I Travel by Night (5 page)

They were after him fast enough, because he could hear their laughter all around him. One of them nipped at his left ear, like an evil kiss. A woman in a grimy green dress danced before him, making him change direction. A man in a formal suit, a tophat and a black waistcoat used a cane with a dog’s head on it to strike lightly and mockingly at his face. Something that was missing its legs—a nightmare figure in the tatters of a Confederate uniform—came at him from the underbrush on its hands and stubs, its eyes glinting red and its fangs snapping at the air. A hand stroked the back of his head, almost in pity. A tongue licked his cheek, and Lawson smelled blood on the thing’s mouth.

In that instant he almost lost his mind.

They were all around him, converging on the hobbling cripple who thought he might awaken in Alabama on a summer morning with the sun already hot in the trees and none of this—
none of this
—would have ever happened. He would go to the breakfast table in the house in Montgomery and meet his two angels, Mary Alice and Cassie, and there would be no more war or thoughts of war and no more horror upon horror.

Yet here, in this woods of Shiloh in the dark of a starless night, Trevor Lawson toppled over a fallen tree and went to the ground like a hunted beast. He crawled as best he could, and feeling them about to fall upon him he twisted around and fired the Colt and fired again but this time the hammer clicked on an empty chamber and all was lost.

Whether it was men or women or both who flung themselves upon him, he did not know. Whatever they were, they were strong and they were hungry. They were going for his throat, but he was being bitten on shoulders and chest, through his uniform and into the flesh. They were licking the blood of his wounds with their tongues and forcing the wounds wider with their fangs. They were on him like worms on an apple, like ants on a piece of sugar candy; they swarmed him. He fought back, striking left and right with his Colt, for the revolver had become simply a blunt instrument. But though he fought and kept fighting he knew in his soul he was doomed because his blood was running and the fangs were sinking into his throat on both sides.

Abruptly one figure was thrown aside and then another. There was a mewling sound from bloodied mouths. The mass of creatures moved back, shoulders hunched like whipped dogs.

“
I
want this one,” said the woman in red.

It had been nearly a whisper, but even so it carried force. She stood over Lawson, staring down upon him. A sweep of her hand pushed back her waves of black hair, and Lawson saw the beautiful high-cheekboned face of a fallen angel. She was regal in her evil; she wore it as grandly as she wore her earth-stained crimson gown. She smiled at him, a smile of triumph and need…and then in a blur of red she was at his throat.

He tried to push her away, tried to club at her with the Colt, but it was useless. He was weak and depleted; everything was becoming hazy and dreamlike. He felt the flow of his blood going into her, and he shuddered. He was growing cold. Still she drank of him. His mind was sluggish, but he realized he was being carried away by the blue canoe of death on its lazy current and he could no longer fight back. It was a matter of time now…a matter of time…

And then she drew back just short of taking him all, and he heard her as if from a great distance saying
This one goes with us
and he was picked up and carried through brush and thorns and scraped by treebark. Until he lost his senses and sank down again into the dark, and that was how it had begun.

Forward
, Lawson thought as he rode Phoenix toward St. Benadicta and lit a cheroot.
Always forward
. His match flared in the dark. He was aware that his breathing was changing. It was becoming shallower, tighter, as if his lungs were becoming ever smaller. He wondered if his organs would in time shrivel and die, until he was a true creature of the Dark Society, and then he would have no more need of breathing the air of the human world.

That would happen if he became reliant solely on human blood. But the truth was, the desire for human blood was growing stronger and stronger in him, and unless he found LaRouge and killed her soon…and consumed from her the black ichor that ran through her veins as the blood of the vampire…he was doomed to eternal life as a monster of the night.

Right now, though, he was a gunslinger and adventurer who handled all matters for a price, and right now he had enough lungs left to enjoy one of his favored Marsh-Wheeling cheroots. He was alive and still mostly human. Mostly. He had a job to do, and that was enough for right now.

Lawson felt the sun sinking. Always it was so, and never could he explain to Father Deale what that sensation was. Even wrapped like a mummy in his black curtains and hidden under bedsheets or sometimes under the bed or in a closet, he felt the sun sinking. With his eyes closed and his body in its state of sleep, he sensed the change of light in the hours, and then in the evening when the sun had almost gone he quickly came fully and often hungrily awake.

So it was, on this first night in St. Benadicta. The man in the black Stetson and the black suit with the white shirt, the crimson waistcoat and the gunbelt that holstered two backward-facing Colt pistols could never have been taken to be what he really was. When he walked down the stairs of the boarding-house and onto the dirt street—the only street—of St. Benadicta, the sun was nearly a memory and stars had begun to sparkle in the sky. No one would have thought that indeed he had secured a room early this morning and had slept not in its rather moldy bed but in its much more moldy closet, away from the broken shutters that allowed in a little too severe a sun for the gentleman’s comfort.

His first drink of the evening had been cattle blood from a small Japanese bottle similar to the one that had broken in his coat the night before. He’d bought six of the things, all from the same Royal Street antiques dealer. It pleased him to be in possession of things of beauty, especially if they were functional.

He walked in the direction of the saloon, which was a flimsy wooden structure near the docks. The town, as much as it was, ended at the edge of the swamp. Logging boats and barges were tied up for the night. He would need a rowboat himself, for later. At the moment he needed information, as the gnarled old woman who ran the boarding-house had only told Lawson in her thick Cajun accent that Nocturne was “no mo’”.

Fiddle music came from the direction of the Swamp Root, the name painted on the bar over the batwing doors. Yellow lantern light spilled out. Loggers staggered around, supported by flouncy women. Across the way was another building with Pleasure Palace painted in red on its front. It seemed to Lawson that St. Benadicta held only two activities for these lumberjacks when they weren’t sawing timber in the morass out there. He avoided a collision between himself and a drunken bulk of a man who was being helped across the street by an equally drunk and bulky woman, and then he pushed through the doors into the Swamp Root.

The place was crowded, smoky and noisy and altogether disagreeable, but it was the only bar in town. Above Lawson, a couple of dozen old axeheads had been driven into the timbers and left there to grow red skins of rust. A bartender was busy pouring hard liquor and beer for thirsty and very loud patrons. The fiddler was doing his best, but every third note seemed to be a cat’s squall. No one minded. Women wearing patchwork gowns and with feathers in their hair hung on the arms of florid-faced men who were spending their pay unwisely and too well. Lanterns hung from ceiling hooks and the candlelight jumped off broken teeth and the glint of coins. Lawson took a long look around. There were no vampires in here, only humans in need. He stepped up to the bar, caught the bartender’s attention and asked for a small shot of whiskey, best in the house.

It came in a glass that was sufficiently clean. “We don’t want no trouble, sir,” said the bartender, as he set the whiskey down. His voice was nervous and he had a cocked left eye.

“No trouble,” Lawson answered, with an attempt at a reassuring smile. He was aware that he looked the part of trouble, and that his pallid and rawboned appearance spoke of graves and death. When the Colts were in full view, so much the more. He was confident of his speed and his aim, and confident that no man would take him on without paying a price, and those confidences also spoke in his silence.

“A question for you,” Lawson said as he put upon the bar the coin for his drink. “I’m looking for a town called Nocturne, south of here. Heard of it?”

“No sir. Ain’t been here very long.”

“Thank you anyway.” Lawson looked at the heavy-set man on his right. “A town called Nocturne. Heard of it?”

“Don’t know nothin’ ’bout that,” was the rather addled reply, for a nearly empty bottle of rotgut stood at his pleasure.

“A town called Nocturne?” Lawson asked the gray-bearded and wiry man on his left. “South of here? Do you know it?”

“Ain’t nothin’ south a’here,” the man answered in a voice that might have put to shame the grind of a heavy bandsaw cutting through the hardest cypress. “Swamp and more swamp, is all.” He took a swig from his mug of cloudy brown beer. “You got the city smell on ya. New Aw’luns?”

“That’s right.” Lawson mused on how many smells he could perceive in the Swamp Root, and how few of them were pleasant. The blood smell in here was nearly overpowering, that and cheap cigars, sweat, the smell of unwashed bodies and clothes, the tang of the sour beer and the sharp whiskey, and the occasional fragrance of feminine essence as one of the women brushed past.

“What’re you doin’ here, then?” The man took stock of Lawson’s clothes and, being an intelligent fellow, came to a conclusion. “You ain’t no lumberjack.”

“No, I’m not.”

“Oh, I got it! You’re one of
them
! Am I right?”

Lawson maintained a slight smile. “One of
them
, sir?”

“You got a brother back there.” The man motioned with a scarred thumb toward the rear of the Swamp Root. At a round table under the glow of lanterns sat a group of six gamblers playing cards. They were being watched by an interested audience of both loggers and whores. The ‘brother’ this man referred to was a broad-shouldered gent in a tan-colored suit and a Stetson the same hue, cocked at a jaunty angle. In front of him on the table was an impressive amount of currency and coins. The other players were all raggedy lumberjacks who had obviously been enticed to join this game by… “A cardsharp,” said the man. “Comin’ in here on payday and takin’ candy from the babies. Ain’t no use tellin’ ’em, they ain’t gonna listen.”

“Hm,” said Lawson, watching the cardsharp gently lay down what appeared to be a winning hand, for the others groaned and slapped their cards aside. Two of the loggers had had enough and left the table, but their places were quickly taken and the game continued. “Is he fleecing the sheep?” Lawson asked.

“Not so you’d know it. He loses enough to gull ’em. Never gets down so far he can’t climb back up, though. Little babies, thinkin’ they’re gonna leave that table with some money for Mona. Heh! But listen here, ain’t
you
one of his breed?”

“No, not his breed.” Lawson was already picking up his shotglass and moving away. “But I don’t like cheaters, so I think I’ll go watch the game.”

“Not sayin’ he is for sure. That kinda thing’ll get you killed, and he
is
wearin’ a six. But get in there and gull
him
, if you can. You look like you’re able.”

Lawson made his way back. If anything, he might find someone who knew Nocturne. As he neared the table, he saw the cardsharp glance up quickly from the cards at his approach and then back to business again. But in that brief instant Lawson had seen a broad apple-cheeked face with a cleft in the chin, thick reddish eyebrows and below them deep-set dark eyes. The man had a friendly, easy and relaxed composure, but also in that brief instant Lawson had seen a black glimmer of warning in the eyes and a tightening of the beefy shoulders, the message being
approach me with caution
.

That was like a summons to Trevor Lawson, who sipped at his whiskey and brought up his predator’s smile.

He took a position alongside the table, where he could watch everyone. They were playing Five Card Draw with deuces wild. The cardsharp raised the pot to two hundred dollars and then folded. On the next hand, he was the first to fold. Lawson watched the man lose forty dollars on the following hand to a pair of tens and a deuce. The cardsharp removed his hat, mopped his brow with a handkerchief and then returned the hat, and that was when Lawson saw how he kept the cards up his sleeve. The man was very quick and very smooth, but he was not quicker and smoother than the vampire’s eye. The next hand he won sixty dollars by way of two jacks and two deuces.

One of the other loggers decided retreat was the better course of valor and left the table. “Join in?” Lawson asked, and everyone but the cardsharp nodded. Lawson said, “Thank you,” and took a seat opposite the man.

“Five dollars to play, friend,” the cardsharp said without meeting Lawson’s gaze. Lawson put down his money, and the game continued.

The fiddler scratched on. The bartender poured beer and whiskey. Two men got in a fight and went crashing through the batwing doors into the dirt. The game went on, with Lawson up by twenty dollars and everyone but the cardsharp doing reasonably well. Biding his time, Lawson thought. And sizing me up as well.

In the yellow light, the floating cigar, cigarette and pipe smoke and the fetid mist that rose from the water and drifted into the saloon, Lawson was aware that someone else had entered the Swamp Root and had come back to watch the game. He smelled her before he saw her. She was maybe twenty-four or twenty-five years old. She brought with her the aromas of lavender, leather, lemon soap and hot blood. When he gazed into her eyes he saw two bits of hard black charcoal, aimed at him. Her full-lipped mouth looked like it could bite the head off a water moccasin. She was tall and lithe and had light brown hair tied back in a ponytail. On her head was a dark green jockey’s cap. She wore a gray skirt and a black riding jacket over a white-and-green checked blouse. Her chin was firm and square and her nose was sharp and tilted up at the tip. Then Lawson took appreciative note of the intricately-tooled wheat-colored gunbelt slung on her slim waist, holding a couple of dozen bullets and a Remington revolver with a mother-of-pearl grip.

Lawson lost the following hand to a thin lumberjack with maybe six teeth in his head and black hair that had been cut under a soupbowl. The cardsharp paused to have a sip of his own whiskey, and his eyes too found the young woman who’d just arrived. A few other men came forward to test the air, and finding it too rare for them they retreated, especially when the  new arrival casually rested a black-gloved hand on the butt of her pistol.

“I’m Neville Brannigan,” said the man across the table from Lawson. “From Houston, Texas.” He offered a hand that was the perfect size to be slipping cards in and out of sleeves.

“Is there any other Houston?” Lawson asked, shaking the man’s hand in a quick, firm and cold grip. He saw Brannigan’s eyes narrow. “Trevor Lawson, from New Orleans.” Lawson wondered if Brannigan had really been introducing himself to the young woman with the six-shooter.

“Might I ask what business you have in St. Benadicta?”

“Passing through.” It was Lawson’s turn to deal. He spent a moment squaring the deck. “Looking for another town, actually. Ever heard of a place called Nocturne?”

“No. And I will say, Mr. Lawson, that there is nowhere from here to pass through
to
. This is as far as civilization goes.”

“Anyone else heard of Nocturne?” Lawson asked the others at the table, and got either the shaking of heads or blank stares. “Well, then,” he said, “I suppose it’s hidden.” He offered the deck to the man on his left to cut. “But I’m sure I’ll find it.”

“What about this particular Nocturne is so appealing to you, sir?” Brannigan opened a silver cigarette case and removed a freshly-rolled stick. He used his thumb to fire the match.

“I have business there. In fact, I’m expected. Now…about yourself…you are a mainstay here? Or also passing through?”

“I am an
entertainment
here,” was the smooth reply, accompanied by a cloud of smoke. “I make the circuit of the logging towns, to give these fine men something on which to focus their energies besides the obvious. In that way I do my part for the common good.” He smiled, showing a gold tooth at the front of his mouth. The smile didn’t last very long, and was replaced by a narrowed-eyed expression of curiosity. “You are very
pale
, sir. Why is that?”

“I have an unfortunate condition,” said Lawson, as he prepared to deal. “Also…like you, Mr. Brannigan…I work at night. Same game?”

“Absolutely,” said the cardsharp, tapping ashes upon the floorboards.

When the cards were dealt, Lawson had a queen of spades, a four of clubs, a six of clubs, an ace of diamonds and an ace of hearts. Brannigan instantly raised the ante to fifty dollars, which made two of the other players fold. Lawson saw the raise and raised another fifty. Brannigan saw the raise and studied his cards with a blank expression. The other two loggers at the table folded. Brannigan took one card, Lawson discarded his clubs cards and took two. He wound up with a queen of spades, an ace of diamonds, an ace of hearts, a ten of hearts and a seven of spades. Not very good, he thought…but good enough.

“Fifty dollars,” said Brannigan.

“Fifty, and raise fifty,” replied the vampire from New Orleans.

“
Really
?” Brannigan smiled across the table, but his eyes were cold. “Well…it’s getting a little hot in here, gents.” He laid his cards down face-up, took his handkerchief from his breast pocket and started to take his hat off to wipe his forehead.

“Mr. Brannigan?” said Lawson, in a voice that commanded the cardsharp’s attention. When that happened, Lawson threw his Eye.

Lawson wasn’t sure how he did this, only that when he wanted to—and the need was there—it was simply a matter of a little mental concentration. In fact, it was getting easier. He envisioned a flaming eyeball pushing itself out of his forehead, and travelling across the distance of a few feet to the forehead of another man, where it winnowed itself in and disappeared, still burning. And there in the man’s brain it threw a light, as it moved through the corridors of memory. These corridors might have been the hallways of a haunted house, for Lawson had learned that all men carried their ghosts. Many of these spirits were sad, many were hideous to look upon. The flaming Eye moved within Neville Brannigan’s head, and Brannigan wore a crooked smile and his own eyes had glazed over. The cardsharp’s hand was still reaching for his hat. Lawson saw quick images of Texas prairie and ramshackle farmhouses surrounded by tumbleweeds and blowing dust. He thought this was more Lubbock than Houston, and maybe Brannigan had reason to lie about his hometown. He saw a farmhouse on fire and a woman holding a child to her breast as she fled through the dust. He saw a shadowy figure advancing across a room that had a picture of Jesus hanging on the wall, and in the shadowy figure’s hand was a knife. He saw a man on his knees, bleeding from the mouth and nose, and a knife going into the back of the man’s neck. He saw a black horse rearing up, and a whip swinging out, and he heard a woman’s scream that chilled the dying marrow of his bones. He saw cards by the hundreds, and faces around the tables, and he saw a young boy with curly blonde hair being beaten by the butt of a pistol in a small dank room where light itself seemed a stranger.