They took Joab’s pistol and led him outside. Didn’t even leave him time to put on a coat. They marched him over to the opera house, but then just stood there waiting outside. Why didn’t they take him in? Sam asked.
Soon enough, as if called to, the doors of the opera house opened and out stepped the Negro woman, Mrs. Henry, who played a part in killing his mother. Instinctively he reached to his side for his pistol. They were smart to have taken it from him. Even without the rounds in the chamber, he would’ve run at her and tried to split her skull. Though it looked like someone else had done that work for him already.
“I want to see Mr. and Mrs. Reed,” he finally said.
They all stood quiet for a long minute.
“No you don’t,” Mrs. Henry finally said.
He stepped forward now, half her size but unafraid. “I saw my mother’s arm torn clear off her body, the blood shot as high as my face. You were there, too. Do you remember it?”
The women looked to Mrs. Henry but she’d already turned, starting for the opera house doors. She knew she couldn’t tell this young man shit.
“Let him come,” Mrs. Henry said.
Mrs. Henry opened the door and held it. She waved for Joab and Mrs. Wong and Mrs. Brown. Mrs. Price moved only to put her arms around her child.
“Not Sam,” she said.
Mrs. Henry nodded. “Not Sam.”
“I’m going to get him fed,” Mrs. Price said, leading Sam across the street, toward the Grill Cafe. Mr. Shibata had closed down for the winter season, but there might be something stored that they could eat.
Sam took two steps with Mrs. Price but then turned again, broke loose and ran to Mrs. Henry, who leaned down close. She thought Sam had come in for a hug, but instead Sam whispered in Mrs. Henry’s ear, then returned to his mother.
The women led Joab inside.
Joab didn’t recognize the opera house.
The walls still stood, but many of the seats were missing. Not missing, but moved. Hadn’t they been bolted down? He was sure they were, but now they lay scattered in piles the way the Montana winds sometimes overturned cabins and wagons, turning them into toys.
But that wasn’t the only difference.
“Walk carefully now,” Mrs. Henry said. “Don’t slip.”
The floors were dark and slick. The gaslights didn’t illuminate the ground well enough to understand why. Mrs. Brown and Mrs. Wong no longer held on to him, so he wandered ahead of them by a step or three. He had to move slowly because Mrs. Henry had been right, the floor was slippery and it would be easy to fall.
As his mind adjusted to the wrecked orchestra seats, the slick floor, after he had a chance to comprehend these things, he then registered the smell, a scent really, and he knew it right away. His mother appeared before him, there on the floor of the opera house, the blood flushing from the torn arm socket; even out there at the cabin he’d understood the aroma of an ending. Damp and overwhelming. But if that had been the smell of one death, then the opera house stank of a dozen more.
Something moved on the stage, behind the curtains. This was what drew his eye to the stage, where the theater organ had been toppled over. It lay at an angle on the stage.
Joab felt no fear because, truly, he felt nothing. He pulled himself up on the stage, looking to the curtains that billowed. He looked backward and the women were not approaching him. They weren’t even paying attention to him. They, too, looked around at all this chaos and struggled to understand it, even as they had been in it before they came for him and Sam.
Standing on the stage gave Joab greater perspective. Now he could see the orchestra seating a little better. He saw two men. They couldn’t see him. They couldn’t see anything. They were, at this point, only parts of people, flung about as wildly as the chairs. These were Matthew and Finn Kirby.
Joab and his brothers had held people down while their mother smothered them. He’d seen death plenty of times before now. But he’d never seen slaughter. It looked as if someone had released rage from a bottle and let it loose on the town.
“My whole life,” Mrs. Brown said, down in the orchestra. “My whole life I’ve felt like doing this. But it wasn’t allowed.”
Joab turned away from her when she said this. On the stage he could see the blood better. It made the floor here as slick as it had down in the orchestra. Blood all over.
He walked closer to the theater organ to see why it sat at an angle. He crouched to find people underneath it. Was it Mr. Reed? Or Mrs. Reed? The Busy Bees?
Yes.
Parts of them.
Then the curtains shook again and out it came.
“Demon,” Joab said.
Bigger now. Or had he shrunk it in his memory just so he could tuck it away into a small corner of his mind? No words could do it justice. In that moment, it appeared to be five stories high and twice as wide. Why wasn’t he scared? Maybe he’d been expecting this. Something like this. Maybe he even welcomed it.
“All right then,” he said.
The creature stalked closer. When it stepped on the theater organ, it finally cracked in half. In two more steps the demon was here. The mouth seemed large enough to swallow him.
“All right then,” he said again. It might’ve been a kind of final prayer.
But then someone else joined them on the stage. Mrs. Henry stood beside Joab.
“Elizabeth,” Mrs. Henry said. “Please let this boy live.”
Elizabeth? What the hell kind of demon was named Elizabeth?
The creature looked from Joab to Mrs. Henry. Something strange occurred to him as he watched the pair up close. He couldn’t explain it, but was there a…resemblance?
“Please,” Mrs. Henry said.
A moment. A request. A decision.
Elizabeth snorted and turned and stomped to the lip of the stage and leapt down. Mrs. Brown and Mrs. Wong stood close to each other, but they didn’t run. Elizabeth approached them and, to his shock, they held their hands out and touched Elizabeth’s face. With tenderness. He looked away, back to Mrs. Henry.
“Why?” he asked. He said this with anger, not appreciation. He didn’t care for pity, or even sympathy, from this woman.
Mrs. Henry looked at him for a long moment.
“Sam said you deserve another chance, too.”