Fever: A novel of arctic horror

1. The Swindler

“Why you won’t find a better bar of laundry soap west of the Mississippi,” Doug proclaimed as he held up the simple bar, wrapped in plain paper. “It will leave your clothes like new, fresh as can be. But that’s not all!”

I let his words wash over me, the patter as familiar as my own name. A handful of people stopped to listen to my brother, who stood behind an open suitcase set atop a wooden crate on a busy Seattle street corner. A few cabs trundled past, the clop of hooves seeming slower than usual, as if the July heat was a physical force slowing them down. Most of the traffic along this lane of shops, saloons, and groceries was on foot, though, making it the perfect place for the performance.

Performance. Doug liked when I called it that. It sounded better than “scheme” or “swindle.”

A break in Doug’s patter was my cue. “What’s so special about it?” I called, as if I’d just happened along and stopped to hear the sales pitch of a total stranger.

Doug gave me—and the rest of the people who’d stopped to listen—a smile big enough to show off his gold canine tooth. The original had been lost to the fist of an unhappy mark back in Colorado. He wore a good suit—nothing fancy, but with enough obvious quality to make him seem trustworthy. I, on the other hand, dressed in the rough, patched clothes that might have belonged to any down-at-the-heels working man.

Most people looked down-at-the-heels these days, of course. The financial panic of 1893 hit the entire country hard, and left behind an uncertainty that still lingered four years later.

“I’m glad you asked,” Doug said. “Now, my soap is a dollar per bar?—”

“A dollar!” exclaimed another man, who’d stopped to watch. “What’s it made out of, diamonds?”

“It’s certainly worth its weight in diamonds,” Doug replied smoothly. “But some of these packages are extra special. You see, some of them have money concealed within the wrapping—five dollars, ten dollars, and one lucky buyer will find a crisp new one-hundred dollar bill inside!”

Thatcaught people’s attention, as intended. A few more stopped, muttering to each other with a mix of hope and skepticism.

They were still circling the hook, though. Which meant it was time for me to nudge them onto it.

“I don’t believe you,” I declared. “Prove it.”

“Sure thing, friend.” Doug gestured to the neat pyramid of wrapped soap in front of him. “For the price of one dollar, you can test your luck and pick out any of these soaps you’d like.”

My face set in an expression of skepticism, I pushed to the front of the crowd, dug around in my pocket, and produced a worn dollar bill that I handed to Doug. Then I stood for a moment in front of the stack of soap, pretending to make a choice, my hand hovering first over one package, then the other.

Of course, I knew exactly which one to pick. It was always the third bar from the left on the second layer of the pyramid Doug stacked the soaps in.

I plucked it free, then turned to the crowd and held it up so they could clearly see me open the wrapper. A gasp went up when a five-dollar bill was revealed.

“Oh my God—it’s true!” I shouted, waving the bill jubilantly in the air. “I found five dollars! I’m going to buy my wife a new dress!”

The promise of free—or nearly free—money worked its magic. “I want a bar!” another man cried, and then another. The crowd surged forward, bars flying off the pile as quickly as they could shove the dollars into Doug’s hands.

We’d bought the batch of one-hundred bars for five dollars total, which would turn a tidy profit even accounting for the occasional five or ten salted into the mix to keep the frenzy going. But as the pile dwindled, Doug called a halt to the proceedings. “There are only five bars left, friends,” he said. “And, as no one has yet found the hundred dollar bill, why it must be in one of them.”

More and more people had stopped, first to see what was happening and then to join in. Their eyes fixed hungrily on the remaining bars of soap. A hundred dollars was a real windfall, and every last one of them wanted it.

“Now there are a lot more than five of you,” Doug said, then paused, as if pondering the dilemma. “I think the only fair way is to auction them off.”

I melted to the back of the crowd and switched the flat cap I’d been wearing for a bowler hat, pulled low to hide the scar on my forehead, then slipped on a pair of spectacles with plain glass for the lenses. Most people didn’t pay much attention, and wouldn’t remember me as the same man who had bought the first bar. Sliding my hands into my pockets, I palmed the fake hundred dollar bill. As the remaining bars were auctioned off and no cash discovered within, the bidding grew more and more frenzied. In just a moment, I’d step in and make a truly outrageous offer for the final bar.

The shrill blast of a police whistle cut through the din of the crowd. “What’s this, then?” shouted a copper. “Break it up! Break it up!”

My gut twisted and my pulse raced. I lurched forward, intending to help Doug, but it was already too late. The copper blundered into the crate, knocking the suitcase off and sending money flying in all directions.

No.

The crowd turned into a mob in an instant, descending on the scattered money, grabbing up handfuls, pushing and shoving others out of the way. Soon fists were flying and the copper laying about with his nightstick, while trying to snatch up some of the cash for himself.

Damn it.

There was no sense in staying behind. Doug had already sprinted off down a side street, so I pulled my hat lower, hunched my shoulders, and hurried off in the opposite direction, cursing all the while.

Devil take that copper and his clumsiness. If he’d just minded his own business, we’d have rent money, plus some left over to eat and pay our other creditors. Now we were out both the money and soap.

We’d have to order more, try the scheme again. Maybe in some other city, even.

My shoulders sagged. Sometimes, I wished we had a different life. We’d be hopeless at farming, but I might have been content as a clerk, or a salesman, or a bank teller.

Doug wouldn’t have been, though. He was a restless soul, for one thing. And for another, he had the unshakable certainty that one day we’d be rich beyond our wildest dreams. It was just a matter of finding the right scheme at the right place and time.

Besides, it was my fault we’d started down this path. If I hadn’t let our little sister die…

I pushed the thought aside, along with the image of Bessie’s face, wreathed in flame, that arose with it.

Unsettled by my thoughts, I wandered with no destination in mind, crossing back over my own path more than once. As I drew close to the corner we’d been “performing” on, I spotted a young man sitting on the curb, his head bowed in what appeared to be abject despair. His shoulders hitched, as though suppressing sobs.

There was no need to get involved. Whatever the lad was going through, it was none of my business.

Except…hadn’t I seen him in the crowd around the soap earlier?

Damn it again.

“Are you all right?” I asked.

The boy looked up, and God he was young, probably not even twenty. His eyes were red, and he blinked them rapidly. “I’m…I’m fine.”

“Clearly that isn’t the case,” I observed. The boy’s boots were split at the seam, and his coat so patched little of the original material remained.

The boy rubbed his eyes roughly with his sleeve. “It’s just, I came here hoping for work, but I haven’t found much. I was going to go home—Idaho—but I spent the last of my money on this soap.” He pulled three bars out of his pocket and looked at them morosely. “There might have been money in the wrapping, you see, and…well. There wasn’t in the first, so I bought another, then another…and now I don’t have anything left. I’m an idiot.”

Why did I stop to talk to him? I should have kept walking, spared myself the guilt now squirming in my gut.

I could go. Just walk away. Doug lived by the creed that suckers duped themselves. If they didn’t have the money to spare, they should have kept it in their pockets in the first place.

“Here.” I pulled out a handful of change and some rumpled bills. Everything I had on me, except for the fake hundred-dollar bill that wouldn’t withstand close inspection. “This should get you home.”

The boy’s eyes widened. “That’s—that’s really nice of you, Mr….?”

“Muir.” That was the name we were using right now, anyway.

“I’ll—I’ll pay you back! Give me your address, and I’ll send the money as soon as I have it!”

The grateful look on his broad face made me feel even more guilty. “Don’t worry about it.”

I brushed off any further attempt to thank me and walked briskly away. Not only had we lost the soap and the money, but now I didn’t even have enough in my pocket for a cup of coffee.

Doug would kill me when he found out.

* * *

A few hours later, I paused on the landing outside the boarding-house room I shared with my brother. Loud voices came through the thin door, raised in anger.

“You said you’d have my money by now, Muir. So where is it?”

My heart sank. Our visitor was a very unpleasant fellow by the name of Joe Hunter. Doug met Hunter at a saloon when we arrived, struck up a conversation, and ended up with a loan to cover our first month of rent and other expenses.

And now that loan had come due.

I hesitated, uncertain whether to enter or not. Would my presence help or hinder?

“I said I’d have it by the end of the month,” Doug said, voice so calm I could barely hear him. “It’s only the sixteenth.”

“You think I can’t read a calendar? You think I’m stupid?”

“Of course not, Joe, I?—”

“That’s Mr. Hunter to the likes of you.” The sound of cracking knuckles reached me in the hall. “I ought to teach you some manners.”

I hastily opened the door. Hunter seemed to fill the room, looming taller and wider than Doug and me put together. His face had gone the same red as his flaming hair and his bushy beard, and one enormous hand was curled into a fist.

At my entrance, he stepped back from Doug, who sat at our sole table looking far more calm than I felt. “There’s the runt of the litter,” Hunter sneered at me.

My spine stiffened. I was shorter than Doug, it was true, and somewhat slight, but hardly a runt. I wanted to defend myself…but who was I kidding? Hunter could turn me to paste with those fists.

“Mr. Hunter,” I said coldly.

His sneer became a smirk. “That’s better. Take a lesson from your little brother here, Muir.” He turned and pointed a stubby finger at Doug. “End of the month, you hear me?”

“I hear,” he said.

Hunter nodded, then brushed past me and stomped loudly away down the stairs. I shut the door behind him, then threw the lock in case he decided to return. Though given how flimsy the door was, I doubt it would prove much of an obstacle.

Doug sighed, took the half-empty whiskey bottle off its shelf, and drank straight from it. I sat across from him; he shoved the bottle at me and I took a swig. The stuff was vile, burning on the way down, but it did the trick.

“Are you all right?” I asked.

“No.” He scowled at the bottle. “If that damned copper had just come along five minutes later, or minded his own fucking business…”

“Yeah.” I took another swig, then passed it back. “Do you ever think about quitting?”

The question had been on my mind more and more often of late, and after the guilt-laden encounter with the boy today, I could no longer keep it to myself.

Doug’s brows drew together. “Quit?”

“You know…this. The schemes, the…swindles.”

“The performances, you mean,” he said. “And no, why would I?”

“I don’t know…isn’t it all just getting a bit…old?”

Doug frowned yet again, this time in confusion. “What do you mean?”

“Just that we’ve been doing this since I was fourteen. Coming up with performances, never settling down, always one step ahead of the coppers…” I looked around at the barren little room with its single gaslight and bare plaster walls, no different than a hundred others we’d stayed in. “Is this all there is for us?”

“Look, this isn’t permanent.” Doug took a generous swallow of the whiskey. “We just need something big. Something that will let us pay off Hunter, pay off our other debts, and set us up for life.”

I’d believed him when I was a kid, when he said we’d soon be rich. Now that I was almost thirty, I’d begun to think the payout Doug chased was just an illusion.

He still believed, though. He’d always believed—not just in his vision, but in me.

No one else would have. Not after what I’d done.

“You’re right,” I said resignedly. “So what next?”

“I’m not sure, but don’t worry. I’ll come up with something.” Doug finished off the whiskey. “When have I ever led you wrong?”

* * *

Despite Doug’s reassurances, I slept restlessly. Dreams filled my night, evaporating each time I woke from them. Leaving behind only the fading memory of Bessie calling me, until the scream of a train whistle blotted out her voice.