The Shotgun Arcana (22 page)

Most of the tanks were empty but a large one contained something that devoured the light of her lamp, some viscous darkness. Gillian stepped closer to it. There was a chain attached to a ceiling hook, hanging down and partly submerged in the oily black fluid.

The sweet-burnt scent was very strong coming from the tank. It had taken on a musky quality as well and Gillian suddenly shuddered as she felt her body responding to the peculiar and slightly offensive smell. It was as though every square inch of her skin was alive but her mind began to feel as if it were stuffed with cotton. She was flushed and her clothing seemed too tight and the tightness was arousing her. Lascivious thoughts better left to the bedroom swarmed in her head, and Gillian fought to push them away. Only moments ago, she had been terrified and upset. This was not natural; this was something being done to her, done by the stench of the oily substance. She dipped her fingers into the tank, and suddenly pulled them back as reason reasserted itself. Gillian looked, horrified, at the thick black slime that coated her index and middle finger. The urge to stuff her wet, glistening fingers under her nose and deeply inhale the obscene scent was almost more than she could stand, but she knew instinctively that if she did so she would be lost to these alien thoughts and feelings. She knew what real desire was, knew true longing and the pleasure and awareness of her own body and this … this was a cheap narcotic shadow of it. She pushed it away, out of her head as much as she could, and wiped the ooze off on Will’s old pants. There was movement in the tank, something swimming through the midnight darkness, attracted by Gillian’s fingers. She leaned down close to the glass and tried to peer into the oily morass. It smashed against the glass with great force and Gillian jumped back with a shriek. She thought it was a snake. The burst of fear helped clear her head and she stared at whatever it was in the tank. There were several of them gliding through the oily slime like eels.

A terrible memory assaulted Gillian. The Stained. Last year, after the troubles in which so many had died, they’d called it a plague of the Black Vomit, but Gillian knew better. Everyone did, but no one wanted to admit it. Some horrible, pneumonic sickness had gripped Golgotha and transformed friends, neighbors and family into soulless monsters who oozed a black oily substance from every orifice. The same black oily substance in the tank before her.

“Oh Clayton,” she said. “Why couldn’t you just leave it alone, let it die?”

She moved cautiously toward the tank again, reached carefully over the churning surface of the obsidian fluid and grabbed the chain that was submerged in it. She lifted the chain, which had some weight to it; something was hanging from it. Slowly, the decapitated, mostly rotted skull of a woman rose from the oozing blackness, her tattered scalp still clinging to dank hair, resembling black seaweed. Parts of her skull, picked clean, were evident and scraps of her flesh hung loosely to other parts of her head, drooping and clumping like wet paper. Her eyes were empty, raw sockets and her lipless mouth gaped stupidly. Black things, like segmented worms, about six inches long, slithered out of the head’s eye sockets, mouth and even the tattered ears. They made fat, plopping noises as they dropped back into the inky fluid of the tank.

Gillian nearly retched and dropped the chain, causing the head to sink back into the tank with a slow suctioning sound. She staggered back, hand over her mouth, and tried desperately to push the thoughts and images out of her mind. She had no clue who this woman was or how Clay had come into possession of her severed head. The thoughts that had troubled her back on the road to the livery returned, but with a much more visceral, sinister taint to them.
People disappeared all the time in Golgotha:
strangers, wanderers, vagrants, prostitutes. What if Clay needed them, needed meat for his experiments?

And Auggie, her Auggie. Sweet, kind, loyal … Auggie, with blood and women’s makeup on his clothes. Oh, no, no, no, no, no …

She turned, the panic rising in her, struggling for a foothold of reason and calm. The light from her lantern caught another tank near the end of the row. The liquid in it was smoky, slightly amber-colored, as though it contained a diluted version of the worm oil substance. Another head floated in it, bobbing, submerged and apparently perfectly preserved. It was a young woman, perhaps in her twenties; she had been beautiful, her hair was black and floated behind her like drifting wings. There was something familiar about her. Gillian knew her but she couldn’t place …

No!

Gerta. It was Gerta, her best friend. Gerta with the gray hair and the wrinkles. Her dear old friend who had died at the age of forty-eight. Gerta, Gertie … Auggie’s Gertie … Oh Clay, how could you do this?

The eyes of the head snapped open. They focused on Gillian, pupils narrowed in the bright lantern light. The mouth opened, tried to speak …

Gillian ran, dropping the lantern. As she released the trigger, the flame vanished with a snap just before the lantern crashed to the floor and shattered, without igniting a fire. She snorted the stench of the tank room out of her nostrils as she bolted back into the main barn.

There was the sound of a wagon arriving in the exercise yard just outside. Gillian spun about, looking for a place to hide. She ran to the large metal door at the back of the barn and struggled to open it, praying it led to an exit. The door hissed open and a blast of frigid air passed over her, colder than the winter wind outside. The strange squeaking metal-scraping noise was louder, having been muffled by the door. The light from the open door revealed nothing of the interior. There were no windows, no light, only a cold and sightless void. Gillian heard Auggie’s booming voice at the open door to the barn. She stepped quickly into the cold room and shut the metal door behind her. It was absolute darkness, like you experience underground. The squeaking noise, which Gillian was pretty certain was some type of contraption Clay had developed to keep the room so cold, was the only sound. The thick, metal door blocked out the sound from the rest of the barn.

Gillian tried to calm herself. She knew both of these men. She thought highly of Clay, and was in wonder of his intellect. She understood how awkward he was trying to puzzle out people, who simply made no logical sense to his mind. And she loved Auggie, loved him with every ounce of her being.

She backed away from the door; the thick insulating India rubber that sealed the jamb cut off even the tiny sliver of light from the cracks around it.

Will had been the man she fell into love with, been charmed by, as a girl, but with his passing, with the mercy of experience that time grants, she knew Augustus Shultz was the love of her life. Surely these men would do her no harm. The image of the head in the tank, fat black worms sliding out of it, vomited into her brain. She struggled to push the idea of the man she was to marry being anything other than noble and good out of her racing mind.

She bumped against something in the darkness. She turned, haltingly, toward it and gingerly felt the invisible form, trying to fathom what she was feeling. There was a table … and something cold and smooth atop it. She moved along it its length until she felt fingers. It was an arm, icy, still, lifeless. It was a corpse on a table. She felt the rough cloth of a simple sheet partly covering the body, and suddenly Clay’s diagram with the cut lines was before her mind’s eye. She recoiled and moved away only to bump into something else in the darkness. The speed knocked her partly over it. Cold skin, breasts, and a ragged, damp cavity above the breast, which her fingers slipped into. Another table, another corpse.

Gillian was reaching the end of her self-control; she envisioned a great frozen hall of tables in this unnaturally cold room, filled with dead women, raw material for Clay Turlough’s imagination. She staggered, hitting another table, another body. She had no idea where the door was, how to get out. She wanted to scream, but she swallowed it and steeled herself as best she could, being in the dark with the dead.

There was whoosh of air escaping over the constant whine of the mysterious machinery and a bright square of light appeared to her left. She heard Auggie’s voice over the squeaking of the machine.

“Where do you want me to put her?” Auggie said.

Clay had one of the globe lanterns in his hands and its light stabbed into the darkness of the room. Gillian could see there were over a dozen tables with bodies in the cold room. They all seemed to be women. “Over here,” Clay said, stepping into the cold room, gesturing with the lantern to an empty bench off to the left of the door. Gillian slid down behind one of the occupied tables; the floor was smooth stone and cement, with clean straw scattered everywhere. She peeked over and saw Auggie carrying a woman’s corpse; she was dressed in tattered nightclothes and stockings. She looked like a prostitute. Her face was smudged with thick pancake makeup, dried blood and dirt, and her chest and belly bulged, as if the insides had been disturbed and then returned to the cavity. Her face was young and it was familiar to Gillian, but no name came to mind. She felt very sad for the anonymous girl cradled in Auggie’s strong arms. The look on her fiancé’s face in the lantern was not that of a savage leering killer; it was sadness. He felt for this girl, too, and he carried her gently, like she was fragile, and with respect. He lowered her gingerly on to the wooden table, covered her with a sheet and crossed himself.

“Does that make you feel better?” Clay asked. It was not a malicious question. He sounded more like a child, trying to understand something that bewildered him.

“Ja,”
Auggie said. “It does. It’s asking the Lord to watch over her poor soul to protect it from evil and give her peace.”

“Hmm.” Clay nodded. “Doesn’t seem to be terribly effective. Soul wouldn’t need protecting if the transportation for it was designed a bit more sturdily. I don’t think this God fella is a very good engineer.”

Auggie shook his head. “Clay, how can you say such things about your own creator.…
Ach!
I can hardly hear myself over that infernal squeaking! Always squeaking in here! What is that?”

“The pulley and fan system,” Clay said. “I designed the cold room on essentially the same principles as Mr. Andrew Chase of Chicago’s refrigerated rail car.”

“Ach, du meine Fresse!”
Auggie said, his voice tired, stressed. “I just asked a simple question. Why can’t you ever just give a simple answer?”

Clay continued, unabated. “However, I employed solidified carbon dioxide as the cooling agent, and since I didn’t need it to move, like a rail car, I employed this steam-powered pulley and fan system to force the cold air around the insulated room.”

“This is the last one, Clay,” Auggie said, interrupting. “No more. This is not right, what we are doing.”

“Yes, yes, it is the last one,” Clay said, oblivious to Auggie’s intent. He lifted the girl’s hand and examined it carefully, then her wrist. “This is exactly what I needed. It’s very fortuitous…”

Auggie sputtered. “Fortuitous? Clay, this girl is dead and was buried. Her life, her future, has been stolen from her. How can you be so inhuman?”

Clay continued to examine the dead girl’s fingers carefully. “It’s just death, Auggie. It’s a natural process. I have never understood why folks get so emotional about it. We don’t make much fuss about other bodily functions … well, most of them anyway. My first memories as a child were of death. It’s a problem to be solved, not some cosmic decree, not fate or the will of some fickle god. We live, we die. What we are doing here, the research I’m involved in, could change the human race, and make death no more of an inconvenience than a case of the sniffles.”

He put the girl’s hand down and rested it on the table. Auggie covered her again.

“As for the manner of her death,” Clay said, looking at his friend and tightening his jaw. “I assure you it was gentle compared to that poor child over there. Your god seemed not up to the job of protecting her last evening. Maybe she didn’t pray hard enough for her life.”

Clay gestured to one of the tables near where Gillian hid. The light cut the darkness and Gillian tried to push herself closer to the floor.

“Is that the girl murdered in the alley last night?” Auggie whispered.

“Yes,” Clay said. “More like butchered. Monstrous. We have a fiend among us, a lunatic with a penchant for cutting up innocent women in a most gruesome manner. He knows his way about a knife, I’d wager. A skinner, a butcher, someone with medical training…”

“Like you,” Auggie said quietly. “Like you, Clay.”

“Yes.” Clay nodded in agreement. “Exactly like me.”

The two men paused and were silent. Gillian had a horrible image of Clay drawing a blade and driving it into Auggie’s chest.

Clay blinked a few times, seemingly confused by the stern look on Auggie’s face. “Oh,” he finally said, “you suspect it’s me that’s killing these girls. Preposterous.”

Gillian bumped against the table she was hiding behind. The cold, stiff hand of the girl on the table slid out from under the sheet and caressed Gillian’s cheek. It was too much. She couldn’t contain herself any longer. Gillian let out an audible gasp of revulsion, jumped up and rushed into the lantern light. Both Clay and Auggie froze in mid-speech.

“I want to know everything, you two,” Gillian said. “I want to know why you are keeping those vile, murderous worms alive. I want to know what you are doing with poor Gerta’s head and where these women’s bodies are coming from and what you’re doing to them, Clayton.”

Auggie looked at Clay, horror blooming in his weary eyes. “Gerta? Clay, what is she talking about? You told me Gerta was gone … destroyed in the fire.”

Clay sighed. He opened the door to the cold room and walked out, Gillian and Auggie following.

“I know this may seem strange to you, Gillian,” Clay said, “but if you will listen and keep an open mind…”

Gillian rushed to the workbench and grabbed a scalpel stained with old blood and rust. She brandished it and Clay stepped back, away from her.