Dead Man’s Hand (33 page)

“All right, but I’m sure I won’t be able to say it.” She turned back to the window.
“It’s a beautiful night.” Several silent moments passed before she said, “Why are
you here?”

“Here in this town, you mean?”

“You know what I mean. This town, tonight. You know what tomorrow is, don’t you?”

“The longest day of the year—the Summer Solstice, they call it. June the twenty-first,
1899.”

“That isn’t all, and we both know it. Why would you be here, elsewise? And why would
my grandmother be so worked up about it? She’s frightened, that’s what. I know that
dear old lady better than I know my own self, and she’s frightened. Not of you, but
of… tonight. What’s going to happen.” I could see the girl peering at me from the
corner of her eye as we both looked out at the neighbors’ houses, the broad sky and
all the stars. It was like we were standing on a table, looking out over the world
like God Almighty Himself. At least, that’s what a man other than me would have thought.

All I said was, “Yes, I know what night this is. And I also know that the finest calculations
of the Royal Observatory over in Greenwich, England say that there’s just a little
less than an hour left before midnight.” And tomorrow was going to be a big one, I
felt pretty certain—something truly strange. Midsummer’s Day in Medicine Dance was
always a bit odd, but this was going to be the kind that only happened every thirty-nine
years. I don’t really understand the reason for the thirty-nine year cycle myself,
but I once knew a man who did. “So maybe you should get back to your room,” I told
Catherine, “and lock the door while we wait to see how bad it’s going to be.”

“Shows what you know,” she said, scowling. “I don’t even have a lock on my door. And
you still haven’t answered my question, so don’t try to send me off to bed like some
silly kid.”

I didn’t have two smiles in me that night, but it was close. “My apologies, Miss Denslow.
You’re right—I didn’t answer the question. I’m here because of a promise I made somebody.
That’s the best way I can put it. I don’t mean you or your grandmother any harm.”

“I never thought you did,” she said, then climbed back up the stairs, but she showed
me by the way she did it that she was acting under protest.

I waited a few minutes, then leaned close to the open window and inhaled the warm
June air. It tasted like what nearly every such night had probably tasted like since
the last Ice Age. But that would change.

I went upstairs at last, only because I knew it would be easier for the women to fall
asleep if they knew I was back in my room. But I also knew I’d be too restless to
stay there long.

* * *

Mrs. Denslow herself came down a bit after four in the morning. I was back at the
window, watching the stars wheel slowly across the sky.

“Where have you been since last time, Custos?”

I didn’t answer her directly. “What do you remember about that?”

“Snow everywhere. That was the first time I realized how strange this place really
was. We’d always been lucky on Midsummer before, I guess. Just some differences in
climate. You know, suddenly more humid because the river was a lot wider. Things like
that. Used to see some pretty strange looking birds, too, a few unusual animals. But
then that last time you were here, what was it, 1860 it must have been, and we had
the snow, and that was… Well, you remember.”

“I remember lots of things. What do you remember?”

“It was like being on the moon.” She laughed. “Heavens, not that I’ve ever been there!
But it felt like that, it was so different. I woke up that morning and my youngest
son was crying—cold, poor little tyke. Everything was so strange. White as far as
you could see, and the mesa was lower than it ordinarily is. The whole valley was
snowed in. I saw an elephant!”

“A mammoth. If it was as snowy as that, it was a mammoth.”

“You didn’t see one yourself?”

“I was busy.”

“Well, who wasn’t? But I remember you. Papa and Mama didn’t have a spare room, so
you slept over at the Dahlers’ place in their barn, but in the morning you helped
Papa shovel the snow and ice off our roof so it didn’t collapse. You helped a lot
of other folks, too.” She turned toward me. She’d lost her slightly brittle air. “But
how can you be here again? And looking just the same, almost?”

“You should get some sleep, Mrs. Denslow.” I caught her look. “Marie, I mean. Tomorrow
may be a long day.”

“Do you think we’ll get the snow and the elephants again?” She sounded almost hopeful.
“That was something. But there were wolf tracks, too, big as dinner plates! I hope
we don’t see those.”

Dire wolves. No, we definitely didn’t want to see any of those, or cave bears, or
sabertooth tigers, or any of the other giant predators of that era, creatures that
made cougars look like kittens. But maybe we’d get lucky. Maybe we’d get nothing worse
than twenty-four hours of Devonian ocean at Medicine Dance’s doorstep, nothing but
interesting fish and insects, then a sunset we’d never see the likes of again, a wide
sky empty of birds. But it was equally possible we’d get the dire wolves again or
worse.

Which was why I’d brought so many guns.

* * *

It wasn’t snow this time, and there weren’t any mammoths or dire wolves, but that’s
about where Medicine Dance’s luck ended.

I was oiling my guns as the first rays of light snuck in between the closed curtains.
Mrs. Denslow had finally gone back to bed an hour or so earlier, and Catherine was
still asleep. I had been about to go out and look around before they woke up, thinking
I might save everyone some difficulty that way, but instead I heard a loud knocking
on the front door.

I couldn’t quite imagine a dire wolf doing that, so I only took my pistol as I headed
down to see who it was. Marie Denslow appeared at the top of the stairs behind me
with a lantern in her hand and a shawl around her shoulders.

It was Edward Billinger, looking quite shocked. The young man wasn’t wearing a shirt
collar, and it was pretty obvious he’d dressed in a bit of a hurry. “We’re drowned!”
he declared.

“What are you up to, Ned?” called Mrs. Denslow. “Don’t exaggerate, now. No one’s drowned—not
here, anyway.”

“May God strike me dead if I’m exaggerating!” Billinger was wound tight as a spool
of sewing thread. “Come look! Come on! You’ve never seen the like!”

I followed him outside, Mrs. Denslow a few cautious yards behind me.

The view had certainly changed since the day before, but it took me a moment to figure
out why. At first I thought the distant eastern hills had risen, then I realized that
they were gone altogether, that the heights I could see beyond the town were new mountains,
taller and farther away. I turned and looked west. Lost Angel Mesa, the background
of the town since the first cabin was built, had simply vanished. Strangest of all,
though, was what had happened to the rest of Brujado Valley, twenty miles or so of
grassland stretching south from the town to the usual mountains. It appeared now to
have become an ocean.

It truly was a bit startling, even to my unusual sensibilities.

“Where did all this come from?” asked Billinger, waving his hands like a drunkard.
To be fair, I don’t think he was a jot less than utterly sober; seeing one of the
thirty-nine year cycles in action for the first time can do that to a man. Human beings
aren’t meant to see big things change that fast.

“It’s not so much
where
it came from as
when
,” I explained. “And it’s not so much when it came as when did we come to it. Because
we are the ones who are out of place, Mr. Billinger.”

“Call me Edward—or even Ned,” he told me. He was terrified, but doing his best to
be courteous. “Because if we’re all going mad together, then we likely don’t need
to be too formal.”

I found myself liking the young man, but knew that might mean adding another responsibility.
I wasn’t at all certain I could afford to do that.

“Can you explain it to him, Mr. Custos?” Mrs. Denslow had come up behind us. Even
though dawn was spreading light all across the wide water and the distant mountains,
she still held up her lamp like Diogenes on the hunt. “Because I can’t—and this is
my second time.”

“I can’t really understand everything myself, but I’ll do my best to tell it the way
I heard a smart man do it.” I turned to Mrs. Denslow. “Maybe we should wake up Catherine
and get it explained to everyone all at once now, while things are peaceful. Might
be a bit busy for it later on.”

Mrs. Denslow agreed and strode back to the house, still following her lantern like
a worried miner.

“What do you mean, ‘a bit busy later on’?” Edward Billinger was still staring in utter
astonishment at the scene before us. “Is there something I ought to know?”

I imagined that when one had looked at a huge mesa all one’s life, and were now suddenly
without that mesa and staring out at an ocean that hadn’t been there the day before,
one might find it a bit disconcerting. Didn’t Billinger have any family? Hadn’t anyone
warned him what might be coming?

“I’ll get to that when I get to that.” I didn’t want him running off again until I
could figure out whether I’d need him here. “Maybe you should come inside, Mr. Billinger.
You had any breakfast?”

He looked at me as though I had just asked him if he’d ever seen a pig fly. “Breakfast?
I woke up and there was an ocean outside my window.”

“Come on in and get some,” I said. “You’ll thank me for it later.”

* * *

The greenish light of dawn gave way to a harsher, whiter, more ordinary looking world
(except, of course, for the new body of water) as we finished up the griddle cakes
and bacon that Mrs. Denslow had been good enough to make. Well, I say we, but I didn’t
eat much. I never do.

“A long time ago,” I began, “Mrs. Denslow’s grandfather, Noah James Lyman, came from
England and settled here in Medicine Dance. He was a bit of a scientist, as rich men
sometimes were back in the old country, and he chose this part of Arizona because
of things he had heard about it—stories the local Indians told—and some curious artifacts
found by the earliest pioneers. The very name of the place, Brujado Valley, meant
‘enchanted,’ or even ‘cursed.’ Over the years, Doctor Lyman became more and more convinced
that the place was special and began a series of experiments that he expected would
prove just how special it was.”

“Special how? And what sort of experiments would those be?” Ned sounded a bit skeptical.
I was glad, because I’d seen how he kept looking at Catherine, and I would have hated
to think a serious admirer of hers could turn out to be stupid.

“I don’t have the scientific knowledge to explain,” I said, “except that Doctor Lyman
believed that this area… Well, his way of saying it was that Medicine Dance ‘sat very
lightly in time.’ Those were his words. And Noah Lyman was a very, very smart man.
He thought he could figure out a way to understand what was special about the place
and… harness it, I suppose you’d say. Like the way you’d fasten the tow-rope of a
river barge to an ox-bow, then let the ox do the work of pulling the boat.”

“So he was going to use the town to pull a barge?”

“Ned, hush now,” said Catherine. “You’re just making fun, but you certainly can’t
explain all that
water
out there. Let Mr. Custos speak.” I was glad to see that she didn’t put up with any
nonsense from him, either.

“Not exactly,” I replied to Billinger’s question. “More like he was going to try to
find what it was that made the place special and then redirect a little of it. Like
digging a channel off a big, fast-moving river to get some of the water to flow somewhere
else and turn a water wheel.”

A dog was barking outside, loud and getting louder. I cocked an ear.

“I apologize, then,” Billinger said, “but I’m afraid you’ve lost me, sir.”

“Doctor Lyman built a machine that he thought could find the
frequency
of this place, which is a bit like the way a string or a bell makes music, a pattern
of vibration. When he finally discovered that frequency, he tried to duplicate it
artificially. But it didn’t quite work.”

The dog was still barking loudly, with a frightened edge to it now. Catherine stood
up to look out the window.

“Whatever are you doing, Catherine?” Mrs. Denslow said. “And what’s got into that
dog? I confess it’s fretting me.”

“It’s… I’m not sure, Grammy. There’s something on the fence down at the far end and
it’s bothering poor Gally to distraction. I think it’s a hawk, but it’s awful big.”

“Don’t say ‘awful,’ say ‘awfully.’ We call that an adverb, dear.”

Billinger was up now, looking out the same window. “It may be an adverb, as you say,
ma’am, but it ain’t no hawk. Crane, maybe. I’ve seen a few of those down in Sulphur
Springs…”

I climbed to my feet. “That’s no crane. Fact is, that’s no bird at all. And there’s
a lot of them.”

Now everyone crowded the window to watch the things wheeling through the sky. Most
of the winged creatures were spinning lazily along the edge of the new ocean, but
a few were right above us.

“Oh!” said Catherine as the one on the fence launched itself across the yard. It glided
past the window before banking on its leathery wings and heading toward the water.
“It’s… it’s horrid! What is it, Mr. Custos?”

“I’m not certain,” I told her. “The wings look like a bat’s, but…” The creature had
a long beak, but not a feather to be seen. “Some kind of… reptile?”

I didn’t have long to wonder. Only a few moments later, another of the nightmare creatures
glided down from the sky on leathery wings that must have spanned close to a dozen
feet. It landed not twenty yards from our window, and the barking of Mrs. Denslow’s
watch dog suddenly jumped to an entirely different level of frenzy. The reptile-bird
seemed offended: it opened its long beak and hissed, then leaped up into the air,
flapping its huge wings, and glided toward the side of the house where the dog was
tied up, just out of our sight. The barking became a yelp of panic.