Beyond the Pale (3 page)

Travis adjusted the wire-rimmed spectacles that perched in front of his pale eyes. Jack Graystone had given him the spectacles a few years back. Jack owned the Magician’s Attic, an antique store on the west side of town, and he was one of Travis’s oldest friends, maybe even his best. The spectacles were over a hundred years old, and once they had belonged to a young gunslinger named Tyler Caine. Jack
always said the best way to understand the here and now was to gaze at it through the eyes of a distant time and place. Sometimes Travis thought Jack was the wisest man he knew.

Travis approached the billboard, his scuffed boots crunching against the hard ground. There—that was what had caught his eye. Last night’s gale had ripped away a piece of the old cigarette ad. He drew in a cold lungful of air. Through the hole in the advertisement he could see what appeared to be a painting of a rugged landscape. Only it didn’t quite look like a painting. It was too
real
, more like a photograph, breathtaking in its perfect clarity. He could just see the edge of a snow-covered peak, and beneath that the hint of an evergreen forest. Without even thinking, Travis reached a hand toward the billboard, to peel off more of the ad’s colored paper.

That was when he heard them.

The bells were faint and distant, yet clear all the same, and crystalline. The sound made him think of sleigh bells on a winter’s night. His hand fell to his side, and he cocked his head to listen. Now all he heard was the low moan of wind over granite. He shivered and remembered he needed to get to the saloon. Whatever the sound had been, it was gone now, if he had ever really heard it in the first place. He started back for the truck.

The wind shifted and brought with it, fleeting but clear, the chime of music.

Travis spun back around. Once more the bells faded into silence, but this time he could tell from which direction the sound had come. His gaze traveled across a sere expanse of grass until it reached a dark hulk a few hundred yards away.
You don’t have time for this, Travis
. But he was already walking across the field, hands jammed into the pockets of his coat.

A minute later the orphanage loomed above him, taking a bite out of the blue-quartz sky. He had never been this close to the ruin before. Now the windows seemed more gaping mouths than staring eyes. Lichen clung to scorched clapboards like some sort of disease. Even after all these years a faint burnt smell emanated from the place, acrid and
vaguely menacing. Travis held his breath: the eerie voice of the wind, and silence, that was all.

He pushed his way through a patch of dried thistles and walked around the side of the house. Behind the place were a pair of outbuildings. They were far enough away from the main house that the fire had not gotten them. Dull paint peeled from their walls, and their doors were sealed shut with rusted padlocks. Storage sheds of some sort. Between the buildings was a narrow run, almost like an alley. Had something moved there in the dimness?

He took a step into the space between the sheds, and in the murk he glimpsed a pile of scrap metal and an old rain barrel. That was all. He was about to turn away when he noticed a glint of light by his feet. He squatted down and saw tracks in the ground. Water had seeped from the earth to pool in the tracks and reflect the waning daylight. The prints had been made by small, cloven hooves, probably a mule deer. They wandered all over the valley. With a shrug, Travis stood and turned to head back to the truck.

This time the bells were closer. Much closer.

Travis whirled around. There. Something
had
moved—a dim form by the rain barrel.

“Who’s there?” he called out. No answer. He took another step, deeper in. Shadows closed behind him, and a new sound drifted on the air, a sound almost like … laughter. It was high and trilling, the mirth of a child, or that of an ancient woman. The rain barrel rocked back and forth, then toppled. Water gushed onto the ground, dark as blood.

Travis’s heart shriveled in his chest. He started to back out of the alley. The mocking laughter rang out again. He bit his lip to stifle a cry of fear, turned, tripped over his boots, and broke into a run.

He was brought up short by a tall, stiff object, and this time he did cry out. He stumbled backward and looked up.

“Can I help you with something, son?”

The man standing before Travis looked like he was eighty years too late for a funeral. His black suit of moth-eaten wool was archaic and oddly cut, with a long hem and a high collar. The suit hung loosely on the man’s spare frame, while the shirt beneath had turned the yellow of old bones, its neck bound with a limp string tie that flapped on the air.
The man snatched a hand up to keep his broad-brimmed hat from taking off on a gust of wind.

“I said, can I help you, son? I mean, are you in need of some aid? Forgive my saying, but you look as white as Lot after he slipped on out of Sodom.”

The man’s voice was dry, like the rasp of a snake’s belly against sand, but coated with a sticky Southern sweetness. This was a voice to invoke dread and devotion in one fell swoop. A grin split the man’s face. His teeth were the same dull yellow as his shirt, and his eyes glinted like black marbles.

“You aren’t simple, now are you, son? You can talk, can’t you?”

Travis managed a nod. “I’m fine, really. It was nothing, just an animal by the sheds.”

Instinct told him to get out of here. The man gave Travis the creeps, him and his papery skin and that skeletal smile. He had to be some sort of vagrant, what with those thrift-store clothes. And there was something foreboding about him. Not violent, but perilous all the same.

Travis swallowed hard. “Listen, I need to get going. I have … I have something I need to do.”

The man watched him with those black eyes, then gave a solemn nod.

“So you do, son. So you do.”

Travis did not reply. He hurried past the other, kept his eyes fixed on the ground, and hoofed it as fast as he could across the field without looking like he was out and out running. To his great relief, he made it back to the truck. He climbed inside, then cast one last glance over his shoulder. The man in black had not moved. He still stood in front of the ruined orphanage and clutched his hat while waves of grass surged around him. He gazed at the horizon, like those dark marble eyes of his could see something coming, something other eyes could not.

Travis shivered, shut the truck’s door, and cranked the key in the ignition. With a spray of gravel the pickup launched itself down the road.

Travis laughed as the oddness of his encounter at the orphanage evaporated in the mundane task of piloting the truck. Now that he thought about what had happened, it no
longer seemed so strange. There had been some sort of animal between the sheds, and the man in black was just a drifter, peculiar but harmless. As for the sounds—he could chalk those up to wind and imagination. Either that or he was going insane, and there was nothing at all special about
that
. He hummed along with the radio as he drove.

A pointed shape came into view up ahead. As he drew closer, Travis saw it was a big circus tent pitched in a field next to the road. Its canvas roof was patched in countless places, and parked to the side was an old school bus covered with a blotchy coat of white paint. He slowed down as he passed the tent. In front was planted a crude sign. As always, it took a moment of concentration to stop the words from roaming, then he reined them in. The sign read:

It was an old-fashioned revival. Travis hadn’t thought these sorts of things still existed. He shifted into fourth, and the tent vanished behind him. At least now he knew where the strange man had come from, and he had been right on one count. The old guy was a nut, although not the kind he had thought.

The battered pickup cruised down the road, and he turned his attention to everyday matters—how many kegs of beer he needed to order for the bar, who he had to call to get rid of that skunk holed up under the saloon, and when he was going to find time to patch the leak in the storeroom’s roof.

Yet all the way into town, Travis couldn’t quite forget the far-off music of bells.

Twilight was drifting from the sky like silver snow by the time Travis turned onto Elk Street and brought the pickup to a halt in front of the Mine Shaft Saloon. Only the summit of
Castle Peak rose high enough above the valley to be gilded by the last of the sunlight. He stepped out and shut the vehicle’s door without bothering to lock it. Small-town living had its own little luxuries.

Elk Street hadn’t changed much in the last hundred years. If cars could be traded for wagons and potholed pavement for red mud, Castle City’s main drag wouldn’t look much different than it had at the height of the mining days. It ran broad and straight through the heart of town—unlike the narrow, convoluted roads of Eastern cities, constructed by people who were still accustomed to the cramped burgs of the Old World, before they came to realize just how much elbow room this new continent truly had to offer. Weather-corroded false fronts rose sharp and square against the sky, and hitching rails stood in front of most buildings, although these days they usually kept mountain bikes from wandering off instead of horses.

Lights were coming on all along Elk Street against the deepening night. People strolled the boardwalks, heading to the Mosquito Café for the best cup of cappuccino in Castle County, or chatting in front of McKay’s General Store, or stopping to look at the smoky quartz crystals, obsidian bolo ties, and hand-drawn tarot cards in the window of the Blue Summit Earth Shop. At the end of the street, graceful as a ghost, hovered Castle City’s old opera house, with its Greek Revival columns and baroque marble facade.

Travis hopped onto the boardwalk in front of the saloon just as the neon sign above sizzled to red-and-blue life. He reached out to turn the brass doorknob, then paused. He frowned and leaned toward the door to peer at the upper left corner. There. It was so small and inconspicuous he had nearly missed it. Something had been scratched into the door’s faded gray paint, an oval shape formed of two curved lines:

What it signified Travis couldn’t say. Most likely it was just some piece of graffiti. Castle City didn’t have much of a vandalism problem, but it did happen on occasion. Whatever
it was, he was certain it hadn’t been there yesterday: The scratch marks looked fresh. Travis let out a sigh. Well, he needed to repaint the door anyway. He added that job to his growing list, then headed into the saloon. The comforting rumble of conversation and the clink of beer glasses told him that Max hadn’t driven away all of the customers. At least not yet.

Max stood behind the bar and pored over a mass of papers spread out before him on the expanse of old wood. His long hair was tied back in a ponytail, and a yellow pencil perched behind one ear. He stroked the drooping black mustache he had copied a few months back from the local ranch hands and slid a bowl of pretzels across the bar to a customer. All at once he grabbed the pencil and scribbled on one of the pages, then he leaned back, chewed on the eraser, and smiled the smug smile of a kid who had just traded two
Green Lanterns
and a
Superboy
for a
Batman Giant Special
. Travis had been right. Max was going over the saloon’s books again.

Like the street outside, the Mine Shaft Saloon hadn’t changed much in the last century. These days electric bulbs shone in the wrought-iron chandeliers that hung from the pressed-tin ceiling, and neon beer signs glowed above the beveled bar mirror, but that was about it. Mummified heads of elk, deer, and mountain lion stared down glass-eyed from the walls, draped in funeral shrouds of cobweb and dust. Time-darkened Wanted posters plastered the posts that supported junk-filled rafters. An antique player piano stood against one wall, still capable of plunking out its tinny music with nail-studded hammers.

The regular customers greeted Travis with hellos and raised mugs as he wound his way through the haphazard scatter of tables and chairs. He smiled and waved back. Maybe he didn’t have a family anymore, but these people came close. Some of the hands from the dude ranch down the highway sat around a table where they played cribbage and drank single-malt scotch. A pair of red-cheeked German college students in wool sweaters and Birkenstocks had stowed their big backpacks in a corner, and now the two young men were trying to go shot for shot against a blue-haired contingent from the local chapter of the Daughters of the Frontier. They were losing. A pair of cowboys in Wranglers
and bright geometric shirts two-stepped together to a country song in the warm glow of the jukebox. And in a corner, Molly Nakamura patiently taught several others how to fold origami animals out of stiff sheets of paper, although none of their crumpled-looking creations quite looked like Molly’s graceful cranes and prowling tigers.