Clockwork Phoenix 4

by Mike Allen

  * * *

  All told five nights had passed, five days, since the murder in

  the field.

  That fifth night there was a bloody sunset, carmine and implacable. Cut off now from the army, he had found no shelter anywhere, and the few cold-withered roots he managed to grub did him no good. One afternoon he caught a rabbit, a skill from his youth. But then he could not kill it, not even efficiently and cleanly as he knew how to do. He could not kill it because he had, of all things, killed Gerner, and the curse of the outlaw was on him. So he let the animal go. Stunned, it kept like a stone long minutes in the frosty grass before bolting out of sight. There were streams where Corlan broke the morning ice and drank the water. He was used to that. By now the little pewter flask in his greatcoat pocket was empty of brandy.

  When the blood soaked from the west, he sat on the ground and saw stars appear above, each one like the tip of a polished sabre driven through the uniform of the sky. Or they were shiny bullets.

  Then the trees wept. Sleet striped through with a horrible, determined sound.

  Well, why not just lie down here, just lie down and let the world that had cursed him finish him off? Or he could fire one of the shiny stars in his revolver through his head.

  Eventually he got up, and ran—then only stumbled—on.

  The stars were washed away.

  And darkness fell like a curtain.

  * * *

  Maybe it was the days without food, or the peculiar roots, even the icy chewiness of the cold, cold water, that made Corlan think he met his grandfather about an hour later.

  Corlan was walking by then, slowly. And the old man simply appeared between two of the pillar-like stems of the black pines. He was made of trees and winter, and his hair of the grey snowy rain. But he had been like that.

  “Well, Cor, here you are,” he said, thoughtfully, the way he had been used to, a couple of decades earlier.

  Corlan’s father was a bullying sot. The grandfather had often stepped between them. But whereas the father ruled through violence, the grandfather exerted command through his calm iron will. And where, perhaps, this had unhinged his own son, his grandson it saved. It was the grandsire, inevitably, who had weaned Corlan towards a military life. He had, too, taught him how to read and value books, to absorb music, to deal well with women, even those he loved. And to kill an animal for food swiftly and without redundant pain. “We are allowed to eat them, my boy,” he had said, “which does not mean we should hold them in contempt. We must face the hard nutritional facts, perfect our methods, and cause as little suffering as possible. Respect your food, it was alive only yesterday. Hunting is a necessity, never a sport. We have the right to sustain our existence, but not to pretend those other things, upon which we prey, are unworthy of our concern and care.”

  Yet now, having spoken only his brief greeting, the grandfather merely stood there. And Corlan had the urge to go to him and kneel down and make a confession. The grandfather had nevertheless been dead for fifteen years. Corlan did not forget this. And next minute the old man’s image faded in the rain, as the stars had.

  And then, through the unfilled gap in the trees, which seemed damaged, Corlan saw the great pile of a building, reared up above the forest. Something in the rain outlined the building on the sky, although no lights showed in the bulk of it. A ruin, perhaps, some long-abandoned architectural hulk from the days of the Rupertian Conclave—centuries out of date.

  Corlan stayed where he was, and looking upward at the masonry he felt a profound despair.

  It was as if, he later decided, condemned to death, he had witnessed before him the proposed scaffold.

  Yet he did not linger very long. He moved free of the dilapidated tree-line and started to climb the steep slope beyond. There was nowhere else to go. Or only one. And he was not ready, despite his previous thoughts, to go there.

  * * *

  By the time he reached a sort of fossilized drawbridge, and crossed by it over a type of pit, to a huge, arched, black door, Corlan had seemingly recalled every legend and eerie tale told of these forests. To see a ghostly grandsire was nothing. The vegetal labyrinth contained the strongholds of far worse phantoms, not to mention vampires, were-men, and ghouls.

  He had always disdained such stuff. In childhood even he was seldom afraid of anything supposedly supernatural—the natural world being adversary enough.

  When he struck the door he believed no one and nothing would respond. The door might even simply creak inward, unsecured in the building’s abandonment. (It was a castle, towers here and there seemed to rise up from it, and it was far larger than any mansion.) But the door did not give. And all at once a greenish feeble light woke up overhead, in a shoulder of the stone, which was pierced he then saw by the thinnest slits of windows. This light began to crawl down towards him.

  Corlan quietly considered taking to his heels. But that was an intellectual joke he was having with himself.

  He did not truly expect some fiend to undo the locks and peer out at him. Alas, he was living in reality, not a book.

  Something made grinding noises—bolts, keys, hinges, and a quarter of the black door opened.

  A fiend looked out at Corlan Von Antal.

  For a moment he gaped at it, and then he broke out laughing. “I’ve died and gone straight to Hell for my crime, yes?”

  The poor fiend shook its head, from where narrow grey snakes of hair trickled, shaking in harmony. “Not so, sir. This is the House Veltenlak. What do you seek?” The voice was like rusty nails softly scratching together.

  Corlan said, “I’ve lost my way,” smiling still at the awful irony of his words. “I need somewhere to rest. To eat something, drink something not frozen mud, to sleep. Oh,” he said unhappily, “if death’s just sleep, I’ll settle for that.”

  He was addled, of course, from events, and five days without food. He heard himself with censorious dismay.

  But the poor fiend, he now realized, eyes adjusting to its waveringly hand-held lantern, was only a skinny, bent-over man, about a hundred years of age, which probably indicated seventy or so. He wore faded dusty eldritch black clothes, perfectly couth though worn out—as was he. His eyes were dull and watery, and his mouth, which now sadly smiled back at the visitor, contained, it seemed, only a third of the teeth God had originally planted there.

  “We have not much now. But you are welcome. Come in, sir, come in. A little company will be pleasant for us.”

  * * *

  What did Corlan feel as he crossed that threshold? (Where the miniscule bones of a mouse lay like brown needles.) He was never certain, so weary, his head swimming. He always afterward had a vague notion he stumbled, and the old fellow did not reach out to steady him, only moved backward a step, and stood waiting a short way into what seemed to be a vast dark cave, whose high walls were of striated rock, and here and there on them something murkily gleamed or glinted, as the lantern-light trembled over it. Then, after Corlan had righted himself, if so he had to, the other man turned and limped off into the darkness.

  Corlan looked about him with a sort of oddly uninterested curiosity. He began to see that they moved through and then out of some great hall, a place in the past for banquets and aristocratic councils. Up on the stone walls there were tattered banners fringed with ragged bullion, and antique swords and shields and other warlike implements, that shone and winked from their cobwebbing. A colossal hearth went by on his right, with two savage and enormous stone animals guarding it—he could not make out what they were. There was half an armorial motto, in Latin: Non Omnis Moriar. Now what did that mean? The grandfather would have known. We do not die? We die? All things die…? No, not that…

  Here they went round what seemed a very thick pillar, high as the inestimable roof, and possibly having the girth of three or four pines grown together. Now came a passageway, long and curving, like a static worm. The lantern splashed on running wet, puddles, on peculiar stainings and spidery cracks. The enclo
sure stank of rot and dampness worse than the hall. Something scrambled across the old man’s feet and vanished—as it looked—into the blank wall. A rat, a lizard.

  “Where are you taking me?” Corlan asked languidly. He was near to falling down.

  “A kitchen below, sir. Teda keeps a fire there.”

  “Does she? Teda … And how do they call you?”

  “Tils,” the old man said.

  “Whose house is this?”

  “He is gone, sir.” Oddly the old man’s voice took on at this a weird harshness. He sounded younger, and more stern.

  “He,” said Corlan. “But what is his name?”

  The old man did not answer this. He said only, in an inexpressibly unnerving way, “He is dead, sir. Not spoken of. Never spoken of.”

  Corlan thought, Oh, then, one of the bloody story-book ghouls. Dead but still active and in residence. It is a story I’ve walked into. I don’t care. Oh God I must lie down.

  Just then they turned a corner and before them, along another paved stone walk—this without a roof—another door showed buttery light. Above, the rain, having successfully leaked its way into the house, had given over, and the weaponry stars were back in full force.

  They got up a steep and pitted step, and Corlan saw now the roofed kitchen with a few lamps and a fire burning. A pot was slung over it. He smelled soup, and there was a loaf on a table, and coffee had been brewed, and there the white alcohol glittered in its decanter, schnapps or junever. This must be a dream then. He reached a bench and collapsed onto it.

  There was also a woman, an old one to match the old man. Teda, presumably. Teda and Tils.

  It was the ruined schloss of an undead vampire or werewolf, and these two old bundles of bones were doubtless mad as frogs, and ready to prepare any guest for the monster’s delectation. Well, let them. So long as they fed him first.

  He pulled some coins from his pocket, all he had—his pay was in arrears. It would save him from being robbed by them later. They were glancing at the money as he offered it, as if they had never seen coins before. Maybe they never had. The ghoul had taken care of them.

  We do not altogether die.

  That was what the Latin meant, surely?

  Of course. How apt.

  Corlan fell asleep.

  * * *

  There is night. And there is the Night—the night-dark void that hides inside the often gilded covers of reality: The Abyss. A little of the latter goes a very long way.

  Attributed to the philosopher Anton Woetzsner

  (1797-1889)

  * * *

  When he came to again Corlan believed he was in the open, out in the dark fracturing of the pine-pillared night. All was pitch-black, but for a row of savage scarlet eyes that seared at him, crouched low down, flickering with lust.

  He did not think he would have time to grip the revolver.

  One of the eyes blinked, and went out.

  It was the kitchen fire. He was in the kitchen of the stone schloss, lying on the bench.

  Corlan sat up. He drew out flint and tinder, struck a light. They had left a lamp on the table, which he lit. A bowl of the broth was there too, cold now but no matter, a chunk of the loaf. The coffee was gone, but not the junever-gin.

  He ate in the half-light like a starving dog, knew it and cared nothing, his face almost in the dish, growling and grunting. When he was done, for a moment a fierce nausea gushed through him—too much after too little—then faded back, leaving only a dull digestive ache.

  He sloshed the gin into a small chipped glass and swallowed two gulps.

  Everything would improve now. They, the raddled old couple, had saved his life. Where had they gone to? Oh naturally, to alert, or to hide from, their master, the owner of House Veltenlak.

  No, Corlan decided, he would stop that now. He was restored. There were no vampires, none of the other creatures either. This was only a ruinous heap, once grandiose, deserted as several of the ancient castles had been, since an era of war began.

  Something hissed and whispered high up. A vaporous serpent came sliding towards him down the wall, and there another—another—

  Corlan shook himself. Numbskull. It was only dust or powder escaping the ceiling. The entire habitat was crumbling. All about him, as he concentrated, his ears no longer dinning with fatigue and hunger, he could detect such sighs and grumblings, cracks and masonry groans. Subsiding, these doomed walls due to disintegrate and tumble, leaving only shattered stone blocks and part-standing shafts, through which the winds would blast their cannon-shot.

  The fire was dying rapidly now, and the tepid kitchen growing ever colder.

  But Corlan drank another glass of junever, and glanced about. He was refreshed. He wanted something to do until the morning came, when he would take himself off.

  He wondered idly where Tils slept, and Teda. They had left the sparse column of coins on the table.

  Standing up, he took the lamp, and went all round the kitchen, which was not itself very big, and gave on a second kitchen through a broken door. The second kitchen was itself broken, some of its roof down. Beyond, a yard, black with moonless night, and a well, but peering into this it seemed to have gone dry, only rain and muck inside. Three dead rats, coiled tight as rope, lay on the ground.

  How long until sunrise? He took a reading from the patterns of the stars, where he could see them. Three, four hours, he thought.

  Corlan went back through the kitchen and the corridors.

  He reached again the vast hall-cave beyond the pillar with an odd suddenness. As if it had shifted and come to meet him. The unpleasant impression caused him to pull up and rigidly stand there. The flame in the lamp jerked and the stonework jumped with it.

  This was when Corlan felt, he thought for the first, (but afterwards he was sure it was not for the first at all) a kind of seeping, leaching yet indescribable dread. Years after he would, to himself, compare all this to an abrupt loss of blood that for an instant made you lightheaded, and then sick, faint, leaden and ashen and barely conscious.

  But his senses stayed intact, indeed quite keen.

  He wondered had he been poisoned—venom in the food or alcohol. But it was not that. His guts had quieted. Yet—his hands shook, and it took all his will to steady them. He had been, in battle, reasonably cool. What was this? Nothing. Some childish fantasy lingering—

  The horror, (for horror was in fact precisely what it was) did not let go.

  Determined then Corlan went directly into the enormous hall. He reached the giant fireplace with its sentinel beasts. What were they? Wolves? Dragons? Some mismatch of both? He smashed the lamp straight down on the hearth so it shattered and the flame spilled out. He had seen immediately logs lay on the stone apron, laid ready if evidently for a great while unused. They were damp, too, the huge rainy chimney would have seen to that. But the lamp-oil anointed them, and spluttering, smoking blue and spiking out raw green sparks, they began to burn. Then the smoke went black, but already Corlan had seen ranks of filthy candles waiting all about, on the mantle, on tall candle-standards either side. The struck flint soon roused them. The smell was vile, animal fat in the wax, the rank unwilling wetness in the wood. Corlan’s stomach heaved but he clamped his will upon it. Generally well-trained, his healthy body was used to obeying him.

  He stepped back and looked everywhere around him, able to see it all finally, all the splendour of its dying hollowness.

  And the horror increased.

  It rose up through him as the sickness had done, but worse, much worse. Nor would it permit his steely will to order it down and away. It swelled through his belly and heart and throat and brain. It expanded in his mind and looked out through his fire-burning glaring eyes. It said to him, wordless, voiceless, in a language untranslatable but always known: Behold, Behold. Behold.

  Corlan rushed across the hall; he did not know what he did, he was in retreat.

  So he came to a staircase, the stone treads wide and shallow and
rising upward between ranks of stone posts taller than a man, in the tops of some of which were older filthier candles, or only stubbs, whose melted greasy lace trailed downward.

  Swiftly up the stair he ran.

  The horror went with him.

  It was thick as wax or stone, yet malleable, and it twisted inside him as a snake would.

  It’s real, he thought, blindly, madly, as he sprang from step to step. (Once, twice, tiny bones crunched under his feet.) It exists—

  Then he had reached the top and ahead a great opening, like a mouth, toothed with bits of swords and shields hung there, gave on another corridor, very wide. The fluttering light below in the hall penetrated this passage.

  Corlan, despite his confusion and fear, slammed to a halt, grabbing at the topmost stair-post.

  One of the statuary beasts from the fireplace had got loose. It was here now, poised in the passageway, staring at him, its eyes not like fire at all, but a pearly, nearly opalescent colour, between emerald and blue Artic ice.

  This fear was nearly welcome. It was so different from the horror.

  Corlan found he had taken hold of the revolver, but his hand shook again; it was awkward—besides, how could he shoot a beast of stone? In those moments the thing gazed on at him, and all at once furrowing its brow, frowning, as a man would, puzzled and affronted by the idiotic antics of a stranger.

  It had human eyes, the beast, regardless of their colours and luminosity. Then he knew what it was. Not a carving come alive but a physical animal, a huge, dark-ruffed wolf. He could kill it, then. Perhaps its splattered gore might appease the evil spirit that now pursued Corlan. But probably not. The wolf would be the monster’s own familiar, would it not, beholden to its master. A vampire in legend was inclined to favour the wulven kind. Or again, a werewolf might change into just such an abomination.