I rubbed my cheek against her shoulder. She squeezed me yet tighter, her breath catching with tears.
“You need to use magic, Morwen. Magic would keep the dark out. Hang spirit-traps. Light blessed candles. Sprinkle holy water along the windows and doors. Clap your hands and shout if that’s all you can manage! You made such a good start with the charm. Why won’t you finish the job, and really ward this house well?”
Morwen kissed me on the head and dropped me back onto the floor. I grumbled under my breath, but followed as she scooped up my still-wailing baby.
Sprawling on the floor, I watched her sway back and forth with the hiccuping, red-faced child, murmuring sweet nothings into his ear. “I’ve done all I can do,” I told her mournfully, despite knowing she could not understand. “I’ve laid all the Marks I know, and I’ve paced the doors and windows. I even peed on the hearth, which I know you won’t like, but it’s not just Santa that comes down the chimney. I can only do so much, though. It’s your house, not mine. That matters.”
Looking over the blonde, tousled head of her child, Morwen frowned at me. Her gaze wasn’t well-focused, but her face bore a kind of listening expression. I clambered to my feet, trying to lock eyes with hers.
“Morwen,” I called, as clearly as I could. “Can you hear me, Morwen?”
Morwen tilted her head and dug a finger in her ear, as if she’d suddenly sensed water in there. My heart stirred with new hope.
We both startled at the sound of a sharp, canine whine at the front door. Morwen looked surprised, but my faint sensation of hope blossomed into full-blown relief. It was the mastiff!
I raced to the front door and called to him under the crack. “I’m here! What is it?”
“What?” The mastiff, unpracticed at communicating with cats, could not interpret a merely verbal message. He needed to see me, too.
“The window!” I squalled, and jetted to the parlor, where I waited with my paws pressed against the picture window. I heard Morwen come into the room behind me, my baby still sniffling on her shoulder. She gasped audibly as the huge mastiff reared up, placing his paws on the glass opposite my own.
“What news?” I asked him, in my absolute best attempt at his language.
“The strangers buried things today. In four areas, at the edge of town. North, South, East, and West. That’s been confirmed by six different dogs. A pit bull claims they climbed to the top tower of the old church, and two little yappy things say…” I couldn’t help but purr at the mastiff’s clear prejudice, and nearly missed the rest of his communique. “…they went down into the basement of the old library across the street.”
North, South, East, and West. Above and below. The six sacred directions. Chills shot down my spine all the way to my claws, but these were thrills of victory. I had been right! Whatever the strangers’ true motives, they were, at the very least, occultists. “You dug it up?”
“No,” said the mastiff. “Not a dog I talked to would go near, and they all told me to stay away, too. Said whatever the things they buried are, they smell bad. Bad.”
“Of course,” I said grimly.
“This day has been bad, too—and won’t the night be worse?” The mastiff whined and barked, clearly on the verge of panic. “Even my master got scared. He’s so drunk, I’m afraid he’ll never wake up! Can’t you help him?”
“I can’t get out of the house,” I said. “My human, she won’t let me go.”
The mastiff fell back from the window. “Then I’m going home,” he said, his tail pressed against his belly. “It’s not good to be out here now.”
“No! Wait!” I clawed furiously at the glass. Pumpkin Spice! I heard Morwen warn behind me, but I didn’t care in the slightest. “Get other cats! Dig the things up! Bite the bad men! Do something!”
“I can’t!” said the mastiff, and barked again. “I don’t know what you know. I can’t be out after dark!” He began to whimper continuously, hardly drawing breath. “That’s how Mo died! We never even found his body!”
“Damn it to the Underworld!” I yowled, and sprang to the front door. I scraped and scratched at it with all my suppressed fury and fear, slicing deep into the old wood, heedless of Morwen’s admonishing yelps.
“Let me out!” I screamed back at her, twisting round to glare at her. “Damn it, Morwen, for all our sakes!”
Morwen stopped her bitching, and looked round-eyed at me, even as my baby began to bawl pathetically once more. Patting the child absently on his back, she came closer to the door. I paused in my scratching.
I focused upon her brown eyes with the totality of my being, and summoned every scrap of power my soul had ever possessed, in all its accumulated lifetimes.
“Morwen,” I said. “Things are bad! But I. Can. Fix them. But you—you have to let me out. Do you hear? Out. I can’t save us all from in here!” I slashed again at the door in my rage, in the violent need to be understood for once.
Morwen still stared at me. I stared back, breathing heavily, my tail puffed up, every claw unsheathed.
Slowly, she shifted her child’s weight to her hip. Having freed one hand, she reached hesitantly out, and grasped the doorknob. I watched, hardly daring to breathe, as she twisted it and opened the door.
A blast of icy wind struck at once, surging forcefully through the tiny gap and flinging the door wide with a bang. Morwen started back, and I nearly did as well. It struck me as an ill wind, both in the proverbial sense, and also because it was so bitterly, bone-freezingly cold.
“Thanks,” I said to Morwen, in a more natural way. “Wish me luck.” Then, my tail firmly erect and my head held high, I exited the house with a quite passable display of feline nonchalance.
“Come on,” I told the mastiff, who regarded me with awe. Licking his drooping jowls, he followed in my footsteps, as I bounded over the soft, snowy drifts.
I was halfway down the block before my mind caught up with my ears, and I realized what Morwen had said as she shut the door:
Good luck, Pumpkin Spice.
* * *
I’d thought things were bad inside the house. They were infinitely worse outside. The road was bordered with high drifts, far taller than the tips of my ears, where the snowplows had done their work. Operating against all of my instincts, we were forced to walk nearly in the middle of the road, fully visible to the living, the dead, and everything in between.
It was difficult to say if anything watched us, though, for in the gathering dusk, all was confusion. The boundaries of time and space were more permeable than ever. Motion flickered almost constantly in my peripheral vision, and whenever I jerked my head round to stare, I could catch just a glimpse of something—the rotating wheel of a carriage; the flutter of a woman’s long skirts; a candle being placed in a window that hung, suspended, in the air. It was never more than a glimpse, though, and faded as soon as I focused, leaving only the winter street scene to which I was accustomed. Then I would resume walking, only to be distracted by another flicker in the corner of my eye, and another, and another. I’d gone no more than ten body-lengths down the street before I was utterly exhausted, and suffering somewhat from whiplash.
My plan was to look for the strangers at Libby’s house, only two blocks from my own. If we were fortunate, perhaps they’d returned home after their dark work, and could be blocked or trapped inside the boarding house itself; a highly unlikely plan, but the best that had occurred to me. That scheme ended when we arrived at what should have been a four-way intersection, and instead saw six or seven different roads. Three times I attempted to select the correct route, and three times discovered myself walking down a winding dirt lane, or a weed-choked cart track, rather than a modern paved street. I felt fortunate we were able to retrace our steps each time, but feared pressing our luck. What if we began wandering one of those antiquated paths, and then couldn’t find our way back?
The little kitten at the Arched Back Inn, Bug, had suggested that phenomena such as these were common dur
ing the Dark Yule, and that the confusion usually resolved itself by morning. Yet this Dark Yule, my Dark Yule, was so different from that of her memory, I didn’t trust sunlight to solve our problems. If we lingered too long in another time, we might never return to our own.
So I gave up trying to reach the bed and breakfast, and instead huddled behind the mastiff, allowing his bulk to block some of the gut-freezing gale. I was beginning to develop a grudge against the wind; it seemed to have something against me in particular.
“Where did they bury them? The bad things?” I asked the mastiff.
“North, South, East, and West,” he repeated, clearly irritated with what he perceived as my failing memory. I glared at him and he added, with some reluctance, “The western one isn’t far from here.”
“Take me?” I asked. Perhaps, if I could not stop the occultists themselves, it was not too late to disrupt their overall scheme.
“I can try,” the dog replied dubiously, having just observed my failure at navigation. He turned and headed up the street, while I did my best to walk in his massive pawprints. Between all the distracting twinkles and flutters of those fragments of the past, I caught a glimpse of that wicked mother ghost and her rag-doll corpse, peering at me around the corner of the house. A shudder shook me from nose to tail, and I scampered up closer to the mastiff, treading nearly on his huge heels.
It was sheer luck that Morwen’s house was near the western edge of Kingsport. Two rights and a left later—all of them, luckily, uncomplicated by distortions of space-time—we arrived at a three-way crossroads, just beyond the last street of the last suburb. It was formed by a small road intersecting with a bike path, and there was a heap of snow mounded in its exact center. I didn’t need the mastiff to tell me we’d reached our destination: first, because he was shivering and whimpering, his tail tucked firmly between his legs; and second, because I too smelled the foetid odor that had him nearly piddling himself.
The dogs were right: there was a word for this scent, and that word was bad. It wasn’t that it smelled bad; after all, even the rankest corpses and feces hold some interest for dogs. So it didn’t make my nose wrinkle—yet it terrified me. It reeked of wrongness, if that is possible to comprehend. It invoked a sweeping, cosmic kind of horror the likes of which I’d never experienced. The picture that sprang into my mind, unbidden, was of the stars burning out one by one in an eternally blackened sky. Mere Death, by contrast, would smell sweetly wholesome.
My legs quivered as I neared the scent, but I forced myself onward, trying to breathe as little and as shallowly as possible When I opened my eyes to See That Which Cannot Be Seen, I saw—much to my surprise—absolutely nothing. No ghosts lingered here, no vengeful spirits gathered nearby. Certainly there were no night-gaunts. The very quiet felt unnatural, and I wondered if even those I feared, also feared this.
Holding my breath, I sidled closer, and dabbed at the pristine snow with my paw. Nothing bit me, at least. Gingerly, I swiped the snow away, trying to see what lay buried beneath.
The smell grew stronger, and the mastiff began to bark.
“Quiet!” I demanded. My own ears were practically welded to my skull and my fur stood straight out in every direction, but I continued to paw at the snow. When the smell threatened to overwhelm me, I closed my eyes and thought of Dot, of Libby, of Morwen, of my baby. Already, at dusk, I could hardly traverse two blocks in this town without being led astray. What would happen at full night-fall?
There, under the snow, my paw touched something soft. I opened my eyes, and perceived a package wrapped in black cloth, still half-buried.
Gingerly, with the very tips of my claws, I pulled open the cloth. Inside, I was surprised to see a fairly mundane collection of items:
A small compass with broken glass.
An old gold pocket watch, also with broken glass.
A sigil, written in flowing ink upon torn brown paper.
A collection of dried herbs.
A silver coin.
The fresh, bloody corpse of a domestic yellow canary.
A fragment of some greasy, greenish stone, with gold flecks and striations throughout.
Curiously enough, I could tell at once it was the stone that oozed the evil scent. The other objects were comparatively normal. The great clue lay in the condition of the compass and pocket watch, and it was from them that I drew my conclusions.
Inserting my claws into the very edge of the black fabric, I pulled it askew, attempting to scatter the collected items across the snow. A few things tumbled out of the cloth, including the fragment of stone, whereupon I was so overwhelmed by its sinister odor that I staggered away, gagging.
With effort I stumbled back to the mastiff and, after three great heaves, coughed a dripping hairball onto the snow. Though this made me feel better, I doubted I could return to disrupt the buried spell any further. In fact, I was having difficulty even persuading myself to turn around and view the scene; for whatever reason, I did not wish to see where the stone might have fallen.
The mastiff paused in his incessant whining to sloppily lick the top of my head, a kindly gesture I did my best not to dodge.
“You ok?” he asked, apparently genuinely concerned.
“Yes.”
“What is it?” he wanted to know—though I noted he, too, looked anywhere and everywhere save for that disrupted mound.
“A broken…” How did dogs say ‘watch’? Or ‘compass’? “Broken human things,” was the best I could do.
“What? Why?” the mastiff asked.
“The bad men,” I attempted to explain. “They want time broken. And space broken. So they do it to the things.”
“I don’t understand. What does that do?”
“It’s magic.”
“I don’t get it.”
“Most don’t,” I snapped. My nausea had returned, and I rather thought more than a hairball might come up this time. I did not want to taste that shrimp kibble again.
“But why? Why are they doing this?” the mastiff wanted to know.
How like a dog to get at the heart of the matter, and ask the one question to which I still had no answer. “I don’t know,” I admitted, swallowing my feline pride. But I’ll find out! I added, in my own mind, and to the universe at large.
My mouth was full of saliva; I swallowed hard and willed my stomach to remain calm. “Come on,” I told the dog, rubbing against his leg as I passed. “Let’s go to my house. We will think of what to do.”
The mastiff followed me readily enough. I hadn’t intended to take him into the house—I couldn’t risk Morwen locking me in again—but there was plenty of shelter amongst the trees of our backyard. It would have been enough to soothe the dog down and form the beginnings of a plan.
But it was not to be.
One moment, I was bounding through deep, wet snow, aiming for the golden glow of the nearest streetlight; the next, I was facing a stand of bare-branched trees, skeletal and ominous, their limbs whipping in the icy wind. I tried to turn back, only to discover behind me a rundown, Colonial-style farmhouse. Its unlatched iron gate swung wildly until the rusty hinges shrieked, but no lights shone in the house’s black windows. To our left were snowy fields; to our right, a silent, towering barn. I looked up, and saw the stars emerging, shining brightly forth in the absence of the overpowering moon.
Full dark had come, and we were lost in a Kingsport that wasn’t ours.
The dog lost his head utterly. He bayed at the sky, and dashed off in some random direction. I watched his large, clumsy form lope across that empty field, to disappear behind a row of trees that also shouldn’t have been there.
As for me, I sat gingerly down in the snow, curled my tail round my paws, and wondered whether I shouldn’t just go to sleep.
11
Furtive
Sleeping was by far the most sensible course of action. Wherever I might be in the material world, I felt certain I could navigate my way to the dreamlands. There I might coll
aborate with other cats; beg the wisdom of magic-users more powerful than myself; visit the weed-choked temple and its black vision pool; or simply wait out all this unpleasantness at the Arched Back Inn.
This tactic wasn’t without its dangers, of course; who knew what might happen to my body while my soul roamed the worlds of sleep? I flicked my tail and sneezed, a loud sound in the silent farmyard. To hell with it! We cats do not fear death. Oh, it’s often painful, and tragic, and certainly damned inconvenient; but really, when your claws are out and your back is against the wall, what is the worst thing that can happen? You die, and that’s that. We’ve all done it before, and we’ll all do it again.
Some of us even accelerate the process. I dipped my head in memory of old Tilly, and the choice she’d made.
Head still bowed, I flicked my ears forward. There it was again! In the dead hush of this alien Kingsport, the faint chatter of human voices could just barely be heard in the distance. With no better option in mind—aside from the aforementioned catnap—I rose to see what they might be about.
First, however, I lapsed into a long, luxurious stretch, in defiance of the unnatural hush of that dark farmhouse, and my own uncertain fate. Then, feline pride intact, I sauntered toward old Kingsport, my ears turning this way and that to catch every nuance of those distant murmurs.
I soon discovered I wasn’t really in Kingsport at all, but well outside it. No suburban streets here, only, at long intervals, dingy colonial farmhouses, barns, and outbuildings, all of them not yet old but already battered by strong winds from the sea. Many of those houses had lit windows, which glowed reassuringly golden in the moonless night; yet I could detect no sounds within their wooden walls. I stayed well away from them all, and kept to the rutted track that meandered vaguely eastward. At least in this Kingsport, though the wind still blew fiercely, the snow was significantly less. I was leaping through only an ankle-deep accumulation, not negotiating drifts taller than my head.
The Dark Yule Page 13