The black man in the worn canvas trousers and blue jacket that made up the rough uniform of a seaman in the Union navy walked down the narrow street, surveying the damage done by the riots. Half the ramshackle tenements he saw had been scorched or showed fire damage of some kind, and all had been ransacked. For the moment they were all abandoned, left to the rats until folks came back and tried to take up their lives again.
The sailor now wondered whether that would ever happen. Lincoln had emancipated the slaves, but that seemed to have angered the white folk even more than usual. Sometimes the sailor thought being a field slave in Alabama or Mississippi had more joy than being a freeman in a city like New York. If a black man had a job, it meant he’d taken it from a white. If he had no job, then he was just a lazy nigger who thought the world owed him a living. Being in the navy wasn’t much better, but at least the food was regular and the pay was better than cleaning up horse crap on the streets or humping cotton bales onto the ships bound across the sea.
At least the lynchings and the burnings and the beatings had ended. With the arrival of troops from Pennsylvania and Maryland, an uneasy quiet had fallen over the city streets. Nobody was doing much business yet, but the sailor knew that in time everything would go back to looking normal. The glass would be swept up, the burned buildings repaired, and the newspapers would find some other cause to promote or decry. A city trying to eat itself alive wasn’t something the average resident of New York City wanted to remember—much better to forget it ever happened and go back to the business of making money.
The sailor reached the end of the street. The building where he was supposed to rendezvous with Miss Kate had been burned to the ground. The tenement was now nothing but blackened beams and a skeletal stairway that had somehow managed to survive. He stepped up onto the remains of the front stoop and looked into the twisted wreckage of the building. The air was ripe with the sour smell of wet ash, made worse now by the light rain that had begun to fall even before he left the Jersey shore. The rain had calmed the rioters almost as much as the soldiers he had fetched.
He struggled through the half-blocked remains of the doorway. The hallway in front of him was a charred passage, but at its end he could see the sagging, half-destroyed entrance to what was probably a cellar laundry, or maybe even a gin mill. He saw something silver in the debris at the head of the cellar steps. Easing himself carefully along the passage and skirting sagging areas in the floor, he reached the basement doorway and pushed the cinders and ash away to reveal a long knife, its blade made of some dark stone, the handle worked silver. Holding the knife, he peered down the dark stairway. It looked reasonably intact.
“Miss Kate?” he called out.
There was only cold silence. He stood there uncertain, frowning, every fiber of his being whispering faint warnings, almost willing him to turn and leave. But his feet felt like lead, and warnings or no, he felt a terrible, consuming curiosity.
“Miss Kate?”
This time there was an answer.
“Barnabus?” A strange, soft voice.
Clutching the knife, the black man started down the stairs.
“It’s me, Miss Kate. What in the name of all that’s holy are you doing down there?”
“Barnabus?” the soft voice queried a second time.
He reached the bottom of the steps. Ahead there was nothing but pitch-darkness and the smell of wet earth. Something else, he thought suddenly. Something very old and as dry as time itself: the scent of an autumn leaf, crumbled in your hand. The smell of a dead thing.
Barnabus stood in the darkness, waiting. There was a scratching sound and the flare of a phosphor match. The match was applied to the wick of a lamp, and suddenly everything was revealed.
“Dear God,” said Barnabus. The room was a horror. He saw in the flickering lamplight that a massive pair of planks had been nailed together to form an X. There were leather thongs fixed to every corner of the monstrous instrument as well as rusty-looking spikes of iron. The plank was stained with splashes of deep russet brown.
Beside the wooden X a man stood wearing a sergeant’s uniform with a pair of big Colt Navy pistols pushed through his belt. The man’s hair and the uniform were slick with mud, as though he’d crawled up from a sewer or a grave. His right hand was gone, the stump blood crusted, the neatly cut end of a yellowish white bone poking out through the putrefying flesh. The sergeant was smiling, tossing a coin into the air and catching it with his good hand. A gold coin. Barnabus watched the spinning gold piece, mesmerized.
“Barnabus the ferryman,” said the sergeant.
“Yes,” whispered Barnabus. Fear was clutching at him, but he could not move. He stared at the flickering coin.
“Throw me the knife,” said the sergeant, and Barnabus did. It dropped into the mud at the sergeant’s feet. He crouched and picked up the blade, then stood and pushed it into his belt beside one of the pistols.
“Come closer,” said the sergeant, and unwillingly Barnabus did. The sergeant’s voice was barely a whisper. His eyes were like black hailstones. Something moved in his jaw, and Barnabus saw that the shape of the soldier’s face had changed, elongating like a snake or a wolf about to leap upon its prey.
“Do you know who Charon was?” the creature hissed.
“No,” whispered Barnabus. Dear God, his eyes, his eyes!
“He was a ferryman, just like you, the boatman of the dead. In ancient times they placed a coin on a dead man’s tongue to send him on his way. The price of passage for your soul.”
“Please,” whispered Barnabus, the single word a prayer.
“I’ll pay for your soul, Barnabus; you’ve nothing to fear.” The sergeant stepped forward, bringing the black-bladed knife up in his hand and sweeping it across the sailor’s throat. The obsidian blade was sharper than any sword, and there was almost no pain at all. Blood began to fountain from the ghastly wound, and the sergeant leaned forward, enclosing the slashed throat with his lips, sucking noisily. He drank, supporting the entire weight of the other man’s sagging body with one hand beneath his arm. Finally the blood stopped pulsing and the sergeant dropped the carcass onto the dirt floor. His face and chin were dripping, staining the already filthy front of his uniform.
“I always pay for what I take,” the ghastly creature slurred. “Always.”