Anyone else walking through the fabled batwing doors of Gambler’s Rest would have taken one look at the ghoulish inhabitants and turned around, resolving to seek friendlier company among the wolves and rattlesnakes of the forest.
But Lonnie had come too far for that.
A soldier in moldering bronze armor, double-headed ax protruding from his face, set down his dice and fixed Lonnie with a stony, one-eyed gaze. The man he was throwing against, an ashen-faced starveling covered by the barest threads of a loincloth, mirrored the gesture—neck purple with the evidence of strangulation. A motley assortment of outlaws, knights, and sailors—all dead, all horrible—put their cards aside to leer at the intruder.
Lonnie didn’t care. He barely saw them.
He had traded stories with sharps and swindlers across the territories, consulted maps, searched forests acre by acre, and dug up no less than three graves—each one an unadorned wooden cross marking the ignominious resting place of a man killed with cards in hand. He had found the way, alive. And though a hundred faces stared at him, he was interested in only one.
Lonnie stepped forward and the doors swung shut behind him, doing nothing to keep out the biting winter wind—indeed, it was colder inside than out. His eyes flitted from table to table, eliminating each as a possibility. He lingered on a face, hoping it was hers—but it was some other dead woman, with a curse in her eyes, and for a moment he could not look away. Terror and despair gripped him and he cast his eyes upward, away from the horror on all sides—and there she was.
A woman, standing stock-still, with braided brown hair and an oval face. Bloodless bullet wounds in her chest and shoulder. She stood on a balcony that coiled endlessly into the sky, shoulder-to-shoulder with other dreadful specimens—headless, limbless, drowned, burned—and though dirt-brown icicles hung from the ancient banisters, Lonnie could not see her breath.
“Evelyn!” he shouted.
“Lonnie!”
It was the way she always used to say it. Every husband’s name gets sanded down to a pattern by years of familiar use. The “ah,” flat and extended, dropped into the “ee” at just the right moment, and Lonnie realized that no one had said his name quite right for ten years.
But Evelyn had not moved her mouth.
It was not her voice.
Behind him.
Lonnie turned and had no trouble picking out the one who spoke. Every gambler still watched him, but one man had fire behind his eyes. He wore a faded blue soldier’s uniform—not the Union bluecoat, but something older that Lonnie could not identify. Ragged golden epaulets clung to his shoulders and tarnished silver buttons lined his front. He sat at a poker table with dead men, but seemed almost alive. More than alive. The others moved slowly, stared without intelligence, gripped cards with stiff fingers. This man—though a deep triangular wound to the neck proved he was one of the dead—positively glowed.
“Evelyn isn’t there anymore,” he said.
“What happened to her?” said Lonnie.
The man raised his hand—a sweeping gesture that dismissed his companions from the table. He was too animated for this place. It was his eyes more than anything—swirling, burning, shifting and blinking constantly—somehow expressing too much. His entire existence seemed in poor taste. He pointed toward an empty chair, then began gathering cards back into the deck.
“Do you know what we play for here?” said the man.
“What happened to Evelyn?” said Lonnie.
“I’m getting there! Look at the table. What’s missing?”
The old table was worn and stained. The surface of the wood was cracked, and through the cracks Lonnie could see history—gilt-bronze, alabaster stone—surfaces through time. It was less of a table than it was the idea of a table. It was empty except for a pair of bronze scales. No food, no drink, no money.
Nothing to bet with.
“You can’t imagine how boring it is to be dead,” said the man, hitting the table. “A gambler killed with cards in hand can’t find his way to heaven. We end up in this place—neither here nor there. Unresolved, like a coin in the air. Some unlucky souls have been here for thousands of years. We’re stuck here with our lives behind us, and there’s only one currency—memory.”
The man tapped his head.
“New memories don’t stick well in a dead brain. All we can do, forever, is gamble for other people’s memories. And I’m the best gambler here. That’s why Evelyn stands on the balcony with the unmoving dead—I won her memories. She overplayed her hand. Now she’s in my head.”
Lonnie had heard of this place—he had gathered scraps of legends, tall tales, half-forgotten songs and stories—but he had heard nothing about this. He met the dead man’s ever-blinking eyes, but they were unreadable, even to him.
“I don’t believe you.”
“I knew your name, didn’t I? I remember traveling with you from town to town. I know all your little signals for fixing card games—and I know you’re hopeless at poker without them. I know every one of your tells. And I know that despite all this, once I tell you that you can win Evelyn back, you’ll risk everything to do it. Even though you’ll lose.”
Lonnie sat, watching the man closely. The man pulled a silver coin out of the interior pocket of his coat. On one side there was a lion holding a sword, on the other there was a crown and a foreign script Lonnie could not read.
“Tell me how to win her back.”
The man moved the set of scales so it was directly between them.
“I’ll show you. Think of a memory.”
“What?”
“Something small to start. You walked through the snow on your way here. Think of the cold. I haven’t been cold for years.”
Lonnie remembered his walk to the door—the sting in his ears, the crunch of the snow underfoot, the wind howling through the trees and gnawing his skin—and as he concentrated, his side of the brass scale began to descend, as if weighed down.
The man nodded.
“I remember running through a desert valley once, sword at my side, with an army of swift men. There was somewhere we had to go. I don’t know what came before or after—this is an old memory, not one of mine—but the stone was sharp and I remember the cry of the birds. I’m through with it.”
The brass scales equalized.
“50/50 odds,” said the man. “No tricks, just luck. Men have gambled this way since before the beginning of history. Some of the dead here still roll sticks and bones, though they barely remember why. But I remember.”
The man held the coin in front of him.
“Call it. Lion or line? Heads or tails?”
“Tails.”
The man flipped the coin, and as it hung in the air, Lonnie could feel the outlines of both memories superimpose—the urgency of his walk to the saloon door, the desperation of the desert run, the bitter cold, the beating sun, the aching legs, the hunger, the fear. Then the man caught the coin, slapping it on his wrist with more dexterity than was appropriate for a dead man.
Heads.
And suddenly Lonnie’s mind was empty. He looked frantically around the room—face to horrible face, table to moldering table, balcony to forbidding balcony—grasping for details like a drowning man grasping for driftwood. He was in Gambler’s Rest. He had crossed to the world between worlds, he had passed through the saloon door—but everything between those memories was gone.
The man staggered back as if he had been shot, then shivered with cold—or maybe pleasure.
“That’s the stuff!” he said. “That packs a wallop! I’ve played for dead memories, but a living memory? I felt that in my bones!”
He snatched up the deck of cards and began to shuffle them, speaking quickly.
“You could give Evelyn all her memories back and walk out of here together—you just have to win them from me first. Five-card draw is your game, right? Don’t bother answering. I know everything about you.”
Lonnie was himself again, but there was an absence inside him and it was sending him into a panic. He took a long, shuddering breath—willing his heart to stop racing, fighting to remain rational.
“How do I know you have all of Ev’s memories?”
“I’ll tell you. It’s because I know the way out. I have no use for it—I’ve won lifetimes of memory, reduced these people to almost nothing. I’m more alive here than I’d ever be on earth. You must have found the way, too—after all, you came here alive. But Evelyn didn’t know the way. So she gambled every treasured moment, every single one of her memories, trying to get back to you. You should feel flattered.”
“Where did we meet?”
“A steamboat. In Montana.”
“Where did we get married?”
“Lago.”
“What was the last thing she said to me?”
“I don’t remember. ‘Pass the water,’ I think. It didn’t seem important at the time. Isn’t that the way? They never know what’s about to happen. There’s never any time to prepare.”
Lonnie was breathing very hard now. He tried to read the man’s face again, but it was inscrutable. Hundreds of scraps of personality danced behind his eyes, informed by thousands of years of memory. With every blink, they shifted—expressing something new. Something more than human.
The man shoved the cards toward Lonnie.
“Cut the deck,” he said.
Ten years ago Lonnie might have been able to cheat—misdirect the man and fix the deck somehow. His hands had been quick—quicker than most men’s eyes, if they weren’t watching too closely. But his fingers had lost their memory. He had hardly touched a deck of cards in all that time—not without Evelyn. He needed a partner. She had the head for numbers and the heart for danger. After what happened, how could he carry on alone?
The man watched closely as Lonnie cut the deck, as though he could tell what Lonnie had been thinking—or knew him so well that he could guess.
“Ante up,” said the man.
But Lonnie could not think of a single memory trivial enough to risk. He remembered so much—great triumphs and awful tragedies, each one essential to the story of their lives. He tried to focus on one normal day, starting from the beginning. Something mundane.
“Coffee. Coffee together.”
Even before Lonnie’s end of the scale fell, he knew he had wagered too much. He used to wake up and make coffee when they were on the road. Ev woke up not long after. She’d smile. Sometimes they’d talk, but more often they would watch the sunrise—a luxury that they could afford even in hard times, even without a roof over their heads. It was a little thing, maybe, but the thought of letting it go brought Lonnie nearly to tears.
The man laughed again—a profane sound, even for this horrible place.
“Coffee together? How sentimental. I’ll put that up too.”
The scales equalized.
“I wonder what it will be like to have two memories of the same event,” said the man, dealing five cards to each of them. “Maybe it’ll be like a stereoscope—greater depth, I mean. Or maybe I’ll just go mad.”
Lonnie picked up his cards, trying to keep his face blank. Five cards—a pair of nines, the rest useless. A tricky hand. Evelyn would have known what to do. Could he win with a pair of nines? Or should he fold and try again, giving up the memory he had put on the scale? Could he give it up—even something as little as that?
No.
He had already lost her once.
One memory had followed Lonnie through ten years of searching—driving him when he grew tired, never allowing him to rest. That memory filled him now, and—almost before he had decided what to do—the scale drew it from his mind.
“It all happened so fast,” he said. “We were careless—we had been winning too much that night. Ev was blinking at me, signaling a bad hand, and someone figured it out. I couldn’t tell what was happening—there was a loud noise and something on the ground. I thought someone had knocked over a chair. Then he tried to shoot me and I ran. I thought she was behind me.”
As he spoke, Lonnie could feel Evelyn’s presence behind him, though he didn’t dare look. Her sightless eyes burned into the back of his head. Lonnie didn’t flinch.
“I remember,” said the man. “She saw him draw but didn’t have time to react. First bullet in the shoulder, second bullet in the chest. They felt like two sledgehammers. She died in seconds—there was nothing you could have done. Still, the last thing she saw was you running out the door.”
The scales balanced.
Lonnie discarded three cards and drew three. The dead man discarded nothing. Two pair—nines and tens. Not great. Not terrible.
Lonnie barely looked at them.
It didn’t matter.
He had first met Evelyn across a poker table. She won a fortune from him that day, with an audacious bluff and nothing in her hand. Just determination. Lonnie had that. Ten years of it. He would never leave Evelyn behind again. He stared into the dead man’s shifty, unreadable eyes.
An audacious bluff…
“I’ll bet all my memories of her,” he said.
Lonnie tried to hold it all in his head at once: the good, the bad, everything in between. Rich times, with pockets full of stolen money. Poor times, with hardly a piece of stale bread between them. Sitting across the table as opponents—the day she’d first said hello. Sitting across the table as partners—the day she didn’t know to say goodbye. The scales took it all.
For a while, neither of them spoke.
Then the man smiled.
“I’ll raise,” he said. “I bet Evelyn. All her memories—her whole life.”
The scales moved again—heavier now on the man’s side than Lonnie’s.
“You’ll have to go all in,” he said. “A life for a life. If you win, you’ll get her back. If you lose, you’ll be a shell like her—stuck on that balcony, forever. Either way, at least you’ll be together.”
The man leaned back in his chair, and though his eyes swirled with a hundred different emotions, Lonnie thought he could see triumph. It was over. The man had called the bluff. He had probably stacked the deck from the beginning—Lonnie would have watched closer, if he had been thinking straight. He had come so close and none of it mattered. He was about to lose everything.
Unless…
There was another way to finish this. Lonnie knew the way out. He had stood at a crossroads, followed the lonely cry of the jay, slept for a day and a night under a grafted apple tree. He could fold. He would lose the memories of Evelyn—the memories that had dogged his steps for ten long years, that had robbed him of his joy. They were just memories. They weren’t her—they were nothing.
He would start again.
Lonnie searched the man for any hint of doubt, hoping against hope that there was another way—but there was nothing. He drew in breath, preparing to say the word that would end his journey. The man just kept blinking at him, incessantly, inhumanly—too much energy, too much life.
Blink.
Blink.
Blink.
And suddenly Lonnie understood.
It was Evelyn.
Lonnie had been wrong all along. Evelyn wasn’t behind him, accusing him with a blind stare. She had been across the table, just like always. She was part of this man, seeing through his eyes—and she had signaled Lonnie the same way she had on their last day together. The man had nothing in his hand. He was bluffing.
This time Lonnie didn’t hesitate.
“Call.”
Lonnie threw his cards onto the table, revealing his two pair. The man had stopped blinking, and his face—once so animated—was suddenly very grave. His fingers lost their strength and his cards fell, landing face up on the table.
No pair. Nothing.
Lonnie had won.
Suddenly Lonnie’s mind was swimming with memories—most of them familiar, yet slightly different. Days and nights together. Moments he had treasured and moments he hadn’t realized he had forgotten. He could have spent days standing completely still—holding it all in, understanding her completely—but he could feel each memory tugging away from him, drawn toward Evelyn like iron filings drawn toward a magnet. He let them go.
And Evelyn woke up.
She smiled. It was the same smile that Lonnie remembered. The one he never thought he would see again. He could hardly believe it.
“I was worried you couldn’t see me,” she said.
Lonnie couldn’t keep the tears from his eyes.
Evelyn climbed down from the balcony, and they held each other for a long time. Then, hand in hand, they walked out the batwing doors of Gambler’s Rest—away from the horrible man, the dead faces, the despair. She was very pale, but color returned to her cheeks with every step—a little farther, and two lead bullets fell gently into the snow—farther still, her wounds knitted and she began to shiver. Lonnie could see her breath. He gave her his coat.
It was hard to see through the swirling snow, but the sun had just begun to rise.