Way Out West (The Markhat Files Book 10)

by Frank Tuttle

  “The Coffin Early,” I said. “Mama, the C&E has lost entire trains out West. Vanished without a trace.”

  “Now that’s just foolish talk,” Mama opined. “Will ye have another slice of ham, Walking Stone?”

  Slim nodded, his toothy mouth split in poorly-concealed amusement.

  “If it’s just foolish talk, Mama, why aren’t you going?”

  Mama puffed up. “Because I’m a woman of means and I prefers to send my employees,” she said. “Employees that I pays generously, for all their smart-mouthed back-talk.”

  I took a long draught of bitter strong coffee.

  Buttercup the banshee stepped out of the wall that stood between Mama’s sitting room and Buttercup’s closet of a bedroom. She skipped to the table, leapt across Slim’s hairy lap, and gave me a fierce hug.

  “You’re no more leaving Rannit than I am,” I said to Mama. I tousled Buttercup’s hair. She giggled and skipped out of the room, passing through Mama’s door without the bother and fuss of opening it first. “But fine,” I added. “I’ll play along. Three thousand miles by rail. That’s ten days of riding, if I’m lucky, which I won’t be. Say twelve days, each way. With a week in Hogville—”

  “Hogstown,” Mama barked. “They calls it Railsend now. First thing you’re to do is change the name to Hogstown.”

  “Fine. Hogstown Add a week to take care of business. That’s thirty-four days, Mama. No way am I just vanishing without telling Darla where I am and why.”

  Mama shrugged and nodded. “Figured as much. Take her with you. You’re both so keen on travelin’, these days.”

  “Then I guess we’ve got a deal. If for no other reason than to see what you’re up to.”

  “I told you all I got to tell,” Mama said.

  I finished my coffee and stood. “Save us both a lot of grief if you’d have told the truth instead,” I said. “But you’re the lady with the sack of gold.”

  “I’m the boss, is what I am,” Mama said. “Now get to making plans. I don’t hold with my employees loitering about on my coin.”

  I tossed the sack of gold to Slim and executed a snappy Army salute. “Yes, Ma’am, Sir.”

  She chased us out with a broom, but I noticed not a single blow landed on Slim’s furry shanks.

  Chapter Three

  My office is next door to Mama’s place. I hoped to catch Gertriss in, didn’t, but did sort through some mail and scratch Three-leg Cat behind his ears.

  Slim curled up in a ball in a corner and napped. Troll snoring is second only to thunder in volume, particularly in a small space. When Three-leg tired of my attention, I exercised my right as proprietor of the firm to rummage through the contents of the office waste-baskets.

  At the bottom of Gertriss’s bin lay three letters addressed to her in a familiar hand. None had been opened. I left them where they lay.

  “Evis,” I muttered. “I think you might be wasting your time.”

  Evis Prestley, former beau of Gertriss, is a man of many fine talents, even if he is a bit dead. He’d undergone a risky medical procedure a few months back—a procedure intended to treat his vampirism and return him to a semblance of normality. He’d gotten lucky, and the treatment had worked. Then his luck had run out. He’d somehow estranged his ladylove Gertriss in the process of turning more human, although I never got the full story on just what transpired to end their romance.

  I must have missed the first few knocks at my door due to Slim’s thunderstorm snoring. But I took note when my caller began to bang on the door with both fists.

  I roused Slim with a cautious toe to his calf. “Wake up, sunshine,” I said. “We’ve got company.”

  Slim unfolded, rising to a stoop in a single fluid motion. Runt he might be, but a Troll is a Troll, and I was glad those knobby Troll fists weren’t clenched in anticipation of pummeling me.

  Fearless fellow that I am, I flung open the door, greeting the slight stranger on my stoop with a wide and winning smile.

  “Good morning,” I said. My caller was well-dressed and wearing the newfangled sun glasses that were all the rage these days. “What can I find for you today?”

  “A chair and a beer,” said Evis. I didn’t recognize him until I heard his voice. He knew it, and grinned, and stepped quickly inside out of the sun. “Were you gone so long you’ve forgotten your friends from the old days?”

  I gawked. Slim shut the door.

  “You look—” I began.

  Evis grinned and pulled off his topcoat. The sharp tips of his canines shone wet and white against his lips, but just for a moment.

  Gone was the mouthful of needles he’d worn as a halfdead. Gone was the tight-stretched gray skin, the eyes like dirty marbles, the fingers crooked into black-taloned claws.

  Evis had hair, short and straight and brown. Receding a bit, but quite human. He was pale, but no more so than any downtown banker. His eyes were brown and the whites were the right size and damned if he wasn’t better looking than me after all.

  “Normal?” he said, finishing my sentence. “Human? Not at all like a bloodthirsty monster?”

  “I was going to say ‘like an accountant,’” I replied. I opened the door to the back room, found the tiny icebox, fished out three sawdust-covered beers. “Damn. You look good,” I added.

  Evis smiled. He still kept his lips closed, out of habit, I suppose, but his smile was quick and easy.

  “The treatments are working,” he said.

  He launched into a technical description of the process, which I couldn’t follow. But I could drink beer with the best of them, as could Slim, so we sat there and nodded and feigned looking knowledgeable while Evis rattled on.

  We ran out of small talk and beer. I knew damned well Evis was stalling, hoping Gertriss would show, but she didn’t, and he slumped over in his chair and let his forced smile drop.

  “Dammit all anyway,” he said.

  “She’s a Hog,” I noted. “You might have noticed a stubborn streak.”

  He shrugged. I fetched the last of the beers. “So how’d you know we were back?” I asked.

  “Had a kid watching the slip,” he said. I remembered the empty chair on the wharf. “Was wondering if you two were coming back at all. How’d you like Bel Loit? Housing prices outrageous?”

  I raised an eyebrow. “Liked it just fine. Wouldn’t know about the real estate. Why do you ask?”

  Evis shrugged. “Word’s come up from below,” he said in a near whisper. “We’re all to start looking for second homes. Quietly. Discretely. Bel Loit was mentioned as the best place to start.”

  Even Slim’s fanlike ears pricked up.

  “Word from below?” I asked. “You mean Avalante is picking up stakes?”

  Evis made frantic shushing noises. “No. We’re just all to make arrangements in the event Rannit should, and I quote, ‘become less than hospitable.’ That’s all. There wasn’t any urgency attached to the request. But it’s troubling, nonetheless. Thought I’d mention it to you, too.”

  Sorcery ran tiptoe up and down my spine. I was suddenly sure Darla had in fact bought that tiny old house on Whiskey Lane.

  Darla buying houses. Mama buying towns. Evis looking to do the same.

  “What the hell?” I muttered.

  “Beats me,” Evis answered, draining his beer. “Was hoping you might have some insight into things.”

  “Me? No. You might ask Stitches.”

  “I might,” said Evis. “But she’s still on the Moon.” He rose and fixed his dark spectacles over his perfectly human eyes. “Well, be seeing you. Tell Mama I send my regards.” He bit back anything else he wanted to say.

  “I’ll see if I can get Darla to talk to Gertriss,” I said.

  “Thanks,” said Evis, and for an instant he looked far more glum and downtrodden as a restored human than he ever had as a gray-faced, fanged halfdead.

  Slim shut the door behind him, and growled out some long Troll phrase.

  “Which means?”
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br />   Slim guffawed. “Love plays even monsters for fools,” he said in Kingdom.

  I finished my beer and pondered that, but couldn’t find a rebuttal.

  “I’m going, too,” said Darla when I told her about heading West with Mama’s money.

  “Going to be a long trip,” I said. We were sitting in the swing I’d just installed on Dasher’s deck, taking advantage of the evening breeze and ignoring the stink from the crematoriums that rode on the air. “Trains aren’t fancy. You’ll have no room at all for your ballroom dancing.”

  She stuck out her tongue. I’d bought two tickets anyway. You don’t need to be a witch or a wild-haired soothsayer to see some aspects of my future.

  “Cornbread will have to stay here,” I added, sensing her next questions. “Slim, too. But they’ll have a time. Slim loves the shaggy mutt.”

  Darla kicked up her feet, revealing a fetching glimpse of ankle. “They say the new trains are very comfortable, husband.” She grinned. “Feather beds, long monotonous nights with absolutely nothing else to do…”

  “Neighbors stacked alongside us, paper-thin cabin walls, nosey porters…”

  She whispered something. My ears had hardly begun to flush red when the screaming began.

  Slim stormed aboard, a boat-hook in one paw and a sword in the other. Cornbread danced between his feet, barking and growling, his doggy eyes mad with a primal mix of rage and terror.

  That wasn’t what scared me, though.

  What scared me was the sight of every crow and every sparrow and every soot-stained gutter eagle taking flight at once and driving north as fast as their eager wings could bear them.

  “What the hell?”

  I saw it then.

  It swam up the Brown, monster head held high. Behind the head came coil after coil of thick black body, the coils looping up and out of the water in massive undulating arcs.

  The head was a good forty feet from horned crown to tip of narrow jaw. Two hundred feet of body was showing, cutting a wake through the sluggish Brown as it swam below the Brown River Bridge.

  Boats turned or collided or made for shore. Whistles blew. Traffic on the Bridge, high above the water, came to a standstill as heads by the hundreds popped over the rail.

  The monster reared back, rose out of the water, and let loose a roar they claim was heard echoing through the canyons of downtown itself.

  Then the monster sank with a massive whoosh of spray and began circling, its slitted red eyes turning quickly to and fro.

  Darla put her revolver away. “We’ll need a rotary gun,” she said, as though remarking that beans would be a welcome addition to our supper. “With incendiary rounds.”

  “If that thing comes this way, we’ll just buy a nice solid bunker twenty stories down at Avalante,” I said. “What’s a sea monster doing in our river?”

  The sea monster turned its back, throwing four hoops out of the water. It made quickly for the bridge, where it circled the massive stone pilings, sniffed at one in the middle, and began coiling around it.

  The crowd at the bridge railings dispersed. The serpent wrapped itself around the piling, rising out of the water until it embraced an iron support halfway up the bridge. Then it ran out of body, squirmed as if settling in for a long nap, and closed its glaring eyes.

  It hissed. The sound was loud and piercing, akin to a freshly wounded steam engine. The sound carried across the Brown and right down the nape of my neck. The serpent hissed again and blew spray, but then it went still.

  Water fell in gouts from the mane of spiky fur that decorated its neck. A barge struck a piling next to the beast, and another barge collided with the first, and some idiot on the bridge fired four rounds from a handgun at the beast, which didn’t so much as twitch.

  Cornbread’s barking ceased. He let the monster know who was boss with a final low growl, then came to sit panting at Darla’s feet.

  “The price of catfish just doubled,” I said.

  Darla’s dark eyes moved across Dasher’s deck. “We’ll need rotary guns fore and aft,” she said. “Slim, can you build us a pair of concealed mounts? Something that unfolds quickly, with sockets for the legs of the gun’s tripod?”

  Slim cocked his head before nodding an affirmative. Darla got up and started pacing, dictating refinements of the gun emplacements to Slim, while I watched the beast for signs of movement.

  What was it Mama had said? Evil swimming up, evil floating down.

  Our neighbors spilled onto their decks, mouths agape. The opera singers quickly settled down to sketch the beast before the sun set, and the ladies of leisure commenced a hilarious but thoroughly obscene series of conjectures concerning the beast’s mating habits.

  I sat in my chair and drank beer, and decided that maybe, just maybe, Mama’s faded pasteboard cards were right on the money this time.

  Chapter Four

  The river monster slept so hard it turned to stone.

  Stone, or something so dense and hard and unyielding it was indistinguishable from rock. The transformation took a mere two weeks, but by the end of them, the stone serpent was old news.

  The papers dubbed it the ‘summer of monsters.’ The serpent, it turned out, was merely a portent of things to come.

  Wolves the size of dray horses were seen nightly, stalking the unwary just outside the old siege walls. Great fleets of vultures took up a vigil in the sky above Rannit, circling by day, perching on the rooftops by night. More joined the widening gyre by the hour, until the shade of their patient wings covered the whole of downtown in a wheeling, dizzying shadow that grew darker and wider with every passing day.

  A giant’s fleshless bones climbed the High House, perching atop the Twisted Spire with one skeletal hand upraised, middle finger extended toward the heavens in a gesture as old as the Kingdom itself. The Regent had the Corps knock the old bones down, but the giant’s bones came back, night after night, thirteen times.

  The giant climbed. The Corps sent sorcerers. In a rare display of restraint, the wand-wavers refrained from blasting the entire neighborhood. Rumor had it they were charged with removing the threat without damaging so much as a single slate roof-tile.

  Even hampered, the Corps prevailed, sending the bones falling down night after night—only to have them reappear as soon as darkness fell.

  On its final ascent, the Corps unleashed something so potent the High House’s iron spire melted, puddling in the streets, and the giant’s burned bones fell like ashen snow. It walked no more, after that.

  The day after the giant’s final fall, a fog rose up over the Brown. Fishermen began telling tales of drowned bodies walking on the water, stalking their boats, snatching away crewmen who had neglected their prayers. The fog engulfed the Brown River Bridge and a dozen bridge clowns vanished in a single night. The Army posted guards along its length, and by sunrise, the soldiers had beaten twenty waterlogged corpses into twenty piles of pulp.

  Soldiers talked.

  Rannit’s five churches wasted no time in declaring the events on the River a fulfillment of one of their mutually exclusive pet prophecies. The faithful took to the streets, and ran headlong into the grim apparition the papers dubbed the dullahan.

  Headless, clad in black, riding a spectral black horse and lashing out at one and all with a whip formed from human spines, this grim phantom’s rampage terrorized poor and rich alike. The Watch made numerous attempts to stop and subdue the thing, only to be bowled aside like so many toy soldiers. Again, the Corps was summoned, and Evis himself witnessed the dullahan whip a minor sorcerer who called herself Midnight to death while he parted her magics like cobwebs.

  Minor sorcerer or not, Midnight was Corps. Two nights later, an entire neighborhood near the old south gate went up in a single massive ball of fire, and the dullahan was seen no more.

  It didn’t end there, though. Rumors swept through Rannit, quick as crows and eager as mice. The dead rose from the Chalk, they whispered, and the City Crier ran drawings of graves
blown open, as though erupting from within.

  The next day’s papers brought tales of old-time witches pecking on windows and cackling at children up and down Wellworth Street. After that, black dogs began stalking the finer homes on the Hill, cornering lone curfew-breakers and speaking aloud a litany of their sins before mauling them on their own doorsteps.

  Murders of crows took to attacking priests as soon as the sun set. Again, the churches declared the End of Days, each church mainhold blaming the others for bringing down heavenly judgment. This time, the quarreling faithful exploded, seemingly determined to bring about the end with furious mobs if the storied Angels of Vengeance were too busy to do it themselves.

  The circling vultures ate their fill. Still, they remained, their numbers growing, as if anticipating violence on a scale not seen since the War.

  Riots broke out not far from the docks. The fighting raged so close we boat folk took to the Brown. Darla and I put Dasher between the wharfs and the boats of our neighbors. Slim fired the new rotary guns just once, when a band of looters surged out onto the slips. They scattered when the glowing tracers arced low over their heads, and we saw no trouble after that.

  RANNIT GONE MAD claimed the Crier the next morning. I couldn’t disagree.

  Through it all, I trudged through the troubled streets, getting writs of this and deeds of that signed, notarized, copied, served, and packed carefully away. When Mama’s signature was required, I sought her out, but she seemed no more disturbed by the plague of supernatural nasties than she had by the heat.

  When pressed, though, she shut up, and shut up hard. That troubled me more than the night the comet first appeared, or when the blasts of trumpets, Angel-loud and sourceless, sounded from the skies from midnight till dawn.

  The appearance of the comet did what the Army and the Watch and the Regent himself failed to do. It cleared the streets. Windows went shuttered. Doors stayed locked. The people who did dare the outdoors did so in a hurry, with scarves around their mouths and noses or dead masks on their faces.