The Curse of Jacob Tracy: A Novel (25 page)

“Amen,” said a chorus of voices, and he opened his eyes to see that a dozen of the passengers had joined him and Miss Eliza on their knees.

He saw something else, too. The block of salt was glowing white, faint but distinct in the smoky gloom. He lifted his hand from it with a quick startled inhalation, and a few grains clung to his fingers, like the luminescence of a firefly.

“It worked,” he said stupidly.

“It did?” Miss Eliza said.

“Can’t you see that?” he asked, but he could see she didn’t. “Never mind. Step back.”

He raised the ax like a tamping pole and smashed it down on the block. A big chunk split off and he hit it again, in short hard blows to break it up as much as possible. The glow never faded, but spread out across the floor wherever the salt touched. Trace bore down on the chunks with the flat of the ax blade until they subsided into powder.

Suddenly there was a fresh yelp and scurry around the edges of the car. Trace looked over his shoulder to see flames licking up through the floor, in a bull’s-eye of rapidly spreading black.

“Trace!” Boz hollered again.

“I’m comin!” he said. “Everybody get over here and pick up some salt! Smash it up, grind it down so you can sprinkle it.” Everyone’s hands scrabbled for pieces of salt-lick. Trace scooped a handful of grains into his own pocket and hefted up the ax, moved toward the car door where Boz and the conductor were gathered.

“You really think that salt-lick’s gonna hold them off?” the conductor demanded.

“We don’t have a choice!” Trace shouted. “We can’t stay in here. Try to corral them together, get them off in a body. I’ll clear the way for you as much as I can.”

“Excellent idea, my godly friend!” Ferris appeared at his elbow, saluted him with his booze flask. “I’ll be right behind you!”

Trace glanced at Boz, who was showing some serious strain—his expression was determined, but his eyes were worried and Trace realized it was because Boz—for the first time in five years—didn’t believe in him. “It’s gonna be all right, Boz,” he said. “Stay close to Miss Eliza.”

He gave the door a yank.

It slid halfway and stopped, its track blocked by the dead steer hanging from the ceiling. But that was all right, as Trace had time to realize: the narrow opening meant only two of the beasts could attack at once.

And they did. Ferris spat fire at the one on the left. Trace swung his ax straight up and clove into the other’s ribs. His wild swing threw it against the doorframe over his head; it collided and bounced back down, squalling and flailing. Trace shook it off and jumped out after it.

He landed solid and plunged his hand into his vest pocket, swept out his arm in a fanning gesture like sowing wheat. Glowing grains of salt arced out from his throw, and the five keung-si who had been converging on him suddenly leapt backwards, one of them falling right down and rolling over. It got up again, shaking its head, shrieking rage at him.

“Come on,” Trace said, brandishing the ax. “Come on, you whore.”

It pushed off on its knuckles and flew at him. He quick-drew the Colt and shot it out of the air, then buried the ax in its head before it could get up again. He wheeled at the sense of something behind him, but it was Ferris, who blew fire at the next one, missing but driving it away. Trace scattered another handful of salt and the creatures hissed and fell back further; he glanced over his shoulder and saw Boz and the conductor leap down from the car. Charles and Miss Eliza followed, and people were handing out the children, but Trace had no more time to look because they were circling him again. He and Ferris stayed back to back, while the beasts feinted and grabbed, shying back from the ever-widening lines he drew in salt.

There was a shout and a gunshot blast, and Boz hollering orders, and the crying of children, and Miss Eliza’s voice rising calm over all. Trace saw their white nightshirts spreading at the edges of his vision, glimpsed Boz on his left and was glad, as they pushed their perimeter out further from the burning stock car.

It was almost light as day, now, and the heat was getting intense, as the treated lumber of the car began to flame in earnest. He spared a glance backward; two men were letting down the limp body of Brother Clark. All the passengers were out on the dicey shale slope, flinging salt around them as Miss Eliza directed, until they were all ringed in a shining white barrier, like a fence made of moonlight.

“It’s workin,” Boz said, relief in his voice.

“Yeah,” Trace said, and laughed. The beast nearest him snarled at his mirth and Trace bared his teeth at it. “You like that? Huh? You want some of this?” He whipped out his Colt and shot it in its snarling face. It bowled over backwards and Trace leapt after it.

CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

“I count fourteen,” Charles said, flinging the last head into the smoldering remains of the stock car.

“Me too,” Boz agreed. “Not countin the three or four piles of ash, can’t tell what they were.”

“I can account for five piles of ash, personally,” Ferris said.

“That makes twenty even,” Trace said, kicking the canvas-wrapped bundle at his feet. He yawned and cocked his right arm back behind his head to stretch the shoulder. He was going to be damn sore in those muscles for the next few days, although at the moment all he felt was limp and weary in a glad-to-be-alive way. The sun was coming over the rise, sending golden fingers of light over the ground and the sleeping pile of emigrants—those that could sleep, anyway. Some of them had just plain lapsed into senselessness.

Trace sobered, looking over at them, their clothes smeared with soot and blood. He saw the conductor looking, too. The man’s gaze traveled from the little knot of survivors, over the butchered cattle, across the train standing like a gutted monument to the massacre. The conductor rubbed a hand across his face, paying extra attention to his eyes. He wiped away clean streaks on his cheeks.

Boz put a hand on his shoulder. “You did your duty, mister. You stayed with the train.”

“Thank you,” the conductor said in a shaky voice. He blinked several times, jabbed at his nose with a middle finger to push up spectacles that weren’t there. He wiped his hand on his pants and offered it to Boz. “Thank you, Mr.—?”

“Bosley. John Bosley.”

“Pleasure to meet you,” the conductor said.

Trace felt a touch on his hand and looked down to see Miss Eliza smiling at him. She looked remarkably pretty and fresh, with a dressing-gown thrown over her soiled nightdress, and her dark hair hanging loose in the wind.

“Brother Clark is awake,” she said, the corners of her lips twitching. “He doesn’t seem to remember how he fell senseless. He thinks perhaps he breathed too much smoke.”

“Funny, I would have said he was blowin it,” Trace said, and they chuckled together, until her eyes suddenly brightened with tears. She put her fingers to her lips and looked away.

“I’m sorry about your brother,” he said.

She managed a brave smile. “No greater love than this.”

“Yes,” he said gently.

She looked at her hands for a long moment, then gestured at the bundle under his boot. “You are taking that package back to St. Louis? To your employer?”

“Yeah.”

“This Miss Fairweather you work for must be a remarkable woman, to concern herself so with the welfare of strangers.”

“She’s, ah, dedicated, for sure.”

“Are you likewise … dedicated … to her cause?”

There were so many angles to that question that Trace looked at her, wondering if Eliza Kingsley was also more than she seemed.

But she was blushing. “I mean to say, with my brother gone … it would be a comfort to have a man like you in our number. At least until we reached Butte. Or if you needed to complete your business in St. Louis first, I daresay you might find a place with us, later…”

It was a flattering invitation, to be sure. It should have been exactly what he wanted. He braced himself for the onslaught of yearning, guilt, remorse—any of the caustic emotions that had gnawed at him for eighteen years.

He felt only a mild regret, like realizing a favorite pair of boots was worn beyond repair. “I’d like that, ma’am. But it’s not possible.”

“I see.” Miss Eliza bowed her head again, then straightened and offered her hand. “God be with you, Mr. Tracy.”

“And you, ma’am.” He clasped her hand, warm, for a moment, and then let her go back to her flock.

Boz edged up on his flank a moment later. “Did that woman just
propose
to you?”

“Pretty much.”

“You’re a knucklehead.”

Trace sighed from the bottom of his soul. “I know.”

“Listen,” Ferris called, and they all turned to look at him, standing poised with his head cocked northward. “I think our deliverance is at hand.”

A moment later they all heard it: the long, echoing blasts of an approaching locomotive.

*   *   *

“Y
OU MIGHT HAVE
sent word,” Miss Fairweather said peevishly, as she led the way up the attic steps to the laboratory. “Surely there was a telegraph office
somewhere
between here and Eagle Rock.”

“Look, lady, I had enough trouble gettin this thing on the train,” Trace grunted, as he wrangled his burden up through the opening in the floor. “The brakeman thought I was carryin some kind of Indian corpse—I had to convince him it was sawdust and horsehide, like one of those patchwork critters in a carnival show. And you owe me another ten for the bribe I had to pay him.”

“Oh very well.” Miss Fairweather waved a hand toward one of the black-topped tables, and Trace rolled the bundle off his shoulder with a sigh and a thud. He took out his jackknife and cut through the twine, then peeled back the canvas until the thing was exposed to daylight.

It was even uglier dead than alive. She peered over it for a long moment, nostrils flared in distaste, and then summoned Min Chan, who peered into the sunken eyes, inspected the fearsome teeth, pinched and prodded the desiccated skin. Servant and mistress held a brief, murmured conversation, and Miss Fairweather’s expression turned more dour, if that were possible.

“Is it what you thought?” Trace asked. “A kwang-see?”

“It is what I feared, and that is a false keung-si. Tell me, when you dispatched this creature, did you observe any spectral emissions from the body?”

“You mean the Chinaman’s soul leaving it?”

“Is that what you saw?”

He had not quite doubted his own senses, but that night had been so chaotic and bizarre, he had hesitated to draw any conclusions. “The first one I killed, I saw the soul leavin it. He seemed thankful. And I think he stayed around to help me later. So you’re sayin these were … men?”

“In some capacity, yes. I think they were infected with the corrupted essence of another creature, in an attempt to mingle and … manipulate their two spirits.”

Trace felt his mouth curl in disgust. “Who would do that? Who
could
do that?”

Miss Fairweather hesitated for the briefest moment. “You recall the box you fetched for me, from Sikeston?”

He could hardly forget; he’d once dreamt it was trying to burrow its way into
his
guts. But he also remembered the erstwhile owner of that box. “You mean the Russian? Mereck?”

“Yes. I’ve seen his works in this vein before.” She beckoned him to another table, on which rested a long glass cage. Inside was a small brown bat. “Are you familiar with this creature?”

“That’s a bloodsucker.” He’d seen plenty of them down near the Mexico border.

“Indeed.
Desmodus rotundus,
in the Latin. A torment to livestock in the southern parts of this country.” She picked up a pair of pincers, dipped them into a crock, and drew out a bit of something red and dripping. She opened a door on top of the cage and dropped the morsel inside, leaving a smear of blood down the side of the glass.

In a flash, the bat leapt toward the treat, levering the tips of its wings on the floor and swinging its legs between, like a man on crutches. It covered an amazing amount of distance in a single stride and pounced on the dark tidbit, pale tongue lapping eagerly.

“Yeah,” Trace said, trying to ignore the crawling flesh up his back. “That’s what they did.”

“While you were gone, I retraced the destructive path of these keung-si to a point north of Santa Fe. A month ago there was a rash of livestock being slaughtered by something larger than a bat, said to be almost human in appearance. A brief perusal of local newspapers reveals there was a carnival in the area at the same time.”

“Wasn’t Mereck travelin with a circus?”

“I believe he does, yes.”

Trace thought of Ferris—his mysterious references to guiding forces, and his reluctance to say anything more about it. The Fire-Master had managed to disappear from the depot at Eagle Rock before Trace could collar him. Ferris had turned in his seat near the front of the rescue car, as they pulled into the station, and met Trace’s eye over the heads of the thirty-odd survivors between them. He’d touched his hat in salute, slipped through the doors as soon as they were open, and vanished into Idaho Territory.

“I met a man on the train,” Trace said slowly. “Said he was headin out west to meet up with a circus outfit. He knew your name.”

Miss Fairweather frowned. “You were speaking of me to strangers?”

“Not to just anyone. This man … he was a bit like me. He saw the dead. And I think he could do a few other things, like conjure fire. He said he’d been put on that train to protect me.”

Trace didn’t recognize the next few words she spat out, but he knew cussing when he heard it.

“He was put there to
stalk
you, you fool! Ye gods! What else did you tell him?”

“He saved my
life.
”

“Of course he did! His whole purpose—” She stopped, clenched her jaw, and began again in a more measured tone. “This sorcerer, this Mereck you have heard talk of, likes to prey on psychics like yourself—preferably those with little understanding of their powers. If this man you met was an agent of Mereck’s, he was put in place to befriend you, to determine whether you were a likely mark. And if he saved your life, it was because his master would not want such a resource lost, before he could exploit it.” She drew a deep breath. “Mr. Tracy, this haphazard approach to cultivating your abilities is putting you at unnecessary risk. I would have you live here, as my pupil, so that I may supervise your training and see that you are protected in the meantime.”