Robert McCammon: Last Train from Perdition

Her reaction is summed in three words: “You are insane.”

“All right,” he answers. “ Row .”

When they reach Nocturne, they hear merry music coming from one of the half-submerged and moss-laden mansions. Many boats are roped there. A party is in progress.

Lawson and Ann are invited up the rotten staircase into a ballroom where vampire musicians play and creatures of the Dark Society dance and whirl across the boards, their shadows thrown large by the candlelight upon the moldy green walls. At the center of this festivity is a chair with a woman wearing dirty clothes roped into it, a black hood over her head, the head slumped forward and the body slack.

Christian Melchoir introduces himself, and by this time Ann Kingsley realizes that what she has stepped in is not a custard pie.

As Ann goes to release her sister, the figure in the chair throws aside the loosely-tied ropes and stands up, and taking the hood off LaRouge reveals herself and asks Lawson, “I think you’ve been looking for me?”

Surrounded by the vampires eager to tear him apart, Lawson reveals his own secret…he has brought dynamite in a harness under his waistcoat. He lights the fuse and tells Ann to get out however she can. Then Lawson takes hold of LaRouge to test the myth, even as he knows he has less than a minute to live…but at least by draining her ichor, she will be totally and certainly dead.

Melchoir attacks, shapechanging to a winged figure, grasping hold of Lawson and tearing him away from LaRouge. He thrusts them both out a window into the night, as Ann fights for her life using silver bullets that Lawson has given her. Melchoir and Lawson crash into the steeple of a ruined church, and there Lawson is able to draw his derringer and put a silver bullet into the head of Nocturne’s creator.

Lawson hangs onto the church steeple, his ribs broken and spine nearly snapped. In a weakened condition, he hears LaRouge calling for Christian Melchoir but ashes cannot answer.

Quiet falls. As dawn begins to break, Ann appears with a skiff below the church and Lawson pushes himself off the roof into the boat. Ann had fought her way out of the mansion, gotten down in the mud of the swamp and stayed there all night. She tells him that she watched some of the vampires row away in their boats, but some remain in the rotting mansions.

Lawson knows that many will be here, but LaRouge—whom he has heard called the queen of the Dark Society—will have already gone.

His quest must continue, but first he has some dynamite that could be very useful to blow this accursed town to pieces and with them the hideous sleepers in the shadows. He must be quick, because already the weak sun is making him burn.

Though shaken, Ann is still resolute to find her sister though Lawson has told her that Eva is likely already turned. Ann tells him she wants to join him in his fight, that she would be useful to someone who travels only by night, because she could walk freely in the daytime world and be his eyes by sunlight.

“Will you let me help you?” Ann asks, as Lawson prepares to blow Nocturne and its sleepers to Kingdom Come.

It is a heavy burden, to allow a human to help him. He knows the risks…but he realizes that to find LaRouge and end his torment, either by death or by returning to the human condition, cannot be done alone, and thus his answer is…

One.

“Yes,” he had said nearly six months ago in the ghost of a Louisiana swamp town, after a night of almost unspeakable horror. He’d been answering a question posed to him by the woman who now stood at his side, and that question had been: Will you let me help you?

Trevor Lawson wondered if Ann ever thought of that affirmative reply as a curse, or as a sentence to be cast into the world of the Dark Society. There could be no return from that world without victory, and victory might be impossible but it was sure that flesh would be torn and blood would be consumed through hungry fangs.

He hoped, as he listened to the shrill voice of the wind that seemed to make this building shudder, it would not be his fangs that did such work on her throat. Or any other fangs, if he could help it.

If.

A dangerous word.

They had entered through the building’s back door. They ascended side-by-side up a stairway to a door inset with frosted glass as gas lamps hissed upon the walls. Small diamonds of ice glittered on their hats and coats. A freezing rain had settled in just after nightfall. The weather prognosticator in the day’s edition of the Omaha Bee had by chicken bones, Indian dreamsmoke or telegraph reports predicted the eastward movement of a tremendous storm swirling itself down from Canada, sure to be as the reporter wrote, a “veritable behemoth of a snow-thrower”, indicating that he was paid by the word. It was early December of 1886. Any simpleton could see from the swollen bellies of the dark clouds hiding the sun all afternoon that the front edge of winter was going to be very sharp this year.

Trevor Lawson and Ann Kingsley had together come to many doors since that hot July night in Louisiana. Any door might open into the maw of the Dark Society, and Lawson knew they waited for him. They tracked him. They watched him from their holes, their basements, their ruins. They felt him in the currents of the night just as he felt them when they got close enough. He knew they must be so much better at this sense than he, but it was a condition growing stronger in him. Part of the “gift” they’d given him, one of many such. He could laugh himself to tears over that but now on those rare times when the heartsick pain lanced him deeply enough and he had the fluid to spare his tears ran red down a gaunt face that was becoming the color of the finest white paper sold to any scribe in New Orleans, his choice of home. Or rather to say, losing all color except that of the moon. He was writing his own story, month by week by day by hour. His story was one of great loss, of hardship, of time spent as a family man and young lawyer in Alabama, then on to the battlefield of the War Of Secession. He’d felt it was his honorable duty to serve, and instead he had been served.

Served up, to her .

The one in red. The creature who had turned him.

She watched him now, through many eyes. He was sure of it. Sure also that there were humans in service to their cause—their war against the daytime world—for whatever such befouled humans could gain from that dubious enrichment. Perhaps she watched him through human eyes, so he couldn’t breathe her essence of perfumed evil and know how close she stood. If only he could see her, could find her…if only…

If .

A dangerous word.

Upon the frosted glass of the door was painted in bold black letters R. Robertson Cavanaugh , Mining And Investments . There glimmered light beyond: what appeared to be a double-wicked candelabra whose two small yellow flames wavered back and forth like luminous cat’s-eyes. “The correct place and the correct time,” Lawson said to Ann, as he noted the hour of eight on his silver pocketwatch. He returned it to the pocket of his ebony waistcoat, sewn from Italian silk. Under his long black leather coat with a fleece collar he wore an expensive gray suit. On his head was a black felt Stetson with a cattleman’s crease and a thin band made from rattlesnake skin. If he was turning inexorably into more of a horror than he already was, he figured he should dress well doing it. As an adventurer and sometime gun-for-hire he could thankfully afford such indulgences. And around his narrow waist—if not his raison d’etre then certainly his reasonable companion—was the black holster that held two backward-facing Colt .44s. The Colt on the right had a rosewood grip and the Colt on the left had a grip formed of yellowed bone. Each pistol held six slugs. The gun on the right side held regular lead bullets, while the one on the left did not. Lawson had been instructed to enter the office directly at eight. He reached for a brass doorknob polished by many wealthy hands. As he did he saw Ann wince just a fraction and he knew exactly what demon had surfaced from her mind.