by C. E. Murphy
Cernunnos’s wildfire green hit me between the eyes, and the cauldron’s black mass took me down for the count.
Monday, October 31, 11:37 p.m.
All the blood in my body had come to live in my head. My skull was so swollen with it my eyes felt puffy and my nose was stuffed. I was pretty sure it was blood and not, say, a sudden-onset head cold, because of the throbbing in my temples and the general ferocious itching of my face. I’d dangled upside down often enough as a kid to recognize the symptoms. Furthermore, the rest of my body had the opposite kind of itch, the kind that comes on from being cold due to a lack of blood flow. My hands were pretty much numb, in fact. My brain sent signals that my fingers should wiggle, but didn’t get any feedback on whether that was happening.
I really didn’t want to open my eyes, but I had to try anyway. Try was the operative word: for some reason they wouldn’t open, and my psyche was of two minds about what I thought of that. The first mind was just as happy, since it didn’t really want to look around anyway. The second mind was reasonably certain not being able to open my eyes was bad. I had to agree with the second one, and for all that my body was already cold, its core temperature dropped another couple degrees as low-grade panic set in. My face became a sticky, sweaty mess and bile came to make friends with already-worn enamel. My heart jumped into triple time, which made my face itch more, which was the only reason my panic stayed low grade instead of racheting up to top level. I was just too damn physically uncomfortable to give terror more than its basic due.
Beyond the thudding in my ears I could hear a whisper of leaves, the lapping of water and a man’s voice mumbling in a language I didn’t know. It wasn’t any of the easy ones I didn’t know, like Russian or Spanish or Latin. I decided I needed a smaller repertoire of ignorance, and made a note to get right on that. As soon as I figured out what had happened to me.
Well, said my sarcastic little voice, you could use the Sight to take a look around. Or would that be too easy?
I was going to start therapy and get rid of that voice as soon as I got out of wherever I was. Before reducing my general ignorance, even. Because if I didn’t, one of these days I was going to take a rock and bash my own head in so I didn’t sarcasm myself to death.
There was, as usual, a flaw in my logic, but I didn’t want anybody, not me and not my smart-ass back-talking brain, to point that out. Teeth set together against peanut-gallery commentary and bile, I reached for my magic, and had the sudden hideous idea that it wasn’t going to respond.
For once sensationalism didn’t win out. Brilliant, unearthly vision spilled through the darkness, and I came to terms with an ugly truth: there were probably more humiliating things than being a shaman who awakens to discover herself trussed up, blindfolded and hanging inverted over a death cauldron, but right then I really couldn’t think of any.
The goddamn cauldron was enormous. I’d seen pictures, and I’d known how much space it took up at the museum, but that was a whole different perspective than staring into its deadly gaping maw. Intellectually I knew it couldn’t be more than five or six feet deep, but looking into it with the Sight was worse than looking across the Dead Zone. There, I had a sense of perspective. Granted, it was a perspective that told me how very very small I was, but that was better than staring into the cauldron. It was full of empty nothingness, and it went on forever.
Black magic rolled out of it, seductive and cool. Black didn’t mean evil, just black: that was its color, but it didn’t feel dreadful and wrong. It felt inviting, and it was much, much more powerful than its remnants had been at the museum. It whispered that I could relax, give up my cares, be comfortable and quiet, undisturbed for eternity. All I had to do was accept that all life came to an end, and slip within its hungry mouth.
For all that being dangled like a worm on a line was mortifying, it was a hell of a lot better than being free to fall into the thing beneath me. I scrabbled for healing magic, slamming up a barrier between myself and the cauldron. Shale blue wrapped around me, all the silvers and blues mixed together to create the most cohesive shield I’d ever built, but it didn’t release me from pig-squealing terror. The magic wasn’t afraid of death, not in the least. What it did and what the cauldron offered were two sides of a coin.
In no way did that make me feel better. I clenched my eyes shut, even if they were, technically, already closed. I wanted to breathe through my teeth, slow tense breaths to calm my heartbeat, but trying made me realize a gag was stuffed between them. That wouldn’t have been so bad, but noticing it also made me notice it tasted like the bile I’d spat up. I gagged again and tears leaked out from under my blindfold to trickle down my forehead. My face reminded me that it itched, then took the itch up to a whole new level, like rubbing poison ivy on chicken pox.
I’d been wrong. Writhing around, sobbing and trying to scratch my face with my shoulder while being suspended above a death cauldron trumped just being suspended above the cauldron any day. I had a miserable feeling I’d be adding to that list of mortification before I got out of there.
My watch, which regularly beeped on the quarter hour and which I was typically too habituated to notice, beeped. A single beep, which meant it was a quarter-hour notification, rather than the double-beep of an hour. I didn’t know which quarter hour it was. It’d been pushing ten o’clock when I’d left Petite in front of somebody’s driveway. In the worst-case scenario, I had fifteen minutes to get myself out of this. Except my watch was set seven minutes fast to prevent myself from being late, so in fact in the worst scenario I had twenty-two minutes to get myself out of this, and in the best I had over ninety. I thought I should probably go with the shorter time frame, just in case.
It turned out having an extremely short deadline, where the dead part was going to be depressingly literal, helped clarify my thoughts to a remarkable degree. I was a shaman. I could heal things. I could, therefore, presumably encourage my blood to ignore gravity and work its way back into my system instead of trying to all explode out of my skull.
This fell under the category of easier said than done. I ended up with this dreadful mental imagery mixed between reinflating a tire and a clown blowing up balloon animals, but it worked. It also caused screaming pain in my extremities as blood was reintroduced to them, but at least if I could get myself out of this trap I’d be able to catch myself before I fell into the cauldron. I hoped. I hadn’t quite figured out how I was going to magically snap the ropes tying me in place, but I was working on it.
I rubbed my face against my shoulder again, relieved myself of residual itching. The movement knocked my blindfold loose and sent me swinging a slow circle as the piece of cloth fell into the cauldron below me.
Seeing: a bonus. What I was seeing: less of one. The sound of water was from a family-size swimming pool a few yards—the measurement, not the behind-the-house garden area—away. The pool water glowed with a peculiar colorlessness, as though it had been sterilized. A play set with swings, a slide and a sandbox filled the area beyond the pool, but the Sight showed them as gray and utilitarian. The same held true for a beach ball and other scattered toys: none of them had any life, like they’d all been purchased for show, not use. Creepy. Appropriate for Halloween, I guessed, but creepy. It was even more appropriate to the setting in which Suzanne described my forthcoming demise, which didn’t even qualify as creepy. I didn’t have a word for that, except maybe augh. Augh seemed like the right response to being hog-tied in the place I was supposed to die.
I swung away from the swimming pool on a slow turn, like a rotisserie chicken, and caught a glimpse of the pole holding me up. It belonged to a basketball backboard, and beyond it sat a picnic table. That was okay. It was gray with disuse, like the rest of the yard, but generally okay.
The freezer-burned female corpse sitting at the table was considerably less okay.
CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX
My brain wouldn’t let me process more than the dead woman for a few seconds. She’d been
blond once upon a time, and for a desiccated corpse she still had a lot of hair. It was piled in a loose bun that was beginning to fall around cadaverous cheekbones and sunken eyes. Her skin was mostly blue, with rough raw purply-red streaks marring her flesh where it was exposed under her dress. At a guess, I thought she’d been dead for over a hundred years. Not that I really knew from long-dead bodies, but her dress looked straight out of Laura Ingalls Wilder.
The two little dead girls sitting with her, which my eyes had been trying very hard not to see, wore equally old-fashioned clothes. Their hair, dull brown, was carefully braided, and the fragile lace on their collars looked as if it’d undergone an attempt at cleaning bloodstains and viscera from them.
All three of them were partially crushed, though their bodies were sitting in such a way as to almost disguise that. The woman, though, tipped to her left, like her hip couldn’t bear weight, and there was a collapse to the left side of her torso that couldn’t be accounted for by perspective. Her left ankle, booted in fading leather, seemed both whole and delicate, which made the rest of the mess that much worse.
The bigger girl was angled away from me, but once my vision adapted to her mother’s misshapen form, I could see that the child’s shoulder and rib cage were smashed in, and I thought her face was turned the other way to hide similar damage to her features. The littler girl was more broken in half, a childish smile on her dead face as she rested her head on her arms against the table. I suspected that was the only way she could sit up at all, given the flatness of her hips and waist. Even frozen solid, her body wouldn’t have the integrity to remain upright.
I rotated another quarter circle or so, and Archie Redding stopped reading the foreign language to smile beatifically at me and say, “Hello,” in perfectly comprehensible English.
I said, “You crazy motherfucker,” except I had a gag in my mouth, so it came out something like “Y’kavee moffaffuka,” which, under the circumstances, I felt got the point across. Redding looked like somebody’s genial grandfather with sparkling green eyes and a sweet old smile, just as he had in his museum security photograph, although he hadn’t been wearing a long black hooded robe in that. “Wwava vuk iv wong wivvu?”
“I’m sorry,” he said very earnestly. “I’m afraid I can’t understand you. I’d remove the gag, but I can’t allow you to start screaming, so we’re going to have to do without clear communication. Don’t worry, though. It won’t last long. I’ll be cutting your throat in about ten minutes. I need a test case for the cauldron, you see. My guide suggests that between midnight and the first minute after, it has the power to actually bring the dead fully back to life, rather than simply make undead warriors like these poor fellows.” He gestured to one side, and I finished my rotation to discover ten silently screaming dead men standing in rank beside me.
I admit it. I’m not proud. I screamed like a little girl. The gag did a decent job of making me sound deeper and more rugged, but in my heart of hearts I knew that the sound that had erupted from my throat was up there with the most soprano of sopranos, a pure ripping sound of absolute terror.
I spent a good fifteen seconds at it before I realized the dead men weren’t lurching to pull my flesh from my bones or eat my eyeballs out or anything else of equal disgustingness. Nor, at a second look, were any of them Cernunnos or his Riders, so I flung my weight sideways and rotated back to Redding. “Whevva vukivva Hhnnt?”
He shook his head with what looked like a genuine affectation of sympathy. “I do wish we could speak. I’d like to know what brought you here, and there’s so little time.” He brightened. “But if the cauldron works as my guide believes it will, then we’ll be able to talk afterward.”
Hopefully, I said, “M mmnt hweem,” and meant it. I’d gotten all my screaming out already. I was sure I could make better use of my time than screaming if he’d ungag me. Like biting his face off, or something.
Redding looked like he’d understood me that time, but it didn’t make him remove the gag.
“Whovvavuk iv vrr ghyyyv?” I was getting better at talking through the gag. At least, I thought I was. Redding didn’t seem impressed. What’s a girl got to do? I ask you.
The obvious answer was keep him talking. If I could stretch my useless interrogation out to one minute past midnight, the dead family would stay dead, I would stay alive, and maybe I could jimmy myself off the basketball hoop and knock Redding out with my body weight as I tried to avoid head-diving into the cauldron. It was a plan. I ran with it. “Vvt hhvvnd voo vr fmmvy, Revving?” I was getting better at talking. My gag was loosening. Apparently Redding hadn’t taken Kidnapping 101 before tying me up here.
Wherever the hell here was. We’d visited Redding’s apartment, and I was pretty sure if there was other property listed in his name, we’d have visited there, too. Either this place wasn’t on the books or we’d done some embarrassingly sloppy police work. Which reminded me unpleasantly of the little army of dead men at my side. Those people had gone missing from somewhere, and they didn’t bear the Redding family’s freezer burns. He hadn’t been keeping them on ice to use for test runs in the cauldron.
The thought that they were, in fact, hordes of undead birthed straight from the cauldron, like in the movie, swept over me, and I swung back around to look more closely at the little army.
They carried short swords and wore leather armor over their cadaverous bodies, which lent credence to them being ancient warriors torn from the cauldron’s heart. Either that, or Redding had murdered a bunch of soldiers from the Society of Creative Anachronism, which honestly seemed less likely than undead killers several centuries old.
“Vve cauvvron vrks,” I said in genuine astonishment. I didn’t want it to, but a tiny part of my brain chalked up a functioning black cauldron as unexpectedly cool. “I vvoght vrr wavvnt an army invvide it. Vrr’d vey cmme frmm?”
Redding, to my dismay, checked his watch before answering. I wasn’t fooling him into losing track of time. Evidently we had enough, though, because he said, “My master gave me the incantation to retrieve ancient souls held captive in the cauldron, warriors who would protect me while I completed the ritual for my family. More were born, but most were too weak after so much time. These are all that are left.”
That suggested the undead could die. I actually relaxed into my bonds, slumping in relief. There was light at the end of the proverbial tunnel. I cast a thankful glance upward, except up was down and the tunnel below me was the cauldron. I said, “Crap,” so softly that the gag couldn’t distort it, and, more urgently, repeated, “Vvt did hhvvn voo yrr fmmly?” Keeping him talking could only benefit me.
He sighed, turning a page in his book and finding the text he wanted with a fingertip before answering me. “We ought not have been traveling in winter, but it had been mild, and we hoped we might push through the mountain passes and be in California by spring. We wanted to farm, you see. That was our dream, me and Ida and the girls.” He fell silent again, cheery countenance darkened with old, maddening sorrow. “There was an avalanche. I was thrown clear, but Ida and the girls…their bodies were frozen by the time I retrieved them. Some of the others in the wagon train buried their dead there, but I could never do such a thing. I took them west, all the way west, praying for a miracle that would bring them back to me.” His smile came back, beatific and terrible. “And before winter broke its hold, a miracle came to me.”
“Vervuvvos?”
“A banshee,” he corrected, though I couldn’t tell if he’d understood me. It didn’t matter. His answer stripped the strength from my muscles and I sagged toward the cauldron, eyes closed in something very close to defeat. More or less everybody knew banshees were Irish harbingers of death, that they came to cry on a porch the night someone was due to die.
The one I’d met did a whole lot more, too. Every thirty years or so, when the full moon and the winter equinoxes aligned, it came to kill in the name of its master. If it could do that, I had very little doubt it could do
more, like answer the prayers of a desperate man willing to do anything to restore his family. Whatever price it demanded would be unspeakable, but I doubted very much that Redding had cared about or considered that angle of retrieving his family from the dead. Revulsion flowed through me, my power’s answer to a hideous idea, but Redding’s expression remained serene. “It told me how to preserve their bodies in salt and ice and blood, and gave me a charm to chant when I opened my own veins to offer the blood. It offered me an answer to my prayers.”
“Rivvual murvur iv nevvar a good anver.” I felt strongly that this was true. On the other hand, I was a few minutes from dying and very curious. Also, I intended to stage a fanastic rescue just as soon as I figured out how. I’d left the rapier in Petite’s backseat, and I wasn’t sure it’d do me much good for getting out of a hog-tie anyway.
On the other hand, it was a damn sight better than nothing. I fixed my eyes on Redding, doing my best impression of listening hard, and took a long slow breath through my nostrils to steady my breathing. I’d drawn the rapier out of nowhere once before, when the circumstances hadn’t been any more forgiving. If desperation counted for anything, it would materialize in my hand any second now. Redding glanced at his watch again, suggesting my let me explain, Mr. Bond tactic wasn’t working as well as I hoped. He tapped the text he intended to read, checked his watch a third time, then turned his attention back to me. Apparently the timing had to be just perfect, and we were still a little ways out from my impending doom. “The blood had to be my own. Family to family. Nothing else would preserve them through time until they could rise again. But I was already aging, and so the banshee offered me a way to extend my own years so I could tend to my dear wife and children. The death of a child on the eve of the dead,” he said solemly, “at every fiftieth anniversary of the year of my birth. That was the least it would accept, to give me life long enought to see my family restored.”