They left the security tent. As they neared the festival proper, the music and crowd noise grew more intense and the bright lights waned. Beams of green and blue swept across the crowd in time with the beat. Glowing bracelets and necklaces twirled as people danced.

  Lawrence stopped, staring at the scene. “So this is what Penny’s created. Devil’s Fest.”

  Matthew pulled Lawrence along. They wove between festival-goers, then had to push as the crowd got denser.

  Near the hotel, Matthew leapt over the wooden barrier. His head spun, and he stumbled as he ran up to the entrance. He tried the door. Locked. As he expected. He was furious at himself for not keeping a key, but Sully had it now. How could he have known?

  “Hey, what’re you doing!” Behind them, a security guard was waving his arms. “You can’t go back there.”

  “I’ll distract him,” Lawrence said. “You keep looking for Penny.”

  Matthew nodded. He didn’t recognize the guard, and he didn’t want to stop and explain or wait for permission. He’d have to go around the side. There were some boarded-up windows near the back, and he knew which ones were a little loose. His crew had tried their best, but the brick was a bit soft in places. He just needed a tool. Some leverage.

  He started toward the far side of the building. But as he passed the front windows, Matthew heard banging. He turned, scanning for the source of the sound.

  Penny was looking out from the dark lobby, her palms pressed against the window glass.

  “Lawrence, take a look at this.”

  Jason was standing before the open doorway to the bank building. I climbed the steps. Inside, the building was little more than a shell. The wooden rafters and beams were exposed, everything blackened by fire.

  But there was a bit of rope hanging from one of the floor joists. The end of the rope swung steadily back and forth, back and forth. The creaking sound matched the rope’s rhythm, as if there was a heavy weight at the end. Yet there was nothing tied there. No source for that creaking. No natural source, I should say.

  “Jesus,” I murmured. I thought of Beau MacKenzie’s diary, what he’d seen and heard in the Paradise Hotel. But we were far from the hotel.

  What the hell was happening?

  -from A DEVIL IN EDEN by Lawrence Wright

  Devil’s Night - 1894

  Douglas was dreaming. He knew it was a dream because his mother was there. He was a little boy, and it was Sunday.

  “You’d better wake up now, Deedee,” she said. “Time for church. Jesus might wait for us, but the preacher ain’t.”

  Then he heard people singing.

  Not singing. Screaming.

  He gasped, sitting up. He was in a dark room. His body hurt. Oh Heaven, did it hurt. He couldn’t go to church like this.

  But that had been the dream. With his mother, who’d passed. Had she really come to him? If she did, then she’d come for a reason.

  You’d better wake up.

  Pain or no, he had to get moving. That man had shot him in the hallway of the Paradise Hotel. That was why he hurt so damned bad. His shoulder was on fire. But somehow, he was alive. He felt for the wound, nearly blacking out when his hand touched the crater where the bullet had gone in. But the blood was tacky. It seemed to have clotted. Someone had tied fabric around the wound.

  Marian. Where was she? And what about Tim?

  Had he really heard screams, or just dreamed them?

  Douglas staggered through the dark. It was night, and he had no idea how much time had passed. The hotel was quiet. He nearly tripped over something—a body. The men in the hallway. Flies buzzed. His hands met congealing wetness. The stench of feces gagged him.

  There was light ahead. Douglas came into the kitchen, where moonlight was coming in around the curtains. A worse smell hit his nose, metallic and rancid and noxious. He could make out shapes in the dark, but nothing was clear.

  “Tim? Marian?”

  All he heard was incessant, unearthly creaking.

  He reached the window and pulled back the drape. Light flooded the kitchen. A terrible scene came into view. Blood had pooled on the floor, black as tar in the low light. Tim was sprawled in the middle of it, partway into the dining room. The man was very dead. Flies hummed around him.

  Douglas breathed in and out. The smell was making him even more light-headed. He had to get outside to fresher air.

  He found the back door. The air was sweet and cold in his nostrils, filling his lungs. He bent over and retched.

  You’d better wake up now, Deedee.

  “I’m awake, Mama,” he said. “I’m awake.”

  After a few minutes, Douglas started to walk. Every step was an effort. His limbs and joints were stiff. The town seemed deserted, as if everyone had vanished. Or were they dead? Is this some hell? he wondered. Punishment for my sins?

  But he wouldn’t see his mother in hell. That gave him hope.

  He stumbled onward along the backside of Main Street’s buildings, past outhouses and stinking trash piles. The stables were somewhere this way. East—that’s what the porter had said to Tim that morning.

  The porter was dead. Tim was dead. Maybe Marian was dead, too.

  He couldn’t bring his thoughts together. All Douglas knew was that he needed a horse. Right now, that was enough.

  After some minutes, a more wholesome smell met his nose. Hay and animal manure. He heard something large moving, and then a loud sneeze. He’d never spent a lot of time around horses—not like his cousin Ronald, who’d found work driving cattle—but he knew that sound well enough.

  The stable door was not bolted. Someone had left it ajar. Douglas went inside. His mind kept blinking in and out of awareness, but his hands seemed to know enough on their own. The horses were braying, stomping in their stalls. Douglas found a calm one and led it out into the open space.

  Next he needed to tack up. His foot bumped into a curved shape on the ground, and he nearly fell—it was a saddle. There was more tacking scattered on the ground, as if someone had been here in haste and knocked everything about. But they weren’t here now, so Douglas didn’t worry over it. He began to prepare the horse. Marian had saddled their rides to get to Eden. His wife was good with horses, too. But even before that, Douglas remembered watching his cousin Ronald on rare visits. Ronald’s horse, Sunflower, had hated Douglas. Bared its huge teeth at him. Never let him ride.

  But this horse was placid. It could tell something was wrong, and it scuffed nervously at the dirt. But it let Douglas lay the blanket down, tighten the buckles on the saddle, and position the halter and bridle. He was sure he’d attached something wrong. But he’d done his best.

  Finally, he led the horse out into the street. He kept expecting someone to come out and stop him. But no irate stable hands appeared.

  His only doubt was about Marian. Where was she? Dead in the hotel? Had she escaped, somehow?

  But what if she was still here someplace, alive?

  I don’t owe that woman a damned thing, he thought. She’d been nothing but a curse to him. He never should’ve listened to her mad ideas. He’d been such a fool. Seeing that empty safe was one of the worst feelings he’d ever had. All the things he’d done—thieving, holding Fitzhammer prisoner, refusing to let the cook go—it had all been for nothing. Nothing except evil. The Paradise Hotel was indeed an accursed place, just as the cook had said. For all Douglas knew, this entire town was cursed.

  He thought these things as he led the horse through the shadows. Then he saw the canyon walls narrowing and realized he’d been going the wrong way. Heading not toward the road, but away from it. He spun around, and that’s when he saw her.

  Marian, lit up by moonlight.

  She was walking haltingly down Main Street, looking like a vengeful spirit. Like she’d risen from the depths. Hair in a wild corona around her head. Eyes so wide and shining, he could see the fury in them from his hiding place. She had a thick bundle wrapped across her torso, carrying something.

  Douglas pulled the horse behind a building. But she hadn’t seen them. He wished for his weapon. The horse tossed its head, and Douglas petted its neck.

  “Calm now,” he whispered. “You’re all right.”

  He wasn’t sure if it was really Marian, or some monster that had taken her form. In the dark and in his addled state, both possibilities seemed equally likely. He remembered how she’d killed Fitzhammer in the hotel dining room, pulling on that rope until the life squeezed out of the man. She’d never intended to let Fitzhammer live. Douglas understood that now.

  Perhaps Fitzhammer had deserved this fate, for whatever evil he’d done to Marian in the past. But that wasn’t justice. It was simply more evil.

  Evil that I helped to do.

  Whatever Marian really was—woman or devil or vengeful force of nature—Douglas bore some responsibility for what she’d done here today.

  He tied the horse to a railing. “I’ll be back.” He followed Marian’s form down the street.

  When she neared the bank, she stopped. Douglas stopped as well, watching. There was another horse—this one tied up in front of the bank, with saddlebags attached.

  Marian took off her bundle. She looked inside it. Seemed to be talking to it. An odd sound carried across the street to Douglas—a sort of choked cry. Marian tucked the bundle into one of the horse’s saddlebags. She walked up to the bank’s entrance. She tried opening it, but it was locked.

  Then she starting banging with both fists on the double doors.

  Bart had never seen so much money.

  He was inside the bank’s vault, and he’d lost track of time. There was more wealth here than he’d even imagined. Fitz had kept some things to himself, the old rogue. Bart kept piling the cash into bags. Gold bars and purses of glittering dust, too. A few times, he caught himself counting. How was he even going to carry it all?

  That didn’t matter. He’d be able to carry enough. But he couldn’t keep wasting time. It was already dark outside.

  His only regret was killing the bank teller. All that filthy blood. Bart’s stomach did a turn, thinking of it. He’d have to walk through the mess again when he ventured upstairs. But the teller hadn’t listened when Bart explained the situation. Fitzhammer’s being held for ransom. I need to get into the deposit box. Hell, he’d had the key! Everybody in town had heard the gunshots at the hotel, all dozen or so souls who were left. Those who hadn’t fled. Bart had seen the dust rising along the road.

  The stable boy, Pete, was one of them. Bart had gotten rid of him easy enough. They’re killing everyone, Bart had said. Scared him real good. Bart had the bloodstains on his clothes to prove it. Pete saddled up his little donkey and got right on out of town, hadn’t he? This town was full of cowards. Especially with O’Connor and the Pretty Eyes Saloon’s barkeep dead.

  He just wished he didn’t have to deal with the women at the hotel. And the baby. Damn little pest probably wasn’t even his. If he’d been a violent man, he’d have killed Marian already. But he wasn’t some mindless monster. He didn’t go around killing for no reason. He was clever. He looked for solutions to his problems.

  Marian was going to be his solution.

  He’d laid even more of his clues at the Paradise before coming here. Scrawled the name “Marian” on the dining room wall with that skinny man’s blood. It had a whiff of melodrama about it. Like some tale of gasping women in a gothic castle. But in such situations, subtlety didn’t pay. When the law men finally came riding into town, Bart wanted no doubt about the true culprit. He’d make sure that neither Marian nor Fitzhammer’s money were ever found to contradict him.

  As for Bart himself? By morning, he’d be on Main Street with the few remaining townspeople, ready to tell his tale. He’d have to leave out the part about visiting the bank, now that the teller had been so stubborn. But he could blame that death on Marian as well.

  Anabel made him sorry, though. She was still pretty in a certain light. He’d have to get rid of her, too, and he hated to think on it. Perhaps he could find a cliff, and she’d have a fall. As long as he didn’t have to touch her when she died.

  He’d nearly finished packing up his satchels when he heard a noise above him. The ground floor.

  Bart left the bags and crept over to the stairs. It had sounded like banging. Could the bank teller still be alive? No. That was impossible. Had somebody else worked up their courage and come sniffing around? If he was seen, that could be a problem.

  Carrying his lantern, he slowly went up the stairs, weapons at the ready. He’d retrieved his own revolver from Marian’s possession, and he still had the one from the barkeep, too. The rhythmic banging started up again. It was coming from the bank’s entrance, which Bart had been careful to lock.

  Someone was banging on the double doors.

  Bart unholstered his revolver.

  Marian stopped knocking and crouched to one side of the bank’s entrance. Darkness shrouded her. She felt the shadows permeating her soul as well, turning her into a wraith. A creature made of night.

  That had to be Bart’s horse tied up outside the bank. He hadn’t ventured out in response to her knocking. But eventually, he would come. She’d be waiting.

  Nothing seemed to be left in the world except for him. Not even the baby changed that fact. Once, however briefly, Marian had been a mother. Somehow, she might have learned to love that child. But now? It wasn’t possible. She had taken the life of an innocent man. Sullied the little bit of purity left in her soul.

  When Anabel had fallen, the last human part of Marian had died too.

  She still heard the thud on the hard-packed dirt, the scattering of pebbles against the walls. Faced with that horror, Marian’s mind had gone strangely quiet. As if sleepwalking, she’d stumbled through the hotel. The baby had burbled and cooed in her sling against Marian’s side. In the kitchen, she’d ignored the grisly remnants of the earlier battle. There was a bottle of milk inside in the icebox. Marian had tasted it—goat’s milk, not yet turned. She’d dribbled the white liquid into the baby’s mouth.

  She would find some safe place to leave the child. She owed that much to Anabel. But Marian no longer cared what happened to her own miserable self.

  So long as Bart Adams was dead.

  From the bank’s entrance, there came a faint click—the inner bolt sliding free. The door opened. The hinges were well-oiled, silent. Light spilled from the opening. A man stepped out, pausing to look around. His gun glinted silver.

  Him.

  Her breath quickened. Her skin flushed. Not yet, she told herself. Wait.

  Bart walked down the wooden steps. He carried a heavy sack. The planks creaked ever so slightly. His head swiveled left and right. Watching for the person who’d banged on the bank’s doors. He glanced behind as well, straight at Marian. But she was still hidden among the shadows.

  As soon as he turned and started toward his horse, she rose. Anabel’s sharpened spike dug into her palm.

  When he reached the horse, Bart tucked the gun into his belt. He lowered the sack beside the horse. A sound came from one saddlebag. The baby, grizzling in her sleep.

  Bart stepped back. “What in the—”

  Marian closed the distance between them, her boots moving in silence over the dirt. Now, she couldn’t hesitate. If she gave him a single moment’s warning, he might overpower her.

  She grabbed for his weapon, wrenching it sideways from the holster. At the same moment, her left hand rose in the air. The spike slashed downward. The point of the wood sunk into Bart’s lower back. He screamed and thrashed, knocking her aside. The spike snapped. She dropped the blunted end.

  But she’d taken his gun. Marian braced both hands together and pulled the trigger of Bart’s revolver. The shot sent bits of brick flying from the bank building. He was running for the still-open entrance doors. Then Bart spun around. His arm lifted. He was holding another gun—Marian hadn’t realized he had a second.

  Heat sliced across her side. But she kept after him, firing the revolver once more. This time Bart screamed. He tripped and fell forward, halfway across the bank’s threshold. He crawled the rest of the way inside.

  She reached the doorway just as he tried to kick it closed. The door landed against her bruised and bleeding torso. More shots rang out as Bart fired again and again. They echoed against the bank’s thick walls and tin ceiling. She felt a punch to her thigh. Her knee buckled.

  Then came the clicking of an empty chamber.

  Marian had fallen back slightly, crouching partway behind the door. The pain was like a massive weight. Her eyes went dark. She blinked, and her vision cleared a bit. Only half a second had passed. In that brief pause, Bart had retreated farther inside the bank. Blood poured down Marian’s leg.

  She realized that she still held his revolver in her hands.

  She lurched forward, dragging her wounded leg behind her. A cry came out of her with every step. A sound of pure rage.

  The room was lit by a kerosene lantern, which sat on the wooden counter. Bart crawled along the floor. He’d gotten past the bank teller’s desk and was now heading for a set of stairs. They led down to a cellar. Marian realized what must lie below—the bank’s vault. He thought he could shut himself inside. Hide from her, like he’d hidden behind darkness and lies for so many years. Perhaps he’d die in that small room, wasting away like Anabel.

  But that wasn’t enough for Marian. She wanted to see it happen.

  He’d reached the railing. He pulled himself up, trying to stand.

  Marian’s arm shook. She could barely lift the revolver. She fired—a miss. Bart slipped on the top stair. He clung to the railing. His body twisted and he looked up, his eyes meeting hers. She saw terror there. She felt nothing—not pity, not mercy, nor pleasure. Simply emptiness where her heart had been.

  Marian steadied her hand and fired again.

  The bullet hit him in the chest. Bart let go of the railing and careened down the stairs. Marian dropped the gun and fell to her knees. She lay on the floor at the top of the staircase. She couldn’t see Bart down there at the bottom. But she could hear Bart’s labored breathing.

 

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