The Dire King

by William Ritter

  “So,” said Charlie. “What do you think?”

  “I think,” I said, considering the scene before me, “that this is all fake—it’s just a façade. Someone wants us to believe there’s a lot of mystical hokum going on, but it’s all just for show. We’ve been reading the book by its cover.”

  “But why go to all this trouble?”

  “That’s a good question.” I shook my head. “But none of it is real.”

  “That body is real enough,” said Charlie.

  We glanced back at the stage. The cloth that had been shrouding the corpse lay in a stained, ruffled heap on the ground. It was quite empty. Mr. Fairmont was gone.

  “Where—” Charlie began.

  “Do you ever grow tired of unexplained phenomena?” I asked Charlie numbly. We both approached the stage. “Because I do. I grow very tired of unexplained phenomena. I would enjoy a perfectly logical and reasonable phenomenon just once. Just one case.”

  “No you wouldn’t,” Charlie whispered, sniffing the air as his eyes scanned the clearing.

  “Oh, no?” I said. I nudged the rumpled shroud with my toe. “And what makes you so sure I wouldn’t?”

  His eyes caught mine, and there was a glint of admiration in his glance. “You’re here.”

  I spotted it before Charlie did. I almost missed it at first, there in the shadows of the closest tree, the one marred with the ankh. The hunched figure standing at its base was facing away, nearly hidden in the shadows and partially shrouded by the billowing draperies. He was not holding still, exactly—I might have spotted him more easily if he had been perfectly still—but he was rocking ever so slightly. The motion was both natural and not completely human, like branches bobbing in the wind or clothes swaying on the line. Almost hypnotic.

  I pointed, and Charlie gave a mute nod. He moved a step closer to the man. “Hello?” he said at last. “We see you there. Show yourself.”

  That was when the thing that had once been Steven Fairmont turned around. All of the horror I should have felt upon seeing the man’s body lying dead flooded my senses at the sight of him up and moving. Terrible things had been done to Fairmont’s body. Things that I will not recount. The man’s injuries were grievous, but they did not bleed. What fluids did escape the wretched creature’s wounds were the consistency of molasses and moved with its same sticky slowness. He continued to rock ever so gently, his eyes unfocused and filmy. The quiet hum in my skull had been replaced with a mad jangling of alarm bells. For all his rhythmic motion, the man’s chest was not heaving. I watched it, fixated on it, holding the air in my own lungs until I could not contain it any longer. Fairmont was not drawing breath. The dead walked.

  Chapter Eight

  That dime novel, the one with the spooky cult and the unrealistic rituals on the cover, had not mentioned the living dead. It had concluded, as I recall, with a miserly old man from up the lane being unmasked and the whole affair being chalked up as a showy attempt to frighten away superstitious neighbors all along.

  The thing beneath the trees was not wearing a mask. It was barely wearing its own skin.

  “Mr. Fairmont?” Charlie called out, cautiously. “Can you hear me?”

  The grisly face snapped up, milky white eyes fixing on Charlie’s voice. The corpse’s whole body seemed to shudder as it tensed.

  “We are here to help,” Charlie said soothingly. “Can you tell us who did this to you?”

  Fairmont’s sallow brow furrowed into a fierce scowl, and pale lips peeled back as the mutilated corpse bared its yellow teeth. It snarled wetly, a sound more like that of a rabid dog than of a man.

  “We are not your enemies, Mr. Fairmont,” Charlie continued.

  “I don’t think that’s Mr. Fairmont any longer,” I whispered.

  Not–Mr. Fairmont leaned forward hungrily, its tortured muscles rippling for a moment as though straining against an invisible bond. In the next moment it was as if that bond had snapped. The corpse erupted forward. It was not running so much as it was falling, only barely catching itself with each stride. I staggered backward, clutching at my pockets to retrieve the silver dagger with which I hoped I might defend myself. Charlie positioned himself ahead of me, holding out his open palms, still trying to assuage the horrible creature. The wet, wheezing snarls only intensified as the cadaverous figure struggled up over the raised stage and back down on our side, lurching and swaying, but pressing ever toward us.

  Charlie threw off his coat. “Stand down,” he yelled at the thing, but his optimism for a peaceful resolution was clearly draining fast. He pulled his suspenders off his shoulders hastily, preparing for the inevitable. “This is your last warning.” Charlie’s face darkened as the stubble along his jaw began to spread.

  With the ravenous creature almost upon him, Charlie transformed. The corpse threw itself forward and a powerful hound met the thing in midair. Charlie, in his canine form, was no scrawny stray. Imposing muscles pumped beneath a coat of tawny caramel and rich chocolate brown fur. His front paws slammed into the corpse at its sternum, whipping the disfigured figure backward like a rag doll and slapping it onto the hard ground. Fairmont’s head hung at an unnatural angle on its neck.

  Charlie growled low, baring his fangs.

  The corpse reached a hand up to its own head and reset its neck with a sickening crack. Charlie barked, and I sincerely hoped he had no intention of actually biting that decaying carcass. The creature that had once been Fairmont balled its pallid fingers into a fist and hammered Charlie hard on his neck. Charlie was not braced for the first blow and bore the full brunt of it. The second he was prepared for, and he caught the corpse’s arm at the elbow. His fangs sank into the sickly flesh, but the wretch barely seemed to notice. With its free hand, the thing drove a ruthless blow into Charlie’s chest, spinning the hound off him and into the grass. They both staggered to their feet.

  Charlie dropped something to the ground with a heavy thump. He had taken the dead man’s arm with him. He shook his shaggy head, smacking his canine lips and looking both dazed and thoroughly disgusted.

  The thing’s milky eyes refocused on me. With renewed ardor, the creature lumbered at me, its one remaining arm reaching toward me. I fumbled frantically until I had the dagger free of its sheath, and then I whipped it straight at the monster’s head.

  I am not a marksman, although I had found more cause of late to practice. Contrary to my customary athletic style—which is haphazard and graceless at best—my knife spun through the air directly on target, lodging itself with a satisfying thunk squarely in the creature’s jugular. I could not have replicated the shot with a hundred more attempts if I had tried. For a fleeting moment I allowed myself a modicum of pride in my own skill. The reanimated corpse of Steven Fairmont was harder to impress.

  I felt the creature’s cold, dead fingers graze my neck as I threw myself out of its grasp. Had the thing still been in possession of both arms, my maneuver would have been too late. It stumbled and spun, correcting its balance after the near miss as I tumbled out of the way and back to my feet.

  Charlie was at my side in an instant, growling and bracing himself for a second encounter.

  “Watch your end, Ned!” a voice said suddenly, breaking through the bushes to the creature’s left.

  “Yeah, yeah. I’ve got it,” came another voice. Ned’s, I presumed.

  The snarling corpse turned its head crookedly to look toward the new voices. I cursed. The coroner’s men.

  “Stay back!” I yelled.

  It was too late. Carrying the front end of a wooden litter, a skinny young man of no more than twenty stepped into the clearing. He froze, face-to-face with the abomination. The creature’s grotesque visage locked on his, my dagger still jutting out of its neck.

  “Oi! What’s the idea?” The other man’s voice came from behind the bush, and then the gurney was shoved forward, and the terrif
ied Ned with it.

  Charlie bounded forward in an instant, but not before the corpse clutched the petrified Ned by the hair and buried its yellow teeth into the poor man’s throat.

  Charlie slammed headlong into the monster, sending them both rolling across the grass until they crashed into the pillar at the head of the row. Above them, a sculpture rocked back and forth—a hefty urn overflowing with stone fruit. Charlie managed to gain the upper hand a second time, pinning the savage corpse at the base of the statue. The creature thrashed and growled, blood dripping down its chin and head, which was propped up at a sickly angle at the base of the pillar. For all its frustrated fury, it would have a more difficult time dislodging its captor with only one arm. The litter lay discarded in the grass behind them. I swallowed hard. Ned was dead.

  The man who had been at the other end of the litter, a heavyset fellow in a battered longcoat, let out a scream that startled the ravens from their trees halfway across the gardens. He turned and fled, his footsteps pounding away as he put as much distance between himself and the ghastly scene as possible.

  The creature gargled an inhuman moan of discontent. I watched, helplessly, as the unholy corpse pummeled Charlie’s neck and chest, driving the occasional kick up into his gut. Charlie weathered the blows valiantly, but the corpse showed no signs of tiring. It did not even seem to notice when its head cracked hard against the bricks as it struggled.

  I clambered around as quickly as I could to the far side of the pillar. Bracing my feet against the dense shrubbery as best as I could, I reached high above my head and pressed against the urn on top. “Get ready to move out of the way!” I yelled. Charlie looked up for just an instant, and then let out an involuntary yelp of pain as the creature belted him across the jaw.

  With great effort I could only just tilt the heavy statue an inch or so forward. It wobbled when I released it and settled right back into place. I cursed again. I had no leverage.

  I heard Charlie whine piteously. Fairmont’s remaining hand had grabbed a fistful of his fur just below his ear and was shaking the hound’s head viciously. I leapt down clumsily and pulled my skirts free of the useless bush. “Hold on!” I yelled. I sprinted across the clearing and grabbed hold of the discarded litter. Trying very hard not to look at the lifeless Ned lying beside it, I dragged the wooden gurney back across the grass. Propping one end against the heavy statue, I found purchase on a cluster of marble grapes spilling merrily out of the top of the urn. Another yelp from Charlie, and I saw a tuft of chocolate brown fur tossed aside as the creature’s arm drew back for another blow.

  “Now!” I screamed.

  The corpse thrashed. Charlie rolled away. I heaved against my end of the litter, and the statue tipped. For a fraction of a second the urn seemed to hang in the air, weightless, and then it dropped. The head that had once been Steven Fairmont’s lay directly below it. The two met with a wet crunch.

  I staggered out from around the pillar. The body did not move. Not a finger twitched. The upturned urn had buried itself several inches into the soil where the thing’s skull had been. All around the impact crater was a dark, sickly something I dared not think too hard about. I breathed. Charlie panted. We stared at the corpse, which was lifeless once more. The smell was atrocious.

  “I think,” I huffed, “it might be over.”

  Charlie limped back toward the stage to retrieve his clothes. I cautiously retrieved my knife and cleaned it on the grass, keeping a wary eye on the corpse until Charlie returned in his human form. He stepped back to my side shortly, pulling his coat stiffly over his shoulders.

  Footsteps sounded behind the hedgerows.

  “We should go,” I whispered.

  Before either of us could act on my advice, Lieutenant Dupin appeared around the corner, staggering at once to a halt. He had a pistol drawn already, and his eyes widened as he surveyed the mad scene. The voices of his fellow officers were closing in.

  Charlie did not run. His eyes moved from the mutilated Mr. Fairmont to the savaged Ned. “It isn’t over,” he said somberly. “Fairmont was the weapon, not the wielder. We still don’t know who did this.”

  Dupin stood agape. He turned to face Charlie. The gun in his hands trembled. The voices of the agitated officers behind him grew closer.

  “We will report to Marlowe everything that happened here,” I assured the officer. “Charlie is not responsible for any of this. Please, you need to believe me.”

  “Go,” he gulped.

  A minute later, we were clambering along the low branch of the oak tree, and in short order we were back on the road into New Fiddleham. Neither one of us had spoken a word as we had retreated through the gardens.

  “I should not have asked for your help,” Charlie said at last.

  “I think we can plainly see that you should have,” I said. “You can’t seriously have expected to handle a thing like that all on your own—someone’s found a way to give the rotting dead the will to live. Good news, though: I do believe we’ve reached that special level of odd that Jackaby cannot possibly decline to investigate. You don’t have to go it alone.”

  “I am fortunate that I did not tonight,” he conceded. “Thank you for being there for me.” His fingers brushed mine as we walked side by side, and I slid my hand up to hold his arm. He smiled shyly.

  “I’ll keep saving you if you keep saving me,” I said.

  Chapter Nine

  When I was seven, I became terribly ill and developed a severe fever that lasted for days. My father recalls the incident as though I had nearly died, while my mother recalls the event as though I had done it on purpose to get out of piano lessons. My own memory of it is, perhaps, less coherent than my parents’, but it remains with me to this day. At the height of my delirium, as my nanny pressed cool washcloths to my forehead, I lay on my bed with a parade of horrifying visions swimming before my weary eyes. In retrospect, that vivid fever dream may have been just the thing to brace me for the scene that awaited Charlie and me upon our return to 926 Augur Lane.

  “No!” Jackaby’s muffled bellow came from the other side of the door as we mounted the steps. “Take that out of your mouth! Put that down! That is an apotropaic wand carved from Egyptian ivory during the—and you’ve broken it. No! Don’t sit on that! Oh, for heaven’s sake.”

  I opened the door. To say that the crowd within was pressed shoulder to shoulder would not do justice to the assortment of bodies occupying Jackaby’s foyer. The tallest among them, a hunched giant, could have put his head through the ceiling if he had stood fully upright. A tight group of very short men huddled around the umbrella stand scarcely came up to my waist, although their pointed violet hats nearly doubled their height. There were smaller creatures still, a few of them barely more than twinkling balls of light that fluttered around a lithe, angular woman with twigs in her hair—although I was not sure if I should count those ones as bodies in their own right, or if they were more adornments of hers. There were people with beards and people with gills and one with a face that my eyes refused to focus on no matter how hard I tried. Jenny was there as well, making an effort to shoo a small cloud of pixies away from the more fragile relics on the shelves. I could see by the red clay shards on the floor that she had not been successful in keeping them from toppling a Grecian urn. The motley mob stood, stooped, or flew shoulder to knee to belly button all around the cramped chamber.

  “Please! If you would all simply stop moving!” Jackaby yelled. “Oh, Miss Rook—where in God’s name have you been?”

  “We—” I began.

  “Riveting. Please make yourself useful, would you? Douglas and Jenny and I have been coordinating temporary placements for everyone until I can sort this all out.” He waved us to step forward. I had to squeeze past the little men in violet hats, who kindly shuffled into a tighter huddle. The giant grumbled something in an accent that sounded a bit like French and a bit like a g
rizzly bear growling from the bottom of a very deep well.

  “You heard me!” Jackaby spun and pointed a finger up at him. “I said temporary and I meant it! You’re not staying!”

  The giant shrugged glumly and his shoulder blades scraped the ceiling.

  Jackaby turned back to us. “What in heaven’s name took you so long?”

  “Don’t get cross with me. A man rose from the dead! His corpse literally stood up at the scene of the crime! He attacked us! I had to sort of . . . squish him.”

  “It’s true,” said Charlie.

  “What color was its hair?”

  “What?” I said. “What sort of question is that? What does it matter what color his hair was?”

  “It never hurts to narrow things down. The West African ‘zombi’ is typically black-haired, while its Haitian variant can be any hue. The ‘draugr’ from Scandinavia, on the other hand, is frequently redheaded, and also typically boasts a full beard. Was your dead man bearded?”

  “No. I don’t think so.”

  “He was a brunet, I think,” Charlie offered. “Why? Which ones are worse?”

  “Oh, there’s really no difference between them beyond the hair,” Jackaby said. “Never hurts to be precise, though. Whatever he was, no good ever came of the dead rising.”

  “I’m going to pretend I didn’t hear that,” Jenny called from across the crowded foyer. “Hey! Get off that lamp! Oh—I hope you burn your wings, you little brats!”