Cape Hell (17 page)

Half of it, of course, was delirium. The building had to be an illusion. Such a house, the grass around it shorn close to the ground, with homey yellow light glowing through the glass and a blue-enamel mounting block resting beside the flagstone walk, had been transported there in my fever from a neighborhood in St. Louis or Denver, within walking distance of a schoolhouse and a church. It no more belonged in that wild place than a hopscotch court on Cemetery Ridge. The gourds were homely enough to be real.

I was wrong about both, as it turned out; but by then I knew I'd been wrong about almost everything connected with Oscar Childress from the start.

As the creatures dismounted and milled about, unhitching harnesses and opening their trousers to spill acrid-smelling water onto the ground—I swore steam rose from it, although the evening was warm—I looked for Joseph, but by then it had grown too dark to see inside the wagon that had been carrying him. Once again my gaze went toward that impossible house. Piled up against a side wall, just visible in the shifting light of the torches, was a pale heap that struck a gong deep in my memory.

In my ranch hand days I'd supported myself winters hunting buffalo, then switched to wolfing and traded the pelts for bounty. The packs had swollen on the easy pickings of the shaggies' abandoned carcasses, and when they'd stripped them to the bone, armies of vagabonds had swarmed in to harvest the skeletons for sale to manufactories back East, which fashioned them into buttons, combs, and handles for knives and chests of drawers and pulverized them to press into china for the table and to filter the impurities from sugar. Within months of the last hunt, the plains were scraped clean of any evidence the beast had ever existed, millions vanished in twenty short years. I'd led pack horses piled with wolf pelts through city streets turned into canyons of bone; but soon even they vanished. Where Childress had managed to find so many to refine his coarse-ground cane was another of the mysteries that piled up around him like—well, the bones themselves.

I heard the
shink
of a pin being drawn from an iron staple, followed by another, and then the tailgate swung down with a rattle and thump of elmwood. A toe struck me in the ribs, shooting a red flare of pain all the way to my torn scalp. My keeper, awake at last, stood stretching, his own bones making as much noise as the tailgate. I pulled myself to my feet before he could aim another kick. I was wearing my old comfortable range Stetson, trained to my head so it wouldn't blow off in a stiff wind, but I held the brim as I made to step down, because the angle I'd chosen to avoid contact with the sticky lump wasn't natural. I steadied myself with the other hand on the side of the wagon as I groped for the ground with one foot. Standing on bare earth I couldn't feel my legs. I took a couple of steps to get the blood flowing, but instead of the pins and needles I expected my knees folded and I pitched straight forward into black.

*   *   *

At first I
thought the whole business of the house and the torches and the pile of bones and the stop itself was a dream, and actually felt the familiar lurching of the wagon; but there was something different, almost alien, about the surface where I lay on my back. I hadn't slept in the upholstered berth aboard the train in days, and had no idea how long I'd spent stretched out on the weathered boards of the wagon. My muscles and bones had adapted themselves to unyielding planks, beginning with the floor of the locomotive's cab, to the point where the softness of feathers, ticking, and clean linen—it smelled of cornstarch and fresh air—made them ache. Whoever had carried me here would have been kinder to have laid me on a floor, then a stiff bench, and brought me by degrees to occupy a civilized bed.

Just where the bed was I couldn't say, even when I opened my eyes. Darkness surrounded me, so black it made my heart clatter. I was sealed inside a padded coffin; cedar, from the sweet scent. I lay breathing shallowly, to avoid exhausting what air was left me, dreading to raise a hand and confirm the tightness of my confinement. My hand twitched, lifted an inch, dropped back to my chest. I pressed my lips tight and willed it to rise again. My arm went up and up and felt nothing but empty air. I opened my mouth wide, exhaled in a whoosh, and sucked in, filling my chest until it ached. I felt as if I'd dived into a thousand-foot lake, touched the bottom, and clawed my way back to the surface with my lungs straining through the last fathom close to bursting. The air was even sweeter than it smelled.

Gradually—glacially—my eyes adjusted themselves, allowing a gray glimmer of light to measure the dimensions of the room where I lay and to suggest a shape for the objects that shared it with me. It was either windowless or the curtains were heavy, because the only source of illumination was a hollow rectangle at the far end where a door didn't fit flush to the frame. I had no idea if it was day or night, or if the space beyond was lit by the sun or a lamp. It reflected on the curvature of a pitcher near my head, and fell from there to the top of a table or a nightstand within reach of where I lay. Through the corner of my eye I made out a bedpost, curved also, but not well enough to decide whether it was wood or metal, only that it, too, was capable of reflecting light.

They fascinated me, those polished surfaces. Apart from the glass-bezeled gauges and steel of the
Ghost
and the rails it rolled on, it had been days since I'd laid eyes on anything that wasn't coarse and light-absorbing; even the lush fittings of the parlor car were a dim memory since I'd decamped to the front of the train.

Something else glittered, as if from its own source of light; the gilded binding of a leather-bound volume lying beside the pitcher on its stand. I brought my face close to the spine and peered, but the room might have been black as pitch for all I could make of the gold-stamped title: It was German. That gave me a good idea of whose bed it was. Two people in that vicinity might understand English and Spanish; it was unlikely more than one would be educated in any other language.

I decided it was night. The air was chill at that altitude without the sun to warm it, and wrapped my face in a cold mask. My arm, cold too, was bare where it lay on a coverlet made from the pelt of some animal and cured to silken softness; doeskin, I thought. Between it and my body was a linen sheet, woven so finely it felt like heavy cream. It covered my other arm. I slid my hand down my body, confirming my suspicion that I was naked.

I felt weak, but my skin was cool and dry. There was no determining how long I'd been there, or how many times I'd been bathed of sweat and the bedding had been changed. Malaria has been with me off and on in all the years since, and the time needed for the fever to break varies. It might have been hours or days.

Carefully, to avoid triggering a relapse, I peeled aside the coverlet and sheet, sat up, gathered energy, and swung my feet to the floor. That amount of effort took as much out of me as I had for the moment; I leaned my shoulder against the bedpost to collect my strength. My bare soles rested on thick wool, a woven rug probably of Indian workmanship. I worked my toes, enjoying its warmth. I'd begun to shiver, and to worry that another attack was on its way.

When the sensation faded, I found the courage to test the extent of my recovery. I shifted my weight forward, grasped the bedpost, and pulled myself upright. The room did a slow turn but ended up stable. I tugged the sheet off the bed, wrapped it around me, closing it at my throat, and went exploring.

Some kind of decoration hung on a wall, a large painting, I thought, but the subject, painted in dark colors and possibly made more murky with age, remained anonymous inside a frame of some dark lustrous wood.

Beyond the edge of the rug the floor was wooden as well, cool and smooth under my unshod feet. There was pine aplenty in the Sierras, and evidently labor sufficient to cut and split and plane and sand it. Such mindless and repetitive work would be ideal for the tiny brains of the men who'd brought me there.

I bumped into something tall and solid. I laid a palm against the door of a wooden cabinet. The cedar smell increased when I pulled it open. I groped inside, felt fabric. I hadn't been out of my canvas coat in a week, and knew the texture even in the dark. Probing further, my hand found the Gatling cartridge in the pocket where I'd put it. My relief was tinged with revulsion: Who'd be senseless enough to overlook it when he was undressing me, if not one of my doltish escorts? The thought of his hands touching my bare skin made it crawl. It was as if a snake had slithered over me while I slept.

The rest of my clothes, gritty as they felt from constant wearing, were as welcome as the coat with its secret treasure. I let the sheet fall to the floor and stood naked in the stiff Mexican night. I dressed slowly, pacing myself, sitting on the bed to pull on my boots. The effort spent me. I lay back for a few minutes to refuel. I wasn't quite as weak as a kitten, but I fell short of a full-grown tabby.

Whoever had hung up my things hadn't been accommodating enough to leave behind my revolvers; but there was no need to be greedy. The fifty-caliber slug slapped pleasantly against my hip when I put on the coat.

I had a fair notion where I was: the plantation headquarters of Major Oscar Childress, thousands of feet almost straight up from Cape Hell.

 

TWENTY-THREE

My hat occupied
a top shelf of the cabinet, still damp with sweat. That was encouraging; I hadn't been out of my senses more than a day or two or it would be dry. I'd been in that state before, once when a bullet grazed my scalp and a few times when the horse under me decided I didn't belong and pitched me headfirst into the American frontier. It was always like reading a book with pages torn out, and a relief to know it wasn't missing anything beyond a couple of chapters.

The thought of old head injuries reminded me to check my scalp. My temples were throbbing, but that could have been part of the fever. I fingered the tender spot carefully, felt woven cloth, and around it bare skin. Someone had shaved a tonsure some two and a half inches square and patched it with gauze.

I couldn't picture any of Childress' half-animals performing that operation, or bothering to consider it. The image of poor Joseph, traitor or not, crucified in the back of a wagon was as vivid as when I'd first seen it. If the major had added physician to his long list of skilled occupations, he was a da Vinci for the nineteenth century.

I slid a hand inside my pocket and closed it around the Gatling round, purely for security. I still didn't know what to do with it, but it was the only secret I had left.

Approaching the rectangle of light I hesitated, then groped for a handle. It was a knob, engraved bronze or brass from the feel. It would be locked, naturally. Naturally I paused again when it turned without resistance and a latch slid free with the slight friction of metal scraping metal.

Caution be damned. I'd been carried up the mountain for a purpose, and if it was important I stay in that room the door wouldn't have been left open. I swung it wide and entered a library.

It was rigged out like the shelves in a ship, with wooden lips attached to keep the books from falling. Were earthquakes common at that altitude? The shelves were pine; tiny cones of sawdust had been left by termites, but the books themselves were in good condition, although they showed traces of use. The titles were printed on cloth and stiff paper and stamped in gold leaf into leather old and shabby and oiled and glistening:
The Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection, Selected Poems of Robert Browning,
odd numbers of the Encyclopedia Britannica,
Frankenstein,
a shelf of Dickens,
The Anatomy of Melancholy,
bound copies of
The Lancet, Principles of Steam, Alice in Wonderland,
Clausewitz,
The Oregon Trail
. I didn't linger over the ones in German, French, Latin, and some hen-scratches that were either Hebrew or Greek, but I'd heard of Nietzche somewhere and knew Julius Caesar had had something to say about how Gaul was divided. There were many more, hundreds more, on adjoining shelves all around the room, but they were lost in gloom. It was a hodge-podge of science, history, fiction, philosophy, and poetry, arranged in no order I could apply, either by author or subject, as if they'd been flung randomly into place after consulting, like oranges squeezed dry.

It wasn't just show. I'd visited the libraries of wealthy self-made men and seen their immaculate sets, the spines uncreased and bought by the yard to impress visitors not observant enough to note the fact they'd arrived unopened from the dealers and stayed that way. Waiting—which is what you spend most of your time doing where important people are involved—I'd taken down dozens of them to kill time, only to find most of the pages uncut. Plainly these books had been opened and shut scores of times, their spines thumb-blurred and the bindings loose. Someone had underscored whole passages of Shakespeare in iron-gall ink. The reader had marked his place in Act IV, Scene II of
Richard III
with a Confederate two-dollar bill. I snapped shut the hefty volume—all tragedies—and slid it back into its slot, not before a tarantula scampered out and vaulted up to the top shelf.

The hour was later than I thought; or earlier. A gap in the heavy curtains covering one of a pair of tall windows let in the tarnished light of either dawn or dusk. I walked up to it, spread the heavy green panels, and looked at a crescent of brilliant orange stuck to the edge of a shadowy mountain. I guessed we were in the middle of the range, and having no other means of sensing direction couldn't determine whether I was looking east or west. I waited. It seemed to me the sun was moving up rather than down. When a yellow ray sprang free I knew it was the former. Dawn comes late in the mountains. That made the time nearer six o'clock than five. I was alone, but wouldn't be for long. In the Sierra Madre, no one sleeps in.