Cyril shrugged. “Does it matter?”
The crows cawed raucously, gaining altitude on the larger bird before tipping over and diving at the back of its head, hitting it with enough force that it started to evade, shrieking in anger, even trying to roll and claw at them a few times, but the crows were far more aerobatic, avoiding it easily and resuming the attack. The hawk tried to remain overhead, but as it started to lose feathers, it turned to flee. The crows pursued, harassing it relentlessly.
“Magic always works best when it’s used in congruence with the natural order,” Cyril said. “Crows are prone to attack larger birds … it’s in their nature and there are plenty of them living in these trees, so they seemed like the natural choice.”
“Could you have driven it off in another way?”
“We could have, but it would have required more time and will,” Cyril said.
John returned quietly. “They left,” he said. “Looked like they were following the bird.”
“Excellent,” Cyril said. “Let’s give them some time and then we’ll go retrieve my cache.”
Chapter 24
They waited atop the ridge for several minutes, watching and listening for any sign of the bounty hunters. Satisfied that they were gone, Cyril motioned for John to lead the way. They slowly descended, stopping frequently to check for danger, but the narrow valley seemed to be completely devoid of life.
They headed for an old road that had been cut into the embankment of a shallow creek that ran between a cluster of old buildings—several houses, a few outbuildings, and a small garage. All of them looked as though they’d been abandoned decades ago.
When they reached the road, they stopped, listening intently for approaching riders. The place had an eerie silence about it, as if fog had settled over new-fallen snow on a dead-calm night … except it was the middle of the day and the blue sky was filled with cottony white clouds.
“Take a firm grip on your courage,” Cyril said, looking to each in turn to punctuate his words before heading for the cluster of buildings.
Everything looked normal enough, yet Ben’s skin tingled with dread. He found himself checking his sword in its scabbard.
“This place is wrong,” Homer said.
“Stay close.”
“I don’t think I can get any closer,” Homer said, trembling as he leaned against Ben’s leg.
A door slammed, then slowly creaked open.
“Where did that come from?” Frank whispered harshly.
John pointed toward one of the houses while Rufus pointed to another in a different direction.
“Ignore it,” Cyril said, seeming to orient himself, and then frowning.
“What’s wrong?” Imogen asked.
“The houses are out of place,” Cyril muttered.
“What the hell does that mean?” Frank asked.
“It means that things have moved,” Cyril said.
Ben saw something in the trees. He fixed his attention and waited, straining to hear footsteps. A figure in a dingy white dress flitted between the trees and vanished behind one of the houses.
“I just saw a woman.”
“Ignore her,” Cyril said.
“Does anyone else see that?” Hound said, pointing toward a bank of heavy fog rolling slowly down the valley toward them.
“Yep,” John said.
Imogen nudged Cyril. “There’s a little girl over there watching us.”
“Don’t look at her!” he whispered.
Ben couldn’t help looking her way, but he managed to keep his head still, peering out of the corner of his eye. She was standing between two trees not forty feet away, looking straight at them. She looked normal enough, except that she was barefoot and wore only a simple nightgown. Her hair was stringy black and unkempt.
When the fog reached them, the little girl vanished along with all of the houses. The temperature fell several degrees, damp air soaking into them.
“Stay together,” Cyril said. “This way.”
Ben could just make out his grandfather’s silhouette through the thick fog for a moment before he vanished as well.
“Follow my voice,” Cyril said, sounding very far away. Ben moved toward him cautiously, his heart pounding in his chest. The fog cleared around them and Ben found himself alone with Homer pressed up against his leg.
The little girl stood not ten feet away looking straight at him.
“Will you help me, mister? I got lost in the woods and I can’t find my mommy.”
Ben froze, not daring to look at her, struggling to resist acknowledging her presence, and yet knowing that he would ultimately fail.
“Over here,” Cyril said.
Ben hurried away from the girl, heading back into the fog toward his grandfather’s voice. From behind him he could hear her calling to him, her voice fading into the heavy fog, “Please, mister, don’t leave me here.”
His conscience nagged at him to turn back and help her. What if she was real? What if he was leaving a little girl all alone in the forest? He stopped, torn between reason and conscience.
Before he could make a decision, Cyril appeared out of the white air and took him by the elbow.
“Ignore her,” he said intently. “She’s not real.”
Ben nodded tightly, taking a deep breath to steady himself. Another break in the fog and he saw that everyone else was waiting on the porch of one of the houses. Cyril led him there quickly before the fog closed in around them again.
“Stay close together,” he said, opening the door slowly. The rusty hinges protested loudly. Cyril waited for a moment at the threshold. The house was dark and dank, the air within musty and stale.
“Come on,” he said, leading them into the living room. It looked as though it had been abandoned quickly. Pictures still hung on the walls, the glass stained by years of neglect. Furniture was arranged around the hearth. The air smelled of mold.
Cyril took a moment to light his lamp, casting a flickering light that did little to diminish the unwelcoming feel of the place. A hallway leading to the back rooms and a doorway opening into the kitchen branched off the living room. Cyril chose the hall, moving cautiously.
The front door slammed shut behind them with such force that one of the pictures fell off the wall and shattered. Ben froze, scanning the room without moving his head. Even Hound looked scared, which did little to bolster Ben’s courage.
“I thought you said they couldn’t do anything but scare us,” Rufus said.
“Apparently I was wrong,” Cyril said.
“Great,” Rufus said, unslinging Bertha.
“Don’t go blasting away at ghosts.”
“Could be there’s more than ghosts here.”
“Point taken,” Cyril said, leading them halfway down the hall before stopping.
“What’s wrong?” Imogen asked.
“Wrong house,” Cyril said. “Back the way we came.”
They reached the living room and the door slammed open again, rattling more pictures from the wall, their glass panes shattering when they hit the floor. The little girl stood in the doorway, her head down, her face obscured by her black stringy hair. She swayed from side to side, breathing shallowly and quickly, enough to make a living person hyperventilate.
They all stopped, involuntarily staring at her.
“I knew you could see me,” she said, her voice no longer that of a little girl. She looked up at them. Her face was gaunt and cracked, as if the skin had been pulled tight and dried in place. Her eyes were gone, leaving only empty sockets filled with impossible blackness. Her smile was sweet and innocent, but began to transform as her mouth opened wide.
“Close your eyes!” Cyril shouted.
Ben heard him but he simply could not pull his attention away from the terrifying spectacle before him.
The girl’s face grew into a skull, eyes shining with blackness that seemed to dampen the light where she looked. Her mouth filled with rows of sickly yellow teeth filed to needl
e points. Her flesh fell away and then her body with it as her skull grew impossibly large and rushed at them, washing through them, insubstantial as air, yet filling Ben with a paralyzing terror.
The only reference he had for the experience was his time in the stalker’s realm—and that saved him. He was able to remain rooted in place, holding his sanity tightly with every scrap of his will. Homer lay prone beside him, eyes buried beneath his paws while he whimpered. He was the only one to heed Cyril’s warning.
Imogen screamed, then bolted down the hallway. John stood stock-still, trembling but unable to take action. Frank shouted an obscenity and fled into the kitchen. Hound held his ground, bringing Bertha to bear on the now-empty doorway, but holding his fire.
A child laughed in the distance, the sound muffled by fog.
“What the hell just happened?” Hound finally said.
Cyril opened his eyes and pursed his lips after a quick headcount.
“You just saw a ghost.” He looked at John and then at Ben. Ben nodded that he was in command of his faculties. Cyril offered him a quick smile and went to John, slapping him across the face. The Highwayman shook his head, coming to his senses and searching for an enemy he could fight.
“How?” was all he could muster.
“There are forces at work here that are far beyond normal understanding,” Cyril said.
“Where’s Imogen?” John asked, his own fear suddenly displaced with worry for her.
“She ran down the hallway,” Ben said. “Frank went into the kitchen.”
John headed for the hallway, but Cyril stopped him with a hand on his arm.
“Slow down, we’ll go together.”
Hound went to the kitchen door and peered through. “Looks like Frank went out the back door,” he said. “I’ll go get him.”
“When you find him, take him up the hill out of the fog,” Cyril said. “Wait for us just over the ridge where we hid from the bounty hunters.”
Hound nodded, heading into the kitchen.
“How’re you doing?” Ben asked Homer.
“Ghosts shouldn’t be as scary as they are.”
Ben knelt down and pet him for a moment before following Cyril and John.
The doors of the bedrooms and the bathroom were all standing open. They found Imogen huddled in a corner of the last room. She was trembling and crying, her forehead pressed against her knees as she rocked back and forth.
Cyril went to her, approaching slowly, laying a hand on her head and whispering a few reassuring words under his breath. She looked up, confusion in her eyes.
“What happened?”
“Ghosts,” he said. “You’re safe now.”
“This was her room,” Ben said, looking at a dust-covered frame atop an old dresser. The picture it held showed the girl standing in a grassy yard, the green ground dappled with sunlight. She was laughing and playing, wearing a brightly colored dress. Then in the next moment, her visage changed and she was looking straight out of the frame at him with black, empty eye sockets.
“Holy shit,” he said, leaping back, trembling anew. “How’s that even possible?”
Cyril laid the frame down on its face and put a hand on Ben’s shoulder.
“The veil is thin here. The rules of reality as you understand them don’t apply.”
Ben swallowed hard and nodded, even though he couldn’t bring himself to comprehend, much less accept what he’d just seen.
“Let’s go,” Cyril said, leading them out of the house and onto the porch. Ben felt as if he’d stepped into another world. The fog was gone, but it was night. He struggled to reconcile what he knew with what he was seeing. They’d entered the house in midafternoon, and they’d only been inside for a few minutes, yet the forest was dark as pitch. He stepped off the porch and looked at the sky. There were no stars and no moon, though he knew that the moon should be high in the sky at this point in its cycle.
He turned to Cyril, beseeching him for an explanation with a look, but got only a helpless shrug in return.
“I think the next house is that way,” he said, holding his lamp before him like a talisman.
They moved together in a tight cluster, nobody wanting to get separated from the group. Ben saw movement out of the corner of his eye. Before he knew it, his head snapped toward the potential threat. A creature stood just outside the range of Cyril’s lantern. It looked almost human, but stood just under three feet tall. It had a wrinkled face, pockmarked and dotted with warts and moles where it wasn’t covered with a bushy beard. Malevolent green peered out from under thick eyebrows. It smiled at Ben, revealing sharp canines as it tossed a rock into the air and caught it before hurling it at Ben with surprising force.
He tried to dodge out of the way, but the rock struck him on the shoulder hard enough to leave a mark. The thing laughed with malicious glee and then raced into the darkness more quickly than Ben would have thought possible.
“That wasn’t a ghost,” Ben said, drawing his sword.
“No, it wasn’t,” Cyril said, without slowing.
They reached the next house and Cyril stopped on the porch, shaking his head. “Doesn’t make sense,” he muttered.
“I can’t argue with that,” Ben said.
Cyril pulled the door open and raised his lamp, casting light into the main room and shaking his head again. “Layout’s all wrong.”
A rock shattered the window next to them. All eyes turned to see the creature in the woods smile maliciously at them and then vanish into the darkness.
“What is that thing?” Imogen asked.
“Something from another realm that slipped through the veil,” Cyril said. “Don’t bother with it unless it gets close.”
He led them to the third house, nodding to himself when they reached the porch. “This looks right,” he said, pulling open the creaking door.
Light filtered out of the forest in the distance, like dozens of torches casting their illumination through lingering mist. Figures moved in the trees, some of them shaped like men, others shaped in such hideous forms that Ben found himself hoping he would never have to see them up close.
“Inside, quickly,” Cyril said.
A chorus of howls erupted from the night, some trailing off into shrieks of rage and pain, others transforming into gibbering laughter laced with madness.
After everyone had filed inside, Cyril quietly closed the door. The house was in similar condition to the others, dilapidated and falling to ruin. All of the furniture was decaying and smelled of rot. Cyril paused for only a moment before heading to the hallway leading into the back of the house. He stopped at the second door and frowned at the broken lock, leaning in to examine it more closely.
“What’s wrong?” Ben asked.
“I put this lock here,” Cyril said. “It’s been broken from the inside.”
Ben and Imogen shared a look when Cyril drew his sword and used it to open the door, revealing the landing of a staircase. As he cautiously peered around the corner, his frown deepened.
Laughter from somewhere outside filtered through the walls. Ben scanned the hallway in both directions for movement but saw nothing. Cyril started down the stairs.
Ben followed, taking note of footprints in the heavy dust coating the steps. The prints were small, almost childlike, except that the feet that made them wore heavy boots.
Cyril stopped at the bottom landing and carefully surveyed the shadows, his sword at the ready. After several moments, he moved slowly into the basement, stopping a short way in and raising his lamp.
His light illuminated a pentagram carved into the concrete, an intricate rune etched inside each point. The pentagon within the star contained twin circles, the outermost touching all five sides, the innermost just a few inches away. Myriad arcane symbols were carved into the space between them.
“What is this?” Imogen asked.
“Black magic,” Cyril said. “Don’t step on it.”
After a few more moments of examination, Cyr
il pulled his attention away from it and went to one of the walls, running his hand over the blocks, tracing a line of mortar.
“Here,” he whispered. “Ben, come hold the light. John, watch the stairs. Imogen, watch the pentagram.”
“For what?” she asked, her eyes going slightly wider.
“Anything unusual,” he said, handing the lamp to Ben, sheathing his sword and drawing a knife.
He started scraping away at the mortar. His work was slow at first, but after he’d dislodged a few chunks, the rest began to fall away more quickly. He pulled a block out and set it aside, motioning for Ben to hold the light higher.
There was a space behind the wall.
The next block came free quickly. It wasn’t long before Cyril had opened a passage large enough for a man to squeeze through. He took the lamp from Ben and leaned inside, filling the space beyond with light and plunging the room they occupied into darkness.
Footsteps behind them drew their attention, small feet coming impossibly fast down the stairs. John shouted in the dark and then fell, scrambling to regain his feet. Cyril pulled his lamp back into the room, drawing his sword as he whirled. Ben already had his blade out and at the ready, but he wasn’t quick enough.
The little creature darted across the room and stabbed Ben in the leg with a long knife, then retreated into the pentagram. His green eyes glinted with hate and his smile was more a threat than an expression of mirth.
“My master will take your world,” he said, dodging slightly to one side, catching John’s arrow out of the air.
Ben slumped to one knee, pain flooding into him. Bright red blood flowed from his wound onto the floor. He felt as though his life were being drawn out with it, as if the arcane symbols of the pentagram were pulling the vital fluid out of him. Red quickly filled all of the grooves in the ritualistic circle.
The little creature began speaking in some language that Ben had never heard before.
“Hurry,” Cyril snapped. “Get Ben through the gap in the wall.” From the tone of his voice, Ben knew that his grandfather recognized the words being spoken.
John and Imogen worked together to pull him into the small space. Homer followed with Cyril right behind him.
The Dragon's Egg (Dragonfall Book 1) Page 24