The Spirit is Willing (An Ophelia Wylde Paranormal Mystery)

by Max McCoy

  “No,” she said. “Like I said, we were just passing through.”

  “Do you remember the name of the first man lynched?”

  “He was known by a nickname only, something that sounded Indian. Black Hawk, I think,” she said. “That could be any one of the ten persons on the list.”

  “Yes,” I said, “but Black Hawk sounds terribly similar to Blalock, doesn’t it? Let’s cross Ford off the list, and draw a somewhat lighter line through Blalock. That leaves us with us with eight names. Anybody else on the list ring a bell?”

  “Jasper Arnold came here about the time that Miles did. He contracted pneumonia and died that winter.”

  I crossed Arnold off.

  “Seven,” I said.

  “Do you recognize anyone else?”

  She said she didn’t.

  “What about this Ethan Smith,” I said. “I met a Smith in Denver, Eureka Smith, who struck me as exceptionally odd. He was the spirit photographer in the case I told you about. He said he had done some gold prospecting in the past. Do you think Ethan Smith and Eureka Smith may be the same man?”

  “I don’t remember any Smiths at all,” she said. “But there were so many men flowing through the camps at that time. Very much like it is now. They could have been here and I just wouldn’t know it. There are still a few old-timers around. I’d go to the saloons—ask for Old Ben Collins, who is one of the originals. Look first at The Great Divide, which is a short walk, to the west end of the gulch. Jackson Miles built The Divide so fast after striking it rich they say some of the walls were built from packing crates.”

  26

  By the light of a lamp on the nightstand, I lay in bed and went over my notes. With Augusta’s help, I had made tremendous progress, but there was still more to puzzle out.

  There was a hand mirror on the nightstand, glass up, and I could see Horrible Hank’s green face as he tried to turn his head to the correct angle to get a peek in my direction.

  “Enough of that,” I said, reaching out to turn the mirror over.

  “Don’t flatter yourself,” Hank said. “You bored me silly long ago. I’m trying to see the sketch on the back of that paper. Is that a drawing of a hitch?”

  “It’s something I made so I wouldn’t forget what the knot used in poor Charlie Howart’s suspension looked like,” I said. “It had to be untied to get him down.”

  “Why didn’t you just cut the rope?”

  “Because the knot would still be attached to the leg of the stove,” I said. “Why are you asking?”

  “It’s a common hitch, used to secure steamboats to docks,” he said.

  “Something nautical, then?”

  “Yes, a Lighterman’s hitch, or a variation.”

  I picked up the mirror and held it over the drawing.

  “You’re certain?”

  “Who’s the steamboater here?”

  “Would it be used on vessels other than steamboats?”

  “Certainly,” he said. “Mean something?” he asked.

  “Maybe,” I said.

  “Oh, there’s one other thing,” Hank said. “I was lying when I said you bored me. How about showing a little shoulder, seeing as how we’re all cozy in bed?”

  “You’re impossible,” I said. “Why don’t you just go away?”

  I turned the mirror facedown on the nightstand.

  The jolting of the train as it slows and then eases forward again brings me fully asleep. I sit up and look out the windows of the car, and see that we are pulling into a brightly lit station in the middle of a great city.

  The car is empty, except for the old man and me.

  “Where are we?” I ask.

  The old man beside me shakes his head.

  “You still don’t know anything.”

  “Why are you so rude?”

  “Because I’m forgotten,” he says.

  The train stops and I can see people standing patiently on the platform, men and women of all ages, and children, but they each stand apart from one another, so it does not seem that any of them constitute a family. They begin filing into the train.

  I go forward and find the conductor, who is taking tickets from the new passengers, punching them, and handing them back. The tickets are yellow and blue and green. They all say, “COFFIN TICKET—WATERLOO TO BROOKWOOD—LONDON NECROPOLIS RAILWAY,” and each ticket has a unique ten-digit number in small type.

  “It doesn’t matter where you sit,” the conductor keeps telling the new passengers. “There’s no class division here, you’ve left all that behind. Sit wherever you like.”

  “Where are we?” I ask, struggling against the flood of new arrivals.

  “Cemetery Station,” the conductor says. “London.”

  “How did we get to England?” I ask. “Trains can’t cross the ocean.”

  “You’ll have to take all matters of physics up with the superintendent.”

  “If I’m asleep, then how can I read what’s written on the tickets?” I ask. “I can only read numbers when I’m dreaming, not words.”

  “You’re not exactly asleep, are you?” he asks.

  “This is a part of Waterloo Station, then?” I ask. “A real place? Not a dream place, not something found in a storybook or told to children to make them behave?”

  “Cemetery Station is very real.”

  “And what is Brookwood?”

  “Brookwood is the final destination,” he says. “Brookwood Cemetery is a lovely, restful place, made just for the Necropolis Railway. It’s only a forty-five-minute ride away.”

  “What are you saying?”

  “The superintendent explained it to you already.”

  “That I can either go mad or choose to get off at the final destination?”

  “That would be your choice.”

  “To hell with this,” I say. “You go to the end of the line without me. I’m stepping off here.”

  I brush past the conductor and the line of newly dead, and reach the door of the car. I expect that I will somehow be prevented from reaching the platform—there will be an invisible force to throw me back, or I will find myself back in the car with the old man, or I will just go to wake—but nothing happens when I leave the car. I walk a few steps and turn around and look at the train, with its curious green engine and its squat cars, and the caskets being hauled into the coffin car by the scampering widdershins.

  I turn and walk away.

  I find a broad set of metal stairs leading down, away from the raised platforms of Cemetery Station. When I reach the base of the stairs, I find myself in the cavernous central part of the station, the largest building I have ever seen, all metal and stone and huge windows and skylights and bustling with life. There are living people waiting to board trains, and leaving trains, and buying newspapers and eating snacks, and rushing to do all of the things that living people are accustomed to do. And the sound—it is extraordinary, a symphony of chatter and footsteps and hissing, actual trains.

  Laughing with joy, I rush to a family who is about to ascend a platform for a departure.

  “Please, help me get back home,” I say. “If only you could lend me a little money, so that I could send a transatlantic wire asking for help, or if that’s too much to ask, if I could just get directions to the American embassy.”

  They don’t seem to hear me. Not the mother, father, or three children.

  “Listen to me,” I say. “I need your help.”

  There is no response.

  “How rude!” I bark.

  I rush to a man reading a newspaper while getting his shoes shined.

  “I urgently need a moment of your time,” I say. “You see, I’m from America—you could have guessed that from my accent—and through no fault of my own, I’ve become stranded here. Spirited away, as it were. I don’t even know what part of London the station is in, so if you could just give me some direction on how to find any other group of Americans, or even the London bureau of the Herald-Tribune, I would be ete
rnally grateful.”

  Neither the man nor the bootblack act as if they hear me.

  Infuriated, I reach out to snatch the newspaper that is hiding the man’s face, but watch in horror as my hand passes through the paper—and I feel nothing.

  I rush to a dozen more people, one at a time, shouting and waving my arms, even stamping my feet, but my antics have no effect.

  It isn’t just that I am invisible.

  I have become a ghost.

  My unfinished business is back up the metal stairway, at the Cemetery Station, and it is getting ready to pull away. I imagine spending an eternity in Waterloo Station, shouting and waving my arms at people who can neither see nor hear me.

  I run back to the stairs as fast as I can.

  27

  There was one thing that set The Great Divide apart from all other saloons in the Leadville district, and probably every saloon in the state of Colorado, Denver included: the twenty-foot-long diamond dust mirror behind the bar.

  The Divide was built hard against a slope at the end of California Gulch, and looked as if it were three or four buildings nailed together. There was the main room of the saloon itself, which was the oldest part of the building, but over the years additions had been tacked on: a second floor that had a balcony, a separate wing that housed a restaurant, even a cupola with a wrought-iron eagle clutching an iron ball at the top. And all of it was painted firehouse red.

  It was a saloon designed by a madman.

  I had come to The Divide early, not yet nine o’clock, hoping to catch some talkative old-timers before the place became packed with thirsty miners. The door to the saloon was open, and the mirror caught the morning sun and bathed the interior with warm light. Already there were a dozen men scattered about the place, drinking silently.

  The interior of the place was as weird as the exterior. The mirror was its most famous feature, but the walls had the wildest collection of objects I’d ever seen assembled in one place. It was a museum to eccentricity, including an entire menagerie of stuffed animals known to be lethal to humans, from a diamondback rattlesnake to a grizzly bear. There were dressmaker forms draped with unfinished calicos, a pair of rusting last stands from a long-closed cobbler’s shop, and a white porcelain head that had its bumps segregated by dotted lines into aspects of personality and character (religiosity, friendship, combativeness).

  But the thing that made me most uncomfortable was the collections of human teeth, in huge frames with inked descriptions (mandibular first molar) from defunct medical schools (Beitzinger College of Dentistry, Topeka).

  As I walked up to the bar, I tried to ignore Hank, who was floating in the mirror like a bather in a swimming pool.

  “How grand,” he exclaimed. “Finally, room to breathe!”

  I shook my head at him.

  “I’m here on business,” I said. “Can’t you be quiet for once?”

  Hank stuck his tongue out at me.

  “Beg your pardon, miss?” the bartender said.

  “Talking to myself,” I said. “Bad habit.”

  “What can I get you?”

  The bartender placed his palms on the bar and leaned forward, obviously relieving the stress on his back. He had blue eyes and a ruddy complexion and his accent was Irish Bronx.

  “Do you know,” I asked, “are any of the gentleman drinking in the back, would they be old-timers who were around fifteen or eighteen years ago?”

  “No,” the bartender said. “They’re recent, like most of us.”

  “Too bad,” I said.

  “What are you drinking?”

  “Something light.”

  “You mean like rum or gin?”

  “Lighter.”

  “Beer?”

  “Something without alcohol,” I said.

  He cocked his head.

  “Not much call for anything that don’t have a kick,” he said.

  I asked for water. He nodded, then went to the end of the bar and filled a glass from a pitcher. He came back and placed the glass in front of me with as much gravity as if it were a double whiskey.

  “Thanks,” I said. “Nice mirror.”

  “Diamond dust,” he said.

  “Must be worth a fortune.”

  “It cost a fortune to get here, but it’s not made of diamonds,” he said. “All mirrors are backed with silver, but diamond dust mirrors have quicksilver added to them so that it spreads over the glass evenly.”

  “Almost like a photographic plate.”

  “I suppose,” the bartender said. “If you look closely, there’s a fine grain to the backing, which resembles diamond dust.”

  “It is beautiful,” I said. “How did they ever get it up here?”

  “Andrew Jackson Miles paid for it, that’s how,” he said. “He built the place and he had this mirror shipped in special from St. Louis. Can you imagine it surviving the trip in a freight wagon all the way from the depot in Canon City?”

  “Can you imagine how much bad luck there would be if you broke that mirror?” I asked. “Instead of seven years, it might be seven hundred.”

  The bartender laughed.

  “Everybody is scared to go near it,” he said. “It gives me the fantods just to polish it. Can you imagine having to tell Mister Miles that you broke his mirror? No, thanks.”

  “Do you know Jackson Miles?”

  “Sure, I know Jacks,” he said. “He hired me.”

  “When was that?”

  “A year, maybe longer,” he said.

  “He built this place after he struck it rich?”

  “The first time,” he said. “Both Jacks and old man Tabor made plenty of money from California Gulch, but it was the silver that made them as rich as Solomon. The gold rush didn’t last but a couple of years. Sixty-two, I think, was the last year it came close to producing a million dollars. After that, the decline was pretty steady. The Tabors stayed, but Jacks lit out for Denver—but he kept control of his saloon and his claims here. They weren’t making much money, but he said he kept them for sentimental reasons.”

  “So when was the silver discovered?”

  “In 1876—same year Colorado became a state—somebody figured out the heavy black sand that had been clogging the gold sluices was really a mixture of lead and silver. They knew about the lead already, but the concentration of silver was a surprise—a hundred ounces per ton.”

  “They had been throwing away fortunes,” I said.

  “Exactly. And because silver was way up over one dollar per ounce, it didn’t take much ciphering to know that a person could get wealthy fast. The mining moved from the gulch north to Leadville, and Jacks was first to strike it rich, because he had the means necessary to get the silver out of the ground first. Tabor got richer, too, but Jacks was first.”

  “Sounds like his success is made of a little luck and a whole lot of ambition.”

  “That’s why he’ll be the next governor of the state,” the bartender said. “And that’s why I’ll tend bar for the rest of my life, and with this aching back of mine.”

  “What happened?”

  “Had a Burleigh fall from a column jack and pin me under it,” he said. “It didn’t break my back, but it cracked it. I was a damned good drill operator, at least until I got hurt. And when you get hurt, you’re on your own. Nobody wanted to hire a half-crippled Mick with a bad attitude.”

  All the while the poor bartender was talking about getting hurt by the drill, Hank was rolling his eyes. He had placed himself in such a way that it appeared, at least to my eyes, that he was sitting on the bar stool next to me.

  “That’s nothing,” Hank said. “He should be in a steamboat explosion and be mortally scalded by the steam. Now, that’s some pain.”

  “Tell me about the drilling,” I said, trying not to look in the mirror.

  The bartender gave me a brief history of the Burleigh compressed air automatic drill, and the heavier steam-powered drill that came before it, and how he had come from New York with
nothing but the clothes on his back and had learned mining from the ground up. In Nevada, he had started as a nipper—somebody who carries tools and replacement parts down to the drillers—then began as a driller’s helper, and finally came to Colorado as a fully fledged operator.

  “You were working for the Miles operation?”

  “Another consolidated, the Empire,” he said. “But Jacks heard about the accident and gave me a job here. He said my primary duty is to protect that mirror. So, if a drunk gets the least bit rowdy—he’s out of here. Not going to chance any poorly aimed bottles breaking it.”

  “Didn’t know Miles had a soft streak.”

  “He does,” the bartender said. “Take this place, for instance. We’re at one end of California Gulch, or what used to be the gulch before they blasted and washed it away. A normal person would have moved this place to Leadville, where the business is. But Jackson wanted to keep it here, because it was the site of one of his early gold claims.”

  “You mean, over the shaft?”

  “Well, it was more of a drift than a shaft.”

  “A drift?”

  “A horizontal tunnel into the rock. The building is built against a huge rock face with a quartz outcropping where a rich lode was found. Jacks sent a declined drift into it. It’s behind us, somewhere.”

  “Why didn’t he mine it for silver?”

  “No silver in quartz,” the bartender said, putting his hands on his hips and stretching backward for his back. “And I think Jacks just wanted to seal up the claim and keep it as it was, for sentimental reasons. He knew the silver rush would destroy everything that stood in its way.”

  “From what I’ve seen,” I said, “he may be right.”

  “Jacks is very fond of this place,” the bartender said. “He stops by, every other month or so, and when he does he brings some of the stuff you see on the walls. He’s got a sense of humor, he does.”

  “This place is a monument to fatal, failed, and unfinished business.”

  “I don’t see that,” the bartender said, shrugging.

  He put ajar of pickled eggs and a bowl of fruit on the bar.

  “No sandwiches yet,” he said. “Not until lunchtime.”