Red Snow

He received the message from his old friend Morgan Callaghan after he’d been thanked by the people of Monasta, Missouri, for the two men he’d recently killed. Their withered bodies, one once-thin and the other once-fat, had been laid on doors in the draughty barn, which also served as the town chapel. Prayers were said, and hymns had been sung.

“Fully believe they are sufferin’ right now, and that their sufferin’ will be eternal, and praise the Lord.”

But their voices trailed off, their gazes slipped away from his tinted spectacles, and their hands didn’t linger long in the grip of his glove.

One of the townspeople, a plump woman named Prudence Van Heyke who’d lost her eldest daughter to the attentions of Timo Thacker and Elmer Buckley, went over to where their bodies were now laid. She looked at them in a way which didn’t suit her kindly features, then attempted to spit on their greyed faces. Plainly, this was an action she wasn’t used to performing, for the spittle ran down her chin.

Afterwards, they all stood outside for a photograph to be taken for the town weekly newspaper. October clouds roiled. A few thin trees bowed. The barn creaked as if straining to take flight. He stood at the back of the group and tipped down his hat. He could already feel the coming winter, almost taste the snow. When the photographer took the brass cap off the camera, he moved his head side to side. That way, all the picture would show of Karl Haupmann was a ghost.

It was then, just as the crowd was dispersing, that the lad from the Western Union office came running up the street with a yellow scrap of telegraph paper clutched in his hand. He took it from him and opened it up.

KARL STOP BELIEVE FROM RECENT REPORTS MIGHT FIND YOU HERE STOP OONAGH DYING STOP COME NOW TO SWEETWATER IF AT ALL STOP ALL BEST REGARDS AS EVER STOP MORGAN CALLAGHAN STOP

There’d been talk of fried chicken and poundcake that evening in the same barn, but these people of Monasta were more than happy to see their killing saviour gone. He collected supplies from the town store and visited the livery stables, where the hunchback old man would have none of his money, and offered a fresh pinto mare, maybe a year or two past her prime, but good and sturdy enough. The horse didn’t take fright at him as he went over to stroke her mane either, the way that many did.

They all stood along Main Street and watched as he rode out. No waves or cheers. Just half-sideways glances and shivering shrugs. One girl ran out toward him clutching a posy of weeds, but her mother called to her with an angry yelp and drew her back tight to her apron. A crow hopped on the Western Union’s tin roof, regarding him with a bright black eye before if flew off to join the sky’s gloom.

He followed the ditched road which led north and west. By the time he looked back, Monasta, Missouri, had vanished in the gather of evening.

He found a hollow that night in the lee of the wind and lit a brushwood fire. Not so much for its light and heat, as for how it pushed away the growing sense of winter, and of things lost.

He saw to the pinto then made coffee over the fire and swallowed some dry biscuit and strips of jerky until his stomach felt full. He ungloved his hands, unhooked his spectacles, and took out the telegram from his top pocket, studied it as if searching for some extra meaning in the flicker of the fire, then folded it back. He sat there for a while so still that the night seemed to soak into him. Then, suddenly switching alert in a way that caused the pinto to whinny, he unflipped his saddlebag and removed a package in black cloth, which revealed two boxes and a calfskin-covered notebook.

The notebook was, or had been, well made. Battered now, but with a supple binding and good stitching, with an inscription on the inside page he paused to read—Somewhere for you to set down all those ideas, Karl. Warmest wishes Oonagh—before flicking on past scrawled and crossed-out lines of execrable poetry, amateurish drawings of landscapes and a woman’s face seen in profile, then others, somewhat better executed, of the innards of anatomy and then effects of a .69-calibre lead ball on various parts of the human frame, the pages more stained here, thumbed and bloodied, then, after a greyed and splattered gap, and in a stronger and almost entirely different hand, came lists of ideas, symptoms, records of modern atrocities and ancient horrors, and clippings from the papers on the latest theories on the transmission of disease, interspersed with other scraps dealing with types of possession and insanity, all ornamented with vigorous annotations and oddly elegant sketches of gargoyle-like faces and scraps of carved stone, the notations ending with neat columns of figures, dates, and dosages set beside symbols to indicate the phases of the moon.

He then opened the smaller of his two boxes and uncapped an inkpot and took out a pen. Pausing for a moment, glancing up at the sky—which was shrouded tonight; a sheer black dome—he let the calculations settle in his head. Then he wetted the brass nib, made tonight’s entries, blotted and closed the page and turned his attention to the larger of his two boxes, which breathed out a sweetly medicinal smell.

His hands moved more quickly now. Objects tinkled. Powder was tapped from a blue glass bottle to be measured on a set of unfolding scales, then transferred to a polished copper bowl, to which was added a thimbleful of mild acid. A flint sparked. A small wick flared, briefly struggling against the pull of the wind until he snuffed it out and poured the dissolved fluid through a funnel into the mouth of a syringe. He undid the studs on his shirt cuff. His left forearm now exposed, his right hand looped a twist of rubber piping above the crook, he tightened it with the grip in his teeth until a worm of artery rose. Then he drove the needle in.

Foucault had determined the speed of light, slavery would soon be abolished, Richard J Gatling had invented a new kind of rapid-firing gun, and Karl Haupmann was a freshman at Harvard. To be in Boston and studying to be a physician was his own act of rebellion against his father’s insistence that trade was the only way to earn a living, and New York the only sensible, profitable place for a man to live.

It was in a lecture on natural sciences, with Professor Heely droning on about the foolishness of the so-called catastrophe theory, that he found himself uncharacteristically speaking out.

“Did exactly the right thing, his friend,” said a hearty voice as the students trooped from the theatre. He knew it was Morgan Callaghan before he turned, and was expecting to be made the butt of some joke. Morgan was hardly Karl Haupmann’s crowd, in that he had any kind of crowd at all. Morgan was money. Morgan was old-world Boston privilege. Morgan’s japes and pranks were as celebrated as the Callaghan family name. But that broad, boyishly handsome face beneath its shock of dark-brown hair bore a guileless grin.

“Karl Haupmann, isn’t it? You really put that old duffer Heely in his place. Have you ever examined the evidence of the stones of Pozzuoli? Have you read Lyell’s Principles of Geology? Of course you have. But have you considered where you and I might take lunch?”

Morgan’s friendliness, Morgan’s frankness, Morgan’s expansive generosity, swept him into a world far away from the cold rooms of his New York childhood. Here, people greeted each other with kisses and broad hugs. Here, drink wasn’t stored in a locked medicinal cabinet, midnight was just the start of the evening, and there was excitement in every dawn.

Then there was Oonagh Callaghan, Morgan’s older sister by almost a year, although they could just as well have been twins. Oonagh was as pretty, everyone agreed, as Morgan was handsome. No, she was far prettier. Possibly even cleverer as well.

Oonagh attended lectures. Oonagh wrote papers. Oonagh asked questions, held soirées, and took her many admirers and followers out on long, discursive walks across the Common. Even though, as a woman, she couldn’t sit for exams or attain any of the professions, she railed against these antique restrictions, and was relentlessly involved in Harvard’s intellectual and social life. Oonagh Callaghan was charming and beautiful and brilliant. Much secret poetry was written about her. Many fevered dreams were dreamt.

Karl Haupmann held no hope of being anything other than a dim planet distantly orbiting Oonagh Callaghan’s radiance. Women had been strange and unknowable creatures to him since own his mother’s early death, and Oonagh seemed to belong to an even more exalted species than all the rest.

Dances were occasions he particularly disliked. Big, stupid gatherings where people exchanged inanities, then dragged each other around to the accompaniment of squeals of shoe leather and false delight. But attending at least some of these occasions was compulsory for all Harvard students, and one such gathering took place in the colonial pile of pillars and baroque ceilings known as the Old State House in the spring semester of his second year.

He borrowed a suit, which was far too short in the leg, and shoes, which bit like pincers on his walk across town. Then he stood there for the required number of hours as the ridiculously dressed figures stumbled and turned whilst the music roared. As soon as midnight arrived—a limping, unreluctant, Cinderella—he made his way back out across the dark lawns.

Oonagh Callaghan was standing alone on the wide portico at the top of the Old State House steps, and she was so entirely lovely that he could never properly remember the details of how she looked that night, nor what she wore. It must have been some sort of ballgown, possibly of darkish blue and bare at the shoulders, and also perhaps scooped toward the bosom, then maybe picked out in pearl.

He must have shrugged, perhaps spoken of an essay that needed attending. But she was holding out her bare arms.

Next thing he knew, they were dancing together across the dew-wet lawn outside the Old State House, which in itself was something impossible, seeing as he could scarcely tell a waltz from a jig. But Oonagh was humming, and his arms were miraculously around her, and she was gorgeous beyond all beauty, with her brown eyes shining in the dimness and her long dark gown falling loose. Were they dancing to the music that was playing inside? Was there any kind of music playing at all? It seemed more like some chorus of distant voices, or the night air singing in his ears. Eventually, they broke apart.

“You see, Karl, you can dance, if somebody just leads you. All you have to do is follow the song.” Then she turned back toward the Old State House and was swallowed by light and noise.

All sorts of thoughts and premonitions came upon Karl Haupmann in the weeks which followed. Stupid thoughts. Wistful thoughts. The kind of thoughts he supposed that any healthy man might have about a woman he yearned for, although he was often ashamed.

He saw himself and Oonagh Callaghan holding hands. Saw her sitting with him before a fire in some pleasingly substantial house. He awoke from fierce dreams feeling the tickle of her breath. And in the real world of coffee house crowds and evening meetings of the various societies to which they both belonged, their relationship did seem to grow more close. Oonagh sought out his opinion on current matters, and looked at him slyly sometimes when they sat with other people, as if sharing some private joke.

He often wondered if there was some kind of special bond between himself and the Callaghans. They, too, had lost their mother at an early age, although their father had died not long after, whilst his was still alive and thriving in his own cynical way back in New York. It must have been a lonely existence—brought up under the eyes of a series of lawyers, nannies, tutors, and trustee relatives, with no house that they could call their own until they reached majority and gained control of their assets.

Of course, it was expected that Oonagh would marry into another family of Boston Brahmins, with perhaps a rewarding pastime in the natural sciences to keep her occupied in the times between bearing children. And he was Jewish by birth and blood, for all that his father enjoyed renouncing every kind of religion, whilst Oonagh was sincerely Roman Catholic despite her advanced views. Not a match made out of the workings of ordinary life, perhaps, but what price, in this new and ever-changing age, could be put on hope, and love?

Abraham Lincoln had been inaugurated as president, Elisha Otis had patented the steam elevator, and South Carolina’s separation from the Union had been followed by several other Southern states. That summer, Karl Haupmann and Morgan Callaghan and all the other graduates cheered and threw up their hats in the Harvard Yard, then headed off to enlist in a true and simple cause which would probably be settled by fall, and almost certainly by Christmas.

Much though the sun stung his eyes, he still chose to travel by daylight. The days brought an increasingly bitter wind. The nights, a crusting of ice. He lit fires and forced himself to eat dry bread and jerky in the amounts he calculated a man of his age and weight should need, although the stuff sat like gravel in his gut. Each night he reread the telegram before administering the huge dosage of morphine necessary to keep his contagion at bay.

He rode on in the direction of the west and the north. At some point he must have passed into a land which the maps had called The Great American Desert or Unknown Land or Unorganised Territory—at least, until recently, when Kansas had been declared a state. To him, such words were redolent of the dunes and mirage places of the tales of A Thousand and One Nights, which his mother had shared with him as a child, but this landscape was wild and open and bleak. Morgan had shared his dreams with him too, back in the opulent house that he and Oonagh then rented on Devonshire Street during their years of study in Boston. Deals to pacify the Indians. Lines drawn by Congress across seeming nowhere. Proposals to knit this divided nation into something whole.

On the tenth day of his journey out, the stone-graven clouds flickered and broke in a damburst of sleet. He rode as best he could, but as dark started to settle he caught the aroma of woodsmoke, and a mingled stench of human and animal shit. The pinto whinnied and turned, and would have fought him if he’d tried to head her away. He submitted more for her sake than his own.

He followed the scent until he came to a snakerail fence. He dismounted, lifted the rail, and led the pinto on until he found a muddied path set between winter cabbages. Then he caught lanternlight shining through the storm-glitter from a single-pane window, and the hunched outline of a low house with a sod roof. All so real and simple and domestic.

He was about to turn back toward the prairie when the barrel of a long-nosed musket nosed from a crack in the door.

“Goddarn it… This thing…” The barrel wavered. “What in hell do you want? I know you’re out there.”

“Better come close so I can see you.” A woman’s face emerged to study him and his pinto standing out in the rain. It was craggy. Neither old nor young. “Suppose you may as well come in.” Her voice had a coarse burr. “Night such as this ain’t fit for Satan himself, and you don’t look to be him…”

The house was long and low and dirt-floored, and shared by an ox and hog at the further end. The central fire smoked. Rain leaked through the roof. It would be a struggle to make any kind of living here, but the woman, who announced herself as Mrs Knox, had big strong hands and a broad, if stooped, back. Her husband, though, sat useless in the corner on the only proper chair. His jaw was crusted with stubble and food. His wet lips moved as if he was speaking, but no proper words came out.

“There’s no safety on these plains.” Mrs Knox ladled fat-scummed liquid from a pot chained over the fire, after he’d seen to the pinto and shaken off his wet outer clothes. “Things were better before the railroad. The Injuns didn’t care about a few trappers and settlers. They’re less forgiving now.”

“Scotland, originally. Came across after we were evicted by the laird. We were young then, scarcely married, and I was with child. Lost our land so the laird could stock it with sheep. Lost the bairn on the voyage over. Aye, an’ lost a lot of other things since. Were told before we staked our claim that the land out here was as good as back in Sutherland.”

The steam of the lumpen fluid she’d given him mingled with the room’s other smogs and stinks. He felt his tongue explore a hurting sharpness in his teeth. “Is that…” He half-raised the wooden spoon. Then he put it down. “Is that how you’ve found it to be?”

“Nearest you get to the Highlands out here are these storms. The winters are freezing and the summers are hotter than all the furnaces in hell. Sometimes I move around here naked as Eve. Not that he cares…” Mrs Knox cocked an eyebrow at her husband. “Came back from the war the way you see him now. Lost his senses the way other men lost an eye or a leg.”

Karl Haupmann nodded. He’d examined many similar cases back when he was serving as a physician. The textbooks called it Soldier’s Heart.

“The good Lord made this life as nothing but a test…” Mrs Knox watched him set the food aside. “But you’ll maybe slip through quicker than he’s expecting into the next if you don’t take on good sustenance.”

He knew without reference to his notebook that the moon was thinning to almost nothing somewhere far above this roof. A hole in the sky, or a black mirror held to the earth. Better if he hadn’t come to this house. As it was, he’d need some excuse to go outside into the storm with his saddlebag, although he supposed there had to be a privy of some kind out there.

Mrs Knox filled him a copper-hooped bucket from a tin kettle. He took off his gloves and tinted spectacles and set them aside. The air clammed his back as he loosened his belt and braces, and hooked his shirt around his waist.

“Yes…” He didn’t like the way she was standing and studying him so close as her fingers explored the shine of scar tissue at the junction of his shoulder and neck.

“This as well?” She lifted, turned, examined the seared mess in the palm of his left hand.

“Aye, and you look and try to act like a cowpoke when it’s plain you’re an educated man.” Her fingers still lingered across his back and shoulders as he took the sliver of soap from a chipped plate and sluiced clouded water over his hands. As he did so, he caught a faint scent from it which, like a message from a dream, reminded him powerfully of something lost.

“Go easy with that soap. It’s about the only thing we got here that don’t reek of smoke and hog. Which way you heading?”

“Locals around here mostly call it Slaughter on account of what’s supposed to happen there when the place is done. Mister Knox and I went that way this spring to stock up our supplies.”

“Not by the ways of out here. I’d say, the horse you got, three good day’s ride.”

“It’s a town like any else. Or will be when it’s finished. For now, it’s a few bits of building that ain’t yet made up their minds what they are. You should use this to dry yourself.” Mrs Knox passed him a square of coarse cloth.

“Do you know about the people who own it?” he asked as he rubbed himself. “A man by the name of Callaghan? His sister?”

“They live in the big house. People don’t see much of the sister, though it’s said she’s passing pretty. There’s some maintain she ain’t well. Can’t tell you much else.”

He felt her lay her hand again across his shoulder. “My, but you’re cold.” Callused fingers squeezed. “Him over there. My so-called husband. You hear him now…?”

“Does that sometimes. It’s nothing new that he ever sings of. Nothing that belongs to this soil. Sings about Cailleach Bheur. Sometimes she’s a maiden and sometimes she’s a hag and sometimes he can hear her wandering around and tapping her staff outside these very walls. There are things like that everywhere across this nation—things that are lost but trying to find their way in an alien land. Have you heard of the Baobhan Sith? They prey on unwary travellers, suck a man right clean of his wits. I’m of the opinion that it was one of those creatures my husband encountered on whatever field of battle it was that the man I knew was lost.”

“I’m sorry, Mrs Knox.” Karl Haupmann shook his head and tried to step back from her. “But I really don’t hold with such things.” Still, it could have been just the rain, but he thought that he could hear a dragging shuffle and the tip-tap of a staff outside. More distant things as well. Voices, or maybe animal cries. But her hands were around him and her breath was quick, and everything else threatened to dissolve.

“My, Mister, you’re young enough, and strong, but you’re so very cold. I’ve scarce felt skin with this much need to put some heat in it since I bundled up my lost bairn on board that ship. It’s as if you’re made of dead marble. Some kind of wounded statue of a man.” Still, her fingers were tracing. “Or you’re filled with something that’s out there in the dark. But maybes there’s a touch of warmth somewhere inside the both of us that I can help you find? Him over there, we don’t need to bother about. It’ll just be a wee moment between ourselves.”

The beasts at the far end of the low black room stirred. Saliva was filling his mouth, the air was sharpening like a knife drawn across a whetstone, the fire was dying, and the cottage seemed to be dwindling to nothing but shadows. Only Mrs Knox was clear to him now. She was pressing against his body, her need raised toward his own. Her heat and flesh shone out like a flame of marshgas. In another moment, his desire would be beyond rational control.

He pushed her away and stumbled back, knocking over things. He hunched shivering against the wall.

Mrs Knox’s eyes were wide in the lantern light. Her hands trembled the shape of a cross. “What…?”

“It’s nothing,” he slurred. The sharpness still bitter in his mouth, and burning his throat. “Just a condition that I have.”

Another few moments as she stood looking down at him, then the strangeness began to settle. He could see her thoughts readjusting. Soon, like any other sane being, she’d set aside whatever she’d really seen as a mere flicker of nightmare, or nothing at all.

“In that case, I’ll get you some bedding.” She turned away from him. Then she turned back. “But I’ll ask you to sleep over there with the beasts, and keep away from me, mister, with whatever it is that ails you, and whatever you really are. And bear in mind that I’m the kind of a woman that sleeps with a loaded gun.”

He settled himself in the barricaded space with the animals. Waited for Mrs Knox and her husband’s breathing to slow. Then, he fumbled in his saddlebag and drew out one of his blue bottles and tipped some into his hand and licked and swallowed at the dry, bitter powder inside until the poison’s spreading blackness finally took hold. For a while, it seemed that he was in some high workshop filled with the remnants of old churches, and the strangely beautiful woman who stood before him was shaking her golden hair from a dark hood. Then he was standing on the sidewalk of some city street, where it was near-dark and almost snowing, and strange long, lit machines thrummed by and gave off smoke. Then he was nowhere at all.

Still a taste like wet rust in the back of his mouth next morning as Mrs Knox stood watching at her doorway while he fixed the pinto’s saddle. Her old gun was propped at her side.

“I’m sorry for any trouble I’ve caused,” he said. “If you want more than I’ve already paid—”

“Ach, No—you’ve paid plenty.” He saw her shiver. Could still see the throb in the tender well of her throat where the jugular ran sweet and exposed. “So you might as well be gone.”

He nodded and mounted. Flicked the reins and dug his heels. The sky was clear and open but for a few fast white clouds. The prairie soil was splashy under the pinto’s gait, and spread in far-glinting puddles that the wind chased in flashes. Even wearing his tinted glasses and with his hat dragged down, he felt like he was staring right up at the sun.

He remembered his long pursuit of the men called Timo Thacker and Elmer Buckley, and the reports that had finally led him to Monasta, Missouri, and how the people there had seemed trapped in a terrible dream.

The last leg of his trail reached to some wooded hills east of the town; these men had plainly come to assume themselves invulnerable, and had made no serious attempt to cover their tracks. It was evening when he got close. He tethered the horse he was then riding at the base of the final rise, and set about preparing his Navy Colt. Rodding the barrel and tipping out his normal lead slugs. Oiling the mechanism and loading the six from the wrap of packing he’d kept them in since he’d had them specially made by a silversmith in St. Louis, careful as he did so not to touch the metal. The thought struck him as he clicked back the loading gate and spun the cylinder that he might even say a prayer. But he wasn’t—had never been—that kind of man.

The moon hung bright and full, and seemed as strong to him now as had once the midday sun. Swiftly, he began to climb. The trunks of the birch trees caught like flashes of flame. Then came voices and wafts of smoke. When he emerged into the clearing where the two men sat drinking and laughing, he remained so much a part of the dark that not even their three bony horses noticed his presence until he stepped closer toward the fire.

Behind them, a few straggling thorn bushes clung to the otherwise bare rock of a near-sheer sandstone cliff face, and it was from their branches, like coats hung from coathooks, that their most recent victims had been hung. Back when they’d been serving with him in the Union Army, he remembered Elmer Buckley and Timo Thacker telling him how they’d worked as cattlemen, and noticed how neatly the knots were hitched, although the decay was such that some of the bodies were starting to dismember under their own weight. The smell of awful.

Immediately, their hands went to their guns. But it was his experience that even the worst killers tended to wait until someone had finished talking before they tried to shoot them dead. What, anyway, could these two creatures imagine they had to fear? Timo Thacker and Elmer Buckley would have acquired a sense of invulnerability during their spree across these plains, and he could see from the fire-flicker on their ruined faces that they were amused rather than threatened by the sudden arrival of a lone man. Then recognition came.

“Is that…?” Timo Thacker peered through the fire’s shimmer. “I do believe it’s Captain Haupmann…!” He nudged his mate by the elbow. “Remember? He was a medic we hauled stretchers for under General Sherman’s command.”

Elmer Buckley was peering forward as well. Rubbing his eyes in a near-comic parody of understanding. “But it can’t be!”

“There’s no need to stand,” Karl Haupmann said as he sat down on the far side of the fire. “We’re all civilians now.”

“Reckon that’s the case.” Timo Thacker had always been the leader of the two men, although his eyes had sunken so deep in his once-round face you couldn’t see them as anything more than ruby glints, and he looked sickly-bloated and ill beyond mere illness, and was scarecrow-dressed in a man’s frock coat and a woman’s gingham blouse. If ever he’d needed independent evidence of the horror of his contagion, it was surely here.

Elmer Buckley giggled. As much as Timo Thacker had maintained some diseased puffball residue of his old plumpness, Elmer Buckley, who’d always been skinny, was now a pile of sinew-strung bones. He was wearing the rotted uniform of a soldier of the United States, although the insignia and rank were varied. Both men had their boots off and were stretching their feet toward the fire as if they scarcely felt its heat, although both lacked several toes. Provided you could ignore the horror of how they looked and everything which surrounded them, they could almost have been withered children playing dress-up. Elmer Buckley reached down beside him, lifted a large brown jug, and tipped it up to take a long gulp.

He had no desire to drink whatever was on offer, but accepted the jug as another way of buying time. The thought that it might be filled with human blood only came to him as he raised it. It wasn’t—although the stuff burned, and made him gasp.

“Way there!” Elmer Buckley wheezingly giggled some more. “Rubbing alkee-hol. An’ ain’t it the truth it’s strong stuff.”

“I was wondering,” he said, leaning over to return the jug, “exactly how much you two men remember of the last time we were in each other’s company?”

“Ain’t much to say, really, is there?” Timo Thacker replied. “One minute we was fine and young, and the next along comes the draft and we’re stuffed into uniforms like cheap sausages and wheeled out for target practise for the fucking Secessionist guns. An’ pardon my French, sir.”

Timo Thacker seemed to find this bitterly funny. When he’d finished laughing, he hawked a large, dark gob of something that wasn’t merely phlegm into the fire.

“So there we was, an’ it seemed like bein’ stretcher-bearers was better than bein’ bayonet bags for downhome boys from Alabamee, although a’ course they don’t tell you that you got to go out when the guns is still firing. Still, orders is orders, an’ if you don’t do as you’re told you soon find out there’s plenty other ways of gettin’ shot…”

Timo Thacker was gazing into the fire, suddenly filled with the same kind of empty stillness Karl Haupmann sometimes felt coming over himself.

“It weren’t no battle, was it? Not when you’ve seen so fucking many of the things, Captain, as we alls have.”

“Not much to say. Apart, anyways, from it being right at the sorry arse end of the war.” Timo Thacker peered forward, as if recognising his old captain afresh. “An’ we was on stretcher duty with you, wasn’t we, sir? Out there doin’ our best to sort the livin’ from the dead.”

Timo Thacker’s features loosened like a deflated balloon. “There was this other character out there at the end of the battle, wasn’t there? Some ragged sort of man, as I recall. At least, what we could see of him, it being close to nightfall. Up to no good a-pickin’ about the bodies. Something off about his fingers, as well. Like they was broken down to claws. A face that didn’t bear much lookin’ at either. But lootin’s a crime, ain’t it, Captain? It goes against all that’s decent and good.”

He hadn’t expected to be drawn so strongly back. Could smell the mud and smoke of that twilit battlefield. Could see that ragged figure stooping, moving on, quick and crablike and oddly fast. Could hear the surprised catch in his own voice as he called out for it to stop.

“Sure as hell it weren’t up to God’s business. For then it scurries off, into yonder wood. An’ we follow. Isn’t that what you recall, Captain, as well?”

With a plain effort to draw himself back to the present, Timo Thacker picked up a long stick, or possibly a burnt human thigh bone, and used it to stir the fire. “Well, that’s the thing of it, Captain. An’ it was a pure long time ago. Whole lot of blood and shit gone under the bridge since then. How’s about you, Elmer?” His voice quavered, oddly hopeful, toward his friend. “Is there much about this business the good Captain here is askin’ after that you recollect?”

“Me?” Elmer Buckley shuffled his bones like a scolded back-of-the-class kid. “What I mostly remember is…” His cracked lips made a splitting sound. Then he stopped, and gave another of his spastic giggles. “Almost nothing at all.”

“Guess there may have been,” Timo Thacker conceded, although his voice had now assumed the wary air of a private being questioned by an officer over some alleged misdeed. “But back then, there was a whole hell of a lot a’ most things. All I knows is that it wasn’t long after that the whole sorry war ended, and Halleluiah for that.”

“Get on! Feel?!” For Timo Thacker, this truly was hilarious. He rocked back and forth, twitching and wheezing. “You hear that, Elmer? Ain’t that just the kind a’ bullshit that got us right to where we now is!”

“Well,” Timo Thacker grinned a black, rotten grin. “I long said goodbye to them. An’ good riddance, seein’ as they only ever hurt.”

“Increased sense-iv-ity an’ how-do-you do! Now the Captain’s a-talking like the posh Eastern doctor he always was.”

“But still nothing, Captain. Although I think I can speak for both me and Elmer when I says we’ve always much preferred a nice bit of the dark. It’s when the cathouses are open. That, and the bars.”

“The moon? About as many feelings about her as she has about the likes of us. Which is none at all.”

“Yeah,” Timo Thacker conceded. “You always was the kind of officer to ask dumbfool questions. But the real sorrow, Captain, is that part of me still feels to be fighting that war, an’ that everything after, an’ all the things we done… Well, they just seem like a drunkard’s dream.”

“A poem—now ain’t that like some kind of song put down on a page for thems that can read, but without all the singin’, or somesuch?”

“Well, thankee. I always wondered but never thought to ask a book-learned man like yourself. But maybes you’re right. You see, the thing of it is, me and Elmer here, we sure as hell been a-lookin’ for something, an’ even surer than Satan’s arse we ain’t found it.”

“Leastways,” Elmer Buckley put in with sombre moderation, “not yet. But it don’t not mean we ain’t stopped lookin’. Do it, Timo?”

Timo Thacker stirred the fire. “I guess not. Like there was this place some of the boys used to rattle on about when we was still serving for Abe. The kind of place where any man—Secessionist or Unionist, hero or deserter, it didn’t matter—could take his ease. Some said it was a fine vessel, maybe a painted paddle-steamer on the Missi. Others said that it was a grand house, the sort a’ place that’s full a’ beautiful things and mirrors, where all are welcome and there’s fine wine and incredible food. An’ a’ course, there’s some real fine lookin’ women there, as well…” He shook his head. “I sometimes reckon I can hear them callin’ to me even now.”

All, of course, just another campfire tale. But for an odd moment, Karl Haupmann thought he could hear a soft chant of voices over the shift of the trees and the stir of the fire.

A near-easy stillness then settled over the camp. Timo Thacker and Elmer Buckley seemed oddly glad of their old captain’s presence but, company or not, he knew it wouldn’t be long before they made their move to kill him and then do whatever else they did to their victims. Unless it was the other way around. A great many of the worst and more fanciful stories which had attached to these two ruined men seemed to be simply that, but many mysteries still hung here in the stench and smoke. Questions he’d hoped that, by finally reaching them, he’d be able to resolve. But now he realised that his quest had been useless as anything more than a means of eradicating Timo Thacker and Elmer Buckley from the world, just like so many other bad men he’d tracked down and killed. Slowly, like someone who might merely be attempting to locate a troublesome louse, he shifted his hand toward his Navy Colt.

“Wouldn’t bother doing that,” Timo Thacker drawled. The red light in his eyes had sharpened.

“In that case,” he said, trying to keep a conversational tone, “I think I’ll just take it out anyway so I can sit a bit more easily. After all”—he eased the gun out and laid it on his thigh—“a weapon’s pretty much the same whether you have it in your holster or in your hand unless you plan to do something with it. By the way, you might remember this was the same piece I had with me when we were serving. Wasn’t new even then, but it’s proved reliable. As much as any gun can be relied upon, anyway…”

Keep talking. That was the trick. Show them the Navy Colt and keep talking about it, the way men did about horses, whores, and guns, and Timo Thacker was nodding for a while as if sincerely interested, although Elmer Buckley merely giggled until the giggle became a cough.

“Thing is, Captain,” Elmer Buckley said as he re-cleared his throat, “that you’re wasting your time here with our sorry hides, killer though it’s plain you are.” His gave a skull’s grin. “You asked a whole lot a’ questions about how we been doin’, but not the one that matters. You gonna show him, Timo, or shall I?”

“Believe I will,” Timo Thacker said. He got up to a crouch, reached to his back and produced the narrow-bladed knife which was sheathed there, Indian-style. Standing now, he unfolded the left sleeve of his dirty-laced blouse to reveal an arm which seemed to be made less of skin than of half-melted, sooty wax, and Karl Haupmann caught a fresh wave of the sick, dreadful smell, which he now realised came at least as much from these two creatures as from the putrefying bodies hung nearby.

“Watch this…!” Elmer Buckley giggled again, eager as a punter at a fair, as his long-time friend pressed the blade to the damaged jerky of his left forearm and began to saw through. “Now ain’t that something to behold!”

The knife worked deep. Blood began to drip, not in the quick flood which would have come from any healthy being, but slow as it might from an incision made in a corpse. It seemed darker as well, the physician in Karl Haupmann noted, less livid and vital than even the fluid that now ran in his own veins.

“What we’re saying, Captain, you see,” Timo Thacker murmured as the stuff over-welled and runnelled down the back of his forearm, where it formed glutinous drips which fell toward the fire, “is that there ain’t nothing you can do to us which will cause us harm. What is it that’s said in the Good Book…? For flesh is meat indeed, and his blood is drink!”

The dimmed fire hissed and threw up a sour and coppery scent, but like the closing lips of river mussel, the wound was already starting to seal.

Timo Thacker was waving his knife as he declaimed from the Bible, and the fire was dim and his breath came in smoky clouds until Karl Haupmann raised and fired the Navy Colt. Timo Thacker stood grinning for a moment as the explosion rang hollow. Then, as if not so much surprised or threatened, but disappointed, he put his hand toward the lower portion of his ribs, which seemed to have melted where the silver bullet had struck home.

“You can’t…” he began saying, but the sound choked into nothing as fluid bubbled from his lips like over-boiling jam. His head rocked. Then something small yet vital seemed to slip from him and he keeled forward across the fire in a spray of sparks.

“What the tarnation fuck, Captain?” Elmer Buckley’s tone was disbelieving. “Look what you gone an’ done.” Now he was standing, backing off from his fallen friend. He wiped his face, which shone with tears, with the braided sleeve of his old army waistcoat. Then he remembered that he, too, possessed a gun. Karl Haupmann’s Navy Colt was already raised but the hammer fell with a dull click, and when he tried to depress the trigger again, the whole mechanism stuck.

Although the two men were close, Elmer Buckley’s first shot only breezed past. Next came another flash, and Karl Haupmann felt a hot push in his left shoulder. The pain was immediate and intense. For a moment the entire night threatened to dissolve. But it didn’t. He merely winced, swayed. Then he took a step forward.

“Fucking Jesus fuck…!” Elmer Buckley was stumbling back. He might have got in another shot—might even have slowed his adversary—but instead he turned and fled, and his cadaverous face as he glanced back showed nothing but fear and panic.

Karl Haupmann watched the flap of his braces. Watched the grey-white flash, like the tail of fleeing deer, of his prey’s bony feet. He raised the Navy Colt’s hammer, rotated the cylinder back and forth until the failed percussion cap tinkled out, aligned the next chamber, and made absolutely sure the mechanism worked.

The woodland parted and the trees were twists of sap and energy and the sky was a reel of stars as he set off in pursuit. He somehow knew that an outcrop of the cliff before which the two men had sheltered blocked the way ahead. Stepping around the last of the trees, he heard the scrabble of rock as Elmer Buckley tried to climb away. Then came a loud crash as he fell backwards, and a snap of breaking bone.

“Damn it!” Elmer Buckley was hunched and wobbling on one stork-like leg in the stark blaze of the moon. “You bastard, sir…!” His lips curled. “You see what you’ve gone and done!” Almost comically, he tried to hop away. Then he fell back, pushing himself up against the wall of rock, testing his damaged leg. “You’re worse than…” Now, his face was changing as his eyes grew wide with sudden, final understanding. “Even worse than us!”

Important to be quick now. In another moment, Elmer Buckley might remember that he also still possessed a gun. But a bark from the raised Navy Colt, a salt cloud of powder smoke, and he was falling, and Karl Haupmann stood close to watch the life leak out of his old comrade in shuddering breaths. Then, in a last croaking gasp, the lost thing of a man died, and the moon shone down on nothing but a withered corpse.

He spent the rest of the night laying out the bodies, tidying up the mess at the encampment, and searching for further clues, although without success. Dawn found him settling with his notebook to record how Timo Thacker and Elmer Buckley’s bodies had stiffened just like any other cadavers, and how the fine, pale, and oddly delicate marks at the sites of their initial contagion—on the lower left side of the chest in the case of Thacker, and beneath the armpit for Buckley—were far less radical than the broad scar on his own neck. The silver bullets had spread like acid, dissolving skin, tissue, and bone just as predicted from the damage he’d inflicted to his own left hand during those painful early tests in St. Louis. No sign of reanimation. Another myth refuted; the dead remained dead. He was finishing his notes when he felt a hot, renewed pain in his left shoulder and unbuttoned his shirt to inspect the almost forgotten wound. No sign left of any swelling. Just an oddly neat aperture where Elmer Buckley’s bullet had entered, which was now pulsing. In another moment the plain lump of lead was evicted from his flesh like a loose tooth.

He was riding the edges of a landscape of low hills. In the distance, he sometimes saw the faraway smoke of dwellings, and evidence of land which had been cleared, broken, and ploughed. Occasionally, he thought he saw mirage spires. There were dreams at night of sitting looking out at many rooftops where large white birds clackered their beaks. The spat word: Ezekiel. The smart of a hand slapped across his face. The days were fine enough despite the wind’s cold and the wetness of the ground, but the sky had a flickery feel, and the colours of things sometimes seemed wrong at their edges. He felt wary, backwards tugs. That feeling of coming winter. Glimpsed visions of droplets of blood leading across pure, new snow. The pinto strained her reins and looked at him uneasily. He rode on.

Even discounting all that had happened since the war, his and the Callaghans’ lives had long been headed in different directions. He and Morgan might both have been commissioned as captain physicians, but Morgan was placed on the staff of the Commanding Officer—at first that was Irvin McDowell—and set about shuttling messages to and fro for his political masters in Washington. Karl Haupmann, meanwhile, soon saw action at Belmont and Fort Henry, and was then transferred to join the Army of the Mississippi and learned more about methods of battlefield amputation and the impossibility of treating diseased shrapnel wounds than any sane man could ever want to know.

The two old friends joshed each other for a while when they wrote about who was seeing the most of history, but as the war continued and McDowell was succeeded by a procession of other incompetents, and it became apparent that Robert E Lee was the best general the Union had never had, their joshing ceased and their letters grew terse. The ones from Oonagh dwindled, as well. She wrote at first about the trials of bureaucracy and the uselessness of whatever building she was currently trying to transform into a hospital, and shared her theories about the importance of good nursing practise and simple hygiene. Then—in dribs and drabs as supply lines grew stretched, and then completely—their correspondence dried up.

In the hazed grey twilight of his third day, he steered off the clear road he was now following toward a shimmer of nearby hills, where the ground beyond flattened out into a kind of amphitheatre. There it was, Sweetwater, like a thin, half-finished sketch of a town. The few lights that showed seemed welcoming enough, but he decided he should not arrive with the settling dark. He turned from the view, unhitched the pinto, and led her back to a place where a small stream clattered and set up camp.

He dreamed that night that he was back in New York, in the house where he’d grown up. He knew from the little touches he saw there—the dried posies, the silly little paintings and scraps of needlepoint—that his mother was alive again. But where was she? He tried doors, stairways, and corridors which led back to ways he’d already gone. One door, though, took him out into the street. Helpless anxiety gripped him as he stumbled out in the dark of the Bowery, then he awoke into a world of mist.

The pinto whinnied in alarm when he came to her from out of the grey-hung trees. It was still barely dawn. By rights, it might have made better sense to wait for the sun to burn it off, but he was no friend of the sun now, and in no mood to linger any longer than he already had. He headed down from the ridge in hope of recovering the track he’d been following, but the mist thickened as he descended. As much as anything, he ended up navigating his last mile into Sweetwater by the smell of the place, which was of coalsmoke and the reek of upturned clay. The pinto’s hooves sucked and cracked. For a while he was riding through a glimpsed landscape of felled trees and half-frozen mud. It could have been the aftermath of a battle. All that was missing was the tang of cordite and the moans of dying men. Once, he even thought he saw something scuttling and grey at the edge of his sight.

He stroked the pinto’s head to soothe her as the first of Sweetwater’s buildings emerged like the prow of a vessel out of the fog. Others soon loomed left and right. He guessed this was the main street, although the place was so quiet and the fog so dense it was hard to tell. Standing in the saddle and straining his eyes through the blue lenses, he saw that many of the buildings lacked roofs or windows, or were encased in scaffolding, or simply stood as empty frontages. Then he came to a taller and more substantial bulk of windowless red brick, where he could just make out the letters callag painted on the frontage in new red paint. He tethered the pinto to a rail beside it and tromped his boots across duckboards set halfway over the mud. He lifted the bar of an iron door, which gave inwards with a heavy groan.

He was inside some kind of storehouse, although of near-cathedral-sized dimensions, and topped with an impressive glass dome which admitted a wan kind of light which fell over vast heaps of possessions. He walked amid a maze of new furniture and tall rolls of carpet and pots and vases and jars and jugs. Tea chests everywhere. Statues, even, frozen in marble mid-gesture. As if the contents of every Fifth Avenue department store had been borne to this one place in some strange tidal wave of power, influence, and wealth.

He came to a polished maple door which was set properly in a frame and thought he heard movement from beyond. He gave its brass handle a turn.

Morgan Callaghan had his head down, and was working over a strew of papers which covered his desk. Here, the packing cases had been pushed back and stacked neat and high to form walls. A few landscape paintings had been unwrapped and stood against them to display their placid, classical landscapes of crags, nymphs, and fauns. There was also a globe, and a workbench set with scientific instruments, and two wingback chairs. Even an iron-framed single bed. Unless you looked up toward the high glass roof, this odd space made a good approximation of the study of a Boston Brahmin with a scientific bent.

Morgan was still involved in reconciling his figures, and Karl Haupmann noticed how a small bare patch about the size of a dollar had appeared at the crown of his old friend’s head.

Then Morgan did look up, and his face changed by quick gradations from frustration to understanding.

Morgan looked nothing like most men did out here in the West. He wore a well-tailored tweed suit and a silk tie, and had a fresh white collar to his shirt. He’d shaved recently. Put on a sweetish cologne. He’d filled out a little, and small pouches were now beneath his grey-blue eyes, but he was still resolutely handsome, and had kept that crooked-dimple grin.

All the old times were briefly there. The japes and schemes. Bursars’ hats hung on church spires. Wild midnight carriage rides. Railings climbed. That giant message hung on sheets out across the windows of Massachusetts Hall when the President of the Divinity School had announced that On the Origin of Species was the work of the Devil. IF DARWIN IS THE DEVIL HORACE BRAND DOES THAT MAKE YOU GOD? Then Morgan stepped back, and a little of the gleam left his eyes.

“She’s… Not good, Karl. There’s no use my pretending otherwise. That was why I sent you that message, old boy. That was why you had to come.”

The morning fog was clearing as Morgan Callaghan took him back along Sweetwater’s main street. A few men were now out working, wheeling barrows or sawing wood, but even as a cold sun broke through, the place still seemed unformed.

“We’re aiming to be fully ready for the start of next year’s cattle drives. For now, it’s just a matter of preparing as best we can, then hunkering down for the winter. As you saw, though, the packinghouse is finished.”

“The building you came through to find my office. Of course, it’s all full of Oonagh’s lumber now, but that’ll be where the cattle get turned into meat and money by next summer at the absolute latest. These facilities used to get called all sorts of things—abattoir, slaughter house, butchery—but packinghouse is the modern term, and it’s the modern way, and I aim to make damn sure that the Sweetwater railhead’ll show the other new towns out here a clean pair of heels. And over there, of course, is the telegraph house from where I sent you that message—I really must show you how. But you must be starved, Karl, and your horse must need seeing to. Now, this is our home.” He chuckled. “Or it will be when it’s finished and done…”

If Morgan’s office was that of a Boston Brahmin, the building ahead of them could have been a mirage thrown from the new streets of Washington, then dropped half-finished into Kansas mud. A few quiet servants retreated when they ascended the steps into the hallway, which was set with a good piano, although many of the window apertures still had boarding across them and the air smelled of fresh plaster and raw wood.

“I have a sensitivity to bright lights. There was a night attack with flares. I was—”

“No, no. Stupid of me to bother you with questions when I’m sure you’ll want to change and wash. Oonagh doesn’t awake early in any case. It’s this way—no, don’t worry about your boots, old man. The carpets aren’t down in this stretch…”

The guest bedroom was finished with panelled wood and decorative brass, and set with pictures of prize steer and more of those faraway, hazy, classical landscapes. There was a separate bathroom with a plumbed-in bath, and another room adjoining with a smaller porcelain object. Morgan laughed at Karl Haupmann’s puzzlement as he lifted the wooden lid.

“It’s a flushing commode, old boy—guess they’re not too common out on the prairie. See, you pull this chain.” Water cascaded. “And back in here, in the wardrobe, I’ve got the servants to hang you some new clothes. Man, but you’re cold, and thin as a rake! Just lay your old stuff over there on those newspapers. You can leave your gun there too. Sweetwater really isn’t that kind of place.”

“Sure. I’ll get it sent over. Anything you want, old boy. Absolutely anything—all you need do is ask. My, but it’s so good to finally have you here… The only other proper visitor Oonagh and I have had since we set up here was Cousin Daphne. You probably remember her from Boston?”

He nodded, although amid all the eccentric Callaghan relatives, the name rang no particular bells.

“Woman was a snob back then, and, believe me, Karl, she hasn’t changed one jot in all the years since. Only came out here, I think, because she thought she could ride and hunt. Left a few weeks ago when Oonagh started getting worse, and good riddance. So now you can understand how very good it is to have someone like you here at last.”

After Morgan had finally left, and the servants had come and gone, he took off his hat and glasses and removed his gloves and unslipped his gunbelt and pulled off his boots and peeled himself out of his clothes, then studied what he saw in the full-length mirror. A straggle-bearded creature with sharp ribs and a hollow belly and a bad scar on his throat—he looked almost as bad as Timo Thacker and Elmer Buckley had, or the photos he’d seen of the survivors of Andersonville. It was amazing Morgan had recognised him at all.

He fiddled with the bath until he understood its working, then filled it and sank down in clean, warm water. A fat square of soap lay beside the edge, and the same scent came to him as from the scrap he’d been given by Mrs Knox. Once again, it filled him with a lost sensation that wouldn’t come.

With the bath done, his face shaved, and his hair unknotted with the help of a tortoiseshell comb and ivory-handled razor, and following some less than successful efforts to remove the scum he’d deposited around the bath, he opened drawers to see what else Morgan had provided. There were new pants, shirts, socks, and underthings. Far too much, it seemed, for any one person to need… He puzzled for a while over a concertina of reinforced cotton, until he realised it was probably a whalebone corset left behind by Cousin Daphne.

He chose his clothes and dressed himself in new fabrics, and set the leather pants belt on its innermost notch. The boots were comfortable, although the wary figure which slowly formed as if from the haze of his own uncertainly in the mirror seemed even less recognisable than before.

Long corridors. The whole house silent but for the drag of his new boots, and a sense of half-finished waiting like the day before a grand show. He came to a door which he presumed led to another bedroom. It was ajar, and gave out an unmistakable sickroom smell.

Oonagh Callaghan was sitting up in a big bed on many blue silk pillows at the centre of a grand room. Several tall windows gave views through the clearing mist across what would one day be a fine garden, then on across the town toward the low hills and wide and empty plains of Kansas. A large fire blazed in its hearth. The wallpaper, an elaborate pattern of Chinese pheasants and pagodas, seemed to shift as he waded across the carpet. Everything was so hurtingly bright without the glasses he’d stupidly left back in his room.

Oonagh half-raised a hand from the counterpane. “You can leave us awhile, Mary.”

“Come on over here, Karl. Sit down.” She smiled. Her grey eyes were unchanged, although new lines of weariness sloped around them. “It’s very wonderful to see you.”

This whole room might have come out of a fashion print, but for the miniature temple of bowls and medicines which populated a stand on the far side of her bed. Oonagh Callaghan as well. Her hair was combed and clean, and fell loose across her shoulders in dark, glistening waves, and her face looked damply fresh. Her eyes glittered and those lashes, which he’d once attempted to write a poem about, seemed even darker and longer than he remembered. Her mouth was somewhat fuller too. And redder. Even her cheekbones were finer and more prominent. All in all, as she regarded him with that flickering gaze which never quite settled, she was a distillation of the strange and terrible beauty of consumption.

“Tell me, Karl, are you really doing all those terrible things I’ve read about?” she asked without all the usual preamble, for she always had been a creature of admirable directness.

“I suppose I am.” He sat down on a silk upholstered chair beneath the large crucifix on the wall. “If you mean I’m killing men who deserve to be killed.”

“They deserve death far more than the many thousands who died in this recent war.” He shrugged. Felt oddly naked without his gun, gloves, and glasses. “Most of them, anyway.”

“That sounds to me like an impossibly fine calculation.” He really had forgotten just how quick she was. How lovely, as well. “When you used to say your life’s work was to heal.”

“And you seem so different.” Her gaze travelled over him. Taking in his face and the scar on his neck, which he’d done his best to cover with a new neckerchief. The other on the palm of his left hand. “You’re thinner, of course. And you really must let me see to your hair. Your eyes look strained, and the set of your mouth… But I guess we’ve all been changed.” She gave a chuckle. “I mean, who am I to talk…?”

Then she started coughing, covering her mouth with a piece of linen which soon grew flecked with blood. Its salt scent reached him in a hot wave. He was a trained physician, and he should offer to help. But all he could do was stand up from his chair and stumble out from the room as Oonagh gave gasping instructions to the maid, who re-emerged with bowls of hot water and towels.

“Of course we’ve tried all the usual treatments,” Morgan said as the two men sat together at lunch. “And a whole lot of pretty unusual ones, as well… Gold injections. Endless inhalations and varieties of compression. Hot spas and cold baths. Ha! Priests and prayers, of course, although I can’t believe incense is good for the lungs. Weird contraptions made of magnets. If I was looking to make money and had no scruples, old boy, I can’t think of a better way than offering consumptives the prospect of a cure.”

A tall pot of coffee stood steaming before them. Dishes of beef, sausage, mushrooms, bacon, grits, bread rolls, jams, and sauces, bright yellow scrambled egg and even yellower butter. Karl Haupmann doubted he’d ever seen so much food.

“She’s better out here in Kansas. Last time we were back east, her condition immediately got worse—the air there is scarcely fit for breathing—but I’m not pretending it hasn’t been hard. You know as well as I do how this awful disease progresses, Karl—as well as Oonagh does herself. There have been weeks, months, sometimes whole years when we could kid ourselves that she was on the mend… And she’s proud. Yes, and she’s determined. But now…” Morgan ran a hand through his hair. “It’s like… It’s like there’s a vast hidden sea that’s rising and falling right beneath us here in this house. Sometimes, it’s placid. Sometimes, there are these terrible storms that rise up from nowhere and toss her around and threaten to take her away. You can sometimes almost hear them roaring somewhere far below. In a way, I guess we’re now resigned to her dying out here. But…” He smiled something like his old lopsided smile. “I’m just so bloody glad you’re here, Karl.”

“You’re not so difficult a man to find these days, you know. You’re developing a kind of fame. Karl Haupmann metes out justice. Karl Haupmann the killer. Not dead or alive for Karl Haupmann, but dead or dead. Another few years at the business you seem to have chosen, and actors’ll be playing you on the Broadway stage. Better, I reckon, if we keep your name from the remaining servants and workers, by the way, just in case they’ve heard who you are.”

“That’s…” This rich food, the fresh coffee, seeing Oonagh… He pushed aside his plate of scrambled eggs near-untouched. Stifled a sickly belch.

Morgan chuckled. “Should have asked whether you’d developed a liking for garlic. Have some water, old boy. You always were a man with a taste for plain things.” He poured from a cut glass decanter. “What a pair you and I make, though, eh? One minute we’re both admiring ourselves in our uniforms. Then six whole years go by, and maybe if Oonagh hadn’t worked in those damp, hellhole hospitals… Maybe if she hadn’t tended whatever injured man it was gave her this curse. But who am I to talk about the war, eh? When I was with all the stuffed suits back in Washington and you were winning back the Carolinas.”

“Like I say, Karl. Soon as I open my mouth, I’m talking grade-A Washington bullshit. No use saying the past is just the past, but we might as well look toward the future. That’s why I’m in Sweetwater, Karl. That was why I first wrote you about coming here—where was it you’d ended up when Lee finally surrendered…?”

“Yeah, Greensborough. And I sent you that letter, and I guess you must have got it even if you didn’t reply. But that offer. The offer to come here and help me set up this place. Help Oonagh, I guess, as well. It’s still standing. Help me, Karl. This here in Sweetwater is something special and can change a whole lot of things as a result. I meant that when I first wrote you, and I mean it even more now. Help me, Karl. I want you with me through this.”

“Yes…” He nodded. Then he grinned. “You are, you old bastard—late as ever, but then you always were unreliable as hell.”

He’d planned to stay here just a day or two. Rethink and move on before the weather closed in. But his days at Sweetwater soon slipped into an easy routine. He would get up, wash and dress in his new clothes, and eat a surprisingly hearty breakfast. Then Morgan would show him some new mechanism or scheme he was working on. And, with so many people already gone from the railhead, and more leaving by the day, there was plenty of work in preparation for winter needing to be done.

Had Oonagh ever really been that close to death? By now he wasn’t so sure. But he did know that, just like Morgan’s optimism, the state of her health came and went, and was as happy as they were that it now seemed much improved. Engaged in their company and spending long hours outside absorbed in simple, regular work, he felt like a different man. Even the chill, bright sunlight didn’t bother him too much.

The two men would return to the house in the late afternoon, and Oonagh would generally be up and dressed, most likely preparing dinner but maybe reading a book—the discoveries of which she, of course, wanted to share with them. They would eat in the makeshift room they had to put up with until the main dining hall was finished, and the wine and the arguments would flow, and sometimes afterwards Oonagh would sit down at the piano in the hall. Popular tunes or the waltzes of Chopin filled the house. She used an ebony walking cane for support, suffered occasional bouts of coughing, and was plainly taking lots of laudanum, but otherwise it was almost like the old days—or the days he’d once hoped would come.

“I’m so glad you’re here, Karl,” she said after she’d propped her cane beside her table and sat down on the bed to recover her breath. “Kansas can feel so empty sometimes, with no Cousin Daphne to tease, and now most of the staff have left as well.”

She looked up at him. Smiled. Her hair was held in silver clasps. She wore a dress of black velvet with a dove-shaped silver pendant at her throat which he remembered from Boston. Then her gaze shifted in that way he knew signalled a more serious turn. “Morgan’s still angry with me. Thinks I shouldn’t have volunteered to nurse those soldiers. Done something”—she waved a hand—“more abstract, worthy, feminine. You men can never understand what it’s like being a woman. The restrictions. The expectations…”

She paused a moment. He heard the slide of flesh against flesh as she massaged her bare throat.

“When I first started to get the symptoms, I just prayed and carried on. That was when I stopped writing you. I mean, what was I supposed to say? And then I had—I suppose you’d call it a collapse. I was sent to recuperate in the sea air at Portsmouth, and got tutted over by visiting relatives, and the feeling of helplessness was almost as bad as the illness itself. That’s why I prefer it here.”

“I imagine Morgan’s told you about all the cures we’ve tried. But you know what he did, the very first thing he went and got for me after I was diagnosed…?” She reached to pull open a drawer, drawing out something which he thought at first was just some kind of jewelled pendant. But it was ornate, and looked to be very old.

“It’s a genuine holy relic. Or as genuine as they come. Has a provenance that goes back to Venice in the eleventh century, and possibly even as far as Byzantine Constantinople and Saint Helena herself, who of course is said to have discovered the true cross. And from then, who knows? The setting probably dates from the fourteen hundreds. In there—you see that crystal in the centre?—there’s supposed to be a frozen tear of the dying Christ. I still haven’t asked Morgan how much it cost.”

He took it warily, wondering if it contained silver. It seemed not, but he still felt an odd hollowing of his belly, and the light from the windows gave an odd pulse. Handworked curricles of gold set around something which seemed little more than a lump of driftglass. He raised it to his eye, saw avenues of light, and something red yet dark dancing tauntingly in its heart. He almost stumbled over the edge of the bed as he gave it back.

“It is, isn’t it? One doesn’t have to believe to see that. Although perhaps it helps…” He saw how she touched the object to her throat and breasts before placing it back in the drawer. “You know, you’re different, Karl. You even talk differently. It’s as if you’ve acquired some distant accent. Or come from another world. I don’t want to hear about the men you’ve killed, but you carry them with you like Jacob Marley’s chains.”

“There have been times when I’ve felt”—his throat clicked—“more than lost.”

“Which of us hasn’t? We’re all lost, or wandering, or searching for something. But you know what, Karl?” She looked around her room, then smiled up at him. “It might be right here.”

The first snows fell. The night frosts grew heavy. Now that most of the buildings were secured for the winter, the main task which occupied the two men was constructing an iron chapel which had come in hundreds of separate pieces all the way from Pittsburgh on a flatbed railtruck, along with special tools, pulleys, bolts, chains, wires, and self-sealing rivets. The instructions were a mess, but he surprised Morgan with his easy grasp of what went where, and the brisk, elegant sketches he produced to demonstrate his thoughts. They took turns working the hand crane and climbing ladders to steer the girders into place. Sometimes, balanced between the frozen grey earth and the heavy sky, he had brief, giddy visions of being inside some grandly echoing space of stone, but this half-finished building was more like some black-mandibled beetle.

He locked the door to his bedroom whenever he left it, and made it known to the few remaining servants that he preferred to see to things himself. He kept his Navy Colt and his old saddlebag under his bed, and stuck rigorously to the dosages and the entries in his notebook, and rode the next dark moon as easily as any since the start of his contagion, even if he did notice how Oonagh’s blood scent strengthened at that time as well. A difficult moment came when he cut his arm, seemingly pretty badly, on a sharp edge of metal as he and Morgan worked on the iron chapel. He’d pushed his friend away and then wore a bandage for several days, although the wound took only minutes to heal. He’d hoped to find a supply of morphine sulphate amid all the stores in the packinghouse. The discovery evaded him, but he calculated that he had more than enough grains left in his blue bottles to see him through to next spring, and if push came to shove, he could always try some other poison to stretch things out. What exactly had he been planning on doing anyway, with Timo Thacker and Elmer Buckley now dealt with and every trail dead?

“Just look at us, eh, Karl? Who needs Boston and the friggin’ Porcellian Club? I don’t know how I’ve ever managed without you, old boy…”

The two men often took a lantern and a fresh bottle to the packinghouse study via the linking tunnel that ran underground from the main house once Oonagh had gone to bed. One thing he noticed was that he was now far more resistant to the effects of drink than the Karl Haupmann of old. Morgan, meanwhile, although still a prodigious drinker, seemed to have developed a much weaker head. Now, and especially if they opened a second or third bottle, the ways of their days back in Boston were reversed and it was Karl Haupmann who helped Morgan Callaghan to his bed.

Then, one November morning, he sensed a change in the light as he opened his eyes to this fine yet now familiar room. Feeling for his tinted glasses and getting up to part the curtains, he saw heavy white flakes drifting beyond the windowglass in the grey dawn air. Not lightly and hesitantly as before, but with the full certainty of winter snow.

Somewhere, seemingly far off, the last train to leave Sweetwater for the season was jetting steam. And there was Morgan. Shaking hands and clapping backs with all his usual bonhomie, hungover or not. Carriage doors slammed. The engine tooted. Elbowed pistons slid. Soon all the carriages were lost in the vanishing white, and Morgan stood alone, hands deep in his pockets and shoulders raised shiveringly high. He glanced up toward Karl Haupmann’s window before hurrying back toward the house.

The telegraph went dead, and work on the iron chapel soon became impossible as the snows rolled in. With little else now left to be done, he spent his many free hours in the large, high room which one day would become the Callaghans’ new library, although for now most of the books were still stacked in packing cases.

He delved and discovered, searching first through medical works, some of which he’d made use of years before, in the old merchant’s house back in Boston that Oonagh and Morgan had rented on Devonshire Street. Now he sought out entries on epilepsy and catalepsy and hebephrenia, and looked for insights on forms of rabies and types of parasitism, but found nothing new. The writings of Lamarck, though, were striking. The man’s thoughts regarding a drive toward survival, which forced change upon an organism through some chemical or electrical force, seemed a promising new route of research.

He also encountered other works. Byron’s The Giaour and Goethe’s The Bride of Corinth, for example, and similar Gothic fables. Nonsense like Varney the Vampire as well—for Morgan had always had a taste for trash—which he also forced himself to plough through, along with even stranger tales from dusty Latin tomes filled with ugly woodcuts showing claw-footed succubae squatting on sleepers’ chests, and corpses rising from their graves. A phrase from a ballad about a wandering, vagrant figure called Tom-A-Bedlam, which had been written by an anonymous English poet in the seventeenth century, caught his eye.

…For forty days and forty nights

I waded thro blude red to the knee

And saw neither sun nor moon

But herd the roaring of a hidden sea…

Then there was Countess Elizabeth Báthory, a figure from proven history who’d lived in Hungary in the late Middle Ages and had reportedly eaten the flesh of her servants and bathed in their blood. And Vlad the Impaler, another literally bloodthirsty member of the Eastern European nobility, who also was said to be invulnerable to all weapons. He also found several recent papers detailing the latest theories on the transmission of thoughts and impressions from mind to mind, and struggled through Kant’s analysis of time as a structural framework, and re-examined Isaac Newton’s view of it as another dimension.

Bound editions of old newspapers with stories of bad deeds and bad men—of plain murders, and worse, which had raged like a fever across this country in the aftermath of war. The Reno Gang, of course, and all the usual famous figures, but other reports as well. Two men, seemingly ex-soldiers, who sometimes went by the names of Lawson and Basset, who’d been wanted in many counties until a killer the papers didn’t name had tracked them down at a place called Fingerpost and brought their lives to an end. Then there was Bob Jennings, and a pair known as the Britches Twins, and a mad Indian called Red Knife. All of them dead now. Those, that was, who’d ever existed at all.

He stood up. Stretched. Felt the amazing strength in the cold ropes of his muscles as he lifted down another heavy packing case. Mere history, this time. The record of ages long gone when Cleopatra had toyed with Rome, and Hannibal had somehow crossed the Alps with his elephants in conditions perhaps not dissimilar to those which now prevailed outside these walls. And architecture, the wonders of European cathedrals. Surely this was safe ground. Page after page of old engravings, intricate in their execution, and hard not to admire in an abstract kind of way.

But somehow more than that. He found their ambition strangely compelling, and was reminded of the intricate doodles and cartoons his own hand sometimes executed as if with a will of its own. All those years, all that effort, striving to say something which could surely never be expressed in mere stone and brick. Perhaps Oonagh was right and—

He was staring at a page which displayed the west front, as seen from the Rue Mercière, of the Cathedral of Our Lady in Strasbourg. This place, this street, and even many of the buildings, and cliff face of stone which soared over it, all seemed—no, not familiar. As he turned the pages, to other views, visions, of the cathedral’s pillar-forested, decoration-encrusted interior, and then of the whole city seen spread to its walls, docks, and canals from its tower, which was reputedly the highest in Christendom, it wasn’t even a question of recognition. He was simply there. And then he wasn’t. And his blood ran colder than ever with some lost horror, and a strange roaring filled his ears.

Christmas came, and he and Morgan waded out to a nearby ridge and felled a conifer and dragged it back and set it up in the hallway. They made each other paper presents for the day itself, and drank eggnog, and had a meal of what the label on the jar said was best potted goose, even if that was to be doubted from the thing’s taste and chew. A brief, awkward moment when his hands grew bloody on a knife and fork silver-coated by a new process known as electroplating, which Morgan had just explained. He wrapped them in a napkin and pretended a small cut. Afterward, chairs were arranged around the piano, and they sang hymns, and Oonagh read to them of the journey of the wise men from the Gospel of Matthew, and the troubles of the world seemed very far off.

Then it was 1868 and the weather worsened and going outside for any reason beyond clearing a path to the stables to see to the horses became impracticable, and the night-time conversations over the dinner table settled with increasing frequency on the Callaghans’ childhood. Much though Karl Haupmann might have liked to imagine they’d experienced something like his own lonely upbringing, they spoke of it as a golden time filled with scrapes and adventures, with the adult world as something to be spied upon, bested, and ridiculed. While he’d been sitting at the far end of a long table as his father slurped his soup in a grey, silent house, Oonagh and Morgan had been building sailing ships out of the tapestries, spending nights outside hidden in trees, tobogganing down staircases on heirloom trays, or taunting Cousin Daphne and her ilk…

“Do you remember, Morgan, that dog we had during the second year at Great Aunt Mary’s house?”

“You see, Karl.” Oonagh gave him a smile. “We never could fix on a name. He was a ferocious beast, really. Friendly enough with us most of the time. But as for anyone else…”

Once again, they were off. But sometimes the arguments, the contradictions, the well-if-you’d-actually-take-the-time-to-listen-to-what-I’m-sayings became more persistent. It was happening again tonight as Morgan, ever the considerate host, stood up to serve coffee, and the conversation took a lurch toward faith.

“The sun never stands still and the world isn’t flat, Oonagh. We know things now which we didn’t know when the words you seem to place so much faith on were written. You’ll take sugar, Karl…?”

It was plain tonight that she was worn out. The sheen of her skin had gained a sheet of feverish sweat, and her hands shook when she tried to drink more wine to suppress a deeper bout of coughing. Her voice quavered when she spoke.

“The thing is, Morgan… The thing is that not everything can be explained by this plus that equals something else. You sometimes claim to be interested in the workings of the human heart—and I don’t mean chambers and valves. I mean…” She made a gesture that seemingly encompassed most of Kansas along with this half-finished house. “What I mean is…” Now, there were more coughs. “What I mean… What… What I… Wh—” She banged the table in frustration as the next bout finally subsided, a bloodied red napkin balled in her fist. Her hair was lank and a drip of sweat hung shivering at her nose until, in a further angry gesture, she swiped it off. Her skin was now so pale it seemed to have an inner glow. The smell of fresh human blood, along with the bittersweet odour of laudanum, was dark and strong.

“Dearest Oonagh,” Morgan began, “I really think it’s time you should—”

“What should I do, my darling brother? You tell me that. Should I go back to my bed, return to my sickroom? Resume counting off what’s left of my hours and days?” Her eyes flashed. “You see what life’s like between us here now, don’t you, Karl? What we are, and what we’re waiting for… But then…” Her mouth twisted. Her teeth, made more prominent by the wasting of her condition, were flecked with red. “You’re only here because of whatever you now are. Death draws you like a moth to a flame.”

She slumped back, shivering and exhausted, and pushed weakly against her brother when he tried to support her up to her bed.

“I guess we can’t blame her for being difficult, Karl,” Morgan said later as they sat in the study in the packinghouse. “But I’m sorry you had to see that.” He gave an odd chuckle. “I guess I’m sorry for a whole lot of things… This sure isn’t the world I expected to be living in. Nothing like it…”

“You could say that.” Morgan’s hand shook as he picked up a fresh decanter. “Oonagh’s a woman, with all that entails, and I’m guessing that’s still a little outside your experience, old boy. Starts with how we got on with our own mothers, is, apparently, the latest theory. But I don’t even remember mine. And yours—she died in some kind of fall, didn’t she…? Oh, I’m sorry. Have some more of this wine.”

Then he was almost back to the Morgan of old, and talking about how cattle weren’t simply meat, but a treasure chest of chemical opportunities. Bone and blood. Glues and lanolins and lubricants. Then there was soap…

“You must have noticed some of this in your bathroom.” He held out a white, paper-wrapped block. “We’re already selling a little of it commercially.”

Karl Haupmann strained his eyes, yet the thing seemed oddly blurred. Beneath Sweetwater in copperplate lettering was a picture of how the town itself would soon look—but instead of trains and carts and bustle, with the Callaghans’ house set in the background, he seemed to see a great city swimming before him out of the pure white.

“Took a whole lot of work to get the right lathering and the consistency. Not to mention the scent. Stuff about top notes and middle tones… Go on. Open it up.”

The smell as he fumblingly unwrapped the bar was strong yet exquisite. He’d grown familiar with it here, but this new intensification was strange. Stranger still, though, was the effect tonight’s wine was having on him. He’d certainly drunk more than usual, and he was pretty sure Morgan had commented on this being a particularly powerful vintage. It had had a bitter edge, which was maybe down to some uncommon ingredient. Weren’t fish scales sometimes used in the fining process? Or was that for beer? But fish scales were silver—he could almost see them glinting about him as he peered through the swirling gloom toward his old friend.

The voice far off. This really was strange. Yet also familiar. There had been many nights such as this back in Boston when not just the wine but the rich food, the faces, and the places and all of Morgan’s hospitality had overwhelmed him. Now, it seemed to be happening again. And that scent was still on his hands, which also took him back to Boston, and he realised with an easy laugh as Morgan lifted him that everything since had been nothing but a dream.

A summer afternoon, and he was in the library in the old merchant’s house on Devonshire Street that the Callaghans had rented. At some point he’d put aside his essay and wandered out into the hallway to study the paintings. Then, he took the stairs.

Timbers creaked as he passed the door along the upper corridor, which he knew led to Oonagh Callaghan’s bedroom. Not that he would have ever considered entering such a place. Even if, as today, it was ajar.

There was Oonagh. Standing wreathed in steam before the slipper bath which she must have just stepped from. The warm air was intensely fragrant. Tendrils of wet hair lay across her shoulders and breasts. “Oh, it’s you Karl…” she said, but made no immediate attempt to cover herself. Then, the moment broke, and she reached for a towel. “Well, never mind.” She gave an easy smile. “If you see Bertha, can you tell her I’m finished with my bath?”

Hurtingly bright above him hovered a great black-threaded eye. He groaned and felt resistance when he tried to turn. He seemed to be lying on an iron-framed bed. This had to be the packinghouse, and Morgan was beside him. Yet he still couldn’t move.

“What…?” All kinds of thoughts rushed through him. A dark, bitter taste edged his mouth.

He felt the warmth of Morgan’s hand laid upon his thigh as he strained again. Beneath the rough blanket which covered him, he seemed to be entirely naked.

“It’s…” A pause as Morgan consulted his pocket watch. “Just after seven in the morning. You’ve been out for three, almost four hours.”

“What do you mean, out?” He closed his eyes. Waited for the falling feeling to lessen. Willed his thoughts to re-gather. “This light—it’s too strong.”

“Of course, old boy. Stupid of me. Here.” Morgan hooked his tinted eyeglasses around his ears and the snowy blaze of the packinghouse roof dimmed. “Guess we should make sure we keep you covered, as well.”

“My room—there are things I need.” He heard the bed creak as he made a stronger effort to sit up. Felt resistance at his ankles and wrists.

“Well, let’s face it, you haven’t exactly been forthcoming with us, have you?”

“Well, yes. Simple fact of the matter is, Karl, I couldn’t just let things go on.”

Morgan chuckled. “For what it’s worth, old boy, enough chloral hydrate to fell a horse. I’m sorry.”

“And I thought I had the only key to my room.” It was almost funny. Funnier still, or at least more absurd, was the realisation that he was more uncomfortable with the thought of Oonagh’s cool gaze travelling over those earlier entries—the feeble drawings, the dreadful poetry—than all the later stuff about moons and morphine, records of atrocities, and cravings for blood.

“Karl—you’re my and Oonagh’s best and oldest friend. That’s the very last thing we’d ever think of you.”

Yet he was in restraining cuffs, the sort he’d used many times to stop delirious soldiers from injuring themselves, although these seemed to be made of steel instead of stitched canvas. And, more prosaically, he needed to piss.

A bucket was brought and the chains which ran through the bed from his cuffs were loosened sufficiently for him to half-stand. Karl Haupmann glanced around the makeshift study as he relieved himself. The place was, amongst many other things, a trove of scientific instruments. And Morgan Callaghan was still a physician. His temperature—which was always deathly low—would certainly have been taken whilst he was unconscious. Small incisions—to see if his body really did heal almost instantly—could well have been made.

“This is a mess, isn’t it?” he sighed as he sat back on the cold edge of the bed. “I should never have taken the road to Sweetwater.”

“Now you’re being ridiculous. I mean, all the time you’ve been with us, we’ve known something was wrong. Not that you seemed ill, exactly. But you certainly didn’t seem well. I soon decided you were taking morphine, but it always felt like something more than that. And then all the other small things which might have meant nothing on their own, but kind of stacked up.”

“And now, if you’ve both read my notebook, you know as much as I do. Or as little.”

“Well, maybe. But we are where we are. And what else is there to do but for us try to make sense of this, Karl old boy? Can you tell me that?”

He’d often considered sharing the truth about his contagion—or at least whatever of the truth he could manage to scrape up. In some pause between the dinner table arguments perhaps, or maybe later on in the evening when the last chord had faded from the piano out in the hall, or sitting beside Oonagh in the blue blaze of her room, or with Morgan right here in this packinghouse. In fact, it seemed like the worst kind of betrayal of their friendship to have held back for so long.

Just some figure moving through the twilight smoke of an emptied battlefield. Could have been a soldier or another physician, but there was something about the patient way it moved that told him it was something else. Looter, most likely. When the figure bent to linger at a particular spot, and he heard what might have been screams, he knew it was up to no kind of good.

The figure raised its head consideringly as he went over at a run. He couldn’t see much, but he sensed that it was ragged and old, although it then scuttled off semi-sideways toward the nearby stand of trees with surprising speed.

The figure didn’t stop, but the body of a young secessionist soldier lay sprawled in the dip of land where it had been. Freshly exposed tissue shone amid new blood at what was left of the throat. Calling for the two nearest stretcher-bearers to follow him, he unholstered his Navy Colt and headed for the trees.

This was March 1865. Through all the years of this conflict, the North had been crying out for good generals. Now, at last, they had one in the rugged shape of William Tecumseh Sherman, and had crossed into North Carolina under his command, cutting a swathe of devastation in a new method of all-out warfare known as scorched earth as the entire conflict finally crawled to its bitter end.

Strange times filled with strange tales. Of Jefferson Davis arrested in woman’s clothing. Of freed Southern slaves taking every Northern man’s job, and possibly their wives as well. Of angels with flaming swords joining in the heat of slaughter, and of the ghosts that came to haunt such places after.

Now, he was at the trees. Dark corridors reaching off in every direction. Many stars tonight, but no moon. Formal surrender negotiations were probably already taking place up in Washington, and it made every kind of sense to give up and turn back. Instead, quiet, cautious—curious, even—he motioned the privates to follow him deeper into the wood.

A faint hiss of breathing out there in the darkness. What might have been a bitter chuckle.

“What is it, captain?” whispered the fatter private, who was named Timo Thacker, and considered a campfire wit. Both men were breathing uneasy, and had their bayonets fixed.

He gestured them to fan out. Back where the trees began, a broken wagon had a dead horse still harnessed to it, which was starting to bloat and rot in the shafts. He caught a grey glint of movement there, along with an oddly feral smell. A wildcat? A chill passed through him and his voice fell oddly flat as he called again for the thing to come out, and cocked his Navy Colt.

Down by the dead horse, down beneath the wagon’s canted broken wheel, where there was a trench which had been set for protection with the spear-like iron staves of some old, uprooted fence, he caught the gleam of a bald, cankered head, and saw, in far less light than seemed possible, eyes black as ebony marbles as the head was raised. Bird-thin shoulders beneath feathered rags. More of that rank, feral smell. Fresh, yet indefinably old. Hands with no apparent fingers beyond jagged stubs of bone. Teeth out of a nightmare. Chin strung with gore.

Not fleeing now, and clearly no longer afraid, the old thing of a man climbed out toward him around the staves of the trench. The cattish, meathouse smell intensified. When Captain Karl Haupmann could—legitimately—have fired, he lowered his gun.

Next moment, the creature leapt at him with astonishing speed and agility, and a strange kind of tussle ensued. The old man was so light that by rights he should have easily thrown him off. But he—it—writhed and clung, hissing clotted phrases which sounded oddly French. He heard himself shouting for help, followed by the useless hot blat of his dropped gun. Then felt a searching scrabble of teeth against his face slide down toward his throat.

The two privates were with him now, trying to prise the thing off. But the cold, sick, slick, earthy, feral smell intensified, and he felt something give with a strange, sweet sharpness at the left side of his neck. Then, in a grunting tumble, they all fell, and the creature gave a hissing scream as one of the iron staves which jutted from the trench broke like a spear through its chest. It was dying, surely, but it was still somehow gripping him with those fingerless hands as it writhed and mewled. Somewhere far off, as if underwater, he could still hear the two privates shouting and struggling. Then something final about the night seemed to give, and the old man, the creature, let go, and those terrible jaws widened a last time, and vomited out a last, long black gout of blood.

They were helping him up. The dead horse, in a seethe of maggots and foul air, was deflating and the thing pinioned on the iron stave was little but a blackened lump.

“Hey, sir, that’s a nasty bite you got there on your neck. You can’t be too careful, an’ you might a’ swallowed some of that old critter’s blood.”

He was conscious he was stumbling out of the wood between Timo Thacker and Elmer Buckley’s supporting arms, and of being coated in gore. Even in the army, the arrival of such a trio back at camp would normally have made a surprising sight, but not now, and at the end of another battle. The hospital tent they laid him in felt reassuringly like home, with its familiar aromas of damp canvas, carbolic and sick men, and he was happy to let himself be seen to by his colleagues, and stripped of his ruined clothes. Even the cold pain in his shoulder and neck, and the shivers that followed, were soon dissolved by morphine, and he fell into a surprisingly easy sleep.

Next morning, he felt almost fine and could walk unaided. He used a propped shaving mirror to peel off the bandaging around his neck, expecting to find something nasty and deep. But there was nothing but the clean, silvery scar tissue of an injury that already looked months old, and an odd widening of the pupils, although, peering at his tilted reflection, he almost felt as if he was looking at someone else. All stuff and nonsense, and no sign of Privates Thacker and Buckley either. They’d vanished, presumed deserted, although the way things were now heading, no one cared enough to send out a search party for them. Nor could he find the clearing in the woods when he searched for it, and he made no formal report.

His division had moved to a big encampment outside the town of Greensborough when news finally came that the war had ended. He was kept busy as ever in his work as a physician—men still fought and shot each other, only now they did it outside bars—and maintained his intake of morphine to hold back the edge of a fever that kept threatening to take hold.

Trains came and went in the sidings beneath the bright green hills that surrounded Greensborough, bringing all the medicines and materials—even fresh ammunition—for which they’d been pleading throughout the war. Meanwhile, the president had been assassinated, and a steamship called the Sultana had gone down on the Mississippi with a thousand homebound Union soldiers drowned. The world seemed oddly bright, and fresh-washed. Everything smelled rich and there was an odd ache in the roof of his mouth. Half the time he felt extraordinarily good. The rest of the time he didn’t know what the hell he felt.

Then a letter arrived from Morgan—the first in ages—sharing his plans and making that offer for him to come to what would eventually become known as Sweetwater, but also bringing first news that Oonagh had fallen ill with consumption. He sat out on a log overlooking the town in the long light of evening, reading and rereading the pages as if searching for some new meaning even as the dark came in. There was no moon tonight. Nothing but stars. A whole month had already gone by since he’d encountered that strange old thing of a man in the aftermath of what they were now calling the Battle of Bentonville, and he was still getting the night sweats and the shivers.

He pocketed Morgan’s letter and wandered down into Greensborough, with its spilling bars, shouts, and gunshots. There was smoke and heat. There were men carousing with whores. He smelled their sweat. Felt the raw brush of the air against his skin and the strange shape and taste of his mouth. He swallowed one of the waxy morphine pills he kept in a tin in his pocket, and then another, although he knew he had to stop. Yet something still threatened, and he could hear and see things with bizarre clarity—especially tonight—even if strong daylight still hurt.

His stomach growled, and he considered whether he was hungry. A hog, penny a slice, topped with fried onion and wrapped in new bread, had been set to roast out on a lot beside a livery hotel. His tongue explored the odd geographies of his mouth as he swallowed back saliva and studied the gleaming meat, but the idea of eating seared skin and dead flesh left him strangely disgusted. He wandered on.

Oonagh Callaghan was ill and nothing was the same in this newly peaceable year of 1865. Not even Karl Haupmann—and whatever kind of plans he was left with now. The world had turned and the moon had turned with it, and he somehow knew it was far better that he keep away from the crowds. This alley, for instance, for all its reek of piss and vomit, seemed oddly welcoming—more part of whatever he now was—than anywhere he’d known, experienced, since… Exactly when? He had no idea.

He looked toward the figure who’d come to stand by him, presumably from out of that nearby bar. He could see him very clearly, dark though it was. Thin. With pale skin and reddish hair and a neck raw from recent shaving. Smell him too. He wasn’t exactly drunk, but he wasn’t sober either. Made better use than most did of soap and water. Wasn’t—never had been—a soldier. You could always tell. He wore a cheap ring. A florid necktie. Had some kind of chain at his throat.

“You just seem to be standing here, when it’s plain to see…” The man smiled awkwardly. Gestured. He had a light Irish brogue. “The main use for which this alley is put. Or perhaps I should say uses. Come on…”

He hooked an arm around Karl Haupmann’s. Drew him back out into the teeming river of the street.

“You’re a doctor, I’m guessing, from that badge on your uniform. You must have seen a great deal.”

He stumbled and blinked. The spilling light seemed almost as hurtful as daylight.

The man—Mark—was still drawing him on. Perhaps with the intent of robbing him. As if that mattered. Not a soldier, no. But his thinness and a strange kind of wariness suggested that, like most people, he’d been left far from untouched by the war.

“You’re certainly not yourself, are you my friend? Yet you don’t seem to have been drinking. Best thing, in my experience, is a nice lie down.”

They’d left the crowds behind now, along with some oddly sneering shouts, and were heading downhill into the better, deeper, richer dark.

“You’re a captain, aren’t you? Do you have any money? I mean, it’s not essential. But at least I thought I should ask. Watch out for that puddle…”

Now, they were down at the edge of the rail sidings, where displaced families and other casualties of the storms of war had set up camp. Then they were inside somewhere, a kind of tent mostly made of leaning boards and scraps of sack. A flint scritched. A muttonfat candle flared. The roof was low, but at its centre Karl Haupmann found he could stand. A hovel, really, with a bed and a few things for cooking and washing. Small efforts had been made to make the place homely, with some old cushions and odd bits of crockery and glass.

Many of Greensborough’s whores, he now recalled, also lived down by these sidings. Not that he’d ever had much dealings with such creatures beyond the occasional shifts he’d put in at the pox clinic, where everything was reduced to syringes and symptoms and diseased bits of flesh. But he knew that men were drawn to men far more often than the so-called guardians of morality claimed.

“Might as well sit yourself down on that chest. We can pass the hour any way you prefer.”

There was little, though, to suggest any kind of commercial transaction was involved even as the man, Mark—although he was barely more than a boy—took off his frayed coat and folded it with oddly touching neatness, and then, button by button, began to loosen his shirt.

So very thin. Wrists like pale knobbled twigs. His back now turned and the vertebrae perfectly outlined beneath the freckles and patches of peeling skin. The twin scapulae like bony wings. He smelled—there was no other word for it—delicious. Yet humans were such fragile creatures. A pulse. A breath. A few frail hopes and thoughts. Now, he was loosening his belt.

This was almost like the many thousands of soldiers who’d stripped themselves to be examined by Captain Physician Karl Haupmann. Yet all of that seemed very far away; a different kind of life lived by someone other than whoever he now was. He wondered abstractly as the boy, man, Mark, turned toward him, if whatever he was feeling here in this hovel was merely an expression of simple lust. In many ways, that would make perfect sense—after all, he was still a virgin and rarely ever sought the company of women, beyond worshipping Oonagh Callaghan from afar—and the wish for things to simply be that way, just another quirk in the infinite weave of Creation, seemed oddly appealing, even though some roaring part of him knew that they were not.

“Say, fella.” Callused palms rubbed skin again skin. Again, the man shivered. That chain still dangled at his throat. “You know, you really do look odd.”

The night almost perfected now. Solid and clear as blackest crystal. A falling leap into midnight dark.

The whole spinning earth seemed to roll beneath him as he stepped forward. The sudden flood which filled his mouth, the pain in his gums and the prickle at his lips, seemed oddly familiar, almost prosaic. What really mattered was the power, the need, the strength.

Almost the same question that Captain Physician Karl Haupmann had asked another creature under the dark of a different moon. But he was stronger now, and nothing was the same. There would be no anguish or disgust. Standing in the remains of his clothes and already half-weeping. The boy. The man. The prey. The sacrifice. The bag of blood. Not surprised now, but somehow knowing. As if he’d been waiting for this moment of ultimate consummation since the red dark before his first howling breath.

They often muttered such things. Prayers and pointless pleadings. None of it mattered. That cross, as well, dangled on a cheap chain which the bitten fingers were now clutching. Easily ripped aside. His jaw ached and parted. It seemed simple now. Perfect and natural and easy. For this was how it had always been.

Not even words, really, nor any proper resistance, but merely the small sounds any animal made during the process of death. But the light from this thing those puny fingers were holding seemed brightly awkward. Almost like the sick blaze of the sun. Not a cross at all, but a tiny, bitter dagger stabbing and flashing and tearing at the fabric of his lust, the strength of his need.

The prey, the man, Mark’s, voice was stronger now as he sensed hesitation, and the night seemed to slide between them in disjointed blocks.

Now the voice was a quavering scream. There were hovels nearby. Others who might come blundering in with their guns and clubs and silly superstitions. All of which could be dealt with. But the risks were escalating even as the sense of whoever he was, and the exultation that came with it, drained away.

He turned from his prey and stumbled back out into the night. At a loping run, clawing through washing, clambering walls, he fled.

Greensborough is a town fringed with factories and mills, many of which had been plundered and damaged during the last convulsions of the war, and Karl Haupmann ended up crouched amid broken pulleys and shattered boilers in a place where a few stars glimmered through a shell-holed roof. Whatever the need had been remained with him—although, knife drawn across a whetstone, sunlight on silver, nail dug into a wound, it was now a thin, protracted screech. And whatever the boy, man, Mark had said about his eyes… The whole way he’d felt… Impossible… And yet…

He crawled across the floor of the factory to raise his head over the stone lip of some kind of sump, well, or cistern, thinking there might be a mirror of water beyond. Something cold and foul breathed up at him, and for a moment he sensed an eel-like slide. Then, a deformed kind of face, a terrible mask, the image of a pale, fanged, black-eyed predator, formed and shimmered in the blackness.

He sank back. Shivering. For he was Captain Physician Karl Haupmann of the soon-to-be-disbanded Army of the Tennessee, a modern man of science and reason. Whatever had happened tonight—whatever he’d just seen down in that cistern—it wasn’t him, and couldn’t possibly be real. Nor was it something he could ever allow himself to become.

More fever-shivers of horror or need tore through him. He knew this night still had a long way to go. Knew, too, there would be many other nights and dark moons, year on year and decade after decade until he eventually became like that poor, terrible thing he’d discovered picking its way across the last battlefield, muttering in clotted French as it snapped at his throat before vomiting out whatever life it still possessed…

He felt in his pocket, where several dozen waxy pills rolled inside a tin box. Enough to last many weeks, or so he’d calculated, but he chewed and swallowed them all, gagging against their bitterness. Then he lay back and waited for everything to disappear.

It was already past noon. He was sitting on the iron frame bed in the packinghouse with a blanket over his shoulders and another across his bare lap.

“Lucky for you that that pervert threatened you with something made of silver.”

“Of course, for him as well. But have you ever—and I understand how difficult this must be—let go of this urge and killed anyone else?”

“But you…” His old friend’s warm brown eyes were unusually cold. “…want to?”

“It never really goes away, and strengthens with the waning of each moon. Which is why I take the morphine—not because it’s a medicine, and not because I’m in pain, or not that alone. But because it’s a poison which suppresses, absorbs the power, the urge, just enough for me to live on as something passably human. At least, if I keep out of bright light.”

“And you’ve never found anyone else with your condition? I mean, apart from those two privates?”

“It’s all there in my notebook.” The chains ticked as he scratched at his arm. He wondered if he felt hungry, and in what way. Once, Morgan had left the packinghouse for half an hour, and had returned not with his syringe and blue bottles, but with tea and toast. “I think Timo Thacker and Elmer Buckley absorbed a deal less of the old man’s blood than I did. They weren’t…” He scratched again. “As fully infected. More trapped in a kind of halfway state. Strong, but weak. Lost and looking for something they could never find. Invulnerable—or so they thought—but rotting.”

“You think I don’t know that, Morgan? The old man, he must have been infected somehow. I even have an idea of how it happened. I sometimes get these odd flashes—it’s a mechanism I can’t explain—but I believe he was a craftsman in some old abbey or cathedral. I think it might be in Strasbourg in France. And I think he was already an old man when it happened…” That pale, beautiful woman standing amid the religious detritus of some antique workshop. “I really don’t know, other than that he somehow ended up picking over the bodies in that Carolina battlefield… And that he was once, probably, a good man. I think his name was Ezekiel.”

“All of this…” Wonderingly, Morgan shook his head. “All the old myths and folktales. Oh, I fully understand we’re talking about a rare and difficult contagion, Karl, which you’ve successfully suppressed with medication. An achievement in itself. Maybe some of the symptoms really are a bit like hydrophobia in rabies just as you say in some of your notes. But the broader scientific implications remain extraordinary.”

“My own thoughts still sometimes go that way—after all, I’m still a rational man. Although, to be honest Morgan, less and less. You see, even if something makes no sense and stands against all you believe in, if it’s there, and if there’s no escaping it, you have to try to understand it for what it really is.”

“That’s how I got this…” He held out his seared left palm, although Morgan must have noticed it many times before. “I did it back when I was trying to work out my levels of response and resistance after I’d fled Greensborough for St. Louis.”

“And strong sunlight, as well. And this strange business with the phases of the moon. But not holy water, or the blessed sacraments—no I won’t go there, and I know you’ve explored all the possibilities. How about garlic, though?”

“I never did like the stuff and not everything about me has changed, so I think that’s just down to a poorly educated palate.”

Morgan smiled. “And—I know you’ll think I’m stupid for even asking—but there’s no truth in all the stuff about mirrors?”

“Of course there isn’t. That would be against the basic laws of physics. Neither can I change into a bat or a wolf.” But the way his reflection had seemed to hesitate when he’d looked down into that cistern, that foul slide of darkness, as if something even more horrible was waiting for him there… The blankets prickled as he tried to sit more easily. He was starting to sweat. The need for morphine had been surprisingly slow to rise, most probably because of the chloral hydrate, which of course was a poison as well, and thus would have a similar suppressing effect. But it was beginning now.

“Look, Morgan. I don’t blame you for being curious, and you’re right to be wary. What I’ll do, just as soon as this weather clears, is head off and leave you. Meanwhile, I can stay here in the packinghouse if that makes you and Oonagh feel more easy. You can even”—he raised his arms—“keep me in these things. But you’ve read my notebook—you know about the dangers of this contagion. So it’s important that you bring me my box with the morphine and the syringe. I’ve missed one dose already.”

Morgan smiled, but in the disappointed way he often did when someone proposed an argument he didn’t agree with. “Now that would be sheer foolishness. We can help each other, old boy. You can help yourself. What you’ve told me, what I’ve already learned and seen, it casts a dazzling new light upon everything we imagine we know about the world…”

Morgan picked up the tray, and his footsteps faded until the iron door that led out of the packinghouse finally boomed shut.

The iron bedframe was a sturdy thing, with its base bolted to the concrete floor. Running the chains to and fro did nothing to loosen them; they, too, were well made, and of good steel. What time was it now? Probably no more than late afternoon. Any other day than this, he’d be getting washed and dressed in his room before heading downstairs to discover what interesting new line of poetry or philosophy Oonagh had found in one of her books. But all of that had been a dream. This was what was real.

He swallowed. His tongue explored his mouth. His heart, his pulse, his breathing roared. This or that much morphine, taken intravenously in otherwise deadly doses according to the phases of the moon. A delicate calculation even for a medical man. In that it was any kind of calculation at all. He lay back. The bed creaked beneath him. He almost dozed.

He started at the sound of the iron door opening. Followed this time not by Morgan’s brisk heelclicks, but the slower tap of a cane. Dusk had settled down from the great, snow-cataracted eye above him, and a lantern threw shadows across the heaped paraphernalia of the packinghouse. He could sense Oonagh Callaghan’s presence long before she opened the door into this makeshift study, but her odour was sour and sick, and she no longer smelled like Sweetwater soap.

“This is Morgan’s territory.” Her hand trembled as she set down her cane. “I hardly ever come here.”

She’d made an effort to be presentable in the sort of clothes he associated with their Sundays here, but the effect had not been a success. Her hair stuck to her temples. Her lips were frayed. There was even something wrong with the buttoning of her dress. Clearly, she’d also taken a great deal of laudanum; the stuff leaked out of her in bitter puffs. He also realised from her scent that they were closer than he’d feared to the next fully dark moon.

“Morgan says you’ve both read that notebook you once gave me. I guess he’s explained whatever else there is to know.”

“It’s been plain since you arrived here, Karl, that something was wrong. You were so cold, so pale, so changed. It was like being visited by the ghost of the man we’d once known. Yet so quick, so strong! You look at things in that dark, odd way. Your voice, even your handwriting, isn’t the same. Strange though it may seem, and impossibly strange though the answer seems to be, it was really just a question of what happened to make you into this different creature who still possessed your name.” Now, she leaned forward. “But what’s it like? How does it feel?”

“I really don’t know, Oonagh. That’s what I’ve been trying to find out, and travelling, killing men, all these recent years. All, basically, to no avail. But then there are these voices, these glimpses of other places—”

He nodded. “I think the old thing of man once had a visitor—a woman—someone he thought he might come to know, but never could. But this isn’t some bedtime story, Oonagh—things come to me, then they fade. But I do know he was incredibly old, and lost, and in pain.”

“Terrible—to be possessed in that way. But he survived, Karl! So have you. And now there’s all the evidence you’ve set down in our notebook. The tremendous efforts of control and understanding you’ve made. Is it really true that you can withstand serious injury, even bullets?”

“This isn’t some miracle.” He shivered and shifted. “I do understand—understand better than anyone—that the ability of my body to repair itself might seem to offer new medical insights. But it’s also incredibly dangerous. Look what it did to that old man. Look what it’s doing to me…” He was conscious of the cold. Conscious of his chains. Consciousness of his near-nakedness. Conscious that it wouldn’t help to weep. “It’s a disease, a curse, a contagion, not some blessing. That’s why I need more morphine. Not sometime soon, or later tonight, or tomorrow. But right now. You haven’t been through this. And I have.”

“Don’t you tell me that!” Her dulled eyes flared. “Don’t you tell me what I have and haven’t been through…” Then she tried to smile. “You know, Karl, Morgan and I used to have this aunt. Oh, she probably isn’t one of the ones we’ve mentioned. She wasn’t particularly eccentric, but she had this phrase she liked to use. I’d rather die, she’d say. Rather die than do something trivial such as attend the theatre after a bad review. I know she was just a vain and stupid woman, but I used to wonder what that phrase really meant. Rather die—than what? Suffer? Cause distress? Or do something bad—make a pact with the Devil like Faust in that play? Then, when I got this illness, the question became less abstract. Would I rather die, and in what circumstances…?”

“And you know what the answer is, Karl? Although I’m a religious woman, I realised I would submit to anything rather than lose the one real and certain thing I have. Which is my life. Oh, I still pray. I still think I believe. But is it a sin to desperately want not to give up your existence? Perhaps you understand what I’m saying. Perhaps not. The point is, Karl, that you have been possessed by something which gives you extraordinary physical resilience, and there’s every reason to believe it can be passed on. You say it’s dangerous, but I’m prepared to take that risk.” She fumbled with a handkerchief. Wiped her nose. “And what could be more dangerous, and final, anyway, than death itself? You say I don’t know. But I think I do. You’re my chance to live, Karl, and I’d rather die than not take it. I truly would…”

By trembling movements, Oonagh stood up, retrieved her cane and lantern, and shuffled her way out of the packinghouse. After she’d closed the iron door, he heard the heavy slide of a bolt being drawn.

A bitter wind moaned as it stirred the snow over the glass roof and the blankets were thin, but although he was shivering, he soon became drenched in sweat. He concentrated on using the extra lubrication to help work the left manacle off his wrist, and for a while there was progress, but the knuckles were simply too broad, and the single padlock which Morgan had used to secure the chains was as solid as everything else.

He tried to imagine his old friend’s return. To picture him bearing his precious blue bottles and syringe, many apologies, and perhaps even a key. Tried to imagine their world together here in Sweetwater remade. Jokes around the table. Frank contradictions and smiling jibes. Echoes of Chopin down the hallways. Hope. That flushing commode. It all seemed a very long way away.

He gave the chains some further angry tugs. Shivered and shuddered in hot new waves. But was it for blood, or morphine, or simple freedom that he craved? Impossible to tell. What did it matter anyway? Better to concentrate on the left hand, although by now it was badly swollen, and resisted the slide of the manacle even more than before. But he mustn’t give up. He had to get away from this place. Despite all of this, he still owed that to his friends. As the skin stretched and tore and began to ride across his palm, the thought struck him that this was rather like removing a glove. But no matter how hard he pulled or pressed, the bones across the knuckles were simply too broad.

The hand was a sodden thing now, dripping and throbbing, although it would soon start to heal. Slowly, he eased back the manacle. Then rested the knuckles on the bed’s iron frame. After a few light, testing taps with the manacle on his other wrist, he swung it down with all his strength. He blacked out for a few moments. After another attempt, and a longer period of blackness, it was finally possible to ease the entire manacle off the broken mess of his left hand. A bad moment when it seemed the freed steel hoop wouldn’t fit through the bedframe. Then it did, also releasing the rest of the chains, so he was now able to stand up.

He swayed for a while, balancing pain against consciousness. Then, still manacled by both ankles and one wrist, but finally able to move, he shuffled off through the brilliant dark, chains rattling behind him like that Dickens ghost. Both doors leading out of the packinghouse were bolted from the outside and had been designed, literally, to withstand a stampede. He searched for other ideas, possibilities, tools. He’d searched for morphine and other chemicals before without finding any, but how about this bow saw…? The teeth soon blunted without making any impression on the chains. Come spring, Morgan would find out just how badly many of his Eastern suppliers had let him down.

There were boxes filled with Venetian glass and bed sheets of Alabama cotton. There were tallboys and chests. Garden hoes and patent cloches. Cooking pots and chamber pots and pots for plants. Nothing, though, of any practical use. Then, his dragging chains snagged on the claw feet of an ottoman, setting it rocking, then toppling in a booming, domino rush. Sideboards keeled over. Statues crashed. Whole fine china dinner services skidded and shattered into white-edged shards. Karl Haupmann stood waiting amid the ringing aftermath and slow-falling dust. Any moment now, surely, would come the slide of a bolt. But the silence extended. After all, this packinghouse had been specifically designed to muffle the noise of slaughter.

Shivering and sweating, he looked up at the glass roof toward which all these piled mountains of possessions somehow seemed to strive. Morgan had once explained how it had been constructed using the same principles as the dome of the Pantheon in Rome, but with a lightness and economy of materials which only modern engineering could achieve. How it was, in effect, a huge glass bubble.

He began dragging things. Silk-covered armchairs, barrels of lamp oil and chests of drawers—whatever was close—were all thrown together into a growing pile. He tried thinking of his task as a puzzle in geometry. Tried imagining that he was back at home in the Bowery, stacking bricks on the rug floor in his mother’s room as she breathed encouragement from up in her bed.

The chains proved useful when it came to hauling the heavier objects if he looped them around. He was climbing now, pulling table-legs and torn picture frames, on and on and up and up, until he’d made a mountain with a creaking summit where he could stand and touch the dome’s cold edge.

He took a garden rake and struck hard against the glass. A pane wheezed. Using the looped chains and the returning strength of his left hand for extra purchase, he struck again, and again. A small crack finally appeared, then lengthened in a frosty hiss. As he stood shivering and panting, the crack spread, somehow leaping the iron supports to form a spiderweb which soon covered a third of the dome.

Then it stopped. He stared up at it, breathing hard, and was preparing to raise the rake and strike again when, with a deep groan, followed by a roaring, slashing, battering landslide, the entire roof collapsed in a thunder of glass, iron, and snow. Deafened, battered, he hunched and flinched until the torrent ceased with a few soft slidings and tinklings, and the stars and a bright, thin moon glittered down over the jagged yet strangely beautiful crater he’d somehow made. He’d lost the blankets and his tinted glasses, and his body was stuck with shards and the weeping of blood. But he was still conscious. Was still almost alive. Could still move.

He pulled out the bigger fragments of glass that had struck into his flesh, then climbed to the very edge of the packinghouse roof. The noise of this collapse must have been incredible, but all the windows of the big house up on the snowlit rise remained unlit. Perhaps Morgan was drunk, and Oonagh lost to her laudanum. Would that be so unusual? Important, anyway, for the sake of their lives and what was left of their friendship, to move on. A drop of maybe thirty feet lay before him, although there seemed to be a deep drift of snow directly beneath. But such distances were hard to judge, even when simply looking from a window into a city street. The wind moaned. The silent stars beat down. Then he was falling, flying, and his breath was punched from his lungs with a gravelly crunch.

By heaving steps, he began to wade off. One stride. Then another. The snow slightly less thick here. Only up as far as the knees. How far to go? As far as possible, that was all. But Sweetwater was still close when he looked back, and a deep, bloodied trail of indentations marked his passage from the packinghouse’s oddly roofless silhouette. Not good enough, soldier, and stand up straight, man, and salute the flag.

But standing, walking, didn’t seem like the best option right now. Better, especially with the drag of these chains and the depth of this snow, to simply crawl. Closer to swimming. This was more like it. Gasping lunges toward the ridgeback rise ahead. Bare angles of the black trees against the thinning stars. Confusions of root and rock. Somewhere to curl up and hide from the coming sun.

The stars almost gone now and the sky growing pinkish-blue. Hours, this journey must have taken, yet the ridgeback rise seemed no closer, and the long shadows were more like those thrown by a multitude of mighty buildings than the mere silhouettes of trees. A city, yes, and a fine one, glittering with power and light. Perhaps the old man called Ezekiel was there, or the green-eyed woman he still scarcely knew. Others too—a great army of the lost. Bleeding, weeping, ant on an empty page, Karl Haupmann crawled on across the snowfield as voices rose toward him in chorus with the searing light of the sun.

Another voice amid the swirling chorus. Somehow closer, yet incredibly far off in the brightness and cold.

“I can see exactly where you’ve gone! You’ve left a trail so big you might as well have put up bunting. So why the hell don’t you just show yourself?”

Soft crunch of footsteps. He was looking down as if from afar on the scene of a town frozen as if perfected on the printed wrapping of a bar of soap. Then he saw a figure dressed in good furs and snowshoes and carrying an odd-looking gun, who was breathing hard as he struggled up toward a stand of trees.

“Doesn’t matter what you did to the packinghouse, you know. All that matters… old boy… is that we get you back…”

Lie still as winter. Run forever from the sun. Burrow ever deeper into the calling dark of this cavern or cave, which should somehow be much deeper and more ancient than this freezing hollow in the snow. But the taunting voice was so close he could smell the exertion of his old friend’s body, hear the whistle through the frosted hairs of his nose.

Cornered. No options left and no place to run. Sickened by cold, betrayal, exhaustion, and the fickle, sickle moon. Sickened by the light, as well, and scarcely sheltered from anything by this thin burrow, which was then blocked by a fur-clad shadow, and a familiar laugh.

“You’re in some bad way, aren’t you, old boy?” Morgan said. Then he raised the odd-seeming gun, which gave a subdued phut.

“Hey, Karl…” It was Morgan again, but the dream had reshaped itself. “I found these in the mess you made of our packinghouse, so I guess you’d still prefer to have them on…” Fingers felt through bright bars, hooking something familiar around his ears and across the bridge of his nose.

The blue lenses brought some focus. He saw, in the light of a hung lantern, that he was in a cell-like room set with endless white tiles.

A tap hissed. Morgan shook water droplets from his hands and felt for a towel. This was one of the facilities in Sweetwater where the cattle carcasses would be skinned and bled come next spring, or summer at the latest. Set into the ceiling was the clever network of rails that Morgan had also demonstrated, along with the steel cage in which he was confined now hung. It had struck Karl Haupmann before how oddly medical the whole modern process of slaughter had become. He and thousands of other physicians could only have dreamed of facilities this pristine for tending injured men during the recent war.

“What do you think I want? Of course, I want to help Oonagh. I want that desperately. But what I really want is what any rational man would want in this situation. I want to know, Karl. I want to understand. You have no idea, old boy”—Morgan reached for a large steel bowl, and then a long knife—“how much I love life and knowledge.” His voice was slurred, and he staggered slightly on the slope of tiles toward the drain hole. “Nor how much I love my sister, and what I would be prepared to sacrifice to sustain these things…”

“Please don’t do this. You can kill me—at least, if that’s still possible. You can do whatever you like. But you can’t help Oonagh. You can’t save her. All you can do is make things worse.”

Morgan chuckled disappointedly. “Do you really think I would perform a procedure on any patient, let alone my darling sister, that I wasn’t prepared to undergo myself? Think of Scheele. Think of von Pettenkofer…”

The cage swung as Karl Haupmann strained against it, but held rigid by bolted steel, there was no possibility of escape. Morgan steadied its rocking, then raised the long blade through the bars. Little more than a tickle at his neck, but something gave, and the tiled room flickered, and a soft pattering began, which Morgan lifted the bowl to catch. Muttering in Latin as he did so. Corpus et sanguinem. The body and the blood.

Alone. But not alone. The calling, singing dark. Once again, the dream had moved on. He was sitting, but not exactly sitting, at a long table set with white linen and many candelabra. The light from all their candles was restless, there were so many points and surfaces upon which it could gather. Not just the plates, tureens, and cutlery, and the salt shakers and the pepper pots and all the glasses and the bottles, or even the food, of which there was a great deal—with glistening hams and shining fruits, white cobblestone heaps of potatoes and darkly lustrous greens—but over the brilliant walls of the strange grotto of this dark moon which surrounded them.

Perhaps he was back in Boston and at one of the famous Callaghan soirées, for Morgan and Oonagh were sitting at each of the table’s ends. In that case, the arguments, the pranks, the jostles for position over the meaning of everything which would be laughed over or forgotten by morning, would soon begin. But that didn’t seem right, because this place was simply too grand. All around in this glinting white palace, lay piled and frosted heaps of furniture, kitchenware, clocks…

He looked up against the resistance of the thing which was holding him, and saw a moonless space spangled with stars.

“Ah, Karl! You’re with us! I’ve adjusted the frame slightly so you can be more comfortable…”

He was set at the mid-point of the table in what had clearly once been the packinghouse in Sweetwater, yet this was still like some over-vivid dream, for he seemed to be entirely naked beyond his tinted eyeglasses and this restraining corset of steel. He turned his head as far to the right as the cage would allow, and saw that Oonagh’s hair was combed through and swept back in gleaming waves which framed her face and revealed the diamond-glinting lobes of her ears. A thick foxfur stole covered her shoulders to give a shadowed glimpse of gold and crystal in the divide of her breasts. She wore something that was more a gown than merely a dress. Blue-black, but with points of brightness that could have been flames or flowers. You can dance, can’t you Karl? He could hear the waft of music from the Old State House, feel the pinch of those borrowed shoes. He watched as a bead of sweat parted from her hairline and wandered down her cheek to explore the gleam of her lovely throat. The fever-heat that roared off her was so strong she seemed to shimmer like the candle flames. Then her face contorted, and she began to cough.

“Oh Oonagh,” said Morgan. “You’ve suffered for long enough. But the view from the other side is spectacular. Isn’t that right, Karl?”

The steel enclosure creaked, and Karl Haupmann saw that Morgan had also dressed for whatever this occasion actually was. Had on a new suit, its colours and nap stylishly understated, even if it did look to be a little tight across the chest. But so much else about him seemed wrong. The impossibly wide darkness of his eyes in particular, but also the pale gloom of his skin. Not a pallor, but a kind of luminous greyness which the dazzle of the candelabras scarcely touched. Then he smiled and raised his red glass to toast them both, and made uncharacteristic gulping noises as he drank, and the last of the dream died, and Karl Haupmann knew the truth.

“Can’t what, old boy?” Morgan slammed down the glass so hard it shattered in his hand. “Can’t live the rest of my life not knowing and forever wondering? Can’t do what any man would do if they had a curious, scientific bent? But you always were on the outside of things, weren’t you, old boy? Karl Haupmann the scrawny Yid with a dead, mad mother and a father in trade. Then the soldier who barely returned. Wandering Jew. Ancient Mariner. Or the Dutchman in that execrable new opera by Wagner. The role suits you so well you don’t even realise you’re playing it. But it doesn’t have to be like this. Not now. Not with all the things you could have become. Those two rabid ex-stretcher bearers, for instance. Didn’t it even cross your mind, old boy, that you could have commanded them to do whatever you wanted? That they were looking for something like you just as much as you were looking for them?”

Morgan turned his black gaze toward his sister. “You know, Oonagh,” he slurred, “the process is far more quickly accomplished than you probably imagine. The initial fever only lasted a few hours. It’s nothing compared to the pains and indignities you’ve already had to endure. Wasn’t it Aunt Euphenia who used to say that there was no such thing as giving up? Or was it Aunt Chloe with the terrible breath? Either way, they were right. It isn’t just the strength. It isn’t even the grace or the ease. It’s the breath of memory rising from a dark well… Life after life, existence after existence. We can do anything now. Be anything. All restraint and restrictions have been lifted. All bets are off…”

He smiled a distorted smile, and his eyes were nothing but dark pits. “If you can’t accept that, old boy, after all you’ve been through. Well…” He lifted a napkin from beside the shattered glass to reveal the Navy Colt. “Oonagh and I will have to carry on without you. You never could win an argument with me, Karl. So why bother to try now?”

Morgan stood up, swayed slightly, then rolled back his sleeve and unfolded a towel. Laid beneath it were a white porcelain bowl and a steel surgical knife.

“Oh, but it can’t, old boy.” He took the knife to his forearm and made a deep incision. Slowly at first, then quick, dark, and rich, the blood began to fill the bowl. “I suppose there should be speeches and ceremonies at this point, eh?” He grabbed the towel to wipe his arm as the wound began to close. “The kind of shenanigans you wanted for that iron chapel, Oonagh, with hymns and gold chalices and some old Irishman who thinks he’s God’s representative on earth wearing a stupid frock.”

Almost as pale as her brother, Oonagh shook her head. “This isn’t right, Morgan. I mean, look at you. Look at poor Karl. Look what this has already brought us to.”

“Don’t you think it’s a bit late, my dearest, darling, dying sister, for that? What this means, what this is, is a chance for another kind of life.”

“Oh, Oonagh, Oonagh, now you’re being ridiculous.” Morgan threw aside the blooded towel. “Just because something doesn’t fit into the prissy restrictions of your ridiculous religion, when you know I’ve only ever done what’s best for us both…” Now, changed though he was, he sounded hurt and they were almost back in the world of I-disagrees and if-you’ll-just-listens they’d long inhabited. “This, my darling sister”—he raised the red-brimming bowl—“is freedom from death. Not just now, but forever. Oh, I understand you’re afraid. Wasn’t Christ afraid on the cross? Wasn’t Abraham afraid when God asked him to kill his son? Wasn’t Columbus—”

“This isn’t another of your stupid analogies, Morgan,” Oonagh said, pulling herself up from her chair with a clatter of china and glass. “This is about what’s right. And what’s wrong.”

“Which are entirely relative concepts, as I’ve explained to you a million times. Of course this is difficult. Why the hell do you think I did it first, Oonagh, if it wasn’t for your sake? Why do you think I built Sweetwater? Why do you think I brought Karl here? Why do you think I’ve ever done anything in my entire bloody life? I want to be with you, Oonagh. Nothing else matters. Nothing ever has. Think of the pharaohs. Think of the times we’ve spent together. Hiding from the world in cupboards when we were young. Hiding so many other things since. But no longer. There’s nothing left to resist, Oonagh. There is no other choice…”

Still holding the bowl, Morgan leapt up onto the table with impossibly easy grace. He no longer seemed drunk, no longer seemed like the sometimes-blundering man of old, for even the sinking candles barely stirred as he strode between the many things which were laid there. But for the power of his presence, he could have been a ghost. Then he leapt down again, and was somehow still holding the unspilled bowl, although Oonagh had backed away from him and around her chair.

“Get away from me, Morg!” Her fingers closed on the pendant relic at her throat.

“Oh come on! You know I don’t believe in that stuff, and I doubt if you do either. Faith is just another position you’ve assumed so you can disagree with your brother. I’ve really had enough of all this mock moral superiority. In so many ways, I’ve been too easy on you for far too long. You were always the first. First born, and first to pet the pony and choose every treat. First to find fault, as well. Oh, I love you Oonagh. Love you far more dearly than you’ve ever loved yourself. You despised that beautiful body of yours long before it ever betrayed you. Always said how much you hated the curves and confinements and the stupid whalebone stays. So why don’t you join me, Oonagh? What on earth is stopping you from becoming all you could become…?”

Now he was holding the bowl out toward her, but instead of taking it, she dashed it from his grasp with a gasping sob. It spun up and over, and the blood sprayed out, flowering over the table in ruby droplets and flecking her face, but mostly falling down the front of her brother’s suit in a gleaming bib.

“Oh, well done, sis,” he snarled, clawing at the stuff. “But you know this doesn’t make the slightest difference. There’s always, always more blood…”

Oonagh shook her head, and tried to take another step back, but the glittering heaps of the packinghouse blocked her way. She was still gripping the relic, and mouthing words that might have been a prayer, but Morgan threw the chair aside in a shattering crash. Then he grabbed her arm, and it seemed for a moment as if they were kissing until the sideways movements of his head grew more fevered and her body started to shudder, and the scene became primeval. The torn and misarranged thing of exposed bone and grey-white flesh Morgan finally cast aside bore little resemblance to his beloved sister.

He stood, swaying. Then he wiped his chin and began to climb back onto the table. The candelabra tinkled as he stumbled. Many of the remaining candles flickered out.

“You know, old boy…” he said in a voice still slurred by blood and predatory incisors, “this really is incredible. I can feel her. It’s like…” In a small but characteristic gesture, he pushed a bloodied hand through his hair. “She’s still with me…” Now on his knees, he crawled and fumbled in a clatter of plates until his fingers closed on the Navy Colt’s grey metal, and straightened up, and turned it around, and pushed it under his chin.

Night was fading. It was very cold and there was the reek of death and blood and cordite. Soon, savage spears of light ignited the rim of the packinghouse.

Karl Haupmann shifted his head. Tried to focus down on his own body. Saw flesh that was starting to burn and blister inside rainbowed bars of wingnutted metal. Some sort of levered mechanism projected at the front of the device, doubtless designed so that the butcher could release the finished carcass with one easy strike. But his arms were gripped, his body held.

The sun still rising. His flesh peeling. Nothing left to do but burn, and no good reason not to. But so very hard to give up. Monster of a man. Not dead or alive, but dead or dead for Karl Haupmann. Living curse. Pleading hands and voices calling from across the centuries. But, looking down, something in him changed as he studied the unreachable lever that held him. With an effort, a shift of focus, or perhaps a kind of prayer to some dark god, he felt it give, and the cage parted.

With a Persian rug dragged over his shoulders, he crawled through the ruins of the packinghouse and found that the iron door was unbolted, and took the dark, linking tunnel to the empty house beyond. He’d feared he might have to resort to swallowing large doses of Oonagh’s laudanum, but his boxes and notebook had been laid neatly on his bed as if the Callaghans had intentionally left them out for him. And perhaps they had. His hands were shaking and a part of him he didn’t really believe still existed was weeping almost uncontrollably as he fumbled his blue bottles, but he somehow managed to get the stuff down. Then he climbed onto the bed and lay there shivering until sleep finally overcame him, and he dreamed for a while of Oonagh as she rose, nature perfected, from her bath, but then he was in some other house, which was filled with mirrors, and a dark figure was standing beside him, and he knew that something darker still lay at the building’s heart.

Almost night again when he awoke, and the scabs and scars which had covered his body were entirely gone. He straightened his tinted glasses, smoothed out his notebook, re-collected the spilled morphine, and sorted and arranged the contents of his boxes. Then he got himself dressed.

A tall, pale, hollow-cheeked man wearing a broad hat and tinted eyeglasses arrived at Kansas City one day in the spring of 1868. He and his pinto looked worn-out and ragged, but they attracted few glances. This was a frontier city, prosperous in its own way, but far odder sorts came and went at this hiring time of year.

He agreed a price for the pinto at a decent-seeming stable and booked himself a room at a temperance hostelry. Then he went out into the streets with his saddlebag flung over his shoulder, and called in at a bank, and arranged a telegraph transfer of money from an account at the Corn Exchange Bank of New York. Then he visited a tailor, and a boot-maker, and a barber, and his ragged appearance diminished somewhat. It was only at the apothecary that his credentials were questioned, and then only briefly, for who other than a physician could want this much morphine, and have the means to pay? He retreated to his hostelry and shut himself in his room as night began to fall. Next morning he settled up his bill, and was gone.

Karl Haupmann stood at Kansas City Station waiting for the eastbound train. He’d exchanged his saddlebag for a leather carrier, and looked far less the cowboy than before, although he still carried his Navy Colt armed with the two remaining silver bullets that some dogged part of him refused to use on himself.

Opposite the station and across the mud lay a jumble of buildings, shouting men and moaning, steaming cattle. He shifted his bag to stand where the view was blocked by a wall, on which many wanted posters had been hung. Some of the men he recognised. One or two he’d been involved in the killing of. But many were new. This, after all, was still a wild and a lawless land, and each new season brought a fresh batch of murders, rumours, and atrocities. He’d found nothing in the many newspapers he’d studied about a mystery killer at a half-built railhead, however, although he knew it would come.

He’d left Sweetwater the best part of a week before, mostly riding by night or through the long dusks across a landscape still patched white, but turning rapidly to brown. The telegraph was down in half a dozen places and snowmelt had cut through several culverts, leaving nothing but spaces of flailing rail, which he doubted would ever be re-joined. The town itself was already slipping back into the prairie soil from which it had striven to rise. Walls tumbling in and roofs collapsing and shoddily fitted windows falling out. Ivy and pools of damp forming around the fine piano as they invaded the once nearly grand house. The uncompleted iron chapel was a skeleton of red rust.

He’d dug graves for Oonagh and Morgan Callaghan in what was to have been their garden, soon as the melt would allow. He’d even marked the spot with two crosses, but had said no prayers. He wasn’t—had never been—that kind of a man, and had no wish to intrude into the world of their god. When others finally arrived to find the place abandoned, and word reached the Callaghans’ relatives back in Boston, a story of sorts would start to emerge. Reports from the servants who’d left prior to the winter of how the Callaghans had welcomed a tall, taciturn, and seemingly nameless man—a tale that might even be corroborated by a frontier woman named Mrs Knox. Could this be the culprit, the cold-hearted killer, who’d coldly accepted Oonagh and Morgan’s famous hospitality before killing them some time during the winter and fleeing the scene? And wasn’t this monster exactly the sort of creature who’d have been sought out by the Karl Haupmann of old, hunter and destroyer of bad men? It sometimes seemed to him that he was still crawling across a vast, empty snowfield away from the packinghouse, but the trail of blood lay ahead of him as well as at his back, and he knew it was his duty to find whatever lay at its end.

The train arrived, all smoke and steam and sliding metal. He let a Negro porter help with his luggage, then settled into his compartment, and pulled down the blind against the sun.

The Road to Sweetwater

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