Tales of Ravenloft (ravenloft)

by David Wise

  "And what shall it be for all of you?" he asked them. "Continue the tour, or bring it to a close here and now?"

  As I had done throughout the evening, I rushed then to nail my coffin shut. "I, for one, am utterly fascinated and wish to carry this all to its conclusion. "Stezen answered me with a wave of the hand that indicated that he had expected nothing else. Flustered to have been read so easily, I glanced away toward the window again, where servants of D'Polarno were already nailing boards into place.

  "What of the rest of you?" D'Polarno asked in the silence that followed. "Continue, or quit?"

  The man who answered for the host was a tall, hatchet-faced fellow who held his hat clutched tightly in his hands and blinked his large fish eyes often as he spoke. "Of course, we're enjoying the tour — to the utmost, sir, Marquis D'Polarno. But it's getting late and, well. . I bet it would take a good few months to really apprec-"

  "A few years," Stezen interrupted dryly.

  "Yes, years, to really appreciate all that's here. So if we could call it a night and, perhaps, see the rest of the gallery next week some time?" Those standing around him nodded their appeasing agreement.

  "Sorry," Stezen said, running his thumbnail beneath the nail of his little finger," this is your one and only tour. "He gestured to the crowd. "Come. The final room."

  My heart leapt. If he harbored his fountain anywhere, it would be in this place. I needed only to step across the threshold to find out, and perhaps this would be my literal doorway to eternity. Inwardly upbraiding myself for standing still so long, I started forward, and reached the back of the anxious group.

  The great black doors creaked open. Stezen, at the head of the procession, backed slowly through them. The cold that poured out of the chamber beyond reached me even at the party's rear, and I gasped slightly. My eyes stared through the portal to see a cavernous room all in black. Indeed, the floor and wall and ceiling were so lightless that they seemed to recede forever. No paintings here, only thousands of pieces of white granite statuary, only rows upon rows of poised figures, like the gravestones of a battlefield's dead.

  In their center stood a magnificent and enormous fountain — the magnificent and enormous fountain. Its sprays and jets of water arced up higher than any ceiling I had ever seen. The base of the fountain was wide and white, and its waters a kind of pale blue, the only true color in the cavernous chamber. In the center of the fountain, a vast marble mountain rose, composed of columns and acanthus and countless statues in relief or full: griffins, snakes, cockatrices, scarabs, phoenixes, lambs. Most importantly, though, was the water, cascading through thousands of falls and chutes, rising again through piping and tubes only to spray out and fill the black firmament.

  So mesmerized was I by this, so moved and affected, that I felt drawn forward across that threshold into the cold and windy and infinite place. I stood on the black floor, knowing it to be there by the pressure of its pushing back, but having the queer sensation that I stood on nothing. To relieve this distressing confusion of the senses, I let my eyes rise up the form of D'Polarno, standing on the floor before me.

  He smiled his feline smile, gestured at the room about us, and said," Welcome, Dr. Ferewood, to the Hall of the Eternities."

  Only then did I notice that we two stood alone. The nervous flock of ten, who had gone through the gate before me, had dissipated into air. Well, not precisely air. By the path where I stood, I saw the tall, hatchetfaced, fish-eyed supplicant from the other room. He stood splendid in white marble, his hat still clutched tightly in those fists that would clutch nothing else, forever.

  "Where are the rest of them?" I asked through a constricting throat. "What have you done?"

  "They're around here somewhere," Stezen said with a laugh and a casual wave of the hand. That simple gesture took in a number of the guests: a woman in her flushed thirties, whose belly had just begun to show the child, now stone, within; a gap-toothed falconer whose staring eyes of granite had that wide and fierce and unblinking aspect of birds; a lady all done in furs whose heretofore and hereafter silent grace was augmented by sables, now elegantly spiked in stone. All statues. All dead.

  Though Stezen paused for only a breath, his voice broke like a cannon blast on my musings. "I'd really begun to think I'd not find any of you worthy to drink from the fountain tonight — I thought everybody'd end up in one sordid scene or another in one of my paintings. But here you are."

  "The rest aren't free?" I gasped. "The rest are in these sculptures? The paintings?"

  "It is as I told you — as I showed you," replied D'Polarno easily. "You saw the merchant and his wife, and the duke in the magical painting back there. You see this one standing here like some granite rube, staring forever at you. ."

  "You've turned them into — "

  "Immortals," Stezen interrupted. He coughed into his hand. "Well, immortals of a sort. They're still very much alive, I assure you. But they've all been freed of their flesh and embodied now in stone. That's the best immortality I can offer to the common cut of man."

  "All of them? Every last one of them? From Krimean, the oaf in the first room, to. . to this one standing here now?"

  Stezen just shook his head. His face wore a look of feigned surprise in mockery of me, and he said," Of course, all of them. In the room of classic sculptures, didn't you notice those women clustered about in mourning? Remember them from the table, clinging to each others'arms? You yourself studied the monolith in the first room, studied it in great depth — commented on it even. Didn't you recognize that the statue you studied was Krimean? "

  "You've killed them!"

  "No. "The response was curt. "No, I did not. I've told you, they are alive, only in bodies of stone, which will last them millennia, if not forever. " "But why, why did you do it? "

  "They asked me to," Stezen replied simply. "You think you were the only one to come here seeking the fountain of life? Of course not. I sent the word out myself — carefully, restrictedly — to just the sort of people who would covet it and would have the stuff to make it this far and drink. But only you made it."

  "Only me."

  "Only you."

  My avarice — my compulsion and passion for immortality — began again to take me over. At first I'd been shocked to discover the fate of my fellow revelers, then stunned in an attempt to puzzle out just what had happened to them all, then confused. . Now all my qualms fell away, as the hunter's twinge of sadness departs when the pangs of hunger set in.

  "Only me," I muttered again stupidly.

  Stezen nodded. "All the others sought immortality for fear of death. They feared the rending of their flesh, the ending of their minds. But you know immortality is more than that."

  "Yes," I moaned, though I did not really. "I know."

  "You know that immortality is about soul and being. You, like me, would sacrifice body and mind for it."

  "Yes."

  "For the others, it was a fashion. For you it is a faith. I gave the others the immortality for which they had asked. I offer another immortality — a higher, better immortality — now to you."

  Already I was walking toward D'Polarno, toward the hissing, thundering fountain. He turned about and led me there, producing a leathern cup from within his vest, unfolding it, rounding it, and seating himself on the fountain's rim. I did the same.

  The next words he spoke were almost lost to the roar of the water. "This libation will give you everlasting life, free you of the ravages to the flesh, free you of the frailties of the mind. It will transform you, fill you, allow you to transcend all that is petty and mortal. Will you drink?"

  I nodded in mute reverence.

  He dipped the leathern cup into the bubbling water, a strangely crude vessel for so empyreal a drink, and lifted it, dripping, up to me. When a few drops struck my knee, the water felt cold and clear and magnificent.

  "Drink," said he.

  I drank. The taste was like nothing I had ever had before. The water was very chill, an
d when it went down my throat, it caused a sensation that I can only call an ecstatic burning. The feeling spread rapidly through me, reaching the tips of my fingers and toes, making my skin flush with its intense heat. It felt as though sparks were flying through my body, transforming it into a vital, trembling, invincible form.

  I laughed out loud, and my voice was carried into the fountain and it merged with the water that had brought this unbelievable joy — merged and circulated and bubbled and danced. I was alive, as though for the first time ever.

  "Welcome," said Stezen," to the brotherhood of Immortals. "He leaned toward me and, in the custom of his land, kissed me upon the lips. Then he raised his hand, brushed my jaw for a moment, and jabbed a steelhard forefinger through my cheek.

  There was a moment of horrible tearing, and I glimpsed my flesh splitting away like the shirt ripping from a man's shoulders. Then the ruptured skin of my forehead dragged over my eyes and brought crimson darkness to them. I staggered for a moment, feeling Stezen peel my body from me like the skin from an orange. Everything was violent jolting and liquid sloshing and lacerations rubbing. Flesh and bone and marrow, torn away from my soul.

  Then it was over. It was that sudden. In a rushing cascade of slippery mortal flesh, I was defrocked of my body. But I — my soul — remained.

  Though my mortal shell, my fleshly existence, has been removed, I am still here, a disembodied mind — the ghost in the gallery. All my time has been like this now, bodiless and eternal. I could not scream my rage to Stezen. I could not even see him to hate him. I have no eyes to see with. I have no ears to hear with. I have no skin, no tongue, no nose, no heart, no hands, no bone, no flesh at all with which to sense or affect the gallery around me. I am utterly alone, and utterly indestructible.

  Since that time — how many centuries or minutes, I know not — I've realized how truly Stezen spoke. I was mortal and wished not to be. To become otherwise, all that was mortal in me would needs be purged. He did so. And now I know it was mortality, not immortality, that I had once loved.

  So I tell my tale, in the vain hope that if there are others like me in this gallery, others whose beings have been stripped of their bodies, they might perhaps hear and let their souls weep. But mine is a vain hope. For I, myself, cannot hear their cries.

  The Freak

  He burst from the dark forest, a twisted, ragtag figure frantically running along the rutted gullies of the old dirt road. A man fleeing for his very life.

  In every direction, tremendous granite mountains dominated the horizon, looming large above the wooded valley. Sharply silhouetted by the star-filled sky and waning crescent moon, the somber, jagged monoliths stood silent and uncaring of what occurred below in the world of mortal men.

  Though dressed in tattered clothes, the body of the running man was perfection: the limbs and chest of a young Adonis, strength and masculine beauty personified. But when a shaft of moonlight pierced the thick cover of trees and illuminated his face, it was clear that nature, which had so richly rewarded his body, had definitely not done so here. His grotesque features were the essence of nightmares.

  Mottled, discolored skin. A flat, slit wound of a nose, like that of a rutting boar. One eye was three times too large, sans lashes and set above the other, with no regard for balance or function. His bulging forehead extended in irregular patterns as if the pressure inside was simply too much for the bones and his head was likely to burst apart at any moment. One ear was human enough, though of disproportionate size; the other was delicately pointed like that of an elfin child, a tiny pink flower growing on the side of the crumbling, moldy ruin of his face.

  His hair, a dozen shabby hues, grew in tufts along his ragged widow's peak, and his crown was partially bald. He lacked a top lip entirely, and the bottom was too full by far, easily exposing his broken, gap-filled teeth. Even the jaw appeared to have been melted in a furnace, then randomly recast.

  It was a face of horror, and that was what it radiated now. Raw horror.

  Wheezing for breath, the grotesque mockery named Anatole the Freak glanced over a slim shoulder and stumbled into a rut in the hard-packed soil. Down he fell, gashing his lopsided chin on a sharp rock. The small pain went unnoticed as the deformed hermit scrambled to his feet, just in time for torches to appear over the low rise behind him.

  They had found him. Now the panting hermit could clearly hear the loud crackling of the torches, the angry voices of his three hunters, the deadly pack of hounds — vicious, bloodthirsty brutes that liked to wound before eventually killing. The dogs were savage beasts, fit companions for the humans pursuing him. "There he is!" shouted the burly man, swinging his bare sword.

  "Murdering freak!" screamed the tall one, brandishing an axe.

  Bullwhip in left hand, rope in right, the fat man added," Sick 'im, boys!"

  Anatole sprinted for the safety of the trees, but, released from their restraining ropes, the snarling dogs surged upon him in a instant. Seizing his bedraggled clothes in their teeth, they pulled the freak down to the ground, their great jaws snapping inches from fingers and eyes. Crying aloud in fear, Anatole covered his face with both hands, a meager protection from their lethal fangs.

  "Why are you doing this?" he screamed in confusion. "I am innocent!"

  "Liar!" stormed the overweight man, uncurling his weapon. In the darkness, his arm jerked, and a whip cracked across the back of the cowering recluse. His rag shirt split asunder under the stinging lash, and pain knifed into his flesh.

  A shuddering gasp escaped his lips as the freak raised his hands in surrender. "Please!" Anatole begged, tears cascading down the twisted ravines of his cheeks. "I haven't left the swamp for weeks! I know nothing! Nothing! Tell me what was done. I'll prove my innocence!"

  The bullwhip cracked again, and a sizzling and popping torch was thrust toward him, the flames nearly setting his stringy hair on fire.

  "Shut up, monster!" screamed the man with the sword, flecks of foam staining his thick mouth. "We'll not listen to your lies anymore! You killed those people, and we know it!"

  "Killed who?" he pleaded in bewilderment. "Who?"

  Outraged by his refusal to confess, the workmen put weapons aside, and their fists pounded him mercilessly. Helpless beneath their iron blows, Anatole fell unconsciousness for awhile, lost in a red haze of pain. And when at last his mind cleared, he saw the three men standing tall above the slavering dogs, the rope leashes in their callused hands being knotted into a hangman's noose.

  All the while screaming his innocence, the bloody hermit was kicked to his feet and shoved toward the woods. The night watchmen from the village had no intention of wasting time with a public trial or other legal foolishness. When the mayor and constable awoke in the morning, it would be over and done. A tree with a stout limb would be the judge tonight, and a dog's rope the jury.

  Roughly, the laughing murderers hauled the weeping Anatole off the road. But as the stout boots of the killers stepped off the packed dirt, their leather soles crunched on loose gravel, the sound making the men pause. Lowering the torches, they saw an unknown road stretch out before them. What was this? The three men looked about in confusion. No other highway cut through the forest, and certainly none with crushed rock to stiffen the soil against the autumn rains. Theirs was but a poor village of farmers and fishermen.

  With icy dread, the men watched thickening mists obscure the landscape, the ghostly fog moving with unnatural speed. A chill took them all as they saw a strange newborn cobblestone road physically stretch to the foggy horizon. And just below the crescent moon there loomed the black silhouette of a bizarre figure, the weird outline discernible by the complete lack of stars in the stygian sky.

  At the sight, an awful hush engulfed the four, and even the dogs stopped panting in the eerie silence. It was as if all their ears had been stoppered shut with wax. Breath fogging from their open mouths, they saw the forest grow black as pitch, saw steaming mist rise from the ground everywhere. Rumbling storm clo
uds masked the moon, and a graveyard cold gripped them as, in growing horror, the would-be murderers realized that the far figure was coming their way at a full gallop.

  Appearing and disappearing within the billowing tendrils of moving fog, the silhouette formed the familiar outline of a man on horseback, and the watchmen sighed in relief. . until the surging clouds parted and the shimmering moonlight bathed the oncoming rider with nightmarish clarity. A man on a horse, yes, but unlike any this side of hell.

  The horrible horse was impossibly large, heavily muscled as if for war, and moving faster than any noble's racing steed. The flaring nostrils of the mighty beast emitted blasts of white steam into the cold air. Its hide was the shiny black of oiled metal, its eyes wild and white, its sharp teeth distended and bared in a hateful grin. A burning spray of bright sparks erupted from every loud strike of the powerful hooves on the stony road. It was a beast of the Apocalypse. Some dark and obscene thing from the very depths of the Abyss itself.

  The rider, bent low against the wind, was dressed in elegant finery, the clean white shirt and spotless black velvet jacket of a rich nobleman. His fold-top boots were of an ancient style, long out of fashion, his ebony and scarlet cloak spreading out behind him to completely hide the road beyond, as if it no longer existed. Sparkling among the somber apparel were spurs and stirrups of gleaming, polished silver.

  As the noble approached, the watchmen cried aloud: the evil figure possessed no head. None at all. His stiff white collar of fine starched linen encircled vacant air.

  Misunderstanding, the watchmen waited for the newly dead body to fall from the saddle, waited for the victorious cry of the brigands who had slain him seconds ago beyond the rise. But with the reins held tight in his left glove, the decapitated man dutifully rode onward, ever onward with increasing speed. Then the empty shoulders turned a bit, and the stupefied villagers were pierced by the stare of eyes that were not there — or at least, eyes that were not in this land of the living.