Authors: Elizabeth Einspanier
To see if this was in fact the case, I knocked at the front door to the mayoral mansion. The butler, a Negro in his thirties, let me in an
d announced my arrival to Mr. Cavanaugh, who joined me in the parlor soon afterwards.
“Dr. Meadows,” Mr.
Cavanaugh greeted me, grinning and enthusiastically pumping my hand, “So good to see you today. I trust you’re here to see how my wife slept?”
“Yes, sir,” I said.
“Well, I can only say that it was a miracle,” he gushed. “My wife woke up this morning a changed woman. I don’t know how long it’s been since she’s had this much energy.”
“That’s wonderful,” I agreed. “May I see her? I’d like to look her over while I’m here.”
“Yes, yes, of course—follow me.” He beckoned, and I followed him upstairs.
Carolyn was in high spirits when we joined her in the upstairs study. Her face had gained some color, and her eyes were sparkling as she greeted me, smiling like a schoolgirl.
“Doc, I can scarcely believe it!” she exclaimed. “I was starting to despair of getting a good night’s rest after so long, but whatever was in that medicine you gave me certainly did the trick! I haven’t felt this alive in five years!”
I flushed a bit at the praise. “It was a pleasure, Mrs. Cavanaugh,” I replied. “May I check you over to make sure everything is going well?”
“Oh, yes—of course!”
Everything seemed to have improved with the addition of a good night’s rest—as I’d expected it might—but when I checked her pulse rate I immediately saw a cluster of four parallel scratches on the inside of her wrist. They were pink and looked half-healed.
“What’s this?” I asked, turning her wrist towards the light to get a better look. In light of the previous night’s experience patching up Wolf, I was especially alert for any signs of infection, but I saw none.
“Oh, I probably fetched my arm on a rose bush during my last midnight stroll,” she said lightly. “It’s nothing to worry about—they’re almost healed, see? And now that I’m not sleepwalking—thanks to you—I won’t have to worry about anything like that anymore, will I?”
The marks didn’t look like scratches from a rose bush’s thorns; they were too thick and too close together. I couldn’t quite identify their source, though, which worried me.
“You’ll want to keep them clean, all the same,” I told her. “They may not look angry now, but they’re still healing. If they start to look red or inflamed, you come see me.”
She told me she would, and I took my leave without noticing any further oddities.
When I returned home I found that, as requested, Wolf had not burned down the clinic. Instead, I found that he’d cleared his things from the front hall and swept up the dust that I knew they would have left behind on the floor. I found Wolf himself in the kitchen, his revolvers partially disassembled atop a towel on the table. He had his crossbow in his lap and was rubbing some sort of oil into its stock with a well-used cloth that at one time might have been white. He paused in this process and glanced up as I entered.
“Thank you for cleaning up the front room,” I said.
He grunted. “Least I could do,” he said. “How were yar rounds?”
“Overall the usual, though one of my patients finally got a good night’s sleep last night.”
He tilted his head, setting aside the crossbow. “That unusual for her?”
I told him about Mrs. Cavanaugh’s troubles, and how much better she looked that morning. “The only thing that worried me were the scratches on her wrist, but she didn’t seem—”
Abruptly Wolf straightened up, and he stared keenly at me. “Scratches?” he echoed. “Where on ‘er wrist?”
I pulled up my own sleeve a few inches. “Here, where the pulse is.”
“She say where they came from?”
“She thought she’d scratched herself on one of the rose bushes in the yard while sleepwalking, but they weren’t there yesterday, and they didn’t look like the sort of scratches a rose bush would leave.” I sighed. “They looked like she’d been nipped by some sort of an animal, honestly—”
I got no farther than that, as Wolf surged to his feet and grasped me by the shoulders.
“I need to know exactly what they looked like. This is real important, Doc—from what ya say he might already be starting, but I have to be sure before—”
I wrenched myself free of his grip—which was far stronger than I’d expected, given the previous evening. “What are you going on about, man?” I demanded. “Speak sense!”
His upper lip peeled back from his teeth in a brief, soundless snarl. “Ya said ya don’t believe in legends and ghost stories,” he said evenly. “I don’t know how much of this to tell ya.”
I sighed. “Look, just tell me straight. If you know what could have left the marks, that might help me to understand what’s going on. Is this connected with that man you’re chasing?”
He frowned, scratching his ear with his overgrown fingernails. “Yeah. It is.” He sighed and sat back down, picking up his crossbow and the polishing cloth. “Now, let me make this perfectly clear—everything I’ve told ya about the man is true.” His mouth twisted. “But I ain’t told ya everything about him.”
I pulled over another chair and sat to listen, sitting forward with my elbows on my knees. “Go on,” I said. Something about his demeanor had my guard up, though, particularly his sudden caginess about his quarry.
He fixed me with his yellow eyes. “Main thing ya gotta know about him is, he ain’t human. He looks human, and acts and talks like the most civilized feller ya ever met, but he ain’t human, not one bit.”
So earnest was he in his claim that I felt a slight chill run up my spine. “Then… what is he?”
He sighed, scratching at his wounded side. “I think that’s something ya’re going to have to see for yarself, Doc.” He looked up at me. “I’ll need ya to do me a favor this evening.”
“What sort of a favor?” I asked.
“I need ya t’be my eyes and ears round here until I get healed up. If I was up to par, I wouldn’t be asking ya fer favors like this, but he winged me pretty good, and I need t’make preparations. They’ll take me ‘bout a day, and I don’t want ‘im getting spooked and running off.”
I said nothing, but nodded slowly.
“Good,” he said. “When dark falls, I need ya t’go over to the Lucky Lady and see if ya can find him.”
“Why after dark?” I asked, “Wouldn’t looking for him be easier in the daylight?”
He shook his shaggy head. “He’s mainly up and about at night. I’ll need ya t’look fer a few things outside the place first. First, he travels in a black coach, all fancy-like, with all the curtains drawn. The coach driver won’t be much to look at—older feller, white hair, dressed nice like his boss—but he’ll be close by the thing. Keep yar eyes peeled. And watch out for them horses—they’ll be off by themselves, away from the rest. They’re big brutes, all glossy black, and they’ll only answer to the groom or the boss. Anyone else gets pulped.”
I nodded, taking mental notes.
“If ya don’t see the coach outside the inn, then that means he’s staying somewhere else. Look till ya find it. This ain’t a big town.”
“Yes, but skulking around at night…” I started to protest, but he cut me off with a sharp wave of his hand.
“Ya’re the town doctor. People won’t think ya’re skulking—they trust ya, right?” I nodded slowly. “Anyway, the sooner ya find this guy, the better it’ll be f’r everyone here.”
I decided to accept this at face value. “All right—so once I find where he’s staying, then what?”
“Then ya get in and get a look at him. Then I guarantee ya’ll see the sort of man he is. He’ll probably have a couple of ladies with him. In all likelihood, one of them will be my bride. Just get a look at everyone, find out as much as ya can, and get back here and let me know what ya find. We’ll go from there.” I went to stand up, but he signaled for me to wait. I settled myself, and he rummaged in a side pocket of his bag. He emerged shortly with a strange trinket—a piece of polished green stone about the length of my thumb, strung on a piece of cord. He offered it to me. “Wear this when ya go,” he said.
I took the bauble and looked it over. “A… good luck stone?” I asked, dubious of good luck charms and arcane trinkets. I knew men who carried rabbit’s feet for luck, but I didn’t believe in such things.
“It’s moss agate,” he said, “Good f’r protection.”
“Protection?” I echoed.
“It’ll keep him out of yar head,” he said, “He has a way of getting to people, making them think he’s other than he is.” He glanced out the window. “I need to have at least one man in this town on my side.” He looked back at me. “Trust me. Ya get a look at him, and ya’ll be glad ya have it.”
I sighed, deciding to humor him. This seemed to be a gift—perhaps compensation for my earlier medical services—and ultimately it felt rude to decline. I put it on, slipping the woven thong over my head.
***
So it was that I found myself approaching the Lucky Lady at dusk whilst wearing a bit of shiny green rock around my neck (but tucked out of sight under my shirt), wondering what on earth I was getting myself into. Little did I know how quickly I would find out the answer to that unasked question—but I am getting ahead of myself.
When I arrived at the Lucky Lady,
I noted the presence of a coach parked to one side of the Lady, painted a shade of black so dark that it seemed to be getting a head start on the coming nightfall. It appeared to have been painted very recently, as the sun had yet to bleach it to any degree. I did not approach too closely, however, as I saw the groom nearby, smoking a cigarette. As Wolf had indicated, the groom was an older gentleman—I estimated him to be in his fifties or sixties—and he had a curious, haunted look about him, like a soldier that had recently come from the battlefield. I wondered what he had seen, but decided not to engage him in conversation.
I continued into the Lady. It was not busy tonight; the main dining room was sparsely populated, as it was after the dinner hour by now. Most people were merely nursing drinks or talking with friends and family. To offer the appearance of purpose at the Lady—for I could not very well just hang about waiting for Wolf’s mystery man to appear without some explanation—I ordered a meal of roast beef and potatoes, and a beer to wash it down.
My food arrived in only a few minutes, and I began eating. May’s roast beef was always a treat, and tonight was no exception. I was maybe halfway through my meal when movement at the stairs drew my eye in that direction, and I saw a handsome, richly-dressed gentleman descending from the rooms above.
He was clad in a black suit, the highest statement of city fashion and impeccably tailored, his boots polished to a high sheen. He was pale, unlike the well-tanned working folk of Salvation, and his hands were slender and delicate, with long, thin fingers like those of a surgeon or a pianist. He had a wavy mane of glossy chestnut hair that pooled about his shoulders, and an impeccably trimmed handlebar mustache. Attending him were two women, breathtakingly beautiful; one was a fair-skinned, bosomy redhead, her figure accentuated by whatever arcane corsetry she wore under her scarlet dress, while the other was an exotic beauty with dark eyes, coppery-brown skin like an Indian, and coal-black hair falling in loose waves about her shoulders, clad in a jewel-green dress. Both women wore elegantly jeweled chokers that sparkled in the light. Together, the three of them projected such an aura of charisma and grace that I could not help but feel in awe of them.
Then, at the landing, they turned. The gentleman glanced idly into the sparsely populated dining room with barely veiled disinterest, as though the townsfolk were of utterly no consequence. During that survey, his eyes fell on me—and the bit of agate I wore under my shirt suddenly turned to ice against my skin.
His eyes were black, deep soulless pits of hell with no humanity behind them whatsoever. It was like staring into the eyes of a cold-blooded murderer… or worse. And the eyes of the women attending him were likewise cold and unfeeling, like the glass eyes of wax statues. The redhead smiled in response to a greeting, but there was something false about her smile. The Indian woman at his other hand likewise smiled and flirted with one of the townsfolk near her, with the same level of disingenuousness.
I could not say what it was about them that struck me as false, but they seemed to me like unskilled actors in a farcical play, pretending to be as human as the other people in the common room.
But the man’s
eyes were what held me—the eyes of a beast, at best. In that instant, I knew fear—the primal, stomach-clenching terror that a rabbit must feel when it is spotted by a wolf. I wanted to run, to get away from this demon in the shell of a man, but I couldn’t move. I was frozen to my chair, the sweat breaking out on my face.
And in the next instant his attention flicked away to some other point of interest, and I could move again. I glanced around, wondering if anyone else had seen what I had. Nobody gave the slightest indication. Had I imagined it? Had Wolf spooked me? Certainly there could be no demons in such a town as Salvation, at least not beyond the mortal kind that could be stopped with a noose. But that man… I doubted fifteen feet of hemp would even faze him. The man and his entourage walked past me to the door, and I caught a whiff of a foul smell, like that of a rotting corpse, though I saw no decay on any of the three visitors. They passed by the spot where I sat rooted to my chair in sheer, bone-deep terror, and I cannot describe the relief I felt when the trio finally left the Lucky Lady.