The Medicine Seller

At any rate, there I was, in a town where the fog pressed in so thick that all the colors seemed muted, when they weren’t washed out altogether, and I thought it might be an interesting idea to have my picture taken.

It was all the rage, in this town. Having your picture taken. The photographer had rolled in a few months before I had, and got very popular with the locals in a hurry. There was a sitting in a different house every day. It seemed to me that some people were getting repeat pictures, more than they needed, but it’s hardly any of my business how people spend their money, after all. And who knows, the first picture might not go right.

I was staying at the saloon—this was one of those places where guests stay in the saloon and not in someone’s house—and I had met the photographer before. He was a long, tall drink of water, a lot like you (the Preacher looked sour) but very pale rather than dark, with black, shaggy, shoulder-length hair. A bit inclined to keep to himself, I thought, but it takes all sorts, doesn’t it? Nothing wrong with keeping your thoughts under your hat. I had tried to sell him some simple preventatives. the sort that might be useful if you travel a bit—you know how you come into a new town, and you instantly get whatever cold is going around, which is not only irritating but bad for business, because nobody much trusts a medicine seller who’s sniffling? Well, I do have some brews that help with that, purple coneflower and so forth, and I’d be happy to sell them to any of you, if you’re so inclined—

(“You were telling a story,” the Preacher reminded him.)

So I was! So I was. I was telling you about the photographer. Well, he wasn’t much of one for talk, but as it happened, the widow who lived right beside the saloon needed some medicine for her knees, which had bothered her ever since a bad fall she took in her youth, and she found that mine worked perfectly and commissioned as many bottles as I could brew, so I was sitting pretty right then and thought I might want my photograph taken.

I sat for it in the main room of the saloon. The photographer cleared everyone else out—he did have a way with people, or at least the people he had worked with—and set up a backdrop, and then worked with his camera. It took a lot of doing, I thought, that camera. It needed to be loaded with a “plate”—that was the part that the photograph was impressed on or painted on or whatever you want to call it—and there seemed to be a lot of adjustments to be made to the machine itself, all of them from under a dark drape that went over the back, which was probably to avoid getting light on the “plate.” And then there was the flash—I hadn’t been expecting the flash. He told me to wait for it, focusing on a point a bit to the left, and then he set it off and it left green spots in front of my eyes. The “flash” is just a pan where you ignite a little gunpowder, you see, so that everything is illuminated when the photograph is taken. I don’t know the exact technical specifications. Not my business, so to speak. Now, if you wanted to know how to brew up a cough medication such that it will soothe and allow sleep and make you forget that you were even coughing at all—well, I probably wouldn’t tell you, would I, a man has to have some secrets, after all! But my point is, I expected the photographer to have his own little business secrets, and that, I figured, was all fine and dandy.

“It’s done?” I said, after a moment when nothing seemed to be happening.

“I have to develop it. But yes, the sitting is done.”

I knew that the photographer had put blackout blinds on his room’s windows, and that had something to do with the “development” process. Not sure what it was. It seemed, at the time, like a big deal over not much. Yes, a painting takes a while, but at least you can do it in the light! If you have to meddle with strange-smelling chemicals to make the photograph take hold, or get finished, or whatever it is, I’m not sure that’s so much different from doing a painting when it comes right down to it. Certainly isn’t instant. You hear stories, about back when the World still existed, about photography and how you could have a picture instantly in your hand, just with a click, and if the stories are real, which I doubt, I suspect they might be talking about something other than photography. I don’t think—

(“You were telling,” the Preacher said with a little bit of an edge, “a story.”)

Thank you! I swear, I could forget my own head if it weren’t stuck on firm enough. At any rate, the photographer went up to his room to attend to the developing, and I went out to talk to people around the town, and see how the Widow Elis was doing, and that sort of thing. And in a little bit, I wasn’t thinking about the photo at all, because the first thing the Widow Elis did was cancel her order for the pain medication! I swear. Actually, I was very, very tempted to swear.

What I did, of course, was ask her why. Why would she willingly reject a source of comfort?

“Oh, I don’t need it,” she told me. “I didn’t fall off the ladder anymore.”

Well, that didn’t make any sense to me, but I had to accept it. So I went around to another family that had bought medicine from me, and talked to the wife about photographs.

She was a thorough enthusiast for photography, it seemed. She had the picture of their family framed and set in the entryway for all to see, and we stood there while she showed me details. How her husband had his hair neatly combed, and her children were not running around being little terrors, and how lovely and respectable everything looked in a photograph. And I privately thought, well, that’s the way of it, isn’t it? You pretend to be more put-together than you really are, when you sit for a picture. It’s all fake. And I did it too, I specially combed my hair—well, as you can all see, my hair is less than it once was, but I combed it well anyway, right before the photograph, and straightened up my collar, and put my best face forward.

And now I was wondering, as Mrs. Deevo yelled at her children to stop doing whatever they were doing that made rolling noises across the upstairs floor, if it was actually a good thing to have images of yourself doing better than yourself, if you see what I mean. Yes, a picture is a nice thing to have, but . . .

But I couldn’t put it into words.

At any rate, the photographer wasn’t done developing the pictures that day. I went to sleep in the saloon’s upper room, and came down the next day, and was greeted with a photograph of myself, already framed.

And let me assure you, it was beautiful. Confidence seemed to come off the photograph in waves. And, of course, I’m a man with confidence, you have to have confidence in your medicines if you’re going to sell them, and you have to sell them if they’re going to help anyone, and at the end of the day, that’s what I’m all about, is helping someone—but there was something about the man in the picture that made him look like he would be so much better at it.

Part of me wanted to put the picture on my suitcase, so that my customers could see my best side. Part of me, and I don’t know why, wanted to rip it to pieces.

At any rate, I thanked the photographer, and I went out to see Mrs. Deevo, who was laying in a supply of cough syrup for the winter. You see, Mrs. Deevo’s younger son was not a well child, in that he got a cough each winter and it often went into his lungs, which meant fear and fever and rasping, gasping breaths—and the hope was that if my humble nostrums could relieve the cough at the beginning of the cycle, it would never proceed, you see. And I happen to be a dab hand with a cough syrup. Granted, they don’t taste perfect, but they’re full of ingredients that soothe the nerves—laudanum, that’s a favorite, you have to be very careful with it, of course, but just a little bit—

(“You were telling a story.”)

Yes, yes, of course. So at any rate, I go over to Mrs. Deevo—through the fog, I remember thinking it was incredibly thick that day—and as soon as I laid my suitcase on the table, she said that only one bottle would be needed.

I asked why, of course. Her son has this cough every winter.

“Oh, yes, a little bit,” she said, “but it’s nothing serious, after all.”

Well, that wasn’t right, and I knew it wasn’t right, and I told her so. Anything that goes into the lungs can kill.

“It’s never gone into his lungs,” she said serenely.

It struck me, at about that moment, that the house was very quiet. I asked where the children were.

“Upstairs, playing cards, I believe.”

I had never been in Mrs. Deevo’s house when those children weren’t making noise, and for some reason, it gave me a chill. But I left without much of a resolution. And without seeing the children, which, in retrospect, would have told me something . . .

At any rate, back to the story. I went to my room in the saloon, where I had hung my photograph on a hook on the wall. The man in the picture, I thought, could persuade Mrs. Deevo to purchase the crucial medicines. The man in the picture was confident, poised, the very image of a salesman. All I had to do was be more like the man in the picture. And with that resolution, I went to bed.

I will not say I felt different in the morning, exactly, but I wound my confidence as high as it would go and set out to confront Mrs. Deevo. “And you see,” I remember saying to her, “a little prevention now could avert tragedy later. Can we turn the lights up a little bit more? It’s such a gloomy day.”

Mrs. Deevo gave me an odd look. “I do believe it’s the best day we’ve had since the fog started,” she said, turning the light up. “I do hate that fog. It’s been sticking around for months, as far as I can see—but today, it’s gone, and that’s a good enough reason to celebrate—“

I was not listening to her anymore.

I was not listening to her anymore, because it seemed to me that Mrs. Deevo—had no color to her. She was all greys and a faint brown tinge, like a photograph.

“Excuse me,” I said suddenly, “I have to go.” And I ran out.

I must have seemed like a madman, running through that town, trying to figure out what bits had color and what bits hadn’t. The fog made it very difficult. The fog made everything black and white. And it seemed to me—sneaking suspicion, you know the sort you get when you encounter something wrong, something you ought to get away from—that maybe the fog was here to make things more convenient for the colorlessness. Suck the color out of something in bright daylight, everyone notices. But take the color in a fog . . .

At length, I ran to the inn, and pulled my picture off the wall, and threw it into the fire. I could feel the confidence in me being drained away as the paper curled and sparked strange colors, but I was not looking at that—I was looking at my hands, trying to judge whether color was creeping back into them as the photograph burned. No, I was not like Mrs. Deevo—but how close had I come?

Out I ran, out to the Widow Elis’s house. Before she could speak, I plucked the photo off the wall and held it to the candle, and she gave a shriek like nothing I have ever heard—a shriek like nothing I ever want to hear, because as the photograph curled in the fire, she was consumed with flame herself. There had been nothing left of her, you see. She was all photograph. I wouldn’t have burned the photograph if I knew—would I? I would like to think that I might steel myself to do it if it would prevent the spread of the plague—but the plague was not spread by its victims, it was spread by a single, sinister photographer and the temptation to see a better self.

I ran out of the Widow Elis’s house, which was crackling and starting to burn behind me, and started shouting in the street. “Beware the photographer! Beware the photographs! They will take what makes you into you, and leave a copy!” The truth is, I don’t remember all of what I shouted, and I doubt it was that coherent.

But the next thing that happened was that I was caught by the mayor’s boy, a brawny young man with—I quailed to note—no color to him at all, and pushed up against a wall. “He set the Widow Elis on fire!” the young man accused.

“I tried to save her!” Tried, and failed so spectacularly that one could call it murder, depending on whether you can murder someone who isn’t there any longer. “She was taken—she was taken over by the photograph—“ I could see the stony, closed-off look of the gathering crowd. “You have to believe me! The photographs, they’re wrong, they turn you into themselves—“

“And what’s wrong with that?” challenged a voice from the crowd.

But I wasn’t listening to them. I was noticing the photographer. Setting up his camera.

If he photographed me now, I realized, waving my hands and shouting, smudged with soot, eyes wild—the very picture of a ranting madman—then that is what I would become, as long as the picture existed anywhere, and how was I supposed to get it away from him—

So I screamed, and butted the mayor’s son with my head, and started sprinting for the town’s edge.

And that’s when I heard the whistle of the train, pulling into the station, and knew that I might survive as me.

I don’t know what happened to that town, though. The Widow Elis’s house was still on fire when I left, but I don’t know if it was spreading—I couldn’t tell the smoke from the mist. The mist was very thick when the train pulled away.

“Doesn’t sound that bad to me,” the Gunslinger said thoughtfully, “looking a little different, but being better. Faster. More dangerous. That’s a trade a lot of people would be willing to make.” The Gunslinger, the Kid noted with some admiration, had lit a very thin cigar, and was looking remarkably rugged in smoking it.

“Not me,” the Medicine Seller said with feeling.

“I don’t really believe it, anyway,” the Gambler said.

“Would I lie to you?” The Medicine Seller’s eyes were wide.

“Oh, I can believe all the bit about the photographer, and the photographs, and how they turned people gray. But I’m not so sure of you running down all fired up to save the Widow. Seems more likely to me that you burnt your own photograph and crept out of town without saying anything. Because in the story, you had to run without your case. How did you get your case back?”

The Medicine Seller clutched the suitcase to him. “It’s a new one,” he said. “Well, not new new—a rain maker had it before me, I believe—but new to me, and I did have to build my business back from scratch, from tinctures to glass bottles. Luckily, I knew a few people who owed me favors . . .”

It sounded sensible, but the Kid wondered if he hadn’t seen the Medicine Seller twitch very slightly at the Gambler’s accusation.

“What happens to towns that these things happen to?” the Kid wondered aloud. “Do people still stop there? Are there any kinds of warnings?

“Sometimes,” the Ghost-catcher said, “they fade out of the Network.”

“And sometimes,” the Medicine Seller added, “you’ll find that the trains are stopping at a new spot, and it isn’t Desert, but there are no people, and you have to wonder if it’s actually an old town, just—wiped clean. I visited one of those just a little while ago. People were settling there, all sorts of adventurous sorts, and they told me a lot of things to avoid, everything from ‘never plant pumpkins’ to ‘if you see a man in a long black coat, walk away swiftly,’ but I didn’t know how much of it was real cautions and how much was just them throwing things at the wall to see if they stuck, so to speak. There are always dangers, in a new place like that. You lose people.”

“It’d be a nice place to stage a murder,” the Businessman mused, “if you wanted to. Blame it on Things. I wonder how often that happens.”

“Ever been to a place like that?” the Medicine Seller asked. “You could tell a story about it.”

The Businessman shrugged. “It’s not my turn. It’s hers.”

The Gambler looked satisfied to be acknowledged. “Turns out I do have a story,” she said. “About gambling. Any of you hear about the Crystal City?”