by D. J. Butler
Probably, Sam thought, watching him flap his arms like a turkey and cringe from contact with the side of the great steam-truck, it had been the other Englishman who had punched the holes in the Jim Smiley.
After the big steam-truck was loaded, some of the Fort’s men climbed up onto the ramparts and walked the full circuit, scanning the horizon for threats with their spyglasses. The enclosure was designed to look like an old wooden stockade, with a jagged top like the shoulder-to-shoulder points of sharpened logs, but the wall was made of thick slabs of plascrete just like Bridger’s Saloon and all its points were made of iron, as was the walkway that ran around the inside, giving the Fort’s defenders a platform from which to watch and defend. The Fort sat squarely astride the road, with one huge tower-shouldered gate looking east, to the Platte and the Mississippi and beyond, and another gazing resolutely west, to New Russia, to California, and to the Kingdom of Deseret.
Once they had confirmed that the horizon was clear of hostiles, the Fort’s people threw levers inside one of the west towers, and with a rush of steam into the center of the gate from both towers, the huge, interlocking steel fingers that comprised the gate itself groaned and withdrew into their plascrete housing, opening the way for outbound traffic.
Even idling, the Liahona coughed significant fumes into the air, and when Jones blasted the signal from the tin-peaked whistle at the corner of his wheelhouse and engaged the throttle, the black cloud that belched out of the rear of the stream-truck could have entirely covered any two Missouri counties or the entire state of Rhode Island. Steam hissed out, too, through various chinks in the beast’s body, pfffting out past the gears that worked the tracks, from cracks in the hull and from a pipe that rose out the machine’s back end, alongside the exhaust pipe, for the purpose.
Twenty-odd passengers on the Liahona’s deck waved hands, hats and scarves at the Fort’s staff lingering in the yard—none stupid enough to linger too close to the truck. The staff waved back, some with polite hats and some with less-polite single fingers and sneers. This was the edge of the United States of America, Sam was reminded; once the Liahona left Fort Bridger she entered the Kingdom of Deseret, and relations between the U.S. and the Kingdom were not always completely friendly.
Sam looked for the Englishmen and found them sitting by the rail and enjoying the sun. The dark one met his bold gaze, mustache for mustache, and when the Englishman raised his glass in salute, Sam toasted him right back. The pale one looked away.
Sam pulled his goggles down over his eyes and a scarf up over his mouth and nose.
To his surprise, as the Liahona thundered by and just before its cloud of dust enveloped him, he thought he saw the gypsy palm reader. So the vagabond showman was going to the Great Salt Lake City, was he? What had he said he was doing, something about a display of mummies? Sam hadn’t really been paying attention, he’d been thinking about death. Death and Henry.
Well, fine, he’d have a good conversation with Mr. Brigham Young and then he’d go see the mummies. Maybe have his palm read again. For that matter, Young had something of a supernatural reputation. Sam tossed aside the last of his cigar and considered what questions he might ask the famous Prophet of the Rockies, if given the chance. Is there an afterlife, Mr. President, and if so, where in its various parts is my brother Henry? That about cut to the heart of the matter.
When the dust settled, Sam tugged his scarf down, shaking out the red-brown sand it had collected.
“O’Shaughnessy!” he roared, and then he saw the man waiting on the gravel at the foot of the ladder.
“What do you want, Sam Clemens, you bloody slave driver, you?” O’Shaughnessy roared back, stomping up out of the stairwell, but when he saw Sam frozen, staring down at the ground, he shut up. From ten feet away, Sam could smell the liquor on the Irishman.
“Good morning,” Sam called to the stranger. “Can I help you?”
The man wasn’t tall, but he was stocky, and he gave the impression of physical power. His hair and beard were long and streaked with gray and his body, the body of the horse he rode, and the body of the packhorse he led all bristled with guns and knives. He wore buckskins and furs and so did the animals. Sam peeled away his goggles for a more unobstructed view of this genuine Western curiosity.
“You’re headed into Deseret!” the man growled.
O’Shaughnessy crept across the deck, avian head low, and pulled out a gun.
Sam glanced, not meaning to, and noticed that the pistol was unfamiliar and odd-looking, with a big metal bulb on the end of its muzzle and another where the cylinder should be. Does it shoot gas? Sam wondered. He prided himself on being a man who knew mechanicks, but guns were not his strong suit. Where did O’Shaughnessy get such a thing?
Sam took another sip of coffee out of habit and then spat the red mud out onto the deck. “Mercy!” he snapped. He poured the rest out to avoid repeating the mistake. “Is that some business of yours, mister?”
“Will it make you feel better about my intentions if I let your friend get the drop on me?” the mountain man called. “Hell, if I’d wanted you dead, you gotta figger, I’d a killed you in the night.”
“I suppose I should count my lucky stars you’re such a gentleman, then,” Sam countered, but he nodded to O’Shaughnessy and the Irishman stood upright and showed his head. He kept the strange gun at his side, though, Sam noticed, and therefore out of sight.
“You aren’t a Pinkerton, are you?” O’Shaughnessy asked.
“No!” The grizzled stranger barked a noise that might have been a laugh. “I’m a Deseret Marshal, though, if you’re looking for a lawman. Name’s Rockwell.”
“Mostly, Mr. Deseret Marshal,” the Irishman said, smirking at Sam, “it’s the lawmen that come looking for me.”
Idiot doesn’t know when to shut his mouth. “What can we do for you, Mr. Rockwell?” Sam asked.
The mountain man hawked up a gob of phlegm and spat it into the dust settling around his horse’s hocks. “You can turn this pretty little steam-truck of yours around and go home,” he said gruffly. “It ain’t safe for you in the Kingdom.”
Sam ruminated on this communication for several long moments, but couldn’t figure out what the fellow was up to. “This is a strange way to deliver a threat, sir,” he finally countered. “We outnumber you and we have the higher ground.”
“That’s ’cause it ain’t a threat,” Rockwell objected. “I’m just stating a fact. I’m telling you that I am the law in the Great Salt Lake City and I can’t guarantee your safety.”
Sam scratched his head, a gesture that turned into a vigorous brushing off of dust. “Well, Mr. Rockwell,” he finally said. “We haven’t broken any laws of the Kingdom of Deseret, nor do we intend to. We have lawful business there, official business even, and as far as I can see, there’s no reason we can’t carry it out. Your dark intimations are very dramatic and I think you yourself would cut a fine buccaneerish figure on the stage, but I have things to do and I estimate that the curtain is about to close upon our conversation here.”
“You ain’t listening to me!” Rockwell snapped, swinging down from his horse. He reached for the Jim Smiley’s ladder, but as his hand grasped the first rung, O’Shaughnessy tsk, tsked at him, and Sam looked over to see his associate aiming the bulb-gun at the mountaineer.
“We’ll stay better friends, Mr. Marshal,” the Irishman smiled, “if you stay off our fookin’ vessel.”
Rockwell spat again, stared at both men like a hungry hawk, and then swung back into the saddle. “When you’re lying on the red rock,” he bellowed at them, “holding your guts in your hands and weeping out the last seconds of your lives, you remember this! You wanna call for your mamma in that moment, you can. You wanna call for Jesus, go right ahead. Just don’t waste your damn time calling for Orrin Porter Rockwell!”
With a snort of indignation, Rockwell turned his horse’s head and trotted towards Fort Bridger’s westward-facing maw.
“Bloody hell,
I hate these people already,” O’Shaughnessy griped, holstering his fancy gun. The holster, Sam thought, reminded him of the ones he had seen tied to the Pinkertons’ hips.
“Oh, I don’t know,” Sam disagreed, watching Rockwell turn north off the road into the sagebrush and scrub grass. “I kind of like a place that sends out a welcoming committee.”
“Mummies!” cried Edgar Allan Poe, flinging his hands up in a conjuror’s wave before him. “Mummies, of both man and mysterious beast!”
He stalked the deck of the Liahona, the cool breeze snapping around his ears under the brim of his tall hat and blowing behind his smoked spectacles, threatening to dry out his eyeballs and his skin despite all the oil in his air. At least, between the Liahona’s speed and the height of its deck off the ground, the air was free of the reddish dust that the steam-truck’s huge tracks churned up and spewed in its wake. He could barely keep from coughing as it was, and a lungful of dust would surely drag him down into paroxysms.
A little boy, dressed in overalls, a miniature sailor’s jacket, and slouch hat and carrying a length of wire towards the wheelhouse, stopped to listen. Passengers’ heads turned, including the heads of the two Englishmen … good.
“Mummies!” he cried again. “Mummies and other curious, fascinating, and even … repellent … evidences of the wisdom and high craft of ancient Egypt!”
From within his coat he produced one of Pratt’s four canopic jars, the one with the baboon head, and spun on one heel in a slow pirouette with the little object held forward in his hands, showing it to the benches full of passengers. It hadn’t been made to be used in this sort of a show, of course, but what Orson Pratt and Horace Hunley didn’t know was unlikely to hurt them. He deliberately clicked to a stop facing the Englishmen, sitting on either side of a woman in a red dress, and assessed them carefully through his tinted lenses.
One man was younger, in his middle twenties, perhaps, and had the pale, flustered, and determined look of a privileged young fellow trying to make his way in the world. Something had carved a bite-shaped chunk out of the brim of his top hat, giving him a comical appearance, but he seemed delighted with Poe’s theater, clapping vigorously as Poe tucked away the canopic jar and produced instead the cylinder of scarabs. Absalom Fearnley-Standish, Poe thought to himself, who are you, really, and what are you doing here?
His companion was older, nearing forty, and was hard, dark, scarred, and masculine. He was dressed in a frock coat and waistcoat like he might have worn on the streets of London, but he was hatless, and his clothing showed the dust and wear of many miles of road. Richard Burton, famous explorer, etcetera. Well, Mr. Burton, Poe mused, let’s assay you a little bit, test your mettle.
Let’s test you both.
“And magic!” he cried and, reaching into his canister, he pulled out a handful of the brass scarabs and scattered them across the laps of Burton, Fearnley-Standish, and their female companion.
“Aagh!” shrieked Fearnley-Standish. He would have jumped from his seat if Burton hadn’t restrained him with a hand on his arm.
“Arjuna’s bow, man, they won’t eat you!” the explorer snorted.
Then Poe saw their female companion’s face and froze. She was short and dark, all straight lines and grace, and though he would have recognized her through any disguise, she wore none.
It was Roxie.
Robert, you didn’t mention … but then, of course …
She smiled at him, the polite and slightly flirtatious smile of a woman who is casually attached to another man but conceals within her a voracious, insatiable wolf. She didn’t recognize him, obviously, but then it had been years, and Poe was proud of the verisimilitude of his false nose. Within his breast, a desire to seize her in his arms, sweep her to his chest and devour her mouth with his warred against an equally strong urge to pull his pistol from inside his jacket and blow out her vicious, wicked, conniving brains.
“Well, man!” Burton snapped. “Get on with it!”
He felt stunned, his vision out of focus. He floated, lost. Then, in the sea of passengers’ faces under flapping parasols, he saw the physiognomy of his accomplice, the haggard dwarf Jedediah Coltrane. Coltrane was mouthing something to Poe, a nervous look on his face; Poe’s professionalism reasserted itself and he tore his eyes away from Roxie’s.
Stepping back, he raised both hands about his head, one of them holding the cylinder by its lid, and cried out in a loud voice, to be sure that the entire deck could hear him. “Behold the incantations of Thoth! Behold the power of Hermes, Thrice-Greatest! Behold the might of the Egyptian priests, able to reach through the curtain of death itself and command the obedience of the inanimate and the damned!”
When he was sure they were all watching him, he waved his empty hand in a great circular flourish over the scarabs, carefully thumbing the recall button inside the canister’s lid. “Nebenkaure, panjandrum, Isis kai Osiris!” he shouted.
The clocksprung beetles sprang instantly to life. With a great chittering and clacking, each metal bug rolled upright, oriented itself, and then began its trek. From the laps and boots of Roxie and the Englishmen, from the bench they sat on and the floor beneath them, the brass beetles swarmed in a great mass toward Poe.
He raised his hands, stood still, and laughed as diabolically and mysteriously as he could as the bugs climbed his clothing, laughed when he felt the first brass legs touch the bare skin of his neck, laughed with his whole chest and belly as the scarabs detoured around his head and crawled up his left arm, kept laughing as they swarmed ticklishly about his fist and dropped one by one into their native canister, and then, for effect, stopped laughing at the exact moment in which he slammed the canister shut.
The spectators went wild.
“That wasn’t Egyptian,” Burton said sourly, but the passengers all about him applauded, and a few whistled or whooped in excitement.
Coltrane clapped along with the crowd, shooting shrewd appraising looks at the people around him. Sizing up the marks, Poe thought. The man had the ingrained instincts of an inveterate carny. The little boy with the loop of wire stood stiff as a statue, his eyes so wide they threatened to swallow his face.
“They’re scarab beetles, Dick,” Fearnley-Standish pointed out.
“I meant the words,” the darker man growled. “Pure higgledy-piggledy. Nonsense. Arrant balderdash.”
“My name is Doctor Jamison Archibald!” Poe announced. “Tonight, at seven o’clock by the Captain’s watch, in the stateroom, for the very reasonable sum of two copper pennies, any passenger may see exhibited and explained these and other marvels, visual and auditory. See the uncanny hypnotic hypocephalus in action, stealing the souls of men! Witness the muscular terror of the dire Seth-Beast!”
“Will children be admitted free of charge?” inquired a plain-faced, reedy-voiced, gray-wrapped matron in a blue prairie bonnet, clutching under her bony wings a trio of similarly undernourished-looking brats.
“My dear madam,” Poe stage-whispered, meeting her eyes over the rims of his spectacles, “the things I have to display are dark and terrifying apparitions; the stuff of nightmares. Children will not be admitted at all.”
The little boy with the loop of wire shuddered.
“There’s nothing hypnotic about a hypocephalus,” Burton huffed to Roxie. “It’s just a damned pillow!” He glared at Poe. “The Geographical Society would cut you to pieces, you knave!”
Burton was the genuine article, then, and not some impostor. He also seemed to be a tough customer, and his fuse was none too long. Poe decided he would have to be careful around the explorer. On top of everything else, the man seemed very attached to Roxie. Was he playing her?
Was she playing him?
Poe felt uneasy. “For an additional three cents,” he quipped with a bow in Burton’s direction, “you may join me at the lectern tonight and share your commentary.”
Burton’s jaw went rigid and his face began slowly turning purple. “As for the Seth-Beast,
you humbug, there’s no such animal! It is a mere symbol of chaos, and the Egyptians made it up!”
Coltrane woofed! raucously in the ear of the little boy, who jumped nearly out of his skin and went scuttling on to the wheelhouse to complete his errand. The dwarf laughed heartily at his own prank.
Poe bowed again, deeply, and raised the canister to incite another round of applause. He turned and walked away, upstaging Burton and not letting him finish.
“It’s just a jackal!” Burton shouted after him across the deck. “With the ears and tail of a jackass!”
Absalom cleared his throat. Annie didn’t look up.
He felt ridiculous, leaning slightly into the wind to keep his hat on his head, coattails flapping behind him, a mint-spiked lemonade in each hand. What if she thought he was an idiot? She had looked so happy talking to the Brute the night before—maybe he was actually the sort of man she liked.
Absalom was uncomfortably conscious of his smoothness, his refinement, his lack of facial hair, the humiliating look of his damaged hat. He didn’t think he could bear it if she mocked him, not in front of all the other passengers.
But then, he thought to steel himself, a man who would dare to court an Angel must needs risk a terrible fall.
He cleared his throat again. Still she didn’t look up. Her nose was buried in a book of some sort, a cheap-looking print with a soft cover that appeared to be profusely illustrated with dreadful pictures of gunmen and wild animals.
“Pardon me, miss,” he said. “I thought you might enjoy taking some refreshment.”
The Angel looked up and smiled. “Aw,” she said, “that’s so sweet of you.” Absalom smiled and handed her the lemonade. “Thank you,” she said, took the drink, and returned to her novel.
Absalom stood by her side for a few seconds. When he couldn’t think of anything to say, he turned and lurched away.
