Portlandtown: A Tale of the Oregon Wyldes (18 page)

Henry closed his eyes. Upon opening them, his gaze once again fell on the Hanged Man, and this time he met the dead man’s stare without succumbing to it.
Let him look at me awhile,
he thought.

Henry studied the pistol in his hand. It was the same weapon that had come out of the ground with the dead man, albeit with a fresh coat of paint. He checked the cylinder and was surprised to find it loaded.

“Nice of them to arm you,” he said, and slipped the gun into the holster on the right side of the dead man’s body.

A gun was fired somewhere outside the tent, startling Henry, and for a moment he was free. There was no book, no body, no resurrection—all he had to do was turn and run.

(
stay
)

Henry closed his eyes and let the warm words fill his body. He would be a captive, but the words would keep him safe. At that moment, Henry thought it a fair trade.

Several more gunshots rang out, but Henry didn’t flinch. Carefully, he retrieved the black book from his inside coat pocket, opened it to a page covered with rough notes and scribbles, and began to read.

*   *   *

Sixty-seven miles to the south, a rogue swell struck the
Año Nuevo
broadside, tilting the vessel hard to starboard.

Andre rode the wave from the edge of his bed as it tilted the room past twenty degrees, enough to send his suitcase sliding across the floor. The world hung at odds with gravity for a moment longer, then rolled back to right and the otherwise calm waters of the Oregon coast.

Andre received no such reprieve.

“No, no, no,” he said, although there was no one in the room to hear him. His world had been dealt an even more powerful blow moments before the wave struck. He would later decide the two events were connected, but for now he knew only that the worst had occurred. His connection to the book had been severed. It had a new master.

And he was using it.

*   *   *

Mason ducked as a bullet blistered the corner of the flatbed wagon, filling the air with splinters. Second and third shots whizzed past overhead, and then he popped up long enough to return fire, before another volley answered his own.

“Where’s my fire!” he screamed at no one in particular.

Mason ejected the spent cartridges from his pistol and quickly reloaded. At his feet, a bag lay torn open, its cache of coins and a few government notes spilled onto the dirt. There was no lockbox. At the first sign of trouble, the brute had tossed the box and the tiny, one-armed woman on top of a trailer, out of sight and out of reach. That left the take from the Hanged Man’s tent and little else. Charlie had snatched the money bag from the brute’s belt, but it had cost him.

“How is he?”

Hugh shook his head. “Shoulder’s busted. Some ribs, too.”

“I’m fine!” Charlie said and then sucked in a gulp of air. “Hurts like a bitch, though.”

“Good,” Mason said. “Pain means you ain’t dyin’.”

Mason scanned the area around them. They were at the south end of the camp, farthest from the entrance, and on the opposite side of the big top from the Hanged Man’s tent. Garibaldi and half-dozen carnival folks had them pinned down on two sides. From here, they could cut back to the midway or take their chances on the steep western slope behind the camp, which in the dark would likely be suicide.

A few stragglers remained on the midway, apparently not alarmed at the sound of gunshots, or the flames that should have been lighting up the night sky.

“Where’s my g’damn fire!”

*   *   *

Henry held the knife firmly against his thumb, waiting for the blood to come. It didn’t. It wouldn’t, until he broke the skin. This was proving more of a problem than he’d anticipated.

“Come on,” he whispered to himself. “Just a little slice. Won’t hurt a bit.”

Henry didn’t believe it.

He believed what he read. The words on the page had flowed into his eyes, through his mind, and out of his mouth. They were resurrection, life, and redemption (
vengeance
), for himself and the dead man to whom they were directed. They were true.

The condensed version of the spell was only a dozen lines long and Henry had spoken them clearly and correctly, he was sure. There was only one line left.

But first there was blood.

“Don’t think about it, do it.”

Henry closed his eyes and pressed the knife against his flesh. Still no blood. There wouldn’t be until he pulled the blade across his skin and he knew it. For all the strength given him by the book, it had somehow failed him on this one thing. He was afraid of the pain.

(
coward
)

Henry opened his eyes. “I’m not a coward.”

The knife slipped easily across Henry’s thumb, cutting deeper than he’d intended. It was cold and painless. He stared at the red, inch-long line crossing his fingerprint as it swelled and overflowed with blood. And then the pain came.

“Ouch.”

Henry waited for the fear to return, but the stinging in his thumb had the opposite effect. His head was clear, his path laid bare before him. He would share his blood with the dead man and …

“Make him my own.”

Henry raised his now-dripping left thumb to the Hanged Man’s forehead. He pressed it there, letting the blood flow onto the face of the dead man. A single drop rolled across the bridge of the nose, cutting a crimson line through the pale makeup before slipping into the right eye. Henry watched as his blood spread across the yellowed white, tinting it orange and then red.

Henry drew back and admired his handiwork. Was it enough? The book was vague on the amount of blood needed for resurrection, as well as where to apply it. It referred only to “wetting the flesh.” He glanced at the cut on his thumb, where fluid continued to seep, and thought it best not to be stingy.

Henry traced the faint scar across the Hanged Man’s neck with his thumb, leaving a fresh trail of blood. He half expected the scar to open and swallow the red line, but it did not. Henry considered touching each of the bullet scars on the dead man’s chest, but held back. Had they always been scars? When would he have had time to heal before dying?

“That’s enough,” he said, cutting off the questions. Henry backed away a few steps and waited.

A fresh volley of gunfire erupted outside the tent, followed by men yelling and then more shooting. Henry barely heard it. The shooting was someplace else, somewhere that couldn’t touch him, not now, not ever again.

“Rise, my friend.”

Nothing happened.

Henry blinked. His thumb hurt. What had he done wrong? A moment of panic faded away almost immediately and Henry smiled.

“Not done yet,” he said, pulling the black book from his pocket. Somewhere in the back of his mind, Henry was surprised that he’d lost track of the book, even though it now pulsed in his hands. It had left him, but only for a moment.

Henry started to open the book, but caught site of his bloody thumb and stopped. He didn’t know why, but getting his blood on the pages would be bad. He slipped the book under his arm and then tore a strip of cloth off the sheet that hung beside the Hanged Man listing his crimes. Henry wrapped the fabric around his injury, seeing the word
murder
roll about his thumb and then disappear beneath the next wrapping. When it was done, he took the book in his left hand and let it fall open, finding the point where he’d left off immediately. Henry read:

“Blood given, bloed reduco, vita captus, mortuus haud magis. Thou art risen, élévation et come forth. Sto in nex umbra and wag vir niks. I call to thee…”

Henry stopped reading. He stared at the text, not sure what to say. He’d read over the spell several times, had practiced the foreign words until sure he was speaking them correctly, but somehow he’d missed this before.

I call to thee, (nom).

He’d read it before as it was written, but now understood he was not supposed to say the word but rather to insert a name—the name of the dead man.

What name?

Hugh and Charlie had argued this topic repeatedly before concluding the man didn’t have a name. He might have at some point, but it had been long forgotten, if it had ever been known. His name was the Hanged Man.

Henry wasn’t so sure. That name was his, but was it the man’s true name? Would it speak to whatever power was to bring him back to the land of the living? Henry stumbled over the question in his head several times before coming to the obvious answer. There wasn’t another name to use.

Henry looked at the Hanged Man’s face. Thin streaks of blood ran down either side of the nose, turning to black tears in the ashen makeup. Without thinking, Henry reached up and drew down the eyelids. The right one refused to close completely. It would have to do.

Henry looked to the book, but he already knew the words to speak. He never got the chance to say them.

Mason’s gun pressed against Henry’s temple made sure of it.

“Where’s my fire, Henry?”

Henry’s eyes flicked to his right. Mason was only a few feet away, his face bloodied in much the same way as the Hanged Man’s. Henry was so engrossed in his task, he’d missed the man’s approach entirely.

Mason sniffed the air. “I don’t smell smoke. I should smell smoke,” he said, and pressed his gun harder against Henry’s temple. “Where’s my g’damm fire, Henry!”

Henry opened his mouth but said nothing. He wasn’t afraid. He wouldn’t make an excuse, he wouldn’t lie. He didn’t have to.

“I’m lighting it right now,” he said.

Henry turned back the corpse, closed his eyes, and spoke:

“I call to thee, Hanged Man, forever sent, never to return; I call to thee, return to me.”

The last half of the sentence was a translation from the Latin and French hodgepodge that was scribbled in the book. Henry didn’t think about it, he just did it. He knew the words. At that moment, he could have spoken the entire text of the spell in English, or any language, in fact. He knew it.

Henry opened his eyes.

The Hanged Man’s were still mostly closed.

Mason looked from Henry to the Hanged Man and back to Henry. His gun never moved.

“What? You trying to start a fire with magic? You an idiot? Use a g’damn match!”

“No,” Henry said, his voice wavering. “I spoke it all, all of it. Every word. He’s supposed to…” Henry reached for the Hanged Man.

Mason grabbed his collar and threw him down. “Never should have brought you. Just a stupid kid.”

“Shoot him.”

Henry turned on his side to see Charlie drop to the ground at his brother’s feet. Both men were wounded, Charlie obviously worse than Hugh.

“Put a gun in his paw and throw him out front,” Hugh said. “Give ’em something else to shoot at ’sides us.”

“No,” Henry said. “Wait! He’s coming, he’s coming back.”

“Who?”

Henry pointed at the corpse behind Mason. Mason didn’t turn around.

“Is that what you’re doing?” Mason laughed. “Trying to raise the dead?”

Hugh and Charlie exchanged glances as Mason moved back to the tent entrance. He slipped open the flap as little as possible and scanned the grounds. Satisfied, he dumped the spent cartridges from his pistol and began to reload.

Henry registered that Mason’s weapon had been empty, but he didn’t care. His attention was back on the dead man. What had he done wrong? He made a mistake in the reading, he must have.

“I can fix this,” Henry said, flipping open the book. He scanned the pages, his finger darting over the words, his mouth repeating them silently. The words in his head matched those on the page. Where was his mistake?

“What have you got left?” Mason asked Hugh.

Hugh glanced at his pistol. “Two and I’m out.”

Charlie handed his weapon to his brother. “Full six, but that’s all I got.”

Mason looked around the tent, finally spying the gun in the Hanged Man’s holster.

“That loaded?”

Henry didn’t look up from the book.

Not waiting for an answer, Mason strode toward the body, but was struck high in the left shoulder by a bullet fired from outside the tent. He spun on the spot and went down in front of the dead man on display.

Hugh dropped low and returned fire, emptying his pistol blindly into the side of the tent. He switched to Charlie’s, fired once more, and then dragged his brother behind a pedestal in the center of the room on which a Native headdress was displayed.

Shots rang out on all sides of the tent. Most of the bullets passed through one wall and exited the opposite. A single shot grazed the Hanged Man’s right thigh. None of the men in the tent noticed as blood began to ooze from the wound.

Finally, a voice called out, “Hold yer fire, dammit!”

The shooting stopped.

Mason rolled over on his hip, sat up, and scanned the tent, front to back. There was no place to hide that didn’t back up against canvas, a poor proposition for defensive purposes. One of the torches beside the Hanged Man had fallen and was within reach. Mason picked it up, weighing his options in either hand. Fire back or fire?

“Give it up, son,” called out the circus master. “Got nowhere to go. Give up now, you live. That’s my one and only offer.”

Mason looked at Hugh and Charlie. Both brothers had had enough. They wouldn’t be of help. Henry was only a few feet away, his face buried in that damn book. He was useless. That left Mason and the dead man. Mason smiled.

“Always heard you were good in a fight,” he said to the corpse and then tossed the torch into the coffin. A moment later, the Hanged Man’s pant leg caught fire.

Henry flipped another page, then nearly screamed in pain as his leg began to burn. Only it wasn’t his leg.

Henry leaped to his feet. He grabbed the torch and threw it across the tent, where it struck canvas and fell to the ground still burning. Without hesitation he swatted at the flames with his bare hands. There was pain, much of it focused in his bloodied thumb, but the fire was out quickly. The pain in his leg subsided.

“Thanks,” said a voice beside him. “Hate to see my investment go up in smoke on the first night.”

Henry turned to see Mason, Hugh, and Charlie under guard. Garibaldi, the brute at his side, had his weapon trained on Henry.