Liahona (10 page)

“You ain’t listening to me!” Rockwell snapped, and swung
down from his horse.
 
He reached
for the
Jim Smiley’s
ladder, but as his
hand grasped the first rung, O’Shaughnessy
tsk, tsked
at him, and Sam looked over to see his associate
aiming the bulb-gun at the mountaineer.

“We’ll stay better friends, Mr. Marshal,” the Irishman
smiled, “if you stay off our fookin’ vessel.”

Rockwell spat again, stared at both men like a hungry hawk,
and then swung back into the saddle.
 
“When you’re lying on the red rock,” he bellowed at them, “holding your
guts in your hands and weeping out the last seconds of your lives, you remember
this!
 
You wanna call for your mama
in that moment, you can.
 
You wanna
call for Jesus, go right ahead.
 
Just don’t waste your damn time calling for Orrin Porter Rockwell!”
With a snort of indignation, Rockwell turned his horse’s head and trotted towards
Fort Bridger’s westward-facing maw.

“Bloody hell, I hate these people already,” O’Shaughnessy
griped, holstering his fancy gun.
 
The holster, Sam thought, reminded him of the ones he had seen tied to
the Pinkertons’ hips.

“Oh, I don’t know,” Sam disagreed, watching Rockwell turn
north off the road into the sagebrush and scrub grass.
 
“I kind of like a place that sends out
a welcoming committee.”

*
  
*
  
*

“Mummies!” cried Edgar Allan Poe, flinging his hands up in a
conjuror’s wave before him.
 
“Mummies, of both man and mysterious beast!”

He stalked the deck of the
Liahona
, cool breeze snapping around his ears under the brim
of his tall hat and blowing behind his smoked spectacles, threatening to dry
out his eyeballs and his skin despite all the oil in his air.
 
At least, between the
Liahona’s
speed and the height of its deck off the ground, the
air was free of the reddish dust that the steam-truck’s huge tracks churned up
and spewed in its wake.
 
He could
barely keep from coughing as it was, and a lungful of dust would surely drag
him down into paroxysms.
 

A little boy, dressed in overalls, a miniature sailor’s
jacket and slouch hat and carrying a length of wire towards the wheelhouse,
stopped to listen.
 
Passengers’
heads turned, including the heads of the two Englishmen… good.
 

“Mummies!” he cried again.
 
“Mummies and other curious, fascinating and even…
repellent
… evidences of the wisdom and high craft of ancient
Egypt!”

From within his coat he produced one of Pratt’s four canopic
jars, the one with the baboon head, and spun on one heel in a slow pirouette
with the little object held forward in his hands, showing it to the benches
full of passengers.
 
It hadn’t been
made to be used in this sort of a show, of course, but what Orson Pratt and
Horace Hunley didn’t know was unlikely to hurt them.
 
He deliberately clicked to a stop facing the Englishmen,
sitting on either side of a woman in a red dress, and assessed them carefully
through his tinted lenses.

One man was younger, in his middle twenties, perhaps, and
had the pale, flustered and determined look of a privileged young fellow trying
to make his way in the world.
 
Something had carved a bite-shaped chunk out of the brim of his top hat,
giving him a comical appearance, but he seemed delighted with Poe’s theater,
clapping vigorously as Poe tucked away the canopic jar and produced instead the
cylinder of scarabs.
 
Absalom
Fearnley-Standish, Poe thought to himself, who are you, really, and what are
you doing here?

His companion was older, nearing forty, and was hard, dark,
scarred and masculine.
 
He was
dressed in a frock coat and waistcoat like he might have worn on the streets of
London, but he was hatless, and his clothing showed the dust and wear of many
miles of road.
 
Richard Burton,
famous explorer, etcetera.
 
Well,
Mr. Burton, Poe mused, let’s assay you a little bit, test your metal.
 

Let’s test you both.

“And magic!” he cried and, reaching into his canister, he
pulled out a handful of the brass scarabs and scattered them across the laps of
Burton, Fearnley-Standish and their female companion.

“Aagh!” shrieked Fearnley-Standish, and would have jumped
from his seat if Burton hadn’t restrained him with a hand on his arm.

“Arjuna’s bow, man, they won’t eat you!” the explorer
snorted.

Then Poe saw their female companion’s face and froze.
 
She was short and dark, all straight
lines and grace, and though he would have recognized her through any disguise,
she wore none.

It was Roxie.

Robert, you didn’t mention… but then, of course…

She smiled at him, the polite and slightly flirtatious smile
of a woman who is casually attached to another man but conceals within her a
voracious, insatiable wolf.
 
She
didn’t recognize him, obviously, but then it had been years, and Poe was proud
of the verisimilitude of his false nose.
 
Within his breast a desire to seize her in his arms, sweep her to his
chest and devour her mouth with his warred against an equally strong urge to
pull his pistol from inside his jacket and blow out her vicious, wicked,
conniving brains.

“Well, man!” Burton snapped.
 
“Get on with it!”

He felt stunned, his vision out of focus.
 
He floated, lost.
 
Then, in the sea of passengers’ faces
under flapping parasols, he saw the physiognomy of his accomplice, the haggard
dwarf Jedediah Coltrane.
 
Coltrane was
mouthing something to Poe, a nervous look on his face; Poe’s professionalism
reasserted itself and he tore his eyes away from Roxie’s.
 

Stepping back, he raised both hands about his head, one of
them holding the cylinder by its lid, and cried out in a loud voice, to be sure
that the entire deck could hear him.
 
“Behold the incantations of Thoth!
 
Behold the power of Hermes Thrice-Greatest!
 
Behold the might of the Egyptian priests, able to reach
through the curtain of death itself and command the obedience of the inanimate
and the damned!”
 
When he was sure
they were all watching him, he waved his empty hand in a great circular
flourish over the scarabs, carefully thumbing the
recall
button inside the canister’s lid.
 
“Nebenkaure, panjandrum, Isis kai Osiris!”
he shouted.

The clocksprung beetles sprang instantly to life.
 
With a great
chittering
and
clacking
, each metal bug rolled upright, oriented itself, and then began its
trek.
 
From the laps and boots of
Roxie and the Englishmen, from the bench they sat on and the floor beneath
them, the brass beetles swarmed in a great mass towards Poe.
 
He raised his hands, stood still and
laughed as diabolically and mysteriously as he could as the bugs climbed his
clothing, laughed when he felt the first brass legs touch the bare skin of his
neck, laughed with his whole chest and belly as the scarabs detoured around his
head and crawled up his left arm, kept laughing as they swarmed ticklishly
about his fist and dropped one by one into their native canister, and then, for
effect, stopped laughing at the exact moment in which he slammed the canister
shut.

The spectators went wild.

“That wasn’t Egyptian,” Burton said sourly, but the
passengers all about him applauded, and a few whistled or whooped in
excitement.
 
Coltrane clapped along
with the crowd, shooting shrewd appraising looks at the people around him.
 
Sizing up the marks, Poe thought.
 
The man had the ingrained instincts of
an inveterate carny.
 
The little
boy with the loop of wire stood stiff as a statue, his eyes so wide they
threatened to swallow his face.

“They’re scarab beetles, Dick,” Fearnley-Standish pointed
out.

“I meant the words,” the darker man growled.
 
“Pure higgledy-piggledy.
 
Nonsense.
 
Arrant balderdash.”

“My name is Doctor Jamison Archibald!” Poe announced.
 
“Tonight, at seven o’clock by the
Captain’s watch, in the stateroom, for the very reasonable sum of two copper
pennies, any passenger may see exhibited and explained these and other marvels,
visual and auditory.
 
See the
uncanny hypnotic hypocephalus in action, stealing the souls of men!
 
Witness the muscular terror of the dire
Seth Beast!”

“Will children be admitted free of charge?” inquired a
plain-faced, reedy-voiced, gray-wrapped matron in a blue prairie bonnet,
clutching under her bony wings a trio of similarly undernourished-looking
brats.

“My dear madam,” Poe stage-whispered, meeting her eyes over
the rims of his spectacles, “the things I have to display are dark and
terrifying apparitions, the stuff of nightmares.
 
Children will not be admitted
at all
.”

The little boy with the loop of wire shuddered.

“There’s nothing hypnotic about a hypocephalus,” Burton
huffed to Roxie.
 
“It’s just a
damned pillow!”
 
He glared at
Poe.
 
“The Geographical Society
would cut you to pieces, you knave!”

Burton was the genuine article, then, and not some
impostor.
 
He also seemed to be a
tough customer, and his fuse was none too long.
 
Poe decided he would have to be careful around the
explorer.
 
On top of everything
else, the man seemed very attached to Roxie.
 
Was he playing her?

Was
she
playing
him
?

Poe felt uneasy.
 
“For an additional three cents,” he quipped with a bow in Burton’s
direction, “you may join me at the lectern tonight and share your commentary.”

Burton’s jaw went rigid and his face began slowly turning
purple.
 
“As for the Seth-Beast,
you humbug, there’s no such animal!
 
It is a mere symbol of chaos, and the Egyptians made it up!”

Coltrane
woofed!
raucously in the ear of the little boy, who jumped nearly out of his skin and
went scuttling on to the wheelhouse to complete his errand.
 
The dwarf laughed heartily at his own
prank.

Poe bowed again, deeply, and raised the canister to incite
another round of applause.
 
He
turned and walked away, upstaging Burton and not letting him finish.

“It’s just a jackal!” Burton shouted after him across the
deck.
 
“With the ears and tail of a
jackass!”

*
  
*
  
*

Absalom cleared his throat.
 
Annie didn’t look up.

He felt ridiculous, leaning slightly into the wind to keep
his hat on his head, coattails flapping behind him, a mint-spiked lemonade in
each hand.
 
What if she thought he
was an idiot?
 
She had looked so
happy talking to the Brute the night before—maybe he was actually the
sort of man she
liked
.
 
Absalom was uncomfortably conscious of
his smoothness, his refinement, his lack of facial hair, the humiliating look
of his damaged hat.
 
He didn’t
think he could bear it if she mocked him, not in front of all the other
passengers.

But then, he thought to steel himself, a man who would dare
to court an Angel must needs risk a terrible fall.

He cleared his throat again.
 
Still she didn’t look up.
 
Her nose was buried in a book of some sort, a cheap-looking
print with a soft cover that appeared to be profusely illustrated with dreadful
pictures of gunmen and wild animals.

“Pardon me, miss,” he said.
 
“I thought you might enjoy taking some refreshment.”

The Angel looked up and smiled.
 
“Aw,” she said, “that’s so sweet of you.”
 
Absalom smiled and handed her the
lemonade.
 
“Thank you,” she said,
took the drink, and returned to her novel.

Absalom stood by her side for a few seconds.
 
When he couldn’t think of anything to
say, he turned and lurched away.

*
  
*
  
*

Burton’s head hurt, and he badly wanted to stab
someone.
 
Anyone.
 

He’d woken up in discomfort and had immediately been
saddened to see Roxie sitting at his cabin’s dresser, fully dressed and
finishing up with her coiffure.

“You are one hell of a woman.”

Roxie had stood, smiled, and then stooped to kiss his
cheek.
 
“Remember that,” she had
said simply, and then she was gone.
 
He was left with the salt-creamy smell of her of body and astonishing
memories.

He shivered.

At least he had slept soundly—that in itself was a
luxury for Burton, who was a terrible insomniac.
 
He had luxuriated in the rest, lying in the little bunk as
long as her smell and the warmth of her body lingered, eventually forcing
himself to shave, dress and rejoin human society.