by Frank Tuttle
Othur giggled.
Petey licked my hand. You might not believe now, I thought. But I bet you will before sunrise.
Petey whirled and growled, and I heard footsteps-booted, hurried footsteps from at least two men-sound down on the stairs.
We scooted out of there. Petey led the way, and I followed. Just like old times.
We wound and we wound and we wound, until the halls got narrow and the doors got smaller and the storm felt like it was just inches above our heads. The axe continued to fall, and I heard snatches of a brief argument, and then all the voices but those of the hex fell silent.
Petey led me to a door, stopped. And though he was nothing but hex and poison and memory, he wagged his tail, and I saw.
The door-latch turned, the door opened and there stood the widow, wide-eyed.
I raised a finger to my lips, and she bit back her words. I stepped inside, pushed the door shut. Lightning flared, and the widow’s eyes went wide, and I knew she was seeing the blood on my face.
“It’s nothing,” I whispered. “Good to see you. Why aren’t you in your room?”
“Mrs. Hog warned me to seek a secret place tonight,” she whispered. She bit her lip to stop its trembling. “Have you seen him? He’s out there. Can you hear him?”
I shook my head. Maybe she didn’t know. “I’m more concerned about your sons,” I said. “You know they’re at your door. With an axe, and at least two men.”
“I cannot,” came the cry again. “I cannot!”
The widow did not hear; instead, she nodded. “I know,” she said in reply to me. “I heard the sounds, went out. I saw.” She set her jaw, and did not cry. “What are we to do?”
“You must,” came a voice in the thunder. I pinched my nose and the widow winced.
“We’ve got to get downstairs,” I said. “They’ll be through the door shortly. When they find you gone, they’ll go room to room. We’d better not be here for that.”
“But-outside-Ebed is there, outside.”
“No, he isn’t,” I said. “He’s dead. He’s gone. The man with axe is very much alive.”
She shook her head. I heard the cry again ignored it.
“We’re going to go downstairs,” I said. “We’re going to get Jefrey. Then we’re going to a neighbor.”
She started to argue. I cut her off.
“What did Mama tell you?” I said. The axe blows fell faster now. Even House Merlat’s pre-War, solid oak doors weren’t going to hold them back much longer. “What did she say?”
The widow said nothing, but she looked me in the eye, nodded once.
“Let’s go,” I said. I stepped into the hall and let Petey lead the way into the dark.
We made it down the stairs. We hid once, at the top of the second floor landing, while Abad and a hireling-a man even bigger than the axe-man upstairs-trotted past, cussing and panting.
Abad’s friend had a crossbow. Not a big fat Army-issue Mauser, but a sleek black rig narrow enough to slip easily through doors and poke around corners. Probably had a killing range of only thirty feet, but that’s just fine for the odd bit of murder in our better stately homes.
We all held our breath. Mama’s hex showed me faces in the walls but was quiet while Abad and his crossbow-fancying friend passed.
We waited until the sound of their passage and the last faint glow from the lamp they carried was gone, and then I took the widow’s hand and we darted down the stairs. She moved well, and the soft-soled shoes she’d chosen were as quiet as my socks. And at least her customary black garb let her blend in well with the shadows.
At the foot of the stairs, I listened, heard only cries and moans. I led the widow to the shadowed alcove by the stairs and motioned for her to be still.
“Jefrey,” I whispered, and pointed toward the door to his closet. “Wait.”
I went, Petey at my side, ghostly dancers twirling about me. Blink they were there-blink again, gone. I put my ear to the door.
“I cannot, no, I cannot.”
Petey growled.
“Quiet,” I hissed. Then I heard Jefrey snore, and I opened the door.
While I gathered him up, I pondered my next move. It seemed simple enough-just sneak out the front and wake the Watch. The storm would hide us. Once away, we’d be impossible to find. With luck, they’d not know we were gone until the Watch came and told them.
I slung Jefrey over my shoulder and stepped back out into the ballroom and blinked away the phantom dancers about the time a crossbow clicked and sent a bolt all the way through my left arm, just above the elbow.
The widow shrieked and thunder boomed, loud enough to rattle windows. I dropped Jefrey and went down on one knee, trying to find the man in the shadows so I’d know which way to run.
Lightning flared and I found him, crouched in the dark on the other side of the staircase, five steps from the widow.
He lowered the crossbow, grinned, pulled out a long knife. He shouted something to his friends, but it was lost in the thunder.
Petey snarled. I’d heard that same snarl only half a dozen times, down in the tunnels. It was pure wolf, pure rage, sudden promise of a torn throat, of a leap and a bite and a wet red gush of blood.
The man heard it too. He heard it and he whirled, seeking its source, and a sudden rush of shadows broke from my side and threw itself full upon him.
He fell. He flailed and kicked for a moment, long knife whipping and slashing and striking sparks off the tiles.
I rose. Blood ran down my arm, kept running, and I could feel it rush out new with each heartbeat. But I rose and stumbled toward the man, halfway there before I realized my own knife was gone, dropped, probably under Jefrey and too damned far away.
The widow stepped out of the shadows, a red-on-yellow Hang fish-urn in her hands. Without ceremony, she lifted it high above her head and hurled it down upon the man still wrestling emptiness on the floor at her feet.
He rolled. She missed. The urn shattered, and the man cursed and rolled and caught her right knee with his hand. The widow screamed and kicked him hard in the face.
I leaped. He hadn’t seen me coming. Lightning cracked and burned, just past the stained-glass windows set high up in the walls, turning the floor red and green and a dark royal blue. I had just enough light to land a punch hard in his throat and shove my right knee hard into his groin as I fell. He gasped and I hit him again and then the widow pressed a long thin knife in my right hand and I buried the narrow blade deep in his throat.
He gurgled and went still. The widow pulled me up. The sharp end of the bolt stuck out of my arm, flopping loose, but at least it hadn’t lodged in the bone. Then I saw the blood begin to pool at my feet, felt the giddiness that comes as harbinger to shock.
“Got to get this wrapped up,” I said. “Got to get out.”
The widow bit her lip. Then she reached out and snatched the bolt free from my flesh.
I nearly passed out. She propped me up and took off her scarf and tied it tight around the wound.
“Get up, boy,” said a voice. The widow heard it too.
“Get up. You ain’t done yet.”
Behind us, Jefrey groaned and stirred. I blinked back tears, began to hear music again-though this time, it was a funeral dirge.
“Got to get out,” I said. I rose, managed to step over the dead man and take up his blade. “Got to go.”
The widow rushed to Jefrey’s side. She had him sitting up when I got there, and he even tried to open his eyes. But he wasn’t walking, and I wasn’t carrying him.
Shouts sounded, up the stairs, and I saw the flash of a lamp.
We took Jefrey between us and stumbled away. I steered us toward House Merlat’s tall, wide doors, but then I heard a warning growl beneath the thunder and saw dark shapes mass in the shadows ahead.
The widow halted. “See!” she hissed.
I squinted, looked. There-was that light? Down the hall, past the doors?
“This way,” cried Eliz
abet. “Check the closets!”
I cursed. The door was that way. The door and the lawn and the Watch-but we’d never beat Elizabet there, and whoever might be with her.
The widow yanked us around. “This way,” she said, panting under the burden of Jefrey’s weight and my own growing weakness. “There’s a safe-room.”
“I cannot,” wailed the voice, through Mama’s hex. “I cannot, please, please, no.”
Footsteps sounded, behind the light.
We went. I tried to remember hallways, tried to place windows and turnings and ways. Was there a sitting room to the right, with windows that might be opened? Where was the hall that led to the pantry?
But Mama’s hex filled the darkness with faces, and as my arm began to throb in earnest, my head seemed to swell and grow light. I could smell Petey’s wet musk, feel his breath hot and moist at my knees. I heard mourners cry amid the music now, and as we passed down yet another hall, it seemed that we merely joined a line of weeping shades already bound for the faint, faint light at the end of a long, cold tunnel. They shuffled and they moaned as they walked, and just as I realized I was moaning softly with them, Petey reached up and bit my hand.
I jumped and pulled the sagging Jefrey up so that his knees no longer dragged on the floor.
“In here,” said the widow. She let Jefrey go, fumbled with the latch and key. And then the door opened with a groan, and Jefrey and I fell inside.
“What is this place?” I asked. “Is there another door?”
“There they are!” shouted Elizabet, from down the hall. Someone answered, though who it was and what they said was lost to the thunder. “Wait, Mother!” she shouted. “There’s someone here I want you to meet!”
The widow heaved the door shut. More clicks and throws sounded in the dark, and after a moment I heard a crossbar being dropped.
Blows sounded on the door. “Oh, do come out, Mother,” shouted Elizabet from the other side. “Don’t be an old bore! Isn’t Daddy waiting for you, just outside? Haven’t you seen him, calling for you?”
The widow didn’t reply. I heard her fumble in the dark, open a drawer and lit a match.
I looked about. The room was maybe ten-by-twenty, no windows, one door. The walls and floor were plain, smooth stone, bare and unadorned. The ceiling was of banded iron. The only door, the one the widow had just barred, was also fashioned of old banded iron.
Chairs lined one wall. A dusty cask sat in a corner. I was betting it was dry and empty.
“Safe,” chuckled the voices. I groaned and let myself sink to the floor.
The pounding on the door ceased. “I’ll be back soon with the others, Mother,” said Elizabet. “I’ll bet Roger has a chisel in his bag. You’ll like Roger, Mother. He’s such a dear. I doubt he’ll even hurt you much, before he breaks your neck.”
Then she laughed, and the room fell silent.
I gasped. My arm throbbed and I imagined it was swelling and wondered if it would soon burst. The widow helped me up, tried to move me toward a chair.
“Rest,” she said. “They’ll not be soon through that door.”
“They don’t have to be,” I said. I turned, put my hands upon the cold, rusty iron. “They can take their time, chisel away the hinges. Might take two days.” I licked my lips. My mouth was so dry I could barely speak. “How long can we stay here?” I said. “How long will we last?”
The widow opened her mouth and quickly shut it. I watched the realization sink in-the realization that we had neither escaped nor found safety.
My head reeled, but I stood. “We’ve got to go,” I said. “Before she gets back. Let them think we’re in here.” I reached for the latch.
The widow knocked my hand away. “No!” she cried, her voice loud in the small bare room. “No! We cannot. We cannot open the doors.”
“I cannot,” came an answering cry, and now I knew the voice. “Do not ask that of me.”
The widow whirled, and sobbed, and I knew she heard it too.
The room flickered in the widow’s shaky candlelight, and Mama’s hex and my blood loss and shock rose up and conspired to show me another room, and another time. I saw Lord Merlat on his deathbed, saw the Lady Merlat-not yet the widow-kneeling at his side. “I cannot,” she cried over and over. “Do not ask that of me.”
She clenched a dark bottle in her hand. Medicine. A certain amount brings ease. More than that-and perhaps the doctors even stressed this, as the wet fever raged-more than that brings peace.
“I love you,” she sobbed, and this time her mouth moved silently with the phantom words from the hall. “I love you, but I cannot take your life away.”
“My God,” I said. The room spun, and I was back with the widow and the doors of rusty iron. “You think that’s why he’s back? You think he came for you because you couldn’t kill him at the end?”
She couldn’t meet my eyes. She looked away, the matches fell from her hand and she sank to her knees.
“I cannot,” cried the phantom.
She let out a wracking, wordless sob that sounded louder than all the thunder, all the hex-cries still ringing in my ears. She sobbed and caught her breath, and her thin body shook.
“He begged me,” she said, after a moment. “So much pain. I wanted to. I tried to. But. God forgive me. I couldn’t kill my Ebed.”
I backed away, toward the door. The throbbing in my arm rose into my shoulder, crept toward my neck. Dark spots began to dance before my eyes. Poison, I thought, and heard laughter in the distant storm.
Something wet stroked my good hand. Petey tugged at me, scratched at the door.
Do what needs doing, boy.
You’ll know what that is, when the time comes.
I lifted the crossbar. The widow didn’t see what I was doing until she heard the latch click.
“No!” she cried, but I opened the door.
The hall was empty. Thunder grumbled. I stepped outside, turned.
“Lock it again,” I said. “Lock it. And cover your ears.”
“You can’t go out there!” she screamed. “You can’t!”
“I’m not,” I said. I hesitated. Words were getting hard to form.
“It isn’t vengeance,” I said. “It never was.” I licked my lips, panted a bit, forced it out. “The kids know about the will. Know you’ve got to have an accident before you make it legal.”
Jefrey moaned, pawed at the air.
“He only came back on the nights the kids had plans for you,” I said. “He came back to save you. Came back to rouse the house. It isn’t vengeance he’s after, Lady. And it isn’t you.”
She wept. If she heard, I couldn’t tell.
I reached, and pulled, and shut the door.
I turned. Petey took his place at my feet. The hall tilted and pitched and I had to put my hand on the wall just to stay upright. If Elizabet and her brothers and their friends showed up while I was in that hall, I’d be joining the phantoms. The line of mourners still walked, but I pushed past them and stumbled back the other way.
Toward the doors. Toward the big dark double doors. I reached the ballroom, slipped on my own blood where it smeared the tiles, crawled until I reached the stairs. Then Petey nipped at my butt, and I stumbled to my feet and followed the lightning-flashes to the door.
I hid once, when the Merlat children came racing down the stairs, spilled onto the tile floor and went scampering off down the hall. I counted five-three Merlats and two angry henchmen, probably brothers to the man I’d just killed.
I held my breath and prayed none of them had the sense to look down and realize what those smears on the floors meant. But they raced away, toward the pantry, not the widow’s safe-room. Fetching more tools, I decided. Chisels and hammers this time.
I crawled toward the doors. Voices rose up around me. Petey clawed at the latch and whined and urged me on with yips and barks.
I reached the door, rose up, took the latch, got blood all over it. The dark spots before my eyes swelled an
d spun.
“I loved you,” cried the widow, and somehow I heard.
“She did, you know,” I said. And then I pulled myself up, turned the latch and opened the right-hand door.
The storm spilled inside, rain pouring, wind whipping, cold blast rushing. It blew the door back wide, caught the left-hand door, flung it open too, knocked me back and down on my knees.
I let the cold rain spray my face. The voices and the shadows grew dim, Petey whined and I opened my eyes.
At first, I saw only darkness. But then lightning flashed, Petey growled and there, on the lawn, was Ebed Merlat.
Ten long strides away, grave clothes wet and whipping, face pale, eyes rotted away, mouth wide open in a frozen lipless scream.
He walked for the open doors. Each time his grave-boot fell, thunder wracked the tortured sky. He lifted his stiff yellow hands and the wind howled and roared anew-and in the thunder, I was sure I heard the beginnings of a long, loud scream.
“All them years in the ground, boy,” said the voices. “Savin’ up a scream.”
He turned his eyeless face upon me, and I am not ashamed to say I rose and ran stumbling away.
Petey herded me with nips and yelps toward the safe-room hall. Rain and wind blew in behind me. That, and that awful thunder that meant Eded Merlat was one step closer to coming home at last.
I bounced off the walls and left blood on every surface, but somehow I made it back to the door. I collapsed in front of it, heard the widow weeping and sobbing behind the iron.
“It’s nearly over,” I said. “Not much longer.”
I don’t know if she heard me. But she heard, as did I, the sound of heavy footsteps treading slowly down the hall.
I tried to rise but couldn’t, and failed to crawl as well. The footsteps sounded louder, sounded nearer, no more accompanied by thunder, but with the loud crunch of grave-dirt upon the polished tiles.
The voices about me rose up, then fell to whispers. Petey stood stiff beside me, wolf growling warning, dead man or no.
A shadow fell over me, and the air-the air grew as cold as the heart of winter, or the bottom of a grave. I closed my eyes and jammed my hands, even my numb left hand, over my ears. I felt the iron door buckle where the dead man laid his hand upon it, but I heard no scream.