Chapter Two
Provender Creed picked at the scraggly whiskers that had grown in since dawn. He was tired; every one of his thirty-six years weighed heavily on his narrow shoulders. He hadn’t slept in three days. Sleep, as he was fond of saying, was for honest men.
He hawked and spat a wad of tobacco juice over the balcony railing.
The moon sat fat and low in the bruise-purple sky, turning the rooftops of Rookwood silver with its lambent glow. The noise McGraw called music floated out to him from the saloon at his back and filled in the lulls in the hubbub. The melody was warped and pock-marked. It wasn’t that the notes were wrong, but rather that some were missing. No surprise, really. McGraw only had eight fingers, but he claimed he felt them all. The ghost fingers made no sound, though if you watched the man's hands on the keys you'd swear you could see all ten digits smack ivory.
Creed leaned on the rail and watched Mae and Colleen saunter down Main Street, arm in arm. The two moved together with a subtle, rhythmic gait that gave the impression they might be joined at the hip. The pair of them were easy on the eye, and even easier on the purse at a dollar a poke. As they approached, he smelled their cheap perfume. The sickeningly sweet reek stuck in his craw, but it was better than the alternative, horse manure, men, and sweat. Mae and Colleen worked for Silas Boone, and he kept a cheap house, preferring lots of custom over bored girls and empty rooms. 'Keep the boys
The hint of a coming chill was in the air. Creed felt it creep up the back of his neck. The air stirred, and a shadow dropped beside his on the ground, but Creed didn't turn. He heard something, a voice calling from what seemed a long distance, and shook his head to clear the cobwebs. He turned his attention from the whores to the man who now stood beside him.
'What?' he said.
'I said it’s a bad business, Creed,' Silas Boone said again.
'What is?'
'Have you been listening to a word I’ve said?'
Provender Creed shook his head. 'Can’t say as I have,' he said. A movement in the bruised sky caught his eye. It was too far away to focus on at first, but as the murder of crows spread out across the shadowy clouds, he found himself trying to count them like that silly nursery rhyme. After sorrow and joy, girls, boys, gold and secrets the trader was lost and there were still hundreds of birds taking wing to fill the sky. They wheeled and screamed, and followed a long, sweeping arc toward town.
'What the hell?' Creed muttered, as the first bird settled on the shingle of Ed Harmon’s shack. The bird pecked away at the roof for a full minute before it turned to preening its feathers. In that minute more birds settled. One roosted on Rufus Cruller's hotel, another on Felix Ruckley’s supply store, one on the roof of the Sheriff’s Office, one on the print shop and another on the foreman’s hut along toward the road to the mine.
While Creed watched black feathered birds settled on each of the tar-paper roofs of the shanties down by Slaughter Alley. What he marked as peculiar about their behavior was that not once did two birds settle on the same roof. Within minutes the carrion eaters rested on the rooftops of every building in Rookwood, one bird to each.
The last of the murder came to rest on the balcony rail less than a yard from where Creed stood. It regarded him with jaundiced eyes.
'Can’t say as I like the look of this,' Silas mumbled, shifting from foot to foot uncomfortably. The fool still had breadcrumbs in his beard.
'Perhaps they’ve come for us,' Creed said. 'They do say that the crows reap the souls of the living and carry them back to the land of the dead. Maybe that’s what this is. Maybe the birds have come to carry us all away,' he reached out quickly and caught the crow's soft body in his hands. With a quick, deadly twist he wrung its neck.
He looked up at Silas, tossed the crow aside, and laughed.
'Or maybe not. Now, what were you saying about bad business?'
Silas wasn't listening. He was standing very still, staring past the rail and down the street. Creed followed the direction of Silas Boone’s gaze. The tavern keeper had locked onto the small black form nested on his own roof.
'I could kill that one as well, if it would help you concentrate?'
Silas shook his head. 'No, no. What was I saying? Bad business. Yes. Messengers rode through town this morning. They said they’d witnessed some mighty peculiar goings on out toward Scar Crag.'
'How so?'
'They came across a trapper's enclave, only there was no sign of the trappers. Neither hide nor hair of them to be found. The camp appeared to be abandoned, and they left everything behind. They didn't stop to investigate, but they kept their eyes open. No sign of anyone on or around the road.'
'You thinking Indians? Coyotes?'
'I ain’t thinking a thing,' Silas Boone said. 'That the camp was empty was just one strange thing, and it wasn't the strangest.'
'No?'
'No.'
'Then what was?'
Silas Boone told him.
Chapter Three
Ma Kutter heard scratching on the roof.
It was a small insistent sound, like rats picking away at the shingles.
'Get away!' she shouted, pushing herself out of her chair. The fire was warm, the light from the oil lamp low, casting shadows across the gable. She grunted. Her back ached when she straightened up. It was always worse at night. Her joints froze as the burden of dragging her old bag of bones around wore them down. She sank back into the chair, exhausted from even that small exertion.
Such were the joys of age. She was getting shorter by the year and sprouting ugly grey whiskers from her chin like a crone in stories told to frighten children. There had been a time when she'd turned heads, but all that remained was a shriveled up hag barely able to stand for a minute or more without someone to lean on.
A hock of wild pig boiled on the fire. The water hissed and sizzled as it spilled over the brim of the tin pan.
The scratching on the roof grew steadily louder.
Without it she might have heard the other sounds, the slight susurrus and the death rattle as the viper slid from the darkness to coil slowly around the leg of her chair. Ma Kutter felt its scaled skin brush her ankle but by then it was already too late. She barely felt the pin-prick of the snake’s fangs sinking into her soft fatty flesh. It was the sudden flush of warmth as the venom entered her blood that gave it away. By then she was already dead.
As she slumped in her chair, her hands clutching weakly at the arms, the scratching on the roof stopped. The serpent wound its way past her, out through a crack in the door and into the shadows beyond.
