But the gray man didn’t hesitate or check for a moment, striding on, around the next turn in the track.
“Get a fire going,” Abe said. “What I need most. Dry myself and get warm. Be fine then. Fucking fine with a good blaze to heat me up.”
A small carved sign, under an overhang, protected from the elements, read Quarter Mile To Hotel.
“Sounds good,” Abe said.
Around the next bend, Trader was so far ahead of him that he wasn’t even in sight.
For the first time, dimly against the skyline, Abe thought he could make out the tumbled ruins of a building, presumably the hotel that the sign referred to.
He slogged on, face down against the driving rain, stumbling in the deep ruts that crisscrossed the trail, hoping that Trader would be in sight when he reached the top.
But he wasn’t.
Abe was greeted instead by a small group of bedraggled men with muskets. “Blood for blood, you bastard,” one of them said. “You’re a fucking dead man.”
Chapter Twenty-Two
“Dark night!”
“Yeah,” Ryan agreed. “If that’s not one of the damnedest things you ever did see.”
The barbershop was brightly painted, all of the wooden surfaces varnished and polished. The mirrors gleamed, and the floor was clean enough to eat off.
“See what you meant,” J.B. said.
“What?”
“About there sort of being someone in here. I see what you mean.”
There were nine figures in the single long room. Three were dressed as barbers, in blue-and-white-striped aprons. Three were customers, sitting in each of the mahogany-and-brass chairs. The other three sat or lounged on the padded bench that ran the length of the shop.
They were all dead.
“KNEW WHAT HE WAS DOING. Or she was doing,” Ryan commented, touching a wondering finger to the cheek of the stoutest of the barbers. It felt cool and waxen to the touch, like artificial fruit. The glass eyes twinkled with a convincing jollity, and the mustache had a spiky elegance.
“Seen plenty of stuffed animals.” J.B. lifted the arm of a young man on the bench seat, testing it for weight and movement. “Real light,” he said.
Ryan shook his head. “Damnedest thing,” he repeated. “Yeah, I’ve seen fishes and birds and moose heads and cougar and bear. Every kind of embalmed and stuffed creature in the world. But never human beings.”
The place was immaculate. Everything gleamed and sparkled, all dust and dirt banished.
There was a beautiful sampler on the wall, above the bench, in a hand-turned beechwood frame. The date at the bottom was the eighth day of the eighth month in the Year of Our Lord, 1888, with the name of the person responsible for the embroideryJemima Austerand her hometown of Pawtucket.
The sampler was a quote that Ryan knew related to the Great War between the States from the middle of the nineteenth century. “Grant stood by me when I was crazy and I stood by him when he was drunk. Now we stand by each other, always.”
J.B. had taken off his glasses to read it out loud. “Double-weird thing for a girl to sew,” he said.
“Look at this.” Ryan had seen a plastic box fixed to the wall beyond the second of the swivel chairs. A sign nearby read Turn This Handel Fifty Times And Youl Heer Whats On Our Minds.
“Go on then,” the Armorer said.
“Could be boobied.”
J.B. laughed. “Anyone takes this much trouble to set up these dummies isn’t going to want them blown apart. Go ahead, Ryan, turn it.”
There was a resistance, which he guessed came from it being used to generate some small flow of electricity, dutifully counting up to fifty turns.
There was a red button on the side of the box, and Ryan pressed it.
After a few moments of hissing and crackling, what he figured was a loop tape began to play through concealed speakers around the barbershop. They heard the clicking of scissors and the humming of clippers, overlaid with the voices, supposedly, of the trio of men standing frozen behind each of the chairs.
Different accents. One from the bayous and one, more terse, from New England. The third with the Texas drawl. The words were overlaid and overlapped.