At the worst possible second, the creature’s intrusion brought a memory to the surface. In the memory, he was also pinned down, held not by the knees and hands of a monster, but by smooth skin. Skin that should never have touched him, let alone forced its will upon his small body.
Garret screamed a silent, smoky plea for mercy. Then, above the roaring flames and crashing timbers, through even the rending mire of the memory, he heard an audible scream. It was Mrs. Malvern.
The memory retreated, leaving Garret lying on the scalding floor again, choking, maybe burning to death with the indistinct form of the creature pinning him. Its claws were still in Garret’s chest, but it wasn’t paying attention to him. It was looking in the direction of Mrs. Malvern’s scream. In a flash and a swirl of smoke, the creature was gone. Garret heard a wall crash as it rammed its way through. The ceiling above the wall hit the floor, scattering cinders. Mrs. Malvern called, and the creature answered. She called again, and the creature replied, homing in.
The next few moments passed in dizziness and a dim awareness of searing heat and coughing. Then someone had him by the hand, tugging him weakly across the floor. The hands holding his were clammy and weak, and they managed only to move him a few inches at a time. But he slid on his own blood, and they didn’t have far to go. After a few paces, Garret felt cool air wash over him. The little strength in the hands failed completely, but with a few gasps of fresh air, his body regained enough strength for him to crawl off of the Malvern’s front porch and tumble down the steps. With a thunderous crash, the front of the mansion came down, flinging cinders and belching smoke.
Garret lay in the grass, and he hacked and hacked, his body trying to expel the mess that had coated his lungs, starving him of life-giving air. Every part of his body was loudly reporting some kind of injury, and his eyes and nose were running, but he saw a heavyset person sit down heavily in the grass beside him. Mrs. Malvern.
Garret tried to ask what had happened, but only more coughing came out. He hacked up mucus, greyish-black onto the green lawn. When his eyes cleared enough to see, Mrs. Malvern had a damp cloth in her lap and tears in her eyes as she watched her home burn to the ground.
You called to it, he tried to say. Coughing came out instead. You called and it came after you. More coughing. With an earth-shaking whooom, the remaining portion of the mansion’s top floor came down. Mrs. Malvern’s shoulders bowed in defeat, and she put her face in her hands and cried. Garret’s back felt like it was fried to hard, crackled leather. His vision was fading in and out. Mrs. Malvern was covered with soot and smoke, her hat was gone, her hair was undone for the first time Garret had seen it so. It was long and full, coming halfway down her back, and it, like her teary face, was smeared with soot.
Pushing on her knees for support, she stood, looked down at him and said, “Garret, find my daughter.”
She walked away without another word. Garret tried to call after her to wait. The words rasped and grated and lost their sound. She walked away without looking back. Her shoulders were bowed with sadness, but her steps had purpose. Behind Garret, the mansion was a heap of rubble, roaring with flames that reached into the sky.
Chapter 18
Mrs. Malvern had a long way to go, and she knew she couldn’t walk that far. There was little time left, she suspected. Little of anything left. Powell was gone. That she knew. Whether he died tonight, or tomorrow, or fifty years from now, he was long since gone. She’d lost him the day she’d lost Charity. Mrs. Malvern walked down the hill, her knees and hips aching, every stone on the road working hard to turn her ankle or break it, and leave her sitting, unable to do the last thing she needed to do, the thing she should have done so long ago.
She’d let Ella stay because she knew Ella didn’t kill the goose. She had, even at the time, begun to suspect who really had, but it was too hard to believe. Or perhaps it was too easy to believe. She stopped walking and turned, casting a longing glance back at her home. The rising hill hid it from view, except for the column of angry, black soot and smoke rising into the air.
The monster had gotten her out of the house. It made her sick to think it, but she had known it would come if she called. She’d been trapped when the roof had started to give way and she’d waited until she was lying on the floor, coughing and swimming in her own sweat before her pride had broken down enough to call for its help.
She kept walking, putting one sore foot in front of the other, but her chin was not upraised with her usual pride. Neither were her shoulders held back. She made no effort to retrieve her long grey hair, trailing down her back. She was Mrs. Malvern no more. She was once again Colleen. Just Colleen.
Resolutely, Colleen turned and continued down the hill. Her dress was torn to ribbons. Her arm still ached badly from where something had landed on it, and then she had hurt it worse trying to drag the young heathen from her burning house. He was skinny as he could be, and should have been easy to drag, but she no longer had the old strength in her hands. Antonia had it, and Colleen loved her for it. She loved Antonia for everything she was, and even more for what she could be. She could live and be happy and successful, more than Colleen herself had ever been. Yet Antonia wanted to throw it all away for a boy, just as Charity had. Colleen thought again of the boy, Garret, whom she had dragged from the house. She had pitied him for what he was, and hated him for what he wasn’t, but when the creature had set her on the floor beside him, and torn the front doors away on its exit, she had, for a brief moment, seen a bit of what Antonia saw in him.
So she grabbed his hands and tugged him across the floor, watching his blood smear in trails behind him. His hands were calloused and rough from swinging a hammer since not long after he learned to walk. His muscles were lean and tight from the years of hard work. He would never amount to anything, but perhaps that was the point. Perhaps that was what Antonia and Charity both saw that Colleen did not. She hated to think it, that she could have been wrong all those years. Because that would mean she had killed her own daughter. It would mean Charity’s loss was her fault. Colleen couldn’t deal with the concept. If she did, she would fall down right there in the road.
The boy’s ability to turn into an animal had surprised her less than anything about him. He had always looked young and feral to her. Poorly dressed, ill-mannered, never good enough for her daughter. However, he had shown up, and that was more than anyone else had done. His small body had been torn to ribbons: cuts, rips, huge rows of bruises across his chest and back. Some of the injuries were days or even weeks old. Others he had acquired in the mansion that very hour, but none of them had made him quit. Nothing had been able to make him give up on Antonia.
Colleen stumbled. She was weeping and it was becoming hard to see where to set her feet. The little blacksmith had refused to give up. He wasn’t smart enough to beat the thing he was up against. He wasn’t strong enough to destroy it, and he seemed to realize it. But he kept trying anyway. No matter how much it hurt. He was almost as brave as he was stupid.
As she looked down on the boy in her mind’s eye, another memory began to replay. She saw her own finger, pushing the key to Charity’s bedroom across the desk. Lifting her finger off the key, surrendering her precious daughter. The key lay there, rocking gently back and forth on its barrel to the time of a soft heartbeat, its brass curves gleaming in the light until Dr. Goldblume’s claw-like hand covered it.
Colleen stumbled to the edge of the road and sat down on a log. A long tattered piece of cloth, which had been her sleeve, hung from her shoulder. She pressed it over her mouth to hold in all of the things she couldn’t let out right now.
She allowed herself only a minute or so to regain some steadiness. She could afford no more than that. Antonia could afford no more. Colleen forced herself to stand and continue walking. She would borrow a buggy from the Johnson farm, not far down the road. If they weren’t there, she’d borrow it anyway. She’d spent months denying what had happened, years reasoning her way around what
she had done. Now her home was burning, her husband and one of her daughters were lost, and the other was in grave danger.
The boy was right. It didn’t matter who had started this, it had to be stopped. So Colleen would be the one to finish it. First, she would retrieve whatever information was left and place it in intelligent hands as a failsafe. It would be a short but rough buggy ride to recover it. She didn’t know exactly what she was looking for, but she knew where to find it.
Then she would face up to her duties to her family, her town, and her society. Colleen had never failed to do what duty required, and she would not waver now. The creature had already come to her once when she called for it. It would come again. She would explain. She would take responsibility. The creature would see reason, if she allowed it to hold her responsible. She knew it would. It had to.
* * *
Garret crawled hand over hand across the lawn. His wolfstrap was lying a few yards away in a crumpled heap. He tried to call it to himself, but his thoughts were slipping, clouded by smoke and blurred by injury. The strap flopped towards him, shivered, and lay still. Garret did too, for a moment. He’d forgotten why he was crawling towards it. The rest of his thoughts began to leave his mind as well. He lay on the grass, confused, and hacked up some more grey mucus. He reached for another handful of turf and tugged, but he didn’t move very far. One hand, pull. The other hand. Pull.
His body was so heavy. It seemed the only thing it had strength left to do was cough. As he lay there, and seconds began to stray from him, the coughing subsided too. It fell away until his breathing became long and very shallow. Lack of oxygen smeared his thoughts. His last was of Molly before she also fled his mind, leaving a silver emptiness. The coughing was gone, and his pain faded with it. His body, which was made of lead, relaxed. It felt like a heavy shell which he could neither control nor move. His chest hitched another shallow breath, then stilled for a while. Garret lay inside himself, forgetful of all things.
The Malvern’s mansion burned before his unfocused eyes, and out of the blaze, a shape walked quickly towards him. It was the thing which had come from his forge and made the wolfstrap for him. It was again man-like, tall and strong, but hidden, wrapping our world around itself so tightly that only its form was visible, as if it was impressed on the air from behind.
It knelt at Garret’s head and laid a hand on his chest. Garret felt a coolness rush into him, reconnecting his mind and body, forcing him to plug back into a host of unpleasant sensations. His chest leaped, inhaling a huge gasp of air, and another. Pain roared through him, and he blinked, remembered Molly and Sarn, and wondered where his mind had been.
The thing still knelt over him, and it spoke to his mind, much as the creature did, but this was gentle and cool, like dipping a foot in a brook on a summer’s day.
Your hour is near, young one. Be true to who you are, and all will be well. But if you give in to fear, more will be lost than you can imagine. They come now to test you, again.
With that, the thing was gone. Its form retreated from the air as if it had stepped away from the curtain it was pressed against. Garret gripped a handful of grass. His fingers closed slowly, but at least they were responding. He drew in another deep breath, sending spikes of pain through his chest, and making flashing butterflies flutter before his eyes. He struggled to summon thought, but it too was slow.
A tremor ran through him. For a moment, he thought he’d had a small fit of some kind, but when it happened again, he realized it was not his body, but the ground beneath him which was moving. The Malvern’s mansion continued to crackle and smolder. Somewhere a board fell, and another. Garret felt it again, a vibration through the ground. One of the chimneys, which had been leaning dangerously, began to tilt towards him.
Garret cringed, tried to roll away, but his body felt like a crashed locomotive lying beside the tracks: a million pounds of dead weight that no power on earth would set right again. Garret cringed, made a weak whine as the chimney slammed into the earth to his left, sending chunks of stone to pelt him.
Garret had lived his life in the solid stillness of the Appalachian Mountains, and so he had come to take the immovability of the earth for granted. The ground beneath his feet simply was. It was as reliable and unchanging as his little brother’s love for him. So when the ground began to break up around him, his wracked mind and body didn’t know how to process the sensation of the earth sinking and sliding away as if it was so much pig slop.
With a sound that was more felt than heard, the earth caved in at the center of the Malvern’s mansion. Garret grasped feebly at grass which was being ripped, and stones which were beginning to roll, as the rubble of the mansion collapsed downwards. Burning boards fell and banged against each other, throwing off clouds of sparks. Stones and remnants of brick walls fell inward, some colliding, others simply breaking up and cascading into the widening sinkhole.
Garret grasped like a mindless animal, but he fell. Walls, studs, plaster, all of it burning, all of it pluming smoke, sifted through cracks in the earth and disappeared. The grass and dirt in Garret’s fingers ripped loose, and he fell into the dark. He fell until he lost all sense of direction, until he was tumbling through cool darkness with no sense of up or down. It came back to him in spades when he landed. His impact with the floor was bone crushing, and should have killed him, but his torn body breathed still. All was dark. He couldn’t see his own hand, and heard nothing but his own breathing.
The floor began to swallow him. It had been hard and slick as the Malvern’s marble floors, but now it began to pull him down like quicksand. It was still hard and cold, but pliable at the same time. It was like sinking into cold, liquid iron. He cried for help and flailed. His legs were first to go, though he pulled mightily and floundered. He’d been here before, wherever here was, but it had been years ago. One way or another, he felt certain this would be the last time. Something had to change. He had to make a decision—the decision from which he’d been hiding since he was a small child.
He screamed and twisted, but his waist disappeared. He slapped at the surface, but it just clung to his arms, stringing from his hands like heavy tar. His abdomen was gone, and he called for help as the cold weight moved up his body. It was heavy, too thick even for him to inhale it when he went under. It wasn’t going to drown him, it was going to smother him like liquid rubber.
His chest sank into the surface, though he kicked and paddled his arms as if he could swim. His shoulders went, and he strained for a last breath. His quivering feet bumped against something round buried beneath him in the thick coldness. It was someone’s head. A dead body. The last who fell here before him. There were others too, he knew. Hundreds of them, entombed and rotting in the black depths. He knew because he had been down there before, a long time ago. He had seen. And maybe in reality, he had never really left.
The sticky floor pulled him down, covering his chin and his ears. A powerful hand grabbed him by both forearms and lifted him partially out of the floor. It hurt. The floor pulled him down, clung to him, sucking at him, but the hand held him firmly.
Garret, it said. You cannot win. You must let us help you. There is no one else now. Your father has abandoned you. Your mother has used you. But we have never lied to you. Have we not done exactly as we said we would do for you, Garret? Have we not given you the strength that has brought you this far?
Garret had no idea what the thing was, and yet this talk of promises rang a bell somewhere far away in his memory. It was telling the truth. They had done as they had promised. Despair blossomed in his heart because he knew that the first part of its statement was also true. He was totally, hilariously outclassed. The creature would kill him. It would kill Molly and Sarn. It would kill them all.
We will help you, Garret. Don’t forget us when the time comes, and we will help you save everything that you love. We are as tired of liars as you are.
The hand pulled Garret up out of the muck, and flung him back up the way he ha
d come.
Remember us, it said again, as he began to feel the physics of the real world return to him.
Along with physics came pain. Tremendous, vengeful, relentless pain. Garret was lying back on the Malvern’s lawn with the mansion smoldering behind him, and his body crying all manner of injury. The ground was flat and level, and the glowing remnants of the Malvern’s mansion continued to burn as if they had not been disturbed. There was no sinkhole. Nothing had fallen, including Garret.
A sickly baying came from Garret’s left. He rolled his head and tried to get a shoulder under himself. The noise came again, this time from his right, then repeated from his left. Twilight was falling, and the howls were ill and ravaged, driven by an unholy hunger. They sounded much like the creature, come to think of it.
Garret managed to flop from his torn back onto his bruised stomach. In his watery vision, he saw three canine forms dragging themselves towards him. They were the Malvern’s Danes, or at least what was left of them. Their skin was sloughing, revealing muscle and bone. The one on the left was dragging its uselessly mangled back legs. The one on the right was missing a front leg. The limb had been torn away entirely, leaving the muscle and snags of bone dribbling on the grass. The Dane in the middle had all its appendages, but the skin had completely slid from its face, taking its eyes with it and baring all its teeth in a sightless, eternal growl. The three of them lurched towards him, practically dead on their feet, but moving with purpose, as if driven by their impending deaths. Saliva strung dark and tacky from their jaws. It reminded him of the blackness in which he’d nearly suffocated.
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