Courage Keep Your Heart
courage keep your heart
Supernatural
Samuel Walker, Samuel Colt
600 words
Walker’s Paterson lay on the table, over a spread of diagrams, maps, and plans for modification. Light from the lamp flickered over the barrel, ran down the length of it like oil on water. In the chair across from his own, the captain hunched his shoulders and shivered only slightly.
“The nights are still cold, here,” Walker said. “Nothing at all like Texas.” He sipped his bourbon and watched him over the tilt of his glass. “Have you been there?”
He thought of the heat of India, tried to imagine that searing sun without the oppressive moisture; like being pressed everywhere with desperate hands, a fist down his mouth whenever he spoke. It had been like drowning on dry land. He couldn’t imagine it, that freedom. He said, “I remember Calcutta.”
He’d seen horrible things there. The lumped, disfigured faces of the lepers; men missing fingers, legs; the open sores. Their terrifying female deity, impossible dark arms and bloodthirsty tongue. An incomprehensible rot, hand in hand with such beauty. And he’d seen other things there, too. Things he had never told anyone.
Walker was watching him, the light from the lamp seeming to turn his tanned face unnaturally waxen, too smooth, too elegant for a soldier; and there was a halfguarded consideration on his face that frightened him.
He wiped his hand over his eyes, his face. When he opened his eyes again, the captain’s look was tempered, but not gone.
“What happened in Calcutta?” Walker’s voice was so gentle, and the drink was easing him. It was easy to answer. To tell him. About the empty house, the skin bubbling and blacking her open mouth. How she had reached out her arms as if to beg for help, as if to immolate him in her fire. And how she had passed right through him; and when he had turned, she had gone.
He felt his throat tighten, his neck prickle with the telling. The fire on the wick bent in an unfelt current. Shadows swelled, danced, and fell back again.
The captain stood and stretched. Walked to the table and refilled his glass.
He felt slightly ridiculous for having told him. He was a man of science. His friend a man of action. What use had either of them for ghost stories? “There are enough real horrors in the world,” he said. “Why the need to manufacture such wild visions? Why did I see what I did? Was it the heat? Was it that place?” He shook his head, not expecting an answer.
Walker replaced the empty glass in his hand with the one now filled and briefly squeezed his shoulder; he gulped the liquor gratefully, savoring not the taste this time, but the burn. “I’m a fool,” he said. “Listen to me, a frightened, delusional old man already at the age of thirty.” He shook his head again, as if he could shake his shame free, and tried to smile. He felt his lips tremble instead, and clenched his jaw around his failure.
The captain reseated himself, still with that burning, calculating look. He leaned forward, hands steepled between his knees. In a level, sober voice, Samuel Walker spoke.
“What you saw was very real.” He waited for a reaction, and when he received none, he continued. “These things are real; and ghosts are the least of our problems. Mr. Colt.” He quirked his lips in a brief smile. “Samuel,” he amended, and his eyes twinkled at the familiarity, their shared name. “Tell me. What do you know about demons?”
