Hellfire (6 page)

Mike stepped in front of her with his arm out. “Take it easy in there, Rodney!”

Ozzie peeked up from behind her fingers. She hadn’t realized she’d thrown her hands over her face. She put her arms to her sides and tried to stand tall.

The man behind the door was Rodney Flipp. He had been brought into the state hospital by the Rail Agency after being caught trying to steal mail from a train out west. The courts were still trying to discern whether he was part of a larger gang, so they had delivered him along with an order he be held quietly. Flipp had concocted a whole, lying backstory and fought tooth and nail with any of the doctors who tried to question him. It had taken days of stern talking and a few doses of sedatives to finally calm him down.

Ozzie had wondered why they hadn’t put him in a jail cell. When she had a good look at him, she understood. The man had no hair: not on his head, not on his brow, nowhere. He spent most of his days now sitting on his bed in a tight ball, mumbling to himself and sniffing. Clearly, something had agitated his mind.

Flipp’s face was pressed against the little, barred window that stood at eye-level in the door. He had been quiet enough that the orderlies had left it open.

Now Flipp’s voice was strained, almost wheezing. “I can smell it on him!”

Ozzie’s skin crawled.

“Stop that!” Jim called. He didn’t wait for a reply and hurried down the hall toward the new patient’s empty room.

Mike remained rigidly in his place in front of Ozzie. She cleared her throat and looked over his shoulder. “What can we do for you, Rodney?”

His wide eyes had been following the new patient, and they flicked back toward her. “My name’s not Rodney.”

“Rodney, please,” Ozzie said in a firm voice. “We’ve been over that. You don’t remember things correctly.”

Flipp furiously banged his head against the thick wooden door. It made dull thuds. “Oh, I remember! I remember all too much! I just want to be rid of it, and then you bring…that…on him! You bring him in here with that stink all over him!”

“What stink?” Ozzie asked calmly. “He should smell just fine. The orderlies gave him a bath not an hour ago.”

“You can’t wash it off,” Flipp said. He held a thin-fingered hand up next to his face. “I can smell it on my own skin…” He gagged and pulled his hand away.

“What smell?” Ozzie repeated.

“The smell of death!” Flipp shouted. “The foulest devils! Hell itself!”

Other patients in the hall began shouting. The ones already awake started bellowing, waking up the rest. Howls and wails rang down the hallway.

“I’ll calm him down,” Mike announced. He cracked his knuckles and then pulled a master key off his belt.

Flipp retreated from the doorway. Mike gruffly opened the door and went inside.

Ozzie watched after him a moment. Mike’s curt voice barked several times. Flipp replied in a squeal to the first two, but then he went quiet.

Ozzie turned away and rushed down the hall. Jim was already inside the new patient’s room. She doubted she could help Flipp, and she did not want to see Mike restrain him. Some things had to be done.

She tried not to think about it and turned the corner into the new patient’s room. Jim had undone the straps at the patient’s wrists and fiddled with the belt.

The patient looked around. His mouth opened and closed as if he were almost to speak.

“You’re in the hospital,” Ozzie told him, hoping it would help.

He turned toward her. His brown eyes were full of mist. “Where?”

“Gloriana State Mental Hospital,” Ozzie said.

He looked confused a moment and then shook his head. “No, that’s not right. I shouldn’t be here.”

Jim stood up. He held a hand out to the redheaded patient. “Come on, boy, I’ll help you into bed. You’ve got a lot of resting to catch up on.”

“I can’t rest,” the man said softly. “I’ve got to do something.”

“What is it?” Ozzie asked. “Maybe I can help?”

The patient stared blankly at her.

Jim took his hand and pulled. “Up you go.”

The patient sleepily stood up from the wheelchair and then sat back down on the bed next to it. He cradled his head.

It was a quaint room, with walls painted a soft white. All that was in it was the thin straw mattress and a tin chamber pot that rested in one corner. The rooms in the wings for hysterics and addicts had furniture in them, but it was agreed the violent patients had as little as possible to get into trouble with. At least they shared the same wide view of the lush hospital grounds through their barred windows.

The patient stood up. “I have to get out of here.”

Jim stopped him with a hand at his chest.

“Where are you going?” Ozzie asked him.

“I have to go,” the patient said. “To the lake.”

“Why do you need to go to the lake?”

The patient furrowed up his brow. “It’s all going to be destroyed. I have to try to stop it.”

Jim looked up at Ozzie with stern, dark eyes. She pursed her lips. He didn’t like her humoring the patients like this, especially when they predicted horrible things.

“We’ll talk about it after you’ve had some rest,” Ozzie said.

“No, I can’t rest. My mother. My sister. They’re in the city.”

“We can contact them,” Ozzie told him. “What are their names?”

“Martha Kemp. My sister’s Ann. They have to get out of the city.”

“I’ll let them know,” Ozzie assured him. “What’s your name?”

The man seemed to struggle a moment. “Nate. I’m Nate Kemp.” His eyes suddenly went wide. His jaw dropped. “The train wreck, the thing in the fire! I remember now!”

He leaned on Jim, trying to push past him. Jim held him back.

“Calm down!” Ozzie called.

“No, not now!” the patient, Nate, cried. “We have to hurry! The fire! Everyone’s in danger!”

Ozzie tried to make her voice as soothing as she could. “No one is in any danger.”

Nate’s eyes flashed. “We are all in danger. Grave danger.”

“That’s enough!” Jim cried. He pushed the patient back onto the bed. Nate tried to struggle, but he was still moving slowly.

Jim grabbed a leather strap at the edge of the mattress and pulled it across Nate’s chest. “Help me with this!”

Ozzie hurried forward. She buckled the bronze clasp through the other end of the strap.

Nate tried to push against it. “You don’t understand!”

“You’re not well,” Ozzie told him. “Have some rest, and we’ll talk about this with the doctor later.”

Nate struggled again, but Jim had finished strapping down his legs. Ozzie stood back from the bed. The redhaired patient tried to push against the straps a few more times before dropping back and taking deep, slow breaths.

“That’s all right, you’ve worn yourself out,” Jim told the patient coolly. “Take a nice rest, now.”

Nate breathed heavily through gritted teeth. “Don’t do this.”

Ozzie bit her lower lip. “You’re not well.”

Nate went back to struggling, and Ozzie took a step backward. Jim walked out of the room. With a final look down at the patient, Ozzie turned and followed Jim.

There was something about the way he spoke. Most of the patients she had witnessed were livid like Nate, but they seemed to lose clarity as they fell into their madness. Nate seemed strangely certain, if muddled from the ether she’d gotten from the quieter ward.

Jim closed the door after Ozzie and locked it. Muffled grunts came through the thick oak.

Mike was in the hallway, carrying a glass bottle.

Ozzie’s eyes went wide. “The missing ether!”

“Yes, ma’am,” Mike confirmed. “I found it tucked between the mattress and the wall in Rodney’s cell. Still some of it left.”

Ozzie narrowed her eyes to think. Flipp had been as wild as the new patient when he was brought in, but he did seem to settle down, gradually. They hadn’t heard a peep out of him for a couple of days now.

“Just after the ether was last seen two days ago,” Ozzie muttered.

Mike held it up. Clear liquid sloshed at the bottom of the bottle. “He must have been huffing on it since it disappeared.”

“It’s amazing he can still stand up,” Ozzie said. “Where did he get it?”

Mike shrugged and shook his head.

She stamped her foot and marched down the hallway. Most of the patients had quieted down by now, but a few were still cackling in their rooms. Flipp’s room was quiet.

Ozzie pulled back the hatch that covered the little window into his room. He had lost the privilege of being able to see into the hallway.

Flipp sat next to his bed, his foot resting in a shackle that led to the iron loop bolted to the middle of the floor. The shackle had been off for days now, but now he’d lost that privilege, too. His chin tucked into his chest.

There was a red spot on the side of his face darkening into a bruise. Ozzie winced for him. It had seemed as if he were making a recovery.

She remembered the ether. It wasn’t recovery; it was being covered up by medicine. “Rodney.”

He looked up at her. After a long sigh, he asked, “What?”

“Where did you get the ether?”

He shrugged.

Ozzie cleared her throat and said more loudly, “Where did you get the ether?”

Flipp sat still.

“I don’t want to have to call Mike back in there,” Ozzie told him. The threat made her own heart ache.

Flipp held up his hands. “No, no… Fine. The doctor gave it to me.”

Ozzie wrinkled her eyebrows. “Which doctor was that?”

“Doctor…,” Flipp began. After a long mumble, he said, “I don’t remember.”

“You don’t remember?”

“I’ve had a lot of ether,” he said. His tongue stuck out and licked his lips. “I could use some more, too. It helps me forget.”

“Forget what?”

Flipp clamped his lips and his eyes closed. After a moment, he said, “I don’t like to think about them.”

“About what?”

Flipp threw his head back. “I just want to forget!”

“Ether isn’t the solution to your problems,” Ozzie told him. “I have to tell Dr. Sims about the theft. Maybe he can work with you to heal your mind.”

Flipp’s head settled back onto his chest. “It’s not my mind that’s the problem.”

“And what is the problem?”

“There are things on the other side of the wall.”

“Your wall?”

“Not that kind of wall,” Flipp told her. “The wall between life and death. Things, vile things, squirm around on the other side. They’re starting to come through.”

He snorted, as if he couldn’t believe it himself. Then he laughed. His laughter came as a screeching bark.

Ozzie slammed the hatch shut and latched it.

Chapter Ten

Tom Husk stepped off the train and into Shreveport, Gloriana’s second city. It was a far cry from the sleepy town of Bastrop, where farmers made up the bulk of the population. There, people kept mostly to themselves, working their farms and coming to town for socials on the weekend. The only time the town felt crowded was market day, when steamwagons were loaded with harvests of vegetables, grains, and fattened animals. Once the work was done, people danced in the streets to music played by men who formed bands without practicing.

In Shreveport, every day was market day. The train yard had six lines of rails where cars were traded out, and all six were buzzing already in the morning. The passenger train spat out well-dressed customers like Tom Husk onto the brick platform next to the station. Boys in caps chased after them with hands full of rock candy and sugared fruits, offering anything for a few coins. Black porters in garish, red uniforms hauled luggage and crates out of the baggage cars. Only the shrill whistle of steam could be heard over the roaring din of voices and bodies.

Husk looked back over the trains. Cattle lowed and stamped awkwardly in their wooden cattle cars facing east. They must have arrived from up the Texas Trail, probably as confused as any creature alive since leaving their pastures on a ranch a day or two before. Some of the cattle were being emptied out by men with wide-brimmed hats and long willow rods. The rest would be shipped east to hungry folks as far away as Ohio.

The farthest track stood beside the rock-covered embankment that led down to the Red River. Its water was as rusty as its name, carrying mud and loose debris down from Indian Territory. A tall steamboat rested at the port. While men worked cranes loading crates destined for New Orleans, a gang of elderly men in straw hats sat in the shade, several of them fishing.

Husk straightened himself up and rested his hands by holding the lapels of his gray suit. He liked this suit: light-cotton fabric, grown in Gloriana, manufactured in Gloriana. It showed what a great state this was. The cut was that of a businessman, not too fancy and not too plain. Too fancy, and common people wouldn’t want to talk to him about anything other than how much money he had. Too plain, and the people with money wouldn’t want to talk.

Reporting was all about getting people to talk. First, he had to find someone who knew something worthwhile. Every town had gossips, but they could talk for hours about something that didn’t matter or couldn’t be printed in a paper without a libel case. The men working the train yard probably knew a share about the train crash story, but Husk imagined their boss had already told them to keep tight lips and refer snoopy journalists to him. He might as well ask the bricks on the platform.

If there were anyone who knew a story, and had the time and the druthers to share it, it was old timers. Husk looked back over at the band of men out fishing. They might have a lead or two, and men out shooting the breeze would make it clear whether they knew something. He hopped off the safety of the brick platform and down to the gravel-spotted train yard. Husk’s boots crunched on the rocks and then went quiet as he reached the grassy edge.

The cool breeze from the shady bayou cut right through the warm morning sun. It would be sultry this afternoon, but now it was practically pleasant. Far from the bustling train yard at the edge of the trees, the old men had a comfortable spot to wait out large river fish.

They looked up from beneath their straw hats. All of their thin lips were pressed tight. Several of them were chewing.

Husk tipped his hat. “How do, gentlemen?”

A slow, grumbling chorus of “how do” came back.

Husk nodded to the pair of men with fishing poles leading down to the water. “How’re they biting?”

“All right,” one replied. “Boats churn up the water plenty, but the catfish are back out, at least.”

Husk hummed in agreement. He wasn’t much for fishing, but getting the story was all about making the talker comfortable. In his career as a journalist, he had gotten just about anyone to talk about anything, from neighbors cavorting in the dead of night to the baker’s wife admitting he used two-thirds the amount of dough for each biscuit than he did five years before. Nothing sold papers like people thinking they were being cheated, unless it was something terrifying. With trains crashing and the Rail Agency being even more secretive than usual, this story might be both. He still had to warm up the men before he could get them to tell him anything really juicy.

“River traffic ruin the fishing much?” Husk asked. “We don’t get too much of that back in Brastop.”

“You’re from Bastrop?” an old timer chewing on a bit of straw chirped up.

“Sure am,” Husk replied. He smirked a little. Throwing out a town name was a good way to build a bridge.

“You know Molly Prichert?”

“Sure do,” Husk told him. His smile broadened. Names were even better. “She makes a great peach pie. I just about went broke bidding on one for the charity auction last fall.”

The man with the straw snorted. “That’s my girl, Molly. That Prichert boy better be treating her right.”

“Oh, he is,” Husk assured him. “That furniture store of his is selling so much they can hardly get the new stock off the train before it’s out the door.”

The man grinned, showing a few yellow teeth around his chewed-brown piece of straw. “Doin’ better than a river-hand’s wife, I suppose.”

A few of the other men grunted. Husk suspected their sons-in-law didn’t own furniture stores. Still, he had one willing to talk.

He stuck out his hand to the man with the straw. “Tom Husk, editor and reporter for the Bastrop Daily Star.”

The man took his hand and shook it. “A newspaperman, eh? What brings you all the way to Shreveport?”

“We had a train wreck up there yesterday,” Husk said. “I’d seen you’d had one of your own a while back, so I came down to see if I could find any stories about it.”

The man stopped smiling. His straw dropped in his mouth.

Husk glanced around the group. The other men had turned away.

He bit his tongue. Something was very suspicious about the train wreck if locals wouldn’t talk about it. If a dog bit a man, that would be on everyone’s lips for the next day or two, and might sell a paper or two. If a man bit a dog, everyone would buy the paper to read about it, but it would be so shameful no one would talk to an outsider about it.

Husk needed to lighten the mood. He cleared his throat and said innocently, “I guess trains aren’t all they’re cracked up to be. Maybe we should be sticking to river travel after all.”

The old timers hummed and grunted in mild agreement.

Husk reached under his hat to scratch his thin hair. He sweated.

“You folks seem to be doing pretty well with the Red River right there,” he said.

“Wouldn’t have a town without it,” one of the men with the fishing poles said.

Husk felt a smile coming on and stopped himself before it gave him away. Someone was talking; it was a step in the right direction. “Oh?”

“Thirty years ago, there weren’t a Shreveport, just the Great Raft.”

“I’ve heard a little about that,” Husk said, leading him on.

Another old timer whistled. “Weren’t nothing ‘little’ about it! That raft stretched all the way from Carolina bluffs down south up to Loggy Bayou.”

“Practically into Indian Territory,” one added in a gruff voice that showed its years of tobacco.

“That big, eh? How’d it do that?”

The man with the fishing rod pointed downriver. “Right here’s where the Red River takes on all the water from Twelve Mile Bayou, McCain Creek, and the like. All that western swampland dumped sawyers that tripped up the debris floating down the Red River, mostly trees and limbs that fell in during the rainy years. Some of it impaled on the banks, and that started up a natural floating dam. Stuff at the bottom couldn’t rot out fast enough to keep up with the fallen wood from upstream. Year after year, it piled up over a hundred miles.”

Husk whistled. It was pretty impressive, though he doubted it would make the newspaper. “What happened to it all?”

“It was just a big pile of rubbish blocking up the river, turning it into an impassable mire filled with snakes and gators. Folks wanting to settle west weren’t having any of that, so Washington sent out ole Captain Henry Shreve to come clear it up.”

Husk arched an eyebrow. “How do you clear up a hundred miles of dead trees?”

“The Heliopolis,” one man said, practically singing the name in praise. “Abel, you worked that boat, didn’t ya?”

A round-faced old timer who hadn’t spoken yet coughed. His eyes were dark brown, almost like they led to endless tunnels. He rested, leaning back against the tree trunk. “Yep.”

“Do tell,” Husk prodded.

The man shook his head slowly. “The Heliopolis was Shreve’s patented snagboat, first of its kind, and it was a beast of a machine. It looked like an upturned spider, grabbing logs with claws from its crane-mounted hoists. We dragged away those big logs to the shore to be dried for lumber.”

“And the smaller ones?”

The man closed his eyes. “The smaller ones were drawn into grinders on the boat that fed straight into that maw of the boat’s vicious furnace. Even wet wood burned in a fire with Newton’s Catalyst, though it spewed out smoke black as the night and screamed as no man should hear.”

“It screamed? What do you mean?” one of the other men called.

“It screamed,” the round-faced man repeated. He opened his eyes again. They seemed to shiver in fear. “Most folks said we were making up tales, but I’ve sat around a fire with wet wood and heard it pop and hiss. This was no hiss. The wood groaned and cracked, and on top of it the fire let out a scream like a woman in childbirth.”

He stopped and winced. “No, not like that. Nothing that’s going to cause any good like a newborn babe. I worked on Rob Utton’s pig farm as a kid. Whenever it was feeding time, the pigs would scream, an angry, horrible scream that wanted nothing but to eat the whole world. We ploughed through the whole raft like that, just eating up all that God-felled wood and screaming.”

He went quiet and stared into the distance. Husk realized he and the other men were watching him. No one seemed to know what to say.

Husk swallowed until he could speak. “But it was worth it, right? I mean, once the river was clear, that opened up the whole of northwest Gloriana to trade.”

“Yup,” the old timer with the fishing pole said. “Gave us a river port right here in the middle of nowhere. They even named it in honor of Capt’n Shreve. Colonel Burr gave him a medal. That was right before he retired from being governor in ‘36.”

Husk nodded. Burr, the founder of Gloriana, had been eighty when he finally retired. They said he was a man dedicated like none other. When he died shortly after passing the office on to his adopted son, they said he left a whole room full of instructions.

“The Colonel always liked Shreve,” the man chewing straw said, “especially after Shreve kept getting sued by those boys in New Orleans for breaking their river monopolies. Colonel Burr’d been looking for an excuse to give him medals for years.”

A couple of the men laughed.

“Whoowee, the Colonel hated them boys in New Orleans!”

Husk hummed. The old timers could talk for hours about anything, especially if they got onto the topic of Colonel Burr. Some people had paintings of him in their homes like an altar; others thought he was a slave-master to the whole of Gloriana, despite his dedication to abolition. He needed to get the talkers back onto trains.

“Once the river port was set up, how much longer until the train came through?” Husk asked.

The old men stopped their rumblings about Burr and turned back to him.

One scratched a day’s worth of scruff on his chin. “Oh, it weren’t long at all, just a couple of years. That’s how I came to town, building on the bridge and laying rail out west on the Texas Trail.”

“Back when it was the Republic of Texas,” another added.

“That’s right. Burr was all about Glorianans helping out our ‘brothers to the west.’ Remember that retirement speech of his, talking about the importance of the railway and sending volunteers to the Texans?”

“He probably would’ve declared Gloriana independent, too, if it weren’t already a state.”

“Don’t you get started on Colonel Burr’s federal politics!”

Husk groaned. He was losing them again. “But about that train—”

“Barge coming in!” someone shouted. “Abel, we got ya.”

All of the men stood up. The ones with fishing rods pulled in their lines and scooted back from the riverbank. Two of the men went to either side of the round-faced elder at the tree and took his hand. Husk watched as they hefted him onto his feet and led him to higher ground.

Husk’s jaw drop. The old man who had witnessed so much in the settlement of Gloriana was blind.

He turned away to keep from staring and looked upriver. A barge, loaded down with black coal, was pushed by a little steamboat. The red water flowed up around its edges, creating a high wake that sloshed over the rocky shore.

The old man who had been chewing on straw, Mrs. Prichert’s father, caught him by the shoulder, “Bituminous coal, down from the Choctaw region of Indian Territory. More fuel for the fires of Gloriana.”