by Alma Katsu
“I must at least satisfy my curiosity that she is not there. I must do something,” Adair told Jude. “Waiting in this house is driving me mad.”
But Jude had other concerns, too. “Do you feel you’re ready to go out on your own?” he asked after a minute’s hesitation. “There was a story on the news that a girl was killed over by the old mansion. . . . The police said it was especially brutal—‘excessive’ was the word they used, like something a lunatic might’ve done. . . . It was you, wasn’t it?” Jude’s hesitant tone surprised Adair—no one likes to be taken for a madman—and made him pause on his way to the waiting taxi. “They showed the dead girl’s picture on television. She looked a lot like Lanore, I’ll give you that,” Jude continued, his eyes carefully downcast, “but you can’t go killing everyone you please. What if you get up to St. Andrew and Lanore isn’t there? What will you do then?”
Adair couldn’t admit to Jude that the bloodletting had changed him. In order to keep his sanity while he was behind the wall, he had had no choice but to suppress his rage, winding it tighter and tighter until it was like a weapon, coiled and ready to go off when he finally met up with her. But it was as though he’d wound it too tightly and something inside him had cracked when he’d killed that girl. He’d unleashed his rage in a single act of violence against an innocent woman unlucky enough to cross his path. And for what? His crime merely filled him with deep remorse and shame. He vowed never to allow himself to fly into such a blind fury again. A small piece of him worried irrationally that somehow Lanore had been hurt by the release of his rage, that his evil intention had touched her. Superstitious, yes, but now he was desperate to find her, or evidence of her, to be sure that this wasn’t the case.
And, too, he sought to make a pilgrimage of sorts. He couldn’t shake the feeling that all his troubles could’ve been avoided if, two hundred years ago, he hadn’t sent Lanore on her own back to St. Andrew to fetch Jonathan. If he’d gone with her, he would’ve claimed Jonathan’s body for his own and never given Lanore the chance to plot against him. All the misery of the past two centuries would’ve been avoided if not for this one instance of shortsightedness on his part. He would force himself to make the trip now, in contrition, and with luck, fate would accept his offering and turn back the hand of time to deliver Lanore to him.
As he drove into St. Andrew, Adair was amused to see that the town was not so different from those he’d known in medieval times. Rows of tradesmen’s shops lined the main street. Laggards shuffled up and down the sidewalks for something to do while old men sat sunning themselves on park benches. A tavern and a church, the two anchors of every town, stood across from each other in the square. Adair found lodgings at a public house that went by the name “Bed and Breakfast,” its accommodations more fussy and claustrophobic than he would’ve preferred, but it was in the center of town and seemed a good location from which to gather information.
He carried his suitcase to his room and locked the door before pulling out his two books of spells. Running his hand over the timeworn covers, he slipped them under the mattress, securely locking the door behind him again when he left. The woman at the front desk directed him to the only bar in the downtown area, called the Blue Moon—which could not be missed, in any case, for the glowing blue crescent in the window—and Adair settled into a midday conversation with the barkeep and a handful of patrons.
Two of them recognized the name Rolf Schneider as the man who’d passed through town with a girl, seemingly just another couple of tourists traipsing through St. Andrew. But everyone knew the girl’s story: that she’d murdered her companion and left his body in the woods, and then managed to escape from the county hospital, taking one of the doctors with her. Adair took in every detail, including the names of the doctor’s former wife and children, and the town where they now lived.
Had anyone seen the girl? Adair asked. Could anyone describe her? The patrons shook their heads, advising Adair that the only people to see her were the police and the night nurse at the hospital. Adair bought a round of drinks and sipped a watery beer while he mulled over the curious series of events that he could not have guessed on his own, not even if an oracle had whispered clues in his ear. Jonathan was dead, and that meant Lanore had killed him, for it couldn’t have happened any other way. Adair couldn’t imagine what would’ve persuaded Lanore to let Jonathan go after hundreds of years together. She couldn’t have tired of him, could she? He burned with curiosity to know what had happened between the two.
Having gathered all the information he could, Adair bid the patrons good night, slapped money on the counter, and went back to the inn. He retrieved the books of spells from their hiding place and began skimming through the pages. Although Lanny’s tracks ran cold at Jonathan’s grave, Adair was undeterred. It would take very strong magic, but Adair had come to find Lanore, and that meant he had no choice but to reanimate Jonathan and retrieve the clues from a dead man’s memory. The task was daunting: if rumors about the resurrection spell could be trusted, it was an act that required the highest degree of skill and power. An act that was considered by many to be dangerous and blasphemous, and one that for a number of reasons—chief among them being a sense of deep foreboding—Adair had never attempted. Even if the spell succeeded, Adair had no idea what condition Jonathan would be in, if his mind would be wiped clean, if he would be of any use at all. . . .
Still, Adair wanted nothing in this world more than to find Lanore, and to do so, it appeared he had to ignore his unease and undertake the darkest of the dark arts, the most profane of its acts. He would bring a soul back from the land of the dead, and the consequences of this—for surely there would be consequences—would be his to bear. He was willing to defy the powers that governed the universe to possess Lanore once again, and having made his decision, he began to marshal the strength he’d need to make this happen.
FIFTEEN
Dusk had settled over the Great North Woods by the time Adair found the police station. The building sat by itself on a deserted logging road, set far from town, which was quiet anyway except for the high tourism season, and closer to the logging camps where most of the trouble happened the rest of the year. A black-and-white SUV sat parked in front, speckled with dried road salt, although it was approaching summer.
It was empty inside the station, with no signs that anyone was working. The entryway was cramped with filing cabinets and haphazardly stacked boxes, and as warm as a closed attic. “Hello?” Adair called out. “Is anyone on duty?” His voice sounded lonely against the background whir of a fan.
“In here,” a man called back, and Adair followed the voice down the hall to an open door. A dull brass plaque on the wall read “Sheriff Joseph Duchesne.” The man behind the desk looked nothing like a sheriff, not even in a backwater town such as this. He had neither the physique nor the bearing for the job, and was an awkward specimen, all elbows and knees, with a prominent Adam’s apple begging to be struck. Further, he had a face that solicited neither trust nor respect, the face of an incompetent cheat, and the sheriff betrayed a hint of fear when he saw Adair.
“You’re the sheriff,” Adair said doubtfully.
“That’s why I’m sitting behind this desk,” the man replied impatiently. “Can I help you?” He eyed Adair suspiciously; it was plain that the sheriff was wary of out-of-towners.
“I heard that you saw the woman who came through here some months ago.”
“We get a lot of people come through here,” the sheriff replied coolly, but it was clear that he knew whom Adair was talking about.
“I’m referring to the girl who allegedly killed someone: a young woman, blond hair, very slight. Beautiful,” he added with a hint of melancholy.
“Yeah. That’s her.” The sheriff sat up taller, eyes narrowing. “What do you know about her?”
Adair ignored him. “And the man she killed? Did you find the body?”
“Sure, we found him, but—”
“And what did
he look like?”
The sheriff pushed away from the desk. “Now, hold on a minute. This woman you’re asking about is involved in a serious crime, murder in the first degree. The case is still open, and it seems you might know something about it. I’m going to have to call in one of my officers as we need to ask you a few questions, Mr. . . .?” Duchesne hung on the word, waiting for Adair to give him his name as he picked up the receiver to dial. Adair stepped over and pressed the button, disconnecting the phone.
“I asked you what he looked like—the dead man.” Adair took a deep breath to slow his emotions, and tried not to imagine breaking this annoying little man apart with his bare hands. He’d crack like a crab claw, there was so little flesh on his bones. “Would you say he was a good-looking man?”
The sheriff’s face reddened. “What kind of question is that? What are you . . . some kind of homo?” He rose unsurely, like a man unfamiliar with danger, his hand hovering indecisively over his holster. Adair moved in and slammed him against the wall, pinning him there.
“What does it matter to you if I swive men or women or livestock? You will answer my questions or I will snap your miserable neck. Do you understand?”
The sheriff sputtered and choked in Adair’s grasp, their eyes locked as he struggled for air. As far as Adair was concerned, the sheriff was like a chicken whose body still twitched even though its head had been severed: he was already a dead man, he just didn’t know it yet. Adair tightened his grip and slammed him into the wall a second time. “Where’s the body now?”
“The body?”
A third slam, and the wall cracked beneath him. “The dead man. What was done with his body?”
“I’d have to look at the records right over there.” Sheriff Duchesne lifted his chin in the direction of a filing cabinet. Adair dropped him to his feet and gave him a shove. The sheriff didn’t try for the door, perhaps because he was already at the limit of his courage. He found the file in the second drawer, his hands shaking as he shifted through the papers inside.
“Usually we cremate the unclaimed bodies, but the paperwork says the crematorium wasn’t working and they sent him back. According to the records, we buried the body.”
“Here? In town?”
The sheriff nodded.
Adair slid the sheriff’s gun out of his holster and shoved him toward the door. “Take me there.”
Adair found a shovel in the back room, tucked behind a giant bag of road salt and two pairs of galoshes, and threw it in the backseat of his rental car. He put the sheriff at the wheel with a warning about what to expect if he tried to escape; the sheriff, now as meek as the docent at the museum, obeyed. They drove to an empty field on the edge of a shaggy wood, and Duchesne led Adair on foot to the grave site. Darkness had fallen, but the night was still and cool. A few blackflies buzzed about their heads. A metal marker sunk in the ground read “B17.”
Adair handed the shovel to the sheriff. “Dig.”
It took a long time to reach the coffin, and Adair spent this time pacing along the rim of the plot, mentally stepping through the spell he’d learned eons ago from old Henrik, the one copied on a piece of parchment and stuffed in his ancient book. He recalled that session with Henrik, holding his breath as the chick fluttered back to life, then sat inert, its butter-colored down trembling with every tentative breath. How he’d wanted to put his hands over it and crush it, send it back from where it came out of mercy. . . . But he’d let that feeling pass, because even at fourteen, he had been a man of science and he knew he had to resist feeling pity or fear.
He feared that he’d have the same outcome now, but he couldn’t let fear stop him from trying. In any case, the situation wasn’t the same: Old Henrik had been a dabbler, weak. Adair was confident that he was massively more powerful than his tutor had ever been. But if the result was unsatisfactory—if the creature that came back was a monster—Adair promised himself that he would smother Jonathan with his own two hands, once he’d collected the necessary observations.
Uncertainty battled with determination, however, twisting his stomach. He wanted Jonathan’s body for his own—one look at the photograph from the refugee camp confirmed that—but the thought of taking over a body that had been dead for a while was unsettling, to say the least. He’d seen many a decomposed body and knew well the strange emptiness of a lifeless form, but a dead man left to rot on the battlefield was quite different from one that had been moldering in the ground for months. There was also the question of what to do with Jonathan if they switched bodies; not even Adair would be able to release his soul through death. Adair felt a pang of compassion for Jonathan (they had been friends once, after all) but pushed it away: it was one more thing that could not be helped, and it wouldn’t be the first time he’d condemned a man to purgatory to further his own desires.
The shovel made a hollow sound as it struck the top of the plywood coffin. When the sheriff pried off the lid, they both retched at the smell of cadaverine, the noxious gas produced inside Jonathan’s fermenting, unpreserved body. Adair then had Duchesne heave the body bag to the surface before dispatching him with a blow to the back of his head with the shovel.
A black vinyl body bag in a plywood box, sunk into an unmarked grave. What a sad ending for the town’s favorite son, Adair mused. How ignobly they have treated him. Adair took a deep breath before unzipping the bag.
The contents sloshed beneath him, so Adair knew to expect some advanced decomposition. The flesh was no longer solid but a heavy black custard held together by Jonathan’s clothing. The face that had once been the personification of beauty was now only slime clinging to a skull, scattered eyelashes embedded in the muck, and the teeth beginning to show through. The outcome would’ve been much better if they’d treated the body in the usual way, but the town wasn’t about to waste money preserving an unidentified corpse.
Adair collected his wits and uttered the proper words over the body to reanimate Jonathan’s decomposed form. Did the actual words matter, or did it depend on the will of the man who spoke them? He had to believe it was the latter, for the words had been known to practitioners of dark arts for hundreds of years, but he’d heard few claims of success. He could believe only the strongest Adepts would be able to raise the dead, and naturally he put himself in this class. There was the question of whether the most accomplished—and hence wisest—Adepts would attempt the spell, given the taboo against piercing the veil between the two worlds, but this was the sort of self-restraint that Adair rejected. True discoveries were made by the bold. If only God could know both worlds, the living and the dead, Adair would dare to steal a bit of God’s might.
Within seconds, a familiar and welcome power came over him—gently at first, then surging along every nerve and muscle in his body, crackling through his bones and squeezing the breath from his lungs. This surge of energy connected him to Jonathan’s body, and for a moment he was connected to what had to be a residue of Jonathan’s consciousness at the last moments of his life: remorse, sadness, and bitterness as he waited to be released. Uncomfortable thoughts came to him, too: the dark abyss of his imprisonment lurked at the edges of his perception. It hovered beyond the glorious bright power that gripped Adair, emanating menace and loneliness. It made sense that this huge, dark presence might be associated somehow with the glorious power he sought to tap: they were both forces of the universe, after all. But the dark presence worried him. It felt threatening in some way.
The recomposition process was painfully slow, to his great irritation, and Adair was sure that the darkness was keeping him from a rare sight. Even by moonlight, he could tell that the gelatinous mass was solidifying into a dusty white creature. Then hair began to sprout and features to emerge, but the body remained as white as alabaster with lavender pooled around its eyes and mouth, as with the exhausted or anemic. When the eyelids fluttered upward, the right one sagged, and then the right corner of the mouth failed, as though Jonathan were a stroke victim. Thank God, the eyes we
re not dull and lifeless, but overall something was missing. Adair could not quite put his finger on the problem, but something was very wrong.
“Ah!” At length Jonathan spoke, and when he did, a last puff of cadaverine escaped into the air and hovered over his head like a wisp of smoke. “Hah! What is this? Where am I?”
“Jonathan,” Adair said. He was reluctant to touch him, afraid to disrupt the regeneration process before the body had set.
“Yes, I am Jonathan, though I thought I was Jonathan no more.” He spoke like a mystic in a trance, buffered from being fully present.
“Do you know who I am?”
Jonathan’s eyes fluttered over Adair’s face once, and despite the clumsiness of his half-formed face, Jonathan winced in recognition. “Yes, I remember you, Adair.”
“And where did you come from, Jonathan? Where were you a moment ago?” It was the question that had burned in Adair’s mind ever since Henrik’s baby bird had come back to life.
“I was . . . I was in another place . . . not like this one. Dark and cold, and as aimless as ocean currents.”
“Not like here? Then where were you?” Adair asked, anxious.
“Where am I now?”
“Home. You are in St. Andrew. Do you remember how you ended up in this grave?”
On hearing the name of the town, the corpse’s face looked pinched, and a shiver of distaste ran across it. “Yes, I remember.”
Adair tried again, his temper growing sharp. “Were you dreaming before I woke you? Was it like a dream?”
“It was not . . . like here.”
“And were you alone, Jonathan? Was there anyone with you, someone you knew, perhaps? A loved one?”
The cadaver frowned again. “No one I knew, no.”
“And what”—Adair paused, humility and timidity returning for this one question—“of God? Have you met a deity? A higher power? And what of the devil? Have you seen the dark master?”