Sarah Palin: Vampire Hunter (Twinkle)

by Dan McGirt

  “The carving!” I said.

  “Brilliant,” muttered Merc. “Yes, let’s try that.”

  Merc pressed and pulled at the various figures in the bas-relief, to no effect.

  “Let me try,” I said.

  “Cosmo, I’ve been opening hidden doors since before you planted your first turnip. I can handle this.”

  “But I have an idea!”

  Merc sighed. “Then go ahead. By all means, show me how it’s done.”

  I grasped two of the horse-and-rider figures at the edge of the carving and tugged gently, as if turning a wheel. There was a metallic click from inside the wall. The outer band of the relief moved on its own. Like a sideways carousel, the nine riders moved in procession, completing a full rotation. When they returned to their starting points, there was another click and a section of the wall swung open.

  “I was going to do that next,” said Merc.

  “It just came to me.”

  Sapphrina pushed past us, calling “Rubis!”

  I caught her by the arm. “Let me go first. It might be dangerous.”

  “True,” said Merc. “In fact, you might want your sword, Cosmo.”

  “It’s, ah, in the other room,” I said.

  “And your armor?”

  “Also in the other room. Why don’t I go fetch those?”

  “What would you do without me?” said Merc, shaking his head. “As for you, Mistress Corundum—”

  “I’m not staying behind!”

  “We don’t know what dangers lie beyond that door.”

  “I can take care of myself,” Sapphrina opened her robe to reveal a slender dagger strapped to her thigh.

  “You sleep with a knife?” I said.

  “A girl can’t be too careful,” said Sapphrina. “I can defend myself.”

  Merc shook his head. “We go to rescue your sister from an unknown danger, which may involve attacking we know not what. This is a bit beyond defending yourself.”

  “Then I’ll defend my sister as if she were myself!” said Sapphrina, in so stern and savage a tone that even I took an involuntary step back. She leaned over the shorter wizard, as if daring him to object again.

  Merc removed his sunshades and met Sapphrina’s hard stare. I braced for another blast of his quick temper. Instead, he smiled.

  “I can dig where you’re coming from,” he said.

  Beyond the hidden door was a winding stairway, leading down. The turns were tight, the ceiling low, forcing us to descend in single file. Merc took the lead. I followed, sword in hand, with Sapphrina close behind me.

  “Nothing good comes of hidden stairways in the backs of tombs,” said Merc.

  “What do you mean?” I asked.

  “Usually it means ghouls, necromancers, or the restless dead.”

  “Or grave robbers,” I said.

  “Fairly hardworking robbers to make all this,” scoffed Merc.

  “Let’s just find Rubis!” said Sapphrina.

  “That is what we’re doing,” said Merc. “But it is no use pretending we aren’t descending into danger.”

  The stairway opened into a small round gallery. Opposite the stairs were the mouths of two tunnels. The one on the left sloped downward. The one on the right kept level, at least so far as we could see by the lantern.

  “Which way did she go?” I asked.

  “I’m thinking,” said Merc.

  “Rubis!” shouted Sapphrina.

  “I wish you would quit doing that,” said Merc.

  “Why?” demanded Sapphrina. “She may hear and call back to us.”

  “Maybe,” said Merc. “But in this instance I think some semblance of stealth would be the wiser course.”

  “Why?” said Sapphrina.

  “Unless I miss my guess, some external force entranced your sister and led her through the door and down the stair. If so, she will not hear or heed your call. She may not even be aware of her actions or her surroundings.”

  “How do you know?” I asked.

  “Educated guess.”

  “Based on what?”

  “Well, I, er, sense a great evil,” said Merc.

  “Oh, now you do!” shot Sapphrina.

  “The stone interfered with my mystic senses before,” said Merc. “Lots of iron deposits in this kind of rock.”

  Sapphrina gave a snort of disgust.

  “So what do your mystic senses tell you now?” I asked. “Which way did Rubis go?”

  From the tunnel on the left sounded a gibbering, soul-chilling, strangely trilling blast of unearthly music like the playing of a mad piper on a hellish instrument, accompanied by the insane cries of fearful leprous ravens and a one-armed drummer in the grip of a fatal seizure.

  “That way,” said Merc.

  With rising trepidation we followed the falling path toward an unknown destination. Waves of unspeakable evil and more than evil washed over us like the fear-flecked foam of a degenerate ocean in which swim the unspeakable proto-crustacean leviathans of pre-cataclysmic opacity. The darkness itself opposed our progress, pushing hard against the enfeebled luminance of Mercury’s lantern, which flickered and dimmed with every step. The tunnel air grew thick and foul, cold and verminous against our skin, and reeking of purple hate and iridescent polychromatic cosmic annoyance. That horrible atonal fluting rose and fell like the ragged breathing of an asthmatic mountain goat as it is devoured by squirming maggots and a one-eyed ferret. Visions of strange and terrible landscapes assaulted my brain. The fungal mountains. The squat, misshapen scarlet trees that were not trees. The fearful scream of dying un-bees swarming inside my skull, feasting on the blood-hued honey that drips from the walls of living flesh that line the sky! The detestable spectral refulgence of unwholesome saltant voles groping sightlessly beneath a gibbous quivering moon of leering chipmunk skulls! Pus-filled protuberant blisters on the pockmarked forehead of sanity! Wan beams of desolate madness piercing the unrememberable soup-stained curtain of dim-fevered reason! The adverse multisyllabic adjectives of a baroquely overwrought antique affectation! Ai! Ei! Ia! Oi! Ui!

  “I think I’m losing my mind,” I said.

  “That is a terrible thing to lose,” said the White Rabbit.

  “Where did you come from?” I asked.

  “I’m not here,” said the Walrus. “But neither are you.”

  “Ignore them,” said Mercury. “And the Grinning Cat too.”

  “I’m a flower,” said Sapphrina. “Cupcakes. Sweets for the sweet. Mind the fennel.”

  “This way lies madness,” said Mercury.

  “You think?”

  “It is coming back to me now,” said Merc. Beads of fever sweat glistened on his brow. “The runes. The half-traced symbols on the broken door. It was a seal.”

  “I’m a walrus,” said the Walrus.

  “Shut up, I’m not talking to you,” said Merc.

  “Sorry, man.”

  “Go on,” I said. “Before my ears melt and all sounds become buttons.”

  “Take heed,” said Mercury. “I will fight to hold my disintegrating mind together long enough to explain what is happening. It is said, in half-remembered ancient legends so terrible and obscure that they are never written down and only spoken by oldest of sages in the most dramatic of stage whispers, that when the Demon Lords and all their train came forth into Arden from Somewhere Else, that they did not come alone, but were pursued by nameless, formless alien things even more terrible and horrid and mind-numbingly scary than the demons themselves.”

  “I’ve never heard anything like that.”

  “You live in Darnk.”

  “Good point.”

  “These elder beings of immense enormity were called the Senior Obnoxious Deities. The Old SODs, for short.”

  “You just said they were nameless.”

  “Everything is nameless until someone names it!”

  “As you say. But do speak up,” I said. “I can’t hear you over the bear with the banjo.”

&nb
sp; “The Gods and the Demon Lords formed an Unholy Alliance against the SODs. Terrible was the war, which bent the bounds of time and space. The weapons of the SODs are the fear and madness they emanate by their mere existence, an existence against which the fabric of the universe itself recoils in shuddering revulsion. After many trials and losses, the gods and demons prevailed against their awful foes, banishing the SODs and sealing forever the pestilent, vertiginous doorway to their realm.”

  “Six pence for pansies,” said Sapphrina, skipping gaily.

  “What has this to do with us now?” I said.

  “Some of the Old SODs evaded banishment. They went to ground, hiding in the shadowy spider holes of reality. One by one they were hunted down. Though they could not be destroyed, they were bound in secret places, caged by the power of the Great Seal, the Sign of Power to which the elder things are uniquely vulnerable—the Nine-Sided Cube. It gives the SODs a ferocious headache.”

  “I should imagine.”

  “I believe that the cave in which we took shelter was one such forgotten prison of a SOD.”

  “I told you the cave was creepy.”

  “Yes, you did. You all did. And I take full responsibility for overruling you. But that is neither here nor there now. We are, quite literally, descending into elemental madness with every step we take. The Gods themselves could not kill what is entombed here. We must face the awful truth: Rubis is gone.”

  “No!” screamed Sapphrina. “Violets! Chrysanthemums! Ginger snaps!

  I batted away a flying green octopus. “Mercury, is there no hope at all? And could you tell those ducks to stop throwing onions at me?”

  “All hope is gone!” said the wizard, tearing wildly at his beard. “Only madness! Do you hear me? Madness! Insanity! Seriously untreatable mental health issues!”

  “But my pretty Rubis!” said Sapphrina. She screeched like an owl, hopped about on one foot, and shouted, “A ducat for a diadem!”

  “Rubis has gone to her doom!” said Merc, twitching and foaming at the mouth. “She has already been absorbed by the Fundamental Fear! And we are soon to follow!”

  “Unless she went the other way,” I said.

  “What?” said Merc.

  “Well, maybe she didn’t come this way. Maybe she took the other tunnel.”

  Mercury wiped his mouth with his sleeve.

  “That is worth looking into,” he said. “Let’s go back and check.”

  Sure enough, we found signs that Rubis had passed down the right-hand path — a fresh footprint and a scrap of red silk torn from her robe.

  “We’re on the right track,” said Merc.

  “We must find her!” said Sapphrina.

  “We will,” I promised.

  The tunnel zigged, zagged, twisted, and dipped, but the downward grade was slight. We were no longer descending into the depths of Arden but, rather, winding our way back into the hilltop. We traversed perhaps a quarter of a mile as the mole burrows before the tunnel ended at an obviously manmade archway fashioned of hewn and polished blocks. The wide chamber beyond was illuminated by a weird green light.

  “The green light In my experience the glowing green chamber is usually the place,” said Mercury. A nimbus of crackling blue energy formed around his hands.

  “Let’s go,” I said, holding sword and shield at ready. Sapphrina clutched her dagger and nodded.

  We burst through the arched doorway. The room was set out like a feasting hall of old, with a wide stone table at its center. Upon the walls hung the rotting tatters of tapestries depicting ancient battles against monsters and demons. Lining the far wall were a dozen chests and caskets overflowing with silver and gold coins; loose rubies, diamonds and other gems; and assorted armbands, bracelets, neckpieces, and other adornments. It was the most wealth I had ever seen. The coin of Darnk was the lead skank, though pine cones of a certain size were also accepted as legal tender.

  The source of the strange light was a growth of phosphorescent mold clinging to the tapestries and other furnishings, and most thickly to the stalactites reaching down from the ceiling like the grasping fingers of a greedy green giant. Mercury’s lantern, now slung around his neck, cast a clean white radiance into the room, but did not fully banish the ghastly green glow.

  By that pale and terrible light we beheld the occupants of the chamber seated around the table like a council of doom. They were nine in number, geared in ancient breastplates and peaked helmets of war. They were men—or the skeletal and mummified remains of men—with withered strips of shrunken flesh clinging to their time-yellowed bones. Each corpse was further dressed with a coarse black robe cut of cheap cloth. Decay had reduced the robes to threads and tatters. Knotted noose-like around each dead man’s neck was a length of rope.

  Rubis sat in their midst, still wrapped in her red silk robe. Though appearing unharmed, she stared vacantly at the surface of the table, upon which were several piles of strange octagonal coins. She made no response to Sapphrina shouting her name with a mixture of stunned relief and desperate fear.

  “She is bewitched!” said Sapphrina.

  “Likely,” said Mercury. “Let’s grab her and go. This is not a place to linger.”

  But before we took another step, the dead men sprang to their feet! They moved with surprising swiftness for men whose muscles had crumbled to powder centuries ago. Witch-light flickered in the eyeless sockets of their skulls as they moved toward us with outstretched hands.

  “Barrow-wights!” said Merc.

  “Barrow whats?”

  “Wights!”

  “Whites?”

  “No, wights.”

  “No whites? No eyes, for that matter. Just scary lights.”

  “Not whites, wights.”

  “Where?”

  “Wight in front of—I mean, right in front you!”

  “Say that again.”

  “These are barrow-wights. Corpses unnaturally reanimated by evil spirits—perhaps demons, perhaps their own tainted souls. Expert opinion varies.”

  “We could ask them.”

  “Later! These dead wight men have my sister!” said Sapphrina.

  “Not for long,” said Merc. He raised his hands. A ball of blue energy formed in each. He hurled the magic missiles at the two nearest warriors, striking each of them in the chest. Both of the corpse-men were blasted backward. They slammed into the wall and slumped to the floor.

  I charged the next wight in line. I swung my blade overhand and struck the warrior’s shoulder, shearing off the right arm.

  Merc and I peeled left and right, determined to reach our captive companion. Merc drew his own sword and cut an acrobatic swath through the three wights on his side of the table. He ducked and sliced off the leg of one, twirled and cut the second in twain at the waist, vaulted into the air to land behind the third and, before it could react, beheaded the creature and shoved it to the ground.

  I shield-smacked the first wight in my path, trampled over it, and smashed the next with the same maneuver. Not quite so flashy as Merc’s moves, but I reached Rubis and our final foe at the same time as the wizard.

  “Hold!” said the last dead man standing, evidently their captain.

  “It speaks!” I said.

  “Hold, I say!” His hollow voice had the sound of someone with an exceptionally dry throat speaking through a tube—or from the depths of a grave. “In the name of The Gods, hold!”

  I froze, but held my sword at ready. Merc likewise stayed his hand. The creature stood directly behind Rubis, who had yet to stir. The wight’s intent was unclear—was he threatening to harm her if we did not surrender?

  “Release her from your foul spell, or I will finish you!” I said.

  “If I don’t do it first!” said Mercury. A recharged nimbus of blue energy formed around his left hand, while his sword arm remained steady.

  “Foul spell? What mean you?” said the wight.

  “This is my sister, fiend!” said Sapphrina, suddenly brandishing her dag
ger at my side. “Free her or else!”

  “Free her?” The wight raised his bony hands. The witch-lights in his eye sockets flashed. “She is our guest, not our prisoner.”

  “Seek not to deceive us with your lies!” said Sapphrina. “She is ensorcelled!”

  “No, I’m not,” said Rubis.

  “Yes, you are!” said Sapphrina. “You’ve lost your—Rubis! You are untranced!”

  “Of course, dear sister!” Rubis bounced to her feet and hugged her twin. “But you’ve ruined the game.”

  “Game? What game?”

  “The boys and I were having a hand of poker,” said Rubis, revealing a set of yellowed pasteboard playing cards. “Nine-card stud with a six-pip demi-suit, reverse draw, double blind, gryphons high, jesters wild. It’s an antique variant, but I’m getting the hang of it.”

  “That she is,” said one of wights I had bowled over. The animated corpse clambered to its feet, as did all of its fellows still in possession of their legs.

  It was hard to keep a dead man down.

  “Uh, Merc?” I said. “We’re outnumbered again.”

  “You’ve gone mad!” said Sapphrina. “Madder than I was in the last scene.”

  “I’m only mad that I drew an inside straight before you barged in!” said Rubis.

  “No!” said the barrow-wight captain. “I thought sure you were bluffing again.”

  “Count yourself lucky, Sir Bones,” said Rubis. “I’d have cleaned you out to the last rib if they hadn’t come by!”

  Several of the wights laughed. It was a disturbing sound.

  Mercury was not amused. “Wandering off in the night to play cards with a wight is not too bright. How did you get here?”

  Rubis opened her mouth to reply, then paused. “Honestly, I have no idea.”

  “Aha!” said Sapphrina. “You were bewitched!”

  “Someone better explain this,” said Merc. Blue sparks crackled around his clenched fist. “Or you’ll be sorry.”