AN ACCOUNT OF THE PHANTOM BILL GANG

EXCLUSIVE TO LIBRE KINGSTONIA PRESS

October 15, 1891

by Mutt Wilford

as told to and confirmed by Frederick Grant

I share this tale as a warning, to what I witnessed in the caverns beneath this damned city, a warren of spider holes and wolf dens that the Queen of Kingstonia has yet to tame, where other kinds of vermin have lived and hid as they built their little empires like ants.

Vermin like me, who witnessed what can be done if vengeance against the cruel is given shape and form. Vermin like me, who remain alive solely because such an instrument of vengeance saw fit to leave a witness.

It is true that I ran with Phantom Bill, terror guard of Kingston Pen before the sky rock crashed into the den of thieves and turned this city into a nightmare. I, too, was a guard, junior in rank, and saw firsthand the collection of wild damnations caged for society’s protection. Phantom Bill was Captain of the Guard, ran his ship with barbed discipline, and when the chaos reigned after the impact of the sky rock, he took to the transformed city to start his own law and order, hunting down those who’d escaped. Justice, he said, justice has no mercy. Bill certainly had none as master of corrections. And he had less now.

But his gang was being whittled. Through the limestone streets, into the shifting walls of the city’s heart, called Arcadia, and even at the outskirts where the green mist that emerged from the sky rock covers us like an impenetrable cloud, Phantom Bill’s gang and associates were being slaughtered.

Rumours filled the din. Of a madman with iron hands. Of a shadow that could not be stopped. In Kingstonia, one is quick to believe such creatures exist, what with the walking dead called Lurchers who serve Queen Charlotte like slaves, and the Copper Knights, made of railway junk, that run mad through Arcadia. Anyone who tasted the green mist that emerged from the sky rock was changed in ways vile and unnatural. My own small taste cursed me with a memory like a book that can never be lost, whose pages I recall without desire, a perfect reflection of the past stamped in my head, filled to the brim with monsters.

Though his gang was reduced from twelve to four, Phantom Bill was no fool. A veteran of the Indian Wars, he began a reconnaissance, gathered intelligence, pieced together the scraps about what thing had bested his men.

And it led us to the Libre.

This very paper held accounts of the creature and the slaughtering of Bill’s crew. Every man had been a guard of the Pen, men who’d stood at Phantom Bill’s side as he kept the savage inmates from breaking loose, until the sky rock undid all his work. The articles had such details that Phantom Bill came to believe the author had himself witnessed the attacks and was turning this murderous shadow into a hero.

So he sent his last squadron to the home of the author, one Frederick Grant, living above the secret and transient office of the Libre at the Broken Beard Tavern. I led the attack, having gathered and remembered all the stray facts about Grant’s whereabouts from the vendors at the market square and the other old gossips who milled about in daylight before the fangs of the city emerged to feast.

My squad was all that remained of Bill’s mighty gang, two of the best Kingston Pen had to offer. Lieutenant Martin Jones, a graduate of the Royal Military College, had hands as cold as a witch’s heart, and a curdled reputation for cruelty. The other was Badger Collins, a former circus strongman with black eyes whose blood and bone might as well have been made of iron ore, as no man could tear him down.

And me, Mutt Wilford, a third-rate soldier who turned in his Enfield for the baton and irons of a jailer rather than dig an early grave along the All Red Route and find his death in some malaria-strewn scrap of the Empire.

We surprised Grant in his cot. Badger’s gut shot took out his screams, and Jones’s frosted finger silenced his lips before the sackcloth covered his face and we made our escape. Not one of the guzzling thugs in the main room stopped us.

Which should have made me suspicious.

Our lair was below ground. How the great tunnels of Kingstonia were built is a coat of myth stretched so thin the colour of truth has all but bled out, and I’ve heard tall tales of everything from magical worms to supernatural hares the colour of old dead blood. No matter, it’s where much of Kingstonia lives who wish to avoid the gaze of Queen Charlotte and her Lurchers. So it was with Phantom Bill.

We thrust the sacked head of Mr. Grant into the orange flutter of gaslight that illuminated the interrogation chamber. He landed before Phantom Bill.

In his day, Bill had been the most fearsome thing in Kingston Pen. A soldier during the first Riel rebellion, he’d parlayed his dirty fists into bare-knuckle brawls and rough and tumble championships before hunting scalps for Washington during the war with the Sioux. I’d not heard much else of his exploits until he came to the Pen, ordered by the Warden to establish “peace and order” to this nest of cretins. So he did. And the inmates called him the King of Beasts, though never to his visage. Tall, hard, and with the only hair on his head being his jagged sideburns, Bill’s arms were as tough as the rhino-hide whip that he took from the Pen and wrapped around his waist. Miles of truth and blood have been spilt by that serrated hide. And our room would likely go red again.

“Let’s see him,” Phantom Bill said, and I took off the hood.

“Gash!” Lieutenant Jones said, covering his mouth with spidery white fingers. “He looks like fresh shit!”

The mangled, ruined countenance of Mr. Grant looked up. Nose crunched into his skull-like face, one eye swollen black, the other pleading. But worst was the mouth. It was as if someone had cut a wound in a swollen man’s guts, yet words came out past cracked teeth. “Puh-please, no more, I . . . told ’em . . . I told ’em all I knew—”

“This your handy work?” Phantom Bill said to Badger Collins, who shook his head.

“I carried ‘em after one blow to the gut. That’s all,” said Badger. “Must have been like this when we bagged him.”

Phantom Bill leaned down at the quivering dishevelled man in poorly matched breeches and shirt. “Who did this to you? Be quick and true, and I’ll be the same.” He gripped his belt where his irons hung. Irons that had tasted the green mist. Irons that never ran out of bullets. Never jammed. The whip, the iron, and Bill’s . . . talent made him the most feared underlord of Kingstonia. “Speak.”

“T’was Ruby Jacks.”

Ruby was one of our own, gone missing a day ago.

Bill’s boot cuffed Mr. Grant’s head, sending a single jagged tooth through the gloom. “Ruby Jacks is dead. We found his body this morning and burned it so Queen Charlotte would not turn him Lurcher.” He gripped his iron in its holster. “Last chance.”

“I saw him die!” Mr. Grant screamed. “I will tell you what happened. Just let me live.”

The rotten man still oozed with the beating he took, kneeled before Phantom Bill as if in confession. “You got one chance of leaving my domain alive,” said Phantom Bill. “Answer every question I ask. I smell deceit dripping on the floor, and we’ll toss your innards before a Copper Knight and see if it walks away wearing your skin.”

Mr. Grant sighed, lips red and wet. “Honestly, sir, once you hear what I’ve seen, that might be a blessing.”

So it rolled out of him. How Ruby Jacks had found Grant last night while we hunted dead ends. But Grant was not alone.

“Jacks worked me over, saying I need to share what I knew of the creature who tore your gang to threads. But when I tried . . . he showed up.”

“Who?”

Grant’s eye spied around, as if he feared to speak the creature’s name, lest it pop from the shadows like Athena from the skull of Zeus. Finally, he whispered, “The Iron Shadow.”

Phantom Bill cackled, as did Jones and Badger. “Worthy of a dime novel! And the Iron Shadow bested Ruby Jacks?”

Mr. Grant closed his eyes and shuddered. “You saw him, didn’t you?”

What was left, anyway. Ruby Jack’s face had been mangled as bad as Mr. Grant’s. But his heart . . . it had been torn from the body like the pit from an overripe cherry.

Bill shot us hard gazes, wrist twisting, warming his whiphand. “You weren’t followed, were you?”

“No, sir,” Badger said. “Mutt said to run through Arcadia, so none could follow, as the walls were shifting. You’d have to have been a louse in my beard to have followed us into the city’s undergut.”

Phantom Bill nodded at me. “At least one of you had brains while mine were here. Now, Mr. Grant. To business. Who is he?” Phantom Bill said, stalking around Mr. Grant, walking from light to darkness while the gas light flickered. Badger stood by the chamber entrance with arms crossed, Jones tapped his dead-white fingers next to him, and I leaned against the wall with a hand on my iron, watching things I can never unsee. “Who is the Iron Shadow?”

Mr. Grant’s head rolled forward. “He was a prisoner.”

“Ha! That narrows it down, eh, boys?” Phantom Bill said, and pulled the handle of his rhino-hide whip, uncoiling that snake of agony from his guts. “How about we get more specific.”

Mr. Grant gurgled. “He was the only innocent man in the Pen.”

The whip cracked as loud as our laughter. “My ribs are aching! Oh, Mr. Grant, you should have been in vaudeville.” Bill stalked around Grant, the whip slithering behind him until he stopped and prepared to unleash it. “And who might be the only innocent man in Kingston Penitentiary?”

Mr. Grant’s eyes opened. “Mercer Donnelley. Of the Black Donnelleys.”

All we heard was the hiss of lamps.

The Donnelleys. Land-thieving Irish. They’d been massacred by a Vigilance Committee a decade before the sky rock fell. Men, women, children, broken and beaten and killed in an orgy of mob violence in the name of the law. Their name was blood in Ontario.

“But he died in solitary. The place collapsed in on itself when the sky rock hit us like an artillery barrage,” I said, having been guard on watch that night. Badger and Jones looked away and Phantom Bill’s mouth twitched.

Mr. Grant’s voice hardened. “No, that last relation survived. He was an innocent man, but surrounded by the drunken Vigils with the blood of his family still bright on their boots he was goaded. No man alive could quell the desire to lash out, and so he did, and the mob near beat him half to death before a real lawman arrived and dragged the last Donnelley to jail for fighting for his life. A few dozen assaults were pinned on him, while the Vigils walked free. So it was that the last of the Donnelleys was silenced behind the grey walls of the Stony Lonesome. But I suppose you all know that.” Badger and Jones held their heads low, though Phantom Bill was steady as the pillars of heaven. “The boy had been weak and stupid. Had not thought more than one step ahead of his angry firsts, so it was life in the Pen, under the watchful eye and red right hand of the King of Beasts.” Grant sucked in air through his frostbit and gashed lips. “But, when the boulder from heaven rammed the Earth, he tasted green mist. Like all of you. And he changed. His hate, his desire for vengeance, well it bled into the walls, and they bled into him, that limestone soaked in the screams of the damned. Those iron manacles around his fists melted into his flesh, and his goal in life turned cold and true. He would kill his tormentors. And those who killed his family.”

“How in the hell do you know any of this?” Jones said, iced hands like claws. “Are you in league with that bastard Donnelley?”

Grant smiled, “You could say we share a life sentence.”

Bill cracked back his whip.

Of all the impossible things locked in my mind’s vault, the nightmare that fuels my dread is what happened next.

Grant tore his shirt, revealing the empty space where his heart used to be and the tattoo of a scorpion on his arm, the only one I’d ever seen was on Ruby Jacks, from his time in Cairo with the constabulary.

“Hell’s gate,” Phantom Bill said, teeth clenched. “We . . . we burned you clean.” Every man took a step back. The smell of blood and iron filled the room. It was is if the skin of the creature before us had molted and where his hands once sat there emerged iron fists, manacles the likes we use for those in solitary.

The kind worn by Mercer Donnolley.

But this was no beaten Irishman on the bloodstained stones of the corrections room. It was a stone grey monster, built of brick and mortar, skin akin to the walls that held him. But unlike the prison, Donnelley moved like wildfire. His face was a brick of hatred with tombstones for teeth. His hands snapped his bonds like we’d made them of braided paper.

The rest was a bloody whirlwind. Phantom Bill called for an attack, and I reached for my irons while Badger and Jones attempted their one-two special: Jones’s iced hands went like claws for Donnelley’s throat. Normally the shock of cold would freeze a man so hard that Badger could then maul his paralyzed form into kindling. I held my fire, fearing to cut them down.

But Donnelley’s prison skin was colder than Judas’s soul. He clamped his iron hands around Jones’s wrist. A sick crunch followed before he rammed those arctic talons onto Badger’s chest. The giant froze, skin gone a paler shade of death.

I fired. All six shots. The room swarmed with ricochets. Gripping both men by the necks, Donnelley tossed Badger and Jones at me like two money sacks. They hit me so hard the rest is a fuzzy dream, though it came back sharp when I clawed myself through my unconscious patrons.

There was a crack, and the whip wrapped around Donnelley’s neck. Bill yanked, but the monster stood unmoved. “No more whips, William,” said Donnelley’s hoarse voice, like gravel broken under the hammer of a chain gang. “No more nights of blood and scar in the lonesome cell. It’s retribution, William. On you and your Vigils. I am your reckoning.” He gripped the rhino hide and yanked the weapon free from Bill, who went for his gun. “Fire all you want. Mosquitoes do worse.”

“Ain’t no normal iron, you Black Irish shit!”

Bill fired and fired, and Donnelley smiled . . . but as the shots kept coming, the smile died. Pieces of him broke off and black ooze fell from the wounds that emerged from his grey skin. “You ain’t the only one made fresh and terrible, you bastard! This gun was in my hand when I tasted green mist!”

Donnelley covered his face and charged with the thunder of a locomotive, aiming straight for Bill . . . and learned firsthand how Bill got his nickname in Kingstonia.

Donnelley passed through Bill, whose body had gone blue and shiny. The monster crashed into the cavern wall and shook the lamps so bad it was hard to see. Bill took a deep breath, the blue hue gone, and laughed. Donnelley screamed and tried again and fell on his face near the cavern’s mouth, the whip still in his metal hands.

“Mercer Donnelley,” Bill said, taking another deep breath, spinning his iron’s chamber, “I find this rich. When we goaded you to fight you were as namby-pamby weak as your kin, screaming under our heels as we brought justice by snuffing out their thieving lives. And when fortune frees you, gives you the means for vengeance, where do I find you? On your knees, broken and leaking as before.” He spun the chamber again. “You’ve been killing my crew. You’ve been sneaky and backstabbing as only your kind can be. And tonight, you Irish dog, I will finally end what we started in your family’s stolen home. Would the very last Donnelley have any parting words?”

Donnelley pulled himself to his knees, grey arms before him, one hand holding the whip. But the holes in his arms shook and bled black across the floor. “Yes, Phantom Bill. I do.”

He clocked the hammer. “Then say your peace.”

Wheezing, Donnelley raised his head to find the terrible iron before him. “It is a question I have longed to ask you.”

“You’re stalling, and I’m bored. So long, Mercer. When you get to hell, tell your bastard family the King of Beasts says hello.”

Donnelley gripped the whip in his shaking hand. “I held my breath each time you skinned me. Held in the pain, too. Each scar a mark of pride on my hide. Because I learned not to scream, thanks to you, William. I keep my screams inside. So I must ask you.” His lip twitched. “How long can you hold your breath?”

Bill’s eyes went wide.

There was a short burst of gunfire as Donnelley charged, chest exploding, gunshot on rock, suffering wounds that should have killed a rampaging bear. Then the gunfire stopped. Donnelley had slashed the air with the whip; it gripped Bill’s wrist as he held his breath and became a phantom.

But the whip already had him, and the ghostly blue hue covered Donnolley, as if he were in the intangible realm with Bill. Bill raised his pistol, mouth puckered, but Donnolley yanked, tearing Bill down and toward him as his iron right hand swung with the merciless strength of an executioner’s ax, and nailed Bill’s chin so hard his jaw broke off, flying into the dark, while his immortal iron flew in the other direction.

Bill gasped, ghostly blue hue gone, his form returned to the land of the living, but on his hands and knees. His cleaved skull looked up, red and rushing.

Donnelley’s limestone face grinned. “When you get to hell, tell Old Scratch the last of Donnelleys sent you!”

Choking on redness, Bill could not turn phantom. An iron hand was raised high, and the punch that Donnelley brought down drove Bill’s face three feet into the rock, and shook out all but one lamp.

Then, Donnelley . . . changed. His skin lightened and the wounds healed quicker than dirt rinsed off skin, bullets popping out of his skin like corn kernels from a fire. And there before me was the picture perfect visage of Phantom Bill, jaw intact.

I uttered a curse, and Donnelley tore me away from the two slumbering sods. “You. . . .” he said with Bill’s sadist tone. “You were not there. At our home. With the Vigils.”

I shook. “No,” I said, for it was true.

He dropped me, then retrieved Bill’s immortal iron and holstered it. “You see what price I pay. I wear the face of those I kill. For a day, their skin is mine, and I can walk among the living, before I go back to being an iron shadow.” So it was that he killed Ruby Jacks, and took his form the day before.

For it was all part of a cunning ruse.

Donnelley and the journalist Grant were partners in justice here in Kingstonia. When Phantom Bill’s gang became feared and powerful, Donnelley hunted them down and Grant seeded the Libre with tales that would lead Bill’s men to Grant’s whereabouts. When Ruby found Grant, Donnelley was waiting and dispatched him with such violence that his heart was never found. He tossed the body where it would be discovered, had Grant spread rumours he was hiding above the tavern, and then Donnelley asked Grant to work him over so we would not recognize the face of Ruby Jacks.

I know this because Donnelley and Grant told me, and, because my hands were clean of his family’s massacre, I lived to tell it. Jones and Badger were not so lucky. Ex-Vigils both, the Iron Shadow wore their hides for a day before vanishing into Kingstonia.

There is the truth of it. What comes of me is of little account. This is a mad city at the best of times, and my flawless memory will soon drive me madder still.

So I leave you with a warning. Think twice of committing ills on the streets of Kingstonia, be you inmate or jailer, because for one man those who wreak harm on the innocent are all the same and are to be accorded no quarter. For those who glory in suffering, for those who seek the joy of pain, for those who prey on families in rough times, an Iron Shadow waits.

__________

Jason S. Ridler (www.jridler.com) was born in Pointe-Claire, Québec, raised in Toronto, and spent ten years in the prison capital of Canada, Kingston (though as a student). He holds a PhD in War Studies and has published three novels and more than fifty short stories.