Corlan looked about him with a sort of oddly uninterested curiosity. He began to see that they moved through and then out of some great hall, a place in the past for banquets and aristocratic councils. Up on the stone walls there were tattered banners fringed with ragged bullion, and antique swords and shields and other warlike implements, that shone and winked from their cobwebbing. A colossal hearth went by on his right, with two savage and enormous stone animals guarding it—he could not make out what they were. There was half an armorial motto, in Latin: Non Omnis Moriar. Now what did that mean? The grandfather would have known. We do not die? We die? All things die . . . ? No, not that . . .
Here they went round what seemed a very thick pillar, high as the inestimable roof, and possibly having the girth of three or four pines grown together. Now came a passageway, long and curving, like a static worm. The lantern splashed on running wet, puddles, on peculiar stainings and spidery cracks. The enclosure stank of rot and dampness worse than the hall. Something scrambled across the old man’s feet and vanished—as it looked—into the blank wall. A rat, a lizard.
“Where are you taking me?” Corlan asked languidly. He was near to falling down.
“A kitchen below, sir. Teda keeps a fire there.”
“Does she? Teda . . . And how do they call you?”
“Tils,” the old man said.
“Whose house is this?”
“He is gone, sir.” Oddly the old man’s voice took on at this a weird harshness. He sounded younger, and more stern.
“He,” said Corlan. “But what is his name?” The old man did not answer this. He said only, in an inexpressibly unnerving way, “He is dead, sir. Not spoken of. Never spoken of.”
Corlan thought, Oh, then, one of the bloody story-book ghouls. Dead but still active and in residence. It is a story I’ve walked into. I don’t care. Oh God I must lie down.
Just then they turned a corner and before them, along another paved stone walk—this without a roof—another door showed buttery light. Above, the rain—having successfully leaked its way into the house—had given over, and the weaponry stars were back in full force.
They got up a steep and pitted step, and Corlan saw now the roofed kitchen with a few lamps and a fire burning. A pot was slung over it. He smelled soup, and there was a loaf on a table, and coffee had been brewed, and there the white alcohol glittered in its decanter: schnapps or junever. This must be a dream then. He reached a bench and collapsed onto it.
There was also a woman, an old one to match the old man. Teda, presumably. Teda and Tils.
It was the ruined schloss of an undead vampire or werewolf, and these two old bundles of bones were doubtless mad as frogs, and ready to prepare any guest for the monster’s delectation. Well, let them. So long as they fed him first.
He pulled some coins from his pocket, all he had—his pay was in arrears. It would save him from being robbed by them later. They were glancing at the money as he offered it, as if they had never seen coins before. Maybe they never had. The ghoul had taken care of them.
We do not altogether die.
That was what the Latin meant, surely?
Of course. How apt.
Corlan fell asleep.
There is night. And there is the Night—the night-dark void that hides inside the often gilded covers of reality: The Abyss. A little of the latter goes a very long way.
Attributed to the philosopher Anton Woetzsner (1797-1889)
When he came to again Corlan believed he was in the open, out in the dark fracturing of the pine-pillared night. All was pitch-black, but for a row of savage scarlet eyes that seared at him, crouched low down, flickering with lust.
He did not think he would have time to grip the revolver.
One of the eyes blinked, and went out.
It was the kitchen fire. He was in the kitchen of the stone schloss, lying on the bench.
Corlan sat up. He drew out flint and tinder, struck a light. They had left a lamp on the table, which he lit. A bowl of the broth was there too, cold now but no matter, a chunk of the loaf. The coffee was gone, but not the junever-gin.
He ate in the half-light like a starving dog, knew it and cared nothing, his face almost in the dish, growling and grunting. When he was done, for a moment a fierce nausea gushed through him—too much after too little—then faded back, leaving only a dull digestive ache.
He sloshed the gin into a small chipped glass and swallowed two gulps.
Everything would improve now. They, the raddled old couple, had saved his life. Where had they gone to? Oh naturally, to alert, or to hide from, their master, the owner of House Veltenlak.
No, Corlan decided, he would stop that now. He was restored. There were no vampires, none of the other creatures either. This was only a ruinous heap, once grandiose, deserted as several of the ancient castles had been, since an era of war began.
Something hissed and whispered high up. A vaporous serpent came sliding towards him down the wall, and there another—another—
Corlan shook himself. Numbskull. It was only dust or powder escaping the ceiling. The entire habitat was crumbling. All about him, as he concentrated, his ears no longer dinning with fatigue and hunger, he could detect such sighs and grumblings, cracks and masonry groans. Subsiding, these doomed walls due to disintegrate and tumble, leaving only shattered stone blocks and part-standing shafts, through which the winds would blast their cannon-shot.
The fire was dying rapidly now, and the tepid kitchen growing ever colder.
But Corlan drank another glass of junever, and glanced about. He was refreshed. He wanted something to do until the morning came, when he would take himself off.
He wondered idly where Tils slept, and Teda. They had left the sparse column of coins on the table.
Standing up, he took the lamp, and went all round the kitchen, which was not itself very big, and gave on a second kitchen through a broken door. The second kitchen was itself broken, some of its roof down. Beyond, a yard, black with moonless night, and a well, but peering into this it seemed to have gone dry, only rain and muck inside. Three dead rats, coiled tight as rope, lay on the ground.
How long until sunrise? He took a reading from the patterns of the stars, where he could see them. Three, four hours, he thought.
Corlan went back through the kitchen and the corridors.
He reached again the vast hall-cave beyond the pillar with an odd suddenness. As if it had shifted and come to meet him. The unpleasant impression caused him to pull up and rigidly stand there. The flame in the lamp jerked and the stonework jumped with it.
This was when Corlan felt, he thought for the first, (but afterwards he was sure it was not for the first at all) a kind of seeping, leaching yet indescribable dread. Years after he would, to himself, compare all this to an abrupt loss of blood that for an instant made you lightheaded, and then sick, faint, leaden and ashen and barely conscious.
But his senses stayed intact, indeed quite keen.
He wondered had he been poisoned—venom in the food or alcohol. But it was not that. His guts had quieted. Yet—his hands shook, and it took all his will to steady them. He had been, in battle, reasonably cool. What was this? Nothing. Some childish fantasy lingering—
The horror, (for horror was in fact precisely what it was) did not let go.
Determined then, Corlan went directly into the enormous hall. He reached the giant fireplace with its sentinel beasts. What were they? Wolves? Dragons? Some mismatch of both? He smashed the lamp straight down on the hearth so it shattered and the flame spilled out. He had immediately seen logs lay on the stone apron, laid ready if evidently for a great while unused. They were damp, too, the huge rainy chimney would have seen to that. But the lamp-oil anointed them, and spluttering, smoking blue and spiking out raw green sparks, they began to burn. Then the smoke went black, but already Corlan had seen ranks of filthy candles waiting all about, on the mantle, on tall candle-standards either side. The struck flint soon roused them. Th
e smell was vile, animal fat in the wax, the rank unwilling wetness in the wood. Corlan’s stomach heaved but he clamped his will upon it. Generally well-trained, his healthy body was used to obeying him.
He stepped back and looked everywhere around him, able to see it all finally, all the splendor of its dying hollowness.
And the horror increased.
It rose up through him as the sickness had done, but worse, much worse. Nor would it permit his steely will to order it down and away. It swelled through his belly and heart and throat and brain. It expanded in his mind and looked out through his fire-burning glaring eyes. It said to him, wordless, voiceless, in a language untranslatable but always known: Behold, Behold. Behold.
Corlan rushed across the hall; he did not know what he did, he was in retreat.
So he came to a staircase, the stone treads wide and shallow and rising upward between ranks of stone posts taller than a man, in the tops of some of which were older filthier candles, or only stubs, whose melted greasy lace trailed downward.
Swiftly up the stair he ran. The horror went with him.
It was thick as wax or stone, yet malleable, and it twisted inside him as a snake would.
It’s real, he thought, blindly, madly, as he sprang from step to step. (Once, twice, tiny bones crunched under his feet.) It exists—
Then he had reached the top and ahead a great opening, like a mouth, toothed with bits of swords and shields hung there, gave on another corridor, very wide. The fluttering light below in the hall penetrated this passage.
Corlan, despite his confusion and fear, slammed to a halt, grabbing at the topmost stair-post.
One of the statuary beasts from the fireplace had got loose. It was here now, poised in the passageway, staring at him, its eyes not like fire at all, but a pearly, nearly opalescent color, between emerald and blue Artic ice.
This fear was nearly welcome. It was so different from the horror.
Corlan found he had taken hold of the revolver, but his hand shook again; it was awkward—besides, how could he shoot a beast of stone? In those moments the thing gazed on at him, and all at once furrowing its brow, frowning, as a man would, puzzled and affronted by the idiotic antics of a stranger.
It had human eyes, the beast, regardless of their colors and luminosity. Then he knew what it was. Not a carving come alive but a physical animal, a huge, dark-ruffed wolf. He could kill it, then. Perhaps its splattered gore might appease the evil spirit that now pursued Corlan. But probably not. The wolf would be the monster’s own familiar, would it not, beholden to its master. A vampire in legend was inclined to favor the wulven kind. Or again, a werewolf might change into just such an abomination.
I am going insane. Stop this. It’s just an animal.
“Hey!” Corlan bawled suddenly at the motionless wolf, and waved his arms.
The wolf lowered its head, then turned from him. It padded off into the passage, not hurrying, neither startled nor enraged.
As it moved, its gait was slow and heavy. If it had been human its shoulders would have sagged. The ruffed head hung down. Halfway off into the dark, just before the darkness swallowed it, Corlan saw it pause. He heard it drinking, sluggishly and not for very long, then it slunk on, dragging its feet now, it seemed to him, as though exhausted.
In the end Corlan snapped off a piece of candle from the last of the posts, lit it, and went after the wolf. A short distance, and there was an old glazed clay bowl on the floor, which held the liquid the wolf had been drinking. Pink in color—milk, Corlan thought, mixed with and curdled by blood.
Closed doors lined the passage. At the end the corridor branched both left and right, but either side was only a wreckage of smashed stone. There was another wide arched doorway in between, this slightly open. The wolf had gone in there; Corlan could smell it. Hesitating outside, he heard it jump up on something, and then settle. He heard it sigh, the same mournful sighing which the House Veltenlak constantly gave. The wolf must have copied it. Corlan did not enter the room.
All this while horror stayed fast inside him. As the wolf had, it seemed to be settling itself, lying down, making itself comfortable within his body, his soul.
He was so weary now. As if he had not eaten, not slept, was ill or wounded, or a slave worn thin with thankless, awful labor, and no hope anywhere, none. No chance at all.
Two: Day in Night
Non Omnis Moriar—
Behold the voiceless wordless voice proclaimed.
It flung aside the curtains of unknowing and there, before him, lay an infinite vista. But it was a view without a single image in it.
Behold . . .
Non Omnis—the inscription, time-gnawed or hacked away.
BEHOLD—
Corlan woke, sitting bolt upright, like a puppet yanked into position on strings. His head rang and the room cartwheeled. He was back in the bloody kitchen. He could not recall returning here. Perhaps he had never left it, only got up and eaten the food—the bowl stood empty that had held the soup . . . or had it held curdled blood and milk? Crumbs on the table, the decanter of gin one quarter less. So, got up, eaten, drunk, lain down again and slept, dreamed of roaming the stenchful ruins, lighting fires, while some maleficent entity fastened upon him. Utter nonsense.
Deep in his sinews he felt the horror stir. He resisted instinctively, since it did not exist.
The old woman—Teda?—was creeping into the kitchen, sparing him a solitary glance fraught with misgiving, or—could it be compassion?
Corlan rose, nodded to her, and went out into the courtyard behind the other, broken kitchen, to relieve himself, and wash his hands and face in the cleaner pockets of the rain.
These procedures did little for him. He felt like death. He had a fever, he thought. But never mind that, today he must get on. If he could buy a handful more food, some drinkable water, he could continue on his journey to the eastern borders. This was his only method now he had become an outcast. Or, he supposed, he could go back and give himself up to the army, let them strip him of all honor and shoot or hang him amid the trees.
He found Teda had brought him a cracked china cup of coffee, and his eyes filled with sentimental tears. Through them he glimpsed the crooked distortion of her hands. What was it? Old age and rheumatism, no doubt. He thanked her and drank and said, “There’s a wolf sleeps in this house.”
“Yes,” she said, softly. “That is Hris.”
“Hris—a wolf. A choice pet.”
“Not a pet. Always about. In former days.”
He downed the coffee like medicine. “You mean, do you, when your master was—alive.” If ever he was alive, Corlan added to himself. But deep within his body or his brain, the horror twitched, nearly lazily now, comfortable with him. Shake it off. “Who was this master?”
“We don’t speak of him.”
“Why not?”
“It is—” she left a long gap. She said, “There are partings, sir. Severences.”
True, he thought. Death severs people. But The Master was not people—he did not die. He remained, and drank his coffee—blood—or else dined on the flesh and skeletons—of human things.
Corlan got up again and staggered, holding on to the table to keep himself upright. A fever. Damnation—to be ill when it was so urgent to travel far away—
“You’ve been generous,” he said, “but I’ll be off in an hour. Is there any food I might buy from you—”
She had gone. He had not seen her go.
Swaying, he allowed himself to sit down again. She had refilled his cup, and he had not seen that, either. He drank it. It did not taste as if poisoned. From somewhere he must wrestle back his strength.
During the day, the castle was no better. Wan light interruptedly yet perpetually splintered through its narrow window-spaces and cracks, littering the stony floors.
Every so often a gushing sigh, or whisper, indicated the stone-dust that poured out of ceilings and walls. In certain spots it ran like water from a tap.
He had meant to leave within the hour, but had felt so weak and sick he had not yet attempted it. An appalling nervousness of going outside again into the forest began to assail him. He had resorted to biting his nails. He had not done this since he was a young boy in his father’s cruel presence.
Corlan did return to the hall. It was as he recalled, though more bleak and empty in daylight. Scattered all over lay the shreddings and grains of the bones of rodents, while in all the spider-nets, dead spiders and their unconsumed prey became dabs of sticky tar. The hearth contained burned logs and the blackened glass of the destroyed lamp. He had done that, then. Crazy. God knew what might have happened—the filth-clotted chimney catching alight—he seemed to hear it crash . . . The armorial motto was less evident by day. We do not altogether die.
What about the wolf—Hris? Corlan forced himself up the stair and went along the passage, both of which seemed shorter, in height and length, than during the night. Yet he took an age to walk up and along them.
The bowl was still there. Most of the pink disgusting blood- milk was gone now.
He reached the door under the arch. In the chamber beyond dusty webs hung down like draperies. There was a gaunt bed, with four upright carved posts. The wolf lay there; it was real. As he stared at it, it opened one sluggish eye, which by day was a smoky amber. It watched him, not moving, as he, leaning on the door-frame, did not move either.
“Is he real too, Hris?” Corlan asked the wolf. “Your master? The undead lord. Risen like Christ out of some tomb. Devouring me. Eating me alive. And you, poor bloody animal. Draining you dry, and everything here. So many little corpses, bones—drained, sucked inside out.”
The Year's Best Dark Fantasy & Horror, 2014 Edition Page 39