Last Train from Perdition Copyright © 2016
by The McCammon Corporation.
All rights reserved.
Dust jacket and interior illustration Copyright © 2016
by Michael Whelan. All rights reserved.
Interior design Copyright © 2016
by Desert Isle Design, LLC. All rights reserved.
Electronic Edition
ISBN
978-1-59606-739-4
Subterranean Press
PO Box 190106
Burton, MI 48519
subterraneanpress.com
Table of Contents
Cover
What Has Gone Before...
One.
Two.
Three.
Four.
Five.
Six.
Seven.
Eight.
Nine.
Ten.
What Has Gone Before…
In the year 1886, in his lair of the Hotel Sanctuaire in New Orleans, the adventurer and gun-for-hire Trevor Lawson lets his services be known by a card that reads All Matters Handled and, below that, I Travel By Night.
On a night in July, he receives a visitor from Shreveport. The wealthy lumber merchant David Kingsley has brought Lawson a letter from a man he’s never met, named Christian Melchoir. In that letter, Melchoir states Your daughter is very beautiful, Mr. Kingsley. And worth money to you, I’m sure. To return her to you, I require gold pieces in the amount of six hundred and sixty-six dollars. She is being held in the town of Nocturne, which is reached from the hamlet of St. Benedicta. Inform only one man of this, and send him to me with the gold. His name is Trevor Lawson.
Kingsley wants to know what connection Lawson has with the abduction of his youngest daughter Eva, but Lawson doesn’t know any man named Melchoir…though he does believe Melchoir wants him and is using the girl as a device. Lawson agrees to take the job, and tells Kingsley he will do his best to “return your daughter in a whole state”.
Outside the hotel, Lawson discovers that Kingsley is being followed by a spindly figure in a black top hat and duster…and the chase is on.
Trevor Lawson is not only an adventurer and a gun-for-hire, but is also a vampire. He has taken the hard path of resistance to the forces that compel him to drink human blood and he subsists for the most part on the blood of animals…but he realizes that the vampiric Dark Society considers him a danger and desires him to be either fully in their fold or destroyed, and thus they send spies to watch him and—in the case of Kingsley’s daughter Eva—use an innocent to lure him into what he knows must be a trap.
After a furious chase, Lawson confronts his quarry on the rooftops of the Vieux Carre and is stunned when the spindly vampire demonstrates an ability to shapechange into something more spiderlike than human. Lawson kills the creature with a silver bullet to the head, but not before taking damage himself. One benefit Lawson has discovered to his condition is that the injuries of broken bones and damaged internals will quickly heal. The only way he understands to destroy a vampire is with a silver bullet, consecrated with holy water, and delivered to the skull; thus a blood-hungry creature of the night breaks apart and burns, and is scattered in ashes by the unforgiving winds.
As dawn is about to break, Lawson visits his friend Father John Deale, who supplies him with both the animal blood and the silver bullets and is his compatriot in Lawson’s battle against the Dark Society. Lawson tells the priest his experience of the night before, and confides that he believes as vampires age they become faster and stronger and some adapt the shapechanging abilities. He tells Father Deale he knows he’s walking into a trap, and that Eva Kingsley may have already been “turned”, but he has to go. The priest listens intently, for he’s had his own experience with the Dark Society: in 1838, before he took the priesthood, his hometown of Blancmortain was visited by vampires who claimed ten victims, including his wife Emily. Blancmortain is now abandoned and forgotten, but Father Deale knows the creature that used to be his wife is still out there, somewhere.
The town of Nocturne is on no map, but St. Benedicta is a logging town at the edge of the swamp and to there Lawson must travel by night on his horse Phoenix. On the journey, he reflects on the horror of how he was taken by vampires from the dying and wounded on the battlefield of Shiloh, where he fought as a captain for the Confederacy. He was fallen upon by a ragged hoard of them, all eager to bite throat, shoulders, chest…wherever their fangs could find purchase. They were upon him like ants on a piece of sugar candy, but before they could consume him they were thrown aside by a stronger and more dangerous presence…that of a beautiful black-haired female in red who calls herself LaRouge, and it is she who over a period of time drains Lawson of his lifeblood and “turns” him to the life of the restless and ever-thirsty undead.
In the darkness of a root cellar prison, Lawson had heard from a legless Confederate vampire the tale that if one could consume the ichor from the body of the creature who had turned you, there was a chance of recovery to the state of being fully human. Was it truth or a myth? There was no way of knowing. But emboldened by this, Lawson was able to escape his prison…and now his search is for LaRouge, to test the tale…truth or a myth?
In the meantime, his condition worsens and turns him away from the sunlight further into the world of night, yet he continues his profession as a way to keep his connection with human beings, and also as a way to find his path to the throat of LaRouge.
In a barroom in St. Benedicta, Lawson exposes a cheating gambler by the use of his “Eye”, a psychic power that allows him to roam through the often-twisted hallways of the human mind, learning the secrets that are hidden there, and also to manipulate human thought. An attempt on his life is stopped by a bullet from the dark, yet no gunman steps forth to lay claim to a truly extraordinary shot.
St. Benedicta’s dockmaster tells Lawson everything he knows about Nocturne: a town of mansions, opera house and concert hall built deep in the swamp to rival New Orleans, but destroyed by a vicious hurricane in the year 1870 and long abandoned. The builder of that town? A possibly deranged young man from a rich family. His name…Christian Melchoir.
Lawson sets out in a rowboat but dawn catches him. He has brought along a black canvas shroud he is able to sleep in during the day, provided he can find shade, and it is in this state of vampiric repose that he hears another rowboat coming.
The young woman who has followed him tells Lawson her name is Annie Remington, but Lawson quickly realizes she is Ann Kingsley, Eva’s older sister. As Annie Remington, she travels with a show for the Remington Firearms Company performing trick shots, and it was her bullet that put an end to the attempt on his life the night before. She tells Lawson she couldn’t allow him to be shot, for she’s determined to follow him to Nocturne to make sure her sister is released and that Lawson himself is not behind the kidnapping.
Lawson wants no part of Ann accompanying him to Nocturne, but she’s adamant and unrelenting in her desire to go with him. Lawson says he can’t explain about his sleeping in the shroud just yet, but if she will wait until nightfall he’ll tell her why and then she can make up her own mind about continuing on to Nocturne…but he would much rather she turn her boat around right now and head back to the relative safety of St. Benedicta.
At nightfall, Trevor Lawson emerges from his protective shroud and goes to great lengths to explain to Ann just who he is, what he is, and what he’s fighting against. He tells Ann that Christian Melchoir, most likely on the command of LaRouge, has taken her sister to draw him to the Dark Society because they consider him a traitor and a threat and they wish to destroy him, so what he’s rowing his boat toward is definitely a trap…o
ne that will ensnare Ann as well, if she joins him.
Her reaction is summed in three words: “You are insane.”
“All right,” he answers. “Row.”
When they reach Nocturne, they hear merry music coming from one of the half-submerged and moss-laden mansions. Many boats are roped there. A party is in progress.
Lawson and Ann are invited up the rotten staircase into a ballroom where vampire musicians play and creatures of the Dark Society dance and whirl across the boards, their shadows thrown large by the candlelight upon the moldy green walls. At the center of this festivity is a chair with a woman wearing dirty clothes roped into it, a black hood over her head, the head slumped forward and the body slack.
Christian Melchoir introduces himself, and by this time Ann Kingsley realizes that what she has stepped in is not a custard pie.
As Ann goes to release her sister, the figure in the chair throws aside the loosely-tied ropes and stands up, and taking the hood off LaRouge reveals herself and asks Lawson, “I think you’ve been looking for me?”
Surrounded by the vampires eager to tear him apart, Lawson reveals his own secret…he has brought dynamite in a harness under his waistcoat. He lights the fuse and tells Ann to get out however she can. Then Lawson takes hold of LaRouge to test the myth, even as he knows he has less than a minute to live…but at least by draining her ichor, she will be totally and certainly dead.
Melchoir attacks, shapechanging to a winged figure, grasping hold of Lawson and tearing him away from LaRouge. He thrusts them both out a window into the night, as Ann fights for her life using silver bullets that Lawson has given her. Melchoir and Lawson crash into the steeple of a ruined church, and there Lawson is able to draw his derringer and put a silver bullet into the head of Nocturne’s creator.
Lawson hangs onto the church steeple, his ribs broken and spine nearly snapped. In a weakened condition, he hears LaRouge calling for Christian Melchoir but ashes cannot answer.
Quiet falls. As dawn begins to break, Ann appears with a skiff below the church and Lawson pushes himself off the roof into the boat. Ann had fought her way out of the mansion, gotten down in the mud of the swamp and stayed there all night. She tells him that she watched some of the vampires row away in their boats, but some remain in the rotting mansions.
Lawson knows that many will be here, but LaRouge—whom he has heard called the queen of the Dark Society—will have already gone.
His quest must continue, but first he has some dynamite that could be very useful to blow this accursed town to pieces and with them the hideous sleepers in the shadows. He must be quick, because already the weak sun is making him burn.
Though shaken, Ann is still resolute to find her sister though Lawson has told her that Eva is likely already turned. Ann tells him she wants to join him in his fight, that she would be useful to someone who travels only by night, because she could walk freely in the daytime world and be his eyes by sunlight.
“Will you let me help you?” Ann asks, as Lawson prepares to blow Nocturne and its sleepers to Kingdom Come.
It is a heavy burden, to allow a human to help him. He knows the risks…but he realizes that to find LaRouge and end his torment, either by death or by returning to the human condition, cannot be done alone, and thus his answer is…
One.
“Yes,” he had said nearly six months ago in the ghost of a Louisiana swamp town, after a night of almost unspeakable horror. He’d been answering a question posed to him by the woman who now stood at his side, and that question had been: Will you let me help you?
Trevor Lawson wondered if Ann ever thought of that affirmative reply as a curse, or as a sentence to be cast into the world of the Dark Society. There could be no return from that world without victory, and victory might be impossible but it was sure that flesh would be torn and blood would be consumed through hungry fangs.
He hoped, as he listened to the shrill voice of the wind that seemed to make this building shudder, it would not be his fangs that did such work on her throat. Or any other fangs, if he could help it.
If.
A dangerous word.
They had entered through the building’s back door. They ascended side-by-side up a stairway to a door inset with frosted glass as gas lamps hissed upon the walls. Small diamonds of ice glittered on their hats and coats. A freezing rain had settled in just after nightfall. The weather prognosticator in the day’s edition of the Omaha Bee had by chicken bones, Indian dreamsmoke or telegraph reports predicted the eastward movement of a tremendous storm swirling itself down from Canada, sure to be as the reporter wrote, a “veritable behemoth of a snow-thrower”, indicating that he was paid by the word. It was early December of 1886. Any simpleton could see from the swollen bellies of the dark clouds hiding the sun all afternoon that the front edge of winter was going to be very sharp this year.
Trevor Lawson and Ann Kingsley had together come to many doors since that hot July night in Louisiana. Any door might open into the maw of the Dark Society, and Lawson knew they waited for him. They tracked him. They watched him from their holes, their basements, their ruins. They felt him in the currents of the night just as he felt them when they got close enough. He knew they must be so much better at this sense than he, but it was a condition growing stronger in him. Part of the “gift” they’d given him, one of many such. He could laugh himself to tears over that but now on those rare times when the heartsick pain lanced him deeply enough and he had the fluid to spare his tears ran red down a gaunt face that was becoming the color of the finest white paper sold to any scribe in New Orleans, his choice of home. Or rather to say, losing all color except that of the moon. He was writing his own story, month by week by day by hour. His story was one of great loss, of hardship, of time spent as a family man and young lawyer in Alabama, then on to the battlefield of the War Of Secession. He’d felt it was his honorable duty to serve, and instead he had been served.
Served up, to her.
The one in red. The creature who had turned him.
She watched him now, through many eyes. He was sure of it. Sure also that there were humans in service to their cause—their war against the daytime world—for whatever such befouled humans could gain from that dubious enrichment. Perhaps she watched him through human eyes, so he couldn’t breathe her essence of perfumed evil and know how close she stood. If only he could see her, could find her…if only…
If.
A dangerous word.
Upon the frosted glass of the door was painted in bold black letters R. Robertson Cavanaugh, Mining And Investments. There glimmered light beyond: what appeared to be a double-wicked candelabra whose two small yellow flames wavered back and forth like luminous cat’s-eyes. “The correct place and the correct time,” Lawson said to Ann, as he noted the hour of eight on his silver pocketwatch. He returned it to the pocket of his ebony waistcoat, sewn from Italian silk. Under his long black leather coat with a fleece collar he wore an expensive gray suit. On his head was a black felt Stetson with a cattleman’s crease and a thin band made from rattlesnake skin. If he was turning inexorably into more of a horror than he already was, he figured he should dress well doing it. As an adventurer and sometime gun-for-hire he could thankfully afford such indulgences. And around his narrow waist—if not his raison d’etre then certainly his reasonable companion—was the black holster that held two backward-facing Colt .44s. The Colt on the right had a rosewood grip and the Colt on the left had a grip formed of yellowed bone. Each pistol held six slugs. The gun on the right side held regular lead bullets, while the one on the left did not. Lawson had been instructed to enter the office directly at eight. He reached for a brass doorknob polished by many wealthy hands. As he did he saw Ann wince just a fraction and he knew exactly what demon had surfaced from her mind.
Another door to be opened. Another threshold to cross, and what lay within?
She had dreaded doors and thresholds since Lawson had returned with her to her father’s ma
nsion just outside Shreveport after the events of July. Under a scythe of a moon they had found the barn’s doors open and David Kingsley’s prized horses gone. The nightblack house was empty, though its front door was also wide open. The servants were not to be found. Kingsley did not answer his elder daughter’s calls. The flare of the oil lamp that Lawson had bought in the swamp town of St. Benedicta on the return trip revealed evidence of violence. Firstly, a painting of Ann’s cherished mother, dead from consumption these last ten years, had been torn from the wall and ripped apart. Shredded would be the word.
And secondly, in the library where Ann’s father in brighter days liked to take his repast by smoking his cigars and reading the classics, if horse-racing news might be called such…
Lawson had heard the hideous humming of the flies at work beyond the closed door before Ann had. Without horses to nip upon in barn or pasture, the flies had come in through a broken window and surely filled the room like roiling clouds. They worked by night as well as by day, and like the vampires they were voracious and greedy in their feasting.
“Enter,” said a rough voice beyond the frosted glass of this new door before Lawson could turn the knob. Of course the man in there could see their shapes illuminated by the gas lamps. The personage who had summoned Trevor Lawson from New Orleans sat nearly in complete darkness save for the double candles. Lawson understood; the letter had said this was a very personal matter. Sometimes those were best left to the mercies of the dark.
He opened the door and went in first, with Ann right behind him. He had the feeling she wanted very much to draw her own Remington Army pistol from beneath her violet-colored coat, if just as a precaution, but she did not and he thought that was good: though their worlds of existence were both far apart and by necessity like joined shadows thrown by the same light, she trusted him.
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