Fevre Dream (15 page)

GEORGE GORDON, LORD BYRON
1788–1824

Abner Marsh studied Byron’s face for a time, and found himself envying the poet’s features. Beauty was never something he had experienced from within; if he dreamed of grand gorgeous steamers, perhaps it was because he so conspicuously lacked beauty himself. With his bulk, his warts, his flat squashed nose, Marsh had never had to worry over much about women neither. When he’d been younger, rafting and flatboating down the river, and even after he’d worked a spell on steamers, Marsh had frequented places in Natchez-under-the-hill and New Orleans where a riverman could find a night’s fun for a reasonable price. And later, when Fevre River Packets was going strong, there were some women in Galena and Dubuque and St. Paul who would have married him for the asking; good, stout, hard-faced widow women who knew the worth of a sound strong man like him, with all those steamboats. But they had lost interest quick enough after his misfortune, and anyway they had never been what he’d wanted. When Abner Marsh let himself think of such things, which wasn’t often, he dreamed of women like the dark-eyed Creole ladies and dusky free quadroons of New Orleans, lithe and graceful and proud as his steamers.

Marsh snorted and blew out his candle. He tried to sleep. But his dreams were flushed and haunted; words echoed dimly and frighteningly in the darkened alleys of his mind.

. . . Morn came and went—and came, and brought no day.

. . . Gorging himself in gloom: no Love was left.

. . . men forgot their passions in the dread

Of this their desolation.

. . . a meal was brought,

With blood.

. . . an astounding man.

Abner Marsh sat bolt upright in his bed, wide awake, listening to the thumping of his heart. “Damn,” he muttered. He found a match, lit his bedside candle, and opened the book of poems to the page with Byron’s picture. “Damn,” he repeated.

Marsh dressed quickly. He yearned for company something fierce, for Hairy Mike’s muscles and black iron billet, or Jonathon Jeffers and his sword cane. But this was between him and Joshua alone, and he had given his word not to talk to no one.

He splashed some water on his face, took up his hickory stick, and went out onto the deck, wishing he had a preacher on board, or even a cross. The book of poems was in his pocket. Far down the landing, another steamer was building steam and loading; Marsh could hear her roustabouts singing a slow, melancholy chant as they toted cargo across the planks.

At the door to Joshua’s cabin, Abner Marsh raised his stick to knock, then hesitated, suddenly full of doubts. Joshua had given orders not to be disturbed. Joshua was going to be almighty displeased by what Marsh had to say. The whole thing was tomfoolery, that poem had just plagued him with bad dreams, or maybe it was something he ate. Still, still . . .

He was still standing there, frowning in thought, his stick upraised, when the cabin door swung silently open.

Inside was as dark as the belly of a cow. Moon and stars cast some small light across the door frame, but beyond was hot velvet blackness. Several paces back from the door, a shadowy figure stood. The moon touched bare feet, and the vague shape of the man was dimly felt. “Come in, Abner,” came the voice from the darkness. Joshua spoke in a raspy whisper.

Abner Marsh stepped forward across the threshold.

The shadow moved, and suddenly the door was closed. Marsh heard it lock. It was utterly dark. He couldn’t see a thing. A powerful hand gripped him tightly by the arm and drew him forward. Then he was pushed backward, and he was afraid for an instant until he felt the chair beneath him.

A rustle of motion in the darkness. Marsh looked around, blindly, trying to make sense out of the black. “I didn’t knock,” he heard himself say.

“No,” came Joshua’s reply. “I heard you approach. And I have been expecting you, Abner.”

“He said you would come,” came another voice, from a different part of the darkness. A woman’s voice, soft, bitter. Valerie.

“You,” Marsh said in astonishment. He had not expected that. He was confused, angry, uncertain, and Valerie’s presence made it even more difficult. “What are
you
doin’ here?” Marsh demanded.

“I might ask the same of you,” her soft voice answered. “I am here because Joshua needs me, Captain Marsh. To help him. And that is more than you have done, for all your words. You and your kind, with all your suspicion, all your pious—”

“Enough, Valerie,” Joshua said curtly. “Abner, I do not know why you have come tonight, but I knew you would come sooner or later. I might have done better to take a dullard as a partner, a man who would take orders without questions. You are too shrewd perhaps for your own good, and mine. I knew it was only a matter of time until you saw through the tale I spun for you at Natchez. I’ve seen you watching us. I know about your little tests.” He gave a rough, forced chuckle. “Holy water, indeed!”

“How . . . you knew, then?” Marsh said.

“Yes.”

“Damn that boy.”

“Don’t be too hard on him. He had little to do with it, Abner, though I did notice him staring at me all during supper.” Joshua’s laugh was a strained, terrible sound. “No, it was the water itself that told me. A glass of clear clean water shows up in front of me a few days after our talk, and what am I to think? All the time we’ve been on the river, we’ve been getting water full of mud and sediment. I could have started a garden with the river mud I’ve left at the bottom of my glass.” He made a dry, clacking sound of amusement. “Or even filled my coffin.”

Abner Marsh ignored the last. “Stir it up and drink it down with the water,” he said. “Make a riverman of you.” He paused. “Or maybe just a man,” he added.

“Ah,” said Joshua, “so we come to the point.” He said nothing more for a long time, and the cabin seemed suffocating, thick with darkness and silence. When Joshua finally spoke, his tone was chilled and serious. “Did you bring a cross with you, Abner? Or a stake?”

“I brung this,” Marsh said. He pulled out the book of poems and tossed it through the air, to where he judged Joshua was sitting.

He heard a motion, a snap as the spinning book was snatched from the air. Pages rustled. “Byron,” Joshua said, bemused.

Abner Marsh couldn’t have seen his fingers wriggling an inch in front of his face, so thoroughly was the cabin shuttered and curtained. But Joshua could not only see well enough to catch the book, but to read it as well. Marsh felt goosebumps rise on him again, despite the heat.

“Why Byron?” asked Joshua. “You puzzle me. Another test, a cross, questions, those I might have anticipated. Not Byron.”

“Joshua,” said Marsh, “how old are you?”

Silence.

“I’m a fair judge of age,” Marsh said. “You’re a hard one, with your white hair and all. Still, from the looks of you—your face, your hands—I’d say thirty, thirty-five at the most. That book there, it says he died thirty-three years ago. And you say you knew him.”

Joshua sighed. “Yes.” He sounded rueful. “A stupid mistake. I was so taken by the sight of this steamer that I forgot myself. Afterward I thought it would not matter. You knew nothing of Byron. I was sure you would forget.”

“I ain’t always quick. But I don’t forget.” Marsh took a hard, reassuring grip on his stick, and leaned forward. “Joshua, I want us to talk. Get the woman out of here.”

Valerie laughed icily in the darkness. She seemed closer now, though Marsh had not heard her move. “He is a bold fool,” she said.

“Valerie will stay, Abner,” Joshua said bluntly. “She can be trusted to hear anything you might care to say to me. She is as I am.”

Marsh felt cold and very alone. “Like you are,” he echoed heavily. “Well then.
What are you?
”

“Judge for yourself,” Joshua replied. A match flared suddenly, startlingly, in the black cabin.

“Oh, my God,” Marsh croaked.

The brief small flame threw harsh light on Joshua’s features. His lips were swollen and cracked. Burned, blackened skin pulled tight across his forehead and cheeks. Blisters, swollen with water and pus, bulged beneath his chin and clustered on the raw red hand that cupped the match. His gray eyes gaped whitened and rheumy from hollow pits. Joshua York smiled grimly, and Marsh heard the seared flesh crackle and tear. Pale white fluid ran slowly down one cheek from a fissure freshly torn open. A piece of skin fell away, revealing raw pink flesh beneath.

Then the match went out, and darkness was a blessing.

“His partner, you said,” Valerie said accusingly. “You would help him, you said. This is the help you gave him, you and your crew with your suspicions and your threats. He might have died for your sake. He is the pale king, and you are nothing, but he did
this
to himself to win your worthless loyalty. Are you satisfied, Captain Marsh? It seems not, since you are here.”

“What the hell
happened
to you?” Marsh asked, ignoring Valerie.

“I was in the light of your gaudy day for less than two hours,” Joshua replied, and now Marsh understood his pained whispering. “I was aware of the risk. I have done it before, when it was necessary. Four hours might have killed me. Six hours, most certainly. But two hours or less, most of it spent out of direct sunlight—I knew my limits. The burns look worse than they are. The pain is bearable. And this shall pass quickly. By tomorrow at this time, no one will ever know anything had touched me. Already my flesh heals itself. The blisters burst, the dead skin sloughs off. You saw for yourself.”

Abner Marsh shut his eyes, opened them. It made no difference. The darkness was as full either way, and he could still see the pale blue after-image of the match hanging before him, and the awful specter of Joshua’s ravaged face. “Then it don’t matter about the holy water, and the mirrors,” he said. “It don’t matter. You can’t go out by day, not really. What you said—those goddamned vampires of yours. They’re real. Only you lied to me. You
lied
to me, Joshua! You ain’t no vampire hunter, you’re one of them. You and her and all the rest of them.
You’re vampires your-goddamned-selves!
”Marsh held his walking stick out in front of him, an ineffective hickory sword warding off things he could not see. His throat felt raw and dry. He heard Valerie laugh lightly, and move closer.

“Lower your voice, Abner,” Joshua said calmly, “and spare me your indignation. Yes, I lied to you. At our very first meeting, I warned you that if you pressed me for answers you would get lies. You forced the lies from me. I only regret that they were not better lies.”

“My partner,” Abner Marsh said angrily. “Hell, I can’t believe it even now. A killer, or worse’n a killer. What have you been doin’ all these nights? Goin’ out and findin’ somebody alone, drinkin’ blood, rippin’ them apart? And then moving on, yessir, now I see. A different town most every night, you’re safe that way, by the time the folks ashore find what you’ve done you’re gone off somewheres else. And not runnin’ neither, just loafin’ along in grand style in a fancy steamer with your own cabin and everything. No wonder you wanted yourself a steamboat so much, Mister Cap’n York. God damn you to hell.”

“Be silent,”
York snapped, with such force in his voice that Marsh abruptly closed his mouth. “Lower that stick before you break something waving it around.
Lower
it, I say.” Marsh dropped the walking stick to the carpet. “Good,” said Joshua.

“He is like all the rest, Joshua,” Valerie said. “He does not understand. He has nothing for you but fear and hate. We can’t let him leave here alive.”

“Perhaps,” Joshua said reluctantly. “I think there is more to him than that, but perhaps I’m wrong. What of it, Abner? Be careful what you say. Speak as if your life hung on every word.”

But Abner Marsh was too angry for thought. The fear that had filled him had given way to a fever of rage; he had been lied to, made a part of this, played for a big ugly fool. No man treated Abner Marsh like that, no matter if he wasn’t a man at all. York had turned his
Fevre Dream,
his lady, into some kind of floating nightmare. “I been on this river a long time,” Marsh said. “Don’t you try to scare me none. When I was on my first steamer, I seen a friend o’ mine get his guts cut out in a St. Joe saloon. I grabbed the scoundrel that did it, took the knife off him, and broke his damn back for him. I was at Bad Axe too, and down in bleeding Kansas, so no goddamned bloodsucker is goin’ to bluff me. You want to come for me, you come right on. I’m twice your weight, and you’re burned up all to hell. I’ll twist your damned head off. Maybe I ought to do that anyhow, for what you done.”

Silence. Then, astonishingly, Joshua York laughed, long and loud. “Ah, Abner,” he said when he had quieted again, “you
are
a steamboatman. Half-dreamer and half-braggart and all fool. You sit there blind, when you know I can see perfectly well by the light leaking in through the shutters and drapes, and beneath the door. You sit there fat and slow, knowing my strength, my quickness. You ought to know how silently I can move.” There was a pause, a creak, and suddenly York’s voice came from across the cabin. “Like this.” Another silence. “And this.” Behind him. “And this.” He was back where he had started; Marsh, who had turned his head every which way to follow the voice, felt dizzy. “I could bleed you to death with a hundred soft touches you’d hardly feel. I could creep up on you in the darkness and rip out your throat before you realized I’d stopped talking. And still, despite everything, you sit there looking in the wrong direction, with your beard stuck out, blustering and threatening.” Joshua sighed. “You have spirit, Abner Marsh. Poor judgment, but lots of spirit.”

“If you’re fixin’ to try to kill me, come on and get it done,” Marsh said. “I’m ready. Maybe I never outrun the
Eclipse,
but I done most everything else I had a mind to. I’d rather be rottin’ in one of those fancy N’Orleans tombs than runnin’ a steamer for a pack of vampires.”

“Once I asked you if you were a superstitious man, or a religious one,” Joshua said. “You denied it. Yet now I hear you talking about vampires like some ignorant immigrant.”