She stopped there, turning her face to his, and he saw the tears streaking her cheeks. "One day, Krysty..." he said.

They met up again in the lobby about half an hour later. All were subdued by the macabre experience of touring the luxurious mausoleum. Lori had been crying, and Doc Tanner was showing worrisome signs of retreating once more into a catatonic madness. His eyes had become hooded, as if they'd been painted with a thin veil of beeswax. Occasionally he would mutter. "Madness," or "Oh, the horror of it all... The bastards! Insane, criminal bastards!"

Ryan took them to the kitchen, gave everyone a torch and showed them how to prime them with the pushbutton. He and Finn and J.B. took a spare light to hang on their belts. He and Krysty also showed everyone the supplies of food.

It seemed like there'd be no way of heating anything up, but Finn went fossicking around the storage closets, emerging with a red cylinder of camping gas. Lori teetered off and brought in pans of discolored water from the streams around the motel, heating them and tipping in the unappetizing powders, stirring them to form a bland thick soup. Krysty added some salt and pepper from the metal condiment containers on the tables in the Atchafalaya Dining Room.

Finnegan disappeared through the heavy doors of the Cajuns' Bar, which were covered with shreds of rotted maroon velvet. He returned with a dozen bottles in his arms.

They sat and drank, mostly in silence. Some of the wine was still drinkable, despite having stood untouched on shelves for almost a century. Best was a couple of quarts of imported French brandy, thick and sweet, to be savored on the palate, with a fiery kick that didn't register properly until it was well down the throat.

"Bar was filled with bones. Must have been the best parts of ten to fifteen people all jumbled in the joint. Some was women. Remains of some fancy shoes in among the ribs and skulls."

Ryan stopped spooning up the reconstituted mush to look at the chubby gunman. "What's that, Finn? Bones all jumbled up?"

"Yeah."

"Then someone had been in that part?" Finnegan considered the question, belched and took another sip of the brandy. "Got to be right. Fucking right, Ryan. Only place in this gaudy that the chills had been moved at all. Yeah. Looked like bottles were gone. Gaps on shelves."

It was late afternoon.

The sun that had shone so boldly through the morning had vanished, drifting away under a leaden-gray cloud cover.

Through chinks in the faded drapes, the lights from the torches flickered and danced. They could be seen outside, across the waterways.

They could be seen by the crouching figure in ragged leather breeches and jerkin. A figure with eyes like fire and hair white as snow.

Chapter Fourteen

The razor-edge of the dagger methodically chopped and cut the crystalline powder. The chopping made it as fine as ground flour, separating it into narrow lines no thicker than a stalk of wheat, no longer than a man's middle finger. The surface of the mirror was dulled and scored with a thousand tiny scratches, from years of use. It was an artifact that predated the short war, brought in by one of the sec patrols, handed first to the sec boss, then on to the baron himself.

The drug, a powerful hallucinogenic mixture of cocaine, heroin and mescaline, had been brought by swampwag to the baron's headquarters from a tumbledown dock a few miles from Baton Rouge. It had been part of a shipment carried by a battered clipper ship from Trinidad. Its country of origin had once been called Colombia, but now had no name at all.

The Baron knelt beside the glass-topped table, his legs stuck awkwardly behind him, his great head lowered over the mirror. In his right hand he held a thin tube of beaten gold, made for him deep in the swamps by one of the living dead who had an unusual skill with metals.

The tube traveled slowly along the line of the drug, known as "jolt," from its sudden and strong effect on users. Baron Tourment snorted at it, the powder disappearing as the tube went along one line, then down the next, taking four lines in total.

Immediately shutting his eyes, holding his face between his two huge hands, he waited for the rush. In the whole of Deathlands it was doubtful that there was a single man of science with the pharmacological knowledge to understand how jolt worked. But its effects were always the same.

"Uh," grunted Tourment as a kick of pain speared through his sinuses, bursting behind his eyes. His head shook uncontrollably, rolling from side to side. He tried to keep his eyes squeezed shut, but the force of the spasm jammed them open, the pupils rolling sightlessly. His fingers grasped convulsively and his toes drummed; his walking frame clattered on the wooden floor of the suite. After the first spasm of pain, the drug moved differently, attacking the cortex, closing down on the short-term memory of the frontal lobes. The power of a shot of jolt lasted from three to five minutes, depending on its purity and on the strength of the user. Baron Tourment could afford to pay for the best, but his giant body absorbed the drug too fast for his own pleasure. Its effects rarely lasted for more than about three and a half minutes. But what a two hundred seconds they were! A tumbling passage through time and memory and imagination, into scenes of desolation and horror. Scenes of horrific violence that made the giant black man press his fingers against his swelling erection. Twice he laughed loudly, making the guards outside the door shudder and glance fearfully at each other. When the Baron was jolting, his mood was even less predictable than usual. A sec man who'd once entered at the wrong moment had been taken out, clutching his own spilled intestines. The baron had laughed then.

But Tourment used the jolt for one special reason. In the last thirty seconds or so, it clouded the mind, and a form of madness followed. The Baron was the seventh son of a seventh daughter, and had always had a little of the power of seeing. As the jolt worked its way into the abandoned corridors of the mind, it sometimes increased his precognition, his powers of doomseeing. Sometimes it granted him remarkable insight into a potential advantage.

Or a potential danger.

Since the strange death of the auguring bird and the passing of the old woman, Baron Tourment had been uneasy.

Outsiders had come into his demesne. He still believed in his heart that the strangers must be mercies: hired guns from outside the ville. Maybe from the north or farther east. Mercenaries! Brought in by the young boy in West Lowellton.

"Should have purged 'em," he muttered, his voice thickened by the jolt.

How could they have afforded it? Mercies, to go against him! It must have been his generosity in leaving them with a little in previous years. That was his mistake, and they used it to hire blasters.

Now the jolt was cartwheeling through the ridges of his skull. He lay flat on the floor, which was the only safe place to be after snorting several lines of jolt. The eyes were open, staring wide and blind, the hands so contracted that the nails drew half moons of blood from his pale palms.

"Ten thousand doors to death," he whispered, his sibilant voice dying against the velvet drapes that covered the doors and windows.

He was in the bayous. Naked and alone, beneath a sky that was slashed with green clouds. The mud rose to his groin. He tried to run but without his prosthetic aids he kept falling. His face was vanishing beneath warm, clinging mud that filled his ears and nose and eyes and open mouth. He tried to scream, but the slime choked him.

Someone was pursuing him, someone who always dodged aside when the baron tried to look behind him into the gathering darkness.