Silver Threads Read online

  Herne watched Zimmerman, trembling like a rabbit before a rattler, swaying on his feet as if he was about to faint.

  After the sisters had withdrawn, Sheriff Daley turned to the manager and patted him on the back. ‘You and me got the room with a connectin’ door, Bob. Now ain’t that real cozy. Why don’t you an’ me go up now and we can jaw some about life before sleepin’? If you others’ll excuse us ...’

  ‘I wanted to go for a walk, Sheriff,’ stammered Zimmerman. ‘I always like the view from the cemetery wall across the valley at midnight. Really like that... like it a whole lot. Midnight, by that wall. Real pretty…’

  He finally looked at Herne, making the assignation even more clear. If he’d written it large upon a sheet of card and walked around the room with it, the meeting-place and time couldn’t have been more obvious. Jed guessed that it was born from fear and desperation, seeing that the family was going to keep him from seeing the shootist, cribbing him up until after he’d ridden away.

  But none of the men seemed to notice, simply bidding each other their goodnights. Joab and Gawain offering Herne a last cigar from a silver humidor on the sideboard. Which he refused, retiring to his own room and bolting the door. Checking that the note was undisturbed. It was still there.

  Getting on the bed, fully clothed, and lying back in the darkness, waiting for midnight.

  ~*~

  From his room he could see the garden. See the rough stone of the graveyard wall. Staring at it in the white light of the moon, he recalled a song he’d once heard a whore sing in a bar in Memphis. Pretty girl with a knife-scar around her mouth.

  ‘Why build a wall round a graveyard, when nobody wants to get in? Why build a wall round a graveyard, when nobody wants to get out?’

  Funny how that had come back to him at such a moment.

  He’d heard the noise of movement along the corridors, better than an hour after he’d gone to his own room. Men talking in low voices. A scuffling sound, that stopped very quickly.

  At that point Jed had climbed into the bed, simply pulling the blankets over him, keeping on all his clothes, the Colt ready drawn and cocked in his right hand. It seemed like a time for being careful.

  There was the faintest scraping of noise, somewhere behind the wall, like a mouse lurking at the back of a curtain. Half on his side Jed tried to see into the darkness. He had excellent night vision and he had learned from the Chiricahua Apache the trick of looking slightly to one side of something in poor light to get a better sight of it.

  But the room was fully dark.

  Or was there the hint of something halfway along ...? Behind the picture? A trace of a glow where the eyes of the picture should be?

  A glow that vanished as soon as he thought he’d seen it.

  Remembering that hidden spy-hole made him suddenly concerned about hiding the message from Zimmerman. Maybe they’d seen him and found it. Replaced it. Maybe.

  If they had, then the manager was a dead man, and so was he.

  ~*~

  ‘If you got a choice of standing and being killed and moving and being killed, then get moving.’ He couldn’t remember who’d said that to him. It was probably Whitey Coburn, the lean albino who’d shared so many of his adventures. Sounded like Whitey.

  It was good advice and Herne followed it. Slipping from the bed and out down the trellis, into the moon-bathed garden.

  It was empty, the town beneath silent and black. Used to frontier settlements where the drinking and womanizing went from dawn to dusk and round again to dawn, Herne found this orderliness eerie and unnatural. He strode through the damp grass to the wall near the cemetery, in case Zimmerman had somehow managed to elude his guards. For that was what the Sowrens and Daleys were. Jed no longer had much doubt about that. Even though he excluded the two old ladies from that judgment.

  There was nobody there. The garden was still and deserted, just a light wind blowing through the topmost branches of the trees. He looked back at the house, wondering if he was being observed, but not a light shone anywhere.

  ‘Hey,’ he breathed to himself, seeing a dim strip of gold against the midnight mansion. A vertical line of light that seemed to be coming from somewhere near the level of the grass. That meant it must be in one of the cellars. Maybe in one of those heavily-bolted underground chambers.

  Herne stepped like a great panther, the long wet grass of the lawn muffling every sound of his boots. The pistol again drawn and cocked in his right hand. Probing at the darkness before him like a lethal antenna.

  As he came nearer he could see that one of the massive wooden shutters across the window had warped a little in the recent rain, leaving a gap no more than a half inch wide. Finally, he was against it, pressed close to the wall of the house. In a pool of deep shadow. Finger on the trigger, Herne edged in, closing one eye so that he could see through the gap, into the brightly-lit cellar beyond.

  ~*~

  In his life Jed Herne had seen more dreadful things than most men could ever even imagine. Seen death and injury in a hundred places. Inflicted more than his share of it. And in the end it ceased to mean as much. You became less sensitive to it. You grew an extra skin so that you didn’t go mad when you saw what was left of a close friend after Arapaho squaws had been sporting with him for three long, long days. It was the only way to be.

  He thought he’d seen about everything there was for a man to see.

  But he’d never imagined anything like he saw in the cellar of the house of Miss Eliza and Miss Lily Sowren in the town of Wild Rose in Dakota Territory in that mild spring night of eighteen hundred and eighty-five.

  It was like something from a vision of Hell, painted by a madman. And from outside the mansion, there wasn’t a lot he could do. Just watch.

  And listen. The window had been opened to let in a breath of air and he could hear snatches of the conversation through the gap in the shutters.

  Above the noise of the fire and the muffled groans and screams of Robert Zimmerman.

  What was left of him.

  From where he was Herne could see most of the small cellar. See the great oak door with its studded metal bolts. An iron grille in it, making it like a prison. The walls were of rough stone, with various rings set fast in them at differing heights. At the centre of the one wall was a fire-basket, filled with glowing coals. So hot they gave out a shimmering white light. In the brazier Jed could see several rods of odd lengths and shapes. Like branding irons.

  In the middle of the room, more or less beneath the window where he watched, Herne could see an oak table. About six feet in length, with its sturdy legs bolted to the floor. There were odd stains along its length. Dark brown, almost black, that he would have wagered his life were dried blood. Old dried blood.

  And on it were sets of tools. Whips of varying lengths. Some with braided leather thongs. Some with cruel metal tips vicious enough to tear the skin from a man’s back in a dozen lashes. And there were knives. Long, broad-bladed cleavers like a butcher’s, and narrow daggers with points like needles. There were hooked implements and devices for probing and rending and stretching. A handful of silver pins and lengths of new hemp rope, some thick and some thin.

  At each corner of the table he noticed a set of iron manacles, with heavy locks on them.

  But what caught the eye more were the three people in the room.

  One man and two women.

  Eliza Sowren. Lily Sowren.

  And their manager, Robert Zimmerman.

  Herne blinked twice to make sure that he wasn’t locked in some appalling nightmare. But he wasn’t. What was going on in that sweltering cellar was hideously real.

  Zimmerman was naked.

  His body was stretched out against the stone wall in a cross shape. Wrists chained to rings high up, near the ceiling, drawing him up so that his feet hardly touched the floor. His ankles were also spread as wide as possible, secured with more chains. The flickering light of the fire cast shimmering shadows across his skin, thr
owing parts of his body momentarily into darkness.

  There was a collar of metal around the small man’s neck, secured to a great bolt above his head, holding him quite still and helpless.

  Herne stood motionless in the dark pool of shadow by the house wall and watched. The only movement the heaving of his chest and the tightening of his hand around the butt of the Colt, the knuckles bone-white in the night.

  Miss Eliza and Miss Lily moved around the cellar as calmly as if they were holding an afternoon tea for a few of their respectable friends. Eliza wore a silk dress in her favorite purple, and Lily was predictably in pink. The macabre touch was that both of them were wearing gloves to above the elbows. Both in colors that matched their dresses.

  Lily was sweating furiously in the heat, pausing to wipe her forehead. Herne noticed then that both the women were dappled with spots of blood. And that Lily’s pink gloves were sodden with crimson around both hands, clear up to the wrists.

  It didn’t take a lot of imagination to see what was going on. To know the reason for the hideous torture of the wretched Zimmerman.

  Faintly through the shutters, Jed heard the muttered conversation.

  ‘You’d do well to tell us the whole truth, Robert, my dear young boy.’

  That was Eliza.

  ‘All of this will stop as soon as we believe what you are telling us. The pain will go away and you can go and sleep and get better.’

  That was Lily, smiling across at her younger sister.

  ‘Told you. Said where robbery was. When. Nothing else. Swear I didn’t. Not you. He doesn’t know ’bout you. I swear it.’ Herne was puzzled by the garbled tone to the manager’s voice, as if he was having difficulty speaking. He pressed his eye closer to the gap and was able to make out the details of what the two respectable ladies had done to their helpless victim.

  They must have been working on him for more than an hour to have achieved so much.

  There were burn marks around his face, threads of blood worming from his eyes, his nose and his ears. There was more congealing blood around the mouth. By straining, Herne could see Zimmerman’s feet, and understood why he was finding talking so difficult. One or both of the Misses Sowren had carefully knocked out every tooth from his mouth, leaving them on the floor in front of him.

  There were more burns across his hairless chest, patches of bright crimson around each nipple showing where the sharp knives had been employed. There were no nails left on either fingers or toes.

  Weals across his chest and the lower part of his stomach showed clearly where he had been savagely whipped, some of the bloody marks extending to his genitals. His body was splattered with vomit and from the bitter stench, Jed could tell that the wretched manager had fouled himself, either from shock or from pain.

  ‘Better tell us, you naughty boy,’ giggled Lily, stepping in closer, seizing him by the genitals. Twisting and clutching them with agonizing force, making his mouth sag open in a silent scream. Lily was panting with enjoyment of what she was doing, wrenching at his body harder, using her great weight, face close to Zimmerman’s, savoring every exquisite second of his suffering.

  ‘He’ll have another fit of the vapors if you do that for too long, sister,’ called Eliza. Then we won’t find out what the stinking little whoreson told that shootist, Herne.’

  Lily reluctantly relinquished her prize, slapping him hard across the face to restore him to consciousness. She was as strong as any man, and the blows from her gloved fist rocked the little man’s head from side to side, the crack of the blows clearly audible to Herne outside the house.

  Eliza had picked up a metal spike from the fire. It was about fourteen inches long, and she held it with a thick cloth to protect her fingers from the obvious heat. The tip was about an inch wide, but it quickly widened to the breadth of a man’s forearm. She held it up so that Zimmerman could see it, laughing as he whimpered. Guessing through the red mist of pain what she intended to do with it. What part of his body was going to be ravaged and abused by the hot iron.

  ‘Please, don’t... Please!! I can’t tell you anymore!!!’

  ‘Yes you can, my sweet boy,’ said Lily, so quietly that Jed could hardly hear her. ‘You can tell us so much more. But not too quickly.’

  She was flushed with the exertions, swaying on her feet, eyes shutting in a kind of grotesque rapture, while Eliza closed in with the metal spike, ready to impale their victim.

  ‘Tell us, Bobby,’ said Eliza. ‘Just tell us what that murdering son of a bitch upstairs knows. Then it’ll stop for you.’

  ‘I’ve told ... told you what I know.’

  She drew nearer to him and Herne began to level the pistol, intending to shoot both women down in cold blood.

  Not that his blood was cold. It boiled with a relentless anger at the evil women, seeing now that he had been wrong all along. It wasn’t the sons or the nephews that were behind the robberies and the killings. It was simply these two respectable silver-haired old ladies.

  ‘After that I’ll get the hot spoon and take out his eyes, sister, dear,’ said Lily.

  ‘Perhaps we can cook them up for him. I fear he’s going to be with us for some time before he comes to his senses and he will become hungry.’

  ‘Only one eye, sister,’ smiled Lily. ‘We would not want him to avoid seeing what is happening to him. That would be a great cruelty, surely?’

  Eliza moved in closer with the long metal bar in her hand, approaching Zimmerman, who was writhing in his chains.

  ‘Can you open his legs a little wider for me, sister?’ she asked.

  ‘Perhaps if I can reach high enough to kick him. For if we slice off this pathetic little pizzle of his,’ Lily said, grabbing at him again, making his head roll from side to side in pain. ‘Slice that off and feed it to him a piece at a time. Like cutting gristle off a fine steak.’

  Lily reached for one of the gleaming blades from the blood-stained table, laughing with delight at the prospect of what they were going to do.

  Herne’s blazing anger had gone. Replaced by an icy bitterness. Tainted with a sickness to the pit of his stomach at what was happening.

  It was time to end it.

  He brought the Peacemaker up in his right hand, leveling it at Eliza Sowren through the bright segment of light. Ready to kill her.

  When there was a flash of pain across the back of his own skull. The dark pool of shadow where he’d been hiding seemed to rise up his body and swallow him in its black.

  Chapter Ten

  Recovering consciousness was generally more painful than being knocked out The pain was what brought you round. Grinding, tearing pain. Feeling as though the back of the head had been torn apart.

  When Jed came to he was facing a pair of bright oil lamps, both turned up so high that the glass chimneys were becoming fast blackened with soot The flames flickered and danced, throwing strange shadows across the walls and ceiling.

  It is impossible to disguise the fact that you are coming round. At that time there is no way at all that you can control your body. The eyes flicker and there are involuntary movements that you can do nothing about.

  ‘He’s back!’ called a voice that sounded as though it came from the further end of a railroad tunnel. Sounded like Marcus Daley, the saloon-keeper, but with his eyes still squeezed shut against that light, Jed didn’t bother to look round to see.

  It didn’t make a whole lot of difference. It didn’t matter either who had slugged him, creeping silently up through the muffing long grass as he prepared to gun down Eliza and Lily.

  None of that mattered.

  He heard the sound of feet moving in towards him. One man. A light woman, tapping along on elevated heels. And the ponderous tread that must be Lily Sowren. Despite his great reserves of courage, Herne felt a pang of what must have been fear at the thought that he was helpless in the power of those two unspeakably wicked old women.

  There was the crack of a boot in the ribs and he rolled over on his side. Tes
ting the rawhide thongs that bound him. They’d done a good job. His wrists were forced tightly together behind his back, the cords cutting into his skin. He couldn’t feel his fingers, and guessed that the nails would be swollen and black from the pressure of the bindings. His ankles were also tied, though not so efficiently. Moving his leg he could feel that they hadn’t found the razored bayonet in its sheath in his right boot. It seemed to be the only card he held against the royal flush of the Misses Sowren.

  Outside he could hear the sound of the wind, beginning to rise suddenly as if a storm threatened. Herne doubted whether he’d live to see it.

  Rolling over also brought home to him the fact that there was a narrow cord linking his wrists to his throat. If he attempted any sudden movement then he was likely to strangle himself.

  ‘Do take care with yourself, Mr. Herne,’ said Eliza Sowren.

  Jed squinted up at her, seeing her elongated form stretching out far above him, the angle making her look more than ten feet tall.

  ‘Yes, Mr. Herne. We have no wish to harm you any further,’ added Lily, standing at the side of her sister.

  Herne kept his mouth shut There didn’t seem a lot he could say.

  ‘Conversation will, regrettably, have to be brief. You have stumbled upon our secret, and the price for that comes very high.’

  “Extremely high,’ added Lily.

  ‘What have you done with Zimmerman?’ asked Jed, feeling at the thongs holding him, deciding that they had been tied too tightly for him to hope to shift them.

  ‘My sons have taken him back to the mine,’ replied Eliza. ‘He was very foolish, was he not? Now we shall see him no more.’

  ‘What about the body?’ Surely the whole damned town and the workers at the mine couldn’t all be involved in the murders and thefts.

  ‘Smelting furnace gets mighty hot, Mr. Herne,’ laughed Marcus Daley, with a fat man’s throaty chuckle.

  That was it. Nobody would find a few splintered bones amid the ash of the furnace slag.

  ‘He didn’t stay alive for all that long after we found you spying,’ said Lily, grinning like an Oriental statue, rubbing her hands together.