An occasional drunkard, Nevis had drifted west in search of justice and financial restitution without finding either. His aim had been to reach San Francisco, where the cosmopolitan air of so great a city would surely revive his spirits, but he had progressed no further than Denver. He told himself the invigorating air of a town one full mile above sea level would be an acceptable substitute for San Francisco; he would breathe alpine clouds rather than salty fog, and be spiritually refurbished as a result of such Olympian ingestions. That had been three years before, in 1881, and Nevis was still awaiting the arrival of the muse, or recognition of his talents. He made a living for himself as assistant to an inferior painter much sought after by the newly rich mining potentates of the Rockies, and was able to keep his tongue and his envy in check only by way of liberal amounts of alcohol. The hack he worked for was without even a shred of ability, in Nevis’s opinion, yet the fool was becoming rich himself through the patrons he monopolized.
One night, particularly enraged by criticism from his employer for having mixed a combination of colors not precisely to his exacting standards, Nevis began sketching caricatures of the man in various positions of abuse, subjecting him to the amorous attentions of jackasses, policemen with large batons, brutish sailors and inventive eunuchs, a bevy of vengeful furies engaged on Nevis’s behalf to right the wrongs perpetrated against him by the world in general and the hack in particular. He wielded his charcoals in a bar that in recent months had become his favorite retreat, and soon attracted a host of admiring critics, some of whom were able to recognize the butt of his ill humor. Nevis sold all of his sketches to pay off his bar bill, which had become a subject of dispute between himself and the proprietor. Feeling much better for having vented his spleen for actual profit, Nevis passed out on the floor.
Two days later, Nevis was unemployed. Choice selections of his barroom artistry had been forwarded to Denver’s most prominent social portrait painter, and the hack was neither impressed nor amused by his apprentice’s betrayal. When he learned that the sheets in his hand represented only a fraction of Nevis’s work in a similar vein, his rage had been a terrible thing, and Nevis was glad to quit his position as the hack’s helper. It was liberation of a kind, and he celebrated by establishing a new bar bill at the scene of his creative crime. The celebration lasted until the following afternoon, at which time Nevis collapsed from an excess of liquor. He was put to bed by the proprietor’s wife, for whom, while still relatively sober, he had executed a quick portrait emphasizing what little beauty she retained at the age of fifty-one.
Nevis returned to cruel sobriety the next day, and found an unknown man by his bed. The man was handsome, middle-aged, and had about him the aroma of wealth Nevis had grown accustomed to during his former employer’s dealings with the elite of Denver. Nevis told himself not to be intimidated, even under such circumstances as this.
“Good day, Mr. Dunnigan.”
“Yes …” said Nevis, aware that his response was not appropriate, aware also of the tremendous thuddings within his head.
“Are you unwell, Mr. Dunnigan?”
“No …”
“That is good news, sir, because I have an unprecedented offer to make you.”
“Offer …?”
“An offer, Mr. Dunnigan, of work.”
“Work?”
“On a scale hitherto unknown in our fair city, sir. Work of an altogether historic character. A first, as they say. Would you be interested in embracing such a project?”
“I … I would.”
“I have overstepped myself. One moment, please.” His guest took from his creaseless jacket a sheet of paper and unfolded it for Nevis’s inspection. “This is your artistic handiwork, sir?” The hack, in this particular instance, was being sodomized by a gleeful centaur.
“Uh … yes.”
“I realize this is merely a quick study, but I must ask you, Mr. Dunnigan, if you are acquainted with the broader canvas, the more, how shall I say, heroically proportioned type of thing.”
“Sir, I am. Sir, are you familiar with a study entitled Venus Revealed, which can be found in abundance throughout the drinking establishments of the land, and elsewhere?”
“Ah, yes, the delightful lady among the pillows. You are the author of that work?”
“Of the original, which was superior in every way to the copies that abound without my permission.”
“An unfortunate situation, to be sure. I have heard it voiced that art is its own reward, but I’m a practical man, Mr. Dunnigan, and I expect most painters are also. That is why you may be assured that your work for me, should you accept the task, will be rewarded according to my satisfaction with the finished result. A businessman’s agreement is what I require, on paper, and signed by an attorney. Are you averse to such an arrangement?”
“No indeed, sir, so long as rights to reproduction are retained by myself. Once bitten, twice shy, as the anonymous wise man said.”
“Mr. Dunnigan, I cannot agree to that stipulation, nor need you, when the nature of the work is made clear.”
“I listen with open ears, sir.”
“It may be best if I take you directly to the site you’ll be required to work in.”
“Site? You mean a studio will be provided?”
“Not exactly. Can you rise, Mr. Dunnigan? I’m able to provide lunch before we view the room.”
“Room?”
“Sir, just as Michelangelo was commissioned by the Pope to cover the walls and ceiling of the Sistine Chapel in Rome, so have I commissioned you for a task of similarly epic proportions. Well, it may be that I exaggerate a little.”
“A church?”
“No, Mr. Dunnigan, not a church.”
Her visits from the tall man were becoming less frequent now that Omie was ten. He had flown through her dreams like a black eagle, with his long flapping coat and the broad hat that threw his face into shadow so deep she could see only his eyes, bright with a will to mete out death, and the iron bar that ran between his teeth. She had wondered, during his first visitations, why he kept it there, that iron bar spearing his cheeks like some bizarre tribal ornament, but it became clear, as she saw him again and again during the hours of night, that he kept the bar in place simply because it was so very ugly; the tall man wanted the world to see his punishment, but Omie could never determine its cause. Sometimes he saw her, as she saw him, but never for very long. She knew from his ugly, penetrated face that he was scared of her, just as she was of him, and decided it must be on account of her blue mark. Both of them were being punished, and neither knew the reason why.
Omie was known to sleepwalk around the mansion that was called Elk House by its owners, and the Big House by everyone else. It stood above Glory Hole like a brooding sentinel, its massive escarpments of brick and stone as tall as castle walls, its gables and cupolas so high they caught the winds that howled across the great divide and broke them into airborne moanings and whimperings that could sometimes be heard the length of the valley on Christmas Day, when the ore crushers were silenced, the smelters left to simmer untended. Her nocturnal perambulations were known to the town, word of them taken there by servants. It was said that Omie Brannan stood or walked or even ran full tilt along the corridors in complete darkness, demanding of some invisible entity that it reveal itself. It was because of the blue mark on her face, most people agreed; any girl so blighted would naturally become a little crazy, and the problem would likely worsen as she grew older and became aware that nature had not outfitted her for matrimony, except, of course, to a fortune hunter willing to disregard her mental and physical deficiencies for the sake of laying hands on a part of the Brannan millions.
There were other disquieting rumors about the girl with the blue mark, and many of them accounted for the steady turnover in staff at Elk House. Omie’s eye, despite its inky shadowing, was able to see what other eyes could not, by natural law, ever be aware of. Omie’s eye saw events that had yet to occur, and Omie’s m
outh was bound to describe them, whether it was the imminent demise of the cook’s cousin in Maryland, the gardener’s unfortunate accident when a bough from one of the trees broke off in a storm and crushed his arm, or the way in which a stray dog would cause the matched palominos of her own mother’s carriage to bolt along Brannan Boulevard, injuring an elderly woman who happened to be crossing in front of the team.
These and other incidents of their kind upset and mystified all who heard of them, but at least Omie’s predictions, intoned in a hollow voice on some occasions, simply remarked upon in passing at others, could be relegated to the category of the spirit world’s penetrations into the realm of physical matter, in accordance with its own baffling precepts. What to make, though, of the stories concerning Omie’s ability to cause objects of known weight and substance to dance in the air like soap bubbles? These were powers beyond common understanding or acceptance. The new scientific age was under way, with its mechanical marvels and materialistic biases at full throttle; godless, perhaps, but not without consolation for the thinking man. Where did Omie fit into this modern scheme of things? Neither ectoplasmic fish nor corporeal fowl, she was a creature in between, the fleshly conduit for hidden things, nameless concepts, a creature with feet on different planes, and people were afraid of her.
Zoe had seen what Omie could do, and the ability her daughter possessed was a wondrous gift, in Zoe’s opinion, certainly not anything to fear. She had several times witnessed Omie moving furniture around a room without a single piece ever touching the floor until it was positioned according to the girl’s wants. Once seen, the ponderous aerial dance of sofas and tables, bureaus and chairs, was not to be forgotten. There had been only one mishap, when Zoe came upon Omie about her mysterious business for the first time, shifting an ornate vase filled with freshly cut flowers from one side of the living room to the other; Omie had lost her concentration when she knew herself to be observed, and allowed the vase to crash onto the parquet floor. Since that time, Omie would perform on demand to amuse her mother. She was not called upon to do the same for Leo Brannan.
Leo had become used to his stepdaughter’s ability to foretell future events, but her defiance of gravity was quite another matter, and he forbade any such levitations in his presence, warning her that to continue these performances would strain her mental capacity to the point of permanent enfeeblement. He assumed the power stemmed from her brain, and Omie did not inform him otherwise. She did confide to Zoe that her technique involved a separate pair of invisible hands that extended on invisible arms from the pit of her stomach, not her head, as Leo maintained. The arms would grow to any length Omie required, and the hands were very large indeed, about the size of soup tureens, and had an indeterminate number of fingers. Zoe told her not to tell Leo. Leo could not be distracted from the never-ending business of running the mines by anything of a distressing nature, or he would become morose and incommunicative. Whenever Leo withdrew into himself, as he seemed more often to do nowadays, everyone at Elk House suffered his protracted silences. It was better to keep things secret from him, so they could all live together without discord.
Her new husband had permitted Zoe to name her discovery above Glory Hole, and she had called it the Deer Lick Mine. She wanted to name the company that grew from it the Salt of the Earth Mining Company, but Leo said this was too whimsical for so serious a venture, and insisted that it be named Brannan Mining, which to Zoe’s way of thinking lacked all poetry, but she did not object. He did allow her to name many of the other shafts that soon were sunk on claims adjacent to the first, to pull from the ground more and more of the gold that laced the side of the valley like a fabulous web. The Wildcat, the Sinbad, the Flatiron and the Grand Mogul: these and lesser shafts drew to the surface a grade of ore unparalleled in richness. A spur line of the Denver and Rio Grande Railroad was extended from Leadville to Glory Hole in record time, and flatcars hauled by three and four locomotives brought in massive banks of machinery needed to pulverize the naked rock and render it tractable to further stamping, until the fist-sized chunks of ore were reduced to pellet size for amalgamation with mercury to extract their veins of brilliance. More trainloads of steel arrived, and a smelting works was built, from whose controlled infernos the most precious of metals ran in molten streams. These were channeled into ingot molds, there to lie in blazing bricks that slowly cooled to the sullen bronze color of solid gold. The new and already grimy factories of Glory Hole occupied one slope, facing the other, dotted with mine shafts. In time, the town and its environs spread almost to the valley’s rim, where Elk House loomed against the sky.
Leo bought out all his competitors, most notably the Rocky Mountain Mining Corporation, within a year, whether their claims were worth the money offered or not, and so came to own the valley that ran like a filthy crease among the untouched peaks. The trains arrived each day, panting and snorting along impossible ledges, toiling across trestle bridges built with the last of the native lumber to span chasms and gorges, and they unloaded from every car tons of coal from the mines of Durango, to be shoveled into the furnaces that powered Leo’s steam-driven engines of wealth—the pithead cable lifts; the conveyor belts that tirelessly carried crushed ore to the stampers; the smelters that forged bricks of gold. Day and night, smoke rose from the chimneys, even on Sunday; the crucibles of wealth were maintained at white heat by men working shifts around the clock, and the ingots that rose in million-dollar stacks were taken by train out of the valley under armed escort, destined for the treasuries of the nation. The Brannans were the richest family in Colorado, and Glory Hole was their town.
If Omie was prone to chasing ghosts along the corridors of Elk House by night, then Zoe was thought to be pale and uncomfortable enough to have seen several herself. The mistress of the house was not known for her friendly ways, nor was she considered mean or cruel. She was without friends, since no other family of similar status lived closer than Denver, and her sole joy appeared to be her matched horses and her carriage, which she drove with spirit along the mountain roads. Zoe had no interest in the day to day business of maintaining so large a residence. She allowed the servants to be directed toward this task or that by a capable individual named Mrs. Scoville, for whom Zoe’s lack of concern with all matters domestic was an opportunity to conduct herself in the manner of a regional tyrant. Mrs. Scoville so intimidated the staff of polishers and washers and cooks and maids, they did not even invent an unsavory sobriquet for her, out of fear she would somehow hear of it and descend upon them with her eyes of steel and chin of granite. And yet it was known, since there were witnesses, that Mrs. Scoville, the scourge of Elk House, was deathly afraid of someone half her height and only a fraction of her weight.
Omie spent much of her time upstairs, and this was the reason Mrs. Scoville spent much of her time on the ground floor. On those occasions when Omie descended to visit the garden—a series of walled terraces hugging the valley wall—Mrs. Scoville would absent herself from any part of the house in a line extending from the bottom of the staircase to the outer door leading to the garden, in order that she might avoid meeting with the tiny witch. Omie was one of Satan’s little imps in ribbons and curls, and it was bad luck even to come near her, let alone cross her path or be touched by her hand, or the hem of her petticoats. Only the power Mrs. Scoville wielded among the servants kept her from packing her bags, but such courage as it took to live beneath the same black slate roof as the devil’s emissary was not summoned easily.
Mrs. Scoville saw it as no more than her perfect right, a kind of compensation, to remove a portion of the budget set aside in hard cash for necessary household purchases, and hide it in a bag beneath her bed. A dollar here, five dollars there: it was all earned by having to live with her immortal soul in constant jeopardy. It was entirely possible that the imp in pink would one day startle her with an act so outrageous it would provoke a heart attack, and if that happened, Mrs. Scoville knew her soul would jump right out of her body and be s
eized by the invisible presence Omie was known to court and cajole and follow on flying shoes through the corridors and rooms. So she stole, and over the course of time managed to secrete in her hideaway an accumulation of dollars totaling more than nine hundred. Mrs. Scoville loved her treasure trove of rustling paper, and would often drag the leather satchel from beneath her bed, even when she had no new bills to swell its contents, and set out the notes according to their denomination, and smooth their crinkled faces. When she had two thousand dollars saved, and not before, she would quit that place of unnatural occurrences and set herself up with a respectable boarding-house in Baltimore, the city of her birth. It was a good and handy thing that the mistress of Elk House had no interest at all in taking care of the domestic budget. Mrs. Scoville was even responsible for ordering the hay and feed Mrs. Brannan’s precious nags required, and she stole from those moneys also, because not to do so would be to allow the presence of evil in the world to go uncontested. The imp’s family were aware of her impishness, and yet did nothing to have her saved, so it was only right that it was their money (only a tiny smidgen of it, after all) Mrs. Scoville siphoned off into the bag beneath her bed. God surely understood. She would run a clean and Christian boardinghouse when the time came, and would allow neither drinking nor smoking on a Sunday, as proof of her thievery’s good intent.
“Sorrowful” was the adjective most often applied to Zoe by those who did not know her, and these were many, since she socialized scarcely at all with the outside world. Her face bore the stamp of pride, it was true, but not pride of the haughty or arrogant kind; Zoe’s pride was drawn from the need to conceal her disappointment with life. Her husband was the source of her sadness, or rather, Leo’s own disappointment over Zoe’s inability to give him living children caused him to look upon her with less affection than before. Three miscarriages in three years had soured his love. Where another man might have been drawn closer to his wife by their shared suffering, Leo allowed himself to blame Zoe. She had given birth to Omie without difficulty, and borne a healthy son (Zoe kept from Leo the fact that Omie was not Bryce Aspinall’s child, but the product of rape), so it was difficult for him to understand why she could not do the same for him. As his patience thinned, he grew less inclined to mourn along with his wife for the latest of their partially formed progeny. Leo had given her his name, and become a father to her daughter by another man; it was little enough to ask of her that she give him a son in return. But she did not, and he took himself away from her through the day while he managed the huge mining operation that bore his name, a name and fortune he could not hand on to a male heir, and in the evening he seldom arrived home in time to eat with Zoe and Omie. His wife was often asleep in her bedroom when Leo climbed the stairs at last to his own. Avoidance, subtle yet hurtful, was his stratagem, but Leo would have denied this.