by Paul Boor
“Yes, Francis, you’ve a fine whiskey here.”
Van Horne studied the screened cages of insects, puzzled by how the delicate structures were arranged into two groups, one marked by stripes of red paint. “Tell me about your mosquitoes, will you?” he asked.
“The particle of yellow fever resides in their salivary glands, you see. Here—the red cages are the ones that have it. Renée was able to pass the particle into our colony of guinea pigs. If she can grow it in the cells of this young boy you’ve brought her, we hope to eventually inject it into horses.”
Seeing the puzzled look on Nicolas’s face, Keiller struggled out of his chair and said, “Come—I’ll explain better in the laboratory.” He limped off, waving for Nicolas to follow.
The hour was late, the research laboratory empty. A single electric light burnt over the nearest lab bench, where the draped body of the small boy, the “fresh one,” lay on a gurney, abandoned by the experimenters. Nicolas felt a strange thumping in his chest at the sight of the draped body. Keiller raced to the far wall and began fussing over a complicated apparatus; Nicolas followed. The professor turned a valve on his apparatus and struck a flint; an intense flame burst forth, scorching a stick of a chalky substance until it glowed white-hot.
“Calcium carbonate,” Keiller explained. “It’s limelight.” He aimed the brilliant light at a mirror mounted under a microscope on the lab bench, then slowly passed a glass slide over the microscope’s stage. When he appeared satisfied with what he saw under the lens, he motioned for Nicolas to look. “You’ll be seeing at a power that few men have experienced,” he said. “Only Wetzlar grinds optics to such incredible tolerances.”
“What am I looking for?”
“The orange dots,” Keiller said. “I’ve focused on the mosquito’s salivary gland, stained with the acridine dyes I employ. That’s the particles of yellow fever you’re seeing, or the infernal Yellow Jack, as we call him.”
“I see it, Francis. Yes, I do.”
“Ah, Nicolas, so much has happened in the world of science since Jenner gave us an anti-toxoid for cowpox. So much has been learned.”
Keiller displaced Nicolas at his scope. While peering into it, he began to lecture again, his hands sporadically shooting into the air. “Just as our greatest genius, Pasteur, has shown us the particle of rabies and given us a vaccine for anthrax . . . though Jean Toussaint still claims the credit, the silly old fool . . .”
Van Horne stepped to the open window. The rain had stopped. He took a breath of the storm’s cool aftermath and shook his head clear of the sulfurous atmosphere. While Keiller lectured, Nicolas stared at the dull lights of the hospital across the street and thought how ghastly the place must be when the fever struck and filled its beds with dying men, women, and children.
“Ha!” Keiller chuckled behind him. “Wouldn’t Toussaint like to know what we’re up to with yellow fever, eh? The scoundrel’s stolen Pasteur’s ideas at every turn—he’d be quick to steal ours. Little does he know we’re growing the particle on this very island.”
While Keiller ran on, Nicolas walked to the other end of the lab bench, where the dead boy on the gurney was now brightly lit by the limelight. Nicolas lifted the shroud and stood back—it was his first thorough look at the body so hastily loaded in Buffalo. The marbled, bluish color of decomposition was just beginning on the boy’s upper torso. A long incision ran the length of his chest and abdomen, where the experimenters no doubt took their samples. The incision had been neatly shut, baseball-stitched with coarse black suture. The body, washed clean, was still wet and shiny.
The dead boy appeared to be an ill-bred youth, and one who’d been poorly fed. His shaggy hair was in disarray, the jut of his jaw cantankerous and defiant even in death. With his head turned slightly away, his upper torso seemed strangely misshapen and mottled. His neck, desiccated to a brownish crust, appeared furrowed. On closer exam, was the windpipe severed?
As Keiller’s science lesson droned on in the background, Nicolas bent over the corpse and stared close, wide-eyed. On the boy’s right shoulder was a darkly pigmented scar about half the size of a silver dollar, a crisscross of thin black lines that resembled an X.
Ж
“It’s that horrid thing . . . I recognize it from my dreams,” Nicolas muttered as he flipped the shroud back over the body. “On the boys. The mark.”
8
Morphine Dreams
A brisk north wind pushed Nicolas’s carriage toward the beach at an easy trot. The rain had flushed the stench of horse droppings out of the street. Houses sparkled in the moonlight. This unusual freshness reinvigorated Nicolas, the tired traveler, but the sight of that boy on the gurney had his mind on a knife edge. Sleep would not come easily.
It was hours past midnight. The lobby of the Majestic Beach Hotel was deserted. Nicolas climbed the grand stairway to his room, turned the key in the lock, entered, and threw the windows open.
He tried to remind himself that, overall, it was a successful day. The delivery ended strangely, and there was the unsettling issue of the boy’s corpse and its puzzling mark, but Nicolas had witnessed the inner workings of a medical college and met an excellent gentleman and scientist with some good whiskey. But, now, in his elegant hotel room, he had to force himself to forget the day’s trials, and the nightmares. He needed to relax. Not any common means of relaxation would do, though. Nicolas aimed for a most modern, special form of relaxation he’d only recently learned to partake of.
From his steamer trunk he retrieved his “mix”—a small vial concocted for him by Forestport’s apothecary, Mr. Boatmann, according to the specifications of the undertaker Thomas Chubb. Thomas’s favored mix consisted of six parts morphine, one part cocaine hydrochloride, and a touch of chloral hydrate to prevent the morphine from “rattling one’s nerves,” as Boatmann had put it.
Nicolas took up the well-worn metal syringe Thomas Chubb had presented as a gift before Nicolas departed the North Country. He drew a single milliliter of Mr. Boatmann’s handiwork into its cylinder—a dose he’d found reasonably relaxing. He slipped the coarse steel needle just beneath the skin of his forearm, the “subcutaneous method” Thomas had demonstrated for him.
A bright red weal rose up. Nothing more than a mild sting, really.
Yes, it had been a profitable day—now perfectly punctuated by something quite new, this warm chemical tingle. Joy crept through his body; his tired legs seemed to glide like a ghost’s across the Oriental carpet. The bright light of Keiller’s dissecting room, corpses swinging on hooks, and the unsettling puzzle of two unidentified boys melted into a pleasant dreamlike state.
Ah, sweet morphia—a white cloud suffusing the room, cool air at the window, and the mesmerizing unrest of a vast, undulating expanse of salt water. He would undress in the pale light of the moon, and the last sound in his ears before his well-earned sleep would be the tranquil lull of the surf.
9
Uneasy Respite
On awakening, Nicolas discovered that he’d slept in his clothes. He hadn’t done that in weeks, not since he’d first experimented with Chubb’s steel needle.
Still in his damp shirt and pants, he stretched the stiffness out of his arms by the window and shook his head free of the cobwebs. Last evening’s storm and strong north wind had been replaced by a mild sea breeze, warm by a Northerner’s standards. The gulf was cobalt blue, the sky bright. In the hallway, Nicolas called out to a porter for a pitcher of hot water, then he undressed and piled his dirty clothing on the floor by the bed.
He checked his watch. Nearly midday, and he already felt exhausted. By now Adam would’ve made quick work of the remaining ice. That bottom layer, a mere three feet deep, would be packed in Bonferri’s icehouse by Adam’s trusty longshoremen. The hold would be cleaned, everything shipshape. As early as tomorrow they might board the train for home.
He was down to his last clean shirt and collar. He tied on a fresh cravat, knotting it roguishly long, and descende
d the grand hotel staircase to meander through the crowded lobby, his nerves rattling from the evening’s morphine.
He sank deep into the plush purple of a lobby sofa and admired the high-vaulted ceiling and dark-stained woods of the bar, where a few diehards were downing their morning eye-openers. Porters and visiting businessmen passed by. He considered a visit to the hotel’s barber for that shave and mustache trim, but the nerves, the jitters, lingered. The shave could wait.
On the Majestic’s airy veranda he settled on a wicker chaise longue near the rail. The fine, grey sand of Galveston lay a few feet away, and the surf pounded a few yards further. A passing porter tossed a blanket over him to shield him from the drifting sand. He stretched his legs, pulled the thin cotton blanket tight about his neck, and watched with amusement as tiny yellow-and-blue-striped land crabs scuttled to and fro, then dove into holes in the sand no larger than a dime. Overhead, squadrons of raucous gulls hovered and swooped. The sea breeze whipped the blanket’s edges about his middle and Nicolas sensed an undeniable energy there, a dark motive building in his groin. He hadn’t paid heed to these urges for months, this stirring of his manhood, this carnal longing. Perhaps it had been all of a year.
Nicolas turned his mind to the possibilities the evening might offer. There’d be drinking and carousing in the bars along the wharf, though it would probably be wise to steer clear of that. He’d seen other, more elegant establishments where men of commerce like himself might imbibe and wait for the evening to unfold. A city this size surely had its share of distractions . . . brothels . . . slinky femmes de pavé, or “streetwalkers,” as Adam had called them in New Orleans. Women of the night. Whores.
The roll of the surf and the laugh of the gulls soon lulled Nicolas from his lubricious reverie. His eyes grew heavy. He dozed.
He had the recurring dream about his son—the nightmare he’d had a thousand times. In it, he knew he was dreaming but was frozen in place, packed in cotton, unable to move. His son Ethan, his firstborn, the sickly fellow lost as a child, came toward him, staggering out of the pines after so many years, ragged, ghostly pale, forlorn, cloaked in white. Ethan called to him in a high-pitched child’s voice, and he, his father, could do nothing.
But the past few days, ever since Buffalo, there was a nightmare within the nightmare. Other boys marched out of the woods behind his son, first two, then dozens, beckoning, silently mouthing, “Help us! Help us!” These new boys were covered with spiders, crawling from their mouths and staining their skin with strange black marks—symbols, or pictographs. The spiders went for Ethan, trying to mark him with the stain. Nicolas reached for his son; he pawed at the air, then watched the gossamer figures recede into the white and disappear, as if lost in a blizzard.
Nicolas found himself tossing and fighting with his blanket, wide awake and coated in sweat. His arms and legs were made of lead. He shook his head free of the nightmare and slowly rubbed warmth back into his tingling limbs. It was midafternoon.
Perhaps his nerves were jangled more than he’d thought.
10
An Unpleasant Business
Nicolas was enquiring in the hotel lobby about the location of the city’s telegraph office when he again heard a lone boy’s voice calling to him. This was no nightmare fellow who approached, but a gangly, smiling Oriental chap who appeared about fifteen years of age.
“Laundy, sir? Good sir have laundy for me?”
The boy was looking for work. Nicolas had the enterprising youth follow him to his room, where the nasty pile of last night’s clothes and a bagful of soiled pants, shirts, and collars were whisked away, with a few extra coins promised for delivery that evening.
At the hotel entrance, Nicolas hailed a hackney coach to carry him to the wharves. As the coach approached Pier 22, however, he was shocked to see that his blocks of ice were only now being stacked into place at Pierre Bonferri’s icehouse. This was work Nicolas thought completed hours ago. He shouted to stop the carriage, tossed a coin to the driver, and rushed to find Adam, who was on the ship, cursing and kicking at the deck.
“Damned longshoremen never showed up!” Adam said. “Neither of ’em. I found these other two, and even they were unwillin’ till I upped the price. Ridiculous, for a measly two hours of work unloading that last layer.”
“What’s the problem?”
“From the looks these fellas gave me, boss, I’m afraid there’s rumors about us. I heard ’em wondering out loud why we took our ship last night to the medical dock. You see, boss, it’s nothing but cotton in this port, and the longshoremen are a superstitious lot. They’re called cotton jammers ’cause of the way they jam a ship with cotton. They’re the best in the world. Draw good pay for it, too. These cotton jammers are colored fellas, and they’re all about voodoo, spells, and black magic. They even talk their own language, callin’ it ‘gumbo,’ part Africa, part French.”
“Let’s hope these cotton jammers don’t ruin this port for us. It looks like a good market for ice. Did you pick a block for the downtown exhibit, Adam?”
“Yep. Found a beauty. Wait’ll you see.”
Adam led the way to a corner of Bonferri’s icehouse, where he pointed to a single three-foot square block covered with canvas and sawdust. His eyes gleamed as he pulled back the canvas and slid the nearby icehouse door along its rails for light. “Helluva hunk of ice, eh, boss? She’ll last. And looky here,” he said, pointing to the glassy blue surface where a plump fish the length of a man’s arm shone through.
“Perfect,” Van Horne said, nodding.
“A walleye. Good-sized one, ain’t it? Foolish fish froze right there where it swam. That should keep ’em talking about our ice.”
“Let’s go to Slade’s Emporium and speak with Mr. Slade personally. Once Bonferri’s payment is ready, we’ll be on our way. If railway passage is available, we may get off this island tomorrow.”
“But for tonight, boss, I believe I’ll find me a game of poque,” the sturdy foreman said with a wry grin. “I done pretty good on the trip down, eh?”
Van Horne had seen firsthand Adam Klock’s success at the New Orleans card game of poque, a Mississippi riverboat favorite. Adam, a shrewd North Country pitch player, had used the game to separate a fair number of boatmen from their hard-earned wages.
“Perhaps I’ll find me a whorehouse, too,” Adam added.
The two Northerners ambled elbow-to-elbow along the oily brick of the harborside, in the midst of all things nautical and the throbbing midday commerce of a busy port. They were about to cross into Sailortown when shouting erupted behind them and, turning back, they were met with a most bizarre sight.
Some distance down the thoroughfare, a buckboard rumbled toward them, pulled by two big-boned, well-lathered roan horses. The wagon was the same type as those crisscrossing the harborside stacked with bales of cotton, but its only load was four colored men seated in its bed. The men had burlap wrapped about their faces like hoods, with crudely cut eyeholes. The man on the driver’s plank, also a colored fellow, was hoodless.
“Merciful Lord,” Adam muttered. “Look at that.”
The hooded men held heavy ship’s ropes that led to two prisoners, their hands bound behind their backs with twine, pulled several yards behind the wagon. One captive shuffled along, his head downcast like a domestic beast’s. As the wagon drew near, the second man stumbled, fell, and was dragged on the brick like a sailor keelhauled behind his ship for a crime committed on the high seas.
Wagons on the street halted. Cotton jammers and other laborers on the piers gawked. As the grim procession neared Adam, the fallen man twisted on the roadway, skidding along to shouts of “Faster!” and “Drag ’em!” as if the spectacle were the finest of sport.
“Poor devil,” Adam whispered.
“No man deserves this,” Nicolas said.
The man who was down regained his feet and staggered alongside his fellow prisoner—a light-skinned, freckled fellow with hair the reddish brown color Nicolas kne
w as “ginger,” though now the man’s shaggy mane was matted and soiled with road dirt and sand.
The taunts of the scruffy types on the wharf grew louder. The driver, whose face was a lighter brown, like coffee whitened with cream, gave his team a switch; the wagon jerked forward and the prisoner again stumbled and pitched forward onto the brick.
“Mercy!” Adam cried.
The miserable soul was dragged behind the buckboard like a sack of potatoes. His back and shoulders were scraped red and raw. The brick was bloodied. As he tumbled closer, the rope entangled his neck.
“Stop this! Stop it now!” Nicolas shouted at the driver. He stepped into the path of the approaching wagon and raised an arm. “What crime have these men committed, may I ask?”
The driver hauled up on the reins and scowled. He was a short, stout youth, with the blunted features of a colored man, but lighter skin. At close range, that coffee-colored skin gave off the distinctive yellowish sheen of a mixed breed, a mulatto.
“It’s none of your business,” the man shot back. His flinty eyes glistened. “Stand back, or y’all be next!”
The buckboard lurched, aiming dead at Nicolas. Jumping back, Nicolas saw this mulatto fellow close-up. He was clean shaven, no more than twenty years of age, and had the most unusual head of hair—jet-black, two feet long and straight, and tied in wild clumps into which were woven small bones like those of a chicken or the vertebrae of a small reptile . . . a snake or turtle. A necklace of similar making swung from his neck. This elaborate getup gave him the aura of an African chieftain.
“Let’s git it done,” he yelled to his men, and with another slap of the reins the wagon rushed down the street, its steel-rimmed wheels grinding loudly on the oily brick.
