Last Train from Perdition

by Robert McCammon

  Or maybe he does?

  “We can’t ask anyone about Eric,” Lawson went on. “That would risk word getting back to Mathias and the others and we don’t want them spooked. So the only recourse I think we have is to bide our time and visit the local saloons where such men might gather.” He was silent for awhile and she was silent, and at last he asked, “Are you all right?”

  “I am,” she said.

  But he knew she was not. How could she be? How could anyone be, who had seen what she’d witnessed?

  In the Kingsley mansion in Louisiana that night, Lawson had not only heard the buzzing of the flies but had smelled the blood immediately upon entrance through the wide-open front door. It was human blood, aged maybe six days. Lawson figured it had been two or three nights after their episode with Christian Melchoir and LaRouge in the ghostly town of Nocturne. He reasoned she had led them on a raid here, and might have been joined by Ann’s sister Eva if the girl had been turned.

  “Wait here,” Lawson had said, his eyes shining in the glow of the oil lamp he held. God help him but the rank aroma of the spill had quickened the flow of the black ichor through his own veins and made him nearly wild with hunger. It was all he could do to keep his head from snapping back and the rattlesnake-like fangs sliding forth to…what? Tear into the throat of Ann Kingsley?

  “Draw your gun,” he told her, his voice a harsh rasp. “Loaded with silver?”

  “Yes.” She had kept silver bullets in it since leaving Nocturne and during their journey through the swamp back to St. Benedicta. From there, they’d spent two days in search of a town from which the vampires might have gotten boats to reach Melchoir’s bad dream. The nearest was a place called Sawblade, another logging town. Only it was deserted, not even a dog left in the soggy streets. A half-dozen boats had been pulled up on shore and hacked to pieces with axes, showing that some had escaped in the night before Lawson’s dynamite went to work.

  She had passed this way. Lawson was certain of it. As he and Ann had stood in the darkness with just the single lamp to light a path, and all the silent empty houses of Sawblade around them and even the crickets and frogs voiceless, Lawson had felt the passage of LaRouge here like a claw creeping across his cheek, scratching very lightly with razored nails at the back of his neck, promising next time…next time…

  They wanted him—she wanted him—because he defied them. Because he clung to his fading humanity with his newfound vampiric strength, because he would not fall before the power of the Dark Society. He was a threat to them, a danger to their future on this earth.

  He was an if.

  If he fought them and won, would there be others who stood with him? Could there be?

  Next time…next time. “Draw your gun,” Lawson repeated.

  “Do you think…one of them is in there?”

  “I think one of them is out here. Draw your gun and if I lose control…just keep it ready.” He needed a taste from his Japanese bottle of cattle blood to steady his nerves and dull his desires, but there was no time for that. The best thing to do was to get out of this house as quickly as possible, yet that closed door in front of him must be opened.

  “Don’t move,” he told Ann. When he opened the door the rush of the blood-smell hit him in the face and set all senses aflame like a torch touched to pitch-soaked linen. It burned through him in an instant, nearly sending him to his knees. Or sending him at Ann Kingsley like a ravaging juggernaut. He did not hesitate; he walked into the room and shone his lamp upon the scene of carnage.

  She disobeyed him, but she had to. She stood a few feet behind him and to the side, and she had to turn away for a moment to be sick but Lawson needed her to look at the bodies. There were three, a man and two women. Not much left of them, but enough to tell what they’d looked like.

  When Ann could speak she said, “Those…are the servants. My father is not here.”

  Lawson saw a declaration upon the pine-panelled wall. He lifted his lamp toward it. It was scrawled there in crusted gore, and as the flies spun around and around in angered clouds both he and Ann read the writing.

  Revenge is a dish best eaten bloody.

  “My father,” Ann repeated, in a voice near breaking, “is not here.”

  They couldn’t leave without searching the rest of the house. They did so with their pistols ready to fire a silver angel at anything that moved along the light’s edge. But Ann was correct, as Lawson had figured she would be: her father was not there.

  Once outside, Lawson had uncorked the Japanese bottle and had a drink of the cattle blood concoction that his friend Father John Deale procured for him from a New Orleans slaughterhouse. Ann had walked off a distance, even in the dark, and Lawson could say nothing to her so he let her alone.

  She had as much to settle now with the Dark Society as did he. Lawson could image the vampires raiding her father’s mansion, coming into the house like whirling blades on a violent wind, all fangs and claws and depraved desires. And he knew she must understand that if indeed her father and her sister were still alive and had been turned they would be yearning in their own fever to taste her blood and turn her.

  It was their way, and they would not—could not—stop until all in this world travelled by night.

  Piano music and harsh voices spilled out from the canvas folds of the Cristal Palace. Snowflakes whirled through the smoky air. Lawson and Ann stepped from the street’s frozen mud onto the green boards of the sidewalk, and he started to push through the entry into Perdition’s only den of entertainment.

  But stopped.

  He turned toward the direction they’d just come from, where the Perdition Hotel stood like an unsightly brown-boarded lump on the mound of a hill.

  “What is it?” Ann asked, knowing he was sensing something beyond her reach.

  “We’re being watched from the hotel…second floor, third window from the right. A man was standing there. He just pulled back.”

  “One of them?”

  “A human,” Lawson said. He lifted his chin as if smelling the air like an animal. He sought what he’d come to think of as the “atmosphere of the unholy”. Whether that was a particular burnt-flesh smell or a rushing of the ichor within him or simply the awakening of a sense of threat that humans possessed but was a thousand times stronger in the vampire he did not know. He just knew he had it, and it told him to be wary. “I’m not feeling any of them within close range.”

  “Someone just curious?”

  “The man from the train was curious.” Lawson had seen the man at the hotel when he and Ann were getting the keys to their rooms. Aboard the train, when the man had stared fixedly at Lawson once more, the vampire had thrown his Eye and entered the mind of Eli Easterly, for that was a name written in memory on the inside page of a well-used Bible, there in those corridors of the mind. Within seconds Lawson had walked through Easterly’s mansion and found scenes there that told of a tormented life…a life still in torment.

  “Well,” said Lawson, quickly scanning the darkening sky, “we have work to do.”

  He pushed the canvas aside and they entered. The place was crowded, noisy and nearly stifling hot with all the bodies packed in and a pot-bellied stove burning wood at the back. Smoke from cigars, pipes and cigarettes swirled around the figures and floated in a blue cloud at the ceiling amidst a score of oil lamps hanging on nails. On the right side of the establishment was a long bar backed by a mirror in an ornate silver frame. A few tables were set around and in a corner out of the way was the music-offending piano and its player, a bald-headed black man with a long gray beard. On the left side of the Palace were card tables, a roulette wheel, a big spinner for Put & Take and various other stations designed to separate the crowd of miners from their money. In one sweeping glance the vampire gunslinger took in games of Faro, Keno, Mexican monte, Chuck-A-Luck, craps, Newmarket, and about as many variations of poker as there were tables. A winner’s holler seemed to go up every five seconds, followed by an equally loud bout of c
ursing and otherwise bitter language from the losers. Eyes went to Lawson and Ann but didn’t linger, because the wheel and spinner were turning, cards were being slapped down on green felt and ivory dice were tumbling.

  Lawson made his way to the bar with Ann following close behind. He ordered a whiskey from a wizened bartender who likely kept a shotgun within reach at all times. “Anything to drink?” Lawson asked Ann, but she shook her head. Just as well, Lawson thought; the whiskey was something to toy with, for the strength of these potions was designed to further stupefy a man into betting against a dealer’s high hand.

  He reached back, unclasped the strap of his goggles and removed them. They went into a pocket of his overcoat, which he would be inclined to remove but that might bring the pickpockets stumbling toward him in an affectation of drunken friendship. As it was, here came the bar girls, two of them. They wore their makeup as if it had been applied by children just learning how to fingerpaint. Their frilly dresses were new, though, likely supplied by the management; one was as bright blue as Lawson figured the Mediterranean to be and the other as orange as an overripe pumpkin, which suited the woman’s figure. On their way toward Lawson they took the opportunity to flick hats and press the backs of men at the tables. He saw others moving through the throng, all of them wearing the bright frilly dresses that must’ve come up by train all the way from San Francisco: pink as summer lemonade, green as a backwoods meadow, purple as a dream of passion, red as new-spilled blood.

  Before Lawson had a chance to scan the crowd for the face of Eric Cavanaugh, Blue was upon him. She wore a frozen smile that must be painful to her jaws. The pain showed in eyes that were nearly as blue as the dress. She had blonde hair that had likely been pinned up earlier but now drooped from the weight of heat and smoke. Her makeup made her almost as pale as himself, her lips a garish slash of crimson and little spots of rouge coloring her cheeks. A small black beauty mark had been applied just at the corner of her left eye.

  “Bu..bu…buy me a drink?” she asked, and if she had ever flinched at the sound of her own speech impediment those days were long gone; the way she held herself told Lawson she thought she was as good as anyone else here, or maybe she was just a very good actress.

  “Certainly,” he answered, and she asked the bartender for—of course—champagne. Which made Lawson want to smile at the preposterousness of it, but he thought his smile might frighten her off so he did not. This girl had not approached him last night; it had been a Chinese girl who seemed to know only how to say in English “Buy drink? Buy drink?” But he had a use for this one.

  The walking pumpkin flashed silver teeth at Ann and also asked for a drink. Ann shook her head. The pumpkin immediately got a look from Hell’s half-acre in her eyes. “You was in here last night,” she said, as if in reproach. “What’re you lookin’ for?”

  “Peace,” Ann said.

  “You a mite late,” came the answer. “Church burned down last month.” And with a flouncing of orange she turned away and strode with dignified grace into the midst of the gambling, hollering, cursing throng.

  “What’s your name?” Lawson asked the girl, who was probably seventeen under all that pancake.

  “What do you please to call me?”

  “Blue,” he told her.

  “Dandy. Then what do I ca…ca…call you? Whitey?”

  “As you please. I’m also known as Trevor.”

  “You got a funny accent.” Her eyes narrowed. “Not from around here?”

  “From the south. I live in New Orleans.” Their drinks came. Was it champagne or colored water? Didn’t they know here that champagne should be fizzy? Lawson paid the bartender and touched his glass to Blue’s. “To your happiness,” he said.

  She gave a quiet little laugh that had a twist in it, and when she sipped she watched him over the rim of the glass.

  Lawson took the opportunity to let his gaze wander over the crowd of men. All he saw were hats, coats, and bearded faces, just like last night. He had Cavanaugh’s description of Eric fixed firmly in mind, but this taxed even the powers of a vampire. Blue was standing a little too close to him. Her blood smelled spicy, like pepper and cinnamon. He wafted the glass of foul whiskey under his nostrils to mask her appealing scent; it helped only a little.

  “Would you like to make some money?” he asked her, just before another whoop of triumph burst forth at the roulette wheel. No matter, Lawson thought; the winnings would be back in the pocket of the house within the next few spins.

  “That’s what I’m here for,” she said, with a slight lift of her half-empty glass.

  “All right.” He dug into a pocket of his dark green waistcoat for a pair of silver dollars and put them before her on the bar. She glanced only casually at them, but he knew he had her. From here on, though, it was a dangerous ride. “We’re looking for someone.”

  “Du…du…” She had to pause to get her tongue in working condition. “Do tell.”

  “A young man by the name of Eric James. I can’t spot him in here because of all these beards. Do you know him?”

  She gave Lawson a frown. “I figured you two might be the law. Openin’ for a sheriff here, if you’re interested. Last one got ta…tarred and feathered and rolled out of town in a ba…ba…barrel.”

  “We’re not the law. We’re private.”

  “Okey-dokey, if you sa…say so. What’s this fella done?”

  “Nothing. I just want to talk to him.”

  “Ha!” Blue smiled, though it was more of a sneer. “Come from New Orleans all this way to ta…talk? You ain’t such a good liar.”

  “It’s no lie. We want to talk to him. I’ll tell you that he’s in no danger from us, and in fact we’re in a position to help him. If you know him, do you also know his friends?”

  Blue didn’t answer for a moment. She stared straight ahead and just over Lawson’s shoulder, and he knew she was trying to decide in quick order many things: whether to trust a stranger, whether to betray someone that she likely spoke to or had relations with on a fairly regular basis, or whether to give a damn at all.

  At last she said, “His friends are a rowdy bu…bunch. He’s quieter than they are, kinda more refined.”

  The vampire gunslinger’s gaze sharpened. He could easily send his Eye into her and draw out every secret, but it seemed a terrible violation. He would give her as much chance as he could. “Are any of them here?”

  “They’re all here,” she answered without hesitation. She reached for the silver dollars, but Lawson’s hand was so much quicker; he covered the coins long before she could get there.

  “You haven’t earned those yet.” So saying, he drew a third silver dollar from his pocket and set it down amid the others. “I want you to do this: go to Eric’s friends and touch them on the back, one after the other. Just make it casual, as you always would. Lastly, I want you to go to Eric and touch him. Tell him—as quietly as you can—to come to the bar. Speak the word ‘Omaha.’ Do you understand that? Afterward, come back here. You’ll get your money and I’ll buy you another glass of champagne.”

  She snorted. “Ain’t real ch…ch…champagne.”

  “I’ll buy you a glass of whatever you like, if you do what I ask.”

  Blue looked from Lawson to Ann and back again. Her gaze fell to the holsters under their coats. “Is there guh…guh…” She got it out only with an effort. “Gonna be trouble?”

  “I don’t know, but I will tell you again that we’re trying to help Eric. Gunplay is not what we favor.”

  “Lots of gu…guns in here,” she said. “Men been shot d…d..dead for even drawin’ one.”

  “I’m sure. Our intent is to leave here without anyone being hurt.”

  Still she was not completely sold. “Eric’s okay,” she said. “His bunch…rougher’n six miles of ba…bad road. Wouldn’t want to cross ’em.”

  “We’ll take care of that.” Lawson motioned toward the coins, which he figured was quite a payday for a girl in Blue’s posi
tion. “They’re yours, if you’ll help us…and help Eric too.”

  “Help him to what?”

  “Freedom,” said Ann.

  The way Ann had spoken that seemed to touch a chord in Blue. The saloon girl took a long look at Ann as if seeing her clearly for the first time. Then, abruptly, she shrugged her thin shoulders. “No sk…sk…skin off my ass,” she said, and her eyes had gone distant. “I’ll do it for two more dollars. Make it f…five.” She tapped the bartop with her fist, which had diamond shapes tattooed on the knuckles.

  “My pleasure.” Lawson added the extra two silver dollars. “They’ll be waiting for you.”

  Blue started to turn away and then stopped. “You ain’t g…g…gettin’ me in a damn m…mess, are you? I k…keep a clean nose.”

  “No mess. A valuable service, that’s all.”

  She nodded. She stared for a moment at the five silver dollars as if they were her only friends in the world. Then she made a small noise of assent that might have been a word or might just have been a little breath of air escaping her lips, and she turned away to the task at hand.

  Three.

  “Do you trust her?” Ann asked as they watched Blue move toward one of the Faro tables.

  “We’ll find out soon enough.” Lawson took the opportunity to uncork his blood bottle and pour a little taste in to redden the bad whiskey, and he paid no mind that the bartender watched him as one might watch a dangerous and unpredictable animal.

  Blue slipped through the crowd of men as the piano-player pounded the broken ivories and the cries of triumph and misery rang out. She stopped behind a man playing Faro and put a hand on his right shoulder, but he gave her no attention. Lawson and Ann saw that this man was slim and rawboned, had a mop of light brown hair and a slight darkening of beard. His brow seemed to overhang the rest of his long-jawed face and his eyebrows were dense brown thickets that met above the bridge of a hooked nose. He wore no hat but had on a red-plaid shirt and a gray jacket.