Of Grave Concern Part 15

"I hope it is the only time."

"Now, the old-timers say the best cure for the common hangover is to brew up some tea using rabbit pellets," Doc McCarty said, lifting his gla.s.ses so he could read the label on a small tin he had taken from the shelf. "You could try some rabbit-drop tea, if you like."

"The thought makes me want to hurt you."

"Here, I have something that will relieve the headache," McCarty said. "Don't worry, this won't turn you into a hoppie or a laudanum wh.o.r.e. It's a powder that is mostly caffeine."

"Why not just drink coffee?"

"Because you'd have to drink a whole pot of it," he said. "Dissolve a teaspoon of this in a gla.s.s of water and drink it down. Then drink three or four more gla.s.ses of water after that, because part of the pain of a hangover is dehydration."

"What irony."

Doc McCarty got a gla.s.s and filled it with water from a pitcher behind the counter.

"I'd avoid the water at most of these joints along Front Street," he said as he spooned the powder into the gla.s.s, then mixed it vigorously. "Mostly, they go down to the Arkansas River and fill their buckets. Problem is, there are a few thousand longhorns in the fields around us. When these beasts eliminate, their product trickles into the river."

He handed me the gla.s.s. "This water comes from my rain barrel out back."

I muttered my thanks. Then I drank down half the gla.s.s.

Then Doc McCarty fetched a bottle of bourbon from a cabinet, walked over, and uncorked it.

"You can't be serious," I said, covering the gla.s.s with my hand. "Just the smell of it makes me want to retch."

"Just an ounce or two," he said. "You're suffering alcohol withdrawal. A bit will ease the pain."

I moved my hand.

"So much for never."

He poured a shot into the water, turning it the color of weak tea. "You're that woman, aren't you?"

"What woman?"

"Professor Wylde, the medium."

"Uh-huh," I said, drinking the watered-down bourbon.

"I would be interested in doing an investigation of your powers."

"No thanks," I said. "I've been subjected to enough at the hands of educated men. They have done things to me during seances that wouldn't have been allowed during the Inquisition."

"What do you mean?"

"It begins simply enough, with the doctors wanting to hold your hands to make sure that you're not manipulating objects. Then it progresses to the binding of both the hands and the feet, and of the legs. Sometimes they will tie your hands behind your back and then run a cord from that to your ankles. And then there are the searches, being required to shed every piece of clothing to a.s.sure them that you're not hiding some apparatus for making fraud inside your bloomers, and then they want to examine your mouth and other orifices. Finally you are put in stocks, or your entire body is locked inside a box with holes for just your hands, and barely enough room to breathe."

"Sounds unpleasant," Doc McCarty said.

"That's like calling an iron maiden uncomfortable," I said. "The medical doctors will never accept communication with the dead, even if Jesus Christ appeared before them Himself and told them what Ben Franklin had for lunch in Summerland and where Captain Kidd hid all the loot."

Doc McCarty smiled.

"Well, I wasn't planning to bring out the thumbscrews," he said. "I'm just curious, that's all. I've seen enough to know there are more things in heaven and earth-people surviving wounds that should have killed them, prayer making a difference, folks coming back from being a few minutes dead and talking about bright lights and dead relatives."

"You sound like a regular sky pilot, Doc."

"Faith is not unusual," he said. "It's the natural condition of man. But it's curious that a woman who professes to demonstrate spirit communication seems skeptical of religious faith. Don't you believe, Miss Wylde?"

"I believed in a lot of things, Doc," I said, "when I was a child. But now, I have given up childish things."

"That's good," he said. "Using the Bible to support your disbelief. Clever."

"Glad you liked it," I said.

"But clever never eased an aching heart."

"You're selling clever short, Doc." I handed him the empty gla.s.s. "You're onto something with this headache powder and bourbon cure," I said. "You could patent it and make a fortune. I can almost hear myself think again."

The front door opened with a bang.

Jack Calder backed into the drugstore, carrying a man by the legs, two dusty cowboy boots sticking out beneath each elbow. Tom the Jailer, had the other half, and between them was a thin orso covered in blood. The man's head bobbed limply against Tom's stomach.

"Over here," Doc McCarty said as he cleared a table of a coal oil lamp and a few books. The body was deposited on the table, and Doc McCarty ripped open the b.l.o.o.d.y s.h.i.+rt.

There was a ragged hole in the man's chest, about the diameter of a coffee can. The edges of the skin were blackened, and, deep inside, I could see white splinters of his sternum-and beneath that, his beating heart.

Doc splattered whiskey over his hands, handed off the bottle, and rubbed them together with vigor. Then he plunged both hands into the wound, attempting to stop the bleeding.

The stricken man's eyes shot open and he uttered a terrible gasp.

I realized the man was the bullwhacker whom I had seen with the freight caravan during my first day in Dodge.

"What happened?" Doc asked.

"Don't know," Calder said. "Found him like this on the south bank of the Arkansas River."

"Get her out of here," Doc snapped.

"Let me stay," I said. "I recognize the man."

"What do you want us to do, Doc?" Calder asked.

"I-I don't know," Doc McCarty stammered. "I've never seen a wound like this. It's as if he was shot in the chest with a mountain howitzer, but there's no ball or shot or any fragments."

The bullwhacker turned his head. His eyes rolled, and a stream of blood poured from the corner of his mouth to puddle on the floor. There was a hollow rush of air as his lungs emptied.

"He's gone," Doc said.

"No more chipped beef for him," Tom said.

"Show some respect," Doc said. "Take off your hat, at least."

Doc slowly removed his hands from the man's chest. As he did, he drew out a sliver of something that looked like gla.s.s. In b.l.o.o.d.y fingers, Doc held the shard up to the light to get a better look at it.

Red and black swirled and coiled.

"It looks like a chip from a shattered marble," Doc said.

Then the piece evaporated, leaving Doc holding nothing.

A s.h.i.+ver ran down my spine as I remembered Malleus and his leather bag and the violet-and-yellow-and-blue marble he had plucked from the mud after knocking the wind from me.

"What was that?" Tom the Jailer asked.

"Never saw anything like it," Doc said.

"It was a splintered aura," I said.

"What?" Calder asked.

"An aura is a shadow your soul casts," I said. "But that one wasn't his. It was somebody else's. It was somehow shot into his chest, like a bullet, where it exploded."

"That's the craziest thing I ever heard," Calder said.

"You said you knew this man?" Doc asked.

"No, but I've seen him," I said. "He drove the oxen for Malleus, the repulsive creature who owns the freight company. I don't remember the bullwhacker's name."

"Shadrach," Calder said.

"Yes, that's it."

"Malleus, you say?" Doc asked. "What an odd name."

"What language is that?" Calder asked.

"A dead one," Doc said. "A 'malleus' is Latin for 'hammer,' and the reason I know is because I had to learn it in medical school. It's the name of a small bone in the ear that transmits sound vibrations from the eardrum."

"Where did you meet this Malleus?" Calder asked.

"On Bridge Street," I said. "The freight caravan was coming back into town from someplace in Texas. On Wednesday, I think. They had a problem with a wheel and Malleus b.u.mped into me. It was unpleasant. There was also a handsome man who rode with them, a whiskey trader."

"Vanderslice," Calder said with venom.

"He did not tell me his name."

"What color was his s.h.i.+rt?"

"Black, with mother-of-pearl b.u.t.tons."

"That's Vanderslice," Calder said. "He's a bad type. I received a federal warrant for his arrest this morning. He's been selling liquor to the Indians."

"Then why don't you arrest him?"

"I would, but he left yesterday with the freight wagon train to Fort Elliott. He travels with the train nearly to the Canadian, then breaks off and heads west, toward a hideout n.o.body's ever seen. Rumor is that he keeps a Comanche wife and child there."

Doc McCarty threw a sheet over the body.

"Sorry you had to witness that," he told me.

I mumbled something and stepped out of the drugstore to Front Street.

Using the technique of looking while not looking, which Jonathan had first taught me so long ago, I scanned the people around me: cowboys with red or yellow auras, businessmen with hues that ranged from green to tan, a few working girls who were out early and whose auras ran the gamut, including some blacks and orange.

Then I looked at myself in a shop window.

Nothing. No violet, no yellow, no blue.

I no longer had an aura.

This creature, this Malleus, had stolen my aura and trapped it in a leather bag, along with the rest of his collection, and was now somewhere on the southern plains.

The thought made me sick.

I fell to my knees there in the mud and heaved until nothing more would come up.

21.

"I am Kate Bender and I address you from h.e.l.l."

The voice was cold and proud and had some foreign accent, but not German. Greek, perhaps. I was aware that the words were coming from me, and I knew I was standing on the stage of the opera house, but I was asleep.

The question that had preceded the trance-"Are you Kate Bender?"-had come near the end of the performance, but there were still a few minutes of candle left, so I had to give some kind of answer. There are, of course, a thousand ways of replying without answering. I was just about to launch into one of those long-winded, but meaningless, monologues, when I involuntarily uttered a single word: "Yes."

I had never heard a crowd go so quiet.

Fils de salope, I thought. What was wrong with me? Was it still the aftereffects of the hangover? Did losing my aura also make me stupid? I cursed myself and prepared another tack, this one about how we really were all Kate Bender, because there lurks the capacity for great evil in all of us. It was then I slipped into the trance and began talking with this voice that was not my own.

"Now we're getting somewhere," the cowboy with the auburn curls, who had come back for the repeat performance, declared. "Tell us, Kate Bender, how did you and your murderous kin escape?"

"Magic," the voice said. "Only magic. How else could this supposed family, the four most wanted people in America, disappear without a trace?"