This was not her father.
A second warrior appeared from another opening in the stone circle, axe gleaming red in the moonlight, eyes a sickly burning orange. Then a third and a fourth.
“Daddy?” Samantha asked the night-No answer came in return.
She peered into the circle, searching the dark and the fiery glow for some sign that he had returned. The terror that raced through her at the sight of these ghostly things, these revenants or specters, was laced with wonder. If they existed, if these were the dead men who had been burned here only to live again, where was Carl Finnin? Where was her father?
“Where is he?” she shrieked at the silent warriors who stood just outside the circle and glared balefully at her with burning eyes. “Give me back my father!”
Her anguished cry tore from her throat and echoed across the island, but the specters remained still. Her emotions in chaos, unleashed, drove her forward. She raced at the nearest, the first one she had seen.
“Sam, stop!” Brian screamed behind her.
“Give him to me, God damn you! I want him back!”
Samantha raised her fists. She would force them to listen, force them to answer. The warrior with the homed, dented helmet stood motionless, as though he had been carved from these very stones. She ran at him, shrilly screaming, all conscious thought set aside. Samantha Finnin had gone berserk. She struck out at the revenant and it was solid enough. The thing’s eyes flared more brightly, but it did not so much as flinch as she balled her fists tighter and struck it again and again, screaming for the miracle for which she had sacrificed much of her sanity.
She did not even notice when the dead warrior began to raise his sword.
Brian tackled her from the side, drove her to the ground. Samantha hit her head and blackness swam at the edges of her vision. He was shouting at her, but the words meant nothing. She could not even hear them, could only see the contours of his face shaded by the glow of ethereal flame within that circle.
In there, she thought. She had to go inside the circle. They’re keeping him from me.
“I told you!” Brian screamed down at her, his face close enough that spittle flew from his mouth and struck her, close enough that she could smell his stale breath. “We’ve got to go!”
Two dead warriors loomed behind him, outlined against the moon. Samantha’s eyes widened in horror as the one with the homed helmet raised his bloody sword. Brian must have seen the terror in her eyes for he reared up and began to turn.
Soundlessly, the sword scythed across the night in a gleaming sweep. The blade hacked into Brian’s throat, cleaving flesh and cracking bone, and blood sprayed Samantha’s hair and face and clothing as his head struck the hard ground nearby and bounced several times before coming to rest against the trunk of a tree.
Brian, who had been her best friend. Brian, who had loved her. Brian, whom she had dragged back into her life only to give him a nightmare in return for all he had given her.
Her mouth was open, but her throat whistled with a thin, reedy slip of air. No scream would come out. Samantha scrabbled backward away from the dead warriors. The others had remained still, but now they stepped away from the stone circle and started toward her as well. Leather scraped against leather. Weapons clanked. Their eyes burned with all the colors of the unearthly pyre that had consumed her father’s corpse.
Blasphemy. Brian had been right. Whatever gods the people who had built this place believed in., it was holy to them. She had defiled it.
With the taste of Brian’s blood mingling with her own upon her lips, Samantha rocketed to her feet. She could not run through the trees for the gulls awaited her that way and she was sure they would block her passage. But the other side of the island? It was possible that they did not guard the entire shoreline.
Two of the revenants, armed with double-edged battle-axes, stopped by Brian’s headless corpse and began to hack him apart. A flurry of wings announced the arrival of a small flock of gulls, which settled down to peck at Brian, tearing chunks of his flesh away in their beaks.
Samantha ran through the clearing away from the dead warriors, away from the stone circle, away from Biddeford Pool. She was headed out to sea, scrambling to keep her feet beneath her as her momentum carried her to the edge of the clearing and into some thicker woods.
She cast a final glance over her shoulder and saw the red and silver gleam of bloodstained weapons as the dead men followed her. They had begun slowly but now they ran faster, grunting like animals. The sound snaked under her skin and Samantha felt something snap in her mind; she wondered if it was what remained of her sanity.
They were twenty feet away.
Past them was the stone circle, ghost fire burning within. She would never see inside it, never know if he was in there, waiting for her, waiting for that conversation that would never come.
And then, just as she slipped deeper into the trees and the ground sloped downward beneath her, roots and rocks under her feet, Samantha saw a final figure stepping from inside that circle. A tall man, though not so tall as the others. A dark silhouette in a suit with wide pinstripes and no shoes on his feet.
It should have drawn her back or at least given her pause, or so Samantha thought. Instead the sight of this last revenant snapped her head around, pushed her gaze away, and she ran through the trees, down the hill toward the rear of the island, holding her breath until it hurt and then beginning to hyperventilate, her chest rising and falling in tiny bursts.
Dead men crashed through the trees behind her. The branches that whipped at her face did not seem to slow them. She ran blindly, knowing that she must go down and down and that the path would take her to the ocean. But then the trees thinned out enough that she could see the waves below her and her chest tightened; shock and denial waned inside her but her eyes had not deceived her. She had been descending at an angle, still headed toward the shoreline but not directly.
Samantha corrected her path, pulled her arms in tight and lowered her face as she pushed through a tight clutch of trees and then she was out of the woods. Brush scraped at her jeans, snagged the denim, but she forged ahead, hope sparking in her as she saw the surf crashing on the rocky edge of the island sixty or seventy yards away. There were no gulls to block her way. Not one. She ran down the rocky overgrown slope at a wild pace she could not hope to control, barely keeping her feet under her.
Off to her right, death crashed through the trees and out onto the rough terrain—the warrior with the dented, horned helmet was first to appear, moonlight dull on the tarnished iron headpiece. The others followed, some farther along the tree line, but others closer. Too close. Samantha glanced over her shoulder with wide eyes and screamed with the collision of tenor and fury and hope in her. The water was so close. The ocean crashing on the rocks. If she could just get off the island she would be safe.
Or would she?
The idea that this might not be true had never occurred to her. Even as it did, as the waves below lost the aura of safety they’d held under her gaze, Samantha heard a grunt and shot a glance at the warriors cutting across the downward slope toward her. The nearest had eyes that glowed with copper fire. Beneath a thick red beard his dead lips were pale and gray and they curied back in a sneer. The warrior raised his axe and he hurled it at her.
Samantha spun away, lost her footing, and then—in a frenzied effort to avoid being caught—she leaped out away from the hillside. In a fraction of an eyeblink she pictured it all in her head. Her momentum would drive her out and down, she would hit the rocks and brush and she would tuck and roll and let it cany her downward until she could get up again and then she would rush the last few yards to the ocean.
As she dove forward she flung her arms out.
The axe whickered through the air, spinning around, and its razor-sharp blade caught the tips of the last two fingers on her left hand, shearing them off above the top joint.
In her mind the image of her landing splintered. Shrieking in shoc
k and pain she fell to the ground in a long arc. Samantha struck hard, the air knocked out of her, and she tumbled rather than rolled out of the brush to the rocky ledge at the shore of the island and she struck her head again.
Blinking back the streaks of white that erupted across her vision like fireworks, she reached out her left hand for leverage so that she could stand. The bleeding, severed tips of her fingers touched the ground and she sucked air into her lungs through clenched teeth, blackness seeping in around the edges of her vision. The arm snapped back against her breasts and she held it there as she rose onto her knees, got one leg under her, and began to stand.
A rough and stinking hand grabbed her by the hair and hauled her to her feet. Samantha stared in horror at the dead thing in its horned helmet that held her, strands of hair tearing
free of her scalp. Her mind screamed, but her voice was silent now. Her heart thundered, but her legs would simply not work any longer. The revenants burning eyes studied her, its rotten teeth bared like an animal’s. Beneath leather and fur its muscles were massive. It held her effortlessly by the hair like some filthy rag doll about to be discarded. The others gathered around her.
The warrior in whose grip she dangled raised his blood-encrusted sword in his free hand. Samantha barely noticed. Her gaze was locked upon his, searching for something alive in his eyes and finding only cold fire and bloodlust.
Nearby, the waves crashed against the rocks. The wind drove the surf higher and the trees upon the island swayed under its power. In her mind’s eye she could see Brian being hacked apart, food for the gulls, his flesh tearing under their beaks. The urge to close her eyes, to accept the blade, was heavy upon her. But she resisted it. Instead she stared at the dead thing and she fought her exhaustion to stand straighter.
“I had to know,” she whispered weakly. It was not an apology, merely an explanation.
The sword gleamed redly as it whickered through the air, its edge slashing toward her neck. A shadow moved among the dead men and some of the warriors were shunted aside. A hand shot in front of Samantha and grabbed the blade, stopping the sword with a wet slice and a jarring crunch of bone. The horned helmet turned, the warrior snarling as he glared at the intruder. But he lowered his sword.
Samantha stared into the face of her father.
Carl Finnin stood among them, salt-and-pepper hair and mustache perfectly groomed. Though he wore the clothes he had been dressed in for his funeral, this was not the face of a dead man. The thread that had been used to sew his eyelids and lips shut was gone. He gazed at her with his own eyes, not the stuffing that had replaced them in the coffin.
The dead warriors, the resurrected corpses of Norsemen who had traveled to these shores centuries earlier, brandished their weapons, menace flowing from them with every agitated motion. Their eyes burned and they edged a little closer to Samantha and her father. A dead man, just as they were, but somehow returned from Valhalla despite the blasphemy of his burning on that pyre. The one with the homed helmet laid the flat of his sword against her father’s chest to keep her from him. Carl Finnin slapped the blade carelessly away with a scowl that matched the Viking’s own. And why not? They were all dead already.
“Daddy?” Samantha said, voice and heart breaking.
All the words rushed into her mind, all the questions she wanted to ask him, all her bitterness and love and every wish she had ever made that he would just love her. Something sparked in his eyes then and she knew that somehow he had read her mind, or simply seen in her all the pain, all those questions. .
Her father slapped her hard across the face.
When he spoke, fetid spittle flew from the dead man’s mouth and his eyes narrowed with contempt.
“You stupid, selfish girl,” he rasped in a voice like the whisper of burning kindling. “It was never about you. I never thought about you or anyone else, only what I needed. Me, Carl Finnin. And look. Look what you’ve done. You’ve grown up just like me.”
His words cut into her and Samantha could not breathe. How could it be as simple as that, as brutally real? Whatever good had been part of him, at his core he had been callous and selfish. But if that was true… Samantha prayed that the rest was not. She shook her head in denial, refused to accept that she was no better.
Flames erupted from her father’s eyes and then his clothing and his hair began to burn. The dead warriors had been observing carefully, weapons clutched in cold, pale hands. Now— as he began to burn—they began to close the circle they had made around Samantha and her father.
“Look what you’ve done,” her father said, his words carried to her on the black smoke that curled up from the flames that consumed him for a second time.
The warriors attacked, intent upon killing her and destroying this abomination she had created. Engulfed in flames, his flesh running like candle wax, charring to black again, Carl Finnin shot an elbow into the face of the warrior closest to him and tore the axe from his hand. He swung the blade around and lodged it in the bloodless throat of the revenant that came at Samantha from behind. The swiftness of his motions painted the night with the flames that danced upon his resurrected form. Carl brought the axe down with both hands toward the dead thing that had held his daughter moments before. The axe split the helmet between its horns and cleaved the warrior’s skull in two.
His skin split and blackened and curled up at the torn edges like tree bark in the fire. A scream of anguish tore up from inside him, but this was not the dead voice she had heard before; this was the voice of her lather, the laughter of those rare and precious moments they had shared, and it cried out in despair. His eyes burst and fire licked up from the gaping holes.
Cloaked in all-consuming flame, a walking funeral pyre, Carl reached out and grabbed Samantha. Where he touched her, she burned. Her clothes were set on fire and she felt her arms burning as he lifted her off her feet. Samantha screamed for him to stop, to please stop, not to kill her, though the words were lost in the roar of fire. She let loose howls of sorrow and blazing agony. As he spun her above him, Samantha caught glimpses of the warriors attacking. A sword slashed across his back, but her father only stumbled slightly and kept on. A huge, ghastly revenant threw his axe. There was a wet thunk as it slammed into her father’s back and stuck there.
Fire roared up along his arms and her hair caught. Flames raced across her sweatshirt and then Samantha was burning … burning all over. On fire, she thought. I’m on fire.
She would join her father.
The burning man staggered two more steps and then he hurled her with unnatural strength. As she fell, rolling over in the air, Samantha saw the warriors fall upon her father, driving him down beneath their blades, fire spreading from him to engulf his attackers as well.
Samantha caught a glimpse of the moon. It was red and orange and she thought it might be on fire.
Then she struck the ocean and plunged beneath the waves. She choked on salt water and felt it burn where the fire had singed her scalp and chest and the places where her father had grabbed onto her. Her mind seemed frozen, conscious thought retreating like an animal to some shadowed comer inside her mind. But instinct took hold and Samantha pawed at the water, struggled to the surface, spat and choked and would have thrown up if there had been anything left in her convulsing stomach.
Her feet touched the ocean bottom. She stood and found that the waves barely reached her shoulders.
The tide was going out.
On the shore were scattered the burning remains of the things bom of the pyre, brought forth upon the altar within that stone circle. But Samantha hardly saw them for at the rocky ledge where the waves struck the shore three translucent figures loomed, their forms rippling in the breeze like the surface of the sea itself, black hair blowing across their faces, obscuring their features. Where their crimson robes revealed flesh, their skin gleamed a pale, bluish white.
The three women turned their hands upward and deep red flames rose from their palms. They moved delicat
ely, as though they might spill the fire into the sea, and they walked out over the waves, their steps easily a foot above the surface of the ocean.
Samantha began to swim. She was at the back of the island and so she struck out at an angle she thought was parallel with the beach, though she could not see it.
The women did not follow. They paused above the waves perhaps twenty feet from the rocky shore of the island and from there they simply watched her go. But they radiated an unmistakable sense of menace, a threat. Once before she and her friends and their little game of pretend death had drawn the attention of something here, disturbed a force that was better left to a dark slumber. Now she had roused that ancient power again, and this time she had desecrated it with her need. Her selfish need.
The tide tugged at her beneath the surf, but the waves pushed her forward. Soon enough Samantha could no longer see the fire on the other side of the island or the spectral women.
The water was over her head. Her body was scarred with bums and gashes and her bones ached with an utter exhaustion unlike anything she had ever felt before. Her clothes were heavy with water and dragged her down, threatened to pull her under the gentle waves. Several times she paused and stared at the blank, dark faces of the cottages on the distant beach and nearly surrendered to the weight of her clothes and her conscience, but still Samantha kept on.
Look what you’ve done. You’ve grown up just like me.
The words echoed through her mind, branded there, perhaps the only thing keeping her from slipping into unconsciousness and drifting out to sea. There was a truth in them that horrified her. Hollow and numb as she felt, a sharp certainty cut through her grief then. It was true that she had let what her father had been shape her, both his love and his distance, his moments of affection and his years of disregard. She had been the clay and his negligence the wheel, fired on a kiln of passing years. Samantha had never been so cold; it felt like she was dead inside. But it also felt as though something new had been sculpted now, not in the kiln but the pyre.
Four Dark Nights Page 14