by David Boop
“Milly is a proper horse,” she said. “She likes carrots. When we’re done practicing your riding, you can feed her one.”
The anticipation of giving Milly a treat made Simon forget about anything else. He squeezed his boots into the horse’s flanks. Milly responded by plodding forward a few steps and stopping to munch on dry grass between two patches of snow.
Simon kicked the horse’s flanks. “Come on, horse,” he said, but Milly ignored him. Eloise sensed his frustration. He had told her he could ride, but Milly wouldn’t cooperate with his declaration. He kicked harder. “Go, horse! Go!”
All at once, Milly went. She shot off like a bullet with Simon bumping along atop, yelling, “Help!”
Eloise ran after. “Simon!”
She yanked up her skirts to free her legs. She wished she could wear men’s pants here, as she did on the trail. She ran fast, but she couldn’t catch a horse at full gallop. Her only hope was that Simon would control the animal, which was unlikely, or Milly would turn around on her own.
Simon started to slip.
“Aunt Eloise, help!”
Eloise watched, terrified, as Simon tilted to the right and his left foot parted from the stirrup and he tilted farther and farther until he crossed some invisible barrier and jolted out of the saddle entirely and toppled headfirst toward the ground.
For a heartbeat, Eloise was a girl again, watching a horse rear and buck and throw her sister from the saddle.
Forgetting when she was, she screamed, “Annie!”
Her feet were too slow, her boots seemingly encased in lead, but she reached the motionless figure at last and knelt beside him. Milly, having rid herself of her passenger, slowed and walked back toward the barn.
Simon cried, his whole body shaking. He clutched his left arm to his chest.
Despite herself, Eloise felt relief. He was alive.
“Are you hurt?” she asked. She reached for him, but he jerked away. “It’s all right. Does your arm hurt? May I look at it? It’s all right. I’m here. Your mother is here.”
“You’re not!”
The words stung her. “I am.”
“You’re not!”
In her earlier panic, she had not noticed what he had named her when he called for help. Now she remembered.
“You said Aunt Eloise.”
His eyes were watery and helpless. “Father says I must call you Mother and not Aunt. Please don’t tell him.”
“I’m not your mother?”
He shook his head.
“Annie?” she asked.
He nodded miserably.
Stunned, Eloise looked out at the winter landscape without seeing it, and without hearing another word of Simon’s, or his sobs as she lifted him in her arms and carried him to the house.
Her world was not as she had believed. Peter had kept secrets and had persuaded Simon to do the same.
Why had he not been honest? She hitched a wagon to Milly, who had returned to the barn, calm and oblivious to the chaos she had caused, but Eloise could not find that same calm. She drove the cart with Simon in the back to town to see the doctor. The long trip gave her thoughts time to settle into two new truths.
The first made her sad, that the Peter with whom she now shared a life was not her husband. In his world, Annie had lived. Eloise had separated her sister from her husband and son. She had destroyed their family.
The second truth filled her with rage: Peter had lied to her, but she couldn’t believe he did it of his own accord. He had to have been coerced in some way.
Eloise knew who had done the coercing—there was only one possibility—but not why. She had to know why. For that, she would have to make one last visit to the Spinners.
* * *
A hundred children or more filled the streets of the town with no name. They ranged from toddler to teen. Boys and girls. White, brown and black. They played games with balls and sticks, and chased one another around the blacksmithy, and dug in the dirt, and stood doing nothing more than staring at a bug or a tree. They talked and yelled and laughed and cried.
Bewildered, Eloise walked among them. She might as well have been invisible for the interest the children showed in her.
This was wrong. The wrongness wasn’t just a gut feeling. It had gravity to it, a solid presence that was more there than the buildings around her and the ground she stood on. Every instinct told her to leave, but she couldn’t. Not until she had answers.
An older girl with brown braids sat on the steps of the old general store, engrossed in a dime novel. On the cover, a cowboy pointed his six-shooter at a green alien creature with a huge head.
“Good morning,” Eloise said.
“Mornin’,” the girl said.
Eloise wasn’t invisible, after all.
“How did you get here?” she asked the girl, who shrugged without looking up from the dime novel. “Where are your mother and father?”
“Ain’t got no mum and dad.”
“Everyone has parents.”
She shrugged again.
“Where are you from?” Eloise asked.
“Over there.”
“I don’t understand.”
Shrug.
“What do you mean, over there?”
The girl looked up. Her irises were so dark as to appear black. She pointed at the saloon.
“You came from that building?”
She nodded and returned to her reading.
No children played on the saloon’s steps and porch, as if by mutual agreement this area was off-limits. The bramble tree had doubled in size since Eloise had last seen it. The tree and building had gone to battle, but the battle was over now, and the building had given its surrender. Branches thrust through windows, walls and the roof—gnarly, knotted wood, bent into clawlike shapes.
This was the source of the wrongness. The feeling became more concentrated as Eloise approached the saloon. Climbing the steps to the porch felt as if she climbed a mountain.
Inside, the sounds of the children silenced. Eloise heard only her own breathing. The air smelled of rotten things. The tree trunk took up half the space. Roots crawled across the floor. Eloise stepped over them. She stared at the tree for several seconds before she realized the dolls were gone.
“You have returned,” said the voice.
“What have you done?” Eloise demanded. She looked for a shadow figure behind the splintered bar but saw none. “Why is the town full of children? How did they get here?”
“That is not your business.”
“It is my business. What do you mean to do with them?”
“What we will.”
“I take it back,” Eloise said. “The deals we made. All of it.”
“You cannot undo what has been done.”
“You gave me a husband and child who are not my own.”
“He made a deal with us. In coming here, in doing what he did, he fulfilled his part of it.”
That took Eloise’s breath away. Peter had dealt with the Spinners.
“What deal did he make?”
“Only he can say.”
“I asked. He turned away and would not speak.”
“Then you will not know.”
She clenched her fists in frustration. “If he has fulfilled his part, send him home. Send them both home. Will you do that?”
“We will on one condition. Your life, freely given, to spin where we please.”
Incredulous, she said, “You would do to me what you did to him?”
“Yes.”
Only then did Eloise understand how neatly she had walked into their trap. Was this what had happened to Peter? Had he lost Annie or Simon and made a deal to bring them back, only to discover that in seemingly getting what he wanted, the Spinners had used him instead?
Her own Peter had been loyal and loving. He would have done anything for his family. This Peter would have done the same.
In her mind, she saw the man who was not her husband, and his son Simon,
with her sister’s strawberry hair. It was them, or her. That was her choice. Which meant there was no choice at all.
She bowed her head in defeat.
“Send them home,” she said. “I am yours.”
“It is done.”
The tree shivered, then shook. The roots undulated, while shadows spun faster and faster. A roaring filled her ears, louder than her pounding heart.
The tree glowed from within, a cold light like which she had never seen before and could not have described even if a gun were put to her head. The light spread from the core to the branches to the brambles, but it did nothing to illuminate the room.
Eloise gaped. She forced down a scream. Was this what Peter had seen? And Simon?
A sinuous root caught her foot. She tumbled backward and expected to hit ground, but she didn’t. Shadows swallowed her. The saloon and tree vanished. In darkness, she fell and fell, and closed her eyes and waited for impact.
THE STOKER AND THE PLAGUE DOCTOR
Alex Acks
“I don’t give a shit about the hazard pay. I’m not doing it,” the stoker, a man named Eli, snapped.
James, the depot agent, crossed his beefy arms over his chest. “You think you got a choice?”
Theodore watched them argue with annoyance. He felt seconds slipping away like sand grains through his fingers, each one perhaps representing the last breath of some unfortunate man or woman’s life. He’d gotten as far as Cheyenne City, Wyoming, on regular freight trains, his space assured by the fact of his rank. But there were no trains scheduled out to anywhere near his next stop for well over a week, and that was far too long. He’d tried to acquire an engine and a stoker for the journey, but he didn’t have the sealed orders that would allow him to demand it. And thus, this stupid argument.
“You’re damn right I got a choice,” Eli continued. “You can have me whipped all you like, but that still won’t make me wake the fire.”
“Maybe I’ll have you up on charges. Insubordination. How about treason?”
Theodore cleared his throat. The other two men looked down at him, as if they’d almost forgotten he was there. His diminutive height had been of use to him in the past, when it came to sniffing out secrets and remaining unnoticed by bullies. Now, with the clock ticking on the mission he’d set for himself, it had become a burden that made everyone underestimate him, from the surgeon general to these utter morons. “There is no criminality in refusing to volunteer for an unsanctioned journey.” As tempting as it was to lie in pursuit of the greater good, he was far too honorable of a man for that. “But I will promise you a favor. A heavy one.”
“Ain’t a favor big enough in the world to die for,” Eli said. “Not even from one of you.”
Before Theodore could respond to that implied insult, a muffled shout sounded through the half-open door that stood nearby. “I’ll take the job!”
“Who was that?” Theodore demanded.
“No one—” James began.
Theodore yanked the door open, summoning forth a wash of cool, earthy air. Wooden stairs led downward, and he followed them. James, cursing, was right behind him. In the claustrophobic basement of the train depot, there was a single, small cell made of iron bars, and a redheaded, pale man inside. A fist-sized cage of copper wire that flared with the living heat of a spark hung over his heart on a chain—he was a stoker, then. The man’s eyes widened as he looked at Theodore and took in his apparel: long black coat of a particular cut, a silver watch chain peeking from his pocket, and black leather gloves.
The man jerked back from the bars, crossing himself as he said: “Plague doctor.”
Theodore was used to being treated with a sort of cautious respect, often laced with fear by those who mostly knew plague doctors by reputation, but this man looked like he’d seen a ghost. On the other hand, Theodore did not care. He only needed someone who would get him where he needed to go. He looked at James, whose ruddy complexion had become an apoplectic maroon. “Well, is this man a stoker?”
“That’s Leon O’Connell. He’s a damned murderer. Killed one of yours, even,” James said. “Just waiting for the damper to come through next week, and then he won’t be my problem anymore.”
“I don’t care.” So this stoker deserved to die. Expediency meant in this moment that it didn’t matter. Theodore looked back at Leon, and the man shivered under his gaze. “I can’t call on a favor large enough to save you from the hangman. Do you still volunteer?”
Leon squared his shoulders and stepped back up to the bars. “I’ll take being under the sun again before I die.”
“You will release him into my custody, then,” Theodore told James.
James hemmed and hawed, cussed and wheedled, but Theodore would not be moved. Lives were at stake, and he wasn’t above reminding the depot agent where plague doctors fell in the hierarchy of the Army on the Frontier. In that, it didn’t matter that the surgeon general hadn’t sent him.
James at last unlocked the cage. As Leon stepped out, Theodore pulled off one of his gloves and reached up to touch the man’s face. He felt in that instant the warm vitality that rang through all stokers, and tasted metal and oil and smoky fire. For that instant, he held Leon’s life in his hands, and the power of it was both intoxicating and displeasing—there was nothing wrong with the man’s health, for all he deserved to die for his crimes. Theodore nudged him with his power, enough to twist his gut a little. Leon staggered back satisfactorily, clutching at his stomach.
“The fuck was that?” Leon gasped.
“Disease,” Theodore said shortly. “If you run, if you kill me, you will be dead in three days, and it won’t be peaceful.”
James guffawed into Leon’s horrified silence. “Let’s get you to your engine, then.”
* * *
The old 4-2-0 had seen better days—its cattle guard bent and pitted with rust, all of its paint covered with soot or long since blasted off by sand. And that’s all that waited on the tracks: the single locomotive, surrounded by rolling ropes of August heat.
Being in the light had at least pushed the feeling of sickness away from Leon’s gut and left him filled with energy; the living spark of soul and metal and fire caged at his neck—which had guttered low while he’d been in his cell—flared hot back to life against his skin. He felt whole for the first time in weeks, with the tracks humming nearby, thrumming with the song of dozens of locomotives large and small as they worked across the country. He rested a hand on the locomotive and felt it stir; it was tired, aching, so unlike his old partner that it made him ache, too. “Not expecting to come back, huh,” he said to the plague doctor.
“The lack of faith isn’t mine,” the little man snapped. He crossed his arms over his barrel chest, his black eyes sparking in his sallow face. “Is there anything else you need before we depart?”
“Just the destination.”
“Owlwood.” At Leon’s confused look, the plague doctor added, “The spur out past Whitewood.”
“That’s a long fucking trip,” Leon observed. Fine by him, because it was that many more days of life, that many more days to try to figure out how to escape the doctor’s witchcraft and the law.
“Did you have somewhere else to be?”
Leon laughed and climbed up into the locomotive like it was the scaffold to the noose. But damn, it felt good to have the heavy iron around him again. He was dimly aware of the plague doctor behind him as he rested his hands on the engine’s heart and felt it stir in response. “Just one more time for both of us,” he said, coaxing. He opened the cage at his throat one-handed and guided the spark down into the engine’s heart, where it flared into full, hot life.
The locomotive wheezed unsteadily through its bent stack, like an unsteady snore. Its great heart beat slowly, unevenly, then began to speed as the machine woke. Engines were monsters made by man; they couldn’t be truly alive, no matter how much blood and flesh got folded into the metal. But with half a stoker’s soul and fire, they became the m
ightiest animals to ever shake the earth. Leon felt the engine’s elemental awareness, its wordless, fatigued questioning and pains, and did his best to reassure it: one more time.
The locomotive understood, gathered itself, and began to accelerate down the track, wheels screeching as the rust stripped from them.
Leon sat down on the splintery bench seat, his chest heaving and head swimming. Maybe it was another symptom of having been out of the sun for so long, but he was tired. He glanced at the plague doctor, still standing at the end of the engine compartment. A few narrow chests had been stacked up in the limited space, presumably the doctor’s belongings and, Leon hoped sincerely, supplies. “Got some water in there?”
Wordlessly, the plague doctor flipped the lid on one trunk and offered him a canteen.
“You going to keep standing there the whole time? It’s a long trip.”
“I didn’t expect it to be comfortable.” But the plague doctor sat on the bench across from Leon, carefully avoiding touching him.
Leon drank the lukewarm water. “Your lot doesn’t normally travel alone.” Plague doctors were too valuable to send off without a cadre of soldiers, particularly when there were some areas of the frontier where people had strong feelings about witchcraft or shamanism.
“It’s no concern of yours.”
“Is what we’re headed into also not my concern? Because I’d like to know if I got a different kind of agonizing death waiting for me.”
The plague doctor tilted his head. “Your supervisor said you were a convicted murderer. Who did you kill?”
Leon bared his teeth. “Jumped a train off the track. On purpose.” When the man offered him no reaction, not even a slow blink of the eyes, he continued, “Army train. Taking cannons and Gatlings out to the cavalry so they could cut up more Indian women and babies. And yeah. One of you.”
“Not merely a murderer, then. A traitor,” the plague doctor said coolly.
“Proud of it,” Leon said. He felt a stab of sorrow, thinking of the locomotive he’d destroyed in the process. The great machine that he’d been partnered with since he’d gotten out of the army school at sixteen, the source of the metal he’d used to make his spark, had deserved better. And maybe that word gave him a lick of sick guilt, just because he’d been beaten into a shape that was supposed to feel that way since he’d been taken in. That just kindled his resentment.
