I slipped my left arm through the shield loops and carefully pulled the sword free with my right. The sword had good balance and nice heft; the blade was about thirty inches long. We’d had a couple of sessions on sword fighting in my hapkido class after the ninja-and pirate-crazy youngsters pestered the sensei. I was no swashbuckler, but the weapon felt comfortable.
The Warlock said his mother had given the necklace to him; had her metaphoric protection simply become literal in this dimension? Or had the necklace been enchanted in a way that Pal couldn’t sense?
Either way, so far this place doesn’t seem that bad, I thought, staring up at the shattered moon.
Suddenly I heard someone crashing through the underbrush nearby. I turned, sword raised, and saw a pale young man with long, curly blond hair and a fringed buckskin jacket stumble into the clearing, panting hard, his breath steaming in the icy air. The guy bent over, resting his hands on his knees, trying to get his wind back. He wore a gray or red T-shirt beneath his jacket—it was hard to tell the color in the moonlight—and faded jeans tucked into tall suede lace-up boots. He reminded me of the Who’s lead singer; I guessed he’d been trying to play up the look.
“Benny!” he exclaimed, looking up and seeing me for the first time. Wait, he was certainly looking at me, but didn’t exactly seem to see me. “I told you to go home, man! This shit ain’t right! We gotta get outta here!”
He ran up to me. I couldn’t quite bring myself to take a swing at him, so I stepped back. Frowning, he grabbed the sleeve of my shield arm and tugged me sideways.
“Don’t stand there like a jerk, we gotta go, Benny,” the young man insisted, starting to jog again and pulling me along behind him. “Bad storm’s coming!”
A wind rose in the trees, and I thought I heard hail hitting the leaves, but it didn’t sound right. The hissing was far too loud, and I thought I could smell smoke. I looked up.
The meteor shower from the shattered moon had intensified, and fiery moonstones were streaking down into the trees. Steam rose where they struck snowy branches. Dark leaves flashed into orange flames.
I stopped resisting the young man and matched his pace.
“You ain’t supposed to be here,” he told me. “I thought I got you home safe. I—I shouldn’t have brought you out here. I’m sorry,” the young man gasped, running faster.
“It’s okay,” I said reflexively, feeling lost.
“It was a terrible thing your dad did, but nobody needs to know. We gotta do what my mom said, and keep it quiet. You didn’t tell anyone else, did you?”
“No,” I replied.
“Good boy,” the young man said, looking relieved. We broke out into a freshly plowed field, kept running. The hiss and thump of the meteorites sounded closer and closer.
The young man stumbled, doubling over in pain. “Oh God. They’re comin’ for us.”
“What’s coming?” I asked, peering over my shoulder as I ran. The front edge of the meteor storm was emerging from the trees. The cooling moonstones turned black as they tumbled earthward, their crusts cracking… and dark, winged things were hatching from them in midair, shaking off the rocky shells and flying toward us through the trees.
As the first few darted out into the moonlight, I saw that they were big crows with cold, shiny black eyes and cruel curved beaks and talons. More and more flew from the woods in a dense flock swirling toward us, strangely silent but for the rush of wind through black feathers.
The young man looked back at the horde and let out a shuddering sob. In his moment of inattention, his foot fell through a hole hidden by the snow and he went tumbling headlong.
I hurried over to try to help him up; the snow was thicker here, and running was difficult. “Are you okay?”
“No, don’t touch me! Get out of here!” The young man’s face contorted into a profound grief I dared not imagine.
The crows were less than fifty yards away and gaining fast. “Let me help you up—”
“No! Benny, go, get out of here! It’s too late for me.” He rolled up onto his knees and threw a hunk of ice at me, which I easily dodged.
I hefted the shield in front of me and closed my eyes, beginning a chant to cast a protective sphere around the two of us. But the words wouldn’t come; the ancient languages were blocked in this place, and my magic with them.
The young man was staring at the snow. Tears spilled down his cheeks. “Oh God. I shoulda known what he was doing. We shoulda stopped it, shoulda done something to help Siobhan and your brothers. All I did was burn the damn house down so nobody would find out, but I can’t forget.”
He reached inside his buckskin jacket and pulled Out an old revolver. Before I had a chance to protest, he put the barrel of the gun against his chest and pulled the trigger. His whole body jerked as the gun went off. He collapsed sideways in the snow.
“Get outta here, Benny,” he gasped, clutching the wound near his heart, struggling to breathe. “It’s a sin to kill yourself.”
I began to backpedal, shield raised, sword clenched in my gloved fist, staring at his dying form.
The mob of crows slowed as it reached the young man, hovered, and dove on him as if he were a tasty bit of roadkill. He weakly tried to shield his face as they pecked and tore at him. The birds were eerily silent in their attack. Their talons and beaks sheared through his leather jacket and jeans like steel razors. The flapping mass of birds smothered his body. Soon, only his right hand was visible, his fingers clawing at the snow.
A crow flew down beside his hand and eyed his fingers hungrily. The bird grabbed the skin between his thumb and forefinger in its beak and pulled. His pale skin came cleanly off as if it were just a glove, and beneath it was not human bone and tendon but a slender hoof.
The young man thrashed, rose up on all fours, shaking off crows and shredded clothing. He was no longer a man but a spotted fallow stag, a yearling buck with short antlers. Through the flocking crows I could see that the terrified deer bore the fresh gunshot wound on its chest, blood dark on its white fur.
Most of the crows attacked the stag with fresh savagery, but about twenty turned their beady eyes on me.
I turned and began to run as hard as I could. The field arced around a small copse of trees, and after I rounded the curve I saw a big three-story Victorian house at the end of the field. The windows glowed with yellow electric lights, the rooms inside indistinct through gauzy curtains.
The house, I realized, had the right dimensions to be an intact version of the burned farmhouse. I didn’t much want to go inside, but knew I had to if I expected to find Cooper. And the crows closing fast behind me weren’t giving me much of a choice.
I pelted across the field into the front yard, up the broad wooden front stairs onto the wide front porch. I slid to a hard stop against the front doors and pounded on the red-painted wood with the pommel of my sword. My bruised knuckles ached sharply, hut I didn’t care. “Hello! Is anyone in there?”
A tall, clean-shaven man in a flannel shirt and jeans answered the door. His brown hair was buzzed close to his skull, but I could see a touch of gray at his temples. Something about the set of his jaw and broad shoulders reminded me of the Warlock, but his smile and glacier-blue eyes made me think of Mr. Jordan.
“Hello, what can I do for you?” he asked, looking completely unperturbed that a woman with a sword was standing at his door. He glanced past me at the winged murder bearing down on his house. “Looks like a bad storm tonight, eh?”
“Yes, a very bad storm,” I agreed anxiously. “May I come inside, please?”
“Oh, sure, I suppose so,” he said. “Wouldn’t be very neighborly to leave a pretty girl like you out on a night like this, would it?”
The man held the front door open wide, and I dashed inside under his arm just as the first of the crows reached the porch.
“My name’s Lake,” the man said as he shut the door and bolted it. Two seconds later I heard a solid thud as a bird hit the door, then the scrape o
f claws and beaks against the wood.
“I haven’t seen you around here before,” Lake continued. “You move into the Murphy place down the road?”
“No sir, I’m from the city.” I stared at the house around me. It appeared to be a very nice, pleasant country home decorated with folksy knickknacks and colorful handmade quilts on the backs of sofas and chairs and woven rag rugs on the gleaming hardwood floors. “I came out here to find a friend who got lost in the woods.”
“Well, I hope your friend found a dry place for the night! You’re welcome to stay; we have a guest bedroom upstairs. My wife and I were just sitting down to dinner… care to join us?”
“Sure,” I said, intending to just sit politely at the table and not consume anything.
Lake led me into the dining room. The rectangular six-seat table was laden with a country feast: mashed potatoes, a boat of sausage gravy, green beans, fluffy biscuits, and an enormous roast turkey. The food smelled delicious; my mouth started watering despite my determination.
A pretty, gray-eyed woman in her mid-thirties wearing a green-checked gingham A-line dress sat at the far end of the table. Her long, curly black hair was pulled back in a ponytail, and in her lap she held a large china doll dressed in a blue satin jacket and knickers. The doll had to be at least thirty inches tall, and looked like it was intended to be a replica of the figure from Thomas Gainsborough’s Blue Boy painting. The woman did not react when Lake entered the room, keeping her downcast gray eyes fixed on the top of the doll’s head. Something about the set of her nose and cheekbones reminded me of Cooper.
A crow rammed the window behind the sad woman’s seat. The noise made me jump, but neither Lake nor the woman seemed to notice it. More thumps and claw-scrapes; the whole mob had reached the house, and the birds were trying to get in. Although the windows rattled alarmingly, at least it seemed the crows weren’t striking with enough force to break the glass. I hoped the house’s chimney had a grate.
“Have a seat anywhere you like.” Lake settled in the chair at the head of the table near the sad woman.
“This sure is a lovely dinner,” I said, trying to keep my voice steady and not really making it. There was no room to sit down with the shield, so I sheathed my sword on it and pulled out two of the rail-back chairs opposite the woman. I carefully propped my shield up in the left chair and sat down in the right. I rotated the shield so I could quickly grab my sword if the need arose.
“I know it might seem like a lot for just two people, but my son Benny will be home tomorrow from boarding school, and we wanted to cook up a nice big bird for him,” Lake said. “That boy could eat his own weight in turkey sandwiches. He’s on the lacrosse team now; he was voted best midfielder in the eighth grade last year. He was on the honor roll every quarter, and he’s the tallest boy in his class.”
“I bet you and your wife are very proud,” I said, looking around at the room.
What was this place? My gut told me it was definitely a re-creation of the farmhouse as it existed thirty years ago, right before it burned down. I knew a little about hells, and this looked like the kind where tormented souls re-experienced the events leading up to their spiritual catastrophe over and over again in an endless loop. It was a living serial nightmare, partly metaphoric and partly real.
In a hell like this, tormented souls would eventually get some kind of epiphany or catharsis from their self-inflicted loop of pain, and then they’d move on to the Beyond. Or maybe they simply got bored, and went off to haunt something instead. Either way, three decades was a long time for a purgatory hell to exist. Was something keeping them here? I couldn’t tell.
If Cooper and the Warlock had come from this house, it would stand to reason that their parents or guardians had lived here as well. I couldn’t see anything of Cooper in Lake. But I could easily believe the man might be the Warlock’s father, and the sad wife looked like both brothers.
But who was the young man who’d transformed into a stag? And who was Benny? Clearly the souls trapped here in the hell had expected him to join them someday.
“Oh, we’re proud as brass buttons,” Lake said. He gave his wife a wide, toothy politician’s grin. “Benny’s going to be a big man in this state someday, just you see.”
My heart bounced. I’d definitely seen that same smile on Mr. Jordan’s face. The realization hit me:
Benny could be short for Benedict. Could Mr. Jordan be Cooper’s half brother and the Warlock’s full brother?
Something rapped sharply at the window. The battered, bleeding young stag had staggered up to the glass, apparently trying to drive the crows away. His horns squeaked against the pane, and I could see that his muzzle was covered in scratches. He stared at me through swollen eyelids and gave a couple of hoarse barking cries as if he were trying to warn me of something.
Lake didn’t seem to notice the stag. He lifted the bowl of mashed potatoes and offered it to me. “Try these; we grew ‘em right here on the farm.”
I took the bowl, trying to be polite, and put a spoonful on my plate. I figured I could push them around and make it seem like I was eating.
Underneath the sounds of the stag and the crows battling at the window, I thought I could hear someone sobbing. It sounded like it was coming from the basement beneath my feet.
My right eye, blind in the woods, was sending flashes of something to my brain now that I was in the house. The stone eye was starting to itch as it had when I held the odeiette at the Warlock’s apartment. My current gemview, I suspected, wasn’t giving me the whole story. Bracing myself, I stared at the sad woman and her pretty china boy and blinked to the next view.
The woman was dressed in a long purple satin dress that had clearly once been regal, but now the fabric was stained and the ermine trim was moth-eaten and tattered. She rocked in her chair, weeping, her face dirty and her curls a ratty mess that looked like they hadn’t seen a comb in weeks. Her wrists were chafed as if she’d been wearing shackles. She clutched a large, naked ball-jointed doll made from pale wood. The doll’s face was a smooth blank plane except for two eyes made from dark blue glass.
Lake was standing at the head of the table dressed in a ragged ermine mantle over a dirty red surcoat and white tunic. A tarnished brass crown sat on his head.
He shouted at the weeping woman: “I can’t believe my son came out of a faithless witch like you!, you were just going to abandon him, weren’t you? But my son’s going to rule the world someday, and you’re going to help him. He’ll have magic so strong no one will believe it, you hear me? Look at me when I’m talking to you!”
I turned away from Lake’s insane fury, and finally noticed that the room had changed. The walls were the dark gray stone of a medieval castle, and the dinner table had turned to old oak planks on trestle legs. Torches smoked and flickered in wrought-iron sconces. The food had turned to wood; the turkey was a painted burl, and the mashed potatoes were nothing more than sawdust.
King Lake turned his fury on me. “Why aren’t you eating?” he barked. “My food not good enough for you, is that it?”
“No sir, I’m just not very hungry—”
“Liar!” he snarled at me. “How dare you lie to me in my own house!”
He came around the table at me, his fist raised. I grabbed the sword, but as soon as I touched the metal a warning rose in my mind. This version of Lake, though strange, felt more real than the polite dinner host, but I couldn’t kill a man who was surely already dead. My stone eye flashed a vision of King Lake throwing me off the front porch to the hungry mob of crows. I quickly blinked back through a dozen dark, strange views until I saw the tidy country home once again.
Lake was sitting in his chair, calmly buttering a fluffy biscuit. The woman sat silent, not eating, gazing down at her china doll. I slowly released the sword, my heart still pounding.
“You don’t have to eat if you’re not hungry,” Lake told me. “You look like you’ve had a long day; would you like me to just take you up to the
guest room so you can get some rest?”
“Sure,” I replied. Maybe once he’d left me alone I could figure out a way to sneak down to the basement. “That sounds like a good idea.”
I picked up my sword and shield, and Lake led me out of the dining room back through the foyer to a staircase.
“Benny will be home tomorrow around noon; my nephew Reggie is driving him out here. We’ve got a wonderful birthday surprise for Benny,” Lake said as he led me up the narrow stairs. “He’s almost a man now, by my reckoning. It’s going to be a very special day for him. You should stay for the party; I bet Benny would love to meet a pretty woman like you.”
Nephew Reggie. I remembered what the young man in the woods had told me before his transformation, remembered his 1970s-era clothing. The stag was Reggie, I realized, still trying to protect his family from the evil that had driven him to suicide. I was more convinced than ever that this house was the place Cooper and the Warlock had lived before Cooper lost his memory.
“A party sounds like fun,” I said, being careful to not overtly promise Lake anything. I wasn’t sure if a casual promise in this place would be spiritually binding, but I didn’t want to take any more risks than I had to.
He pulled open a door that led to a small bedroom with a single bed, a writing desk, and an old fashioned sewing machine in the corner. A narrow door led to a closet-sized half bathroom with a small green night-light in the electric fixture by the sink.
“It’s nothing fancy, but it’s comfortable,” he said.
“This is great, thanks.” I stepped inside.
“Sleep tight! Don’t let the bedbugs bite!” He abruptly shut the door behind me, and I heard a bolt click.
Dammit!
I turned and tried the doorknob. It was locked fast. I leaned my full weight into the door, but it wouldn’t budge. Great. Just great. I set my shield down on the bed, then knelt to inspect the knob to see if it had any screws that might be removed. The brass knob ring was smooth and featureless. The hinges were on the other side of the door, so I couldn’t pry them loose.
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