The Curse of Jacob Tracy: A Novel (38 page)

Trace hardly stopped moving all day. And yet he could not, as he had done all the weeks previous, lose himself in the busyness. He was constantly aware of that nether-world moving just at the edges of his senses. Part of him was keeping an ear tuned toward Boz, and the Kid, and Remy. And another part of him was thinking about St. Louis, and the telegraph office in Evanston.

He’d been a fool to come out here. And a fool to run from Miss Fairweather, when all she’d done was show him the truth he’d asked for. It was the same old tired altar-boy reflex: anything new or inexplicable must be evil, and therefore avoided.

Is it so threatening to your tiny Christian mind, that you must deny the possibility, rather than accept it, and learn to fight it?

It was hard to think of himself as a coward. Miss Fairweather had said he was not, and he did not think he behaved like one when faced with a clear and immediate threat—like the keung-si. But he had to be honest with himself: he’d been pulling away from Miss Fairweather all spring, half-fascinated and half-fearful, because he was afraid of what she wanted from him. Because he was afraid of the
something worse
he’d always known was out there. Because he dreaded the gulf he could see widening between himself and Boz.

Boz kept to the training paddock most of the day. He turned up for dinner at noon with a nod and a nonchalant attitude, as if the quarrel had never happened. “Saw our wolf-hunter down at the bath-house this morning,” he said in a low voice, sopping up bean juice with a bit of rye’n’injun bread. “He was markin out those tracks around the pump.”

“You say anything to him?”

“Nope. Saw all I needed to see. But he don’t know that.” Boz jerked his chin. “Watch out.”

Trace glanced over to see Remy ambling toward the fire-pit, a bloody mare’s leg slung across his shoulders, and a burlap bag dangling from one hand.

The Kid was sitting alone; he too had lain low all morning, sequestering himself in the office, diligently completing every task Trace set him to. The others ignored him as if he had ceased to exist.

Remy straddled the bench across from the Kid, dropped his burdens on the ground. He upended the burlap sack and shook out a tangle of heavy steel traps, which scattered in the dirt like a giant’s game of knucklebones. Remy leaned the mare’s leg against his knee, drew a skinning-knife from his boot, and peeled off a fatty strip of hide. He began to grease the springs and hinges of the traps with the bloody rag.

The wolf-hunter whistled as he worked. The ranch hands, though hardly sensitive to blood and dead meat, cast puckered-up glances at Remy’s breach of etiquette and turned away to their own meals.

Remy exhausted the greasy scrap, tossed it aside, and used the knife to peel off another flap of skin, then a bit of meat, which he stuffed in his mouth.

“Eez good for the blood, raw,” the wolf-hunter said, to the Kid’s stare. “Make you strong, so you never catch la grippe.”

The Kid got up, dumped his plate for the second time that day, and stalked off toward the office. Remy’s eyes followed him, as he took a cheroot from his pocket and lit it. The smell was like damp socks, rot under a log. Remy fished in the other pocket and pulled out an old, smudged bottle, full of something that resembled the specimens Trace had fetched for Miss Fairweather: dark amber, cloudy, and clotted. Remy took a much-stained handkerchief, uncorked the bottle, and upended it over the cloth.

The waft of scent nearly made Trace gag, even from ten feet away. Boz made a low sound of disgust and the wolf-hunter looked up, smirking.

“Remy’s secret receet,” he said. “Wolf piss an’ beaver-musk. Let it brew a few weeks. Wolfs come from a mile away, thinking they on the trail of some love-ly lady wolf.
Aroo!
” He howled lasciviously, and then laughed.

That was enough for the rest of the diners. The remaining cowboys vacated the fire-pit, some of them grumbling under their breath. Trace got up and went over to the wolf-hunter, stood there with plate in hand, and made an effort to speak without breathing.

“Listen, friend,” he said. “I don’t mean to get in the way of your work, but the rest of us’d take it as a kindness if you did it somewhere else.”

“Oh-oh. Do that parfum de loup offend your nose, Prêtre?” Remy took the cheroot from his teeth and tapped the ash onto Trace’s boot. It might’ve been an accident, since the wolf-hunter’s sly golden gaze never left Trace’s. “Remy
hate
to think he make a bad step in dis salle de bal.” He made a sweeping gesture across the ranch proper.

“Just keep your traps and your bait outside the yard, hear?” Trace dumped his dishes in the wash-bin and headed for the office.

He expected to find the Kid quietly at work. He’d seen no one else go into the foreman’s house, and so was surprised to hear the Kid’s voice coming from within—arguing with someone, in a petulant, protesting tone.

Trace stepped onto the porch and the voice cut off abruptly. The Kid turned toward the door with a spooky, animal reflex. His cheeks were flushed, his eyes red and watery.

“Who you talkin to, Kid?”

The boy’s chin wobbled furiously. “You better keep that animal away from me, Preacher, or something bad’s gonna happen!”

“Who?”

“That Cajun trash! He followed me up from Salt Lake and now he’s tracked me here from Evanston.”

Even though Trace had considered the possibility himself, it still sounded unlikely. “Why would he be trackin you, Kid?”

“Because he’s a devil! Or a deviant. I don’t know! I just want him to leave me the hell alone!” The boy seemed manic, desperate. “You see things, don’t you, Preacher? I mean they don’t just call you that because you were at seminary. God talks to you.”

“Sometimes,” Trace said cautiously. “What’re you gettin at, Kid?”

The Kid reached into his vest pocket and pulled out a folded page of newsprint, offered it up with a challenging look.

It was a page from the Salt Lake
Clarion,
dated mid-April. And there in the first column was a reprint of the original story about the Herschel murders. Trace read the words with a feeling of recurring nightmare—
intimations made by one Jacob Tracy … adamant in his assertions of Miss Herschel’s innocence … Could some otherworldly knowledge be the source of his certainty?

“That’s you, isn’t it?” the Kid said. “I heard you and Boz talk about St. Louis.”

“Where’d you get this?”

“I read it. Back in Salt Lake, just before … I left.”

“So who’s followin who, huh?” Trace’s skin felt taut, as all his senses groped for the lie, the trap. He couldn’t remember the last time he’d met a man he couldn’t get a read on, and that in itself was worrisome. “No—you can’t expect me to believe you came up here lookin for me.
I
didn’t even know I was gonna be here in April.”

“I didn’t,” the Kid said. “It wasn’t til you got here, and I overheard you tell Boz how you needed to take a turn on the night watch—”

“What do you do, Kid, listen at doors?”

“No! I wasn’t trying to listen. But
everybody
knows you talk to God on your watches. The others make jokes about it, but not too loud, cause they all know you got eyes in the back of your head. And I thought I remembered your name from the paper, so when we were in Evanston on the Fourth, I went by the printer’s office, and they had an old copy with the story in it.”

It was possible—just. Given the sensationalism of the Herschel murders, and small papers’ tendency to reuse any and all interesting content that came across the wire … it was appalling to think how far his fame might have spread. And what interested parties might have seen it.

“Look, Kid.” Trace threw the paper on the desk, and sat. “You gotta realize reporters will take a little bit of a thing and twist it til it sounds like somethin entirely different.”

“But you
are
a man of God, I
know
it! Please, Preacher, I don’t know what else to do—”

“What’s the matter, son? What is it you think I can help you with?”

The Kid wrapped his arms hard around his shoulders. “I
hear
things. Voices, telling me to do things. Making me
want
to do things.”

“Like what?”

“Tear everything
apart
.” He raked his nails down his arms hard enough to make threads pop in his shirt sleeves. “Last night I dreamt I was standing in the horse corral—
you
saw me there, with blood on my hands. But when I woke up, I was in the bath-house, and I was all muddy. I don’t know how I got there.”

Rather convenient, don’t you think?
Miss Fairweather’s voice echoed in Trace’s head. “Have you walked in your sleep before?”

“I did when I was a kid, but not like this. I didn’t wake up in strange places. And I didn’t have these dreams.”

“How long has this been goin on?”

Some dark memory crossed the Kid’s face. “Since April.”

“Before or after your folks died?”

“I don’t remember. Before.”

There was something
hazy
about the boy’s aura, as if a cloud of mosquitoes swarmed around him. The nearest thing Trace had seen to it was the demon in the drunk tank, but this didn’t have the grasping, territorial feel of a demon. It was aloof, distant. He thought he might’ve been able to force his way through the veil, get a look at it from that side, but he didn’t want to tip his hand. The Kid’s distress seemed real enough, and if there was a demon in him—particularly one with a taste for blood—Trace didn’t want to back it into a corner yet.

“So what do you want me to do, son?”

“I thought maybe you’d know how to … I always heard that Catholics had special prayers, to drive out demons—”

“You think you’ve got a demon?”

“What else could it be?”

“Well, did you talk to anybody else about it? I’d think the Prophet might know a thing or two—”

“My father knew,” the Kid said curtly. “He said I’d brought it on myself for having … bestial thoughts.”

In spite of himself, Trace winced. The Kid was watching him too closely for comfort—trembling downy chin and cold, old eyes. He didn’t think the boy was wily enough to have contrived this scene, but maybe the thing inside him was.

Or he might be genuinely insane. Trace had heard similar accounts of sinister voices, from fellow patients in the asylum. Not the lycanthrope—
that
fellow had been quite jolly and up-front about his affliction.

“All right,” Trace said at last. “I know somebody who might know somethin. But I’ll have to send ’em a telegram when we go into town next week.”

The Kid’s face lit up. “You mean I get to go to the horse-fair with you?”

“I don’t see why not. You been enough of a help here, and I gotta take somebody.”
And I’d rather not let you out of my sight while we’re gone.
“But I was figuring on takin Hanky along too, so you might wanna bury the hatchet with him before we go.”

The Kid’s elation deflated like a pig’s bladder. “What do you expect me to say?”

“Tell him you’re sorry you hit him, for a start. And I expect you to treat Boz with respect from here on out, too. He’s my partner and your elder, besides.”

The sullen look did not alter, but the Kid’s eyes shifted away. Trace had the impression he was listening to something—a whisper that Trace sensed only as an insectile whine.

But: “All right, Preacher,” he said, and put on a meek good-boy face.

CHAPTER THIRTY-FOUR

TO: SABINE FAIRWEATHER, HYDE PARK, ST. LOUIS.

SUSPECTED LYCANTHROPE IN AREA PLEASE ADVISE RE INDENTIFICATION SUBJUGATION OR IF SPIRIT SIGNATURE POINTS TO OTHER KNOWN CULPRITS PORTENTS OMINOUS

J. TRACY

“Will you want that sent today, sir?” the telegraph clerk asked, rousing Trace from his scowl at the page.

He took the pencil out of his teeth and pushed the telegraph form across the counter, his arm stiff with the dual effort of moving forward and holding back. He wished he could
talk
to her. It was hard to know what to say in a telegram, or whether he was asking the right questions, even.

In the nine days between the slaughter of Boz’s horse and their departure for town, the ranch had been quiet. No slaughtered stock, no mysterious tracks, no disturbances in the night.

“Dey not hungry after a big kill,” Remy explained, when somebody asked why he hadn’t caught anything. “He lay quiet for a while til he get hungry again.” The wolf-hunter was making a batch of his cheroots on a little rolling machine, filling the papers with pinches of dried material that looked like no tobacco Trace had ever seen. “Besides, dey smell Remy nearby, dey know eez danger. Wolfs is smarter than you think.” He offered the cheroot to the Kid, who gave him a look of contempt, so Remy shrugged and smoked it himself.

The wolf-hunter made a show of poisoning bait and setting traps, but as far as Trace could tell he was only there to collect three squares a day and get under everyone’s feet. Twice he had left a pile of traps on the steps below the bunk-house door, right where somebody was likely to break an ankle if they came stumbling out in the dark.

“How well do you know that scalawag?” Trace asked Miller, just before they left for Evanston.

“Remy?” The rancher chuckled. “He’s a rare one, ain’t he? He’s a good trapper, though, don’t let him fool you. Just leave him be, he’ll prob’ly be gone by the time you get back.”

The fact that Miller had known Remy for several years made the Kid’s claim of having been followed even less likely, which reinforced Trace’s suspicion that the thing possessing the boy was trying to cover its tracks. Despite his unsavory habits, Remy did not seem inclined to provoke trouble. Other than mealtimes he never went near the Kid—or any of the rest of them, for that matter. The wolf-hunter’s nature was as solitary as the critters he hunted.

Meanwhile the Kid, whether by contrivance or some remission of his condition, had been remarkably sweet-tempered for the past week. He made peace with Hanky—whether there had been actual apologies issued Trace didn’t know, but soon after their talk he had seen Hanky teaching the Kid how to lasso, a glaring gap in the Mormon boy’s knowledge that had cost him considerable skin from the others. Letting himself be taught was a gesture of tremendous condescension on the Kid’s part, though Hanky was too open-hearted and blunt to realize it.