Now the man looked left. Flying out of the dark, milky bone, black hollow eye sockets, and a mirthless grin frozen in time by the moonlight from the window. The Hessian cloak peeled back revealing the skeletal killer, and its silvery blade clutched in bony fingers ready to stab. The man wrenched the dagger free from Usan’s throat, ripping the mage's soul from his body. The bony assassin’s flight ended, crashing onto Usan’s now lifeless form. And there it laid to rest, skull lying cheek down on Usan’s chest, white stick arms offering its creator a loveless embrace.
The man whispered into the night. Maybe Usan’s soul still floated nearby and would hear. “The problem with your new bodyguard, Usan, is that when you die so does the magic that holds it in un-life.”
Then the man thought to himself, And if you ask around for something strange like a skeleton, I’m going to hear of it and arrange to be the one that delivers it to you.
The man remembered carrying the Hessian wrapped skeleton into Usan’s office and remembered seeing the fearful look on Pernicus’ face.
Turning, he propelled himself from the room, crashed down the stairs and stopped at the front door. A yellow glow grew in the doorway to the kitchens, spreading its light across the walls and the cook appeared holding an oil lamp. The cook gasped “Pernicus!” at the sight of the knife blade picked out of the dark by the lamp light. The man who was not Pernicus dashed out of the door, slammed it behind him, locked it and removed the key. Outside he looked up the gloomy road for the two guards. Their backs were to him, and they were ambling back to the marketplace. The man crossed the road, skipping over the tops of the ruts then vanished into the dark alley opposite. A short run and he turned left down a road that seem to have appeared by accident rather than design. Buildings and fences jutted into his path like giant packing boxes tossed into a warehouse. The buildings soon parted exposing him in the open marketplace. He began a calculated stumble over the ruts. Holding Usan’s bloody dagger above his head, he balanced himself. The moonlight hurled a dull gleam onto the blade. Looking around, he found the guards at the western entrance to the marketplace. They yelled. He stumbled on. Back in the narrow road leading to the hut, he glanced behind and saw the guards making jumbled progress after him. He resumed his agile sprint across the tops of the ruts wrapping the blanket of darkness in the narrow road around him.
Opening the hut door, he slipped through it as easily as he slipped through disguises. He looked down at a sleeping man with blond hair on the floor by the wood burning stove. It wouldn’t be long before the sleeping draught wore off and Pernicus would awake. Setting aside the bloody dagger, the man unbuttoned and removed the blue jacket and redressed Pernicus in it. He flipped open the stove door, pulled the blond wig from his head and stuffed it into the flames. Retrieving the dagger, he leant over the sleeping Pernicus, placed the dagger in the palm of his hand, wrapped the fingers around it and wiped as much of the sticky drying blood onto Pernicus’ hands as he could. Grabbing his jacket off a hook on the wall, he pushed both arms in and did up just two buttons for now. He dashed a jug of water he’d left by the stove over Pernicus’ head, spun around and burst out of the hut door.
Leaping across the narrow road, he landed with his feet on the window sill of the opposite building. Reaching up, he grasped a rope hanging above his head then hauled himself onto the building's flat roof and pulled the rope up after him. Lying on the roof, the slender man lost himself in shadow cut into the moonlight by the taller building at his back. Pulling the hood of his black leather jacket over his head, he relaxed like a man returned home after a day’s work. The guards came down the road in a stumbling run, one pointing at the hut’s open door. Both guards disappeared into the hut, and the man in the shadows listened to their muffled voices. A small smile crept onto his face. Pernicus appeared at sword point, confused and protesting as the guards marched him off toward the marketplace.
The man imagined the fate awaiting Pernicus. That fate would pounce on him like a pack of prairie wolves bringing down a calf. Pernicus probably didn’t deserve it, but the man felt no guilt. The war was not over just because there were no armies in battle this night.
The only record of the man’s real name was in his memory. Watching from the shadows years before, the man had seen the general inform his parents that he was lost in battle. There are some things a man can watch that will harden the heart to almost anything. Now he had scouts under his command all over both kingdoms spying on who needed to be watched, and like tonight, sometimes more. The only people he answered to were the general and his queen. They just called him the Scout Commander.
His job was done. It was perfect. It had run like the workings of Usan’s grandfather clock. Tomorrow, the man would return to another job. Tomorrow he would slip back into another disguise and spend the day selling belt buckles, and other works of metal. And he would always be watching for another Pernicus.
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The Eresutna
Nicholas Kotar
Among us seminarians—or brothers, as the monks preferred we call each other—the Reichbann Waterfall had a kind of hallowed presence. I’d only been there once before, a summer about six years ago, but back then I never would have dreamed of stripping to my undies and plunging into the frigid pool at the waterfall’s base. Today though, I was excited speechless by the possibility. It was still muggy and awful in early August in this part of upstate New York, and the black robe we were obliged to wear in public was starting to chafe not a little. My friend Solomon and another second-year, Theodore, a dour Russian who insisted on speaking only very broken English with me—my Russian is perfectly fine, thanks for asking—took the seminary van and invited me along.
Solomon was the first to jump in, the first to whoop his exhilaration, the first to stick his head directly under the waterfall.
“I can’t breathe!” he exclaimed, Texas twang and all. “Isn’t this the life, though, brother?”
Solomon always laughed with his whole self, his generous six foot something body bobbing up and down, just like that swordfish aspic we had every Christmas at the monastery. As I did a lot during those early days, I stopped everything—thought, action, word—to let it sink in.
I was only a “first-year,” and I had just arrived in Jericho about a week before. Its reputation preceded it—take that to mean whatever you like—and maybe because of that, I had been avoiding this place for most of my adult life. But oddly enough, the moment I stepped into the courtyard of St. Nicholas Monastery and Seminary, I felt like I’d arrived home for the first time in years. Solomon and I took to each other immediately. He was a St. John’s grad with a brain the size of his Texas tummy, and he enveloped you with his charm like the mother hen in the Psalms. It was just what I needed after the failed engagement, the failed job, the failed everything.
“Mark, don’t be a stick in the mud, get-in-ere!”
The first second under the rushing waterfall felt like dying. I mean, here’s a huge Texan holding me pinioned between his beefy arms, and I don’t even reach up to his shoulder in height. But the next second, it felt like liquid sun was being poured on me. And coming out from under it, laughing like a little girl, I saw the details of the place as though caught in a high definition photograph.
The gully reached up above our heads higher than a skyscraper in this part of the valley, and the crags everywhere were tufted over with moss and small trees. The bigger evergreens were limited to the level of the water, but even at the top you could see a few aspens trying desperately to dig into the rocks with roots like arthritic knuckles. Below our pool, the water plunged into a cataract like something out of Last of the Mohicans and The Mission all in one. No wonder the fourth and fifth-years brought their fiancées to this place.
Finally, the summer lightning gave us pause. No need to give
up the ghost during the first week in seminary.
“There will be plenty of opportunities later,” Solomon reminded us, laughing.
His rather typical seminarian joke was cut off by a different kind of thunder. Just above us, falling down in slow motion, was a huge, rotting pine trunk.
All three of us ducked under the water, as if the surface tension would have been enough to stop a tree! But somehow it ricocheted off the rocks to our left and flipped over our heads, landing point down just a few feet to our right before doing a somersault like some drunk Romanian gymnast and falling down the big waterfall with—I swear!—a barbarian yawp of treeish glee.
I knew that strange things happened in Jericho on a regular basis, but this was ridiculous. Theodore and I did the logical thing and laughed our heads off. Only Solomon didn’t. He stood on the edge of the water’s fall, staring down with an eerie look, like he had seen a dead man, and that dead man was himself.
“Sol! Come on, let’s get out of here!”
The greenish tinge on his face remained during the entire drive back to the monastery.
“Sol,” I said. “That was close, wasn’t it?”
He didn’t say anything, so I pretended to look at the lush hills of upstate farm country. Theodore fell asleep within minutes.
“Mark,” Sol said as we drove up to the monastery. His voice grated, and his eyes were far away. “There are some things that happen here, in Jericho, that … well, don’t make any sense. But there’s no way of explaining them away.”
“What do you mean?” I tried to keep inflection out of my voice, afraid he would clam up again.
“Strange things, creepy things. You know, supernatural stuff… Oh, I don’t want it to sound childish… it’s like that old Greek priest that visited here twenty years ago—”
“The one who saw all the demons hanging by their tails from the trees around the monastery and said, ‘By this I know that holiness is present here’?”
“Yeah, sort of.” He didn’t sound convinced. In fact Solomon, for the first time since I met him, seemed at a loss for words.
“Mark, I need to tell you what I saw at the falls. Later. When we’re alone.”
As we drove up to the seminary, the haunting presence of the parking lot, Fr. Barsanuphius himself , waited for us.
“Markiño! Heeeeeyyyyy!”
I tried not to wince as Solomon managed to slip away.
I still don’t know how Fr. Barsanuphius managed it—he always appeared out of nowhere like the fog on the hills. Always with that crooked smile, teeth half-rotten from excessive consumption of Dr. Pepper and Doritos, arms outstretched as if ready to take in the whole universe into his giggles. No one here seemed to remember that he was severely autistic. In the monastery setting, it just didn’t show.
“Markiño! [little grunt of barely-repressed excitement] You’ve got such a high voice! I love hearing you sing first tenor. [gives the tone to himself] It’s amazing! And you know what we’re singing soon, right? On the Dormition?”
“Yep, Father, I remember! It’s O Wondrous Miracle.”
“OOOOOO Wooooooondrous Mihihihiracle!!” He sang it to himself. I couldn’t help smiling.
“Markiño,” he whispered, scratching the eternal eczema on his right wrist, “I hear you went to the falls. You know where they are? In German Flatts. Do you know why it’s called that?”
“Because it’s full of flat Germans?” I already knew the well-rehearsed routine.
“Haaahahahhhaaaa! I love your sense of humor! Did you see the Erestuna?”
“Did I see the what?”
The change in his manner from grin to grimace was so sudden it took the wind out of me.
“The Erestuna. They say she still shows up sometimes under the falls. You should be careful.”
“What’s an Erestuna?”
He walked away, rocking back and forth while he tugged at the fringes of his beard. Only after he was back inside the main building did the screams start.
It was Theodore. Or rather, what was left of him.
Theodore looked like he’d been sucked dry. I had to remind myself to breathe, because every time I looked, it felt like my body was forgetting how to do the most basic things—move, blink, breathe. I had seen the face of death before, too often. But this was different. Mostly, it was the smell—old moss and peat. Not something you usually associate with corpses.
Solomon stood to my right, his face chalky. It wasn’t fear. For all the world, he looked like he blamed himself. He caught my eye and inclined his chin toward the cornfields.
“Mark,” he said as we waded through the fresh mud between the drying stalks of corn, “this is my fault.”
“Good grief, Solomon! I know we’re in a monastery and everything, but can you hold off on the self-flagellation please?”
“Listen!” He even grabbed my arm, suddenly, then let it go, as if he were ashamed of it. “The waterfall. Remember? I saw something… someone.”
He blushed. That was the weirdest thing about the whole episode. He blushed like a teenager just on the south side of his first kiss.
“Sol, what’s going on?”
We had walked up to the old church in the aspens, carved as richly as the fabled hag’s house on chicken feet. He sat on the ground, littered with pine needles, and leaned against the church wall. He seemed to gather comfort from it.
“Mark, I saw a… woman. Well, not a woman, exactly. Ok, here goes. When the tree that was supposed to kill us fell down the falls, I looked over the edge. At the bottom, on one of the rocks, I saw a girl. Naked. With long, almost greenish hair, like it was somehow… mossy. She looked at me. I started to feel weird, like something was being sucked out of me. I knew I should look away, that I was seeing something I shouldn’t see, but I couldn’t!”
I didn’t know what to say, so I just waited for him to continue. For the first time since I met him, I thought that maybe he was insane. I didn’t like that thought, so I tried to shake it off. Solomon was sweating and breathing heavily, and for a second I thought he was going to faint. But he gritted his teeth and forced himself to go on.
“I never told you, Mark, but I think you should know this. I’m not as young as you. I’m already over thirty, and I’ve long felt that I need to figure out what to do with my life. You know, choose a path and all that. Coming to seminary is only part of it. I made a vow, you see.”
“A vow?” I felt like I was being time-warped into medieval Russia.
“A promise, to myself and to God. I wanted to see if I could be a monk, if I could give up those things… you know, for eternity. I’m quite hot-blooded, you know…”
I didn’t know, but I could imagine. I had seen him go red with anger at some of the brothers, and I suspected that someone who had that capacity for rage would have a lot of trouble with the so-called sins of the flesh.
“I vowed to keep my mind chaste. I vowed that I wouldn’t allow even the slightest whiff of sexual fantasy into my thoughts. Maybe you think it’s crazy, but…”
I did think it was crazy. How can you make a vow like that? How, when even here, in the middle of nowhere, you had Internet access, and even if you limited yourself to your email account you still wouldn’t be protected from the occasional Victoria’s Secret ad. And in a place like St. Nicholas Monastery, where you saw a girl once every three weeks if you were lucky, one little look at those “angels” and you’re done for.
“But I had to know if I could limit myself. If I can’t control my thoughts, there’s no point in trying to live a life of abstinence, not with my past.”
“I didn’t realize you had a past.”
He laughed, but there was no joy in his eyes.
“So when you saw this… girl,” I said, “you broke your vow, is that what you’re saying?”
He looked at me, long and deep, as if gauging the level of our friendship. Once again I didn’t like the way this made me feel. I felt distant from him, like I didn’t know him at all. I
had very few friends as it is, and this was becoming an all too familiar continuation of a long pattern of disillusionment.
“Mark, please try to accept what I have to say. When you make a vow like that, in a place like Jericho, the consequences for failure are not small.”
“Solomon, what are you saying? How did you break your vow?”
“Do you remember that girl, Zlata, who came last week?”
“The psycho Serb from Germany?” I had to choke back a laugh.
He flared red, in anger as much as embarrassment.
“Ok, so you broke your vow. So you’re not monk material. What does that have to do with Theodore’s death?”
“Mark, she’s an Erestuna. Don’t you know what that means?”
“What in God’s name is an Erestuna?”
“You of all people should know your folklore, Mark. Erestunas are debt collectors. If you make a vow of that kind and you can’t keep it, they come to collect the life that you promised to preserve chaste. They often appear as beautiful girls, and sometimes…”
“Good grief, Solomon! Have you seriously gone crazy like the rest of them?”
“Mark, you saw what was left of Theodore. I think she’s trying to draw me out. To finish me off.”
“The police are going to have a field day with this.”
“Police? There aren’t going to be any police.”
Only in a place like Jericho could a sentence like that actually reflect reality.
I needed to see for myself. I wanted to believe Solomon, not because I thought any of it was possible, but because he was my friend. That’s not a mawkish sentiment—I’ve never had many friends, and never found that elusive “best friend” that everyone’s going on about all the time. Solomon was becoming that true friend, a real brother, and I couldn’t lose him, especially to a soul-sucking vampire-thing from legends.
I went back to the falls in the evening, when no one would miss me at the monastery. I saw her, just like he said. I don’t know how it’s possible, but she was there, on that rock, brushing her greenish hair with some kind of gnarled comb and singing softly in what sounded like very colloquial village Russian.
Glimpses: an Anthology of 16 Short Fantasy Stories: An exclusive collection of fantasy fiction Page 4