Scryer's Gulch

by MeiLin Miranda

  She returned to her rooms, excited to tell Misi about her discovery, but the black cat was nowhere to be found. No time to waste calling him. She pulled her code book out of the bottom of her carpet bag, and set to work on an ethergraph to Chief Howman. As she wrote out the unencoded version of the letter, she cast back her thoughts to Daniel, her tall, angelically blond boss. She wondered if he knew how she felt about him; she had intimations of his high regard for her, but he was quite married. His mousy little wife didn’t deserve such a heroic, brave, handsome, intelligent man, but even so, Annabelle knew to be almost in love with him was wrong. She yawned. Why was she so sleepy? She rested her head on her hands, elbows on the desk, and closed her eyes.

  Annabelle opened them to a scratching at the bedroom window. How had she ended up sitting on the bed? She held the codebook in one hand, and a letter in the other. Someone had lit the lanterns against the night, and the coal fire burned in the little sitting room stove. She must have fallen asleep, but apart from where she sat, the bed was undisturbed. A chill struck her.

  The scratching became more insistent. Annabelle opened the window and Misi came bounding in. “For crying out loud, Annie, I’ve been out there for nearly an hour!” complained the cat. “I almost wore grooves in the glass! What’s the matter with you? You just sat there staring at whatever-it-is in your hand with your back to me! What’d I do now?” Annabelle said nothing, but crossed to the sitting room with the codebook and the letter. “Annie? What is it?” said Misi, trailing behind.

  “I don’t know, kitty,” she answered in a low, distracted voice. “Something’s wrong.” She sat down again at the desk with the codebook, translating the mundane message in her hand.

  “You wrote a letter?” said Misi.

  “To Daniel Howman,” she muttered, flipping pages.

  “Why not send an ethergram?”

  “Too much to say.”

  Annabelle didn’t remember writing the letter, its inanities and inquiries after non-existent relatives making up a cipher she couldn’t read without the corresponding book. She finished decoding the first few paragraphs, and gasped, her face the color of the paper. She stood up, knocking the chair over. Misi jumped onto the desk in alarm. “Are you all right? What is it?” he cried.

  “It’s...a love letter,” she said, tears slipping down her face. “Agitation of the Lady, it’s a love letter to Daniel Howman!”

  “Daniel Howman?” blinked Misi. “Your boss? You’re in love with your boss?”

  “No! ...maybe,” she amended, wiping her eyes. “Misi, he’s married. There’s nothing between us. Except...”

  “Except there’s something between you. Demons have eyes, y’know.”

  “Oh, kitty!” she sobbed.

  Misi tried to comfort her with an ineffective paw. “Annie, please let me change, please?” She nodded; he jumped from the desk, landing in his more human form, and gathered her into his still-furry arms. “Oh, sweetie, there now, there now! It’s all right, it didn’t get sent.” He shushed and crooned and rocked her in his arms, until she quieted, exhausted.

  “I don’t understand what happened, kitty,” she sighed, cuddled next to him on the hearth rug. “One moment, I was writing out my report on Jamie Runnels, and the next, I was sitting on the bed--”

  “What about Jamie?”

  “I found this on him,” she said, digging into her pocket. She pulled out the nugget of hermetauxite, and handed it to him.

  “Augh! Pollution!” He let it drop to the floor, shaking his hand as if burnt; the nugget rolled to a stop before the fire, malevolent and shiny. “So--it’s the Runnelses, then,” he said, wiping his hand on his fur.

  “I don’t know about that, but it’s our first solid clue.”

  “Annie,” the demon murmured, “did you have that thing in your pocket when you blacked out?”

  Annabelle raised her head from his shoulder. “It was in my pocket when I left the schoolhouse. I didn’t take it out until...until just now.” They watched the fire flicker over the nugget’s uneven surface. “By the Quiet, Misi! Do you suppose that thing made me...?” She frowned. “I was thinking about Daniel. I don’t know that I love him, Misi, but there’s something there and I just thought how much I wished I could tell him, how much I wished I knew how he felt about me, and then I woke up with this.” She waved the paper. “That nugget’s been in Jamie’s pocket this whole time. He didn’t want to go to school.”

  “That’d explain the schoolhouse vandalism, wouldn’t it?”

  “It surely would.” She patted her eyes dry. “That nugget isn’t refined. Imagine what it could do in the hands of a first-rate spellcaster--he could make anyone do anything he wanted. We have to stop whoever’s doing this. But first, let’s burn these papers.” She gathered up the cipher and its translation and stuffed them into the little stove, then put her head back on Misi’s shoulder and watched the papers turn into cinders.

  Had she seen the original letter wadded beneath the bed, she would have burned that, too.

  Episode 16: Culling the Herd

  The full moon crept over the town, slipping silver through the bars of the jail where John held Rabbit through his transformation; it glinted faint on Georgie Prake’s tears as he sat in the darkened window he’d occupied almost continually since his disgrace; and it shone white on a woman’s bare skin. The moon lit the woman only briefly. Her coloring dappled, and she blended into the surrounding shadows. Mamzelle prided herself on her camouflaging, especially chained as she was to the form of a human woman.

  She loved hunting. Before Jed captured her, she stalked anything that moved, the wilier the better. Humans generally bored her, unless they knew she was on their trail and they were smart. It might take her a year of trailing some desperate, intelligent man before she caught him unawares. Never women: women were tiresome, their world too circumscribed to make them a challenge. How did Howard the bouncer put it? Like shooting fish in a barrel. Better to chase animals. Something was always trying to eat them, which made them more worthy adversaries; humans had grown used to their status at the top of the food chain.

  Now, hunting men satisfied her as it never had before, perhaps because it was not allowed her very often. She supposed the restriction made her hunger for it more--and then, she wanted everyone in town dead anyway.

  She stole close to the miner’s camp, sticking to shadows; her coloring flickered in patches from rock gray to faded green to dusty brown as she slinked to her favorite stakeout, a hunting blind of sorts among the rocks at the base of an old hillside wash-out. From here, she would wait for one of the men to leave the tent city for a piss.

  This far back from town was where the greenhorns camped, the new men, low on the totem pole. The experienced miners knew something waited in the dark, here at the back of the pack, but haste, greed, arrogance and skepticism made the new men scornful, and kept Mamzelle in kills. She never waited long by a demon’s standards before a man stumbled too far from the herd, and the sooner the better; the rocks reeked of urine, and worse.

  She hadn’t been there more than three hours when the uproar of the camp disgorged an obliging victim, wobbling out of the firelight toward her blind: a big man, stinking drunk, but still dangerous-looking. She’d never seen him before, and the state of his kit denoted a recent arrival; he looked a little too clean, and his clothes were still unpatched. “Allo, mon cher,” she purred, just loud enough to be heard.

  “Wuzzat? Someone here?” called the man, not quite as drunk as Mamzelle had feared; she smiled wider. The more sober, the more fun.

  “Over ‘ere,” she replied, stepping out of the blind and taking on a more natural coloring.

  The man stopped in his tracks and whistled. “Whatever they called that stuff, it weren’t whiskey. I’m goin blind.”

  “It is to be believed--I am ‘ere,” she said, smoothing a hand down her hip. “Do you like me?”

  “Lady...why, yer buck naked!”

  “You are objecting
?” she said. She began edging minutely to his left; he turned unconsciously to face her as she moved.

  “N-no! I mean--” He whistled again, took his hat off, and ran a hand through thinning hair. “Lady, what are you doin out here all by yourself with--without yer clothes?”

  “Call it...a call of courtesy. Eef you like Mamzelle, maybe you come see me an my girls in town?”

  “Mamzelle--you’re that Frenchie who runs the Palace! Lady, I ain’t got the kinda money fer you!”

  The greenhorn hadn’t noticed she’d cut him off from the camp, and her smile grew. “No money, this time. You have des amis in this place? Friends?”

  “No, ma’am, not a soul.”

  “You wish to be mon ami, perhaps?”

  His uncertain smile strengthened. “On the house? Oh, yes, ma’am, I surely would!”

  “Très bien, very good,” she leered, her teeth finally long and sharp, and her eyes ruby red. “Mes amis, they run very fast. Can you run very fast, chèri?”

  “Run? Why would I wanna run?” His smile faltered. He took in her nails, lengthening into scythes, and stepped back only to discover rocks behind him and Mamzelle between him and the safety of the camp. “Lady,” he whispered, “what are you?”

  “What I am matters not, I think. What matters is ‘ow fast you can run before I catch you. I have a nature merciful tonight. I promise you five minutes’ head start.”

  “Help!” he screamed, but the revelers in the camp were used to such cries; if some newcomer was getting rolled for his stake, why borrow trouble?

  He yelled again for help. Mamzelle said, “There will be the time for the screaming, mon ami. Now it is the time for the running. Run!” The greenhorn lumbered up the rockfall, and Mamzelle sighed. Perhaps she should’ve given him ten minutes; it seemed speed had been sacrificed for size. Nevertheless, she waited the five minutes--a promise was a promise--and sauntered up the rocks, following his scent into the scrub-covered hills.

  He gave her a good enough chase--close on an hour all told, though she ran only at the end, when he had tired of running enough to turn and fight. When she caught him, she held him tenderly in her arms as he thrashed in his death throes, her claws sunk deep into his ribs and her teeth ripping into his shoulder.

  Sheriff John and Deputy Rabbit stood over a horribly mangled body the next morning, dumped at the foot of the rockslide. “Doc, what do you think?” John asked an older man dressed in black, crouched by the body.

  “I think he’s dead, Sheriff, is what I think,” said the doctor, not bothering to look up as he coolly rolled the body from one side to another. “Hard to breathe without a neck.”

  John looked to the sky for patience. “Dr Horridge, I’m asking you for your professional opinion on what might have killed him--cougar? Wolf? Bear?”

  “Man with really sharp teeth?” added Rabbit.

  “I know what you’re asking. Let a man in a grim profession enjoy himself a little.” Dr Horridge shook his head. “Can’t rightly say, Runnels. Coulda been any kind of animal with claws, but I tell you: it’d have to be a damned big one--near as I can tell, it took out his throat with one bite. And a smart one--he wasn’t killed here. Something dragged him.” Horridge stood up, stretching his back till it popped. “I’m getting old. And whatever it was, it wasn’t hungry. Didn’t really eat so much as savage him. Not many predators’d do that. Except, of course, for Man.”

  “Huh,” said John, slipping his thumbs into his gunbelt. “Well, thanks, Doc. By the by, how’re the two from the Lucky Pint doing?”

  Horridge shook his head. “Well, it’s a funny thing. The one hit on the head, looks like he’ll make it. He’s sitting up, talking a little--slow, but he was never a college professor. His friend, who laid him out? Liverish. Yellow eyes, when you pry ‘em open. He’s never woken up yet. I don’t think he’ll make it through the week. So no hanging for the hoi polloi. Now if you gentlemen will excuse me, I’ve got breakfast bespoke at the Hopewell.” He took off his glasses, clapped a low top hat on his head, and pushed through the circle of miners come to rubberneck.

  “This man have any friend who can do for him?” John asked the onlookers. A few heads shook; no one came forward. “All right then, we’ll call the undertaker in,” he sighed. He walked through the miners and back toward town, Rabbit following behind.

  “‘Nother one, Johnny,” said Rabbit, shaking his head. “Every full moon some greenhorn goes down, right around this spot. People are starting to talk.”

  “I know.” John waited until they were out of anyone’s hearing, then said, “I think we’ve got another werecritter here who isn’t quite as peaceable as a bunny.”

  “I think you may be right, brother mine.” They walked into the main street, both troubled. “How many people know about me, Johnny?”

  “Me. Prake. Jamie. Aloysius if you can call him ‘people.’ Miss Duniway, now. Why?”

  Rabbit shook his head. “If anyone were to find out I change on the full, he might take it into his head that I turn into something worse than a jackrabbit.”

  “It won’t happen, Rab,” John said firmly.

  They were at the jail. John felt eyes on him and looked up to see Mamzelle, standing on her balcony at the Palace drinking her morning coffee. She wasn’t respectable, but John didn’t consider himself above anyone; he touched his hat. She inclined her fine head, and then gave him a wide, contented smile before she turned back into her boudoir. Most men would take it well to have a beautiful woman smile like that at him, thought John--even if she were a demon. But something about the set of her shoulders, the loll of her head, brought him up short; he shivered, though he didn’t understand why.

  Episode 17: Evidence

  “You look happy this morning,” said Jed from the depths of a big tufted leather chair.

  Mamzelle returned to her boudoir from the balcony. “I am always ‘appy at the full moon,” she said, settling on her chaise.

  “Don’t sit down. Bring me my coffee.”

  She narrowed her eyes to slits, but got up and poured him a cup. “I wonder, ‘ow badly this would sting eef I threw it in your face?” she said.

  “Go ahead. Then you’d find out how it feels to lose an eye.”

  “Eet’s a rrrhetorical question. I can’t hurt you anyway.”

  “Just remember that,” he smiled over the cup’s rim.

  “I will, even as I eat your liver while you scream for mercy. That is not rrrhetorical.”

  Jed chuckled. “Keep dreaming, Mamzelle. It’s good for the soul, or would be if you had one. So,” he said after a long pull at the coffee, “good hunting last night?”

  “Eh. ‘E was big and clumsy. A good fight at the end, one supposes, but a bear would ‘ave been better.”

  Jed took his coffee to the balcony door, far enough out that he could see the street, but not be seen; everyone knew he owned the Palace, but he didn’t like to advertise it. “You were discreet?”

  “Discretion of the most thorough.”

  “Then explain the little procession down there.”

  Mamzelle pushed past him onto the balcony, and looked down into the street. The undertaker and his morose Mexican assistant were trudging toward the funeral home, a stretcher slung between them; blood stained the sheet covering whatever-it-was, though she knew very well what it was. She shrugged. “I ‘ad to leave him somewhere.”

  “You’re sure no one saw you?”

  “It would be easier to make sure eef you let me change shape.”

  “Ah-ah, my dear, you won’t get me to slip up that way.” He walked back inside. “Just remember. If you get caught, it won’t be me who gets put down.”

  “It will be both of us, monsieur, je vous assure.”

  Jed waved a hand. “I order you to hide the body next time.”

  “Very well,” she said, bowing her head and smiling to herself.

  “And you’re speaking too much French. I don’t understand French. I just like you sounding French.”r />
  “As you weesh.”

  “And another thing.” Jed sat back down on the leather chair, and pointed down. “Here, at my feet. Charity tells me you were impolite to her yesterday.”

  Mamzelle sank to the floor before him, sullen and graceful. “Moi? ‘Ow could I be impolite to someone ‘oo is not supposed to notice I exist?”

  “Charity’s temper matches her hair. She acts before she thinks, and I figure she looked over here on an impulse.”

  “I care not at all.”

  “Oh, I know what you won’t care for,” said Jed, “and that’s my putting Charity in charge of you for a few hours, to do whatever she wants you to.”

  “What could she to do me?” sniffed Mamzelle.

  “She’ll think of something. Now go find the bourbon. This coffee needs a little help.”

  Annabelle passed the undertakers on the street; as a schoolteacher, she’d hardly be expected to take a sight such as that in her stride, and she didn’t, the memory of the night before still fresh in her mind. Had whoever--or whatever--killed that man have done it under the influence of tainted ore? She had to believe it was possible. She glanced over at the jail. The temptation to tell John Runnels what was going on pushed hard against her resolve. Didn’t he deserve to know? It had affected his own son, after all, and who knew how much of it might be here in town, waiting to cause more trouble.

  Jamie watched her anxiously all day in class, and more than once she caught him surreptitiously searching the floor under his desk. He even offered to stay after to sweep, but she sent the dejected boy home.

  On her way back to the Hopewell, Annabelle spied Mayor Prake coming from the ethergraph office. Time to reassure him about Georgie; she hurried down the boardwalk to intercept him. “Miss Duniway,” said Prake, taking his hat off to reveal his balding head. “And how are you? Let me reiterate once again how very sorry I am about Georgie--”