The shadow in the corner had grown, and sounded as if it was whispering to them.
"No more talk. Hold out your hand." Helen pulled a knife from her pocket. The handle was a bone of some kind.
Becca stared at the knife and back at Karl.
Karl took a deep breath and held out his hand. Helen took hold of his right pointer finger and cut a deep slice into the tip. Pain shot through Karl's hand and the dripping blood forced him to look away.
"Squeeze the blood into her mouth," Helen demanded.
Karl walked toward Becca, staring into her deep green eyes, which looked pleading as she stared at his pocket. Karl pulled out the gag.
"The bone," Becca mouthed and then opened wide.
He took the bone from his pocket and dropped it into her mouth.
"No!" Helen screamed.
Karl flew into the wall to his right and was flung onto his back.
Helen stabbed her knife into Becca's chest, and Margret hacked at her with the machete.
Becca released a death scream. Karl froze for a moment, wanting to help her, but it was too late. He turned and ran. Climbed the stairs and entered the main level. Becca's screams became fainter as he ran across the main room and out the door. He slammed the door. Fierce hissing filled the air. The cats.
They were everywhere. Hundreds of them. They'd been waiting for him. He'd never had a chance to escape.
Everything quieted in Karl's mind. This was the end. Warmth spread over him as he accepted his fate. He'd always wondered how he'd feel when his death was near. He'd imagined himself accepting it like a warrior. And he was. But he wouldn’t go without a fight.
Karl charged forward, kicking and swinging his hands over his head. For a moment, he wondered if the cats would part and let him pass. Teeth sank into his legs. Claws punctured his sides, front, and back, and it felt as if his scalp might be ripped off. He swung at the attackers, but another immediately replaced every one he knocked off. The weight of the cats brought him to his knees.
Forced to lie face down, Karl closed his eyes. Warmth spread over his body and the stinging pain numbed. He stopped fighting. He waited for death to take him when an explosion and light flooded his vision.
Cats shrieked, and the weight of them lessened. Karl lifted his head and squinted. Through the blood streaming over his eyes, he saw two large objects fly over him, landing on the retreating cats. They had white skin covered in blood—it was the bodies of Helen and Margret.
Hands gripped his side, rolling him over. A creature stared down at him. It had green scaly skin with great wings on its back. Karl looked into the eyes. They were a deep green.
"Becca?" He wheezed.
The creature nodded. "You will soon pass into shadow. Is that what you want?"
Karl’s sight began to fade. Everything darkened except for Becca's green eyes. "I don't want to die."
"Then, you shall be mine."
As his sight failed, Karl felt himself lifted into the air followed by the rush of wind.
* * *
Karl stood next to his mother as the auctioneer peddled an antique buffet table that had been in Aunt Jeanie's dining room.
"I always wanted that," Mother said.
"Why didn’t you keep it?" Karl asked.
"Easiest just to split the money." Mom scratched her cheek. "Uncle Gary is the executor of the will, and this is how he wants it."
After the last of the furniture was auctioned off, the auctioneer began the sale of the last item—the house. At first, there were six people bidding on the house, all of them developers looking for a quick buck. Once it was down to two, Karl pulled the bidder number out of his pocket.
Finally, when the last challenger had given up, and the auctioneer began the call for final bids, Karl raised his number and the auctioneer acknowledged him.
"Karl, what are you doing?" Mother asked.
Two bids later, the house was his. Mother rested her hand on his shoulder, and he flinched.
"It’s a cash auction. Where did you get that kind of money?" Her voice was a mixture of upset and concern.
"My new girlfriend and I wanted to get a place out here. Thought the house should stay in the family." Karl glanced down at his wrist. Green scales had crept onto the palm of his hand. He crossed his arms over his chest.
"Are you serious?" Mother asked, her eyes wild. "And if you break-up?"
Karl forced a smile. "I'll be with her forever."
Evander Holbrook
By Greg Quinion
Evander Holbrook was cold. He sat indoors near the stone of a fireplace, but it didn’t make much difference. In fact, Evander Holbrook seemed always to be cold. He was so cold lately that he didn’t even shiver anymore. It wasn’t quite winter yet, but it didn’t matter. It was cold. Autumn in the hills of northwest Connecticut didn’t promise much warmth, and even so, Evander Holbrook was always cold lately. He sat by his fire under a heavy wool blanket, staring out the window.
The day had reached its end, and the sun, sunk far past the horizon, losing its last futile rays of cold pale red across the open hill, the light crossing his dead fields to expire unseen on the forest beyond. As the light died in the gloaming a vague purple hue fell upon the property of Evander Holbrook, coating it in dimness. It settled first on the backside of the lonely hill on which his house stood, then stretched out its long, wide hand and took hold of his barn. The sharp lines and angles of the old roof seemed blurred now, twisted and askew as if viewed through an old glass. It fell upon his apple trees, and in the wind their gnarled, unkempt branches seemed at once to grow taller, before they shrank back, one after another as if closing their long fingers and hunching over their stunted trunks in preparation for the nights long slumber. Evander Holbrook saw his well now, formless and colorless in shadow. He watched as pitiless dusk again took hold of his pasture, and slowly, like an approaching tide enveloped it foot by foot. The fingers of shadow laid hold of the plot, not minding that here it lay fallow or there it was thick under the burden of ripening squash. The fingers clasped around and over each brown, decaying vine of summer, overran each dry stalk, buried each plant long gone to seed. It claimed his pumpkins one by one. It devoured all he owned.
At the limits of his vision, he could just decipher the cold slate standing erect at the edge of the forest. The pale, thin stone now stood well within the growing domain of the shadow. His thoughts drifted to her, and he remembered. He could see all the green things and taste the sweetness of spring. He could hear a voice that only he now remembered, and he recalled the feel of cotton over skin. Before he had reckoned the time, the purple shade had covered everything, and all the golden light of the hour was spent as if it had never been. The purple darkened into a sallow azure, and he turned and gazed down over the crest of the hill as an evening fog rolled in. The fog rose in thin wispy pillars from the swamp, out beyond and below the limits of his vision. Each pale column met the wind and slowly swirled and rolled, until uniting in one mass and settling evenly over the grey marsh. The mist slowly spread, its eddies taking root in the hollows of the land, filling them and feeling out the paths to the higher places flanking the marsh. Suddenly, his house was surrounded by its thickening whiteness.
In his propensity for empty thought, he had lost track of time. He could see nothing now, not the barn, not the apple tree, not the wall of trees beyond his little house. He tried in vain to pierce its depths with his eyes, looking for nothing in particular. Suddenly, he shivered and remembering his cold, he shook violently and turned to tend his fire. It had burned low, and its coals throbbed and faded into deeper and deeper tones of orange. When no tongue of flame remained to lick the graying coals he finally roused himself from his chair, threw on his woolen overcoat and pulled his heavy leather boots up over his stockings. He armed himself with an axe and headed outside to gather more wood from the barn. The whole world was white, and he could only make out the drab brown mat of wet fallen leaves that lay a few feet around him. His foo
tfalls sounded loud on the leaves, and he was startled at first. Even stranger, within that fog all other sounds were muffled. He could hear nothing of the wind across the fields, the crows in the gnarled branches of the apple trees or the stamping of the mule in his barn.
He found his wood bunker empty of all but two slender logs. He stood in curious thought. It had been empty the night before, and he had filled it. Had he not? He swore aloud and stomped his feet. It seemed that it always was empty lately. It seemed that he was always cold lately. Curse it all, he thought.
“It is cold, and am forever lacking for dry cut wood.” He stomped back into the house, threw the meager logs on the smoldering fire and resolved to find more wood before the evening darkened further.
He would have to cross the pasture, across the big bald hill and enter the woods beyond. In one hand he brought a carrier, in another he took up his axe. He had a woodpile not far into the woods, accessible over a narrow path. He had cleared a portion of woods all summer, and stacked it neatly to season. Before winter he would have to move as much of it into the barn as possible, but for the time he was reliant on the small stock in the barn’s bunker, which needed constant refilling. Yet at this time of year the weather was still mild and his need was not yet great. He would fetch enough wood for the night, then move a cartful to the barn tomorrow.
Over his shoulder he threw his musket. There could be game he thought, it is winter and nightfall and the deer seemed often to come out at this time. Once he had found himself in superb hunting blind while collecting wood at twilight, not more than a handful of rods away from a healthy buck, yet impotent for all his trouble, his rifle resting above his mantle a quarter mile away. Not this time he thought. It was a Pennsylvania rifle, his pride and the most valuable of his possessions. He had spent what little money his father had bequeathed him on it. The family farm had gone to his older brother Nathaniel. With his rifle as his share he had scratched a decent living in the west, gathering furs and skins to be traded at the river forts. With such money he had bought his farm and after the war had settled with his wife. The Pennsylvania rifle had given him his fortune, and it had made him a man of property.
He had never really been to Pennsylvania. But he had traveled some. He had hiked through the snow blasted wildlands south of Quebec in the dead of winter in ’75, with Benedict Arnold. Starvation and sickness had laid him low long before he laid eyes on the St. Lawrence and he had spend that winter upon the Kennebec, eating shoe leather and cursing his officers before being sent back to Boston. The next year he had seen enough to sour him on war for good. He had weathered sharp engagements on Long Island, at Kip’s Bay, Harlem Heights, White Plains, Trenton and Princeton, all following General Washington and taking a good account of the British and Hessians with that same steady Pennsylvania rifle. Its stock bore a notch for every occasion he was forced to shoulder it against his fellow man. He had retired from such exertions in the hard winter of 1776. He had done enough he figured. He had gambled away his youth in his zeal for the cause and reckoned he had done as much as any man could. He had departed Morristown and walked home through the winter to Connecticut and his wife.
Though taverns and hearths were miles apart then, he had been young and quite indifferent to the cold, and he had not suffered. Youth had kept his body indifferent to any lasting discomforts. Thoughts of Rebecca had kept him moving. In his youth, the wind never cut too deep, and the frost never did bite so much as it did later. He had spent many nights out in the open, hunting in the wastes or camping with the army. Even in such of those times that he had believed himself to be freezing, he realized now that he never really knew what it was like to be truly cold. Never knowing what it meant to wear every stitch of cloth you owned yet never feel an inch closer to warmth. Never truly knowing what it felt like to know you would never be warm again. He didn’t know when that feeling had started, but lately he felt the air of every damp morning deep into the core of his bones. The winter that had taken Rebecca had been frigid, had changed everything else, but even then, he had bore it up in his typical puritan disregard. Yet sometime after that, he wasn’t sure when, it was as if all the accumulated chills of his lifetime had come upon him in one season. Since then, even the summer sun didn’t seem to warm him for very long.
He approached the black wood along a familiar path. It had been a road once and he had followed it when laying eyes upon his plot for the first time. He had widened it since and connected it with other local ways, but near the edge of the woods could still be seen its original mode. No more than a few feet wide, it was overgrown and not fit for two mule carts to pass each other. In places, the trees bent over it, leaned over it and grasped the branches of those on the other side. Tunnel-like, it wound deeper and deeper into the tract-less wood, broken only by limestone outcroppings and narrow winding brooks and dry ravines. There was not much game here. Some deer at times, but often weeks passed without seeing even one. Not in over a year had he seen a turkey. Weeks earlier, he had shot a pheasant, but it had been mean, gamey meal and not worth the work. If anything at all were to be caught here, it was the scrawny black squirrels that cut their ways lazily through the oaks, but these were not worth the lead and powder it took to bring them down, and Evander Holbrook gave them a miss.
As he penetrated the wood, he found surprisingly that the fog was left behind at the pastures edge. The wood was still, and sounds seemed dead, much as it had been in the fog. The air came to him with some trouble, and he had to force it to draw into his lungs. As everywhere else, it was cold, but to Evander Holbrook, who was always frozen lately, it seemed even colder than had been the white fog behind him. He took a few steps, again startled by the volume of noise his footfalls created among the leaves and dry twigs of the forest floor. His eyes scanned the familiar places for any fallen boughs or easily dropped timber. As he expected, he saw none, and resolved to move deeper into the trees, farther from his familiar haunts, which he knew to be stripped of dry fuel. As usual, there were no easy pickings lying about, and he resolved to take from his carefully piled stock farther down the path. He coughed loudly, almost in spite of the dead silence, and moved onward.
He walked with a noticeable limp. It did not always cause him pain, but at times it slowed him considerably. On cold evenings such as this, the leg behaved most inconveniently. He had received the limp in the war. Disobeying his wife’s entreaties and appeals, he had heeded the call to arms only a few months after he had returned home to Connecticut. Walking overnight to meet the alarm of the British raid on Danbury, he arrived in time to join Arnold and Wooster and take a lead ball in his leg behind a barricade at Ridgefield. From that day on, he considered his military career truly over and walked ever after with the conspicuous limp, and reproving wife as evidence.
It wasn’t long before he found himself in almost complete darkness, and he cursed the lassitude that had bid him to while away his afternoon by the fire without lifting a finger. It was not like him to tarry and waste the sun’s hours, yet it seemed that lately he had done this overmuch. He cursed himself and cursed the cold. He lost himself in fantasies of the warm drink he would prepare upon his return. He preferred warm ale that he prepared in a copper vessel over the fire. He found that when warm, it soothed his rheumatic aches and eased the pain where the British ball had hit him. In camp with the army, he had found it a practical expedient to simply heat an iron poker in the coals and thrust it into a large tankard, bringing it to an instant boil, whereupon he’d pass it between the men. Rebecca had always taken it mulled with nutmeg and from time to time he indulged himself of this on holidays, though usually he made “flip”, by mixing in a liberal measure of rum, or, “brandy if it is handy!” as he would joke. After the winter took Rebecca, he had small thoughts for spices and holidays and he usually just warmed the ale alone and took it that way.
The farther he walked, his mind digressing on tankards and nutmeg and hot cider and the like. When his mind returned to his more pressing mat
ter, he found himself well lost in a beech wood. Turning around and muttering, he spent a short moment considering his direction before stomping off in the direction he thought he had come by. Despite the fog, there was still some light remaining, and he did not begin to worry until he found himself somewhere he surely had not come to before in any of his wanderings.
Or had he? He had come to a narrow gulch, which wound down and away off into the west, where a faint glow above the trees marked where somewhere the sun still held sway. At the bottom of this ravine was the bed of a narrow brook, presently devoid of all water but clearly defined as a line of sand, silt, and rock winding through the dead valley. The site was vaguely familiar to him, and his head swam with thought trying to place the image, certain that it was no more than simple déjà vu. The sight of the brook gave him a thirst, yet with no water running he contented himself to sit down on one particular flat-topped boulder that projected out into the middle of the stream. He laid his rifle on the ground and dwelled on his condition.
He felt there was something to this place. It was a most peculiar feeling, neither comfortable nor uncomfortable. The most odd thing was that he swore he could hear the water, though he saw it to be naught but dry sand and a thin covering of brown leaves. He pondered this for a while, lost in thought. A tree stood skeletal over him, only the barest assemblage of leaves clinging to its limbs. As he watched, one nearest to him quivered suddenly and with a barely perceptible sound detached and floated softly and eternally to the ground.
He remembered how she shook, how she had quaked so constantly that no roaring fire or blanket could give her respite from the cold. He had boiled water, made compresses, brewed tea. He had brought extra blankets from the barn and damning the fleas covered her in her distress. He had read her favorite passages as she lay, masking his fear with courage for her benefit, until near the end when his quavering voice gave way to open sobbing and his heart rent open at the thought of losing his only friend. Her lamentable cries had driven him mad with dejection. In her trial, she seemed to not notice him as if looking past him, through him and onward to some singular thing that stood invisible in the corner and stood in such a presence that all of her miserable resources were concentrated wholly in regarding it. “I’m cold,” she had murmured to it. “I’m cold, my God, I am cold”, she had said, to nobody in particular. He repeatedly felt her brow and found it burning hot, yet nothing could bring her warmth in the slightest. On the last day she gave not a moment of notice to her husband of seventeen years, and he had not the courage to overcome his denial and speak any words of parting to his fading friend.
Dark Light Book Three (Dark Light Anthology) Page 31