Perdition

Caitlin Kittredge

From the personal files of Mr James Priestly, being a record of the events that occurred at Perdition, Arizona, on or about May 18 1888.

I beg you not to call me mad. I know that what I have set down here may seem like fancy, or the whiskey ravings of a drunk.

I was that in the spring of 1888. I admit it freely. But what I saw in that town, that mean dusty town hunched against the desert like a starving coyote waiting for a beast to die – that is the honest, clear and sober truth, best as I can recollect it these many years gone.

I was twenty-one years old that spring, going no particular direction but West and having been ejected from every respectable town along my route, I came to find myself in Perdition. A more aptly named township there never was, for it was the definition of Hell – no water, barely any whiskey, suspicious eyes and full up with the worst scum that Arizona Territory had to offer.

One of them myself, with three bodies to my credit through Kansas and Texas, I hunkered in and resolved to move on as quickly as I could gamble my way to a fresh horse.

The saloon didn’t have a name, or if it did, the sign was long weathered away by the ever-moving dust of the desert, which stripped paint and skin with equal fastness, crept into every crevice and compounded my misery by finding its way to the bottom of my glass. The man I sat down to gamble with had nearly white eyes – I thought at first that he was blind and this would be a neat and profitable game indeed. But he looked at me, and he did not blink when he shoved the dog-eared deck in my direction.

“Cut the cards.”

I did as he bid, and his hand came out fast, like a rattlesnake, and took them back. It was all bones, that hand, but it didn’t shake. The man was just a bag of skin, but he didn’t appear ill or malformed in any way as he dealt and threw his ante onto the table. I had the coins in my hand to return when the door of the nameless place swung open and a woman appeared.

She wore breeches, like a man, with a man’s jacket over a woman’s shirt. Her hair was falling out of its pins and streaked over with dust, but I judged it to be darker underneath. She wasn’t pretty, too old for that, with too many sun lines wrought into her face, but she was striking. That’s a word my mother used often – striking – and I’d always taken it, as a boy, to mean something more than merely pretty.

The woman arrested me with her square, open face, sure enough, but the Winchester rifle in her hands caught my eye a deal more.

My poker partner stopped moving, and breathing, as she stalked through the place and came to my shoulder. She said to the man, “You look like my John.”

And then she shot him.

Arizona Territory,

1888

Kate Elder’s horse died twenty miles from Perdition. The animal had been foaming and stumbling for at least ten more, so Kate didn’t fault it much. Water was scarce, and if she hadn’t filled her canteen when she left Prescott, she’d be in the same boat as the flea-bitten roan.

There should be water. Even in the desert, there’s water if you know where to look. John had taught her that. He was an adaptable creature, John was, and he knew the desert as well as he knew the swamps and backwoods at home.

Known. John had known the desert. Kate didn’t catch herself clinging to the dead, never had. Even calling him “John” inside her head instead of his nickname was a way of blocking him out, putting him in the past where he belonged.

She couldn’t see the town when she picked up her pack and started walking. The Winchester seven-shot thumped against the back of her thigh, counting off steps and feet and miles. Perdition hunched at the base of a mesa, she knew that. Always in the shadow of the rocks, as the sun set behind it.

The sky was red, and she hadn’t gone but six or seven miles at most. Kate tucked her jacket around her and kept walking. There would be no predators in this desert at night. Not when they could smell what spread its foulness and filth out from the little smear of dust road and shanty-house that made up Perdition.

John had called these places Death’s acre, the spaces around the night creatures that no man, wildcat or coyote ever wanted to encounter. He did have a colourful way of putting things, John. He liked words, he liked names. Liked to hear himself talk.

“Why do they call you ‘Big-Nose Kate’?” he asked the first time they spoke.

“The same reason they call you ‘Doc’, I suppose,” she’d answered. “To differ you from all the other sawbones knocking around out there.”

“I’m a dentist, truly,” he said, and he smiled. Kate would learn later this wasn’t a common occurrence, unless he’d had a few glasses of whiskey. “Got any molars troubling you? Bicuspids overstepping their bounds?”

“Don’t mind him,” said Doc’s big, slow-spoken friend Wyatt. “He’s drunk.”

“So tell me, Kate with the prominent proboscis,” Doc said. “How many other Kates are there?”

She’d blushed, which wasn’t something she made a habit of. Blushing just gave men the wrong idea in a town like Griffin, tucked away in rough-and-tumble cattle-droving Texas. “Truthfully, Mr Holliday, there’s just me.”

Kate blew down the seams of her gloves, warming her hands. You wouldn’t think a desert would get a chill at night. You wouldn’t think a woman who should be well past roaming around in one would be out in it, either, but here she was, nearly forty years old and trudging through the brush towards what would probably be the last bad idea she’d ever get a chance to indulge herself with.

If only John hadn’t called her here. If only he’d been strong in the end.

But John wasn’t anything. John was dead.

And Kate Elder had eleven more miles to walk.

Fort Griffin, Texas

1877

Kate sees him first, across a room full of drovers who smell like dust and cowhide. He is dressed in dove grey and dealing faro with a concentration most men bring only to fighting or fornicating.

She is not in Exeley’s Beer Hall to meet a man. She is in this mean, dirt-floored little place to seek employment. Exeley doesn’t hire sporting women, but he does hire honest workers. At least, that’s what the word at the train station was. Kate isn’t proud. Not any more. She’ll sweep and clean glasses, boil wash and do mending. She’ll empty spittoons and carry the leaden trays of beer and whiskey bottles to and from the gambling tables.

She’s stronger than most women her size, and she’s got a good head. She can handle the drunken cowboys pressing in around her as if they were part of the herds they drive up to Kansas on the Chisholm Trail, handle them just fine.

Kate threads her way towards the barkeeper, the bald-pated Exeley.

She doesn’t make it. A drover loops his arm like a lasso around her waist, pulls her against him so she can smell his sweat now, too. “And how much are you?” Cheap mash breathes into her face, chokes her nose and mouth.

Kate puts her hands on his barrel chest and shoves. “I’m not.”

The drover’s rheumy grin widens. “You’re free? Must be my lucky day.”

Kate feels like she’s drowning in his stink and his heat. She can’t get free. She can’t lift up her leg and deliver a knee to where it’d hurt. She can barely breathe as his trail-hardened arm clamps down on her ribcage, his other hand pawing at her only decent dress.

Through the cacophony of hoots and shouts, a voice comes, flat and hard as a thunderclap.

“Why don’t you leave the lady alone?”

Her head snaps, nearly catching the drover on the chin. He’s staring. All of his friends are staring. Kate would know the face anyway, from the tintypes they sold in Dodge City and the penny novels hawked at every stop between Dodge and Fort Griffin. The down-turned moustache, the eyes that could fell you like a fist, the tall wide forehead and the nose crooked from breaking and resetting and breaking again.

Wyatt Earp has just saved her skin.

The drover lets go of her like her flesh is hot iron. “Sorry.”

“Sorry, what?” Earp’s eyebrows draw together like a storm front. The drover’s eyes flick between Kate and the Marshal as his fear claws its way through his drunken stupor.

“Sorry, ma’am, for any offence I may have caused you.”

“That’s better.” Earp waves him to the door. “Go on, get out.”

Wyatt sits her in an empty seat at the faro table, asks her if she wants a drink. Kate asks for whiskey.

The faro dealer smiles. “A woman after my own heart.” In all the places where Earp is broad and imposing as the landscape beyond the doors of Exeley’s, the faro dealer is slight and quicksilver. Kate looks back at Earp, watches the crowd part as he walks through it.

“He’s married, you know.” The faro dealer collects his cards and his money and shuffles for a new hand. He doesn’t watch his fingers. He’s watching her.

Kate feels red sneaking up her neck. “I’m sure I don’t know what you mean.”

“I only tell you because his wife’s a mean one. They’re man and woman in every way but legal, and that just makes her meaner. And you’re too pretty to get a laudanum bottle in the head.”

Laughter bubbles out of her throat, that this man should not only presume so much but be telling tales about the great Marshal Earp in the same breath. The faro dealer taps the deck into shape. “See, I was right. Much too pretty.”

When he’s dealt the hand, he tips his hat to her. “I’m John Henry Holliday, but most folks call me Doc.”

“And are you a lawman too, Doc?” she asks. Wyatt sets down a glass of whiskey. The glass still has the lip prints of the previous owner on the rim.

“This son of a bitch? He’s a degenerate card player if there ever was one. If you’ll excuse my language, ma’am.”

Doc smiles, and Kate knows it’s an old joke between the men. Even if the smile is stiff, and if Doc’s eyes are more slate than silver when Wyatt laughs at his expense.

“I’m just a faro dealer, ma’am,” he tells her. “At least until the sun goes down.”

Perdition, Arizona

1888

Sunset came and went while Kate walked, and the moon was hung high overhead when she reached the outskirts of Perdition. A small cemetery set outside the town limits was the first hint of civilization. The graves were wooden crosses or nothing at all, just humped dirt where the ground kept its secrets. A white shiny spot in the dirt turned out to be a leg bone, dug up and gnawed by a coyote.

Kate had the Winchester off her back, in her hands, the metal of the lever and the stock warming against her skin. There were sounds in the darkness, at last, and that could only mean she was getting close. Some of them could turn into rats, or wolves. Bugs, bats. Night creatures. Carrion-eaters.

The owl’s call nearly made her scream, and Kate pulled up hard. She was too nervous, too tight. She’d end up shooting herself, or a citizen that still drew breath.

It swooped over the cemetery, dived, and picked up a fat wriggling rat. Its blunt-feathered wings made no sound as it climbed into the night, taking a perch in a cottonwood tree a little ways off.

Kate lowered the rifle. John always said owls watched for lost souls, to capture them and take them on to the netherworld. Said that in Greek mythos, owls were the keepers of the dead, neither harm nor help. They just watched. John was full of such facts, and during a long stage ride or a slow night at the tables, he told her because she listened.

He hadn’t needed to teach her anatomy, though, when she’d found out about his side profession. Her father was a doctor and he made sure his Mary Katharine knew something about the ways a man could bend and break and be sewn back together. Kate knew where to aim and where to shoot.

But Doc taught her the lore, the stories. Without them, you couldn’t hope to understand, not really.

The owl ripped a fat cut from the rat’s belly and swallowed it. Kate grimaced. “I hope it’s one of yours,” she murmured to the dark, and kept walking into town.

“You’re not from Texas,” Doc had said, after they’d spent hours at the faro table talking, when it had gone full dark outside and Kate had given up hope of a job. “You’re from a long way off.”

“I was born in Europe,” she admitted. “Hungary. And you, Mr Holliday – you’re not from Texas either.”

“Valdosta, Georgia,” he admitted, although he ran the words together – Valdostageorgia, with As long and wide as a muddy river. “It seems we have something in common, Miss Kate.” He took a drink from his flask, winked at her. “We neither of us ended up where destiny said we’d be.”

Dodge City, Kansas

1878

Kate knows that something is not right with Doc. She’s never been a particularly suspicious woman and certainly not a jealous one – jealousy is for married women and haggard old spinsters, like the ones that glare at her in the street when she and Doc are out taking the air.

The air in Kansas is thick and wet in summer, full of dust and dancing motes in autumn. Neither one helps Doc’s coughing.

He told Kate the night they met that he was sick, and not to expect him to live any time at all. Kate doesn’t make a habit of expecting anything from anyone, especially not gamblers who move from town to town, trailing their lawman friends like the Romany caravans that rumbled through the streets of Kate’s childhood city.

Because of this, she and Doc have spent over a year together. Expecting nothing, and enjoying most things. He talks to her. He doesn’t treat her like she’s stupid, or even like she’s a woman at times. He tells her stories about hunting fox in the swamps outside Valdosta, about his dentistry practice. He told her about a man who had every one of his teeth pulled while drunk, and made it funny, so that Kate had to hide herself behind her fan. Laughter until you’re red-faced is unladylike.

There’s always money, whiskey and a feather bed at the end of the night, if they go to bed. Doc is a better lover than most before, and what he lacks in consideration he makes up for in ardency. Doc is dying and he grasps on to her like she’s the air that his rotted lungs can’t breathe in.

Kate knows, if she were a different Kate than Big-Nose Kate Elder, woman of no particular skill but possessed of a sharp tongue, were he a different Doc than Doc Holliday, the fastest gunfighter since Bill Hickok, that she’d be in love with him.

But there’s something not right about Doc, and it’s eating Kate away as surely as the tuberculosis is eating at her lover.

That’s why she follows him this time, when he slips out of bed, into a shirt and pants and his favourite overcoat. She waits, breathing slow and even in the dark, while he straps on his twin nickel-plated pistols and tucks a rifle up under his arm.

Doc has been leaving her at night for months, in Texas and in Kansas, and at first Kate, the other Kate, was furious and heartbroken. But she’s never smelled another woman on him, not even the smoke and soot of a gambling house. Never seen anything except tired crescents under his eyes in the morning light.

She’s left on her stockings, and it’s a simple trick to pull on a shirtwaist and skirt, shove her feet into boots, and be after him once the door of their rooming house swings shut.

They’d retired early, Doc tired and pale and not in the mood to engage in couple’s familiarity. Kate remembers the taut feeling of his shoulders as she slipped his jacket off.

“Somebody tried to kill Wyatt tonight,” he says before she can ask.

“Knowing Wyatt, this somebody probably had a reason,” she replies.

“I almost shot a man in the chest, Kate.” Doc slumps on their bed, and she mounts it behind him, wrapping her arms around his torso, pressing her face into the ashy gold hair that smells of pomade. It’s like putting your face into hay, clean and sweet.

“But you didn’t, love,” she tells him.

“But I was ready to,” he says, so quiet it’s difficult to hear over the street noise below their window.

Doc is a few dozen feet ahead of her, walking with purpose through the empty streets. The rifle is under his coat – not even the trusted friend of Marshal Earp can shirk the ordinance against firearms inside the limits of Dodge.

He turns into the shanty town where the Chinamen have their laundries and seamstressing concerns and opium parlours. Kate doesn’t understand opium. Opium makes you stupid, and slow. Kate has learned from Doc the value of being sharp and fast.

Doc passes under someone’s forgotten laundry line, his pale face and hair in shadow for a moment before the moon finds them again. And then he stops, and he turns in a slow circle.

Kate yanks herself into the alcove of a laundry, bags and bundles of clean clothes breathing out scratchy fibres and the scent of lye. He’s almost seen her, and she can’t articulate why, but she knows that Doc seeing her now would ruin something, kick out some foundation their time together is resting on.

Behind Doc, the shadows move.

Kate watches them unfold, grow arms and legs and teeth. The teeth shine under the moonlight, silver and brighter than the polish on Doc’s pistols.

She’s screaming before she can bite her tongue. “John, look out!”

In one motion, Doc raises his rifle, pumps the lever, aims and fires. The shadow drops back and falls to the ground. The shadow is hissing.

Kate moves from her hiding place but Doc stops her. “Stay put!” He draws the pistol from the left side of his belt and points it at the black mass on the ground. The mass that is wearing a man’s clothing and a man’s face, and has teeth like a hungry cougar. Bleeding clotted black blood from a chest wound, but still grinning and hissing.

Doc is a true shot – he doesn’t miss eight times out of ten. He hasn’t missed now. The thing’s heart is shot out. And yet it still bleeds. It still moves. It looks her in the eye.

The pistol speaks, and the thing goes still, collapsing like the laundry sacks piled up under the tents all around them.

Kate doesn’t think she can speak, but she manages. “Is he dead?”

“It.” Doc’s chest is moving like a bellows, short and shallow. “It, not ‘he’. And no . . . ” Doc doubles over, choking, and the spell holding Kate’s feet breaks. She goes to him, rubs the centre of his back like she’s done a hundred times before, waits for the fit to pass.

He stops coughing after a time. Spits the blood at the thing. Its eyes are still open and Kate can’t look any more. There’s something still in there. “It’s looking at me.”

Doc grips her shoulders. “I need something from our room. Can you wait here until I get back?”

Kate can’t answer, can just nod limply. The expression on Doc’s face is scaring her a thousand times more than any living shadow.

Doc is frightened.

“I can.” She sits on an overturned water barrel to demonstrate her fastness.

“If it gets up again . . . ” Doc presses the dead weight of the pistol into her hands. “Aim for the head, and don’t you miss.”

Then he’s gone, a blacker spot on the black night, and Kate is alone with the thing, this shadow-thing that tried to kill her John Henry.

It is a very long time before Doc comes back, and Kate spends every minute in agony, imagining the worst. Her imagination is no match for the truth. But she hasn’t learned the truth of Doc’s nights. Not yet.

Perdition, Arizona

1888

She knew the truth, in the back of her mind. A rivulet of stories from her father, the doctor, caught up with the dime novels she’d read to pass the time on long rides or when Doc and Wyatt were out on men’s affairs, combined into a flash flood with the instinct that lives in every breathing thing, far back, underneath civility and flesh.

Kate knew what the thing on the ground was. When Doc came back with his beaten-up black leather dentist’s kit, she wasn’t surprised. When he took out the wooden spike and the hammer, she didn’t look away even though he told her to.

And when the body on the ground had turned to foul-smelling grey ashes, already starting to scatter on the light wind, she grabbed Doc and slapped him hard, then started to cry.

He held her and whispered in her ear. “You have to understand, Kate. It’s not something I go telling every man, woman and child in creation.”

As the ash blew away and was forgotten, so the companionship of Kate Elder and Doc Holliday began to change. She told him the stories from her father and her father’s grandmother before that, related while she and her sister huddled around the coal fire in Budapest. The vampir, who had their heads cut off and their ashes mixed with holy water to keep their corpses from wandering home again.

Kate had passed the cemetery, and she could see the first sweep of shanties and tents that made up Perdition. There was no movement. Not even wind deigned to stir this forsaken patch of ground. The Winchester was growing sweaty in her grip and her shirtwaist was growing damp against her skin.

This wasn’t a hunting vampire that John shot on the wing. This wasn’t a red-eyed whore feeding on lonely cowboys. Kate didn’t know what waited for her in Perdition.

She just knew that she had to come.

The telegram crackled under her touch as she reached down to check her bullet belt. Every loop a full round, every round tested and true. Just like John’s.

She’d been in Aspen, Colorado when the news had come. It wasn’t unexpected, sudden, a shot and a body falling. She’d been to see him already. She’d made her peace with John Henry Holliday.

Holliday dead. Gone to Perdition. Your svcs needed.

She’d shed her tears and broken her crockery and had her time with that ice-cold empty feeling that came from knowing what she had to do, here in Perdition.

Now it just remained to finish.

John told her stories in return, like he always had, only now they were about how he’d come across a woman in the swamp outside Valdosta one moonlit midnight. How she’d had a little freeman child with her. John was seventeen, but his father was a war veteran twice over and he taught his son to shoot first and think later.

The little girl survived. The woman ran into the swamp, wounded and needing to feed.

Next sundown, she came to the Holliday house with six of her kin. “They can’t cross thresholds,” John had said. “But she sure did put up a howl. Sent the fear of God straight through me.”

He went to the free Negro town across the piney woods from the Hollidays’ snug home in downtown Valdosta, and the little girl’s grandmother told him how her people dealt with vampires.

The next night, Doc was ready.

Kate’s chest clenched when she breathed in, ever so slightly. He’d taught her how to shoot straighter, how to make silver bullets to put them down, what trees to fashion stakes from to kill them.

John had taught her how to survive in a world where things that breathed were little better than cattle.

And he’d died. He’d up and died and left her behind, to pick up his mess and burn it clean and scatter the ashes to the four directions like the Navajo. Four corners, four ways to keep the ghosts of your dead from rising again.

Sound and movement spilled from a saloon at the far end of the street, and Kate wiped her hand down on the rough cotton pants she’d kept in her trunk for nearly five years.

Just in case she ever needed to ride as hard and fast as the devil himself again, to prevent something worse than the devil from rising and walking.

Her hand would be steady and her aim would be sure. She wouldn’t shy away from doing the duty she’d tumbled into that night she’d followed Doc from the rooming house, going on ten years ago now.

Kate steadied her grip on the Winchester, and walked towards the saloon.

Tombstone, Arizona

1881

Tombstone is a young town, birthed from the rock and the sand of Arizona. It does not have a decent milliner’s shop or a single fine dining establishment. The rooming house Doc finds for them on Fremont Street, Fly’s, is barely better than the hovels Kate lived in on her quest down the Mississippi and across the plains to Kansas, but at least there are no bugs and the landlord keeps his remarks about an unmarried couple in a single room to himself. Tombstone has whores in abundance, springing up like flowers from the fertile soil of mining and railroad money.

Because Tombstone also has silver mines. They wind for miles under the earth, deep and dark and cramped. The perfect hiding place for a creature that cannot face the sun.

Kate has cleaned a nest before – the weight of the kerosene jug tugs on her arm as she and Doc venture into the mine. They are twelve miles from Tombstone, creeping down a vent tunnel in the Graveyard Mine. “A more apt name I’ve never heard,” Doc mutters as they move through the dim and the dust. “The bastard who laid this claim had the devil’s own humour.”

His lantern doesn’t pierce much more than ten feet ahead, and he needs his other hand free to put down anything that might be moving in this forgotten section of ground. So Kate carries the kerosene, the matches, the spikes and the mallet.

Silver will paralyse a vampire, but only fire or a piercing of the heart will kill it. It seems like they’re mocking her, Kate thinks as they walk, by living so close to the very thing that can leave them helpless.

Kate has a Winchester strapped across her back, and a knife dipped in silver in the belt of her man’s trousers. The mine is hot, and sweat works its way down her neck and over her ribs in a parody of Doc’s touch.

“It’s easy for them in a place like this,” he says from ahead of her. “A man dies in a whore’s bed, it’s drink or vice that did him in. A whore dies in the street, it’s what she had coming from on high. The marshal’s more concerned with keeping the breathers from shooting each other over claims and the rest of them are so blinded by silver they wouldn’t notice if one walked into the smithy and asked to have its fangs filed.”

“Even Wyatt?” Kate says. Wyatt knows that Doc is a gambler and that Kate is his woman. He doesn’t know about the midnight assignations. He doesn’t know what watches him from the dark places.

“Especially Wyatt,” Doc says. His tone of late is flat and angry when Wyatt comes up. Kate knows that Wyatt has given up law and taken up speculating. He’s become angrier and more inclined to cuff a drunkard than escort him out of Earp’s preferred saloon. Wyatt and Doc’s friendship is strained in this silver-veined, lawless place. The vampires don’t provide a help.

They’ve spread among the whores like syphilis, and Kate has put a stake through the heart of no less than three soiled doves in their four months at Tombstone. The nest will be the end of it, killing the disease rather than a symptom, Kate hopes.

She’s gotten stronger in the time she’s been with Doc. Smarter, too. Vampires are like a creeping rash on the face of the night. They can be burned and destroyed, but they always come crawling back. And they come to Doc, like moths to a lantern. Fierce as his reputation is among the daylight denizens of the frontier, it’s worse among the night creatures. All of them want a pound of flesh from the hide of Doc Holliday.

The lantern lights up pine boxes, crude coffins slapped together from knotty wood still oozing pitch. Tucked up against the earth, like mushrooms sprouting from a dead man’s skin.

Doc sets the lantern down and, as he does, Kate catches sight of a pale hand in the dirt. “John Henry. There.”

He bends and checks the girl’s throat – one of the Chinese girls who smiles at Kate when she takes in their washing – and shakes his head. “She’s dry.”

Near the corpse are a litter of fine clothes and whiskey bottles, and a belt half full of bullets. “Damn it,” Doc growls. “God damn it straight to hell.”

Kate keeps one eye on the coffins, for any sign of stirring, one eye on Doc as he pokes through the detritus. “What’s wrong, Doc?”

“All this doesn’t come from thieving off corpses and skulking in shadows,” he whispers. “They had it brought here.” He stands, pushes back his coat and puts his hand on the butt of his left pistol, a reflexive motion. In that moment, in the low light, he becomes the legend and not the man she knows. “They have a familiar,” Doc says. His boot kicks aside a belt buckle, a brand-new hat, a cattle brand that reads D-8.

“That’s a rustler brand,” Kate says. She wishes later she hadn’t. “I heard Wyatt and Virgil talking. They use that brand to change US army cattle into that . . . D-8 for US.”

Doc’s face goes stony still. “Is that so,” he says, and picks up the brand, stares at it before tossing it into the recesses of the tunnel. Picks up the kerosene, and splashes it over the coffins.

The vampires scream as they burn. Trapped-animal screams. Kate knows that Doc dreams about the men he’s had to shoot, the living ones, but Kate dreams of the screaming.

At the mouth of the tunnel, Doc watches the smoke for a moment and then buttons his jacket. Kate finally gives voice to the black thought that arose when they found the dead girl. “You’re going to have to kill him. The man helping the blood drinkers.”

Doc drops his eyes to his dusty boots. “Yes.”

Kate slides her hand into his. “He’s giving those things aid and comfort. He got a woman killed. He doesn’t deserve to live.”

Doc surprises her by pressing a kiss against her dirty, sweaty forehead. “You’re the angel on my shoulder, my Kate,” he whispers. “And sometimes the devil, too.”

Kate coaxes him away from the mine, and onto the horses. They don’t speak while they ride back to Tombstone. In the rooming house, they make love while the sun sets, still wordless. After, when she’s left watching cobwebs trail against the stained ceiling, Doc has his worst coughing fit in some months. Blood stains the sheets, and all Kate can do is watch as his body twitches.

After that he sleeps, light and restless to every sound. Kate doesn’t attempt slumber. She’ll just hear more screaming.

The familiar’s name is Frank McLaury, and it takes Kate and Doc nearly a month of watching and waiting at the mine to find him.

McLaury and his brother Tom run with a gang of cattle rustlers, the Clantons, Billy Claiborne and a few others. He uses his brethren to bring women and whiskey and whatever the vampires desire back to the mine, claiming he works for a reclusive industrialist with peculiar tastes. The other cowboys are too drunk or too dumb to question him. They drink all night when they’re not rustling cattle. During the day, the gang rarely leaves camp.

Doc is getting sicker, and he’s getting angrier, and Kate knows that he can’t keep up the constant strain of watching McLaury and killing the man’s masters one by one much longer.

Kate goes to Virgil and begs him to intervene on the county’s behalf. The gang robs stages, steals cattle . . . Kate knows the justice-minded Virgil will take action.

What action, she couldn’t have imagined. Virgil gets his brothers deputy badges, and before any time at all has passed the Clantons and McLaurys are riding into Tombstone spoiling for a fight.

Doc walks with them down the alley behind Fremont Street. He orders Kate to stay inside and away from the windows, but she peers through the sheer curtains as the four men walk together in the October sun.

When Doc and McLaury meet, Doc doesn’t say a word. He raises his shotgun and aims, but he doesn’t fire. Letting McLaury say his last words.

McLaury sneers. “I know what you are, Holliday.” He spits in the dirt. “I smell it on you, and you can call it consumption but we know different. I smell it on you strong as your whore’s perfume.”

Doc fires then, and McLaury goes back like a sack of skin and bones. He drops in the dirt. His living blood spills, red brown like the Georgia dirt of Doc’s home soil.

Kate hits the floor as the Earps, the Clantons and the rest of the cowboys turn the alley into a shooting gallery. She can smell cordite and black powder, and hear screaming.

It’s different than the vampires – it’s human and it comes from a human’s pain. A long while later, when she dares peer over the sill again, only Wyatt and Ike Clanton are left in the street. There are bodies, too. But not Doc’s.

His footfalls when he finally comes to the room are heavy. There’s blood on his collar and on his face, ranging like raindrops into his light gold hair. Doc collapses on the bed and puts his head into his hands. “That was awful,” he mutters. “Just awful.”

Kate goes to him and sits with him while the light changes to night. “It’s done?” she asks finally.

“ We kill the sire, burn the last of the sire’s kin, and it’s done,” he affirms. “Tombstone is a habitable and civilized bastion of the living, once more.”

Kate doesn’t miss the blade-edge tone. Doc doesn’t believe in civilization, any more than the average drover believes in vampires.

“What was he jabbering about? McLaury?” To move, Kate goes about wetting a cloth in the basin, handing it to Doc. He daubs at the blood on his cheek and forehead. The cloth turns pink.

“Nothing.”

“John Henry.” Kate sets the pitcher down with force. “It was not nothing. I could see your face.”

Doc lies back on the bed with his boots still on, after setting his hat carefully aside. He looks as thin and tired as Kate’s ever seen him. Pale as a corpse. Cold as one of them when she goes to at least take off his gun belt and his tie before he has another coughing fit.

“Kate, a man in my line of work has some secrets that he keeps out of necessity, and some that he doesn’t want to keep, but he does anyway, because they’re just harmful, hateful things that do no one any good. You understand?”

Kate sighs. The pistols are heavy as she hangs them next to his hat and she lies next to Doc, curling her body so that it fits to the shape of his, like a gun in a holster. “So you won’t tell me.”

Doc puts one hand in her hair, his card-quick and gun-calloused fingers stroking her cheekbone. He kisses her forehead again. “Not today, my dear.”

“But maybe some day?” She reaches back and undoes the laces of her stays. She didn’t bother putting on a dress when Doc walked out to meet the Earps. He’d need her, when he came back. If.

Doc gives her a quick smile, really only half of one, and it’s a lie but she pretends it’s not. “Someday. Yes.”

Perdition, Arizona

1888

She found him at the card table, and for a moment she couldn’t breathe. He looked so familiar there, so much like Doc, that it took Kate a full half-turn of the clock hands before she could move any further than the rude clapboard contraption that passed for a door.

A pasty-faced Irish boy was playing cards with him, red hair sticking out from his hat every which way. Doc’s eyes never blinked, never wavered from the boy’s wrists where blue veins pulsed as he laid his cards on the table.

“Three jacks, partner. That makes three hands to me . . . ” He trailed off when he spotted Kate’s shadow across his cards and coins.

Doc’s gaze shifted more slowly. His eyes, when he met hers, were as blank as an open sky. Kate’s bile rose and she tasted her meagre breakfast of dried venison and hardtack in the back of her throat.

“You look like my John,” she whispered. The motion was so familiar, but it seemed to take a thousand seconds. Pump the Winchester, squeeze the trigger. Repeat the motion twice more, until the thing sitting at the card table went over backwards, crashing to the ground.

“But you’re not,” Kate said. Doc began to laugh. Clotted blood caught itself up in his teeth, turned his grin to a shark’s grin.

“Going to kill me, Kate? Going to get the stake and the mallet and drive it in yourself, through the gristle and the bone? Going to listen to me scream while you do?”

There was silence in the saloon. Utter silence, the kind you only found in the eyes of storms. Death’s acre, Kate thought. The place where nothing lives, not even sound.

“Ma’am?” The red-headed boy broke the silence. “Maybe you should put that rifle down?”

Doc clambered up, brushing at his coat where the rifle has shot holes. “You ruined my suit, Kate.”

The boy squeaked in shock. “Mister . . . maybe you should sit down. You got shot up pretty bad . . . ”

“Maybe, maybe. Maybe’s a weak word, boy. You should be more direct, you want people to listen.” Doc grinned again. Blood dribbled down his chin.

Kate lifted the Winchester, jerked it. “Outside. The next ones won’t just be lead shot.”

He inclined his head and, before the staring gamblers and cowboys, they moved into the street, a matched pair, step for step.

The moon had climbed high up, shedding cold pale light on the scene. Kate caught eyeshine from behind windows, down side alleys, watching her. Unblinking.

Behind her, the boy followed them into the street. “Ma’am, I don’t rightly know what’s happening here . . . ”

“And you shouldn’t, child.” Kate didn’t take her gaze off Doc. He stood in the middle of the hard-packed street. He wore a gun belt, but his ivory-handled pistols were gone. Doc didn’t need the thing that made him Doc any more.

“I’m not leaving you alone with that . . . man,” the kid piped up.

Kate dared to glance at him. “What’s your name?”

“James Priestly, ma’am. Out of Chattanooga, Tennessee.”

“Well, James Priestly from Tennessee, I suggest you go back into that gin mill and you drink yourself stupid and forget everything that you just saw. For your own peace of mind, forget.”

Priestly’s thin, freckled face crinkled into a frown that was too old for the boy wearing it. “I don’t understand . . . ”

“And you don’t want to. Scoot.”

The kid backed up to the saloon door, but didn’t go inside. Kate turned her attentions back to Doc. He was still, that dead stillness one could only achieve by not being possessed of a heartbeat.

“Well?” Doc called.

“You know why I’m here,” Kate shouted back.

He moved, and the space between them closed, fluid, like air slipping from lungs. Doc’s skinny fingers knotted in Kate’s dusty hair, and his dry cheek pressed against hers. He jerked her neck back, exposing her throat to the sky and the moon. “You can’t do it, Kate. You wouldn’t do it to me.”

Kate looked into Doc’s eyes, cloudy and cataract-covered as they were. “I have to,” she whispered, and felt a twist like a boot in her gut.

Doc’s lips, cold like the night air, passed down her neck. “You won’t kill me, Kate.”

Kate shuddered. She missed him. She’d missed him. Every night, and every morning. Every time she saw a tall slender man in dove grey in the street.

“I will,” she told Doc. “Because I promised you I would.”

Glenwood Springs, Colorado

1887

It is spring when the stage deposits Kate in Glenwood Springs. She and her carpetbag proceed down the street to the Hotel Glenwood, taking in the swelling green on the hillsides and the fragrant air. The desk man at the hotel points her to John’s room.

She’s prepared for the worst, but not for what she sees.

There are buds on the trees outside Doc’s window, and a soft mist clinging to the mountains beyond, but inside the room smells of funerals and graveyards.

Doc is small against the pillows, and his hair has leached of colour along with the rest of him, hanging on his sweaty forehead, lank and grey.

He smiles at her, and presses a stained handkerchief against his lips. “Kate.”

She’s resolved to stay away, stay aloof, but she flies to him and lets him put his free arm about her. “You came,” he says into her hair.

“Of course I did, you stupid man.” He smells sick, of stale sweat and staler soap, but he’s still John. She doesn’t move away.

Doc coughs and she hears the rattle in his chest. “Nobody else did.”

“You know people.” She’s trying to be kind, and she sits up and straightens his blanket, fetches a fresh handkerchief from the neat stack some maid or laundress has left on the dressing table. “They don’t want to see a man dying of consumption. They haven’t seen what we have, so plain death . . . it scares them off.”

“Kate.” Her back is to him as she refolds the handkerchiefs out of want of something to do. She can see him in the mirror, almost a ghost on glass. “Kate, I don’t have consumption.”

Her hands stop. For a movement of a watch, everything stops. “What are you babbling about, John Henry?”

His words are lost in coughing for a long moment, but he wrestles his body still and speaks. “I need you to listen to me, Kate. Without judgment and without anger. I don’t deserve it, but I’ll be damned if I have anyone else to ask. I don’t.”

When she approaches the bed again, he catches her hand. “All I have is you, Kate. I’ve lost every God-damned thing in the world besides.”

Feeling the long shadow of ill omen on her, Kate sits beside him anyway and says, “All right, John. What is it that’s got you in such a sentimental state?”

Doc tells her about the first vampire he killed, in that Georgia swamp. “She didn’t die right away. She got her hooks into me right and proper, and she . . . she fed on me.”

Kate tries to pull away but Doc is suddenly strong again. “It didn’t make me one of them, Kate. I never drank dead blood. She didn’t kill me that night, she just . . . changed me. I could see sharper and shoot straighter. Wasn’t until I spent a few more years in wet air, breathing in graveyard dust at nights, that I realized I was getting sicker, too.”

Doc’s gaze goes to the window, to the mountains. It’s started to rain softly, drops dribbling down the glass. “For the time I had left, I was a man possessed of the skill I needed to kill them. For the time I had left, and it wasn’t any time at all.”

Kate is shaking now, and it’s not out of fear for her neck. “You couldn’t tell me the truth? God damn you, John Holliday.”

He tries another smile. “You’re a little late for that, Kate. I’m damned, sure enough. Figure I have been since I drew breath in this world.”

“What am I supposed to do? Put a stake in you? Douse you in salt and holy water? Maybe I should cut off your head and burn your bones, John. Would that be a fitting end to this life we’ve shared?”

“If you have to,” he says softly. “Her kin are still looking for me. She was old, older than the states or the colonies. And I was a damn fool with a damn fool’s luck, and I killed her. They’ll come and they’ll feed me dead blood if they can.” Another cough, another blossom of blood. “In my weakened state, I can’t do much.”

“No –” Kate starts, but Doc cuts her off. He’s still got that gaze, steel reflecting sun in a high blue sky.

“I know where every vampire killer in the western territories lives and breathes, Kate. I know their weak spots and their gun stashes. I can’t be allowed to become . . . that.”

“You’ll lose yourself,” Kate recites. She can’t help but lay out the litany of the vampire, anticipate what’s coming if John’s enemies find him before he passes. “You’ll only want blood and you’ll hunt us for revenge.”

“Irony is rarely as elegant as the poets would have us think,” Doc mutters. “That’s why you have to do it, Kate. You have to see my corpse nailed into that consecrated ground, buried six feet deep and salted over.”

Kate breathes in, out. She’s going to choke if she has to sit in this sickroom another moment. “When?”

Doc releases his breath, as if there was a doubt she’d do the last thing the man she loved asked of her. “Before winter, I imagine. I’ll send for you.”

Kate goes away, and Doc doesn’t send for her. He dies quietly on his own after a near-coma of two months, unable to speak and barely able to eat. When the pallbearers arrive to carry his bones to Linwood Cemetery, on the hill above Glenwood Springs, his body is not in its bed. There is broken glass and blood, and the undertaker, a friend who understands such things, cables Kate.

She starts hunting him, following a trail of broken bodies from Colorado back to Arizona. Back to the place where everything began to go wrong, among the silver and the sagebrush. She follows him to Perdition, and it is in Perdition that she will lay the vampire who was John Henry Holliday to rest.

One damn way or another.

Perdition, Arizona

1888

Kate and Doc stood for a long time under the moon, her heart beating too fast and his not at all. Finally, he let go of her. “You’re not scared. It’s no fun when you’re not scared.”

“You don’t mean that, John.” Kate works the pain from her neck being twisted, grips her rifle.

“Don’t call me that!” he flares. “You don’t know what I’ve turned into! I’m not your John!”

“Said it myself, didn’t I?” Kate stroked the stock of the Winchester regretfully and then put it away, hanging on her back. “John . . . Doc. I’m not going to fight with you.”

He leered. “Thought you said you came to kill me, you shiftless dried-up old whore.”

“Kill you.” Kate nodded agreement. “Not fight.”

“Unless you have a magic bullet inside that Winchester, don’t waste my evening,” he says. “I’ll not spend my time on nostalgic women.”

Kate looked him in the eye, and then met the eyes of all the watching vampires in turn. “They’re going to kill me,” she said. “If you walk away from me, they’re going to kill you too. I am a killer of dozens of their kind in my own right, and I helped you to burn and ash hundreds more.”

Doc’s teeth showed, and they gleamed under the moon. They were as long as the first joint of her finger and bleached-bone white. They could tear out her throat with a single motion.

Kate didn’t allow herself fear, not that she ever had. The first time she’d seen Doc kill one of them, all the fear had fled, replaced by a calm. Knowing what lived in the night, knowing instead of imagining, was power. It was a power that could chase away fear.

If you were certain of what lived there, and Kate wasn’t certain of much, as she watched Doc lick his lips and smell for her sweat on the wind.

“Well, come ahead then, little woman,” he taunted her. “Turn me into a cinder pile, if you can.”

“You know I can’t,” Kate says quietly. “Not that way. I could never match you at shooting and fighting while you were alive and I sure as hell can’t now.”

“Then I suggest you pack up and try to make it out of town before I get across this distance.” They stood barely an arm’s length apart. “Because if I catch you you’re going to be with me for ever, Kate. I promise you that.”

Kate raised her chin. Raised her voice, too, so it echoed off the rude shacks of Perdition and the mesa beyond. Priestly, the kid, watched. The vampires watched. Kate shut her eyes. “I saw you first, across a crowded beer hall. You were dealing faro. You had gold hair and I swear it was the brightest thing in the room.”

Doc’s voice pitched down until it was nearly a snarl. “Shut your mouth, Kate.”

“You never treated me like I was stupid or frail,” she kept on. “You spoke to me like I was a man and you held me like I was worth something.”

“Kate.” It was a threat this time, and she opened her eyes. Doc’s death mask of a face had gone wary, and around them the vampires were moving closer. She saw shadows now, men in dark preachers’ suits, women in the tattered vestments of whores. Smelled that cloying sick stench of decaying bodies.

“You trusted me with your worst secret, and you trusted I’d believe in all of this,” Kate whispered. “You and I had something that no one else had, Doc, and because of that I fell in love with you.”

She had vowed that she wouldn’t cry over him, but a tear slipped out and she let it go, cutting an arroyo in the dust on her face. “You weren’t some pig-ignorant gambler and you weren’t a cold-blooded killer and you weren’t Doc – you were John Henry Holliday, and only I got to see that.”

She reached out, slowly, slowly and touched his face. It was the same as the air, but she never wanted to let go. “You’re my John,” she repeated in a whisper. “And I know you can still see that.”

For a long moment, longer than any she’d experienced, Kate thought that Doc was going to kill her, simply dip his head forwards and drain her dry.

Then he broke. He grabbed on to her and buried his face in her neck, with no hint of lip or fang. His cold, stiff body racked itself with shuddering.

“Kate,” he whispered. “Kate. I know who I am.”

“Yes,” she murmured, stroking his hair. It was dirty and wanted a brush. “It’s all right, John Henry. We’re going to make it right.”

“I’m so sorry,” John whispered. “For those I killed. For not sending you a message at the end.”

“It’s all right,” Kate repeated. “I’m here for you, John. Just like I promised.”

“They won’t . . . ” He pulled back from her, scanned the figures holding a loose half-circle in the street. “They won’t let me go.”

“They will.” Kate pointed at the vampires, her finger sweeping like a rifle sight. “A life for a life. I stop hunting all those gathered here, and they let us walk out of Perdition, together.”

Kate looked at Priestly, who hadn’t moved. The Tennessee boy had nerve, she would credit him that. “You, kid. Find two horses and then follow us. But don’t come close until I give a word.”

Priestly nodded and slipped off. Doc leaned against Kate, heavy like he would after a night of too much whiskey.

“Where are we going?”

Kate let them pass through the outer cordon of the gathered vampires before she answered. “Away, John. We’re just walking away.”

John understood, and she knew it when his weight pulled away and he walked upright, like the man she’d known him to be. “Thank you, Mary Katharine.”

She nodded her head. “You’re welcome, John Henry.”

Kate walks with John past the cemetery, past the owl gliding slowly above them looking for mice and lizards. Past the cottonwood trees and out onto the mesa. They will walk as far as it takes. Kate will listen to John Henry Holliday’s last words. She has already said her goodbyes.

When it is over, she’ll move on. Colorado has taken her fancy. She doesn’t have a pact with any of the vampires there. Or perhaps back to Kansas, or Missouri. The thick fog of the Mississippi hides night creatures of all stripes, and Kate still has killing years left in her.

But that is the future. Right now, Kate is walking with Doc. They walk in a straight line across the desert floor and beyond the mesa. When it’s time, Kate will sit with Doc on a flat plateau or a stone rearing from the desert floor.

They will sit together, silent. And like so many mornings before, when they’ve been together all night, they’ll watch the sun come up.

* * *

And there you have it, reader – the truth of what happened in Perdition, to Miss Kate Elder (née Mary Katharine Horony) and to Mr John Holliday, plain and accurate as I could make it.

Miss Elder never wept when I came up on her with fresh horses. She took the smaller of the two, thanked me in a most decorous manner, and advised me to forget what I had seen.

I could not accede to her wishes, of course, but in my truthful retelling have tried to be accurate and logical, without giving over to sensation. I swore that morning that I would put away the whiskey bottle and the demons it conjured, and I’ve largely managed. There are worse demons in this world.

I went back to Tennessee and then to the Great Lakes, and along the way I had tried my best to impart the truth, where the truth need be told:

There are things in the night that are not people, and there are people in the night who stand guard. I endeavour only to be one of them, and to watch over the daylight world as those who came before me did, ever vigilant and never resting.

That is the whole of it. That is the truth, and nothing more.

James Priestly

Chicago, Illinois

December 12 1913