The Golden Minute
Page 9
The magistrate did not take a corresponding step back as Cady approached him, her hand slipping into the pocket where the mace lay in wait.
She started to raise her voice so the other women could hear her again.
“My husband has been taken from me by witchcraft. I hold you responsible for that. I am imprisoned and falsely accused with these innocent goodwives, while Diablo, the Lord of Destruction and Reaper of Souls, runs free.”
Thanks, Blizzard, Cady thought to herself. Owe you one.
Aloud she went on, “I hold you responsible for that, too.”
The other women were tentatively glancing back over their shoulders, captured by her performance, and naturally drawn to a voice which was speaking up for them, insisting on their innocence.
After all, if Mary Bradbury didn’t work out, she was gonna need another sidekick.
“I do not know what happened to my husband,” Cady said, loading her delivery with real spite, “but I know that you, sir, are charged with securing us from the evils of Mephisto, Baal and Diablo, and instead you punish the innocent and ignore the coming of the final boss battle.”
He frowned.
Damn it. She’d gotten a little carried away channeling her love of Blizzard’s dark fantasy dungeon crawler.
“How dare you even breathe such lies,” the magistrate hissed. “What god do you worship that you dare speak to my office with such surquedry?”
She wasn’t sure what he meant by ‘surquedry’, other than probably meaning he thought she was a lippy bitch, but at least he wasn’t asking about Smith beaming up to the Enterprise anymore.
Cady was not even a little bit religious, but her parents went to church every Sunday, and they’d dragged her along until she’d moved out of home. In fact, that was one of her top three reasons for moving out, including round-the-clock Fox News, and the Disney Princess fit-out of her tiny bedroom.
“I worship the God of the holy Bible,” she shot back at him, as a demo of just how tight she and the big guy really were. “But what of you, Magistrate? Who do you serve? You let my husband be taken by witchcraft. You are accountable for all this, Harvey.”
“My name is not Harvey,” the man spat back. “I am Justice Deodat Granville.”
She committed the name to memory, repeating it silently three times so that she wouldn’t forget. If Cady ever got her phone back she’d find out whether this asshole rated a Wikipedia mention, and if he didn’t he was probably another Chumley.
“Well, Deodat, answer me this. If these women are witches, how do you come to be down here alone and unmolested with them? If they have powers, why do they not use them on you? Compel you to set us free? Surely a woman who can fly through the night on a broomstick can manage that? And yet there you are, not letting us go free. Not even contemplating it. And here we are without a single flying broomstick between us.”
The other women had all turned around by now.
The pregnant chick, Faulkner, added her voice to Cady’s demands.
“You do not answer the goodwife, Magistrate. From your sour expression perhaps your mouth is full of bonny-clabber.”
Two spots of high color stood out on Granville’s cheeks, and he spun on his heel so quickly that he almost lost his footing and tumbled over into the muck on the cellar floor. Cady resolved to get some time with her little riot grrl Faulkner over there. From the defiant look on her face, this bitch was a weapon.
“You would do well to keep your own counsel, Abigail Faulkner,” Granville said. “I have the notes and proceedings of your trial. You live only because of the life you carry in the womb. Were it not for that blameless soul, you would have swung from the hanging tree already. Lest you desire to be carried immediately from the birth chamber to a place of execution, I bid thee keep thy forked and hissing tongue behind those thin lips.”
“Hey, asshole…” Cady said, her hand closing around the tube of mace. She had not intended to hose this guy down, but she did have a famously short fuse, and he had just lit that sucker up. She might well have drenched him had the heavy wooden door at the far end of the cellar not squealed open to admit a gaggle of extras from The Handmaid’s Tale. Half a dozen Aunts and Marthas trailing in the wake of Sheriff Corwin, who roared at the prisoners to avert their eyes from his host.
“I’ll not have you afflicting these poor women while it remains in my power to secure them from your fascinous crafts. Get back, now!”
He banged the head of his club on a heavy wooden cask as he strode by. It boomed like a cannon shot in the confined space, and Cady jumped in spite of herself. The defiance she’d felt flickering in her fellow inmates guttered out.
Magistrate Granville stood aside, his face returning to a normal hue, as Corwin drew a large iron ring festooned with keys from his belt.
“Stand back,” he ordered Cady, and she did so.
This was not her first time in a cell, and she’d learned in ancient Rome that the bars weren’t much protection if your captors decided to stick something through them and into you. Mary was sobbing and shivering in the corner, her face turned away. Corwin released the padlock and swung open the door, raising the business end of his club to ward off any attack by Cady.
“Again, if I was a witch, your little wooden stick there wouldn’t impress me much.”
The sheriff had some trouble understanding what she meant, but he heard the “witch” in there and that was enough for him.
“Get back, foul harlot,” he ordered.
It would’ve been a great time to mace Corwin and Granville and make good an escape, except that the confines of the cellar were now packed solid with the cheer squad for the local witch-burning mafia. If she gave these bitches an eyeful of pepper spray, chances were they’d scream loud enough to bring a company of redcoats all the way from Boston. And she’d still get dog-piled anyway.
Before she could sort out her thoughts or even a basic To Do list, the women poured into the cell. The first one grabbed her, and Cady lashed out with a fist, catching her a glancing blow on the temple that dropped the woman but hurt her hand, which felt tingly and numb. Then a brown calico tide washed over her and she struggled in vain to throw them off. Not for the first time did she regret giving up on that self-defense course she’d done with Georgia. Agent Romanoff wouldn’t have taken this shit. Wonder Woman would have sent Handmaids flying everywhere. Even Lara Croft would have busted out some mad parkour skills to run up the side of the cell wall and across the curved, vaulted ceiling to drop on the far side of her attackers. Might have put some well-placed arrows in their asses, too.
But Cady just went down, thrashing and scratching and even biting somebody at one point. That got a reaction, a pealing scream and a flurry of blows which didn’t really hurt; not until Sheriff Corwin forced his way into the melee and gave her a sharp jab in the guts with the end of his club. It drove the breath from her body and winded her so badly that for a few moments Cady simply stopped resisting. She lay, gasping, tears in her eyes, as she was stripped almost-naked on the filthy floor of the holding cell. One arm of her shirt was caught on her dad’s Timex, hiding it. For now. The women did not speak to her or to each other. She heard grunts, and what sounded like curses, but not much else as they forcibly undressed her. A distant part of her mind worried over losing the few uptime trinkets she’d held onto, concealed inside the inner pockets of the sheepskin jacket, but she quickly understood they weren’t interested in searching for contraband.
They just wanted her naked.
“The strange breeches are caught on her boots,” a woman’s voice complained.
“And the manly shirt on her wrist.”
Cady shivered and tried to ball herself up on the cold, wet floor of the cell, but the women who’d stripped her were surprisingly strong. Fingers like iron claws dug into her arms and legs, pulling them straight. Cady squeezed her eyes shut but a clout across the side of her face forced them open momentarily, as a sea of stars washed across her vision.
But the Puritan bitches weren’t as considerate. They poked and probed at her, at one point forcing Cady to roll over. That was painful. Her knees and elbows ground into the stone floor. And it was vile. She gagged on the stench of human waste mixed into the slurry of mud and other filth. She got some of her fight back when she felt strong fingers clawing at her butt crack.
“Fuck off,” she spat out through clenched teeth, and to her shock the women did.
In fact, they seemed to leap away from her. Maybe cussing was a super power here?
“She has the mark,” one of them announced. “The Devil’s teat. Satan himself has suckled there, I will avow it.”
Cady scrabbled away from them, dragging her filthy shirt and grabbing at her coat for cover as she went. It lay on the ground, attracting no attention from her captors. They hadn’t managed to get her boots off and her jeans were tangled at her ankles. But they had found what they needed.
She had a benign mole just under the fold of her left butt cheek.
They were all staring at her ass as though the hordes of hell might come pouring out the crack.
“The Devil’s suckling is evidence enough to send her for trial,” Granville declared. “She will answer for her blasphemies this very day.”
9
It were all he could do not to tear open the letter right there in front of the check-in desk. The envelope was heavy, a rich creamy vellum inked in a delicate hand with his full name and even his marshal’s rank.
Deputy US Marshal John Titanic Smith.
The desk clerk handed him a room key and asked if he needed a bellhop for his bags. Smith missed the question at first, lost in the thicket of pondering on that mysterious letter. He barely caught the gist of the clerk’s question the second time around.
“Oh. No,” he said. “I can tote my own luggage. But I might call on the hotel’s washer woman if’n that’d set right by you. I had some trouble gettin’ here and my jacket sorely needs a clean.”
“But of course, sir,” the clerk said, all silky and ingratiating now that Smith was a paying guest, boasting of some significant connection to the local mucky mucks through this professor and his ‘Historical Society’. Smith didn’t care for a lick of it. It stunk worse than moldy limburger, but nobody had pulled a gun on him or tried to run him through with a toad sticker. So for now he would go along to get along.
“I will send a bellboy up to collect your jacket, sir. I can see it has been badly soiled. I hope you were not bothered by these dreadful street toughs. They cause such uproar now.” He leaned forward to impart a secret. “They forget their place in the new order.”
Smith had no idea what he meant, and little interest in finding out. He just wanted to read his dang letter.
“Not much bothered no,” he said without commitment. “This is some other feller’s blood, not mine. Be good to wash him off me.”
The clerk blanched a little and began fussing with his desk set.
“I will see to it, sir.”
“And you can send a couple of pitchers of hot water up for a bath, too.”
The clerk appeared nonplussed by the request, but then smiled as if he had just been let in on a marvelous jape.
“Oh, but the Esplanade pipes steaming hot water to every room, sir. You may fill your bath to the brim if you wish. Let it out. And repeat as often as you would. Our boilers will never run dry or cold.”
Smith was eager to be gone, to read this letter which had reached him across hundreds of years and untold miles. He was already turning away from the reception desk when the clerk pointed him to a bank of elevator doors by the nearest piano.
“You can take the lift to your room on the third floor, Herr Smith.”
Befuddled for a moment, Smith saw a set of doors roll open and two men appear from within. He’d heard in his own day of these electro-mechanical lift boxes. The tallest buildings in New York all had them. Like grain elevators but for people, and powered by engines not draft horses. Momentarily struck by the worry that he might not be able to work the thing, he was relieved when a third man, in the livery of the hotel, stuck his head out of the box and announced that he was ‘going up’.
Smith took his room key and knapsack, heavy with all of the equipage Cady had bought in Seattle, and hurried over to the elevator. The operator, he saw, had lost a leg at some time in the past and was now making do with a wooden peg in its place.
“Your floor, sir?”
“Three, I guess,” Smith answered, checking the wooden tag on his room key. The number 312 was imprinted in gold leaf on the dark grain.
They rode up in silence, save for the rumble of the carriage, and he exited into a long hallway carpeted in red and lit by electrical bulbs in sconces fashioned to imitate some sort of flower. Room 312 was down to the left and around a corner a-ways. The lock yielded to his key, and he bustled inside, dropped his pack and shucked off the bloodstained jacket, which he hung on the back of the door.
His hands were shaking as he tore open the envelope.
Two sheets of paper nestled inside, each folded separately.
His hands and feet felt oddly numb, and he stumbled to a small writing desk where he all but fell into the chair. He pulled out both sheets, opened them, and laid each next to the other on the leather blotter of the desk.
A single word stood out.
A woman’s name.
Cady.
She had signed the longer of the two notes, which was written in a neat, looping style.
* * *
Hey Cowboy,
Yeah. It’s me. Long time no see, huh? Well, it’s been a long time for me. A couple of hundred years. But I’m kinda hoping less than a day for you when you read this.
Long story short, I got out of that shit show in Salem. (That’s where you dropped us, by the way. Fucking Salem. Right in the middle of witch-hunting season). And I hauled ass to Boston.
Waited for you there at the Red Lion.
You ghosted me.
Eventually I gave up and got the Hell outta Dodge. Hooked up with this old girl I met in the can. Hunkered down in ye olde New England and used my mad history skillz to make some scratch. Not like a world-changing fortune. Had to stay under the radar and shit. But enough to fund my homies in the secret society you’re about to meet.
Obviously I don’t know exactly who they are. I’ve been dead for about two hundred years. (Thanks for that, btw. So loved being stranded here.)
But, dude, I’m begging you.
If you get this letter in Berlin, and that’s a super long bet I’m making, it means my guess was right. You jumped using Chumley’s watch, and I’m hoping, dreaming, praying that it was synced to old Mr. Wu’s. So he could track us.
The next stop on that ride would be Berlin.
If not… well, that’s too fucking depressing to think about.
I’m fifty-seven years old now, John, and I hate everything.
This is my one roll of the dice.
Make me lucky.
Love,
Cady
The whole of the Hotel Esplanade felt as though it were tumbling and spinning about him. Walls tilted and the rug underfoot took flight like a magic carpet. Smith had to squeeze his eyes shut and breathe in and out for a good half a minute before the wild gyrations of the world and him within it calmed and finally settled.
He took another long, shuddering breath and read the letter again.
It surely did sound like Ms Cady; right down to the unholy cussing.
But…
Love,
Cady
* * *
What did this mean? Was it merely a parting salutation? Did she truly have such feelings for him, even though she had not spoken them directly before this?
And fifty-seven years old!
How long had she been there when she wrote this?
&nbs
p; Smith realized he did not know her exact age, but he had thought her to be in her early twenties. That meant it were possible she’d written this, if it was her, decades after they’d parted in that muddy field.
Salem.
He shivered.
That was a name to conjure the Devil himself. Folks still talked about Salem in his time, more’n a hundred and eighty years after the madness of the witch trials.
A loud rapping on the door caused him to jump, and he answered the caller on unsteady legs. It was a bellhop, looking to carry away his laundry for cleaning. Smith gave the boy his jacket and tried to tip him, but the young’un would have none of it.
“This is my job, sir.”
Smith, still befuddled, gave him some coins from a pocket and closed the door on the boy before returning to the writing desk. He had not attended to the contents of his room when he’d first arrived, so fiercely did he burn with the need to get at that letter. He saw now that he had rented himself quite the palatial suite. A large feather bed dominated the room, but did not crowd it out. There was space enough for a small nest of occasional chairs, and in their midst a tiny coffee table set with fresh flowers. A fireplace had been swept clean for the summer, and a dining table and chairs stood ready in case he might prefer to take his repast in rather than out. There was even a small drinks cabinet on which stood a handy collection of spirits and such like.
A creeping essence of the purest guilt and inner loathing stole over him, like sadness over a tick-fevered pup.
What horrors and hardships had he given Ms Cady to endure by way of his escape, while he luxuriated here in some expensive Prussian boudoir, which needed but a brace of perfumed harlots to complete the picture of louche and profligate gratification.
Dull fire burned him from within and he found he could not look at the note from Cady lest the shame of it all completely unman him.