Free Fevre Dream by George R.R. Martin

steamers Marsh knew of that didn’t carry freight, only passengers. He couldn’t see for a minute how they turned a profit, but that wasn’t important. What was important was how fast they were. The
Northerner
had set a new record for the Louisville—St. Louis run back in ’54. The
Southerner
broke it the following year, and still had the fastest time; one day and nineteen hours even. High up on her pilot house, she wore the gilded antlers that marked her as the fleetest steamer on the Ohio.
    The more he considered the prospect of taking her on, the more excited Abner Marsh grew. All of a sudden it occurred to him that this was not something Joshua would care to miss, beauty sleep or no. Marsh stomped forward to York’s cabin, determined to roust him out. He rapped sharply on the door with the head of his walking stick.
    No answer. Marsh rapped again, louder and more insistently. “Hallo in there!” he boomed. “Get yourself out of bed, Joshua, we’re goin’ to run us a race!”
    Still no sound came from within York’s cabin. Marsh tried the door and found it locked. He rattled it, pounded on the walls, knocked on the shuttered window, shouted; all to no avail. “Damn you, York,” he said, “get yourself up or you’re goin’ to miss it.” Then he had an idea. He walked back near the pilot house. “Mister Kitch, sir,” he shouted up. Abner Marsh could shout with the best of them when he put his lungs into it good. Kitch popped his head out the door and looked down at him. “You blow that whistle,” Marsh told him, “and keep blowing it till I wave at you, you hear?”
    He returned to York’s locked door and began pounding again, and suddenly the steam whistle began to shriek. Once. Twice. Three times. Long angry blasts. Marsh flailed away with his stick.
    York’s cabin door came open.
    Marsh took one look at York’s eyes and his mouth hung open in mid-shout. The steam whistle sounded again, and he waved hurriedly. It fell silent.
“Get in here,”
Joshua York said in a cold whisper.
    Marsh entered, and York swung the door shut behind him. Marsh heard him throw the lock. He didn’t see it. He didn’t see anything. Once the door closed, York’s cabin was black as the pit. Not even a crack of light snuck in through the door or the shuttered, curtained windows. Marsh felt like he’d gone blind. But in his mind’s eye, a vision lingered, the last thing he’d seen before the darkness closed in: Joshua York, standing in the doorway naked as the day he was born, his skin deathly white as alabaster, his lips drawn back in animal rage, his eyes like two smoky gray slits opening onto hell.
    “Joshua,” Marsh said, “can you turn on a lamp? Or pull back a curtain, or something? I can’t see.”
    “I can see just fine,” York’s voice replied from the darkness behind him. Marsh hadn’t heard him move. He turned, and blundered into something.
“Hold still,”
York commanded, with such force and fury in his tone that Marsh had no choice but to obey. “Here, I’ll give you a light, before you wreck my cabin.”
    A match flared across the room, and York touched it to his reading candle, then seated himself on the edge of his rumpled bed. He’d donned a pair of trousers, somehow, but his face was hard and terrible. “There,” he said. “Now,
why are you here?
I warn you, you had better have a reason!”
    Marsh began to grow angry. No one talked to him that way, no one. “The
Southerner
is next to us, York,” he snapped. “The fastest damn boat on this river, got the horns and everything. I’m fixin’ to run
Fevre Dream
after her, and I thought you’d want to see. If you don’t think that’s reason enough for getting you out of bed, then you ain’t no steamboatman and you never will be! And you watch your manners with me, you hear?”
    Something flared in Joshua York’s eyes, and he started to rise, but even as he did he checked himself, and turned away. “Abner,” he said. He paused,