jagged; and the eyes were ruby red; and though the killer’s face had been pale, it was nothing next to the inhuman chalk whiteness of the face at the window; and what hung around that face was not the green branches of the willows, but a filthy black mane of hair.
It was one of the men of the hills, she realized, one of the aboriginal people of the West, who had lived in the land when it was still formless and unmade.
The expression on the face was solemn, still.
She calmed her breathing. Her foot started to sting.
She was in her underclothes—but then the figure at the window was apparently naked, under his mane, and it seemed silly to stand on ceremony. She said, “Good afternoon.”
He reached out a hand. The arm—beneath that black mane—was long, stick thin, and oddly articulated. The fingers were like a necklace of bones. With one black fingernail it began to tap on the glass.
Perhaps the expression was not solemn, exactly, but simply unreadable—stiff as a crudely carved statue. Now she noticed that his jaw and the protrusions of his throat were quivering, as if with tremendous excitement. She wondered if he was able to speak.
The black fingernail drummed a rhythm on the glass. It was not simple tapping; it had the quality of music, or language, or ritual. It grew quickly faster and faster and more complex, and a second nail joined it, developing surprising polyrhythms. Then it stopped; then it began again. The red eyes continued to watch her. The sound was oddly lovely. A song, always repeating. She stepped closer to the window. The finger struck a hard beat, and the glass cracked—
She shrieked and jumped back. In the same moment, a big man in a white shirt came into view and struck the Hillman on the back with a stick. “Hurry up! Move on! You leave her alone!” He yanked on the Hillman’s chain and dragged him stumbling away from the window. “Sorry, ma’am.” He tipped his hat. “Won’t happen again.”
They moved away, and the rest of the Hillfolk gang came into view, half a dozen of them, and almost at once she lost track of which had been the one at her window.
What had he wanted from her?
The golden pocket watch ticked quietly on her bedside table, where it sat on top of her copy of the Child’s History and beside her flask of nerve tonic. She picked it up, more for comfort than for anything else, and was shocked to see that the whole strange communication had taken place in a matter of moments. It had felt like hours.
Negotiations with Mr. Bond went poorly.
He was a big man, aggressive, with a bald and sunburned head and a boxer’s body stuffed into braces and a sweat-stained shirt, and he looked entirely out of place sitting at a desk in a little warehouse office doing bookkeeping, but that was how Liv found him. He barked:
“Don’t need passengers. Going to be a hard trip. Where do you think you are?”
“Yes, Mr. Bond, everyone tells me the journey is dangerous. That fact has been more than adequately impressed upon me. I can pay.”
He named a sum that was quite outrageous, and when her face fell, he laughed.
“They say you’re a doctor—know anything about horses?”
“No.”
“Can you set a broken bone, at least?”
“I’m not that kind of doctor, Mr. Bond.”
“Then we don’t need you.”
Maggfrid was waiting outside Bond’s warehouse. He looked so downcast when he saw Liv’s face that she laughed and impulsively hugged him. “Smile, Maggfrid! Mr. Harrison says good things come to those who keep smiling.”
She’d read Harrison’s pamphlet in her hotel room that afternoon. It didn’t take her long—the print was large and the thoughts it expressed simple to the point of vacuity. It was titled Samson Smiles’ Commonplace Book, Or, The Book of the New Thought. Mr. Smiles himself, pictured in black-and-white on the frontispiece, was a well-dressed and muttonchopped gentleman whose face bore an expression of almost holy serenity. His Commonplace Book consisted of short repetitive maxims on the virtues of confidence, enthusiasm, perseverance, self-help, and moral character. Hope is the mother of success, for who so hopes strongly has within him the gift of miracles. Liv had found it inane. The world smiles on a man who smiles! Was this what passed for thought out here? Seize the day! Was this what passed for religion? The world is what we make it.