Starfires

Clayton Connor strode down the boardwalk along West San Francisco Street. Behind him, the church clock by the Plaza struck six. Even at this hour, the streets were busy -– after all, Santa Fe was the territorial capital. A goods wagon racketed past, the horse’s hoofs thudding in the snow and mud slush. He knew people were eyeing him curiously. Unlike most men, he wore no hat or topcoat, so that the falling snow dusted his shoulders and bald pate. He did not feel cold, however. 

He had not felt the cold for fifteen years. 

-- Is this the end? said the quiet internal voice in the back of his mind.

The Pinkerton detective believes so, Connor thought back.

-- A long chase this has been.

Indeed.

Burro Alley was a narrow dark passage between two adobe buildings. A sign, HANNAH THE DRESSMAKER, hung above a single lantern-lit window. He opened the blue-painted door and stepped through.

Inside lay a wide low-ceilinged room. Connor smelled dust, glue, fabrics, lantern oil, and the piñon logs burning in the kiva-style fireplace in one corner. Headless, armless torsos stood in ranks: dressmaker’s dummies. 

A woman looked up from her sewing at a sturdy table near the fire. “We’re about to close, sir.” Then her eyes widened and she let the garment she was working on drop into her lap. “Saints preserve me,” she whispered. “Clay? Clay -– is that you?”

Connor stood easily, hands at his sides. “Hello, Frederica.”

Frederica went on staring. “I thought you were dead.”

“I know you did.”

“I can’t imagine why I didn’t recognize you. You haven’t changed a bit.”

“A lie, Frederica, to greet your loving husband? You can see I’ve changed.” Though you’d be surprised how much. “And so have you.”

In the ruddy light from the lantern on the table, Connor could not be sure, but he thought Frederica flushed. She placed her sewing on the table and rose. Yes, she had changed. The narrow foxlike face was wider and softer, the reddish hair shot with gray, the once-sleek body thicker at hips and bosom. 

Had she known about his small inheritance in 1869, when they met at that ball in St. Louis? Looking back over their brief, tempestuous marriage, he found he remembered best her talk of money: how comfortable it would make them, how many diamond bracelets she could buy, what a big house in San Francisco they could have. And he, besotted, had ignored the warning signs.

Were those blue eyes, he thought, always as cold as they are now . . . like the dead flat eyes of a doll?

Frederica shrugged. “It’s what you say when you meet someone you haven’t seen in years, Clay. You’re . . . thinner, and better dressed, and I’ve never seen you clean-shaven. Bald, too. When did you –-” 

“There’s no time for lies, Frederica.”

“I never lied to you.”

“Another falsehood. Perhaps I should begin a tally, to see how many you will tell.” Connor shrugged. “Perhaps you never did lie about anything important. At least,” and his smile was thin, “not until the day you left me -- to die alone.”

Frederica did not move. “Is that how you see it?”

“How else? ‘Starfires,’ you said, ‘they’ll make us rich.’ And so I went down into that canyon, the one my guide said belonged to a thing called the Winged Silence. All I brought back was that raging fever.” Connor’s voice shook a little, and he paused before continuing. “And when I came out of the fever at last, my guide, who’d nursed me through it, told me you’d packed and vanished in the night. Left me to die.”

“I was frightened, Clay. Afraid I might catch that fever.”

“Conveniently ignoring that ‘in sickness and in health’ part of our vows.”

“Is that all you came here to say?”

“Not at all, Frederica my old love. I’m here to discuss some truths, and to reveal others. Aren’t you at all curious about what I’ve been doing all this time? I’m rich now, Frederica. Starfires made me rich. And in a peculiar way, it happened because of you.”

* * *

Sometime in 1868, stories had begun to spread from the new territories of Arizona, New Mexico, Colorado. Stories that sent shivers up the back; stories about cursed places, about evil presences that crawled up from the wild canyons at night. Soon men realized the West was full of things older than mankind, beings even the fiercest Indians feared and called the Things That Walk Beneath the Canyons . . . Entities that had emerged from twists in the very fabric of the world.

Brave, or foolhardy, men explored those canyons. Most died. Some, however, clawed their way back out with booty: “starfires,” dark but fiery sapphire-like stones found only in those infested areas. Always found in pairs, the stones were at first prized merely as jewelry. Then someone had discovered that each pair was somehow linked mystically. Words spoken before one half of a pair emerged from the other half, instantaneously, no matter how far apart the stones were.

“Imagine it,” Connor told Frederica. “A man speaks into Stone A in New York City, and in the same moment Stone B, its twin, repeats the message aloud in an office in San Francisco, three thousand miles away.”

“Magic.” Frederica’s hands gripped each other.

“Yes. A gold mine.” Connor settled into a stuffed chair. “Because, unlike Mr. Morse’s telegraph, my starfires require no wires, no maintenance, no trained key operators; very little staff at all. I’m busy establishing offices in cities all over America and Europe. Instead of sending a letter by ship, a businessman in Chicago will send instructions in an instant to his office in Paris. People will always want faster communication. Starfires, Inc., will provide that . . . at a tidy profit for yours truly. You were right.”

Frederica smiled. “Then you came here to thank me.”

“No,” said Connor.

She stared at him. Abruptly she swung around and went to a cabinet along the rear wall. “Where are my manners? Would you like a drink?”

“No. It doesn’t agree with me.”

“Then you have changed. Suit yourself.” She opened a door, took out a glass and a dark bottle, uncorked the latter and poured herself a generous portion, then came back to her sewing table. She sat with a rustle of her skirts, downed half the wine, put the glass down, and regarded him. 

“So why come to see me? Don’t tell me you’re still in love with me after all these years.”

Clayton Connor threw his head back and laughed, a full-throated roar of delight. “Vanity, thy name is Woman!” he said at last. “No matter what age a woman attains, she never imagines a man may have more important goals than her white body or her red lips.”

Frederica’s mouth tightened. It gave Connor a small satisfaction to see that. “Don’t kid yourself, Clay my love. I know what you like. I could make you howl at the moon if I wanted.”

“Not any more.”

“Maybe, maybe not. So why are you here?” 

Connor leaned forward in his chair. He said quietly:

“How do you feel these days, Frederica?”

“If that’s another remark about my age --”

“No,” Connor said. “You sleep only four hours a night, but you’re not tired. You’re never cold, not even in the winter. Your hair and nails grow faster than when you were young; you have to trim them every day. Your vision is sharper than that of other people -– you see easily to sew in this dim room, with only a single lantern for light. Yes?”

Frederica’s jaw dropped. “How –- how can you know those things?”

Connor smiled. “Because, Frederica my love, I came back from that canyon with more than a fever; and when you left me, so did you.”

* * *

Frederica’s face looked pale. “You talk the way you did when you were sick.”

Connor nodded. “It’ll be simpler to show you.”

“Show me what, you old fool?”

“You’ll see.”

Connor shut his eyes and let his mind drift. It had been some years since he had needed to do this, but it came naturally now. Come forth, he thought at that dark sphere near his heart.

A moment’s hot pain, like heartburn from dining on fiery New Mexican chiles, shot through his whole body; and Connor felt it happen. He opened his eyes.

A lightning bolt hung in the air between himself and Frederica. Bluish-yellow, it was motionless, as if frozen in time by one of Mr. Mathew Brady’s photographs –- yet wider than any lightning bolt, like a line of paint smeared by a child’s thumb.

Frederica was gaping at it. Connor said calmly:

“This is Tam --” He clicked his tongue as if to a horse

“-- cha, whom the Navajo call the Winged Silence. My business partner for the last fifteen years.”

* * *

Her wineglass dropped from Frederica’s nerveless hand. A spot of red wine, like blood, splashed on her slipper.

“I can’t pronounce their name for themselves,” Connor said. “Some would call them demons. I suppose that’s as good a word as any. Though, I hasten to say, they’re not the ‘fallen angels’ of the Bible. They’re older than humankind, maybe older than the Earth. The Navajo have been aware of them for --”

“A trick.” She sounded hoarse. “It’s some kind of trick.”

-- No. 

Tam(click)cha’s voice sounded like frying bacon. It was toneless, with no humanity in it.  

-- Your mate came into our domain, looking for what you call starfires. We had destroyed others, but we were . . . intrigued by him. Our entry into his body caused his cells to revolt, which would have destroyed him. We would learn nothing if he died. We thus moved into the Second Plane.

“Which meant I recovered,” Connor said. “Its presence –- or their presence; I’m still not sure what they mean when they use the English plural –- their presence first made me sick, yes, but then they cured me. And when we could communicate, we struck a bargain. Tam(click)cha would lead me to the starfires, which mean nothing to them. In return, I would use the riches and influence the starfires brought, to help them.”

Frederica’s gaze was still fixed on Tam(click)cha. “No!” she cried. “No, no, no!” She snatched her shears from the table and hurled them at the motionless spear of light. The shears slid through the image, hit the far wall, and clattered to the wooden floor below one of the dressmaker’s dummies.

-- We are not in your plane. But do not repeat that.

Frederica shuddered. She wrapped her arms around her body as if cold. “Help them?” she whispered. “To -– what? Take over this world?”

“They have no real interest in what they call our plane.” As Connor spoke, he realized something was not right. The burning sensation in his body was not fading. “We’d have no interest in taking over and running an anthill, would we?”

-- We consist of two parts, Tam(click)cha said. -- The Greater and the Lesser. It is not like your mating. The Lesser is our immortal part. We may not speak more of this. But sometimes the Lesser does foolish things.

“Frederica,” Connor said. “Remember when the guide brought me back to our cabin, and you helped him get me into bed? Do you remember a sudden flash of heat and dizziness that went through you?”

“No!”

“Yes, you do.” Connor grinned at her. “That was when the Lesser moved into your body the same way the Greater moved into mine. For the last fifteen years you’ve been carrying it with you!”

* * *

Frederica sat still. A night wind moaned down the alley, and a shutter creaked.

“It gave you the night vision,” Connor said, “and the immunity to cold, and the rest. Unlike with me, it never announced itself to you. It lived in the dark places of your body, and it helped you; but you never knew it was there.

“For reasons Tam(click)cha has never explained, it couldn’t leave, or chose not to. Which is why I’m here. Because Tam(click)cha needed the Lesser back. They couldn’t sense where the Lesser was, not while it was within a human –-”

“No!” Frederica’s eyes were wild. “No! It’s some kind of trick, I tell you. It’s a trick!”

“-- within a human,” Connor went on as if she had not spoken. “To find the Lesser, we had to find you.”

He rubbed at his chest and stomach. The burning sensation was forming into knots, little hot balls around his heart and stomach. He ignored them.

“For years, every time I got some money ahead from selling the starfires as jewels, I spent it on detectives. It’s a big country, and you kept moving. First Denver, then Kansas City, then San Francisco. Each time they came up empty I had to start over. Then Tam(click)cha showed me what the starfires could do. My company was first to demonstrate the technique, and the money at last rolled in, and I could tell the Pinkertons to find you no matter what it took.”

Frederica’s lips drew back from her teeth, and he thought how sharp those teeth looked. “You’re lying! You’re spinning me this story to scare me!”

-- No, Tam(click)cha said again. –- For behold.

Connor watched, fascinated. A bolt of sparkling light, yellower and wider than Tam(click)cha, slid from Frederica’s startled eyes and mouth. She gasped, once. Then the new wide bolt joined with the narrower one of Tam(click)cha. They merged, Connor thought, as two different paints from an artist’s palette merge to form a new color that is like neither one. A crescent of light now hung in the air, a rich green.

-- I am complete again.

Part of Connor’s mind noted the change in pronoun.

“That was inside me all this time?” Frederica said in a shaky voice. “A parasite, living off me?”

“Living inside you,” Connor corrected. “Not off you. In fact it was beneficial. It couldn’t stop the aging process, but look at all the other benefits -- Argh!”

A sheet of agony shot through his chest and down into his legs. A groan escaped his locked teeth. Across the table, he saw Frederica’s eyes widen. She gave a horrified little scream. Then she began to tear at her bodice as though it were on fire. “It hurts -– it hurts –-”

“Tam(click)cha!” Connor gasped. It felt as if the small pain spots were burning coals setting his chest and belly ablaze. He had never felt like this -– not with Tam(click)cha within him, or during those rare times when the demon had moved outside his body. “What’s wrong with us?”

-- Did you think that prolonged and intimate contact with me would have no consequences? There was no amusement in the demon’s sizzling voice, no human emotion at all. –- Without my presence, your cells are multiplying, running wild. What your kind will someday call tumors. Death will supervene soon.

“Damn you, Clay!” Frederica’s voice was a shriek. She rose to wobbling feet and leaned on her table, panting. “You did this to me! It’s your fault, all of it! I wasn’t about to nurse a husband about to die of a fever, or to catch it myself. You’d have done the same! Don’t try and tell me you wouldn’t!”

“No.” Speaking was a massive effort for Connor now. “I would never have . . . abandoned you.”

-- No matter. Female, if you had stayed with him, the Lesser would have returned to me, and I would have left your mate. Your bodies would have recovered. You ran away, however, which constrained the Lesser to stay in you, and constrained the I-that-was-we to remain inside your mate. You have engineered your own fate.

Frederica hissed like a cat. She dropped back into her chair, wrapped her arms around her body, and uttered little panting screams.

“Tam(click)cha.” Connor was sweating. It seemed the hardest thing he had ever done, to get out words. “I know you have . . . little interest in human affairs. But I have been your business partner, and your home, for fifteen years. Surely . . . that is worth some consideration? Help us!”

-- You have been comfortable, and have gained power over your kind. Is that not payment enough? A hesitation. -- But never let it be said that the line of (click)cha does not care for its pets. There is a plane where I can take you both. Your suffering will end. But I cannot ensure that you will continue to . . . exist . . . in the way you count it now.

Frederica stopped panting. “No!”

“Oh, yes,” Connor said. All at once, he felt peaceful. The pain was still there; it was blinding. Behind it, though, he felt a strange satisfaction. “Yes.”

He thrust himself up and tottered across to Frederica. As he came up to the table his legs gave, and he dropped to his knees before her. He seized her hand. “My love,” he said.

Frederica bared her teeth. With fingers hooked into claws she slashed at his face so that blood welled. “Bastard!” she snarled.

Connor grinned back. “I love you too, bitch.” He raised his voice. “Tam(click)cha! Now!”

The twin tails of the conjoined lightning bolt flicked down and surrounded them . . .

. . . and the room was empty.

On the sewing table, the lantern wobbled and crashed to the wooden floor. Flames licked at the dry wood and leaped up and up, until the room, the dummies and fabrics and tools, vanished in an inferno that took all night to extinguish.