Red Snow

The driver stands at the kerb as winter’s first snow gusts across Lower East Houston Street. Hunched shoulders, wet hats, and lit machines shove, jostle, and spark, here in this city, which has grown in a seeming instant from the Manhattan marsh.

Across the sidewalk slush, beside the dripping brooms and zinc tubs of a rundown druggists and ironmongers, a peeling sign announces Neville Tildsley and Partners, Architects—Ask Anytime for a Free Estimate, although there are no partners, and business clearly isn’t good.

Wait here.

The driver nods and slides his bulk back into the Packard, as, up the dark stairs, the architect is surprised by a late visitor to his office.

The Road to Sweetwater

1

He received the message from his old friend Morgan Callaghan after he’d been thanked by the people of Monasta, Missouri, for the two men he’d recently killed. Their withered bodies, one once-thin and the other once-fat, had been laid on doors in the draughty barn, which also served as the town chapel. Prayers were said, and hymns had been sung.

Then the people lined up.

Good work you did, killin’ them two beasts.

Hope they didn’t die easy. Easy ain’t what they deserved.

We are all most exceedingly grateful.

Fully believe they are sufferin’ right now, and that their sufferin’ will be eternal, and praise the Lord.

Thank you, Mister Haupmann.

Thank God.

You’ve rescued us.

You’ve saved our town.

But their voices trailed off, their gazes slipped away from his tinted spectacles, and their hands didn’t linger long in the grip of his glove.

One of the townspeople, a plump woman named Prudence Van Heyke who’d lost her eldest daughter to the attentions of Timo Thacker and Elmer Buckley, went over to where their bodies were now laid. She looked at them in a way which didn’t suit her kindly features, then attempted to spit on their greyed faces. Plainly, this was an action she wasn’t used to performing, for the spittle ran down her chin.

Afterwards, they all stood outside for a photograph to be taken for the town weekly newspaper. October clouds roiled. A few thin trees bowed. The barn creaked as if straining to take flight. He stood at the back of the group and tipped down his hat. He could already feel the coming winter, almost taste the snow. When the photographer took the brass cap off the camera, he moved his head side to side. That way, all the picture would show of Karl Haupmann was a ghost.

It was then, just as the crowd was dispersing, that the lad from the Western Union office came running up the street with a yellow scrap of telegraph paper clutched in his hand. He took it from him and opened it up.

KARL STOP BELIEVE FROM RECENT REPORTS MIGHT FIND YOU HERE STOP OONAGH DYING STOP COME NOW TO SWEETWATER IF AT ALL STOP ALL BEST REGARDS AS EVER STOP MORGAN CALLAGHAN STOP

There’d been talk of fried chicken and poundcake that evening in the same barn, but these people of Monasta were more than happy to see their killing saviour gone. He collected supplies from the town store and visited the livery stables, where the hunchback old man would have none of his money, and offered a fresh pinto mare, maybe a year or two past her prime, but good and sturdy enough. The horse didn’t take fright at him as he went over to stroke her mane either, the way that many did.

They all stood along Main Street and watched as he rode out. No waves or cheers. Just half-sideways glances and shivering shrugs. One girl ran out toward him clutching a posy of weeds, but her mother called to her with an angry yelp and drew her back tight to her apron. A crow hopped on the Western Union’s tin roof, regarding him with a bright black eye before if flew off to join the sky’s gloom.

He followed the ditched road which led north and west. By the time he looked back, Monasta, Missouri, had vanished in the gather of evening.

He found a hollow that night in the lee of the wind and lit a brushwood fire. Not so much for its light and heat, as for how it pushed away the growing sense of winter, and of things lost.

He saw to the pinto then made coffee over the fire and swallowed some dry biscuit and strips of jerky until his stomach felt full. He ungloved his hands, unhooked his spectacles, and took out the telegram from his top pocket, studied it as if searching for some extra meaning in the flicker of the fire, then folded it back. He sat there for a while so still that the night seemed to soak into him. Then, suddenly switching alert in a way that caused the pinto to whinny, he unflipped his saddlebag and removed a package in black cloth, which revealed two boxes and a calfskin-covered notebook.

The notebook was, or had been, well made. Battered now, but with a supple binding and good stitching, with an inscription on the inside page he paused to read—Somewhere for you to set down all those ideas, Karl. Warmest wishes Oonagh—before flicking on past scrawled and crossed-out lines of execrable poetry, amateurish drawings of landscapes and a woman’s face seen in profile, then others, somewhat better executed, of the innards of anatomy and then effects of a .69-calibre lead ball on various parts of the human frame, the pages more stained here, thumbed and bloodied, then, after a greyed and splattered gap, and in a stronger and almost entirely different hand, came lists of ideas, symptoms, records of modern atrocities and ancient horrors, and clippings from the papers on the latest theories on the transmission of disease, interspersed with other scraps dealing with types of possession and insanity, all ornamented with vigorous annotations and oddly elegant sketches of gargoyle-like faces and scraps of carved stone, the notations ending with neat columns of figures, dates, and dosages set beside symbols to indicate the phases of the moon.

He then opened the smaller of his two boxes and uncapped an inkpot and took out a pen. Pausing for a moment, glancing up at the sky—which was shrouded tonight; a sheer black dome—he let the calculations settle in his head. Then he wetted the brass nib, made tonight’s entries, blotted and closed the page and turned his attention to the larger of his two boxes, which breathed out a sweetly medicinal smell.

His hands moved more quickly now. Objects tinkled. Powder was tapped from a blue glass bottle to be measured on a set of unfolding scales, then transferred to a polished copper bowl, to which was added a thimbleful of mild acid. A flint sparked. A small wick flared, briefly struggling against the pull of the wind until he snuffed it out and poured the dissolved fluid through a funnel into the mouth of a syringe. He undid the studs on his shirt cuff. His left forearm now exposed, his right hand looped a twist of rubber piping above the crook, he tightened it with the grip in his teeth until a worm of artery rose. Then he drove the needle in.

2

The year was 1859.

Foucault had determined the speed of light, slavery would soon be abolished, Richard J Gatling had invented a new kind of rapid-firing gun, and Karl Haupmann was a freshman at Harvard. To be in Boston and studying to be a physician was his own act of rebellion against his father’s insistence that trade was the only way to earn a living, and New York the only sensible, profitable place for a man to live.

It was in a lecture on natural sciences, with Professor Heely droning on about the foolishness of the so-called catastrophe theory, that he found himself uncharacteristically speaking out.

Did exactly the right thing, his friend, said a hearty voice as the students trooped from the theatre. He knew it was Morgan Callaghan before he turned, and was expecting to be made the butt of some joke. Morgan was hardly Karl Haupmann’s crowd, in that he had any kind of crowd at all. Morgan was money. Morgan was old-world Boston privilege. Morgan’s japes and pranks were as celebrated as the Callaghan family name. But that broad, boyishly handsome face beneath its shock of dark-brown hair bore a guileless grin.

"Karl Haupmann, isn’t it? You really put that old duffer Heely in his place. Have you ever examined the evidence of the stones of Pozzuoli? Have you read Lyell’s Principles of Geology? Of course you have. But have you considered where you and I might take lunch?"

Morgan’s friendliness, Morgan’s frankness, Morgan’s expansive generosity, swept him into a world far away from the cold rooms of his New York childhood. Here, people greeted each other with kisses and broad hugs. Here, drink wasn’t stored in a locked medicinal cabinet, midnight was just the start of the evening, and there was excitement in every dawn.

Then there was Oonagh Callaghan, Morgan’s older sister by almost a year, although they could just as well have been twins. Oonagh was as pretty, everyone agreed, as Morgan was handsome. No, she was far prettier. Possibly even cleverer as well.

Oonagh attended lectures. Oonagh wrote papers. Oonagh asked questions, held soirées, and took her many admirers and followers out on long, discursive walks across the Common. Even though, as a woman, she couldn’t sit for exams or attain any of the professions, she railed against these antique restrictions, and was relentlessly involved in Harvard’s intellectual and social life. Oonagh Callaghan was charming and beautiful and brilliant. Much secret poetry was written about her. Many fevered dreams were dreamt.

Karl Haupmann held no hope of being anything other than a dim planet distantly orbiting Oonagh Callaghan’s radiance. Women had been strange and unknowable creatures to him since own his mother’s early death, and Oonagh seemed to belong to an even more exalted species than all the rest.

Dances were occasions he particularly disliked. Big, stupid gatherings where people exchanged inanities, then dragged each other around to the accompaniment of squeals of shoe leather and false delight. But attending at least some of these occasions was compulsory for all Harvard students, and one such gathering took place in the colonial pile of pillars and baroque ceilings known as the Old State House in the spring semester of his second year.

He borrowed a suit, which was far too short in the leg, and shoes, which bit like pincers on his walk across town. Then he stood there for the required number of hours as the ridiculously dressed figures stumbled and turned whilst the music roared. As soon as midnight arrived—a limping, unreluctant, Cinderella—he made his way back out across the dark lawns.

Karl, is that you? What happened? Why are you going so early?

He stopped and turned to look back.

Oonagh Callaghan was standing alone on the wide portico at the top of the Old State House steps, and she was so entirely lovely that he could never properly remember the details of how she looked that night, nor what she wore. It must have been some sort of ballgown, possibly of darkish blue and bare at the shoulders, and also perhaps scooped toward the bosom, then maybe picked out in pearl.

Why didn’t you ask me to dance?

He must have shrugged, perhaps spoken of an essay that needed attending. But she was holding out her bare arms.

You’re so silly, Karl. So charming. Why don’t we just dance out here?

Next thing he knew, they were dancing together across the dew-wet lawn outside the Old State House, which in itself was something impossible, seeing as he could scarcely tell a waltz from a jig. But Oonagh was humming, and his arms were miraculously around her, and she was gorgeous beyond all beauty, with her brown eyes shining in the dimness and her long dark gown falling loose. Were they dancing to the music that was playing inside? Was there any kind of music playing at all? It seemed more like some chorus of distant voices, or the night air singing in his ears. Eventually, they broke apart.

You see, Karl, you can dance, if somebody just leads you. All you have to do is follow the song. Then she turned back toward the Old State House and was swallowed by light and noise.

All sorts of thoughts and premonitions came upon Karl Haupmann in the weeks which followed. Stupid thoughts. Wistful thoughts. The kind of thoughts he supposed that any healthy man might have about a woman he yearned for, although he was often ashamed.

He saw himself and Oonagh Callaghan holding hands. Saw her sitting with him before a fire in some pleasingly substantial house. He awoke from fierce dreams feeling the tickle of her breath. And in the real world of coffee house crowds and evening meetings of the various societies to which they both belonged, their relationship did seem to grow more close. Oonagh sought out his opinion on current matters, and looked at him slyly sometimes when they sat with other people, as if sharing some private joke.

He often wondered if there was some kind of special bond between himself and the Callaghans. They, too, had lost their mother at an early age, although their father had died not long after, whilst his was still alive and thriving in his own cynical way back in New York. It must have been a lonely existence—brought up under the eyes of a series of lawyers, nannies, tutors, and trustee relatives, with no house that they could call their own until they reached majority and gained control of their assets.

Of course, it was expected that Oonagh would marry into another family of Boston Brahmins, with perhaps a rewarding pastime in the natural sciences to keep her occupied in the times between bearing children. And he was Jewish by birth and blood, for all that his father enjoyed renouncing every kind of religion, whilst Oonagh was sincerely Roman Catholic despite her advanced views. Not a match made out of the workings of ordinary life, perhaps, but what price, in this new and ever-changing age, could be put on hope, and love?

The year was 1861.

Abraham Lincoln had been inaugurated as president, Elisha Otis had patented the steam elevator, and South Carolina’s separation from the Union had been followed by several other Southern states. That summer, Karl Haupmann and Morgan Callaghan and all the other graduates cheered and threw up their hats in the Harvard Yard, then headed off to enlist in a true and simple cause which would probably be settled by fall, and almost certainly by Christmas.

3

Much though the sun stung his eyes, he still chose to travel by daylight. The days brought an increasingly bitter wind. The nights, a crusting of ice. He lit fires and forced himself to eat dry bread and jerky in the amounts he calculated a man of his age and weight should need, although the stuff sat like gravel in his gut. Each night he reread the telegram before administering the huge dosage of morphine necessary to keep his contagion at bay.

He rode on in the direction of the west and the north. At some point he must have passed into a land which the maps had called The Great American Desert or Unknown Land or Unorganised Territory—at least, until recently, when Kansas had been declared a state. To him, such words were redolent of the dunes and mirage places of the tales of A Thousand and One Nights, which his mother had shared with him as a child, but this landscape was wild and open and bleak. Morgan had shared his dreams with him too, back in the opulent house that he and Oonagh then rented on Devonshire Street during their years of study in Boston. Deals to pacify the Indians. Lines drawn by Congress across seeming nowhere. Proposals to knit this divided nation into something whole.

On the tenth day of his journey out, the stone-graven clouds flickered and broke in a damburst of sleet. He rode as best he could, but as dark started to settle he caught the aroma of woodsmoke, and a mingled stench of human and animal shit. The pinto whinnied and turned, and would have fought him if he’d tried to head her away. He submitted more for her sake than his own.

He followed the scent until he came to a snakerail fence. He dismounted, lifted the rail, and led the pinto on until he found a muddied path set between winter cabbages. Then he caught lanternlight shining through the storm-glitter from a single-pane window, and the hunched outline of a low house with a sod roof. All so real and simple and domestic.

He was about to turn back toward the prairie when the barrel of a long-nosed musket nosed from a crack in the door.

Goddarn it… This thing… The barrel wavered. What in hell do you want? I know you’re out there.

Just seeking shelter.

Better come close so I can see you. A woman’s face emerged to study him and his pinto standing out in the rain. It was craggy. Neither old nor young. Suppose you may as well come in. Her voice had a coarse burr. Night such as this ain’t fit for Satan himself, and you don’t look to be him…

The house was long and low and dirt-floored, and shared by an ox and hog at the further end. The central fire smoked. Rain leaked through the roof. It would be a struggle to make any kind of living here, but the woman, who announced herself as Mrs Knox, had big strong hands and a broad, if stooped, back. Her husband, though, sat useless in the corner on the only proper chair. His jaw was crusted with stubble and food. His wet lips moved as if he was speaking, but no proper words came out.

There’s no safety on these plains. Mrs Knox ladled fat-scummed liquid from a pot chained over the fire, after he’d seen to the pinto and shaken off his wet outer clothes. Things were better before the railroad. The Injuns didn’t care about a few trappers and settlers. They’re less forgiving now.

Where are you from? he asked, taking the bowl.

Scotland, originally. Came across after we were evicted by the laird. We were young then, scarcely married, and I was with child. Lost our land so the laird could stock it with sheep. Lost the bairn on the voyage over. Aye, an’ lost a lot of other things since. Were told before we staked our claim that the land out here was as good as back in Sutherland.

The steam of the lumpen fluid she’d given him mingled with the room’s other smogs and stinks. He felt his tongue explore a hurting sharpness in his teeth. Is that… He half-raised the wooden spoon. Then he put it down. Is that how you’ve found it to be?

Nearest you get to the Highlands out here are these storms. The winters are freezing and the summers are hotter than all the furnaces in hell. Sometimes I move around here naked as Eve. Not that he cares… Mrs Knox cocked an eyebrow at her husband. Came back from the war the way you see him now. Lost his senses the way other men lost an eye or a leg.

Karl Haupmann nodded. He’d examined many similar cases back when he was serving as a physician. The textbooks called it Soldier’s Heart.

The good Lord made this life as nothing but a test… Mrs Knox watched him set the food aside. But you’ll maybe slip through quicker than he’s expecting into the next if you don’t take on good sustenance.

He knew without reference to his notebook that the moon was thinning to almost nothing somewhere far above this roof. A hole in the sky, or a black mirror held to the earth. Better if he hadn’t come to this house. As it was, he’d need some excuse to go outside into the storm with his saddlebag, although he supposed there had to be a privy of some kind out there.

May as well wash yourself.

Mrs Knox filled him a copper-hooped bucket from a tin kettle. He took off his gloves and tinted spectacles and set them aside. The air clammed his back as he loosened his belt and braces, and hooked his shirt around his waist.

Got that in the war, did you?

Yes… He didn’t like the way she was standing and studying him so close as her fingers explored the shine of scar tissue at the junction of his shoulder and neck.

This as well? She lifted, turned, examined the seared mess in the palm of his left hand.

You could say.

Must be hard…

It can be sometimes. He tried not to shiver. That, I’ll admit.

Aye, and you look and try to act like a cowpoke when it’s plain you’re an educated man. Her fingers still lingered across his back and shoulders as he took the sliver of soap from a chipped plate and sluiced clouded water over his hands. As he did so, he caught a faint scent from it which, like a message from a dream, reminded him powerfully of something lost.

Go easy with that soap. It’s about the only thing we got here that don’t reek of smoke and hog. Which way you heading?

A place called Sweetwater.

Locals around here mostly call it Slaughter on account of what’s supposed to happen there when the place is done. Mister Knox and I went that way this spring to stock up our supplies.

Is it far?

Not by the ways of out here. I’d say, the horse you got, three good day’s ride.

What’s it like?

It’s a town like any else. Or will be when it’s finished. For now, it’s a few bits of building that ain’t yet made up their minds what they are. You should use this to dry yourself. Mrs Knox passed him a square of coarse cloth.

Do you know about the people who own it? he asked as he rubbed himself. A man by the name of Callaghan? His sister?

They live in the big house. People don’t see much of the sister, though it’s said she’s passing pretty. There’s some maintain she ain’t well. Can’t tell you much else.

He felt her lay her hand again across his shoulder. "My, but you’re cold. Callused fingers squeezed. Him over there. My so-called husband. You hear him now…?"

In a thin, high voice, Mister Knox was singing.

Does that sometimes. It’s nothing new that he ever sings of. Nothing that belongs to this soil. Sings about Cailleach Bheur. Sometimes she’s a maiden and sometimes she’s a hag and sometimes he can hear her wandering around and tapping her staff outside these very walls. There are things like that everywhere across this nation—things that are lost but trying to find their way in an alien land. Have you heard of the Baobhan Sith? They prey on unwary travellers, suck a man right clean of his wits. I’m of the opinion that it was one of those creatures my husband encountered on whatever field of battle it was that the man I knew was lost.

I’m sorry, Mrs Knox. Karl Haupmann shook his head and tried to step back from her. But I really don’t hold with such things. Still, it could have been just the rain, but he thought that he could hear a dragging shuffle and the tip-tap of a staff outside. More distant things as well. Voices, or maybe animal cries. But her hands were around him and her breath was quick, and everything else threatened to dissolve.

"My, Mister, you’re young enough, and strong, but you’re so very cold. I’ve scarce felt skin with this much need to put some heat in it since I bundled up my lost bairn on board that ship. It’s as if you’re made of dead marble. Some kind of wounded statue of a man. Still, her fingers were tracing. Or you’re filled with something that’s out there in the dark. But maybes there’s a touch of warmth somewhere inside the both of us that I can help you find? Him over there, we don’t need to bother about. It’ll just be a wee moment between ourselves."

The beasts at the far end of the low black room stirred. Saliva was filling his mouth, the air was sharpening like a knife drawn across a whetstone, the fire was dying, and the cottage seemed to be dwindling to nothing but shadows. Only Mrs Knox was clear to him now. She was pressing against his body, her need raised toward his own. Her heat and flesh shone out like a flame of marshgas. In another moment, his desire would be beyond rational control.

He pushed her away and stumbled back, knocking over things. He hunched shivering against the wall.

Mrs Knox’s eyes were wide in the lantern light. Her hands trembled the shape of a cross. What…?

It’s nothing, he slurred. The sharpness still bitter in his mouth, and burning his throat. Just a condition that I have.

Another few moments as she stood looking down at him, then the strangeness began to settle. He could see her thoughts readjusting. Soon, like any other sane being, she’d set aside whatever she’d really seen as a mere flicker of nightmare, or nothing at all.

In that case, I’ll get you some bedding. She turned away from him. Then she turned back. But I’ll ask you to sleep over there with the beasts, and keep away from me, mister, with whatever it is that ails you, and whatever you really are. And bear in mind that I’m the kind of a woman that sleeps with a loaded gun.

He settled himself in the barricaded space with the animals. Waited for Mrs Knox and her husband’s breathing to slow. Then, he fumbled in his saddlebag and drew out one of his blue bottles and tipped some into his hand and licked and swallowed at the dry, bitter powder inside until the poison’s spreading blackness finally took hold. For a while, it seemed that he was in some high workshop filled with the remnants of old churches, and the strangely beautiful woman who stood before him was shaking her golden hair from a dark hood. Then he was standing on the sidewalk of some city street, where it was near-dark and almost snowing, and strange long, lit machines thrummed by and gave off smoke. Then he was nowhere at all.

4

Still a taste like wet rust in the back of his mouth next morning as Mrs Knox stood watching at her doorway while he fixed the pinto’s saddle. Her old gun was propped at her side.

I’m sorry for any trouble I’ve caused, he said. If you want more than I’ve already paid—

Ach, No—you’ve paid plenty. He saw her shiver. Could still see the throb in the tender well of her throat where the jugular ran sweet and exposed. So you might as well be gone.

He nodded and mounted. Flicked the reins and dug his heels. The sky was clear and open but for a few fast white clouds. The prairie soil was splashy under the pinto’s gait, and spread in far-glinting puddles that the wind chased in flashes. Even wearing his tinted glasses and with his hat dragged down, he felt like he was staring right up at the sun.

He remembered his long pursuit of the men called Timo Thacker and Elmer Buckley, and the reports that had finally led him to Monasta, Missouri, and how the people there had seemed trapped in a terrible dream.

The last leg of his trail reached to some wooded hills east of the town; these men had plainly come to assume themselves invulnerable, and had made no serious attempt to cover their tracks. It was evening when he got close. He tethered the horse he was then riding at the base of the final rise, and set about preparing his Navy Colt. Rodding the barrel and tipping out his normal lead slugs. Oiling the mechanism and loading the six from the wrap of packing he’d kept them in since he’d had them specially made by a silversmith in St. Louis, careful as he did so not to touch the metal. The thought struck him as he clicked back the loading gate and spun the cylinder that he might even say a prayer. But he wasn’t—had never been—that kind of man.

The moon hung bright and full, and seemed as strong to him now as had once the midday sun. Swiftly, he began to climb. The trunks of the birch trees caught like flashes of flame. Then came voices and wafts of smoke. When he emerged into the clearing where the two men sat drinking