Robert McCammon: Last Train from Perdition

He spoke for both himself and his associate.

His answer was, “Yes.”

Two.

“Ready?” Lawson asked. “Ready,” Ann answered, with a purple-gloved hand’s quick touch to the holstered pistol under her coat. They set off. Positioned some fifty yards from the front porch of the aptly-named Perdition Hotel was the completely misnamed—and misspelled, on its sign—Cristal Palace. Or it might have been wishful thinking, that a saloon and gaming house nailed haphazardly together with raw green boards and roofed with corrugated tin might somehow stand fast during a long hard Montana winter. For the moment it was standing, though half of it seemed to droop in sad acceptance of its ugly frontage. Its windows were glassless, covered with oilskin paper, its front door a curtain of canvas doubled to keep the cold from blasting through. Smoke rose through a chimney that might have been formed of metal cans joined one on top of another in a crooked insult to the builder’s art, and was dashed away by the constant wind with an occasional flying pinwheel of indignant sparks.

As Trevor Lawson and Ann Kingsley crossed what was purportedly a street, Lawson contemplated how a heavy fall of snow could ease the most repellent features of a ramshackle town like Perdition. All yesterday and last night the white snow had come down. Inch after inch of it had first frozen and then shrouded the town’s foundation of black mud. It had settled upon the roofs of the general store, the fledgling bank, the railroad depot and the assay office and made them groan like old men in tortured dreams. It had softened the hard vista of a primitive place situated in a valley between ancient mountains, from which the promise of a goldstrike was both a blessing to some and a curse to others depending on luck and fate.

Such was Perdition in gray twilight on the sixth evening since Lawson and Ann had met with R. Robertson Cavanaugh. They had been at the hotel since night before last. Not inconsiderable attention was paid to them, since their clothes and coats marked them as being on business other than the search for gold; indeed, it appeared that their strike had already been counted. But the people of Perdition were not ones to ask too many questions or nose into anyone else’s business, as long as no claims were jumped and no killings were done in the street. At present the below-zero weather kept the miners in town, kept the Cristal Palace busy and raucous, and also in town—and sooner or later in that same Palace, Lawson guessed—would be the Deuce Mathias gang. He reasoned that wild bucks such as they would have a short resistance to cabin fever, and they would have to find steady release at either the gaming tables, the bar or the backroom bordello.

Lawson and Ann waited for a wagon carrying a load of barrels to creep past, leaving black trails in the snow, and then they continued on their route. Though the light was low Lawson wore his dark-tinted goggles. He was bundled up not from the cold, which had no effect on him, but from the needles-and-pins pain even this weak sun had on his exposed flesh. The sun was going down fast beyond the western mountains; it could not sink fast enough for the vampire gunslinger.

From the number of horses tied up at the hitching posts in front, the Cristal Palace was obviously doing a brisk business. As Lawson and Ann crunched through the snow they could hear the bad notes of a diseased piano being pounded and the shoutings and hollerings of rough men made happily stuporous by equally bad liquor. Last night the two searchers had been in the Palace for a couple of hours. There had been curious glances aplenty and one old miner had tried to dance with Ann, but after awhile they were treated as part of the scenery. They had been looking for any young man who fit the description of Eric Cavanaugh supplied by his father. The mission had not shown results. It was highly likely Eric would be sporting a beard and would no longer resemble as young a man as his father recalled, and likely also he would be in the company of at least one of the three gents who’d brought him here.

“We have to be cautious,” Lawson had told Ann during the train trip from Helena in the late afternoon. Snow flew outside under dark gray clouds as the 4-4-0 steam locomotive pulled its coal tender, single red-painted passenger car and four freight cars through the mountain passes. There were six other passengers: a woman with two small children, a tall austere man who had the rigid bearing of a bible-thumper, and a man and woman travelling together who drank from a whiskey bottle most of the way, talked in slurred voices and gave out harsh laughter when nothing was funny.

“Cautious,” Lawson repeated. He wore his dark goggles and was sitting in a corner where he could pull the curtains on the windows around him. The sunlight was nearly gone, and yet there was still pain. He wished he could wrap himself up in the black shroud he always carried in his bag but getting the attention that would bring was not wise. “If we find Eric here…a dangerous word, if …we’re going to have to figure out some way to approach him without bringing the rest of the gang down on us. The only problem I have with gunplay is that Eric or some bystander might be hit. Not by us, by them .” He noted the man he took to be a preacher staring at him from the other side of the car. The stare lingered for a few seconds and then the man looked away. If he only knew, Lawson thought.

Or maybe he does?

“We can’t ask anyone about Eric,” Lawson went on. “That would risk word getting back to Mathias and the others and we don’t want them spooked. So the only recourse I think we have is to bide our time and visit the local saloons where such men might gather.” He was silent for awhile and she was silent, and at last he asked, “Are you all right?”

“I am,” she said.

But he knew she was not. How could she be? How could anyone be, who had seen what she’d witnessed?

In the Kingsley mansion in Louisiana that night, Lawson had not only heard the buzzing of the flies but had smelled the blood immediately upon entrance through the wide-open front door. It was human blood, aged maybe six days. Lawson figured it had been two or three nights after their episode with Christian Melchoir and LaRouge in the ghostly town of Nocturne. He reasoned she had led them on a raid here, and might have been joined by Ann’s sister Eva if the girl had been turned.

“Wait here,” Lawson had said, his eyes shining in the glow of the oil lamp he held. God help him but the rank aroma of the spill had quickened the flow of the black ichor through his own veins and made him nearly wild with hunger. It was all he could do to keep his head from snapping back and the rattlesnake-like fangs sliding forth to…what? Tear into the throat of Ann Kingsley?

“Draw your gun,” he told her, his voice a harsh rasp. “Loaded with silver?”

“Yes.” She had kept silver bullets in it since leaving Nocturne and during their journey through the swamp back to St. Benedicta. From there, they’d spent two days in search of a town from which the vampires might have gotten boats to reach Melchoir’s bad dream. The nearest was a place called Sawblade, another logging town. Only it was deserted, not even a dog left in the soggy streets. A half-dozen boats had been pulled up on shore and hacked to pieces with axes, showing that some had escaped in the night before Lawson’s dynamite went to work.

She had passed this way. Lawson was certain of it. As he and Ann had stood in the darkness with just the single lamp to light a path, and all the silent empty houses of Sawblade around them and even the crickets and frogs voiceless, Lawson had felt the passage of LaRouge here like a claw creeping across his cheek, scratching very lightly with razored nails at the back of his neck, promising next time … next time …