Dan Simmons - The Fifth Heart

“How long have you and the other . . . ah . . . readers been so employed?” asked James.

“Three weeks now, with never so much as a question about the book. Until you come along, that is. I think our guy is runnin’ out of cash though. I’m afraid that by this time next week, I’ll have to find honest work.”

“Is it the author, Mr. Johnston Smith, who is paying you for this . . . advertising effort?” asked James.

“It’s the author all right, but his name ain’t Johnston nor Smith. He’s a young-lookin’ cove, no more’n twenty-one or twenty-two at the oldest with shoes more worn than ours is . . . and his real name is Stephen Crane.”

“Well, it’s an interesting way to promote one’s novel,” said James, wondering if such a stunt might work for him in the more literary crowds of London. But, no . . . the literary crowds in London did not use transit designed for the masses save for railway carriages, and no British man or woman would start a conversation with a stranger in the carriage. It simply was not done.

“You know,” said the man with the book now closed and on his lap, “I’ve read me a book or two in my day, and this MAGGIE thing ain’t even a real book.”

“How do you mean?”

“I mean,” said the man, “that it’s only about forty pages long, and that with wide white margins on each side and a bunch of empty white pages in front ’n’ back.”

“A short story bound as a book,” mused James.

The man shrugged. “All I know is I got one more lousy hour to prop this thing up before the trolleys shut down and I can go home to sleep. My arms are killing me from holdin’ this trash up to my nose all day and night, but this Crane fellow checks up on us almost every day. The lot of us’ve compared notes and, if the book ain’t raised right or your eyes ain’t open, you get canned on the spot. And there ain’t many jobs these days where a man gets paid two dollars a day for just sitting on his ass.”

James shook his head as if in sympathy.

The trolley came to a stop in a dark part of town and the driver and conductor got out to swing it around. The end of the line evidently.

James decided to stretch his legs for a moment.

“You’re not getting out here, are you?” asked the paid book man.

“Just for a second,” said James.

But as soon as he was out in the muggy air, he saw, half a block away, under the only street lamp working on that block, the flash of baldness, the glimpse of a frock coat and old-fashioned high collar, and the white-worm movement of the long strangler’s fingers before the darkness swallowed the man up again.

Forgetting about the trolley, James began walking quickly after the apparition.

Beyond that last, weak street lamp, there was not only deep darkness but a sudden end to the tenements and shacks that had lined each side of the street. It was as if James had followed Professor Moriarty all the way out of Chicago and they were on the dark prairie together.

But then the smell struck James. The smell and the sense of hundreds if not thousands of massive but unseen animal hooves, the stench and the atavistic certainty that one is being stared at in the darkness by countless unseen eyes. The street ended in a T and straight ahead through the staggering stench James could make out a great, dark, occasionally moving mass of living, breathing, staring, and excreting organisms. Cattle.

He’d reached the Chicago stockyards. Not a single street light or building’s lighted window pierced the darkness to either side. Far out in the filled corrals there was a gas lamp or two, but they were too far away to shed any light on his immediate surroundings. James saw the strangely dark glistening of horns far out there.

James chose to turn left and walked boldly into the breathing darkness in that direction.

It took a minute or two for him to realize that there was no sidewalk, no paved street under his shoes. Just gravel and dirt. At least it was not mud of the sort he was sure filled the cattle pens to his right. He could hear the squelching as sleeping cattle moved fitfully or others shoved their way through the mass to a feeding trough.

James also realized that he felt . . . different. The apathy and anger of the day had drained away with his bold searching out of Moriarty in the dangerous Chicago neighborhoods. He’d caught no more glimpse of the bald head and long, white fingers since he’d come to this black collision of crumbling city warehouses and the huge stockyards, but he hadn’t really expected to find—much less confront—the mastermind of crime.

Henry James realized it was as if he was outside himself, above himself, watching himself (here where it was too dark even to read the hands of his watch without striking a match). Before this night, he’d been struggling to be a playwright; now he was both actor and audience, watching himself as he acted . Not “performed”, but acted , as in carrying out a physical and purposeful (and somewhat daring) action. If this is how a character in some lesser writer’s novel feels . . . I like it , thought James.

It was hard for him to believe at this moment that a little more than a month and a half ago, he’d been ready to drown himself in the Seine. For what? Sagging book sales?

James almost laughed aloud as he strode along in the night. As much as he still disliked Sherlock Holmes for a myriad of valid reasons, he now realized that the detective—whether real or fictional—had been Henry James, Jr.’s, savior. This strange night in this strange city, James felt younger, stronger—more alive—than any time he could remember, at least since his childhood. And he deeply suspected that the life and energy he’d felt as a boy was merely his lunar reflection of the sunlight of older brother William’s wild energy and spirit.

Drastic engagement . These were the words that now echoed through James’s mind. Not merely a reinvigorated engagement with the stuff of daily life, but an engagement with the dangers and dramas outside any life he’d ever allowed himself to imagine, much less live. For the first time he understood how his brother Wilkie could have suffered such terrible wounds, seen such horrible things—one of the two men carrying Wilkie along the dunes on a stretcher the day after the night battle at Fort Wagner had his head blown to pieces, the spatterings of brains and white bits of skull falling all over Wilkie as the stretcher fell to the ground—yet Wilkie, only partially recovered, had eventually gone back to the war. As had James’s brother Bob after losing half his regiment in a different battle.

Drastic engagement . James suddenly understood why such moments were life to Sherlock Holmes and why the detective had to resort to injections of cocaine or morphine or heroin to get through the dull, backwater days of the quotidian between dangerous cases.

It might have been Moriarty he’d glimpsed from the trolley a half hour earlier, but probably not. It didn’t matter that much to James at that moment.

And then he saw motion. Dark shapes moving toward him. Vertical forms outside the wooden fences of the corrals. Men.

James’s eyes had adapted well enough to the dark—the backs of the warehouses to his left had no lit windows or outside lamps—that he could see that the forms were of four men and that all of them carried clubs, truncheons.

He stopped.

Lifting his gentleman’s stick into both soft hands, James wished that it was Holmes’s sword-cane.

Should he run? James realized that he had more dread of being dragged down from behind on the run, like one of these cattle at a rodeo, than of facing whoever or whatever was striding toward him so quickly in the darkness.