Wayne Patrick

pwbracken@cox.net

Chapter 55

Maxine Bishop came from the back of the house to the parlor. She was surprised to see a young girl in buckskin and braids and was perplexed as to the reason why a fourteen year old Ioway girl would want to speak with her. She sat down next to Takchawee. "What are you doing here?" she asked.

"My grandmother, Nidawi, sent me here for protection."

"Protection? Protection from what?" Miss Bishop asked.

"Protection from…Dr. Foster."

"Doc Foster? Oh, goodness, why would you need to be protected from him?"

Through sniffling tears, Takchawee told Maxine of the ordeal she'd just endured. 

A shocked Maxine had never seen the compassionate Frank Foster capable of anything but kindness. "Did he, uh, touch you?"

"No," she replied, "but I was afraid."

Maxine patted her hand and said, "You stay with me until we can sort this out." She led Takchawee upstairs to a spare room in the attic and had her settle in.

Maxine recalled what one of her girls had told her about Emerson: that he had mentioned Foster in his drunken ramblings. Something strange is going on here. 

She determined that she'd have to have a talk with Sheriff Stiles, but wanted to speak to Antoine Poulet first. Monsieur Poulet, she had come to believe, had the rare ability to hold someone's confidence and had a sympathetic ear. He was also aware of her drunken anonymous client: a client that spouted off something concerning land leases while in the throes of lovemaking. She decided the time for her clients' anonymity was over. I have to tell someone. I have to tell Poulet. I just can't believe Frank would do something like this, but I don't think the girl would be lying. 

She left the house and walked down the hill to 415 Main Street, but finding Poulet absent, put off her talk with him and went back home.

Chapter 56

Frank Foster took an afternoon ferry from Westport in Kansas City upriver to Big Cloud. He arrived after sunset and wasn't overly concerned with someone recognizing him, but chose to be cautious. He never put much faith in whatever Victoria Tutwiler told him, but kept a low profile as he disembarked. With his collar up and his hat down, he discretely took the back alley to his home office. He unlocked, entered the back door, set his bag down and lit a candle.

Back outside, he lifted the cellar's bulkhead door. It fell open to the side. He walked down the steps into the darkness.

He hoisted the candle above his head and was met with silence. Takchawee's chair was empty, lying on its side encircled by impotent strands of frazzled rope. The candle jiggled in his shaking hand.  That bitch Nidawi. His consuming ire brought visions of revenge, crowding what little rational mental capacity he still possessed. This is her handiwork. It's time she was taken care of - it is past time and time the Lord called her home. I'm a soldier of the Lord, yes, a bona fide soldier of the Lord and I'm going to send her into hell. Won't that be nice? Won't that be real nice?

The candle flame faltered as a wisp of clammy air blew past. A puzzled Foster looked to the far corner of the cellar. In the dim silence, he found a ghostly mist forming. He'd never seen mist in his cellar. His first impression was of river fog; the kind that rolled off the Missouri on early fall mornings. What the hell is this? 

The mist crept forward, hugging the floor. 

He backed up and turned his nose up with repulsion as a stench filled the room. The innocuous-appearing mist came closer and closer, and then began to boil. Its turbid clouds rolled toward him like the swells of an angry ocean. Wave upon wave advanced and covered his legs up to his waist until he was standing three feet deep in a soggy glacial fog. His legs shook with the biting chill.

He found the mysterious sea of mist curious and fascinating. It soon rolled away from him and seemed to settle, but then rose from the ground to the ceiling in a wall of twisting and wrestling clouds. A faint form emerged from its depths. He rubbed his eyes. The distorted image solidified into sharp focus.

Out of the ethereal fog came an apparition of a disfigured man, legs clad in buckskin. Above its waist was a torso that appeared bloody, butchered and vacant. Its back vertebrae from neck to pelvis were cloaked in exposed strands of spinal cord nerve endings, aimlessly writhing like snaky Medusan hair. The tips of the cords glittered with sparking, as if electrified. 

Another smaller visage emerged within the torso. A beating heart appeared, the color of pigeon blood and illuminated from within. The muscled membrane beat with rhythmic precision as it contracted and expanded. The severed spinal nerve endings ceased writhing, lengthened, stretched and wrapped themselves around the muscle like a protective cage. The entity's heart sparkled with thousands of minute lights.

The ghost's arms hung limp at its sides. Above its neck was nothing. The apparition was without a head.

Foster drew back. "Whu - what are you? What do you want?"

The doctor didn't hear the reply with his ears. A hoarse whispering voice dripping with disgust reverberated in his brain with crystalline clarity. "A reminder of your guilt," it said.

"Get out of my goddamn cellar!" the doctor screamed. "You're just a hallucination. No one gives a damn about you, least of all, me."

The ghost raised its arm and pointed a finger at Foster. "Your misery will last until your dying day."

Foster covered his ears trying to evade the grating voice of the reminder of his own mortality. The voice was just as deafening and menacing. "Until your dying day...until your dying day," it echoed.

"I piss on your grave!" an indignant Foster shouted.

The ghost's voice lowered to a gravely demonic sonority. "You already have," it replied.

Foster drew his arm back and threw the candle at the ghost. The candle landed on the earthen floor and sputtered out. Darkness settled in the cellar, save for the glow of the pulsating heart. "Get out!" Foster cried. "This is just illusion and trickery."

"You are wrong, doctor," the ghost whispered in his ear. "This heart is life - life that you took because of your own greed, but you cannot extinguish this light. Lucifer himself cannot snuff it out."

Foster shook his head, as if trying to erase a nightmare from his memory. He backed up in retreat and scooted his foot behind him, searching for the bottom step.

The pulsating heart fragmented and disintegrated. As it fell apart, it scattered blinding beams of light throughout the confined space. Foster covered his eyes, but the intense light still burned.

The heart's light faded and evaporated with the retreating cloud of mist. Foster found himself standing in the alley behind his office, but couldn't remember how that had come about.

*     *     *

The ‘Lady Franklin’ Riverboat

  Missouri River near Kansas City

The ‘Lady Franklin’ made good time between Memphis and St. Louis. Her machinery hummed with precision efficiency as more and more coal was fed to the boiler fires. The muscular paddle wheel pushed the river away as it propelled its way upstream against the vigorous current.

The steamship was one of the fastest on the Mississippi and Missouri Rivers and her captain and pilot wanted to keep it that way. 

Leonora Beaumont gazed out on the Missouri River banks from the window of her upper deck stateroom. Her eyes focused on the bare trees bordering the river. She sat at her dressing table, retrieved her tortoise shell hair brush from her bag and fluffed her red hair. 

Her mind was fixed on Antoine Poulet and how she was going to take his life. Her hate for him had become an all-encompassing obsession.  I'll take the tip of my knife and rest it under his scrotum and move the blade up - watch him scream and bleed. 

Confident that she would somehow find him in Big Cloud, she'd then take care of business. She didn't consider the lawful consequences, as long as Poulet was banished from the earth and resting six feet under. He would love no other forever more.

She stood up from her dressing table and slipped on her heavy cloak that she kept near at all times. Gold Eagles had been sewn into the hem for her expenses. Her loaded Derringer nestled peacefully in the folds of the material. The Bowie knife rested in its sheath on her thigh. She locked and left her top deck Texas stateroom and wandered out on the deck to the railing. 

The breeze nipped at her nose. She pulled her cloak closer around her face and glanced up. The stars in the twilight sky blinked and winked at her. A cheerless smile came to her as she recalled the last time she'd been winked at. It had been at her debut ball in 1834.

She leaned over the rail and gazed down at the dark water. The bow cutting through the water made a soothing splashing sound as it moved against the rough current. The sound was one of progress and hope for most of the passengers, but for Leonora Beaumont, it was the sweet sound of impending revenge.

Due to the rains in the north, the river had swollen and the current ran swiftly downstream. The paddle-wheeler had to move against the current and it took more and more coal to keep the boilers' steam pushing the pistons that turned the paddles. The pilot ordered maximum fire. Just ten miles north of Kansas City, near Stigers Island, the unpredictable current became deeper and faster. The boilers were at full capacity. The pilot, obsessed with keeping a tight time schedule before docking for the night, continued to order full steam as the boat made its journey up the Missouri.

The engineering supervisor in the engine room made his way forward to the boiler section. An order of "full steam" made him nervous. The condition of the riveted iron steam cans was always a concern. As he reached the room, he heard a metal-on-metal grating and groaning coming from one of the three boilers. The pressure and heat had become so great, that it strained at the rivets of the expanding iron housings. The groaning became louder. He immediately reported to the pilot that the boilers were incapable of containing any more pressure. As they expanded beyond capacity, one of them popped a rivet from its seam. The engineer heard a loud hiss just before the seam, now weakened, split open with a powerful blast of hot water. The other boilers exploded. The engineer was killed instantly with the wave of scalding water.

The explosions ripped vertically through all three forward decks, scattering splintered wood and shards of hot metal like confetti high into the sky. The pilot house was blown off with the explosion leaving the boat now without a captain. The passengers in the lower decks of the bow had been killed by the explosion or drowned soon thereafter.

 Passengers unfortunate enough to be in their beds were blown up and out and either died instantly or found themselves in the deep water. A few tried to swim. Most could not. Some jumped off into the unknown and tried to grab a piece of flotsam to hold onto. Pandemonium prevailed. Hopeless screams soon turned scarce and inconsequential with each passing minute.

A fire broke out in the stern area casting bleak shadows and dim flickering light on the surface of the rushing water. Bodies, some alive, but mostly dead, began to be pulled downstream with the current. What was left of the crippled boat began to list to one side as the frigid and muddy river filled her hold. The ship moaned and creaked as it began to break up and disappear below the surface of the roiling black water.

Leonora Beaumont found herself clinging to a loose railing from the top deck as the boat started to turn on its side. "Help me, please! Someone!" 

Her screaming and cries for help were carried away and lost on the chilly wind. Her strength faded. She lost her grip on the slick rail and fell thirty feet into the icy river. She'd never learned to swim and she flailed her arms, desperately trying to grope for anything to hang onto in the darkness. She struggled to shed her cloak, but it was tied tightly around her neck. Her feet kicked violently as she fought against the weight of her gold-filled wrap. The current carried her away. Utterly exhausted, she managed to gasp one last breath before the mighty Missouri pulled her down in a whirlpool to the cold and muddy bottom.

Then there was silence.

Chapter 57

Frank Foster fumbled for his Colt revolver in the side pocket of his leather coat. He smiled to himself at the idea of the cold barrel being warmed with the expulsion of a bullet to an old woman's skull. With the quarter moon and star-filled night sky as his ally, he started up the narrow footpath to Nidawi's remote cabin.

The screech of an owl broke the silence of his walk. He heard rustling in the brush to his side. He froze. A few feet in front of him, to the side of the trail, he spotted two blinking eyes aglow with red in the waning light. Shifting and bobbing up and down, they seemed to be suspended in air; weightless, wavering and hesitant behind the thick fronds of a withered fern. 

A crash came from the thicket and Foster jumped. The red fox disappeared in the brush on the other side of the path. Foster caught his breath. All he heard was his rapidly pounding heartbeat. He took another deep breath.

As he paused, his inner voice whispered.  It is time you called the bitch home. You tried to be understanding. You tried to give her the benefit of the doubt. She has done nothing but undermine your efforts. 

He bowed and prayed: Oh Lord, give me strength to remove her from this earth. You're on my side, aren't you? You know what a miserable excuse for humanity she is. She will feel the flames of hell licking her heels very soon and we won't have to worry about her anymore, will we? She will be where she belongs for all eternity. For all eternity.

While Foster began his walk, Nidawi pulled her chair up to her fire, reached into a jar and pulled out a lifeless spider. She laid it on the warm hearth, opened another jar and took a pinch of a white powder. She sprinkled it on the spider and then held it to the firelight while she whispered a chant. When she was through chanting, she flung the spider's body into the fire. It landed on a flaming oak log. The old woman watched the spider come to life and crawl over the burning log, its legs and body now aglow with a golden hue. It grew larger as it ambled over the embers and then disappeared up the flue. 

As Foster reached the clearing of Nidawi's cabin, he rushed to the door. He lifted his heavy booted heel and kicked it in. The door flew open and crashed against the inside wall. He found Nidawi stirring a pot over the fire. "Where is she?" 

She paid him no attention.

Foster marched over, balled up his fist and struck her face. The assault sent her reeling, but she managed to catch herself on the chair before she fell to the floor.

He pulled out the Colt and leveled it at her. "Now, where is she?"

"Please don't harm her," Nidawi said through her pain.

Nidawi turned and took a quick glance past Foster into the night outside.

He caught her eyes gazing past him. He whipped around and took a long look behind him. He turned back to her. "She's outside, isn't she?"

Nidawi remained mute and stared at him with pleading eyes.

Foster backed up to the open door and kept the revolver trained on her. He strained his eyes in the dim light of the clearing and at first, found nothing, but then caught a glimpse of faint light. It poured from a cleft in the limestone hill behind the cabin. He'd never seen the narrow entrance to her food storage cave.

He crept over to her well and stopped, but heard nothing. He advanced to the opening in the exposed rock and peered through the crack. A blazing torch rested in a fissure in the rock wall. A cool, musty breeze blew past. He wormed his chubby body through the crack and eased himself in. Tangles of naked tree roots dangled from above, their tentacles groping blindly for nourishment. He grasped the torch, pulled it out and held it above. He moved it around the room. The light illuminated stoneware crocks and jars in various sizes resting on the ground and on boulders bordering the entrance. He found nothing else but a passage in the far corner. 

He cocked the revolver and moved to the passage entrance.