George Martin - Fevre Dream

Only Julian couldn’t hear Billy. And even if he could, he might not come, not out into the sun. The thought terrified Sour Billy. Julian would come when it got dark, would come and finish the change. But by dark it would be too late.

He would have to go to Julian, Sour Billy Tipton decided, as he laid there in his blood and pain. He would have to move and go to where Julian was, so Julian could help him.

Sour Billy bit his lip and gathered all his strength and tried to get up.

And he screamed.

The pain that shot through him when he tried to move was a burning knife, a sudden sharp agony that stabbed through his body and drove all thought and hope and fear out of him, until there was nothing but the pain itself. He shrieked and lay still, and his body throbbed. He could feel his heart thumping wildly, and the pain, the pain slowly fading. That was when Sour Billy Tipton realized that he couldn’t feel his legs no more. He tried to wriggle his toes. He couldn’t feel nothing at all down there.

He was dying. It wasn’t fair, Sour Billy thought. He was so close. For thirteen years he had been drinking the blood and getting stronger, changing, and he was so close. He was going to live forever, and now they were taking it away from him, robbing him, they’d always robbed him, he’d never had nothing. It was a cheat. The world had cheated him again, the niggers and the Creoles and the rich dandies, they was always cheating him and laughing at him, and now they were cheating him of life, of his revenge, of everything.

He had to get to Julian. If only he could make that change, it would all be all right. Otherwise he’d die here, and they’d laugh at him, they’d say he was a fool, trash, all the things they had always said, they’d piss on his grave and laugh at him. He had to get to Mister Julian. Then he would be the one laughing, yes he would.

Sour Billy took a deep breath. He could feel his knife, still gripped in his hand. He moved his arm, took the knife between his teeth, trembling. There! That didn’t hurt so much, he thought. His arms was still all right. His fingers spread and fought for purchase on the wet deck, slick with mold and blood. Then he pulled hard as he could, with his hands and his arms, dragged himself forward. His chest burned, and the knife blade came plunging into his back again, so he shuddered and bit down real hard on the steel between his teeth. He collapsed in exhaustion and agony. But when the hurt finally ebbed a bit, Sour Billy opened his eyes and smiled around his knife blade. He had moved! He had pulled himself forward a whole foot, he thought. Another five or six pulls, and he would be at the foot of the grand staircase. Then he could grab hold of the fancy banister posts and use them to haul himself upward. Them voices were coming from up there, he thought. He could get to them. He knew he could. He had to!

Sour Billy Tipton stretched out his arms, dug his long hard nails into the wood, and bit down on his knife.

Aboard the Steamer Fevre Dream, May 1870

The hours passed in silence, a silence laced with fear.

Abner Marsh sat close to Damon Julian, with his back against the black marble bar, nursing his broken arm and sweating. Julian had finally allowed him to get up off his belly, when the throbbing in his arm had gotten to be too much for Marsh, and he began to moan. In this position it didn’t seem to hurt so much, but he knew the agony would come flooding back the instant he tried to move. So Marsh sat very still, and held his arm, and thought.

Marsh had never been much of a chess player, as Jonathon Jeffers had proved a half-dozen times. Sometimes he even forgot how the damned pieces moved from game to game. But even now he knew enough to recognize a stalemate when he saw one.

Joshua York was sitting stiffly in his chair, his eyes dark and unreadable at this distance, his whole body tense. The sunlight was beating down on him, searing the life from him, burning off his strength as it burned off the river mists every morning. He did not move. Because of Marsh. Because Joshua knew that if he attacked, Abner Marsh would be choking on his own blood before York could possibly reach Julian. Maybe Joshua could kill Damon Julian then, and maybe not, but either way it wouldn’t make much difference to Marsh.

Julian was stalemated too. If he killed Marsh, he would lose his protection. Then Joshua would be free to come at him. Clearly Damon Julian feared that. Abner Marsh knew how it was. Defeat will do that to a man, even to such a thing as called itself Damon Julian. Julian had broken Joshua York dozens of times, and bled him to seal the submission. York had triumphed only once. But that was enough. The certainty was gone from Julian. Fear lived inside him like a maggot in a corpse.

Marsh felt weak and helpless. His arm hurt like hell, and there was nothing he could do. When he was not studying York and Julian, his eyes returned to the shotgun. Too far, he told himself. Too far. When he sat up against the bar, it had put the gun even farther away. Seven feet at least. It was impossible. Marsh knew he could never do it, even at the best of times. And with a broken arm… he gnawed his lip and tried to think of something else. If it was Jonathon Jeffers sitting where Marsh sat, maybe he would have been able to figure something out. Something clever and surprising and devious. But Jeffers was dead, and Marsh had only himself to rely on, and the only thing he could think to do was the simple, direct, stupid thing-make a grab for that goddamned shotgun. If he did that, Marsh knew, he would die.

“Does the light bother you, Joshua?” Julian asked once, after they had been seated a long time. “You really must get used to it if you are to become one of them. All the good cattle love the sunlight.” He smiled. Then, quickly as it had come, the smile faded. Joshua York did not reply, and Julian did not speak again.

Watching him, Marsh thought how much Julian himself seemed to have decayed, just as the steamer and Sour Billy had gone to rot. He was different now, somehow, different and even more frightening. After that one, brief question, he had no more taunts. He had no words at all. He did not look at Joshua York or at Marsh or at anything in particular. His eyes stared off into nothingness, cold and black and dead as coals. They still had a lambent quality about them, and in the shadows where Julian was seated they sometimes seemed to burn with their own dim light beneath his pale, heavy brow. But they did not seem human. Nor did Julian. Marsh remembered the night that Julian had come aboard the Fevre Dream. When he had looked into his eyes then, it was as if he saw masks falling away, one after the other in endless succession, until at the bottom, beneath it all, the beast emerged. Now it was different. Now it was almost as if the masks had ceased to exist. Damon Julian had been as evil a man as Marsh had ever met, but part of his evil had been human evil: his malevolence, his lies, his terrible musical laugh, his cruel delight in torment, his love for beauty and its ruin. Now all that seemed to be gone. Now there was only the beast, hunched in the darkness with feral eyes, cornered and fearful, unreasoning. Now Julian did not ridicule Joshua, nor expound on good and evil and strength and weakness, nor fill Marsh with soft, rotten promises. Now he only sat and waited, shrouded in darkness, his ageless face devoid of all expression, his eyes ancient and empty.

Abner Marsh realized then that Joshua had been right. Julian was mad, or worse than mad. Julian was a ghost now, and the thing that lived inside that body was all but mindless.

Yet, Marsh thought bitterly, it would be the winner. Damon Julian might die, as all the other masks had died in turn, through the long centuries. But the beast would go on. Julian dreamed of dark and sleep, but the beast could never die. It was clever, and patient, and strong.