Baen Books Free Stories 2017
Page 6
He had to hide his rifle before the police arrived or he was going to be in so much trouble.
He raced for the nearest the door. “Wait! My ammo bag!” He ran back, picked it up, and realized that he couldn’t leave the bear lying unconscious on the floor. While the police would help the teachers, they’ll probably shoot the bear. “Oh no!”
He tried shaking the bear awake. “Get up! Get up!”
It grunted but didn’t wake up.
It was no use. He had to hide the bear.
He glanced around the huge room. Besides the closed bleachers and the basketball hoops, the room was utterly empty. Extending the bleachers would take too much time. The stage curtain was closed but he wouldn’t be able to get the massive animal up the short flight of steps. Nor could he get it down the steps to the locker rooms under the stage. There was the storage room for the gym equipment and large play props but it usually was locked. He ran over to the doors. Stunningly, they weren’t. He ran back to the bear and tugged feebly on it in an attempt to pick it up.
How long before the police showed up? Neither Dunmore or Green Bank had a police department. They would have to come from Marlinton. It was twenty-minute drive but there could be a squad car patrolling the area. The sound of the alarm might bring the people that lived down the road. They would have guns. Everyone hunted in this part of the woods.
Dugan ran in a circle around the bear. How could he move such a huge creature alone?
He remembered that the gymnastic team had dollies to move their equipment. A couple boys got into trouble last year for racing them around the gym. He ran back to the storage room. Four dollies sat by the door. He stacked them together and wheeled them back to the bear.
He struggled to roll the bear onto the dollies. He heaved up the huge head and kicked the first dolly under its shoulders. The big front paws were easier to move. “You are a seriously big bear!”
When he lifted the bear’s hindquarters, its front started to roll across the gym floor. “No! Wait!”
It took three tries with the bear rolling willy-nilly about the gym to get the last dolly under the massive butt. Over the loud fire alarm, he could hear a distant siren growing closer. The police were coming!
Dugan pushed the bear to the storage room and hid it under bags filled with soccer balls. He ran back to the gym to snatch up his muzzleloader. He heard shouting of men filling the halls. He’d run out of time; he couldn’t leave the school unseen with the gun. He ran back to the storage room.
The door didn’t have a latch on the inside. Dugan supposed it was so students wouldn’t lock themselves in it. The doors opened out, so he couldn’t barricade them shut. He closed them firmly and turned off the lights. All he could do was sit in the dark and pray.
Within minutes, the police determined that there was no real threat of fire. The alarm was silenced.
Sitting in the dark, listening to the muffled voices of the first responders was a weirdly enlightening. For the first time in his life, people saw the evidence that something strange had happened to him. They doused Dr. Creagh’s body with fire extinguishers and then proclaimed that the smoldering remains “weren’t human.” The puncture wounds were discovered on the teachers and staff. One victim was roused enough to cry out. “A mine! We fell into a mine!”
He wasn’t crazy. He was sitting within feet of a snoring bear that could talk. It owned a Smart Car. It could drive. There been an invisible angel at the supermarket.
There was an invisible angel standing in the open doorway.
She’d yanked open the doors and glared down. Her brilliant wings were stretched out behind her, shielding them from the first responders. He knew that she knew that he was at the root of the chaos behind her.
“I didn’t do anything,” he blurted out. “Well, I did something but only after Dr. Creagh—he’s a dvergr—they’re these bugs that look like people—well, I didn’t know they were bugs, my mother never told me about that part. Dr. Creagh did this! I don’t know why. I don’t know anything. My mother never told me . . . ”
Actually, his mother had. He had spent years thinking she was crazy. That he was crazy.
Any relief of finding out he wasn’t crazy was stolen by the knowledge that the world was filled with all the monsters his mother told him about. Her world was a frightening, dangerous place.
Was that why people kept saying that there were no things as monsters? Did it feel better to stay ignorant than admit the truth? But wasn’t it more dangerous to walk around with blinders on? Dr. Creagh had scared him silly but Dugan had no power to investigate Creagh’s credentials or research his background or even check on the well-being of Dr. Metzer. None of this would have happened if the teachers had taken off their blinders and acknowledged something weird was going on.
“Where’s the bear?” the angel snapped.
“The bear didn’t do anything bad!” He stood up. His muzzleloader wasn’t loaded but it would make a good club.
“Where is it?”
He knew it be bad to lie to her. Angels probably were like Santa Claus. She probably knew when he was lying.
Before he could think of a safe answer, the bear grunted loudly from under the soccer balls.
Dugan blocked her glance toward the hidden bear. “I’m not going to let you hurt him,” he said. He had no idea how he’d stop her since her gun was probably loaded and his wasn’t.
She glanced down at his muzzleloader, eyes narrowing.
He pressed on, hoping that he could talk his way out of this since he couldn’t win a fight with her. “The bear is my friend. He’s teaching me photography. He protected me.”
“Do you even know what he is?” she said.
“I know that he’s good.”
“Good is subjective.”
“All my life people have told me that what I knew to be the truth were signs of insanity. They’ve said that every shred of evidence that I could gather was proof that I was crazy. Nothing I could do or say or show them would make them change their minds. It’s because they didn’t want to admit that they’re possibly wrong. They’ve been fed one safe, clean version of reality and refuse to believe anything that goes against.” He waved his hand toward the teachers lying on the floor being examined by paramedics. “They’ll find some stupid, impossible, wrong explanation for this. Toxic gases from some abandoned coal mine. Food poisoning. Something. Anything but the truth, because the truth would require being open to the idea that they don’t know everything. I know that the bear is a good person not because I’m using some preconceived notion of what is good and evil, but because I’ve weighed the evidence.”
She scuffed her boot beside a smear of blood on the wooden floor. “It’s wounded. Is it poisoned like the others?”
“Yes.” It felt dangerous to admit but the evidence was clear.
“You know how to cure dvergr poisoning?”
He knew only what his mother taught him. “Would the nine-herb charm work?”
“Yes.”
He dug through his ammo bag. His mother had taught him to make a healing salve with herbs that they picked on the mountain. It had mugwort, cockspur grass, lamb's cress, plantain, mayweed, nettle, crab-apple, thyme and fennel. Like the spell charm bullets, the salve worked too well to abandon. It was more evidence that he’d been ignoring.
He smeared the salve into the bear’s wound. "Bone to bone, blood to blood, limb to limb, as if they were mended.”
I’m not crazy, he thought. It felt like stepping back to the sanity of his childhood, where the world was a frightening place but he was strong within it. He saw wolves at Charlottesville because they were really there, not because he was insane and seeing things that weren’t real. He saw the truth. The evidence was there if he believed his own eyes and not what others told him was the truth. He was powerful because he could take action.
“You do realize that you’re petting me,” the bear grumbled.
“Oh, sorry.”
“It’
s all right.” The bear heaved itself to its feet. “Get your gun, let’s go.”
“What? You think we can just walk out of here?”
“You heard the firemen. Toxic gas!” the bear muttered. “Makes you see the damnedest things that aren’t really there.”
“They still might try to record us with their phones.”
“Oh, the joy of vacationing in this area is that most people don’t own cell phones because they can’t get any reception. It’s the National Radio Quiet Zone. But just in case, walk fast and keep your head down.”
DEI BRITANNICI
A Prologue to Witchy Eye
D.J. Butler
“Please,” Father Edward Grant pleaded. “I believe this may be vital.”
The cold October rain skipped right past Grant’s tall boxy hat and poured down his neck. He shivered, despite the heavy cloak. He’d ridden a long way, dressed in priestly black in the hope that if he met Cromwell’s men, their respect for clergy might give him some protection.
“The general be in council.” The guard’s face was stony, but then relaxed, ever so slightly. He and his fellow soldiers wore Churchill’s red and white, faded and stained almost gray. “I wot who you be, Father. I were born and raised in Aldershot. St. George’s Road, just up the ’ill from your church.”
Grant seized the guard’s hands. The other man’s skin felt hot to the touch, the priest was so chilled from his two days’ ride over the North Downs and into the Weald. “Daniel!” he cried. “You’re the butcher’s son, I know you! I baptized you, Daniel!”
“Aye, you brought me to salvation, Father, but this ben’t the right moment for such recollections. I be on duty.”
The other guard, who hadn’t spoken, stepped forward and put a hand on Father Grant’s shoulder.
A breeze blew open the tent flap behind Daniel for just a moment, and Grant caught a glimpse of long curly white hair. Not the powdered white of an aristocrat’s periwig, but the glossy white of a man whose natural hair had turned that color prematurely, and framed within the silver curls, pale ivory skin.
“Sir Isaac!” Father Grant tightened his grip on Daniel’s hands, hearing the younger man’s knuckles pop. “Sir Isaac Newton, I see him in there in the council.” His mind raced.
“Aye, Father, he were invited General Churchill’s council of war, and you were not.”
“Only do this, and I will leave.” Grant shuffled back half a step, mud sucking noisily at his heels, but retained his grip on Daniel’s hands. “Only give Sir Isaac a simple message. If he is not interested, I will go away.”
The second guard grunted his disapproval, but Daniel nodded. “Aye then, Father. What be the message?”
“Tell Sir Isaac someone has stolen the Aldershot parish register. Sir Isaac, you understand. Sir Isaac must hear the message.”
The two guards looked at each other skeptically.
“I am not mad,” Grant said. “You know me, Daniel, I baptized you.” He sobbed once, saying the word baptized. Then he sniffed deeply, feeling the rain and chill begin to settle into his lungs. “You know I am not mad.”
“I wot you were not mad, Father.” Daniel took a deep breath. “And therefore I shall bear your message. Stay here.”
Daniel pushed the priest farther back. With an effort, Father Grant relaxed his hands and let Daniel go. The young guard from Aldershot stooped to enter the tent.
The second guard snarled, tilting his pike forward slightly in a threatening manner. “I be no Aldershot man, and I ken you not, sir. Keep your distance.”
Sir Isaac Newton exploded from the tent and into the rain. He was not dressed for the weather in his white shirt and breeches, but he plunged past the guard to grab Father Grant by the shoulders in a close embrace. He smelled like man who had not bathed in many days, and his fingernails were stained odd colors—alchemy, no doubt.
“The parish register of Aldershot!” Newton gasped. “Stolen! Are you certain?”
“I . . . I am the parson, Sir Isaac,” Father Grant stammered. “The lock was shattered with a musket ball, and nothing was taken but the register. You understand why I have come straight here, I think.”
“Damn it! Damn us!” Sir Isaac spun and dragged the priest with him toward the tent door. “Damn you!” he cried to the guard. “Damn the delay! Damn it all!”
He pulled Father Grant into the tent.
The interior was lit as well as warmed by torches, and further warmed by a small fire. All the flame left the tent smoky despite an open flap in the tent ceiling that let in a constant spatter of rain in exchange for venting some of the fumes. Standing around a light table bearing a map were men Father Grant didn’t recognize, other than Daniel the butcher’s son and, from his paintings, General John Churchill. The famous war leader had a shopkeeper’s face, but enviable hair, long, black, and thickly curled. He looked much better groomed than his wizard.
“Sir.” Father Grant executed his best bow, holding his dripping hat to his chest and keeping it there.
“My sergeant here says you’ve come to report a stolen register of baptisms,” John Churchill said.
“Aye,” Daniel said.
“And burials and weddings.” Father Grant nodded. “Though it’s the baptisms in particular that concern me.”
“And my thaumaturge Isaac is thereby distressed, though I do not for the life of me see why. Still, he is my wizard, and what is the point of having a magician in your company if you ignore his advice? Also, I find that the most surprising things become matters of life and death when one battles the Necromancer and his forces.”
One of the other men in the tent pressed a warm goblet into Grant’s hands. It smelled of wine and he gratefully took deep gulps, breathing as much as tasting the spices.
“It’s the Aldershot parish, John,” Isaac Newton said. “Aldershot.”
“A third of our men here today are from Aldershot,” Churchill said.
“Stolen,” Newton continued. “The church was broken into and nothing was stolen but the register.”
“They left the pyx and the chalice,” Father Grant said. “Pure silver. They left the poor box. So not ordinary burglars. Not looters.”
“And if Aldershot, why not Farnham?” Isaac said. “Why not Haslemere? Do you understand, John?”
John Churchill removed an octavo volume from his coat pocket and ran his fingers over the spine and cover. Father Grant caught a short glimpse of the book’s title and author, stamped in gold on the front: DEI BRITANNICI, WINSTON CHURCHILL. John’s father, a scholar whose researches into the ancient Britonic and Saxon religious practices of the island had earned him first censure, then praise, and ultimately a reputation for being a heretic.
“I am beginning to understand,” John Churchill said.
“I do not,” Daniel said, somewhat indignantly. The others ignored him and he kept his place.
“It is contagion.” Newton paced the tent in an erratic pattern, wheeling and retracing his steps, changing his angle radically with each turn. In his movements, he resembled nothing so much as a bee. An enormous, silver bee. “A person, having once been in contact with the Aldershot register—and at such a fragile and energy-ridden moment as baptism, at that!—must always be in contact with that register, from the point of view of a practitioner of gramarye. It’s an act of genius, if cruel genius. Do you think he has read the Principia? Good god, did I inadvertently teach the Necromancer his craft?”
“I have read the Principia,” Father Grant said. “It is how I saw the problem.”
“There you have it, Isaac,” Churchill said. “If you gave the Necromancer this foul idea, then you also planted the seed of our salvation in the heart of this good parish priest.”
“Begging your pardon, Sir Isaac,” Grant added, “but in addition to neatly demonstrating the principle of contagion, might this not also be an example of the principle of sympathy?”
Newton stopped pacing and fixed Father Grant with a piercing eye. “How so?”
“It is indeed I, then, who have done this to us.” Isaac Newton’s eyes brimmed with sudden tears.
John Churchill snorted. “Oliver Cromwell was forty years on this earth before you ever saw your mother’s breast, Isaac. What on earth do you believe you can have taught him about magic?”
Father Grant, shocked by the sight of tears, struggled to recover. “Indeed, he may have come to similar conclusions from reading Albertus Magnus. Or Cornelius Agrippa, or other books. I once spent an hour in the library of a London Jew, who had the most astonishing texts.”
Churchill clapped his hand on Newton’s shoulder, nearly knocking the other man down, but he turned his attention to Father Grant. “Is Albertus Magnus part of your lectionary cycle, Father? That seems rather off the beaten path.”
Father Grant looked down at his hat. “I aspired as a younger man to wear the red. To be an adept of the Humble Order of Saint Reginald Pole. Only I hadn’t the talent for it.”
“That’s too bad,” Churchill said. “I’d trade a lot for few more solid Polites.”
Isaac Newton straightened his back, his grief falling off him like red leaves blown off by an autumn storm. “But this parish priest had done you better service than many a wizard would be able, John. Thanks to his warning, we have a chance.”
The flattery from Sir Isaac, his participation in the discussion with such eminent men, and the danger he knew loomed over them all boiled together in Father Grant’s veins and thrilled his heart. “A nighttime raid?” he suggested. “Have you men bold and able enough to creep into the Necromancer’s camp and steal back the register?”
John Churchill blinked at him. “Is that where the book is, then?”
Grant faltered. “I don’t . . . I thought . . .”
“They could be anywhere,” Sir Isaac said grimly. “For all we know, he has the register of every parish in Hampshire locked up in the Tower of London and is there preparing to incorporate them into some unhallowed spell.”