Fevre Dream (39 page)

“You should have let me kill him.”

“Perhaps. Though without Billy we would have died on the steamer that day. He has a quick mind, but Julian has twisted him terribly, as he twists all those who listen to him. Without Billy, this way of life Julian has constructed would collapse. It is Billy who rides into the city, and brings back Julian’s sorry prey. It is Billy who sells off the silver from the boat, or parcels of land, or whatever else is needed to keep some money on hand. And, in a sense, it is because of Billy that you and I have met again.”

“I figured you’d get to that sooner or later,” Marsh said. “You been with Julian a long time, without runnin’ off or doin’ nothin’. Only now you’re here, with Julian and Sour Billy hunting for you, and now you write me this goddamned letter. Why now? What’s changed?”

Joshua’s hands were tight on the ends of his armchair. “The truce I spoke of is over,” he said. “Julian is awake again.”

“How?”

“Billy,” said Joshua. “Billy is our link with the world outside. When he goes into New Orleans, he often brings back newspapers and books, for me, along with food and wine and victims. Billy also hears all the stories, all the talk in the city and along the river.”

“So?” said Abner Marsh.

“Of late much of that talk has been about one topic. The papers have been full of it, too. It is a topic dear to your heart, Abner. Steamboats. Two steamboats, in particular.”

Abner Marsh frowned. “The
Natchez
and the
Wild Bob Lee,
”he said. He couldn’t see what Joshua was getting at.

“Precisely,” said York. “From the papers I have read and the things Billy has said, it seems that a race is inevitable.”

“Hell, yes,” said Marsh. “Soon, too. Leathers has been braggin’ all up and down the river, and he’s starting to cut into the
Lee
’s trade bad, from what I hear. Cap’n Cannon ain’t goin’ to stand that long. It ought to be a hell of a race, too.” He tugged at his beard. “Only I don’t see what that’s got to do with Julian and Billy and your damned night folks.”

Joshua York smiled grimly. “Billy talked too much. Julian grew interested. And he remembers, Abner, he remembers that promise he made to you. I stopped him once. But now, damn him, he intends to do it again.”

“Do it again?”

“He will recreate the slaughter I found on the
Fevre Dream,
”said Joshua. “Abner, this business between the
Natchez
and the
Robert E. Lee
has caught the interest of the whole nation. Even in Europe large wagers are being placed, according to the papers. If they race from New Orleans to St. Louis, it will take them three or four days. And three or four nights, Abner. And three or four
nights
.”

And all of a sudden Abner Marsh saw where Joshua was going, and a coldness settled on him such as he had never known. “The
Fevre Dream,
”he said.

“They are floating her again,” said York, “clearing out that waterway we had filled in. Sour Billy is raising money. Later this month he will come to the city and hire a crew, to help make her ready and man her when the time comes. Julian thinks it will all be very amusing. He intends to take her to New Orleans and land her until the day of the race. He will let the
Natchez
and the
Robert E. Lee
depart first, and then he will take the
Fevre Dream
upriver after them. When darkness falls, he will close in on whichever boat is leading, pull alongside her, and . . . well, you know what he intends. Both steamers will be lightly manned, without any passengers, to keep their weight down. Julian will have an easy time of it. And he will compel all of us to take part. I am his pilot.” He laughed bitterly. “Or I was. When I first heard his madness, I fought him, and lost yet again. The next dawn I stole Billy’s horse and fled. I thought that I could frustrate him by running. Without a pilot, he could not bring it off. But by the time I had recovered from my burns, I saw the fallacy in that. Billy will simply hire a pilot.”

Abner Marsh had a heavy churning in the pit of his stomach. Part of him was sick and furious at Julian’s plan to make the
Fevre Dream
some kind of demon steamer. But another part of him was entranced by the boldness of it, by the vision of his
Fevre Dream
showing up both of them, Cannon and Leathers and the whole damn world to boot. “Pilot, hell,” Marsh said. “Them two steamers are the fastest things on the goddamned river, Joshua. If he lets them get off first, he ain’t never goin’ to catch them, nor kill nobody.” But even as he said it, Marsh knew he did not really believe it.

“Julian thinks that makes it all the more amusing,” Joshua York replied. “If they can stay ahead of him, they live. If not . . .” He shook his head. “And he says he has the greatest faith in your steamboat, Abner. He intends to make her famous. Afterward, both boats are to be wrecked, and Julian says we will all escape to the shore and make our way to the east, to Philadelphia or perhaps New York. He is weary of the river, he claims. I believe that is so much empty talk. Julian is weary of life. If he carries through this plan, it will mean the end of my race.”

Abner Marsh got up off the bed and stamped his cane on the floor in fury.
“Goddamn it to hell!”
he roared. “She’ll catch ’em, I know she will, she could have caught the goddamned
Eclipse
if she’d been given the chance, I swear it. She ain’t goin’ to have no goddamned trouble outrunnin’ the likes of the
Natchez
and the
Bad Bob
. Hell, neither one of
them
could ever beat the
Eclipse
. Goddammit, Joshua, he ain’t goin’ to do this with my steamboat, I swear he ain’t!”

Joshua York smiled a thin, dangerous smile, and when Abner Marsh looked into his eyes he saw the determination he had once seen in the Planters’ House, and the cold anger he had once seen when he barged in on York by day. “No,” York said. “He isn’t. That’s why I wrote you, Abner, and prayed that you were still alive. I have thought a long time about this. I am decided. We will kill him. There is no other way.”

“Hell,” said Marsh. “Took you long enough to see that. I could have told you that thirteen goddamned years ago. Well, I’m with you. Only—” He pointed his cane at York’s chest. “—we don’t hurt the steamer, you hear? The only thing wrong with that goddamned plan of Julian’s is the part where everybody gets killed. The rest of it I like just fine.” He smiled. “Cannon and Leathers is goin’ to get such a goddamned surprise they ain’t goin’ to believe it.”

Joshua rose smiling. “Abner, we will do our best, I promise you, to see that the
Fevre Dream
remains intact. Be sure to caution your men.”

Marsh frowned. “What men?”

The smile faded from Joshua’s face. “Your crew,” he said. “I assumed that you came down here on one of your steamboats, with a party of men.”

Marsh suddenly recollected that Joshua had mailed his letter to Fevre River Packets, in St. Louis. “Hell,” he said, “Joshua, I ain’t got no steamers anymore, nor any men neither. I came down by steamboat, all right. Cabin passage.”

“Karl Framm,” Joshua said. “Toby. The others, those men you had with you on the
Eli Reynolds
. . .”

“Dead or gone, all of ’em. I was near dead myself.”

Joshua frowned. “I had thought we would attack in force, by day. This changes things, Abner.”

Abner Marsh clouded up like a thunderhead about to break. “The hell it does,” he said. “It don’t change one goddamned thing, far as I can see. Maybe you figured we was goin’ in there with an army, but
I
sure as hell knew better. I’m a goddamned old man, Joshua, and I’m probably goin’ to die soon, and Damon Julian don’t scare me no more. He’s had my steamboat for too goddamned long and I ain’t happy with what he’s done with her and I’m goin’ to get her back or die trying. You wrote that you made a choice, dammit. Now what is it? Are you comin’ with me or not?”

Joshua York listened quietly to Marsh’s furious outburst, and slowly a reluctant smile crept over his pale white features. “All right,” he said at last. “We’ll do it alone.”

CHAPTER THIRTY-TWO

Julian Plantation, Louisiana,
May 1870

They left New Orleans in the middle of the night, rolling and clattering over dark, rutted roads in a wagon that Joshua York had purchased. Dressed in dark brown, a hooded cloak billowing behind him, Joshua looked as fine as in the old days as he snapped the reins and urged the horses onward. Abner Marsh sat grimly beside him, bouncing and jouncing as they rattled over rocks and holes, holding tight to the double-barreled shotgun across his knees. The pockets of his coat bulged with shells.

Joshua pulled off the main road almost as soon as they were out of the city, and left the secondary road quickly as well, so they moved swiftly down pathways little traveled, and deserted now in the dead of night. The roads became narrow, twisting lanes, through thick stands of yellow pine and heart pine, magnolia and cypress, sour gum and live oak. At times the trees twined together overhead, so it seemed as though they were plunging through a long black tunnel. Marsh found he was nearly blind at times, when the trees pressed close and shut out the moon, but Joshua never let the pace slacken. He had eyes for the dark.

At length the bayou appeared on their left, and the road ran along it for a long time. The moon shone pale and still on the black, quiet water. Fireflies were drifting through the lazy night, and Marsh listened to the deep croaking of bullfrogs and smelled the heavy, rich odors that drifted off the backwaters, where the water lilies grew thickly and the banks were dense with snow-white dogwoods and daddy graybeard beneath the old, towering trees. It might be the last night of his life, Abner Marsh thought. So he breathed it deeply, snorted up all the smells it had to offer, the sweet ones and the sour ones alike.

Joshua York looked straight ahead, and kept them thundering through the dark, oblivious and hard-faced, lost in his own thoughts.

Near dawn—a vague light had just appeared in the east, and some of the stars seemed to be fading—they passed around an ancient Spanish oak, dead now, trailers of gray moss dripping feebly from its withered limbs, and into a wide, overgrown field. Marsh saw a row of shanties off in the distance, black as rotten teeth, and close at hand stood the charred and roofless walls of an old plantation house, its empty windows gaping at them. Joshua York brought them to a halt. “We will leave the wagon here and proceed on foot,” he said. “It is not so far now.” He looked up toward the horizon, where the brightness was spreading and eating up the stars. “At full light, we will strike.”

Abner Marsh grunted assent and climbed down off the wagon, clutching the shotgun tightly. “Goin’ to be a nice day,” he said to Joshua. “Maybe just a trifle gaudy.”

York smiled and pulled his hat down over his eyes. “This way,” he said. “Remember the plan. I will smash the door in and confront Julian. When all his attention is fixed on me, step in and shoot for the face.”

“Hell,” said Marsh. “I ain’t goin’ to forget. I been shootin’ at that face for years, in my dreams.”

Joshua walked quickly, with long strides, and Abner Marsh moved heavily beside him, struggling to match his pace. Marsh had left his cane back in New Orleans. This morning, of all mornings, he felt young again. The air was sweet and cool and full of fragrance, and he was going to get his lady back, his sweet steamer, his
Fevre Dream
.

Past the plantation house. Past the slave shanties. Through another field, where indigo was growing wild in a profusion of pink and purple flowers. Around a tall old willow tree whose trailing tendrils brushed Marsh’s face as gently as a woman’s hand. Then into a denser stand of woods, cypress mostly, and some palmetto, with flowering reeds and dogwood and fleurs-de-lis of every color growing all about. The ground was damp, and grew damper as they walked. Abner Marsh felt the wetness soaking through the soles of his old boots.

Joshua ducked under a thick gray drape of Spanish moss that hung from a low, twisted limb, and Marsh did likewise one step behind him, and there she was.

Abner Marsh gripped the shotgun very tightly. “Hell,” was all he said.

The water had returned to the old back channel, and it stood all about the
Fevre Dream,
but it was not deep enough, and the steamer was not afloat. She rested on a shoal of mud and sand, her head thrust up into the air, listing about ten degrees to larboard, her paddles high and mostly dry. Once she had been white and blue and silver. Now she was mostly gray, the gray of old rotting wood that has seen too much sun and too much dampness and not enough paint. It looked as if Julian and his goddamned vampires had sucked all the life out of it. On her wheelhouse, Marsh could see traces of the whore’s scarlet that Sour Billy had slapped upon her, and the letters OZ real faint, like old memories. But the rest was gone, and the old true name could be seen again, where the newer paint had crumbled and peeled. The whitewash on her railings and colonnades had fared the worst, and that was where she was grayest, and here and there Marsh saw patches of green clinging to her wood, and spreading. He began to tremble as he looked at her. The damp and the heat and the rot, he thought, and there was something in his eye. He rubbed at it angrily. Her chimneys looked crooked because of the way she was listing. Spanish moss festooned one side of her pilot house, and drooped off her verge flagpole. The ropes that held up her larboard stage had snapped long ago, and the stage had come crashing to the forecastle. Her grand staircase, that great curving expanse of polished wood, was slimy with fungus. Here and there Marsh could see wildflowers that had taken root in cracks between the deck boards. “Goddamnit,” he said. “
Goddamnit,
Joshua, how the hell could you let her get like this? How the hell could you . . .” But then his voice cracked and betrayed him, and Abner Marsh found he had no words.

Joshua York put a gentle hand on his shoulder and said, “I’m sorry, Abner. I did try.”

“Oh, I know,” Marsh swore. “It was him that did it to her, that turned her rotten like everything else he touches. Oh, I know who it was, I sure as hell know that. What I don’t know is why the hell you lied to me, Mister York. All that business about the
Natchez
and the
Robert E. Lee
. Hell. She ain’t goin’ to outrun nobody, she ain’t never goin’ to move again.” His face was beet red, he knew, and his voice was starting to get loud. “Goddamnit it all to hell, she’s just goin’ to sit and
rot,
goddamnit it, and
you knew it
!” He stopped suddenly, before he started to shout and woke up all the damned vampires.

“I knew it,” Joshua York admitted, with sorrow in his eyes. The morning sun shone behind him, and made him look pale and weak. “But I needed you, Abner. It was not all lie. Julian did put forth the plan I told you, but Billy told him what bad shape the
Fevre Dream
was in, and he gave it up at once. The rest was all true.”

“How the hell can I believe you?” Marsh said flatly. “After all we been through, you
lied
to me. Goddamn you to hell, Joshua York, you’re my own goddamned partner, and you
lied
to me!”

“Abner, listen to me. Please. Let me explain.” He put a hand up against his brow, and blinked.

“Go on,” said Marsh. “Go on and tell me. I’m listening, damn you.”

“I needed you. I knew there was no way I could conquer Julian alone. The others . . . even those who are with me, they cannot stand before him, before those eyes . . . he can make them do anything. You were my only hope, Abner. You and the men I thought you would bring with you. It has a painful irony. We of the night have preyed upon the people of the day for uncounted thousands of years, and now I must turn to you to save our race. Julian will destroy us. Abner, your dream may have rotted through, but mine can still live! I helped you once. You could not have built her without me. Help me now.”

“You should have just asked me,” Marsh said. “You could have told me the goddamned truth.”

“I did not know if you would come to save my people. I knew you would come for her.”

“I would have come for
you,
damn it. We’re partners, ain’t we? Well, ain’t we?”

Joshua York regarded him with quiet gravity. “Yes,” he said.

Marsh glared up at the gray rotten ruin that had been his proud lady, and saw that a goddamned bird had built a nest in one of her stacks. Other birds were stirring and fluttering from tree to tree, making little birdy sounds that vexed Abner Marsh no end. The morning sunlight fell upon the steamer in bright yellow shafts, slanting through the trees and swimming with dust motes. The last shadows were stealing away from the dawn, into the underbrush. “Why the hell now?” Marsh asked, frowning at York again. “If it wasn’t the
Natchez
and the
Robert E. Lee,
what was it? What makes today different from the last thirteen years, that all of a sudden you’re runnin’ off and writing me letters?”

“Cynthia is with child,” said Joshua. “My child.”

Abner Marsh remembered the things York had told him so long ago. “You killed somebody together?”

“No. For the first time in our history, conception was free of the taint of the red thirst. Cynthia has been using my drink for years. She became . . . sexually receptive . . . even without the blood, the fever. I responded. It was powerful, Abner. As strong as the thirst, but different, cleaner. A thirst for life instead of death. She will die when her time comes, unless your people can help. Julian would never permit that. And there is the child to think of. I do not want it corrupted, enslaved by Damon Julian. I want this birth to be a new beginning for my race. I had to take action.”

A goddamned vampire baby, Abner Marsh thought. He was going to go in and face Damon Julian for a child that might grow up to be just like Julian was. But maybe not. Maybe it’d grow into Joshua instead. “If you want to do somethin’,” Marsh said, “then why the hell ain’t we in there, instead of yapping out here?” He jerked his shotgun in the direction of the huge ruined steamer.

Joshua York smiled. “I am sorry for the lie,” he said. “Abner, there is no one like you. You have my thanks.”

“Never mind about that now,” Marsh said gruffly, embarrassed by Joshua’s gratitude. He walked out from under the shadows of the trees, toward the
Fevre Dream
and the rotted, purple-stained indigo tanks that loomed behind her. When he got down near the water, the mud grabbed at his boots and made obscene sucking sounds as he pulled them free. Marsh checked again to make sure the gun was loaded. Then he found an old weathered plank lying in the shallow, still water, leaned it up against the side of her hull, and hefted himself up onto the main deck of the steamboat. Joshua York, moving quickly and silently, came behind him.

The grand staircase confronted them, leading up to the darkness of the boiler deck, to the curtained staterooms where their enemies slept, to the long echoing dimness of the saloon. Marsh did not move immediately. “I want to see my steamer,” he said at last, and he walked around the stair into the engine room.

Seams had burst on a couple of the boilers. Rust had eaten through the steam pipes. The great engines were brown and flaking in spots. Marsh had to step warily to make sure his foot didn’t crash through a rotten floorboard. He went to a furnace. Inside was old cold ash, and something else, something brown and yellow and blackened here and there. He reached in, and came out with a bone. “Bones in her furnace,” he said. “Her deck rotted through. Goddamned slave manacles still on the floor. Rust. Hell.
Hell.
”He turned. “I seen enough.”

“I told you,” said Joshua York.

“I wanted to see her.” They walked back out into the sunlight of the forecastle. Marsh glanced back over his shoulder at the shadows, the rotten rusted shadows of all that she had been and all that he had dreamed. “Eighteen big boilers,” he said hoarsely. “Whitey loved them engines.”

“Abner, come. We must do what we came to do.”

They ascended the grand staircase, climbing with care. The slime on the steps was foul-smelling and slippery. Marsh leaned too hard on a carved wooden acorn and it came off in his hand. The promenade was gray and deserted and looked unsafe. They entered the main cabin, and Marsh frowned at three hundred feet of decay and despair and beauty gone to rot. The carpet was stained and torn and eaten away by fungus and mold. Green splotches spread across it like cancer eating away at the soul of the steamer. Someone had painted over the skylight, had covered all that fine stained glass with black paint. It was dark. The long marble bar was covered with dust. Stateroom doors hung broken and shattered. One chandelier had fallen. They walked around the pile of broken glass. A third of the mirrors were cracked or missing. The rest had gone blind, their silver flaking away or turning black.

When they walked up to the hurricane deck, Marsh was glad to see the sun. He checked the gun again. The texas loomed above them, its cabin doors closed and waiting. “He still in the captain’s cabin?” Marsh asked. Joshua nodded. They climbed the short flight of steps to the texas deck, and moved toward it.

In the shadows of the texas porch, Sour Billy Tipton was waiting.

But for the eyes, Abner Marsh might never have recognized him. Sour Billy was as ruined as the boat. He had always been skinny. Now he was an animated skeleton, sharp bones thrusting against sickly yellow flesh. His skin had the look of a man’s who has been bedridden for years. His face was a damned skull, a yellowish pockmarked skull. Nearly all his hair had fallen out, and the top of his head was covered with scabs and raw red blotches. He was dressed in black rags, and his fingernails had grown four inches long. Only his eyes were the same: ice-colored and somehow feverish eyes, staring, trying to scare, trying to be little vampire eyes, just like Julian’s. Sour Billy had known they were coming. He must have heard them. When they turned the corner he was there, his knife in his hand, his deadly practiced hand. He said, “Well—”

Abner Marsh snapped up the shotgun and fired both barrels, point-blank, at his chest. Marsh didn’t much care to hear that second, “Well.” Not this time.