Cunning Devil

by Chris Underwood

  It’s a good place to hide. I should know. The Strangers aren’t the only people around here who need to stay hidden.

  Lawrence scratched and howled in the back of my van as I drove. He was shaking the dog cage so violently I was getting a little concerned he would manage to break out. My brilliant plan to soothe the creature by throwing a blanket over the cage only seemed to have infuriated him more.

  The smart thing to do would’ve been to take him directly to Alcaraz, but the old researcher’s estate was a ways away, on the outskirts of the town. I was already running a few minutes late to get to Mr. Mills place, thanks to my dear sister delaying me with her misguided concerns. I couldn’t afford to lose the job. The guy already sounded uncertain about hiring me, and I didn’t want to give him a chance to change his mind.

  So I headed straight for his house. Delilah, the plastic hula girl fixed to my dashboard, danced as I drove.

  My route took me on a leisurely drive along Main Street. Gnarled trees lined the center of the road, some of the long branches looming low enough to scrape their leaves on the top of my van as I passed. Scattered among the cafes and shops I passed were tourist traps that sold maps to local haunted houses and T-shirts with cartoon pictures of ogres. Lost Falls’ hidden community tolerated that kind of stuff, figuring that it was easier to cultivate misinformation than try to cover up the truth entirely.

  The streets were busy, at least as busy as they get around here. I passed a bus that had pulled over to disgorge tourists at an information center dressed up to look like a witch’s hut. The locals, out with their families, either tended to eye the tourists with disgust or ignore them completely.

  Every now and then, I spotted people wearing heavy amulets or silver bracelets that were too old and tarnished to be purely for decoration. I even recognized a few amulets I’d sold myself, or some that had to be Early’s workmanship. It made it easy to identify those who knew—or suspected—that not all of the town legends were complete horse shit. Even during the day, in the middle of town, some folks felt a little safer with some silver or a protection amulet close at hand.

  Whatever helped them get through the day. I just hoped none of them ran into any prowling Strangers after nightfall.

  The crowds thinned out as I headed back towards suburbia. The only sound I had for comfort was the growling of the creature in the back of the van. I don’t listen to the radio much these days. Talk shows bore me and music…music isn’t for me anymore.

  Mr. Mills’ address was in an older part of town. One of the oldest parts of town, in fact. The narrow roads were so potholed I was at risk of breaking my van’s suspension if I wasn’t careful. The houses here were all wood and brick and flaking paint, packed in tight behind fences and stone walls as old as the town itself. It was a favored location on all the haunted house tours. Most of these places looked the part, at least.

  I found Mr Mills’ house at the end of a cul-de-sac. It was no better than its neighbors. Weeds had overtaken the front garden entirely, and were laying siege to the house. They’d sent vines to creep up the western wall, and I had no doubt sappers were undermining the foundations as I watched. All in all, quite an impressive shit hole.

  “You’ve got to be kidding me,” I muttered.

  I grabbed my bag and got out. Before I went to the house, I opened the back door of my van. The dog cage growled at me from beneath the blanket.

  With a glance up at the house to make sure no one was looking out the windows at me, I lit one of the small candles I kept in my van for situations like this. While I waited for the wax to melt, I fished a scrap of calfskin parchment from my bag and scrawled a simple written charm on it in black ink. With a bit of luck, the sleep charm might keep the creature docile, at least until I got back. Without a better idea of exactly what the creature was, it was the best I could do.

  I folded the parchment, sealing it with a few drops of candle wax. I blew out the candle and left the sealed charm sitting on top of the dog cage.

  It was worth a try.

  I locked up and turned my attention back to the house. It creaked like it might fall over at any moment.

  I pushed open the squealing gate and fought my way through the jungle. A plywood board had been laid over the steps leading up to the veranda, forming a makeshift ramp that’d been screwed in place. It was the only renovation the place had seen this century.

  My hopes for this job had fallen somewhat when I first saw the house. They dropped right out the bottom of my boots when I rang the bell and the door creaked open.

  I’ve seen reanimated bodies that looked more alive than this guy. He had the look of a fit, strong man gone to seed in his middle age, so worn down by life he’d given up on the whole enterprise.

  His ears were too big for his head, but despite that I got the feeling he probably would’ve been a bit of a heartbreaker in his youth. Now he didn’t even bother to clean the food stains from his jeans. He wore the T-shirt of a band that hadn’t been touring in twenty years, which was likely when he’d bought it. He’d shaved two or three days ago—and cut himself pretty badly, by the look of it—but he’d missed a whole big patch under his left ear. The errant beard hairs stood like a tuft of grass in the tundra.

  He was an all-round sorry-looking son of a bitch.

  I’d been hoping for someone a little desperate, someone willing to pay good money for a job well done. This guy, on the other hand, had nothing left to live for. I doubted he had enough cash to put dinner on the table, let alone pay me what I was worth.

  Judging by the look on his face, I guessed I wasn’t quite what he expected either. Early didn’t have that problem when he visited clients. He had the Gandalf look going on, with the wrinkles and the hair coming out his ears.

  Me, not so much. Between the beard and my size, I’ve been told I look like I belong in a biker gang. I supposed I didn’t much resemble the wise old man that Mr. Mills was probably expecting. But I gave him my best smile anyway, trying not to let my disappointment show on my face.

  “Mr. Mills?” I said, holding out my hand. “I’m Osric Turner.”

  After a moment’s hesitation, he put his hand in mine. His palm was hard and calloused, but his grip was weak.

  He looked at me. “You’re the…uh…?”

  He wasn’t the first person to have trouble deciding what my job title should be. A few centuries back, there were plenty of names to describe folks like me. Pellar. White witch. Cunning man.

  There aren’t many of us left now. In fact, Early and I are the only cunning folk I know of within two hundred miles of Lost Falls. Once, though, there were more. We were needed.

  We were the ones you came to when your crops failed or your prized cooking pan went missing. We were there to track down your son after he wandered into the woods alone. We broke curses and protected against witchcraft. We provided magical assistance for the common folk, all at a reasonable price. And though we weren’t always trusted, we were always in demand.

  Unfortunately, modern cunning folk—such as yours truly—have to take jobs where we find them.

  “Yes,” I said, as the man struggled to verbalize. “That’s me.”

  “I thought you’d be…uh…”

  This guy had a lot of trouble finishing sentences. I just nodded, smiling politely.

  “I get that a lot.” I gestured. “May I?”

  “Oh, yes, yes. Come in.”

  The rotten floorboards flexed underfoot as I stepped through the doorway. My initial impression of the house only grew stronger as I followed Mills down the narrow hallway. A wet dog smell hung in the air. Wallpaper was curling off the walls in strips, revealing damp and mold beneath. The spiders had taken up permanent residence around the light fixtures. It would take a battering ram and a SWAT team to get them out.

  I glanced through an open bedroom door as I passed, and saw a stack of moving boxes, half of them opened, labeled things like: Clothes - Brandon and Kitchen - Glass - Fragile. What furniture
there was had been scattered half-heartedly about, awaiting the chance to be properly arranged. I got the feeling they’d been waiting a while already.

  “New in town?” I asked, trying not to breathe in too much. There was a good chance the air was laced with spores of some deadly flesh-eating mold.

  “Hmm? Oh, yes,” he said over his shoulder. “Sort of. We needed a change of scenery.”

  Some scene. How bad was his last place, if this was an improvement?

  He threw open a door and we stepped into the living room. It was named for good reason: I think it was the only room that was actually being lived in. The couch was a fold-out, draped with blankets and pillows. There was a small dining table by the wide bay windows, which seemed to be the only place light could penetrate the house.

  A woman was sitting in an electric wheelchair beside the table, bathing in the sunshine. She was in worse shape than the house. Both legs had been amputated above the knee. She had her arms, at least, but the fingers were gnarled with arthritis. One eye was completely white, and the other was half-clouded. Her flesh seemed to hang off her bones.

  “This is my mother,” Mills said to me.

  By the look of her, I would’ve believed she was his grandmother, but who was I to argue?

  Mills laid a hand on the old woman’s shoulder and hollered in her ear. “Mr. Turner is here.”

  She was slow to react, and when she did, her movements were glacial. She turned her head away from the sunlight and her one good eye sought me out.

  “Good,” was all she said.

  “Nice to meet you, Mrs. Mills,” I said.

  “What?”

  “She’s very deaf,” Brandon Mills said to me. He yelled in his mother’s ear again. “He says it’s nice to meet you.”

  Her face twitched into a frown, then with the barest wave to indicate that she understood, she turned back to the window.

  “Sorry,” the man said to me as he guided me away. “Her mood isn’t great at the best of times.”

  “And these aren’t the best of times,” I said.

  “No. No.” He sighed, dragging his hand across his face. “Can I get you anything? Water? Coffee?”

  I shook my head. “How about you tell me what it is you’ve lost?” I suggested.

  He sighed again, nodding. “You’re right.” For a moment, he looked almost as old as his mother. Then he silently gestured, beckoning me to follow.

  He led me back into the hallway and into another room. As soon as he threw open the door, I got a lungful of mothballs and dust.

  For some reason, this room had carpet, though the rest of the floors in the house were all hardwood. Moth-eaten curtains were drawn across the windows. It was a small room, barely an office, and the spiders were really dug in here.

  There was only a single piece of furniture in the room, and it had pride of place, right in the center.

  A baby’s crib.

  It looked brand new, and it was remarkably free of spider webs. A mobile hung over the crib, turning slowly in some hidden breeze.

  I grew cold all of a sudden. The sight of the crib brought long-buried memories fighting to the surface.

  Images of a crib, not so different from this one, beside a window that’d been thrown wide open. Curtains blowing in the cold of the night. The off-tune scream of a baby. Or what was supposed to be a baby.

  “Mr. Turner?”

  Mills’ voice reached through the memories, dragging me out of the sinkhole. I plastered a smile to my face.

  “Sorry,” I said. “Got a little light-headed for a second.”

  “Do you need—?”

  “No, no. I’m fine. This crib…”

  “Used to be my son’s.”

  The “used to” in that sentence left no doubts as to its meaning.

  “I’m so sorry,” I said.

  “Do you have children, Mr. Turner?”

  I shook my head. “But I used to have a younger brother. Theodore. Teddy.” How long had it been since I’d said his name? “There were sixteen years between us, so I took care of him a lot. He…uh…he died when he was a baby.”

  I didn’t know why I was telling Mills this. Must’ve been Alice’s talk, getting inside my head. Or maybe it was just the sight of this crib. Hell, this damn crib. I could barely bring myself to look at it.

  “My son was eighteen months old.” Mills’ voice was quiet, but it seemed loud in the confines of this small, still room. “When he died, it destroyed us. My wife and I. The relationship couldn’t survive.”

  I caught a glimpse of a silver chain disappearing beneath the collar of his shirt. I wondered if he kept his wedding ring on that chain. The way he spoke about his wife, I could tell he still loved her, despite the tragedy.

  The picture was starting to come into focus. My guess: when they split, Mills’ wife got the house. He’d moved here with his mother, using whatever he had left to rent or buy this old dump. Say what you like about Lost Falls, but at least the property prices were affordable enough.

  “I feel stupid,” Mills said. “I don’t…I’m not sure I believe in what you do. No offense.”

  “None taken.”

  “I just don’t know what else to do. I don’t have much money. I—”

  “Mr. Mills,” I said. “Tell me what I can do for you.”

  For a moment, I could see the cracks in the facade he was barely keeping together. His lip trembled; he covered it with his hand. He stared at the crib for a moment.

  “My boy is gone.” He wrapped his hands around the crib’s railing. “All I have left of him is this crib. And one other thing. A silver rattle. It’s been in our family for more than a hundred years. My mother, she played with it when she was a baby. So did I. So did my son. Now, now it’s…”

  “Missing,” I said.

  He closed his eyes and nodded.

  “Describe it,” I said.

  “It’s about eight inches long. Ivory handle, with a silver head. There are two rows of bells, four in each row. It’s a beautiful old thing. Until yesterday, it sat right here.” He gestured to the center of the crib mattress, then turned to me. His eyes were suddenly hard and desperate. For a moment, I caught a glimpse of a different man, a stronger man. Someone used to shouldering the burdens of the world and doing what needed to be done. “Please. I can’t explain to you how important that rattle is to me. Me and my mother. I need it back. It’s all I have. All I have,” he whispered, his voice breaking off at the end. And just like that, the fire in his eyes was extinguished.

  All my dreams of a nice big payday had long since gone down the toilet. The man said he didn’t have much money, and I believed him. Hell, if that rattle really was an antique, it was probably more valuable than anything else in the house.

  But I took another look at that crib, picturing the baby that used to sleep there. In my mind’s eye I saw that other crib again, I heard that cry that wasn’t Teddy’s. And a different part of my brain took over.

  “I’ll find it,” I promised.

  Stupidest damn promise I’ve ever made.

  4

  There hadn’t been a break-in. No one had jimmied the windows to steal the rattle. Brandon Mills said the two police officers who’d come the day before had already determined that, and my own investigation confirmed it.

  According to Mills, the cops had taken his statement and promised they’d keep an eye out, but they hadn’t seemed convinced that anything criminal had happened. I doubted they even believed the rattle really existed. Even if it did, they probably thought his mother had lost it somewhere (the poor demented old dear).

  But the cops were wrong. Silver, like iron, is damn good at soaking up emotional energy.

  Silver that old, kept in the same family for so long and used by several generations of little Mills babies, would be brimming with that kind of energy. I figured that maybe, just maybe, it was powerful enough to leave a residue of its existence behind.

  I guessed right. The charged powdered silve
r I scattered over the crib mattress coalesced into a faint shape in the center of the mattress, like iron filings exposed to a magnetic field.

  The rattle had been here, all right. But where had it gone?

  Here’s a little secret of the cunning man’s trade: inanimate objects are a pain in the ass to track. Even in situations like this, where the object holds enough memory and history to leave behind some trace of itself, trying to follow that trail is near impossible.

  That’s not to say I didn’t give it a shot.

  I’d already sent Mills out of the room before I started doing anything too mysterious. The fewer people who knew how I worked, the safer I’d be. Ordinary people who see magic being performed tend to get a little…anxious. It upsets their world view. Brings out all those terrified, dangerous, torch-and-pitchfork feelings in them.

  When I’d poured most of the powdered silver back into its vial—that stuff isn’t cheap—I took the last pinch and dropped it into a concoction of my own making. It contained—among other things—a couple of drops of my own blood, the seeds from the first apple to fall from the tree in my backyard that season, and a dash of pureed sheep’s liver.

  Magic ain’t always pretty, folks.

  I dipped a cheap silver-plated pendant into the concoction. The silver was new, blank, with no history to mess with my investigations. After letting it sit for a moment, I drew out the pendant and held it by its string, watching it carefully.

  I was getting something, but it was faint. The pendant, now primed with the memory of the rattle, was pulling ever so slightly towards the room’s south wall.

  I went to the wall, one eye on the pendant. It was hard to tell, but I was pretty sure the rattle had found its way over here recently. It wasn’t here anymore—if the rattle was still in the house, I would’ve got a much more pronounced response. But when it’d been taken from the cradle, it had gone this way.

  And it had been taken. That’s another nugget of cunning folk wisdom, passed down from generation to generation. Get out your pencils. Here it is: inanimate objects don’t get up and walk away on their own.