Ye men of Old Virgina!
And in that hand there glistens- O God! What joy to feel!
A polished blade, full sharp and keen,
Of tempered State Rights steel!
“I want what was taken,” Martha said.
Silas stood in the doorway, hat low, coat still carrying the road—dust worked into the seams, the hem stiff with old mud. He had not been home three hours. The furlough paper sat in his pocket, folded and creased, handled too often.
Three weeks’ leave. No promises after.
Martha did not ask him in.
She stood narrow in the frame, hair pulled tight. Her American print dress was plain but clean, the cuffs darkened where her hands had worried them. Her eyes held him without warmth.
“My brother’s arm,” she said. “They took it.”
Silas looked past her into the house. The interior was close and unlit, the walls swallowing what little light came from outside. A chair sat angled away from the table, like someone had risen quickly and not returned.
“Army surgeons,” she said. “Or the men that follow after. I heard both.”
She stepped aside just enough for him to see.
The table was scrubbed raw with salt and lemon. A basin sat beneath it, catching a slow drip of something that had missed its mark. On the tabletop, under a sheet too short to tuck, lay her brother-one sleeve folded flat against nothing.
Silas took off his hat and turned it once in his hands.
“I just got clear,” he said. “Just for a little while.”
“You’ll go back,” she said.
“I’ve been at the whiskey all night, and I ain’t meaning anything by it’
“They keep parts,” she went on. “For study. For charms.”
A pause.
“I know where it went,” she said.
That made him look at her.
“Baltimore.”
Silas let out a slow breath. His gaze settled again on the covered body-the hollow where the arm should have weight.
“You want it buried proper,” he said.
“I want it back,” she said.
Silence pushed through that anteroom like the chambers of a heart.
Silas slid a thumb under the edge of the furlough paper in his pocket. He thought of how thin a thing it was to stand between him and being taken again-body, time, all of it.
“Why me?” he said.
Martha met his eyes.
“You’ve had dealings with them. And-” she paused. “I know about how you was born. The caul.”
Something in him tightened, deep and involuntary, like a stitch pulled wrong. Every word felt like another verse in an old murder ballad that would not end.
Silas put his hat back on.
“Baltimore,” he said.
“Yes.”
Another pause.
“I’ll bring it.”
“Silas, you ever hear that one,” Martha said, “about the soldier by the Potomac?”
“Heard a good many things,” he said.
“That poem,” she went on.
He glanced at her. “Seen it printed.”
“They find it on them,” she said.
“Who?”
“The dead.” She said it plain. “Folded up small. In a pocket, or laid in close. Enough times folks took notice.”
He shifted his weight in the doorway. “Paper turns up where it will.”
Martha shook her head.
“No,” she said. “This one comes after. That’s the difference. Men started throwing it away when they came across it. Wouldn’t carry it. Said it had a way of getting ahead of you.”
Boone looked past her, into the dark of the house.
“And it still turns up?” he said.
Martha’s eyes held on him.
“Still does,” she said. “Seems to know where it’s going.”
Silas was born backstage at New York’s old Park Theatre. His mother, Eleanor-blossoming from a retirement to which she would never return-was mid-finale when the pains became urgent. He arrived so quickly that she managed to take the curtain call and accept a glass of champagne before they were whisked away in a general’s staff carriage. He grew up in the shadow of the footlights, his father attached to the War Department and living at his club whenever he was in town.
By happy chance, four army surgeons were in the audience that night; they regarded him with the affection of uncles. They took him straight from his mother’s arms to Virginia, where statesmen are made. They taught him the mechanics of the heart and lungs, the silent, pulsing logic of the neck, and later, as judges, they bent their principles whenever his cases came up—and come up they did. He was only released from prison while Atlanta burned. They threw the cells open, put a rifle in each hand, and swore them in then and there, outfitting him and his cellmate with bloodied tunics.
That sat between Silas and Martha. Only one way she could know it. She was a seer, too.
Silas was one of the few Easterners in the Army of Virginia, a man whose presence among the largely illiterate rank and file felt as jarring as his arrival in the midst of the fray. Afterward, the general had simply told him to stay on and use every instinct he possessed to investigate Ezekiel Everett. General Ballard didn’t care for the morality of the thing; he cared about the manifests. When truces were called and the battlefield dead were tallied, for every hundred lost, only fifty were being tagged and boxed for the home trains. The rest were vanishing into the mud, into the river-swallowed whole. And though he couldn’t prove it yet, he knew Everett was to blame.
Everett had arrived in the county with the first freight of wounded, calling himself an embalmer-surgeon, and the infirmary’s counts had been hemorrhaging ever since. He never spoke much of the war, claiming his methods were for the sake of the living. He would cut at the neck and wrists, drain the body of its dark, clotting blood, and pump a clear, viscous liquor into the arteries using a small brass-handled pump. He refused to name the ingredients, only offering that they were “zincated salts and conserving fluids,” designed not to mock the dead.
The result was unmistakable. The bodies became pale and smooth, their lips drawn tight, their eyelids sealed with thin wax. Their skin took on a hard, glossy sheen, as if they had been carved from cold marble. Mothers who had lost sons, and fathers who had buried children, often asked for Everett by name, desperate to see their dead returned to the faces they remembered from before the fever, before the war.
Silas tracked him the only way he knew how-by the places that set his teeth on edge. He’d once heard of a parlor trick some head-shrinking quack cooked up: a man hides a thing in a room, then links arms with you and strolls as if it’s nothing. But his nerves give him away. Get too close, and he tugs-just a twitch, just enough. Follow the pull, and you’ll find what he doesn’t want found. Every mile north was like walking into a bad dream he couldn’t wake from, but the harder his spirit tried to turn back, the surer he was that he was closing in.
Silas came up the Mississippi in stages, on packets that burned more wood than they carried freight, their boilers coughing like consumptives in the night. He slept when he could, never long, the river slapping at the hull like something wanted in. At Vicksburg, a preacher laid hands on him without asking and got a slashed face for his trouble. North of Memphis, the banks grew crowded with machinery-engines sunk into the mud, drawing up a black slurry-the shoreline held in place too long, the same stand of cypress sliding past again and again like a trick of stage scenery. By the time they made Cairo, something in him had gone off its true bearing.
He came off the clipper into Baltimore. The harbor stank. His boots were still wet, squelching on the boards at Fells Point, and something in him had turned sour on the voyage in. It sat low in his gut and wouldn’t settle.
For a second, he thought he was still at sea. He could almost smell it again-that closed-in rot of bodies and bilge. Someone breathing too close in the dark. Then a gull cried overhead and the harbor snapped back into place. He checked the note in his pocket, more out of habit than anything: Meet at the theatre, midnight. The Actor awaits.
People said John Wilkes Booth was mixed up in a plot against Lincoln. People said a lot of things.
Soldiers moved through the streets and around the harbor, and the fort kept its guns ready. Telegraph wires ran everywhere, carrying messages no one trusted. You heard stories-trains stopped, neighbors turning on each other depending on who was listening.
There were other kinds of talk, too. Hospitals taking in more than the wounded. Doctors who worked late with the doors shut. Parlors where people sat in the dark and tried to speak with the dead. Some swore by it. Some made money off it.
A handful of men in red, white, and blue face paint hurried past him, loud and unsteady, like they’d been up all night. You could get anything here if you knew where to ask. Votes, papers, a body.
The Front Street Theatre wasn’t hard to find. Big, columned, trying to look Grecian and almost pulling it off. The ground floor was all horses and carriage space. Behind it, the Jones Falls slid past, slow and dark. Silas saw the fire before he reached the doors.
It was already burning steady. Sheets curled and blackened, lifting into the air as ash. Playbills, handbills-all fed into the flames. A ring of men stood around it drinking. Scattered around the edge were small copper stars, about the size you’d see on a general’s shoulder. He nudged one with his boot. Cheap metal. Worn down.
The Order of the Star. Copperheads, mostly out of Ohio, if the stories were right. The fire popped. For a moment, he had the uneasy feeling he’d seen those same stars somewhere else. He looked up at the theatre. Whoever this Actor was, he was already inside. He kept to the edge.
A card caught in the fire’s lip, charring at one corner but not yet taken. The ink held fast where the others bled away. He stepped in and took it.
“Let it burn!” someone called.
Silas ignored him. He brushed the ash from the surface.
EZEKIEL EVERETT
Perfected in the Arts of CARNOMANCY & BIBLIOMANCY.
Wrongs Considered. Injuries Repaid.
I READ THE SIGNS & INTERPRET THE SIGNS
Let the DEAD Be Answered
I AM A DOOR SET IN THE VEIL.
BEHOLD THE RED WORLD BEHIND THIS ONE.
Silas turned the card once, then slid it into his coat. Behind him, the fire climbed.
A bandstander in a frayed white suit and wide-brimmed Quaker hat paced a gazebo hung with a banner: One Night Only. He accosted onlookers by way of a megaphone, though he hardly needed it. The crowd surged, laughter snagging on unease. Silas let himself be carried with them, boots slipping in the churned mud.
“We have in attendance patriots and traitors, saints and gluttons, creditors and carrion! All the republic’s children. And for our central amusement-ah.” He turned, slow as a weather vane in dead air, and gestured to the curtain. “For our central amusement, a gentleman of uncommon conviction. An artist of consequence. A man who understands that a nation, like any body, must occasionally be opened to discover what truly ails it.”
A hiss passed through the audience. A woman near Silas clutched her shawl tight enough to blanch her knuckles.
“Step right up -closer, closer, don’t be shy. We’re in the thick of it now, the marrow, in the head of the long bone. Tonight’s performance admits no latecomers and forgives no early departures! This ground-this good, honest American soil-dark as spilled blood, a needle in the eye. That’s history under your boots, and history here is a butcher’s ledger. And it will be war to the knife and knife to the hilt.”
“We begin, as all things do, with hunger-the real article: Starving Time. Ate the horses first, then the dogs. And it never stopped. Just changed its dress. Revolution? Of course. Civil war? Oh, yes. Expansion, progress, destiny-fine words, all of them. And you? Yes-you’ve got just enough of it in you to understand the rest of the story.”
He gestured to Silas, who grimaced in return and flashed the bone handle of his Sheffield dagger-eight and a half inches long, encased in a scabbard of red leather.
“Step right up, ladies and gentlemen-mind the mud, it takes a shoe if you let it. Yes, gather close. We imported a great many things, friends-salt, iron, scripture, BLOOD. But that we came by honest.”
Silas made his way inside the theatre. An actor, not Booth but resembling him, was holding court at a table near the back. He watched the first scene from the wings. It lasted only a few minutes. He slipped past a man and woman in greatcoats and auburn wigs, both drunk.
Silas pushed through the stage door, the heavy iron latch clicking shut behind him like a trap. The air here was thin, suffocating, and smelled of cheap perfume, guttering tallow, and dust on long-neglected floorboards. He hadn’t taken three steps into the gloom of the wings before a figure peeled itself out of the velvet drapery—a man wearing an ermine-trimmed cloak over mud-spattered breeches, his face a disaster of white greasepaint and uneven, charcoal-smudged brows, his movements jerky, his eyes rolling back in his head.
Whatever was responsible for so much bad luck, it had not finished with him. He was dreadfully scarred. Every limb seemed at some time to have been broken.
“It is not fair! If I were you, no doubt I should be as oblivious of my good fortune. But I intend to correct that injustice.”
He was familiar to Silas; he even wondered if he were some old poker partner, changed beyond recognition by drink and madness. He could not remember. He couldn’t remember a lot about those gambling days.
“What have we here?” the man hissed, his voice a gravelly, affected baritone. He thrust a hand out, the long, painted nails digging into the air, and caught Silas by the lapel. His grip was surprisingly cold. “An interloper! Come to steal the focus from the lead?”
Silas didn’t flinch, but he shifted his weight, his hand instinctively dropping toward the hidden line of his blade. The air smelled of stale gin and rotting stage lilies.
The actor’s face twisted into an exaggerated, jagged mask of grief, then snapped instantly back into a wide, toothy, and wholly insincere grin.
The man’s fingers twitched, tracing the line of Silas’s collar as if he were measuring him for a shroud.
Behind him, a woman in a tattered Victorian gown flickered in and out of the lamplight, her movements too fast, too fluid, like a creature captured in a series of disjointed frames.
“He’s the new prop,” she chirped.
He shoved Silas backward, the force of it surprising, and swept off toward the stage, his cloak trailing behind him like a spill of blood. “Rehearsal continues!” he shrieked toward the dark rafters, leaving Silas alone in the throat of the theatre, the shadows stretching out to meet him.
Booth sat before a narrow mirror, one lamp burning low beside him. The paint had not yet been fully removed. One side of his face still held the ghost of a king.
“You were in the house. A guest from Virginia, is it?” he said. He held out his hand, the nail in need of trimming, a brown line at the distal edge. His grin was manic; an odd light danced in his eyes.
Silas shut the door behind him.
A small glass vial rested on the table. Booth picked it up, rolled it once between his fingers.
“Sit. I at last have privacy in my dressing room. Not like the old days, when it was always crowded with admirers after a performance. Now I’m all alone.”
Silas leaned instead against the wall, watching.
Booth shrugged slightly and tipped a measure of ether onto a folded cloth. He held it to his face and breathed in, slow, practiced. His shoulders slackened. The line of his mouth flickered.
He lowered the cloth and looked at Silas through the mirror.
“He will be with you directly. In a matter of moments… Ezekiel.”
Then he turned, his movements quiet, and vanished through a curtain at the back of the room. The space behind it seemed to swallow the light.
Silas stood by the chair, his hand resting on the back of it, feeling the cold grain of the wood.
Booth was near the far wall, studying a row of pinned pages as if reading a script. He seemed to have forgotten Silas entirely. Then he spoke-perhaps to someone Silas couldn’t see. His voice was no longer the theatrical, arrogant tenor he’d used in the dressing room; it was flat, hollow, and utterly devoid of performance, behind it the whine of a brass pump.
“I am your starving mother and your slaughtered calf. I die in wretched poverty so that you may enjoy the best the world offers. I am the unseen need, the unheard shriek, the unadmitted wound, the unacknowledged victim.”
He looked down at his own hands, splayed wide in the dim light.
“I have no soul to sell,” he whispered. “It’s already in bondage.”
The silence that followed was heavy, curdled.
Booth’s posture shifted, the tension draining out of him, replaced by a sudden, jagged exhaustion. When he turned back toward Silas, the actor’s mask slid into place-the arrogance, the biting amusement.
He looked at Silas as if nothing had been said.
Silas stared at him, the weight of those words still vibrating in the air.
“Who were you talking to?” Silas asked.
Booth tilted his head, his eyes bright and empty. “Does it matter? In a place like this, one is never truly alone.”
A rustle of cloth came from behind the curtain.
Booth stepped closer to Silas, his voice dropping to a conspiratorial murmur.
“Don’t let the performance bother you, friend. We all have our role to play.”
His voice sounded odd, as if he’d been dosed with chloroform. “Come up,” he said, backing away and out of sight. “Come up and see.”
Two women sat cross-legged on a nearby table, naked, their skin flushed deep red. One of them-Martha Hale. Her eyes were open but unfixed, her mouth parted. A length of intestine coiled in a bowl before her.
“It is gone. Do you have it? It has to be in here somewhere,” the girls said in unison, Everett’s lips moving in time with their words.
A soldier was found hunkered down in the center of the kill floor of the slaughterhouse, his arms elbow-deep in the steaming, stripped cavity of a horse. He was tearing through the meat, frantic. “It must be here somewhere,” the man muttered, his voice a broken rasp. “They said it would be inside.”
Silas felt a howling sense of tremendous loss climb the length of his spine.
The room behind him was larger than it had seemed possible from the outside. There were racks of candles, many melted down, only a few lit. It reeked of incense with an undercurrent of gunpowder. On another set of shelves sat a variety of presidential busts in states of derangement, disfigurement, and horror; a few were littered with scattered teeth under an anguished, gummy grimace. In one or two, that grimace bore a violently truncated tongue, revealing striated muscle beneath.
Mounted on the wall in the far corner was a cow’s head, untouched by even the barest taxidermy. Its eyes, red and rheumy, bulged from their sockets, its mouth hung open. Maggots squirmed in its nostrils.
“I know you,” said Everett. “You’ve always been so close to the other side. Have you felt it?”
Silas was shaking with fear now, his guts yielding. “I have,” he said.
“No, no, you haven’t,” Everett said, smiling. He was missing teeth. “Something is missing for you, isn’t it. We are all missing pieces.”
“The girl who came to me about her brother-”
Everett pushed his lips back from his teeth. “Nobody came to you.”
“Was it Martha?”
“It was no one, Silas. No one at all. Here. Put your hands on it.”
He extended the soldier’s missing arm, untouched by time or rot.
A terrible sound filled the room-a cacophony of buzzing insects, whirring blades, white noise.
Silas looked at the arm.
At the hand, waiting, pointing home.
Silas never made it south.
Everett’s war-damaged souls took him before dawn. They were the leftovers of the fighting: men with marble-smooth skin and missing limbs sewn back on crooked, faces half-preserved in glossy wax. One dragged a wooden leg that left deep grooves in the dirt. Another had a brass pump tube still jutting from his throat, whistling softly with every breath. Their hands were stained deep red.
They dragged Silas back through the theatre’s hidden door and into a low building swallowed by trees and shadow. The severed arm was torn from his coat and laid beside him like an offering. He fought, but there were too many red hands pulling him down.
They laid him across two sawhorses and opened him, slitting him from throat to waist. Ribs cracked apart with wet pops. His head and shoulders hung down, arms dragged flat across the dirt as they emptied him. His own contents-cooked and steaming-slapped onto the floorboards.
They brought stacks of books and manila folders-ledgers of the dead, pages torn from Bibles and surgeons’ notes. They stuffed them inside Silas, packing dense writing tight behind his ribs and crushing the words down into the hollow of his abdomen. Paper rasped against raw meat. Ink bled into blood.
The war-damaged souls worked with terrible care, as if filling a brother they had lost long ago. The caul-born flesh accepted it greedily. They sutured him shut with coarse black thread.
Then they dragged him-arms and legs dangling, knocking over tables and chairs to a wash basin. They heaved him in, red hands shoving his face beneath the running tap.
Silas thrashed. Water lashed over the lip. They pressed him down harder. His body jerked sideways, skin flushing livid, then bleaching corpse-white. His eyes and mouth snapped open in a silent scream as the words inside him began to move, rearranging themselves like living script.
They hauled him out.
Clammy and colorless, he flopped onto the stone. They held his head while he coughed up water and stared across the floor at the glistening heap of his own guts. Inside his packed chest, the papers fluttered and whispered.
The red world pressed close.
In America, the war had never really ended. It had simply learned how to walk again-stuffed full of fresh words and old wounds, marching forward on borrowed limbs.
-- C.Hightower is a Horror and High Fantasy Author. Her celestial outlaws ride roughshod over fraying reality. Eternity loves the lost; she writes for them.
