You don’t understand him at all.
He stands up at the desk. In his hand is a sheaf of oblong papers, which he slips into one of the desk’s many letter slots. “I won’t be needing these anymore”—his tiny eyes scan the dark room—“just as this place will no longer be needing me.”
Now his hand is extending, his palm full of gold coins. “Take this. I’ll write you a receipt.”
Your mouth hangs open as you shake your head no.
His fingers pluck up one coin. “At least take this ten-dollar piece. It belongs to you, does it not?”
“No…”
“My time here is at an end, and so is yours.” He removes his false nose to reveal gnawed holes. “Say your prayers, fornicatress. You’ve much to be grateful for. You will live a long, long life, and you will have children and grandchildren and great-grandchildren, and you will die on the day before Trotsky is murdered.”
Your stare gapes. “What?”
He walks away into a side hall.
It’s as if the house ejects you; you nearly fall down the front steps. Mr. Gast’s corpse has turned on the rope again, to face your exit. You stumble down the path, exhausted by your witness. Before you begin to run, you see the last edge of the sun melting over the distant cotton and soya fields, backlighting so many skulls on sticks, and you also see the tan mutt that escaped the room upstairs humping the other stray dogs in the yard, and that’s when you feel as if Lucifer himself has just blown you a kiss…
You fall to your—
CHAPTER ELEVEN I
—knees before the toilet to vomit harder than he ever had in his life. Holy ever-living HELL, Collier thought in the mad, wincing turmoil. He didn’t remember stumbling to the bathroom, but he did remember the nightmare…
With each pulse of vomit, the alarm pulsed in the bedroom. The images from the nightmare assailed him, and ghosts of discomfort throbbed at his anus and his left nipple. When he was done, his stomach squeezed dry, his vomit floated in the toilet like an inch of oatmeal.
The worst dream of my life…
He sat on the bathroom floor, head between his knees.
It was the first time he’d ever dreamed he was a woman—
Not just a woman, a Civil War whore…
When he could bear the buzz of the alarm no more, he straggled up and smacked it off. It was twenty-five before seven. Oh, shit, he recalled. Church. While showering, the distress in his belly sharpened when he recalled the ludicrous incident with Lottie and, worse, the awful hallucination of those four small hands titillating him…
And the dog.
I got the triple whammy last night, he groaned to himself as he dressed. And didn’t J.G. Sute say that someone was murdered in the bath closet?
And was that trace smell of urine his imagination or…
Downstairs he heard early risers chatting over the light breakfast Mrs. Butler served every morning. Collier stepped quickly past the dining room door, so not to be seen. Then he turned for the door and noticed—
The fancy antique desk sat recessed within the wall, close to the small portrait of Mrs. Gast. The same place it was in the dream. Collier knew his dreaming mind had been quite creative last night, producing the morbid dream out of pieces of things he’d heard. My name was Harriet and I just got raped every which way, and then I saw that weird little dude sitting at that desk, the guy with the messed-up nose. Of course his mind had remembered Dominique’s story of a similar man sitting at the same desk during the wedding reception. He reread the tiny metal plate: ORIGINAL MAPLE WRITING TABLE—QUEEN ANNE- STYLE—SAVERY AND SONS—1779. It was no big deal, he knew, but…
In the dream, I saw the guy put a stack of papers…
His fingers fished around one by one through the letter slots. The slots were quite deep. In one he found an inexplicable business card that read PHILTY PHIL’S BAR! ST. PETE BEACH, FLORIDA. The card was obviously new. He forced his fingers down deep into the very next slot—
Something there…
With finesse and some aggravation, his forefinger and middle finger managed to seize something and pull it out.
A sheaf of very old, heather gray sheets of paper, oblong-shaped, about seven inches by three. The same things he’d seen the man in the dream put in this self-same desk.
Don’t freak out, Collier warned himself. Up front, it seemed impossible, but coincidence more easily explained it. I noticed them when I first saw the desk, but wasn’t consciously aware of it…
Or so he hoped.
The stack seemed about sixty pages thick, and some were white instead of the heather gray. He’d seen one before already, in one of Mrs. Butler’s displays. They were paychecks from the era, and he supposed they might even be moderately valuable to a collector. He read the first one.
RECEIVED OF: Mr. R.J. Myers, AGENT OF THE EAST TENNESSEE AND GEORGIA RAILROAD COMPANY, Fifty DOLLARS.
The date: April 30, 1862, and at the bottom was scribed a signature: Windom Fecory.
Windom Fecory, Collier thought back. The man whom the bank is named after. The man with the gold nose…
Collier peeled off a few of the checks and put them in his pocket. Maybe Mr. Sute knows exactly what these things are. The rest he put back in the slot.
But what of the rest of the nightmare?
Morris, the john in the whorehouse, he thought. Didn’t I see his name on something in one of the display cases? One of Harwood Gast’s rail workers, no doubt. But it could still be explained by a subconscious recollection; even the dull but precise pain in his left nipple could be explained. Collier had to wonder if he was hunting for proof of something supernatural now. I wonder what a therapist would say. “Well, Doctor, last night I dreamed I was a woman and I got corn-holed by a rugged railroad worker. Oh, and I also got drunk with a bunch of gay guys earlier.”
Why bother trying to figure it out?
The morning air outside refreshed him; he was at the church in less time than he thought. As he waited for Dominique, some other people standing outside the church door seemed to be eyeing him, so he moseyed away so not to seem abrupt.
“What are you doing over here?” Dominique asked, appearing around the corner. Collier was stunned. She wore a refreshing camel tan wrap-dress with a smart belt. Her eyes glittered in the morning light.
“Oh, I—”
“I keep forgetting, the Prince of Beer doesn’t want to be made,” she giggled.
“Exactly. Especially at church.”
Collier wasn’t prepared when she gave him a peck on the lips. Her soap and shampoo, as usual, turned him on in a big way; even her mouthwash and toothpaste seemed enticing.
