by J. K. Coi
He should tell the young man that such a life was an illusion that couldn’t come true, not for people like them who’d seen and done too much to ever cover up the memories of it.
They shoved the table against the door. While he and Lillian worked on making quick bars for the windows with rungs from smashed kitchen chairs, Charles took Hartman—along with two other servants Graham had never met before—to inspect the other entrances to the house.
Graham had made it clear they shouldn’t feel too badly if it became necessary to dismantle the gaudy new furniture in order to protect the rest of Hill House, earning a baleful look from Lillian.
He suggested sending someone out with a horse to find help, but Lillian had advised against it. “They’re drawn by noise, heat and movement, which is why most of them are converging here.”
Anna returned to the kitchen, their gazes meeting right away like two magnets drawn to each other. He caught his breath and his determination wavered. Would he be able to walk away from her? She was his heart, and now that he’d come home and claimed it again, it had started beating heavy and loud in his chest and he didn’t know if he’d survive without it.
She came forward with a brave nod and stood at his side. He allowed himself to rest his hand on the small of her back. It should have been innocent enough, but both of them drew in a sharp breath at the small touch. The rush of awareness took him by surprise. Considering they had been together so recently, he would have thought himself sated for the moment, but a surging heat spread like the tide, rushing to fill all the nooks and crannies that had gotten dry and crusty from deprivation.
Anna dropped her gaze and turned away first. She started going through all the drawers and cupboards to find anything that could be used as a weapon.
The tinderbox remained in his jacket pocket. He’d felt it sitting there against him the entire time, but suddenly it was heavier than it should be. Warmed by more than his body heat. It called to him. Demanding his attention. His caresses. His wishes.
At first it hadn’t been so difficult a thing to ignore. He’d even started to think Lillian’s claims about the trinket’s unholy pull were exaggerated, even if its effects appeared to be real enough. He was stronger than those who had succumbed before him. He would have no trouble resisting.
But that was before the debacle upstairs.
Now when he touched it, the thing seemed to have gained more strength. His focus waned and his guard went down. Just a moment. And one moment was apparently all that was required for the magic to slither back inside him like a snake into a dark hole.
I wish…I wish…I wish…
“Graham?” Anna. Her voice brought him back to his senses.
He shook off the weight of the tinderbox’s power with a shudder of cold fear, blinking furiously.
In his mind he was shoving back the rush of grime-encrusted, clawed, dead hands reaching for him, but on the surface he only cleared his throat. “I’m all right,” he said.
The compulsion hadn’t really left. It remained, and was going to continue to grow until he couldn’t stop himself from wishing again.
He couldn’t let that happen.
“We must do something.” He turned to Lillian. “Why didn’t they start to attack the house earlier?”
“My guess is they found a small animal in the garden. Something that moved or made a noise. They’ll spend hours searching for it unless something else draws their attention.”
Like a heavy rock thudding off the garden shed, he thought. “Couldn’t we create another diversion for them and send someone off on a horse in the opposite direction while they’re distracted?”
Lillian crossed her arms and stared him down. “What if the herd separates? What if our diversion succeeds but they wander into the woods and get distracted by something else? Do you want to be responsible for letting any of those things loose where we can’t keep track of them? Could you ever be certain that you had found and destroyed them all?”
That settled that.
Anna dumped an armful of thick wooden rolling pins, heavy iron ladles and various other kitchen utensils on the countertop before reaching for one to keep for herself. A wicked-looking, wide butcher’s blade. She held the knife so matter-of-factly it could have been a silk fan.
The sight of her wielding it made him weak with a bone-deep fear, and he promised himself she would have no cause to use it.
As far as he could tell, none of the creatures carried weapons. Pale, grasping fingers poked through the makeshift bars on the windows. Bloody and dirty and scraped down to nothing but bone, they scratched and clawed desperately to get to the people they could smell inside.
They didn’t seem to have any level of intelligence. If Lillian was to be believed, the dead things acted purely on their one and only instinct—to satisfy their raging hunger with living flesh. Flesh that they had tracked to this entrance. Flesh they could smell through the broken door and windows.
So far, that meant they didn’t seem to be interested in wandering away from the house, but only because their attention hadn’t yet been snagged by something else. If they separated and attacked multiple entrances, the household would be overrun in no time. What if one of them wandered close enough to the stables to smell the horses? What if someone from the village happened along? It might be late for visitors, but stranger things had happened.
Something was going to have to give…and soon.
The attack had become more frantic as soon as the windows were smashed and the door splintered. Graham didn’t want to know what would happen if they succeeded in getting through, but he had a feeling he was going to find out before too much longer.
He couldn’t stop thinking of his father. About what it would have done to him to be forced to watch his mother’s dead and rotted corpse rise from her grave and come after him.
Lillian said he’d been the one to do it. That he’d cut her down himself, but the horror of it had broken him. When the creatures were defeated he’d retreated to his study…and then he’d gotten the unknowingly false news telling him his son was dead.
She’d tried to cajole him back to the living, and when that didn’t work she tried reasoning with him and even tried making him angry—hence the garish redecorating—but one day a few months later, she went to check on him and he was dead in his chair.
“I tried to get him to at least tell me where he’d hidden the tinderbox, but he refused and I couldn’t find it for the life of me.”
He had a feeling he knew where his father would have hidden it. The same place Graham had hidden his most prized possessions as a child—on the bookshelf in the library, behind his mother’s copy of Macbeth.
What he didn’t know was how it had gotten back into the hands of the witch and made it up into that tree for Graham to find, but he supposed that involved magic as well.
“Why didn’t my father destroy it once he knew what it did?” What if Graham could find a way around the curse, but still access its magic? What if he could bring his father back? What if he could make sure no sickness would ever take Anna from him, like it took his mother? Or go back and stop the war before it started so that no one had to die?
What if he could wish for—
“He may have tried, but do you really believe it would be so easy as throwing it into the fire? Not to mention, the magic quickly consumes until it becomes the one thing in all the world that you can’t live without. It’s impossible to see it for what it really is.” Lillian stopped and looked at him. “Which is why you need to give it to me. Now.”
Graham refused. He said it was because he still didn’t know if he could trust Lillian and her son, but of course that wasn’t the entire truth.
He stuffed both hands into his pockets, knuckles grazing metal. The tinderbox. The urge to use it was too strong. Afraid of what he would do if he kept the thing any longer, he pulled it from his pocket and laid it down in the center of the countertop.
All eyes were on it in an i
nstant. He didn’t want it, but every time he thought about throwing it away—do it, just toss it into the fire—his temples pounded with pain and his chest tightened. Anna looked mesmerized and afraid. Even Lillian looked insecure. As much as she’d wanted him to give it up, she didn’t trust herself with it either.
Everyone glanced up at the low-pitched, wild howling coming from outside. The witch’s hounds? Was she coming for her keepsake? How close were they, he wondered?
A loud crack startled everyone as the kitchen door broke apart. Now the only thing keeping the zombies out was the table pushed up against the opening…and it was already sliding forward over the plank floors.
He jumped forward and threw his weight against it. “We can’t hold them off like this,” he yelled. “We have to do something.”
One bony, dead hand stopped reaching through the slats over the window and suddenly closed on one instead, pulling hard until the cracking of the wooden shaft ripped through the room. Suddenly, a half dozen more followed the first’s example, filling the fissure and yanking at the bars.
Anna and Lillian jabbed and slashed. The creatures drew back quickly, but the screams that followed seemed more rage-filled than pained. Did they even feel pain?
Charles came back into the kitchen. Graham dug in his heels with his back against the table, barring the door, fighting the constant shoving. “Get over here and help me.”
Hartman was right behind him and rushed forward to add his weight to Graham’s. It helped, but they couldn’t keep this up for long.
The sounds coming from outside chilled him to the bone. The nightmares he already lived with were bad enough. He didn’t need to add more, but if he survived this night, he would hear those chomping, snarling cries of desperate, mindless savagery for the rest of his days.
“Jasper and Bart are watching the main doors. They aren’t going to be able to hold that entrance for much longer either,” Charles said, breathing heavily. “The monsters have started to migrate. I took one out trying to break through the library window, but others will have heard the ruckus and be on their way. I went out to see if there was a safe way to get off the property, but they’re everywhere, like a swarm. A few are heading toward the stables.” He paused. “But most of them are still looking for a way inside.”
Lillian glared at him “What did you think you were you doing? You know better than to go outside without backup.”
The young man only shrugged. “I had it under control,” he snapped. “No noise. Nothing saw me.”
She looked like she wanted to argue, but Anna interrupted. “There are so many of them,” she muttered, a faraway look on her face. She seemed eerily calm. “Why are there so many?”
The tinderbox was in her hands.
Nobody had noticed her step forward and take it, but now nobody could take their eyes off of her. She rubbed it and rubbed it.
His heart leaped into his throat.
“I had better clean this up,” she said in a dreamy voice. “It’s so tarnished and dirty.”
His hand shook as he reached out. He motioned for her to hand over the tinderbox, but she wasn’t paying him any attention. Her focus was on the item in her hands. She acted as if everything were completely normal. As if she hadn’t started scrubbing the tin frantically.
She was scaring him now, going on about how pretty it would look once it was clean. She sounded calm and rational but distant.
“Anna. Anna love, give me the box.” When she didn’t look up, he gave up on asking and lunged forward, leaving Hartman to hold the kitchen entrance on his own. She pulled the thing close to her body and danced away from him.
Charles raised his revolver, but hesitated. Thank God.
However, Lillian wouldn’t hesitate, so Graham stepped directly between her and Anna while he continued to try to ease closer to her.
“You know,” she continued. “This is so silly. I’m sure we could put an end to this right now.” She paused in her rubbing to squint down at the inscription on the tinderbox.
“You don’t want to do that, Anna.” He pressed one more step forward. She finally glanced up at him. “Darling, please.”
“Graham?” She sounded confused, but in the moment once again. He was getting through to her.
He held out his hand.
She instinctively hugged the tinderbox closer, but then she shook her head. It was obvious she was fighting the pull of its darkness. She could beat it. He knew she could.
Lillian wasn’t as certain. She pressed forward, moving up beside him with a blade digging into his gut and a revolver trained on Anna.
“Lily, let him try.” Hartman called out to stop her even as Graham took a small step closer to Anna.
“I’m sorry, I can’t,” she snapped. “I don’t want to do it, but I can’t let her—”
At that moment, one of her other men came into the kitchen. Bart or Jasper. He didn’t know which one and it didn’t matter.
He was a tall man, a giant really, and looked down his hawkish nose, taking in the situation in a heartbeat.
In less time than it took to call a warning, he moved on Anna in a sprint, grabbing the tinderbox right out of her hands and shoving her aside.
“No!” Graham was already barrelling into him, tackling him to the floor. His fingers grazed the box but slipped off, leaving him empty-handed.
Charles was just a half-second behind, his reaching fingers finding only air. He swore. “Jasper, don’t do it!”
But the words were already tumbling out of the man in a heavily accented Scottish brogue. “Please, I wish…I just wish…” he stuttered, “I want to be out of this death trap! I wish I was out of this bloody house!”
A crack of gunfire echoed in Graham’s ears, but a second too late. Lillian’s bullet hit nothing.
Jasper was gone.
Chapter Ten
Graham grabbed the tinderbox as it fell to the ground, hissing as it burned his palm.
“Give it to me! I’m finished asking and now I take the cursed thing by force!” Lillian yelled, shaking the revolver at him. Her eyes were wide and bright as she turned the barrel of her gun and a hateful glare on Anna.
“She didn’t make the wish,” he reminded her firmly, pulling Anna close. “It was your man who succumbed to the tinderbox’s pull.”
“No, she’s right. It was my fault,” Anna interrupted. “I’m so sorry.”
Graham fixed Lillian with a warning stare, daring her to try something. The tinderbox went back into his pocket. She eyed the movement with a bite of her lip, but didn’t say anything.
Charles stepped forward and gently took his mother’s elbow. He spoke calmly, as if the woman wasn’t near to careening over the edge of a very thin line. “Mother, Jasper was new. He couldn’t have withstood—”
Lillian clenched her teeth, but she finally lowered her weapon. “The zombies? Where are they?”
The noises coming from outside increased in strength. And yet, they weren’t right on top of them on the other side of the kitchen door, clamoring for entry. He spun around to look. Hartman remained braced in front of the upended table, arms stretched out, but he wasn’t holding anything back anymore.
Just then a horrible cry rose above the snarling and grunting.
A scream.
The plea for help was cut off abruptly. Anna gasped and bit her fist. She put into words what everyone had already concluded. “It’s Jasper out there. He wished to be out of the house.”
“His wish was granted.” Lillian’s voice fell heavy between them all.
Graham grabbed a knife from the countertop and marched to the door.
“What the hell do you think you’re doing?” Charles put a hand to his shoulder, but he shrugged it off.
“We have to help him.”
Hartman straightened and stood in his way, crossing his arms. “That man knew the consequences of makin’ a wish.”
“So you’re just going to leave him out there? You won’t save him? Any of yo
u?”
“He’s dead already, or he’d still be screaming,” Charles replied. “We’ve got a short reprieve before they’ve finished fighting over his bones and come back for us, so I suggest we use the chance we’ve been given and head out through the front.” He looked to Lillian for confirmation. She nodded, already loading her belt with a blade from the kitchen stash.
Graham decided he didn’t want to know what had happened to make such a young man so hard and pitiless.
Yes, they needed to hurry, but he had to know for sure. If there was any chance of saving the man…
Moving to the window, he peered out into the darkness. Outside, thunder rumbled even though there were no clouds in the sky, and the intermittent howl of some large animal—three large animals if he didn’t miss his guess—echoed over it.
The full moon was still high in the night sky, providing him with enough of a glow to see the huddle of zombies crowded together a few feet into the garden, snarling and snapping at each other as they struggled to get a piece of whatever was in the middle of them. It was impossible to tell what they were fighting over…until one lifted something up and waved it out of reach of the others before bringing it to his mouth and chomping down on it.
A human arm.
He shuddered and turned away, feeling guilty and helpless. He hated the feeling. If he was going to get Anna through this, he couldn’t allow himself to be weakened by fear and doubt.
He clenched his jaw and faced the others. “We have to fight them. You said it yourself, we can’t let these things start to wander toward the village. If we leave—”
“It’s too late,” Lillian protested. She glanced over her shoulder toward the door. “Because of Jasper’s wish, we have even more of them on our doorstep than we did before. Too many to fight. It would be certain death for all of us.”
Her gaze slipped to Charles for a fraction of a second, and then fixed on Anna. “You might as well shoot her now.” She pointed outside where they could still hear the creatures feasting on Jasper’s body. “It would be a kinder death than sending her out into that, armed with little more than kitchen utensils.”