“So what are you suggesting I do?” he whispered.
Fight. The beast is a thing of mind. It’s taking its power from you, Shadow. You are near, and so it’s become more real. Real enough to own Oliver. Real enough to hurt you.
“Me?”
“You think ghosts can talk to everyone?” asked Cassie Burglass’s voice in the darkness, urgently. “We are moths. And you are the flame.”
“What should I do?” asked Shadow. “It’s hurt my arm. It damn near ripped out my throat.”
Oh, sweet man. It’s just a shadow-thing. It’s a night-dog. It’s just an overgrown jackal.
“It’s real,” Shadow said. The last of the stones was being banged into place.
“Are you truly scared of your father’s dog?” said a woman’s voice. Goddess or ghost, Shadow did not know.
But he knew the answer. Yes. Yes, he was scared.
His left arm was only pain, and unusable, and his right hand was slick and sticky with his blood. He was entombed in a cavity between a wall and rock. But he was, for now, alive.
“Get your shit together,” said Cassie. “I’ve done everything I can. Do it.”
He braced himself against the rocks behind the wall, and he raised his feet. Then he kicked both his booted feet out together, as hard as he could. He had walked so many miles in the last few months. He was a big man, and he was stronger than most. He put everything he had behind that kick.
The wall exploded.
The beast was on him, the black dog of despair, but this time Shadow was prepared for it. This time he was the aggressor. He grabbed at it.
I will not be my father’s dog.
With his right hand he held the beast’s jaw closed. He stared into its green eyes. He did not believe the beast was a dog at all, not really.
It’s daylight, said Shadow to the dog, with his mind, not with his voice. Run away. Whatever you are, run away. Run back to your gibbet, run back to your grave, little Wish Hound. All you can do is depress us, fill the world with shadows and illusions. The age when you ran with the Wild Hunt, or hunted terrified humans, it’s over. I don’t know if you’re my father’s dog or not. But you know what? I don’t care.
With that, Shadow took a deep breath and let go of the dog’s muzzle.
It did not attack. It made a noise, a baffled whine deep in its throat that was almost a whimper.
“Go home,” said Shadow, aloud.
The dog hesitated. Shadow thought for a moment then that he had won, that he was safe, that the dog would simply go away. But then the creature lowered its head, raised the ruff around its neck, and bared its teeth. It would not leave, Shadow knew, until he was dead.
The corridor in the hillside was filling with light: the rising sun shone directly into it. Shadow wondered if the people who had built it, so long ago, had aligned their temple to the sunrise. He took a step to the side, stumbled on something, and fell awkwardly to the ground.
Beside Shadow on the grass was Oliver, sprawled and unconscious. Shadow had tripped over his leg. The man’s eyes were closed; he made a growling sound in the back of his throat, and Shadow heard the same sound, magnified and triumphant, from the dark beast that filled the mouth of the temple.
Shadow was down, and hurt, and was, he knew, a dead man.
Something soft touched his face, gently.
Something else brushed his hand. Shadow glanced to his side, and he understood. He understood why Bast had been with him in this place, and he understood who had brought her.
They had been ground up and sprinkled on these fields more than a hundred years before, stolen from the earth around the temple of Bastet and Beni Hasan. Tons upon tons of them, mummified cats in their thousands, each cat a tiny representation of the deity, each cat an act of worship preserved for an eternity.
They were there, in that space, beside him: brown and sand-coloured and shadowy-grey, cats with leopard spots and cats with tiger stripes, wild, lithe and ancient. These were not the local cats Bast had sent to watch him the previous day. These were the ancestors of those cats, of all our modern cats, from Egypt, from the Nile Delta, from thousands of years ago, brought here to make things grow.
They trilled and chirruped, they did not meow.
The black dog growled louder but now it made no move to attack. Shadow forced himself into a sitting position. “I thought I told you to go home, Shuck,” he said.
The dog did not move. Shadow opened his right hand, and gestured. It was a gesture of dismissal, of impatience. Finish this.
The cats sprang, with ease, as if choreographed. They landed on the beast, each of them a coiled spring of fangs and claws both as sharp as they had ever been in life. Pin-sharp claws sank in to the black flanks of the huge beast, tore at its eyes. It snapped at them, angrily, and pushed itself against the wall, toppling more rocks, in an attempt to shake them off, but without success. Angry teeth sank into its ears, its muzzle, its tail, its paws.
The beast yelped and growled, and then it made a noise which, Shadow thought, would, had it come from any human throat, have been a scream.
Shadow was never certain what happened then. He watched the black dog put its muzzle down to Oliver’s mouth, and push, hard. He could have sworn that the creature stepped into Oliver, like a bear stepping into a river.
Oliver shook, violently, on the sand.
The scream faded, and the beast was gone, and sunlight filled the space on the hill.
Shadow felt himself shivering. He felt like he had just woken up from a waking sleep; emotions flooded through him, like sunlight: fear and revulsion and grief and hurt, deep hurt.
There was anger in there, too. Oliver had tried to kill him, he knew, and he was thinking clearly for the first time in days.
A man’s voice shouted, “Hold up! Everyone all right over there?”
A high bark, and a lurcher ran in, sniffed at Shadow, his back against the wall, sniffed at Oliver Bierce, unconscious on the ground, and at the remains of Cassie Burglass.
A man’s silhouette filled the opening to the outside world, a grey paper cut-out against the rising sun.
“Needles! Leave it!” he said. The dog returned to the man’s side. The man said, “I heard someone screaming. Leastways, I wouldn’t swear to it being a someone. But I heard it. Was that you?”
And then he saw the body, and he stopped. “Holy fucking mother of all fucking bastards,” he said.
“Her name was Cassie Burglass,” said Shadow.
“Moira’s old girlfriend?” said the man. Shadow knew him as the landlord of the pub, could not remember whether he had ever known the man’s name. “Bloody Nora. I thought she went to London.”
Shadow felt sick.
The landlord was kneeling beside Oliver. “His heart’s still beating,” he said. “What happened to him?”
“I’m not sure,” said Shadow. “He screamed when he saw the body—you must have heard him. Then he just went down. And your dog came in.”
The man looked at Shadow, worried. “And you? Look at you! What happened to you, man?”
“Oliver asked me to come up here with him. Said he had something awful he had to get off his chest.” Shadow looked at the wall on each side of the corridor. There were other bricked-in nooks there. Shadow had a good idea of what would be found behind them if any of them were opened. “He asked me to help him open the wall. I did. He knocked me over as he went down. Took me by surprise.”
“Did he tell you why he had done it?”
“Jealousy,” said Shadow. “Just jealous of Moira and Cassie, even after Moira had left Cassie for him.”
The man exhaled, shook his head. “Bloody hell,” he said. “Last bugger I’d expect to do anything like this. Needles! Leave it!” He pulled a mobile phone from his pocket, and called the police. Then he excused himself. “I’ve got a bag of game to put aside until the police have cleared out,” he explained.
Shadow got to his feet, and inspected his arms. His sweater and coat
were both ripped in the left arm, as if by huge teeth, but his skin was unbroken beneath it. There was no blood on his clothes, no blood on his hands.
He wondered what his corpse would have looked like, if the black dog had killed him.
Cassie’s ghost stood beside him, and looked down at her body, half-fallen from the hole in the wall. The corpse’s fingertips and the fingernails were wrecked, Shadow observed, as if she had tried, in the hours or the days before she died, to dislodge the rocks of the wall.
“Look at that,” she said, staring at herself. “Poor thing. Like a cat in a glass box.” Then she turned to Shadow. “I didn’t actually fancy you,” she said. “Not even a little bit. I’m not sorry. I just needed to get your attention.”
“I know,” said Shadow. “I just wish I’d met you when you were alive. We could have been friends.”
“I bet we would have been. It was hard in there. It’s good to be done with all of this. And I’m sorry, Mr. American. Try not to hate me.”
Shadow’s eyes were watering. He wiped his eyes on his shirt. When he looked again, he was alone in the passageway.
“I don’t hate you,” he told her.
He felt a hand squeeze his hand. He walked outside, into the morning sunlight, and he breathed and shivered, and listened to the distant sirens.
Two men arrived and carried Oliver away on a stretcher, down the hill to the road where an ambulance took him away, siren screaming to alert any sheep on the lanes that they should shuffle back to the grass verge.
A female police officer turned up as the ambulance disappeared, accompanied by a younger male officer. They knew the landlord, whom Shadow was not surprised to learn was also a Scathelocke, and were both impressed by Cassie’s remains, to the point that the young male officer left the passageway and vomited into the ferns.
If it occurred to either of them to inspect the other bricked-in cavities in the corridor, for evidence of centuries-old crimes, they managed to suppress the idea, and Shadow was not going to suggest it.
He gave them a brief statement, then rode with them to the local police station, where he gave a fuller statement to a large police officer with a serious beard. The officer appeared mostly concerned that Shadow was provided with a mug of instant coffee, and that Shadow, as an American tourist, would form a mistaken impression of rural England. “It’s not like this up here normally. It’s really quiet. Lovely place. I wouldn’t want you to think we were all like this.”
Shadow assured him that he didn’t think that at all.
VI. The Riddle
Moira was waiting for him when he came out of the police station. She was standing with a woman in her early sixties, who looked comfortable and reassuring, the sort of person you would want at your side in a crisis.
“Shadow, this is Doreen. My sister.”
Doreen shook hands, explaining she was sorry she hadn’t been able to be there during the last week, but she had been moving house.
“Doreen’s a County Court judge,” explained Moira.
Shadow could not easily imagine this woman as a judge.
“They are waiting for Ollie to come around,” said Moira. “Then they are going to charge him with murder.” She said it thoughtfully, but in the same way she would have asked Shadow where he thought she ought to plant some Snapdragons.
“And what are you going to do?”
She scratched her nose. “I’m in shock. I have no idea what I’m doing any more. I keep thinking about the last few years. Poor, poor Cassie. She never thought there was any malice in him.”
“I never liked him,” said Doreen, and she sniffed. “Too full of facts for my liking, and he never knew when to stop talking. Just kept wittering on. Like he was trying to cover something up.”
“Your backpack and your laundry, are in Doreen’s car,” said Moira. “I thought we could give you a lift somewhere, if you needed one. Or if you want to get back to rambling, you can walk.”
“Thank you,” said Shadow. He knew he would never be welcome in Moira’s little house, not any more.
Moira said, urgently, angrily, as if it was all she wanted to know, “You said you saw Cassie. You told us, yesterday. That was what sent Ollie off the deep end. It hurt me so much. Why did you say you’d seen her, if she was dead? You couldn’t have seen her.”
Shadow had been wondering about that, while he had been giving his police statement. “Beats me,” he said. “I don’t believe in ghosts. Probably a local, playing some kind of game with the Yankee tourist.”
Moira looked at him with fierce hazel eyes, as if she was trying to believe him but was unable to make the final leap of faith. Her sister reached down and held her hand. “More things in Heaven and Earth, Horatio. I think we should just leave it at that.”
Moira looked at Shadow, unbelieving, angered, for a long time, before she took a deep breath and said, “Yes. Yes, I suppose we should.”
There was silence in the car. Shadow wanted to apologise to Moira, to say something that would make things better.
They drove past the gibbet tree.
“There were ten tongues within one head,” recited Doreen, in a voice slightly higher and more formal than the one in which she had previously spoken. “And one went out to fetch some bread, to feed the living and the dead. That was a riddle written about this corner, and that tree.”
“What does it mean?”
“A wren made a nest inside the skull of a gibbeted corpse, flying in and out of the jaw to feed its young. In the midst of death, as it were, life just keeps on happening.”
Shadow thought about the matter for a little while, and told her that he guessed that it probably did.
STORM CONSTANTINE
IN THE EARTH
STORM CONSTANTINE is the creator of the “Wraeththu Mythos”, the first trilogy of which was published in the 1980s. She has written more than thirty books, including full-length novels (Hermetech, Burying the Shadow etc.), novellas, short story collections and nonfiction titles, such as Sekhem Heka. She is currently working on a new novel and several short stories.
Constantine is the founder of the independent publishing house Immanion Press. She lives in the Midlands of the UK with her husband and four cats.
“‘In the Earth’ was primarily inspired by my recollections of a childhood friend,” she recalls, “who was an unusual person to say the least, but exciting company. Several of the escapades described in the tale are drawn from my own experiences, although embellished for this piece.
“I was always a little frightened but so intrigued and awed I never wanted to say no to any of my friend’s ideas and lose her respect. This friend didn’t disappear from my life because of doing something terrible, she merely moved away with her family. But only a few years ago, I met someone who still knew her, and when I suggested getting in touch with her, the response I got had to be included in the end of this story.”
THE CENTIPEDE WAS cut in two. “Why did you kill it?” Mawde asked. Jeryl pursed her lips. She was squatting in the dirt of the lower cellar, the frilly skirt of her white Sunday dress pulled up over her knees. “Don’t you know what they do?” she said.
Mawde shook her head. “Run about?”
“They burrow—into any hole of your body, and then they start eating.”
Mawde grimaced. She couldn’t believe that. Why would a humble creature like a centipede do that?
“They do,” said Jeryl. “I’ve seen pictures. They ate a woman’s eyes from the inside.”
Mawde was sentimental about all creatures, whereas her cousin Jeryl seemed fixed with the idea that if anything was small enough to slaughter with a quick stamp of the foot or a blow from a trowel, then it was her treat—or perhaps her duty—to kill it. Mawde’s mother said that all animals, however scary and unpleasant they might look, were all part of Nature’s creations and must be respected. Loved.
Jeryl’s mother didn’t believe in anything. Now Jeryl poked the centipede parts with a stick she’d found.<
br />
Outside, the summer was gloomy and thundery, pressing down on the tall wooden house, making its labyrinth of cellars a cauldron of shadows and lifeless air. A smell of old earth surrounded the girls; pungent and musty. Jeryl was staying with Mawde’s family for a whole month during the school holidays. She liked to play in the cellars. She said there were tunnels down there, hidden behind the sagging wooden racks and shelves, which snaked right into Pike Mountain, dating back to the start of time. Even when dressed in feminine flounces, within this confection lurked the heart and mind of a grubby little boy. No amount of dressing up would change that.
Jeryl had been looking for tunnels (hence the digging that had unearthed the doomed centipede), but to Mawde’s relief so far none had been found. She liked her cousin’s company but wished sometimes her favoured pastimes didn’t have to involve danger or fear.
It wasn’t enough simply to sit in the sunshine on the porch roof, but Jeryl insisted they had to jump down from this height onto the lawn, which hurt Mawde’s ankles and feet. They couldn’t just play make-believe in the cellars but had to look for tunnels—undoubtedly haunted, or so Jeryl said. Neither was it enough to climb the tall old yew trees that clustered like hags at the garden’s edge; they had to hang upside-down by their knees from the highest branch they could reach…then right themselves and drop to the ground. Jeryl was always on the lookout for higher places from which they could jump and was unconcerned that yew wood was relatively soft and therefore not the best support for weight, even of a child.
She was obsessed with heights, but also like to push herself physically. “This could be too high,” she might say solemnly, before holding out her arms and throwing herself into the air. Mawde was afraid of these antics—demands, even—but couldn’t bring herself to refuse them. Jeryl’s scorn was worse than her challenges. But that aside, she was the most fascinating playmate, unlike any other girl Mawde knew.
Neither set of parents were aware what the girls got up to during their holidays. In all the households Mawde knew, it was common for the children to be shooed out of adult company after breakfast, tolerated briefly at lunch, then sent out again until tea. Unless it was bad weather when they were allowed to play indoors, but out of adult hearing, such as in the attics or cellars. Bizarrely, neither Jeryl nor Mawde had ever hurt themselves, which perhaps—Mawde thought—meant that her mother’s stories about guardian angels must be true.
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