by B. V. Larson
I nodded silent thanks to the Captain. He nodded back and cleaned his knife on his jacket. I turned to face the survivors. There were less than ten of us left.
“Let’s go look for the Preacher and Wilton,” I said quietly. The rest of them followed me, some weeping openly for our dead.
“Is it over?” asked Holly. I gave her a hug, she had lost everything today.
“I think so.”
We heard rustling and thumping back down the hall. I led the way. We found no movement other than the flopping of the oak tree in the basement. I had a sudden thought and went back to the door that topped the basement stairs. When we got there, my heart skipped a beat. It was hanging open, broken down from the inside. I drew my weapon.
Nelson was there, still at his post in front of the door. He had his pistols in his hands, but they were empty and so were his dead eyes. I pushed Holly back so she wouldn’t have to find her father this way. I got Mrs. Hatchell to take hold of her shoulders. She began talking to Holly’s ear earnestly while Holly’s body shivered with silent sobs.
“Vance,” I said in a hoarse voice. “Something got past Nelson. Something is up here with us.”
There were footsteps on the stairs beyond the door. It led down into total blackness. The few propane lanterns that still burned in ruins of the center cast only wan beams in this dark corner of the halls.
I put the tip of my saber into the blackness and gestured madly for a lantern. Vance brought me one that guttered and spit, turning an old orange color that indicated the fuel was all but spent.
“Is the witch dead?” asked a voice from the dark pit of the stairwell. I felt vast relief.
“John Thomas, I’m so glad it’s you,” I told him as he emerged. I waited until I had a good look at him before I lowered my blade. He was gripping his shoulder, there was blood on his face and he was in obvious pain, but he seemed as human and determined as ever.
“I echo the sentiment,” said the Preacher.
I frowned however, looking at the broken down doorway. “You just came up, but I think something else preceded you.”
“I know,” he said, almost whispering. “I think its Doctor Wilton.”
A single thought went off in my head, the lantern.
I headed past the others huddled in the hallway. They watched me with dull aching gray faces. I headed back toward the lobby. There, standing by the lantern, was Doctor Wilton. She had her hands inside the tarnished brass housing and was touching the large prism itself, caressing it.
“Isn’t it a beautiful thing, Gannon?” she asked me quietly as I approached her.
I stalked forward like a policeman approaching a jumper on a ledge. “It certainly is,” I agreed evenly.
“My power is different than hers, you know,” she said, and when she turned her gaze slowly toward me I saw a faint, unnatural light in her eyes. Perhaps, in time, they would come to shine like mirrors as had the Hag’s.
“I can see that you don’t trust me, nor do I blame you. Let me speak, all of you! It was I that stopped an army of horrors coming up from the basement behind you! Would you have been able to survive a second army like the one Gannon cut through? No!”
We looked from one to another. “Go take a look, Vance,” I said.
“Yes, of course, check up on my words, I welcome your scrutiny. I stopped as many of these things from the rear as you did from the front, Gannon. You owe your lives to me as much as to your weapons,” she said. Casually, as she spoke, her twisted hand rested on the table very near the lantern.
“Don’t use the lantern, Wilton,” I warned, taking another step. “It’s dangerous.”
“Oh, I know,” she chuckled. “And don’t worry; I have no intentions to wield it as she did.”
“I don’t think any of us can control that thing safely.”
She laughed aloud at that. “No, there is little safety in something this powerful,” she agreed. “The prism inside this lantern allows one to shape the reality of things around you directly. We saw her do it. I could rebuild this lowly ruin into a shining castle.”
Vance came back up behind me. “It’s true,” he said. “There are more horrors in the basement. At least three more things would have marched up behind us.”
“Exactly,” said Wilton.
“What happened to Nelson then?”
Wilton looked troubled. Her hand moved up to her face, then dropped. “That was unfortunate. I came through the door after I held back the enemies at your rear, but Nelson was there. We surprised each other. He fired at me, and I had to… I stopped him.”
“You killed him, you mean!” cried out Holly.
For just a moment Wilton looked human and almost like her old self. “I’m so sorry, my dear. It was an accident. When people fight in the darkness, they don’t always know friend from foe.”
“Perhaps he did recognize you,” said Vance.
I took a step forward, then another. She fixed me with her gaze then, and I stopped my approach. I stood motionless.
“Think, Gannon,” she told me. “We have here the very gift we need to survive in this harsh new world. We could make an army of these trees, sworn to protect us, to guard the last precious humans that still breathe.”
I thought hard, and asked, “Why didn’t you speak when you tried to come up out of the basement? We would have let you come up.”
She blinked for a moment. I was glad to see I had her off track. “I wasn’t thinking then.”
I nodded. I was vaguely aware that the others were filling the lobby behind me. I needed time to think and to let them gather before we tried anything, so I kept talking. “You were the one that came up the stairs. You were the thing that twisted the doorknob against all my strength.”
“Not quite,” she said with a new hint of a smile. “You held it in the end.”
“It was you then,” said the Preacher. He had arrived and stood at my side. I glanced at him and his eyes were dark and unforgiving.
“You survived the basement as well! You are indeed blessed, Reverend,” said Wilton, but she didn’t seem pleased.
The Preacher talked to me, but kept his gaze on Wilton. “Gannon, you put Mr. Nelson on guard in front of that door, and he didn’t survive the task did he?”
Wilton’s eyes flicked from him to me, and then down to Holly, who now stood with us, grim-faced.
“You can’t refuse this gift, it is everything that I’ve worked for and much more!” she said pleading with us. “Don’t you understand, without harnessing this new force of nature, as man has always done, we will be only mundane. We will be slaves to whoever wields the power of the shifting. I’m offering you a chance to do more than survive another week, I’m offering you a chance to rebuild.”
“We cannot tolerate abominations of the flesh such as this artifact produces,” said the Preacher in a tone of absolute certainty. “Warped magic tools yes, but not warped individuals. I have drawn the line. This line must not be crossed.”
“You! You!” she cried out with wild frustration. “Who are you to draw the line between science and morality? I offer you so much for so little.”
“What do you want in return?” asked Gannon. “Our service?”
“Your help, yes,” she said. “That’s all, just your aid, your working hearts and minds.”
Gannon shook his head. “I’ve already declined to enter the service of one Hag today, I’m not going to serve a second.”
“Abominations, eh? What of you, boy? You are no mundane! Show them, I demand that you show them! What do have hidden in that pocket?”
I opened my mouth, closed it again.
The Preacher turned to me. “She has a point, Gannon. It has come time to show us.”
I hesitated. Things had suddenly reversed. I felt everyone’s eyes on me. The claws in my glove clutched into a ball. I stood there for a moment, dumbfounded.
The Preacher grabbed my wrist and before I could react, ripped my hand into the open. The scaly claw of a v
elociraptor splayed itself in the cool air.
“Gannon too, has been touched by these unnatural forces,” he said to the others. “Look what your perfect prism has done to the best among us, just by his touching of it. Such a force can’t be wielded by us, not if we are to remain human.”
Monika grabbed my shoulder. She looked up at me with worried dark eyes. “Let’s just go, Gannon. I’ll go with you,” she said.
I looked around at them, into their faces. They didn’t know what to do. I had been their champion, but I was not a mundane, as she called us. I had been one of the enemy all along. And Wilton, was she feeling the same way that I was? Did she see us all as her friends, turned upon her after all her work to save us?
“Come with me, Gannon,” said Wilton. “We will form a leper colony and wait for the rest of them to fall sick. For mark me, all of them will.”
Monika buried her face against my chest. Of all of them, she was the only one not looking at my hand.
I looked at everyone. The Captain was there, sitting on a beam that had fallen from the ceiling. He and the Preacher seemed the most passive. The rest of them were staring at the horror that terminated my left wrist.
“Give him a moment,” said Mrs. Hatchell. “He knows what must be done.”
The Preacher glanced at her, and then slid his eyes back to me. He knew it as well, I could tell, but for a few seconds I could not think of what it was. Then, slowly, I had it.
I jerked my hand from the Preacher’s grasp. The sudden motion made people jump back. I had become a feral animal. I was going to split up the last survivors if I left, and already, despite their love for me, they feared me.
It was more than I could bear.
Accordingly, I held out the claw, and I raised my sword, which still glowed with the magic sharpness the Hag had given me, and I chopped it off in one horrible, but clean, stroke.
Thirty-Eight
I must have blacked out for a moment. When I opened my eyes again, confused and numbed, I was on the floor. The Preacher, Vance and Monika lifted me up and propped me against a relatively undamaged wall. The cold bricks felt good against my hot cheek.
“Tie it off, quickly now,” Wilton was saying, and even through the haze of pain and shock, I appreciated the professional concern in her voice. She was still part human, and I knew from having been part monster, that she was neither all evil nor all good.
The Preacher touched my face and gently guided my chin so I could see his face. “Gannon,” he said, “that was well done. I had not thought you would perform the necessary task yourself. I had thought my axe would have to pass judgment upon your twisted hand. I’m impressed and glad you could do it alone.”
I became vaguely aware that Monika was crying. Others were wrapping up my stump in some gauze and tape.
“Fine,” said Wilton, disgusted with the lot of us. “Just fine, if you’ve been asked to join two witches and refused, well I’ve been judged by the lot of you three times now, and that’s the end of it for me. I’m going off on my own, again, and I’ll not come back. If any of you should want my protection, you can come join me at my lab. Otherwise, you can all rot.”
So saying, she lifted up the lantern from the table and began to hobble out into the parking lot.
The Preacher was in front of her, blocking her way in an instant. His axe had appeared in his hand, and it was upraised.
I tried to struggle to my feet, sliding up against the wall of bricks, using them to steady me. It didn’t work, I felt sick and sagged down again. I thought about vomiting, but held it back.
She glared at the Preacher. “You’re no priest, you are a murderer!”
“I am no murderer.”
“You are a slave to that axe then,” she said, “It rules your mind.”
“The axe is only the executioner, I am the judge.”
The lantern flared up, showing its true brilliance. The prism inside burned brightly again. Perhaps it sensed a new master.
The Preacher’s axe flashed downwards. Several of us screamed. I hobbled forward. The lantern flashed intensely and blinded us all with a silent blast of light. It was like standing in the wake of a thousand dazzling flashbulbs, each of a different shining hue. My retina showed huge purple blotches.
I heard a crash and a tinkling sound. When my eyes could function again, I saw the brass lantern had been shorn apart. The prism inside had fallen and shattered into a spray of sparkling jewel-like shards.
Wilton fell to her knees, sobbing. I thought she was more filled with grief than I had been for my lost hand.
Everyone stepped quietly out to form a circle around her. She groped in the rubble, as if not believing the prism wasn’t there, that wasn’t still whole. She found a purplish shard, for each piece had a color, it seemed, and she held it up, shaking it at us.
“Fools! What great idiots you all are!” she sobbed, “you are like cavemen, striking down what you don’t understand. Trapped on a deserted island with a single radio, you would all gather to smash it in some primitive rite. Even you, John Thomas. I just didn’t believe anyone could be so stupid.”
“Beatrice,” said the Preacher gently, “you must leave us now. In fact, you should be slain for murder. Your body is too riddled with twisted flesh for you ever to survive an exorcism of the sort Gannon has.”
“The Hag would have killed you all if I had not been down in the basement covering your backs,” she retorted.
“Yes, and this is the only reason the axe has not yet taken your head,” replied the Preacher evenly. “But you wanted more than just to save us, Beatrice, you wanted to take the Hag’s place and rule us.”
“Nonsense,” she said. “I tried to beguile you so you would help me defeat the Hag my way, that’s true. Perhaps we would not have so many dead now if you hadn’t stopped me.” She struggled to her feet, her hoof scratching a furrow in the powdered cement. The Preacher guided her elbow helpfully, but she shook him off. “I don’t want your help.”
In that moment, Mrs. Hatchel gasped and reached out desperately. A figure moved close to Wilton. The old woman gave a cry of agony. She pitched forward. A huge knife hilt stuck out of her bad leg. She glared back at Holly, who Mrs. H. had wrapped up in her arms. Both Holly and Wilton breathed hard and glared at one another. Wilton’s eyes dropped first.
“You might have killed her!” said Hatchel. “Holly, you don’t know what you are doing.”
“Yes I do,” said Holly. “Let go of me and I’ll show you.”
Wilton struggled to her feet again. She pulled the bowie knife out of her leg and tossed it aside. I was amazed she could get up. I began to believe that she had fought horrors down there in the dark basement and lived.
Wilton held the lavender shard in her hand up in the air for all of us to see. It pulsed and seemed to ripple. “Mind the shards,” she said, “there might be some power in them yet.”
Wilton determinedly hobbled away from us. I wondered how many witches with good intentions had been driven from villages in just such a manner over the centuries. It was dawn now, and we watched her go, remembering the last time she had left us on a fateful day.
The rest of us looked back at the shards on the ground. They sparkled with internal light. It was not the brilliant beam that they had presented us with before, but still, it was clearly supernatural.
“That piece of the prism,” said Vance thoughtfully. “It seemed enchanted.”
Holly knelt and gingerly poked at a piece that looked like an icicle of rich amber. “This one looks like a knife,” she said. “I need a knife that could kill a Hag.”
The preacher stopped Holly with a hand and put up his other hand with fingers splayed. Everyone stopped. “Let’s not take any more of this evil into our hands. We shall bury these shards far from here, without touching them. If you agree, Gannon.”
Everyone looked to me. I nodded, barely able to stand.
A new voice joined us then. It was a high-pitched voice, and I knew it in an
instant. It was the voice of Malkin, the elf.
He tsked and clucked his tongue. We all looked up, and saw him looking down at us from the ruined roof of the waiting room.
I took a breath, the others raised their weapons and stared up with wide eyes.
“Are you here to harass us or help us, Malkin?”
The elf walked slowly around the hole in the roof, looking down at us as he replied. “You have done me a favor. You have ridden this place of the Hag. For that, I owe your people. I recognize this debt.”
I noticed that the preacher’s axe was in his hand and it was twitching excitedly. No doubt, it wanted to chop Malkin in half.
“What will you do to repay your debt to us, elf?” I asked. I recalled that in the old stories of his kind, wagers and debts and promises mattered greatly.
Malkin stopped circling up there and pointed down into the mess that was the waiting room around us. We followed his eyes and saw my hand lying on the floor. Blood had leaked to form a dark pool around the severed hand. I looked at it and blinked in recognition. It was strange to see a part of yourself lying on the floor. Everything seemed dream-like at that moment.
“Do you notice a difference?”
I heard a few of the others gasp. I looked at my severed hand again, and in a flash I realized what he meant. “It’s my hand again. The claw is gone.”
“Gannon, I’m so sorry,” said Monika, wrapping herself around my waist comfortingly.
At first I didn’t know what she meant, but then I thought I knew. Perhaps I hadn’t needed to chop off my hand. Perhaps I could have just waited, and when the lantern was destroyed my twisted hand would have returned to normal.
“Yes, yes,” said Malkin, crouching so that his tiny, pointed knees stuck out before him. “Sadness.”
I sucked in a breath and began to grow angry. Anger was good, as it kept away the shock from my injury that fogged my mind.