by Cat Rambo
“I am used to you,” he said, but she thought some other emotion glinted far below the living light of his eyes.
Someone knocked on the partition. Belinda, pressed up against the glass.
“Someone’s in with papa’s things,” she said. “I heard them knocking about.”
They crowded in, Artemus first. The heavy musk of wolf musk hung in the air. Where they had searched through the Professor’s things but kept them in order, someone else had executed no such caution, but rather flung drawers open, tumbled cases on the floor, and dumped belongings out onto the floor. The puzzle pieces lay underfoot mixed with a scattering of tea bags and the delicate bones of some bird’s wing, mingled with some reptile’s coiled spine.
“Looking for something.” Artemus picked up a copy of a book and laid it on the bedspread.
“But what?” Elspeth said.
“The formula still.”
“So it’s whoever killed him but they still don’t have the formula.” Elspeth looked around the compartment. “Either because it’s here hidden among his belongings, or because he’s hidden it elsewhere on the train.”
“Or because he never had it,” Artemus pointed out.
Disappointment clenched at Elspeth’s gut. “What makes you think that?”
“It seems as possible as anything else,” Artemus said. He looked around at the mess. “Someone believes it’s here, at any rate.”
“If it’s a werewolf, they’ll surely try one last time before we hit the next town,” Elspeth said. “How is he or she managing to keep up with the train?”
“They are supernatural creatures, endowed with uncanny amounts of speed and endurance,” Artemus said. He didn’t add that one of his appeals for the Pinkerton Agency was his ability to match those uncanny abilities.
They waited in the darkness. Artemus was braced in the cupboard space; Elspeth crouched near the door. Belinda was bundled in Elspeth’s bed again with orders to bar the door and not come out for love or money. After those instructions had been given, the two Pinkertons had taken up position. They didn’t speak.
The hours jolted by, the train slowing and speeding up. If she were the wolves, she’d wait for one of the curves where the train would be forced to deaccelerate, she thought. Even as it occurred to her, the axles squealed as they leaned left.
She tilted her head, listening, but also extending her other sense outward, searching for thoughts. There. ? where ? was not the thought of any passenger but the frustration of someone looking for a specific thing, returning to search again. river/camphor/dust flared in her senses and said they were familiar, long familiar. She heard a sound she couldn’t decipher, lost between the outer and the inner perceptions.
“They’re trying to get into your room,” Artemus said, moving to the door.
She followed after him in the darkness, wishing they’d told Belinda to wait elsewhere.
Sparks flared, a shot rang out.
Artemus shouted.
She struck a light in the silence to see him holding a lean and ragged wolf by the paw/wrist. Green eyes glinted, considering her. The toothy jaws opened and croaked out, “Hnake. Here. Kill Hnake.”
She looked at Artemus, but his gaze confirmed her own senses. Sincerity.
They backed into the other tiny bedroom, debris and puzzle pieces crunching underfoot.
“You’re looking for a Snake,” Artemus said. “You sensed it, presumably.”
The heavy muscle dipped in a nod. This close, Elspeth found that every instinct of her body screamed to get away. The green eyes blinked in amusement, considering her.
“It’s Belinda,” Artemus said.
“This again?” Elspeth said. “I know you don’t like her.”
“That has nothing to do with anything. She’s the Snake. She’s taken the actual daughter and disposed of her along the way. As a master illusionist, she’s able to cloud your mind and make you think she’s just a null.”
Elspeth ran through matters in her head. The sheer weighty reluctance of doing so convinced her that Artemus was right. Something was very wrong with Belinda.
“Something more,” Artemus said. He knelt and picked up a handful of puzzle pieces. “Look at the backs.”
She turned over the carved wood with dawning realization. “Pencil marks on the back. It’s his formula.”
Artemus’ blue eyes shuttered. “If the knowledge goes to the War Ministry, they will make machines from fallen soliders. So will anyone else who learns it.” He methodically plucked puzzle pieces from the floor. “They are very flammable, these pieces.”
This was why they assigned a human to the mechanical, to think out questions of judgment and justice. In theory. But it seemed he no longer needed her.
She took the pieces from his hands and shoved them in the waistband of her shirt. “If we just throw them out, there’s still a chance someone could find and reassemble them.”
He nodded. “The engine is three cars up.”
But when she reached the engine, Belinda was there.
“Ahhhh,” the young woman breathed out regretfully as she saw Elspeth’s face. She spread her hands in a helpless gesture. “I take it the jig, as we say, is up?”
Elspeth took a few steps forward, looking at the door to the boiler, small and square and securely shut.
Before she could move again, Belinda’s form blurred and interposed itself. Elspeth felt the hard muscles against her own.
“Would you like?” the voice buzzed, half out loud, half in mind. Like to see what I really look like?
She breathed out assent and the golden curls shimmered, gave way to a hood of shimmering scales, purple and pine and scarlet, and eyes that stared at her tenderly. She was enfolded in coils, and Belinda’s mouth hovered over the vein that pulsed in her neck.
I will not touch your blood, the voice said in her head, not for all the world, beloved, but oh, if I did, it would be right here -- the teeth dipped and grazed the skin in a circle of freezing pleasure that ran from that point down to her very core, where it warmed and made her loins heavy with desire -- right here and the lips caressed the skin as though licking some flavor from them.
Even as that pleasure burned, Elspeth grappled the door open and threw the puzzle pieces in to flare up in a cascade of sparks. Even so, the arms held onto her waist, the warm breath caressed her shoulder. It is a bad thing for anyone to hold, and there will be other power, given time, the internal voice hissed, and suddenly nipped, not breaking the skin but making her gasp aloud with the intensity of the pleasure.
The orgasm shook her, drove her off her feet, and the arms released her to let her slide against the wall as the Snake backed away, green eyes amused and regretful.
We will meet again, you and I.
The door opened and the figure was gone, fallen out into the dark night.
“It is,” Artemus said, “something that we can explain to the War Ministry. The professor died telling no one the formula. It died with him.”
“You don’t want to say that the emissary of a group of magical shape shifters killed him for it”? Elspeth asked.
Artemus shuddered. “We would face questioning for weeks.” The amusement faded. “We’ll have to find the group ourselves.”
“If they don’t find us first,” she said. She heard the voice again, beloved, and then there will be other power, given time.
She looked to Artemus.
We will meet again, you and I.
And what will happen then?
Afternotes:
This story started, as you may have guessed, with the title. I had previously written “Her Windowed Eyes, Her Chambered Heart,” and wanted to return to Artemus and Elspeth. Sharp readers will notice contradictions in the love story between the two; that is by design and will be explained in a forthcoming story.
Rappaccini’s Crow
I.
Doctor Rappaccini has a pet crow named Jonah. He says he raised it from a chick, but I have trouble imagi
ning Doctor Rappaccini patiently nursing anything, tucking a blanket around it to keep it warm or feeding it mealworms and apple shards. If he has such a faculty for tenderness, he doesn’t exhibit it towards any of the patients here.
Today he made an appearance to supervise Mr. Abernathy’s removal from his wheelchair.
Someone should have realized Abernathy was never moving from it, but the orderlies probably welcomed not having to lift him back and forth. Bedsores must have formed while he sat there. Over the weeks, they split and healed, split and healed, finally fusing him to the wicker.
The orderlies left him there, looking out over the garden’s distant purple leaves. Never showing any sign of pain, till his flesh grew into the chair. Today at 2:45 PM, he screamed while they cut it away, and Doctor Rappaccini and his crow watched, unspeaking. When they were done, he leaned forward to listen to Mr. Abernathy’s heart with his stethoscope. By then Abernathy had lapsed into silence, but I wondered that Rappaccini could hear the beat of the man’s heart over the painful wheeze of his lungs.
The Doctor wears a pad on his shoulder for the crow to shit on. It misses most of the time, and gray and white clots the black coat’s backside.
It’s hit or miss whether Abernathy will survive. I don’t know that he cares either way.
Before this, all he did was stare out his window, day and night, past purple and green leaves towards the east, towards the mountains the white men call the Cascades.
Over the mountains, they tell me, the sun shines all the time.
Thunder last night. Not natural thunder, but echoes from the unending battle being waged far out among the San Juans. The great phlogiston-fueled battle rafts crash against each other day and night, pushing their claim to territory back and forth. We’re close enough to those battle lines that many people have fled south to Oregon. Others have stuck it out, saying that the lines will shift again, in a different direction.
I have stayed. Where else would I go?
I wheel the Colonel out into the watery sunlight. He can walk, but he prefers the dignity of the chair, in spite of its awkwardness, to having to struggle for every step.
Two days ago, when he surrendered his artificial leg to me after a visit from his niece, the Colonel said, “I knew every man of the three who owned this before me.”
He slapped the cloudy brass surface of the calf. “And some fella will get it after me. Maybe someone I know, maybe someone I don’t. Do you think ghosts linger around the objects they leave behind? If so, I’d be surprised if there weren’t three ghosts riding this one.”
I didn’t answer, and he didn’t expect me to. He knows my vocal cords were seared away in the same war that stole his leg. The same war that’s furnished most of the inhabitants of this asylum. Broken soldiers, minds and bodies ground-up by its terrible machines.
Used to be an injury was enough to get you out. Now if they can, they turn you into a clank, half human, half machine, and send you back to the endless task of pushing the lines back and forth. Nowadays we receive only the men who cannot be repaired, and here they sit or lie in their beds, waiting to die a slower death than the war would have given them, tended by orderlies like me, other broken men and women who can function enough to pretend to work.
People forget. Even though I can’t speak, I can still hear. Or maybe they don’t forget that. Maybe they just figure I’ll never be able to tell anyone.
True enough. I don’t have many who understand hand signs here in the asylum. But I can write out messages, even if it takes me a long time to construct the letters, even if they waver and bobble in a way that got me beaten over and over by the nuns back in school. As though your relationship with God was reflected in the character of your handwriting.
I don’t see Dr. Rappaccini that much. But that crow goes everywhere in the asylum. No one pays it much mind. It flaps along corridors and perches on the back of chairs, goes into patient rooms and pokes through their dressers. Mr. Whitfield told me it took his wife’s wedding ring, which he’d had on the night table in a china saucer so he could look at it when he first woke up.
Maybe the crow took it. Or maybe another orderly slipped it in his pocket, thinking to himself that we’re not paid that much, or at least not enough to be able to resist temptation. I don’t know.
Either way, even if Mr. Whitfield lost it himself, he cried when he told me about it; ineffectual old man sobs. I patted his shoulder, feeling how thin and bony it was under the threadbare garment. Dr. Rappaccini says Mr. Whitfield is one of the lucky ones. His body wasn’t harmed by the war. Instead he has war shock, pieces of his mind blown away instead of his flesh.
Is he truly one of the lucky ones? Sometimes I think that must be; having something broken in your head must be better than having something broken in your body, visible to anyone who looks at you.
Other times I’m not so sure.
I watched the crow this morning, thinking that if it had taken Mr. Whitfield’s ring, it would have put it somewhere. That it would have some treasure trove of what it’d stolen, somewhere in the asylum, and that I’d be able to retrieve the ring from it.
Mr. Whitfield was so upset. His white hair stood up in startled tufts and his eyes oozed tears. It was as though all his soul was in that ring. He told me that it was the only thing that let him remember his wife.
So I watched the crow. It made its rounds like a doctor, room to room, checking on each patient. I hadn’t noticed that before. Who would; who has time to watch a crow, here where we are overworked, where every idle hand is quickly put to labor?
It’s odd how everyone seems to defer to it, almost as though it is Dr. Rappaccini himself. The only person who dares defy it is the cook, when she shoos it away from the beef roast being readied for the dinner.
She never speaks of her past, but it surfaced in her language, the spray of invective, filthy and informative, spat in the crow’s direction.
She flung a saucepan at the crow as well. The crash as it hit the wall cupboard made everyone in the kitchen jump. Everyone looked around, afraid that Doctor Rappaccini might have seen .
He wasn’t there, but the crow was indignant enough for both of them. She was lucky it couldn’t talk, couldn’t tell the doctor what she had done to his beloved pet. It hopped away on the counter, then flapped up to the high shelf held up with iron corbels and perched there, clacking its beak and cawing at her as though about to explode with indignation.
She went over to the window above the sink and opened it, stepped back, and gestured at it. As though it understood her, the crow flapped and flew out, still berating her with squawks and quonks.
By evening though, it seemed to have forgiven her. Or maybe it was taunting her, I don’t know which. Either way, it hopped on her shoulder as she was trying to ladle out dinner to the shuffling rows of patients. She couldn’t push it off, since the doctor was standing there watching.
But it couldn’t resist payback. She showed me later the blood on her arm where its claws had dug in, a cluster of discolored oozing marks. If I could have, I would’ve told her to wash it. I tried to mime that out. Demons live where there is dirt, and who knows what kind of demons a crow harbors? Instead she wrapped it back up, winding the bandage around her arm, hiding the damage.
Last night I dreamed I was the crow.
Crows aren’t male and female the way we are. Or at least it’s a matter of indifference to humans, and something that presumably only matters to other crows. I flew among men and women and all of them looked at me and knew that I wasn’t like them, but that was all right, because I was a crow.
Other parts of being a crow were less appealing. I flapped my wings and made a gravelly sound in my throat as I plucked an eyeball from a corpse. I popped it in my beak like a grape squeezed between thumb and forefinger, full of juice, to the point where it burst, spattering liquid over my wings.
I woke with a coppery taste in my mouth.
Over breakfast, I watched outside where Jonah sat on
the fence post, calling to the other crows. None of them came down to sit with him, no matter how much he cooed or wheedled. Several times he flapped up to try and land beside them. Each time they pecked at him until he flew away.
No one else seemed to notice except the Colonel. He caught my eye and said, “Probably doesn’t smell right to them. Doesn’t smell the way a proper crow should.”
So Jonah pays some price for his life here. It must seem worthwhile to him, or he wouldn’t stay.
Perhaps that’s why his temper is so nasty; why he cannot stand to be thwarted.
I wonder what the other crows must think of Jonah. A crow that’s allowed itself to be tamed in order to make its life more comfortable. Do they envy it, or think it’s sold its soul?
If there was someone else like me, what would that reflection say about me?
Would he envy me?
Or think I’ve sold my soul?
Sometimes prejudice works to my advantage. I don’t have to share a room with any of the other orderlies, because they are white and don’t want to sleep with the dirty Indian.
That saves me trouble. I can unwind the bandages around my breasts and breathe.
I’m still a man. That’s what I feel like.
But sometimes my body doesn’t agree.
It’s always been that way. I knew I was a man, even when everything else was telling me differently. It wasn’t until I ran away from the orphanage, lied and enlisted in a war that was eating up soldiers faster than anyone could produce them, that I could live the way I wanted to.
It wasn’t something I could have accomplished on my own. Here and there people have helped, looked the other way or let me slide by. When I was injured, of course the doctors knew. They could’ve caused a scandal. As it was, all they did was make sure I couldn’t draw on my pay, because I’d accumulated it under false pretenses, or my pension, which fell into the same category.
But there is plenty of work for those no longer fit to be soldiers. My options, the options offered an Indian who could no longer speak, were certainly not those offered someone with paler skin or whose gender was unquestionable, but I did all right.
