by Scott Hale
Warren let him go and walked away. “Miranda, what’s wrong?” The big man had big tears leaving bloody smears down his face.
“They killed Jessie,” she said. She unlaced her bracers and pinched the skin on her left forearm. “They killed her.”
Elizabeth was shivering. She stepped over the bodies towards their fallen friend. She started stripping off pieces of armor as well. They fell with a splash into the pools of gore.
“Don’t do that,” Warren said to her. “You’ll need it.”
Elizabeth shook her head. She ripped off her breastplate. The blood that had collected behind it spilled out and soaked her feet.
Atticus wheezed when he breathed, on account of only having one functioning lung. Most of his armor, that patchwork of colors and craft, was damaged, so he removed those pieces. He left his legs protected, as well as one of his arms. Bending down, he took the captain’s helmet and slipped it over his head. At this point, he need only worry about the essentials.
“I can’t feel it,” Miranda admitted when Warren went to touch her left arm. “I can’t move it.”
He sighed and spun her around to look at the hole the soldier had put through her back. He pulled out a pouch and poured some powder from it into her wound.
“Nerve damage. Leave the bow. Your sword arm is still good?”
She nodded.
Elizabeth knelt beside Jessie’s body. She rooted around her neck and inside her breastplate. Something clinked. She pulled out a necklace made of shells.
“Can I wear it for a while?” Miranda asked.
“Of course. Seventy-five percent yours, anyways.”
“You were there, too.” Miranda hobbled forward. Elizabeth met her halfway and fastened the trinket around her neck. “Can’t believe she kept it.”
She smiled, put her forehead to Miranda’s. “We all kept something from back then.”
“She died the way she would’ve wanted to: spectacularly,” Warren said, his lip quivering. He was trying to make the others feel better, but as for himself, he was on his own. “Through hell, we find heaven.”
“Through hell, we find heaven,” Elizabeth and Miranda repeated as one.
“I didn’t know her,” Atticus said, breaking his silence, “but I wish I had. I know that hurt too well.”
“You really can’t die, can you?” Elizabeth said. She pulled Miranda in close and patted her back, shushing her cries.
“Couldn’t even if I wanted to.”
“Lift up your shirt,” Warren said. He wiped his eyes, snapped his head to the doorway as though he’d heard someone. “Lift it up. Quick.”
Atticus did as he was told. The shirt was sticky, ruined, so when he was able to peel it off, he dropped it to the floor. Warren covered his mouth, while Elizabeth and Miranda gawked at the blasphemy of flesh that was his body. Two wicked slits, one in his chest, the other in his stomach, pumped out blood like a spigot. Large gouges and deep lacerations ran across his purpling flesh. The injuries from Bedlam had opened up as well, the arrow holes now glistening and smelling sour. His neck had more or less healed, but still the wound from Blythe’s kunai remained untouched. It seemed he could fix what needed fixing now, but the past was beyond him, forever damaged.
“You keep nodding off, Gravedigger. Are you okay?” Warren said. He seemed as though he wanted to touch Atticus, to marvel at what, surely, this man of muscle and brute strength could only dream of.
“Yeah, just dying is all.” He looked at his stomach wound and noticed it had already started to shut. “It’s getting easier. Maybe I’ll explain it better when we’re done.”
Warren nodded and looked back at Jessie’s corpse. Voice quivering, he said, “I’d like that. I think we all would.”
After ten minutes of pitch-black hallways and above ground sewage tunnels, Atticus and the others finally reached the swimming room. Surprisingly, the pool was still filled, but the water looked more like ink than anything else. The numbers on the side of the pool varied between two and fifty-five feet, sometimes directly after one another, as though the owner hadn’t been entirely sure himself of its depths.
There were a few bodies bobbing in the kiddy-pool, blood from their backs streaking across the black water.
“Couple of our own,” Warren said, recognizing the cabalists. “Third team. They cleared the place.” He craned his neck. “Whatever killed them left.”
Noticing there was no obvious way out of the room, Atticus said, “Where to?”
Miranda started to cry again. Like a reflex honed from years of looking out for one another, Elizabeth immediately went to her.
“I’m fine,” she said, flicking Elizabeth’s nose ring. “Just need to think of something else.”
“There’s one way into the basement. Francisco said it was the most fortified. So, he had another suggestion.” Warren rubbed the back of his head. He hissed as he touched the tender skin there. “A secret passage, in this room. It wasn’t on any of the maps, he said. Something he found a long time ago and kept quiet about.”
“You sure it exists?” Atticus said.
He followed Warren and the others to a second, smaller pool. It was empty, a few people in width, about three feet deep, and held a garden of Haruspex drops.
“Saw a man take a bet and bite into one of these,” Atticus told them. “Lost his mind before the bulb left his mouth. Lost the bet, too.”
“Great story,” Miranda said snidely.
Elizabeth nudged her and told her to stop.
“Gravedigger, find the deepest marker and stand on it.” Warren crouched down, his hands hovering over the Haruspex. “Elizabeth, Miranda, go to the east and west walls. There should be pentagrams on them.”
Ten, thirty-three. In the dim light here, Atticus had to squint to see the markers on the pool’s edge. Five, eleven, five. The black liquid smelled like run-off, he thought, or some by-product. Eighty-eight, seventy-two. He straightened up as a ripple broke across the surface. Ninety-nine. He backed away, just in case something got grabby in the grubby muck. Zero, negative four, negative thirteen. He rounded the corner, sprinted, rounded the other. One, two hundred.
Elizabeth shouted she’d found something.
Six hundred and sixty-six.
And then Miranda did as well.
Atticus covered the last stretch of the pool and returned to that telling number: Six hundred and sixty-six.
Elizabeth stood on the tips of her toes. Arm outstretched, she pressed her hand against a patch of cracks high on the wall. “This is it, yeah?”
Warren nodded and said to Miranda, “And you have yours?”
“It’s here.” She was standing near the doorway, looking at something beside a light switch.
“Gravedigger.” Warren reached into the Haruspexes and something clicked. “Put your weight on the numbers.”
Atticus did that.
“Miranda, go for it.”
And so she did.
“Elizabeth… Wait.” Warren tilted his head.
Thump, thump, thump—the sound rang out through the halls they’d left behind.
“Soldiers,” he said.
But Atticus knew better.
“All right, press it,” Warren said, sounding rushed. “No one moves until I say.”
Elizabeth, grunting, rammed her palm into the pentagram. Without missing a beat, the room went to work. Grinding gears inside the floor gave the pool the shakes. Behind the walls, ropes tightened, stretched. A death-rattle gasp, a snake-rattle shake. The Haruspex pool’s bottom dropped back like a plate and plummeted the plants into the dark below it.
It was said that, by the plants, one would see their death. Atticus kept that detail to himself.
Warren told them that was enough so, equally intrigued, they hurried over to him. Taking a stone out of his pocket, he crushed it, blew on it until it glowed, and dropped it through the opening. A sharp din sounded as it hit the wrought iron staircase hidden a few feet further down.
; Thump, thump, thump. The shepherd was getting closer.
“I’ll go first,” Atticus volunteered.
Holding her arm, Miranda’s eyes lingered on the entrance to the poolroom. “What is that sound?”
“Rather not know.” Warren nodded at Atticus. “Hop to it, then.”
Thump, thump, thump. It was right outside the door, just out of sight, grinding the end of its crook into the ground.
Atticus stepped into the pool, sat down, and threw his legs over the edge of the opening. He gripped the sides, turned around. Lowering himself into the dark below the pool, he watched the door, his heartbeat now matching the cadence of the creature that had come to collect him. Quiet as he could be, he let go and fell onto the rickety staircase.
The air in the dark below, in the secret hell of the house, was clinging and cold, like something that’d been left alone for far too long. Dead as he might be, Atticus had to cover his nose to get away from the smell here. The thick musk of mucus and milk was just a little too much for him to take.
“It’ll do,” he whispered, looking up into the swimming room. “One at a time, though.” He grabbed the glowing stone and held it outward, seeing where the stairs led to. “Don’t know how much it’ll hold.”
To avoid putting too much weight in one place, Atticus started down the staircase. Miranda dropped, and then Elizabeth and Warren. Atticus couldn’t hear the shepherd anymore, and no one said nothing about it, so he put it out of his mind.
Warren nudged the Beauties until they gave him the thumbs-up. “Okay, if we follow this and hit the switch at the bottom, we should come out into a storeroom, right next to where we need to be.”
“Most of the soldiers will be there,” Atticus said. He took a step; he heard what sounded like breathing.
“Probably twenty-five or so, yeah?” Elizabeth blew on her hands, to burn the chill of battle. “A few stragglers, maybe.”
Warren nodded. “All the teams were told to converge on the basement after taking their points. Hex and your friends may or may not be there. Depends on Ichor’s health.”
“Hey, Gravedigger,” Miranda said, “how’d your family die?”
“Two soldiers from Eldrus put us in a predicament.” Atticus was surprised Warren hadn’t already told them his story. “And then they put us in the ground.”
“You crawled out, though.” Miranda sniffed her nose, calmed a tremor in her cheek. “How?”
“I don’t know,” he lied.
And she knew it. “What makes you different from your ghoul friend?”
Atticus sighed. “If I knew how to bring Jessie back—”
Miranda shook her head, looked away.
“I’ll take vanguard,” Warren said.
Atticus went sideways and let him pass.
“I want to show you guys something.”
The wrought iron staircase slumped and swayed as they plodded down its steps. Atticus had heard breathing before. He continued to hear it now, coming from inside the crumbling walls. Someone was sniffling as well. Thinking it was Miranda, he thought nothing of it, until he glanced back and saw that it wasn’t.
“I’ll be,” Warren said, stopping where the staircase went wide. He pressed his face to the wall, picked away at the bricks. Looking through the hole, he said, “The old man Francisco was right.”
Elizabeth stopped and said, “Not a good time to be withholding information, boss.”
Smiling, Warren stepped back and waved Atticus over. “Cathedra thought this place was haunted. The noises they heard coming out of the plantation didn’t start when Eldrus showed up. They’d—come here, Gravedigger—they’d always been here.”
Atticus went over to him. Before he looked in the hole, he said quietly, “You all right?”
Warren kept on smiling, but the smile seemed sadder now, forced. “Oh yeah. Thought you might appreciate this.”
Atticus put his eye to the peephole, to see what haunted this forgotten hollow. The space beyond was larger than he expected. With the support beams and scaffolding that ran along the untouched earth, he had a feeling this was meant to be another room for the house.
“What am I looking—”
And then Atticus got his answer. A glistening sack of a man sat up out of the shadows and turned. The man’s face was no more than ears, jaws, mouth, and nose. His brain was there, though the top of it was pulled back by wires that were fixed to the gray flaps and tips of his skull. His arms weren’t arms, not anymore, but shredded pieces of skin, like ground beef, stretched to impossible lengths. They ran like straightjacket sleeves across the floor, feeding directly into the foundations of Carpenter Plantation. As for legs, he had none. The man had nothing below the torso, except for a steady spurt of black fluid that squirted out the bottom of his spinal cord.
“What is this?”
Atticus’ shoulders dipped as Elizabeth and Miranda leaned over him. He gave up his position to the Beauties and joined Warren, who was further back on the staircase.
“Abel, the master of the estate.” He put his hands on his hips. “He became the thing he hated. The old man said he’s been haunting this house for hundreds of years. Hell, he might’ve been the only evil thing left in this place until Eldrus arrived. I guess he got comfortable.”
“You trying to learn me something?”
Warren shrugged and said, “I saw what you’re capable of. You have your purpose. When you’ve done what needs to be done, you should be done.”
“Kind of you. But you’re singing to the choir. That’s the plan.”
“That stuff in the pool, that’s from him, yeah?” Elizabeth said, peeking back.
“Yeah,” Warren said. “I guess Mr. Abel used to be a force to be reckoned with. But time got him, like it gets us all.”
“He did this to himself, then?”
Atticus was getting impatient. Warren’s delays, however strategic they may have been, were starting to piss him off.
“Well, no, not entirely. There was a letter Francisco recovered. Abel threw a few parties before he boarded the place up for good. Letter talked about a woman in black that showed up, a local Witch of some sort. Guessing she offered him power and turned him into that Horror. He’s been stuck here ever since.”
Atticus started descending the stairs. “We should put him out of his misery.”
Warren laughed and followed after him. “Misery is all he has. It’s better he’s forgotten. People can do a whole lot with a little bit of misery.”
The stairwell ended at a brick wall flanked on all sides by engraved plates. Warren put his ear to the wall, said he heard nothing, and pressed the plate that was more faded than the rest. The wall shook. The outline of an archway formed at the center of it as bricks pulled away from one another. Without warning, the entire wall collapsed, spilling the ancient bricks into the room beyond.
“Fucking shit,” Warren said, coughing as a cloud of dust blew into the hidden stairwell. He kicked at the bricks until there was enough room to cross the wreckage. “So much for subtlety.”
Atticus was the first to go through. He was too close to Clementine and Will to hang back. The longer he waited, the less there’d be of them, and himself.
There was a storeroom on the other side, like Warren said, but instead of supplies it held rows of cots. But how anyone could sleep here, Atticus couldn’t figure, because the air was like molasses. Thick, clammy, the soupy atmosphere had given rise to the hundreds of mushrooms and fungi that sprouted from the floors and walls.
From where he stood, he spied a large room through the doorway yonder. It was the basement, lantern-lit. This was where the carriages had gone into at the back of the plantation earlier. Muffled shouts and buckling wood told him there was a barricade somewhere, most likely between the soldiers and the cabalists ordered to get in.
“We still have the element of surprise, yeah?” Elizabeth said.
“Might not hear us,” Atticus said.
He marched between the beds. Belongi
ngs were stacked under most; the soldiers to whom they belonged unlikely to ever claim them again.
“Got to be quick.”
“Blythe’s yours,” Warren said. He and Miranda caught up with Atticus. “But don’t leave us hanging, Gravedigger. If we call, you come.”
Atticus nodded, said ‘of course,’ but didn’t really mean it. He pushed through the shower of spores that the mushrooms kept coughing up and went to the doorway. The basement was huge, triple the size of the house and only half furnished, as though necessity had forced it beyond what had originally been intended. Long, tall curtains sectioned off portions of the basement, like sheets left out in the sun to dry.
But what he initially mistook as a poor excuse for privacy, he quickly realized was something else entirely. Stepping out of the storeroom, he saw that the curtains weren’t curtains at all, but massive sheets of fungal growth. And all of them were exhaling in unison towards the back of the house, feeding something yet unseen with their toxic breath.
“Hold them back! Hold them!”
Atticus followed the shouting, the strained groans. To his right, through the gaps in the fungal walls, he saw a barricade. Ten or more soldiers manned the mess of desks and chairs that stood in front of the chained double-doors.
Now that he had his bearings, Atticus looked to his left, where the sheets were blowing toward, and knew, further back, he’d find the carriages and, inevitably, the corpses.
“Leave them,” Warren said, surprising him. “They didn’t hear us, which means neither did Blythe.”
“Let the men break through and chop them down,” Miranda said, her arm limp at her side. “Or vice versa.”
“Whatever pays the bills better, yeah?” Elizabeth chimed.
Miranda shook her head. “Yeah.”
“We’ll watch your back, Gravedigger,” Warren said. “Press on and get what’s yours.”
Atticus avoided touching the sheets as he steered himself towards the back of the basement. Even being near the fungal walls made him feel faint, sick in the head. How many are there? he thought anxiously, passing between one after the other. More spores rained down on him from mushrooms above. With every layer he passed, the fungal walls grew darker in coloration, their exhalations weaker. Were Warren and the Beauties still behind him? He couldn’t tell and didn’t care enough to turn around to check. His wife and son were up ahead, and the shepherd. The shepherd.