By the time I had made my way through the dark streets to my studio the fever had worsened considerably. Opening the front door, which no one had seen fit to lock, I had to fight back nausea at that old familiar smell of graveyard detail and the Benders’ charnel pit, and for a moment I wondered whether I wasn’t delirious, for I could think of no rational reason for such a smell to permeate my entryway, unless Mrs. Fenster had died during my absence and gone undiscovered until now. An eerily faint orange light was barely discernible in the upstairs foyer, and I imagined I heard the muffled weeping of women.
Atop the stairs I was greeted by the macabre spectacle of a veiled quartet of ladies, dressed in mourning and quietly lamenting. Black crêpe bunting had been draped all about the walls of the foyer, and though candles were burning throughout the room no lamp was lit, and it was impossible to make out any of the faces beneath the black lace veils. At the center of the room on a makeshift catafalque lay a figure so small I took it for a child at first, until its features, distorted by two or three days’ lifelessness, resolved in my mind into those of my poor stunted assistant Lemuel. I presumed, then, that these were his aunties and his mother.
I bowed in the ladies’ general direction, as the stoutest of them rose huffing to her thick feet. “Didn’t have any way to ask for your permission,” she said.
“Mrs. Fenster?” I pointed at the still form. “What happened?”
She gave me an odd look. I attributed the pinching of her nostrils to the general stench in the room until she opened her mouth. “I shot him, as you well know, with your own gun.”
“Lemuel?” I asked, stupefied at such a claim.
“Lemuel’s over there.” She indicated a corner of the room near the gallery where the boy sat on a wicker chair with a look of bovine contentment on his imbecilic features. Looking over at the body on the slab I reconsidered its concave eyes and its lips drawn tight to reveal its uneven dentition; even in that state, these were clearly the mortal remains of a man of forty or fifty, and I understood that its slight resemblance to my own idiot assistant was a family one.
Mrs. Fenster had raised her veil, and I noted to my surprise that she herself had been weeping. “I’m surprised to see you carrying on so about Cowan,” I said.
She sniffed with some force, snorted, really. “He was my brother-in-law for an awful long time, Mr. Sadlaw, and wasn’t always mean.”
I nodded, and sniffed myself. The smell was powerful, and I wondered aloud why he hadn’t been put underground.
“What with the riots and your lady friend, plus a fire in a boardinghouse, the undertakers is all busy with the better sorts of stiffs, and Hiram’s been moved to the back of the line with the paupers.”
“I understood the Bulletin was going to pay all the funeral expenses.”
“With Mr. Banbury dead the paper ain’t paying for planting nobody but Banbury.” She studied my face and scowled. “You’re not well.”
“I’m not,” I allowed, and I sat down in a narrow armchair that sat against the wall. The pervasive tinge of corruption in the room exacerbated the effects of the fever, and a sweat had broken on my brow.
“You could do with a bite to eat, I’ll wager.”
Oddly, despite the ferocious stench in the room and my queasiness, I did feel hungry. I hadn’t eaten since the fateful hors d’oeuvre at Banbury’s reception.
“Come on into the kitchen, I’ve kept the door shut and the smell’s not bad in there.” I followed her waddling form through the door and found that the odor was, indeed, much diminished. She offered me first a biscuit from a tin. I bit into it with relish, and though it was a tasteless thing it was a pleasure to swallow. On my second bite I forgot myself and bit down with the left side of my jaw, and presently howled with such force that when I fell off my chair Mrs. Fenster’s three sisters burst into the kitchen to see what was the matter.
The pain was momentary and was replaced quickly with a foggy dreaminess as my housekeeper and her three veiled sisters clucked over my prostrate form, arguing about what was the matter with me. The fever seemed to rise back up in me with great speed, and I began wondering who was under which veil. I supposed that one sister was the pressman’s widow, that another was Mrs. Fenster’s murderous accomplice, and I wondered whether the third wasn’t the sister Mrs. Fenster had gone to visit ten years prior, from which trip she returned to kill the faithless Mr. Fenster. They seemed to be swimming above me in some sort of thick but transparent fluid, and their voices weren’t entirely clear to me either. I managed to point at my mouth.
“Tooth,” I yelled.
They picked me up and, as one, carried me through the house to the sound of rustling cotton. They babbled incoherently as they laid me out on my bed, and Mrs. Fenster lit the bedside lamp. She made some sort of pronouncement, and they all gasped at it.
Mrs. Fenster disappeared for a moment, and one of the sisters removed her veil. To my astonishment she was a lovely woman of perhaps forty years, and bore only the most tangential resemblance to my housekeeper. She mopped my brow with a handkerchief, muttering soothing words to me, and I began to feel the shameful stirrings of an erection. At that moment Mrs. Fenster returned, and at her signal the two still-veiled sisters each took hold of one of my arms. The lovely widow straddled me indecently at the waist, then grabbed my lower jaw and, simultaneously, my forehead. I was at once aroused and terrified, and as Mrs. Fenster approached me from the side I screamed, certain these were the angels of death, come to take me to hell. This arranged very well for Mrs. Fenster, who deftly inserted the pliers she had gone to fetch into my mouth and yanked powerfully once, twice, and thrice. At three I lost consciousness, aware that the fractured molar had slipped from its moorings.
I awakened on several occasions without truly regaining full consciousness; just enough to remember hearing Mrs. Fenster talking to a police officer about the reason the dead man was still in the foyer, and about her theory of where I had gone.
“He was here just long enough to pack his grip,” she said, “and then he lit back out, never to return. He said he was headed for Ohio, where he has folks.”
There was also a hubbub at one point because the idiot boy had punctured the hand of the dead man with a fork, stabbing it to the makeshift catafalque and laughing maniacally. That may have been a fever dream, however.
And then toward the end of my delirium I was brought into something akin to consciousness by the extremely pleasant sensation of some sort of warm wetness at my groin. Upon opening my eyes I found one of the sisters bobbing her head up and down at my waist. I must have let out a gasp because she looked up, disengaged her mouth from my prick and, using her right hand to keep the black veil from her face, smiled most pleasantly at me.
It was the widow Cowan herself, and the muted daylight that showed through my drawn curtain revealed her to be, if not the beauty I’d deliriously imagined the other night, a reasonably handsome woman nonetheless, despite a right eye with a tendency to wander, and a nose that had been broken and badly set. She seemed not at all embarrassed to be surprised in such an act. “This is by way of thanking you for being so kind to my boy all these months.” She slipped her mouth back around my cock and, lowering the veil, resumed bobbing. As she did so the border of the veil rhythmically grazed the skin above my groin, and though I was somewhat bothered by the smell of her husband’s putrefaction in the other room the overall sensation was pleasurable. I drifted back into a dream-state and she became a dozen women one after another, starting chronologically with Mary Harding and proceeding forward. When a Kentucky lass whose name I couldn’t remember metamorphosed into my abandoned wife Ninna I was taken by surprise but, oddly, not displeased, and it was into Ninna’s hungry gullet that I discharged a day or two’s worth of ejaculate. I opened my eyes again to find the widow wiping her lips with a handkerchief in a demure manner.
“My name’s Henrietta, but they call me Hennie,” she said, and I slipped back into contented sleep before I found the words to reply, aware that I was recovering and anxious to be going.
A DAY LATER I sat upright as though just waking from a satisfying night’s sleep, and called for Mrs. Fenster.
“Do you want me to fetch you some soup?” she asked when she came in.
I took a whiff and nearly told her no, famished though I was. “Not to be indelicate, but when are the undertakers coming?”
“For Hiram? They came and got him yesterday. He’s planted like he belongs.” I must have looked dubious, because she added, “That’s a smell that’s going to linger for a time. You’ll have to be leaving anyhow.”
She handed me a Rocky Mountain News from a stack that had been growing at my bedside and pointed at an article on the front page:
BETRAYED BY THIRST
ANOTHER ESCAPE FROM THE CITY JAIL
Four of Ten Evaders Caught in a State of Inebriation, Four Chinese and Two White Inmates Still At Large. One is Accomplice of Banbury’s Murderess.
This was not the lead article, however. My old chum Banbury claimed the top of the page:
EDITOR’S ASSASSIN CALLED “MADWOMAN”
District Attorney Vows: “SHE SHALL HANG.”
Oft-Wedded Medusa’s Motives in Killing
Beloved Editor Are No Doubt Political.
“Where’s my grip?” I swung my legs off of the bed.
“Packed,” Mrs. Fenster said. She went to fetch me a pitcher and a bowl for washing up. It wasn’t as bad a job as I’d have expected after a jailbreak and several days abed; the widow Cowan had sponge-bathed me while I slept, having detected at close quarters an offensive odor distinct from the cadaver’s.
Once I had washed, shaved, and dressed I took a survey of the studio and gallery. There was no possibility of hauling the inventory or equipment, nor of having them shipped, and once again I was faced with the prospect of running out of a place I had adopted as my own; at least this time I had the opportunity to pack a few articles of clothing. I told Mrs. Fenster and Lem they could have it all in lieu of severance pay.
“Rent’s paid here until the end of the month, so get it out before then. Or perhaps you could come to an agreement with Mrs. Banbury and stay.”
She snorted. “And who’d make the pictures? I can’t. The boy’s barely got the smarts to pour that stuff onto the plates and dip ’em into the chemicals, he doesn’t know how to have people sit, or what to make a picture of.”
This was hard to dispute, and the boy nodded, unoffended at his auntie’s assessment of his capacities. I began to scratch out a list of photographers and dealers in photographic goods, and a rough approximation of what I thought my gear might bring.
She balked when she saw the amounts on the page. “That’s too much for severance, Mr. Sadlaw. How’s about I send you half the proceeds?”
“Don’t know where I’ll go and if I sent word when I got there, it might be intercepted.”
She nodded. “I might keep some of the chairs and the sofa for myself. And the pianoforte,” she said.
“I didn’t realize you played.”
She seemed almost wistful as she gazed upon it. “I don’t but they’re nice to have in a parlor.”
I hied to my bedroom where I lifted a floorboard and took from its hiding place a roll of bills. Eighty dollars; not a princely sum but more than I’d had when I fled Cottonwood, and this time I left behind me no loved ones, only a business and some objects of monetary value. In a decade hardly anyone would remember I’d been through, much less regret my absence.