clubs, an ace of diamonds and an ace of hearts. Brannigan instantly raised the ante to fifty dollars, which made two of the other players fold. Lawson saw the raise and raised another fifty. Brannigan saw the raise and studied his cards with a blank expression. The other two loggers at the table folded. Brannigan took one card, Lawson discarded his clubs cards and took two. He wound up with a queen of spades, an ace of diamonds, an ace of hearts, a ten of hearts and a seven of spades. Not very good, he thought…but good enough.
“Fifty dollars,” said Brannigan.
“Fifty, and raise fifty,” replied the vampire from New Orleans.
“Really?” Brannigan smiled across the table, but his eyes were cold. “Well…it’s getting a little hot in here, gents.” He laid his cards down face-up, took his handkerchief from his breast pocket and started to take his hat off to wipe his forehead.
“Mr. Brannigan?” said Lawson, in a voice that commanded the cardsharp’s attention. When that happened, Lawson threw his Eye.
Lawson wasn’t sure how he did this, only that when he wanted to—and the need was there—it was simply a matter of a little mental concentration. In fact, it was getting easier. He envisioned a flaming eyeball pushing itself out of his forehead, and travelling across the distance of a few feet to the forehead of another man, where it winnowed itself in and disappeared, still burning. And there in the man’s brain it threw a light, as it moved through the corridors of memory. These corridors might have been the hallways of a haunted house, for Lawson had learned that all men carried their ghosts. Many of these spirits were sad, many were hideous to look upon. The flaming Eye moved within Neville Brannigan’s head, and Brannigan wore a crooked smile and his own eyes had glazed over. The cardsharp’s hand was still reaching for his hat. Lawson saw quick images of Texas prairie and ramshackle farmhouses surrounded by tumbleweeds and blowing dust. He thought this was more Lubbock than Houston, and maybe Brannigan had reason to lie about his hometown. He saw a farmhouse on fire and a woman holding a child to her breast as she fled through the dust. He saw a shadowy figure advancing across a room that had a picture of Jesus hanging on the wall, and in the shadowy figure’s hand was a knife. He saw a man on his knees, bleeding from the mouth and nose, and a knife going into the back of the man’s neck. He saw a black horse rearing up, and a whip swinging out, and he heard a woman’s scream that chilled the dying marrow of his bones. He saw cards by the hundreds, and faces around the tables, and he saw a young boy with curly blonde hair being beaten by the butt of a pistol in a small dank room where light itself seemed a stranger.
It was not Lawson’s intent to interpret these ghosts. They just existed here, in this man’s mind. By trial and error, Lawson had also learned that the Eye served the purpose of searing with its flames his victim’s strength of will. With the Eye roaming free in a man’s memory, that individual was reduced to a mass of flesh whose mind belonged to the vampire.
“Show us your hidden cards,” said Lawson.
Brannigan was still smiling crookedly, his eyes beginning to twitch and water. He was yet strong, and he was trying to resist.
“Show us,” Lawson repeated, “your hidden cards.” His gaze was impassive, his voice slow and deliberate. “Show us now.”
Brannigan trembled. His mouth opened as if to protest, and the gold tooth sparked light. But he did not speak, for his senses had abandoned him.
He reached into his left sleeve and brought out an ace of spades, which fell from his fingers onto the table. Reaching into his right sleeve brought a deuce of clubs fluttering down.
“I’ll be damned!” growled one of the lumberjacks. “Lookit! Bastard’s been cheatin’ us!”
“Silence,” Lawson said, a quiet but firm command that was best obeyed. “Mr. Brannigan, show us your hand.”
It seemed the cardsharp wanted to twist his head to both sides, but his neck seemed too tight. His face was sweating. His fingers trembled as he turned his cards over. He revealed a five of clubs and a five of diamonds, a four of hearts, a jack of diamonds and a ten of clubs.
Lawson turned his cards over, and stared into Brannigan’s watery eyes. He brought his own flaming Eye back from the haunted hallways, and said, “I think a pair of aces wins this pot, sir.”
The flaming Eye left Brannigan’s forehead and floated across the table back into Lawson’s possession. The cardsharp had turned nearly as pale as the vampire. He shuddered and made a sick moaning noise, as if he were about to puke all over the table, the cards, the money and everything. Lawson raked the money toward himself before it could be vomited upon.
The lumberjacks were standing up, red-faced and angry. Brannigan was staring dumbly at his cards, and at the two cards that had been hidden. “What…happened?” he asked, a thread of saliva breaking over his lower lip. “My God…what happened…?”
“You skunked us, you bastard!”
“Sonofabitch, we don’t suffer cheaters!”
Something seemed to click in the cardsharp’s brain. Brannigan looked across the table at Lawson, and at the pile of money, and suddenly the man snarled like an animal and he was standing up, throwing his chair backward. His right hand went into his coat. Lawson saw the holster and the revolver there, and the man was fast but Lawson was supernaturally faster. He already had the Colt with the rosewood grip up in Brannigan’s face before the cardsharp’s six could clear leather.
“Let’s not get too angry,” Lawson said quietly. “Bad for the health.”
Brannigan’s hand left his pistol. Then he remained still, his fearful gaze fixed on the business end of Lawson’s gun.
The fiddler had ceased his squalling. The place had hushed and all attention was focused on the little drama at the card table. One of the loggers who’d stood up shouted, “Damn him, he stole more’n a hundred dollars of my money! I say he swings!”
“Yeah, hang the bastard!” another one hollered.
“Now look what you’ve started,” Lawson said to the hapless cardsharp. He also stood up, and noted that the young woman with the holstered six-shooter had moved back into the throng and was gone. “Hold on, all of you!” he told the crowd as they moved forward. “Maybe he can pay his way out of a lynching? Nasty way to leave this earth. Mr. Brannigan, if I were you I’d give up every cent of the money I won. Put it on the table. Then put your gun on the table, turn around and walk out of here, get your horse and go. The sooner the better.”
“Hell, no!” shouted the first lumberjack who’d wanted a hanging. “He cheated us, he gets a damned necktie party!”
Brannigan was already emptying his pockets. Coins and bills were flung to the table, followed by the man’s gun.
Lawson kept his Colt somewhere between Brannigan and the crowd. “You don’t want to hang anybody tonight, gents,” he said easily. “Your money’s here. Collect it as you please. But killing this man because he was stupid and greedy? Get the law down here on you? No. I say let him walk.”
“Well, then…break his legs, is what I say!” yelled a black-bearded behemoth who looked like he could do this deed with one hand.
“Let him walk,” Lawson repeated, staring into the man’s fierce blue eyes. He restrained throwing his own burning Eye until he had to. “Want him out of town now? Then step back and let him go. Take your money and be pleased to have it.” He paused, waiting to deflect anymore threats, but none came. He hated cheaters, but he didn’t care for a lynch mob either. “Mr. Brannigan, you see the way out. I’d go while you can.”
The cardsharp cast Lawson a look that may have been either grudging thanks or a faceful of hatred, but he got himself moving. A few men blocked his way and caused him to either move around them or squeeze between
. On the way past the bar someone threw their beer in his face, and someone else added a glistening yellow egg of spit to his cheek. Then Brannigan was out the batwing doors and gone, the fiddler started up again and the noise did too and Lawson put his gun away and gathered up his own money. He took a beer that was sent to him from the bar, sipped it and set it aside because it wasn’t to his taste. He needed a little cattle blood to make it palatable. He spent awhile talking to some loggers about finding Nocturne and none of them knew the place. Where to rent a boat? he asked, and was told to look for McGuire at the dock.
Lawson left the Swamp Root and headed for the water. The darkness of the swamp beckoned him. He was walking past the stable when the image of a picture of Jesus hanging on a wall jumped into his mind. He smelled beer and caught a figure coming up from a shadow to his right, and as he whirled around with a speed no human could match the knife in Brannigan’s hand went for his neck.
Six.
By the time Lawson thought of what he should do, he was doing it. His arm came up in a blur and grasped the cardsharp’s knifehand to stop the fall of the blade, and he prepared himself to throw the fool through the nearest window.
But before he could put that thought into action, a pistol shot cracked and the knifeblade broke in front of Lawson’s face. A second shot, delivered on the powdersmoke of the first, lifted Brannigan’s hat off his head and sent it spinning. Brannigan bleated with terror, all intent to do harm forgotten. He wrenched desperately to get free of his captor, who had ducked low to avoid any more flying lead. Then Lawson let Brannigan go and the man ran for his life, in the opposite direction of the swamp. Lawson aimed a kick at his tail, but the cardsharp’s speed of terror beat the vampire’s half-hearted vengeance and so Brannigan scurried away into the night whimpering like a little lost child.
From a crouched position, Lawson drew both pistols and surveyed the darkness. He saw the gray gunsmoke hanging in a narrow alleyway. Just that fast, the vampire gunslinger sped forward to the mouth of the alley, where he flattened himself against a wall of rough planks. Nothing moved beyond. He heard the noise of shouting. People were coming to find out what the shooting was about. Lawson eased into the alley, both revolvers ready, but his red-centered eyes detected no threat. Damnation, he thought. Somebody shooting at me or at Brannigan? Whoever had pulled the quick-fire trigger, they were gone.
And so too, he decided, he ought to be.
He slipped away and became one with the dark. He holstered his guns, but kept his eyes aimed. In another few minutes he rounded a roughhewn building and found himself at the dock where the logging boats were tied up. Beyond lay the absolute darkness of the swamp, but on the dock was a cabin that showed lamplight through the windows. Lawson knocked at the door and waited.
It opened with a billow of sour whiskey smell into Lawson’s face. A wizened old man with a scraggly white beard and white eyebrows that jumped like angry snakes peered out, a blue jug of Rose’s Whiskey gripped in his hand. He was bald, his head blotched with age spots burned in by the sun. A razor scar began at the left side of his mouth and progressed nearly to the ear. His nose had been broken more than twice. He wore a faded and ragged pair of overalls, his chest bare and showing a boil of white hair. He narrowed his dark little eyes. “Whazzit?” he asked, in a voice like the grating of stone against stone.
“McGuire?”
“I am. Who’re you?”
“Trevor Lawson, from New Orleans. You’re the dockmaster here?”
“Dockmaster?” McGuire gave a nasty chortle. “I watch the boats at night. Work on ’em some if they need work. Keep the records of who goes out and where they’re goin’. That make me a dockmaster?”
“It does.”
“Then,” McGuire took a swig of his liquor, “I reckon I is.” He offered a thin-lipped smile that lasted only a few seconds. “What’re you wantin’ with me?”
“I need a boat. A small skiff, something with two oars. Got anything that’ll do?”
McGuire hesitated, as if thought he hadn’t heard this right. “A skiff,” he repeated. “You’re from New Orleans and you come here to this damned shit-hole to take a skiff out into Hell’s Acres? What’s your business? Runnin’ away from a nuthouse?”
“I’m sane,” Lawson answered, though sometimes he doubted it. “I’m looking for a town called Nocturne.”
McGuire laughed, but his eyes weren’t in it. “Now I know you’re an in-sane idjit! Ain’t no town called Nocturne out there! And I know that swamp, as much as any man does. Much as any man wants to know it!”
“No town called Nocturne?” Lawson prodded. “You’re sure of that?”
The dockmaster took another drink of what was most likely both his courage and his pride. “Sure there ain’t one now. Nocturne was wiped out near sixteen years ago.”
“Ah.” A ray of light in this eternal midnight, he thought. “Wiped out how?”
“Hurricane. Came tearin’ in from the Gulf and flooded the town. That was August of 1870.”
Lawson nodded. “May I come inside for a few minutes?”
“No!” came the quick response. “This is my home! I don’t suffer no idjits here.”
A hand into a pocket and the production of a five-dollar gold piece made McGuire put down the jug he’d been lifting to his mouth.
“Come right on in,” said the dockmaster, opening the door wider. He took the gold piece as Lawson entered, and then closed the door behind.
The place was a hermit’s heaven. All the furniture—chairs, table, bed—looked to have been hammered together by a crooked man using a crooked hammer. There stood a cast-iron stove rimmed with rust. On the planked floor was a red rug that looked like a dog had been chewing on it, but there was no dog. The walls were bare boards and even the lamplight looked dirty.
“My castle,” said McGuire, with just an edge of sarcasm. “Welcome to it.”
Lawson had seen worse. He’d been trapped in worse. He decided not to sit. “Nocturne,” he said. “Tell me where it is.”
“Out there.” McGuire hooked a gnarled thumb toward the swamp. “Off the main channel to the west, about five miles as the crow flies. What the hell you wantin’ with Nocturne?” His eyes studied Lawson’s clothes. “New Orleans gent. But somethin’ ain’t right with you, is it?”
“No,” said Lawson.
“You smell funny. Cold, like a grave.”
“My nature,” was the answer, delivered calmly and quietly. “Everyone else I asked about Nocturne tonight didn’t know it. Why do you?”
“I used to live there, bucko.” McGuire sat down at the crooked table. He set the jug aside and placed the gold coin before him so he could admire it. “Got anymore of these?”
“Enough for a skiff with two oars.”
“I reckon you do. Drink?” He tapped the jug with two knuckles.
“Not my brand. I want to leave for Nocturne within the hour.”
“Now there’s a story in this!” McGuire grinned wickedly across the lamplit room at the vampire. “Goin’ to Nocturne at night? Goin’ to a ghost town in the dark of the swamp? Holy Mary, you did get out a nuthouse window, didn’t you?”
“I’m sane enough,” said Lawson. But barely so, he thought. “You say Nocturne is a ghost town? Destroyed by a hurricane? What else?”
McGuire took a long drink and turned the gold coin between his fingers. “Not all destroyed. Some of the mansions are still there, but they’re half-ate up by the swamp. See, Nocturne was built on higher ground. Well, it was higher ground then. Fella who built it was a strange sort. A young man from a rich family. Came into the loggin’ business to compete with his father, they had a kinda rivalry goin’ on. Young fella was a little out of his mind, is what all us jacks figured. Well…maybe a lot out of his mind. We heard his father was a bully, ragged that young fella all the time about bein’ worthless. So he spent money, time and labor buildin’ an opera house and concert hall out in the swamp. Buildin’ big mansions for himself and his business
partners, but they didn’t stay very long when they saw what he was doin’. Tryin’ to build another New Orleans, make a port out of it. Puttin’ all his money in makin’ a fancy town where the ’gators used to drop their eggs and the snakes coiled in the mud by the hundreds. Then that hurricane hit.” McGuire angled the coin so lamplight touched it and laid the color of gold across his scarred face. “Oh, Almighty God…that was a blower,” he said quietly. “A monster, that thing was. Flew in on black wings, it did, in the middle of the night. Brought the swamp and the creatures of the swamp right into those workmen’s houses, into those company stores, into that church and school and the opera house and concert hall and right into those mansions. Everything that wasn’t blowed away or flattened was flooded. The dock and all the equipment destroyed. It was like…a punishment from God, for pushin’ too far. You know what I’m sayin’?” He looked to the vampire for understanding.
“I do,” said Lawson.
“I thought you would. You’ve got the look on you.”
“And what might that be?”
“The look of somebody who knows what it’s like to be punished by God,” said McGuire. “I have been too. Lost my wife and a fine son in that storm. At dusk one day I was fifty, and at daybreak the next I was eighty. But time heals every hurt, they say. You believe that?”
Lawson was silent, because he didn’t know what he believed.
“Yeah,” said McGuire, who reached again for the jug of Roses, “I’m still waitin’ too.” When he finished drinking, he ran a hand over his face and sat staring at the wall for a moment as if he’d forgotten he had company in his castle. Then he said, “Twenty dollars, I’ll give you a skiff with two oars. You won’t make Nocturne tonight, though. Tomorrow sometime. That’s best, you don’t want to try to get there in the dark, you’ll never find it. I’ll get you a boat with a torch holder, fix you up. That’ll help. When you wantin’ to leave?”
“An hour at the most. I have to get some things from my room.”
I Travel by Night Page 5
