The Shotgun Arcana (31 page)

“It sounds like you’re playing at being God,” Auggie said.

“Well, he’s not doing a very good job of it himself,” Clay said. “I figured I’d take the initiative. Auggie, if man waited around for God to drop things out of the fool sky for him, we’d still be in skins and living in caves.”

Clay reached for Auggie’s hand. “Now give me your paw, here. I’m going to show you what my formula can do.”

Auggie pulled his hand back and Gillian helped him.

“No,” Auggie said.

“Indeed,” Gillian said.

“What are you?” Clay said. “Yellow?”

Auggie sputtered, “I … I am not … not yellow,
ja
? But this is, how did Gillian say, gunk … and I will not…”

“I’ve tested it,” Clay said, looking at the two and shaking his head. “You think I’d use it on anyone if I didn’t know it was safe?”

“If that’s the case, Clayton,” Gillian said, “then why on Earth haven’t you used it on your face and hands? Your burns?”

Clay blinked a few times and then slowly touched his own scarred face. “Gillian! It hadn’t occurred to me to do that. It would be an excellent demonstration of the restorative fluid’s properties.”

Gillian had to smile. “Yes, Clayton, it would. Are you sure this is safe to use on yourself?”

“You saw how it restored poor Gertie’s head after the decay and the fire. Observe.”

Clay took a long glass pipette with a rubber bulb at the end and drew it full of the fluid. He then carefully dripped the formula over his free hand, turning the hand, to moisten both sides. Auggie and Gillian leaned forward to observe more closely. In less than a minute, the flesh began to return to its normal color and smooth texture. The damage from the fistfight—the bloody torn knuckles—also began to fade, to mend.

“Sü
ß
e Mutter im Himmel,”
Auggie said. “How can this be?” In less than five minutes, Clay’s bony, slender hands and even parts of his wiry arms were completely healed of the horrific burns, of any damage at all. Clay held them up, still damp from the formula that had not soaked into the skin.

“Quackery indeed, Gillian,” Clay said. “Science. Pushing back the frontiers of ignorance and superstition. My formula will change the world.”

*   *   *

The waiter at Delmonico’s brought Gillian and Clay’s entrées.

“’Bout time,” Clay uttered. “Starved. Smells good.”

Clay tore into his roast beef without a care for how his lack of table manners may have troubled the other patrons. Gillian sipped her water and watched him attack the food on his plate, occasionally taking a small bite from her own and chewing it carefully before swallowing. There were smacking sounds from Clay’s full mouth and the clink of metal against china. Gillian half expected to see sparks.

“Something still troubles me, Clayton,” she said, dabbing her lips with a napkin. “You had a diagram up of a…” Gillian looked about and lowered her voice as she leaned forward. “… headless woman.…”

“Yes,” Clay said, as particles of the partly chewed food erupted from his mouth like a volcano. “Template. I needed to calculate the dimensions of the body for Gertie to make sure I could harvest the appropriate-sized parts. That’s what took so damn long and why I needed Auggie’s help. I had to find the right sizes for everything, or else Gertie would be all mismatched, and I wasn’t going to do that to her. It was a damn sight easier with the dog, that’s for sure.”

Gillian refrained from asking what dog and instead said, “Those were my measurements, Clayton. To the inch. Why?”

Clay paused and grabbed the sleeve of the passing waiter. “Hey, Slick, send another gravy boat over this way, will you?” The waiter nodded and walked away, shaking his head and muttering something in Spanish that Gillian was sure wasn’t “the customer is always right.” Clay picked at his teeth as he answered her.

“Yes, I used you as the model for the template. I didn’t realize it at first but after I saw you and the drawing, I realized it was you. You have a perfect body by the Western standards of beauty, Gillian. Congratulations.”

The waiter returned with the gravy in time to hear Clay’s scandalous admission. He blushed a bit and looked from Clay to Gillian, then departed as quickly as he could back to the kitchen.

“Pass that bread, will you?” Clay said, unaware of the waiter and Gillian’s discomfort.

Gillian blushed and became acutely aware of the other patrons who were now intently trying to eavesdrop on their possibly torrid conversation. Again, she wished that Clay had asked to meet somewhere more private, but that would beg the assumption that Clay Turlough had any idea of how humans worked past a purely biological level.

“I … Clayton! Well … thank you, Clayton. No one has ever said that to me before … in such a manner.”

Clay shrugged. “Just stating a fact’s all.”

“Did you ever consider … harvesting my body?” she asked. “Seems much easier than hunting up already dead parts.”

Clay stopped picking and eating. He looked squarely at Gillian. “Did I consider murdering you, cutting off your head and attaching Gertie’s head to your body? Yes, I considered it as an intellectual exercise, of course. For about ten seconds. Gillian, I know you think I’m some kind of monster—”

“No, Clay, I think very fondly of you—”

“Sometimes,” Clay interrupted. “Other times you think I’d do anything to prove my theories. I’m very dedicated to my work, but I’m a straight shooter, Gillian. Auggie is my best friend in the world. Not many folks in this world have the patience to be my friend. You make Auggie happy—happier than I’ve seen him since Gertie got sick. And … I must confess a certain … fondness for you as well. You are a brave lady, and you have a reasonably well-stocked brainpan; and you love him, as much as Gertie did. Auggie has lost so much in the last few years. I would never take you away from him … and I would never want to do you harm myself. I hope that clears things up for you.”

He tore back into the meat and Gillian watched him again, smiling, some wonder and confusion in her eyes, battling it out.

“I must confess a fondness for you, too, Clayton,” she said. “I must indeed.”

*   *   *

After the demonstration at his kitchen table, Clay walked them back over to the barn and showed them the body: It was on one of the tables in the cold room. It was spallid, dead flesh, stitchwork and, of course, a headless, ragged neck. The hands were missing but Clay explained that the girl who had been murdered in the Dove’s Roost alleyway had perfect hands to complete the patchwork body. Gerta’s head and brain were fully healed and revitalized in the biorestorative formula.

“I should be able to complete the preparations and undertake the revivication process in the next few hours,” Clay said. “You are both welcome to stay.”

“I … no,” Auggie said. His knuckles and face were now healed, as were Clay’s injuries; even Clay’s burned face was unmarred. “I do not think I should, Clay. I am still unsure that this is what is best for Gerta. She was so unhappy. She wanted to be free from the pain of that existence.”

“This isn’t like the jar,” Clay said. “This is a brand new life for her, a brand new physicality, and I swear to you, Auggie, if she is in pain, if she changes her mind, if she decides she doesn’t want this, I will never let her suffer.”

“Changes her mind?” Gillian asked.

“Yes,” Clay said. “I’ve spoken to her about this extensively. Well, to her head anyway.”

“I … I want to speak with her, Clayton,” Gillian said. “Alone, please.”

Clay took them back to the tank room. As they walked through the barn, Gillian nodded to the elaborate mechanical contraption on the back of a wagon.

“What on earth is this, Clay?” she asked.

“Something I came up with after that bad spate of lightning storms we had at the end of summer,” he said. “Still haven’t got the kinks out of it yet.”

Clay opened the door to the tank room. Auggie stopped by the door, his massive arms crossed.

“Clay says he has to set up the apparatus to talk to her,” Gillian said. “You don’t want to come in for a moment?”

Auggie shook his head.

“I understand,” she said. “Any messages for her?”

“Nothing I didn’t already tell her,” Auggie said quietly.

“Gillian?” Clay said, and gestured to the door. Gillian kissed Auggie and then joined Clay. The door thudded as Clay closed it and Auggie stood alone.

The tank room was illuminated by numerous lamps. Clay set about his work quickly and efficiently. He poured a powder that resembled salt from a bag into the tank with Gerta’s head. The solution rained down as white, slow-motion columns that hit the bottom of the tank and then spread and diffused as swirling clouds of sediment.

“This will stimulate the solution itself to act as an electrical producing medium to power the craniovox,” Clay said. “I’ve been corresponding with a youth in Sweden, name of Svante Arrhenius. Boy’s a genius, a prodigy. Helped me with some ideas I had about the conductivity of ion-rich solutions. Solved some of my neurological restoration and construction problems I’d been wrestling with.”

Clay took a circular device woven with numerous thick rubber-coated cables and wires, and gently placed it on Gerta’s head, making sure it was secured tightly. He ran his healed fingers through Gerta’s long floating hair gently. He ran a cable from the device to a wooden box with a crude, circular metal screen on its face and a few thick black toggle switches. Clay attached the cable to the back of the box. He dried his hands and flipped one of the switches. There was a loud snap, a puff of smoke from the box and a strange, barely audible hum in the air.

“This works on a larger scale, but is essentially the same equipment I used on the vox screen I had in her jar,” Clay said. He gestured for Gillian to join him by the tank and pointed to odd devices the size and shape of large coat buttons mounted along the front face of the tank’s edge.

“Talk toward these and she will be able to hear you through the head harness,” he said. “I’ll flip the connection to finish the circuit. If you have any trouble at all, I’ll be outside with Auggie.”

“Thank you, Clayton.” Gillian pulled a wooden chair in front of the tank and sat. Clay had set lanterns on either side of the tank and one behind it to provide illumination for the conversation. He snapped the other switch on the wooden box and there was a momentary screech, which rapidly faded. He nodded to Gillian and Gerta and then exited the room, closing the door behind him.

“Hello,” Gillian said.

The drifting head opened and closed its mouth, bubbles spilling away.

“Hello, dear friend,” a woman’s voice, faint but audible, said from the screen on the wooden box. Gillian smiled when she heard the voice.

“I know it must seem a dreadful question but, how do you feel?” Gillian asked.

“I think it must be a little like our memories when we are very young,” Gerta said. “I remember … things. Other things seems to be dreams or nightmares, I can recall flashes, impressions but not full memories.”

“Do you remember dying?” Gillian said.

“The end, yes,” Gerta said. “Pain, choking, drowning in my own body. Fear … horrible fear. The fear was worse than the dying, I recall. Like tripping in a dark room, the fear of the fall into nothing. I remember talking to you, to Augustus. Clay came once when you were both exhausted and slept. He told me how he felt about me, said he would never have done anything to hurt me or Augustus. Dying feels very … cramped, like you are in a tent that’s tight with too many people; you just want to step outside and breathe fresh air, feel space around you. Have a moment alone.”

Gillian’s eyes had grown wet as she listened. “I missed you,” Gillian said, her voice cracking. “You were my sister, my mother, my best friend. I missed you so much.”

“I missed you too,” Gerta said. “I knew you would look after Augustus. I knew you would not let him fall away from the light. Thank you, Gillian.”

Gillian choked a little and sniffed, wiping away the tears. “I hope you know how much he loves you,” she said. “If I knew … If I knew what Clay was doing … I’d never have…”

“Loved him?” Gerta said. “You loved him the first time he told Will to have a care how he talked to you in public.”

Gillian laughed and sobbed.

“He’s a good man, it’s easy to love him,” Gerta continued. “I remember the fire. It was awful—sleepwalking in the burning house, screaming, and oil-faced shadows. But I wasn’t scared anymore, Gillian. I learned to control the fear in the jar. So many things in life, in death, are so much less terrible than we imagine if we can just control the fear. We can survive the jar, we can escape it, if we let go of the fear.

“I remember talking to Augustus, saying our good-byes. He loves me, yes. He loves the memory of me, of us. His Gerta has gone. He loves his Gillian now, and I want him to have a new, beautiful life with you, my dearest friend. I hoped for that when I was dying—I saw you cling to one another. Your happiness, his happiness, is my joy. I wanted it even more when I escaped the jar, when Augustus finally let me go.”

“And now?” Gillian said. “Gerta, I love you. You were always better to me than my own family ever was, and I can, and will, stop Clayton from doing this to you, if you wish. This is about what
you
want, what
you
need, not Clay, not Auggie, not even me. It’s your life, your soul, Gerta. Tell me, what do you want?”

Gerta’s head tumbled, the raven hair a curtain that drifted between her eyes and Gillian’s. The shadows of the lantern made Gerta’s old eyes and young face seem almost ghostly and translucent.

“It has been so long since I could move as I choose to move, to have volition. Before that I was ill, so ill, and before that I had grown so old, so quickly, the stresses of life crippling me while my insides still wanted to sing. I have been a prisoner for so long, Gillian. To that damned jar, to my sickness, to my own bed, and in the cage my body became. Death was the only freedom I ever felt and even it was taken away from me.”

“The methods Clay is using are … questionable,” Gillian said. “To say the least. There may be side effects we know nothing about; you may be trading an end to your suffering for more suffering, Gerta. I just want you to go into this with your eyes wide open, not just hearing Clay’s pompous claptrap about—”